Travelling menageries exhibited groups of lions and/or tigers in small cages along with other animals throughout Britain during the 19th century. These travelling exhibitions began to include a demonstration of bravery by a lion keeper entering the small cage, and by the late 1830s well-known tamer acts included displays of force against lions. Isaac Van Amburgh rose to prominence among ‘brute-tamers’ for his capacity to subdue so-called wild beasts.

This chapter outlines how menagerie handling acts by male and female lion and tiger tamers developed in Britain between the 1820s and the 1860s, and considers these acts of confrontation and staged conquest in relation to 19th-century concepts of nature and fear. Early cage acts were underpinned by biblical and Roman notions that were soon enlarged with the fantasy narratives and geographical adventure stories of theatrical pantomimes.

Early exhibiting

The public exhibition of exotic animals such as big cats and elephants was intermittent until the 19th century. The Romans traded and exhibited numerous wild animals from Africa and staged them in public entertainments,1 but exhibiting remained small-scale over the ensuing centuries in Europe with most of these rare animals destined for private collections. Exotic animals remained the possession of wealthy individuals, albeit in ways that pre-empted later menageries, and they also became a type of currency in international diplomacy.2 For example, the Tower of London menagerie collection received a gift of three leopards from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II to Henry III in 1235, and this Royal Menagerie expanded through the centuries.3 The antecedents of travelling menageries in Britain might be traced back to travelling exhibits with a single exotic animal; an elephant was exhibited after 1254, and lions were touring around Britain by 1585, and another elephant toured in 1623.4 Lions, in particular, became the perennial favourites and in 1654 John Evelyn records how he watched a lion play with a lamb, and put his hand into a lion’s mouth to feel its rough tongue.5 Samuel Pepys describes several visits to lions on public display.6 Three elephants were on display in Britain in 1675, 1683 and 1720 as live exhibits but did not survive long, although their bodies remained of scientific and cultural interest, and by 1803 elephants were noted as attracting the most attention.7 Following the pattern of individual animal exhibits in Britain, a lion reached the USA in 1716, and the first tigers in 1789.8

Animal fights with domesticated animals were staged historically. Social resistance to animal entertainments and, in particular, the staging of animal fights gained momentum in 17th-century Britain when the Puritan leaders successfully campaigned to close London’s Southwark theatres, and especially those venues involving bear-baiting with dogs.9 The human theatre was eventually reinstated under licence with the restoration of the British monarchy. Staged animal fighting, too, continued and, as might be expected, with attempts to pit an exotic animal against a domesticated breed. In 1825 George Wombwell, with Wombwell’s menagerie, was aware of the fight history and gained notoriety for staging a fight between a lion and six mastiffs.10 But such animal fighting entertainments were uncommon public practices in part because of the costs of replacing exotic animals. In entertainments for the aristocracy in Europe, however, in ‘spectacular eruptions of violence . . . [t]hese fights would be played out in an abundance of brutality and blood.’11

The advent of menageries presenting exotic animals to the public in the 18th century expanded on the trade in exotic animals for the private menagerie collections in royal and aristocratic gardens.12 Public menageries in Britain that travelled and presented a variety of animals, including exotic animals, developed in conjunction with the entertainments of the fair. Gilbert Pidcock’s ‘Exhibition of Wild Beasts’ existed from 1708 as a small-scale exhibit; Pidcock travelled to fairs and through the British countryside with exotic animals in a caravan.13 Pidcock’s subsequently merged with Polito’s, and later under Edward Cross it developed into the salubrious indoor Exeter Change in a permanent venue located in the centre of London.14 By the late 18th century, travelling menageries in Britain had acquired sufficient numbers of individual exotic species to allow comparisons between members of the species. Public animal exhibition might have satisfied curiosity and provided sensory stimulation, but there was also aggression towards the animals from both exhibitors and spectators.15

The exhibiting of exotic animals to the paying public proved profitable and grew in scale. An 1805 advertisement for Polito’s read: ‘The largest travelling collection in the known world, to be seen in six safe and commodious caravans, built for the purpose and all united (which altogether provides one of the noblest views of the wonderful productions of Nature ever beheld) in the Market-place.’16 This advertisement reveals that for sixpence, members of the labouring classes and children could see the diversity of nature embodied by: ‘a noble lion’, ‘Royal Tigers’, kangaroos, panthers, a beaver, leopards, wolves, a wolverine, a ‘civet’, a ‘muscovy cat’, a ‘satyr’, an ‘ichneumon’, a possum, a ‘wanderoo and upwards of fifty other quadrupeds’. Wealthier spectators were charged a shilling.

The growth of 18th-century trade networks and 19th-century colonial land acquisition facilitated the expansion of the range of animals on display. As Harriet Ritvo explains, animal trading developed within the pattern of Britain’s extension of imperialist control of the colonies in Africa and Asia and followed the trade routes.17 Since some animals, like lions and tigers, did breed in captivity, there were species-specific circumstances that should be noted in this ongoing process of menagerie expansion. The trading and exhibiting of live animals involved financial resources, and exotic animals came to be valued according to scarcity and the cost of their acquisition.

The number of travelling menageries in Britain expanded in the early 19th century with George Wombwell starting to tour Wombwell’s menagerie from 1805, in competition with, for example, Ballard’s, Atkins’ and Hilton’s.18 Wombwell’s descendants would eventually operate three touring menageries with female family members in charge at different times.19 Travelling menageries bought from traders; John Simons presents a history of one of London’s key trading businesses, run by Charles Jamrach and his sons, which also exhibited animals.20 Public interest in animal exhibits can also be attributed to publicity, and in Britain, a lioness who escaped from Ballard’s became famous for attacking a mail delivery horse in 1817.21 Ballard’s menagerie was at Salisbury Fair when the lioness escaped from her cage into nearby fields. At one point she was mistaken for a donkey, but later emerged on the road to attack the horse pulling the Exeter mail coach. During efforts to recapture her, she killed a menagerie dog, and the publicity surrounding the episode meant that increased numbers visited the menagerie to see the lioness. In response, Ballard raised the admission fee.

Animal exhibiting grew in response to demand, and popular interest was stimulated by publicity. A menagerie would also take advantage of an animal’s cleverness; for example, the elephant at Wombwell’s would unbolt a door. It was the larger animals that could attract the most publicity, but since even Asian elephants were still rare by the turn of the 19th century, there was a publicity contest in Newcastle to attract spectators to view Atkins’ living elephant versus Wombwell’s dead one. Apparently Wombwell’s dead elephant attracted larger crowds.22

In a significant historical development, wild animal displays expanded in longstanding public leisure garden attractions, and London’s Zoological Society in Regent Park, which included animals from the Royal Tower menagerie, opened its collection to the public after 1827.23 David Hancocks explains that animal exhibiting catered for increased numbers of the ‘idly curious’, at a time when untamed nature was acquiring increased value.24 Private and public collections were understood to provide opportunities for scientific observation of exotic animals, in line with the 18th-century pursuit of knowledge. Zoological curiosity corresponded with progressive social change and even political upheaval. Walter Putnam explains that in the turmoil of political change in France, the two Indian elephants in the French royal family menagerie became ‘objects of immense scientific and public curiosity’ for the citizenry within the new republic because they ‘served to measure the contours of the geographic world’.25

As the numbers expanded, exhibited animals became integral to displays of nature within the wider social practices of leisure and travel and were often framed by convoluted anthropomorphic emotions. An English visitor in Paris in 1814 and 1817, who twice visited the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, noted seeing living lions, an elephant and Monsieur Martin Brown, the bear.26 The personified profile of the bear was raised after he was accused of murder in 1820 when a man who fell into the bear pit was killed. Although this was not the first death, there was an investigation to alleviate public anxieties, popularly satirised as a trial in which a lion and other animals presided in judgement. It was the possibility that the victim was eaten by the bear that aroused public fears of cannibalism arising from Martin’s anthropomorphised identity, but that event also coincided with social unease about wider events in the French colonies, including slave uprisings. Paula Young Lee finds that the satirical trial defended the bear with rhetoric comparable to that used in defence of human insurgents, and the prevailing counter discourse was that ‘nature’ needed to be displayed in ways that reflected all its divisions.27 Physical barriers in menageries also needed to reflect beliefs about the differences between species in nature.

The problems of containment and control did inhibit menagerie expansion and this was most apparent with the travelling circus. Circus managers recognised the value of exotic animal attractions for decades before these attractions could be routinely integrated into each performance in the circus ring program. For example, a zebra was first walked around the perimeter of Astley’s Circus ring in 1780, although zebras did not seem to appear again until 1832.28 Circus was dominated by acts with horses, and a small range of menagerie cage exhibits did accompany some circuses from the 1840s. Circus was invented by Philip Astley and, for 100 years after 1768, despite increasingly complex human acrobatic feats, clowning and rope acts, the program in the circus ring was principally a display of equestrian prowess with the rider’s mastery and acrobatic skills impressing spectators accustomed to horses and horseriding. Astley’s was licensed to present equestrian shows and had both male and female riders – clown horse acts were particularly popular.29 Under Andrew Ducrow’s management, Astley’s long evening programs with human acrobatic interludes and rope-dancing acts expanded the pantomimes to include spectacular melodramas expressly written to feature groups of fast-moving horses, often in war re-enactments (see Chapter 2). Some early British and European circus programs included domesticated animals from street, fair and garden performances,30 and these were added to an evening’s entertainment in the interludes between the appearances of the horses. Dogs performed from the earliest years, and trained farm animals like pigs, cows, geese, rams and goats were added periodically – there was a ‘learned’ pig act at Astley’s by 1784.31 Circus spectators could applaud the surprising capacity of species from familiar domestic worlds and the animals could be easily and cheaply acquired for performance.

Most bred and imported exotic animals, however, remained in the more controlled confinement of zoological gardens, public menagerie ventures and private collections. The latter included those commonly kept by scientists in the 19th century. For example, in the mid-century, as a surgical student at Oxford University, Frank Buckland kept a private menagerie of living specimens including a bear together with his dead zoological specimens; later he worked in the natural sciences.32 An animal in a public menagerie was usually billed as being from a general geographical region and, because the public associated exotic species with faraway places, a visit to see an animal became like encountering a foreign world. A kangaroo from the Botany Bay colony (not yet unified with the other colonies as Australia) was first exhibited for a costly one shilling entry fee in London’s Haymarket in 1791, to a curious public who had previously only seen the elfin-like image first drawn by Sydney Parkinson and copied by George Stubbs. Live kangaroos would subsequently become common in private and public menageries, widely recognised as harmless.33 In the first decades of the 19th century, England exported its convict prisoners to the Australian colonies, and imported fauna curiosities.34

Wombwell’s became the best known of the travelling public menageries in Britain, and by 1840 the scale of exhibited captive animals was extensive. The public promenaded at their own pace amid the exhibited 13 lions, lionesses with cubs, eight tigers and one tigress and cubs, leopards, a puma, a jaguar, a panther, an ocelot, a sloth, bears, striped and spotted hyenas, wolves and jackals.35 The bears included a polar bear and black and brown bears and there were three elephants, a rhinoceros, white antelope and three giraffes transported from northern Africa by Monsieur Reboulet. The giraffes were the most recent acquisition and were among the first of their kind to appear in a menagerie.

Touring public menageries provided extensive opportunities to view exotic animals and, like other entertainments, stimulated imaginative responses. As Edward Ziter explains about 19th-century entertainment spectacles, these popularised a geographical imagination with their implicit power relations.36 Such imagining was enhanced by the sight of exhibited exotic animals.

Handling feats and fights

In 1825 an unnamed keeper at Atkins’ Royal Menagerie in Britain entered a partitioned cage which held a lion and tigress and their offspring and interacted with them.37 William Hone observes how:

This feat was subsequently claimed for Isaac Van Amburgh, clearly not the first handler to undertake it.39 Next the Atkins’ keeper had the tigress jump numerous times through a two-foot (61 cm) diameter hoop. After some perseverance, the lion reluctantly followed. At the end of the act, the keeper lay on the floor sandwiched between both animals.40 Regardless of moments of playful interaction and the act of pretending to sleep designed to display the keeper’s compatibility with the lion and tiger, from the earliest menagerie acts, there was physical coercion with varying degrees of force used to bodily move lions and tigers. Pushing and handling came to typify menagerie human–animal big cat acts and underpinned the progression towards compliance and tameness by the end of the act.

Hone writes that the temperament of the tiger is ‘fierce’, ‘cruel’ and that he or she often reacts without a reason and is a species capable of ‘uniform rage, a blind fury’.41 The whole species was judged as hostile, and comparisons between leopards, lions and tigers were indicative of a 19th-century tendency to classification. The comparative scarcity of elephants in touring menageries in the first part of the 19th century was apparent in Hone’s comment that Atkins claimed to have the only elephant on tour at that time.

The record of which handler was first to undertake taming and basic stunts in the menagerie cage or den was complicated by publicity that routinely laid claim to presenting a ‘first’. The keeper from Atkins’ was entering the cage in 1825 and possibly handling the lion’s jaws, although Frank Bostock credits George Wombwell with the idea of putting on display two sick cubs alongside the keeper who nursed them to health. Wombwell had the keeper sitting with the cubs, billing him as a ‘lion-tamer’.42 Fifty years later there was acknowledgement of an unnamed Wombwell’s keeper in the 1820s to 1830s who sat like a rider on a lion’s back and opened the animal’s mouth.43 As a boy in the mid-1830s in Britain, Thomas Frost remembers seeing the Wombwell’s menagerie keeper, Manchester Jack, enter the lion, Nero’s, cage ‘and sit on the animal’s back, open his mouth’.44 In emulation of the devout Daniel, who emerged unscathed after a night spent in the lions’ cave or den, menagerie acts represented a triumph of faith over fear.45 ‘Den’ was the widely used 19th-century word for ‘cage’ in the menagerie, providing direct biblical associations with the early Christian era in Rome, and the stories of Daniel and Androcles. But despite the legitimacy acquired through this biblical framing, even the earliest of acts with wild animals attracted critics. A journalistic account found Winney’s act at Atkins’ with his poses as Daniel and Hercules ‘passing strange’ and in poor taste.46 Spectator responses were mixed from the outset.

There was also a quite different account of Wombwell’s first fighting act. George Wombwell presented a fight between a lion and six mastiffs at Wombwell’s menagerie – no keeper was mentioned. George had been told a story about lion and dog fights in the Tower of London during the reign of King James I, and he had staged a dog and lion fight in Warwick on 26 July 1825.47 In a report recalled some years later, George Wombwell’s business was poor due to competition from an increased number of menageries. George usually exhibited two lions, younger Wallace and older Nero, and he decided to put the placid Wallace on show together with six mastiff dogs for an entry price ranging from one to five guineas. All seats were sold but the fight disappointed spectators because, while the lion would scratch a dog and take a lump of skin, and the dogs looked like they would attack the lion, the performance did not become a ‘serious fight’.48 George, who made a sizable amount of money, claimed that he could not make them fight. It seems likely that this lion-baiting did take place because it was recalled as part of the Wombwell family annals. Edward Bostock writes disingenuously in later years: ‘Such a fight, of course, would not be allowed in these enlightened times, but in those days all sorts of animal fights were encouraged, and heavy stakes were lost and won on the results’.49 Certainly these ‘wicked sports’, such as fights with domesticated animals, were prohibited by British law in 1835 and subsequently in other countries.50 As Edward indicated, the fighting act between animals was also a gambling act.

Human–animal proximity and tamer handling also carried the misconception of compatibility between humans and wild animals. Menagerie demonstrations by tamers were periodically integrated into pantomime spectacles in the circus and the theatre from the 1830s and within narratives in which even friendship between humans and lions was possible in a faraway land. The circumstances of interaction in a theatricalised spectacle were more nuanced than that of the menagerie cage act, and therefore possibly more misleading regarding human–animal relations. Henri Martin, who made menagerie appearances in Europe from the 1820s, was an equestrian who acquired a menagerie through marriage, and he developed a reputation even among naturalists for his zoological study of animals.51 At the Cirque Olympique in 1831, Martin performed behind a wire screen in a mimed melodrama with an orientalist narrative written especially for his group of lions. In Hyder Ali, or the lions of Mysore, he played the nabob Sadhusing persecuted by sultan Hyder Ali. In the show, Martin’s character was eventually imprisoned in the lions’ cage, and he exhibited his ease with the lions by appearing to lie down to sleep with them in a forest. This forest was home to llamas, a buffalo, a monkey, two boa constrictors and a kangaroo gathered together in a fantasy of a geographical place.52 After Martin appeared at the Drury Lane theatre in 1831 in a version of this pantomime, the keeper Winney from Atkins’ emulated the character by appearing at Astley’s in 1832 billed as Zoomkantorah from India.53 Presumably this was intended to theatrically heighten the lions, now-familiar hoop-jumping display in the den, and such acts set precedents for orientalist costumes in lion and tiger acts. By the mid-1830s, Martin, who had pioneered exotic animal acts in mainland Europe, and Van Amburgh, who had done the same in the USA and Britain, had established reputations as the leading tamers, known as ‘lion kings’ in the UK and ‘lion tamers’ in the USA.

‘Lion kings’ proved particularly popular attractions and were soon widely copied, coming to dominate travelling menageries by the mid-19th century. The act in the cage revealed the human performer gaining control over the lion, and the title of ‘king’ or ‘lord’ was promoted for the human trainer although, in species hierarchies, the lion with his majestic mane and control of the pride was also considered a king among animals. While the handling methods were highly questionable, and possibly exaggerated in contemporary accounts, nonetheless an impression of force was a deliberate strategy to enhance the theatrical spectacle. One performer came to dominate lion king handling acts – Isaac Van Amburgh.

Lion king

Isaac A Van Amburgh rose to prominence among 19th-century menagerie performers first in the USA, and then in Britain. The claims about his achievements, however, probably exaggerated his feats. For example, ‘[s]ince the year 1834, the public of both hemispheres has looked upon him as the greatest lion-tamer in the world.’54 Whether or not he was ‘the greatest’, Van Amburgh was certainly the best known of the tamers not least because he was a clever showman and an astute business manager who leased his performance spaces including theatres. Significantly, Van Amburgh pandered to audience interest in confrontation and yet encouraged impressions of his mysterious effect on animals. He was probably entering cages with a mix of lions, tigers and leopards in the USA by 1833, and in Britain at Astley’s by 1838, where he acquired the label of the ‘American Lion King’. His confrontational act demonstrated the ‘great moral drama of nature’.55 In doing so, however, it implicitly confirmed the triumph of humankind over nature.

While entry to the cage aroused spectators’ fear for the handler’s safety, there was also some compassion expressed for the animals since they were handled and appeared to some spectators to be physically subdued by Van Amburgh in his act. His theatrical style and accompanying rhetoric reinforced his capacity to tame animals, a process that his act demonstrated in front of spectators, and he became much better known than a reported seven predecessors who pioneered this type of act and were probably milder in their handling techniques. Apparently Van Amburgh’s performance involved displays of aggressive bravado to confirm his dominance of the animals and it was his reputation for forceful action that came to typify human–lion exhibitions. His taming act staged an impression of confrontation, followed by animal submission.

Claims that reiterated the effect of Van Amburgh’s mere presence on wild animals and on spectators were contradicted by other accounts of his striking and hitting animals during the act. A claim that Van Amburgh tamed animals through his magnetic presence seemed to spread as his reputation grew, and it was possibly promoted to offset criticism. The effectiveness of Van Amburgh’s taming was vividly illustrated through the act’s use of a lamb. In one drawing, Van Amburgh confronts a lion, and in another he kneels, his arm raised in a triumphant gesture, with a child standing and straddling his knee beside the prone body of a lion, while Van Amburgh holds a lamb, an unmistakable symbol of innocence.56 The proximity of these figures that were emblematic of vulnerability confirmed that the wild animal had been rendered harmless.

Born in July 1811, Van Amburgh started out in the early 1820s as a boy attendant who cleaned the cages of a travelling menagerie.57 The contemporary biographical details about how Van Amburgh came to work with lions and tigers vary, and it is likely that these accounts were embellished after Van Amburgh became well known. RH Horne, writing as Ephraim Watts, met with Van Amburgh and claims that he ‘distinguished himself’ after a head keeper was killed when trying to move a lioness into another cage, and Van Amburgh ‘offered to tame her spirit’ and entered her cage ‘with his crow-bar’.58 The crowbar remained a prop in his act.

Watts’ description of Van Amburgh’s physique is intriguing. He was five foot ten-and-a-half inches (1.79 m) and handsome, although his body was ‘steep-looking’, ‘narrow-sided’, ‘long-backed’ and, while he was exceptionally strong, he was not muscular.59 In contradiction, however, was the admiration expressed by another observer for his ‘Herculean caste’ and ‘extraordinary muscle power’.60 Van Amburgh’s physique attracted interest, as if the lion king was on show among the animal bodies. His facial features were ‘especially delicate, almost female’ with ‘extraordinary’ eyes: ‘the balls project exceedingly, and it seems as if he could look all round him without turning his head’ but, while ‘bright’ and ‘shining’, they were also ‘cold, whitish’ as if like ‘a dead ghost’s’.61 Watts claims that it was the power of Van Amburgh’s eyes which made wild beasts fear him – rather than his crowbar.

Watts’ account also states that Van Amburgh’s grandfather was a Native American named ‘Great King of the Forests’, and that his mother dreamt of roaring beasts during her pregnancy.62 Typically 19th-century descriptions located wild animals in forests.63 Van Amburgh was described as having the power to subdue ‘man-eating’ lions and tigers through his presence. This was traced back to a childhood love of animals and naturalist study that led to his capacity to exert control over smaller animals. Apparently ‘[h]e not only tamed all those he had an opportunity of meeting a few times, but also acquired a surprising influence over them’.64 Similar comments circulated in newspapers and potentially influenced public opinion and the reception of the act, as this report reveals.65

There were approving shouts from spectators.

Contemporary comic verse engaged with public fears about his potential death, enhancing the act’s appeal. Van Amburgh was depicted as fearless when confronting the lions.

Van Amburgh was acknowledged in this stanza playing with the mouth of the lion, if not putting his head near the jaw. The satirical poem implied that the act involved a lion fighting back and a theatrical embellishment suggested the demise of Van Amburgh that was subsequently reversed when he stood up – the poetic humour claims that he had been restored to life with an ointment. Deliberately or inadvertently staged in the action, there was a Christian refrain to the tamer’s survival in a lion act.

Apparently Van Amburgh countered criticism that animal acts caused moral ruin and religious offence by quoting Genesis about how humans are accorded dominion over other animals.68 It had a circular effect, with descriptions of animal submission in his act interpreted as almost a biblical miracle: ‘The Lion licked the hand that overcame him, and knelt at his conqueror’s feet; the Leopard fondled as playful as a domestic tabby; the Tiger rolled on his sides.’69 Ferguson continues that Van Amburgh created a tableau in which he called animals to come to him; he was ‘the proud King of the animal creation. It was a striking exhibition of love and confidence reigning where fear and power could only be supposed.’ The process of overcoming animal aggression in Van Amburgh’s act had been assumed to have been achieved through love.

While commentators were concerned to represent the capacity of animals to submit to Van Amburgh as their master, in keeping with a triumph of human love and biblical idealism, descriptions of his act hint that he used some force to keep them obedient. One reviewer specifies that Van Amburgh ‘cuffed and struck at the lion and tiger, pinched their ears, and slapped them right and left’.70 This account makes it clear that he handled the lions forcefully.

The contradictions were perpetuated in pantomimes about overcoming aggression. Van Amburgh’s act was integrated into a pantomime with confrontational associations, in contrast to Martin’s earlier pantomime with its impression of peaceful co-existence. Van Amburgh appeared at Astley’s between 27 August and 20 October 1838, dressed as a Roman, Malerius, in The brute of Pompeii, or the living lions of the jungle, in which he was cast in among lions, tigers and leopards in two cages in the arena at Pompeii.71 Malerius befriended these lions and tigers and diverted their attack. A business collaboration between Andrew Ducrow and Van Amburgh transferred this theatrical display of interspecies friendship to Drury Lane theatre but in a different incomprehensible melodrama about a hero cast among the lions and tigers. The partnership ended abruptly when, for an unknown reason, Ducrow and Van Amburgh came to blows behind the scenes.

Van Amburgh continued to present his act at Drury Lane, including in a Christmas pantomime. Early in 1839, Queen Victoria went to see it six times and made a backstage visit to watch the animals being fed, in defiance of the outrage expressed in newspapers about this type of display in a London theatre.72 Apparently on the Queen’s second visit, the Drury Lane box office took over £712, the largest amount in its history.73

There was an effort to bring together the act by Wombwell’s keeper, probably Manchester Jack, and Van Amburgh’s act to create a competitive trial of daring at Southampton.74 The contest did not eventuate, perhaps because Van Amburgh’s reputation had gained pre-eminence, and Wombwell’s was trying to gain some advantage by this association. Competition among acts was intensifying.

With regard to the staging, there were probably physical barriers or partitions between the animals in the cage, although most images do not confirm that spatial arrangement. It is likely that the barriers could be removed and reinserted at different times during the act. In an illustration of the pantomime stage arrangements in 1843, Van Amburgh is at one end of a cage and there are two lions, two leopards and a tiger at the other, suggesting that they were only close at certain moments during the act.75 In Edwin Landseer’s well-known 1847 painting, Portrait of Mr Van Amburgh as he appeared with his animals in London theatres, Van Amburgh stands forcefully centre stage with arm out, pointing, as the animals seemed to cower to avoid him (Plate 1; see also Chapter 2). The image suggests that his commanding presence alone tamed animals.

Van Amburgh’s menagerie act toured British theatre venues, and an Edinburgh review gives a more detailed account of the interaction with the animal performers:

But when a lioness snapped, Van Amburgh came closer to look at her, and apparently she shrank away. The act involved handling animals and even wrestling one, and he clearly handled the lion’s jaw. But there was minimal mention of even rudimentary tamer feats; for example, the basic trick of hoop-jumping that was performed elsewhere. This may indicate that there was a turnover of animals in Van Amburgh’s act.

A later newspaper description of Van Amburgh’s touring performance confirmed the enormous public appeal of the act and described how he put his face near to the lion’s mouth. Van Amburgh could attract 2000 spectators to a show, including ‘distinguished members’ of Oxford University.77 It was a large audience for a 19th-century provincial performance. By 1843, he displayed a giraffe, a novelty at that time, before entering the lion and tiger cages as a character, Rollo, whip in hand. He was:

The public willingly attended to be shocked. The 1843 account offers one indisputable description of Van Amburgh putting his head into the lion’s mouth, as well as pushing the animals.

The act confirmed a hierarchical arrangement of species by presenting Van Amburgh facing danger and exercising dominance, sometimes through physical handling contact with the animals. This was interpreted as a display of human courage and fearlessness and Van Amburgh was promoted as being without fear. He showed no obvious physical signs of fear and at some point in the act, possibly at the finale, a lion may have licked his hand and he may have caressed a leopard or another animal. Watts was at pains to point out that instead of being fearful of the animals, Van Amburgh ‘looks upon himself as an object for them to fear’ because they are ‘cowards at heart’, and their ‘terribleness’ can be overcome.79 Van Amburgh was accorded boldness, modesty and a ‘kind, communicative’ temperament.80 The tamer who effected submission was demonstrating largesse to a less deserving species, aggressive by inclination; the act verified the forbearance of humankind.

In a report of a conversation with Britain’s best-known military veteran, the Duke of Wellington, Van Amburgh apparently denied that he was ever afraid: ‘“The first time I am afraid, your grace,” replied the lion king, “or that I fancy my pupils are no longer afraid of me, I shall retire, I shall retire from the wild beast line.”’81 While this meeting suggested an effort to associate the nation’s leading military battle hero and a fearless lion tamer in public perception – an association with heroism often repeated in the 19th century – it also confirmed Van Amburgh’s status as the leading tamer and that the act was regarded as comparable to going into battle.

The act’s costumes conveyed historical references and alluded to the Judaeo-Christian stories that were central to the meaning of the acts. Landseer’s painting showed Van Amburgh in a simple Roman-style tunic, and other illustrations showed him in a more decorative costume suggestive of a soldier or gladiator.82 But his bare arms and legs would have conveyed some vulnerability, offsetting the impression of an invincible fighting persona. One illustration of Henri Martin with a lion shows him standing above a lion in a Roman-style tunic and about to attack, his knife hovering above the lion; in a second he wears an animal skin suggestive of a prehistoric hunter; in a third he is dressed in a white shirt and trousers.83

If a number of circus historians have claimed a performance heritage back to the Greco-Roman era for the foundational circus skills such as acrobatics and rope-walking, the 19th-century circus historian, Thomas Frost, also makes a connection between menagerie animal performances that he saw and animals in Roman spectacles.84 The association was no doubt reinforced by mid-century theatrical menagerie demonstrations like those of Van Amburgh, whose costumes and rhetoric deliberately alluded to ancient Rome, with animal fights and duels between gladiators and animals as entertainment. But menagerie cage acts were 19th-century inventions and unlike the actual fighting acts of ancient Rome, which had often ended in animal and human death.

Cage acts were theatrical presentations, and integrated into orientalist narratives about geographical exploration that had been widely presented in theatre from the late 18th century. Pictures of stories could be put on the sides of cages and later in the USA the Van Amburgh menagerie cages depicted ‘scenes, incidents and accidents in the life of Dr Livingstone, while hunting in the African deserts’.85 Van Amburgh toured Britain in 1841 in a pantomime in which he played Karfa, an Arab slave accompanying Mungo Park as he discovers the source of the Niger. In this stage production a tiger enters without a cage. ‘[T]he dramatic effect of this feline actor’s entrée is most powerful – indeed several ladies screamed’.86 Van Amburgh’s character rolls over with the tiger, saving his (Christian) master – an army officer and a naturalist – from the wild animals and Moor enemies. Karfa’s later encounters are in a den at the behest of the Moor leader; he leaves triumphant. The inclusion of wild animals in the dramatised spectacle might have been popular for its realistic effect, but with physical contact it was also sensational.

Van Amburgh’s successor and competitor at Astley’s was James [John] Carter, who followed in Van Amburgh’s wake in 1839, adopting his style but without his impact, even though Carter is depicted unusually in one illustration as bare-chested.87 Carter performed in Britain, other countries in Europe and briefly in the USA. In a ten feet square cage, he stopped fights and was the ‘master of the wildest and savage creatures’ who ‘trembled with fear at his presence’.88 He may not have instigated his own act and instead may have been groomed by George Wombwell.89 Carter was hired in 1839 by Ducrow to work with the whole menagerie in Afghan, billed as an ‘Egyptico-Hindu-Arabian Spectacle’.90 He worked on Astley’s stage behind a wire screen with horses, zebras, crocodiles, ostriches, lions, tigers and leopards, and at one point even drove a harnessed lion like a chariot horse. But Carter’s act at Astley’s was criticised because the lions and tigers seemed too tame. Maurice Willson Disher quotes critics who said that the lions did not display the ‘savageness, an uneasiness, an air of offended dignity’ or ‘growls’ to provide spectators with ‘the satisfactory feeling that the life of a fellow creature was in danger’. The public expected acts with menagerie animals to deliver confrontation, or at least a sense of excitement, and fear for human safety through risk-taking.

Carter and Van Amburgh appeared together in an orientalist theatre fantasy, Aslar and Ozines, or the lion hunters of the burning Zaara, in 1843, but not to acclaim, as the critics decried the lack of plot and poor acting of the ‘brute-tamers’.91 These pantomimes relied on vague knowledge of animals, often in a misleading association with a foreign geography. Carter worked with an animal called a ‘Brazilian tiger’, who was probably a jaguar.92 In 1848, Van Amburgh performed in Morok the beast tamer at Astley’s, in a drama based on the story of the Wandering Jew, and was billed with a ‘black tiger’ that was probably a panther.93

Van Amburgh’s crowbar and Carter’s encounters with hostile animals were possibly not indicative of all the acts of their contemporaries; Henri Martin was thought to be considerate of the animals in his act, as was Manchester Jack. Van Amburgh was understood to have used a crowbar to achieve submission and for protection, and he was also reputed to beat and to starve the lions and tigers to make them react during performance. Joanne Joys writes that it is hard to separate such accusations from promotional hype, especially as it was offset by creationist claims that the animals knelt in submission, according to religious expectations.94 Certainly tamers lay down with the animals in handling stunts. Whether they used theatrical effects to deliver an impression of forcefulness or not, they may have used ruses to make the caged animals react.95 This happened with other animals. For example, piano wires were used to lift the arms of chimpanzees tied to their seats on stage.96 An increasing number of acts involving ‘lion tamers’ meant that comparisons were made between them. A contemporary account, however, dismissed claims of ‘furious attacks’, explaining that Van Amburgh controlled the animals with commands, and ‘he has no occasion to use any peculiar violence’ or to subject even a tiger to ‘severe corporal punishment with a large horsewhip’.97 But this defence suggests persistent accusations. While the crowbar was possibly a prop and/or the protective device of last resort and the whip provided sound effects, even if the animals were accustomed to these acts, they were physically forced into position through handling that was at least intrusive and, at worst, brutal. Therefore a perception of the tamer’s special abilities belied the use of human strength.

The tamer act represented a display that was scarcely thought possible. There was disbelief that the lions did not devour the tamer, given that they had ‘power’ and the ‘physical strength’.98 A tamer act was considered extraordinary because the perception of danger induced excitement and amazement. Van Amburgh met these expectations with his heightened delivery.

It was clear, however, that Van Amburgh was a ‘shrewd and able showman’.99 He returned to the USA in 1845 and worked with the newly established Van Amburgh & Co. menagerie for the next decade, building up two touring menageries. Although he retired from presenting the act in 1853, he continued to accompany the touring show managed by Hyatt Frost.100 When Van Amburgh died on 29 November 1865 at the Sam Miller’s Hotel, Philadelphia, he was synonymous with lion acts in menagerie entertainment. Isaac Van Amburgh’s animal-handling act exemplified the taming of a fearful nature.

Fearful nature

An animal was an undifferentiated representative of a species and was framed within a human idea of an amorphous nature that needed to be ordered and in which aggressive animals threatened and yet cooperated with humans. The confrontation with lions and tigers in 19th-century menagerie acts was considered to curtail a naturally ‘fierce disposition’ so that animals were tamed.101 In the confined space of a small cage, the costumed handler posed in a tableau that emulated familiar Christian themes and historical stories or even the myth of Hercules wrestling a lion, which, in turn, legitimised the act. The elephant is not included in the Bible, giving lion acts in particular pre-eminence, and by the mid-19th century, some were incited to roar loudly, as if about to attack the human performer, accentuating his or her bravery. The reputation of the animal for fierceness attracted spectators, but the act needed to demonstrate Christian authority over the natural world.

In demonstrating the human handler’s capacity to overcome his or her fear in approaching and in handling an animal deemed physically dangerous, menagerie acts drew on pre-existing preconceptions of hostility. Yet the idea that humanity should at least give animals a sporting chance instead of staging an unfair fight was evident,102 and anti-cruelty advocates hinted at kindness to wild animals. At the height of Van Amburgh’s popularity in Britain, veterinary surgeon to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, W Youatt, recounts how school boys were told the story of a lion remembering a runaway slave who had once hidden in the lions’ den, and had extracted a thorn from his foot. The lion had been hunted and trapped and was ‘half-starved’ when he encountered the slave again. Youatt writes that:

The lion had the capacity to return kindness and to be a loyal friend. But this anecdote was recounted alongside Youatt’s stories about the loyalty of dogs, suggesting slippage in distinguishing species attributes. Youatt is explaining general principles against cruelty towards domesticated and ‘inferior animals’ and he makes an argument that their welfare and rights should come out of comparable human values in the society. He argues that humanity stands to benefit when it prohibits cruelty to animals and extends sympathy and affection, and that this cannot be fully achieved by legal means and requires public support.

Concern about the mistreatment of animals in 19th-century menageries coincided with the questioning of prevalent assumptions about nature, fear and courage. When John Stuart Mill considered the concept of nature and its cruelty in the 1850s, he discerned that an experience of wildness arose out of fear, but that this fear could be overcome through courage. While acknowledging some ambiguity in his use of terms, Mill finds that nature ‘denotes the entire system of things’ or things ‘apart from human intervention’, but that humans are inseparable from the spontaneous process of ‘nature’s physical or mental laws’, with their actions either altering or improving nature.104 Significantly, the natural world was widely understood to be cruel and harsh, full of conflict and killing. Mill explains that the human is like a particularly crafty wild animal until tamed by culture. Civilised culture brought about improvements in the behaviour of nature, including human nature.105 Mill disagrees with the view that courage, then, was considered to be part of an untamed natural state, and therefore the overcoming of the natural condition of fear was understood as a virtue. Instead he argues that courage, too, was socially produced rather than natural, and accompanying emotions were evident so that humans may be ‘naturally pugnacious, or irascible, or enthusiastic, and these passions when strongly excited may render them insensible to fear’.106 In Mill’s analysis, before the publication of Darwin on emotions, social imperatives could facilitate courageous behaviour.

Handlers in menagerie acts were probably more pugnacious than courageous. Wild animals in cages or in chains showed nature’s wildness, albeit safely contained. The conflation of animals with fearful nature allowed a menagerie handler to mimic notions of nature’s courage in humans and the imposition of order on nature. But the staging of these acts also entrenched beliefs in the lion’s and tiger’s innate aggression and extreme hostility to humans. If dominance of nature came to exemplify human progress, a menagerie act that enacted a shift from fearful confrontation to calm relations with animals confirmed the triumph of civilisation over untamed nature.

By the 1850s, the tamer entering the lion’s cage had become a standard feature of menageries, although there was disquiet over the proliferation of these acts in Britain. Accidents also meant that the worth of the exhibition was questioned. In providing useful publicity, the occasional bloody spectacle of tamers being mauled, and their offstage reputation for drinking heavily, fuelled social opposition.107 Accidents may have happened because of alcohol use by presenters, but it is also possible that some reports of injuries were exaggerated. The courage of menagerie tamers was part theatrical, since the risk of attack was promoted as part of an act’s calculated appeal. The emotional impact was contrived and crucial.

Menagerie cage acts staged familiar narratives to elicit predictable emotional responses and by presenting different species in close proximity. Alexander Bain gives a biblical example of the lion and the lamb lying peacefully together as an extreme juxtaposition resulting in the strongest emotional impact on viewers. Bain’s example also relates to menagerie acts with this combination that replicated existing symbolism and utilised social beliefs about specific species. Bain gives a further example with the use of monkeys in artificial action to create humour, although he notes that an artist working with animals could not be a zoologist or a geographer. He specifies: ‘the monkey, from its being a creature so much more filthy, mean, and groveling, and which therefore in performing human actions, presents a wider contrast of dignity and debasement’.108 In his reasoning, the greater a contrast between animals and humans, the greater the emotional effect.

In a distinctive example of animal performance, monkeys, long relegated to comedy acts, became part of acts with a more earnest tone in response to social fears in the 1860s. Trained monkeys – recognised as performers in Elizabethan England – were also part of circus equestrian acts, and were at Astley’s Circus in the 1830s, trained to ride as jockeys on horses in comic imitation of humans.109 This juxtaposition of horses and monkey jockeys was a popular performance often called a ‘Dandy Jack act’, and one claim names the monkey as Jocko.110 A widely presented circus pantomime of the time, The Brazilian ape or Jocko, however, had a human performer dressed up as Jocko the ape. In the 1860s, there was growing social anxiety that feared the animal in the human. An imitation of human behaviour in monkey performance that was not particularly comic was effected for quasi-scientific purposes and public fascination.

Jane R Goodall writes: ‘[T]heatre and performance not only provided entertainment for the widest spectrum of the public during this period, but were also a major form of general communication about topical issues’, including evolution.111 From the 1860s menagerie exhibitors opportunistically responded to social Darwinist ideas of evolution by claiming to present a living link between humans and apes. Accuracy was not at stake and there was a tightrope-walking sensation in 1869 billed, misleadingly, as a ‘gorilla monkey’.112

Yet relations with individual animals were not uniform, despite those animals being considered indicative of a generic species, and emotional bonds developed between human and animal performers. A sentimental account of a monkey trainer, desperately trying to save his beloved fellow performer who had caught a chill during winter, reveals mutual dependency as the despondent trainer becomes unable to perform or to make a living after the monkey dies.113 While a monkey riding a horse mimicked human performance and was applauded for cleverness, this routine additionally generated an artificial pattern of compatible relations between other species. Whether presented with serious or comic intent, a particular animal species was staged in extreme contrasts for theatrical effect. If human-like behaviour by monkeys denoted integration into human worlds, conversely acts with apparently fierce lions and tigers compounded notions of species distinctiveness based on emotional temperament, and confirmed humanity’s separation from a harsh and fearful nature.

Lion queen

Female tamers increased the appeal of the cage act through the fear of attacks because of their feminine vulnerability. Thomas Frost names Miss (Polly) Hilton from the Hilton’s menagerie as the first woman to enter a cage in Britain as a lion queen, appearing around the mid-1840s.114 She was part of a family menagerie business, the usual way that women became tamers at that time. Wombwell’s soon copied Hilton’s precedent, and there is a Mrs King mentioned presenting in Glasgow with Wombwell’s by 1845.115 The most well-known ‘lion queen’ was Ellen Chapman, who was performing by 1847 as Madame Pauline de Vere, probably with tigers and leopards as well as lions, in handling stunts that included opening the lion’s jaw.116 Chapman, known as Nellie, later married ‘Lord’ George Sanger, who became Britain’s leading circus entrepreneur and menagerie proprietor in the 1870s.117

The advent of women tamers in the mid-1840s in England added novelty value to the tamer act and suggests that, by then, cage demonstrations needed an additional gimmick. In the USA, Charles Wright entered a lions’ cage in 1829, and Stuart Thayer identifies women entering lions’ cages in the USA from 1848 including two who had their own acts, Mademoiselle Troppecourt and Eugenie Delarme.118 Handlers displayed fearlessness in simply entering the menagerie cages and this was complicated by women tamers, who elicited a greater degree of horrified reaction from the public. The female tamer implicitly challenged the idea that feminine fearfulness was natural.

Women tamers attracted large crowds. In Britain, Chapman’s popularity was greatly enhanced by Wombwell’s visit to the royal family at Windsor where Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort, Albert, and their household watched from a vantage point overlooking a courtyard where Chapman’s cage had been pulled up under a window. Queen Victoria waited to meet Chapman, the lion queen, who recounted that the Queen gave her a gold watch and chain, and said, ‘Oh, my dear, are you not afraid? I do hope you will not get hurt. I felt so terrified when I saw you open the lion’s mouth and put your head in its jaws.’119 If the claim of the Sanger family that Chapman did this handling feat were accurate, and given that it was not standard in tamer acts with women, it certainly would have had novelty value. Chapman replied that she was more nervous about meeting the Queen than entering the lions’ cage, to which the Queen added she would pray that Chapman did not get hurt.

Chapman quickly rose to prominence. She may have been directing the animals to move around the cage without touching them but she also did handling feats. George Sanger said that Chapman came to see his act at the Stepney Green Easter Fair in 1848 where he was performing as a conjuror dressed in what he called his ‘Hamlet costume’: a white shirt with linen cuffs, black velvet tunic and a hat with ostrich feathers. He claims: ‘I knew that Nellie was the only girl in the world for me.’120 Whatever the sequence of events and whether Sanger or Chapman first saw the other’s act in 1848, they had met when they were children as both came from travelling show families. Sanger acknowledged that when they met again in 1848 Chapman was an attractive young woman, and they talked together at length. But as an ambitious young showman, he probably noted an extra dimension that might have added to her personal appeal. She was George Wombwell’s star, earning him more than £100 a day as the lion queen.

When Chapman left Wombwell’s menagerie to marry Sanger in 1849, her cousin, Ellen Eliza Blight (also known as Helen Bright) apparently took over the position of lion queen star. A musician’s daughter, 17-year-old Blight’s career at Wombwell’s was brief. Blight died from a tiger attack 11 January 1850 at Greenwich Fair, when a tiger who had not previously shown ‘animosity’, sprang at her during an additional performance and bit into her face and throat.121 Frost heightens his description of the event with his choice of emotive language claiming that the tiger ‘exhibited some sullenness or waywardness, for which Blight imprudently struck it with a riding whip which she carried’.122 Subsequently a stuffed tiger was exhibited with a label claiming that he was the tiger who had killed Blight.

Disbelief in a female capacity for courage was revealed by an alternative version from an eyewitness claim that Blight died of ‘fright’.123 No doubt the accident increased condemnation of women handlers and the controversy meant that there were renewed efforts to ban women tamers in Britain.124 Somewhat later a circus person pondered: ‘It certainly does not seem to be a woman’s work, though I suppose it wouldn’t do to stop ’em at it, or some ladies might feel they were done out of their “rights”.’125 The appeal of the lion cage act was greatly enhanced by young female performers. Female presence also contained eroticised implications and lion queens in Europe later entered the cage with bare arms and necks.

Apparently Chapman was shocked about Blight’s death, since Blight was mauled by a tiger who had not been troublesome for Chapman. She was reported as being critical of how Blight worked with the lions and tigers, which indicates that the two women may have been appearing at Wombwell’s menageries at the same time during 1848 and 1849. Sanger recounts that Blight was repeatedly urged by Chapman not to hit the animals with the riding whip. Chapman reportedly says that Blight:

This description suggested that Chapman moved the animals around the cage by pointing, and possibly in other ways that suggested reflex actions in response to her movements: the animals moved around the cage as she came closer or reacted if she moved a whip high or low. The deliberate use of such practices was not specified elsewhere, although this insider knowledge would become central to training from the 1880s, and therefore Sanger may have recounted the earlier events informed by knowledge obtained in later years. Importantly, Sanger claimed that if the tamer did not mistreat the animals with unkindness, they would not attack. This claim elaborated on rhetoric about friendship with lions that had been present from the 1820s. It was discussed as a protective strategy. Although an ideal of kindness implies its demonstrative expression, here it was interpreted as not being physically cruel. A belief that ‘unkindness’, torment and ill-use were the main cause of attacks persisted even though accidental attacks could also be explained as a keeper’s inexperience or drinking on the job.127

Significantly, Sanger omitted mention of Chapman being clawed on her back and head, in an accident that had long-term health effects.128 Chapman’s kindly treatment towards the animals had not afforded her protection during that encounter. The evidence about the defensive benefits of kindness was highly selective.

Attitudes to animal handlers were also underpinned by preconceptions about gender identity that cut across national boundaries. Haney’s art of training animals specifies the value of kindness in training horses by using an example of a woman rider from Europe who found that temperamental Arabian horses responded to her because they had been ‘tenderly’ reared and fed by Arab women.129 There was a presumption that certain types of emotional attitudes and behaviours were more commonly expressed by women, and thus transcended even national pride.

Sanger claimed to be relieved that Chapman had given up her lion queen act when they married, although she remained a performer in Sanger’s numerous variety shows.130 In 1856, however, he added six lions to his successful equestrian circus and a troupe of performers dressed up as Native Americans to compete with the touring Howes and Cushing’s American Show. He bought the lions from William Jamrach in London and put them into a pantomime called The condemned preserved, about a young African man (played by Sanger) who falls in love with the daughter of a rajah.131 The rajah throws the male lover into the lion’s den.132 The daughter, played by Chapman, follows her lover into the den. When the rajah cries out for someone to save her, it is her African lover who does so. Sanger stated that this act proved popular with the audience. In a concession to social values, the daughter had to be rescued although, as a performer, Chapman probably did the rescuing herself.

The lion king in Sanger’s circus by 1858 was James Crockett, a musician who had reportedly developed lung problems and could not play his wind instrument so shifted into lion taming; this may not be the full explanation since he married into the Sanger family, marrying George’s sister, Sarah.133 The inexperienced Crockett was chosen to be the lion king because he was tall with a long beard, and looked the part. Crockett remained with the act when Sanger’s six lions were sold, and became well known in Britain, Ireland and mainland Europe for an act similar to Van Amburgh’s, earning £20 a week. His act was deemed to have scientific value, although at Astley’s in 1861 Crockett was billed as presenting four lions in a ‘thrilling oriental spectacle’ as ‘the Lion Conqueror’ in a plot in which he rescues the story’s heroine and her son.134 He received a ring from Queen Victoria and was eventually hired to work in the USA in 1864, where he died a year later, apparently from heat exhaustion or illness.

Menagerie cage confrontation was only surpassed in popularity by a display of majestic triumph and docility in the presence of royalty. Sanger’s had an African lion ‘impersonate’ a British one for the 1871 royal procession to give thanks for the Prince of Wales’ recovery from illness, and Sanger organised with the police superintendent for his carriage with the lion to join the procession making its way slowly through London’s very crowded streets to St Paul’s Cathedral.135 Chapman, dressed as Britannia holding a shield and trident, stood beside a lion lying on top of a horse-drawn carriage. The lion was pulled up from his cage on a ramp. An eyewitness recounted that it was very risky, although some spectators thought the lion was stuffed.

Sanger provides details of how he spent £7,000 on his carriage for the procession:

In the days that followed, Sanger claimed that his Queen’s Tableau and colonial entourage and the carriage were seen by 80,000 spectators the first day, and 96,000 the following day. An ex-lion queen as Britannia standing in a tableau symbolising the nation, complete with a lion proved a crowd-attracting spectacle. Even Queen Victoria was pleased with the impersonation and tribute to her sovereignty that brought together imperial triumph and human triumph over other species. The Queen’s Tableau wagon continued to be part of Sanger’s parades for years, with Chapman later replaced by their daughter, Georgina. (Chapman died on 29 April 1899, aged 67.)

In 1871 George Sanger divided up the family’s equestrian circus business with his brother, John Sanger – the siblings thus becoming competitive rivals – and George bought Astley’s Amphitheatre in the Westminster Road for £11,000 from the widowed Mrs William Batty. ‘[T]he menagerie was an integral part of the establishment’, the largest in Britain.137 Sanger emulated Van Amburgh’s menagerie act and added a lamb to the carriage roof alongside the lion, and Sanger describes the lion as ‘kindly tempered’.138 Since the description of the first tableau does not mention a lamb, its composition seemed to have changed over time. Sanger’s grandson, George Sanger Coleman, claimed that a lion cub, Georgie, and lamb, Billy, grew up together in the same cage and were ‘firm friends’. When they were fully grown the lion continued to lick the ram, who would butt the lion. There were also two dogs raised with a lion for a playful act. The Queen’s Tableau that Coleman saw was three-tiered, with Britannia seated on the top tier with the lamb and the lion on her lap; there was also a soldier beside her, dressed in a white-plumed helmet with a drawn sword. Perhaps it is not surprising, given these depictions of Britannia side by side with a placid lion, that Queen Victoria became Sanger’s most celebrated spectator, and there were command performances on 8 January 1885 and 17 June 1898.139 Royal interest and approval conferred prestige on acts with exotic animals.

Lion-taming acts showed animals being subdued during the performance in a transformation intended to elicit thrills, excitement, wonder, and even amazement. It could have been this public admiration that placed these animals largely outside anti-cruelty concerns, and distinctions between the regulatory protection of animal species continued in the 19th century. As Ritvo explains, once 19th-century British society questioned the punishment of domesticated animals, and proposed the moral worth of kindness, these values accorded national pre-eminence to some animal species. Yet exotic animals were the property of humans, who were held responsible as such animals became integrated into imaginative displays. The displays promoted greater control to dispel fear, and to make nature seem benign. Leaving aside Sanger’s sentimental tableau of nationhood, those efforts and values did not seem to apply to lion- and tiger-tamers’ acts since it suited business that they remained emblematic of a fearful nature. A lion handler might be presumed responsible for the circumstances of the animals, but the claim that exotic animals could be managed offstage with kindness reflected unsubstantiated optimism. Instead the theatrical style of menagerie cage acts showed men and women physically handling the lions in confronting ways, and acts of aggression expanded in style and continued to dominate 19th-century menagerie entertainment.