David Musgrove travels back to the jeopardy and exhilaration of the Victorian circus, to explore Bob Carlisle’s hair-raising career as a clown and tiger tamer
Tickling tigers one day, and cracking jokes to expectant crowds the next, Bob Carlisle was a circus showman, agent, clown and big cat tamer. In the third episode of our new series on this larger-than-life character of the Victorian age, David Musgrove speaks to historian John Woolf to consider Carlisle’s hair-raising life in the travelling circus, and how it helps us to understand the world of Victorian show business.