If reading is a serious part of your life, chances are good that you are familiar with abebooks.com., which aggregates on a single website the holdings of most of the second-hand book dealers in the Anglophone world. I would not venture to estimate the size of the stock thus organized, but it surely must be in the millions. I am trying not to acquire any more books, or at least to dispose of enough to ensure that the ones I require do not increase the total book space, already too large, in the house. But for many books I want, or think I want, the prices are so low that from the financial-exertional point of view, it is more rational to order a book than go through the effort of making a special library trip to track it down. And when I am writing something scholarly, or even contemplating doing that, I often need, or think I need, to gather a mini-collection of books relevant to the project.
I have bought some hundreds of books in this fashion over the years, most of them later recycled as donations to the annual Bryn Mawr Book Sale. Abebooks is quite efficient, but every now and then there is a goof-up in the system or an ordered book is a no-show. This past week I had a new experience. We are soon to leave for France where in my leisure I want to think about a little project on religious themes in nineteenth-century European literature. So I ordered a few light-weight books I shall want to have with me. The typical price for such books is eight dollars, including shipping. As they have been arriving, I have simply been opening them, setting them aside, and immediately discarding the sometimes bulky packing materials. This past week I got three books. I thought they all related to the project just mentioned; but I only looked at them, really, after a few days. By then the packing materials had been recycled. I now discover that one of the three recently arrived books is one I never heard of and certainly never ordered. It must have been sent to me by mistake, but with the packaging discarded, I now have no way of knowing from which of thousands of bookshops, as no transaction concerning it features in the usually highly accurate Abebook records. It’s like a gift from a Secret Santa.
Here is a freak occurrence in a double sense. Because the book (whose compiler is somebody named Marc Hartman) is entitled American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History’s Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers. What it is really about is freak-shows and the famous human freaks featured in them. And before any reader freaks out over my use of the word freak, silently censured by the virtuous but philologically naïve along with other useful words like retarded and handicapped, the politically correct euphemisms of an earlier age, I might point out that the meaning that shocks them is historically novel. The more traditional meanings of the word are joke, jape, or stunt and a human being of unusual and imposing appearance. Or it can mean anything very strange, unexpected, or uncommon, such as a “freak accident”. Onions, in the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, thinks the origins of freak are probably “dialectical”. (I presume it is probably northern, as I seem to remember that in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the terrifying green giant is a freke. But the poet uses the word frequently, often meaning simply “a guy”.)
The book is mainly an anthology of the better-known freak-shows organized by P. T. Barnum (1810-1891), often associated with his museum on lower Broadway in New York City. Of course, Barnum was merely the most famous, successful, and influential of the entertainment professionals who made this peculiar theatrical performance ubiquitous for nearly a century in this country. It is true that Barnum himself did not use the term “freak-show”, though everybody else, including his business successors did. He called his offerings “sideshows” or “congresses of living wonders.” He sought out and exploited people with unusual physical features and medical anomalies: Siamese twins, giants, midgets, bearded ladies, that sort of thing. Remarkably, he developed them not merely as oddities to be gawked at, but as actual performers, some of whom were compelling as speakers and actors. He always spoke of them as one would of professional actors of high quality. Perhaps on account of this, the morale among his odd-ball troupers was generally high, and many were well remunerated. Many were grateful that Barnum turned their physical abnormalities, which so limited their possibilities for normal social life, into remunerated professions. But of course Barnum was no stranger to fraud, to which he probably relapsed as need dictated. His first prominent show featured the “Fejee Mermaid,” which according to the author “was nothing more than a monkey’s torso with a fish tail attached”. There were undoubtedly some frauds among his later specimens as well; but he actually does seem to have tracked down and put under contract the tallest, the shortest, the fattest, the thinnest, and in general the weirdest-looking human beings alive. Barnum was a huckster, and it is not surprising that he had considerable success in politics. He was also principled, to a point. He was, for example, a fierce and outspoken abolitionist. However, that did not keep him from beginning his career essentially by buying an old black woman, Joice Heth, whom for years he put on display as the ancient nursemaid of the infant George Washington and, at 161, the oldest living person in the world. (She died in 1836, probably in her eighties).
Autres pays, autres moeurs: other lands, other customs. Though our politicians often still speak as though we are in unbroken contact with the early Republic, it was in many ways a strange and foreign land. Barnum is supposed to have said “There is a sucker born every minute.” That appears to be one of the things he perhaps should have said, though probably didn’t. For our young country was full of hayseeds and rubes who lapped up the pseudo-exoticism of Persian dwarves and quadrupedal Malay princesses and other museum attractions on offer. Americans were not yet three generations away from the London mobs which relished public executions at Tyburn, toured mental asylyms for sport, and who enjoyed dog fights and bear-baiting. It is not surprising, I suppose, that they could find unabashed amusement in the mere fact of grotesque human deformity. I would not ordinarily seek out an encyclopedia of freak shows but having had one freakishly thrust upon me, I have to say I learned a lot about the texture of mid-nineteenth-century American life. Barnum’s spirit lived on well into the twentieth century, indeed into my own lifetime, with the Believe It or Not! books, radio broadcasts, and newspaper features by Robert Ripley. According to its own estimation, the “Believe It or Not Museum,” a “museum of living wonders and curious oddities,” is to this very day the biggest attraction in Amsterdam! Bigger than the Rijksmuseum?
