Jungle pets

Fig. 1: The Alphabet of Animals, 1880, pg. 2

Fig. 2: For Very Little Folk, 1899, pg. 2

Fig. 3: The Child's Picture Book of Animals Domestic and Wild, 1880, pg. 7

Fig. 4: The Large Picture Primer, 1886, U-V

Fig. 5: Aunt Louisa's Nursery Book, 1885, E-H

Fig. 6: Aunt Louisa's Nursery Book, 1885, J-M

Fig. 7: Amazing Adventures, 1904, pg. 25

Fig. 8: In the Jungle: A Book of Wild Animals and how they Live, 1915, Elephant

Fig. 9: In the Jungle: A Book of Wild Animals and how they Live, 1915, Hippo

Particularly after the 1880s, jungle animals became such a ubiquitous and familiar part of children’s imagery that their roles and meanings shifted slightly.  They were no longer merely within the imperial perspective; jungle animals were a familiar and even domestic part of the English world.  As other authors have demonstrated, the ideological process of familiarizing the colonies envisioned a British state whose intimate knowledge of the colonized subject enabled them to rule it more completely.[1]  Wild jungle animals were steadily brought into the realm of the familiar and the controlled in a way that nations, peoples, and continents never could be.  This page examines the process of domesticating the jungle through images of exotic animals alongside pets, within domestic spaces, and even dressed in human clothing.

The process of familiarization can be most easily seen in picture books that juxtaposed familiar English pets with exotic animals, as in the page from The Alphabet of Animals (fig. 1).  Here, a domestic cat and a donkey share space with an ape and a boar.  The cat and donkey are particularly marked as domestic, being harnessed for work and curled in the corner of a barn, respectively.  An 1899 alphabet, For Very Little Folk, functioned similarly.  An elephant is placed between doves and a frog, thereby reducing the hugeness and strangeness of the elephant (fig. 2).  Elephants were, perhaps, as gentle as doves and tiny as frogs.  By familiarizing and shrinking jungle animals, these texts were helping to re-categorize the jungle as something familiar, domestic, and even boring.   

More than simply equating elephants with doves, some books brought jungle animals into domestic spaces.  The Child’s Picture Book of Animals featured a zebra tucked away beneath an image of a girl and her mother feeding the ducks (fig. 3).  The impression is almost that the little English family keeps a zebra in their barn, which requires feeding after the ducks.  Another ABC features an indoor tea-scene directly above “V is for Viper, a venomous snake,” (fig. 4).  Ladies drinking tea are as domestic as it is possible to be, and yet they are mere inches from a viper.  One picture book took this idea even further: In Aunt Louisa’s Nursery Book, each letter is associated with a finely illustrated interior space (Fig. 5, 6).  Here we can find tropical fauna only with some effort.  An elephant appears on a canvas under E, and a lion is framed on the wall under L.  Here, the jungle is so domesticated that it has become a cursory part of the English home.

The final and most extreme way that animals were domesticated involves scenes where exotic animals wore clothing.  The gorillas in Amazing Adventures are not clothed, but they apparently walk upright, use walking sticks, and shake hands (fig. 7).[2]  Apparently gorillas were not so much wild animals as polite neighbors.  It is Raphael Tuck’s In the Jungle, however, which most astonishingly civilizes the jungle.  Here, an elephant is a “great golfer” and a hippo performs “hush-a-bye-baby” with a lion as his piano accompaniment (fig. 8, fig. 9).  Partly, these pictures function on the humor of wild animals playing golf.  But they also remake the tropics into something familiar, civilized, and fundamentally nonthreatening.

Notes