…as it is understood that both Mr Dudley and Mr Stephens, now out on bail, are still lying under the charge of having murdered one of the crew of the Mignonette, I am to request you to move Sir William Vernon Harcourt and cause them to be informed whether he sees any objection to the renewal of the certificates as requested.
Home Office officials feared that if the men had their certificates, it would give them an incentive to breach their bail and the home secretary decided the matter: ‘I think their certificates might not be renewed at least until the court has decided whether the men are guilty of murder.’
Brooks had none of the financial problems of his former shipmates. Although required as a witness at the assizes, he was free to return to sea in the interim, or resume work as a rigger at Fay’s Yard, but he preferred the offer of more remunerative employment in a travelling show. Several showmen had also approached Tom, offering him money to exhibit himself, but he turned them all down flat. Brooks had no such scruples. Billed as ‘The Cannibal of the High Seas’, he appeared all over the West Country and the south coast in a sideshow to a travelling fair amongst the bearded ladies and manacled ‘Wild Men’.
Unshaven and dressed in suitably distressed rags, Brooks posed in front of a crudely painted backdrop of the Mignonette’s dinghy adrift on the ocean. For the further edification of the paying customers, he devoured scraps of raw meat in a gruesome simulacrum of the ordeal he had endured. In addition to his wages and his keep, he was allowed half the proceeds from the souvenir postcards of himself that he sold.
The Mignonette’s dinghy also became an attraction in its own right. After being exhibited in Falmouth it was later sold to an Exmouth showman for fifty pounds. Although it was the genuine article, the dinghy was enhanced before being put on show. The existing marks on the cross-members and brass crutches for the oars were deepened to give them more prominence and bloodstains were added to heighten the audience’s vicarious thrill.
There was no shortage of paying customers wanting to see Brooks or the dinghy. The Victorians had a voracious appetite for the curious, ghoulish or criminal. Even after public hangings were outlawed, the Dead Houses, in which unidentified bodies scavenged from the rivers or harbours were displayed until claimed or buried in paupers’ graves, were always thronged with crowds eager for the macabre spectacle. Parties of members of polite Victorian society also amused themselves by touring the Bedlams — the hospitals for the insane — poking fun at the unfortunate occupants.
Penny ballads about natural and man-made disasters were hastily penned and hawked around the streets, and penny dreadful newspapers, such as the Illustrated Police News, achieved huge circulations on an uninterrupted diet of gruesome pictures and ghoulish copy celebrating crimes and disasters. The Mignonette case provided their illustrators with plentiful source material.
The proprietors of travelling freak shows were merely cashing in on this insatiable public appetite. They had evolved out of the annual country goose, horse and hiring fairs, held on holy days and holidays. Curiosities were often exhibited among the hucksters, whores, quack-medicine salesmen, travelling toothpullers, and the recruiters for King and country, pressing the King’s shilling on drunken farm boys.
There were animal curiosities — exotic species like lions, elephants or ‘cameleopards’ — giraffes — but the greatest public appetite was for human oddities. ‘Monsters’ with a physical deformity, such as the Elephant Man, dwarfs, albino Negroes, bearded ladies and children, giants and giantesses, Siamese twins, people with skin disorders, hermaphrodites and Wild Men were among the most popular exhibits.
Freaks became so central to the financial well-being of these travelling fairs that attractions were often subsidized by the rest of the showmen. In winter, when virtually no fairs — other than ice fairs — were held, freaks were exhibited in a rented room of a shop or tavern.
Travelling shows continued to tour the country and often attached themselves uninvited to attractions such as the Great Exhibition of 1851, but the urbanization of the population as a result of the Industrial Revolution provided a ready audience for larger, more permanent attractions — dime museums in the US and the English penny museums and curiosity shops characterized by Dickens.
At a time when theatres were regarded as little more than brothels with entertainment, the penny museums found a way to evade local bylaws that prohibited lewd or indecent displays by pretending to an educational status that few deserved. Some had a genuinely educative role, but in most cases, like John Burton’s Falmouth shop, they were simply collections of animate or inanimate curiosities, described in pseudo-scientific terms such as ‘The connecting link between man and brute creation’.
Fashionable fringe theories, like ‘maternal impression’, were also used to justify the display of abnormalities: a ‘lion-faced’ boy’s father had been mauled to death in front of his mother, for example, and a pair of Siamese twins had been caused by the mother seeing a pair of post-coital dogs unable to separate.
The largest museums, like Madame Tussaud’s in London or P. T. Barnum’s in New York, became true mass entertainments. Barnum’s vast American Museum was the biggest public attraction in New York, so large that families would bring packed lunches and spend all day there.
Even the middle and upper classes were not immune to the appeal of the new museums. The most famous attractions were visited by society figures and private showings were often arranged. Queen Victoria met Tom Thumb and his bride on three separate occasions and P. T. Barnum commissioned a miniature version of her own state coach from the royal coachbuilders. The Thumbs travelled in it to their Barnum-orchestrated wedding in 1863 and a report of the nuptials occupied a full page of the New York Times. The Queen also received the ‘tallest couple alive’ at Buckingham Palace on the eve of their wedding in 1871 and gave the bride-to-be a diamond ring and a wedding dress.
To feed the public frenzy for ever newer and stranger curiosities, freak hunters roamed the country and the furthest reaches of the Empire. Some attractions were recruited as adults, others — children and even babies — were bought from their parents. Annie Jones, ‘the most marvellous specimen of hirsute development since the days of Esau, 3,700 years ago’, was first exhibited as ‘The infant Esau’ at just twelve months old.
Attractions were advertised on huge painted banners, posters and handbills, and by barkers outside the entrance, using unequalled heights of hyperbole.
The greatest, most astounding aggregation of marvels and monstrosities… looted from the ends of the earth, from the wilds of darkest Africa, the miasmic jungles of Brazil, the mystic headwaters of the Yan-tse Kiang, the cannibal isle of the Antipodes, the frosty slopes of the Himalayas, and the barren steppes of the Caucasus… a refined exhibition for cultured ladies and gentlemen… The most prodigious paragon of all prodigies in over fifty years. The crowning mystery of Nature’s contradictions, the incarnate Paradox before which Science stands confounded and blindly wonders.
A flimsily clad snake-charmer would often act as a lure, invariably on the promise that ‘more would be revealed inside’. Sometimes the peculiarities of the attractions were genuine, more often they were exaggerated or completely bogus.
Every aspect of their lives was also fictionalized. Kings, queens, princes and princesses abounded, and wives and children of normal appearance were invented to emphasize the abnormality of the attraction. ‘Darkest Africa’ and ‘The Cannibal Islands’ were frequently cited origins, but some freaks were given an even more ludicrous provenance. Two albino brothers were presented at one freak show as ‘Ambassadors from the Planet Mars’.