Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Clara's Grand Tour Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-century Europe by Glynis Ridley Glynis Ridley author biography, plus links to books by Glynis Ridley. Glynis Ridley is the author of Clara's Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe , which won the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) Prize. A British citizen, she is now a professor of English at the University of Louisville. This biography was last updated on 12/28/2010. We try to keep BookBrowse's biographies both up to date and accurate, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's a tough task. So, please help us - if the information about this author is out of date or inaccurate, and you know of a more complete source, please let us know. Authors and publishers: If you wish to make changes to a bio, send the complete biography as you would like it displayed so that we can replace the old with the new. Clara's progress. When the 18th-century bookseller Tom Davies told James Boswell that Samuel Johnson "laughs like a rhinoceros", it seems that his simile was precise as well as ludicrous. For a few years earlier he, like all other curious Londoners, had had the opportunity to view one of the most famous animals of enlightenment Europe. In 1758, advertisements had announced: "To be seen, at The Horse and Groom in Lambeth-Market, the surprising, great and noble animal called Rinoceros alive." This was Clara, an Indian rhino whose travels around Europe are recorded in Glynis Ridley's entertaining book. After her mother was shot when she was a few months old, the rhinoceros had been reared in Assam in the household of a director of the Dutch East India Company. A rhino calf is apparently quick to accept human society, and Clara was allowed to come indoors, meet dinner guests and eat from the table. (The intimacy of some later drawings of her as an adult, evidently painstaking and closely observed, suggests that she remained relaxed about the presence of humans, even strangers.) She was purchased by the Dutch sea captain Douwemout van der Meer, who wished to bring her to Europe, believing she would make him money. Much of the book tries to imagine the means by which the huge, and growing, beast was transported on her many peregrinations. During the long voyage from India, the amiable young rhino was evidently kept in a cage on deck. She was fed with beer and tobacco by the sailors, her hide rubbed daily with fish oil, in lieu of the mud in which she would normally roll to keep herself from dehydrating. Van der Meer took her home to Leiden, where she was stabled on the city's outskirts. Soon he was constructing an extraordinary reinforced wagon with huge iron-rimmed wheels in which to tow her around Europe. It had to keep her hidden, for at each stop spectators would be asked to pay to view the mythical behemoth. Astutely, Van der Meer recruited the crown princes of Europe as patrons of the display. First, he headed to Vienna, hoping to impress the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa. Among the stopping places was Berlin, where the wonderful beast was inspected by Frederick the Great and his courtiers. In Vienna the royal family gave the rhino their blessing and the emperor made Van der Meer a baron. Sometimes Clara had to be walked over difficult terrain, tempted onwards by the oranges she loved. To get from Germany into Switzerland Clara was floated on a barge, pulled by horses, up the Rhine. Eventually she arrived in Versailles, where Louis XV had a large menagerie, established by Louis XIV to represent the exotic lands over which France held sway. "All Paris, so easily inebriated by small objects, is now busy with a kind of animal called rhinoceros," wrote Grimm to Diderot, one philosophe to another. Intellectuals were rapt; fashionable ladies took to wearing headgear imitative of the strange beast's horn. Struck by the rhinomania, Van der Meer tried to sell Clara to the French king, but set his price too high. Soon he was off to Italy, where his charge disconcertingly shed her horn but still managed to be the star of the Venice carnival. Clara eventually died in London, where her corpse was seized by the anatomists. Her bones are lost, though they probably reside in some museum. Just as he had hoped, Van der Meer made a small fortune from his travels with his rhinoceros. He also made money by selling rhino illustrations to those who had just had a viewing: woodcuts (to the plebs) and engravings (to the bourgeois). Everywhere there were mementoes of her unique presence. Medals were struck and portraits painted. Sculptures were made in marble and in bronze. In France, craftsmen made pendules au rhinoceros: model rhinos on elaborate ormolu bases supporting clocks. In Dresden the master animal modeller Johann Kändler made sketches for what would become exotic works of Meissen ware. Clara's owner had to be paid, of course, for each sitting. Frustratingly, while the book does have illustrations, many of the most intriguing artifacts are not shown. Ridley tries to make her story into "a portrait of an era", but it does not really bear this weight. Instead it is an assortment of pleasant digressions. The rhino and her carer arrive in Austria and you get a potted history of the Habsburg dynasty. They visit Dresden and Ridley gives you several pages on the elaborate manufacture of Meissen porcelain in the 18th century. The fragments of 18th-century culture are as miscellaneous and often amusing as all the odd "Clara memorabilia" that the book records. · John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London. Clara's Grand Tour : Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-century Europe. In an age before railways and modern roads, the three-ton Clara, as she became known, had to travel in an enormous coach drawn by eight horses. For seventeen years she journeyed across mainland Europe and to Britain: she became a favourite of heads of state, including Frederick the Great and Louis XV; she modelled for scientific portraits and etchings; and she inspired poems, songs, fashions and trinkets. Glynis Ridley has brought Clara's tragicomic story vividly to life. Her book is also a portrait of an era that saw the rhinoceros as an object of marvel and a challenge to fundamental philosophical and theological beliefs. Результаты поиска по книге. Отзывы - Написать отзыв. LibraryThing Review. Thoroughly unreadable. It's like an awkward, dry dissertation. Though unlike a dissertation, the author employs the laziness of middle schoolers everywhere trying to pad a word count - say the same . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. A perfectly fine, just not particularly interesting or impressive account of a rhinoceros in Europe. Given what she had to work with Ridley did an admirable job with this book, but it's little more than a popular account of Clara's journey. Читать весь отзыв. Clara's Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe. For nearly 20 years in the mid-1700s, a 3-ton Indian rhino named Clara traveled Europe--from Rotterdam to Breslau, Naples, Marseilles, and many places in between. Making this an even more amazing achievement is that it happened before railways and modern roads existed. Clara, orphaned when she was only months old, was hand raised by a Dutch merchant in Assam, India. When she was 3 years old, a Dutch sea captain brought her to Europe. There, she became a sensation. In one of the first marketing campaigns of all time, her owner promoted Clara's appearances to peasants and royalty alike. Both came to see her. There were Clara product tie-ins galore: poems, songs, fashions, portraits, etchings, and bronze figurines. Her image adorned everything from tin coins to fine porcelain, and a fortune for the Dutch captain. Ridley, a first- time author, is a professor of 18th-century studies, and as such discusses not just Clara's travels but also diverse subjects including early publishing and the long-term effects of Hannibal's invasion of Italy. This book should please anyone interested in the history of the 18th century or of marketing. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005, 224 p., b&w illus., hardcover, $21.00. ISBN 13: 9780871138835. Clara's Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Ridley, Glynis. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. The author chronicles the adventures of Clara, a three-ton rhinoceros who became the toast of Europe, seen by royalty and ordinary folk alike on a spectacular series of tours across the continent during the mid-eighteenth century. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Glynis Ridley was a lecturer in eighteenth- century studies at Queen's University, Belfast. She now lives in Kentucky. From Publishers Weekly : The titular rhino was raised from a calf by a Dutch sea captain who exhibited her in the 1740s and '50s to enthusiastic crowds of European commoners and royalty. In this pleasant if somewhat aimless study, Ridley treats Clara as an early harbinger of the society of the spectacle. Poets celebrated her, sculptors and painters immortalized her, and she was the star of "one of the first recognizable media campaigns," as her owner drummed up excitement with enticing ads and raked in a fortune at the box office and from the sale of posters, medallions and other Clara memorabilia. Ridley's narrative ambles agreeably along, veering from the details of Clara's diet and travel arrangements to accounts of her impact on contemporary observers, and feels padded out with digressions on such topics as Renaissance anatomy texts, porcelain production in Saxony and Hannibal's invasion of Italy. Ridley's claim that Clara stood "at the center of philosophical and theological disputes"—one philosophe allegedly cited her as proof of the existence of God—is overhyped; the animal's main influence appears to have been the correction of misconceptions about rhino anatomy. But Ridley's first book is a gracefully written look at a diverting sideshow in European cultural history. Eight pages b&w illus. not seen by PW . Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.