Blake was not alone in his fascination with the tiger. When “The Tyger” was published in 1794, the East India Company had been making forays into India for nearly two centuries. Tigers were often shipped to England as exotic souvenirs. Londoners could encounter these “man-eaters” at the Tower of London’s Royal Menagerie or in circuses and cockpits where one could place a wager on a tiger’s odds against other animals.

In Georgian England, the tiger was both an object of spectacle and––as Blake’s poem evokes––the very essence of a terrifying beast. They epitomized the animal kingdom’s threat to man, though this anthropocentric view ignores the fact that tigers only attack people when provoked or unnaturally dislocated. Treated as commodities, many tigers did not survive the passage from Asia to Europe. Tiger skins were used as rugs, their heads stuffed as ornaments. Those that did lived out distressed existences shortened by unsuitable habitation. Their bodies were likely then preserved or dissected in service of modern taxonomy and classification.

A new age of natural history had emerged in eighteenth-century Europe. No longer set apart from animals, humans became a subject of scientific study. The fearsome tiger, who could potentially destabilize man’s place in God’s hierarchy, increased anxieties around divine creation: “Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” By the early Victorian period, the British public were well-primed to enact domination through images of the tiger hunt.