Poor bewildered beasts

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.