Coda

William Huggins (1824-1910) frequently visited the Wombwell menagerie to use the animals as model for his paintings. Maria West may have had one of his early works hanging in her Stoke Newington living room.


The story of Wombwell’s menagerie is to some extent a story of empire and the proprietorial attitudes of Great Britain and other imperial powers to the countries they colonised. Just as the great nations of the time thought nothing of bringing back the archaeological treasures of their colonies and other foreign countries to develop some of the most outstanding museums in the world, so their naturalists explored and categorised the flora and fauna of the same distant regions. 

It took one starry-eyed romantic dreamer however with a passion for animals but a ruthless and hard-headed business mind to transform these erudite pursuits into a mass entertainment phenomenon. 

In browsing the many resources now available regarding the menagerie, there are many other stories, and it cannot be denied that the menagerie business was an attritional enterprise with high casualty rates for both animals and also people. In a correspondence on the web, David Lampard of the Ipswich museum, reports that the museum has at least 29 specimens from the menagerie acquired between 1847 and 1852, and a further 14 donated by Edward Henry Bostock. It is his belief that the Wombwells distributed lists of dead animals for purchase to the museums of the day. This is certainly more likely than the report of a local newspaper of the period, complaining that the menagerie simply dumped the dead animals on the museum doorstep as a regular practice. George was too good a businessman for that. And for all what would be considered cruelty and negligence from our perspective today, it was not in the interests of the menageries to allow their animals simply to die off on a regular basis. They were, in their own way, dedicated to the natural world. 

The menagerists were not however equally knowledgeable, competent or skilled in their understanding of the animals, and a thin grey line seems to have been crossed at some point, when it was no longer enough to display the animals simply as they were. More action and entertainment was required than this, and consequently the boundaries between menageries and circuses start to get more than a little blurred. And this, in turn, must have impacted on the treatment of the animals, since the question of proper care then had to balanced against the issue of training. 

In a way, nothing became Edward Bostock better than his recognition that the time had come to bring down the curtain and move on.