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6 results

  • The Public's Obedient Servant, P. T. Barnum

  • Susan Estabrook Kennedy
  • Journal:
    Prospects / Volume 4 / October 1979
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    30 July 2009, pp. 303-329
    Print publication:
    October 1979

  • Phineas Taylor Barnum was a strange breed of nineteenth-century Renaissance man. Although best known as showman and exhibitor of “curiosities,” Barnum enjoyed a multifaceted career including stints as editor, politician, reformer, and patron of a higher form of “the arts” than is usually associated with him. But in each of these endeavors, he represented a product of, and comment upon, his roots. If his enterprises grew and adapted in striking parallel to the social and political changes of the nineteenth century, they also represented a constant application of the peculiar down-eastern Yankee of Connecticut known as the “humbug.”