Colby Quarterly

Volume 18 Article 3
Issue 2 June

June 1982

The Freaks of Learning

G. E. Bentley, Jr.

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Recommended Citation
Colby Library Quarterly, Volume 18, no.2, June 1982, p.87-104

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 Bentley, Jr.: The Freaks of Learning

The Freaks of Learning

For thee we dim the eyes and stu!! the head

With all such reading as was never read
Dunciad, I, 165-66
87

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88 COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY

As THE Eighteenth Century was trying to draw quietly to a close, with

.r\. Farmer George brushing the dew from his lawns and William
Cowper sitting by the fire with the cup that cheers but not inebriates,
there was an extraordinary outbreak of pigs in the social and intellectual
life of England. These were not merely pigs of good breeding and im-
peccable taste; they were creatures of decorous deportment and aston-
ishing learning as well. They appeared in drawing rooms and on stage,
and their accomplishments filled the lacunae of magazines and letters
and literary causeries. They profoundly impressed some of the greatest
geniuses of the age and left a name at which the world grew pale, to
point a moral or adorn a tale. Not only did they appear in poems, but
poems were written for them; indeed, the Learned Pig was seen as the
rival of one of the greatest poets of the age.
"Why pigs?" I hear you cry. Well, pigs are stubborn and contrary,
dirty and disorderly, only congenial to man when cut down to size and
served at table. The perversity of pigs is legendary, from the Gadarene
Swine to Animal Farm, and they provide synonyms for gluttony, stu-
pidity, and contrariness-general pigheadedness. Doubtless it was chief-
ly the incongruity of these wilful, ignorant beasts when exhibited as
docile and intelligent performers which excited remark and speculation.
The fact of the paradox was plain to all: the Learned Pig could perform
feats not merely remarkable in any animal, such as spelling words and
telling time; he could do things which could not be repeated by his hu-
man audience, such as card-tricks and mind-reading. What the Learned
Pig did was wonderful to those who saw him; how they reacted and ex-
plained it is what seems wonderful to us. The comments on the Learned
Pig by the men of genius of the age are indicative of the nature of their
own genius. The genus of Learned Pig was indeed wonderful, but yet
more wonderful was the genius of the scholars and sages and Romantic
poets who wrote about him.
These prodigious pigs were remarked by authors as diverse as Dr
Johnson and Mary Wollstonecraft and appeared in works as serious as
The Prelude and The Statesman's Manual. They served as subjects for
cartoons by Rowlandson and moral essays in children's books and sav-
age doggerel by Blake, and they illustrated the manners of the English in
works by Joseph Strutt and Robert Southey and Thomas Hood. These
freaks of learning clearly exercised a fascination among the literary
geniuses of the age as they did among the swinish nlultitude.
These are not merely portly pigs, such as the titan twelve feet long and
weighing one thousand six hundred eighty pounds exhibited at a fair in

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G. E. BENTLEY, JR. 89
1
1748. The literature of the ordinary pig is mostly jocular and focuses
largely upon their culinary qualities, as in the epic "Dissertation upon
Roast Pig" (1823) by Charles Lamb, whose letters are littered with ref-
erences to succulent pigs he has known. The mighty Empress of Blan-
dings reigns under the benign eyes of Lord Emsworth and P. G. Wode-
house; pigs rule the world of Animal Farm; and a Semichorus of Swine
enlivens Shelley's Oedipus Tyrannus (1820). The best-known painter of
pigs in the Romantic era was the bucolic inebriate George Morland,
and, had it not been for the generous patronage of John Linnell, Wil-
liam "Blake's last years would have been employed . . . [in engraving]
a set of Morland's pig and ploughboy subjects."2 Hazlitt compares Sir
Walter Scott's fictional talent to that of an actor with a pig: "Sir Walter
has found out (oh, rare discovery) that facts are better than fiction; that
there is no romance like the romance of real life. . . . With reverence
be it spoken, he is like the man who having to imitate the squeaking of a
pig upon the stage, brought the animal under his coat with him."3
I have no evidence that Lord Byron was acquainted with Sapient Swine,
but he did have one memorable encounter with an Italian pig. As he re-
counts in a letter of 22 April 1817, his mastiff Mutz
was promoted into a Bear in the natural History of the Bolognese . . . a character which
he has by no means sustained in point of valour-he having been defeated with loss of
honour-hair-and almost the small remains of tail which the Docker had left him-by a
moderate-sized Pig on the top of the Pennine Alps-the Pig was first thrown into con-
fusion & compelled to retire with great disorder over a steep stone wall but somehow he
faced about in a damned hollow way or defile & drove Mutz from all his positions-with
such slaughter that nothing but night prevented a total defeat. 4

However, these are mere pigs, quite unrelated to the learned wonders
who amazed audiences just before and after 1800.

1. See R. D. Altick, The Shows of London (1978), p. 39. The title design derives from the dedication
to Charles Darwin (1860) in Robert R. Brough & Charles H. Bennett, Character Sketches, Development
Drawings and Original Pictures of Wit and Humour [1872].
My learned friend Dr. J. R. de J. Jackson pointed out to me the remarkable redundancy of references
to sophisticated swine during the Romantic period, and other unique assistance has joyfully been given
me in the great boar hunt by Richard Altick, John Baird, Beth and Sarah Bentley, Bob Essick, Heather
Jackson, Jim King, Hugh MacCallum, Margaret Maloney, and Don Smith.
These Freaks were first presented orally to The Friends of the Osborne and Lillian H. Smith Collec-
tions, Boys and Girls House, Toronto Public Library, and subsequently circulated to the Friends, repro-
duced from an illustrated typescript.
2. Blake Records (1969), p. 274. [Thomas Richards], [Greek for] Choiroccrographia: Sive Hog-
landiae Descriptio (1710) is merely a satire on Hampshire and on Edward Holdsworth's Muscipula
(1709).
One wonders whether the Empress of Blandings is descended from Beatrix Potter's Tale of Pigling
Bland (1913).
3. William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (1825), p. 40.
4. ISO late into the night': Byron's Letters and Journals, ed. L. A. Marchand, V: 1816-1817 (1976),
217.
Keen scented pigs galloped after game in the royal forests when Mediaeval and Renaissance penal laws
made the use of dogs by poachers exceedingly rash, and a handsome black Berkshire sow named Slut
joyfully renewed the tradition in the New Forest in the early nineteenth Century-her master, a profes-
sional bird-dog trainer, said she was considerably better at her trade of pointing and retrieving than any
dOg (Rural Sports, Vol. III, cited in J. Bryan III, "Slut, the Gun Pig: In Merry Old England, a Berk-
shire sow learned to hunt," Blair & Ketchum's Country Journal, VIII, 11 [Nov. 1981],35-36).

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GENUS PORCUS SOPHISTICUS

ET GENIUS ROMANTICORUM
,
"j

Sapient Swine performed before multitudes during at least

two periods when Romanticism flourished, one beginning in
1784 and one in 1818-l823. s The only earlier account I have
encountered is from the Fifteenth Century, when the Abbot
of Baigne provided for Louis XI "a concert of swine voices"
in a velvet pavilion, "a thing as singular as ever was seen."
His choir consisted of "a great number of hogs, of several
ages," which he conducted with "an organical instrument,
and as he played upon the said keys, with little spikes which
pricked the hogs he made them cry in such order and conso-
nance, as highly delighted the king and all his company."6
But this is scarcely swinish learning on a scale comparable with that seen
by the Swan of Lichfield and the Great Bear.

5. Altick, p. 307: The Sapient Pig of 1818-1823 was owned by Mr Pinchbeck (see below) and tutored,
according to his publicity, by "Souchanguyee, the Chinese Philosopher." He answered questions by
"pointing to cards, letters, and persons in the audience."
6. Nathaniel Wanley, The Wonders of the Little World, ed. Wm Johnston (1806), I, 384 (first edi-
tion: 1678).
Robert Herrick is said to have taught a pig to drink from a tankard, and when Grimod de la Reyniere
had no other guests he would entertain a pig, who sat at table with him.

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G. E. BENTLEY, JR. 91

During the summer of 1784, the first truly educated hog of whom I
have record toured the provinces, astonishing farmers at country fairs.
Among those astonished was Miss Seward, who told Dr Johnson in 1784
of a wonderful learned pig, which I had seen at Nottingham; and which did all that we
have observed exhibited by dogs and horses. The subject amused him. 'They (said he), the
pigs are a race unjustly calumniated. Pig has, it seems, not been wanting to man, but man
to pig. We do not allow time for his education, we kill him at a year old.' Mr. Henry
White, who was present, observed that if this instance had happened in or before Pope's
time, he would not have been justified in instancing the swine as the lowest degree of
groveling instinct. Doctor Johnson seemed pleased with the observation, while the person
who made it proceeded to remark, that great torture must have been employed ere the
indocility of the animal could have been subdued.-'Certainly (said the Doctor), but
(turning to me [Miss Seward]) how old is your pig?' I told him three years old. 'Then (said
he) the pig has no cause to complain; he would have been killed the first year if he had not
been educated, and protracted existence is a good recompense for a very considerable
degree of torture."

It was natural to Dr Johnson and his friends to suppose that the pig had
been tortured, but evidently this was not the case. Robert Southey re-
marked that
Any thing that is strange . . . will attract crowds in England. . . . The learned pig was
in his day a far greater object of admiration to the English nation than ever was Sir Isaac
Newton. I met a person once who had lived next door to the lodgings of this erudite swine
in a house so situated that he could see him at his rehearsals. He told me he never saw the
keeper beat him; but that, if he did not perform his lesson well, he used to threaten to take
off his red waistcoat,-for the pig was proud of his dress. Perhaps even Solomon himself
did not conceive that vanity was so universal a passion. 8

As Blake remarked in a different context: "Solomon says 'Vanity of

Vanities all is Vanity' & what can be Foolisher than this [?]" 9
The common reaction to the Learned Pig's performance was of
course one of enthusiastic credulity in his abilities, which were common-
ly taken to be supernatural. One "grave old gentleman. . . declared his
performances were the effects of the Black Art; that the Pig ought to be
burnt, and the Man banished, as he had no doubt but . . . [his trainer]
familiarly corresponded with the deviL" Some, "like the ancient Pythag-
oreans, believing in the transmigration of souls, conclude that the spirit

7. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), II, 552.

John Horne Tooke mockingly quotes [James Burnett] Lord Monboddo, OJ the Origin and Progress
of Language, I [1773], 136, about the capacity of animals to speak: " 'There is a man in England at
present, who has practised more upon them and with greater success than any body living:' -(I suspect
his lordship means the owner of the learned Pig)-'and he says, as I am informed, . . . That, if they
lived long enough and pains sufficient were taken upon them'-(Well, what then?)-'it is impossible to
say to what lengths some of them might be carried' " (The Diversions of Purley, I [1798], 115 fn. [first
edition: 1786]). Tooke is probably wrong in his conjecture that Lord Monboddo meant the Learned
Pig, for the Pig had probably not yet appeared in public in 1773.
8. Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella [i.e., Robert Southey], Lettersfrom England [said to be] Translated
from the Spanish, Third Edition (1814), III, 19-20 (first edition: 1808). Southey's "The Pig" (1799) is
merely a poetic defence of the common pig, the edible, not the learned kind. Southey once made a list
of subjects for "Little Poems," including "Pig a philosopher, and without prejudice. . . learned pig"
(Southey's Common-Place Book, Fourth Series, ed. John Wood Warter [1851], p. 197).
9. The Writings of William Blake (1978), I, 662, inscription on his engraving of "Mirth." This text is
the source of all Blake quotations here.

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of the grunting philosopher might once have animated a man." The

mundane, human agency by which the Pig achieved these feats is de-
scribed by W. F. Pinchbeck, who says that he himself exhibited a Pig of
Knowledge about 1804; he gives detailed directions for training which
begin at the beginning: "Take a Pig, seven or eight weeks old. . . .' ,
He warns: "You are not to beat him into the knowledge of your design,
but coax him to it, if possible." The pig is taught at first to pick up the
correct card to spell a word when he comes to it by the trainer "snuf-
fing" or "breathing from your nose," but eventually
the secret communication . . . is unnecessary. You may relinquish it by degrees; for the
animal is so sagacious, that he will appear to read your thoughts. The position you stand
in, not meaning any stipulated place, or certain gesture, but what will naturally arise from
your anxiety, will determine the card to your pupil. I will only add, that I have been as
much amazed at the performances of this animal, as the spectators before whom I exhib-
ited him. to

The pig's performances were so successful in the provinces that, not

long after Dr Johnson's death in December 1784, he was brought to
London, where he was introduced with a flourish of publicity. An
advertisement in the Daily Universal Reporter said that at Sadler's Wells
"will be introduced the amazing LEARNED PIG":
This entertaining and sagacious animal casts accounts by means of Typographical cards,
in the same manner as a Printer composes, and by the same method sets down any capital
or Surname, reckons the number of People present, tells by evoking on a Gentleman's
Watch in company what is the Hour and Minutes; he likewise tells any Lady's Thoughts
in company, and distinguishes all sorts of colours. . . . 11

His appearance provoked a representational cartoon by Thomas

Rowlandson of "The Wonderful Pig" on 12 April 1785 (see fig. 1), in
the background of which is another ad: "The Surprising PIG, well
versed in all Languages, perfect Arethmatician Mathemtician & Com-
poser of Musick."
The Learned Pig also appeared in a caricature by Samuel Collings
about 1785 entitled "The Downfall of Taste & Genius" (see fig. 2).12 It
shows the muses of poetry and painting being overwhelmed by a stam-
10. William Frederick Pinchbeck, The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled . . . comprising
The Learned Pig,-Invisible Lady . . . (Boston, 1805), pp. 10, 9, 13, 23, 19, 26. The frontispiece shows
"The PIG of KNOWLEDGE!!" spelling "BOSTON."
11. The Symbolic Pig: An Anthology of Pigs in literature and art, ed. F. C. Sillar & R. M. Meyler
(1961), p. 61, giving the date merely as "1785." Altick, p. 40, quotes an ad from a scrapbook in the
British Library: "he reads, writes, and casts accounts by means of typographical cards, in the same
manner that a printer composes and by the same method . . . sets down any capital or surname; solves
questions in the four rules of Arithmetic," tells time, &c., ad baccalaureatem. William Hedgepath, the
Hog Book (1978), in Chapter v on "Swine in Art, Sport and Show Biz" (pp. 183-220), says "the
'Learned Pig' [was] first exhibited in 1784" in London, but Altick more plausibly gives Spring 1785.
In 1785, the wife of Benjamin West recorded in her household expenditure book 15. "To see the
Learned Pig" (R. C. Alberts, Benjamin West [1978], p. 170).
12. In Dorothy M. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department
of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Vol. VI: 1784-1792 (1938). No. 6715 is "The Downfall
of Taste & Genius, or The World as it Goes" (c. 1785) by S[amuel] C[ollings]; and No. 7214 is a print
[by Gillray] of 30 June 1787 which includes a [learned] Pig ridden by a monkey whose name, Jacko, is
on the saddle. William Blake might have been interested by both prints, because he engraved Collings's

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G. E. BENTLEY, JR. 95

pede of carnival performers, led by the Learned Pig, directed by a

monkey called Jacko, and drummed on by a martial hare. Most of these
animals were perennial favourites; only the Learned Pig was a novelty at
this time.
It also provoked a somewhat wanton poem in The Public Advertiser
of6Aprill785:
On the Learned Pig
Though Johnson, learned Bear, is gone,
Let us no longer mourn our loss,
For 10, a learned Hog is come,
And wisdom grunts at Charing Cross.
Happy for Johnson-that he died
Before this wonder came to town,
Else it had blasted all his pride
Another brute should gain renoun . 13

On 19 December 1785 Parson Woodforde rode to Norwich, where

After Dinner the Captain and myself, went and saw the learned Pigg at the rampant
Horse in St. Stephens-there was but a small Company there but soon got larger- We
stayed there about an Hour- It was wonderful to see the sagacity of the Animal- It was
a Boar Pigg, very thin, quite black with a magic Collar on his Neck. He would spell any
word or Number from the Letters and Figures that were placed before him[;] paid for
seeing the Pigg 0.1.0. 14

There was, of course, something of a clamour in the press. A corre-

spondent of The Gentleman's Magazine, LVII (June 1785), 413,
remarked that Maty's [New] Review, VII (April 1785), 289-90, has "got
the start of you in his animadversions upon that phenomenon of learn-
ing, that formidable rival to other productions of genius, the most won-
derful Cheshire Pig." The New Review note was by the great though
then fledgling Greek scholar Richard Porson:
THE LEARNED PIG.
THIS gentleman professing himself to be extremely learned, will have no objection to find
his merits set forth in a Greek quotation:

*
which, no manner of doubt, he will immediately translate for the amusement of the dilet-
tanti who visit him.

"The Sow's Revenge" for The Wit's Magazine, Vol. I (Feb 1784), and because Jacko appears in his
Island in the Moon (? 1784). The assault of the Learned Pig upon Painting here anticipates his own alle-
gation by twenty-some years.
An undated poster for James L. Hazard's exhibition of the "WONDER and ADMIRATION of the
WORLD! THE LEARNED . . . PIG" is reproduced in Martin Gardner, "Mathematical Games: How
to be psychic, even if you are a horse or some other animal," Scientific American, CCXL, 5 (May
1979), 18.
13. Altick, p. 43.
14. The Diary of a Country Parson: The Reverend James Woodeforde, ed. John Beresford II (1926),
220.

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This, though not very elegant, and probably made from the [?dog] Latin, as it does
honour to the ingenuous beast, and shews that he is above any sentiment of envy on this
occasion, I shall insert.
A gentle pig, this same, a pig of parts,
And learn'd as F.R.S. or graduate in arts;
His ancestors, 'tis true, could only squeak,
But this has been at school-and in a month will speak. 15
*As it is possible that the pig's Greek may want rubbing up, owing to his having kept so
much company with ladies, the chien sfavant has kindly communicated a translation.

It may have been some such reference as this which led William
Unwin to compare William Cowper, or at least his poetical eclat, with
that of the Learned Pig. In a letter to John Newton of 22 April 1785,
Cowper wrote: "You tell me that I am rivalled by Mrs. Bellamy 16 and he
[Unwin] that I have a competitor for fame not less formidable in the
learned Pig. Alas! what is an author's popularity worth, in a world that
can suffer a prostitute on one side, and a pig on the other to ecclipse his
brightest glories?" 17 Two years later,
When [Robert] Burns was in Edinburgh, 1787, attending the first edition of his poems
there he was asked to be of a party; he thought it was for the purpose of exhibiting [him],
answered that he would, on condition that they had also the learned pig present[.] The
performance of this animal was then exhibited [in a Grassmarket booth] in Edinburgh for
money. 18

Burns seems to have thought of the Learned Pig as a rival to poetry,

much as Cowper did.
Mary Wollstonecraft may have seen either the pig himself or the ac-
count of him in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), for, in her
persistent diatribe against Rousseau in her Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792), she writes indignantly:
His ridiculous stories, which tend to prove that girls are naturally attentive to their per-
sons, without laying any stress on daily example, are below contempt.-And that a little
miss should have such a correct taste as to neglect the pleasing amusement of making O's
[as in EMILI US, quoted here], merely because she perceived that it was [made while she
was in] an ungraceful attitude, should be selected with the anecdotes of the learned pig. 19

I quote the passage for its illumination of performing pigs, not for its
logic.

15. Tracts and Miscellaneous Criticisms of the Late Richard Porson, Esq., ed. Thomas Kidd (1815),
pp. 54-55.
16. The famous, dissolute, and then decayed actress (? 1727-88), brought to public attention once
more by her Apology for the Life of George [sic] Anne Bellamy (1785).
17. Quoted for me from the incomplete MS in Princeton by my friend Professor James King.
18. Robert Burns: His Associates and Contemporaries, ed. Robert T. Fitzhugh (1943), p. 32, quoting
James Grierson's MS note of August 1817; the Grassmarket booth is added, without evidence, in
Robert T. Fitzhugh, Robert Burns: The Man and the Poet (1970), p. 128.
19. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), p. 86. A footnote in
Chapter viii cites Boswell's life of Johnson. When Louise Holroyd was introduced to many sophis-
ticated strangers at Bath, she said, "I felt like a Learned Pig" (The Girlhood of Maria Holroyd, ed. J.
H. Adriene [1896], p. 77, quoted in E. S. Sunstein, A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
[1975], pp. 52, 362).

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G. E. BENTLEY, JR. 97
It may have been about this time that Bowles & Carver published their
anonymous print of "The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge" showing a pig
performing in a parlour evidently engaged in spelling "PORC[INE]"
(see fig. 3). 20
The pig appeared once more in [William Darton's] A Present for a
Little Boy (1798), in a chapter called "Anecdotes of Tame and Wild
Swine":
as all men are not of the same agreeable disposition, so neither are pigs equally tractable;
for some pigs have evinced so teachable a disposition, that children might take a useful
lesson from their conduct; . . . several of them have been taught to read, and, in appear-
ance, to spell better than some little boys could, who were several years older.
One pig was shewn in London, that was taught to spell the name of any person or place;
several alphabets, in single letters, being placed before him, he pointed out the letters with
his snout, and placed them in order, to make out the words required. This pig, in being
taught, must have suffered great pain, if not some cruelties; for little boys have obstinate
tempers, some have been beaten, others have had their hair pulled, or ears pinched, to
make them mind their spelling: how difficult then must it be to teach a pig to converse
with men.- We rather suspect some harsh methods must have been used by the teacher of
the learned pig, and on that account it appears improper to encourage such shows. 21

And to enforce the point, a useful woodcut shows a pig choosing out
cards with letters on them, directed by a man with a wand and watched
by two couples with a little boy apiece (see fig. 4).
Learned Pigs were active in children's books, such as Sarah
Trimmer's very popular Fabulous Histories Designedfor the Instruction
of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals (1786). In Chapter
IX, later called The Learned Pig, little Harriet is told by her Mama:
The creature was shewn for a sight in a room provided for the purpose, where a number
of people assembled to view his performances. Two alphabets of large letters on card
paper were placed on the floor; one of the company was then desired to propose a word
which he wished the Pig to spell. This his keeper repeated to him, and the Pig picked out
every letter successively with his snout, and collected them together till the word was com-
pleated. He was then desired to tell the hour of the day, and one of the company held a
watch to him, which he seemed with his little cunning eyes to examine very attentively;
and having done so, picked out figures for the hours and minutes of the day. . . .
And do you think, mama, said Harriet, that the Pig knows the letters, and can really
spell words? I think it possible, my dear, for the Pig to be taught to know the letters one
from the other, and that his keeper has some private sign, by which he directs him to each
that are wanted ;-but that he has an idea of spelling, I can never believe. . . . I would
advise you, Harriet, never to give countenance to those people who shew what are called
learned animals; as you may assure yourself they exercise great barbarities upon
them . . . . 22

20. Reproduced in Catchpenny Prints: 163 Popular Engravings from the Eighteenth Century origi-
nally published by Bowles and Carver (N. Y., 1970), no. 105; originally published about 1787-95.
21. [William Darton] A Present for Little Boys [1798], reprinted (1969), not paginated. A new plate
was made for the edition of 1825.
22. Mrs [Sarah] Trimmer, Fabulous Histories (1786), pp. 71-73. Later editions were called The
History of the Robin, in one of which (1875) is a delicious chapter heading by Giacomelli exhibiting a
bespectacled pig at the crest of a mountain of tomes labeled Platon, Homere, Pope III, Birds, Virg[il],
Bronte, &c. (see p. 90 above). Harrison Weir (b. 1824), Animal Stories Old and New, Told in Pictures
and Prose [1885], p. 54, has two coloured pictures of a Learned Pig named Toby which Weir saw "years

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Mama would have been much comforted had she known what Robert
Southey and William Frederick Pinchbeck knew, that the Pig was
trained with gentleness, not with cruelty.
Joseph Strutt used the pig as an illustration of The Sports and
Pastimes of the People of England in 1801:
I cannot help mentioning a very ridiculous show of a learned pig, which of late days at-
tracted much of the public notice, and at the polite end of town. This pig, which indeed
was a large unwieldy hog, being taught to pick up letters written upon pieces of cards, and
to arrange them at command, gave great satisfaction to all who saw him, and filled his
tormentor's pocket with money. One would not have thought that a hog had been an ani-
mal capable of learning; the fact, however, is another proof of what may be accomplished
by assiduity; for the showman assured a friend of mine, that he had lost three very prom-
ising brutes in the course of training, and that the phenomenon then exhibited had often
given him to despair of success. 23

In The Prelude (1805) Wordsworth found the Learned Pig one of the
emblems of the nature of London, in a description of the sights of St.
Bartholomew's Fair:
What a shock
For eyes and ears! what anarchy, and din,
Barbarian and infernal . . .
. . . with staring pictures and huge scrolls,
Dumb proclamations of the Prodigies;

All moveables of wonder, from all parts,

Are here - Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
The Horse of knowledge,24 and the learned Pig

All out-o' -the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,

All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts
Of man, his dulness, madness, and their feats
All jumbled up together, to compose
A Parliament of Monsters. . . .
Oh, blank confusion! true epitome
Of what the mighty City is herself. . . . (Book VII, II. 685-723)

ago . . . at Camberwell Fair" for a penny. The Pig carried a card to a person who called out the
number on it, spelled "vittels," alld then disappeared to have some "with a joyful grunt, and the show
was over."
The rustic speaker of Anon., "Ballad for Old-Fashioned Farmers. On the Great Exhibition," Punch,
XX (1851), 212, scorned the shiny frivolity of the Great Exhibition of 1851 and much preferred "The
Fair as was held nigh our own native town" in days "When we was contented wi our vorevathers'
rules," where one could view, inter alia, "the ram with six legs and the learned pig," as my learned
friend Professor Desmond Neill points out to me.
23. Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1834), Bk. III, Ch. vi, sect.
viii: "The Hare and Tabor, and Learned Pig," p. 248 (first edition: 1801). Mrs. E. J. Rogers tells me
that there is a short chapter on the Learned Pig in Catherine Strickland (later Traill), Fables for the
Nursery (1825) and a reference in her Charles Seymour: The Good Aunt and the Bad Aunt (1832), p.
67.
24. The Horse of Learning was exhibited at Exeter Change, London, in 1760-72 (Altick, p. 40), and
others doubtless were shown later. They may be related to Blake's "horses of instruction" (who are not
so wise as "The tygers of wrath") in his Marriage of Heaven and Hell (?1790-93), pI. 9 (p. 83) and his
Vala (?1796-?1807), p. 25,1. 3 (p. 1110) and to his picture "done many years ago" of "The Horse of
Intellect" described in his Descriptive Catalogue (1809), pars. 88-89 (pp. 854-55). Marilyn Gaull,
"Romantic Humour: The Horse of Knowledge and the Learned Pig", Mosaic, IX, 4 (Summer 1976),
42-64, only touches on The Horse of Knowledge and The Learned Pig as incidental illuminations of
Romantic Humour.

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For Coleridge, characteristically, the Learned Pig is the subject of an

adjectival joke; in his Statesman's Manual (1816) is an anecdote of
the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who returning highly gratified from a
showman's caravan, which he had been tempted to enter by the words THE LEARNED
PIG, gilt on the pannels, met another caravan of a similar shape, with THE READING
FLY on it, in letters of the same size and splendour. 'Why, dis is voonders above
voonders!' exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as the first comer, and soon fatigued by
waiting . . . [droused, until the driver called out:] fAre you booked all the way for
Reading?'-Now a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still . . . . 25

It may have been the second, or at any rate, a succeeding Learned Pig
of 1818-23 whom Thomas Hood encountered and memorialized in his
"Lament of Toby, The Learned Pig," with its motto: "A little learning
is a dangerous thing":
Of what avail that I could spell
And read, just like my betters,
If I must come to this at last,
To litters, not to letters?
0, why are pigs made scholars of?
It baffles my discerning,
What griskins, fry, and chitterlings
Can have to do with learning.
Alas! my learning once drew cash,
But public fame's unstable,
So I must turn a pig again,
And fatten for the table.
Of all my literary kin
A farewell must be taken,
Good bye to the poetic Hogg!
The philosophic Bacon! 26

William Blake's references to swine are somewhat unusual; snoring,

human, and learned. On p. 60 of his Notebook he wrote:
I askd my dear Friend Orator Prigg
'Whats the first part of Oratory[?]' he said 'A great wig'[.]
'And what is the second[?]' then dancing a jig
And bowing profoundly he said 'a great wig'[.]
'And what is the third[?]' then he snord like a pig
And puffing his cheeks he replied 'a Great wig'[.]

In "The Everlasting Gospel" Blake said that Jesus

turnd the Devils into Swine
That he might tempt the Jews to Dine

25. S. T. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White (1972), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, No. VI, p. 38.
26. Thomas Hood, The Comic Annual (1835), 176-80; verses omitted here imply that the Pig's orig-
inal owner was named Mullins, that the Pig knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and that he received his
directions "Simply by ringing at the nose, According to Bells system" (referring to the "Bel and the
Dragon" controversy [1804 ff.] over the Madras System of mutual education between Andrew Bell and
Joseph Lancaster).

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102 COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERL Y

Since which a Pig has got a look
That for a Jew may be mistook[.] (Notebook, p. 120)

Finally, on Notebook p. 40 he wrote a fragment of a poem called

"Barry":
Give pensions to the Learned Pig
Or the Hare playing on a Tabor [.]
Anglus can never see Perfection
But in the Journeymans Labour[.]27

Hares playing on tabors were an ancient form of fair amusement.

Joseph Strutt wrote:
It is astonishing what may be affected by constant exertion and continually tormenting
even the most timid and untractable animals; for no one would readily believe that a hare
could have been sufficiently emboldened to face a large concourse of spectators without
expressing its alarm, and beat upon a tambourine in their presence; yet such a perfor-
mance was put in practice not many years back, and exhibited at Sadler's Wells; and, if I
mistake not, in several other places in and about the metropolis. Neither is this whimsical
spectacle a recent invention. A hare that beat the tabor is mentioned by Jonson, in his
comedy of Bathoiomew Fayre, acted at the commencement of the seventeenth century
[1614]; and a representation of the feat itself, taken from a drawing on a manuscript up-
wards of four hundred years old . . . is given below [fig. 5].28

Figure 5

27. William Blake's Writings (1978), II, 958, 1057,951. The starting point for the present essay was a
belated effort to annotate the last reference, spurred on by Robin Jackson's curiosity about similar
references in Coleridge and elsewhere.
28. Strutt, pp. 247-248. A correspondent in The Gentleman's Magazine, LVII (June 1785),413, com-
pares Swift's account of a hare who danced, played upon a drum, &c., with "the feats of this animal [a
hare] at Sadler's Wells." .

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I cannot identify Orator Prigg or the Pensioned Pig, but the Hare in
Blake's poem probably represents the artist and dramatist Prince Hoare.
Elsewhere Blake wrote of
trembling Hare [who] sits on his weekly paper
On which he used to dance & sport & caper 29

clearly alluding to Hoare's weekly periodical called The Artist (1807-

09). Blake assumes such a clear association between the name of Prince
Hoare and prostitution that he need not make it explicitly. The explicit
link, as Professor Jackson points out to me learnedly, is in Romeo and
Juliet, II, iv, where Mercutio is tormenting Juliet's Nurse:
Mercutio: A bawd, a bawd, a bawd! So ho! [A hunting term: "The quarry's jound!'1
Romeo: What hast thou found?
Mercutio: No hare, sir; unless a hare, sir, in a lenten pie, that is something stale and
hoare ere it be spent.
[Sings
An old hare hoar,
And an old hare hoar,
Is very good meat in lent:
But a hare that is hoar
Is too much for a score
When it hoars ere it be spent.

The quarry, Mercutio implies, is a bawd for a whore, and a hoary bawd
at that. Blake's Hoare had printed in his Artist for 6 June 1807 a puff
for Stothard's painting of the Canterbury Pilgrims, the idea for which,
Blake believed, was stolen from Blake's design of the same subject;
Blake's point is that Hoare is a stale go-between, a pander for prosti-
tuted ideas.
Thus the freaks of learning, the Musical Hare, the Sapient Swine, and
the Horse of Learning, become the jokes of genius. It is curious to ob-
serve the consistency with which men reveal the characteristic nature of
their genius in responding to these Learned Pigs. For Dr Johnson, they
provoke ponderous reflections on the preferability of a tortured life to
an early death. For Southey, they speak eloquently of vanity. From the
learned Porson they elicit jocular quatrains in Greek. For Cowper and
Burns, the pig serves as a warning of the vanity of public reputation, at
least of their public reputation. They remind Mary Wollstonecraft of
the masculine prejudice of the world, or at any rate of Rousseau. Wil-
liam Darton makes them an object-lesson to little boys learning to
read-and perhaps to their parents not to use harsh methods in teach-
ing. Wordsworth takes the Learned Pig (inter alia) at St. Bartholomew's

29. Notebook p. 22 (Writings, II, 935). Anglus may represent Robert Hunt, who had called Blake
"an unfortunate lunatic" in The Examiner for 1809 (see Blake Records [1969], 216), and who is certain-
ly referred to in the lines immediately before those quoted above:
The Examiner whose very name is Hunt
Calld Death [Blake] a Madman trembling for the affront[.]

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104 COLBY LIBRARY QUARTERLY

Fair as an emblem of man's "Promethean thoughts" and "dulness,"

"true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself." Coleridge makes the
Learned Pig into an instance of Dutch fancy, the waywardness of words
and associations. For Tom Hood, poor Toby's neglected learning pro-
vides occasion for facile reflections on the instability of public fame,
before they cook his philosophic Bacon. And for William Blake the
Learned Pig represents wilfully misguided patronage. Such are the
Freaks of Learning.
Thus the Eighteenth Century did not draw quietly to a close after all.
As if Revolutions in North America and in France were not enough,
there were outbreaks of Romantic Poetry and of Sapient Swine to dis-
turb the peace of the Augustans. What conclusions may we draw, from
all this
Learning, that cobweb of the brain,
Profane, erroneous, and vain. (Hudibras, 1. 1339)

If we despair with Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution

in France, we may conclude that "Learning will be cast down into the
mire, and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude." But I think
we may more appropriately end with Alexander Pope:
Such labour'd Nothings, in so strange a style,
Amaze th'unlearn'd, and make the Learned smile.
(Essay on Criticism, 11. 326-27)
University of Toronto
Canada

Table of Plates
Title page. See n. 1. (Richard Landon Collection) 87
A learned pig crested on a wave of books. See n. 22. (Osborn Collection of
Early Children's Books, Toronto Public Library) 90
Fig. 1. Rowlandson, The Wonderful Pig (1785). See p. 92. 93
Fig. 2. Collings, The Downfall of Taste & Genius (1785). See pp. 92, 95,
and n. 12. 94
Fig. 3. The Wonderful Pig of Knowledge. See p. 97 and n. 20. 98
Fig. 4. A pig choosing cards. See p. 97 and n. 21. (Osborn Collection,
Toronto Public Library) 99
Fig. 5. A dancing hare. See nne 28, 23. (GEB copy) 102

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