P.T. Barnum's The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself

Phineas Taylor Barnum is at least as famous for his masterfully constructed public persona as he is for anything he actually did. The gleeful wheeler-and-dealer con-artist cum master of ceremonies has become such a iconic figure of the mid-nineteenth century American love for glitter and flash that the period is sometimes refered to by critics as the Age of Barnum, a time of brash exhibitionism, aggressive advertising, and downright public fraud, perfectly embodied by the bold and indefatigable Barnum. Of course, when dealing with a man as attentive to appearances as Barnum, any publication is bound to be artfully arranged, so it is with a grain of salt and a gram of good humor that we must approach Barnum's 1855 autobiography The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself.

In his Life we see only what Barnum wants us to see, but his choices in that area are sometimes surprising. His emphasis on his own misunderstood piety and uncredited respect for his audiences is, perhaps, expected, but his stress on the importance of good sportsmanship is more interesting. We tend to think of Barnum as the practical jokester, the con-man, the ultimate huckster, but in his Life, Barnum is the mark as often as he is the man. The Barnum Barnum lets us see knows how to take a joke. Raised to believe he is heir to a small land fortune, an edenic piece of property he has never seen called Ivy Island, Barnum proves a remarkably good sport when he discovers he has in fact been the butt of a decade-long, community-wide practical joke. When Ivy Island turns out to be a nasty piece of essentially worthless swampland, the disappointed Barnum takes it on the chin and soon begins to laugh about it himself. (That he later uses this land as collateral for a loan is the best kind of comic irony.)

The Life is littered with these kinds of incidents, and in each Barnum proves himself to be the best audience for the practical jokes of others, as willing to laugh at himself as he is to laugh at anyone else. Naturally, this is undoubtedly intended to soften the criticism of his readers. Look, Barnum says, I've been fooled too and I'm laughing about it! (This is precisely the line of reasoning that he would take with the Joice Heth hoax.) But it also calls attention to the links Barnum is drawing between practical jokes and the con. Throughout the Life, Barnum views himself as a practical joker, not a swindler or a cheat. He emphasizes that there is pleasure to be derived from being tricked, as much or more than can be found in straightfoward dealing. Isn't there as much inherent oddness in a monkey's head sewn to the body of a fish as there is in a real mermaid?

His rationalizations tell us a great deal about how Barnum wanted his audience to interact with him, but that is not the greatest pleasure of the book. The greatest delight to be had from the Life comes from Barnum's commitment to disclosure. By telling us how he pulled off his greatest tricks he lets us in on the private joy of the con-man that Poe described. Barnum lets us join him in the grin.

Edgar Allan Poe's "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences"

It is a sincere pity, as far as I'm concerned, that the word "diddling" has drifted so far from its original meaning. Taken from the name of Jeremy Diddler, the clever swindler of James Kenney's 1803 farce "Raising the Wind," "to diddle" used to mean simply to defraud. Now, as far as I can tell, it means something that a creepy scout leader does to his troop members. This is just too bad. But, despite my reputation with my students, lamentations on the decline of American English really aren't my style. So leaving jeremiad aside for the moment, let's proceed to Edgar Allan Poe's 1850 essay "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences."

Originally published as "Raising the Wind; or, Diddling Considered as an Exact Science," "Diddling" has little else to do with the Kenney play, and Poe later dropped "Raising the Wind" (a slang phrase meaning "to put together a little money") from the title. However, the focus on con artistry and its perpetrators remains. Poe begins by locating the con at the center of human identity:

"Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man ... A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny."

What follows is not so much a reasoned argument regarding the con as it is a series of examples of successful and amusing diddles, arranged in no particular order, that each alike bear the nine characteristics Poe identifies as vital to the con: minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin. Many of these are easy enough to swallow as part of a definition; it is certainly audacious to take another man's wallet and impertinent to do it while he's watching. The variety of methods evolved for taking that wallet clearly earn con artistry points of originality, and if interest does not motivate, I would be hard pressed to determine what does.

But the quality of minuteness is trickier. Poe identifies the diddle as conducted always on the small scale. The diddler on the large scale, we are told, is generally called a financier. Now, obviously Poe is having a little fun here (and drawing attention to the oft-recognized parallel between the tactics of the petty crook and the Wall-Street tycoon), but it's worth considering that a line may need to be drawn between Poe's "diddle" and what we have come to think of as the con. Ocean's Eleven are hardly financiers for all their pocketbooks might tell, and long cons can prove very lucrative; if they couldn't, they would never be practiced.

Ultimately we may have to go beyond Poe's definition to get to the heart of the con; however, he does call attention to one vital aspect that many others neglect: the "grin." The immense, and in the real world necessarily private, pleasure that the diddler enjoys upon successfully completing his work is perhaps his most appealing characteristic. The diddler, in Poe's definition, is having fun, a fact which may go a long way toward explaining why we like him so much and why literature detailing his movements has had such a long and successful career.

Mark Twain's Roughing It

In a blog titled The Salted Mine, it seems only right to begin with Mark Twain’s 1872 ode to the American West, Roughing It. Twain's extensive travels during the 1860s had taken him clear across the country to Nevada, California, and ultimately as far as the Hawaiian islands. Roughing It is a loose chronicle of that period, intermixed with anecdotes, newspaper clippings, hearsay, and, if we know Twain at all, a fair bit of exaggeration.

Roughing It is an amusing, if somewhat too long, bit of travel fiction, featuring a Twain not at his strongest, nor at his funniest, but worth reading to anyone with an interest in the history of the American West or an overabundance of interest in early Twain. My interests lie in neither of these directions. For me, Roughing It is worth reading primarily for its references to the promise and the perils of speculation on the American Frontier. Twain's charmingly naive narrator engages in a whole host of speculative activities, demonstrating (as Twain did in his own lifetime) a singular incapacity for business. After accidentally burning down his logging project, he allows his ownership of a million dollar mine to lapse while he is spending his projected capital, and then sleeps through the departure of the ship scheduled to take him to a fortune-making meeting.

If he manages to avoid becoming a victim of one of the most popular hoaxes of the time, the salted mine, it is more by luck than skill. A salted mine is, of course, a mining claim that has been planted with a small amount of gold, silver, or in some cases a small number of gemstones, in order to make it appear more rich than it is in fact. One of the truly classic confidence tricks, the salted mine plays on the greed and haste of the mark who, in his hurry to claim near instantaneous wealth, fails to ascertain the true value of the land in question before laying out his money. The glittering appearance of the salted mine was designed to make the seller rich and the speculator appallingly poor.


The trick worked because the truth is that most of the mining fortunes made after the initial surge of the gold rush were not made by individual miners driving their picks into veins of solid gold or panning goose-eggs out of the local stream. Actual mining was expensive, back-breaking work best conducted on a large scale by cheap labor. The real money was in speculation. Mines were established with minimal labor, their value assessed (often unreliably) by a small sample of rock submitted to an appraiser, and then they were sold by the foot to other miners, who often had no more intention of actually working the mine than the original owner did. Feet of mine traded hands in exchange for whiskey and pork and haircuts, much like paper money does now (and did in the Eastern States at the time).

As with the salted mine, the apparent exchange value of these feet often far exceeded what the mine would yield in reality. This contrast between appearance and reality is one to which Twain repeatedly returns throughout the narrative; in this charmingly self-deprecating scene the narrator believes he has struck it rich during a casual stroll through wilderness and presents his findings to his more experienced friends:

"Gentlemen," said I, "I don't say anything--I haven't been around, you know, and of course don't know anything--but all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!" and I tossed my treasure before them.
There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light. Then old Ballou said:
"Think of it? I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn't worth ten cents an acre!"
So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away. So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn. Moralizing, I observed, then, that "all that glitters is not gold."
Mr Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold. So I learned then, once and for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

I like very much Twain's moralizing here, for it is to these "men of mica" that this blog is dedicated. My own commonplace human nature cannot abide honest or earnest men (I leave Whitman and Emerson to other folk), and pledge this blog to those men (and occasionally women) whose appearance continually belies their reality, to the cheats, quacks, frauds, fakes, humbugs, charlatans, swindlers, and counterfeits of the remarkable nineteenth century.

Welcome friends, enemies, assorted wandering folk, to my blog, such as it is. The Salted Mine is to be a repository of sorts for all the wild and fantastical hypothesizing I plan to do in preparation for my orals examination in English and American literature (to take place with much ado in May of 2008). I cannot imagine why any of this might be of interest to others, but as my father says “if you like this sort of thing than this is precisely the sort of thing you like.” If you don’t like this sort of thing, then I suppose it’s up to you to bugger off.

Each of the entries to follow will, I hope, take up the cause of one of the 100 or so texts I’m expected to claim some familiarity with come May. Some of these texts are well known. Some are not quite so well known. And some have scarcely seen the critical light of day since their publication. What they share in common, in most cases anyway, is an authorial interest in crime, the con, and the making of the self. If my comments on these works often seem more pyrite than pure gold, then you have my apologies. It is not often that one hits pay-dirt in the well-mined field of literature.