The Georgian Menagerie

Plumb dives deep into the court records, estate inventories, letters, diaries, engravings and songs to reconstruct a London in which animals--particularly rare and exotic ones--played highly visible, financially significant and emotionally valuable role. From the trade in native songbirds eclipsed by the import of long-lived and vocal parrots (usually named "polly"), the exotic gifts to the Queen placed on display (zebras, elephants) and the visitors who projected feelings of pride, family loyalty and imperial dominance on them, boxing kangaroos, circus animals and eccentric country gentlemen who decided to bring tigers back from the Raj. Many of the stories are intimate, everyday encounters of ordinary people with a much-beloved pet, mined from sources that mention them obliquely in the purchases of tiny coffins, embroidered collars, ransoms for their safe return from ruffians and portraiture.

Enjoyed the tracking of enlightenment culture and economic expansion. Fascinating insight into interior lives of Georgian menagerists. Didn't enjoy reading about the exploitation of animals for medicine.

It must have been fun to live in a time when people believed in dragons. Elephants, you see "waded into pools of water when they wanted to give birth; a male would stand by the pool to guard the mother from their mortal enemy, the dragon." How marvelous.

Unfortunately, that seems like one of the only fun aspects of life in the Georgian period – especially for animals. In the "long eighteenth century", there was very little empathy or sentimentality expended on fellow human beings, much less animals (except where the sentimentality ran deeper than the Thames), and as is to be expected when reading about this period there were passages that will make your hair curl. Remember, this is the time period of John James Audubon, whose name has become synonymous with conservation, but whose paintings are all (I believe all) of birds he killed and posed.

But he was setting out his nets in the wilds of America. This book explores the impact of non-native animals introduced into Europe, and especially England – and particularly London. I wouldn't have thought there would be enough to fill a book – but I underestimated the potential. By combing through historical records of all sorts, including journals and letters, newspapers and wills and criminal files, Christopher Plumb has compiled a kind of mind-boggling array of creatures that made their way – living or dead – to and through London.

As pets, as exhibits, as subjects for study, as food, and as other commodities, exotic animals could be big business. They could also let their investors down in a big way; between the fragility of health of creatures being taken from the tropics to London and the cutthroat tactics involved in the trade, fortunes could vanish in what seemed like the blink of an elephant's eye. Some animals became fashionable – I felt a little silly at having to readjust my thinking about parrots and canaries, because obviously they are not native to England (canaries being named for their islands of origin), because they became so common. ("Dennis O'Kelly …died of gout in 1787. His obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine made more mention of his parrot than of his own life.") ("Wigton tried to prove the ownership of the bird by putting his hand in the cage and tickling the bird; the bird bit him and made a croaking sound just as Wigton said it would.")

The problem with this sort of history is that because the data being mined is scattered and fragmented and rather random, there is rarely a beginning and a middle and an end to the stories being told. Example: after a close-up encounter with, I believe, a leopard (somehow I failed to make a note of the animal), "the boy, 'in a gore of blood', was sent to Guy's Hospital for surgery." We are never told if he survived; the records might not have done so, if there ever were any.

Still, even as a collection of facts and anecdotes, this is fascinating. Gruesome in places (the fate of the elephant kept at the Exeter Exchange is horrifying) and repulsive in places (the whole section on bears. And civets. I mean – snuff? Snuff??), but always fascinating. (About the former, a quote: "the little elephant that had been coaxed up two flights of stairs and put in his den was now, some 16 years later, a big angry elephant". A full-grown elephant on the third floor of a city building. Yeah. You know that's not going to end well.)

The writing was erudite and served very well to stitch together the patchwork of the history, with the author's sense of humor cropping out in places. ("Its taste, God forbid, was described as 'subacrid' or 'bitterish'." Again, I stupidly didn't make a note on the highlight, but I have a horrible feeling that quote came from the civet section…) The only thing that stood out as less than enjoyable was the constant use of the phrase "the middling sort" in place of something like "the middle class".

I highly recommend this to writers of fiction set in the period. Where the historical record is a a bit scanty, there's endless room for the historical novelist to play.

This was received from Netgalley, free for an honest review. Thank you!

Georgian London was not the sort of place you would imagine being bitten by a kangaroo or having to worry about an elephant falling through your ceiling would be a problem, yet cases of both incidents have been recorded. In fact the Georgian “thirst for novelty and the exotic” ensured that Britain, and more specifically London, were awash with every type of creature that could survive the boat journey from America, Asia or Africa. A pub in Tower Hill housed cassowaries, hair dressers kept bears in their basements in order to use their fat for wig pomade, and fresh turtle soup was used as a political tool to impress friends and win votes. From the private menageries of the upper class, to the living rooms and shops of middle income Londoners, this book explores a world that saw the Strand echo with lion’s roars.

Using court records, wills, playbills, diaries, letters and newspaper articles Plumb fills his book with anecdotes of encounters between exotic animals and their enthralled Georgian audiences. Sometimes these stories are light hearted, such as the running joke that ladies preferred their parrot companions to actual suitors, to the more disturbing tales that describe the awful treatment and cramped enclosures these poor creatures were forced to live in. It is a fascinating and well researched insight into a rapidly expanding world that allowed its people’s voracious appetite for anything new and unusual to be sated.

I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Georgian Menagerie by Christopher Plumb is precisely what its title portends it to be. The book details the evolution of the menagerie during the long eighteenth century, and with it the changing ways in which British culture viewed animals and their relationships to them. The book is cleverly divided into a variety of sections to better sum up the changing cultural values:

Trade Ingredients Crowds (which delves into people's relationships with animals at large and contains sections such as "Bitten, Crushed and Maimed" and "Under the Knife"
Humor

For such a slim volume the book is suprisingly informative and contains a great deal of primary sources within. While the way some animals are treated is incredibly distressing (Chunee the elephant in particular) what surprised me the most was how little our behavior towards some animals has changed. There are still idiots poking and harassing animals at the zoo, still people who view animals more as property than sentient beings, and still all too many people who believe that animal parts have a strong place in medicine that will revitalize them.

The Georgian Menagerie was an eye-opening book. Say what you will about the past, but at least during that time animals weren't destroyed for attacking those who abused them.

A fascinating read, at times truly cringe worthy when reading about the horrible ways in which people treated some of the more exotic creatures in their midst.

The Georgian Menagerie is a fascinating look at the exotic world of animals in 18th Century London. The book is well written and beautiful, while equally shocking when we as the reader realize how poorly treated animals of an exotic nature were during that time period. Those interested in Georgian London or at the early days of site attractions will deeply enjoy this book.

Leave it to the Georgians to create what was basically an exotic zoo in the Tower of London and other important buildings. Have to admit I felt really bad for some of the animals and how they were treated. That said while I didn't always enjoy what I read I did find it very interesting.

A very fascinating read about exotic animals pre 19th century. For all interested in animals throughout history and their role in our world.