Clearly, Victorian England was a country of strong contrasts. Dirt and filth of slums on one side and elegant houses of rich people on the other, progress and leisure went side by side with poverty and exploitation of workers. A picture so well painted by Charles Dickens in the A Tale of two cities: Scientific progress and colonialism brought prosperity to English nation but with it fear crept in, too. 'Charles Darwin's new study on the idea of fitness in the world added to the anxieties that being abnormal brought about. To be a freak or to be deformed was cause for ridicule and spectacle. If a person did not fall into the ideal of normalcy within society, they were considered the "other" and being the "other" was not something that made one
