On a Monday morning, February 5, the snowy mountaintops of Wales came into view, and the Yorkshire slipped around the island of Anglesey and into the mouth of the Mersey. The ship docked in Liverpool, where a large crowd had gathered to see Tom Thumb disembark. But Barnum chose not to expose the little man to the public yet, and when Cynthia Stratton carried her son down the gangplank like a baby in her arms, as Barnum had asked her to do, the crowd did not notice them. Barnum’s party and their luggage proceeded the few blocks to the domed, Greek-columned Customs House, where money was efficiently extracted from the sea-weary Yankees. Then it was on to the Georgian-style Royal Waterloo Hotel—“the best in the city,” Barnum called it—where the porters showed more English efficiency by parting him from his half-crown coins. Feeling out of place and thoroughly fleeced, Barnum and company went to the hotel dining room, where “we washed down our indignation with a bottle of port” and dined on roast beef and “fried soles and shrimp sauce.”1
That night, another bout of homesickness overtook him. Realizing that he was “a stranger in a strange land,” he admitted to “a solitary hearty crying-spell.” But his shore legs soon returned, and he was back to business. His intention had been to send letters of introduction to Buckingham Palace and go there with Tom Thumb immediately to set up “head-quarters.” This plan went from highly improbable to impossible when Barnum learned that the royal family would “not permit the approach of entertainments” because it was officially mourning the death of Prince Albert’s father, Ernest I, who had passed away in Germany on January 29.2
Undaunted, Barnum hired a hall in Liverpool and offered his Lilliputian prodigy to the Liverpudlian public for a short run. His advertisements in the city papers announced, “TOM THUMB ARRIVED!” and went on to make more profligate use of capital letters and exclamation points, including the noteworthy claim that “TOM THUMB, Jun., was visited in America by more than HALF A MILLION of Ladies and Gentlemen of the highest distinction.”3
Barnum was about to get his first lesson in the challenges of conquering England. So strong was the prejudice against the former colonies that his assertions about his success in America didn’t hold much sway. Dwarf acts were common in England, the prevalence of little people an environmental outcome of the country’s rapid and incautious industrialization, and they were offered in venues even less respectable than the theaters, which were themselves not palaces of respectability. These acts did not have the polish or wit of Tom’s performances, which is why Barnum’s strategy was to present the general as a better form of entertainment than that offered at fairs in the countryside. Doing so would permit charging a great deal more for the privilege of seeing Tom at a venue like the one Barnum had hired, the Portico (“a small room, but neatly fitted up”) in Liverpool’s Bold Street. The public balked, however, as Barnum sought to charge a shilling, roughly a U.S. quarter, rather than the penny that people were used to paying at fairs.4
All was not lost, though, because the manager of the Princess’s Theatre in London made the trip to Liverpool to see Tom Thumb perform and offered Barnum a three-night spot on his stage. Barnum jumped at the chance. The little general made his London debut in Oxford Street on February 20 on a program with a farce called Blasé and a production of the new Donizetti opera, Don Pasquale. The next night he would again appear between the acts of an opera, this time Bellini’s I Puritani, and for his final performance there, on February 27, he was again sandwiched in the Donizetti. Barnum had tried without much success to introduce Tom Thumb to the editors of London’s newspapers, but only one paper wrote about the Princess’s Theatre performances. The Illustrated London News deigned to devote a single sentence to Tom Thumb, and it was a doozy: “The production of this little monster affords another melancholy proof of the low state the legitimate drama has been reduced to!”5
But Barnum had not crossed the Atlantic to be deterred by a single bad newspaper notice. He saw Tom Thumb’s reception differently, recasting it as a “decided . . . ‘hit’ ” and a “visible guarantee of success in London.” If his memory put a favorable spin on his situation, it was undoubtedly shaped by the success to come. Neither the poor showing in Liverpool nor the seeming indifference in London discouraged Barnum; instead, these stumbles seemed to invigorate him. He wrote that he was offered a second run at a “much higher figure” in London, but he chose a separate path altogether, making the decision that he would, henceforth, exhibit the general only on his own terms, and he busied himself to satisfy them.
Those terms still included, against all odds, the involvement of Queen Victoria. Barnum was in London less than two weeks before he managed to meet the American envoy to the Court of St. James, Edward Everett, thanks to letters of introduction from, among others, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New-York Tribune, with whom Barnum had an acquaintanceship that was growing into a friendship. The ambassador called on Barnum to meet Tom Thumb, and then invited the two of them to the midday meal at his house in Belgravia the next day, March 2, where Everett’s family “loaded” the general with gifts. Everett was an American of real distinction. A brilliant professor of Greek literature at Harvard as a young man—his pupil Ralph Waldo Emerson considered him “his personal idol”—he had been a U.S. representative and then governor of Massachusetts, and he would become U.S. secretary of state and a U.S. senator in the 1850s.6
When Everett introduced Tom Thumb into his household in London’s Grosvenor Place, he was undoubtedly acting less as a diplomat and more as a father and a husband. He, his wife, and their children were still mourning the death in October of their eldest child, Anne, and young Tom was an immediate source of joy. The delight his family took in the little man was perhaps the most compelling reason why Everett promised Barnum he would cross the street to Buckingham Palace and intercede in person with royal officials to have Tom presented to the queen.
Barnum’s assault on London and the queen included renting a “magnificent mansion” in Mayfair, an area thick with aristocrats and the merely wealthy, and the employment of a “tinselled and powdered” servant to man the door. Out went invitations to editors and members of the nobility, who now came and were appropriately impressed with the young general. Soon “crested carriages” bearing uninvited visitors arrived at his Grafton Street address; Barnum had his servant politely turn them away, a matter of proper etiquette, Barnum averred, but also a way to increase the value of an invitation. Soon the beautiful, raven-haired Baroness Charlotte von Rothschild sent a carriage to take Barnum and Tom Thumb to her mansion at 148 Piccadilly, adjacent to the site of today’s Palm Court at the Ritz. She was the wife and first cousin of Lionel de Rothschild, whose family in effect bankrolled the royal government and who, in Barnum’s description, was “the most wealthy banker in the world.” Barnum spent several paragraphs in his autobiography describing the splendor he saw at her house, the elegantly attired servants, impressive statues, marble stairs, and, in the drawing room, the “glare of magnificence” exuded by gold and gilt, huge chandeliers, and bijous wherever his glance fell. They spent two hours in the company of the baroness and a score of lords and ladies, and when they left, a “well-filled purse was quietly slipped into my hand, and I felt that the golden shower was beginning to fall!”7
AFTER BARNUM HAD ANOTHER SUCH payday from a banker (twenty guineas—about $125—for a half hour of Tom Thumb’s time), and now realizing that Everett’s efforts at Buckingham Palace would not lead to an immediate audience with the queen, the showman rented a room in the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly Street. The 1812 Georgian building, named for its façade, which was meant to evoke an Egyptian temple, had once housed, among much else, Napoleon’s carriage from Waterloo, treasures James Cook collected on his travels, relics from the tomb of Seti I that inspired Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” and, thanks to the size of its main room, Géricault’s massive painting The Raft of the Medusa. In recent years, such curiosities as “the Living Skeleton” and the Siamese Twins had been on exhibition there, leading the way to Tom Thumb.
Barnum engaged one of the two upstairs rooms at the hall, and in the great room downstairs was the American painter George Catlin’s extensive collection of paintings of North American Indians—more than five hundred in all, hung from floor to ceiling—along with costumes, weapons, and other objects used by Native American tribes. At the center of the 106-foot-long room was a Crow teepee made of decorated buffalo skins. Twenty-five feet tall, it could hold eighty of Catlin’s customers at once. Catlin had traveled through the western United States, Canada, and Mexico for seven years, painting portraits of the people he encountered and collecting artifacts of their vanishing cultures. His collection had toured in New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and elsewhere in America and had been on display at the Egyptian Hall for three years beginning in 1840. Despite a recent influx of customers over a short period when Catlin had brought nine Ojibwe Indians to the Hall to entertain crowds with ritualistic dance, his business had dropped off dramatically from its peak.8
Barnum asserted that a “rush of visitors” went to see Tom Thumb when he opened in March at the Egyptian Hall. The crowds would aid Catlin, as would Barnum’s own connections, and in turn the artist would aid Barnum. As he became acquainted with Catlin, Barnum learned of the painter’s growing concern that he was no longer making enough from his exhibit to cover his rent for the great room, so Barnum offered to switch rooms with him and take on the larger obligation if Catlin would leave his paintings on the walls downstairs, where Tom Thumb would now appear. Since exhibiting Indians was something Barnum had been doing at the American Museum, he also secured a new band of fourteen “Ioway” Indians, among them Chief White Cloud, who would board ship for England and demonstrate war dances in company with Catlin’s lectures. In a letter to Moses Kimball at about that time, Barnum predicted of the Indians, “Catlin and self will make money on them. I think to a large amount,” and by all reports they were well received in London.9
Tom Thumb had been on display at the Egyptian Hall for only a few days when Barnum’s royal fantasies took a turn toward reality. The American envoy Everett had appealed to the master of the queen’s household, Charles Murray, who also happened to be a long-standing friend of Catlin and had helped arrange for the Ojibwes to meet Queen Victoria and her court. Murray and Barnum had breakfast one morning at Everett’s house, and within a few days a regally uniformed member of the Life Guards appeared at the Grafton Street house with an invitation for “General Tom Thumb and his guardian” for an evening audience with the queen at Buckingham Palace. Murray passed along Victoria’s wishes that Tom not be schooled in the etiquette of addressing a royal personage, so that he might appear before her “naturally and without restraint.”10
Late in the day of March 23, Barnum wrote out one of the most effective advertisements he would ever compose and affixed it to the front door of the Egyptian Hall. “Closed this evening,” the notice read, “General Tom Thumb being at Buckingham Palace by command of Her Majesty.” Barnum was determined, he explained in his autobiography, “to make the most of the occasion.” He and the general presented themselves at the palace, Tom decked out as a court swell in formal evening attire and wielding a tiny cane. The lord in waiting met them and gave Barnum and Tom two rules of etiquette for dealing with the queen: never speak to her directly, and walk backward when leaving her presence.11
They were led along a corridor and up a wide marble staircase to the doors of the queen’s long picture gallery. When the doors opened, the queen stood at the far end of the room, still attired in mourning for her father-in-law, wearing a black dress and no jewelry. Alongside her were Prince Albert; her mother, the Duchess of Kent; and “twenty or thirty” other members of court, the ladies “arrayed in the highest style of magnificence, their dresses sparkling with diamonds.” Barnum reported that his tiny friend approached this forbidding group “with a firm step, and as he came within hailing distance made a very graceful bow, and exclaimed, ‘Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen! ’ ” The gathering did not titter in aristocratic disapproval at this display of the little man’s ebullience but greeted it with “a burst of laughter,” a genuine expression of their delight. The queen, not quite twenty-five years old, whom Barnum would describe as “small of stature, and not of the most beautiful form or countenance,” was “very sociable and amiable in her manners,” putting one “immediately at ease in her presence.” She took Tom’s hand and led him around the gallery, showing him some of the hundreds of paintings on display and asking him many questions. Tom’s answers kept the trailing retinue “in an uninterrupted strain of merriment,” Barnum recalled, and soon Tom felt emboldened to compliment the queen on her art collection, which he called “first-rate.” Tom then performed for her, singing, dancing, doing his imitations of famous figures, among them Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Cincinnatus, and Samson. Afterward he got in a long conversation with Prince Albert and others in the court, giving Barnum an opportunity to breach etiquette. He had been told that he could only converse with her using the lord in waiting as intermediary. The queen began to ask Barnum questions in this way, and Barnum answered in kind. But soon he felt comfortable enough in her presence to address her directly, risking the disapproval of her henchman. She did not miss a beat, however, and began speaking directly back to him.
The audience lasted better than an hour, and then Barnum had the opportunity to display the lord in waiting’s second piece of advice about etiquette, to retire from the queen walking backward. Barnum reminded us in his autobiography that it was an exceedingly long room to back out of, and he noted that because the lord in waiting was practiced in backward-walking, he kept “somewhat a-head (or rather a-back) of me.” But with his tiny legs, Tom Thumb’s reverse pace left him far behind (or rather, ahead), and so from time to time he would turn his back on the queen and run furiously to catch up with Barnum, and then begin once more to back decorously away until once again he needed to turn and sprint to catch up. Tom’s antics continued to amuse the royal party, but one of the queen’s “poodle-dogs” grew excited at the ruckus Tom was making and began to bark fiercely at him. Tom responded by threatening the dog with his diminutive cane, and a mock battle commenced, further amusing the queen and her party.12
The bedazzled showman made much of the audience at Buckingham Palace in one of his letters to the New York Atlas and included it in both versions of his autobiography. But he got a more immediate bounce from the visit by discovering, before he left the palace, that the man who wrote the “Court Journal” for the morning papers was in the building. Barnum asked to see the fellow and was pleased that he could persuade him that Tom Thumb’s visit was newsworthy, and also that the reporter asked for an outline of the visit. Barnum provided on the spot a notice that then ran in the papers word for word. The evening had been a triumph in every conceivable way, not least because the queen promised Tom a second invitation so that the future king, three-year-old Albert Edward, could meet him (as their first audience had taken place after the Prince of Wales’s bedtime).13
Barnum could not have known it, but A. H. Saxon points out in his biography of the showman that the one person who was not entirely swept away by the good feeling of the evening was the young Queen Victoria herself. In her journal for that day, she reported having seen “the greatest curiosity I, or indeed anybody, ever saw,” but after describing Tom Thumb, she added, “One cannot help feeling very sorry for the poor little thing & wishing he could be properly cared for, for the people who show him off tease him a good deal, I should think.” The queen’s concern for Tom was based on her belief that he was twelve years old; how much more concerned would she have been if she had known that he was half that age and perhaps in need himself of the early after-supper bedtime enjoyed by the Prince of Wales? Barnum did convey to Everett, in a note of “ten thousand thousand thanks” written upon his return from the palace, that the queen “desired the lord-in-waiting request that I would be careful and never allow the General to be fatigued.” As for the teasing, it seems likely that the queen simply misunderstood Barnum’s jocular sense of humor, which was more American, perhaps, in its informality than anything she was used to. Even teasing, after all, suggests a level of equality and comfort between man and boy that might well have been unfamiliar in the formal royal household.14
Tom Thumb and Barnum returned to Buckingham Palace two weeks later, when the queen introduced the little general to Prince Edward and her other child, Princess Victoria. On this occasion the queen presented to Tom, “with her own hand,” as the Times of London reported the next day, “a superb souvenir of gold and mother-of-pearl, set with precious stones. On one side were the crown and the royal initials, ‘V.R.,’ and on the reverse a bouquet of flowers in rubies.” She also gave Tom a gold pencil case with his initials. These and a gold watch presented to him in June by the Queen Dowager Adelaide at Marlborough House went on display at the Egyptian Hall, along with other baubles given Tom by members of the nobility. For some reason, probably having to do with their own need for favorable publicity, Buckingham Palace did not object to Barnum’s exploitation of the royal family in this way. Barnum mentioned that after each visit to the palace he was sent a “handsome douceur” from the queen but admitted that this was “the smallest part of the advantage derived from these interviews.” The biggest part was “the force of Court example in England.” He played this advantage to the hilt, in newspaper ads and at the Egyptian Hall. But the nobility, whose members had adopted Tom as their special favorite, promoted him well enough themselves by going again and again to his performances. Barnum wrote that there were sometimes as many as “fifty and sixty carriages of the nobility” lined up on Piccadilly Street in front of the hall.15
Business, then, was good. Barnum averaged from all sources about 500 pounds, or $2,500, per day from March 20 until July 20, with Tom doing three shows a day and often giving two private showings in the evening. That adds up to $300,000 in four months, against expenses that Barnum estimated at about $6,000 for that time. His advertising strategy went beyond declaring Tom’s connection to the royal family and eventually returned to the approach that had worked so well in the last days before they sailed from New York. This time Barnum warned of the general’s imminent departure for Paris, and English crowds fell just as easily for this ploy, eager to get a last glimpse of Tom before the departure that seemingly never came.
One other publicity coup from this period had not been planned, or at least Barnum said it wasn’t. Among the little general’s regular patrons in England was the most famous general in the world, the Duke of Wellington, who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo some three decades earlier. The first time the duke attended one of Tom’s performances at the Egyptian Hall, Tom was doing his Napoleon bit, striding to and fro and seemingly lost in thought. When Barnum introduced the two, the duke asked Tom what he was so deeply contemplating, and Tom’s sorrowful reply was instant: “I was thinking of the loss of the battle of Waterloo.” Barnum gave credit for the witty response to young Tom, but the showman often deflected credit in this way—not as often as he claimed it, but still regularly. In any case, it was sold to the papers as an example of Tom’s spontaneous wit, and the duke himself was so amused by it that he told the story wherever he went.16
THE FIRST SIX MONTHS IN England could hardly have gone better for P. T. Barnum. As a businessman, and as a showman, he had had the instinct before ever leaving New York for how he would promote Tom Thumb. Before the plan took shape, the general was less than a success in Liverpool and the object of derision in London, but in a short time he became the toast of England and a means of enrichment for Barnum and, more modestly, for the Stratton family. Barnum’s potent combination of naïveté, arrogance, persistence, and luck—very American qualities, even in the eyes of Americans themselves, but especially so to the British—somehow brought to fruition his far-fetched strategy of partnering with the queen herself. This ur-American successfully corralled not just the queen but also every ambulatory member of her court, despite a hearty British distaste for the former colonies and for the brash, uncouth, self-confident sort of American Barnum so utterly embodied. If Barnum went to England seeking a new Old World to conquer, then he inarguably accomplished that, perhaps even beyond his hopes.