"At the Alhambra Theatre, in Leicester Square, on July 8, 1882, appeared Marian the Giant Amazon Queen in an operetta called Babil and Bijou, billed as "a grand fairy spectacular opera, with music by G. Jacobi". According to the billing at this time she stood eight feet two inches high and was still growing.
"The theatre critic of the Illustrated London News, the famous journalist George Augustus Sala, wrote of the giantess: "Notwithstanding her colossal height and build, she is very well proportioned, and she is decidedly handsome, possessing as she does the true pre-Raphaelite maxilliary angle. " The Daily News remarked: "She possesses a conspicuous advantage over most of her compeers, inasmuch as she has really considerable claims to good looks."
"However, she found no favour in the sight of that eminent theatrical critic Clement Scott, who wrote in The Theatre for August 1, 1882: "Suppose it had been suggested to me that good music would be put on one side, good singers cold-shouldered, beautiful ballets made a second consideration, our lovely English women rendered of no account, singing, acting, decoration, spectacle, art, all made subordinate to one abnormal monster - well, I should have laughed the Barnum to scorn who had such faith in monstrosities and the eccentricity of the English public. But, as it turns out, I should have been extremely wrong. Mr William Holland, of the Alhambra Theatre, has proved that at any rate. He has discovered in Germany a gaintess who, massive, awkward, and unwieldy as she is, has managed to draw more people to the Alhambra Theatre than have ever before been known to assemble there at this time of year ... Clubs are emptied, people remain in town, society is in a flutter and a ferment, because every evening at eleven o'clock, a young woman waddles across the stage and allows an army of the most beautifully made women on the world to pass under her extended arms. No one talks of anything else but Mr. Holland's giantess, with her amiable unexpressive face, her clumsy gait, and her speechless look of dismay. It does not amuse me to hear that she is still growing; I only pity the fate of the poor girl so cruelly ill-used by Nature."
--- Colin Clair, "Human Curiosities" (1968) |
