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Lavinia actually met General Tom Thumb while working in P.T. Barnum's circus. Their wedding was one of the biggest events in nineteenth century New York. After Lavinia and Tom were married they both got even more famous. Since Lavinia’s life revolved around her presence in the media, she once said “I belong to the public.”
Lavinia and General Tom Thumb were living a life of luxury due to their fame, but this also came with some down sides. Lavinia and Tom were presented as childlike to the public by P.T. Barnum. This was an advertising strategy to make the audience feel sympathetic for them in order to sell more tickets. Though they were some of the most famous people in America at the time, due to the way they were presented people kind of treated them like children. Many people Lavinia met wanted to pet her and hold her. This frustrated her because she just wanted to be seen as a normal English lady. She wrote in her autobiography “It seemed impossible, to make people understand at first that I was not a child; that, being a woman, I had the womanly instinct of shrinking from a form of familiarity which in the case of a child of my size would have been as natural as it was permissible.” Even though Lavinia was not extremely fond of how she was viewed by the public, she still continued to perform.