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NY Times Sunday Book Review, July 9 2017
Hippos and Monkeys and Chimps, Oh My! The History of the London Zoo
By CONSTANCE CASEY
THE ZOO
The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of the London Zoo: 1826-1851
By Isobel Charman
349 pp. Pegasus Books. $27.95.
As we learn from “The Zoo,” Isobel Charman’s vivid, entertaining and
scrupulously researched history of the London Zoo’s first years, the
founders’ aim was to dispel human ignorance about God’s creatures.
(Animals were firmly considered to be the work of an almighty hand; when
the zoo was conceived in 1826, it would be 33 years before Charles
Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”) For Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles,
originator of the project and president of the Zoological Society of
London, the animals were to be “objects of scientific research, not of
vulgar admiration.” Vulgar admiration was for shabby, for-profit
menageries. Raffles, an officer of the East India Company and the
founder of Singapore, acquired the land in Regent’s Park but died of a
stroke at 45 before the zoo opened in 1828.
Charman recounts the history of the zoo through seven profiles, starting
with Raffles, then moving on to an architect who cared more about the
comfort of people than of animals, a beleaguered veterinarian, a
taxidermist who fell heir to the veterinarian’s failures, Charles
Darwin, a head keeper and an aristocrat with a hippopotamus obsession.
As the story unfolds, it becomes painfully clear that the most
consequential human ignorance about God’s creatures was not knowing how
to keep them alive. The beasts illustrated the vast extent of the
British Empire, a plus for the patriotic. But those far corners of the
empire were mostly warm, while the empire’s capital was damp, dirty and
cold. After a few months of London’s sooty fog, the monkeys were
coughing like Dickens’s orphans. Post-mortems of primates showed serious
lung infections, not unlike those in Londoners of the time.
The Zoological Society’s purist vision for the zoo, riding the wave of
the post-Enlightenment passion for collecting and classifying species,
would transform by the end of the 19th century into something like the
kind of zoo we know today — a staple of school field trips, a boon for
desperate parents, a chance for city people to look a wild animal in the
eye. Amazingly, the zoo was closed to the public until 1847, nearly 20
years after its founding. (Some well-connected folk were admitted
earlier, but only if sponsored by a fellow of the Zoological Society.)
Inevitably, a paying public was necessary to support staff and decent
maintenance.
It’s the scenes of animal misery in those trying early years that remain
in the reader’s mind. These include the suicidal kangaroos battering
themselves against a fence (at least one succeeded), the elephant that
spent nine months in a ship’s dark hold traveling from India to England
by way of China, and an elderly lion poked in the eye by a woman
wielding a parasol. For her previous book, “The Great War: A Nation’s
Story,” Charman, a London-based television producer, expanded on a World
War I documentary. In this mid-19th-century story the source of tension,
as in her war narrative, is the casualties.
By far the most sympathetic of Charman’s human subjects is the
veterinarian Charles Spooner, who was in charge of animal welfare. It
was an impossible job, since hundreds of animals flowed in from the
collections of royals and aristocrats, colonial officials and ships’
captains. In his 20s, Spooner had finished only eight months in a
veterinary college. He had little in the way of medication on hand —
laudanum, purgatives and laxatives. Spooner was finally blamed for the
unacceptable death rate and fired. (The reader is gratified to read in
Charman’s epilogue that he became a professor at a veterinary college
and an early advocate for anesthesia in surgery on animals.) Spooner’s
wards’ many fatalities went to John Gould, chief animal preserver, who
was, in a cold and quiet way, accomplishing the zoo’s original
scientific goal, classifying the natural world “skin by skin.”
Charman ends with the 13th Earl of Derby, an eventual president of the
zoo who, shortly before his death, negotiated the acquisition of a hippo
from Abbas Pasha of Egypt. The 500-pound creature traveled to England on
a Peninsular and Oriental lines steamship, sloshing around in a
specially built 400-gallon iron tank. It was worth the effort: 10,000
people a day came that first summer to admire him.
Close to 90 percent of the animals now in large modern zoos are not
snatched from their native habitat; they are the offspring of other zoo
animals. They get excellent medical care and the right diet, but still
what they experience is incarceration. Even the most enthusiastic of the
London Zoo’s founders and staff could see the pathos in the animals’
situation. Lord Derby, who went to such lengths to pluck the hippo from
its home on the Nile, couldn’t bear to see the higher primates “so sad
in confinement.” Charman seems to agree. She dedicates her book to
Tommy, a London Zoo chimp who lived in one early keeper’s home, kept
warm for a while by the fireside. Soon, though, he sickened and died,
his arms around his keeper’s neck.
Constance Casey, a former New York City Parks and Recreation Department
assistant gardener, writes on natural history for Slate.
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