The Vapour Trail

A few years back I wrote a couple of articles about ‘lost race romances’ set in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. Largely written by boys’-own-adventure novelists such as Ernest Favenc and William Sylvester Walker (but also by the popular writer, Rosa Praed), these works imagined the discovery a race never before known to civilisation somewhere in the Australian interior.

The narratives of lost race romances such as George Firth Scott’s The Last Lemurian (1898) and Praed’s Fugitive Anne (1902) were obviously influenced by the English-born South African writer, Rider Haggard. He wrote about unknown races being discovered in Africa in She (1886-7) and Allan Quartermain (1887), bestsellers throughout the British Empire. Drawing on bizarre theories about the lost continent of Lemuria and its peoples, the lost race motif itself was obviously influenced by the late-Victorian fascination with social Darwinism and eugenic ideas. In some cases, the races discovered in these works were imagined as a once spectacularly ‘advanced’ people who had degenerated into a sad condition under the pressures of isolation in the Australian outback. Anxieties about racial degeneration and the like, in which the turn-of-the-century era was so lamentably rich, were thus evoked in these literary offerings.

What I didn’t realise when I became interested in The Lost Explorer (1890) and other novels was that the idea of a lost race in the Australian interior had roots in a mid-nineteenth century freak show. Indeed, from about the mid-1860s, two unfortunate kiddies from Circleville, Ohio, were billed as ‘the Wild Australian Children’ in a travelling American exhibit of freaks and ’scientific’ curios. In the cruel argot of the business, these children were ‘pinheads’: that is, they were microcephalic, and had severe intellectual disabilities. Promotional pamphlets accompanying their exhibit described them as the members of a near-extinct cannibal tribe, plucked from the desert wilds of Australia by an explorer-adventurer, Captain Reid.

According to their publicity, “phrenologists and other scientific men” had come to the view that the Wild Australians ”belonged to a distinct race hitherto unknown to civilisation”. My ignorance of this fact when I wrote my articles (and the absence of it in any other work on the Australian romances) demonstrates once again the extent to which popular theatricals are under the radar for most studies of nineteenth-century culture. I wonder whether there were other such exhibits of ‘lost Australian races’ on the sideshow circuit in the 1860s-70s, and whether Haggard had become aware of them before writing She? And what do the Wild Australian Children have to say about notions of race and Australianness in America during the 1860s and 70s?

References

Melissa Bellanta, “Mobilising Fictions, or, Romancing the Australian Desert, 1890-1908″, History Australia, 1.1 (2003): pp 15-29

                       , ‘Fabulating the Australian Desert: Australia’s Lost Race Romances, 1890-1908′, Philament 3 (April 2004): http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/publications/philament/issue3_Critique_Bellanta.htm. (References to all of the Australian lost race romances are outlined in the footnotes to this article).

Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 119-20. Bogdan includes a poster of the Wild Australian Children in this work, taken from the Harvard Theatre Collection.

For anyone interested in Circassian Beauties, the subject of a post I wrote last week, this offering on the Virtual Dime Musuem adds a great postscript… 

In 2006, Alexandria’s New Old Theatre, a theatrical company specialising in reviving Victorian melodramas, put on a version of Caesar; Or, the Watchdog of the Castle. As the review in the Washington Post indicated, this was one of many nineteenth century melodramas to feature a dog in a heroic part.

Obviously the forerunner of Lassie, The Wizard of Oz, and the other lovable-dog Hollywood movies, animal melodramas had a certain enthusiastic following in minor English and American theatres – and even some of the big ones – in the 1820s and later years. Plays with monkeys also feautred - and according to Frank Rahill, plays with courageous birds as well. Here are some representative titles: The Cherokee Chief; or, The Shipwrecked Sailor and His Dog, The Smuggler’s Dog, or, the Blind Boy’s Murder, Jack Robinson and his Monkey (is that where the phrase ‘before you can say Jack Robinson’ comes from, I wonder?), Philip and his Dog, and The Planter and his Dog; or the Slave’s Revenge.

Actors who worked with dogs on stage were apparently known in the ninteenth-century industry as “dog Hamlets”. They worked in a three-person team – or rather, a two-person-and-dog team, the humans playing hero and villain respectively. As Rahill puts it, “the dog was by far the most important person in the ensemble”. In Philip and his Dog, the canine hero drowns the villain and steals bread for starving farmers. Usually, though, the dog’s ”prize contribution to the entertainment was to leap at the throat of the villain and tear open a carefully prepared sack of red ochre planted there for the purpose, the malefactor dying a horrible, bloody death on the stage”.

Reference

Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1967), 139-40.

Fears of “white slavery” were rife in England during the 1880s, when William Stead published his sensational revelations of white girls captured and forced into Continental brothels in the pages of his Pall Mall Gazette. Any of the Londonites reading his “Maiden Tribute” series could not only glut their interest in stories of English roses trafficked into sex-slavery – they could also go to any circus sideshow and see for themselves a ”Circassian beauty” said to have escaped sexual servitude in Turkey.

Circassian beauty in England, image from Sideshow World.

Any freak show worth its salt in the 1880s included a Circassian Beauty. She was invariably a pale-skinned young woman kitted out like a hippie from the 1970s: puffy silk pants, sheer-flowing coats, and most importantly, a nimbus of frizzy, Afro-style darkish hair. Usually these women had names beginning with ‘Z’: Zana Zanobia, Zoe Meleke, Zula Zeleka, Zalumma Agra, Zoberdie Luti. Often they would seat themselves cross-legged on stage, holding a water-pipe, and looking demurely at the audience as the pitchman presented them as the purest example available of the Caucasian race. Once! (he would say), once this beauty had lived in the Caucasus, that region on the shores of the Black Sea which formed the cradle of all white peoples. She had been crooooooo-elly stolen from her home during a Turkish raid, and afterwards sold in the white slave markets of Constantinople as the member of a harem to an evil Turk. Beautiful as she was, she had been kept veiled from the rest of the world, and made to do her harem-owner’s bidding before being dramatically rescued.

Zoe Zolena, image from Sideshow World.

The Circassian beauties were of course a hoax. Zoe Meleke, who appeared on the P T Barnum circuit in the States, was American-born. According to the circus press agent Dexter Fellows in the 1930s, one of the most famous Circassians - ‘Zuleika, The Circassian Sultana’ – was an Irish immigrant from Jersey City. Women tricking themselves up as these beauties would create the trademark ”mossy hair” by using beer as shampoo and an artful use of the comb. The only real requisite was pale skin and a certain round-faced vacant beauty – that and a willingness to be gawped at by rubes pruriently imagining her in congress with a Turkish overlord. The whole phenomenon says a great deal about the voyeuristic fantasies that accompanied notions of the Orient and cross-racial sexual encounters in this period of British New Imperialism and eugenic theories across the West.

PS For the Carnivale fans out there, Adrienne Barbeau’s character Ruthie (above) is surely based loosely on the image of the Circassian beauty. Her hair is almost frizzy, her clothes redolent of the Turkish harem, and her snake-dancing act has just the right amount of sexual titillation to make a commentary on the 1880s craze. Indeed, according to this blog post (although it does not indicate what its source was), Circassian beauties turned to snake-dancing or charming once they started losing their novelty.

References

Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 235-40.

Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81-134 (on W T Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” series).

For more images, see the Circassian Beauty archive.

The latest issue of M/C is out now, an online journal of media and culture. It looks at voting and citizenship, and has an article by yours truly called ‘Voting for Pleasure, Or, The View From a Victorian Theatre Gallery’.

I wrote the article in response to claims that various forms of voting-for-entertainment represent a coming epoch of direct democracy in Western culture… that old everything-is-democratic-is-good chestnut that still seems to count for so much in media and cultural studies. Actually, voting-for-entertainment isn’t all that new. As I show in the article, popular theatrical audiences regularly experienced the thrill of evicting performers or cheering for the ones they liked in rowdy Victorian theatres. Those forms of de facto voting hardly won them political gains or other freedoms outside theatre galleries. So what makes new media commentators like John Hartley so convinced that current forms of voting-for-fun (like Idol, or online polls) are so emancipatory now?