'The Great Freak of Nature – Half-a-Man and Half-an-Elephant'

When the Elephant Man appeared as if from nowhere in a shop premises in the Whitechapel Road in London towards the end of November 1884, he was still in the early days of his career as a professional freak. His real name, as his birth certificate bears witness, was Joseph Carey Merrick, and his manager at that time was Mr Tom Norman, a showman who specialized in the display of freaks and novelties. The shop hired for his exhibition was then numbered 123 Whitechapel Road. The building survives today as one in a terraced row of early nineteenth-century shops, though it has since been renumbered as 259. The adjoining premises to its east side carried until recently the pawnbroker's emblem of three iron balls high up on the wall. To the west side lay the shop of Mr Michael Geary, fruiterer and greengrocer.

Directly across the road from the row of shops, on the other side of the wide thoroughfare, stands the imposing entrance to the London Hospital. The present front in fact dates from improvements made in 1891. In the 1880s the hospital displayed a long and imposing classical façade, set well back behind railings and with porters' lodges at the main gates. The whole effect was designed to inspire confidence in the capabilities of medical science as well as a measure of appropriate awe among the inhabitants of the district. It was the outward and visible sign of authoritarian benevolence and charity in an area that had for many decades experienced an intimate connection with deprivation and poverty: one in which successive waves of penniless immigrants settled alongside the original communities of London's poor; those who, in the definition of the great Victorian pioneer in social investigation, Henry Mayhew, 'Will work, cannot work and will not work.'

In such a district therefore Joseph Merrick arrived to fall under Tom Norman's care, it being hoped that the Elephant Man's impact on London would be profitable for them both. Outside the premises, across the shop front, leaving only the doorway clear, the showman hung a large canvas sheet painted with the startling image of a man half-way through the process of turning into an elephant and announcing that the same was to be seen within for the entrance price of twopence. If the artistry was rough, and the colours garish to sophisticated taste, the poster evidently had the sensational effect intended. A young surgeon from the London Hospital, Mr Frederick Treves, who visited the freakshow, could recall the poster in every vivid detail when he came to write about it some forty years later:

This very crude production depicted a frightful creature that could only have been possible in a nightmare. It was the figure of a man with the characteristics of an elephant. The transfiguration was not far advanced. There was still more of the man than of the beast. This fact – that it was still human – was the most repellent attribute of the creature. There was nothing about it of the pitiableness of the misshapened or the deformed, nothing of the grotesqueness of the freak, but merely the loathing insinuation of a man being changed into an animal. Some palm trees in the background of the picture suggested a jungle and might have led the imaginative to assume that it was in this wild that the perverted object had roamed.

Whatever it was which could possibly be causing poor Merrick to take on an approximation to an elephant, in displaying him as a freak Mr Norman was working in an ancient tradition the roots of which lay far back in the history of fairgrounds and circuses in England. London in particular had been noted for its insatiable appetite for monsters since at least the days of Elizabeth I. As Henry Morley stated in his Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair, it was not merely the common throng who sought out a formidable diet of signs and wonders and supported popular fashions in the grotesque. Everyone in society, up to the level of its crowned head, 'shared in the tastes ... for men who could dance without legs, dwarfs, giants, hermaphrodites, or scaly boys'. He goes on to comment, writing his book in the late 1850s:

The taste still lingers among uncultivated people in the highest and lowest ranks of life, but in the reign of William and Mary, or Queen Anne, it was almost universal. Bartholomew Fair, with all the prodigies exhibited therein, was not as it now would be, an annual display of things hardly to be seen out of a fair, but was, as far as Monsters went, only a yearly concentration into one spot of the entertainments that at other times were scattered over town and country.

Bartholomew Fair was officially opened each year on 23 August, the eve of Saint Bartholomew, and continued for two weeks. While the revels lasted, many poor tradesmen in the Smithfield area were glad to hire out a part of their premises for the display of some prodigy of nature. Prime sites were those shops or workrooms close to taverns, such as the premises where a 'changeling child' might be viewed,

next door to the Black Raven in West Smithfield ... being a living Skeleton, taken by a Venetian Galley, from a Turkish Vessel in the Archipelago. This is a Fairy Child, supposed to be born of Hungarian Parents, but chang'd in the Nursing, Aged Nine Years and more; not exceeding a foot and a half high. The Legs, Thighs and Arms are so very small, that they scarce exceed the bigness of a Man's Thumb, and the face no bigger than the Palm of one's hand.

On another occasion, 'next door to the Golden Hart in West-Smithfield' there was to be seen 'the Admirable Work of Nature, a Woman having Three Breasts; and each of them affording Milk at one time, or differently, according as they are made use of'.

Advancing sharply up the social scale, the West End of London featured its permanent exhibition halls available for hire to show-men. When, in 1826, the bookseller and radical pamphleteer William Hone interviewed Claude Amboise Seurat, the 'Anatomie Vivant; or Living Skeleton!' for the edification of readers of his periodical The Every-day Book, he visited him at Pall Mall in a room known as the Chinese Saloon. When Barnum brought General Tom Thumb to London in 1844, the curiosity aroused was so phenomenal that he was able to engage the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. These remarkable premises were built in 1812 by William Bullock to show his own vast and miscellaneous collection of...