Our half-term blog post gave me the idea of taking a trip to MOSI, where a host of quirkly activities are underway all this week.
Victorian funfair at MOSI
Don’t miss Pablo Fanque’s Circus of Dreams at MOSI this half term.
Pablo Fanque, it turns out, was a real person: the first non-white proprietor of a British circus. For three decades his Victorian circus was the most popular circus in Victorian Britain. MOSI’s performance makes the link between Pablo Fanque’s circus acts and the jobs carried out by Manchester’s young mill workers. For example, lifting heavy bolts of cotton can be likened to the strongman’s act and a job involving dodging dangerous machinery can be viewed as similar to putting one’s head in the mouth of a wild beast, much like Pablo Fanque’s lion tamer.
Helter skelter at MOSI’s Victorian funfair.
Poignantly, the children of the mills rarely earned enough to pay the entry fee to Pablo Fanque’s Circus of Dreams to watch their theatrical counterparts. Instead they would draw pictures of the acts as they imagined them and hide them around the mill, a snatched scrap of childish enjoyment in a lifetime of servitude to the mill.
Aimed at under eights, this wonderfully entertaining slice-of-Victorian-life is completely free, although donations to MOSI are welcome on entry or exit to the museum.
