The Life She Was Given

The modern circus draws inspiration from many forms of entertainment, including the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome, where horse-drawn chariots raced along a large track and gladiators battled wild animals, and Philip Astley’s horseshows in the Royal Amphitheatre in 18th-century England. It wasn’t until the 18th century that performances associated with the circus, including acrobatics, clowning, and menageries, came together under one roof to form the entertainment audiences know today. In the 19th century, important Industrial Revolution inventions like the steam engine helped to turn the circus into a wildly popular attraction, as trains could carry the show from town to town.

For the better part of a century, the circus reigned as the most popular form of entertainment in the US. After the financial crash of 1907, two major circus companies merged, creating the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, dubbed “The Greatest Show Earth,” which toured as two separate acts for over a decade and enjoyed a monopoly. Entire towns would celebrate the circus arriving in town, with schools shutting down and banks closing so that townspeople could attend parades and watch the big top tent being set up. As Janet Davis explains, “for isolated American audiences, the sprawling circus collapsed the entire globe into a pungent, thrilling, educational sensorium of sound, smell and color, right outside their doorsteps” (Davis, Janet M. “American’s Big Circus Spectacular Has a Long and Cherished History.” Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Mar. 2017). Circuses frequently relied on billing their acts as exotic or undiscovered, enticing audiences to experience something they had never seen, and often preying on their gullibility and lack of education.

One facet of the circus, popularized in P. T. Barnum’s American Museum and the debasing “human zoos” of the Universal Expositions, were “freak shows,” also called sideshows, which became an essential part of circus acts in the 19th century. People with deformities and differences had been put on display for large crowds since at least the medieval period. In 19th-century America, freak shows became a large enterprise, supported by the rise of vaudeville, circuses, amusement parks, and fairgrounds. Well into the 1900s, sideshows often relied on unethical schemes and tricks to dupe audiences. Additionally, showmen and circus leaders profited greatly off the exploitation of those with disabilities—drawing huge numbers of visitors to the sideshow meant monetary gain. Advertised via banners and pamphlets, freak shows encompassed a wide variety of performers, including those with physical limitations or disabilities, conjoined twins, people with dwarfism, people with missing limbs, and bearded women, among many others.

As audiences turned to new forms of amusement like cinemas in the 1920s, the circus had to reinvent itself. The Great Depression and the World Wars also had an impact on the number of audience members and supplies the circus could rely on. By the 1950s, the traditional circus began to decline in popularity, as many homes had televisions as the main form of entertainment. Coinciding with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the animal rights activism in the 1970s, and changing attitudes about people with physical differences that evolved with the rise of scientific and medical knowledge, views on the circus changed as people began to see how the acts exploited performers.

The modern circus of the 21st century demonstrates yet another evolution in the circus’s lifespan, as it focuses on skill-based displays of acrobatics and clowning rather than inherent aspects of human appearance.