Becoming Tom Thumb. Eric D. Lehman

in “the kindest manner” to visit her three times during the day, to show the public the “most wonderful contrast.” Other plays and skits followed, which included a gender switch to “our Mary Ann,” as well as fabricated and exotic backgrounds and status enhancement, of which the title “General” was the most obvious example.¹⁶ All these techniques were used to promote Charles, and of course were not only common amongst little people, but actors, singers, and performers of all sorts.¹⁷ This is the business of entertainment. Barnum used these techniques at the beginning because he thought he had to. But it quickly became apparent that what he had on his hands was not another humbug, but an actual attraction.

      After the initial reviews came out, he increased Charles’s salary to $7 a week for a year, $3 of which went directly to Sherwood, who acted as a sort of gofer for Barnum during this period. Lodging and travel were also paid by Barnum, however, and a bonus of $50 was promised. Sherwood and Cynthia signed this contract on December 22, 1842.¹⁸ Along with other doubts, the showman remained terrified that the four-year-old child would increase in stature, and seemed relieved whenever he reported to his friends in letters that he had not. Later, he reports with joyous humor to his daughter Cordelia, “He don’t grow a hair, but the little dog grows cunning every day.”¹⁹

      Overlaid by the contract his parents signed with Barnum, this is the first known photograph of Charles at age four, sitting next to a man once thought to be his father, Sherwood. However, this is in dispute. The oldest portrait photograph of a person known to exist is only three years older than this one. Collection of The Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, Connecticut.

      For those who saw Charles up close, there was no question as to his remarkably small size. However, during performances on stage, an unfortunate lack of scale was created. James White Nichols mentioned this illusion, and Barnum’s solution, saying: “When standing alone on his platform, it was remarked by many, he did not look so small as they had anticipated. The truth was he appeared somehow, in that position, magnified above his real size. The showman understood this too, and by bringing him down and placing him beside the smallest child which could be found present and able to stand, made his extreme littleness in the contrast more vividly apparent.”²⁰ All observers commented on Charles’s “perfect” appearance as a very handsome, “fully-grown” man shrunk down to the size of a baby. An 1843 quote by Dr. J. V. C. Smith in the Massachusetts Medical Journal is also often quoted to support this: “He appears now as fully developed as he ever will be. Of all dwarfs we have examined, this excels the whole in littleness. Properly speaking he is not a dwarf, as there is nothing dwarfish in his appearance—he is a perfect man in miniature … We gaze upon his little body dressed out in the extreme fashion of the day with indefinite sensations not easily described, partaking of that class of mixed emotions which are felt, but which language has not been able to explain.”²¹ A few years later, the Washington Union remarked, “Instead of a spectacle of deformity, you are surprised to see one of the most graceful and well-proportioned miniatures of a man which the imagination can conceive, with fresh complexion, delicate hands and feet.”²² This focus on “proportion,” made much of in the early years as a promotional strategy, was taken seriously by scientists of the day.

      Charles’s obvious intelligence was also a direct challenge to craniometry, a popular “science” at the time. This usually involved a process of measuring the size and shape of a skull, including bumps and anomalies, and judging by these measurements the propensities, sentiments, and mental abilities of a person, which were supposedly located at specific points around the brain. A “phrenologist” examined Charles’s skull, and reported that the brain is “the smallest recorded of one capable of sane and somewhat vigorous mental manifestation,” saying further that “Gen-eral Tom Thumb is, then, I repeat, a case of un-usual interest to the phrenological world.”²³ What he is not saying with this understatement is that Charles’s existence completely refuted the theory of linkage between brain size and intellect, an idea that unhappily continued to linger until the twentieth century, influencing various racial supremacist and imperialist philosophies.

      One silent tribute to the boy’s precocious brainpower was the fact that so few educated adults questioned the inflated age Barnum tagged him with. Ambassador Everett certainly did not, and neither did any of the European nobility he encountered over the next few years.²⁴ His physical condition was also important, as “dwarfs” were often considered sickly or unfit. He was advertised as having “always exhibited the most perfect health.”²⁵ The Baltimore Sun noted “We cannot describe the sensation with which one looks upon this diminutive specimen of humanity. Were he deformed, or sickly, or melancholy, we might pity him; but he is so manly, so handsome, so hearty, and so happy, that we look upon him as a being of some other sphere.”²⁶ And in fact this seems to be the case and not just propaganda. Until 1883 there is only one report of Charles being too ill to perform, despite working long hours, traveling constantly, and smoking daily cigars.

      Nevertheless, he had to prove his health repeatedly to a society that thought of dwarfs as perpetually weak and sickly. And although child actors were fairly common, concern for their health was just as prevalent as it is today. When child actor Master Betty had burst onto the English scene forty years earlier, a number of people, including Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, the brother of George III, tried to make sure that acting five times a week in “deep tragedies” was not taking its toll on the boy’s health.²⁷ Since Charles was even younger and much smaller, this issue was no doubt brought up by members of the audience quite often. To preempt this, the showman, whether Barnum or a surrogate, would usually bring it up during the performance, giving “general statements and remarks on the little General’s health,” along with assuring the audience that no “signs” or “omens” accompanied his birth. He would stress the happiness and appetite of the child, citing his “uncommon power of enduring fatigue,” despite being “task’d with constant performance through the whole day, almost, without rest.”²⁸ Along with reassuring both the prejudiced and genuinely concerned, Charles and his managers needed to carefully turn whatever pity or sympathy the audience might have into wonder and amusement. No one wanted the audience to go away distressed or unhappy.

      While the success of “Tom Thumb” was bringing in huge sums of money for Barnum, the showman continued his media assault, combining exaggeration with truth. Many of his early stories about Charles might be somewhat embellished. One suspicious anecdote took place during his dinner with Colonel James Watson Webb in New York. Charles stood on the table while the turkey was being carved, and knocked over a tumbler of water. This event seems quite reasonable, but his quick response, that he was afraid he might fall in, sounds invented, as does when he promptly drank the health of all present in a glass of Hungarian wine.²⁹ However, like most of Barnum’s stories, there was a grain of truth in it, and the rehearsed dinner table joke was certainly repeated at other houses over the years.

      Charles was clearly the biggest draw for visitors at the American Museum, and sending him away meant a risk. Barnum knew, however, that money could be made elsewhere. Throughout the first year, the boy traveled to different places around New York and New England accompanied by Barnum or his business manager, Fordyce Hitchcock. From May to June 1843, Charles spent six weeks doing his “statues” at the Kimball Museum in Boston, accompanied by Hitchcock and his father. Apparently during all that time Sherwood did nothing but sit in his hotel room, even when Senator Daniel Webster and President John Tyler came to Boston on June 17 to speak at the anniversary of Bunker Hill, amidst a huge celebration.³⁰ This strange incident foreshadowed Sherwood’s increasingly erratic behavior as the years passed. Luckily, during the tours of theaters and halls in the Atlantic cities that year, Sherwood began acting as ticket-seller, and this job seemed to please him, especially handling the money.

      Detailed accounts of these exhibitions are rare, but James White Nichols gives a thorough description of one of these “levees” in Danbury, Connecticut a few years later. Though by that time Charles had advanced in skill and was putting on plays and more complicated performances, apparently he occasionally fell back on the basic formula, only changing