Little people: big business then, big business now

Midgets. That's what they used to be called anyway. They're probably still called that by a lot of people. I think the proper term today is "little people," or maybe "dwarfs." Do they fascinate you? Do you laugh when you see them? Apparently, a lot of people do, or else they wouldn't still be featured in the most juvenile of movies, on plenty of reality shows and elsewhere in pop culture today.

I don't know any little people. If I did I'd ask one how it feels to have stature be their most salable trait. Come on - would the Rolloff family be featured on television if they weren't a family of midgets? I doubt it.

I bring this up because last Saturday I had a client bring a large consignment of sideshow items, including a bunch of CDV photos of midgets and other midget ephemera. It's fascinating stuff, and reminded me of how big the sideshow business was in those days, championed by the master of the oddity-for-money racket, P.T. Barnum.

This collection included  Barnum's famous midget Tom Thumb, a figure who was very well known in the 19th c. and reproduced in many, many CDV photos. It also includes other known midgets such as Commodore Knutt.

I look at a lot of early photographs and am often reminded of how much has changed since the 19th century. The fashions are different, society is different. Women have more rights, and they can vote. Most men no longer where gigantic mustaches (my brother excluded). The photographic process has changed.

But people are still people. They still are fascinated by oddities among their kind. The very tall, the albino or the cross dresser (or bearded lady as these sideshow features were called then).

And yes, the midget. The person whose genetic makeup led them to be less tall than most of us. They were objects of fascination then and still are today. Right or wrong, it's the way it is. That's what struck me most when I looked at these images, that people have not changed very much since the 1860s. They're still making a buck off of someone's physical differences.

But then, the little people were complicit in this too. Or, rather, those little people that decided to take part in sideshows then or on television today. Money talks.

Here are some of the midget images we received last week on consignment. As you can see, they range from the 1860s through to the 1940s. I'm not sure how popular midgets were in the mid- to late- 20th c., but of course they're popular again today on television and in movies.  Unless we suddenly stop judging books by their covers, I imagine short people will still be a laugh riot,  subject of fascination or money maker in another 150 years.