by Yunte Huang
The twins arrived back in New York on March 7. They had left the United States as two eighteen-year-old greenhorns, little known to the world. Fifteen months later, after an extended, profitable tour in Great Britain, they were now famous. Besides a vaunted reputation, they had also gained forty pounds, making their total weight 240 pounds, an increase that was facetiously ascribed by a newspaper reporter to “their eating so much of the roast beef of old England.” Their height was now 5 feet 2 inches.6
A week after their return, on March 15, while the nine Supreme Court justices were still deliberating the fate of millions of Native Americans after William Wirt’s passionate plea on the previous day in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the twins were put on display again in New York City. Their success in England had served to stimulate further the curiosity of the American public. The ex-mayor and tireless diarist Philip Hone, who had missed the twins last time, eagerly went to the show on the opening day. That night, when he retired back to his Park Place mansion after a feast of eyes, he penned an elaborate entry in his journal:
March 15.—Went this morning to see the Siamese boys, who returned last week from England. I did not see them when they were exhibited formerly in this city. This astonishing freak of nature is exceedingly interesting, and the sight of it is not disagreeable, as I expected to find it. They are now nearly twenty years old, kind, good-tempered, and playful; their limbs are well proportioned and strong, but their faces are devoid of intelligence, and have that stupid expression which is characteristic of the natives of the East. They are united by a strong ligament of flesh or gristle, without bone, about three inches in breadth and five in length. Their movements are, of course, simultaneous. They walk, sit down, play, eat and drink, and perform all the functions of nature in unison; their dispositions and their very thoughts are alike; when one is sick the other partakes of his illness, and the stroke of death will, no doubt, lay them both in the same grave; and yet their bodies, heads, and limbs are all perfect and distinct. They speak English tolerably well, and appear fond of talking.7
His condescension and racism notwithstanding, Hone shared with his contemporaries a guarded fascination with the exotic twins. In a few years, he would become an enthusiast of P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions, being one of the first to visit the Joice Heth show and subsequently a frequenter to almost anything the Prince of Humbugs would care to put on display. In 1840, Hone would spend a few days in Philadelphia, visiting the famous Chinese Museum, mesmerized by what he described in his diary as “an immense collection of curious things collected by a Mr. Dunn during a residence of twenty years in China.”8 Seeing the twins, Hone had expected to experience revulsion, yet he felt a freakish fascination.
We do not know whether Edgar Allan Poe, drenched in sorrow at drinking holes in the city after his recent court martial and dismissal from West Point, visited the twins on Broadway. Newspapers carried daily reports and advertisements about the exhibition; handbills and posters were plastered all over the city. Judging by the nature of Poe’s literary work, which shows a clear obsession with twins and all forms of human abnormality, it is not unreasonable to assume that Poe would have enjoyed watching the conjoined twins and appreciated their embodiment of the aesthetics of the grotesque. In Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick and Madeline, two residents in that house of doom and gloom, were twins. Not only did they bear a striking resemblance, but also “sympathies of a scarcely intelligent nature had always existed between them.” When one died, the other quickly dissipated. The story ends with the sister’s spectral return, taking her brother away to the land of Nevermore: “with a low moaning cry, [she] fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” In “Hop-Frog,” the eponymous dwarf-cripple teamed up with Trippetta, a young female midget, and exacted revenge on the king and his seven councilors who had abused and mocked them. Hop-Frog tricked the king and his men into disguising themselves as ourang-outangs with tar and feathers, hanged them all from a chandelier, and burned them into “a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass.” In this dark tale of vengeance, Poe clearly identified with the freaks, the outwardly subhuman. “There is no exquisite beauty,” Poe said, echoing Francis Bacon, “without some strangeness in the proportion.” The connoisseur of the grotesque would certainly have appreciated the Siamese Twins.9
The first publication about Chang and Eng by a major writer, however, did not come from Poe but rather from Edward Bulwer Lytton, lionized in the British and American literary worlds at the time.
14
A Satirical Tale
A flamboyant dandy virtually forgotten by history, Edward Bulwer Lytton was once a towering figure in British letters. Before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 turned public tastes against almost everything Victorian, the sales of Lord Lytton’s books had rivaled those of his friend Charles Dickens. Born in 1803 at No. 31 Baker Street in London, just a few doors down the street from the fictional residence of the future Sherlock Holmes, Lytton was educated at Cambridge. Supported by his heiress mother’s allowance, he had lived a playboy’s life of extravagance and notoriety before storming into the London literary scene with the 1828 publication of his novel Pelham, or the Adventures of a Gentleman. Featuring a hero who was the epitome of wit and dandyism, Pelham was a huge commercial smash, enabling Lytton to receive enormous sums in advance for his future books. Riding the wave of success, Lytton went on to write a book of verse about the exotic sensation that was the rage of London, the Siamese boys.1
Prior to the publication of Lytton’s book, Chang and Eng, though the talk of the town everywhere they went, had inspired only bits of doggerel as ephemeral as the reputation of their obscure authors, such as this one that had appeared in the Berkshire Chronicle in 1829:
My yellow friends! and are you come,
As some have done before,
To show the sign of “two to one,”
And hang it o’er your door?
How do you mean your debt to pay?
Will one discharge the other’s?
Or shall you work by subterfuge,
And say, “Ah, that’s my brother’s”?2
Published in England in January 1831, just as Chang and Eng were leaving the country, Lytton’s new work, The Siamese Twins: A Satirical Tale of the Times with Other Poems, would become the first book-length portrayal. In the ensuing decades and even centuries, the incredible story of Chang and Eng would spawn countless representations—fictional, biographical, satirical, scholarly, dramatic, operatic, and cinematic. It is a cultural tradition set in motion by Lytton as a representative man of Victorian letters, whose poetic wit filled every page of his light-footed narrative verse.
Running more than 250 pages, The Siamese Twins took much liberty with facts and tailored them to fit a Molière-like romantic comedy full of farce and satire. For comic and metrical effects, Lytton changed the twins’ names to Chang and Ching, and their father’s to Fiam to rhyme with Siam. To counterbalance fictionalization, Lytton drew heavily on the canon of British travel narratives for ethnographic details and stereotypes, such as the flat noses and blackened teeth of the Siamese. The following portrait of Fiam was hardly flattering:
Our Fiam was a handsome fellow,
His nose was flat, his skin was yellow;
Tho’ black his locks, with truth you’d swear
His teeth were blacker than his hair.3
References to the Finlayson Mission, the Crawfurd account, and other travel journals littered the footnotes in this book of light verse. Lytton recast Robert Hunter as a Mr. Hodges, “the member of a mission, / To probe the Siam trade’s condition.” Hodges was so shocked by his first sight of the conjoined twins that he passed out:
He lay so flat, he lay so still,
He seem’d beyond all farther ill.
They pinch’d his side, they shook his head
,
And then they cried, “The man is dead!”
Regaining consciousness, Hodges, like Hunter, immediately saw a business opportunity. The twins were subsequently brought to England. After undergoing an examination by the eminent doctor Sir Astley Cooper, as they did in real life, they were put on display and became a sensation:
From ten to five o’clock each day,
There thronged to see them such a bevy,
Such cabs and chariots blocked the way,
The crowd was like a new King’s levée.
Money flowed into Hodges’s pocket. But the youthful twins resented being treated like animals by their owner and seen as freaks by the audience, as Chang put it to Ching:
How hard a thing it is to be
Teased, worried, questioned, pulled about,
Stared at and quizzed by every lout,
And give a right to all the town
To laugh at us for half-a-crown.
In response, Ching suggested a radical change to their predicament:
Tomorrow, ’gad, we’ll make them all dumb
By cutting this confounded thraldom.
We’ll claim old Hodges’s account,
Keep house upon our share’s amount.
It is a bold idea that was never put into practice in the fictional narrative by Lytton, but it strangely foreshadowed what was to come in the real life of the Siamese Twins. At times, fiction makes a claim on reality and conjures it into being.
Chang, the dandy of the two, fell in love with Hodges’s daughter Mary, and he also attracted the interest of some society ladies who took a fancy to his exoticism. But his conjoined state presented quite a dilemma for romance. When a Lady Gower invited Chang to a rendezvous, she wondered if “he would not bring / His vulgar brother, Mr. Ching”—an impossible request, of course, but juicy fodder for Lytton’s satire.
Absurdities, as in a Sheridan comedy, abounded. The twins got into a fistfight with a fellow at a bar one night and were arrested by a Peeler. The next morning, Ching took all the blame in court and made a passionate plea to exonerate his twin brother, a tactful maneuver actually adopted by Chang and Eng whenever they had a run-in with the law:
But he—my brother—no offence
Committed; you must let him hence!
Take me to prison, if you please,
But first this gentleman release.
The bond might save them from the wrath of the law, but it proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to Chang’s pursuit of love. In the depths of melancholy and depression, Chang carried a knife into their room. But he did not have the courage to do the unthinkable. Sympathetic to his painful plight, Mary went to Chang’s assistance. Like the biblical Eve tempting Adam with the forbidden fruit, she slipped opium into the twins’ wine cups. When the twins fell under the influence of the drug, a surgeon entered the room and severed their tie forever.
Their rude awakening the next morning was not their separation, however, but the horrific truth Mary revealed—that she did not love Chang and that she was already engaged to someone else. While Ching would never regain his former self in spirit, let alone in body, Chang paid the ultimate price for unrequited love, falling victim to a seductive plot. Brokenhearted, he disappeared from London, wandered around the world, and was never heard from again. This was, as the satirical narrator summarized the moral of the tale, “what Liberty hath cost.”
The handful of scholars who have studied the rise and fall of Lytton’s literary career agree that The Siamese Twins possesses an autobiographical relevance to the contradictions that plagued this enigmatic Victorian man of letters: Lytton was deeply tied to his mother and to his wife, but he also desperately and repeatedly tried to sever those bonds. As they would do for future generations of writers ranging from Herman Melville and Mark Twain in the nineteenth century to Mark Slouka and Darin Strauss in the twenty-first century, the Siamese boys gave Lytton perfect raw material to work out his own issues or to fathom the mystery of the human bond, physical or metaphysical.
Published around the time of Chang and Eng’s departure from England in January 1831, Lytton’s book literally chased its eponymous protagonists across the Atlantic. It hit American bookstands in March, just in time for the opening of the twins’ exhibition in New York. Newspapers reprinted long excerpts of the book, along with rave reviews. “As a whole,” opined one reviewer, The Siamese Twins was “an excellent satirical poem.” Even though this reviewer for the Connecticut Mirror found fault with the “Don Juan abruptness” with which Lytton closed lines and reversed sentences, he agreed with the editor of the Philadelphia Gazette in maintaining that “we regard [Lytton’s] works, flowing as they have freshly and spontaneously forth, with something akin to the feelings of beholding the sorceries of a magician. The human heart, with all its countless springs of love, avarice, and ambition, is to him, like the leaves of an open book.”4
Many of these reviews and reprints appeared in the newspapers that closely followed the movements of the Siamese Twins or carried advertisements for their shows. A popular book-length treatment of their story, albeit fictional, by a major author, went a long way toward cementing the twins’ position in the Anglo-American imagination. Pretty soon, the fictional plot of Lytton’s book became entangled with journalistic reports on the twins, as evidenced by this short article in the Eastern Argus Semi-Weekly: “The Siamese Twins have lately, each of them, drawn a prize in a lottery in Philadelphia. These young fellows will, by and by, be enabled to cut a splash in society—be the ‘observed of all observers’—and possibly realize some of the scenes written down for them by Bulwer [Lytton] in his late poem. Young, charming and rich! They may make many a fair damsel’s heart to palpitate.”5
No verisimilitude, however, could prepare us for the dramatic turns that the conjoined life of Chang and Eng would take. Reality sometimes eclipses the wildest imagination.
15
The Lynnfield Battle
The winter of 1831 was brutal, the worst in many years. Big snowstorms devastated the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to Maine. New York City was repeatedly buried under mountains of snow that heaped up to several feet. Violent northeaster gales hurled snowdrifts in all directions and drove in tides so high that wharves were overtopped and waterfront cellars were flooded. Mail delivery was disrupted. Sleds, sleighs, and horses had to be employed day and night to clean up the snow on the streets.
While the city was busy battling the weather on the night of March 19, an English shoemaker named Edward Smith carried a duplicate set of keys, walked into the City Bank of New York (the present-day Citibank) on Wall Street, and absconded with $245,000 in banknotes and Spanish doubloons. This was the first recorded bank heist in the United States. Smith, a denizen of the Lower East Side, was quickly nabbed, convicted of the crime, and sentenced to five years in Sing Sing.
Blizzards might provide a convenient cover for bank heists, but they were bad for showbiz. As James Hale wrote on March 16, 1831, to Susan Coffin, who had returned home to Newburyport, the receipts for the first two days of the twins’ exhibition came to only $55. “I hope to do better every day,” Hale wrote, trying to sound upbeat.1 But his hope was dashed when another storm hit the wider area, greatly diminishing traffic. Hale wrote to Mrs. Coffin again two weeks later: “The weather has been very stormy here . . . the walking is bad—We have not had forty ladies since we opened—they you know are our best customers, if we can get them—Our receipts have averaged but $20 per day—and two nights at the Theatre paid $50 per night amounting in all—15 days to 425 dollars.”2
A rare ray of sunshine arrived in the midst of the dreary weather and business doldrums. Chang and Eng received news from their mother, Nok. By now they had been away from Siam for almost two years. Even though they enjoyed their new lives in the West, homesickness for the two young men was palpable. The welcome messenger who delivered the news, along with a letter from their mother, was one Mr. Holyoke. As Hale described, “Mr. Holyoke came on Monday
and gave Chang Eng news from their mother, also a letter from her which has been translated to them. They are now quite easy.”3 We do not know the contents of the letter, or whether it was written in Siamese or Chinese or English. Anyway, through layers of intermediaries, they could hear their mother’s words, like endearing echoes. It reminded them of their audience with the king a few years earlier, when words were whispered back and forth at the court through interpreters. It brought back memories of the hissing sound of raindrops falling on palm leaves, and the lazy lapping of waves on the muddy banks of the Meklong. For a moment, they had a sudden urge to go home. But they were not free, not yet their own men, according to the contract they had signed with Abel Coffin.
Feeling that they had tapped out the New York market and needing to change their locale, the small troupe—Hale, the twins, and a man named Tom Dwyer, who drove the buggy—decided to brave the weather and hit the road. What followed was a series of extended stays and whistle-stop visits in the Northeast, ranging from big cities to tiny hamlets, basically anywhere they could set up a show. A cross-check of Hale’s correspondence and newspaper reports gives us a glimpse into their taxing itinerary.
They reprised their visit to Philadelphia for three weeks in April, again using the Masonic Hall as their base. Hale was able to send Mrs. Coffin only $150 in receipts, partly due to the fact that the twins had been under the weather for a while. As Hale told Mrs. Coffin in a letter dated April 23, “Chang Eng have been very ill—a touch of the liver complaint—they are now heartier than ever—they were confined to the bed 4 days & under the Doctor’s hands.”4