Accessibility and Archives: Caroline Crachami (1815-1824) and the Importance of Remembering
In this, the 14th in a sequence of blogposts around disability and inclusion from the Accessibility working group of ARA’s Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Charlotte Hopkins, an Archives Officer at London Metropolitan Archives, reflects on the processes involved in creating her new book entitled, The Ballad of Caroline Crachami: The Sicilian Fairy. Released ahead of the bicentennial of Caroline’s death in 2024, and with the support of a descendant of Caroline’s father, the book includes a unique combination of original silhouette drawings by Bronia Sawyer and historical prints from the London Picture Archive.
This project was a labour of love that has been many years in progress. I first came across Caroline Crachami (1815-1824) when I was doing an MA in Victorian Studies. We looked at the long nineteenth century which included a closer study of the fascination with people as curiosities. Caroline had microcephalic primordial dwarfism, previously known as Seckel or (bird-headed) syndrome. This is a very rare congenital condition in which growth is restricted. The head is small with large eyes, a narrow face, and a prominent nose. It is thought that she was almost nine years old at death and only 50cm tall. Her birth records have not been found, but her father was born in Palermo in Sicily. He left there to perform at the Theatre Royal in Dublin following the Napoleonic War and the family subsequently settled in Ireland.
I saw her skeleton on display at the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn, around 2008. I was moved by this encounter: seeing this small child staring back at me, not merely a specimen. Caroline was on display until 2016 when the museum closed for refurbishment. Rightfully, she was not incorporated into the new displays. This moment kept returning to me over the years and I felt compelled to give her a voice and recognition. There had been some telling of her story in Timothy Knapman’s, The Smallest Person which was adapted for the Edinburgh Fringe by the Trestle Theatre puppet company in 2004. Also, Gaby Wood’s The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness which is an excellent study produced in 1998.
About 7 years ago, I began working on a poetic ballad as a tribute to her memory. For me, I felt that poetry would convey the story in an immediate, emotive, and accessible way. It is told in the form of a ballad, which is in the tradition of telling a story that is often sung, having the twin themes of love and death. This starts out as a tale of the parents trying to seek medical advice for their daughter. Tragically, Caroline ends up being exhibited in England and exploited as a result. My story is a re-imagining of the events which set out to give her a voice, one that she didn't have, and hasn’t been allowed to have over the centuries. As a young girl with a disability, she was not given agency. It is a narrator’s tale but very much with Caroline front and centre concerning what I believe to be the essence of the truth of what happened to her.
The story is also told through Bronia’s silhouette illustrations which speak of another era. I had always had an affection for portraits such as this captured in shadow. I was keen for Caroline’s image to not be fixed, as we do not know exactly what she looked like. The aim was for the images to place her at a particular time whilst remaining somewhat timeless. This, coupled with historical prints in the book help to put the reader into the setting of the 1800s.
The challenge has been trying to escape the language of the Georgian world that saw her as little more than a ‘freak of nature’ or an extraordinary curiosity. The sources that represented her journey were limited, existing in newspaper reports and the memoirs of Dr Gilligan (he was the one to eventually bring her to London and involved in the transaction of her body to the Royal College of Surgeons).
I tried to understand the framing of Caroline as the ‘Sicilian Fairy’ or ‘Dwarf’ when she was put on show at the various locations in Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and London. Due to her size, this made sense that she appeared to be of fairy-like proportions, but it also imbues a sense of the magical. That she was somehow other-worldly is typical of how the Georgians and later the Victorians would view people with dwarfism. It is interesting to note that there were other 'dwarfs' that were exhibited as fairies, like the Corsican fairy, the Devonshire fairy, and the American fairy. People seemed to want to imagine a pre-industrial time before cities were expanding at a rapid rate: to imagine for a moment that she could be the fairy of their dreams and transport them to a magical place or an idyllic scene, away from the dirt, grime, and stress of the city. But positioning Caroline as an ‘other’ makes for uncomfortable reading today.
A drawing from the book, Viewing Caroline as a spectacle.
I strove for this to be as accurate a representation as possible, but some details are inevitably lost to the past. During the months she was exhibited she had solely been in the care of Dr Gilligan. We do not know what happened, except for what the newspapers purport to have occurred, which was that her father was distraught. Her age has also been questioned. She was possibly around eight or almost nine years old which is based upon an approximate birth date of June 1815. In the 1950s, her dentition was interpreted as indicating she was only three years of age. A paediatrician spoke up about this at a talk I gave and informed me that the records of children’s teeth and growth cannot be used as an accurate measure of her age, as she simply may have had a smaller dental structure due to her overall restricted growth. Certainly Caroline had verbal engagement and intelligence older than a child of three years of age. However, it was a common practice for showmen to inflate the age of their subjects for effect to make them seem even more remarkable.
Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you have experience of working with records of disabled people, or using historic records with disabled people. If you are interested in contributing to a similar post, in the first instance contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .