Freak Show

For people in rural areas the circus’s arrival in town and the county fair were the only amusement they had.

The freak show was the main attraction of most dime museums of the period 1870–1900, and the human oddity was the king of museum entertainment (Hartt 1909, 108; McNamara 1974; Wilmeth 1982).

Starting in the 1870s dime museums proliferated, reaching their peak in the 1880s and 1890s. They operated from coast to coast, and any decent-sized city had one.

Those that were solvent had made the transition from science and education to entertainment and amusement while still maintaining the trappings of the museum’s respectability.

The photo album was the television of Victorian homes: what Victorians viewed, what they collected, reflected their interests and tastes.

The freak show thus joined the burgeoning popular amusement industry, and the organizations that made up that industry, housing as they did an occupation with a special approach to the world, developed a particular way of life.

“Freak” is a way of thinking, of presenting, a set of practices, an institution—not a characteristic of an individual.

This is not to say that many freaks did not have profound physical, mental, and behavioral differences, for as we will see, many did; but, with very few exceptions, every person exhibited was misrepresented to the public. The gaff was only the extreme of this misrepresentation.

born freaks, made freaks, and novelty acts

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the blurred distinction between species and freaks of nature became moot; all human exhibits, including tribal people of normal stature and body configuration, as well as people who performed unusual feats such as swallowing swords, fell under the generic term freak.