Thus James Frowde (1831-99), whose mother had been one of the famous Hengler family of pyrotechnists, rope-dancers, tragedians and circus proprietors, recalls his first memory of performance, some time around 1835. As he himself recognises, what he describes is an archetypal melodramatic moment. The play would seem to be one of the many stage versions of the heroic fable of St George and the Dragon, whose 1833-4 enactment on the classic boards of Drury Lane by Andrew Ducrow and his famous horses from Astley's Amphitheatre caused critical disgust. The drama clothed nationalist mythologising in gothic fairytale, spectacular horsemanship and special effects (Ducrow had a flying dragon that lifted him bodily from his saddle during the climactic combat). In little James's primal scene, evil - embodied in the scaly, tale-swinging beast of nightmare - menaces feminine innocence embodied in his handsome aunt. His telling of the story invokes the trope of the naïve theatregoer carried away by the fiction, overlaid with the intertheatrical joke of the boy's family relation to the stage: he not only took the dragon for real, but really knew and wished to protect the human performer.