Alexander Clayton

When animals took to the stage in eighteenth and nineteenth century London, they embodied the design and intentions of numerous makers and influencers. Physically, this design could take the form of breeding, training, and staging, whilst rhetorically, their acts could be crafted through showmanship, promotion, and a range of extraneous print products. This dissertation addresses how the characteristic of intelligence, otherwise known as sagacity, was enhanced and endued onto animals between 1750 and 1850.

These heightened representations reacted to the changing leisure demands of Londoners, and specifically responded to the attitudes and enthusiasms of the capital’s middle class. In their performances of education and morality, acts were crafted to appeal to a middle-class audience that were knowledge hungry, politically active, and culturally self-conscious. Through analysing sagacious animal acts within Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the bourgeois public sphere, this dissertation illustrates how performances influenced — and were influenced by — these rational discussions taking place amongst the bourgeois public.

In proposing this argument, this study explores the design of performances within the contexts of London’s cultural fashions, human-animal relations, and print culture. In understanding these themes, change over time will be observed, with performances rising, adapting, and ultimately declining alongside developments in Enlightenment taxonomy, Romanticism, and middle-class manners.