Goldfish in the Parlour
The Victorian craze for marine life
'For the first time, fish became our companions and a corner of many a Victorian parlour was given over to housing tiny fragments of their world enclosed in glass.'
The experience of seeing a fish swimming in a glass tank is one we take for granted now but in Victorian England this was a remarkable sight. People had simply not been able to see fish as they could with the invention of the aquarium and everything that went with it.
Goldfish in the Parlour looks at the Victorian-era boom in the building of public aquariums, as well as the craze for home aquariums and visiting the seaside. Furthermore, this book considers how people see and meet animals and, importantly, in what institutions and in what contexts these encounters happen.
John Simons uncovers the sweeping consequences of the Victorian obsession with marine animals by looking at naturalist Frank Buckland’s Museum of Economic Fish Culture and the role of fish in the Victorian economy, the development of angling as a sport divided along class lines, the seeding of Empire with British fish and comparisons with aquarium building in Europe, USA and Australia.
Goldfish in the Parlour interrogates the craze that took over Victorian England when aquariums 'introduced' fish to parks, zoos and parlours.
John Simons is an historian specialising in the history of animals. He has written or edited twenty books, on topics ranging from Middle English chivalric romance to Andy Warhol to the history of cricket. His previous books on animals include Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation (2002), Rosetti’s Wombat (2008), The Tiger That Swallowed the Boy: Exotic Animals in Victorian England (2012), Kangaroo (2012), which was listed for the Royal Society of Biology’s Book of the Year Award, and Obaysch: A Hippopotamus in Victorian London (2019). He is a published poet and has just completed his first novel. He has worked in universities on every continent except Antarctica and most recently was Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University in Sydney.
More books by author
