The Elephant Man

Being no oil painting myself, I have had my fair share female admirers and  females who have vomited at the thought of me naked...

Joseph Carey Merrick was far better known for his hideous looks than I ever have been.

Only 27 when he died (short even by Victorian standards) and born 5 August 1862, living till 11 April 1890 Merrick was an Englishman who became known as "The Elephant Man" because his physical appearance caused by a congenital disorder. Because of his condition, he garnered the sympathy of Britain during the Victorian era. A number of sources incorrectly give his name as John Merrick not joseph (a common mistake even now).

Joseph Merrick was born to Mary Jane Potterton and Joseph Rockley Merrick. Because of an error made by Sir Frederick Treves in his book, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, Merrick is sometimes erroneously called John Merrick. He was the eldest of three and had a younger brother and sister. In an autobiographical note which appeared on the reverse side of his freak show pamphlet, Merrick mentions that his deformity began developing at the age of three with the appearance of small bumps on the left side of his body. His mother died when he was 12. According to family accounts, she was physically disabled as well. His father remarried, but his stepmother did not want young Joseph. Obliged to earn a living by selling goods on the street, Merrick was constantly harassed by local children. Unable to bring home a profit and tired of fighting with his stepmother, Merrick left home.

Twice ending up in the Leicester Union workhouse, Merrick was unemployable for most of his life. On 29 August 1884, he took a job as a sideshow performer where he was treated decently and earned a considerable sum of money. At one point during his sideshow career, Merrick was exhibited in the back of an empty shop in Whitechapel (259 Whitechapel Road, E1 – now called the Ukay London Sari Centre), where he was seen by the physician Frederick Treves (later knighted). As Treves recalled decades later in his memoirs, he gave Merrick one of his business cards in the event that Merrick would be willing to submit to medical examination. The two men then went their separate ways. When sideshows were outlawed in the United Kingdom in 1886, Merrick travelled to Belgium to find work. There, he was mistreated and ultimately abandoned by a showman, who stole Merrick's savings of £50 (worth approximately £3900 as of 2010).

After making his way back to London, Merrick inadvertently caused a disturbance in Liverpool Street railway station. Suffering from severe bronchitis and hampered by his deformities, Merrick was barely able to speak intelligibly. However, he had kept Treves' business card and Treves was duly summoned by the authorities. In his role as physician at the London Hospital, Treves arranged for Merrick to be given permanent quarters there. Merrick thrived in these circumstances.

He became something of a celebrity in Victorian high society. Alexandra of Denmark, then Princess of Wales and later Queen Consort, developed a kindly interest in Merrick, leading other members of the upper class to embrace him. He eventually became a favourite of Queen Victoria. However, Treves later commented that Merrick always wanted, even after living at the hospital, to go to a hospital for the blind where he might find a woman who would not be repelled by his appearance. In his final years, he found some solace in writing and visiting the countryside.

In the summer of 1887, he spent some weeks at the Fawsley Hall estate, Northamptonshire. Special measures were taken for his journey and he was forced to travel in a carriage with blinds drawn to avoid attracting attention. He greatly enjoyed his time away from urban London, made many new friends, and collected wild flowers to take back to London. He visited again in 1888 and 1889. He was cared for at the hospital until his death at the age of 27 on 11 April 1890. His death was apparently caused by the accidental dislocation of his neck during sleep – Merrick, unable to sleep reclining due to the weight of his head, may have tried to do so in this instance, in an attempt to imitate normal behaviour. The coroner at his inquest was Wynne Edwin Baxter, who had come to prominence during the notorious Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

Merrick's preserved skeleton remains in the pathology collection at the Royal London Hospital. While his remains have never been on public display, there is a small museum focused on his life, which houses some of his personal effects and period Merrick memorabilia.

Joseph Merrick was originally thought to be suffering from elephantiasis. In 1971, Ashley Montagu suggested in his book The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity that Merrick suffered from neurofibromatosis type I, a genetic disorder also known as von Recklinghausen disease. During 1986 it was postulated that Merrick actually suffered from Proteus syndrome, diagnosed by Michael Cohen seven years earlier. Unlike neurofibromatosis, Proteus syndrome, named for the shape-shifting god Proteus, affects tissue other than nerves, and it is a sporadic disorder rather than a genetically transmitted disease.

During June 2001, Paul Spiring had an article published in Biologist  in which he proposed a new diagnosis. Spiring suggested that Merrick suffered from combined neurofibromatosis type 1 and Proteus syndrome. This hypothesis was endorsed by Robert Matthews, a correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph in an article titled "Two wrongs don't make a right - until someone joins them up". It also formed the basis for a documentary film titled The Curse of The Elephant Man that was produced for the Discovery Health Channel by Natural History New Zealand Limited (released 21 July 2003).

During 2002, Natural History New Zealand Limited, along with genealogists, put out a BBC appeal to trace the Merrick family line. In response to the appeal, a Leicester resident named Pat Selby was discovered to be the granddaughter of Merrick's uncle. A research team took her DNA samples in order to try to diagnose the condition that caused his deformities. The investigation also discovered that Merrick's sister, Marion Eliza, suffered from myelitis. Marion Eliza died at the age of 23 of severe food poisoning.

During 2003, DNA tests conducted by Dr. Charis Eng on samples of Merrick's hair and bone showed no mutation in the PTEN gene (only present in some Proteus syndrome sufferers). Hence, there is as of yet no physical evidence to support the theory that Merrick suffered from Proteus syndrome.

Merrick's condition greatly affected his social relation and his views of himself:

"Tis true my form is something odd,

But blaming me is blaming God.

Could I create myself anew,

I would not fail in pleasing you.

If I could reach from pole to pole,

Or grasp the ocean with a span,

I would be measured by the soul,

The mind's the standard of the man."

A poem by Isaac Watts that Joseph Merrick would use to end his letters.

Little is known about Merrick's family. He was named after his father, Joseph Rockley Merrick (March 1838 – 30 January 1897), who was born in Leicester to Sarah Rockley, the third wife of Barnabas Merrick (23 August 1792 – 12 April 1856). Joseph Sr. married the reportedly "crippled" Mary Jane Potterton on 29 December 1861. It is believed that the Merrick family lived at one time on Syston Street in Leicester, off the Humberstone Lane, but being poor houses, they have since been demolished. The original site is now the Cobden Street Estate.

Their oldest son, Joseph, was born on 5 August 1862, in Leicester. Their younger son, William Arthur Merrick, was born on 8 January 1866, followed by their daughter Marion Eliza Merrick on 28 September 1867. William contracted scarlet fever and died on 21 December 1870. Marion Eliza had been disabled since birth, but would survive until 19 March 1891, dying from a seizure.

The Elephant Man, the film released on 3 October 1980, features Mary Jane's son "John" speaking highly of her. "She has the face of an angel," he says. John (Joseph) is depicted looking at a small picture of his mother very often in the film.

Mary Jane died from bronchial pneumonia on 19 May 1873. Joseph was re-married to Emma Wood Antill on 3 December 1874, and she soon convinced her new husband to send the deformed Joseph away.

Name discrepancy

Early biographies of Merrick inaccurately give his first name as John, an error repeated in many later versions, including the 1980 film The Elephant Man. This error arose and propagated because most of the early works including Ashley Montagu's The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity and Frederick Drimmer's Very Special People, used as research the memoirs of Sir Frederick Treves, written many years after his first-hand experience with Merrick. Treves misreported Merrick's first name as John, causing Montagu and Drimmer to repeat this error in good faith. Montagu's book, in an appendix, quotes a document by Dr. F.C. Carr Gomm, written shortly after Merrick's death, in which Gomm correctly identifies Merrick as Joseph; Montagu dismisses this as Gomm's error. The stage play identifies Merrick as John throughout, except when Gomm (also a character in this play) reads aloud the same document later quoted by Montagu, correctly naming him as Joseph Merrick. In the play, Treves considers this an error, "correcting" Gomm by remarking, "John. John Merrick." The film From Hell also contains what may be a tongue-in-cheek reference to this historical disagreement: in a scene where Merrick is depicted, the character introducing Merrick refers to him correctly as Joseph Merrick but an unseen guest "corrects" him by whispering loudly "John Merrick!" This has been a common mistake for the past century.

Following the publication of Montagu's book, Merrick returned to popular attention around 1980 when two high-profile productions made him their subject. His life story became the basis of the 1979 Tony Award-winning play The Elephant Man, in which he is initially played by Philip Anglim, followed by David Bowie. In the following year, the Academy Award-nominated film The Elephant Man was released, in which he was played by John Hurt. A novel based upon the film was released in the same year, written by Christine Sparks. Each production took a different approach to the story, with the stage version largely focused on Merrick's lack of a sex life. In 1982, the play was broadcast as a television movie. In most productions, the actor playing Merrick wears no makeup, instead mimicking his physicality so the audience has to imagine his deformities. In 2003, Naxos Records released on CD and DVD the world premiere of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, a new opera by the French composer Laurent Petitgirard.

In May 1987 reports began circulating that pop star Michael Jackson had offered the Royal London Hospital up to $1 million for Merrick's remains. The reports included quoted statements from the Hospital and from Jackson's publicists. Jackson responded by including a dance sequence with an animated elephant man skeleton in the 1989 video for "Leave Me Alone", which also parodied other press stories about him. He directly denied the reports in his 1993 interview for Oprah Winfrey:

That's another stupid story. I love the story of the Elephant man. He reminds me of me a lot, and I could relate to it. It made me cry because I saw myself in the story, but no, I never asked for the—Where am I going to put some bones? and why would I want some bones?… Someone makes it up, and everybody believes it. If you hear a lie often enough, you start to believe it.

Despite Jackson's denial, the claim was repeated in the reports following his death. But in a conversation with CBC Radio, David Edwards, the chief administrator of the London Hospital at the time, said Jackson had visited the venue and was shown Merrick's bones.

Guitarist Buckethead has titled several songs referencing Merrick, including "John Merrick - Elephant Man Bones Explosion" a song and imaginary ride on the album Bucketheadland 2 released in 2003. In 2005 Buckethead released Secret Recipe, a DVD with several bonus MP3 songs. Among them included the song titled "John Merrick Lectures". In 2006 Buckethead released the album The Elephant Man's Alarm Clock again referencing Merrick this time as an entire album. Heavy metal band Mastodon has written several songs about Merrick. The last track on the first three of their studio albums is a reference to Merrick. They are: on Remission, "Elephant Man;" on Leviathan, "Joseph Merrick" and on Blood Mountain, "Pendulous Skin." The Fall of Troy, an experimental progressive rock band, released the song "Whacko Jacko Steals The Elephant Man's Bones" on its 2005 album, Doppelganger. This was a reference to the rumor of Jackson purchasing Merrick's bones.

References to Merrick have also been featured in various television shows. In the season one episode "The One About Friends" of the comedy series The Cleveland Show, one gag involves Cleveland Brown revealing that he used to share a room with Merrick, who revealed to him that he was not given the name of "Elephant Man" for his appearance, but instead for his large penis.