“He must be seen, to convince it is not in the power of language to convey an adequate description of this Fanciful child of nature, formed in her most playful mood.” In September 1810, George Alexander Gratton was one of the biggest draws at London’s Bartholomew Fair. For centuries people had flocked to the fair each summer to watch players and puppets, animals and acrobats and all manner of human spectacles. But a shilling to see George would be the best shilling ever spent. At 2 years old, he was a celebrity. What did he do? Nothing. He was famous for the colour of his skin. He was neither black nor white: he was both.
JOHN RICHARDSON knew how to persuade people to part with their pennies. Showman, impresario and canny businessman, he ran a travelling theatre that was famous across England. Each year it toured the country’s fairs, offering spectacle and entertainment. The show boasted plays set in exotic places, dramatic lighting, eerie sounds and fabulous scenery. But how to hold onto your audience in the interval between comic skit and ghostly melodrama? In 1809, Richardson discovered the perfect answer: a child so extraordinary that people would gaze upon him in wonder.
For someone who never reached his fifth birthday, George Alexander Gratton had a remarkable impact, says Temi Odumosu, who researched George’s story for a new exhibition at London’s Hunterian Museum. People flocked to see the child. His image appeared on hundreds of handbills, and admirers could buy a print to take home. His portrait still hangs in All Saints Church in Richardson’s home town of Marlow. “Long after he died, people were still awed and fascinated by this marvellous spotted boy,” says Odumosu.
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George was born on 24 July 1808 on the island of St Vincent in the West Indies. His parents were both black slaves but George’s body was more white than black, with dark patches on his shoulders and forearms and around his knees and ankles. His face was even more striking, black for the most part but with a white stripe from the top of his head to his chin – including a triangle of pure white hair above his forehead.
As a baby “he was shown in the capital of his native land, at the price of a dollar each person”, reported the Literary Journal in 1819. Warned that superstitious islanders might threaten George’s life, his parents agreed that he should be sent to England. “The child was only 15 months old, when in September 1809, being brought to Bristol… Mr Richardson, the proprietor of the travelling theatre, was applied to, and an engagement entered upon.” Richardson is said to have paid 1000 guineas for the boy. Soon George could be viewed between performances of the melodrama Monk & Murderer and the comical Love and Liberty.
Thirty years earlier, another spotted child called Mary Sabina had made an equally big impression on Europe’s natural scientists and philosophers. None of them ever set eyes on the child, but they were captivated by her image in George Buffon’s monumental Histoire Naturelle, published in 1777.
Mary Sabina was born in 1736, the daughter of black slaves who worked on a plantation belonging to Jesuit priests in Cartagena, in what is now Colombia. Little else is known about her. José Gumilla, the priest in charge of the Jesuit College in Cartagena, wrote that during a visit to the plantation hospital he had seen a black slave with a baby of such extraordinary appearance – almost certainly Mary Sabina – he feared his readers wouldn’t believe his description. He warned the child’s mother to guard her well. Mary Sabina never left South America, but at least two paintings of her reached Europe.
In 1746, the burgomaster of the French port of Dunkirk, a Monsieur Taverne, found a portrait of Mary Sabina aboard a French privateer. It was part of the loot from an English ship captured en route from the Americas to London. “From the figure of the spots, the child may be likened to a dappled or piebald horse,” wrote Taverne. He kept the picture for more than 20 years before deciding to show it to Buffon, one of France’s most famous naturalists. Buffon was astonished. He had seen albino Africans with pure white skin but never markings like these.
“The child may be likened to a dappled or piebald horse”
Like many of his contemporaries, Buffon took a keen interest in variations between people of different races and cultures. In the 18th century there was much biological and philosophical speculation about the nature and origins of difference. “There was debate about whether humans could be separated into different species according to race or if we all came from the same source or family,” says Odumosu. “There was also debate about whether colour and racial characteristics were the result of climate or social circumstances.”
This period was also the time when the slave trade was reaching its peak and there was a powerful incentive to categorise people in a way that justified the subjugation of Africans. Underlying the discussions was the idea that there was a hierarchy of racial superiority, with black Africans at the bottom and white Europeans at the top. “Racial ideas during the period were crude, yet also complex. The exploration of biological difference was often tarred by social and political agendas,” says Odumosu.
Theories were one thing, but none could explain away certain awkward facts. Some anatomists had dissected dead slaves and found pockets of what they called “black juice” under the skin – but then they found the same substance, which we now know as the pigment melanin, under the skins of white Europeans. “People whose skin was both black and white added a new element to the equation. At first sight it was just a curiosity; a marvel of nature,” says Odumosu. “But to white Europeans these cases suggested that black Africans had the potential to be white too – and that was difficult to deal with.”
So how to explain Mary Sabina’s colouring? Gumilla plumped for the oldest idea in the book: “maternal impression”. In the 4th century BC the Greek physician Hippocrates appeared as an expert witness for a woman accused of adultery after giving birth to a dark-skinned baby. He explained that she kept a picture of a Moor (an African) in her bedroom and that this had made an impression on the unborn child, altering its colour. Gumilla concluded that Mary Sabina’s mother must have owned a black-and-white dog. Taverne and Buffon had more rational theories. Taverne’s was that the painting’s label, which said the child was born to two black slaves, was a lie to preserve the honour of her European mother. Buffon disagreed, arguing that there were lots of children of mixed race and they were invariably some shade of brown. He concluded that both of Mary Sabina’s parents were African, but that one was black and one was albino.
When George Gratton arrived in England, no one was any closer to an explanation. To scientists, his condition remained a puzzle: to the public he was a wonder of nature. In 1876, eminent dermatologist Erasmus Wilson gave a lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons in London in which he returned yet again to the subject of the spotted children. During his lecture he unveiled an original portrait of Mary Sabina, which he had somehow acquired. Its effect on the audience was much the same as George’s had been on revellers at the Bartholomew Fair. They were awestruck. Wilson believed that the children probably had some sort of skin disease.
By the 20th century it was obvious that “piebaldism” was not exclusive to black-skinned people. Cases cropped up in people of all colours, including white-skinned Europeans, although it was harder to spot their white patches. It was also obvious that piebaldism ran in families. Modern genetics eventually provided the explanation: piebaldism is a rare genetic disorder that disrupts the development of melanocytes, the cells in the skin that produce melanin. Those areas where melanocytes develop normally produce melanin; those lacking melanocytes have no colour and appear absolutely white. The pattern of development is very distinctive, with a multitude of symmetrical patches and spots, and the most characteristic feature of all – the white forelock.
So what happened to George and Mary Sabina? There’s no record of Mary Sabina’s life, but we do know what happened to George. All accounts agree that Richardson, himself born in a workhouse, cared for the boy, says Odumosu. When the child suffered a “gathering in the jaw”, Richardson called some of England’s top doctors to treat the infection. The cynical might say he was simply trying to protect his investment, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Despite the doctors’ efforts, on 7 February 1813 George died, aged 4 years and 9 months. A distraught Richardson had the child buried in a brick tomb in the churchyard of All Saints Church, taking steps to prevent bodysnatchers making off with such an unusual corpse. When Richardson died 23 years later, he was buried in the same vault as George, their headstones bolted together.
