Somebody's Luggage (Miniature Wedding Album of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren) (c. 1863): Art, History and Details

Somebody's Luggage (Miniature Wedding Album of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren) (c. 1863) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Mathew Brady (American, 1823–1896).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This deluxe commercial souvenir commemorates the marriage of “General” Tom Thumb (Charles Sherwood Stratton) and Lavinia Warren, performers at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. Thumb was such a celebrity that the wedding pushed the Civil War off newspapers’ front pages for days. Cartes-de-visite of the wedding sold in the thousands; Brady even licensed the image to lithographers and other photographers. In one image, Lavinia holds a baby who was borrowed for the photo shoot to suggest her domestic skills. The locket is shaped like a miniature suitcase bearing the words “Somebody’s Luggage,” the title of an 1862 story by Charles Dickens.

Object facts

• Title: Somebody's Luggage (Miniature Wedding Album of Tom Thumb and Lavinia Warren)
• Date: c. 1863
• Creator attribution: Mathew Brady (American, 1823–1896)
• Culture: America
• Type: Jewelry
• Technique: brass photographic locket with 12 miniature albumen prints
• Dimensions: Overall: 2.7 x 2 x 1 cm (1 1/16 x 13/16 x 3/8 in.); Each: 2.3 x 2 cm (7/8 x 13/16 in.)
• Collection: PH - American 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2015.51

Collection credit

Gift of Herbert Ascherman Jr.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.