In Mile End Road, opposite the London Hospital, there was a line of small shops. Among them was a vacant greengrocer's which was to let. The whole front of the shop, except for the door, was hidden by a hanging sheet of canvas announcing that the Elephant Man was to be seen within and that the price of admission was twopence. Painted on the canvas in primitive colors was a life-size portrait of the Elephant Man.
Joseph Carey Merrick, born in England on August 5, 1860 or '61, is better known as The Elephant Man. Through horrible physical deformities which were almost impossible to describe, he spent much of his life exhibited as a fairground freak until even nineteenth-century sensibilities could take no more. Hounded, persecuted and starving, he ended up at London’s Liverpool Street Station where he was rescued, housed and fed by the distinguished surgeon Frederick Treves. To Treves’ surprise, he discovered during the course of their friendship that lurking beneath the mass of Merrick's corrupting flesh lived a spirit that was as courageous as it had been tortured, and a nature as gentle and dignified as it had been deprived and tormented. The subject of several books, a Broadway hit, and a film, Joseph Merrick has become part of popular mythology. Here, in this fully revised edition containing new details, are the true and unromantic facts of his life. This is an extraordinary and moving story, set among the brutal realities of the Victorian world, telling of a tragic individual and his survival against overwhelming odds.