* * *
IN HIS LAST YEARS, BARNUM had both the time and the means to set his affairs in order. Death did not sneak up on him. In the previous decade, he had lost his wife and beloved youngest daughter, and as the 1880s began, two of his closest preacher friends, Abel Thomas and Edward Chapin, both died. At the time that Barnum had been so ill, he recounted, Chapin had from his own deathbed sent a daily messenger inquiring about his health. Minnie Warren had died in 1878, followed by Commodore Nutt in 1881, and then two years later Tom Thumb, little Charley now grown portly, died of apoplexy at home in Massachusetts at the age of forty-five. Barnum was in Montreal at the time; he wired Lavinia his sympathy and then released the text of the telegram to the newspapers. After ten thousand people had passed by Charley’s coffin before a church service in Bridgeport, he was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, where a marble, life-size likeness of him atop the Stratton family monument to this day stares at Barnum’s own monument a few feet away. Near the end of the long burial rite, Lavinia fainted into her mother’s arms and had to be carried to her carriage.
Another great blow came to Barnum in 1887, when Jenny Lind Goldschmidt died in London on November 2. She and Barnum had remained on good terms, and the news stirred the warm feelings he had harbored for her when they had been touring together: “I remember the glorious voice of the Nightingale, not alone in the raptures of unrivalled singing, but low and soft, with pitying, tender words, as she sought to comfort one in trouble; or ringing out in the hearty laughter of blithe and vigorous young womanhood.”2
Barnum had wanted to leave a male heir, and even after Charity and he had had four daughters, he hoped that Nancy would give him the chance to pass on his name. When that did not happen, he persuaded Pauline’s oldest son, Clinton Seeley, whom Barnum fondly called Clinte, to change his middle name from Hallett—Charity’s maiden name—to Barnum, thus becoming Clinton Barnum Seeley. The persuasion involved a gift of $25,000. Barnum did everything he could to prepare the boy to succeed him in the circus after he was gone, writing to Bailey, “It is better for you & me that my successor be named Barnum.” As it turned out, though, Barnum Seeley did not much enjoy circus life, and Bailey did not think much of the boy.3
Late in life, Barnum started to style himself “The Children’s Friend,” in part because of all he had done in his lifetime as a showman to entertain families with kids. Less than a year before he died, he asked Bailey to put that moniker under his portrait in circus publicity materials, and justified the wish by explaining, “It pleases parents & children.” But it also pleased Barnum himself. In his last book, Funny Stories, he wrote that on his final visit to London, when he and Bailey took the whole show there, the circus posters showed his picture with his name below it. But, he claims, in the United States it was no longer necessary to put his name on posters under his image, just the words “The Children’s Friend.” The title was no less true for being awarded to himself by himself. From his earliest days as a museum owner, he had always insisted that any enterprise in which he was involved be appropriate for every member of the family, and half-price tickets for children were almost always part of his advertising pitches. Barnum’s role in the more general movement to make theatrical performances acceptable for the whole family helped open up the theater to children. In 1855 he had begun the controversial practice of sponsoring baby shows at the American Museum that, for better or worse, filled the establishment with children, their mothers eager to win cash prizes for finest or fattest baby or best twins.4
When in 1883 the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children had taken him to court on the grounds that the performances of a cycling family called the Elliott Children were putting them at risk, Barnum set up a private showing for doctors and lawyers, including, as it happened, the three judges who would hear the case. The doctors gave the act a clean bill of health and the judges followed their lead. After the not-guilty judgment, Barnum walked up to his accuser in court, offering to pay him $200 a week to be displayed as a man who would “take the bread out of those children’s mouths.” In a reprise of his performance when the ASPCA had charged him, Barnum appeared in the center ring of Madison Square Garden to point out that he was a director of the society that was accusing him, and his wife Nancy was the vice president of the Connecticut chapter of the SPCC.5
In the 1880s a series of books and stories for young people began to appear under Barnum’s name, although the question of how involved he was in their production has never been resolved. A likely answer is that the circus promotion department churned them out with Barnum’s oversight and occasional participation. Arthur Saxon speculates that because Nancy had her own literary ambitions, she might have lent a hand as well. Barnum had written an adventure book in 1876 called Lion Jack: A Story of Perilous Adventures among Wild Men and the Capturing of Wild Beasts, Showing How Menageries Are Made, followed by a sequel called Jack in the Jungle. Many of the subsequent children’s books and stories also had subjects related to the capturing of animals and other aspects of the showman’s own career.6
Barnum’s last years often found him surrounded by grandchildren and then great-grandchildren. Nancy had entered married life determined not to stay at home, as Charity had, while Barnum was off on his many travels, and she even wrote an article for Ladies’ Home Journal warning, “It is an ominous state of things when husband and wife can really enjoy separate pleasures.” So the two spent many happy hours together going to the theater or visiting his shows on the road, vacationing in the mountains of New Hampshire, passing the warm months at Waldemere, and making frequent trips back to England to visit her father and friends. But by the 1880s Nancy began to suffer from the same sort of nervous disorders that Charity had, and she began to spend time in posh sanitariums while Barnum was often on his own.7
In an 1882 letter to a grand-niece, he explained that he was on the road with the circus, waiting for Nancy to get well because “I thought I would rather be alone in these 3 cities with the show than alone in New York with nothing to do.” In 1886 he wrote the daughter-in-law of his friend Abel Thomas that Nancy “has her ups & downs, the latter being twice as numerous as the former. It gives me pain & regret to see & think of, for she really suffers much.” Barnum’s own health was surprisingly good during these years, and when he wasn’t still deeply engaged in his businesses, he spent more and more time either writing to or doting on the children in his family. One recipient of his letters was the grandson of his daughter Helen, Henry Rennell, known as Harry, born in 1882 and living with his family in Harlem. “I think about you and would like to see you every day,” Barnum wrote to his great-grandson in the early spring of 1887. In midsummer, when he and Nancy were vacationing in the Adirondacks and the Rennells were staying at a house in sight of Waldemere, he again wrote Harry, “You and I must ride together and see the pigs and other nice things when I get home, and we must ride every day.” By September, when Harry had returned to New York with his family, “Now I am going out alone in my buggy,” Barnum wrote. “If you were here I should drive you awful fast. Hope I shall do it next summer.”8
In the midsummer letter, he encouraged Harry to say so if he wanted any “new whips or brooms,” because “Grandpa Barnum has got plenty of money to buy them for you.” He had so much money, in truth, that he spent much of his last decade thinking of ways to give some of it away. At this point in his life, his motive could no longer be thought of as profitable philanthropy, but more along the lines of Mark 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” He had always been generous with Bridgeport, even beyond ways in which he himself could benefit. Years before, he had been involved in establishing a cemetery on the western outskirts, where Mountain Grove was laid out in the best rural-cemetery-movement style, with large trees and pleasant lanes, a place to mourn or just visit surrounded by natural beauty. During the war he had donated spaces for the Union dead, and in 1882, when he was building a crypt for Ch
arity where he himself would be buried, he gave three thousand plots for the poor, to be scattered around Mountain Grove so as not to create a Potter’s field, and added another gift of $50,000.9
He also helped establish the first hospital in Bridgeport, where he sponsored a free bed for a poor person and served as its president until his death. Having helped create the public library, he donated books he had purchased or culled from his own collection. He continued to sit as a director on boards for water, parks, a bank, horse-pulled streetcars, and a ferry to Port Jefferson. Seaside Park remained his special project. He paid to drain soggy ground, bought more acres and donated them to the city, and laid out new lanes to drive his great-grandchildren up and down in his buggy pulled by his horse Bucephalus. His last major gift to Bridgeport was a Romanesque building on a corner lot in the heart of the city. In 1888 he bought the land for the local medical, scientific, and historical societies and gave them $50,000 to begin construction of the building, which he insisted must be fireproof. He approved the plans for the building, to be called the Barnum Institute of Science and History, soon before his death, and the last change to his will instructed his executors to pay the remainder of the building’s cost, which would amount to $35,000. It opened in 1893 and stands today as the Barnum Museum. A tornado in 2010 compromised the structure and a long-term restoration is under way.10
Throughout his life, Barnum was a generous supporter of the Universalist Church. For more than four decades he gave money to the Bridgeport society of that faith, making regular contributions each month in addition to paying for such things as having the interior of the meeting house painted in 1848, buying Tiffany stained-glass windows and an organ, making repairs after a fire, building a parsonage, giving the society land, and leaving it $15,000 in his will, wherein he also left thousands more to other Universalist causes. He also supported other churches in Bridgeport and those he attended in New York City. But his biggest legacy related to the church was in his support of Tufts College in Massachusetts, which was nondenominational but founded by Universalists.
He first gave $50,000 to Tufts for the construction of the Barnum Museum of Natural History in the early 1880s, and then left more in his will to have two wings added to the building, in all spending about $100,000. He eagerly supported the museum, sending its curators preserved specimens of animals—many, including Jumbo, having died in his circus—and shipping them duplicates made from collections at the Smithsonian and elsewhere. Barnum kept his intention to contribute the initial money for the building secret until it was revealed at the 1884 commencement for the college. Partly this was to stave off the constant appeals for money he received from other quarters, but it was also because he was not at first comfortable letting his family know that such a large amount would be taken from their legacy. But a few days before the announcement was to be made, he wrote to the Tufts president, “Heirs may as well know I do what I like with my own.” The building, the stuffed Jumbo, and the many other specimens Barnum collected for it served the college for nearly a hundred years until, almost inevitably, fire destroyed it all in 1975. It was his sixth and his very last great fire.11
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EARLY ON THE MORNING OF October 12, 1889, Barnum, Nancy, and young Barnum Seeley sailed on the Etruria for the showman’s final trip to England. The night before he had received friends and at least one reporter at the Murray Hill Hotel, where a dozen people had said their goodbyes with a tone suggesting that they were afraid they would not see him again. When the next person, a good bit younger, addressed him in the same way, Barnum couldn’t take it any more. “You will have the pleasure of seeing me here in America again, if you are here yourself,” he said with humorous emphasis. “Be sure you take care of yourself, and don’t get sick and die.”12
At seventy-nine, Barnum remained strong enough for one last extravaganza, an undertaking he had been dreaming about for years and seriously planning with Bailey for months: to take The Greatest Show on Earth to London. Now he was following forty circus agents across the Atlantic and would be followed in a few days by two ships transporting the entire circus, including England’s beloved Jumbo in both his postmortem forms. Barnum offered more than one figure for how much he and Bailey had spent to realize this dream, ranging from $500,000 to $3 million, and he claimed he was prepared to lose $500,000 over the course of the three-month run in Olympia Hall in Kensington. But no such sacrifice would be necessary.13
More than twelve hundred performers had crossed the Atlantic with Barnum and Bailey, accompanied by a menagerie of monkeys, elephants, camels, giraffes, and nearly four hundred horses, but by this point in his nearly six-decade career, it was the showman himself who was the greatest show’s greatest draw. Indeed the advertisements in the London newspapers barely mentioned Bailey at all, but promised that Barnum would be in attendance at every performance, which he almost always was, despite his years. Soon after the start of each presentation in the cavernous hall, the frenzied activity in the three circus rings paused while Barnum rode in a gilded open carriage around the hippodrome track, the vast oval encompassing the three rings. One of the lion tamers later wrote that, from time to time during this slow procession, Barnum would bid the coachman to stop the matched high-stepping carriage horses, then stand up and croak out in his flat New England accent to the immense crowd, “I suppose you come to see Barnum, didn’t you? Wa-al, I’m Mr. Barnum.” Then he would “make a profound bow” and receive the acknowledgment of his patrons, the men doffing their hats and the women flapping their handkerchiefs. Was it the gilded carriage, the finely liveried coachmen, or the deliberate pace of the horses that gave the proceeding the air of a royal personage acknowledging his admiring subjects?14
Barnum was greeted in London as a returning hero, with glowing accounts in the newspapers and with circus posters on every corner. A dinner for 150 upper-crusters (organized by, among others, Randolph Churchill, Jenny Lind’s widower Otto Goldschmidt, and Oscar Wilde) honored Barnum at the Hotel Victoria, where he was staying. The Greatest Show itself was soon entertaining twelve thousand patrons twice a day at Olympia.
Although Queen Victoria was not in London and did not see the show, as she had hoped to do, two future kings of England did attend. Barnum’s widow recalled that this setting “became a rendezvous for the nobility; the favorite resort of the great middle class; and the Mecca for the poor.” Barnum charged as little as a shilling for many of the seats, and children were admitted at half price. As he passed through the streets of London, Nancy recalled, he could hear people refer to him affectionately as “Good Old Barnum,” which “made his heart and face glow.”15
Not only did the royals go to the circus, some of them more than once, but so did the Lord Chief Justice of England and the Lord Mayor of London and their wives. The visitor whom Barnum felt most honored by, he told the Pall Mall Gazette, was William Gladstone, the liberal, longtime former and still future prime minister of Great Britain, who told Barnum he had read his autobiography. After Barnum tried to puff up his famous guest, he realized “it was no use flattering that man—he could not take any flattery. Oh, he is a truly great old man.” And so was Barnum himself, judging by the attention he received during the London visit—which even included modeling for Madame Tussaud’s museum, to which he donated a full suit of his clothing for his wax figure.16
The grand finale for each of the twice-a-day performances was a new part of the show. This was a huge “panoramic and historical” spectacle developed by the Hungarian producer Imre Kiralfy called “Nero, or the Destruction of Rome,” featuring twelve hundred players and a healthy contingent of the show’s menagerie, supported by an orchestra and choir. They staged a grand procession into Rome and a whirlwind of races and games. The gladiator contests alone left the stage “strewn with enough corpses to keep all the coroners in England busy for a month.” For the grand finale, Nero feasted and finally died while the city burned. The stage ran along one whole side of Olympia, “half a mile long,�
�� one newspaperman declared. In the British papers, the circus ads claimed that $75,000 had been spent on scenery for “Nero” and $250,000 on costumes; presumably the figures were given in dollars instead of pounds so the amount would seem greater.17
On New Year’s Eve a reporter for the Licensed Victuallers’ Mirror of London tried to capture the kaleidoscopic action in the spectacle:
Dancing girls in every colour and shade of colour—all silk, satin, and glitter; Troupes of soldiers, horse and foot, in their habits as they lived; barbarians from Gaul and Germany, ladies borne on litters, Roman citizens, gladiators, elephants, priests, musicians, negro slaves, Nero on his splendid car drawn by four horses abreast. . . .
We can compare it to nothing else, as the procession passes round, as the 300 ballet girls go through their evolutions.18
Barnum told the Pall Mall Gazette that even Gladstone, “the greatest Greek, Hebrew, and Latin scholar in the world to-day,” had found the Roman costumes “most correct” and that he “had nothing to learn from my spectacle of ‘Nero.’ ” If Barnum here takes credit for the spectacle, he did give Kiralfy full credit in all of his advertisements, and as the show continued and “Nero” amazed its audiences, it became ever more prominent in the ads. Bailey got a good deal less credit in the publicity while they were in England, and the circus itself was often called P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, which does not seem to have bothered Bailey at all.19
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