Becoming Tom Thumb. Eric D. Lehman
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apparently deep in thought. The British hero of the Napoleonic Wars approached the miniature man dressed in the outfit of his enemy, and asked him what he was sad about. “I was thinking of the loss of the Battle of Waterloo,” Charles said morosely. Whether Barnum had known the Duke was coming and fed Charles that brilliant rejoinder, or whether the clever boy himself had come up with it, Wellington eagerly told the story of the two “generals” throughout London, and accounts of the dialogue spread quickly through the British press. As Barnum said, this event “was of itself worth thousands of pounds to the exhibition.”20 This incident and the humor inherent in such a great warrior being played by such a little person were enough to make the portrayal unforgettable. But of course, Napoleon’s reputed lack of height gave the impersonation a ring of truth that made it one of the jokes of the century.
Rehearsed or not, the wit of this tiny American was on display every day, and all went away satisfied with his charm and talent. From March 20 to July 20, 1844 “General Tom Thumb” packed Egyptian Hall, averaging a take of £500 a day doing his impressions of Napoleon and comedy routines with Barnum. He added a new lyric to his performance of “Yankee Doodle,” singing, “I’ve paid a visit to the Crown, Dressed Like any grandee: The Queen has made me presents rare, Court ladies did salute me; First rate I am, they all declare, And all my dresses suit me.” He became a figure of fun in the satirical magazine Punch a number of times, called “The Pet of the Palace.” He visited the homes of the rich and famous at night for £50 apiece. By this time he had “polkas and quadrilles named after him” and could not travel anywhere without his parents fearing he would be trampled underfoot.21
In another stroke of advertising genius, Barnum had a miniature coach crafted by a carriage-maker in Soho, colored ultramarine with crimson and white trimmings, and reportedly measuring only twelve inches wide. Ponies from Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre pulled it around the parks and avenues.22 Barnum wrote to his friend Moses Kimball about them: “His carriage, ponies & servants in livery will be ready in a fortnight and will kill the public dead. They can’t survive it! It will be the greatest hit in the universe, see if it ain’t!”23 The carriage and its gear cost over £300, but that sum was less than a day’s work for Charles and Barnum at this point. The coach featured a “coat of arms” that included the British lion and American eagle, as well as the Yankee motto “Go Ahead” painted on the side. Two small boys served as coachman and footman respectively.24 This was the final piece to the marketing puzzle, because as Barnum had hoped, the sight of Charles being driven around London in this tiny carriage sent the English people into an uncharacteristic frenzy. In a letter to a friend the following year, Barnum put it succinctly: “The fact is no man can live after seeing his little Equippage, without seeing the General himself, and after seeing him they must talk about him. The little rogue is a sure card wherever he goes.”25
Pictured here the year before she met Charles, the young Queen Victoria catapulted him to international stardom with her patronage. Courtesy of the University of Bridgeport Archives.
Victoria herself was still talking about her encounters with the American prodigy a year later, when Edward Everett visited her at Windsor Castle. Charles had “evidently amused her very much.”26 Told by Barnum that “Tom Thumb” was twelve years old, the Queen throughout these encounters treated him like a young man. But that fib about his age was another piece of public relations propaganda. When he became the darling celebrity of the English crown, Charles Stratton was barely six years old.
When Charles Stratton was born in 1838, Bridgeport, Connecticut had been an official reality for less than two years. Wedged between the successful colonial boroughs of Fairfield and Stratford, the small village of Stratfield had hugged the shore of a shallow bay, hemmed in by a triangular island and a reef. It was not nearly as desirable for large ships as the protected bays elsewhere along the coast of Long Island Sound, and boasted no other obvious geographical advantages. Its inhabitants gathered around the small Congregational church, farmed the broad flat meadows and gentle hills, and built wharves to run a limited coastal trade. Then, when Fairfield was burned by the British in 1779, the untouched town of Stratfield took up some of its trade. Thus began the transformation from a small Puritan community into the commercial powerhouse of Connecticut.
For the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the borough technically remained part of Stratford, alternately called Bridgeport or Newfield by its inhabitants. It grew more quickly than any other community in the state, from two hundred settlers to a few thousand, while the small village center became a small business district, complete with modest hotels and dry goods stores. But it was still far behind its neighbors in some ways. Muddy streets and gravel sidewalks ran with sewage during rainstorms and cows roamed the streets freely. Travelers from New York often passed quickly through, heading east from the border of Fairfield past straggling houses to the bustling downtown by the bay, then turning north along the Pequonnock River to avoid the salt marshes, through open farmland and forest up to the giant elm tree on Old Mill Green. From here they could turn southeast toward Stratford and the coast or northeast to Hartford and Boston. A large arrowhead peninsula south of this road had escaped colonial settlement for the most part, until in 1835 a toll bridge was built from the business district near the wharves to this marsh-hemmed farmland.
By now all the townsfolk called their community of a few thousand “Bridgeport,” and that was the official name when the state of Connecticut granted their borough its own charter in 1836. Despite protests from the turnpike companies, the Housatonic Railroad was chartered that same year to build a railway from the docks north along the river valley. By 1840 the line reached to New Milford, and the first train, garlanded with flags, left Bridgeport Station at 9:00 a.m. to a rousing performance by the local brass band. The schedule was coordinated with the ferries to New York, making the growing city an important junction on the way to the mines and factories of western Massachusetts.
Charles’s grandfather, Seth Sherwood Stratton, was born in the wilds of North Stratford in 1782, to a family that had settled in Connecticut a hundred years earlier. He moved south to the growing village of Bridgeport, and married Amy Sharp of Oxford. Their son, Sherwood Edwards Stratton, was born in 1811, and he married Cynthia Thompson of West Haven, bringing her to Bridgeport and living in a two-chimney house at the intersection of Main and Arch Streets, on the edge of the village two blocks from the Pequonnock River. The black-bearded Sherwood served as a private in the 2nd company, 4th regiment, of the Light Artillery of Bridgeport and worked as a local carpenter, and apparently was less affluent than his brother Samuel or the rest of the Stratton clan. Cynthia seems to have worked part-time as a cleaning woman at Daniel Sterling’s hotel a few blocks away at Main and Wall Streets. In their plain salt-box home they had three children who lived past childhood, two girls, Frances Jane and Mary Elizabeth, and one boy, Charles.1
The latter was born on January 4, 1838, and baptized at the nearby St. John’s Episcopal church. He was a large baby, as he joked years later: “I weighed nine pounds when I was born, within half a pound of one of my sisters, who has since attained a weight in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds; so you can see how the gap has widened between us.”2 At five months old he stopped growing, lingering for years at the same weight and height, and even his feet, for example, remained only three inches long. His pituitary gland rather than bone dysplasia or other issues caused his growth problems, though this was long before the discovery of those connections. At the time, his doctor, David Nash, a graduate of New Haven Medical College, could not figure out the reason for the lack of growth, but seems to have at least assured Cynthia that it was not due to her grief over a departed family dog during the pregnancy.3
This 1845 map of Bridgeport shows the pre-industrial town along the