VICTORIAN FISHKEEPING

Would you believe that aquaculture and the international industry that supports it all began with an unsuccesful attempt to breed hawk moths? Although both ornamental and edible fish had been kept in outside pools for many centuries, the modern age of aquaculture began in the autumn of 1829 when an amateur naturalist called Samuel Nathanial Ward found the chrysalis of a hawk moth. Wishing to attempt to rear the creature when it emerged the following spring, he put it in a bottle, resting on a bed of earth, shoved it into a corner of his study and promptly forgot about it. The following spring he found that although the hawk moth hadn’t emerged, two seedlings - a fern and a grass - had germinated although Ward had not watered them. In one of those extraordinary pieces of serendipity that characterise the advancement of science, Ward had accidentally discovered that plants enclosed in almost airtight glass cases are practically self sustaining.

Ward followed up on these experiments, and over the next few years he managed to succesfully propogate over thirty species of fern in these hermetically sealed conditions. News of this new discovery spread slowly. In 1834 a London nurseryman used Ward’s technique to send delicate plants to Australia, and in 1842, after no less a scientific personage than Faraday had discussed Ward’s findings at a meeting of the Royal Institution, Ward published his findings in a paper entitled “On the Growth of plants in closely glazed cases”. The public were interested - Natural History was a national preoccupation at the time - but there was a major stumbling block to ‘Wardian Cases’ (as they were now called), becoming a popular hobby. Since the Napoleonic Wars a quarter of a century earlier, there had been a stringent tax on glass. However, when this was repealed in 1845, the Wardian Case full of ferns became an essential peice of furniture in the parlours and drawing rooms of the emergent middle classes. The great fern craze only lasted a few years but it paved the way for a new national obsession - the aquarium.

People had attempted to keep fancy goldfish in bowls for years. Invariably they died when the oxygen ran out although one budding aquarist, Mrs Anna Thynne, had discovered a novel way to keep her pets alive. She maintained the oxygenation in her tank by having the water poured back and forth for half an hour a day. “This was doubtlessly a fatiguing operation, but I had a little handmaid, who, besides being rather anxious to oblige me, thought it rather an amusement." As most people were not blessed with servants who were so easily amused, the pursuit of aquaculture remained an esoteric and arcane occupation. However, following on from his experiments with ferns Ward discovered that with the simple addition of some valisneria and some pond snails, two small goldfish could be kept in a tank for nearly a year without a water change.

By this time the Wardian Cases of ferns were so ubiquitous that they were considered to be bordering on vulgarity, and the new revelations about the ease of fishkeeping prompted many erstwhile fern keepers to throw out their precious plants, turn their Wardian Cases upside down, and become fishkeepers.

In the meantime two naturalists, Robert Warrington and best-selling author Philip Henry Gosse, were carrying out experiments independently of each other, and almost simultaneously announced that they had managed to keep marine creatures alive in captivity. Writing in a book called A Naturalists rambles on the Devonshire Coast (1853), he described his success at keeping small marine creatures, especially sea anemones, and in doing so enthused an entire section of the British public into wanting to follow his example. The following year he debated the relative merits of the words 'aqua-vivarium' and 'vivarium' before concluding “let the word Aquarium be selected to indicate these interesting collections of aquatic animals and plants.” He also announced that an affordable ‘Marine Aquarium for the Parlour or Conservatory’ was already being manufactured on a large scale for public consumption.

The books of Gosse and other authors also inspired a generation of amateur naturalists to take up the occupation of rock-pooling. This involved exploring rocky shores in search of interesting and peculiar creatures and by 1858 the two hobbies had led to enormous numbers of people keeping sea anemones as pets.

At the same time public aquaria were opened in London and Brighton, and the star arrivals at both exhibits became another national obsession. One commentator wrote '..the arrival of the octopus had attracted almost as much attention as the visit of a foreign emperor, and the death of a porpoise was mourned as a national calamity.' When London Zoo exhibited its first hippopotamus the animal-hungry public visited in droves and went away inspired to start their own aquariums at home. G.H. Lewis - the biggest proponent of the hobby of sea-anemone propogation - wrote in Seaside Studies (1958) that "At once pet, ornament and ‘subject for dissection’, the Sea-Anemone has a well established popularity in the British family circle; having the advantage over the hippopotamus of being somewhat les expensive; and less troublesome to keep.”

Like all fads that grip the public imagination, the craze for aquariums was short-lived. Like the C.B. Radio fad of the early 1980s it was soon replaced with other interests. The public aquaria, which had been opened with the grandiose aim of the advancement of piscatorial science, were soon degraded into sordid freak shows where prostitutes plied their trade and there were as many jugglers, performing bears, dancing midgets and siamese twins as there were fish.

Writing in 1890, Gosse’s son scathingly commented that when his father had been “eagerly proposing the preservation of marine animals alive in mimic seas, he certainly did not anticipate that within forty years an aquarium would come to mean a place devoted to parachute jumping monkeys, performing bears and aerial queens of the tightrope.”

Possibly the most important aspect of the short-lived boom in home aquaria during the mid-Victorian era was the fact that its practitioners were mostly women. The pursuit of natural history was something that had taken place for many years across all echelons of society, but for many Victorians the obsession that naturalists had with the reproductive habits of the creatures that they studied were “not quite nice” and certainly totally unsuitable for those of the fairer sex. The fact that the inhabitants of aquaria were singularly lacking in external genitalia was certainly one of the main reasons for the extraordinary success of the short-lived movement.

A century and a half later we may laugh at these mores of petty gentility. Indeed the image of the corseted Victorian gentlewoman ordering her maid to dutifully aeriate her aquarium whilst she remained in blissfull ignorance of the sexual habits of its inhabitants is an amusing one - especially when seen against the social situations prevalent at the time - a culture were child prostitutes and female alchoholism were common - and which led to the appalling predations of Jack the Ripper and others.

However, we should never forget that if it weren’t for these pioneers the hobby we all know and love would not exist today. Bearing this in mind, we should raise a silent toast to the Victorian aquarists each time we look at our fish tanks, tend our fish or even read the parts of this blog that refer to fishkeeping....