Leicester Chronicler - Joseph Carey Merrick

Listening to the historic heartbeat of the City of Leicester
and its environs in the English East Midlands

This site is part of tempus omnia revelat

Design and text © Stephen Butt 2005-2009
Revised 10/10/09

Go to home page

Hill Street blues
Joseph Carey Merrick

		On Saturday 15 May 2004, a plaque was unveiled on the side wall of the former Hippodrome Theatre in Wharf Street, Leicester, England, to commemorate the life of Joseph Carey Merrick. He is one of Leicester's most famous and tragic sons, but the story of his life and his deformity has been open to different interpretations. The theatre was demolished in March 2009. The plaque will be fixed to the new building which is to be constructed on this site. This page is not intended as another biography of Merrick, but is a different telling of the tale in the context of life in an inner city, in Victorian times and today. Hill Street runs adjacent to Lee Street where Merrick was born. It is where he worked for a time as a boy, rolling tobacco for a cigar maker.

The former Hippodrome, Wharf Street

Much has been written about the trauma of the Elephant Man's adult life, his time as a showground freak with showman Tom Norman, and his later years as an item of medical interest in the care of surgeon Sir Frederick Treves.

Much has been inferred about the maternal commitment of Mary Merrick, seemingly abandoning her handicapped child to the harsh inhumanity of the Leicester workhouse.

Victorian cobbles on the line of Lee Street

In truth, like so many others of their class, Mary and Joseph Merrick faced a constant struggle to look after their young family, and lost that struggle to the sheer harsh realities of life in Victorian England.

In 1870, their second child died of Scarlet Fever, aged five; three years later, Mary contracted bronchial-pneumonia and died - on her thirty-sixth birthday. Her death meant the loss of her income to the family.

Joseph’s father could not increase his earnings to fill the void and look after his two young children as well. Inevitably, when the money ran out, the family home had to be sold, and the young Merrick family had to move into lodgings.

Their boy’s physical deformities had started to become apparent whilst he was still a toddler, though it seems that his appearance did not prevent him from attending the nearby Syston Street Board School from where he gained a short but valuable education.

Perhaps the strict discipline of the school stopped the other children from taunting him, but the turmoil of his young life continued.

Already aware of `being different’ from other children, he faced constant trauma throughout his childhood years.

His family relocated five times in his first twelve years, he lost his mother, he faced the upheaval of his father's re-marriage (to his landlady) and the consequent feelings of rejection from the new family, as well as the antagonism of an uncaring step-mother and half-brothers and sisters; and he witnessed his father going bankrupt as his small haberdashery business folded.

Old picture of the Hippodrome Theatre

It was in the twenty-fifth year of Queen Victoria's reign that Mary and Joseph Merrick celebrated the birth of their first-born son.

He was named Joseph after his father, and Carey after the Baptist preacher William Carey. They lived in the Wharf Street area of Leicester, a flat ribbon-development outside the medieval city walls which had been laid out to connect the city centre with the Leicester Navigation Canal.

“May the liquid stream of fortune enrich you” was the motto of the Leicester Navigation Company’s seal. Little enrichment visited the lives of the Merrick family or their neighbours.

The only streams which visited the family’s Lee Street home were composed of raw sewage whenever the nearby River Soar flooded the area.

At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a cigar shop in nearby Lower Hill Street. His first job lasted just two years. By that time his growing deformity meant he was becoming clumsy. His fingers could no longer work the tobacco leaves.

Desperate for income, his father sent Joseph to hawk haberdashery goods on street corners. Joseph had little success because of his appearance. His new, extended family expected him to sell a minimum amount of goods each day to support himself.

Perhaps inevitably, one day, suffering from malnourishment, the boy spent what little money he had taken on food. That night after his father had beaten him viciously, he separated from his family for ever.

Today, Lower Hill Street is a pedestrian link between a large grey multi-storey car park and the city's main shopping areas. Grey-faced office blocks tower on either side. Most are empty and are bearing the signs of decay and vandalism, redundant designs based on the redundant ideas of the 1960's building boom.

Opposite, where the ten-storey concrete office block Epic House now stands, is where Joseph Merrick found his first employment soon after his twelfth birthday.

Many of the narrow streets of Merrick's time remain. From the Humberstone Gate where Mary Merrick whilst pregnant visited the notorious street fair in May 1862, to Lee Street, the Merrick's first home after their marriage.

From Upper Brunswick Street, their second home, and Russell Square, where Joseph's father ran his haberdashery business, to their later tenement homes in Birstall Street and Wanlip Street, and finally to Lower Hill Street.

Here and there, a dark red-brick wall is evidence of the back-to-back tenements of that time.

Russell Square has an air of emptiness and decay. Some of its few lock-up shops are closed and boarded up. Broken glass is scattered across pavement and tarmac. In some of the empty buildings there are the obvious signs of drug-taking. There are young children playing on the streets outside.

On the adjacent housing estate there is higher than average unemployment and a growing sense of decay and despair.

Given the stress of unemployment, of struggling to hold families together against a background of low and declining incomes and of the links between poverty and ill-health, there is also a sense of inevitability; that families will fall apart; that, with seemingly no escape from the cycle of despair, children will fall ill, will play truant, and will get into trouble.

Joseph Merrick survived his childhood. Remarkably, he seemed to be mentally and emotionally unaffected by the harsh experiences of his early years.

His eloquence and his patient understanding and acceptance, not only of his disfigurement, but of peoples’ responses to his appearance, is humbling. He concluded his own brief autobiography with the words opposite:

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.

Today, Lee Street is a short cul-de-sac leading to the rear of several business premises. This view is towards Wharf Street. Lee Street originally continued beyond the present concrete buildings and the multi storey car park to join Wharf Street close to the location of the former Hippodrome Theatre.

The open gate on the left leads to a private car park. 50 Lee Street, Merrick's birthplace, was nearby. Victorian cobbles are still visible.