Abstract
This paper explores the implications of the early development of London Zoo, which thrived as a fashionable metropolitan resort in the Victorian era. Its commercial success presented problems to the governing body, the Zoological Society of London. Although the society had been defined as a scientific institution, the commercial nature of public entertainment provided by the zoo undermined this assumption. Generating as well as indulging public demands for 'zoological entertainment', the society confronted growing tensions between its scientific identity and the alleged moneymaking activities of the zoo business. Accordingly, debates arose, first within the society, eventually at the law court, concerning how the society's public rationale should be justified. The paper concludes that the scientific society, the public, the government, the judiciary, and local authorities, all played their parts in the commercialisation of leisure, often with competing prospects of its benefit. It was their entangled engagements that brought forth the hybrid offspring of science and commerce.
