Becoming Tom Thumb. Eric D. Lehman
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Swift-moving trains allowed grand performance tours to and from large cities, and to the smaller towns in-between. Steamships allowed easy coastal journeys and more comfortable long ocean voyages, making transatlantic celebrity possible in a way never seen before. Mass-produced newspapers and telegraph reporting led to enhanced promotion and advertising, as well as creating new conduits for gossip. Souvenirs could be produced by the thousands for sale to admirers. And photography changed the way celebrities were seen by the public, bringing their actual images into peoples’ homes and lives. Celebrities could be created quickly from scratch by ingenious promoters, and those already famous could increase their followings using fresh methods.
Though we have even more clever methods and advanced machinery now, celebrity in the nineteenth century took much the same form as it does today, with a public fascination about people in the daily media. Reputation in a particular field, whether sports or science, could propel people to celebrity, though it did not always do so. These people could be wealthy or not, though sometimes great wealth and social status alone was enough to create a celebrity in the public mind, as the Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild demonstrated in London and Paris. Often a criminal or even someone associated with a criminal act, such as Lizzie Borden or Jesse James, became a nationally known figure. Popular appeal is a tricky thing, and often depends on a variety of intangible characteristics and events.
Even a simple connection to other famous people could be enough to create new celebrities, and P. T. Barnum used this trick to great effect in his promotions. Furthermore, celebrity status was often something that happened to you whether you liked it or not. French actress Sarah Bernhardt sought publicity while Italian actress Eleonora Duse shunned it, but both were adored by millions. Though celebrities usually became famous for achievement, sometimes secondary characteristics gave them wider popularity. Therefore, Swedish soprano Jenny Lind’s generous morality brought her attention, just as poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s supposed atheistic immorality brought him infamy. Charles Dickens’s writing made his name well known, but his lecture tours made his public figure famous. Was it Lord Byron’s poetry that made him a celebrity, or gossip about his rumored love life?
Some of these celebrities have lasted in popular imagination, and some have not. Few, however, matched the outrageous contemporary fame of General Tom Thumb. The numbers are difficult to calculate, but using a very conservative model, Charles Stratton gave at least twenty thousand official shows, performed in front of more than fifty million people, and visited two dozen countries circling the globe. His photographs and souvenirs found their way into hundreds of thousands of households and his advertisements into millions of copies of newspapers. He toured the United States a dozen times, not including limited excursions in the Northeast and regular shows in New York City. The list of people who saw him perform is a who’s who of the nineteenth century, from King Leopold of Belgium to the Rajah of Benares to Ralph Waldo Emerson. But even more incredibly, his name and image was also known to orphans in Australia and tribesmen in Africa. And unlike most performers, his celebrity did not last merely a few years, or even a decade, but endured for four decades in which he scarcely waned in popularity, continuing to sell out theatres to the year of his death.
His celebrity emerged from a number of factors, including beginning his career at such a propitious time in history. He was by all accounts charming, funny, and quick-witted. He could sing and dance and use his small body to make the audience gasp or shout. Of course, his size gave him a great advantage, but there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other “dwarfs” on display in Victorian America and Europe, and none ever came close to Charles’s level of fame.4 Charles also had the benefit of being a “child star,” at least for the first part of his career, and he was not alone. The nineteenth century had begun with a mania for “Master Betty,” an English boy actor, and Americans followed in his wake, from John Howard Payne to Cordelia Howard.5 However, like the child actors of today, as they aged they usually slid from public view except as occasional fodder for the gossip pages. With forty years in the public eye, Charles’s popularity cannot be accounted for with charges of novelty alone. Furthermore, no one who actually saw him perform later disavowed his talent or their own reactions to him, as they had done so vociferously with someone like Master Betty. Children who saw Tom Thumb in the 1840s brought their own children along to his shows in the 1870s. This longevity seems to rule out his popularity as a “mania,” and is one more factor that calls for a consideration of his importance in American culture.
Transatlantic celebrities who came in the other direction during the early nineteenth century are easy to find. However, most Americans who make the standard lists of national and international stars appear in the latter part of the century, from Harry Houdini to Walt Whitman, from Buffalo Bill to Billy the Kid. In the 1840s and earlier, the pickings are slim, unless we consider someone like Andrew Jackson as a “celebrity” rather than a “hero.” Theater actors like Edwin Forrest performed in Europe and achieved critical acclaim in the northeastern cities, though it would not be until William Gillette performed as Sherlock Holmes at the end of the century, that an American stage actor achieved worldwide fame or fortune at the level of Tom Thumb. Singers, dancers, and authors achieved widespread recognition, certainly, amongst certain segments of the population. But though someone like James Fenimore Cooper wrote the most popular English language novel of the early nineteenth century, Last of the Mohicans, Cooper himself hardly had crowds of screaming admirers following him down the streets of New York City.
A more apt comparison might be comedian and clown Dan Rice, who spent these same few decades entertaining the American public. Thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans flocked to his shows and circuses. With his red, white, and blue-striped tights, stovepipe hat, star-spangled cape, and goatee, he was probably the model for the popular image of “Uncle Sam.” Like Charles, he benefited from and contributed to the new world of popular culture, and like Charles, he was mostly forgotten. However, though Rice’s career as comedian and clown began several years before Charles Stratton’s, when Tom Thumb became a sensation Rice had just finished working a “learned pig” show. The legendary clown would not achieve nationwide fame for another decade, with his real prominence coming only during the Civil War. He also never, unlike Charles, earned an international audience that stretched from Cuba to Ceylon.6
It seems that Charles’s only real competition was his mentor, P. T. Barnum, who symbolized Yankee ingenuity and progress to the entire world. When Civil War hero and former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant circumnavigated the globe (eight years after Tom Thumb had done the same) he found to his bemusement that Barnum’s name was “familiar to multitudes who never heard of me.”7 Of course, Barnum was only an occasional performer, and achieved his own fame as a promoter and publicist, and as a manager and mastermind. Together, he and Charles ushered in the age of American celebrity.
Unfortunately, like nearly all celebrity performers, after his death Charles’s star dimmed quickly. By the twentieth century some no longer believed he had had talent, or that millions of people from disparate nations had flocked to his shows. Even locally he was practically forgotten. In the 1930s, when Charles Burpee wrote his voluminous Story of Connecticut, P. T. Barnum earns a page, with only a small mention of his protégé, calling him, “Tom Thumb, a Bridgeport dwarf named Stratton,” and saying that the showman “feted him here and before Royalty abroad, riding in his elaborate mite of a coach with reminiscence of medieval splendor. Barnum well rewarded Stratton with a dwarf wife and a rich and happy home in Bridgeport.”8 After this somewhat condescending comment about “rewarding” him with a “dwarf wife” and “happy home,” Burpee goes on to describe Barnum’s other triumphs. More troubling is that in the two volumes of biographical notes, Charles is not mentioned once, though many minor businessmen are. We could forgive this as a focus on the merely wealthy rather than artists and cultural figures (there are a number of others missing, too), but in fact Charles was quite rich, a member of various clubs, and had contributed to the development of his home town. His death inspired an outpouring of local feeling unmatched until Barnum himself died eight years later. Burpee is not the only one who made this sort of omission, and we can only speculate at reasons for Charles’s removal from our collective story.
Part of this may have been the low station entertainers still held at that time with the sort of academics who wrote histories. After all, the 1881