London Zoo and the Victorians 1828–1859 by Takashi Ito (review)

The zoo in Regent’s Park, London, is no longer what once it was, and indeed it has never been quite as it has announced itself. From Sir Stamford Raffles’s 1825 Prospectus for the institution, which looked toward “general advancement of Zoological Science” via a collection of animals to be “introduced and domesticated in this country,” the zoo has understood itself in high-minded terms. Yet as Takashi Ito notes, perhaps the most remarkable feature of the zoo is that “it has offered entertainment … continuously, in Regent’s Park, from 1828 up to the present day” (5, emphasis added). The zoo’s current mission “to promote and advance the worldwide conservation of animals and their habitats” remains in tension with its popular role as an urban amusement, but it also reverses geopolitical valence from Raffles’s centripetal vision—which gathered zoological exotica from the margins of the world to London—to a more centrifugal approach in the twenty-first century. Now the zoo looks outward from London to “worldwide conservation” and extends its view to “animals and their habitats” (“About the Zoological Society of London,” www.zsl.org/about-us, emphasis added).

Ito notes that from the very first, “the London Zoo had a unique capacity both to evoke and receive different and sometimes competing ideas” (169). The task of the historian of the zoo consequently must be not only to chronicle the zoo’s activities, but to help sift those ideas and interpret the zoo’s meanings—reading it sometimes against the grain of its own explicit positions and records. For the past thirty years or more, treatments of the zoo in the nineteenth century have been shaped by interpretive frameworks of those such as Richard Altick and Harriet Ritvo, and it is with such frameworks that Ito takes issue in this closely considered study. Ito seeks to lift the zoo out of its established traditions of reception to isolate several questions: about science and popular zoology, about the ways in which audiences and spectators constituted a new public in the urban environment, and about the role of imperial vectors in the zoo.

The monograph begins with the zoo’s construction in 1828 and its first reception in the periodical press and proceeds chronologically. The first two chapters cover the zoo’s initial decade, its urban architecture and conditions of animal display, and the networks by means of which the zoo procured its animal subjects. The third chapter pivots to the question of the public—a novel entity that in its self-evident heterogeneity gave rise to distinct anxieties at the zoo. The fourth chapter focuses on a contrast between the zoo’s early Victorian existence, when a scientifically controlled Society struggled to make ends meet, and the period from 1847 to 1859, during which the commercial necessities for sustaining operations took precedence over scientific inquiry. The fifth chapter explores the unhappy history of acclimatization in the Zoological Society in the late 1850s, describing efforts to assimilate exotic beasts to British climes (particularly Himalayan birds that perished during their passage from Indian hill stations to coastal ports for conveyance to London).

London Zoo and the Victorians 1828–1859 offers a fine-grained history of the early years of the Society and its gardens, and with its deep dive into source material it represents an essential resource for zoo scholars. It offers a rich bibliography and is well illustrated, with a number of colored images and an appendix of fascinating figures showing fluctuations in attendance and receipts, including a remarkable increase in admissions to the zoo in the year of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park (1851). The care with which Ito handles details such as the Society’s finances offers, for instance, a corrective to Altick’s characterization in The Shows of London (1978) of a zoo “subsidized by a well-heeled society, while the Surrey [Zoological Gardens] depended wholly” on gate receipts (33). Ito’s work...