Volume 25, Number 15 · October 12, 1978
Yesterday's Today Show
By Francis Haskell
The Shows of London: A Panoramic History of Exhibitions 1600-1862
by Richard D. Altick
Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 553, 181 illus pp., $35.00
Around the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, the Church, the Law, Medicine—those dignified (and suitably capitalized) achievements by which civilizations are judged and by which man seeks to dominate the chaos threatening to engulf him—there has always spilled out a series of gaudy, yet ill-defined subcultures which have been little studied and which—in part—form the subject of Professor Altick's very long, enthralling, and admirably illustrated book. The Shows of London can be read with keen interest for its accounts of freaks and automata, learned pigs and panoramas, dwarfs, Temples of Health and bush men—dozens and dozens of attempts, made over two and a half centuries, to attract a paying public through the ingenious exploitation of human credulity. It is a story which exhilarates and sickens by turns, and Professor Altick tells it very well. He has absorbed a prodigious amount of detail from innumerable sources, yet his tone is dry without being sententious, evocative without being sentimental.
Review, 1978 words
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