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It is possible that the single event in circus history most often referred to is George Washington’s visit to Ricketts’ Circus in April, 1793. As a social event it is unimportant, but seems to appeal to circus historians for the status such a visit lends to the institution of the circus. Certainly, if the President of the United States allows himself to be seen at an equestrian performance it speaks well for the social acceptability of the entertainment. That it might speak ill of the intellectual powers of our first president doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of the commentators of the event.
Washington’s biographers give us a picture of the man as one who was secure in his social position, certainly sure of his own ability, perhaps a bit stuffy by contemporary standards, thus somewhat humorless and certainly no intellect. Perhaps Northern Virginia farmers are still this way. In short, we are not surprised at his enjoying an equestrian performance.
However, the importance of the event seems to us to lie in its indication that an upper middle class gentleman felt it was worth his while to attend the circus. And to attend it more than the single time that might be expected of any curious mind. It leads us to ask who it was that comprised that early audience and what they added to the scene.
Ricketts, and those who followed him in presenting indoor shows, kept very close to a pattern in arena construction in America. It was based on the London and Paris amphitheatres, which were in turn based on the theatre. The circus might be said to be a theatre with the ring scooped out of the middle. The seating was divided into boxes and pit, just as in the theatre, the stage, where it existed, was no different than that of the theatre. The one common difference was the lack of seats, or of very many, in the pit at the circus.
Thus we have the ring with its low, solid wooden fencing (the lower, solid wood curbs did not come into use until the 1850s) surrounded by the pit area which was in turn surrounded by the boxes. Outside the boxes was the narrow corridor by which one reached them. All this gave the buildings their predominantly circular shape. It was not unusual to let a stage into the circle, thus making of the ring of boxes a horseshoe. Entrances from the stables were usually on one or both sides of the stage and the orchestra pit was between stage and ring.
The boxes were quite low, three or four feet from the ground, giving in these low buildings a view over the pit audience, which usually stood. The area beneath the boxes was useless unless, as in some cases, the boxes were built high enough to expand the pit area. We have seen this referred to as the gallery upon occasion and entrance to it was cheaper than to the pit. In the theatre, of course, the gallery was behind the boxes and slightly higher so that standees there looked over the boxes to the stage. In time the gallery was expanded, seats were installed and today we have them as balconies in our theatres, the boxes having gone by the board.
By making boxes available the circus proprietors, as did the theatre owners, set up social distinctions among their patrons. The boxes were more expensive, usually fifty percent more, though at times only twenty-five percent more, so one bought a ticket to the boxes if one could afford it. They were partitioned one from another and each had three to five benches in it, no small amenity for a show lasting two hours or more. In choosing to sit in a box the customer indicated that he could afford it and that he preferred sitting to standing during the performance and that he preferred more private company than the pit provided.
The pit cost fifty cents as a rule until the panic of l8l9 when it dropped to twenty-five cents where it stayed until the twentieth century. The audience there either stood or sat upon the ground. It was the practice to bring food and drink to entertainments, and in fact most of one’s valuables in the sense that leaving them at home unattended was no wiser in that day than now, especially for the lower class.
The pit audience ate, drank, cracked walnuts’, they conversed, walked about, conducted business, there being nothing to confine them inside the pit as the seats do today. They were not above commenting on the performance, the music and each other. Since the spoken word was at a minimum during most of the arena activity opportunities to disrupt the performance were much less in the circus than in the theatre, but a poor showing might well elicit comments that reached a performer’s ear. Drunkenness in public gatherings was common then when there was no police presence or laws against such behavior. Circuses in larger cities had bars in the building and intermissions for refreshment were part of the program.
From the demeanor and manners of the pit audience, the raucousness of which is chronicled as far back as Shakespeare’s time, we would assume that a merchant, for example, would not want his wife and daughters to be there so he would place them in a box. One dollar, the usual charge for a seat in a box, represented a week’s wages for some people. From this we might deduce that the middle class sat in the boxes, the laboring class in the pit.
Unfortunately, the observations of persons attending the circus which have survived have all been of middle and upper-middle class origin. When newspapers refer to the mix of the audience they use the term “fashionable” as in the phrase, “The Circus was attended on Monday evening by a large and fashionable audience . . .” which was printed in the Rhode Island American on January 9, 1827. Or the statement from the Columbian Centinel of November 15, 1815, “The taste for Equestrian Exhibitions has much increased and fashionable crowds and respected families (are seen) at the Circus.” From these and their like we assume community leaders, in either social or business matters, attended the shows. As in so much history we run the risk of reporting only about an elite, if these were our only sources. They reinforce our belief that there were class distinctions in the audience, but leaves the unlettered portion without a voice. Fortunately, there is one source of information about conduct generally and this is the advertisements for circus performances.
We infer that if a proprietor notes that something is forbidden in his hall it has occurred often enough to disrupt the show. For instance, a warning against whistling during the performance because it makes the horses stop seems to us to indicate it happened too often for orderly performances. Smoking cigars was generally forbidden, as much because of the fire hazard as for sanitary reasons in the unventilated buildings. Bringing dogs to the circus was often forbidden in advertisements, probably because they were noisy and had the habit of staling where they willed.
In 1826 Nathan Howes felt bound, during a stand in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to warn that any person moving from pit to box would forfeit his ticket and have to leave the circus. (1) The temptation to occupy an empty seat was apparently too much for some pit occupants.
It was not uncommon for a troupe in the 1820s to announce that “rigid police” would be in attendance to preserve order and decorum, rigid meaning, in eighteenth century usage, severe or stern. As we mentioned, there were no municipal police to attend to such functions.
In 1817 we find the first reference to whores in the audience, though in theatre annals they appear almost as early as actors. James West, showing in Boston in July of that year felt compelled to announce that no females of a certain description would be admitted in the boxes. (2) His concern must have been that since the boxes were where middleclass ladies sat there would be no place acceptable to them if prostitutes could sit there, too. His warning was common in the period following it and all through the years that circuses were confined to buildings.
One presence in the modern (i.e., post Civil War) circus that was not in the early nineteenth century one was children. Whereas we have come to think of a circus performance as something for children, they were by no means in any numbers in that early audience. The society of the time saw no reason to entertain children, there was little enough for adults. Children were treated as small adults and pretty well confined to the domestic circle until their early teens. The circus audience was itself rather immature, by our intellectual standards.
West T. Hill says of theatre audiences of the time that they were primarily middle class and seeking contrived endings, slapstick farces and sentimental comedies. No Shakespeare, no Racine, no Moliere for them. The circus audience, being even less intellectual than that of the theatre, must have been poor clay indeed, for all they watched were athletic skills. It can be seen from this that circus proprietors had no need to cater to children and they didn’t until their adult audience began to abandon them in favor of other types of popular entertainment. When children were finally admitted at half-price it was not usual to let them sit in the boxes unless they paid full fare.
One class of society that apparently was wanted, but could only be admitted freely in the North was black people. Most theatres prohibited attendance by blacks. North and South, the circus had no such rule, but was forced by local convention in Baltimore or anywhere south of there to either prohibit them or segregate them.
The first notice of this treatment is dated May 1799 when John Bill Ricketts played Annapolis, Maryland. He advertised standing places for colored people at half price. (3) In Richmond in 1810 Pepin and Breschard charged a lower admission for colored people. (4) James West in Baltimore in December, 1817 said that people of color would not be admitted, but either local slaveholders or a lack of ticket buyers caused him to relent and he reserved a space on each end of the pit for blacks. (5) The same proprietor partitioned off the back of the pit for people of color in Washington in 1817, (6) and Price and Simpson provided seats on the left hand side of the pit in Savannah in 1823. (7)
One last view of this segregation is the 1827 New Orleans visit of the North American Circus where parquetes—or boxes—were fitted up for free people of color and a separate place was reserved for black people. (8) This in obeisance to the Louisiana convention of having a sort of apartheid based on three skin colors.
All these audience distinctions changed in the 1830s when the circus obtained its own theatre, the canvas tent. Grimsted refers to the theatre audience as being divided socially by box, pit and gallery and then divided again by specialization as each type of theatre found its own hall. (9) By this he meant drama, opera, vaudeville, burlesque, etc., not by those names and not all at once, of course. The circus with its canvas tent drew away from an audience made up exclusively of city dwellers and the competition of many types of entertainment. It moved to the smaller western towns and a more homogenous audience where the only distinction was that between general admission and reserved seats. The class distinctions disappeared as did the classes themselves. The small town audience presented other problems, but they rose from the nature of the towns themselves and must be the subject of other research.
Footnotes
1 Portsmouth Journal, December 16, 1826.
2 Columbian Centinel (Boston), May 10, 1817.
3 Maryland Gazette (Annapolis), May 23, 1799.
4 The Enquirer (Richmond), May 10 to 25, 1810.
5 American & Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore), Dec. 10, 1817.
6 National Intelligencer (Washington), January 13 to February 24, 1819
7 Savannah Daily Republican, December 15, 1823.
8 Louisiana Gazette (New Orleans), March 9 to April 20, 1827.
9 David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled (Chicago, 1968).
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