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The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in
19th -Century Fiction, by Lillian Craton; pp. xii + 244. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press,
2009, $109.99, £65.99.

Lillian Craton’s The Victorian Freak Show makes an important contribution to the growing
study of physical difference in the nineteenth century, in part because it fleshes out aspects
of difference to which we have been less attentive: those not typically considered medical
or congenital disabilities, such as body size. One should not expect, therefore, a book that
focuses solely on the types of physical difference by which freak performers earned their
living; indeed, the subtitle more accurately describes the book’s content. The most signifi-
cant innovation of the project is the way in which Craton uncovers the often positively
figured valence of such differences as they are depicted in literary texts. She argues that
such representations apply pressure to the expectations for gender performance, crafting
more flexible norms, and in this way she broadens the scope of our analysis.
Craton opens the book with a rich discussion of freak shows and bodily spec-
tacle. In a Victorian social climate that laid the groundwork for eugenics and theories
of human perfectibility, the representation of the nonnormative body was deeply
significant. She also argues for the importance of fiction in offering ideals that both
participate in and resist such a project. “The inclusion of grotesque bodies,” she
suggests, “expands and complicates the novels’ implications for an increasingly
proscriptive culture of physical normativity” (25). Craton divides the book into four
broad themes: littleness, fatness, female masculinity, and bodily mutability.
With regard to size, she focuses on Charles Dickens’s novels. Central, of course,
are characters like Little Nell and Little Dorrit, but she also includes Quilp, Miss Mowcher,
Jenny Wren, and Ninetta Crummles, emphasizing Dickens’s use of little women and girls
as idealized human miniatures. Situating her discussion against an analysis of hypopitu-
itary and achondroplastic dwarfs (the former of whom were perceived to be more propor-
tional and aesthetically pleasing), sympathy as a rhetorical strategy, and the exhibition of
littleness by the artist or collector, Craton argues that Dickens uses the affection we have
for attractive, child-like figures to make a case against exploitative viewing. Dickens
remarks on his “own exploitation of bodily difference and the reader’s consumption of
bodily spectacle [in ways that] take us to task for moments of narrow-mindedness in our
response to human variation” (85). Through this, readers might become more reflective
about abuses of those who are different or the impoverished.
In the most compelling section of the book, Craton considers fatness as a
model of nurturance. Situating her argument amid conversations about the patholo-
gizing of fat and the idealization of self-starvation for women (groundwork laid by
critics such as Gail Turley Houston, Anna K. Silver, and Joyce Huff), Craton sees an
additional model: that of “fat mothering” as a valuable supplement to miserly and weak

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parenting (96). Pointing to an array of characters from Clara Peggotty to Mrs. Jarley,
Craton argues that we must broaden our discussion of Victorian fat. As she puts it, “to
discuss fat only through anorexia is akin to discussing a photo only in terms of its nega-
tive. Let us add a consideration of Victorian fat at its best and consider whether the
dynamic of exchange between gender and body norms might not work, every now and
then, in favor of those who defy norms” (111). By locating the strength and resiliency of
fat women in Victorian fiction and their key role in the nurturance and development of
others, Craton makes an important contribution to the discussion of women’s excess
and restraint, but, more subtly, she also challenges us to reconsider how our own
cultural obsessions blind us to important topoi in the period.
In the next section, Craton discusses female masculinity in sensation fiction,
a richer and more intellectual womanhood. She turns to New Woman fiction of the
1890s, critiquing the often totalizing generic distinctions made between these novels
and sensation fiction through the work of writers like Florence Marrayat and Florence
Dixie, among others. Craton argues that female masculinity, as exemplified by the
bearded woman, raises questions about naturalized gender norms, social justice, and
equity. It is a fine argument, and one wonders why, given the depth of her research in
other chapters, this one isn’t integrated more fully with the excellent and wide-ranging
body of scholarship on sensation fiction that has already assembled much of the under-
girding for the arguments she makes about gender.
The last chapter makes a logical extension of the claims offered thus far,
exploring the mutable body, with a focus on the iconic shrinking and growing Alice, to
point to the ways that perspective—both in terms of scale and social location—shifts and
structures meaning. She parallels this discussion with Lewis Carroll’s photographic
experiments in perspective. By following Alice’s transfigurations, the reader can begin to
imagine how the social meaning of difference has been figured by acts of looking and
assessment from a particular social location. In this way, we can understand meaning
itself as situated. Craton turns to the metaphor of the looking glass, suggesting that the
“fictional body is a looking glass” and that this odd body “draws our attention to the play
between internal and external forces in identity and reminds us of the way all bodies
gather their meaning from context and cultural expectation” (210, emphasis original).
Ultimately, the greatest strength of the study is Craton’s ability to do for us
what she argues this fiction may have done for the Victorians: to provide a new perspec-
tive on the odd body and its meaning. Scholars in disability studies and Victorian
studies will find this book useful and compelling, particularly in its discussions of fat
and body size, yet it is readable for undergraduates as well.
Marlene Tromp
Arizona State University

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 4

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Ian Small (i.c.small@bham.ac.uk) is Professor of English Literature at the University of

Birmingham. He is general editor of Oxford University Press’s ongoing, multi-volume
edition of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and, with Josephine M. Guy, author of Oscar
Wilde’s Profession: Writing and the Culture Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century (2000).

Richard L. Stein (rstein@uoregon.edu), Emeritus Professor of English at the Univer-

sity of Oregon, has written widely on Victorian literature and the visual arts, including,
most recently, “Illustrating Bleak House” in Approaches to Teaching Dickens’s Bleak House
(2007), edited by John O. Jordan and Gordon Bigelow, and “National Portraits” in Victo-
rian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace (2007), edited by James Buzard, Joseph
Childers, and Eileen Gillooly. His current project is a study of Victorian visuality.

David Sunderland (sd99@gre.ac.uk) is Reader in Business History at the University

of Greenwich. He is the author of Managing the British Empire (2004), Managing British
Colonial and Post-Colonial Development (2007), Social Capital, Trust and the Industrial Revo-
lution, 1780–1880 (2007), and An Economic History of London, 1800–1914 (2006),
co-authored with Michael Ball.

Jeremy Tambling (jeremy.tambling@manchester.ac.uk) is Professor of Literature at

the University of Manchester, and his most recent work on Charles Dickens is Going
Astray: Dickens and London (2008).

Marlene Tromp (marlene.tromp@asu.edu), Professor of English and Women’s Studies

and Director of the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State
University, is author of Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian
Spiritualism (2006) and The Private Rod: Sexual Violence, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian
England (2000). She has also edited and contributed to Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of
Freakery in the Nineteenth Century (2007) and Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Beyond Sensation (2000).

Martha Vicinus (vicinus@umich.edu) is Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished University

Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Intimate Friends: Women
Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (2004), surveys the different forms of same-sex desire among
women, based on unpublished archival materials, literature, court cases, and autobiogra-
phies. Her current work, “Cosmopolitan Women, 1880–1930,” considers the friendships,
politics, and aesthetics of a group of fin-de-siècle Anglo-American women writers.

Vlasta Vranjes (vranjes@fordham.edu) is Assistant Professor of English at Fordham

University. Her current book project, “English Vows,” examines literary responses to
the role that marriage legislation played in shaping nineteenth-century Englishness.

Sarah Willburn (swillbur@mtholyoke.edu), of Amherst, MA, is the author of Possessed

Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings (2006). She is also the
co-editor, with Tatiana Kontou, of the forthcoming Ashgate Research Companion to
­Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult. Currently, she is working on a book that
will treat encounters between Victorians and magically possessed objects in accounts of
collecting and the auction trade.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.