Clara's Grand Tour: Travels With a Rhinoceros in 18th-Century Europe

by Glynis Ridley

222pp, Atlantic Books, £14.99

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