Elephants in the High Street

Abstract

In 1855 a contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, William Aytoun, recounted his childhood experiences of visiting George Wombwell’s travelling menagerie on Edinburgh’s Castle Mound. Writing nostalgically about his boyhood encounters with the wild beasts, the now grown-up menagerie customer described how he had been enticed into the show, that ‘mysterious quadrangle of wagons’, by the ‘huge and somewhat incongruous pictures of lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, wolves and boa constrictors making their way towards some common centrepiece of carrion’. The entry fee paid, Aytoun ventured into the menagerie ‘with a far more excited feeling than any middle-aged traveller experiences when he first catches a glimpse of Timbuctoo’, and, descending a flight of stairs into the interior of the exhibition, was immediately assailed by the ‘strange and wildly tropical... commixed odour of sawdust, ammonia and orange peel. A hideous growling, snarling, hissing, baying, barking and chattering’ assaulted the young visitor’s ears as he penetrated further into the menagerie. Apprehension, however, was soon replaced by enchantment as the boy scrutinised in turn each of the caged animals and observed its movements. Years later Aytoun still remembered seeing ‘Nero, the indulgent old lion, who would stand any amount of liberties’.

Why is an elephant unlike a tree? — Because a tree leaves in the spring, and the elephant leaves when the menagerie does. (Bristol Mercury, 23 December 1871)