London Zoo examined in its nineteenth-century context, looking at its effect on cultural and social life At the dawn of the Victorian era, London Zoo became one of the metropolis's premier attractions. The crowds drawn to its bear pit included urban promenaders, gentlemen menagerists, Indian shipbuilders and Persian princes - CharlesDarwin himself. This book shows that the impact of the zoo's extensive collection of animals can only be understood in the context of a wide range of contemporary approaches to nature, and that it was not merely as a manifestation of British imperial culture. The author demonstrates how the early history of the zoo illuminates three important aspects of the history of nineteenth-century Britain: the politics of culture and leisure in a new public domain which included museums and art galleries; the professionalisation and popularisation of science in a consumer society; and the meanings of the animal world for a growing urban population. Weaving these threads altogether, hepresents a flexible frame of analysis to explain how the zoo was established, how it pursued its policies of animal collection, and how it responded to changing social conditions. Dr Takashi Ito is Associate Professor in Modern British History, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

Tracing the cultural, material, and discursive history of an early manifestation of media culture in the making. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, huge circular panoramas presented their audiences with resplendent representations that ranged from historic battles to exotic locations. Such panoramas were immersive but static. There were other panoramas that moved—hundreds, and probably thousands of them. Their history has been largely forgotten. In Illusions in Motion, Erkki Huhtamo excavates this neglected early manifestation of media culture in the making. The moving panorama was a long painting that unscrolled behind a “window” by means of a mechanical cranking system, accompanied by a lecture, music, and sometimes sound and light effects. Showmen exhibited such panoramas in venues that ranged from opera houses to church halls, creating a market for mediated realities in both city and country. In the first history of this phenomenon, Huhtamo analyzes the moving panorama in all its complexity, investigating its relationship to other media and its role in the culture of its time. In his telling, the panorama becomes a window for observing media in operation. Huhtamo explores such topics as cultural forms that anticipated the moving panorama; theatrical panoramas; the diorama; the "panoramania" of the 1850s and the career of Albert Smith, the most successful showman of that era; competition with magic lantern shows; the final flowering of the panorama in the late nineteenth century; and the panorama's afterlife as a topos, traced through its evocation in literature, journalism, science, philosophy, and propaganda.