Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. BarnumBarnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
General
Struggles and Triumphs: or, Forty Years' Recollections of P. T. Barnum
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor)
Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor), 1810-1891; Circus owners -- United States -- Biography
“You may remember that in this city (St. Louis), I acted in one instance
as your ‘legal adviser,’ and as such, necessarily became acquainted with
all the particulars of your contract with the so-called Swedish
Nightingale, as well as the various modifications claimed by that
charitable lady, and submitted to by you after her arrival in this
country; which modifications (I suppose it need no longer be a secret)
secured to her--besides the original stipulation of one thousand dollars
for every concert, attendants, carriages, assistant artists, and a
pompous and extravagant retinue, fit (only) for a European princess--one
half of the profits of each performance. You may also remember the legal
advice I gave you on the occasion referred to, and the salutary effect
of your following it. You must remember the extravagant joy you felt
afterwards, in Philadelphia, when the ‘Angel’ made up her mind to avail
herself of one of the stipulations in her contract, to break off at the
end of a hundred nights, and even bought out seven of that
hundred--supposing that she could go on without your aid as well as with
it. And you cannot but remember, how, like a rocket-stick she dropped,
when your business connection with her ended, and how she ‘fizzed out’
the remainder of her concert nights in this part of the world, and soon
afterwards retired to her domestic blissitude in Sweden.
“You know, Mr. Barnum, if you would only tell, which of the two it was
that was ‘for-getting,’ and which ‘for-giving’; and you also know who
actually gave the larger portion of those sums which you heralded to the
world as the sole gifts of the ‘divine Jenny.’
“Of all your speculations--from the negro centenarina, who didn’t nurse
General Washington, down to the Bearded Woman of Genoa--there was not
one which required the exercise of so much humbuggery as the Jenny Lind
concerts; and I verily believe there is no man living, other than
yourself, who could, or would, have risked the enormous expenditure of
money necessary to carry them through successfully--travelling, with
sixty artists, four thousand miles, and giving ninety-three concerts, at
an actual cost of forty-five hundred dollars each, is what no other man
would have undertaken--you accomplished this, and pocketed by the
operation but little less than two hundred thousand dollars! Mr. Barnum,
you are yourself, alone!
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