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116 pages

English

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This book asks an important question:

If you were born in rural England in 1837 and died in 1901 and never travelled more than thirty miles in any direction would you have seen a hippopotamus before you died?

The answer is, surprisingly, yes.

In fact, the roads of England were thronged with all manner of creatures. There were even exotic butterfly farms. Kangaroos hopped around the lawns of stately homes, tigers prowled the backstreets of the East End, a tapir terrorised the people of Rochdale, an angry cassowary pursued a Lord as he was out for his daily ride, a boa constrictor got loose in Tunbridge Wells.

This book is the first to explore the full and surprising extent of the exotic animal trade in nineteenth-century England and its colonies. It combines deep and original scholarly research with a lively style aimed at the non-academic reader. It looks at zoological gardens, travelling menageries, private menageries, circuses and natural history museums, to show exotic animals played a key part in the Imperial project and in the project to ensure that leisure was educational. It shows how this trade was intimately connected with the tides of Empire and how, as Germany rose, one area of competition in which Britain came off worst was the scramble for elephants.

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Histoire

Great Britain

History

Europe

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Publié par	Libri Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	30 novembre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781907471810
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

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THE TIGER THAT SWALLOWED THE BOY
THE TIGER THAT SWALLOWED THE BOY

Exotic Animals in Victorian England
John Simons
Copyright © Libri Publishing 2012
ISBN 978 1 907471 71 1
The right of John Simons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in its contents.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library
Cover design by Helen Taylor
Design by Carnegie Publishing
Printed in the UK by Ashford Colour Press
Index by James Lamb: james@jalamb.com
Libri Publishing Brunel House Volunteer Way Faringdon Oxfordshire SN7 7YR
Tel: +44 (0)845 873 3837
www.libripublishing.co.uk
Contents Preface and Acknowledgements ix Chapter One Introduction – Jaguars Make Awkward Pets 1 Chapter Two The Trade in Exotic Animals – The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy or Snakes (by the Mile) 19 Chapter Three The Travelling Menageries – The Only Dead Elephant in the Fair! 57 Chapter Four Circus and Spectacle – A Playful Lion is a Terrible Thing 81 Chapter Five Zoological Gardens – I Have Known Human Lovers of the Wombat 99 Chapter Six The Private Menageries – Exit Pursued by a Bear 137 Chapter Seven Museums, Collections and Conclusions – In the Dead Zoo 159 Select Bibliography 175
Illustrations Bostock’s menagerie on the road c. 1912 14 Wombwell’s menagerie on the road c. 1856 21 The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy, 1879 22 Tipu’s Tiger 24 Jamrach’s shop 27 Inside Jamrach’s shop 32 John Hamlyn’s shop in 1896 – Hamlyn is looking directly at the camera with his hat in his hand. 50 A ticket for Wombwell’s menagerie 58 The Royal Family at the menagerie in 1847 63 Staffordshire Figure of Polito’s Menagerie 64 Day’s Menagerie at St Giles’s Fair in 1895 68 Maccomo 75 The tragic death of the Lion Queen 78 Savage South Africa 83 Pablo Fanque 89 Isaac Van Amburgh and his Animals 92 Portrait of Mr Van Amburgh 93 George Wombwell’s grave 96 A ride on Rama at Dublin Zoo in the 1880s 117 A souvenir entry token for Belle Vue 120 Belle Vue in 1906 122 Heywood Hardy The Disputed Toll © Manchester City Galleries 123 The sea lions at Groudle Glen 131 Sea lions at old Brighton Aquarium 132 The Monkey Pagoda at Culzean Castle 142
Preface & Acknowledgements

Books are like quarries in that when you write one (or dig one) you end up with a book (or quarry) and a spoil heap. Sometimes there is a lot of good stuff in the spoil heaps – the silver in the spoil heaps from the lead mines just outside Aberystwyth for example – and it seems a shame to waste it. This book is one of two that have been dug from the spoil heap of my Rossetti’s Wombat which came out in 2008 and was largely concerned with the specifics of the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s private menagerie and, more generally, with the Australian animals who crowded the streets of Victorian London and filled the fields of the English countryside in surprising numbers and with vigour and exuberance. Out of the spoil heap came a short cultural history of kangaroos and this larger study of exotic animals in Victorian England. Victorian England means just that and the main focus of the book is on the years 1837 to 1901. There is, of course, some address to the presence of exotic animals in earlier periods in things like the Tower and Exeter ’Change menageries and the early years of the touring and private menageries. But this is simply to show how the tsunami of exotic animals which deluged England in the nineteenth century was the product of a gently lapping tide that had been rising since the Middle Ages. In the nineteenth century it became catastrophic due to a fortuitous combination of Imperial adventure and expansion and the discovery of education and science as tools of political reform and social control.
This book ranges over both familiar and unfamiliar territory and concentrates on the unfamiliar. For example, it doesn’t spend as much time on London Zoo as it might have done as that zoo’s history has been written extensively in many other places but it does look at Manchester’s Belle Vue Zoo in some depth. Lord Walter Rothschild’s menagerie at Tring is also given relatively short treatment partly because it was less important as a menagerie than as a museum and partly because Lord Walter has been the subject of a substantial biographical monograph which gives extensive treatment to the museum and menagerie – which did, after all, define his life. Tring is treated very much as a point of comparison with the earlier and equally influential although now less known collection of Lord Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, at Knowsley Hall and to illustrate the ways in which the shape and motivations of zoological collections and collectors in the nineteenth century were not uniform but were sculpted by the larger social forces that played around them. Earl Fitzwilliam’s menagerie at Wentworth Woodhouse was, although much smaller than the Knowsley collection, as important in its own way as an example of the serious zoological intent and the genuine interest in the animals shown by its owner.
The book tries to trace the complete cycle of the exotic animal phenomenon in Victorian England. Significant attention is paid to the trade in animals and, in particular, the business structure of the Jamrach family firm, which dominated the English trade for the second half of the nineteenth century, is set out in detail, I believe for the first time. Attention is then given, in turn, to the various locations in which exotic animals could be seen: the zoological gardens, the private menagerie, the circus, the travelling menagerie and the natural history museum. Although the focus is on England and to a lesser extent Scotland and Ireland I also spend some time looking at the opportunities to encounter exotic animals across the Empire and specifically, in Australia. This is for four reasons. The first is that the citizens of the Australian colonies thought of themselves as British. This is not to say that by the end of the nineteenth century there wasn’t a specifically Australian identity but that people there broadly looked to the “Old Country” (a phrase you still sometimes hear from elderly Australians) for all manner of things and not least culture and entertainment. The second is that since the spoil heap for this book first piled up on my desk I have moved to live in Australia and all my work now reflects that new context. The third is that Australia was one of the few Imperial domains over which Britain had a complete monopoly. This gave the Australian bird and animal trade a particularly important role which was different in quality and scale from, say, the trade in Canadian animals which was more or less entirely based around the whaling and fur (beaver, bear and seal) industries and led to the near extinction of the beaver and Canadian bison. The fourth is that the underlying thesis of this book is that the exotic animal industry was intimately related to the contours of Empire and Imperialism and that to understand it fully you have to take an Imperial perspective. That there is a relationship between animals and Empire is not, of course, a new idea and was authoritatively articulated by Harriet Ritvo some twenty-five years ago. What I am doing here is building a very detailed picture of some aspects of it and showing how those details were conditioned by the specific opportunities that Empire made possible – or which the decline of Empire closed off.
During the writing of this book two interesting novels appeared both of which relate to its theme. The first, Christopher Nicholson’s The Elephant Keeper , is a wonderful evocation of the world of the private menageries of the eighteenth century and although it isn’t based on fact it could well be. The second, Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch, is a good yarn based very loosely indeed on the incident of the escaped tiger which is a key structural element of this book. The real story is a good deal stranger.
All of this work has been written at Macquarie University in Australia and I acknowledge the support of my colleagues there especially Professor Judyth Sachs and my Vice Chancellor Professor Steven Schwartz. It had its origins in Lincoln University and, in particular, I would like to mention the Lincoln University students, now graduates, Paul Day and Tony Pollard, who were recipients of that university’s undergraduate research awards and spent their scholarships working with me to build a database of travelling menageries and helping me plot their course around the British Isles during Queen Victoria’s reign.
I must acknowledge my wife Kathryn, my sounding board for all ideas and a wonderfully talented artist currently working hard for her first solo exhibition in Australia.
And I want to thank my parents whose thoughtful love in taking me to museums and zoos in the late 1950s before I ever went to primary school and when most parents would not have had the imagination to see what a small boy might really enjoy, is, as much as anything, the root of the scholarly career I have pursued with enormous pleasure pretty much every day of the last thirty-four years.
Pleasingly, this book was finished on the Feast Day of St Gerasimos the Righteous of Jordan whose holiness gave him authority over wild animals. He shared his cell with a lion which ado