Читать книгу Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe - Frederik L. Schodt - Страница 10

“The story of professor Risley Carlisle . . . is full of curious changes.”

—Hartford Daily Courant, May 30, 1874

Who was Professor Risley? In 1866, when he arrived in San Francisco as the manager of the Imperial Japanese Troupe, he was already well known, in an age that produced many legendary and colorful impresarios. As a writer for the San Francisco Daily Morning Call put it in 1867, just as Risley left that city,

Everybody has heard of this famous man, and his life and varied experiences will form a conspicuous chapter in some history of “American Showmen,” to be written in the future. He has in the pursuit of his profession travelled over nearly the whole of the globe, and is as well known in Paris as he is in New York; his name is as familiar in Yokohama as it is in San Francisco. . . .1

“Professor Risley” was the stage name of Richard Risley Carlisle, who used it for most of his adult life. Born around 1814, newspaper obituaries at the time of his death in 1874 generally gave his birthplace as Salem, New Jersey. For most of his life, he called nearby Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his hometown. Recent research pinpoints the place of his birth in Bass River, Burlington County, New Jersey, near the coast. Noted circus historian Stuart Thayer, who wrote one of the best summaries of Risley’s life, aptly refers to him as “A Man in Motion,” but until the beginning of the twenty-first century, when it became easier to search disparate sources of information, it was not clear how early Risley developed his extraordinary velocity. At times, he appears to us almost as someone who appeared on earth fully developed, with muscles tensed, ready to spring into action. 2

Map of northeastern United States.

As an adult, Risley was described as “proficient in athletic sports and a man of great personal strength and endurance.” Solidly built, he was also “a fine wrestler, skater and swimmer, with a fine musical voice, and performed with taste on the flute.” From an 1849 passport application, we also know he was 5’ 8”, had gray eyes, brown hair, fair complexion, high forehead, oval face, an average mouth, round chin, and a Roman nose. One detailed obituary in 1874, apparently written by someone who knew him, describes him as “a man of wit, a rapid talker . . . , and of a most jovial disposition.” He was also said to have had a speech impediment that, combined with his speed of talking, sometimes made him hard to understand. But it did not stop him from being

highly entertaining.3

Nothing in Risley’s origins immediately suggested that he would become the first person to introduce American-style circus into Japan, or to stage some of the first presentations of Japanese acrobats in the West. In 1814, Japan was about as far away from the shores of New Jersey, figuratively speaking, as the moon is from Earth today. The United States was a brand-new nation, having declared its independence from Britain only thirty-eight years earlier. It was a fraction of its current size, consisting of only eighteen small states hugging the Atlantic coast, and its focus was entirely on expanding its own western frontier, and on Europe. In the year of Risley’s birth the so-called “War of 1812”—America’s second war with Britain—was ending, and that summer the White House was burned by British troops. Japan, meanwhile, was isolated from the outside world and had been so for two hundred years, so whatever Americans knew about it usually came indirectly, via China or Holland, which had limited interaction with the Japanese. If ordinary Americans referred to anything remotely Japanese, it was usually with the adjective japanned, which meant “lacquered” items.

A Restless Spirit

In an era when most people lived and died in the same area, Risley was born into a traveling tradition. His father was John Carlisle, a sea captain at a time when the ports of southern New Jersey were bustling with commerce and ships from distant lands. In 1821, in preparation for his retirement from the sea, the captain built a house overlooking the Mullican River in New Jersey, where young Risley presumably lived with his sister, Elizabeth. In 1945 the house still survived, and a faded photograph from that period shows it to have been quite substantial, with at least two stories. One of four giant sycamore trees planted by the “jolly sea captain” was still standing, and the owner of the house had one of the captain’s original ledgers—written in a neat, looping hand, with copious notes.4

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, skillful sleuthing by John Kovach, the official historian for St. Joseph’s County, Indiana, helped fill in some of the missing details in Professor Risley’s early life. An article appeared in the local South Bend Tribune about a man who, when cleaning out a former old church, had discovered an iron cross with a note that said, “This cross marks the graves of the two children of Richard Carlisle, founder of New Carlisle.” The next day, Kovach was deluged with questions from readers, and he began unearthing old, forgotten records, revealing the astounding gyrations of Risley’s early years, before he became a professional acrobat. As Kovach reflected in 2011, “Little did I know what roads I would be traveling down!”5

On October 15, 1833, following his father’s death in 1828, Risley married Rebecca C. Willits of Philadelphia. He was not yet twenty-one, and it must have been an awkward union since (for reasons that are not entirely clear) the next year Risley’s new father-in-law named him as a defendant in a lawsuit, establishing a trend that would last throughout his life of being involved in legal actions. The year after that, in 1835, Risley’s first son, John, was born, and that spring the new family moved to St. Joseph County in the then-new state of Indiana. The area had been rapidly opened up to settlers in the wake of an 1827 treaty with the Potawatomi Indians. Perhaps hoping to make his fortune, in 1835, for two-thousand dollars, the twenty-one-year-old Risley purchased 160 acres of land from Lazarus Bourissa, a French fur trader in the area, and in the same year he submitted a “plat,” or plan, for a town he called (after himself) “New Carlisle.” Risley’s original “dedication” shows his meticulous attention to detail and linearity in design, for he specified that the main boulevard, Michigan Street, should be made one hundred feet wide, with alleys parallel to it sixteen and a half feet, while those perpendicular to it were to be eight feet in width.6

New Carlisle survives today, but Risley did not live long in the town that he established. In 1836, his second son, Henry, was born, but all did not go well. As Kovach has discovered, in 1837 the twenty-three-year-old Risley was sued by his brother-in-law, John Egbert. And while the lawsuit was going on, a campaign advertisement in the April 17, 1837, edition of the South Bend Free Press newspaper shows that Risley apparently decided to run for the Indiana State Legislature, as a representative of the County of St. Joseph. In 1838, a daughter was born and died, and that same year Risley sold his land and declared bankruptcy. He was briefly hired by St. Joseph County to be a bounty hunter, and in 1839 he purchased 160 acres in Michigan. The certificate of purchase survives, made out to a “Richard R. Carlisle, of St. Joseph County Indiana,” and testified to by then-President Martin Van Buren. It seems to have been one of the last times Risley used his real name.7

Much information about Risley’s movements in this period is still murky. In addition to being a bounty hunter and investing in real estate, he also was at one point a postmaster and a shopkeeper or merchant. One man who knew Risley later claimed that he lived in Philadelphia and was in the glass-cutting business with a shop and a warehouse “in Third Street near Arch,” but where this fits into an already complicated timeline is unclear.8 At any rate, by 1840 Risley had left Indiana, and he had also left some deep impressions on its people. Two decades later, the Ohio Repository in Canton ran a long, humorous article titled “How Prof. Risley Went in on His Muscle,” about his Indiana days. It gave a rare glimpse of his early character, and fits the classic pattern of several recorded Risley stories, which have drama and humor and an interesting emphasis on vernacular language. It described him as then being a South Bend, Indiana, merchant, who

. . . was quite a favorite with the ladies and the best part of “Young America” [ . . . ]—but a perfect terrifier to the rowdies. . . . [He] was the best natured fellow in town, but he was known to be as quick as a cat, and as muscular as a horse, and the rowdies seemed to have an instinctive knowledge that he was bad stock for them to invest in.9

In this story, a group of rowdies disrupted a local ball but were dispelled by Risley, who took one of the men by the heels and swung him around like a battle axe, scattering the others. Chastened, they then hired the biggest thug they could find, who days later appeared in Risley’s store. Ever the gentleman, Risley agreed to a fight on the local green, as long as the loser paid any fines for disturbing the peace. He encouraged the bully to have a friendly drink before the combat began, and then managed to “spread him out like a wet rag.” He thereafter nursed the bloodied giant, taking his pulse and talking to him kindly, as though to an old woman, saying, “You needn’t have any fears of being sued for breach of peace. . . . Nobody around here would call this a fight. . . . We’re only playing. . . . Shall we play anymore?” The two men reportedly resumed drinking and remained fast friends ever after, the bully later becoming a baggage handler in a circus.10

The role of ordinary businessman did not suit Risley well. According to some sources who knew him, around 1838 he also began appearing in “Welsh’s circus” on the East Coast, “playing the flute.”11 Exact dates aside, when Risley’s name does start to appear regularly in newspaper advertisements in 1841, he clearly already has considerable name recognition as an acrobat and entertainer.

On November 24, 1841, the New York Evening Post ran an advertisement for Welsh’s circus at the Bowery Ampitheatre in New York. It boldly announced upcoming evening performances, commencing with a grand Waltz and Gallopade and some equestrian performances, followed by Mr. Cole and “his singing Dog Billy, who will walk on two feet.” Another main attraction was to be “Mr. Risley and his little son only five years old who will go through their astonishing performances in imitation of the Polish Brothers.” There would also be vaulting by Mr. McFarland, a “Negro Extravaganza” by Messrs. “Risley and Williams” and, following a fifteen-minute break, some arena entertainment by the whole company and a comic afterpiece of “Poor Snip!” Box seats were fifty cents, but seating in the pit was a quarter. The Polish Brothers were a popular acrobatic act in the Northeast, and exactly what aspect of them Risley and son imitated is not clear. The “Negro Extravaganza” that Risley performed was presumably an early type of minstrelsy, a soon-to-be hugely popular form of musical, dancing, and comic entertainment in which White performers imitated Blacks, and especially Black slaves.12

Beyond Circus

Circuses were already popular entertainment in 1840s America. Introduced from England, they had not yet evolved into giant multi-ringed extravaganzas, but they were already well organized and populated with exotic wild animals, thrilling equestrian stunts, acrobats, jugglers, magicians, and musical and comedy acts, the last often taking the form of black-faced minstrel skits. In an era when people had few entertainments and a great curiosity for the unknown, the foreign, the exciting, and the risqué, circuses were hugely popular among the masses and could draw enormous crowds. Still, they were often scorned by the elites and the more puritanical members of local communities. An article titled “Circus” in the Freeman and Messenger newspaper in Lodi, New York, put it this way in 1840:

Our village is soon to be paid a visit by a gang of strolling mountebanks, jugglers, rope-dancers, equestrians and loafers, accompanied by their pimps and abandoned wretches. Music, excentricities [sic], negro songs and vulgar slang will be the principle feats to procure the patronage and attract the gaze of all who may be so sensually disposed as to give their money to so worthless a set of beings. We would ask, what are the benefits to be derived from visiting the circus? No one is benefitted thereby; but on the contrary thousands are corrupted in their morals, and hundreds ruined.13

In nineteenth-century America, the circus had far less social status than even the theatre, which was itself regarded as dubious entertainment at best. As the greatest impresario of the nineteenth century, P. T. Barnum (who elevated American hucksterism to an art form and helped create the modern circus) noted in 1841, “Actors maintain a profound disgust for the sawdust, and the circus people have a supreme dislike to the legitimate business, which they regard with supreme contempt. Yet it is the ambition of the circus folks to play in a regular theatre.”14

Partly because the circus belonged to a subculture and demimonde that catered to the cravings of the American public for novelty and exoticism, it was from the beginning also extremely multicultural. It was one of the few places in nineteenth-century America where performers of so many different backgrounds and utterly unrelated talents could mingle with relative freedom. And the names of the acts presented in early advertisements reveal the public’s curiosity and hunger for the foreign. When the previously mentioned “Polish Brothers” performed in Baltimore in January 1838, they also appeared in a piece called “Bedouins of the Desert.” They were followed by “Chinese and Grecian Exercises” and a then-popular equestrian number titled “The Courier of St. Petersburgh.”15

Playbill for an October 13, 1842,

performance of Welch’s New Olympic Circus, showing “The Inimitable Exercises of Mr. Risley and Son” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. courtesy, the library company of philadelphia.

Risley may have found one potential role model for the future in General Rufus Welch, the well-known impresario and owner of Welsh’s Circus, where Risley first made his name as an acrobat. In the 1840s, no one better represented the international aspects of circus than Welch, or Welsh, as he was sometimes called.

The portly Welch lived from 1800 to 1856 and was no more a real “general” than Risley was a “professor.” Yet he had a general’s view of organization and of the world, for his scope and his ambition seemed boundless. A much beloved man, he formed a variety of menageries and (often with associates) some of the most famous circuses of the mid-nineteenth century. He worked especially in the northeast of the United States, in the area of New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, staging increasingly spectacular events. But he was also an early world traveler. As later obituaries noted, Welch “traveled in nearly every quarter of the globe,” through North and South America and Europe. He is also said to have visited Africa to collect lions and elephants and other exotic fauna, reportedly introducing the first giraffes into North America.16

Whether Welch directly triggered Risley’s interest in the outside world, and eventually in Asia, is unclear. But Welch’s circuses did help Risley make the acquaintance of other artists and performers who would later help him in his international career. And Welch’s international ambitions foreshadowed those of Risley. In 1843, New York newspapers were reporting that Welch would, “with his troop coast up the Mediterranean, visit Cairo, and crossing the Isthmus of Suez, descend the Red Sea, visit Western and Eastern India, and push his way to China, and ere the lapse of eighteen months, exhibit an American equestrian troop to his majesty the brother of the Sun and Moon, at the Royal Chon Chon amphitheatre at Pekin.” There is no evidence that Welch ever made it to Beijing, but he was nonetheless awe-inspiring for his time, “astonishing the semi-barbaric hordes of the East,” and “edifying the Christians, Jews and Mahometans of Algiers.” By the spring of 1844, he was said to have toured “Gibraltar, Cadiz, Algiers, Genoa, Marseilles, Palermo, Mahon, and crossed the Atlantic for South America, and at the last advices was performing in Rio with success.”17

The Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, earthquake of February 8, 1843. courtesy, national information service for earthquake engineering, university of california, berkeley.

In 1842 Risley appeared with his young son on the playbills of several Welch-associated circuses and events in the Northeast, and the pair quickly began to attract attention as something that straddled the line between circus and a more refined type of entertainment. In March, they were featured at Welch & Delavan’s Front St. Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, performing what was billed as “The Magnificent Italian Scena of Gymnastics.” This involved not only acrobatic feats, including perch acts, but posturing in classical styles, which became a trademark Risley feature, and it hinted at what Risley would come to promote as a kind of “drawing room entertainment.” Little John, in particular, completely charmed the heart of audiences. In July the Baltimore Sun proclaimed that the “gymnastics of Mr. Risley and his son, are universally admitted to be of the most extraordinary in character; these can be only understood and appreciated by sight itself.”18

By the end of 1842, Risley and son had become something of a sensation. Writing about the local highlights, the editor of the Boston Gazette boldly stated:

The performances of Risley and his son have since been imitated, but never equalled. He was Magnus Apollo in comeliness, a Hercules in strength, and the son a Cupid in beauty. Of all exhibitions of physical grace in classical posturing they surpassed any we have ever seen. The throwing of the boy into the air, who turned a somerset and alighted safely on his father’s feet, invariably drew forth the loudest applause.19

This would be only one of the many superlative reviews with which the Risley family would be showered, and it is one of the first clear references to what would become known as “The Risley Act.” The expression “Risley Act” is one of the few still in use in gymnastics today that takes its name from a real person. Loosely speaking, it generally consists of one person lying on the ground on his or her back, juggling someone else using the feet. In Risley’s time, however, it referred to his juggling of his own small children. It is highly unlikely that he was the first person in the world to perform this act, as some have claimed, but he raised it to a new level of perfection and style, to the point where it was always associated with him. At least one writer claimed that Risley could toss his son twenty-five feet in the air. Even allowing for exaggeration, the sight must have been awe-inspiring, if not terrifying.

At the beginning of 1843 Risley became famous not only for his stage performances, but for a long article he wrote that was widely reprinted in American newspapers and even (six months later) as far away as Sydney, Australia. There is no solid evidence that Risley ever had much formal education, but this story is an example of how he learned to use events to promote himself, leading one American wag to comment, “it has done as much for his present fame as the graceful performances of his ‘truly astonishing Ellslerian boy.’”20 It is also around the same time that Risley appropriated the title of “Professor” for himself.

June 26, 1843, playbill from the New Strand Theatre, London. bpf tcs 63, harvard theatre collection, houghton library, harvard university.

Early in February 1843, Risley was visiting French-controlled Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, as part of a tour of the Caribbean, probably with a troupe from the Welch & Mann Circus. At ten-thirty in the morning of February 8, just when he finished breakfast at a local coffee shop, one of the worst earthquakes ever recorded in the area struck.21 In his account, in a dramatic fashion fit for an adventure novel, Risley tells how he felt the jar and saw the building he was in start to collapse. As a quick-witted, professional acrobat, he was able to jump out the window just in the nick of time, smashing through the glass and landing some ten or twelve feet below in the yard. Later, during an aftershock, he was knocked completely unconscious and awoke to find his clothes in tatters. He also miraculously found himself holding his son, John, who had been separated from him—the only two survivors in a building said to have held seventy-one at the time. The city was ruined, with collapsed buildings bursting into flames and what Risley estimated as fifteen thousand people dead. His printed account is one of the rare times that we can read his own words and hear his unique voice.

I scarcely knew what had happened, and whether it were not all a dream.—I then began to look about me, and saw various individuals, men, women, and children, of all classes and individuals, wandering about half frantic, like myself. . . . All weeping, or in the utmost conceivable agony, pitching and falling about among the ruins and dead bodies. They would go from one dead body to another, overhauling them to see if they could find the person sought for—and if not successful, pass on to another.22

Risley was able to escape, although he claims he lost six thousand dollars, including four thousand dollars in gold, which in those days was a grand sum, since general admission to a circus in America then cost around twenty-five cents. It would be just one of many times when he amassed, and lost, a fortune. To North American audiences, most of whom had never experienced anything as terrifying as a major earthquake, his story was nearly as fascinating and thrilling as one of his performances, and it only helped to further cement his reputation as an extraordinary individual.

Off to Europe

By the summer of 1843, Risley was in London, and his movements subsequently become a near blur of constant travel. On June 26, he appeared with son John at the New Strand Theatre, performing what was billed as his “Italian Scena of CLASSICAL GYMNASTICS.” A newspaper ad in The Age for the performance announced, “all attempts at description must very faintly portray the power and effect of this scena.” Then after a Burletta,

Mr. Risley and his Wonderful Son will give their second grand Italian Scena, in which feats will be performed by this incomparable Boy, aided by his father, unequalled by any other artists in the known world, incredible as it may appear to even beholders, this infant prodigy will conclude his unparalleled classical feats, by turning circles, high in air, and alight into his father’s hands!23

Thereafter, Risley and son John would perform throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, their reputation growing ever greater. In the media, John would be called, variously, the “infant prodigy,” “the wonder of the age,” and “le petit Mercure.” Audiences simply could not get enough of the family act, and what was sometimes called “Aerial Dancing.”

On September 24, The Age ran an even more detailed and laudatory review of one of their performances at the Surrey Theatre.

We, on Wednesday evening last, again witnessed the extraordinary evolutions of Mr. Risley and his son, and were far more than ever delighted. It is decidedly the most finished, the most classical performance of the kind we ever beheld. Mr. Risley himself is a finely-formed person, with every muscle beautifully developed; he is, in short, a most perfect model of a man, while his son is one of the sweetest little fellows we ever saw. It is peculiarly pleasing to see the mutual confidence displayed, and it is that very confidence which renders the exhibition so admirable, seeing that no alarm is created, no fear is inspired. Every movement is natural, graceful, and elegant, and while our wonder is excited, we are filled with admiration. They who imagine that these performances are but a series of gymnastic exercises, are deceived. The exhibition is not a mere display of physique. Intellect is perceptible in every motion, while the performance, as a whole, indicates strongly the exercise of mind. We, therefore, cannot marvel at the sensation created. It is, in reality, a beautiful display, and one which affords a striking example of what nerve, when coupled with physical power, and guided by intellect, can, without danger, achieve.24

In Edinburgh, Scotland, the locals awarded John a special medal. In Belfast, Ireland, the Dublin University Magazine took a slightly cynical view of Risley’s use of the title, “Professor,” noting that “almost everybody now-a-days dubs himself a professor, doctor, or member of something scientific, expressed by many mysterious hieroglyphics and capitals.” But it also noted that what Risley called “classical gymnasia” were indeed “applauded by the celestials,” and their booking had been extended. Risley and John played through the holiday season and closed out the year with more drawing room entertainment at London’s renowned Theatre Royal, Haymarket, performing a piece called “Peter Parley’s Gambols of Puck with the Elf King Oberon.” Their “extraordinary performance” was described as “being executed with such perfect ease and elegance, that the most fastidious lady might have them in a drawing-room without the fear of censure.”25 Posters amplified this message, describing the performances as “The Most Extraordinary and Chaste Exhibition,” countering whatever unsavory reputation such acts might normally have had.

In January 1844, London newspapers began to advertise that Risley would add his youngest son, Henry, to his act, and from that point on he usually did. While John and Henry were presumably at this point around nine and eight years old, respectively, even allowing for a slight fuzziness in documentation, they were billed as being considerably younger. The Weekly Chronicle of January 21, for example, advertised John as Risley’s “infant son” and Henry as being “only four years old.”26 Nonetheless, the interplay between the father and the two boys only increased the overall popularity of the act. In June, the Age and Argus gushed:

The theatre has literally been besieged every night. . . . To give the performances in detail is akin to impossible, for from the emerging by the trap-door of the King Sprite (Master John Risley), the entree of King Oberon (Mr. Risley), and the appearance, of little Puck (the infant Risley), their movements, evolutions, and scientific attitudes are so rapid, so varied, so everything that is classical and graceful, that it would take a greater space than we can afford to do them ample justice. Indeed we should be at a loss to signalise any one of the innumerable features of this miraculous performance, which is throughout a combination of every anatomical beauty of which the human form is capable.27

What really impressed the audiences, in addition to the artistry, was the way Risley could juggle his children with his feet. Over a century and a half later, Risley’s name survives in the Guiness Book of Records because in Edinburgh, in February 1844, he and one of his sons executed the world’s first back somersault, feet-to-feet.28

Lithograph portrait of Professor Risley and his two boys, around 1843–44, in Paris. Drawing by Jules Petit. f ts 939.5.3 (ii/xi), harvard theatre collection, houghton library, harvard university.

Lithograph illustration of Risley performing with his two boys, in Paris. Drawing by Jules Petit. f ts 931.10, harvard theatre collection, houghton library, harvard university.

England was in the midst of the long and prosperous Victorian Age, and its citizens had an increasingly intense curiosity about the exotic outside world (into which their empire was rapidly expanding). Circuses and spectacles were an important type of entertainment, and although the circus had first developed in England, performers from America were particularly popular. Yet Risley was careful to position his act as something straddling circus and theatre. Calling it “Classical Gymnasia,” his act consisted of “aerial dancing, poses, groups, and studies of arts,” and incorporated elements of gymnastics, ballet, and spectacle.29 He was also particularly adept at exploiting the Victorian penchant for romanticizing the innocence of young children.

The appeal that these performances had was extraordinary. As a reporter for the Age and Argus wrote after witnessing one of the family’s performances in the Haymarket in 1844:

It is a singular fact, that the usually quiet audiences of this theatre, seem to have undergone some talismanic revolution, by witnessing the elegant feats and evolutions they go through, as every night they have been called before the curtain to receive anew those testimonials of applause from every part of the house, which had been so liberally bestowed upon them throughout their performances; the waving of hats and handkerchiefs was as general as prolonged and hearty.

The Herculean symmetry of the parent, which the sweet children seem likely to inherit, was beautifully displayed by one of the most recherché and splendid costumes we ever saw. A pretty little ballet of action has been specially composed for them, interspersed with well selected music, which certainly contributed much towards the interest they always excite.30

This sweetness and innocence allowed an ever-wider audience to enjoy the shows, including high-ranking members of society who might normally not be expected to do so. In his diary for April 1844, James Fraser, a high-ranking bishop in the Church of England, notes that on the ninth he went to see “General Tom Thumb,” the tiny American midget being exhibited, as well as some Ojibewa Indians (both sponsored by P. T. Barnum), but he was not particularly impressed. On the thirteenth, however, he stopped in at the Haymarket and writes that “I never was more electrified in my life than by witnessing the gymnastic performances and postures of a certain Mr. Risley and his son ‘Le petit Mercure.’31

Professor Risley and sons, circa 1843–45. f ts 931.10, harvard theatre collection, houghton library, harvard university.

For the next few years, Risley and his boys took Europe by storm. After touring England, Ireland, and Scotland, they moved to France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Russia, playing the capitals of the continent, eliciting praise wherever they went. Their popularity was extraordinary, and they drew crowds that numbered in the thousands. In Paris, they debuted on June 15, 1844 at the prestigious Porte-Saint-Martin, with a performance titled “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (after Shakespeare’s play). Several major papers soon ran ecstatic reviews, and from them and some lithograph illustrations of their performances that appeared, it is clear that Risley’s success was partly in the presentation—in the aesthetics of his shows. He and his boys would wear classically themed silver-sequined and spangled costumes (“fleshings” or flesh-colored tights) and perform on top of a beautiful carpet. The staging was also elaborate, complete with artistic scenery (in Paris a pretty forest with flowers and stars) and a dreamy mood augmented by music. But more than anything else, it was the sheer athleticism of Risley and his boys that impressed people.

On June 20, a critic writing under the initials C. B. in the Independent, said: “These three characters are neither dancers, nor clowns, nor tightrope balancers; they are all of them, together, and their talent is universal. . . . [T]he father and both young sons surpass in agility and suppleness whatever amazing feats we can dream of in our imagination.”32 On June 24, a lengthy review appeared in La Presse by the famous French writer and arts critic, Théophile Gautier. He was so impressed that he thought the Risleys put professional ballet dancers to shame. His enthusiasm oozed from his flowery phrases. A century later, in 1948, dance historian Marian Hannah Winter would discover Gautier’s article and translate much of it:

The two adorable gamins, successively or together, climb to the assault of their father, who receives them on the palms of his hands, the soles of his feet, launches them, returns them, throws them, passes them from right to left, holds them in the air, lets them go, and picks them up with as much ease as an Indian juggler manoeuvres his copper balls. . . .[N]ever was more grace united to more strength. These turns accomplished, they next execute them heads down on his feet, without being excited, or breathless, or sweaty. . . . While watching them catapulted so far, falling from so high, we thought to what degree the training of dancers of the opera is incomplete and backward.33

In 1948 Winter was motivated to include a detailed and well-researched section on Risley’s early life in a piece titled “Theater of Marvels,” in Dance Index magazine, and in the process, she helped to resurrect him from what was then near-complete obscurity. In her writing on Risley, however, she mentions multiple times that there never seemed to be any mention of a wife or of ever marrying. She clearly suspected—as have subsequent writers in both France and America—that John and Harry were not his real children.

There was good reason for this suspicion, for it was quite common in the early days of the Victorian era for entertainers to “adopt” young children and showcase them in their acts as their real progeny. It is a practice that at its worst evokes all sorts of nightmarish images of circus life, where small children were sometimes kidnapped, horribly abused, or at the minimum exploited. In Risley’s case, however, we now know from census and other records in the United States that he was married to Rebecca, even if she rarely accompanied him in his adventures and stayed in Philadelphia. Today he probably would have been arrested for child abuse because he tossed his children about on stage, but the children were indeed his.

Risley was an extraordinarily powerful man, and gifted athletically, but there are clearly limits to working with growing children, and in 1845 John was presumably already ten years old. The year after Risley opened in Paris, some local wags had already wondered aloud whether, “when the boys grow too big to be knocked about like cricket balls, it is the father’s intention to change places with them.”34

With success, as would happen throughout his life, Risley quickly faced imitators. By December 1844, Gautier—the same illustrious French critic who had earlier written so glowingly about Risley—was calling him “surpassed,” after seeing three tiny American children named Ohio, Missouri, and Arkansas tossed about by a youth of eighteen.35

Even more serious competition came from another American named Richard Sands. An equestrian, gymnast, and posturist, Sands would one day become famous, among other things, for walking on the ceiling using special shoes. With two beautiful golden-haired “children,” he also appeared in Paris in June of 1845. Japan, still closed to the outside world, did not feature prominently in French consciousness at the time, but China did, for like the British Empire, Napoleonic France was starting to nibble at a weakened China’s borders. In a ridiculously faux-Chinese-themed act called “The Juggler and the Mandarin,” Sands juggled the children on stage with his feet, and the critically promiscuous Gautier fell in love with him, too, calling him Risley’s “teacher” and writing that “the pupil was strong, but the teacher is astonishing.”36

Luckily, Risley was generally acknowledged to be the leader in this new genre of entertainment, as well as its inventor, and other writers usually sprang to his defense. In August of 1845, when describing Risley’s appearance at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre in Paris, the arts critic of the paper Le Tintamarre stressed that “he is the real Risley, not the fake one we have seen at the Variétés [theatre], named Sands. . . . ”37

Going Global

Risley’s reputation traveled fast, through published accounts and word of mouth. And he began performing in front of more and more exalted people, and also associating with them, for he was now a true celebrity. In the spring of 1845, he visited Russia, performing in St. Petersburg at the Grand Alexandrian Theatre, and in Moscow, meeting with Russian nobility and generals and being awarded multiple medals. Back in London, on January 27, Risley and his boys appeared before Queen Victoria and Prince Albert at the Old Drury Theatre and “had the honour of attracting the especial attention of the royal auditors and their marked approbation.”38 A month later, on February 27, Risley visited and breakfasted with Gansevoort Melville (the older brother of novelist Herman Melville and head of the U.S. legation in England, who would die of illness only months later). As Melville wrote in his diary for that day, clearly impressed:

I was much pleased with the boys & on the whole with the father. He has been 3½ yrs abroad & markedly successful. He played 70 nights at the Haymarket, 110 in Paris, & brought out of Russia with him 65,000 rubles—65 cents to the rouble. He has bought a place near Phila for $33,000 to which he means to retire in about 2 yrs. He is 39 yrs old & a crack shot—5 ft 9 ½ inches high and most symmetrically built.39

Professor Risley and sons, circa 1843–45. Ink with applied color on paper, 14x9 inches, SN1546.134.8. from the circus collection, the john and mable ringling museum of art, the state art museum of florida, a division of florida state university.

Wherever possible, Risley collected autographs of important people in a little morocco-bound book, and in a conscious effort at self-promotion he would often display it to reporters, friends, and even, sometimes, to the general public. Twenty years later, a San Francisco reporter for the Daily Morning Call would marvel tongue-in-cheek:

Hiram Powers testifies to the gratification the performances of Risley and his sons have afforded him, so does Fanny Ellsler, and C. Edwards Lester, and Lord Holland, and the Maharajah of Burdwan, and dozens more whom it would be interesting to publish, could we decipher the crooked chirography of their signs manual.40

Wherever Risley went, he had an extraordinary ability to create stories that tended, in today’s parlance, to quickly “go viral” and to further enhance his fame. In Vienna, where public baths were very popular, it was normally necessary to first pass a swimming test before entering the deep end. Risley and his boys refused and created a sensation by doing cannonball somersaults into the water from the upstairs gallery, an audacious act described a few years later in the normally staid U.S. magazine Ladies Repository.41

Sometimes it was not just what Risley did, but what he said, that made the news. At the beginning of January 1847, Risley and sons made their first appearance at the Theatre Royal, St. Carlo, in Naples, Italy. When the performance ended the family was called out by the audience ten times to appear on stage, at a theatre that held four thousand people and where, according to the correspondent of the New York Sun, they were “reaping a golden harvest” of money. The brother of the King of Naples was so impressed that he called on Risley and, in the course of the conversation, asked him what he planned to do when the children got bigger. Risley, ever the wisecracker, rejoined by asking if the royal recalled the story of a Roman athlete, who “commenced by carrying a calf and continued, by practice, to carry it, after it got to be a cow.”

At a party later held at the local U.S. minister’s residence, Risley’s words generated even more publicity. The young United States was at war with Mexico. While the war was highly controversial, many Americans were proud of their nation’s performance on the battlefield and still sensitive about their relationship with England. Risley thus told a joke about a Yankee and an Englishman discussing the war wherein—after the Englishman questioned Americans’ pluck because of reports of peace offers with Mexico—the Yankee retorted, “Well, I don’t know what our folks have offered to do with Mexico; but, stranger, I’ll jest tell you one thing—I’ll be d___d if we ever offered to make peace with you!” While perhaps not particularly funny to modern readers, this joke so resonated with patriotic readers in the United States at the time that it was reprinted in scores of papers over and over again for the next several years, even in the Manitowoc Tribune in faraway Wisconsin, as late as September 20, 1855.42

Another aspect of Risley’s character that always guaranteed notoriety was his extreme competitiveness and penchant for risk-taking. As noted before, Risley’s trip to Russia in the spring of 1845 was a huge success. As one story goes, since he was known to be a crack shot with the rifle, in Russia he was also asked to enter, and bet on, a competition with the best local marksman. He of course won spectacularly. A gifted skater, he also undertook a competition with some top Russian skaters which he won in an electrifying manner, skating at high speed, leaping over twelve foot holes cut in the ice, and executing somersaults as he did so, repeatedly. Later, when back in London, Risley boasted at a fancy dinner party that he was the best shot, the toughest wrestler, the longest jumper, the finest billiard player, and the farthest hammer-tosser in all of London. Some of his dinner companions took him up on his comments, and found the best men they could in the city. Yet Risley easily won the rifle match and, to unnerve his opponent, “threw up an orange and put a bullet through it, and nicked a piece cut of a penny that was also tossed into the air.” He also vanquished the English wrestler, set a new record in the long jump, and won at the hammer toss. But when it came to billiards—the skill of which Risley was most proud—he was defeated by John Roberts, an English champion. Stung, Risley later brought Andrew Stark, one of the best American billiard players, to London and wagered on his beating Roberts. He lost up to thirty-thousand dollars, an even greater fortune than he had lost in the earthquake of Guadeloupe.43

John K. Chapman & Co. broadside for Risley’s “Panorama of the Mississippi,” when shown at the American Hall in Leicester Square, London, circa 1849. courtesy, the winterthur library: joseph downs collection of manuscripts and printed ephemera.

Despite Risley’s bravado about being able to juggle his sons as they grew older and heavier, he clearly knew what the future held. In September 1847, he returned to the United States and put on successful performances with his sons in New York and, in early February, in New Orleans, possibly even moving on to Vera Cruz, Mexico. But then he did something of a business somersault and went into partnership in the United States with John Rowson Smith, the descendant of a long line of professional painters, who had created a giant panorama of America’s Mississippi River. Leaving his sons behind in Philadelphia with their mother and his in-laws to be educated, Risley started a new career as an impresario and a showman.

Panorama Man

In the mid-nineteenth century, before moving pictures had developed, giant moving panoramas were a popular form of entertainment. Consisting of colossal paintings on canvas that could be unrolled on a wooden framework and thus tell a story, they allowed people to experience exciting far-away places or events and often featured exotic locales or scenes of famous battles. With dramatic narration, some music, and clever lighting and effects, the panoramic experience came as close to a cinematic virtual reality show as was possible at the time.

One of the best-known panorama painters of the day was an American painter named John Banvard. He created, among other items, an enormous panorama with thirty-six scenes of the Mississippi River. After achieving huge success with it in the United States, he took it to Britain in 1848. The English then had a nearly boundless curiosity about wild and untamed America and its unimaginably huge open spaces, and they helped Banvard—whose painting purported to depict “three thousand miles” of scenery—temporarily become a rich man.

Risley knew John R. Smith from his days with the Rufus Welch circuses, for Smith prominently features in Welch’s newspaper advertisements dating back to January 1843 as the decorator and painter of backdrop scenes. Exactly who first painted a giant moving panorama of the Mississippi is not clear, but Banvard’s was first exhibited in London, and a scandal erupted when both the Smith-Risley and Banvard panoramas were displayed there in 1849.

Risley arrived in London from America around February 13, 1849, with Smith and a man called Henry S. Risley, who is not to be confused with Henry C. Risley, the professor’s son. Henry S. presumably had some familial relationship with the professor, but what, exactly, is unclear. He was, however, some sort of specialist in panoramas and apparently critical to their set-up. Professor Risley and Smith’s work appeared in London early March. It was billed as larger and grander and better in all ways than that of Banvard and advertised as a “Gigantic American Panorama” that required “four miles of canvass” and depicted—not three thousand miles—but “nearly four thousand miles of American scenery, being the largest and most perfect moving painting in the world.” It took over two hours to view, seated in chairs in a theatre-like hall with fancy chandeliers.44

Many London newspapers acknowledged the charms of both productions, but some delighted in comparing the fidelity and skill of the respective painters, or in supporting either the Banvard or Risley-Smith versions, or in simply reporting on the dueling that occurred in the overheated advertising campaigns waged by the two camps. Banvard accused the pair of having plagiarized his idea and copied his painting. Risley, for his part, wrote the famous painter of American Indians, George Catlin, to have him vouch for the originality and wonderfulness of his production, and published the response. In broadsides, he filled nearly all available space with laudatory quotes from the many London papers who sided with him. Banvard, not to be outdone, collected the signatures of prominent Americans living in England who vouched for the superiority of his work, and published them in the newspapers. He also had glowing reviews from the popular novelist Charles Dickens. On November 14, one could find testimonials running by both Banvard and Smith on the same page of the Manchester Guardian, each proclaiming the superiority and originality of their works. Smith asserted that Banvard had stolen his idea way back in 1839, from an identical panorama that had subsequently been lost in a fire.45

Risley and Smith may have had more energy than Banvard, because Smith created a copy of his giant painting and thus made it possible for Risley to tour it even more widely, gaining ever more exposure. He appears to have subcontracted the panorama business to Henry S. Risley, but either way the panoramas were shown with the Risley name in other European countries, even as far away as Norway. In Oslo (then Kristiana) as late as 1852, it “touched the imagination of the Norwegian poet Vinje, who came away from the exhibition convinced that America was destined to conquer the world.”46 And, of course, it helped to spread Risley’s fame.

The Sky Is the Limit

In 1849, Risley also had other business ventures going on in England. In London’s Vauxhall Gardens he ran a bowling alley, or what was called a “bowling saloon,” where he served an assortment of American drinks. Vauxhall Gardens was at the time one of the more popular London outdoor entertainment spots, where performances and spectacles were often staged, and it gave Risley a chance for even more publicity. Ballooning, still very much in its infancy, was then something of a public spectacle, and some of the most famous balloon ascents at the time took place at Vauxhall Gardens, performed by the legendary aeronaut of the day, Charles Green.

On August 1, 1849, at Vauxhall Gardens, Risley ascended with Green and a party of several other men and women, watched by a cheering crowd of thousands, with music playing and guns firing. As one of the few humans then ever privileged to fly, he later wrote about the experience in an article that resembled his account of the Guadeloupe earthquake of 1843, except that his language was even more colorful. Titled, “Professor Risley’s Ascent in a Nassau Balloon,” it was given wide circulation in newspapers throughout Europe and the United States (including Scientific American).

Because the article was in Risley’s own “voice,” some publications introduced it as an example of “slang literature,” but it reveals much about Risley. He mentions several of the exotic locations he has visited, and he hints that he may have at one point had some formal, higher education. He mentions being accompanied by “Young Hernandez,” whom he refers to as his “protégé,” but who was actually a celebrity in his own right—an Irish-American boy who was a former member of Welch’s Circus and a star equestrian, with whom Risley would have a long association.47 Most of all, however, the article again reveals Risley’s charismatic personality, for it was written with humor and mixed mid-nineteenth-century vernacular with flowery and classical allusions. Stylistically, it might be mistaken for something by Mark Twain.

The article starts out with Risley noting that he has been on mountain tops before, but never aloft, and that practical Americans usually have no interest in building castles in the sky.

The milky way yields no butter, the moon don’t furnish us with cheese; the dog-star don’t follow game. . . . Venus is not half so bright as the dazzling eyes of Kentucky; the shooting stars never bring down anything worth having; the “golden rays of Sol ain’t worth a clod of California earth; . . . the ‘blanket of the night’ is not a marketable commodity—don’t keep one warm; while sheets of lightning are too hot for any climate.”48

The British satirical magazine Punch imagines Shakespeare’s Hamlet, redone by Risley. punch, vol. 11, 1846.

When the balloon actually begins to ascend, Risley describes being nearly rendered speechless by the thrill, until he has a sip from a flask of sherry provided by the pilot. “Talk of sensations! I felt as though my soul had slipped slick from its clay, and was going a holiday making with my heart in its hand.” But amid the light-heartedness, he also sounds like a philosophical twentieth-century astronaut, viewing earth from space for the first time. He realizes that from his exhilarating and precarious new perspective, the normal worries and differences and squabbles of mankind soon pale in significance.

Our lives hung on the chance of a moment, and the best thing we could do, while in the enjoyment of vitality and health, was to gild the pill of existence as brightly as possible. Had I read the Bible from Genesis to Revelations, I could not have learnt a better lesson; national animosities and human prejudices subsided before it.49

With such a flair for publicity, it should not be surprising that, during the 1840s and 1850s, Risley’s name became a household word. His ability to juggle his sons with his feet became known as the “Risley Act,” or the “Risley Business,” but his name also became a metaphor for great agility and thus acquired an even wider usage, as in the expression “à la Risley.” The British humor magazine Punch in 1846 delighted in using Risley as a way to measure British politics and politicians. One writer stated, “We should as soon as think of recommending Professor Risley, the posture master, to regulate the present posture of the nation, as dream of accepting Brougham in the capacity of a Prime Minister.” Another cracked: “Professor Risley and his Sons are positively stiff and inflexible when compared with the very supple state of the Marquis of Anglesea and his aide-de-camps. . . . ”50

To keep his career going, Risley required a great deal of agility. After the success with his panorama of the Mississippi, he had a giant panorama of the River Thames created, which he took back to the United States for American audiences, and which Henry S. Risley later frequently toured. In 1853 he also imported a ballet troupe from Europe to America, and it proved a failure, so much so that he fell terribly in debt. At the end of the year, an expensive and expansive 114 acre property—that he had purchased in his glory days in Chester, Pennsylvania—was repossessed by the local sheriff. He toured cities on the Atlantic coast with his children and he developed a variety show, but the fates were not smiling on him. In the spring of 1854 someone abducted his beloved dog Pro, a purebred Newfoundland used in one of his acts. He was able to make the most of this misfortune and generate more newspaper articles when the dog miraculously returned alive, having apparently made his way home to New York from far away Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.51 But times were difficult.

The world was changing. At the end of 1854, Risley was performing in New York with one son and a contortionist, named D’Evani. By the spring of the following year, he was finally appearing with a new protégé he would call his “son,” named Charles. It was time to try something new, and in 1855, for those seeking newness, the American West was a powerful magnet.