M.J. Rose

There is another account of Joseph Merrick’s life that suggests he may have been better off if he had stayed in the freakshow, living out his days as one of the most respected showmen of his day. The memoirs of Tom Norman, Merrick’s London manager are most certainly biased, but his version presents a compelling challenge to the more widely-known claim that Merrick was better off in the hospital.

Was the exploitation of Merrick by the well-heeled society folks of his day just another type of freakshow? Possibly one in which Merrick was debased even more than he was in his former life as a respected sideshow entertainer? It’s an interesting question, and one that we here at the Museum find incredibly fascinating. I think that many of us probably share a deep sympathy for Joseph Merrick — a man with what seemed like an artist’s sensitivity and a beautiful heart and mind.

Image of Joseph Merrick published in the British Medical Journal in 1886.

Re-examining ‘the Elephant Man’ (The Public Domain Review)

Nadja Durbach questions the extent to which Joseph Merrick, known as the Elephant Man, was exploited during his time in a Victorian ‘freakshow’, and asks if it wasn’t perhaps the medical establishment, often seen as his saviour, who really took advantage of Merrick and his condition.

“The scenes are among the most heartless in cinema history: a drunken, abusive showman exhibiting the severely deformed Joseph Merrick to horrified punters. David Lynch’s The Elephant Man begins with its lead character being treated little better than an animal in a cage. But it soon finds a clean-cut hero in the ambitious young surgeon Frederick Treves, who rescues the hapless Merrick from his keeper and gives him permanent shelter at the London Hospital. Supported by charitable donations, the victim recovers his humanity: he learns to speak again (in a decidedly middle-class accent), to entertain society guests and to dress and behave like a well-heeled young dandy. Merrick, no more the degraded show freak, reveals his inner goodness and spirituality and dies happy.

Lynch’s movie is based largely on Treves’ sentimental chronicle. But that narrative is merely one version of events – and one that in the end tells us more about middle-class morality than it does about Merrick. There is another story that casts a different light on what happened. The memoirs of Tom Norman, Merrick’s London manager, are surely as biased as Treves’. But as one of the most respected showmen of his day, Norman’s account challenges head on Treves’ claim that Merrick was ultimately better off in the hospital than at the freakshow…”

See the rest here.

We don’t know about you, but we’re thinking that any book that claims to “to paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds,” and that deals specifically with Victorian occultism and the mysterious phenomenon of synesthesia, is worth a look-see…

…and so, behold –

Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia

“Grounded in the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Thought-Forms (1901) is an odd and intriguing work. Benjamin Breen explores these “synesthetic” abstractions and asks to what extent they, and the Victorian mysticism of which they were born, influenced the Modernist movement that flourished in the following decades.

Thought Forms The music of Mendelssohn.“The music of Mendelssohn” – Source.

“I have always considered myself a voice of what I believe to be a greater renaissance — the revolt of the soul against the intellect — now beginning in the world,” wrote William Butler Yeats to his mentor, the Irish nationalist John O’Leary, in 1892. Yeats believed that magic was central not only to his art, but to a dawning epoch when spirituality and technology would march together toward an uncertain future.

Thought-Forms, a strange, beguiling, frequently pretentious, utterly original book first published in 1901, emerged from this ferment of late-Victorian mysticism. It was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, erstwhile members of the London Theosophical Society alongside Yeats, and it features a stunning sequence of images that illustrate the book’s central argument: emotions, sounds, ideas and events manifest as visual auras.

The book’s grand ambitions are evident from the first page. “To paint in earth’s dull colours the forms clothed in the living light of other worlds,” Besant laments, “is a hard and thankless task.” She insists that the images in the book “are not imaginary forms, prepared as some dreamer thinks that they ought to appear.” Rather, “they are representations of forms actually observed as thrown off by ordinary men and women.”

– See the rest, here, courtesy of one of our favorite sites: The Public Domain Review.

On daydreaming, New York City, writing, art, the Alice in Wonderland quality of everyday life, and the beauty of walking…

Enjoy this meditation on life with delightful and wise artist Maira Kalman (thank you Brain Pickings) —

“We always are in this in-between world of “Is this a dream? Is this really happening? Are we in costume? Who are we?”