"In fact, one cannot see it without laughing"

Abstract

This cultural biography of the kangaroo in eighteenth-century Britain is concerned with the meaning and spectacle of the kangaroo in animal merchants, menageries, museums, and anatomical collections at the end of the long eighteenth century. In this paper, the kangaroo is featured both living and dead—as taxidermy, spirit preparation, or living, leaping kangaroo. The changing meaning or status of the kangaroo in these different collections contexts is narrated through individual kangaroo biographies and as a coherent whole is also a prosopography—a collective cultural biography of the kangaroo in Georgian Britain. Living kangaroos in this period held a very specific attraction for their spectators and we will see how this appeal was linked to contemporary British political culture. Understandings of nationhood, climate, the political economy of gathering, naturalizing, and disseminating plants and animals throughout the Empire, and the politics of natural history during the Napoleonic Wars were significant in constituting perceptions and meanings of the kangaroo in Britain. In addition to charting a series of relationships between sites and practitioners in Georgian Britain, this paper uses the kangaroo as a subject for articulating the changing practices of natural history, anatomy, and zoology in Britain between 1770 and 1830. The kangaroo in this period can be understood as consisting of many different cultural species of kangaroo created by differing practitioners—naturalists, anatomists, or exhibitioners, and different spectators. The politics of nation and natural history, and the negotiation of exhibitionary and disciplinary boundaries are particularly significant to the biography of the kangaroo. In this paper, I trace different sites, methods. or ways of encountering and knowing the kangaroo. For the early nineteenth century, I use the kangaroo to narrate a context for the establishment of expertise in the field of zoology, particularly marked by the emergence of the museum and menagerie of the London Zoological Society. This paper, though specifically concerned with the kangaroo, is then intended to resonate more widely with contemporary scholarship within the history of science and museum studies that is centered on the changing creation, perception, and utility of the "specimen" as a category of object.