The Burning of Barnum's Museum

Barnum’s Museum on the Tufts University Campus was named after it’s creator, Phineas Taylor (P.T.) Barnum, a “self-educated advocate of temperance who preached the Victorian virtues of self-improvement, education, and innocent recreation . . . as well as an early supporter and contributor to the American Museum of Natural History in New York” (McClellan), and the Smithsonian. Barnum’s Museum was home to such artifacts as Feejee Mermaid and Tom Thumb, but his most valuable piece was Jumbo the Elephant, who was sourced from his own travelling circus.

In addition to his own contributions to the museum, dealers and collectors in Europe also donated “[g]ifts of random ethnological material, coins, curiosities, and stuffed birds” in order to “amass a comprehensive display of natural history” (McClellan). However, due to these donations , ever-expanding globalization, and the dedication of Victorian science “to the study and classification of specimens, which museums both demonstrated and enabled” (McClellan), the collection of the museum grew increasingly exotic; it began to resemble somewhat more of a ‘wunderkammer,’ or ‘curiosity cabinet.’ John P. Marshall, Tuft’s first professor or geology and chemistry, stated in the Annual Report of the President of Tufts College that ‘the primary intention of [the] museum [was] the instruction of [the] students rather than the amusement of the sight-seeing public.’

A report found in Harper’s Weekly details a fire that broke out at the Barnum’s Museum on March 2, 1868. Interestingly, the pedagogical intent of Victorian natural science upon which the museum was founded is not reflected in the report, instead “several monstrosities of the show, were rescued, as were also a few of the wild animals belonging to the menagerie; but the most of these, and all the minor curiosities of the Museum were lost.” Spitta mentions the critique that “museums construct and anchor national and private meaning in the things they opt to collect and contain” (5), and how ‘the sight-seeing public’ viewers' evaluation of value was thereby affected. Furthermore, the language that is used to describe the exotic, ‘piteous and frightful’ creatures that escaped the fire, ‘minor curiosities,’ and ‘random ethnological material’ can be paralleled to the language that is used in colonial narrative and the appropriation of objects that belong to other cultures and their consequential derived meaning.

Finally, the ‘weird ghastliness’ of icicles shining in the light of the moon, like ‘a giant Koh-i-noor under a cloud,’ is a serendipitous reference to the real Indian diamond that currently resides with the British Crown Jewels upon which the Moonstone was partially inspired. The diamond is exoticized and ‘weird’ like the patchwork exhibits that Barnum’s Museum was composed of. The systematic devaluation of meaningful objects to ‘things’ that is present in thing theory is relevant in the discussion of the Moonstone and in museums because of the context that is absent in the Verinder family to give the Moonstone a meaning more than simply a tragic nuisance. In A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, Bill Brown asserts that "the poet should recognize things as the necessary condition for ideas," and although his argument mostly orbits American capitalism and consumerism, it is worthwhile to examine this object-predicated meaning when understanding the role the Moonstone has in the Verinder family. Culturation is needed to make meaningful the diamond as well as other ‘random ethnological material’ that was donated to the Barnum’s Museum, but because the Moonstone was stolen from its historical context like the items that Spitta evaluates in her book, this meaningful connection needed to evaluate its importance is impossible to make.

Works Cited

Annual Report of the President of Tufts College, 1893-94. 1894, pp. 63

Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. U of Chicago, 2003.

Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone. Oxford University Press, New York, 1999.

Harper's Weekly: A Journal of Civilization. 21 March. 1868, pp. 129-144.

McClellan, Andrew. "P. T. Barnum, Jumbo the Elephant, and the Barnum Museum of Natural History at Tufts University." Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 45-62.

Spitta, Silvia. Misplaced Objects: Migrating Collections and Recollections in Europe and the Americas. U of Texas, 2009. Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Ser. in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture.