The Celebrated Showman Unmasked

Abstract

In July 1835, a sometime clerk, lottery agent, and grocer from Connecticut ventured into the entertainment business. He did so by exhibiting a blind, withered, and partially paralyzed African-American women, first in New York City, and then, over the subsequent eight months, throughout New York State and New England. The exhibitor was Phinneas T. Barnum, soon to become the country's foremost purveyor of commodified culture. The elderly woman he put on display was Joice Heth, a Kentucky slave whom Barnum advertised as "The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World": ostensibly a deeply religious 161-year-old wonder who had served as George Washington's nurse in his early years of life. At almost every stop on the tour's itinerary, throngs of visitors paid to hear, examine, question, prod, and converse with Heth. This touring exhibit, the relationships among its key participants (chiefly Barnum and Heth, but also Barnum's confederate Levi Lyman), and its place in nineteenth-century American culture receive Benjamin Reiss's detailed attention in The Showman and the Slave.