Salon for the City is London's longest running cultural event. Every month we take a look at the City through a different lens with two amazing speakers in the historic location of London's only surviving 18th century Horse Hospital.
Doors 7pm
Tickets £13.5
London Leisure - Victorian Style
The Bearded Lady, Zip the Pinhead, Major Tom Thumb, The Elephant Man, The Hottentot Venus were just some of the more controversial corners of popular entertainment in the world of Victorian freak shows — where the abnormal, the extraordinary, and the misunderstood were paraded as spectacle and sold as wonder to the capital's eager citizens.
Historian and author Dr. John Jacob Woolf offers a deeply researched, empathetic, and eye-opening look at the lives behind the wonderful posters, at the performers who captivated crowds and challenged Victorian notions of normality.
Who were these so-called “freaks” - vulnerable human oddities driven to make a living the only way they could, victims of exploitation, or pioneers of performance who found power in their difference?
Acts who showcased their physical forms were but one theme of the many other performers who trod the boards in London’s palaces of entertainment in the nineteenth century. Archivist and historian Ross MacFarlane returns to the Salon to present some of the lesser-known – but equally spectacular – Victorian wonders, many of whose performances tapped into the revolutionary changes in science and technology in the nineteenth century.
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Dr John Woolf is a researcher, writer and historian specialising in nineteenth-century cultural history. He works across TV, radio and film and is the author of 'The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age'
Ross MacFarlane is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of History, Queen Mary University of London. A professionally qualified archivist, with over 20 years’ experience working on the history of science and medicine, has worked in the has researched, lectured and written on a range of topics, such as aspects of the occult, the history of early recorded sound, and the collection of amulets and charms in Edwardian London.
