This chapter examines ‘eccentric biography’, a genre that placed abnormality on the national stage and in homes in Britain from the late eighteenth century. The genre’s popularity is contextualised by considering a wider body of material, much of it commercially available, depicting remarkable or eccentric personalities and bodies. The ways these works conceived, categorised and commodified deviations are studied. Their expressed and latent uses in a specific cultural context are examined. Virtual display of the abnormal is not a-historical delight in bizarreness: how people are perceived as different ‘has less to do with what they are physiologically than with who we are culturally’. ¹