So, happy anniversary of the publication of Thomas Rowlandson’s The Wonderful Pig — marking the arrival in London of a prodigious porker who could apparently read, write, tell the time, and do maths.
This was Toby, the Learned Pig, and it wasn’t the only print the highfalutin hog inspired. There was also Bowles and Carver’s The WONDERFUL PIG of KNOWLEDGE, in which he’s in the process of spelling ‘porcine’.
…and Samuel Collings’ The downfall of taste & genius or the world as it goes — in which the muses of poetry and painting are stampeded out of view by carnival and circus performers including Toby, a monkey riding a dog and a drumming rabbit.
He even gets a mention in Wordsworth’s Prelude:
All moveables of wonder, from all parts,
Are here — Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,
The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig
(The horse of a knowledge was another performing animal of the same era.)
Toby was a sensation in London society, having already been renowned in Dublin and around Britain, for choosing cards from the floor to carry out arithmetical calculations and spell words. Samuel Johnson died too soon to see him, but heard him described, and…
Then, (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.
Toby was owned by shoemaker Samuel Bisset, who became an animal trainer in middle age, and clearly had a gift for it. In the words of Jan Bondeson, from his book The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History:
Mr. Bisset toured the provinces with a troupe that also contained two monkeys walking the tightrope and playing the barrel organ, a hare beating the tabor, canaries that could spell, and a tortoise that could bring back objects like a dog (although more slowly!). The star performers were his Cat’s Opera: an orchestra of cats sitting with music books in front of them, beating on dulcimers and drums with their paws, “squalling at the same time in different keys or notes”. When these cats performed in London, at the Haymarket, during the next season, they attracted much attention. In little more than a week, the Cat’s Opera brought in nearly 1,000 pounds to their owner, a sum illustrating the Londoners’ great delight in animal amusements.
People worried that his animals performed so well that his methods must be cruel, but poet Robert Southey (in addition to noting that “The learned pig was in his day a far greater object of admiration to the English nation than ever was Sir Isaac Newton”) wrote:
When he died, a Mr Nicholson seems to have bought the whole troupe, and it was he who brought the beasts to the metropolis, where they stayed for months, even appearing at Sadler’s Wells — although not everyone was impressed…
![The common reaction to the Learned Pig’s performance was of course one of enthusiastic credulity in his abilities, which were commonly 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.”](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*uVPypeLY7fliULqPaD0blA.png)
Sadly, of course, Pig hath but a short time to live, and after four years of fame, Toby went off to the sty in the sky — but he had started a fashion for performing porkers, and a string of them took his place, all called Toby, as in this account of a later, less polished, provincial appearance (from a publication called Once a Week in 1873:
Toby, the learned pig, who was brought round the towns of Lincolnshire some thirty years back — a fine, fat, smooth, white pig, carefully washed and scraped, till he was as “clean as a Christian,” so his leader said; and, certainly, his personal appearance was most satisfactory. One day, Toby was led round the town by a bright chain, just by way of an advertisement of the evening’s performance, while the big drum and Pan-pipes were behind, and a banner, emblazoned “The Learned Pig,” in front. Toby walked along, smooth, white, and decorous, merely giving an occasional grunt, or a snuff at some vegetable refuse left in the way, till the procession was passing a filthy, muddy pool by the roadside — for we were a dirty set of people at Swilford, and local boards were not then born. The pool was inches deep in mud and water, and Toby, though learned, was still a pig. He must have felt like the old Irishwoman, “so horrid clean,” for, in spite of the checking of his bright chain, he gave a grunt of delight, rushed off, and the next moment was having a glorious wallow, first on one side, and then upon the other, snuffling, snorting, running his nose under, and blowing up a mud volcano, and at last completely smothering himself with the cool, wet, odorous slush, in whose midst he lay upon his side, half buried, winking one eye; and, in the midst of his thorough enjoyment, giving vent to little soft grunts of satisfaction, in spite of the cuts of a whip, the dumb astonishment of the big drum and pipes, the looks aghast of the banner-bearer, and the delighted roars of the crowd.
This Toby was clearly a different colour from the original — and for decades afterwards, there were Tobys of all shades, on both sides of the Atlantic, and even an ‘autobiography’.
This image, which you may have seen before, is from this later era of Tobys
Eventually, of course, the idea of Learned Pigs ran out of steam, and other crazes took its place. Still, in their time, these Superior Swine had inspired Wordsworth — and classical scholar Richard Porson, who wrote:
And in these fractured, polarised times of ours, we need something to bring us together in wonderment. Perhaps now is the time to revive a noble tradition…
