Joseph Carey Merrick (August 5, 1862 - April 11, 1890), known as "The Elephant Man", gained the sympathy of Victorian era Britain because of the extreme malformity of his body. Due to a mistake in Sir Frederick Treves' book The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (1923), Merrick is sometimes known as John Merrick.

Merrick was born in Leicester in 1862 to Mary Jane (nee Potterton) and Joseph Rockley Merrick. He had a younger brother and sister. In an autobiographical note which appeared on the reverse side of his freak show pamphlet, Merrick mentions that his deformity began developing at the age of three with small bumps appearing on the left side of his body. His mother died when he was 12. According to family accounts, she too was "crippled." His father remarried, but his stepmother did not want young Joseph. Obliged to earn a living by selling goods on the street, Merrick was constantly harassed by local children, and tiring of his stepmother's harassment regarding his inability to bring home a profit, Merrick left home.

Twice ending up in the Leicester Union workhouse, Merrick was unemployable for most of his life. On August 29, 1884, he took a job as a sideshow attraction where he was treated decently and earned a considerable sum of money. At one point during his sideshow career, Merrick was exhibited in the back of an empty shop on Mile End Road in London now called the London Sari Centre, where he was seen by the physician Frederick Treves (later knighted). As Treves recalled decades later in his memoirs, he gave Merrick one of his business cards in the event that Merrick would be willing to submit to medical examination. The two men then went their separate ways. When sideshows were outlawed in the United Kingdom in 1886, Merrick travelled to Belgium to find work. There, he was mistreated and ultimately abandoned by a showman, who stole Merrick's savings of 50.

After making his way back to London, Merrick inadvertently became the cause of a disturbance in Liverpool Street train sta

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