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This chapter examines the accomplishments of the famous showman P.T. Barnum and the piano maker William Steinway, two private citizens who invested in urban growth and city planning in greater New York’s coastal environs. Arriving in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at midcentury, Barnum proclaimed himself the city’s greatest benefactor and initiated a personal planning agenda to balance residential, park, and industrial land use. Under Barnum’s attention, Bridgeport became an important satellite city of New York City. Steinway established a company town on the upper East River in the 1870s to expand production and isolate workers from labor unrest, and in turn, initiated urbanization in northwestern Queens. Steinway represented the powerful interests of real estate and industry of the city center, but he also looked beyond Manhattan to embrace a metropolitan-level point of view. Blurring public service and private interest, Steinway built a reputation as an industrialist, benefactor, and proponent for a regional New York. In both Bridgeport and the Steinway Settlement, political boundaries mattered less than the networks of manufacturing, transit, shipping, and finance that knit Manhattan, its peripheral ring of industrial sites, and satellite cities into a regional entity.

With the arrival in New York of the celebrated Chinese junk Keying in 1847, Afong Moy’s presence as a well-known Chinese spectacle was again in demand. Chapter 10 tells us that after an eight-year hiatus, P. T. Barnum, America’s preeminent promoter, engineered her return. Coupled with Tom Thumb, Barnum recounted their origin stories in a seven-page pamphlet and presented them together at his American Museum in 1848. In characteristic fashion, in 1850, Barnum supplanted one Chinese female spectacle with another, a supposed Chinese woman of a younger age named Pwan-ye-koo. She presented in Afong Moy’s place in America and later in England. Foreigner Jenny Lind’s arrival in late 1850 captivated the American public, and Afong Moy—first a billboard for Chinese goods and then an objectified oriental exotic—was completely forgotten.

Chapter 1 argues that the US lecture tour introduced Oscar Wilde to a form of curiosity entertainment that inspired him to continually modify his person for different regional audiences. Though Wilde’s 1882 tour has received much attention for the way it catalyzed the author’s celebrity, very little has been said regarding Wilde’s actual lecturing practices. This chapter therefore examines how the circuit connected Wilde to America’s increasingly commercialized forms of public speech. It does so by focusing on Wilde’s relationship to P. T. Barnum. While Barnum is best known as a circus magnate, he was also a popular speaker who specialized in self-improvement lecturing. Placing Wilde in this particular context, the chapter shows how newspapers readily associated Wilde not only with Barnum but also with his many curiosity attractions. However, its larger aim is to illustrate how Wilde incorporated a sense of Barnum’s overall rhetoric into his own lecturing. Throughout his tour, Wilde subtly adapted Barnum’s self-improvement into a means of self-manipulation, at times going so far as to alter his own class and racial identity in order to appeal to specific audiences.

In early 1864, a pamphlet called Miscegenation was published anonymously in the United States. This chapter examines P. T. Barnum's account of it in Humbugs of the World. Barnum describes the adroit manipulations of politicians and the media used to make the pamphlet an international sensation and to associate it in the public mind with the Republicans—then the party of Lincoln, emancipation, and racial equality—to discredit them in that year's election campaign. In the five years from 1859 to 1864, three great anthropological discursive hoaxes had been successfully constructed and sold to a broad consumership: the “Noble Savage,” the “missing link,” and “miscegenation.” Crawfurd had been instrumental in promoting two of the three, including the Noble Savage, which would have the longest-running success of all.

This chapter narrates the account of P. T. Barnum, an entrepreneur who harnessed the growing popularity of the theatre to further his business ventures. During his stint at the Vauxhall, Barnum noticed that the taste for popular family entertainment of a reasonably respectable kind existed even among members of the artisan class. While pleasure gardens welcomed families, theatres traditionally did not, Barnum recognized the benefits of breaking this tradition. When he learned in 1841 that Scudder's American Museum, on the corner of Broadway and Ann, had been put up for sale, he secured it. Here, in 1841, Barnum began mounting spiritually invigorating dramas and family-oriented minstrel and variety shows.

This chapter explores aspects of nineteenth-century popular culture that contributed to the emergence of the cave man character. References are made to previous works from history, cultural and literary studies and the history of science. These show how long-standing ideas about the earth’s history were challenged by geological, archaeological and paleontological evidence of ancient and extinct mammals, dinosaurs and hominids. Elite ideas were popularised for a mass public by scientists themselves, and through evolutionary freak shows that exploited scientific controversies for profit. Increasingly, scientific ideas were generalised and disseminated by mass-market, heavily illustrated books and magazines. A new style of comic magazine introduced ‘cartoons’ which poked gentle fun at current sensations, as did an emerging entertainment industry centred on music hall, pantomime and other forms of popular theatre. New steam-powered transportation meant that books, magazines and performers travelled farther and faster than ever before. Britain was the hub of this new mass culture, both spreading and receiving ideas through a continuous, reciprocal dialogue with the emerging empire and America.

The epilogue traces the influence of New England’s edenic influence on the formation of American identity by way of Benjamin Franklin, a Freemason who adopted and adapted edenic ideals in ways that popular nineteenth-century writers like George Thompson and P. T. Barnum would imitate. A belief in the biblical Eden continued to influence nineteenth-century fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper, among others, but fringe religious figures like Sojourner Truth, Robert Matthews or the prophet Matthias, Joseph Smith, and Brigham Young were the true inheritors of this New England interest in recreating a historical Eden. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded by Smith, and the coalition of environmentalist groups currently working to return the earth to an imagined prior, pristine state are just two of the diverse movements still striving to invent Eden today.

With their distinctive dress, speech, and style, newsboys formed one the most conspicuous youth subcultures in early America. Predominately Irish, they also earned reputations as brawlers, gamblers, and consummate theatergoers. The era’s most prominent artists, writers, and performers transformed them into symbols of Young America itself and drew them into campaigns to promote temperance, nativism, westward expansion, and war with Mexico. More than any other personification of the age, newsboys represented the liberating potential of a democratic society driven by a wide-open market economy. Yet they also epitomized the bamboozlement of mass politics and the sham of self-interest masquerading as concern for the greater good. Their shrill cries and saucy ways alternately annoyed and amused their elders, but these incorrigible habits also helped them to survive the hardships of street life.