Object Status:
Unlocated
Accession Date:
April 5, 1811
Primary Source Reference:
Peale Museum Accessions Book, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, p. 54
Additional Source Text:
Poulson's American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), 4 May 1811 reads: "Mr. Fitzgerald, now in this City, lately from Cork, has presented to Peale's Museum, the shoe and stocking of O'Bryan, the Irish Giant. Ex pede Herculem. Hercules by his foot."
Notes:
The Irish Giant was Charles Byrne (1761-1783), whose skeleton has for more than 200 years been at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London and is the subject of current controversy. Author Hilary Mantel fictionalised his life in the novel The Giant O'Brien (1998).
About 1825 Anne Newport Royall saw these items in the Peale Museum and reported: "I was so much exhausted going throught the apartments, that I was unable to measure either, but from the looks of the stocking, his leg must have been as thick as a common woman's body, (it was of coarse silk.) It strikes me that it was a foot across the calf. The shoe was enormous, and what made it appear more so, near by it lay the shoe of Simon Pap, the dwarf, who was but twenty-eight inches high. His shoe was three inches and one half in length. It is a pity they did not stuff the skin of the giant; his figure astride of the mammoth, would have capped the climax." Anne Newport Royall, Sketches of the History, Life, and Manners, in the United States (New Haven, 1826), pp. 216-217
See also the entry "The shoe of Simon Paap, the dwarf."
