94. Napoleon Buonaparte, Joey the Clown and a Chariot for Sale - All in the Day's News: The Archaeology of a Box (9)

 

 

Among the treasures in my box I find a facsimile of The Times dated Thursday, June 22nd, 1815 (price 6pence ha'penny). I have no idea now of how or why I acquired this.

For me the distinctive feature of The Times in my youth was the small ads that filled the front and back pages, replaced since 3 May 1966 by conventional news stories.

The big news story of June 22nd 1815 was the defeat of Napoleon's army at the Battle of Waterloo.

 

I have always loved reading the small ads in newspapers as they usually turn up some items of curiosity. For example, when in Hawaii in 1985, I noted these down:

• Become legally ordained minister. Credentials sent for $3 offering. Mother Earth Church.
• Divorce $25.
• [On a T-shirt] Property of 3 Mile Island Nuclear Plant. Glows in the dark.
• [A picture of Uncle Sam and the text] Join the Army. Travel to exotic distant lands; meet exciting, unusual people and kill them.
• Australia – New Zealand. 50,000 jobs. Top pay. All occupations. Free transportation.
• Women Too Expensive? Stop Dating Ripoffs! Free details.
• Avoid Death and Holocaust. Free! Cassette tape, no obligation.

This 1815 edition of The Times doesn't disappoint. Along with the apartments to rent, the houses to buy, the jobs to be filled, the businesses to be traded or wound up, the notices of sermons and meetings, the horses, ponies and cows for sale, there's a yellow chariot at 150 guineas.

 

And there's some novel entertainment:

At the Freemasons' Tavern in Lincoln's Inn Fields, William Wilberforce MP, President of the African and Asiatic Society, is to preside over the Society's Anniversary Dinner.

 William Wilberforce was a key player in the long running parliamentary campaign to abolish the slave trade. Finally in 1807 the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act abolished the slave trade in the British colonies. But although the trading in slaves was now illegal, slavery itself was not. It was not until 1833 that the Abolition of Slavery Act passed its third reading in the House of Commons. Wilberforce died three days later.

 

So What's On? in London theatres in June 1815.

 

 

At the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Edmund Kean (1767-1832) stars in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, a Jacobean comedy by John Fletcher. In 1814 Drury Lane Theatre was on the verge of bankruptcy and so employed Kean, England's leading Shakespearean actor. He opened as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice to huge audiences and followed up with the lead parts in Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear.

 

At the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden this evening Miss O'Neill plays the title role in Isabella or, the Fatal Marriage by the English actor, playwright and theatre manager David Garrick (1717-1779). Elizabeth O'Neill (1791-1872) was an Irish actress who, after causing a sensation in Dublin was employed by Covent Garden and made her debut there in 1814 as Juliet.

On Friday June 30th a special benefit show of opera, farce and 'other entertainments' will take place for Mr Brandon, the Covent Garden's box office manager and treasurer. The comic opera The Duenna, whose lyrics were written by Richard Sheridan (1751-1815), playwright and long-term owner of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was described by Byron as the 'best opera ever'.

At the Royal Amphitheatre (Astley's) a variety show featuring, among other things, a real horse race and a real fox chace. Astley's in Westminster Bridge Road was the home of the circus.

At Sadler's Wells a dance, a comic song, a melodrama and a pantomime with the Clown of Clowns, Mr Grimaldi. Joseph Grimaldi (1778-1820), actor, comedian and dancer, was the most popular entertainer of the Regency period (1811-1820). He is buried in Joseph Grimaldi Park in Islington and each year on the first Sunday in February there is a memorial service for him. Clowns attend in their full costumes to take part in the service and then put on a show for the local community.

 

 

At Vauxhall, under the patronage of the Prince Regent, a Grand Gala and Fireworks Display. Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was London's leading venue for public entertainment and attracted enormous crowds drawn from all walks of society. Each evening at dusk a thousand oil lamps would be lit so that festivities could continue into the night. In 1817 the Battle of Waterloo was re-enacted there with a thousand soldiers participating. Here is Thackeray's description in Vanity Fair of  'all the delights of the Gardens':

the hundred thousand extra lamps, which were always lighted; the fiddlers in cocked hats, who played ravishing melodies under the gilded cockle-shell in the midst of the Gardens; the singers, both of comic and sentimental ballads, who charmed the ears there; the country dances, formed by bouncing cockneys and cockneyesses, and executed amidst jumping, thumping and laughter; the signal which announced that Madame Saqui was about to mount skyward on a slack-rope ascending to the stars; the hermit that always sat in the illuminated hermitage; the dark walks, so favourable to the interviews of young lovers; the pots of stout handed about by the people in the shabby old liveries; and the twinkling boxes, in which the happy feasters made-believe to eat slices of almost invisible ham...

 

 

 

 

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