The Quizzing Blog: A Leopard in the Orangery – Regency Britain’s Exotic Pet Problem
Written by Anastasia Rydaeva.
Let’s say you are shopping for ribbon in the Strand sometime around 1810. You are browsing the windows of the fashionable milliners and hosiers of the Exeter Exchange, and over the ordinary hum of commerce you hear it – a lion. Roaring. Directly above your head. Nobody around you so much as glances up.
Everyone is behaving as though it is something perfectly normal… which indeed it is.
The upper floors of the Exeter Exchange housed one of London’s most famous menageries, where big cats roared and monkeys shrieked while shoppers haggled over stockings below. And here is the twist: nearly every animal in establishments like this was for sale, for the right price. A menagerie was, in a way, a somewhat unnerving pet shop. Between roughly 1780 and 1840, animals that had once been the preserve of Tudor kings cascaded down the social ladder – first to the aristocracy, then the gentry, then the rising middle class, and eventually into the cramped rooms of people who could barely feed themselves, let alone a monkey.
And it really was, quite often, a monkey. Capuchins and spider monkeys were by far the most popular exotic pets of the era. They started out as ruinously expensive in the eighteenth century, but prices dropped steadily – partly because imports flooded in through the East India Company and enterprising sea captains (dealers kept warehouses right on the docks), and partly because of what we would now recognise as a robust second-hand market. Monkeys, it turns out, are destructive, expensive, and entirely indifferent to your soft furnishings. Buyer’s remorse was rampant, and London newspapers of the early 1800s were full of advertisements from owners desperately offloading their purchases. Landlords responded the way landlords always do: even in decidedly unfashionable neighbourhoods, one might see signs banning “monkeys, birds, lions, and other creatures.”
That the lions needed mentioning at all sure tells you something.
Now, at the top of society, the collections got genuinely deranged. Lord Shelburne – who had briefly been a prime minister, so hardly a fringe eccentric – kept an orangutan and a (supposedly) tame leopard in his orangery at Bowood, with a white fox running loose through the house for good measure. The philosopher Jeremy Bentham, a frequent guest, was said to have been quite fond of the leopard (of the animal’s own opinions we know nothing). Sir Hans Sloane was trailed around his Chelsea home by a tame, one-eyed wolverine. Sir Robert Walpole kept a pet flamingo that lived in his kitchen to stay warm by the fire, which frankly shows more sense than most of the humans in this story. Queen Charlotte received a zebra as a wedding gift and kept a small herd at the Buckingham Palace stables; attempts to ride them or train them to harness were, we are told, not successful in the least. She also had a habit of gifting people live kangaroos – a sentence I did not expect to write, and a gift her friends presumably did not expect to receive. When the Duke of Devonshire kept a tame elephant in his gardens at Chiswick House, he, on the other hand, sometimes cheerfully invited visitors to ride it.
The logistics were mind-boggling. The Duke of Richmond’s menagerie at Goodwood – lions, tigers, bears, baboons, a solitary raccoon – went through some seventy pounds of meat a day, plus a hundred and fifty loaves of bread a week for the herbivores. His head keeper had the additional headache of up to five hundred uninvited gawkers turning up on Sundays. At Stubton Hall, Sir Robert Heron kept llamas, armadillos, emus, black swans, eleven hundred goldfish, and a chameleon, which was sadly killed by a careless gardener in 1820.
However, the mania was not only an aristocratic disease. A day labourer in Seven Dials might keep a fox or a hedgehog – the hedgehog earning its keep by patrolling the kitchen for beetles – and professional trappers could earn a year’s income from a few months of catching young foxes and squirrels for the London pet trade. Fashionable young men strolled Mayfair with ring-tailed lemurs on their shoulders, feeding them cake and bread, which the lemurs loved and which almost certainly shortened their lives. The wealthy kept jerboas – tiny desert rodents – in ornate cages fitted out as miniature desert panoramas, and often accidentally killed them by feeding them nuts, which jerboas cannot eat. A recurring theme emerges here: the affection was great; the actual husbandry skills were not.
Occasionally the affection reached heights that alarmed even contemporaries. When the widowed Mrs Orby Hunter died in 1813, she left her parrot of twenty-five years an annuity of £200 a year – a sum many curates would have envied. The caretaker had to produce the living bird at her solicitor’s office annually (Mrs Hunter having shrewdly anticipated the moral hazard), and custody could pass only to “a respectable English lady of means” – never a man, a foreigner, or a servant who might be tempted by the money.
A premise for a heroine, anyone?
