Edmund Kean—Mystery of his Parentage—Saunders’s Circus—Scowton’s Theatre—Belzoni—The Nondescript—Richardson’s Theatre—The Carey Family—Kean, a Circus Performer—Oxberry, the Comedian—James Wallack—Last Appearance of the Irish Giant—Miss Biffin and the Earl of Morton—Bartholomew Fair Incidents—Josephine Girardelli, the Female Salamander—James England, the Flying Pieman—Elliston as a Showman—Simon Paap, the Dutch Dwarf—Ballard’s Menagerie—A Learned Pig—Madame Gobert, the Athlete—Cartlich, the Original Mazeppa—Barnes, the Pantaloon—Nelson Lee—Cooke’s Circus—The Gyngell Family
With the present century commenced a period of the history of shows and showmen specially interesting to the generation which remembers the London fairs as they were forty or fifty years ago, and to which the names of Gyngell, Scowton, Samwell, Richardson, Clarke, Atkins, and Wombwell have a familiar sound. It introduces us, in its earliest years, to the celebrated Edmund Kean, “the stripling known in a certain wayfaring troop of Atellanæ by the name of Carey,” as Raymond wrote, and whom we find performing at the London fairs, sometimes tumbling in Saunders’s circus, and sometimes playing juvenile characters in the travelling theatres of Scowton and Richardson. The early life of this remarkable man is as strange as any that has ever afforded materials for the biographer, and the mystery surrounding his parentage as inscrutable a problem as the authorship of the letters of Junius.
Phippen, the earliest biographer of Kean, says that he was born in 1788, and was the illegitimate offspring of Aaron Kean, a tailor, and Anne Carey, an actress. Proctor, whose account is repeated by Hawkins, states that his parentage was unknown, but that, according to the best conclusion he was able to form, he was the son of Edmund Kean, a mechanic employed by a London builder, and Anne Carey, an actress. Raymond says, on the authority of Miss Tidswell, who was many years at Drury Lane Theatre, that he was the son of Edward Kean, a carpenter, and Nancy Carey, the actress. While these various writers agree as to the name and profession of the future great tragedian’s mother, and the patronymic of his father, they give us the choice of three baptismal names for the latter, and at least two occupations. There seems no doubt, however, that his father, whether he was a carpenter or a tailor, was the brother of Moses Kean, a popular reciter and imitator of the leading actors at the beginning of the present century.
No register of his birth or baptism has ever been discovered, and it is even a matter of doubt whether he was born in Westminster or in Southwark. Miss Tidswell seems to have been the only person who possessed any knowledge of his birth and parentage that was ever revealed, a circumstance which caused her to be suspected of herself standing in the maternal relationship to him. Kean, when a child, called her sometimes mother, and sometimes aunt; but, according to her own account, she was in no way related to him, but had adopted him on his being deserted by his real mother, Anne Carey.
His first appearance in public was made in the character of a monkey, in the show of Abraham Saunders, at Bartholomew Fair, probably in 1801. He was then twelve or thirteen years of age, and already innured to a wandering and vagabond mode of life; being in the habit of absenting himself for days together from the lodging of Miss Tidswell, in order to visit the fairs, and sleeping under the trees in St. James’s Park, to avoid being locked up by his guardian, and thus prevented from gazing at the parades of Saunders and Scowton on the morrow.
Proctor says, somewhat vaguely, though probably with as much exactness as the materials for a memoir of Kean’s boyhood render possible, that when about fourteen years of age, he was sometimes in Richardson’s company, and sometimes in Scowton’s or Saunders’s; and that, besides tumbling in the circus of the latter, he rode and danced on the tight-rope. In performing an equestrian act at Bartholomew Fair, he once fell from the pad, and hurt his legs, which never quite recovered from the effects of the accident.
In 1803, another notability of the age made his appearance at Bartholomew Fair, namely, Belzoni, afterwards famous as an explorer of the pyramids and royal tombs of Egypt. He was a remarkably handsome and finely proportioned man, and of almost gigantic stature, his height being six feet six inches. His muscular strength being proportionate to his size, he was engaged by Gyngell to exhibit feats of strength, as the young Hercules, alias the Patagonian Samson, in which character he lifted four men of average weight off the ground, and held out prodigious weights at arm’s length. He afterwards went to Edmonton Fair, where he performed in a field behind the Bell Inn. Of his engagements during the following six or seven years we have no account, but in 1810 he sustained the character of Orson at the Edinburgh theatre, when he was hissed for not being sufficiently demonstrative in his attentions to the maternal bear. Five years later, he was exploring the pyramids and sarcophagi of Egypt, as assistant to the British Consul at Alexandria, and in 1820 his name was famous.
In the same year that Belzoni performed his feats of strength in Gyngell’s show, there was exhibited in Bartholomew Fair, together with a two-headed calf, and a double-bodied calf, “a surprising large fish, the Nondescript,” which “surprising inhabitant of the watery kingdom was,” according to the bill, “drawn on the shore by seven horses and about a hundred men. She measured twenty-five feet in length and about eighteen in circumference, and had in her belly when found, one thousand seven hundred mackerel.”
The first mention of Richardson’s theatre in the annals of the London Fairs occurs in 1804. Of his early career there is no record; probably it did not differ much from that of his pupil, Kean, or his successor, Nelson Lee, or of the famous “roving English clown,” Charlie Keith, and numerous others whose lives have been passed in wandering from place to place, amusing the public as actors, jugglers, conjurors, acrobats, etc. Whatever his antecedents may have been, there is no doubt as to his character, all who knew him concurring in representing him as illiterate and ignorant, but possessing a large fund of shrewdness and common sense; irritable in temper, but agreeable in his manners so long as nothing occurred to excite his irascibility; sensitive to any unprovoked insult, which he never failed to revenge, but always ready and willing to lend a helping hand to those who had been less fortunate than himself.
Many stories are current among showmen and the theatrical profession of Richardson’s goodness of heart and his occasional eccentricities of conduct. On one occasion, while his portable theatre was at St. Albans, a fire occurred in the town, and many small houses were destroyed, the poor tenants of which by that means lost all their furniture, and almost everything they possessed. A subscription was immediately opened for their relief, and a public meeting was held to promote the benevolent purpose. Richardson attended, and when the Mayor, who presided, had read a list of donations, varying in amount from five shillings to twice as many pounds, he advanced to the table, and presented a Bank of England note for a hundred pounds.