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MERMAID 1

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THE TEXT

The text is an advert inviting Victorian people to come and see Mermaid’s and Mermen, it is based in Hull, a seaside fishing town renound for fishing.

Exhibitions of live human curiosities had appeared in travelling fairs, circuses and taverns in England since the 1600s. These included so-called giants, dwarves, fat people, the very thin, conjoined twins and even people from exotic climes. Freak shows were a particularly popular form of entertainment during the Victorian period, when people from all classes flocked to gawp at 'unusual' examples of human life.

Novelty acts relied a great deal on shock, therefore performers were not revealed in the flesh to audiences until money had changed hands. Titillating publicity was crucial, as the people described in these adverts often bore little resemblance to what lay behind the curtain or turnstile. Exaggerated and stylised illustrations lent age to dwarf acts, stature to giants, and plausibility to mermaids and bear boys. The advertisers of these shows aroused the curiosity of the audience by overplaying, often entirely inventing, 'true life' stories.

GENRE, AUDIENCE AND PURPOSE

The text is a poster likely to be on the street, in shop windows.

The price is 6d to 3d depending on where you sat, this is fairly expensive in terms of Victorian times, suggesting upper class would sit in the more expensive seats and the middle class in the cheaper seats. It is unlikely the working class would go at all.

The purpose of the poster is to persuade people to go and see the show, and there is a lot of exaggeration and lying in the poster to make the Mermaid sound more fascinating than it actually is.

GRAPHOLOGY

The titles are all capitalised, similair to adverts today.

There is a large quantity of writing, a lot more than there is today, possibly because it was expensive and difficult to print pictures, so writing had to replace where pictures would be today. Another reason for lack of pictures could be to make people come and see the Mermaid’s if you show them a picture you are giving away the surprise element.

Size of font and different types of fond represent how important the text is, whereas today it isnt seen as stylish to have lots of types of fonts, we like one type of font.

LEXIS

Nondescripts – an object which is deifficult to describe, in this case the Mermaid’s, adding to the curiosity about them and feeding into the Victorians love of freak shows. Today we might use ‘thing’ to describe an unusual being.

Lilliputians – a tiny person, today we would just say a small person or a dwarf.

Scaramouch – an italian clown

These words sound fancy and could have been used to glorify the show, they were used where simple words could have been used.

GRAMMAR

Lots of adjectives used to describe the Mermaids, to make the Mermaids sound more spectacular than they probably are and they could also be in place of a picture.

“upwards of three feet in length” now this may be said as “taller than three feet”

Three dashes --- could represent a pause and trying to show the text was supposed to be colloquial, but they may not have been standard set of rules for writing mimicked spoken language.

Some words began with a capital letter where if they were to be grammatically correct they shouldn’t have, however it could have been used to show importance to that particular word.

PRAGMATICS

The poster shows people were very gullible and believed that this was a real Mermaid, this could be due to the lack of scientific knowledge of the general public.

It also shows the middle/upper class got entertainment out of seeing freak shows, today in English culture this would be seen as exploitation of the disabled.