The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (review)

James W. Cook’s book on “artful deceptions” in nineteenth-century American popular culture is not merely fascinating, fluently written, and engaging to read. It sheds light on a number of different subjects and helps us to appreciate the thoroughly interconnected nature of cultural phenomena in what he calls, quite appropriately, the “age of Barnum.” Indeed, it is a stellar example of cultural history, providing the reader with both a vivid picture of the specific social milieu that encouraged this new mode of exhibition and an understanding of the more amorphous intellectual climate that influenced exhibitors and audiences alike. Making shrewd use of the available evidence, Cook has written a book filled with compelling stories and anecdotal details. Yet what stands out in the end is the rigor and incisiveness of his analysis—the provocative conclusions he derives from his vignettes and the remarkable way that he is able to make us see their larger significance.

Cook begins with P.T. Barnum’s exhibition of Joice Heth, an elderly African-American woman that Barnum promoted as the youthful George Washington’s “nurse,” a 161-year-old living relic of America’s colonial and revolutionary past. As a number of historians have already noted, Barnum’s promotion of Heth was a milestone in the history of American popular culture, when he first discovered the value of casting doubt on the authenticity of his attractions in order to arouse public interest in them. But Barnum was not the only showman who sought to whet public interest by raising questions of truth and artifice; in fact, as Cook reveals, he was one of many exhibitors who embraced this strategy, some of whom actually preceded and influenced Barnum. Among the virtues of Cook’s fine book is the attention it pays to these now forgotten characters and to the often sensational products they brought to the public’s attention: “curious wonders” like automaton chess-players, exotic mermaids, and putative “missing links”; sleight-of-hand tricks that epitomized a new “modern magic” developed by celebrated performers like Alexander Herrmann and Harry Kellar; controversial trompe l’oeil paintings by artists such as William M. Harnett that delighted viewers—and enraged critics—by consciously blurring the line between illusion and reality. Such “tricksters,” Cook notes, were part of the long and often morally problematic tradition of the “carnivalesque.” In the nineteenth century, however, as the tastes and expectations of audiences changed, and as performers adapted their acts in line with this development, the latter were able to gain a new measure of respectability and become part of the emerging world of urban commercial amusements. Cook does a wonderful job of explaining why this occurred, and demonstrating the ways in which the provocative mix of “illusionism” and “realism” devised by these showmen was incorporated into commercial popular culture.

What united Cook’s cast of characters was not simply their interest in exploring the line that separated the genuine from the fake, but also their penchant for drawing attention to their deceptions and inviting audiences to speculate about their authenticity, a marketing strategy inspired by an astute understanding of the times. By raising such issues, they transformed their exhibitions into a kind of “perceptual contest” with viewers, an exercise that invited viewers to examine them closely but in the end “created as many problems as they solved.” (p.28) Unlike Neil Harris and other scholars, who contend that the Barnumesque entertainments of the nineteenth century encouraged audiences to embrace the values of the popular Enlightenment and develop the capacity to differentiate between humbug and truth, Cook insists that the artful deceptions of the nineteenth century played a more complex role, holding out the promise of discovering the “truth,” yet also, through their unwillingness to come clean, helping to “socialize their audiences to a brave new world in which the very boundaries of truth were becoming more...