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Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. xiii + 273, £27.95/$39.95, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-520-25768-9.

Historiographically speaking, the study of freak shows morphs from that of monsters (teratology) to the identity politics of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and disability of the late twentieth century. The trope – with freaks as ‘key to the production of the categories of “the self” and “the other”’ (p. 17) – is by now fairly worn, but Nadja Durbach makes a good show of it in five engaging and illustrated chapters focused on, in turn, ‘the Elephant Man’, ‘the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy’, ‘the Hairy Belle’, the would-be ‘primitive’ Aztecs and ‘Earthmen’, and finally, ‘Cannibal King’ (for the further locating of the freak show within the larger history of Victorian and Edwardian entertainment and commercialised leisure, as well as British labour, social and economic history). Durbach has nothing to say on the etymology of ‘freaks’, but she makes it clear how in nineteenth-century British culture they became a potent source for the making up and corseting of what it was to be ‘human’ – be it in terms of body shape and size, colour, sexuality, and distinctiveness from those further down the chain of animal forms. Hence, freaks also served powerfully for the emerging-as-dominant evolutionary discourses of the second half of the century – of humans, races, and civilisations. Middle-class scrapbooks were lovingly filled with their photographs, suggesting how the nomativities were recreated and consolidated in domestic settings.