A visit to the new Aquarium, by A Correspondent
An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
This feature, published in 1876, describes a visit to a newly opened public aquarium at a seaside resort in the north of England.
The new Aquarium at Saltby, which opened its doors at Whitsun, has been called by its directors ‘the most instructive building in the north of England’, and for once a prospectus has not greatly overstated the case. We spent the whole of Tuesday afternoon there and came away with sore feet, a damp coat and a better notion of the bottom of the sea than all our schoolbooks had given us.
The visitor descends a broad stair into a long, dim corridor, cool as a cellar, lined on either hand with great tanks of plate glass lit from above. The effect is that of walking along the sea bed with the water standing up on either side of you like a wall. In one tank a shoal of mackerel turned and flashed together as though a single mind directed them. In another the anemones, which on the rocks at low tide are no better than lumps of red jelly, had opened into flowers of crimson, cream and the palest green, and waved their petals in the current like a bed of asters in a breeze.
The chief attraction, and deservedly so, is the octopus. We confess that we had expected a monster. What we found was a creature of extraordinary delicacy, the colour of a ripe plum one moment and of wet sand the next, which flowed rather than swam about its tank and examined our fingers against the glass with an eye that was disconcertingly intelligent. A small girl beside us asked her father whether it was thinking. He did not know. Neither did we.
So far, our praise is without reserve. We are less certain about the rest of the establishment. The directors, having built a temple to natural history, appear to fear that natural history alone will not pay the interest on their shares. Accordingly there is a brass band in the upper hall that plays from two until ten, a roller-skating floor, a dining saloon, a gallery of comic waxworks, and, at four and at seven, a young woman billed as ‘Undine, the Living Mermaid’, who sits in a tank of warm water with a tail of painted canvas and combs her hair. The crowd at Undine’s tank was ten deep. The octopus, at the same hour, had the corridor to himself.
We do not grudge the holiday crowd its band or its skating. But we would remind the directors that a man may hear a brass band on any pier in England, whereas there are not many places where a working family can watch an octopus change colour. The Aquarium is a fine thing. It would be finer still if it trusted its fish.
“The writer believes the new aquarium is a complete success.”
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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.