In February 1863, the wedding of Lavinia Warren and Charles Stratton, known to the world as General Tom Thumb, drew crowds so vast that the New York Times reported more than twenty thousand women in the city had dressed an hour and a half early just for a chance to glimpse the couple. The bride stood two feet eight inches tall. The groom, a seasoned performer who had spent nearly two decades in the spotlight, stood slightly over two and a half feet. Their marriage at Grace Church in New York City was treated as one of the weddings of the century, with two thousand invited guests that included former governors, mayors, congressmen, and prominent socialites, while those without invitations paid as much as sixty dollars to secure a place in the pews.
When the event was over, Barnum sold a thousand tickets for the reception at the Metropolitan Hotel at seventy-five dollars each. The woman the public knew as Lavinia Warren was born Mercy Lavinia Warren Bump on October 31, 1841, in Middleborough, Plymouth County, Massachusetts. Her parents, James Sullivan Bump and Huldah Pierce Warren, were of modest means and distantly descended from Mayflower passengers. At birth Lavinia weighed six pounds and seemed a healthy baby, but she soon stopped growing.
Doctors would later understand that she had proportionate dwarfism, a condition almost certainly caused by a pituitary disorder affecting growth hormone production, which left her at a maximum height of two feet eight inches. Her younger sister Minnie, born in 1849, shared the same condition and grew to be slightly smaller. The other seven siblings reached normal heights. Despite their size, Lavinia and Minnie were healthy, attended school, and lived a relatively ordinary childhood.
Lavinia became a schoolteacher at sixteen, but her career in the classroom ended after her teenage years when a cousin invited her west to visit a boat they owned on the Mississippi River. The invitation was not entirely innocent. A local showman ran a Museum of Living Wonders there, part of a booming industry of curiosity shows that exhibited people with unusual features. Lavinia was quickly persuaded to join as the Lilliputian Queen, a title drawn from the tiny inhabitants of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
She spent years performing up and down the Mississippi region before P. T. Barnum, the most prominent showman in America, sent an agent to recruit her in 1862. Lured by higher pay, Lavinia moved to New York to join Barnum’s American Museum in Lower Manhattan.
She sang, she danced, and she mingled with crowds after performances, quickly becoming a fan favorite. Among the other performers was General Tom Thumb, whose real name was Charles Sherwood Stratton. He had performed with Barnum since childhood, had toured America and Europe, and was already so famous that it was said only members of the Bonaparte dynasty rivaled his renown. Tom began courting Lavinia, which created a rivalry with another small performer, Commodore Nutt.
Nutt had met Lavinia earlier and was deeply in love with her, but his feelings were not returned. Tom prevailed, though not without difficulty; on one occasion the Commodore knocked him unconscious in a fight. Lavinia’s mother disapproved of the general and his taste for the high life, but after Tom agreed to continue performing full-time, Lavinia accepted his proposal. The wedding took place on February 10, 1863.
Afterward, the couple visited the White House and met with President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War. When Lincoln asked the general if he had any advice on ending the fighting, Tom suggested asking Barnum, who could bring it to an end in under a month. Barnum then organized a three-year European tour, during which Lavinia and Tom visited most of Europe’s great capitals and met with Napoleon III of France, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, and Pope Pius IX. They traveled on to British India, passing through Calcutta and what is now Bangladesh, before returning home with a fortune that made them millionaires by today’s standards.
There were downsides. Because of her size, Lavinia was constantly treated like a child by the public, and many who met her tried to hold or pet her. Barnum encouraged this image even as she aged into her thirties, to maintain high ticket sales. Lavinia, who was by then a grown woman, disliked being seen as a child but continued performing anyway, stating simply, “I belong to the public.
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In the years after the wedding, as public interest in the couple began to decline, photographs of Lavinia with a baby were released. The public reacted with excitement, and the couple followed with a nationwide tour. The reality was darker than the image. Barnum and his team secretly secured a child from a local orphanage before each show, presented it as Lavinia’s own, and returned the child when the performance was over.
In each new town, the same ruse was repeated. Barnum even invented a story that the baby had died at age two from brain inflammation. So successful was the deception that many historians believed it for years. In truth, Lavinia never had children, likely because her small size would have made childbirth dangerous.
In 1878, her sister Minnie died in her arms from complications during childbirth. Earlier in 1883, Lavinia and Tom were guests at the Newhall House hotel in Wisconsin when a fire broke out. The building burned quickly, and the couple seemed doomed, but their small size proved an advantage as firefighters carried them to safety. At least seven people perished in one of the worst hotel fires in American history.
Tom Thumb did not survive long after the fire. On July 15, 1883, six months after the escape, he died from a stroke at just forty-five. Years of hard living had caught up with him. Lavinia was devastated and would remain in mourning for much of the rest of her life.
She also faced financial trouble. The fortune the couple had made in the 1860s and 1870s had been steadily squandered on a sailing boat, several properties, a horse stud, a lavish household, an expensive carriage, champagne, and cigars. When Tom died, she had about one hundred sixteen thousand dollars, roughly half a million in today’s money. It was a respectable sum, but she had grown accustomed to a high standard of living, so she went back to work.
She joined a show with Count Primo Magri, an Italian dwarf eight years her junior who had worked with her and Tom on and off over the years. In 1885, two years after Tom’s death, Lavinia married the Count in the very same church in New York where she had married Tom twenty-two years earlier. The marriage lasted thirty-four years, until their deaths, though it was strange and unstable; both partners were seemingly regularly unfaithful, and both continued working late into their lives because they spent money as quickly as they earned it. The era of the great freak shows was passing by the 1890s and 1900s.
Moving pictures were beginning to appear, and by 1912 the Hollywood film industry was developing. Lavinia and the Count became some of the first dwarves to appear in a motion picture when they starred in The Lilliputian Courtship, which premiered in 1915. The silent film was deeply offensive by modern standards, featuring characters with names like Pipsey and Uncle Tiny Might and scenes of performers riding Shetland ponies. It was the final notable act in Lavinia’s long performing career.
She died on November 25, 1919, in her native Middleborough, Massachusetts, at seventy-eight years old, a very long life by the standards of the time. She was laid to rest beside Tom, who had been buried thirty-six years earlier. Her gravestone read simply, “His Wife.
” The Count died the following year.