The Greatest Show on Earth

A little digression on when the circus comes to town.

James Barry often lamented the lack of fun in the community. Unlike “the old days”, he’d write, this Christmas, or New Years, there were no balls, sprees or shooting matches, as there had been when he was young. Thank goodness, he must have thought, when a circus came to town.

He noted attending five circuses over the course of the diary, two were apparently unimpressive – so unimpressive he didn’t even bother to name them. “The Great Stone & Murray Circus” arrived in Pictou in the summer of 1872. As is so often the case, Barry didn’t give much detail – and misreported the name as “Murray & Stone” – only letting us know that he and 11-year-old daughter Josephine “spent a lot of money”, concluding that it was “pretty good”.

The poster I’m drawing on above is from Old Town Maine, for the previous year, 1871. If not perfectly accurate, it gives is a good sense of what James and the other Pictou County folk saw that night. As the poster makes clear, Stone and Murray’s show was largely an equestrian company. They featured members of the Cooke family, husband and wife John Henry and Henrietta Cooke, as well as John Henry’s sister Rosina – “Mlle. Rosina”, she was Scottish but the billing lent some exoticism. The Cookes were the American branch of a British equestrian show, Cooke’s Royal Circus, who had been touring since 1780. Other performers had a briefer pedigree. The Snow Brothers, an acrobatics team, were younger, but they knew the Maritimes; they had been in Charlottetown in September 1864 (when across town Canadian and Maritime politicians met to discuss federating). They were still performing a decade later with W. C. Coup’s “United Monster Shows”, but they didn’t tour the Maritimes.

Did Barry laugh, or grimace, at Tom Barry, the Hibernian Clown, or C. H. Munroe, the Grotesque Clown? Did he marvel at the ascending balloon? Or the “spectacle” of the twenty horse parade? We don’t know. But if the clowns resembled the often mean-spirited humour of T. C. Haliburton, he’d have had a chuckle. Why, Josephine might have wondered, is Daddy laughing at this ugly man?

Barry also saw P. T. Barnum’s circus twice, once travelling to Truro in 1876 and then again in New Glasgow in 1879. He was certainly more enthusiastic about Barnum: “I went over to Johnny McLeod’s this morning quite early, and him and his three sons and daughter, and George Walsh, in one wagon, Drawn by 2 horses, went over to [New] Glasgow to see Barnum’s ‘greatest Show on Earth’ and sure enough it was the ‘greatest'”. Again, as usual, Barry offered us few details, but he was seldom so effusive.

Barnum toured the Maritimes semi-regularly, part of a typical route that took them from their base in Connecticut through New England, New York and “British Canada” [which in 1879 meant two stops in New Brunswick and two in Nova Scotia]. Also primarily an equestrian show, Barnum’s however was more adventuresome, and it’s fair to say nothing like it had been seen before in Pictou County.

One wonders why Johnny McLeod’s children attended when neither Bess nor Josephine came along this time. Barry doted on Josephine, and even though she’d no longer be a child (she’d have been 16 in 1876) it’s hard to imagine her not wanting to attend. Bess would have been 9, a prime age for the circus. But, in Bess’s case, it’s not that surprising as Barry rarely took her anywhere, perhaps as I speculate elsewhere because in his eyes she remained tainted.

The last circus Barry noted was “P. Ryan’s and Robinson’s CIRCUS”, in August 1882. But they were late arriving, and slow setting up. Barry sold his ticket and went home. Not a man to sit around and wait. But even in the 1890s, they had the most circus-y poster.

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My brief circus research drew from the the sources noted above, as well as William E. Stout, Olympians of the Sawdust Circle: A Biographical Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century American Circus (San Bernardino, CA : Borgo Press, 1998); Sarah Hovde, “A nineteenth-century family circus“, The Collation: Folger Shakespeare Library September 2017; and Thomas Frost, Circus life and circus celebrities (London, Chatto and Windus, 1881) – notes the Cookes – Henrietta and John Henry (husband and wife) as “prominent members of Stone and Murray’s company” (p.225) Barnum images from Connecticut Digital Archive, https://collections.ctdigitalarchive.org/node/57684#page/1/mode/2up.