1 Barnum's Great Barnum–London Show, which combined Barnum's attractions (including Jo-Jo) with those from the London circus, opened at Madison Square Garden 16 March 1885 and closed in Newburg, NY, 24 October 1885. It stopped in ten northeastern states as well as two locations in Canada. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Sixty Years Recollections of P. T. Barnum . . . Illustrated, and Brought up to 1889 (Buffalo, NY: Courier Company, 1889), 344.

2 “The Dog-Faced Boy,” New York Herald, 12 April 1885.

3 Ibid.

4 Sixteen-year-old Fedor Jeftichew arrived from St. Petersburg, Russia in 1884, at which point Barnum began billing him as Jo-Jo (also nicknamed “The Human Skye Terrier” in advertisements). Jeftichew's act largely consisted of him growling or barking at audiences while dressed as a Russian cavalryman; he died in 1903 at age thirty-five. See Hartzman, Marc, American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History's Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers (New York: Penguin, 2006), 51–2Google Scholar.

5 New York Herald, 22 March 1885.

6 “Dog-Faced Boy.”

7 James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 17.

8 Ibid., 28.

9 O'Neill, Bonnie Carr, Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 See, in particular, Blumin, Stuart, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 11, 140Google Scholar; Scott E. Casper, “Introduction,” in A History of the Book in America: vol. 3, The Industrial Book, 1840–1880, ed. Scott E. Casper et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 32; and Eric Schocket, Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 12.

11 Blumin, 245.

12 Ibid., 244–5.

13 Ibid. Whitman specifically pegged the middle-class man as one “living . . . at the rate of a thousand dollars a year or thereabouts.” See Whitman, I Sit and Look Out: Editorials from the Brooklyn Daily Times, by Walt Whitman, ed. Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwarz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 145.

14 Blackmar, Elizabeth, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 179Google Scholar.

15 Cromley, Elizabeth Collins, Alone Together: A History of New York's Early Apartments (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 32–3Google Scholar; Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (1991; repr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), xxxiii; Katherine Grier, Culture & Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1997), 3–4.

16 Grier, 59–60; Stevenson, 53–5; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), 262.

17 Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 14, 49–54 (quote at 51).

18 Critics trace amateur theatricals back to European court masques in the seventeenth century. Meanwhile, amateur educational theatre appeared in the American colonies. In England, recreational amateur parlor shows were popular in early nineteenth-century England (and often were cited in later American guidebooks to justify the practice); see Eileen Moira Curley, “Beyond the Pocket Doors: Amateur Theatricals in Nineteenth-Century New York City” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2006), 9.

19 On the distribution and pirating of guidebooks, see Melanie Dawson, Laboring to Play: Home Entertainment and the Spectacle of Middle-Class Cultural Life, 1850–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 8–9. Karen Halttunen also notes the middle-class readership for the guides; see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 175.

20 Diaries and firsthand reports are scattered in the historical archive. For instance, New York City teenager Ella Moore reported her family's parlor theatrical performances in a series as “Ella Moore's Letters from the City,” Godey's Lady's Book, running monthly from June through November, 1860 (564–5; 88, 184–5, 282–3, 375, 471–2). Perhaps most famously, Louisa May Alcott, her sisters, and local friends wrote and performed in their own shows; see Stern, Madeleine B., “Louisa Alcott, Trouper: Experiences in Theatricals, 1848–1880,” New England Quarterly 16.2 (1943): 175–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among the upper classes, Boston was an especially popular center of parlor theatrical activity; see Doherty, Katherine M., “Playbills in the Massachusetts Historical Society of Amateur Theatricals, 1775–1921: A Preliminary Checklist,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 91 (1979): 101–211Google Scholar. As opposed to the guides’ encouragement of various game playing among their middle-class readers, the extant playbills and scripts surrounding these upper-class theatricals suggest more full-length productions of well-known commercial plays and farces.

21 Dawson, 3. In her seminal work on the subject, Halttunen also identifies it as a mainly middle-class phenomenon (174). Although there are scarce details of any nonwhite home performances, free Black individuals did participate in amateur theatre more publicly. Notably, in the Crispus Attucks Day ceremonies beginning in 1859, abolitionist William Cooper Nell recruited nonprofessional Black actors to perform in allegorical and historical tableaux. Initially staged at Boston's Faneuil Hall, these commemorative events—celebrating the life of Attucks, a Black man who died in the Boston Massacre—added variety elements as the years proceeded, including opera excerpts and short dramatic scenes; see Tavia Nyong'o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 55–65.

22 Dawson, 3.

23 Ibid., 1.

24 Anon., Parlor and Playground Amusements: Entertainment and Instruction for the Family Circle or Evening Parties (Boston: Locke & Bubier, 1875), 3. As was common with the pirating and reprinting of various guidebooks, the same passage actually appeared twelve years earlier in Oliver Optic [pseud.], Sports and Pastimes for In-doors and Out (Boston: Cottrell, 1863), iii.

25 George Arnold and Frank Cahill, Parlor Theatricals; or, Winter Evenings’ Entertainment (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1859), 3.

26 Ibid. Cf. “Advertisement: Parlor Theatricals: or Winter Evenings’ Entertainment,” Banner of Light 15.7 (7 May 1864), 5.

27 Tony Denier, The Amateur's Guide to Home Theatricals: How to Get Them Up and How to Act in Them (New York: Samuel French, 1866), 7.

28 Moore, June 1860, 564.

29 For detailed makeup descriptions, see Denier, Amateur's Guide, 35–6. Participants could also buy prepainted stage scenery, with some backdrops spanning up to twenty feet wide, from playtext publisher Samuel French in New York. See, for instance, the back cover of Douglas Jerrold, The Rent-Day (New York: Samuel French, [1872–8]).

30 Tony Denier, Parlor Tableaux; or, Animated Pictures (New York: Samuel French, 1868), viii.

31 Denier, Amateur's Guide, 25.

32 Frank Bellew, The Art of Amusing (New York: Carleton, 1866), 237.

33 Ibid. For a more detailed picture of this effect, including a view of the audience, see Leger D. Mayne [William Brisbane Dick], What Shall We Do To-Night? or, Social Amusements for Evening Parties (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1873), 300. Other visual effects could require complicated and seemingly dangerous engagement with raw materials. To produce a lightning effect, Mayne proposes mixing “a little gunpowder—very little . . . with sulphur, so as to give it a blue tinge” and then throwing the solution “through the flame of a candle [to] give a flash.” Ibid. For more on these types of effects, see Curley, Eileen, “Parlour Conflagrations: Science and Special Effects in Manuals for Amateur Theatricals,” Popular Entertainment Studies 6.1 (2015): 26–41Google Scholar.

34 Paul Gilmore, The Genuine Article: Race, Mass Culture, and American Literary Manhood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 31.

35 Ibid.

36 Rosemarie Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 137.

37 Curley, “Beyond the Pocket Doors,” 26.

38 Robert Clyde Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 64. In addition, Faye Dudden, Bluford Adams, and Paul Gilmore suggest that the museums intended to cultivate a middle-class (and specifically not working-class) audience, and they succeeded; see Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses & Audiences, 1790–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 105–7, 112; Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman & The Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 121–4; and Gilmore, 34.

39 Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 173.

40 Allen, 64–5.

41 See Adams, 21.

42 Most of this encouragement was developed through architectural renovation. The Walnut Street Theatre and the Arch Street Theatre (both in Philadelphia) and the Broadway Theatre (in New York) all introduced a parquette space to welcome exclusively middle-class audiences. Meanwhile, Laura Keene's Theatre (also in New York) and the Boston Theatre reduced high-price private boxes in order to cultivate more middling audiences. McConachie, 200–3.

43 Barnum's agent Fordyce Hitchcock bought the Baltimore Museum for Barnum in 1845, but then Barnum sold it in 1846. He opened a Philadelphia Museum in 1849 at the corner of Chestnut and Seventh Streets—a “first-class establishment” according to Barnum—but sold it in 1851, and it burned down later that year. P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself (London: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston, 1869), 264–5.

44 Adams, 78, 117–18.

45 James W. Cook, “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum's ‘What Is It?’ Exhibition,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thompson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 139–57, at 147; Adams, 78. For more on the oft-forgotten cosmoramas—in which viewers would peep through wall-mounted magnifying glasses to view illuminated miniature paintings—see Erkki Huhtamo, “Toward a History of Peep Practice,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudrealt, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 32–51, at 39–41.

46 Adams, 79–80.

47 Ibid., 26. The working classes, in return, disrupted her performances. According to Adams, gunfire rang outside of Lind's Cincinnati concert sponsored by Barnum, and thousands of protestors disrupted one of her Pittsburgh performances; ibid., 201.

48 Barnum's clientele was largely middle-class in the 1840s and early 1850s. But as middlebrow and high-end theatres moved uptown during the late 1850s and 1860s to accommodate their relocating clientele, Barnum's downtown American Museum was forced to rely partly upon the local working classes for business. Specifically, he sought working-class audiences of white, U.S.-born Protestants. Adams, 25, 90–5, 112–13. Notably, even after a fire burned down the Museum in 1865, Barnum rebuilt it downtown (at 539 and 541 Broadway) until this venue burned down too in 1868.

49 P. T. Barnum, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (New York: Redfield, 1855), 399.

50 Although these plays were written in the 1840s, Barnum staged them to great fanfare after he renovated his lecture room in 1850. See McConachie, 161–97.

51 Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 135, 161.

52 Adams, 2.

53 Barnum's Museum was not the only museum venue upon which the guides were capitalizing. Most major cities had a dime museum at some point in the nineteenth century. As mentioned, Moses Kimball's Boston Museum found great popularity in the 1840s–50s. Meanwhile, a variety of Bowery dime museums attracted working-class attention in the 1870s. See John Springhall, The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to 1940 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 22–30. But in terms of public notoriety among middle-class readers, Barnum's was undoubtedly the most dominant influence on the parlor theatre guidebooks; see, for instance, the parodying of a Barnum-like proprietor in the game called “The Museum,” in Mayne, 32–4.

54 Eric Fretz, “P. T. Barnum's Theatrical Selfhood and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Exhibition,” in Thompson, 97–107, at 105.

55 O'Neill, 27.

56 Robert Wilson, Barnum: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 59.

57 The tour seemed to have more detractors than the original exhibit. Critics in Charleston, South Carolina were so vocal that Barnum had to ship the Fejee Mermaid back to New York to avoid bad press. See Ibid., 58–70. Barnum often remained defiant, however, challenging scientists to explain the Fejee Mermaid and thus leaving its origins a mystery. Adams, 81.

58 O'Neill, 34. Barnum actually had debuted the “What Is It?” in Great Britain in 1846, where the character was performed by Hervey Leech, a white New York–based actor who darkened his skin with makeup. O'Neill and others have asserted that Johnson took over sometime in the 1860s. However, Cook's research indicates that Johnson, who played “What Is It?” for decades, may not have started working for Barnum until 1877. Thus, it is possible that there was yet another performer who occupied the role in the 1860s; see Cook, Arts of Deception, 126–8.

59 The Leopard Boy was a young man with black and white spots of skin, usually advertised as a primitive import from African jungles. In reality, the Leopard Boy was performed by several young Black men suffering from the skin disorder vitiligo. See Hartzman, 60. Barnum exhibited many Native Americans over the years, including most prominently a group of Cheyenne, Caddo, and Apache leaders in 1863; O'Neill, 36–7.

60 Cook, Arts of Deception, 138.

61 New York Herald, 3 March 1860.

62 O'Neill, 35.

63 Cook, “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts,” 149.

64 Mayne, 32–3.

65 Ibid., 33–4.

66 Dawson, 2. Dawson examines a similar “museum” home entertainment that was outlined in Godey's Lady's Book in 1864.

67 Cook, “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts,” 140.

68 The giraffe required two performers hidden inside of a draped, spotted cloth resembling the animal's body, with one actor holding a five-foot pole attached to a homemade giraffe head. Mayne states that performers should devote careful detail to crafting the head: “A grocer's paper bag may easily be wrought into a tolerable resemblance by a little trimming with the scissors, and fastening with pins or thread; some holes cut out for the eyes, and the nostrils and mouth the same . . . the whole marked with ink or watercolor to imitate the spots of the animal”; Mayne, 67–8.

69 Ibid., 41–2.

70 Ibid., 44.

71 Anon., How to Amuse an Evening Party (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1869), 45. Another similarly titled book reprints much of the Dick & Fitzgerald material five years later; see Anon., How to Entertain a Social Party (New York: Frank Reed, 1875).

72 Mayne, 102.

73 Thumb was the most famous in a series of dwarfs that Barnum employed, including Admiral Dot, Commodore Nutt, and Tom Thumb's eventual wife, Lavinia Warren. See Hartzman, 37–9 (Dot), 77–8 (Nutt), 89–92 (Thumb), and 97–8 (Warren).

74 David A. Gerber, “The ‘Careers’ of People Exhibited in Freak Shows: The Problem of Volition and Valorization,” in Thompson, 38–54, at 51. Ateliotic dwarfs were known for their “doll-like features” and physical resemblances (height excepted) to nondwarfs. Since the advent of growth hormones, ateliosis has been a significantly rarer type of dwarfism; see Herrero-Pueras, Manuel, “Freak Bodies Politic: Charles Stratton, Dred, and the Embodiment of National Innocence,” American Quarterly 67.4 (2015): 1137–67Google Scholar, at 1141.

75 For the public fascination with the bodies of Stratton and his wife, Lavinia Warren, and the national implications of these corporeal Others, see Franzino, Jean, “‘The Biggest Little Marriage on Record’: Union and Disunion in Tom Thumb's America,” American Quarterly 67.1 (2015): 189–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 173–85.

77 Anon., How to Amuse, 44.

78 Most famously, in 1856, Thumb put on blackface and performed as Tom Tit (Stowe's Tomtit) in a stage adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred; a Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp; see Herrero-Pueras, 1137–67.

79 Mayne, 103.

80 Anon., How to Amuse, 45–6, at 45.

81 Ibid., 45–6.

82 Anon., Sights and Wonders in New York, Including a Description of . . . Barnum's Museum (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1849), 21.

83 Hartzman, 42–3. Goshan was alternately billed as the Palestine Giant and later the Middlebush Giant. His exact height and weight changed between advertisements and bills, which variously listed him as measuring between seven and eight and a half feet tall and weighing between 400 and 600 pounds. Of course, like many of Barnum's attractions, Goshan was not what he seemed. Although billed alternately as an Arab, a Prussian, a Turk, and even an African American man from Kentucky, Goshan was in actuality a white man (birth name Arthur Crowley) from the Isle of Man.

84 Assembly Buildings (Philadelphia), playbill, From Barnum's Museum: Miss Anna Swan, The Nova Scotia Giant Girl! . . . Gen. Grant, Jr. The Least of All Little Men, 27 September 1864. McAllister Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia, Rare PB Phi Assembly 1864 (6)5761.F.20.

85 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 45.

86 Dawson, 95.

87 For Uncle Tom tableaux, see James H. Head, Home Pastimes; or, Tableaux Vivants (Boston: J. E. Tilton, 1860), 222–3, and Denier, Parlor Tableaux, 32. Regarding “the usual way of making a colored man” via makeup and costuming, see Bellew, 289.

88 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 14.

89 O'Neill, 49.

90 Cook, Arts of Deception, 28.

91 Adams, 124. Specifically, the earlier Washingtonian groups, led by working-class ex-drunkards who gave “experience speeches” regarding their past misdeeds, gave way to middle-class associations like the Sons of Temperance and the American Temperance Union. (For “experience speeches” see Scott C. Martin, Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-Class Ideology, 1800–1860 [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008], 138.)

92 The Drunkard played a hundred consecutive performances at Barnum's Museum in 1850, at that time a record for an uninterrupted run; Bank, 143. Pratt's Ten Nights in a Barroom was an adaptation of T. S. Arthur's best-selling novel of the same name, published in 1854.

93 Springhall, 26.

94 Barnum reports featuring “The Temperate Family” and “The Intemperate Family” waxworks, along with a wax tableau depicting the Last Supper, in his Philadelphia Museum during his proprietorship there from 1849 to 1851; Struggles and Triumphs, 264. All three waxworks in the New York Museum are described by the character “Uncle Find-out” in Anon., Sights and Wonders, 6. In both texts, the displays are attributed to “Mrs. Pelby” (Boston-based actress and artist Rosalie French Pelby).

95 Anon., Sights and Wonders, 6.

96 For a thorough, invaluable study of the home tableaux vivant phenomenon in America, see Chapman, Mary, “Living Pictures: Women and Tableaux Vivants in Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Culture,” Wide Angle 18.3 (July 1996): 22–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 Denier, “The Drunkard's Home,” Parlor Tableaux, 11–12, at 12 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text).

98 George Arnold and Frank Cahill, “The Drunkard's Home,” The Sociable; or, One Thousand and One Home Amusements (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1858), 163–4.

99 Julia Skelly, Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919: Wasted Looks (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014), 56.

100 Evening Post (New York), 28 January 1848.

101 John W. Frick, Theatre, Culture and Temperance Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 97–8, 106.

102 American publishers included Wiley & Putnam, White & Potter, and T. B. Peterson. For the stereograph ad, see Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 4 December 1858.

103 In the most famous stage version by T. P. Taylor, the drunkard is given a name (Richard Thornley) and this profession in the cast list. T. P. Taylor, The Bottle, in The Minor Drama XX (New York: John Douglas, 1847), 6. For more on the drunkard's working-class markers, see The Graphic Works of George Cruikshank, ed. Richard A. Volger (New York: Dover, 1979), 160.

104 George Cruikshank, The Bottle. In Eight Plates (London: D. Bogue, 1847), n.p.

105 Ibid.

106 Denier, “The Bottle,” Parlor Tableaux, 42–9, at 42 and 43 (hereafter again cited parenthetically in the text).

107 Alan Ackerman, The Portable Theater: American Literature & the Nineteenth-Century Stage (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 160.

108 M. D., “Going to Barnum's,” Advocate and Family Guardian (New York), 23 (15 December 1857), 247–8, at 247 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text); italics per the original.

109 For more on story papers—which were oversized “literary” or “family” newspapers—and their expanding middle-class audiences, see Cohen, Daniel A., “Making Hero Strong: Teenage Ambition, Story-Paper Fiction, and the Generational Recasting of American Women's Authorship,” Journal of the Early Republic 30.1 (2010): 85–136Google Scholar, at 86–7, 95–7.