The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass entertainment, and then as an example of an attraction at the rebuilt Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1864. But he is the star of John Woolf’s breezy personality-driven history of the ‘freak’ show, an intriguing sub-set of that wider field of leisure activity.
Tom is first introduced there 20 years earlier when, aged six and standing just 25 inches tall in red velvet coat and breeches, he performs before an enchanted young Queen Victoria in Buckingham Palace, together with his manager, P.T. Barnum.
Born Charles Stratton in Connecticut, Tom was snapped up by Barnum, who made him the centrepiece of a highly lucrative showbusiness empire, based on his American Museum in New York, which catered to the 19th-century demand for freaks and human oddities. Starting with Joice Heth, billed as a 161-year-old slave woman who was once George Washington’s nurse, Barnum used hoax, humbug and salesmanship to promote his business, which endured till only two years ago in the Barnum and Bailey circus. Milking his royal connections was just one example of his chutzpah.
Read in tandem, these two books illustrate how, from around 1850, the entertainment industry, particularly in Britain, began to alter in character, with Queen Victoria playing a significant role. She did this partly by giving the royal seal of approval to the display of freaks, but also, taking her cue from Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851 and its later Crystal Palace incarnation, by encouraging mass amusements to move out of pubs and music halls into larger exhibition spaces, such as fairgrounds and theme parks, which stressed education and inclusivity as well as pleasure.
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