Popular culture and pre-Darwinian natural history collided in January 1843 when Phineas T. Barnum\u2019s notorious \u201cFeejee Mermaid\u201d made its way to South Carolina after several months of controversy and acclaim in New York City. The three-foot \u201cmermaid\u201d (actually a gruesome forgery cobbled together from a monkey torso and the bottom half of a fish) was exhibited at Charleston\u2019s Masonic Hall from January 17 to January 21. A ventriloquist and an orangutan were among the other curiosities.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the mermaid\u2019s arrival, the city\u2019s rival newspapers, the Mercury <\/em>and the Courier, <\/em>lined up on opposite sides of a heated and complex debate about the exhibit\u2019s authenticity, the authority of expertise, and the relationship between commercial entertainment and scientific knowledge. Beyond its popular appeal, the mermaid touched on disputes among natural historians over the fertility of \u201chybrid\u201d creatures, the existence of intermediate species in the \u201cgreat chain of being,\u201d and the unity of humankind. The Reverend John Bachman, a Lutheran minister and naturalist, led the antimermaid assault in the Mercury, <\/em>writing under the pseudonym \u201cNo Humbug\u201d to denounce the exhibit as a \u201cvice manufacture . . . palmed on our community as a great natural curiosity.\u201d Alanson Taylor, Barnum\u2019s uncle and manager of the exhibit, replied with a letter of his own suggesting that \u201cNo Humbug\u201d could not possibly be a legitimate scientist or a physician, and that his mermaid was too fragile for dissection anyway. Taylor earned the support of the Courier, <\/em>whose editors dismissed Bachman and his supporters as unqualified skeptics who discounted the mermaid without having seen it. Bachman continued to ridicule both the exhibit and the gullibility of the Charleston public. The controversy pitched back and forth, and Taylor was forced to spirit the Feejee Mermaid away before it could be destroyed by angry visitors.<\/p>\n Bachman, John. The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science. <\/em>Charleston, S.C.: C. Canning, 1850.<\/p>\n Bondeson, Jan. The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History. <\/em>Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999.<\/p>\n Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. <\/em>Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.<\/p>\n Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory. \u201cEntrepreneurs and Intellectuals: Natural History in Early American Museums.\u201d In Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum, <\/em>edited by William T. Alderson. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 1992.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Popular culture and pre-Darwinian natural history collided in January 1843 when Phineas T. Barnum\u2019s notorious \u201cFeejee Mermaid\u201d made its way to South Carolina after several months of controversy and acclaim in New York City. The three-foot \u201cmermaid\u201d (actually a gruesome forgery cobbled together from a monkey torso and the bottom half of a fish) was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":-1,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","class_list":["post-8803","entry","type-entry","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","ecms-a-z","ecms-charleston-county","ecms-encyclopedia","ecms-lowcountry","ecms-m","ecms-popular-culture","ecms-recreation-and-leisure","ecms-science-and-medicine"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n