Barnum asserted that a “rush of visitors” went to see Tom Thumb when he opened in March at the Egyptian Hall. The crowds would aid Catlin, as would Barnum’s own connections, and in turn the artist would aid Barnum. As he became acquainted with Catlin, Barnum learned of the painter’s growing concern that he was no longer making enough from his exhibit to cover his rent for the great room, so Barnum offered to switch rooms with him and take on the larger obligation if Catlin would leave his paintings on the walls downstairs, where Tom Thumb would now appear. Since exhibiting Indians was something Barnum had been doing at the American Museum, he also secured a new band of fourteen “Ioway” Indians, among them Chief White Cloud, who would board ship for England and demonstrate war dances in company with Catlin’s lectures. In a letter to Moses Kimball at about that time, Barnum predicted of the Indians, “Catlin and self will make money on them. I think to a large amount,” and by all reports they were well received in London.9
Tom Thumb had been on display at the Egyptian Hall for only a few days when Barnum’s royal fantasies took a turn toward reality. The American envoy Everett had appealed to the master of the queen’s household, Charles Murray, who also happened to be a long-standing friend of Catlin and had helped arrange for the Ojibwes to meet Queen Victoria and her court. Murray and Barnum had breakfast one morning at Everett’s house, and within a few days a regally uniformed member of the Life Guards appeared at the Grafton Street house with an invitation for “General Tom Thumb and his guardian” for an evening audience with the queen at Buckingham Palace. Murray passed along Victoria’s wishes that Tom not be schooled in the etiquette of addressing a royal personage, so that he might appear before her “naturally and without restraint.”10
Late in the day of March 23, Barnum wrote out one of the most effective advertisements he would ever compose and affixed it to the front door of the Egyptian Hall. “Closed this evening,” the notice read, “General Tom Thumb being at Buckingham Palace by command of Her Majesty.” Barnum was determined, he explained in his autobiography, “to make the most of the occasion.” He and the general presented themselves at the palace, Tom decked out as a court swell in formal evening attire and wielding a tiny cane. The lord in waiting met them and gave Barnum and Tom two rules of etiquette for dealing with the queen: never speak to her directly, and walk backward when leaving her presence.11
They were led along a corridor and up a wide marble staircase to the doors of the queen’s long picture gallery. When the doors opened, the queen stood at the far end of the room, still attired in mourning for her father-in-law, wearing a black dress and no jewelry. Alongside her were Prince Albert; her mother, the Duchess of Kent; and “twenty or thirty” other members of court, the ladies “arrayed in the highest style of magnificence, their dresses sparkling with diamonds.” Barnum reported that his tiny friend approached this forbidding group “with a firm step, and as he came within hailing distance made a very graceful bow, and exclaimed, ‘Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen! ’ ” The gathering did not titter in aristocratic disapproval at this display of the little man’s ebullience but greeted it with “a burst of laughter,” a genuine expression of their delight. The queen, not quite twenty-five years old, whom Barnum would describe as “small of stature, and not of the most beautiful form or countenance,” was “very sociable and amiable in her manners,” putting one “immediately at ease in her presence.” She took Tom’s hand and led him around the gallery, showing him some of the hundreds of paintings on display and asking him many questions. Tom’s answers kept the trailing retinue “in an uninterrupted strain of merriment,” Barnum recalled, and soon Tom felt emboldened to compliment the queen on her art collection, which he called “first-rate.” Tom then performed for her, singing, dancing, doing his imitations of famous figures, among them Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Cincinnatus, and Samson. Afterward he got in a long conversation with Prince Albert and others in the court, giving Barnum an opportunity to breach etiquette. He had been told that he could only converse with her using the lord in waiting as intermediary. The queen began to ask Barnum questions in this way, and Barnum answered in kind. But soon he felt comfortable enough in her presence to address her directly, risking the disapproval of her henchman. She did not miss a beat, however, and began speaking directly back to him.
The audience lasted better than an hour, and then Barnum had the opportunity to display the lord in waiting’s second piece of advice about etiquette, to retire from the queen walking backward. Barnum reminded us in his autobiography that it was an exceedingly long room to back out of, and he noted that because the lord in waiting was practiced in backward-walking, he kept “somewhat a-head (or rather a-back) of me.” But with his tiny legs, Tom Thumb’s reverse pace left him far behind (or rather, ahead), and so from time to time he would turn his back on the queen and run furiously to catch up with Barnum, and then begin once more to back decorously away until once again he needed to turn and sprint to catch up. Tom’s antics continued to amuse the royal party, but one of the queen’s “poodle-dogs” grew excited at the ruckus Tom was making and began to bark fiercely at him. Tom responded by threatening the dog with his diminutive cane, and a mock battle commenced, further amusing the queen and her party.12
The bedazzled showman made much of the audience at Buckingham Palace in one of his letters to the New York Atlas and included it in both versions of his autobiography. But he got a more immediate bounce from the visit by discovering, before he left the palace, that the man who wrote the “Court Journal” for the morning papers was in the building. Barnum asked to see the fellow and was pleased that he could persuade him that Tom Thumb’s visit was newsworthy, and also that the reporter asked for an outline of the visit. Barnum provided on the spot a notice that then ran in the papers word for word. The evening had been a triumph in every conceivable way, not least because the queen promised Tom a second invitation so that the future king, three-year-old Albert Edward, could meet him (as their first audience had taken place after the Prince of Wales’s bedtime).13
Barnum could not have known it, but A. H. Saxon points out in his biography of the showman that the one person who was not entirely swept away by the good feeling of the evening was the young Queen Victoria herself. In her journal for that day, she reported having seen “the greatest curiosity I, or indeed anybody, ever saw,” but after describing Tom Thumb, she added, “One cannot help feeling very sorry for the poor little thing & wishing he could be properly cared for, for the people who show him off tease him a good deal, I should think.” The queen’s concern for Tom was based on her belief that he was twelve years old; how much more concerned would she have been if she had known that he was half that age and perhaps in need himself of the early after-supper bedtime enjoyed by the Prince of Wales? Barnum did convey to Everett, in a note of “ten thousand thousand thanks” written upon his return from the palace, that the queen “desired the lord-in-waiting request that I would be careful and never allow the General to be fatigued.” As for the teasing, it seems likely that the queen simply misunderstood Barnum’s jocular sense of humor, which was more American, perhaps, in its informality than anything she was used to. Even teasing, after all, suggests a level of equality and comfort between man and boy that might well have been unfamiliar in the formal royal household.14
Tom Thumb and Barnum returned to Buckingham Palace two weeks later, when the queen introduced the little general to Prince Edward and her other child, Princess Victoria. On this occasion the queen presented to Tom, “with her own hand,” as the Times of London reported the next day, “a superb souvenir of gold and mother-of-pearl, set with precious stones. On one side were the crown and the royal initials, ‘V.R.,’ and on the reverse a bouquet of flowers in rubies.” She also gave Tom a gold pencil case with his initials. These and a gold watch presented to him in June by the Queen Dowager Adelaide at Marlborough House went on display at the Egyptian Hall, along with other baubles given Tom by members of the nobility. For som
e reason, probably having to do with their own need for favorable publicity, Buckingham Palace did not object to Barnum’s exploitation of the royal family in this way. Barnum mentioned that after each visit to the palace he was sent a “handsome douceur” from the queen but admitted that this was “the smallest part of the advantage derived from these interviews.” The biggest part was “the force of Court example in England.” He played this advantage to the hilt, in newspaper ads and at the Egyptian Hall. But the nobility, whose members had adopted Tom as their special favorite, promoted him well enough themselves by going again and again to his performances. Barnum wrote that there were sometimes as many as “fifty and sixty carriages of the nobility” lined up on Piccadilly Street in front of the hall.15
Business, then, was good. Barnum averaged from all sources about 500 pounds, or $2,500, per day from March 20 until July 20, with Tom doing three shows a day and often giving two private showings in the evening. That adds up to $300,000 in four months, against expenses that Barnum estimated at about $6,000 for that time. His advertising strategy went beyond declaring Tom’s connection to the royal family and eventually returned to the approach that had worked so well in the last days before they sailed from New York. This time Barnum warned of the general’s imminent departure for Paris, and English crowds fell just as easily for this ploy, eager to get a last glimpse of Tom before the departure that seemingly never came.
One other publicity coup from this period had not been planned, or at least Barnum said it wasn’t. Among the little general’s regular patrons in England was the most famous general in the world, the Duke of Wellington, who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo some three decades earlier. The first time the duke attended one of Tom’s performances at the Egyptian Hall, Tom was doing his Napoleon bit, striding to and fro and seemingly lost in thought. When Barnum introduced the two, the duke asked Tom what he was so deeply contemplating, and Tom’s sorrowful reply was instant: “I was thinking of the loss of the battle of Waterloo.” Barnum gave credit for the witty response to young Tom, but the showman often deflected credit in this way—not as often as he claimed it, but still regularly. In any case, it was sold to the papers as an example of Tom’s spontaneous wit, and the duke himself was so amused by it that he told the story wherever he went.16
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THE FIRST SIX MONTHS IN England could hardly have gone better for P. T. Barnum. As a businessman, and as a showman, he had had the instinct before ever leaving New York for how he would promote Tom Thumb. Before the plan took shape, the general was less than a success in Liverpool and the object of derision in London, but in a short time he became the toast of England and a means of enrichment for Barnum and, more modestly, for the Stratton family. Barnum’s potent combination of naïveté, arrogance, persistence, and luck—very American qualities, even in the eyes of Americans themselves, but especially so to the British—somehow brought to fruition his far-fetched strategy of partnering with the queen herself. This ur-American successfully corralled not just the queen but also every ambulatory member of her court, despite a hearty British distaste for the former colonies and for the brash, uncouth, self-confident sort of American Barnum so utterly embodied. If Barnum went to England seeking a new Old World to conquer, then he inarguably accomplished that, perhaps even beyond his hopes.
SEVEN
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THE CONTINENT
By June 1844, Barnum had fully met the challenge of presenting Tom Thumb in London. Business was going so well that he turned the management of the general over to H. G. Sherman, a former singer Barnum had employed in the past, whom he now brought to England in part to be Tom’s “moral instructor.” Barnum intended to devote more time to writing his Atlas letters and to having experiences that could become the narrative center of these letters.
With that in mind, Barnum set off for Paris to visit the tenth national industrial exposition under way there. Among his goals was to acquire exhibits for the American Museum back home. The fair, located in a temporary structure built between the Seine and the Champs-Élysées (where the Grand Palais and Petit Palais now stand), held nearly four thousand exhibitions, ranging from steam engines to typefaces. Barnum snatched “a few thousands” from his coffers in London to purchase curiosities he found at the fair, and in three days of “calm examination” of the miles of displays, he gathered the cards of eighty-seven makers of automatons and other oddities he saw there, with the intention of visiting each of them while he was in Paris. Among those he met was the soon-to-be-famous magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, who was displaying his mechanical inventions in a prominent spot in what was called the Palace of Industry. One of his creations, an automaton he called the Writer, won first prize at the fair, and Barnum bought it or a copy of it “at a good round price” to display in London and eventually at the American Museum. The original mechanism featured a wax head carved by Robert-Houdin to resemble his own face and a carved wooden body, seated at a table, where it would write or draw responses to questions asked of it.1
A visit originally planned for several days lasted two weeks, as Barnum methodically followed up with each of the other mechanical craftsmen whose cards he had collected, purchasing other items to send back home. At the same time, he became neither the first nor the last American to fall hard for the charms of Paris, availing himself of touristic wonders ranging from the Louvre to Notre-Dame and Versailles. And like many an American in Paris, he wrote of his experiences in detail, even returning to the subject in letters written well after this visit.
Across the avenue from the fair was an elegant, sixteen-sided, equestrian-themed building in stone, known as the Cirque des Champs-Élysées, where the equestrian acts of the famous Franconi family gave their summer performances. Barnum went one evening and was almost as enamored of the three-year-old building itself—especially the steep arrangement of the seating around the circular ring—as of the riding feats on display. In the next year the Cirque would house a series of concerts by Hector Berlioz, featuring at great expense hundreds of musicians and singers, though the building proved to be better suited to horses than to music, its acoustics creating, in Berlioz’s words, “deplorable harmonic confusion.” But the design would stick in Barnum’s mind for later use.2
When Barnum returned to London in the middle of the summer, he took advantage of the many doors that Tom Thumb’s fame, and his own, were opening. “We had the free entrée to all the theatres, public gardens, and places of entertainment,” he wrote, “and frequently met the principal artists, editors, poets, and authors of the country.” Added to this social whirl were his many business enterprises; after listing them for Moses Kimball in a letter in August, he concluded, “I guess I have about enough on hand to keep one busy.” Yet amid this jumble of activity, Barnum could not resist the temptations of sightseeing or of writing about his adventures for his audience in New York. As he put it, he always had an eye on his business, “but I also had two eyes for observation and these were busily employed in leisure hours.”3
One of the writers with whom Barnum had become acquainted was Albert Richard Smith, a journalist, playwright, mountaineer, and performer. The two met in early September at Dee’s Hotel in Temple Row in Birmingham, “a large clean town, with a pure country air blowing about its handsome streets,” as Smith put it. On the morning of September 4, Smith noticed Barnum out the window of the coffee room of the hotel, “a tall, active person who was arranging the cortège, and cuffing the more intrusive boys into order.” Barnum had just taken delivery of a tiny carriage, its deep blue body twenty inches high and eleven inches wide, which had been specially built for Tom Thumb in Soho. On its doors was an elaborate coat of arms including the words Go-a-head. Two Shetland ponies pulled the carriage, and boys in sky-blue livery coats and red breeches served as coachman and footman. As Smith watched, the miniature equipage was drawn into the street crowded with people eager to see it. The carriage would become a Barnum signature, one of his c
hief ways of advertising his scheduled shows of Tom Thumb—just as, in the future, a traveling circus would parade elephants through a new town when it arrived.4
Both Barnum and Smith chronicled a day of sightseeing that gave texture to the exhausting experience of spending time in the presence of a person with Barnum’s energy and acquisitiveness. The day began at five the next morning with the eager showman rapping on Smith’s door; by six they were aboard a mail coach “whirling” along on a thirty-mile journey to Stratford-upon-Avon to see sights associated with the birth and entombment of William Shakespeare. A soaking rain had left them chilled, so upon reaching the town they stopped at the Red Horse to warm by a fire and eat breakfast. They found a well-thumbed copy of Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book in the inn’s tiny parlor. A chapter of the book describing Irving’s own experience in Stratford was “mended, and pencilled, and spliced,” Smith wrote. The chapter opens with Irving seated in that very parlor of the Red Horse.5
The timbered house of Shakespeare’s birth on Henley Street was “a humble-looking place enough,” to Smith’s eye, but Barnum apparently found it sufficiently interesting to someday secure first refusal to buy it. The idea would be to ship it “in sections to my Museum in New-York” for display, a possibility that aroused the British public to the point that several patriots pooled resources and purchased it, preserving it for the nation. Smith, who first published his account of the day in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1847, was eager to ingratiate himself with the English audience of the literary and humor magazine. He reported that Barnum, noticing a portrait of Shakespeare on the wall, told the elderly proprietress of the house that he would send her a companion portrait of Tom Thumb, and then showered her with the general’s cartes de visite and urged her to talk up the act with her visitors. After a short walk to Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare’s funerary monument—which features a sculpture of the Bard from the waist up—had been in place for more than two hundred years, Smith purported to have caught Barnum trying “to wafer one of the General’s visiting cards on the monument, saying it was for an advertisement.”6
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