Anguish, by August Friedrich Albrecht Schenck, c. 1878. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
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Miscellany
In the “Those That Will Work” section of Henry Mayhew’s London Labor and London Poor, published in 1861, there is a profile of Jack Black, whose self-appointed title was “Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty.” In addition to exterminating vermin royal and common, Black kept a collection of rats, which included a rare white one. Noting the white rat’s popularity with audiences, he bred it to sell the offspring; novelist Beatrix Potter is believed to have bought her albino rat Samuel Whiskers from the exterminator. It is speculated that the majority of albino rats, the variety most often used in science experiments, are descended from Black’s original pet.
I do not mean to call an elephant a vulgar animal, but if you think about him carefully, you will find that his nonvulgarity consists in such gentleness as is possible to elephantine nature—not in his insensitive hide, nor in his clumsy foot, but in the way he will lift his foot if a child lies in his way; and in his sensitive trunk, and still more sensitive mind, and capability of pique on points of honor.
—John Ruskin, 1860
