Nights at the Circus: Part One, London
Meeting Fevvers
For we are at the fag-end, the smouldering cigar-butt, of the nineteenth century which is just about to be ground out in the ashtray of history. It is the final, waning, season of the year of Our Lord, eighteen hundred and ninety nine. And Fevvers has all the éclat of a new era about to take off.
Thrown immediately into Fevvers’ disarrayed dressing room, American journalist Jack Walser is determined to find out the truth behind her almost-unbelievable trapeze act. Is Sophie Fevvers - the Cockney Venus, pie-and-mash-eating, champagne-swilling, cold-cream-slathered darling of London’s theatre world - an astoundingly talented aerialiste, or is she truly, incredibly, part swan?
Catch up - spoilers ahead!
Part One takes place entirely in Fevvers’ dressing room after her act. It’s past midnight (for a few hours in a row, apparently), and she is shrouded in a grubby baby blue satin dressing gown. Her assistant/mother/manager Lizzie is on hand to fact-check and to field any questions from Walser that veer too close to exposure, but Walser barely gets a word in anyway. He uses up his entire notebook taking down Fevvers’ life story, broken only by Fevvers’ appetite and Lizzie’s disappearances to get more champagne, eels, and bacon sandwiches, and Walser is certain that he’s heard the church bells chime midnight more than once.
As for Fevvers herself, six feet tall, blonde, with a voice that “clanged like dustbin lids,” and a face “broad and oval as a meat dish,” her life story begins with her birth, or rather, her having been hatched from an egg. As a child, she’s taken in by Ma Nelson, the madame of a brothel, and earns her keep by posing as cupid with a bow and arrow, and with tiny feathers sprouting from her shoulders. As she (and her wings) grow, she’s promoted to impersonating the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and scaring off all but Ma Nelson’s most loyal clientele.
When Ma Nelson dies unexpectedly, the women of the brothel decide that rather than staying to see their beloved home be inherited by Nelson’s brother, who plans to turn it into a home for “fallen women,” they will take off themselves. They burn down the house and scatter across London - Fevvers has, evidently, kept up with them all and each of them has since found her own version of happiness. Fevvers and Lizzie end up in Battersea, staying with Lizie’s sister and her family, and helping to run the family’s ice-cream parlour business. A series of unfortunate events, however, leads Fevvers to Madame Schreck’s freak show, where she is part of a tableaux of strange and wonderful characters. Realising that not only has she been tricked into imprisonment at Schreck’s, but that Schreck has also sold her to a client wanting to sacrifice her as a May Day offering, Fevvers manages to escape and find her way, naked and flying along the train routes, back to Battersea. Not long after, she finds fame and fortune as the aerialiste at Colonel Kearney’s circus, suddenly richer than she’s ever been, though she still refuses to take a taxi (Carter herself hated the expense of London’s black cabs).
After hearing her outrageous stories, Walser is amazed, and tells his editor that he plans to join the circus himself, to follow Fevvers on her grand tour, and write dispatches from his travels as he works on finding out whether Fevvers is fact or fiction.
So what do you think so far? Is Fevvers really feathered? (Does it matter?)
Read Rosalind Jana’s review of Nights at the Circus, archived from Five Dials issue 43 (scroll to page 58)
Still to come:
Friday 2nd August — Part two, St Petersburg
Friday 16th August — Part three, Siberia
Content warnings: sexual assault, violence, animal abuse
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