BEFORE THE FOOTLIGHTS

AND

BEHIND THE SCENES:

A BOOK ABOUT

"THE SHOW BUSINESS"

IN ALL ITS BRANCHES:

FROM PUPPET SHOWS ΤΟ GRAND OPERA; FROM

MOUNTEBANKS TO

MENAGERIES; FROM LEARNED PIGS TO LECTURERS; FROM

BURLESQUE BLONDES TO

ACTORS AND ACTRESSES:

WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS AND REFLECTIONS (ORIGINAL AND RE-
FLECTED) ON MORALITY AND IMMORALITY IN AMUSEMENTS:
Thus Exhibiting the "SHOW WORLD" as

SEEN FROM WITHIN,

Through the Eyes of the Former Actress, as well as FROM WITHOUT, through the Eyes of the Present Lecturer and Author.

BY

OLIVE LOGAN.

"This World is all a Fleeting Show."

PARMELEE & CO.,
PHILADELPHIA, PA.; CINCINNATI, O.;

MIDDLETOWN, CONN.

541

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by

PARMELEE & CO.,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Eastern District

of Pennsylvania.

PREFACE.

THERE is little need of a preface to such a book as this. It is such a big book—it holds so much—that I have been able to express myself pretty fully, and I do not find, in giving a last look at the pages as they lie before me, that I have forgotten to say anything I wanted to say.

And if I had, I should not drag it into the preface and half say it, for fear of never getting a chance to say it anywhere else.

I don't believe this book will be my last. I don't expect to get through writing on my favorite subjects for a good while yet—a statement which some of my critics will receive, I fear, with indescribable anguish.

The book is the result of many years of careful preparation, during which I have been gathering, from experience and from study, the material here presented. I have scorned no source from which reliable and worthy material could be derived from the most ponderous volumes to the most ephemeral newspapers - from the reminiscences of the most cultivated and scholarly play-goers to the gossip of the humblest of the player-folk-from the experiences of the most celebrated actresses, actors and managers, to the experiences of my humble self, from

girlhood to womanhood, through a life which has been full of strange vicissitudes.

I give my work to the world in the sincere and earnest hope that it will do good. If it strips off some of the "gauze and vanity" from the "show world," I hope it also exhibits that world in a fairer and juster light to many who have hitherto looked on it with ungenerous and unenlightened eyes.