Cassie McCullough

And so there was this sense of what is true?

You know, what is illusion?

What is propaganda?

and what is a lie, essentially.

And that felt very suited to the circus, you know, with the idea of tricks, showmanship.

And there's a character, Toby, in the novel, who I mentioned briefly earlier, who's Jasper's brother.

And he is tasked with taking photographs of the Crimean War.

But

making them look pristine and trying to sort of undo the negative accounts that William Howard Russell, who was a real journalist reporting on the Crimean War, was sending back to London to the Times there.

And so for him, for Toby, he kind of represents this conflict between truth and what is false, which, yeah, it was interesting to write about.

Yeah.

So carte de visite were tiny little sort of, they were very small photographs, you know, they weren't much bigger than passport photos.

And again, that was another way in which the circus and the freak show kind of just, it blew up.

I mean, not literally, I mean, quite a few of the circuses did actually blow up, but it was a way of getting people's faces and names out there.

And lots of people would buy these small photographs and keep them as little mementos.

of the people who they'd seen performing.

That's what he does there at the circus.

And there's an early scene where he photographs Nell.

And for her, this is a moment where she is able to see herself so differently from how she's been led to believe she looks.

And she finds a real power in that, actually.