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Refer nowadays to Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-91)-once among the most recognisable and talked about of all nineteenth century Americansonly to conjure up visions of Barnum & Bailey's three-ring circuses, menageries, acrobats, and Jumbo the elephant. Such images tend to obscure that in 1880, on creation of the famous travelling circus combination, the renowned Connecticut-born showman was already over 70 years of age, even if long prominent as an impresario and promoter who, well before the arrival of the electronic media, both titillated and entertained massive audiences. A century later he was eulogised in the long-running 1980s Broadway musical Barnum! as a flamboyant show-business phenomenon (as played by British performers Jim Dale and Michael Crawford) improbably enamoured of Swedish soprano idol Jenny Lind (1820-87) whose mid-nineteenth century American concert tour Barnum managed.2
The new century has seen the publication of several important scholarly works on various aspects of P. T. Barnum as a largely progressive, multifarious, social and cultural phenomenon.3 Hence the beginnings of what eventually came to be called 'mass culture', requiring extensive advertising, large-scale investment, and mass ticket sales, are now seen by historians as largely Barnum's creation. Yet to highlight this show business entrepreneur, Wizard of Oz-like charlatan, and iconic circus showman as a great cultural innovator or modernizer who built much of what certain scholars now call 'the culture industry', tends to underplay Barnum's pre-modern or backward-looking enthusiasm for traditional amusements like the 'freak show'-even in late career an essential ingredient of his circus midways.
Accordingly, Barnum merits recognition for having brought what became the 'sideshow' to prominence as a central part of what would soon constitute the show business in the United States. Grotesquely malformed specimens of humanity-'freaks' in common parlance-had been among the most popular exhibits of travelling carnival shows and fairgrounds for centuries on both sides of the Atlantic. The golden age' did not begin, however, until a 31-year-old Barnum launched his latest enterprise in New York-the renovated American Museum (1841-65) across from what is still St Pauls Church in Lower Manhattan-and ushered the freak show into the era of mass culture.
Barnum's Career Prior to the Big Circus
Barnum's life history, according to Robert C. Toll, is 'more than the story of the foundation of American show business,...