Tom Thumb’s Best Man: The Curious Case of Commodore Nutt

Abstract: This essay explores the brief history of Commodore Nutt, a famous-then-forgotten dwarf whom P. T. Barnum exhibited at his American Museum in Civil War–era New York. If newspaper puffery was to be believed, Nutt was nothing short of a minor phenomenon as Barnum began plugging him into various skits and tours. One of Nutt’s most sellable attributes was his ostensible physical resemblance to Tom Thumb, a massively popular attraction at Barnum’s Museum the previous generation. Both Nutt and Thumb were ateliotic dwarves, with proportional physical features that observers often fetishized. But by the 1860s, Thumb had aged out of his exhibitory appeal and moved to endeavors beyond Barnum’s Museum. In the most obvious sense, Nutt’s presence allowed audiences a younger, fresh-faced version of Thumb. Yet the growing obsession with Nutt’s looks—and the claims that he was in fact Thumb himself , just with a different name—promised something else. As the ravages of war were tearing the nation (and bodies) apart, Nutt’s seeming reincarnation of Thumb offered audiences the idea that agelessness and immortality were genuinely possible.