four weeks at three dollars a week.”13 Barnum also knew from bitter experience with performer John Diamond that no matter what the “drawing” power of any given live display, the success depended not only on the act, but on the personality and the temperament of the performer.
The Stratton house where Charles was born stood on Main Street near the center of Bridgeport, at a time when it was a small village. Drawing by Rudolph Pirhala. Courtesy of the Bridgeport History Center.
Charles was hardly the first little person to perform on the American scene. However, in the 1700s none became famous beyond limited regions, except one “dwarf child” also renamed Tom Thumb. This child, whose real name was Calvin Phillips, toured New England and New York from 1798 to at least 1801. Calvin was advertised in much the same way as Charles, as “handsome, and well proportioned,” but unfortunately for him was not taught more than “childish amusements.” A duo that became somewhat well known, the “Clarke Dwarfs,” Caroline and Edward, were thirty-six inches high and accomplished singers. However, like Calvin Phillips, spectators found them to be “infantile.” Joseph Stevens, also called Tom Thumb or “Major” Stevens, achieved minor fame in the northeast during the 1830s, though he was a full four feet high.14 He was still working part-time at the New York museums when Charles Stratton arrived in the city and took his job and name in dramatic fashion.
The first steamboat to connect Bridgeport and New York had been the Fulton in 1815, replaced seven years later by the General Lafayette, named in honor of the Marquis’s visit to the city. By 1842 the Nimrod was one of several ships steaming through Long Island Sound, and Barnum and the Strattons boarded it for New York in early December. They were about to put a diminutive four-year-old child on display in the largest city in America. This could easily be seen as the basest form of exploitation, though for his age more than his size. His parents wanted money, yes, but the pay was not so great at the beginning that they would have been swayed solely by that. The options for a “dwarf” in the mid-nineteenth century were limited, and perhaps they thought they were doing something that would help him survive. Nevertheless, as a child he was being “put” on display, rather than choosing to do so himself, as he would later in life.
His wife said in later years that “He [Charles] had often remarked that he never remembered having been a child, being placed on exhibition when he was but four years of age, and was then educated to act the part of a man and put childish things away.”15 This assertion was supported by others, like the Reverend W. H. Adams, who says that in conversation Charles expressed regret “that he had never known childhood.”16 Child stars have dealt with this issue throughout the ages, and this small boy from Bridgeport was no exception.
New York must have seemed a strange country to little Charles, who had never seen anything but the dirt roads and ramshackle houses of provincial Bridgeport. British author Charles Dickens had visited New York shortly before the Strattons arrived, and his account gives a good idea of what they would have seen. Dickens found Broadway a “wide and bustling street, which, from the Battery Gardens to its opposite termination in a country road, may be four miles long … Was there ever such a sunny street as this Broadway! The pavement stones are polished with the tread of feet until they shine again; the red bricks of the houses might be yet in the dry, hot kilns; and the roofs of those omnibuses look as though, if water were poured on them, they would hiss and smoke and smell like half-quenched fires.” Hackney cabs, coaches, phaetons, tilburies, and carriages swelled the streets. Beggars collected in areas like Five Points, where “narrow ways” reeked of “dirt and filth.” He found “leprous houses,” “miserable rooms,” and “wolfish dens.” But he also noticed “singularly beautiful” women in “rainbow silks and satins” with “gaudy hoods and linings” walked with whiskered gentleman who turned down their shirt-collars. On Wall Street where the “houses and tables are elegant,” merchants “locked up money in their strongboxes,” and by the waterside “bowsprits of ships stretch across the footway, and almost thrust themselves into the windows.” The streets and shops were gas-lit by night, and in the “rakish” bars with their prints of George Washington and the American Eagle, men hammered blocks of ice for drinks.17
Upon his arrival, Barnum covered the city in broadsides advertising “Tom Thumb,” a designation his brother Philo often took credit for, but one that was of course already popular for any little person of the time. This much-used name originally came from the first fairy tale printed in the English language, in 1621, in which a boy no larger than his father’s thumb fights dragons and giants, and becomes a knight in King Arthur’s court. Perhaps drawing on this English background, Barnum’s first broadside read: “P.T. Barnum of the American Museum, Broadway at Ann Street, is proud to announce that he has imported from London to add to his collection of extraordinary curiosities from all over the world, the rarest, the tiniest, the most diminutive dwarf imaginable—Tom Thumb, Eleven Years Old and Only Twenty Five Inches High, Just Arrived From England.” If Cynthia was surprised by the name change, as Barnum claimed, she was even more confused about the mention of England in this advertisement. But the showman’s rationale for this change was simple: the foreign and exotic sold more tickets than the domestic and common. The age change was based on the idea that a four-year-old of that height would not be seen as so extraordinary as would an older child. Without this, and other promotional methods, he said, “it would have been impossible to excite the interest or awake the curiosity of the public.”18
Another of those early advertisements was underplayed, as if Barnum didn’t quite yet know how good he had it. “The Manager is happy to announce that he has at an extraordinary expense engaged General TOM THUMB. Jr. The most wonderful Dwarf in the World. He is but one foot and ten inches high, and weighs only fifteen pounds. That being precisely his weight when three months old. He is lively and talkative, of fine symmetrical proportions, and is unquestionably the greatest living curiosity in the world.”19 Apparently Barnum added the “General” to “Tom Thumb” almost immediately. Charles told a different story later, and his wife repeated it in her autobiography, saying that Queen Victoria had a part in naming him. However, this is misremembered childhood talking; there are numerous references and advertisements that name him “General” before he left for England, including this one.
The “Jr.” in these early advertisements made him sound even smaller, and was probably essential because Charles’s predecessor “Major Stevens” was sometimes called Tom Thumb, and Barnum wanted to distinguish the two performers. The success that was about to come for Charles Stratton, though, would put all the others “in the shade,” and there would then be no need for this kind of distinction. His small size had launched him into the world of entertainment. His talent, intelligence, and skill would keep him there.
Museums in the United States were still experiencing an uncertain childhood. Were their primary purposes to provide academic settings for elites? Education for the public? Entertainment? Or were they simply “repositories” of curiosities, as Dr. Johnson defined them in his 1755 dictionary? The first small American museum was founded in Charleston, South Carolina in 1773, followed by a variety of societies and academies interested in promoting the development of knowledge, all with varying levels of capability and finances. Public funds or private donations for institutions arrived haphazardly and rarely. For the next century, museums continued in this state of flux, with respected institutions like Boston’s Gallery of Fine Arts promoting an exhibition in 1818 of engravings by Hogarth, and a year later featuring a pair of dwarfs called “The Lilliputian songsters.”1 This was further complicated by the attitude of a public which attended museums primarily for entertainment and not enlightenment. Talking,
