ABSTRACT
This chapter accepts that the circus or, to be more precise, the large circuses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected a number of the ideas associated with modernity. It draws on a theoretical interpretation of modernity by Jameson and the delineation of historical eras by Marshall Berman. The publicity strategy of the FitzGerald Brothers' Australian Circus described indicates a proclivity for technology and its display. Frost, and all historians of the circus who followed him, trace the origins of the circus to the entrepreneurial and performance initiatives of Philip Astley in London, Paris, Dublin and the rural regions of both France and England during the latter decades of the eighteenth century. Frost's account of the early circus, and its striving for modes of production that were aesthetically and materialistically innovative, chimes with one of Jameson's observations about modernity.
