Joseph Grimaldi, as this fast-paced, rumbustious biography shows, invented the figure of the classic clown that we know today, both in his dress and larcenous antics and in the sadness behind the mask. Around 1803, already a star of the London stage, he perfected his look, creating the figure of "Joey". The clothes were an outsize, wildly patterned version of the shirt, ruff and pantaloons he had worn at school, with child's slippers and a tower of coloured wigs. Then came the face, with its red mouth, rouged cheeks and curving eyebrows. "Day after day," writes Andrew McConnell Stott, "he sat before the mirror, brush in hand, marking his features, wiping them clean, and starting again, until finally a face emerged from the candlelight that bore a grin so incendiary it refused to be erased."
The grin, however, was also a devouring maw and the "zany child" look was less a nod to innocence than a cloak for memories of fear. Like many theatre folk, Joe came from a long line of entertainers. His forebears were travelling comedians, performing at the fairs of Europe: his grandfather won the name "Iron-Legs" by leaping to the chandeliers at L'Opéra Comique in Paris for a bet; his father, Giuseppe, "the Signior", was a pantomimist and ballet master who drilled the children at Sadler's Wells with jaw-dropping ferocity; his mother, Rebecca, danced in the chorus.
Joe was on stage from the age of two, lapping up applause and dodging his father's rages. As he grew older, he worked at Sadler's Wells, whose season ran throughout the summer, and at the smarter Drury Lane in winter. When the seasons overlapped, he performed at both, running through the alleys between them.
Stott evokes both the dizzying excitement and the harshness of theatrical life. He lays out the evolution of pantomime from its 17th-century prototypes to its Regency splendours. He follows the feuds between the sprawling families of Kembles and Dibdins, the disastrous antics of Astley's circus and the ruthless flamboyance of Sheridan. He makes detours to bring in other stars, like Grimaldi's rival, the giant clown Dubois or the hapless child prodigy, Master Betty, whose dressing room was crammed with leering men.
He explains the financial pressures on managers and their desperate wooing of audiences with grandiose displays, like the fleet of ships floating on a vast tank of water (which turned brackish beneath the boards of the stage and was a constant trap for the unwary stagehands). And he is particularly good at conjuring up the physical ambience of the different theatres, with their dusty green rooms and gloomy, leaking cellars.
The audiences not only talked and yelled through performances but hurled a rain of nuts, oranges and other missiles – one man was killed by a bottle flung from the gallery. When Kemble put the prices up at Drury Lane, the riots lasted for days. These were dangerous places; in a stampede after a mistaken cry of "fire" at Sadler's Wells in 1806, 18 people died, while a real blaze at Drury Lane caused over 20 deaths. In a horribly surreal moment, as nearby residents tried to smother the flames, the great goose from Mother Goose – "canvas and feathers on a light wicker frame" – escaped from an attic window and drifted gently on the thermals towards Lincoln's Inn Fields.
Harlequin and Mother Goose, written by Thomas Dibdin, was Grimaldi's greatest triumph, netting huge profits. It is difficult to capture the pantomime's twists and turns and Stott's long plot summary makes baffling reading, even with the text as an appendix. But the confusion and chaos, the silliness and magic made Joe's triumph assured. The actress Mrs Jordan, whom he had adored since his youth, described him simply as "a genius… yet unapproached". It was not his acrobatic tricks that endeared him to the crowd, but his invention of character and his dizzying mutability. He made strange constructions, including a vegetable man who came alive; he sang more songs; he developed his skill as a mime. Byron patronised him (in the true, cruel sense of the word), the Prince Regent admired him, Hazlitt adored him and the young Dickens would edit his memoirs.
Yet Grimaldi's fame was undermined by sadness. His brother, John, went to sea at the age of eight, returning for a single night many years later and then vanishing again, in a manner worthy of a melodrama. His first wife, Maria, whom he dearly loved, died in childbirth along with their baby after only a year of marriage. Although Grimaldi was married again, to the sturdy actress Mary Bristow, their son, Joseph Samuel (known as JS), whom Grimaldi tried hard to keep from going on stage, also became a clown. A ferocious alcoholic, JS died horribly – possibly of poisoning – at the age of 21.
Grimaldi never really prospered. Hopeless with money, he was constantly defrauded by colourful conmen. His demanding act also took its toll, mentally and physically. He met with terrible accidents, perhaps engineered by resentful stage carpenters, and by his 50s was in constant pain. But his audiences stayed loyal. At his final benefit at Sadler's Wells, on St Patrick's Day in 1829, a crowd of 2,000 gathered hours before. Grimaldi lay stretched out on his bed, immobile and weak. When he reached the theatre, however, he kept the crowd roaring. After the curtain fell, he reappeared to proclaim in a trembling voice: "My race is ended." Shouts of "No! No! No!" rained from the crowd, Stott tells us. I wish I could have seen him. A round of applause is due to this exuberant, impassioned portrait, for bringing the great Grimaldi, "Joey the Clown", into the limelight again.
Jenny Uglow's A Gambling Man: Charles II and The Restoration is published by Faber, £25
