Barnum does not say how he first heard about young Charles S. Stratton, but he reports that he asked his older half brother, Philo Barnum, to set up a meeting with the child. Philo had moved in about 1838 to Bridgeport, then a small town only recently incorporated, and was now running a hotel there called the Franklin House.
Charley Stratton’s ancestors had lived in coastal Connecticut for more than a hundred fifty years, and his grandparents had inhabited the village that became Bridgeport since early in the nineteenth century. His parents, who were first cousins, also settled there, occupying a saltbox house on Main Street. His father scraped by as a carpenter and his mother worked as a part-time maid in a nearby hotel. They had two daughters and then welcomed their son into the world at about the same time as Philo arrived in town. On January 4, 1838, the nine-and-a-half-pound baby was born, well-proportioned, healthy, unremarkable. When Charley reached the age of five months, however, now weighing fifteen pounds and less than two feet in length, he stopped growing. Otherwise his physical and mental development continued as would be expected in a child his age. People in town got used to seeing him accompany his mother to work or riding on the wagon of a local baker who drove through the streets selling his goods. Various townspeople would take credit for making Philo aware of this local sprite, but given the intimate size of the town, that would hardly seem to have been necessary. Barnum’s reluctance to give Philo credit for bringing the child to his attention was likely due to Philo’s later claim to a share in the considerable profits that would eventually grow out of the meeting.1
The fateful convergence of Barnum and the future General Tom Thumb occurred in the dining area of Philo’s hotel in November 1842. Barnum had ridden a packet boat upriver from New York to Albany on a business matter, but while he was there the Hudson froze over, so he started back overland, via the Housatonic railroad, traveling on it as far as its terminal in Bridgeport, from which he would take a steamboat to New York the next day. Always resourceful in the use of his time and ever on the lookout for a new act for his museum, Barnum made the most of this overnight stop. One local woman remembered that the Stratton boy wore a blue velvet suit to the meeting. In his autobiography, Barnum described Charley as the smallest child he had ever seen of walking age, “a bright-eyed little fellow, with light hair and ruddy cheeks,” who was “perfectly healthy, and as symmetrical as an Apollo.” The boy, not quite five years old, appeared at first to be what nobody would call him for the rest of his days, “bashful,” in Barnum’s description. But he soon opened up, persuading the showman that—as those bright eyes suggested—he was intelligent for his age. Still, Barnum detected no evidence yet of what would turn out to be Charley’s extraordinary cleverness. Barnum claimed that the meeting left him doubtful about the boy’s earning potential, and so he hired him to appear at his museum as a human oddity for only four weeks at $3 per week, plus his expenses and those of his mother, Cynthia.2
With his usual alacrity and willingness to fudge the truth, Barnum both detected and immediately solved the main problem in exhibiting Charley. If he revealed the young man’s real age, how would people know that he was anything other than a smallish child rather than what was true, that he was a perfectly proportioned dwarf ? “Some license might indeed be taken with the facts,” Barnum ventured, and license was indeed taken in his promotion of the boy, beginning with simply changing Charley’s age to eleven. While he was at it, Barnum claimed that his discovery was of a more exotic origin than a plain saltbox house in banal Bridgeport. This time he did not reach for Pernambuco but contented himself with saying that young Stratton was “just arrived from England.” Barnum wrote that he did not intend to justify these deceptions, but then he went ahead and did it anyway. Changing the boy’s age was acceptable in Barnum’s mind because he had “reliable evidence” that Charley was “really a dwarf ”; in that, at least, people would be getting what they paid to see. About the second deception he was more shameless:
I had observed (and sometimes, as in the case of Vivalla, had taken advantage of) the American fancy for European exotics; and if the deception, practised for a season in my dwarf experiment, has done any thing towards checking our disgraceful preference for foreigners, I may readily be pardoned for the offence I here acknowledge.3
Barnum makes this self-justification at least partly in jest. The American tendency in the first decades of the Republic to look to Europe in matters intellectual and cultural was under attack elsewhere, for example in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 speech “The American Scholar,” and as Barnum noted, he himself had observed the phenomenon before. But the idea that his “dwarf experiment” might actually school the public was played for comic effect, with more than a hint of self-mockery. After all, disparaging your audience even retrospectively is not a wise strategy for increasing its size. As if realizing this, in the later version of his autobiography, Barnum cut this passage and the rest of his justification for these deceptions.
To complete the promotional reinvention of Charley Stratton, Barnum gave him the name Tom Thumb, after the hero of an old English folk tale involving Merlin and King Arthur’s court, where Sir Thomas, no bigger than a thumb, had been made a knight of the Round Table and sallied forth on a mouse. Perhaps the English origin of the name gave Barnum the idea of claiming England as Charley’s homeland. In the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, Tom is purchased from his parents for the purpose of showing him. At least two dwarves dubbed Tom Thumb had already been exhibited in New York and regionally before Barnum discovered Charley Stratton. And one of them, whose real name was Joseph Stevens, was still appearing in the city when Barnum brought his new Tom Thumb to New York. Because Stevens was nearly four feet tall, more than twice Charley’s size, and already established, Barnum sometimes referred to Charley as Tom Thumb Junior. Stevens also went by the name Major Stevens, and perhaps for this reason Barnum gave his Tom Thumb the higher rank of general.4
Barnum remembered that the boy and his mother arrived in New York on Thanksgiving Day, which in the year 1842 was celebrated across the state on December 8. According to a New York diarist, the weather was “very gloomy,” featuring a “dark sky, rain, snow.” Ads in the Tribune and the Herald announced that Tom Thumb would go on display at the American Museum on that very afternoon, and Barnum immediately began to introduce his miniature general to friendly journalists.5
James Watson Webb, the editor of the Courier and Enquirer (and known as Colonel Webb, a rank actually acquired in the army), wrote in his paper that “the distinguished General Thomas Thumb” and his unnamed companion had arrived at the door of his house unannounced just as he was preparing to carve the turkey for the family dinner. He described Tom frolicking on his dining-room table, kicking over a glass of water so as not to be drowned in it and avoiding the wineglasses for the same reason. The general greeted each of Webb’s excited children and then took a seat and ate with gusto, stopping only to propose a toast, drinking from a glass of the sweet Madeira wine known as malmsey. After describing this scene, Webb then put in the plug for Barnum’s new act that the showman clearly had been angling for. He wrote of Tom Thumb, “He is the greatest curiosity we have ever seen; and we are quite sure that all who omit to pay their respects to him, at the American Museum, will for ever regret it.”6
Barnum introduced Tom Thumb to the city with the usual promotional blitz, making the rounds of editors and rewarding them with paid advertisements in their papers for favorable stories such as Webb’s. He also had handbills posted around the city, which did not fail to mention the “extraordinary expense” of importing Tom from England. Tom and his mother lived on the museum’s fifth floor, among such other human curiosities as two giants. Barnum and his family now lived next door in what had been a billiards parlor. Charity had given birth the previous spring to the couple’s third daughter, Frances, joining Caroline, now nine, and Helen, now two. The five of them often made what little room was necessary at their hearth for their tiny new neighbor, as Barnum worked on the boy’s theatrical education: “I took great pains to train my diminutive prodigy, devoting many hours to that purpose, by day and by night, and succeeded, because he had native talent and an intense love of the ludicrous.”7
One of the woodcuts Barnum commissioned for his autobiography shows him sitting by the fire instructing Tom Thumb, who is dressed as Napoleon. This impersonation would be Tom’s most famous, perhaps because it was both the most ludicrous and yet somehow appropriate, given the French emperor’s reputed stature. The initial period of instruction must have begun before Tom reached New York, since a squib in the Herald on December 9 promised, “[Tom Thumb] is lively and full of fun, swings his cane with great nonchalance, talks of his unpleasant trip across the Atlantic in the steamship, and withal is quite a comic young gentleman.” Cane swinging, knowing what to say about the fictional Atlantic crossing, and displaying a knack for comedy would all require preparation, and Tom was still a month from his fifth birthday. Perhaps the truest word in Barnum’s comment about training Charley Stratton is prodigy, for how many five-year-olds can even speak at length, much less exhibit Tom Thumb’s theatrical presence? In a very short time the boy would learn scripts, songs, and dance steps, take up mimicry, and contribute spontaneous witticisms to the puns and other wordplay that Barnum devised for him. No teacher, not even one as determined and experienced in theatricality as Barnum, could have taught so young a person so much so fast. But perhaps what Barnum was unwittingly doing was even more remarkable: revealing Charley’s native ability to the young man himself. Both of them must have been excited by the transformation Charley was undergoing, making it easy to believe Barnum when he said that he and Charley quickly grew quite fond of each other.8
DURING TOM THUMB’S FIRST WEEKS at the museum, a tryout, in effect, as Barnum tested his initial doubts about how well the boy would attract patrons, no elaborate costumes or scripted remarks had yet been prepared. In his 2013 book, Becoming Tom Thumb, Eric D. Lehman says Tom at first appeared in the museum’s Hall of Living Curiosities. He would spend most of his time (as Joice Heth had done when she was on display in various venues) interacting with the visitors to the museum as they passed by his station. This gave Barnum’s customers a chance to see up close just how well proportioned Tom was and also how astonishingly small, small enough indeed to have emerged from a fairy story. Tom said later that once he and Barnum began to appear together on the stage in the museum’s Lecture Room, Barnum would sometimes show up just as the performance was scheduled to begin, wearing an overcoat with flap pockets so deep that Tom could curl up in one of them to hide himself. When the audience members crowded around Barnum, asking where Tom Thumb was, Barnum would call out for him. Tom would push up through the flap and respond, “Here I am, sir.”9
Tom’s tryout period was cut short, a resounding success. Even during the boy’s first month at the museum, Barnum had encouraged the public to visit immediately by advertising that his little man would appear only for “the rest of the week.” The crowds clamored to see him. Just two weeks after Thanksgiving Day and three days before Christmas, Barnum signed a one-year contract with Tom’s parents, raising the weekly payment to $7, $3 of which went directly to Tom’s father, Sherwood Stratton, who had arrived on the scene and would put his carpentry skills to use as a museum handyman. Soon thereafter Barnum raised Tom’s weekly rate further still, to $25. Barnum wrote, “He fairly earned it, for he speedily became a public favorite.” As the act became more developed and more and more New Yorkers had seen him, Barnum began sending Tom out on the road, eventually exhibiting him in “numerous cities and towns in many of the States.” By the beginning of 1843, Tom Thumb was traveling down the East Coast and into the South.10
In the weeks when Barnum and Tom Thumb were developing the act, the showman himself appeared on stage as both introducer and straight man. When he sent Tom and his parents on the road, Barnum would not entrust them to just anyone. An old friend from home, Fordyce Hitchcock, an ordained Universalist minister no less, filled the straight-man role and also protected Barnum’s interest in the boy. For this, Barnum paid him $12 a week. When Tom went to Boston to appear at Moses Kimball’s museum, Barnum urged “Friend Moses” to take on this added expense, or at the very least to find someone reliable to replace Hitchcock, someone who would not attempt to steal “Tommy” away from Barnum’s employ.11
Evidently Barnum’s confidence in Hitchcock was well placed. Not only did he keep the young star in the fold, but he later took the job of assistant manager of the American Museum and held it “for seven or eight years.” Eventually, when Barnum was out of the country for an extended period, he left Hitchcock in control of the museum, which he ran, in his boss’s estimation, “with consummate tact as well as the strictest fidelity.” Barnum seems to have offered his friend a job when Hitchcock abruptly left the church and needed what he later called a “helping hand.” Indeed one photograph of “the Parson” shows dark, haunted eyes set deep in his long, bewhiskered face. But whatever the cause of his leaving the clergy, Hitchcock’s gratitude to Barnum for his loyalty as a friend lasted for the rest of his days.12
Barnum’s letters to Kimball in 1843 gave a running commentary on how Tom Thumb was doing, both with Hitchcock on the road and during his interludes back at the American Museum. Kimball himself was eager to show Tom Thumb at his Boston Museum, and at one point grew annoyed at Barnum for holding him back. By late summer Barnum would accommodate Kimball, but he had reason to feel proprietary about what he had created in this act. Tom was, after all, Barnum’s first great discovery and would be his most reliable moneymaker. Indeed, in the first of the following excerpts from letters to Kimball, Barnum explained his unwillingness to share Tom with another museum owner, one of the Peales who ran museums in Philadelphia and Baltimore:
February 5: “By the way Peale wrote me the other day to ask if I could not send him a Tom Thumb, [but] being now nearly new and without a rival, he was [very] valuable.”
February 21: “At present, my museums are neither of them making a penny, and all I spend is on Tommy.”
March 6: “Tom Thumb is doing so well that I think of letting him go farther south and let you have him at cost three weeks. (If two won’t do) say in May or June—perhaps sooner—certainly as soon as he returns from South after stopping with me a fortnight.”
March 31: “I am only averaging $50 per night. Tom Thumb is only doing about the same. I fear his southern tour won’t be as good as I anticipated.”
April 15: “Tommy T. is doing but little more than paying expences.”
May 15: “I expect Tom Thumb tomorrow. . . . I understand that the parents lately have . . . complained of my treating them ill in sending them south. . . . However I have no fears but I can straighten that out for First they can’t leave me if they would. . . . [I will] blow the concern to hell before I’ll allow anybody else [to take] up the fruit which I have shaken from the tree.”
May 25: “The General is just bringing us up straight again. Yesterday we took $166—I hope he will help you [earn] a couple of thousand dollars, and I am sure he will nearly do that if you push it right.”
July 15: “I leave Sunday afternoon for Albany with Tommy and Co.”
September 14: “I send herewith Tom Thumb’s Boots, which I hope you will forward to him at Salem if convenient.”
September 29: “Tom Thumb will be here some time next week and I shall keep him a spell.”
October 12: “I have agreed to let John Sefton have the General one night next week at Niblo’s for his benefit. I am to take General on the stage & show him off, & have him passed round, which I shall decline but express my regret at being obliged to do so, as he must return at once to the American Museum, but that they can see him, shake hands, & converse with him at the Museum any day during the week! Sefton gives me $50 and will not detain him 30 minutes.”
October 24: “I only took $112 last night—lost some $30, probably by letting General go to [Niblo’s]. Sefton had a jam and General killed ’em dead.”
October 31: “Next week Tommy goes to Baltimore or Philadelphia.”
November 15: “My business is shocking—last week took but $428 [in contrast to a $1,240.40 week when Tom Thumb was at the museum in October]. What about the Albino Lady?”13
But for all the attention Tom Thumb received in the private letters to Kimball as the year went by, Barnum summarized 1843 in a single sentence in both versions of his autobiography and skipped ahead to early 1844, when he set sail for England with the three Strattons. Leave it, then, to the New York Herald, which on December 1, 1843, summed up the success of Tom Thumb’s first full year in Barnum’s employ:
He has been visited by nearly half a million persons in America, and has been feted by many families of the first distinction. He is so graceful, so pert, so intelligent, and withal, so wonderfully diminutive, that all who see him are charmed with him at once, and his visits to all our cities, have necessarily been so many signal triumphs.14
The piece was so glowing that Barnum might have written it himself, even if it appeared in what was otherwise a news column under the heading “Theatrical.” One column over in the same issue, an obvious advertisement began, “
THE SPLENDID TRIUMPH OF THE AMERI-/can Museum, is owing entirely to the tact and talent displayed in the management.” It went on to promise, “To-morrow will be a great holiday there, for ladies, families, schools, &c. General Tom Thumb will amuse thousands of little ones with his facetious songs, dances, jokes, &c.” Another hint that the first item was either written by Barnum or in close collaboration with him was its expression of the showman’s hopes and plans for the show’s upcoming European trip: “[Tom Thumb] will undoubtedly visit Queen Victoria and be received with marked attention by all the nobility in Europe.” The item then listed the cities Tom would visit and reiterated, “He will also call upon the Queen at Buckingham Palace.” The repetition suggests that Barnum was making a resolution rather than announcing a firm engagement, for nobody at the palace had yet been informed of the visit.
BARNUM EAGERLY MADE THE MOST of Tom Thumb’s imminent departure. He created an advertising campaign in the New York papers warning that the opportunity to see the little man before he slipped away was itself slipping away. Barnum would advertise a departure date and then come up with an excuse for why Tom Thumb was still around—his own variation on the going-out-of-business-sale stratagem. Early in January the date of his sailing was sometimes left vague but the ads made it sound alarmingly soon (“A FEW DAYS LONGER!”), but as the month wore on, the departure was fixed on January 16, when Tom would sail on the new packet ship Yorkshire, bound for Liverpool. Performances were promised up to the final hour. One advertisement in the Tribune said an appearance at 11 a.m. would be followed, “if the wind proves fair,” by a noon sailing. As Barnum’s commercial luck would have it, the wind did not prove fair, blowing as it was from the east, and so several more last-minute performances were made possible before the ship did finally sail on January 18. The New York correspondent for the National Intelligencer in Washington poked fun at Barnum’s blitz, writing, “His Littleness sailed this morning for England—‘or so they say,’ ” and went on to speculate, “Possibly, MRBARNUM has ‘a contrary wind’ in reserve, and he may be ‘unavoidably detained’ another week.”15
But on that Wednesday a favorable fifteen-knot wind from the northwest blew in, and late in the morning Tom Thumb, dressed in military regalia, left the museum in an open carriage. He was preceded by the American Museum house band, which Barnum joked “kindly volunteered” to accompany him. Boys followed the carriage down Fulton Street, and ladies waved white handkerchiefs from the windows of buildings he passed, Tom all the while doffing his hat and taking bows. When the barouche arrived at the wharf, a thousand people were waiting. One reporter wrote, “The vessels in the neighborhood swarmed with these who had gathered for the purpose of seeing the General off.”
Once he boarded the ship, Tom was placed atop its capstan, where he struck Napoleonic poses and waved to the crowd. Barnum, the Strattons, a servant, a tutor for Tom named George Ciprico, and the museum’s naturalist, Emile Guillaudeu—along with a contingent of Barnum’s friends and eight other passengers—all boarded the ship. At 11:30 a.m. two steamers towed it away from its moorings and through the harbor. The museum’s City Brass Band, as Barnum had dubbed it, played aboard one of the towing vessels.16
A newspaper reported that some 3,200 people had seen Tom Thumb at the museum the day before, but in spite of this bonanza, Barnum confessed to shipboard feelings that were not typical of him: “What with the depression of spirits I felt on leaving family, friends and home, and the dread of sea-sickness, I was in what we Yankees call ‘a considerable of a stew.’ ” Still, he was engrossed by the action going on around him:
The deck was covered with ropes, blocks, and cables; sailors were running in all directions; the pilot, a gruff looking chap with a high florid complexion, was giving orders in language that was Greek to me. . . . I became utterly confused. I was out of my element—I had got beyond my depth.17
It took the steamships two hours to tow the Yorkshire through the Narrows and out to Sandy Hook, at which time one of the vessels sounded a bell signaling Barnum’s friends to board for the journey back to lower Manhattan. Barnum recalled, “That moment my usually high spirits fell below zero. As I successively grasped for the last time the hand of each friend as he passed to the steamboat, I could hardly restrain a tear.” The band started to play from the deck of the steamer. When Barnum recognized the familiar notes of “Home, Sweet Home,” “the tears then flowed thick and fast.” His party stood on the quarterdeck, handkerchiefs swirling, and watched as the other steamer chugged off into the distance. “When the strains of ‘Yankee Doodle’ floated over the waters,” Barnum wrote, “we all give three hearty cheers, and wave our hats, in which even the sailors join, and I care not to acknowledge that I wept freely, overpowered as I was with mingled feelings of joy and regret.” Barnum concluded the scene by reporting that the gruff and florid harbor pilot boarded the second steamer at two o’clock, “and thus was broken the last visible living link that bound us to our country.”18
Barnum described this scene three times, first in a letter written in England for the New York Atlas, then in the 1855 edition of his autobiography, and again in the 1869 edition. Each version is slightly different from the others, but in all of them his emotion seems genuine, and in all of them he contrasted his flowing tears with his deserved reputation for “high spirits,” a “natural bias . . . to merriment.” In the two versions of the autobiography, he protested that he was as given to “seasons of loneliness and even sadness” as the next person, but that his Christian faith pulled him through. He went so far as to say, “In all my journeys as ‘a showman,’ the Bible has been my companion, and I have repeatedly read it attentively, from beginning to end.” The strong meaning he packed into this moment owes something to the growing importance that faith would have in his life as he grew older. However, even as he wrote the Atlas letter, which he began a half hour after docking in Liverpool, he saw the departure and the deep emotions it stirred up in him as a significant moment in his life.19
All those tears, that mixture of “joy and regret,” suggest that he was honestly sorry to be leaving his wife, children, and members of his broader family, his many friends, and the comfortable home and work life he had built for himself in just two years. In telling this story of leaving America, he reported that he had now paid off all his debts for the Museum and that he had also bought out the rival Peale’s Museum and created “a handsome surplus in the treasury.” He now felt confident in his success and believed that his business “had long ceased to be an experiment” and was now in “perfect running order.” The joy expressed in his tears reflected the side of Barnum’s personality that contrasted with his need and love for domesticity—for all those things drifting away with the bleating brass band. He had realized his ambitions in an amazingly short period of time.20
But to his mind, a business in perfect running order no longer needed him. He was now, in effect, starting over. The challenge was not whether Tom Thumb would make him money in a new place; the challenge was the new place itself, a place that had no notion of who P. T. Barnum was. While he knew the language, everything else about the coming experience would be an experiment in whether what he had learned at home would work abroad, and if not, whether he had the wit to adapt. We know he set his sights on meeting the queen in Buckingham Palace, but he would also travel the length and width of the island in an attempt to win over Victoria’s subjects. Whether or not he would succeed in the land of his forebears would be a test for Barnum of his own worth, of how far he had come and how far he might yet go.