Takashi Ito's important new book on the early years of the London Zoo situates its history among the histories of urban leisure, public science, and animal history. He focuses his analysis upon “how the zoo mediated between the scientific community and the non-specialist public” (166). En route, Ito places the London Zoo within the many discourses of imperial, metropolitan, and intellectual history that influenced its founding and first three decades. Ito is scrupulous in documenting the cultural politics of everything from the zoo's residence in Regent's Park (and resultant fears of noise and animal filth) to the increasingly pressing, social-class inflected question of access to the zoo. The great variety of his sources, which range from the Zoological Society's minutes to personal diaries both foreign and domestic of the zoo's visitors, is fascinating. The one area in which readers familiar with larger philosophical discourses of animal studies might wish for more historical narrative is animal history.

In his introduction, Ito remarks promisingly upon the topic of animal agency: “Theoretically, the application of the term ‘animal history’ would suggest a reassessment of a human-centered view of history and a discussion of the possibility of recovering the agency of animals in historical narratives” (14). He relates a kangaroo's apparent suicide, quoting a line from the Zoological Society of London's records, “Occurrences in the Garden,” on 22 October 1830: “killed itself against the fence of the padock [sic]” (36). There seems to be no record in Ito's sources about the kangaroo's capture or treatment, but Ito does provide fascinating details of animal capture in relation to the predecessors of four giraffes who were a cause célèbre at the London Zoo in May of 1826: French trader George Thibout of Cairo “captured five giraffes in Kurdufan (Kordofan) in the central region of what is now Sudan, but four of them died as a result of the severe winter on the way back to Angola (Dunkulah) in north Sudan” (66). Animal suffering and animal death are a part of the history Ito writes, and he does locate this animal history within the emerging debates on animal welfare and public science. Visitors to the London Zoo in the early Victorian era had rejected the bear-baiting tortures popular with some of their forebears. They wanted to see happy animals, and “many individual visitors seemed to appreciate the zoo's ideals”; still, “the zoo's daily journal suggests that the actual physical environment of the zoo was at odds with the visitors' first impressions, and, in fact, caused stress and distress to the animals” (36).

The wonderful color lithographs of scientific naturalist and artist Joseph Wolf (1820–1899), produced over thirty years for the Zoological Society of London in the decades following the period covered in Ito's history, represent animals in their natural habitats without reference to human spectators—or gazing out upon the spectators who look upon them, calmly returning the gaze of the human animal. Recent science on animal minds, from biologist Marc Bekoff's Minding Animals (2002) to anthropologist Barbara King's How Animals Grieve (2013) provides a context in which Ito might have further explored the individual London Zoo animal's agency and build upon his discussion of Darwin toward the end of his study (162–66). Instead, Ito decides to pursue this thread by identifying the discrepancies between the representation of animal well-being (including the harmony between humans and animals) and the reality behind that representation. This reality often included—especially in the London Zoo's early years, 1826–1830s—the almost immediate deaths of many captive animals in an “economy of animal collection” (36) that Ito unflinchingly records. Ito's narrative choice, however, means that we will not know much about Toby the Bear, for instance, except that he climbed to the top of a pole in the Zoo's early “bear pits” and was a popular spectacle and attraction. We learn much more about the cultural craze surrounding Obaysh the hippopotamus, who arrived at the zoo in 1850, than we do about his responses to his new environment.

In the fascinating interplay of controversies about public science, imperial and national competition (with France in particular), and increasingly reformist and democratic demands for greater access to the zoo, two discourses are perhaps most compelling. The first is the ongoing discussion of the economy of animal collection as much more than an imperial enterprise, as more complicated and nuanced. This is one of the most original elements of Ito's book, and is wonderfully confirmed in the recent history by Ann Colley, Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps (2014), which extends the insistence upon the varied networks of animal collection to an examination of the emotional significances of wild animal skins. In his analysis of a related discourse, Ito thoroughly examines the conflicts between scientists and imperialism, concluding that “empire-building and scientific enterprise were not always mutually supportive” (161).

The second discourse that Ito traces most compellingly is the ongoing push for further access to the zoo, a process that might perhaps be set more overtly within the contexts of workingmen's and women's rights in the period between the First Reform Bill and 1848. Ito's documenting of the competitive pressures the London Zoo experienced from the Surrey Zoo's more public exhibitions is very interesting. Helen Cowie's book on zoos and menageries, Exhibiting Animals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Empathy, Education, Entertainment, also published in 2014, expands upon the local nature of this competitiveness. Ito records the financial exigency as well as political pressure that led eventually to opening the London Zoo on Sundays, when even working-class men and their families could visit, despite Sabbatarian disapproval. The Great Exhibition and the burgeoning spirit of reform led to the zoo's allowing access to the general public after its early decades of largely catering to the well-to-do. Despite continuing fears that the zoo would become more an amusement park than a place for research and education, by 1843 its “grassy open field began to be used for promenade concerts” (111).

More research might be done on these spectators' perceptions, especially in relation to gender as well as social class (though elsewhere Ito addresses both topics well). Other questions arise in relation to the visitors' spectatorship: Were some animals eroticized despite the “educational” value that redeemed their display from the accusation of coarseness that was leveled at other exhibitions in fairs or menageries? And was any of this eroticization, if it occurred, explicitly gendered? Takashi Ito has offered us a provocative and beautifully documented study that is essential reading for any scholar interested in cultural transmission at the site of the London Zoo—or more generally in English zoo culture.