A Startling History, In Mid-Air

This is one of the many terrific old circus posters I've been looking at as a little break from playing detective in the hunt for Fred Bell.

Fred Bell, for those of you who missed the Eastern Mystic post last week, is the Dickensian fellow who was supposed to be the secondary interest in a post about a female detective in Brooklyn in the 1890s.

Well, I searched for him in the Brooklyn Eagle archive, as a matter of course - and was stopped short by what I found.

Fred Bell was an English-born minister (born about 1846) who was famous in the 1870s as the "Singing Preacher." Thousands packed the Brooklyn Academy of Music to hear him preach and sing - and hundreds were turned away at the door.

There were at least four legal cases and mysterious goings-on that Bell was at the center of. They include:

1. Trouble in Brooklyn with a Mrs. Morris (one of Bell's parishioners);
2. Trouble in England with regards to his church, and to women, which included a law suit;
3. The suspicious death of Emily Hall in Michigan in 1895;
4. Bell and another minister's fistfight in Ohio.

Fred Bell also wrote a book about his experiences as a missionary in the slums of New York City in the early 1870s. He had a complicated marital history, and possibly had trouble in California, too. He traveled restlessly between the US and England for more than 20 years, between 1871 and the mid-1890s - and as a Brooklyn Eagle reporter noted in one of the dozens of articles I found (and am reading and taking notes on), Bell seemed to get into difficult situations in every place he landed.

I've also been reading his book, Midnight in the Slums of New York, and tracking him and the other people in his life through the British and American census records.

I'll edit all the information down into a few posts that will take you on a journey through the life of one of the strangest and most fascinating Victorian people I've come across yet. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I am enjoying the research.

I do need to hunt up a few more people, including a mysterious brother-in-law in St. Clair, Michigan, though. That's what I'm doing just now. The research sometimes feels a bit like being in mid-air in the circus poster above - confusing, colorful and hard to believe, but absolutely true.

Stay tuned!

Barnum poster from the Library of Congress.