My PhD research examines representations of animals in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century British popular natural history, focussing on how the expressions of national identity and imaginings of space, frequently articulated within them, helped to configure the imperial nation by reinforcing hierarchies of civilisation, informed by stadial models of human development. 

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Britain saw a proliferation of popular natural history and animal knowledge was increasingly communicated, propagated and consumed through text, images and exhibitions of live or preserved animals in menageries, museums and zoological gardens. Popular zoological literature was primarily encyclopaedic in structure, with individual entries for specific or collections of species. This format also extended to contemporary guidebooks, published to accompany exhibitions of live or preserved animals at attractions and institutions. Works of popular natural history were produced by specialists and non-specialists and images and information were readily transferred from one publication to another. In this way, a memetic discourse emerged, that solidified particular understandings of individual species within the popular imagination. Furthermore, animal knowledge was frequently collated from a range of sources, including works by eminent naturalists, animal encounters in travel literature and personal observations of live and preserved animals, with each contribution to the discussion retaining the concerns and preoccupations indicative of the genre from which it was extracted. 

Although the popular zoological discourse encompassed a wide array of animals, large, impressive mammal species received the greater attention and were more frequently depicted and discussed. Indeed, it was the repeated locating of these species within specific geographical and temporal spaces and the repeated highlighting of associated human-animal relationships, that helped to reinforce hierarchies of human civilisations both within and beyond the borders of Britain. Through these processes, works of popular natural history promoted an affluent, urban, middling strata of British society, their core readership, as representative of the national character, which aided in configuring the imperial nation by promoting conceptions of British identity linked to notions of modernity, industriousness, commercial success and moral superiority.