(3) Pieces of American Circus Ephemera. Includes an original 1948 magazine advertisement to buy a 35 piece Barnum & Bailey Circus playset (with a mattress advertisement verso), a 1949 ticket for the medium sized Cole Bros Circus which began in 1884 and eventually went defunct in 2016, and a ticket for the Dailey Bros Circus, a smaller railroad outfit that ran from 1940 to 1950.
Condition: Commensurate with age. Some tears to the sheet and one of the tickets, and general fading to all.
Size: 13 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.
The Englishman John Bill Ricketts brought the first modern circus to the United States in 1792, having begun his career with the Hughes Royal Circus in London in the 1780s. During the first two decades of the 19th Century the Circus of Pepin and Breschard toured from Montreal to Havana, building circus theaters in many of the cities it visited. Later Purdy, Welch & Co. and the van Amburgh circuses brought even more popularity to the interior of the country rather than the coastline, and in 1825 Joshuah Purdy Brown was the first circus owner to use a large canvas tent for performances, which soon became the icon of the industry. The biggest development came in the mid 19th Century with the elevation of whiteface clowns to a primary part of the acts rather than openers, taking the slapstick pantomime popular before the Civil War to new heights. The American circus was fundamentally revolutionized by P. T. Barnum and William Cameron Coup, who launched the travelling P. T. Barnum’s Museum, Menagerie & Circus, the first freak show, in the 1870s. Coup also introduced the first multiple-ring circuses, and was also the first circus entrepreneur to use trains to transport the circus between towns. The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show On Earth made a monumental five-year journey through America, Canada, Mexico, and Europe from 1897 to 1902, impressing other circus owners with its large scale, its touring techniques (including the tent and circus train), and its combination of circus acts, a zoological exhibition, and a freak show. This format (which reached its pinnacle under the Ringling Brothers) was adopted by European circuses at the turn of the 20th Century, and remained the dominant format into the 1950s. The influence of the American circus brought about a considerable change in the character of the modern circus, as arenas were often too large for speech to be easily audible. The traditional comic dialogue of the clown assumed a less prominent place than formerly, and many clowns adopted mime techniques and resorted to broad physical comedy to entertain the audiences. The vastly increased wealth of stage properties and massive sets relegated the older equestrian feats to the background, replacing them with more ambitious acrobatic performances. After World War II the popularity of the circus declined as new forms of entertainment (such as television) arrived and the public’s tastes changed. From the 1960s onward circuses attracted growing criticism from animal rights activists, and many circuses went out of business or were forced to merge with other circus companies, unable to compete with their larger competition. The “New Circus” movement originating in Quebec in the mid 20th Century gave rise to epic modern shows like Cirque du Soleil, and today Feld Entertainment now controls a virtual monopoly on “classic” circus events in the United States, having acquired the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows Inc. in 1967.
Commensurate with age. Some tears to the sheet and one of the tickets, and general fading to all.
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