by Peter Ford
Having linked three pieces in the bizarre medical jigsaw, Radcliffe Crocker rounded off his remarks with an inspired suggestion. He reminded the meeting of a case presented before the society by his old mentor, Dr Tilbury Fox, where a patient with the symptoms of a looseness of the skin had developed these after an injury and a resulting abscess that needed to be lanced. It was found that the parts of the body affected were those supplied by the nerves damaged by the injury and the subsequent abscess. Might it not therefore be that changes in the nervous system had governed the bodily distribution of the disease in the Elephant Man?
As a surmise it was still vague enough, and it still left many questions unanswered, but with the hindsight of more than a century it is possible to say it was a better explanation than Treves had a right to expect. The Pathological Society of London and Dr Radcliffe Crocker had provided as accurate an answer as it would have been possible to give anywhere in the world in the state of medical knowledge in 1885.
What, meanwhile, of Joseph Merrick and Tom Norman? The tide of rational decency was by now running heavily against their mutual interest. Even in the East End of London a new sensitivity in public opinion was leading to demands for official action to shut down exhibitions found by a growing number of citizens to be offensive. It was all part of a long and undeniably civilizing process. The ‘taste for Monsters’ which, Henry Morley wrote, ‘became a disease’ during the heyday of Bartholomew Fair, was one ‘of which the nation has in our own day [the 1850s] recovered with a wonderful rapidity’. During Queen Anne’s reign, at the house next to the Greyhound Inn during Bartholomew Fair, there was an exhibition of a hydrocephalic child: ‘but Thirty weeks old, with a prodigious big head, being above a yard about, and hath been shown to several Persons of Quality’. There can be few societies today in which an attempt to put on such an exhibition would be greeted with anything but outrage.
Nevertheless there are always two sides to a question whenever righteous indignation succeeds in imposing its general will. In his book The Travelling People, Duncan Dallas records the lamentation of a post-Second World War fairground showman who was having much difficulty in finding an adequate supply of human freaks. He blamed it on the Welfare State in Britain: ‘… you never hear anything about these people. They seem to be smothered. They seem to be kept out of the way in the background.’
The inference is that freaks still exist in plenty but that society would prefer to avoid the discomfort of knowing about them. The old showmen, Tom Norman among them, were predictably at one in claiming that their freaks were better off out in the world, among people and earning a living, than shut away in an institution or an isolated home from which they could never venture forth, dependent on charity or welfare. So where was the line to be drawn between an object of legitimate curiosity and an offence to public decency?
There was no doubt in the minds of the London police that Joseph Merrick fell firmly within the latter category. They had therefore stepped in to close down the show in the Whitechapel Road as they would, three years later on the same site, close down the waxworks exhibition on the theme of the Jack the Ripper murders. Joseph had retreated back along the road out of the metropolis and disappeared somewhere into the provincial background. Frederick Treves had no reason to think he might ever have dealings with him again.
Meanwhile there were his notes and data as well as the photographs, and there was one further task he intended undertaking. This was to prepare his account of the case for publication in the Transactions of the Pathological Society of London. Copies of the photographs were sent to Messrs F. Huth, Lithographers, of Edinburgh, and eventually the finished plates, together with Treves’s description, were published in the Transactions for 1885 under the heading, ‘A Case of Congenital Deformity’.
Thus Treves had made a permanent record of the case to be bequeathed to medical posterity and taken up by any future experts who might feel drawn to unravelling its mysteries. By this time he was busily engaged in delivering the Hunterian Lectures on Anatomy to the Royal College of Surgeons, and if he thought further of the Elephant Man it was to hope that his impression of him as a retarded individual was accurate.
The fact that his face was incapable of expression, that his speech was a mere spluttering and his attitude that of one whose mind was void of all emotions and concerns gave grounds for this belief. The conviction was no doubt encouraged by the hope that his intellect was the blank I imagined it to be.
The possibility that Joseph Merrick might after all have any realization of the dilemma of his life would, Treves felt, be too appalling even to consider.
CHAPTER 4
A Parade of Elephants and Early Griefs
What therefore is known or may be discovered of the origins of Joseph Merrick?
His birth certificate gives the information that he was born Joseph Carey Merrick on 5 August 1862 at 50 Lee Street, Leicester; that his father was Joseph Rockley Merrick, warehouseman, and his mother Mary Jane Merrick, née Potterton. As the date of their marriage in the parish church of Thurmaston was 29 December 1861, it is fair to assume that Mary Jane was already pregnant by the time she went to the altar. She was twenty-six years old when she gave birth to Joseph, and his memory of her was, as we shall see, one of the most important elements in his life.
An anonymous article on the Elephant Man that appeared in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle on 27 December 1930, which is clearly based on a knowledge of the Merrick family circumstances, states that Mary Jane was herself a cripple. She was born in the small village of Evington on the south-east outskirts of Leicester, the third child in a family of nine. Her parents, William and Elizabeth Potterton, were ordinary country people. Indeed, her father, a farm labourer, could not write his own name, but the Pottertons did well by their children, allowing them to attend school until they had received at least a basic education.
When Mary was about five years old her family moved from Evington to settle in the village of Thurmaston, a few miles to the north of the city. From there, at the age of twelve, she left home to become a servant to a family in Leicester itself.
For the next thirteen years she remained in service, enduring a life that could have been distinctive only for its long hours and attic bedrooms, the endless carrying of hot-water jugs and coal buckets, incessant scrubbing and blackleading and the invariable rules about ‘no followers’. Then in 1861, when she was twenty-five, she met Joseph Rockley Merrick, who was just over a year younger than herself. He made his living as the driver of a brougham, a closed four-wheeled cab.
The Merrick family’s village of origin is reputed to be Clynnog-fawr in North Wales, but by the 1780s they were established in London. Joseph Rockley Merrick’s father Barnabas (the third Barnabas running in order of descent) had been born in 1792 at Spitalfields, where the family was successful in the weaving trade, owning looms, engines to run them and leasehold property. He married, first, in 1815, a bride from Wanstead, who bore him four children, and secondly, in 1826, a Sarah Jones, though this marriage was childless. By the 1830s he was working as a bobbin-turner in the hosiery trade in Leicester, and in 1837 he married for the third time, to Sarah Rockley from Radford in Nottinghamshire.
Joseph Rockley Merrick was the eldest of Barnabas and Sarah’s three sons, the other two being Henry and Charles Barnabas Merrick, all born in Leicester. After Joseph Rockley and Mary Potterton had married in turn, they set up their first home at 50 Lee Street, a small house in one of the warren of streets behind Humberstonegate, only a few yards from the address of Joseph Rockley’s by then widowed mother Sarah.
The city of Leicester was meanwhile expanding rapidly on the basis of the industrialization of its traditional crafts of hosiery and knitwear, to which were added boot and shoe manufacture. Fresh mazes of narrow streets and dingy back-to-back housing sprang up with regularity in each succeeding year. From the north side of Humberstonegate a long, narrow street called Wharf Street ran down at right angles to reach the new pu
blic wharf on the canal. The land to each side of Wharf Street was low-lying, even marshy, but by the 1860s the gardens and nurseries still charted on the maps of 1828 had disappeared beneath a confusion of backstreets. Lee Street was one of these: a side-turning off Wharf Street.
From its moment of construction Lee Street could justly be defined as a slum. The houses were small and lacked running water. Sanitation was a constant problem, for the sewers were inadequate and many houses possessed only cesspits. The removal of refuse was in the hands of private scavengers who were both ineffective and irregular. Worst of all were the floods. Once a year the River Soar and the canal could be expected to rise and fill the streets to a depth of two or three feet, the water having forced its way back up through the sewers, bringing with it sewage and garbage. It was both insanitary and lethal. Over many years Leicester suffered a death-rate that annually removed between twenty-six and thirty in every thousand of its population; and, as always, the death-rate was highest among infants and children. The Victorian mothers of the time had little hope of being spared the helpless despair of watching at least one of their children sicken and die.
Shortly after his marriage Joseph Rockley Merrick changed his job, giving up his employment as a brougham driver and going to work in one of the many cotton factories. The work was monotonous and the hours were long, the usual shift lasting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. in winter and from 6 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. in summer, with half an hour for breakfast and dinner. Many firms by this time allowed Saturday afternoon as a half-day off, but there were no statutory bank holidays and even Boxing Day was regarded as a normal day of work. Wages varied, but a man working two knitting frames could earn as much as 12s. (60p) or 15s. (75p) a week, a woman 9s. (45p) and even a child might bring home 2s. (10p) or 3s. (15p). Joseph Rockley Merrick was somewhat more fortunate in that he managed to obtain a position in the warehouse where the wages were slightly higher than those paid to the operatives. Men and women who worked in the warehouse were generally regarded as a better class of employee.
In Leicester, Mary came under the influence of the Baptist ministry. This was particularly strong in the town, and for a period in her life she was a teacher in one of the three Baptist Sunday schools in the city, though which one is unrecorded. Education in Leicester, as in many of the other new and growing industrial centres, presented a considerable problem in the 1860s. Children of seven and eight years old were still being employed by cotton factories, by boot manufacturers and in the brickyards. There were no free schools prior to the Education Act of 1870, and often parents could not afford to pay even the small fees charged by the various day schools, apart from their unwillingness to sacrifice the wages of their earning children. Only a third of the children in Leicester received a full-time education, and many of these attended for such short periods that they could have gained little benefit.
For the other two thirds of the children there were the Sunday schools, usually run by the Nonconformist churches. The purpose of these was to teach not only religious instruction, but also the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic. While we do not know which Baptist Sunday school employed Mary, the activities of the Friar Lane Baptist Sunday School give an indication that the régime was sternly imposed alongside the benevolent motivation of the Nonconformist conscience in working for the betterment of working-class children.
The Sunday schools were often surprisingly large establishments. The Friar Lane establishment had as many as 350 pupils and 45 teachers. Admission was a matter of application and interview, and truancy led to expulsion, for discipline was strict. At the beginning of the nineteenth century this school had even possessed a pair of stocks for the correction of the unruly. Successful scholars could, however, look forward to prize day and receiving certificates of proficiency; and there was always the annual Sunday school outing.
The relentless work routine for the populace of the industrial centres of the nineteenth century created, by reaction, an appetite for diversion and cheap entertainment during those few hours people could call their own. The 1860s were the first great period of growth for the institution of the British music hall throughout the provinces, although many of the new halls continued to be attached as incidental attractions to existing inns and taverns. There were meanwhile the more traditional diversions whose origins ran far back into antiquity: the charter fairs and visiting circuses and menageries, the latter featuring elephants among their attractions. And the mention of elephants at once sets off an echo: the carefully tended story that Joseph Merrick put forward to account for his condition, that his mother had been knocked down by an elephant during the time she carried him in her womb.
The Leicester Journal for 9 May 1862 contained the following announcement:
Notice is hereby given that the next Leicester MAY FAIR will be held on Monday, the 12th day of May next for the sale of horses, beasts and sheep, and on Tuesday, the 13th and following days for the sale of cheese. By order, Saul Stone, Town Clerk. N.B. No cheese wagon will be allowed to enter the Market Place except from Hotel Street.
The following day the Leicester Chronicle dutifully repeated the notice.
There had been fairs in Leicester since the thirteenth century. The dates of the fairs, and the festivals they celebrated, had varied over the years, but gradually they coalesced into the two great annual fairs of the city. The first was held early in May each year, at the time of the ‘Invention of the Cross’; the second in early October. Before their discontinuation in 1902, they were among the truly great charter fairs of Britain. People would pour into the city from the neighbouring villages and towns to buy and sell in the markets, hire employees and domestic staff and assess the quality and prices of cattle and horses. They replenished farmhouse stocks for another six months, exchanged domestic news with neighbours, bought clothes and marvelled at new fashions, pushed their way between the street stalls and ended up revelling in the tomfooleries of the pleasure fair.
For the citizens of Leicester the fairs were a mixed blessing as the streets and thoroughfares became blocked by stalls and surging crowds. Cotton spinners hurrying in the early morning to the small factories and mills would find their paths blocked by the cattle being driven through to the Cattle Market in the city centre. For two days the streets grew foul and treacherous. As Dr John Barclay of Leicester remarked in a lecture he delivered in 1864:
That the cattle market is a terrible nuisance no one will, I think, deny. I am sure that no one will say a word in support of it who have to barricade their doors against the filthy accumulations that make the streets look and smell like a cowshed for a couple of days. In my own part of the town we are quite blockaded …
The very next day after the cattle sales were over the poultry came into town, noisy and crowded into the backs of a hundred carts. Then there would be a day of comparative peace and cleanliness as the cheese fair took over. From every farm and dairy the great cheeses were brought, laid on fresh straw in the bottoms of carts. From end to end of the town the carts, their horses unharnessed, stood backed against the kerbs, tailboards lowered to display the cheeses to passers-by. Shopkeepers and housewives alike would move along the line, tasting samples before buying. The best cheeses went quickly to the large grocers; only the worst cheeses would still be left when the gas lamps were lit at early dusk.
In the meantime, as the trading fairs proceeded, the Humberstonegate was, as one of the wider thoroughfares of the town, set aside for the great pleasure fair. Stalls and booths were ranged down either side of the street, and where the road widened into its broadest part there were swings and merry-go-rounds; theatrical booths and marionettes; freakshows, sword swallowers and jugglers; stands for the sale of sweets, pastries and patent medicines.
Mrs I. C. Ellis, in her collection of reminiscences, Nineteenth Century Leicester, remembered it thus:
The fair in Humberstonegate was a glimpse of paradise. It was a never forgotten joy to go on the roundabouts though we never ventured on the swing
s. The wild beast show roared and smelt like nothing else on earth, but the daintiest, loveliest thing was the marionette show. We were taken down the bazaars – and very nice the stalls were – a long row of tents with wares all on one side … There were booths with dancers in tights disporting themselves on a platform – these our father or other conductor avoided, but the marionettes we were allowed to see … We went to front seats (2d. by the side door, 1d. if you went in at the front, in view of all the fair). When we had all been paid for and were sitting as we thought in seclusion, the proprietor opened the front of this tent and displayed his respectable audience, and shouted again, ‘Twopence in at the side door, one penny in at the front.’
In its report of the 1862 pleasure fair, the Leicester Journal succeeded in putting across the general aura of excitement:
Giants, descendants in direct line from the Anakims of old; india-rubber men; or acrobats; wonders of every description in animated nature, and astonishing novelties in art, are presented. A picture of a monstrous pig, exhibited outside one booth, is said to have its perfect living counterpart weighing several tons within. At another booth resides a cow, whose hind quarters are adorned with an extra leg, which the proprietor informs us, is intended expressly for scratching her nose.
The Leicester Chronicle, taking up the theme, adopted a more jaundiced tone:
Not withstanding the heavy showers of rain and the somewhat limited attractions … it has been visited by a large number of the country folk during the week … There was a new circus, Croueste’s, displaying to the admiring gaze of the juveniles a number of coloured vignettes, representing equestrians in all sorts of impossible attitudes; and a dilapidated theatrical booth, with actors and actresses, whose dresses were in admirable keeping with the woe-begone appearance of the building. A giant pig, a threelegged cow, some dirty looking and rickety swingboats, really superior roundabouts, stalls for nick-nacks, and rifle galleries – made up a somewhat motley gathering of the peripatetic tradesfolk.