Wild Men usually appeared bound in chains ‘for the protection of the audience’. Since the only qualification was long hair and dirtiness, they were easily come by and were at the bottom of the freak-show hierarchy, often alcoholics working for no more wages than rotgut alcohol and a roof over their heads.
White Europeans taking on the inward and sometimes outward markings of ‘primitive men’ also became great attractions in their own right. John Rutherford became a freak-show celebrity in 1828 by claiming to have been held prisoner by the New Zealand Maori for six years, forcibly tattooed all over his body and compelled to marry the chief’s thirteen-year-old daughter, with whom he had three children.
The later, and somewhat prosaic, revelation that he was already married with a family in the UK, and had jumped ship in New Zealand in order to live with a Maori woman and had chosen to be tattooed did little to dent his popularity as an exhibit.
Tattooed Europeans soon became another freak-show staple. Tattoos had connotations of sexuality and criminality, which increased the vicarious excitement of seeing them, especially to women. By exhibiting their body art, they were able to show their legs and thighs to paying customers, a display that would otherwise have been banned as lewd and immoral.
Since it was easy to acquire tattoos — there were tattooing parlours in every seaport — competition between rival freaks and freak shows became intense. After the attractions of tattooed men and women began to pale, tattooed children, dwarfs and fat ladies appeared. There was also a tattooed legless man and a tattooed knife-thrower on the freak-show circuit, and Coney Island even had a tattooed cow.
In addition to enhancing and faking the exhibits, freak-show operators were not above other sharp practices such as short-changing, rigging games of chance, advertising non-existent attractions and licensing their crowded stalls and alleys to teams of pickpockets. Gulling the public was so profitable that employees in ticket booths were routinely unpaid and sometimes even had to pay their employer for the privilege of working for him. They earned their living by cheating the public.
Violent scuffles broke out between duped marks and freak-show employees, and local newspapers often ended their account of the fair with a body-count of people robbed or injured.
By the middle of the century most museums and freak shows also incorporated live shows, in which the attractions would perform either in tableaux vivants or full-scale productions, even including song-and-dance routines. Barnum’s American Museum included a chandeliered ‘lecture hall’ — an auditorium for live shows capable of holding three thousand people.
Freaks acquired from their parents as children were groomed for stardom, and a pair of Siamese twins earned great celebrity as the ‘Singing Nightingales’. Some freaks were even managed by a relative, using their misfortune to make a living.
Like Ned Brooks, most attractions were required to produce some performance. Wild Men paced up and down, growled at the audience, gnawed on bones, ate raw meat or bit the heads off live chickens or rats, but the crowds would also be entertained by fire-eaters, sword-swallowers and snake-handlers — invariably scantily clad women.
In addition to the admission charge, booklets and photographs were available, with each freak selling their own pictures and keeping half the proceeds. Accumulating such souvenir photographs and cartes de visite was a Victorian obsession. As well as the rigidly posed formal family portraits, pictures of music-hall celebrities, military figures, like General Gordon and Sir Garnet Wolseley, and freak-show oddities were collected, catalogued and pasted into elaborate albums.
The freaks were posed in front of painted backdrops — jungles, stormy oceans, burning deserts — and the curiosity value of the attraction was enhanced either by the use of suitable props or by tampering with the negative. Midgets were seated in oversize chairs, the clothes of giants or fat ladies would be padded, and extra hair would be added to the pictures of bearded ladies or children.
The phenomenal success of the museums of curiosities contributed to their downfall. Other attractions — street fairs, circuses, carnivals and amusement parks — all began using freak stalls alongside the big top or the ferris wheel as sideshows to the main event.
The increasing competition from music halls and the emerging cinemas signalled the terminal decline of the live freak show, but as late as the 1930s a few travelling shows were still operating in more remote rural areas. Inanimate freaks and curiosities continue to be displayed to this day.
Live freak shows struck some as disgusting and exploitative, but though there were undoubtedly cruel and corrupt operators, most freaks professed themselves happy with their lot, and glad to be able to earn the only living open to them. In most cases they shared accommodation with the ‘normal’ show staff, winning an acceptance and equality of treatment that would not have been available to them in the rest of Victorian society.
Cannibals had been standard freak-show fare for half a century before the Mignonette’s sinking, but the attractions had almost always been exotic, primitive peoples. Mrs Fraser, who survived the sinking of the Stirling Castle off the Queensland coast, was an exception, an exhibit in a London freak show in 1837 whose tales of life amongst ‘the cannibal savages’ of Australia were recounted in a popular broadsheet.
In the eighteenth century, South Sea islanders were regarded as ‘noble savages’ of Rousseau’s description, and the experience of early voyagers like Captain Cook made the islands appear earthly paradises. Cook had tried to bring back a Tahitian from his first voyage, but he died during the voyage home. His second produced a live, tattooed Polynesian, Mai, who was put on display when Cook returned to England.
By the early nineteenth century, tales — sometimes true, but often lurid penny-dreadful accounts of the savagery and cannibalism of primitive peoples — had led to a sea change in public attitudes. The noble savage was now widely regarded as a sub-human species of brute creation. Hottentots were described as ‘The most primitive people on earth’, and South African bushmen as ‘earthmen [who] burrow in the ground’.
The Illustrated London News cautioned that ‘By burrowing, the reader must not understand that they dig and hide under the surface like rabbits, but that they scratch hollows in the ground to shield them in a measure from the wind.’
Showmen showed no such inhibitions, referring to ‘A colony that resembles a gigantic warren of rabbits. They eat poisonous as well as innoxious serpents… separate the head from the body with a knife or for want of that, bite it off.’
Black Africans and South Sea islanders, especially Fijians, were routinely described as ‘cannibals’. Not all were what they seemed. On one occasion a Zulu cannibal was recognized by two women visitors: ‘He ain’t no Zulu, that’s Bill Jackson. He worked over there at Camden, in the dock.’
Of P. T. Barnum’s ‘Four Fijian cannibals’ exhibited in 1872, one was from Virginia and two more had been living in California for some years. None of that prevented Barnum from issuing a press release when one of them died of natural causes, claiming the other three had been interrupted while making a meal of him.
Even when showmen finally conceded that there were no longer any cannibals in Fiji, they still continued to present bogus attractions as ‘the sons and daughters of cannibals’.