Struggles and Triumphs - P. T. Barnum (top 20 books to read txt) 📗

in Brooklyn April 10, 1871. At the outset the exhibition was truly a mammoth one. It embraced a museum, menagerie, caravan and hippodrome⁠—all first-class and unsurpassed in previous shows⁠—and Dan. Costello’s celebrated circus was added. It was an exhibition absolutely colossal, exhaustive, and bewilderingly various as the most liberal expenditure and years of experience could possibly make it. My motto through life has been: “Get the best, regardless of expense.” My aim was to combine in the several shows more startling and entirely novel wonders of creation than were ever before seen in one collection anywhere in the world, and to furnish my patrons with wholesome instruction and innocent amusement, without the taint of anything that should seem immoral or exceptionable. In all this I fully succeeded, and I declare with pride that this grand combination has proved to be the crowning success of my managerial life.

My canvas covered about three acres of ground, and would hold nearly ten thousand people, yet from the start in Brooklyn, and throughout the entire summer tour, it was of daily occurrence that from one thousand to three thousand people were turned away. After an extraordinarily successful week in Brooklyn, I visited all the leading places in the immediate vicinity; then the principal towns in Connecticut; next through Rhode Island to Boston. How the great combination was received and appreciated in “the Athens of America” is well set forth in the following extracts from a two-column article in the Boston Journal:

The arrival in Boston last Monday of Barnum’s new enterprise, comprising a museum, menagerie, caravan and hippodrome, to which is gratuitously added Dan. Costello’s mammoth circus, has produced a sensation in this city never before equalled by any amusement enterprise known to New England. We have had our anniversaries, reviews, parades, the Odd Fellows, and today shall have Fisk’s famous “Ninth.” But after all, nothing seems to equal or eclipse the great Barnum and his immense amusement enterprise, which is the theme of universal comment and observation here, as elsewhere. “Have you seen Barnum?” is the question that is heard in the streets, counting houses, stores and shops, the public being as anxious to see the veteran Show King as they are to visit his big show. We confess that Barnum is a curiosity, and always has been for the last thirty years, during which time he has figured prominently before the American people, until the fame of him is as familiar to both worlds as household words. Verily, who has not heard of P. T. Barnum and the famous American Museum? We don’t mean that as a specimen of the genus homo Barnum is very different from other specimens who have gained notoriety and success; but simply as an embodiment of the very best representative type of a shrewd, enterprising, wide awake American, who has achieved an immense success in his specialty as the greatest amusement caterer of the nineteenth century. Through two disastrous conflagrations his immense museum collection in New York, however, the accumulations of half a century, were in a single day almost entirely swept out of existence. This was a serious loss to the public, as it was to Mr. Barnum, although he is said to have taken it as coolly and imperturbably as the apple woman round the corner would the loss of a Roxbury russet. Already advancing in years, and thinking, no doubt, he had served the public long enough, Mr. Barnum concluded, after the loss of his museum, to retire permanently from the show business, and, taking Horace Greeley’s advice, go a fishing or seek the shades of a more quiet and private life for the balance of his days. A man, however, like P. T. Barnum, who has spent a whole life amid scenes of bustle and excitement, with a constant tension of muscle and brain, catering for the ever recurring demands of a curious public, naturally fond of amusements, especially the marvellous and sensational, is rarely satisfied to withdraw suddenly, like the tortoise, within his own shell, and let the outside world “wag” without taking an active interest in passing events. Thus Mr. Barnum’s retirement, although surrounded by every luxury that money could furnish, became the veriest prison to every element, nervous, physical and intellectual, of his being, and it is no wonder, under these circumstances, that he became absolutely “restive under rest.” His ambition, like ancient “Utica,” he felt to be too much “pent up,” and as “volcanoes bellow ere they disembogue,” so “smoke betrays the wild consuming fire.” Like Dan. Costello’s famous gymnasts his vaulting ambition has fairly o’erleapt itself, for by a single bound he comes before the public in a new role, having on his hands an “elephant” more ponderous and expensive to manage than the famous quadruped that used to be seen “plowing” on his Bridgeport farm, not for agricultural purposes exactly, but as a “rocket thrown up to attract public attention to my Broadway American Museum.” About a year ago Mr. Barnum, desirous to do good in his day and generation, instituted and put on wheels his present mammoth enterprise, at a cost of nearly three-quarters of a million dollars, which has met with a success unparalleled in the annals of the show business. This success is so sudden and complete as to astonish everybody, and none more so than professionals themselves. Knowing the interest the public feels in all that pertains to P. T. Barnum, and especially his “last great effort,” (Barnum himself calls it his last great “splurge,” which we readily grant in deference to his known modesty,) we sent one of our reporters to interview the whole affair, and as his injunctions were imperative to “stick to facts” (fiat justitia ruat codum), our readers will be able to judge of the big show as it appeared. One thing is very evident. Since starting from New York, Barnum’s show has been patronized by the largest concourse of people ever known