By the close of the nineteenth century it was estimated that there were some three-quarters of a million cats in London, and they were of course variously treated. In late nineteenth-century Whitechapel an ancient prostitute-“a frowzy, debauched, drunken-looking creature,” as described by Charles Booth-distributed meat from a basket to every passing stray. Kindness of this nature seems to have emerged in the late nineteenth century. One old resident remarked to Booth: “The day was when no cat could appear in the streets of Bethnal Green without being hunted or maltreated; now such conduct is rare.” If there were ever to be written a history of moral emotions, it could do worse than study Londoners’ treatment of animals.
Dogs appear in almost every depiction of a London “street-scene,” prancing on the road and mingling joyfully with horses and pedestrians alike. There have been dogs at every stage of the city’s history, accompanying families in their walks along the fields, barking at passing processions, eager and fierce during riots, growling at and fighting each other in obscure disputes over London territory. In the twelfth century a royal edict declared that “if a greedy ravening dog shall bite” a “Royal beast,” then its owner forfeited his life. So we may imagine the inhabitants of early medieval London nervously taking out their dogs for sport, or pastime, or hunting, in any of the fields and meadows beyond the walls of the city. Yet the dogs which were taken to these areas had to be “expeditated”; their claws were cut down to the balls of their feet to stop them from running after deer.
A proclamation was made in 1387 “that dogs shall not wander in the City at large”; yet in the same order a distinction was made between wild or wandering dogs and household dogs. So the concept of the “pet” existed in medieval London. The most prized of London dogs was the mastiff. Many were sent as gifts to prominent persons abroad, and a German traveller of the sixteenth century noted that some of those dogs “are so large and heavy that if they have to be transported long distances, they are provided with shoes so that they do not wear out their feet.” They were also used as guard dogs and in the records of London Bridge there are payments made in compensation to those who had been bitten or hurt by the mastiff hounds. The major problem in the city, however, has always been that of strays. A notice at the newly built St. Katherine Docks, by the Tower of London, dated 23 September 1831, warned that “the Gate Keepers will prevent the admission of DOGS, unless the Owners shall have them fastened by a Cord or Handkerchief.” The principal complaint against the animals was that they wreaked “Considerable Injury” upon goods, but the age of commerce was also the age of philanthropy. In the mid-nineteenth century a Home for Lost and Starving Dogs was established in London; this is the first instance of canine welfare in the city. “When it first opened there was a disposition to laugh,” “Aleph” wrote in 1863, “but subscribers were found, and the asylum flourishes”; removed to Battersea in 1871 after complaints in the neighbourhood about the noise, it flourishes still, as the Battersea Dogs Home.
The flea is as ancient as the dog, but its part in the natural history of London is shrouded in obscurity. The bed bug was first noticed publicly in 1583, while the cockroach was reported by 1634. We may infer, however, that lice and fleas of every kind have infested London from the beginning of its recorded history, to such an extent that its condition has often been taken to resemble them. London, according to Verlaine, was “a flat, black bug.”
If animals in London were not used for labour or for food, they were characteristically employed for the purposes of entertainment. Ever since the first lions were placed in the Tower of London in the thirteenth century (to be joined later by a polar bear and an elephant), animals have provided a spectacle for the restless and voracious crowd. The first performing elephant in the London streets was recorded by Robert Hooke in 1679. Londoners could “see the animals” at Exeter Change. A building of three floors at the corner of Wellington Street and the Strand, it was known in the 1780s as “Pidcock’s Exhibition of Wild Beasts.” The animals were kept on the upper floors “in a small den and cages in rooms of various size, the walls painted with exotic scenery, in order to favour the illusion.” The menagerie went through the hands of three separate owners, and an engraving of 1826 shows the old house jutting above the Strand with pictures of elephants, tigers and monkeys daubed upon its front between two grand pillars of Corinthian design. Its popularity was very great, largely because, apart from the Tower zoo, it was the only menagerie of exotic species in London. The less dangerous animals were, on occasions, led through the streets as a living advertisement. Wordsworth mentions a dromedary and monkeys; and J.T. Smith in his Book for a Rainy Day, writes of an elephant “being led by its keeper between ropes along the narrow part of the Strand.” On 6 February 1826 this elephant, named Chunee, could stand his restraint no longer and, in violent anger, was about to burst out of his cage. A firing squad of soldiers from neighbouring Somerset House could not dispatch him, and a cannon was deployed to no effect. Eventually his keeper killed him with a spear, and he expired with 152 bullets found inside his body. Then the commercial spirit of London pursued him after his death. His carcass was on display to the crowds for some days until it became noisome, at which point it was sold off as 11,000 pounds of meat. The skeleton was displayed thereafter, until it became part of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Chunee was finally obliterated by a bomb in the Second World War. From his promenade along the Strand in 1825 to his destruction by fire in 1941, his story has an authentic London flavour.
The spirit of the city may also explain the passion for performing animals and circuses. In the streets of the capital rats danced on ropes and cats played dulcimers. Performing bears were ubiquitous from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, while performing monkeys and horses were part of the standard repertoire in rings and arenas. In the 1770s, Daniel Wildman specialised in riding upon a horse with a swarm of bees covering his face like a mask. Half a century later the Zoological Society was given a few acres of land in Regent’s Park for the erection of various pits and cages in a “zoological garden,” which was opened to the public two years later in 1828 and soon became a principal attraction of London; there are many prints showing the citizens enjoying the antics of the imprisoned creatures. In fact serious scientific research was soon overtaken by the demands of entertainment. “It is the very place for quiet easy talk in the open air,” Blanchard Jerrold wrote in 1872, “with the animals to point the conversation … will pass all London in review in the course of the season.” A shop by the bear pit was opened “for the sale of cakes, fruits, nuts and other articles which the visitor may be disposed to give to the different animals,” and a long stick was provided for feeding buns to the bears themselves.
Many visitors had their favourites, some preferring the monkey to the lynx or the hippopotamus to the wombat, and would come back each week to mark their condition. But together with pleasurable sympathy, there was always some anxiety that these creatures might break out of their imprisonment and wreak havoc among their captors. That is why both Dickens and Thackeray, joined by interest in public hangings, were also fascinated by the snakes held in confinement. Curiously enough, both of them depicted the same scene at feeding time. This is part of Thackeray’s account: “an immense boa constrictor swallowing a live rabbit-swallowing a live rabbit, sir, and looking as if he would have swallowed one of my little children afterwards.” So the zoo takes on symbolic importance in the life of a violent and dangerous city; here is violence tamed and danger averted, in the green surroundings of the Park. Here sits the lion which, in the words of a poem by Stevie Smith, is “Weeping tears of ruby rage.”