Captive Animals and Disabled Children at the London Zoo

Beginning in the 1830s and 40s, the London Zoo at Regent’s Park brought young visitors into close, albeit mediated, contact with animals from around the globe. Critical scholarship on the nineteenth-century zoo focuses on its function as imperial theater: the spectacle of accumulated creatures demonstrated Britain’s control over foreign realms and their human and non-human inhabitants. This chapter, however, turns from this relationship between the zoo and the empire to highlight instead a contemporary analogy between the zoo and the metropole, particularly linking the confined animal with the debilitated urban poor. Two books for children—Charlotte Tucker’s The Rambles of a Rat (1857) and Curtis Dunham and Oliver Herford’s Two in a Zoo (1904)—employ the connection between the caged zoo animal and the disabled child, simultaneously marshalling dehumanizing rhetoric about disabled bodies while proposing new ways of considering disability and childhood that anticipate progressive political movements. These texts compellingly argue that human disability—when compared to the transplanted and confined condition of the zoo animal—is not a constitutional physical malady but rather the consequence of badly-designed man-made environments. This chapter illustrates how these narratives for children provide critical hinge moments in the intersection among children’s rights, animal rights, and disability rights discourses.