Hughes, Charles | Trick riders horsing around

Hughes, Charles

The Compleat Horseman, or, the Art of Riding Made Easy ... London: Printed for F. Newbery, [1772]

12mo (171 x 102 mm). 2 engraved plates depicting the riding school and Mr. and Mrs. Hughes on horseback, 9 woodcuts printed on 5 leaves at the end (rectos only); some toning, and a little marginal spotting and staining. Contemporary marbled boards; boards rather worn, rebacked, red lettering-piece. 

One of two issues published by F. Newbery in the same year; ESTC locates six copies of each. The author is described as "professor of horsemanship, at his riding-school, near Black-friars Bridge," and the nine charming woodcuts show the "many attitudes by which Mr. Hughes and his assistants prove their amazing dexterity in horsemanship." The woodcuts depict Hughes standing on his head while discharging a pistol, brandishing a saber while on one leg, blowing a trumpet, etc. The final cut depicts a woman standing on a horse while holding a long riding crop.

Hughes was said to have been "a handsome man of great strength but of rather irritable temper. He opened his own riding school near Blackfriars Bridge on Easter Monday 1772, riding with his wife, a Miss Tomlinson and his sister, who was romantically named Sobieska Clementina, a variation on the name of the consort of the Jacobite claimant James Edward Stuart. Playbills state that Hughes vaulted backwards and forwards over three horses then over a single horse forty times without stopping" (ODNB).

In 1773, Hughes traveled to Russia to perform for Catherine the Great in the royal palace of St. Petersburg. Hughes went on to introduce the term circus in 1782, when he opened what he called the Royal Circus a few hundred yards south of the ampitheatre owned by a rival horseman—his former employer, Philip Astley.

REFERENCE:

ESTC T116463; Roscoe A245