13 
In America, 1831 was dubbed the “Year of the Great Eclipse.”
In the lead-up to the solar event, doomsayers predicted that the end of the world was coming. As one almanac peddler warned, the darkness would be such that domestic fowl would retire to roost, the moon would ride unsteadily in its orbit, and Earth would tremble on its axis. When the solar eclipse finally occurred on February 12—lasting one minute and fifty-seven seconds and covering a path up to sixty miles wide, America became a nation of anxious stargazers. From bleary-eyed elders to bright-eyed infants, everyone looked up to the darkening heavens through a piece of smoked glass and dreaded the worst. However, the highly anticipated apocalypse ended with a whimper, not a bang. The spectacle was quite a letdown, with the darkness fleeing, as one observer snorted, like “a thunder gust.” The stargazers felt bamboozled by advertising quacks who had promised an exhibition of “fireworks or phantasmagoria.”1
Anticlimactic as the celestial event was, it did launch a year of chaos and cataclysm that would decisively change the destiny of the United States. On January 1, William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator, igniting a spark that would soon turn into the wildfire of the abolitionist movement. In March, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, handed down a decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, legitimizing the genocidal removal of Indians, blazing the infamous Trail of Tears. In August, Nat Turner led a violent insurrection of slaves in Virginia that shook the nation to its core. If the disappointed heaven-gazers in February had blamed doomsayers for their superstitious exaggerations that fizzled, they would now have to think again when Turner’s band of rebels roamed and rampaged, spilling the blood of white masters, mistresses, and innocent children in the swampland of southeastern Virginia. In fact, Turner, a self-taught, literate preacher, had regarded the February eclipse as a divine signal for action. “I had a vision,” as he confessed later in jail. “I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams.”2 After Turner was hanged, the nation had scarcely any time to recover from the shock before another calamity loomed on the horizon: cholera. It was the same epidemic that had begun in India in 1817 and taken the lives of Chang and Eng’s father and siblings in 1819, reaching China by 1820, and then crossing the border into Siberia. After that, the epidemic ravaged Europe much as Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes had done. It made its appearance in Liverpool in September 1831, and, given the direct trading routes between Liverpool and the United States, would hit the nation with force by year’s end, causing thousands of deaths.
When Chang and Eng watched the darkening sun from the decks of the Cambria on February 12, they probably recalled scenes of the lunar eclipse on the eve of their departure from Siam, when the locals, following custom, banged gongs, beat pots and pans, and screamed at the tops of their lungs to scare away the sky dog trying to swallow the moon.
On this return trip across the Atlantic, they made certain not to travel in steerage. Perhaps their protest the previous time had paid off; or perhaps Susan Coffin, who now alone managed the twins with the help of James Hale, had finally realized the importance of keeping the twins comfortable and contented so that she could milk more cash out of them. Now that Robert Hunter, prior to his departure for Asia, had sold his share in the twins to the Coffins, she and her husband had become sole owners of Chang and Eng. As Mrs. Coffin told her children in a letter, “Your Father has got these boys to earn money to send you both to school with.”3 Abel Coffin, traveling on the other side of the world, also wrote to tell his wife to “be kind to Chang Eng,” although he immediately added, “but you must not let them have too much their own head it is necessary to have them mind you.” Coffin acknowledged that he might have been harsh in his treatment of the twins, but he was also quick to defend himself. He asked his wife to tell Chang and Eng that, “although they might think I was hard with them I think their own good sense will convince them that I have never done anything but what is for their good. . . . I shall always do by them as by my own children.”4 These words of reluctant admission and ready self-exoneration revealed a relationship fraught with tension. In his self-righteous way, Coffin might have thought that he had been treating the twins like his children. Ahab might have thought that his harshness toward the Pequod’s crew was merely typical behavior of a strict patriarch, but Ishmael knew well, as did Melville in real life on the whaler Acushnet, that the condition aboard was no better than chattel slavery. Likewise, even though Chang and Eng now enjoyed traveling in cabin class rather than the dreaded steerage, they knew that the improved treatment did not originate from Mrs. Coffin’s kindness. As they would put it bitterly one day in a letter, referring to themselves in the third person because the letter was written by an intermediary, “As to Mrs. Coffin doing all she could for their comfort & loving them & liking them—they say, they have no doubt that the number of thousands of hard shining dollars which they have enabled her to spend have made her like them—but let Mrs. C. look into her own heart & they feel confident she will discover that the great loving & liking was not for their own sakes—but for the sake of the said Dollars.”5
The twins arrived back in New York on March 7. They had left the United States as two eighteen-year-old greenhorns, little known to the world. Fifteen months later, after an extended, profitable tour in Great Britain, they were now famous. Besides a vaunted reputation, they had also gained forty pounds, making their total weight 240 pounds, an increase that was facetiously ascribed by a newspaper reporter to “their eating so much of the roast beef of old England.” Their height was now 5 feet 2 inches.6
A week after their return, on March 15, while the nine Supreme Court justices were still deliberating the fate of millions of Native Americans after William Wirt’s passionate plea on the previous day in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the twins were put on display again in New York City. Their success in England had served to stimulate further the curiosity of the American public. The ex-mayor and tireless diarist Philip Hone, who had missed the twins last time, eagerly went to the show on the opening day. That night, when he retired back to his Park Place mansion after a feast of eyes, he penned an elaborate entry in his journal:
March 15.—Went this morning to see the Siamese boys, who returned last week from England. I did not see them when they were exhibited formerly in this city. This astonishing freak of nature is exceedingly interesting, and the sight of it is not disagreeable, as I expected to find it. They are now nearly twenty years old, kind, good-tempered, and playful; their limbs are well proportioned and strong, but their faces are devoid of intelligence, and have that stupid expression which is characteristic of the natives of the East. They are united by a strong ligament of flesh or gristle, without bone, about three inches in breadth and five in length. Their movements are, of course, simultaneous. They walk, sit down, play, eat and drink, and perform all the functions of nature in unison; their dispositions and their very thoughts are alike; when one is sick the other partakes of his illness, and the stroke of death will, no doubt, lay them both in the same grave; and yet their bodies, heads, and limbs are all perfect and distinct. They speak English tolerably well, and appear fond of talking.7
His condescension and racism notwithstanding, Hone shared with his contemporaries a guarded fascination with the exotic twins. In a few years, he would become an enthusiast of P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions, being one of the first to visit the Joice Heth show and subsequently a frequenter to almost anything the Prince of Humbugs would care to put on display. In 1840, Hone would spend a few days in Philadelphia, visiting the famous Chinese Museum, mesmerized by what he described in his diary as “an immense collection of curious things collected by a Mr. Dunn during a residence of twenty years in China.”8 Seeing the twins, Hone had expected to experience revulsion, yet he felt a freakish fascination.
We do not know whether Edgar Allan Poe, drenched in sorrow at drinking holes in the city after his recent court martial and dismissal from West Point, visited the twins on Broadway. Newspapers carried daily reports and advertisements about the exhibition; handbills and posters were plastered all over the city. Judging by the nature of Poe’s literary work, which shows a clear obsession with twins and all forms of human abnormality, it is not unreasonable to assume that Poe would have enjoyed watching the conjoined twins and appreciated their embodiment of the aesthetics of the grotesque. In Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick and Madeline, two residents in that house of doom and gloom, were twins. Not only did they bear a striking resemblance, but also “sympathies of a scarcely intelligent nature had always existed between them.” When one died, the other quickly dissipated. The story ends with the sister’s spectral return, taking her brother away to the land of Nevermore: “with a low moaning cry, [she] fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.” In “Hop-Frog,” the eponymous dwarf-cripple teamed up with Trippetta, a young female midget, and exacted revenge on the king and his seven councilors who had abused and mocked them. Hop-Frog tricked the king and his men into disguising themselves as ourang-outangs with tar and feathers, hanged them all from a chandelier, and burned them into “a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass.” In this dark tale of vengeance, Poe clearly identified with the freaks, the outwardly subhuman. “There is no exquisite beauty,” Poe said, echoing Francis Bacon, “without some strangeness in the proportion.” The connoisseur of the grotesque would certainly have appreciated the Siamese Twins.9
The first publication about Chang and Eng by a major writer, however, did not come from Poe but rather from Edward Bulwer Lytton, lionized in the British and American literary worlds at the time.