Clara's Grand Tour : Travels With a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe - Hardcover

Glynis Ridley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 184354010X ISBN 13: 9781843540106

Publisher: Atlantic Books, 2004

Synopsis

Book by Ridley, Glynis

About this title

About the Author

Glynis Ridley was a lecturer in eighteenth- century studies at Queen's University, Belfast. She now lives in Kentucky.

From Publishers Weekly

The titular rhino was raised from a calf by a Dutch sea captain who exhibited her in the 1740s and '50s to enthusiastic crowds of European commoners and royalty. In this pleasant if somewhat aimless study, Ridley treats Clara as an early harbinger of the society of the spectacle. Poets celebrated her, sculptors and painters immortalized her, and she was the star of "one of the first recognizable media campaigns," as her owner drummed up excitement with enticing ads and raked in a fortune at the box office and from the sale of posters, medallions and other Clara memorabilia. Ridley's narrative ambles agreeably along, veering from the details of Clara's diet and travel arrangements to accounts of her impact on contemporary observers, and feels padded out with digressions on such topics as Renaissance anatomy texts, porcelain production in Saxony and Hannibal's invasion of Italy. Ridley's claim that Clara stood "at the center of philosophical and theological disputes"—one philosophe allegedly cited her as proof of the existence of God—is overhyped; the animal's main influence appears to have been the correction of misconceptions about rhino anatomy. But Ridley's first book is a gracefully written look at a diverting sideshow in European cultural history. Eight pages b&w illus. not seen by PW.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 184354010X
• ISBN 13: 9781843540106
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 222