by Peter Ford
The splendour and display impressed him, but, I think, the ladies of the ballet took a still greater hold upon his fancy. He did not like the ogres and the giants, while the funny men impressed him as irreverent. Having no experience as a boy of romping and ragging, of practical jokes or of ‘larks’, he had little sympathy with the doings of the clown, but, I think (moved by some mischievous instinct in his subconscious mind), he was pleased when the policeman was smacked in the face, knocked down and generally rendered undignified.
Later on another longing stirred the depths of Merrick’s mind. It was a desire to see the country, a desire to live in some green secluded spot and there learn something about flowers and the ways of animals and birds. The country as viewed from a wagon on a dusty high road was all the country he knew. He had never wandered among the fields nor followed the windings of a wood. He had never climbed to the brow of a breezy down. He had never gathered flowers in a meadow. Since so much of his reading dealt with country life he was possessed by the wish to see the wonders of that life himself.
This involved a difficulty greater than that presented by a visit to the theatre. The project was, however, made possible on this occasion also by the kindness and generosity of a lady – Lady Knightley – who offered Merrick a holiday home in a cottage on her estate. Merrick was conveyed to the railway station in the usual way, but as he could hardly venture to appear on the platform the railway authorities were good enough to run a second-class carriage into a distant siding. To this point Merrick was driven and was placed in the carriage unobserved. The carriage, with the curtains drawn, was then attached to the mainline train.
He duly arrived at the cottage, but the housewife (like the nurse at the hospital) had not been made clearly aware of the unfortunate man’s appearance. Thus it happened that when Merrick presented himself his hostess, throwing her apron over her head, fled, gasping, to the fields. She affirmed that such a guest was beyond her powers of endurance for, when she saw him, she was ‘that took’ as to be in danger of being permanently ‘all of a tremble’.
Merrick was then conveyed to a gamekeeper’s cottage which was hidden from view and was close to the margin of a wood. The man and his wife were able to tolerate his presence. They treated him with the greatest kindness, and with them he spent the one supreme holiday of his life. He could roam where he pleased. He met no one on his wanderings, for the wood was preserved and denied to all but the gamekeeper and the forester.
There is no doubt that Merrick passed in this retreat the happiest time he had as yet experienced. He was alone in a land of wonders. The breath of the country passed over him like a healing wind. Into the silence of the wood the fearsome voice of the showman could never penetrate. No cruel eyes could peep at him through the friendly undergrowth. It seemed as if in this place of peace all stain had been wiped away from his sullied past. The Merrick who had once crouched terrified in the filthy shadows of a Mile End shop was now sitting in the sun, in a clearing among the trees, arranging a bunch of violets he had gathered.
His letters to me were the letters of a delighted and enthusiastic child. He gave an account of his trivial adventures, of the amazing things he had seen, and of the beautiful sounds he had heard. He had met with strange birds, had startled a hare from her form, had made friends with a fierce dog, and had watched the trout darting in a stream. He sent me some of the wild flowers he had picked. They were of the commonest and most familiar kind, but they were evidently regarded by him as rare and precious specimens.
He came back to London, to his quarters in Bedstead Square, much improved in health, pleased to be ‘home’ again and to be once more among his books, his treasures and his many friends.
Some six months after Merrick’s return from the country he was found dead in bed. This was in April, 1890. He was lying on his back as if asleep, and had evidently died suddenly and without a struggle, since not even the coverlet of the bed was disturbed. The method of his death was peculiar. So large and so heavy was his head that he could not sleep lying down. When he assumed the recumbent position the massive skull was inclined to drop backwards, with the result that he experienced no little distress. The attitude he was compelled to assume when he slept was very strange. He sat up in bed with his back supported by pillows, his knees were drawn up, and his arms clasped round his legs, while his head rested on the points of his bent knees.
He often said to me that he wished he could lie down to sleep ‘like other people’. I think on this last night he must, with some determination, have made the experiment. The pillow was soft, and the head, when placed on it, must have fallen backwards and caused a dislocation of the neck. Thus it came about that his death was due to the desire that had dominated his life – the pathetic but hopeless desire to be ‘like other people’.
As a specimen of humanity, Merrick was ignoble and repulsive; but the spirit of Merrick, if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth browed and clean of limb, and with eyes that flashed undaunted courage.
His tortured journey had come to an end. All the way he, like another, had borne on his back a burden almost too grievous to bear. He had been plunged into the Slough of Despond, but with manly steps had gained the farther shore. He had been made ‘a spectacle to all men’ in the heartless streets of the Vanity Fair. He had been ill-treated and reviled and bespattered with the mud of Disdain. He had escaped the clutches of the Giant Despair, and at last had reached the ‘Place of Deliverance’, where ‘his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell from off his back, so that he saw it no more.’
1 British Medical Journal, Dec. 1886, and April 1890
Bibliography
1. Books and articles directly relevant to the story of the Elephant Man or his clinical condition
Battiscombe, Georgina, Queen Alexandra, Constable, London, 1969.
Bland-Sutton, Sir John, The Story of a Surgeon, Methuen, London, 1930.
Boyd, William, Textbook of Pathology, Henry Kimpton, London, 1947.
Brain, Russell, Diseases of the Nervous System, 5th edition, Oxford University Press, 1956.
Cambridge, 2nd Duke of, George, Duke of Cambridge: A Memoir of His Private Life, Based on the Journals and Correspondence of H.R.H., ed. J. E. Shepherd, 2 vols., Longman, London, 1906.
Carswell, Heather, ‘Elephant Man Had More Than Neurofibromatosis’, Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 248, no. 9, 3 September 1982, pp. 1032–3; based on Seminars of Roentgenology, vol. 17, 1982, p. 153.
Clark, R., ‘Proteus Syndrome’, in Hughes and Huson (eds.), Neurofibromatosis, see below.
Clarke-Kennedy, A. E., The London: A Study of the Voluntary Hospital System, vol. 2: The Second Hundred Years, 1840–1948, Pitman Medical Publishing, London, 1963.
Cohen Jr, M. Michael, ‘Understanding Proteus Syndrome, Unmasking the Elephant Man, and Stemming Elephant Fever’, Neurofibromatosis, vol. 1, 1988, pp. 260–80.
Crocker, H. Radcliffe, Diseases of the Skin: a Review of 15,000 Cases of Skin Disorder, 3rd edition, vol. 2, Lewis, London, 1905.
Crowe, F. W., Schull, W. J., and Neel, J. F., A Clinical Pathological and General Study of Multiple Neurofibromatosis, Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Ill., 1956.
‘Death of the Elephant Man’, report in the British Medical Journal, vol. 1, 16 April 1890, pp. 916–17.
‘Death of the Elephant Man’, report on inquest in The Times, 16 April 1890.
Eaton, Colin, ‘Freak Found Refuge on Northants Farm’, Northants Post, 15 November 1980.
‘“Elephant Man”, The’, report in the British Medical Journal, vol. II, 11 December 1886, pp. 1188–9.
Elephant Man, The, pamphlet amplified from an account published in the British Medical Journal, John Bale & Sons, London, 1888.
‘Elephant Man, The’, anonymous article in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle, 27 December 1930.
Entract, J. P., ‘The Elephant Man’s Pied à Terre’, London Hospita
l Gazette, vol. LXXIII, no. 2, May 1970.
Fienman, Norman L., and Yakovac, William C., ‘Neurofibromatosis in Childhood’, Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 76, no. 3, March 1970, pp. 339–46.
Flower, Sir Newman, Just As It Happened, Cassell, London, 1950.
Gomm, F. C. Carr, ‘Death of the Elephant Man’, letter to The Times, 16 April 1890.
Gomm, F. C. Carr, ‘The Elephant Man’, letter of appeal in The Times, 4 December 1886.
Graham, Peter W., and Oehlschlaeger, Fritz H., Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1992.
Grenfell, Sir Wilfred, A Labrador Doctor, revised popular edition, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1929.
Halsted, D. G., A Doctor in the Nineties, Johnson, London, 1959.
Hughes, R. A. C., and Huson, S. (eds.), Neurofibromatosis, Chapman & Hall, London (in preparation).
Kaleta, Kenneth C., ‘Lynch and History: The Elephant Man’, Chapter 2, David Lynch, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1992.
Kendal, Madge, Dame Madge Kendal by Herself, John Murray, London, 1933.
Merrick, Joseph Carey, The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick, H. & A. Cockshaw, Leicester, n.d.
Minutes of the London Hospital House Committee, 7 December 1886; 14 December 1886; 15 April 1890.
Montagu, Ashley, The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity, Allison & Busby, London, 1972; Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, New York, 1971.
Norman, Tom, ‘This is Tom Norman: Sixty-five Years a Showman and Auctioneer’, unpublished MS in possession of the Norman family; subsequently published as The Penny Showman: Memoirs of Tom Norman, ‘Silver King’, with additional writings by his son, George Barnum Norman, privately printed, London, 1985.
Norman, Tom, letter of self-justification in the World’s Fair, 24 February 1923.
Poole, E. F., The Story of Byfield, Archer & Goodman, Northampton, 1930; this repeats an article, ‘The Romance of Redhill Wood’, Northampton County Magazine, vol. I,1928, pp. 292–3.
Reed, Nicholas, ‘The Mystery of Lot 583’, World Medicine, 29 November 1980.
Reports of the first meeting of the Pathological Society of London to consider the case of the Elephant Man, British Medical Journal, vol. II, 6 December 1884, p. 1140; Lancet, vol. II, 6 December 1884, p. 1000; of the second meeting, British Medical Journal, vol. I, 21 March 1885, p. 595; Lancet, vol. I, 21 March 1885, pp. 1188–9.
Reviews of The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences by Sir Frederick Treves, British Medical Journal, vol. I, 17 March 1923, P. 335; Lancet, vol. I, 17 March 1923, pp. 547–8; World’s Fair, 10 February 1923.
Seward, G. R., ‘The Elephant Man’, Parts I-III, British Dental Journal, 22 September 1990, pp. 173–5; 6 October 1990, pp. 209–16; 20 October 1990, pp. 252–5.
Seward, G. R., ‘Joseph Merrick’, in Hughes and Huson (eds.), op. cit.
Somerset, Lady Geraldine, ‘Private Journal of the Duchess of Cambridge’, MS diary in the Royal Archives, Windsor Castle Library.
Tibbles, J. A. R., and Cohen Jr, M. M., ‘The Proteus Syndrome: the Elephant Man Diagnosed’, British Medical Journal, vol. 293, 13 September 1986.
Treves, Frederick, ‘A Case of Congenital Deformity’, Transactions of the Pathological Society of London, vol. XXXVI, 1885, pp. 494–8.
Treves, Sir Frederick, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, Cassell, London, 1923.
Trombley, Stephen, Sir Frederick Treves: The Extra-Ordinary Edwardian, Routledge, London, 1989.
Weber, F. Parkes, ‘Cutaneous Pigmentation as an Incomplete Form of Recklinghausen’s Disease, with Remarks on the Classification of Incomplete Forms of Recklinghausen’s Disease’, British Journal of Dermatology, vol. 21,1949, pp. 49–51.
Weber, F. Parkes, Further Rare Diseases and Debatable Subjects, Staples Press, London, 1949.
Weber, F. Parkes, ‘Periosteal Neurofibromatosis, with a Short Consideration of the Whole Subject of Neurofibromatosis’, Quarterly Journal of Medicine, vol. 23,1930, p. 151.
Wiedemann, H. R., Burgio, G. R., Aldenhoff, P., Kunze, J., Kaufmann, H. J., and Schirg, E., ‘The Proteus Syndrome’, European Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 140,1983, pp. 5–12.
Wilson, S. A. Kinnier, Neurology, vol. 2, Arnold, London, 1940.
The story of Joseph Merrick in Treves’s version provided the inspiration for the play by Bernard Pomerance, The Elephant Man, first produced at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in 1977, and later on Broadway and at the National Theatre in London; text published by Faber & Faber, London, 1980. Treves’s story was, as well, the starting point for the script of the film also called The Elephant Man (directed by David Lynch, starring John Hurt) which was released in 1980.
2. Selected list of other works consulted
‘A Palace of Varieties for Leicester’, Nottingham Journal, 3 September 1883.
Altick, Richard, The Shows of London, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.
Cullen, Tom, The Times and Crimes of Jack the Ripper (originally entitled Autumn of Terror), Fontana, London, 1966.
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Reviews of the pantomime, The Babes in the Wood: Illustrated London News, 7 January 1888; Punch, 7 January 1888.
‘Tom Norman’, The Era, 26 October 1901.
Torr, Clara, MS diary in possession of the Torr family.
Treves, Sir Frederick, Highways and Byways in Dorset, Macmillan, London, 1906.
Treves, Sir Frederick, The Other Side of the Lantern, Cassell, London, 1905.
Tyrwhitt-Drake, Sir Garrard, The English Circus and Fairground, Methuen, London, 1946.
Viski, Károly, Hungarian Peasant Customs, 2nd edition, George Vajnu, Budapest, 1937.
Wilson, A. E., Christmas Pantomime, Allen & Unwin, London, 1934.
Index
Agricultural Hall, Islington, 1
Albert, Prince Consort, 1
Alexandra, Princess of Wales (later Queen Alexandra), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; meets Merrick, 1, 2;
and corresponds with, 1, 2
Alexandra Home, London Hospital, opening of, 1, 2
Anatomy of the Intestinal Tract and Peritoneum (Treves), 1
Antill, Emma Wood, see Merrick, Emma Wood
Antwerp, 1, 2
Apple Cart, The (Shaw), 1
Ashe, Mr, 1, 2
Atkins’s menagerie, 1, 2
Austen, Jane, 1, 2, 3
Austin, Alfred, 1
Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick, 1, 2, 3, 4; text of, 1
Babes in the Wood (pantomime), 1
Badby, 1
Banvard, Mademoiselle, 1
Baptist Missionary Society, 1
Barclay, Dr John, 1
Barnes, Rev. William, 1
Barnum, Phineas T., 1, 2
Bartholomew Fair, 1; traditions of freaks at, 1, 2
Baxter, Wynne, 1
‘Bedstead Square’, London Hospital, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Bee-hive Inn, see Living, The
Benfield, Thomas Warburton, 1, 2
Bird, William Goodman, 1
Blanchard, W. L., 1
Bland-Sutton, John (later Sir), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Bostock family, 1
Bowlby, John, 1
Boyd, William, 1
Brain, Russell, 1
Bramley, Harry, 1, 2
British Home for Incurables, 1, 2
British Journal of Dermatology, 1
British Medical Journal, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
British Red Cross Society, 1
Browning, Robert, 1
Brussels, abandonment of Merrick in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Bullock, William, 1
Burdett-Coutts, Baroness, 1
Byfield, 1
Byrne, Charles, 1
Cambridge, 1st duchess of, 1, 2