Who Was Topsy?
Born in Southeast Asia in 1875, Topsy was a female Asian elephant captured as a baby and brought to the United States to be forced into circus work. Her later reputation as a ‘man-killing elephant’ led to her public execution on Coney Island, New York, in 1903. The filmed spectacle of her cruel death, ‘Electrocuting an Elephant,’ made by the Edison Manufacturing Company, resonates today with more than 1.6 million views on YouTube.
What is The Topsy Project?
The Topsy Project is an art-based initiative dedicated to challenging her life story—currently told as a villain who killed people—to replace it with her true story, as a victim who had to defend herself from a lifetime of abuse.
The Topsy Project’s Creative Producer is Kim Stallwood, who since 1976 has dedicated his life to campaigning for animal rights and vegan living. He works closely with graphic designer Richard de Pesando and writer Jill Howard Church.
The Topsy Project began with Kim Stallwood researching and writing Topsy’s biography, which led to the idea of also writing a graphic novel about her life to reach a wider audience.
Additional ideas are also in development to tell Topsy’s story, including films, radio documentaries, and art exhibits.
Kim Stallwood said,
“The Topsy Project is an innovative arts project, commercially successful but not profit-driven, to reframe the narrative about animals to recognise them as sentient beings with their individuality and unique biographies.”
Kim Stallwood
Author, Scholar, Curator
Kim Stallwood is an author, scholar and curator dedicated to the Animal Rights Movement. His archive is now part of the British Library’s permanent collection. The Swiss-based nonprofit animal law organisation, Tier im Recht, holds the Kim Stallwood Collection. He is currently writing the definitive autobiography of Topsy the Elephant.
Topsy The Elephant
A Biography of an Elephant
Kim is writing the biography of Topsy, the female Asian elephant who was electrocuted to death on Coney Island, New York in 1903. The narrative is written from various sources, from fiction to contemporary science, to tell the story of an individual animal’s life and the larger view of the plight of her kind, and animals generally.
The Kim Stallwood Archive
The British Library, London
In 2020 The British Library in London established the Kim Stallwood Archive, an extensive collection of 800 organisation, people, and subject files, including correspondence, manuscripts, meeting notes, and press cuttings chronicling his involvement with the international Animal Rights Movement dating from the mid-1970s onwards as part of their modern history archive.
The Kim Stallwood Collection
Tier im Recht, Switzerland
The Swiss-based animal law foundation, Tier im Recht, acquired the Kim Stallwood Collection in 2021. The publications, audio-visual materials, artefacts, posters, and much more became part of TIR’s extensive and professionally managed library and archive. Kim’s library of more than 2,000 books is scheduled to also go to TIR’s offices in Zurich.
