Victorian Animal Dreams

Victorian Animal Dreams
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Representations of Animals
in Victorian Literature and Culture
Edited by
Deborah Denenholz Morse

College of William and Mary, USA
Martin A. Danahay
Brock University, Canada
First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing
Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright © 2007 Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay have asserted their moral right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
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Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Morse, Deborah Denenholz, 1949–
Victorian animal dreams : representations of animals in Victorian literature and culture.
– (The nineteenth century series)
1. Animals in literature 2. English literature – 19th century – History and criticism 3.
Animal welfare – Great Britain – History – 19th century 4. Consciousness in literature
5. Consciousness in animals
I. Title II. Danahay, Martin A.
820.9’362’09034
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Victorian animal dreams : representations of animals in Victorian literature and culture / edited
by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay.
p. cm. – (Nineteenth century series)
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5511-4 (alk. paper)
1. English literature–19th century–History and criticism. 2. English literature–English-
speaking countries–History and criticism. 3. Animals in literature. 4. Animal welfare–
Great Britain–History–19th century. 5. Animal rights–Great Britain–History–19th century.
6. Human-animal relationships in literature. 7. Animals–Symbolic aspects. I. Morse,
Deborah Denenholz, 1949– II. Danahay, Martin A.
PR468.A56V53 2007
820.9’362–dc22
2007005518

ISBN 9780754655114 (hbk)
ISBN 9781138246430 (pbk)
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

General Editors’ Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Notes on Contributors xiii
Introduction 1
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay
Part I Science and Sentiment 13
1 Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets 15

Teresa Mangum
2 Victorian Beetlemania 35
Cannon Schmitt
3 Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the Nineteenth Century 53

Nigel Rothfels
4 Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals, and Gender 65

Susan David Bernstein
5 Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations 81

Ivan Kreilkamp
Part II Sex and Violence 95
6 Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in

Victorian Art 97
Martin A. Danahay
7 “The Crossing o’ Breeds” in The Mill on the Floss 121

Mary Jean Corbett
8 Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance 145

Elsie B. Michie
9 Pacific Harvests: Whales and Albatrosses in Nineteenth-Century

Markets 167
Anca Vlasopolos
vi Victorian Animal Dreams
Part III Sin and Bestiality 179
10 “The Mark of the Beast”: Animals as Sites of Imperial Encounter

from Wuthering Heights to Green Mansions 181
11 Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray

Dogs in Oliver Twist 201
Grace Moore
12 The Sins of Sloths: The Moral Status of Fossil Megatheria in

Victorian Culture 215
Alan Rauch
13 Tiger Tales 229

Heather Schell
14 The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the

Nineteenth Century 249
Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge
Afterword 271
Harriet Ritvo
Index 277
List of Illustrations
Plates
1 “Remarkable Beetles Found at Simunjon, Borneo” in Alfred Russell Wallace,

The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise;
A Narrative of Travel with Studies of Man and Nature (1869; tenth edition, 1890;
reprint, New York, 1962).
2 “Longicorn Beetles of Chontales” in Thomas Belt, The Naturalist in Nicaragua:
A Narrative of Residence at the Gold Mines of Chontales; Journeys in the
Savannahs and Forests; with Observations on Animals and Plants in Reference
to the Evolution of Living Forms (1874; rev. edn, London: Edward Bumpus,
1888), opposite p. 280.
3 “Hunting on the Congo” (Jagd am Congo) by Albert Richter in Die Gartenlaube
(Leipzig: Ernst Keil, 1893), p. 369.
4 “A Good Day’s Work with Elephants” in Arthur H. Neumann, Elephant Hunting
in East Equatorial Africa. Being an Account of Three Years’ Ivory-Hunting
under Mount Kenia and among the Ndorobo Savages of the Lorogi Mountains,
including a Trip to the North End of Lake Rudolph (London: Rowland Ward,
1898). p. 198.
5 Linley Sambourne, “Man Is But A Worm,” Punch’s Almanack 1882 82
(6 December 1881): n.p.
6 Linley Sambourne, “Nature’s Own Designs,” Punch, or the London Charivari
53 (21 December 1867): 256.
7 Linley Sambourne, “Mr Punch’s Designs From Nature,” Punch, or the London
Charivari 55 (11 July 1868): 11.
8 Linley Sambourne, “Mr Punch’s Designs After Nature,” Punch, or the London
Charivari 60 (1 April 1871): 127.
9 Two naturalists (after Richard Owen and T.H. Huxley) in The Water-Babies: A
Fairy-Tale for a Land-Baby with one hundred illustrations by Linley Sambourne
(New York: Macmillan, 1904), p. 69.
10 Linley Sambourne, “Ballad of Bathybius,” Punch, or the London Charivari 94
(28 January 1888): 47.
11 Linley Sambourne, “A Bird of Prey,” Punch, or the London Charivari 102 (14
May 1892): 231.
12 Walter Howell Deverell, A Pet (1853) courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London.
viii Victorian Animal Dreams
13 Detail from The Awakening Conscience (1851–53) courtesy of the Tate Gallery,
London.
14 Detail from Work (1859–63) courtesy of Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester
City Council.
15 The interior of the Redpath Museum (c. 1893) courtesy of the McCord, Museum
of Canadian History, Montreal.
16 The opening of the Redpath Museum (1882) courtesy of the McCord, Museum
of Canadian History, Montreal.
17 Two illustrations from Simeon Shaw, Nature Displayed in the Heavens, and on
Earth (London: for Sir Richard Phillips by G. and W.B. Whitaker, 1823).
18 “The New Rocking Horse” Anon, “Old and New Toys” Punch, 14 (1848),
p. 76.
19 Paul B. Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London,
1861), p. 234.
20 Illustration from William Charles Baldwin’s African Hunting and Adventure
from Natal to the Zambesi (London, 1894).
21 “Prehistoric Pantomime” Punch Almanack 107 (1895).
22 Illustration from R.C. Money’s “A Day After Rhinoceros” The Boy’s Own Paper
15 (1892–93).
23 Illustration from Rudyard Kipling, Second Jungle Book (1895. Oxford, 1992).
24 Advertisement from The Graphic Supplement (2 December 1899).
25 “True Patriotism” Punch 9 (1845), p. 197.
26 “Affairs of Hungary” Punch 18 (1850), p. 63.
27 “Remarkable Crocodile Found in Ireland” Punch 21 (1851), p. 102.
28 “The Model Legislature” Punch 30 (1856), p. 257.
29 “Pro-Slavery Solecism” Punch 32 (1857), p. 39.
Figure
1 Animals on a Violent/Peaceful and Foreign/Domestic Grid 106

The Nineteenth Century Series
General Editors’ Preface
The aim of the series is to reflect, develop and extend the great burgeoning of
interest in the nineteenth century that has been an inevitable feature of recent
years, as that former epoch has come more sharply into focus as a locus for our
understanding not only of the past but of the contours of our modernity. It centres
primarily upon major authors and subjects within Romantic and Victorian literature.
It also includes studies of other British writers and issues, where these are matters
of current debate: for example, biography and autobiography, journalism, periodical
literature, travel writing, book production, gender and non-canonical writing. We are
dedicated principally to publishing original monographs and symposia; our policy
is to embrace a broad scope in chronology, approach and range of concern, and
both to recognize and cut innovatively across such parameters as those suggested by
the designations ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’. We welcome new ideas and theories,
while valuing traditional scholarship. It is hoped that the world which predates yet
so forcibly predicts and engages our own will emerge in parts, in the wider sweep,
and in the lively streams of disputation and change that are so manifest an aspect of
its intellectual, artistic and social landscape.
Vincent Newey
Joanne Shattock
University of Leicester
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank our splendid contributors, first of all. Without their thinking on the
Victorian Animal, this collection would not have existed.
We are also grateful to Harriet Ritvo, whose germinal book, The Animal Estate,
inspired the work in this volume.
Our thanks to our families, who lived with this project for years on end: Charles,
Evan, and Lucy Morse and Deborah Reed-Danahay (but not Emily and Ian Danahay,
who wisely fled the house to go to University, far from parental publishing angst).
We are grateful for what we have learned from the non-human animals who live
in our homes and teach us about what one lecturer on animals calls “other nations”:
Holly, Mozart, and Vincent Morse, canines extraordinaire, and felines Sweetie and
Lavender (who have different surnames but refuse to divulge them or their secret
names, having read Old Possum’s poem on the naming of cats).
Thanks are due, as ever, to Deborah’s two animal-loving friends, Deborah Robbins
and Carol Sklenicka, who have taught her over their thirty years of friendship with
her that cats (not to mention baby hummingbirds) are just possibly as fascinating
as dogs. Deborah’s brother David’s and sister Cynthia’s weekly phone calls have
continued to be essential to any project she undertakes. Finally, thanks are due to
Deborah’s mother, Elizabeth Denenholz, who—like Deborah herself—could not
imagine a life without dogs.
Notes on Contributors
Susan David Bernstein is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin,

Madison. She is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and
Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (1997) and the editor of two novels by
Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (2006) and Reuben Sachs (2006). Currently she
is working on a book about the Reading Room of the British Museum, gender, and
space.
Mary Jean Corbett is the John W. Steube Endowed Professor of English and
Affiliate of the Women’s Studies Program at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,
where she has been a member of the faculty since 1989. She is the author of
Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian
Autobiographies (Oxford, 1992); Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing,
1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge,
2000); and Sex and Marriage within the Family from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf
(forthcoming). Her current book project explores sex and marriage within the family
in women’s fiction from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf.
Martin A. Danahay is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada. His

publications include Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and
Masculinity (Ashgate, 2005) and A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography
and Autonomy in Nineteenth Century Britain (1993) as well as numerous articles on
Victorian literature, culture and art. He is most proud, however, of his groundbreaking
article on Kathie Lee Gifford.
Ivan Kreilkamp, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana

University, is the author of Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge, 2005)
and co-editor of the journal Victorian Studies.
Mary Elizabeth Leighton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of

Victoria, Canada. Her work has appeared in Victorian Periodicals Review, Essays on
Canadian Writing, English Studies in Canada, Notes & Queries, Excavatio, Topia:
Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, and Victorian Literary Mesmerism (2006).
With Lisa Surridge, she is co-editing an anthology of Victorian non-fiction prose.
Teresa Mangum is an Associate Professor of English and International Programs

at the University of Iowa. Her work in animal studies includes “Dog Years, Human
Fears” (Representing Animals, 2002) and “Narrative Dominion or the Animals Write
Back? Animal Genres in Literature and the Arts” in Volume 5: Animals in the Age
of Empire, 1800–1920 (2007). She received the 2005 Humane Society’s Innovation
Award for an animal studies service-learning course and is book review editor of
xiv Victorian Animal Dreams
the H-Net list, H-Animal. She recently co-directed an interdisciplinary faculty
research seminar, “Articulating the Animal,” at the University of Iowa Obermann
Center for Advanced Studies. She also co-curated two exhibits at the University of
Iowa: a photo-essay exhibition, “The Animals Among Us,” and “Picturing Animals:
International Perspectives from the Permanent Collection of the University of Iowa
Museum of Art.”
Elsie B. Michie is an Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

She has published a book on Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, and
George Eliot (1993). She is currently completing The Vulgar Question of Money,
a book on women of wealth in the novel of manners from Jane Austen to Henry
James.
Grace Moore teaches at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author
of Dickens and Empire (Ashgate, 2004), which was short-listed for the New South
Wales Premier’s Biennial Award for Literary Scholarship (2006), and the co-editor of
Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation (Ashgate, 2004). She is at present editing
a collection on nineteenth-century piracy and writing a monograph on reinventing
Victorianism.
Deborah Denenholz Morse, inaugural University Professor for Teaching Excellence

at the College of William and Mary, is the author of the first feminist study of
Anthony Trollope, Women in Trollope’s Palliser Novels (1987; rpt 1991), and co-
editor with Regina Barreca of The Erotics of Instruction (1997). Professor Morse
has published articles on Anne Brontë, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mona Simpson,
Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Coles Taylor, A.S. Byatt, Hesba
Stretton (forthcoming), and Kay Boyle. Another collection of essays, The Politics of
Gender: Trollope in the 21st Century, edited with Margaret Markwick and Regenia
Gagnier, is under contract with Ashgate. A monograph, Narrative and Tolerance
in the Novels of Anthony Trollope, is also under contract. Professor Morse was a
keynote speaker at the Exeter Trollope and Gender Conference in July 2006. She is
the Essay Submissions Editor for Victorians Institute Journal.
Alan Rauch, Director of Graduate Liberal Studies at the University of North

Carolina at Charlotte, earned his BSc in biology at McGill University, where he
first encounted the Megatherium. He received a Master’s degree in zoology prior
to obtaining the PhD in literature. The author of Useful Knowledge (2001), his
work deals with the dissemination of knowledge in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and explores the intersections among science, technology, and culture. He
is currently editing England in 1815, the journal of a Bostonian merchant. Another
current project, “Private Reading Public Knowledge,” is a study of libraries and
knowledge practices in England’s industrial north. Rauch edits the interdisciplinary
journal, Configurations, and is Vice President of the Society for Literature, Science,
and Art.
Notes on Contributors xv
Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Her publications include The Platypus and the Mermaid,
and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (1997) and The Animal Estate:
The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). She is the co-editor
of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism,
Exoticism (1991), and the editor of Charles Darwin’s The Variation of Animals and
Plants under Domestication (1998). Her articles and reviews on British cultural
history, environmental history, and the history of human–animal relations have
appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including The London Review of Books, The
American Scholar, Technology Review, and The New York Review of Books, as well
as scholarly journals in several fields. She is currently working on a study entitled
“The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and the Victorian Environment.”
Nigel Rothfels is the author of Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo
(2002), a history of the origins and legacy of naturalistic displays in zoological
gardens, and the editor of the multidisciplinary collection of essays in animal
studies, Representing Animals (2002). He is currently writing a history of ideas
about elephants since the eighteenth century.
Heather Schell is an Assistant Professor and Deputy Director of the First Year
Writing Program at the George Washington University. She is currently working on
a book-length manuscript on Victorian predators, as well as completing an article
on wolves, inheritance, and masculinity in twentieth-century America. She recently
taught a course entitled “Pests, Pets, and Meat: Animals in American Culture.”
Cannon Schmitt, Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and

editor of the journal Criticism, is the author of a book, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-
Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (1997), as well as essays in
Representations, ELH, Genre, and elsewhere. He has recently completed work on a
book titled Savage Mnemonics: Victorian South America, Evolutionary Theory, and
the Reinvention of the Human.
Lisa Surridge is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria,

Canada. She is author of Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (2005),
co-editor of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd (1998), and author of articles
and reviews in Victorian Literature and Culture, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorians
Institute Journal, Women’s Writing, University of Toronto Quarterly, Journal of
the History of Sexuality, Victorian Review, Brontë Society Transactions, Victorian
Newsletter, and Carlyle Studies Annual. With Mary Elizabeth Leighton, she is co-
editing an anthology of Victorian non-fiction prose.
Anca Vlasopolos’ non-fiction novel, The New Bedford Samurai, appeared in 2007,
as did her poetry collection, Penguins in a Warming World. She published a non-
fiction book, No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (2000; recipient of
the National Writer’s Voice Award for Creative Non-Fiction; and of the Board of
Governors and Life Achievement in Arts awards from Wayne State University). Her
xvi Victorian Animal Dreams
scholarly publications include a book of literary criticism, entitled The Symbolic
Method of Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Yeats, and over thirty scholarly articles and
book chapters on British, French, Italian and comparative literature, theatre, and
film.
Introduction
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay
Willie always speaks to me when he can, and treats me as his special friend. My ladies
promised that I shall never be sold, and so I have nothing to fear; and here my story ends.
My troubles are over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am
still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my old friends under the apple trees.
Anna Sewell, Black Beauty (1877)
No doubt as long as man and all other animals are viewed as independent creations, an
effectual stop is put to our natural desire to investigate as far as possible the causes of
Expression. By this doctrine, anything and everything can be equally well explained; and
it has proved as pernicious with respect to Expression as to every other branch of natural
history. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
A few years before the dying Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty, which she claimed
in the novel’s subtitle was “translated from the original equine,” Charles Darwin
published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The effect of both
works was to foster the growing belief in animal subjectivity, and to embolden those
who fought for the relief of animal pain. As Lucy Bending states in her discussion
of antivivisection rhetoric, “Anna Sewell’s talking horses in Black Beauty (1877)
brought to the fore sensate creatures who lacked the power to communicate their
sufferings forcibly enough for their pain to be taken seriously by those who inflicted
it.”
Cultural support for the late Victorian and Edwardian antivivisection struggle
included not only scientific evidence from the era’s preeminent naturalist, but also
the “evidence” of animal subjectivities portrayed in Victorian fiction and visual art.
Even theater productions, like James Barrie’s 1904 stage play Peter Pan, Or the
Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, in which the commonsensical dog Nana is a much
more responsible parent than the ineffectual Mr Darling, provided comic proof of
the animal kingdom’s mind and soul. Indeed, as James Turner tells us in Reckoning
with the Beast, in some moral discourses, animals became “role models” for the
education of the heart. Remarkably, these depictions of animal wisdom occurred
See James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the
Victorian Mind (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; reprint edition, 2001); Coral Lansbury,
The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison
1985); and Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century
English Culture (Oxford 2000).
Bending, p. 116.
Turner, p. 74. See also Ivan Kreilkamp, “‘Petted Things’: Wuthering Heights and
the Animal.” Yale Journal of Criticism. 18 (1), (Spring 2005): 87–110: “As Ritvo’s analysis
suggests, these RSPCA reports, published annually from 1824, but especially influential from
the 1840s on, typify an important genre of Victorian writing. To be a literate middle-class
while many Victorians were grappling with the consciousness of man-as-animal, and
with the interpretation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) as heralding a
natural order of predation, Tennyson’s “nature red in tooth and claw.”
The effect of Darwin’s ideas was both to make the human more animal and the
animal more human, destabilizing boundaries in both directions. Even defining the
term “animal” remains a perplexing problem for both academic disciplines and
popular discourse. For instance, proposed legislation in England in the summer
of 2004 was protested by some gardeners because they claimed that it would give
slugs and snails the same level of protection as cats and dogs. Many people who
would support legislation that would send humans to jail for cruelty to cats and dogs
would not support the same protection for fish or slugs. Apparently the vertebrate/
invertebrate split is crucial for some people in terms of the limits of “cruelty,” so that
while it is acceptable to drown slugs in beer, the same would not be allowed for cats
or dogs. Obviously, like Black Beauty, cats and dogs can be anthropomorphized and
endowed with human consciousness where slugs cannot so easily be remade in the
human image. The term “animal” itself, and the representation of animals, invokes
a diverse range of aesthetic and political judgments that are the subject of heated
academic and popular debate.
This book is concerned with the varied and compelling representations of animals
in Victorian literature and culture. Our collection of essays builds upon the work of
a number of scholars in the burgeoning field of “animal studies:” Roy Willis, Donna
Haraway, Richard Ryder, Steve Baker, Akira Lippit, Cary Wolfe, Erica Fudge, Nigel
Rothfels, Kathleen Kete, and Jennifer Price come immediately to mind. Like the
Englishperson by mid-century was to develop one’s sensibility and sympathy through the
vicarious experience of reading narratives of animal suffering” (8).
The Daily Telegraph in an article “Gardeners critical over slug protection laws” on 11
July 2004 reported that “a new animal welfare law that will offer slugs and snails the same
protection as cats and dogs was condemned by gardeners yesterday,” <http://www.telegraph.
co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/11/nslug11.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/11/
ixhome.html>.
More recently an American supermarket, Whole Foods, decided to stop selling live
lobsters because it was “inhumane” for them to be plunged into boiling water, the preferred
method of cooking in the United States. See “Whole Foods Bans the Sale of Live Lobsters,”
<http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/16/ap/business/mainD8I99PRO0.shtml>.
See Roy Willis, Man and Beast (Basic Books, 1974) and Signifying Animals (Allen &
Unwin, 1990); Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003); Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals,
Identity, and Representation (Manchester University Press, 1993); Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites:
American Culture, The Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (University of Chicago
Press, 2003) and his edited collection, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (University
of Minnesota Press, 2003); Richard Ryder, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes Toward
Speciesism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and
Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999) and Animal (Consortium,
2002); Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (University of
Minnesota Press, 2000); Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) and his edited collection, Representing Animals
(Indiana University Press, 2002); and Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in
Introduction
anthropologist Roy Willis, we are interested in “what animals signify to man,” and
like historian and art critic Steve Baker, we examine questions of symbolic and
rhetorical uses of animal imagery that both code and illuminate the subject of human
identity in Western culture.
The study of animals in the Victorian period has largely been circumscribed by
national boundaries. For instance, James Turner’s analysis in Reckoning with the
Beast draws mainly upon examples from England and some from America; this
collection of essays, however, ranges from England to various outposts of the English
empire, in particular India and Africa. Turner’s book is concerned primarily with the
Victorians’ movement toward humane values in relation to animals, while the essays
here deal with a myriad contradictions inherent in the Victorian representation of
animals. This collection of essays, by contrast, is interested in the power relations
encoded in the many different ways of representing animals in Victorian culture.
Our greatest debt is to Harriet Ritvo. Since her germinal work in The Animal
Estate nearly two decades ago, it has been clear that “animal-related discourse”
in the Victorian era was “both enormous and diverse … [it] might be inspired
by primary motives as disparate as sentiment (pet-keeping), economics (animal
husbandry), and curiosity (natural history).” Ritvo finds that discourses as overtly
different as those of cattle-breeding, dog fancying, rabies epizootics, zoo-keeping,
and big game hunting are in fact connected by their insistence on the “domination
and exploitation” of animals. This collection gratefully acknowledges Ritvo’s
legacy as it further explores human dominion over the Victorian animal kingdom. It
also complicates that legacy, questioning the sufficiency of “domination” as a master
rubric by which to think through relations between humans and other animals in the
nineteenth century.
With the development of “post-human” perspectives, especially in work
influenced by Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the distinction
between human and animal has been eradicated. However, as Harriet Ritvo warns
in the “Afterword” a term like “post-human” carries with it its own assumption and
could exemplify “the same kind of wishful thinking that the term ‘late capitalism’
does” if it simply recycles the same old metaphors and clichés. While Derrida’s “The
Animal that Therefore I Am” seems radical, in some ways it takes Anna Sewell’s
attempt to “speak for” an animal to an even further extreme in its subversion of
the possibility of a human/animal distinction. Derrida’s recent work has been an
Modern America (Basic Books, 2000). See also Arien Mack and Marc Bekoff eds, Humans
and Other Animals (Ohio State University Press, 1999); Erica Fudge, Susan Wiseman and
Ruth Gilbert eds, At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in
the Early Modern Period (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002); H. Peter Steeves and Tom Regan eds,
Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (SUNY Press, 1999); Jennifer Ham and
Matthew Senior, Animal Acts: Configuring the Human in Western History (Routledge, 1997);
Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler eds, The Animal Ethics Reader, (Routledge 2003).
Most recently, see Harriet Ritvo, “Animal Planet,” Environmental History 9 (April 2004).
Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian
Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 4, 6.
This is a translation of “L’Animal donc je suis” in L’Animal Autobiographique, ed.
Marie-Louise Mallet. It appears as “The Animal That Therefore I am (More to Follow),” trans.
extended meditation on the possibility of an “animal autobiography” that grants
consciousness to the “animal” without remaking it in the image of the human by
questioning the human/animal divide. While Derrida would object to Sewell turning
Black Beauty into a puppet for human words, his “animal autobiography” project is
in the same lineage as Sewell’s Black Beauty.
Derrida plays with a pun on animaux/animots (animals/aniwords) that is possible
only in French to make a linguistic argument for the centrality of the “animal” to
human discourse. As Derrida says “there is no animal in the general singular, separated
from man by a single indivisible limit.” Derrida here is working in a tradition that
can be traced back to Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
in its effort to reshape the perception of the human/animal continuum. The essays
in this collection either directly or indirectly reflect this growing scholarship on
the animal in a “post-human” environment and interpret the current academic and
popular discourse on the “animal” from this new theoretical perspective.
Derrida claims that classifying the multiplicity of other life forms under the
homogenizing category “animal” is a “crime of the first order against animals.”
In this claim he is aligned with critics of “speciesism” who extend critiques of
racism and sexism to include animals. Proponents of “speciesism” argue that not
to extend the same rights as humans to animals is immoral. Their argument takes a
debate that began with Darwin’s publications on the origin of species to its logical
conclusion, and translates the theological debate on whether animals have a “soul”
into the vocabulary of “rights.” The Victorian debate over the status of animals has
not been superseded but instead translated into a new contemporary political and
social context.
While Derrida’s approach is radical, the boundary between the animal and the
human has long been unstable, especially since the Victorian period. Where the
boundary is drawn between human and animal is itself an expression of political
power and dominance, and the “animal” can at once express the deepest fears
and greatest aspirations of a society. Dolly the sheep, famous for being the first
successfully cloned animal, could be seen either as yet another achievement of science
in bringing the reproductive process under human control or, as in a memorable
cartoon, a Frankenstein-like monster taking science into forbidden territory. Just
as Darwin’s theories led to horror stories like The Island of Dr. Moreau in which
evolution is controlled and speeded up by a scientist (thus subverting “natural”
selection through science), so Dolly the sheep conjured up horror stories of cloning
gone amuck in Hollywood movies that portray the supposed effects of unleashing
cloned beings on the world.
Periodically in the Western press a single animal will come to represent a broad
spectrum of attitudes toward the “animal” when seen as “out of place” and thus to
have escaped conventional categories. A beached whale in a river, a bear in an urban
setting, or deer roaming through suburban gardens will evoke reactions ranging from
extraordinary attempts at rescue by concerned citizens to calls for mercy killing. The
animal itself, a mute symbol in the discursive field of the media, is simply the canvas
David Wills, Critical Inquiry 28:2 (2002). See also Jacques Derrida “And Say the Animal
Responded?” trans. David Wills in Zoontologies; The Question of the Animal, pp. 121–46.
Introduction
on which a culture can sketch the range of its many, and often contradictory, attitudes
toward both the “animal” and the concept of “nature” as a zone purportedly separate
from the human that needs either to be exploited or protected.
As these essays make clear, human control over animals in the present and
in the Victorian period includes imaginative possession in the realm of fictional
representation in writing, performance, and visual art as well as the rule of physical
force manifested in hunting, killing, vivisection, and even zoo-keeping. All these
examples are “dreams” of animals; that is, they represent attempts to imaginatively
appropriate the realm of the “animal” for widely divergent aesthetic and political
ends. The essays range from interpretations of the Victorian mania for beetle-
collecting, dog elegies, and post-Darwinian evolutionary fashions to examinations
of the imperial anxieties manifested through images of elephant and whale killing,
or through racialized crocodiles in literature throughout the nineteenth century. An
emphasis upon the great significance of animals to the Victorians—and upon the
continuing fascination with the many shapes this Victorian obsession took—unifies
the essays in this collection.
These essays all look backwards to the Victorian discourse on animals, but do
so from a sophisticated perspective that is aware both of continuity and change in
the status of the “animal” in industrializing and postindustrial societies. A debate
on the status of the “animal” also brings into question the status of the “human”
as the two cannot be seen in isolation. The discourse on animal rights inevitably
invokes political battles over human rights, especially in connection with women
and ethnicity. The discourse on animals is a political discourse, and these essays
contribute to the ongoing analysis of the politics of representation of the “animal.”
The essays in Part I explore the relationship between “science” and “sentiment.”
While “science” and “sentiment” in the Victorian lexicon were antonyms, these
chapters explore the relationship between desire and the scientific endeavor. Whether
analyzing the relationship between “passion” and “knowledge” in the collecting of
beetles, or the links between “sensation” fiction and Darwinian theory, each chapter
brings together strands in the representation of animals that would have been separate
in Victorian terms.
In Part II an interest in real and symbolic violence and the vagaries of desire unite
the chapters. The chapters deal with desire crossing boundaries during breeding and
interbreeding, disturbing the divide between human and animal. “Breeding” in all
its manifold associations of sexual activity and heredity is brought into question,
especially in relation to horse and “sexual dominance.” A range of animals, including
whales and birds, are implicated in sex and violence simultaneously.
Part III examines the role of the animal as scapegoat. Human concepts of sins
like sloth or avarice are imputed to animals who, of course, know nothing of human
law. Can an animal “sin” or be a “criminal”? These chapters examine the ways in
which animals are used to exemplify, amplify, or comment upon concepts like sin
and crime. “Bestiality” in this chapter carries with it all the negative connotations of
the term, suggesting acts that take people out of the realm of the “human,” but that
also bring animals within the matrix of human desire, sin and transgression.
The focus of the essays upon fictional representations of animals and visual
animal images in art as well as upon historical and scientific documents is an original
aspect of our diverse study. Together, these essays propose to do for the Victorian era
what Christine Kenyon-Jones has begun for the Romantic era in her Kindred Brutes:
Animals in Romantic-Period Writing, a text that ranges from Rousseau and Erasmus,
Darwin to Byron and Shelley in elucidating what animals signified as “objects of
human culture.” Thus, in his essay “Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the
Nineteenth Century,” Nigel Rothfels demonstrates that Enlightenment ideas that
constructed the elephant sentimentally, as an animal with “purported wisdom and
deep soul,” inflected the Victorian big game hunters’ complicated views upon the
suffering of the majestic elephant.
Figures of the animal are pervasive in Victorian fiction as social critique, as
caricature, as fantasy—and as proxies for human aspiration and pain. The most
famous Victorian animal story is probably Black Beauty (1877), the crippled Anna
Sewell’s impassioned plea for humane treatment of horses and the working classes,
narrated by Beauty himself. Sewell’s great book was closely followed in popularity
by Marshall Saunders’ American novel Beautiful Joe (1893), a courageous dog’s
first-person narrative that argued for humane treatment of canines; its introduction
pointed to “the wonderfully successful book, entitled ‘Black Beauty,’ [which] came
like a living voice out of the animal kingdom.”10 Countless imperial narratives were
told by animals, such as “A Dog’s Life in Burma,”11 and the first-person animal
narrative issued in a new complexity and ambiguity in relation to the text’s imperial
politics.12 As Heather Schell argues in “Tiger Tales,” by the end of the century, even
the savage tiger was anthropomorphized in hunting narratives, an individual character
in his own bildungsroman, telling his own harrowing—and often heroic—story.
Human relations with animals took many forms, running the gamut from the
Victorian displacement of human fears and desires onto their pets to the decision to
shoot or hang elephants for their “crimes.” Teresa Mangum’s essay, “Animal Angst:
Victorians Memorialize Their Pets,” explores Victorian dog elegies as expressions
of anxiety about the mourners’ own old age, the senescent Queen, and the aging
Victorian era itself. Mangum’s work draws upon not only Ritvo but Kathleen Kete,
who discusses pet-keeping in nineteenth-century Paris in relation to French intellectual
discourse in The Beast in the Boudoir. Mangum’s extensive research on Victorian old
age coupled with her readings of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals (1872) provides an entirely new context in which to consider
dog elegies as cultural documents.13 Nigel Rothfels’ “Killing Elephants” expands
Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing

(Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001), p. 1.
10 See Hezekiah Butterworth, Introduction to the Phoenix edition (Philadelphia: The
Griffith & Rowland Press, 1893).
11 The British Library catalogue lists a vast number of these narratives.
12 For an excellent analysis of first-person dog narratives see “Dog Years, Human Fears”
in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Indiana 2002), pp. 5–47. Mangum discusses
canine subjectivities in relation to Victorian fears about aging. She finds that “the old dog, not
the dog, emerges as the canine voice of authority,” p. 44.
13 See especially Teresa Mangum, “Growing Old: Age,” in A Companion to Victorian
Literature & Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Blackwell 1999) and “Dog Years, Human Fears”
in Representing Animals.
Introduction
not only upon Ritvo’s discussions of imperial hunting and British menageries, but
also upon Rothfels’ own recent book, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern
Zoo,14 in which he documents the history and transformation of attitudes toward wild
animals and their incarcerations for human titillation and knowledge and for their
own protection and survival.
The Victorian obsession with animals implied a new epistemology, as Cannon
Schmitt argues in “Victorian Beetlemania.” Schmitt finds that beetles are portrayed
as “organisms whose alluring alterity gives rise to paroxysms of desire and bouts
of miserly acquisitiveness” in its most famous practitioners, Charles Darwin and
Alfred Russel Wallace. Schmitt’s essay is informed by his voluminous research on
the lives and work of Darwin and Wallace,15 for whom a new way of knowing the
natural world was implicit in evolutionary theory itself, in the recognition of possible
kinship even in unlike species: exalted man and the lowly beetle. As Schmitt argues,
the Victorian obsession with arranging beetles for aesthetic rather than scientific
purposes in display cases, or wearing clothing that imitated the patterns of beetle
markings or was decorated with the carapaces of dead beetles, can appear to us
“alien and apparently frivolous … ” but Victorian beetlemania “dramatizes the
necessity of retheorizing what it meant to know the natural world in the nineteenth
century.” Susan David Bernstein’s essay looks at post-Darwinian iconographies of
women’s fashions in Punch cartoons and in the genre of serialized sensation novels.
She examines why “the gendering of evolutionary narratives sifted into the visual
imagery of the 1860s where women are plumed and scaled … while in sensation
novels, female characters often possess a ‘simian taint’.” Bernstein’s work locates
“animal-fashioned females” in relation both to Darwin’s The Origin of Species
(1859) and his The Descent of Man (1871).16
As Bernstein’s analysis suggests, a number of the essayists in this collection
are interested in the gender implications of animal representation. Anca Vlasopolos’
“Pacific Harvests: Whales and Albatrosses in Nineteenth-Century Markets” connects
the profitable feather trade for women’s dress and stage costumes with the destruction
of many bird populations, including the Steller’s or short-tailed albatross, which
chiefly breeds on the Japanese island of Toroshima. Grace Moore’s essay on animals
and criminals in Victorian crime fiction is grounded in her recent work on gothic and
detective novels in her anthology, Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation and in
her writing on Dickens’ Oliver Twist in Dickens and Empire.17 Moore argues that the
14 Nigel Rothfels, Savages And Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Johns Hopkins
2002). See also “Immersed with Animals” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels
(Indiana 2002), pp. 199–224.
15 See most recently Cannon Schmitt, “Darwin’s Savage Mnemonics.” Representations
88 (Fall 2004).
16 See also Susan David Bernstein, “‘Supposed Differences’: Lydia Becker and Women
Lecturing in Science in Victorian England,” in Sidelined Sciences, eds D. Clifford, E. Wadge,
A. Warwick and M. Willis (London: Anthem Press, 2006), pp. 85–93, 228–30; and “Ape
Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question,” in Journal of Victorian
Culture 6.2 (Fall 2001): 250–70.
17 Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation, ed. Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore
(Ashgate, 2004). See also Grace Moore, Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race, and
animals associated with criminals often “take on the sufferings of other voiceless
figures within the novels, particularly women” or alternatively, can be “extensions”
of the criminal himself, as in the case of diseased, rabid animals. At times, sweet,
innocent animals are used to “humanize” or feminize the guilty, seemingly inhuman
criminal. Elsie Michie’s essay, “Horses and Social/Sexual Dominance” traces a
pattern in Victorian novels from Jane Eyre through Wives and Daughters to Tess of
the D’Urbervilles in which horses are associated not only with new money but also
with sexual dominance. Mary Jean Corbett’s essay, “‘The Crossing o’ Breeds’ in The
Mill on the Floss” situates Eliot’s text not only “within the very mixed discourse
of human and animal sexual reproduction,” but also within “the gender politics of
breeding [which] are imbricated with a parallel, sometimes intersecting discourse
on race.” Both Michie’s analysis of major Victorian novels in relation to gender and
Corbett’s work on animal breeding are informed by their writing on racial issues and
the Irish.18
Corbett’s comments about race introduce a major focus of our essays. Lisa
Surridge and Mary Elizabeth Leighton analyze the racial implications of crocodile
images in their essay, “The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the
Nineteenth Century.” In literature and political cartoons from Christina Rossetti’s
poem “My Dream” to Punch, Surridge and Leighton trace the way the “crocodile
functions in literature and visual culture as a cultural sign of appetite, excess, violence,
and most predominantly alterity.” Their essay concludes with James Barrie’s ticking
crocodile in Peter Pan, a “comedic inversion” that suggests the “over-determined
status of the crocodile as a cultural sign at the turn of the century.” Both Heather
Schell’s “Tiger Tales” and Nigel Rothfels’ “Killing Elephants” examine the racial
dynamics of big game hunting and imperial rule. Schell’s discussion of the shikari
(British Indian hunter), especially in relation to the pursuit of the anthropomorphized
tigress, merges issues of race and gender. Deborah Denenholz Morse focuses upon
the critique of race prejudice in connection with social class critique through animal
representations in texts ranging from Wuthering Heights and Black Beauty to W.W.
Jacobs’ “The Monkey’s Paw.”
Deborah Morse’s analysis of Heathcliff-as-wolf/dog as well as underdog or
“the monkey’s paw” as connected to the “factory hand” introduces the concern
with social class that informs many of the essays in our collection. Heather Schell’s
“Tiger Tales” claims Sewell’s Black Beauty as speaking for the “working-class
animal,” while Kipling “gave his British readers in the 1890s the perspective of
the educated, professional animal and threw in a degenerate aristoc(r)at for good
measure.” Teresa Mangum’s essay on dog elegies discusses Ouida’s tear-jerker A
Dog of Flanders in relation to social class, commenting upon the loyal dog Petrasche
Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (Ashgate, 2004).

18 See Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870:
Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge, 2000). See also
Elsie B. Michie, Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian
Woman Writer (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993) and “White Chimpanzees
and Oriental Despots: Racial Stereotyping and Edward Rochester” in Jane Eyre, ed. Beth
Newman (Boston and New York: Bedford Books of St Martin’s Press, 1996).
Introduction
and his young master Nello, outcast and dead in each other’s arms. Anca Vlasopolos
in “Pacific Harvests” views the issues of social class and animal representations
through the figure of the Japanese boy Manjiro, who served as both worker and
master, victim and exploiter of the whaling and feather trades. In another vein, Mary
Jean Corbett in “‘The Crossing o’ Breeds’” dwells upon not only the fine gradations
of the middle classes but also middle-class assumptions in relation to marriage as
George Eliot depicts them in the context of animal reproduction. Elsie Michie details
the association of horses and hunting with the power of the newly rich commercial
classes that are threatening the hegemony of the landed gentry and aristocracy.
Two essays in our volume that are concerned with social class critique also make
new connections between Victorian scientific and literary representations of animals.
Alan Rauch’s essay, “The Sin of Sloths: The Moral Status of Fossil Megatheria
in Victorian Culture,” traces the use of the giant ground sloth as a metaphor
conceptualized by science and literature. Rauch discusses Charles Kingsley’s
dream sequence in his “Condition-of-England” novel Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet,
in which Kingsley’s Mylodon “serves as an emblem … for the emerging moral
consciousness that would eventually distinguish humans over all other creatures.”
Ultimately, the sloth is used by scientists like Richard Owen—Victorian England’s
most successful comparative zoologist—as a cautionary metaphor or parable that
tells humans about the “importance of will, self-determination, and responsibility in
the ‘highest’ living organisms.”19 Martin Danahay’s essay, “Nature Red in Hoof and
Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in Victorian Art” interprets Darwin’s influence
upon the representations of pets and other domesticated creatures in the paintings of
the Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, and in the
work of the preeminent Victorian animal painter, Edwin Landseer. Danahay explores
the ways in which representations of domestic animals acting violently subverted
the Victorian ideology of the “home” as a sanctuary from the symbolic violence of
economic relations in an industrialized society.
Martin Danahay’s focus upon violence reverberates throughout our book, from
Elsie Michie’s interpretation of Alec’s descent from horseback to rape Tess and
Rothfels’ account of the killing of the Exeter Change Menagerie’s beloved elephant
Chunee to Deborah Morse’s analysis of the bird-girl Rima’s murder in W.H. Hudson’s
Green Mansions. One of the essays in our collection that most closely tries to fathom
the violence directed against animals is Anca Vlasopolos’ “Pacific Harvests.” Her
essay considers the history of nineteenth-century whaling concerns and the feather
trade, economies that decimated whales and albatrosses. Vlasopolos importantly
links nineteenth-century waste and exploitation with contemporary use and abuse
of animals, connecting the Victorians’ obsession with animals to our own need to
understand and protect the earth’s other creatures: the “kin” Darwin identified so
many years ago.
The essays in this collection are unified by the goal of recovering elusive
Victorian attitudes toward animals. Our interdisciplinary approach in the volume,
19 See especially Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the
March of Intellect (Duke University Press, 2001) and One Culture: Essays in Science and
Literature, ed. George Levine and Alan Rauch (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
10 Victorian Animal Dreams
both within and between essays, demonstrates a commitment to understanding the
full cultural significance of animal representation in the Victorian era. We hope
that our essays will provide a new complexity and sophistication to the study of
Victorian animal images through interpretations of the disparate, rich use of animal
representations by Victorian writers, scientists, painters, sociologists, politicians,
hunters, philosophers—and even policemen.
The effort to illuminate the Victorians’ obsession with animals is inevitably
haunted by our own twenty-first-century perspective, and our vision is informed
by ideas of animal rights and by new critical perspectives from the “posthuman”
to “speciesism.” Although perspectives on animal welfare and animal subjectivity
were changing drastically during the Victorian era, few people espoused the radical
idea of animal rights that can now be found in organizations such as People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) or within the academic discourse on animal
consciousness. Some enlightened artists—most signally, Joseph Wolf at the London
Zoo—portrayed animals as subjects of their own lives, regardless of the desires of
human beings.20 The work of many scholars, including the seminal revolutionary
philosopher Peter Singer in Animal Liberation, Richard Ryder in Animal Revolution,
Keith Tester and others in Animals and Society21—and the more recent protest lodged
by Donna Haraway in Companion Species Manifesto—has codified the urgent need
for an inclusive transformation of consciousness. Perhaps that sea change will be
influenced by these essays that search for the meanings of animal representation in
a period even more fractured than our own by the tensions between exploitation and
compassion.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Susan J. and Richard G. Botzler eds. The Animal Ethics Reader
(Routledge 2003).
Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Manchester
University Press, 1993).
Bending, Lucy. The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century
English Culture (Oxford 2000).
Bernstein, Susan David. “Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre
Question,” in Journal of Victorian Culture 6.2 (Fall 2001): 250–70.
20 See Joseph Wolf, Tiermaler/Animal Painter, ed. Karl Schulze-Hagen and Armin Geus
(The Basiliskerirene Press, 2000). This beautiful book, written in both German and English,
was the accompanying text to the first exhibition of Wolf’s work in 2000–2001, in Darmstadt,
in Leiden, and at the Natural History Museum in London. Wolf painted the animals at the
London Zoo in their natural habitat, as subjects of lives that were not necessarily linked to
humankind.
21 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (Ecco/HarperCollins, 1975); Keith Tester, Animals
and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights (London: Routledge, 1991). See also Animal
Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, ed. H. Peter Steeves and Tom Regan (SUNY
Press, 1999).
Introduction 11
—— “‘Supposed Differences’: Lydia Becker and Women Lecturing in Science in
Victorian England,” in Sidelined Sciences, eds D. Clifford, E. Wadge, A. Warwick
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Corbett, Mary Jean. Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790–1870:
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Ills, Critical Inquiry 28:2 (2002): 369–418.
—— “And Say the Animal Responded?” trans. David Wills in Zoontologies; The
Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe, pp. 121–46.
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Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
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——, Susan Wiseman and Ruth Gilbert eds. At the Borders of the Human: Beasts,
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Maunder, Andrew and Grace Moor eds. Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation
(Ashgate 2004).
Michie, Elsie B. Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the
Victorian Woman Writer (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993).
—— “White Chimpanzees and Oriental Despots: Racial Stereotyping and Edward
Rochester” in Jane Eyre, ed. Beth Newman (Boston and New York: Bedford
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PART I
Science and Sentiment
Chapter 1
Animal Angst:
Victorians Memorialize their Pets
Teresa Mangum
Ear-piercing canine choruses assault the ear. Fetid steam wells up from wet heaps
of manure and permeates eyes, nose, and skin. Congealing blood oozes under and
over leather shoes. The glistening, flaccid skin and featherless pores of stripped,
dripping carcasses border a market path formed by counters of iced fish, dank with
salt, sea, and death. Londoners of the nineteenth century lived in a veritable animal
sensorium. Responses to this intimate apprehension of living, working, preening,
suffering, dying, and dead animals varied intensely. Urban and animal historians alike
document the extreme emotions roused by this animal assault upon the senses—from
fear to disgust to outrage to compassion—and the consequent actions. The fearful
called for clearing the streets in the interest of public health; the disgusted demanded
the removal of slaughter houses and “knacker’s yards” to the periphery; the outraged
sought legal protection for working animals; and the collectively compassionate
formed organizations such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals, founded in 1824 and denominated “Royal” in 1840, or launched seemingly
quixotic rescue projects such as the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs, initiated in
1860 and established in the famous Battersea location in 1871.
I would like to express warm thanks to Martin Danahay, Deborah Morse and Corey
Creekmur for careful readings and inspiring suggestions and to Lata and Rafi for creature
comfort. A fellowship from the University of Iowa Provost’s Office and a residency at the
University of Iowa Obermann Center for Advanced Studies both provided generous support
for the writing of this essay. I also want especially to thank Andy Pryke for allowing me to use
his photograph of the Hyde Park pet cemetery. This essay is my own small memorial to the
animals who have suffered and died in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Diana Donald’s perspective as an art historian is especially intriguing in “‘Beastly Sights’:
The Treatment of Animals as a Moral Theme in Representations of London, c. 1820–1850,”
Art History 22.4 (November 1999): 514–44. The omnipresence of animals is also detailed
by Keith Thomas in Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–
1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983). The sensory intensity of Victorian Britain has become
an increasing scholarly interest more generally as evidenced by two fascinating studies:
John Picker’s Victorian Soundscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Janice
Carlisle’s Common Scents: Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004).
The history of this dog shelter is provided in Gloria Cottesloe’s Lost, Stolen, or
Strayed: The Story of the Battersea Dogs’ Home (London: Arthur Barker Ltd., 1971).
In this essay, I look at another emotional call and response to urban animals,
particularly to those who were or could be conceived of as pets. That is, I want
to examine the intersecting rituals and emotions that we call loss, mourning, and
memorialization when we are discussing humans. Then as now, pets, in particular
dogs, received the greatest attention—whether they were abandoned, abused,
valued, or mourned. Work animals, hunted animals, and even animals caught in
the entertainment and exhibition industries provoked concern and efforts for their
protection. This concern could be motivated by the amorphous form of attention
we call “love” for animals or by an intolerance of suffering in any sentient being.
In any case, animals that could be imagined as pets evoked unique and distinctive
sensations that ranged from deliberate avoidance to guilt, dread, fury, longing,
deep personal attachment, sentimental idealization, and anthropomorphism. These
emotions easily tangled into the web of feelings and social practices we characterize
as mourning and, further, into the impulse to memorialize objects of affection that
mourning calls into being.
Synthesizing the voluminous literature on death and mourning during the
nineteenth century, Gerhard Joseph and Herbert Tucker assert that Victorian beliefs
about death produced two master narratives: the first narrative is rendered visible
in representations of the moment of death and the second in newly prescriptive
descriptions of the mourning process. While ostentatious mourning for public
figures declined after 1880, Joseph and Tucker note that extravagant expressions
of grief continued throughout the century in private life, at least for those families
able to afford the time and materials requisite for the full repertoire of mourning.
Moreover, the process was never guesswork: etiquette manuals provided detailed
instructions regarding the number of months that particular forms of dress should
be worn, imposed prohibitions against social activities, and even delineated
distinctions between appropriate grief and melancholia (Tucker, p. 119). Historians
have long documented the material history this mourning has left us—the crepe-
draped carriages, the child “mutes” hired to follow the hearse, the black, gray, then
lavender clothing, the rings and lockets containing a lock of the loved one’s hair,
jet fashioned into every kind of ornament imaginable, the painted miniatures, and
later the photographs of the dead themselves. However, Esther Schor’s important
book Bearing the Dead shifted the focus from practices and commodities toward
the cultural significance of represented mourning. She argues that “an individual’s
traumatic grief” is “a force that constitutes communities and makes it possible to
conceptualize history.” She adds, “Even as we give life to the dead, the dead shape
the lives we are able to live.” As Victorians deepened their attachment to pets,
In A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Oxford:

Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 111.
See for example, the collection of essays Death in England: An Illustrated History,
ed. Peter C. Jupp and Claire Gittings (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Pat
Jalland’s Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and James
Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death (London: Newton Abbot, 1972).
Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 4.
Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets 17
many turned to these existing forms of mourning to express loss but also to find a
legitimizing community.
Animal historian Keith Thomas claims that by 1700 symptoms of obsessive pet-
keeping were pervasive. Substantial evidence suggests that among the wealthier
classes the memorializing of animals became increasingly commonplace through
the eighteenth century and fairly widespread among upper- and middle-class pet
owners by the late nineteenth century. In her fascinating history of and attitudes
toward dogs, Susan McHugh notes that images of canine faithfulness appeared on
“Classical funereal iconography, and these idealized depictions in turn appear to
have modeled the primary significance of dogs in early medieval Western religious
paintings.” McHugh’s Dog, like Robert Rosenblum’s The Dog in Art from Rococo
to Postmodernism and Ruth Silverman’s The Dog Observed: Photographs, 1844–
1983, reproduces monuments to humans which represent abstract qualities such as
loyalty and faithfulness through the figures of sculpted dogs (especially greyhounds,
according to McHugh) as well as monuments designed by humans to honor individual
dogs. These studies demonstrate that Victorian memorialization of animals built
upon a time-honored practice. However, the profusion of animal memorials, the
intensified attachment to animals, and the engulfment of pets in the elaborate rituals
and commodities unique to nineteenth-century mourning together signal a profound
shift in human–animal relations during the nineteenth century.
Ivan Kreilkamp convincingly argues in another essay in this volume that
animals, particularly dogs, had a fragile hold on human sympathy and imagination.
I would argue that this same precariousness—implicitly analogous to the anxious,
unpredictable human hold on subjectivity and social status in a rapidly changing
nineteenth-century world—encouraged compensatory attachment to pets. We find
Thomas also quotes a witticism of turn-of-the-eighteenth-century racehorse painter

Benjamin Marshall: “‘I discover many a man who will pay me fifty guineas for painting his
horse who thinks ten guineas too much to pay for painting his wife’” in Keith Thomas, Man
and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane,
1983), p. 117.
Dog (London: Reaktion Press, 2004), p. 68.
Robert Rosenblum, for example, discusses the sculptures of Anne Seymour Damer
(1749–1828) in The Dog in Art from Rococo to Postmodernism (New York: Harry Abrams,
1988). Damer was hired to memorialize the pets of a number of wealthy patrons). He notes
in passing that in the late eighteenth century “many dogs and other pets began to be buried
… under monuments conceived in the image of their masters’ and mistresses’ tombs. He also
includes an illustration of a small funerary monument for a dog named Ninette that he claims
was intended as a “mock-serious bibelot that mimicked the exalted allegories of eighteenth-
century tombs” by Claude Miche (1738–1814), known as Clodion (p. 22), and an amazing
monument by Matthew Cotes Wyatt (1777–1862) to commemorate an English lord’s favorite
Newfoundland, Bashaw (p. 37). Bashaw was on view at the Great Exhibition of 1851. There
are also photographs of memorials in Ruth Silverman’s The Dog Observed: Photographs,
1844–1983 (New York: Knopf, 1984). Kathleen Kete says that in Parisian pet cemeteries
“distinction between animal and object was lost in canine mortuary art. Tombstone motifs
were a pastiche of everyday life, clichés that evoke otherworldly fantasies with the ideal of
petkeeping culture” in The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 91.
traces in intensified expressions of emotion, guilt, loss, and mourning of animals.
Moreover, the devaluing of most animal life, on one hand, and the heightened
attachment to pets, on the other, is a crucial and inherent contradiction in nineteenth-
century human–animal relations, a contradiction to which I repeatedly turn in
this essay. While mourning focused on an individual pet, the attention to animal
suffering often encompassed animals that could have been “pets”: mutts, despised
street mongrels, overworked carters’ dogs, and any animals scientists would refer
to as research subjects and animal rights advocates would lament as vivisectors’
victims. This contradiction deeply threatened animals’ well-being. Those who
dismissed animals as worthless callously inflicted neglect, abuse, abandonment,
and painful scientific experimentation. Those who “loved” animals doomed most
(the non-pets) to misery when they demarcated and exalted a few species as “pets.”
Both responses demanded the abjection of animals as a condition of co-existing with
humans. Whether taken as models for human behavior, Job-like figures of endurance,
members of what we might now call an extended humanimal family, or as projections
of the (human) self or of idealized human virtues, dogs could be at once praised and
vilified, loved and quite deliberately lost. Kreilkamp painfully demonstrates how
imagery and action that positions human characters as dogs debases the human. In
this essay I flip the coin to consider the corresponding appreciation, in all senses of
that word, when pet owners attempted to signify the value of an animal through our
species’ practices of mourning and memorialization.
In the case of animals woven into human domestic lives, memorialization
obscured the paradoxical economic and objectified status of the pet. How could one
own a being and yet refer to it as an equal in phrases such as “man’s best friend”?
Mourning rituals allowed pet “owners” to represent symbolically the loss this
animated property could so curiously compel. Surprised by the intensity of grief,
many animal owners sought to reconcile cultural confidence in human superiority
with personal feelings of bereavement that sometimes dealt a stronger blow than grief
for departed human companions. Perhaps such unanticipated emotional priorities
help explain why in the latter part of the nineteenth century the same excessive
mourning rituals that comforted a widowed queen promised to ease the misery of
losing a family pet. In fact, like the Queen, her subjects who could afford to do so
sought representational strategies to memorialize their animals—from portraits to
tombstones to tourist artifacts to epitaphs, poems, and stories. Turning to aesthetic
forms used to honor human dead and comfort the living, pet owners endeavored to
give shape, significance, and legitimacy to the unfathomable loss they felt at the
death of “mere animals.”10 In so doing, pet owners would have come face to face with
the paradoxical nature of human–animal relationships. An animal’s death asks the
human companion to reconcile personal, domestic experiences of loss, on one hand,
In the “Mutts” chapter of Dog, Susan McHugh documents the tendency of eighteenth-
and especially nineteenth-century commentators to draw explicit connections between street
dogs and human homeless people (p. 135).
10 Ironically, even as I sit polishing this essay, an announcer for the local NPR affiliate—
in an appropriately subdued, concerned voice—describes the wide range of services offered
by one of their sponsors, a local pet cemetery.
with the tumult of animals and the uses and understandings of animals—for example,
the pleasure in eating and wearing animals, the threat of rabies, the dependence
upon the labor of animals, the ambivalent need for and horror of vivisectionists’
experiments—on the other hand. How deeply did this experience of contradictions
affect those whose pets died? Presumably, then as now, many pet owners mourned a
single animal whom they believed to be utterly unique (though usually replaceable).
Others were taught by grief to see animal suffering all around them and to work on
behalf of animals’ welfare.
Pet mourning practices may have encouraged the avoidance of responsibility
toward “animals” as a whole, but the obvious fact of many Victorians’ attachment
to pets and grief at their loss ought to be acknowledged. And in order to accept grief
as a legitimate response to an animal’s death, Victorians first needed to believe that
animals themselves were capable of love—that should “we” be the first to go that
the animal would grieve the loss of “us.” Cultural discomfort with deep emotional
attachment to animals, the valuation of animals that attachment implied, and the
social responsibilities to animals such value would impose thus led to a curious
displacement of grief. In effect, the nearly obsessive depictions of dogs overwhelmed
by grief for lost masters and mistresses or faithfully attached to places associated
with the dead may be the most powerful, if also the most oblique, animal memorial
projects of all. This desire to be monumentalized by an animal’s grief inspired
a host of images, many of such imaginative force that they still circulate today.
Schoolchildren in Scotland learn of “Greyfriar’s Bobby,” a Skye Terrier who kept
vigil by his policeman owner’s Edinburgh grave for fourteen years. Bobby allegedly
mourned at “Auld Jock’s” tomb from his death in 1858 until the dog’s own death
in 1872.11 Visitors to the Victoria and Albert Museum are still moved by Sir Edwin
Landseer’s sentimental portrait of a forlorn working-dog, “The Old Shepherd’s Chief
Mourner” (1837), in which the collie rests his chin on the shepherd’s humble coffin.
College students read Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Helvellyn” (1805) and William
Wordsworth’s poem “Fidelity” (1805), though private ownership prevents us from
seeing Landseer’s painting of 1829, “Attachment,” all of which commemorate
the female terrier that guarded her dead master’s body on the Scottish mountain
Helvellyn for three months in 1805. Much of the world recognizes “Nipper,” the
loyal fox terrier featured in Francis Barraud’s oil painting “His Master’s Voice”
(1898–99) as he allegedly listens to that silenced voice on a Victrola and who still
11 Bobby himself was memorialized, first with a tag inscribed “Greyfriar’s Bobby.”
Presented to him by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, 1867 (along with exemption from the
local dog tax) and in 1873 by a fountain paid for by Angela Burdett-Coutts. E.S. Turner
provides details in “Animals and Humanitarianism,” a chapter of his book All Heaven in a
Rage (London and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965). Marjorie Garber also writes in Dog
Love that Bobby’s collar and dinner dish are displayed in the Huntley House museum in
Edinburgh (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, p. 256). Bobby’s own final resting place
is unknown, she notes, so that when a group of Americans decided to create a grave marker
for him, they placed it atop the human gravesite. Also, thanks to Deborah Morse for pointing
me to the beautiful children’s book about Jock and Bobby: Eleanor Atkinson’s The Ghost of
Greyfriar’s Bobby, illustrated by Ruth Brown (New York: Dutton Juvenile, 1996).
listens today in RCA Victor advertisements.12 In The Face in the Corner: Animals in
Portraits from the Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Robin Gibson recalls
the popularity of Edward VII’s Caesar, a “somewhat disreputable-looking terrier,”
who followed Edward’s coffin in the funeral procession from Westminster Hall
to Windsor. Caesar’s fame finely illustrates the complexities of animal mourning.
According to Gibson, faked photographic postcards that placed the dog at Edward’s
feet and a fictional memoir entitled “Where’s Master?” transformed the impressive
spectacle of a dog in mourning into a commercially successful memento of both the
dead king and the old, dying dog.13 Given these examples, perhaps it should not be
surprising that many of Robert Jesse’s illustrations throughout his book History of
the British Dog depict abandoned, dying, or grieving dogs.14 Volume II opens with
a sketch titled “Forsaken.” A small mixed-breed terrier crouches on a cliff over the
sea, ears and tail flattened, and howls desperately as the sails of a ship disappear
over the horizon. In a later sketch, “Where thou diest, will I die,” a dog drapes
himself over a boulder to gaze mournfully at the rough cross in the sand below. Jesse
accompanies his discussion of Scott’s and Wordsworth’s versions of the Helvellyn
incident with his own drawing. Here, the terrier strains over the fallen man’s chest
to look into his blank, dead face, surrounded by the sublime mountain setting in a
sketch simply titled “Helvellyn.”
Perhaps this capacity for grief that merits grieving is what we mean when we say,
“I love my dog.” Like us, the Victorians sought to understand or at least to justify the
intense connection, culminating in terrible loss, they felt for their pets. John Berger,
one of the most skeptical present-day theorists of human-animal relations offers
a grim explanation. He bemoans the “Vanishing Animals” who fade beneath the
imposition of human emotion onto beast companions: “He can be to his pet what he
is not to anybody or anything else. Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react
as though it, too recognizes this.” In the cross-species relationship which results,
“the autonomy of both parties has been lost … the parallelism of their separate lives
has been destroyed”;15 the animal is “co-opted into the family and into the spectacle”
(p. 665). The late brilliant philosopher, poet, and animal trainer Vicki Hearne
alternatively suggests that language binds humans to dogs. Remarking that dog
trainers characterize success as learning how to “talk” to a dog, she surmises, “Dog
and handler, having learned to talk, are now in the presence of, and are commanded
12 McHugh briefly discusses what she calls “dog mourner” paintings in her chapter
on “Breeds” (in Dog) as further evidence of the way that pure breed dogs were held up
as exemplars of intelligence and virtue. Also, in The Beast in the Boudoir, Kathleen Kete
discusses the popularity of similar stories of bereaved animals haunting the graves of their
dead humans in France (p. 22).
13 The Face in the Corner: Animals in Portraits from the Collection of the National
Portrait Gallery (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1998), pp. 70–71.
14 Researches into the History of the British Dog, from Ancient Laws, Charters, and
Historical Records, with Original Anecdotes and Illustrations of the Nature and Attributes
of the Dog from the Poets and Prose Writers of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times. With
Engravings Designed and Etched by the Author Volumes I and II (London: Robert Hardwicke,
1866).
15 New Society 39 (31 March 1977): 664.
by, love.”16 This profound need for connection lies at the heart of current “therapy
dog” programs in which dogs and their human companions visit convalescent homes
and hospitals. In Dog Love Garber speculates that autistic children and elderly people
with dementia are more drawn to dogs than people because “the overwhelming
dimension of human need sometimes makes the task of reparation seem hopeless.
Dog love is local love, passionate, often unmediated, virtually always reciprocated,
fulfilling, manageable” (p. 14). In an increasingly urban, competitive, commercial,
and alienating environment such as nineteenth-century London, the longing to
believe in animal love was also motivated, I suspect, by what philosopher Sandra Lee
Bartkey calls “touch hunger,”17 a craving heightened by the loss of tactile affection.
Dogs and other pets satiate this hunger with eloquent affection. Together, these
competing interpretations of animals’ behaviors raise crucial problems for Victorians
who longed to believe animals could experience love and therefore grief in order to
justify their own very human feelings of attachment and loss. Berger would argue
that human attachment paradoxically obliterates animals, even the exalted animal.
Human language is as likely to construct and constrain an animal by “binding” it as
to inspire love as humans would understand it. And inevitably, animal attachment
to humans is best understood by humans when expressed as animal service to and
for humans. Nineteenth-century scientists, literary critics, and novelists insist upon
animals’ capacity not merely to endure human adoration but to return the emotion.
And repeatedly, memorializing animals teeters precariously upon celebrating the
dubiously humane process of “humanizing” animals rather than trying to respond to
an animal as truly other, truly itself.18
Recent, extremely valuable studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
domesticated animals such as Keith Thomas’ Man and the Natural World (1983),
Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English And Other Creatures in Victorian
England, Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-
Century Paris, and Christine Kenyon-Jones’ Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-
Period Writing insightfully speculate on the cultural and social changes produced
by human interaction with “real” animals, even as Erica Fudge reminds us that the
history of animals is inevitably “the history of human attitudes toward animals”.19
“Real” animals are the subject of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions
in Man and Animals (1872).20 Darwin argues that animals experience feelings
16 “Talking with Dogs, Chimps, and Others,” Raritan 2:1 (Summer 1982): 81.
17 Sandra Lee Bartky, “Unplanned Obsolescence: Some Reflections on Aging” in Mother
Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), p. 67.
18 While nearly all serious animal studies scholars address the profound problem of
“knowing” animals, several philosophers offer especially useful questions (though not
answers). Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and
Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) provides an excellent
overview of the issues and a fine bibliography.
19 See Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) and Kenyon-Jones’ Kindred Brutes: Animals
in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001). The quotation appears in “Animal
Lives,” History Today 54.10 (October 2004): 6.
20 Darwin, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
analogous to human emotions: he reads signs of these emotions in gestures, facial
expressions, and postures. Part science, part sentiment, Darwin’s work embodies
the longing for reciprocal ardor that innumerable Victorians felt in the presence of
animals. In particular, Darwin claims that animals feel and express love and loyalty,
hence grief. Darwin offers detailed descriptions, accompanied by drawings, of what
he considers the “inverse emotions” in animals—hostility and love—to claim that
animals feel at least a rudimentary version of human passions. Acknowledging that
an animal’s affection for its master “is combined with a strong sense of submission,
which is akin to fear,” Darwin argues that canine codes of submission are visible
when the body “sinks downwards or even crouches, and is thrown into flexuous
movements” (p. 120). However, he adds that such behavior, “so clearly expressive
of affection, is of the least direct service to the animal” (Darwin, p. 56). Lacking a
motive in self-interest, Darwin argues, this behavior must be attributed to genuine
feeling. He dodges the connection between affection and physical pleasure by quoting
Pierre Gabriolet in French with the proviso that “the reader can judge whether the
explanation appears satisfactory.” According to the editor’s translation, Gabriolet
writes: “It is always the most sensitive parts of the bodies that seek the endearments.
When the whole length of the flanks and body are sensitive, the animal twists and
crawls under the caresses” (Gabriolet in Darwin, p. 119). Sidestepping the erotic
implications of Gabriolet’s language, Darwin invokes a chaste anthropomorphic
narrative through which to explain animal behavior—the family romance.
In the chapter “Joy, High Spirits, and Love” Darwin speculates on the connection
between love and physical contact. He attributes the “strong desire to touch the
beloved person” to “inherited habit, in association with the nursing and tending of our
children, and with the mutual caresses of lovers” (Darwin, p. 212). He continues:
lower animals share the same principle of pleasure derived from contact in association
with love. Dogs and cats manifestly take pleasure in rubbing against their masters and
mistress, and in being rubbed or patted by them. Many kinds of monkeys, as I am assured
by the keepers in the Zoological Gardens, delight in fondling and being fondled by each
other and by persons to whom they are attached. (p. 213)
Embedded in this mapping of animal emotions is Darwin’s longing to believe in

asexual recognition, acquiescence, desire, pleasure, and mutuality in a dog’s address
to her or his “master.” This reciprocity requires a transfer of love and longing from
the dog’s own progeny, even its own species, to its human companion. The sacrifice
produces delight in submission to a human, pleasure in lavishing undemanding
affection upon humans, and a fundamental shift from behavior dictated by an instinct
of self-preservation to behavior motivated by pure, selfless feeling.
Darwin’s book is merely a milestone among the nineteenth-century books,
magazines, and medical studies that debate animals’ ability to feel, to reason, and
even to possess immortal souls. Victorian theorists of animal emotion ranged from
armchair philosophers to leading scientists and psychologists. Eminent psychologist
Henry Maudsley, for example, protested against claims that animals could be
overwhelmed by grief in “Alleged Suicide of a Dog”,21 whereas George Romanes’
21 Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 4 (1879): 410–13.

chapter on dogs in Animal Intelligence includes myriad anecdotes featuring the
emotional life of dogs.22 As Ritvo demonstrates for the nineteenth-century British
context and Kathleen Kete for that of France, pet owners and readers drawn to
literary representations of pets developed an increasingly commercialized culture
of pet shows, pet paraphernalia, and pet stories. Increased attention to the child
and cultures of childhood prompted devastating scenes of death featuring children
from Charles Dickens’ Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41) to Little
Eva’s demise in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Readers who
spilled tears over a dog’s death—like those who wept over dead children in fiction—
demonstrated their belief in a dog’s newly imagined emotional life.
Queen Victoria’s own portrait painters, particularly Landseer, created memorials
to her animals and “family” portraits that included animals as well as children.
These portraits kept the Queen’s favorites alive on her walls long after they had
been replaced by an endlessly reconstituted menagerie of dogs, cats, birds, and
horses. These portraits promoted a vogue for animal painting and for sculptures
of animals. The Queen’s devotion to animal portraits also advanced the careers of
animal painters such as Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–1873), the Scottish Gourlay Steel
(1819–94), Freidrich Wilhelm Keyl (1821–71), Charles Burton Barber (1845–94),
and Maud Earl (1864–1943).23 Biographies of animal painters and histories of these
paintings frequently note that an artist was called in to create a painting that would
survive an aging animal’s death. William Secord’s lavish Dog Painting, 1840–1940:
A Social History of the Dog in Art (1992) richly documents the variety of poses,
narrative situations, and personalities assigned to these often anthropomorphized
figures.24 Images of attentive mother dogs and comic pictures of dogs in human
dress or situations were popular. Spectators were taught not only the value of artistic
reproductions of animals as memorializing tributes, but also how to mourn their
passing. Thus, sentimental paintings of children burying the family pet offered gentle
lessons in mourning practices and properly dignified expressions of grief.
At the same time that Londoners established homes for lost and abandoned
dogs in Battersea, they also built pet cemeteries. The nineteenth century marks the
22 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1883), rpt. ed. Daniel N. Robinson (Washington,
DC: University Publications of America, 1977). The issue continues to be hotly debated, as
suggested by Michael Pollan’s “An Animal’s Place” in a 2002 New York Times Magazine (10
November 2002: 58–65): 100, 110–11, Charles Siebert’s cover article in the 24 July 2005 New
York Times Magazine on the emotional traumas of “retired” research chimpanzees (“Planet of
the Retired Apes,” (24 July 2005): 28–35, 61–63), and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s several
books on animal emotions, among other examples, The Pig Who Sang to the Moon: The
Emotional World of Farm Animals (New York: Ballantine Books, 2003) and with Susan
McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte
Press, 1995).
23 For a quick sense of the great number, see Sir Walter Gilbey’s Animal Painters of
England, From the Year 1650: A Brief History of Their Lives and Works, 3 vols (London:
Vinton and Company, 1900–1911.) Interestingly, Gilbey’s book focuses on paintings of
animals associated with sport; he has far less to say about paintings of rural animals and
animal portraiture. He does provide helpful lists of paintings for each author he discusses.
24 Secord’s book is published by the Antique Collector’s Club, 2003.
move from enshrining pets in portraits to literal interment. Wealthy Britons had long
contrived private memorials to their pets. In the 1730s, for example, Sir Paulet St
John erected a pyramid on his Hampshire estate to honor a fallen horse and the
Duchess of Bedford built an elaborate temple complete with Corinthian columns
and an ornate frieze to mourn the passing of her Pekinese. William G. Fitzgerald’s
1896 Strand Magazine article “Dandy Dogs” suggests that by the end of the century
mourning for lost pets had become an accepted and commodified ritual available
to the larger masses.25 Fitzgerald notes the rise of dog funerals, cemeteries, and
cremation urns.26 He also describes a poetic “dog’s funeral card” (p. 550). Public
pet burial grounds were widely available by the last decades of the century. These
included the dog cemetery still visible behind the bars adjacent to the Victoria Gate
in Hyde Park, which opened in 1880 and closed in 1915 after reaching its limit of
three hundred graves. The graveyard can now only be seen by special appointment
with park officials, but even a stolen glimpse through the wrought iron fence reveals
miniature tombstones embellished with names, dates, brief epitaphs and elaborate
stone carving. A current website on pet burial in Britain reassures readers that the
Rossendale Pet Cemetery in Lancashire, with 1,500 graves, has recently gained
permission from the local council to allow owners to be buried with their pets,
observing that many had formerly had their ashes scattered on beloved pets’ graves.
One of the details provided by this website reveals a crucial contradiction in both
Victorian and our own vacillating valuation of animals: pet cemeteries in Britain
are now licensed as landfill sites. While humans can be buried in appointed pet
cemeteries, pets cannot legally be buried in human cemeteries because dead animals
are classified as “controlled waste.”27
As Fitzgerald’s “Dandy Dog” article indicates, public cemeteries called forth pet
tombstones and memorial sculpture, a vogue anticipated by well-known writers as
well as royals, as in the case of the famous sculptures Sir Walter Scott commissioned
of his beloved dogs. Victorian tourists to the homes of both Scott and Emily Brontë
routinely asked to see dying dogs and dog gravesites alike. As I have discussed
elsewhere, surviving as well as entombed animals were treated as relics of the
profound intimacy between animals and authors, tantalizing visitors who longed for
mystical communion with the dead celebrities.28 Literary critics delight in recounting
stories of the attachment between artists and their animals. Christine Kenyon-Jones
recalls that in 1808 Byron built a mausoleum at Newstead Abbey (which is still
standing) for his Newfoundland dog Boatswain and embellished it with what became
an infamous epitaph belittling human loyalty in comparison to that of his dog. The
epitaph concludes:
25 Anecdotally, my colleague Florence Boos is researching the writing of working-class

British women, who often published in small, regional newspapers. She has seen numerous
poems by poor and working women that celebrate dog companions or lament their loss.
26 William G. Fitzgerald, “Dandy Dogs.” Strand Magazine (XI Jan to June 1896): 549.
27 For these and other details about pet cemeteries in Britain see <www.pets2rest.co.uk/
petcemeteries.htm>. The site also notes a BBC television special, “One Foot in the Past:
Animal Memorials,” transmitted on 15 April 2000, which I have not yet been able to see.
28 See my article, “Dog Years, Human Fears” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 35–47.
Ye! Who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on—it honours none you wish to mourn:
To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one,—and here he lies.
In 1811 Byron attempted to ensure that he would be buried with his dog at his own
demise, a plan scotched when he sold Newstead.29 Much later in 1881 John Massie,
publishing anonymously in Temple Bar, would sniff: “‘Epitaph on a pet, in a pet!’
and ‘Cynical!’ are the exclamations which, in spite of the unpardonable punning, rise
unbidden to our lips as we reach the concluding word of our Byronic quotation.”30
Kenyon-Jones notes that Byron was attacked because his seeming parody of human
memorialization practices did not “ironize enough” (p. 12). In other words, the
genuine sense of loss that rings even through Byronic bitterness and satire disturbed
his critics more than his condemnation of human faithlessness. Kenyon-Jones also
offers a fascinating contrast between Byron and Wordsworth. In his “Essay upon
Epitaphs” (1810), Wordsworth objected to epitaphs for animals, arguing that the
animal “is incapable of anticipating the sorrow with which his surrounding associates
shall bemoan his death, or pine for his; he cannot pre-conceive this regret, he can
form no thought of it; and therefore cannot possibly have a desire to leave such regret
or remembrance behind him.”31 In her chapter on “Dog Loss,” Marjorie Garber,
discussing this same passage, muses over Wordsworth’s quandary: “This, I think, is
part of the poignancy of the relation between human being and dog: that we sense
in dogs so much in the way of sympathy for our moods, griefs, and losses—and that
we are so powerless to explain loss, death, and sadness to them” (Dog Love, p. 252).
Despite his protests, Wordsworth himself created an animal epitaph by writing an
anti-epitaph entitled “Tribute” upon the death of a favorite spaniel, Music, in 1805
(Kenyon-Jones, p. 27).
John Massie also quotes Sir Walter Scott’s letters and biographies, noting
Scott’s lamentation that “‘The misery of keeping a dog … is his dying so soon;
but, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years, and then died—what would become of
me?’” (p. 481). Like many other pet owners, Scott commissioned a statue of his
aging pet in anticipation of the need to mourn and memorialize the loss to come.
Like Byron, he dignified the memorial with a Latin epitaph, which he translated
as, “Beneath the sculptured form which late you wore,/ Sleep soundly, Maida at
your master’s door” (quoted in “Dogs of Literature,” p. 481). Massie, not nearly so
enamored of dogs as Scott, snidely adds, “When, however, a dog did die, he vowed
no perpetual widowhood, but after a decent interval, the vacancy was usually and
often completely filled” (p. 479). Despite Massie’s trivializing of Scott’s attachment,
he acknowledges the intensity and form of loss by describing a bereaved pet owner
as a widow. Yet even as Massie concedes this analogy he also undermines its force
by feminizing Scott for his sentimentalizing of animal loss and by mocking him as a
fickle widow. Interestingly, every account of Scott’s attachments to his animals that
29 Stories of Byron and his dog are detailed in George Jesse’s history of dogs along with
accounts of Scott’s and Brontë’s dogs.
30 “Dogs of Literature,” Temple Bar 61 (January–April 1881): 476.
31 From The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, quoted in Kenyon-Jones, p. 26.
I have seen specifically includes one detail. This same deerhound Maida appears in
several portraits of Scott and is reputed to be a model for several dog “characters”
in his novels. On the night that Maida died, Scott sent a note excusing himself from
a dinner party, offering as his reason “the death of a dear old friend.”32 Scott’s being
affected to the point that he would renege on human social obligations as well as his
substitution of the term “friend” for dog clearly fascinates biographers; they treat
Scott’s grief as an endearing, idiosyncratic foible of a great romantic artist. However,
Scott’s note quietly asserts a revolutionary attitude toward a non-human animal.
Unselfconsciously elevating a dog to the status of a cherished friend deserving of
marked withdrawal and mourning, Scott memorializes Maida—one animal—in an
anecdote that came to possess the permanence of the actual memorial he erected to
his dog.
The degree to which animals promised access to the dead, especially the dead
artist, is particularly striking in the case of Emily Brontë, whose elusiveness tantalized
readers even during her brief career as a living author. As late as 1897, Clement
Shorter’s essay “Relics of Emily Brontë” lists her dogs as prominent “relics” for
tourists who visited Haworth in the years just after Emily’s death.33 Bemoaning the
lack of information and evidence of the writer’s life and character, especially a formal
portrait, Shorter turns instead to a sketch of her dog Ginger, a watercolor of the dog
Keeper and the cat Flossie curled up together, and a watercolor of Anne Brontë’s
dog, King Charlie. Even today, guides tell visitors to Haworth that the affectionate
cat on the grounds is a descendant of one of the Brontës’ cats (and I’ll confess to
being a bit awed myself a few years ago when the then reigning cat insistently leapt
into my arms, where it curled up and remained, purring, as I strolled through the
church and viewed Brontë memorials). Biographers of the Brontë sisters, beginning
with Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 Life of Charlotte Brontë and including Stevie Davies’
entire chapter on Emily Brontë and animals in Emily Brontë: Heretic, discuss the
strange relationship between Emily and the large part-mastiff, part mongrel dog
Keeper and then, after Emily’s death, between Charlotte and Keeper. Shorter quotes
one of Charlotte’s guests after Emily’s death who explicitly makes the connection
between Keeper, “this poor old memento of the past,” and the writer herself:
He was very old, almost toothless, and I believe wholly blind…. This had been the
companion of Emily Brontë in her long strolls across the hills, when she wandered afar;
with brain seething with weird imaginations; and later, when she sought the congenial
melancholy of the moors with weakening footstep, and heart and brain gradually fading
before the fatal advance of the English atropos—consumption.34
32 This story appears in every source I’ve consulted including the two I reference here,
the Temple Bar essay and George Jesse’s account of Scott.
33 The Bookman: A Literary Journal 6.1 (September 1897): 15–19.
34 Shorter is quoting John Stores Smith, invited to visit Charlotte Brontë after she read his
essay on Mirabeau. Smith’s account was first printed in a Manchester newspaper, Free Lance,
in 1868 and then reprinted in Shorter’s source, The Manchester City News, on December 28,
1896.
As this visitor’s musings illustrate, the dog becomes the companion of the mysterious
writer not only through literal space but through the psychological space of illness
and the spiritual space of death itself.
Maureen Adams gathers such accounts in her recent essay “Emily Brontë and
Dogs: Transformation within the Human–Animal Bond.”35 Feeding the myth of the
Brontës’ strangeness, these stories detail the violence of Keeper and Emily alike,
feeding fans’ fantasies of moors and madness. Marjorie Garber also notes that
accounts of Emily Brontë’s funeral invariably allude to Keeper’s presence in the
funeral cortege and in the pew at the family’s feet, where he remained while the burial
service was read. Keeper’s behavior during the three years he lived after Emily’s
death, interpreted by family and visitors alike as never-ending grief, transformed
him into a living memorial to the elusive artist. He ultimately came to epitomize
canine faithfulness but also the human–pet celebrity relationship itself thanks to
repeated retellings in biographies, memoirs, and even travel guides. Once again,
the author of “Dogs of Literature” suggests how this process evolves, as the critic
(quite implausibly) argues that the fictional mastiff Tartar in the novel Shirley “is
Charlotte Brontë’s tribute to her dead sister Emily’s favorite, as ‘Shirley’ is to Emily
herself; and all the scenes in which they figure are taken from real life” (“Dogs of
Literature,” p. 496). The Temple Bar author concludes with the whimsical suggestion
that “in a sense, they are all ours—Maida, Lauath, Boatswain, Diogenes—even as
those are ours whose possessions or creations they were” (p. 499). This association
of dogs with writers and of animal memorialization with the arts, particularly the
literary arts, suggests how literature itself becomes the most enduring and accessible
memorial to animals. And while many fictional accounts of “lost” animals have been
dismissed from serious consideration for wallowing in excesses of sentimentality, the
complaint itself in part justifies the lengths to which writers went as they struggled
to represent and authorize grief felt by animals and conversely grief felt for animals.
One of the most intriguing examples, with which I will close, is the work of Louise
de la Ramé (1839–1908), who published as Ouida.
Ouida was merely one of innumerable professional and amateur authors who
wrote elegies, sonnets, short stories, and eulogies lamenting the death of pets.
Mournful poems, tales, and anecdotes memorializing animals for heroism, fidelity,
or abject victimization at the hands of humans capitalized upon the increasingly
sanctioned emotion readers were learning to feel when animals died. To note but a
few examples, we find the anonymously authored poems “My Dog’s Epitaph. By the
Subaltern” (1826) and “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” (1827);36 Louise
Imogen Guiney’s “To a Dog’s Memory;”37 an entire volume of stories about dogs
collected from The Spectator in 1895; and a tidal wave of every genre in George
R. Jesse’s two-volume History of the British Dog (1866). Indeed, the frequent
appearance in Punch of parodies lampooning such grief may be the best evidence
35 Society and Animals 8.2 (2000): 1–7.

36 “My Dog’s Epitaph. By the Subaltern” Blackwood’s 19.113 (June 1826): 685–6 and
“Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 22. 131 (Oct
1827): 439–40.
37 In Century Magazine 38 (October 1889): 947.
of its ubiquity, as we see in “An Elegy on the Death of a Pet Dog” (1900) in which
a caller “peered around the room/ And spied a cosy seat—/ Alas, for little Fido’s
doom!/ ’Twas Fido’s pet retreat!”38
However, Ouida is unique both in the range of her publications about animals
and in holding a dual role as an author and activist. In addition to publishing nearly
fifty volumes of essays, short stories, and novels and 28 identifiable essays in British
and American periodicals such as Bentley’s Miscellany, Fortnightly Review, The
Nineteenth Century, and The North American Review, Ouida also published an anti-
vivisection polemic, The New Priesthood: A Protest Against Vivisection (1897),
and a personal account of her pets and those of others, Dogs (1897). Her enduring
1872 novel A Dog of Flanders is a histrionic dirge to dog love set in Belgium.39
The emotionally grueling children’s book remains in print and has been translated
into film, including a 1959 version directed by James B. Clark and Kevin Brodie’s
1999 film. Ouida denounced the suffering imposed on animals in every conceivable
literary form. Mary Sanders Pollock’s recent study of Ouida’s “rhetoric of empathy”
offers a riveting analysis of the thematic, ideological, and stylistic connections that
link the essays, short stories, and novels in which Ouida focuses on relationships
between dogs and humans. Pollock explains that in Ouida’s view, “cruelty toward
domesticated animals also always results in disaster for the humans associated with
them, in plots suggesting that humans and nonhuman animals are bound together in
one living community … that cannot ultimately survive the mechanistic economic,
social, and intellectual structures of modernity.”40 A Dog of Flanders, like many
of Ouida’s short stories, urges this fatalistic argument through portraits of animal
death (often linked human and animal deaths) which become textual shrines.41 By
compelling readers to visit these fictional shrines, Ouida demands that each mourner
become part of a collective mourning process. Moreover, by sheer repetition of
animal characters’ suffering and death and by linking despised, abused animals with
human counterparts, Ouida challenges readers’ impulse to allow mourning for one
animal to eclipse the suffering of animals generally. Even the individualistic logic
of the nineteenth-century novel, which might encourage readers to focus so intently
on a single character—here an animal character—could be overcome as Ouida’s
fans worked their way through the novelist’s oeuvre, reading again and again of
animal suffering. Sanders offers particularly rich insight into the strategies by which
Ouida creates an “ontological equivalence of human and canine” by using a free
38 In Punch (11 July 1900): 26.

39 A Dog of Flanders. 1872 (New York: H.M. Caldwell Co., n.d).
40 “Ouida’s Rhetoric of Empathy: A Case Study in Victorian Anti-Vivisection Narrative”
in Figuring Animals, ed. Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), p. 137.
41 Pollock offers detailed analyses of Ouida’s rhetorical strategies and the political issues
she addressed relative to animal emotion in several short stories featuring dogs, including
“The Marriage Plate” and “A Hero’s Reward” from the collection Pipistrello, and Other
Stories (1880), “Moufflou” from Bimbi: Stories for Children (1882), “The Stable-boy” from
Santa Barbara, and Other Tales (1891), and “Ruffo and Ruff” and “Toto” from La Strega,
and other Stories (1899). As Deborah Morse suggests, other novels such as Black Beauty and
Beautiful Joe serve a similar function as textual shrines.
indirect narrative style to characterize both human and animal characters (p. 144).
In addition, Ouida risks using melodramatic death scenes in this same gesture of
democracy among species, relying on pathos and mourning rituals to elevate both
debased humans (the poor, the old, the ill) and animals, especially dogs.
A Dog of Flanders details the sufferings of an impoverished, artistic orphan and
his dog. Embedding the child and dog alike in tropes of orphanhood and adoption,
the novel quickens the mutual “touch hunger” of child and dog. The fairy-tale quality
of the language contrasts painfully with the harsh world of poverty and village
politics that eventually destroys both characters, and the opening delineates the co-
protragonists’ intense connection:
Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.

They were friends in a friendship closer than brotherhood. Nello was a little Ardennois;
Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were both of the same age by length of years, yet
one was still young, and the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all
their days: both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It
had been the beginning of the tie between them, their first bond of sympathy; and it had
strengthened day by day, and grown with their growth, firm and indissoluble, until they
loved one another very greatly. (pp. 9–10)
Raised by his grandfather after his mother’s death, Nello survives thanks to the
labor and hence income provided by a dog whose loyalty they win by rescuing the
dog from near death. Described in heroic terms, the dog of Flanders “was body,
brains, hands, head, and feet to both of them: Patrasche was their very life, their
very soul” (p. 19). The narrator explains the dog’s adoration for the boy through
canine biography: the pup of abused working dogs, he had been brutalized by his
drunken former owner. Abandoned for dead, he is discovered and gently restored
by grandfather and grandson. The dog supports the family for years by drawing
their milk cart to customers, labor Patrasche insists upon by standing between the
shafts of the cart, displacing the human laborer. Growing old together, dog and the
man anticipate their deaths “with one thought,—when they were gone, who would
care for their darling?” (p. 113). In effect, Ouida intensifies the family romance of
dog love by elevating the dog first to family provider and then to surrogate parent (a
conceit James Barrie turns to comic effect a decade later in nursemaid “Nana,” the
St Bernard who minds the Darling children in Peter Pan).
Falsely accused by the leading man of the neighborhood of setting fire to his
barn, Nello loses all of his customers; his grandfather dies hungry and miserable;
and Nello’s last hope—a prize for a painting he has submitted to a local contest—is
given to another, less talented but socially prominent young painter. Starving and
shivering, Nello crawls into the Antwerp Cathedral for a last glimpse of the paintings
that had inspired his love of art. Nello’s final vision is Rubens’ The Raising of the
Cross. As Pollock points out, in the lower left foreground of this famous painting a
dog gazes up at an agonized, dying Christ (Pollock, p. 141). Nello and his starving,
age-weary companion slip into death and are found the next day on the cold stone
floor in icy embrace:
All their lives they had been together, and in their deaths they were not divided; for when
they were found the arms of the boy were folded too closely around the dog to be severed
without violence, and the people of their little village, contrite and ashamed, implored
a special grace for them, and, making them one grave, laid them to rest there side by
side—forever! (p. 170)
The complexity of this scene of memorialization is stunning. The mirroring of

two dogs loyal to their suffering masters intensifies the impact and significance of
the deaths of boy and dog alike by associating Nello and Patrasche with the most
powerful scene of “faithfulness” and self-sacrifice in western culture. As Deborah
Morse points out, Ouida further solemnizes and aggrandizes their attachment and
their deaths by alluding to David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel 1:23,
“Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they
were not divided: they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions.”42
Victorians would not only have recognized the Biblical reference; they would also
have situated the story of a “mere dog” within the literary history of this allusion
from Elizabeth Gaskell’s use of the phrase in Mary Barton (1848) to George Eliot’s
epitaph on Maggie and Tom’s tomb in The Mill on the Floss (1860). The exaltation
of the mourning dog at Christ’s feet also offers the reading spectator a model for
proper mourning of the boy and dog. Together the verbal and “visual” allusions
insist upon the rightness of a shared, equitable grave.
In addition, the painting takes the form of mise-en-abîme, as a scene within the
final death scene. And this image within an image is nested within the novel—itself a
funereal march through the mourning of the mother whose death generates this unique
family, the (most unusual) assumed death of Pastrache’s parents, the mourning of the
grandfather who orphans Nello a second time, and the inevitable death of the boy
and dog toward which the novel moves. Dog love, framed by human art and divine
architecture, apotheosizes boy, dog, and readers alike in the purifying purgatory
of death. “Touch hunger” is etherialized and spiritualized; quite literal hunger is
purged of corporeality and human brutality alike; and the loss of a loyal, loving dog
redeems readers. Ouida’s increasingly ferocious polemic on animal suffering and its
correlation with human misery suggest that she hoped this memorial would inspire
readers to compassion and action on behalf of wretched humans and animals alike.
All of the “monuments” that I have discussed in this essay remind us of the
limits of articulating an animal. Even when an artist creates a memorial intended to
make a pet speak for itself (much less represent “its” human), the memorial honors
a dead animal while potentially distracting humans from the many animals living
miserable lives. As animal historian Erica Fudge reminds us, histories of animals
depend upon texts written by humans, so that in a sense animals then and now (with
the problematic exception of apes participating in language experiments) are already
buried in and by human language.43 By extension, painted and sculpted memorials
42 Many thanks to Deborah Morse for drawing my attention to the allusion and its
dissemination in literary texts.
43 See Erica Fudge’s essay, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in
Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002),
pp. 3–18.
suffer the same limitations. With every attempt to memorialize an animal, nineteenth-
century pet owners simultaneously acknowledged and more deeply buried the
silent beings on whom they increasingly depended for intimacy and a meaningful
emotional life.44 Thus, the metamorphosis of love into loss and of mourning into
projects of memorialization also implicated human–pet relations in the larger cultural
project of containing the omnipresent animal corporeality of nineteenth-century
life. Jonathan Burt45 and Diana Donald, among others, have demonstrated that the
link between “vision and cruelty” inspired groups like the RSPCA. Burt argues that
the desire to prevent the sight of cruelty to animals motivated a range of legal and
social changes, such as the 1835 Act that made malicious and wanton cruelty to
animals illegal, the 1857 bill that prevented children under fourteen from witnessing
the activities within slaughterhouses, and the 1867 ban on public demonstrations of
vivisection.46 By literally or metaphorically burying animals, pet owners joined this
social ambition to hide animals and their suffering from public view and hence, from
public responsibility.
In effect, memorials—whether portraits, statues, elegies, or heroic anecdotes—
could supplant actual animals and their suffering. This happened when, through the
complex operations of mourning, pet memorials transformed one animal into all
animals. Memorials marked the gap left by a distinct, valued animal personality.
In all fairness, they also implicitly argued for the worth of animal life and even
in some cases the hope for a reunion with the animal companion in the afterlife.
The paradoxical problem with mourning was that memorialization idealized but also
isolated the beloved pet as a being apart from the animal world of stray dogs, hunted
animals, work animals, and “food” animals.
We absolutely must acknowledge that mourning animals did in some cases
produce these unanticipated cruel consequences for animals. And yet, I would not
wish to close this essay with simple condemnation of a culture in which many people
genuinely valued animals and sought means, however sentimental and impractical,
to express that affection. In the late century riot of urban expansion, imperial
conquest, agitation by women and workers, technological transformation, and even
confusion about the relationships among species, simplicity of any kind would have
been in short supply. Clinging to the pleasures of human–animal companionship,
Victorian animal lovers may have perversely complicated the deaths of pets and
More whimsically but with her usual rigor, in “Animal Lives” Fudge addresses this issue
again in an essay that meditates on the reasons why there can’t be entries for animals in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography given the categories of information required for
inclusion.
44 I discuss the role of animal narrators in “Dog Years, Human Fears.”
45 Jonathan Burt’s essay “The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light
and Electricity in Animal Representation” is online at <www.psyeta.org> and in print in
Society and Animal 9.3 (2001): 2.
46 Burt continues his analysis of the connections between dismay over animal cruelty
and attempts to remove that cruelty from public view in his essay, “The Effect of Pets in the
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” in Hounds in Leash: The Dog in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, ed. Jonathan Wood and Stephen Feeke (Leeds: Henry Moore
Institute, 2000). Also see Diana Donald’s “‘Beastly Sights.’”
lost sight of other animals as they strove to account for that most complex of simple
things—loving and feeling loved. Fortunately, many denizens of the nineteenth
century, Ouida among them, learned from their own love and loss to perceive animal
suffering in the dizzying, diffuse animal sensorium that surrounded them. In their
example, we find hope that mourning has the potential to inspire change rather than
obliviousness and action rather than self-absorption in grief.
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Chapter 2
Victorian Beetlemania
Cannon Schmitt
On a peach-coloured divan sat Lady Narborough pretending to listen to the Duke’s

description of the last Brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection. (Oscar Wilde,
The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Is he [i.e. the human], indeed, ever able to perceive himself completely, as if laid out in a
lighted display case? (Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense”)
With wonderful improbability, Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche between them
provide two opposing poles of what collecting beetles might have meant in the
second half of the nineteenth century. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), a book
given over to tracing the lineaments of passions as they are passed from person
to person, acted on, and imperfectly but insistently concealed, Wilde figures such
collecting as the most incommunicable, inconsequential, and uninteresting passion
extant. Lady Narborough must feign attention to “the Duke’s description of the last
Brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection” simply because no genuine
curiosity can be mustered for an enterprise that, if not one’s own, seems so purely a
“hobby” in the most deprecating sense of the term: demanding mastery of endless
minutiae but with no purpose beyond itself; tediously difficult and pointless all at
once. Nietzsche, on the other hand, in his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral
Sense” (1873), deploys the image of the sort of shallow illuminated box used to
house collections of beetles (and much else besides, from butterflies to mineralogical
samples) as a metaphor for access to full knowledge. Passion, communicable or
not, makes no appearance; on the contrary, at stake is the possibility of objectivity
understood as dispassionate observation. Can humans ever see themselves with the
detachment and clarity, Nietzsche asks, with which they ostensibly see the objects of
their collections? Can humans know themselves the way they know their beetles?
Taken together, these two passages might be understood to reiterate a familiar
account of the relation between natural history and biological science—as well as
between passion (and affect, feeling, emotion) and knowledge. Over the course of
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891; reprint, Oxford and New York,
1981), p. 159.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), trans. Daniel
Breazeale, in Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg (eds), The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings
from Classical Times to the Present (Boston, 1990), p. 889.
I range freely among these terms because each names an aspect of the phenomenon
that, in its connection with beetles, I address in this essay. Rei Terada parses the distinctions at
issue as follows: “by emotion we usually mean a psychological, at least minimally interpretive
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the story goes, amassing and studying
collections of insects and other bits of the natural world moved from being primarily
an amateur pursuit driven by affective attachments to being part of the apparatus
of rational and institutional knowledge production. The anachronism involved in
placing Wilde’s late-Victorian Duke as an exemplar of a pre- or early Victorian stance
toward collecting seems to be part of Wilde’s point: the Duke inhabits an intellectual
backwater—and is thus hopelessly boring to his au courant interlocutor—precisely
because he has failed to make the shift from taking pleasure in natural history’s
endless tabulations to submitting to the selfless rigor demanded of the practitioners
of biology. Nietzsche’s question, reformulated in light of this gloss on Wilde’s Duke,
might then read: can humans ever look at themselves without affective or narcissistic
distortion? Can humans know themselves scientifically?
Nietzsche answers in the negative. What we call truth, he avers, is nothing but a
“movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms,” what we call
science nothing but “the graveyard of perceptions.” The force of such a critique
inheres in its diagnosis of language as inherently anthropocentric and so unsuitable
for the production of a truth understood as “objective.” Interestingly, however,
Nietzsche shares a principal assumption of the objectivist epistemology he attacks:
namely, that true knowing, were such a thing possible, must be divorced from the
knowing self and its clamorous feelings and desires. His critique further assumes—
or, to be more exact, the question that precipitates it assumes—that humans’ vision
of the nonhuman is somehow less contaminated by that clamor than humans’ vision
of themselves. But what if the interest humans take in the (rest of the) natural world
experience whose physiological aspect is affect. Feeling is a capacious term that connotes both
physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions) …. Passion highlights
an interesting phenomenon, the difficulty of classifying emotion as passive or active.” Feeling
in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA and London, 2001),
pp. 4–5, emphasis in the original. Adam Frank provides an acute survey of recent work on
affect in “Some Avenues for Feeling,” Criticism 46.3 (Summer 2004): 511–24.
Useful discussions of Victorian natural history, not all of which endorse the version of
its history I have condensed (and, to be certain, simplified), include D.E. Allen, The Naturalist
in Britain: A Social History (Harmondsworth, 1978); Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural
History, 1820–1870 (London, 1980); and Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural
History (New York and Oxford, 1989). See also Gavin Bridson’s monumental The History of
Natural History: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1994).
Foucault’s well-known account of that shift says nothing about pleasure, focusing
instead on the advent of historicity in the study of nature: “One day, towards the end of the
eighteenth century, Cuvier was to topple the glass jars of the Museum, smash them open and
dissect all the forms of animal visibility that the Classical age had preserved in them …. [This
act] was also to be the beginning of what, by substituting anatomy for classification, organism
for structure, internal subordination for visible character, the series for tabulation, was to
make possible the precipitation into the old flat world of animals and plants, engraved in
black and white, a whole profound mass of time to which men were to give the renewed name
of history.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(1966; New York, 1970), pp. 137–8, emphasis in the original.
Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying,” pp. 891, 894.
Victorian Beetlemania 37
were no less intense than their self-interest? And what if that interest were not
opposed to the production of knowledge but constitutive of it?
In this essay, I explore these possibilities by way of the Victorian fascination with
beetles—an unlikely but nonetheless instructive set of materials for a case study
in the affective registers of knowing the natural world in the nineteenth century.
Specifically, I attend to beetlemania in the work of two Victorian natural historians:
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Close scrutiny of passages dealing with
beetles central to Darwin’s Autobiography (1887) and Wallace’s autobiographical My
Life (1905) reveals what might be called an affective epistemology: a way of knowing
beetles, and by extension the natural world in its entirety, that exceeds the bounds of
the positivistic and classificatory. Beetles in these texts are not simply objects that
provide the empirical occasion for natural–historical knowledge production. They
are such objects, but they are also more: organisms whose alluring alterity gives
rise to paroxysms of desire and bouts of miserly acquisitiveness. Beetle-hunting is
associated with a powerful and peculiar emotional charge—something of which we
can discern in a comment of Darwin’s from late in his life: “Whenever I hear of the
capture of rare beetles, I feel like an old war-horse at the sound of a trumpet.”
It would be possible to conduct such a study by gathering and dissecting literary rather
than natural–historical examples of beetlemania. To add to that found in The Picture of Dorian
Gray, four specimens from a myriad: In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the Reverend Farebrother
shows himself an intellectual cousin of Wilde’s Duke when he remarks to Lydgate: “I can’t
let you off, you know, because I have some beetles to show you. We collectors feel an interest
in every new man till he has seen all we have to show him.” George Eliot, Middlemarch
(1872; reprint, Oxford, 1996), p. 159. A defining question of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is
whether Jim himself should be seen as a “butterfly” or a “beetle.” Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
(1900; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1986), passim. In a Gothic mode, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle
takes the eponymous creature as an embodiment of exotic and feminized evil; one of Marsh’s
narrators describes his encounter with “the beetle” thus: “it enveloped my face with its huge,
slimy, evil-smelling body, and embraced me with its myriad legs.” Richard Marsh, The Beetle
(1897), in Graham Greene and Sir Hugh Greene (eds), Victorian Villainies (New York, 1984),
p. 452. Finally, this small set of literary beetles would be incomplete without mention of a
vignette by Edmund Gosse that, in the midst of an autobiographical account of growing up
the son of the Plymouth Brother and marine zoologist Philip Henry Gosse, reveals a decidedly
more urban, not to say modern, sensibility: “My Father was praying aloud, in the attitude I
have described, and I was half sitting, half lying in bed, with the clothes sloping from my
chin. Suddenly a rather large insect, dark and flat, with more legs than a self-respecting insect
ought to need, appeared at the bottom of the counterpane, and slowly advanced. I think it
was nothing worse than a beetle. It walked successfully past my Father’s sleek ball of a
head, and climbed straight up at me, nearer, nearer, till it seemed all a twinkle of horns and
joints. I bore it in silent fascination till it almost tickled my chin, and then I screamed ‘Papa!
Papa!’” Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (1907; reprint, Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 134. (I
thank Margaret Diane Stetz for alerting me to this last passage.)
Charles Darwin, quoted in Arthur V. Evans and Charles L. Bellamy, An Inordinate
Fondness for Beetles (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), p. 137. In the course of this essay
I hope to demonstrate, among other things, just how over-determined is Darwin’s choice of
an animal simile to convey the intensity and corporeal–emotional valence of his response to
“hear[ing] of the capture of rare beetles.”
For Darwin and Wallace, of course, knowing the natural world was tantamount to
knowing the human world as well: in formulating the theory of evolution by natural
selection, these two men placed humans in nature as never before, necessitating
the recognition of humans as the product of the same forces that produced other
animals and all life on the planet. Early in the twenty-first century that recognition
has something self-evident or even banal about it—at least for those not affiliated
with the various fundamentalisms that continue to attempt to resist it. As Barbara
Herrnstein Smith writes, by way of a prelude to interrogating the uncertainties this
way of putting it masks (and not, to be sure, ventriloquizing the aforementioned
resisters), “Of course we are animals, it is said ….” But the human/nature divide
was a tangible and potent one in the nineteenth century, as widespread dismay at
the assertion of its nonexistence attests. Novelist and ornithologist W.H. Hudson
succinctly isolates the source of that dismay when, looking back to the mid-Victorian
period from the 1920s, he writes: “[T]he fact of evolution in the organic world was
repellent to us … because we did not like to believe that we had been fashioned,
mentally and physically, out of the same clay as the lower animals.”10
One order of those lower animals, beetles, occupy a surprisingly important
position in the genealogy of that “fact.” Darwin, like many in his generation,
dates the beginning of his career in natural history from the time he became a
beetle-hunter.11 Wallace, explaining the key moments in his development of the
explanation of the origin of species, gives as much space to his early encounter
with beetles as he does to his reading of Malthus on population.12 Darwin’s and
Wallace’s retrospective treatments of beetles—and of the whole inhuman array
of barnacles, fish, spiders, wasps, earthworms, and so on for which beetles stand
by way of synecdoche—evidence the role of feeling in the making of knowledge.
They also suggest a new way of thinking about the consequences of evolutionary
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations,” differences:

Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 15.1 (2004): 2, emphasis in the original. On the
surprising continued potency of the anxieties surrounding the recognition of the human as
animal, see Dana Seitler, “Freud’s Menagerie,” Genre 38 (Spring/Summer 2005): 45–70.
10 W.H. Hudson, A Hind in Richmond Park, vol. 15 of The Collected Works of W.H.
Hudson (New York, 1922–23), p. 254. Nicholas Jardine and Emma Spary remind us, however,
that “the boundaries between the natural and the conventional, artificial, and social have been
continually contested and relocated.” Jardine and Spary, “The Natures of Cultural History,” in
N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E. Spary (eds), Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge, 1996),
p. 12. In particular, the scientific understanding of the relation between humans and nature
has taken varied and contradictory forms over the last three centuries—from a conviction
that the two may be spoken of as discrete entities, to a conviction that the latter includes
the former, to many beliefs in between these two ends of the continuum or indeed off the
continuum altogether. For two treatments of representative pre-Victorian debates, see Emma
Spary, “Political, Natural and Bodily Economies,” in Cultures of Natural History, pp. 178–96;
and Paul B. Wood, “The Science of Man,” in Cultures of Natural History, pp. 197–210.
11 Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882 (1887; reprint,
New York and London, 1969), pp. 62–64. Subsequent citations appear in the text following
the abbreviation A.
12 Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2 vols (London,
1905), vol. 1, pp. 237–57. Subsequent citations appear in the text following the abbreviation M.
theory for how the Victorians understood, to quote Smith again, “the continuity or
discontinuity between humans and other species.”13 Those consequences are usually
explained in terms of the disturbing transformation of what had been a relation
of similitude (between apes and humans, say) into one of kinship. But potentially
more traumatic and indisputably more demanding of less straightforward models
of relation than self/other was the transformation of what had been radically unlike
humans (beetles, say) into kin. As Marjorie Grene and David Depew write: “After
Darwin [and Wallace], the whole multitudinous and variegated biota on and over and
below this earth forms a family, not nearer to or farther from some social ideal type,
but related to one another through generation, just as our families are—though …
in a much more complex pattern, of which we perceive only scattered bits.”14 After
Darwin and Wallace, knowing beetles is knowing one’s relatives—and no longer
entirely distinguishable from knowing oneself.
1.
At one moment in his posthumously published Autobiography, Darwin addresses his

difficulties with a memory he describes as “extensive” but also “hazy” and “poor”
(A p. 140). In this context, the things recalled with ease and precision as he looks
back over his life—the plains of Patagonia, the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego,
his disagreements with his wife over Christianity—take on special significance.15
Prominent among those things are beetles. “I am surprised,” he relates, in a section
treating his days as an undergraduate, “what an indelible impression many of the
beetles which I caught at Cambridge have left on my mind” (A p. 63). He goes on to
gesture at the reasons for that indelibility by connecting it to pride of authorship: “No
poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in
Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects the magic words, ‘captured by C. Darwin,
Esq.’” (A p. 63). Despite an initial emphasis on the insects themselves, the identity
of the beetle or beetles in question here seems irrelevant: “delight” results from the
discovery of a heretofore unknown species and the commemoration or attribution of
that discovery (“‘captured by C. Darwin’”) metaphorized as literary achievement;
the details (of the poem, of the insect) remain unspecified, apparently immaterial.
In one sense, Darwin’s metaphor encourages a view of collecting as, like writing,
an act of creation: “magic words” bring something into being. In another, collecting
and writing figure as interchangeable not because finding beetles is like composing
poems but because both derive value from the moment of recognition provided by
publication. Indeed, collecting represents an even more narcissistic activity than
writing: whereas the poet delights in seeing his poem published, the collector thrills
not to the picture or name of the thing caught but rather to the appearance of his own
name.
13 Smith, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations,” p. 6.

14 Marjorie Grene and David Depew, The Philosophy of Biology: An Episodic History
(Cambridge, 2004), p. 214.
15 I discuss Darwin’s memory of Fuegians and its role in evolutionary theory in “Darwin’s
Savage Mnemonics,” Representations 88 (Fall 2004): 55–80.
The rest of the passage, however, trading as it does in the precision of binomial
nomenclature (“Panagœus crux-major,” “P. quadripunctatus” [A p. 63]) paired
with vaguely loving descriptions (a specimen of the former is called “pretty [and]
a treasure” [A p. 63]), gives the lie to the notion that, as Darwin claims elsewhere
in the text, he was impelled in his search for rare beetles by “the mere passion for
collecting”—that the things collected, that is, were a matter of indifference (A p. 62).
But the tension between what might be thought of as acquisitiveness inspired by
affective and narcissistic motives and a commitment to discerning the particulars of
living things in and for themselves remains evident throughout.16 Consider in this
regard the following anecdote, which Darwin provides in illustration of the claim
that “no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave
me so much pleasure as collecting beetles”:
I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles
and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to
lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected
some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle
out, which was lost, as well as the third one. (A p. 62)
In this passage, fabulous in both the Aesopian and the more familiar sense of the
word, the author of On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man, and
Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) recalls his earlier incarnation as an avid collector
driven to tragicomic loss by the unbridled desire for rarity and novelty. As with the
indifference to the exact identity of the specimen labeled “‘captured by C. Darwin’”
in Stephen’s Illustrations of British Insects, the failure to mention the species of
beetle in question suggests indeed a “mere passion for collecting” divorced from the
attempt to produce knowledge, and especially from any specifically coleopterous
epistemophilia, any burning desire to learn about beetles. The moment in which one
of the three insects is “popped … into [Darwin’s] mouth,” however, raises another
possibility. If the collection for its own sake can be imagined to have no necessary
relation to knowledge (the Linnean system subtending it in this case marking merely
the potential for adding one’s own moniker to an elaborate nomenclatural edifice—
in the form, for instance, of some Panagœus darwini), the incorporative gesture that
provides an interim solution to the problem of two hands and three beetles itself
16 The same tension may be found in Darwin’s account of many moments on the Beagle
voyage. In a letter to Frederick Watkins, for instance, he writes of South America: “The
brilliancy of the scenery throws one into a delirium of delight, and a beetle hunter is not
likely soon to awaken from it, when whichever way he turns fresh treasures meet his eye.”
Francis Darwin ed., Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 2 vols (New York, 1888), vol. 1,
p. 213. On the significance of this “delirium of delight” as a precursor to what will come to
be Darwin’s understanding and representation of a natural world given shape by evolutionary
change, and thus in constant flux, see James Krasner, “A Chaos of Delight: Perception and
Illusion in Darwin’s Scientific Writing,” Representations 31 (1990): 118–41. Jane Camerini
gives an account of Darwin’s and Wallace’s (as well as Joseph Dalton Hooker’s and Thomas
Henry Huxley’s) fieldwork in “Remains of the Day: Early Victorians in the Field,” in Bernard
Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context (Chicago, 1997), pp. 354–77; see also Jane
Camerini, “Wallace in the Field,” Osiris, 2nd ser., 11 (1996), pp. 44–65.
suggests a kind of “knowing” that is visceral and immediate: an (inadvertent) tasting,
an (attempted) preserving, a (near) ingesting. Such knowing teeters on the threshold
between the cultural and the natural: Darwin-the-collector is transmogrified into
Darwin-the-animal, tearing off bark and putting beetles in his mouth, the “one which
[he] held in [his] right hand,” “alas,” spewing an acidic defense to save itself from
being pinned and put in the display case (or, for all it knew, eaten).
This moment recalls two others, each of which provides help in formulating the
nature of Darwin’s transmogrification and its implications for thinking the inter-
implication of knowledge and affect. The first is the founding of the “Gourmet”
or “Glutton Club,” a club devoted to dining on flesh formerly “unknown to human
palate.”17 Darwin was a member at about the time the beetle encounter is supposed
to have taken place. The second is the example Darwin gives in the Descent of a dog
faced with a situation similar to his own: “Mr. Colquhon,” Darwin reports, “winged
two wild-ducks, which fell on the opposite side of a stream; his retriever tried to
bring over both at once, but could not succeed; she then, though never before known
to ruffle a feather, deliberately killed one, brought over the other, and returned for
the dead bird.”18 Both eating nonhuman animals not commonly regarded as food
and telling stories of canine cleverness constitute, as Harriet Ritvo has it in The
Animal Estate, “exciting exercise[s] in human prowess”—confirming the separation
between human and animal by reasserting human dominance.19 Both also seem to
confirm the separation between the affective and the epistemological—the enjoyable
but frivolous frisson provided by the taste of hippopotamus, for instance, having
little to do with the argumentative edge Darwin hopes to gain in making his case for
human descent from other animals by putting into evidence a rational dog.
When we consider such exercises in connection with the tale of the three beetles,
however, an additional interpretation comes into view. Darwin offers up the retriever
anecdote expressly to establish the similarity between (as the title of the chapter
of the Descent in which it appears puts it) the “Mental Powers of Man and the
Lower Animals.”20 The rhetorical trope at work in that chapter can be summed up
(perhaps presumptuously) as anthropomorphism: the attribution of human-like traits
to animals. But since, in the beetle tale, the young Darwin (as described by the
old Darwin) comes off as rather slower than Mr Colquhon’s retriever, it might be
fair to speak here as well of zoomorphism: the attribution of animal-like traits to
humans.21 And what, then, was the Glutton Club if not an institution formalizing
behavior common to adventurous omnivores: testing the world by tasting it (even
17 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist
(New York and London, 1991), p. 88; see also Janet Browne, Charles Darwin, vol. 1: Voyaging
(New York, 1995), p. 109.
18 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols (1871;
reprint, Princeton, NJ, 1981), vol. 1, p. 48.
19 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian
Age (Cambridge, MA and London, 1987), p. 11. See also Harriet Ritvo, “Zoological
Nomenclature and the Empire of Victorian Science,” in Lightman, Victorian, pp. 334–53.
20 Darwin, Descent, vol. 1, p. 35.
21 For a compelling treatment of the epistemological and rhetorical stakes involved in
Darwin’s complementary anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, see John R. Durant, “The
if, in the event, the world burns one’s tongue and has to be spat out)? Darwin’s
beetles provide a glimpse of a knowing that has to do not only with how humans go
about encountering the natural world but also with how one part of nature (retriever,
Cambridge undergraduate) goes about encountering another (wild duck, beetle,
strange flesh)—and that involves not only dispassionate observation but also delight.
In this instance, knowledge is not achieved at the expense of self and its passions;
on the contrary, selfishness and passion take the shape of (and give shape to) the
desire to know. Furthermore, the knowledge that results tells of the literal relatedness
of the human self to the objects of its inquiry. Narcissism becomes a less tenable
objection to such knowledge when the boundaries between knower and known begin
to waver.22
2.
It may be that such readings are hopelessly anachronistic. By invoking an

understanding of the human as an animal among animals to illuminate Darwin’s
beetle-collecting days at Cambridge, they risk conflating two distinct Darwins and
two equally distinct views of nature. For those days predated not just the formulation
of the theory of evolution by natural selection and the public demonstration of its
applicability to humans but even the circumnavigation of the globe documented in
The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) that provided key data on which that theory was
based.23 Any suggestion of kinship between the unlucky young Darwin and the beetle
he placed in his mouth (or, rather, between Darwin and the unlucky beetle he placed
in his mouth), it might be objected, smuggles a post-1837 vision of humans as part
of the natural world into an earlier historical moment—a moment characterized most
saliently by a natural–theological sense of the complexity and diversity of nature as
confirming not only the existence of a Creator but also the difference and divinely
sanctioned supremacy of the human.24
Ascent of Nature in Darwin’s Descent of Man,” in David Kohn (ed.), The Darwinian Heritage
(Princeton, NJ, 1985), pp. 283–306.
22 As I note elsewhere: “In the wake of Darwinism, the distinction humans make
between themselves and other animals must be seen as essentially arbitrary. Like ‘species’ in
the Origin (‘Certainly no clear line of demarcation has as yet been drawn between species and
sub-species … or, again, between sub-species and well-marked varieties …’), ‘human’ after
the Descent becomes a term of convenience, a name for a difference that may not actually
exist.” Schmitt, “Darwin’s Savage Mnemonics,” pp. 72–3.
23 The text that has come to be known as The Voyage of the Beagle was originally
published as Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the Various
Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle, under the Command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N, from 1832
to 1836, Darwin’s contribution to the Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of H.M.S. Adventure
and Beagle, between the Years 1826 and 1836, Describing Their Examination of the Southern
Shores of South America, and the Beagle’s Circumnavigation of the Globe, ed. Robert FitzRoy
(London, 1839).
24 On 1837 as the date of Darwin’s conversion to transmutationism, see Sandra Herbert,
“The Place of Man in the Development of Darwin’s Theory of Transmutation, Part I. To July
1837,” Journal of the History of Biology 7.2 (Fall 1974): 217–58.
But the beetle story, although documenting a moment from the late 1820s or
early 1830s, is set down on paper in 1876. Darwin tells tales of a younger self,
and he cannot help but do so in the way so many other retrospective Victorian
narrators (e.g. the poet in The Prelude [1850], Jane in Jane Eyre [1847], Pip in Great
Expectations [1861]) do, which is to say by crafting the past from the vantage of
the present. Darwin tells the story of his youthful encounter with beetles from the
position of one who knows (more: as one who was arguably the most successful in
demonstrating) the relatedness of all living beings. The concluding sentence of the
Origin reads: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having
been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet
has gone cycling according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”25 Once
attained, could “this view of life” ever be forgotten? Composing his Autobiography
over fifteen years after that sentence was penned, could Darwin write of his early
encounters with beetles without recalling that they were his relatives?
If such questions seem over-ingenious, we can at least turn to another retrospective
narrator who gives solid evidence of the possibility of thinking human–beetle
kinship in the first half of the nineteenth century: Alfred Russel Wallace. In My
Life, Wallace provides a detailed account of how he became a naturalist interested
in, and eventually capable of providing a solution to, the question of the origin of
species. Toward the end of that account, summing up its most germane elements, he
concludes:
But, as already stated, the events which formed a turning-point in my life were, first,
my acquaintance with [Henry Walter] Bates, and through him deriving a taste for the
wonders of insect-life, opening to me a new aspect of nature, and later on finding in him a
companion without whom I might never have ventured on my journey to the Amazon. The
other and equally important circumstance was my reading Malthus. (M vol. 1: p. 240)
I note in passing that Wallace tropes as appetitive (“a taste”) his new-found relation
to “the wonders of insect-life.” But more to the point is the fact that Bates, the
entomologist remembered for discovering the existence of a mimicry that bears his
name (and that also, coincidentally, often has to do with “taste”), did not introduce
Wallace to insects in the abstract.26 The introduction, as Wallace makes clear, was to
25 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859; reprint, Cambridge MA and London,
1964), p. 490.
26 In The Malay Archipelago, opposite a full-page illustration of “Moluccan Beetles,”
Wallace describes Batesian mimicry: “If [a] butterfly, being itself a savoury morsel to birds,
… closely resembled another butterfly which was disagreeable to birds, and therefore never
eaten by them, it would be as well protected as if it resembled a leaf; and this is what has
been happily termed ‘mimicry’ by Mr. Bates, who first discovered the object of these curious
external imitations of one insect by another belonging to a distinct genus or family, and
sometimes even to a distinct order.” Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The
Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise; A Narrative of Travel with Studies of Man
and Nature (1869; 10th edition, 1890; reprint, New York, 1962), p. 306.
Coleoptera. Describing his surprise and excitement at the sheer number of species of
beetles in existence, Wallace writes:
If I had been asked before how many different kinds of beetles were to be found in any
small district near a town, I should probably have guessed fifty or at the outside a hundred,
and thought that a very liberal allowance. But I now learnt that many hundreds could
easily be collected, and that there were probably a thousand different kind within ten miles
of the town…. I also learnt from him [Bates] in what an infinite variety of places beetles
may be found, while some may be collected all the year round, so I at once determined to
begin collecting…. I therefore obtained a collecting bottle, pins, and a store-box; and in
order to learn their names and classification I obtained … Stephen’s “Manual of British
Coleoptera.” (M vol. 1: p. 237)
Through Bates Wallace contracts a “passion for collecting” beetles, to recall Darwin’s
Autobiography, but not one rooted, as for Darwin, in rarity. The reverse attracts
Wallace: beetle profusion, beetle diversity, ease of capturing beetles in “an infinite
variety of places” and “all the year round.”27 Further, although novelty is at issue, in
this case novelty belongs not to specific but as yet unnamed species (Darwin’s “two
rare beetles” joined by a “third and new kind”) so much as to the natural world in its
entirety: beetles “open[ed] up to [Wallace] a new aspect of nature.”
The reference is an oblique one, and deliberately so: Wallace solicits readerly
curiosity in uncovering the identity of this “new aspect” and the difference it makes
or interest it raises. Clarification comes twenty pages further on in My Life, in a
passage in which Wallace quotes from a letter he wrote to Bates in September,
1847—according to Wallace, the last correspondence between the two before they
set out for the Amazon:
After referring to a day spent in the insect-room at the British Museum … and the
overwhelming numbers of the beetles and butterflies I was able to look over, I add: “I
begin to feel rather dissatisfied with a mere local collection; little is to be learnt by it. I
should like to take some one family to study thoroughly, principally with a view to the
theory of the origin of species. By that means I am strongly of the opinion that some
definite results might be arrived at.” (M vol. 1, pp. 256–7)
“Overwhelming numbers,” initially the occasion for becoming a collector of beetles,

lead now to dissatisfaction with a “mere local collection”—even when that collection
promises fair to hold “probably a thousand different kind.” What Wallace described
as his “taste” for beetles suddenly seems consonant with that which caused Darwin
to place one of the two rarities in his mouth to free a hand for a third.28 What had
27 Counted in terms of number of species, beetles make up 20 per cent of the living
organisms on the earth—and a staggering 25 per cent of all animals. Such profligate profusion
is presumably what J.B.S. Haldane had in mind when, according to a famous but possibly
apocryphal anecdote, he answered the question of what might be inferred about the Creator
from studying the natural world with the phrase: “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” Evans
and Bellamy, Inordinate, pp. 9, 11.
28 See, in this connection, what is perhaps Wallace’s most fully rendered account of the
satisfaction of his taste for insect life (in which a butterfly, not a beetle, plays the starring role):
looked quite different from Darwin’s accumulative drive ends up resembling it at the
moment a new procedure and a new aim come into view: the searching scrutiny of
“some one family” in the hopes of producing “some definite results” in connection
with “the theory of the origin of species.” Wallace turns from accumulating—which,
like tasting or ingesting, can seem to be an “animal” mode of dealing with (the rest
of) nature—to thorough study and “theory.”29 But that theory (ironically, although
not merely so) leads back to what had, for a moment, apparently been left behind:
human kinship with beetles, butterflies, ducks, retrievers.30 Taste, avid pursuit, the
sense of being overwhelmed, dissatisfaction, another round of pursuit: such are the
curious intensities and strange way-stations on the path to making knowledge.
“[O]n the succeeding [day] the sun shone brightly, and I had the good fortune to capture one of
the most magnificent insects the world contains, the great bird-winged butterfly, Ornithoptera
poseidon. I trembled with excitement as I saw it coming majestically towards me, and could
hardly believe I had really succeeded in my stroke till I had taken it out of the net and was
gazing, lost in admiration, at the velvet black and brilliant green of its wings, seven inches
across, its golden body, and crimson breast. It is true that I had seen similar insects in cabinets
at home, but it is quite another thing to capture such one’s self—to feel it struggling between
one’s fingers, and to gaze upon its fresh and living beauty, a bright gem shining out amid the
silent gloom of a dark and tangled forest. The village of Dobbo held that evening at least one
contented man.” Wallace, Malay Archipelago, pp. 328–9.
29 For prominent animal collectors, see the Descent, in which Darwin describes the
collecting habits of Australian bower birds as evidence of sexual selection and “a taste for
the beautiful” in animals: “The Satin bower-bird collects gaily-coloured articles, such as the
blue tail-feathers of parakeets …. The Regent bird … ornaments its short bower with bleached
land-shells belonging to five or six species.” Darwin, Descent, vol. 2, pp. 112–13.
30 Matthew Fichman notes: “Whatever Wallace’s fascination with beetles and butterflies,
the human implications of evolution were always in the foreground of his thought.” An Elusive
Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace (Chicago and London, 2004), p. 68. As
independent co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by means of natural selection, Wallace,
like Darwin, knew humans to be related to “beetles and butterflies.” By the end of the 1860s,
however, he arrived at a position as to the nature of that relation that departed widely from
Darwin’s: that humans were the product of natural selection guided by some higher power.
“[T]he laws of organic development have been occasionally used for a special end,” he writes,
“just as man uses them for special ends; and, I do not see that the law of ‘natural selection’
can be said to be disproved, if it can be shown that man does not owe his entire physical and
mental development to its unaided action, any more than it is disproved by the existence of
the poodle or the pouter pigeon, the production of which may have been equally beyond its
undirected power.” Alfred Russel Wallace, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection:
A Series of Essays (New York and London, 1870), p. 370. On Wallace’s “evolutionary
philosophy,” of which the belief in guided natural selection forms a crucial part, see Fichman,
Elusive, pp. 66–138. Another persuasive discussion of the interpenetration of Wallace’s social
commitments, spiritualism, and scientific thought may be found in John Durant, “Scientific
Naturalism and Social Reform in the Thought of Alfred Russel Wallace,” The British Journal
for the History of Science 12 (1979): 31–58.
3.
In conclusion, I would like to dwell on what I take to be some of the more provocative
possibilities opened up by the attention I have lavished on some appearances of
beetles in the work of Darwin and Wallace. To do so, I will return to the suggestion
in Wilde’s and Nietzsche’s depictions of natural–historical collecting that true
knowledge requires the absence of emotion and self. Most studies of epistemology
in connection with Victorian science implicitly or explicitly endorse that suggestion.
The eminent contributors to the nineteenth-century section of Richard Creath’s and
Jane Maienschein’s collection of essays on Biology and Epistemology (2000), for
instance, examine Darwinian thought in its relation to the work of three British
philosophers of science: John F.W. Herschel, William Whewell, and J.S. Mill. An
unstated but central assumption of their examinations is that the production of
knowledge is a matter that has to do chiefly with logical rigor—in this instance, with
the degree to which Darwin’s claim to have demonstrated that natural selection is
the primary mechanism for evolutionary change did or did not meet the standards
for proof laid down by the most thoughtful and persuasive thinkers of his day.31 In
Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England (2002),
to take another recent example, George Levine, although less interested in precise
evidentiary and logical questions, clarifies the degree to which certain versions of
those questions posit self-denial as the necessary prerequisite for the human—and
especially the scientific—attempt to know the world. He documents and, moreover,
endorses what he calls the “narrative of scientific epistemology,” a narrative that
tells of the individual’s willingness to give up her or his self, even to die, to achieve
knowledge of the real.32
On the first page of his book Levine notes but passes over the “gossipy quality
and … hyperbole” of the phrase “dying to know,” emphasizing instead its indication
of a commitment “to find things out, even at the risk of life.”33 But what if we
31 See Michael Ruse, “Darwin and the Philosophers: Epistemological Factors in the
Development and Reception of the Theory of the Origin of Species,” in Richard Creath and
Jane Maienschein (eds), Biology and Epistemology (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 3–26; John Hodge,
“Knowing about Evolution: Darwin and His Theory of Natural Selection,” in Creath and
Maienschein (eds), Biology, pp. 27–47; David L. Hull, “Why Did Darwin Fail? The Role of
John Stuart Mill,” in Creath and Maienschein (eds), Biology, pp. 48–63. Robert J. Richards’s
contribution differs from the first three insofar as his call for a “historical model of theories”
refuses the distinction between “ideology” (thus presumably also desire, passion, and so
forth) and “science.” Robert J. Richards, “The Epistemology of Historical Interpretation:
Progressivity and Recapitulation in Darwin’s Theory,” in Creath and Maienschein (eds),
Biology, p. 81.
32 George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian
England (Chicago and London, 2002), 17. On questions of detachment and the possibility of
objectivity in nineteenth-century Britain, see also Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance:
Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2001) and
Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (Fall
1992): 81–128.
33 Levine, Dying, p. 1.
allowed that phrase its full spectrum of connotations, its complete tonal range? What
if we acknowledged that “dying to know” names, in addition to a willingness to
sacrifice self for knowledge, a selfish desire for knowledge so pressing that one feels,
hyperbolically, as though one will die without it—or at least, to be more accurate, as
though one must say that one will die without it? What Levine dexterously excises
from his titular metaphor would then return with a vengeance (or a promise): the self
and its passions; curiosity; playfulness and exaggeration. Such a return need not be
considered in the spirit of accusation or demystification; rather, it might constitute
one component—a crucial one—in a fuller picture of what knowing means (or
meant, or could mean).
It is as a modest contribution to that fuller picture that I have offered up Darwin’s
and Wallace’s moments of passionate pursuit of beetles. I do not argue that such
moments are knowledge, merely that they are part of the process of the production of
knowledge and should be acknowledged as such. A central question for me has been
how best to conceptualize the relation between knowing and being passionate, and
one way I have sought to answer that question has been to focus on the emotional–
corporeal aspects of beetlemania: the bodily sensation resulting from the sight of
a rare beetle or the physical contact between beetle and collector. Instructive in
this connection is how Nicholas Jardine and Emma Spary, in the introduction to
their and J.A. Secord’s wide-ranging and important collection Cultures of Natural
History, make space for the body of the collector and its responses in the five “types
of practices” they identify in their attempt to elaborate the essentials of a cultural
history of natural history. Two aspects of “bodily” types of practice they single
out are “normative accounts of physical and emotional experience in response to
particular situations” and “the legitimation of natural historical enquiry by appeal
to the emotional experiences it engenders.”34 In their depictions of encounters with
beetles, Darwin and Wallace exemplify both.
Those depictions also indicate the degree to which beetlemania spills beyond
the bodily into the remaining types of practice Jardine and Spary identify: material,
social, literary, and reproductive. It belongs to literary practices as one instance of
a pervasive mode of writing up one’s experiences of knowing nature. My focus
has been on retrospective autobiographical accounts, but in travel narratives there
is, if anything, even more emphasis on the thrill of the find—accompanied by
illustrations such as “Remarkable Beetles Found at Simunjon, Borneo” in Wallace’s
The Malay Archipelago (1869) or “Longicorn Beetles of Chontales” in Thomas
Belt’s The Naturalist in Nicaragua (1874), illustrations that attempt to capture that
34 Jardine and Spary, “The Natures of Cultural History,” p. 9. For a remarkable treatment
of, among other things, Darwin’s affective relation to the natural world, see Gillian Beer’s
“Four Bodies on the Beagle: Touch, Sight, and Writing in a Darwin Letter,” in Open Fields:
Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford and New York, 1996), pp. 13–30. On Victorian
knowledge-making and the senses more generally, see Kate Flint, “Sensuous Knowledge,” in
Anne-Julia Zwierlein (ed.), Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century
Literature and Culture (London, 2005), pp. 207–215. A.S. Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia”
constitutes an engagement with some of the issues I discuss via the medium of historical
fiction; A.S. Byatt, “Morpho Eugenia,” in Angels and Insects (New York, 1992).
thrill visually and thus make it available to armchair travelers.35 (See Plates 1 and
2). Darwin and Wallace’s accounts of beetles are also at once material and social,
involving them, complete with apparatus (at a minimum, Wallace’s “collecting
bottle, pins, … store-box” and “Stephen’s ‘Manual of British Coleoptera’”), in
the wider social movement of natural–historical collecting in the period. Finally,
such accounts are also reproductive in Jardine’s and Spary’s sense insofar as
the transmission of enthusiasm for beetles (from Bates to Wallace, for example)
accomplishes the transmission of enthusiasm for the study of life as such and hence
establishes professional trajectories.36
Another answer to the question of how to think the relation between passion
and knowledge-making, one ineluctably tied to Darwin and Wallace themselves, has
been to find in the reaction to encountering nature a reaction to encountering self.
How can the self be sacrificed, put aside, or overcome in the study of nature when
one recognizes other living beings as relatives, as versions of oneself? We have
useful ways of thinking about narcissism and passion as impediments to knowing.
What we lack, it seems to me, and what I have tried to gesture at here, is a way to
take seriously the affective, visceral, animal, and familial modalities of knowing
that inform or underpin the production of human knowledge about the natural world
even as, in Darwin’s and Wallace’s case, they necessitate a view of that production
as itself belonging to “nature.”37
35 Nancy Leys Stepan analyzes the role of such illustrations in constructing a specific and
lasting image of the tropics in Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca, 2001). Wallace is the focus
of Stepan’s second chapter, pp. 57–84. On natural–historical illustration more generally, see
Peter S. Dance, The Art of Natural History: Animal Illustrators and Their Work (Woodstock,
NY, 1978); Brian Ford, Images of Science: A History of Scientific Illustration (New York and
London, 1992); and David Knight, Zoological Illustration: An Essay towards a History of
Printed Zoological Pictures (Hamden, CT, 1977).
36 In the “Preface” to the book that resulted from Wallace’s four years in South America,
A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, he reports: “the pleasures I have found
in the contemplation of the strange and beautiful objects continually met with, and the deep
interest arising from the study in their native wilds of the varied races of mankind, have
been such as to determine my continuing in the pursuit I have entered upon.” Alfred Russel
Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, with an Account of the Native
Tribes and Observations on the Climate, Geology, and Natural History of the Amazon Valley
(London, 1853), pp. iii–iv.
37 Elizabeth Grosz’s recent work takes Darwinian theory as making thinkable a relation
between nature and culture, and thus nature and knowledge, that is other than a relation of
opposition: “Darwin provides feminist and cultural theory with a way of reconceptualizing the
relations between the natural and the social, between the biological and the cultural, outside
the dichotomous structure in which these terms are currently enmeshed. Culture cannot be
seen as the overcoming of nature, as its ground or necessary mode of mediation. According to
Darwinian precepts, culture is not different in kind from nature.” The Nick of Time: Politics,
Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham and London, 2004), p. 91.
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Chapter 3
Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige

in the Nineteenth Century
Nigel Rothfels
In her 1983 book on animals and ethics, Animals and Why They Matter, Mary
Midgley makes an observation about how ideas about animals have changed in the
twentieth century. For Midgley, it was clear that there had been a “marked change
in the last few decades in the moral view that ordinary people take” toward animals.
Midgley illustrates her argument with an extended discussion of a story about
elephant-hunting published in 1850, but which, she believes, would “have passed
without comment as normal at a much later date” (Animals and Why They Matter
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 14). The story, which she quotes at
length, comes from Roualeyn Gordon Cumming’s memoir Five Years of a Hunter’s
Life in the Far Interior of South Africa. With Notices on the Native Tribes, and
Anecdotes of the Chase, of the Lion, Elephant, Hippopotamus, Giraffe, Rhinoceros,
&c (New York: Harper Brothers, 1850). Of all the stories of elephant hunting in
the nineteenth century, only a few have been as well known as those written by
Cumming, a British hunter and adventurer, who was arguably “the most celebrated
of all nineteenth-century hunters in southern Africa” (John MacKenzie, The Empire
of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988), p. 96). And of all Cumming’s elephant hunting stories, it
seems that none has caught people’s attention over the years as much as the story
related by Midgley. The key section of Cumming’s original reads as follows:
We followed the spoor through level forest in an easterly direction, when the leading party
overran the spoor, and casts were made for its recovery. Presently I detected an excited
native beckoning violently a little to my left, and, cantering up to him, he said that he had
seen the elephant. He led me through the forest a few hundred yards, when, clearing a
wait-a-bit, I came full in view of the tallest and largest bull elephant I had ever seen. He
stood broadside to me, at upward of one hundred yards, and his attention at the moment
was occupied with the dogs, which, unaware of his proximity, were rushing past him,
while the old fellow seemed to gaze at their unwonted appearance with surprise.
Halting my horse, I fired at his shoulder, and secured him with a single shot. The ball
caught him high upon the shoulder-blade, rendering him instantly dead lame; and before
the echo of the bullet could reach my ear, I plainly saw that the elephant was mine. The
dogs now came up and barked around him, but, finding himself incapacitated, the old
I am grateful to David Blackbourn and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European
Studies at Harvard University for the 2003 workshop on “Modern German Environmental
History in European Perspective” at which I first presented portions of this material.
fellow seemed determined to take it easy, and, limping slowly to a neighboring tree, he
remained stationary, eyeing his pursuers with a resigned and philosophic air.
I resolved to devote a short time to the contemplation of this noble elephant before I
should lay him low; accordingly, having off-saddled the horses beneath a shady tree which
was to be my quarters for the night and ensuing day, I quickly kindled a fire and put on the
kettle, and in a very few minutes my coffee was prepared. There I sat in my forest home,
coolly sipping my coffee, with one of the finest elephants in Africa awaiting my pleasure
beside a neighboring tree.
It was, indeed, a striking scene; and as I gazed upon the stupendous veteran of the
forest, I thought of the red deer which I loved to follow in my native land, and felt that,
though the Fates had driven me to follow a more daring and arduous avocation in a distant
land, it was a good exchange which I had made, for I was now a chief over boundless
forests, which yielded unspeakably more noble and exciting sport.
Having admired the elephant for a considerable time, I resolved to make experiments
for vulnerable points, and, approaching very near, I fired several bullets at different
parts of his enormous skull. These did not seem to affect him in the slightest; he only
acknowledged the shots by a “salaam-like” movement of his trunk, with the point of which
he gently touched the wound with a striking and peculiar action. Surprised and shocked
to find that I was only tormenting and prolonging the sufferings of the noble beast, which
bore his trials with such dignified composure, I resolved to finish the proceeding with all
possible dispatch; accordingly, I opened fire upon him from the left side, aiming behind
his shoulder; but even there it was long before my bullets seemed to take effect. I first fired
six shots with the two-grooved, which must have eventually proved mortal, but as yet he
evinced no visible distress; after which I fired three shots at the same part with the Dutch
six-pounder. Large tears now trickled from his eyes, which he slowly shut and opened;
his colossal frame quivered convulsively, and, falling on his side, he expired. The tusks of
this elephant were beautifully arched, and were the heaviest I had yet met with, averaging
ninety pounds weight apiece. (Vol. II, pp. 14–16; see also Nigel Rothfels “Why Look at
Elephants?” in Worldviews Environment, Culture, Religion, 9.2 (2005): 166–83.)
For Midgley, the passage is important on two counts. First, she is struck by the
apparent historical distance between her own view of elephants and hunting and that
which she finds in the story. She writes, “I do not know whether there are still old
gentlemen around today who can cheerfully look at that episode exactly as Cummings
[sic] did, as a piece of perfectly natural civilized behaviour …. For most of us …
the light seems somehow to have changed—indeed, it probably did so during the
First World War. We cannot see things that way any longer” (p. 15). Second, and to
Midgley, more importantly, she quotes the passage to point to a problem faced by
those whom she calls the “absolute dismissers” of claims of animal rights—those
who steadfastly argue that animals simply don’t matter in the way that people do and
that, at most, we should be concerned about the care of animals only because their
poor treatment might lead to potentially adverse consequences for people, including
potentially making them “callous in their treatment of [other] human beings” (p. 16).
For Midgley, though, “absolute dismissers” cannot possibly be that absolute.
According to Midgley, an absolute dismisser could only find fault with Cumming’s
behavior insofar as the hunter clearly degrades himself as a human through “glaring
faults of confused vainglory and self-deception” (p. 15) when he misjudges himself
vis-à-vis the elephant, the forest, and the natives as something more than he clearly
Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the Nineteenth Century 55
is—he is, after all, merely the dude with the gun and not, in fact, “chief over boundless
forests.” Here, she steps back, though, and considers the significance hunters seem to
find in the act of hunting and what that suggests about the impossibility of absolute
dismissal. In a section entitled, “The Meaning of Elephanticide,” she points out that
while on the surface sport hunting seems to function the way it does because the
hunter does not believe that the animal truly matters, in fact this kind of hunting only
exists precisely because the animal matters. She writes:
Sane people do not usually congratulate themselves [the way Cumming did] if they have
merely smashed a machine or a plastic toy, or even blown up an enormous boulder. They
choose a large animal because they can think of it, not just as an obstacle, but as an
opponent—a being like themselves in having its own emotions and interest. Other similar
sports make this plain. Bull-baiting has not been replaced by bulldozer baiting, because
active personal conflict is essential to such affairs. The self-deception of hunters like
Cummings [sic] seems therefore to be of the same kind which is found in a murderer
who supposes that by shooting an opponent from behind a hedge he has proved himself
superior to his victim. It is not like that involved in smashing a machine because one
thinks it is attacking one. It depends on a true belief in the consciousness, complexity
and independence of the victim, accompanied by a false estimate of what is achieved by
killing him. But the main fault, in both cases, depends on the true belief, not on the false
one. (p. 16)
The reason people hunt elephants for sport, according to Midgley, is because they
are able to convince themselves that they have set themselves against an aware,
dangerous, difficult, and, in some sense worthy opponent. The importance of
Midgley’s observation is that it makes clear why accounts of elephant hunting
generally present the creature as a uniquely profound contest for the hunter. If
certain kinds of hunting (for example, of fox or boar) are pursued because of the
physical challenge or the skill required of the hunter; if other types of hunting (for
example, of trout with a fly rod or of turkey with a musket) are pursued because
of the challenge of gaining unusual expertise with particular hunting technologies;
if yet other types of hunting (for example, of water buffalo or lion) are pursued
because of the potential danger to the hunter; elephant hunting, according to its
classic practitioners, combined essentially all the pleasures of other hunts into
one. It required, they argued, extraordinary physical endurance, keen intellectual
engagement, high personal risk, and expertise with unconventional weaponry.
Indeed, for many hunters in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, elephants
were quite simply the ultimate game. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in his account of
hunting in Africa, African Game Trails, “No other animal, not the lion himself, is so
constant a theme of talk, and a subject of such unflagging interest round the camp-
fires of African hunters … as the elephant. Indeed the elephant has always profoundly
impressed the imagination of mankind. It is, not only to hunters, but to naturalists,
and to all people who possess any curiosity about wild creatures and the wild life of
nature, the most interesting of all animals” (African Game Trails: An Account of the
African Wanderings of an American Hunter–Naturalist (New York: Syndicate, 1910),
p. 283). While other animals were perhaps more dangerous, thought Roosevelt, “The
chase of the elephant, if persistently followed, entails more fatigue and hardship
than any other kind of African hunting” (p. 290), and “far greater demands are
made by elephant hunting on the qualities of personal endurance and hardihood
and resolute perseverance in the face of disappointment and difficulty” (p. 292)
than in any other kind of hunting. Similarly, the hunter and explorer C.H. Stigand
maintained that “There is something so fascinating and absorbing about elephant
hunting that those who have done much of it can seldom take any interest again in
any other form of sport. It seems so vastly superior to all other big game shooting
that, once they have surrendered themselves to its charms, they cannot even treat
any other form of hunting seriously. Everything else seems little and insignificant by
comparison” (Captain Chauncey Hugh Stigand, Hunting the Elephant in Africa and
Other Recollections of Thirteen Years Wanderings (New York: MacMillan, 1913),
p. 1). In short, the elephant hunter lived a life apparently as big as his quarry. As the
professional elephant hunter James Sutherland exalted, “I think it would be difficult
to find another [life] so full of wild, exhilarating excitement, hair-breadth escapes,
and devil-may-care risks, and though the end is usually swift, perhaps that is better
than flickering out slowly on a bed of sickness” (James Sutherland, The Adventures
of an Elephant Hunter (London: MacMillan, 1912), p. 15).
One can easily assemble an extensive collection of the sort of death-defying and
somehow unimaginably formidable elephant hunting adventures related by people
like Roosevelt, Stigand, Sutherland, Samuel White Baker, William Cornwallis
Harris, Frederick Courtney Selous, Carl Georg Schillings, Arthur H. Neumann,
William Charles Baldwin, Hans Schomburgk, and others. With this in mind,
Midgley’s decision to use Cumming’s account of brewing coffee to illustrate the
necessity of seeing the quarry as a worthy adversary might seem at first a bit odd.
This adventure is, after all, a notably one-sided affair. In fact, most of the account of
Cumming’s largest bull he had yet seen concerns events after he “secured him with
a single shot.” The reason Midgley uses this particular story, however, is because it
shows especially well how hunting, in her view, must necessarily be a fantasy—it is
not that the elephant is in reality a deadly foe to Cumming’s skill and technology, but
the exact opposite. The elephant in this story is pathetic from literally the moment
the account begins, and thus the tale shows how expansive Cumming’s (and, by
extension, all hunters’) imaginative resources can be. Sport hunting, for Midgley,
is necessarily the enactment of an illusion of power and control—a fantasy built on
the hunter projecting, sometimes seemingly ironically, excessive significance onto
the hunted animal and the hunt itself. Importantly, for Midgley, this fact becomes
especially clear in historical hindsight: it seems impossible, she believes, for readers
today to imagine the elephant in Cumming’s narrative as much of anything other
Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails; Samuel White Baker, The Rifle and the
Hound in Ceylon (London: Longman, 1854); C.H. Stigand, Hunting the Elephant; James
Sutherland, Adventures of an Elephant Hunter; Carl Georg Schillings, Mit Blitzlicht und
Büchse im Zauber des Eleléscho (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1910); Arthur H. Neumann,
Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa. Being an Account of Three Years’ Ivory-Hunting
under Mount Kenia and among the Ndorobo Savages of the Lorogi Mountains, including a
Trip to the North End of Lake Rudolph (London: Rowland Ward, 1898); Hans Schomburgk,
Wild und Wilde im Herzen Afrikas (Berlin: Fleischel, 1910).
than pitiable, and Cumming’s quite different expectations make clear the historical
distance stretching over the last 150 years.
In pointing to a historical watershed around World War I, something which
seems to push the nineteenth century back into a more remote past, Midgley is, of
course, occupying pretty familiar ground. When she refers to “old gentlemen … who
can cheerfully look at that episode exactly as Cummings [sic] did,” most of us can
picture the sort of sometimes amusing sometimes unsettling anachronist Midgley
seems to have had in mind. For me, the voice is captured well in this context by
Lieut. General Sir Gerald Lathbury’s “Forward,” to Richard Meinertzhagen’s Kenya
Diary, 1902–1906—an account of Meinertzhagen’s years with the King’s African
Rifles in Kenya. Lathbury concedes that while “some readers will recoil at the
extent of the bloodshed described … life, human and animal, was held cheap in
those days, and the white man was a small minority in a country peopled by warlike
and potentially hostile tribes” (Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, Kenya Diary, 1902–
1906 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1957), p. vii). Meinertzhagen, himself, seems
equally of another time when he opens his account by writing that he dreams of the
adventures of Harris and Cumming, that he is “already in touch with the romance
of Africa,” and that “the Dark Continent has [him] firmly in her grip” (p. 3). As for
his exploits with gun and bayonet, he excuses himself by writing: “The hunting of
big game gave me good healthy exercise when many of my brother officers were
drinking rot-gut or running about with somebody else’s wife; it taught me bushcraft
and how to shoot straight. After all, the hunting of men—war—is but a form of
hunting wild animals, and on many occasions during the First World War I thanked
God that I had learned several tricks of my trade when hunting wild and dangerous
game” (pp. 178–9).
The sometimes seemingly faraway world of Meinertzhagen, Cumming, Roosevelt,
and others is captured well in an illustration entitled “Hunting on the Congo” by
Albert Richter, which appeared in 1893 in the German bourgeois magazine Die
Gartenlaube (Plate 3). The work resonates with the words of so many accounts of
elephant hunting. Carl Georg Schillings, for example, could well have conceived of
a caption for Richter’s illustration when he wrote poetically of the “sovereign, noble
feeling discovered by the hunter who, alone, stalks the gigantic African bull elephant
to terrifying closeness” (Mit Blitzlicht, p. 71; original emphasis). Typically erasing
in his accounts the presence of native trackers, gun-bearers, servants, and carriers,
Schillings considered elephant hunting as a particularly solitary and profound
experience, for which “over the long run, only a few men have the mettle” (p. 71).
Richter’s illustration, with its careful attention to the white hunter and the caricatured
representations of the elephants, the tracker, and the gun-bearer, catches that point
in countless hunting adventures when the white hunter, after a careful and quiet
stalk, finally reconnoiters the herd in order to pick out the “lead bull.” The moment
is of critical importance because it instantly separated, for most of these writers,
the sportsman from the professional and the pot hunter. The true sportsman, it was
argued (in line with Midgley’s ideas about the quarry), sought only the male—the
females being imagined as physically less spectacular and less of a challenge and
threat. To be sure, it was occasionally unavoidable that a female would be shot, but
not, it was claimed, without cause. As Hans Schomburgk put it in the introduction to
his Wild und Wilde im Herzen Afrikas (Wildlife and Savages in the Heart of Africa),
“if I should be accused of having killed many elephants, I must acknowledge myself
as guilty, but at the same time console myself, that I always hunted according to
the rules and with very few exceptions—where there was mortal danger—didn’t
bag any cow elephants” (Wild und Wilde, xiii; see also Nigel Rothfels, Savages and
Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002), pp. 63–7).
Of course, none of this should be seen as some kind of objective reporting.
Richter did not portray an actual moment, but rather a “classic” moment; hunting
stories, like fishing stories, are about the art of story telling, not about the arts of
hunting and fishing. The reality is that almost all nineteenth-century hunters out for
elephants, whatever kind of hunter they imagined themselves to be, essentially tried
to kill as many elephants as possible whenever the opportunity presented itself. Dead
elephants provided food for carriers, helped facilitate negotiations with local peoples,
funded the exploratory, missionary, scientific, commercial, and other passions of the
colonizers, and often provided “good sport” to boot. To be sure, hunters in the first
half of the nineteenth century were more limited by the nature of their weaponry and
transportation systems. Cumming, for example, hunting in the early 1840s, typically
fired first to lame an animal (for example, in the shoulder) before he would then
fire relentlessly to kill it. With this in mind, his remarkable bag of over a hundred
elephants not surprisingly pales in comparison to later accomplishments. Arthur H.
Neumann, for example, hunting sixty years later, repeatedly succeeded in killing
more than ten elephants in a single day, bringing down elephant after elephant with
only one or two shots. Of course, as the technology of hunting changed and as
elephants began to disappear from the landscape, the hunt was increasingly regulated.
Even with hunting quotas, however, there remained some flexibility in the laws (for
example, hunters were entitled to shoot when faced with a mortal threat, and special
circumstances, such as hunters collecting for museums, could be considered in the
issuing of licenses).
Neither Cumming nor Neumann, though, wrote about every single elephant they
hunted, not to mention every single elephant they shot but did not succeed in putting
an end to quickly enough to physically claim the carcass and its ivory. Hunter/authors
relate particular stories for particular reasons. With this in mind, the importance of
Cumming’s story becomes more clear when it is seen against other accounts, such
as, for example, the first story of an elephant hunt in Neumann’s Elephant Hunting
in East Equatorial Africa. After relating how he followed the tracks and sounds of a
herd of elephants, Neumann writes:
We were uncertain now of the exact whereabouts of the elephants, so proceeded very
cautiously up wind towards where we supposed them to be: and before we had got far into
the jungle, after leaving the swamp, we made one out. I then took my double .577 and
leaving the men, approached stealthily quite close to the one we had first seen…. It was a
cow; a big one, though her tusks were not large. I could now make out two or three others
(apparently also cows) beyond, and I knew there were pretty certain to be more I could
not see; but there was no possible chance of getting farther without disturbing the nearest,
so I determined to shoot her if I could. (pp. 36–37)
Neumann continues and explains that his expensive expedition had already been
underway for four months without sighting any elephants, and at this point he
was “not inclined to risk failure through trying to pick and choose” (p. 37). After
dismissing the idea of shooting her in the eye because it might not be fatal and his
“reputation as a hunter” would be “blasted at the outset should I make a failure of
my first chance at elephant,” he eventually got his “longed-for chance” at a “temple
shot” with his large-caliber gun and he “instantly put a ball between the eye and the
ear, dropping her like a stone” (pp. 37–8). The other elephants moved off a short
distance. He followed and soon came upon two, “the nearest facing me, her trunk
up and chest exposed.” He quickly shot her in the chest and then shot her with his
second barrel as she turned to run. “Following again I saw her down not more than
fifty yards on. Going round to her head she gave a slight struggle, so I thought it wise
to give her a shot in the back from my ‘cripple-stopper’ (as I call a Martini-Henry one
of my men always carries for the purpose, so as to economise my own cartridges)”
(p. 38). After pursuing the other elephants further, he “came upon another standing
at right angles, which I dropped under a tree with the temple shot, like the first”
(p. 38), then he saw two or three more ahead. He writes:
One, as I approached, came towards me in an aggressive way, having evidently become

aware of my presence. I dared not wait, so close was she, so fired for her head, being
unable to see her chest, when not more than six yards off. She fell to the shot, but somehow
or other sideways on to me. I could see her dimly through the undergrowth between us,
and make out for a second the outline of her head as she lay, not on her side but as it were
kneeling down. I ought to have given her the second barrel then, knowing she could only
be stunned; but I was a little too slow, and she was up again and off without giving me
another chance. She stood and screamed some sixty or seventy yards off, but the cover
was so tall I could only see the top of her back and the top of her head. Following once
more I was taken off her spoor by two small cows which ran past on my left, at one of
which I got a snap shot but failed to kill. I ought not, perhaps, to have fired at these, but
the ivory hunter is bound to endeavor to make as much hay as possible when he does get a
little sunshine, and the jungle precluded running or seeing beyond a few yards. However,
both these last got off, and the herd seemed to have cleared out.” (pp. 38–9)
In contrast to Cumming’s stories, Neumann’s stands out for its almost mechanical
efficiency. The narrative pares down essentially to: found a herd of elephants, shot
as many as I could (by myself!) making certain not to let any of the natives shoot
(however illogically given the economic imperatives repeatedly noted throughout
my book), killed three. Even though the story stretches over three pages, there is
little time for Neumann to reflect, nor space for him to consider the larger meaning
of his life and fortunes. Where Cumming sits contemplatively in his “jungle home”
thinking back on the haunts and hunts of his youth, Neumann pushes on to the next
elephant and notices little more than “Great colonies of weaver birds, thronging
in the bush, [which] made a great din with both voices and wings, with a rather
confusing effect” (p. 37). Where Cumming describes his victim’s “philosophic
air,” and imagines what the “old fellow” might be thinking, Neumann publishes
photographs showing three and four dead elephants in a single frame or his piles of
ivory (Plate 4).
The easy explanation for the differences between the accounts of the two authors
would be to argue that Cumming hunted for sport and Neumann hunted for ivory.
But this distinction is not very useful; Cumming collected as much ivory as he could
and Neumann considered himself a hunter, first, and repeatedly jabbed back at those
who frowned on his activities. In his “Preface,” for example, he writes:
I am prepared to be denounced as cruel, I admit at once that I am…. One cannot complain
of the censure of kind-hearted people who object altogether to the taking of life—on the
contrary, I respect them. But the attacks of such superior sportsmen as, while themselves
giving us graphic accounts of their exploits in pursuit of the harmless eland, giraffe, and
other defenseless creatures, write in horror of the cruelty of hunting elephants (having
themselves not penetrated far enough into the wilderness to get the chance) are harder to
bear. It is particularly cruel, they tell us, to hunt cow elephants (especially to the hunter, no
doubt). I wish one of these gentlemen would come and show us how to shoot bulls only, in
the dense cover in which elephants have to be sought in Equatorial Africa. (p. viii)
In the end, there is clearly more going on here than a differentiation between sport
and professional hunters in the nineteenth century.
The beginning of a more subtle explanation for the issues surrounding elephant
hunting in the nineteenth century can be found, I believe, in Midgley’s suggestion that
Cumming’s story would “have passed without comment as normal at a much later
date” (p. 14). Midgley’s assessment of Cumming’s behavior stems from a habit in
thinking about “the Victorian era,” the “nineteenth century,” and even about animals
and history. That habit—encouraged, in fact, by some of the primary documents
themselves, such as the Lathbury quotation above—is the idea that animals were
understood substantially differently “back then.” In this case, for Midgley, the habit
results in Cumming’s behavior being seen as somehow normal, unobtrusive, or in
line with his times.
The real world of the past, of course, is more messy and unsorted than we remember
it or sometimes want it to be. In the context of elephant hunting, for example, this
untidiness can be easily seen in the casual humor of a small entertainment piece
excerpted from The University Magazine which appeared in the New York Times in
1878 with the title “Elephant Hunting”:
I was sitting next at dinner to a gentleman holding the office of Colonial Secretary at
Ceylon, but then on leave in England, and who was recounting, with much enthusiasm,
his exploits among the elephants. On one occasion he had fired at one, and either he
missed his mark or the bullet bounded off, for the animal, unhurt, charged in return, and
the hunter’s foot slipping, he had had a narrow escape from being killed by the monster.
An elderly gentleman, who sat on the other side of me, and who had listened to the story,
grunted out, “And serve him right, too; why wouldn’t he let the elephant alone—what
had the elephant done to him?” And I was much disposed to indorse the old gentleman’s
sentiments. (“Elephant Hunting.” New York Times (29 Dec. 1878): 3)
Indeed, it seems that despite the claims of Lathbury, despite the self-congratulatory
prose of Roosevelt, Baker, Stigand, and others, the sense that many people have
today that these figures were something between repugnant and ridiculous was also
shared in the nineteenth century. In fact, perhaps George Orwell’s observation that
the colonial officer’s “whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long
struggle not to be laughed at” (Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1950), p. 8) should be extended to the home front as well. Only
among the more striking of the hunters’ critics was Sir James Emerson Tennent. In
his 1861 monograph Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon, Tennent repeatedly
expresses his disgust at elephant hunters while mocking their justifications for
hunting. Insisting that hunting elephants “requires the smallest possible skill as a
marksman” (James Emerson Tennent, Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon
(London: Longman, 1861), p. 142), Tennent claims that a Major Rogers killed
“upwards of 1400; another, Captain Gallwey, has the credit of slaying more than
half that number; Major Skinner, the Commissioner of Roads, almost as many;
and less persevering aspirants follow at humbler distances” (p. 142). Tennent then
continues in a footnote: “To persons like myself, who are not addicted to what is
called ‘sport,’ the statement of these wholesale slaughters is calculated to excite
surprise and curiosity as to the nature of a passion that impels men to self-exposure
and privation, in a pursuit which presents nothing but the monotonous recurrence
of scenes of blood and suffering.” After relating an account by Samuel Baker of his
repeatedly sending a mortally wounded dog into a brawl with a wild boar, Tennent
concludes that “If such were the habitual enjoyments of this class of sportsmen,
their motiveless massacres would admit of no manly justification. In comparison
with them one is disposed to regard almost with favour the exploits of a hunter like
Major Rogers, who is said to have applied the value of the ivory obtained from his
encounters towards the purchase of his successive regimental commissions, and had,
therefore, an object, however disproportionate, in his slaughter of 1400 elephants”
(p. 142).
While Tennent attends in particular to the hunting activities of Baker, who
recorded his adventures in Ceylon in his 1854 memoir The Rifle and the Hound in
Ceylon, he nevertheless recounts “with a shudder the sickening details” (p. 146)
of the same hunt from Cumming that caught Midgley’s attention over a century
later. For Tennent, three elements in Cumming’s story stood out: 1) that the elephant
“limped slowly towards a tree, against which it leaned itself in helpless agony, whilst
its pursuer seated himself in front of it, in safety, to boil his coffee, and observe its
sufferings”; 2) that Cumming “resolved to make experiments for vulnerable points”
by shooting the elephant repeatedly in various places, and 3) that at the end of the
story, “Large tears now trickled from his eyes, which he slowly shut and opened; his
colossal frame quivered convulsively, and, falling on his side, he expired” (p. 146;
original emphasis). For Tennent, it seems, little could excuse the behavior of a hunter
who could relish so easily the pathos of an elephant. Indeed, even though Cumming’s
account of hunting in South Africa was clearly beyond the scope of Tennent’s work,
the story, marked by coffee, experiments, and tears, pointed to something profoundly
disturbing; it manifested a cruelty that he found both intolerable and beyond ignoring
out of conventional civility or politeness. In this, it seems, he was not alone. As
Alfred Edmund Brehm concluded after recounting, again and at the same length as
Midgley and Tennent, the same story by Cumming, the hunter “gives innumerable
proofs of such a savage and pointless bloodthirstiness that we would certainly see
any excuse [he might offer for his behavior] as merely a recognition of his brutality”
(Alfred Edmund Brehm, Brehms Thierleben: Allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs.
2nd edn (Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1876–79), p. 483).
In its retelling by Tennent, Brehm, and Midgley, Cumning’s story stands out
against countless narratives of elephant hunting (what Tennent called the “tiresome
iteration” [p. 147]), and the story has caught the attention of readers like few others.
Even the Oxford English Dictionary refers bibliographically to Cumming’s surprising
phrase “‘salaam-like’ movement of his trunk” in its definition of the salutation
“salaam” as “Peace” (Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989) vol. XIV, p. 384). Among all the accounts of hunting adventures from
the period, this story, intended as it is to demonstrate the prestige of the hunter,
seems to show even more the pathos of the elephant. As much as Cumming may
have seen himself heroically, his account points to a fault line or crack in Victorian
or, more generally, nineteenth-century ideas of hunting. It makes clear that hunting
narratives must be understood not as accurate accounts of “what really happened,”
but rather as arguments in a developing and quite public debate about the significance
of animals in human life. Conceived this way, it is clear that we need a much more
nuanced understanding of the nature of hunting and acceptable hunting behavior
in the nineteenth century. As the New York Times noted in its obituary of Gordon
Cumming in 1866: “With his acknowledged skill as a hunter of lions was joined a
less commendable passion for the indiscriminate slaughter of more harmless game,
and an ability in telling large stories” (“Death of Gordon Cumming, The African
Lion-Hunter.” New York Times. (17 April 1866): 5). Another New York Times article,
written in 1896 about the Boers, aptly described Cumming as “Quixotic” (“Sturdy
Folk, The Boers” New York Times. (12 January 1896): 32), and I believe it would
be better at this point to imagine him as a sort of fictional character who presents
a particular and importantly contested view of elephants and hunting, rather than
to see him as the representative of an accepted understanding of the importance of
animals in the Victorian period.
I am not saying that there has been no change in ideas about animals since the
middle of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Midgley is almost certainly correct in her
belief that there had been a “marked change in the last few decades in the moral view
that ordinary people take” toward animals. The simple existence in the United States
today of several so-called “elephant sanctuaries” where elephants, “retired” from the
worlds of entertainment in zoos and circuses, can live out their remaining days in
quiet and warm repose, where their “dignity” can be finally restored, should make it
clear enough that the times—and views of elephants specifically and animals more
generally—have changed. Still, every day cable hunting channels make it clear that
the likes of Cumming, Roosevelt, and Meinertzhagen are still quite clearly with us,
even while their cultural status is somewhat diminished. Ideas about the significance
of elephants and their deaths are far from settled today; just as they were far from
settled in the nineteenth century.
Works Cited
Baker, Samuel White, The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (London: Longman,
1854).
Brehm, Alfred Edmund, Brehms Thierleben: Allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs (2nd
edn, Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, 1876–79).
Cumming, Roualeyn Gordon, Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of
South Africa. With Notices on the Native Tribes, and Anecdotes of the Chase, of
the Lion, Elephant, Hippopotamus, Giraffe, Rhinoceros, &c. (New York: Harper
Brothers, 1850).
“Death of Gordon Cumming, The African Lion-Hunter,” New York Times, 17 April
1866: 5.
“Elephant Hunting,” New York Times, 29 December 1878: 3.
MacKenzie, John M., The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British
Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Meinertzhagen, Colonel Richard, Kenya Diary, 1902–1906 (Edinburgh: Oliver and
Boyd, 1957).
Midgley, Mary, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
1983).
Neumann, Arthur H., Elephant Hunting in East Equatorial Africa. Being an Account
of Three Years’ Ivory-Hunting under Mount Kenia and among the Ndorobo
Savages of the Lorogi Mountains, including a Trip to the North End of Lake
Rudolph (London: Rowland Ward, 1898).
Orwell, George, Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1950).
Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Roosevelt, Theodore, African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of
an American Hunter–Naturalist (New York: Syndicate, 1910).
Rothfels, Nigel, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002).
——. “Why Look at Elephants?” Worldviews Environment, Culture, Religion, 9.2
(2005): 166–83.
Schillings, Carl Georg, Mit Blitzlicht und Büchse im Zauber des Eleléscho (Leipzig:
Voigtländer, 1910).
Schomburgk, Hans, Wild und Wilde im Herzen Afrikas (Berlin: Fleischel, 1910).
Stigand, Captain Chauncey Hugh, Hunting the Elephant in Africa and Other
Recollections of Thirteen Years Wanderings (New York: MacMillan, 1913).
“Sturdy Folk, The Boers,” New York Times, 12 January 1896: 32.
Sutherland, James, The Adventures of an Elephant Hunter (London: MacMillan,
1912).
Tennent, James Emerson, Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon (London:
Longman, 1861).
Chapter 4
Designs after Nature: Evolutionary

Fashions, Animals, and Gender
Susan David Bernstein
One of Edward Linley Sambourne’s best known drawings is his 1882 cartoon for
Punch’s Almanack, “Man is but a Worm,” a revolving depiction of evolution from
“chaos” and invertebrates to simians and finally to an aged Charles Darwin, whose
last book on earthworms, and whose own death, offer a context for the image (see
Plate 5). But it took Sambourne some years to work up to figuring man spiraling
out of the lowly worm. He began with a different range of animal analogies for
women. Among Sambourne’s earliest contributions to Punch is one appearing in
December 1867 of a young swell ogling a woman decked out in a costume that
incorporates peacock feathers into her dress, hat, and parasol (see Plate 6). The
caption reads, “As Birds’ Feathers and Train Dresses are all the go, Miss Swellington
adopts one of Nature’s Own Designs.” This image inaugurates in the pages of Punch
what became Sambourne’s first extensive series, entitled “Designs After Nature” and
encompassing some 20 images between 1867 and 1876, but most of them appearing
by 1871. Nearly all the cartoons display women in elaborate dress featuring parts of
animals, whether birds, sea creatures, or insects.
The vestimentary excesses of women adorned in peacock feathers, fish scales,
or wasp wings suggest a vision of sexual selection, a crucial component in Charles
Darwin’s theory of the transformation of species by natural selection. In contrast to
Darwin’s account of sexual selection in On the Origin of Species where ostentatiously
arrayed males compete for the attentions of dim-featured females, Sambourne’s
Miss Swellington parades in male peacock attire. “Designs After Nature” is part of
a cultural preoccupation with taxonomies of nature, and with speculating—in this
instance, capriciously—about the margins between humans and other animals. Given
Darwin’s attention to the role of “structure, color, or ornament” in his description
of sexual selection, it is striking that male peacock feathers grace human feminine
forms in two of Sambourne’s cartoons of “designs after nature.” While the Victorian
millinery industry was bestrewn with feathery fashions, by the century’s end animal
Linley Sambourne, “Man Is But A Worm” Punch’s Almanack 1882 82 (6 December

1881): n.p.
Linley Sambourne, “Nature’s Own Designs,” Punch, or the London Charivari 53 (21
December 1867): 256.
protection societies, such as the Fur, Fin, and Feather Club, campaigned against the
use of animals in women’s clothing and accessories.
This essay examines the fashion of animals in the wake of Darwin’s publications
on evolution. I begin by considering “design” both as fashion and as agency to
think about how the dovetailing of animals and women in Sambourne’s drawings
and in the popular sensation novels of the 1860s opened up representational spaces
to explore femininity. Sensation fiction as a genre encapsulates in a different way
fashion, women, and evolution. Immensely popular among readers of serial fiction
in magazines of the 1860s, sensation novels typically featured female characters
who specialized in stratagems that attempted to disrupt traditional social orderings
of class and gender, of elite bloodlines and their material properties. Preoccupied
with both embodied and legal inheritance, sensation fiction plots correlated nature
and culture, the genuine and the artificial, much like the very phrase “designs after
nature.” Moreover, sensation characters often mingled together masculine and
feminine traits, one way in which category clashes emerge in these novels. Noted by
many initial reviewers, sensation novels appealed to a female readership in part by
offering images of bold women with more active roles in sexual selection.
As James Eli Adams has argued, Tennyson’s In Memoriam pictured an alternative
to a feminine “Nature” as a maternal, nurturing agent by his personification of
“Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Nearly a decade later, Darwin offered a diluted
version of female agency in The Origin of Species, while his consideration of
human sexual selection in The Descent of Man in 1871 muted feminine power
altogether. Like mythological forms of female hybridity including mermaids and
sirens that devolved into the ubiquitous femme fatale of late-Victorian culture, the
blur of woman and animal appearing in Sambourne’s cartoons and in depictions of
sensation heroines of the 1860s marks a kind of watershed moment in this ongoing
debate about nature and gender.
Elsewhere I have argued that the genre of sensation fiction, whose appearance
coincided roughly with the 1860s “ape anxiety” spurred by The Origin of Species,
is part of a larger cultural preoccupation with inheritance, transformation, and
classification. Animal-fashioned females in cartoons, essays, and sensation novels
of Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins explore the possibilities of female
sexual agency before and beyond Darwin’s Descent. What might Sambourne’s
series along with other visual and verbal images of fashionable feathers and fins
tell us about concepts of gendered human embodiment during this decade when
evolutionary descent captured the public imagination? On questions of sexual
difference, “designs after nature” overlap and collide with cultural formations of
gender; artifice and nature are infinitely intertwined, despite Darwin’s efforts to
preserve this binary through his designations of artificial and natural selection.
Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998),

pp. 114–24.
James Eli Adams, “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in
Tennyson and Darwin,” Victorian Studies 33.1 (Autumn 1989): 7–27.
Susan David Bernstein, “Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre
Question,” Journal of Victorian Culture 6.2 (Autumn 2001): 250–71.
Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals, and Gender 67
Sambourne’s gallery of women appareled in male animal component parts, physical
descriptions of sensation heroines, and contemporary essays on species and genres,
illuminate suggestive intersections more broadly between fashion and evolution.
Darwin understood taxonomies of nature as a “process” under revision rather
than a fixed catalogue of classifications. As Harriet Ritvo has explored, mermaids
and hermaphrodites offered compelling taxonomic challenges between human and
non-human, between male and female. Sambourne’s cartoons parody the mermaid
craze of the early nineteenth century, only this time accented by Darwinian debates
about descent. Given that Darwin’s theory of species evolution implicated all
organisms as sites of ongoing transformation, it is not surprising to encounter an
array of sartorial splendors linking humans with other forms of life, as Sambourne’s
cartoons do. In Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress, and the Body, Alexandra
Warwick and Dani Cavallaro write, “Dress represents the body as a fundamentally
liminal phenomenon by stressing its precarious location on the threshold between
the physical and the abstract, the literal and the metaphorical.” Theorizing dress as
the embellishment of porous borders between self and other, Warwick and Cavallaro
distinguish between dress as boundary and dress as margin. As boundary, dress divides
and frames, contains and encloses the body, while dress as margin blurs distinctions
and links individual entities to a more complex world (Warwick and Cavallaro,
Fashioning the Frame, pp. xv–xviii). As boundary and margin, dress renders the
body “unamenable to absolute compartmentalization.” Just as dress challenges the
notion of a unified identity category, it also prompts “playful experimentation,” and
it is through this spirit of play that Sambourne’s cartoons might be read (Warwick
and Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame, p. 7).
Early in the series appeared a cartoon with this caption: “Mr. Punch’s Designs
From Nature (?),” and underneath, “Toilette Du Soir à La Sirène” (see Plate 7). On
the head of this fashionable siren sits a mollusk-styled appendage with sea weedy
hair sprawling down her back, a dress that blends into fish scales and leads to a
mermaid-like tail. To the side a bearded man gazes uneasily at this “fashion from
nature,” and poking out from the bottom of a curtain are a pair of legs complementing
the missing appendages of the sea-costumed woman. An apt illustration of the way
fashion works as margin and boundary, the dress ruffles blend in with the scaly train,
blurring organic and inorganic bits.
Fashion provides a linchpin for exploring a cultural uneasiness around boundaries
that the reception to Darwin and to sensation novels both exemplify. Design as
fashion typically implies ephemerality and innovation, something transient yet
widespread. This idea of continuous and often imperceptible change is constitutive
of both evolutionary theory and sensation fiction, each structured through serial
See Harriet Ritvo’s study of nineteenth-century taxonomies, The Platypus and the
Mermaid and other figments of the classifying imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress,
and the Body (New York: Berg, 1998), p. 7.
Linley Sambourne, “Mr Punch’s Designs From Nature,” Punch, or the London
Charivari 55 (July 11, 1868): 11.
reproductions—whether the gradual transformations of species through subspecies
and varieties, or narrative progression through weekly or monthly serial installments.
This idea of fashionable designs as popular yet fleeting emerges in magazine articles
on sartorial styles.
Shortly after Sambourne’s “Designs From Nature” series began, an article,
“Thoughtfulness in Dress,” appeared in the September 1868 issue of The Cornhill.
The writer observes that variation is the mainstay of feminine fashion: “Were there
no succession of fashions, dress would sink to a mere mechanical reproduction of
established models …. The real interest is in watching the variations which may
be produced in the dress of a woman …. And in the course of its revolutions,
fashion every now and then developes [sic] really beautiful forms.” In particular,
accessories and “extraneous adjuncts as muffs, parasols, and fans” are most subject
to the compulsions of contemporary fashion, something Sambourne’s cartoons
populate with animal parts. This focus on constant modifications in women’s fashion
is similar to the process of evolution in nature, and even the phrasing in the article
invites a comparison between natural laws of reproduction and economic laws of
production. The parallels between the theories of Darwin and Marx were evident to
Victorians. Frederick Engels remarked at Marx’s funeral, “As Darwin discovered
the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in
human history.”10
Another contemporary essay on fashion identifies sensationalism as the “cause
of eccentricities in costume; and the desire for incessant change—a desire very
naturally fostered by tailors, dressmakers, and mercers.”11 Again, this fashion parade
of novelty captures not only the logic of capitalism but also the pattern of natural
selection, where both simultaneously try to set gender distinctions at the expense
of other categorical differences. The very extravagances of contemporary fashion,
this All the Year Round article goes on to illustrate, frequently derive from designs
after nature: “Ladies are found doing the best they can to make themselves look like
beehives and trees …. Others issue out of imitation hives, in the winged similitude of
honey-makers.” Victorian fashion as designs from nature accentuate the proximity
of humans and animals, as the 1861 Temple Bar essay, “All about Hair and Beards,”
declares by pointing out that hair in one form or another is a feature common to plants,
animals, and humans.12 In Sambourne’s series of cartoons, women’s hair prominently
blends with the nonhuman animal accents of each sartorial wonderment.
If Sambourne’s drawings and magazine columns transport animal designs
into the world of women’s fashions, Darwin brings human design into play in his
discussion of sexual selection in the realm of animals in The Origin of Species.
Personifying sexuality in nature, Darwin describes the role of flashy feathers in the
[Caroline Stephen], “Thoughtfulness in Dress,” The Cornhill 18 (September 1868):

281–98. Stephen’s brother Leslie became editor of The Cornhill in 1871.
10 E.J.E. Hobsbawm, “Marx, Karl Heinrich,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39021>.
Marx’s Das Kapital was published in 1867; the first English translation appeared in 1887.
11 “Eccentricities of Costume,” All the Year Round 9.212 (16 May 1863): 280–83, 282.
12 “All About Hair and Beards,” Temple Bar 3 (September 1861): 247–61.
mating process: “successive males display their gorgeous plumage and perform
strange antics before the females, which standing by as spectators, at last choose the
most attractive partner.”13 As a kind of intelligent design, this example endows birds
with human and social attributes. Like Victorian middle-class courtship practices,
active roles are the prerogative of males, while females occupy a more passive
position, with the exception of their supposed ability to “choose the most attractive
partner.” Darwin calculates this restrained female agency in his gendering of sexual
selection. In natural selection, however, a feminine-gendered “Nature” enjoys
enormous power in contrast to that of mere man: “Man can only act on external
and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they
may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of
constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his
own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends” (Darwin, Origin of
Species, p. 146). Unlike Tennyson’s personification of a dangerously ruthless force
in the natural world, Darwin’s rendition tempers the autonomy of this abstract nature
with feminized human attributes of selfless devotion to the welfare of “the being
which she tends.” Here “Nature” is a domesticated designer, while males sport the
fashions of “gorgeous plumage.” Rosemary Jann has observed how gendered power
relations of male force and female inferiority underwrite Darwin’s evolutionary
narratives; thus Darwin adjusts his definition of instinctual sexual behaviors in
animals so that he can project modern patriarchy across the border between animals
and humans. However, as Jann points out, “This rhetorical move left him unable
fully to explain what had subverted the sexual prerogatives of female animals” in
The Origin of Species.14
Given this context of Darwinian sexual selection, it is not surprising to see
Sambourne’s “Designs After Nature” explicitly linked with Darwin’s study of human
sexual selection. Sambourne’s series repeats the gender-blurring Miss Swellington’s
male peacock plumage in another cartoon nearly four years later upon the occasion
of the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in April
1871 (see Plate 8).15 A rear view of a woman’s figure embellished by the entire
form of a male peacock, from its ruffled head on her own, its body as the bulk of
her hat, and its tail feathers trailing down her back. The caption announces, “Mr.
Punch’s Designs After Nature. Grand Back-Hair Sensation for the Coming Season.”
The cartoon overwhelms the page which carries two articles. On the left-hand side,
an essay on the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat-race entitled “The Great Event
of the River” provides one context for this image of a dazzlingly feathered fashion
plate featured on the water’s edge.
13 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. Joseph Carroll (Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press, 2003), p. 149.
14 Rosemary Jann, “Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its
Discontents,” Victorian Studies 37.2 (Winter 1994): 290.
15 Linley Sambourne, ““Mr Punch’s Designs After Nature,” Punch, or the London
Charivari 60 (1 April 1871): 127.
The right-hand column carries a short column titled “Most Natural Selection”
with speculations about “Mr. Darwin’s theory of the Descent of Man.”16 Summarizing
social conventions against intermarriage alongside Darwin’s argument about human
descent, the spoof concludes with a comic endorsement of divergent crossbreeding:
“Any human being, desirous of a perfect mate, would clearly do best of all to marry,
if possible, the Larva of a Marine Ascidian.” This coupling of a parody on Darwin’s
account of human sexual selection with the elaborate plumage in Sambourne’s
“Designs After Nature” imagines a narrative of heterogeneous descent. Of course,
Darwin reversed his gendering of agency in sexual selection when he assigned
human males the role of selecting the most beautiful females in The Descent of
Man. Typically, Darwin understood the varying standards of beauty in humans to
correspond with the most exaggerated features of its own type of secondary sex
traits, such as crinolines, bustles, and beards. Sambourne’s cartoons play with this
notion of beauty by juxtaposing human and animal parts, just as contemporary
fashion incorporated feathers and furs of animals. The very page format carrying
“Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature” that ran the same month as Darwin’s 1871
publication on human sexual selection demonstrates the intermingling of nature and
culture, of natural law and social arrangements.
This alignment of fashion, agency, and evolutionary process surfaces in “A
Vision of Animal Existences,” a reverie published in an 1862 issue of the Cornhill.
As the narrator strolls in the London Zoological Gardens, he encounters a “middle-
aged lady, of thoughtful aspect, in a dark-blue dress and sober bonnet. Authoress
by profession was written on her countenance. Her yellow parasol lay folded on a
table beside her, and she beguiled the oppressive noontide hour by perusing a thick
volume, which I recognized.” From these sartorial details, the narrator muses on
the strategies of taxonomy in natural history from Buffon to Cuvier to the “thick
volume” of reading: “The blue-robed lady’s green-covered book teaches that the
world of plants and animals is a world of incessant change; that, in coming ages,
every living thing will be only a metamorphosed shadow of its present self.”17 The
“green-covered book” refers to the design of John Murray’s first editions of The
Origin of Species, a marketing fashion presumably familiar enough to readers of
the Cornhill to make mention of Darwin’s title unnecessary, especially given what
follows. For the “lady in blue” turns out to be, according to the card she hands the
narrator, “Natural Selection! Originator of Species!”
Transforming Darwin’s natural law of evolution into contemporary dress, this
fashioning underscores a margin that draws together biology and culture, and sexual
difference with gender. Although her clothing does not materially quote the animal
world, these fashions function as props in this whimsical narrative of evolution.
What appears at first glance as an ordinary parasol becomes “a deadly instrument,
a massive gold, paradoxically called a life preserver.” In other words, women’s
fashions furnish a design for imagining the tools of natural selection, while this story
fantasizes about a feminine agency behind selection. Sambourne likewise imagines
such gendered and generative power in a Punch cartoon titled “Mistress of Creation”
16 “Most Natural Selection,” Punch, or the London Charivari 60 (1 April 1871): 127.
17 [E.S. Dixon], “A Vision of Animal Existences,” The Cornhill 5 (March 1862): 311.
in which a fashionably dressed lady with a veiled hat, a jacket and muff and skirt,
perches on a globe, and gazes regally at a menagerie of creatures including a woman,
turtle, goose, seal, squirrel, beaver, goat, bear, beetle, and a worm. A precursor to his
“Man Is But a Worm,” here Sambourne’s “mistress of creation” stands startlingly
erect amid a field of assorted creatures.18
Another magazine contribution affiliating women’s clothing trends with designs
found on the backs or heads of other animals is Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Fuss and
Feathers.” This 1866 essay appeared in Temple Bar, a new periodical that featured
the current reading fad of sensation novels. She observes that peacocks, flamingoes,
parrots, and doves would love their fashionable appeal were they denuded of
feathers: “Fuss and feathers do marvellous work, not only in the Zoological Gardens,
but throughout the wide world generally, and under all manner of conditions.”19
Linton derides ostentatious dress and manners as superficial fluff that obfuscates
the dull and durable substance of character underneath. The entire essay seems
anxious about dressing for a part, about the difficulties of reading women’s social
identity through fashion. An epithet for extreme allegiance to contemporary fashion,
“fuss and feathers” signifies “all that is exaggerated, unfounded, unpractical, and
untruthful” in contrast to the unadorned veracity of plain dress.
Interestingly, Linton’s views of fashion in dress corresponded with her assessment
of popular fiction, especially the portrayal of women in recent serialized novels.
Celebrated for her attack on modern young women as the “Girl of the Period,”
Linton eschews ephemeral trends as troublesome because they transgress clear-cut
categories of nature and culture. Thus Linton deplores this newly fashioned woman
who populates sensation novels of the decade as “a tall, dark-haired virago, who
might pass as the younger brother of her husband, and about whom nature seemed
to have hesitated before determining whether to make her a man or a woman—a
kind of debatable land, in fact, between the two sexes, and almost as much one as
the other.”20 Linton’s depiction of this gender-crossing modern girl anticipates the
femme fatale of fin-de-siècle art, just as the sensation novel was a precursor of new
women fiction some decades later.
The category of sensation novels was coined around 1860 alongside contemporary
interest in evolution in nature and human descent from animals. As parallel taxonomic
dilemmas about the boundaries of literary genres and natural species, both the term
“sensation fiction” and the concurrent attention to the relation between humans and
animals suggest a double anxiety of assimilation and simianation, defined as “a distress
over the fusing of divisions,” whether in the context of social class or gender, literary
genre, or affiliations across species in nature (Bernstein, “Ape Anxiety,” p. 255).
Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, whose first installment on 26 November 1859
in All the Year Round appeared only two days after the publication of The Origin of
18 This image appears as the frontispiece in Barbara T. Gates ed., In Nature’s Name: An
Anthology of Women’s Writing and Illustration, 1780–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002). Gates cites 3 January 1874 for the publication of this Punch cartoon. I was
unable to locate this image in any of the January 1874 issues of the magazine.
19 [Eliza Lynn Linton], “Fuss and Feathers,” Temple Bar 17 (May 1866): 192.
20 Eliza Lynn Linton, “Little Women,” Saturday Review 25 (25 April 1868): 545–6.
Species, is probably the first serial novel termed “sensation fiction” by reviewers.
In the second installment a week later, Collins furnished an example of Linton’s
modern woman who occupies this “debateable land … between the two sexes” in
the character of Marian Halcombe. The narrator conveys this confusion of categories
through Marian’s body, one that further hints at simian origins: “Never was the old
conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted …. The lady’s
complexion was almost swarthy and the dark down on her upper lip was almost a
moustache. She had a large, firm, masculine mouth and jaw; prominent, piercing,
resolute brown eyes; and thick, coal-black hair, growing unusually low down her
forehead.”21 Like Sambourne’s “Designs After Nature” cartoons, Marian’s body
is a conglomeration of diverse parts that blur gender and racial categories, further
accented by simian strains through her large jaw, hairiness, and low forehead.
Collins offers another heterogeneous heroine in his next sensation novel, No
Name, also serialized in Dickens’s weekly magazine.22 Similar to Marian Halcombe,
Magdalen Vanstone’s physical appearance poses a conundrum about the laws of
inheritance, likewise the legal theme of the plot: “By one of those caprices of
Nature, which science leaves still unexplained, the youngest of Mr. Vanstone’s
children presented no recognizable resemblance to either parent.”23 Like Darwin’s
depiction of mating birds in sexual selection, the passage comments on Magdalen’s
plain brown hair as “unmixed with flaxen, or yellow, or red—which is oftener seen
on the plumage of a bird than on the head of a human being” (Collins, No Name,
p. 5). This description compares Magdalen with female birds, those in Darwin’s
account of sexual selection deficient in the “gorgeous plumage” of their male suitors.
Magdalen’s subsequent willful scheming to secure her male suitors makes manifest
her own intelligent, practical, and vindictive designs in marital selection.
This melding of gendered traits is reflected in Magdalen’s unaccountably hybrid
countenance “so remarkable in its strongly-opposed characteristics—was rendered
additionally striking by its extraordinary mobility … all varieties of expression
followed each other over the plastic, ever-changing face” (Collins, No Name, p. 6).
Such a combination of incessant change and alloyed physical features conveys a
nature unpredictable and uncategorizable, uneasy qualities that Collins aligns with
the artificial versatility of a stage performer. This duplicity becomes a signature
feature of sensation heroines, a doubleness that might be immediately legible, as in
the case of Marian and Magdalen, or a superficial cover that hides a different and
inscrutable identity. In each instance, gendered traits clash and mingle in ways that
destablize sexual difference as simply or only a nature-based category.
Like Linton’s depiction of “a brave, an energetic, or a supremely criminal
woman,” (Linton, “Little Women,” p. 545) female empowerment in sensation fiction
stems from these mixed qualities. Herself a woman determined to reclaim her rightful
21 Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 25.
The Woman in White ran in weekly serial installments in Dickens’s All the Year Round from
26 November 1859 to 25 August 1860. This passage comes from the second installment.
22 No Name first appeared in serial form in 44 weekly episodes published in All the Year
Round, from 15 March 1862 to 17 January 1863.
23 Wilkie Collins, No Name (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 5.
inheritance by a series of impersonations onstage and off, Magdalen meets her match
in Mrs Lecount, also a woman of significant cunning. A contrast with Magdalen’s
heroic self-empowerment, Lecount’s mental acuity and daring nerve are portrayed
as reptilian traits, with frequent references to her “smoothly gliding” hands and
figure, and her penchant for slimy creatures. Lecount’s tastes anticipate the fashion
for aquariums from the 1850s, or as Collins’s narrator puts it, “the art of keeping fish
and reptiles as domestic pets,” although Lecount’s fondness for this “glass Tank”
of toads, snails, and lizards illuminates her own peculiarity, since aquariums in the
internal time frame of the novel were not yet “popularized in England” (Collins, No
Name, p. 200).24 The tank is also inherited from her deceased husband, Professor
Lecomte, described as “an eminent Swiss naturalist” who was “great at reptiles”
(Collins, No Name, p. 204). This alignment of husband and hobby certifies Mrs
Lecount’s reptilian passions, an extended trope for Mrs Lecount’s character: “Snails
clung to the sides of the tank; tadpoles and tiny fish swam swiftly in the green water;
slippery efts and slimy frogs twisted their noiseless way in and out of the weedy
rock-work—and, on top of the pyramid, there sat solitary, cold as the stone, brown
as the stone, motionless as the stone, a little bright-eyed toad” (Collins, No Name,
p. 200). With her penetrating vision of Magdalen, her cool and obsequious—that
is, toadying—manners, Mrs Lecount as mistress of Noel Vanstone’s household is
a human version of her “bright-eyed” toad as the centerpiece of the aquarium, a
microcosm of the world beyond the tank.
Animal imagery inflects other sensation heroines, a metaphoric strategy to further
this reading of female autonomy as repulsive or domesticated, as artificial or natural.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon affiliates her two irregularly gendered sensation heroines,
Alicia Audley in Lady Audley’s Secret and Aurora of Aurora Floyd, with horses. A
highly bred animal often associated with affluence and social prestige, the horse as
metaphor for these spirited sensation heroines also implies a power that is ultimately
tamed and within traditional structures of family and the home. Those characters who
signify a more nefarious threat to social ordering are linked with undomesticated
animals. Besides the reptilian Mrs Lecount, Lady Audley is cast as a Lamia, with one
of her bejeweled fingers encircled by “an emerald serpent,” her “white hands gliding
softly over the keys” of the piano.25 Moreover, a domestic animal in the novel proves
an apt reader of Lady Audley’s hidden nature when Alicia’s Newfoundland assesses
this recondite character: “The dog, which had never liked my lady, showed his teeth
with a suppressed growl” (Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, p. 114). Robert Young
has pointed out the critical role of analogy between artificial and natural selection in
the reception of Darwin’s theory.26 As this example of Alicia’s dog attests, however,
24 For more information on the “aquarium mania” of the 1850s as “theatres of glass” that
were at once public displays and private hobbies, see Rebecca Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle
(New York: Norton, 2003), pp. 248–50.
25 Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. Natalie M. Houston (Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003), p. 122.
26 Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 80.
what is “natural” is necessarily conflated with what is “artificial” in the instincts of
a family pet.
These popular novels, with such characters that run against the grain of
conventions of middle-class femininity, were regarded by critics as a suspicious
fad. Trendiness in reading or dress meant a vulgar artificiality that belied genuine,
seemingly natural, or unaffected values. In the same vein, some reviewers received
The Origin of Species with skepticism because of its “wide-spread notice,” as the
North British Review puts it. Here the critic goes on to wonder if Darwin’s book is
“one of true science” or whether its popularity indicates that “the substantial food
which, without doubt, it contains (has) been received for the sake of the spice mixed
with it?”27 At this historical moment, both evolutionary theory and sensation fiction
are signs and symptoms of category quandaries, whether a question of species, genre,
or gender. One review even correlates such boundary dilemmas referenced to Darwin
and sensation fiction. Henry Mansel’s exploration of these popular novels offers an
analogy between penny dreadfuls and sensation fiction drawn from an evolutionary
nature by definition in flux: “In a rigidly scientific study of the subject … these tales
are to the full-grown sensation novel what the bud is to the flower … what the typical
form is to the organized body. They are the original germ, the primitive monad, to
which all the varieties of sensational literature may be referred, as to their source,
by a law of generation … as worthy of the attention of the scientific student as
that by which Mr. Darwin’s bear may be supposed to have developed into a whale.
Fortunately in this case the rudimentary forms have been continued down to the
epoch of the mature development.”28 The review concludes this analogy between
cheap publications and the upscale sensation novel by describing the latter as “the
rich dress that conceals while it adorns the figure.” Yet in arguing for this kind of
evolution of fiction from the street to the drawing-room, Mansel also finds this
progression as incomprehensible as a passage in The Origin where Darwin imagines
transformation of species by making a bear ancestor into a whale.29 Where “rich
dress” signifies a dubious evolution in culture, the bear/whale analogy in this review
conveys a specious conversion in nature.
Critics of sensation novels continued to construe improbable and surprising
resemblances between culture and nature, between humans and animals, again
certifying the imbrications of artifice and wildness. Thus a review of Braddon’s
novels equates her use of bigamy with the spectacle of a baboon in a traveling show:
“When Richardson, the showman, went about with his menagerie, he had a big,
black baboon, whose habits were so filthy, and whose behaviour was so disgusting,
that respectable people constantly remonstrated him for exhibiting such an animal.
Richardson’s answer invariably was, ‘Bless you, if it wasn’t for that big black baboon
I should be ruined; it attracts all the young girls in the country.’ Now bigamy has
27 [Rev. Mr. Dunns], “Mr Darwin’s Origin of Species,” North British Review 32 (1860):
455.
28 [Henry Mansel], “Sensation Novels,” Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863): 481–514,
505–506.
29 For further discussion of this controversial example which Darwin then expunged
from the second edition of Origin, see Bernstein, pp. 263–5.
been Miss Braddon’s big black baboon, with which she has attracted all the girls in
the country.”30 By framing the appeal of Braddon’s sensation fiction through this
condensed apposition of bigamy and a “big black baboon,” the passage insinuates
a radical female sexual agency, one in which “all the young girls in the country”
express transgressive desires across differences of race and species. Furthermore,
this appeal of bigamy, a multiple rather than singular sexual selection, contradicts
conventions of Victorian marriage, procreation, and the very bloodlines of patrilineal
inheritance.
This category violation rampant in and around sensation fiction corresponds
with Sambourne’s “Designs After Nature,” much as critics like Mansel and Linton
assailed the “criminal”—or unfeminine and carnal—passions of sensation heroines
through animal imagery. Although the cartoon series ceased in the 1870s, Sambourne
did supply Punch with a number of “literary portraits” with a particular emphasis
on sensation novelists including Braddon and Collins in the 1880s.31 During this
decade as well, Sambourne illustrated an edition of Charles Kingsley’s allegory
of evolutionary theory, The Water- Babies. In this subtitled “fairy tale for a land-
baby,” serialized in Macmillan’s from August 1862 to March 1863, Tom the chimney
sweep undergoes a literal sea-change after a little girl mistakes him for a “small
black gorilla” in his sooty state. Obsessed with his filthiness, a condition that doubles
figuratively both for the material evolution of human flesh and for Christian sin, Tom
throws himself into a stream and turns into a water-baby, a transitional amphibious
form between child and adult, between sea invertebrates and humans. A zealous
collector of specimens of nature with an aim to putting water-babies in aquariums,
Professor Ptthmllnsprts (with vowels inserted, “put them all in spirits”) is Kingsley’s
send-up of T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s most public defender of natural selection. One of
Sambourne’s one hundred illustrations for the 1886 edition included an image of
two naturalists, caricatures of Richard Owen and Huxley, examining a water-baby
in a specimen bottle (see Plate 9).32 In another Punch image, Sambourne illustrates
the “Great Fairy Science” as a full-breasted woman in a scholarly cap and gown,
but with a skirt that mimics in shape and ruffles at the hem the mermaid’s tale. As
Barbara Gates has noted, Sambourne’s drawing visualizes “the anomaly of woman
as body and mind.”33
Although no longer explicitly linked to the “Designs After Nature” series,
Sambourne’s drawings continue to imagine women and animals together in the fin de
siècle. His 1888 Punch cartoon (see Plate 10)34 accompanies a “Ballad of Bathybius,”
a versed dialogue between Huxley (the Latinate “Huxleius”―a parody of taxonomic
30 “Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review 86 (July 1866): 125–8, 126.

31 See “Miss M.E. Braddon,” Punch, or the London Charivari 80 (5 March 1881):
106; “Ouida,” Punch 81 (20 August 1881), p. 83; “Wilkie Collins,” Punch 81 (14 January
1882): 22.
32 Sambourne’s illustration appears in Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies: A Fairy-Tale
for a Land-Baby with one hundred illustrations by Linley Sambourne (New York: Macmillan,
1904), p. 69 (Chapter 2). This 1904 edition reprints the original 1886 publication.
33 Barbara Gates, In Nature’s Name (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 9.
34 Linley Sambourne, “Ballad of Bathybius,” Punch, or the London Charivari 94 (28
January 1888): 47.
nomenclature), and a mermaid named “Bathybius,” after a neologism attributed
to Huxley for “a formless mass of living protoplasm.” Scrutinizing the mermaid,
Huxleius, in a stance familiar from The Water-Babies illustrations, perches on a
sea-wall gazing at the mermaid who resembles the siren of Sambourne’s “Designs
From Nature” (see Plate 7), with wavy hair streaming down her back and her fish
bottom. Only this “Bathybius” reclines bare-breasted without the suggestions of
dress and toilet, or even the tiny feet peeping under the costume in the 1868 cartoon.
Even her hand resembles a marine organism. This au naturel design after nature
was most probably produced with assistance from Sambourne’s new photographic
work which he used as source material for his cartoons. Beginning with his purchase
of camera equipment in 1882, Sambourne took thousands of photographs of his
household staff, family, and himself, and then joined a Camera Club where he
photographed nude women as often as several times a week.35 In the Bathybius
cartoon, the hybrid mermaid is a creature of the sea, devoid of sartorial designs,
unlike her earlier counterparts in Sambourne’s “Designs After Nature.” Clothing
fashion belongs wholly to the Huxley figure with his mutton chop whiskers, bow-tie,
and checkered three-piece suit. The cartoon reiterates the typical Victorian gendered
binary of masculinity aligned with culture, femininity with nature, but without the
comic reversals or blurrings in the images some twenty years before.
A revamped version of Tennyson’s red-clawed feminine “Nature,” Sambourne’s
Punch cartoons of animal accents in women’s fashions in the 1890s assume a more
sinister tone where he portrays a lady of high fashion as the femme fatale of birds,
whose feathered bodies furnish the raw materials of stylish millinery. Two cartoons
in particular render Sambourne as activist, dedicated to the cause of the Society for
the Protection of Birds.36 His May 1892 Punch cartoon (see Plate 11),37 titled “A Bird
of Prey,” features what the text copy beneath calls “the harpy Fashion” hovering
over her quarry, with arms as the edge of outspread wings. Gigantic claws substitute
for feet at the hemline of the harpy’s “much-beplumed garments.” To depict this
vulturine power Sambourne aligns designs from nature with the human artifice of
women’s fashions, a logic that dovetails with the rapacious femininity of fin-de-
siècle culture. A companion cartoon to “A Bird of Prey” is Sambourne’s 1899 “The
‘Extinction’ of Species” where the earlier “harpy Fashion” now appears as a modern-
dressed woman rising from a marsh of water birds with a multi-plumed hat perched
on her head and an enormous millinery design incorporating the body of a dead egret
35 Shirley Nicholson, A Victorian Household (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton

Publishing Ltd., 1998) p. 129. According to Nicholson, there are over 10,000 photographs
in Sambourne’s collection, including some fascinating self-portraits (see pp. 15–16). These
photographs are now part of the Sambourne Family Archive, housed at the Kensington
Central Library, near 18 Stafford Terrace where Sambourne and his family lived from 1874.
Sambourne died in 1910. The house is open to the public. See <http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/
linleysambournehouse//general/default.asp>.
36 See Gates, Kindred Nature, pp. 114–24, for a discussion of the advent of the Society
for the Protection of Birds and other related activities.
37 Linley Sambourne, “A Bird of Prey,” Punch, or the London Charivari 102 (14 May
1892): 231.
dangling from her upraised hand.38 This “fashion-plate lady without mercy and the
egrets” symbolizes the culprit fashion industry against which protection societies
for animals campaigned. Many women spearheaded these agencies, like the Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds, and such animal activism was part of a wider
network including the anti-vivisectionist leagues.
Thus the context surrounding Sambourne’s cartoons shifted from 1867, when
Miss Swellington in her peacock feathers strolled within the pages of Punch, to these
1890s images where the sartorial artifice of human (and commodity consumerism)
selection trumps natural selection in the struggle for survival. Women in relation to
animals in Sambourne’s early “Designs After Nature” and in sensation novels of
the 1860s offer an ambiguously humorous angle on femininity in flux. But these
1890s cartoons, like the aggressive women lurking in novels of the decade such as
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, imagine a powerfully embodied femininity, more carnal
than ladylike in all manner of appetites, from bloodsucking vampires to bird-
fashioned consumers. By this time, persistent challenges to traditional marriage and
family included a growing feminist movement, theories and practices of alternative
sexualities, and the new women fiction and poetry linked to such critiques of gender
and sexuality. Concurrently at the end of the century, Darwin’s speculative account
of change in nature in The Origin of Species had evolved into social Darwinism and
eugenics. As connections across boundaries became more apparent, from species to
genders and genres, the lines between became more insistently calcified.
In the 1860s when Sambourne introduced his animal-fashioned women in the
cartoon series, cultural speculations about human transmutations also occasioned
questions about female agency, whether understood in terms of sexual selection
in nature or the empowered sensation heroines and their counterparts of incipient
feminists as “strong-minded women.” As a humorous instance of this cultural
preoccupation, Sambourne’s “Designs After Nature” cartoons pinpoint hair as the
margin between human and beast, where women’s coiffure and millinery fashions
blend or resonate with fins, feathers, or wings.39 Ann Balsamo maintains that
technologies of corporeality, or “techno-bodies,” are boundary figures “belonging
simultaneously to at least two previously incompatible systems of meaning—the
organic/natural and the technological/cultural” so that the body is reinvented not
as a fixture of nature, but as a “boundary concept.”40 Sambourne’s drawings and
sensation novels explore different ways of reading affiliations between animals and
women. It is worth noting that mammals, and especially apes, are kept at bay in
Sambourne’s fashion series. Where simian strains are more frequently referenced to
Irish or African men during this period, women are figured as reptiles or birds in the
various designs after nature from sensation novels to cartoons. Fashions in reading
and sartorial splendors offer a comic version of female hybridity in contrast to the
38 Linley Sambourne, “The ‘Extinction’ of Species,” Punch, or the London Charivari

117 (6 September 1899): 100.
39 Elaborate descriptions of the hair of sensation heroines abound as another trope for
their sexualized agency.
40 Anne Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body (Durham: Duke University Press,
1996), pp. 4–5.
more diabolical visions of bestial women a few decades later, such as Sambourne’s
“fashion Harpy” images of predatory species-slayers appeasing their hunger for
animal fashions. By the end of the nineteenth century, the power of evolutionary
theory as an explanatory narrative, along with the increasing political and cultural
heft of women and alternative sexualities were less subjects for frothy humor,
whether on Sambourne’s drawing board or in the pages of fin-de-siècle novels.41
Works Cited
Adams, James Eli. “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in
Tennyson and Darwin,” Victorian Studies 33:1 (Autumn 1989): 7–27.
“All About Hair and Beards,” Temple Bar 3 (September 1861): 247–61.
Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1996).
“Belles Lettres,” Westminster Review 86 (July 1866): 125–32.
Bernstein, Susan David. “Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre
Question,” Journal of Victorian Culture 6:2 (Autumn 2001): 250–71.
Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Lady Audley’s Secret, ed. Natalie M. Houston
(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003).
Collins, Wilkie. No Name (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species, ed. Joseph Carroll (Peterborough,
Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003).
[Dixon, E.S.]. “A Vision of Animal Existences,” The Cornhill 5 (March 1862):
311–18.
[Dunns, Rev Mr]. “Mr Darwin’s Origin of Species,” North British Review 32 (1860):
455.
“Eccentricities of Costume,” All the Year Round 9:212 (16 May 1863): 280–83.
Gates, Barbara T. ed. In Nature’s Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing and
Illustration, 1780–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
——. Kindred Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Hobsbawm, E.J.E. “Marx, Karl Heinrich,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/
article/39021>.
Jann, Rosemary. “Darwin and the Anthropologists: Sexual Selection and Its
Discontents,” Victorian Studies 37:2 (Winter 1994): 287–306.
Kingsley, Charles. The Water-Babies: A Fairy-Tale for a Land-Baby with one
hundred illustrations by Linley Sambourne (New York: Macmillan, 1904).
[Linton, Eliza Lynn]. “Fuss and Feathers,” Temple Bar 17 (May 1866): 192–201,
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “Little Women,” Saturday Review 25 (25 April, 1868): 545–6.
[Mansel, Henry]. “Sensation Novels,” Quarterly Review 113 (April 1863): 481–
514.
41 For a study of depictions of bestial women, see Rebecca Stott: The Fabrication of
the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: the Kiss of Death (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire:
Macmillans, 1992).
“Most Natural Selection.” Punch, or the London Charivari 60 (1 April, 1871): 127.
Nicholson, Shirley. A Victorian Household (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton
Publishing Ltd., 1998).
Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid and other figments of the classifying
imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Sambourne, Linley. “A Bird of Prey,” Punch, or the London Charivari 102 (14 May
1892): 231.
——. “Ballad of Bathybius,” Punch, or the London Charivari 94 (28 January 1888): 47.
——. “Mr Punch’s Designs After Nature,” Punch, or the London Charivari 60
(1 April 1871): 127.
——. “Mr Punch’s Designs From Nature,” Punch, or the London Charivari 55
(11 July 1868): 11.
——. “Nature’s Own Designs,” Punch, or the London Charivari 53 (21 December
1867): 256.
——. “Man Is But A Worm,” Punch’s Almanack 1882 82 (6 December 1881):
n.p.
——. “The ‘Extinction’ of Species,” Punch, or the London Charivari 117
(6 September 1899): 110.
[Stephen, Caroline]. “Thoughtfulness in Dress,” The Cornhill 18 (September 1868):
281–98.
Stott, Rebecca. Darwin and the Barnacle (New York: Norton, 2003).
——. The Fabrication of the Late-Victorian Femme Fatale: the Kiss of Death
(Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillans, 1992).
Warwick, Alexandra and Dani Cavallaro. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress,
and the Body (New York: Berg, 1998).
Young, Robert M. Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Chapter 5
Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations

Ivan Kreilkamp
The dogs that are brought in suffer from distempers, from broken limbs, from infected
bites, from mange, from neglect, benign or malign, from old age, from malnutrition, from
intestinal parasites, but most of all from their own fertility. There are simply too many of
them. When people bring in a dog they do not say straight out, “I have brought you this
dog to kill,” but that is what is expected: that they will dispose of it, make it disappear,
dispatch it to oblivion. What is being asked for is, in fact, Losung (German always to hand
with an appropriately blank abstraction): sublimation, as alcohol is sublimed from water,
leaving no residue, no aftertaste. (J.M. Coetzee, p. 142)
Great Expectations is, of course, a novel about memory, structured around Pip’s
attempt to remember the past and give it narrative shape. At the novel’s core
lies a fear of being forgotten or misremembered, of “perishing out of all human
knowledge.” The entire work plays out the tension of its opening scene, where
Dickens contrasts two possible fates: that of being remembered and memorialized,
as Pip’s parents are in the letters inscribed on their tombstones, or alternately, of
being obliterated and forgotten―not remembered but dismembered and cast aside,
as Pip fears he will be when Magwitch threatens to cut his throat in the graveyard.
Dickens, I will argue here, associates this threat of obliteration, of being destroyed
so as to leave no remnant or residue, with the fate of the dog. To be a dog is in this
novel to lack a narrative, to fail to take hold within others’ language and memories,
to lose all solid form, somewhat like those “Dogs, indistinguishable in mire” in the
opening paragraph of Bleak House. Dogs are preeminent examples of the category
Claude Levi-Strauss defined as “metonymical human beings,” pet animals who are
inconsistently treated as incomplete or as part-humans. Pet dogs, in British culture,
typically possess a tantalizingly incomplete identity: they are granted a name and a
place by the hearth in the family circle, but only temporarily, only as long as their
human master permits it. Their identity and ethical status are fundamentally unstable
and dependent, in a manner that Dickens’s novel powerfully evokes. The novel begins
For their helpful readings of and suggestions about drafts of this essay, I’d like to
thank Jennifer Fleissner, Deidre Lynch, Andrew Miller, Deborah Morse, and John Plotz, as
well as audiences at the Narrative conference in Berkeley in 2003 and the North American
Victorian Studies Association conference in Toronto in 2004.
Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 2000).
Charles Dickens Great Expectations World’s Classics. (Oxford and New York: Oxford
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962),
p. 207.
with the protagonist “call[ing] himself” Pip, but among the first names he is called
by another is “young dog” (p. 4). To be a dog is, in Great Expectations, to possess
and to typify in a novel deeply concerned with the precariousness of identity―a
precarious or threatened identity, an identity falling short of the standard of full-
fledged novelistic character, and so one is always in danger of being forgotten.
1. Like a Dog
Can animals count as “characters” within nineteenth-century British culture or

literature? Animals in the Victorian period, I suggest, are often treated as semi-
human in the realm of culture and as semi-characters in the realm of literature.
What I mean by this is that animals, or certain privileged domesticated animals,
are given names and invested with personality and individual identity, but that this
status is unreliable and subject to sudden abrogation. One of the primary signs of the
precariousness of pets’ status as human-like characters is their troubled relationship
to memory and memorializing, particularly in the form of writing or print. It is
typical for a Victorian pet to be treated in certain respects like a person but also
typical for an animal to be forgotten or replaced and allowed to disappear without
recognition in a manner that would seem troubling in the case of a human being.
Animal characters are fundamentally “minor,” in the sense defined by Alex Woloch
in his discussion of the narrative function of the minor character: “In terms of their
essential formal position,” he writes, as “subordinate beings who are delimited in
themselves while performing a function for someone else … minor characters are
the proletariat of the novel” (p. 27). If this is so, then animals are a sub-proletariat of
the novel: represented, but only in passing; given nicknames rather than true markers
of identity; possessing no solid claim to recognition or memory on the part of the
narrator or any other character. Even the minor human characters Woloch examines
possess an enviable robustness of identity and agency by comparison with nearly
any represented animal.
On the one hand, as Keith Thomas and others have documented, pets in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain became increasingly invested with
qualities of personality and individual identity, so much so that they were not only
given names but frequently memorialized in written forms:
Alex Woloch, as it happens, devotes an entire chapter to the minor characters of Great
Expectations—see The One Vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist
in the Novel. ((Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 177–243)—
without analyzing the novel’s references to animals. But he does cite a wonderful biographical
detail about Dickens in which the importance of the figure of the dog goes basically un-
remarked: “In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd notes that as the author moved from
house to house, he obsessively carried certain objects to place on his writing desk, including a
bronze image of ‘a dog fancier, with the puppies and dogs swarming all over him’” (p. 178).
Woloch reads these dogs as images of minor characters swarming over a central protagonist;
this essay can be read as an attempt to give more consideration to the question of why these
are, specifically, figures of “puppies and dogs.”
Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations 83
When cherished pets died, the bereaved owners might be deeply upset. They would
commemorate their passing in epitaphs and elegies … In the eighteenth century the remains
of pets might be covered with an obelisk or sculptured tomb. If the owner preceded them
to the grave they might attend the funeral; and, from the late seventeenth century onwards,
they could even hope to receive a legacy for their maintenance. (Thomas, p. 118)
Yet on the other hand, it would seem that such privileged, near-human relationship
to memorialization—allowing a pet to be granted a future in memory and history
beyond death, in the form of writing or inscription or even a financial legacy—
remained a relatively rare occurrence. Thomas cites a Dorset farmer who wrote in
1698 that “my old dog Quon was killed, and baked for his grease, of which he
yielded 11 lbs” (p. 102). By the nineteenth century, pets—especially dogs—were
increasingly given names and in other ways treated as beings possessing individual
characteristics and personality. But even so, the fate of that farmer’s old dog, killed
and baked for grease, would still seem to hover as an implicit threat over any animal
in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Britain. To be a dog is to risk such absolute
disintegration, a reduction to material substance that puts the lie to any former claim
to subjectivity.
Pets in Victorian literature embody minorness in various and complex ways—
one of which relates to genre. When pets and especially dogs feature as characters in
Victorian narratives, those narratives tend to fall into the orbit of one of two minor
generic categories, either children’s literature or the anecdote. “Whereas earlier
dog literature seemed simply a specialized branch of natural history,” Harriet Ritvo
writes, the new early nineteenth-century genre of “sentimental books about dogs …
included not only descriptions of the dogs’ physical and moral characteristics, but a
selection of heartwarming and enlightening anecdotes” (p. 86). British newspapers
and periodicals were in the 1840s and 1850s filled with anecdotes and vignettes
about loyal and brave dogs; indeed, to be confined to the sphere of the anecdote
would seem to define the Victorian dog’s ambiguous position. Within the strictly
delimited, bounded form of the anecdote, even acts of bravery, devotion, or heroism
cannot guarantee any lasting recognition; an animal “protagonist” of this particular
genre possesses an individuality that may be marked as at once exceptional and
admirable, and anonymous and short-lived. Consider this typical notice from
Chambers Edinburgh Journal:
Dogs soon become aware of any misfortune in the family to which they belong, and
show their sympathy in a variety of ways .… A female in Lincolnshire died, who had
two favorite dogs …. When the deceased was carried to the churchyard, one of the dogs
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–
1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983).
See Teresa Mangum on why and how dogs in Victorian culture “came so readily to be
associated with late life, the passage of time, and death itself” (“Dog Years, Human Fears,”
Representing Animals (ed.) Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002),
p. 39). See also Mangum’s essay in this volume on Victorian dogs, death, and mourning.
followed the corpse, and neither threats nor entreaties could drive it away. (“Jesse’s Scenes
and Tales of Country Life,” p. 300)
Identified only as “one of the dogs,” the creature who is the center of interest in
this brief narrative fails to break away from the “group” (of two) in which she is
embedded, and remains grammatically and conceptually subordinated to that
collectivity. This breakdown in individuality, or failure truly to achieve it, suggests
a potential tension that may arise when a dog escapes the form of the anecdote and
enters a more extended narrative. Generally denied the status of a protagonist or
developed character in such longer narratives, animals, when they are so represented,
can embody alternative, non-novelistic temporalities—anecdotal, minor, interrupted.
An animal character is, perhaps by definition, an incomplete or fragile character,
one whose continuity over a long span of time or pages cannot be guaranteed or
anticipated, and whose presence in a long novel may implicitly challenge that very
form’s presumption that individual identity can be maintained over a long duration.
In Dickens’s novel, the possibility or threat of being seen or treated as a dog bears
a strong relationship to the issue of memory and memorialization and particularly
to the anxiety of being forgotten. Peter Singer, in a discussion of the philosophical
basis for animal rights, observes that “the interest a being has in continued life …
will depend in part on whether the being is aware of itself as existing over time, and is
capable of forming future-directed desires that give it a particular kind of interest in
continuing to live.”10 If we consider this idea in relation to the form of the Victorian
novel, we might contemplate the problem Dickens and other novelists faced when
they turned away from the early nineteenth-century form of the “sketch” to the more
extended novel. The vivid personalities and urban types that Dickens, in his guise
as “Boz,” could sketch in passing and leave behind, had now to be sustained and
developed as novelistic characters, possessing new reservoirs of interior experience
and expectations of futurity. A represented animal might gain special significance
in this context as, among other things, a reminder of the lot of those pre- or non-
novelistic characters formerly left behind undeveloped and not able to “continue
to live,” a preeminent instance of an “undeveloped” character failing to “exist over
time.”
Pip begins both the novel, and his identity as a memory-filled subject, filled with
fear in a graveyard, misreading the language on a gravestone. His task is to write
himself into a permanent, stable relationship with death and memory so that future
readers will properly understand him and do justice to him when he can no longer
speak for himself. His task must be to avoid the fate of those “personalities” or
“Jesse’s Scenes and Tales of Country Life,” Chambers Edinburgh Journal (19,
Saturday, 11 May 1844), p. 300.
For another argument about the role of animals in a Dickens novel, see Mary Rosner,
who comments on the transformations that occur “as characters move back and forth between
the civilized and uncivilized, the human and the bestial” in Martin Chuzzlewit. “The imagery
in this novel,” she argues, “invites readers to recognize the animals in man” (“Reading the
Beasts of Martin Chuzzlewit.” Dickens Quarterly (4(3), September 1987), p. 136).
10 “Animal Liberation at Thirty,” The New York Review of Books, (15 May 2003),
p. 25.
semi-characters in a sketch by Boz, who enter the reader’s consciousness with vivid
force but soon depart, leaving no residue. In this context, Dickens’s representation of
animals, and his use of figurative language comparing humans to animals, becomes
shaped by a concern that individual identity, personality and memory might not be
retained: that all one’s individuating characteristics might slip away into formlessness
and an abyss of forgetfulness or misremembering that would threaten the possibility
both of novelistic form and of continuing identity over time.
Philosophers and theorists have long debated the problem of how to consider
animal communication in relation to human language, considering whether animal
signs or gestures deserve to be understood as a kind of language or signifying.11
Recent work in animal studies, especially that engaged in conversation with the
writings of Emmanuel Levinas, has also dedicated considerable attention to another
category, that of the “gaze” as the marker of subjectivity or of a significant otherness,
an otherness that might make ethical claims on a human subject.12 In a recent essay,
“The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Jacques Derrida returns
insistently to a “moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal,
for example the eyes of a cat … I have trouble repressing an instinct dictated by
immodesty:”13 “Nothing,” he adds, “will have ever done more to make me think
through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see
myself seen naked under the eyes of a cat” (p. 380). For Derrida, the gaze between
a language-less animal and a human being encapsulates the ethical and political
problem of recognition and reciprocity. The stare of his pet cat becomes, for Derrida,
an embodiment of the problem of responding to mute or non-signifying otherness; in
this essay, indeed, he announces his turn to the question of the place of the “animal”
in Western thought as the major topic of what has turned out to be his final body of
work.
Derrida’s essay first led me to recognize the ways Dickens’s novel is fundamentally,
if also marginally, concerned with the definition and rhetorical deployment of the
category of the animal.14 Derrida’s analysis of his cat’s gaze resonates, in particular,
with Dickens’s effort in Great Expectations to think through questions about the
11 On the question of how and whether it makes sense to understand animal communication
as a kind of language or speech, see Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name
(New York: HarperPerennial, 1994). Hearne’s remarkable book returns frequently, if always
in passing, to Dickens and his work: see pp. 25, 31, 60, 66, 69, 246, 262.
12 John Berger’s famous essay, “Why Look at Animals?” is dedicated to an analysis of
the meaning of the gaze that occurs between a human being and an animal in contemporary
Western culture (About Looking, New York: Pantheon, 1980).
13 Critical Inquiry (Winter 2002 28(2)), p. 372.
14 The link between Derrida’s essay and a work of Victorian literature is closer than it
might at first appear. Derrida, who has rarely if ever in his previous work analyzed texts by
Victorian British authors, announces delightfully, early in the essay, that “[a]lthough time
prevents it, I would of course have liked to inscribe my whole talk within a reading of Lewis
Carroll” (“‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject” in Points … Interviews, 1974–
1994 (ed.) Elizabeth Weber, (trans.) Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995), p. 376). To register the full force of that apologetic aside, one must realize that this
essay is derived from a 10-hour talk.
boundaries and definition of self-definition, naming, and autobiography.15 These
questions as routed through representations of the animal are manifested most
obviously, perhaps, in the literary trope of personification, the literary granting of
personhood to things or creatures normally not given that status. One of the first
animals thus personified in the novel is a black ox who fixes Pip with a stare very
much as the cat does Derrida:
The cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes, and steaming
out of their nostrils, “Holloa, young thief!” One black ox, with a white cravat on—who
even had to my awakened conscience something of a clerical air—fixed me so obstinately
with his eyes, and moved his blunt head around in such an accusatory manner as I moved
round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn’t help it, sir! It wasn’t for myself I took it!”
Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of smoke out of his nose, and vanished
with a kick-up of his hind-legs and a flourish of his tail. (pp. 16–17)
Pip finds himself confronted and “fixed” by an accusatory, fleeting gaze, a gaze that
follows him: the ox “moved his blunt head around … as I moved round.” Part of
the accusation here is a mimicry and a paralleling. The head is “blunt,” suggesting
the physiognomic difference between cattle and person, yet that head also tracks
Pip with an insistence that seems full of meaning to Pip, prompting his blubbering,
apologetic response. There is something communicative, even perhaps “human,”
in the way the ox’s head follows Pip. This passage is exemplary of the novel’s
engagement with animals and animality in several respects. One is the “suddenness”
with which the cattle come in and out of the field of vision and Pip’s consciousness.
In this novel of abrupt entrances and exits, these creatures’ hold on our attention is
especially fleeting. If these are characters, they are characters without a past or a
future, “coming upon” our protagonist and coming into personification with startling
abruptness, and then “vanishing” in a “cloud of smoke.”16
A second factor here is the animals’ ambiguous relationship to speech. That
cloud is at once that which blocks vision—the ox seems almost to escape in
a smokescreen—and also the animal’s speech: Pip sees the cattle as speaking
collectively “out of their nostrils.” The steam that their breath becomes in the cold
air presents itself as a form of accusatory language—albeit language emitted through
the nose rather than the mouth—before transforming back into a cloud. The animal’s
abrupt “vanishing” can be seen as following on the devolution of what was, briefly,
seen as speech, back into mere breath. To vanish would seem to be characteristic of
the animal: to vanish is to fade back into the misty realm without personification,
language, or characterization, the formless life of cattle. Such a vanishing poses an
15 See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative on “the
problem of identity, self-consciousness, naming, and language” in Great Expectations
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 116–17).
16 See Woloch on the minor character’s tendency to appear and disappear abruptly: an
unnamed minor character in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, Woloch argues, possesses a
singularity that is “conditioned by his sudden appearance and quick exit from the novel”
(p. 136).
implicit threat to Pip, given his own worries about naming and individuation: he
fears that he himself, like any animal, may slip away into such an abyss.
Another scene of animal–human confrontation or similitude follows soon after,
as Pip watches the convict eating the food Pip has stolen for him.
I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided
similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s. The man took strong sharp
sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too
soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought
there was danger in every direction, of somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was
altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably, I thought, or to
have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all
of which particulars he was very like the dog. (p. 19)
Here too Dickens describes a “decided similarity” between human and animal, a
similarity underlined when the description ends by returning again to the claim that
the man is “very like” the dog.17 The question of human “likeness” to the animal is, of
course, a fundamental one in both ethical and biological thinking on animal–human
relations. As Cary Wolfe asks, “Who is ‘like’ and who is ‘same,’ who the original
and who the copy, who the human and who the animal?”18 Wolfe suggests that a truly
ethical stance toward the animal cannot depend on a claim for the animal’s similarity
to “us,” nor on a self-interested hope for reciprocity: “why should not the supremely
moral act be that directed toward one, such as the animal other, from whom there
is no hope, ever, of reciprocity?” (p. 199).19 The ethical act toward the animal must
be a freely given one, a gesture of pure generosity or hospitality, not demanding a
prerequisite of speech or a communicative or comprehending gaze in return. We see
something similar to such an act in Joe’s response to Magwitch. Dickens’s depiction
of Magwitch’s capture develops what develops as an ongoing logic in the novel
linking the state of being like a dog or animal to a denial of comfort and hospitality.
After Magwitch has been taken, Joe extends a gesture of hospitality to the convict:
17 Dickens’s comparison of Magwitch while eating to a dog resembles this description

of Mr Barkis in David Copperfield: “I offered him a cake as a mark of attention, which he
ate at one gulp, exactly like an elephant, and which made no more impression on his big
face that it would have done on an elephant’s” ((London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 114).
The key difference would seem to lie in the distinction between the elephant’s presumed
impassivity and the dog’s furtive, shamed hunger. Another analogy would be Bleak House’s
Jo, who “begins to gulp the coffee, and to gnaw the bread and butter; looking anxiously about
him in all directions as he eats and drinks, like a scared animal” ((London: Penguin Books,
1996), p. 719). As Allen Woodcourt tries to find a place for Joe, he considers, “It surely is a
strange fact … that in the heart of a civilised world this creature in human form should be
more difficult to dispose of than an unowned dog” (p. 719). Dickens adds, “But it is none the
less a fact because of its strangeness, and the difficulty remains.”
18 Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and
Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 180.
19 See also Singer, p. 24, for an assessment of, and rejection of, the capacity for
“reciprocity” as a valid criterion for the determination of which creatures deserve ethical
stature.
“We don’t know what you’ve done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for
it, poor miserable fellow-creatur” (p. 39). More than simply offering kindness or
hospitality—Joe has also told Magwitch he was “welcome to” the pie he had eaten—
Joe is making an importantly open gesture of forgiveness and inclusion here.
Joe’s hospitality is made not on the grounds of a privileged—“human”—status
but on that of sharing the broad category of “miserable fellow-creatur.” That is, he
does not aim to pluck Magwitch from the ranks of the inhuman, undeserving of
hospitality or kindness, to restore him to the ranks of human, but instead makes a
claim for general kinship or commonality.20 If Joe and Magwitch are “miserable
fellow-creatur[es],” Joe himself has no particular status above that of creature; and in
fact, he has just a sentence earlier repudiated his own status as a propertied owner of
the pie Magwitch devoured: “God knows you’re welcome to it—so far as it was ever
mine.” Joe can be seen as undermining the division between the propertied human
subjects who are entitled to food, comfort, and hospitality and those dehumanized
others who are treated as animals: “No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested
in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word, except that
somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, ‘give way, you!’” (p. 40). The very next
sentence in the novel underlines Dickens’s implication that Magwitch, as a despised
prisoner, has been animalized: “By the light of the torches, we saw the black Hulk
lying out a little way from the mud of the shore, like a wicked Noah’s ark.”21 Noah’s
ark was a boat of the saved, those to be remembered, while all other living creatures
were destroyed, erased from memory. The prisoners on the Hulks are treated as
animals and as without dignity: the hunt for Magwitch on Christmas day, offering
the spectacle of a human being run down like an animal, is a profanation of the joyful
day in its mockery of any claim to an inclusive human community.
Dogs are generally linked, in Great Expectations, both with degradation and
humiliation and, in a different register, with imagination, lies, and figurative language.
When Jaggers asks Joe if he keeps a dog, and adds: “Bear in mind, then, that Brag
is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better” (p. 135), he at once tropes on dog names and
invokes a supposed canine quality that might exist in tension with the verbal act of
troping: that of steadfastness, fidelity, and honesty. If dogs are conventionally seen
as being “true,” faithful pets, notably lacking in deceit or duplicity, this might seem
to render them inappropriate vehicles for metaphor or other figurative language.
20 Dickens’s implication that human beings might be grouped with animals as fellow
“creatures” may well have been influenced by Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, published a
year before the first serial of Great Expectations. Gillian Beer writes that the effect of Darwin’s
work was to “range man alongside all other forms of life. The multi-vocal nature of metaphor
allows … [Darwin] to express, without insisting on, kinship” (Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary
Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000), p. 56). Beer, in turn, suggests that Darwin may have been “freed
from some of the difficulties he experienced in expressing the nature of man to the rest of the
natural order by his reading of Dickens, whose style insists on the recalcitrance of objects ….
The theme of hidden yet all-pervasive kinship is one which their narratives share” (p. 56). See
also Goldie Morgentaler for a Darwinian reading of Great Expectations (“Meditating on the
Low: A Darwinian Reading of Great Expectations.” SEL (38 1998): pp. 707–721).
21 See also p. 227, where the references to dogs and to a wicked Noah’s ark recur.
Yet one of Pip’s most memorable lies involves the invention of imaginary dogs, as
Dickens seems to imply a sharp contrast between associations of dogs with fidelity
or “truthfulness” and Pip’s own imaginative, mendacious relation to language.
Dickens memorably links dogs with both social humiliation and metaphor when
Pip, following his distressing first visit to Miss Havisham’s, can find no language to
explain what he feels about the visit, and so tells an outrageous string of lies ending
with a description of four “immense” dogs who “fought for veal cutlets out of a silver
basket” (p. 66). These powerful dogs recall Pip’s earlier comparison of Magwitch to
“a large dog of ours”; dogs are clearly, for Dickens, strongly linked with eating and
food and perhaps, more generally, with the state of hunger or material need. These
dogs can also be seen as Pip’s wishful transformation of the scene that in fact earlier
took place at Satis House, where Estella emphasized Pip’s low status in a manner
familiar to him—through the socially-encoded rituals of a meal:
She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She put the mug
down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread and meat without looking at me,
as insolently as if I were a dog in disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended,
angry, sorry—I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart—God knows what it was—
that tears started to my eyes. (p. 61)
Estella and Miss Havisham reward Pip’s lower-class status, his “coarse hands” and
“thick boots” (p. 59), with “insolent” treatment fit only for that most degraded creature,
“a dog in disgrace.” Pip’s fantasy dogs are, then, an effort at compensation, a reversal
of the shameful treatment: the “dog in disgrace” expands to become four “immense”
dogs dining sumptuously on a cut of meat Pip has doubtless never tasted, a veal
cutlet.22 These imagined dogs are grandiose and extravagant; the most impressive
creatures Pip can come up with. Yet their actions also hint at some of the pathos
and limitations of animal identity. Fighting for pieces of meat, they seem proxies
for Pip, embodying his feelings of figurative and literal hunger and prefiguring his
subsequent fisticuffs with the pale young gentleman (later Herbert Pocket). At Satis
House, Pip must earn his keep through a performance of degraded status; whether by
“playing” or fighting in response to her explicit or implicit commands, he resembles
the dogs in his pet-like subordination. Even in Pip’s fantasy version of his visit to
Satis House, in which he dines sumptuously on “cake and wine on gold plates”
(p. 66), he consumes only on command: “I got up behind the coach to eat mine,
because she told me to.”
The link between dogs and lies or metaphorical language leads to the novel’s
implication that to be a dog is to occupy a shadowy realm of incomplete identity,
identity that may not possess permanence or leave permanent traces. The power of
those immense dogs corresponds to their fundamental weakness: that is, they exist
only in Pip’s language and imagination. In this sense they are no different from
any literary character, yet they lack the support of the conventions of realism that
grants “real” characters continuity and extension in time. As we’ve also seen in his
depiction of the disappearing cattle, Dickens is broadly interested in what it means to
22 On Pip’s hunger and relation to food, see Ian Watt, “Oral Dickens,” Dickens Studies
Annual 3 (1974), pp. 165–81.
be a “character” who lacks robust substance, agency, or continuity. When Pip arrives
at Matthew Pocket’s lodgings at Bernards Inn, he is disappointed: “I had supposed
that establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our
town was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied
spirit, or a fiction” (p. 171). The emptying out of “Mr. Bernard” to “disembodied
spirit” exemplifies a central anxiety in the novel, that of finding oneself or another to
be in fact nothing but a spirit, a fiction, a made-up name in someone else’s narrative
(a concern that is first hinted at in the novel’s inaugural sentences, when Pip explains
that his name is less Christian or proper than a nickname, a single syllable by which
he “came to be called” (p. 3)). Pip’s fabulous dogs are paradigmatic of such a status
and, indeed, perhaps more broadly of the animal or pet in Victorian fiction. Denied
proper place within the novel’s diegesis, they exist only in a realm of shame and
fantasy, skulking in the disavowed corners of the plot.
2. Dying Like a Dog
The culmination of the novel’s logic regarding the likeness between humans and
animals and the fear of being treated as or forgotten like a dog occurs in the scene
of Orlick’s attack on Pip. This is characterized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as “one
of several very powerful [scenes] in this paranoid novel to bring men together under
a wildly exacerbated homosocial bond of rivalry.”23 But the salient category here, a
category posing special boundary problems, may be species as much as gender. Like
Bentley Drummle, another of the novel’s villains, who “would always creep in-shore
like some uncomfortable amphibious creature” (p. 201), Orlick seems to emerge
from moist places, his form indistinct: “When we came near the churchyard, we
had to cross an embankment, and get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up
from the gate, or from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant
way), old Orlick” (p. 129). Orlick is a figure of ambiguous and amphibious animality
who poses a particular threat in his metonymic relation to the oozy marshes of Pip’s
upbringing, that site of primordial origins where—in this post-Darwinian novel—
human identity may become indistinct, its boundaries blurred or undefined.
Orlick’s attack on Pip foregrounds the problem of human–animal resemblance
and constitutes a terrifying fulfillment of Pip’s deepest fear: that he will disappear
and be forgotten or mis-remembered like a dog or a minor character. Harriet Ritvo
observes that “once nature ceased to be a constant antagonist, it could be viewed
with affection and even, as the scales tipped to the human side, with nostalgia.”24
This is, of course, the logic that generates the domestic pet as one of the cultural
forms for which Victorian Britain became best known.25 In this scene Pip seems to
23 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 31.
24 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: the English and other Creatures in the Victorian
Age Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 2.
25 On the pet as a pre-eminent Victorian form, see also my essay “Petted Things:
Wuthering Heights and the Animal” Yale Journal of Criticism (18(1), Spring 2005), pp. 87–
110.
have fallen shockingly back into a pre-modern state of pure nature and animality, a
state of “constant antagonism” and fundamental enmity, as Orlick, “with his mouth
snarling like a tiger’s” (p. 420), continually reminds Pip: “Oh you enemy, you
enemy!” Orlick’s revenge may be seen as a revenge of the animality that has always
been defined as the abjected other of the human.
Orlick calls Pip not just “enemy,” but a much more specific embodiment of a
traditional enemy to mankind: “wolf” (p. 419). Dogs descended from wolves, so
Orlick is at once placing Pip back in the ancient wild past and rendering him the
predator, the savage beast whose death at the hand of man may be just or necessary.
Orlick’s greatest threat, however, resides in his claim that he will not only kill Pip
but dispose of his body so thoroughly that he will be “misremembered” after death.
Dickens defines Pip’s possible fate here precisely as a form of dehumanization, an
annihilation so complete that it would prevent any true memory of Pip to outlive
him. Orlick boasts,
“I won’t have a rag of you, I won’t have a bone of you, left on earth. I’ll put your body in
the kiln—I’d carry two such to it, on my shoulders—and, let people suppose what they
may of you, they shall never know nothing.”… The death close before me was terrible,
but far more terrible than death was the dread of being misremembered after death. And
so quick were my thoughts, that I saw myself despised by unborn generations—Estella’s
children, and their children—while the wretch’s words were yet on his lips. (p. 420)
Orlick’s next words emphasize that what he proposes to do to Pip is, specifically, to
treat him like a common animal who is entitled to no gravestone, elegy, or full-fledged
narrative memory: “Now, wolf,” said he, “afore I kill you like any other beast—which
is wot I mean to do and wot I have tied you up for ….”26 Orlick’s definition of Pip as
“like any other beast” emphasizes Pip’s grouping in the expansive category of animal,
of which there are always too many. As my epigraph from J.M. Coetzee suggests,
essential to the category of the animal is an excessive multiplicity (a multiplicity that
is, in Woloch’s argument, also fundamental to fictional minorness: the abundance
of minor characters defines the special status of the single protagonist). There are
always more fish in the sea, more dogs in the pound, yet this superabundance of non-
human creatures is linguistically subsumed into a single term: “the set of the Animal
in general, the animal spoken of in the general singular,” “the whole animal realm
with the exception of the human” (Derrida, p. 408). For an animal to be treated as an
individual then, is to receive a kind of gift or dispensation, to be temporarily selected
and individuated from the undistinguished masses of animal life.
We recall Pip’s early observations that Magwitch was “very like the dog.” Such
“likeness” between animal and human, according to Joe and perhaps Dickens’s
own logic, offered a route to an ethical recognition of “the other” as deserving of
26 It should be kept in mind, however, that the treatment with which Orlick threatens
Pip, that of being killed and buried in an unmarked grave, carries a class-based implication as
well, since to be buried without proper recognition in a pauper’s grave was a dreaded fate in
Victorian Britain. I am simply emphasizing a less-often recognized aspect of Orlick’s threat,
one relating not to the category of class so much as species, although the two cannot be
entirely disentangled here; Orlick threatens both to animalize and pauperize Pip.
hospitality and kindness. Yet here, Orlick’s rhetorical gesture sweeps Pip into a realm
of mute, helpless animality. It seems appropriate to that logic that once Orlick has
defined Pip as “like any other beast,” Pip senses his human status abandoning him
so completely that he fears not simply his dehumanization but his inhumanization in
a transformation into pure vapor: “I knew that when I was changed into a part of the
vapour that had crept before me but a little while ago, he would do as he had done in
my sister’s case.” Orlick threatens—to adopt the language Coetzee uses to describe
the destruction of dogs in Disgrace—to sublimate Pip “as alcohol is sublimed from
water, leaving no residue;” to turn him into sub-substance, a “disembodied spirit,”
something below the level of form.
Dickens conjoins Orlick’s physical threat—to break down and destroy the
body—to a threat to Pip’s reputation or presence in memory. “I was within a few
moments of surely perishing out of all human knowledge,” Pip declares. To be so
treated would be to have one’s individuality, claim to a name or to agency, negated.
To be misremembered would seem to resemble in some respects the state of being
dismembered, perhaps like the “veal cutlets” fought over by Pip’s fantasy dogs. To
be dismembered is to be reduced to a featureless mass, something like a piece of
meat—that into which any animal, even a pet, can be instantly transformed. The body
of any dead human being is considered deserving of special treatment and burial; a
dead animal becomes mere flesh or meat.27 E.M. Forster famously defined novel
characters according to a distinction between the flat minor character and the round
protagonist or other developed character. Dickens seems to evoke the possibility of a
state below even that of flat character—perhaps that of road-kill or slab of meat.
The form of Great Expectations enacts a hope or faith that narrative might
serve as a source of memory, atonement, and forgiveness. As chapter succeeds
chapter, Pip gives accumulating form and continuity to his experience and grants
it extension in time and memory. As with any autobiography, the fact of narration
attests to, if nothing else, the survival of the narrator and his “continued life,” a
continuation we multiply and reinforce in the act of reading. In the confrontation
with Orlick, the narrative undergoes a crisis of animalization as it approaches a brink
of misremembering, forgetting, and shockingly sudden loss of the status of a subject
or character. “Quon,” the name of the farmer’s old dog, is a variant of the word
“whone” or “one.” We might take Quon’s fate to be in a general sense emblematic of
that of the English dog in Victorian culture, who is granted the right to be “one,” to
possess a name and character and history like any other whole subject, but who may
find that subjectivity abrogated with no warning, transformed into grease or vapor.28
27 On the category of non-human flesh or meat, see Derrida, “Eating Well.”

28 This seems an appropriate moment to note that Dickens was himself an enthusiastic
dog owner. Fred Kaplan writes of Sultan, an Irish bloodhound Dickens received as a gift from
Percy Fitzgerald: “He had become his master’s favorite, partly because of his affectionateness,
partly because he rejected and detested everyone else. ‘So accursedly fierce toward other
dogs’ that he had to be muzzled to be taken out, he attacked everything moving or still ….
The price of such total love was the problem of having to deal with his creature’s unmitigated
enmity to the rest of the world. To Dickens, he was the finest dog he had ever seen. ‘Between
him and me there was a perfect understanding.’ Breaking his muzzle frequently, though, he
came home ‘covered with blood, again and again.’ One day he swallowed an entire blue-eyed
This is what Orlick threatens Pip with as well, the promise of such a final abyss, with
neither rag or bone left to attest to his former existence on earth. To endure this fate
would be to become an impossibility as a protagonist or narrator; it would mark the
collapse of the very form of the novel we read.29
Works Cited
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Inquiry, 28:2 (Winter 2002): 369–418.
——. “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Elizabeth Weber (ed.),
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Dickens, Charles, Bleak House (London: Penguin Books, 1996).
——. David Copperfield (London: Penguin Books, 1985).
——. Great Expectations (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
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Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal,” Yale Journal
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kitten, afterward suffering ‘agonies of remorse (or indigestion?).’ When he seized the little
servant of one of the servants, Dickens flogged him. The next morning he took the dog to the
meadow behind the house, accompanied by a half dozen men with guns and a wheelbarrow.
Sultan bounded out cheerfully, anticipating ‘the death of somebody unknown.’ He paused,
meditatively, with his eyes on the wheelbarrow and the guns. ‘A stone deftly thrown across
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(Dickens: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 534).
29 A dog possessing subjectivity, dignity, and a narrative voice is not, of course, in fact an
impossibility within the history of the novel. Following the massive success of Anna Sewell’s
1877 Black Beauty, other authors inspired by the anti-cruelty movement devised animal
protagonists. Margaret Marshall Saunders’s 1893 Beautiful Joe, the fictional autobiography of
a dog whose former master had cut off its ears and tail, can, for example, be read as a kind of
answer to Pip’s fears (Saunders, [Margaret] Marshall. Beautiful Joe : an Autobiography, intro.
by Hezekiah Butterworth (Philadelphia : The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1893)). The narrative
in effect remembers and re-members a creature who had been, if not literally dismembered,
certainly mutilated and abused.
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Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2002): 35–47.
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Expectations,” SEL 38 (1998): 707–721.
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Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Rosner, Mary. “Reading the Beasts of Martin Chuzzlewit,” Dickens Quarterly 4:3
(September 1987): 131–41.
Saunders, [Margaret] Marshall. Beautiful Joe: an Autobiography, Hezekiah
Butterworth (intro.) (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1893).
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Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Singer, Peter. “Animal Liberation at Thirty,” The New York Review of Books (15
May 2003): 23–6.
Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–
1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983).
Watt, Ian. “Oral Dickens,” Dickens Studies Annual 3 (1974): 165–81.
Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and
Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Woloch, Alex. The One Vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the
Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2003).
PART II
Sex and Violence
Chapter 6
Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic

Animals and Violence in Victorian Art
Martin A. Danahay
It has long been recognized that the nineteenth century witnessed a profound shift
in both the perception and treatment of animals. Prior to this shift, the British had
a particularly bad reputation for bloodthirstiness and a taste for sports such as bull
baiting. For example, James Boswell records in his journal one evening deliberately
eating large quantities of roast beef and going to a cock fight in order to live up to
this bloodthirsty image. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the humane
treatment of animals was taken for granted and George Gissing in The Secret Agent
showed Stevie’s innate sense of justice by describing his horror at the mistreatment
of a horse. This brutality has a much more profound effect on Stevie than any of
his stepfather’s sermons on oppression in British society. Like the British general
public, Stevie seemed to find it easier to become outraged at the cruel treatment of
animals than by similar acts against people.
Much attention has been paid to domestic animals as the objects of violence in
the context of changing Victorian attitudes toward animals, but I will in this essay
explore the issue of domestic animals as the bearers of violence. While the Victorians
were increasingly comfortable with the idea of animals as passive sufferers who
were in need of protection by their human mentors, the idea that domestic animals
could themselves act violently became increasingly problematic. Representations of
domestic animals acting violently in Victorian art bring into conjunction categories
that were increasingly viewed as separate, and make the animal the vehicle for an
exploration of conflicting ideological codes of domesticity and aggression. The term
See James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the
Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 4–14 for a history
of this shift on both sides of the Atlantic; Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English
and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987),
pp. 2–4 for a discussion of the reasons for the shift in attitude and Moira Ferguson for a
discussion of the issues of national identity in the treatment of animals in Animal Advocacy
and Englishwomen, 1780–1900: Patriotism, Nation and Empire (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 2–4.
Boswell eats a steak to confirm the English reputation as “beef-eaters” and watches
“cock-fighting for about five hours to fulfill the charge of cruelty” in Frederick A. Pottle ed.,
Boswell’s London Journal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), p. 86.
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (London: J.M. Dent, 1907), p. 157.
“domestic” especially is brought into question when domesticated (as opposed to
“wild”) animals are represented as violent.
The conjunction of the “domestic” and “violence” in my title would have been
viewed as a confusion of categories in the Victorian period. The domestic space
was represented as a safe haven from the public sphere of competition, avarice and
violence, and was supposedly immune from the kind of antisocial forces associated
with the marketplace and street. John Ruskin’s famous formulation of this ideology
in “Of Queen’s Gardens” is cited most frequently in terms of gender segregation, but
he also separates the home through a contrast between “peace” and the “anxieties of
the outer life” in addition to the contrast between male and female:
This is the true nature of home – it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all
injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. In so far as it is not this, it is not home; so far
as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown,
unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by either husband or wife to cross
the threshold, it ceases to be home. (Ruskin, Sesame, p. 96)
For Ruskin “terror, doubt and division” are fatal for “the true nature of home,” so
that a domestic space in which any conflict or violence takes place ceases to be, by
definition, a “home.” Ruskin unintentionally underscores the fragility of his ideal
“home” because it can be destroyed by any contamination of the “outside” world.
In practice this was a barrier frequently breached as the “home” was not insulated
from the conflicts of Victorian society in the way in which Ruskin hoped. Ruskin
thus underscores the necessity of separating the “domestic” from violence and the
way in which the two categories are anathema; to bring “violence” into the space of
the “domestic” is to violate a sacrosanct boundary.
Many Victorian houses by Ruskin’s definition were not “homes.” As A. James
Hammerton has documented in Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-
Century Married Life there were plenty of Victorian marriages in which violence
and conflict played a part. This was true both of working-class and middle-class
marriages, despite the Victorian belief that physical violence was confined to the
lower classes (Hammerton, p. 3). However, given the status of the domestic sphere
as a haven from conflict, it was difficult to recognize that abuse even existed in the
home. Aggressive animals in Victorian representation can often suggest domestic
violence indirectly when it would not be possible to address the topic overtly.
This ideological separation of the ideal of the peaceful domestic sphere and the
eruption of brutality is violated in the representation of pets that I will examine in
this article. In keeping with the growth in the Victorian period of pet-keeping and
the perception of certain animals as members of “companion species” rather than
the source of food or labor, dogs, cats and birds became confused with the ideal of
the “family” on a par with women and children. Paul S. White in “The Experimental
Animal in Victorian Britain” quotes R.H. Hutton’s argument that dogs and cats be
exempted from vivisection because they “were in fact members of the human family
or household” (White, p. 68). A dog in its own miniature “house,” an attentive lap
As White notes, dogs embodied more fully and consistently than any other animal
in their function as “family friends and devoted servants.” See Paul S. White, “The
Nature Red in Hoof and Paw 99
dog, or a sleeping cat could evoke associations of fidelity, peace and companionship
strongly linked to the ideal of the family and the domestic sphere as the “place
of Peace” evoked by Ruskin. Like women, pets were securely located within the
protective boundaries of the domestic sphere.
This division between the home as inside and “private” and the outside as “public”
could impede the efforts of those who championed animal rights and opposed cruelty
to animals in the nineteenth century. The RSPCA in its efforts to legislate against
the inhumane treatment of animals found itself in conflict with Victorian domestic
ideology when it tried to impose its code of conduct on the private lives of its
citizens. Both Harriet Ritvo in The Animal Estate and Brian Harrison in Peaceable
Kingdom have noted the importance of the ideologies of domesticity and privacy
for the Victorians. Harrison argues that “the RSPCA recognized that much cruelty
… occurred on private premises or inside the family, and wisely did not attempt
the impossible …. Lord Mahon told the annual meeting of 1835 that dogs were not
protected ‘because we wish to avoid an inquisition into private life’.” (Harrison,
p. 120; Ritvo, pp. 145–6).
While the RSPCA may have recognized that as much cruelty to animals occurred
in the domestic sphere as in the public streets, it could not propose legislation that
entered the supposedly sacrosanct private, domestic realm. Similarly Victorian
legislation was reluctant to admit the category of “domestic violence” as applicable
to relations between husbands and wives. Harrison does not elaborate on this point,
but his formulation that “much cruelty occurred inside the family” is striking in
the way it underscores that Victorian domestic ideology made domestic violence,
whether against fellow family members, especially women, or animals, difficult to
represent overtly in texts or images. Since the domestic sphere was by definition the
site of comfort and refuge from violence, it could not be recognized that domestic
relations could themselves be violent.
Ruskin, therefore, emphasizes in Of Queen’s Gardens that the feminine and the
domestic are synonyms, so that wherever a woman is becomes “home” even if she
does not have a roof over her head. In his analysis of images of home in Dickens’s
fiction, Frances Armstrong emphasizes that by idealizing women as domestic angels
Experimental Animal in Victorian Britain,” in Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on

Anthropomorphism, ed. Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2005), p. 68.
Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1982).
As Lisa Surridge in “Dogs’ Bodies, Women’s Bodies: Wives as Pets in Mid-Nineteenth-
Century Narratives of Domestic Violence,” Victorian Review 20:1 (Summer 1994), points out,
there was a deep contradiction in Victorian legislation on the domestic sphere generally in that
an idealized view of the middle-class home as a site of peace and security “led to increased
expectations of domestic behavior, and hence to demand for public scrutiny and regulation of
such behavior; at the same time, however, this very scrutiny violated the social construction
of the middle-class home as a “place of peace,” secure from outside intrusion,” p. 3. Theresa
de Lauretis has analyzed the process that makes certain forms of violence invisible through
ideologies of gender that normalize supposedly private forms of aggression in Technologies
of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
in this way Victorian males could “disguise the fact it was a figure of their own
creation.” They could also, I would add, repress troubling knowledge of violence
and conflict between the genders and the classes by turning both women and
the domestic sphere into peaceful refuges from a nature “red in tooth and claw.”
As we shall see, domestic pets and women served similar functions in Victorian
iconography, drawing upon a set of associations of the domestic as a private area
untouched by violence and as a bulwark against capitalist exploitation figured as
“nature red in tooth and claw.”
James Turner in his Reckoning with the Beast locates the production of our
contemporary view of domestic animals as pets in the mid- to late Victorian period,
and describes it as an explicit reaction against the image of a nature as “red in tooth
and claw.” Turner asserts that “when nature presented a terrifying image of beasts
with fangs dripping blood, the kitten toying with its ball of yarn made for a more
cheering picture …. By creating the modern pet … animal lovers manufactured an
animal designed to quell savage nature with the balm of love” (Turner, p. 76). Pets,
along with idealized images of the home and of the angel who presided over it,
fulfilled similar functions in keeping at bay a violent, carnivorous nature. Domestic
animals, particularly pets like rabbits, cats and small dogs, were used to counteract
images of violence, cruelty and the conflict between species implied by the idea of
the “struggle for existence.”
Women themselves frequently identified with domestic animals as the victims of
violence. When advocating women’s rights, Victorian writers would often link the
status of women as the property of their husbands to that of domestic animals. Mona
Caird, for example, uses an elaborate simile between women and domesticated dogs
to describe the position of Victorian women:
We chain up a dog to keep watch over our home; we deny him his freedom, and in some
case, alas! even sufficient exercise to keep his limbs supple and his body in health …. In
the same way we have subjected women for centuries to a restricted life, which called
forth one or two forms of domestic activity; we have rigorously excluded (even punished)
every other development of power; we have then insisted that the consequent adaptations
of structure, and the violent instincts created by this distorting process, are, by a sort of
compound interest, to go on adding to the distortions themselves … We chain because we
have chained. The dog must not be released, because his nature has adapted itself to the
misfortune of captivity. (pp. 272–3)
Frances Armstrong, Dickens and the Concept of Home (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Research, 1990), p. 13.
For other studies of the relationship between humans and animals in the nineteenth
century see James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human–Animal
Relationships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Kathleen Kete, The Beast
in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-century Paris (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995).
The imaginative connection in the nineteenth century between women and animals
has long been recognized in such classic studies as Coral Lansbury’s The Old Brown Dog
in which Lansbury examines the connection between the representation of women and the
practice of vivisection.
Caird makes striking use of the imagery of a chained dog here by suggesting that it
is a form of domestic violence against both women and animals. Caird exploits the
identification of women and domestic pets, found most obviously in Walter Howell
Deverell’s A Pet (1853) for example as way to suggest imprisonment rather than
safety and security (Plate 12). The enclosing domestic space represented tranquility
for Ruskin but is a form of imprisonment for Caird, the chain at a symbolic
level representing slavery. Like John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women”
Caird suggests that women are domestic slaves, which also suggests that pets are
“imprisoned” as well.
Caird refers briefly to “the violent instincts” within both pets and women that
are a result of imprisonment; she thus reinscribes violence within both women and
the domestic sphere. Friedrich Nietzsche made similar claims about the suppressed
violence of women; in aphorism number 239 he draws upon the stereotype of women
as more “natural” than men and then represents this nature in terms of violence:
What inspires respect for woman, and often enough even fear, is her nature, which is
more “natural” than man’s, the genuine, cunning suppleness of a beast of prey, the tiger’s
claw under the glove, the naivete of her egoism, her uneducability and inner wildness,
the incomprehensibility, scope and movement of her desires and virtues – What, in spite
of all fear, elicits pity for this dangerous and beautiful cat “woman” is that she appears
to suffer more, to be more vulnerable, more in need of love, and more condemned to
disappointment than any other animal. (Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism #239)10
Nietzsche indirectly bolsters Caird’s claim that men keep women “chained” because
they fear the possible violence that would erupt if such restraints were removed.
Rather than a dog, Nietzsche uses the tiger as a symbol of the most extreme violence
imaginable, turning women into felines rather than canines. Caird’s and Nietzsche’s
images of women as violent are at the opposite end of the spectrum from Ruskin’s
ideal of female peace and serenity. Theirs are the exceptions rather than the rule in
representations of Victorian women as pets. Rather than sources of violence, women
were most often portrayed as the victims of such violence.
In both cases animals and women are linked through “nature.” In Victorian
representation both women and animals are supposedly closer to “nature” so that
the natural is feminized. If in a post-Darwinian context nature is violent, then the
corollary is that women and animals have the capacity for violence. Caird and
Nietzsche are exploiting this corollary. Nietzsche’s image of the “tiger’s paw” under
the glove is an especially interesting image in this regard, echoing fears in stories
such as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau that the animal is a presence within all
humans, although Wells also explores the possibility that an animal can be rendered
human. It also parallels the image cited by Bernstein in the previous chapter, “A Bird
of Prey” (Plate 11).
Caird and Nietzsche are drawing on what Wolffe and Elmer term “the animalized
human” who registers most strongly the “ongoing practices of violence against
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,
trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 169. This quotation is embedded in a
misogynist view of women much like that countered by Caird below.
nonhuman others” (Wolffe and Elmer, p. 147).11 Drawing on the work of Jacques
Derrida on the “animal subject” and on animal rights attacks on “speciesism,” they
argue that the human/animal divide is based on a fundamental symbolic violence that
is repressed and marginalized but underscores all representations of animals (Wolffe
and Elmer, p. 146). Pets are “humanized animals” in Wolffe’s and Elmer’s terms and
it is thanks to this hybrid identity that they can be identified with women who are
seen as “animalized humans.” Nietzsche’s aphorism 239 inscribes a “nature” and
“wildness” at the core of women’s identity that underscores the unstable “animalized
human” status of the female body. The male body, by contrast, would be the
“humanized human,” and thus the only “pure” subject. Paul S. White, in an interesting
contrast to Lansbury’s work, has documented the way in which physiologists urged
“young men entering on the threshold of manhood” to undertake dissection as a way
of strengthening male “self mastery” and thus resist degenerating into an animal
(White, p. 67). By subjecting animals to violence, these young Victorian men would
reinforce their identity as “humanized humans.”
In an essay on women’s rights, Frances Power Cobbe quotes a saying that “the
women of Lancashire are … like dogs, the more you beat them the more they love
you” (p. 140), a saying that uses the same equation of women and domesticated
dogs as Caird’s extended metaphor but turns women as “animalized humans” into
objects of violence. Caird and Cobbe cite the image of the dog but for very different
purposes, one emphasizing the dog as potentially violent, another as a victim of
inhumane treatment from a presumably male owner. Representing women as victims
accorded better with the stereotype of them as vulnerable and weak, not “beasts of
prey” as in Nietzsche’s aphorism 239.
Cobbe is particularly notable in this context because she combined agitation for
women’s rights with the cause of animal rights. She also insisted that the domestic
sphere was the unacknowledged scene of violence in such essays as “Wife-Torture in
England,” insisting that the term “torture” rather than “beating” be used to underscore
the horror of domestic violence.12 In this same essay she equates women’s hearts and
birds, arguing that “in the hands of such a man a woman’s heart must be crushed,
like the poor bird under his heel” (Cobbe, p. 142). Cobbe equates women and pets
as equal victims of male violence. In a less critical vein than Cobbe, Tennyson in
“Locksley Hall” has his narrator assert the squire his cousin Amy marries will esteem
her “something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse,” (line 50) equating a
11 Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer, “Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis

and the discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs” boundary 2 22:3
(Autumn 1995): 141–70.
12 While advanced in her views on gender matters, Cobbe reproduces class stereotypes
of violence when she asserts that “wife-beating” is not as frequent in the upper and middle
classes because “in his apparently most ungovernable rage, the gentleman or the tradesman
somehow manages to bear in mind the disgrace he will incur if his outbreak be betrayed
by his wife’s black eye or broken arm, and he regulates his cuffs or kicks accordingly. The
dangerous wife-beater belongs almost exclusively to the artisan and labouring classes.”
(Cobbe, p. 134).
wife with other domesticated beasts. Tennyson, like Cobbe and Caird, is drawing on
the equation of women with domestic animals as property of men.13
I will examine domesticated animals in two Pre-Raphaelite paintings, William
Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1851–53) (Plate 13) and Ford Madox
Brown’s Work (1859–63) (Plate 14). As violent domestic animals, the dogs and cat
I will examine in these paintings are being used to pantomime troubling gender
and class conflicts in Victorian culture that betray an eruption of violence into
domestic relations. In each canvas the apparently marginal presence of dogs and
a cat encode ideological contradictions that cannot be overtly acknowledged. In
particular, these paintings rely upon the category of the “domestic” and its range
of conventional associations with the private “home” and to British animals as
domesticated rather than wild or savage “foreign” animals. These associations are
threatened by the eruption of violence and coercion into the domestic sphere when
these animals themselves become violent. Domestic animals in these paintings,
with their associations with the supposedly private realm of affection and family
intimacy, are thus the site of deep-seated anxieties about the relationship between
classes, gender and violence in the Victorian period. They represent the unsettling
eruption of violence into relationships that were supposedly immune from conflict,
relationships that would conventionally have been viewed as sacrosanct in Victorian
domestic ideology.
Images of violence occur in even the most domesticated of Victorian contexts
despite idealizations of “home” as the site of peace and security. Donald S. Hair, for
instance, has argued that Tennyson’s In Memoriam is a “domestic elegy” that includes
many of the idealized images of home found in Ruskin and Patmore. Even in this
“domestic elegy,” however, there are examples of violence, and my title alludes to
the famous section that added a catchphrase to the English language. In Tennyson’s
famous lines from Section 56 of In Memoriam, God’s love for human beings is
opposed to a violent female Nature who “red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek’d
against his creed” (Tennyson, lines 15–16). The “claws” in Tennyson’s image are
strikingly akin to the “claws” that Nietzsche sees as hidden under women’s gloves.
In both cases the female proximity to violence is being suggested by the imagery of
claws.
As James Eli Adams has argued in “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and
the Feminine in Tennyson and Darwin,”14 Tennyson’s lines are powerful because
Nature transgresses the norms of femininity both by shrieking and threatening
violence against humans. Tennyson’s Nature is, in short, Nietzsche’s woman with
the “tiger paws” under the glove, an unsettling image of femininity in Victorian
terms. I would argue that the image is even more unsettling if the claws in question
belong not to a tiger but to a domestic cat; the image then transgresses both norms of
femininity and the domestic. Later in In Memoriam when Tennyson wants to create
13 This and all other poems referenced in this essay can be found online at the University
of Toronto’s site “Representative Poetry Online” at <http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display/
index.cfm>.
14 James Eli Adams, “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in
Tennyson and Darwin,” Victorian Studies 33:1 (Fall 1989): 7–27.
a repellent image of a savage nature that he wishes his readers to repudiate, he calls
into service animals that were not native to the British Isles to represent all that his
readership should deny as part of their human identity:
Arise and fly

The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.
(In Memoriam, Section 118, lines 25–28)
Tennyson appeals to foreign colonial animals here to characterize the “beastly”

nature he wants his Victorian audience to abjure, rather than more familiar domestic
animals. He does not suggest, for instance, that his Victorian readers should “arise
and fly” the cat or dog, which are as much members of the animal kingdom as apes
and tigers. Domesticated animals that are indigenous to Britain, although they are
in fact just as “beastly” as monkeys and tigers, do not carry the same symbolic
weight as undomesticated animals that originate outside the British Isles.15 Thus
“beastliness” for Tennyson is seen as either distant in time as in the dinosaurs that
he terms “Dragons of the prime/That tare each other in their slime” (lines 21–22), or
removed in space and located in foreign realms rather than in contemporary England.
Domestic animals represent not just the home, but also suggest the status of England
itself as a peaceful country free of violence and predation.
I have deliberately, however, substituted “hoof and paw” for “tooth and claw”
in Tennyson’s quotation. My title “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw” underlines how
an image of a benign, domesticated nature in “hoof and paw” is opposed to and
contradicts the savagery Tennyson depicts in invoking the “tooth and claw” of
dinosaurs, apes and tigers. While dogs also have teeth and cats have sharp claws,
they are not conventionally associated with violence, even though they can act
violently. Thanks to the cult of pets it became almost impossible to associate some
kinds of domestic animals with violence, which gives my title a comic juxtaposition
in its yoking together of “hoof and paw” and violence. While I do not examine cows
in this essay, I use “hoof” in my title to retain the rhyme with “tooth;” the idea of a
violent cow (but not a “mad cow”) is of course a minor joke. Horses have hooves
too, but due to their long association with the military it is not hard to find images
that associate them with violence as “war horses;” such images can be found in the
paintings of Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler) for example. There is, by contrast,
no such thing as a “war cow.”
The image of animals in the Victorian period was deeply fissured along the axis
of violence. Certain animals, such as cats and dogs, even though they had teeth
and claws and could scratch and bite, were designated as symbols of peace and
15 The tiger has long been associated with ferocity, as it is in Blake’s “The Tyger” for
instance, and the monkey obviously raises Victorian anxieties over the way in which Darwin’s
theories brought the supposedly separate animal and human worlds into proximity; hence
Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s infamous insulting question to Thomas Henry Huxley “was
it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?” See
Leonard Huxley, The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, Chapter 14.
companionship. Other animals, especially apes and tigers, were assigned to a more
primitive and violent past and were thus ascribed to a space against which the
domestic, both on the level of the home and the nation, could be defined. For cats
and dogs to be “red in hoof and paw” would, therefore, be a radical disruption of
categories; such instances signal the eruption of contradictions in Victorian ideology
that were displaced onto animals who were used to express indirectly the existence
of violence that could not be acknowledged directly.
These attitudes can be mapped out in graph form using the axes of violent/
peaceful and foreign/domestic (Figure 1). Cats, dogs and birds in cages are of course
the epitome of “peaceful domestic” animals, but the categories are unstable and
contradictory. Among simians a monkey wearing human clothes, as a “humanized
animal,” could be classified under “peaceful” and domesticated but the “ape”
referred to by Tennyson is “violent” and “foreign.” A dog in a kennel is peaceful
and domestic, but could be violent as well. The lion if accompanied by an image of
Britannia or Queen Victoria is “domesticated” but violent, representing the martial
aspirations of the country, whereas in Africa by itself it could represent the supposed
inherent violence of the entire continent. The tiger abjured by Tennyson had for quite
some time symbolized the violence encountered in foreign lands by British troops.
These categories were, however, under pressure from Charles Darwin’s theories,
which eroded the human/animal barrier and introduced violence even into peaceful,
domestic British nature.
In his understated prose Darwin presents us with such a moment in an apparently
innocuous discussion of the competition between birds for worms. Darwin in The
Origin of Species emphasized how “the face of nature bright with gladness” was
an illusion and that the apparently idle songbirds trilling in the thickets of England
were actually “constantly destroying life” and are themselves “destroyed by birds
and beasts of prey.”16 In a crucial move Darwin in The Origin of Species used native
British birds, not tigers or large prehistoric predators, to characterize nature as
violent. Darwin emphasized predation and destruction as part of everyday British
nature, not as located in some exotic and “savage” beast such as an ape or tiger.
Understandably such a vision of a destructive and violent British nature would be
upsetting to Romantically inspired lovers of the native fauna who were used to
stressing its nurturing side and focusing on such animals as sportive little hedgerow
sparrows as symbols of happiness. Wordsworth, for instance, in “Lines Written in
Early Spring” described the birds around him as “hopping and playing” and their
movements as conveying “a thrill of pleasure” (lines 13–16). Where Wordsworth
saw birds as signs of a joy in nature, Darwin’s passage is closer to Tennyson’s image
of a nature “red in tooth and claw” in which beasts prey upon one another.
Pre-eminent in the process of defining animals as noble pets in the Victorian period
was of course Sir Edwin Landseer.17 Landseer in paintings such as The Shepherd’s
16 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: Literary Classics, 1860),
p. 40.
17 Matt Cartmill in A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through
History has noted the general change in representations of animals in the nineteenth century,
as they were represented as “psychological subjects” rather than just possessions (p. 138).
Fig 1 Animals on a Violent/Peaceful and Foreign/Domestic Grid
On Landseer’s animal paintings, see Christopher Wood, Victorian Panorama: Paintings of

Victorian Life (London: Faber and Faber, 1976) and J. Batty, Landseer’s Animal Illustrations
(Alton: Nimrod Press, 1990).
Chief Mourner or Dignity and Impudence endowed animals, especially dogs, with
human emotions and made them icons of domestic virtues and sympathies. It is no
accident that Landseer became the chronicler of both his own and Queen Victoria’s
favorite pets, participating in profound ways in the general Victorian cultural sea
change in attitudes toward animals as nineteenth-century Britain moved toward an
urbanized and industrialized nation with radically different ties to both nature and
domesticated animals.
In a painting like Dignity and Impudence Landseer endows dogs with human
qualities, and plays off the size and power of the larger dog and the smaller one. By
having both dogs emerging from a kennel, Landseer drew upon Victorian images of
the home and its associations of comfort and familiarity that also informed Ruskin’s
“Of Queen’s Gardens.” The dogs’ kennel functions as a synecdoche for a range
of cultural associations with the comforts of home. The chain just visible in the
foreground also implies the presence of humans and the domestic connection of
dogs and homes. It also links the dog and obedience, with none of the subversive
suggestions of repressed violence found in Caird’s imagery. The painting underscores
the rhetorical force of Caird’s imagery in that for Landseer the dog and kennel
connote domestic virtues where for Caird they connote oppression.
There may be some suggestion of Victorian gender relations in the painting also,
in that the larger dog may be perceived as more conventionally “masculine” in its
size and power, and the smaller more “feminine.”18 The smaller dog looks more
like a “lap dog,” a small breed suitable for domestic interiors and light enough to
be carried around. Where Caird saw the chaining of dogs as a symbol of violence
against the natures of both women and animals, Landseer has a romanticized and
anthropomorphic view of the animals in his painting. Whatever the connotations of
this popular painting, it draws upon a series of benign domestic images in its subtext
and depends upon a conjunction of animals and domesticity for its appeal.
Landseer, however, also painted images of violent animals, such as Man
Proposes, God Disposes (1877) in which nature destroys human beings, but the
context marks a crucial difference from his paintings of pets in domestic settings.
In the case of Man Proposes, God Disposes violence is depicted through polar
bears, an exotic animal for the British. The polar bears and the Arctic in this context
function as admonitions against overweening human ambition. The theme of polar
expedition recalls images in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein of scientists and explorers
like Captain Robert Walton who leave behind the domestic comforts of England and
reap a suitable punishment.19 This violent polar landscape is the antithesis of the
comforts of home; just as dinosaurs in Tennyson’s poem are removed in time, these
polar scenes are removed in space. Violence is seen as inhabiting the remote and the
distant, not the local and present.
18 Surridge in “Dogs’ Bodies, Women’s Bodies” documents the conventional association

of women with dogs such as spaniels, p. 6.
19 On the rejection of domesticity in Frankenstein see Johanna M. Smith “‘Cooped
Up:’ Feminine Domesticity in Frankenstein” in Frankenstein: Case Studies in Contemporary
Criticism (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
With few exceptions Landseer usually paints domestic animals as peaceful. His
exceptions to this rule are the paintings that caused many critics to accuse him of
a streak of sadism and a penchant for unnecessary violence, but these criticisms
seem largely class-based, and reflect a middle-class revulsion at aristocratic “blood
sports.” Ruskin, for instance, criticized Landseer for gratuitous violence in The Otter
Speared (1844) writing that “I would have Mr. Landseer, before he gives us any
more writhing otters, or yelping packs, reflect whether that which is best worthy of
contemplation in a hound be its ferocity, or in an otter its agony, or in a human being
its victory, hardly achieved even with the aid of its more sagacious brutal allies,
over a poor little fish-catching creature, a foot long.”20 Ruskin participates here in a
general middle-class repudiation of violence, while Landseer, with his close ties to
the aristocracy, continues to celebrate the blood sports associated with a gentleman’s
way of life. This is nowhere more apparent than in his painting of Victoria and Albert
at home, Windsor Castle in Modern Times (1841–45). In this painting Albert is in
hunting gear, and associated with masculine prowess in the hunt. For contemporary
eyes this is, however, a very odd scene (though it would not be for Victorians) in
that dead birds are scattered around the living room. The presence of these dead
birds bolsters the image of Albert’s masculinity through his association with blood
sports.
In Landseer’s painting of the aristocracy at home, the conjunction of domestic
life, hunting and the presence of a small child are not seen as antithetical. So
unexceptionable is the conjunction of dead game and the domestic in this painting
that Victoria and Albert’s daughter is shown as examining one of the dead birds.
From the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries the categories of blood sports and
domesticity, and especially blood sports and motherhood, have been gradually
separated and finally seen as antithetical. Deer, birds and rabbits in popular culture
have become associated with “love, beauty and innocence” in popular representations
such as “Bambi” (Cartmill, p. 159) and it is shocking for my students, whenever I
show this image in class, to see a young child touching dead animals because it
brings her into contact with death and violence.
In Landseer’s aristocratic world view, however, the domestic sphere and the
spoils of hunting can be represented together without any suggestion of conflict.
This is because Landseer has an aristocratic rather than middle-class attitude to
the killing of animals for sport, and represents blood sports as heroic, masculine
enterprises. His painting The Otter Speared celebrates an erect, virile masculinity
that sees spearing a small animal on a long pole as a validation of this masculinity.21
For the middle classes, animals and violence were increasingly seen as categories
that needed to be separated from each other and it was this group for whom Ruskin
was talking in both “Of Queen’s Gardens” and his criticism of Landseer’s painting
of an impaled otter.
20 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. IV (New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1886), p. 149.
21 Cartmill quotes Landseer on hunting as stating that “there is something in the toil and
trouble, the wild weather and savage scenery, that makes butchers of us all” (p. 140). The “us
all” here is clearly gendered male.
The point I wish to underscore here is that Landseer, like Tennyson and Victorians
generally, had contradictory images of animals as both peaceful and loyal when
at home, and violent and dangerous when in foreign lands, so that he could paint
both Dignity and Impudence and Man Proposes, God Disposes. The divisions that
enabled Landseer to support contradictory images of animals as simultaneous icons
of domestic virtue and representations of irrational violence were encoded in the
term “domestic.” The “domestic” encompassed national ideals as well as those
associated with the home.
It is striking therefore that in the paintings I am about to discuss violence is
represented through domestic British animals, not through polar bears, tigers or
dinosaurs. In each of the paintings I analyze, the conventional separation of domestic
animals and violence I have described above is violated. I am not going to attempt
a synthetic history of domestic animals and violence in the Victorian period here;
the field is too broad and contradictory for such an enterprise in this short space.
I do wish, however, to underline how in William Holman Hunt’s The Awakening
Conscience and Ford Madox Brown’s Work, the conjunction of domestic animals
and violence encodes profound and unacknowledged ideological conflict in the
paintings. In each case an apparently minor subplot enacted by domestic animals
comments on and radically reorients the apparent moral of the painting. By bringing
together violence and the domestic, these animals introduce “Nature red in hoof and
paw” into the canvas in ways that destabilize the painting’s narrative.
The Awakening Conscience
John Ruskin, in his letter to The Times of 5 May 1854 defending Holman Hunt’s The
Awakening Conscience noted a rapid series of conventional markers that signaled
the narrative encoded in the painting: “Those embossed books, vain and useless …
marked with no happy wearing of beloved leaves; the torn and dying bird upon the
floor; the gilded tapestry, with the fowls of the air feeding upon the corn; the picture
above the fireplace with its single drooping figure – the woman taken in adultery”
(Ruskin, Volume VI, pp. 334–5). I wish to focus on the detail that Ruskin makes
just one in a whole series of signs that point to adultery, sexuality and the “fallen”
woman who has sinned. Ruskin notes that there is a bird dying upon the floor in the
clutches of a cat, but does not speculate as to why this detail is included, nor does
he dwell on the equivalences drawn between human and animal behavior by the
inclusion by Holman Hunt of this cat and its victim bird in the canvas. Obviously,
the introduction of violence into this domestic space signals that it is not a “home” in
the idealized sense and this little drama as much as the embossed books and images
conveys that it is not a “place of Peace” in Ruskin’s terms.
Ruskin in his rapid catalogue of the room does not need to draw out the connection
between the woman and the bird for his audience. Birds in cages were routinely
associated with women. Deverell’s A Pet, for example, (exhibited in 1853, the same
year as The Awakening Conscience) represents a woman standing in a door frame,
implying her enclosure in a domestic setting that is the equivalent of the cage in
which her pet bird is kept. The connection of the woman to the category “pet” is
reinforced by a dog sleeping at her feet, its head just touching her skirt. The dog
in A Pet, as in Landseer’s Dignity and Impudence, reinforces the association of the
woman with domestic peace and tranquility.
The woman is also a liminal figure, in a doorway between a domestic interior and
the garden beyond. Like the domestic animals around her, she is viewed as a bridge
between the natural and the domestic. While she kisses a bird in a cage, a “wild” bird
sits on the path in the background. This bird is, though, not particularly “wild” as it
is represented in the controlled and ordered setting of an English garden. However,
like the references to violence in Caird and Nietzsche the “wild” bird could hint at
the freedom that the domesticated woman and the domesticated bird have had to
forfeit.
The association of women and caged birds was also common in Victorian poetry.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes the aunt in her poem “Aurora Leigh” in the
following terms:
She had lived

A sort of cage-bird life, born in a cage,
Accounting that to leap from perch to perch
Was act and joy enough for any bird.
(Browning, Aurora Leigh, lines 304–308)
Barrett Browning is drawing upon a common set of associations in making this

analogy between a woman and a bird. The woman in The Awakening Conscience as
a “kept woman” could very easily be herself viewed conventionally as a bird in a
gilded cage. She is, like the woman in Deverell’s A Pet, implicitly likened to a pet,
kept for the amusement of the male figure in the canvas who has created this love
nest for his own nefarious purposes. Since women were expected both to sing and
look beautiful, they were frequently associated with songbirds in cages.
Once again, Nietzsche has an aphorism that draws upon the association of women
with caged birds:
Men have so far treated women like birds who had

strayed to them from some height: as something more
refined and vulnerable, wilder, sweeter, and more soulful –
but as something one has to lock up lest it fly away.
(Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 237)
Nietzsche likens women to birds, and suggests that they are more “refined” than
men, and thus delicate and sensitive; more “vulnerable” and thus in need of male
protection; “wilder” and thus closer to nature than men; “sweeter” and thus softer
than men; and finally “more soulful” or possessing a greater spirituality than men.
With characteristic verve Nietzsche then abruptly makes explicit the final corollary
of the metaphor of women as birds, namely that they have to be locked up in cages.
As with many of Nietzsche’s pronouncements on women, this one suggests an
underlying misogyny both in his personal attitudes and in cultural attitudes.22
If Ruskin had much to say about the struggle between the cat and the bird he
would probably, as do most contemporary critics, have focused on the position of the
woman as both a “fallen woman” and one who has finally seen the light and is about
to change her wicked ways. I wish, however, to focus on the cat. George Landow
has termed this cat a “rather blatant symbol for the man” and quotes F.G. Stephens’
remark that the cat is an image for “the false, pitiless and cruel seducer”23 (p. 51).
This cat is clearly male identified. If the woman is identified with the bird as a female
victim, the man in the chair is identified with the cat as a powerful and predatory
victimizer. This identification is underscored by the way in which the cat is looking
not at the bird, but at the woman who is rising from her seat. The attitude of the cat’s
head echoes that of the man; they are both looking at the woman in ways that suggest
their close identification. Why are the man and the cat so closely identified?
The glance of the cat marks it as a displaced image of male sexual violence. Hunt
is overtly glossing his painting with a hopeful message about redemption from sin
and the potential escape of the woman in the picture from the sinful love nest. The
woman rising from her chair faces toward an open door that can be seen in the mirror
behind her head. Through this door can be seen unlit greenery that symbolizes her
return to a “natural” pre-fallen state that was recalled for her by the song she and the
man were singing at the piano. The painting thus suggests that she is about to fly out
of the love nest and find her rightful path, a conclusion underscored by the way in
which Hunt paired The Awakening Conscience with The Light of the World in which
Christ is knocking on the sinner’s locked heart asking it to open. The cat killing the
bird, however, contradicts this hopeful message and indicates the unequal power
relations at work in the painting. The woman in the painting may be unable to escape
the clutches of the “tigerish” man, just as the bird cannot escape from the cat.
The uncomfortable fact remains, however, even in paintings such as this, that
the source of violence in the painting is male sexuality, although this violence is
displaced onto the cat rather than expressed directly. To focus on the woman in this
painting as victim, which is what the image of a cat killing a bird reinforces, is to
miss the implicit representation of the male sexual violence that Hunt encodes in the
image of a cat leaving a bird torn and dying on the new carpet of this love nest. The
cat “red in tooth and claw” introduces the excluded world of predation and violence
into the domestic scene of a man and woman at a piano. The cat symbolizes male
domination and control made possible by unequal class and gender distributions of
power. While Hunt represents the woman as rising from the chair toward possible
22 For analyses of misogyny in Victorian literature and art see Adrienne Munich,
Andromeda’s Chains: Gender and Interpretation in Victorian Literature and Art (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989); Joseph Kestner, Mythology and Misogyny: The Social
Discourse of Nineteenth-century British Classical-subject Painting (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1989) and Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Female Evil in
Fin de Siecle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
23 George Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979).
redemption, the cat and bird reinforce the death grip that the male seducer holds on
his victim in conventional Victorian narratives of seduction and betrayal.
This aspect of gender relations was very difficult for male Victorian artists and
writers to recognize overtly. They tended to reinforce what Lynda Nead in Myths
of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain refers to as women,
especially prostitutes, as “social victims” but not see themselves overtly as implicated
in the situation. They occluded their own complicity in coercive or violent sexual
relations, preferring to see themselves in positive terms. Carol Christ in her analysis
of Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, for instance, has noted how Patmore
ascribes an active role to the male and a passive role to the female, but seems uneasy
about the implications of this gendered separation of sexual roles for male sexuality.24
While Patmore sees himself as “active” and the female as “passive,” he is uneasy
about the implications of this for himself as a sexually active man and the position
of dominance into which this places him.
For Patmore, as for Hunt, male sexuality could seem uncomfortably close to blood
sports. For middle-class men, the association of masculinity with blood sports was
becoming increasingly untenable. Patmore uses metaphors of hunting to characterize
sexual relationships in his poem, but seems uneasy about the implications of this
view of gender relations. Like Hunt using a cat killing a bird, this implies that male
sexuality itself was “red in tooth and claw” and implicated in predation and violence.
While male Victorians would like to think of their relationships to women in terms of
chivalry and protection, such blood sport imagery tacitly acknowledged the existence
of violence and domination in such private, personal relationships.
Hunt’s painting violates the separation of the domestic and issues of violence
and coercion. Hunt does not do this overtly, of course; these issues erupt through his
image of the cat as “red in tooth and claw” and preying upon the bird bleeding on the
carpet. Whereas in Landseer’s image of Victoria and Albert at home the dead birds
reinforced masculinity through blood sports, for Hunt the dying bird symbolizes
an inappropriate form of masculine behavior. He participates in the redefinition of
appropriate forms of male behavior that outlawed domestic violence, as Hammerton
documents. Like Brown, however, Hunt cannot confront the implications of this
image directly. Like the growling dogs in the next picture I will examine, this
predatory cat is relegated to the margins of the painting, although the presence of a
nature “red in tooth and claw,” no matter how marginal, still serves to subvert the
hopeful message of the central tableau. In both cases the violent domestic animals
introduce troubling issues into the canvas.
24 Carol Christ, “Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House,” in A Widening
Sphere: Changing Roles for Victorian Women, edited by Martha Vicinus (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1977) pp. 146–62.
Work
In Ford Madox Brown’s Work (1859–63) there are three dogs in the foreground of
the canvas. It is easy to overlook these dogs when one first glances at the canvas.
One’s eye is naturally drawn to the heroic working-class figures who make up the
central tableau in the picture. These statuesque figures represent an idealized image
of the working classes. The men working in the excavation are strikingly free of
dirt and sweat and seem exceptionally well fed and muscular.25 Brown makes it
clear from his catalogue description that he has nationalistic purposes behind his
portrayal of these working-class men; they are the epitome of the British navvy, and
an occasion for nationalist pride in their prowess.26
The painting as a whole has a roughly triangular structure in its central composition,
a structure which mimics visually the conventional division of Victorian society
into three classes. The upper portion of the pyramid is taken up by two figures on
horseback. These are, according to Brown, an upper-class father and his daughter.
The man is very rich, says Brown, “with a seat in Parliament, and fifteen thousand
a year, and a pack of hounds” (Hueffer, p. 193).27 The association of the man on
horseback with blood sports marks him as a member of the upper classes. The
position of these two figures at the apex of the pyramid reflects their conventional
social superiority which is reinforced by their well-groomed horses. In this painting,
however, the horse expresses the social superiority of the riders in that all the other
figures in the canvas are walking. Horses could also be used to represent a number
of different Victorian social issues. For instance, Coral Lansbury saw in the story of
Black Beauty parallels between the abuse of women and the abuse of animals, which
highlighted issues of both anti-vivisection and women’s suffrage.
Horses and class distinctions were closely linked in Victorian culture. Ritvo has
noted that one Victorian commentator complained that “the lower class of person
to whom the care of horses is entrusted frequently possess less sense than the noble
animals which groan under their tyranny” (Ritvo, pp. 133–4). The “noble” horse in
this quotation has more class status than its human owner. The horses in Brown’s
Work help to elevate the riders above everybody else and to emphasize their separation
from the scene in front of them. This separation is reinforced by the shadow in which
they are cast, which makes them marginal to the bright, sunlit group of workers in
25 Brown has been criticized for making his workers too clean, but as Gerard Curtis
notes in “Ford Madox Brown’s Work: An Iconographic Analysis,” The Art Bulletin LXXIV:4
(December 1992): 623–36, this was part of Brown’s attempt to link work, cleanliness and
moral purity (628). For a discussion of Brown’s motives in painting Work see Albert Boime
“Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and Mystification of Work in
the Nineteenth Century,” Arts Magazine (September 1981): 116–25.
26 Brown’s catalogue description is reproduced in Ford Madox Hueffer, Ford Madox
Brown: A Record of his Life and Work, 1821–1893 (London, 1896). For perceptive account of
the painting’s genesis see E.D.H. Johnson, “The Making of Ford Madox Brown’s Work,” in
Victorian Artists and the City, eds I.B. Nadel and F.S. Schwarzbach (New York: 1980).
27 This use of dogs as class symbols contrasts with Caird’s use of dogs and gender
relations.
front of them.28 The upper classes in Brown’s pyramid are superfluous and marginal
to the central work of society, a criticism underscored by his linking of the upper
classes to the pastry cook’s tray in his catalog description.
Brown wants to make the working-class men at the heart of the painting
symbolically central and expressive of his culture’s most deeply held values in terms
of work.29 Subverting this overt message, however, are three dogs at the bottom
of the canvas. On one side is a sleek, upper-class dog that Brown in his catalog
description refers to “as that exceedingly beautiful tiny greyhound in a red jacket
that will run through the lime” (Hueffer, p. 192). On the other side are two dogs, one
a bull pup that potentially links some figures on the canvas to a crime mentioned
on some of the bills pasted to the wall,30 and the other belonging to the motherless
girl trying to discipline the extremely fiendish looking little child she has by the ear.
Brown describes the children’s dog in terms that give him a class consciousness:
The dog which accompanies them is evidently of the same outcast sort as themselves.
The having to do battle for his existence in a hard world has soured his temper, and he
frequently fights, as by his torn ear you may know; but the poor children may do as they
like with them; rugged democrat as he is, he is gentle to them, only he hates the minions
of aristocracy in red jackets. (p. 193)
Dogs do not have a class structure in which the terms “democrat” and “aristocracy”
would make sense. These are clearly Brown’s own anthropomorphic comments, he
having already made apparent in his catalogue description of the man and young lady
on horseback his dislike for “the minions of aristocracy” and his own “democratic”
sentiments. The mongrel dog thus expresses Brown’s class attitudes and his
imaginative identification with the working classes in opposition to the aristocracy.
Brown’s use of dogs to express class distinctions was typical of the hierarchical
values that many Victorians expressed through the ownership of animals; Ritvo
quotes an English sportsman on safari who describes the canines around him as
“dogs of high and low degree, from the purebred English greyhound to the Kaffir
cur” (Ritvo, p. 90), so that dogs mimic the colonial social structure. Like Brown,
the sportsman identifies the greyhound as an aristocratic dog. The fact that these
animals, one “upper-class” and the other “lower-class” (although these distinctions
make sense only in the context of Victorian social divisions, not because of anything
inherent in the animals themselves), are growling at each other introduces class
violence into an otherwise harmonious tableau depicting a structured society. While
Brown overtly celebrates an ordered and aesthetic hierarchy that imposes structure
on Victorian social distinctions, ranging from style of dress to ownership of animals,
28 Teresa Newman and Ray Watkinson in Ford Madox Brown and the Pre-Raphaelite
Circle (London: Chatto and Windus, 1991) have argued that the contrast between light and
shade here implies that the “couple on horseback cannot enter the navvies’ sunlit space; their
way, and, by implication, society’s progress is barred by class conflict.” (p. 123).
29 Curtis notes Brown’s Socialist agenda in creating the painting.
30 Curtis does a superb job explaining the clues in the painting that link the bull pup to
the flower seller figure and a subplot of crime and violence, p. 624.
the dogs represent the displaced violence that neither Brown nor his contemporaries
are able to recognize overtly.
Brown himself, despite his laudable intentions in this canvas is not immune from
middle-class prejudices against the working classes, prejudices that led them to be
viewed as violent and disorderly by nature. Mongrel dogs were often represented as
the sources of both violence and disease and, like the working classes, characterized
as a threat to “society at large” (Ritvo, p. 179). Mongrel as opposed to “pure bred”
dogs thus could be used to reinscribe Victorian social divisions onto the natural
world, and present social distinctions as arising spontaneously from the natural
order.
It was axiomatic for many Victorian social commentators that the working classes
were prone to violence. Even Elizabeth Gaskell, who was sympathetic to the Chartists
when she portrayed them in Mary Barton included a condemnation of working-class
violence. Disraeli in Sybil shows a working class erupting in inevitable revolutionary
violence. Later in the century when Hubert Van Herkomer represented a striking
worker, he made his face seem brooding and threatening and drew upon late Victorian
fears of the proletariat. Brown does not overtly share in these prejudices, wishing
to represent the working classes sympathetically and as heroic when performing
manual labor, but he nonetheless represents them in displaced form in the mongrel
dog. The mongrel, working-class dog represents the class violence that subverts the
aesthetic and social order of Brown’s painting.
While the canvas as a whole represents a largely harmonious social order, the
dogs encode the violence and conflict that characterized the inter-class tensions
of the Victorian period. The workers are represented as reacting good naturedly to
the interventions of a pamphlet-delivering philanthropic middle-class lady, but the
dogs import into the painting the uneven application of anti-violence legislation. As
both Coral Lansbury and Harriet Ritvo have documented, the working classes were
linked to violent blood sports which were gradually banned by restrictive legislation,
while upper-class blood sports were left unregulated, and continue to be a locus of
class conflict in Britain to this day. The violence of such practices as bull baiting
and cock fighting was transferred unproblematically onto working-class males, and
these males were themselves often referred to as “brutes.” The violence of animals
and of the working classes thus became linked. Brown is approaching dangerously
close to such characterizations in his representation of the anger of a mongrel dog
which symbolically stands for the violence of the working classes. The “democratic”
dog which hates the minions of aristocracy represents both Brown’s own displaced
feelings of hostility and the conventional view of the working classes as violent and
unruly.
The clash between these two domesticated animals in the painting introduces
ideas of aggression and combat that could not be acknowledged directly either by
Brown or his audience. The dogs link the humans in the canvas not only to class
conflict but also to crime in that the “bull pup” plays a central role in a buried narrative
of criminal activity to which Brown gives clues in the canvas. Disrupting the overt
social harmony of the canvas, these domestic animals suggest that Victorian society
itself was “red in tooth and claw.” Relationships between the classes, far from being
harmonious, were riven by violence and hostility. Crime, police action, and violence
are apparently marginal, but actually subvert Brown’s central image of Victorian
society as an orderly and harmonious whole. The dogs fighting in the foreground
reveal the repressed subtext of animosity and conflict that Brown cannot incorporate
directly into his vision of the Victorian working-class male as a domestic national
hero. Their bared fangs are an uncomfortable reminder of conventional associations
of working-class males and violence that even Brown, a political sympathizer, could
not escape.
Conclusion
The history of the relations between humans and animals in the Victorian period is
a diverse, contradictory and complex field. This history is made more difficult to
decode by contemporary inheritance of Victorian attitudes toward animals through
the cult of the pet. I have endeavored to show in this analysis that images of domestic
pets such as cats, dogs and caged birds registered contradictory images of class and
gender relations in relation to violence. Perceptions of animals, whether domestic or
wild, were influenced by class, gender and racial categories. In underscoring the way
in which domesticated animals function in these two canvases, I wish to emphasize
how the boundaries between the human and animal were under stress in the Victorian
period. Thanks to the impact of such diverse forces as Darwinian views of nature,
the push for women’s suffrage, the urbanization and industrialization of the British
landscape, and the creation of zoos as scenes of “wild” animals in captivity, images
of animals in the Victorian period were radically contradictory.
The most interesting aspect of these two examples of the use of domestic animals
is the way in which they are acting violently. They suggest that the dominant
critical approach to domestic animals in the Victorian period as the passive victims
of violence does not fully recognize the complex and contradictory relationship
between ideology and violence in Victorian representation. It was not only dinosaurs,
apes or tigers that could enact violence. Cats and dogs are also members of the
animal kingdom, not surrogate humans, and could also be shown as “red in hoof and
paw.” When cats and dogs acted violently, however, they destabilized the Victorian
division between the world of private, domestic relationships and the public world
of competition and conflict. Domestic pets revealed how permeable this barrier was
to the forces of violence, class conflict and sexual domination.
These images of violence figured through animals reinforce the comments made
by Karl Marx about Darwin’s theory of “natural selection:”
It is remarkable how Darwin recognises among the beasts and plants his English society
with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, inventions, and the
Malthusian “struggle for existence”. His is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes, and
one is reminded of Hegel’s Phenomenology where civil society is described as a “spiritual
animal kingdom,” while in Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society.31
31 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence ed. S.W. Ryazanskaya,
trans. I. Lasker (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1975), pp. 223–4.
Marx’s comments underscore how economic competition and exploitation in
Victorian society were transferred onto animals. Such a displacement “naturalized”
human social relations and turned animals into surrogates for political debates.
Representing civil society as the “animal kingdom,” however, did not solve problems
of competition and violence. The pets that I have analyzed perform aspects of
Victorian social relations that were so troubling they could not be addressed directly.
Cats and dogs if acting violently do not epitomize civil society so much as sites
within domestic and class relations where conflict could not be represented in human
terms. As “humanized animals” pets stand in for their human counterparts, whether
acting as a tiger-like domestic cat or a mongrel dog that hates the upper classes.
These domestic pets register the displaced violence of Victorian social relations.
As a signifier, the domestic pet could therefore fulfill radically different functions
in different polemics. For early activists for women’s rights, cats, dogs and caged
birds could represent women as victims of male oppression, caged and chained like
their animal counterparts. For misogynist commentators such as Nietzsche, animal
imagery could be used to dehumanize women and suggest that they possessed a
civilized veneer that concealed a potential threat to the male member.
For artists like Hunt and Brown, domestic animals are contradictory signifiers.
They incorporate elements of the conventional association of domestic animals with
home, country and the female, but their more nuanced representations also register
many of the contradictions in Victorian attitudes toward animals. Needless to say,
these contradictions continue into the present; one has only to consider the differing
roles played by dinosaurs in Jurassic Park movies and the purple, soft dinosaur on
the children’s television show Barney, or by dogs and other pets in Disney movies
and horror movies, to realize that contemporary attitudes toward animals, including
pets, are as contradictory as those in the Victorian period.
Works Cited
Adams, James Eli. “Woman Red in Tooth and Claw: Nature and the Feminine in
Tennyson and Darwin,” Victorian Studies 33:1 (Fall 1989): 7–27.
Armstrong, Frances. Dickens and the Concept of Home. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Research, 1990.
Batty, J. Landseer’s Animal Illustrations (Alton: Nimrod Press, 1990).
Boime, Albert. “Ford Madox Brown, Thomas Carlyle and Karl Marx: Meaning and
Mystification of Work in the Nineteenth Century,” Arts Magazine (September
1981): 116–25.
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Chapter 7
“The Crossing o’ Breeds” in

The Mill on the Floss
Mary Jean Corbett
The nature of European men has its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be
developed by allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of development
is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which carries with it a life independent
of the root.
Consider the very early conversation between the miller and his wife from The
Mill on the Floss (1860) in which the two attempt to account for the unaccountable
characteristics of their children by reference to family origins:
“… Tom hasn’t got the right sort o’ brains for a smart fellow. I doubt he’s a bit slowish.
He takes after your family, Bessy.”
“Yes, that he does,” said Mrs Tulliver, accepting the last proposition entirely on its own
merits; “he’s wonderful for liking a great deal o’ salt in his broth. That was my brother’s
way, and my father’s before him.”
“It seems a bit of a pity, though,” said Mr Tulliver, “as the lad should take after the
mother’s side istead o’ the little wench. That’s the worst on’t wi’ the crossing o’ breeds:
you can never justly calkilate what’ll come on’t.”
Leaving aside for the moment what the Tullivers say, I want to note first the fact
of their saying it. As against the silence of Adam Bede (1859) on this point, The
Mill on the Floss inquires into the origins and causes of character from the outset:
it introduces both the lay language of family resemblances (“taking after”) and the
specialist discourse of breeding in an effort to identify how it is that these children
come to be who they are or, at least, appear to be. This not only marks a difference in
how Eliot imagines the task, style, and generic valence of her second novel; it also
functions as an element of her historicism. That Adam Bede, published just a year
before The Mill, poses few or no questions about the genesis of character indicates
much about Eliot’s conception of that historical moment as cold pastoral; set about
thirty years later, the emphasis of The Mill, in its concern with generational and
gendered sameness and difference, falls much more heavily on the mechanisms of
change, deploying animal and plant analogies that are all about process.
George Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” in Essays of George Eliot ed.
Thomas Pinney (New York, 1963), p. 288.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss ed. Carol T. Christ (New York, 1994), I, ii, pp. 11–12.
The language of the cross generates that emphasis almost from the outset.
Whether a deliberate strategy for inducing change or a result of accidental contact,
intercrossing functions as an agent of modification that operates over time to the
benefit of the new organism. “With animals and plants a cross between different
varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives
vigour and fertility to the offspring,” Darwin argues in The Origin of Species
(1859), and that additional power to reproduce bestows an advantage on the crossed
individuals within “the economy of nature”: for “if any one species does not become
modified and improved in a corresponding degree with its competitors, it will soon
be exterminated.” By contrast, the whole point of interbreeding is to select desirable
traits and reproduce them in successive generations of a single variety or strain rather
than to promote variation. From a Darwinian point of view, crosses can be a crucial
motor of change, yet as Mr Tulliver becomes aware, the variations that might arise
cannot be fully calculated in advance: the effort to establish particular traits as the
direct outcome of (natural) inheritance or, in the miller’s case, to control character
by exercising (artificial) selection is faulty and limited. The narrator of The Mill
reprises the spirit of remarks in Adam Bede on how nature, with “the deep cunning
which hides itself under the appearance of openness,” will refute the “confident
prophecies” of “simple people” (MF, I, v, p. 29): for as Darwin admits in The Origin,
“the laws of inheritance are quite unknown: no one can say why the same peculiarity
in different individuals of the same species, and in individuals of different species, is
sometimes inherited, and sometimes not so.” The unpredictability thus inherent in
“the crossing o’ breeds,” which I examine in the first section of this essay especially
in relation to gender, poses decided obstacles to Tulliver’s plans, as neither Maggie
nor Tom conforms to his specifications.
Yet the novel also offers an analysis of character formation in which “family
likeness” plays a crucial if somewhat muted and mystified role. For even as Tom
and Maggie retain much of their early characters, both do develop and change over
time; moreover, if young Maggie begins her fictional life as an animal, “a small
Shetland pony” (MF, I, ii, p. 13) or “a Skye terrier” (MF, I, iii, p. 15; iv, p. 25), she
is even in her animality a highly bred product of a process in a way that Hetty Sorrel
of Adam Bede is not. For Hetty is one of those “plants that have hardly any roots;
you may tear them from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over
your ornamental flower-pot, and they blossom none the worse” (AB, xv, p. 146).
Depthless and rootless, all pollen-y stamen and no seed-bearing pistil, Hetty can go
anywhere, with no “loving thought of her second parents—of the children she had
helped to tend—of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own
childhood even” (AB, pp. 145–6) to keep her fixed in one dear perpetual place. By
contrast, Maggie and Tom Tulliver share the “deep immovable roots in memory”
that Hetty lacks, not so much because they spring from Tullivers and Dodsons, but
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 143,
147.
Darwin, Origin, p. 76.
George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Carol A. Martin (Oxford, 2001), ch. iv, p. 38.
“The Crossing o’ Breeds” in The Mill on the Floss 123
rather because they are possessed of and by affections that “[twine] round” such
“old inferior things” as the family furniture. Being rooted means harboring “an
unjustifiable preference” for “an elderberry bush” over “the finest cistus or fuchsia”
simply because “it stirs an early memory” (MF, II, i, p. 127). The important point is
that in having the capacity for being committed to a past, as Hetty does not, they earn
a place within the narrative pale, having an element in their “natures” that, within
Eliot’s evolutionary outlook, raises them above the level of “nature.” In this way,
Eliot represents the modern “individual” possessed of a psychological “nature,” as
I will demonstrate in what follows, as evolving somewhat unpredictably from its
animal and human antecedents.
In making these preliminary points, I aim to revise an influential strand of critical
discourse regarding The Mill on the Floss that takes the novel’s language of breeding
and blood as an heuristic key to understanding what George Levine has called “the
inevitable development of [Maggie and Tom’s] characters according to the pressures
of heredity and irrevocable events.” Within this framework, which is shared by some
of the novel’s own characters, critics attribute the actions and outcomes that compose
the careers of Maggie and Tom to a biological determinism as powerful as any flood,
as in Sally Shuttleworth’s claim that “the mixing of Tulliver and Dodson blood
rendered Maggie” (but, seemingly, not Tom) “unfit for survival in her environment.”
Her reading complements U.C. Knoepflmacher’s assertion that “the outside forces
affecting Maggie,” “irrevocably determined” by her father’s genes, “are withstood
by her brother by virtue of his Dodson tenacity.” As Josephine McDonagh argues
in more general terms, “natural features are seen to behave like people, and people,
by extension, like nature”; Eliot creates “a world in which natural forces are always
determining … exerting their ineluctable control over the form of human life.”10 But
by attributing to Eliot perceptions and attitudes more properly identified with her
characters, and overlooking the ways in which the narrator recasts those views over
the course of the novel in a different key, this line of criticism makes “nature” too
reliable an arbiter of human character in the novel, as “irrevocable” or “ineluctable”
as the onward flow of the Floss. Indeed, as Jules Law’s analysis of this critical
position concludes, in representing the river as a virtual “allegory of inexorability,”
By contrast, as Morgan notes, “because Hetty is outside the human community, we

share Bartle’s and the narrator’s evaluation of her as subhuman, as most closely related in her
sensual greed” to Bartle’s dog, Vixen (Susan Morgan, Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in
Nineteenth-Century British Fiction [New York and Oxford, 1989], p. 142).
George Levine, “Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss,” PMLA, 80 (1965):
403.
Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe
of a Beginning (Cambridge, 1984), p. 57.
U.C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley,
1968), pp. 212–13.
10 Josephine McDonagh, “The Early Novels,” in George Levine (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge, 2001), p. 47.
even some of her best readers have underestimated Eliot’s interest in “circumstances
which are genuinely, objectively uncertain.”11
Although Law’s central example for illustrating “the unexpectedness of endings
and the unpredictability of consequences” centers on Mr Tulliver’s lawsuit against
Pivart over water rights, I believe that the emphasis on the unexpected and the
unforeseeable is very much present, too, in the discourses of breeding that prove
to be, as Susan Meyer recognizes, “an endless preoccupation in this novel.”12 If Mr
Tulliver is wrong about almost everything else, he’s right in his recognition with
regard to biological reproduction that “‘you can never justly calkilate what’ll come
on’t.’” For critics to contend that it’s the mixture of antagonistic qualities in the
offspring of Tulliver–Dodson sex that constitutes the problem of Tom and especially
Maggie’s “nature” is to accord a kind of certainty to scientific and lay perceptions
about reproduction that, in my view, the novel—conceived and written at a moment
when those perceptions were very much in flux—does not. The Mill on the Floss is
not, in other words, “a story about the power of biological inheritance to overcome
the individual will,” as Deborah Epstein Nord characterizes The Spanish Gypsy
(1868).13 And Maggie’s character and destiny are not the result of what Eliot called,
in describing the origins of that text, “an inherited organisation”—or, at least, not in
any reductively biological sense.14
Rather than take this discourse about sex, nature, and character at face value, I
propose instead critically to examine its different articulations in The Mill on the
Floss as well as other contemporary discussions of the meanings and mechanisms of
heredity. In broad discursive strands imbricated with popular and specialist discourses
of sexual reproduction, and alternately aided or ironized by the narrator, Dodsons
and Tullivers chart resemblances and discover unexpected differences, gauge the
success or failure of their efforts to select for outcomes, through their reflections on
this aspect of nature in all its puzzling complexity. Their discourse is closely allied at
11 Jules Law, “Water Rights and the ‘Crossing o’ Breeds’: Chiastic Exchange in The Mill
on the Floss,” in Linda M. Shires (ed.), Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the
Politics of Gender (New York and London, 1992), pp. 53, 60.
12 Law, “Water Rights,” p. 64; Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian
Women’s Fiction (Ithaca and London, 1996), p. 146. In her chapter on The Mill, Meyer connects
some elements of the broad discourse of reproduction, which she examines largely in regard
to the constitution of Maggie’s mixed character, to nostalgia for “a lost female freedom and
a lost racial diversity, alike sacrificed, in the novel’s schema, to history’s relentless progress”
(p. 145), arguing further that “in Maggie’s story Eliot also tells the story of the conflictual
history of England, with particular reference to the contact between various racial groups”
(p. 146). Because I look at these questions specifically in relation to contemporary discussions
of animals and plants, I sense in her analysis a conflation of terms that are distinct in my own:
for example, she identifies the term “breed” with “race,” in a way unjustified by a reading of
the wider scientific contexts in which such terms appear. Nevertheless, Meyer’s emphasis on
conflict, contact, or the lack thereof between racialized groups highlights an important strand
of Eliot’s thinking about the relationship between race and history.
13 Deborah Epstein Nord, “‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in
Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Victorian Studies 41 (1998): 191.
14 Quoted in Meyer, p. 129.
some points to that of racial/national/ethnic character, which forms a critical element
in both George Henry Lewes’ and George Eliot’s thinking on heredity. Synthesizing
the biological and the historical, Eliot invokes the lay perspective on blood that will
not mix as part of the larger analysis that she develops to establish and explain the
difference of Maggie and Tom from their immediate familial and social context.
That these children of the next generation quite literally embody an alternative way
of answering the questions their progenitors ask helps to demonstrate where Eliot
departs from the perspectives of that earlier generation as well as how she reshapes
them in accord with different, but no less problematic ideological precepts.
Taking After
In the tracing of family resemblance that dominates the early books of The Mill,
Tom appears more Dodson than Tulliver, Maggie more Tulliver than Dodson, with
their parents perceiving and assessing those likenesses according to their own needs
and criteria. For example, Mrs Tulliver posits her son’s affinity for salty broth as
something on the order of an acquired characteristic, passed down to Tom from
her father and her brother. Notable as one of very few references in the entire book
to Dodson men—among them the invocation of the dead brother whose unseen
sons, Mrs Glegg fervently hopes, “supported the Dodson name on the family land,
far away in the Wolds” (MF, II, iii, p. 170)—it’s also a relatively idiosyncratic
attribution of Dodsonness, most often identified with the possession of “particular
ways” in “household management and social demeanour,” made by the sister
who is “the merest epitome of the family habits and traditions” (MF, I, vi, p. 38)
in defense of her wavering claim to clan membership. Unable to identify her own
daughter as visibly descended from her family of origin, that is, Bessy is so much
the more eager “to have one child who took after her own family, at least in his
features and complexion, in liking salt and in eating beans, which a Tulliver never
did” (p. 38). With Tom having made his first appearance in the novel as “one of
those lads that grow everywhere in England, and, at twelve or thirteen years of age,
look as much alike as goslings” (MF, I, v, p. 29), independent testimony from the
grocer and the publican of St Ogg’s subsequently supports the claim that he “‘takes
after his mother’s family’” (MF, III, v, p. 186) at sixteen. Yet in the family context,
the attribution of resemblance says more about his mother than it does about Tom
himself: his display of characteristically male Dodson tastes becomes a convenient
peg on which Mrs Tulliver may hang her “self-serving and self-revealing” desire
for a child who confirms her place in her first family, as one of the group of sisters
committed to propagating the patronymic of which their marriages have legally, but
not socially, deprived them.15
A pity, then, “‘as the lad should take after the mother’s side istead o’ the little
wench’”: Mr Tulliver concurs in his wife’s ascription of Dodsonness to Tom,
although he locates the grounds of similarity in his paucity of “brains” rather than
his partiality to broth or beans. Largely preoccupied with her daughter’s troubling
15 Law, “Water Rights,” p. 62.

difference from herself and complacently gratified by finding a way to link Tom to
her own male kin, Bessy does not even begin to hear the snub in her husband’s words,
which deplore the migration of the intelligence he associates with his birth family
to a child of the opposite (and wrong) sex, in another instance in which “taking
after” functions as a form of self-affirmation. As in his wife’s case, Mr Tulliver’s
relationship to his first family certainly shapes his view of family likeness. With her
daughter “inferior enough to Maggie in fire and strength of expression, to make the
resemblance between the two entirely flattering to Mr Tulliver’s fatherly love,” sister
Gritty sees Lizzy as her older cousin’s lookalike, with Mr Tulliver remarking that
“‘both take after our mother’” (MF, I, viii, p. 69). Somewhat qualifying Law’s claim
that all such talk is “pure postulation,” others confirm the visible resemblances among
Tulliver women, albeit the Dodson sisters also have a point to make in making the
connection:16 “it was agreed by the sisters” that Maggie “was the picture of her aunt
Moss, Mr Tulliver’s sister,—a large-boned woman, who had married as poorly as
could be; had no china, and had a husband who had much ado to pay his rent” (MF,
I, vii, p. 52). They quite obviously imply that Maggie is heading for the same fate.
As Tom follows in the Dodson male line, then, Maggie follows the Tulliver
females. Her likeness to his mother, sister, and niece does not so much gratify Mr
Tulliver’s vanity as revivify his filial and fraternal piety: moved to contemplate his
children’s future by Gritty’s reminder that “‘there’s but two of ’em, like you and me,
brother,’” he “was not long in seeing his relation to his own sister side by side with
Tom’s relation to Maggie. Would the little wench ever be poorly off, and Tom rather
hard upon her?” (MF, I, viii, p. 69). Provoked by the structural parallel of sibling pairs
to consider the possibility that Tom will take after him in a different sense, he aims
to shape that uncertain, unknown future by conforming his current decision—not to
call in the Mosses’ debt—to how he would have Tom act toward Maggie.17 Although
Tulliver’s connection to his family of origin is very differently configured than is
his wife’s, having a child who takes after “his people,” and specifically his closest
female kin, similarly enables him to understand himself as continuously linked to
that past in a way that Maggie will emulate, though in a different key. As is also the
case for Silas Marner, in whose imagination the “sleeping child” on his hearth recalls
the “little sister whom he had carried about in his arms for a year before she died”
and conveys “a message come to him from that far-off life,”18 Tulliver’s familial past
returns to him embodied in female form.
A child whom you (and others) perceive as taking after you and yours, whether
in looks, manners, or acts, thus confirms your connection to the first family and,
perhaps, earns a special place in your heart: each Tulliver parent has a particular
16 Ibid., p. 57.
17 The narrator remarks that Mr Tulliver here “clothe[s] unimpeachable feelings in
erroneous ideas” (I, viii, p. 72), and Law thereby reads “Eliot’s point”: “Mr Tulliver misreads
his own change: he has constructed a scheme of symmetrical relations in which his own
sympathetic actions—his moral self-checking—can be figured as the negation of a future
dynamic” (“Water Rights,” p. 57).
18 George Eliot, Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. Terence Cave (Oxford, 1996),
p. 109.
fondness for the child that s/he identifies as belonging to her or his own. And the
implicit expectation among Tullivers and Dodsons is that a child will take after one
family or the other, never both. Among the very few points on which Mr Tulliver and
Mrs Glegg agree, for example, is that Maggie resembles the Tullivers in all respects:
echoing an earlier claim to the same effect by Mr Tulliver (MF, I, viii, p. 68), her
aunt says “‘there isn’t a bit of our family in her’” (MF, III, iii, p. 178) after Maggie
has spoken out passionately in her father’s defense. To be sure, “there were some
Dodsons less like the family than others—that was admitted” (MF, I, vi, p. 38); and
even if Philip Wakem “‘takes after his mother in the face’” (MF, II, ii, p. 133), “‘he’s
got his father’s blood in him too’” (MF, II, vi, p. 154). But for the most part, the
older generation tends to regard members of the younger branches in dichotomous
terms rather than as a blend of two family lines; even when they do see mixture, as
I will explore below, they represent the meeting of the two “breeds” as a union of
antitheses.
As should already be apparent, the other key expectation and desire that underlies
all such characterizations is that a child should take after its same-sex parent: if the
resemblances that they can identify even across gender difference between parent
and child please Mr and Mrs Tulliver, then the differences that arise within gender
sameness perplex them. Yet the “assumption that character is normally inherited
along lines of gender”—first ironized in the narrator’s reference to Maggie as “this
small mistake of nature” (MF, I, ii, p. 12) who constitutes what Leila Silvana May
calls “a miscarriage of family continuity”19—also has an important corollary: that the
father’s contribution to the make-up of his offspring should outweigh the mother’s.
This perspective had a good deal of weight to it, and Eliot may be parodying the
androcentric bias of “the consensus of breeders” at the time of the novel, that “the
male parent dominated in shaping offspring”: although Harriet Ritvo points out
that “an absolute assertion of male dominance needed modification in view of the
obvious tendency of young animals to resemble both their parents,” experts in animal
husbandry “still reserved the more vigorous genetic role for the stud.”20 Lewes, for
one, contested the assumption of male predominance in determining the character
of offspring by reference to Buffon, where he finds “the most decisive example
we could quote of the twofold influence of parents.”21 A she-wolf and a setter dog
give birth to a male and female cub. The son looks like its dog-father; the daughter,
her wolf-mother: so far, so good. But “the cubs manifested a striking difference in
disposition, in each case resembling in character the parent it did not resemble in
appearance and in sex; thus the male cub, which had all the appearance of a dog,
was fierce and untameable as the wolf; the female cub, which had all the appearance
of a wolf, was familiar, gentle, and caressing even to importunity”: Lewes concludes
of “these hybrids” that “the wide differences in the aspect and nature of the parents
19 Law, “Water Rights,” p. 57; Leila Silvana May, Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations
and Sororal Resistance in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Lewisburg, 2001), p. 70.
20 Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying
Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp. 106, 107.
21 [George Henry Lewes,] “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human,” Westminster
Review, American Edition, 66 (July 1856): 83.
enables us to separate, as it were, the influence of each” (“Hereditary,” p. 83). In
like fashion, Darwin’s doctrine of “pangenesis,” expounded in The Descent of Man,
and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), posited that secondary sex characteristics
“are present in both sexes”; this only becomes apparent, however, when two species
intercross, “for each transmits the characters proper to its own male and female sex
to the hybrid offspring of either sex.”22 In a human context, the consequences for the
“hybrid offspring” of the cross, on these interpretations, would be a sort of latent
gender hybridity within all individuals, each bearing the potential for manifesting
“the characters proper to … either sex.”
Generally speaking, Darwin came to believe that “equal transmission of
characters to offspring of both sexes was the commonest form of inheritance.”23 But
Mr Tulliver has trusted to a natural gender asymmetry of reproductive power, as he
suggests in recounting to Mr Riley the calculations that led him to take Bessy as his
mate:
“It’s the wonderful’st thing”—here he lowered his voice—”as I picked the mother because
she wasn’t o’er ’cute—bein’ a good-looking woman too, an’ come of a rare family for
managing; but I picked her from her sisters o’ purpose, ’cause she was a bit weak, like;
for I wasn’t agoin’ to be told the rights o’ things by my own fireside. But you see when a
man’s got brains himself, there’s no knowing where they’ll run to; an’ a pleasant sort o’
soft woman may go on breeding you stupid lads and ’cute wenches, till it’s like as if the
world was turned topsy-turvy. It’s an uncommon puzzlin’ thing”. (MF, I, iii, p. 18)
Expecting his traits to descend to his son and his wife’s to her daughter, Mr Tulliver
retrospectively represents his selection of Bessy from the pool of available Dodson
women as based on her good looks, her family’s reputation “for managing,” and her
“soft” temperament and moderate intelligence, qualities that contrast with many of
his own. (Compare this principle of marital complementarity with the alternative
ground of likeness on which Mr Glegg picks “the eldest Miss Dodson as a handsome
embodiment of female prudence and thrift”: since he was “himself of a money-
getting, money-keeping turn,” he had “calculated on much conjugal harmony”
[MF, I, xii, p. 102].) In his effort to control outcomes—the course of his marriage,
the character of his children—through a deliberate process of selection, Tulliver
assumes not only that sons will take after fathers, but also that his strength will
predominate over female weakness in all aspects of the marriage; Bessy’s “pleasant,”
stereotypically feminine softness had inspired him with a confidence he could not
have felt in marrying the dictatorial Jane. One might say that if nature did indeed
behave according to what Mr Tulliver supposes to be human ways, then his genetic
contribution would always trump his wife’s, in a sort of natural primogeniture.
In aiming to make a rational choice of spouse, the miller anticipates the spirit
of Darwin’s views on sexual selection among humans, articulated most fully in The
Descent of Man. “Deeply influenced by what he had learned about artificial selection
22 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London,
2004), p. 263.
23 Ibid., p. 266.
from his voluminous correspondence with plant and animal breeders,”24 Darwin
wonders at the disparity between the deliberation men exercise in mating animals
and the relative casualness with which they decide on the women who would bear
their children: “Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his
horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them: but when he comes to his own
marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. He is impelled by nearly the same
motives as the lower animals, when they are left to their own free choice. … Yet he
might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of
his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities.”25 That more men did
not choose wives “with scrupulous care” had social and political implications for
all humankind: “a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration
of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so
ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed”; and “no one who has attended to
the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to
the race of man.”26 In consciously, deliberately choosing a mate whom he perceives
as very different from himself, Tulliver thus partially adopts a breeder’s logic to
forward his aims, in a fashion that Darwin might approve, even if he does not select
for the particular qualities that would enhance “the race of man” according to quasi-
eugenicist values and even if Darwin and Tulliver, too, were “frankly and profoundly
ignorant of both the causes of variation and the precise means by which favorable
variations were preserved and accumulated.”27 Since the eighteenth century, animal
breeders had maintained that the surest way to guarantee the results they wanted was
by “persistent inbreeding,” which “provided the quickest method of fixing desirable
characteristics and getting them to breed true”; “so satisfactory were the results,”
Ritvo reports, “that they were repeatedly urged as justification for similarly hygienic
practices among people.”28 Accepting the analogy, Darwin yet partially contested the
point, concluding a long treatise on self-fertilization among orchids by inviting the
reader to join him in making the inference “that some unknown great good is derived
from the union of individuals which have been kept distinct for many generations.”29
24 Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood

(Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 87.
25 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 688.
26 Ibid., p. 159.
27 Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge,
1985), p. 113.
28 Ritvo, Platypus, pp. 118, 119. Ritvo establishes that around the time at which the novel
is set, “in-and-in breeding lacked either a political or a religious charge; instead, crossing
within a restricted lineage of animals selected for desirable characteristics was simply an
effective technique for increasing control over the quality of the next generation” (The Animal
Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age [Cambridge and London, 1987],
p. 67). Later in the century, however, at the time Eliot is writing, anxieties do emerge about
interbreeding among animals and humans, as I discuss in the chapter of the manuscript from
which this essay is drawn.
29 Charles Darwin, On the Various Causes by which British and Foreign Orchids are
Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (Stanfordville, NY, 1979),
p. 360. In Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage (Urbana and
Here advocating by analogy of orchid to human what came in a human context to
look like miscegenation, Darwin’s comments added fuel to a heated debate over the
relative advantages and disadvantages of interbreeding among humans.
What is most pertinent for my analysis of The Mill on the Floss at this juncture
is that in using this analogical discourse, despite their difficulty with metaphorical
language, both parents cast their children as the hybrid products of a cross between
Tulliver and Dodson. Each child is conceived as the product of mixture between two
distinctly marked varieties, in which ostensibly sex-linked traits are irremediably,
unaccountably scrambled. And the lay perception of this unpredictable mixture is
strikingly expressed in the language of categorical difference when Maggie’s failure
to take after her mother so perplexes Mrs Tulliver that she voices her discomfiture
at Maggie’s departure from Dodsonness in both looks and manners by using a
racialized term. With the shining example of the well-behaved Lucy ever before her,
a girl who “‘takes more after me nor my own child does’” (MF, I, ii, p. 12) and is
“‘more like my child than Sister Deane’s’” (MF, I, vi, p. 37), Bessy wonders how
Maggie came to vary so much from the family norm while the fair, plump, blonde
Lucy had issued from “the thinnest and sallowest of all the Miss Dodsons” (MF, I,
vii, p. 52). Having placed her faith in the stability of the Dodson type and imagined
herself a more strongly marked representative of it than Lucy’s own mother, she
simply can’t account for her daughter’s difference: Maggie’s dreamy ways make
her appear “‘half an idiot i’ some things’” to her mother, and “‘that niver run i’ my
family, thank God, no more nor a brown skin as makes her look like a mulatter’”
(MF, I, ii, p. 12).30 What if anything more than the shade of Maggie’s complexion
Mrs Tulliver (or George Eliot) might mean to imply by this term is unclear—perhaps
nothing at all.31 But in marking a categorical difference between herself and her
daughter that follows from an originating distinction between Dodson mother and
Tulliver father, Bessy’s word helps to initiate the references to “blood” that form
another crucial strand of the discourse on animal and human sexual reproduction, in
Chicago, 1996), pp. 85–6, Martin Ottenheimer observes that Darwin removed this comment
from the 1877 edition, surmising that he was perhaps influenced in his change of view by
the researches of his son George, who undertook a statistical study of first-cousin marriage.
Kuper summarizes the younger Darwin’s conclusion as “the practice might be quite all right
for the rich but bad for the poor” (Adam Kuper, “Incest, Cousin Marriage, and the Origin of
the Human Sciences in Nineteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, 174 [2002]: 172).
Kuper also suggests that the impact of first-cousin marriage might have had particular interest
for Darwin, as for his contemporaries Alfred Henry Huth, Henry Maine, and Lewis Henry
Morgan (all of whom weighed in on the issue), because each of these men had married a first
cousin.
30 See Lucy’s much later rebuttal of Mrs Tulliver’s classification of “brown skin” as not
“respectable” (MF, VI, ii, p. 310), when uncle Pullet refers both to Cowper’s The Task and
“The Nut-Brown Maid” in joining dark skin once more with madness. Thanks to Deborah
Morse for reminding me of this passage.
31 For Maggie’s identification with gypsies, see Meyer, pp. 153–6; Nord, “‘Marks of
Race,’” 199–202; and Alicia Carroll, Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot (Athens,
2003), pp. 41–50. As Meyer puts it, “the marks of race play a central figurative role” (p. 130)
in the novel.
which the messier metaphorics of mixture associated with crossing unsettle the self-
regarding attributions of “taking after.”
Crossing Breeds
To cross, or not to cross? Early in the novel, we encounter something like a folk
perspective on the dubious wisdom of crossing animals to select for a specific trait
that serves no practical purpose. As Maggie belatedly inquires into the health of Tom’s
“lop-eared rabbits,” starved to death by neglect, the head miller Luke “soothingly”
claims that these artificially engineered creatures “‘happen ha’ died, if they’d been
fed,’” for “‘[t]hings out o’ natur niver thrive: God A’mighty doesn’t like ’em. He
made the rabbits’ ears to lie back, an’ it’s nothin’ but contrairiness to make ’em hing
down like a mastiff dog’s’” (MF, I, v, p. 28). Invoking divine opposition to human
interference, Luke’s criticism also targets an especially useless variation introduced
by crossing, one that might indeed disadvantage a rabbit, whose permanently
perked-up ears presumably serve a protective function. Moreover, there’s no place
for such “‘nash things’” (p. 28), either in the mill or “‘in that far tool-house, an’ it
was nobody’s business to see to ’em’” (p. 27) because they don’t fit into the working
model of the enterprise. When next we hear of Tom procuring an animal (having
resisted the doubtful attraction of ferrets), we know that the “‘little black spaniel’”
that Bob Jakin secures as a gift for Lucy Deane (hundreds of pages and ten years
later) will fare much better than those unnatural, unnourished bunnies. Being not
only a “‘rare bit o’ breed’” (MF, VI, iv, p. 316), but a true pet, committed to the care
of a mistress who “was fond of feeding dependent creatures, and knew the private
tastes of all the animals about the house” (MF, VI, i, p. 299), Lucy’s purebred puppy
has its designated place in the Deane household economy. That Tom has chosen such
a pet for such a cousin—the cousin whom it would be most advantageous for him to
marry and for whom the novel obliquely indicates he has a serious liking—shows
how well he has come to understand the symbolic function of breeding.
Although happy to oblige Tom, for his own part Bob prefers a mutt: his dog “‘is
as fine a cross as you’ll see anywhere along the Floss’” (MF, IV, iii, p. 232), and he
defends its mixed birth against all comers, advancing its superior claim to intelligence
as against its lack of ornamental charms. Arriving at the mill “followed closely by
a bull-terrier of brindled coat and defiant aspect” (p. 230) named Mumps, he offers
the lonely Maggie a puppy for company—“‘better friends nor any Christian’”
(p. 231)—adducing the virtues of the cross and also reversing the typical direction
of analogical comparisons:
“there’s a pup—if you didn’t mind about it not being thoroughbred: its mother acts in the
Punch show—an uncommon sensable [sic] bitch—she means more sense wi’ her bark
nor half the chaps can put into their talk from breakfast to sundown. There’s one chap
carries pots,—a poor low trade as any on the road,—he says, ‘Why, Toby’s nought but a
mongrel—there’s nought to look at in her.’ But I says to him, ‘Why, what are you yoursen
but a mongrel? There wasn’t much pickin’ o’ your feyther an’ mother, to look at you’”
(p. 231).32
Although Toby provides nothing much “to look at,” she has more to say, “means
more sense,” than do most humans. Redeeming Toby from the potman’s snobbish
aspersions, Bob turns the tables to link “chap” to “pup,” identifying both as mixed-
breed “mongrels” and, at least in the pup’s case, none the worse for it. As against
the pride of parentage and commitment to bloodline that privileges the pure over
the mixed, he vindicates the cross and, moreover, casts it as the implicit norm for
ordinary human breeding as well. For the potman, with his “poor low trade,” to
prefer something “to look at” over something to listen to in a dog strikes Bob as a
species of false consciousness. A decorative dog purely bred for the Deane drawing
room is all well and good in its place, but a working dog that performs “in the Punch
show,” or travels with a packman, is an altogether different thing. A mongrel—that
heterogeneous thing that more and more of Eliot’s contemporaries were coming
to understand as a figure for the English themselves as a people of hybrid stock,
mixed in blood and character33—is an eminently useful creature whose very “vigour
and fertility,” to recall Darwin’s terms, insures its ability not just to survive, but to
propagate more of its mixed kind.
The perspectives that Luke and Bob take on the animal world are partially
compatible with Mr Tulliver’s attitude in that he, too, clearly aims to breed children
for use—although a daughter’s value is also partially measured, of course, by her
being something “to look at.” Persistently assessing Tom and Maggie’s traits, or
“points,” according to the markets for professional labor and marriage, the son’s
dullness and the daughter’s “‘cuteness” don’t measure up: Tom’s father fears,
for example, that Dodson “brains” alone won’t make “a smart fellow” without a
larger graft of Tulliver ingenuity. Projecting a future in which his son would attain
professional status rather than take up a (Dodson) managerial position or a (Tulliver)
small proprietorship, that Tom shows no aptitude for schooling, while Maggie does,
threatens to frustrate Mr Tulliver’s carefully laid plans. “‘An over-’cute woman’s no
better nor a long-tailed sheep—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that’” (MF, I,
ii, pp. 11–12), with a man’s intelligence no more serviceable in a woman than lop-
ears on rabbits. But having exerted control to the best of his ability, Mr Tulliver only
puzzles over the less-than-predictable outcomes of crossing breeds, and offers what
remedies occur to him as practicable—a gentleman’s education for Tom, a haircut
for Maggie. Although he does not voice precisely the same sentiments as Luke,
there’s a comparable degree of resignation to the power of unknown forces and no
further effort to analyze what went awry.
32 Cf. an anecdote from Eliot’s “Recollections of the Scilly Isles and Jersey” (1857), in
which a “Mr Buckstone amused us by his contempt for curs—‘O, I wouldn’t have a cur—
there’s nothing to look at in a cur’” (The Journals of George Eliot ed. Margaret Harris and
Judith Johnson [Cambridge, 1998], p. 279).
33 For an extended reading of Matthew Arnold’s reimagining of Englishness as a hybrid
people, see Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and English Writing, 1790-1870:
Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 155–65.
It’s the Dodson sisters, rather, who explicate these exasperating children by
more direct reference to blood, reifying the perceived differences between Tulliver
and Dodson, as in Bessy’s representation of Maggie as a “mulatter,” and thus
introducing the racialized note in an explanatory mode. “Poor Bessy’s children were
Tullivers”; “Tom, notwithstanding he had the Dodson complexion, was likely to be
as ‘contrairy’ as his father”; and, most tellingly, “the Tulliver blood did not mix well
with the Dodson blood” (MF, I, vii, p. 52): the Deane-Dodson “mix,” by contrast,
issues in more favorable and gender-appropriate issue. Such talk clearly contributes
to the aura of inevitability that many critics have taken as the fundamental meaning
of heredity in the novel, solicited and supported by the discourse of crossing that
shapes the representation of Tulliver and Dodson as opposed types, almost “different
entities.”34 My sense, however, is that Eliot invokes this aspect of the discourse of
breeding only as part of the larger analysis that she develops to establish and explain
the difference of Maggie and Tom from their immediate familial and social milieu.
The notion of failed mixture, a mainstay of contemporary racial science, undergoes a
good bit of transformation in the narrative’s accounting for these hybrid children.
In the context in which Eliot writes, Mrs Tulliver’s use of the term “mulatter”
implies hybridity and sterility, with which it is associated in all contemporary
discourses of reproduction. Blood that does not “mix well”—or that only achieves
what a contemporary student of kin-marriage calls “a mixture without a blending”35—
implies a failure of “fusion” among incompatible elements. And “the absence of
fusion,” Darwin writes, “affords the usual and best test of specific distinctness”
among animals, although he did not find this “distinctness” among “the races of
men,” who were not in his view “sufficiently distinct to inhabit the same country
without fusion.”36 Under the emergent term of miscegenation, which did posit that
polygenist “distinctness” between (and among) Europeans and others, the crossing
of widely separated “breeds” or “races” was alleged to “produce mediocrity and
reversion to a primitive and unimproved type,” issuing in decreased fertility and
degenerate offspring.37 Indeed, a natural aversion between different breeds would
usually prevent such misalliances in the first place, as “works of natural history
offered voluminous testimony to the desire of animals to avoid miscegenation.”38
While Ritvo establishes that “the accumulation of well-attested examples of fertile
interspecific hybrids undermined the essentialist position,” since it provided proof
positive of fertility across borders, Robert J.C. Young proposes that “the claim
of degeneration,” which could only be judged true or false over time by close
observation of offspring, constituted “the final, and undoubtedly the most powerful,
retort to any apparent demonstration of the fertility of mixed unions.”39
34 Ritvo, Platypus, p. 97.

35 Alfred Henry Huth, The Marriage of Near Kin, Considered with Respect to the Laws
of Nations, the Results of Experience, and the Teachings of Biology (London, 1875), p. 332.
36 Darwin, Descent, p. 202.
37 “The Marriage of Near Kin,” Westminster Review: American Edition, 104 (October
1875): 151.
38 Ritvo, Platypus, p. 89.
39 Ritvo, Platypus, p. 97; Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory,
Culture and Race (London and New York, 1995), p. 16.
From another perspective, a miscegenous union could have outcomes that might
be understood in Eurocentric terms as positive: in advancing the lesser group, Darwin
surmises, “a cross with civilized races at once gives to an aboriginal race an immunity
from the evil consequences of changed conditions,” conditions no doubt forcibly
“changed” through the impact of European colonial and imperial expansion; albeit
with substantial differences of emphasis, both Herder and Gobineau would subscribe
to this line of thinking.40 But considering only the impact on the dominant culture,
degeneration was the price that would be exacted for mixing: the very virtues of
vigor and fertility that Darwin attributed to the cross among plants and animals were
those reproductive qualities that it would allegedly most imperil among humans.
Thus “a lively debate was generated by the question of whether racial mixing brings
down civilization”—what Werner Sollors calls “the familiar racialist position”—“or
stimulates and invigorates cultural activity.”41 What is not in dispute in this debate is
that crossing leads to change, whether classed under the heading of degeneration or
development, and thus functions as a motor of history, even if, in the very long run,
the crossing of closely related varieties would lead to a stable type.
Relying on both Comte and Spencer for his analysis, Lewes’ review of
contemporary books on human and animal breeding—which appeared in the very
same number of the Westminster Review as “The Natural History of German Life”
(1856), Marian Evans’ important article on the sociological writing of W.H. Riehl42—
attributes to intercrossing among humans the power of making change but also of
arresting it. He argues, for example, that “a whole dynasty of blockheads would never
produce a man of genius by intermarriage with blockheads”; a union with a member
of another group “must introduce ‘new blood’” in order for “the man of genius” to
40 Darwin, Descent, p. 221. According to Robert J.C. Young, Herder regards

“colonization and racial mixture … as introducing a fatal heterogeneity,” even as he argues
that “the very progress of mankind comes as the result of diffusionism, or cultural mixing and
communication” (p. 41). Gobineau’s work similarly posits that the strong race must interbreed
with the weaker if the weaker is to advance, yet the mixture itself brings on the decay of the
stronger, with Gobineau characterizing “adulteration of blood” as “the basic cause of the fall
of nations” (p. 106).
41 Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of
Interracial Literature (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1997), p. 134.
42 Examining among other things “the historical type of the national physique” in
Germany, this review essay has often been designated by critics (myself included) as the key
to Eliot’s early realism, which aims without idealization “to give a faithful account of men
and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind” (AB, ch. 17, pp. 164–5) by paying
respectful attention to such particulars as “an old woman bending over her flower-pot … and
all those cheap common things which are the precious necessaries of life to her” (p. 166).
See Mary Jean Corbett, “Representing the Rural: The Critique of Loamshire in Adam Bede,”
Studies in the Novel, 20 (1988): 288–301. Cottom has most forcefully dissented from this
critical position, arguing that Eliot’s “generalizations tend to be repeated in a limited set of
variations … thus representing a fixed stock of ideas about human nature in Eliot’s writing”
(Daniel Cottom, Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary Representation
[Minneapolis, 1987], p. 75). Perhaps inadvertently, the language Cottom here uses to register
his objection echoes the very terms of the discourse on which Eliot relied.
issue from it, because “the variation must have its cause” (“Hereditary,” p. 86).43
Along with other theorists of heredity, Lewes would categorize “blockheads” as a
“fixed type,” unalterable after a long history of interbreeding: blockheadedness is an
outcome of too little intercourse with others over too a long period of time and thus
becomes an acquired trait, passed down from parent to child. It is by positing, with
Darwin, both that variation requires the introduction of a new strain and that “we
inherit the acquired experience of our forefathers—their tendencies, their aptitudes,
their habits, their improvements”—that Lewes fixes the boundaries of the type
(“Hereditary,” p. 89).
What all this leads is to a theory of national character as “the acquired experience
of our forefathers” writ large, produced at the rhetorical expense of those whom
civilized races should presumably avoid. Lewes’ discussion of the “Moral Sense”
in this essay provides a partial key. Following Comte, he asserts that in the “slow
subjection of the egotistic to the sympathetic impulses” lies the path of “the
development of the Human Family,” as of the individual, for “what is organically
acquired becomes organically transmitted” (“Hereditary,” p. 89). Thus among lesser
peoples—“Australians,” “Hindoos,” “Papuans”—“the sympathetic emotions are
quite rudimentary” because such savages “have not acquired” (p. 89) them from
earlier generations. “What is meant by the ‘Moral Sense’ is the aptitude to be affected
by actions in their moral bearings,” and “this aptitude to be so affected is a part and
parcel of the heritage transmitted from forefathers” (p. 89). If we assume constant
interbreeding within a given population, then those whose progenitors lack the “Moral
Sense” cannot possibly inherit it: “just as the puppy pointer has inherited an aptitude
to ‘point’ … so also has the European boy inherited an aptitude for a certain moral
life, which to the Papuan would be impossible” (p. 89). Quoting approvingly from
Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1855), Lewes notes that “heritage, for the first
time, is made the basis of a psychological system”: “‘a modified form of constitution,
produced by new habits of life, is bequeathed to future generations’”; “‘the modified
nervous tendencies produced by such new habits of life are also bequeathed; and
if the new habits of life become permanent, the tendencies become permanent’”
(p. 89). Once “the transmitted organization” of a people has been fixed as national
character, any individual representative of that people “never altogether merges his
original peculiarities in that of the people among whom he dwells” (p. 89). Turning
from savages elsewhere to aliens and animals at home, Lewes concludes that it “is
little more remarkable” that “the Jew should preserve his Judaic character while
living among Austrians or English … than that the Englishman should preserve his
43 Lewes uses the word “intermarriage” in a way that corresponds to how we currently
use that term: a union “between members of different families, castes, tribes” (OED; emph.
added). This usage dates as far back as the seventeenth century. The first use of “intermarriage”
in precisely the opposite sense—“marriage between persons (or interbreeding between
animals) nearly related” (emph. added)—dates from the 1870s, although it was used earlier,
as in both the letter from Mary Ann Evans to John Sibree and the quotation from Tom Paine
which follow in my text. I have tried to remain alive to the ambiguities of its usage, as
nineteenth-century writers use the term sometimes in one sense, sometimes in the other. To
avoid confusion, in this essay I typically use the term “crossbreeding” to denote the first sense
above, and “interbreeding” for the second.
Anglo-Saxon type while living among oxen and sheep”: for so long as there is no
intercourse between separate types, “no important change in the race can take place”
(pp. 89–90).
At the very end of her career, George Eliot argued in “The Modern Hep! Hep!
Hep!” (1879) that a distinctively English national and cultural inheritance could
be endangered by “a premature fusion with immigrants of alien blood,” for “the
tendency of things is towards the quicker or slower fusion of races.”44 Although her
analysis here differs from Lewes’ much earlier one, she, too, sounds the Comtean
note regarding “the Moral Sense,” asserting that “all we can do is to moderate [the
tendency] so as to hinder it from degrading the moral status of societies by a too
rapid effacement of those national traditions and customs which are the language of
the national genius.”45 She suggests, in other words, that Lewes’ confident positing
of the fixed type might be undermined by “the tendency” to fusion, attributing to
“immigrants of alien blood” the power to alter and degrade the character of their
host by eroding its “traditions and customs.”46 Crossing with “others” might lead to
cultural degeneration of “the national genius.” And yet before George Eliot’s career
had even begun, Mary Ann Evans had advanced the claim in a letter to John Sibree
that the lack of intercrossing among humans would pose an analogous threat: “the
law by which privileged classes degenerate from continued intermarriage must act
on a larger scale in deteriorating whole races.”47 Her point here is comparable in tone
and tenor to what Tom Paine had to say on the subject fifty years earlier: “By the
universal economy of nature it is known, and by the instance of the Jews it is proved,
that the human species has a tendency to degenerate, in any small number of persons,
when separated from the general stock of society, and intermarrying constantly with
each other.”48 Two different practices—crossbreeding and interbreeding—thus
potentially lead to the same end.
Writing for the Westminster in 1856, neither Lewes nor Evans was so much
concerned with the possibilities of cross-racial fusion as with the historical
production through “continued intermarriage” of the type, a term that “came into
widespread use in the 1850s” and “brought together the implications of both species
and race.”49 In her account of the persistence of the type, which closely parallels
Lewes’ in its emphasis on the agency of interbreeding, we can grasp a racial basis
44 George Eliot, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” Impressions of Theophrastus Such ed.
Nancy Henry (Iowa City, 1994), p. 158.
45 Ibid., p. 160.
46 For a contemporary example of how such anxieties emerge in the context of Irish
immigration to England, see Corbett, Allegories, pp. 82–113. Mary Ann Evans was more
sanguine about possibilities of fusion between some groups than others, if the letter to Sibree
can be credited, in which she asserts that “the repulsion between [“negroes”] and the other
races seems too strong for fusion to take place to any great extent” (Mary Ann Evans to John
Sibree, Jr., 11 February 1848, The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight [New Haven
and London, 1954], vol. 1, p. 246).
47 George Eliot Letters, p. 246.
48 Quoted in James B. Twitchell, Forbidden Partners: The Incest Taboo in Modern
Culture (New York, 1987), p. 135.
49 Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire, p. 13.
for Eliot’s historical vision. Drawing on her observations of such objects as artworks
and peasants during her travels in Germany two years earlier, Marian Lewes tells a
story in which the effects of “continued intermarriage” are everywhere apparent:
In one part of the country we find a longer-legged, in another a broader-shouldered race,

which has inherited these peculiarities for centuries. For example, in certain districts
of Hesse are seen long faces, with high foreheads, long, straight noses, and small eyes
with arched eyebrows and large eyelids. On comparing these physiognomies with the
sculptures in the church of St Elizabeth, at Marburg, executed in the thirteenth century, it
will be found that the same old Hessian type of face has subsisted unchanged, with this
distinction only, that the sculptures represent princes and nobles, whose features then bore
the stamp of their race, while that stamp is now to be found only among the peasants. A
painter who wants to draw medieval characters with historic truth, must seek his models
among the peasantry. This explains why the old German painters gave the heads of their
subjects a greater uniformity of type than the painters of our day: the race had not attained
to a high degree of individualization in features and expression. It indicates, too, that
the cultured man acts more as an individual; the peasant, more as one of a group. …
many thousands of men are as like each other in thoughts and habits as so many sheep or
oysters ….50
To identify observable physical “peculiarities” among regional/ethnic groups as

“inherited” traits is clearly to assume that no modifying influence—or “new blood”—
has intervened to shorten Bavarian legs or narrow Prussian shoulders: reproductive
sexual relations within a single, separate cohort, rather than between different ones,
has been the German historical norm. So, too, does “the same old Hessian face,” at
least 600 years in the making, persist “unchanged”: here echoing Disraeli’s Coningsby
as well as anticipating Hardy’s Tess, Marian Lewes reports that it is now peasants
rather than princes who possess it.51 Whether this physiognomic survival signifies
class and ethnic endogamy among peasants, derives from “continued intermarriage”
leading to the degeneration of a once-privileged class, or betrays the failure of
amalgamation between the blood of conquerors and conquered, she does not say and
perhaps cannot know. What is clear is her belief that today’s peasants thus provide
for today’s artists a visible, physical record of an “historic truth” that could only have
been preserved in the absence of crossbreeding or the failure of fusion.
Those thirteenth-century sculptures also present another ideological truth,
aesthetically expressed. By their “greater uniformity of type,” they demonstrate that
“a high degree of individualization” is a product of a process, an outcome rather than
a cause of historical change. Because of their lack of traffic with others, because they
had remained stationary, the peasants of “the race had not attained” that “high degree.”
By contrast, what Spencer had called “nervous tendencies,” and not just physical
traits like broad shoulders and long legs, become the permanent heritable property
of more highly organized races that in their intercourse with others have increased
the capacities of their stock. Here, too, then, can we see “heritage” becoming “the
50 George Eliot, “Natural History,” p. 274.

51 As Disraeli’s Millbank remarks, “‘the real old families of this country are to be found
among the peasantry’” (Coningsby; or, The New Generation [Harmondsworth, 1983], p. 193).
Hardy’s Durbeyfields were presumably once D’Urbervilles.
basis of a psychological system” in which a diversified inheritance issues in more
complex offspring. Individuality is thus a property of “the cultured man” rather than
of a group whose members are as alike “as so many sheep or oysters” and who are as
distinct from the members of other groups as “oxen” are from “sheep”—or, perhaps,
to recall Lewes’ words, as are Jews from Anglo-Saxons. Where “uniformity of type”
prevails, “individualization” does not; to make the individual, it would appear,
requires something on the order of a cross.
Pluralizing Nature
While Dodsons and Tullivers each see themselves as very different from their opposite
number, they would by no means qualify in the nineteenth century’s racialist terms
as widely separated types whose crossing would issue in degenerate offspring. The
particulars that Eliot’s narrator gives us may differentiate them from one another, but
in her overarching framework, they are of course much more alike than not. Even to
cast the one family as “the forces of convention uncomprehended and rigidified” and
the other as “the forces of blind spontaneity of feeling” overly polarizes them, since
both subscribe to many of the same fundamental notions, attitudes, and practices.52
In the famous opening chapter of “The Valley of Humiliation,” after summing
up what the two have in common—the “conventional worldly notions and habits
without instruction and without polish” (MF, IV, i, p. 222), which the reviewer
E.S. Dallas termed “a purely bestial life of vulgar respectability”53—the narrator
does attribute some particular “family traditions” to Dodsons alone: “the thorough
scouring of wooden and copper utensils, the hoarding of coins likely to disappear
from the currency, the production of first-rate commodities for the market, and the
general preference for whatever was home-made,” habits of “industry, rigid honesty,
thrift” (p. 223) that have been passed on from one generation to the next. It is only by
analogical sleight of hand that the narrator introduces a biogenetic note, assimilating
the handing down of customs to the mysteries of hereditary transmission:54 “the
same sort of traditional belief ran in the Tulliver veins, but it was carried in richer
blood, having elements of generous imprudence, warm affection, and hot-tempered
rashness” (p. 224). As if by means of heredity, Dodsons and Tullivers, too, pass on
“the same sort of traditional belief,” with the “richer blood” of the latter providing a
somewhat different, more intense medium.
“Blood” here and elsewhere in the narrator’s discourse functions as metaphorical
shorthand that conflates, perhaps deliberately, biological and social transmission.
52 Levine, “Intelligence,” p. 406.

53 Quoted in David Carroll (ed.), George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (New York, 1971),
p. 136.
54 Eliot’s description of the Dodson adherence to custom also resonates with Paxton’s
analysis of how Marian Lewes depicts “the German peasant’s devotion to custom” in “The
Natural History of German Life”: “the peasant’s entrenchment in custom carries a negative
valence precisely insofar as it is unreasoning, blind, and lacking in self-consciousness”
(Nancy L. Paxton, George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and the
Reconstruction of Gender [Princeton, 1991], pp. 13–14).
Such a formulation might indeed reflect what George W. Stocking, Jr. characterizes
as the “implicit biological rationale in the Lamarckian (and Spencerian) assumption
of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which … provided a mechanism by
which habitual behavior became instinctive, and cultural inheritance became part of
biological heredity.”55 But it never features, either within the narratorial commentary
or among the younger set, as a means of explicating what come to be called Tom
and Maggie’s “natures.” If the narrator represents Dodson and Tulliver “blood”
as differing in degree rather than kind, then she also takes even greater pains to
establish that their children differ from the older generation (and also from each
other) in more substantive ways, not according to the criteria that parents and aunts
employ to measure resemblance, but by virtue of something that she casts almost as
historical necessity. Telling Emily Davies some years after the publication of The
Mill that her “sole purpose in writing it was to show the conflict which is going on
everywhere when the younger generation with its higher culture comes into collision
with the older,” Eliot makes the ideological move that Daniel Cottom has identified
as pervading all her fiction: via “the characterization of representation of any sort as
a symbolic entrance into the universal,” Tom and Maggie are made to stand in for
“the younger generation” and, somewhat paradoxically, its generic individuals.56
The passage from the novel that most closely articulates this authorial stance
also appears in the opening chapter of Book Fourth. Here the narrator famously
juxtaposes the “ruined villages” on the Rhone, which figure collectively as “the sign
of a sordid life,” with “those ruins on the castled Rhine” that “belong to the grand
historic life of humanity” and convey “a sense of poetry” (MF, IV, i, pp. 221, 222).
The “narrow, ugly, grovelling existence” on the Rhone, as on the Floss, lacks by
contrast even “the poetry of peasant life;” “the mental condition of these emmet-like
Dodsons and Tullivers” weighs upon both the narrator and her imagined audience
as an “oppressive narrowness” (p. 222). We must be made to feel it, too, “if we care
to understand how it acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie—how it has acted on
young natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human things
have risen above the mental level of the generation before them” (p. 222). From
Tom and Maggie to you and me, the narrator suggests, is not so great a leap, perhaps
less than the distance between them and their parents, or us and ours, as this conflict
between generations also repeats itself “in many generations” and is “going on
everywhere.” In what is perhaps the paradigmatic instance of the rhetorical pattern
that Rosemarie Bodenheimer has identified among Eliot’s narrators, in which
we overhear the narrative voice “telling the imaginary reader that he is thinking
something that an actual reader has most likely had little inclination to think,” the
“assumption of shared experience” underlies the universalizing appeal to readers
always and “everywhere.” 57
55 George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), p. 235.

56 Emily Davies to Jane Crow, 21 August 1868, Emily Davies: Collected Letters, 186–
1875, ed. Ann B. Murphy and Deirdre Raftery (Charlottesville, 2004), p. 287; Cottom, p. 53.
57 Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters
and Fiction (Ithaca and London, 1994), p. 52; Cottom, p. 53.
In another ideological precept masquerading as a general truth, the narrator here
attributes Tom and Maggie’s rise “above the mental level of the generation before
them” to “the onward tendency of human things.” Echoing as it does the single most
important metaphor of the novel, the phrase constructs an analogical relationship
between a force of nature, like the river, and the course of “human things”; again we
may interpret the Floss as an “allegory of inexorability” as it rolls on, bearing Tom
and Maggie along with it, lifting them above the insect intelligence of their birth
family only to consign them ultimately to the watery deeps. That “tendency” may
also be identified with Eliot’s gradualist or meliorist notion of progress; or, more
concretely, as an instance of her commitment to the philosophical schema of historical
development that underpins her representation of St Ogg’s as “a society which has
not yet moved beyond the egoism of man’s animal beginnings to the sympathy and
benevolence which Feuerbach and Comte believed would grow out of egoism.”58
But we might also say that it makes itself most dramatically felt, as in the essay
on Riehl, as a movement from the “uniformity of type” demonstrated by Dodsons
and Tullivers to the “high degree of individualization” exhibited by their hybrid
offspring. For where their parents see and speak about conflicts of blood, these new
“young natures,” with their “higher culture,” experience inter- and intra-generational
conflict in terms provided by an emergent psychological discourse, as when Maggie
tells Tom, “‘our natures are very different. You don’t know how differently things
affect me from what they do you’” (MF, VI, iv, p. 318). These terms also echo in
the comments of an anonymous contemporary reviewer, who asserts that the novel
reveals “not alone the inner workings of two very different natures, but the effect
the two natures have upon one another.”59 The conflict between Dodson and Tulliver
“blood,” I suggest, is transferred to an interior psychological terrain, the higher
“mental level,” on which both Tom and Maggie live, struggle, and die.
As distinct as these generationally marked discourses may appear, then, the novel
and its narrator do mystify a fundamental continuity between them. The breeding
experiment in which the older generation indulges may not establish the precise new
variations it aims to bring about, but they are effectively transmuted into another,
“higher” idiom: the increasing individuation of the younger generation produces, in
Tom’s case, “a nature in which family feeling had lost the character of clanship by
taking on a doubly deep dye of personal pride” (MF, VII, iii, p. 404) and, in Maggie’s,
the internal conflict that keeps her perpetually at war “against formidable, never
permanently conquerable ‘savages’” within her own psyche.60 That both Maggie and
Tom ultimately function as types of the modern gendered individual—the divided
feminine self, the man of maxims—helps to suggest the continuing if muted power
of the racialized discourses of reproduction that The Mill on the Floss deploys in its
effort to distinguish nature’s role in making natures.61
58 Levine, “Intelligence,” p. 403.

59 Quoted in D. Carroll, p. 110.
60 Meyer, p. 143. As Meyer points out (p. 141), the word “savage” recurs frequently
during the second half of the novel.
61 I am very grateful to Deborah Morse for occasioning this essay and for her extremely
valuable assistance in completing it.
Works Cited
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her
Letters and Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Carroll, Alicia. Dark Smiles: Race and Desire in George Eliot (Athens: Ohio
Carroll, David ed. George Eliot: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes & Noble,
Inc., 1971).
Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000).
——. “Representing the Rural: The Critique of Loamshire in Adam Bede,” Studies
in the Novel, 20 (1988): 288–301.
Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History, and Literary
Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London:
Penguin Classics, 2004).
——. On the Various Causes by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised
by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing (Rpt. Stanfordville, NY: Earl
M. Coleman, Publisher, 1979).
——. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation
of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, ed. J.W. Burrow (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1968).
Davies, Emily. Emily Davies: Collected Letters, 1861–1875, ed. Ann B. Murphy and
Deirdre Raftery (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004).
Disraeli, Benjamin. Coningsby; or, The New Generation, ed. Thom Braun
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983).
Eliot, George. Adam Bede, ed. Carol A. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
——. The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1954–74).
——. Impressions of Theophrastus Such, ed. Nancy Henry (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 1994).
——. The Journals of George Eliot, ed. Margaret Harris and Judith Johnson
——. The Mill on the Floss, ed. Carol T. Christ (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994).
——. “The Natural History of German Life,” in Thomas Pinney (ed.), Essays of
George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 266–99.
——. Silas Marner, The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. Terence Cave (Oxford: Oxford
Huth, Alfred Henry. The Marriage of Near Kin, Considered with Respect to the Laws
of Nations, the Results of Experience, and the Teachings of Biology (London,
1875).
Knoepflmacher, U.C. George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968).
Kuper, Adam. “Incest, Cousin Marriage, and the Origin of the Human Sciences in
Nineteenth-Century England,” Past and Present, 174 (2002): 158–83.
Law, Jules. “Water Rights and the ‘Crossing o’ Breeds’: Chiastic Exchange in The
Mill on the Floss,” in Linda M. Shires (ed.), Rewriting the Victorians: Theory,
History, and the Politics of Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1992),
pp. 52–69.
Levine, George. “Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss,” PMLA, 80
(1965): 402–409.
[Lewes, George Henry.] “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human,” Westminster
Review, American Edition 66, (July 1856): 75–90.
“The Marriage of Near Kin.” Westminster Review: American Edition, 104 (October
1875): 147–55.
May, Leila Silvana. Disorderly Sisters: Sibling Relations and Sororal Resistance
in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press, 2001).
McDonagh, Josephine. “The Early Novels,” in George Levine (ed.) The Cambridge
Companion to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
pp. 38–56.
Meyer, Susan. Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca
and London: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Morgan, Susan. Sisters in Time: Imagining Gender in Nineteenth-Century British
Fiction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Nord, Deborah Epstein. “‘Marks of Race’: Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity
in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Victorian Studies, 41 (1998): 189–
210.
Ottenheimer, Martin. Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996).
Paxton, Nancy L. George Eliot and Herbert Spencer: Feminism, Evolutionism, and
the Reconstruction of Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Age (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1987).
——. The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying
Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
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Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
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Interracial Literature (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
1997).
Stocking, George W. Jr. Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).
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and New York: Routledge, 1995).
Young, Robert M. Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture
Chapter 8
Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance

Elsie B. Michie
The Mill on the Floss (1860), Wives and Daughters (1865), and Tess of the
d’Urbervilles (1891) all reveal their authors’ intense interest in evolution. (Eliot’s
novel appeared at the same moment as The Origin of Species, Gaskell’s shortly
thereafter, and Hardy’s in the long shadow of Darwin’s work.) All three novels
explore the shift that the theory of evolution triggered in nineteenth-century thinking:
from conceiving the world as an ordered hierarchy where some are natural lords over
others to perceiving it as a place of conflict and mutual aggression. In this fearsome
new world those things previously thought of as subordinate—people, animals,
emotions—were now understood to be unruly, eagerly seeking to overturn the
structures and disciplines that traditionally bound them. Eliot, Gaskell, and Hardy
explore this perceptual change through the image of a man on horse back. The horse
had long been seen as naturally subservient, offering man (and woman) a seat from
which to shine forth as a lord of the universe. But the riders depicted in The Mill on
the Floss, Wives and Daughters, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles are not the individuals
traditionally associated with the dominant classes, squires and landowners. Instead
they are men newly enriched by the commercial wealth whose presence seemed to
be transforming the small river towns, country villages, farms and hamlets that Eliot,
Gaskell, and Hardy depict so lovingly. In these nostalgic rural or provincial novels
the authors represent such social disruption through men who display a potential
to dominate in their relation to sexually magnetic women and their ability to ride
and control high-spirited horses. This image allows the unruly economic forces that
threatened to burst the seams of the social order—commercial money and steam
power—to be linked to the biological forces Darwin described, the aggression that
leads to the survival of the fittest and the ineffable drives of sexual selection.
The horse is a particularly interesting figure in Victorian iconography because it
stands at the juncture of a set of complex and resonant attributes that are both social
and sexual. When Philip Hamerton describes England as “the last stronghold of noble
equestrianism,” he evokes the horse’s symbolic function as an emblem of class status
and nationalism. As a domesticated animal, the horse also represented dominion
For a discussion of the horse as a general emblem of dominance see the work of
Donna Landry. “Horsy and Persistently Queer” is particularly interested in the way women
also perceived their power to be enhanced and represented by the horses they rode.
Philip G. Hamerton, Chapters on Animals (Boston, 1901), p. 79. As Harriet Ritvo
notes, “Popular natural history traditionally characterized the horse as ‘noble,’ and sometimes
as nobler than the class of humans generally charged with its care” (The Animal Estate: The
English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age [Cambridge, Mass., 1987], p. 19). Donna
over the natural world but was valued simultaneously for its docility—its ability to
accept discipline—and its aggression (as a war horse) and speed (as a racer). At the
same time, as an animal that had been bred extensively from the seventeenth century
onwards, the horse provided investigators like Darwin with data on questions of
genetics and inheritance that had long been studied (but studied in a different context
from natural selection because here the breeding was done for a purpose). Because
it is ridden, the horse has a particularly intimate relation to the human body. As
Hamerton notes, “by [its] accurate interpretation of our muscular action, even when
so slight as to be imperceptible to the eye of the by-stander, the horse measures the
skill, the strength, the resolution of the rider.” This passage suggests, however, the
problem that began to emerge in the years following the publication of Darwin’s The
Origin of Species. Is it the rider that is controlling the horse or the horse the rider?
The writings examined here, both fictional and non-fictional, suggest that, by the
second half of the nineteenth century, the horse ceased to function as an image of
secure dominance, an easy and masterful seat from which one could control a set
of natural powers, and became instead a marker of forces barely kept in check that
threatened to overturn or, at the very least, disrupt traditional notions of hierarchy.
The term used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to describe the control
of horses was the word “manage,” which, as Donna Landry has shown, came into
English through equestrian schools. Landry cites the famous nineteenth-century
jockey Samuel Chifney who argued against the use of a tight rein, because “his speed
slackened where the horse has that sort of management to his mouth.” In this instance
management refers to “the manège, or indoor school, where Continental Europeans
dressage with its intense discipline and collection of the horse was practiced.” This
usage gives manage its first meaning in the OED, “to handle, train or direct (a horse)
in his paces,” which is followed by subsequent developments: “to conduct or carry
on (a war, a business, an undertaking, an operation) … to control the course of
Landry makes a similar point, asking, “What is it about the English and horses … that makes
the combination so autocratic, so redolent of national and racial privilege expressed as upper-
classness?” (“Horsy and Persistently Queer: Imperialism, Feminism and Bestiality,” Textual
Practice 15:3 [2001]: 474). Landry analyzes primarily eighteenth and early nineteenth-
century representations of the horse and associates them specifically with colonial dominance,
writing that, “The English man or woman became, by dint of being mounted on a horse, the
embodiment of an imperial race, a warrior class, a nation destined for global superiority and
far-flung rule” (“Horsy,” 475). Writing in 1858, G.J. White-Melville similarly asserts that, “an
Englishman and a lover of the horse are synonymous terms” (“The Taming of Horses, and Mr.
Rarey,” Fraser’s Magazine 58 [November 1858]: 571).
Both Darwin’s interest in domestic breeding and his use of phrase “natural selection”
made it sound too much as if nature were breeding for a purpose. As George Levine notes,
“Wallace pleaded with Darwin in lengthy correspondence to drop the metaphor. In his own
original paper, he had argued the irrelevance of domestic selection to natural selection (and
of course Darwin begins the Origin with a chapter on domestic selection)” (Darwin and the
Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction [Cambridge, MA, 1988], p. 99).
Hamerton, Chapters, p. 75.
Donna Landry, “The Bloody Shouldered Arabian and Early Modern Culture, Criticism
46:1 (Winter 2004): 45.
Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance 147
affairs by one’s own action”; “to administer and regulate the use and expenditure
of (finances, provisions, etc)”; “to control, cause to submit to one’s rule (persons,
animals, etc.), and “to bring (a person) to consent to one’s wishes by artifice, flattery,
or judicious suggestion of motives.” This complex set of interconnected meanings
defines the personal and social attributes of the male horseback riders in The Mill on
the Floss, Wives and Daughters, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Stephen Guest, Mr
Preston, and Alec d’Urbervilles. These men are able to “manage” horses that, under
the hands of others, might go out of control. As Alec d’Urbervilles says of the mare
Tib, when she races downhill to Tess’s consternation, “if any living man can manage
this horse I can—I won’t say any living man can do it—but if such as the power, I am
he.” They are also members of the new managerial business class that was playing a
more prominent role in Victorian society in the latter half of the nineteenth-century.
All three seek to manage the women who attract them—Maggie Tulliver,
Cynthia Fitzgerald, and Tess Durbeyfield—all of whom are depicted in terms that
might remind us of horses. In Eliot’s novel Stephen describes Maggie as “too tall”
and “a little too fiery.” It is clear to him that, “to see such a creature subdued by
love for one would be a lot worth having” (Eliot, Mill, p. 409). In Gaskell’s novel
Cynthia “ has the free stately step of some wild animal of the forest.” She needs to
“curb herself” when she is in the presence of men she respects, and fears that she
will never be free of Preston because he is not “a man to be easily thrown off.” Tess
too has passions that make her, like Maggie and Cynthia, “rather dangerous and
unmanageable” (Eliot, Mill, p. 428). The men who pursue these women struggle to
control or manage a set of unruly emotions, what we might call the animal passions:
sexual desire, aggression, fear, anger. Each man recognizes that to be successful one
needs to be adept at “the management of … temper” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 324), one’s
own, the horse’s, the woman’s. Such private skills carry over into the public arena.
All three are smooth operators, adept at flattery. Cynthia’s description of Preston,
“it’s like turning on a tap, such a stream of pretty speeches flows out at the moment”
(Gaskell, Wives, p. 312), is echoed in Maggie’s bantering comment that in Stephen’s
case, “so much fluency and self-possession should not be wasted entirely on private
occasions” (Eliot, Mill, p. 380). D’Urbervilles, too, is a persuasive talker whose
speech wears Tess down in the end. These abilities mark the fact that the men are
members of the new managerial classes. (Each man is specifically associated with
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, ed. Scott Elledge (New York, 1991), p. 39.
All subsequent references cited in the text as Hardy, Tess.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Oxford, 1980), p. 381. All subsequent references
cited in the text as Eliot, Mill.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (London, 2000), pp. 207, 218, 390. All
subsequent references cited in the text as Gaskell, Wives. Representing the woman in animal
imagery also evokes the idea of the hunt. The imagery of hunting is picked up later in Tess
when Tess hides in a haystack for the night and wakes up to find herself the companion of
birds injured by hunters. The name of the primeval forest where she is raped, The Chase, may
evoke not just general images of the hunt, but also, perhaps, William Somervile’s 1735 poem
on hunting The Chace. In Wives and Daughters, too, there is a suggestion of the hunt when a
chapter is entitled “Cynthia at Bay.” In The Mill on the Floss, Stephen Guest describes himself
as, “a poor hunted devil” (p. 447).
management. Alec offers Tess a job “managing” his mother’s fowls. Stephen Guest’s
father offers Tom Tulliver a job “managing” the mill. Mr Preston is the “manager”
of Earl of Cumnor’s estate.)
These men represent a new kind of power that seemed, particularly in the period
when Eliot and Gaskell were writing, to be dominating the culture—the power
of money that comes from running a business rather than maintaining land. Alec
d’Urbervilles and Stephen Guest have fathers “so wealthy that they can purchase
for their sons the leisure that mimics aristocratic style,” but that wealth comes
from managerial skills not inheritance. When Stephen Guest characterizes himself,
somewhat mockingly, as among “men of great administrative capacity” who have
“a tendency to predominance” (Eliot, Mill, p. 416), he is accurately describing his
position as heir to the most thriving business in St Oggs. Though Preston, as an
estate agent, does not possess the liberty Guest and d’Urbervilles have to roam the
country, his financial success still gives him the psychological freedom to imagine
quitting his job; “he was, in fact, too rich and independent to care greatly for
preserving a post where his decision might any day be overturned” (Gaskell, Wives,
p. 5). That Preston has more disposable income than the landowning gentry becomes
clear when he meets the village’s Tory squire, Sir Roger Hamley, who makes “an
involuntary comparison of the capital roadster on which Mr. Preston was mounted
with his own ill-groomed and aged cob” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 322). Even Hamley’s
wealthy neighbor, the Whig lord, the Earl of Cumnor, is less well mounted than
his own land agent whom he sees “coming towards them on his good horse, point
device, in his riding attire.” The earl himself is “in his threadbare coat, and on his
old brown cob” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 506). The phrase “point device” suggests that
the agent rather than the lord is the man chivalrously correct in his appearance.
This image of a new managerial class able to appropriate the noble emblems of the
past is borne out in Tess of the d’Urbervilles when Alec d’Urbervilles tells Tess, “‘a
castle argent is certainly my crest … and my arms a lion rampant’” (Hardy, Tess,
p. 29), heraldic symbols he “possesses” because his father bought them along with
the family name.
One of the signs of high breeding that was, over the course of the nineteenth
century, increasingly in the hands of the newly enriched commercial classes was
the horse.10 While one might have expected that, as English society moved into the
Victorian period, the horse would become less socially important, an anachronistic
vestige of a land-owning past, in fact the opposite was true. As F.M.L. Thompson
has demonstrated, the nineteenth century became the great age of the horse, with
an increasing number of horse-drawn carriages and omnibuses and an expansion of
Margaret Homans, “Dinah’s Blush, Maggie’s Arm,” in Andrew H. Miller and James
Eli Adams (eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Bloomington, 1996), p. 32.
10 The potential to become a symbol of upward mobility seems to have been present
in the horse from early in the nineteenth century. Harriet Ritvo cites an 1803 text, William
Holloway and John Branch’s The British Museum or the Elegant Repository of Natural
History, where the authors state of the horse that, “in his carriage … he seems desirous of
raising himself above the humble station assigned to him in creation” (Animal Estate, p. 20).
horse racing and hunting.11 Moreover, as the century progressed horse ownership
gradually became a marker less of one’s class status or one’s nobility than of one’s
money. As the author of an 1865 article explains, “There can be no doubt that it is the
wealth of our great cites, and especially of London, which has given such a stimulus
to hunting all over England. The jeunesse dorée of England nearly all have, or affect
to have a decided penchant for the sport of kings and Kaisers.”12 The possessors of
fine and fast horses in Eliot’s, Gaskell’s, and Hardy’s novels all wield the power of
money. As the narrator comments of the estate Alex d’Urbervilles’ family has bought
along with their name, “everything on this snug property was bright, thriving, and
well-kept: acres of glass houses stretched down inclines to the copses at their feet.
Everything looked like money—like the last coin issued from the mint” (Hardy,
Tess, p. 27). So, too, when Stephen Guest first appears we hear that his “diamond
ring, attar of roses, and air of nonchalant leisure, at twelve o’clock in the day, are the
graceful and odoriferous result of the largest oil-mill and the most extensive wharf
in St. Ogg’s” (Eliot, Mill, p. 363).
In Stephen Guest’s case, this financial power derives from the steam engine; “it’s
this steam, you see, that has made a difference: it drives on every wheel double pace,
and the wheel of fortune along with ’em, as our Stephen Guest said at the anniversary
dinner” (Eliot, Mill, p. 396). Once again, we might expect, and contemporaries did
expect, that the horse would lose out to such mechanical developments. As Gina
Dorré has argued, in discussing the era of The Pickwick Papers, “In the most
simplified sense, many felt that the course of progress—epitomized by the steam
engine, or iron horse—threatened the moral order in that it upset the imagined pre-
industrial harmony between man and nature.”13 As the century progressed, however,
it became clear that riding was, in fact, not hindered but fostered by mechanical
improvements. The author of the Temple Bar article explains that, “the iron horse,
which was regarded with the most gloomy forebodings and shakings of head, even
so sapient as those of Messrs. Tattersall, as the great and natural foe to fox-hunting,
11 See Victorian England: The Horse-Drawn Society (London, 1968). Indeed in G.J.
White-Melville’s article in the 1858 Fraser’s Magazine there is a fascinating passage where
he imagines what mid-nineteenth-century life would have been like if the horse suddenly
vanished.
12 “Horses and Horsiness,” Temple Bar 14 (July 1865): 447. Thompson quotes a similar
contemporary analysis; “it was an admiral who offered the most profound analysis when
asked to explain the great increase in the turnover of London horse sales in the fifty years
before 1873: ‘I think it is the money, the enormous wealth of London,’ he said; ‘so many
people keep hunters now, who never dreamt of keeping them before. I know that at Melton
there are 500 people in a field where formerly there would not be 100, and many of them
have two or three horses each in the field … it is owing to their means; that their riches have
increased, and that the love of hunting has increased in proportion to their means of being able
to indulge their fancy’”(Victorian England, pp. 14–15).
13 Gina Marlene Dorré, “Handling the ‘Iron Horse’: Dickens, Travel, and Derailed
Masculinity in The Pickwick Papers,” Nineteenth Century Studies 16 (2002): 2.
has proved its greatest ally.”14 As the term “iron horse” suggests, 15 the horse became,
not the opposite of the new mechanical developments but their measure.16 And,
if the horse measured the power of the engine, the engine could also be used to
reconceptualize the power of the horse. In the volume on The Horse published under
the superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1831 the
authors explain that the horse provided such effective competition for its mechanical
rivals because it is, in effect, a fleshly version of the locomotive; “An animal is
but a beautiful piece of machinery, and although perfect in its construction, and
wonderfully accommodating in its movements, it still, like the engine, has a limited
power, and has its peculiar modes of action, its strong and its feeble parts.”17
In the novels analyzed here, the horse, ridden by agents who follow post-
industrial economic practices, is associated not with traditional relations to nature
and the land but with forces, like steam power and the locomotive, that, by the latter
half of the nineteenth century, threatened to disrupt or do away with those relations.
In Eliot’s novel the Tullivers’ water powered mill is threatened by the steam power
brought in by Guest and Company. In Gaskell’s novel the control of the land that
for centuries would have been the prerogative of men like Squire Hamley is now
being challenged by those with the wealth to engage in new agricultural practices.
14 “Horses and Horsiness,” p. 446. We see such an alliance in Trollope’s novels when
young men use the railroad to transport their horses to various meets where they can indulge
a day of riding and then return to their work in the city. See also an 1861 article where the
author explains that, “at the time that the railways were first introduced into this country, it
was confidently predicted that from that date the race of English horses would decline, that
the demand for them would diminish, and that English farmers would consequently cease to
breed them. This dismal prophecy has not, however, been fulfilled. On the country, horses
of all kinds are more in request now than they ever were before; and first-class animals have
risen in value at least forty percent. During the last twenty-five years” (M.J. Higgins, “Horse-
keeping and Horse-breeding,” The Cornhill Magazine 3 [May 1861]: 617).
15 The terms that would develop for the later invention the car were also defined by the
past: horseless carriage, roadster, which as Gaskell’s usage makes clear, came from a term
for a horse. Up through the 1930s, “express locomotives of the London and North Eastern
Railway were named after racehorses” (John K. Walton, “Review. Flat-Racing and British
Society 1790–1914: A Social and Economic History,” Journal of Social History (35:2 (2001):
488).
16 Isaac Watt used the term “horse-power” to express the output of a steam or electric
motor. The OED’s first example of the term comes from 1806. Interestingly the editors
conclude their entry with a passage from The Glasgow Herald of 1897 in which the author
argues, inaccurately as anyone who has recently bought something with an engine knows, that,
“the term ‘horse-power’ has probably seen its best days. As a scientific term it has been much
abused, and as a commercial term it carries no meaning.” The term candle-power also came
into usage in the nineteenth century, another measure of technological advances, initially of
the strength of illumination of gas lamps, by an item that came from an earlier point in time.
The first usage for “candle-power” that the OED cites is 1869.
17 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, The Horse; With a Treatise on Draught
(London, 1831), p. 410. G.J. White-Melville makes a similar point, arguing of horses that we,
“find them with few exceptions as governable as machines, and as sure to perform their part
till the motive power is ‘used up’” (“Taming of Horses,” p. 577).
As Jules Law notes, “Between 1825 and 1845, steam engines were beginning to
compete with natural hydraulics as a power source of mills …. At the same time,
the development of methods for mass-producing iron piping (for irrigation) and clay
tiles (for drainage), and the dissemination of agronomic knowledge through newly
created colleges and publications of agricultural science, resulted in an expansively
more productive phase of farming.”18 Ironically in Gaskell’s novel the traditionally
minded Squire is the first person in the neighborhood to attempt such drainage out
of a concern for his land. However, because possession of land leaves him with
little excess funding he must give up the project when his eldest son gets into debt
at Oxford. Installation of the tiles is then taken up by the wealthy Whig lord the Earl
of Cumnor and overseen by his progressively minded, moneymaking agent Preston.
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles such changes in agricultural practice are marked by the
use of the coal-powered threshing machine that replaces the traditional handheld
flails that the rural laborers prefer. We also see changes in relation to the land in
the Durbeyfields’ loss of the freehold right to their cottage, which means the end
of the life they have known, with its combination of farming and peddling goods.
In Hardy’s novel that eviction is prefigured and associated with Alec d’Urbervilles
through the house where Tess is sent to manage fowls, which used to be the property
of “certain dusty copyholders, who now lay east and west in the churchyard” (Hardy,
Tess, p. 42).
Both Gaskell’s and Eliot’s novels contain scenes that emphasize the anger of the
men who have had more traditional associations with the land against the usurpers
who are replacing them. In Wives and Daughters Squire Hamley feels his loss of
power most acutely when he goes to inspect men installing drainage tiles where
the Whig Earl’s property borders his own. Having heard they are pulling up the
gorse, thereby destroying the cover necessary for a proper hunting, he comes to
stop the vandalism, to assert his longstanding rights as a property owner. When the
Earl’s agent Preston, who is described as “also on horseback, come to overlook
his labourers” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 322), refuses to take the Squire’s word that the
damage should be stopped Hamley is livid, crying out, “I should like to try my
horsewhip on you for your insolence” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 323). In The Mill on the
Floss Mr Tulliver enacts what Hamley only desires. Returning home after having
finally paid off the debts he incurred going bankrupt, the former mill-owner hopes
to encounter the lawyer Mr Wakem, who now owns what was for generations the
Tulliver family residence. Tulliver thinks, “the rascal would perhaps be forsaken of
his cool, domineering impudence. He would know by-and-by that an honest man
was not going to serve him any longer” (Eliot, Mill, p. 355). When his nemesis
appears in the road in front of him “on a fine black horse” (Eliot, Mill, p. 355),
Tulliver rides at him, throws him to the ground, and horsewhips him. In these scenes
what particularly galls the men whose lands and powers have been usurped is the
arrogant assumption of prerogative in the men who replace them, an arrogance that
18 Jules Law, “Water Rights and the ‘crossing o’ breeds’: Chiastic Exchange in The Mill
on the Floss,” in Linda M. Shires (ed.), Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History, and the
Politics of Gender (London, 1992), p. 58.
is perfectly captured by describing those upstarts as riding their high horses.19 (That
distinction in elevation is literally worked out in both scenes, since the squire is
riding a pony rather than a stallion and the beaten Wakem is sent home on Tulliver’s
horse because it is lower than his own.)
In 1865 Eliza Lynn Linton explored the various ways “riding a high horse”
might be understood, emphasizing how often it is wealth that raises its possessor
to that unearned elevation; “We get high horses and ride on them when we have
more money than our neighbors; when we have testimonials and presentation-plates;
when we inherit where we had no claim of birth or blood, unexpectedly and richly.”20
Hardy conveys the pleasure of mounting a high horse, of feeling superior to those
who have thought themselves your equal, in Tess of the d’Urbervilles when Tess is
returning home from the dance with her rural co-workers and becomes embroiled
in an altercation with Car Darch. As Alec arrives on horseback and offers Tess
escape from the farm workers who are mocking and threatening to attack her, she
is entranced; her “fear and indignation at these adversaries could be transformed
by a spring of the foot into triumph over them” (Hardy, Tess, p. 53). It is this sense
that a spring of the foot has enabled better dressed and better mounted opponents to
triumph over them that so angers the squire and mill-owner in Gaskell’s and Eliot’s
novels. They hate being confronted by someone who assumes the stance Lynn Linton
describes when she argues that, “fame, fine friends, success, a good fat legacy, or
a well-managed income, even finery and dress, will build up a high horse any day,
from whose back the rider looks down on the smaller multitude below with pity or
contempt.”21 In The Mill on the Floss the rudely imperious attitude of those who
have mounted the high horse of wealth is what triggers the eventual altercation. As
Wakem approaches Tulliver in the road he exclaims, “‘Let me pass, you ignorant
brute, or I’ll ride over you’” (Eliot, Mill, p. 355).22
19 In discussing Gaskell John Lucas has written of “the new man, the outsider … who
is needed either because the head of the business has decided he is above business affairs or
because he can’t cope with new business methods” (The Literature of Change: Studies in the
Nineteenth-Century Provincial Novel [Sussex, 1977], p. 8). Lucas has argued that such men,
of whom Preston would be an excellent example, represent “the middle-class fear of being
‘invaded’ from below” (Literature, p. 8). I want to take the power relations a step further.
The fear and anger evoked in these scenes arise from characters experiencing themselves as
“below” individuals they conceive should be “below” them. I would agree with Lucas that
such a fear “often shows itself in sexual terms” (Literature, p. 8), though explicit sexuality
seems to me to be displaced from scenes between men to those between men and women.
20 Eliza Lynn Linton, “High Horse,” Temple Bar 15 (August/November 1865): 355.
21 Linton, “High Horse,” p. 348.
22 That Wakem’s comment in some sense crystallizes fears of the age is suggested by the
fact that it is repeated, in almost exactly the same terms, in Frances Trollope’s The Ward of
Thorpe Combe (1841). Contemplating the novel’s vulgarly rich main character, its land-poor
aristocratic hero thinks of the quotation from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, “Set a beggar
on horseback and he will ride at a gallop.” He concludes of the avatar of new wealth that “‘she
rides well … Only I must take care that she does not manage her steed so as to trample us all
in the dust’” (II, p. 50).
It is this image of someone who threatens, even, at moments, desires, to trample
others in the dust that is invoked in The Mill on the Floss, Wives and Daughters, and
Tess of the d’Urbervilles through the figures of Stephen Guest, Mr Preston, and Alec
d’Urbervilles. For Eliot, Gaskell, and Hardy, the aggression embodied in these men
is conceived in terms of a social evolution in which the moneyed interests represent
a force potentially capable of overcoming the landed classes that had traditionally
held power. Even before the publication of The Origin of Species the Victorians
conceived the development of the money economy in terms of evolutionary theory.
In Lombard Street, a collection of essays published in the Economist in the 1850s,
Walter Bagehot asserted that, “The rough and vulgar structure of English commerce
is the secret of its life; for it contains ‘the propensity to variation,’ which, in the
social as in the animal kingdom, is the principle of progress.”23 Eliot, Gaskell, and
Hardy were all consciously interested in Darwin, evolution, environment, adaptation,
heredity, and genetics. As Shuttleworth notes, “throughout her essays, letters, and
notebooks for her novels, George Eliot draws on a wide-wide ranging knowledge of
such diverse fields as geology, physics, astronomy and philology … [She] greeted
the publications of Darwin’s Origin of Species as an ‘epoch.’”24 Elizabeth Gaskell
was distantly related to Darwin, met him on numerous social occasions and told her
publisher that she had, at least partially, modeled Roger Hamley, the scientist in Wives
23 Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (New York,
199), p. 11. The post-Darwinian Lawrence Oliphant argued more explicitly that, “I may
yet hope that a process of natural selection is in progress and that joint-stock companies,
like the human race, are to rise into new and better conditions through the ‘survival of the
fittest’” (“The Autobiography of a Joint-Stock Company (Limited)”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine 120 [July 1876]: 96). George Levine has explained that in the nineteenth century
Darwin’s theory was used both “as a defense of laissez-faire capitalism” and “in the attack on
the remaining areas of special social and political privilege in British society” (Darwin and
the Novelists, p. 94). In a later article on Darwin and sexual selection, he also notes that it “has
been established once and for all that the theory of natural selection has close and documented
ties to laissez-faire economics” (“‘And If It Be a Pretty Woman All the Better’—Darwin and
Sexual Selection,” in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (eds), Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis
1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer [Oxford, 2003], p. 39). Those ties persisted into
the twentieth century, with Andrew Carnegie writing in 1900 that, “A struggle is inevitable
and it is a question of the survival of the fittest,” and John D. Rockefeller asserting that, “the
growth of large business is merely the survival of the fittest” (Charles Darwin, Darwin: A
Norton Critical Edition, ed. Philip Appleman [New York, 1979], p. 387).
24 Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge,
1984), p. 14. For further extensive discussions of the relations between Eliot’s narratives and
Darwin’s see also Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 137–95.
and Daughters, after him.25 Hardy, as Gillian Beer has noted, “acknowledged Darwin
always as a major intellectual influence on his work and his ways of seeing.”26
While references to Darwinian thinking pervade Hardy’s later novel, Eliot’s
and Gaskell’s novels contain references to an earlier moment in the debates on
evolution. In The Mill on the Floss, Stephen first makes Maggie pay attention to
him when he talks about William Buckland’s Geology and Mineralogy, Considered
with Reference to Natural Theology (1836), a volume commissioned and funded by
a legacy from the Earl of Bridgewater to “demonstrate God’s wisdom and goodness
using geology.”27 In Wives and Daughters Gaskell references that same juncture in
the history of writing about evolution when the squire’s second son, Roger Hamley,
is described as a naturalist who reads Huber and Cuvier, and is sent to Africa because,
“Mr. Crichton, who died some time ago, and fired by the example of the Duke of
Bridgewater, I suppose—left a sum of money in the hands of trustees … to send a
man out with a thousand fine qualifications, to make a scientific voyage, with a view
to bringing back fauna of distant lands” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 344). The references
to Buckland are historically accurate to the time in which both novels are set, the
1830s, and apt in the sense that Buckland was most fascinated by describing the
dying out of whole groups of animals, most prominently the dinosaurs. In a letter
appended to the last of the Bridgewater Treatises, Herschel described this as “the
mystery of mysteries, the replacement of extinct species by others.”28 Both Eliot’s
and Gaskell’s novels reflect evolutionary thinking of the period by representing
characters like Mr Tulliver and Squire Hamley being brought to realize that their
25 Hilary Schor mentions Gaskell’s “familial relationship to and interest in Darwin”

(Scheherazade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel [Oxford, 1992],
p. 196). According to Coral Lansbury, Darwin was a kind of cousin to Elizabeth Gaskell,
related through Gaskell’s mother Elizabeth Holland (Elizabeth Gaskell: The Novel of Social
Crisis [New York, 1975], p. 11). Winifred Guérin documents the meetings between Gaskell
and Darwin that led Darwin’s sister to tour Europe with Gaskell’s daughter Meta (Elizabeth
Gaskell: A Biography [Oxford, 1976], pp. 276–7). Gaskell wrote to her publisher George
Smith that, “Roger is rough & unpolished—but works out for himself a certain name in
Natural Science,―is tempted by a large offer to go round the world (like Charles Darwin)
as naturalist” (Elizabeth Gaskell, The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell, ed. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur
Pollard [Cambridge, MA, 1967], p. 732). For readings of Darwinian strains in Wives and
Daughters see Deirdre d’Albertis, Dissembling Fictions: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian
Social Text (New York, 1997); Patsy Stoneman, Elizabeth Gaskell (Bloomington, 1987);
and Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel
(Chicago, 1991).
26 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 222. A number of people have written about Hardy and
Darwin, among them, Gillian Beer, George Levine, Peter Morton, Roger Robinson, Elliott
Gose, Perry Meisel, Bruce Johnson, and Angelique Richardson.
27 William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, Considered With Reference to Natural
Theology, vol. I, The Evolution Debate, 1813–1870, vol. II (London, 2003), p. vii. “Stephen
became quite brilliant in an account of Buckland’s treatise which he had just been reading.
He was rewarded by seeing Maggie let her work fall, and gradually get so absorbed in his
wonderful geological story that she sat looking at him, leaning forward with crossed arms”
(Eliot, Mill, pp. 380–81).
28 Quoted in Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, p. 95.
economic relation to the land makes them dinosaurs, in a figurative sense, poised at
the moment at which their kind is about to be extinguished, run over, as it were, by
the new groups of individuals, like Preston, Wakem, the Guests, who are coming to
social prominence.
However, Gaskell’s and Eliot’s novels also reflect evolutionary thinking of the
period following the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) when Darwin was
expanding on the implications of his earlier work to produce the Descent of Man and
Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871. Published in 1860 and 1865 respectively, Eliot’s
and Gaskell’s novels anticipate the move Darwin was to make in that later book by
depicting the men who represent the classes that were becoming socially dominant
as figures also of sexual dominance.29 The fact that all three authors invoke the
male’s propensity to dominance through his relation to horses perfectly echoes the
emphasis in Darwin’s thinking in both Sexual Selection and the later The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) on the analogies between human and
animal behavior. The horse, with its long history of domestication and breeding as
well as its close physical relation to the humans who rode it, stood, as becomes clear
in the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, on the interface between
the animal and the human world. In Darwin’s arguments, the crucial difference
between those worlds lay in the fact that in the animal world the female had the
power of choice in selecting a mate while in the human world it was the male. The
horse, however, provides one of the rare examples in the animal world where the
male makes the choice in sexual selection. Darwin notes that, “Mr. Blenkiron, the
greatest breeder of race-horses in the world,” has informed him that, “stallions are
so frequently capricious in their choice, rejecting one mare and without any apparent
cause taking to another, that various artifices have to be habitually used.” However,
29 I am arguing here, as George Levine has put it, not for “the ‘influence’ but the
absorption and testing of Darwinian ideas and attitudes … in the Victorian novel” (Darwin
and the Novelists, p. 3). Jill Matus makes a similar argument that, “the relationship between
scientific knowledge and cultural imperatives is one of interplay and exchange” (Unstable
Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity [Manchester, 1995], p. 7).
Though Descent of Man and Sexual Selection was published after Mill on the Floss and
Wives and Daughters, many of its ideas were anticipated in The Origin of Species as well as
the works of other naturalists in the period. Jennifer Panek has noted the series of scientific
writers working on sexual selection at the time that Gaskell and Eliot were writing. Several
critics have also suggested that Darwin himself might have reacted to Gaskell’s novels.
Darwin’s son Francis reported of his famous father that, “he was extremely fond of novels.
… Walter Scott, Miss Austen, and Mrs. Gaskell, were read and re-read till they could be read
no more” (Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed Francis Darwin, two
vols [New York, 1896], I, p. 102). Citing this passage, Ruth Yeazell comments that, “to argue
that Darwin’s account of sexual selection owes something to the language and plotting of
novelists, or that it relies on textural evidence as well as direct observation, is not to deny
its explanatory power” (Fictions of Modesty, p. 225). In considering North and South, Carol
Martin similarly notes of Darwin and Gaskell, “one might even ask, facetiously, whether the
influence was perhaps reciprocal” (“Gaskell, Darwin, and North and South,” Studies in the
Novel 15:2 [Summer 1983]: 94).
“Mr. Blenkiron has never known a mare to reject a horse.”30 In Gaskell’s, Eliot’s,
and Hardy’s novels, this description is borne out when a male on horseback pursues
a female and compels her, at least temporarily, to accept him,
All three novelists were fascinated, as was Darwin, by the workings of sexual
attractiveness in both genders. As Gaskell explains, “it is odd enough to see how the
entrance of a person of the opposite sex into an assemblage of either men or women
calms down the little discordances and any disturbance of mood” (Gaskell, Wives,
p. 125). Cynthia Fitzpatrick, the woman Mr Preston desires, has an “unconscious
power of fascination …. Some people have this power …. A school-girl may be
found in every school who attracts and influences all the others, not by her virtues,
nor her beauty, nor her sweetness, nor her cleverness, but by something that can
neither be described or reasoned upon” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 206).31 When the narrator
explains that this mysterious attractiveness “seems to consist in the most exquisite
powers of adaptation” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 207), we hear echoes of a series of early
evolutionary writers who focused on adaptation.32 In attempting to characterize what
makes Cynthia desirable, Mr Preston tells Molly, “she has such charm about her, one
forgets what she herself is in the halo that surrounds her” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 148).
The image of the halo recurs in Tess of the d’Urbervilles when the drunken laborers,
who have been characterized as, “a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity
of Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing,” walk home
surrounded by a gleam, “like the nimbus of a saint,” “a circle of opalized light,
formed by the moon’s rays upon the glistening sheets of dew. Each pedestrian could
see no halo but his or her own” (Hardy, Tess, pp. 48, 49, 53). We might think here of
Tess described as having a luxuriance, an amplitude, a fullness about her, of Maggie
in The Mill on the Floss with arms so large they cannot fit into her aunt’s dresses, arms
that, as Margaret Homans has persuasively argued, “serve as genteel metonymies for
her breasts.”33 These descriptions suggest that sexual attraction involves a force, an
aura that extends outwards from the limits of the self.
In the novelistic portraits of the men who desire these women that extension of
the body that marks sexuality is evoked through the horse. In Wives and Daughters
30 Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York, 2004),
p. 474.
31 In its acknowledgement of the simultaneously powerful and effable nature of sexual
attraction this passage seems almost to anticipate Darwin’s assertion, of horses, that, “that the
females are allured or excited by particular males, who possess certain characteristics in a
higher degree than other males; but what these characters are we can seldom or never discover
with certainty” (Descent of Man, pp. 474–5).
32 That the word “adaptation” would have suggested Darwinian thinking to contemporary
readers is borne out by George Henry Lewes’s comment in his review of Darwin’s work that,
“the laws of Natural Selection may indeed be said to be only a larger and more philosophic view
of the law of Adaptation which Lamarck had imperfectly conceived” (quoted in Shuttleworth,
George Eliot, p. 20).
33 Homans, “Dinah’s Blush,” p. 34. The emphasis, particularly in Hardy’s text, on the
fullness of Tess’s hair which her mother has washed and brushed is echoed in Darwin who
argues, in Sexual Selection, that, “They admire long hair and use artificial means to make it
appear abundant” (Descent of Man, p. 527).
Mr Preston is described as “a fair man, with light brown hair and whiskers; grey,
roving well-shaped eyes, with lashes darker than his hair; and with a figure rendered
easy and supple by the athletic exercises in which his excellence was famous, and
which has procured him admission into much higher society than he was otherwise
entitled to enter” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 145). “He looked remarkably handsome in his
riding-dress, and with the open-air exercise he had just had” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 213).
In Tess of the d’Urbervilles Alec d’Urbervilles is, similarly, “the handsome horsey
young buck,” who takes Tess up in his gig and tells her, as if he and his horse were
one, that, “I always go down at full gallop”; “It is not me alone, Tib [the mare] has
to be considered, and she has a very queer temper” (Hardy, Tess, pp. 37, 39). In The
Mill on the Floss Stephen Guest gallops from place to place, appearing unexpectedly,
“a gentleman on a tall bay horse; and the flanks and neck of the horse were streaked
with hard riding” (Eliot, Mill, p. 445). In these fictions the horse augments male
sexual power in much the way that Philip Hamerton describes in his 1873 book,
Chapters on Animals:
When he [the horse] has … enabled you to display the grace, skill and the manly beauty of
your person, before the admiring eye of ladies, you are proud of him as a statue, if it could
feel, would be proud of the magnificence of its pedestal. The saddle is a sort of throne for
man: when seated there, he had under him the noblest of all the brutes, so that he may be
said to sit enthroned above the whole of animal creation.34
Such elevation is literalized in Gaskell’s, Eliot’s, and Hardy’s novels in the scenes that
most emphasize sexual and social dominance, where a man on horseback confronts
the woman he desires when she is on foot. In Wives and Daughters Cynthia and
Preston are seen in the woods, “walking together in a very friendly manner; that is
to say, he was on horseback, but the path is raised above the road where the little
wooden bridge over the road” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 422). In Eliot’s novel, Stephen
uses his horse to pursue Maggie when she has retreats from her cousin Lucy’s, where
he can visit her regularly, to her Aunt Moss’s, where she seems most vulnerable
because she is staying with the poorest and most dependent of her relatives. In
Hardy’s novel, Alec twice captures Tess with a horse. The first time he makes her get
into his gig and then rushes down hill at a gallop. Even after that terrifying descent
when she succeeds in getting out of the carriage, he still uses his horse to corner
her; “turning the horse suddenly he tried to drive back upon her, and so hem her in
between the gig and the hedge” (Hardy, Tess, p. 41). Later he will take her up on his
horse, ride into the Chase, the locus of an eighteenth-century poem about hunting,
and there take sexual possession of her. In all three novels, the male character’s use
of a horse to reach and possess a woman reflects the gender difference Darwin found
in sexual selection in the animal kingdom where, “the male possesses certain organs
of sense or locomotion of which the female is quite destitute, or has them more
highly developed, in order that he may readily find or reach her; or again the male
has special organs of prehension to hold her securely.”35
34 Hamerton, Chapters, p. 64.

35 Darwin, Descent, p. 181. Interestingly, in terms of Darwin’s emphasis on female
destitution, in Eliot’s, Gaskell’s, and Hardy’s novels, the women’s poverty makes them more
In The Mill on the Floss, Wives and Daughters, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles the
man’s relation to the animal he owns and rides symbolizes the relation he seeks with
the woman he desires. In his 1858 article G.J. White-Melville argues that, “there are
two sentiments which act with irresistible influence on the instinctive intelligence
of the brute as on the reasoning mind of man, and these are, Fear and Love.”36 In
The Mill on the Floss we see fear written on Maggie’s face when Stephen appears
on a horse at the Moss’s farm and attempts to force her into obedience; “her lips and
eyelids quivered; she opened her eyes full on his for an instant, like a lovely wild
animal timid and struggling under caresses, and then turned sharply around towards
home again” (Eliot, Mill, p. 449). This is the language of submission, the language
Darwin uses in The Expression of Emotion in Animals when he writes about the
signs of fear in both humans and beasts. Hardy uses almost identical language to
describe Tess when Alec tries to force her to kiss him; “‘Will nothing else do?’ she
cried at length, in desperation, her large eyes staring at him like those of a wild
animal” (Hardy, Tess, p. 40). Both these scenes end with the man compelling the
woman to kiss him. In Eliot’s novel, Stephen insists on “‘one kiss—one the last
before we part,’” and Maggie submits, then saying “tremulously, ‘Let me go’” (Eliot,
Mill, p. 450). In Hardy’s novel the implication of dominance is more explicit as the
narrator writes of Alex, “he was inexorable, and she sat still and d’Urbervilles gave
her the kiss of mastery” (Hardy, Tess, p. 40).37 The language of mastery surrounds
desirable. It is when Cynthia shows Preston the shabbiness of her belongings, “a sort of rag-
fair spread out on the deal table” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 448) that he is first drawn to her. When
Maggie tells Stephen that she has earned money by sewing, the narrator comments that. “if
[she] had been the queen of coquettes, she could hardly have invented a means of giving
greater piquancy to her beauty in Stephen’s eyes” (Eliot, Mill, p. 378). So, too, Tess comes to
Alec a suppliant asking financial aid for her family.
36 White-Melville, “Taming,” 570.
37 The male domination of women in these texts, what Elliott Gose calls in the case
of Tess “the blood seal of Alec” (“Psychic Evolution: Darwinism and Initiation in Tess,” in
Scott Elledge (ed.), Tess of the D’Urbervilles [New York, 1991], p. 430), is so complete that
the women seemed to be marked in some way by their bond with those men. They cannot
easily form sexual bonds with the more intellectual men who court them subsequently, in
Cynthia’s case Roger Hamley the scientist, in Maggie’s Philip Wakem the artist, in Tess’s
case Angel Clare the agnostic son of a churchman. One might read the women’s encounters
with the physically domineering men in terms of another theory that Darwin accepted from
horse breeding, the theory of telegony, which held that once a mare had been impregnated
by a stallion, foals she bore subsequently would bear traces of the male horse that initially
impregnated her. Arthur E. Shipley explains telegony; “in the words of Bruce Lowe, who
has formulated the theory, we may say that, ‘briefly put, it means that with each mating and
bearing the dam absorbs some of the nature or actual circulation of the yet unborn foal, until
she eventually becomes saturated with the sire’s nature or blood, as the case may be.’ Although
not very well expressed, it is obvious what the author means; and if this saturation really takes
place, it accounts for a good deal more than telegony. It would affect the whole body and
nature of the dam, and not only the reproductive organs” (“Zebras, Horses, and Hybrids,” The
Quarterly Review 190 (October 1899]: 408). Though Tess is the only one of the three heroines
to bear a child, all are in some figurative sense marked by their encounter with a man who,
like a stallion, seeks to possess them sexually.
all three men.38 Stephen is early described, in relation to his fiancé Lucy, as someone
who has “mastered the little hand.” Maggie feels in his presence a “strange, sweet,
subduing influence”; “this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without
any act of her own will,” leaving her “paralysed” (Eliot, Mill, p. 366, 459, 464, 466).
In Wives and Daughters we hear, of Preston, that “something in his face and manner
implied power over her” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 276). In attempting to explain why she
agreed to marry a man she now says she loathes, Cynthia asks her step-sister Molly,
“have you never heard of strong wills mesmerizing weaker ones into submission?”
(Gaskell, Wives, p. 390).
We might turn here usefully to Gillian Beer’s description of fear, an emotion she
feels Darwin references but never explores fully. In her words, “though horror may
be an obliterative experience, fear makes keen. It awakens thought and sensation.
The self becomes alert, ready, yet passive.”39 It is this intensely sensitive passivity
that is evoked so powerfully in Eliot’s, Gaskell’s and Hardy’s novels where we hear,
most explicitly, of Cynthia that, “it was part of her soft allurement that she was
so passive,” and later, of her relation to Preston that, she seems “to have taken it
passively at the time” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 220, 450). While this juxtaposition of male
aggression with female passivity looks like a classic version of gender relations
as they are typically understood in Darwin’s Sexual Selection,40 Beer’s comments
remind us that a state of passivity is not necessarily one of inaction. The novels’
own implicit comparisons of sexual pursuit to horse-breaking make it clear that
such passivity is not a natural state but one that has been artificially created by the
breaking down of resistance. Darwin himself concludes of the horse that, “strong
antipathies and preferences are frequently exhibited, and much more commonly by
the female than the male.”41 Eliot’s, Gaskell’s, and Hardy’s novels all emphasize
that the women who are mesmerized or paralyzed by these males also resist them.
Describing Cynthia with Mr Preston, Gaskell’s narrator comments that, “if a
physiognomist had studied her expression, he would have read in it defiance and
anger” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 281). So, too, we hear of Maggie and Stephen that, “she
flashed a slightly defiant look at him” (Eliot, Mill, p. 376). Even Tess feels “sudden
impulses of reprisal” (Hardy, Tess, p. 54).
It is in Gaskell’s novel that we see most clearly how attraction can be a seat of
aggression in both men and women. Preston realizes that, “no one would ever be to
[him] what Cynthia had been, and was; and yet he could have stabbed her in certain
of his moods” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 484). Cynthia says of him, “I’ve thought I would
marry Mr. Preston out of pure revenge, and have him for ever in my power—only I
think I should have the worst of it; for he is cruel in his very soul—tigerish, with his
38 As Elliott Gose notes, “In Tess Darwinian self-assertion manifests itself in an

aggressive-submissive pattern which has its locus in the relations between Alec and Tess but
is generalized to include society past and contemporary” (“Psychic Evolution,” p. 428).
39 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, p. 222.
40 See Rosemary Jann for a fascinating analysis of the implications of Darwin’s desire to
“justify male aggression and female coyness” (“Darwin and the Anthropologists,” in Andrew
H. Miller and James Eli Adams (eds), Sexualities in Victorian Britain [Bloomington, 1996],
p. 91).
41 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 474.
beautiful striped skin and relentless heart” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 452). The gendering
of this image is reversed in the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles where Alec appears
to have Tess in his power forever only to discover the cruelty in her soul that lets
her stab him when she is in full anger. Gaskell’s image of a tiger, with its Indian
associations, also suggests colonial anxieties about seeking to dominate someone
who may in turn rise up and prove cruel. It one of the most popular colonial novels
of the period in which Tess of the d’Urbervilles was written, H. Rider Haggard’s She,
the title character, a single white ruler who attempts to hold sway over a multitudes
of blacks, tells the novel’s narrator, “blame me not if passion mount thy reason, as
the Egyptian breakers used to mount a colt, and guide it whither thou wilt not.”42
Here we have an image of the fear Eliot’s, Gaskell’s and Hardy’s novels play out at
an emotional level, the fear that it is no longer reason that rides and therefore controls
and manages passion, but that passion is now the rider. In The Mill on the Floss in
particular the push and pull of aggression associated with riding are manifested as
much within the breasts of the individual characters as in their dealings with each
other.
When Maggie sees Stephen arrive on a horse streaked with the sweat of fast
riding, she “felt a beating at head and heart—horrible as the sudden leaping to life
of a savage enemy who had feigned death” (Eliot, Mill, p. 445). Stephen is similarly
described as seeking “to resist the attraction that was continually threatening to
overpower him. He told himself so; and yet he had once or twice felt a certain
savage resistance, and at another moment a shuddering repugnance” (Eliot, Mill,
pp. 439–40). He finds himself “dizzy with the conflict of passion—love, rage, and
confused despair” (Eliot, Mill, p. 442).43 The term both Eliot and Hardy use to label
this passionate upswelling of resistance is devilishness. Alec d’Urbervilles refers to
the small moment of reprisal where Tess threatens to unseat him as they are riding
into the Chase as “devilish unkind” (Hardy, Tess, p. 54) and asks what the devil
the row is about when he first takes Tess up on his horse. Stephen Guest finds in
Maggie, “An alarming amount of the devil” and later describes himself by saying,
“see what a hunted devil I am: I’ve been riding thirty miles every day to get away
from the thought of you” (Eliot, Mill, pp. 377, 447). To understand the implications
of this hellish imagery I turn to the historical moment I would identify as the point
of confluence of the three texts analyzed here, the spring of 1860. In that season, as
Jenny Uglow has pointed out that:
As far as Elizabeth Gaskell’s circle were concerned, the topics of possible interest that
spring were two books. The first was On the Origin of Species published on 22 November
42 H. Rider Haggard, She (Oxford, 1991), p. 154.

43 Of the three novels considered here, Eliot’s comes closest to the psychological sense
in which Freud invokes the image of the horse when he argues that, “The ego’s relation to
the id might be compared with that of a rider to his horse. The horse supplies the locomotive
energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal and of guiding the animal’s
movement. But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal
situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to
go” (“The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” in New Introductory Lectures [New York,
1965], pp. 68–9).
1859 … . Battle had been joined at once between supporters and detractors of Darwin, and
a war of words now raged in journals, lecture halls and drawing rooms; it would rise to a
climax in the fierce confrontation between Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley at the
British Association in Oxford in June. The other circus of war was Essays and Reviews,
a volume of theological essays from seven contributors, including the Gaskells’ Oxford
friends Benjamin Jowett and Mark Pattison. Their broad church view, which included a
denial of hell and (from some) an embrace of ‘Darwinism’ (a phrase coined by Huxley in
April) outraged the Anglican establishment and led to two of the writers being tried for
heresy in ecclesiastical court. 44
This was the spring when The Mill on the Floss was first published, on 4 April 1860.
Gaskell was so eager to receive a copy that she could barely take the time to thank
the publisher who sent it.45 This was the period when Hardy was first exposed to the
Darwinian ideas that would be so instrumental in his later conception of Tess. As
Peter Morton notes, “Hardy, aged only 19 when the Origin [of Species] appeared,
probably read it almost at once; he had certainly done so by 1864.”46
The controversies Uglow describes reflect the dramatic shift in thinking
that took place in the aftermath of the publication of The Origin of Species. As
George Levine has argued; “most pre-Darwinian speculation about science drew an
absolute line between animal and human life, and the detailed physical similarities
between human and beasts were not taken to reflect any consanguinity. A moral
and spiritual nature distinguished the human from all other living creatures.”47 The
collapse of this distinction meant recognizing that those parts of the personality that
made humans similar to animals, parts previously conceived as under control of
our spiritual nature, were now understood to be devilishly rebellious, threatening
to break lose at any moment.48 The image of the horse and its rider provides the
perfect microcosm for marking this conceptual shift in relations of dominance. The
horse was traditionally seen, as G.J. White-Melville put it in 1858, as “intended by
the Creator for the especial service of man.” This position, he argues, somewhat
44 Jenny Uglow, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories (New York, 1993), pp. 487–8.
45 Gaskell wrote to George Smith, “only think of having The Mill on the Floss the second
day of publication, & am so greedy to read it I can scarcely be grateful enough to write this
letter” (Letters, 611). It may be that out of that excitement came the passages in Wives and
Daughters that echo Eliot’s novel.
46 Peter Morton, “Neo-Darwinian Fate in Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” in Scott Elledge
(ed.), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (New York, 1991), 432.
47 Levine, Darwin and the Novelists, p. 37.
48 George Eliot also implicitly associated hell with the power of money that, I have been
arguing, is invoked through Stephen Guest, Mr Preston, and Alec d’Urbervilles. Christopher
Lane cites a passage from Eliot’s letters in which she asks, “‘You will wonder what has
wrought me up into this fury” and replies that, “it is the loathsome fawning, the transparent
hypocrisy, the systematic giving as little as possible for as much as possible that one meets
with here at every turn. I feel that society is training men and women for hell’” (Hatred and
Civility: The Antisocial Life of Victorian England [New York, 2004], p. 117). The scenes I
have analyzed from The Mill on the Floss, Wives and Daughters, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles
seem to me perfect instances of the hatred that Lane argues breaks through “the thin veneer of
altruism protecting us from other people and ourselves” (Hatred and Civility, p. 33).
defensively, is something, “no naturalist, we think will be found to deny.”49 Even a
recalcitrant horse can be tamed; “It is for us to bring the reasoning powers which, as
Lords of Creation, we possess, to bear upon his inferior instinct.”50 The process of
taming reveals the mental and spiritual superiority of man that Levine points to in
pre-Darwinian thinking; “when the horse finds himself striving in vain against the
master-will, when he sees his superior standing calmly by his side speaking words
of kindness and encouragement the while he is struggling with and succumbing to an
irresistible force, it is no wonder that the lower animal is compelled to acknowledge
its lord.” 51
But in the era following the publication of The Origin of Species it was no longer
possible to be confident of such an easy and natural hierarchical relation between
human and beast. While Philip Hamerton’s 1873 volume opens with the glorification
of the horse as a throne cited earlier in my discussion, it ends with the author shifting
from man’s to horse’s point of view and arguing that, there is “a subtle satisfaction
in believing that we are beloved by our slaves. But the plain truth is, that horses, as
they live usually in our service, have little to love us for, and most commonly regard
us either with indifference or dislike.”52 Discussing a horse of his own that became
completely unmanageable after a period of neglect, he writes:
In the animal’s brain there dwelt a spirit that was your most faithful servant—your most
humble and dutiful friend; that spirit is gone, and instead of it there is a demon who is
determined to kill you whenever and opportunity offers. The Teutonic legend of black
steeds with fiery eyes that were possessed by evil spirits, are no more than poetical form
that clothes an indubitable truth. The nature of the horse is such that he is capable of
endless irreconcilable rage against his master, and against humanity,―a temper of chronic
hate and rebellion like that of Milton’s fallen angels.53
The imagery of devilishness emerges here, as it does in Eliot’s and Hardy’s novels,
to mark a post-Darwinian world where humans can no longer be seen as the natural
lords of creation. (The belief in hell may have disappeared but its image remains in
representations of the drives that threaten to overturn old hierarchies.)
The attitude of acknowledging one’s lord, that White-Melville invokes in
describing horse training, is precisely what has been disrupted in a novel like Wives
and Daughters when the land agent Preston refuses to treat Squire Hamley with the
deference he feels he deserves. As the Earl of Cumnor’s daughter later explains, “I
cannot bear that sort of person … giving himself airs of gallantry towards one to
whom his simple respect is all his duty” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 152). The complacency
of this assertion is almost immediately challenged when Molly Gibson comments
that, “your ladyship keeps speaking of the sort of—the class of—people to which I
belong as if it were some strange kind of animal you were talking about” (Gaskell,
Wives, p. 153). Taken in its positive implication, Molly’s statement implicitly asks
49 White-Melville, “Taming,” p. 570.

for a mindset in which everyone is treated as an equal. Everyone is human. But
the obverse side of that assertion would be the fear that all humans may, in fact, be
animals. Despite the evocations of docility and deference made most forcefully by
those of the highest ranks in Gaskell’s novel, individuals may not, as Squire Hamley
finds out, when Preston looks down on him, enjoy being placed in a subordinate
position. The scenes in The Mill on the Floss, Wives and Daughters, and Tess of the
d’Urbervilles that involve a man’s aggressive attempts to possess a woman mark
indubitably the way relations of dominance involve violence, anger, resistance, fear.
These novels show that it is not just that figures like Squire Hamley who hold a
traditional relation to the land are disappearing from the world. It is also no longer
possible to view the world as those men once did, as a place of hierarchies where the
individuals on the bottom of the totem pole, animals, women, people of lower-class
status or different races, are happy to be where they are.
Writing in 1865 in her article on “High Horses,” Eliza Lynn Linton argues that
marriage and the family, too, can no longer be seen as a places where individuals are
in blissful harmony with one person’s will happily subordinated to the other’s:
There are one or two fallacies concerning domestic life which every one thinks it a kind
of moral loyalty to repeat and pretend to believe; and one is, that homes are happy, and
that families are contented with each other’s society …. But those who are not afraid to
look truth in the face, however painful or iconcoclastic, know that as a rule homes are not
happy.54
Families are not happy, as she goes on to make clear, because marital relations are
riddled with temper that leads both partners to want to ride their high horses. The
example Linton picks to illustrate her premise is of a marriage where the wife lords it
over the husband. Such a choice would be appropriate, given my own argument about
class relations, because it shows a reversal of expected patterns and the unhappiness
of the male being the butt of the control he is used to exercising. We see precisely
such a marital relation in Wives and Daughters where Dr Gibson’s wife Hyacinth
Clare is associated with Mr Preston through her ability to manage. As the daughter of
the Earl of Cumnor says of her former governess, “I used to think I managed her, till
one day an uncomfortable suspicion arose that all the time she had been managing
me” (Gaskell, Wives, p. 152). The novel shows quite clearly Clare’s successful
management of her doctor husband, a point I mention to emphasize that these novels
do not endorse male domination but raise the issue of domination through male
figures on horseback in order to explore its more unpleasant but perhaps inescapable
ramifications.
The vision of social relations not as a harmonious linking of individuals each of
whom wishes for the greater good of the ones to whom they are attached, but as a
battleground of violent interactions and power struggles is perfectly consonant with
54 Linton, “High Horse,” p. 348. The ability to control one’s horses is implicitly compared
to the ability to control one’s family when the writer of The Cornhill article argues that, “there
is no department of a wealthy town establishment which is more easily controlled than its
stables, provided ‘Paterfamilias’ understands the management of them” (Higgins, “Horse-
keeping,” p. 614).
the writings even of early evolutionary thinkers like Buckland, who explained in
Geology and Mineralogy, Considered with Reference to Natural Theology that:
to the mind which looks not to general results in the economy of Nature, the earth may
seem to present a scene of perpetual warfare, and incessant carnage; but the more enlarged
view, while it regards individuals in their conjoint relations to the general benefit of their
own species with which they are associated in the great family of Nature, resolves each
apparent case of individual evil, into an example of subserviency to universal good.55
Eliot’s, Gaskell’s, and Hardy’s novels invoke this idea of hierarchy as perpetual
warfare through images of men on horseback. However, those novels, particularly
the earlier two, pull back from the full implications of that vision of antagonistic
social relations, showing instead altruistic impulses that lead its heroes and heroines
to follow paths other than the ones mapped out in the scenes that highlight aggressive
social and sexual drives. In some sense Eliot and Gaskell follow Buckland’s lead in
placing violence within a larger framework in which we feel the action of universal
good. But I would note Buckland’s use of the term “subserviency” to resolve the
tension between the violence he sees in nature and the benevolence he hopes to
find in God. Surely he is invoking in the arena of religion the relation Hamerton
and Linton argue we fantasize about the horse and the family, the relations where
we imagine that subordinates love the benevolent being who dominates them. The
scenes I have analyzed from The Mill on the Floss, Wives and Daughters, and Tess of
the d’Urbervilles suggest that this is exactly the assumption that was being radically
challenged in the latter half of the nineteenth century when the horse ceased to be
a comfortable emblem of the pleasures of dominance and became instead a locus
for articulating anxieties about forces, individuals, and emotions that, like Milton’s
fallen angels, threatened to break free from the subordinate positions traditionally
allotted to them and establish empires of their own.
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Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-
Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The Horse; With a Treatise on
Draught. London: Baldwin and Cradock. 1831.
Stoneman, Patsy. Elizabeth Gaskell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Thompson, F.M.L. Victorian England: The Horse-Drawn Society. London: Bedford
College, 1968.
Trollope, Frances Milton. The Ward of Thorpe Combe. London: Richard Bentley,
1842.
Uglow, Jenny. Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories. New York: Farrar Strauss
Giroux, 1993.
Walton, John K. “Review. Flat-Racing and British Society 1790-1914: A Social and
Economic History.” Journal of Social History 35:2 (2001): 487–9.
White-Melville, G.J. “The Taming of Horses, and Mr. Rarey.” Fraser’s Magazine 58
(November 1858): 570–82.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English
Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991.
Plate 1 Remarkable Beetles Found at Simunjon, Borneo (1869)
Plate 2 “Longicorn Beetles of Chontales” (1874)
Plate 3 Jagd am Congo (1893)
Plate 4 “A Good Day’s Work with Elephants” (1898)
Plate 5 “Man Is But A Worm” (1881)

Plate 6 “Nature’s Own Designs” (1867)
Plate 7 “Mr. Punch’s Designs From Nature” (1868)
Plate 8 “Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature” (1871)
Plate 9 Two naturalists (after Richard Owen and T.H. Huxley) in

The Water-Babies
Plate 10 “Ballad of Bathybius” (1888)
Plate 11 “A Bird of Prey” (1892)
Plate 12 Walter Howell Deverell, A Pet (1853)
Plate 13 Detail from The Awakening Conscience (1851–53)
Plate 14 Detail from Work (1859–63)
Plate 15 The interior of the Redpath Museum (c. 1893)

Plate 16 The opening of the Redpath Museum (1882)
Plate 17 Two illustrations from Simeon Shaw’s Nature Displayed (1823)
Plate 18 “The New Rocking Horse”
Plate 19 Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (1861)
Plate 20 African Hunting and Adventure from Natal to the Zambesi (1894)
Plate 21 “Prehistoric Pantomime” (1895)
Plate 22 “Tree’d!” (1892–93)
Plate 23 Second Jungle Book (1895)
Plate 24 Advertisement from The Graphic Supplement (1899)
Plate 25 “True Patriotism” (1845)
Plate 26 “Affairs of Hungary” (1850)

Plate 27 “Remarkable Crocodile Found in Ireland” (1851)
Plate 28 “The Model Legislature” (1856)
Plate 29 “Pro-Slavery Solecism” (1857)
Chapter 9
Pacific Harvests: Whales and Albatrosses

in Nineteenth-Century Markets
Anca Vlasopolos
During the years 2001 to 2004, while preparing for a historically based novel, I found
myself researching how short-tailed (Steller’s) albatrosses came to near-extinction.
How the albatrosses came to be exterminated begins with a personal history of
extraordinary human kindness across cultures and, concomitantly, with an insidious
and unexpected thread of cross-cultural contamination. The same history informs
the transmission of industrial-level killing of the Pacific whales, a sea hunt that the
United States made illegal in 1970 and in subsequent legislative acts by banning
products derived from endangered great whales, long after the trade in whale oil
per se had become economically irrelevant, but that Japan, along with Norway,
Iceland, and native tribes, continues to this day. The moratorium on whale hunts
is, moreover, very fragile. In June, 2005, at the International Whaling Commission
meeting in Korea a delegate described the decisions about allowable whale “takes,”
while purportedly based on science, as entirely political: “You wouldn’t run a piss-
up in a brewery this way” (<www.bbcnews.com>, June 20, 2005).
The story of Manjiro, the man who stands as the bridge between East and
West and who was indirectly responsible for the near-extinction of the short-tailed
albatrosses, is known widely in Japan and known only locally in the United States.
There are two biographies of Manjiro by American authors as well as children’s
books about him. In Japan, Manjiro is the hero of comic books, children’s books,
young-adult fiction, at least one novel, biographies, as well as critical studies of
Japanese–American relations and of the changes surrounding the first contacts with
the West during the nineteenth century, contacts that led eventually to the forcible
opening of Japan by Perry and his black ships in 1853, and more significantly to the
fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration. Yet neither the studies
Peter J. Stoett, The International Politics of Whaling, Vancouver: University of British

Columbia Press, 1997), p. 87.
Donald R. Bernard, The Life and Times of John Manjiro (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1992); Emily V. Warriner, Voyager to Destiny: The Amazing Adventures of Manjiro, the Man
Who Changed Worlds Twice … (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956); Rhoda
Blumberg Shipwrecked! The True Adventures of a Japanese Boy (New York: HarperCollins,
2001).
Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1971); Tetsuo Kawasumi, John Manjiro and his Era eds Tetsuo Kawasumi
and Naoyuki Agawa (Tokyo: Kosaido, 2001); John Manjiro, Drifting toward the Southwest:
nor the popular fiction nor the biographies deal with the environmental impact of
this extraordinary contact point—the transpacific voyages of Manjiro. An article in
National Wildlife Magazine and Safino’s Eye of the Albatross are the only source so
far for the connection between Manjiro’s life and the near-extinction of the largest
albatross of the Pacific.
Manjiro’s first voyage began by accident, a storm at sea that overtook a small
fishing boat off the southwest coast of Japan. In 1841, an illiterate, impoverished
Japanese boy of fourteen, stranded with four elder fishing-boat mates on the
uninhabited island of Torishima, which lies approximately six hundred miles
southeast of Yokohama, was rescued by an American whaling ship from New
Bedford, Massachusetts. The captain, William Whitfield, deposited the four Japanese
adults in a stopover in Honolulu, but he was so taken with the youngest Japanese’s
intelligence and tremendous learning ability that he offered to take the boy back
to his hometown, Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and educate him in a trade. Manjiro
(or John Mung as the Americans called him, or, as he renamed himself in adult
life, Manjiro Nakahama) acquiesced to leaving with Whitfield for Fairhaven. Once
in Massachusetts, he became a member of the Whitfield household for a period
of nearly five years. In that time, Manjiro acquired a full primary and secondary
education and a trade, coopery, as well as a certificate from the Bartlett School of
Navigation in Fairhaven.
During his thorough acculturation in a New England community dependent on
seafaring and made greatly prosperous by it, Manjiro understood and to some extent
adopted Western attitudes toward nature and the industrial-scale hunt of animals for
human uses. He was also subjected to the inevitable harassment that a person of color
would suffer at that time, despite his relatively privileged location; New Bedford
and Fairhaven were for the time remarkably cosmopolitan communities. Frederick
Douglass began his anti-slavery campaigns from New Bedford and Nantucket, and
he declared the whaling brotherhood as the least racialized he had encountered.
In fact, about three thousand African-Americans served on New Bedford whalers
between 1803 and 1860, and some, admittedly few in number, rose to the level of
captains.
The Story of Five Japanese Castaways eds and trans. Junya Nagakuni and Junji Kitadai (New
Bedford, MA: Spinner, 2003). The most authoritative narrative of Manjiro’s voyage is his own,
given first to the interrogators during the imprisonment in Nagasaki and then recalled to be
recorded and illustrated. This narrative, accompanied by the superb commentary of the editors
and translators, Junya Nagakuni and Junji Kitadai, has some of Manjiro’s own drawings of his
experiences in the US, as well as his recollection of the topography of Torishima. A tradition in
the Nakahama family is that the eldest son of each generation produce a biography of Manjiro,
so we have several accounts based on family documents as well as extensive research from
three generations of eldest Nakahama sons.
Carl Safina, Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival (New York: Holt,
2003); Rick Steiner, “Resurrection in the Wind” [Steller’s albatross recovery on Torishima],
National Wildlife Magazine (Aug–Sept 1998), 1–8, Steiner).
W. Jeffery Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail
(Cambridge: Harvard, 1997, New Bedford Whaling Museum exhibits).
Pacific Harvests: Whales and Albatrosses in Nineteenth-Century Markets 169
Yet, despite the frequent interactions among peoples of different races in whaling
ports, Captain Whitfield faced difficulties bringing Manjiro into his church pew in
Fairhaven, for example. Partly due to such prejudices against non-whites, Manjiro
longed to return to Japan, where he had left his widowed mother and siblings. After
nearly a decade of trying, which included another whaling voyage and a stint in the
Northwest in quest of gold during the gold rush, Manjiro managed to convince an
American ship’s captain in Oahu to take him and two of his Japanese boat mates back
to Japan. The Japanese had to set out in their own boat, which they had stocked with
supplies in Oahu and stowed on board the large merchant ship, while the ship itself
stayed well away from the coast, since Japan was still closed to foreigners. Stranded
sailors and returning Japanese, who were seen as infected by contact with the outside
world, were summarily put to death, although by the time Manjiro returned, enough
foreigners and returning Japanese had crossed the boundary, and the Tokugawa
government found them to be more useful as informants than examples.
After more than two years of interrogation by the arm of the Shogunate in
Nagasaki, during which the repatriated three men were subjected to various tests
to determine whether they had been converted to Christianity, they were released.
The two brothers who a decade earlier had taken a starving boy onto their boat
to teach him fishing went back to their village and the hardships of working-class
existence; an added hardship was the government’s interdiction that they go to sea
again, so they never resumed their livelihood as fishermen and subsisted upon a
small government pension.
As during the rescue from Torishima and the whaling voyage toward the
Hawaiian islands, Manjiro, who had been singled out by Whitfield for his remarkable
intelligence, was again selected from the repatriated three, this time by his own
government, for his knowledge of languages, education in navigation, general
insight into Western society, and intimate knowledge of whaling. After being
allowed to return to his native village for a very brief time, Manjiro was recalled
by the daimyo of his district and eventually sent on to Edo to become a primary
informant about the West to the Japanese authorities. Although never fully trusted
by his own government because of his affection for and gratitude to friends in the
US, Manjiro nevertheless became the founder of the Japanese whaling industry, the
coordinator of navigational institutes in Japan, and the first teacher of English at
what was to become Tokyo University. He was elevated to the position of samurai,
which allowed him to take a last name, Nakahama, his choice being an abbreviation
of his home village—Nakanohama.
Once Japan opened to the West, Manjiro was sent on two diplomatic missions
to the US, one to Washington, DC (although he himself was left in San Francisco),
one to New York. On the second trip, Manjiro took a train to visit Captain Whitfield
in Fairhaven. That visit combined with his consultation of a physician in London
about an infected leg were causes for disciplinary action against him by the Japanese
authorities when he returned, and he never traveled outside the country again. But,
perhaps guilty at having abandoned his former boat mates to a life of obscurity and
poverty, Manjiro might have decided to help out a carpenter friend, who had helped
him model the first whaling ship for the Japanese fleet (Hasegawa). He told this man
of the wealth to be made in the West from exotic feathers and about the uninhabited
island of Torishima, where the short-tailed albatrosses were so numerous that they
looked like snow drifts settling on the peaks and sides of the volcanic rocks that
made up Torishima.
My imaginative reconstruction of Manjiro’s life involved me in intensive research
in the whaling and feather industries of the nineteenth century, but more significantly
in the ethos of an era much like ours, in which exploitation of living things and natural
resources for commercial and political dominance on a global scale, for mechanical
advancement, and for technical knowledge was an unquestioned virtue. I have been
to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum bird collections, to New Bedford and
Fairhaven, where I walked in Manjiro’s steps (what used to be the poor section of
Fairhaven, Oxford village, has remained surprisingly unchanged except for the value
of property), and I have researched whaling practices in Hawaii and the Northwest.
The historical collections at the Mystic Seaport Museum Research Library, the
Whaling Museum in New Bedford, and the Millicent Public Library in Fairhaven,
Massachusetts, have provided me with information about whaling logs, navigational
charts, and statistics about whale oil and its translatability into currency. My research
took me to Tosashimizu, Japan, where Manjiro rose to prominence upon his return;
to Toho University where as a guest of Professor Hasegawa I examined his extensive
collection of Manjiro biographies and other representations, such as comic books
and children’s books; on a cruise, guided by Professor Hasegawa, of Torishima to
see the albatross colonies from the ship (the island is off limits to all but authorized
personnel); to Oahu and Maui, to trace the whaling routes and Manjiro’s journeys to
the US and back to Japan.
What the journeys have brought home to me is that both globalization and
isolation entail unforetold dangers and consequences of which we cannot dream.
By any standard, but particularly the standards of nineteenth-century Western
xenophobia and racial “science,” the Americans who rescued and then welcomed
Manjiro and his mates were immensely generous. Through his Western acculturation,
Manjiro rose from a life of deprivation, illiteracy, and poverty to become the first
Japanese to navigate across the Pacific Ocean, a leader of navigational industry in
his own country, and an instrumental presence in the peaceful opening of Japan to
the West. He was able to leap over the extremely rigid class boundaries of a near-
feudal society by putting into practice the know-how and energetic ambition he had
learned and practiced in the West, as well as the virtues of tolerance and good will
that he imbibed in the Whitfield household.
But what were the results of this extraordinary point of contact between two
men and two cultures? I attempt to provide some evidence in this essay. One of
Manjiro’s formative experiences was his rescue by William Whitfield. The voyage
It is clear that there was a meeting between Manjiro and Nakaemon. Based on Hiroshi
Hasegawa’s speculations on the subject and the historical evidence, I attributed motives to
Manjiro that seem plausible but are not verifiable. That Nakaemon set up the bird factory on
Torishima some time after his encounter with Manjiro and that Torishima had been unknown
as a source of birds on the mainland before Manjiro’s repatriation are facts.
of The John Howland, the three-masted whaling ship of which Whitfield was master,
took Manjiro to Hawaii, then back to the Japanese whaling grounds, then around
Cape Horn to Massachusetts. In the course of the voyage, The John Howland killed
approximately one hundred whales. This “take” was considered successful, but not
unusual. If we take into account that from the 1830s to the 1870s about six hundred
ships annually left various ports on the Eastern seaboard of the United States alone,
we can calculate that in a period of three years at least six thousand whales were
killed and processed. Other nations, as well as ports of informally colonized nations
like Hawaii and the Philippines, also launched whaling ships every year. Among all
the ships traveling the Pacific in ever greater density—and out of approximately one
thousand American vessels annually in the Pacific over seven hundred were whaling
ships―the whales killed every year must have numbered in the tens of thousands.
Not all the hunted whales succumbed to the harpoon and the lance immediately.
Many managed to sink, at which point the sailors in the whaling boat were forced
to cut the line so as not to be dragged down into the depths; others escaped with
lines still attached and harpoons embedded in their flesh. Others were wounded so
severely that they died after a time, away from the initial hunt, only to be found
floating and either processed by other ships or to be devoured by sharks and other
predators. By the 1840s, a fate like that of The Essex—destroyed by an enraged
wounded whale, the crew drifting for several weeks before being rescued—was
already the stuff of legend. Logs and sea journals of the mid-nineteenth to late
nineteenth-century vessels record meetings between ships that occurred at least
weekly, and at times daily, so a stranded crew would be rescued long before having
to resort to cannibalism. Because of the heavy traffic along whaling and merchant
routes in the Pacific, ships “spoke” to one another with great frequency, and news
about the best hunting grounds and about the home base traveled the Pacific at a rate
of speed that would surprise twenty-first-century folk accustomed to thinking that
we invented high-speed communications.
In relation to whaling, the second formative experience in Manjiro’s adventures
was his voyage on The John Franklin, whose captain, Ira Davis, had worked as an
officer under Whitfield on The John Howland. Manjiro was hired as a cooper and
steward, prestigious positions that allowed him to have cabin privileges instead of
living with the sailors and greenhands in the fo’c’sle, a small common room “before
the mast,” which he would have shared with about seventeen others. This voyage
may be a case of life imitating art since it postdates Moby Dick (itself loosely based
on the voyage of The Essex). Ira Davis became obsessed not with a single whale
but with acquiring the largest amount of whale oil. Ships would stamp or brand
their insignia on the oil casks and, when putting to in a Pacific port, would often
request that other ships, less fortunate in the hunt, take a part of the cargo home, for
Peter Booth Wiley with Korogi Ichiro, Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore
Perry and the Opening of Japan (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 30.
Ben-Ezra Stiles Ely, “There She Blows”: A Narrative of a Whaling Voyage, ed. Curtis
Dahl (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971); James Munger, Two Years in the Pacific
and Arctic Oceans: Being a Journal of Every Day Life on Board Ship (Fairfield: Ye Galleon
Press, 1967).
a fee. Then the lucky ship would be free to roam in quest of more whales, and the
gain from larger numbers of barrels would make the trip even more profitable. The
voyage of The John Franklin was fortunate. After about two years, the hull of the
ship was filled to capacity with whale oil. Davis stopped at ports to send oil home,
and each time he stopped, he lost men; not only was his regime extremely harsh, but
it was common for sailors to jump ship or simply to return to their native islands
once whalers came into port. It appears that Davis picked up Muslim sailors from the
South Pacific islands, for when these men refused to eat pork—typically the main
source of protein on board—Davis ordered all the pork barrels overboard so as to
make room for more whale oil. Shortly thereafter, it became clear to the young men
that the captain had gone mad, and they staged a mutiny. Davis was put in irons by
his crew and released into the custody of American authorities in Manila. Since after
the overthrow of the captain every officer moved up one rank, Manjiro, who became
third mate, is the first Japanese to have become an officer on a vessel carrying the
US colors. The elevation was not without great hazard to the very young officers and
crew of The John Franklin. They expected to be tried for mutiny upon their return to
New Bedford, but news from Manila confirmed their account that Davis was indeed
insane, and, perhaps more significantly, the ship came back loaded with an enormous
amount of the precious oil, a fact that mitigated for the otherwise unforgivable crime
of the high seas—mutiny.
What Manjiro deduced from this experience we can only speculate, but the
record shows him very eager not only to lead the ship-building industry for whaling
in Japan but to become master of the first three-masted ship governed by Western
methods of navigation ever launched by Japan—the Ichiban-Maru. After witnessing
the damage to the Ichiban-Maru by a storm off the Bonin Islands (now Ogasawara
Gunto), the Japanese government’s enthusiasm for a whaling fleet waned, especially
since they needed to put energy into defense and to build warships and merchant
vessels to compete with the encroaching Western nations as well as with the threat
from Russia. When Japan resumed whaling, it adopted the Norwegian methods of
the cannon- or grenade-launched harpoon from ship deck, which obviated the need
for whaling boats, and of factory ships that not only rendered the oil from the blubber
but processed the entire whale carcass on board. These slaughterhouse ships, from
several official whaling nations or operating as rogues, still navigate the oceans,
killing species of whales such as the blue and the fin-back that the three-masted ships
could not attempt to kill, both because of size and swiftness of flight.
The contemporary distaste in the West regarding whale killing and enthusiasm
for whale watches represent a very new attitude toward the marine mammals. Japan,
Norway, and Iceland are presently hunting minke whales for “scientific research,”
because this species has been declassified as endangered or threatened, and South
Korea is lobbying to join the three whaling nations. However, not so long ago, even
in the West, whale products found favor: children in England, for instance, depended
on whale meat for protein during World War Two. General Motors, among other
industries, continued to use the very fine spermaceti oil in its engineering research
until the US ban of whale products in 1970. The International Whaling Commission,
Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York: Knopf, 1991).

established in Cambridge, England, in 1946, started as a pro-industrial club, with an
attempt to manage the whale “fisheries” so as to retain adequate stock.
Since the twelfth century, whale populations have been decreasing, first in
the Atlantic from the very successful hunting methods of the Basques, then from
the ever-increasing pressure of large-scale hunting starting in the last half of the
eighteenth century and lasting into the present. During the nineteenth century, the
near-disappearance of the black “right” whale—the right one to hunt because it did
not sink when it died—was regarded not as a depletion and ultimate extinction of the
species but as a sign that the whales were migrating elsewhere. The discovery of the
rich feeding and breeding grounds of sperm whales in the Pacific coincided with the
increased demand for lubricants and artificial lighting in the Industrial Revolution.
Machinery required lubrication; efficient shifts at work necessitated lighting that was
relatively smoke-free, neither for aesthetics nor the safety of the workforce, but for
visibility to enhance production. The chief element in saving the remaining whales
was the discovery of petroleum, a substance that could efficiently be substituted for
all the uses of whale oil, except in very fine equipment. Whale products, such as
baleen used for corsets and umbrellas, became obsolete, but ambergris continued to
be used in expensive perfumes and cosmetics.
After these centuries of use and the accelerated pace of killing brought on by
new technology, ironically developed with lubricants from whale oil, what is the
fate of the whale populations, which saw the largest scale of depredation during
the long nineteenth century? The International Whaling Commission, which is now
seen as a US-dominated complete-moratorium advocacy organization—a perception
that serves certain national, tribal, and corporate interests, offers estimates of whale
populations only from the 1980s and early 1990s. Its website states that statistics
for current estimates are being gathered, but decisions are made each time the
Commission meets as to the “sustainable take” of species evidently without updated
information about their numbers. The statistics, even as they appear, are not
encouraging: the minke whales of the North Pacific are at 25,000 (as of 1987–95); the
blue whales number between 400 to 1,400, hardly a sustainable number for a species
whose reproduction rates are quite slow; gray whales in the western Pacific are fewer
than a hundred, in the eastern Pacific at 26,000; bowhead whales, rediscovered by
Northwest and aboriginal peoples of the Arctic as “traditional” hunts along with the
gray whales, number 8,000; right whales, the scientists tell us, will probably become
extinct in the first half of the twenty-first century.10
The massive whale hunts of the nineteenth century forged the world as we know
it not only by “lighting up the world,” as the inscription on the New Bedford Whaling
Museum proclaims, but by fueling the Industrial Revolution. Few of us realize that
just as petroleum has been instrumental in bringing nations and ruling families to the
fore as international players since the last decade of the nineteenth century into the
twenty-first, so whale oil was the prime commodity in building empire during the
long nineteenth century. Fortunes that led to presidencies and ruling families were
10 Steven K. Katona, Valerie Rough and David T. Richardson, A Field Guide to Whales,
Porpoises, and Seals from Cape Cod to Newfoundland, rev. 4th edn (Washington and London:
Smithsonian Institution, 1993).
accumulated on the lives and deaths of whales. Whalers brought in an average of one
million dollars’ (at nineteenth-century value) worth of oil annually to the US, and the
industry employed about seventy thousand people on board ships alone. An average
voyage brought home between $100,000 and $300,000, to be divided most unevenly
between owners and crew; for instance, the captain’s share was an eighth of the
take, a cabin boy’s three hundredths. Naturally, the lion’s share fell to the owners.
The Delano family of Fairhaven, for instance, founded the fortune that sent their
grandson to the White House for four terms on whale oil and its trade. The merchant
houses of the East Coast influenced foreign policy and financed some of the costs
of the Perry expedition, ostensibly sent against Japan so as to open ports to whaling
ships in dire need of fresh water and other supplies. The popular campaign that led
to Perry’s naval quasi-blockade of Edo had been carried out in the press in the late
forties, around the Japanese capture of a mutinous crew of the whaling ship Lagoda.
The crew would have been dealt with very severely by the US had it returned home,
but its being captured and imprisoned by the Japanese led to the jingoistic fervor that
in turn pressured Congress to authorize Perry’s high-handed adventurism (Wiley and
Ichiro, pp. 30–36).
Unlike the whale oil, the bird hunts of the nineteenth century had no heavy-
industry value, but they supported both the fashion and the war industries. Yet the
discourse about both whales and albatrosses indicates the distancing we humans
need in order fully to engage in the exploitation of animals. From the time of the
arrival of the colonists to the New World, the sea was described as a “pasture” that
was to be used by humans. The analogy is imperfect, of course. Humans did not
send out their domesticated flocks upon the briny pasture—they “harvested” the
bounty that grew without humans’ toiling or spinning. The very word “harvest” or
“culling” applied to hunts of animals into the twenty-first century shows our desire
to classify animals as plants in our relationship to them so as to make the killing of
sentient beings appear as an agricultural undertaking. In addition, when it comes to
whales, mammals whose intelligence and habits make them closer to humans than
perhaps any other sea creature, the words “fish” and “fisheries” appear all through
the logs and journals of whalers and travelers, and the word “fisheries” is still used
today, even by the IWC; this use distances the warm-blooded, air-breathing, slow-
reproducing, and culturally organized whales from those who kill them.
As for the albatrosses, derisive popular nomenclature was and is applied to
them—booby (although technically a description of a different genus), goony,
ahodori—the Japanese for “fool birds.” The albatrosses’ reluctance to change
migration paths or nesting sites or to abandon their habitat when attacked by humans
has been seen as an example of signal stupidity and lack of self-preservation. Few
of the nineteenth-century commentators on albatrosses were familiar with Darwin’s
observation during his voyage to the Galapagos, “We may infer from these facts
[the tameness of animals in isolated conditions], what havoc the introduction of any
new beast of prey must cause in a country, before the instincts of the indigenous
inhabitants have become adapted to the stranger’s craft or power.”11 Consequently,
11 Mark Ridley ed., The Darwin Reader (New York: Norton, 1987, p. 83).
killing albatrosses, which was as easy as clubbing them as they attempted to land,
appeared to be another form of innocuous “harvest.”
The short-tailed albatrosses, first classified by Steller and therefore also called
Steller’s albatrosses, used to breed on several volcanic islands that are part of the
“ring of fire,” named for the continued activity of the volcanoes that gave birth
to the islands. However, the primary breeding and nesting colony of short-tailed
albatrosses, numbering in the millions before the end of the nineteenth century,
was on the Japanese island of Torishima. While the Japanese whaling fleet inspired
by Manjiro’s instruction joined the multitude of international vessels scouring the
oceans for ever rarer whale pods, Manjiro’s acquaintance Nakaemon Tamaoiki set
up a feather-processing factory on Torishima. Of the estimated three to five million
short-tailed albatrosses, described in bird guides as the most beautiful of the genus
(Diomedea), only three thousand remained by 1932 (Hasegawa).12 In 1932 the
Japanese government, influenced, after decades, by the international conservationist
impetus that had led to the formation of many preservationist societies such as the
Audubon, recognized the value of the short-tailed albatross and decided to make
Torishima a national monument to protect the birds. However, the impoverished
men on the island, still eking out a living from a few birds, became enraged and
proceeded to kill all the remaining albatrosses so as to make a final profit from
the birds. Shortly thereafter, a volcanic eruption did away with all traces of human
habitation on the island, until World War Two, when a station was set up on the island
for military reasons. In 1949, the species was declared extinct by a researcher for the
Audubon Society, who circled Torishima and saw no traces of the birds. In 1951, a
Japanese meteorologist stationed on the island happened to see a few white, large
birds that turned out to be short-tailed albatrosses returning from their migration to
the nesting grounds. These thirty-some birds were remnants of the huge colonies
of the late nineteenth century that succumbed to the thirst for exotic feathers in the
West and to the need for down jackets for soldiers preparing to fight in the Japanese–
Russian conflicts. The Western feather trade was by far the weightier element—the
pun is not unintended. It has been documented, for instance, that between 1890 and
1929, “50,300 tons of plumage had entered France” and that “hundreds of thousands
of albatrosses, killed in the Pacific, went directly from Yokohama, Japan, to Paris.”13
Nor was France the primary recipient of feathers and skins of exotic birds. Various
large-scale depredations of bird populations were occurring throughout the world,
with the US and Great Britain as recipients of the feathers and/or participants in the
hunts. As with the whale oil, the profits in the bird trade were in the millions, and in
1900 “approximately 83,000 people” were employed in the feather-fashion industry
(Doughty, p. 23).
12 Personal communication from Hiroshi Hasegawa, which appears in Steiner as well

as Safina. The authoritative tome in English on albatrosses, including the short-tailed, is
Tickell’s; Tickell identifies Hasegawa as the short-tailed albatrosses’ “guardian” (W.L.N.
Tickell, Albatrosses (New Haven: Yale, 2000).
13 Robin W. Doughty, Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, A Study in Natural
Protection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 124.
The fate of the short-tailed albatross changed due to the single-minded dedication
of one ornithologist. Since 1976 Hiroshi Hasegawa, a Japanese ornithologist and the
world’s authority on the short-tailed albatrosses, has been working for the protection
and restoration of the species.14 Hasegawa has restored native grasses that keep
the volcanic soil in place and prevent erosion; he has had a bird-decoy artist make
life-size replicas of the albatross in mating poses and has played the albatrosses’
mating castanet sounds on slopes of the island less subject to volcanic activity; and
he has been monitoring and banding the population for three decades. He is also
working with an international commission including the US Fish and Wildlife to lure
the birds to other nesting sites on which they would imprint, such as the contested
Senkaku Islands (claimed by both Taiwan and Japan, now in Japanese possession)
and the Ogasawara Gunto (Bonin) archipelago. To date, the birds’ numbers have
risen to fifteen hundred, but their genetic pool is limited and their nesting grounds
are constantly threatened by the activity of the Torishima volcano, which most
recently erupted in the summer of 2002. In their spring-to-fall migration and juvenile
years at sea, the albatrosses are a risk from long-line fishing and habitat degradation
throughout the Pacific rim.
The fate of the albatrosses is similar to the fate of the whales. The Atlantic
species of albatross have been nearly exterminated, as have the whales. Some Pacific
populations are faring better, but the Pacific-rim nations are engaged in drilling, oceanic
petroleum transport, and industrial-level fishing that threaten to destroy species and
deplete habitat to an extent inconceivable before the advent of high technology.
Despite the clear line of succession among Western nations in globalizing practices
from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present, we tend to forget our
history and expect aboriginal peoples and less powerful nations unilaterally to bear
our ethical burden of environmental responsibility. The US has indeed banned whale
hunting and is a powerful advocate against the hunt internationally, but our moral
stance is quite wobbly considering the US government’s refusal to sign the Kyoto
Protocol, which is the foremost international cooperative agreement for protection
against the deterioration of the planet.
In the wake of Manjiro’s shipwreck and rescue, personal friendships and
community tolerance have been fostered. Fairhaven and Tosashimizu became sister
cities. The descendants of the Whitfields and the Nakahamas kept up frequent
correspondence and even visits up to World War Two, and then resumed them in the
1960s and 1970s to the present. Even during the war, when residents of Fairhaven
demanded that Manjiro’s gifts to the town, displayed in the public library, be removed
out of respect for the men fighting in the Pacific theater, the town council refused to
erase Fairhaven’s history of having harbored the famous adopted son from Japan.
Manjiro Nakahama is a name known to the majority of Japanese school children,
although he is virtually unknown to Americans. Manjiro’s great-granddaughters
have lived in the US, one as a professor of linguistics. The world has become more
knowable, more accessible because two remarkable men formed a bond that spanned
more than half the globe. Yet we now have near-silence on Torishima, which
14 Hiroshi Hasegawa, Ride on the Wind! Short-Tailed Albatrosses (Tokyo: Floebel Kan,
1995).
resounded with the raucous cries and the castanet mating dances of the short-tailed
albatrosses. The seas whose behemoths lit up the world with their oil and lubricated
the plethora of machines invented during the Industrial Revolution are now nearly
empty of the giant creatures that used to be sighted as a matter of course off the
shores of all the oceans of our planet. Of the hundreds of thousands of right whales
in the oceans of the planet, only three hundred remain. Most species of animals and
plants rely presently on international cooperation and efforts for preserving habitat,
and we are losing species at a daily rate.
In our rush to globalization—now that we know so much more than did Manjiro
and Whitfield, those men of courage and great good will and probity—will we follow
the triumphant trajectory of cross-cultural transmission that appears benign but
thrives on the exploitation of all other life? A mere novel such as the one I completed
after the fascinating research journeys I undertook cannot offer definitive answers to
such multi-layered and immensely complicated questions. It will, I hope, make the
readers feel both the triumph of the hunt and the ebb and flow of whales’ gasping
for breath after being wounded, make the readers hear the sounds and silences of
birds lighting upon the fragile rocks inhospitable to humans that have been the birds’
home for millions of years, see albatrosses rafting to cool off from their mating
dance, watch them leaving for their migrations that many times circumnavigate the
world, perhaps never to return, perhaps to come again, to hint to us of what life was
and might be again.
Works Cited
Bernard, Donald R. The Life and Times of John Manjiro (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1992).
Blumberg, Rhoda. Shipwrecked! The True Adventures of a Japanese Boy (New York:
HarperCollins, 2001).
Bolster, W. Jeffrey. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail
(Cambridge: Harvard, 1997).
Doughty, Robin W. Feather Fashions and Bird Preservation, A Study in Natural
Protection (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
Ellis, Richard. Men and Whales (New York: Knopf, 1991).
Ely, Ben-Ezra Stiles. “There She Blows”: A Narrative of a Whaling Voyage, Curtis
Dahl (ed.) (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1971).
Hasegawa, Hiroshi. Ride on the Wind! Short-Tailed Albatrosses (Tokyo: Floebel
Kan, 1995).
Jansen, Marius B. Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (Stanford: Stanford
Kaneko, Hisakazu. Manjiro: The Man Who Discovered America (Tokyo: Hokuseido,
1956).
Katona, Steven K., Valerie Rough and David T. Richardson. A Field Guide to
Whales, Porpoises, and Seals from Cape Cod to Newfoundland (rev. 4th edn)
(Smithsonian Institution, 1993).
Kawasumi, Tetsuo. John Manjiro and his Era. Tetsuo Kawasumi and Naoyuki
Agawa (eds) (Tokyo: Kosaido, 2001).
Manjiro, John. Drifting toward the Southwest: The Story of Five Japanese Castaways,
Junya Nagakuni and Junji Kitadai (eds and trans) (New Bedford: Spinner, 2003).
Munger, James. Two Years in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans: Being a Journal of
Every Day Life on Board Ship (Fairfield: Ye Galleon Press, 1967).
Ridley, Mark (ed.). The Darwin Reader (New York: Norton, 1987).
Safina, Carl. Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival (New York: Holt,
2003).
Steiner, Rick. “Resurrection in the Wind,” National Wildlife Magazine (Aug–Sept.
1998): 1–8.
Stoett, Peter J. The International Politics of Whaling (Vancouver: University of
British Columbia Press, 1997).
Tickell, W.L.N. Albatrosses (New Haven: Yale, 2000).
Vlasopolos, Anca. The New Bedford Samurai and the Fool Birds of Japan (Kingsport,
TN: Twilight Times Books, forthcoming).
Warriner, Emily V. Voyager to Destiny: The Amazing Adventures of Manjiro, the
Man Who Changed Worlds Twice … (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956).
Wiley, Peter Booth with Korogi Ichiro. Yankees in the Land of the Gods: Commodore
Perry and the Opening of Japan (New York: Penguin, 1990).
PART III
Sin and Bestiality
Chapter 10
“The Mark of the Beast”: Animals as

Sites of Imperial Encounter from
Wuthering Heights to Green Mansions
In texts ranging from the mid-Victorian Wuthering Heights (1847) through to the
High Victorian Black Beauty (1877) to the early Edwardian Green Mansions (1904),
the imperialist encounter between English male aggressor and colonized people
is figured in animal metaphor. The Other―a subject people of the Empire in its
dominions or at home in England―is often depicted as a savage brute that needs
taming. However, many Victorian narratives, including stories by Kipling, Doyle,
and W.W. Jacobs, ultimately expose the imperialist himself as the unruly beast. In
other Victorian texts, oppressed British people (children, women, the lower classes)
are portrayed as sympathetic, downtrodden animals and identified with the Empire’s
exploited, beleaguered subjects. In the course of this essay, I will attempt to trace
some patterns in the representations of imperial encounter in the shape of the beast.
My purpose in so doing is not only to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this trope in
Victorian fiction, but also to elaborate upon its various—and at times unexpected—
meanings.
I begin with Emily Brontë chiefly because Wuthering Heights is a touchstone
early Victorian text known to be written by an intense animal-lover who is connected
in readers’ minds with Nature—in particular, with the savage wildness of the
Yorkshire moors. Emily Brontë’s deepest sympathies are with the natural world
and with the animal in Wuthering Heights. Brontë’s world is not akin to Romantic
Wordsworthian pastoral, as a part of her mythos insists. Brontë’s Nature—including
her Animal—is more like Coleridge’s earthly paradise of “Kubla Khan,” where one
On this aspect of the novel see especially Stevie Davies, “Emily Brontë and the
Animals,” in Emily Brontë: Heretic (London: The Women’s Press, 1994). See also Enid
Duthie, The Brontës and Nature (London: Palgrave, 1986). For countering or complicating
views, see Margaret Homans’s “Repression and Sublimation in Wuthering Heights,” PMLA
(Oct 1978) and Lucasta Miller’s recent The Brontë Myth (New York: Knopf, 2004).
This romanticized, sentimentalized version of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relation to the
natural world was popularized in David Lean’s 1939 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights,
with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and the exotic, Indian-born Merle Oberon as Cathy, in a
fascinating racial reversal.
could expect to find “woman wailing for her demon lover.” Moreover, although
one might trace a branch of Wuthering Heights’s Romantic lineage to Coleridge’s
darker supernatural visions, Brontë’s Victorian text is also very much a book of its
times, influenced by the work of Darwin and other progressive scientists. As Stevie
Davies states, Wuthering Heights “demonstrates a profound engagement in the
evolutionary debates of the 1830s and 1840s …” (Davies, Heretic, p. 103). Brontë
accepted the predatory realities of the natural world, and recognized man as animal,
implicated in Nature’s creative and destructive courses. Davies argues that “the more
one contemplates this fearless gaze, the more one respects the passion for Nature that
fills her work … But to love Nature with this destructive reality incorporated into
the understanding rather than censored out, is the greater and more fulfilling love”
(p. 109).
The center of Emily’s vision of the natural world is the brutish Heathcliff, “a
fierce, pitiless, wolfish man,” as his beloved Catherine admits. Heathcliff, as has
been remarked, is distinctly canine, as faithful and as undomesticated as Emily’s
own mastiff Keeper, her constant companion on her beloved moors—and as
inconsolable at Emily’s death as the tortured Heathcliff is at Catherine’s. In an
imperialist context, Heathcliff can be seen as a figure for the immigrant Irish during
the Great Famine, as Terry Eagleton, Elsie Michie, and Mary Jean Corbett have
discussed, and he is viewed by the “civilized” English as an animal, wild and dark,
even ape-like in his shaggy uncouthness and his silence. Or, as Deirdre David and
Susan Meyer tell us, he is a sign for all the Empire’s regressive aborigines, primitive
See Toni Reed, Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky: 1988).
All citations are from Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. Christopher Heywood
(Toronto, Canada: Broadview 2002).
See Davies, “Emily Brontë and the Animals.” See also Ivan Kreilkamp’s recent essay,
“‘Petted Things’: Wuthering Heights and the Animal.” Yale Journal of Criticism (18 (1),
Spring 2005): 87–110. The first draft of my essay was presented as a conference paper in
April 2000, at Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies, and the paper was refined for a
lecture at Trinity College, Oxford, in October 2001, so although Davies had a great influence
on my thinking, Kreilkamp’s fine essay was unavailable to me when I theorized and wrote
my own work. I was, however, stimulated by his commentary at the 2003 NAVSA Inaugural
Conference in Bloomington, for which I am grateful. My citations from his brilliant Yale
Journal article (see below) are very recent revisions.
On Keeper’s role in Emily’s funeral and his starvation vigil at her bedroom door see
Edward Chitham, Emily Brontë (London: Blackwell, 1993) and Juliet Barker, The Brontës
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994). Ivan Kreilkamp has a brilliant discussion of Keeper-
as-Heathcliff in “‘Petted Things’”.
See Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power (London: Macmillan, 1988); Elsie Michie,
“Heathcliff, Rochester, and the Simianized Irish” in Novel, reprinted in Outside the Pale:
Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1993); and Mary Jean Corbett, Allegories of Union in Irish and
English Writing, 1790–1870: Politics, History, and the Family from Edgeworth to Arnold
“The Mark of the Beast” 183
dark man from somewhere in the British dominions. Picked up like a stray dog in
the streets of the port city of Liverpool, Heathcliff could be a prince from India (as
Nelly declares), or a gypsy from a roaming tribe. As racial outsider, he threatens
miscegenation.10 Whatever his racial origin—and that origin is a mystery in a book
that is, as Stevie Davies claims, about “searching for origins”11—Heathcliff cannot
be civilized, however much his English masters (Hindley Earnshaw, the Lintons)
might wish him to be.
Although the racial and animal discourses are linked, Ivan Kreilkamp has recently
differentiated these discourses as they are embodied in Wuthering Heights:
The arguments of Meyer and other critics who have attended to the dynamics of race and
imperialism in Wuthering Heights are convincing and necessary, but I want to think more
literally about what it means that Heathcliff, whose hair is like ‘a colt’s mane’(57), is so
forcefully associated with animals; species seems as salient as race as a category by which
to consider Brontë’s depiction of the character, and should not be reduced to or considered
as a subcategory of race.12
For a moment, then, let us explore Heathcliff’s animality before we return to issues of
race and imperialism. Although Heathcliff superficially takes on the vestures of the
gentleman after a mysterious three-year absence and returns to Thrushcross Grange
in his fine suit, he is truly a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Heathcliff is bloodthirsty and
predatory; he tells Nelly that when Catherine no longer wants Edgar’s presence, “the
moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out, and drunk his blood!”
(p. 243). Acts of predation on the moors are darkly remembered in Catherine’s
delirium. Heathcliff starves the baby lapwings and might have attacked the parents:
I heard Deirdre David discuss this aspect of Wuthering Heights many years ago when
she was a Keynote Speaker at a Victorians Institute Conference. Of course her book, Rule
Britannia: Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1995), recalls imperialist visions, but does not discuss them in relation to Wuthering
Heights. More recently, Susan Meyer has discussed the racial aspects of Wuthering Heights
in Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1996). Carine M. Mardorossian discusses the teaching of race issues in
“Geometries of Race, Class, and Gender: Identity Crossing in Wuthering Heights” in
Approaches to Teaching Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, ed. Sue Lonoff and Terri A.
Hasseler (New York: Modern Language Association, 2006).
In the Broadway comedy, The Mystery of Irma Vep, Nelly melodramatically cites lines
direct from the novel: “I would frame high notions of my birth.” Although the play enacts
these lines in the melodrama genre, in fact the possible royal connection imbues even more
mystery into Heathcliff’s past, as he may have emerged from a background more elevated
than the Earnshaws and Lintons.
10 See especially Christopher Heywood’s fascinating, controversial introduction to the
2002 Broadview edition of Wuthering Heights in which he examines the possibility that
Heathcliff is a black slave.
11 See Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë: The Artist as a Free Woman (Manchester: Carcanet
Press, 1983).
12 See Ivan Kreilkamp, “‘Petted Things.’”
“Did he shoot my lapwings, Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look”
(p. 216).13
Years before Catherine evinces her delirious fascination as spectator with “my
lapwings,” she has suggested her identification with the predator Heathcliff much
more overtly. In her confession to Nelly, Catherine muses: “I’ve dreamt in my
life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve
gone through and through me, like wine through water, and changed the colour of
my mind” (p. 172). The image of the (surely red) wine coloring Catherine’s mind
through a kind of heretic baptism/Eucharist in which her mind/identity becomes
a darker shade is Catherine’s poetic recognition of the animal Heathcliff that is—
herself.14 As she famously declares, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always
in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself,
but as my own being—so don’t talk of our separation again …” (p. 175). In his
recent book, Lot’s Daughters, Robert Polhemus suggests that without Heathcliff’s
“necessary presence” beside her in their final encounter, Catherine could not give
birth to her daughter, the second Catherine: “In the spirit of her book and her faith,
he is a necessary presence. He literally squeezes new life—a new Cathy—out of the
woman he loves.”15
And in this last passionate meeting with Catherine, Heathcliff is distinctly
animal. Nelly recalls that Heathcliff “gnashed at me, and foamed like a mad dog,
and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy” (p. 255). After Catherine’s death,
he marks his territory as a dog or wolf might, tossing out Edgar’s fair curl from the
locket upon Catherine’s dead body lying in state, while he places his own dark lock
of hair (and scent) within his beloved “master’s” symbolic heart, claiming Catherine
as his own erotic territory.16 After Cathy’s death, Heathcliff silently holds mourning
vigil out in the elements, an image of animal-like stolidity and stasis. Nelly remarks
that Heathcliff, hatless and wet with dew, has obviously “been standing a long time
in that position” by the old ash tree, as he is ignored by “a pair of ousels, passing
and repassing within three feet of him, busy in building their nest” (p. 260). After
Catherine’s death, Heathcliff looks at Nelly with “an unflinching, ferocious stare”
while he “dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and lifting up his eyes, howled,
not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and
spears” (p. 262).17 He digs up Catherine’s body as a dog might heave up the earth to
13 The best discussions of this scene are in Homans, “Repression and Sublimation” and
Davies (Heretic).
14 This beautiful line is given to Emily herself in Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 film of the
novel.
15 Robert Polhemus, Lot’s Daughters (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
2005), p. 194.
16 This idea was first suggested to me by an undergraduate student in one of my Victorian
Novel classes. It was at least ten years ago, before I was thinking about this project, so I can’t
recall the student’s name, alas.
17 It seems important to note here that unlike Lockwood, who in his dream brutally saws
the girl-ghost Catherine’s wrist upon the jagged window-pane until he bloodies the sheets
(with all that implies), Heathcliff hurts himself until his own blood runs down the tree and
marks his own forehead, suggesting a kind of profane Crucifixion. See also the “Heathcliff”
retrieve his favorite, long-buried bone. Or, as Ivan Kreilkamp suggests, Heathcliff is
like the fiercely loyal dogs in magazine stories of the mid-century who dug into the
earth in order to be closer to their beloved, buried dead.18
Near his death, haunted by Catherine’s presence, Heathcliff is thought to be a
werewolf by the neighborhood. Even his confidante Nelly wonders “Is he a ghoul,
or a vampire?” … “But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harbored by
a good man to his bane?” (pp. 423–24). He is finally seen in a vision on the moors
only by the shepherd boy and his sheep, who “darnut pass ’em” (p. 430). The boy
and animal—both part of the Romantic primitive, and possibly a Christian sign of
Shepherd and sheep/lamb as well―see the ghostly lovers as they profanely wander.
But they also fear the wolf—as boy and sheep need to do.19 Through Brontë’s
Heathcliff, the primitive and animal is affirmed even as it is made inaccessible,
visioned as both savage and divine.
Issues of social class are inextricably connected to issues of Heathcliff’s animality
and racial origin. Heathcliff—named for a dead Earnshaw son but himself “as dark
almost as if it came as the devil” (p. 129)—evokes the unlanded, dispossessed people
within as well as outside England who might gain the riches necessary to infiltrate
the ancient landed gentry who exploit him. Terry Eagleton is the germinal source for
reading Heathcliff within a Marxist context.20 Ivan Kreilkamp connects Heathcliff as
proletarian to what he terms “Heathcliff-animal”:
As Terry Eagleton writes, ‘Heathcliff’s presence is radically gratuitous …. He is available

to be accepted or rejected simply for himself, laying claim to no status other than a human
one.’ (p. 102)
We might add that Brontë particularly stresses this ethical dilemma by problematizing
the very category of “human status” in her depiction of the character. Heathcliff
might be a prole, but he crosses borders into the upper and middle classes as well,
destablilizing social class boundaries. As mysteriously wealthy returning “gentleman”
begotten from humble origins, he might embody the nouveau riche of the Empire’s
commercial and mercantile classes who marry into or take over the landed gentry’s
families and estates. Nelly surmises that “his upright carriage suggested the idea of
his having been in the army” (p. 189). The military was a traditional career choice
figure Baines (Harvey Keitel) in Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano, who bashes his head
against a tree in his frustration at his beloved Ada’s (Holly Hunter) having her finger chopped
off by her husband Stewart (Sam Neal).
18 See Ivan Kreilkamp, “‘Petted Things,’” p. 21: “In his extravagant mourning for
Catherine, Heathcliff closely resembles a stock figure of Victorian magazine writing, the
faithful dog whose loyalty exemplifies passionate attachment and presses against the boundary
dividing everyday life and death.”
19 For constructions of Heathcliff as both wolf and dog, see Deborah Denenholz Morse,
“Wolf-Men in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Hesba Stretton’s Half-Brothers,”
unpublished conference paper given at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2002 at the
18th-/19th-century British Women Writers Conference and “Animal Gods: The Wolf-Man in
Wuthering Heights,” unpublished conference paper presented at the “The Brontës and Their
World,” Pace University, New York, April 2004. Available upon request from the author.
20 Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power, is still the best source for this reading.
for both younger sons of the landed gentry who would not inherit estates, and for
the sons of the emergent professional middle classes. Heathcliff as a member of the
imperial army also leads back to a discussion of race, with Heathcliff the subaltern
recreated as Heathcliff the imperialist.
Whatever his class or racial status, Heathcliff as fearsome, predatory animal
wrests territory away from its domesticated claimants, reversing English imperialist
conquest, the dominion of the powerful. For a time, he governs two estates of the
landed gentry. Heathcliff quits his territory only when the promise of reunion with
the earth of Catherine’s body and the earth of the moors merges with the earth of
his own body,21 and Catherine’s haunted soul is no longer divided from his own. His
final animal claim is the bed upon which he and Catherine slept together during their
childhoods, where they probably mated, the territory which is theirs in life—and in
death.
In post-Darwinian English culture, as one might expect, the animal is often
envisioned as a devolved human being, as in, most famously, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde (1885).22 This classic tale of the good and evil in all men, of the double
self—the public and private identities of late Victorian man—is of course also a
tale of the animal in man. The respectable Dr Jekyll has repressed all of his natural,
animal self, which is then violently distorted before it emerges as the regressive
Mr Hyde. The simian Hyde—whose name suggests not only secrecy and disguise
but also an animal’s skin or hide23—runs over a little girl in the street like an Asian
“Juggernaut” and murders a Member of Parliament, Sir Danvers Carew, with “ape-
like fury,” smashing his body with a cane made of exotic wood from somewhere out
in the imperial dominions. The Empire strikes back.
Stevenson’s critique is fiercely gendered as well, as he exposes the sterility of
modern English male urban culture, an environment in which the natural animal
urge to procreate is denied. There is no green space, no Nature, no courtship, no sex,
no babies born during the narrative. This homosocial, professional, urban culture
is sterile.24 The significant relationships, as has been often noted, are between men,
whether they are homosocial, homoerotic, or homosexual: most prominently, Jekyll/
21 Heathcliff confesses to Nelly that he has bribed the sexton to knock out the side of his
coffin and of Catherine’s, so that in death, the earth of their bodies will mingle. As Nelly tells
Lockwood, “We buried him, to the scandal of the whole neighborhood, as he wished.”
22 Martin Danahay’s recent 2005 Broadview edition is instructive on this aspect of
Stevenson’s text.
23 My students in the spring 2001 course “Victorian Animal as Social Critique” noted the
animal hide/Hyde.
24 There has been a good deal written on the possible homosexuality of Stevenson’s text.
See especially Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin-de-Siecle: Identity and
Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Martin Danahay, Introduction to the
2005 Broadview edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “Questions of Represssion”, including
William Veeder, “Children of the Night: Stevenson and Patriarchy” and Jerrold E. Hogle,
“The Struggle for a Dichotomy : Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters” in Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde After One Hundred Years, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1988); and briefly discussed in Frank McLynn’s Robert Louis Stevenson
(London and Melbourne: Pimlico, 1993) .
Hyde and the Damon and Pythias of Jekyll/Lanyon, but also Utterson/Enfield and
Utterson/Jekyll/Hyde.25 The female is symbolically marginalized in this society, and
literally trampled in the street or forced to witness from an upper window as a kind
of brutal rape is visited by the furious, simian Hyde upon a courtly, feminized older
man, Sir Danvers Carew, who has waving long white hair. Despite his womanly
appearance and demeanour, however, Carew is a Member of Parliament, a male
lawgiver to the Empire. At the center of the novel’s most brutal scene is Hyde the
frustrated animal-man, bringing the jungle to a West End London street, mimicking
the Empire’s primitive brutalities in the realms of England’s ruling classes, in the
most “civilized” metropolis in the world.
In Black Beauty (1877), the encounter with the Empire’s force—social class
dominance at home and racial oppression abroad—is brought home to England. The
hero of the book is a beautiful, loving, faithful horse, Black Beauty himself. Anna
Sewell’s impassioned plea for humane treatment of horses—“translated from the
original equine”—is told in the first person, by Black Beauty himself. The book
was originally intended for working-class readers, as an anti-cruelty tract, although
it has, famously, become one of the most popular books for children ever written.26
The subtitle is “The Autobiography of a Horse”, a phrase which symbolically takes
Sewell’s tale out of a wholly imagined, fictional space and puts Beauty’s narrative in
a generic category with Mill’s Autobiography and Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua.
As part of this lofty Victorian literary genre, Beauty’s account is given something
akin to a like authority, the gravity of true history and the compelling authenticity
of personal and religious confession. As the “autobiography” of a working-class
creature, Sewell also places Black Beauty’s narrative in the genre of working-class
autobiographies, a story that might be compared to the documents Regenia Gagnier
examines in Subjectivities.27 At the same time, its subjective viewpoint, from
Beauty’s imagined animal perspective, gives powerful credence to the claims of
animal interiority, to animal capacities to love, to be dutiful—and to suffer pain.28
The voice of the suffering Black Beauty also recognizes the humanity of the
supposedly brutish lower classes. In this text, it is the upper classes, the rulers of
England and the civilized world, who are often beasts. Both Beauty and the mare
Ginger are mistreated by aristocrats who care more for speed and style (including
the infamous “bearing rein”) than for the welfare of their horses. Virtually all of the
horses’ oppressors, especially in the novel’s first half, are upper-class men who are
bent upon their own pleasure. In the second half of the book, it is often working-class
men, desperate and hungry, who abuse their horses as they are misused by the callous
upper classes. Black Beauty’s brother is—not inconsequentially—named Rob Roy,
25 See especially Veeder and Hirsch, One Hundred Years.

26 See Adrienne E. Gavin, Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (Thrupp, Gloucestershire:
Sutton 2004).
27 Gagnier discusses working-class autobiographies and classic fictional autobiographies
in her brilliant, landmark work, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain,
1832–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
28 See especially Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-
Century English Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
after Sir Walter Scott’s great Scottish warrior against English oppression. Rob Roy
has his leg broken during a foxhunt by the good Squire Gordon’s thoughtless only
son—and, “with a dreadful shriek,” Rob Roy is shot. Sewell has the young squire
break his neck as well, her commentary upon the reckless, inhumane treatment of
an enslaved fellow creature. Indeed, Black Beauty has been read by Moira Ferguson
and others as a slave narrative, an important abolitionist treatise.29
Black Beauty himself is well born, a thoroughbred—his mother’s name is
Duchess—yet he is egalitarian, making friends with the pony Merrylegs and the
roan cob Justice as well as with the thoroughbred mare Ginger and the old brown
hunter Oliver, and always loving according to the treatment he receives rather than
the rank of his master.30 He uncomplainingly does the hard work of a taxicab horse,
undertaking a working-class job and identity. What matters to Beauty is that his driver,
Jerry Barker, is kind, and thinks of his beloved horse before he thinks of himself.
Eventually, the cavalier unconcern of upper-class “gentlemen” for both driver and
horse undermines Jerry’s health after he waits for hours in the rain for his rich,
pleasure-seeking passengers one night. Jerry is forced to sell Black Beauty,31 whose
life as an abused carthorse becomes hellish until he is rescued by compassionate
people—the aptly named Mr Thoroughgood and his grandson Willie—and Beauty
ultimately meets up again with his old groom, kindly Joe Green. Ultimately, Beauty
finds sanctuary with two affectionate women who are much like Sewell herself and
her loving mother—and akin to the female witnesses to Beauty’s and other horses’
torture at the hands of men and boys. Sewell imagines the life of “working-class”
horses by having her high-born hero-narrator actually become one of these animals,
and narrate their horrific experiences with sorrowful dignity—and the deserved
rescue most of them never found with poignant joy.
Other cab horses are indeed worked to exhaustion, or to their deaths. As the
taxicab driver Seedy Sam opines desperately—the cab rental system sanctioned by
the city authorities results in near starvation of the cab drivers who do not own their
own horses. Therefore, these poorer folk drive their rented horses all the harder, in
order to survive themselves. Sewell places the blame for Sam’s death upon the police
who do not regulate the cab trade—in a larger sense, upon those who allow virtual
slavery among any of God’s creatures. As her quintessential Christian gentleman
declares: “My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power
to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”
Sewell’s book can be read not only as an indictment of class and race prejudice, but
also as a condemnation of cruelty against women. The discourse on gender includes
not only the incessant cruelty of men, but also the suffering of women. Through
Ginger’s narrative in particular, Sewell argues that women are often compelled to
serve men against their will. Ginger is a beautiful, high-spirited thoroughbred whose
29 See especially Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900:

Patriots, Nation, and Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
30 One could argue that “Duchess” is simply a slave name.
31 I received a very moving and perceptive paper from my honors student Angela
Polidoro about the continual abandonment of Beauty, even by his best human friends. This
homelessness marked the animal experience, in Angela’s reading.
training to the bit and bridle is vividly described as a kind of rape of a virgin: “It was
all force,” she tells Beauty. After this episode, Ginger becomes a “fallen woman”.
She has a reputation as a difficult, feisty horse, because she will not allow men to
give her pain without a fight. Gradually, Ginger is worn down, however, as she is
passed from male owner to male owner, until she encounters Beauty in the city
where they are both working as carthorses.32 Ginger then only wishes for death,
which she finds soon thereafter. Beauty sees the once-beautiful mare flung across
a cart, used up by men at last, after years “on the street”. It is not an accident that
most of the kind interventions performed in the novel during scenes of abuse are
enacted by girls or women who cannot bear to witness the torment visited upon
silent, powerless creatures.33
Sewell’s “autobiography of a horse” is a powerful document. In this story
beloved by children and adults alike for nearly 150 years, Sewell does a great deal
more than defend the rights of animals. The text exposes the cruelty visited upon all
creatures in patriarchal Victorian England. Black Beauty is a powerful indictment of
human injustice—and indeed, of English “animal” savagery perpetrated by culpable
humans—most of whom are male brutes.
The work of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and W.W. Jacobs is more
overt and explicit in its critique of Empire. Often, the imperial encounter between
Englishmen seeking dominion and the native Other is figured in animal metaphor.
Doyle’s work depicts native peoples as animal, at times to express the English fear
of “going primitive,” of embodying the savage Conradian heart of darkness. Yet,
when the great detective Sherlock Holmes encounters the irrational as West meets
East, he often finds that the Empire is striking back at the brutal heart of the English
oppressor.
Perhaps the most famous of Doyle’s detective stories—and Doyle’s own
favorite—is “The Speckled Band,” which Doyle called “that grim snake story.” In
this tale, a degraded physician from an ancient gentry family returns from army
service in India with poisonous snakes, baboons and cheetahs, which he allows
to run free on his decrepit estate. Dr Grimesby Roylott “has a passion for Indian
animals.” Dr Roylott has also, not inconsequentially, been imprisoned in India for
murdering his native servant. His own English violence—a madness that has a long
family history, as the text tells us—is visited upon an Indian.
This fact of English violence complicates the assessment that Dr Roylott has
“gone primitive” with a vengeance.34 His depraved casting off of civilized constraints
32 A number of my students in my fall term 2005 “Victorian Novels of Tolerance” course

wrote on the gender critique of Black Beauty. Amber Freihaut deserves special mention here.
33 See in particular Part IV, ch. 1, “Jakes and the Lady” and the following chapter, “Hard
Times”, in which a little girl named Grace tries to keep Beauty from being overloaded but is
overruled by her father.
34 This “going primitive” in Doyle, Kipling, and other late Victorian writers is, according
to Patrick Brantlinger in Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), one of the “three principal themes of
imperial Gothic” (p. 230). The other themes are “an invasion of civilization by the forces of
barbarism or demonism; and the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the
modern world” (p. 230).
includes not only his Indian menagerie of exotic animals—including a baboon
that Holmes and Watson take at first for a “distorted child”—but also Roylott’s
fraternizing for weeks on end with the local band of gypsies, a thieving, disreputable
bunch whom he protects by allowing them to camp on his land. There is nothing
exotically bohemian in Roylott’s life, however. He is not imbued with the intriguing
aura of Holmes smoking opium or engaging in some of his Eastern postures.35 The
brutish violence and animal strength that expresses itself when Dr Roylott pitches
the village blacksmith into the river is an Old English violence—with an Anglo-
Saxon, not an Indian, pedigree.
This violence includes the sexual and financial exploitation of his stepdaughters,
Julia and Helen Stoner, and his murder of Julia. Doyle presents issues of Empire
and issues of gender as inextricable, both issues of English patriarchal oppression.
He figures them in the deadly swamp adder that is “the speckled band,” the phallus
that enters the daughter’s bedroom through a hole in the wall, and causes ravage and
death. Julia is prevented from consummating her marriage or inheriting her mother’s
money by the stepfather’s snake/phallus. Helen in her turn has probably been abused
by Dr Roylott previous to her betrothal, as the bruises on her wrists suggest to the
observant Holmes. Dr Roylott again uses physical violence over the daughter’s body
in order to retain control of her inheritance from her mother, which he will lose if
she marries. Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan argue that “in his daughter’s
murder and symbolic rape Roylott enacts the ultimate patriarchal privilege: control
over women as property that simultaneously denies them access to property and to
sexual consent.”36 The Indian snake—like the English daughter who seeks help from
Sherlock Holmes—turns on its vicious English master. Both Helen’s murdered sister
Julia and the murdered Indian servant are avenged when Holmes canes Roylott’s
snake as it crawls toward its victim’s bed, causing it to retreat and attack his master.
Roylott’s swamp adder and Holmes’s cane significantly perform their phallic battle
above the bolted-down bed of the daughter, a kind of primitive homosocial sexual
ritual that only briefly keeps Helen’s virginity and maternal legacy intact, as she is
engaged to be married very soon. But the dangerous English stepfather is vanquished,
his sexual and imperialist fantasies and predations at an end. As Sherlock Holmes
remarks at the story’s end, “I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily on my
conscience” (p. 173).
The brilliant ghost story, W.W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw,” describes the
retribution of the East upon the West through the dark agency of a mutilated animal
fragment. This shard of simian flesh represents the maimed and suffering Indian
people and exposes the brutishness of English subjugation. The Hindu monkey god
Hanuman, a hero of the epic Ramayana, is worshipped in India as Rama’s devoted
general and rescuer of Rama’s beloved Sita. The primate named for him, Hanuman
langur, is “respected, fed, and worshipped across India, and has thus escaped the
35 See, for instance, the beginning sequence of “The Man With the Twisted Lip.”
36 See Rosemary Hennessy and Rajeswari Mohan, “‘The Speckled Band’: The
Construction of Women in a Popular Text of Empire” in Sherlock Holmes: The Major Stories
with Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. John A. Hodgson (New York: Bedford Books, 1994),
p. 392.
vagaries of time.”37 However, the English oppressor desecrates Hanuman when it
subjugates and “dismembers” the Indian people, symbolized in the monkey’s paw,
which is still imbued with Hanuman’s sacred power; as the Indian fakir tells the
Indian sergeant, it embodies “fate.” Hanuman’s victory in the Ramayana when he
defeats the demon Ravana is sometimes viewed as the victory of the common man.
The monkey’s paw wields the animal-god’s retribution for the exploitation of the
Indian people—and perhaps for the fracturing of India itself.
In its terse narrative, race and class consciousness intertwine, as an Indian army
soldier’s seemingly reluctant gift of a potent talisman—the magical, wish-granting
monkey’s paw—brings a working man’s son, Herbert White (a factory “hand”) to
his barbaric death, “caught in the machinery,” in the ominously titled Maw and
Meggins factory.38 At the “hands” of a machine, the beloved son’s body is mangled
into fragments that liken his body to that of the dismembered monkey’s, whose paw
is the only piece of him that has survived his implied torment. As my phrase “beloved
son’s body” suggests, the son’s torn body also recalls Christ’s broken body, and
hence the idea that the working-class son has died as a kind of sacrifice, as payment
for the ‘monkey’/simianized native people’s deaths in India, in the horrors to which
the English family of the ‘Whites’ eagerly listen, as the Indian army veteran weaves
a narrative web that entangles them in its deadly story.
The story is also an Oedipal text, a retelling of the mother–son love that excludes
the jealous father and resists the patriarchy. In Jacobs’s dark version of the tragedy,
Mr White’s wish upon the monkey’s paw inadvertently kills the rival son, as the
Empire’s white fathers have been killing not only the sons of Mother England
but also the native sons of the Empire’s dominions. The Oedipal tragedy begins
with the opening of the story. The mother and son exchange a knowing smile at
the foolish-seeming father as he resists losing the chess game to his son; the father
plays recklessly, “putting his king into such sharp and unnecessary perils that it even
provoked comment from the white-haired old lady knitting placidly by the fire.”
Mr White is angry at his son’s checkmate, and he “bawled” out, with “sudden and
unlooked-for violence.” The father seems excluded by the look of understanding
that passes between the son and the mother, the “knowing glance.” The father’s
mysterious response is to “hide a guilty grin in his thin grey beard,” a line that
accentuates his shame, his foolishness, and his age. And just then, the soldier,
Sergeant-Major Morris, will arrive at the door, the man who is acquainted only with
the father—and with him he will bring the monkey’s paw.
Reading through the frame of the Oedipal plot, the mother’s grief after her son’s
death becomes more powerful. One of the most poignant elements of the story is the
37 See Valmik Thapar, Land of the Tiger: A Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1997), p. 20. See also Joshua M. Greene,
Hanuman: The Heroic Monkey God (San Rafael, California: Mandala Publishing Group,
2003).
38 Again, Patrick Brantlinger’s Rule of Darkness comes to mind, with its definition of
imperial gothic. The monkey’s paw is obviously an instance of “an invasion of civilization
by the orcs of barbarism or demonism,” and yet, as my argument suggests, the oppressor
seems to receive a rough and appropriate justice, although the victim himself, the Whites’ son
Herbert, is innocent.
mother’s insatiable longing for her dead, beloved son. The father does not suffice,
and the mother hungers for her boy. The father must acknowledge, finally, his
subconscious rivalry with the son, and his desire to dis-member the son, in a perverse,
upside-down version of the Freudian family romance. In the end, the monkey’s paw
has brought forth the primal competitions within the Whites’ family, and Jacobs’s
vision of how imperial England encourages those most familiar tensions as well as
the hatreds between whites and those termed Other.39
It is significant that it is the father who first desires the monkey’s paw. He wishes
on it for two hundred pounds, the precise amount offered by the factory owner to
him and his grieving wife in “compensation” for his only son’s death. It is the son,
Herbert, who most fears the animal fragment, and who sees its horror in the fire the
night before he dies, a kind of foreboding vision of his own imminent suffering: “He
sat alone in the darkness, gazing at the dying fire, and seeing faces in it. The last face
was so horrible and so simian that he gazed at it in amazement.” The father’s wish
has brought about the gruesome death of the son, as the patriarchy sends its sons to
India to die as they themselves visit horrors upon the sons of India. Yet the father is
also the parent who, finally, realizes the monster that the mother has conjured with
the second wish on the monkey’s paw, a wish that embodies her urgent desire that the
talisman bring the son back to life. With the third and final wish, the father stills the
son’s profane resurrection. The knock at the door ceases, the threatened revelation of
the full horror of repression both abroad in India and at home in the dehumanizing
factories. The parents are left with their grief—and their responsibility for the desires
that have engendered the brutal realities for the next generation. There is no hope
at the close of the story, except that the father wishes to protect his wife from the
nightmare vision of her monstrous son. From the opening of the door to the soldier to
the opening of the door to the nothingness that was, moments before, the returning,
soulless body of the couple’s son, the retributive cycle is relentless—but, finally,
complete, the father’s urgent responsibility comprehended at last, and enacted.
Of W.W. Jacobs’s contemporary Rudyard Kipling’s many animal stories (Just So
Stories, The Jungle Book, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi), perhaps the most devastating is the semi-
autobiographical “Baa-Baa, Black Sheep,” in which an English child (the “Black
Sheep” of the story’s Mother Goose title) is sent from an edenic childhood in India to
a repressive, cruel home in a lower-middle-class evangelical household in “civilized”
England. Kipling’s persona Ruddy, the “black sheep” of the title, is also known as
“Punch,” after the Punch and Judy puppet show. The overt, gendered violence of
the puppetry is subtle background to the happiness in India, which occurs amidst
the brutal subjection of an entire people. Punch and Judy’s battering regime also
39 I gratefully acknowledge my Victorian Short Story students at The College of William

and Mary over the past six years for stimulating my ideas about Jacobs’s enigmatic tale.
Conference papers in which I discussed Jacobs, Kipling, and Doyle include the 2000 INCS
Conference in Eugene Oregon, the 2001 BAVS Conference in Lancaster, England, the 2003
Santa Cruz INCS Conference, and the 2003 Bloomington NAVSA Inaugural Conference.
I am indebted to the many commentators on my paper, including Anca Vlasopolos, Mary
Jean Corbett, Teresa Mangum, Christine Poulson, Nigel Rothfels, Christine Krueger, Richard
Stein, Robert Polhemus, Ivan Kreilkamp, and Cornelia Pearsall.
informs the violence of the Calvinist Aunty Rosa—whom the Anglo-Indian children
call “Antirosa,” suggesting not only their Hindi-inflected language, but Kipling’s
symbolizing of the opposition to nature in the Englishwoman’s oppressive religion.
Her harsh cruelty toward “black sheep”/ Punch echoes the repressive dominion of
the English in India.40
In some late Victorian narratives, the eroticized beast that is the site of imperial
encounter is a human being defined by the English oppressor only as an animal.
Kipling’s stories offer multiple examples that, as Peter Morey argues in Fictions of
India: Narrative and Power, “challenge … those easy binarisms which are the basis
of racial–imperial hierarchies.”41 One such Kipling tale in which such an imperial
encounter is brutally negotiated is “Georgie-Porgie” (1888), another Mother Goose-
named story that, like ‘Baa-Baa, Black Sheep,” links the innocent maternal/animal
titled children’s text of every English middle-class boy and girl’s childhood with
the later violence of English patriarchal dominion over other races. In this quietly
devastating narrative, a racist, misogynist English soldier in Burma buys a Burmese
girl from her father and takes her as his concubine. He names her “Georgina,”
after himself—with the obvious egotistical implications. Georgina is a wonderful
homemaker and lover—frugal, passionate, loyal. She is, Kipling makes quite clear, a
much more admirable character than the unfeeling George, whom she adores “like a
god.” Without in any way blaming Georgina for her victimization at the hands of both
Burmese and English patriarchies or condemning her for her worship of Georgie,
Kipling indicates that the Burmese girl is unwittingly complicit in her subjection
by accepting Georgie’s white male superiority. The comfortable home life she so
willingly provides for George engenders a desire in him for real marriage—which
for George, means marriage to “a sweet English maiden who would not smoke
cheroots, and would play upon a piano instead of a banjo.”
Dispatching the reluctant Georgina back to the father from whom George bought
her, he himself sails to England in search of his English bride. Once having found
his desired wife in a suitable middle-class Englishwoman, George takes her back to
the East, this time settling in India. Georgina, meanwhile, embarks on a journey of
heroic dimensions—400 miles—in order to rejoin her beloved “husband” George.
She arrives at his new outpost, only to be discovered by George’s friend and fellow
officer, who sympathizes with the “poor beast” Georgina, but does not consider her
to be of the same species as his friend’s civilized English bride. He seems, rather
uncomfortably, to be too fond of George’s wife himself, referring to her as an adored
“angel.” The story closes after the officer kindly but firmly shows Georgina that
George is happily married now to a much-superior being. Georgina creeps down
to the rocks by the river to weep—and perhaps to destroy herself—fulfilling the
40 At the recent 2005 NAVSA in Charlottesville, Virginia, Kelly Hager gave a brilliant
talk that focused in part upon Punch and Judy violence in The Old Curiosity Shop. After the
presentation, Kelly and I discussed Dickens, Punch and Judy, and Kipling, and we both think
that Punch and Judy marital violence serves in both texts in part as a mask for violence to the
child, both sexual and social.
41 Peter Morey, Fictions of India: Narrative and Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2000), p. 30.
promise of the story’s Mother Goose rhyme (“kissed the girls and made them cry”),
the story’s epigraph. The English bride and Georgie hear the crying and are indignant
about the natives who “beat” their wives, while they affectionately joke with one
another about the impossibility that the civilized Georgie will ever beat his beloved
wife. Meanwhile, the “beaten” Georgina weeps by the river while the beastly George
lives a “civilized” existence with his English angel, a woman who prefigures Kurtz’s
Intended a decade later in Heart of Darkness.
Perhaps the most frightening of the Kipling stories that negotiate the imperial
encounter is “The Mark of the Beast.” Indian soldiers once again figure centrally in
this story of tensions between East and West. The story is told by a British soldier
who is knowledgeable about the ways of India. He tells of a New Year’s Eve party
of soldiers, civil servants, and planters, and he defends their drunken rowdiness:
“When men foregather from the uttermost ends of the Empire, they have a right to
be riotous.” The play and the talk centers on animals or metaphors of animals, and
one man playing pool seems animal-like: “… they tried to play pool with a curled-
up hedgehog found in the garden, and one of them carried the marker round in his
teeth. Half a dozen planters had come in from the south and were talking ‘horse’
to the Biggest Liar in Asia, who was trying to cap all their stories at once.” Later,
the storyteller lets us know that the Empire’s ambassadors dispersed far and wide:
“some of us went away and annexed Burma, and some tried to open up the Soudan
and were opened up by Fuzzies in that cruel scrub outside Suakim, and some found
stars and medals ….”
The New Year will begin with new knowledge of the East—and of themselves—
that the Westerners will ultimately reject as too frightening. The nameless narrator
and his police friend Strickland form a “Guard of Dishonour” to escort the drunken
landowner Fleete home. On the way, Fleete desecrates a statue in the temple of
Hanuman, the monkey-god: “Fleete dashed up the steps, patted two priests on the
back, and was gravely grinding the ashes of his cigar-butt into the forehead of the
red stone image of Hanuman.” Fleete calls out drunkenly: “Shee that? ‘Mark of
the B-beasht! I made it. Ishn’t it fine?” Retribution for this desecration is swift and
violent: Fleete is embraced by a leprous “Silver Man” who emerges from behind the
monkey-god’s image, “perfectly naked in that bitter, bitter cold, and his body shone
like frosted silver, for he was what the Bible calls ‘a leper as white as snow.’” The
sacred Silver Man is also like an inoffensive, playful animal, who “mews like an
otter”; he clasps Fleete and “dropped his head on Fleete’s breast.”
The Silver Man’s animal magic is both swift and dramatic. The drunken Fleete is
almost immediately turned into a predatory animal, a wolf or a leopard, who smells
blood and is always hungry for raw meat. His friends find a mark “just over his left
breast, a mark, the perfect double of the black rosettes—the five or six irregular
blotches arranged in a circle—on a leopard’s hide.” Fleete has become the devouring
animal that he is in his heart, and the narrator tells his friend Strickland that “he ate
his food like a beast.” The stable’s horses are terrified, and Fleete is getting hungrier
by the moment, eventually losing human speech and making only “beast-noises in
the back of his throat.”
The West demonstrates superior force—but not, significantly, superior soul—by
torturing the mewing, otter-like Silver Man until he agrees to take away the “evil
spirit” that has imbued Fleete. With a touch upon Fleete’s left breast, the Silver Man
removes the animal spirit from the Englishman’s body, and the mark of the beast
disappears. In sharp contrast to the Silver Man’s gentleness, the torturing of the
Silver Man by red-hot gun-barrels is so horrific that the narrator tells us “this part is
not to be printed.” What is not written is the torture of this sacred Indian man/animal
by the profane English brute/man. Although the narrator knows this and tells this to
us, he ultimately refuses to acknowledge the larger implications of his story. Haunted
by his perilous experience with Strickland and Fleete, still the narrator closes his
tale with the assurance that the story should not be told to the public because they
would not believe it, and “it is well known to every right-minded man that the gods
of the heathen are stone and brass, and any attempt to deal with them otherwise is
justly condemned.” The knowledge that Doyle’s and Jacobs’s characters are forced
to confront is, finally, denied by Kipling’s narrator—but the savagery of the Empire
is illumined by his tale, and burns darkly in the memories of his listeners.
Late Victorian and early Edwardian texts continued to depict the imperial encounter
in images of the animal. Some of these tales are famous, such as Tarzan of the Apes
(1912), the American Edgar Rice Burroughs’s saga of the natural man who cannot
happily return to civilization’s artifice and brutality as England’s Lord Greystoke.42
Less well known is W.H. Hudson’s haunting Green Mansions (1904), the elegiac tale
of the Fall of Man and the first murder, figured as the love of the Hispano-American
Abel and his white-robed “bird girl” Rima, murdered by the savage natives because
she is a friend to all the animals rather than hunting them. Vegetarian, clothed in
spiders’ webs, Rima is the last of her exterminated people, the final descendant of a
peaceable race. Hudson, a British naturalist raised in Venezuela, writes in opposition
to the violent exploitation of aboriginal peoples. In Green Mansions, he recasts the
imperialist conflict in biblical terms, finding his character Abel’s murdered soul in
the bird-girl who flames in the heart of darkness.43
Purportedly translated from the Spanish into English by the Venezuelan expatriate
Abel’s nameless English “nearest friend,” the entire text is a eulogy by this nameless
man for both “Mr. Abel” and his beloved Rima of the forest. The novel is a frame
narrative, with the Prologue written by the English friend about Abel, and the rest of
the text the friend’s transcription of Abel’s oral tale, as Abel told it to him. Abel’s act
of telling his story is itself an act of conciliation as well as expiation, for his English
friend has accused him of coldness and a lack of reciprocity.44 The narrator tells us
42 Although many of us were raised with Johnny Weismuller’s athletic Tarzan, the most
faithful film representation of Burroughs’s book is Hugh Hudson’s lyrical 1984 film The Legend
of Greystoke, with Christopher Lambert as a beautiful, melancholy Tarzan/Greystoke.
43 Hudson was particularly appalled by the murderous trade in exotic bird feathers. It was
Hudson’s “concern for the welfare of his beloved birds” that led to his “personal involvement
such as the preliminary skirmishing which resulted in the formation of the Royal Society for
the Protection of Birds, an organisation which virtually recognizes Hudson as its patron saint”
(Peter Dance, Foreword to W.H. Hudson, A Shepherd’s Life (Reprint edn, Tisbury, Wiltshire,
England: The Compton Press, 1978). See also Anca Vlasopolos, “Pacific Harvests” in this
collection for another rendering of the consequences of this pillage.
44 This accusation of coldness between men and the act of telling/writing as expiation is
oddly reminiscent of Gilbert Markham’s words to his brother-in-law Halford on the very first
that he and Abel were brought together by a love of English literature, and especially
a knowledge and love of “modern poetry”: “This feeling brought us together, and
made us two—the nervous olive-skinned Hispano-American of the tropics and the
phlegmatic blue-eyed Saxon of the cold north—one in spirit and more than brothers.”
An act of civilization—translation of a written text—will replace the murder enacted
between the first two brothers. And the scion of the British Empire is warned by the
conquistador.
Abel’s text is a testament of faithful love, of revenge and murder, and of the
hope of forgiveness. He tells of the primeval beauty of Rima’s forest, her “wild
paradise,” of her own supernatural loveliness, of her unknowable language and song,
an “exquisite bird-melody,” and of her loving, fierce soul. He tells how she is burned
alive in her tree by the ignorant natives who are afraid she is a “daughter of the
Didi,” an evil Spirit, the fire “shriveling her like a frail, white-winged moth into the
finest white ashes.” In his turn, he helps an enemy tribe to murder Rima’s murderers.
Now a killer himself and in a state he later calls “moral insanity,” he wanders Cain-
like through the forest wilderness, nearly mad, until he feels repentance brought on
by visions of the beatific Rima.
Abel abruptly realizes that he has been in a state of madness for the two months
after Rima’s murder: “If I had really been insane during those two months, if some
cloud had been on me, some demoniacal force dragging me on, the cloud and insanity
vanished and the constraint was over in one moment, when that hellish enterprise
was completed.” When the murderers are all dead, Abel can no longer kill, and “for
Rima’s sake, I could slay no living thing except from motives of hunger,” even the
“monstrous hairy hermit spider” that haunts his hut each night and seems to be as
much a psychic vision as a real creature.
During his crazed wanderings after his revenge murders, Abel’s killing of a
sloth as an act of survival rather than an act of revenge is an important symbolic
event that culminates in his return to sanity, his acceptance of Rima’s death, and
the inheritance of her loving spirit despite his own fallenness. Abel has become a
“gaunt, ragged man with a tangled mass of black hair falling over his shoulders, the
bones of his face showing through the dead-looking, sun-parched skin, the sunken
eyes with a gleam in them which was like insanity.” Then he has a vision of Rima
that makes him realize his murders had “cast a shadow” on her soul. Shortly after
Abel experiences this sorrowful vision, he unexpectedly finds a sloth in the forest, “a
robust, round-headed, short-legged creature” that Abel kills quickly and mercifully
for food. He pities the sloth, imagining Rima’s petting of its round head: “‘Poor
sloth!’ I said as I stood over it. ‘Poor old lazy-bones!’ Did Rima ever find you fast
asleep in a tree … and with her little hand pat your round, human-like head; and
laugh mockingly at the astonishment in your drowsy, waking eyes; and scold you
tenderly for wearing your nails so long, and for being so ugly?” With the food the
sloth provides, Abel can make his way slowly to the coast, and to his new life of
redemptive thought and work.
page of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: “I did not take up my pen to reproach you
… but, if possible, to atone …”
At the story’s close, all the tales of murder, of annihilation of entire tribes,
culminate in Abel’s hope for salvation, albeit through his own murders he is complicit
in the barbarity. Although the portrayal of the Amazonian natives in Green Mansions
can easily lead readers to accusations of racism and defense of Western dominion,
one can read Hudson’s novel, alternatively, as a rejection of imperialism.45 When
Abel arrives at the British Colony where he meets his literary friend, he is no longer
infected with the maddening desire for possession, the lust for gold, that first took
him into the forests. Instead, Abel’s “kindly disposition, his manner with women
… his love of little children, of all wild creatures, of nature, and of whatsoever
was furthest removed from the common material interests and concerns of a purely
commercial community” make him regarded by the inhabitants of the Guiana with
“esteem and even affection,” despite his Venezuelan citizenship. As his British
friend states: “The things which excited other men—politics, sport, and the price of
crystals—were outside of his thoughts.”
On the first page of Abel’s English friend’s Prologue, he refers both to Rima’s death
and to the fallen world that punishes her innocence: he focuses upon a mysterious
“darkened chamber” in Abel’s Guianan house, in which there is “a cinerary urn, its
surface ornamented with flower and leaf and thorn, and winding through it all the
figure of a serpent” (Chapter 1). With Rima’s inurned ashes as both memento mori
and sacred relic, symbol of her love for all creatures and her sacrifice in the fallen
world, Abel struggles toward his own personal redemption: “there is a way, which
every soul can find out for itself—even the most rebellious, the most darkened with
crime and tormented by remorse. In that way I have walked ….” In Green Mansions,
the male imperialist aggressor becomes the worshipper of the female/animal goddess
of peace on earth, whose fiery sacrifice has allowed his own redemption.
Out of Rima the bird-girl’s ashes rises, phoenix-like, the continued negotiation of
the imperial encounter in animal metaphor in later Edwardian fiction, most famously
in the 1912 American Tarzan of the Apes. In Edgar Rice Burroughs’s boys’ adventure
tale, the admirable John Clayton, the future English Lord Greystoke, heir to an
earldom, is orphaned as a baby in the African jungle and lives to be King of the Apes.
In the original book that begins the chronicle of Tarzan’s adventures, the Ape-Man
refuses to inherit his English titles, an act of renunciation that costs him not only his
earldom but also the girl he loves, Jane Porter. In later Tarzan stories, he does finally
marry Jane (at the end of The Return of Tarzan), but he ultimately comes back to the
African jungle from all his travels, refusing the life of a ruling-class imperialist even
after others come to know his real identity as the Earl of Greystoke. Through his
return to his jungle home, Tarzan chooses not only to live with wild animals, primates
lower than he on the evolutionary scale—he also identifies himself symbolically as a
colonial ‘animal’ subject, King of the Apes. Perhaps the consummate expression of
45 See in particular Ian Duncan, Introduction to Green Mansions (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1998). I am grateful to Professor Duncan for alerting me to his work after
I presented my paper, “From Heathcliff through Black Beauty to Rima” at the 2001 INCS
Conference in Eugene, Oregon.
the tension between animal and man in the Victorian imperial encounter is this act:
the English earl/ape-man refuses to be an imperialist.46
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Chapter 11
Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts:

Stray Women and Stray Dogs in
Oliver Twist
Grace Moore
In the closing pages of Oliver Twist, the criminal Bill Sikes’s dog Bull’s-eye
plunges to a dramatic end as he leaps toward his dead master’s shoulders. Howling
dismally and emerging from concealment only at this final moment, Bull’s-eye
appears the epitome of canine virtue whose life is no longer worth living once his
owner has gone. Bull’s-eye’s apparent loyalty is particularly staggering given that
a few chapters earlier, Sikes had attempted to drown him, fearing that the dog’s
distinctive appearance would lead to his capture and arrest for the murder of the
tragic prostitute Nancy. Physically and verbally abused throughout the novel, Bull’s-
eye’s relationship with his owner uncannily parallels the interactions between Sikes
and Nancy. United in their hopeless loyalty to Sikes, Bull’s-eye and Nancy form two
corners of a triangular relationship, in which the dog frequently mediates between
the two humans. This chapter will examine Bull’s-eye’s role as a criminal animal,
paying particular attention to his interactions with both Sikes and Nancy and the
ways in which Dickens offloads undesirable traits from the two characters onto the
dog.
As a keen dog lover Charles Dickens is renowned for having created some of
the most memorable canines in the English literary canon. As the nineteenth-century
military hero and animal lover E[dward] B[ruce] Hamley has commented:
Dickens has doubly and trebly proved himself a dog-fancier by his portrait of Diogenes,
the enemy of Mr. Toots; and Gyp [sic], adored by Dora; and Boxer, the associate of John
Peerybingle, who took an obtrusive interest in the baby: besides which he has devoted a
whole paper of his “Uncommercial Traveller” to dogs, especially those who keep blind
men, and has added to his animal gallery a capital pony and a miraculous raven.
Notably absent from this impressive array of faithful Dickensian hounds, however,
is Bill Sikes’s dog, Bull’s-eye; the most complicated animal to appear in any of
I am extremely grateful to Deborah Morse, Cathy Scott, Lucy Sussex and Kate Watson, each
of whom has contributed to the completion of this chapter in differing and characteristically
generous ways. This essay is for Henry: “wonderful dog— valuable dog that— very” (The
Pickwick Papers, p. 12).
E.B. Hamley, Our Poor Relations: A Philozoic Essay (Edinburgh and London: William
Blackwood and Sons, 1872), p. 58.
Dickens’s novels. The majority of Dickens’s dogs are affectionate, humorous
and loyal companions who offer comic relief at tense junctures in the narratives.
However, in creating Bull’s-eye Dickens tapped into a number of important early
nineteenth-century debates on animal welfare and society’s changing perception
of animals. In particular he drew upon the growing belief that animals and human
beings shared a number of behavioral characteristics and on an increasing interest
in the dog and his interactions with humans. Bull’s-eye is the most psychologically
complex animal to appear in any of Dickens’s novels. It is his curious relationship
with his brutal owner and Nancy that distinguishes him from Dickens’s other, more
light-hearted canine creations and makes him just as significant as any of the novel’s
human characters.
Perceptions of dogs had been changing in Britain since the onset of the
industrial revolution and, as they became increasingly domesticated, so dogs were
anthropomorphized more and more. The children’s writer and animal enthusiast
Joseph Taylor outlined some of the key characteristics ascribed to the nineteenth-
century canine in The General Character of the Dog (1804):
He is all zeal, ardour, and obedience. More apt to recal [sic] to mind benefits than injuries;
he is not discouraged by blows or bad treatment, but calmly suffers, and soon forgets
them. Instead of flying, or discovering marks of resentment, he exposes himself to torture,
and licks the hand from which he received the blow: to the cruelty of his master, he only
opposes complaint, patience, and submission.
Taylor’s portrait of the long-suffering and loyal dog will be as familiar to today’s
readers as it was to those of the nineteenth century, but it is a portrait that Dickens
explicitly rejects in Oliver Twist. Instead of meekly accepting Sikes’s cruelty like
Taylor’s mild-mannered dogs, with their short memories and forgiving natures,
the cur Bull’s-eye is as short-tempered as his owner, acting upon resentment when
he feels it and suffering the consequences of his impulses. Bull’s-eye certainly
suffers more than his fair share of blows and verbal abuse, yet he resists Taylor’s
neat characterization and Dickens seems almost to be writing against a prevalent
tendency to valorize the dog:
Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by their masters; but Mr.
Sikes’s dog, having faults of temper in common with his owner, and labouring, perhaps,
at this moment, under a powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his
For instance, Dora Spenlow’s excessive regard for her little dog, Jip, lightens the tone
of the passages where David Copperfield attempts to “mould” his wife into a more suitable
helpmeet.
Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing
(Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 1–3.
Joseph Taylor, The General Character of the dog: illustrated by a variety of original
and interesting anecdotes of that beautiful and useful animal, in prose and verse (London:
Darton and Harvey, 1804), p. 3.
Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts 203
teeth in one of the half-boots. Having given it a hearty shake, he retired, growling, under a
form; just escaping the pewter measure which Mr. Sikes levelled at his head.
This scene emphasizes Bull’s-eye’s peculiar positioning within the novel, embodying
elements of both the victim and the ruthless accomplice, not unlike the youthful, but
hardened members of Fagin’s gang, who have come to embrace their corruption
whole-heartedly. In this scene Bull’s-eye displays his affinities with Sikes, but also
his submission to his owner’s iron rule, pointing to the complexity of their day-to-
day interactions.
Despite rejecting the convention of the dog as willing victim, Dickens
anthropomorphizes Bull’s-eye, representing him as an accepted and loyal member
of Fagin’s band. When explaining the meaning of the word “prig”—meaning a
petty thief—to Oliver, the Artful Dodger attests to Bull’s-eye’s criminal credentials,
describing him as “the downiest one of the lot” (p. 130) and praising his staunch
refusal to betray the group, even in the face of adversity. Through this encounter
we learn that Bull’s-eye is a solitary creature who rejects the society of other dogs.
More importantly, however, he is deliberately aligned with human beings, with the
narrator commenting ironically that, “there are a good many ladies and gentlemen,
claiming to be out-and-out Christians, between whom, and Mr. Sikes’ dog, there exist
strong and singular points of resemblance” (p. 130). The dog’s human characteristics
are outlined further by Charley Bates in the aftermath of Sikes’s illness, when he
declares, “I never see such a jolly dog as that … smelling the grub like a old lady
going to market! He’d make his fortun on the stage that dog would, and rewive the
drayma besides” (p. 290). Charley’s comment here is particularly interesting in its
alignment of Bull’s-eye with the feminine, which reminds readers of his complete
subordination to Sikes. It also foreshadows some of the very real drama to unfold
in the pages to follow, anticipating Nancy’s insubordination to Sikes’s will and the
ghastly melodrama surrounding her murder.
In many ways, Bull’s-eye’s role is to emphasize Sikes’s irredeemable criminality.
Harriet Ritvo has drawn attention to how animal welfare had, by the nineteenth
century, become intertwined with notions of Englishness and virtue. The abuse
of domestic animals like dogs had come to be seen as something alien and other,
and Ritvo has astutely commented that, “The Victorian critique of “inhumanity”
… confounded two missions: to rescue animal victims and to suppress dangerous
elements of human society.” The fact that Bull’s-eye has assimilated so many of
Sikes’s character traits points to the house-breaker’s truly pernicious influence.
According to Ritvo’s arguments, Sikes is a throwback who confounds contemporary
morality and who alienates himself from society as a whole through his maltreatment
of his dog. Indeed, Joseph Taylor rather naively observed that “… even in the homes
of crime, hearts may be made more tender by kind acts and words for the dumb
creatures that always return love for love” (Taylor, p. 75). So hardened a criminal is
Oliver Twist, ed. Humphry House (Oxford: The Oxford Illustrated Dickens, Oxford
University Press, 1994), p. 103.
Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), p. 131.
Sikes that he cannot even find “kind words” for his dog, and his abuse of Bull’s-eye
should prepare the reader for his later, brutal attack on Nancy.
While Bull’s-eye cannot be neatly classified as a “pet”, he is a thoroughly urban
animal and, as Marion Scholtmeijer has commented, “Urban existence and cruelty
to animals are strangely linked.” While for the Victorians the city was the epitome
of civilization and progress, cruelty to animals had become a sign of the metropolis’s
savage underbelly and a dangerous reminder of the perils of backsliding. As Ivan
Kreilkamp notes in Chapter 5 many nineteenth-century dogs remained in danger
of “absolute disintegration.” Moreover, Robert Mighall has argued that in Oliver
Twist Dickens sought to steer crime fiction away from the “charming” distance
of eighteenth-century gothic writing, creating in its place a new urban gothic to
represent the realities of crime in the metropolis. Mighall reads environments
like the rookeries of Oliver Twist as places of degeneration, and argues that their
inhabitants are throwbacks to humanity’s savage past. Mighall’s remarks form part
of a critique of the short-sightedness of later nineteenth-century criminologists like
Cesare Lombroso, or Max Nordau, who focused their attentions upon the body and
brain of the criminal, rather than looking to geography for answers. Mighall follows
Dickens’s lead and instead examines the role of environments like rookeries and
lairs in shaping and propagating criminality, a concern that Dickens pursues in his
depiction of the rookery, Tom-all-Alone’s in Bleak House where he anticipates the
putrid contamination that will seep from Tom to corrupt and infect the rest of the
city of London.
So completely does Sikes fit the “type” of the urban criminal, that he is only
vulnerable when he leaves the anonymity of the city to commit the burglary in
Chertsey, which fails when Oliver alerts the household to his presence. Bill is so
alienated from metropolitan morality that by the end of the novel he has moved
beyond mere cruelty to become an animal himself and is referred to as the “wild
beast,” with Dickens’s illustrator George Cruikshank accentuating his degenerate
appearance in the text’s accompanying engravings (see, for instance “The Last
Chance”). Moreover, for Cruikshank, Bull’s-eye seems to have come to embody
his master’s regressive traits by staying loyal to him, since his drawings of the dog
become increasingly ape-like in the final plates. Indeed, Dickens’s friend John
Forster had complained in a letter to the publisher Richard Bentley of November
1838 that Cruikshank had depicted the dog as “a tail-less baboon,” thus unwittingly
drawing attention to his degeneracy.10
While Bull’s-eye is contaminated by Bill’s evil, he remains a victim. His fierce
behavior complicates our compassionate response to his abuse, in a text where
Marion Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction from Sanctity to Sacrifice

(Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1993), p. 142.
Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s
Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Osbert Sitwell ed. (Oxford: The Oxford Illustrated
Dickens, Oxford University Press, 1996).
10 Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. I 1820–1839. Madeline House
and Graham Storey (eds) (Pilgrim edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 451.
the boundaries between good and evil are frequently blurred. In writing of the
maltreatment of animals in fiction Marion Scholtmeijer has observed:
[T]he very dilemma that fiction writers face in uniting animals and cities draws out a
highly complex appreciation of the animal. In a strange way, acts of violence in these
stories acknowledge the reality of animals. The moment of enlightenment for the reader
if not obviously for the character comes with the recognition of the similarity between
the victimized person and the victimized animal. It appears paradoxically that, by means
of aggressive acts, urban people can reach across the chasm separating urban and animal
life. Indeed—and this is the most terrifying feature of urbanism—cruelty to animals in the
urban setting muddles up sanity with madness. In the fiction that brings the urban person
to the point of cruelty to animals, that cruelty can even signal the individual’s genuine
contact with his or her own humanity. (Scholtmeijer, p. 145)
Scholtmeijer’s comments suggest a convergence between the animal and human

victims that is helpful in understanding the series of connections between Nancy and
Bull’s-eye that run through the novel; both are Sikes’s victims and both display a
frustrating complicity in their own continued abuse. In addition, both are complicit in
supporting Bill’s thuggery, almost acting as extensions of him, as Nancy demonstrates
when she abducts Oliver and as Bull’s-eye reveals on his first appearance, where
his “face scratched and torn in twenty places,” his scowling eyes and his skulking
demeanor mirror those of his master (p. 86). Scholtmeijer’s assertion that aggression
against animals is also bound up with urban alienation and issues of self-definition
also sheds light upon Sikes’s personality and his own subordinate relationship to
the more devious mastermind behind the gang, Fagin. Unable to assert preeminence
within the gang of thieves, Sikes uses Bull’s-eye and, to a lesser degree, Nancy to
demonstrate his superior physical strength and ruthlessness to those around him. His
abuse of his two closest companions forms part of a brutal performance, wherein
the two victims’ abused bodies act as permanent signifiers of Sikes’s dominance and
lack of mercy.
In a novel where a number of characters are doubled (Oliver and the doomed
orphan, Little Dick, Nancy and Rose Maylie, and Oliver’s dead mother, Agnes, and
Nancy to name but a few), Bull’s-eye functions as a doppelgänger for Nancy at a
number of points. The parallels between the dog and the woman are established
early in the narrative, with Bill’s exchanges with Nancy echoing his interactions
with Bull’s-eye, kicking the dog when his countenance suggests reluctance to follow
him and verbally abusing the young woman. We learn on our first encounter with
Bull’s-eye that “He appeared well used [to violence] … for he coiled himself up in
a corner very quietly without uttering a sound” (p. 86). Meanwhile, shortly after this
altercation, Bill menaces Nancy into disguising herself as Oliver’s sister. It is Fagin,
however, who makes the links between Bill’s two co-dependents most explicit when
he attempts to incite Nancy to murder the villain. Adopting a persuasive tone, he
urges:
You have a friend in me, Nance; a staunch friend. I have the means at hand, quiet and
close. If you want revenge on those that treat you like a dog!—worse than his dog, for he
humours him sometimes—come to me. I say, come to me. (p. 340)
Fagin’s suggestion that Bull’s-eye is better treated than Nancy offers a gloomy insight
into the degree of ill usage that Dickens is unable to show his human character
enduring at the hands of her lover. Fagin’s allusions to extreme violence and cruelty
ominously anticipate the later events he engineers when he incites Bill to kill Nancy.
Indeed, even in their deaths the pair continue to parallel one another, with Nancy
“nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash on her forehead”
(p. 362), while the dog lies in a ditch with his brains dashed out.
Bull’s-eye’s presence in the text makes Sikes’s magnetic hold over Nancy more
credible, since he too is unable to leave in spite of a lifetime of ill treatment. In
addition, when he is the victim of Sikes’s violence, Bull’s-eye acts as a kind of foil,
absorbing more blows and abuse than Nancy, up until the final murder, where the
two change places. Contemporary readers were horrified by the violence of Nancy’s
death. Richard Ford, writing in the Quarterly Review, objected to Dickens’s graphic
depiction of criminals and their slang, but could not fail to be moved by Nancy’s
fate. While Ford cast aspersions on the plausibility of some of Nancy’s choices, he
commented that “The circumstantiality of the murder of Nancy is more harrowing
than the bulletin of 50,000 men killed at Borodino,”11 going on to add that, “her death
is drawn with a force which quite appals” (p. 98).12 Dickens famously exploited the
emotions evoked by the scene in his public readings of the 1860s, when the drama and
pathos of “Sikes and Nancy” moved audiences to horrified tears. Reactions to Bull’s-
eye’s abuse and eventual death would be much more complicated, embodying as he
does elements of both Sikes and Nancy, and because of his status as an animal, rather
than a rational human being. Ironically, in a discussion of “Martin’s Act” of 1824,
Hilda Kean has commented on the paradox whereby, “The state was intervening in
‘domestic relationships’ decades before it would do so on behalf of children or of
adult women.”13 The law as it was written, then, notionally offered more protection
to Bull’s-eye than to Nancy and in a Victorian urban setting even a “cur” like Bull’s-
eye would have elicited more sympathy than a streetwalker.
Bull’s-eye is not the only Dickensian dog to display strong links to a female
protagonist. In Dombey and Son, Florence Dombey’s dog Diogenes provides an
unlikely outlet for his owner’s repressed passions, bounding effusively toward
Walter Gay at every possible opportunity. Dora Spenlow’s life is so closely entwined
with that of her little dog Jip that he is unable to go on living after her death. Dickens
shows Jip to be an alter-ego for the giddy, girlish young Dora who gradually has her
life “moulded” out of her through her husband David’s attempts to be “firm.” Jip
11 “Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress. By Boz”. The Quarterly Review (vol. 64,
1839): 991.
12 Interestingly, Ford describes Sikes as “a thorough miscreant, of that coarse, bull-dog
grossness, which is peculiar to this country …” (p. 99), although he goes no further to develop
the implicit parallel between dog and master.
13 Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800
(London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 34. The original Martin’s Act of 1822 (named after the
MP who campaigned for its introduction, Richard Martin) was a piece of legislation through
which it became a criminal offence to physically abuse farm animals, including sheep and
cattle. The act was followed by a second bill of 1924, which sought to protect dogs, cats and
monkeys.
recognizes from the outset that David will be bad for Dora, growling and gnashing
his teeth at his mistress’s suitor and refusing to smell his flowers.14 Furthermore, in
Little Dorrit, Henry Gowan’s dog, Lion leaps at the criminal Blandois, expressing
the fear that Amy feels but cannot articulate when she looks into the evil man’s eyes.
Oliver Twist, I would argue, offers the most sustained examination of the interactions
between human characters and a dog, mapping out a triangular relationship between
Bull’s-eye, Nancy and Bill in which the dog comes to embody significant elements
of both characters.
Dickens’s decision to include a prostitute in his criminal gang attracted
widespread disapproval from the novel’s first reviewers. As a realist writer with a
strong commitment to confronting the middle-class reading public with the need
for social reform, Dickens was certainly aware of his character’s potential for
outrage. Readers with delicate sensibilities like those “of so refined and delicate a
nature” whom Dickens attacks in his Preface of 1867 would have found it difficult
to empathize with a woman in Nancy’s position. Just as the more self-righteous
characters in the novel condemn Oliver’s mother for her weakness, so Nancy would
also have been held responsible for her plight. Dickens certainly attempted to
confront the judgmental by having Nancy turn on Fagin and berate him with her
corruption, but critics like Thackeray still maintained that Dickens had romanticized
the criminal class. Far from seeking to glamorize crime, Dickens was attempting to
reveal its creeping contagion and, I would argue, added Bull’s-eye to the criminal
band as a way of demonstrating that crime can corrupt all but the exceptional few.
As he protested in the Preface:
It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to
paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their
lives, to show them as they really were, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest
paths of life, with the great black ghastly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them
where they might; it appeared to me that to do this, would be to attempt a something which
was needed, and which would be a service to society. And I did it as I best could. (p. xv)
Dickens makes a number of significant connections between Bull’s-Eye and Nancy,

both of whom are united in their inability to break free from Sikes. Women, like
dogs, are associated with domestic space in nineteenth-century Britain, but neither
Bull’s-eye nor Nancy can be neatly contained within the domestic sphere. There
were, of course, numerous charitable institutions committed to reclaiming women
14 Jip subsequently exposes David and Dora’s relationship to Dora’s cruel chaperone,
Miss Murdstone, when he is found carrying one of David’s love letters between his jaws,
suggesting perhaps that he hoped to be rid of David through the exposure. Later, when Dora
becomes aware that she will never be able to become the wife David needs and as she grows
conscious that her husband’s true partner in life should be his childhood friend and “sister”,
Agnes Wickfield, Dora begins to fade from life, dying from a miscarried pregnancy that
David mistakenly believed might help her grow into a woman. As a result of the extraordinary
empathy he shares with Dora, Jip too loses his fragile hold on life as Dora dies; as David
recounts, “He lies down at my feet, stretches himself out as if to sleep, and with a plaintive
cry, is dead” (p. 768).
like Nancy from their lives of crime, Dickens’s Urania Cottage project of the 1840s
offering just one example. However, when Mr Brownlow and Rose Maylie offer
Nancy a new life overseas, she declines, declaring passionately that she is unwilling
to leave Bill and unable to reform. Nancy’s fatalistic attitude here anticipates Bull’s-
eye’s loyal shadowing of Bill in the final chapters. Dickens complained in his Preface
that, “It has been observed of Nancy that her devotion to the brutal house-breaker
does not seem natural” (p. xvii). Yet, Bull’s-eye’s continued devotion is even more
perplexing; since he has witnessed Sikes’s murder of Nancy and even trodden in her
blood, he knows that he can expect no mercy from his master.
The relationship between Sikes, Nancy and Bull’s-eye is at its most effective
when all others are excluded from it. This insularity is at its height during the period
following the aborted break-in, where Nancy and the dog hold a bedside vigil for
the house-breaker:
The dog sat at the bedside: now eyeing his master with a wistful look, and now pricking
his ears, and uttering a low growl as some noise in the street or in the lower part of the
house, attracted his attention. Seated by the window, busily engaged in patching an old
waistcoat which formed a portion of the robber’s ordinary dress, was a female: so pale and
reduced with watching and privation, that there would have been considerable difficulty in
recognising her as the same Nancy who has already figured in this tale …. (p. 287)
Here Bull’s-eye and Nancy are united in their concern for Bill, and while worry has
left Nancy a shadow of her former self, Bull’s-eye is here almost unrecognizable in
his behaviour. The dog’s wistful yearning for his master to awake aligns him more
closely with Nancy than at any other point in the novel. Spurning the role of ferocious
cur, Bull’s-eye’s conduct is highly feminized in this scene, which reveals the depths
of his attachment to and dependency upon his master. Bull’s-eye’s yearning here
converges with Nancy’s listless watchfulness, and both the dog and the woman are
sapped of their vitality while Bill is unconscious.
While René Girard has commented that triangles of desire are under constant
pressure, owing to rivalry between the desiring and the vanity of the desired, Bull’s-
eye’s status as a dog makes this Dickensian triangle a little more complicated. Sikes
clearly demands complete loyalty from both Nancy and Bull’s-eye, both of whom
evidently share an inexplicable attachment to or co-dependency with their tormentor.
Although it is difficult to determine why the villain enjoys this hold over either one of
them, both Nancy and Bull’s-eye occupy positions within the Victorian social order
that leave them vulnerable.15 Brute though he may be, Sikes offers some degree of
protection to two figures who would otherwise find themselves alone on the streets.
The “statement of a Prostitute” which appears in Mayhew’s London Labour and the
London Poor points to the precarious existence of the streetwalker, with its young
speaker commenting, “I continued walking the streets for three years, sometimes
making a good deal of money, sometimes none, feasting one day and starving the
15 Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne
Freccero (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965).
next.”16 This unreliable lifestyle is remarkably similar to the foraging existence
of a stray dog—a parallel that Dickens highlights when the starving “spirited and
rampacious animal” Oliver Twist devours scraps intended for the Sowerberrys’
dog, Trip, at the beginning of the novel. Indeed, so compelling was this analogy for
Dickens that he returned to it in Bleak House (1851–53), aligning Jo the dispossessed
crossing sweeper with a drover’s dog:
A band of music comes, and plays. Jo listens to it. So does a dog—a drover’s dog, waiting
for his master outside a butcher’s shop, and evidently thinking about those sheep he has
had upon his mind for some hours, and is happily rid of. He seems perplexed respecting
three or four, can’t remember where he left them, looks up and down the street, as half
expecting to see them astray, suddenly pricks up his ears and remembers all about it. A
thoroughly vagabond dog, accustomed to low company and public-houses; a terrific dog
to sheep, ready at a whistle to scamper over their backs, and tear out mouthfuls of their
wool; but an educated, improved, developed dog, who has been taught his duties and
knows how to discharge them. He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same
amount of animal satisfaction; likewise as to awakened association, aspiration, or regret,
melancholy or joyful reference to things beyond the senses, they are probably upon a par.
But, otherwise, how far above the human listener is the brute! Turn that dog’s descendants
wild, like Jo, and in a very few years they will so degenerate that they will lose even their
bark—but not their bite. (p. 222)
The parallels between Jo and this “thoroughly vagabond dog” are striking, and what
is clearly most significant about the scene is the superior intelligence of the dog,
who, with his thoughts of sheep and herding, possesses a much richer inner life
than poor Jo. The dog is also far better cared for than his human counterpart, having
been taught and nurtured by his master. Through comparing Jo to a dog, Dickens
highlights the boy’s wasted potential, but is also able to point to the dangers of
leaving him to scavenge on the streets. Jo’s rage, combined with that of the many
other street dwellers sharing his fate will, should it ever erupt, be much more difficult
to contain than that of a wild dog. However, the analogy allows Dickens to convey
the latent ferocity that may lurk within the dispossessed. Later in the narrative Allan
Woodcourt’s unspoken belief that young Jo was “more difficult to dispose of than an
un-owned dog,” highlights the public disregard for the street-dweller, and reinforces
Dickens’s earlier depiction of poor Jo’s bestial status (p. 636).
Almost thirty years after the publication of Oliver Twist, Dickens wrote an article
for All the Year Round, entitled “Two Dog Shows,” drawing attention to the plight
of the stray, left to roam the streets of London with no protection.17 The piece is
divided into two halves, with the first section detailing an exclusive dog show in
Islington with classic Dickensian humor, while the second part offers a parallel
“show” at the Lost Dogs’ Home in Hollingworth Street, Holloway. Dickens’s tone
changes swiftly from one of satirical amusement at the spoiled show dogs and their
somewhat preposterous owners, to a tone of real compassion for the neglected and
abused creatures who have made their way to sanctuary:
16 Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, vol. I, ed. John D. Rosenberg,
(New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1968), p. 413.
17 “Two Dog Shows,” All the Year Round, 2 August 1862.
For this second dog-show is nothing more nor less than the show of the Lost Dogs of the
metropolis—the poor vagrant homeless curs that one sees looking out for a dinner in the
gutter, or curled up in a doorway taking refuge from their troubles in sleep. (p. 495)
What is particularly striking about this compassionate description is the way it

parallels a number of Dickens’s discussions of the inmates of Urania Cottage, the
“home for homeless women” which he administered with Angela Burdett Coutts,
or the depictions of urban beggars that appear in writings like The Uncommercial
Traveller. The piece ends with advice for readers wishing to assist stray dogs in
finding their way to the home:
If it should happen in the course of your walks about the metropolis that that miserable
cur which has been described above should look into your face and find in it a certain
weakness called pity, and so should attach himself to your boot-heels; if this should befall
you, and if you should prove to be of all too feeble a character to answer the poor cur’s
appeal with a kick, you must straightway look about for some vagrant man or boy—alas!
they are as common in this town as wandering dogs—and propose to him that for a certain
guerdon he shall convey the dog to the asylum at Holloway.18
Dickens’s language here is remarkably similar to the tone of the omniscient narrator
in Bleak House, partly satirical and partly condemnatory. The almost offhand
references to “some vagrant man or boy” point to the visibility of homelessness and
dispossession within the city, implying that a stray dog is a more remarkable sight
and more likely to incite action than that of a stray man or child. Hilda Kean takes this
idea one step further, commenting in her response to the article that, “when kindly
women saw stray dogs roaming the streets of London they were not simply witnessing
fellow creatures in distress, or a putative personal loss from their own family, but
they could also witness an animal who had fallen from a position of security into
neglect” (Kean, p. 88). As well as offering a worthy cause for humanitarian ladies,
the stray dog also evokes responses akin to those of Rose Maylie when she hears
Nancy tell the story of her life. Rose begins by “involuntarily falling away from her
strange companion” when Nancy begins to tell her tale (p. 302). However, by the end
of their meeting Rose’s sympathies have been evoked and while she regards Nancy
as “a woman lost beyond redemption,” she also acknowledges to the prostitute, “You
have a claim on me” (p. 306).
The journalist and renowned slummer James Greenwood (author of The Pall
Mall Gazette’s “A Night in the Casual Ward”) explicitly equated stray dogs with
streetwalkers in his article for The Star (later a pamphlet) Going to the Dogs.19
Writing of the “Temporary Home for Lost and Starving Dogs” established in Islington
in 1860, Greenwood describes some of the inmates in terms that recall Mayhew’s
reports in The Morning Chronicle. The home is “for sick, starving, and discarded
dogs that nobody owned, and who were eking out a wretched existence, kicked
18 The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces, (ed.) Leslie C. Staples (Oxford:
The Oxford Illustrated Dickens, Oxford University Press. 1996), p. 495.
19 James Greenwood, “Going to the Dogs” (reprinted from The Star, London: C. Beckett,
1866).
from door to door, and made cruel sport of by those merciless little human savages
that infest London streets” (p. 3). The stray dogs are here depicted in abject terms
and their degradation is highlighted by the fact that they are the victims of street
children.20 As the piece continues, Greenwood distinguishes between different types
of strays—just as there are both vulnerable and hardened prostitutes—depicting the
impenitent, experienced street dogs who shrewdly keep a “regular beat,” moving
from working man to working man in order to scavenge food (p. 7). Greenwood’s
depiction of the stray dog’s night-time behavior reinforces his parallel between the
fallen woman and the “out-and-out street cur”:
His worst time is at nights, since, being a marked character in the neighbourhood, lodgings
he has none. Oh, he is an accomplished cadger. Are you out at midnight, hurrying home
muffled from the cold, you hear a soft pattering of feet behind you, and looking, behold
a poor dog—a forlorn, limp-tailed animal, with downcast eyes and woefully puckered
mouth—who stands still as you gaze on him. (p. 7)
The dog is then taken in for the night by the tender-hearted reader, only for it to
disappear with the dawn, in quest of bacon rinds and crusts of bread at the various
city eateries it haunts throughout the day, just like the prostitute with her regular
clients and watering holes. This is not to suggest that Greenwood feels anything
other than sympathy for the homeless dog. Nevertheless, he is very much aware
that, like Sikes’s Bull’s-eye, some dogs are better able to care for themselves than
others.
The columnist Mary Fortune (writing as “Waif Wanderer”) was to adopt
this equation of stray dogs with stray women in a number of her articles for The
Australian Journal in the late 1860s, although she is more kindly disposed toward
both dogs and women. In “The Dog Days” (April 1869) she blurs a discussion of
infanticide with the disposal of a dead dog, stealthily following a pair of women
who seem to be disposing of a young child, but who are in fact murdering a “little
whinging mongrel” to avoid paying a licence fee.21 However, in “Towzer and Co.”
Fortune depicts a pair of dogs quite remarkable for their resemblance to Sikes and
Nancy.22 The “Towser” of the title is a “well grown mongrel terrier” and a decidedly
dominant male dog, whose companion, referred to only as “Co” is a dispossessed
20 Greenwood goes on to chart public objections to the dogs’ home, extending his parallel
between the dispossessed and the unfortunate dog in an argument that is remarkable for its
similarity to some of Dickens’s indictments of telescopic philanthropy:
People shook their heads and sneeringly demanded to be informed whether the very last
little boy or girl had been fished out of the kennel to which the vice or poverty of its
parents had consigned it—whether it had been set on its little legs, and cleansed and
clothed, and sent to school, and permanently provided for,―that these humanitarians felt
at liberty to extend a succouring hand to the mangy little puppy dogs and prowling curs
generally orphaned and in distress. (p. 3)
21 “The Dog Days,” The Australian Journal (April 1869), p. 483.

22 I am extremely grateful to Lucy Sussex for suggesting this parallel and for drawing
my attention to Mary Fortune’s writing.
female, forced to pander to the more dominant dog’s needs, having been reclaimed
from a life on the streets. Fortune describes the unfortunate as:
A poor little trembling, yellowish-coloured mongrel, so nervous that a look is sufficient to

set it shaking from “stem to stern” is this nameless waif of caninity. It is nameless in that it
crawled—off the street, I suppose—into its present quarters, and, having apparently found
its vocation, will not leave them for any inducement. (p. 215)
She then broadens her discussion, using the abject little dog as a representative of a
whole class of women, who evoke both pity and disdain:
But however one may try to admire the idea of a dependent and helpless femininity, one
must rebel at times, for the honour of the sex, against too abject an exhibition of it, even in
a dog …. And yet, as we think a little over the position of poor little Nameless, we cannot
help extending much of pity toward her to mingle with the occasional disgust her conduct
inspires. (pp. 215–16)
This blend of humanitarianism, frustration and revulsion is remarkable for its

similarity to the reactions of Mrs Maylie’s servants when Nancy appears at the front
door, asking to see Rose. Nancy’s character in this scene is perceived as “doubtful”
and the four “chaste housemaids” recommend that she be “thrown, ruthlessly, into
the kennel,” yet she inspires pity within a man-cook, who pleads her cause (p. 299).
Mary Fortune aligns the stray dog with the stray woman, using her discussion of
canine loyalty and suffering to draw attention to the helplessness of females on the
streets and in the thrall of domineering, violent males.
The presence of Bull’s-eye makes Sikes’s and Nancy’s relationship rather
more complicated than the straightforward bullying that Fortune recounts between
Towzer and the “little Nameless.” While the triangle is unthreatened Bull’s-eye and
Nancy have little to do with one another and simply tolerate each other’s existence.
Once Nancy has compromised her loyalty, however, by meeting with Rose and
Mr Brownlow and betraying Fagin’s gang, Bill begins to pit the woman and the
dog against one another. So fragile is the menage that it is disrupted when other
characters trespass into it and it is unable to withstand any external pressure. Oliver
is the first disruptive influence, who in drawing out Nancy’s latent maternal instincts,
leads her to look beyond her own immediate concerns and who unwittingly causes
the first skirmish between herself, Bill and the dog. Oliver attempts to escape from
Fagin’s lair and Nancy leaps to his defence when his efforts are detected:
“Keep back the dog, Bill!” cried Nancy, springing before the door, and closing it, as the
Jew and his two pupils darted out in pursuit. “Keep back the dog; he”ll tear the boy to
pieces.”
“Serve him right!” cried Sikes, struggling to disengage himself from the girl’s grasp.
“Stand off from me, or I”ll split your head against the wall.”
“I don’t care for that, Bill, I don’t care for that,” screamed the girl, struggling violently
with the man: “the child shan’t be torn down by the dog, unless you kill me first.”
“Shan’t he!” said Sikes, setting his teeth. “I’ll soon do that, if you don’t keep off.”
(p. 114)
Having become unbalanced, the triangular relationship never recovers, and as
Nancy’s values are repeatedly challenged as a result of her feelings for Oliver, other
characters—most notably Fagin—intervene and disrupt the dynamic. The growing
hostility between the three comes to a head when Bill invokes Bull’s-eye to prevent
Nancy from meeting with Oliver’s protectors. Sikes threatens, “And if I hear you for
half a minute longer, the dog shall have such a grip on your throat as’ll tear some of
that screaming voice out” (p. 339). From this point onwards the disintegration of the
triangle is inevitable, with both Bull’s-eye and Nancy clamoring and failing to be
indispensable to Bill.
Ultimately, Nancy’s actions bring about the destruction of all three characters.
While Sikes’s accidental hanging mirrors the fate that the Law would have meted
out to him for his brutal slaying, Bull’s-eye’s death is almost suicide-like, with his
fatal leap from the parapet toward his master’s shoulders. Just as Sikes is unable to
live with the vivid memory of bludgeoning Nancy’s eyes, so Bull’s-eye is incapable
of living on without his master. The intensity of the violence, loyalty and suffering
of both Nancy and the dog is accentuated by the somewhat insipid interactions in the
comfortable bourgeois world to which Oliver Twist is restored. The woman, the dog
and the villain point to the true dangers of the criminal underworld, highlighting the
real otherness of the slums and the inscrutability of allegiances among the criminal
fraternity.
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist (1837–1839). Humphry House (ed.) (Oxford: The
Oxford Illustrated Dickens, Oxford University Press, 1994).
——. David Copperfield. (1849–1850). R.H. Malden (ed.) (Oxford: The Oxford
Illustrated Dickens, 1947).
——. Bleak House (1852–1853). Osbert Sitwell (ed.) (Oxford: The Oxford Illustrated
Dickens, Oxford University Press, 1996).
——. “Two Dog Shows.” All the Year Round. (2 August 1862).
——. The Uncommercial Traveller and Reprinted Pieces. 1860. Leslie C. Staples
(ed.) (Oxford: The Oxford Illustrated Dickens, Oxford University Press, 1996).
——. Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 1, 1820–1839. Madeline House and Graham
Storey (eds) (Pilgrim edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
Ford, Richard. “Oliver Twist; or the Parish Boy’s Progress. By Boz”. The Quarterly
Review. Vol. 64 (1839).
Fortune, Mary [Waif Wanderer]. “The Dog Days”. The Australian Journal (April
1869).
——. The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, Lucy Sussex (ed.) (Ringwood,Victoria:
Penguin, 1989).
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure.
Yvonne Freccero (Trans) (1961. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
Greenwood, James. “Going to the Dogs” (reprinted from The Star. London: C.
Beckett, 1866).
Hallie, Philip P. The Paradox of Cruelty (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan
Hamley, E.B. Our Poor Relations: A Philozoic Essay (Edinburgh and London:
William Blackwood and Sons, 1872).
Kean, Hilda. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800
(London: Reaktion Books, 1998).
Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing.
(Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001).
Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. I. John D. Rosenberg
(ed) (New York: Dover Publications Inc. 1968).
Mighall, Robert. A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s
Nightmares (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Ryder, Richard D. Animal Revolution. 1989 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000).
Scholtmeijer, Marion. Animal Victims in Modern Fiction from Sanctity to Sacrifice
(Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1993).
Taylor, Joseph. The General Character of the dog: illustrated by a variety of
original and interesting anecdotes of that beautiful and useful animal, in
prose and verse (London: Darton and Harvey, 1804).
Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain and Humanity in the
Victorian Mind (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1980).
Chapter 12
The Sins of Sloths:

The Moral Status of Fossil Megatheria
in Victorian Culture
Alan Rauch
We are … surprised by finding such gigantic proportions in an animal called the

megatherium, which ranks in an order now assuming much humbler forms. (Robert
Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844)
As a child, I often went to see the delightful natural history exhibits at McGill
University’s unabashedly Victorian Redpath Museum (Plates 15 and 16). Built
in the 1880s as a teaching repository for natural history, it housed the collections
of the renowned scientist and staunch anti-Darwinian, Sir William Dawson. A
natural theologian at heart, Dawson believed in a “well arranged collections of
natural objects” that would reflect “the power and divinity of nature’s author.”
While Dawson’s original intention was lost on me, I still found the museum to be
a quirky, encyclopedic place and I continued to return there for—in the Victorian
sense— “instruction and amusement” until, as a student of zoology many years later,
amusement was sacrificed for instruction and, needless to say, examination. The
centerpiece of that museum was a fossil skeleton mounted in an upright position
against a post, that served to support its weight. I supposed that creature to be a
Tyrannosaurus Rex which, even then, was the most glamorous fossil that could
occupy a child’s imagination. Only later did I discover—somewhat to my chagrin—
that the creature in question was a Megatherium, an ancestral sloth (of the Order
Edentata) that lived during the Pleistocene. That disappointment, which lasted for
years, abated as I began to discover how important the Megatherium was to Victorian
culture … and it is that issue that I want to address here.
However fascinated the Victorians eventually became with dinosaurs, a term
coined around 1840 by the great comparative anatomist Richard Owen, the great
reptiles were still relatively unknown in the early part of the nineteenth century.
There was, however, yet another set of prehistoric creatures that were for the early
Robert Chambers. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844, ed. James Secord
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
For more information about Dawson and the early collections at McGill Redpath
Museum and similar museums, see Susan Sheets-Pyenson’s, Cathedrals of Science (Kingston
and Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1988).
Cited from Sheets-Pyenson, p. 84.
Victorians equally absorbing and at least as compelling. Late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century discoveries had revealed a previously unknown group, the
Megatheria or giant ground sloths, which roamed the jungles and caves of South and
North America in the not-too-distant pleistocene. These animals were dramatically
different from the contemporary species of sloths that were described in a variety
of popular sources. As the early Victorians well knew, the living descendants of the
sloth family, not only spend their lives suspended upside down in trees, but are also
incapable of walking, and are, in fact, so slow that moss grows on their fur. The
giant ground sloths, though hardly dynamic creatures, were nevertheless remarkably
powerful and, in stark contrast to the sloths we know, were mobile, upright, and
active foragers of the forest.
The renowned French anatomist, Georges Cuvier invoked the word Megatherium,
“the great beast,” to describe the older order of sloths. No doubt, the name refers
to the remarkable size of the animals, and one can’t help but think that the name
also alludes to the colossal bones of which these fossils were comprised. The giant
ground sloth stood 13–14 feet tall, had powerful claws, incredibly massive bones
and, apparently, strong social behaviors. The first ground sloth skeleton—from
Paraguay—was mounted in Madrid and became quite well known across Europe; it
was depicted as early as 1796 in the Monthly Magazine and British Register. Other
skeletons soon emerged from South America, many sent by Charles Darwin, and
additional celebrity was added to the group when Thomas Jefferson described the
North American variety of Megatherium, Megalonyx in West Virginia. The first
major scientific document about the Megatheria was Cuvier’s description published
in 1804. The giant sloth became perhaps the most remarkable animal icon of the
early nineteenth century. Not only was the sloth depicted in virtually every new
encyclopaedia, it frequently dominated the main entranceways of natural history
museums, and eventually achieved literary notoriety especially in the works of
Charles Kingsley.
There are a number of stories to tell about the cultural status of the sloth, and
I’ll try to do them brief justice here. But the question for me is what generated this
fascination with sloths? Why did this creature, the Megatherium, which in 1832
Darwin cautiously categorized as “antediluvian,” fascinate the Victorians and
Giant ground sloths existed as recently as 8,000 years ago and some of their organic
remains, including droppings (coprolites), can still be found in isolated caves.
Georges Cuvier, 1804, “Sur le Megatherium,” Annales du Muséum d’Histoire
Naturelle, pp. 376–400.
In T.H. Shepherd’s 1837 illustration of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College
of Surgeons, for example, the Megatherium not only occupies a conspicuous space in the
museum itself, it is also the object of attention of the gentlemen (possibly led by Owen who
delivered the Hunterian lectures in 1837) depicted in the engraving. (Shepherd’s engraving is
reproduced on the cover of ISIS, Vol. 96 (4) 2005).
See Charles Darwin’s letter to his sister Caroline, dated 24 October–24 November
1832, in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1821–1836, Vol. 1, Frederick Burkhardt
and Sydney Smith (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 276.
The Sins of Sloths 217
command their attention? It may be helpful, before exploring the zoological details
of the sloth, to list some of the factors that contributed to that fascination:
1. The Giant Ground sloths represented a group of only recently extinct

mammalian organisms. Although they were found as fossil, it was clear that
they had not died out all that long ago.
2. The Giant Ground sloths were huge, rivaling in size contemporary animals
such as the rhinoceros, the elephant, and the hippopotamus which were only
just beginning to appear in English zoos and menageries.
3. The bones of the sloth were massive, and structured unlike other mammals
living or extinct. The arrangement of the frame was peculiar and even caused
some idle speculators to classify them with Quadrumana, or the primates.
4. The habits and the build of the sloth were controversial and engaging. It was
believed that they may have had protective armor composed of bony nodules
in their skin. Some believed they excavated their food, like moles, others
believed that they pulled down branches from trees. Some, including Keats,
believed that they were predatory:
Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain

Clings cruelly to us, like the gnawing sloth
On the deer’s tender haunches: late, and loth,
Tis scar’d away by slow returning pleasure.
(Endymion ll. 906–909)
5. The contemporary South American sloth as vestige of its ancestor was, for
the Victorians, a fascinating case study. Slow, upside down, with little or no
activity, or facial expressions, the modern sloth was named after a “deadly
sin” that was particularly loathesome to the Victorians. Taken as a whole,
the group’s transformation from a robust beast to an awkward tree-dweller
seemed to suggest that organic development might not, in this instance at
least, be progressive.
Let me elaborate briefly on this last and most important point. The legacy of many
prehistoric creatures—even as we consider them in our scientifically informed
modern era—seems impressive. Though Mammoths and Mastodons are gone, we
still have Asian and African elephants, and while the saber-toothed cat is long extinct,
there remains a wide array of impressive “great cats” throughout the world. But
the Megatherium, one of the most impressive mammals in history, is gone entirely
The significance of certain objects within museum collections is emerging as a

significant area of inquiry in both museology and cultural history. Samuel J.M.M. Alberti’s
recent essay, “Objects and the Museum” (ISIS 96:4 (2005): 559–71) provides an incisive
survey of object studies in general and more particularly of how we need to account for the
social “life of a museum object.”
John Keats, “Endymion” in Douglas Bush (ed.), Selected Poems and Letters (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin), p. 59. Interestingly enough a recent argument has been made in support of
carnivorous habits in the Megatherium. (See R.A. Farina and R.E. Blanco. “Megatherium the
Stabber.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B (1996) 263, pp. 1725–29).
and its only legacy is the sloth. Sheer size, sheer power, and sheer strength—all
qualities of the Megatherium—were apparently no guarantee of eventual success,
given the contempt with which modern sloths are regarded. It was surprising, as
Robert Chambers observed in his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, that an
animal of such “gigantic proportions” could now exist in so much “humbler” a form.
In short, this biological retrenchment was an intriguing problem for the Victorians
and it elicited a number of responses. In the early twentieth century, the essayist
and Romantic scholar, Basil de Selincourt reminded his readers, in an essay titled
“Meeting the Megatherium” (1923), that:
The world was at one time overrun by gigantic animals, all of which gradually disappeared,
exposed to attack and decay by their unwieldiness. The lesson of the past is that survival
depends, among other things, on a maintenance of the proportion between the bulk of the
creature and its brains. Great strength, feebly directed, turns sooner or later upon itself and
is its own undoing.10
Though de Selincourt brings a modernist and strikingly environmentally aware

consciousness to his use of the Megatherium, his interpretation of the misapplication
of “great strength” echoes the natural theological logic of his nineteenth-century
predecessors.
The ground sloth skeletons that were coming in from South America in the early
nineteenth century were, of course, part of a colonial enterprise that was bringing
all sorts of new animals into the Victorian frame of mind. Giraffes, though familiar,
were new to England in the early nineteenth century, the platypus an oddity of
some concern, and Gideon Mantell’s Iguanodon (announced in 1825) was gaining
interest and attention. Richard Owen, given a fossil femur from New Zealand, had
reconstructed the giant Moa (an ostrich-like bird), adding even more wonder to
the possibilities of organic form. Owen’s technique, of building an entire organism
from the evidence of a fragmentary tooth or bone was itself a new methodology
that promised great results. It was the triumph of the new school of comparative
anatomists, headed by Cuvier, but followed by many including Owen who was—
without doubt—Britain’s rising star of zoology. As director of the Hunterian museum,
Owen firmly established himself as a central clearinghouse for zoological knowledge.
Despite his later reputation, Owen was not interested in making claims about divine
authority or special creation. He subscribed to the functionalist school of Cuvier, yet
also adhered to a more transcendentalist understanding of organic form and organic
development. An ally of Charles Darwin at the outset, in part because Darwin sent
him the fossils that fueled his reputation as a comparative anatomist, Owen later
became Darwin’s opponent, again perhaps because of the instability of Owen’s own
views about form, function, and organic relations. As Nicholas Rupke has shown in
his remarkable biography, Owen was clearly the most celebrated scientist of the first
half of the nineteenth century.11
10 Basil de Selincourt. “Meeting the Megatherium,” pp. 160–73, in The English Secret

and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1923).
11 Nicholas Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven: Yale, 1994).
Owen was the author of two great tracts on Megatheria (one in 1842 and the
second in 1861), and had the great distinction of serving as the director of both
the Hunterian Museum and later the British Museum of Natural History. It is not
surprising therefore, to find that fossil skeletons of various species of the Megatheria
were used as centerpieces of the many natural history museums that came under his
influence. The Megatherium became known as his hobby horse and among the many
caricatures of Owen is a particularly striking image of him riding the skeleton of a
giant sloth.12
As huge fossil sloths were imported from South America, many of them came
under Owen’s care. Decades before the great dinosaurs of North America would be
uncovered by O.C. Marsh and Edwin Drinker Cope in the American West,13 early
mammals were perhaps the most fascinating group. What distinguished the ground
sloths from other mammals was, I want to suggest, the radical transformation that
had apparently occurred in the survival of the extant members of the group. As I
have already indicated, other extinct mammals had close analogues in impressive
contemporary forms. And some of the more unusual mammals, the heavily protected
glyptodont (a huge prehistoric armored creature), for example, had surviving
representatives in the smaller—but no less peculiar armadillos. But the Giant
Ground Sloth was a giant no longer. What is more, there was an emerging paradigm
in paleontology that would be later set apart as a “Cope’s rule” by the American
paleontologist Edwin Drinker Cope (1840–1897).14
Cope’s hypothesis, which we see rehearsed in virtually every museum display
depicting the evolution of the horse, is that species—in general—begin with small
(and typically humble) origins, and undergo a magisterial rise in size. For creatures
that are apparently “too” large—like the dinosaurs—there is a sudden (creationists
might want to read “punishing”) decline. For mammals, however, the increase in size
has led to the current epoch: large mammals are, for us and for the Victorians, normal.
What then, could ever have happened to the sloth, which in its current form, to cite
Thomas Bewick’s History of Quadrupeds (1790), is seemingly “the most helpless
and wretched” of all animals?15 That question was, indeed compelling enough to be
included in the very first volume (1832) of the Penny Magazine, Charles Knight’s
publication for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Accompanied by
an illustration taken from Cuvier, the article captures the excitement it elicited:
This specimen of the megatherium, in its magnificent ruins, must give activity to the fancy.
It is said that there is nothing interesting in antiquarian research, but as it is associated
with man. But here are remains which carry the mind back to the most remote times; not to
the contemplation of the ages of mankind, but to the earlier condition of the globe, when
12 This image, a cartoon by Frederick Waddy, is reproduced in Rupke, p. 137.

13 There has been increased interest recently in both Cope and O.C. Marsh; see for
example, Mark Jaffe’s The Gilded Dinosaur, (New York: Random House, 2001) and David
Rains Wallace’s The Bonehunters’ Revenge : Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded Age (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
14 See E.D. Cope, The Origin of the Fittest (New York: Appleton, 1887).
15 Thomas Bewick, The History of Quadrupeds, 1790. (London: W.H. Smith and Sons,
1980).
it was undergoing a succession of changes, which were, at length to suit it for the abode
of the human race.16
A decade later, the curiosity had not abated. In 1842 Richard Owen undertook a
comprehensive description of a Mylodon, another genus of the ground sloth. “The
singularly massive proportions of the skeleton of the Mylodon robustus,” Owen
wrote, “arrest the attention of every observer, and are not less calculated to excite
the surprise of the professed comparative anatomist.”17 The surprise that Owen
generated was not merely in the description of this creature, it was in one of the most
celebrated inductive feats of paleontology. The pattern of fractures in the braincase
of the specimen skull suggested to Owen that the original animal had inadvertently
shortened its own life by dislodging a tree that ultimately fell on its head and
cracked its skull. Owen’s compelling narrative—which traced the life and death of
a single prehistoric creature thousands of years ago—fascinated the reading public.
Offering an interpretation of behavior from physical features, Owen’s work at once
confirmed the theory that the Megatheria grazed on trees, and were not arboreal (as
contemporary sloths are) and certainly not ground foragers (like their cousins, the
anteaters), or predatory (as Keats imagined). Owen, who had already established
himself as a figure of significance through his writing and his many popular lectures,
attracted a wide array of readers, journalists, and enthusiasts with the speculative
flourish that dominated his essay. Here was an ancient creature that seemed—to
popular readers of Owen—willfully stupid and thus a victim of its own “sin” of
stupidity. What’s more, it was a creature that—but for its self-driven stupidity—
seemed to have the majestic size and strength that would have accorded it a place
of distinction among contemporary fauna. Thus the giant ground sloth functions
as a kind of paleontological parable (as in fact so many other creatures did) for the
ostensible will, self-determination, and responsibility that earned certain animals a
place among the “highest” living organisms.
Owen’s analysis certainly placed the apparent grandeur of the giant ground sloth
in a new light. And this new perspective had to be reconciled with new evidence
and assessments about the extant species of sloths. For many, like the explorer
and naturalist, Charles Waterton, whose frequently reprinted Wanderings in South
America (1825) was one of the most popular natural history books in the early
nineteenth century, the sloth was something of a biological conundrum. “His gestures
and cries,” Waterton writes from the perspective of a field-naturalist, “conspire to
entreat you to take pity on him.” But beyond pity, Waterton recognizes that there are
substantive questions that this perplexing animal asks either of science or Providence.
“On comparing [the sloth] with other animals,” Waterton writes,
you would say that you could perceive deficiency, deformity and superabundance in his
composition. He has no cutting-teeth, and though four stomachs, he still wants the long
16 Charles Knight, The Penny Magazine (No. 1 – 31 March 1832), pp. 207–208.

17 Richard Owen, Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct Gigantic Sloth, Mylodon
robustus, Owen : with Observations on the Osteology, Natural Affinities, and Probable Habits
of the Megatherioid Quadrupeds in General (London: Printed by R. and J.E. Taylor, sold by
John van Voorst, 1842), p. 15.
intestines of ruminating animals. He has only one inferior aperture, as in birds. He has
no soles to his feet nor has he the power of moving his toes separately. His hair is flat,
and puts you in mind of grass withered by the wintry blast. His legs are too short; they
appear deformed by the manner in which they are joined to the body, and when he is on
the ground, they seem as if only calculated to be of use in climbing trees. He has forty-six
ribs, while the elephant has only forty, and his claws are disproportionably long. Were
you to mark down, upon a graduated scale, the different claims to superiority amongst
the four-footed animals, this poor ill-formed creature’s claim would be the last upon the
lowest degree. (93)18
The striking contrasts in the zoological details of the sloth were not lost on Charles
Kingsley who was familiar with the works of both Waterton and Owen. Kingsley,
in fact, borrowed Owens’s story of the Megatherium (a Mylodon in this case), in its
entirety, for the well-known dream sequence in Alton Locke. Kingsley’s ground sloth
is “a vast sleepy mass, with elephantine limbs and yard-long talons … contrasting
strangely with a little meek rabbit’s head” (p. 323).19 (The last feature is noted in
many popular accounts of the sloth.)
An individual who took equal pride in his status as an Anglican cleric and as
an amateur scientist of note, Kingsley was eventually one of the most aggressive
church-based apologists for evolution. He quickly recognized in the Megatherium
an early opportunity to discuss moral issues as well as the very controversial topic
of progressive organic development. First, keep in mind that if any connection
were to be made between the ancient Megatherium and the modern tree sloth, some
argument about organic relationships had to be made. Without exploring that issue
in detail—this is, after all, a decade before Darwin’s Origin—suffice it to say that
many scientists were eager, whether on a divine plan or a strictly materialist basis, to
establish connections between fossils and their descendants.
Still, the prevailing popular belief was in a divinely ordained universe. And what
more could creationists hope for than a modern creature which rendered “sloth”—a
word that until the seventeenth century was simply an adjective—full embodiment
as a noun?20 The fact that divine wisdom had created such a creature suggested
a divine plan that served not merely as an example of god’s wisdom, but as a
cautionary example—inscribed in nature—to man. The discovery of the Megatheria,
the sloth’s ancestors, proved problematic since the evidence was that these forms
18 Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America, 1825 (London: MacMillan and

Company, 1879).
19 Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, 1850 (London: J.M. Dent and Sons,
1910).
20 The paradoxical description of “swift” may be attributed to Gonzalo Fernández de
Oviedo whose Natural History of the West Indies (1526) is among the first full accounts of
South American flora and fauna. Oviedo opens his description of the Sloth by calling it “the
stupidest animals that can be found in the world,” (p. 54) and after commenting on its “reverse
name” (swift) considers the possibility that it “lives on air” since “it has never been seen to eat
anything, but it turns its head and mouth into the wind more often than any other direction.”
“I have never seen,” Ovieda concludes, “such an ugly animal or one that is more useless”
(p. 55). (The Natural History of the West Indies. 1526. Trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959).
were far more active and certainly less slothful than their modern descendants. If
indeed, contemporary sloths stemmed from the Megatheria and, in the process, had
been rendered even slower, less alert, and—as if in a final insult—fully inverted,
God’s wisdom seemed to playing a cruel trick on an innocent creature. Owen’s
interpretation of the animal’s natural history seemed to help rectify that problem.
Here was an ancient creature rising to enormous physical potential but exceeding
its intellectual capacity. By pulling down trees on itself, this creature apparently
ensured its own destruction, and would leave only the most humiliating reminder
of its existence on this earth. Here was an allegory in nature perfectly suited to
Kingsley’s—and to the Victorian—frame of mind.
There is no point going into Alton Locke in detail here,21 but readers of the novel
will surely recall the critical role of the giant ground sloth in the remarkable dream
sequence.22 As invoked in the novel’s title, Alton Locke is both “Tailor and Poet,”
struggling to survive as a working man and troubled by a world that seemingly
has no moral compass. The first part of Alton Locke’s dream traces a kind of
evolutionary progression of development that ultimately seems futile without the
ability to act with the passion, sense, and the reverential intellect of a human. Alton’s
frustration is particularly clear when he takes the form of a Mylodon.23 When he
observes his cousin threatened by a falling tree (a scenario described in great detail,
for giant sloths at least, by Owen), he tries to cry out a warning but how could “a
poor edentate like myself articulate a word?”24 Speech, the gift of human intellect,
is replaced by the only thing a sloth can muster and that is brute strength. Alton thus
places his huge bulk beneath the tree and, sacrificing his own life, saves George.
This altruistic gesture, which suggests perhaps the possibility of complex behavior
in prehistoric mammals, also underscores the huge separation between the primitive
action that Alton must take as a sloth, and what he might otherwise have been capable
of as a human. The sacrifice of Alton as sloth, needless to say, also invokes Christ’s
sacrifice, made exclusively for humanity. Life and death, in the prehistoric world,
21 See my article, “The Tailor Transformed,” (Studies in the Novel, Summer 1993, Vol.
25(2): 196–213) for a more extensive discussion of the novel as a whole.
22 I do want to note parenthetically a possibly serendipitous coincidence: one of the first
scientific publications on the Megatherium was written/illustrated by Johann Samuel Eduard
d’Alton (1803–1854).
23 The giant ground sloths, extinct members of the Order Edentata, included both the
Mylodon and Megatherium (in separate super-families) and were the subject of considerable
interest in mid-century as sample fossils were being sent, by Darwin and others, from South
America. Richard Owen’s early Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct Gigantic Sloth
(1842) was followed by his comprehensive Memoir on the Megatherium (1861). William
Buckland also discusses, derisively, the giant sloths in his Bridgewater Treatise, Geology and
Mineralogy (1836–37). Kingsley’s description of the death of Alton’s Mylodon may have
been prompted by an exchange between Buckland and Owen that suggested the possibility
that the upright sloths might actually have been killed—inadvertently of course—by falling
trees. For a discussion of Megatheridae and Mylontidae, see Nicolas Rupke’s Richard Owen:
Victorian Naturalist (New Haven: Yale, 1994).
24 Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, 1850 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983), p. 340. All citations are from this edition.
had no articulate meaning and thus even Alton’s seemingly heroic gesture; our
“trust” is misplaced in this primeval world if we believe, as Tennyson desperately
wants to, “that somehow good/Will be the final end of ill” and that “nothing walks
with aimless feet” (p. 64).25
From his sluggish form as a Mylodon, Alton transforms into a baby-ape in
Bornean forests and in so doing, suggests the possibility of an emergent awareness
that exceeds that of the now-extinct Mylodon. As a human-like creature, this ape—
though still not endowed with either language or spiritual grace—presages the
possibility of an existence that can escape the ineluctable brutality inherent in the life
a giant sloth. But even as he develops as an ape, he still cannot prevent his “animal
faculties” from “swallowing up the intellectual.” In the final analysis, he remains an
animal, deprived of self-awareness and, more important, of divine inspiration.
Kingsley, a dedicated follower of modern science, was not averse to emerging
theories in biology (including, a decade after Alton Locke, evolutionary theory), but
it was critical for him that Alton’s transmutation—from brute to human—involve
a transcendent element that could not be comprehended by material biology. To
arrive at that special state of grace that distinguishes humans from all other creatures
requires active engagement in the pursuit of intellect and spiritual refinement;
human beings must transcend their own animality to achieve futurity. That futurity,
a special state of grace, is inaccessible to those who wander through life guided
by slothfulness, by sluggishness, and a lack of self-awareness. The giant sloth—
whose futurity was lost to extinction—is a powerful emblem of the impossibility of
advancement, just as Kingsley’s amphibious Water Baby represents potential in the
direst adversity. Kingsley teases out the idea of potential in the Water Babies where
the tribe of “Do-as-you-likes” who live in the land of “Readymade.” Theirs is a land
without intellectual curiosity where animalistic self-gratification and superstition
are the central principles. Unable to adapt in order to overcome the constraints
of their environment, the Doasyoulikes—who with the proper values might have
been capable of advancement—sink into a crude and brutal existence echoing the
evolutionary decline of the sloth:
They are grown so stupid now that they can hardly think: for none of them have used
their wits for many hundred years. They have almost forgotten, too, how to talk. For each
stupid child forgot some of the words it heard from its stupid parents, and had not wits
enough to make fresh words for itself. Beside, they are grown so fierce and suspicious and
brutal that they keep out of each other’s way, and mope and sulk in the dark forests, never
hearing each other’s voice, till they have forgotten almost what speech is like. (p. 148)26
The frightening prospect of such a decline was a central concern of middle-class

Victorians who feared that the industrial culture that so dominated daily life, might
lead to an undereducated, unrefined, and unbelieving populace.
25 Alfred Tennyson, The Works of Alfred Tennyson, Vol. 10, In Memoriam (London:
Henry S. King and Co., 1875). These lines are from Stanza LIV.
26 Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies. A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, 1863 (New York:
E.P. Dutton, 1908).
Victorians thus warmed easily to an allegorical view of nature that offered hope
and were delighted to have Megatheria skeletons guard the hallways of their natural
history museums and adorn the pages of their scientific anthologies, if only in a
self-congratulatory gesture to remind themselves of their intellect, their religion, and
their industry. The ground sloth served many purposes for diverse audiences. For
most, it was an amusing creature that seemed to suggest that the ante-diluvian world
was a slow and sluggish place, devoid of righteousness.
Two illustrations in Simeon Shaw’s Nature Displayed (1823),27 a wonderfully
idiosyncratic compendium of natural history, demonstrate the peculiarities of both
the sloth and Megatherium as seen through nineteenth-century eyes (Plate 17). The
modern sloth itself is depicted upright, on all fours, with its claws uncomfortably
extended, while its ancestor is portrayed as a crude and ungainly fossil. The young
dandy standing near the skeleton may well be there to suggest scale of size, but he
also evokes a scale of both refinement and erudition.
The rudely outsized skeleton of the Megatherium was a source of interest for
many writers. The great palaeontologist William Buckland, an author of one of the
Bridgewater Treatises, capitalized on the strange skeleton of the Megatherium to
make an argument for divine wisdom in creating creatures suited to their time and
circumstances:
His [the Megatherium] entire frame was an apparatus of colossal mechanism, adapted
exactly to the work it had to do; strong and ponderous in proportion as this work was
heavy, and calculated to be the vehicle of life to a gigantic race of quadruped; which
though they have ceased to be counted among the living inhabitants of our planet, have in
their fossil bones, left behind them imperishable monuments of the consummate skill with
which they were constructed. Each limb, and fragment of a limb, forming a co-ordinate
of parts of a well-adjusted and perfect whole; and through all their deviations from the
form and proportion of the limbs of other quadrupeds, affords fresh proofs of the infinitely
varied, and inexhaustible contrivances of Creative Wisdom. (p. 164)28
Yet where Buckland found the giant sloth so perfectly designed, Cuvier could only
wonder about the many apparent imperfections of contemporary sloths. So strange and
anomalous are these creatures, that in even in Cuvier’s strict anatomical reckoning,
they seem to have been set aside by a supernatural force, given that according to the
best zoological principles they should never have survived. “If we consider Sloths in
the relation they bear to other animals,” writes Cuvier,
the general laws of organization at present existing apply so little to their structure,
the different parts of their body seem so completely contradictory of those laws of co-
27 Simeon Shaw, Nature Displayed in the Heavens, and on Earth (London: for Sir
Richard Phillips by G. and W.B. Whitaker, 1823).
28 William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy, 1837 (New York: Arno Press, 1980).
Buckland’s description of living sloths is strikingly modern. Despite the “apparent monstrosity
of external form,” that Buffon and others have used to “misrepresent” the creatures as
“imperfectly constructed,” Buckland observes that “the peculiarities of the Sloth, that render
its movements so awkward on the earth, are fitted with much advantage to its destined office
of living entirely upon trees , and feeding upon their leaves” (p. 142).
existence which we have found established in the rest of the animal kingdom, that we
might be almost tempted to consider them as the remains of the former order of things
the living relics of that precedent nature of which we are obliged to seek the other ruins
beneath the surface of the earth, and that they escaped by some miracle the catastrophe
which destroyed their contemporary species.29
For others, who kept abreast of scientific discoveries of people like Darwin, Owen,
and Lyell, the ground sloth hinted ever so slightly that the transformation of
organismal forms might have a moral component that would rescue it, and the culture
that produced it, from absolute materialism. Still for others, the giant ground sloth
and its diminutive surviving relatives was an indication of the many possibilities of
an evolutionary mechanism—without moral or progressive imperatives—that could
alter and change species even over relatively short periods of time.
But in all of these readings the giant ground sloth and its relatives retains a
kind of sinfulness that intrigues and delights museum-goers. From what seems to
be the excessively massive skeleton of the Megatheria to what appears to be the
incomprehensibly slow and inverted world of the modern sloth, the animal has
never lost its moral connotation. The English, in particular, remain fascinated by
the sloth as is clear from both an early illustration in Punch (Plate 18), depicting a
rambunctious boy on “the New Rocking Horse,” to the children’s song, “The Sloth”
penned by the entertainers Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in the 1960s. The
lament, in the sloth’s own voice, has everything to do with lingering Victorian values
about industry and duty:
I could climb the very highest Himalayas

Be among the greatest ever tennis players
Win at chess, or marry a princess
Or study hard and be an eminent professor
I could be a millionaire—play the clarinet—travel everywhere
Learn to cook, catch a crook
Win a war, then write a book about it.
I could paint a Mona Lisa, I could be another Caesar
Compose an oratorio that was sublime
The door’s not shut on my genius but …
I just don’t have the time.
(The Sloth – Michael Flanders and Donald Swann)30
Since my initial introduction to Megatherium, I have encountered dozens of replicas

and skeletons of Megatherium in museums both small and large. Megatheria can
also be found in a wide array of nineteenth-century illustrated texts, as well as in
stunning murals, like those by Charles Knight and, more recently, Robert J. Barber
at the American Museum of Natural History. The popularity of palaeontology has
also increased the depictions of Megatheria in contemporary children’s science
29 Georges Cuvier, cited in The English Cyclopædia conducted by Charles Knight

(Natural History, Vol.1) (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854), p. 646.
30 Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann, EMI
CDFSB 13 (CDP 7974672).
books and television documentaries. But all of our encounters—frequent though
they have been—are much less significant than the experience of typical museum-
going Victorians. For them, it was a highly valenced and ideologically charged
image that participated in debates of great national importance, to say nothing of
national identity (which was to be anything but slothful). A creature of significance,
the importance of the sloth—both ancient and modern—is probably too easily lost
in the aura of nonchalance, of ineptitude, of sheer slothfulness that the creature itself
can often project.
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Alberti, Samuel J.M.M. “Objects and the Museum,” ISIS 96:4 (2005): 559–71.
Anon. “Old and New Toys,” Punch, 14 (1848): 76.
Asúa, Miguel de and French, Roger. A New World of Animals, Ashgate, 2005.
Bewick, Thomas. The History of Quadrupeds, 1790, London: W.H. Smith and Sons,
1980.
Buckland, William. Geology and Mineralogy, 1836–37, New York: Arno Press,
1980.
Chambers, Robert. Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, 1844. ed. James
Secord, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Cope, E.D. The Origin of the Fittest, New York: Appleton, 1887.
Cuvier, Georges. 1804. “Sur le Megatherium”. Annales du Museum d’Historie
Naturelle: 376–400.
Darwin, Charles. The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: 1821–1836, vol. 1 ed.
Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985.
de Selincourt, Basil. The English Secret and Other Essays, London: Oxford
Farina R.A. and Blanco, R.E. “Megatherium the Stabber.” Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B.
(1996) 263: 1725–1729.
Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo. Natural History of the West Indies (1526).
Trans. Sterling A. Stoudemire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1959.
Flanders, Michael and Swann, Donald. The Bestiary of Flanders and Swann. EMI
CDFSB 13 (CDP 7974672).
Jaffe, Mark. The Gilded Dinosaur, New York: Random House 2001.
Keats, John. Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush, Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
Kingsley, Charles. Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet, 1850, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983, p. 340.
—— The Water Babies. A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, 1863, New York: E.P. Dutton,
1908.
Knight, Charles. The English Cyclopædia (Natural History, vol.1) London: Bradbury
and Evans, 1854.
——. The Penny Magazine. No. 1 – 31 March 1832.
Owen Richard. Description of the Skeleton of an Extinct Gigantic Sloth, Mylodon
robustus, Owen: with Observations on the Osteology, Natural Affinities, and
Probable Habits of the Megatherioid Quadrupeds in General. London: Printed
by R. and J.E. Taylor, sold by John van Voorst, 1842.
——. Memoir on the Megatherium or Giant Ground-Sloth of America, London,
1861.
Rauch, Alan. “The Tailor Transformed,” Studies in the Novel, Summer 1993,
vol. 25(2): 196–213.
Rupke Nicholas. Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist, New Haven: Yale, 1994.
Shaw, Simeon. Nature Displayed in the Heavens, and on Earth, London: for Sir
Richard Phillips by G. and W.B. Whitaker, 1823.
Sheets-Pyenson, Susan. Cathedrals of Science, Kingston and Montreal: McGill-
Queens University Press, 1988.
Tennyson, Alfred. The Works of Alfred Tennyson, vol. 10, In Memoriam, London:
Henry S. King and Co., 1875.
Wallace, David Rains. The Bonehunters’ Revenge : Dinosaurs and Fate in the Gilded
Age, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
Waterton, Charles. Wanderings in South America, 1825, London: MacMillan and
Company, 1879.
Chapter 13
Tiger Tales
Heather Schell
When George Sanderson arrived in Madras in 1864, he envisioned a delightful

“jungle-life” replete with “wild elephants, tigers, and bison.” Sanderson, like many
young, middle-class British men who came to India to forge new careers, saw bagging
a tiger as a rite of passage. Almost every memoir on Indian hunting from the period
contains at least one incident or even chapter entitled “My First Tiger.” Sanderson,
whose memoir races to this big event by the second page, described the “proud
satisfaction of shooting [his] first tiger!” Of course, few hunters could shoot just
one, especially when princely excess was within their reach. Percy Wyndham, for
example, estimated that he had “seen about five hundred shot,” while the death toll
witnessed by Sir John Hewett was a more modest 247 tigers. Frederick Hicks, author
of Forty Years among the Wild Animals of India, reckoned his own contribution with
seeming indifference: “I kept count up to 200, then stopped. … It may be 400, or
more or less, I don’t know.” Such tallies do not include the numerous occasions on
which hunters wounded but failed to kill tigers that were never subsequently found
(see Sanderson, pp. 321–2); indirect evidence of their target practice appeared in the
ghastly number of healed bullet wounds that hunters frequently reported in the hides
of their freshly-bagged tigers. Even descriptions of tiger hunting were popular, if
we assume that the plethora of accounts appearing in magazines and memoirs were
prompted to some extent by reader interest. So ubiquitously were tiger-hunts detailed
in hunters’ memoirs that the tiger-hunter himself became somewhat of a stock-type
by the end of the century.
And yet, after World War One, these ardent destroyers of tigers would become
vocal advocates for saving tigers. In fact, Corbett National Park in India, noted for
its tiger conservation efforts, was named in honor of Jim Corbett, the most famous
career hunter of big cats. So much affection for tigers had Corbett that he even trained
a local tiger cub to be wary of humans, so as to protect it. This apparent volte-face
was not, however, as unexpected as it may appear. Their memoirs reveal that, by
George P. Sanderson, Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India, 1882. 3rd edn
(New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2000), p. 1.
Sir John Hewett, Jungle Trails in Northern India (London: Methuen, 1938), p. 66.
Quoted in Stanley Jepson (ed.), Big Game Encounters: Critical Moments in the Lives
of Well-Known Shikaris (London: Witherby, 1936), p. 189.
See Hewett, p. 43; A. Locke, The Tigers of Trengganu (New York: Scribner’s, 1954),
p. 114.
Brigadier-General R.G. Burton, A Book of Man-Eaters (London: Hutchinson, 1931),
p. 125.
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, career big game hunters in the British Raj
were already framing themselves as apologists for tigers. How this was possible
is a puzzle. Three possible explanations spring to mind: concern about cruelty to
animals, desire to protect the sport by preserving sufficient animals for future hunts,
and determination to keep hunting skills in the hands of the British. While these
explanations account for many aspects of Victorian behavior toward animals, they
are in this case insufficient. Instead, we will need to consider a fourth conjecture, as
unlikely as it may seem: career tiger hunters came to identify with their prey. They
saw the tigers they killed as equals, creatures who shared their ethics, their food
preferences, and their habitat. This identification entwined their sense of political
power over the Indian people with a new self-definition as predators, driven by the
spread among big game hunters of ideas based on evolutionary theory.
The hunters’ sense of kinship with tigers was infused with a nascent conviction
that masculinity itself was essentially predatory, and that predators made an important
contribution to natural selection. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its
description of the natural world as an arena of ceaseless competition, meshed well
with the life experience of professional big game hunters. In naturalizing a process of
“the stronger extirpating the weaker,” the theory also normalized predatory behavior,
something that an earlier theory like natural theology had framed as aberrant. No
longer a “sub-typical” trait (to use Robert Chambers’ term), predatory behavior was
now a powerful, potentially beneficial tool: for example, Sanderson argued that the
tiger, “in ridding the country” of “old, scraggy, and useless cattle,” “does good to the
community” (Sanderson, p. 269). In this regard, predators almost looked like active
agents of natural selection.
In The Descent of Man, first published in 1871, Darwin openly asserted what On
the Origin of Species only implied: humans are related to other animals. Further, in
a less-controversial section of the second volume, Darwin posited a “law of battle”
as a secondary sexual characteristic among male mammals. The male mammal
seemed less likely than other male animals, such as birds, “to win the female …
through the display of his charms” (Darwin, p. 239); instead, male mammals relied
on competition with other males:
Most naturalists will admit that the greater size, strength, courage, and pugnacity of the
male, his special weapons of offence, as well as his special means of defense, have all been
acquired or modified through … sexual selection. This does not depend on any superiority
in the general struggle for life, but on certain individuals of one sex, generally the male
sex, having been successful in conquering other males …. (Darwin pp. 312–13)
The argument focused less on the precise relationship between fighting and
reproductive success, and more on extensive evidence that male mammals fight each
other. While this law of battle applied overtly to intra-species competition, Darwin’s
examples pitted lions against tigers, elephants against tigers, rams against men, and
buffalo against dogs. In other words, for the law of battle, masculinity is a stronger
unifying feature than is species.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London:
Murray, 1871).
Tiger Tales 231
The law of battle thus granted a somewhat epic value to hunting a powerful male
animal: no longer a mere arbitrary act of violence, killing such an animal reenacted
the timeless battle between male rivals. In the spirit of this gripping narrative, late
nineteenth-century hunters tracked and killed their tiger “rivals,” then mourned their
deaths. Living in perceived isolation, both cultural and social, individual hunters
pursued solitary tigers; in fact, as I’ll discuss later, the hunters even showed a
penchant for hunting methods that emphasized this similarity. Overall, their feeling
of kinship explains why, while American big game hunters were still bent on the
obliteration of large predators, some British tiger hunters worried about the future of
tigers and wrestled with self-doubt about their own hunting. Half a century before
the new discipline of ecology would muster a defense for predatory animals, half a
century before the tide would slowly turn against the wholesale slaughter of wolves,
coyotes, lions, panthers, and raptors, British tiger hunters began to rally for the
preservation and welfare of their favorite big cats.
This essay will examine the complexities of cross-species fellow feeling through
a close look at the deaths of three tigers, as detailed in a memoir written by George
Sanderson, a government-paid hunter who worked in India during 1864–1877. Highly
respected among his peers, Sanderson was responsible at various points in his career
for slaying tigers and capturing elephants. His magnum opus, Thirteen Years among
the Wild Beasts of India, stayed in print for over thirty years and became a standard
reference for other aspiring authors of authoritative hunting manuals. Thirteen Years
dedicates three chapters to tigers, with one chapter providing general information—
classification, habits, methods of hunting, and so forth—and the two remaining
chapters recalling specific hunts. Though Sanderson informs his readers that “it is
a pity to see the tiger proscribed and hunted to death by every unsportsmanlike
method [i.e., any method other than shooting] that can be devised” (Sanderson,
p. 269), he nonetheless outlines the techniques for using nets, beaters, and other less
sporting means. Significantly, he draws the line at teaching his readers how to use
poison. He himself had once poisoned three tigers but was so appalled by the results
that thenceforth he would only kill the cats with “legitimate methods” (Sanderson,
p. 289). By exploring the context of Sanderson’s disdain for poison, I will trace the
transformation in hunters’ disposition toward tigers and, I hope, foreground some
of the limitations to current thinking about Victorian attitudes toward predatory
animals.
What made poison “illegitimate”? Poison appears manifestly less humane
than a bullet, probably more painful, and liable to kill the wrong animals—it may
seem obvious that British sportsmen would reject this method for better options.
When Sanderson recounts his unsuccessful early experiments with strychnine, he
suggests that the poisoning, while not fatal, caused “great agony”; one of the tigers
was overheard “groaning and roaring” for “some days” (Sanderson, p. 289). This
consciousness of animal suffering shows Sanderson to be a man of his era. We can
point to Mary Sewell’s Black Beauty (1878) as not only a catalyst for but also a
symptom of the Victorian era’s increasing public sensitivity to animal pain. While
the entire century witnessed an unprecedented interest in the welfare of animals
(the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was established in 1824),
this concern had not always centered on suffering. Instead, cruelty to animals had
been condemned on the grounds that it coarsened the person who committed it;
the narrative argument in William Hogarth’s series “The Four Stages of Cruelty”
(1750–51), in which a child who tortures animals becomes a murderer as an adult,
retained its currency throughout the nineteenth century and was applied to hunters
as well as vivisectionists. Reflecting this line of reasoning, the Act to Prevent
Malicious and Wanton Cruelty to Animals (1809) condemned the abuse of animals
as “most pernicious in its example, having an evident tendency to harden the minds
of the People against the natural feelings of humanity.” An alternative justification
for protecting animals had been advanced as early as 1789, when Jeremy Bentham
proposed in Principles of Morals and Legislation that our behavior toward animals
should be evaluated by their ability to suffer (see Chapter 17, Section 1). However,
not until debates about vivisection took center stage in the animal welfare movement
did the utilitarian use of pleasure and pain as the benchmarks of ethical behavior take
a prominent role. The Act to Amend the Law Relating to Cruelty to Animals (1876),
designed to regulate vivisection, was premised on the belief that causing animals
pain was unacceptable, except perhaps in the pursuit of new scientific discoveries;
even then, experiments inducing pain were allowed only when no other recourse
would avail. Sanderson’s memoir, published at the height of public concern about
animal suffering, could therefore be expected to accord with the values of the day.
However, hunters had largely been sheltered from the censure directed at
perpetrators of cruelty toward animals. The exemption for hunters was originally
a factor of social class: game preserves, and therefore permission to hunt, had long
been the province of the upper classes. As other scholars have noted, the movement
for the humane treatment of animals was directed primarily toward the working
class, especially in the first half of the century, when legislative efforts on behalf
of animals were directed against such blood sports as bull baiting and cockfighting.
The freedom from criticism enjoyed by hunters was still more liberal in the colonies,
where middle-class British men had more or less free reign to shoot, trap, or
otherwise torment any animals they wished. Yet even in the far-flung reaches of the
British Empire the burgeoning movement for animal welfare made itself felt. Hunters
were clearly conscious of England’s new-found ethics against causing pain. In Big
Game Shooting, for example, Clive Phillipps-Wolley worried that “in these days
of ultra-civilisation an apology is needed” for men with “the old hunting spirit.”
His concerns regarding animal welfare were clearly directed toward public opinion:
“kindly natured men hate to hear of the infliction of needless pain, and waste of
innocent animal life” (Phillipps-Wolley, p. 3). In apparent response to actual insults
from these “kindly natured men,” Phillipps-Wolley plaintively remarked that “it
would be well if some of those of our own race, who should know better, would be
less ready to call other men butchers” (Phillipps-Wolley, p. 4).
Despite these reservations, Phillipps-Wolley assured his readers that he deplored
“the wholesale slaughter of big game,” as must “every thinking man” (Phillipps-
Wolley, p. 3). Big game hunters, having apparently internalized at least some of
the new values regarding animals, made a point of attesting to their abhorrence for
Clive Phillipps-Wolley, Big Game Shooting (London: Longmans, Green, 1894), p. 2.
Tiger Tales 233
“excessive slaughter,” as Ritvo notes. This impulse shows up in memoirs of tiger
hunting. A young Victor Brooke, writing to his sister in 1863, explained that it was
very important to follow up a wounded tiger; otherwise, “you leave the poor brute
in pain, and no one with any love and admiration for what is grand, could think
complacently of these really noble animals being left to die in suffering.” Samuel
White Baker averred that “all real sportsmen whom I have met have been really
tender-hearted men—men who shun cruelty to an animal.”10
Given the historical context, reviling the use of poison may appear to be a
straightforward application of the RSPCA’s ideals. It is not. First, although British
shikari (a term for “hunter” used in India) had imported the rhetoric about animal
pain from the animal welfare movement back home, their expressed solicitude did
not accord with their actions. Not only did they continue to hunt tigers, but they never
behaved as though they wished to minimize animal pain. For example, consider the
ubiquitous practice of waiting for a few hours before tracking a wounded tiger, in
order to give its injuries time to “stiffen”; such a delay, though a practical move
to protect a vulnerable hunter rifling through the underbrush, was anything but
merciful. Even as the hunters began to act according to a new code of honorable
killing, animal pain was seldom an important consideration. Human impulses are
often contradictory, and a discrepancy between behavior and sentiment is insufficient
reason to dismiss the latter as a mere façade. Nonetheless, given that the shikari did
not noticeably alter their practices to reduce their game’s suffering, a reluctance to
cause pain cannot account for their squeamishness toward the actual use of poison.
Furthermore, insofar as the stricture against animal suffering applied in the
colonies, tigers would have been an exception. The new British tenderness toward
animals was not kindled by every type of beast: predators, except for domesticated
dogs and cats, were among the least cherished. Animal welfare advocates tended
to class carnivorous animals as participants in blood sports; like their human
counterparts, these creatures were implicated in the cruel destruction of defenseless
beasts. Sympathy premised on animal pain sprang from a conception of animals
as victims; predators were generally perceived as victimizers, not victims. Nor did
predators find any patrons among the preservationists, who saw them as depleting
the stock of game animals that the preservationists themselves wanted to kill.
While some animal welfare supporters hoped to convert carnivores to a vegetarian
diet, preservationists simply wanted to eradicate them, just as wolves had been
exterminated in England. Into the 1930s, the tiger was classified as “vermin” in
India, so its slaughter was absolutely unregulated (Jepson, p. 195). The British
were definitely not averse to the idea of poisoning vermin. In fact, many convicted
poisoners back home had purchased their weapon quite openly, contending that they
planned to use it on rats or dogs. Should prevailing attitudes not provide sufficient
Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 278.
Oscar Leslie Stephen (ed.), Sir Victor Brooke: Sportsman and Naturalist (London:
John Murray, 1894), pp. 78–9.
10 Quoted in T. Douglas Murray and A. Silva White, Sir Samuel Baker: A Memoir
(London: Macmillan & Co., 1895), pp. 391–2; italics in original.
motivation, the economic benefits were tempting. Sizable bounties for man-eaters
encouraged hunters to try to slay every tiger they found.11
Finally, if we examine the scene in which Sanderson describes his final, successful
attempt to get tigers to eat strychnine, the question of whether poisoning actually is
less humane becomes problematic:
I should say that the male tiger had commenced to eat first, and the poison must have been
almost instantly fatal, as he lay within four yards of the carcass. He had not struggled at
all; he must have felt the poison, turned away, and dropped dead. One tigress was on her
back thirty yards distant, the other near her; the latter had struggled slightly. As a proof of
the almost instantaneous effect of the poison in this instance not more than half-a-dozen
pounds of flesh had been eaten. Upon being moved, a quantity of blood ran from the
nostrils of all three tigers. (Sanderson, p. 291)
Sanderson refers to his “success” as “painfully complete” and writes that he “felt
like a murderer when [he] viewed the unfortunate victims” (Sanderson, p. 290).
His word choice suggests a guilty conscience: “I confess I had never expected such
slaughter” (Sanderson, p. 290; my italics). Yet this poisoning caused an “almost
instantaneous” death, a seeming improvement over the lingering death throes that
were the customary result of a tiger’s close encounter with a British hunter. In
contrast to his horror over the “slaughtered” tigers, Sanderson expresses no remorse
in the following description of a much more tortuous method of killing:
In January 1870, a tiger, tigress, and panther were surrounded with nets by some villagers
… We shot the panther on the first day, but the enclosed thicket was so dense that we could
not get the tigers to show … On the fifth day, however, we wounded them both. After
this, as nothing would make them break cover, we were obliged to send to Mysore for
elephants, and we killed them, still full of vigour, on the tenth day. The weather was hot,
the circle in which they were enclosed was only seventy yards in diameter, and the heat of
the fires kept up day and night all round was considerable. Still they existed without a drop
of water for ten days, suffering from wounds half the time. A tiger can go much longer
than this without food without serious inconvenience. (Sanderson, pp. 280–81)
Why should the poisoned tigers, who must have dropped dead almost instantly, be
more pitiable than the big cats who survived—trapped, wounded, and roasted—for
ten days before Sanderson finally managed to kill them? It is impossible to see any
element of a “clean kill” here that would allow Sanderson to stomach trapping tigers
but revolt at poisoning them.
If concern about animal pain is not what motivates Sanderson’s animus toward
poison, we might hypothesize that it struck Sanderson as somehow unsporting.
Career hunters were among the earliest Victorian conservationists, and some of
them endeavored to reduce the numbers of animals killed by making the hunt more
challenging for the hunter. Tiger hunters who wrote memoirs attempted to influence
the standards of aspiring big-game hunters both by recounting their own experiences
11 For more details about bounties on man-eaters, see John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of
Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1988), p. 182.
Tiger Tales 235
and by suggesting, through their rhetoric, that hunters who used other methods were
less “sporting.” For example, here is Sanderson castigating a method he sees as
too easy and safe—for “a sportsman is not supposed to look for absolute safety
on all occasions, any more than does a soldier” (Sanderson, p. 293): “I have often
wondered how any one can consider being perched upon a tree under a blazing
sun whilst a tiger is being driven towards him sport, and use the term poaching in
reference to this” (Sanderson, p. 284).12 Should this hint prove too subtle, he next
suggests that such a “poacher”—dependent upon “diabolical appliances” in his
“calorific post”—is a very devil (Sanderson, p. 285).
Sanderson’s messianic drive to inculcate “good sportsmanship” could be
interpreted as straightforward self-interest. As Harriet Ritvo demonstrates, the
code of hunting ethics was generally less concerned with animal welfare than with
imposing the carefully monitored rituals of English sport on the unregulated colonies;
this move seemed vital in light of declining game populations, exploding numbers
of hunters, and improved weaponry that permitted even the most inept hunters to
amass large bags with ease. The new hunting code at the end of the century rejected
the speedy slaughter of random masses of animals and emphasized expertise,
technique, selection, self-control, and the “clean kill” (see Ritvo, pp. 272–6). These
standards were enforced with legislation, or, in its absence, were simply promoted
as gentlemanly conduct.
Such reinforcement certainly appears in the memoirs of some tiger hunters,
notably those who refer to themselves as shikari. Use of this Urdu term, meaning
“hunter,” signaled identification with the land of India and distance from the type of
man who came to India on a sporting trip. The word also served as a class indicator.
In the early Victorian era, hunting had remained primarily the prerogative of the
nobility and gentry; access to game required either access to a large country estate or
income and leisure to travel to foreign lands lacking game regulations.13 However,
the nascent social mobility of the mid-nineteenth century was more pronounced in the
colonies, where the growing military infrastructure provided regular opportunities
for promotion and the British social milieu was less staid. As John MacKenzie
explains in The Empire of Nature, some renowned Victorian hunters “gained an
entrée both into the aristocratic elite and into the scientific circles of natural history
museums through their hunting prowess” (MacKenzie, p. 38). Also, middle-class
men now had access to big game as officers in India. They stayed abroad for decades,
and they became the expert shikari whose advice and aid were sought by visiting
aristocratic hunters. It mattered to them that others see them as both professionals
and gentlemen. Though he didn’t use the term for himself, George Sanderson was
definitely a shikari.
12 Openly calling someone “unsporting” would probably have been a serious insult; none
of the memoirs I examined ever applied that adjective to another man’s behavior, although, as
the above example illustrates, the memoirists trample all around the concept.
13 For a history of early hunting in England, see Ch. 1, “Origins of Hunting Traditions,”
in Richard Thomas, The Politics of Hunting (Aldershot: Gower, 1983), pp. 11–30. See also
P.B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1671–1831 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981).
There is a drastic divide between these shikari and those visiting upper-class
hunters who, along with the higher echelons of the British Indian government,
enjoyed the pageantry of the Moghul style, extolled and emulated the previous era’s
big bags, and often promoted the elimination of tigers. The aristocratic British hunt
is best exemplified by the tour of the Prince of Wales in 1875–76, which featured
an elaborate entourage of elephants, houdahs, and Indian staff; such hunts were an
important expression of elite British prestige and power in India (see MacKenzie,
pp. 194–5). These hunters adhered to an older model of good sportsmanship.
Given the striking contrast between the pageantry of the aristocratic hunter and
the stealthy, solitary methods of the British Indian shikari, the effect of British class
on hunting style seems straightforward. Yet MacKenzie observes merely that tiger-
hunting “for sport rather than protection was normally conducted from elephant-back”
(MacKenzie, p. 181).14 In fact, these two types of tiger-hunting were mostly carried
out by different hunters. MacKenzie’s generalization conflates two characteristics
of class-based big game hunting. The British Indian shikari, who generally shunned
hunting on elephants, tried to limit their quarry to tigers that, in their terms, needed
to be shot, such as man-eaters and “cattle-lifters” (albeit the sheer quantity of the
latter guaranteed that little restraint was required). These shikari were the enforcers
of the new hunting code. In contrast, the wealthy sportsmen who traveled to India
especially for big game hunting were, by the shikaris’ standards, already made
suspect by their upper-class status. This divide endured well past the Edwardian era.
In Big Game Encounters (1936), for example, Stanley Jepson advocates a fee for
licenses to kill “dangerous game,” to help prevent “the cruel and senseless slaughter
by wealthy people who try to set up records in tiger shooting” (Jepson, p. 189).
Class perspectives are linked to different conceptions of sporting behavior. By
“sporting,” shikari were referring to the relatively ascetic qualities associated with
the new hunting code: effort, skill, discipline, and solitude. The British elite, while
also lauding “sporting” behavior, valued pageantry, quantity, generosity toward other
hunters, and camaraderie. For example, Sir John Hewett, in India from the 1880s
until the early 1910s, clearly uses these traditional criteria for “good sportsman”:
“no one in recent years has seen more tigers shot than the late Maharaja Scindia, but,
like the good sportsman he was, having disposed of a reasonable number himself, his
chief pleasure was in showing them to other people [to shoot]” (p. 66). In opposition
to these hunters, shikari were suspicious of hunting methods that required too much
help from others, particularly hunting with beaters or with elephants (see Phillips-
Wolley, p. 22). The following quote, from the preface of A.I.R. Glasfurd’s Rifle and
Romance (1905), perfectly captures the distinction:
These jungle sketches do not deal with what is perhaps the popular idea of Indian sport—
the imposing line of elephants, the gay party, the “file-firing” of the battue, and piles of
slain. They are merely the records of the quiet solitary shikari, who, lacking either the
means or the inclination—or both—for the slaughtering of a large amount of game in a
14 MacKenzie focuses on the increasing divergence between Indian and British hunting
styles, especially in the wake of the Mutiny. By the end of the century, many traditional Indian
hunting methods—and Indian hunters—were defined as cruel and unsportsmanlike (Empire,
pp. 299–300).
Tiger Tales 237
short space of time without the exercise of personal effort or woodcraft, works alone, or
in the company of a single comrade, and with his simple equipment penetrates to retired
spots—the peaceful haunts of game.15
Similarly, Sanderson dismisses the skill of sportsmen who do not use his methods:
“How many men have killed their forty or fifty tigers who have never succeeded
in bagging one by watching,—the fair outwitting of the subtle beast on his own
ground!” (Sanderson, pp. 284–5). He prefers waiting alone in a machan over a kill,
“so seldom successful” but infinitely preferable “for the lover of nature” (Sanderson,
pp. 284–5).
If hunting by elephant typified the privileged man of leisure, the metonym for the
hard-working shikari was the machan. The machan was a platform constructed in a
tree over a tiger’s kill, in which the shikari would wait, alone, in hopes that the tiger
would return to eat. This was known as “sitting up over a kill.” A hunter’s expressed
attitude about a machan can be read as a testimonial to his values. Like Sanderson,
soi-disant shikari inevitably rated sitting up over a kill as their preferred method.
In contrast, Hewett deems shooting from a machan “an ignoble death for a tiger”
(Hewett, p. 56) and refuses to try it; predictably, he only hunts via elephant (p. 46).
Furthermore, as Glasfurd’s comments about means and inclination illustrate, hunters
often associate their preferences with relative status, income level, and leisure. An
unsigned piece from Once a Week (1869) describes the machan as “certainly not
the sort of couch upon which the Sybarite who is annoyed by a crumpled rose-leaf
would wish to spend several hours.”16
The position of poison on this continuum of hunting methods isn’t straightforward.
Colonel H.G.C. Swayne, active in India over a decade after Sanderson, later opined,
“Personally, I should be content to see all the predatory cats poisoned, for the sake
of the natives and stock.”17 Swayne’s enthusiasm for poison was atypical, but his
assumption—that poison would be easier and more effective at killing tigers—would
make sense of shikaris’ opposition to strychnine. Sanderson shared this assumption,
withholding his “fatal method” for fear that “district officers with strongly-developed
utilitarian views would be enabled to poison off all the tigers in their ranges by this
means” (p. 290). Given a colonial government sufficiently averse to tigers to employ
official tiger hunters, Sanderson may have been justified in suspecting that at least
some district officers would mount a strychnine-based tiger eradication campaign,
but this does not appear to have happened, at least not often.18 Moreover, to my
knowledge, none of the well-known accounts of tiger-hunting details a technique
for poisoning tigers; this does not simply indicate authorial opprobrium, because
many of the memoirs offer guides to hunting methods of which the authors openly
disapprove. Instead, the absence of first-hand or even specific accounts of poisoning
suggests that, despite Sanderson’s comment that “strychnine is occasionally used for
15 A.I.R. Glasfurd, Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle (London: John Lane, 1921),
p. vii.
16 “An Evening with a Tiger,” Once a Week 20.3 (3 July 1869): 536.
17 Edgar Barclay, Big Game Shooting Records (London: Witherby, 1932), p. 121.
18 Ritvo cites a report of “a man who called himself a sportsman” eradicating tigers with
strychnine in a region of southern India (p. 278).
destroying tigers,” such use cannot have been very common. Sanderson had to learn
on his own, and his early trials merely made the tigers vomit. Finally, Sanderson’s
fears to the contrary, poisoning does not appear to have been easy. Captain J.H.
Baldwin, Sanderson’s contemporary, scoffed at a proposal to destroy tigers with
poisoned bait; this “absurd proposition” revealed that its proponent “was not
well acquainted with the habits of the animal.”19 Whatever the cause, difficulty or
disinclination, the British never made a practice of poisoning tigers.
While the new code of sportsmanship obviously influenced Sanderson, it is
insufficient to account for the strength of his antipathy for poison. A variety of other
methods, such as netting and trapping, also fall short of his standards of “legitimacy,”
but his tone in discussing them was more tolerant, and he didn’t withhold the directions
for using them; the remorse he expressed regarding the strychnine only reappears on
one other occasion (involving the slaughter of a tiger he had liked). Other death
scenes, such as the one involving the netted tiger, tigress, and panther quoted earlier,
are recounted with little emotion. Therefore, poisoning must be offending something
other than, or in addition to, the code of sporting behavior.
The use of poison held connotations that originated independently but intersected
with British hunting standards. One of these associations, MacKenzie would argue,
has to do with the post-Mutiny desire among British hunters to distance themselves
from the people of India, by defining both Indian hunters and Indian hunting
methods as cruel; the utility of poison, which accounted for its appeal to the locals,
made British hunters see it as unsporting and wrong (p. 300). He supports this
with a citation from Edward Braddon, in which this hunter writes that the peasant
victims of tigers “even approved of murder by strychnine.”20 Sanderson likewise
remarked that his crew was enthusiastic about his success in poisoning the tigers;
they reportedly exclaimed, “‘Oh, this is good! here have our master and we been
risking our throats … in poking about after tigers for months, when one dose of this
capital ‘medicine’ would have done. This is the thing for the future’” (Sanderson,
pp. 290–91). However, note that poisoning is described as a new method, “for the
future,” not an old one. This suggests that poison, out of the myriad methods used
by the British to kill tigers in India, was perhaps a foreign import. Poison’s relative
novelty would make sense of the fact that Sanderson had to “experiment” on his
own to figure out how to apply the strychnine (Sanderson, p. 289). It appears that
the British associated poison with Indian hunters not because the latter traditionally
poisoned tigers but because the thought of poisoning tigers did not disgust them.
Given that cruelty toward animals, the new hunting code, and general British
xenophobia cannot fully explain the opposition to poison, what accounts for it?
I would argue that we need to consider seriously hunters’ claims of affection for
tigers. After all, Sanderson made a point of defending the tiger’s reputation. Half a
century before the ecological role of predators was widely understood, Sanderson
argued that tigers were beneficial to the agricultural community: “The balance of
nature cannot be interfered with with impunity,” he declared (Sanderson, p. 268),
19 John Henry Baldwin, Large and Small Game of Bengal and the North-Western
Provinces of India. 2nd edn (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1876), p. 10.
20 Edward Braddon, Thirty Years of Shikar (Edinburgh, 1895), p. 300.
Tiger Tales 239
offering a detailed financial estimate to prove that the economic cost of lost livestock
was counterbalanced against the tiger’s “services rendered in keeping down wild
animals which destroy crops” (Sanderson, p. 267). Sanderson’s explicit vindication
of the Felis Tigris occupies three solid pages, and the chapters on tigers contain
numerous ameliorating explanations of tiger behavior. He kept at least one tiger as
a pet. Sanderson was typical in this regard; many shikari around this time began to
write about these predatory cats with approbation and sympathy. This certainly looks
like evidence of partiality.
Weighing against all Sanderson’s assertions is an incontrovertible fact: he
continued to kill tigers. His powerfully expressed sympathy for tigers did not
stay his hand. It is tempting to agree with Ritvo that the remorse and admiration
recorded in hunters’ memoirs are “ barely skin deep” (Ritvo, p. 267). After all, regret
for a tiger shot one day never seemed to keep shikari from picking up their rifles
the next day. However, we must keep in mind that the thrill of the chase was a
time-honored, socially-condoned experience for British men, while sympathy for
predators was not. That a man who had built his career and reputation on big game
hunting should soldier on is no surprise (though, indeed, some later hunters—most
notably Corbett—would find a way to spare tigers). Therefore, we need to analyze
not Sanderson’s continued hunting, but his dismay at success. The latter reaction
springs from a complicated sense of his personal relationship with tigers.
Sanderson’s apparent inconsistency arose not from hypocrisy but from the
contradictory impulses which pushed shikari toward demonstrating their masculinity,
on the one hand, and sympathizing with animals, on the other hand. Both behaviors
were seemingly encouraged by evolutionary theory as articulated by Darwin in The
Descent of Man, allusions to which abounded in hunting literature. Evolutionary
theory justified the “hunting instinct” as a fundamental masculine impulse, the
linchpin of humanity’s successful dominion over other animals, and the source of
Britain’s imperial triumph.21 This gave hunters scientific support for their belief that
hunting was an especially healthy, educational, and meritorious activity; the merit
increased with the ferocity of the prey. At the same time, evolutionary theory also
suggested that humans were distant kin to fellow mammals such as tigers. The bond
between British shikari and tigers was even closer—they were the best big game
hunters in India.
Shikari increasingly described both themselves and tigers in ways that emphasized
their similarity. The tiger was a solitary hunter. British Indian shikari also perceived
21 See the discussion of “the natural man” in H.G. Wells, “Human Evolution, an
Artificial Process.” Wells proposes the survival of Palæolithic man’s “love of hunting and
violent exercise” as an explanation for “the love of killing which has been for ages such a
puzzle in his own nature to man” (H.G. Wells, “Human Evolution, an Artificial Process,” in
Robert Philmus and David Hughes (eds), H.G. Wells: Early Writings (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1975), p. 215). In The Tiger-Hunters, Burton writes knowledgably about
“primitive man, the hunting animal, from whom we are all descended and from whom hunting
instincts are likely to be inherited” (The Tiger-Hunters (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1936),
p. 51).
themselves as solitary hunters.22 They wrote scornfully of the enormous retinues
required by a tiger hunt with elephants, the method associated with local royalty
and visiting aristocratic sportsmen. Of course, there was often little connection
between a shikari’s self-perception as a solitary hunter and his hunting practice,
which customarily entailed dragging along dozens of local men to carry supplies,
look for the wounded tiger, carry lanterns, and so forth. Colonel A.E. Stewart offers
an extreme example. In the “Dedication” of Tiger and Other Game, he brags: “All
my shikar in the jungles has been my own ‘bundobust,’ and I have never had friends
with elephants to run beats for me. I have done it all on my own and learned the
jungles from my own observations, on my flat feet or in a bullock cart. You go and
do the same.”23 In light of this impressive claim, the attentive reader will be surprised
to note that, by page 33, Stewart’s list of “essentials” has reached a total of one
hundred and thirteen local men, including beaters, bearers, orderlies, boda men, and
Dâk runners; nor does this figure include the numerous commissioners, officers, and
headmen whose assistance procured the “essentials.”24 However, although hundreds
of men might participate in a single hunt, there was a crucial distinction among them:
the British shikari and the tiger were the only ones carrying dangerous weapons.
Hunters also believed that the tigers themselves could “discriminate with
wonderful sagacity” between “an armed man” (e.g. a British man) and “a possible
victim,” inevitably a villager (Sanderson, p. 271)—apparently the Victorian tiger
also recognized the hunt as a contest between itself and the British shikari. Tigers
had long symbolized both India and her ruling class, in the eyes of the Moghuls as
well as the British. The “direct and obvious” connection that Ritvo notes “between
triumphing over a dangerous animal and subduing unwilling natives” (Ritvo, p. 254)
should, in theory, apply even more strongly toward the tiger. However, the predatory
connection between tiger and shikari struck these hunters as more salient than shared
species or even nationality; as colonial officers or man-eaters, they shared a position
of power over the Indians, who were their servants, subjects, or prey. If Indian
villagers were particularly vulnerable to tigers, one might attribute this to proximity
(Jepson, p. 184); however, most shikari preferred to believe that tigers intentionally
spared the British. Sanderson suggested that one tigress failed to spring on him and a
companion because “her astonishment overcame all other feelings when, instead of
encountering the ‘mild Hindoo’ of the country, she received such a warm reception
22 This analogy also found its way into non-hunting literature. For example, Arthur Conan
Doyle often refers to Holmes as either a tiger or a lone tiger-hunter: a vigil in “The Adventure
of Black Peter” induces in the narrator “the thrill which the hunter feels when he lies beside
the water pool and waits for the coming of the thirsty beast of prey,” perhaps “a fierce tiger of
crime” (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1995), p. 206). See also
Doyle, “The Adventure of the Empty House” (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, pp. 122–35).
23 A.E. Stewart, Tiger and Other Game: The Practical Experiences of a Soldier Shikari
in India (London: Longman’s, 1927), p. x.
24 Ritvo (p. 261) and Mary Louise Pratt (Imperial Eyes) note the British tendency abroad
to erase the local people from the scene. In Imperial Eyes, Pratt writes that Khoikhoi servants
are “referred to simply as ‘a/the/my Hottentot(s)’ (or not at all, as in the eternal ‘our baggage
arrived the next day’)” (Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 52).
Tiger Tales 241
from two ‘Sahibs’” (Sanderson, p. 315). The popularly accepted ability of tigers to
distinguish between British shikari and Indians was supposed to derive, at least in
part, from the tigers’ recognition of a fellow predator. James Best, a representative
of the India Forest Service, explained to a “lady guest” that she had no need to
fear man-eating tigers: “as dog will not eat dog, so tigers do not like eating meat-
nourished European flesh, … prefer[ing] the vegetarian Hindu.”25 As a corollary,
Sanderson also imagined that the villagers perceived themselves solely as prey in
relation to tigers: “the creature was only known as a fearful beast which had eaten
papa or mamma …” (Sanderson, p. 305).
In addition, the tiger, swift and merciful at the kill, seemed to share the new code
of sportsmanship. Sanderson expended some effort to establish the tiger’s sporting
method of slaughter, contradicting the earlier expert opinion that the tiger kills by
seizing the nape of the neck. While Sanderson himself had “never witnessed a tiger
actually seize its prey,” he was sure from others’ descriptions and teeth marks on kills
that the tiger “seizes the throat in his jaws from underneath, and turns it upwards and
over” to dislocate the neck, the entire operation so swift that a tiger could kill several
domestic cattle before the rest noticed anything amiss (Sanderson, p. 277). After
acknowledging two instances in which a tiger clearly had killed by biting the nape
of the neck, Sanderson carefully justified these as unique circumstances prompted by
the prey’s large size and ferocity (Sanderson, pp. 277–8). Sanderson argued that his
explanation simply made more sense, in terms of efficiency: the method propounded
by those other experts would imply that “the beast would be borne to the ground,
where killing it would be a longer affair than by dislocating its neck” (Sanderson,
p. 278). Instead, tigers preferred a clean kill, in accordance with the values (if not
the practices) of the British Indian shikari. Later shikari agreed that “[d]eath must, in
such circumstances, be almost instantaneous” (Locke, p. 121).
The predatory connection between tigers and hunters is most clearly articulated
in the popular metaphor of tigers as gentlemen. Reginald Heber Percy offers a
striking example:
The cattle-lifter is generally a stay-at-home old gentleman, averse to travel, who takes
two or three villages under his protection, and lives, as far as they will allow him, on good
terms with the people, simply taking a cow, or a donkey, as his droit du seigneur every
four or five days.26
Sanderson’s favorite tiger was “locally known as the ‘Donnay’ tiger,”27 but
Sanderson shortened this to a nickname that connotes old-world Spanish nobility:
25 James W. Best, Tiger Days (London: John Murray, 1931), p. 186. Lions were held to
be similarly selective. Ionides, writing decades later, commented, “It may be some comfort
to white men when they camp in lion country that, apart from one or two isolated cases
of Europeans being eaten in Kenya, the man-eating lion has so far confined its attention to
Africans” (Constantine John Philip Ionides, Mambas and Man-Eaters: A Hunter’s Story (New
York: Holt, Rinehart, 1966), p. 86).
26 Reginald Heber Percy, “Indian Shooting,” in Clive Phillips-Wolley (ed.), Big Game
Shooting, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1894), p. 197.
27 Donnay is the Canarese word for “cudgel.”
“the Don.” Tigers were often contrasted favorably to panthers: “The tiger is, as a
rule, a gentleman. The panther, on the other hand, is a bounder,” Glasfurd asserted
(Glasfurd, p. 135); similarly, “‘[t]he tiger is a gentleman but the panther never,’ an old
Bhil shikari” once told Jepson (Jepson, p. 174). Many authors alluded to the tiger’s
“nobility.” They were not uniformly willing to accept the connotations of this word
choice; Glasfurd, for example, rejected the implicit compliment: “I don’t think a tiger
is noble or magnanimous. I myself have called him a ‘gent,’ but it is only because he
is naturally a more timid animal than most other felines” (quoted in Jepson, p. 180).
For the most part, however, the shikari who referred to the tiger as a gentleman
anthropomorphized whole-heartedly. They assigned names and personalities to the
tigers they hunted and wrote testimonials for the ones they slew.
Percy once again provides an eccentric illustration of this sympathetic
anthropomorphism. In explaining “the marked preponderance of adult tigresses over
tigers,” Percy rejects “the native story that the male tigers kill the young male cubs”28
in favor of a more familiar system of inheritance:
[M]ay not the young male tigers as soon as they leave their mothers avoid the domains of
the heavy old cattle-lifters, and taking to the hills and forest form the game-killing class,
till they are powerful enough to succeed to the estates of their sires, either by force or by
inheritance, owing to their sire having met with an accident when entertaining a sahib,
and so settle down and take wives? The writer has no proof to give in support of this
suggestion but merely offers it for sportsmen to consider. (pp. 212–13)
Percy clearly recognizes that this explanation is his own invention but still finds it
more appealing than the alternative. His theory of tiger primogeniture recognizably
accommodates British values. Clearly it would be easier for the hunter to identify
with self-made tigers who “succeed to the estates of their sires” than with father
tigers who kill their sons. Percy’s idea also made more sense in the context of the
progressivist popular understanding of natural selection, in which the new replaced
the old.
The eating habits ascribed to tigers further demonstrated their likeness to the
British hunters. Tigers were believed to shun carrion (Baldwin, p. 11) as well as
the offal of their own prey: unlike the panther, the tiger refused to eat “intestines
and other foul matter” (Jepson, p. 174).29 These “clean feeders” had, in fact, the
dietary tastes of British gentlemen.30 The local Hindu population of vegetarians
28 This “story” is fairly close to the current zoological understanding of tigers, which
suggests that the ouster of the dominant male tiger is frequently followed by efforts on the part
of the new dominant male to destroy all of the former’s cubs; sadly, no gallant forbearance is
shown toward the female cubs, either.
29 Carrion-eating was interpreted as a sign of cowardice. See the account of Walter
Elliot, quoted in Jerdon (p. 94).
30 We can see the same idea applied to lions in Selous’ essay, “The Lion in South
Africa”: while “the lion is not a clean feeder in the sense that he will only eat fresh meat, he is
wonderfully dexterous in disembowelling a carcase, without messing the meat” (F.C. Selous,
“The Lion in South Africa,” in Clive Phillipps-Wolley (ed.) Big Game Shooting, Vol. 1,
(London: Longmans, Green, 1894), pp. 321–2). The tidy lion would often even bury the nasty
bits “with earth and grass” (p. 322). This contrasted favorably to the Kafirs’ method, which
Tiger Tales 243
behaved inappropriately toward their cattle, in British eyes. In demonstrating to
readers that the value of livestock lost to tigers was relatively minor, Sanderson
noted that villages housed “a large number of old, scraggy, and useless animals of no
value to any one”; furthermore, “these wretched beasts generate … cattle diseases”
(Sanderson, p. 269). By implication, the tigers who picked off the “wretched beasts”
were better shepherds than the Hindu. Like the British, these big cats saw cattle as
savory rather than sacred. Authors of hunting literature who expressed sympathy for
tigers invariably emphasized the tiger’s love of “beef.” For example, Percy suggested
that the heaviest tigers on record had no doubt eaten recently: “Those which scaled
over 500 lbs. must surely have included a good deal of beef” (Percy, p. 218).
Sanderson wrote of the Don that “his main object in life [was] beef” (Sanderson,
p. 307); this tiger was “a glutton at beef; he required his steaks both regularly and of
good quality” (Sanderson, p. 306). An appreciation of meat—especially beef—was
seen as quintessentially British, a source of both national pride and strength; this
traditional association can be seen in the nickname for the Yeomen of the Guard,
who are responsible for protecting the body politic in the person of the monarch:
the Beef-Eaters. Given England’s valorization of meat-eating, Sanderson’s comment
registers approbation and some level of fellow-feeling.
In light of this perceived kinship, the problem with poison becomes clear. The
most obvious way to poison a tiger was to poison its kill. Listen to Sanderson’s
description of lacing a dead bullock with strychnine: “Next morning the bullock had
swelled to an enormous size and the wound was dripping a gelatinous matter. …
[B]y evening fully a quart of fluid had dripped and coagulated below” (Sanderson,
p. 290). The description is detailed and revolting. Like the tiger, British hunters were
“gluttons at beef,” and the thought of tainting a bullock was disgusting. Beef was for
eating, not for worshipping or poisoning. Insofar as beef was the preferred diet for
the stalwart British man, poisoning beef was tantamount to a rejection of everything
that England stood for.
In addition, poison as a method of killing people was associated solely with
murder, not the military, so British officers in the Indian Army might well have
shrunk from it. Many British shikari were British Indian officers. For example, A.I.R.
Glasfurd began to write hunting literature as a Captain and ended as a Colonel; R.G.
Burton was a Brigadier-General. These authors all extolled hunting as a method for
improving a soldier’s military skills. Shakespear suggested that, had more men been
trained as sportsmen, England would have fared better in the Mutiny.31 Glasfurd
described hunting as a nearly orgiastic military experience: “Just a man’s hands,
a horse’s legs, roar-roar of wind in ears, and a splendid fighting foe in front. The
acme of physical—and mental—uplift. The cavalry spirit!” (Glasfurd, “Foreword,”
p. vii). Like his peers, Sanderson saw tiger hunting as actively beneficial to the
purposes of empire—“officers see for themselves matters affecting the districts of
which they have charge when visiting out-of-the-way localities for sport, which
left “everything in such a filthy mess that some people would lose all appetite at the very sight
of it” (p. 322).
31 Major Henry Shakespear, The Wild Sports of India: With Detailed Instructions for the
Sportsman (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862), p. x.
they would never otherwise learn” (Sanderson, p. 269). Writing after World War
I, Stewart praised “jungle shooting” as the finest peacetime training available for
an officer (Stewart, p. ix). The material parallels between big game hunting and
the daily business of soldiering do not appear to be particularly marked, but the
hierarchical likeness is powerful: British Indian shikari displayed mastery over the
natural, foreign world (including the terrain, the local people, and the game) when
they hunted, just as officers were expected to act with similar mastery over their
troops.32 Soldierly training thus provided an important rationale for hunting in an
era that increasingly questioned the ethics of blood sports. In this context, poisoning
a tiger would actually undermine the rhetoric of big game hunting as character-
building military preparation.
Even in the sordid hierarchy of homicide methods, strychnine was reprehensible.
So strong was public opinion against poison in the Victorian era that alleged poisoners
were apparently the least likely of accused murderers to get a fair trial. According
to J.H. Beale, who wrote a series of articles on “The Psychology of Poisoning” in
1901, juries in murder cases involving poison had a tendency to convict, even though
in many cases “the evidence introduced did not prove guilt beyond a reasonable
doubt.”33 He concluded, “It is probable that poison is so secret and so terrible an
agent, that even a suspicion of its use prejudices a jury against the accused, and in
fact though not in law shifts the burden of proof” (Beale, p. 9). The logic of profiling
in early twentieth-century country house mysteries cast poisoning as a woman’s
crime. While the Victorians don’t seem to have believed this, they did see certain
poisons as more feminine or masculine. Arsenic, easily purchased as a cosmetic and
slow in its effects, was more appropriate for the temperament of a gentle murderess,
while strychnine, violent and swift, was the poison of choice for men who did not
care about disguising their actions. Such men also evinced an “insensibility to the
pain … of the victim”; the infamous case of Dr Pritchard, in which he poisoned
his wife slowly over a period of four months, showed his desire “not to avoid
dramatic suffering, but to escape detection” (p. 113). While strychnine at least had
the advantage of seeming like a masculine choice, it was still abject. Male poisoners
were seen to be craven; according to one commentator, poisoners were characterized
by a “cool, calculating, cowardly, crafty temper” (qtd. in Beale, p. 333). With his
cowardice and willingness to prolong his victims’ suffering, a poisoner was the very
antithesis of the good sport.
Comparing homicide to hunting may seen far-fetched, but this analogy is
implicit in a telling detail from shikaris’ statements about poison: the use of the
term murder. One does not “murder” a beast; one murders a fellow species member.
When Sanderson confessed to feeling “like a murderer,” his word choice indicates
an uneasy—perhaps unexpected—sense of kinship. The species barrier provided
no buffer from the suspicion that he had done something immoral. Of course, in a
political context, murder indicates a killing not sanctioned by the military, and that
32 See also MacKenzie, pp. 176–7; Ritvo, p. 271.

33 J.H. Beale, “The Psychology of Poisoning.” (The Green Bag 13 (1901): 5–9, 111–14,
331–5): p. 9.
Tiger Tales 245
implication also resonates here. A being who has been murdered is not a legitimate
enemy.
One particular story in Sanderson’s memoir demonstrates the sheer psychological
messiness of his attitude toward tigers: the hunt in which he eventually killed the
Don, a “harmless and good-natured beast” whom the shikari had perceived as a
“notable rival” (pp. 306–307). Sanderson generally described tigers in a way not
merely anthropomorphic but also affectionate, and that language is very much in
evidence here. Once the Don lay dead, Sanderson “regarded the fallen hero with
pity” (Sanderson, p. 312). He also attested that he “would not have been sorry had
[the Don] been alive and unhurt again” (Sanderson, p. 313). In Sanderson’s account
of this drawn-out hunt, the exact moment when he kills the Don is surrounded by
narrative trouble. The hunter abruptly changes his frame of reference to the tiger,
who is no longer a “friend” or “rival” but a “wounded monster, too sick to move”
(Sanderson, p. 312). Temporarily designating the Don as a “monster” serves to render
the tiger not only inhuman but even unnatural, lower than a beast; it gives Sanderson
a license to kill. Yet, at the very moment of pulling the trigger, the shikari “forgets”
how to hold his rifle and nearly breaks his nose with the recoil, making himself
“almost as bloody as the tiger” (Sanderson, p. 312). Sanderson’s story suggests that,
in killing the Don, he has temporarily ceased to be a good sportsman. Once the Don
is dead, Sanderson describes their connection as “intimate” and offers a stalwart
eulogy (p. 312). Such passages as these point to the problem of knowing how to
read the affectionate statements about tigers in hunters’ memoirs. The possible irony
that underlies references to “rivals” and “heroes” may itself be a cover—one which
would allow a hunter like Glasfurd, when called on his wording, to save face by
claiming that he did not actually believe that a tiger was a gentleman. After all,
sympathizing with a predator was not a popular stance.
In Sanderson, we see the first glimmer of a new Western attitude toward tigers.
Based originally on a sense of shared kinship as beef-eating lords of the Indian
jungle, this affection for tigers would eventually extend to other predators as well,
and be shared by other people of European descent.34 Shere Khan, the wicked, mangy
man-eater of Kipling’s Jungle Books, has yielded his place to the charming twins in
Two Brothers, in which the tiger protagonists are pitted against one another by the
evil hands of man.35 Even tigers who attack humans in the US may not be killed, as
demonstrated by the highly publicized 2003 case involving Roy Horn and his tiger,
Manticore. While Victorian shikari were committed to ascertaining the exact cause
of a tiger attacking a human, the US Department of Agriculture has by far outdone
them, expending two years to investigate Manticore’s attack and documenting the
34 The opinions on tigers among the peoples of Southeast Asia appear to have been much
more tolerant, sophisticated, and nuanced than those of their colonizers. Ironically, present-
day conservationists place most of the blame for the endangered status of tigers and other
regional big cats on the local people. While it is no doubt true that habitat loss and poaching
for traditional medicines have harmed the tiger, this cannot possibly rival the original damage
committed by Victorian sportsmen.
35 Two Brothers, Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud, Universal, 2004.
findings in a 233-page report.36 As another outgrowth of the Victorian legacy, our
new-found love of tigers comes at a time when less than 5000 tigers survive in the
wild in the Indian subcontinent, according to a 1999 World Wildlife Fund report.37
The WWF points to habitat loss and poaching as tigers’ main enemies. Still, tigers
faced their worst challenge a century ago, when their population was drastically
reduced by sportsmen unregulated by law or public opinion.
The increasing sympathy felt by tiger-hunters toward their quarry was ultimately
good for tigers, as their most avid pursuers eventually became their champions. In
1871, Darwin referred to “humanity to the lower animals” as “one of the latest moral
acquisitions” (Descent of Man, Vol. 1, p. 101). This observation, while it may apply
fairly accurately to European and Euro-American cultures, misleadingly suggests a
straightforward progression of Western ethics. Instead, shikari seem to have had a
finite amount of concern for living beings in India, and affection for tigers usually
came at the cost of the villagers. Previously, tiger-hunters had justified their sport
as part of the white man’s burden, protecting the villagers and their cattle. As their
efforts to protect the big cats grew, shikari became more tolerant of truant tigers.
This is evident in their increasingly sparing choice about when to apply the label
“man-eater.” Although Sanderson agreed wholeheartedly with his contemporaries
that the man-eater was a “truly terrible scourge” that could only be felled by “some
European sportsman” (Sanderson, pp. 270–71), he considered an understanding of
the tiger’s intentions, methods, and circumstances crucial in establishing guilt. For
example, a human might have been killed by accident (Sanderson, p. 307).38 Later
shikari concurred with Sanderson’s approach, weighing such factors as whether or
not a suspect tiger had “deliberately hunted these people” (Jepson, p. 183) or had
touched the corpse (Locke, p. 116). These hunters were also ready to extend their
chivalry to tigresses, who were expected to be dangerous in mating season or with
cubs; Locke believed that “temperamental tigresses … cannot altogether be blamed
for attacking a human being” (Locke, p. 118). Sanderson opined that a tigress who
killed a few humans to feed her cubs could not even be considered a real man-eater
(Sanderson, p. 244). Shikari tended to concur that “every tiger is allowed one or two
‘free’ men before he is classified as a man-eater” (Jepson, p. 183).
To be fair, it appears from their descriptions that Sanderson and other British
shikari actually made more effort to avoid harming local people than did the
visiting hunters who vocally extolled their own noble mission. Some of the hazards
of working with a British hunter are revealed in Baldwin’s The Large and Small
Game of Bengal, when he remarks, chillingly, that “it is a very bad practice to fire
in the direction of a number of beaters. I have often seen it done by thoughtless
36 Adam Goldman, “USDA Fails to Find Cause of Attack on Horn,” 2005. Associated
Press Online. 4 Aug. 2005. <http://www.ap.org/>.
37 World Wildlife Fund, “Tigers: Population Estimates,” 2005. (4 Aug. 2005). <http://
worldwildlife.org/tigers/population.cfm>.
38 For example, once, while attempting to snare rabbits, the villagers had inadvertently
netted the Don: “In escaping he had to ‘over’ one man to clear the way, but it was universally
agreed that it was a pure accident; and though the man died soon afterwards, the Don lost
nothing in public esteem by the mischance” (p. 307).
Tiger Tales 247
men, but it is most unfair to these poor fellows” (Baldwin, p. 37). Even when these
“poor, miserably clothed, and often half-starved mortals” were not actually at risk
of getting shot, they were pushing through dense jungle, “with nothing but a stick in
their hands,” in danger of being mauled (Baldwin, p. 31). In contrast, sitting up over
a kill, as the shikaris preferred, was less hazardous to human life. Sanderson reported
that no human was ever killed on one of his tiger hunts (p. 284).
Shikari helped establish the strange pattern for Western attitudes toward other
(non-Western or non-human) living beings. We are asked to choose between spotted
owls and working-class loggers, tigers and practitioners of Traditional Chinese
Medicine, blue crabs and fishermen, chimpanzees and children with rare diseases.
These groups are always posed as having mutually exclusive interests, so that helping
one side necessitates heartlessly condemning the other to destruction. The figure
who best illustrates this polarizing tendency is Peter Singer, the radically utilitarian
philosopher hailed by activists for animal rights as a messiah and condemned by
activists for disability rights as a force of evil. While the terms of this particular
debate might have startled Victorians, one thing has not changed: just as people of
privilege pitched early nineteenth-century animal welfare issues as a contest between
working-class people and animals, today’s discussions of animal rights tend to
frame each problem as a painful battle between a villain and a martyr, with the roles
assigned according to the predilections of the commentator. We might do well to
reframe this contest of humans versus beasts in the light of the tiger hunters’ startled
insight: the tigers and the villagers were not really enemies.39 We can no longer
easily point to a gay sporting party with “an imposing line of elephants” to blame
for extinction, habitat loss, or global warming; today’s economic and environmental
predators—multinational corporations and governments—are faceless, which directs
our attention to the visible participants: the assorted victims, human and animal. The
only solution lies in a more holistic understanding of our complex interdependence
with the other creatures who share our small blue planet.
Works Cited
Baldwin, John Henry. Large and Small Game of Bengal and the North-Western
Provinces of India, 2nd edn (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1876).
Barclay, Edgar. Big Game Shooting Records (London: Witherby, 1932).
Beale, J.H. “The Psychology of Poisoning,” The Green Bag 13 (1901): 5–9, 111–14,
331–5.
Best, James W. Tiger Days (London: John Murray, 1931).
Braddon, Edward. Thirty Years of Shikar (Edinburgh, 1895).
Burton, R. G. The Tiger-Hunters (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1936).
——. A Book of Man-Eaters (London: Hutchinson, 1931).
39 British hunters frequently remarked on the local tolerance for tigers. For example,
Baldwin marvels at some length about the “very extraordinary and unaccountable” fact that
the “villagers … do not appear to be anxious … to get rid of their enemy”; he attributes this
to “superstitious dread” and “apathy” (pp. 15–16).
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London:
Murray, 1871).
Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905 (Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth, 1995).
“An Evening with a Tiger,” Once a Week 20.3 (3 Jul. 1869): 535–9.
Glasfurd, A.I.R. Rifle and Romance in the Indian Jungle (London: John Lane,
1921).
Goldman, Adam. “USDA Fails to Find Cause of Attack on Horn.” 2005. Associated
Press Online. 4 Aug. 2005. <http://www.ap.org/>.
Hewett, John. Jungle Trails in Northern India (London: Methuen, 1938).
Ionides, Constantine John Philip. Mambas and Man-Eaters: A Hunter’s Story (NY:
Holt, Rinehart, 1966).
Jepson, Stanley (ed.). Big Game Encounters: Critical Moments in the Lives of Well-
Known Shikaris (London: Witherby, 1936).
Locke, A. The Tigers of Trengganu (New York: Scribner’s, 1954).
MacKenzie, John M. The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British
Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).
Munsche, P.B. Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1671–1831
Murray, T. Douglas and A. Silva White. Sir Samuel Baker: A Memoir (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1895).
Percy, Reginald Heber. “Indian Shooting,” in Clive Phillips-Wolley (ed.), Big Game
Shooting, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green, 1894), pp. 182–362.
Phillipps-Wolley, Clive. Big Game Shooting (London: Longmans, Green, 1894).
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London
and New York: Routledge, 1992).
Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Sanderson, George P. Thirteen Years among the Wild Beasts of India, 1882, 3rd edn
(New Dehli: Asian Educational Services, 2000).
Selous, F.C. “The Lion in South Africa,” in Clive Phillipps-Wolley (ed.), Big Game
Shooting, Vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green, 1894), pp. 314–46.
Shakespear, Henry. The Wild Sports of India: With Detailed Instructions for the
Sportsman (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862).
Stewart, A.E. Tiger and Other Game: The Practical Experiences of a Soldier Shikari
in India (London: Longman’s, 1927).
Stephen, Oscar Leslie (ed.). Sir Victor Brooke: Sportsman and Naturalist (London:
John Murray, 1894).
Thomas, Richard. The Politics of Hunting (Aldershot: Gower, 1983).
Two Brothers. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Universal, 2004.
Wells, H.G, “Human Evolution, an Artificial Process” in Robert Philmus and David
Hughes (eds), H G. Wells: Early Writings (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1975), pp. 211–19.
World Wildlife Fund. “Tigers: Population Estimates” (4 Aug. 2005). <http://
worldwildlife.org/tigers/population.cfm>.
Chapter 14
The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized

Crocodile of the Nineteenth Century
Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge
“Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night,” Christina Rossetti invited the
mid-Victorian readers of “My Dream” (1862). Her fantastic poem depicts newborn
crocodiles emerging from the “pregnant” Euphrates. Anthropomorphized and
orientalized, the swiftly growing reptiles are girdled “with massive gold / And
polished stones,” the biggest marked by a “kinglier girdle and a kingly crown.” This
largest crocodile turns with “execrable appetite” and cannibalizes the others, sucking
and crunching their bodies until the fat distils on his chin. Only then does he sleep,
“gorged to the full.” Inexplicably, the monstrous crocodile shrinks to common size
and his oriental girdle and crown disappear: “all the empire fade[s] from his coat.”
Suddenly a vessel appears, its power quelling both the Euphrates and the cannibal
beast, which shows signs of subjugation and apology by shedding “appropriate
tears” and wringing his “hands.”
Anthropomorphic and orientalized, standing for the monstrous, the cannibal,
the false, and finally for the subjugated, Rossetti’s beast represents a figure of
quintessential otherness. As such, we suggest, it is the type for many others in
nineteenth-century British visual and literary culture. From the crocodile that haunts
Thomas De Quincey’s opium-induced nightmares in Confessions of An English
Opium Eater (1822) to the crocodile’s bite that signals the infection of empire in Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), the beast functions culturally as a
sign of excessive appetite, hypocrisy, violence, and, most predominantly, alterity.
In contrast with the rapacious yet regal Bengal tiger, the crocodile has no honorable
associations. It symbolically inhabits the underbelly of empire, the slime at the
bottom of the river. Why did such negative connotations devolve on the crocodile
as opposed to other exoticized animals such as the tiger or the elephant? We suggest
six broad reasons. First, the tears that the crocodile secretes as a means of cleaning
and lubricating its eyes made it stand in classical sources as a symbol of false
Our grateful thanks to our research assistants Anna Kelly and Julie Lambert, who hunted
down many crocodiles on our behalf, to Colette Colligan for the Burton reference, and to
Judith Mitchell, who read and commented on earlier versions of this paper.
The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R.W. Crump (Baton Rouge, 1979),
pp. 39–40.
Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of An English Opium Eater (London, [1907]); Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890. London, 2001).
emotion and hypocrisy. Second, the crocodile’s supposedly voracious feeding (and
especially the fact that young crocodiles are eaten by adults of their own species)
made it a symbol of excessive appetite, as well as cannibalism. Third, the reptile’s
habitat in areas of Egypt, India, and Africa (geographical areas of colonization in
the nineteenth century) suggested its use as a sign of the colonized other. Fourth,
the crocodile’s rumored association with rapacious, excessive, or deviant sexuality
readily transferred to the people of the regions it inhabited. Fifth, its perceived status
as low on the evolutionary scale made it available as a symbol of primitivism and
racial inferiority. Finally, the animal’s manner of hunting by lurking in rivers and
mud lent itself as a metaphor for colonial treachery. The crocodile, in our estimation,
thus stands as the example par excellence of Harriet Ritvo’s assertion that certain
dangerous or carnivorous animals served as parallels for “alien or socially excluded
human groups.”
Crocodiles and the Colonial Other
The crocodile emerged as a key nineteenth-century imperialist symbol with Napoleon’s

1798 invasion of Egypt, an invasion that set the keynote of the “Oriental renaissance”
in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In France, the reptile
predominated in the official symbolism for the Egyptian campaign: the crocodile,
Wilfred T. Neill, The Last of the Ruling Reptiles: Alligators, Crocodiles, and Their
Kin (New York, 1971), p. 16. Shakespeare alludes to this myth in Othello (“If that the earth
could teem with woman’s tears,/ Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile” [The Complete
Works of Shakepeare, ed. David Bevington (New York, 2004), IV.i.l.250–51]) and Spenser in
the Faerie Queene (“As when a wearie traueller … / Doth meet a cruelle craftie Crocodile,/
Which in false griefe hyding his harmefull guile,/ Doth weepe full sore, and sheddeth tender
teares;/ The foolish man, that pitties all this while/ His mournefull plight, is swallowd vp
vnwares,/ Forgetfull of his owne, that mindes anothers cares” (ed. A.C. Hamilton (London,
1977), I.v.l.18). According to Neill, the myth of the hypocritical crocodile was brought to a
New World context by Sir J. Hawkins, a slave trader who encountered crocodiles off the coast
of Colombia in May 1564 (Neill, The Last of the Ruling Reptiles, p. 16). John Sparke the
younger, who kept the journal of the voyage, wrote that “In this riuer we saw many crocodils
…. His nature is euer when he would haue his praie, to crie, and sobbe like a christian bodie,
to prouoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them, and thereupon came this
prouerbe that is appleid vnto women when they weepe, Lachryma Crocodili, the meaning
whereof is, that as the Crocodile when he crieth, goeth then about most to deceiue, so doth
a woman most commonly when she weepeth” (Clements R. Markham ed., The Hawkins’
Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I (London: Hakluyt
Society, 1878), pp. 40–41).
Age (Cambridge, 1987), p. 25.
Edward Said, Orientalism (1978. New York, 1994), p. 42.
The crocodile was associated symbolically with Egypt because it inhabited Egyptian
waterways and because it had been worshipped by the ancient Egyptians (G.W. Trompf,
“Mythology, Religion, Art, Literature” in Charles A. Ross ed., Crocodiles and Alligators
(New York, 1989), pp. 157–8.
The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the Nineteenth Century 251
chained to a palm tree, was featured on the Napoleonic medal for the conquest of
Upper Egypt. The animal also became a focus for the newly founded Institut de
l’Égypte, the massive orientalist study that comprised so crucial a part of Napoleon’s
imperialist strategy. British caricaturists took over the crocodile as symbol for the
Egyptian campaign, this time with satirical resonance: James Gillray’s 1799 anti-
Napoleonic caricature “L’Insurrection de l’Institut Amphibie” depicts a Frenchman
trying to saddle and bridle a crocodile, undercutting the heroic significance of the
crocodile in official French symbolism and suggesting the futility of the campaign.
Primarily, however, the British deployed the crocodile as a figure for Napoleon
himself. The crocodile’s association with insatiable appetite as well as with alterity
underlay this metonymic shift. Hence Gillray’s famous cartoon of the Battle of the Nile
depicts the French fleet as a host of “Revolutionary Crocodiles” (one, representing
L’Orient exploding, vomits skyward). A British caricature of Napoleon following
the Coup de Brumaire represents him as the “Corsican Crocodile dissolving the
Council of Frogs!!!” (i.e. the Council of Ancients), flanked by a guard of impeccably
uniformed crocodile soldiers. The crocodile’s gaping jaws and huge teeth indicate
Napoleon’s appetite for power.10 In British representations of the Egyptian campaign,
then, the crocodile represented both France and Egypt, colonizer and colonized,
Napoleon’s status as loathed aggressor conflating him with the predominant symbol
of the Egyptian other.
Yet despite this negative connection with the hated Napoleon, crocodile motifs
surfaced in fashionable Regency decor. Here they evoked exoticism and orientalism,
recalling the world of the near east that Napoleon’s campaign had opened to
European consciousness, and signaling the extent to which Britain’s national
identity was increasingly constructed in a global context, through its assimilation of
the wealth and signs of other cultures. Craven Cottage in Fulham, built circa 1805
and much admired by the Prince of Wales, featured an Egyptian hall complete with
crocodile motifs.11 Similarly, the Brighton Pavilion, symptom of Regency excess,
flaunted an impractical and sinuous crocodile-shaped sofa;12 in turn, contemporary
cartoonists lampooned the fashion for crocodile furniture as a form of mania or
“meublomanie.”13 As Edward Said suggests, on the “Oriental stage stands a
David Block, “Commemorative Medals Related to Napoleon: The Egyptian

Campaign.” 2002. 12 May 2004 (<http://fortiter.napoleonicmedals.org/medals/history/egypt.
htm>).
Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp.108–109.
See also “French Generals retiring, on account of their health.” James Gillray,
The Works of James Gillray: 582 Plates and a Supplement Containing the 45 So-Called
“Suppressed Plates” (1851. Bronx, 1968).
10 Jérémie Benoit, “Anti-Napoléon: The Ideology.” n.d. 12 May 2004 (<http://www.
napoleon.org/en/special_dossier/caricatures/images/us_Img041.jpg>).
11 John Morley, Regency Design 1790–1840: Gardens, Buildings, Interiors, Furniture
(New York, 1993), p. 346.
12 Robert Woof, Introduction, in Thomas De Quincey: An English Opium-Eater 1785–
1859 (Cumbria, 1985), p. 14.
13 “Meublomanie, or Rage for Furniture,” The Satirist, or Monthly Meteor (1 Nov. 1807),
pp. 113–19. This fashion is evoked in turn by De Quincey in his Confessions, as his opium
prodigious cultural repertoire whose individual items evoke a fabulously rich world:
the Sphinx, Cleopatra, Eden, Troy …” (Said, Orientalism, p. 63). For nineteenth-
century England, the crocodile stood as one of the most powerful of these orientalist
symbols of wealth and exoticism.
The crocodile stood not only for Egypt and the Nile but for cultural otherness
more broadly, including that of Africa and India. Explorer narratives and early
colonial accounts of Africa describe “large populations of crocodiles” in the Shire,
Limpopo, Kwanza, Luapula, Zambezi, and the Blue and White Nile Rivers, as well
as in Lakes Victoria, Bangweulu, Tana, Mweru, and Nyasa (now Malawi).14 Because
of its man-eating propensities, the crocodile was described in many early European
accounts of Africa as “hideous,” “loathsome,” “disgusting and ungentlemanly”
(quoted in Musambachime, “The Fate of the Nile Crocodile in African Waterways,”
p. 201).15 David Livingstone’s mid-Victorian journals of his African travels, for
example, record how the crocodiles’ “nature leads them to shew skulking habits.”16
Similarly, the French-born American explorer Paul Du Chaillu’s 1861 memoir of
his African explorations records the “savage-looking jaws,” “formidable rows of
teeth,” and “dull, wicked eyes” of two crocodiles that he had shot.17 The illustration
to the memoir vividly portrays the menace of the beasts, whose huge sinuous shapes
dominate the foreground and dwarf the human figures in the canoe (Plate 19).
As with memoirs of Africa, early nineteenth-century British descriptions of India
highlight the dangers of crocodiles lurking in Indian waterways. Captain Thomas
Williamson recorded in his Oriental Field Sports (1819) the rapacious behavior of
the Indian crocodile:
dream is haunted by a crocodile which metamorphoses into domestic objects: “All the feet of
the tables, sofas, &c., soon became instinct with life: the abominable head of the crocodile,
and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions” (De Quincey,
Confessions, p. 242). A short story in the Strand of 1917 used such now-outdated furniture as
a basis for the protagonists’ night of horror, as ghostly crocodiles seem to haunt their house.
In turn, the story is mentioned in Sigmund Freud’s essay on the uncanny (see Nicholas Royle,
The Uncanny (New York, 2003), pp. 134–41).
14 Mwelma C. Musambachime, “The Fate of the Nile Crocodile in African Waterways”
African Affairs 86 (1987), p. 201.
15 A particularly lurid account of crocodile treachery occurs in T. Arbousset and F.
Daumas’ Narrative of an Exploratory Tour to the North-East of the Colony of the Cape of
Good Hope, trans. John Croumbie Brown (Cape Town, 1846). These Parisian missionaries
describe the Basutos’ “superstitious dread” (p. 6) of the crocodile, which was rumored to
suck the blood and marrow out of its victims without mangling their bodies. A dramatic
account of “A gentleman devoured by a crocodile” is found in the memoir of the naturalist J.
Leyland’s Adventures in the Far Interior of South Africa Including a Journey to Lake Ngami
and Rambles in Honduras (London, 1866), p. 160.
16 I. Shapera ed., Livingstone’s Private Journals 1851–1853 (London, 1960), p. 222.
17 Paul B. Du Chaillu, Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa (London,
1861), pp. 234–5.
Bathing is very dangerous on account of the alligators.18 The sharp-nosed kind called
gurriol, lives on fish; but the blunt-headed kinds such as the muggah, (which name is
often applied to the sharp) and the koomeer, make cattle and men their chief prey. These
amphibious devils grows [sic] to an enormous size. Some are kept in tanks, and are said
to be tame, as they will come when called to receive their daily allowance. Still after what
I have known, I would not trust myself to them, even when in a state of reflection. The
Nabob had some tame alligators in a tank at Lucknow, which, however, occasionally snapt
up a bather! It is very common to see dogs pulled down by alligators in small rivulets. A
gentleman who was shooting near Rajemahab in some long grass on the banks of a nullah,
or small river, suddenly saw two of his pointers seized and swallowed by an alligator
which lurked in the cover; and he might himself have been added to the meal, but for a
round of small shot which he poured down the animal’s throat.
In the ditches of some forts in the Carnatic, alligators are encouraged, to prevent
desertions. Such pariah dogs as are found in the forts are thrown in as food for the alligators,
which soon devour them. Only one dog was ever known to swim across, and his escape
was occasioned by the number of his pursuers; which crowding together, obstructed each
other from seizing the fugitive.19
As C.A.W. Guggisberg notes, “the great crocodilian showpiece of the Indian

subcontinent has always been the ‘mugger-peer’—the crocodile pond of Karachi.”20
In the 1860s, Andrew Leith Adams described this dramatic sight:
[N]ow and then a huge monster would raise himself upon its diminutive legs, and waddling
for a few paces, fall flat on his belly. Young ones from a foot in length and upwards, ran
nimbly along the margin of the pond, disappearing suddenly in the turbid waters as soon
as we approached …. [W]e had a goat slaughtered, during which operation the brutes
seemed to rouse themselves, as if preparing for a rush. Then one guide, taking piece after
piece of flesh, dashed it on the bank, uttering a low, gurgling sound, at which the whole
tank became in motion, and crocodiles of whose existence we had been before ignorant,
splashed through the shallow water, struggling which should seize the prize. The shore
was literally covered with scaly monsters, snapping their jaws at one another. (Quoted in
Guggisberg, Crocodiles: Their Natural History, Folklore and Conservation, pp. 161–2).
As one of the most dangerous animals of India and Africa, the crocodile literally
stood in the way of colonial settlement; indeed, during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, many European governments offered bounties for dead crocodiles and for
crocodile eggs in order to make the countryside safer for people and cattle.21
18 As Wilfred T. Neill observes, the terms were often used interchangeably: by many,
“alligator” was considered a vulgarism, and “the American species was held by more cultured
people to be a crocodile” (Neill, The Last of the Ruling Reptiles, p. 18).
19 Captain Thomas Williamson, Oriental Field Sports (London, 1819), pp. 128–9.
20 C.A.W. Guggisberg, Crocodiles: Their Natural History, Folklore and Conservation
(Trowbridge, 1972), p. 161.
21 Karlheinz H.P. Fuchs, Charles A. Ross, A.C. (Tony) Pooley, and Romulus Whitaker,
“Crocodile-Skin Products,” in Crocodiles and Alligators, ed. Charles A. Ross (New York,
1989), p. 189; Musambachime, “The Fate of the Nile Crocodile in African Waterways,”
p. 202.
Threatening and voracious, the crocodile functions in many nineteenth-century
texts simply to mark the frontier of otherness, the border between us and them, home
and away. For example, in 1819 George Cruikshank depicted British emigrants to the
Cape of Good Hope22 victimized by both cannibalistic “Hottentots” and rapacious
animals: a snake, a lion, and, prominently featured in the lower left corner, a massive
crocodile.23 Through its central motif of violent consumption, as well as, more
specifically, the conflation of “Hottentots” and crocodiles as cannibals, the cartoon
associates the native and the bestial, the racial and the animal other. Most notably, the
cartoon positions the crocodile on the visual frontier, marking the threshold between
the British viewer and the African landscape. Similarly, a crocodile initiates William
Charles Baldwin to his mid-Victorian African hunting adventures, appearing in the
first chapter and featuring in the first illustration (Plate 20).24
By extension, the crocodile served generally as a liminal sign, marking the
beginning of fantastic or exotic adventures. When Alice falls down the rabbit hole in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), for example, she almost immediately calls
up the crocodile when she inadvertently rewrites Isaac Watts’ “How doth the little
busy bee” into “How doth the little crocodile,” transforming Watts’ sign of dutiful
industry into one of amoral consumption:
How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws.25
Similarly, a crocodile-like reptile marks the frontier of the known world in Edward
Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871).26 When the main character falls down a
mine shaft into the futuristic world, he immediately encounters a “monstrous reptile”
resembling a “crocodile or alligator, but infinitely larger” (Bulwer-Lytton, The
Coming Race, p. 21). As John MacKenzie notes, Victorians understood the crocodile
to be an animal that had apparently not evolved since the prehistoric age, making it
readily available for representing lower orders or earlier stages in an evolutionary
22 The Dutch had ceded the Cape to the British five years earlier, in 1814.
23 Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the
Lessons for Global Power (New York, 2002), p. 124.
24 A curious cultural reversal of this trope is found in Behramji M. Malabari’s The Indian
Eye on English Life or Rambles of a Pilgrim Reformer (1891. Bombay, 1895), in which the
Indian author disembarks in London to explore, bringing to the “banks of the Thames” his
servant, whom he names “Crocodile” (p. 4).
25 Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through
the Looking Glass (New York, 1974), p. 38.
26 Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race (1871. Peterborough, 2002).
taxonomy27 (see Plate 21). Thus in The Coming Race, the beast serves to demarcate
evolutionary eras, the boundaries between now and the future.28
Representing the cannibalistic, the greedy, the unevolved, the unpredictable, and
the highly dangerous, the crocodile thus functioned as the quintessential sign of
alterity. By extension, the reptile came to represent the fear of colonial treachery,
uprising, or sneak attack—something lurking, as it were, almost invisibly under the
surface of empire. And because the crocodile’s habitat crossed continents (Africa,
India, Asia) and lines of imperial demarcation, it came to stand for generalized
imperial anxieties rather than those of one particular continent or colony.
Crocodile Hunting as Imperial Allegory
Given the crocodile’s potency as a sign of otherness, it is not surprising that in the
nineteenth century the battle between white man and crocodile became a potent sign of
masculine and imperial power as well as a way of symbolically enacting evolutionary
superiority over ostensibly less evolved racial types. As MacKenzie observes, during
“the high noon of empire hunting became a ritualized and occasionally spectacular
display of white dominance,” as well as a “necessary preparation and training for
European expansion and conflict with other peoples” (MacKenzie, The Empire of
Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British Imperialism, pp. 7, 44). In turn, domestic
readers devoured exotic hunting memoirs, which usually consisted of a collection
of loosely linked and highly graphic hunting narratives featuring exotic animals and
landscapes. In this genre, the crocodile hunt, which combined extreme danger and
the forceful associations of the reptile with the generalized colonial other, became a
premier example of imperial display and training.29
R. Gordon-Cumming’s highly popular A Hunter’s Life in South Africa (1850)
epitomizes the crocodile-hunting narrative. His intensely voyeuristic accounts of his
kills are well represented by the single example below:
Presently, looking over the bank, I beheld three enormous crocodiles basking on the sand
on the opposite side. I was astonished at their awful appearance and size, one of them
appearing to me to be sixteen or eighteen feet in length, with a body as thick as that of an
ox. On observing us they plunged into the dead water by the side of the stream. The next
minute, one of them popping up his terrible head in the middle of the stream, I made a
27 John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation, and British

Imperialism (Manchester, 1988), p. 301.
28 The crocodile’s potency as a generalized symbol of evolutionary stasis is deployed in
John Ruskin’s Love’s Meinie: Lectures on Greek and English Birds (Keston, Kent, 1873), his
polemic against Darwinian evolutionary theory. Ruskin substitutes the crocodile for the ape as
the representative of humanity’s bestial origins, accusing the “men of science” of “deciphering
the filthy heraldries which record the relation of humanity to the ascidian [sea squirt] and the
crocodile” (p. 59).
29 The aspect of display was particularly salient in the case of the crocodile which, until
mid-century, was unprofitable due to its lack of saleable parts: unlike elephant ivory, crocodile
skin became fashionable only later in the century.
beautiful shot, and sent a ball through the middle of his brains. The convulsions of death
which followed were truly awful ….
Following the windings of the river I detected a small crocodile basking on the sand,
when I gave him a shot and he instantly plunged into the river. A little farther on I wounded
a third as he lay on a promontory of sand, and he likewise made the water. A little farther
down the stream, yet another crocodile, a huge old sinner, lay basking on the sand. I
determined to make a very correct shot in this case, and set about stalking him. Creeping
up behind the trunk of a prostrate old tree, I took a rest and sent the ball into his nostril,
when he plunged into the river, colouring the water with his blood.
… [A]t the next bend of the river three huge crocodiles lay on the sand on the opposite
side. Stalking within easy range, I shot one of them in the head: his comrades instantly
dashed into the water, but he lay as if dead, high on the sand. A second shot, however,
through the ribs, brought him back to life. On receiving it he kept running round and
round, snapping his horrid jaws fearfully at his own wounded side. In the convulsions of
death he made one run clean away from the water, but another unlucky turn brought his
head toward the river, into which he eventually rolled.30
Similarly, Sir Samuel White Baker’s 1854 memoir, The Rifle and the Hound in
Ceylon, describes how he and his native guide tracked a huge crocodile that had
eaten a man and two buffalo.31 As the crocodile brushed their canoe, “The native in
the stern grew as pale as a black can turn with fright, and instantly began to paddle
the canoe away.” Baker shoots the crocodile in the shoulder, and “by threats” induces
his terrified guide to paddle after the wounded beast. He then triumphantly shatters
the brain of the beast with a “two-ounce ball” (Baker, The Rifle and the Hound in
Ceylon, pp. 70, 71).32
The most powerful visual rendering of the crocodile hunt as imperial trope
is perhaps Thomas Baines’ 1856 painting T. Baines and C. Humphrey Killing an
Alligator.33 The painting contains all the classic elements of the battle, pitting man
against beast, with the beast metonymically associated with a colonized landscape,
thus extending the allegorical meaning of the battle. We say “man” advisedly because
for much of the nineteenth century this was a specifically masculine test. Indeed, as
early as 1848, Harriet Martineau recognized crocodile hunting as a well worn and
superficial feature of the masculine Oriental travel narrative. As she wrote in Eastern
Life, Present and Past, “A man who goes to shoot crocodiles and flog Arabs, and eat
30 R. Gordon-Cumming, A Hunter’s Life in South Africa (2 vols, London, 1850), vol. 2,

pp. 164–6. The measurement of dead crocodiles was a standard part of the hunt, the length of
the kill measuring the prowess of the hunter.
31 Sir Samuel White Baker, The Rifle and the Hound in Ceylon (1854. New York,
1967).
32 Interestingly, however, Baker’s The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia, and the Sword
Hunters of the Hamran Arabs (1867. New York, 1967), which was dedicated to the young
Prince Albert, pays tribute to the courage of the howartis in stalking and killing a crocodile
with harpoon only (p. 393).
33 Actually, as G.W. Trompf points out, the reptile was a large Indopacific crocodile that
the pair encountered in northern Australia (Trompf, “Mythology, Religion, Art, Literature,”
p. 168).
ostrich’s eggs, looks upon the monuments as so many strange old stone-heaps, and
comes back ‘bored with the Nile’; as we were told we should be.”34
So standard did the crocodile and alligator become in imperial fictions that late
nineteenth-century adventure narratives are simply crawling with them (Plate 22).
G.A. Henty, who dictated his books in a study decorated with weapons and exotic
sporting trophies, and who believed that hunting “lay at the centre of the imperial
experience” (MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, p. 44), seems in particular to have
exploited this trope. In By Sheer Pluck (1884), a novel set during the Second Ashanti
War, the hero Frank Hargate daringly rescues a fellow soldier from a crocodile:
“The water was too muddy to see far through it, but Frank speedily came upon the
alligator,35 and finding its eyes, shoved his thumbs into them.”36 A later Henty novel,
Among Malay Pirates (1897), makes explicit that the crocodile stands in for the
native other.37 In this text, an old British sailor remarks that he “would rather have
a stand-up fight with the Malays than trust myself for two minutes in this muddy
water” (Henty, Among Malay Pirates, p. 29), equating the crocodile’s lurking attack
with colonial resistance. In particular, the novel here represents a non-British mode
of fighting—an underhanded and guileful assault that is not a man-to-man fight.
As the sailor remarks, “Why, they are worse than sharks, sir; a shark does hoist
his fin as a signal that he is cruising about, but these chaps come sneaking along
underneath the water, and the first you know about them is that they have got you by
the leg” (Henty, Among Malay Pirates, p. 29). H. Rider Haggard, that incomparable
author of imperial adventure fictions, similarly deployed the crocodile as a standard
narrative device. She (1887) features an extraordinary “duel to the death” between
a lion and a crocodile: “the crocodile, whose head seemed to be a mass of gore, had
got the lion’s body in his iron jaws just above the hips, and was squeezing him and
shaking him to and fro. For his part the tortured brute, roaring in agony, was clawing
and biting madly at his enemy’s scaly head, and fixing his great hind claws in the
crocodile’s … soft throat, ripping it open as one would rip a glove.”38 Haggard’s The
People of the Mist (1894) climaxes in a bizarre fight between a dwarf and a gigantic
mesmeric crocodile that serves as the god of a mysterious African tribe:
The thing that he had taken for a stone set upon the rock-table was the head of the Dweller
in the Waters, for there in it, as the light struck on them, two dreadful eyes gleamed with a
dull and changing fire. Moreover, he discovered what was the object which lay under the
throat of the reptile. It was the body of that priest whom Otter had taken with him in his
leap from the statue, for he could see the dead face projecting on one side.
“Perhaps if I wait awhile he will begin to eat him,” reflected the dwarf, remembering
the habits of crocodiles, “and then I can attack him when he rests and sleeps afterwards”;
34 Caroline Roberts, The Woman and the Hour: Harriet Martineau and Victorian
Ideologies (Toronto, 2002), p. 147.
35 This is another example of the interchangeable use of alligator and crocodile in the
nineteenth century: as the Ashanti wars took place in Western Africa, the beast is undoubtedly
a crocodile.
36 G.A. Henty, By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War (1884. London, n.d.), p. 315.
37 G.A. Henty, Among Malay Pirates: A Tale of Adventure and Peril (Chicago, [1897]).
38 H. Rider Haggard, She, ed. Daniel Karlin (1887. Oxford, 1991), p. 69.
and, acting on this idea, he stood still, watching the green fire as it throbbed and quivered,
waxed and waned in the monster’s eyes ….
“This is a devil that I have come to fight, a devil with magic in his eyes,” he thought.
“And how can I, who am but a common Knobnose dwarf, do battle against the king of evil
spirits, clothed in the shape of a crocodile?”39
As these examples suggest, by the end of the century the crocodile had become
something of a narrative cliché. The reptile’s presence seems particularly gratuitous
in Doyle’s The Sign of Four, in which Jonathan Small gets his leg bitten off by a
crocodile almost as soon as he arrives in India. Doyle’s use of the crocodile’s bite is
almost perfunctory. It establishes the conventional trope of the crocodile attack only
to suggest that the real danger of imperialism lurks in the form of poisoned darts
which strike at British citizens in the heart of London.
While it had become almost a cliché by the late Victorian period, the crocodile
motif was sharply reasserted in “The Undertakers” (1895), Rudyard Kipling’s
backward glance at the 1857 Sepoy Rebellions.40 This well worn symbol did not
appear in contemporary depictions of the rebellion, but it is deployed here, where the
crocodile’s defeat allegorizes India’s colonial subjection. Kipling’s short story (part
of the Second Jungle Book), depicts a conversation between the “Mugger” (Indian
crocodile), the Jackal, and the Adjutant Bird, all devourers of offal (Plate 23). The
Mugger describes with chilling vividness the corpses that filled the Ganges: “the
dead English came down, touching each other. I got my girth in that season—my
girth and my depth.” Symbolizing the violence of the Sepoys, the river drags the
corpses by the hair: “When the river rose they rose also in companies from the
shoals they had rested upon; and the falling flood dragged them with it across the
fields and through the Jungle by the long hair.” Obviously female (because of their
long hair), the bodies represent massacred Englishwomen. The crocodile, tellingly
personified as male, then recounts how he tried to eat a “naked white child” in a
boat with some Englishwomen: “She fired at me with a short gun of a kind I have
never seen before or since” (Kipling, “The Undertakers,” pp. 226–9). In keeping
with heroic sagas of Englishwomen’s resistance (and invoking the Sepoys’ widely
rumored sexual aggression), the English mother saves her child, who in turn shoots
the Mugger thirty years later. Now an engineer overseeing the building of an Indian
railway trestle, the boy, now grown, enacts his dominance over post-1857 India:
There was a roar like the sound of a small cannon (the biggest sort of elephant-rifle is
not very different from some artillery), and a double streak of flame, followed by the
stinging crack of a Martini, whose long bullet makes nothing of a crocodile’s plates. But
the explosive bullets did the work. One of them struck just behind the Mugger’s neck, a
hand’s-breadth to the left of the backbone, while the other burst a little lower down, at the
beginning of the tail. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred a mortally-wounded crocodile
can scramble to deep water and get away; but the Mugger of Mugger-Ghaut was literally
broken into three pieces. He hardly moved his head before the life went out of him, and he
lay as flat as the Jackal. (Kipling, “The Undertakers,” pp. 232–3)
39 H. Rider Haggard, The People of the Mist (1894. London, 1966), pp. 285–6.
40 Rudyard Kipling, “The Undertakers,” in The Second Jungle Book (1895. Oxford,
1992), pp. 212–34.
The crocodile motif thus becomes politically salient at the zenith of British
imperialism, as the late Victorians turned back a generation after the 1857 Rebellions
to contemplate and reconfigure this great imperial defeat.
Collectible Crocodiles
As a sign of imperial travel, the stuffed crocodile became a collector’s item,

its preserved body functioning as a metonym for “the Orient.” Hence during
Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, one of Dominique Vivant Denon’s goals as he
accompanied Louis Charles Antoine Desaix into the Upper Nile was to capture a
baby crocodile, as if to possess one would enable him to hold Egypt in his hands
(Moorehead, The Blue Nile, pp. 130–31). Little wonder that Gustave Flaubert,
that chronicler of Oriental fantasy, amassed among his Egyptian souvenirs (which
included gazelle skins, Cairo hashish, and eight dozen Jerusalem rosaries) an
embalmed Nubian crocodile.41 However, until mid-century, the crocodile had little
commodity value.42 As already noted, many European governments paid bounties to
local hunters to exterminate crocodiles, which they regarded as dangerous vermin
and significant impediments to settlement,43 but not until crocodile-skin accessories
such as cosmetics cases, valises, purses, and shoes came into fashion across Europe
would large-game hunters add the crocodile to the list of animals such as elephant,
rhinoceros, hippopotamus, and antelope that they killed for profit rather than bounty.
In 1869, the Natal Herald reprinted an article from an English newspaper touting the
increased demand for crocodile skin: “crocodiles are in great demand, it having been
recently discovered that the skin of the monsters is suitable for ladies’ boots, being
of a pliable and soft nature” (quoted in Fuchs et al., “Crocodile-Skin Products,”
p. 189).44 At the fin-de-siècle, as exotic bird feathers as well as snake and animal skin
41 Geoffrey Wall, Flaubert: A Life (New York, 2001), p. 190.

42 Du Chaillu does note that villagers loved crocodile meat (Du Chaillu, Explorations and
Adventures in Equatorial Africa, p. 234), and Fuchs et al. record that hunters sold crocodile
body parts to local medicine men as well as crocodile fat to local African communities for use
in candles (Fuchs et al., “Crocodile-Skin Products,” p. 189).
43 A German immigrant to the Ndumu district in Africa remarked that in the late 1880s,
“As the government paid out ten shillings a head I sent a good few of all sizes down to one
foot in length to the Magistrate at Ingwavuma …. One month I received for this service a
cheque for seventy-five pounds. Some twenty years later when I moved into Swaziland I went
for crocodiles in the Usutu River where twenty shillings a head was paid. This did not last
long owing to the administration had not organised for such wholesale destruction” (Fuchs
et al., “Crocodile-Skin Products,” p. 189). For statistics on kill numbers in the twentieth
century, see Musambachime, “The Fate of the Nile Crocodile in African Waterways,” p. 203.
MacKenzie notes that when preservation efforts were initiated to protect endangered African
wildlife, crocodiles were exempted. Considered vermin, they could be shot at will, and their
eggs could be destroyed (MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, p. 208).
44 In America, the traffic in alligator skins peaked during and immediately after the
Civil War; even before 1900, the demand for hides exceeded the domestic supply, forcing
manufacturers to turn to Central America and Mexico (Fuchs et al., “Crocodile-Skin Products,”
p. 188).
patterns became the mode, crocodile and alligator accessories accrued enormous
popularity as signs of status (Plate 24). In the early 1900s, American tanneries were
producing almost 250,000 skins a year; large tanneries also existed in Europe (Fuchs
et al., “Crocodile-Skin Products,” p. 188). Oddly, this fashion accessory came to
the fore at the moment when the crocodile hunt as imperial narrative had passed its
zenith. The hunt, however, seemed to take on new symbolic value in its metonymic
transmutation to crocodile fashion accessories, which vaguely associated the bearer
with oriental travel and exoticism.
Hypocritical Crocodiles
For Victorians, then, the crocodile functioned as a potent symbol of the colonized or
racial other, with powerful associations with exoticism and Orientalism. However,
outside the colonial context, the crocodile’s associations with hypocrisy and
voracious appetite predominated. The supposedly false tears of the loathed reptile
provided a ready shorthand for the political cartoonists of Punch. In the 1840s
and 1850s, the beast stood for one of the journal’s main satirical targets, Daniel
O’Connell, Irish nationalist leader and founder of the Repeal Association to dissolve
the Anglo-Irish union. One of the journal’s key complaints about O’Connell was
that he financed his repeal campaign by exploiting destitute farmers. Punch depicted
him in 1845 as a well dressed crocodile, weeping as he demanded money from
his “Beloved Countrymen” (Plate 25). Even more loathsome was Francis Joseph,
Emperor of Austria, who was held responsible by Europe for bloody retributions
after the 1848 uprisings.45 The Emperor was caricatured as a crocodile, weeping over
“bleeding Hungary” while Punch execrated the “Shooting of brave soldiers, hanging
of venerable legalists and judges, and scourging on the naked back … [of] wives and
mothers” (Plate 26). The crocodile also stood for Cardinal Newman, another figure
hated for his aggression. When Newman became rector of the Catholic University of
Ireland, Punch featured this figurehead for papal aggression as a mitered crocodile
under the sardonic title, “Remarkable Crocodile Found in Ireland” (Plate 27). (This
use of the motif pointedly recalls the earlier association with Napoleon’s imperialist
expansion.)
Punch also used crocodiles or alligators (the latter having a more obvious
association with the American South) as a derogatory image for the slave-holding
states in the pre-Civil War era. In the 1850s, anti-abolitionist violence was noted in
Punch alongside alligator cartoons (“Sporting in the South” and “James’s Powder”).
In May 1856, when South Carolina representative Preston Brooks physically assaulted
Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the US Senate chamber for criticizing
his kinsman’s pro-slavery views, Punch registered this outrageous behavior with
a cartoon depicting the British lion (representing British parliamentary procedure)
on a see-saw with a terrified alligator (representing the now degraded American
senate) (Plate 28). In January 1857, Punch represented the difficulty of maintaining
45 Joseph Redlich, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria: A Biography (Hamden, 1965),

pp. 61–3.
the pro-slavery position within the American union with a cartoon of a juggling
bird balancing an alligator on its beak (Plate 29). Finally, in March 1861, a Punch
article entitled “Alligators in Tears” depicted reluctant Louisiana secessionists as
hypocrites. Noting that members of the Louisiana Convention wept as they voted to
leave the union, Punch derided the delegates as “Slaveowners, Slavedrivers,” crying
“crocodiles’ or alligators’ tears.”46
Sexual Crocodiles
One of the oddest aspects of the nineteenth-century crocodile as symbol was its
association with deviant or excessive (rapacious, violent, or homosexual) male
sexuality. This often worked in tandem with its Orientalist associations, as the
following examples indicate. Rossetti’s kingly crocodile, for example, has distinctly
sexual overtones: as Jan Marsh notes, he “swells phallicly”47 until his appetite is
satisfied, then “dwindle[s] to the common size” (Rossetti, “My Dream,” p. 39). Suzy
Waldman notes the “luxurious sex”48 of Rossetti’s beast, “Broad as a rafter, potent
as a flail” (Rossetti, “My Dream,” p. 39). Grevel Lindop convincingly identifies a
similar theme in De Quincey’s crocodiles, which, he argues, embody “predatory or
violent sexual tendencies.”49 For example, De Quincey’s essay on Roman history,
published in Blackwood’s in November 1839, describes the erotic exploits of an
“Imperial rebel” who, “having a fancy for tickling the catastrophes50 [posteriors]
of crocodiles,” smears his body with crocodile fat and “pass[es] for a crocodile—
swimming and playing amongst them.”51 Lindop notes that De Quincey’s Latin
source contains no such reference to tickling posteriors, and argues that the sexual
play in this passage is a nineteenth-century addition (Lindop, “De Quincey and the
Cursed Crocodile,” pp. 133–4). The Confessions of an English Opium Eater similarly
evokes sexual relationships with crocodiles: “I was kissed, with cancerous kisses by
crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds
and Nilotic mud” (De Quincey, Confessions, p. 241).52 Lindop relates De Quincey’s
sexualization of the crocodile to Charles Nicholas Sigisbert Sonnini’s Travels in
46 “Alligators in Tears,” Punch 40 (1861), p. 93.

47 Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life (New York, 1994), p. 167.
48 Suzy Waldman, “‘O Wanton Eyes Run Over’: Repetition and Fantasy in Christina
Rossetti,” Victorian Poetry 38.4 (2000), p. 545.
49 Grevel Lindop, “De Quincey and the Cursed Crocodile,” Essays in Criticism 45
(1995), p. 133.
50 The OED identifies this humorous use of “catastrophe,” quoting Shakespeare’s 2
Henry IV, II. i. 66: “Away you Scullion … Ile tickle your catastrophe.”
51 Thomas De Quincey, “On the True Relations to Civilisation and Barbarism of the
Roman Western Empire,” Blackwood’s (November 1839), p. 649.
52 The reference to Nilotic mud suggests anal intercourse and thus specifically
homosexual panic (Nancy Kang, “Marvellous Confessions: Imperialism and Masculine
Desire in Wilde and De Quincey,” Association of Canadian College and University Teachers
of English Conference, University of Toronto. 27 May 2002).
Lower and Upper Egypt (1799, trans. 1799 and 1800), which describes the animal
in radically sexualized terms:
It is on the banks of the Nile that [the crocodiles] deposit their eggs, and there they
likewise copulate. The female, who, during the congress, is turned upon her back, cannot
rise without considerable difficulty; and it is even said she cannot change her posture, or
recover her legs, without the assistance of the male. Will it be believed, that there are in
Upper Egypt men, who, hurried on by an excess of unexampled depravation and brutality,
take advantage of the helpless situation of the female, drive off the male, and supplant
him in this frightful intercourse? (Sonnini quoted in Lindop, “De Quincey and the Cursed
Crocodile,” p. 136)
This passage pointedly conflates the crocodile’s sexual nature with that of the
Egyptians themselves. Notably, Sonnini’s bestial rape narrative reappears in a
footnote to Sir Richard Burton’s heavily Orientalist Arabian Nights (1885–88).53
Here, the metonymic and racial meanings of the crocodile predominate, as Burton
uses Sonnini’s account to illustrate how “fatally common” bestiality is among “those
most debauched of debauched races, the Egyptian proper and the Sindis” (Burton, The
Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night, p. 299). De Quincey’s opium nightmare
thus evokes a strong connection between the crocodile and Oriental sexual deviance,
in the forms of homosexuality, rape, and bestiality.54
Given its associations with racial alterity and sexual appetite, it is worth noting
one instance in which the sexualized crocodile fails to appear: in accounts of the 1857
Sepoy Rebellions. Although subsequently shown to be false, accounts of the rape of
Anglo-Indian women by Sepoys were common in England during and immediately
after the Rebellions. Yet the crocodile symbol does not appear in this immediate
context. (As we have discussed, Kipling later used the crocodile in powerful fin-de-
siècle allegories of the Rebellions.) In 1857, however, Punch’s representations of the
Sepoys repeatedly figure the Bengal tiger, with the tiger threatening to devour, not
ravish, a woman and child.55 A certain cultural tact prevails here, as if the crocodile’s
sexual valences were too horrifying in the immediate aftermath of the Rebellions.
53 Richard Burton, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and A Night. Vol. 4 of 10 vols
([New York], 19–).
54 Charles Dickens deployed the cultural link between crocodiles and sexual appetite in
David Copperfield (ed. Nina Burgis (1849–50. Oxford, 1983)), where the beast prefigures the
intrusion of Mrs Copperfield’s new lover in her son’s life. Just before David’s first meeting with
his new stepfather, David reads a book about “Crorkindills” with Peggotty (Dickens, David
Copperfield, p. 14). Though David seems unaware of the crocodile’s sexual connotations, the
book’s account of crocodiles being unable to turn quickly suggests a fairly comprehensive
knowledge of nineteenth-century crocodile lore, no doubt evoking to at least some readers the
connections between crocodiles and sexual rapacity. At this point in the novel, the bell rings,
and in walks David’s mother with her new lover. The connection between Mr Murdstone and
the sexualized crocodile is implicit, but highly suggestive.
55 See, for example, “The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger,” Punch 33 (22
August 1857), p. 75.
Parodic Crocodiles
Given the abundant use of the crocodile as a symbol of otherness, it was perhaps
inevitable that this trope drew the attention of parodists. Pastiches of the crocodile
battle abound, including in the ever-popular Punch and Judy show. Indeed, one finds
in such parodies significant critiques of imperialism. As early as 1785, Rudolph
Erich Raspe’s ludricrous Original Travels and Surprising Adventures of Baron
Munchausen featured a comic version of a crocodile hunt. In the first chapter of
his exaggerated adventures, the Baron goes to Ceylon and encounters a lion and a
crocodile, two beasts which stereotypically represented imperial conquest. Armed
only with swan shot, he faces the lion, then realizes that behind him is a “large
crocodile, with his mouth extended almost ready to receive me.”56 As the Baron
collapses in fear, the lion springs over him into the mouth of the crocodile. While
his foes are thus entangled, the Baron cuts off their heads simultaneously. After their
double decapitation, the lion’s skin is sewn into tobacco pouches and the crocodile
is measured and stuffed for the Amsterdam museum. While the story suggests that
the European male triumphs by chance rather than by cultural superiority, George
Cruikshank’s delightfully incongruous illustration for a Victorian edition shows
the Baron in heroic posture wielding his sword over the two beasts, with his foot
on the lion’s back. The Munchausen narrative thus not only parodies the trope of
the crocodile hunt but also the overdetermined status of the crocodile as imperial
souvenir.
In Punch, John Tenniel parodied the imperialist trope of the wild animal hunt
in his 1853 series of cartoons about a pudgy British adventurer, Mr Peter Piper,
who goes on an international sporting tour that includes pig sticking, tiger hunting,
buffalo shooting, and bear hunting (the first two had particular significance for
British imperial display in India [MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, pp. 170–71]).
In his pig-sticking adventures in Bengal, this inept imperial hunter finds himself
face to face with a crocodile, which causes him to view pig sticking as “a sport only
fit for maniacs.”57 Penned before 1857, the cartoon is more lighthearted about the
inadequacies of the sporting Englishman than would perhaps have been politically
acceptable four years later. As MacKenzie notes, sport came to carry considerable
imperial weight in post-1857 India: as the Indian empire weakened, “hunting
represented an increasing concern with the external appearance of authority, the
fascination with outward symbols serving to conceal inner weakness” (MacKenzie,
The Empire of Nature, pp. 170–71).
So well established was the symbolic battle of white male against crocodile that
it came to be evoked as a non-event in European women’s Egyptian and African
travels—that is, as an event that distinguished their imperial adventures from those
of the white men who preceded them. In A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877),
Amelia B. Edwards enjoys a comedic anti-climax: “We now despaired of ever seeing
56 Rudolph Erich Raspe, Adventures of Baron Munchausen [n.d.] 29 May 2004, p. 9
(<http://homepage.ntlworld.com/forgottenfutures/munch/munch.htm>).
57 “How Mr. Peter Piper Enjoyed a Day’s Pig-Sticking,” Part 1, Punch 24 (1853),
p. 91.
a crocodile; and but for a trail that our men discovered on the island opposite, we
should almost have ceased to believe that there were crocodiles in Egypt…. I doubt if
Robinson Crusoe, when he saw the famous footprint on the shore, was more excited
than we … at sight of this genuine and undeniable trail.”58 Mary Kingsley’s Travels
in West Africa (1897) is similarly self-conscious about the crocodile’s significance in
imperialist travel narratives. Her comedic version of the crocodile battle is couched
in deliberately domestic and self-deprecating terms:
Now a crocodile drifting down in deep water, or lying asleep with its jaws open on a sand-
bank in the sun, is a picturesque adornment to the landscape when you are on the deck
of a steamer, and you can write home about it and frighten your relations on your behalf;
but when you are away among the swamps in a small dug-out canoe, and that crocodile
and his relations are awake—a thing he makes a point of being at flood tide because of
fish coming along—and when he has got his foot upon his native heath—that is to say, his
tail within holding reach of his native mud—he is highly interesting, and you may not be
able to write home about him—and you get frightened on your own behalf. … Of course,
if you really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about Posterity, and
Posterity’s Science, you will jump over into the black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered
by the thought of the terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care
you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum. But if you are a mere
ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me, you stop in your lagoon until the tide rises
again; most of your attention is directed to dealing with an “at home” to crocodiles and
mangrove flies, and with the fearful stench of the slime around you. … Twice this chatty
little incident … has happened to me, but never again if I can help it. On one occasion, the
last, a mighty Silurian [crocodile], as The Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get
his front paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance.
I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and fetch him a clip on the snout with
a paddle, when he withdrew, and I paddled into the very middle of the lagoon, hoping
the water there was too deep for him or any of his friends to repeat the performance.
Presumably it was, for no one did it again. I should think that crocodile was eight feet
long; but don’t go and say I measured him, or that this is my outside measurement for
crocodiles. I have measured them when they have been killed by other people, fifteen,
eighteen, and twenty-one feet odd. This was only a pushing young creature who had not
learnt manners.59
This narrative includes many of the salient features of the crocodile fight (the
exotic location, the fragile canoe, the British traveler, the measurement of the dead
crocodile), but wittily juxtaposes them with feminine and domestic terms (the “batter-
like” swamp, the crocodiles, “at home,” the governessy teaching of “manners”).
Whereas in 1869, John Ruskin could still state that crocodiles were like “‘words’ of
God,” representing for humanity a state of “moral evil … and becoming myths to
58 Amelia B. Edwards, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877. London, 1982), pp. 306–
307.
59 Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa in The Longman Anthology of British Literature.
Vol. 2B: The Victorian Age, 2nd edn, ed. Heather Henderson and William Sharpe (New York,
2003), pp. 1812–13.
him of destruction,” Kingsley’s text indicates that by 1897 this myth had become a
cliché.60
The Crocodile Winds Down
By the turn of the century, indeed, the crocodile sign’s overdetermined status had
left it widely available for parody. We will focus on the parodies of two particularly
self-conscious authors: E. Nesbit and J.M. Barrie, both of whom deployed the
crocodile trope with full awareness of its imperialist and masculinist baggage. In
The Wouldbegoods (1901), Nesbit’s first chapter establishes her willingness to play
with the icons of late-Victorian imperialism by a deft parody of Kipling’s The Jungle
Book (1894). Nesbit’s Bastable children deflate Kipling’s tigers by draping tiger
rugs over bolsters and beer stands, and defang his wolves by casting their family
dog as Grey Brother. The second chapter launches into an all-out parody of naval
adventure fiction, by depicting the children on a homemade raft afloat in a shallow
moat trying to recover a dairymaid’s pail. In this pointedly domestic context lurks
Nesbit’s parodic crocodile. The raft tips over, the children tumble into the water, and
Dora (like Jonathan Small) suffers the now cliché bite to her foot: “Oh, my foot! oh,
it’s a shark! I know it is—or a crocodile!”61 What lurks in the moat, however, is not
a shark or crocodile but a jagged tin can; the moat has been used as a garbage dump.
By suggesting that the crocodile belongs in the detritus of the nineteenth century,
Nesbit tweaks imperialist adventure narrative by the tail.
Perhaps the most widely known parody of the Victorian crocodile trope is found
in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904). Like Nesbit’s fiction, Barrie’s play is highly
literate and self-aware; both assume a broad knowledge of contemporary children’s
fantasy and adventure fiction. Barrie’s Neverland assembles staple features of
Victorian children’s literature: mermaids, tigers, wolves, pirates, “redskins,” and,
of course, the ubiquitous crocodile. The play requires its audience to recognize the
literary conventions that underpin the actions of the Neverland characters. These
characters (Tiger Lily, Captain Hook, and the mermaids) are not psychologically
motivated, unlike their London counterparts (Wendy, John, and Michael). Instead,
the Neverland characters’ actions arise from their embeddedness in genre: Tiger
Lily is stoic because “redskins” in Victorian children’s fiction are stereotypically
stoic, Hook is evil because fictional pirates are evil, the mermaid tries to drown
Wendy because fictional mermaids lure people to their deaths, and so on. The logic
of Neverland is thus the logic of fiction: actions are entirely predictable because they
accord with generic expectations.
Barrie’s crocodile, like all the other stock characters in Neverland, is radically
synecdochal, representing the trope of the crocodile in action. It represents one of
many lurking Neverland dangers—wild beasts, natives, pirates—all of which belong
to adventure and fantasy fiction. These dangers co-exist and are highly compressed
in Neverland’s repertoire of generic features. Hence, in two pages of script, there
60 John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air: Being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and
Storm (London, 1869), p. 78.
61 E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods (1901. London, 1949), p. 59.
appear the crocodile, wolves, Tiger Lily, and the “redskins.”62 Like their antecedents
in adventure fiction, these dangers are at once frightening and delightful, as is
conveyed by Peter luring John to Neverland with the promise of pirates and by the
lost boys triumphantly wearing the skins of animals which they “think they have
shot.”63 The crocodile that lurks in Neverland is thus the crocodile that lurks in
the nineteenth-century cultural imagination generally, representing the potentially
satisfying conquest of the other—the native other or its metonymic substitute, in the
form of non-British animals.
Barrie’s play both identifies the crocodile as an overdetermined generic
convention and (by means of the clock which it has swallowed) predicts its own
self-consuming demise. The ticking clock (a reassuringly domestic noise) prevents
the crocodile from lurking effectively and thus reverses this sign of alterity and
rapacity, while drawing ironic attention to its function as a sign of historical time
or evolution. Barrie’s play thus effectively renders the crocodile toothless, and, by
extension, announces that time is ticking for this Victorian convention. Moreover,
while they are superficial antagonists, Hook (who has red eyes, yellow blood, and a
claw) is conflated with the crocodile. They both lurk as fictional convention dictates
that they must, but they are not real threats (as Hook’s hilarious expletive, “split my
infinitives,” makes clear).64 In the final Neverland scene where Hook is defeated and
eaten by the crocodile, one generic cliché consumes the other. They are the same:
hackneyed fictional tropes that no longer represent the real danger that Barrie’s play
finally identifies. This danger is not pirates or crocodiles or wolves or “redskins”
or even tigers, but Peter Pan himself, whose stalled masculinity threatens British
manhood far more gravely than threats from the native or bestial other.
In the nineteenth century, then, the trope of the crocodile slithers along a trajectory
from representing a state “of moral evil” (Ruskin, Queen, p. 78) to a virtually
empty cliché. As we have shown, throughout most of the nineteenth century, this
sign invoked the loathed other (Napoleon, the Irish, papal aggression, the slave-
owning states, the mutinous Sepoy, the threat of insurgent colonial subjects) and,
by extension, the potential of British conquest over such threats. Though the
crocodile was a potent sign of danger, the successful crocodile hunt always offered
the assuaging potential of danger averted and quelled—hence Kipling laid the 1857
rebellions symbolically to rest with a shot from the bridge at the Mugger-Ghaut.
The crocodile also reassuringly suggested that danger lurked outside the British
male subject—in the enemy or in the foreign landscape, but almost never in Britain
itself. Kipling’s Mugger, however, stands as one of the last non-parodic uses of
the crocodile motif. By the end of the century, this cultural sign was increasingly
moving into children’s fiction, and even there was gently parodied as a tired cliché.
Not only was this trope hackneyed (as Nesbit’s relegation of the crocodile to the
62 Similarly, seasons and geographical locations change instantaneously, with no

apparent passage of time or distance traveled.
63 J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan: The Complete Play, intro. Karl Michael Emyrs (1904.
Montreal, 1988), p. 53.
64 Barrie, Peter Pan, p. 98. In this respect, it is important that stage productions of Peter
Pan traditionally make no effort to portray the crocodile realistically.
family garbage dump would suggest), but it no longer addressed the real anxieties
of imperial governance. These anxieties concerned neither the foreign landscape
nor the insurgent native but the threat from within: the danger that British imperial
power was compromised by a failing masculinity. When Robert Baden-Powell
responded to this threat by launching his Boy Scouts in 1908, he sought to imbue
the boys of the new century with selected animal characteristics. In the Scouts, boys
formed wolf-like “packs” and trained as “cubs.” Baden-Powell thus invoked and
inverted the paradigm of the bestial antagonist. Instead of fighting against wolves,
boys became them,65 as Kipling’s Mowgli had in key respects become like his wolf
brothers. Whereas Rossetti depicted with loathing the anthropomorphized beast,
Edwardians like Baden-Powell imagined the power of men who embraced animal
characteristics. The trope of the exotic animal other had lost its force. The crocodile
sign, like Kipling’s Mugger, was finally exploded.
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Afterword
Animal Dreams and Animal Reflections

Harriet Ritvo
Most scholars who specialize in the study of animals believe that human beings
fall within that category. This is as true of scientists, who locate Homo sapiens
within the primate order, along with lemurs, monkeys, and other apes, as it is of
humanists (whether they are post-humanist or not) who claim kindred in footnotes or
parentheses. (Here is my own declaration: I share the view that people are animals.)
But often such assertions seem defensive or even strident. Indeed, the insistently felt
need to make them strongly signals a context of semantic and cultural tensions, as
does the reluctance of many taxonomists to locate ourselves and our closest extinct
relatives in the family Pongidae, which usually includes bonobos, chimpanzees,
gorillas, and orangutans, rather than in the more exclusive family Hominidae,
reserved for australopithecines and humans. The entry for “animal” in the Oxford
English Dictionary similarly distills the uncomfortable conjunction of similarity
and otherness. The first sense, illustrated with learned examples ranging from John
de Trevisa to Thomas Henry Huxley, includes all living things that are not plants;
the second sense, illustrated mostly with literary quotations, is less inclusive and
more popular: “in common usage: one of the lower animals; a brute, or beast, as
distinguished from man.”
No matter how careful their definitions or how forceful their assertions, scholars
are inevitably influenced at least as much by the common usage of the terms that they
deploy, as they are by their more rarefied and specialized senses. Like Archimedes,
whose irremediable terrestriality prevented him from moving the earth, humanists
cannot escape their real-world locations; disregarding the conventional meanings of
words risks the fate of Humpty Dumpty. With regard to the study of animals, this
often means that explicit claims of unity (humans are animals) actually reinforce
the human–animal boundary that they are intended to dissolve. That is to say,
such claims incorporate a grudging acknowledgment that this boundary is widely
recognized and powerfully influential. Why else would it be continually necessary
to deny its validity—or to remind ourselves of its arbitrariness? Further, like clichéd
metaphors that turn out to be only half-dead, they may bring buried assumptions
and understandings into the full light of consciousness, thus paradoxically inspiring
articulate contradiction. There is a sense in which the term “post-humanism”
exemplifies the same kind of wishful thinking that the term “late capitalism” does.
If, nevertheless, the traditional boundary between humans and animals seems to
be increasingly permeable at present, at least among some inhabitants of the most
affluent parts of the world, the essays collected in this volume demonstrate that
most Victorians explicitly acknowledged its robustness, despite some longstanding
challenges. Evolution was not a new idea in the nineteenth century. And after the
popularization of the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection as well as
before, the default answer to the question “Are people animals?” would have been
“No.”
But that would not have been the end of the story. As is still the case, cognitive
dissonance seems to have been among the least troublesome of mental conditions.
Alongside formal assertions of extreme difference—that animals’ lack of souls or
lack of intelligence constituted an insurmountable barrier separating them from
people—existed many informal acknowledgments of similarity or even identity. For
example, when breeders castigated the lasciviousness of their female animals, or
bemoaned their reluctance to accept the mates selected for them, they channeled the
outrage of the flouted paterfamilias. When they celebrated the purity of pedigreed
animals they confirmed the value of their own ancestral lines, memorialized in
volumes often referred to as “stud books.” Good animal behavior, especially the
loyal devotion of dogs and horses, was characterized in terms equally applicable to
human servants or employees.
Such behavior could also be appreciatively characterized as “sagacity” or
even “intelligence.” The intellectual powers of the animals anatomically closest to
humans inspired more complex responses, but the conventions for displaying apes
and monkeys unambiguously emphasized resemblance. Zoo apes and sideshow
monkeys were dressed in jackets and dresses; they ate from utensils and drank from
cups; they appeared to enjoy cigarettes and the illustrated books. The guardians of
public morality kept a watchful eye on animal attractions, worried that they were
potential sites of unedifying behavior on the part of both exhibited creatures (so that
the feeding of live prey to carnivores was prohibited) and raucous human observers
(so that the admission of the lower classes into zoos was initially controversial). They
did not, however, seem to be particularly sensitive to the blasphemous undertones
of such presentations.
The pages of many natural history books and travel accounts contained still more
suggestive evidence of closeness: reports, speculative but compelling, of the sexual
interest of wild apes in human females. Sometimes such resonances were figured as
metonymy, emphasizing similarity, and sometimes they were figured as metaphor,
emphasizing difference. But whether the animal analog was wild or domesticated,
primate or ungulate or carnivore, continuity and discontinuity were inextricably
intertwined.
The frequency of such analogies, as well as the fact that their import was
unacknowledged, helps make the study of animals in Victorian culture (and in
other cultures, of course) so interesting and rewarding. Domesticated animals, both
livestock and pets, were omnipresent in Victorian daily life, and in the thoughts and
feelings of the people who lived it. So close were many relationships that criticizing
accounts of them as anthropomorphic can seem beside the point. Some pets, for
example, really did belong to human families in all but the narrowest biological
sense. And at the other end of the affective scale, relationships between some
working animals and their owners strongly resembled relationships between some
human laborers and their employers. The notion of anthropomorphism eliminates
Afterword 273
the possibility of easy interspecific slippage, and erects or resurrects a barrier that
may not have been perceived by any of the individuals involved.
If exploring this history sheds a unique light on human experience in nineteenth-
century Britain, it also emphasizes the extent to which the experiences of humans
and other animals were interdigitated at that time and place. But not, of course,
all animals. The likeliest targets of unconscious identification and projection were
the animals who were most like people, either because they looked like people or
because they were members (whether underprivileged or hyperprivileged) of the
same society. Animals outside these overlapping circles of familiarity were much less
likely potential surrogates. Even accessible wild animals, whether roaming free in the
woods or confined in zoos and menageries, required an additional layer of figuration,
much more likely to be conscious. Animals less available for incorporation into the
human sphere—the inhabitants of remote regions, as well as animals without fur or
(more extreme) without backbones—also attracted a great deal of interest. They were
the subjects of scientific study and amateur fascination, which resulted in numerous
books and massive collections. But with a few exceptions—the social insects (ants
and bees) whose economic organizations seemed to replicate those of people, or the
aquatic creatures that, in the spirit of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” could be
seen to figure in prenatal human development as well as in remote human ancestry—
the interest was of a different kind.
Indeed, it was so different that it brings the use of the blanket term “animal” to
cover them all into question. This expansive and promiscuous usage epitomizes a
serious difficulty implicit in the abrogation of the dichotomy between humans and
other animals: the elimination of one boundary seems to require the establishment
of another or others, although the location of replacement boundaries is equally
problematic. If no obvious gap can be discerned between most kinds of animal and
those most similar to them, large gaps emerge when very dissimilar animals are
juxtaposed. The claim that people are like cats or beavers or hippopotami (that they
belong in the same category with those kinds of creatures) is not the same as the
claim that they are like jellyfish or fleas or worms. Both claims are interesting, and
both are true (that is, they seem true to me), but they make sense in different contexts.
Or, to be more specific, they make sense in different human contexts. The non-
human perspective is ultimately a matter for speculation, but it seems likely that the
living world is differently organized in the view of cats or beavers or hippopotami.
Certainly, the experience of the gorilla Koko, who has shown romantic interest
in male humans and has experienced the pleasures of pet ownership, suggests an
alternative taxonomy, as does the behavior of many domestic dogs.
Confusion about the appropriate context—or intentional misunderstanding
of which sense of “animal” is being invoked—can lead to the kind of reductio ad
absurdum that often undermines animal advocacy, at least when animal advocates
are not preaching to the choir. It is relatively easy to explain why pigs and dogs
should receive the same legal and moral consideration, even if it is much less easy
to insure that they actually receive it. Resistance to acknowledging suine claims to
humane treatment tends to rest on pragmatic (mostly economic) grounds. When,
under the general “animal” rubric, claims to consideration are made on behalf of
creatures less similar to people, resistance becomes stronger and more principled.
If they are defended in the same terms as those of our fellow mammals (or even our
fellow vertebrates), the rights of lobsters, oysters, or termites offer ready targets for
ridicule. (Of course, this is a historically specific observation. Two centuries ago
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women was travestied on the
grounds that if rights were granted to women, farmyard animals would be next in
line.)
The most sweepingly inclusive (or powerfully reductive) categories thus make
more sense for scientists than they do for scholars in the humanities and social
sciences. Biology has offered increasingly detailed and fascinating accounts of the
genetic similarities that connect the smallest, simplest animals with the largest and
most complex, and, indeed, that unify all the eukaryotes, whether animal, plant,
or fungus. But such insights have had little impact on everyday understanding and
behavior at present, and their retroactive influence is still more limited. The study of
human culture, whether contemporary or historical, requires a focus that is at once
larger and smaller. For understanding the relationships between people and other
animals, the fact of similarity is important, but so also is the extent of similarity,
which tends to be a matter of opinion or perception. It varies from place to place
and from time to time. For example, although the general structure of mammalian
taxonomy has remained reasonably constant for several centuries, anglophones tend
to feel closer to gorillas and chimpanzees now than they did in the late nineteenth
century. The once common notion that dogs, or even horses, might bear a closer
resemblance to people in important ways, has largely disappeared.
The relationship between scientific analysis and other ways of understanding the
world has long been problematic—in a nutshell, the two cultures problem. Animals,
both in the flesh and as academic subjects, fall into both spheres. The study of Victorian
animals provides many examples of absent connections. Lay contemporaries might
have been unaware of the conclusions of science, or they might not have understood
them, or they might have chosen to disregard them; a similar set of options is available
to modern scholars. To say that, in many cases, scientific conclusions are beside the
point is not the same as denying them, although excitable members of both groups
(scientists and non-scientists) are apt to conflate these two statements. Nevertheless,
the authority of science has traditionally been an issue with regard to animals, since
many other groups claim alternative and competing expertise. Perhaps the most
striking Victorian example was the protracted indifference of most animal breeders
to scientific advances in the understanding of mammalian reproduction, even before
the popularization of Gregor Mendel’s pioneering research on genetics. Of course,
indifference ran in both directions. Charles Darwin was unusual in his respect for the
experience of farmers and fanciers, as in other ways; most of his fellow zoologists
ignored this massive repository of raw reproductive data.
Thus, as the animal turn on the part of Victorian scholars breaks new ground, it
also revisits perpetually unanswered questions. It is unlikely that the two traditional
cultures will be unified to the satisfaction of all concerned in the near future; treating
scientific documents as texts for interpretation is illuminating, but it is not science.
Similarly productive disengagement will probably also continue to characterize the
relationship between modes of inquiry that are more closely allied. Within the more
restricted sphere of the humanities and social sciences, animal topics broach a range
Afterword 275
of equally durable issues. Since animals were ubiquitous in Victorian culture but not
prestigious cultural subjects, even conventionally literary explications of incontestably
literary texts tend to draw on a wide range of sources. When disciplines borrow each
others’ materials, their differences in method and approach tend, paradoxically, to
emerge more clearly—for example, the differences that distinguish the goals and
rewards of literary or cultural study from those of history or the history of science.
When scholars focus on a topic that raises ethical issues that remain unresolved, the
relationship between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first century can become
confused and confusing. The standing of animals, even those closest to us, still
presents vexed moral, legal, and political issues, and the range of possible positions
is not very different from the range available to Victorians. Nevertheless, consensus
has shifted, at least to some extent, in the direction of consideration and respect,
and it is difficult to avoid judging the past by the standards of the present. Such
challenges are not unique to the scholarly study of animals, of course. They emerge
in the course of most attempts to retrieve the history and cultural significance of
previously marginalized human groups.
The essays collected in this volume show that marginalization, of animals as of
humans, does not exclude the possibility of centrality. Within my own experience
as a scholar, the study of animals has become more respectable and more popular
in many disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, but it is far from the
recognized core of any of them. It remains marginal in most disciplines, and (not the
same thing) it is often on the borderline between disciplines. This awkward position
or set of positions, is, however, the source of much of its appeal and power. Their
very marginality allows the study of animals to challenge settled assumptions and
relationships—to re-raise the largest issues, both within the community of scholars
and in the larger society to which they and their subjects belong. As Claude Levi-
Strauss famously put it, “animals are good to think with,” and they (or should I say
we?) are good in many other ways as well.
Index
Adams, James Eli 66, 103, 148, 159 Bolster, W. Jeffrey 168
Adams, Maureen 27 Boswell, James 97
Affairs of Hungary 260 Braddon, Edward 238
Agawa, Naoyuki 167 Brantlinger, Patrick 189, 191
albatross 167–77 Brehm, Alfred Edmund 61–2
Alberti, Samuel J.M.M. 217 Bridson, Gavin 36
Allen, D.E. 36 Brontë, Emily 24, 26–7, 181–7
Anderson, Amanda 46 Bronte, Ann 195–6
Arata, Stephen 186 Brown, Ford Madox 103, 113–16
Arbousset, T. 252 Browne, Janet 41
Armstrong, Frances 99–100 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 110
Armstrong, Susan J. 3 Buckland, William 224
Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward 254
Baker, Samuel White 56, 60–61 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 197
Baker, Sir Samuel White 256 Burt, Jonathan 31
Baker, Steve 1–3 Burton, R.G. 229, 239, 243
Baldwin, John Henry 238, 242, 246–7 Burton, Richard 262
Baldwin, William Charles 254 Byatt, A.S. 47
Ballad of Bathybius 75
Barber, Lynn 36 Caird, Mona 100–3, 107, 110
Barclay, Edgar 237 Camerini, Jane 40
Barker, Juliet 182 Carlisle, Janice 15
Barrie, James 1, 8, 29, 98, 105, 265–6 Carroll, Alicia 130
Bartky, Sandra Lee 21 Carroll, David 138, 140
Batty, J. 106 Carroll, Lewis 85, 254
Beale, J.H. 244 Cartmill, Matt 105, 108
Beer, Gillian 47 cat 2, 23, 26, 85–6, 98–9, 103–105, 109–
beetle 35–48, 71 112, 116–17, 217, 231, 233
Bending, Lucy 1, 187 cattle 3, 86, 89, 129, 206, 230, 236, 241–3,
Benoit, Jérémie 251 246, 253
Berger, John 20–21, 85 Chambers, Robert 218
Bernard, Donald 167 Chitham, Edward 182
Bernstein, Susan David 7, 101 Christ, Carol 112
Best, James W. 241 Cobbe, Frances Power 102–103
Bewick, Thomas 219 Conrad, Joseph 37, 97, 189
bird 23, 41, 45, 59, 65, 69, 72, 76–7, 98, Cope, E.D. 219
101–102, 105, 108–112, 116–17, Corbett, Mary Jean 8, 182
147, 170, 174–7, 195–7, 218, 230, Cottesloe, Gloria 15
258–9, 261 Cottom, Daniel 134, 139–40
bird of prey 76 Creath, Richard 46
Block, David 251 crocodile 249–67
Blumberg, Rhoda 167 Cumming, Roualeyn Gordon 53–62, 255–6
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie 139–40 Curl, James Stevens 16
Boime, Albert 113 Curtis, Gerard 113–14
Cuvier, Georges 36, 70, 154, 216, 218–19, Farina R.A. 217
224–5 Ferguson, Moira 97, 188
Ferguson, Niall 254
Danahay, Martin 186 Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo 221
Dance, Peter 195 Fichman, Matthew 45
Dance, Peter S. 48 fish 2, 38, 65, 67, 73, 76, 91, 174, 254
Darwin, Charles 1–10, 21–22, 37–48, 65– Fitzgerald, William G. 24
75, 77–8, 88, 101, 103–105, 116– Flanders, Michael 225
17, 122, 128–35, 145–6, 153–64, Flint, Kate 47
174, 182, 216, 218, 221, 225, 230, Ford, Brian 48
239, 246, 255, 272, 274 Ford, Richard 206
Darwin, Francis 40 Fortune, Mary 211–2
David, Deirdre 182–3 Foucault, Michel 3, 36
Davies, Emily 139 Frank, Adam 36
Davies, Stevie 26, 181–4 Fuchs, Karlheinz H.P. 253, 259–60
Davis, Ira 171–2 Fudge, Erica 2–3, 21, 30
Day After Rhinoceros 257
De Lauretis, Theresa 99 Gagnier, Regenia 187
De Quincey, Thomas 249, 251–2, 261–2 Galison, Peter 46
de Selincourt, Basil 218 Garber, Marjorie 19, 21, 25, 27
Derrida, Jacques 3–4, 85–6, 91–2, 102 Gavin, Adrienne E. 187
Desmond, Adrian 41 Gerhard, Joseph 16
Deverell, Walter Howell 101, 109–110 Gibson, Robin 20
Dickens, Charles 8, 23, 72, 81–2, 84–9, Gilbey, Walter Sir 23
91–2, 99, 201–211, 262 Gillray, James 251
Dijkstra, Bram 111 Girard, René 208
dinosaur 104, 107, 109, 116–17, 154–5, 215, Glasfurd, A.I.R. 237, 242–5
219 Goldman, Adam 246
Disraeli, Benjamin 115, 137 Good Day’s Work with Elephants 59
dog 2–3, 15–32, 41, 61, 73, 81–94, 98–107, Gosse, Edmund 37
110, 112, 113–17, 127, 131–2, 183– Greene, Joshua M. 191
5, 201–214, 233, 241, 265, 272–4 Greenwood, James 210–11
Donald, Diana 15, 31 Grene, Marjorie 39
Doughty, Robin W. 175 Grosz, Elizabeth 48
Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir 189–90, 195, 240, Guggisberg, C.A.W. 253
249, 258 Guiney, Louise Imogen 27
Du Chaillu, Paul B. 252, 259
Duncan, Ian 197 Ham, Jennifer 3
Durant, John R. 45 Hamley, E.B. 201
Duthie, Enid 181 Hammerton, A. James 98, 112
Haraway, Donna 2–3, 10
Eagleton, Terry 185 Harrison, Brian 99
Edwards, Amelia B. 264 Hasegawa, Hiroshi 176
elephant 53–62, 87, 217, 221, 229–31, 234, Hearne, Vicki 20, 85
236–7, 240, 247, 249, 255, 258–9 Hennessy, Rosemary 190
Eliot, George 30, 37, 121–8, 130, 132–41, Henty, G.A 257
145–64 Herbert, Sandra 42
Ellis, Richard 172 Hewett, John 229, 236–7
Ely, Ben-Ezra Stiles 171 Hodge, John 46
Evans, Arthur V. 44 Hogle, Jerrold E. 186
Homans, Margaret 148, 156, 181, 184
Index 279
horse 1, 6, 23–4, 53–4, 73, 97, 102, 104, Lindop, Grevel 261–2
113, 145–66, 187–9, 194, 219, 225, lion 30, 55, 62, 105, 148, 207, 230–31,
243, 272, 274 241–2, 254, 257, 260, 262–3
Hudson, W.H. 38, 195, 197 Lippit, Akira Mazuta 2
Hueffer, Ford Madox 113–4 Locke, A. 241, 246
Hull, David L. 46 Longicorn Beetles of Chontales 48
Hunt, William Holman 103, 109–112
Hunting on the Congo 57 Mack, Arien 3
Huth, Alfred Henry 133 MacKenzie, John M. 234–6, 238, 244,
Huxley, Leonard 104 254–5, 257, 259, 263
Huxley, Thomas Henry 40, 75–6, 271 Malabari, Behramji M. 254
Man Is But A Worm 65
Ionides, Constantine John Philip 241 Mangum, Teresa 6–7, 83
Manjiro, John 167–72, 175–7
Jacobs, W.W. 190–92, 195 Mardorossian, Carine M. 183
Jaffe, Mark 219 Markham, Clements R. 250
Jalland, Pat 16 Marsh, Jan 261
Jansen, Marius B. 167 Marsh, Richard 37
Jardine, Nicholas 38, 47–8 Marx, Karl 68, 116–17
Jesse, George R. 27 Massie, John 25
Johnson, E.D.H. 113 Masson, Jeffrey 23
Jupp, Peter C. 16 Maudsley, Henry 22
Maunder, Andrew 7
Kang, Nancy 261 May, Leila Silvana 127
Kaplan, Fred 92 Mayhew, Henry 208–210
Katona, Steven K. 173 McDonagh, Josephine 123
Kawasumi, Tetsuo 167 McHugh, Susan 20
Kean, Hilda 206, 210 McLynn, Frank 186
Keats, John 217, 220 Merrill, Lynn L. 36
Kenyon-Jones, Christine 6, 21, 24–5, 202 Meyer, Susan 124, 130, 140, 182–3
Kestner, Joseph 111 Michie, Elsie 8, 182
Kete, Kathleen 2, 6, 17, 20–21, 23, 100 Mighall, Robert 204
Kingsley, Charles 75, 216, 221–3 Miller, Lucasta 181
Kingsley, Mary 264–5 Model Legislature 260
Kipling, Rudyard 189, 192–5, 245, 258, Moore, Grace 8
265–7 Moorehead, Alan 251, 259
Knight, Charles 219–20, 225 Morey, Peter 193
Knight, David 48 Morgan, Susan 123
Knoepflmacher, U.C. 123 Morgentaler, Goldie 88
Krasner, James 40 Morley, John 251
Kuper, Adam 130 Morse, Deborah Denenholz 185
Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature 69
Landow, George 111 Mr. Punch’s Designs From Nature 67
Landseer, Edwin, Sir 19, 23, 105–110, 112 Munger, James 171
Lansbury, Coral 1, 9, 102, 113, 115, 154 Munich, Adrienne 111
Law, Jules 123–7 Munsche, P.B. 235
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 81, 275 Murray, T. Douglas 233
Levine, George 46–7, 123, 146, 153–5, Musambachime, Mwelma C. 201
161–2
Leyland, J. 252 Nature’s Own Designs 65
Lightman, Bernard 41 Nead, Lynda 112
Neill, Wilfred T. 250, 253 255, 264–6
Nesbit, E. 265–7 Ryder, Richard 2, 10
New Rocking Horse 225
Newman, Teresa 114 Safina, Carl 168, 175
Nietzsche, Friedrich 35–6, 46, 101–103, Said, Edward 250–2
110–11, 117 Sanderson, George 229–32, 234–5, 237–41,
Nord, Deborah Epstein 124, 130 243–7
Saunders, [Margaret] Marshall 6, 93
Ottenheimer, Martin 130 Schmitt, Cannon 7, 42
Ouida [Marie de la Ramé] 27–30, 32 Scholtmeijer, Marion 204–205
Owen Richard 75, 215–16, 218–22, 225 Schor, Esther 16
Schulze-Hagen, Karl 10
Paxton, Nancy L. 138 Secord, William 23
Percy, Reginald Heber 241–3 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 90
Phillipps-Wolley, Clive 232, 242 Seitler, Dana 38
Picker, John 15 Selous, F.C. 56, 242
polar bear 107, 109 Serpell, James 100
Polhemus, Robert 184 Sewell, Anna 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 93, 187–9, 231
Pollan, Michael 23 Shakespear, Henry 243
Pratt, Mary Louise 240 Shakespeare, William 250, 261
Prehistoric Pantomine 225 Shaw, Simeon 224
Price, Jennifer 2 sheep 4, 132, 136–8, 185, 192–3, 206, 209
Pro-Slavery Solecism 261 Sheets-Pyenson, Susan 215
Punch 27–28, 65, 67, 69, 70–1, 75–8 Shorter, Clement K. 23
Shuttleworth, Sally 123
Raspe, Rudolph Erich 263 Siebert, Charles 23
Rauch, Alan 9 Silverman, Ruth 17
Redlich, Joseph 260 Singer, Peter 10, 84, 87, 247
Redpath Museum 215 sloth 196, 215–26
Reed, Toni 182 slug 2
Remarkable Beetles Found at Simunjon, Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 38–9
Borneo 48 Smith, Johanna 17
Remarkable Crocodile Found in Ireland 260 Society for the Diffusion of Useful
reptile 73, 77, 249–50, 254–8, 260 Knowledge 150, 219
rhinoceros 217, 259 Spary, Emma 38, 47–8
Richards, Robert J. 46 Spenser, Edmund 250
Ridley, Mark 174 stallion 152, 155, 158
Ritvo, Harriet 1, 3, 6–7, 21, 23, 41, 67, 83, Steeves, H. Peter 3, 10
90, 97, 99, 113–5, 127, 129, 133, Steiner, Rick 168–75
145, 148, 203, 233–5, 239–40, 244, Stepan, Nancy Leys 48
250 Stephen, Oscar Leslie 233
Roberts, Caroline 257 Stevenson, Robert Louis 186
Romanes, George John 22–3 Stewart, A.E. 240, 244
Rosenblum, Robert 17 Stoett, Peter J. 167
Rosner, Mary 84 Stoneman, Patsy 154
Rossetti, Christina 249, 261, 267 Surridge, Lisa 99, 107
Rothfels, Nigel 2, 6, 7, 9, 30, 83, 192
Royle, Nicholas 252 Taylor, Joseph 202–203
Rupke Nicholas 222 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 2, 66, 69, 76, 102–
Ruse, Michael 46 105, 107, 109, 223
Ruskin, John 98–9, 101, 103, 107–9, 111, Terada, Rei 35
Index 281
Tester, Keith 10 Wallace, David Rains 219
Thapar, Valmik 191 Walton, John K. 150
Thomas, Keith 21, 82–3 Warriner, Emily V. 167
Thomas, Richard 235 Waterton, Charles 221
Thompson, F.M.L. 148–9 Watt, Ian 89
Tickell, W.L.N. 175 Wells, H.G. 239
tiger 91, 101, 103–105, 109, 116–17, 159– whale 4–5, 74, 167–7
60, 229–47, 249, 262–3, 265–6 White, Paul S. 98, 102
Trollope, Frances Milton 152 White-Melville, G.J. 146, 149–50, 158,
Trompf, G.W. 250, 256 161–2
True Patriotism 260 Wilde, Oscar 35–7, 46
Turner, E.S. 19 Wiley, Peter Booth 171, 174
Turner, James 1, 3, 19, 97, 100 Williamson, Thomas 253
Two naturalists 75 Willis, Roy 2–3
Wolfe, Cary 2, 87, 102
Uglow, Jenny 160–61 Woloch, Alex 82, 86, 91
Wood, Christopher 106
Veeder, William 186–7 Wood, Paul B. 38
Vlasopolos, Anca 195 Woof, Robert 251
World Wildlife Fund 246
Waldman, Suzy 261
Wall, Geoffrey 259 Yeazell, Ruth Bernard 155
Wallace, Alfred Russel 37–40, 43–8

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Victorian Animal Dreams

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Deborah Denenholz Morse

Published 2016 by Routledge

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2007 Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

List of Illustrations vii

Part I Science and Sentiment 13

1 Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets 15

3 Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the Nineteenth Century 53

4 Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals, and Gender 65

5 Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations 81

Part II Sex and Violence 95

6 Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in

7 “The Crossing o’ Breeds” in The Mill on the Floss 121

8 Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance 145

9 Pacific Harvests: Whales and Albatrosses in Nineteenth-Century

10 “The Mark of the Beast”: Animals as Sites of Imperial Encounter

11 Beastly Criminals and Criminal Beasts: Stray Women and Stray

12 The Sins of Sloths: The Moral Status of Fossil Megatheria in

13 Tiger Tales 229

14 The Empire Bites Back: The Racialized Crocodile of the

1 “Remarkable Beetles Found at Simunjon, Borneo” in Alfred Russell Wallace,

1 Animals on a Violent/Peaceful and Foreign/Domestic Grid 106

Susan David Bernstein is a Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin,

Martin A. Danahay is Professor of English at Brock University, Canada. His

Ivan Kreilkamp, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Indiana

Mary Elizabeth Leighton is Assistant Professor of English at the University of

Teresa Mangum is an Associate Professor of English and International Programs

Elsie B. Michie is an Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

Deborah Denenholz Morse, inaugural University Professor for Teaching Excellence

Alan Rauch, Director of Graduate Liberal Studies at the University of North

Cannon Schmitt, Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and

Lisa Surridge is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria,

Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing

Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens (Ashgate, 2004).

In A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Oxford:

Thomas also quotes a witticism of turn-of-the-eighteenth-century racehorse painter

Embedded in this mapping of animal emotions is Darwin’s longing to believe in

21 Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 4 (1879): 410–13.

25 Anecdotally, my colleague Florence Boos is researching the writing of working-class

35 Society and Animals 8.2 (2000): 1–7.

38 In Punch (11 July 1900): 26.

Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world.

The complexity of this scene of memorialization is stunning. The mirroring of

n.a. “A Love of a Dog Lost.” Punch. 14 November 1857: 204.

On a peach-coloured divan sat Lady Narborough pretending to listen to the Duke’s

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations,” differences:

At one moment in his posthumously published Autobiography, Darwin addresses his

13 Smith, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations,” p. 6.

It may be that such readings are hopelessly anachronistic. By invoking an

“Overwhelming numbers,” initially the occasion for becoming a collector of beetles,

Allen, D.E., The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Harmondsworth, 1978).

Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige

List of Illustrations vii

Part I Science and Sentiment 13

1 Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets 15

3 Killing Elephants: Pathos and Prestige in the Nineteenth Century 53

4 Designs after Nature: Evolutionary Fashions, Animals, and Gender 65

5 Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations 81

Part II Sex and Violence 95

7 “The Crossing o’ Breeds” in The Mill on the Floss 121

8 Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance 145

13 Tiger Tales 229

1 Animals on a Violent/Peaceful and Foreign/Domestic Grid 106