Innocence, Experience, and Childhood Dramas: Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren

Abstract

In Stacy Carlson’s Among the Wonderful, a conversation takes place between three of the employees of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. The ‘giantess’ Ana Swift, the ‘bearded lady’ Maud Kraike, and the resident pianist Thomas Willoughby are discussing their colleague, Charles Stratton, otherwise known as General Tom Thumb. Maud articulates her discomfort with Charles’s precociousness:

‘You know who is the strangest of them all? Who gives me chills every time I think about him? […] Tom Thumb.’

‘What?’ said Thomas. ‘He’s just a little boy!’

‘He’s terrifying,’ Maud declared. ‘Think about how young he is […] this will be the entire scope of his life, where he looks for all types of sustenance.’

‘Like Caligula in the Roman Army,’ Thomas murmured […]

‘But Ana, you’ve experienced normal life with your family. It’s in you somewhere. He won’t have that, ever’.

(Carlson, 2011, pp. 147–48)