Abstract
On Monday 1 November 1841 a singular convoy wended its way through the outskirts of Ipswich. The weather that day was inclement, partaking ‘fully of the characteristics of November’. This did not discourage the stalwart inhabitants of the town from venturing out to witness the procession, however, for despite the fog and continuous rainfall ‘the lower part of the Woodbridge Road was lined with spectators’, all jostling to catch a glimpse of the strangers in their midst. The wait seemed to drag as the minutes ticked by and the rain intensified, but, at length, the crowd’s patience was rewarded. Around Scrivener’s Corner came a stocky, self-possessed foreigner, driving a carriage drawn by six horses, a ‘finer stud’, which ‘never before were seen in this town’. Behind this young maestro snaked ‘a train of caravans, each drawn by four horses’, and, bringing up the rear, ‘a first rate band’ which serenaded the assembled spectators with a series of rousing airs and marches. All that was wanting to render this impressive cavalcade complete was the collection’s ‘stupendous and beautiful elephant’, which, though present in the town, had been obliged to walk from neighbouring Woodbridge during the previous night in order avoid frightening the local horses — a journey it accomplished in less than an hour.
Van Amburgh had one of his fingers bitten off on Tuesday last at Falmouth, by the lion. He could not perform the following day. Let him beware his head. (Preston Chronicle, 13 August 1842)
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Notes
O.J. Ferguson, A Brief Biographical Sketch of I.A. Van Amburgh (New York: Samuel Booth, 1860), p.12.
Hunting was disparaged in Colonial America, where the Puritans associated it with ‘unconverted aristocrats and savage Indians’, but became respectable during the Revolution, when freedom-loving frontiersmen symbolised the wider cause of opposition to British tyranny. In the nineteenth century, hunting came to be seen as good for the physical and moral development of an increasingly urbanised nation. See Daniel Justin Herman, ‘From Farmers to Hunters: Cultural Evolution in the Nineteenth-Century United States’ in Kathleen Kete (ed.), A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (Oxford: Berg, 2007), pp.47–71.
Morning Chronicle, 4 December 1829. For a wider discussion of the changing representations of the East in nineteenth-century British theatre, see Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage, p.95; and John MacKenzie, ‘Empire and Metropolitan Culture’ in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.275–277.
Marius Kwint, ‘The Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England’ in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002), p.53; Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, p.109.
Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage, pp.101–102. See also Bernth Lindfors (ed.), Africans on Stage: Studies in Ethnologial Show Business (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1999), especially Z.S. Strother, ‘Display of the body Hottentot’, pp.1–61, and Bernth Lindfors, ‘Charles Dickens and the Zulus’, pp.62–80.
John Turner, ‘Pablo Fanque, Black Circus Proprietor’, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (ed.), Black Victorians, Black Victoriana (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p.21.
Leila Koivunen, Visualising Africa in Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts (London: Routledge, 2008).
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© 2014 Helen Cowie
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Cowie, H. (2014). In the Lions’ Den. In: Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137384447_9
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