A Burglar Caught by a Skeleton & Other Singular Tales from the Victorian Press (47 page)

She went to London Dock and endeavoured unsuccessfully to obtain a situation as a steward on some vessel going to New Zealand, and then walked to St George’s Barracks, and tried to enlist, thinking that in the circumstances that was the best thing she could do.

It was now proposed that her friends in the City should be communicated with and her passage to New Zealand arranged for. She was discharged on this understanding.

The Evening Telegraph and Star
, Sheffield, March 6, 1889

Another Woman in Male Attire

A prisoner giving the name of John Bradley was sentenced to fourteen days’ imprisonment for vagrancy at Dublin on Saturday. On being directed when in prison to prepare for a bath, the prisoner refused, and when threatened with compulsion the culprit burst into tears, saying she was a woman.

She was subsequently removed to the women’s prison. She is a good-looking brunette, aged 24, and says her mother dressed her in boys’ clothes from childhood, and when her mother died saw no reason to change her attire.

The North-Eastern Daily Gazette
, Middlesbrough, March 18, 1889

ARTS and ENTERTAINMENT

Preface

The story went something like this. Deep in the heart of the woods of Kostroma in Russia, a hunter spied a sudden burst of movement; two monstrous figures moving between the trees.

Returning with back-up, he tracked the beasts to their lair. Like any wild animal, they put up a savage fight when cornered, but the huntsman finally had his prize.

That’s how showman P.T. Barnum told the tale, anyway. And whether they believed him or not, the crowds came all the same, eager to see the spectacle Barnum billed as the ‘crowning mystery of nature’s contradictions’, ‘the incarnate paradox, for which Science stands confounded and blindly wonders’, ‘the most prodigious paragon of all prodigies’, or, for anyone pushed for time, Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy.

Jo-Jo was actually Fedor Jeftichew, who had toured the circuses of Europe and Britain with his father a decade before, where they were first advertised as the product of a repulsive liaison between a peasant and a bear, then later as proof of Darwinism, a hiccup in the evolution of mankind.

In truth, Fedor had simply inherited his vodka-swigging dad’s chronic condition of hypertrichosis, which obscured their features in great mats of hair.

But truth wasn’t really a concern for Barnum, who took Fedor to America in 1884, and worked him … well, like a dog. At the height of his fame he would perform more than twenty shows a day, occasionally growling and barking for the pleasure of the punters.

And there were plenty of them. After the industrial revolution came the recreational one. A series of reforms left people of the late nineteenth century with more time on their hands than the generations before, and more ways to spend it.

Theatres popped up like spring blooms; music halls and working men’s clubs too. Parks opened, sports stadiums were built, art galleries and museums flourished and a golden age of literature yielded riches upon riches. But the Victorians were forever drawn to the grotesque, and the fairground mix of hokum, fraud and out-and-out exploitation.

Jo-Jo returned to Britain in 1898 and 1899, as Barnum’s vast, eclectic ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ toured the nation, dropping jaws wherever it went. A piece in the theatrical paper
The Era
in January 1899 ducked out of trying to describe all the acts and settled on listing the ‘extraordinary oddities’ involved. The moss-haired girl; the lady with a horse’s mane; the tattooed people; the human ostrich; the expansionist; the cat orchestra; the Yankee whittler; the Albino dislocationist; Little Peter, the dwarf; the Orissa Twins; the wild men of Borneo; the bearded woman; the card-playing pig; the human pin-cushion; the armless wonder; the legless wonder; the hard-headed wonder; the double wonder; the elastic man; and finally the ‘What Is It?’

And What Was It? A bloke from New Jersey, dressed up in a fur suit. ‘We’ve got something for everyone’, Barnum used to say. Particularly the gullible.

‘The Dog Faced Girl’

How Curiosities are Manufactured

A girl of fourteen, named Watine, who was missing from Roubaix, has been discovered by her parents at the Tourcoing Fair, where she was being exhibited in a booth as a woman with a dog’s face.

The showman had cleverly covered the girl’s face with gum, to which the hair and ears of a dog were attached. By order of the police, these were washed off, and after the parents had rescued their daughter, the Mayor ordered the booth to be shut up.

The Hampshire Advertiser
, Saturday, August 6, 1892

A Chivalrous Cowboy

Austin, Texas, Friday: During a performance given here last night of a sensational border drama, ‘Wild Bill,’ a cowboy in the audience, carried away by excitement, drew his pistol and fired at the villain in the play. The villain was in the act of abducting the heroine, and the cowboy objected.

Unfortunately, his aim was bad for he missed the villain and shot the heroine through the shoulder. There was considerable excitement in the theatre, and the play was stopped. The young lady is seriously, but not dangerously, wounded.

The Shields Daily Gazette and Shipping Telegraph
, October 9, 1897