Nadja Durbach's Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture provides a welcome contribution to the fields of disability studies and modern British history, in that it connects late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century freak shows to the formation of modern British identities. Durbach's argument centers on the idea that perceptions of bodily difference are culturally and historically specific, and her project excavates those perceptions during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Specifically, she identifies the ways in which these freak shows constructed bodies as "normal" and "abnormal" according to class, race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Diverging from scholarship that focuses on the victimization of the disabled, Durbach emphasizes the importance of using historically specific terminology, and relies on a term first coined by Rosemarie Garland Thomson in 1996: "freakery." Although Durbach's project is much indebted to Garland Thomson's groundbreaking work, Durbach troubles Garland Thomson's narrative of the anomalous body, which, according to Durbach, neglects to contextualize its central terms of "freakery" and "disability." Durbach cautions against "collapsing" the freak into the disabled because it suggests that "cultural meanings attached to physical difference have remained constant" (16). She maintains that "freakery" and "disability" are distinct approaches to dealing with difference, and she claims that assuming that the freaks of the nineteenth century become the disabled of the twentieth century obscures the dynamic processes that rendered the freak show so crucial to modern British self-fashioning. Spectacle of Deformity explores the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century notion of the freak on its own terms, separate from scholarly notions of disability.

With her goal of understanding "freakery" within British history and literature, Durbach focuses on the freak show as an important space for the negotiation of Victorian and Edwardian notions of the physical body as relate to race, class, gender, sex, and ethnicity. By investigating the construction of these spaces and how particular freak acts were marketed, Durbach argues that the freak show is a space wherein the concepts of "self" and "other" could be defined. Throughout her meticulously researched chapters, which extensively reference promotional materials, reviews, illustrations, letters, and journals, Durbach teases out the cultural functions of freak shows in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Ultimately, Durbach concludes that freak acts 舒 from displays of physical deformity to presentations of racial, and often savage, others 舒 reinforced white British normalcy and superiority.

In Chapter Two, "Two Bodies, Two Selves, Two Sexes: Conjoined Twins and the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," Durbach explores the anxieties of British citizens about deviant sexuality and colonialism through the case study of "Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy," a set of conjoined twins and a hermaphrodite who lived from 1886 to 1905. Lalloo's twin, advertised as Lala, his little sister, was a "Half Body" 舒 arms, legs, and torso 舒 that grew out of Lalloo's chest. Durbach demonstrates how Lalloo's body blurred the boundaries between self and other and male and female, and, thus, confused and frustrated the British public. Lalloo tapped into late Victorian anxieties about "the sexual potential of a double-sexed body" (58), which, as Durbach demonstrates, were present in the medical field as well as the cultural arena. She shows how medical discussions of Lalloo reveal tension between the one-sex and two-sex model of the body. The effort to place Lala in a distinct sexual category from her brother indicates the prevalence of the two-sex model, but the confusion evident in discussions of her genitalia indicate the continued influence of the one-sex model, which holds that female sex organs are merely inverted versions of male sex organs. Durbach situates the British fascination with Lalloo and Lala within contemporary concerns with incest and pedophilia, and she reads all of this within the context of colonialism: Britons of this period increasingly associated "Oriental" sexuality with aberrant children.

Chapter four, "Aztecs and Earthmen: Declining Civilizations and Dying Races," further showcases Durbach's insights on the relationship between British imperialism and freak acts. She discusses the mid-nineteenth-century popularity of exhibiting Aztecs, who represented an example of the eventual decline of "inferior" civilizations and races. Durbach focuses on a brother-and-sister pair, Maximo and Bartola, who travelled throughout the United Kingdom from the 1850s to the 1890s. Maximo and Bartola were supposed examples of degeneracy; they were advertised as the product of incest, and thus were labeled "'diminutive in stature, and imbecile in intellect'" (118). Promotional materials claimed that Maximo and Bartola had no language and asserted that they could not dress or feed themselves. This representation fit in nicely with an emerging narrative of the progress of civilization, in which "the darker races" (130) were doomed to extinction, while other groups of people, namely Europeans, would flourish. Additionally, the pairing of the Aztecs with "Earthmen," people from southern Africa billed as "Stone Age" and "Bushmen" (131), reinforced the message of white superiority. Eventually in the 1860s, debates about the race of Maximo and Bartola revealed that they were not Aztecs at all, but some unidentifiable mixed race. From this point on, their exhibition focused on the potential dangers of miscegenation. Durbach situates interest in Aztec and Mayan cultures historically, beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century with museum exhibitions and travel narratives.

Durbach concludes Spectacle of Deformity with a study of the decline of the freak show. She locates the beginning of the end in the second decade of the twentieth century, listing the notion of "political correctness" (171), shifting attitudes toward deformity after the First World War, the commercialization of the beauty and cosmetic industry, and advances in medical technology as contributing factors. Durbach ends with a nod to her initial caution to scholars about the danger of neglecting to contextualize the concept of disability, as late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century freaks were clearly distinct from later-twentieth-century disabled. Durbach's approach allows her to read the freak show, and the "corporeal hierarchies" (32) it helped to establish and reinforce, within the context of Britain's construction of itself as an imperial power and a modern nation.

Durbach's narrative ends with the freak show "all but dead" (181), having outlived its usefulness in a changing world. Admittedly, the late twentieth century is outside of the book's focus, but the tidiness of Durbach's conclusion, in which changes in medicine and social policy combine to render the freak show "sordid" (182), neglects to account for the myriad ways in which it persists in sanctioned popular culture. Indeed, one wonders what Durbach would make of the recent craze in medical freak television series, such as Discovery Health's "Medical Incredible" or Discovery's "Superhumans." These shows combine the sensational rhetoric of popular culture and the authoritative specificity of medicine in similar ways to the Victorian and Edwardian freak advertisements Durbach analyzes. Rather than accepting that the issues Durbach focuses on resolve once Britons become thoroughly modern, it would be profitable for scholars to think about how, and why, the freak show has persevered well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.