author
Thomas Frost
1821–1908
A lively Victorian journalist and storyteller, he wrote about everything from circus performers and conjurors to political life on the radical edge. His work blends popular history, memoir, and sharp curiosity about 19th-century Britain.
2 Audiobooks
Circus Life and Circus Celebrities
by Thomas Frost
The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs
by Thomas Frost
About the author
Born in Croydon in 1821, he became an English writer, journalist, lecturer, printer, and Chartist. Sources about his life describe him as a radical figure in Victorian literary and political culture, and note family roots in Kent.
He wrote across an unusually wide range of subjects. Among the books most often linked with him are Forty Years' Recollections, Literary and Political, Lives of the Conjurors, and Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, works that helped make him known as both a memoirist and a writer of vivid popular history.
Later accounts suggest that his finances became precarious toward the end of his life, and that he sought support from the Royal Literary Fund. He died in 1908, leaving behind a body of work that still appeals to readers interested in the stranger, livelier corners of the Victorian world.