The History of the Circus

This short illustrated history follows the circus from Roman games and medieval itinerant shows through Philip Astley's late-eighteenth-century London amphitheatre to the tenting companies, menageries, and clowning of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bentley notes how riding acts, clowns, acrobats, and later wild-animal displays were assembled into a single entertainment, and how the form crossed Europe and America. The account is a survey of an institution rather than a memoir of one ring. The book is a compact popular history of the circus, not a training manual and not a novel of circus life.

Bound in orange-pink glazed paper printed in colour, pale orange endleaves. Sixteen pages of colour illustrations of posters and other prints and photographs. No jacket or slipcase. Folio miniature -michael Joseph in association with the Folio Press.