The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb

by Melanie Benjamin

  “You’ll be the leading lady. But imagine headlining your own troupe! I’ve even picked out a name, the Lilliputian Opera Company, starring Mrs. General Tom Thumb. What do you think?”

  “I like it,” I said, nodding, turning it around in my head, waiting for it to click into place, to make sense—to get my heart racing again, wondering where all my train schedules were. Had I packed them away, like everything else? Oh, I certainly hoped not!

  “I like it,” I repeated, smiling up at him. “I like it a lot, Phineas.”

  “I knew you would, Vinnie,” he said, with a satisfied smile, as he puffed away on his cigar—just like a man. I got up then, pausing to rest my hand upon his shoulder, as I began to walk around the parlor, turning on the lights—just like a woman.

  For outside, the dusk was falling.

  And I knew we would talk well into the night.

  CODA

  From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 7, 1878

  Professor Edison, the inventor of the most marvelous instrument of modern times, has already hit upon a scheme in which millions seem to lurk, namely, the publication of a cheap phonographic library, by means of which a five hundred page novel can be sold in electrotype sheets to be adjusted to the phonograph. The instrument will then be adjusted and the novel will be read aloud to the listener by machinery. Fortunately this instrument has only just come into fashion, otherwise we should never have come into possession of that exquisite mine of Oriental fancy the Arabian Nights.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I first encountered Lavinia Warren Stratton in the pages of one of the masterpieces of historical fiction, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. She appeared, briefly and near the end of her life, in a scene with Harry Houdini.

  She didn’t make much of an impression on me then. However, a few months later I was searching for the subject for my next novel, noodling around on the Internet, reading books, histories, lists of notable people—anything that might help me find that one person whose story I just had to tell. On one list, the name “Lavinia Warren Stratton” leapt out at me; I remembered her from Doctorow’s novel, did a basic search on her name, and was immediately entranced.

  Lavinia—known as Vinnie—was born on October 31, 1841, in Middleborough, Massachusetts, to a family of good standing. All of her siblings, as well as her parents, were normal-size, except for her younger sister, Huldah, called Minnie. Both Minnie and Vinnie had a form of proportionate dwarfism, probably caused by a pituitary disorder; had she been born in more modern times, she would have been given human growth hormones. But at the time, she—and her future husband, Charles Stratton (or General Tom Thumb, as he was more widely known)—were highly prized “curiosities” in an America that was just beginning to be linked. With the advent of the railroad, steamships, photography, and the modern press, people could now experience a world outside their own small villages; most people had never seen, nor really ever heard of, little people. And the fact that Vinnie and Charles and Minnie were “perfectly formed people in miniature” made them palatable and interesting to the public; those who had disproportionate dwarfism were, tragically, considered distasteful, and often used in circuses and sideshows to depict savages or idiots.

  Vinnie had a very loving and normal childhood, and was engaged as a schoolteacher in her town. However, a Colonel Wood—purported to be a cousin, although that was never proven—showed up at her door one day with an invitation to appear on his “floating palace of curiosities” out west. To the great shock of her pious New England family, Vinnie leapt at the chance. In her autobiographical writings, she admits to a desire to travel, to see things, to experience a wider world than she could in New England.

  She doesn’t admit that her fate, were she to remain at home, would likely be a dismal one. A woman in mid-nineteenth-century America had few options; either she married, or she remained dependent upon her relatives for the rest of her life. She could not have a career (beyond that of modest schoolmarm) of her own. It’s unlikely Vinnie or her family ever thought, given her size, that she would marry. However, after her cousin’s visit she had another option. She could leave Middleborough; she could travel, she could have a career, and she could do this as a single woman precisely because of her size. For a man named P.T. Barnum had just introduced the public to General Tom Thumb; suddenly there was great interest in the “curiosities” of the world, and Vinnie was only too quick to take advantage of this opportunity.

  After spending almost three years upon the Mississippi—her travels were interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War—Vinnie returned home to Middleborough. A year or so passed before, somehow, P. T. Barnum “heard” of her, and sent an agent to interview her. Her parents were skeptical; they did not wish to have their daughter caught up in any of Barnum’s infamous “humbugs.” But somehow, Vinnie and Barnum persuaded her parents to let her go, and it was only a matter of weeks before Vinnie was capturing the hearts of the New York press with her stately levees; she was heralded by all as the “Little Queen of Beauty.”

  It made sense—not only to Barnum but probably to Vinnie herself—that the Little Queen of Beauty should marry a King, and the perfect candidate happened to be close at hand. Charles Stratton—Barnum’s great discovery and greater friend—made her acquaintance; Barnum wasted no time in fanning the flames of love and most important, the press, and in February of 1863, the two were married.

  Their marriage was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the wedding between Prince Charles and Lady Diana; every paper in the land covered it, relegating the Civil War, for a few days at least, to the back pages. From that point on, Vinnie and Charles, along with her sister Minnie and another little person, Commodore Nutt, performed as the most famous quartet in the world. They traveled the globe; they met Brigham Young, every president in the White House, Queen Victoria; they were among the first passengers on the new Union Pacific railroad linking the country and among the very first Americans of any size to travel to the new colony of Australia.

  In 1878, Vinnie’s beloved sister Minnie died in childbirth. Commodore Nutt had already retired from their troupe, and suddenly the most famous quartet in the world stumbled upon hard times. Vinnie and Charles continued to perform, but tastes were changing; the country was more sophisticated, and their venues were becoming smaller. Hard-up financially—for they had believed they had to live the life their society friends could more easily afford—they even traveled with Barnum’s great circus for a season, performing as part of the sideshow.

  In 1883, Vinnie and Charles were touring once more, staying at the Newhall House in Milwaukee when that hotel caught fire, resulting in one of the worst hotel tragedies in history; Charles apparently never recovered from the shock of that experience and died only six months later. Retreating to her childhood home, her finances in ruin, Lavinia was on the verge of retiring when Barnum encouraged her to keep going, to keep appearing before the public.

  Of course, she did. In 1885 she remarried—to another little person, Count Primo Magri of Italy—and formed the Lilliputian Opera Company. She continued to tour, even appearing in vaudeville and early silent pictures; ever short of funds, the couple opened up a roadside stand near their home called “Primo’s Pastime,” where they entertained anyone who would stop and buy a souvenir. They also spent a sad couple of summers as part of the “Midget City, Dreamland” exhibit at Coney Island.

  In researching Lavinia’s life, the challenge was always to separate the humbug from the truth. P. T. Barnum looms large over everything written about her. Many articles and even a book or two, written not only at the time but much later, appear to accept as fact everything that Barnum ever put forth, including the blatant falsehood that Vinnie and Charles were the parents of a daughter who died in infancy.

  Even Lavinia’s own writings left much to the imagination. She had hopes of publishing an autobiography in her lifetime, but didn’t; several incomplete chapters were discovered after her death, however, and edited and published by A.
H. Saxon in 1979. She also published a couple of essays in the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine in 1906 that purported to be part of her autobiography. But there is so much missing from all of these pages! She never mentions details of the death of her sister, for instance. She doesn’t discuss the baby hoax. She doesn’t discuss much of anything, actually; her writings are really a rather uninspiring travelogue, listing the places she traveled and the people she met. And she freely borrows from Sylvester Bleeker’s published account of their world tour.

  She also doesn’t discuss her feelings. She never shares any disappointments, any frustrations about her size, her physical discomforts. She presents a determined, sunny face always. You have to read very carefully to find the disappointments and frustrations.

  For example, she gives her time with Barnum’s circus in 1881 only a couple of paragraphs and concludes by saying, “It was not to our taste.” Similarly, while writing about some of the dangers of her life upon the river with Colonel Wood, she admits, “It cannot be denied that these occurrances (sic) were a little disquieting.”

  And she makes no mention of her “child,” the humbug she and Barnum perpetuated concerning a baby Thumb. Accounts vary as to whether Lavinia was barren, or she chose not to have children. I have to think that, as intelligent as she was, she was very aware of the dangers to one her size. And when Minnie became pregnant, apparently Barnum’s doctors tried to convince her to have an abortion, which she refused. So obviously, while press accounts of Minnie’s death mention her “fairy child,” Vinnie was only too aware of the risks.

  How she felt, then, having deceived the public into rejoicing over the “birth,” and then mourning the “death,” of her own child can only be imagined; likewise, the guilt and grief she must have felt in watching her own sister die in childbirth. She discussed the hoax once in public, in an interview given to Billboard magazine in 1901, explaining the procedure of obtaining “English babies in England, German babies in Germany.” But she also takes pains to say that “Mr. Barnum was a great man.”

  As I researched Lavinia’s history, her great intelligence and drive were the characteristics that spoke to me. There seemed to be only one other person in her life who even came close to matching those characteristics, and that person was, of course, P. T. Barnum himself.

  Lavinia’s story is so big—there were times when I feared turning her into a nineteenth-century version of Woody Allen’s Zelig—that it threatened to get away from me at times. Yet I found that whenever I turned back to Barnum, a story came into focus. I believe that every novel is either a mystery, a tragedy, or a love story—some are all three—and it became clear to me that this is a love story. An unusual love story; an affair of the mind rather than the body. P. T. Barnum was always the light she was seeking; whether, as at first, he was just the means to bring her to a wider audience and take her away from the dangers of working with shadier characters or, ultimately, the companion, the true partner, she could never find in Charles Stratton or even her beloved sister Minnie.

  I chose to end my novel, then, a good forty years before Vinnie’s death. To me, the story had to end with Barnum; he was the great love of her life, I came to believe, and everything she did began and ended with him. Even in her own autobiographical chapters, Lavinia only devotes four pages to her life after the death of Charles Stratton.

  Did Vinnie marry Charles Stratton only for the fame she had to know it would bring her? Most accounts record their marriage as a happy one. Yet he does not loom over her life in the way that Barnum does. It is difficult to imagine that Vinnie wasn’t aware of the enormous fame that would result in marrying a fellow little person—the most famous little person in the world, in fact. The novelty of the perfect little couple in miniature was too much to pass up. Most accounts also record Charles Stratton as being somewhat of an innocent, an intellectual weakling—although a very genial man, one who would not have caused Vinnie any grief. He also would not have excited her mind in the way someone like P. T. Barnum would have.

  Barnum died in 1891; somewhat like another larger-than-life character, Tom Sawyer, he arranged to have his obituary run a few days prior to his death so that he could read it. His last words were, “How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?”

  Lavinia died on November 25, 1919; she was buried next to her first husband in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Despite her second marriage, she signed her name, until the end of her life, as “Mrs. General Tom Thumb.”

  Yet when she was asked, after Charles Stratton’s death, if she was preparing his biography, she answered no. However, she assured the questioner, she was confident that “My own autobiography I hope to have published and put out to the public before long.”

  In some way, I hope I have fulfilled that ambition; I can’t help but think Vinnie would be pleased to see her name in print, once more.

  To Dennis, without whom

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One of the delights of telling Vinnie’s story was learning not only about her life and that of P. T. Barnum, but also about a colorful, exciting period in our nation’s history. Some of the most helpful books I read were The Lives of Dwarfs by Betty M. Adelson; The Life of P. T. Barnum by P. T. Barnum; P. T. Barnum, the Legend and the Man by A. H. Saxon; Freak Show by Robert Bogdan; Barnum Presents General Tom Thumb by Alice Curtis Desmond; General Tom Thumb’s Three Years Tour Around the World by Sylvester Bleeker; and, of course, The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb (Some of My Life Experiences) by Countess M. Lavinia Magri, formerly Mrs. General Tom Thumb, with the assistance of Sylvester Bleeker, edited by A. H. Saxon.

  There is a delightful website called The Lost Museum, which reconstructs Barnum’s American Museum in an interactive fashion, and also provides much history about Barnum and his various performers: www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu/intro.html. Another website, The Disability History Museum (www.disabilitymuseum.org), introduced me to Lavinia Stratton’s autobiographical essays published in the New York Tribune Sunday Magazine in 1906.

  Two sites were very helpful in providing color commentary on the period: www.sonofthesouth.net is a wonderful resource for Harper’s Weekly magazines of the Civil War period, and Cornell University Library’s “Making of America” website is a treasure trove of nineteenth-century periodicals: dlxs2.library.cornell.edu/m/moa/.

  I am indebted, as always, to Laura Langlie for her insight, support, and savvy. Thanks, of course, to everyone at Random House: Kate Miciak, my wonderful editor; Gina Centrello, Libby McGuire, Jane von Mehren; Susan Corcoran and the tireless publicity team; Sanyu Dillon and the amazing marketing team; Robbin Schiff for her brilliant cover art; and Denise Cronin, Rachel Kind, and Donna Duverglas. Much gratitude to Randall Klein for answering my endless questions, and Loyale Coles.

  And as always, I could not have done this without the support of my family, especially Dennis, Alec, and Ben Hauser.

  A CONVERSATION WITH MELANIE BENJAMIN

  Q: Tell us about how you first discovered Vinnie.

  I first heard about her—or, rather, read about her—in the pages of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. She had a brief scene with Harry Houdini, a major character in the book. She was feisty, even in that!

  Fast forward and I’m halfway through my next book for Random House when I realize that I can’t finish it. It just wasn’t interesting to me, and, of course, how can an author then expect the reader to be interested? But I knew that before I told my wonderful editor I couldn’t finish, I needed to have a couple of preliminary chapters of something else. So I did what I always do—I spent long hours reading histories and timelines, Googling, anything that might spur my interest. This involves looking through a lot of lists, too. I knew the era about which I wanted to write, and I also knew that this time I wanted to write an American story (since Alice I Have Been was set in England). On one of these lists, the name “Lavinia Warren Stratton—AKA Mrs. Tom Thumb” came up, and I remembered that scene in Ragtime. So I did a quick Google search on her name, and was immedi
ately entranced by her story.

  Q: Were you a fan of the circus as a child, or are you now?

  Not really as a child, but, yes, now I enjoy the pageantry. I am really interested in the performers, though—I always find myself wondering how they chose this life and why, and what it’s really like.

  Q: Tell us a little about the research you did on Vinnie: Where and what were your primary sources? What did you find most provocative about Vinnie’s life as you researched the novel? What surprised you the most? What still resonates with you?

  The primary source was her unedited, loosely written autobiographical notes, which were compiled and published in 1979 by a man named A. H. Saxon. Also a book called General Tom Thumb and His Lady, which is based mainly on their lives as advertised by P. T. Barnum—in other words, it’s inaccurate, but important in understanding the myth of their public lives. Also Barnum Presents: General Tom Thumb by Alice Curtis Desmond—again, largely a retelling of Barnum’s version of their lives. And I read several biographies of Barnum himself, as well as Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show.

  But the most important research was Vinnie’s own writings, in her autobiographical sketches. And the most provocative thing, to me, was what she left unsaid. Her voice is so relentlessly cheerful and optimistic—and fiercely ladylike—but she never discusses the heartbreak, the disappointment, the frustration she must have felt so often in her life. She lived in a time when one popular theory equated a person’s intelligence to the size of his head. So she had to have encountered those who thought she was stupid or slow. Plus she faced daunting physical limitations in an era of crude train travel, no elevators, etc. Her personal heartbreaks—and she had them—also were so determinedly glossed over.