… Brooke, ‘The anti-royal menagerie’, Wikimedia Commons, 1812. Image George Stubbs, ‘Lion and Lioness’, Museum of Fine Arts, M. Theresa B Hopkins Fund, 49.6, 1771. Abstract During the long eighteenth century, a huge wave of exotic mania led … public and private menageries, museums, salons, tea-rooms, theatres, opera houses and so forth. Across Europe and in particular in such a polished and commercial nation as England, the purchase of exotic items appears to be a form of … Ferguson as ‘a manner of life which we think necessary to civilization, and even to happiness. It is [...] the parent of arts, the support of commerce, and the minister of national greatness, and of opulence’. 2 The exotic, which first …