London Zoo and the Victorians, 1828-1859

Abstract

<p>In 1836, Leigh Hunt recorded for the readers of the <i>New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal</i> his experience of feeding a bear at London's Zoological Gardens: "It is curious to find one's-self (literally) hand and glove with a bear" giving him buns, and watching his face, like a schoolboy's, to see how he likes them. A reflection rises—'If it were not for those bars, perhaps he would be eating me'" (481). Protected by the bars of the bear pit, Hunt can offer a light-hearted vignette that alerts us to the politics of captivity and spectatorship that characterized the modern zoo as it emerged in the early nineteenth century. Reading pleasure in the "face" of the bear while acknowledging his potentially ferocious otherness, Hunt's reflection also highlights the emotional and sensory dimension of interspecies urban encounters enabled by the great "ark in the park".¹ George Scharf's lithograph "The Bear Pit at the London Zoo," which belonged to the widely circulated <i>Six Views of the Zoological Gardens</i> (1835), a discussion of which bookends Takashi Ito's detailed study of the Regent's Park Zoo, presents a very different perspective. Here, the wildness of the animal that Hunt perceives is subdued to an aestheticized image of human-centred fun, as a clumsy and comical bear climbs a pole in his cavernous pit to grab a bun proffered to him on a stick by a gentleman, to the amusement of the man's well-heeled human family.</p>