A is for Anthroparchy: Zoos, Zebras and the human-animal relationship in British ABC books

Mark Carter

In April 2024, several horses of the Household Cavalry made headline news after throwing their riders and running wild through the streets of London, colliding with vehicles in distressing and chaotic scenes. Part of the reason this event was newsworthy was almost certainly the sheer novelty of seeing these animals outside of spaces where they are expected and existing, even if only temporarily, free from human restraint and control.

A somewhat less dramatic feeling of surprise at an animal travelling unexpectedly through London is described by photographer Paul Henning in the foreword to his ABC book, ABC, An English Alphabet (1947). In this book, the letter Z is represented by a photo of a zebra that Henning had hired from a taxidermist opposite London Zoo. [Fig 1] In the foreword to his book Henning remarks: ‘You can imagine what a kick I got out of carrying the little (stuffed) zebra in a taxi to my studio all the way from Camden Town to Mayfair, and watching the faces of the passers-by when they saw the surprising passenger beckoning at them.’

Figure 1: ABC An English Alphabet, Paul Henning, 1947

These two episodes reveal deep-rooted anthropocentric views about human and non-human animals in relation to the spaces each is expected to occupy. In this worldview, humans are primarily responsible for deciding appropriate spaces in which to encounter animals and for defining their purpose within those spaces. Erika Cudworth, in her 2005 work Developing Ecofeminist Theory, describes the privileging of human needs and experiences that this view is based on as ‘anthroparchy’, defining it as a social system in which: “non-human nature is cast as a series of resources for human ends”.

ABC books are among the earliest examples of literature that children are introduced to and one of the first places they are shown what the wider world looks like, including the social, cultural and political structures such as anthroparchy that shape their experience of that world. Beyond their role in literary acquisition and the mechanics of learning the alphabet, ABC books, like any other works of literature, are informed by myriad political and ideological constructs, including the reinforcement of anthroparchal ideas about how animals are classified and the ways humans have historically made use of them. As Jennifer Ford notes in A, B and (not) Seeing: Animals and Other Ironies in Alphabet Books (2019): “All alphabet books are politically, ethically and culturally constructed. […] For instance, the phrase ‘c is for cow’ that includes an image of a cow on a farm has already presented the young reader with an ideology of farms, of ‘farmed animals’. The presentation of a farm as an unremarkable and natural place for a cow disguises the fact that such places are entirely artificially created spaces, designed and built solely for the purpose of human utilisation of animals as resources for consumption.

Henning’s taxi ride through London with the stuffed zebra may have caused surprise, but his choice of the animal to represent the letter Z is far from unusual. Indeed, as Aunt Lely’s Picture Alphabet from c.1855 declares: ‘Z is always for zebra; and what should we do, without this striped beauty to make the alphabet for you?’. Where Henning is slightly less typical is in the text that he places alongside the image, displaying a quote from missionary Dr Livingstone, which reads: ‘The presence of the zebra is always a certain indication of water being within a distance of seven or eight miles.(Livingstone)’ The use of Livingstone’s words firmly places the zebra not in Camden or Mayfair, but in Africa, and immediately evokes the colonial practices that Livingstone and his expeditions represent. Indeed, Henning was only able to hire a zebra for his ABC book as a result of the many connected anthroparchal practices of hunting, trophies and trade in the bodies of living and dead animals that accompanied Britain’s imperial expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

A powerful example of the overlapping of cages, colonialism and the commodification of animals for human use can be found in The Little One’s ABC (c.1930s) [Fig 2]. 

Figure 2: The Little One’s ABC, c.1930s

This entry is unusual in that it shows a zebra in the seemingly rather incongruous liminal space of a railway station. The zebra is in a crate upon which ‘Zoological Gardens, Regents Park’ can just be made out. As the vertical bars echo the stripes of the zebra, so the letter Z is echoed within the wooden beams of the crate. Lightly sketched in the background are a steam train and a man in a bowler-hat; each in their own ways potent symbols of Britain’s imperial legacy, as is the zoo to which the zebra is being taken. Randy Malamud in Reading Zoos (1998) observes, London Zoo can be seen as ‘an instrument of imperial hegemony’ and notes that: 

‘Animals in cages proved where Englishmen had been, what they had done while there, and what they brought back to enrich the capital. The gathering of animals from the corners of the earth in the heart of Regent’s Park signified the favor bestowed upon the British Empire and everything it stood for – its supremacy over any other place or people.’

Along with zebras, zoos are also commonly used in ABC books to illustrate the letter Z and are often symbolised by images of bars, fences and cages as in Toy-Town Picture ABC (1956)where cages and fences dominate the image as well as being explicitly referenced in the text: 

‘When Saturday comes, / Why you can spend ages / Just looking at all / The strange creatures in cages!’ [Fig 3].

Figure 3: Toy-Town Picture ABC, 1956

In the same way that a farm in an ABC book presents children with unquestioned ideologies of farming, so does the repeated representation of zoos as a natural habitat for animals. The text from this example reads: “There live the tigers / And camels with humps, /Zebras and parrots, / And bison with bumps” with nothing in the text to acknowledge that these animals are only living there as a result of human actions and for the purpose of entertainment and spectacle. A rare acknowledgement of animals’ lack of choice in being kept in zoos is found in ABC and All That by Gladys M Rees (c.1948) [Fig 4] which is the only entry I have found so far that indicates animals might be unhappy in a zoo, showing a yak and zebra yawning ‘Cos they didn’t like being shut up in the zoo.’ 

That they have been ‘Shut up in a zoo’ is a rare admission that animals have been placed in these sites deliberately with direct consequences for their freedom and happiness, while the juxtaposition of two animals whose natural habitats are thousands of miles apart also reveals zoos as entirely artificially constructed microcosms of the natural world. Michel Foucault (1967) described such spaces as ‘heterotopias’ or ‘other spaces’ and noted parallels between historical zoo and prison design. Indeed, it is more than bars that zoos and prisons share. As Pepper and Voigt (2021) point out, zoos perfectly fit Evering Goffman’s (1961) description of ‘total institutions’ wherein all aspects of daily life are controlled by the authority of that institution: 

‘Animals are confined in a closed system that they are unable to leave, and all aspects of their lives are heavily regulated and monitored by those in charge: social interaction, movement, diet, reproduction, activity, sleep, observation, and so on. Moreover, the zoo is separated from the rest of society by physical barriers designed to block escape attempts and keep non-fee-paying members of the public out.’

Prisons and zoos undeniably share certain functional similarities in relation to confinement and observation but notwithstanding undeniable changes in nature afforded by domestication, zoos are not intended as ‘correctional’ in the way that prisons are and as already shown, are often presented in ABC books and elsewhere as natural places for animals to live. First Steps Picture ABC(c.1954)takes a slightly different approach in opting to describe a zoo as ‘a place where animals of all kinds are kept’ and explains that most of the animals are “kept in cages, because they are wild.”The ‘keeping’ of animals and the adjective ‘wild’, particularly taken alongside the presence of so many fences, cages and enclosures are indications of power and control over the animal kingdom that occur throughout many examples of zoos and zoo animals in ABC books. ‘Wild’ is a word that has myriad related shades of meaning some of which relate to being untamed, in a natural state, some of which relate to fierceness and danger, and it’s a tension that can be found throughout lots of entries, particularly when coupled with the passivity of the animals in the many examples of feeding times at zoos that are found in ABC books. As Berger (1980) notes, this reliance upon humans has a transformative effect upon the animals and is an unavoidable consequence of their status as zoo animals: 

‘The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species, have become utterly dependent upon their keepers. Consequently, most of their responses have been changed. What was central to their interest has been replaced by a passive waiting for a series of outside interventions. […] At the same time this very isolation (usually) guarantees their longevity as specimens and facilitates their taxonomic arrangement.’ 

The ‘taxonomic arrangement’ is of course something that the format of ABC books is well suited to exploiting, but Berger’s observation about zoo animals’ dependence on keepers also runs throughout many examples in ABC books, including the following example from the 1910s where rather than zoo or zebra, Z is for Zoo-keeper. [Fig 5] 

Figure 5: ‘Hero ABC’ c.1910s

The description of the zookeeper as ‘knowing no fear’ again draws upon the recurrent tension of danger and wildness and shows how zoos control that danger through the various constructions of the zoo, including the creation of staff and the artificial enclosures/environments in which animals are housed and displayed.

There are of course important issues of ecology and preservation that must form part of any discussion about zoos, and it is worth reminding ourselves that the animals in ABC books are not living, breathing creatures, and nor are the zoos real physical spaces. However, it is important to remember that the link between ABC books and the world they depict is a crucial part of children’s developing literacy and the way they learn to conceptualise the world around them. As Karen Coates observes in her essay P is for Patriarchy: 

‘[W]hile an equine creature with black and white stripes is certainly a concrete object, it is an abstraction to call it a zebra, and a further abstraction to come up with the formula “z is for zebra.” When that abstraction shows up in a picture book for a child, it has the effect of making something present in the abstract that probably does not exist for the child in the reality of his schoolroom. And yet, the letter, the word, and the picture, taken together, forge a link so substantial that the letters become transparent, a mere index, an inert pointer to the world outside itself.’

The complex relationship between abstraction and reality that is enacted in ABC books can have important implications for the ways that children view their own position in the natural world. As Erika Cudworth said: ‘Anthroparchy shapes behaviour and justifies differences that are hierarchically conceived’ and it is not hard to find further examples of these hierarchies elsewhere in children’s literature. Rod Campbell’s Dear Zoo, (1982) for example is based upon the commodification of zoo animals according to perceived suitability as a domestic pet. The repeated refrain of ‘He was too… I sent him back’ may delight young readers but it does so by describing the natural traits of each animal purely in terms of transactional suitability and human wants. Like many social structures built upon unequal relationships of power, anthroparchy is often unnoticed and unremarkable, invisible until something startling like a runaway horse or a zebra in a taxi nudges it into focus. However, if we are to challenge such structures we should be alert to the places they are propagated, including in the most seemingly simple works of literature for children. Whether it is running through the streets, within the enclosures of a zoo or in the pages of a book, we should be mindful of how we envisage our relationship with non-human animals no matter where we encounter them.

Works Cited

Unknown Author (c.1855) Aunt Lely’s Picture Alphabet. New York: McLoughlin Bros.

Unknown Author (c.1954) First Steps Picture ABC. London: Juvenile Productions

Unknown Author (c.1930s) Little Ones ABC. London: John F Shaw & Co

Unknown Author (1956) Toy-Town Picture ABC. London: Juvenile Productions

Unknown Author (c.1910) ABC. Unknown Publisher

Berger, John (1980) ‘Why Look at Animals?” About Looking. New York: Pantheon Books

Campbell, Rod (1982) Dear Zoo. London: Abellard-Schuman Ltd

Coats, Karen. “P is for Patriarchy: Re-Imaging the Alphabet.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 25, no. 2 (2000): 88-97. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.1589.

Cudworth, Erika (2005) Developing Ecofeminist Theory: The Complexity of Difference. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan

Ford, Jennifer. “A, B and (Not) Seeing: Animals and Other Ironies in Alphabet Books.” Oxford Literary Review 41, no. 2 (2019): 219–37. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26845000.

Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/464648.

Henning, Paul(1947) ABC: An English Alphabet. London: Hachette

Malamud, Randy (1998) Reading Zoos. Hampshire: Macmillan Press

Pepper, Angie and Voigt, Kristin “Covid-19 and the Future of Zoos”. Les ateliers de l’éthique / The Ethics Forum 16, no. 1 (2021) : 68–87. https://doi.org/10.7202/1083646ar

Rees, Gladys (c.1948) ABC and all That. London: Robert Hale Ltd.

Mark Carter is a part-time PhD student at the University of Roehampton. His current research project examines the social and cultural significance of British ABC books of the 20th Century as carriers and reflectors of the material culture of childhood. He holds an MA in Children’s Literature from the University of Roehampton and a BA (Hons) in English Literature and Language from King’s College London.