The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie

“The Queen’s Ass”: The Cultural Life of Queen Charlotte’s Zebra in Georgian Britain

Chr istopher Plumb “The Queen’s Ass” The Cultural Life of Queen Charlotte’s Zebra in Georgian Britain S o John Watkins’s (1786–1831) biography of Queen Charlotte, after a particularly unctuous and sugared account of the late queen’s domestic happiness and patronage of charitable institutions , dithered around the matter of the “Queen’s Ass.” Few in GeorgianBritainwereasrestrainedandwouldhave denied themselves asmirk at Watkins’s fastidiousness.1 Queen Charlotte was associated with two living zebra in her lifetime, and they became a significant public representation of her character and that of her son in British culture.2 These two zebra had a material history as they shifted between exhibitionary contexts as well as between life and death. In the “afterlife,” too, these zebra became a source of humor and satire as they became Hanoverian mascots. If the zebra that grazed at Buckingham House were ripe fodder for satirical commentary, they were also good for thinking about Enlightenment “improvement.” Moreover, as the queen’s zebra moved between different sites and practitioners—to showmen , anatomists, museums, and anatomical collections—the cultural life or influence of the zebra was diffuse and enduring. The zebra is a good candidate for understanding the symbolic potential and cultural significance of It may seem ludicrous to close this chapter after so touching a narrative, with an exhibition of animals, but biography is necessarily mixed, and we must take our transitions according to the order of time, without considering the description of the events. Among other presents which were made to Her Majesty, a female zebra attracted most notice and excited considerable amusement.—John Watkins, Memoirs of Her Most Excellent Majesty Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Great Britain 18 | christopher plumb exotic animals in the eighteenth century.3 Exotic animals acquired particularly strong political symbolism in matters of monarchy, and these associations were generated and circulated by public representations that foregrounded humor, satire, sexuality, luxury, and fashion. The Hanoverians had a familial association with striped equids before the arrival of Queen Charlotte’s first zebra in 1762. Frederick Louis (1717–1751), the Prince of Wales, had kept both a male and female zebra at Kew in the late 1740s and early 1750s. These zebra were described with accompanying colored plates in George Edwards’s Gleanings of Natural History (1758), both drawn “from the living animal” at Kew and a “stuffed skin” at the Royal College of Physicians, London.4 Frederick’s daughter-in-law Charlotte and spendthrift grandson, Prince George Augustus Frederick (1762–1830), would later become especially associated with the zebra in public life. The charisma of the queen’s zebra in Georgian Britain, though a “ludicrous ” closing vignette in the first chapter of Watkins’s biography, is at the very heart of this essay as a cultural biography of the zebra. This zebra narrative , like the monochrome appearance of a striped equid, is structured into two distinct “stripes”: first, the charisma of the zebra in Georgian humor; and second, the treatment of the zebra in natural histories as a principal character in Enlightenment discourses concerned with dominion over nature and “improvement .” These particular stripes are indeed permeable because culture is, of course, not stark and variegated; it was quite possible to think about the queen’s zebra with both registers in mind. Unlike the animal afterlives discussed in other essays in this volume, this biography is not primarily one of a singular animal. Instead, it is an eighteenth-century zebra with a hybridized pedigree: a composite of two different female zebra associated with Queen Charlotte, a male and female zebra belonging to Lord Clive and later dissected by John Hunter, as well as a zebra stolen from the king of Spain by privateers. The first section of this essay is particularly concerned with Queen Charlotte’s two zebra and their charismatic place in Georgian culture as the “Queen’s Ass.” The second half is a broader cultural history of the zebra in eighteenth-century Britain, utilizing the zebra hybrid breeding experiment of Lord Clive and the character of Queen Charlotte’s zebra in natural histories as case studies in wider Enlightenment discussion on naturalization and improvement. The separate “stripes” were closely related in Georgian Britain as the charisma and celebrity of the queen’s zebra intersected with political “The Queen’s Ass” | 19 critique and contemplation on the manipulation and tractability of nature. Georgian readers and spectators were aware of the multifarious and simultaneously...