By Anthony Sansonetti

Mary Gannon (1829-1868), later known as the “Lilliputian Wonder” and “La Petite Elssler,” was born in New York City.¹ Gannon’s parents hail from Ireland,² albeit there is an interesting absence of parental figures in her life, especially compelling because there was a “flood” of immigrants from Ireland who resided in New York after she was born.³ Just as a banker handles finances, the parents of a performing child in the nineteenth-century, it has seemed so far, tend to be present in the life of their child. For Gannon, this was not so. A reference to her mother is made once in the American Republic and Baltimore Daily Clipper wherein a journalist notes that Gannon financially supported her mother with her theatrical earnings from childhood up to adulthood.⁴ The beginning of Gannon’s life, I must also add, exemplifies the unreliability of the archive and the historian. Historians continue to argue that Gannon made her debut in 1835 at the Bowery Theatre rather than the Richmond Hill Theatre in 1832.⁵ I take historian T. Allston Brown’s account of Gannon’s life as a starting premise.

At the age of three Gannon made her first appearance on the New York stage in the Richmond Hill Theatre—a “well-populated theatre” with a “clouded historical past”⁶—where she performed in The Daughter of the Regiment.⁷ Three years later, Gannon appeared at the Old Bowery Theatre for the benefit of an unnamed company member.⁸ During this time, she studied and performed the roles of Henry in Jack Robinson and Julio in The Planter and his Dog.⁸ The Planter and his Dog is a “dog act”⁹ wherein a hero manipulates a trained dog with mastery as well as skill.¹⁰ Though she found success in theatrical representation, six-year-old Gannon soon abandoned drama for quite some time and took up the art of dance at the Franklin Theatre.¹¹ Critic L. Clark Davis argues that Gannon harnessed the skill of “infinite grace” while dancing at the Franklin Theatre as a performing child.¹² Davis further suggests that the elegant actions and manners intrinsic to the training of dance at the Franklin Theatre was a gestural and choreographic “charm.”¹³

Gannon did not, as Davis bluntly puts it, owe her theatrical success to her “plain” appearance; instead; “her step upon the stage” startled critics with its “firm, elastic” and strong movement.¹⁴ Gannon’s movement, in other words, were said to possess a physical magnetism. Once she became aware of this, Gannon began to deploy her movement as a defining characteristic of her dramatic repertoire and public persona.¹⁵ Aware of her appeal to her audience in New York, nine-year-old Gannon travelled to Philadelphia in mid-January 1838.¹⁶ With who, why, or how are unknown, yet she appeared at the Walnut Street Theatre as Lady Flimnap in David Garrick’s much-produced “farce” of Lilliput.¹⁷ Garrick’s Lilliput is described as “an afterpiece in the form of a one-act comedy of manners,” which calls for “not less than a hundred” child performers.¹⁸ It was the role of Lady Flimnap that earned Gannon the promising title the “Lilliputian Wonder.”¹⁹ Did Gannon rival Clara Fisher’s transatlantic portrayal of Lord Flimnap? The character of Lady Flimnap is particularly interesting insofar as she passionately confronts and once “loved” Gulliver²⁰—that is, the only older actor on stage.²¹ For Davis, a writer who offers a detailed portrait of Gannon’s life, Garrick’s influential gaze appeared to be directed at Gannon from the beginning of her career as an actress, as if “the greatest Romeo, Don Caesar and Benedict of his day [had] been watching the little lady.”²²

In 1840, Gannon returned to New York after she won over the approval of audience members in Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre.²³ She was quickly hired at the Park Theatre, though details of these performances are undocumented.²⁴ Gannon was soon selected to perform at the American, later Barnum’s, Museum; she appeared as six characters in The Actress of All Work and garnered acclaim for her exhibition of a dance from the ballet La Bayadère.²⁵ Gannon became a sensation with her individual take on The Actress of All Work and was advertised as “La Petite Elssler” on the pages of popular newspapers such as the New-York Tribune (the New-York Daily Tribune).²⁶ Barnum even goes as far as to pompously claim that Gannon “commenced at the Museum.”²⁷ Gannon performed at the American Museum for quite some time. She was hired to dance her popular “Tyrolean dance” and a Spanish dance called “Il Jaleo de Xeres” for several months.²⁸ In December of 1843, Gannon occupied an important place in the American Museum, primarily as an introductory act to Barnum’s main event: an exhibition of General Tom Thumb before a trip to Europe.²⁹ Gannon performed a “laughable monologue” in which she sang, danced and appeared as “several comic characters” for the benefit of Thumb.³⁰ Most of the audience members and journalists who saw her performances were focused on Gannon’s skillful aptitude for executing variegated styles of dance in a matter of minutes.³¹

But who was her theatrical agent? And how did Gannon secure all of these jobs and funds for her impoverished mother without the help of an adult? Is it my mistake to believe that a performing child such as Gannon—who one critic calls the “gushing, jovial pet of New York”³²—is incapable of securing jobs on her own? As I wrap up my research on the life of the “Lilliputian Wonder” and “La Petite Elssler,” I cannot help but question how Gannon’s corporeal movement informed and shaped her embodiment as an infant phenomenon. Did her “graceful” movement provide her with the means to “grow to greatness and win [. . .] the high praise of being ‘the first of America’s female comedians”?³³

While no written account or archival record of Gannon’s trip across the Atlantic exists, the given name “La Petite Elssler” suggests that Gannon may be part of another kind of transatlantic journey. Austrian ballerina Fanny Elssler was, of course, a hot topic in the United States of America at the time of Gannon’s rise to fame in 1840, since she had a publicized encounter with John Van Buren, son of Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the United States.³⁴ Elssler’s landmark tour in 1840—coupled with “female legs encased in tights”—marked the United States’ initial appeal to ballet and added fuel to Elssler’s allure.³⁵ What is interesting about this relationship between Elssler, Gannon, and ballet is that twelve-year-old Gannon began to predominantly dance following Elssler’s visit to New York. Was this one of those groundbreaking moments when the world of theatre mingles with the everyday twists and turns of the nineteenth-century’s political climate? Can Gannon’s tag line be read as a palimpsest? I am left wondering who gave Gannon this nickname. Is it possible that the critics of New York’s theatrical scene likened Gannon to Elssler so that they could feel a little bit closer to the seductions of a European sensation, that enigmatic figure who is always fleeting, the one who is constantly travelling across the Atlantic?

Notes

1. Allston Brown, History of the American Stage (New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1870), 139.
2. Ibid.
3. Mary C. Henderson, “The Park and the Bowery (1798-1850),” in The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses (New York: Back Stage Books, 2004), 39.
4. “Miss Gannon’s Benefit,” American Republic and Baltimore Daily Clipper, December 23, 1845.
5. Gerald Bordman and Thomas S. Hischak. “Mary Gannon,” in The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 252.
6. Henderson, “The Park and the Bowery,” 65.
7. Brown, History of the American Stage, 139.
8. Clark Davis, “Two Artists of Comedy: Maggie Mitchell and Mary Gannon,” The Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading, August, 1868, 245.
9. Nicholas Daly, “Fur and feathers: animals and the city in an Anthropocene era,” in The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 160.
10. Bordman and Hischak, “Dog Dramas” in The Oxford Companion to American Theatre (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 182.
11. Davis, “Two Artists of Comedy,” 245.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Brown, History of the American Stage, 139.
17. Ibid.
18. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, “Commentary and Notes,” in The Plays of David Garrick: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1740-1766, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, vol. 1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 394.
19. Brown, History of the American Stage, 139.
20. David Garrick, “Lilliput: A Dramatic Entertainment, 1756,” in The Plays of David Garrick: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1740-1766, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, vol.1 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 125.
21. Pedicord and Bergmann, “Commentary and Notes,” 394.
22. Davis, “Two Artists of Comedy,” 245.
23. Brown, History of the American Stage, 139.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. “American Museum: Extra Attractions,” New-York Tribune, May 20, 1841.
27. T. Barnum, “The Road to Riches” in Struggles and Triumphs, or, Forty Years’ Recollections (New York: Warren Johnson & Co., 1872), 134.
28. “American Museum,” New-York Tribune, May 26, 1841.
29. “General Tom Thumb!,” New-York Daily Tribune, November 29, 1843.
30. “American Museum, and Perpetual Fair,” New-York Daily Tribune, December 7, 1843.
31. Davis, “Two Artists of Comedy,” 245.
32. “Wallack’s Theatre,” The Round Table: A Saturday Review of Politics, Finance, Literature, Society and Art, January 23, 1864, 92.
33. Davis, “Two Artists of Comedy,” 245.
34. Burton W. Peretti. “‘The Torments of Desire’: Presidents and Performance before 1929,” in The Leading Man: Hollywood and the Presidential Image (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 25.
35. Ibid.

Bibliography

“American Museum.” New-York Tribune, May 26, 1841.

“American Museum, and Perpetual Fair.” New-York Daily Tribune, December 7, 1843.

“American Museum: Extra Attractions.” New-York Tribune, May 20, 1841.

Barnum, P. T. “The Road to Riches” in Struggles and Triumphs, or, Forty Years’ Recollections, 133-155. New York: Warren Johnson & Co., 1872.

Bordman, Gerald and Thomas S. Hischak. The Oxford Companion to American Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Brown, T. Allston. History of the American Stage. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1870.

Daly, Nicholas. “Fur and feathers: animals and the city in an Anthropocene era.” In The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York, 148-188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Davis, Clark L. “Two Artists of Comedy: Maggie Mitchell and Mary Gannon,” The Galaxy: A Magazine of Entertaining Reading, August, 1868.

Garrick, David. “Lilliput: A Dramatic Entertainment, 1756.” In The Plays of David Garrick: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1740-1766, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, vol. 1, 105-132. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.

“General Tom Thumb!.” New-York Daily Tribune, November 29, 1843.

Henderson, Mary C. “The Park and the Bowery (1798-1850).” In The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses, 34-79. New York: Back Stage Books, 2004.

“Miss Gannon’s Benefit,” American Republic and Baltimore Daily Clipper, December 23, 1845.

Pedicord, Harry William and Fredrick Louis Bergmann. “Commentary and Notes.” In The Plays of David Garrick: Garrick’s Own Plays, 1740-1766, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, vol. 1, 377-430. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.

Peretti, Burton W. “‘The Torments of Desire’: Presidents and Performance before 1929.” In The Leading Man: Hollywood and the Presidential Image, 12-49. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

“Wallack’s Theatre.” The Round Table: A Saturday Review of Politics, Finance, Literature, Society and Art, January 23, 1864.