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  • Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain
  • Vanessa Toulmin (bio)
Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp; pp. xiii + 328. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008, $49.95, $9.95 CD-ROM.

The Victorian freak show in the United Kingdom has yet to receive a depth of coverage equalling its American counterpart, and any new research in this international area is a welcome contribution. American scholars have plundered special collections and archives across the United States, and undergraduate and master programmes are dedicated to the topic. Studies include A. H. Saxon's masterly P. T. Barnum (1989); the seminal Freakery (1996), edited by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (who wrote the foreword for Victorian Freaks); and Robert Bogdan's historical overview, Freak Show (1988). More recent work, such as Rachel Adams's Sideshow U.S.A. (2001), updates the sideshow by examining modern performance culture in the late twentieth century and its relationship to earlier historical forms.

By comparison, wide-ranging scholarship on the freak show in the United Kingdom is sparse; both Victorianists and entertainment and theatre historians appear to have shied away from this controversial and still divisive area of research. It has been problematic to use American models and sources to study what was originally a European and British entertainment genre. This material is often analysed with regard to the later development and influence of American freak show performers and impresarios who visited the United Kingdom from the 1840s onwards. For these reasons, historical overviews of the freak show, and studies of its evolution as a mode of entertainment and its precise locations and social space, are lacking in the United Kingdom; many primary archival collections, apart from the famous John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at Oxford, have yet to be mined. This is surprising when one considers the range of venues utilized by freak show performers in the British Isles. Variety stages, shop shows, museums of curiosity, fairground sideshows, entertainment complexes like the Royal Aquarium in London, and the burgeoning seaside resorts and piers provided performance arenas for all manner and types of shows. Despite the range of performance space and the vast array of artists, the contributions in this edited volume disappointingly tend to centre on the more familiar freak show attractions. In addition, very few homegrown shows and British acts, with the exception of the previously well-researched career of Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, attract the attention of the authors.

There is a perhaps more literary than historical leaning evident in the various interpretations offered by the twelve contributors to Victorian Freaks, eight of whom are literary scholars. This slant is evident in Garland-Thomson's foreword, where her [End Page 740] critique of "freak studies" places it as a subfield within American and Cultural Studies. It is difficult, however, to reconcile the foreword's claims about the book with its actual content. Garland-Thomson writes that the "authors here look to the alternative notions of the marketplace and economics in Britain, alongside the intellectual and social history of medicine, the role of imperialism and the peculiar British set of social values presented in the period fiction" (x-xi). Marlene Tromp, the editor, further advances this notion by stating that "the scholarship presented here helps us better understand not only freakery but also the period" (2). In order to justify these claims, the collection should also contain articles on the social context of the performance space, the entertainment structure around freak acts, the medical and social conditions of the performers, and further information on spectatorship. Recent work on how advances in Victorian society enabled the industrialisation of leisure could have provided the historical context for some of this material. Indeed, no rationale is given for the time frame of the exhibitions discussed in the collection.

Despite these reservations, certain contributions stand out. Nadja Durbach's investigation into the career of Krao the Missing Link integrates evolutionary theory with freak show discourse to demonstrate how both respectable and pseudo-science influenced and shaped the presentation of freak show exhibits. Rebecca Stern's assessment of Julia Pastrana is equally fine, bringing physiological discourse and notions...

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