Crowbar in hand, Isaac Van Amburgh became famous for confronting lions in the confined space of a cage in a new type of public entertainment. His look alone was believed to subdue lions although in performance he manhandled them forcefully. Sensationalist handling acts proliferated and the feat that came to typify 19th-century travelling menageries involved tamers, including lion queen Ellen Chapman, putting their heads into a lion’s mouth. Shows in which captive animals submitted to humans proved extremely popular, and Van Amburgh also appeared fighting tigers and lions in elaborate theatrical pantomimes about imperial wars. By the mid-19th century, lion tamer acts were emulating African safari hunts with pistols fired into the air. Similarly war re-enactments with animals and nationalistic sentiments not only increased in number but greatly increased in scale, reproducing realistic effects with the latest cannons, gunpowder and trained horse actors lying dead.

Fighting nature: travelling menageries, animal acts and war shows reveals how animals were integrated into staged scenarios of confrontation throughout the 19th century, ranging from lion acts in small cages to large-scale re-enactments of war.1 Public demand for animal shows ensured their expansion. The coercive treatment of, and fraught interaction with, travelling animals in such fighting scenarios infiltrated every aspect of cultural activity: from theatrical performance to visual art, from adventure books to scientific pursuits. Initially presenting a handful of exotic animals, travelling menageries grew to contain multiple species in their many thousands, and these animals in captivity were indirectly or directly caught up in simulations, and actual incidents, arising from the violent actions of humans. Fighting nature describes how a range of human fighting practices coincided with animal exhibition and animal presence in public entertainment that spread globally. From staged enactments of power and nationhood to spontaneous offstage physical fights in menageries, animals were surrounded by notions of fighting that were formal and informal, orchestrated and accidental.

I propose that while the theatrical mimicry of fighting reflected cultural fascination with ideas of conflict, acts with animals emerged from, and converged with, social and species processes of actual confrontation, conflict and violence and overwhelmed any narrative of reciprocated human–animal kindness. While staged battles with animals pandered to national hubris, far less glorious were numerous offstage fights that erupted between humans in and around menagerie cages. An atmosphere of threat and hostility permeated the 19th-century travelling menagerie and first-hand accounts reveal that members of the public attacked animals. The concept of fighting additionally denotes the human effort to subdue struggling animals but keep them alive, while emphasising how animals fought back; animals were not passive in this process or in lives lived in captivity. Animal shows repeatedly demonstrated emotionally conflicted human–animal and human–social relations. Yet, conversely, theatrical rhetoric about reciprocated kindness and pantomime narratives delivered a false impression of affection and harmonious friendship between humans and other animal species. The contention of this book is that since aggression and violence underpinned the exhibition of animals and manifested overtly in the very popular fighting acts and war shows, aggressive violence towards animals shaped public experience. The travelling menagerie and the war re-enactment in circus were thereby contributing to the militarisation of society and its values rather than merely reflecting them. A precept of fighting nature, even war with nature or ‘nature to war against’, haunted 19th-century animal exhibition.2

Travelling shows presenting exotic wild animal species increased in parallel with the expansion of the process of hunting to obtain them and this book details how it reached an almost incomprehensible scale in the 19th century – actual total numbers are difficult to estimate.3 Animals were caught up in a chain of economic transactions that were emblematic of a 19th-century determination to exploit nature, often through force. An immeasurable number of animals were hunted, trapped, transported and traded for profit to European and North American menageries and zoos, and those bought by travelling menageries continued to be transported and moved from place to place. Menageries proliferated in Britain and the rest of Europe in the first half of the 19th century and, as an exported entertainment form, expanded greatly in the USA after the mid-century and in the far reaches of the British Empire in southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand towards the end of that century. The exotic animals deployed in performance were initially transported from colonial homelands to imperial centres, but through the century they were also moved around colonial regions. Menageries grew into auxiliary businesses accompanying the largest circuses after the 1870s, touring geographically diverse regions and travelling back to Britain and Europe with circuses towards the end of the century.

Fighting nature investigates the significance of what was being enacted through menagerie acts, spectacles and theatrical performances that highlighted animals between the 1820s and 1910s. It asks: what ideas of nature did touring menageries, animal acts and war shows manifest?4 It appears that animals embodied broad concepts of nature, though it was fearful expectations of attack that proved particularly popular with 19th-century audiences. While ideas of a fearful nature were being challenged by social thinking – for example, by Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, and David Hume and Charles Darwin – the public attended menageries in large numbers. Although themes of aggressive interaction were juxtaposed with displays of what Harriet Ritvo summarises as an ‘ordered creation’ with animals ‘sedately marshaled’ in the Victorian zoo menagerie,5 orchestrated performances of conflict attracted attention and even notoriety as they reinforced belief in a need for human dominance. Fighting acts were the lead exhibits in the travelling menagerie and circus pantomime was dominated by war re-enactments with horses. In comparison, where a quality of timidity was accorded to an exotic wild species, the species was invariably relegated to a subsidiary tier of menagerie exhibition.

Animals were caught up in human wars everywhere and the advent of 19th-century war re-enactments with animals made this deployment publicly visible, if not war’s deadly consequences.6 As imperialist ventures came to be embodied by exotic animals, they became covertly indicative of an imperialism of the human species towards other species. Animals were part of the official technology of war, but they were also scapegoats for human social and personal frustration. As Kathleen Kete points out, anti-animal cruelty legislation was overtly connected to fears of social revolution and mob violence, and the protection of animals involved modelling ‘restraint of angry impulses’.7

During the process of researching 19th-century animal acts, I found recurring descriptions of bad behaviour by spectators, and descriptions of menagerie workers fighting each other and the townspeople. A common thread of fights and fighting emerged from first-hand accounts of 19th-century menagerie and circus menagerie life in Britain, and in the USA and in other parts of the world. This suggested continuity with behaviour patterns identified in the 18th century. Louise Robbins specifies deceptive businesses, staged animal fights, bloodshed, and human fights at fairs in 18th-century France, and that fighting activity was common despite ‘a widespread trend in Europe away from public displays of the suffering and death of both animals and humans’.8 This aspect suggests an ongoing carnivalesque dimension to the public fair that Mikhail Bakhtin points to in medieval gatherings in which social status could be temporarily reversed and social propriety ignored. In an investigation of the sensory responses to animals and utility among 18th-century spectators, Christopher Plumb outlines how exhibited ‘animals are fed, teased and beaten by both proprietors and spectators, and these animals would evoke feelings of empathy, disgust or fear’.9 Such tendencies did not disappear in the 19th century, and actually expanded with an increased scale of exhibition.

Audiences for touring menageries were largely local. The arrival of a touring menagerie show with staged cage acts frequently coincided with incidents of local conflict and fighting in the attendant crowd. I suggest that exotic animal exhibition implicitly aligned incidents of misbehaviour in the local social environment of the impermanent menagerie with the distant processes of aggressive acquisition in a remote colonial location often at war. Violence surrounded exhibited animals, from the circumstances of their acquisition and trade to their inclusion in staged acts that simulated aggression or depicted official war history, and to the ad hoc bad behaviour among menagerie spectator throngs. Exotic animals in the 19th century became a metaphoric part of narratives of overt and covert human violence that implicated the overarching politics of nationalist and military conquest and economic exploitation as well as local disturbance and unrest indicative of social turmoil. The menagerie exposed social schisms and anxieties within the larger political context.

This book offers a history of how the range of public performances expanded as travelling menageries grew in scale throughout the 19th century and reached audiences everywhere. It focuses on travelling menageries, including those menageries that travelled with circuses, and it seeks to add to the recent analysis of the history of the zoo and of the menagerie.10 The selective focus is on animals that toured, rather than on menagerie zoos with permanent sites that may have also staged performances. This is an investigation of staged acts11 that accompanied exhibited animals managed in businesses called menageries.12 It also considers accounts of how humans and animals in 19th-century travelling menageries were regularly threatened, which may parallel similar incidents involving circus performers; this aspect of circus history is generalised rather than particularised.

The open space in which the travelling menagerie was located acquired significance through the temporary presence of the animals and it became a socially ambiguous space, one perceived as unordered. Reflecting on 19th-century distinctions, Ellen Velvin explains that ‘[i]n all zoological gardens the animals are mainly kept for purposes of science, but in the animal shows they are kept for amusement and profit, and the environment is totally different’.13 While such a division of purpose may have been less manifest in practice, it was this different atmosphere that was an inducement to spectator responses. The anecdotal accounts of showmen suggest that an unsettled local situation became heightened by the arrival of the show. Travelling menagerie tent shows encountered unruly spectators and confrontational mobs as they moved from town to town. In the mid-19th century, William Coup explains how the spaces occupied by touring shows in the USA:

For spectators, the menagerie seemed to have fewer restrictions and less status than other travelling shows such as circuses that were graded according to the standard of equestrian skill. Menageries were at the outer limit of socially acceptable entertainment and in part because of expectations of trouble. George Conklin claims that where 1870s tenting circuses also had accompanying menagerie tents, this meant that ‘[t]he menagerie was a sort of catch-all in the show’ as it included ‘men and animals not definitely connected with some other part of the aggregation’.15 A perception of a disparate grouping may have inadvertently influenced spectator attitudes.

An undercurrent of defensive hostility remained palpable. Abuse and fights were regular occurrences in an environment founded on the physical dominance and submission of animals. A social realm of hostile behaviour towards animals and fights among humans was connected by animal species and individual animals to the staging of battle spectacles with horses and menagerie animals that depicted conflicts played out in foreign lands. At the same time, a contradictory ideal of animal–human kindness appears in pantomime narratives about human conflict in foreign places with sympathetic animals aligned with one side. Rhetoric about kindness diverted attention from violent treatment and fighting practices.

Ritvo’s foundational investigation of attitudes to domesticated and imported animals within 19th-century British culture reveals how social notions of compassion and kindness in animal care also became indicative of national pride, and this identification became important to the development and acceptance of anti-cruelty values.16 Principles encouraging the wellbeing of working animals were only erratically and spasmodically extended to the care of travelling menagerie animals. Proclamations of kindness towards animals reflected human ideals, and the struggle for the moral improvement of humanity was also played out in rhetoric about animals in menageries. Simplistic beliefs and injurious practices in animal care often occurred because of inadequate knowledge about the behaviour of specific animal species. Though several enterprising menagerie owners and animal keepers championed kindness to appeal to public sentiments and possibly to offset spectator criticism, it also seemed to be a source of dispute among them. Expectations of kindness were more indicative of broader patterns of belief circulating in the British Empire than actual menagerie practices. There were persistent claims that kindness shown towards large captive animals would be reciprocated, but kindness was ineffectual and unreliable for the menagerie management of caged and roped animals. Behind the scenes, the treatment of travelling exotic animals could be brutal, so the atmosphere surrounding captive animals remained volatile.

Throughout the 19th century, exotic animal acts in the Anglo-American menagerie were expressly linked to religious stories that reiterated human moral triumph and animal benevolence, adventurous journeys of exploration and conquest, mythic Herculean acts, and historical and national socio-political events of battles and wars. These were delivered through short descriptors on the sides of cages, promotional handbills and long theatrical narratives; an animal tamer’s costume, props, gestures and movements also conveyed specific narrative impressions. Other 19th-century narratives with human–animal tableaus, however, evoked fantasy worlds in which humans either befriended, or were befriended by, a number of different animal species. Although menagerie animal acts might seem removed from a literary domain, there was continuous exchange with other spheres of culture, and influential books also included the memoirs of big-game safari hunters, one written by the leading circus showman, GA Farini.

The demand for shows that staged aggression was unmistakable, for while timidity in animals may have been endearing it remained less exciting and less marketable. At the same time controversy about 19th-century touring menageries reflected social unease about the risks in staged acts, since they magnified the possibility of violent death from animal attacks. Paradoxically, the possibility of witnessing such an attack attracted spectators. The potential for accidents became a source of compelling anxiety, particularly since accidents featured in newspapers. Concern for animal welfare, however, was less apparent. At least in response to public displays of carnivore feeding, some members of the public expressed disgust that this was on show.

Menagerie acts, like other performance forms, were cultural inventions created by imaginative performers17 and industrious entrepreneurs who forged a number of precedents, and these were imitated and proliferated in lucrative ventures, large and small. Animal exhibition proved profitable, encouraging competitive practices among owners and fostering criminal activities, with competition among businesses becoming a feature of menagerie enterprise.

Fighting nature presents well-known acts and shows created by individuals who made menagerie history; these individuals were both human and non-human animals.18 This history of menagerie animal shows brings to the fore the centrality of animals in all popular performances that depicted war, battles, confrontation and fighting. Their inclusion may have had a normalising effect on social attitudes to animals in situations of violence. Certainly some 19th-century observers indicate conflicted responses and possibly species discomfort with animal inclusion in displays of fighting. Nevertheless the animal shows probably made the co-option of different animal species in war seem acceptable to the 19th-century public. Anti-cruelty campaigns did not prevent human war practices being extended to an ever-increasing number of animals, or the hunting of animals by military men becoming an extension of war.

Approaches to colonised animals

The contribution of 19th-century popular culture to ideologies of colonisation and empire has been investigated in historical analysis since the 1980s,19 encompassing animal studies more recently. Public zoos and menageries encapsulated the prevailing attitudes towards nature in the 19th century, as animal exhibition explicitly responded to curiosity about the regions in colonial empires, and their growth and proliferation became indicative of imperialist triumph and conquest. Menagerie animals were a visible part of a wider national ethos of British and European colonial rule and the shows drew spectators from across the social spectrum, including politicians, members of the royal families and the military. Animal acts reinforced state authority. The appeal of shows with exotic animals additionally came from their capacity to enhance public displays of nationhood and nationalistic evocation of warring empires.

Fighting nature draws on analysis of popular culture and its social and political influence, including in relation to science and natural history,20 since travelling menageries and animal shows also bridged these concepts. The topicality of 19th-century theatre in Britain and its depiction of political events and wars has been well recognised within theatre history.21 The capacity of circus in Victorian England to espouse patriotism and nationalism has been convincingly investigated following similar analysis of American circus history.22 The cultural significance of touring menageries and the use of menagerie animals in pantomimes is shown in Fighting nature to have perpetuated similar social meaning. In addition, newspapers disseminated aspects of British and European culture, including sport in the colonies,23 and it can be added, informed the public about animal shows. In acknowledging a proliferation of histories of popular culture, Billie Melman argues for ‘the circulation of history between its images and the forms and social lives and meanings given to these images through procedures and practices of usage and, when possible, through the imagination and fantasy’, in order to interpret the dynamism of cultural representation and materiality.24 Popular histories of animals demand comparable approaches and interdisciplinary corollaries but also recognition of ethical boundaries in human–animal relations.25

Investigations of 19th-century British social practices, including colonial hunting and imperialism, prove invaluable sources.26 A history of 19th-century travelling menagerie animal shows is a considerable challenge – not least because each distinctive species warrants a history – since archival records are limited, irregular and are frequently generalised. Further, as David Lambert and Alan Lester explain, there was a ‘longstanding problem’ for historians about ‘how to write about such vastly different places, processes and people as those contained within the ever-changing 19th-century British Empire at the same time – how to link the local and particular (metropolitan and colonial) with the general and the universal (imperialism)’.27 Animals could be added to ‘places, processes and people’. Given that there was no singular colonial discourse, Lambert and Lester suggest that individuals might be able to effectively reflect the dispersed and layered nuances of colonial diversity. This approach also makes a history of menagerie animal acts feasible, since individuals illustrated local settings and precedents as well as showing how the specific circumstances of a menagerie can point to the wider set of practices and power relations. It should be pointed out again that the individual lives that encompass and illustrate discursive frameworks were also non-human ones. The activities of individual humans and animals whose acts became indicative of types of performances with travelling shows, were forged in specific localities, but these spread globally.

Histories of imperialism and colonialism expose how cultural dominance manifested conflict and armed confrontation. Catherine Hall’s summary of studies in 19th-century British imperialism delineates approaches in postcolonial studies, maps the progressive expansion of the British Empire in the 19th century, and defines terms.28 While this imperial dominance was achieved through strategies of overt war and violence – more evident in military histories – it is also in historical studies of gender and colonial identity where the impact of an unfolding spectrum of socio-political violence is exposed.29 Here individual lives encapsulate larger forces. Hall specifies that the postcolonial histories of indigenous peoples incorporate the history of human torture, and in relation to the persecution of the racial Other,30 and point to larger patterns of human–to–human violence. But she focuses on how colonialisms were produced by different social groups who comprised ideas of the European,31 and her categorisation of workers in the colonies might be extended to include menagerie workers and operators and hunters. There are insights about human violence scattered throughout a range of colonial histories.32

Relevant to approaches in this book is Melman’s extended analysis of the popular appeal of depictions of social and historical violence in literature and entertainment, which was also a historical consuming of history. Popular enthusiasm for imperial Britain during the 19th century even spread within North America, fuelled by public displays that encompassed entertainment, and this made manifest a psychology of ‘popular imperialism’ that was indicative of the dynamic between government and society.33 In broadly defining ‘popular’ as something beyond a pseudonym for working class, Melman criticises the ‘comfortable and secure’ and ‘orderly’ view of history, and considers the influence of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and punish on studies of spectacles and ideas of ‘crowd-policing’ as well as, it should be noted, modes of surveillance and striving for order.34 Melman argues for a history of, and history as, a space of social danger. The point is that popular depictions did expose the material consequences of state violence; in this instance, for animal lives.

A history encompassing practices ranging from hunting in the colonies to touring colonising countries provides one way of exploring the bodily impact of social forces of human violence. While definitions of human violence remain contested, it is evident that animals were completely caught up in an all-pervasive conflict that underpinned land acquisition and cultural dominance and the enforcement of colonial rule. Summarising a process of unrestrained violence in colonial territory, Ritvo writes that ‘[k]illing large exotic animals emerged as both the quintessential activity and symbol of imperialism’.35 While indigenous populations fought wars to retain their culture and land, colonial enterprise additionally encompassed eliminating roaming animals from large tracts of land that could be cultivated and repopulated with European domestic species. Only some of these displaced indigenous animals survived to be sold into menageries.

British government officials and other professionals made their imperial careers in the 19th century by moving between positions in different colonies, and Lambert and Lester explain that ‘each colonial life provides insight not only into the heterogeneity of the empire . . . but how ideas, practices and identities developed trans-imperially as they moved from one imperial site to another’.36 Contemporary historians recognise ‘the networked nature of imperial space’.37 Lambert and Lester broadly chart the development of approaches within the discipline of history from an acknowledgement of political resistance within what was termed the ‘periphery’ of the empire – which necessitated government intervention and military involvement in former trade outposts and ensured that economic and political motivations became caught up in recognition of the function of geographical space – to the subsequent explicit critique of ideas of centre and periphery. Such histories highlight the influence of interconnected ventures by individuals within the context of official interventionist policies, in ways that are also pertinent to menagerie history.

The official discourse of empires camouflaged the violence of occupation and wars of resistance. Lester outlines the stereotyping of indigenous peoples within three broad overlapping British colonial discourses – ‘governmentality, humanitarianism and settler capitalism’ – seeking to produce ‘orderly, well-regulated behaviour’.38 He continues that discourses were ‘made and remade’ as dispersed places were ‘knitted together within a global cultural and political fabric’. While ports connected by ships linked the colonies and Britain, these material links and the economic practices were effectively served by discourses of the British and colonial press. News about colonial wars, however, did not necessarily reflect an official position and instead could reveal diverse interests.39

Certainly the ‘geographical imagination’ of historians in relation to the significance of geographical place and space has become part of analysis and this can be usefully extended to animal histories.40 But perhaps a historian’s effort to reflect order when faced with profuse materials with complex intersections means that the prevalence of periodic incidents of social disorder escapes closer scrutiny. Incidents of disorder may need to be considered for their links to larger patterns. The ways in which socially sanctioned violence and fighting led to darker, covert consequences and repercussions and infiltrated all facets of personal and professional experience becomes explicit in accounts of individual lives in colonial regions. For example, one commissioner in South Africa was educated in an atmosphere of competitive sport and flogging, developed a reputation as a game hunter, and served in the cavalry in wartime before he took up official government and policing positions that included restricting the mobility of local indigenous women and ensuring the migration of male workers.41 This imposition of force on indigenous people exists within a continuum that also crosses the species divide. The significance of this example is that it cuts across different histories. Developments in sport, war, education, employment and colonial life might constitute discrete histories, but these became unified in the lived experience of individuals so that incidents of violence that seem contained might be located within widespread connected patterns of social violence perpetuated through multiple social spheres inclusive of the treatment of animals.

While accounts by, and of, the individuals who made use of colonial networks to hunt and exploit animals are a prelude to a history of travelling menagerie acts, it is menagerie owners, performers, workers and animals who are the focus of Fighting nature. Individual situations can link local circumstances to the larger realm of imperialism and the discursive frameworks are encapsulated by the individuals caught up in all types of fighting acts. Traces of these acts can be found in advertisements, posters and newspaper reviews but the gaps in the documented record mean that further explanation about animals and acts has to be sought in memoirs of showmen, which also function as primary source material. Although they must be read critically, they do provide extended accounts of individual animals and acts. Some circus histories and biographies of human performers helpfully reproduce primary documents. Animal act histories must draw on a combination of sources, and it can be presumed that more than one listing or description in documentation might imply significance.

Since each animal species was historically traded and exhibited under distinctive circumstances that varied from country to country, this account of 19th-century wild animal acts in travelling menageries in Britain and the rest of Europe, the USA, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand must present selected examples and precedents. The usage of the terms ‘animal’ for non-human animal, ‘species’ for genera, and ‘wild’ to distinguish captured exotic species from domesticated ones follows common practice. My earlier investigations of circus acrobatic and trapeze history made it possible to track social advancement through innovations that pioneered major social developments and progression in, for example, athleticism, female fashions and body training.42 It might be argued, however, that the spread of menagerie acts and exhibition was socially regressive, rather than progressive.

The following chapters focus on the staging of different ideas about fighting nature. In a staged triumph of courage, lion king Isaac Van Amburgh confirmed early 19th-century ideas about overcoming fear of nature as he aggressively entered a small cage with lions and tigers and bodily handled them (Chapter 1). Lion tamers were emulated by lion queens such as Ellen Chapman from the late 1840s, and exotic animals were also taken out of menageries to join well-trained horses in circus war re-enactments. The new genres expanded existing artistic depictions of species antagonism and hierarchical nature (Chapter 2). A gulf developed between menagerie practices of physical dominance and the inclusion of animals in quasi state ceremonies and sentimental pantomimes about ‘the gentle children’ of nature showing loyalty to humans. From the 1850s, performers such as Maccomo, in the costume of an African hunter, simulated the conquering of a hostile nature in staged hunting acts. Those acts reflected how show proprietors, including PT Barnum, were assisted to greatly enlarge their travelling menageries by British and other European hunters who journeyed to Africa and other remote geographical places (Chapter 3). Meanwhile, individual spectators attacked animals and menagerie crowds included aggressive hooligan and criminal elements. In contrast there were the loyal spectators who rallied in defence of national favourites such as the elephant Jumbo, in Britain, after Barnum bought him for the American public (Chapter 4). In another example, audiences were willingly duped by the hoax of a whitewashed elephant billed as nature’s mysterious sacred elephant while they rejected one obtained from an Eastern temple by Barnum. Menagerie businesses travelling with tenting circuses expanded noticeably in the USA after the 1870s, delivering large spectacles of a boundless nature. They toured internationally and were emulated in southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand by shows that additionally contained re-enactments of indigenous wars in southern Africa (Chapters 5 and 6). By then the menagerie tamer routinely put his or her head into the lion’s mouth in acts staged alongside demonstrations of carnivores being fed raw meat; perceived as displays of primitive nature, these proved particularly controversial in the colonies, where acts with female tamers were banned (Chapter 5). By the turn of the 20th century, as tamer handling was superseded by Hagenbeck’s and Bostock’s animal training with minimal bodily contact, male performers, dressed as soldiers, demonstrated physical discipline and dominance over nature while female performers like Claire Heliot (see cover) were attributed older, 19th-century ideals of kindly care for nature (Chapters 6 and 7). The training of exotic animals was viewed as an aspect of the expanding natural sciences alongside the safari hunt for museum specimens – and both captivated the American president, Theodore Roosevelt, who went on safari (Chapter 7). By the early 20th century, staged spectacles brought together all the 19th-century modes of displaying nature in fighting scenarios to accompany one gigantic battle re-enactment with war veterans and horses playing dead while the business of trading animals underpinned European war preparation. Practices related to fighting and war between humans relied on the human hunting of animals. This made human treatment of other species unmistakably war-like.