ABSTRACT
A Punch cartoon of 1849 shows a mother and small child walking along the street, and passing a performing monkey dressed in a hat and coat. ‘Mamma!’ says the child, ‘Look! Dere, dere Papa!’1 This ‘awful instance of perception of character in an infant prodigy’ (as the caption runs) precedes the Darwin-inspired debate on ape ancestry by ten years, but the equivalence of monkeys and humans had been a commonplace joke in street performances and fairgrounds for centuries. The performing arts linked with fairground tradition provide overwhelming evidence of general curiosity about the relationship between humans and other species, but also about the human as species. ‘The question of questions for mankind,’ said Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘ – the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other – is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.’2
