There's a lot of feet in Shakespeare's verse, but there ain't

any legs worth mentioning in Shakespeare's plays, are

there, Pip? Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the

rest of 'em, whatever their names are, might as well have

no legs at all, for anything the audience know about it,

Pip. Why, in that respect they are all Miss Biffins to the

audience.

Martin Chuzzlewit

She was real, historical enough; so were the legs. Roll up, roll up!

No hands, no arms; a woman three-feet tall, who died – the irony! –

in Duke Street in the bustling port of Liverpool. Ladies and gentlemen,

the great Mr Dickens had it wrong, not once but twice –

in Chuzzlewit and Nickleby : Mr Scott Surtees with his own eyes

had seen the Biffin toes! reported it in Notes and Queries 1888.

The painter, Dukes, (and so the irony) exchanged painting lessons

for a contract: her for sixteen years to appear at rural fairs, a freak,

beneath striped canvases, with the Fat Woman, the Smallest

Man on Earth, the Lady with the pig-snout nose.

Used her mouth and shoulders, picked up the paintbrush

with her tongue, could tie a knot in a single hair; sew, cut patterns

with her toes. A Little Marvel then, my friends! A child (I quote)

of hapless fortune … and yet possessor of endowments of no ordinary

kind. Our armless midget painted kings! Not one but two

King Georges, a William, old Queen Vic herself, all of them

patronising. The King of Holland appointed her his miniaturist.

Dickens puts her in his painted toyshop, his Tussauds, when she

is all the rage – with exhibitions, medals, readies coming in.

Believe it or not, gentlemen, she married a Mr Wright

who turned out wrong. Alas, it all went pear-shaped. She died

almost in penury. Where's that? I hear the children ask. Just round

the corner there from jeopardy! Civil List Pension, an annuity secured

by Richard Rathbone, a chiselled headstone in St James's Cemetery

talking of gratifications. Not far from Kitty Wilkinson.

Ah, there now is another! Saint if ever there was one!

Mind how you go!