The Zoo: The Wild and Wonderful Tale of the Founding of the London Zoo; 1824–1851

Charman (The Great War) crafts an affecting narrative of the first 25 years of the Zoological Society of London through the stories of seven of its most influential contributors. She relates the tragedy of Stamford Raffles, the zoo’s founder and first president, who survived a fire that killed three of his children and burned his first menagerie to see his idea for the society come to fruition, only to die suddenly a few months later in 1826. Charman depicts Charles Darwin, a corresponding member of the Society, pondering links between species while studying the inhabitants of the Monkey House, and animal keeper Devereux Fuller proactively seeking to increase exotic imports, including a cameleopard (giraffe). Meanwhile Charles Spooner, the zoo’s veterinarian, contends with the heartbreaking problems of captivity, suicidal kangaroos, aggressive monkeys, and the taunting of animals by patrons wielding parasols. Charman provides historical and atmospheric details of the era through the eyes of her characters; the ever-evolving city was “a tangled mass of coaches, omnibuses and pedestrians... Westminster... glimpsed in snatches through heads and hats.” She writes her subjects’ interior monologues. The book is nuanced, often entertaining, and also tragic, as the Society faced massive mortality rates in its early years; the death of Tommy the chimpanzee is particularly brutal. (Apr.)