Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma

Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma

Susan Nance

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137562074
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The concept of 'modernity' is central to many disciplines, but what is modernity to animals? Susan Nance answers this question through a radical reinterpretation of the life of Jumbo the elephant. In the 1880s, consumers, the media, zoos, circuses and taxidermists, and (unknowingly) Jumbo himself, transformed the elephant from an orphan of the global ivory trade and zoo captive into a distracting international celebrity. Citizens on two continents imaged Jumbo as a sentient individual and pet, but were aghast when he died in an industrial accident and his remains were absorbed by the taxidermic and animal rendering industries reserved for anonymous animals. The case of Jumbo exposed the 'human dilemma' of modern living, wherein people celebrated individual animals to cope or distract themselves from the wholesale slaughter of animals required by modern consumerism.

1

Jumbo: Sentient Animal Celebrity

Abstract: Chapter 1 examines how British consumers in the early 1880s made Jumbo an international celebrity by expressing interest in him as a sentient individual whose experience was a matter of public concern. By a letter-writing campaign and visits to the elephant, women and children, Londoners in particular, defined the London Zoological Society’s sale of the elephant to P. T. Barnum as “cruel” because it denied the elephant’s presumed wishes and needs. News coverage of Jumbo’s behavior and its assumed meaning additionally facilitated consumer generation of animal celebrity, that is, a comforting anthropocentric parasocial relationship of Jumbo with the public. The “Jumbo affair” also generated criticism about how Jumbo’s fans labored over his fate while overlooking slaughter of elephants in Africa to supply ivory for consumer products.

Keywords: Abraham D. Bartlett; celebrity; consumer behavior; ivory; journalism; Jumbo; London Zoological Society; Phineas T. Barnum; zoos

Nance, Susan. Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137562074.0006.

The tale of Jumbo is generally very well known, and its staying power attests to the enormous media footprint Jumbo has had since the 1880s. The story of the elephant is a popular legend that tells the tale of the rise and fall of the most famous animal in world history. As a juvenile of less than two years of age, he was captured in the French Sudan in 1861 when hunters killed his mother and kin. Thereafter, the little elephant was shipped to France where he lived for two years in Paris’ Jardin des Plantes zoological park. Burdened with too many animals, zoo officials there sold the elephant to the London Zoological Society (LZS). In London the elephant grew into adulthood and earned his keeper, William Scott, a handsome living by carrying child and adult riders through the park with an improvised howdah strapped to his back. Although he was popular with zoo patrons during the day, after hours Jumbo was becoming exceedingly dangerous and constantly damaged his enclosure by battering its walls. Seeking to be rid of him, and on the hunt for a younger African elephant bull to display, early in 1882 LZS director Abraham Bartlett sold the elephant to the Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson circus, originally founded by American impresario Phineas T. Barnum.

A cynical British press was ready to exploit the situation and through sensational coverage of the “Jumbo affair,” including the complicated transport preparations for the elephant, the newspapers persuaded Londoners that the sale was a national insult. Protesting loudly, they argued that the LZS was selling off a cherished city pet and sending the elephant to an uncertain future with Phineas T. Barnum, a wily huckster who seemed to encapsulate everything crude and dishonest about capitalism, American style. Children and various other concerned citizens, including Queen Victoria, it was said, were devastated at the thought of Jumbo leaving for America and begged Barnum to reconsider. The showman publicly refused and even a law suit by citizens seeking an injunction against the Council of the LZS could not stop the sale. News of the controversy spread across Europe and North America, from which Barnum gained great publicity. That April, Jumbo sailed for New York with his faithful keeper, William Scott, at his side. After a triumphant arrival in the US, Jumbo toured with the circus for three and a half years. Then, one terrible night, he was hit and killed by a train in St Thomas, Ontario. With Scott weeping at the elephant’s side, Jumbo died. Meanwhile, Barnum was already making plans to have the elephant stuffed and his skeleton assembled for display. Sure enough, a year later the showman toured Jumbo’s remains with the circus to the delight of audiences everywhere. Thereafter, consumer culture retained the name “Jumbo” as a marketing term indicating whimsy and generous size.

By this telling, there are two morals to the story of Jumbo, neither of which helps us understand why consumers accepted Jumbo as a celebrity or how animal modernity shaped his life and its human meaning vis-à-vis human-elephant relationships writ large that decade. First, the popular accounts in magazines, newspapers and trade books seem primarily to offer the story as a nostalgic novelty grounded in a clichéd interpretation of the nineteenth century in which there was “a sucker born every minute,” to quote the classic but apocryphal Barnumism. Hence the story of Jumbo is amusing but so antique that we may consider it mere trivia, since, surely now-a-days the public is not so silly.¹

Second, the scholarly literature that addresses Jumbo – mostly in passing in the context of a broader history of Phineas T. Barnum, circuses or animal symbolism – is that the controversy over Jumbo and his fame is instructive primarily for what it reveals about Barnum as a media personality, and about late nineteenth-century nationalisms.² To be sure, patriotic rhetoric was prominent in the newspaper debates over Jumbo’s sale and North American marketing for the elephant as a circus feature. It made sense to people in the 1880s because extraordinary animals had long served as emblems of imperial, monarchical or national power.³ On both sides of the Atlantic, drawings of elephants served as both serious and satirical emblem of British royal power, pomp and pretension, with cartoon and press chatter on the royal family more than once depicting them surrounded by exotic animals in order to express public ambivalence about their power and wealth. Jumbo and other elephants were the preeminent creatures in this symbolic economy as “a figure for large and unwieldy wholes” – like the British empire.⁴

Additionally, American circus companies employed elephants and other wild animals as indicators of the expense and spectacle of their productions, which distinguished their entertainment from all others. An elephant arms race between American circuses had emerged in the second half of the century, with companies competing to display (and feed, house and transport) the largest “herds” of elephants possible, believing that public knowledge of the expense drove ticket sales. Jumbo himself had 34 fellow elephants when at the Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson winter quarters in the off-season. Many circus men boasted that American circuses thus made European circuses look shabby by comparison, and indeed, American outfits like Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson’s, and its comparable competitors, were the largest entertainment companies the world had every seen.⁵

So, to some degree, the scandal over Jumbo’s sale and export from Britain was an “allegory of Anglo-American relations” and symbolic of “a westward shift in the balance of global power,” as Britons gave up a prized, highly symbolic creature to a former colony.⁶ Certainly Barnum’s publicity and media work at the time encouraged this kind of thinking on the part of the public. At one point, Barnum told London’s Daily Telegraph that American citizens (read: North American circus audiences; the circuses always treated Canada as a domestic market) had to have Jumbo because he had privileged them above all others with “my forty years invariable practice of exhibiting the best that money could procure, [which] makes Jumbo’s presence here imperative.”⁷

Nonetheless, neither an ostensibly credulous nineteenth-century public nor a combination of nationalistic fervor and clever publicity is sufficient to explain not only why Britons were sad to lose Jumbo to Barnum and how North Americans saw the elephant as a trophy thereafter, but the precise ways consumers and journalists acted on those sentiments with this particular elephant. Patriotism and Jumbo’s livingness were, in fact, interconnected, but at a grass-root level. Jumbo’s life offered citizens mediated opportunities for expressions of empathy for a famous animal, who was representative of national identities defined by particular relationships with and uses of animals – for Britons as animal lovers, for Americans as globally preeminent consumers.⁸

Moreover, Jumbo became an international celebrity in the 1880s because modern Britons and North Americans were ready to see and spend money on a zoo elephant they acknowledged as a unique being capable of suffering, a complex character who changed over time and whose experience was of public concern. The interest in and infrastructure for celebrity were highly developed in many western nations. The British culture of celebrity had arguably been founded by late eighteenth-century London theatre actors, sports figures and noted authors, like Lord Byron, whose engagement with the public came to supported hundreds and later thousands of media-related jobs. For a century b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Modernity for Animals?
• 1  Jumbo: Sentient Animal Celebrity
• 2  Jumbo: Tourist and Consumer
• 3  Jumbo: Carcass, Relic, Toy
• Conclusion: From Jumbo to Knut
• Bibliography
• Index