OK, who’s ready for a little break from political, economic, and public health stories? For the past seven weeks, most of my blogs have focused on the repercussions of British taxation and American boycotts on the political and economic life of Annapolis in 1770. Last week, I took a look at smallpox inoculation as it was practiced 250 to 300 years ago. Important and interesting stuff to be sure (or at least this historian thinks so), with some parallels to our own situation in 2020, but it’s time for a diversion of sorts, and this ad from the May 24, 1770 Maryland Gazette is just what the doctor ordered:
Peter Gardiner was a traveling puppeteer and magician, but if “puppet and magic show” conjures up images of the most dreadful kid’s birthday party (dreadful could pertain to the kid, the party, or both—your pick) you ever attended, please banish those pictures from your mind’s eye. Gardiner’s production was no painfully lame amateur show but a professional extravaganza presented “For the Entertainment of the Curious.” And after perusing his ad, who wouldn’t be curious?
Under the general category of Puppetry, Gardiner’s spectacle included “richly dressed” four-foot-tall figures cavorting “as if alive” upon the stage of Annapolis’s West Street theater. But that wasn’t all! Next came a “Surprising View of Water-Works” with “all Manner of Sea Monsters sporting on the Waves.” But wait, there’s more! Audience members could expect to see a dramatic fight at sea “with Ships, Forts, and Batteries, continually firing” and a land battle involving no less than four armies, all of which would “regularly march and perform the different Exercises to great Perfection.”
Moving on to Magic, Peter Gardiner performed “the surprising Art of Legerdemain” with the aid of some sort of “large Machinery, etc.” Next came card tricks and the revivification of a beheaded fowl “in a most amazing Manner” (the reanimated chicken itself undoubtedly being the most amazed of all). Then it was on to fire-eating and frying eggs in a hat “without doing the least Damage to the Hat.” If all that wasn’t enough to pique the reader’s curiosity, Gardiner promised “many other Feats too numerous to mention.” And lest the skeptic think that Gardiner relied on optical trickery to present his wondrous works, the advertiser declared that all would “appear public on the Stage, conspicuously to the View of the Spectators without Confusion.”
"None can be...admitted behind the Scenes, as the Inconvenience must be obvious."
Peter Gardiner performed in other cities and towns besides Annapolis. In April 1769, he was in Williamsburg, where a young lawyer and newly elected Virginia legislator saw his show three times that month. Thomas Jefferson bought two box seats on the 14th and another pair of cheaper tickets in the theater’s pit on the 17th, then returned to the pit by himself on the 26th. In November 1772, another burgess, George Washington, was in Virginia’s capital with his wife and two stepchildren when he recorded an expense of 11 shillings and 6 pence for tickets to Gardiner’s “Puppit Shew.”
Today, the spellbinding legacy of this early American showman lives on in appearances by a reenactor portraying “Mr. Peter Gardiner—Colonial Conjurer” at 18th-century market fairs. I’ve never seen him perform, but if his act is anything like the original Peter Gardiner’s, count me among the curious!
Glenn E. Campbell
HA Senior Historian
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