He made at least one cursory attempt to fob the structure off on his friend Moses Kimball, proposing that the building be disassembled and rebuilt on the Boston Common, but he was honest enough to begin his letter floating this scheme with the admission “I was an ass for having anything to do with the Crystal Palace.” Still, he went on to make a spirited defense of the idea, even asserting, “New Yorkers who now think the palace too far off to visit would positively go to Boston to see it.” Kimball declined his friend’s offer.
Barnum was nowhere specific about how much money he invested in the enterprise. But when he mentioned to Kimball a new project he had begun immediately after resigning his presidency, he added, “I hope [it] will make up my losses by Crystal Palace.” After a series of questionable ventures, he turned to one that put his best qualities forward. It would rely on his instincts as a showman, his impressive verbal skills, and his dedication to hard work.9
For this new endeavor, he anchored himself at home, spending what was left of the summer and much of the fall in the elegant second-floor study he had built for himself at Iranistan. Over the next four months, he would write his autobiography. Given its length, its coherence, its wit, its polish, and its depth of self-reflection, his speed in writing the four-hundred-page book is remarkable. The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, was published in a first edition of fifty thousand copies in mid-December 1854, only a few weeks after its completion. Considering Barnum’s latter-day reputation, it’s worth noting that the book is not dramatically more, or less, mendacious than the usual autobiography by a famous person, and rivals Rousseau’s Confessions in its eagerness to reveal his own foibles, misdeeds, and missteps.10
Yet it is not as though when Barnum sat down at his desk, cocooned in the orange silk damask that covered the walls and ceiling of his study, he was starting from scratch as a novice writer. He had been inventing his persona ever since he had gone to work in his father’s store, and he had polished and polished again his anecdotes about himself in his years as a public speaker and a person in whom the press and the public took an eager interest. He had his hundred letters to the New York Atlas from 1844 to 1846 to draw on for his time in England and Europe; he had journals he had kept in the 1830s that formed the basis of his mock autobiography of Barnaby Diddledum, which had also been published in the Atlas, in 1841; and he had his daughter Caroline’s journals from trips she had made with him in 1848 and 1850–51. He wrote Kimball as he was getting started, “Pray tell me if the story of the old sailor getting [the Fejee Mermaid] in China was really true, and also give me all the particulars of its origins that you can.” In the same letter he asked Kimball if he had a copy of a pamphlet Barnum had written about mermaids. He wrote such letters to other friends to help him jog his memory or recover things he had already written about himself or his undertakings, since he had always been a writer of real productivity, dashing off advertisements, articles, squibs, pamphlets, letters, and on and on. Nothing he wrote ever feels labored: his prose seems to flow easily from the same stream that made him such a good talker. Even the many letters in which he apologizes for the haste with which they were composed exude his high spirits and unwillingness to do things perfunctorily, although the haste sometimes means things tumble out in a stream of consciousness.11
As he was writing his book, Barnum was also busily preparing for its reception. In October 1854 he announced to newspaper and journal editors hither and yon that “fifty-seven publishers have applied for the chance of publishing” the book and also sent out two letters to journalists claiming that “Boston, New York, and Philadelphia publishers are all after the book in a swarm.” In the first letter, he undercuts the claim about the fifty-seven publishers by adding, “Such is the fact—and if it wasn’t, why still it ain’t a bad announcement.” He makes his appeal to publishers in the second letter “as a whilom brother of the Order Editorial.” The jaunty tone of both announcements makes clear that he knew his news would find friendly editors eager to publicize it, especially when he leaked parts of the book to them. Only four days after the second letter, he purchased a notice in New York newspapers, addressed “To Publishers,” asserting “Circumstances having occurred by which the publication of my ‘Autobiography’ is again thrown open to the trade” and encouraging publishers to submit bids for the almost-finished book. Appended to the notice was the book’s preface, consisting of seven short paragraphs, in which he offered his subsequently well-known self-analysis: “On the whole my life has been a merry one. I have looked chiefly on the bright side of things.” He promised that the book would not cover up his humbugs and admitted that some people might find his “confessions . . . injudicious,” a selling point if ever there was one and an observation that presaged the book’s strongest condemnations.12
Barnum’s efforts to publicize the eager competition among publishers to acquire his book came after he had already written to a friend in late August that his publisher would be the firm of Julius Starr Redfield. He never said whether there had been a subsequent falling out with Julius Redfield—a fellow Universalist who attended the same New York City church as Barnum—or whether the idea of a competition was only a ruse to get publicity. But his notices about the competition were reprinted widely, along with the preface, and certainly added to the general interest in what Barnum would produce. The Sun reported that twenty-one bids from publishers came in response to his invitation, and the highest bidder was Julius Redfield! Reporting also had it that Barnum would receive $.56 for each $1.25 copy of the book that was sold, but in fact he signed a contract with Redfield calling for him to get 30 percent, or $.375 per copy. This is the precise deal that Barnum had described in another letter to a friend nearly two months earlier.13
By the middle of March, three months after Redfield unleashed it on the world, The Life of P. T. Barnum had received more than a thousand positive reviews in the United States alone (many seeming so due to selective quotation), and not a few negative ones, and within a year it had sold an astounding 160,000 copies, for which Barnum’s share would have been $60,000. It was published at the same time in England, where pirated editions soon appeared, and was also translated into French, German, Swedish, and Dutch.14
A piece in the New-York Times acknowledged the divide in critical opinion, calling The Life “a very amusing book, which every one will read, half the world will abuse, and nobody can help laughing at and with.” Underlining this divide in its own pages, the Times published a second review asserting that the book established Barnum as a shameless liar, unaware of his own faults, and concluding that it “will be very widely read and will do infinite mischief.” The Herald managed only two snide paragraphs and change for Barnum’s book, suggesting, “It would be hard to find a more disgusting mess of trash, and the book seems to have been published to show to what vile uses printers’ ink may be put.” Overstatement went in both directions, one review calling Barnum’s life “the most readable work ever published.” Barnum himself favored a review in the Springfield Republican of Massachusetts, which suggested that a reader should go beneath the book’s humorous surface to find a “lesson that mere humbugs and deceptions generally fail” to turn a profit and that the showman’s intention was always to employ humbuggery only to publicize his “real and substantial exhibitions, such as his Museum, Tom Thumb in England, and Jenny Lind.”15
Only two of the negative reviews seem to have gotten under Barnum’s skin. The principal one appeared in the Trumpet and Universalist Magazine in March 1855. Its reviewer was indignant that Barnum could associate himself with the Universalist faith and with some well-known Universalist preachers. The other was a devastatingly negative review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, which published both a British and an American edition. It concluded that Barnum “has left nothing for his worst enemy to do; for he has fairly gibbeted himself.” Blackwood’s and other British publications took delight in attributing what they saw as Barnum’s worst characteristics to his being an
American. “Mr. Phineas Taylor Barnum is, we are thankful to say,” the magazine chortled, “not a native of this country.” Punch declared him to be the “type and symbol of the glorious Republic” and saw fit, as the title for its review had it, to propose “Barnum for President,” an idea more absurd in 1855 than it seems today. Barnum undoubtedly encouraged such disparagements by dedicating the book to “The Universal Yankee Nation, of Which I Am Proud to Be One.” The section of the autobiography where he tells how he sold Tom Thumb to the British by setting himself up as a gentleman, renting a fine house and a liveried servant, could not have helped, nor could the sting of his overwhelming acceptance by the British aristocracy and the British people.16
Many of the negative reviews on both sides of the Atlantic were concerned, both overtly and by implication, with the coarsening of public life that Barnum’s book represented. His plain speech, his delight in practical jokes and silly anecdotes, his willingness to admit and forgive himself his faults—all of this punctured the gentlemanly façade of the literary establishment, even as his approach was playing into prejudices in intellectual circles, on both sides of the Atlantic, against Americans who rose in class status through mere commerce. The publication of an autobiography necessarily invites criticism not only of the book but also of the life it portrays, and although Barnum admitted, “There are some things in my Autobiography which may honestly be objected to,” he added plaintively, “I only ask the acknowledgment that there are some good streaks in me and in my book, for I do not admire the doctrine of total depravity.”17
The decision to tell his life’s story at the age of forty-four, just past what would turn out to be his life’s halfway mark, might seem brash in retrospect, but his father had died before turning fifty and life expectancy in general did not promise Barnum the decades that, as it turned out, remained to him. Besides, he had a story to tell and had every right to believe that he could tell it well. Some critics who despised the book saw it as just another of his humbugs—an attempt to fool the public into believing that he really could mean both to confess his sins and absolve himself of them—but clearly the autobiography was not intended as humbug. And if he really thought there was more profit in serious enterprises than in humbuggery, then its financial success proved his point. It has been estimated that his autobiography has sold more than a million copies down through the years, and it did well enough in the decade after its publication to encourage him to greatly expand it fifteen years later.
Barnum had been eager to enhance his public reputation as a serious person since before he began to pursue Jenny Lind. His emphasis on moral drama in his Lecture Room, the family-friendly educational aspects of the American Museum, and his energetic lecturing on temperance all show that he was sincerely putting shameless humbuggery behind him and turning to more substantial and respectable pursuits. His autobiography was meant to emphasize this change in him, admitting (if a little too robustly) his sins and touting his virtues. But the negative aspects of its reception were unexpected. That his efforts at transformation could be so easily ignored and adamantly rejected in so many quarters stung and even staggered him. It must have been especially hurtful to be treated so harshly in Britain, where he had first been accepted by many people at the top of society—a continuing source of pride. Barnum would indeed recommit himself to become a more serious and more worthwhile person in the years after The Life of P. T. Barnum appeared. And although he never admitted it, the dismissive things said about his book and about himself must have motivated this change to come as much as the difficulties that still lay ahead.
THIRTEEN
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A RUINED MAN
After the Jenny Lind tour ended, Barnum briefly but seriously considered moving the family to Philadelphia, where he owned a museum and a country house, but between them Charity and Caroline persuaded him to stay in Fairfield. With that, he redoubled his commitment to his adopted hometown, involving himself in an ambitious real-estate development project in adjacent Bridgeport that would draw more on his energy and his wealth than his wisdom.
Across the Pequonnock River from Bridgeport lay what Barnum called a “beautiful plateau” and what an early travel writer named Timothy Dwight IV called a “cheerful and elegant piece of ground,” the “surrounding country . . . gay and brilliant, perhaps without a parallel.” At the time the travel piece was written, about 1815, Bridgeport consisted of a hundred houses situated on both sides of the Pequonnock, near its mouth. The bridge connecting them gave the village its name. The eastern portion of the community did not develop over time as the western portion had, something Barnum blamed on “want of means of access” to the beautiful plateau. He decided to solve the problem directly, and with a prominent attorney in the town, William H. Noble, set about creating on this fine piece of land the new city of East Bridgeport. Noble had inherited a fifty-acre homestead on the eastern bank of the river, half of which Barnum bought for $20,000 on the last day of October 1851. Together the two men quietly purchased another 174 acres of adjacent land, and then set about, in conjunction with the city of Bridgeport, building a series of new bridges across the river. Barnum and Noble quickly laid out a grid of tree-lined streets on their property and marked off lots for residences and businesses. At the heart of the new city would be a six- to eight-acre grove of trees preserved as Washington Park. (To this day, Barnum Avenue and Noble Avenue cross at the northwest corner of the park.) Soon they began selling the lots at cost, keeping every other one for themselves, expecting to make their money when the value of the lots increased. If that were not enough, they also lent the new landowners the money to buy the land and build on it, allowing them to draw down their debts in irregular payments as small as $5.1
This remarkable deal had a few stipulations: the property must be developed within a year, the style of the houses and buildings had to meet with their approval and be situated back from the street, and the lots must be surrounded by fences and kept tidy. Barnum did not say where the ideas behind these restrictions came from, but the general principles by which they developed their new city anticipated by half a century those of the Garden City movement in England and the City Beautiful movement in the United States. The principles also resemble the ideals of the New Urbanism movement that began in the United States in the 1980s.
With head-spinning rapidity, the first factory in the new city rose, and by New Year’s Day 1852, a group of young coach makers had leased it and moved in. Other businesses and residents followed quickly, and after just thirty months there were “dwellings, stores, factories, etc., which have cost an aggregate of nearly one million dollars.” By the middle of 1853, the new city also boasted its own hotel, church, schoolhouse, and sawmill, and the lots themselves had increased in value tenfold, meaning the value of the land that Barnum and Noble still held had increased by at least this much. Barnum wrote with some satisfaction that he had made a handsome offer to buy out Noble and that his partner had turned him down.
At this point in his autobiography, Barnum unfurled for the first time one of his most memorable phrases, describing what would be a guiding philosophy for his investments in and around Bridgeport: “profitable philanthropy.” He would build bridges to the new city, pay for the laying out of streets, the planting of trees, and the preservation of land for a park, and even lend money at a favorable rate to those who wished to contribute to the overall beauty and desirability of the place. But he would do it in a way that enhanced his own investment. He would undertake good deeds that would benefit himself as well as others. The idea of improving the city and richly sharing in the financial advantages of those improvements would guide his relationship to the two Bridgeports for the rest of his days. In the end, the ledger would be very much in favor of the Bridgeports.2
This “pet scheme” of developing East Bridgeport soon became an obsession of Barnum’s. He had “East Bridgeport on the brain,” and thus was perhaps too open to new proposals to see
the city grow and prosper. Having made so much money from his museum, Tom Thumb, and Jenny Lind, he became increasingly eager to leverage that wealth in new speculations, but he became increasingly careless about how he did so. Once involved, he was lax about keeping tabs on his investments. In addition to his East Bridgeport development, he held properties in Bridgeport and elsewhere in Connecticut, farther off in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and even farther afield. One of his cousins, a scoundrel who had followed the Lind tour scalping tickets, was by this time operating out of Cleveland, where he forged Barnum’s name on notes amounting to $40,000, which he then blew on gambling and female companionship. He later claimed in court that Barnum had known about and not objected to the forgeries, which led to years of legal troubles for the showman.
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