The “Late Style” of Henry James is famously complex; the serpentine sentences in his narration approximate the stream of consciousness, a psychological concept coined by his brother, the philosopher William James. Critical reaction to James’s later masterpieces is generally adulatory, but his high Modernist style has also served as the occasion for some good-natured literary ribbing. In an anecdote from her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton fondly highlights the element of the ridiculous that sometimes arises from James’s tangled, over-intricate way of thinking:

We must have been driven by a strange chauffeur—perhaps Cook was on holiday; at any rate, having fallen into the lazy habit of trusting him to know the way, I found myself at a loss to direct his substitute to the King’s Road. While I was hesitating, and peering out into the darkness, James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. “Wait a moment, my dear—I’ll ask him where we are”; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.

“My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer—so,” and as the old man came up: “My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.”

I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: “In short” (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), “in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…”

“Oh, please,” I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, “do ask him where the King’s Road is.”

“Ah—? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?”

“Ye’re in it,” said the aged face at the window.

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When it comes to a savage understanding of the value of a buck, there are few who rival the great P. T. Barnum, freak show impresario extraordinaire and famed author of the Art of Money Getting (a title, it must be said, much alike to the hand that penned it: sublimely artful in its unvarnished artlessness). And while nearly all dinner-table wiseacres the world over know that Barnum once quipped that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” the self-same parlor pundits rarely cite the showman’s lifelong commitment to the pressing social and political issues of his day. The Huckster’s penchant for pulling off grand hoaxes, parading human grotesqueries, and pushing the latest innovations that the bread and circus had on offer was inextricably conjoined to his work undertaken on behalf of the betterment of his fellow man. If the “man-monkey,” a microcephalic black dwarf by the name of William Henry Johnson, was his Chang, the Moral Lecture Room was his Eng.

Barnum fought much of his life against the tyrannical rule of demon alcohol. In one of the many adventures he shared with “General” Tom Thumb during their three-year European tour, Barnum became an avowed teetotaler and fervent promoter of the cause. (He was less successful in his attempt to purchase the childhood home of Shakespeare.) Upon returning to the United States, the showman built the largest, most modern theater in New York city, using funds earned from his wildly popular American concert series featuring the singer Jenny Lind (a.k.a. “The Swedish Nightingale”); evidently Barnum believed that he could bring respectability to theater and artistry to Temperance in one fell swoop. The first play performed in the new Moral Lecture Room—so-called in order to avoid the iniquitous and deeply immoral implications raised by the word “theater”—was a standard anti-liquor melodrama called The Drunkard. Barnum ran many such plays in his Lecture Room over the years. He also became a popular Temperance speaker himself (for profit, of course, always for a profit) and devoted many exhibits in his American Museum to the virtues of Temperance.

Barnum took up the sword in one other great crusade: abolition. While it is initially counterintuitive to consider a keeper of “human zoos” a great champion of human dignity, Barnum’s anti-slavery position is perhaps best seen in the light of his intimate associations with those misfortunate enough to be marginalized as freaks: Their interest in profits were as great as his, and surely, for Barnum, such an interest was the defining mark of humanity. The minstrel shows put on in the Moral Lecture Room were some of the most satirical of the day, and he often staged overtly abolitionist plays such as the dramatic treatment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As the conflict between the States came to a head, Barnum became an active member of the largely anti-slavery Republican Party and met with President Lincoln at the White House in 1862 (the giantess Anna Swann in tow). During the course of the Civil War, Barnum put on many pro-Union dramas and filled his museum with pro-Union propaganda; he was identified with the Union cause so closely, in fact, that a Confederate arsonist burned down the building in 1864.

After the war and before the traveling circus venture that was to become the “Greatest Show on Earth” and is still seen today, Barnum managed to find time to get elected to the Connecticut Legislature and serve as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He argued eloquently for Connecticut’s ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, saying, “A human soul is not to be trifled with. It may inhabit the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hotentot—it is still an immortal spirit!” Off the record, after his speech, he is rumored to have offered his Congressional colleagues a once in lifetime opportunity to see MeShong, the World’s Tallest Living Immortal Hotentot.

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