As he had predicted, Barnum’s Travelling World’s Fair was back on the rails by the first week in April 1873, this time requiring more than ninety-five rail cars, compared to the sixty-five needed to start the 1872 season. The 1873 show would travel through New England and into the Midwest, then go north into Canada, drawing five million visitors in six months.
Between visits to his circus, Barnum spent much of the summer of 1873 at Waldemere, with the usual clambakes, seaside drives, and visits by friends, all the while “surrounded by my children and troops of grandchildren.” But he made no mention of Charity. His wife of almost forty-four years had always had a propensity for nervousness, which early on both Barnum and their daughter Caroline would joke about and which led to her decision to not accompany Barnum on most of his many travels. After Barnum’s midcareer bankruptcy, however, her health had taken what became a permanent turn for the worse, the cause of which was never specified. At one point in the early 1860s Barnum feared for her life, but she recovered enough that their friend George Emerson could write about his time staying with the Barnums in the late 1860s, “One day she would be under doctor’s treatment, and so much a sufferer as not to be able to take her place at the table; while the next day she would be equal to her favorite ride in the Park, for shopping at Stewart’s, and for what she never was willing to delegate, the immediate supervision of the household.” By the early 1870s, however, she had been diagnosed with heart disease and nearly died of an attack during the winter of 1872–73.1
In the months that followed, her health must have improved, for by the early fall of 1873, Barnum decided to “run over and see the International Exhibition at Vienna,” setting sail for England on the Cunard Line steam paddle-wheeler R.M.S. Scotia and arriving in Liverpool. There he met his friend John Fish, who had been the last person to shake his hand when he left England fourteen years before. Barnum spent several days with Fish at his house in Southport on the coast north of Liverpool, presumably joined by Fish’s daughters, Jane Ann, with whom he had done so much traveling in America, and Nancy, who had also visited America and stayed with a cousin of Charity’s the year before.2
After traveling a bit in the English countryside with Nancy and her father, Barnum visited friends in London and then trotted around Europe, catching the World’s Fair in Vienna just before it closed and visiting a number of cities in Germany, including Hamburg, where he bought “nearly a ship-load of valuable wild animals and rare birds.” He was preparing to leave Hamburg for a visit to Italy when, on November 20, he received the worst possible telegram from Samuel Hurd.
Charity had died the day before, Hurd said, after having become paralyzed and lying unconscious for a day. “Sudden and unexpected,” Barnum called her death, and he used the word anguish twice in rapid succession when describing his reaction. He acknowledged that he was needed by his family to be there by her coffin, but he also emphasized how hard this death was on him, far away and in lonely isolation. He did not leave his hotel room for several days, and on the Saturday when he knew the funeral was taking place—he had been telegraphing instructions to New York related to her arrangements—“my lonely head was bowed, and my tears flowed in unison” with those of his family and friends. Charity had died at their Fifth Avenue town house, in the presence of her family and some of those friends, and after her body was transported to Bridgeport for a funeral at Waldemere, it had been placed in the receiving vault at Mountain Grove Cemetery in Bridgeport, awaiting Barnum’s return. Oddly enough, he did not make immediate plans to go home so that he could console his daughters and end his own loneliness while drawing consolation from them and his friends.
Barnum matter-of-factly pointed out that Charity “had been a suffering invalid more or less for eighteen years,” and she had often “prayed for death to come as an angel of mercy to take her ‘home.’ ” He offered no explanation for why he did not return to New York. Instead he went back to London, where he could be among friends, and “spent several weeks in quiet.” In letters he mentioned a concern about his own health, saying that Charity’s death had set him back and that he suffered from sleeplessness.
From what was about to happen, it seems evident that Nancy Fish was one of those who consoled him during this period and was the reason he did not return home. Born in 1850, Nancy, now twenty-three, would have been a child when Barnum first met John Fish, but Barnum had gotten to know her through letters she wrote to her father when he and her sister had started exploring America with Barnum. In fact, he would later say in an interview that the letters had been so charming he had fallen in love with her without having met her. He was careful not to mention her anywhere in his accounts of 1872 and 1873, but it seems that he was hoping to get to know her better on this trip to Europe. It’s hard to guess where their relationship would have gone had Charity lived, but following her death, Nancy became Barnum’s chief source of consolation. And this friendship would soon develop—if it had not already done so—into a romance.
Whatever his family and friends at home were feeling about his absence, Barnum’s fellow Universalists did their best to cover for him. Rev. Abel C. Thomas traveled from Philadelphia to conduct the funeral service, offering memories of Charity and consoling words. Charity had been close friends with his wife and had pronounced him to be “what every minister ought to be.” George Emerson wrote his long memoir about Charity and his experiences in the Barnum household. In it he praised Charity’s easy and generous hospitality and reported that although she never initiated jokes or funny stories, she was quick with a riposte—which especially delighted Barnum when he was the object of it. He and Barnum would often look for ways to distract her from her infirmity, which would attack her nerves, “perhaps causing her to exaggerate the immediate trouble,” as Emerson delicately put it.3
However deep his private grief was, Barnum seems to have reacted to Charity’s death much as he had to the four devastating fires he had faced. He wrote, “My tongue ceased to move when I attempted to say, as surely we all ought unhesitatingly at all times to say, ‘Not my will, but Thine be done.’ ” But his ability to absorb this greater blow went beyond religious faith or his natural optimism. Even to this tragedy he responded decisively and swiftly, and it is hard not to fault him for it.
He and Nancy fell so much in love over the coming months that, on Valentine’s Day of 1874, they were secretly married in a civil ceremony in London, even giving a false address for where they were living at the time. Charity had been dead for less than three months. The impropriety of remarrying so quickly, and the blow that its exposure would give to his family and to his public reputation, sealed his lips and hers. If members of her family had been aware of the secret marriage, they never revealed it either. Was it grief or lust that drove him to do something so extreme, or was it that odd tendency of public figures to take undue risks, as if to test the power of their own celebrity if caught? After all, Barnum’s face and name were almost as familiar in England as they were in America, so the risk was certainly there. But he was not caught, not for well over a century after his death, when the British marriage certificate finally came to light.4
Barnum at last left for home from Liverpool on April 18, again sailing on the Scotia, stopping first at the Fish residence in Southport, presumably to drop off his new wife. He spoke of his delight at finding his children and grandchildren in good health upon reaching New York, but he launched himself right into business matters the very afternoon of his arrival, and it was weeks of busy days in the city before he returned to the tranquility of Waldemere. In late June his fellow Bridgeporters gave him a public testimonial dinner. The timing of this alcohol-free event, attended by more than two hundred people from near and far, including representatives of all the New York papers, was presumably connected to the death of Charity and his return to an empty house. But Barnum did not say so, and only one of the speeches he reprinted or summarized in his autobiography covering 1874 even mentioned Charity. This particular speech, by a local doctor, gave her all praise for the beauty of the three houses the Barnums had built locally and for their impressive grounds and gardens, declaring that her influence had inspired many others in the city to beautify their own residences. The evening’s dinner, however, was meant to be all about Barnum, and it was. As lonely as Waldemere without Charity might have seemed, he must have felt warmed by this dramatic public display of affection from the people who knew him best. His own affection for the city of Bridgeport was undoubtedly stronger than ever. He had sold the large house on Fifth Avenue since Charity’s death there, so Waldemere was now his principal residence.5
In July Barnum, now sixty-four years old, reported that he was “in robust health with scarcely ever an ache or a pain” and that he was “blessed with a vigor and buoyancy of spirits vouchsafed to but few men of fifty or even less.” He had spent “a pleasant summer at my charming Waldemere.” He did not say with whom he spent that summer, but one of the newspaper articles about the late June dinner referred to Barnum’s “friends from abroad.” Whether or not these were the Fishes we do not know, though it seems more than likely. Barnum and Nancy were making plans for a public wedding in New York that fall.
On September 16 one of Barnum’s preacher friends, the Rev. Edwin H. Chapin, married Nancy and Barnum at Chapin’s Universalist Church of the Divine Paternity, on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Fifth Street. Perhaps because Nancy, now twenty-four, was in fact already married, she eschewed wedding white, wearing a “slate-colored dress,” “a black velvet hat with blue feathers,” and diamond earrings. Barnum, wearing black evening dress, kissed his young bride on the cheek after the vows and blessing were said. Members of both families were on hand, having been informed of the nuptials over the summer, and “a large gathering of gratified friends” were also present to witness the ceremony. The Herald primly reported that there “was no ostentation or nonsense about the wedding.”6
After spending their wedding night at the Windsor Hotel, the couple went off for a honeymoon to a resort in the White Mountains, then to Saratoga Springs, and back to Waldemere in early October. A family legend, perhaps apocryphal, reports that when the couple arrived home, where wedding receptions were planned, they found Barnum’s family awaiting them on the porch, still wearing mourning clothes for Charity, even now not a year dead.