The Lions Repaid All

Abstract

Victoria had no idea just how astonished she would be. On 10 January 1839, having just returned from Brighton, the young Queen went to Drury Lane to see the Christmas pantomime Harlequin & Jack Frost. It was the first time she had seen a play since her coronation seven months earlier. Bored by the traditional holiday entertainment, she complained that the performance was ‘noisy and nonsensical as usual’.1 Yet she was enthralled by another act on the bill: the liontamer Isaac Van Amburgh. After enduring the tedious pantomime, as the Queen slyly wrote in her journal later that night, ‘[t]he Lions amply repaid all’. Over the following six weeks she went to see ‘this miracle of a performance’ seven times. ‘You can never see it too often,’ Victoria insisted, ‘for it is different each time.’

[T]he Queen supposed that Mr. Van Amburgh possessed some strange and heretofore unaccounted system of sorcery, or some unknown talismanic art, connected with the whip which he used, that enabled him to achieve deeds of daring that astonished the credulity of the most credulous, and forced the inmates of the den to obedience, requested him to lay it before her, when to her utter astonishment, she discovered it was nothing but a common cow-hide.

– A Brief Biographical Sketch of I. A. Van Amburgh (c. 1840)