Memories from a Dark and Lonesome Room

As George Wombwell junior recited his woes to the Mail correspondent, there is just an inkling that starts to emerge that his continuing misfortunes may have owed as much to bad judgement as to bad luck: 

How is it, it may be asked, that George Wombwell – a man, who in his day, spent hundreds and thousands of pounds in the purchase of animals for his menagerie has been reduced to such a miserable state of existence” Drink? No. The old man, himself, said that even now when he is playing in the streets he has many offers of drink, but he always declines them. And those in the neighbourhood who know the old fellow had a good word to say for him. They had never seen him the worse for liquor. No, it was a series of misfortunes – illness, loss of animals by disease, fire, and a variety of other causes that sent George Wombwell under.

The old man’s eyes filled with tears as in his dark and lonesome room, he recalled some of the incidents of the past.

“It is more than twenty years now,” he said; “since my menagerie was sold up on the spot where Columbia market now stands. What have I been doing since then? Going about the country, playing in circus bands until I got past it. Now I go out of an evening and play outside four public houses where they know me.”

When the original George Wombwell died in 1850, the menagerie had already been divided into three operations. It was Menagerie Number Three that he left to his nephew, George junior. Since, by 1861, George was living in Bow, and recorded in the census of that year as an artist and photographer, his menagerie must have already been sold off by this time -  more like forty years before the Daily Mail interview than the twenty that George himself suggested. 

The 'spot' which by 1897 had become Columbia Gardens was in earlier days known as Nova Scotia Gardens, a notorious slum and criminal haunt. For the Victorians of the time, Nova Scotia Gardens were best known for the exploits of the London Burkers. The Burkers' business model involved supplying and selling fresh bodies to the medical profession, where they were urgently needed to advance the cause of medical science. The practice of removing recently buried bodies from their graves for this purpose was not actually a very uncommon practice, but in the interests of supply chain efficiency, the Burkers of Nova Scotia Gardens felt that there was room for a more innovative approach to the project. 

The Nova Scotia Cottages that were the Burkers' Business Centre. Picture copied from: http://www.sarahwise.co.uk/italianboy.html, where there is a wealth of information about the Burkers and their activities,

Their brand new business model foundered however when it was noticed that the bodies they provided did not actually appear ever to have been buried. A number of the Burkers' corpses were it seemed 'fresher than fresh', their owners having been generously provisioned with laudanum and rum, and then tipped down a Nova Scotia well until ready for their final trip to one of the major London teaching hospitals. The two main partners in this gruesome enterprise were executed at Newgate in 1831, and, then subjected to the entirely poetic justice of having their own corpses dispatched for dissection. The inspiration for their venture had clearly come from Burke and Hare, who had first piloted the scheme through a series of sixteen murders in Edinburgh culminating in Burke's hanging in 1828. The weak point was that the authorities must already have been alert to copy-cat crimes of this type.

The Novia Scotia slums were eventually purchased by a famous Victorian philanthropist, Angela Burdett-Coutts, and Columbia Market opened in 1869. 

The point to be made here however is that in putting his menagerie up for sale in Nova Scotia Gardens, George Wombwell junior, for whatever reasons, was selling off his stock in a location where most respectable Victorians would have thought twice, three times or more before even approaching. 

As we shall see, when we return to the Daily Mail profile, this proved to be yet another misguided decision.