Joseph Merrick was born as a normal baby on August 5, 1862. Around the age of five he began to grow abnormal deformations. Six years later, his mother died.
His father soon remarried, and Joseph was consequently rejected by his own father and stepmother. They never showed any affectionate feelings towards him whatsoever.
From the age of thirteen on (when he left school just like any other kid at the time) he worked in a cigar factory. At the age of sixteen he had to stop since he did not have the dexterity anymore to roll cigars, due to the worsened deformity in his right hand.
He then worked as a “hawker,” selling stuff from a haberdashery store, door to door. His changing physique interfered more and more with his tries to lead a normal life:
This endeavour was unsuccessful, for Merrick's facial deformities rendered his speech increasingly unintelligible, and prospective customers reacted with horror to his physical appearance. People refused to open doors for him and now people not only stared at him but followed him out of curiosity.
After a sever beating by his father in 1877 he ran away from home for good, and went to live with his uncle Charles.
The extra mouth in Charles’s family was hard to feed, and at the age of seventeen, Joseph moved to a workhouse — also known as “poorhouse.”
Merrick soon realized and concluded that the only way to escape the workhouse was to “perform” on carnivales and sideshows, as a freak. And that is exactly what he did.
He then became known as the “Elephant man,” working for a number of people. Here is a small excerpt on his working for Tom Norman:
Nevertheless, he exhibited Merrick in the back of an empty shop on Witechapel Road Merrick had an iron bed with a curtain drawn around to afford him some privacy. Norman observed Merrick asleep one morning and learnt that he always slept sitting up, with his legs drawn up and his head resting on his knees. His enlarged head was too heavy to allow him to sleep lying down and, as Merrick put it, he would risk "waking with a broken neck.”
Four years later, that area would be haunted by the ghost of Jack The Ripper.
The shop on Whitechapel road was directly across the road from the London Hospital, and through a visitor of the show who was working as a surgeon in the hospital, Joseph became acquainted with a doctor named Frederick Treves. It would change his life.
Treves later recalled that
"the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I had ever seen ... at no time had I met with such a degraded or perverted version of a human being as this lone figure displayed."
Joseph continued to perform as a freak, but his entire life savings were eventually stolen by his then-manager, and then he was abandoned.
In dire circumstances, he returned to London again:
He approached strangers for help, but his speech was unintelligible and his appearance repugnant. He drew a crowd of curious onlookers until a policeman helped him into an empty waiting room, where he huddled in a corner, exhausted. Unable to make himself understood, his only identifying possession was Frederick Treves' card.
