Jumbo: Carcass, Relic, Toy

Abstract

This chapter follows Jumbo’s post-mortem transformation from celebrity circus captive to raw material for naturalists. Correspondence between Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson circus and Henry Ward’s Natural History Establishment shows how circuses and zoologists resisted with public perceptions of animals while treating them, not as sentient individuals, but as raw material. Both interpretations of animals, as pets and raw material, were necessary functions of modernity. Jumbo made an uneasy transition to taxidermic specimen because the high points of circus history and educational taxidermy in North America intersected in the 1880s. Still, many found the “2 Jumbos” — his preserved skeleton and skin — awkward since taxidermy was usually employed with anonymous creatures. Therefore, people again transformed Jumbo into toy and household companion in order to obscure human complicity in his species’ near-extermination that century.