The Museum of Extraordinary Things

Travel Guide

Coney Island 1911

The world of gothic horror, the freak shows, Wolfman and the conjoined twins which people flock to see,marvel and mock.

“You would think it would be impossible to find anything new in the world, creatures no man has even seen before, one-of-a-kind oddities in which nature has taken a backseat to the coursing pulse of the fantastical and the marvelous.”

But it’s not as we delve straight in the world that Alice Hoffman has recreated with use of fiction and even more fantastical fact.
Coney island 1911 – Two things happened that year in real life and this book weaves them in to a magical tapestry that is as fantastical and magical as the freak shows it describes that you may not think any of this could be true.

But then fact is often stranger than fiction…

The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire – Asch Building, Washington Place

Eddie is the photographer who documents the horror of this night when so many people died. This was  real life disaster which shows the brutal conditions of the time when factory workers would lock workers inside to prevent them taking breaks.
The chaos and demand for greater safely stands and workers unions showed the scale of the disaster, the working conditions of the time and

The busy chaotic and harsh working life in New York at that time.
In some ways,the museum of Extraordinary Things seemed much safer.

The Dreamland Amusement Park fire on Coney Island on May 27, 1911.

William H. Reynolds, a state senator at the time designed the park to compete with Luna Park  as entertainment in 1911, as Coralie and her father realise, is changing and people want different things.
This park was to be bigger and better than anything and would feature a a railway that ran through a Swiss alpine landscape, fake Venetian canals amd a miniature world with dwarf inhabitants

The Museum of Extraordinary Things

But it’s the world of the freak shows, of the circus acts and the strange people which the people of NewYork shunned in society but paid to look at in a show which sparkles, crackles off the page to the sound of the fair ground music in the background –

There before me were the treasures my father had collected over the years: the had with eight fingers, the human skull with horns, the preserved remains of a scarlet -colored bird called a spoonbill

“Yet I knew that life spent inside a museum is not a life like any other”

Coralie Sardie has live in this world of wonder and gothic horror and her father later makes her part of the exhibition herself. She joins the long list of acts from the conjoined twins, to the Wolfman who enjoys the wonders of Walt Whitman and Jane Eyre for the way in which the novel reflects his own feeling of being locked away and mocked by society. Such people have feelings and it’s heartbreaking to read how society made them into circus freaks to be mocked. How must it felt to have been cast aside and mocked because of a disability or deformity?
A world of wonder, magic and gothic curiosity abound.