Introduction

There is a particular kind of magic that belongs exclusively to the theatre of childhood — not the polished, self-conscious theatre of adult appreciation, but the raw, gasping, wide-eyed wonder of a child who genuinely cannot tell where the performance ends and reality begins. It is the magic of a figure in white and red who seems to have stepped out of some parallel world where the laws of consequence do not apply, where sausages may be stolen without punishment, where a string of onions becomes a weapon of sublime comedy, where a policeman’s truncheon is merely an invitation to further mischief. That figure — that particular, irreplaceable, world-altering figure — was Joseph Grimaldi, and the book you are about to read is his own account of how he came to inhabit it, and what it cost him to do so.

To say that Grimaldi was the greatest clown England ever produced is to say something true but insufficient, in the way that saying Beethoven was a competent composer is technically accurate but misses the point entirely. Grimaldi did not merely excel at an existing form; he invented the form as we have come to understand it. Before him, the Clown of the English pantomime was a secondary figure, a rustic buffoon who existed largely to be outwitted and humiliated at the margins of a story that belonged to Harlequin and Columbine. Grimaldi took that marginal figure and moved him to the absolute centre of everything. He gave the Clown a face — the white-painted, red-cheeked, wildly grinning face that every subsequent clown in the Western tradition has worn in some form or another — and he gave him a soul, which was something altogether more surprising and more lasting. By the time he retired from the stage in 1828, he had so thoroughly transformed the role that the character was simply called “Joey” in his honour, a nickname that persists in circus tradition to this day. He was not a clown who happened to be famous. He was the origin point of a whole human type.

And yet, for all his fame during his lifetime — and it was extraordinary fame, the kind that filled theatres to dangerous capacity and made his name a byword for joy across the English-speaking world — Grimaldi has become, for most modern readers, a name rather than a person. We know the outline: the great clown, the physical suffering, the melancholy behind the painted smile. We have the legend. What we have not always had, in a form that is genuinely readable and alive, is the man himself — his voice, his humour, his tenderness, his resilience, his very particular way of moving through a world that was simultaneously glamorous and brutal, hilarious and heartbreaking.

This edition exists to give you that man.

The book’s origins are themselves a small drama worth understanding before you turn to the main text, because they bear directly on how you will read what follows and what kind of trust you can reasonably place in it.

Grimaldi spent roughly the last year of his life writing his memoirs. He was by then in serious physical decline — decades of acrobatic performance had destroyed his body with a thoroughness that reads, in retrospect, like a terrible irony, the instrument of so much laughter worn to pieces by the labour of producing it. He wrote, or dictated, at considerable length, with the garrulousness of an old man revisiting a life that had been, by any measure, extraordinary. The resulting manuscript was voluminous, personal, and uneven in the way that all genuinely personal documents are uneven: brilliant in places, digressive in others, raw in ways that a man in full health might have smoothed over.

That manuscript was entrusted to a Mr. Thomas Egerton Wilks, who was well acquainted with Grimaldi and his circle, and who undertook the considerable task of condensing and revising it for publication. Wilks cut substantially, reorganised, and added material drawn from his own conversations with Grimaldi — anecdotes and recollections that had not made it into the written account but that Wilks judged worth preserving. While he was still at work on this task, Grimaldi died, in May of 1837. Wilks completed his labours by September of that year and offered the manuscript to the publisher, who purchased it with the agreement of Richard Hughes, Grimaldi’s executor.

At this point, a third hand entered the process — and it is the most famous hand of all. The publisher engaged a young writer who had recently made a considerable sensation with a series of sketches published under the pen name “Boz” to edit the manuscript further. That writer was Charles Dickens, twenty-five years old, already the author of the Pickwick Papers and already possessed of a prose style so distinctive that it is almost impossible to mistake for anyone else’s. Dickens accepted the commission, reworked the manuscript substantially — changing it from first person to third, sharpening the narrative passages, and bringing his own irrepressible comic energy to bear on the material — and delivered the result in early 1838.

The question of authorship, then, is genuinely layered, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging it plainly. The memories are Grimaldi’s. The initial shaping and some of the anecdotal material are Wilks’s. The prose style, the narrative architecture, and a great deal of the wit and energy that make the book so readable are Dickens’s. Dickens himself was careful to say, in the introductory chapter he wrote for the first edition, that he had not invented or embellished the facts — only improved the manner of their telling. Whether one takes that claim entirely at face value is a matter of individual judgment, but there is no strong reason to doubt it in its essentials. What you are reading is a genuine memoir, processed through several layers of editorial intelligence, and the result is something richer and stranger than a simple autobiography would have been.

It is also worth noting that the book was illustrated by George Cruikshank, one of the great graphic artists of the nineteenth century, whose images of Grimaldi in performance are among the most vivid visual records we have of what the man actually looked like on stage. This edition reproduces those illustrations, and they reward close attention. Cruikshank had seen Grimaldi perform, and his drawings carry the authority of direct witness — the particular angle of a leap, the precise configuration of that famous painted face, the quality of physical comedy that is almost impossible to describe in words but that Cruikshank captures with a line.

The best way to approach what follows is to resist the temptation to read it as a straightforward biography, because it is not quite that, and holding it to biographical standards will cause you to miss what it actually is. It is something more interesting: a portrait of a world, rendered from the inside, by someone who was simultaneously its greatest ornament and one of its most vulnerable inhabitants.

That world is the world of the English popular theatre in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries — a world that has no precise modern equivalent, though it has partial analogies in various directions. It was a world of extraordinary creative energy and almost total institutional precariousness, where performers of genius worked for managers of varying competence and integrity, where the line between legitimate and illegitimate theatre was policed with an absurdity that the performers themselves found endlessly comic, where a single successful pantomime could make a theatre’s fortune and a single bad season could ruin a performer’s livelihood. It was a world in which physical skill of the most demanding kind was expected as a matter of course, in which injuries were routine and career-ending accidents were common, and in which the audience’s appetite for novelty was insatiable and entirely without mercy.

Grimaldi navigated this world from earliest childhood — and when we say earliest, we mean it with a literalness that will startle modern readers. He was performing on stage before he could reliably walk. His father, the dancer and pantomimist Giuseppe Grimaldi, was a figure of considerable theatrical reputation and considerable personal severity, and the picture of Grimaldi’s childhood that emerges from these pages is one that sits in genuinely uncomfortable tension with the comedy that surrounds it. There is warmth here, and there is laughter, but there is also something harder and stranger underneath, and the book is most rewarding when you allow yourself to feel both registers simultaneously.

Read the comic episodes — and there are many, and they are genuinely funny, not merely historically interesting — with full attention to their physical specificity. Dickens, editing the material, had an instinctive understanding of how comedy works on the page, and he renders Grimaldi’s escapades with a timing and a precision that repays slow reading. The famous episodes involving burglars, magistrates, eccentric travelling companions, and the various disasters of provincial touring are not merely anecdotes; they are set pieces, carefully constructed, and they deserve the same quality of attention you would give to a well-told short story.

At the same time, read the quieter passages — the moments of domestic life, the descriptions of friendship and professional loyalty, the accounts of loss — with equal care. The book has a tendency, which is partly Grimaldi’s and partly Dickens’s, to move quickly past its own emotional depths, to treat grief and hardship with a briskness that can seem like evasion but is more accurately understood as a particular cultural style: the style of a man who has learned, through long professional practice, that the show must go on and that dwelling too long on sorrow is a luxury the stage does not permit. When the book slows down, when it lingers, pay attention. Those are the moments when something is being said that the author found difficult to say quickly.

Pay attention, too, to the supporting cast. One of the great pleasures of this book is its gallery of secondary figures — the theatrical managers, the fellow performers, the magistrates and publicans and travelling companions who drift through Grimaldi’s life with the vivid particularity of characters in a novel. Some of them are famous: Richard Brinsley Sheridan appears several times, and the portrait of him is affectionate, exasperated, and entirely believable. John Kemble makes appearances that illuminate the strange social geography of the theatrical world, where a great tragic actor and a great clown might find themselves in the same room and treat each other with a wary mutual respect. Others are entirely obscure — Mr. Mackintosh with his sporting pretensions, the various eccentrics encountered on the road — but they are rendered with a sharpness that makes them feel as real as the famous names.

It is impossible to read this book without thinking about what it means to make people laugh for a living — what it costs, what it requires, what it does to a person over time. Grimaldi gave his body to his art with a completeness that was, in retrospect, devastating. The acrobatic demands of the pantomime Clown were immense: the falls, the tumbles, the physical gags that required precise timing and enormous strength, performed night after night, season after season, often at multiple theatres on the same evening. He would finish a performance at Covent Garden and travel across London to appear at Sadler’s Wells, then travel back, then do it again the next night. The cumulative physical toll of this regime was catastrophic, and the book does not hide it, though it treats it with the same brisk stoicism that it brings to other forms of suffering.

But there is another cost that the book illuminates more obliquely, and it is perhaps the more interesting one. Grimaldi was, by all accounts, a man of genuine warmth and emotional depth — a devoted friend, a loving father, a person capable of great tenderness. He was also a man whose professional identity required him to be, in public, something quite different: a figure of anarchic energy, of gleeful destructiveness, of a joy so extreme it bordered on mania. The gap between the private man and the public persona is one of the book’s persistent undertones, never quite stated directly but always present, like a bass note beneath the melody.