Genre:

Introduction, Drollery; Letter, Spoof

Subjects:

Exploration, Menageries

    The article appears under the quotation attributed to 'Captain Ross': 'I named this place Boothia' (65). In the introduction, Hood reports that a friend had recommended that he should make a fancy fair the subject of a comic sketch, suggesting: 'fancy Jolterhead at the fair of the Surrey Zoological, forcing his clumsy destructive course through groups of female fashionables [...] with the equally laughable intention of inspecting long horns and short horns' (66). Hood reports that he presented his friend instead with a purportedly 'bonâ fide letter' from Jacob Giles of Hampshire. The letter (which is reproduced) complains of a London fancy fair that it had 'no wumwills menageris' (68).