Nadja Durbach, “On the Emergence of the Freak Show in Britain”
This entry dates the emergence of the freak show as a key form of Victorian leisure to the 1840s. It demonstrates that these exhibitions of physical difference served as spaces for negotiations amongst doctors, scientists, anthropologists, and a mass consumer public about how to distinguish “normal” and “abnormal” bodies and about the cultural meanings attached to these classifications. These shows thus helped to educate the public about their place in the hierarchy of classes, races, civilizations, and nations that was so crucial to the nineteenth-century worldview.
