Then they were off to Warwick Castle, where both men noted the presence of an elaborate shakedown by a series of elderly guides with hands extended. After one of the guides went into elaborate detail about relics belonging to the legendary Guy, Earl of Warwick, Barnum wrote, “I told the old porter he was entitled to great credit for having concentrated more lies than I had ever before heard in so small a compass. He smiled, and evidently felt gratified by the compliment.” Both men remembered that Barnum then nonetheless tried to purchase the relics from the old man, but that the porter was especially incensed by this proposal. To which Barnum responded that he would simply have them copied for his museum so that Americans would not have to cross an ocean to see them. This interaction was one example of a developing theme for the outing. Smith wrote that Barnum tried to acquire almost everything he saw in the castle, including a Rubens painting of St. Ignatius.7
Later in the day they visited Coventry, where Barnum came upon a traveling exhibit called the Happy Family, which featured two hundred animals and birds, many of them natural enemies, living peaceably together in a single cage. He bought it on the spot for the hefty price of $2,500 and engaged its owner to travel with it to New York, where, Barnum wrote, “it became an attractive feature in my Museum.” Indeed it remained a staple at the museum for two decades.
From Coventry they took a train back to Birmingham, arriving at 10 p.m. Smith wrote that he saw more in that day than in any other of his life, and over supper Barnum told him that a person must “make thirty hours out of twenty-four in Merrekey” or he would “never go ahead.” Part of Smith’s comic portrayal of Barnum had him saying Merrekey for America and trew for true, and the whole concept of a “go-ahead day with Barnum,” as Smith’s title has it, is to poke fun at the American reputation for industriousness, a quality that often rankled the British. Barnum’s avidity to acquire whatever he saw was always placed in the context of his wanting things for the museum, not for himself personally, and Smith made only a few hints at Barnum’s Yankee “cuteness.” But there was a bull-in-a-china-shop aspect to his sketch of Barnum, whose energy and self-confidence were portrayed as overwhelming to the point of rudeness at times. Smith seemed to mind especially when Barnum knew more about anything English—for instance the history of St. Michael’s Church in Coventry—than he did. Whether or not Barnum was acting a part, his ebullience seems real enough, just one aspect of the general madness of his conquest of Britain.
* * *
HIS MONTHS IN ENGLAND WITH Tom Thumb changed Barnum’s life in noticeable ways, but they would also expose aspects of his personality that were far from admirable. Tom Thumb’s run at the Egyptian Hall, followed by successful touring elsewhere on the scepter’d isle, soon made Barnum a wealthy man. As he put it in an Atlas letter written at midsummer, he had “secured an independence.” At the same time, the showman’s letters to the Atlas were turning him into a celebrity back home. In these letters—perhaps a side effect of the ego-inflating wonder of his life in England—a callousness emerged in him that was not often evident in his other writings or in the view of those who knew him.
In June 1844, as he was laboring over one of his Atlas pieces in London, letters arrived from home conveying the terrible news that his youngest daughter, Frances, had died on April 11, not yet two years old. “But a few months ago,” he wrote as an addendum to his piece, “I left her blithe and merry, blooming in health and happiness; and now, without a moment’s warning, I learn that she is the tenant of the grave.” He noted how much harder it was to receive such news at a distance, but he turned quickly, perhaps too quickly, to an acceptance of God’s will in the matter. Nobody can doubt that his grief was heartfelt—he ended the letter abruptly, with the words, “I can write no more to-day”—and yet this is the only allusion to his daughter’s death in his Atlas letters, and no mention of it at all appears in the autobiographies. It’s possible, of course, that his grief was so palpable and personal that he did not find it appropriate to write more about it. Still, he made no acknowledgment of the grief of his wife and surviving daughters at home. If he considered the possibility of sailing back to New York to console them, he made no mention of this, either.8
He would not return to his family until October, and then without forewarning. He even saw fit on his arrival to play a practical joke on Charity. When he reached New York, he went to the museum and sent Parson Hitchcock with a message to her saying she must hurry with him back to the museum to meet a man who had just crossed the Atlantic bringing news. Under the circumstances, she could only have thought the news was of the grimmest sort. Barnum seemingly never considered the state he put her in, but only alluded to the questionable humor in the situation, writing in the Atlas, “I guess she was a little astonished.” Thus he greeted his wife for the first time after the death of their daughter.9
He made plain in his Atlas articles that his visit home had to do principally not with shoring up his family but with work, which “rules ‘men of business’ with despotic sway.” But when the business was done and he boarded the steamship Great Western on November 9 to return to England, he had Charity, Caroline, and Helen with him, presumably so the family could continue to grieve together over Frances and not suffer the loneliness of their long separations. Charity was not a good traveler, however, and in addition to suffering relentless and debilitating seasickness she often kept the others on board “in a half-suffocation of concealed laughter by her piteous moaning about the dangers of shipwreck.” Disloyally reporting this to the Atlas audience, at the time of her greatest onboard discomfort Barnum entered into the fun by pretending with others to agree with her that the ship might well be about to sink. A. H. Saxon writes, about this and other times in the Atlas letters when Barnum poked fun at her, “One gathers that Charity herself was not amused by these indiscreet revelations, for her husband did not repeat them in his autobiography.”10
His self-absorption extended beyond his immediate family. In the letters he wrote soon after sailing from New York, Barnum took uncharitable swipes at people he had met on his visit home who seemed to regard him with new respect:
I could hardly credit my senses, when I discovered so many wealthy men, who compose the codfish aristocracy of New York, extending their hands to me, and expressing their great delight at seeing me again, although before I left New York those same nabobs would have looked down on me with disdain if I had presumed to have spoken to them.11
He attributed this change in attitude not to his extensive self-promotion and name-dropping in the Atlas letters but to his having “accumulated a few more dirty dollars,” something so many New Yorkers could have known only from the same Barnum letters. Still, he protested that “the very thought of money being the standard of merit makes me sick” to the point of wishing “I was not worth a shilling in the world!” And it was not just the rich at whom he now sneered. When he “met some good honest friends in humble circumstances, who almost appeared to approach me with awe—and then again I felt ashamed of human nature.” His breast-beating continued with the declaration “I wish . . . all the world to know that my father was a tailor, that I am a showman by profession, and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me.” To think that a shoemaker cannot be a gentleman, he continued, but that every rich person must be considered one—“Both notions are false and wrong, and never should be encouraged in a country such as ours.” Which is a worthy enough sentiment, but it is hard to read the passage as anything but another way of exhibiting Barnum’s recent rise in stature.
By far the ugliest aspect of his Atlas writings are his racist comments about a black man who watched Tom Thumb perform at the Egyptian Hall, having arrived with “a well dressed white woman on his arm” and himself “dressed off in great style, with gold chains, rings, pins, &c., (niggers always like jewels).” Barnum reported that he asked Tom Thumb to perform a racist song and dance numbers, and he seemed to take pleasure in the “discomfiture” they caused “ ’de colored genma
n.”
Toward the end of 1844, having arrived in Liverpool with his family and promptly ensconcing them at the Waterloo Hotel, he boarded the steamer Princess Royal to Glasgow to check in on the touring Tom Thumb. In another Atlas letter he wrote how, aboard the steamer, he entered into a debate about slavery with Scottish passengers who said that, but for the peculiar institution, “America would be the greatest, best, and justly the proudest nation in the universe.” Barnum trundled out for the Scots the timeworn argument that it was in the interest of slave owners to treat their slaves well, “and that on the whole, they were much happier than the starving workies of this country.” It is in this letter that he claimed not to be an “apologist for slavery” but added, “The rabid fanaticism of some abolitionists is more reprehensible than slavery itself.”
Another piece appearing in the Atlas at about that time profiled Barnum as “Our Foreign Correspondent,” using as its source “an intimate friend of Barnum’s”—undoubtedly the foreign correspondent himself. In recounting the details of his life up until that point, the sketch reported that while Barnum was traveling with exhibitions through the South in the late 1830s he had in Vicksburg purchased a slave to serve as his valet and later received, in partial payment for a boat he had sold, “a negro woman and child.” He sold all three people, according to the profile, after owning them for a short time, but not before he had administered fifty lashes to the valet for theft.12
His slaveholding, however temporary, is never mentioned in his autobiography, but he would later allude to it in a speech he gave while running for Congress in 1867, admitting he had not only “owned slaves” but “did more. I whipped my slaves.” At this point, decades on in his life, he concluded, “I ought to have been whipped a thousand times for this myself.” This shift does appear to be genuine. For all his casual racism and skepticism about abolitionism early in his life, Barnum, particularly as his interest in matters of temperance grew, would get to know several outspoken abolitionists and come to favor an end to slavery himself in the years before the Civil War.13
The dim view of humanity in general that Barnum expressed in many of the Atlas letters would evolve late in life into the more benign and bemused headshaking in his book Funny Stories, where everyone is fair game. Barnum was a man of his time, and his attitudes toward race, class, women, family, and status, many of them deplorable today, were often, but not always, also of his time. Still, living in a racist society does not ultimately excuse individual acts of racism. Living in an era of head-spinning fluidity of class status does not forgive hypocrisy and snobbery. Being the paterfamilias in a paternalistic culture does not make it understandable when a husband trivializes the emotions of his wife. Given Barnum’s generosity of spirit in other contexts, his zest for living, and his facility for putting himself in the place of others, it is hard not to feel disappointed in him for being a worse man during these years than he would become.
* * *
BY THE SPRING OF 1845, Tom Thumb had traveled throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Barnum and the Strattons—now equal partners in the business of exhibiting their boy—were ready to test his popularity on the other side of the channel. Barnum wrote in late spring to his Atlas readers, “The excitable Parisians talk of nothing but ‘General Tom Pouce, les tres jollie charmant enfant!’ ” If Barnum’s French was imperfect, the sentiment was clear. In Paris dozens of different lithographs and oil paintings of Tom had been created and widely displayed, confectioners made edible representations of him, and little statuettes of the general appeared in shop windows. Soon enough the general himself was appearing nightly at the Théâtre du Vaudeville in the Place de la Bourse in a play written expressly for him called Le Petit Poucet.
Tom had been exhibiting in the Salle Vivienne in the same neighborhood twice a day for only a month when a “grave personage, dressed in black, his hair powdered” and carrying a “splendid” cane, approached the general after a levee and presented him with a small silver snuffbox. According to the Paris correspondent for the Illustrated London News, Tom Thumb’s delight at the gift soon vanished when he realized that the mysterious man had at the same time relieved him of the gold watch that the Queen Dowager Adelaide had presented him the previous year. The police were called, but the elegant thief was long gone.14
Barnum wrote that on the day he and his family arrived in Paris, March 18, he received an invitation to accompany Tom to the Tuileries Palace on the evening of the following Sunday—Easter Sunday—to meet the French king, Louis-Philippe, and the royal family. The king’s daughter, Louise, the wife of King Leopold and thus queen of the Belgians, had seen the general at Buckingham Palace, and Tom’s success with the British royal family was well known in France. This first Tuileries visit went much like the first appearance before Queen Victoria, with Tom now in court dress charming the king, queen, and assorted princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses in a grand reception hall. Barnum found the king easy to talk to, and Louis-Philippe regaled him with stories of his four-year exile in America, during which “he had roughed it generally and had even slept in Indian wigwams.”15
After Tom performed, this time eliminating his impersonation of Napoleon, the king presented him with “a large emerald brooch set with diamonds,” which he asked Barnum to pin on the general. Things were going so well that Barnum felt emboldened to ask the king to allow Tom’s tiny carriage to appear in an upcoming parade on the Champs-Élysées of royal and diplomatic carriages headed to a celebration in the Bois de Boulogne. The king, perhaps not realizing that he was being drawn into a promotional scheme, agreed to make this possible. On the day of the parade, thousands of people lined the route, cheering for “Général Tom Pouce.” Barnum concluded his tale of this event by modestly stating that “there never was such an advertisement,” and where there had been excitement in London, there was now “furor” in Paris. Once again, Barnum’s path to success passed through a royal household.16
Tom and Barnum visited the Tuileries three more times, twice to reprise his act for the king and his court and once, on October 6, to watch fireworks celebrating the king’s birthday. They were also asked to visit the family at the Château de Saint-Cloud, the country palace west of Paris. There, Barnum wrote, the king requested that the general, for the first and only time in France, don his Napoleon costume and imitate the former emperor, something that had to be done “on the sly.” The frisson of the inappropriate mirrored one of Tom’s visits with Queen Victoria, when she asked him to pick a song to sing for her and he had chosen “Yankee Doodle,” which he then incorporated into his act with up-to-the-minute new lyrics about the Buckingham Palace appearances themselves. At the end of the Saint-Cloud visit, the royal family “almost smothered” Tom with kisses, which seemingly every woman in every country he visited felt compelled to do. Tom, although still well short of puberty, enjoyed and eagerly encouraged these attentions, but perhaps his pleasure was less sensual and more pecuniary. Advertisements in the French papers of the time warned that in addition to the entry fee to one of Tom’s levees, “those persons who wish to kiss him are to pay five sous more.”17
In three months in Paris, during which, Barnum wrote, Tom was “as merry, happy, and successful as ever,” Tom’s father was able to save $500 per week from his share of the profits. As Barnum would write to a friend, “I suppose you will hear that General Tom Pouce hit them rather hard in Paris . . . [and] has not done hitting them yet, but we have all got as much money as we want and shall go home next summer.” Barnum took Tom and what had now become a large retinue—twelve people, three vehicles, the tiny carriage and four ponies, and all of their luggage—through the French and Belgian countryside, with a quick visit to Spain to meet the Spanish Bourbon queen, Isabella II, in Pampeluna, as Pamplona was then known, where Barnum was her guest at a bullfight.18
Barnum began to act as an advance man for the troupe, traveling a week or more ahead of them to make arrangements and gather more material for his letters
. In early August he wrote to Tom, “I am as usual tolerably sick, and intolerably homesick.” Three weeks later he wrote to Kimball from Bordeaux, “This is a most charming country, & he who has not seen it has seen nothing.” Later, during the grape harvest in the Médoc region northwest of the city of Bordeaux, Barnum accepted an offer to help stomp the grapes, jumping barefooted into a vat and dancing on them to a fiddler’s polka tune. “Day after day,” he reported to the Atlas, “have I reveled and run riot among thousands of acres of ripe luscious grapes.”19
By the end of 1845, the troupe was back in London for a short run at the Egyptian Hall, after which they turned to the English hinterlands for what was to have been a farewell tour. Charity and their daughters had returned home in June. Mrs. Barnum apparently never acquired her husband’s enthusiasm for the French and their culture, which she found morally lax. She was pregnant with what would be their fourth daughter, and, as he had written in the summer, Barnum was ready to finish his European sojourn. But business remained so strong that he decided to stay in England with Tom for another year, a decision that undoubtedly contributed to a growing sense of unease between Barnum and Charity.
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