The Wonders by John Woolf

Author:John Woolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2019-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

STRATTON DID LEAVE some words but they are few and far between and, as we will see, hard to divorce from his public persona. He was always General Tom Thumb when giving interviews or writing to acquaintances. We are in the territory of the modern celebrity, where never more so have people had to live their life in public: on social media, in gossip magazines, being photographed. Their lives are the entertainment, and we see the roots of this modern-day celebrity culture here.

But how, then, can we gauge Stratton’s perspective on his life and experiences? It all began so young, when he was only four years old. How he felt about his early performing life is hard to discern. Did he relish the attention and the applause of his newfound fame? In an 1878 interview, when he reflected on his first travels around Europe, he admitted, ‘I can’t remember everything.’600 In another interview that year, he mistakenly credited Queen Victoria with giving him the title ‘General’:

Previous to my presentations to the Queen, at Buckingham Palace, in 1844, I had been known simply as Tom Thumb; but the Queen, when I had been presented to her in that form, said, with a smile: ‘You ought to have a title. I think I shall have to call you General Tom Thumb.’ The Duke of Wellington and several others of the nobility were present at the time, and of course Her Majesty’s words were instantly adopted, and I became a General from that time onward.601

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