“Jumboism Is Akin to Jingoism”: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Elephant Craze of 1882

Yeandle, Peter

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_4

Peter Yeandle⁶

Part of the book series: Britain and the World ((BAW))

580 Accesses

Abstract

The Jumbomania of 1882 was the patriotic ‘sensation’ unleashed when London Zoo decided to sell its prized African elephant, Jumbo, to the controversial American showman P. T. Barnum. Yeandle’s chapter analyses Jumbomania to demonstrate how a seemingly trivial media sensation tapped into and articulated popular contemporary racial and imperial ideologies: as the largest elephant in captivity, Jumbo’s size marked him out as an imperial trophy. His ‘taming’ became emblematic of civilising mission; his choreographed refusal to travel demonstrated his patriotism. Jumbomania captured the public imagination, dominating various sites of mass entertainment, literary culture and broadcast media. Moreover, Jumbo’s symbolic significance was instrumentalised in wider debates about Britain’s imperial health, economic and foreign policy and the moral commitment to combat slavery on the African continent.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Chapter: USD 29.95; Price excludes VAT (USA)

eBook: USD 69.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Softcover Book: USD 89.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Hardcover Book: USD 119.99; Price excludes VAT (USA)

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

1.
Times, 25 January 1882.
2.
Susan Nance, Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 12. Other ‘national pets’, including chimpanzees and hippopotamuses, are described in Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 226–32.
3.
Jumbo’s image was used in the satirical press to reference these events. ‘The Political Jumbo’, Funny Folks, 11 March 1882, depicted the elephant as representative of the immovable House of Lords. If the Americans were desperate for a unique beast, asserted Punch, then they should leave the British Jumbo where he is and take Bradlaugh instead. ‘Arcades Jumbo; Or, Br-Dl--Gh and the Elephant’, Punch, 4 March 1882.
4.
Times of India, 18 April 1882.
5.
Telegraph, 2 March 1882.
6.
Telegraph, 22 February 1882.
7.
John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); and John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986).
8.
See, for instance, Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
9.
W. P. Jolly, Jumbo (London: Constable, 1976); Les Harding, Elephant Story: Jumbo and P. T. Barnum Under the Big Top (New York: McFarland, 1999); Paul Chambers, Jumbo: The Greatest Elephant in the World (London: Andre Deutsch, 2007); and John Sutherland, Jumbo: The Unauthorised Biography of a Victorian Sensation (London: Aurum Press, 2014).
10.
Humblebee Films, ‘Attenborough and the Giant Elephant’, BBC1, 10 December 2017, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p05q0fvj. #Jumbo was one of the top five trending topics on Twitter. Jumbo was also at the heart of the Wellcome’s Making Nature exhibition (1 December 2016–21 May 2017) https://wellcomecollection.org/MakingNature [accessed 12 November 2017].
11.
Susan Nance argues that Jumbo was the ‘first international nonhuman celebrity in world history and a profoundly modern creature’; symptomatic of capitalist consumerism, Jumbo’s modernity exposed power relations between man and the natural world. Nance, Animal Modernity, 6. Jumbo features in other studies of animal histories. See Ritvo, Animal Estate, 220 and 232; Helen Cowie, Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 9–10 and 142–54; Wilfred Blunt, The Ark in the Park: The Zoo in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hamilton, 1976), 178–88; and Robert Jones, ‘“The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime”: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2 (1997), 1–26.
12.
Seeking to position animal agency as central to accounts of environmental, sociological, and historical study, Critical Animal Studies scholars borrow from and extend feminist and postcolonial methodologies. The struggle for animal liberation and women’s liberation shares similar theoretical standpoints and objectives, often relating to the exercise of power within patriarchal capitalist societies. Although this approach has confronted several methodological problems, not least the fact that animals do not leave their own written or oral documents for analysis (much like historically overlooked humans), the work of CAS scholars has been innovative. See Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals’, in Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3–18; and Hilda Kean, ‘Challenges for Writing Animal-Human History: What Is Really Enough?’ Anthrozoos, 25 (2012), 57–72.
13.
Nigel Rothfels, ‘Elephants, Ethics, History’, in Christen Wemmer and Catherine Christen, eds., Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 117. Emphasis in original.
14.
Telegraph, 20 February 1882.
15.
Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians (London: Cornell University Press, 2011), 2.
16.
Matthew Scott, Jumbo’s Keeper; and, Jumbo’s Biography (Bridgeport: Trow’s, 1885), 61; and Chambers, Jumbo, 105.
17.
Sutherland, Jumbo, 90.
18.
Chambers, Jumbo, 119. On Jamrach, see Elle Larsson, ‘Charles Jamrach’s Exotic Menagerie and the Victorian Wild Animal Trade’, Animal History Museum Online.http://animalhistorymuseum.org/exhibitsandevents/online-gallery/gallery-8-animals-and-empire/enter-gallery-8/ii-the-animal-resource/exotic-animal-trade/ [accessed 12 January 2017].
19.
See, amongst others, Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day!: A History of Media and Communication in Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2009).
20.
MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 16. On the relationship between jingoism and the newsprint media, see Simon Potter, ‘Jingoism, Public Opinion, and the New Imperialism: Newspapers and Imperial Rivalries at the fin de siècle’, Media History 20 (2014), 34–50.
21.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Introduction’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 2–3.
22.
Herbert Kendrick, Barnum: The Mahomet of Humbug. An Address Read before the Liverpool Philomathic Society (Liverpool: D. Marples and Co. Printers, 1933), chapter entitled ‘National Hysteria’, 3–25.
23.
Standard, 21 February 1882.
24.
Quoted in Ritvo, Animal Estate, 232.
25.
Standard, 22 February 1882.
26.
Telegraph, 2 March 1882; and Standard, 23 February 1882.
27.
Pall Mall Gazette, 23 February 1882.
28.
Standard, 23 February 1882; Saturday Review, 25 February 1882; and Pall Mall Gazette, 24 February 1882.
29.
R. H. Gretton, A Modern History of the English People—Volume I: 1880–1898 (London: Grant Richards, 1913), 94.
30.
Era, 25 March 1882. See also Chambers, Jumbo, 143.
31.
Morning Post, 23 March 1882.
32.
See also Telegraph, 23 March 1882; Standard, 24 March 1882; Illustrated London News, 1 April 1882; and Times, 23 March 1882.
33.
Harding, Elephant Story, 48.
34.
Chambers, Jumbo, 160.
35.
Jolly, Jumbo, 77.
36.
Telegraph, 21 and 22 March 1882.
37.
Blunt, Ark in the Park, 181.
38.
Harding, Elephant Story, 44; Nance, Animal Modernity, 25; and Kendrick, Barnum, 20–21.
39.
Telegraph, 20 February 1882.
40.
Pall Mall Gazette, 2 March 1882; and Daily News, 7 March 1882.
41.
Quoted in Jolly, Jumbo, 77.
42.
Funny Folks, 15 March 1882.
43.
Spectator, 25 March 1882.
44.
Telegraph, 16 March 1882.
45.
Harding, Elephant Story, 48.
46.
Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 11 March 1882.
47.
Jolly, Jumbo, 81–82.
48.
Standard, 2 March 1882; Lloyd’s Illustrated, 5 March 1882; Daily News, 27 February 1882; and Era, 4 March 1882. On pantomime as topical referencing to imperialism more generally, see Peter Yeandle, ‘Performing the Other on the Popular London Stage: Exotic People and Places in Victorian Pantomime’, in Tiziana Morosetti, ed., Staging the Other in Nineteenth-Century British Drama (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 125–52.
49.
Era, 4 and 11 March 1882, 1 April 1882.
50.
Era, 25 February 1882; Graphic, 29 April 1882; Jolly, Jumbo, 70; and Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: Or The spectacular, the Shocking, and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Anthem, 2003), 281–84
51.
See Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music: Britain, 1876–1953 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 325–26.
52.
See advertisement in the Era, 25 March. See also advertisements on the 11th and 18th.
53.
Penny Illustrated Paper, 1 April 1882.
54.
Times of India, 18 April 1882.
55.
MacKenzie, ‘Introduction’, 17.
56.
Richard Fulton, ‘The Sudan Sensation of 1898’, Victorian Periodicals Review 42 (2009), 37 and 59.
57.
Jones, ‘“Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime”’, 5.
58.
Fun, 15 March 1882.
59.
Nance, Animal Modernity, 11.
60.
Sutherland, Jumbo, 91–93. See H. Hazel Hahn, ‘Indian Princes, Dancing Girls and Tigers: The Prince of Wales’ Tour of India and Ceylon, 1875–6’, Postcolonial Studies 12 (2009), 173–92.
61.
Telegraph, 20 February 1882.
62.
Standard, 21 February 1882, 7 March 1882, and 22 March 1882.
63.
Sarah Amato, Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2015), 106–7.
64.
Ritvo, Animal Estate, 231.
65.
Cowie, Exhibiting Animals, 5
66.
Times, 11 April 1882.
67.
Quoted in Amato, Beastly Possessions, 114.
68.
Robbie McLaughlin, Reimagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in Fin de Siècle Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 10.
69.
Helen Cowie, ‘“An Attractive and Amusing Place of Resort”: Zoos, Community, and Civic Pride in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Cultural and Social History 12 (2015), 365–84. See also Amato, Beastly Possessions, 132–34; and Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 81–142.
70.
Standard, 23 February 1882.
71.
Amato, Beastly Possessions, 114.
72.
Times, 21 February 1882; and Telegraph, 20 February 1882.
73.
Pall Mall Gazette, 21 February 1882.
74.
Standard, 21 and 22 February 1882.
75.
Illustrated London News, 25 February 1882.
76.
Telegraph, 23 February 1882. On the use of Pinafore as linguistic shorthand for debates about empire, see Derek Scott, ‘English National Identity and the Comic Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan’, in Peter Horton and Bennett Zon, eds., Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies: Volume III (London: Routledge, 2017), 137–52.
77.
Ritvo, Animal Estate, 39.
78.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal (London: John Murray, 1872), 167. See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy,When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994). On the evidence of Peta Tait’s study of nineteenth and early twentieth-century circuses and zoos, animal handlers and keepers were aware of how to manipulate animal emotions in their training. Tait, Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 26–29.
79.
Moonshine, 11 March 1882.
80.
Fun, 8 March 1882.
81.
Moonshine, 18 March 1882.
82.
Punch, 18 March 1882.
83.
On Jumbo as sentient creature, and the ramifications of that for questions of animal agency, Susan Nance’s Animal Modernity is invaluable.
84.
Daily News, 23 February 1882.
85.
Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 1 April; and Graphic, 1 April.
86.
For detailed descriptions, see Chambers, Jumbo, 53; and Harding, Elephant Story, 59.
87.
Standard, 22 March 1882.
88.
Telegraph, 2 March 1882.
89.
Pall Mall Gazette, 21 February 1882.
90.
Chambers, Jumbo, 70–74.
91.
Funny Folks, beginning 4 March 1882.
92.
See Penny Illustrated, 25 March 1882.
93.
Graphic, 29 April 1882.
94.
Scott, Jumbo’s Keeper, 68.
95.
Standard, 20 and 21 February 1882.
96.
Douglas Lorimer, Colour, Class and the Victorians: English Attitudes to the Negro in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), 82.
97.
Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 21.
98.
Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 202.
99.
Diamond, Victorian Sensation, 221.
100.
At the time of Jumbomania, papers were reporting on how British export trade was hamstrung by American protectionist policies. British free traders attacked protectionism ‘on a politico-moral basis’, according to Edmund Rogers, ‘adducing the United States as proof of the corrupting effects of tariffs on democracy and liberal values’. Rogers, ‘The United States and the Fiscal Debate in Britain, 1873–1913’, Historical Journal 50 (2007), 596.
101.
Standard, 7 March 1882. This was a timely reference given ongoing debate in America about immigration and citizenship that would take legislative form in the Chinese Exclusion Act that became law a few months later. See Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014).
102.
Funny Folks, 11 March 1882.
103.
Punch, 4 March 1882.
104.
Standard, 22 February 1882.
105.
Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 11 March 1882; and Standard, 23 February 1882; and Daily News, 1882.
106.
Telegraph, 22 March 1882.
107.
Morning Post, 10 March 1882.
108.
Telegraph, 23 February 1882.
109.
Standard, 7 March 1882.
110.
Chambers, Jumbo, 146–47.
111.
Morning Post, 17 March 1882; Daily News, 23 February 1882; Standard, 21 February 1882; and Pall Mall Gazette, 7 March 1882.
112.
Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 161. See also William Mulligan, ‘British Anti-slave Trade and Anti-slavery Policy in East Africa, Arabia, and Turkey in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Brendan Simms and D. J. B Trim, eds., Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 271–74.
113.
The BFASS, founded in 1839, ‘was neither the first nor the only anti-slavery body but it was the only one to survive into the 1870s’ and beyond. Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (London: Longman, 1975), 31.
114.
The Anti-Slavery Reporter 2, no. 5 (May 1882), 140.
115.
Times, 28 August 1882.
116.
Amalia Ribi Forclaz, Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Antislavery Activism, 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3. See also the special issue ‘Empire and Humanitarianism’ in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40 (2012); Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (London: Routledge, 2005); Seymour Drescher, ‘Emperors of the World: British Abolitionism and Imperialism’, in Derek Peterson, ed., Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 144–46.
117.
Joanna Lewis, Empire of Sentiment: The Death of David Livingstone and the Myth of Victorian Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 13 and 16. See also Joanna Lewis, ‘Empires of Sentiment; Intimacies from Death: David Livingstone and African Slavery “at the heart of the nation”’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 42 (2015), 210–37.
118.
Lewis, Empire of Sentiment, 57.
119.
Funny Folks, 22 April 1882.
120.
Berny Sèbe, ‘The Making of British and French Legends of Exploration, 1821–1914’, in Dane Kennedy, ed., Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 117. See also Berny Sèbe, Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 143–48; and Justin Livingstone, Livingstone’s Lives: A Metabiography of a Victorian Icon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 84–85 and 131–33.
121.
John M. MacKenzie, ‘Heroic Myths of Empire’, in John M. MacKenzie, ed., Popular Imperialism and the Military (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 125.
122.
Standard, 23 February 1882.
123.
Telegraph, 20 February 1882.
124.
See Nigel Rothfels, ‘Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the Nineteenth Century’, in Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, eds., Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 53–62.
125.
Animal World, 151 (April 1882). On the ivory trade, see John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 121–27.
126.
Nance, Animal Modernity, 33.
127.
Illustrated Police News, 16 December 1882.
128.
Quoted in Jolly, Jumbo, 70.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
Peter Yeandle

Authors

Peter Yeandle
View author publications
You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Peter Yeandle .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Department of History, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA
Stephanie Barczewski
School of History, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Martin Farr

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Yeandle, P. (2019). “Jumboism Is Akin to Jingoism”: Race, Nation, and Empire in the Elephant Craze of 1882. In: Barczewski, S., Farr, M. (eds) The MacKenzie Moment and Imperial History. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_4

Download citation

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24459-0_4
Published: 12 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24458-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24459-0
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics