Historical Fiction

It was a rainy, crummy weekend, so I took advantage of the time not spent doing work stuff to hunker down on the couch with a book.  The book I was working my way through was Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan, a historical fiction adventure of a young enslaved man in Barbados in the early 1800s, who befriends an eccentric scientist, escapes the plantation, and goes on to travel the world and have adventures.  One subplot which I had not anticipated involves the title character, who by the end of the book has developed considerable expertise as a scientific illustrator, planning to open what would be the world's first display of marine organisms (one of his artistic specialties) in what he and his newfound partners dub "The Ocean House."  

This, of course, is a fictionalized retelling of the founding of the first aquarium at the London Zoo, which occurred roughly around this time.

The aquarium part of Washington Black wasn't a big enough component of the book to make me want to include it for a book review here.  Still, I really get a huge kick out of seeing zoos and aquariums make guest appearances - however fleeting - in works of historic fiction.  I especially enjoy it when it's in a context that you might not expect, or an era that's no one we particularly associate with the institutions.  I read a book a few years ago that, in part, featured the royal menagerie of the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul - in the 1700s.  Based on the descriptions of some of the animals housed there, it probably wasn't a very realistic depiction, but it was still pretty unexpected.  

Another historic book I read, Buffalo Girls, by Larry McMurtry, featured as a side character a former beaver trapper who found employment in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in the 1800s alongside Sitting Bull, Annie Oakley, and Calamity Jane on its tour of England.  While in London, the trapper stumbles across the London Zoo, and is absolutely spellbound to see... a beaver.  Thousands of miles away from where he would expect to see one, and long after he'd thought them trapped out.  The trapper is so moved by the experience - and the concept of the zoo - that he begins to formulate a plan to restore beaver to the American west.

Little literary asides like these made me smile, thinking that, hundreds of years ago, there were folks going to the zoo, seeing animals for the first time, and being enchanted by them.  There was almost certainly back then for whom a trip to the zoo or menagerie or prototype aquarium was the most wonderful thing imaginable, the highlight of their year, and all they could talk about or think about.

I could relate.