Jumbo: Sentient Animal Celebrity

Abstract

Chapter 1 examines how British consumers in the early 1880s made Jumbo an international celebrity by expressing interest in him as a sentient individual whose experience was a matter of public concern. By a letter-writing campaign and visits to the elephant, women and children, Londoners in particular, defined the London Zoological Society’s sale of the elephant to P. T. Barnum as “cruel” because it denied the elephant’s presumed wishes and needs. News coverage of Jumbo’s behavior and its assumed meaning additionally facilitated consumer generation of animal celebrity, that is, a comforting anthropocentric parasocial relationship of Jumbo with the public. The “Jumbo affair” also generated criticism about how Jumbo’s fans labored over his fate while overlooking slaughter of elephants in Africa to supply ivory for consumer products.