these “plebian” attitudes. Charles Willson Peale was forced to post a sign at his ornithological exhibits that read “Do not touch the birds as they are covered with arsenic Poison.”2 And as late as 1891, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors on Sunday afternoons, they had to collect canes and umbrellas at the door to ensure that none would be used to “prod a hole through a valuable painting, or to knock off any portion of a cast.”3
Funding, audience, and presentation have always been challenges for museums all over the world, but these issues were particularly acute in the rapidly changing society of early America. Most museums of the time depended solely on an increasingly urban, middle-class population to support them through admission fees. In 1784 portrait artist Charles Willson Peale opened a “museum” in his large home in Philadelphia, using only his own limited resources. Nevertheless, this business grew rapidly in what at the time was America’s largest city, becoming the most important early American museum. Two years later The Peale Museum had taken up residence near Independence Hall, and was packed with paintings, taxidermy, and collections of dinosaur bones. Peale tried to walk a fine line between “rational amusement” and enlightenment for his middle-class patrons, using magic mirrors, speaking tubes, and other gadgets to keep people’s interest. Founded in 1814, his son Rembrandt’s Baltimore establishment at first provided a “serious” art museum for patrons, but when his brother Rubens took over, he switched to a “side-show” style of museum, containing various illusions, automatons, and wax figures. He did the same with his father’s Philadelphia museum, and expanded the franchise to New York in 1825.4
Another museum that followed this model was Scudder’s American Museum, which had its small beginnings in Manhattan as early as 1795, and in 1830 had relocated to a five-story building at Ann Street and Broadway, across from St. Paul’s Chapel. Less than two years before he met Charles, an optimistic P. T. Barnum had purchased Scudder’s. By this time competition from Peale’s, exacerbated by financial panics and fires, had driven Scudder’s to near worthlessness. The current owners asked a mere $15,000 for the extensive collections. In a move of contract legerdemain, Barnum played Peale’s Museum proprietors for fools to the tune of $3,000 by agreeing to manage the American Museum for them if they purchased their rival. At the same time he signed a contract with the owners of Scudder’s American Museum to purchase it if Peale’s defaulted. When it did, Barnum promptly bought it out from under them at $12,000, keeping their management fee as well.
Inside, the museum was an astonishing mixture of natural wonders, wax figures, paintings, inventions, and curiosities, and the enterprise expanded rapidly under Barnum’s management, with his constant eye for the “draw.” To the “legitimate” collections of such things as ancient coins and rare minerals, he added objects as strange as a preserved hand and arm of a pirate and a large hairball taken from the stomach of a pig. He also brought in numerous live exhibits and acts, which were showcased in galleries or dioramas, or performed in the Lecture Room, or both.5 Colorful pictures of exotic animals and other curiosities were displayed between each of the one hundred windows, American flags flapped in the wind high above the street, and New York’s first spotlight swept across Broadway from a rooftop turret.
Though patrons could see the entire collection for just one small fee, Barnum devised other ways to gather their money. Brightly colored concession stands situated throughout the hallways sold books, photographs, and a variety of fish tanks. As the decade of the 1840s passed, visitors would find glassblowers demonstrating their art and selling their baubles, or fortune-tellers and phrenologists predicting fates. A downstairs oyster saloon brought in fresh bivalves, while on the roof a picnic garden allowed guests to bring their own lunch or purchase ice cream and cake. Barnum even installed a taxidermist’s shop, where visitors could bring their recently deceased animals, and at the end of the day pick up their stuffed and mounted pets.6
Charles appeared at the Museum for the first time on Thanksgiving Day, 1842, which that year fell on December 8.7 Horace Greeley’s new daily paper, The Tribune, reviewed this premier exhibition, saying, “General Tom Thumb, Junior, the Dwarf, exhibiting at the American Museum, is by far the most wonderful specimen of a man that ever astonished the world. The idea of a young gentleman, eleven years old, weighing less than an infant at six months, is truly wonderful. He is lively, talkative, well proportioned, and withal quite a comical chap.”8 Other glowing reviews followed, and the increased ticket sales not only kept the American Museum in business, but by January 2, 1843, the rival Peale’s New York Museum was ruined. Barnum promptly bought his second museum and kept it open as “competition,” taking the profits from both.9
Even at Charles’s first appearance, this reviewer saw him as “comical,” though Barnum had not had a chance to “train” him yet in the art of humor, as he claims to have spent long hours doing later. This fact points clearly to inborn comic talents as part of his character and not something “grafted on” as later critics sometimes tried to establish. Other early reviewers mentioned his poise and intelligence, without knowing he was six years younger than advertised. Colonel James Watson Webb of the Courier and Enquirer called him a “little gentleman” and commented on his “dress and manners,” saying “he is a sight worth going a great way to see.” Philip Hone, the wealthy former mayor of New York, saw Charles a few months later. He writes wonderingly:
I went last evening with my daughter Margaret to the American Museum to see the greatest little mortal who has ever been exhibited; a handsome well-formed boy, eleven years of age, who is twenty-five inches in height and weighs fifteen pounds. I have a repugnance to see human monsters, abortions, and distortions … but in this instance I experienced none of this feeling. General Tom Thumb (as they call him) is a handsome, well-formed, and well-proportioned little gentleman, lively, agreeable, sprightly, and talkative, with no deficiency of intellect … His hand is about the size of half a dollar and his foot three inches in length, and in walking alongside of him, the top of his head did not reach above my knee. When I entered the room he came up to me, offered his hand, and said “How d’ye do, Mr. Hone?”10
At the time, Barnum lived in a converted billiard hall next to the museum, and Charles and his parents lodged on the fifth floor of the museum itself with some of the other performers. He started on exhibition in the “Hall of Living Curiosities” at the museum, where he immediately began talking to the curious visitors, evidently overcoming any bashfulness quite quickly. He graduated to the so-called Lecture Room, actually a large theater. On the stage, Charles began with easy skits and tricks. Barnum’s first idea did not require Charles to act a great deal; the “Grecian statues” performance involved Charles posing as great heroes and figures from history, the contrast of size and appearance being the primary spectacle. His small body held taut and poised with club upraised in the attitude of Cain about to kill Abel, or with spear ready to fly as Romulus, drew attention to the fact that this was not a weak, helpless child, but a “man in miniature” as advertised. At both the shows and private parties he would sometimes hold a small cane with two hands and let a man carry him while hanging from it, again demonstrating his strength but this time contrasting it with the size of an ordinary man.11 A writer from the Brooklyn Eagle recalled that Charles “laid hold of a stick which I grasped in the centre and I carried you [Charles] round the room.”12 Highlighting Charles’s size was meant to surprise and shock the audience whenever possible. Charles himself described one of these early tricks in an interview:
At that time I was so small that Mr. Barnum could easily hold me in the palm of his hand. A style of overcoats … known as box-coats, were then in vogue. They had large side pockets with flaps over them. Mr. Barnum wore one of them in winter. I could get in one of the pockets of it, and by doubling myself up the flap would fall over the mouth of the pocket, concealing me from view. It was a favorite trick of Mr. Barnum’s to place me in the pocket of his box-coat and appear in the hall at about the time set for the opening of our entertainment. The people in the audience would come about him, exclaiming “Where is the general, Mr. Barnum? Here it is time for the exhibition to open, but he is not about.” Mr. Barnum
