Seventy Years A Showman
Cód:
491_9781443731133
SEVENTY YEARS A SHOWMAN- Sanger and His Times by Kenneth Grahame. First published in 1926. 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 Dickens work, and that of many Introduction, 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 Sangers parents 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
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