then respond: “Here I am, sir,” emerging from his pocket at the same time. It was a great act, I tell you, and used to take immensely.13
He also showed an aptitude for music, and began learning songs. One of the first was the classic Revolutionary Era melody, “Yankee Doodle.”
Yankee Doodle came to town
Riding on a pony
Yankee Doodle keep it up
Yankee Doodle Dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy.
He would sing versions of this in his high treble voice for at least the next twenty years, changing the lyrics as the situation demanded. James White Nichols of Danbury said in his diary that Charles’s singing voice “was to me purely original. I could bring no human voice I had ever heard in comparison with it. It bore more resemblance to the voice of a bird; sweet, clear, shrill, and effective, it captivated his hearers with its melody, while it astonished them with its strength.”14 Along with musical skills, he showed an aptitude for memorizing rehearsed speeches, dialogues, and song lyrics far beyond his actual age. A well-dressed “straight man” asked him questions while he stood in the costumes and posed. One of these exchanges features the “Doctor” acting as questioner:
DOCTOR: What dress is this?
GENERAL: It is my Oxonian dress. (Puts on dress)
DOCTOR: It is the dress presented to the General by the students at Oxford. What do you represent now?
GENERAL: A fellow.
DOCTOR: I understand—a fellow at Oxford.
GENERAL: No, a little fellow.
DOCTOR: Did you have any degrees conferred upon you?
GENERAL: Yes, sir, Master of Hearts.15
When the Grecian statues were not enough to keep him or the audience happy, Charles graduated to mock battles with “giants,” starting with the French M. Bihin and Arabian Colonel Goshen, who Barnum hired earlier that year. That summer, on July 8, Charles appeared at Peale’s Museum with a “giant girl,” agreeing in “the kindest manner” to visit her three times during the day, to show the public the “most wonderful contrast.” Other plays and skits followed, which included a gender switch to “our Mary Ann,” as well as fabricated and exotic backgrounds and status enhancement, of which the title “General” was the most obvious example.16 All these techniques were used to promote Charles, and of course were not only common amongst little people, but actors, singers, and performers of all sorts.17 This is the business of entertainment. Barnum used these techniques at the beginning because he thought he had to. But it quickly became apparent that what he had on his hands was not another humbug, but an actual attraction.
After the initial reviews came out, he increased Charles’s salary to $7 a week for a year, $3 of which went directly to Sherwood, who acted as a sort of gofer for Barnum during this period. Lodging and travel were also paid by Barnum, however, and a bonus of $50 was promised. Sherwood and Cynthia signed this contract on December 22, 1842.18 Along with other doubts, the showman remained terrified that the four-year-old child would increase in stature, and seemed relieved whenever he reported to his friends in letters that he had not. Later, he reports with joyous humor to his daughter Cordelia, “He don’t grow a hair, but the little dog grows cunning every day.”19
Overlaid by the contract his parents signed with Barnum, this is the first known photograph of Charles at age four, sitting next to a man once thought to be his father, Sherwood. However, this is in dispute. The oldest portrait photograph of a person known to exist is only three years older than this one. Collection of The Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, Connecticut.
For those who saw Charles up close, there was no question as to his remarkably small size. However, during performances on stage, an unfortunate lack of scale was created. James White Nichols mentioned this illusion, and Barnum’s solution, saying: “When standing alone on his platform, it was remarked by many, he did not look so small as they had anticipated. The truth was he appeared somehow, in that position, magnified above his real size. The showman understood this too, and by bringing him down and placing him beside the smallest child which could be found present and able to stand, made his extreme littleness in the contrast more vividly apparent.”20 All observers commented on Charles’s “perfect” appearance as a very handsome, “fully-grown” man shrunk down to the size of a baby. An 1843 quote by Dr. J. V. C. Smith in the Massachusetts Medical Journal is also often quoted to support this: “He appears now as fully developed as he ever will be. Of all dwarfs we have examined, this excels the whole in littleness. Properly speaking he is not a dwarf, as there is nothing dwarfish in his appearance—he is a perfect man in miniature … We gaze upon his little body dressed out in the extreme fashion of the day with indefinite sensations not easily described, partaking of that class of mixed emotions which are felt, but which language has not been able to explain.”21 A few years later, the Washington Union remarked, “Instead of a spectacle of deformity, you are surprised to see one of the most graceful and well-proportioned miniatures of a man which the imagination can conceive, with fresh complexion, delicate hands and feet.”22 This focus on “proportion,” made much of in the early years as a promotional strategy, was taken seriously by scientists of the day.
Charles’s obvious intelligence was also a direct challenge to craniometry, a popular “science” at the time. This usually involved a process of measuring the size and shape of a skull, including bumps and anomalies, and judging by these measurements the propensities, sentiments, and mental abilities of a person, which were supposedly located at specific points around the brain. A “phrenologist” examined Charles’s skull, and reported that the brain is “the smallest recorded of one capable of sane and somewhat vigorous mental manifestation,” saying further that “Gen-eral Tom Thumb is, then, I repeat, a case of un-usual interest to the phrenological world.”23 What he is not saying with this understatement is that Charles’s existence completely refuted the theory of linkage between brain size and intellect, an idea that unhappily continued to linger until the twentieth century, influencing various racial supremacist and imperialist philosophies.
One silent tribute to the boy’s precocious brainpower was the fact that so few educated adults questioned the inflated age Barnum tagged him with. Ambassador Everett certainly did not, and neither did any of the European nobility he encountered over the next few years.24 His physical condition was also important, as “dwarfs” were often considered sickly or unfit. He was advertised as having “always exhibited the most perfect health.”25 The Baltimore Sun noted “We cannot describe the sensation with which one looks upon this diminutive specimen of humanity. Were he deformed, or sickly, or melancholy, we might pity him; but he is so manly, so handsome, so hearty, and so happy, that we look upon him as a being of some other sphere.”26 And in fact this seems to be the case and not just propaganda. Until 1883 there is only one report of Charles being too ill to perform, despite working long hours, traveling constantly, and smoking daily cigars.
Nevertheless, he had to prove his health repeatedly to a society that thought of dwarfs as perpetually weak and sickly. And although child actors were fairly common, concern for their health was just as prevalent as it is today. When child actor Master Betty had burst onto the English scene forty years earlier, a number of people, including Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, the brother of George III, tried to make sure that acting five
