London: The Biography полностью

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.”

It would be the merest commonplace to note that the citizens, all dressed alike and walking through the zoo with well proportioned steps, are themselves imprisoned in the city. It was a trite comment even in the nineteenth century, when Gustave Doré depicted the Londoners by the monkey cage or in the parrots’ walk as equivalent to the animals-animals which in turn seem to be observing them. Yet there is a resonance between the zoo and the city, in terms of noise and in terms of madness. The confused or shrill sound of the crowd was often compared with the sound of animals, while the deranged at Bedlam were in 1857 said by the Quarterly Review to resemble the “fiercer carnivores at the Zoological Gardens.” The comparison is obvious enough. The mad were kept in cages where they were visited by curious observers for the sake of entertainment. Said to sound like “ravens, screech-owls, bulls, and bears,” the deranged were as “ravenous and unsatiable as wolves” or as “drenched by compulsion as horses.” The deranged Londoner, in other words, is an animal; this definition spills over into descriptions of the crowd or mob as a “Beast.” The city itself becomes a vast zoo in which all of the cages have been unlocked.

CHAPTER 46

Weather Reports

When Boswell and Johnson were tasting all the delights of rural life in Greenwich Park, the following conversation ensued.

J.: “Is this not very fine?”

B.: “Yes, Sir; but not equal to Fleet Street.”

J.: “You are right, sir.”

Robert Herrick celebrated his return to London from Devon in 1640, and declared that

London my home is: though by hard fate sent

Into a long and irksome banishment.

To live in the country is a form of melancholy exile. “If these are comforting for a wife,” a sixteenth-century poem suggests, “Defend, defend me from a country life.” When a young West Indian boy from Notting Hill of the 1960s was given a week’s holiday in a Wiltshire village, he was asked how he had enjoyed the change. “I like it,” he replied, “but you can’t play in the streets as you can in London.” “I love walking in London,” Mrs. Dalloway remarks in Virginia Woolf’s novel (1925). “Really it’s better than walking in the country.” To the city dweller the country may not come as a revelation, but as a restriction. It is “dreadful slow,” one nineteenth-century Cockney girl is reported as saying, “no swings, no rahndabarts, nor origins [oranges?], no shops, no nothink-jest a great bare field only.”