Madame, vous fatiguez les singes

E.S. Turner

The Tower Menagerie: Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild and Ferocious Beasts by Daniel Hahn

To kick-start a chronicle, a writer needs an attention grabber, usually a piquant item borrowed from mid-narrative. This history of the Tower Menagerie, founded 1235, begins on a winter day in 1764, when John Wesley, aged 61, arrived at the Tower with a flute-playing companion, to conduct what he called ‘an odd experiment’. The idea was to observe how the lions reacted to music, which might give some indication as to whether animals possessed souls. Descartes had ruled that they were mere machines, incapable of feeling. Hence some response identifiable as appreciation of music, ideally a standing ovation, would have been a timely rebuff to French philosophy. In the event only one lion bothered to come to the front of the den, where his powers of concentration were spoiled by a playful tiger; the other four lions ignored the proceedings; perhaps, like the Duke of Lauderdale, they preferred the mew of a cat to the best music in the world. Wesley’s test for signs of spirituality in the king of beasts is not to be mocked in an age when cognitive ethologists are trying to discover whether animals have a sense of humour or can experience romantic love, and are fearlessly addressing queries such as: ‘Is it permissible to play music to dolphins as long as they can move away?’

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

E.S. Turner wrote his first article for the Dundee Courier in 1927. He contributed to Punch for 53 years, and wrote more than eighty pieces for the London Review. His last social history was Unholy Pursuits: The Wayward Parsons of Grub Street. He died on 6 July 2006, at the age of 96.

Madame, vous fatiguez les singes

E.S. Turner

From the archive