Abstract
The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age by John Woolf is a fascinating and well-researched history of the freak show in nineteenth-century Britain and America. It is written in a lively and engaging style that would be accessible to students and a general audience. The Wonders contains much to interest scholars of the history of theatre and popular entertainment. Through meticulous archival research, Woolf uncovers a wealth of material about both performers and behind-the-scenes figures, many of them familiar to scholars who study freak shows. The reader learns of actual performance practices through eyewitness accounts. In addition, the book offers a great deal of information about the mechanisms behind the performances, such as promotion, exhibition spaces, costuming, styles of performance, and even details such as salaries. These particulars are contextualised within the larger history of the development of commercial popular entertainment and pop culture. However, as someone who researches disability history, I found myself wanting Woolf to engage more with perspectives coming out of the field of disability studies in the humanities, as disability studies provides tools for interrogating the role entertainment can play in furthering ableist ways of understanding bodily differences.
Following a theatrical structure, the book is divided into four ‘acts’. The acts are prefaced by a chapter entitled ‘Curtain Up’, which acclimates the reader to the world of Victorian human exhibits through an anecdote about the first meeting between Queen Victoria and Charles Stratton (known by his stage name, ‘General Tom Thumb’). The introduction that follows describes the book as a series of biographical sketches. Each chapter concentrates on a specific figure or several related figures, whose individual stories shed light on developments in freakery or popular culture more generally. In addition to the figures who are the central focus of chapters, the reader is introduced to a variety of other people who were exhibited, such as Saartje Baartman (billed as ‘The Hottentot Venus’) and Charles Byrne (‘The Irish Giant’). Woolf cautions the reader regarding the difficulty of recovering the lives of freak show performers from the mixture of fact and fiction that has been handed down. He aptly describes one performer as ‘a myth constructed through numerous biographies written during and after his life, each one fulfilling a specific function’. 1 This could be said of any of the performers and promoters he discusses: their public personas were carefully curated during their lifetimes, and their stories were appropriated and put to various uses after their deaths.
The first ‘act’, ‘Dress Rehearsals’, examines the lives and careers of four pre-Victorian figures: Jeffrey Hudson and Jozef Boruwlaski, who played the role of ‘court dwarfs’; 2 Daniel Lambert, a professional fat man; and George Sanger, a British circus entrepreneur. These chapters reveal contexts in which atypical bodies were displayed prior to the institutionalisation of the freak show and introduce some of the practices, such as royal patronage, that continued into the freak show era.
The second section, ‘Show Time’, traces the rise of the freak show from its early status as a disreputable form of travelling entertainment to its acceptance by the respectable Victorian middle classes. In six chapters, Woolf follows the careers of Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined brothers known as ‘The Siamese Twins’, and Joice Heth, the first person to be exhibited by P. T. Barnum. He discusses several topics that return throughout the text, including the freak show's problematic presentation of racial and ethnic difference; the role of science and medicine in legitimising the freak show; and the dehumanising treatment of performers after their deaths by showmen and scientists alike. This section presents a poignant contrast between the experiences of Heth, who was enslaved and owned by Barnum, and those of Chang and Eng, who were able to gain control of their own careers and ended up becoming slaveholders themselves.
The six chapters that comprise Act Three, ‘Double Act’, elaborate on Barnum's career in tandem with that of the most successful performer he managed, Charles Stratton. This is really the heart of the book, as, Woolf asserts, this is the point at which the freak show and theatre converged: ‘Stratton should be regarded within the field of theatre history because, through vaudeville-style performances, he became a celebrated actor’. 3 Stratton also prefigures the current notion of the cult of celebrity, and his popularity ignited a culture war over the relative value of popular entertainment and ‘high art’. This section revisits the meeting between Queen Victoria and Stratton, contextualising it within the history of Victoria's patronage of human exhibits, which conferred respectability on the practice of displaying ‘curiosities’. The chapters also explore in more detail the blurring of the line between public and private in the lives of the performers, by examining the ways in which Stratton's marriage to Lavinia Warren was commodified and framed for public consumption.
As with the opening section, Act Four, ‘The Climax’, covers several different performers whose stories reveal developments in freak show history. The section begins with chapters on the history of Maximo and Bartola and on the role played by racism, evolutionary science, and eugenics in the history of the freak show. Maximo and Bartola, a brother and sister with microcephaly, were exhibited as the last surviving Aztecs, a fiction constructed to support the racist argument that some people were more fit to survive than others. Woolf reads their stories in relation to ethnographic spectacles, called ‘Human Zoos’, and performers billed as the ‘missing link’. 4 The third chapter in this section focuses on the development of the circus sideshow in America in the 1880s. It is followed by three more chapters on individual performers: Julia Pastrana, a hirsute woman whose husband was notorious for displaying her corpse along with that of their son; Anna Swan and Martin Bates, exhibited as giants; and Millie and Christine McKoy, enslaved African-American conjoined twins who were singers, known as ‘The Two-Headed Nightingale’.
The book ends with a ‘Final Act’ – Joseph Merrick, dubbed ‘The Elephant Man’ – and an epilogue on the decline of the freak show. Although freak shows continued well into twentieth century (and still exist today in new forms, such as reality television shows), the paradigm for understanding atypical bodies has shifted to a medicalised one. Merrick's history exemplifies the transition from ‘freak’ to patient. Woolf also delineates other causes for the freak show's downfall, including competition with a new form of visual spectacle, film.
By fleshing out the lives and circumstances behind the Victorian freak show, The Wonders makes a significant contribution to the history of the development of this form of entertainment and of popular culture in general. However, I would have liked to see Woolf adopt a position more thoroughly grounded in the methodologies of disability studies. While he does cite prominent scholars of the freak show who employ a disability studies lens, such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Nadja Durbach, a more consistent engagement with disability studies would create more opportunities to intervene in the ableist discourses and practices surrounding the freak show. Of course, as Woolf points out, many of the individuals he discusses did not see themselves as disabled. However, disability studies looks at more than individual circumstances. The discipline interrogates cultural norms. It asks whom the physical and attitudinal environment was constructed to include and what barriers to participation in the public sphere hinder those who do not meet normative expectations. Take the case of Anna Swan, for example. Anna was exhibited by Barnum as a giant after she ‘was forced to give up training as a teacher because her size was not conducive to studying or the classroom’. 5 Rather than focusing on Anna's inability to fit comfortably into the classroom, a disability studies analysis might note that she was forced out of her chosen career because the classroom was designed in a manner that was not accessible to her. This change in point of view would re-envision the problem as arising from cultural expectations about bodies rather than from the bodies themselves.
A perspective informed by disability studies also has the potential to enrich the conversation on agency and exploitation that inevitably arises within discussions of the freak show. Woolf's focus on biography means that he examines the degree to which each performer was exploited or enabled to achieve financial independence. Regarding Charles Stratton, Woolf writes, ‘Stratton was exploited as a child performer, clearly having no choice when he was thrust onstage aged four, but he was also empowered as a dwarf who operated in the able-bodied world organised against him’. 6 I wanted to see the analysis expand beyond individual cases to question the terms of the discussion itself by challenging the Victorian tendency to categorise and value bodies according to their earning potential within the industrial capitalist labour market. While the freak show enabled a few individuals to thrive within an otherwise hostile environment, it did nothing to change that environment to make it more accessible for the majority of people with non-normative bodies. In fact, by exaggerating bodily differences, the freak show can be said to have perpetuated the view that such differences were too extreme to be accommodated within the culture at large.
Overall, The Wonders is a well-written and carefully documented account of the lives of many of the most important figures in freak show history and would make a valuable resource for scholars of the history of theatre and of popular entertainment. In relation to race and ethnicity, Woolf delves into the ways in which freak shows were implicated in the ideologies of scientific racism and eugenics. In my opinion, the book would have benefitted from a similar approach to disability.
