12 
Indeed, Quasimodo, one-eyed, hunchbacked, bowlegged, couldhardly be considered as anything more than an almost.
—Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
We do not know who she really was, or whether the story is apocryphal, merely another publicity ploy to drum up excitement over the “freaks.” But it seemed that Victor Hugo, who, hounded by his publisher, was trying desperately to finish up The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the other side of the English Channel in the remaining months of 1830, was not alone in feeling the pull of a haunting attraction between a human monster and la femme fatale.
Sophonia Robinson, who went by Sophia, was a young and beautiful London socialite who delighted in poetry and exotica. After meeting the Siamese Twins, Sophia was smitten and fell violently in love with both of them. According to a promotional pamphlet, this enamored English Esmeralda took to the quill and wrote poetic epistolaries to the twins. Though not Shakespearean in literary quality, her expressed yearning was as strong as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, poems of passionate love so scandalous that the poet had to pretend they were translations from another country. Sophia lamented the improbability of having both twins:
How happy could I be with either,
Were the other dear charmer away.
. . .
Thy love, thy fate dear youths to share
May never be my happy lot
But thou may’st grant this humble plea
Forget me not! Forget me not!
It seemed that this love affair was more doomed than the affection between the gypsy dancer and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Monstrous as he was, Quasimodo was one, or almost one, as the novelist phrased it, whereas Chang and Eng were two, or two in one, making it legally and morally prohibitive for Sophia to pursue the matter of heart any further. Cursing Fate, she finally had to give up, at which point she married, in the mocking words of a rumor columnist, “a commercial gent of promising prospects and unexceptional whiskers.”1
This romantic episode, though short-lived, opened the eyes of the twins, who had just turned nineteen. Despite their abnormal physicality, the twins had reached sexual maturity just like any other men. Never shy with the fair sex, they had flirted innocently with chambermaids and other working-class women. On the day they had arrived in London, as the Times reported, the chambermaid at the hotel “tapped their heads, and told them they should be her sweethearts, at which they laughed, and in a playful and boyish manner they at one and the same time kissed each side of her cheek. On being jocularly told of this, they said it was Mary that wanted to have them for a sweetheart, not they that wanted to have Mary.”2 But with Sophia, it was the first time that one of Cupid’s arrows had been shot from the direction of a popular fair lady. Even though they did not fall for her, they were taken by the possibility that they could love or be loved just like any other human being. As Bolton observed, love had now “become a very common subject of discourse between them.” The good doctor was concerned that “it is not an unreasonable conjecture, that some female attachment, at a future period, may occur to destroy their harmony, and induce a mutual and paramount wish to be separated.”3 Bolton was only partially right in his prediction. One day, the twins would turn that glimmer of hope for love into reality, but they would do it in a manner that would scandalize the world.
The sentimental education of these two Siamese youths went hand in hand with their study of other subjects. During their first voyage to the New World, they had already learned some spoken English from the ship’s crew, but they had never taken language lessons with a tutor. Now a gentleman visitor, intrigued by the unusual sight, volunteered to teach them to read and write, perhaps as an experiment to try to correct Nature’s error. The pupils, however, quickly outsmarted the master: The gentleman marked a large A on a card and then pronounced the letter. The boys imitated the sound exactly. He then formed a B and a C. While he was doing this, “Chang interrupted him, wishing to obtain the pencil; and both not only repeated the sounds of the three letters, but imitated their forms, Chang even making a pun on the letter C; for on being asked if he knew its form and pronunciation, he replied, laughing, ‘Yes, I see you.’ ”4
Their quick progress in the English lessons was amply documented in the family correspondence of the Coffins. In a letter from London to her son and daughter in America on March 6, 1830, Susan Coffin wrote that Chang and Eng “have learnt to speak very good English they can converse very well.”5 In July, Abel Coffin wrote to his children that “the boys Chang and Eng are quite well and are very good they wish to be remembered to you they can speak English quite well.”6 In September, Abel wrote again to his children, telling them that “Chang and Eng send their love to you they can write almost as well as you and if you do not pay great attention to your writing they will soon write better as they are quick to learn.”7
In November 1830, an English gentleman named John Layley gave the twins a copy of the newly published A Dictionary of General Knowledge; Or, An Explanation of Words and Things Connected with All the Arts and Sciences. Edited by the English lawyer and miscellanea writer George Crabb, the dictionary was modeled after Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia, sort of the “Wikipedia of the Enlightenment.” Challenging religious authority and aiming to “change the way people think,” Diderot’s vast compendium of knowledge was credited with fermenting radical thoughts leading to the French Revolution. Crabb’s dictionary was much smaller in scale and more modest in intellectual ambition. Although it incorporated general knowledge in the various fields of arts and sciences, the dictionary was a reconfirmation and repackaging of Christian interpretations of history and events as cited in the Bible and skewed by religious biases. For instance, Paradise was defined in the book as “The garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve dwelt in their state of innocence.” Or, the History of Agriculture began with Abel and Cain, followed by Noah. Or, Gypsies were defined as “A wandering tribe, who are to be found in different countries of Europe, and are supposed to be of Egyptian origin.”8
Inquisitive souls, the twins clung on to this compendium of knowledge. Even though the language of the book was still a bit too sophisticated for their level of English, they certainly enjoyed looking at the illustrations of things they used to know in their native language, such as elephant, buffalo, bridge, goose, pagoda, tiger, tortoise, rice, spider, and so on. They must have been surprised to see the entries for Pomona, Venus, and other Roman goddesses accompanied by images of half-naked or scantily dressed female bodies. This was no pornography, but it would be hard to underestimate the shock to the pubescent youths as they laid their eyes on illustrations of nude women for the first time.
From this book, the twins also learned the meanings of words and concepts that would define their unusual lives: exhibition, liberty, Negroes, phrenology, elopement, polygamy, etc. Throughout their lives, they would continue to mine the book’s vast supply of knowledge, and they would pack it in their luggage for every trip. In 2012, when I visited the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, I saw a tattered copy of Crabb’s dictionary, apparently an heirloom in the twins’ family, which contained John Layley’s inscription and dedication to Chang and Eng. If Diderot’s Encyclopedia had changed the way people think, Crabb’s dictionary, conservative as it was in its intellectual outlook, supplied the twins with the necessary knowledge about the world that looked at them differently, a world where they fought hard to belong.
With London as their base, the twins were exhibited widely in Great Britain during their thirteen-month stay. According to James Hale, who had kept a detailed record of their itineraries, they had traveled “upwards of 2,500 miles in the kingdom, and received the visits of about 300,000 individuals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, Bath, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, and most of the principal cities and towns in the kingdom. They were honored by visits from her Majesty, Queen Adelaide, and others of the Royal family, the foreign ambassadors, nobility, and by most of the philosophers and scientific men of the age.”9 When in Liverpool, Charles X, the ex-king of France, visited the twins and left them “a present of a piece of gold,” rather than paying the usual admission fee of half a crown. The twins wisecracked that perhaps the reason “why he gave them gold, was because he had no crown.”10
As popular as they were in Great Britain, the twins failed to be impressed. Neither the climate nor the food sat well with them. As Susan Coffin told her children in a letter, “They are made very much of by all that see them though the boys do not like here as they did in Boston they say Boston the best.” Having been away from Siam for about a year, they were also getting homesick. Again, as described in Coffin’s motherly words to her own children: “Your mother very often says to Chang Eng I want to see my dear Abel and Susan they say me want to see my Mother Brother Sister Chang Eng is very good boys indeed they say that they love your mother much I tell them some times I am going home to America they say No No I shall cry mamah if you go home and leave me your Abel and Susan got one good mother and Uncle in America Chang Eng got none.” For unknown reasons, the twins’ travel companion, Tieu, was found to be misbehaving—“a very bad boy indeed,” as Susan Coffin put it.11 Robert Hunter, who was about to leave for Asia, had decided to take Tieu back to Siam, a move that further saddened the twins. Like the string of a kite flying higher and higher into the sky, the tie to their faraway home threatened to snap at any moment.
According to Captain Coffin’s plan, Chang and Eng would be taken from Great Britain to France, the native land of Rabelaisian giants and freaks: Gargantua, Pantagruel, and other carnivalesque creatures of grotesque realism.12 But French officials refused to grant them permission to cross the English Channel for fear of “maternal impressions,” a time-honored belief that a pregnant woman seeing a monster would lead to deformation of her unborn baby. The superstition survived well into the twentieth century: When film became popular, many pregnant women in rural China were forbidden to go to a movie—either because movies often showcase monsters and freaks or because film itself is a freakish and frightening technology. The Chinese call film “the electric shadows.” Parisians, thus deprived of an opportunity of peeking at “the wonder of nature,” would have to make do, within a few months, with a fictional figure who was “almost human”—Quasimodo, the bell-ringing Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The French rejection brought the twins’ European tour to an early close. In January 1831, just as Hugo’s timeless classic was released onto the streets of Paris, and another popular book featuring the twins was coming off the press at a print shop in London, Chang and Eng boarded the Cambria and returned to America.