Henry Mayhew

I was studying Dickens.

Henry Mayhew had lived farther up Albany Street.

There's a blue plaque at number 55.

Mayhew, the great investigator of Victorian London, the man who went into the streets and asked questions, who talked to costermongers, mudlarks, crossing sweepers, sewer hunters, rat catchers, and street sellers.

Mayhew wanted to know how London worked, how Londoners earned a living.

What they ate, where they slept, how they survived.

And there was I, studying Dickens, living almost within hailing distance of Henry Mayhew, taking no interest in him whatsoever.

That is quite an achievement.

In Merrick's case, he survived multiple thefts while on tour before being left in Brussels.

In the 1890s, journalists like Henry Mayhew began to criticize freak shows as part of a larger critique of Victorian morality, arguing they exploited those who were already socially ostracized.

However, the show's profitability ensured that regulators had little appetite to restrict it, especially when governments saw sideshows as a form of public amusement akin to fairs and circuses.

By the end of the Victorian era, the decline began, not from moral condemnation alone, but also from shifting public interests and the rise of new entertainment technologies like cinema that could capture exotic spectacles in moving images.