Zoo pets represented not Britain, but their native territories, which were invariably British colonies in Africa and Asia, and never colonies which, like Canada and Australia, had signified European populations. It is probably no accident that they were often accompanied by exotic human attendants who [ … ] were presented in the press as equally curious if not equally lovable.11
The exhibited creatures were often likened to human beings. Bartholomew Fair posters trumpeted orang-utans as ‘Ethiopian Savages’ or ‘Negro Men of the Woods’.12
One of the most famous black performers was Pablo Fanque (1796–1871). Born William Darby in Norwich, he went on to become an equestrian, acrobat, rope-walker, and later a circus proprietor. He toured extensively in northern England, where stories about his achievements were passed down from generation to generation. The Beatles allude to him in ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967):
There will be a show tonight on trampoline
The Hendersons will all be there
Late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair – what a scene
Over men and horses hoops and garters
Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!
Fanque appeared at Astley’s Amphitheatre in February 1847 where his talent was widely plaudited. ‘Mr Pablo Fanque is an artiste of colour’ stated the Illustrated London News, ‘and his steed [ … ] we have not only never seen surpassed, but never equalled.’13
There were other black circus performers of note: Alexander William Beaumont, known as ‘The African Lion King’, wore a coat made from leopard skin and died at the age of twenty-seven in 1895 after being mauled by his favourite lion ‘Hannibal’, at the Agricultural Hall in Islington; George Christopher, whose father used to balance cartwheels on the streets of London, christened himself ‘Herr Christoff’, and became one of the finest ropedancers in the world.
Celebrity did not guarantee financial security. Performers grew frail and ended up destitute. Tightrope-walker Carlos Trower, also known as ‘The African Blondin’, died at the age of forty in 1889. Two months earlier his wife wrote to The Era appealing for help:
My husband has been ill for some time and three weeks ago went quite out of his mind. There are no hopes for his recovery, and he has been removed to Grove Hall Asylum, Bow. I am left with three children unprovided for. If you will mention this I am sure there will be a few friends that will help me.14
Not all black people in nineteenth-century London performed freely. There was a longstanding tradition of putting Africans and West Indians on display for the delight and wonder of city-dwellers: Amelia Lewsam, ‘the White Negro Woman’ was exhibited in 1755 at Charing Cross, as was Primrose, the ‘Celebrated PIEBALD BOY’ at Haymarket in 1789.15 In 1810 Saartjie Baartman was brought over to England by her Boer keeper. Promising her that she would make a fortune and be allowed to return home after two years, he renamed her the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and charged visitors two shillings to see her standing in a cage at 225 Piccadilly (where, reputedly, Eros stands today).
Baartman soon became widely known and featured in street ballads and political cartoons. Many of the spectators who flocked to see her noticed that she looked tearful and depressed as she was shunted to and fro across the cage for their benefit. One visitor ‘found her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; and one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “nattral”.’16 Baartman’s humiliations never ceased. She was later displayed in Paris where, upon her death in 1815, not only was her body dissected, but plaster casts and wax moulds were made of her genitals and anus. Replicas of these moulds were presented to the Royal Academy of Medicine. Baartman’s skeleton and brain were also preserved and, until the decision in early 2002 by the French senate to return her remains to South Africa, could be seen together with a plaster cast of her body at the Musée de L’Homme in Paris.17
In such cases two ideas about the nature of black people were crucial. First, the assumption that Africans were simply not human, which legitimized their ill-treatment as well as their enslavement. Secondly, the fact that blacks were not regarded as ‘one of us’ permitted them to be seen as mute and passive vehicles for the diversion and delectation of white Londoners. Blacks who, it was thought, lacked the powers of rationality, computation or, indeed, agency, were reduced to the status of spectacles. They became living, breathing, and, in Baartman’s case, steatopygous incarnations of the cabinets of curiosities so popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Black people, whether descendants of those who had come to London during the eighteenth century or themselves recent arrivals from Central Africa and the Caribbean, could also be found living in the portside communities at Shadwell, Limehouse and Poplar. They worked on boats, lifting crates and bales, clearing decks, rolling casks, arranging ropes and sails. Those without regular employment could be found at West India Docks at six in the morning queuing up with hundreds of other men – ex-clerks, discharged sailors, Irish immigrants – for the chance to lug boxes of tea from wharf to warehouse. This state of affairs angered some. A dock-labourer’s wife interviewed in John Law’s Out of Work (1888) cried out, ‘“Why should they come here, I’d like to know? London ain’t what it used to be; it’s just like a foreign city. The food ain’t English; the talk ain’t English. Why should all of them foreigners come here to take food out of our mouths, and live on victuals we wouldn’t give to pigs?”’18
Not all blacks found jobs. Those who didn’t were likely to be sent to workhouses, the raw and unsentimental nature of whose inhabitants is ably captured by Henry Mayhew and John Binny:
their behaviour was very noisy and disorderly, coarse and ribald jokes were freely cracked, exciting general bursts of laughter; while howls, cat-calls, and all manner of unearthly and indescribable yells threatened for a time to render all attempts at order utterly abortive. At one moment, a lad would imitate the bray of the jackass, and immediately the whole hundred and fifty would fall to braying like him. Then some ragged urchin would crow like a cock; whereupon the place would echo with a hundred and fifty cock-crows! Next, as a negro-boy entered the room, one of the young vagabonds would shout out swe-ee-p; this would be received with peals of laughter, and followed by a general repetition of the same cry. Presently a hundred and fifty cat-calls, of the shrillest possible description, would almost split the ears.19
The East End in which blacks lived became synonymous in Victorian times with spiritual degradation. It was a man-trap, a Satanic stronghold, a dumping ground for human flotsam. It wasn’t just that the area was blighted by poverty; the colour of its inhabitants encouraged reactionaries to see it as a place of contamination, of moral canker. The problem was one of poor (racial) hygiene. In sensationalist newspaper reports as well as in the accounts of social workers, it was seen as a dark zone which needed Christian reclamation just as urgently as those heathen lands thousands of miles away which were being penetrated by explorers and missionaries. General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, wrote a tract about London entitled In Darkest England (1890) that portrayed the East End as a ‘lost continent’, and argued that, ‘The
