In 1735, the Duke of Richmond greeted with obvious disappointment the arrival of an animal sent to him by Sir Hans Sloane. The duke had been hoping for a rare sloth bear rather than “a common black bear,” since he owned five of the latter already. “I beg you would tell him not to send me any Bears, Eagles Leopards or Tygers,” he complained, “for I am overstock'd with them already” (68). The duke's frustration at receiving yet another bear demonstrates the extent to which the trade in exotic animals had grown by the early eighteenth century. Long the ultimate luxury gift from one monarch to another, the presence of exotic animals in Britain was expanded radically during the early modern period, fueled by the growth of international trade, warfare, and a growing commercial society that increasingly treated animals as consumer goods.
In Menagerie, Caroline Grigson traces the evolution of exotic animal collections in England from their origins in the royal collection at the Tower of London in the early thirteenth century through the establishment of the London Zoo and the final closure of the (much-diminished) Tower collection in 1835. Along the way she offers tantalizing glimpses into the practices whereby animals were purchased, transported, fed, and housed, as well as the way owners and onlookers responded to them. We learn, for example, that Joshua Brookes billed Sir Joseph Banks £8 14s 11d to manage the unloading, lodging, feeding, and transportation of three emus from Portsmouth harbor to the Marquis of Exeter's estate (90–91), and that the knees of George IV's giraffe became so weak that she had to be hoisted to her feet using slings and a pulley (237). At times Grigson's interest in a good story seems to overcome her scholarly skepticism, as when she recounts the tale of the actor John Phillip Kemble taking a late-night drunken ride on a rhinoceros (189–90), or informs us that an innkeeper mistook an orangutan dressed in smock and hat for a human (197–98).
Although the book spans several centuries, its real focus is on the eighteenth century, with only the first two chapters (fewer than 50 pages) addressing anything before the reign of William and Mary. Grigson's emphasis on this period reflects the high-water mark of private collections of exotic animals, when menageries were an essential part of great estates; this was also the time when families like the Brookeses, Crosses, and Politos established commercial menagerie dynasties, often engaging in hard-fought rivalry but also intermarrying, merging, and splitting off into new enterprises. As Grigson demonstrates, there was enormous cross-pollination between commercial establishments and aristocratic collectors; the commercial menageries supplied animals for aristocratic menageries, but they also often relied on selling domestic game for hunting to those same estates as a critical source of income. By the late eighteenth century, what had been a marker of royal status had become very much a business. Yet menageries were never only a business. Natural historians and other scientists relied on menageries for access to live specimens, skins, organs, and skeletons; artists were commissioned to paint the animals in real and imagined settings; and speculators dreamed of the day when camels, zebras, and other species might be domesticated in Britain for use as meat and labor.
The great strength of Menagerie lies in its comprehensive look at exotic animal collecting and the wealth of detail it amasses. It also benefits from extensive illustrations, including the luxury of fourteen full-color plates. At the same time, however, Grigson sometimes gets bogged down in that detail, to the detriment of a larger argument. While she makes a case in the brief conclusion for the importance of menageries in bringing together commerce, science, art, and culture, most of the book is descriptive rather than analytical. At times it reads like a catalogue, simply listing the various numbers and species of animals owned by particular individuals at particular times. Grigson's decision to divide chapters by monarchical reigns is also a peculiar choice. Although understandable in the very early chapters, when kings and queens had something close to a monopoly on exotic animal ownership, the organization makes much less sense in bulk of the book when, by Grigson's own account, the royal family played a much smaller role in this arena. The organization means that commercial menageries and their owners are introduced in one chapter, dropped, and then picked up again later, in a way that makes it difficult to follow their changing fortunes and the relationships among them. This is a shame, since Grigson makes the valuable point that menagerie owners and the keepers who worked for them were frequently more skilled and caring than is often acknowledged. It would be useful to be able to track more easily the networks of knowledge formed through the close community of those in the menagerie business.
Menagerie is likely to be most useful to undergraduates needing an introduction to the subject and to scholars mining it for its vivid anecdotes and extensive information about the business of menageries. Those seeking an exploration of the relationship between menageries and broader cultural trends, like that presented in Louise Roberts's study of exotic animals in eighteenth-century Paris, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots (2002) or many recent works on modern zoos, will be disappointed. Grigson even goes out of her way to insist that the London Zoo and its predecessors were not likely to have filled visitors with “visions of Empire” (265). Perhaps not (though many naturalists explicitly associated Britain's acquisition of exotic animals and its imperial power), but some attention to the broader impact and significance of menageries would have been welcome.
