In opening the first public aquarium in 1853 at the London Zoo, Phillip Henry Gosse believed he had unveiled the wonders of the sea. Through the glass walls of the aquarium, what was once a mysterious horizon would become transparent. His intention was fairly clear; the aquarium was to be a location for public education, where people could “get acquainted with the peculiar creatures of the ocean without having to descend into the depths.” 

During the aquatic “craze” of the 1860s, the aquarium made its way into the private English home, leading to a revaluation of its function and audience. Initially, it was marketed under the guise of “family fun,” but the pretense of familial inclusivity was quickly shed as home aquariums became a hobby dominated by men. 

The aquarium served as a symbol of modernity—the glass walls acted as a new “frontier” that provided a tool for grappling with and maintaining control in an environment in flux due to industrialization, changing gender roles, evolving class structures, and imperialism. Yet the glass also served as a barrier in access to some—a means to look in but never participate. The hobby of owning and maintaining an aquarium became heavily gendered and, in doing so, reflected Victorian assumptions of masculinity as it related to power and control.

The 19th century played host to a “leisure revolution” in England and a boom in a number of hobbies—arts and crafts, home exercise, and travel—that promoted recreation. The Industrial Revolution had created a more “rigid demarcation between work and leisure time,” but it had also redefined the vocational landscape. Some hobbies became masculinized when a skill and craft, displaced by industrialization, migrated into leisure. This was the case with aquariums, which became surrounded by faux-technicality.

 “The hobby of owning and maintaining an aquarium became heavily gendered and, in doing so, reflected Victorian assumptions of masculinity as it related to power and control.”

In an 1857 handbook on aquarium care, naturalist Henry Noel Humphreys wrote, “the wonders of the ocean do not reveal themselves to vulgar eyes.” Rather, particular knowledge was required to “appreciate the miracles passing before them.” It was men who supposedly possessed such particular knowledge, while women could not, only directly engaging with the tank as a decorative object, similar to a painting or an antique—as viewers, not participants. In turn, the aquarium came to function as a place for men to hide from the “rigors of the public sphere,” and what they perceived as “the interpersonal demands of the private one.” 

The tank was the perfect “tool for asserting individual mastery of the home because it is itself a home: the ‘happy family’ inside the tank could reciprocally construct one outside.” Like a doll house, the subjects of the tank were confined, constantly visible, and, most importantly, silent, making ideal surrogates for an independent family. The labor involved in maintenance reified the hetero-patriarchal image of men as providers, fathers, and managers, but with a pretext of ownership and unequivocal domination. This was welcome at a time where men felt their power was being threatened. Industrial modernity not only affected their work but also encroached on their homes. As women became more autonomous and joined the workforce, the desire to consolidate control grew. The tank became a means to control as the world outside the glass continued to change.

To own a tank was to be modern, and to be modern was to look to new “frontiers.” The possibility of travel signified status in the Victorian era, and the aquarium represented a voyage from home. By owning tropical fish, men could feel entitled and connected to the places these species came from. In this way, the home aquarium also came to reflect the imperialist notion that the unknown was to be conquered and domesticated. In turn, animals were simultaneously exoticized and demeaned as “primitive.” 

In her book Parlor Ponds, aquarium historian Judith Hamera says the home aquarium fell into broader colonial narratives attached to the pursuit of natural history during the Victorian era, which emphasized the move from “seeing and describing to owning.” While this process was taking place on the global stage in Europe’s exploitation of the New World, naturalist collectors were consolidating their “empire of things” at home, as aquarists did within their tanks. If aquarium owners felt any concern about their status, the aquarium could momentarily wash them away. Reimagined as Robinson Crusoes of their living rooms, wealthy men could picture themselves as brave conquerors at the forefront of a national agenda.

The aquarium also became a vessel of investigation and experimentation. People were familiar with having animals around the home as pets, but the dependency of underwater animals on their tanks made them inaccessible and difficult to understand in the same way as domesticated dogs or cats. To be defined, tank inhabitants were first reduced to objects of scientific inquiry, where catalogs encouraged readers to replicate professional experiments. 

Many aquarium owners falsely believed that aquatic species could not feel pain, and this idea fueled a variety of cruel experiments. Without the usual signs of sufferance, their death was treated more as a financial toll rather than an emotional one. However, their bodies were then reimagined as cadavers, to be dissected or further explored by hand, scalpel or—in its extremity—through taste.  

Beyond objects of analysis, for some, aquatic life took the form of theatrical subjects. Species were crudely categorized in terms of perceived behavioral traits: Prawns were finickity; eels were vicious; and the starfish was lethargic. Owners would then bring to life these characters, writing micro plots of revenge, violence, and justice. Playing the role of omniscient narrator, owners could intervene when, and should, they want to. 

With complete control, they could direct the tank freely and project fantasies of domestic domination onto the tank’s pseudo-social structures, using it to explore their societal aspirations and anxieties. As the sea had been shrunk to manageable size, their problems could be reduced and dismissed, paving the way for masculine fantasies of absolute power. 

“In looking at the history of the aquarium, its walls begin to serve more as a mirror than a lens, telling us less about the world they contained and more of the one that surrounded them.”

Owning an aquarium, given the great expense, was generally limited to the upper class and upper-middle class men. In this sense, their anxieties generally concerned power retention and expansion. Reaffirming their status, men also used the tanks as models to analyze class structures, where the color, size, and location of a species within the tank distinguished their privilege. For instance, the fiddler crab swimming with “the upper classes of fish society, while their poor unfortunate brethren are obliged to mix with common oysters.” 

At times, men pushed analysis of class structures into class warfare, imagining class tensions between different animals. Naturalist Edward Forbes observed that medusae frequently devour small crustaceans, apparently “enjoying the destruction of the unfortunate members of the upper classes with a truly democratic relish.” When narrating the events within the tank, affluent men could look on from a distance, subservient to no one and threatened by nothing.

As a hobby, home aquariums are very much still mired by gendered assumptions. When attending the 2006 International Marine Aquarium Conference, Hamera noted that the “wife acceptance factor” (WAF) was regularly invoked in determining the saleability of a product. In one situation, a speaker at the conference detailed installing a very large aquarium that took up his entire garage. Hamera writes, “husbands were told to cover their wives’ eyes—the ‘wife acceptance factor’ was going to be stretched to the breaking point.” The aquarium took four months to be installed but the speaker noted, “you have to tell your wife it will only be a mess for two weeks.” Such language highlights that home aquariums continue to be viewed as a man's domain, something a wife would at best have to tolerate but not get involved with the details or research aspects. 

At its introduction in the 19th century, the home aquarium offered a stable and, most importantly, contained version of the nation and the home that preserved male prestige and power. These gendered ideas are still something with which the marine community must contend. In looking at the history of the aquarium, its walls begin to serve more as a mirror than a lens, telling us less about the world they contained and more of the one that surrounded them. 

Further Reading

Abberley, W., Underwater Worlds, Submerged Visions In Science And Culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018)

Hayward, E, “Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of Immersion,” differences, 23, no. 3 (2012): 161-196.

Image credit: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "In the Aquarium, Belle Isle Park, Detroit, Mich." New York Public Library Digital Collections.