Abstract
In June 1848, tragedy struck at the Liverpool Zoological Gardens when the ‘fine elephant Rajah’ crushed to death his keeper, Richard Howard. The accident happened on a Saturday morning, when Howard had gone into the elephant’s house to clean it. According to two visitors who witnessed the incident, a ‘Mr and Mrs Liversedge, from a village about three miles from Stockport’, Howard had ordered the animal to move from one side of the den to the other, for access purposes. Rajah, however, refused to budge, and when the keeper punished him for his disobedience by beating him with a broom the elephant knocked him to the floor and trampled on him, ‘smashing, there is little doubt, every bone in his body’. Though several keepers rushed to their colleague’s assistance, Howard’s injuries proved fatal; he expired just minutes after being removed from the den.
Lord Mayo, we read, has, at his own expense, sent an elephant to the Dublin Zoological Gardens. It is not, we hope, a white one. (Manchester Times, 3 July 1869)
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Notes
See, for example, ‘Exotic Captives’ in Ritvo, The Animal Estate, pp.205–242; ‘The Elite and the Invention of Zoos’ and ‘Imperial Glory’ in Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier (eds), Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), pp.73–130; Robert Jones, ‘The Sight of Creatures Strange to our Clime’, pp.1–26.
For a discussion of how provincial towns constructed themselves as centres of ‘polite’ sociability see ‘The Town: Politeness and Place’ in John Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan (eds), Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c. 1680–1830 (London: Routledge, 2007), pp.57–85. For a discussion of the relationship between science and regional identity see Simon Naylor, Regionalizing Science: Placing Knowledges in Victorian England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), which explores scientific activities in nineteenth-century Cornwall; and
Diarmid Finnegan, Natural History Societies and Civic Culture in Victorian Scotland (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009).
See, for example, John MacKenzie, ‘The Second City of the Empire: Glasgow — Imperial Municipality’ in Felix Driver and David Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp.215–237. MacKenzie argues that nineteenth-century Glaswegian identity had a strong imperial dimension, and that the city perceived itself both as Scottish and as intimately connected to the wider British Empire.
Catherine de Courcy, Dublin Zoo: An Illustrated History (Cork: The Collins Press, 2009), pp.1–4.
John Langton, ‘Urban growth and economic change: from the late seventeenth century to 1841’ in D.M. Palliser (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.479;
F.M.L. Thompson, ‘Town and City’ The Cambridge Social History of Britain, Vol. I, Regions and Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp.1–86.
Samuel Alberti, ‘Placing nature: natural history collections and their owners in nineteenth-century provincial England’, British Journal for the History of Science 35:3 (2002), p.292.
Elizabeth Hanson has studied similar community efforts to buy animals in US zoos in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1914, for example, ‘the Boston Post coordinated a campaign for the city’s children to donate their pennies to purchase three retired vaudeville elephants for the new Franklin Park Zoo’ mobilising support from ‘tens of thousands of people across the spectrum of class and ethnicity’. See Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.60.
Pall Mall Gazette, 10 April 1869. For a discussion on the wider social agenda of the zoo, see Juliana Adelman, ‘Animal Knowledge: Zoology and Class-ification in Nineteenth-Century Dublin’, Field Day Review 5 (2009), pp.109–121.
Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp.275–282.
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© 2014 Helen Cowie
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Cowie, H. (2014). Zoo, Community and Civic Pride. In: Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384447_3
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