Most people are only familiar with the vengeful, manipulative hunchback that Shakespeare portrayed, but groups like the Richard III society see that as a distortion or flat-out-lie.
When I first moved to China, in the mid-1990s, the only readily available foreign reading was the heavily censored China Daily and classic books like The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
In the 1920s Homo erectus distorted himself a bit, and took to swinging round church towers or chandeliers as the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame or the Phantom of the Opera, Hugo lives a secret life in a public place—a rubbishy room up in the clockworks, where he tinkers with inventions old and new.