A Gory Event

The year 2023 was a so-so collecting year, with fewer and fewer pieces of early Staffordshire coming on the market. But it went out with a bang for me, thanks to this unrecorded felid that strolled into Bonhams, London, looking for a new victim, and I was happy to become its  prey.

The figure depicts the death of "a young boy of about 11 years of age," as told in newspaper reports of 1834 relating the escape of a lion and tiger from Wombwell's menagerie. I unearthed the gory story, which is covered in all my books, after purchasing the figure below almost twenty years ago.

 As you see, this time the tiger mauls a mother and child, presumably the "mother with a child in her arms" described in the press. Importantly, the seemingly odd title, MENAGERIE, pointed my search in the right direction. Today, the internet would make that search relatively easy, but back then I had to travel to the British Library Newspaper Archive in Colingdale  and painstakingly scan through microfilm of newspapers of the period. Pinpointing the story that inspired figure groups on this theme made it worthwhile, and I admit to arrogance in thinking I own this story. Learning later that it had been fake news has not diminished my pleasure one iota. 
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​Sherratt made these two figure groups  in around 1834, and he made a few others on the same theme. I guess these models had a short life because the public soon learned that the event had not happened. The few that survive today are all somewhat different, and I have tracked them through the years. Again, they are all illustrated in my various works. Significantly, they are among the very few figures that can be dated with accuracy.