SEVENTY YEARS A SHOWMAN INTRODUCTION SANGER AND HIS TIMES BY
KENNETH GRAHAME RETIREMENT and reminiscence are apt to trot in
harness together, and so, when Mr. George Sanger, the great
showman, so familiar, by name at least, to the youth of the last
generation, retired from the circus business in 1905, he proceeded
to set down the simple yet moving annals of his past career, with
the same calm courage with which he would draw the aching tooth of
a favourite elephant. Published in book form in 1910, under the
title of Seventy Years a Showman, these memoirs hardly attracted at
the time all the no tice they really merited. It is to be hoped
that this re issue the book has been many years out of print may
receive fuller attention, for his story is not only excellently and
graphically written, and packed with yarns of the most vivid
character set forth in a per fectly natural and unexaggerated
manner, but it pro vides a reel, so to speak, of moving-pictures
illustrative of a certain period that extending from the early
thirties to the end of the last century during which the rural and
provincial life of England underwent a transformation as complete
as perhaps-any previous period of seventy years could show. It
covers, too, the whole period of Dickenss work, and that of many
Introduction, Sanger and His Times by Kenneth Grahame, copyright,
1926, by E. P, Dutton Company, AU Righto Reserved. SEVENTY YEARS A
SHOWMAN another of lesser fame, all busy depicting the Early
Victorian world in its every phase and once more, as we read, many
of their characters seem to start into life again, each in his
habit as he lived, in the faithful jottings of this simple and
unlettered showman. George Sangersparents wfcre Wiltshire people
his father, press-ganged at eighteen, served ten years afloat, and
fought and was severely wounded in the Victory at Trafalgar from
which event, and his con sequent retirement on a pension of 10 per
annum, we date his entry into the show business, with a self-made
peep-show he could carry on his back. As described by his son, he
seems to have been a man of fine char acter, and his adventures,
intertwined as they are with the writers early years, form as good
reading as any part of the book. But the father, though reaching
out at times in this direction and that, remained faithful in the
main to the peep-show with which he had first challenged fortune.
It was young George who was always the climber, the aspirant, the
seeker after new things. While still a boy, be must needs start his
own little show, which, composed of performing canaries, redpolls
and white mice, strengthened later by two tame hares, bore in it
the seed of the mighty circuses and menageries that were to follow.
At eighteen he was on the road with a travelling van of his own
when about twenty-six he entered the great circus world, and passed
from success to success, their cul mination being the purchase of
the famous Astleys Theatre in 187 1. Followed his Continental tours
and vi SANGER AND HIS TIMES triumphs, during which, as he used to
boast, his cir cuses travelled the roads of every country in Europe
except Russia and thereafter he was not so much a man as an
institution and a British institution too. Mr. Sanger, like a good
showman, married in the profession, choosing for his bride the
popular Lion Queen of a rival establishment, somewhat to the dis
gust of the rival establishment, whoevidently held, not
unnaturally, that showmen ought to marry their own Lion Queens,
instead of poaching on those of other people. She made as good a
wife as she had made a Lion Queen who dares to say that an early
training is ever entirely wasted and when, after forty-eight years
of happy married life, he lost her, his book pays touching tribute
to all that she had been to him, both in solid worth and in
affection. Lovers to the last, he says and that is saying not a
little. In 1905 Mr...
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