A small gravestone stands proudly in the graveyard of Birmingham Cathedral, but on a busy day in the city centre, nobody gives it a second glance. Among the vaults and the grander memorials, this one simple gravestone, yellowed with lichen, is easily forgotten about. Yet it is a monument to one of the many men and women who 18th and 19th century society saw as ‘freaks’ – people who were different in some way to the norm, and who often found themselves touring the country as part of a circus or exhibition. Such individuals were on display, with others paying to view them as a curiosity. As such, this one gravestone is testament to those who had to make the most of their differences in order to survive in a curious, if not downright rude, society.

The gravestone is for Nannette Stocker, her name misspelled as Nannetta on the inscription. It tells us that she died on 4 May 1819, aged 39. Then follows her claim to fame. She was ‘the smallest woman ever in this Kingdom, possessed with every accomplishment, only 33 inches high’.

On 27 October 1797, Nannette had started what was said to have been her first professional tour; 18 years later, she was said to have perfect symmetry, in that she was 33 years old at that time, 33 inches high, with a weight of 33 pounds. At that time, in 1815, she was being displayed at 22 New Bond Street in London with John Hauptman, who was 37 years old and 36 inches tall. It was said that Hauptman had proposed to Nannette and been rejected; some failed to understand why she would turn down any offer of marriage, the suggestion being that as a little person, she should be grateful – plus, the marriage of two exhibiting dwarves would always have been seen as a good publicity event for the New Bond Street ‘exhibition’. In February 1818, just over a year before her death, the appearance of ‘Miss Nannette Stocker, the smallest Woman in the World’ in London was publicised in the Morning Advertiser. The advert made clear that she was a ‘living curiosity’, being both small and accomplished, fluent in English, German, French and Italian. Attitudes towards those who were different are clear here: if she was smaller than the average woman, how could she be cleverer than them? Her perceived ‘difference’ made her popular, however, and on her arrival in England she was presented to George, the Prince Regent, and the rest of the royal family, at Carlton House.

In common with other members of the ‘freak show’ environment, Nannette was often patronised; she was described in her lifetime as ‘the most lively little person imaginable, full of talk, and always appearing with a smile’. When the only thing different about her to the norm was her shorter height, why she should not have been lively, or talkative, or smiling, is not known.

Nannette continued to make the news after her death; in 1888, a Yorkshire paper published a feature on ‘dwarves through history’, using Nannette as an example. It noted again, insultingly, that ‘many dwarfs are idiots almost’, but that Nannette was one of the few who ‘exhibited great intellectual ability’ because of her musical talents. In this, she was put in the same category as Richard Gibson, a short man who worked as a portrait painter. He had been in service to a woman in Mortlake, who noticed his drawings and arranged for him to have lessons. He then developed a reputation for his good copies of portraits by Sir Peter Lely, married a small woman (‘they made a neat little pair, both being 38 inches in height’) in a wedding attended by the king and queen, and became a king’s page.

Despite this suggestion that intellectual capacity was reduced by one’s height more often than not, it was clear that this was not a scientific assertion. In fact, in other quarters, it was paradoxically said that shorter people were more intelligent, with the likes of the ‘so short’ Alexander Pope and Dr Isaac Watts (‘only a trifle higher’ than Pope) being used alongside Nelson and Napoleon to prove this point. The newspaper’s conclusion, though, was still that ‘it is desirable neither to be noticeably low nor high, but to be of a medium height, like most men.’

Both very tall and very short people were put on show, not just for the public, but for private shows by the elite. At one time, the Viennese court had arranged for a show of such individuals, but it was found that the ‘giants’ and the ‘dwarves’ kept mocking each other, and one of the latter nearly killed one of the former. Yet the press and many members of the public failed to see themselves as part of the problem. When a newspaper wrote that dwarves were seen ‘as objects of curiosity to the learned and of amusement to the rich’, as part of an article detailing their ‘oddities’, they were also contributing to that culture of viewing the different as entertainment. Across the Atlantic, the likes of P.T. Barnum eagerly exhibited little people – including the famous General Tom Thumb, stage name of Charles Sherwood Stratton – in the early to mid-19th century, and these entertainers also came to Britain to be watched by intrigued audiences. The private lives of some of these performers became public too, such as when General Tom Thumb married another diminutive performer, Lavinia Warren.

These people of differing heights were not necessarily forced into ‘performing’ publicly, but it’s clear that there was a financial incentive for them to do so. Without this kind of career, many people who were different might find it hard to succeed in society; performing or exhibiting themselves meant that they earned a living – and it could also challenge misconceptions about them, such as the newspaper’s views that shorter people might be less intelligent than those of normal height. But to modern minds it is very uncomfortable that anyone with different physical attributes was put in a position where displaying themselves as an oddity gave them the best chance of success in life.

Worse still was when a young child was involved. The Victorians regularly featured children as part of freak shows, with their parents’ permission. In one case, in 1895, Charles and Mary Ellen Laycock, an Oldham couple, had been exhibiting their daughter, Mary Jane, at a variety of Lancashire fairs. Although she was only months old, they thought their child was a ‘freak of nature’, as it was described at the time, and so although only a baby, she had been featured as a ‘midget show child’. Charles Laycock had been dismissed from his job as an iron turner, and the couple had been on the verge of destitution when Mary Ellen suggested that they ‘show’ their child in a freak show for £2 a week and travelling expenses. They managed to feed their baby on ‘extract of malt and Swiss milk, and a drop of brandy when it was needed’, and for five weeks exhibited Mary Jane at fairs at Openshaw, Gorton, Manchester, Bury, Leigh and Tyldesley. This required substantial travelling around Lancashire, and the fairs took place every day except Sunday and Thursday, from 6pm to 10.30pm. The Laycocks argued that the baby was either asleep, so not disturbed by the public, or, if she was awake, ‘people could handle it [her]’. Mary Ellen insisted that she had no choice but to exhibit her child as a ‘midget’ as she needed to financially support her husband.

Mary Jane would have probably faded into obscurity, had it not been for the fact that she suddenly died at the age of eight months. A post-mortem found that Mary Jane was emaciated, and had died of malnutrition – she was only four pounds in weight. Dr A.J. Lowe, who carried out the post-mortem, said that Mary Jane was not healthy enough to have been exhibited in public, that the exposure of her to such exhibitions had damaged her health, and that although he ‘would not go so far as to say that the exhibition of the child had caused its death, it had certainly accelerated it’. An NSPCC inspector had visited the show when it was at Bury two weeks before Mary Jane’s death, and found her in an ‘improvised tent’. Her arms and legs had been very thin, with loose skin and her eyes sunken. A magistrate’s order should have been obtained by the freak show proprietor to display the baby, but none had been applied for. At the subsequent inquest, the jury returned a verdict of manslaughter against both Charles and Mary Ellen Laycock and they were committed for trial. The implication was that they had virtually starved their baby daughter in order to make her look smaller and thus more of a ‘freak’, to guarantee her success in the freak show world. Instead, she died.

In the Laycocks’ defence, they were from very poor backgrounds, and were clearly struggling so much that they were desperate to find a way to make some money. Of their eventual ten children, four out of the first five died in infancy or childhood; Charles Laycock had to work in various fields in between spells of unemployment, eventually finding a job undertaking underground repairs at the Moston colliery. He was killed in a mining accident in 1916, leaving Mary Ellen to look after their surviving children on her own. To them, the chance of making a bit of money from their underweight baby may have made logical and economic sense; they may also have felt somewhat distanced from her – she was their third child, and their first two had already died in infancy, so perhaps they did what they did to ensure their own survival. There is no record of them ultimately being convicted of manslaughter.

In 1935, Nannette Stocker’s dilapidated gravestone was renovated, the stone being removed for repairs and then replaced on 19 September that year. The renovation made the local news – not the front page, but page three – but attitudes had not changed in the intervening century, as the headline was ‘Here lies a midget’. Although it was mocking the original text, it was not an improvement on how she was described; in fact, it illustrated how each generation felt they were more civilised than the one before, yet some age-old stereotypes and attitudes remained the same over the course of centuries. {