3-052-781 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Odd sketches at the Zoological Society's Gardens: the monkeys, 1880. 'Our Sketches are designed, in the spirit of grotesque or comic art, to represent a few of the queerest and most obvious instances of a fanciful resemblance, in some features of corporal configuration, of aspect or gesture, between well-known inhabitants of the dens and cages and the accidental bystanders or spectators...If we proceed to enter the Monkey House, though only the lemurs deserve to be called handsome or pretty, there are many droll mimicries or parodies of the low and vulgar parts of mankind and its unchastened behaviour. It would often be possible for the tutor of rude and ignorant youth to point the moral of a lesson in deportment and manners by the conduct of apes, whom none of us would wish to copy, though we are diverted with their funny imitation of ourselves'. From "Illustrated London News", 1880.