The Wonders: Age of The Freak Show
My special guest tonight is author John Woolf who's here to discuss the fascinating history behind people who dawned their disabilities to the world for entertainment. Get his book The Wonder: The Extraordinary Performers Who Transformed the Victorian Age on Amazon.
A radical new history that rediscovers the remarkable freak performers whose talents and charisma helped define an era.
On March 23, 1844, General Tom Thumb, just 25 inches tall, entered the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace and bowed low to Queen Victoria. On both sides of the Atlantic, this meeting marked a tipping point in the nineteenth century, and the age of the freak was born.
Bewitching all levels of society, it was a world of curiosities and astonishing spectacle—of dwarfs, giants, bearded ladies, Siamese twins, and swaggering showmen. But the real stories—human dramas that so often eclipsed the fantasy presented on the stage—of the performing men, women and children, have been forgotten or marginalized in the histories of the very people who exploited them.
In this richly evocative account, John Woolf uses a wealth of recently discovered material to bring to life the sometimes tragic, sometimes triumphant, always extraordinary stories of people who used their (dis)abilities and difference to become some of the first international celebrities.
Through their lives we discover afresh some of the great transformations of the age: the birth of show business, of celebrity, of advertising, and of “alternative facts” while also exploring the tensions between the power of fame, the impact of exploitation, and our fascination with “otherness.”
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Start your free seven-day trial and unlock this episode plus hundreds more all ad-free when you become a Mysterian on Patreon. I know many of them are gone now, but were you able to track them down? I mean, were you...
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Is, is that something you try to focus on at all? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I tried to do my best to, uh, uh, kind of, you know, trace geneolo- genealogies and, and, and reach out to people.
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And, um, there was a, a wonderful guy called Dale Swann, uh, in America who was the gr- he was a distant descendant of, um, a so-called giantess, Anna Bates, um, who was born in America- A giant, you mean a, a giant female, is that what you mean?
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Giant, yeah, giant female. Gotcha. Very tall, uh, very tall woman who married another so-called giant, uh, in the 19th century.
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And I managed to track, um- Unlock this episode right now by clicking on the link for your free seven-day trial in the show notes or by visiting mysteriousradio.com.
