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In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's "prevailing taste for deformity." This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; "Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's "missing link"; the "Last of the Mysterious Aztecs" and African "Cannibal Kings," who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness--and thus clarified what it meant to be British-at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.

Human body --- Freak shows --- Abnormalities, Human --- Body, Human --- Human beings --- Body image --- Human anatomy --- Human physiology --- Mind and body --- Sideshows --- Abnormalities --- Anomalies, Congenital --- Birth defects --- Congenital abnormalities --- Congenital anomalies --- Defects, Birth --- Deformities --- Developmental abnormalities --- Human abnormalities --- Malformations, Congenital --- Morphology --- Pathology --- Teratogenesis --- Teratology --- Social aspects --- History --- Malformations --- Exhibitions de monstres --- Corps humain --- Histoire --- Aspect social --- 1847. --- anthropology. --- british culture. --- cannibal kings. --- conjoined twins. --- cultural otherness. --- cultural studies. --- deformity. --- disability. --- elephant man. --- european history. --- exploitation. --- freak show performers. --- freak shows. --- great britain. --- human bodies. --- imperial ideology. --- lalloo. --- missing link. --- modern history. --- modern identity. --- modern sensibilities. --- national identity. --- nonfiction. --- psychology. --- scientists. --- social history. --- social issues. --- social purpose. --- social purposes. --- History of civilization --- anno 1800-1899 --- Great Britain