P.T. Barnum and Jenny Lind have always seemed an odd combination, but their collaboration helped make operatic music popular throughout the US.

To be sure, opera companies had been touring the country successfully for twenty-five years, but they did not have the advantage of either Lind’s star power or Barnum’s promotional genius. American culture has forgotten most of them, but we still remember Jenny Lind.

Barnum made his first reputation as a huckster. As a budding promoter of lowbrow entertainment, he introduced an elderly slave woman to the public, claiming she was 161 years old and had been a nurse for George Washington. Later he trained a 4-year-old boy to sing and dance and exhibited him as Tom Thumb. His “feejee mermaid” was nothing more than the top of a juvenile monkey’s body sewn onto the bottom of a fish.

Such shenanigans made Barnum rich. But he also wanted to claim that entertainment could be a morally uplifting and instructive force in American life. For that, he needed to promote something morally uplifting and instructive.

P.T. Barnum’s big gamble

One of Barnum’s European tours took him to London in 1849. There he first heard the name Jenny Lind. He never actually heard her sing, since her London performances took place a few weeks after Barnum left.

That didn’t matter to him. He knew that she had attracted sellout crowds to all of the concerts. He found her reputation inspiring and determined that, properly managed, the “Swedish Nightingale” could make a lot of money in the US.

After considering the matter for several days, he determined that if he could persuade her to come on any reasonable terms, she would be an immense success for him.

But it would take hard work and careful handling, not to mention considerable financial risk up front. Although she was fabulously successful in Europe, hardly anyone in the US knew anything about Jenny Lind. Barnum later wrote:

It was possible, I knew, that circumstances might occur which would make the enterprise disastrous. “The public” is a very strange animal, and although a good knowledge of human nature will generally lead a caterer of amusement to hit the people, they are fickle, and ofttimes perverse. A slight misstep in the management of a public entertainment frequently wrecks the most promising enterprise. But I had marked the “divine Jenny” as a sure card, and to secure the prize I began to cast about for a competent agent.

Who was Jenny Lind?

After growing up in a poor family, Jenny Lind studied music and made her stage debut at age 10 and her formal operatic debut at 18. Unfortunately, by the time she was 21, her voice began to show signs of fatigue, especially in the middle register.

After a period of enforced silence, she studied with Manuel Garcia, one of the best singing teachers in Europe. Although her middle register remained weak for the rest of her life, Garcia helped her make tremendous improvements both in vocal quality and technique. He extended her range upward and gave her upper register new strength and flexibility.

She returned to the operatic stage in 1842, after just over a year of work with Garcia. From then until her retirement from the operatic stage in 1849 (when she was only 29), she triumphed in all the major opera houses of Sweden, Germany, and England.

Then she decided to retire from opera to devote the rest of her career to concerts. It was the success of her farewell tour that attracted Barnum’s attention.

Negotiation and promotion

In October 1849, Barnum conceived and studied the idea of inviting Lind to tour the US. That November, he enlisted John Hall Wilton, an English acquaintance who had visited the US with a brass band, to negotiate with Lind.

He provided Wilton with numerous letters of introduction, including one he could share with Lind and anyone else he thought appropriate, and another for his eyes only. The latter had various hints and suggestions Wilton could use in his negotiations.

Barnum was willing to pay up to $1,000 per concert and any number of concerts up to 150. He also offered to pay all her expenses, including servants and up to three musical assistants. If necessary, he would deposit the entire amount of money in a London bank before she sailed. Eventually, he had to sell or mortgage nearly all his valuable possessions in order to fulfill that promise.

Preparing the American public

In February 1850, Wilton notified Barnum that he had signed Lind for an American tour and that she would arrive for her first concert the following September. At first, Barnum thought six months was so far away he would be best off keeping his coup a secret for a while. Then he read about it in the newspapers.

He boarded a train and decided to tell the conductor, whom he knew well, about Lind’s coming. The conductor asked if she was a dancer. Barnum figured that if the conductor of a train between New York and Philadelphia hadn’t heard anyone talk about Lind, perhaps six months lead time was not excessive.

He offered the following excerpt from his first letter to the New York newspapers as a sample of how he handled the promotion:

Perhaps I may not make any money by this enterprise; but I assure you that if I knew I should not make a farthing profit, I would ratify the engagement, so anxious am I that the United States should be visited by a lady whose vocal powers have never been approached by any other human being, and whose character is charity, simplicity, and goodness personified.

Miss Lind has great anxiety to visit America. She speaks of this country and its institutions in the highest terms of praise. In her engagement with me (which includes Havana), she expressly reserves the right to give charitable concerts whenever she thinks proper.

Since her début in England, she has given to the poor from her own private purse more than the whole amount which I have engaged to pay her, and the proceeds of concerts for charitable purposes in Great Britain, where she has sung gratuitously, have realized more than ten times that amount.

Barnum also wrote that he would never have approached Lind “without this peculiarity in her disposition.” He counted her benevolence and generosity a greater draw with the American public than her musical ability.

So thoroughly had Barnum prepared the public that thousands of people congregated on New York’s wharfs, docks, and piers to catch a glimpse of her when she arrived. “. . . one man in his zeal to obtain a good view, accidently tumbled overboard.” Lind was alarmed at the sight, but the crowd quickly rescued him. That night, about two hundred members of the New York Musical Fund Society, escorted by about three hundred torch-bearing firemen, serenaded her hotel.

Similar excitement lasted for weeks. Shopkeepers eagerly gave her samples of their wares in hope that they could get her autograph in return. Other shopkeepers offered every manner of Jenny Lind-themed products to the general public. Barnum did his part to assure the tour’s success not only with heavy advertising, but by paying for favorable reviews in regional papers. The success of Jenny Lind’s tour led to Barnum inviting the conductor Jullien to bring his orchestra to the US in 1853.

The commodification of Jenny Lind

Barnum carefully turned Lind into a commodity. Instead of simply selling tickets to her earliest concerts, he auctioned them off. That tactic greatly raised prices. But then some of the buyers tried to cash in on their association with Lind.

One New York hatmaker advertised that he had paid the unheard-of sum of $225 for the very first ticket, He apparently thought it would help him sell more hats. But the auctions brought in $625 for another ticket! The normal price would have been around $7.

Barnum also arranged for numerous consumer products to keep “Lindomania” alive. “We had Jenny Lind gloves, Jenny Lind bonnets, Jenny Lind riding hats, Jenny Lind shawls, mantillas, roves, chairs, sofas, pianos­––in fact, every thing was Jenny Lind.”

The memorabilia often portrayed her shyly facing away from the viewer, as befits the kind of good, modest woman that appealed to the middle class.

One especially ornate product was a set of paper dolls. It included ten different costumes representing her operatic roles. The pictures on the box, however, show the plainly dressed Jenny Lind as a concert performer. The doll itself incorrectly has blond hair.

Jenny Lind and the press

Barnum correctly anticipated that the public would respond to Lind’s generosity and character before they would buy tickets to hear her sing.

Three themes emerge from studying articles and books written about her near the beginning of her tour: her blend of femininity and Christian virtue, her struggle for success and the opportunities she offered for others to succeed, and how effusively large audiences had already reacted to her.

Regarding Christian virtue, the press consistently described her as modest, pious, and pure. One contemporary writer even asserted, “a man could hardly commit a disreputable action” as long as he remembered her singing. The wrote that some men thinking of straying from virtue might even be reclaimed if they could hear her sing often enough. Theaters had long been considered disreputable. Lind showed that the highest ideals of good womanhood could shine there. She also attracted favorable attention because of her charitable acts, which she repeated everywhere she went.

As for her success through hard work, the press portrayed her in terms similar to standard themes in contemporary fiction for women. Her negotiations with Barnum proved her a shrewd businesswoman. If she got any negative press from American writers, it was the complaint that she was paid too much. Most writers, however, admired her acumen financial success as much as they admired her musicianship and personality.

Even all those various contemporary writings about Lind commodified her. People who couldn’t afford tickets or lived in cities Lind didn’t visit could buy the books and magazines. Their emphasis on how enthusiastically audiences responded to her concerts enabled readers to experience them vicariously. Or for people who did attend, they gave them an attractive souvenir. In any case, the various merchandise invited people to identify with Lind’s persona.

Jenny Lind and American culture

Lind’s arrival not only in American cities, but on her farewell tour in England, foreshadowed the later reaction to Marilyn Monroe or the Beatles.

Although some writers decried the foolish excesses of the crowds, many considered such enthusiasm as evidence that Americans had good taste. As one noted, opera had become a popular taste in only a matter of months.

Opera has long had a reputation for appealing to snobbery in this country. In fact, as Lind’s popularity demonstrates, no one requires either a life of luxury or a refined education to have an ear for good music.

The hype about Lind continues to this day, but the personal characteristics that attracted the American public to Lind in 1850 mean little to the American public today. But like the earlier public, we remake celebrities in our own image. In fact, today’s Barnums would probably have no interest in promoting any paragon of virtue. They would promote an opera singer only if he or she were embroiled in some juicy scandal.

The recent film The Greatest Showmancares nothing about Barnum’s marketing tactics or Lind’s talent or personality. It serves up an entirely fictitious love affair between the two. It does not cast high soprano as Lind and let her sing snatches of Lind’s actual repertoire. The movie Lind is a belter, a singer with a low voice and a powerful chest register.  Unlike the movie portrayal, Lind was a plain-looking woman who usually performed in a simple white dress.

The whole thought of any kind of affair between the two is preposterous. Lind had already spurned relationships with Felix Mendelssohn and Hans Christian Anderson. She must have found Barnum coarse by comparison. When she first visited his house, he immediately offended her so much that he had to work hard to persuade her not to return immediately to England.

Barnum, for his part, was happily married and too concerned about his public reputation to risk the distraction of infatuation with another woman. Besides, he, too was a devout Christian, not that society cares much about that today.

As for memorabilia, the vogue for all things Jenny Lind has mostly dissipated, but not entirely. Someone named a kind of spindled furniture the Jenny Lind crib because she once reportedly slept in a bed with spindle posts. Manufacturers are still making and selling them today.

Sources:
The Greatest Showman: The true story of P.T. Barnum and Jenny Lind / Betsy Golden Kellem, Vanity Fair. December 22, 2017
Lind [Lind-Goldschmidt], Jenny [Johanna Maria] / The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1980).
Meet Jenny Lind, one of America’s first female celebrities / Regan Shrumm, Smithsonian. March 16, 2016
P.T. Barnum / Biography.com
P.T. Barnum and the Jenny Lind Fever / in Music in the USA, edited by Judith (Oxford University Press, 2008): 185-89
P.T. Barnum brings Jenny Lind to New York / This Day in History
Reading Lind mania: print culture and the construction of nineteenth-century audiences / Sherry Lee Linkon, Book History 1 (1998): 94-106

Photo credits:
Jenny Lind daguerreotype. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons
P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb. Source unknown
Jenny Lind paper doll set. Smithsonian Institution, Cooper Hewitt Collection
Jenny Lind vanity mirror. Source unknown
Jenny Lind poster. Public domain from Wikimedia Commons