STREET PERFORMERS, 1851

Street performers...admit of being classified into:
(a) mountebanks - or those who enact puppet-shows, as Punch and Judy, the fantoccini, and the Chinese shades...
(b) the street-performers of feats of strength and dexterity, as...stiff and bending tumblers, salamanders, swordsmen, etc...
(c ) The street-performers with trained animals - as sapient pigs, dancing bears, and tame camels.
		(Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor, 1851)

	London is painted round them: burly railings
	and grey rich inaccessible houses; squares - 
	laurelled and priveted, flowered, and fast in palings - 
	where the grave children move and are not theirs
	and are more bright and distant than the sun
	whose wan dry wine shines in the windows - squares
	and heavy curtains, curtains and steps of stone:
	these are their coloured cards, their theatres.

	Hooked nose and hump, the Black Man, the police,
	the hangman's shadow by the prison wall,
	the wandering misery in the courts of peace:
	the mad voice like a wire will draw them all - 
	the puppets and the puppet-masters.  Watch:
	who is to tell, seeing no showmen's heads,
	which are the audience, penny-foolish, which
	the fantoccini and the Chinese shades?

	Now (scarlet plush and gilt) the lights go on;
	cold smoky curtains fold the stage away;
	and all but shadows, penny plain, are gone.
	Flare-cast from vehement oil, great blurs of grey
	upon the gold and indigo, their dole
	habit's iniquity and ungiven bread,
	they drift before the rainy street; they roll
	on sad wheels rags to be inherited.

	The salamander and the swordsman, and
	the maypole-ribboned bear: from dark they pass
	to dark, through blazing islands - as if stained
	in mockery upon hot slips of glass.
	And the flame dies; the fingers are withdrawn;
	the puppets tumble; there are no more slides;
	the paints are in their boxes: they have gone,
	the fantoccini and the Chinese shades.