From the BBC Magazine comes When wild beasts roamed the UK on the fad for keeping wild animals in the Victorian period. It tells the story of "The Tiger that Swallowed the Boy" - the boy being not Albert Ramsbottom - that was a lion - but John Wade.
This Ngram for the English corpus suggests the interest in wild animals started well before the Victorian era, as early as the mid-19th century.
Thanks to Paul Jones for the tip.
2 comments:
Thanks so much for the link to Albert and the Lion, John - my mother died last week and it was one of her faves - it made me laugh to hear it again! Leslie Still
Enjoyed Albert and the Lion, husband's uncle could do the accent as he came from Bolton, Lancs. We got a record with the dialect of those poems, and practiced the speach.
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