Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks: Deformity, Spectacle, and Victorian Culture

Professor Nadja Durbach, University of Utah

Political, intellectual, and economic history, which used to be the mainstay of the historical profession, has largely focused on the ideas, decisions, and values of those members of society holding positions of social or political authority. This scholarship has thus foregrounded elite culture. The cultural turn in the historical profession, however, has meant that popular culture has now moved centre stage, becoming a legitimate subject of scholarly attention. Cultural historians have argued that the trickle-down approach to culture – that ideas move from the elites to the popular classes – is too simplistic a model to account for the ways that attitudes and beliefs are shaped and then move through societies and across time and space. They have thus focused attention not only on high society, but also on the cultural products of the middle and working classes, particularly on leisure activities.

This has necessitated a shift in the nature of the sources deployed in the writing of historical narratives. Historians have traditionally relied on sources that were produced for posterity. Government reports, legal records, and economic and other statistical data were deliberately saved and archived by historical actors themselves and have tended to be the kinds of sources that historians have turned to most frequently to understand the past. This new interest in popular culture has, however, entailed a shift in relation to the kinds of texts that historians now routinely consider historical documents. At the heart of cultural history is a firm belief that no document is inherently more “truthful” or useful to the historian than any other, and thus that the type of sources one must use depends entirely on the kinds of questions about the past that one seeks to answer. This has meant that the varieties of source material that historians now interrogate have expanded enormously. Indeed for cultural historians it is precisely the types of documents not deliberately produced for the historical record – the flotsam and jetsam of the past – that often provide the most telling glimpse into a cultural moment. Ephemera have thus become important sources for cultural historians seeking to understand the beliefs, values, desires and anxieties in circulation at critical moments in the past.