Abstract
In 1855 a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, William Aytoun, recounted his childhood experiences of visiting George Wombwell’s travelling menagerie on Edinburgh’s Castle Mound. Writing nostalgically about his boyhood encounters with the wild beasts, the now grown-up menagerie customer described how he had been enticed into the show, that ‘mysterious quadrangle of wagons’, by the ‘huge and somewhat incongruous pictures of lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, wolves and boa constrictors making their way towards some common centrepiece of carrion’. The entry fee paid, Aytoun ventured into the menagerie ‘with a far more excited feeling than any middle-aged traveller experiences when he first catches a glimpse of Timbuctoo’, and, descending a flight of stairs into the interior of the exhibition, was immediately assailed by the ‘strange and wildly tropical... commixed odour of sawdust, ammonia and orange peel. A hideous growling, snarling, hissing, baying, barking and chattering’ assaulted the young visitor’s ears as he penetrated further into the menagerie. Apprehension, however, was soon replaced by enchantment as the boy scrutinised in turn each of the caged animals and observed its movements. Years later Aytoun still remembered seeing ‘Nero, the indulgent old lion, who would stand any amount of liberties’.
Why is an elephant unlike a tree? — Because a tree leaves in the spring, and the elephant leaves when the menagerie does. (Bristol Mercury, 23 December 1871)
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Notes
For a discussion of other popular nineteenth-century entertainments see Hugh Cunningham, Leisure and the Industrial Revolution c. 1780–1880 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980). For a study of ethnographic spectacles, see
Bernth Lindfors (ed.), Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnological Show Business (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). For a study of panoramas, see
Ralph Hyde, Panoramania: The Art and Entertainment of the All-Embracing View (London: Trefoil Publications 1988).
Andrew Hobbs, ‘When the Provincial Press was the National Press (c.1836–c.1900)’, The International Journal of Regional and Local Studies, Series 2 5:1 (2009), pp.16–43.
For a discussion of the issues surrounding correspondence to magazines and newspapers in the nineteenth century, see Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p.139.
Kevin Tomlinson and David Barnaby (eds), The Log Book of Wombwell’s No.1 Menagerie 1848–1871, as Retained by George Percival, Driver of the Elephant Wagon (Manchester: ZGSM Publications, 1989), pp.32, 62 and 89.
Glynis Ridley, Clara’s Grand Tour (New York: Atlantic Books, 2004).
Bostock, E.H., Menageries, Circuses and Theatres (London: Chapman, 1927), pp.1–2.
Charles Mackie, Norfolk Annals: A Chronological Record of Remarkable Events in the Nineteenth Century (Norwich: Office of the Norfolk Chronicle, 1901), Vol. I, pp.21, 64, 69, 96, 103, 111, 129, 138, 151, 154, 162, 167, 180, 211, 233, 256, 270 and 304; Vol. II, pp.25, 76, 109, 116, 144, 170 and 227. Norwich also enjoyed visits from Batty’s circus in 1839 and from American lion tamers Carter and Van Amburgh in 1841, 1843 and 1844. See Ibid., Vol. I, pp.258, 266, 269, 282 and 288.
Mark Judd, ‘The oddest combination of town and country’: popular culture and the London fairs, 1800–60’ in John K. Walton and James Walvin (eds), Leisure in Britain, 1780–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983).
Thomas Frost, Old Showmen and the Old London Fairs (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1875), pp.195.
Séamas ó Maitiú, The Humours of Donnybrook (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995), p.44.
Diana and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England, 1837–1901 (London: Wayland Publishers, 1972), p.10.
Benjamin Schmidt has noted the ubiquity of palm tree imagery as a symbol of ‘a vaguely situated generically tropical culture’. See Benjamin Schmidt, ‘Collecting Global Icons: The Case of the Exotic Parasol’ in Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (eds), Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchange in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp.31–57.
George Sanger reports that by 1850, ‘gas was becoming quite a common illuminant’. See George Sanger, Seventy Years a Showman (London: Dutton, 1927), p.161.
For a discussion of the sensory aspects of menageries in the eighteenth century, see Christopher Plumb, ‘Reading Menageries: using eighteenth-century print sources to historicise the sensorium of menagerie spectators and their encounters with exotic animals’, European Review of History 17:2 (2010), pp.265–286.
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© 2014 Helen Cowie
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Cowie, H. (2014). Elephants in the High Street. In: Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384447_4
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