Besides making his daily visits to Olympia, Barnum was preparing for publication his large collection of Funny Stories, which was released simultaneously in London and New York in 1890. The book contained brand-new material about this visit to London and recorded in print for the first time anecdotes upon which he had drawn for the many hundreds of speeches he had given in his lifetime, but it also contained memories that had appeared in his autobiographical writings. Some of the funny stories, Barnum candidly admitted in his preface, he had “not hesitated to insert” even when he was not “absolutely certain that they are original.”20
After the circus closed at Olympia on February 15, two and a half million people having seen it, Bailey accompanied it back to New York. Barnum stayed on in London with Nancy, who had contracted the flu and whose health was now “almost a case of life and death” and would require her to remain in England for several more months. But Barnum, who was himself “strong and well,” as he wrote to Bailey, expected to be back in New York, without Nancy, in time for the opening of the new season of the circus at Madison Square Garden. He waited for her health to improve somewhat and then sailed for home in March. Nancy returned in June and wrote that when he met her, “the kindly face which smiled up at me over a big bouquet” looked pallid, but that his spirits were high, and they passed a joy-filled summer at Bridgeport, surrounded by his progeny.21
Two years before, they had moved into a new mansion built only a few feet to the east of Waldemere itself, which they had decided was too big and too antiquated. Built solidly of brick and stone, the new Queen Anne–style structure had electricity and modern plumbing, and although the goal had been to create a smaller and simpler house, Marina—as Nancy named it—was still substantial, containing an art gallery, a music room, a library, a number of guest rooms, and an office for Barnum built around an open fireplace. With Marina ready to be occupied in the summer of 1888, Waldemere was unceremoniously torn down, its basement filled in and trees planted on the spot. Barnum gave Nancy the deed to the new house.22
They spent Barnum’s last birthday, his eightieth, there. Nancy recalled that he seemed “on this day unusually anxious that none should be missing, unusually tender to every one present.” As the family celebration was under way, so was a special dinner he had planned for all of his employees and their families. He made his way to this other event and addressed the people who had been with him, many of them for decades, expressing his gratitude “with moist eyes, and a voice that now faltered with emotion.” In one last sign suggesting Barnum believed he would never see another birthday, he gave Nancy that favorite gift of his for many years now, a copy of his autobiography. He inscribed the date and wrote, “With love forevermore.”23
He and Nancy spent the month of August at Paul Smith’s Hotel in the Adirondacks, a primitive but elegant haunt of presidents and celebrities where Barnum had been going for many years. After passing September back at Marina, where Barnum gave a last talk about his religious beliefs to his Bridgeport church, they set off for Denver to visit his daughter Helen, stopping in Chicago and Kansas City to visit The Greatest Show on Earth for his last time. They were in Denver for two weeks in October. It was, Nancy wrote, “a month of flawless happiness . . . one unbroken round of pleasure,” and everyone who met them saw a “hale, hearty, handsome old man, the incarnation of vigor and hilarity, who received every stranger as an old friend.” They had considered going on to Mexico or California, as the intention for the trip had been for Barnum to introduce Nancy to the West. There was even talk of going on from San Francisco to Japan. But instead they returned to Bridgeport.24
On November 6, soon after they got home, Barnum came down with what was at first thought to be a bad cold. A small stroke likely accompanied it, since he felt “drowsy and listless” that afternoon. Then, after a few days, came a serious stroke—Nancy called it “acute congestion of the brain”—but thanks to “great care, and his good constitution,” he seemed to be on the mend by the beginning of December. His heart, however, which had been a concern for some years, had been weakened, and one of his doctors told Nancy, “The end may not be near, but this is his last sickness.” The doctor warned her to keep the diagnosis from Barnum so that depression did not hurry death along, but Barnum knew just the same, and depression was simply not in his nature.
He “was always cheerful,” Nancy recalled, “often merry. His room was the one bright spot in a sad house, and his hearty laugh was always heard.” He dressed each day, and would sit in the bay window of his room and look out at his gardens, at the park that had been one of his grandest creations, at Long Island Sound, and on clear days at Long Island itself on the horizon. The schooner P. T. Barnum, built in Bridgeport, was launched on December 10; it was supposed to sail out of the harbor in front of Seaside Park, where its namesake and part owner could salute her. But the ship became ignominiously grounded, stuck to the muddy bottom, and Barnum did not see her until the next day, when she was towed past his house. During the next few months, he did not suffer from his illness and was able to keep up with his business affairs, even, as Nancy wrote, “carrying out transactions involving hundreds of thousands of dollars.” Doctors and nurses were always about, as was his lawyer, his Busy B’s, Bridgeport friends, and his family. He did not seem to Nancy like a dying man; still, she wrote, “there came into his eyes a great wistfulness whenever he looked on a loved face.”25
He continued to work with Bailey on finding new acts for the 1891 season of The Greatest Show on Earth. On March 15 a letter from Barnum appeared as a paid advertisement in the Tribune, promoting the new show, which would open on March 26 in a rebuilt Madison Square Garden. It promised that Barnum & Bailey would continue “for all time, and as far as possible this has been provided for.” The Newtown (Connecticut) Bee reported on March 20 that Barnum’s doctors had agreed to let him attend the opening, and the New York papers too said that his health was improved and he would be in the city, though this was likely just part of the hype. Although he did not attend the show, when a reporter from the Bee rang the electric bell on the front door of Marina on April 3 and was admitted to speak with “the king of the amusement world,” he found said king reading in a New York newspaper about the show’s opening. Barnum told the reporter, in the last great understatement of his life, that he “was always glad to meet a newspaper man.” Soon he was offering up to the writer his plans for his own funeral, lamenting that he could not be cremated because there was no facility nearby. He followed up with a joke about a man spreading his first wife’s preserved ashes on his icy front steps so that his second wife would not slip.26
Two days after this interview, he asked Nancy to stay with him “every moment of the little time that is left,” and at midnight on the following day his heartbeat grew irregular. Those in the family not already present were wired that his hours left on earth were few. During that same night, he told Nancy that his last thoughts were of her. He roused the next morning to hear some election news, to speak comforting words to Nancy, and to whisper greetings to the family members who were gathered around him. Soon his heart began to beat faster and faster and then slower and slower until, just after 6:30 p.m. on April 7, he died.27
In the next few days before his funeral, as Barnum’s body lay cooling on ice in Marina, a wreath of roses went up on its carved-oak front door. The flag on the house’s lawn flew at half mast, as did flags across the city and on boats in the harbor. All the public buildings and many of the private ones in Bridgeport were draped in black and white, as were the buildings for Barnum & Bailey’s Winter Quarters. Photos of Bridgeport’s most famous and generous resident, draped in black, also appeared in the windows of many residences in the city. Local children boldly knocked on the front door of Marina to ask if they might have one of the roses from the wreath as a keepsake. Such was the sorrowful intimacy they felt for the showman who had given them so much pleasure.
The newspapers that had been his lifeblood did not desert Barn
um upon his death. The New-York Times weighed in with a six-thousand-word obituary, and the Times of London called him “an almost classical figure.” Hundreds of newspapers across the American continent shared the sad news with the millions of their readers who had visited the American Museum in their youth or more recently attended a Barnum & Bailey extravaganza in their city or town.28
On Friday, April 10, the day of his funeral and burial, the Bridgeport Public Schools were closed, as were the factories and most of the businesses in town. The Greatest Show on Earth itself went dark, as forty-three of its representatives, led by James Bailey and including Imre Kiralfy, made their way to Bridgeport to pay their respects. A late-morning prayer service at Marina for the family and close friends was followed at 2 p.m. by a public funeral at the South Congregational Church, where a suffocatingly dense crowd still left thousands out in the street. Although Barnum had asked to be buried in a plain pine box, his coffin was of cedar with silver trim. The text for the service was from Luke, a favorite expression of Barnum’s: “Not my will, but Thine be done, O Lord.” His preacher from New York, Robert Collyer, who had begun his working life in England as a blacksmith, gave the funeral address, stressing his friend Barnum’s truthfulness and generosity and suggesting that the words on his tomb might read, “Here rests one who never rested.” The hymns sung included “I Long for Household Voices Gone,” the text by John Greenleaf Whittier, and “O Love Divine, That Stooped to Share,” with a text by Oliver Wendell Holmes. At the end of the service, the hundreds in the church wept as they sang “Auld Lang Syne.”29
But by the afternoon of the next day, as Barnum himself would surely have wanted, the spectacle in Madison Square Garden resumed. Rome would be destroyed twice, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m., courtesy of Kiralfy. One hundred circus performers—clowns, aerialists, trick horseback riders—and one hundred “amazing acts,” from magicians to snake handlers, would fill the three rings, and the hippodrome track would offer zebra, elephant, and other wild animal races. “Mystifying illusions” would accompany “an entire world of startling features.” “Children in ecstasies,” the ad in the Tribune that day proclaimed, “adults astounded.” Barnum rested at last in Mountain Grove Cemetery, but the spectacle he had created would, decade after decade, continue to bear his name and delight the millions who would see it.30
1. P. T. Barnum in London in 1844, when he was touring with Tom Thumb and writing for the New York Atlas. Portrait by Charles Baugniet.
2. Charity Hallett Barnum in an 1847 oil portrait by Frederick R. Spencer. “Without Charity, I am nothing,” Barnum would quip, but his wife often stayed at home during Barnum’s many travels.
3. This advertisement for an exhibition of Joice Heth in December 1835 claimed she was 161 years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. The outrageous nature of this humbug would permanently damage Barnum’s reputation.
4. Moses Kimball, a museum owner in Boston and Barnum’s frequent collaborator, brought a “mermaid” to Barnum.
5. What Kimball offered Barnum looked like the upper torso of a monkey joined to a fish. It became another early humbug, which Barnum dubbed the “Fejee Mermaid.” People flocked to see the dried-up specimen when Barnum exhibited it in 1842.
6. A primary reason for the crowds was Barnum’s vigorous advertising, depicting not the Fejee Mermaid itself but idealized images of the mythical creatures.
7. Charles Stratton in the early 1840s, at about the time Barnum discovered and transformed him into General Tom Thumb. The man with Charles is his father, Sherwood Stratton.
8. This carte de visite from the early 1860s shows Tom Thumb dressed for his most famous impersonation, that of Napoleon Bonaparte. He delighted Queen Victoria in this role, but only performed it for Louis-Philippe, the king of France, when explicitly asked.
9. A publicity photo probably taken in about 1850 of Barnum and Tom Thumb in one of the many outfits in which he performed while touring in the United States, England, and much of the rest of Europe.
10. Soon after Barnum acquired the American Museum on lower Broadway in 1842, he not only made it his own, but turned it into the premier tourist attraction in New York City.
11. This 1855 lithograph, titled “Sleighing in New York,” celebrates the exuberance of life on lower Broadway in those times, with Barnum’s museum very much in the mix.
12. Three Barnum daughters, Caroline, Pauline, and Helen, painted by Frederick R. Spencer in 1847. Another daughter, Frances, had died three years earlier.
13. Iranistan, the “Oriental villa” Barnum built for his family in Fairfield, Connecticut, was completed in 1848. Modeled on the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England, it showed off the wealth he had attained while touring overseas.
14. The singer Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale,” was already a sensation in Europe and Britain when Barnum signed her at great expense for an American tour. Barnum promoted Lind not only for her remarkable voice and stage presence, but also for her modesty and morality, traits not always evident in performers of the day.
15. Barnum and his new find, dubbed Commodore Nutt. The two men visited Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet in the White House in October 1862.
16. The 1863 “fairy wedding” of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren distracted the nation from the bloody battles of the Civil War. The two are flanked here by Commodore Nutt and Lavinia’s sister Minnie.
17. Several of Barnum’s properties went up in flames during his long career. An 1865 fire that destroyed the American Museum is depicted here in a painting by Christopher Pearse Cranch.
18. After the fire of 1865 Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, told Barnum that he should “quit, and go a-fishing.” But Barnum would soon open a new museum farther up Broadway.
19. Near the end of the Civil War, Barnum ran for the Connecticut legislature as a candidate from Fairfield so that he could vote for the constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. In all, he served four terms in the legislature and one as mayor of Bridgeport.
20. In the years after the war, the Barnums bought a town house on Fifth Avenue, where Charity oversaw the arrangements for their many guests and where they enjoyed Central Park and other amenities of city life.
21. But Charity’s health declined over a number of years, and in 1873 she died while Barnum was in England. Within a matter of weeks, Barnum secretly married Nancy Fish, the daughter of an English friend.
22. Barnum with Nancy and his children and grandchildren on his sixty-fifth birthday, in 1875. His youngest daughter, Pauline, third from right, would die in April 1877.
23. In 1880, Barnum joined forces with James Bailey and others. Eventually the two men realized that they complemented each other perfectly, and the Barnum & Bailey Circus was born.
24. Barnum had for years wished to display a favorite of British schoolchildren, Jumbo the elephant. In 1882, despite protests from Queen Victoria and many of her subjects, Barnum acquired the great beast and shipped him to America.
25. Jumbo was Barnum’s last big national sensation on the order of Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind. But in 1885 Jumbo was struck and killed by a freight train, and was mourned around the world.
26. Undaunted, Barnum put both the stuffed hide of Jumbo and his skeleton on display, the latter depicted here in a poster for his first Greatest Show on Earth.
27. The picture of prosperous old age, taken in the late 1870s, at a time when Barnum had begun to give away parts of his vast wealth.
28. A postcard of Barnum & Bailey’s Winter Quarters in Bridgeport. The showman’s fifth and final devastating fire occurred here in November 1887.
29. Barnum built Marina (right), the last of his four mansions in Connecticut, just a few feet from his previous home, Waldemere, which was torn down when the new house was completed in 1888. Barnum gave Nancy the deed to Marina.
30. This poster for his final hurrah in London at the vast hall called Olympia shows both Barnum and his partner Bailey, but mentions Bailey only in small type.
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31. The cover of a pamphlet about the spectacle created by Imre Kiralfy called “Nero, or the Destruction of Rome,” which featured 1,200 players and was the grand finale of the Olympia show.
32. Barnum and his beloved great-grandson, Henry Rennell, who was born in 1884. As Barnum got older, he styled himself “The Children’s Friend.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I met the Barnum scholar A. H. Saxon in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in March 2016, I was distracted enough by the tour he gave me of Barnum points of interest in that city—the large seated statue of the man gazing out at Long Island Sound from Seaside Park; Barnum’s grave site in Mountain Grove Cemetery; Saxon’s own collection of Barnum-related art, posters, and memorabilia—that I barely noticed two self-published, spiral-bound notebooks he handed to me. Titled Barnumiana, these books by Saxon are modestly described as “a select, annotated bibliography of works by or relating to P. T. Barnum.” Once I got home and was able to focus on them, I realized what a valuable gift he had offered me, a painstaking work of scholarship enlivened by his strong, witty opinions, and a perfect guide for someone still trying to wrap his arms around the literature by and about Barnum. Saxon’s tour and his bibliography were the first of many acts of generosity that Arthur, as I have come to know him, extended to me as I worked on this book, from telling me where the bodies were buried (and where one particular body was not) to scanning images, thoughtfully reading and annotating a late draft of the book, and always being available, encouraging, and amusing. He did this as he was completing his own final book about Barnum to go with his fine biography and his selected letters of the great showman. The debt I owe him, however, in no way implicates him in any of my book’s shortcomings.
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