The Elephant Keeper: A note from the author…

ELEPHANTS have had a strange history in Britain. For many centuries, that is, there were no elephants in the country, and yet they lived in the popular imagination as fabulous, powerful animals. They were like dragons and basiliks, half-real, half-fictional. Few people could be sure that they definitely existed, let alone be confident of knowing what it might be like to meet a real elephant. In the absence of hard facts imagination takes wing, and falsehoods about elephants abounded. In the medieval period and later it was widely believed that elephants lived for two or three hundred years, that they were frightened of mice, that they worshipped the moon, that they could write Greek. The monks whose gorgeous illustrations fill the medieval bestiaries had never seen elephants, and so they copied illustrations in earlier bestiaries, which were themselves copied from earlier works – in the process, mistakes were multiplied and magnified. The bestiary elephants are typically ludicrous creatures equipped with boarish tusks, trumpet trunks and slender, deer-like legs. Very occasionally, a real elephant appeared to challenge these inventions. The Romans supposedly brought elephants to Britain in the invasion of ad 43, and in the winter of 1254 Louis IX of France gave Henry III of England an African elephant. Housed in the Tower of London, it was given fine wine and fed choice cuts of beef, a diet which may have contributed to its early death. It’s possible that there was another elephant in England a few years later: an elephant’s leg-bone, found in Chester, has been carbon-dated to the fourteenth century. These real animals were soon forgotten. What survived, in people’s imaginations, was a variety of fictional elephants: some huge and terrifying, with sharp tusks and gramophone ears, others squat and tubby. It was in the mid to late eighteenth century, the period in which The Elephant Keeper is set, that the imaginary life of elephants began to fade. Travel to Africa and India had become more common; zoology was increasingly well organised and, from the 1790s, there was a London menagerie in which members of the public could see elephants. Misconceptions about the habits and nature of elephants persisted for many years longer, but it was no longer possible to think of elephants as not real. By the mid-nineteenth century, even people living deep in the countryside must have had a fair idea what a real elephant looked like.