LAUSR

a re-imagining of Swann’s life story was protested against by her descendants, reminding the reader of the pitfalls of neo-Victorian bio-fiction and the ethics of re-membering. The latter issue is further developed in the fourth chapter, which deals with the cultural afterlives of Charles Stratton, a.k.a. Tom Thumb, and his wife Lavinia Warren. They were people of short stature whose life stories, argues Davies, were constructed in their own time as disruptive of the distinction between children and adults, especially with regard to sexuality. Davies shows how the neo-Victorian narratives under scrutiny – Jane Sullivan’s Little People (2011) and Melanie Benjamin’s The Autobiography of Mrs Tom Thumb (2011) – successfully suggest that the exploited can become exploiters trapped in the vicious circle of abuse via depictions of the couple’s treatment of slaves and orphaned children. However, Davies argues that these neo-Victorian re-memberings still fail to imagine the Strattons as adults and thus rise above the Victorian notions of ‘dwarfism’. The final chapter examines the dual depictions of Joseph Merrick, ‘the elephant man’, as a victim and a villain, drawing parallels to the Victorian anxieties about disfigurement, monstrosity, sex workers, and gender. Continuing the thread of medical sensationalism introduced in the chapter on Baartman, Davies shows how neo-Victorian depictions of the medical profession get invariably ‘associated with monstrous, misogynistic masculinity’ (177). Connecting the neo-Victorian depictions of Merrick with those of Jack the Ripper, Davies reads freakery as ‘a free-floating signifier in neo-Victorian versions’ of Merrick (196), suggesting that the TV show Ripper Street (2012-present) offers his most complex re-membering as an individual. In the book’s Afterword, Davies considers neo-Victorianism’s tendency to ‘enfreak’ the respectable, ostensibly normal, Victorians and expose them as the true monsters. She connects it to the conceptualisation of the neo-Victorian freak show as a form that can influence change by returning the gaze of the spectator. Juxtaposing the Victorian freak show’s ‘true life story’ genre and neo-Victorian bio-fiction, Davies stresses the latter’s precarious balancing act between empathy and prurient sensationalism. It is this insistence on raising often uncomfortable yet necessary questions about the ethical dimension of neo-Victorianism’s engagement with the past – and the Victorian freak show in particular – that makes Neo-Victorian Freakery a valuable contribution to the field.