What therefore is known or may be discovered of the origins of Joseph Merrick?
His birth certificate gives the information that he was born Joseph Carey Merrick on 5 August 1862 at 50 Lee Street, Leicester; that his father was Joseph Rockley Merrick, warehouseman, and his mother Mary Jane Merrick, née Potterton. As the date of their marriage in the parish church of Thurmaston was 29 December 1861, it is fair to assume that Mary Jane was already pregnant by the time she went to the altar. She was twenty-six years old when she gave birth to Joseph, and his memory of her was, as we shall see, one of the most important elements in his life.
An anonymous article on the Elephant Man that appeared in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle on 27 December 1930, which is clearly based on a knowledge of the Merrick family circumstances, states that Mary Jane was herself a cripple. She was born in the small village of Evington on the south-east outskirts of Leicester, the third child in a family of nine. Her parents, William and Elizabeth Potterton, were ordinary country people. Indeed, her father, a farm labourer, could not write his own name, but the Pottertons did well by their children, allowing them to attend school until they had received at least a basic education.
When Mary was about five years old her family moved from Evington to settle in the village of Thurmaston, a few miles to the north of the city. From there, at the age of twelve, she left home to become a servant to a family in Leicester itself.
For the next thirteen years she remained in service, enduring a life that could have been distinctive only for its long hours and attic bedrooms, the endless carrying of hot-water jugs and coal buckets, incessant scrubbing and blackleading and the invariable rules about ‘no followers’. Then in 1861, when she was twenty-five, she met Joseph Rockley Merrick, who was just over a year younger than herself. He made his living as the driver of a brougham, a closed four-wheeled cab.
The Merrick family’s village of origin is reputed to be Clynnog-fawr in North Wales, but by the 1780s they were established in London. Joseph Rockley Merrick’s father Barnabas (the third Barnabas running in order of descent) had been born in 1792 at Spitalfields, where the family was successful in the weaving trade, owning looms, engines to run them and leasehold property. He married, first, in 1815, a bride from Wanstead, who bore him four children, and secondly, in 1826, a Sarah Jones, though this marriage was childless. By the 1830s he was working as a bobbin-turner in the hosiery trade in Leicester, and in 1837 he married for the third time, to Sarah Rockley from Radford in Nottinghamshire.
Joseph Rockley Merrick was the eldest of Barnabas and Sarah’s three sons, the other two being Henry and Charles Barnabas Merrick, all born in Leicester. After Joseph Rockley and Mary Potterton had married in turn, they set up their first home at 50 Lee Street, a small house in one of the warren of streets behind Humberstonegate, only a few yards from the address of Joseph Rockley’s by then widowed mother Sarah.
The city of Leicester was meanwhile expanding rapidly on the basis of the industrialization of its traditional crafts of hosiery and knitwear, to which were added boot and shoe manufacture. Fresh mazes of narrow streets and dingy back-to-back housing sprang up with regularity in each succeeding year. From the north side of Humberstonegate a long, narrow street called Wharf Street ran down at right angles to reach the new public wharf on the canal. The land to each side of Wharf Street was low-lying, even marshy, but by the 1860s the gardens and nurseries still charted on the maps of 1828 had disappeared beneath a confusion of backstreets. Lee Street was one of these: a side-turning off Wharf Street.
From its moment of construction Lee Street could justly be defined as a slum. The houses were small and lacked running water. Sanitation was a constant problem, for the sewers were inadequate and many houses possessed only cesspits. The removal of refuse was in the hands of private scavengers who were both ineffective and irregular. Worst of all were the floods. Once a year the River Soar and the canal could be expected to rise and fill the streets to a depth of two or three feet, the water having forced its way back up through the sewers, bringing with it sewage and garbage. It was both insanitary and lethal. Over many years Leicester suffered a death-rate that annually removed between twenty-six and thirty in every thousand of its population; and, as always, the death-rate was highest among infants and children. The Victorian mothers of the time had little hope of being spared the helpless despair of watching at least one of their children sicken and die.
Shortly after his marriage Joseph Rockley Merrick changed his job, giving up his employment as a brougham driver and going to work in one of the many cotton factories. The work was monotonous and the hours were long, the usual shift lasting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. in winter and from 6 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. in summer, with half an hour for breakfast and dinner. Many firms by this time allowed Saturday afternoon as a half-day off, but there were no statutory bank holidays and even Boxing Day was regarded as a normal day of work. Wages varied, but a man working two knitting frames could earn as much as 12s. (60p) or 15s. (75p) a week, a woman 9s. (45p) and even a child might bring home 2s. (10p) or 3s. (15p). Joseph Rockley Merrick was somewhat more fortunate in that he managed to obtain a position in the warehouse where the wages were slightly higher than those paid to the operatives. Men and women who worked in the warehouse were generally regarded as a better class of employee.
In Leicester, Mary came under the influence of the Baptist ministry. This was particularly strong in the town, and for a period in her life she was a teacher in one of the three Baptist Sunday schools in the city, though which one is unrecorded. Education in Leicester, as in many of the other new and growing industrial centres, presented a considerable problem in the 1860s. Children of seven and eight years old were still being employed by cotton factories, by boot manufacturers and in the brickyards. There were no free schools prior to the Education Act of 1870, and often parents could not afford to pay even the small fees charged by the various day schools, apart from their unwillingness to sacrifice the wages of their earning children. Only a third of the children in Leicester received a full-time education, and many of these attended for such short periods that they could have gained little benefit.
For the other two thirds of the children there were the Sunday schools, usually run by the Nonconformist churches. The purpose of these was to teach not only religious instruction, but also the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic. While we do not know which Baptist Sunday school employed Mary, the activities of the Friar Lane Baptist Sunday School give an indication that the régime was sternly imposed alongside the benevolent motivation of the Nonconformist conscience in working for the betterment of working-class children.
The Sunday schools were often surprisingly large establishments. The Friar Lane establishment had as many as 350 pupils and 45 teachers. Admission was a matter of application and interview, and truancy led to expulsion, for discipline was strict. At the beginning of the nineteenth century this school had even possessed a pair of stocks for the correction of the unruly. Successful scholars could, however, look forward to prize day and receiving certificates of proficiency; and there was always the annual Sunday school outing.
The relentless work routine for the populace of the industrial centres of the nineteenth century created, by reaction, an appetite for diversion and cheap entertainment during those few hours people could call their own. The 1860s were the first great period of growth for the institution of the British music hall throughout the provinces, although many of the new halls continued to be attached as incidental attractions to existing inns and taverns. There were meanwhile the more traditional diversions whose origins ran far back into antiquity: the charter fairs and visiting circuses and menageries, the latter featuring elephants among their attractions. And the mention of elephants at once sets off an echo: the carefully tended story that Joseph Merrick put forward to account for his condition, that his mother had been knocked down by an elephant during the time she carried him in her womb.
The Leicester Journal for 9 May 1862 contained the following announcement:
Notice is hereby given that the next Leicester MAY FAIR will be held on Monday, the 12th day of May next for the sale of horses, beasts and sheep, and on Tuesday, the 13th and following days for the sale of cheese. By order, Saul Stone, Town Clerk. N.B. No cheese wagon will be allowed to enter the Market Place except from Hotel Street.
The following day the Leicester Chronicle dutifully repeated the notice.
There had been fairs in Leicester since the thirteenth century. The dates of the fairs, and the festivals they celebrated, had varied over the years, but gradually they coalesced into the two great annual fairs of the city. The first was held early in May each year, at the time of the ‘Invention of the Cross’; the second in early October. Before their discontinuation in 1902, they were among the truly great charter fairs of Britain. People would pour into the city from the neighbouring villages and towns to buy and sell in the markets, hire employees and domestic staff and assess the quality and prices of cattle and horses. They replenished farmhouse stocks for another six months, exchanged domestic news with neighbours, bought clothes and marvelled at new fashions, pushed their way between the street stalls and ended up revelling in the tomfooleries of the pleasure fair.
For the citizens of Leicester the fairs were a mixed blessing as the streets and thoroughfares became blocked by stalls and surging crowds. Cotton spinners hurrying in the early morning to the small factories and mills would find their paths blocked by the cattle being driven through to the Cattle Market in the city centre. For two days the streets grew foul and treacherous. As Dr John Barclay of Leicester remarked in a lecture he delivered in 1864:
That the cattle market is a terrible nuisance no one will, I think, deny. I am sure that no one will say a word in support of it who have to barricade their doors against the filthy accumulations that make the streets look and smell like a cowshed for a couple of days. In my own part of the town we are quite blockaded …
The very next day after the cattle sales were over the poultry came into town, noisy and crowded into the backs of a hundred carts. Then there would be a day of comparative peace and cleanliness as the cheese fair took over. From every farm and dairy the great cheeses were brought, laid on fresh straw in the bottoms of carts. From end to end of the town the carts, their horses unharnessed, stood backed against the kerbs, tailboards lowered to display the cheeses to passers-by. Shopkeepers and housewives alike would move along the line, tasting samples before buying. The best cheeses went quickly to the large grocers; only the worst cheeses would still be left when the gas lamps were lit at early dusk.
In the meantime, as the trading fairs proceeded, the Humberstonegate was, as one of the wider thoroughfares of the town, set aside for the great pleasure fair. Stalls and booths were ranged down either side of the street, and where the road widened into its broadest part there were swings and merry-go-rounds; theatrical booths and marionettes; freakshows, sword swallowers and jugglers; stands for the sale of sweets, pastries and patent medicines.
Mrs I. C. Ellis, in her collection of reminiscences, Nineteenth Century Leicester, remembered it thus:
The fair in Humberstonegate was a glimpse of paradise. It was a never forgotten joy to go on the roundabouts though we never ventured on the swings. The wild beast show roared and smelt like nothing else on earth, but the daintiest, loveliest thing was the marionette show. We were taken down the bazaars – and very nice the stalls were – a long row of tents with wares all on one side … There were booths with dancers in tights disporting themselves on a platform – these our father or other conductor avoided, but the marionettes we were allowed to see … We went to front seats (2d. by the side door, 1d. if you went in at the front, in view of all the fair). When we had all been paid for and were sitting as we thought in seclusion, the proprietor opened the front of this tent and displayed his respectable audience, and shouted again, ‘Twopence in at the side door, one penny in at the front.’
In its report of the 1862 pleasure fair, the Leicester Journal succeeded in putting across the general aura of excitement:
Giants, descendants in direct line from the Anakims of old; india-rubber men; or acrobats; wonders of every description in animated nature, and astonishing novelties in art, are presented. A picture of a monstrous pig, exhibited outside one booth, is said to have its perfect living counterpart weighing several tons within. At another booth resides a cow, whose hind quarters are adorned with an extra leg, which the proprietor informs us, is intended expressly for scratching her nose.
The Leicester Chronicle, taking up the theme, adopted a more jaundiced tone:
Not withstanding the heavy showers of rain and the somewhat limited attractions … it has been visited by a large number of the country folk during the week … There was a new circus, Croueste’s, displaying to the admiring gaze of the juveniles a number of coloured vignettes, representing equestrians in all sorts of impossible attitudes; and a dilapidated theatrical booth, with actors and actresses, whose dresses were in admirable keeping with the woe-begone appearance of the building. A giant pig, a threelegged cow, some dirty looking and rickety swingboats, really superior roundabouts, stalls for nick-nacks, and rifle galleries – made up a somewhat motley gathering of the peripatetic tradesfolk.
Yet this paragraph continues with what is, from the point of view of the present account, an intriguing snippet of information: ‘The principal feature has been, of course, Wombwell’s Menagerie …’ The wild-beast show could hardly fail. Permanent collections of animals were still extremely rare, so the only opportunity most people had of seeing exotic zoological specimens was offered by the travelling menageries. There were in the country several different companies on the road each year, including Atkins’s and Sedgwick’s, but the most famous in the annals of fairground history was Wombwell’s Royal Menagerie.
It was founded in 1807 by George Wombwell, of whom William Hone spoke ill when he encountered him at Bartholomew Fair in 1825:
… he … exhibited himself, to my judgment of him, with an understanding and feelings perverted by avarice. He is undersized in mind as well as in form, ‘a weazen, sharp-faced man’, with a skin reddened by more than natural spirits, and he speaks in a voice and language that accord with his feelings and propensities.
Hone also held against Wombwell a disgraceful event of a short while before at Warwick, where the publicity-minded proprietor set up a gladiatorial combat in which his two lions, Nero and Wallace, were baited by dogs. Despite (or because of) such episodes, Wombwell’s flourished, growing ultimately into three separate touring menageries and on five occasions receiving a royal command, thrice to appear before Queen Victoria herself.
Thomas Frost, author of The Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs, has left a memory from boyhood of the magic anticipation Wombwell’s aroused for him at Croydon Fair:
I … could never sufficiently admire the gorgeously uniformed bandsmen, whose brazen instruments brayed and blared from noon till night on the exterior platform, and the immense pictures, suspended from lofty poles, of elephants and giraffes, lions and tigers, zebras, boa constrictors, and whatever else was most wonderful in the brute creation, or most susceptible of brilliant colouring. The difference in scale to which the zoological rarities within were depicted on the canvas, as compared with the figures of the men that were represented, was a very characteristic feature of these pictorial displays. The boa constrictor was given the girth of an ox, and the white bear should have been as large as an elephant, judged by the size of the sailors who were attacking him among his native ice-bergs.
Elephants had a way of figuring largely in anecdotes of Wombwell’s exploits. On one occasion the proprietor mistimed his tour and, Thomas Frost tells us, was still in Newcastle-upon-Tyne with only two weeks to go before the opening of Bartholomew Fair in London. The possibility of reaching London in time with his procession of caged beasts along the roads of those days therefore looked remote. At this point Wombwell gained wind of the fact that his arch-rival, Atkins, was promoting his menagerie at Bartholomew’s as ‘the only wild beast show in the fair’. Without hesitation Wombwell undertook a forced march to bring his caravanserai to London on the day the fair opened; but the epic effort took its toll of the elephant, the unfortunate beast dropping dead on arrival. Atkins lost not a moment in declaiming that he had ‘the only living elephant in the fair’; at which Wombwell counterattacked with his slogan: ‘The only dead elephant in the fair.’ The tactic paid off, remarks Frost, since a ‘dead elephant was a greater rarity than a live one, and his show was crowded every day of the fair, while Atkins’s was comparatively deserted’.
For the Bartholomew Fair of 1830, Wombwell’s proudest boast was the Elephant of Siam, ‘a theatrical performer’, says Henry Morley, ‘in the spectacle of the Fire-fiend, wherein it uncorked bottles and declaimed for the Rightful Prince. On each side of it he had in his show two miniature elephants, the “smallest ever seen in Europe”.’
It was a Wombwell elephant, too, that once broke out of the fairground to take a leisurely stroll down Croydon High Street in the small hours of the morning, to the alarm and bewilderment of the town constable. The animal stopped at a confectioner’s, butted in the shutters and window panes with its head and helped itself to cakes and dainties.
By 1862, when Wombwell’s was travelling to Leicester for the May fair in Humberstonegate, its founder had been dead a dozen years and the main company was under his widow’s management. The routine leading up to the menagerie’s arrival in town followed, however, a long-established pattern. First the advance agents arrived to book the site, arrange water supplies and stabling, buy in corn and forage. The printers were commissioned to run off handbills, posters went up on walls and announcements were inserted on the front pages of local newspapers whose inside columns carried news of the American Civil War.
Finally, on the first day of the fair, the city found itself aroused at seven in the morning by the rattle and shaking of a column of heavy wagons proceeding through the streets. The convoy consisted of the accommodation caravans, the provision carts and seventeen or eighteen beast wagons. These last, being cages, were eight feet high and broad and as long as eighteen feet, their occupants concealed by great shutters, their wheels iron-rimmed and noisy. Each wagon was drawn by a team of as many as four shire horses that strained before each one, their hooves slipping and sparking on the cobbles; and marching between the wagons, sometimes hitched to one or other of the larger vehicles, there walked elephants and camels.
Once in Humberstonegate, with shouting and a pushing of horses, the wagons were backed up to form a square. Three sides were formed by the wagons themselves. The fourth consisted of the high wooden façade that formed the front of the show. It was decorated with mock wooden pillars and painted panels depicting enraged beasts duelling in impossible jungles while men, magnificent in bare-chested bravery, wrestled with ferocious lions. In the centre of the façade was the pay-box, perched high on a small platform, and the square, when complete at last, was roofed over by canvas sheeting stretched from wagon to wagon. Finally, on the inside of the square, the yellow shutters of the wagons would be lowered on their hinges to mask the wheels and reveal the beasts inside.
Up the steps and past the pay-box the customer could then duck through the curtains screening the doorway to find himself at the head of the steps that led down into the covered square. Tethered here and there in small groups about the compound stood llamas and camels and other hopefully acquiescent creatures. In the cages about the square were wolves and leopards, bears, monkeys, zebras, small antelopes, parrots and pelicans. There might be a tiger, though this was a rather uncommon beast, the showmen finding tigers unpredictable and difficult to train. Two of the cages were for lions. In these a lion tamer stood face to face with two or three of the great cats, making them pose, leap through hoops, lie down and stand to command. But if the lions provided thrills, it was the elephants that imparted a feeling of solid merit to the spectacle. The local population was given to judging the status of any menagerie by the size and number of its elephants.
At midday each day it was therefore customary to open the side gates of the menagerie for the elephants to parade solemnly out and move ponderously through the streets as an impressive walking advertisement. Their procession was one of the highlights of the pleasure fair, and the reporter from the Leicester Journal was speaking for many when he cheerfully summed it up in the phrase that Wombwell’s was here ‘in all its glory’.
The reports of the local press in Leicester for May 1862 contain no mention of an unfortunate girl, crippled and pregnant, stumbling when forced by the crush of the crowd on to the roadway in front of a parading elephant, falling but scrambling clear, distressed and badly shaken. There is no reason why there should be such a record, nor any reason why anyone should have known about the incident afterwards, aside from the immediate bystanders. Yet it has become an event so inextricably intertwined in the legend of the Elephant Man, an incident so often mentioned by those acquainted with Joseph Merrick, that it would be unreasonable to suppose it never occurred.
Mary Jane Merrick gave birth to her first child three months after the Humberstonegate fair. He was christened Joseph after his father, while for a second name his mother chose Carey, calling him after the leading Baptist preacher and missionary, William Carey (1761–1834), who had done much to foster the Baptist ministry in Leicester. Carey not only founded the Baptist Missionary Society in London, but was also one of its two first missionaries. Three weeks after her son was born, Mary herself attended at the Register Office to record the birth.
To begin with, Mary and Joseph noticed no fault in their little boy. The anonymous but informative article that appeared in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle in December 1930 states: ‘… the relatives declare … Merrick was born a perfect baby’. He must have seemed perfectly made, even delicately proportioned, and in spite of the hazards of his environment and an epidemic of smallpox that raged through Leicester in the following year, Mary was spared the pain of losing him. He not only survived but evidently flourished for a time.
Mary’s joy was, however, destined to be short-lived. Her infant son would soon start to grow grotesquely deformed, each year of his life bringing an increase of distortion and affliction. There is some confusion over how the onset of Joseph’s symptoms occurred; available accounts vary greatly as to when the first manifestation of his disease became unavoidably obvious. One writer, in the British Medical Journal of 19 April 1890, suggested it was almost certain that the Elephant Man was born with enlargements of the bones of the skull, right arm and feet. Yet Joseph himself wrote: ‘It was not perceived much at birth, but began to develop itself when at the age of five years.’ Again it is to the article in the Illustrated Leicester Chronicle that we owe the only detailed account.
According to this, it was when her baby was about twenty-one months that Mary first became aware of something strange happening, of a firm swelling on his lower lip. During the next few months, this increased in size, spreading up as a hard tumour into the right cheek until the little child’s upper lip was being pushed outwards by a mass of pink protruding flesh. Mary must have been tormented by the gradual realization that there was something seriously abnormal about her boy and that the trouble showed no sign of passing. As he grew, a bony lump appeared on the forehead, and this, too, increased in size. His skin became rather loose and rough in texture; even his bodily proportions were starting to be marred by peculiar enlargements of the right arm and each of his feet.
Among all the bizarre distortions afflicting the body of her child, the most terrible for Mary must surely have been the initial extraordinary mass of flesh that continued to force its way from beneath the upper lip. It was eventually to protrude several inches in a grotesque ‘snout’ weighing three or four ounces. To the most unimaginative eye, a resemblance to an elephant’s trunk must have suggested itself at once. During those early years, Mary’s mind doubtless went back ever more frequently to her mishap with the elephant in Humberstonegate as she cast helplessly around to explain the inexplicable – to herself as much as to her relations and gossiping neighbours.
In the meantime, Joseph Rockley Merrick had again moved house, taking his family from Lee Street to their new home at 119 Upper Brunswick Street. He had also again changed jobs. The history of the hosiery industry in the first half of the nineteenth century is the story of its mechanization. Steam power had altered the pattern of this former cottage industry and during the 1860s a social observer in Leicester counted more than 250 factory chimneys on the city skyline. Joseph Rockley’s new employment was as the stoker on a steam engine in one of the cotton factories.
Shortly after moving into their new home Mary became pregnant for the second time, and on 8 January 1866 she gave birth to her second son. She called him William after her own father, and added Arthur. Any fears she may have had that her second child would develop similar deformities to those crippling her firstborn proved groundless. William Arthur’s growth, it is said, remained free of abnormalities.
At about this time her elder son suffered a further misfortune. He fell heavily, damaging his left hip. After the injury the joint became diseased, and so the accident left him permanently lame. His appearance must already have been making it difficult for him to mix with other children; now it would have become impossible for him to join in their games since he could do little more than hobble. His mother no doubt did her best to ensure that his life remained as close as possible to normal, for she sent him to school each day; but she must have realized that the deformities were leaving their mark, that he was becoming a lonely introspective child, isolated from his fellows and increasingly dependent on herself for company.
On 28 September 1867 she gave birth to her third and last child. This time it was a daughter. The infant was given the Christian names of Marian Eliza, but any hopes of rejoicing at the arrival of a baby girl in the household were dashed from the start. Marian Eliza too, it seemed, carried the family curse and was born a cripple.
Joseph Rockley Merrick applied himself diligently to his work and achieved further promotion. By now he could classify himself as ‘engine driver at the cotton factory’. He also threw his energies into planning a modest but independent commercial enterprise, perhaps in a desperate attempt to make a secure future for a family that had come to include three cripples. The Leicester Trade Directory for 1870 (prepared in 1869) lists him as proprietor of a haberdashery shop at 37 Russell Square, a small square to the north end of Wharf Street. He had never had any intention of relinquishing his job at the factory. This was one among many small ‘back street’ family enterprises run by wives or relatives. As such it must have been moderately successful since it continued to gain mention in the Leicester Trade Directories through until 1880. Meanwhile he moved his family once again, not to live in the house above the shop but to another house at 161 Birstall Street, a side street close to Russell Square.
The haberdashery shop was not long in business before even more serious personal troubles began to beset the family. In the days of preparation leading up to Christmas 1870, the Merricks’ second son, little William Arthur, nearly five years old, fell dangerously ill with scarlet fever. Within twenty-four hours his condition was desperate and on 21 December he died. The following day Mary attended the Register Office to notify his death, and the death certificate bears mute witness to the devastation she felt at the loss of her one perfect child. When she came to sign the document, Mary, the Sunday school teacher who had signed her name so confidently on her own marriage certificate and each of the birth certificates of her children, could manage no more than a cross, identified by the registrar as ‘the mark of Mary Jane Merrick, present at the death’.
The only prospect she had of burying her grief lay in her time-consuming round of responsibilities: two crippled children to care for and the management of the shop in Russell Square on her husband’s behalf. It may be that her strength was at a low ebb by the spring of 1873 when she fell ill with bronchopneumonia. Her struggle with the disease did not last long. In the early hours of Thursday, 19 May, she died. The day was her thirty-sixth birthday, and her son Joseph was then just three months short of reaching the age of eleven.
When he wrote ‘The Elephant Man’, Frederick Treves, on the basis of what he knew of Joseph Merrick and his past history, reached the conclusion that Joseph’s memory of his mother as a beautiful woman who had loved him was a fantasy. He thought he needed to sustain it for psychological reasons, to counterbalance his own ugliness and the fact that ‘since the day when he could toddle no one had been kind to him’. Mary Jane Merrick was thus dismissed as ‘worthless and inhuman’, a woman who ‘basely deserted’ her small son and abandoned him to the workhouse. In the perspective of what is now known this may be seen as an unfortunate if unintended libel; and to be doubly unfortunate in that it posthumously compounds Mary Jane’s personal tragedy.
It remains a curious fact that, during his first meeting with Frederick Treves, Joseph Merrick chose not to reveal to the surgeon certain essential pieces of information concerning his family background: that his mother had been a cripple, that he had a brother who died in early childhood, that a sister still lived who was also crippled. He never was to do so.