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  • An Insanity, a Madness, a Furor
  • Nicholas Rinaldi (bio)

An Insanity, a Madness, a Furor

When I was performing in London during my first tour abroad, something happened that stays with me, like a bothersome fly that won’t go away.

I was eight years old, advertised by Barnum as TOM THUMB, SMALLEST DWARF IN THE WORLD. Twenty-five inches tall, that’s what I was, and a mere fifteen pounds, strutting around on stage with the pride and flash of a peacock. I sang, I danced, I mimed, I punned, I threw candy hearts at the audience. I was, you might say, not just a thumb but an old hand, having already appeared, at that young age, before hundreds of thousands. But then this thing, this grotesque, perplexing ugliness.

There was a man by the name of Haydon, Benjamin Robert Haydon. He was an artist, sixtyish and a bit dilapidated, his clothes baggy, shoulders hunched, everything about him breathing fatigue and disappointment. His head was large and round, bald on top, with a thick fringe of gray at the temples, and a glum, unhappy face. The nose thin and bony, arched like a sickle, and eyeglasses far thicker than any I’d ever seen. We were both exhibiting at the Egyptian Hall, in Piccadilly, and were both upstairs, on the second floor, I in a large hall, impersonating Napoléon and Yankee Doodle, and he in a smaller space, showing his latest paintings, two very large canvases in heavy gold frames. One showed Nero playing a harp while Rome burned, and the other depicted an Athenian statesman, Aristides the Just, at the moment when he was being banished from the city. Barnum noticed that the face on Aristides was the face of Haydon himself, a self-portrait—and it was clear that Haydon was already thinking of himself as a victim, a man rejected.

His admission price was one shilling. Mine was considerably more, plus an additional shilling from any of the ladies who wished to kiss me on the cheek, and many did. Day after day, I had huge [End Page 29] crowds and too many kisses, while Haydon, poor man, had nobody, and he was more desperate than any of us knew.

Three shows a day I did, and since it was a struggle for my small legs to climb the stairs, Barnum always carried me up. We would find Haydon slouched outside his empty exhibition room, waiting for visitors, hands in his pockets and a grim expression on his face. Barnum always tossed a big hello, but in response there was never anything more than a vague nod or a grunt.

Still, I found the old man weirdly interesting—the mouth turned down at the corners, the uncombed hair at the edge of his baldness shooting out in all directions. Gray eyes floating eerily behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. He was a man on his way down. Years ago he’d been famous, important people admired his work and sat for their portraits, people like John Keats and William Words-worth. But Keats had died long ago, Wordsworth was old and moss-grown, and Haydon, long past his prime, was looking on as the world went rushing right past him. And the other thing, the thing that we didn’t know at the time, was that he was dead broke, with no income, and he was in heavy debt to the moneylenders.

We had both opened on the Monday after Easter, the first week in April. A week or so later, in the press, he was complaining bitterly that the public had abandoned him and was spending its money on a mere dwarf. That’s what he called me, a mere dwarf, and, after that, whenever I saw him, I had to fight off an impulse to punch him in the only vulnerable part of him that I could reach, though that too may have been out of range for me.

He kept his exhibition open until the middle of May, and when he was gone, I was glad as a blueberry not to see him anymore. The crowds, now, were pouring in, and...

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