I am deeply indebted to Martin Jurow, of Los Angeles, California, and Richard Shepherd, of Beverly Hills, California, for suggesting to me the subject of this biography. Without their continued encouragement and enthusiasm, this book could not have been written.
I am especially grateful to Helen Gladys Percey and Dorothy R. Robinson, both of Los Angeles, for assuming so large a burden of the research.
I wish to thank Elizebethe Kempthorne, of Arlington, California, for her editorial assistance; Margaret Solensten, of Los Angeles, for her untiring stenographic aid; Jay D. Barnes, President of the Yates County Genealogical and Historical Society, in Penn Yan, New York, for his cooperation.
My heartiest appreciation must go to Elizabeth Sterling Seeley, curator of that remarkable showcase and archive of Americana, The Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for her thorough investigation of elusive facts and her detailed replies to all the difficult questions that I asked of her. Too, I am beholden to Miss Seeley for putting at my disposal information from Phineas T. Barnum's private journal, address books, circus route books, last will and testament, as well as portions of Caroline Barnum Thompson's unpublished diary.
My thanks, also, to E. P. Dutton and Company, New York, for their permission to let me reprint an extract from Sketches in Criticism by Van Wyck Brooks.
Above all, I suppose, I owe gratitude to Phineas T. Barnum himself. This volume represents the first new biography of the showman written for adults in over three decades. It could not possibly have been accomplished with any degree of completeness without the collaboration of Barnum, whose autobiography and numerous magazine articles remain the prime research sources on his long and varied life.
Between the years 1855 and 1888, there were published at least nine new versions or revised editions of Barnum's autobiography. I have relied mainly on one edition brought out when he was sixty-one: it proved more comprehensive than his first edition and less expurgated than his last. It was entitled Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by P. T. Barnum, American News Company, 1871. Two editions printed after the showman's death combined material from all of Barnum's autobiographies, and they proved most valuable. One was Struggles and Triumphs: or, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself, edited by George S. Bryan, brought out in two volumes by Alfred A. Knopf, 1927. The other was Barnum's Own Story by P. T. Barnum, edited by Waldo R. Browne, The Viking Press, 1927.
Of the full-length biographies written about Barnum, I found most interesting the Life of Hon. Phinecs T. Barnum by Joel Benton, Edgewood Publishing Company, 1891, which was largely a paraphrasing of the autobiography into the third person, but which contained a few personal observations of the author who knew Barnum well; Barnum by M. A. Werner, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1923, which was the first scholarly and witty effort successfully to challenge and supplement material in the autobiography; The Unknown Barnum by Harvey W. Root, Harper and Brothers, 1927, which provided excellent source material on Barnum's publishing and political careers. The most readable of the several juvenile books concerned with Barnum was The World's Greatest Showman by J. Bryan III, Random House, 1956.
Curiously, in no biography of Barnum has there been any organized or sustained attempt to examine his personal life—that is, his personality and habits, and his relationship with both of his wives and his three daughters. I have attempted, as well as I could, to rectify this omission. Besides covering the more or less standard facts of the showman's life in sources employed by previous biographers, I have tried to shed a little more light on his career in the American Museum and the circus, his advertising methods and hoaxes, his involvement with his numerous prodigies, through use of sources overlooked or ignored in his lifetime and later.
Finally, it was my definite intent to illuminate, in a small way, the lives of those people who surrounded Barnum: friends, enemies, business associates, odd acquaintances, employees. Perhaps every man's circle, studied closely, is curious. But more than most, Barnum attracted a veritable zoo of strange and fascinating characters. His life was as well populated with human curiosities as was his American Museum, and I have gone far afield in my research to put them all on display alongside the hero of this work.
The bibliography that follows is by no means complete. In the interests of space conservation, I have confined myself to the most serviceable books and periodicals on Barnum and his circle and his time. To their authors and publishers in two centuries, my sincere thanks.