This is another Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren image, this time by Masury, of Boston.
Another Tom Thumb & Wife, NOT by Brady this time
Tag Archives: Tom Thumb
More Fairy Wedding Photos
I admit it – I got the Fairy Wedding bug. No, not the Charles & Diana wedding bug, or the more recent William & Kate or the Kim & Kris wedding bug (I’d pay YOU to remove the People magazine footage of that debacle from my sight! Celebrity whores have you no shame???). But I digress – I’m fixated on the ORIGINAL celebrity wedding photos: the marriage of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren, photographed by THE American celebrity photographer, Mathew Brady (yes, Mathew with one T), and stage managed for maximum publicity by P.T. Barnum, the original master promoter and co-creator of the circus that still bears his name.
Here is the follow-up to one of my earlier images of Tom and Lavinia in their wedding ceremony outfits. This one is the dress she wore to their reception with the 2000 guest receiving line where they stood atop a grand piano at the Metropolitan Hotel.
Another, odder wedding souvenir card. This one features George Nutt and Minnie Warren, Lavinia Warren (Mrs. Tom Thumb)’s sister and later George’s wife, playing chess. What this had to do with the wedding is beyond me, but it obviously catered to some 19th century sensibility – perhaps the suggestion was that they had outsized brains in their diminutive bodies, further exaggerating the curiosity/freakish attraction to a customer looking for a spot of distraction from the civil war raging around them in 1863.
This image, undated and uncredited, is from some time later, possibly in the 1870s. Charles and Lavinia Stratton were not able to have children of their own, so P.T. Barnum, ever the showman, would acquire an orphan baby and give it to them to portray as their own, and when the baby got too big, he would find another one. Apparently, as a result, they “had” a one-year old baby for the better part of a decade.
As a memory refresher, here’s the rest of the gang in thumbnails.
More from the Family Circus (make that circus family)
I’ve been fascinated by the Tom Thumb “Fairy Wedding” photos since I found the first one. Now that I’ve discovered that there were multiple poses sold, I’m building a collection of them, trying to see if I can find them all. So far, I have four Brady images from the wedding, an unsigned image of Commodore Nutt and what appears to be a regular girl child without back-stamp, and another Brady image of Tom Thumb, his wife, Commodore Nutt and what I’m guessing is a circus giant (he appears to be twice the size of Charles Stratton – Tom Thumb – who was 3 feet 4 inches tall at his death, making the giant next to him in the neighborhood of 7 feet tall).
Here are the new ones:
Addition to the “Fairy Wedding” collection
I just added another “fairy wedding” photo from the Brady group. It’s fun to see how many different poses were taken, and how widely distributed they are. This latest one arrived from the UK. I’m going to put them all together here so they can be seen at the same time without flipping through my blog to find the others.
Random images
Two new additions to the collection – an anonymous CDV of what appears to be at least brothers if not twins, one standing the other seated playing the violin. Best guess is late 1860s / early 1870s. The other is another Brady image of Tom Thumb, his wife, and Commodore Nutt, this time with an average man for comparison. It’s funny how these things turn up in groups – I first get the Fairy Wedding CDV, then another different image of the same people shows up shortly after, so I had to buy it!
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