Charles Price and Jennie Price who appear together on The Chatham Museum handbill shown above, circa 1891, may at first glance appear to be related, perhaps even husband and wife. Upon closer examination, however, as Karl Niedershuh points out below, there was more than one Fat Girl named Price.

This excellent cut of the 18 year old, 450 pound Jennie, surely taken from a contemporary photograph, rises above the usual crude portraiture found on many other contemporary dime museum handbills.

The photo of Charles from the early 1860's which appears below may have been taken prior to his marriage to that other Fat Girl, Annie Price.

It is clearly Annie Price who appears in the well-known photo shown below from Michael Mitchell's Monsters of The Guilded Age, The Photographs of Charles Eisenmann. Listed as Unidentified in Mitchell's book, clearly this photo from the 1880's shows one of the odder pairings in the tradition of "Strangest Married Couples".

From Karl Niedershuh:

Albino performer Charles Price was indeed married to a fat lady, but her name was not Jennie.

Annie Price (née Allan) was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1842 (or 1844), and emigrated to Brooklyn, NY, when she was 14 years old. By the time she was 18, she already weighed more than 300 pounds.

At about age 20, she was hired as a sideshow attraction by Adam Forepaugh at the handsome salary of $80 a month, plus expenses and the services of a maid. While with Forepaugh, she married a circus man named Pettit, who died in 1880, leaving her with two children. It was probably at this time that Annie retired from the circus and took a job exhibiting at Barnum's Museum, afterwards becoming a fixture of the dime museum circuit in and around NYC.

In 1884 she married Charles Price, onstage before a paying crowd at the New York Museum, 210 Bowery. (Charles Eisenmann's studio was at number 229.) From a peak of some 525 pounds, she fell to about 400 during the course of an unspecified illness, and died at her home at 19 Bayard Street on Oct. 25, 1889. Charles was with her, having just brought a glass of brandy to ease her pain when she breathed her last. It was said that she lay in state in an ice box for three days to satisfy the curious multitude who wanted a last look at her, and in order to prevent a mob from gathering at her funeral, was buried in Evergreens Cemetery well after midnight.

I don't know what relation Jennie Price was to Charles Price (if any), but I doubt that they were ever husband and wife. Nor do I have any evidence to suggest that Charles and Annie Price had children. It is conceivable, however, that Jennie was Annie's daughter by her previous marriage. Professional as well as personal reasons might have encouraged "Miss Jennie" to take her stepfather's name. If so, she would have turned 18 in the 1890s, a date in keeping with this sort of engraved portrait. Much of this information comes from the New York Times and Boase's Modern English Biography.

Charles Price also had children by a previous marriage (including a daughter who had a career as a snake charmer), so he could have fathered a fat lady, especially if his first wife was also a woman of size. That, too, is not unlikely. Interestingly, Charles' first wife must have had similar tastes, since she ran off with a professional "fat boy."