Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Dark History of Bearded Ladies & the Victorian Freak Show

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

What would it have really been like to visit a Victorian freak show? Were "freak performers" exploited, or empowered in a world that would likely have otherwise rejected them? And has the Victorian freak show ever really gone away?Joining Kate today is John Woolf, author of The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age, to take us back to this world and explore its dark side.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy, the producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Voting is open for the Listener's Choice Award at the British Podcast Awards, so if you enjoy what we're doing, we'd love it if you took a quick follow this link and click on Betwixt the Sheets: https://www.britishpodcastawards.com/votingEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, it's me, K Lister, back once again for another episode of Betwixter Sheets. But before we can get going, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now you can't get mad at us if you listen and you get offended, because, ha-ha, fair do's, we did tell you.

Come and take a seat with me, betwixtas. We are here in Victorian London for a unique evening of... I'm not sure if we can call it entertainment. Exploitation, perhaps? There's a rather grand sense of occasion, that's for sure. As the crowd settles in for what is known at the time as a side show or a freak show. We are promised an array of performance, from song and dance to Q&A sessions, and to put it bluntly, some beard stroking.

Performing this evening is Julia Pastrana, a fantastic showwoman by all accounts, who hails from Mexico and just so happens to have an abundance of body hair. What really went down at these performances? Well, you will have to wait and see with the rest of us. And perhaps more importantly, what became of Julia and other people like her? Hang on, we're about to find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, many, of course.

You're supposed to rise when an adult... speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. There's a strong argument that the Victorian side show never really went away. It just mutated into reality TV and trashy magazine culture. But the Victorians really ran with that format, and as we'll find out, to really quite shocking ends.

What is the history of these sideshows before the Victorian period? Did any of the performers, especially the bearded ladies, have any autonomy as part of this? Or was it just straight up exploitation? And what influence did Charles Darwin have on this craze? Joining me today is John Wolfe, author of The Wonders, lifting the curtain on the freak show, circus and Victorian age to help me find out. And if you'd like more insights into Victorian pastimes, you should definitely scroll back to our episode on the drunk Victorians

to find out about their quite incredible drinking habits. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only John Wolfe. How are you doing? Very well, thank you. It's great to be here. It's great to have you here. And I'm so excited to talk about this subject. I was asked to write a little bit of a blurb about the history of bearded ladies for some film documentary thing that's coming out. And I was just, you know, I was like, how have we never spoken about this before on Betwix?

We need to get an expert on. And you have written about Victorian, what do we call it, we say side shows or freak shows or? Freak shows, yeah, one of my many obsessions. And I was like, we have to get, we have to get John on for this to talk about bearded ladies. So how did you come to want to study the history? We'll say freak show because that's what the Victorian said. What made you want to study this? Do you remember the moment when you were like,

I need to write a book about this? I do. I mean, to be honest, I blame my parents. I was shown the film, David Lynch's film, The Elephant Man, when I was about nine years old. Yes. Incredible film. And I remember at the time, I was both terrified,

but also incredibly moved. You know, there's this sort of grotesque figure. emerging from the shadows of Victorian London, who is shunned by society and is yet a human being. And I remember from a young age, that sort of paradox of repulsion and attraction was sort of built in. Yeah, I think at undergraduate level, I looked at the history of psychiatry.

And then for my PhD, it was like, well, let's look at physical difference. And that was that. It's one of the many things that, like, you look back at our history and you kind of go, I can't believe that that lasted as long as it did and no one actually pointed out, hang on, putting people with disabilities in a sideshow

and charging people money to see them might not be the wind that we all think that it is. But how long was this going on for? How long is the history of sideshows? I mean, it's almost as long as history itself. The kind of Victorian freak show, side show phenomenon that we might have embedded in our minds really kind of dates back to the ancient travelling

fares, medieval travelling fairs where goods and wares would be sold across the country. And at these fairs, you'd have acts, people from across the globe displaying themselves based on their perceived ethnic difference or physical difference. So you'd have people of short stature. You'd have so-called cannibals from the darkest corners of Africa. And that was sort of one of the beginnings, if you like, of the Victorian friends. freak show. But then you also had a rather sort of paradoxical space in which the display of bodies deemed different really started burgeoning. And that was the royal courts of early modern Europe,

kings and queens, including our own, used to have dwarves, giants, siamese, twins, within the royal palace. So these two sort of quite contradictory places, because the travelling Fares were seen as lowly licentious, transitory spaces in which all social classes mixed, but predominantly the lower classes, plus these royal courts of Europe. And from those two quite dichotomous spaces emerged the Victorian Freak Show. And then you get the doctors who seem to turn up and go, no, this is terribly cruel, we won't do this, and then they would take these people and go, we will put them on medical display, which was basically the same thing but in a white coat.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, Joseph Merrick, the elephant man is a prime example where he was displayed across England and then Europe as a freak and then was ultimately rescued in inverted commas and placed at the London Hospital and under the care of the famous surgeon Frederick Treves. And when Joseph Merrick died, his former freak show manager, a guy called Tom Norman, much maligned,

unfairly so in David Lynch's film. He wrote this really interesting article, this was in the 1920s, where he said that, you know, in the London hospital, Joseph Merrick, he was photographed, he was displayed to medical professionals. He was treated like a medical freak.

He was still on display, and he had no agency. Whereas at least in the freak show, Joseph Merrick earned his own income. It was his choice to enter the freak show. He had an, element of economic agency. Now, of course, he was a showman himself, so one can question where that source or that argument comes from. Nonetheless, it's a really interesting kind of ethical

point, I think, about, well, you know, who really exploited these freaks? Was it really worse than being on display or a medical establishment? And frankly, the medical establishment bought into the freak show as well, especially in the middle to late 19th century. It was the medical establishment that would get private views at the freak shows. Yeah, and would endorse the shows. So whether it was Chang'aneng the Siamese twins or Julia Pastrana, the bearded lady, they actually quoted testimonials from the medical fraternity saying, not only is this a legitimate exhibition, a legitimate physiological difference, but this person is also

rather wonderful. And then showmen would use that to imbue their shows with respectability. Let's talk about bearded ladies. I've just realized I could talk to you about John Merrick for ages and that I'm not supposed to be doing that. Let's talk about bearded ladies because the bearded lady is like a staple of the Victorian freaksha, or at least to me it seems like.

If you think of who you'd expect to see that, the fat lady, she would do another episode on her, the bearded lady and lots of people with kind of contortionists and things like that. But what is a bearded lady? Let's start with that. Like the actual medical... I mean, was it just ladies putting on false beards sometimes?

Well, sometimes, yeah. I mean, one of the sort of raise-on-detches of the freak show was deception. Deception was the name of the game. So sometimes it was women sporting fake beards. But most of the time, in my research, anyway, these were legitimate beards on women. And it can be caused by genetic abnormality. personalities, differences. Polycystic ovarian syndrome. Exactly. So there's all sorts of medical reasons

as to why women at the time would have facial hair or indeed hair all over their body. At the time, the world of medicine wasn't as advanced as it is today, so they didn't quite understand where it came from. So you had all sorts of theories around maternal impressions and some sort of racist theories as well. And frankly, the world of medicine not being able to fully understand added to the wonder and mystique of the bearded lady. Yeah, so it can be genetic conditions, ovarian, or haursuitism as well. Completely normal and nothing freaky about it. But there is something about that juxtaposition of a beard, which is signifying mailness on a woman, that that was enough. to get an audience, to get people to pay for it, there's emerging there, a kind of a blurring

of different boundaries. What do you think is the appeal? Oh, look, there's a beard on a lady. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, bearing in mind the 19th century, this was a period of categorisation and a desire to understand and taxonomize phenomena. And gender ideology was very clear that men had certain roles and women had other roles. And so the distinction between masculinity and femininity was entrenched at this time. And the bearded ladies appeal, well, there's different types of bearded ladies. They were displayed in different ways. And I suppose we could come on to that.

But essentially, the beard was the marker of masculinity. And yet many bearded ladies would portray signifiers of femininity. so they would wear elegant dresses, they'd speak becomingly, they'd epitomise notions of Victorian womanhood, yet they would have the physical markers of masculinity, i.e. a beard. And it was that destabilising of the binary that was so entrenched at the time

between masculinity and femininity that made the bearded lady such an appealing performer. If you were going to go to one of these freak shows, I'm curious as to how would this be set up? Like if you were going to go, if someone said, John, there's a bearded lady on show, let's go and look. Like, would she be sat in a tent? Would it be a room? Would she do a performance?

Like, what would be, or would you just literally pay the money and go, oh, yeah, there she is? No, so, I mean, annoying historians answer, it depends what period in the century and what type of exhibition. But let's say, mid-19th century, so 1850s or so. Actually, I'll give you a prime example. Bearded lady named Julia Pestrade. That's a sad story, that one, isn't it? Very sad story. You would pay to enter an exhibition space,

and in this exhibition space, there'd be pamphlets on sale, which would tell you a fabulous story of Julia Pistrana or the baboon lady or a particular bearded lady. So there'd usually be some narrative that would be expressed both in text and also by a showman. So they'd give you the story of the bearded lady. she would then come on stage.

Often they would sing or dance. Julia Pastrana sang and danced and put on different costumes. So it would be a show. And then often audience members could ask direct questions. Sometimes at freak shows to pay a little bit extra,

they could actually touch the beard or the connecting ligament of Siamese twins. The freak shows could be quite physical as well. And that would be it. So you would expect to perform. you would expect questions and answers, and you might even be able to touch the performer. Also, I think there's an important caveat with all of this,

and I talk about it quite a bit in my book. When we talk about Freak, Freak is very much a social construction. It's a performance, and it's brought to life by the Freak performer, an individual who has a life off stage. and the freak performer who may or may not have a disability, may or may not have an extraordinary body, was an essential part of the freak show experience. So the freak performer brought their own skills to the stage.

They were actors of their generation. I think it's really important that we always remember that when we're talking about freak performers in the freak show, that these are actually actors, some of whom had disabilities, others didn't, who were skilled and talented and contributed to the success of this form of entertainment. Can you tell us a bit about Julia's history? Because you just touched on her there.

And I think it's such a potent story what happened to her. But tell us a little bit about her. Yeah. So we know very little of her early years. There's no birth or baptism records. But she was probably born around 1834 in Mexico. and she enters the Freach Show circuit around the 1850s, and she teams up with a showman named Theodore Lent,

a rather shadowy figure who probably previously dabbled in prostitution. And he displayed Julia Pastrana across Europe. And in 1855, he marries her, and they go around Europe performing, in all likelihood he took most of the proceeds and had most of the control over her life. She was very short. She had a beard and hair that was all over her body. She spoke numerous languages, English, French, German, I think, and Spanish. She was a good singer. She could ride on horseback.

She had a lot of skills and talent. And in 1860, when she was in Russia, she gave birth to a baby boy who was born with same congenital deformities and tragically both Julia Pastrana and her child died in Russia shortly after childbirth. And Theodore Lent, seeing his means of income slipping away and in a rather dark turn to the phrase the show must go on, decides to embalm his dead wife and child and continue with the show. And so he exhibits his embalmed Julia Pastrana and child across Europe. And actually he then marries in the 1860s another bearded lady called Marie Bartel, who he displays alongside his dead wife as the sister, the alleged sister of Julia Pistrana. And Theodore Lent ultimately goes insane and dies in a mental asylum in Russia,

while the embalmed Julia Pistrana and her child continue to tour up until the 20th century. 1970s, wasn't it? Yeah, right up to the 1970s. She was only buried with dignity in 2013, repatriated. Unbelievable, isn't it? It's just, it's such a, it's kind of one of those stories that, like,

if you want to look for exploitation, these side shows, freak shows, Julia is the one that you would go to. But as horrendous as that story is, and it really is, it's difficult to say. But did people in these shows have agency, Was there something to say, if you're a woman and you've grown a beard, bullocks right now, there's not, VET isn't a thing, it's going to be difficult to shave it off. And why should you, if that's your beard and you're happy with it? But you can make money from this. Is there a sense that people lent into this and that there was some agency in this work?

Absolutely. I mean, it's so easy to look back and scoff at the freak show, but exactly as you intimate, at the time, you know, if you were born with a physical, abnormality, you were looking at a life of destitution or dependency on family or locked away in a workhouse or later in the century a mental asylum, whereas the freak show offered an opportunity for fame. It offered an opportunity for fortune. And it gave some performers active economic agency. So even Joseph Merrick, he chose to enter the world of the freak show because he was languishing in a workhouse. You had famous freak performers of the 19th century. And this is the other thing.

We tend to think of the freak show as some sort of strange marginal affair that occurred in the distant past. Whereas in the 19th century, it was the form of popular entertainment. I mean, freak performers were like the Kim Kardashian of their generation. General Tom Thumb, real name Charles Stratton.

He was an international celebrity, a person of short stature, thrust on stage aged four years up, So these issues of exploitation are still there. But he wowed the world and made a fortune and married another woman of short stature at the height of the American Civil War and even distracted the war cabinet who paused their planning to invite Tom Thumb into the White House to meet President Lincoln and the War Cabinet. I mean, these are real rich, influential celebrities who graced the corridors of Buckingham Palace as well. So the freak show was much like the entertainment industry today in many ways. Sometimes it was exploitative, sometimes it wasn't.

So the kind of wholesale condemnation of the freak show I think is misplaced and doesn't really appreciate the constraints that a number of these performers were living in in the 19th century. I'll be back with John after this short break. What about someone like Annie Jones who appears in The Greatest Showman? What was the name of the guy who ran those shows? Was it Barnum? P.T. Barnum.

Thank you. P.T. Barnum. Tell me about him and tell me about Annie Jones. Yeah, so P.T. Barnum, I mean, sort of displayed by the very handsome Hugh Jackman in a relatively recent film The Greatest Showman. He's one of those characters where he was a mammoth, a titan of the entertainment industry and did a lot to revolutionise the world of entertainment, including the world of the freak show. He has been massively whitewashed, including in that film The Greatest Showman. I mean, P.T. Barnum first found fame on the back of a senile, paralyzed, black slave named Joyce Heth.

He lugged across the northeast of America. No, they missed that out. Yeah, they missed that bit out. Fuck. And he billed her as a 161-year-old nurse of George Washington. Of course, she was only about 80. And when she died, he arranged a public dissection of her to prove her age. and it was revealed that she was only about 80.

Wow. So, you know, he was a man of his times and a complicated man. He wasn't quite the hero that he's often presented as in popular culture. Nonetheless, he did do a lot to revolutionise entertainment and propel a number of freak performers into stardom, including the likes of Annie Jones, who was born 1865 in Virginia. And before she was one years old,

she was being displayed as a hairy child. She was nine months old when she was first put on display. Oh, my God. By the age of five, she was billed as the hairy child. She married a showman when she was 16, and they were together for 15 years, and then they divorced, and she married another showman who died. And she died in 1902, having spent her husband.

whole life in the world of the freak show connected to P.T. Barnum's The Greatest Show on Earth. So that was the only world that she ever knew. Her display was very different to Julia Pistrana, because bearded ladies could be displayed in two different modes. One, you might call it the kind of exotic mode. So the likes of Julia Pistrana, it was her ethnic difference. The fact that she was from Mexico was really emphasized. And so you had a lot of bearded women who were displayed within a quite a racialized, ethnic otherness context,

whereas Annie Jones was aggrandized, a more aggrandized most of a presentation. So she was perceived to be and played to Victorian notions of femininity and womanhood, dignified, refined, you know, elegant dresses, spoke in a soft voice. She played to those cultural stereotypes.

And yeah, she was a key act of the 19th century. Someone like Barnum, I think that, well, obviously he turns out he's a bit of a shit. And I don't know why I'm particularly surprised at that. But he and along with others, they turned what was kind of like side show things into a mass industry, really. And as you say, it became an enormous piece of entertainment

for the Victorians. And he was one of the people that did that. in the film he's shown I think he finds Annie like she's working or something and he goes and finds her and he's like I can help how would he have found people really I'm not sure if he was that nice that he would just kind of go up to people

and be like I can make things better for you well it's interesting actually because so I mean the film's kind of fabricated like she was nine months old when he first came across her but he did come across her and he did come across Charles Stratton who he built as General Tom Thumb who was a person of short stature.

He met Charles when Charles was only four years old where he was travelling through Bridgeport, Connecticut. So in the early years, when Barnum had just purchased the American Museum in New York, he sourced a lot of the exhibits himself. Right. But as his entertainment empire grew, he had essentially freak agents

who would go and source potential performers and exhibits from across the globe. So it became a much more kind of professionalised, organised operation where these freak show agents would go out from the local press, from word of mouth, from other showmen, discover, in inverted commas, different performers and encourage them to join the freak show. Like Britain's got talent. Like literally like Britain's got talent. It's a fair comparison as well. I think so I was going to ask you, I was going to make it my final question, but I may as well say it. because I don't think we've come that far from it.

Like we look at something now and, you know, the story of Julia and we're like, God, it's awful. Isn't it awful that we used to do that? But seriously, like when we put people on the stage who we know cannot sing and are going to make an absolute ass of themselves, what is that for unless that is fulfilling that same voyeuristic role, something like, you know, the variety show competitions that we've got on telly? A hundred percent.

I mean, the freak show lingered on into the 1970s. but it metamorphosised and lives with us today. And you think about some of the key ingredients of the Victorian freak show, sensationalism, titillation, an obsession with the body, or that deemed different. And we see that in popular culture today,

whether it is like Britain's Got Talent or Jeremy Kyle, where people from different backgrounds are rolled out on stage and mocked. Like, the ingredients of the freak show is still with us. It's just in a different form. Do you think Darwin had anything to do with the Victorian's love of a freak show?

I imagine that that kind of gave it like a pseudo-scientificy kind of a gloss, his work about, you know, species evolution and all of those things. Yeah, 100%. I mean, Darwin, interestingly, actually wrote about Julia Pastrana in one of his books comparing her to mammals. And his co-theorist, Alfred Wallace, actually saw Julia Pastrana on display. But when his theory of evolution hit the world, Shoman were very quick to capitalize on his theories

to frame how they marketed different freak performers. So bearded ladies in particular, those displayed in the exotic mode were often billed as so-called missing links between ape and man. Because with Darwin's theory of evolution, it created this other narrative that hairy women,

or women or men even from so-called primitive cultures, in inverted commas, were somehow the kind of link between ape and man that was missing. So showmen actually used Darwin's theories to help propagate their shows and their exhibitions. I think my favourite bearded lady from the research that I've done it, I'm going to pronounce it wrong, because I can never speak French, is Clementine Delat?

Delat, oh yes. I love her. Like she really loves. leaned into it. Like she opened a cafe with her husband and they called it the bearded lady cafe. It was really, really popular. Apparently, Barnum actually tried to recruit her and she told him to sod off at the same time. That's right. Yeah, she's one of those good stories of empowerment. It actually makes me think about later in her life, Annie Jones, really objected to the word freak, felt that it was insulting and othering. Now, I caveat that with, it could. It could

could have been a publicity stunt by Barnum, but nonetheless, there is certainly in the history of the Freak Show and with bearded ladies and with her, this kind of reclamation of identity and power. There were some performers who either used the freak show in order to amass enough money to live lives outside of the freak show or those with Bodies Dean different, who stayed away from the Freak Show completely

and had fullsome full lives. without displaying their bodies on stage. And yet, that's an interesting other line of research. When you look at the history of bearded women, is it's not always in a freak show. They pop up in some really interesting places where I wonder, what is that beard signifying? Like, there was a fairer queen who would insist on wearing a fake beard

because that made her look masculine. And apparently there's statues that have been unearthed of Aphrodite, but showing her with a beard. And it kind of creates all kinds of debate around, what is that? Like, no one would have put Aphrodite in a sideshow. So why, what is that doing there? And it's this kind of blending of masculine and feminine

that does something and it's signifying something, but it's not always. Ha, ha, ha, ha, look at that person there's so different. Oh, 100%. I mean, that's one of the things that I love about researching the body and the history of the body is the body is a raw material. on which so much social and cultural meaning is imbued and imputed. Let's just take the beard in the 19th century.

I mean, that signified so many different things. It was the subject of intense debate as well, the great beard question of the mid-19th century. But a beard could signify being a savage, but it could also signify being masculine. It connected to notions of muscular Christianity, of refinement. It had meaning to it.

And so different bodily parts or different bodies mean different things in different cultures. And so, yeah, the bearded lady was so imbued with meaning and dynamism,

which changed over time. It's very interesting as a historian to research how those meanings shift and what they meant at any particular moment in time. Because they turn up in Macbeth. The witches have beards,

And I've never seen a production of Macbeth where whoever was directing it when we're going to use the beards. They never have the beards. Bring back the beards. Bring back beards. But that's interesting. Why would Shakespeare have decided,

I think my witches need beards? Because that, I don't recall in any witch fight, hunting manuals or anything of the time of like check for a beard. But for some reason, he has decided his witches on the more casting spells, Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble need beards.

And from that moment on, no one producing it, they all just glossed over it and just went that. They never have beards. Yeah, I think they should bring them back. And, you know, I mean, no doubt for Shakespeare, I mean, I'm sort of guessing here, but the beard always, it had connotations of savagery and radicalism. And, of course, it undermines femininity, traditional notions of femininity. Wacking on a beard with some witches really sort of plays to that cultural,

meaning of the beard in that sense. Makes them extra ugly, I suppose, extra strange and mysterious. So we've got a long history here of bearded people being exhibited in sideshow, some horrendous stories, some more empowering stories. But when do they start to fade out? I mean, I'm thinking about the sideshow in general.

Was there a moment where people went, actually, maybe this is a bit shit? You know how like a few years ago everyone realized that perhaps it's not the best idea to keep whales in a fish tank. And then we all suddenly went, actually, maybe we shouldn't be. Was that the same with the freak show, that people had a very sudden change of heart?

Or did it just slowly people started to realize this isn't a good thing? I think it was a slow burner. I mean, the freak show and the side show lingered on into the 1970s. And you've got bearded lady performers to this day. But there were kind of turning points and a big turning point for the freak show and the side show. and therefore bearded ladies was the First World War. Oh.

Because that started to produce disabilities on an industrial scale. Wow. And so it was no longer that appealing to gop a physical difference on stage. You also had like the rise of eugenics from the late 19th century. So suddenly like freak performers were somehow testament to declining, racial stocks, so it was imbued with negativity. You also had the rise of medicine as well, which started to explain away the abnormalities on stage, and that started to kill the wonder and the mystique of the freak show.

So really, you start seeing from 1914, 1918, a real decline in the freak show. And then as you creep into the 20th century, the rise of other forms of entertainment, started to kill the kind of popularity of the freak show and then the second world war almost did it away but it did linger on into the 1970s and it always amazes me every time i do like public talks on the freak show there'll always be someone in the audience who comes to me and says i went to coney island and saw so and so or i you know it's still it did linger on into the into the late 20th century, but its heyday was really kind of the 1840s to 1914. And then from then it starts to ebb. I wonder if television had an impact on it because I'm thinking now, like obviously

we don't go and look at people in sideshows because we have learnt this is bad. We're doing what the Victorian doctors did with it is we're pretending that we're medically interested in a lot of this stuff. We've only got to look at documentaries that you can watch, you know, like the fatest person in the world or documentaries on this person with a disability or that person with a disability. And they're kind of packaged as caring, pseudo-scientific, or we're going to learn stuff. But there's a lot of gawking involved as well. So I wonder if television and how you view this stuff changing, have an impact on the sideshow. Yes, I think that's right. And what you started to see in early 20th century on film is some freak performers migrating to the

TV screens. So, I mean, Todd Browning's film Freaks came out in 1933. It's a prime example, but it became more subtle. I mean, the film freaks didn't do very well at the time at all. And today, this sort of respectable gloss that we put over physical difference in order to gorp, it's also quite Victorian that they didn't just, like, throw people on the stage who looked a bit different and everyone stared at them and poked and prodded, although that occasionally happened. It was wrapped up within a very clever narrative within the 19th century, which was around respectability. It was one of the reasons that the freak show became so popular was that the performers on stage were presented as respectable, as refined. The exhibition space was respectable, was refined.

The freak show was a family affair. Kids would go along. There was different prices for the upper classes and the working classes. And crucially, even Queen Victoria was a renowned freak fancier. So if the Queen of England could like the freak show, then it must be okay. So the freak show always had this air of respectability from the 1840s. And then you're so right, with the rise of cinema, it sidelined the freak show when you had this period of the performers coming on stage and then it kind of metamorphosized today into our medical documentary. My final question is about where we're up to today with bearded women, because there are some fabulous influences out there, women who usually have PCOS, but have just decided to go with it. And they're doing some fantastic work, but I can't help but thinking, facial hair is still a huge taboo for women.

Gen Z are currently leaning into underarm hair and body hair. I think the bush is going to make a comeback. I think that they're rebelling against that. But I don't know if that's ever been in a freak show. If anyone, you know, has had excessive pubic hair and they've made their money out of that. But facial hair, there's still a taboo about it. I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where it's not noteworthy,

where if you see a woman with a beard, you wouldn't at least comment on it. Yeah, I think that's right. And it's a shame. I mean, the body is so wonderful and so diverse and filled with all sorts of, of differences and you know I'd love to be in a place where bodies of all shapes, sizes, hair, no hair are celebrated

for the ones that they are. I mean, sadly I'm not Gen Z so I don't really know what's going on there. They're very hairy. They're very into it. And do they TikTok about it? They tick talk a lot about it. It's just a generation of young people have just gone, oh no bollocks to this

and their arm hair and beads everywhere. Yeah, I celebrate that. Honestly, they're going to save us all. Yeah. John, you have been fascinating to talk to you. I've loved this so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? www.johnwulf.com.uk.

And if you're interested in the history of the freak show and the circus and the Victorian age, you can check out my book, The Wonders, lifting the curtain on the freak show circus and Victorian age. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been marvellous. Thank you. Thank you for listening. and thank you so much to John for joining me. And if you like what you heard,

please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you would like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. We have got episodes on everything from Anne Boleyn's Love Life, after crack of that one, to medieval chastity all marching your way.

This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckworth. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.