Tummy-Talkers
Jonathan Rée: Ventriloquists, 10 May 2001
Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
by Steven Connor.
Oxford, 449 pp., £25, November 2000,0 19 818433 6 Show More
by Steven Connor.
Oxford, 449 pp., £25, November 2000,
“... Apart from the fancy Latinate title, there was nothing very grand about the one-legged actor Joseph Askins who toured Britain in the 1790s performing his ‘Ventriloquism, or Conversations in two Voices’. Nor was the ventriloquial act taken far up-market in the 1820s when the quick-change showman Charles Mathews began appearing as Monsieur Ventriloge ... ”