Becoming Tom Thumb: Charles Stratton, P.T. Barnum, and the Dawn of American Celebrity

By Eric D. Lehman

An “evocative and entertaining” biography of the nineteenth century circus performer who became a global phenomenon (Neil Harris, author of Humbug).

When P. T. Barnum met twenty-five-inch-tall Charles Stratton at a Bridgeport, Connecticut hotel in 1843, one of the most important partnerships in entertainment history was born. With Barnum’s promotional skills and the miniature Stratton’s comedic talents, they charmed a Who’s Who of the nineteenth century, from Queen Victoria to Charles Dickens to Abraham Lincoln.

Adored worldwide as “General Tom Thumb,” Stratton played to sold-out shows for almost forty years. From his days as a precocious child star to his tragic early death, Becoming Tom Thumb tells the full story of this iconic figure for the first time. It details his triumphs on the New York stage, his epic celebrity wedding, and his around-the-world tour, drawing on newly available primary sources and interviews.

From the mansions of Paris to the deserts of Australia, Stratton’s unique brand of Yankee comedy not only earned him the accolades of millions of fans, it helped move little people out of the side show and into the limelight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819573322

Eric D. Lehman

Eric D. Lehman is the author of twelve books of history, travel, and fiction, including The History of Connecticut Food, Literary Connecticut, Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London, and Becoming Tom Thumb: Charles Stratton, P.T. Barnum, and the Dawn of American Celebrity, which won the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America and was chosen as one of the American Library Association's outstanding university press books of the year. His 2016 book Shadows of Paris was chosen as novella of the year from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, earned a silver medal in Romance from the Foreword Review Indie Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. He teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Bridgeport and lives in Hamden with his wife, poet Amy Nawrocki, and their two cats.

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Becoming Tom Thumb

CONTENTS

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xxi

Prologue: Playing the Palace 1

The Boy from Bridgeport 10

At the American Museum 20

Prince Charles the First 37

Buttons, Bullfights, and Balloons 49

Hop O’ My Thumb 60

Heart of a Child 73

On the New York Stage 87

The Measure of a Man 103

The Wedding of the Year 119

The Long and Short of It 131

A Very Strange Honeymoon 140

Tom Thumb’s America 152

Around the World 164

At the Helm 174

A Marriage and Two Funerals 185

The Great Fire 195

At Mountain Grove 206

Notes 211

A Note on Sources 239

Selected Bibliography 241

Index 243

PREFACE

"The name of no living individual, big or little, is better or more widely known than that of General Tom Thumb. This declaration on a local promotional advertisement for Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth" seems to be simple marketing strategy, until we begin to find this judgment everywhere, from different pens and different voices, throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. On his death in 1883, the Daily Los Angeles Herald said, General Tom was probably better known than any man in the United States.¹ The Herald emphatically used the word man and not midget or dwarf or any other qualifier. This was no accident. Charles Stratton, better known by his stage name of General Tom Thumb, was by almost any standard the most popular performer of the century.

He also may have been America’s first international celebrity. Before Charles, our celebrities were primarily politicians or warriors, writers or mystics, and were usually regional rather than national. The only international figures were statesmen like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and in certain circles writers like James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving. Occasionally, the title of our first celebrity goes to William Buffalo Bill Cody, who found a worldwide audience at the end of the nineteenth century, but more often someone from the twentieth century takes the prize.² We tend to think that celebrity began then, in the age of film and recorded music, but it obviously did not.

The use of celebrity goes all the way back to the Latin word celebritatem, meaning famous or thronged. People in eighteenth-century England often used it to mean something close to temporary interest, rather than the eternal achievement of fame. However, it was used as an adjective, in describing someone as celebrated or in one case, of philosopher David Hume describing Jean Jacques Rousseau’s behavior as an act to gain celebrity. Its use as a noun describing a person whose attributes and behaviors added up to a famous persona, a celebrated person, a public character, appeared first in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1849 and grew in usage throughout the rest of the century.³ Tom Thumb rose to prominence just a few years earlier. However, despite the word’s increasing usage, the application is partially retroactive, in the sense that we use it today to refer to anyone who is famous, and thus anyone who was famous in history. No one would have called Queen Victoria a celebrity at the time, but the methods in which she was promoted, the way in which she interacted with the public, and the audience reactions to her fame seem to modern eyes to clearly fit the established pattern.

Whatever designation we give them, actors, dancers, poets, and singers in different cultures throughout history have often achieved the type of renown and adoration we reserve for the movie, television, and recording stars of today. However, in the nineteenth century this process intensified and expanded, due to dynamic technological advancements. Swift-moving trains allowed grand performance tours to and from large cities, and to the smaller towns in-between. Steamships allowed easy coastal journeys and more comfortable long ocean voyages, making transatlantic celebrity possible in a way never seen before. Mass-produced newspapers and telegraph reporting led to enhanced promotion and advertising, as well as creating new conduits for gossip. Souvenirs could be produced by the thousands for sale to admirers. And photography changed the way celebrities were seen by the public, bringing their actual images into peoples’ homes and lives. Celebrities could be created quickly from scratch by ingenious promoters, and those already famous could increase their followings using fresh methods.

Though we have even more clever methods and advanced machinery now, celebrity in the nineteenth century took much the same form as it does today, with a public fascination about people in the daily media. Reputation in a particular field, whether sports or science, could propel people to celebrity, though it did not always do so. These people could be wealthy or not, though sometimes great wealth and social status alone was enough to create a celebrity in the public mind, as the Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild demonstrated in London and Paris. Often a criminal or even someone associated with a criminal act, such as Lizzie Borden or Jesse James, became a nationally known figure. Popular appeal is a tricky thing, and often depends on a variety of intangible characteristics and events.

Even a simple connection to other famous people could be enough to create new celebrities, and P. T. Barnum used this trick to great effect in his promotions. Furthermore, celebrity status was often something that happened to you whether you liked it or not. French actress Sarah Bernhardt sought publicity while Italian actress Eleonora Duse shunned it, but both were adored by millions. Though celebrities usually became famous for achievement, sometimes secondary characteristics gave them wider popularity. Therefore, Swedish soprano Jenny Lind’s generous morality brought her attention, just as poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s supposed atheistic immorality brought him infamy. Charles Dickens’s writing made his name well known, but his lecture tours made his public figure famous. Was it Lord Byron’s poetry that made him a celebrity, or gossip about his rumored love life?

Some of these celebrities have lasted in popular imagination, and some have not. Few, however, matched the outrageous contemporary fame of General Tom Thumb. The numbers are difficult to calculate, but using a very conservative model, Charles Stratton gave at least twenty thousand official shows, performed in front of more than fifty million people, and visited two dozen countries circling the globe. His photographs and souvenirs found their way into hundreds of thousands of households and his advertisements into millions of copies of newspapers. He toured the United States a dozen times, not including limited excursions in the Northeast and regular shows in New York City. The list of people who saw him perform is a who’s who of the nineteenth century, from King Leopold of Belgium to the Rajah of Benares to Ralph Waldo Emerson. But even more incredibly, his name and image was also known to orphans in Australia and tribesmen in Africa. And unlike most performers, his celebrity did not last merely a few years, or even a decade, but endured for four decades in which he scarcely waned in popularity, continuing to sell out theatres to the year of his death.

His celebrity emerged from a number of factors, including beginning his career at such a propitious time in history. He was by all accounts charming, funny, and quick-witted. He could sing and dance and use his small body to make the audience gasp or shout. Of course, his size gave him a great advantage, but there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other dwarfs on display in Victorian America and Europe, and none ever came close to Charles’s level of fame.⁴ Charles also had the benefit of being a child star, at least for the first part of his career, and he was not alone. The nineteenth century had begun with a mania for Master Betty, an English boy actor, and Americans followed in his wake, from John Howard Payne to Cordelia Howard.⁵ However, like the child actors of today, as they aged they usually slid from public view except as occasional fodder for the gossip pages. With forty years in the public eye, Charles’s popularity cannot be accounted for with charges of novelty alone. Furthermore, no one who actually saw him perform later disavowed his talent or their own reactions to him, as they had done so vociferously with someone like Master Betty. Children who saw Tom Thumb in the 1840s brought their own children along to his shows in the 1870s. This longevity seems to rule out his popularity as a mania, and is one more factor that calls for a consideration of his importance in American culture.

Transatlantic celebrities who came in the other direction during the early nineteenth century are easy to find. However, most Americans who make the standard lists of national and international stars appear in the latter part of the century, from Harry Houdini to Walt Whitman, from Buffalo Bill to Billy the Kid. In the 1840s and earlier, the pickings are slim, unless we consider someone like Andrew Jackson as a celebrity rather than a hero. Theater actors like Edwin Forrest performed in Europe and achieved critical acclaim in the northeastern cities, though it would not be until William Gillette performed as Sherlock Holmes at the end of the century, that an American stage actor achieved worldwide fame or fortune at the level of Tom Thumb. Singers, dancers, and authors achieved widespread recognition, certainly, amongst certain segments of the population. But though someone like James Fenimore Cooper wrote the most popular English language novel of the early nineteenth century, Last of the Mohicans, Cooper himself hardly had crowds of screaming admirers following him down the streets of New York City.

A more apt comparison might be comedian and clown Dan Rice, who spent these same few decades entertaining the American public. Thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans flocked to his shows and circuses. With his red, white, and blue-striped tights, stovepipe hat, star-spangled cape, and goatee, he was probably the model for the popular image of Uncle Sam. Like Charles, he benefited from and contributed to the new world of popular culture, and like Charles, he was mostly forgotten. However, though Rice’s career as comedian and clown began several years before Charles Stratton’s, when Tom Thumb became a sensation Rice had just finished working a learned pig show. The legendary clown would not achieve nationwide fame for another decade, with his real prominence coming only during the Civil War. He also never, unlike Charles, earned an international audience that stretched from Cuba to Ceylon.⁶

It seems that Charles’s only real competition was his mentor, P. T. Barnum, who symbolized Yankee ingenuity and progress to the entire world. When Civil War hero and former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant circumnavigated the globe (eight years after Tom Thumb had done the same) he found to his bemusement that Barnum’s name was familiar to multitudes who never heard of me.⁷ Of course, Barnum was only an occasional performer, and achieved his own fame as a promoter and publicist, and as a manager and mastermind. Together, he and Charles ushered in the age of American celebrity.

Unfortunately, like nearly all celebrity performers, after his death Charles’s star dimmed quickly. By the twentieth century some no longer believed he had had talent, or that millions of people from disparate nations had flocked to his shows. Even locally he was practically forgotten. In the 1930s, when Charles Burpee wrote his voluminous Story of Connecticut, P. T. Barnum earns a page, with only a small mention of his protégé, calling him, Tom Thumb, a Bridgeport dwarf named Stratton, and saying that the showman feted him here and before Royalty abroad, riding in his elaborate mite of a coach with reminiscence of medieval splendor. Barnum well rewarded Stratton with a dwarf wife and a rich and happy home in Bridgeport.⁸ After this somewhat condescending comment about rewarding him with a dwarf wife and happy home, Burpee goes on to describe Barnum’s other triumphs. More troubling is that in the two volumes of biographical notes, Charles is not mentioned once, though many minor businessmen are. We could forgive this as a focus on the merely wealthy rather than artists and cultural figures (there are a number of others missing, too), but in fact Charles was quite rich, a member of various clubs, and had contributed to the development of his home town. His death inspired an outpouring of local feeling unmatched until Barnum himself died eight years later. Burpee is not the only one who made this sort of omission, and we can only speculate at reasons for Charles’s removal from our collective story.

Part of this may have been the low station entertainers still held at that time with the sort of academics who wrote histories. After all, the 1881 History of Fairfield County only briefly mentions Charles, yet does so at a time when he was still internationally famous. The Standard’s History of Bridgeport in 1897 does not mention him at all, though that error is corrected somewhat in the revision of 1917. To be fair, the 1886 History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport, by Reverend Samuel Orcutt, gives a broad sweep of Charles’s career. Wider-ranging American histories mention him here and there, local histories often include the day that Tom Thumb came to town, and he certainly crops up as a minor figure in the histories of the circus, theater, or entertainment industry. George Odell does discuss him extensively in his comprehensive Annals of the New York Stage, and notes that after Charles’s first performance at the American Museum he was for years thereafter the big attraction in town and country.⁹

The definition of celebrity itself could be partly responsible for Tom Thumb’s decline in public estimation. The word celebrity has always been used to describe anyone who is famous, regardless of accomplishment, a seemingly neutral but ultimately negative connotation. In his seminal work The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America Daniel Boorstin details extensively the lack of qualities in a person that has been fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness.¹⁰ Boorstin clearly delineates between a hero and a celebrity, with one being recognized for achievement and the other for an image or trademark.¹¹ And he is correct; no one would correctly call General Tom Thumb a hero. Likewise, Buffalo Bill did not achieve his real fame as an Army scout, but rather as an actor on the New York stage and as creator of his epic Wild West show. However, this definition can be misleading. No one would claim that Buffalo Bill was not a talented performer, but a lack of ability is precisely what calling him a celebrity can imply. Later critics have assumed or attributed the same lack to Charles Stratton, a lack which the historical record shows is false.

Still, the nature of celebrity is fleeting. Though we may watch their films occasionally, the movie stars of the early twentieth century are as unknown to most people as Tom Thumb. As tastes and sensibilities change, comedy is especially difficult to appreciate, and this is exacerbated by the low value generally placed on comedy in American culture. Comic actors are often forgotten while tragic ones are lauded, and stand-up comedians have always received short shrift from historians. Without audio-visual evidence of Charles’s comedic skills, dismissing his worth is even easier. But regardless of that evidence, a celebrity’s skills and value are necessarily of the time. As Boorstin puts it, The celebrity … is always a contemporary.¹² Cultural values are often momentary or transitory, and even the immortal heroes Boorstin lauds shift and transform as the decades pass.

This is complicated further by the high and low cultural divide that has characterized most artistic criticism for the last century. Lawrence Levine’s influential study, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, investigates this split thoroughly. At the turn of the twentieth century categories began to be established in all the cultural arts, leading to the exaggerated antithesis between art and life, between the aesthetic and the Philistine, the worthy and the unworthy, the pure and the tainted. A rift developed between high and low, with forms like blues, jazz, musical comedy, photography, comic strips, movies, radio, and popular comedians all relegated to the low side. The worst result of this split was not that the low brow audiences were separated from the high brow beauties of Shakespeare and Italian opera, but rather that these rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.¹³

In the nineteenth century, these distinctions were not so clear cut. Highbrow and lowbrow existed side by side much more comfortably. P. T. Barnum himself perfectly exemplified this reality. In 1864 he held a fundraiser for a statue of Shakespeare, in honor of the 300th anniversary of the playwright’s birth. Actors at the American Museum gave performances of Catharine and Petruchio and Dumb Belle, featuring Mr. Harrison, the Comic and Impromptu Singer, and Mr. Stoepel, with his wood and straw instruments between acts. At the same time the museum featured three albino children and a musically-educated seal.¹⁴ This was not a parody or a cruel joke, and most did not see it as an offense to the great Bard. Opera was also, according to Levine, "an art form that was simultaneously popular and elite." Popular songs of the day were often substituted for arias, but again, it would be wrong to think that this was an attempt to sully or parody the operas themselves. Both operas and Shakespearean plays toured the back roads of the United States as well as the densely populated urban areas.¹⁵

Not only did all levels of society enjoy the same sort of entertainment, they shared it. Swedish soprano Jenny Lind’s famous tour of 1850 to 1852 became an occasion for all elements of society to share in excellence.¹⁶ In 1853, Putnam’s Magazine proposed P. T. Barnum be named as manager of the New York Opera, saying He understands what our public wants, and how to gratify that want … He comprehends that, with us, the opera need not necessarily be the luxury of the few, but the recreation of the many.¹⁷ His museum did not cater to one social class or type of audience, but rather tried to appeal to the whole of society. As biographer A. H. Saxon put it: Rubbing elbows with farmers fresh in from the countryside, tradesmen, apprentices and laborers, and ‘respectable’ citizens with their families in tow, were famous scientists like Louis Agassiz and Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, authors like Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, eminent statesmen, religious leaders, and ambassadors from abroad, and even, in 1860, the visiting Prince of Wales.¹⁸ The cultural fluidity of American society encouraged this sort of shared experience, an experience that twentieth-century critics were quick to dismiss as aesthetic tastes became more rigidly subdivided.¹⁹

Once in place, these categories did not only affect contemporary criticism; scholars who re-created America’s past usually overlooked the importance of a popular entertainer like Tom Thumb. In fact, this split has skewed historical assessment of all previous performers and artists. After all, it was not only the supposedly lowbrow entertainers that were caught up in this removal from our cultural memory. A mid-nineteenth century celebrity like Charlotte Cushman, respected for her varied roles on the stage during four decades as one of America’s leading actresses, was quickly forgotten and only recently has received critical attention again.²⁰ The word popular itself became and continues to be an insult in certain circles, as if the achievement of a mass audience is somehow definitive proof of low-quality work. Charles Stratton’s Connecticut neighbor Samuel Clemens was one of the last who achieved both high cultural status and mass popularity, as the celebrity known to the world as Mark Twain.²¹ And even this seminal figure in American literature is sometimes scoffed at by the arbiters of high culture as a popular (and comedic) writer. With someone like Charles Stratton, so easily dismissed as a freak, it is no surprise that he is forgotten by even the most accommodating historians and critics.

It would be naïve to think that this sort of prejudice did not also play a part in his cultural erasure. Even the most open-minded chroniclers and critics often have trouble categorizing little people and their place in history, relying on terms like exploitation and misfortune even when those expressions are not appropriate. Or worse, little people are simply left out altogether to avoid any difficulties or questions for the writer or reader. Ironically, historical prejudice has been one way in which Tom Thumb has recently come back into the public eye. Some critics like Robert Bogdan have tried to position Charles’s story in freak show studies, using this categorical prejudice as a window into cultural attitudes. Bogdan’s analysis of general methods of shaping and marketing the distorted body is illuminating, but unfortunately cites a skewed opinion of Charles himself.²²

Situating the small comedian in a freak show setting is one way to rehabilitate him, but as disability scholar Michael Chemers points out in his book Staging Stigma:

If Tom Thumb was a freak, then the American freak show included the highest rank of melodramatic productions. If he was not a freak, then he was one of America’s most popular stage actors, welcome at the dinner table of the most august families in the nation, and in the house of the president himself. The label freak disintegrates when it touches Stratton, his popularity and influence as well as his artistry and his actions as a private citizen utterly discombobulate our notions of what a freak was, and what an actor was, if we artificially attempt to separate the two. It is a failure of historians who, caught up in misinformed notions of what the disabled body meant on stage and in society, have mistaken the evidence and robbed the disability community of a figure whose impact on American life included, but was not limited by his short stature.²³

Chemers views Charles through the lens of disability studies, and this could be a useful way to handle such a unique celebrity. Comedy studies, body culture, and presentational aesthetics might also be helpful in locating his significance. Whatever the merits or drawbacks of these approaches, they are a step forward in rehabilitating figures that have unjustly disappeared from historical scrutiny.

But there is substantial work to be done beforehand. As Levine would state, the debate over someone like Charles needs to be rooted not merely in the web of our immediate aesthetic and social predilections but in the matrix of history, which can allow us to perceive more clearly what shapes culture has assumed in the American past, which may in turn allow us to understand better both the possibilities and the effects of the types of cultural boundaries we embrace.²⁴ With his worldwide appeal and iconic status, he deserves inclusion in a history in which he played an integral part, whether or not his cultural moment has passed or whether critics of the day deem his celebrity status deserved or not. That is the first task, and the task of this book: to illuminate the full story of Charles Stratton the man, his life as a performer and traveler, playboy and comedian.

Echoes of that story have reverberated persistently but faintly during the last century, in Tom Thumb Weddings and in a smattering of children’s and young adult books. These books often draw on the extensive photographic record, and repeat the information in Barnum’s autobiography and other accessible sources. One of the first to do so was Grandpapa Pease’s Tom Thumb, which took the form of a long poem with colored line drawings, part of a Toy Books for Young People series along with Cinderella and Puss in Boots. The author switched the original English fable about a small man at King Arthur’s court and replaced it with Charles’s biography, turning him into a real Tom Thumb for children.

Later narratives would exaggerate Charles’s story more or less depending on author and intention, but all would focus on the fairy-tale aspect of his rise to fame and fortune. And who could blame them? There is a fantastical element to the story: the man in miniature who became one of the world’s most popular entertainers. When first reading the remarkable tale years ago, I was tempted to think the whole account one of Barnum’s humbugs. Perhaps the photographs had been faked, and stories of audiences with world leaders invented. But as Charles’s remarkable talents and life appeared in diary after diary, newspaper after newspaper, suddenly it became clear that he was no children’s story, but one of the great figures of the nineteenth century, marginalized by posterity.

Separating legend and fact is not easy when dealing with such a man. Sometimes, like so many celebrities before and after him, Charles disappears into his role, often becoming Tom Thumb completely. Who was he? An entertainer? An entrepreneur? A lover, maybe, who kissed more ladies than Don Juan? Was he an actor or a singer? A clown or a pioneer? Perhaps a yachtsman, a horse breeder, or a gentleman of leisure? Of course, he was all of these and more, containing multitudes as his contemporary Walt Whitman might have