Excerpt from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The ladies, they liked me best when I appeared in my flesh-colored tights and played Cupid, shooting toy arrows into the crowd—and how they grabbed for them, my little love darts. When my act was over, I walked among them, and they picked me up and hugged me, and passed me around.

It was a young dwarf 's paradise. The rustling of their silks, the lure of their perfume, the heaving of their breasts as they breathed. Not bad, I thought, not bad at all. I could live with that. The only problem, since I was so short, just twenty-five inches, I wondered who in the world would ever want to marry me? And already, young as I was, I was thinking about that, and I was busy looking.


"Never talk dirty," Barnum said, cautioning me after hearing me pass a few foul words I'd picked up from the workmen who cleaned out the animal cages. "Think dirty all you want, but in public be polite."

"Do you think dirty?" I asked.

"All the time," he answered, gripping me with his dark gray eyes. "But I don't go around boasting about it."

He loomed above me with his great mop of swampy black hair. His face fleshy, the chin firm, the nose thick, lips wide and rubbery. He was under six feet, but there was so much fire and energy in him that he seemed taller than he was. He told me it would please him if I called him P. T. So I did. But in my thoughts, he was always Barnum— not Phineas, not P. T., not Mister Barnum, just Barnum, plain and simple. Because that's who he was. That one word, it summed him up, it defined him, it was him, the word and the person one and the same.

Occasionally we appeared together onstage, dancing side by side, in tandem, the same steps, each wearing a gray swallowtail and a high beaver hat, he twirling his big silver-topped cane, and I twirling my tiny one. And when the music came to a close, he would glide off the stage with me sitting on his shoulder.

So, yes, yes—I liked him, and still do. But hated him, too—because he took me, Charlie Stratton, and turned me into Tom Thumb, and there were days when I was never sure who I really was. Me—I—the one who thinks, who talks, who spits, who dreams. Was I, Charlie Stratton, pretending to be Tom Thumb, or Tom Thumb trying to remember I was really Charlie Stratton? Or was I simply the anger they both felt. The loneliness, the confusion, the bad mouth, a bit of steam coming off a hot roof after a summer storm.


My father had been a carpenter, but it was a hard way to earn a living— less than ten dollars a week, repairing porches and barns. When Barnum found me, good money started coming our way, and my father, little by little, quit hammering. He and my mother stayed with me when I was in New York, and Barnum brought them along when he toured me through Europe, since I was so young.

In London, huge crowds wanted to see me, especially after Queen Victoria invited me to appear at Buckingham Palace. Three visits I had with her, and on one occasion she kissed me on the cheek, and, in an overzealous moment, took a quick nibble at one of my ears. My performances at the Egyptian Hall drew overflow crowds, and it was soon apparent that a Tom Thumb craze was developing. Tom Thumb paper dolls appeared in all sorts of shops. And there was a new sweet, the Tom Thumb Sugar Plum, which sold wildly. Onstage I danced my own version of the polka, and it became the new dance sensation of the season, everybody doing it, the Tom Thumb Polka. Barnum was strutting like a peacock.

But my father, my father. In the halls and theaters where I performed, he sold tickets at the door and handled other small jobs, too— and it was, for him, a muddy time. In Liverpool his wallet was stolen. In Bristol he lost his watch, and in London a bundle of his favorite shirts went to the laundry and never came back.

And there was something else, too. On those many occasions when I was invited into the presence of royalty, he was never part of that, nor was my mother—and I now understand that he must have felt terribly put off. My mother did feel snubbed, and said so, blaming Barnum. "Him, that uppity humbug. Thinks we're not good enough for the high-and-mighty royalty!" She moaned and complained, and dealt with her frustration by rushing about from shop to shop and spending wildly.

Excerpted from The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb by Nicholas Rinaldi. Copyright © 2014 by Nicholas Rinaldi. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.