Splendidly researched and clearly written, The Circus and Victorian Society will reward any reader interested in Victorian entertainment and the Victorian temperament. In writing this exemplary cultural history, Brenda Assael succeeds not only in reconstructing the conditions behind the circus's transformation into commercial entertainment, but in providing an exceptionally full account of the social and political preoccupations of the Victorians. This book will likely serve as a reference point for future scholars of Victorian theater and entertainment.

Assael's study claims to be the first scholarly history of the circus, but its real novelty and importance reside in Assael's ability to intertwine two stories: a narrative of the circus's conversion into a business venture and an account of how the circus engaged “a complex system of meaning and mediation” for Victorian audiences (15). The circus, Assael insists, was “no laughing matter”: its performance, its very existence, was “fraught with contradictions” (13). The book traces the history of the circus as a carnivalesque form, transgressing boundaries between respectability and scandal, even as it finds its niche in a market economy. Circus entertainment continued to elicit complex, ambiguous responses even as it hailed mass audiences.

The book proceeds through a series of detailed case studies. Chapter 1 surveys the career of equestrian rider, W. H. Cooke, in order to relate the transformation of the circus from seasonal endeavor into ongoing, moneymaking enterprise. Chapter 2 describes how the circus equestrian act develops into a spectacle that fueled national patriotism and promilitary sentiment, at the moment when Britain went imperial. Chapter 3 closely examines the exotic acts and displays that became standard circus fare; Assael argues that these exhibits fueled the unruly desires of Victorian spectators to imaginatively possess the object of their gaze. Chapter 4 considers the ambiguous cultural politics of the circus clown and the threat the clown posed to norms of Victorian masculinity. Chapter 5 recounts the public row over lady acrobats in the 1860s. The sixth and final chapter relates disputes over efforts to introduce the regulation of child labor in the circus. Throughout the study, Assael argues that circus artists “inspired and encouraged a desire for excess and excitement” in Victorian audiences (9). All told, she succeeds in conveying to readers a sense of the complex interplay between circus performance and the central philosophical preoccupations of the Victorian age. She also provides readers with a rich phenomenology of the Victorian gaze, with all its particularities, complexities, and contradictions.

My only reservation with the book lies with Assael's declared intent to go beyond previous Gramsci-inspired, Marxist historiography on nineteenth-century carnival culture. Assael rightly claims that class-based interpretation of Victorian leisure has too often promulgated the notion that nineteenth-century pastimes were mere “rational recreations,” that is, not-so-subtle efforts by the bourgeois to manipulate the masses under the guise of educating them. In contrast, Assael emphasizes the cross-class appeal of the circus, refusing to link the entertainment with a distinct politics. She even claims a belief in a universal notion of the popular, a carnival impulse that “exists throughout all periods and places, informing us about liberation and repression … that lie at the heart of all human society” (10). But such declarations of transhistorical truth are rare and happily belied by Assael's practice, which invariably treats popular culture as a privileged locus for class struggle: much like the Gramsci-inspired historiography she rejects.

What The Circus and Victorian Society does—and does marvelously—is tell the story of how the spectacle of physical prowess, an entertainment with roots in the medieval fair and the aristocratic court, became an “organized and respectable trade” (2). Assael presents a compelling case for the hybrid nature of the circus, claiming that it retained a residual, feudal core, even as it was reshaped to compete in the capitalist marketplace. No wonder that Cooke, the equestrian rider whose career Assael chronicles in chapter 1, complains of headaches in letters to his fiancée. Making a living by flouting middle-class convention would be enough to give any Victorian a migraine.