Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Zoo
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: London, England
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
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https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/isobel-charman/124412/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2014124224
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2014124224
HEADING: Charman, Isobel
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PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Television documentary writer, researcher, producer, and director; author.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Isobel Charman’s career in television writing, directing, and prodution had a direct impact on her first book, The Great War: A Nation’s Story. The volume was based on a British Broadcasting Corporation documentary made one hundred years after the war began. The Great War, stated John Van der Kiste in the Bookbag, “follows the course of events over the four years through the letters, memoirs and diaries of about a dozen individuals as it presents their story against the background of fighting on the continental mainland, and of bereavement, shortages and more at home…. It is through the eyes of these individuals, and though a few more who are introduced to us at later stages, that we see how the war gathered pace, and how it affected people at home as well as those who went to fight on the western front.” The stories of “those who experienced the miseries of those four years,” Van der Kiste concluded, “bring it all home in much sharper focus.”
In The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo, Charman delves into nineteenth century history to investigate the origins of one of the world’s oldest zoological gardens. “Charman … resurrects almost three decades of history,” wrote Meghan Rosen in Science News, “beginning in 1824, when the zoo was still just a fantastical idea: a public menagerie of animals `that would allow naturalists to observe the creatures scientifically.'” The institution helped develop “a blueprint for a new kind of menagerie, a world away from the circus-like places that had gone before it,” said Randy Dotinga in the Christian Science Monitor. “That’s not to say it was always successful in achieving that aim. As the decades passed, many of its original aims were left behind, and the quest for ever-more exotic and spectacular beasts took precedence over almost everything else. Although it’s well over 150 years ago now, the tensions in the zoo’s early years are ones that are still faced by modern zoos today.”
The zoo was the brainchild of a retired businessman. “Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, returning home from a grueling stint in Singapore with the East India Company,” said a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “resolved to create for London its own Jardin des Plantes, like the one … in Paris.” The idea was to create a kind of research park in which scientists could observe live animals. “The Zoological Society’s purist vision for the zoo, riding the wave of the post-Enlightenment passion for collecting and classifying species,” wrote Constance Casey in the New York Times, “would transform by the end of the 19th century into something like the kind of zoo we know today–a staple of school field trips, a boon for desperate parents, a chance for city people to look a wild animal in the eye. Amazingly, the zoo was closed to the public until 1847, nearly 20 years after its founding.”
One of the major revelations critics found in Charman’s book was the changes the zoo had to make in the treatment of its animals. “Disembarked from long voyages in the late 1820s,” declared Ysenda Maxtone Graham in the Spectator, “the poor bewildered beasts of Asia and Africa often looked in a terrible state as they lumbered along to the new Zoological Gardens in the north-east corner of Regent’s Park. Once there, many of them didn’t last long.” “The book,” stated Ian Critchley in the London Times, “vividly portrays the harshness of early zoo work: it was a constant, often losing battle to keep the imported animals alive.” “The book is nuanced, often entertaining, and also tragic,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “as the Society faced massive mortality rates in its early years.” “The most important thing I took away from Charman’s book,” concluded Jane McChrystal in the London Grip, “was a reminder that, despite the enormous advances we’ve made in identifying the real physical and psychological needs of animals, our desire to gawp at them is not so different to that of 19th Century zoo visitors, who were not endowed with our understanding.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Christian Science Monitor, March 30, 2017, Randy Dotinga,”When London Set a New Zoo Standard.”
Daily Mail, October 27, 2016, Mark Mason, review of The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo.
Guardian (London, England), July 19, 2017, P.D. Smith, review of The Zoo.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2017, review of The Zoo.
New York Times, July 3, 2017, Constance Casey, “Hippos and Monkeys and Chimps, Oh My! The History of the London Zoo.”
Publishers Weekly, February 6, 2017, review of The Zoo, p. 61.
Science News, March 20, 2017, Meghan Rosen review of The Zoo.
Spectator, December 10, 2016, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, “Poor Bewildered Beasts,” p. 82.
Times (London, England), November 13 2016, Ian Critchley, review of The Zoo.
ONLINE
Bookbag, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/ (July, 2014), John Van der Kiste, review of The Great War: A Nation’s Story.
London Grip, https://londongrip.co.uk/ (December, 2016), review of The Zoo.
Penguin Website, https://www.penguin.co.uk/ (November 1, 2017), author profile.
Biography
Isobel Charman is an award-winning television producer. She has spent the last decade working in factual documentary production as a writer, researcher, producer and director and has worked on award-winning films for UK, European and US broadcasters. For The Zoo she has made unprecedented use of the vast archives at the Zoological Society of London. She lives in London.
BOOKS CHAPTER & VERSE
When London set a new zoo standard
How the British turned the tables on captivity in the 19th century.
Caption
Randy Dotinga
MARCH 30, 2017 —Move over, pandas. You're not the first species to make animal lovers lose their minds. Back in the 19th century, hippo hysteria gripped the British people when a hippopotamus from Egypt came to town.
His name was Obaysch, and he was on the husky side.
"A steamship was specially adapted to get him to England, fitted with a 400-gallon iron bathtub. And a small herd of cows accompanied him to provide all the milk he required," says British TV producer and author Isobel Charman. "A specially adapted train carriage whisked him from Southampton to London, and when he arrived at the zoo it caused an outbreak of what can only be referred to as 'hippomania.' There was even a polka composed in his honor."
But Obaysch wasn't there just to be gawked at. The London Zoo, which opened in 1828 as the world's first scientific zoo, was designed to be more than a place for spectacle.
As Charman reveals in her new book The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo, 1826-1851, its creators sought to embrace the serious study of animals. But, as she explains in a Monitor interview, things didn't always go according to plan in the woolly world of captivated humans and captive creatures.
Famous opening lines: Take our literature quiz
Q: How did people collect animals before the London Zoo was founded?
There was a long tradition of collecting and keeping live, exotic animals. Think back to the Roman era, when wild beast shows took place at amphitheaters.
From the 13th century, exotic animals were kept at the Tower of London in a royal "menagerie." And from the late 18th century, private, commercial menageries also became a common sight in Britain.
The Zoological Society, however, wanted to create a collection quite different than anything that had gone before it. Its aim was to gather animals together for the purpose of scientific study, not prestige or entertainment. They wanted to create a place where the animals could be studied, rather than just gawped at.
A visit was intended to be a new kind of experience, giving visitors the opportunity to see animals in a more natural setting.
Q: How did the zoo's founders and managers balance the interests of the animals and visitors?
From the beginning, there was a tension between the scientific aims of the founders and the need to satisfy the desires of the visitors. The latter often triumphed because the society needed people to keep paying their entrance fees and subscriptions.
The bear pit is a good example of this. It was one of the very first exhibits to be built, designed with a pole at its center that the bears could climb.
Next to the bear pit, one of the keepers’ wives was permitted to run a stall selling cakes and buns, which visitors would stick on the end of walking sticks and umbrellas. They'd encourage the bears to climb the pole and seize them, clearly not a particularly "scientific" exercise, and one that certainly didn’t do the bears any good.
But the visitors loved it, and so it continued. The same happened with the elephant and rhino.
At the same time, the zoo’s first-ever vet was carrying out scientific experiments into the best feeding regimes for the animals.
Q: What are some of your favorite tales about the animals themselves?
One of the most fascinating things for me was how the animals ended in the middle of the biggest city in the world. Many had traveled halfway across the globe to get there.The first orangutan was sent over to London in 1830 along with a leopard. The leopard escaped on board ship and had to be shot, but the orangutan became quite the sailor. He would eat at the dinner table with the rest of the crew and even, so the story goes, take himself to the local tavern when they were in port to get his breakfast.
The first elephant, Jack, arrived in 1831. He had traveled all the way from Madras by way of China and had been cooped up on board ship for many months by the time he was met at the East India Docks. The keepers walked the elephant across London to his new home and had to run to keep up with him. Then were helpless to stop him eating the hats and handbags of the ladies who had gathered to watch!
Q: What is the legacy of the early days of the London Zoo?
London Zoo created a blueprint for a new kind of menagerie, a world away from the circus-like places that had gone before it.That’s not to say it was always successful in achieving that aim. As the decades passed, many of its original aims were left behind, and the quest for ever-more exotic and spectacular beasts took precedence over almost everything else.
Although it’s well over 150 years ago now, the tensions in the zoo’s early years are ones that are still faced by modern zoos today.
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Print Marked Items
Charman, Isobel: THE ZOO
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Charman, Isobel THE ZOO Pegasus (Adult Nonfiction) $27.95 4, 11 ISBN: 978-1-68177-356-8
A whimsical work revisiting the English gentlemen of the early- to mid-19th century who envisioned the first
Zoological Society of London.London-based TV producer and author Charman (The Great War: A Nation's Story, 2014,
etc.) delves into an eclectic cast of characters who created London's first ZSL in 1826. Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles,
returning home from a grueling stint in Singapore with the East India Company, resolved to create for London its own
Jardin des Plantes, like the one he and his wife had admired in Paris. It would be, he decided, "a place of science, of
investigation, of knowledge." A member of the Royal Society, Raffles galvanized the new ZSL and obtained the land
for such a venture in The Regent's Park, designed by John Nash and located in the north of London. Upon Raffles' death
in 1826, the young architect Decimus Burton took over the challenging project, which included the designing of
buildings over five acres where "humans could comfortably, elegantly, enjoyably observe creatures." Indeed, writes
Charman, Burton "was building for mankind, rather than for beasts," and it was a huge hit, open to the public for one
shilling per head in 1828. It soon expanded through a tunnel taking visitors elegantly from one side of the road to the
other (more illustrations or a map would have been welcome). In her charming, engaging narrative, the author deftly
assumes the points of view of her characters, in the spirit of a Victorian novelist. These included the first medical
attendant, Charles Spooner, who was eventually dismissed because of the high mortality rate of the exotic animals (the
wet, cold English winters were a detriment to many of them), and Charles Darwin, a corresponding member of the ZSL
when he returned from his Beagle exploration in 1836, keen to observe the animals himself. A deeply researched,
terrifically entertaining exploration of the London Zoo "through the eyes of some of the people who made it happen."
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Charman, Isobel: THE ZOO." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480921689&it=r&asid=e44b17a369d5dcbe572c3d9419168142.
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The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the
Founding of the London Zoo; 1824-1851
Publishers Weekly.
264.6 (Feb. 6, 2017): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of the London Zoo; 1824-1851
Isobel Charman. Pegasus, $27.95 (358p)
ISBN 978-1-68177-356-8
Charman (The Great War) crafts an affecting narrative of the first 25 years of the Zoological Society of London through
the stories of seven of its most influential contributors. She relates the tragedy of Stamford Raffles, the zoo's founder
and first president, who survived a fire that killed three of his children and burned his first menagerie to see his idea for
the society come to fruition, only to die suddenly a few months later in 1826. Charman depicts Charles Darwin, a
corresponding member of the Society, pondering links between species while studying the inhabitants of the Monkey
House, and animal keeper Devereux Fuller proactively seeking to increase exotic imports, including a cameleopard
(giraffe). Meanwhile Charles Spooner, the zoo's veterinarian, contends with the heartbreaking problems of captivity,
suicidal kangaroos, aggressive monkeys, and the taunting of animals by patrons wielding parasols. Charman provides
historical and atmospheric details of the era through the eyes of her characters; the ever-evolving city was "a tangled
mass of coaches, omnibuses and pedestrians... Westminster... glimpsed in snatches through heads and hats." She writes
her subjects' interior monologues. The book is nuanced, often entertaining, and also tragic, as the Society faced massive
mortality rates in its early years; the death of Tommy the chimpanzee is particularly brutal. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of the London Zoo; 1824-1851." Publishers Weekly, 6 Feb.
2017, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480593887&it=r&asid=f7a3b9afb35cf7001834c63b5318a63e.
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Poor bewildered beasts
Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Spectator.
332.9824-6 (Dec. 10, 2016): p82.
COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo
by Isobel Charman
Penguin Viking, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 349
If you've ever read a history of the early days of the Foundling Hospital, you'll remember the shock: expecting to enjoy
a heartwarming tale of 18th-century babies being rescued from destitution and brought to live in a lovely safe place, you
will have found instead that the tale was mostly about babies dying after they arrived.
So it is with this fascinating book about the early days of London Zoo. Expecting to read about lions, tigers and
monkeys in all their boisterous aliveness, you wade instead into disturbing descriptions of the illnesses they suffered and
their pitiful early deaths. Disembarked from long voyages in the late 1820s, the poor bewildered beasts of Asia and
Africa often looked in a terrible state as they lumbered along to the new Zoological Gardens in the north-east corner of
Regent's Park. Once there, many of them didn't last long. As soon as an animal died, it was pounced on by an anatomist
and a taxidermist: to such an extent that Isobel Charman starts using a euphemism for death. 'On its third day at Bruton
Street, the orangutan became the concern of the Preserving Department.'
The winter of 1828 finished many of them off. No one knew how to treat the animals: did they need more heat, or more
ventilation? Both seemed to kill them. Their illnesses were many and various: a leopard with indigestion, a reindeer
with cutaneous eruptions, a llama with constipation, a puma with 'vomition', a monkey with a lacerated back, and a
chimpanzee called Tommy who lost the will to live and died quietly by the fire in his Guernsey shirt. On top of all that,
there were the animals with weird mental health problems: kangaroos who self-harmed, and then committed suicide by
hurling themselves against the railings. The distraught and overworked medical attendant, Mr Spooner, had to make
quick decisions, such as this one about a lion cub: 'He would administer a clyster to the anus. Nelson must be flushed
out.' So, not exactly the jolly family outing to London Zoo that I was hoping for.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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Charman decides to tell the story in seven chapters, each written in the third person through the eyes of a different man
instrumental in the zoo's founding. These are Sir Stamford Raffles, whose idea it was to start the Zoological Society of
London; Decimus Burton, who designed the buildings, including the marvellous high-doored giraffe house and the
tunnel; Mr Spooner the veterinary surgeon; John Gould, who spent his working life in the annexe of the Zoological
Society, stuffing the dead animals; Devereux Fuller, head keeper in the 1830s, locked in bitter rivalry with Edward
Cross, who had his own crowd-attracting zoological gardens across the Thames; Charles Darwin, corresponding
member, whose watching of the zoo's living animals helped him crystallise his certainty about the descent of man and
natural selection; and finally the elderly Earl of Derby, president of the society, going about in his bathchair in 1847,
when the zoo's visitor numbers had dwindled alarmingly. But then, by a stroke of good fortune, the zoo managed to
acquire a healthy and happy hippopotamus from the Abbas Pasha of Egypt, in exchange for four brace of deer hounds.
London went wild for the hippo.
The pitfall of writing non-fiction through the eyes of a series of historical figures is that the only way to convey
information is by filtering it through the person's thoughts and memories. This involves a great deal of the pluperfect,
and some rather clunky imagined thoughts. So we have, 'He had come a long way from the son of a humble gardener,
hadn't he?' And 'He had been fond of those words [of Keats's] when they were published when he was but a teenager,
and he was fond of them yet.' Using 'but' to mean 'only' and 'yet' to mean 'still' shows us that Charman is trying hard to
'think' 1830s-ish thoughts; but then she suddenly lurches into 21st-century idiom: something is 'nigh-on impossible', and
someone else is 'spitting mad'.
But reading this book will certainly enrich your next trip to the zoo, and will make you relieved at least that ladies no
longer prod Russian bears with their parasols.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Graham, Ysenda Maxtone. "Poor bewildered beasts." Spectator, 10 Dec. 2016, p. 82+. General OneFile,
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p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA473458803&it=r&asid=7871ede0979b9388bbb976808174080a.
Accessed 4 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A473458803
BOOK REVIEW | NONFICTION
Hippos and Monkeys and Chimps, Oh My! The History of the London Zoo
By CONSTANCE CASEYJULY 3, 2017
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The post-Enlightenment passion for collecting and classifying: A view of the zoo in 1835. Credit George Scharf, from Guildhall Library/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
THE ZOO
The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of the London Zoo: 1826-1851
By Isobel Charman
349 pp. Pegasus Books. $27.95.
As we learn from “The Zoo,” Isobel Charman’s vivid, entertaining and scrupulously researched history of the London Zoo’s first years, the founders’ aim was to dispel human ignorance about God’s creatures. (Animals were firmly considered to be the work of an almighty hand; when the zoo was conceived in 1826, it would be 33 years before Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.”) For Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, originator of the project and president of the Zoological Society of London, the animals were to be “objects of scientific research, not of vulgar admiration.” Vulgar admiration was for shabby, for-profit menageries. Raffles, an officer of the East India Company and the founder of Singapore, acquired the land in Regent’s Park but died of a stroke at 45 before the zoo opened in 1828.
Charman recounts the history of the zoo through seven profiles, starting with Raffles, then moving on to an architect who cared more about the comfort of people than of animals, a beleaguered veterinarian, a taxidermist who fell heir to the veterinarian’s failures, Charles Darwin, a head keeper and an aristocrat with a hippopotamus obsession. As the story unfolds, it becomes painfully clear that the most consequential human ignorance about God’s creatures was not knowing how to keep them alive. The beasts illustrated the vast extent of the British Empire, a plus for the patriotic. But those far corners of the empire were mostly warm, while the empire’s capital was damp, dirty and cold. After a few months of London’s sooty fog, the monkeys were coughing like Dickens’s orphans. Post-mortems of primates showed serious lung infections, not unlike those in Londoners of the time.
Photo
The Zoological Society’s purist vision for the zoo, riding the wave of the post-Enlightenment passion for collecting and classifying species, would transform by the end of the 19th century into something like the kind of zoo we know today — a staple of school field trips, a boon for desperate parents, a chance for city people to look a wild animal in the eye. Amazingly, the zoo was closed to the public until 1847, nearly 20 years after its founding. (Some well-connected folk were admitted earlier, but only if sponsored by a fellow of the Zoological Society.) Inevitably, a paying public was necessary to support staff and decent maintenance.
It’s the scenes of animal misery in those trying early years that remain in the reader’s mind. These include the suicidal kangaroos battering themselves against a fence (at least one succeeded), the elephant that spent nine months in a ship’s dark hold traveling from India to England by way of China, and an elderly lion poked in the eye by a woman wielding a parasol. For her previous book, “The Great War: A Nation’s Story,” Charman, a London-based television producer, expanded on a World War I documentary. In this mid-19th-century story the source of tension, as in her war narrative, is the casualties.
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By far the most sympathetic of Charman’s human subjects is the veterinarian Charles Spooner, who was in charge of animal welfare. It was an impossible job, since hundreds of animals flowed in from the collections of royals and aristocrats, colonial officials and ships’ captains. In his 20s, Spooner had finished only eight months in a veterinary college. He had little in the way of medication on hand — laudanum, purgatives and laxatives. Spooner was finally blamed for the unacceptable death rate and fired. (The reader is gratified to read in Charman’s epilogue that he became a professor at a veterinary college and an early advocate for anesthesia in surgery on animals.) Spooner’s wards’ many fatalities went to John Gould, chief animal preserver, who was, in a cold and quiet way, accomplishing the zoo’s original scientific goal, classifying the natural world “skin by skin.”
Charman ends with the 13th Earl of Derby, an eventual president of the zoo who, shortly before his death, negotiated the acquisition of a hippo from Abbas Pasha of Egypt. The 500-pound creature traveled to England on a Peninsular and Oriental lines steamship, sloshing around in a specially built 400-gallon iron tank. It was worth the effort: 10,000 people a day came that first summer to admire him.
Close to 90 percent of the animals now in large modern zoos are not snatched from their native habitat; they are the offspring of other zoo animals. They get excellent medical care and the right diet, but still what they experience is incarceration. Even the most enthusiastic of the London Zoo’s founders and staff could see the pathos in the animals’ situation. Lord Derby, who went to such lengths to pluck the hippo from its home on the Nile, couldn’t bear to see the higher primates “so sad in confinement.” Charman seems to agree. She dedicates her book to Tommy, a London Zoo chimp who lived in one early keeper’s home, kept warm for a while by the fireside. Soon, though, he sickened and died, his arms around his keeper’s neck.
Constance Casey, a former New York City Parks and Recreation Department assistant gardener, writes on natural history for Slate.
A version of this review appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Animal House. Today's Paper|Subscribe
The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo by Isobel Charman – review
An impressive, novelistic retelling of the first 25 years of ‘the first zoo in history’
Charles Darwin used the zoo to observe animals such as orangutans: ‘He had not known how civilised apes could be.’
Charles Darwin used the zoo to observe animals such as orangutans: ‘He had not known how civilised apes could be.’ Photograph: Rolf Nussbaumer Photography/Alamy Stock Photo
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PD Smith
Wednesday 19 July 2017 05.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.29 EDT
The brainchild of statesman Sir Stamford Raffles, the Zoological Society of London was to be “a collection of living animals such as never yet existed in ancient or modern times”. Dedicated to scientific research rather than mere public spectacle, it was initially dismissed by the press as the “Noah’s Ark Society”. But from day one in 1828 it became immensely popular, drawing 100,000 visitors in its first year to Regent’s Park, and 600,000 by mid-century. By then it was popularly known as the Zoo, or, as Isobel Charman puts it, “the first ‘zoo’ in history”. Her book focuses on its first 25 years and is a vivid novelistic retelling from the viewpoints of key figures, from its founder and his wife to Charles Spooner, the vet struggling to keep the exotic animals alive, and Charles Darwin, who used it as a laboratory to observe animals such as Jenny, the orangutan: “He had not known, until this very day, how civilised apes could be.” An impressive work of imagination and research, as well as a pleasure to read.
• The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £8.49 (RRP £9.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
HISTORY
Books: The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of London Zoo by Isobel Charman
Review by Ian Critchley
November 13 2016, 12:01am,
The Sunday Times
A hippo snoozing at the London Zoo in 1852
A hippo snoozing at the London Zoo in 1852
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Isobel Charman’s intriguing book explores the first 25 years of London Zoo’s existence, but it is not a conventional history. She has made extensive use of the archives at the Zoological Society of London, but, instead of an objective account, tells the story through the eyes of its creators, employees and visitors.
She begins with Sir Stamford Raffles, who, in the mid-1820s, conceived the idea of a London version of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. Although there had been menageries for public entertainment in Britain before, Sir Stamford wanted something different: a place where naturalists could observe creatures scientifically.
He died without seeing his plan come fully to fruition, but Charman continues the story from the point of view of some of his colleagues, such as the zoo’s architect, Decimus Burton, and the head keeper, Devereux Fuller.
Charles Darwin visited frequently, and Charman shows how his observations at the zoo were crucial to his theory of evolution. The book vividly portrays the harshness of early zoo work: it was a constant, often losing battle to keep the imported animals alive in the unfamiliar English climate.
The author, who is a historian and a documentary producer, acknowledges that she has fictionalised several scenes where her sources proved patchy.
This might frustrate readers looking purely for the facts, but she succeeds in personalising the story, bringing to life this extraordinary episode in humankind’s search for a better understanding of the natural world.
Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website
Viking £16.99 pp367
The Zoo: the wild and wonderful tale of the founding of London Zoo by Isobel Charman. Penguin. October 2016
A review by Jane McChrystal
The death of Harambe, a Western Lowland gorilla, in May at Cincinnati Zoo raised two troubling questions for me: who was responsible for his fate and what is the purpose of zoos in the 21st Century?
The answer to the first question seems clear. No matter who we blame for his shooting- the animal response team, the parents of the child who fell into his enclosure, the designers and managers of the zoo – Harambe was killed as the result of being bred, born and held in captivity for seventeen years.
When a book appeared in October promising the “wild and wonderful tale of the founding of London Zoo” I picked it up in search of insight into what drove the founding fathers of the London Zoological Society and whether it has any relevance to the function of zoos today.
The Zoo is based on Charman’s extensive research into the Society’s archives and tells its story between 1824-1851 from the point of view of seven historical figures. They were: the first collector, Sir Stamford Raffles; the architect, Decimus Burton; the vet, Charles Spooner; the animal preserver, John Gould; the keeper, Devereux Fuller; a corresponding member, Charles Darwin; the president, the Earl of Derby.
Each man’s story is told in the third person within a chapter of varying length. This narrative technique puts great pressure on the writer to establish and develop a unique voice for each subject which distinguishes him clearly from the others and I don’t think Charman has pulled off this authorial feat.
The attempt to build a narrative based on seven historical figures is further hampered by the disparity in the level of fame each of them has attained. Charman admits she constructed a persona for the keeper, Devereux Fuller, on the foundation of a few facts gleaned from the Society’s records. At the other extreme she had the difficult task of painting a convincing portrait of the young Charles Darwin, when so many biographies exist including Janet Browne’s magisterial account of his early life, Voyaging.
Sometimes the archive material sits heavily on the narrative. For instance, as Charles Spooner, the vet, reflects on his preference for studying pathology in live animal and his abhorrence of vivisection, we are told:
He detested experiments and researches on live animals, was sorry that some thought it the surest way to new knowledge. This had seemed to be changing of late, thanks to the work of other like-minded professionals, and the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, which had been founded a few years ago.
The reliance on archive material also results in a slightly dry, distant depiction of the animals, which should have put heart into the history. Instead, they tend to get pushed aside by the internal wrangling of the LZS and professional disputes, leaving less room for the wild and wondrous.
However, Charman does succeed in identifying the forces that compelled the founding fathers to establish the Zoo and keep it going even when it seemed destined to fail.
They had a quest: to collect new and monstrous forms of life from all corners of the Empire and display them at its centre. Some were motivated by the desire for scientific knowledge, while others wanted to put on a spectacular show for the visiting public.
These days, zoos are keen to promote their earnest intentions and play down their role as entertainment parks. So, they are centres of animal conservation and scientific research. They save the gene pools of threatened species through their breeding programmes. The purpose of admitting visitors is largely educational, designed to produce future generations of conservationists and conservation supporters, who would never emerge without an experience of viewing animals in enclosures.
The World Association of Zoos and Aquariums conducted a large scale, in-house survey of visitors as they arrived at the zoo and on departure to demonstrate the effectiveness of their educational mission. The results were published in 2014.
Roughly 3.5 percent of the visitors entered believing that they can support biodiversity by supporting zoos.
This figure increased by 1 percent when they left.
The evidence is weak and was gathered in a rather poorly designed piece of research.
After all, the journey between believing that one can support biodiversity by supporting zoos and becoming an active advocate of animal conservation is a long one with no map to show how it’s made.
As for the zoo breeding programmes, they don’t result in animals’ release into their natural habitat and can end in the sacrifice of those which aren’t deemed fit to enrich the gene pool.
It’s true to say that the rates of attrition in wild animal populations are high but, while more animals survive in captivity, their lives are shorter and the quality of life they experience is severely compromised. Held in a restricted, alien environment, under constant scrutiny by the public, many animals suffer chronic stress and show stereotyped behaviour such as pacing, feather plucking and excessive grooming and sleeping.
In a world without zoos, some might argue, scientists and vets would be unable to carry out research vital to animals’ health and welfare. If this were carried out in the animals’ natural environment it could have the added benefit of increasing efforts to preserve it.
If children didn’t visit zoos would they grow up indifferent to the future of wild life? I don’t believe so. Techniques of filming animals close up in the wild now produce astonishing documentaries of wildlife at every stage of the life-cycle which exceed any experience of looking at an unfortunate creature pacing up and down in its enclosure.
If we dare to imagine a world without zoos, or even safari holidays, maybe animals could eventually live in their natural environment under our protection. People who seek the sensation of the wild might be well-intentioned, but their presence can endanger the objects of their fascination.
Why do people continue to visit zoos? Here are some suggestions: to entertain the kids; marvel at the extraordinary animals; coo over the cute, cuddly furry ones: shiver at the slithery, carunculated ones and thrill to the proximity of the dangerous ones.
The most important thing I took away from Charman’s book was a reminder that, despite the enormous advances we’ve made in identifying the real physical and psychological needs of animals, our desire to gawp at them is not so different to that of 19th Century zoo visitors, who were not endowed with our understanding.
Jane McChrystal © 2016.
The bear who liked a beer! Not forgetting a constipated llama, the giraffes who took a stroll through London and other astonishing tales from the world’s most famous zoo
The Zoo shows how London Zoo was founded in the 19th century
Isobel Charman's account is told through eyes of seven people involved
Includes tale of the Russian bear, Toby, who has ‘a particular taste for ale'
By Mark Mason For The Daily Mail
PUBLISHED: 17:03 EDT, 27 October 2016 | UPDATED: 19:04 EDT, 27 October 2016
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BOOK OF THE WEEK
THE ZOO
by Isobel Charman (Viking £16.99)
Tricky things, zoos. Even as I was reading this book, a 29 st gorilla called Kumbuka escaped from its enclosure at London Zoo.
The beast was soon recaptured, but as David Attenborough pointed out, it was ‘hardly surprising’ Kumbuka had become restless.
The Zoo describes how London Zoo was founded in the 19th century - and includes the tale of the Russian bear, Toby, who has ‘a particular taste for ale' +3
The Zoo describes how London Zoo was founded in the 19th century - and includes the tale of the Russian bear, Toby, who has ‘a particular taste for ale'
The eminent naturalist wasn’t calling for zoos to be banned, but did remind us that gorillas in the wild are very private creatures — life on display in an artificial environment is bound to upset them.
It’s a contradiction that runs through Isobel Charman’s account of how London Zoo was founded in the 19th century. The tale is a very personal one, told through the eyes of seven of the people involved.
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First up is Sir Stamford Raffles, who, in 1824, returns to Britain from his role with the East India Company a broken man: four of his five children have died. The one thing keeping him going is the dream of founding a menagerie in London.
His wife, Sophia, encourages this, knowing the pleasure Raffles got from their collection of animals in the East.
The couple share ‘joyful memories of their children playing with the young tigers in the nursery... how they had all traipsed through the aviary, dodging flapping wings and bullets of excrement’.
Isobel Charman's account is told through the eyes of the seven people involved +3
Isobel Charman's account is told through the eyes of the seven people involved
Raffles is determined his animals will be ‘objects of scientific research, not of vulgar admiration’. He loathes Mr Cross’s menagerie in the Strand, where Chuny the caged elephant has been trained to take sixpences from visitors with his trunk and then return them.
Chuny isn’t much happier about the arrangement — he eventually tries to escape and has to be killed to prevent carnage. ‘Not until the one hundred and fiftieth bullet had entered Chuny’s great frame, this one just behind the ear, did the beast seem affected at all.’
Next we meet Decimus Burton (so-called because he was the tenth child in his family), the architect commissioned to design the zoo’s premises in Regent’s Park.
He includes some nice touches — the columns in the aviary are decorated as palm trees — but until the buildings are finished, some of the animals reside at 33 Bruton Street, the Society’s townhouse in Mayfair. On one visit there, Burton has his hat stolen by a monkey.
THE ZOO by Isobel Charman +3
THE ZOO by Isobel Charman
Larger animals are soon housed in the park: a leopard, some llamas, kangaroos and emus. The Russian bear, Toby, has ‘a particular taste for ale, acquired under its previous owner, the Marquess of Hertford’.
The place isn’t exactly living up to the noble intentions of its founder — fathers ‘buy buns and apples from the sweet-seller to stick on their umbrellas and walking sticks and so lure the bears up their pole for their children’s amusement’. What’s more, Charles Spooner, the zoo’s medical attendant, is struggling. Previously familiar with cattle, horses and dogs, he now has to care for lions and sables, ostriches and reindeer, pumas and buffalo.
The tigers have caught coughs, a zebra’s got catarrh and a llama is constipated. The kangaroos keep throwing themselves at their fence. Whether it’s an escape attempt or an act of self-harm, serious injuries result.
Many of the animals fail to make it through the English winter, and a keeper is killed by the Arctic bear.
Slowly, however, the institution establishes itself. A monkey called Tommy arrives and steals everyone’s heart. He goes everywhere in his favourite frock and a sailor’s hat. One day, facing away from someone and with his hands pressed against a wall, he is mistaken for a plasterer.
For some reason he sleeps in a seated position, leaning forward with his arms folded. Head keeper Devereux Fuller loves to watch Tommy sleeping, just as he does his own children. Tommy ‘was becoming part of all of their lives’.
And Raffles’s aim of ‘scientific research’ is fulfilled. In the autumn of 1831, the Society helps a promising young naturalist prepare for an expedition to South America.
They train him in the preservation of animals’ bodies so he can bring them back for analysis (John Gould, the Society’s taxidermist, works in a space at Bruton Street known as the Stuffing Room).
On the naturalist’s return, Gould inspects the finches obtained in the Galapagos Islands and discovers that those from different islands have evolved in subtly different ways. This provides evidence for the revolutionary new theories of the naturalist: his name is Charles Darwin.
Visitor numbers are boosted by the arrival of four giraffes. The only way to transport them to the zoo from the London docks is by walking them through the streets.
The giraffes are so horrified by the sight of a cow near the Commercial Road that they refuse to continue until it is hidden from view
The giraffes are so horrified by the sight of a cow near the Commercial Road that they refuse to continue until it is hidden from view.
W hen Tommy the monkey finally succumbs to illness, there is much sadness, though ‘the end, when it came, was calm: he took off the blanket he lay under and put his arms around his beloved keeper’s neck, held his face close to his and died without a struggle’.
The final player in the drama is Lord Derby, son of the man who gave his name to the horse race.
A keen animal collector himself, Derby donates several creatures, including two antelopes, 24 Senegal pigeons and a jungle cock.
Under his presidency, the zoo acquires Obaysch, a hippopotamus, whose journey from Egypt requires P&O to fit a 400-gallon iron tank to its ship for the animal to bathe in.
Obaysch drinks ten gallons of milk a day and is the first live hippo in Europe since Roman times. The crowds flock to see him.
Lord Derby, pushed around the zoo in his bath chair, is delighted they’re here, ‘not at the taverns and gin palaces he has seen in the stinking city to the south of him. They are here for the love of natural history’.
One of the zoo’s most enduring legacies, meanwhile, is the word ‘zoo’. For its first few decades, the institution was known as the Zoological Gardens.
It was only in 1868 that the shorter word first appeared, in a music hall song called Walking In The Zoo.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-3879742/The-bear-liked-beer-Not-forgetting-constipated-llama-giraffes-took-stroll-London-astonishing-tales-world-s-famous-zoo.html#ixzz4ubDnhQfn
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EVIEWS & PREVIEWS
ANIMALS,HISTORY OF SCIENCE
Shocking stories tell tale of London Zoo’s founding
Institution’s early days marred by animal misery
BY MEGHAN ROSEN 7:00AM, MARCH 20, 2017
Gardens of the Zoological Society of London
THE ZOO In 1835, the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London housed an assortment of exotic animals, many of which struggled to survive.
HERITAGE IMAGE PARTNERSHIP LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Magazine issue: Vol. 191 No. 6, April 1, 2017, p. 28
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SPONSOR MESSAGE
The Zoo
Isobel Charman
Pegasus
$27.95
When Tommy the chimpanzee first came to London’s zoo in the fall of 1835, he was dressed in an old white shirt.
Keepers gave him a new frock and a sailor hat and set him up in a cozy spot in the kitchen to weather the winter. Visitors flocked to get a look at the little ape roaming around the keepers’ lodge, curled up in the cook’s lap or tugging on her skirt like a toddler. Tommy was a hit — the zoo’s latest star.
Six months later, he was dead.
Tommy’s sorrowful story comes near the middle of Isobel Charman’s latest book, The Zoo, a tale of the founding of the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London, known today as the London Zoo. The book lays out a grand saga of human ambition and audacity, but it’s the animals’ stories — their lives and deaths and hardships — that catch hold of readers and don’t let go.
Charman, a writer and documentary producer, resurrects almost three decades of history, beginning in 1824, when the zoo was still just a fantastical idea: a public menagerie of animals “that would allow naturalists to observe the creatures scientifically.”
It was a long, hard path to that lofty dream, though: In the zoo’s early years, exotic creatures were nearly impossible to keep alive. Charman unloads a numbing litany of animal misery that batters the reader like a boxer working over a speed bag. Kangaroos hurl themselves at fences, monkeys attack each other in cramped, dark cages and an elephant named Jack breaks a tusk while smashing up his den. Charman’s parade of horrors boggles the mind, as does the sheer number of animals carted from all corners of the world to the cold, wet enclosures of the zoo.
Her story is an incredible piece of detective work, told through the eyes of many key players and famous figures, including Charles Darwin. Charman plumbs details from newspaper articles, diaries, census records and weather reports to craft a narrative of the time. She portrays a London that’s gritty, grimy and cold, where some aspects of science and medicine seem stuck in the Dark Ages. Doctors still used leeches to bleed patients, and no one had a clue how to care for zoo animals.
Zoo workers certainly tried — applying liniment to sores on a lion’s legs, prescribing opium for a sick puma and treating a constipated llama with purgatives. But nothing seemed to stop the endless conveyor belt that brought living animals in and carried dead ones out. Back then, caring for zoo animals was mostly a matter of trial and error, Charman writes. What seems laughably obvious now — animals need shelter in winter, cakes and buns aren’t proper food for elephants — took zookeepers years to figure out.
Over time the zoo adapted, making gradual changes that eventually improved the lives of its inhabitants. It seemed to morph, finally, from mostly “a playground of the privileged,” as Charman calls it, to a reliable place for scientific study, where curious people could learn about the “wild and wonderful” creatures within.
Jenny the Orangutan
GO APE Seeing Jenny the orangutan’s similarities to people helped Charles Darwin formulate his ideas about human origins.
PRINTED BY W CLERK, HIGH HOLBORN
One of those people was Darwin, whose ideas about human origins clicked into place after he spent time with Jenny the orangutan. Her teasing relationship with her keeper, apparent understanding of language and utter likeness to people helped convince Darwin that humankind was just another branch on the tree of life, Charman writes.
Darwin’s work on the subject wouldn’t be published for decades, but in the meantime, the zoo’s early improvements seemed to have stuck. Over 30 years after Tommy the chimpanzee died in his keeper’s arms, a hippopotamus gave birth to “the first captive-bred hippo to be reared by its mother,” Charman notes. The baby hippo not only survived — she lived for 36 years.
Readers may wonder how standards for animal treatment have changed over time. But Charman sticks to history, rather than examining contrasts to modern zoos. Still, what she offers is gripping enough on its own: a bold, no-holds-barred look at one zoo’s beginning. It was impressive, no doubt. But it wasn’t pretty.
Buy The Zoo from Amazon.com. Sales generated through the links to Amazon.com contribute to Society for Science & the Public's programs.
he Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman
The Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman
Category: History
Rating: 5/5
Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
Reviewed by John Van der Kiste
Summary: The prelude to, course and aftermath of the Great War in Britain, seen through the (mainly unpublished) letters, memoirs and diaries of a few individuals at home and at the front.
Buy? Yes Borrow? Yes
Pages: 515 Date: July 2014
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 9781847947253
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During this centenary year, we have seen many ways of telling the history of the conflict which broke out among the Great Powers of Europe and soon involved all four corners of the world. This volume, based on a recent ITV series of the same title, approaches it from an angle which I have not seen before. It follows the course of events over the four years through the letters, memoirs and diaries of about a dozen individuals as it presents their story against the background of fighting on the continental mainland, and of bereavement, shortages and more at home.
Divided into five sections, it opens with an overview of what would be seen in hindsight as the last months of ‘the old order’. 1914 began, like many a year before and since, with gales and floods, to be followed by a glorious sunny summer. Yet for the young and middle-aged adults to whom we are introduced in the first few pages, events at home and abroad were ominous. For former Cambridge student turned aspiring ‘cotton king’ Alan Lloyd and his girlfriend Dorothy Hewetson, carpenter Reg Evans, suffrage group organiser Kate Parrye Frye and her actor boyfriend John Collins, writer and vegetarian pioneer Hallie (Harriet) Miles and her husband Eustace, and the vicar of Great Leighs in Essex, Andrew Clark, whatever the blissful state of their personal lives, there was little cheer ahead. As far as the political establishment was concerned, two crises were competing for attention – the passing of the controversial Home Rule for Ireland Bill, and Austro-Serbian tension following the murder of the Austrian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at Sarajevo. Like many others, Kate noted in her diary that, in the light of ‘such European complications’, parliamentary quarrels at Westminster would probably have to take a second place. By the first week of August, such forebodings had become reality.
It is through the eyes of these individuals, and though a few more who are introduced to us at later stages, that we see how the war gathered pace, and how it affected people at home as well as those who went to fight on the western front. Many of them were destined never to return home, and if they did, they were physically or mentally scarred for life. Those who joined the army and went abroad in a cheerful gung-ho frame of mind soon found their mood tempered fiercely by the reality of trench warfare and the likelihood of death or, even worse, dying by inches from their wounds. As one of them wrote to his family at home, ‘I hate flag wagging and Union Jack hurrahing.’ The optimism of those who believed that the struggle would be over by Christmas was rapidly dispelled. Within a few weeks, British civilians had got the message that this war would involve them all in a way never seen before. Foodstuffs were in short supply, drastic restrictions on lighting, including the use of torches and striking matches, were imposed on all, and there was every possibility that Zeppelins would invade England. Bombs reached the east coast at an early stage with the attacks on Scarborough and Hartlepool, leaving several hundred killed or injured.
As the war dragged on, with news (albeit heavily censored, in order not to depress civilian morale) of escalating casualties at Ypres, the Somme, Amiens and other long-drawn-out battles in Europe, compulsory conscription was introduced, and women went to work in the factories. Their menfolk wrote of increasingly harrowing conditions at the front, and in some cases these letters turned out to be the last thing they would ever write. First-time fathers would learn with joy of children being born, but would not be spared to return home and see them. Even though the United States of America entered the war on behalf of the allies in 1917, the outcome remained uncertain for many more months, and by spring the following year civilian morale was beginning to crack. In the words of one diarist, sickened by such tragedies as children killed by bombs falling on their school in east London, it was often a relief to return to work, which seemed ‘the only way not to dwell on these horrors’. It was noticed that Londoners suddenly stopped smiling, and instead went about their business in ‘a grim, hard and quiet manner’.
In June 1918, soon after the Kaiser had declared a national holiday to celebrate the imminent triumph of his army (never count your chickens, Your Imperial Majesty), many in Britain, government minister and civilian alike, feared that the Germans were on the brink of victory. I found this section the most dramatic in the whole book, reading how the situation slowly changed in the final months from near-despair to success, if that is the right word. For with the appalling cost in human flesh and blood, to say nothing of what would later be seen as a shattered economic position, the end of the war and the onset of peace could hardly be called a victory. An epilogue ties up loose ends by telling us what became of those whose letters and diaries are quoted throughout.
A bare list of assassinations, declarations, battles, and treaties may chart the essentials, but little more. Like the exhibition on the Great War which I saw at the Imperial War Museum in London a few days before I received this book, the voices, or rather the writings, of those who experienced the miseries of those four years, bring it all home in much sharper focus. This is a deeply sobering, essential read.
We can also recommend:
Great Britain's Great War by Jeremy Paxman
A Broken World: Letters, diaries and memories of the Great War by Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf
Buy The Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy The Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman at Amazon.co.uk.
Buy The Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman at Amazon You can read more book reviews or buy The Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman at Amazon.com.
Booklists.jpg The Great War: The People's Story by Isobel Charman is in the Top Ten History Books of 2014.