A visit to the menagerie, by Lemuel Kersey
An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
In this letter, written in 1858, a solicitor’s clerk in a country town tells his cousin about a visit to a travelling menagerie, a touring show of wild animals kept in wagons.
Dear Dick, You will have seen the bills, for they are pasted on every wall between here and the county town: ‘Mr Gorringe’s Royal Menagerie, with NERO, the Largest Lion ever Exhibited in these Islands, who has Devoured Three Keepers’. I paid my shilling on Saturday evening, as you dared me to, and I promised you a full account. Here it is.
The show stands on the fair ground in a ring of painted wagons, lit by flares that roar like bellows and throw everybody’s shadow twenty feet high. There was a band of four who played the same tune all evening, a bear who sat up and begged, a cage of parrots who swore, I am sorry to say, in English, and a smell over the whole which I can only compare to a wet stable that has been left to think about itself.
Now, Dick, I will tell you the truth about Nero. He is old, and he is small. The canvas over the entrance shows him the size of a dray horse, with a keeper in his jaws; the real Nero would not fill a hip bath. His mane is as thin as a worn hearthrug, and when we came up he was at his supper, a shin of horse, which he held between his paws and gnawed with great care on one side of his mouth, exactly as old Mr Pybus does at the Michaelmas dinner. The keeper rattled an iron bar along the front of the cage and shouted at him. Nero looked at us over the bone as a gentleman looks at a tradesman who has called at an inconvenient hour, and went on with his meal. A little boy on his father’s shoulders asked, very clearly, whether that was the lion’s son. Nobody answered him. If Nero ever devoured three keepers, it was a long time ago, and I suspect they were small.
But I had not reckoned with the elephant, who was not on the bills at all. She stood at the end of the row, chained by one hind leg to a post, a great grey creature called Sultana, and the keeper let us give her buns at a penny for three. She took one from my palm with the tip of her trunk, which is as soft and quick as a finger, and breathed on my wrist, warm as a kettle. When a child dropped a sixpence in the straw she felt about for it, found it, and handed it gravely to the keeper. The whole crowd clapped her. I stood beside her for an hour and spent fivepence on buns.
There was something sad in her, too. All the time we watched, she swayed from side to side, slowly, as if she were keeping time to music none of us could hear, and the keeper said she does it all night. I thought of that on the way home.
Still, I had my shilling’s worth twice over, though not from the animal I paid to see. I mean to go again on Tuesday before they move on, and I shall take my own buns, and I shall not trouble Nero.
Your affectionate cousin, Lemuel
“For the writer, the visit to the menagerie is a disappointment.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.