October 24: “I only took $112 last night—lost some $30, probably by letting General go to [Niblo’s]. Sefton had a jam and General killed ’em dead.”
October 31: “Next week Tommy goes to Baltimore or Philadelphia.”
November 15: “My business is shocking—last week took but $428 [in contrast to a $1,240.40 week when Tom Thumb was at the museum in October]. What about the Albino Lady?”13
But for all the attention Tom Thumb received in the private letters to Kimball as the year went by, Barnum summarized 1843 in a single sentence in both versions of his autobiography and skipped ahead to early 1844, when he set sail for England with the three Strattons. Leave it, then, to the New York Herald, which on December 1, 1843, summed up the success of Tom Thumb’s first full year in Barnum’s employ:
He has been visited by nearly half a million persons in America, and has been feted by many families of the first distinction. He is so graceful, so pert, so intelligent, and withal, so wonderfully diminutive, that all who see him are charmed with him at once, and his visits to all our cities, have necessarily been so many signal triumphs.14
The piece was so glowing that Barnum might have written it himself, even if it appeared in what was otherwise a news column under the heading “Theatrical.” One column over in the same issue, an obvious advertisement began, “ THE SPLENDID TRIUMPH OF THE AMERI-/can Museum, is owing entirely to the tact and talent displayed in the management.” It went on to promise, “To-morrow will be a great holiday there, for ladies, families, schools, &c. General Tom Thumb will amuse thousands of little ones with his facetious songs, dances, jokes, &c.” Another hint that the first item was either written by Barnum or in close collaboration with him was its expression of the showman’s hopes and plans for the show’s upcoming European trip: “[Tom Thumb] will undoubtedly visit Queen Victoria and be received with marked attention by all the nobility in Europe.” The item then listed the cities Tom would visit and reiterated, “He will also call upon the Queen at Buckingham Palace.” The repetition suggests that Barnum was making a resolution rather than announcing a firm engagement, for nobody at the palace had yet been informed of the visit.
* * *
BARNUM EAGERLY MADE THE MOST of Tom Thumb’s imminent departure. He created an advertising campaign in the New York papers warning that the opportunity to see the little man before he slipped away was itself slipping away. Barnum would advertise a departure date and then come up with an excuse for why Tom Thumb was still around—his own variation on the going-out-of-business-sale stratagem. Early in January the date of his sailing was sometimes left vague but the ads made it sound alarmingly soon (“A FEW DAYS LONGER!”), but as the month wore on, the departure was fixed on January 16, when Tom would sail on the new packet ship Yorkshire, bound for Liverpool. Performances were promised up to the final hour. One advertisement in the Tribune said an appearance at 11 a.m. would be followed, “if the wind proves fair,” by a noon sailing. As Barnum’s commercial luck would have it, the wind did not prove fair, blowing as it was from the east, and so several more last-minute performances were made possible before the ship did finally sail on January 18. The New York correspondent for the National Intelligencer in Washington poked fun at Barnum’s blitz, writing, “His Littleness sailed this morning for England—‘or so they say,’ ” and went on to speculate, “Possibly, MRBARNUM has ‘a contrary wind’ in reserve, and he may be ‘unavoidably detained’ another week.”15
But on that Wednesday a favorable fifteen-knot wind from the northwest blew in, and late in the morning Tom Thumb, dressed in military regalia, left the museum in an open carriage. He was preceded by the American Museum house band, which Barnum joked “kindly volunteered” to accompany him. Boys followed the carriage down Fulton Street, and ladies waved white handkerchiefs from the windows of buildings he passed, Tom all the while doffing his hat and taking bows. When the barouche arrived at the wharf, a thousand people were waiting. One reporter wrote, “The vessels in the neighborhood swarmed with these who had gathered for the purpose of seeing the General off.”
Once he boarded the ship, Tom was placed atop its capstan, where he struck Napoleonic poses and waved to the crowd. Barnum, the Strattons, a servant, a tutor for Tom named George Ciprico, and the museum’s naturalist, Emile Guillaudeu—along with a contingent of Barnum’s friends and eight other passengers—all boarded the ship. At 11:30 a.m. two steamers towed it away from its moorings and through the harbor. The museum’s City Brass Band, as Barnum had dubbed it, played aboard one of the towing vessels.16
A newspaper reported that some 3,200 people had seen Tom Thumb at the museum the day before, but in spite of this bonanza, Barnum confessed to shipboard feelings that were not typical of him: “What with the depression of spirits I felt on leaving family, friends and home, and the dread of sea-sickness, I was in what we Yankees call ‘a considerable of a stew.’ ” Still, he was engrossed by the action going on around him:
The deck was covered with ropes, blocks, and cables; sailors were running in all directions; the pilot, a gruff looking chap with a high florid complexion, was giving orders in language that was Greek to me. . . . I became utterly confused. I was out of my element—I had got beyond my depth.17
It took the steamships two hours to tow the Yorkshire through the Narrows and out to Sandy Hook, at which time one of the vessels sounded a bell signaling Barnum’s friends to board for the journey back to lower Manhattan. Barnum recalled, “That moment my usually high spirits fell below zero. As I successively grasped for the last time the hand of each friend as he passed to the steamboat, I could hardly restrain a tear.” The band started to play from the deck of the steamer. When Barnum recognized the familiar notes of “Home, Sweet Home,” “the tears then flowed thick and fast.” His party stood on the quarterdeck, handkerchiefs swirling, and watched as the other steamer chugged off into the distance. “When the strains of ‘Yankee Doodle’ floated over the waters,” Barnum wrote, “we all give three hearty cheers, and wave our hats, in which even the sailors join, and I care not to acknowledge that I wept freely, overpowered as I was with mingled feelings of joy and regret.” Barnum concluded the scene by reporting that the gruff and florid harbor pilot boarded the second steamer at two o’clock, “and thus was broken the last visible living link that bound us to our country.”18
Barnum described this scene three times, first in a letter written in England for the New York Atlas, then in the 1855 edition of his autobiography, and again in the 1869 edition. Each version is slightly different from the others, but in all of them his emotion seems genuine, and in all of them he contrasted his flowing tears with his deserved reputation for “high spirits,” a “natural bias . . . to merriment.” In the two versions of the autobiography, he protested that he was as given to “seasons of loneliness and even sadness” as the next person, but that his Christian faith pulled him through. He went so far as to say, “In all my journeys as ‘a showman,’ the Bible has been my companion, and I have repeatedly read it attentively, from beginning to end.” The strong meaning he packed into this moment owes something to the growing importance that faith would have in his life as he grew older. However, even as he wrote the Atlas letter, which he began a half hour after docking in Liverpool, he saw the departure and the deep emotions it stirred up in him as a significant moment in his life.19
All those tears, that mixture of “joy and regret,” suggest that he was honestly sorry to be leaving his wife, children, and members of his broader family, his many friends, and the comfortable home and work life he had built for himself in just two years. In telling this story of leaving America, he reported that he had now paid off all his debts for the Museum and that he had also bought out the rival Peale’s Museum and created “a handsome surplus in the treasury.” He now felt confident in his success and believed that his business “had long ceased to be an experiment” and was now in “perfect running order.” The joy expressed in his tears reflected the side of Barnum’s pe
rsonality that contrasted with his need and love for domesticity—for all those things drifting away with the bleating brass band. He had realized his ambitions in an amazingly short period of time.20
But to his mind, a business in perfect running order no longer needed him. He was now, in effect, starting over. The challenge was not whether Tom Thumb would make him money in a new place; the challenge was the new place itself, a place that had no notion of who P. T. Barnum was. While he knew the language, everything else about the coming experience would be an experiment in whether what he had learned at home would work abroad, and if not, whether he had the wit to adapt. We know he set his sights on meeting the queen in Buckingham Palace, but he would also travel the length and width of the island in an attempt to win over Victoria’s subjects. Whether or not he would succeed in the land of his forebears would be a test for Barnum of his own worth, of how far he had come and how far he might yet go.
SIX
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* * *
THE QUEEN
On a Monday morning, February 5, the snowy mountaintops of Wales came into view, and the Yorkshire slipped around the island of Anglesey and into the mouth of the Mersey. The ship docked in Liverpool, where a large crowd had gathered to see Tom Thumb disembark. But Barnum chose not to expose the little man to the public yet, and when Cynthia Stratton carried her son down the gangplank like a baby in her arms, as Barnum had asked her to do, the crowd did not notice them. Barnum’s party and their luggage proceeded the few blocks to the domed, Greek-columned Customs House, where money was efficiently extracted from the sea-weary Yankees. Then it was on to the Georgian-style Royal Waterloo Hotel—“the best in the city,” Barnum called it—where the porters showed more English efficiency by parting him from his half-crown coins. Feeling out of place and thoroughly fleeced, Barnum and company went to the hotel dining room, where “we washed down our indignation with a bottle of port” and dined on roast beef and “fried soles and shrimp sauce.”1
That night, another bout of homesickness overtook him. Realizing that he was “a stranger in a strange land,” he admitted to “a solitary hearty crying-spell.” But his shore legs soon returned, and he was back to business. His intention had been to send letters of introduction to Buckingham Palace and go there with Tom Thumb immediately to set up “head-quarters.” This plan went from highly improbable to impossible when Barnum learned that the royal family would “not permit the approach of entertainments” because it was officially mourning the death of Prince Albert’s father, Ernest I, who had passed away in Germany on January 29.2
Undaunted, Barnum hired a hall in Liverpool and offered his Lilliputian prodigy to the Liverpudlian public for a short run. His advertisements in the city papers announced, “TOM THUMB ARRIVED!” and went on to make more profligate use of capital letters and exclamation points, including the noteworthy claim that “TOM THUMB, Jun., was visited in America by more than HALF A MILLION of Ladies and Gentlemen of the highest distinction.”3
Barnum was about to get his first lesson in the challenges of conquering England. So strong was the prejudice against the former colonies that his assertions about his success in America didn’t hold much sway. Dwarf acts were common in England, the prevalence of little people an environmental outcome of the country’s rapid and incautious industrialization, and they were offered in venues even less respectable than the theaters, which were themselves not palaces of respectability. These acts did not have the polish or wit of Tom’s performances, which is why Barnum’s strategy was to present the general as a better form of entertainment than that offered at fairs in the countryside. Doing so would permit charging a great deal more for the privilege of seeing Tom at a venue like the one Barnum had hired, the Portico (“a small room, but neatly fitted up”) in Liverpool’s Bold Street. The public balked, however, as Barnum sought to charge a shilling, roughly a U.S. quarter, rather than the penny that people were used to paying at fairs.4
All was not lost, though, because the manager of the Princess’s Theatre in London made the trip to Liverpool to see Tom Thumb perform and offered Barnum a three-night spot on his stage. Barnum jumped at the chance. The little general made his London debut in Oxford Street on February 20 on a program with a farce called Blasé and a production of the new Donizetti opera, Don Pasquale. The next night he would again appear between the acts of an opera, this time Bellini’s I Puritani, and for his final performance there, on February 27, he was again sandwiched in the Donizetti. Barnum had tried without much success to introduce Tom Thumb to the editors of London’s newspapers, but only one paper wrote about the Princess’s Theatre performances. The Illustrated London News deigned to devote a single sentence to Tom Thumb, and it was a doozy: “The production of this little monster affords another melancholy proof of the low state the legitimate drama has been reduced to!”5
But Barnum had not crossed the Atlantic to be deterred by a single bad newspaper notice. He saw Tom Thumb’s reception differently, recasting it as a “decided . . . ‘hit’ ” and a “visible guarantee of success in London.” If his memory put a favorable spin on his situation, it was undoubtedly shaped by the success to come. Neither the poor showing in Liverpool nor the seeming indifference in London discouraged Barnum; instead, these stumbles seemed to invigorate him. He wrote that he was offered a second run at a “much higher figure” in London, but he chose a separate path altogether, making the decision that he would, henceforth, exhibit the general only on his own terms, and he busied himself to satisfy them.
Those terms still included, against all odds, the involvement of Queen Victoria. Barnum was in London less than two weeks before he managed to meet the American envoy to the Court of St. James, Edward Everett, thanks to letters of introduction from, among others, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New-York Tribune, with whom Barnum had an acquaintanceship that was growing into a friendship. The ambassador called on Barnum to meet Tom Thumb, and then invited the two of them to the midday meal at his house in Belgravia the next day, March 2, where Everett’s family “loaded” the general with gifts. Everett was an American of real distinction. A brilliant professor of Greek literature at Harvard as a young man—his pupil Ralph Waldo Emerson considered him “his personal idol”—he had been a U.S. representative and then governor of Massachusetts, and he would become U.S. secretary of state and a U.S. senator in the 1850s.6
When Everett introduced Tom Thumb into his household in London’s Grosvenor Place, he was undoubtedly acting less as a diplomat and more as a father and a husband. He, his wife, and their children were still mourning the death in October of their eldest child, Anne, and young Tom was an immediate source of joy. The delight his family took in the little man was perhaps the most compelling reason why Everett promised Barnum he would cross the street to Buckingham Palace and intercede in person with royal officials to have Tom presented to the queen.
Barnum’s assault on London and the queen included renting a “magnificent mansion” in Mayfair, an area thick with aristocrats and the merely wealthy, and the employment of a “tinselled and powdered” servant to man the door. Out went invitations to editors and members of the nobility, who now came and were appropriately impressed with the young general. Soon “crested carriages” bearing uninvited visitors arrived at his Grafton Street address; Barnum had his servant politely turn them away, a matter of proper etiquette, Barnum averred, but also a way to increase the value of an invitation. Soon the beautiful, raven-haired Baroness Charlotte von Rothschild sent a carriage to take Barnum and Tom Thumb to her mansion at 148 Piccadilly, adjacent to the site of today’s Palm Court at the Ritz. She was the wife and first cousin of Lionel de Rothschild, whose family in effect bankrolled the royal government and who, in Barnum’s description, was “the most wealthy banker in the world.” Barnum spent several paragraphs in his autobiography describing the splendor he saw at her house, the elegantly attired servants, impressive statues, marble stairs, and, in the drawing room, the “glare of magnificence” ex
uded by gold and gilt, huge chandeliers, and bijous wherever his glance fell. They spent two hours in the company of the baroness and a score of lords and ladies, and when they left, a “well-filled purse was quietly slipped into my hand, and I felt that the golden shower was beginning to fall!”7
* * *
AFTER BARNUM HAD ANOTHER SUCH payday from a banker (twenty guineas—about $125—for a half hour of Tom Thumb’s time), and now realizing that Everett’s efforts at Buckingham Palace would not lead to an immediate audience with the queen, the showman rented a room in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly Street. The 1812 Georgian building, named for its façade, which was meant to evoke an Egyptian temple, had once housed, among much else, Napoleon’s carriage from Waterloo, treasures James Cook collected on his travels, relics from the tomb of Seti I that inspired Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” and, thanks to the size of its main room, Géricault’s massive painting The Raft of the Medusa. In recent years, such curiosities as “the Living Skeleton” and the Siamese Twins had been on exhibition there, leading the way to Tom Thumb.
Barnum engaged one of the two upstairs rooms at the hall, and in the great room downstairs was the American painter George Catlin’s extensive collection of paintings of North American Indians—more than five hundred in all, hung from floor to ceiling—along with costumes, weapons, and other objects used by Native American tribes. At the center of the 106-foot-long room was a Crow teepee made of decorated buffalo skins. Twenty-five feet tall, it could hold eighty of Catlin’s customers at once. Catlin had traveled through the western United States, Canada, and Mexico for seven years, painting portraits of the people he encountered and collecting artifacts of their vanishing cultures. His collection had toured in New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in America and had been on display at the Egyptian Hall for three years beginning in 1840. Despite a recent influx of customers over a short period when Catlin had brought nine Ojibwe Indians to the Hall to entertain crowds with ritualistic dance, his business had dropped off dramatically from its peak.8
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