Résumé :
As the founder of the modern circus tradition, P. T. Barnum identified curiosity as one of the strongest drivers of human behaviour. This chapter focuses on how he set out to transform a museum collection of ‘stuffed money and gander skins’ through an exercise in reanimation that introduced elements of Frankenstein’s forbidden adventurism while appealing to the family values of a growing bourgeois clientele. Pride of place amongst his Gallery of Living Curiosities was held by the ‘Happy Family’ group that included the ‘Aztec Children’, the ‘Albinos’ and the ‘What Is It?’ or ‘Missing Link’. With animation came performance. William Henry Johnson as ‘What Is It?’ made the transition from museum to circus, becoming renowned as Zip the clown and mime artist. If the natural history museum appealed to curiosity about form and its biological variants, the circus evolved as a pyrotechnic display of human skill in motion, specialising in illusions, transformations and gravity-defying feats. This involved engineering in the broadest sense, from the design of new physical tricks to the construction of apparatus to enable them. In an era of imperial and industrial advancement, the Greatest Show on Earth played adventurous games with public curiosity, widening the parameters of speculation.

Localisation : Bibliothèque