A rare survival from the summer of 1851. The “Lapland Giantess” was Christine Larsdotter (1819-1854), a Sámi woman, who was exhibited in London and other European cities.
Richard Altick notes that Laplanders “had a special place in the popular imagination … The uncomplaining, long-lived endurers of a harsh climate and unproductive land, they were, in their frostbitten way, noble savages, whose hardship was matched by independence and simplicity.” Larsdotter wasn’t the first Sámi woman to be shown in London. She was preceded by Jens and Karina Christian plus their child and a heard of reindeer, employed by William Bullock at the Egyptian Hall. In January of 1822, the family served both as custodians and caretakers of the reindeer, and a living exhibit of the Sámi people and culture.
Dressed in “the picturesque costumes of their country”, and “[m]easuring around 210 cm tall, Larsdotter spent her working hours being exhibited together with her relative Maria Christina Sjulsdotter, a woman of contrastingly much lesser height. For an entry fee of only one shilling, people could see the women, both natives of Swedish Sápmi (Lapland), exhibited in Saville House, Leicester Square. Together, the Sami visitors piqued the curiosity of both intellectuals and those in search of the latest ‘freak show’. Not only were the women presented as examples of an exotic pre-modern race of people on the fringes of Europe, one of whom exhibited the unusually short stature of the typical ethnic Sami, or ‘Lapp’, but they also provided a unique and exciting contrast to all that in the form of Larsdotter. Public fascination with the Sami among Victorians extended beyond the exhibitions of 1851 to recurring newspaper articles, scientific and ethnographic reports, novels, children’s books, poems, and travelogues. Sami people therefore played a significant role in the development of the nineteenth-century cultural imagination …” (Burnett).
Larsdotter had been on the road, as it were, since 1837 and used the proceeds from her exhibitions to purchase a plot of land in Brännäs where she built a house for herself. She also served in Malå’s general assembly. She died from a brief illness in 1854 (the cause of death was noted only vaguely as gangrene) and her remains were exhumed and transferred to the Karolinska Institutet where they were put on display. In 2024, they were moved to Malå Sami village.
We find copies at the Wellcome and UCLA only.
Altick, R.D., The Shows of London (Harvard, 1978), p.273; Burnett, L.A., “The ‘Lapland Giantess’ in Britain: Reading Concurrences in a Victorian Ethnographic Exhibition” in Concurrent Imaginaries, Postcolonial Worlds (Brill, 2017), p.124
