The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs

Evelyn and Pepys have left no record of the presence of shows at Bartholomew Fair in the first year of the Restoration, nor does the collection of Bartholomew Fair notabilia in the library of the British Museum furnish any indication of them; but Pepys tells us that on the 31st of August, in the following year, he went “to Bartholomew Fair, and there met with my Ladies Jemima and Paulina, with Mr. Pickering and Mademoiselle, at seeing the monkeys dance, which was much to see, when they could be brought to do it, but it troubled me to sit among such nasty company.” Few years seem to have passed without a visit to Bartholomew Fair on the part of the gossiping old diarist. In 1663 he writes, under date the 7th of September, “To Bartholomew Fair, where I met Mr. Pickering, and he and I went to see the monkeys at the Dutch house, which is far beyond the other that my wife and I saw the other day; and thence to see the dancing on the ropes, which was very poor and tedious.”

In the following year two visits to this fair are recorded in Pepys’ diary, as follows: —

“Sept. 2. To Bartholomew Fair, and our boy with us, and there showed him the dancing on ropes, and several others the best shows.” “Sept. 7. With Creed walked to Bartholomew Fair, – this being the last day, and there I saw the best dancing on ropes that I think I ever saw in my life.” In the two following years the fairs and other amusements of London were interrupted by the plague, to the serious loss and detriment of the entertaining classes. Punch and other puppets were the only amusements of 1665 and 1666; and Pepys records that, on the 22nd of August in the latter year – the year of the great fire, – he and his wife went in a coach to Moorfields, “and there saw Polichinello, which pleases me mightily.”

In 1667 the fear of the plague had passed away, and the public again patronised the theatres and other places of amusement. “To Polichinello,” writes Pepys on the 8th of April, “and there had three times more sport than at the play, and so home.” To compensate himself for having missed Bartholomew Fair two years running on account of the plague, he now went three times. “Went twice round Bartholomew Fair,” he writes in his diary on the 28th of August, “which I was glad to see again, after two years missing it by the plague.” “30th. To Bartholomew Fair, to walk up and down, and there, among other things, found my Lady Castlemaine at a puppet-play, Patient Grizill, and the street full of people expecting her coming out.” “Sept. 4. With my wife and Mr. Hewer to Bartholomew Fair, and there saw Polichinello.”

The fair probably offered better and more various amusements every year, for Pepys records five visits in 1668, when we first hear of the celebrated rope-dancer, Jacob Hall. “August 27. With my wife and W. Batelier and Deb.; carried them to Bartholomew Fair, where we saw the dancing of the ropes, and nothing else, it being late.” “29. Met my wife in a coach, and took her and Mercer [her maid] and Deb. to Bartholomew Fair; and there did see a ridiculous obscene little stage-play called Marry Andrey [Merry Andrew], a foolish thing, but seen by everybody: and so to Jacob Hall’s dancing of the ropes, a thing worth seeing, and mightily followed.” “Sept. 1. To Bartholomew Fair, and there saw several sights; among others, the mare that tells money and many things to admiration, and among others come to me, when she was bid to go to him of the company that most loved to kiss a pretty wench in a corner. And this did cost me 12d. to the horse, which I had flung him before, and did give me occasion to kiss a mighty belle fille, that was exceeding plain, but fort belle.” “4. At noon my wife, and Deb. and Mercer, and W. Hewer and I, to the fair, and there at the old house, did eat a pig, and was pretty merry, but saw no sights, my wife having a mind to see the play of Bartholomew Fair with puppets.” “7. With my Lord Brouncker (who was this day in unusual manner merry, I believe with drink,) Minnes, and W. Pen to Bartholomew Fair; and there saw the dancing mare again, which to-day I found to act much worse than the other day, she forgetting many things, which her master beat her for, and was mightily vexed; and then the dancing of the ropes, and also a little stage play, which was very ridiculous.”

Perhaps a better illustration of the difference between the manners and amusements of the seventeenth century and those of the nineteenth could not be found than that which is afforded by the contrast between the picture drawn by Pepys and the fancy sketch which the reader may draw for himself by giving the figures introduced the names of persons now living. Let the scene be Greenwich Fair, as we all remember it, and the incidents the Secretary to the Admiralty, accompanied by his wife and her maid, going there in his carriage; stopping on the way to witness the vagaries of Punch; meeting the Mistress of the Robes at a marionette performance in a tent; and afterwards, as we shall presently find Pepys doing, drinking in a public-house with a rope-dancer, reputed to be the paramour of a lady of rank, whom our supposed secretary may have met the evening before at Buckingham Palace.

Pepys relates that he went, in the same year, “to Southwark Fair, very dirty, and there saw the puppet-show of Whittington, which was pretty to see; and how that idle thing do work upon people that see it, and even myself too! And thence to Jacob Hall’s dancing of the ropes, where I saw such action as I never saw before, and mightily worth seeing; and here took acquaintance with a fellow that carried me to a tavern, whither come the music of this booth, and bye and bye Jacob Hall himself, with whom I had a mind to speak, to hear whether he had ever any mischief by falls in his time. He told me, ‘Yes, many, but never to the breaking of a limb;’ he seems a mighty strong man. So giving them a bottle or two of wine, I away with Payne, the waterman. He, seeking me at the play, did get a link to light me, and so light me to the Bear, where Bland, my waterman, waited for me with gold and other things he kept for me, to the value of £40 and more, which I had about me, for fear of my pockets being cut. So by link-light through the bridge, it being mighty dark, but still weather, and so home.” Jacob Hall was as famous for his handsome face and symmetrical form as for his skill and grace on the rope. He is said to have shared with Harte, the actor, the favours of Nell Gwynne, and afterwards to have been a pensioned favourite of the profligate Countess of Castlemaine. His portrait in Grammont’s ‘Memoirs’ was engraved from an unnamed picture by Van Oost, first said to represent the famous rope-dancer by Ames, in 1748.

A passage in one of Davenant’s poems affords some information concerning the character of the shows which formed the attraction of the fairs at this period,

“Now vaulter good, and dancing lassOn rope, and man that cries, Hey, pass!And tumbler young that needs but stoop,Lay head to heel, to creep through hoop;And man in chimney hid to dressPuppet that acts our old Queen Bess,And man that, while the puppets play,Through nose expoundeth what they say;And white oat-eater that does dwellIn stable small at sign of Bell,That lifts up hoof to show the pranksTaught by magician styled Banks;And ape led captive still in chainTill he renounce the Pope and Spain;All these on hoof now trudge from town,To cheat poor turnip-eating clown.”

The preceding chapter will have rendered the allusions intelligible to the reader of the present day.

Among the shows of this period was another bearded woman, whom Pepys saw in Holborn, towards the end of 1668. “She is a little plain woman,” he writes, “a Dane; her name, Ursula Dyan; about forty years old; her voice like a little girl’s; with a beard as much as any man I ever saw, black almost, and grizzly; it began to grow at about seven years old, and was shaved not above seven months ago, and is now so big as any man’s almost that I ever saw; I say, bushy and thick. It was a strange sight to me, I confess, and what pleased me mightily.” There was a female giant, too, of whom Evelyn says, under date the 13th of February, 1669, “I went to see a tall gigantic woman, who measured six feet ten inches at twenty-one years old, born in the Low Countries.”

Salamandering feats are not so pleasant to witness as the performances of the acrobat and the gymnast, but they create wonder, and, probably, were wondered at more two hundred years ago than at the present time, when the scientific principles on which their success depends are better understood. The earliest performer of the feats which made Girardelli and Chabert famous half a century ago seems to have been Richardson, of whom the following account is given by Evelyn, who witnessed his performance in 1672: —

“I took leave of my Lady Sunderland, who was going to Paris to my lord, now ambassador there. She made me stay dinner at Leicester House, and afterwards sent for Richardson, the famous fire-eater. He devoured brimstone on glowing coals before us, chewing and swallowing them; he melted a beer-glass and eat it quite up; then, taking a live coal on his tongue, he put on it a raw oyster, the coal was blown on with bellows till it flamed and sparkled in his mouth, and so remained till the oyster gaped and was quite boiled. Then he melted pitch and wax with sulphur, which he drank down as it flamed; I saw it flaming in his mouth, a good while; he also took up a thick piece of iron, such as laundresses use to put in their smoothing-boxes, when it was fiery hot, held it between his teeth, then in his hands and threw it about like a stone; but this I observed he cared not to do very long; then he stood on a small pot, and, bending his body, took a glowing iron with his mouth from between his feet without touching the pot or ground with his hands; with divers other prodigious feats.”

There are few notices of the London fairs in contemporary memoirs and journals, and as few advertisements of showmen have been preserved by collectors of such literary curiosities, between the last visit to Southwark Fair recorded by Pepys and the period of the Revolution. The public mind was agitated during this time by plots and rumours of plots, by State trials and Tower Hill executions, which alternately excited men to rage and chilled them with horror. Giants and dwarfs, and monstrosities of all kinds, seem to have been more run after, under the influence of these events, than puppets and players. Take the following as an example, an announcement which was printed in 1677: —

“At Mr. Croomes, at the signe of the Shoe and Slap neer the Hospital-gate, in West Smithfield, is to be seen The Wonder of Nature, viz., A girl about sixteen years of age, born in Cheshire, and not much above eighteen inches long, having shed the teeth seven several times, and not a perfect bone in any part of her, onely the head, yet she hath all her senses to admiration, and discourses, reads very well, sings, whistles, and all very pleasant to hear. God save the King!”

The office of Master of the Revels, which had been held by Thomas Killigrew, the Court jester, was conferred, at his death, upon his son, who leased the licensing of ballad-singers to a bookseller named Clarke, as appears from the following announcement, which was inserted in the London Gazette in 1682: —

“Whereas Mr. John Clarke, of London, bookseller, did rent of Charles Killigrew, Esq., the licensing of all ballad-singers for five years; which time is expired at Lady Day next. These are, therefore, to give notice to all ballad-singers, that take out licenses at the office of the revels, at Whitehall, for singing and selling of ballads and small books, according to an ancient custom. And all persons concerned are hereby desired to take notice of, and to suppress, all mountebanks, rope-dancers, prize-players, ballad-singers, and such as make show of motions and strange sights, that have not a license in red and black letters, under the hand and seal of the said Charles Killigrew, Esq., Master of the Revels to his Majesty.”

The only entertainment of which I have found an announcement for this year is the following: – “At Mr. Saffry’s, a Dutch-woman’s Booth, over against the Greyhound Inn, in West Smithfield, during the time of the fair, will be acted the incomparable Entertainment call’d The Irish Evidence, with the Humours of Teige. With a Variety of Dances. By the first Newmarket Company.” Further glimpses of the fair are afforded, however, by the offer of a reward for “the three horses stolen by James Rudderford, a mountebank, and Jeremiah March, his clown;” and the announcement that, “The German Woman that danc’d where the Italian Tumbler kept his Booth, being over against the Swan Tavern, by Hosier Lane end in Bartholomew Fair, is run away from her Mistress, the Fifth of this instant; She is of a Brownish complexion, with Brown Hair, and between 17 and 18 years of Age; if any person whatsoever can bring Tidings to one Mr. Hone’s, at the Duke of Albemarle’s Head, at the end of Duck Lane, so that her Mistress may have her again, they shall be rewarded to their own content.”

In the winter of 1683-4, an addition was temporarily made to the London fairs by the opportunity which the freezing of the Thames afforded for holding a fair on the ice. The river became frozen on the 23rd of December, and on the first day of 1684 the ice was so thick between the bridges that long rows of booths were erected for the sale of refreshments to the thousands of persons who congregated upon it. Evelyn, who visited the strange scene more than once, saw “people and tents selling all sort of wares, as in the City.” The frost becoming more intense when it had endured a month, the sports of horse-racing and bull-baiting were presented on the ice; and sledges and skaters were seen gliding swiftly in every direction, with, as Evelyn relates, “puppet-plays and interludes, tippling, and other lewd places.” The ice was so thick that the booths and stalls remained even when thaw had commenced, but the water soon rendered it disagreeable to walk upon, and long cracks warned the purveyors of recreation and refection to retreat to the land. The fair ended on the 5th of February.

It was during the continuance of this seventeenth century Frost Fair that Evelyn saw a human salamander, when he dined at Sir Stephen Fox’s, and “after dinner came a fellow who eat live charcoal, glowingly ignited, quenching them in his mouth, and then champing and swallowing them down. There was a dog also which seemed to do many rational actions.” The last sentence is rather obscure; the writer probably intended to convey that the animal performed many actions which seemed rational.

During the Southwark Fair of the following year, there was a giant exhibited at the Catherine Wheel Inn, a famous hostelry down to our own time. Printers had not yet corrected the irregular spelling of the preceding century, as appears from the following announcement: – “The Gyant, or the Miracle of Nature, being that so much admired young man, aged nineteen years last June, 1684. Born in Ireland, of such a prodigious height and bigness, and every way proportionable, the like hath not been seen since the memory of man. He hath been several times shown at Court, and his Majesty was pleased to walk under his arm, and he is grown very much since; he now reaches ten foot and a half, fathomes near eight foot, spans fifteen inches; And is believed to be as big as one of the Gyants in Guild-Hall. He is to be seen at the Sign of the Catherine Wheel in Southwark Fair. Vivat Rex.”

There was probably also to be seen at this fair the Dutch woman of whom an author quoted by Strutt says that, “when she first danced and vaulted on the rope in London, the spectators beheld her with pleasure mixed with pain, as she seemed every moment in danger of breaking her neck.” About this time, there was introduced at the London fairs, an entertainment resembling that now given in the music-halls, in which vocal and instrumental music was alternated with rope-dancing and tumbling. The shows in which these performances were given were called music-booths, though the musical element was far from predominating. The musical portion of the entertainment was not of the highest order, if we may trust the judgment of Ward, the author of the London Spy, who says that he “had rather have heard an old barber ring Whittington’s bells upon the cittern than all the music these houses afforded.”

Such dramatic performances as were given in the booths at this time seem to have been, in a great measure, confined to the puppet-plays so often mentioned in the memoirs and diaries of the period. Granger mentions one Philips, who, in the reign of James II., “was some time fiddler to a puppet-show; in which capacity, he held many a dialogue with Punch, in much the same strain as he did afterwards with the mountebank doctor, his master, upon the stage. This Zany, being regularly educated, had the advantage of his brethren.” Besides the serio-comic drama of Punch and Judy, many popular stories were represented by the puppets of those days, which set forth the fortunes of Dick Whittington and the sorrows of Griselda, the vagaries of Merry Andrew and the humours of Bartholomew Fair, as delineated by the pen of Ben Jonson. It is a noteworthy circumstance, as showing the estimation in which the Smithfield Fair was held by the upper and middle classes at this period, and for more than half a century afterwards, that the summer season of the patent theatres, which closed at that time, always concluded with a representation of Jonson’s now forgotten comedy.

A slight general view of Bartholomew Fair in 1685, with some equally slight and curious moralising on the subject, is presented by Sir Robert Southwell, in a letter addressed to his son, the Honourable Edward Southwell, who was then in London with his tutor, Mr. Webster.

“I think it not now,” says Sir Robert, “so proper to quote you verses out of Persius, or to talk of Cæsar and Euclid, as to consider the great theatre of Bartholomew Fair, where I doubt not but you often resort, and ’twere not amiss if you cou’d convert that tumult into a profitable book. You wou’d certainly see the garboil there to more advantage if Mr. Webster and you wou’d read, or cou’d see acted, the play of Ben Jonson, call’d Bartholomew Fair: for then afterwards going to the spot, you wou’d note if things and humours were the same to day, as they were fifty years ago, and take pattern of the observations which a man of sense may raise out of matters that seem even ridiculous. Take then with you the impressions of that play, and in addition thereunto, I shou’d think it not amiss if you then got up into some high window, in order to survey the whole pit at once. I fancy then you will say, Totus mundus agit histrionem, and then you wou’d note into how many various shapes human nature throws itself, in order to buy cheap and sell dear, for all is but traffick and commerce, some to give, some to take, and all is by exchange, to make the entertainment complete.

“The main importance of this fair is not so much for merchandize, and the supplying what people really want; but as a sort of Bacchanalia, to gratifie the multitude in their wandering and irregular thoughts. Here you see the rope-dancers gett their living meerly by hazarding of their lives, and why men will pay money and take pleasure to see such dangers, is of seperate and philosophical consideration. You have others who are acting fools, drunkards, and madmen, but for the same wages which they might get by honest labour, and live with credit besides.

“Others, if born in any monstrous shape, or have children that are such, here they celebrate their misery, and by getting of money, forget how odious they are made. When you see the toy-shops, and the strange variety of things, much more impertinent than hobby-horses or gloves of gingerbread, you must know there are customers for all these matters, and it wou’d be a pleasing sight cou’d we see painted a true figure of all these impertinent minds and their fantastick passions, who come trudging hither, only for such things. ’Tis out of this credulous crowd that the ballad-singers attrackt an assembly, who listen and admire, while their confederate pickpockets are diving and fishing for their prey.

“’Tis from those of this number who are more refined, that the mountebank obtains audience and credit, and it were a good bargain if such customers had nothing for their money but words, but they are best content to pay for druggs, and medicines, which commonly doe them hurt. There is one corner of this Elizium field devoted to the eating of pig, and the surfeits that attend it. The fruits of the season are everywhere scatter’d about, and those who eat imprudently do but hasten to the physitian or the churchyard.”

In 1697, William Philips, the zany or Jack Pudding mentioned by Granger, was arrested and publicly whipped for perpetrating, in Bartholomew Fair, a jest on the repressive tendencies of the Government, which has been preserved by Prior in a poem. It seems that he made his appearance on the exterior platform of the show at which he was engaged, with a tongue in his left hand and a black pudding in his right. Professing to have learned an important secret, by which he hoped to profit, he communicated it to the mountebank, as related by Prior, as follows: —

“Be of your patron’s mind whate’er he says;Sleep very much, think little, and talk less:Mind neither good nor bad, nor right nor wrong;But eat your pudding, slave, and hold your tongue.”

Mr. Morley conjectures that this Philips was the W. Phillips who wrote the tragedy of the Revengeful Queen, published in 1698, and who was supposed to be the author of another, Alcamenes and Menelippa, and of a farce called Britons, Strike Home, which was acted in a booth in Bartholomew Fair. But worth more than all these plays would now be, if it could be discovered, the book published in 1688, of which, only the title-page is preserved in the Harleian collection, viz., ‘The Comical History of the famous Merry Andrew, W. Phill., Giving an Account of his Pleasant Humours, Various Adventures, Cheats, Frolicks, and Cunning Designs, both in City and Country.’

The circus was an entertainment as yet unknown. The only equestrian performances were of the kind given by Banks, and repeated, as we learn from Davenant and Pepys, by performers who came after him, of whom there was a regular succession down to the time of Philip Astley. The first entertainer who introduced horses into vaulting acts seems to have been William Stokes, a famous vaulter of the reigns of the latter Stuarts. He was the author of a manual of the art of vaulting, which was published at Oxford in 1652, and contains several engravings, showing him in the act of vaulting over a horse, over two horses, and leaping upon them, in one alighting in the saddle, and in another upon the bare back of the horse, à la Bradbury.

Another of the great show characters of this period was Joseph Clark, the posturer, who according to a notice of him in the Transactions of the Royal Philosophical Society, “had such an absolute command of all his muscles and joints that he could disjoint almost his whole body.” His performance seems to have consisted chiefly in the imitation of every kind of human deformity; and he is said to have imposed so completely upon Molins, a famous surgeon of that period, as to be dismissed by him as an incurable cripple. His portrait in Tempest’s collection represents him in the act of shouldering his leg, an antic which is imitated by a monkey.

Clark was the “whimsical fellow, commonly known by the name of the Posture-master,” mentioned by Addison in the ‘Guardian,’ No. 102. He was the son of a distiller in Shoe Lane, who designed him for the medical profession, but a brief experience with John Coniers, an apothecary in Fleet Street, not pleasing him, he was apprenticed to a mercer in Bishopsgate Street. Trade suited him no better than medicine, it would seem, for he afterwards went to Paris, in the retinue of the Duke of Buckingham, and there first displayed his powers as a posturer. He died in 1690, at his house in Pall Mall, and was buried in the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Many portraits of him, in different attitudes, are extant in the British Museum.

Monstrosities have always been profitable subjects for exhibition. Shakespeare tells us, and may be presumed to have intended the remark to convey his impression of the tendency of his own generation, that people would give more to see a dead Indian than to relieve a lame beggar; and the profits of the exhibition of Julia Pastrana and the so-called Kostroma people show that the public interest in such monstrosities remains unabated. But what would “City men” say to such an exhibition in Threadneedle Street? I take the following announcement from a newspaper of June, 1698: —