2 - Collecting and displaying

Summary

The top celebrity in Paris in 1827 was not a human, but Zaraf the giraffe. For the first time since the sixteenth century a giraffe had been brought to Europe. On 30 June she was welcomed at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle by thousands of Parisians, with great enthusiasm and curiosity. During the summer season, she was such a popular sensation that there was a new fashion boom: ‘every fashion turned to à la giraffe; and even the ladies wore dresses, and the men carried handkerchiefs, bearing the portrait of the animal’. A similar celebration was repeated nearly a decade later, this time in London, but on an even larger scale. Britain's first public exhibition of giraffes was hosted by the London Zoo and was the most frequently visited attraction of that year. The extraordinary popularity of the giraffes in both Paris and London could be partly explained by the rarity and extraordinary appearance of the animal, but it was also culturally constructed within a specific historical context.

By taking the example of the sensational exhibition of the giraffes, this chapter discusses two interrelated themes concerning the London Zoo. The first centres on the networks of animal collecting that enabled the Zoological Society to obtain its giraffes. The society took the advantage of the interconnected system of communication that operated across the British Empire. This system was not, however, identical to the animal collecting networks which often stretched way beyond the colonial field.