Andrew Lycett

Amusing Queen Victoria

The young queen was enchanted with the American dwarf Tom Thumb and later gave the royal seal of approval to the display of fairground freaks

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  • Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football: How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment

    Lee Jackson

    Yale, pp. 304

  • The Wonders: Lifting the Curtain on the Freak Show, Circus and Victorian Age

    John Woolf

    Michael O’Mara, pp. 376

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.

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