Becoming Tom Thumb. Eric D. Lehman
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does not mention him at all, though that error is corrected somewhat in the revision of 1917. To be fair, the 1886 History of the Old Town of Stratford and the City of Bridgeport, by Reverend Samuel Orcutt, gives a broad sweep of Charles’s career. Wider-ranging American histories mention him here and there, local histories often include the day that “Tom Thumb came to town,” and he certainly crops up as a “minor figure” in the histories of the circus, theater, or entertainment industry. George Odell does discuss him extensively in his comprehensive Annals of the New York Stage, and notes that after Charles’s first performance at the American Museum he was “for years thereafter the big attraction in town and country.”9
The definition of celebrity itself could be partly responsible for Tom Thumb’s decline in public estimation. The word “celebrity” has always been used to describe anyone who is famous, regardless of accomplishment, a seemingly neutral but ultimately negative connotation. In his seminal work The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-events in America Daniel Boorstin details extensively the “lack of qualities” in a person that has been “fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness.”10 Boorstin clearly delineates between a hero and a celebrity, with one being recognized for achievement and the other for an image or trademark.11 And he is correct; no one would correctly call General Tom Thumb a hero. Likewise, Buffalo Bill did not achieve his real fame as an Army scout, but rather as an actor on the New York stage and as creator of his epic Wild West show. However, this definition can be misleading. No one would claim that Buffalo Bill was not a talented performer, but a lack of ability is precisely what calling him a “celebrity” can imply. Later critics have assumed or attributed the same lack to Charles Stratton, a lack which the historical record shows is false.
Still, the nature of celebrity is fleeting. Though we may watch their films occasionally, the movie stars of the early twentieth century are as unknown to most people as Tom Thumb. As tastes and sensibilities change, comedy is especially difficult to appreciate, and this is exacerbated by the low value generally placed on comedy in American culture. Comic actors are often forgotten while tragic ones are lauded, and “stand-up” comedians have always received short shrift from historians. Without audio-visual evidence of Charles’s comedic skills, dismissing his worth is even easier. But regardless of that evidence, a celebrity’s skills and value are necessarily of the time. As Boorstin puts it, “The celebrity … is always a contemporary.”12 Cultural values are often momentary or transitory, and even the “immortal heroes” Boorstin lauds shift and transform as the decades pass.
This is complicated further by the high and low cultural divide that has characterized most artistic criticism for the last century. Lawrence Levine’s influential study, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, investigates this split thoroughly. At the turn of the twentieth century categories began to be established in all the cultural arts, leading to “the exaggerated antithesis between art and life, between the aesthetic and the Philistine, the worthy and the unworthy, the pure and the tainted.” A rift developed between high and low, with forms like blues, jazz, musical comedy, photography, comic strips, movies, radio, and popular comedians all relegated to the “low” side. The worst result of this split was not that the “low brow” audiences were separated from the “high brow” beauties of Shakespeare and Italian opera, but rather that these “rigid cultural categories, once they were in place, made it so difficult for so long for so many to understand the value and importance of the popular art forms that were all around them.”13
In the nineteenth century, these distinctions were not so clear cut. “Highbrow” and “lowbrow” existed side by side much more comfortably. P. T. Barnum himself perfectly exemplified this reality. In 1864 he held a fundraiser for a statue of Shakespeare, in honor of the 300th anniversary of the playwright’s birth. Actors at the American Museum gave performances of Catharine and Petruchio and Dumb Belle, featuring “Mr. Harrison, the Comic and Impromptu Singer, and Mr. Stoepel, with his wood and straw instruments” between acts. At the same time the museum featured three albino children and a “musically-educated” seal.14 This was not a parody or a cruel joke, and most did not see it as an offense to the great Bard. Opera was also, according to Levine, “an art form that was simultaneously popular and elite.” Popular songs of the day were often substituted for arias, but again, it would be wrong to think that this was an attempt to sully or parody the operas themselves. Both operas and Shakespearean plays toured the back roads of the United States as well as the densely populated urban areas.15
Not only did all levels of society enjoy the same sort of entertainment, they shared it. Swedish soprano Jenny Lind’s famous tour of 1850 to 1852 became an occasion for all elements of society to share in “excellence.”16 In 1853, Putnam’s Magazine proposed P. T. Barnum be named as manager of the New York Opera, saying “He understands what our public wants, and how to gratify that want … He comprehends that, with us, the opera need not necessarily be the luxury of the few, but the recreation of the many.”17 His museum did not cater to one social class or type of audience, but rather tried to appeal to the whole of society. As biographer A. H. Saxon put it: “Rubbing elbows with farmers fresh in from the countryside, tradesmen, apprentices and laborers, and ‘respectable’ citizens with their families in tow, were famous scientists like Louis Agassiz and Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, authors like Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, eminent statesmen, religious leaders, and ambassadors from abroad, and even, in 1860, the visiting Prince of Wales.”18 The cultural fluidity of American society encouraged this sort of shared experience, an experience that twentieth-century critics were quick to dismiss as aesthetic tastes became more “rigidly subdivided.”19
Once in place, these categories did not only affect contemporary criticism; scholars who re-created America’s past usually overlooked the importance of a popular entertainer like Tom Thumb. In fact, this split has skewed historical assessment of all previous performers and artists. After all, it was not only the supposedly “lowbrow” entertainers that were caught up in this removal from our cultural memory. A mid-nineteenth century celebrity like Charlotte Cushman, respected for her varied roles on the stage during four decades as one of America’s leading actresses, was quickly forgotten and only recently has received critical attention again.20 The word “popular” itself became and continues to be an insult in certain circles, as if the achievement of a mass audience is somehow definitive proof of low-quality work. Charles Stratton’s Connecticut neighbor Samuel Clemens was one of the last who achieved both “high cultural status and mass popularity,” as the celebrity known to the world as Mark Twain.21 And even this seminal figure in American literature is sometimes scoffed at by the arbiters of high culture as a “popular” (and “comedic”) writer. With someone like Charles Stratton, so easily dismissed as a “freak,” it is no surprise that he is forgotten by even the most accommodating historians and critics.
It would be naïve to think that this sort of prejudice did not also play a part in his cultural erasure. Even the most open-minded chroniclers and critics often have trouble categorizing “little people” and their place in history, relying on terms like “exploitation” and “misfortune” even when those expressions are not appropriate. Or worse, little people are simply left out altogether to avoid any difficulties or questions for the writer or reader. Ironically, historical prejudice has been one way in which Tom Thumb has recently come back into the public eye. Some critics like Robert Bogdan have tried to position Charles’s story in “freak show” studies, using this categorical prejudice as a window into cultural attitudes. Bogdan’s analysis of general methods of shaping and marketing the distorted body is illuminating, but unfortunately cites a skewed opinion of Charles himself.22
Situating the small comedian in a “freak show” setting is one way to rehabilitate him, but as disability scholar Michael Chemers points out in his book Staging Stigma:
If Tom Thumb was a freak, then the American freak show included the highest rank of melodramatic productions. If he was not a freak, then he was one of America’s most popular stage actors, welcome at the dinner table of the most august families in the nation, and in the house of the president himself. The label freak disintegrates