Becoming Tom Thumb

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Eric D. Lehman. Becoming Tom Thumb

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Becoming Tom Thumb

Preface ix

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Echoes of that story have reverberated persistently but faintly during the last century, in “Tom Thumb Weddings” and in a smattering of children’s and young adult books. These books often draw on the extensive photographic record, and repeat the information in Barnum’s autobiography and other accessible sources. One of the first to do so was “Grandpapa Pease’s Tom Thumb,” which took the form of a long poem with colored line drawings, part of a “Toy Books for Young People” series along with Cinderella and Puss in Boots. The author switched the original English fable about a small man at King Arthur’s court and replaced it with Charles’s biography, turning him into a “real” Tom Thumb for children.

Later narratives would exaggerate Charles’s story more or less depending on author and intention, but all would focus on the fairy-tale aspect of his rise to fame and fortune. And who could blame them? There is a fantastical element to the story: the man in miniature who became one of the world’s most popular entertainers. When first reading the remarkable tale years ago, I was tempted to think the whole account one of Barnum’s humbugs. Perhaps the photographs had been faked, and stories of audiences with world leaders invented. But as Charles’s remarkable talents and life appeared in diary after diary, newspaper after newspaper, suddenly it became clear that he was no children’s story, but one of the great figures of the nineteenth century, marginalized by posterity.

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