Erster Teil:
Aus dem Buch “The world’s most fantastic freaks” von Mike Parker
Hamlyn Publishing Group, Erstausgabe 1994 , Neuausgabe 1999
ISBN: 0 600 58611 1
The Elephant Man
“Stand up!” The penny showman barked his command. And from a darkened corner of the room, what had appeared to be a pile of filthy rags began to stir. Slowly, an inhuman-looking shape began to rise in the gloom, discarding the tattered blanket under which it had cowered. A stench of decaying fruit filled the air as the figure laboured to pull itself to the limit of ist bowed height.
Joseph Carey Merrick finally stood quite still. In the dimness of the old shop, once used by a greengrocer, he cast a strange, unnerving shadow; a hideous, nightmarish caricature of a human being, or of something only half-human. He appeared to have the legs and body of a man. But his head, face and one arm were so grotesquely distorted that they seemed to represent the profile of a wild beast with a long, pendulos trunk. Joseph Merrick, the wretched, stooping, sideshow attraction in the hired shop at No. 123 Whitechapel Road, London, was the Elephant Man.
Outside the shop, opposite the famous London Hospital, a garish, painted poster advertised the most famous of all freaks exhibited in sensation-hungry Victorian England. An such was Merrick’s monstrous appeal that his penny showman master was able to charge a handsome tuppence-a-peep at his prize specimen. The Elephant Man was big business.
In 1884 a young an ambitious surgeon from the London Hospital crossed the road one day to investigate beyond the lurid poster which had caught his eye from an upper window. Frederick – later to become Sir Frederick – Treves, wrote of the freakshow billboard:
‚This very crude production depicted a frightful creature that could only have been possible in a nightmare. It was the figure of a man with the characteristics of an elephant. The transfiguration was not far advanced. There was still more of the man than of the beast. This fact – that it was still human – was the most repellent attribute of the creature. There was nothing of the grotesqueness of the freak, but merely the loathing insinuation of a man being changed into an animal. Some palm trees in the background of the picture suggested a jungle and might have led the imagination to assume that it was in this wild that the perverted object had roamed.’
Inside the shop Treves caught his first sight of the Elephant Man. The pathetic Merrick, than aged 21, was stripped naked to the waist, bare-footed abd wearing only a ragged pair of trousers several sizes too large for him. A hip desease had left him lame and he was only able to stand upright using a stick. A huge, bony growth had enlarged his head to the thickness of a man’s waist, almost hiding one eye, and a second gnarled growth had twisted his mouth into a trunk-like shape. Treves described the face as totally expressionless and wooden, like an ugly native idol. Both legs and one arm were swollen, misshapen and useless, ending in hands and feet no better than paddles, with fat, stunted fingers and toes. In stark contrast, one arm was perfectly formed with smooth skin and a delicate, sensitive hand. A colleague of Treves later said of Merrick: ‚The poor fellow…was deformed in body, face, head and limbs. His skin, thick and pendulous, hung in folds and resembled the hide of an elephant – hence his show name.’
Little is known of the early life of Merrick, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere as a freak-show horror in London’s East End. According to his birth certificate, however, he was born on 5 August 1862, the son of Joseph Rockley Merrick and Mary Jane Merrick, at 50 Lee Street, Leicester. His mother was a cripple, the family home was a slum and, shortly after his birth, Joseph Merrick was abandoned to an orphanage. For as long as he could remember, he had been exhibited as a freak, passing from one kepper to another and from one peepshow to the next. He could speak, but his appalling facial deformities made his words barely intelligible.
The only life he had ever known was in a fairground booth as an object of derision, revulsion or sneering humour; so near to the laughing, cringing crowds to whom he was forced to display his body, yet so far removed from a normal existence. It is known that Merrick could read, but the only books he was ever given were a bible and cheap romantic novels. He was childlike, naive about worldly matters. His idea of pleasure was to lock himself away in a shuttered room.
After much persuasion, Treved managed to prise the Elephant Man away from his keeper. Showman Tom Norman agreed to allow the surgeon to examine him. The examination took place – but just 24 hours later police closed the Whitechapel Road show and Merrick and Norman vanished. Merrick fled to the continent and a string of new masters. But in towns all over Europe, exhibitions of the Elephant Man were being banned and censured as being degrading. Eventually, in Brussels, he ceased to be a viable asset. His latest master robbed him of his savings, gave him a railway ticket to London and washed his hands of him. Merrick was allone, unwanted and penniless; a bizarre, cloaked figure who hid his face with a huge cap pulled well down to avoid investigation by suspicous and untrusting strangers.
Treves, in an essay on the life of the Elephant Man, wrote of Merrick’s voyage home: ‚The journey may be imagined. Merrick was in his alarming outdoor garb. He would be harried by an eager mob as he hobbled along the quay. They would run ahead to get a look at him. They would lift the hem of his cloak to peep at his body. He would try to hide in the train or in some dark corner of the boat, but never could be free from that ring of curious eyes or from those whispers of fright and aversion. He had but a few shillings in his pocket and nothing to eat or drink on the way. A panic-dazed dog with a label on his collar would have received some sympathy and possible some kindness. Merrick received none.’
Somehow, amazingly, Merrick managed to make it to London’s Liverpool Street Station, where he was found, terrified, exhausted and huddled in the darkest corner of the waiting room, by a policeman. He was clutching his only remaining posessions – Frederick Treves’ business card. Treves was called for, and was able to usher the creature he immediately recognized through a gawping crowd into a cab to the London Hospital. There he hoped to provide a permanent refuge for Merrick, despite a hospital rule against taking chronical or incurable cases. Treves succeeded in persuading the hospital’s management commitee to make an exception, and so began the second life of the Elephant Man.
In a letter to the TIMES newspaper, the hospital management committe immediately launched a public appeal for funds. Within a week, enough money had been raised to keep Merrick there fort he rest of his life. A self-contained suite of two isolation rooms was allocated for him. Treves was now able to begin the long and arduos task of trying to rehabilitate him. Slowly, he learned to understand Merrick’s speech. And then he made a discovery which was to add a new, tragic twist. In most cases of such extreme physical derformity, Treves believed, there was an accompanying lack of intelligence and understanding which helped lessen the subject’s awareness of his appearance. In Merrick’s case, he had been blessed – or perhaps cursed – with a sensitive, intelligent mind, fully aware of his appearance and desperate for affection.
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