Tigers are little used as performing animals, partly perhaps from being less easily procured, but also, I believe, from greater distrust of them on the part of brute-tamers. There was a splendid tigress in Fairgrieve’s menagerie, however, with which Signor Lorenzo used to do a wonderful performance; and I saw, some five-and-thirty years ago, in a show pitched upon a piece of waste ground at Norwood, a tiger that played a prominent part in a sensational drama, the interest of which was evolved from the hair-breadth escapes of a British traveller in the wilds of Africa. The author did not seem to have been aware that there are no tigers in that part of the world, the animals so called by the Cape colonists being leopards; but, as the old woman who took money replied to my remonstrance that one tiger could not, without an outrage upon Lindley Murray, be called performing animals, “what can you expect for a penny?”
The old showmen are now virtually extinct, and the London fairs have all ceased to exist. “Old Bartlemy” died hard, but its time must soon have come, in the natural order of things. Its extinction was followed closely by that of all the other fairs formerly held in the suburbs of the metropolis. Camberwell Fair was abolished in 1856, and the Greenwich Fairs in the following year. I cannot better express my opinion as to the causes which have led to the decline of fairs generally, but especially of those held within half an hour’s journey from the metropolis, and the suppression of most of those formerly held within a shorter distance, than by quoting a brief dialogue between a showman and an acrobat in ‘Bob Lumley’s Secret,’ a story which appeared anonymously a few years ago in a popular periodical:—
“‘Fairs is nearly worked out, Joe,’ said the red-faced individual, speaking between the whiffs of blue smoke from his dhudeen. ‘Why, I can remember the time when my old man used to take more money away from this fair with the Russian giant, and the Polish dwarf, and the Circassian lady, than I can make now in a month. Them was the times, when old Adam Lee, the Romany, used to come to this fair with his coat buttons made of guineas, and his waistcoat buttons of seven-shilling pieces. Ah, you may laugh, Joey Alberto; but I have heard my old man speak of it many’s the time.’
“‘There’s good fairs now down in the shires,’ observed the younger man; ‘but this town is too near the big village.’
“‘That’s it!’ exclaimed the showman. ‘It’s all along o’ them blessed railways. They brings down lots o’ people, it is true; but, lor’! they don’t spend half the money the yokels used to in former times.’
“‘Besides which,’ rejoined he of the spangled trunks, ‘the people about here can run up to London and back for a shilling any day in the week, all the year round, and see all the living curiosities in the Zoo, and the stuffed ones in the Museum, and go in the evening to a theatre or a music-hall.’”
The fair referred to was the October fair at Croydon; and I may add that views similar to those which I have put into the mouths of the acrobat and the showman were expressed to me in 1846 by a showman named Gregory, who exhibited various natural curiosities and well-contrived mechanical representations of the falls of Niagara and a storm at sea. He had just received from the printer five thousand bills, which he carefully stowed away.
“This fair don’t pay for bills,” said he. “I want these for Canterbury Fair, where there’s more money to be taken in one day than in this field in three.”
“Which do you reckon the best fair in your circuit?” I inquired.
“Sandwich,” he replied. “That’s a good distance from London, you see, and though it’s a smaller town than this, there’s plenty of money in it. This is too near London, now the rail enables people to go there and back for a shilling, see all the sights and amusements, and get back home the same night.”