Note 33 — Chapter IX
Reading edition
Sadler's Wells opened on Easter Monday, April 11th, 1803, under a change of proprietors. Mr. Hughes retained his fourth; Thomas and Charles Dibdin had purchased Mr. Siddons' fourth for 1400l.; Barford and Yarnold had bought the fourth previously held by Mr. Thos. Arnold, of the First Fruits Office; Mr. Reeve purchased the eighth, hitherto the property of Mr. Wroughton; and Mr. Andrews the eighth previously held by Mr. Coates. The season is memorable for the appearance on that stage of the celebrated traveller, Signor Giambattista Belzoni, as the Patagonian Samson, in which character he performed prodigious feats of strength; one of which was to adjust an iron frame to his body, weighing 127 lbs., on which he carried eleven persons. On his benefit night he attempted to carry thirteen, but as that number could not hold on, it was abandoned. His stature, as registered in the books of the Alien Office, was six feet six inches.
Poor Tom Ellar, in his Manuscripts, notices—"The first time I met Signor Belzoni, was at the Royalty Theatre, on Easter Monday, 1808, my first appearance in London; the theatre closed after the fourth week. In September of the same year, I again met him at Saunders's booth in Bartholomew Fair, exhibiting as the French Hercules. In 1809, we were jointly engaged in the production of pantomime, at the Crow Street Theatre, Dublin; I as Harlequin, and he as an artist to superintend the last scene, a sort of Hydraulic Temple, which, owing to what is very frequently the case, the being over-anxious, failed and nearly inundated the orchestra. Fiddlers generally follow their leader, and Tom Cooke was then the man; seeing the water, off he bolted, and they to a man followed him, leaving me, Columbine, and the other characters, to finish the scene, in the midst of a splendid shower of fire and water. Signor Belzoni was a man of gentlemanly but very assuming manners; yet of great mind." Such was Tom Ellar's opinion of that memorable man, whose celebrity afterwards as a traveller requires no record in this place.