Nothing but a Humbug: P.T. Barnum, Charles Dickens, and the Construction of National Identities in a Living Archive

Abstract

Abstract: Even as the Victorians attempted to stabilize British national identity through institutional ownership of cultural property, Britishness remained a protean, imagined construct. This essay shows, through a new narrativization of the auction of Shakespeare's birthplace in 1847, that the purportedly kitschy and fake aspects of Barnumesque, new-money America were paradoxically also constitutive of Britain's own nationalism. In the spring of that year, newspapers advertised that Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon would soon go up for public auction. Rumours immediately began circulating that the American showman P.T. Barnum, who had recently barnstormed through England with the "Greatest Show on Earth," was intent on purchasing the birthplace for his menagerie of cultural oddities. In opposition to this foreign threat, a full-blown rescue campaign, driven by British media fearmongering, was launched in order to save Shakespeare's home "for the nation." Soon, these efforts drew in Britain's own premier showman of the 1840s, Charles Dickens. The nineteenth-century popular press's mythologization of these events, and the myth's subsequent recapitulation in the twenty-first century, is emblematic of the way national-infused archives wind and unwind in a double-spooled temporality. As I renarrativize archival materials associated with the auction of Shakespeare's birthplace, I proffer a different model of American and British nationalisms that points to their symbiotic development and perpetual reinvention. Ultimately, I suggest, we can learn from the Victorians' reinvention of their own history that the nineteenth-century archive is not a stable point of origin but rather a point of departure for questioning our national heritage and understanding the ways in which we inscribe the past with our present.