Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [651]
The readiness of ladies to attend recitals of European concert artists suggested that still fatter profits lay in finer art. In 1849 Barnum began preparations to bring over Jenny Lind, a Swedish singer. Since her 1844 debut in the Berlin Opera House, Lind had gone from triumph to musical triumph while establishing a reputation for piety, modesty, charitable good works, and a spotless private life. Barnum enticed her across the Atlantic with a guarantee of $150,000 (plus very considerable expenses) for 150 concerts, which Lind, herself no mean bargainer, required him to bank in advance. Barnum mortgaged all he owned and borrowed more. Then he set out to guarantee success.
Barnum launched an unprecedented press campaign to acquaint Americans with Lind’s voice—and, more important, her virtues—concentrating on winning over homemakers and charity ladies and writers of sentimental fiction. Biographies from N. P. Willis and George Foster emphasized Lind’s morals rather than her musicianship, stressing “her intrinsic worth of heart and delicacy of mind.”
Next Barnum orchestrated her arrival. In September 1850 he arranged one of the most tremendous welcomes in the history of New York City. Thousands swarmed to the Canal Street dock from which Lind, pelted with flowers and accompanied by twenty companies of firemen, was conveyed under triumphal arches to the Irving House Hotel opposite A. T. Stewart’s store; there 150 musicians serenaded her into the wee hours. In the next days, Barnum had Lind visit Brady’s gallery, meet Archbishop Hughes, and stop in at the Herald to see its Hoe presses at work. “Reputation was manufactured for her, by wholesale,” a rival impresario grumped, and Barnum gleefully agreed: Lind “would have been adored if she had had the voice of a crow.”
The first concert was held September 11 at Castle Garden. The huge event—five thousand turned up—was handled with perfect decorum. A hundred hired policemen kept order; color-coded tickets matched color-coded seats. Willis rhapsodized at “the clockwork precision” with which people were seated and the “quiet dignity of their egress.” When Lind gave local New York charities her share of the evening’s profits—ten times what she’d made in any single European appearance—Hone declared that “New York is conquered; a hostile army or fleet could not effect a conquest so complete.”
As Lind moved out into the country, to continued adulation, some commentators expressed concern at the rampant “Lindomania.” Barnum’s ability to whip up publicity was a wholly new order of event. He had made use of an assortment of New York institutions—press, photography, hotels—to transform reputation into commodity, to package the first superproduct in the emerging marketplace of popular commercial culture. “Jenny Lind is a celebrity,” said one magazine, using a noun of relatively recent coinage, and there were those who worried that the business of celebrity creation might prove to have its downsides.
Barnum had demonstrated something else. Lind’s earnings were unprecedented in the history of American entertainment. Her New York concerts alone grossed nearly $290,000. Barnum personally cleared half a million on her tour and became a rich man. Clearly, conventional androcentrism had been proved wrong. Big bonanzas awaited those who tailored their entertainments to the precepts of bourgeois morality, and particularly to the hitherto underestimated audience of respectable females.
The entertainment marketplace also welcomed working-class women. German immigrant men and women piled together into immense beer halls like the Deutscher Volksgarten, the Atlantic Gardens, and Lindenmuller’s Odeon where, at rough tables and wooden benches, surrounded by gaudily painted frescos, they drank, sang, and watched amateur theatricals. Women were also present at melodrama, burlesque, and blackface performances, dime museums, ice cream parlors, oyster shops, and lecture halls. But they were most in evidence (as was true for the bourgeoisie) in venues devoted