The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb - Melanie Benjamin [167]
For outside, the dusk was falling.
And I knew we would talk well into the night.
CODA
From the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 7, 1878
Professor Edison, the inventor of the most marvelous instrument of modern times, has already hit upon a scheme in which millions seem to lurk, namely, the publication of a cheap phonographic library, by means of which a five hundred page novel can be sold in electrotype sheets to be adjusted to the phonograph. The instrument will then be adjusted and the novel will be read aloud to the listener by machinery. Fortunately this instrument has only just come into fashion, otherwise we should never have come into possession of that exquisite mine of Oriental fancy the Arabian Nights.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I first encountered Lavinia Warren Stratton in the pages of one of the masterpieces of historical fiction, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. She appeared, briefly and near the end of her life, in a scene with Harry Houdini.
She didn’t make much of an impression on me then. However, a few months later I was searching for the subject for my next novel, noodling around on the Internet, reading books, histories, lists of notable people—anything that might help me find that one person whose story I just had to tell. On one list, the name “Lavinia Warren Stratton” leapt out at me; I remembered her from Doctorow’s novel, did a basic search on her name, and was immediately entranced.
Lavinia—known as Vinnie—was born on October 31, 1841, in Middleborough, Massachusetts, to a family of good standing. All of her siblings, as well as her parents, were normal-size, except for her younger sister, Huldah, called Minnie. Both Minnie and Vinnie had a form of proportionate dwarfism, probably caused by a pituitary disorder; had she been born in more modern times, she would have been given human growth hormones. But at the time, she—and her future husband, Charles Stratton (or General Tom Thumb, as he was more widely known)—were highly prized “curiosities” in an America that was just beginning to be linked. With the advent of the railroad, steamships, photography, and the modern press, people could now experience a world outside their own small villages; most people had never seen, nor really ever heard of, little people. And the fact that Vinnie and Charles and Minnie were “perfectly formed people in miniature” made them palatable and interesting to the public; those who had disproportionate dwarfism were, tragically, considered distasteful, and often used in circuses and sideshows to depict savages or idiots.
Vinnie had a very loving and normal childhood, and was engaged as a schoolteacher in her town. However, a Colonel Wood—purported to be a cousin, although that was never proven—showed up at her door one day with an invitation to appear on his “floating palace of curiosities” out west. To the great shock of her pious New England family, Vinnie leapt at the chance. In her autobiographical writings, she admits to a desire to travel, to see things, to experience a wider world than she could in New England.
She doesn’t admit that her fate, were she to remain at home, would likely be a dismal one. A woman in mid-nineteenth-century America had few options; either she married, or she remained dependent upon her relatives for the rest of her life. She could not have a career (beyond that of modest schoolmarm) of her own. It’s unlikely Vinnie or her family ever thought, given her size, that she would marry. However, after her cousin’s visit she had another option. She could leave Middleborough; she could travel, she could have a career, and she could do this as a single woman precisely because of her size. For a man named P.T. Barnum had just introduced the public to General Tom Thumb; suddenly there was great interest in the “curiosities” of the world, and Vinnie was only too quick to take