• Corpus ID: 146339708

Drink versus Printer's Ink: Temperance and the Management of Financial Speculation in the Life of P.T. Barnum

@article{Belletto2005DrinkVP,
  title={Drink versus Printer's Ink: Temperance and the Management of Financial Speculation in the Life of P.T. Barnum},
  author={Steven Belletto},
  journal={American Studies},
  year={2005},
  volume={46},
  pages={45-65}
}

• Steven Belletto
• Published 1 March 2005
• History
• American Studies

RT Bamum (1810-1891) was by far the most famous American showman of his time. Born in the small manufacturing town of Bethel, Connecticut, he witnessed changes in American life that in many respects serve as reflections of broader social and cultural shifts in nineteenth-century America. Although many Americans today associate the Barnum name with his traveling circus, "The Greatest Show on Earth" was not established until relatively late in his career. Prior to the circus's development in the 1870s and 1880s, Barnum had made himself famous—and infamous—as an exhibitor of curiosities. Barnum's first foray into such popular entertainment came in 1835 when he purchased the right to exhibit Joice Heth, a slave woman who was billed as George Washington's 161-year-old nurse, and who caused sensation in every city to which she traveled. Following his financial successes with Heth, Barnum also managed several people he made nationally and internationally famous, from General Tom Thumb—the perfectly-proportioned midget who so delighted Queen Victoria in 1844—to Jenny Lind, the Swedish vocalist who in the early 1850s became a singing phenomenon in the United States. Other well-known exhibitions include the Fejee Mermaid, a half-monkey/half-fish that captured public interest in 1843, and the woolly horse allegedly sent east by far-flung John C. Fremont in the mid-1840s. By the 1850s, Barnum became most known for his American Museum, a collection of natural—and not-so-natural—wonders from around