Vol. 19 No. 24 · 11 December 1997
pages 6-9 | 7031 words
The Smallest of All Persons Mentioned in the Records of Littleness
Gaby Wood
In the centre of the room there are two skeletons. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, faces the front. His skeleton, tainted brown because of the speed and secrecy of its preparation, is seven feet ten inches tall. So towering are the bones, and so impossibly hefty is their accompanying leather boot, that it’s easy to walk past without noticing the adjacent filigree form. Mounted at eye-level, with its back to you as you look at the giant, is the skeleton of Caroline Crachami: tiny, clean, almost transparent. It stands with the support of a metal rod, which is threaded along the spine and pokes out from the skull. The vertebrae could be beads in a large necklace, the ribs starched lace, the fingers fallen milk teeth. The height given for the whole is one foot ten and a half inches. The smallness and the proportion of the thing (an adult shape the size of a newborn) are breathtaking, and from the back it is possible to see the articulated ivories (the marionette shoulders, the butterfly hips) as a work of art, a windless mobile. But the view from the front makes its one-time personhood inescapable: bottomless eye-sockets, a dark triangle for a nose, a pointless smile.
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[*] Tauris, 250 pp., £10.95, 27 November, 1 86064 228 4.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 2 · 22 January 1998
From Alison Walker
If Caroline Crachami was really three years old, and had been deprived of a mother’s care for some time, it is far more likely that she was suffering from severe nappy rash than the more sinister affliction which Gaby Wood implies (LRB, 11 December 1997).
Alison Walker
London E17
Vol. 20 No. 4 · 19 February 1998
From Jan Bondeson
John Hunter was not the first person to articulate an elephant’s skeleton, as Gaby Wood writes in her article about Caroline Crachami, the early 19th-century Sicilian Fairy (LRB, 11 December 1997), and it is ludicrous to point this out as his greatest claim to fame. Equally absurd is to describe Caroline Crachami as ‘Europe’s most famous dwarf’ when she was hardly known outside Britain. The most astonishing of Wood’s statements is that Caroline was just three years old when she died – which ignores the historical evidence that she was nine, and that she was just ‘a very small retarded child’. It has long been known that her dental age was that of a child of three, but this does not imply that this was Caroline’s age, since delay in bone and dental maturation is a feature of osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism (ODPD), the group of conditions to which she has been assigned by competent paediatricians. It would interest both Wood and the ‘experts’ at the Hunterian Museum who declared themselves ignorant of her diagnosis that a sub-group of ODPD has recently been termed ‘Type Caroline Crachami’. The thorough study of her case has helped paediatricians to differentiate a group of patients with disease characteristics similar to hers: namely, severe growth retardation of prenatal onset, absence of ‘bird-headed’ facies, and only mild mental retardation.
Jan Bondeson
London SW6
