The Actual Dime Museum

This is a broad outline of what the Dime Museum was in Victorian America - there are many more interesting stories about this pop culture phenomenon, which will be told in future posts (for example, the story of my third-great Aunt Kate's family's dime museum in Brooklyn).

The dime museum was a entertainment complex that was part exhibition hall, part theater, and part circus. It was popular in the mid to late Victorian period, and flourished between the Civil War and the First World War. Often the museum was in its own building, but sometimes in smaller towns they might be set up in a storefront. Dime museums were found mostly in the Northeast and Midwest, with large numbers in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia and New York. They were named for their street address, their city or the founder of the museum.

The first true dime museum was P.T. Barnum's American Museum, which opened in New York City in 1841 and was destroyed by fire in July 1865. It was located at Ann and Broadway in a five story building, and up to 15,000 visitors per day came to see the sights. Chang and Eng, the famous Siamese twins, and General Tom Thumb were featured there, as well as waxworks, live performances, and such bogus oddities as the Feejee Mermaid (a monkey's head attached to the body of a fish, which he had procured from the Boston Museum). There were also living exhibits such as Living Skeletons and Tattooed Ladies.*

The dime museum was a cheap entertainment - admission charges ranged from the titular dime up to fifty cents - safe for women and children, and open from morning to night. The exhibits changed rapidly, so that customers were return again and again (the museums often swapped exhibits).

The theatrical part of the museum was an auditorium area. There people could see vaudeville performances by magicians, sword-swallowers, singers, dancers and comedians. Sometimes plays were performed too, and sometimes they were of quite a high quality. There were often theatrical companies attached to specific dime museums. As Andrea Stulman Dennett points out in her wonderful study of the dime museum, some of them - such as the Boston Museum and Wood's Museum in New York - became legitimate theaters after the dime museum craze had passed.

When I was thinking about a name for this blog, I knew that I wanted to write about a large variety of historical topics - a little family history, ephemera, and all sorts of mostly-Victorian popular history and culture. I wanted a name that evoked the idea of a popular history grab-bag or encyclopedia. And arrived, at last, at the Dime Museum. But whatever might be on exhibit here, there will never be an admission charge - not even a dime!

There will be more on specific Dime Museums to come. And plenty of other things, too.

*As in Groucho Marx's immortal song Lydia the Tattooed Lady - which is one of the inspirations of my nom de blog. Lydia's tattoos, by the way, are mostly historical in nature - which makes her a living dime museum of sorts (which is where she and I part company!).

Images:

Barnum's American Museum ads from New York Public Library Digital Gallery, as is the ad for Humbug's American Museum, here.

Austin and Stone ad from New York Clipper, 1884 (scanned by me) - You may recognize part of the text in this ad, since I use it in my header.


MORE ABOUT DIME MUSEUMS

Dennett, Andrea Stulman. Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: NYU Press, 1997).

The Closing of the American Museum in Baltimore

Barnum's American Museum

The Lost Museum (CUNY site about Barnum's American Museum)

The Bowery Boys' podcast about Barnum's Museum

Photo of 1920s itinerant (shopfront) dime museum from ShowHistory.com