ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the shark became more than a name, more than a description in a book to the educated man and woman. Beyond the fisherman’s quay and the coastal market, it was for the first time an object to view up close, even to touch. As early as the seventeenth century, shark specimens had been assembled and carefully arranged by John Tradescant and Elias Ashmole, but what began as a niche pursuit became part of mainstream urban culture over the next hundred years (Walton, 1784:25-6). The routine association of rapaciousness with the shark’s jaws, found in Smollett and elsewhere at this time, might reflect the authors’ familiarity with such sights as they went about their lives (Smollett, 1751:ii, 100). In both Peregrine Pickle and Sir Lancelot Greaves, Smollett suggests that cabinets of curiosity could topple over into props for charlatans, mere mumbo jumbo. This chapter traces the use of sharks in a wide range of prose, from dictionaries through to newspapers, sermons and novels. Sympathetic treatments of the shark have been few and far between. What we can say is that in prose fiction, the shark plays predominantly to a human fear of the invisible, powerful predator, the dark and unknown (Ritter et al., 2008:45-52). It has fulfilled the role of the monster for centuries and will continue to do so unless we take responsibility for the impact that representation has on the lives of ‘others’.
