Historian John Woolf introduces the performers and promoters of the Victorian travelling circus, and explains why the entertainment held such appeal for the 19th-century public
What was it like to step inside the ‘Big Top’ of a 19th-century travelling circus?
In this bonus episode accompanying the HistoryExtra podcast series The Tiger Tamer Who Went to Sea, David Musgrove speaks to Dr John Woolf about the rise of the travelling fair, the railways that allowed its transformation into one of the biggest entertainment spectacles of the era, and the circus’s most famous and complicated characters, from PT Barnum to Buffalo Bill.