Reading menageries: using eighteenth-century print sources to historicise the sensorium of menagerie spectators and their encounters with exotic animals

Abstract

Histories of exotic animal collection and display in Britain during the long eighteenth century have not been conventionally concerned with the sensory or bodily experiences of menagerie spectators. Olfactory, haptic and aural impressions – as well as the affective responses of laughter, disgust, anger and sympathy, are conspicuously absent in attempts to historicise animal collections. This paper principally argues that these often historically intangible and transient sensory experiences with animals were culturally significant acts or readings that produced meaning. To understand how spectators utilised their senses as an interpretive tool in reading menageries the article draws upon eighteenth-century understandings of the senses and bodily comfort. The manipulation of exotic animal bodies in menageries during the long eighteenth century had significant implications for British spectators. It is argued that their specific notions of Britishness in relationship to these captive animals from foreign climes articulated elite cultural notions of gender, climate and national character. In writing a sensory history of exotic animals in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain the author contextualises the reading of contemporary print material with the concomitant experience of the material animals to which this print matter referred. What emerges is a reminder that the act of reading should not be isolated from the production of knowledge through other embodied experiences since such a dichotomy is arguably problematic for historians.

Keywords:

• menagerie
• eighteenth century
• exotic
• animal studies
• sensory history
• spectator
• catalogue
• natural history
• animal merchant
• museum
• visitor
• printed ephemera
• London
• captivity
• representation
• zoological garden
• climate
• reading
• panorama
• Britain

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the doctoral supervision and encouragement of Dr Samuel Alberti and Prof. John Pickstone, as well as the financial assistance of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council as a recipient of a doctoral studentship award. He is also grateful for the constructive comments of the two anonymous referees who read this paper in an earlier form.

Notes

 1. Silliman, Journal of Travels, 106.

 2. In Diana Donald's recent Picturing Animals some attention is given to the affective and sensory relationship between women and birds in eighteenth-century British culture. However, little attention is given to the experience of menagerie spectators in this period. Louise Robbins, in Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots, gives greater attention to sensory engagements with exotic animals. Donald, Picturing Animals in Britain 1750–1850; and Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

 3. Smith, Sensory History: An Introduction. Drobnick, The Smell Culture Reader. Howes, Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Classen et al., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell.

 4. Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum”. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities & Early Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America. With particular reference to embodiment and experience in the eighteenth century see the workshop reader for the Sixth Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop at Indiana University; Sensing and Feeling: The Embodiment of Experience in the Eighteenth Century, 2007.

 5. Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England. Rivers, Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-century England: New Essays. Mullan and Reid, eds, Eighteenth-century Popular Culture: A Selection.

 6. Gregory, The Economy of Nature, 414.

 7. Barbara, and Perliss, Invisible Architecture: Experiencing Places through the Sense of Smell.

 8. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort, 292.

 9. Beilby, Quadrupeds, 245.

10. Mavor, Natural History, 89.

11. Advertisement and News Column: Dromedary and Camel, January 26, 1758, Lysons Collection, Microfilm MC20452 British Library (frames: 9 and 8e).

12. Advertisement and News Column: Dromedary and Camel, January 26, 1758, Lysons Collection, Microfilm MC20452 British Library (frames: 9 and 8e).

13. Advertisement : A Live Boos Potamus, or the River Cow of Egypt, from the Banks of the Nile, a species of the Hippopotamus, Lysons Collection, Microfilm MC20452 British Library (frame: 26).

14. Bennett, Zoological Society Delineated, 64.

15. Bennett, Zoological Society Delineated, 57.

16. Letter from Susan Burney to her sister Susan Burney (1778) cited in Altick, The Shows of London, 29.

17. Evelyn, Diary of John Evelyn, 265.

18. Braunschnedier, Lady and the Lapdog, 31–48.

19. To a Lady on Her Parrot. The Festival of Love; or a collection of warm yet elegant poems, 29.

20. Tague, Dead Pets, 289–306.

21. The Torpedo, a poem to the Electrical Eel Addressed to Mr Hunter , Surgeon.

22. Hayes, Portraits, 38.

23. Hayes, Portraits, 4.

24. Hayes, Portraits, 3.

25. Woodfall's Register . Issue 630, London, April 2, 1791.

26. Church, Quadrupeds, 672.

27. Pictet, Voyage de trois mois, 284. The translation cited in this paper is my own.

28. For a full discussion of the kangaroo in eighteenth-century Britain see Plumb, “‘In fact, one cannot see it without without laughing’: the spectacle of the kangaroo in London 1770–1830.”

29. Silliman, Journal of Travels, 51.

30. Orpen, Anecdotes. London, 432–4.

31. Orpen, Anecdotes, 413–15.

32. Poliquin, Stubborn Clod, 216.

33. For more on English national identity, elites, and landscape gardening see Richardson, The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden. Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth-Century. Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England.

34. Golinski, Climate of Enlightenment, 138.

35. Cheyne and Porter, George Cheyne: The English Malady.

36. Contary to the protestations of some physicians the beef eating epitomised by ‘John Bull’ became an important figurative representation of solid Englishness in the eighteenth century. See Rogers, Beef and Liberty.

37. White, Selbourne, 80.

38. Stukeley, Spleen, 91.

39. Griffiths, Monthly Review, 61.

40. Bennett, Zoological Society Delineated, 208.

41. Bennett, Zoological Society Delineated, 226.

42. Fennel, Menageries, 20.

43. The New Monthly Magazine and Universal Register . London: Colburn, January–June 1816, 211.

44. Ward, Natural History, 91.

45. Sun Issue 1846, London, 23 August, 1798.

46. Observer Issue 428, London, March 2, 1800.

47. The London Packet Issue 4572, London, January 24, 1800.

48. Bullock, London Museum and Pantherion, 1813.

49. For more on Bullock's panorama see Pearce, “William Bullock: inventing a visual language of objects,” 15–27.

50. Bullock, A Companion to the London Museum and Pantherion, 108.

51. For a well-illustrated and detailed account of touring menageries in continental Europe during the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century see Rieke-Müller and Dittrich, Untervegs mit wilden Tieren: Wandermenagerien zwischen Belehrung und Kommerz 1750–1850.

52. Jackson's Oxford Journal , 23 January 1779 (Bodleian N.G.G. Oxon a.4).

53. This is a very scarce printed tract and it seems that perhaps only two are extant in institutional collections. There is, however, a copy in the Huntington Library, California but the copy in the National Library of Australia is ‘missing from the shelves’ and so of indeterminate status. The Huntington Library copy is inscribed ‘Thomas Stewardson’ on the title page and has an illustration cut away from pages 17 and 18. Pidcock, The History, and anatomical description of a cassowar, from the Isle of Java, in the East-Indes.

54. See assorted advertisements by Pidcock in Jackson's Oxford Journal for January 30, 1779, February 6, 1779, and February 13, 1779 (Bodleian N.G.G. Oxon a.4).

55. Burt, Delineation of curious foreign beasts and birds which are to be seen alive at the great room over Exeter Change, and at the Lyceum. Garner, A Brief Description of the Principal Foreign Animals and Birds exhibiting now over Exeter Change. Bingley, Animal Biography or Popular Zoology, Vol. 3.

56. Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, 2006. Rivers, ed., Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays. Mullan and Reid, eds, Eighteenth-century Popular Culture: A Selection.

57. Adams's Weekly Courant , March 21, 1780 and May 2, 1780.

58. The first mention of Gilbert Pidcock's cassowary appears in London's Daily Advertiser on February 23, 1778 when she was on display at the Golden Horse on Oxford Street. Since Pidcock's authored history of the cassowary was published in 1778 it would be reasonable to suggest that he first acquired the cassowary in that year or shortly beforehand.

59. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris, 184–5. Meisen, Die Charakterisierung der Tiere in Buffons Histoire naturelle.

60. Ward, Natural History, 57.