This chapter explores how horses, elephants and other animals were integrated into performance about war between the 1820s and 1870s. This new genre of battle re-enactments involving live animals enlarged on late 18th-century military drama and on long-established depictions of war and predator attack in visual art. Military battles came to be staged in the English circus with horses, and the geographical setting of a war in the theatre could be changed with the addition of an elephant. An elephant with a walk-on role lent an aura of authenticity to 19th-century orientalist pantomimes.

If horse ‘actors’ in the circus made staged battles seem realistic,1 off stage they embodied an ideal of gentler treatment. But the presence of an elephant on the British stage implicitly reinforced ideas of colonial rule and sovereignty, even in melodrama that contradictorily framed them as the loyal rescuers of humans. Heart-warming sentiments prevailed in attitudes to elephants. Yet behind the scenes, human gentleness towards elephants was limited and unpredictable; elephants were often shot, and on occasion by a firing squad. In public, however, an elephant body in particular straddled royal empire, military skirmishes and romantic fantasies of reciprocated kindness.

Battle horses

Nineteenth-century circus with depictions of cavalry expanded on military dramas in the British theatre2 by staging actual battle re-enactments with horses and other animals. The 18th-century origin of the modern circus is inseparably linked to the horsemanship of the cavalry through Philip Astley, who had served in the English army and in war against France (1757–63) before, in 1768, bringing his considerable skill with horses to an equestrian entertainment in Lambeth, London that became known as Astley’s Circus.3 Military training provided foundational equestrian skill for circus entertainment and enhanced its reputation wherever Astley’s toured, including to Paris. Top billing went to a star horse that could execute complex movement and tricks like those associated with military parades. It was this horse training and rider control that was initially on show.4

Interludes in the 18th-century circus equestrian program evolved into extended dramatic narratives involving horses, hunting, orientalist themes and, above all, military dramas.5 The latter were increasingly popular in London theatres in the first half of the 19th century; more than 100 military dramas were staged about the Napoleonic wars.6 Importantly, the representation of battles could be most credibly staged with circus performers on horseback. In 1801 circuses staged depictions of the British in Egypt, with Astley’s boasting ‘Real cavalry and infantry’, and in 1807 Philip’s son, John Astley, staged galloping horses followed by a realistic tableau of the battlefield complete with horses that appeared dead.7 Philip Astley pioneered this trick of teaching a horse to lie down that could be put to use in battle scenes. At Astley’s under Andrew Ducrow from the mid-1820s, 30 or more horses were deployed in the simulation of warfare in the circus, and it was performers in soldier costumes who distinguished the opposing identities in a fight between national armies. The staging of political events, battles and historical sagas with animals added to the increasing appeal of 19th-century circus performance.

Equestrian acts dominated the circus program throughout the 19th century, and horses galloping around a 42-foot (12.8 m) circus ring made it possible to deliver shows with action-based sequences, including cavalry charges. Brenda Assael explains that in Britain, ‘the equestrian military spectacle contributed to an important process of national mythmaking, one that did not originate with the state but arose within the unofficial, popular culture’.8 In her analysis of British theatre and its plays about war in Georgian 18th-century society, Gillian Russell explains that greater public interest arose with a rapid increase in the numbers of soldiers and men with direct experience of war at that time, leading to a ‘militarization of British society’.9 She argues that even away from the theatre, the military delivered a theatricalised spectacle through its uniforms and exhibitions of military life that became like a form of entertainment. The libertine world of the military camp was soon represented in popular drama. Jacqueline S Bratton explains: ‘The stage, therefore, offered a framed and bracketed space in which licence, violence, irresponsibility, physicality and other such enjoyable but antisocial acts or sensations could be savoured.’10

Enterprising managers increasingly presented major military campaigns as visual spectacles. Visual entertainment included the circular panorama from 1799, a continuous painted canvas that was used to depict major battles in Africa and India, and there was an 1815 panorama of the Mughal Emperor’s Durbar Procession in Delhi.11 Madame Tussaud’s Museum of wax figures was started in 1802 as a museum of the French Revolution and was part of a larger domain that reflected ‘the centrality and enormous appeal of violence and crime in the democratized and highly commercialized’ depictions of history.12 While an expansion in the availability of newspaper and other print accounts of wars and politics increased social awareness, the spectacle with painted scenery conveyed a vivid impression of political events to spectators from all social classes.

Circus re-enactments followed the historical events, although it should be noted that the theatre was dominated by orientalist or escapist drama during the actual years of the Napoleonic wars.13 These wars, however, provided the most popular 19th-century war re-enactment event in circus, The battle of Waterloo by JH Amherst, first presented at Astley’s in 1824, which also marked the debut of Andrew Ducrow in Britain. Ducrow had come from Paris where he had been copying Mazurier’s popular impersonation of a monkey, but on horseback. The staging of The battle of Waterloo involved loud noises, flames and limelight to simulate cannon fire, and each of the three acts finished with a military skirmish on horseback.14 Maurice Willson Disher outlines how the production included Prussian soldiers pulling a French soldier off his horse and dragging him away, while a peasant woman complained of French violence. Then Corporal Standfast and his true love, Mary, in Scottish disguise, sang a duet, followed by the Duke of Wellington’s inspection of the troops before the battle that left the British and Prussians triumphant. In a comic interlude, Standfast was rescued by the comic character, Molly Maloney. In the end, the hero and heroine, Standfast and Mary, were reunited. Illustrations of the Waterloo production named the characters and showed soldiers on horseback engaged in battle as well as infantry men on foot with their rifles ready to fire, and a wagon carrying wooden casks. Soldier costumes dominated the visual impact, with performers playing political figures such as the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon Bonaparte, and these re-creations no doubt helped to glorify historical events among the general public. Assael notes that The battle of Waterloo was performed 144 times to 250,000 spectators, and even spectators from the military were impressed with the accuracy of the battles on horseback.15 In a chapter called ‘Napoleon’s circus wars’, Disher compares the staging of Britain and France’s military battles in London and Paris. The staging of events in France had made Bonaparte into a stage hero in numerous pantomimes after 1830, often using genuine soldiers. However, the British circus did not present a durable hero of the same status. Instead a military drama with horses at Astley’s in London was significant for its depiction of an ordinary soldier as a central character amid the battle. In addition spectators could pay extra for the opportunity to participate on stage in the reconstructed fight on horseback.

Disher points out that circus was a performance form in which the horses functioned like actors in the spectacle.16 The actions of horse performers in emotionally expressive narratives served both theatrical and national interests and myths – not to mention species interests – in diverse ways. Such realistic military re-enactment generated sympathy and made a dramatic hero of the nameless soldier and potentially contributed to the public’s acceptance of war.17 The characterisation and the action could make war seem benignly familiar to the audience. In turn, circus was well attended by the military.

Ducrow’s horsemanship was exceptional and he was especially admired for a feat of wild riding strapped to the back of a galloping horse that appeared to be moving out of control. Disher writes that he ‘transformed feats of activity into visions of romance, and on the stage the old horseback spectacles into “grand military and equestrian melodramas” ’.18 The spectacle also pandered to royal interests and ceremonial pomp. In 1834, Queen Adelaide attended a horse pageant about King Arthur that was transferred from Astley’s Amphitheatre to the smaller Drury Lane theatre. The theatre version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table crowded together the horses and male performers on the stage, so that the view of the painted backdrop was blocked by ‘knights caracoling, banners waving, trumpets blaring’.19 The Queen was so delighted with the fantastical spectacle about the founding myth of the British monarchy that she gave £100 to be distributed among the company.

Some military melodramas proved more popular than others with the public. A revival of The battle of Waterloo in 1853 at Astley’s followed the comparatively unsuccessful season of Amakosa! or, scenes of Kaffir warfare in which the romantic couple escaped a burning forest on horseback. Following a less successful program Astley’s often revived a previous hit, such as The battle of Waterloo, or the perennial Shakespeare on horseback. Bratton points out that between 1854 and 1855 there were 25 plays licensed about the war with Russia.20 In 1854 the Crimean War was dramatised at Astley’s in The battle of the Alma, which staged 100 British soldiers fighting the Russians led by Menschikoff and involved the firing of shotguns at close range, so that the theatrical re-enactment caused actual injuries.21 The guns were not stage props and caused at least one fatality.

In the surreptitious exchange between popular entertainment forms and the arts, circus co-opted familiar cultural figures and practices from theatre. The soldier figure’s appearance in popular entertainment followed a pattern established in late 18th-century theatrical melodramas, which had depicted sailors reaching far-flung regions and, specifically, a hero type, Jack Tar, who became a stock character in naval battles in which cannons and smoke effects were often used.22 The character of Jack Tar appeared in early equestrian drama at Astley’s in The sailor’s return or the British tar, and Ducrow appeared on horseback in the costume of a sailor. Bratton explains about the mid-century drama depicting the war in Crimea: ‘Reciprocity between the press, the stage and the public mood resulted in the creation of a myth of the war’ that was ‘anti-heroic’ in relation to the convention of an aristocratic leader and yet reflected a legacy of older heroic populist prototypes such as Jack Tar.23 The appearance of an ordinary soldier as a popular character in 19th-century performance was indicative of the military’s expanding profile within British society, and within ideas of nationalism. The dramatic narratives in circus reinforced the state’s military and political authority, but the entertainment form itself was also unofficially testing the limits of state licensing law, which originally allowed only two spoken-word theatres but permitted riding schools.24

The figure of a fighter, if not the institutionalised soldier, reflected mid-century political concerns and possibly those of popular interest, and was evoked in the defence of social rights and liberties. In his examination of 19th-century society and its history published in 1843, Thomas Carlyle makes a link between working and fighting when he writes of the ‘Fight of Life’ in his critique of poverty caused by laissez faire law and ‘Captain[s] of Industry’. Fighting carried both literal and metaphorical significances in Carlyle’s analyses of business competition, and of triumph achieved through the submission of others and the plunder and negation of the ‘Law of Nature’. While Carlyle condemns fighting with horses and spears, and later guns, as ignoble and murderous, it was seemingly inescapable as the means by which a righteous cause could be supported and achieved, and so fighting also metaphorically encapsulated the social struggle for survival and freedom. He writes:

The notion of a struggle to survive against scarcity, the environment and the delusions of others in the newly industrialised 19th-century society is personified by Carlyle’s fighter, who additionally fought for citizens’ rights. But this figure is somewhat at odds with a soldier type who appeared in popular entertainment upholding state authority and fighting in offshore and far-flung foreign wars to defend his nation and his monarch. Richard Altick points out that Carlyle’s writings are also heavily ironic and, while his remedy for social ills involves revaluing Christian values, his exposé nonetheless influences social reformers and writers, including Charles Dickens.26 Carlyle outlines metaphoric social battles in which he envisages individuals fighting power structures and resisting business practices that seemed to involve combative, warlike strategies. Clearly fighting was a fundamental 19th-century precept.

The celebration of military heroism in circus performance additionally confirmed the central place of horses and other animals in 19th-century conflicts – invariably viewed from an anthropocentric perspective. In the circus, as elsewhere in society, horses were a crucial part of its socio-economic development and, even though circus horse performers were working animals, they may have received fairer treatment ahead of broader social changes in the treatment of other species. The appraisal of horses was influenced by 18th-century Enlightenment values and included the elevation of Eastern horses for their nobility. There were arguments that horses needed to be trained gently, rather than have to suffer brutish treatment from their human riders, who should not dig their heels into the horses.27 While society was gradually recognising that an owner might be held responsible for the pain and suffering of a working horse, a well-trained working horse in the circus could be billed by name and was valuable. The circus horse needed to have a good appearance and was therefore less likely to be ill-treated.

As well as dramatic plots depending on horse performers, circus provided displays of horsemanship that were deemed educational for the public. Significantly, Philip Astley wrote two manuals on horsemanship and techniques for training horses, sharing specialised knowledge about horse care and techniques for training without violence; these were widely read including in the USA.28 Trainers required ‘Judgment, Temperance and Perseverance’ ‘to bring brute creation to a proper sense of duty’, and he iterates how Christian values should extend to the animal world. Longstanding styles of horse training and presentation were adapted to the circus ring and these were eventually grouped into bareback, liberty, high school (haute école), and novelty act types.29 Each presented a particular air or cadence. The non-comic high school involved highly choreographed movement derived from European training methods that had originated with horses on parade. Arabian horses proved most imposing in the ring because of their height. In contrast, the freer movement of liberty acts pioneered in the circus by Astley and Ducrow, which involved groups of riderless horses, generated and sustained more dynamic wild action. Each style carried an expectation of a horse’s movement that might be described as training for a timbre, and conveyed impressions that ranged from grandeur to exciting galloping. The dominance of equestrian acts in the circus only declined in the early 1900s as Western society gradually shifted away from economic and social reliance on horse power.

Horse performers underpinned staged conflict. Conversely, however, the circus ethos promoted expectations for the nonconfrontational management of horses offstage, although this did not apply to other animals, including elephants.

Elephant solos

Dramatic narratives of historical and national achievement staged with horses in the first half of the 19th century were sometimes further enhanced with the addition of an exotic animal. In particular, a saga set in a colonial region became credible to audiences with the addition of an elephant, even if that animal’s appearance made all the other performers nervous. From menageries to zoological societies, members of the world’s largest animal species attracted public attention because of their impressive size and their comparative scarcity in Britain and the rest of Europe (they came mostly from Asia until the mid-century). Thus an elephant made a spectacular addition to a performance or a pageant and to a battle scene. But the care of the elephant was haphazard and the biographical accounts of individual menagerie animals reveal that if they became too difficult to manage in captivity, they were liable to be shot.

In London, Astley’s rival, the Royal Circus, had initially instigated appearances by exotic animals, putting leopards and tigers together with the horses passing across the stage, to represent the geographical regions of the world. It subsequently staged wordless melodramas about battles and sieges in the pit, using printed scrolls to explain the action and to name the enemy.30 Astley’s adopted this orientalist aesthetic, but had elephants and camels appear in The siege and storming of Seringapatam; or, the death of Tippo Sahib that followed a 1791 stage play on this topic.31 Under John Astley, Astley’s staged melodramas and presented a ‘Sagacious Elephant or other animal to keep the interest alive’, setting precedents for English entertainment.32 An elephant reportedly first appeared in New York in 1808 in the story of Blue Beard.33

Two individual elephants, Chuny (Chunee) and Mademoiselle Djeck (D’jeck), helped to make elephants popular attractions early in 19th-century Britain. Chuny, in particular, became the object of public interest and later of childhood memories and social mythology. An Indian elephant, Chuny, arrived in England in 1809; he was exhibited in menageries including the Exeter Change34 and reportedly seemed calm and gentle. This encouraged his addition in 1811 to a Covent Garden fantasy pantomime, Harlequin and Padmanaba, although he took fright at the initial performance, stopped, and eventually stood in a pool of blood after being repeatedly pricked with an ‘iron goad’.35

Chuny was eventually executed by firing squad after it was feared by his keepers that his wooden menagerie enclosure would not hold him during his ‘musth’ (or must) mating season. He was killed (with difficulty) in 1826 on the second floor of the Exeter building. As a boy, AD Bartlett, who was later the superintendent at the London Zoological Gardens and responsible for the acquisition and sale of the legendary elephant called Jumbo, observed Chuny’s execution first-hand. He writes: ‘Being so young I was much alarmed, more on account of the fury of the charges he made on the front of the den than at the firing of the soldiers.’36 Bartlett’s anxiety was caused by his fear that Chuny’s charging would cause the floor to collapse, rather than by any concern for the plight of the animal. After his death, Chuny was depicted in sentimental eulogies that posthumously increased the public profile of this impressive animal.37 Chuny had not become aggressive in public view, and sentiment increased after his regrettable death; the manner of his death made him seem like a martyr. The name ‘Chuny’ was revived by Bartlett when he renamed another Asian elephant, Chunee, at London’s Zoological Gardens.38 After their deaths, the bodies of both Chunys were dissected by curious scientists.

Djeck was far more compliant than Chuny and, conditioned to perform by menagerie-owner Huguet de Massilia, she appeared in Paris at Cirque Olympique in 1829, and then with Astley’s in Liverpool in a drama about the King of Siam’s elephant.39 The pantomime, L’Eléphant du roi de Siam, was created especially for Djeck, who appeared in a sequence of scenes rescuing the legitimate king from usurpers and from prison, carrying him into battle, and, in a crowd-pleasing gesture, holding the king’s crown. She also sat at a banquet, ringing a bell. The English version, The royal elephant of Siam or the fire-fiend, was followed by The triumph of Zorilda, or the elephant of the Black Sea, in which Djeck rescued the heroine and her son from the sea, staged with an impression of moving waves. Appearances in rescue scenarios showing devotion to deserving individuals made the elephant seem heroic. After performing at London’s Adelphi Theatre in 1830, and subsequently touring England, Djeck travelled to New York to appear in the Bowery Theatre, before returning to England in 1831. This type of pantomime narrative also travelled and spread the reassuring impression that the elephant could serve humankind.

There were practical challenges in staging elephant performances. The stage had to be reinforced and, as AH Saxon points out, the size of an elephant made other performers and nearby spectators uneasy. The elephant had to be prevented from drinking before the show, otherwise a stream of urine could drench the stage, actors and musicians, although this event, and the effort to put down sawdust if it happened, became an entertaining comic interlude for those out of range; there was at least one such recorded incident with Djeck.40

Travelling menageries in England gradually acquired and presented a single elephant, with one appearing at Hilton’s from 1833, one at Batty’s from 1836, and one travelling in Van Amburgh’s menagerie around England from 1838 to the 1840s.41 An elephant was becoming a more regular attraction.

An elephant in a menagerie or deployed on stage might simply signify a foreign locality, but an elephant in a pantomime also helped to deflect political realities within narratives that decentred the cause of human conflicts. While European war triumphs were re-enacted, the battles taking place elsewhere remained in the background of an exotic saga; these seemed intended to divert public concern about violence in distant settlements. Shortly after the Napoleonic wars, British rule encompassed about one-quarter of the world’s population.42 Indigenous habitants did not accept the increasing impositions of colonial rule without fighting back. Military responses were justified by a distinctive pattern of imperial defensive rhetoric in relation to the protection of settler women from what was deemed to be the threatening violence of indigenous men. This type of demarcation emerged, for example, in responses to the Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857.43 Conflict in colonial regions revealed a clash of cultures and this manifested in Britain with rumours about sexual assault and rape. In 1865, after the Governor of Jamaica, Edward John Eyre, violently suppressed a riot in Morant Bay in which 439 people were killed, the debate in Britain, led by Thomas Carlyle, defended Eyre’s actions as necessary for the protection of Englishmen and importantly, women. This defence was opposed by John Stuart Mill, who attacked Eyre’s decision as being against the rule of law.

In his analysis of reviews of CA Somerset’s informative play about the Sepoy Rebellion, The storming and capture of Delhi, staged at Astley’s in 1857 with a violent conclusion, Marty Gould finds that reviewers considered the British retaliation justified. He explains: ‘Violence which might in another context be deemed shocking or offensive “suits” this theatrical presentation of a naturalized, militaristic, imperial order.’44 Most exotic entertainment spectacles, however, avoided enactments of overt violence. Popular melodrama elevated British law over indigenous custom, and despite the biases in the narrative and ‘fantastic action’, some productions aimed at realistic effects and accuracy in the spectacle,45 with the addition of animals. A colonial battle could reveal female vulnerability through a rescue scenario without necessarily re-enacting brutality. Instead melodramatic pantomimes featuring elephants reinforced the romance of life in exotic locations in an overt embodiment of cultural myths and faraway origins. The presence of elephants on an English stage legitimised acquisitive political authority and, like horses, they were co-opted into the dominant narrative of nationhood and imperial expansion.

An elephant, framed as heroically rescuing deserving individual humans, fostered illusions about relations between species, and reinforced a gulf between public awareness of exotic animals and the elephant’s actual physical treatment. An elephant seemed compliant and endearing when he or she undertook a trick such as removing a kettle from a fire or laying down on command.46 The elephant’s public appeal was enhanced by fictional narratives about an elephant nature that was loyal to humans.

Gentle nature and hierarchies

The training of animals without force was recommended by Philip Astley in his late 18th-century training manuals on horsemanship and subsequent manuals by others, including the 1869 Haney’s art of training animals. It proposed managing horses by ‘The Power of Gentleness’ and ‘kindness’; it even mentioned taming lions and tigers with ‘mild measures’, and somewhat unrealistically relying on a lion’s affections.47 Sympathetic approaches to horses, other working animals and domesticated pets reinforced the possibility of human partnerships with larger wild animals. A disjunction existed, however, between disparate practices and professed human ideals.

In her exploration of ‘the meaning of kindness’ in England, and of sentiments such as compassion, Harriet Ritvo explains how, through decades, the English developed pride in the nation’s values towards animals.48 Public attitudes to animals became integrated into competitive rivalry among nations. By the 1830s the English anti-cruelty movement was associating foreigners with cruelty. While campaigns for anti-cruelty legislation entailed numerous defeats,49 the belief in an ideal of Britishness and kindness developed these early campaigns. But Ritvo outlines how it was a moral issue of self-discipline and middle-class respectability, so animal abuse came to be associated with lower classes. This meant that prosecutions for cruelty to working animals such as horses had a class bias. As Keith Thomas explains, ‘Kindness to animals was a luxury which not everyone had learnt to afford.’50

The claim that sentiment and the passions were common to humans and to animals was advanced by the 18th-century philosopher David Hume, in his influential works on human nature, examining the reason, instinct and emotions of humans and animals within attitudes to others and to the surrounding world. He argues: ‘Nature may certainly produce whatever can arise from habit.’51 Yet ‘love and hatred are common to the whole of sensitive creation’ and ‘love in animals, has not for its only object animals of the same species’ and ‘sympathy, or the communication of passions takes place among animals’.52 Nonetheless imagination and will belonged to humans, who should overcome the baser passions that led to cruelty. When Thomas outlines the advent of such new 18th-century sensibilities related to feeling, he notes that Hume identifies a ‘blind nature’.53 Jeremy Bentham’s formative moral ideas on suffering emerged to counteract an indifferent natural order, although social values and practices trailed behind; John Stuart Mill would later argue that human suffering took precedence over that of animals.54

In the 19th century, a more conventional thinker, Alexander Bain, brought together a range of commentaries that delineated how emotions originated in the senses and sensation, but emphasised how these belonged within a hierarchical arrangement from higher to lower emotions derived from social values. Adhering to orthodoxy through the ordering of the emotions in which love and affection were more valued over anger and fear, Bain explains that higher emotions need to triumph over baser ones; kindness is an emotion of a higher order, while anger is of a lower order. Irrespective of Hume’s ideas, Bain delineates how emotions such as love and kindness differentiated humans from other animals, although Bain’s writing from the 1870s did grapple with the influence of major thinkers, including Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. But Bain’s ordering of the emotions contains moral underpinnings and judgements indicative of the prevailing social, rather than scientific, values and upheld belief in a human destiny to achieve a higher position through exercising willpower to conquer a lower order of the emotions. As well as outlining the function of human will, these ideas supported belief in consciousness as uniquely human55 – this continues today. Even where Bain’s descriptions are intended to be neutral, his purpose was the instructive use of human willpower in relation to maintaining an overarching emotional order.

Higher-order emotions like kindness and gentleness were unquestionably indicative of human pre-eminence and species rank. Thus animals displayed animal fear within a lower order, which also included dread and terror, and these arose from either surprise or avoidance of physical pain in their environment. Such responses constituted weakness because they led to panic and loss of control. Bain explains that

At the same time an even or joyful temperament can be achieved by the ‘Power of Will’ and knowledge that counteracts a strong imagination. While individuals have a set disposition, they can nonetheless use the will to exercise control, and accumulative acts of control set a social example. In Bain’s approach, emotional control is a demeanour, and while a link between attitudes and consciousness is explained, any behavioural consequences seem largely assumed.

Yet kindness was also widely believed to be a natural female attribute. In her examination of emotions and animals in visual art from the mid-18th century, Diana Donald discerns how contemporary social guidance and explanations prescribed that women should show kindness but men should not, lest they seem effeminate.57 Her analysis of human emotions as depicted in genres of painting argues that beliefs about emotions were reflected and were disseminated through painted tableaux that reinforced female tenderness towards selective animal species. But if emotional displays were a feminine attribute in these circumstances, inexpressiveness typified masculine identity. As Bain summarises: ‘A man that towers above his fellow in force, will, endurance, courage, self-denial, strikes the spectator with an exalted idea of power.’58 There were differences in expectations about the social expression of emotions and kindness, since a capacity for emotional impassivity demarcated a higher order of manliness. Kindness and other higher-order emotions that were evident in observable expression and tender behaviour did not line up with ideas of manly self-restraint that meant instead an absence of physical cruelty.

Bain agrees that the ordering of emotional attitudes emerges from social imperatives and governed intentions towards others. Expanding Spencer’s notion of sympathy, Bain questions a solely biological origin for the most important human emotion of love and protectiveness. In a human-centric approach, he argues that these also transcend sensory causes and sexual drives and parenting, and belong to social exchange. Yet Bain agrees with Darwin’s law of antithesis, outlining that in fighting and predatory behaviour the ‘dangerously strong rival would inspire anger and fear’, but that the opposite situation produces love and manifests a (human) ‘species of tender emotion’.59 Benevolence is a manifestation of feeling pity and/or compassion and could become conjoined with the satisfaction gained from helping others, so that the lower animals could benefit.

Thomas claims that ‘[p]ity, compassion and a reluctance to inflict pain, whether on men or beasts, were identified as distinctively civilized emotions’.60 But such emotional idealism needed economic justification. The guidance about unresponsive or uncooperative animal behaviour was not clear – especially if animals were considered to lack the willpower to override their lower emotions. Bain suggests that the whip, used for training horses, means that once a horse associated the sight or sound of the whip with pain, his or her fear produced compliance. Larger animals were selectively and bodily conditioned for obedience, but there was an expectation of reciprocal gratitude for kindness and sympathy, or at least some recognisable emotional response from a social inferior, including an animal.

The hierarchical ordering of the emotions corresponded with the ordering of the species. Bain managed to incorporate some aspects of Darwin’s ideas while maintaining the prevailing view that humans are special. In 1872, Darwin challenged the human–animal divide and outlined how fear and terror were evident in both animals and humans through bodily and facial signs.61 Darwin’s understanding of emotions as being interconnected physiological processes in humans and animals, and with links between, for example, astonishment and fear, and anger and disgust, undermined earlier simplistic interpretations and 19th-century hierarchies of nature’s emotions, and even assumptions about the sameness of a whole species; that is, 19th-century emotional determinism. Importantly, similarities were pertinent to the management of exotic animals. For example, a handler’s supposed fear of a wild animal could be balanced by a greater appreciation that an animal’s aggression towards humans could be motivated by fright. But this created a conundrum. Ideas that animals and humans had similar emotional capacity and therefore physiology impinged on the widespread belief that a wild brute with base emotions needed to be civilised by human emotions, especially those of kindness and gentleness. Darwin’s work undermined a species hierarchy in which animals constitute the lower order. He suggested animals had the capacity for a full range of human-like emotions, including supposedly higher-order emotions.

At the same time, however, Darwin’s ideas had the potential to allow belief about kindness and comparable emotions in other animals to gain greater momentum. Animals that seemed to demonstrate loyalty in their behaviour or animals that seemed to reciprocate kindness could be integrated into human society. It was advantageous to claim that large-bodied animals would be responsive to displays of kindness.

Benevolence in the menagerie remained conditional. In 1872, JA asked of menageries: ‘Can the performing animals in these travelling collections be made secure of receiving unvarying kindness?’62 The author continued, claiming to have witnessed the ‘reckless violence’ of keepers losing tempers, and beating them with ‘iron rakes’ or ‘rods’. Even if the rhetoric surrounding animals in menageries did not match their treatment, a public expectation gradually developed that kind attitudes should prevail. The gap between the actual treatment of animals and emotional attitudes towards them was reinforced by the way individual animals were celebrated in performances about kindness to humans, which regularly attracted royal attention.

Royal kindness

While the young Queen Victoria was clearly fascinated by Van Amburgh’s lion act, which she attended six times in 1839, George Sanger considered that the older Queen was more interested in elephants.63 Certainly elephants came to dominate Sanger’s spectacles, but they were always a longstanding interest of the British royal family and their menagerie, and this was a politicised subject of 17th- and 18th-century satire, in which an elephant was substituted for the monarch.64 A 19th-century cartoon elaborates on this satirical usage by showing politicians in the zoological gardens, clambering up to ride on a seated crown-wearing elephant, and failing (Plate 3). Sanger, however, was possibly seeking confirmation of widespread social assumptions. If kindness was of a higher order, then in a hierarchical society it needed to be evident at the highest level. Thus Queen Victoria should model kindness even to animals and especially to the dominant large-bodied species such as elephants with a reputation for loyalty. In 1899 she finally and unmistakably obliged in writing when she inquired about an individual elephant.

Whether Sanger was right or not, Queen Victoria was interested in exotic animals that were part of the British Empire, and British royals regularly visited 19th-century menageries and circuses. As a princess, Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, first visited Wombwell’s menagerie on 3 May 1830.65 Victoria also rode around the arena when the Brighton riding school was being converted to a circus, and part of Wombwell’s menagerie was presented at Windsor Castle on 1 November 1834 to King William and Queen Adelaide, and again by Royal Command in 1842, 1847 and 1854.66 Victoria and Albert first attended Astley’s together on 20 May 1841.67 But Queen Victoria was curious about a wide range of popular entertainments of the time, especially those attracting a high degree of public attention. On 23 March 1844, a little person, the so-named General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton) under PT Barnum’s management, was invited to Buckingham Palace; the performance included his imitation of Bonaparte. The aristocracy and the public went to see Stratton perform at the Egyptian Hall in London. Two more invitations to the palace followed and greatly assisted Barnum with his promotion, although later ‘there were so many visits to members of the Royal Family that the showman soon felt it necessary to expend nearly one hundred pounds on a court costume for Tom Thumb’.68

By the 1840s Astley’s staging of royal pageantry and military battles was legendary, and after her life was threatened in a thwarted attack, the Queen was given a special afternoon Royal Command performance at Astley’s in April 1846 to see ‘A Grand Equestrian Day Representation’, and the royal party watched from a box that had been thoroughly searched in an otherwise empty auditorium.69 The performance included the tableau of The Rajah of Nagpore, with more than one elephant. No doubt elephants delivered an authentic aura for foreign royal characters, but the elephant’s presence in an English performance, in front of the monarch, would have seemed like quasi-official confirmation of royal dominion over all the inhabitants of their foreign territory. A living elephant in a special royal performance had considerable symbolic value.

As well as special access to living exotic animals, the royal household received animal skins and other dead specimens as state tributes from the empire in an era when stuffed birds under glass were becoming common in the Victorian household with the increasing availability of taxidermy.70 There is an arresting image of the then Prince of Wales as a young boy in acrobatic tights and a leopard-skin-like shift; he is sitting on a wine barrel, his foot resting on the head of a leopard skin.71 In an odd reference to Dionysian practice and ancient Greece, he wore a headpiece of grapes and held up a goblet. This was part of a tableau performance by the royal children in 1854, on the occasion of the royal marriage anniversary. It suggests that a trophy skin was available for use as a theatrical prop and such utility of a tribute item confirmed royal prerogative.

The royals viewed living animals in menageries through the decades when elephants were increasing in number and in parades. After 1871 Astley’s menagerie animals, especially the renowned elephants, were used by Sanger to present the largest spectacles in England, including one called ‘The Congress of Nations’. The large number of elephants in particular was invaluable to the impact of the spectacle. In 1846 a single elephant was billed at Astley’s for two weeks walking along an elevated ‘tightrope’ that was probably a plank.72 By 1852 Astley’s had the leading act, with four elephants moving together around the ring  like horses, and in 1853 an act with one balancing on two front legs. A line-up of exotic animals in routine appearances gradually increased and enhanced the impact of a fantasy spectacle. Sanger’s addition of a troupe of 11 elephants to the Aladdin Boxing Day pantomime in 1874 outdid previous zoological spectacles in London, and Sanger also toured a show to mainland Europe each year.73 The elephants additionally formed part of a bridal procession sequence that included camels and horses.

By 1876, there were 13 elephants in Gulliver on his travels or, Harlequin Robinson Crusoe, his man Friday, and the wonderful spirit of romance, 700 performers, nine camels, 52 horses and numerous menagerie animals and birds including two lions in a collar and chain in the centre of this animal tableau.74 In what seemed to be a response to public concern, the Lord Chamberlain wrote to Sanger with concerns about the weight-carrying capacity of the stage.

Elephants were being moved on command by the 1870s and John Cooper, who had first started working with lions when he was 11 in 1844, was credited with training the first elephant troupe in England by 1876, presenting six and later eight moving together at a time so that they seemed to dance a waltz and a hornpipe.75 A team of four elephants was worth a thousand guineas in 1882. The elephant act was enhanced by music, and this framed the act’s intention of pleasing spectators with an imitation of human-like actions by the largest animal – an implicit confirmation of human dominance. Cooper went on to train elephants to walk on barrels, ride a tricycle and lift him up, and these were rivalled only by the tricks of the elephants that were later presented by the Lockhart family in the 1880s and 1890s.76 From the 1870s to 1880s, elephants were considered sufficiently manageable to be included in the ring show of the larger circuses that could afford to buy them.

During the parades to advertise Sanger’s shows, elephants walked in between the carriages that carried tableaux. These included the King’s Tableaux, a horse-drawn carriage with a four-high tier structure, on which three tiers of male performers were wearing ‘bejeweled turbans and Oriental costumes’; the top tier consisted of one performer on a swing.77 The other menagerie animals were paraded in 20 cages on wagons followed by horse riders costumed either as military figures or as cowboys and Indians. The scale of this spectacle was intended to impress even a queen.

As indicated, the royal family rewarded performers who worked with exotic animals with attention and often with gifts. In 1887 Queen Victoria was said to have been pleased that ‘among other marks of the spread of enlightenment’ was an increase in ‘humane feelings towards the lower animals’.78 A presumption of humaneness in the British treatment of these menagerie animals may have been idealistic, since elephant care was highly variable. Elephants did not breed in captivity, making the mortality rate an ongoing concern, and Sanger had 13 elephants die during his working life.79

Several months after having watched a parade with the elephants from her carriage on 17 July 1899, Queen Victoria inquired into an incident that brought about the death of an elephant that she would have seen in the Sanger parade. The letter, on behalf of the Queen, is reproduced in Sanger’s biography and reveals a kindly interest in the fate of the elephants. Its existence implies that royal responsibility extended to elephants. In February 1900, a menagerie carpenter and friend invited some acquaintances from a hotel back to the elephant stalls where the elephants were prodded by the group with theatrical spears that were used in a war spectacle. When the elephants duly reacted, the carpenter was crushed to death by an elephant named Charlie who had broken out of his chains. Other elephants broke loose and one, Edgar, was not caught for two days. The mishandled and physically provoked Charlie, who had been with Sanger for 20 years, had to be shot for killing the drunk carpenter. The hierarchical order of the species prevailed in practice, regardless of expressions of kind concern, even from the Queen.

Attacks in art

The painted panoramas and tableaux of conflict used in theatre and circus popularised longstanding themes of predator attack and war in more socially esteemed arts such as painting and sculpture, and these spread to the colonies. The various arts contained an abundance of depictions of animals, including those themed with emotive images of war, conflict and attacks between species. As live entertainments began to reveal comparable capacities to painted depictions during the 19th century, accordingly exhibited animals influenced themes in painting. In turn, artistic depictions of animals impinged on social expectations about exhibited animals. In considering how the arts were indicative of emotional responses within the wider society – and possibly influenced by Aristotle – Bain recognises that humans derive some pleasure from the simulation of fear in art and performance. More significantly, however, he acknowledges that there is also pleasure in viewing the infliction of pain and enjoyment derived from watching fights with animals. He argues that the bodily excitement that arises from actual danger heightened its appeal, such as with the hunting of tigers or the spectacle of bullfights or other contests. Bain considers that animal species are separated on a slim pretext into those that humans make pets of and those that are chased or put into collections for public viewing or hunting; Hume finds the passions of hunting similar to those experienced when studying philosophy.80 Bain is clear that animal entertainments are a major social activity expressly because they stimulate the emotions.

There were notable differences, however, between depictions in performance and those in visual art and literature. The emotional significance was often generalised in live performance and more ambiguous and open to interpretation, although animals were framed within human narratives of conflict and war. An animal appearance did not by itself present a set of hostile emotions. The menagerie lion act relied on the striking visual effect of placing humans and animals in close proximity to elicit fear and excitement, drawing on pre-existing expectations and associations to colour public perceptions.

By comparison, visual art could embellish and particularise facial emotions with an example of either aggression and conflict or a harmonious compatibility between species. The violence of an attack could be graphic and studied at length. The emotional impact could be specific, its detail available for repeated viewing. In particular, George Stubbs, known for his paintings of animals, undertook a series of 17 paintings in 30 years from the 1760s that depicted a lion attacking a horse; there is a suggestion he may have witnessed such an attack. Although each painting in the series offered a slightly different perspective on the same attack, they showed the aggression of the lion on top of the horse, clawing the horse’s back. Diana Donald explains that the paintings by Stubbs show four steps in the attack and were intended to reveal ferocity in nature. Stubbs followed a tradition of painting lions and tigers that went back to Rubens’ painting of about 1616–18, which had been influenced by the legacy of Greco-Roman art. Donald analyses how wild animal species were used to depict and embody human qualities and ultimately to represent nature with individual animals symbolising larger patterns. ‘Stubbs shows such an elemental battle for life in heroic terms . . . in a drama of raw nature itself.’81

The paintings reflected human emotional attitudes. In A lion attacking a horse, painted c. 1765, Stubbs shows a brown lion on top of a white horse whose agonised open mouth, exposed teeth, turned head, and twisted body position depict terrified surprise (Plate 2). The viewer is being positioned to feel sympathy for the horse,82 whose innocent terror contrasts with the demonic power of nature embodied by the lion; his eyes stare out towards the viewer with an ambiguous expression. A romantic natural European landscape surrounds them with the hazy mist of dark green hills and trees and botanical details in the foreground. The side of the horse, including the tail and back leg, is outlined in taut muscular profile and blocks some of the lion’s body from view. The painting conveys a sense of physical fear, even terror, in the unfolding attack and leap that has propelled the lion up onto the horse’s back. It further shows the lion’s muscular effort to hold his position, his claws digging into the horse’s flesh. This concept of a ferocious attack was part of 18th-century art well before the advent of tamer acts. A lion riding a horse and later an elephant would become the epitome of the achievement of the trained animal act after the 1890s.83

Elsewhere Stubbs imagines the same animal species in repose, which may be closer to Thomas’ contestable assertion that Stubbs’ paintings were ‘controlled, detached and utterly unanthropomorphic’.84 Donald explains: ‘Stubbs’ ideas on the relationship between men and fierce animals were not embodied in scenes of hunting and predation alone.’85 He had an interest in anatomical comparisons and towards the end of his life compared human, tiger and fowl bodies and showed curiosity about how animal bodies motivate artists. In comparison, Samuel Daniell’s peacefully idyllic paintings African scenery and animals, 1804–05, were the result of his travels in 1801 to see animals in their habitats and attracted less public attention. In Daniell’s work, elephants wander freely through tranquil landscapes. But the dynamism of painting that depicted the ferocity of lions and tigers and captive animals, including staged acts from menageries, overshadowed such tranquil scenes.

Paintings of exotic animals preceded staged cage acts and exotic animals on circus and theatre stages and delivered pervasive concepts of violence. John MacKenzie writes that the gothic sentiments of 19th-century art influenced orientalist art and reflected the belief that:

Animal attackers were surrogates for an unpredictable nature that was implicitly inclusive of humanity.

Accordingly, in comparison the live entertainment might have been somewhat disappointing. Edwin Landseer was recognised as the leading painter of animals in the first half of the 19th century, and in one portrait study of Van Amburgh and his animal act (Plate 1), Van Amburgh is positioned in the centre of the painting, standing astride, his arm extended, pointing to what appears to be a lion cringing to the side as several other big cats pull back. The emotional confrontation is implied rather than dramatised. Landseer preferred to paint dogs, stags and to a lesser extent lions, and he became best known for his emotive images of dogs and for reproductions of his paintings and engravings, which together generated half of his income.87 His prominence was assured after commissions from the royal family. In an early set of engravings based on his drawings, he created a fighting scene with lions, tigers and leopards. Notably, however, he depicts Van Amburgh in a quiet stance of dominance, looking but not touching the animals. Less skilful illustrations of Van Amburgh’s act by other artists contradict this impression by depicting handling and exaggerated physical confrontation, whereas Landseer replicated its mystique.

To achieve accuracy, Landseer studied live animals in Cross’ Exeter Change menagerie and dissected dead ones. Later he would keep his own collection of live and dead animals. But MacKenzie suggests that Landseer was overwhelmed by the ‘violence’ in his imagination;88 arguably, he might also have witnessed fights between species. Landseer’s art was well known during the first half of the 19th century and preceded a slightly more self-reflective relationship with hunting that emerged from the practice of keeping safari hunting diaries (see Chapter 3). As MacKenzie points out, Victorian artists and travel writers transformed animals and environmental domains into nature itself.

The artistic effort to depict the emotions of an animal attack culminated in the striking effect of taxidermy. Rachel Poliquin recounts how Jules Verreaux’s extremely graphic diorama Arab courier attacked by lions, in which two lions attacked a human on a camel, won a gold medal in 1867. Poliquin suggests that the camel was ‘bellowing in fear and pain’.89 She explains that such a composition was at once geographically informative, dramatically exciting, lurid and frightening.

The extremes of animal behaviour in painted poses and taxidermy could not be easily re-created in live exhibitions and acts. Nor could these deliver the nuances and intricacies of the painted detail of an attack – leaving aside accidents. Even literature and theatrical  dialogue and song lyrics were more specific in their messages about confrontation, patriotism and conflict with animal symbols than the regular menagerie action, and there was a corresponding expansion in theatrical variety shows that presented war themes without animals. In the second half of the 19th century, a subgenre of theatrical melodramas depicting patriotism became more numerous in music hall venues. War was a perennial topic. MacKenzie lists at least 13 political events and military campaigns after 1867 that ‘identify outbursts of public interest in foreign and imperial matters’ and stimulate ‘popular excitement’.90 John Springhall observes that ‘little wars’ happened in the colonies every year of Queen Victoria’s reign after 1870, and these became the substance of ‘romantic adventure and heroism’ in newspapers.91

The emotional impact of art could vary considerably, even about attack and war, and while painting fixed an image of violence, theatre remained cheerfully rousing. Penny Summerfield outlines how some historians consider that the 19th-century theatre, and especially the music hall, educated the public about political events. They also manipulated audience responses and therefore influenced public opinion more broadly to benefit imperialist rule and to advance acceptance of the propaganda about wars in an expanding British Empire. The reactions of spectators probably had some parallels across live entertainments. Melodramas about liberating other places were popular in working-class theatres of the 1870s in England, espousing how the dutiful sailor or soldier freed colonial populations, and these had evolved from earlier nautical tropes of liberating slaves. One interesting feature of theatre and music hall songs about war was the symbolic centrality of animals. A famous example from 1877 was the song ‘By Jingo’, with lyrics about how the Russians threatened Constantinople: ‘we don’t want to fight’, claimed the lyrics, but ‘the dogs of war’ had been let loose because the brute of a Russian bear threatened to attack the poor lion (Britain), who was trying to avoid war by staying in his den.92 State authority over citizens’ lives was reinforced by such patriotic refrains using ideas of animals. Yet Summerfield argues that jingoistic attitudes were more likely to be found among middle-class spectators and in later narratives about a triumphant military in the colonies. She suggests that working-class audiences may have been comparatively indifferent, despite years when large numbers went into the army.

Nonetheless the inclusion of live animals made war narratives credible and heroic, and battle spectacles with animals were staged throughout the 19th century in Britain. The military were appreciative of popular entertainment involving animals, and there were reverse tributes to the circus from the military. For example, in 1872 the ‘ninth (Queen’s Own) Lancers’ of the ‘Royal Marine Barracks’ put up a tent and staged their own circus, presenting well-trained ‘trick’ horses by non-commissioned officers and gymnastic feats for the entertainment of the garrison.93 The horseriding skills of military men meant that they could easily re-create a 19th-century equestrian circus. In the same year there was also a touring show with a troupe of horses and ‘War Arabs’ in the south of England.94

Popular entertainment involving military iconography and endearing animals can be claimed to have distorted public understandings of war, especially in narratives staged repeatedly over time. The perpetuation of imperial ambition required force and therefore public support for soldiers sent to remote places. A music hall production of Britannia (without a lion) presented in 1885 in London personified the British Empire with a female performer who, confronted by the greedy aggression of other nations, was defended by the noble and loyal sons of England and brave sons from the colonies.95 This type of show demanded pride in the English military and the lyrics unmistakably reinforced nationalist sentiments; the need to protect womanhood converged with the imperative to protect the nation, represented by a female figure or an animal. Such entertainments blatantly reinforced how colonial hierarchies of identity and status achieved control of land and of all its inhabitants, including animals, and how this was maintained through militarised regimes.

Empire-building during the 19th century has been described as ‘a very masculine enterprise’, and colonised peoples were accordingly viewed as ‘weak and unmasculine’.96 Animals, too, were colonised within associated emotional hierarchies. Melodramas with war themes and animals contained narrative similarities to other types of theatricalised performance, in that these were human stories about conflict and aggression in which the visual significance was enlarged by realistic animal presence. Colonial rule was also implicitly sanctioned by encounters with animals from the colonies and animals were framed in instructive ways. At the same time individual animal sensations and tales of largesse diverted attention from large-scale human predicaments in remote settlements. The ambiguity of animal presence in performance also facilitated a wide spectrum of signification and meaning that masked the underlying fundamental human–animal conflict. Imputations of violence surrounded 19th-century battle re-enactment and the staging of international conflicts and skirmishes, but the enjoyment – even pleasure – that was derived from these public entertainments with live animals may have offset understanding of the deadly consequences of war and of attack.