Garrick, who had married the dancer Violette two months previously, took his bride to Bartholomew Fair, where they visited the theatrical booth of Yates, which was the best in the fair. He was one of the few great actors of the period who had not performed in the fair; and was probably impelled by curiosity, rather than by the expectation of seeing good acting, though it was not many years since he had made his first appearance on any stage at Goodman’s Fields, playing Harlequin at a moment’s notice when Yates was seized with a sudden indisposition as he was about to go on the stage. The crowd pressing upon his wife and himself very unpleasantly as he approached the portable theatre, he called out to Palmer, the Drury Lane bill-sticker, who was acting as money-taker at the booth, to protect them. “I can’t help you here, sir,” said Palmer, shaking his head. “There aren’t many people in Smithfield as knows Mr. Garrick.”
It was probably not at Yates’s booth, but at one of much inferior grade, that the money-taker rejected Garrick’s offer to pay for admission, with the remark, “We never take money of one another.” The story would be pointless if the incident occurred at any booth in which dramatic performances were given by comedians from the principal London theatres.
We now approach a period when a new series of strenuous efforts for the suppression of the London fairs was commenced by persons who would willingly have suppressed amusements of every kind, and were aided in their endeavours by persons who had merely a selfish interest in the matter. In the summer of 1750, a numerously signed petition of graziers, cattle salesmen, and inhabitants of Smithfield was presented to the Court of Aldermen, praying for the suppression of Bartholomew Fair, on the ground that it annoyed them in their occupations, and afforded opportunities for debauchery and riot. The annual Lord Mayor’s procession might have been objected to on the same grounds, and the civic authorities well knew that the riots which had sometimes occurred in the fair had been occasioned by their own acts, in the execution of their edicts for the exclusion of puppet-shows and theatrical booths. Their action to this end was generally taken so tardily that booths were put up before the proprietors received notice of the intention of the Court of Aldermen to exclude them; and then the tardiness of the owners in taking them down, and the sudden zeal of the constables, produced quarrels and fights, in which the bystanders invariably took the part of the showmen.
The revenues which the Corporation derived from rents and tolls during the fair constituted an element of the question which could not be overlooked, and which kept it in a state of oscillation from year to year. The civic authorities would have been willing enough to suppress the fair, if the question of finance had not been involved. If the fair was abolished, some other source of revenue would have to be found. So they compounded with their belief that the fair was a fount of disorder and immorality by again limiting its duration to three days, and excluding theatrical booths and puppet-shows, while abstaining from interference with the gambling-tables and the gin-stalls.
Giants and dwarfs, and learned pigs and performing ponies had now the fair to themselves, though their showmen probably took less money than they did when the theatrical booths and puppet-shows attracted larger numbers of people. Henry Blacker, a native of Cuckfield, in Sussex, twenty-seven years of age, and seven feet four inches in height, exhibited himself at the Swan, in Smithfield, during the three days to which the fair was restricted in 1751. The principal show seems to have been one containing two dwarfs, a remarkable negro, a female one-horned rhinoceros, and a crocodile, said to have been the first ever seen alive in this country. The more famous of the two dwarfs was John Coan, a native of Norfolk, who at this time was twenty-three years of age, and only three feet two inches in height, and of thirty-four pounds weight. His fellow pigmy was a Welsh lad, fourteen years of age, two feet six inches in height, and weighed only twelve pounds. The negro could throw back his clasped hands over his head and bring them under his feet, backward and forward; and was probably “the famous negro who swings his arms about in every direction,” mentioned in the ‘Adventurer.’
The exclusion of the theatrical booths and puppet-shows from the fair produced, in the following year, a serious disturbance in Smithfield, in the suppression of which Birch, the deputy-marshal of the City, received injuries which proved fatal. This resistance to their edict did not, however, deter the civic authorities from applying the same rule to Southwark Fair, which was this year limited to three days, and diminished of its attractions by the exclusion of theatrical booths and puppet-shows. The principal shows were Yeates’s, which stood in George Yard, and consisted of an exhibition of wax figures, the conjuring tricks of young Yeates, and the feats on the slack wire of a performer named Steward; and the female Samson’s, an Italian woman, who exhibited feats of strength in a booth opposite the Greyhound, similar to those of the French woman seen by Carter at May Fair, with the addition of supporting six men while resting on two chairs only by the head and heels.
Towards the close of this year a man named Ballard brought from Italy a company of performing dogs and monkeys, and exhibited them as a supplementary attraction to the musical entertainments then given at a place in the Haymarket, called Mrs. Midnight’s Oratory. The Animal Comedians, as they were called, became famous enough to furnish the theme of an ‘Adventurer.’ The author states that the repeated encomiums on their performances induced him to be present one evening at the entertainment, when he “was astonished at the sagacity of the monkies; and was no less amazed at the activity of the other quadrupeds—I should have rather said, from a view of their extraordinary elevations, bipeds.
“It is a peculiar happiness to me as an Adventurer,” he continues, “that I sally forth in an age which emulates those heroick times of old, when nothing was pleasing but what was unnatural. Thousands have gaped at a wire-dancer daring to do what no one else would attempt; and thousands still gape at greater extravagances in pantomime entertainments. Every street teems with incredibilities; and if the great mob have their little theatre in the Haymarket, the small vulgar can boast their cheaper diversion in two enormous bears, that jauntily trip it to the light tune of a Caledonian jig.
“That the intellectual faculties of brutes may be exerted beyond the narrow limits which we have hitherto assigned to their capacities, I saw a sufficient proof in Mrs. Midnight’s dogs and monkies. Man differs less from beasts in general, than these seem to approach man in rationality. But while I applaud their exalted genius, I am in pain for the rest of their kindred, both of the canine and cercopithecan species.” The writer then proceeds to comment humorously upon the mania which the exhibition had created for teaching dogs and monkeys to perform the tricks for which the Animal Comedians were famous. “Every boarding-house romp and wanton school-boy,” he says, “is employed in perverting the end of the canine creation.”
The contributor of this paper seems to have had a familiar acquaintance with the shows attending the London fairs, for it was he, whoever he was, who wrote the third number of the ‘Adventurer,’ in which, giving the details of a scheme for a pantomime, he says that he has “not only ransacked the fairs of Bartholomew and Southwark, but picked up every uncommon animal, every prodigy of nature, and every surprising performer, that has lately appeared within the bills of mortality.” He proceeds to enumerate them, and to assign parts in his intended entertainment for “the Modern Colossus,” “all the wonderful tall men and women that have been lately exhibited in this town,” “the Female Sampson,” “the famous negro who swings his arms about in every direction,” “the noted ox, with six legs and two bellies,” “the beautiful panther mare,” “the noted fire-eater, smoking out of red-hot tobacco pipes, champing lighted brimstone, and swallowing his infernal mess of broth,” “the most amazing new English Chien Savant,” “the little woman that weighs no more than twenty-three pounds,” “the wonderful little Norfolk man,” “the fellow with Stentorian lungs, who can break glasses and shatter window-panes with the loudness of his vociferation,” and “the wonderful man who talks in his belly, and can fling his voice into any part of a room.” Incidentally he mentions also “the so much applauded stupendous ostrich,” “the sorcerer’s great gelding,” “the wire dancer,” and dancing bears.