Meanwhile, back in the ever-growing cities of the Victorian era, the working classes and the urban poor found themselves living in densely packed housing with little if any outdoor space, and no trees or greenery. But they found one way to reconnect with the birds of the countryside – not outside the home, but within it.
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Like us, the Victorians were obsessed with birds. Unlike us, they preferred to keep them in cages, rather than watch them in the wild. The cagebird craze became a big part of domestic life, and as well as what historian of science Helen Macdonald calls ‘the usual suspects’ – Canaries and Budgerigars – the Victorians also kept a very wide range of British species, including Wheatears and thrushes, as well as more typical cagebirds such as finches.
These birds were trapped in vast numbers – tens of thousands were caught at popular sites such as the South Downs in Sussex – and sold in London markets such as Club Row in London’s East End. They were caught using a variety of ingenious methods: smearing branches and twigs of trees with ‘bird-lime’ (a glutinous substance made from, amongst other things, holly bark), and by using large nets, which were laid out onto the ground and triggered by pulling a piece of string. Decoy birds were often tethered next to the nets, as a way of luring wild birds in. Spring and autumn were the main bird-catching seasons, as they coincided with the seasonal migrations of the birds.
The Victorian journalist and social reformer Henry Mayhew, who in 1851 wrote London Labour and the London Poor, made a special study of the bird-catchers. He reported that the majority of birds caught were Linnets, an attractive little finch with a sweet and melodious song. Up to 70,000 Linnets a year were being trapped, and sold for three or four pence each – though mature birds with particularly good songs could be sold for as much as half-a-crown (about £12 at today’s values). Goldfinches were also popular, and sold for between sixpence and one shilling a head – equivalent to a few pounds today. For the people involved in bird-catching, it must have been a profitable trade.
The Linnet’s widespread popularity as a cagebird was celebrated in the lyrics of the popular music-hall hit, ‘My Old Man’, written by Charles Collins and Fred Leigh:
My old man said ‘follow the van,
And don’t dilly dally on the way!’
Off went the van with my old man in it,
I walked behind with me old cock linnet…
A more literary example can be found in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House, in which one memorable scene, also shown in the BBC television adaptation in 2005, dramatises the Victorian passion for cagebirds. One character, old Miss Flite, is embroiled in a long-running court case, but takes comfort in her collection of birds in cages, which she vows to release once the case is finally settled.
Cagebirds weren’t kept for purely aesthetic reasons, but because they brought a reminder of the Victorian city-dwellers’ rural past into their homes, according to Jenny Uglow: ‘The song of the bird was like the music of the country; and you could close your eyes, and listen to the bird sing, and be transported back to the countryside that you came from. For people in the city, the wild bird becomes an emblem of the freedom they have lost.’
To our modern sensibilities, the notion that birds in cages could be symbols of freedom may seem bizarre. And indeed for some time there had been growing numbers of people objecting to the practice, including the poet and reformer William Blake. In ‘Auguries of Innocence’, written in the early nineteenth century but not published until 1863, he unequivocally condemns bird-keeping, in a celebrated couplet:
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
According to the historian Keith Thomas, author of Man and the Natural World, wild birds were often invoked as symbols of an Englishman’s freedom, while a growing movement objected to the cruelty involved – not simply imprisoning the birds, but also blinding them, a common practice supposed to improve the quality of their song. But the trade continued, and as Jenny Uglow points out, for many Victorians keeping birds in cages was not regarded as cruel in any way. She cites contemporary accounts of species such as Goldfinches being happy in their cage, and appearing to sing more frequently than they did in the wild.
Not surprisingly, the most popular cagebirds were those with the most attractive song, including the Nightingale, justly famed as the greatest and most varied of all our native songsters. But this insectivorous bird would have been very tricky to keep and look after as a cagebird, as Tim Birkhead, author of The Wisdom of Birds, explains: ‘The Nightingale was a very difficult bird to keep in captivity, requiring live food such as worms and insects, and as a result having very wet droppings, so you had to go to a lot of trouble to keep it – both to feed it and to keep it clean.’
Fed up with the problems of keeping such a fussy bird, the Victorians looked around for a more convenient alternative. They found it not in a wild British bird, but in an imported exotic species, the Canary which, as Tim Birkhead puts it, ‘knocked the Nightingale off its perch’.
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But whether exotic or British, caged birds served another purpose beyond their song and attractive appearance. Birds in cages were regarded by the Victorians as excellent examples of moral instruction, especially as a way of teaching children, as Tim Birkhead explains: ‘If you had a pair of Canaries in a cage, and they were breeding, you could see “mum and dad” feeding the chicks – they were, in a way, like a model human couple.’
Because the Victorians believed birds paired for life, unlike many other creatures, the Christian Church had singled them out for special attention. One clergyman was particularly influential in shaping attitudes to birds at this time. Tony Soper notes: ‘The Reverend Francis Orpen Morris was typical of the clergy of his day, in that he regarded all bird life as moral creatures from which we had to learn.’
F. O. Morris, as he is generally known, was one of the great Victorian popularisers of birds. In his long life – he lived more than eighty years – he published numerous books on many and varied subjects, including British birds. His most celebrated work, A History of British Birds, appeared from 1851 to 1857.
Like many Victorian works, both of fiction and non-fiction, A History of British Birds was published in regular ‘partworks’ costing a shilling each, which made it accessible to a very wide audience. Eventually bound into six hefty volumes, it was subsequently reprinted at regular intervals, and even today hand-coloured plates from this work can be found in antique shops all over the country.
Popular, the Reverend Morris’s work may certainly have been; accurate and informative it was not. This damning verdict, written in 1917 by ornithological bibliographers Mullens and Swann, is fairly typical:
Of this it may be said that, although one of the most voluminous and popular works on the subject, and financially most successful (thousands of pounds having been made out of successive editions), yet it has never occupied any very important position among the histories of British birds. Morris was too voluminous to be accurate, and too didactic to be scientific. He accepted records and statements without discrimination, and consequently his work abounds with errors and mistakes.
Their verdict isn’t entirely negative, and acknowledges that popularity has its virtues: ‘Yet as a book for amateur ornithologists it has charmed and delighted for more than half a century, and it had for many years the great merit of being almost the only work at a moderate price to give a fairly accurate and coloured figure of every species.’
But like so many Victorian clergymen who used nature as a way of teaching morals to their flock, Morris’s lack of a basic understanding of biology let him down – in his case, very badly indeed. For amongst his favourite birds – and one he frequently invoked as an example to his parishioners and readers – was the Hedge Sparrow, now known as the Dunnock.
Despite