1. Martyn Lyons, ‘New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers’ in Guiglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds), A History of Reading in the West (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999), p.313.
2. On eighteenth-century natural history texts, and the increasingly naturalistic portrayal of animals in children’s stories, see Jane Spencer, ‘Creating Animal Experience in Late Eighteenth-Century Narrative’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33:4 (2010), pp.469–486.
3. J.G. Wood, Sketches and Anecdotes of Animal Life (London: Routledge, 1855), pp.54 and 17. The story about the tipsy elephant was reported in the papers in 1854. According to the Daily News, the animal vanished during the night and was found in the early afternoon ‘lying fast asleep in the wine cellar of the hotel’, surrounded by broken bottles and looking ‘the picture of contentment’. See Daily News, 13 September 1854.
4. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp.394–395.
5. For a discussion of visitor responses and the sources we can use to recover them, see Victoria Carroll, ‘The Natural History of Visiting: Responses to Charles Waterton and Walton Hall’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Science 35 (2004), pp.31–6.