This paper will explore ways in which snakes, whole or fragmentary, living or dead, were encountered in London between 1750 and 1840. It will consider the methods of preservation, arrangement and the context of display, and will examine the ways in which prior knowledge about snakes was used in the construction of displays, and how in turn a variety of audiences learned about snakes through non-textual encounter.

Whilst prosopographic accounts of animals have become more common of late, there has hitherto frequently been an emphasis on large, impressive or popular animals. In my wider research, I have deliberately set out to examine a type of animal that has historically elicited feelings of revulsion and fear, at least in the West. I am particularly interested in the development and persistence of stereotypes regarding snakes in the nineteenth century, especially relating to their cultural associations, within an imperial context. I am interested in how knowledge about snakes was created, acquired, transported, modified, and disseminated, and in the relationship between ‘scientific’ and ‘non-scientific’ knowledge-making, and the recycling of anecdote.

I will examine the ‘museo-exhibitionary’ complex at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries to explore tensions between education and entertainment, competition and collaboration, and static and dynamic display. The late eighteenth century saw an increase in the size and formality of natural history collections, but alongside snakes in jars or taxidermied examples, skins still decorated walls, and skulls and rattles retained value as curios. Constrictor snakes were popular constituents of travelling menageries. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw a rise in the display of living snakes with increasingly dramatic advertisements boasting of the length, rarity, and fierceness of their star attractions, and a growing taste for seeing snakes feed on living prey, with some controversy. Post-mortem, many menagerie snakes were supplied to naturalists and re-constituted as specimens and skeletons in collections such as those of the Hunterian Museum. Whilst one of the substantial advantages of menageries was the opportunity for a more comprehensive sensory encounter with animals beyond the visual, a desire and opportunity for tactile interaction sometimes led to tragic consequences. In these cases, the deceased themselves became objects of great medical and scientific interest.