Content area
Full text
Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America. Andrea Stulman Dennett. New York: New York University Press, 1997. xiv +200 pp.
While the history of nineteenth century popular culture has recently come to life with studies of the minstrel show and burlesque, the dime museum has largely remained a mystery. In Weird and Wonderful, Andrea Stulman Dennett finally brings the dime museum's rich history out of the shadows. Popular between 1841 and 1900, the dime museum marketed an eclectic range of entertainment, including freak shows, melodramas and pseudo-scientific exhibits, to a diverse audience. The roots of the dime museum's mixture of education and amusement lie in America's first museums of the late eighteenth century. Without endowments, early museums, such as Charles Willson Peale's American museum in Philadelphia, frequently included entertainment to draw more people in to see the collections of scientific displays and listen to lectures on natural history and art. These early museums gave way to alternate institutions: the endowed museum as a site of scientific learning (such as the Smithsonian, founded in 1841) and the dime museum, a commercial venue of entertainments with only halfhearted (and often deliberately deceptive) educational ideals.
Though he is best-known for his circus career, Phineas Taylor Barnum was actually the central figure in the establishment of dime museums. After purchasing his first dime museum in New York City in 1841, Barnum established a formula for success that entertainment entrepreneurs copied throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. He appeased those who were critical of theatrical...