Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature
Series Editors
Susan McHugh
English Department
University of New England
Biddeford, Maine, USA
Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield, Sheffield
United Kingdom
John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield, Sheffield
United Kingdom
Before the 2000s the humanities and social sciences paid little attention to the partici-
pation of non-human animals in human cultures. The entrenched idea of the human as
a unique kind of being nourished a presumption that Homo sapiens should be the
proper object of study for these fields, to the exclusion of lives beyond the human.
Against this background, various academic disciplines can now be found in the process
of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the animal presences that haunt the margins
of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Instances of such
work are grouped under the umbrella term ‘animal studies’, having largely developed in
relation to a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and
problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and
political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures? While debates around these
themes continue to develop across academic disciplines, this series will publish work
that looks, more specifically, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of
English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s differ-
ence from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a
mode of communication of a wholly other order. Literature, as the apogee of linguistic
expression in its complexity and subtlety, may therefore seem a point at which ‘the
human’ seems farthest removed from the world of ‘the animal’. Our primary motivation
is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by
rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter.Whereas animals are
conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (that is, as signs of
specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of inter-
disciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the
material lives of animals. The series will encourage the examination of textual cultures
as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with non-human animal and advance
understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more
than simply illustrate natural history. Consequently, we will publish studies of the
representation of animals in literary texts across the chronological range of English
studies from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key
thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. This will be the first series to explore
animal studies within the context of literary studies; together, the volumes (comprising
monographs, edited collections of essays and some shorter studies in the Palgrave Pivot
format) will constitute a uniquely rich and thorough scholarly resource on the involve-
ment of animals in literature. The series will focus on literary prose and poetry, while
also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and
contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and
other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14649
Laurence W. Mazzeno • Ronald D. Morrison
Editors
Animals in Victorian
Literature
and Culture
Contexts for Criticism
Editors
Laurence W. Mazzeno Ronald D. Morrison
Alvernia University English Department
Reading, PA, USA Morehead State University
Morehead, KY, USA
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-1-137-60218-3 ISBN 978-1-137-60219-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, the editors of Animals in Victorian Literature and

Culture want to thank the volume’s contributors for their hard work,
patience, and enthusiastic support for this project. It has been a great
pleasure to work with each of them.
We also acknowledge the support provided by the editorial and produc-
tion team at Palgrave for their assistance in getting this volume into print.
Laurence W. Mazzeno extends a note of thanks to the staff of the Frank
A. Franco Library at Alvernia University, particularly Sharon Neal, Roberta
Rohrbach, and Derek Smith, and to the staff of the Earl Gregg Swem
Library at the College of William & Mary for their cheerful (and
invaluable) assistance.
Ronald D. Morrison extends his gratitude to Tom Williams, Chair of the
Department of English at Morehead State University, and Scott McBride,
Dean of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at
Morehead State University, for negotiating a reduced teaching load during
the final stages of this project.
A version of Chapter 2 originally appeared as “Household Words and the
Smithfield Controversy” in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature,
Number 127 (Spring 2015): 31–45. Copyright © 2015 Victorians:
A Journal of Culture and Literature. We are grateful for the permission to
reprint this essay.
v
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison
Part I Animals in the Victorians’ World
2 Collecting the Live and the Skinned 21

Ann C. Colley
3 Dickens, Household Words, and the Smithfield Controversy

at the Time of the Great Exhibition 41
Ronald D. Morrison
4 Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles: Anthony Trollope and

the Australian Acclimatization Debate 65
Grace Moore
5 Dogs’ Homes and Lethal Chambers, or, What Was it Like

to be a Battersea Dog? 83
Susan Hamilton
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Animals in the Victorians’ Literature
6 Bull’s-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide

in Oliver Twist: a Cur’s-Eye View 109
Jennifer McDonell
7 Performing Animals/Performing Humanity 129

Antonia Losano
8 “I Declare I Never Saw so Lovely an Animal!”: Beauty,

Individuality, and Objectification in Nineteenth-Century
Animal Autobiographies 147
Monica Flegel
9 Cathy’s Whip and Heathcliff’s Snarl: Control,

Violence, Care, and Rights in Wuthering Heights 167
Susan Mary Pyke
10 Creatures on the “Night-Side of Nature”: James

Thomson’s Melancholy Ethics 189
John Miller
11 “Come Buy, Come Buy!”: Christina Rossetti

and the Victorian Animal Market 213
Jed Mayer
12 Black Beauty: The Emotional Work of Pretend Play 233

Kathryn Yeniyurt
13 Insect Politics in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle 251

Elizabeth Effinger
Sources for Further Study 269
Index 279
LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. I.1 Jacques-Laurent Agasse. Old Smithfield Market. 1824.

Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art 19
Fig. 2.1 Envelope from Lord Derby’s Letterbooks. By permission
of Archives Department/Vertebrate Zoology, National
Museums Liverpool 23
Fig. 5.1 “Photographed from Life.” Frontispiece, Confessions
of a Lost Dog, by Frances Power Cobbe, 1867 85
Fig. 5.2 “Going into the Lethal Chamber,” English Illustrated
Magazine, August 1895. Photograph by Walter Brock 90
Fig. 5.3 “Coming out of the Lethal Chamber,” English Illustrated
Magazine, August 1895. Photograph by Walter Brock 91
Fig. 5.4 “Come Along—Tea Time.” English Illustrated Magazine,
August 1895. Engraving of image by unknown artist done
by Joseph Swain and signed at bottom right 92
Fig. II.1 William Barraud. A Couple of Foxhounds with a Terrier,
Property of Lord Bentinck. c. 1845. Courtesy of Yale
Center for British Art 107
Fig. 13.1 “Suffrage for both sexes.” Punch, April 2, 1870. Photo
courtesy of the British Library 263
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison
From quiet rural lanes to bustling city streets, animals were ubiquitous in
Victorian culture. In their daily lives, Victorians from all social classes fre-
quently encountered working animals or livestock of various kinds, while
during the same period the practice of pet-keeping became increasingly
common among the middle classes and above. Other animals would have
been observed less often, yet Victorian culture celebrated the exotic wild
animals housed in popular menageries or in the London Zoological
Gardens. Additionally, the agricultural press and “sporting” periodicals
featured stories, often with elaborate illustrations, about prize livestock and
meticulously pedigreed racehorses, while livestock shows and traveling
exhibitions afforded Victorians the chance to see these animals firsthand.
As important as the physical presence of animals was in Victorian daily life,
the symbolic significance of animals exerted an equally powerful influence
on Victorian culture. As Harriet Ritvo (1987) has demonstrated in her
L.W. Mazzeno (*)

Alvernia University, Reading, PA, USA
e-mail: larry.mazzeno@alvernia.edu
R.D. Morrison
English Department, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY, USA
e-mail: r.morris@moreheadstate.edu
© The Author(s) 2017 1

L.W. Mazzeno, R.D. Morrison (eds.), Animals in Victorian
Literature and Culture, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_1
2 L.W. MAZZENO AND R.D. MORRISON
enormously influential The Animal Estate, in Victorian culture discussions

and debates about animals were often closely tied to central social, moral,
and political issues of the day. For example, the long-running debates in the
nineteenth century on the humane treatment of animals, the crafting of early
animal cruelty legislation, and the enforcement of animal cruelty laws were,
at one level, simply intended to reduce cruelty to animals (although in the
nineteenth century most of these efforts were focused disproportionately on
activities typically associated with the lower rather the middle or upper
classes). But, at another level, these issues also became the means for
Victorian culture to consider the shifting boundaries of social class, the
expansion and maintenance of the British Empire, and the benefits and
challenges created by the development of modern science, including ethical
challenges posed by Darwinism. It is hardly surprising, then, that literature
from the Victorian Age reflected and explored both the literal and symbolic
significance of animals in Victorian culture. Using a wide variety of methods
and creative, interdisciplinary theoretical foundations, scholars from our
century have only recently begun to examine the ways in which animals
figured in Victorian literature and culture. The chapters in this book address
a range of literary treatments of animals in the Victorian Age, including the
development of the animal protection movement, the importation of ani-
mals (including specimens in various states) from the expanding Empire, the
acclimatization of British animals in other countries, and the problems
associated with increasing pet ownership.
While the “contexts” in our subtitle refers both to literal animals and
their symbolic associations, one of the most distinctive features of this
book is the fact that the chapters in the first section foreground the
treatment of actual animals in Victorian culture. To one degree or
another, nearly all the chapters in this collection might be described as
historicist, as these scholars attempt to recover shifting and complex social,
political, or scientific contexts (among others) in which Victorians
addressed the subject of animals through a wide range of written forms,
including poetry, fiction, popular journalism, and personal correspon-
dence. In some instances, scholars depend on traditional biographical
and historical scholarship, while others rely upon New Historicism,
Cultural Studies, and other emerging theoretical positions. Tracing these
historical and cultural contexts through which Victorian authors dealt
with animals can often be quite challenging for twenty-first-century read-
ers, and the chapters here are distinctive in that they explore many of these
contexts that were familiar and often vitally important to Victorian readers,
1 INTRODUCTION 3
even though they have now slipped into relative obscurity. Moreover, as
several of our contributors suggest, the contexts in which Victorians
discussed animals in many cases pre-figure topics in our own day concern-
ing the treatment of animals, such as sustainable farming and livestock
production, the utility and ethics of scientific experimentation on animals,
and the growing awareness of the need to control the population of
companion animals, to name just a few. In some cases, specific writers
anticipate contemporary theoretical positions as well.
In her afterword to Victorian Animal Dreams, Harriet Ritvo concludes
that the developing interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies remains mar-
ginalized—a phenomenon she considers an actual strength, in that this
“marginality allows the study of animals to challenge settled assumptions
and relationships—to re-raise the largest issues, both within the commu-
nity of scholars and in the larger society to which they and their subjects
belong” (Morse and Danahay, 275). Animal Studies frequently operates in
the margins that connect and define various academic disciplines, meth-
odologies, and theoretical positions. If there are tensions among these
various elements within the framework of Animal Studies, we believe they
are tremendously productive in that they create many opportunities for the
study of Victorian literature. A focus on animals in Victorian literature
brings along with it distinct benefits, including a friction between the
canonical and non-canonical. The chapters in this collection clearly estab-
lish that many Victorian authors regarded as canonical writers in the
twenty-first century—including, for example, Emily Brontë, Charles
Dickens, Christina Rossetti, and Anthony Trollope—were influenced to
one degree or another by nineteenth-century attitudes and debates about
the treatment of animals, as well as by assumptions about the dividing line
between human and animal. But even when our contributors analyze the
work of mainstream canonical authors, a focus on the representation of
animals prompts them to move well beyond major canonical texts and
open discussions about the significance of works labeled as minor or
marginal.1 Additionally, the collection is balanced out with insightful
treatments of several lesser-known Victorian writers, including Richard
Marsh and James Thomson, as well as analyses of unusual topics such as
Victorian animal skin-collecting, theories of animal training, and the
acclimatization of British farm animals introduced in the colonies.
Moreover, a focus on animals rather than on human beings prompts
us to reflect upon the inadequacy of accepted formal categories, creat-
ing additional opportunities for analysis. For example, feminist critics
have thoroughly analyzed the problem of applying the term “bildungs-

roman” to a novel with a female protagonist, but what happens if the
protagonist of a novel is not a human but instead an animal? Several
contributors, including Monica Flegel, Kathryn Yeniyurt, and Susan
Hamilton, consider the “animal autobiography” to be a little-discussed
form that assumes obvious relevance in this new context.2 To choose
another example, Grace Moore’s chapter on Trollope and the Victorian
concept of acclimatization implicitly challenges genre classifications;
while Trollope’s two-volume Australia and New Zealand (1877) can
be described as Victorian travel literature, the work might be recon-
sidered as a type of early environmental or ecological analysis that
reveals a great deal about how the British viewed native animals (and
natives themselves) in the colonies. In addition, Elizabeth Effinger
examines Richard Marsh’s enigmatic The Beetle (1897), a work that
defies easy categorization, although it might be described as Gothic, a
supernatural novel, or a work of science fiction.
Distinguishing between “real” and “representational” animals remains
a necessary and practical strategy as we seek the broadest possible focus on
nonhuman animals in the Victorian Age, yet this simple binary inevitably
collapses upon close examination, as do many of the categories and
hierarchies we have been discussing thus far. We earnestly believe that
the simultaneous use and deconstruction of these terms and categories
creates a productive tension at work in virtually all of these chapters, as
well as in the field of Animal Studies more generally. In his enormously
influential “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Jacques
Derrida (2002) not only problematizes conventional distinctions between
“human” and “animal,” but he also attempts to describe in some fashion
the “two grand forms of theoretical or philosophical treatises regarding
the animal” in Western culture—what we might, to simplify dramatically,
term as the scientific and the poetic (382–383) (two terms that also beg to
be deconstructed). Later in the work, as Derrida attempts to describe his
far-reaching thesis succinctly, he maintains that the boundary between
“Man and Animal” is “multiple and heterogeneous” (399) and that this
boundary nevertheless “has a history” (399). Victorian literature, strongly
influenced by developments in science and, more generally, a scientific or
empirical worldview, represents a remarkable opportunity to trace the
history of what Derrida calls the “rupture” between human and nonhu-
man. Our contributors utilize a variety of shifting contexts in order for
twenty-first-century readers and scholars to begin to comprehend the
1 INTRODUCTION 5
nature of this rupture and perhaps begin to see our own place in the
unfolding history of the relationships between humans and nonhumans.
In this spirit of deconstruction, many of the contributors to this collec-
tion probe the boundary between “real” and “representational” animals in
provocative ways. For example, Jed Mayer argues that a number of animals
cataloged in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” offer rich symbolic
possibilities that tend to overshadow the fact that a number of the animals
Rossetti describes were literally bought and sold as commodities in
Victorian animal markets. For twenty-first-century academic readers, a
wombat may hold symbolic associations with the British Empire and the
various ways in which animals might represent “spoils of empire.” But
wombats were also adorable pets that enchanted their Victorian owners
(including Dante Gabriel Rossetti) before these animals inevitably suc-
cumbed to the unfavorable climate of England. To choose another exam-
ple, as Ronald Morrison points out in his chapter focused on Household
Words, it was impossible for Victorian readers at mid-century to separate
out the symbolic significance of Smithfield Market from the animal
cruelty, public safety, and sanitation problems created by this noisy,
smelly, and bloody enterprise located in the very heart of London. In
another example, Jennifer McDonell focuses on the metaphorical connec-
tions in Victorian culture between dogs and “good breeding” in human
beings, but she also makes clear from her analysis that these metaphorical
associations in fact often reflect actual practices of animal breeders in the
Victorian era.
We believe that a productive tension between Victorian history and a
broader conception of theory enhances this collection. In developing this
volume it has been our intention to emphasize applied readings of
Victorian texts, but our contributors nevertheless have approached the
study of animals from a wide variety of theoretical positions and many are
informed by a range of traditional and developing disciplines. Although
only a handful of contributors directly address the influence of Darwin—
notably Ann Colley and John Miller—Darwin’s influence over the general
subject of Victorian attitudes toward animals was obviously profound.
Critical works by Gillian Beer (1983) and George Levine (1988), for
example, have proven authoritative. Other contributors acknowledge the
influence of Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway on the development of
the concept of post-humanism. Several have drawn upon the post-colonial
work of Patrick Brantlinger and others, or employ Queer performance
theory to account for ways in which humans figure animals. In short, an
interdisciplinary approach to the representation of animals opens up many

new possibilities for inquiry along the margins of traditional scholarship.
There exists in contemporary Animal Studies yet another productive
tension between what we might call “analytic” and “activist” stances, a
distinction that we also find in literary ecocriticism between “ecologi-
cal” and “environmental” approaches to a text. If we imagine a con-
tinuum stretching between “analytic” and “activist” poles, most of the
chapters in this volume, by design, fall much closer to the “analytic”
pole. Still, we make no apologies for activist implications present in
individual chapters or in the volume as a whole, since all contributors
agree that humans can only benefit from a deeper understanding of
animals and that the alleviation of various forms of animal suffering is
to be celebrated and encouraged. To choose one example, Kathryn
Yeniyurt’s focus on “productive play” derived from the work of
Derrida represents a relatively simple method for promoting a sympa-
thetic understanding of animals that may reduce animal suffering “in
the real world.” Similarly, Sue Pyke’s analysis of Wuthering Heights
addresses shifting ethical views on the treatment of animals that origi-
nated in the nineteenth century and continues into our own to have
benefits for both humans and animals alike.
Although the dividing line between “Romantic” and “Victorian” is
admittedly arbitrary, it is still instructive to glance briefly at the study of
animals in Romantic literature since corresponding work in Victorian
literature has followed a rather different trajectory. As a range of historians
have noted, the advent of anti-cruelty activism coincided with the later
years of the Romantic Movement, with early legislation such as Martin’s
Act to protect livestock and the founding of the RSPCA occurring in the
1820s, for example. The recognition of “animal rights”—still a contested
and difficult term today—nevertheless seems a logical (one might even say
“natural”) extension of Romantic ideology. The publication of Christine
Kenyon-Jones’s (2001) Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period
Writing and David Perkins’s (2003) Romanticism and Animal Rights
represented a watershed moment in Romantic scholarship on animals,
and more work is forthcoming.3 Much of this work has been focused on
the symbolic significance of animals and has often ignored actual animals
in Romantic-era England. Thus it is a welcome change that Perkins, for
example, refers to literal donkeys in discussing Wordsworth’s Peter Bell or
the practice of animal baiting in analyzing the bull-fighting scene in
Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
1 INTRODUCTION 7
It is curious why Victorian scholars were somewhat slower to show the

full-scale influence of the interdisciplinary field of Animal Studies. Several
possibilities suggest themselves. Despite the fact that Victorian Studies has
long been considered an interdisciplinary field of scholarship, a focus on
animals has often been rooted squarely in the discipline of history. For
several decades, historians of Great Britain have been exploring the fasci-
nating subject of animals in British culture. As noted above, Harriet Ritvo
has published a string of influential books on animals beginning in the
mid-1980s.4 Ritvo herself built upon foundations laid by other historians
of the period. For example, Brian Harrison (1982) includes an influential
chapter entitled “Animals and the State in Nineteenth-Century England”
in his Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain. Other
noteworthy work includes two books on the development of Victorian
science and the vivisection debate: Richard D. French’s (1975)
Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society and James
Turner’s (1980) Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and
Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Although these historians have often
looked to literary treatments of animals in the nineteenth century as
examples, literary scholars have been somewhat slower in returning the
favor.
One relatively straightforward explanation for some of the differences
in the ways that scholars of Romantic and Victorian literature have
approached the topic of animals is the fact that the Romantic Age is
typically conceived as more compact, encompassing a handful of major
writers compared to the Victorian Age with its longer time frame and its
longer list of major and minor writers. Although there clearly remains
more to say about the portrayal of animals in Romantic literature, it has
been a somewhat easier task for scholars such as Perkins and Kenyon-Jones
to offer reasonably comprehensive overviews of the Romantic Age’s por-
trayal of animals and to link their conclusions to specific elements of
Romantic aesthetics or ideology. Moreover, most of the major figures in
Romantic literature directly addressed animal issues in one way or another,
and most did so through one dominant genre: poetry. In contrast, it has
been more difficult to characterize the treatment of animals in the
Victorian Age, when a range of new contexts became apparent and when
public attitudes underwent remarkable shifts. During this period the
number of middle-class readers grew significantly, changing the dynamic
of a number of topics, including animal experimentation, the treatment of
working animals, and the significance of pet-keeping. As the century wore
on and Victorian optimism came to be overshadowed by fears of degen-

eration or de-evolution, animals often took on different figurative roles in
the literature. In short, animals in Victorian literature are difficult to
characterize and much more work needs to be done.
Even a casual glance at the Sources for Further Study demonstrates
that many scholars of Victorian literature (including several contributors
to this volume) were exploring the subject of animals in Victorian litera-
ture long before it became common or trendy to do so. Feminist scholar-
ship in particular has been invaluable in establishing helpful parallels
between the treatment of women and the treatment of animals. Despite
its full title, Coral Lansbury’s (1985) The Old Brown Dog: Women,
Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England has much to say about
Victorian texts, including Black Beauty, works by Frances Power Cobbe,
and Victorian erotica. Similarly valuable is Moira Ferguson’s (1997)
Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900. Other scholars have
looked at specific authors, animals, or themes, such as Gina Dorré’s
(2006) Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Recent contributions
to the scholarship continue this trend, including studies such as Beryl
Gray’s (2014) The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination and Philip
Howell’s (2015) At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in the
Victorian Imagination.
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay’s landmark 2007
collection Victorian Animal Dreams deserves special comment and recog-
nition, since this volume helped to pave the way for much of the work that
has followed, including our present volume. The volume brings together
the perspectives of sixteen scholars whose appreciation for and under-
standing of contemporary critical theory, and considerable breadth of
knowledge of Victorian literature and culture, provide a window for us
to understand larger cultural issues by focusing on the representation and
treatment of animals in an age when, as Harriet Ritvo observes in her
Afterword, “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” (Morse and
Danahay, 275).
As Morse and Danahay point out in their Introduction, their collection
is unified by “an emphasis upon the great significance of animals to the
Victorians—and upon the continuing fascination with the many shapes
this Victorian obsession took” (5). As is true of our volume, the Morse and
Danahay collection is unified by its goal of “recovering Victorian attitudes
1 INTRODUCTION 9
toward animals” (9). Morse and Danahay rightly note that the collective
focus of these chapters “upon fictional representations of animals and
visual animal images in art as well as upon historical and scientific documents
is an original aspect” (5–6) of this collection. Victorian Animal Dreams
typically foregrounds its methodology—interdisciplinary scholarship—as
much as its subject. And while the scholarship in this collection is focused
on the nineteenth century, its editors hope their volume will be part of a
larger, ongoing effort to bring about “an inclusive transformation of
consciousness” (10) that will result in “a sea change” in contemporary
attitudes toward the treatment of animals. The impact of Victorian
Animal Dreams in achieving its lofty aims has been nothing less than
remarkable—at least as far as gaining the attention of other Victorian
scholars, particularly literary scholars interested in questions regarding
animal representations and animal rights. Yet as important as this volume
is, by the editors’ own acknowledgment, it is not intended to be the last
word on the subject.
Work in this area has continued in a number of articles and books that
we recognize as important complements to this volume. Most deal with
one aspect of the wide field of Victorian Animal Studies, such as Monica
Flegel’s (2015) Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture:
Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family, or consider the
topic of Animal Studies across a wider chronological span, such as Mark
Payne’s (2010) The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic
Imagination or Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt’s
(2011) Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal
Relationships, in which Jed Mayer’s chapter on vivisection appears. Some,
such as John Miller’s (2012) Empire and the Animal Body: Violence,
Ecology and Identity in Victorian Adventure Fiction, concentrate on a
specific literary genre. None combines work on literary representation of
animals with chapters examining the treatment of actual animals during
the Victorian period and the development of social movements designed
to improve the treatment of animals. Therefore, we hope that Animals in
Victorian Literature and Culture fills in some gaps in both literary studies
and studies of animals.
This collection begins with several chapters focused squarely on actual
animals in the Victorian Age. In one of the more provocative chapters in
the volume, Ann C. Colley discusses the animal trade in “The Exotic
Animal Trade: The Business of Collecting the Live and the Skinned.” As
Colley explains, this trade included both live animals and animal skins
collected throughout the British Empire and shipped back to England for
scientific study. Colley explores the various motivations for this trade and
ways in which live animals or prepared specimens contributed to Victorian
scientific study in multiple disciplines. Specifically Colley focuses on the
12th Earl of Derby (President of the Linnaean Society and founding
member of the London Zoological Society) and his son, later the 13th
Earl of Derby. Colley examines the extensive correspondence between both
men and their agents worldwide as a way to illuminate the practical issues
connected to the animal trade and draw conclusions about the animal trade
and considerations of race and social class in the Victorian Age.
In “Dickens, Household Words, and the Smithfield Controversy at the
Time of the Great Exhibition,” Ronald D. Morrison argues that through
his dual roles as writer and editor of Household Words Dickens played an
active role in the magazine’s substantial engagement with humane issues
in the years leading up to the Great Exhibition. Morrison analyzes a series
of articles from Household Words from the early 1850s that advocate for
the relocation of London’s Smithfield Market to the suburbs. Morrison
concludes that these articles, written by Dickens and a handful of other
writers, reveal that a general concern for the humane treatment of animals
had become more mainstream by midway through the century, and this
ideological position both reflected and shaped the sensibilities of the
middle-class readers of the magazine. But, as Morrison also argues, in
certain respects these articles challenge key elements of conventional
humane rhetoric common in the period that viewed lower-class workers
and foreigners as animal abusers.
In “‘Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles’: Anthony Trollope and the
Australian Acclimatization Debate,” Grace Moore assesses Trollope’s
two-volume travelogue (originally published in serial form) chronicling
the author’s visit to Australia in the early 1870s. Moore utilizes the
concept of “ecological imperialism” to account for the ways in which
Trollope portrays both aboriginal creatures and the English cattle, sheep,
and pigs introduced by settlers coming to Australia. Moore explicitly
connects Trollope’s analysis to the work of regional acclimatization socie-
ties in Australia. In particular, she contrasts Trollope’s description of
Australian reptiles and the references to animals in his other travel writing
to explore the imperialistic elements of his analysis.
In “Dogs’ Homes and Lethal Chambers: Visualizing the Humane
World at the Battersea Home for Lost Dogs,” Susan Hamilton focuses
1 INTRODUCTION 11
on two key moments in the history of the Battersea Home for Lost Dogs
by examining two articles—each with accompanying photographs—that
highlight the twin functions of that famous home often associated with
Frances Power Cobbe. The first is Cobbe’s 1867 Confessions of a Lost Dog,
written as a public relations and fundraising tool, to describe the home’s
role in rescuing lost dogs. The second, written nearly 30 years later in
1895, describes the home’s use of humane euthanasia for unwanted dogs.
Hamilton uses these two articles to explore the complicated, sometimes
contradictory, cultural logic of how the Victorians responded to the
problem of pet overpopulation and to the animal world in general.
Our second group of chapters focuses on animals in Victorian culture
more broadly. In “Bull’s-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide in Oliver
Twist: a Cur’s-Eye View,” Jennifer McDonell builds upon previous argu-
ments that have contextualized Dickens’s early novel as a satire on the
1834 Poor Law. Focusing on Bill Sikes’s dog Bull’s-eye, McDonell argues
that the novel projects onto the dog complex, sometimes contradictory,
Victorian anxieties about inherited traits and social conditioning in the
creation of moral character. However, as McDonell also argues, Bull’s-eye
retains a stubborn agency and animal recalcitrance that resists allegory and
highlights the artificial boundary between “human” and “animal” that
informed various Victorian discourses.
In “Performing Animals/Performing Humanity,” Antonia Losano exam-
ines the significance of performing animals in the Victorian Age by examining
both the concerns expressed over the potential cruelty of the training regi-
men but also the mix of anxiety and pleasure produced by audiences witnes-
sing animals “perform humanity.” She then connects Victorian responses to
animal training to the twenty-first-century theory of Jacques Derrida as well
as theories of Queer performativity. Losano concludes by offering an analysis
of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, which offers extended scenes of the
training of both dogs and horses, as a fruitful case study.
In “‘I declare I never saw so lovely an animal!’: Beauty, Individuality,
and Objectification in Nineteenth-Century Animal Autobiographies,”
Monica Flegel explains how in nineteenth-century animal autobiographies
the concept of beauty becomes crucial in setting individual animals apart
from their “animality” so they might be included in a human family and
afforded the status of the narrator of their own life stories. Flegel exposes
the gender implications of beauty in these works, linking the speaking
animal to “‘female’ objectification, passivity, and dependence.” Flegel also
explores how animal autobiography might be linked to class considera-

tions by looking at how speaking animals are often seen either as repre-
sentatives of a suffering class or as distinct individuals, especially in the
portrayal of cats.
Susan Pyke explores the strategies Emily Brontë employs in Wuthering
Heights to encourage a better treatment of all animals, human and nonhu-
man alike. Pyke demonstrates that Wuthering Heights most often depicts
its nonhuman animals as individuals, with their own subjectivities; they
add value to the narrative as they attend to and become an integral part of
the actions of the novel’s human characters. Pyke argues that Brontë’s
depiction of nonhuman animals as subjects has particular ramifications
when considered in terms of rights violations: in the novel, characters
that exert violence against the nonhuman animal inevitably mete out
cruelty to human animals. Brontë’s effort to write against both behaviors
provides a striking example of the shifting position of nonhuman animals
in the Victorian age. Pyke explains how the shock readers experience at the
violence in this novel allows Wuthering Heights to be read as sympathetic
to current-day ethical movements that consider the benefits of increasing
the relational rights of nonhumans.
In “Creatures on the ‘Night-Side of Nature’: James Thomson’s
Melancholy Ethics,” John Miller attempts to account for what he
describes as the “counter-anthropocentric energies” present in The City
of Dreadful Night (1874) as well as Thomson’s early work “The Doom of
the City” (1857), often considered the prototype for his more well-known
poem. Miller emphasizes ways Thomson anticipates Derrida and Anat
Pick, among other theorists, to account for Thomson’s idiosyncratic
approach to the subject of species difference. Examining textual variants
in sections of The City of Dreadful Night, Miller argues that Thomson
deliberately and specifically addresses the issue of animal suffering in a
work that on the surface seems to focus exclusively on the urban world of
humans.
In “Black Beauty: The Emotional Work of Pretend Play,” Kathryn
Yeniyurt focuses on one of the most popular books ever written in the
English language but which has been routinely slighted by critics. Yeniyurt
draws upon Donna Haraway’s critique of Derrida’s The Animal That
Therefore I Am to assess the significance of the concept of “play,” by
which Yeniyurt means the ways in which a human being may begin to
“imagine the non-human perspective after observing (and perhaps
responding to) an extensive series of the animal’s postures, movements,
1 INTRODUCTION 13
and sounds.” Sewell, she argues, was herself an astute and sensitive observer
of horses, deliberately inviting her readers to develop similar perspectives as
they “play in horsehood” through reading the autobiography of a horse.
In “‘Come buy, come buy!’: Christina Rossetti and the Victorian
Animal Market,” Jed Mayer describes how a focus on animals might
enable twenty-first-century readers to interpret Rossetti’s most famous
and most enigmatic poem in a striking new way. While recent scholars
have emphasized the theme of consumerism and the “sexual and global
politics of consumption” evident in the poem, Mayer successfully places
Rossetti’s work in the context of Victorian animal markets, arguing that
Rossetti relies upon points of comparison between the “objectification and
exchange of women and animals” in the Victorian Age that have clear
connections to her activism against vivisection as well as her work with
fallen women at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate.
In “Insect Politics in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle,” Elizabeth Effinger
explores an intriguing novel published the same year as Stoker’s Dracula
and that shares a number of parallels with that famous novel, including
various innovative formal characteristics. While she makes use of recent
critical studies of the novel as an example of imperial or trance Gothic,
Effinger focuses more squarely on the political dimensions of Marsh’s work,
while also tracing the historical contexts of nineteenth-century attitudes
about insects. The Beetle, with its multiple forms and identities—but
most particularly through the parallels that Marsh invites between insect
and woman—functions as a harsh critique of “the political animal,” man.
Moreover, the actions of the Beetle display the horrifying results when the
politically marginalized refuse to be subjugated any longer.
One of the reviewers of the full manuscript of this collection noted the
rather bleak nature of several of the chapters, especially some of the early
ones. This fact needs a brief comment. Perhaps a Victorian author might offer
a convincing justification for including such disturbing and violent details.
Thomas Hardy (2001), who became increasingly active in various causes to
protect animals from cruelty and suffering, wrote in “In Tenebris II”: “if
way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst” (168). Thus,
authors such as Dickens and Sewell sometimes did focus on the “Worst,”
even while intimating that a “Better” might still be possible. Certainly in
some cases accounts of the fates of actual or fictional animals sensitized
middle-class readers, sometimes for the first time, to the need to prevent
animal cruelty. But it is not always that simple. For example, Derrida argues
that humans not only perpetrate great violence against nonhuman animals
but they also work diligently, often through the rhetoric of various disci-
plines, to “dissimulate this cruelty or to hide it from themselves,” even as
they participate in what he calls “animal genocides” (394). As several of our
contributors argue, what might be termed the “rhetoric of animals” in
Victorian culture often covers uncomfortable truths about topics as diverse
as international politics, urban sanitation, class boundaries, or the role of
women, in addition to the abusive treatment of animals. Moreover, as
Lansbury pointed out in her insightful analysis of Victorian pornography
and antivivisectionist literature, depictions of the suffering of animals have
disturbing parallels to the most violent pornography (112–129). What
Lansbury, writing in 1985, perhaps does not fully explore is the concern
that explicit accounts of animal suffering may hold a powerful (if largely
unconscious) attraction in itself, if only because such accounts reinforce the
boundary between human and nonhuman. Even worse is the possibility that
such accounts might become a kind of violent form of pornography despite
the best intentions of the writers.
As impressive as these chapters are, throughout the editing process we
were struck by how much more needs to be written about this fruitful and
important subject. Certainly more fine work on the Victorians and animals
continues to appear, and Animal Studies has grown into a vital discipline that
appeals to both academic and popular audiences. One particularly good sign
is the growth of student interest in Animal Studies. In the United States, for
example, such programs—often with a substantial amount of coursework in
the humanities, including the portrayal of animals in literature—have been
steadily growing in recent years at the undergraduate level. Students find
such work tremendously appealing, especially since it often includes compo-
nents of “service learning” (and in some cases political or social activism).
Additionally, interdisciplinary graduate programs that combine coursework
in the traditional humanities with coursework in the sciences have begun to
appear in recent years. Since so many standard examples of animal autobio-
graphies are designated (often erroneously in our view) as children’s litera-
ture, there are ample opportunities to seek collaborations between literary
studies and children’s literature.
NOTES
1. Obviously, “major” and “minor” are relative terms that depend entirely on
a given context. Writers such as Frances Power Cobbe or Henry Stephens
Salt, for example, must stand as major writers within the context of
1 INTRODUCTION 15
twenty-first-century Animal Studies. Similarly, in the context of children’s

literature, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty must be considered a “classic” or
canonical text.
2. Scholars such as Tess Coslett (2006) and Amy Ratelle (2015) have recon-
sidered this form in the context of children’s literature and film. See also the
collection edited by Margo DeMello (2013), which is grounded in sociol-
ogy rather than in literature.
3. It is striking that Perkins, writing at the beginning of the twenty-first
century, seems overly self-conscious in his justifications for this subject
matter, an indication of the steady acceptance of Animal Studies over the
last decade or so.
4. Several of Ritvo’s studies are included in Sources for Further Study at the
end of this volume.
WORKS CITED
Beer, Gillian. 1983. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George
Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Coslett, Tess. 2006. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
DeMello, Margo, ed. 2013. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical
Writing. New York: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 2002. The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).
Critical Inquiry 28(2): 369–418.
Dorré, Gina. 2006. Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate.
Ferguson, Moira. 1997. Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Flegel, Monica. 2015. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture:
Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. New York:
Routledge.
Freeman, Carol, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt, eds. 2011. Considering
Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Relationships. Burlington,
VT: Ashgate.
French, Richard D. 1975. Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gray, Beryl. 2014. The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate.
Hardy, Thomas. 2001. The Complete Poems. ed. James Gibson. Rev. edn. London:
Palgrave.
Harrison, Brian. 1982. Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern
Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Howell, Philip. 2015. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian
Britain. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Kenyon-Jones, Christine. 2001. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period
Writing. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Lansbury, Coral. 1985. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in
Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Levine, George. 1988. Darwin and the Novelists. Patterns of Science in Victorian
Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Miller, John. 2012. Empire and the Animal Body: Violence, Ecology and Identity in
Victorian Adventure Fiction. London: Anthem.
Morse, Deborah Denenholz, and Martin A. Danahay, eds. 2007. Victorian
Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and
Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Payne, Mark. 2010. The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic
Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Perkins, David. 2003. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge: CUP.
Ratelle, Amy. 2015. Animality and Children’s Literature and Film. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the
Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Turner, James. 1980. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in
the Victorian Mind. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. He is the

author of books in Camden House’s Literary Criticism in Perspective series on
Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, John Updike,
Ernest Hemingway, and the Brontës (forthcoming). He is also the author of
Herman Wouk in the Twayne U.S. Authors series, bibliographical studies of the
Victorian novel (1989), Victorian poetry (1995), and the British novel 1660–1832
(1997), and more than 300 reference essays and book reviews. He edited Critical
Insights: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Twenty-First Century Perspectives on
Victorian Literature, Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century
(forthcoming), European Perspectives on John Updike (forthcoming), and two
editions of Salem Press’s fourteen-volume Masterplots series. Since 1982 he has
been affiliated with Nineteenth Century Prose and its predecessor, The Arnoldian.
Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University, where

he teaches courses in Romantic and Victorian literature and literary theory. He is
co-editor, with Laurence W. Mazzeno, of Victorian Writers and the Environment:
Ecocritical Perspectives (Routledge, 2017). In that volume, he also has an essay on
Richard Jefferies, agriculture, and the environment. Recently he has published
1 INTRODUCTION 17
essays on Dickens and Smithfield Market in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and

Literature, on Hardy and agriculture in The Hardy Review, and on connections
between ecology and the conception of tragedy in Hardy’s later novels in Twenty-
First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature. He has published on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century authors in such journals as CEA Critic, Critique:
Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Studies, and the CLA
Journal. He is also a long-time reviewer for Choice.
PART I
Animals in the Victorians’ World
Fig. I.1 Jacques-Laurent Agasse. Old Smithfield Market. 1824. Courtesy of Yale
Center for British Art
CHAPTER 2
Collecting the Live and the Skinned
Ann C. Colley
When Britain controlled more than a fifth of the world’s land area, new
trade and military routes made it more possible than ever to collect and
study animals from the reach of empire. Live exotic birds, reptiles, and
mammals, large and small, were brought back to England, and if they
survived, shown to an inquisitive public in an increasing number of zoos
and menageries. Scientists, especially those connected with the London
Zoological Society, were also keen to examine these imported animals so
as to learn more about their outward appearance, behavior, and anatomy.
Many collectors were also interested in receiving the skins of these exotics,
for their markings, colors, and shapes were basic to zoologists’ as well as to
amateurs’ efforts to compile a more definitive taxonomy. Furthermore,
once stuffed and displayed, these skins offered curious Victorians addi-
tional opportunities to catch a glimpse of an ever-expanding world.
Gathering and then shipping these specimens, whether alive or skinned,
however, was a complex, costly, and risky business. During the nineteenth
century, importing wildlife might have been more possible than ever, but the
task was still fraught with danger. Letters sent from dealers and agents hired
A.C. Colley (*)

Buffalo State, Buffalo, NY, USA
e-mail: COLLEYAC@BuffaloState.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_2
22 A.C. COLLEY
by collectors record just how complicated the trade in wild animals was.1
These documents tell of successes but more frequently contain narratives of
loss, hardship, and frustration. Bearing little resemblance to the popular
nineteenth-century hunters’ narratives written for a public hungry for adven-
ture and, perhaps, a sense of national superiority, these letters not only
concentrate on the more mundane matters such as financial contracts, avail-
ability of species, transportation, and cost of passage but also dwell on the
disappointments and obstructions that necessarily accompanied the trade.2
Loss played a major role in this commerce.
To understand better the business, as well as the hazards, of gathering and
shipping wild animals or their skins back to England, I recently read through
the extensive correspondence (hundreds of pages) sent from dealers and
agents scattered all over the globe to one of England’s most prolific collec-
tors, Edward Smith-Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby (referred to in this
chapter as Lord Derby). Lord Derby dealt with agents in South Africa,
Gambia, Sierra Leone, China, Nepal, India, Malaysia, Java, Singapore,
Australia, New Zealand, and Jamaica. He also had people in Central
America and North and South America.3 Lord Derby was able to hire
so many representatives because he was known internationally for his
impressive knowledge of zoology and botany. From 1828 to 1834, he
was President of the Linnaean Society, an organization devoted to natural
history classification. He was also a founding member of the Zoological
Society of London, and from 1831 until his death in 1851, its President.
His estate, Knowsley Hall, situated a few miles from Liverpool, had its
own well-stocked natural history museum as well as a 100-acre private
menagerie. The latter was said to be the most extensive in Britain. At his
death “the Knowsley collection totaled 318 species (1272 individuals) of
birds and 94 species (345 individuals) of mammals . . . and inclu-
ded . . . even exotic fish.”4 Lord Derby was not really interested in collect-
ing beasts of prey such as those displayed in zoos; rather, he was more
intent on gathering breeding species “thought to be of future use of
mankind” (Fisher 2002, 85). He collected skins as well as live specimens;
he also helped secure live creatures for the London Zoological Society.5
THE CORRESPONDENCE
The magnitude of Lord Derby’s correspondence is a reminder that the
trade in exotic animals and skins depended, almost entirely, on letter
writing—on the ability to communicate through letters across thousands
2 COLLECTING THE LIVE AND THE SKINNED 23
of miles. Without having access to the post, agents and dealers could not
properly function. Times were difficult for an agent when, owing to
extenuating circumstances, there were exasperatingly long intervals
between the writing and the receiving of letters, especially when matters
were pressing, and agents in distant places were either waiting for informa-
tion or seeking permission to draw from Lord Derby’s account to pay
expenses (Fig. 2.1).
Sending letters from abroad was subject to other circumstances. For
instance, an agent had often to “seize the moment” and write hurriedly so
as to take advantage of a boat leaving for England. On July 1, 1850,
hurriedly writing from Gambia, Thomas Whitfield wrote to Lord Derby:
“One of H. McWilliam Vessels having come to the Port with a supply of
coals affords me the opportunity of transmitting a short letter to your
Fig. 2.1 Envelope from Lord Derby’s Letterbooks. By permission of Archives

Department/Vertebrate Zoology, National Museums Liverpool
24 A.C. COLLEY
Lordship in which I do myself the honour to state that I have many of the
objects in Natural History, which your Lordship is anxious to possess”
(Letterbooks). This experience was but a repetition of many others, such as
the time on January 13, 1843, when Whitfield hastily scribbled a note to
Lord Derby: “I am just come into this Harbour from the West Coast from
whence I have brought a few things, but as the Vessel by which I send them
is under weigh I have only time to say that I am alive, & that I will forward
to your Lordship a more detailed account by the first opportunity”
(Letterbooks).
Out in the field problems with the post and fear that letters had gone
missing could be vexing for those wanting to impart information to Lord
Derby, purchase specimens, or receive his instructions.6 On November 23,
1836, the Reverend John Fry, one of Lord Derby’s contacts in South
Africa, pleaded: “Should your Lordship have time I shall be obliged for
more particular instructions especially as to the prices I ought to pay both
for the animals themselves and also for their passage” (Letterbooks).7
Earlier a frustrated Fry had written on May, 1 1836: “I have been long
looking out for letters from your Lordship giving me more particular
instructions” (Letterbooks).
CLASS
Though many of those acquiring wild animals and their skins for Lord
Derby were “Gentlemen” or professionals, they were inevitably acutely
aware of having to negotiate in a culture rooted in class differences. Even
when they shared the Earl’s passion for natural history and were often in a
position to know more about a particular species than he, these individuals
never forgot they were addressing a member of the British aristocracy.
Their letters, consequently, are obsequious and replete with expressions
stating a desire to satisfy “My Lordship,” to be in compliance with his
Lordship’s wishes, and be his obedient servant.8 Consequently, it could be
a delicate business to request a favor, such as “taking the liberty” of asking
Lord Derby to write letters of recommendation or introduction so that
permission to enter certain territories might be possible. They had to
negotiate with Lord Derby to change a route, mount an expedition, or
ask for more money, and they had to explain extra costs as well as offer
guidance, justify failures, or sometimes clarify just why someone else had
first choice when selecting certain spoils (agents often worked for more
than one person). Writing from South Africa on January 26, 1837, a
deferential Fry apologized for exceeding his Lordship’s budget: “The

Americans have an agent here and have raised the prices of animals very
much. I am therefore almost afraid your Lordship will think I have paid
very dear for those I have purchased” (Letterbooks).
Collecting without such aristocratic privilege, however, would have
been harder. Lord Derby’s standing in British society as well as his astute
knowledge of zoology gave him (and by extension his agents) the author-
ity, the financial means, and the connections to carry out his projects. His
position helped him gain the assistance of the British admiralty in finding
passage for his agents, to get permission to enter territories impossible for
others to attain, and to benefit from connections abroad,9 such as the time
British colonial officials residing in Belize offered their services in carrying
out Lord Derby’s wishes. In a letter, dated September 16 [?], 1849, his
agent, John Bates, tells Lord Derby about their hospitality and adds: “they
also gave me for your Lordship, two Deer which were kept in the grounds
at government house” (Letterbooks). Such gifts as these from the privileged
or the wealthy also intermittently contributed to Lord Derby’s collection.
Occasionally there was an exchange of specimens between Lord Derby
and those in powerful positions. For instance, on August 18, 1850
Rajandra Mullick wrote from Calcutta:10 “My Lord, With deep sensations
of gratitude I beg to tender my sincere thanks to your Lordship for the
continued favours and the extreme kindness always displayed towards me.
I had last the pleasure to receive . . . the White Fallow deer your Lordship
had the kindness to send out for me.” In return Mullick shipped to Lord
Derby “1 Munipore Buck, 1 Muntjak female, 1 Madras or Sonnerat’s
Jungle Hen, 5 Long tailed Squirrels, 2 Green Parrots and 3 Rufus tailed
Magpies” (Tin Trunk).
METHODS OF ACQUISITION
As suggested above, Lord Derby’s position added authority to his requests
or demands. Agents were proud to have been the means of sending a new
species alive to England. Moreover, they were eager not only to increase
their own standing but also to augment his Lordship’s reputation as a
collector by locating or discovering new and curious specimens. On
October 26, 1839 Fry wrote from South Africa, for instance, that he
would be “highly delighted” to be the means of adding a new species of
lion to Lord Derby’s collection: “I have bid high for a white lion. I think,
in fact, I am sure it is a new species. I hope to send your Lordship a
26 A.C. COLLEY
magnificent skin Amral has with him. I have seen it, unfortunately the
Missionary who has brought Amral to Cape Town has enduced the poor
fellow to promise it to the Governor, he now regrets having done so and as
the skin has not yet reached Government House I have still hope” (Tin
Trunk).
Acknowledging Lord Derby’s desire to have a distinctive menagerie,
agents were wary of offering too many duplicates of what Lord Derby or
others might already possess; instead, they searched for the uncommon or
the unique. Edward Blyth in Calcutta told Lord Derby of a doctor in a
remote area of Ceylon who might be able to obtain for him a live rare
parakeet. Writing from Belize, an enthusiastic Bates informed Lord Derby
that “abounding in these hills” are animals and birds “quite unknown
elsewhere.” He promised Lord Derby “a collection as no one else ever
possessed” (Letterbooks). And wanting to accommodate Lord Derby’s
interest in rare species, Joseph Burke, yet another agent, wrote on
August 2, 1842 that he would be “willing to go to any Country your
Lordship wishes,” but suggested that New Zealand would not be parti-
cularly productive, for the place “must be rather old by this time. So many
emigrants having gone there, and collectors as well” (Letterbooks).
In order to honor Lord Derby’s interests and gather what was excep-
tional, some of these agents lived the life of an explorer and went hunting in
remote areas; yet others hired people to go into the interior to capture or
skin animals and birds. On November 7, 1838, responding to Lord Derby’s
desire to procure waterfowl from America, the Reverend Dr John Bachman
wrote: “I believe I can hire a suitable person for a couple of months at
$30 per month about 6 pounds or something less—including the expenses
for board, traps & nets. He might be able to take a considerable number of
our American species” (Letterbooks). And writing from South Africa on July
24, 1838 Fry spoke of finding a man who is “willing to engage himself to go
in to the interior to collect but I think he is very expensive, as he asks £150
per annum as wages besides his expenses, he is a Scotsman” (Letterbooks).
Later, on February 20, 1845, Fry told Lord Derby that he was pleased to
receive Lord Derby’s permission to commence collecting African Zoology,
but added that “the country from which we must draw our supplies is so
extensive that we can only succeed in getting a good collection by having a
number of agents all over the country as well as interested agents by making
them rewarded depending on their success” (Letterbooks).
Yet others, calling themselves “purchasers,” either scouted local markets
where natives would have wild animals for sale or dealt with merchants who
would approach them with specimens for sale. Some agents also contacted
sea captains who were coming from remote areas or went down to the docks
to meet ships that came in from foreign ports, just in case a sailor had
bagged some exotic creature and wanted to sell it. Often an agent cultivated
influential connections. For instance, after a dealer, Stuart M. Thomson,
procured five birds from the Mexican Governor of Bacalar[?], he informed
Lord Derby, on May 8, 1844, that he intended again to solicit the man’s
“good offices which I know will kindly be given and were valuable both
from his knowledge and his influence over the Indians” (Tin Trunk).
Following a similar principle, Blyth wrote to Lord Derby that he was
going to approach Captain Hutton, for in spite of his eccentricity and his
readiness to take offense, the captain was his only chance of procuring
various animals and birds from the Northwestern region of the Himalaya
(Tin Trunk).
As the example above suggests, none of these methods of acquisition
was without its problems. Even if an agent or dealer did not have to deal
with a live specimen, but rather its skin, there were obstacles, especially out
in the field where ants or other insects attacked, destroyed, and devoured a
freshly skinned hide.11 In addition, conditions made skinning difficult.
Writing from Belize in September 1849, Bates complained to Lord Derby:
“There was a great difficulty in keeping Bird skins in Belize, there were so
many things to contend with. The bats were in immense number & very
distracting as well as Rats & Mice sometimes” (Letterbooks).
Whether collecting a skin or a live being, unreliability and worry about
whom to trust were recurring issues. On November 23, 1836, Fry
informed Lord Derby: “On my arrival here [Cape of Good Hope] last
week I made immediate enquiries about ‘Taylor’ the man your Lordship
expects to be collecting for you. I am sorry to say that I find him to be a
complete failure, and as he has engaged himself to the Americans nothing
more can be expected from him.” Later in the letter, he reassured Lord
Derby:
There is a man here whom I have long known, “Reid” is his name he has
been frequently into the interior and is again about to proceed to collect on
his own account stuffed specimens, he can be trusted and will send down
living specimens to me if I could give him a list of what is wanted and what
would be paid for them here. If your Lordship would authorize me to enter
into any agreement with him I shall have much pleasure in doing so and will
be answerable for him. (Letterbooks)
28 A.C. COLLEY
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that much of the distrust of indigenous

peoples is racist. For instance, when Louis Fraser wrote to Lord Derby on
March 17, 1842, he exclaimed: “I have a Man at Cape Coast who promised
to collect me many things for your Lordship, but there is no trusting to a
Black Man’s word I can say no more about it” [Letterbooks]. Distrust was
also a consequence of disappointment. When Bates arrived in Belize on
January 30, 1843 he soon found out that despite “all the agreements
[concerning the capture of animals] I had entered into with different
parties, not one specimen had been got for me” (Letterbooks). And writing
from Calcutta in 1841, Blyth informed Lord Derby: “Did you hear the
ultimate fate of Beale’s bird which he so long kept at Macao. It was
entrusted to the care of a Chinaman in his absence who neglected it & it
was starved to death!!!” (Tin Trunk).
Relying on natives and local markets could also be unsatisfactory. For
example, nothing would persuade people in a town in Guatemala to sell
Bates a group of desirable birds (such as trogons) that he saw caged in
several houses. In September 1849 Bates explained to Lord Derby: “They
consider them as the Watchmen of their Home” (Letterbooks). Moreover,
in certain areas of Africa it was not easy to circumvent a deeply rooted
assumption on the part of local peoples that a foreign agent was supposed
to take or to purchase any wild animal or bird from a person who had
taken the trouble to catch it. On October 4, 1843 a frustrated Whitfield
explained to Lord Derby that the natives believe that if “they have taken
the trouble to catch your animal, you must buy it, or they will cease to
work” (Letterbooks). The result was that agents unwillingly and occasion-
ally had to carry away inferior specimens or more animals or birds than
they or their patron desired.
Sometimes trips to markets were fruitless. In his narrative letters Bates
talked of going to a market daily in the hope of discovering birds brought
there by Indians, but never saw or found any. He also spoke of the Indians
being in the practice of bringing live animals down the river for sale, but
bemoaned the fact that in Belize it was seldom done.
The one advantage of this method was that many of these animals either
collected or sold by the indigenous people and merchants were already
“domesticated” or used to being confined or handled, and that made
shipping easier. From Calcutta, on February 5, 1843, J.M. McClelland
wrote to Lord Derby: “I have the honor to inform your Lordship that
I have placed on board . . . under charge of Captain Gimblett, a young male
Himalayan Stag about three years old . . . It has been accustomed for the last
two years to confinement having been taken by a hunting party in the

Garrow Hills, & for the last six months during which period it has been
in my possession . . . The creature is perfectly tame, & is quiet as a Lamb. It is
also perfectly healthy with the exception of some disease of the eyes, this
effect perhaps of confinement” (Letterbooks).
As might be predicted, expeditions into the interior were replete with
difficulties. Agents did not necessarily know local dialects and languages.
In his collecting trip to Central America, Bates complained to Lord Derby
about finding himself among people whose language was scarcely known
to him. Falling prey to sickness, however, was even more threatening. Fry
opened a January 26, 1837 letter to Lord Derby by explaining that a
violent attack of fever had nearly proved fatal and had confined him to his
bed for 36 days. Passing through areas that were unhealthy and often
sleeping without shelter and exposed to the elements, agents predictably
fell ill or suffered from accidents while cutting their way or scrambling
through rough terrain, clambering up steep ascents, negotiating roads that
were passable to Indians, or shooting rapids in dangerous rivers. In a long
1849 narrative addressed to Lord Derby about his collecting trips into
Central America, Bates despaired that a particular “mountain was at this
time in a most dreadful state with its rains . . . It is impossible for any one to
form an idea of the difficulties experienced in traveling over this route
without experiencing them.” He also gave a dramatic account of the fever
and ague that nearly cost him his life. He told Lord Derby about having
remained in a place for a number of days because of “suffering most
severely from fever,” so acute that he did not expect “to live one hour
after the other.” He related that no medicine or medical man was obtain-
able, so the “Spaniards [warning him that a white man who attempted to
proceed with fever had died earlier] advised me to return to Belize”
(Letterbooks). Seven days later a padre finally gave him some medicine.
Similarly Whitfield, fearing Lord Derby might think him negligent, clar-
ified that he was ill in Sierra Leone, and that was why he was delayed in
getting in touch. In another letter he related that he had moved to the
North where he hoped the cooler weather would remove his symptoms.
Political problems also interfered with trips into the interior. Territorial
disputes, rivalry among traders and leaders, as well as relations with foreign
countries quite understandably often prevented agents from either getting
into areas or hiring people to catch animals and birds. On April 9, 1846 Fry
warned Lord Derby about the fact that “Kaffir disturbances and severe
drought now make collecting difficult” and later informed him that the
30 A.C. COLLEY
Boers terrify and destroy all they can get their hands on (Letterbooks). From
India T. Smith wrote on October 10, 1843 that “We are going on much as
usual in the Political World with the exception of the Punjab, where the
King and every branch of his family have been cruelly murdered, which may
have the effect of materially altering our relations with that state”
(Letterbooks). Closed borders were also a problem. When in February
1844, for instance, W. Ogilby from the Zoological Society thought about
Lord Derby’s desire to mount expeditions in the Himalaya, he reminded
him that “the Nepalese are as jealous of strangers as the Chinese themselves,
and as I mentioned to your Lordship confine even the British Resident
within the [boundaries] of the capital” (Letterbooks). A year earlier
(November 1843) in a previous attempt to mount an expedition in the
Himalaya and collect among other things Himalayan Pheasants, J. Forbes
suggested to Lord Derby that animals and birds could be obtained in areas
which were either British or under British protection. He added that such
an expedition would only be possible if aided by some native “whose
cooperation could be easily obtained, with the assistance of the Political
agents of the different districts” (Letterbooks). In yet another instance, Blyth,
writing from Calcutta, reminded Lord Derby that he should be aware of the
extreme repugnance with which all Tibetans chiefs and rulers admitted
foreigners to their domain.
Territorial disputes in other parts of the world also caused problems.
On February 24, 1846, from South Africa, one of Fry’s helpers informed
Lord Derby:
I am sadly afraid that I shall be able to purchase nothing more at present, it is

not the season for young Springboks as to Gnoos [Gnus] there are none in
this part at all, the country being in such an unsettled state from the
uncertainty of our relations with the Native Tribes, people would be unwill-
ing to leave their places merely for the object of a Shooting Expedition, it is
only by means of such person that I can hope to get anything from beyond
the boundary, except by specially employing people, which would be
attended with too great expense. (Letterbooks)
Because of the complexity of going out in the field, the question of

whether or not an assistant was needed periodically arose and was
discussed via correspondence with Lord Derby who, of course, would
be paying the costs of an additional employee. In 1842, writing from
the Cape of Good Hope, Burke insisted that on a long journey two
Europeans should be together, and that one of the two should always
be with the collection, which needed to be protected from all kinds
of damage and hardships. Note that when writing to Lord Derby,
Burke put his request for the funding of an assistant in terms of the
collection’s welfare and not in terms of the well-being of those in the
field.
Of all the requests for an assistant, perhaps the most interesting is
one that involves John James Audubon, who knew Lord Derby and
occasionally contributed birds and skins to the Knowsley Hall Aviary
and Museum. In around 1838 Lord Derby was interested in sending
out someone to accompany Audubon, and thereby procure specimens
from North America for his Aviary. Edward Lear, who had been work-
ing for Lord Derby as an illustrator of his menagerie and was a good
friend of Audubon’s son, heard of the request and apparently let it be
known he was interested. Audubon, however, was quick to discourage
Lear’s application—he feared Lear was not tough enough. Audubon’s
letter of July 26, 1839 to Lord Derby is a polite but firm refusal of
Lear’s company. Not only does the letter offer insight into the rigors of
being out in the field but also, when mentioning that the assistant
would be treated as a “Gentleman,” reveals Audubon’s awareness of
Lord Derby’s privileged position:
It is my intention to visit the southernmost parts of the Union especially the

Shores and Islands of the Western coast of the Floridas and much of the
Gulph of Mexico to the mouth of the Sabine River.—After which I wish to
ascend into the country and pursue my way in a north course until I meet
with the Waters of the Missouri, to cross then proceed toward our Great
Lakes and return to England by way of New York.—So a person not inured
to the hardships of such a Journey, and still less to the heats of our Southern
climate . . . which may prove severe—it is true that on my reaching
Washington City, I shall apply to our Governors for the use of the
Revenue Cutters plying on the coast of the Islands and the Mexican Gulph,
and hope to succeed in being enabled to sail in that to the Sabine—in such
case I hope the persons who may accompany me are sure of being admitted
on board—but when disembarking at the Sabine we must proceed perhaps
on foot, perhaps on mules or in a canoe to the sources of that stream and
spend every night on the ground—our food must now be procured by the
gun or fishing line and scanty fare is sometimes our lot—a Young
Englishman whom I took on my last Voyage to the Floridas proving
physically inadequate to the task, and all that I said here to your Lordship
32 A.C. COLLEY
is intended to enable you the better to make choice of a veteran Walker of

Sinew[?] and Metal, one who may not linger on certain occasions when the
greatest energies are called forth. Your Lordship may depend upon my
desire to please you—the individual whom you send shall be treated accord-
ing to his standing in Life with kindness, and should he prove a Gentleman
he will find in me a Brother. (Letterbooks)
PACKING AND SHIPPING

Once the animals were gathered, agents had the demanding responsibility
of packing trunks or cases so specimens would not deteriorate and of
building secure cages for the live animals or of fashioning harnesses. (To
prevent deer from being swept overboard or falling and breaking a leg,
they were kept in a harness inside the hold of a ship.) Letters from Lord
Derby’s agents speak of constructing these containers, enclosures, and
restraints. From Java, J.B. Jukes wrote that he was busily engaged in
packing up a large trunk box, which would contain skins of birds collected
between April and October 1844. On April 25, 1839 Fry referred to
building “a nice house for the Ostriches” (Tin Trunk). (Fry once wrote
to Lord Derby that much of the success in getting the animals home
depended upon their cages.) And in 1849 an exhausted Bates declared
to Lord Derby: “I have employed myself making cages . . . and harness for
the deer . . . all with my own hand except for a little assistance from my
man” (Letterbooks).
Moving the captured specimens down a river or across land to a port
was also laborious and tricky. Over land, animals were often transported by
hired oxen-drawn wagons, many of which broke down or were pulled by
an insufficient number of oxen for the weight the wagon carried; still other
wagons were detained for debt. In an October 1843 letter to Lord Derby,
Whitfield, worried about getting his collection from Senegal to Sierra
Leone, wrote:
I do not think there would be much trouble in obtaining animals at

Fernando Po. The difficulty would be in getting them up to Sierra Leone
and then Gambia and the only way to remove this difficulty will be to get the
interest of the Lords of the Admiralty for their permission for a passage there
to Sierra Leone in one of her Majesty’s Steamers that may be stationed on
the Coast as the passage in any other way will take either 9 or 10 weeks. If I
was to make the Collection at the Gambia & Sierra Leone, & take them to
Fernando Po I should then be in the predicament of how to get to Europe.
(Letterbooks)
Whitfield was concerned that because of monopolized ports, where vessels

did not compete with one another, any master of a vessel could demand a
high price for passage.
One of the most crucial responsibilities of an agent was to locate reliable
ships and trustworthy captains to transport animals back to England. To
avoid wrecks, hurricanes, unfortunate and often tragic delays, as well as
seas chocked with ice, agents also had to judge whether it was the right
season to ship the animals and crates of natural history specimens so they
had a better chance of arriving unscathed. Smith in Nepal, for instance,
wrote in October 1843 to Lord Derby that “There is a very respectable
Liverpool House in Calcutta . . . whom your Lordship’s agent might com-
municate with . . . & enable the Calcutta House to forward Birds or
Animals with the best ships, & with careful captains, also at a favourable
time of the year” (Letterbooks).
To ensure that a living creature survived the passage, captains were
often guaranteed bonuses if they promised to take good care of the
animals on board. As was the practice of many others, Fry offered a
bonus of one pound a head for all the large animals delivered alive, and
McClelland, an agent in India, begged a captain in charge of his animals to
spare no expense and adopt the necessary measures on board to secure as
far as possible their safe arrival. Agents also worried whether or not there
was room on board for all they wanted to send back to England. If there
were not, where and for how long would the surplus shipment of animals
be housed? Then there was the serious matter of making sure that there
was proper bedding (dry hay and straw), enough fresh water—ten buckets
a day for 90 days—as well as adequate and proper food for the various
creatures on board a vessel. Attempting to reassure Lord Derby that all
would be well, Fry informed his patron on April 25, 1839: “Tomorrow I
ship six ostriches, the mail lion, the male Buffalo, 4 Secretaries, 3 Blue
Cranes and a kettle of turtles. . . . I ship them with 20 goats, 8 sacks of
Barley, 4 sacks of gravel, 1 lb 200 bran, 16 3000 Hay and a number of
caffer watermelons of which the Ostriches are very fond” (Tin Trunk).
And Blyth, when sending tigers back to England from Calcutta in
February 1850, explained that to make sure these tigers will be properly
34 A.C. COLLEY
fed during the passage, he has arranged for there to be 60 sheep on board—
meat for the tigers (Tin Trunk).12
Often the problem arose as to what to feed a particular animal. There
were questions about what was a correct diet. From America, Bachman
wrote to Lord Derby to give him advice about feeding ducks collected in
distant lands: based upon a great many experiments made in the Carolinas
he had learned that the best way to raise all young ducks was to give them
animal food mixed with rice flour. Occasionally, thinking that Lord Derby
might know better than they, agents or dealers wrote to their patron to ask
his advice about the best manner of treating or feeding a particular
creature during a passage.
There was also the task of sending a list of the shipments with prices and
with identifying names; sometimes, when giving a name, agents or dealers
also supplied the native names and even coached Lord Derby on how to
pronounce them. In one of his many letters, Whitfield, for example,
instructed Lord Derby in December 1846: “The G in GINGUANGA is
1st soft, 2nd hard, 3rd hard” (Letterbooks). Most dealers and agents, how-
ever, devoted much of their correspondence to enumerating the cost of
the creatures. In a March 6, 1837 letter Fry listed the prices of the birds
and a “cat” (probably what was commonly referred to as a “Jungle Cat”)
he was shipping to England from South Africa. It is worth quoting the
missive at length, for it not only gives a particular sense of the costs
involved but also reflects the concerns accompanying sending these crea-
tures on a long voyage.
My Lord,
I believe I have already twice troubled your Lordship with letters about
the animals and birds I am procuring and have procured: at last I am happy
to be able to announce the departure from the Cape of my first shipment,
they leave me in excellent health all of them I trust that we shall be
fortunate in getting them to England alive. . . . I have today purchased
another species of Vulture which I also send to your Lordship[.] I have
also seen the Captain of the ship Briton and have agreed with him to take
the whole of the specimens for £30 to London . . . Capt. Waring has on his
own account a male and female Zebra and a Pelican all of which he wishes,
should they arrive safe, to sell. He has promised to give up one man
entirely to take charge of the birds and animals and as he takes on board
20 live sheep and has a number of passengers I trust there will be no lack of
food for the birds.
I have given him a bill for the freight on your Lordship and made it payable
at Drummond’s the amount is £30 [copy obscured]
The following is the list of prices I have paid.
Springbok—Cage—etc. as doctor’s bill 5-0-0

2 Storks and Cage 3-0-0
2 Secretaries 2-0-0
5 Ducks 2-0-0
1 Turkey Vulture 5-0-0
1 Cat 2-15-0
2 Crows 1-0-0
2 Common Vulture 4-0-0
1 small Vulture 1-5-0
Discount on bill 7-6
£28-27-6
In the margin beside the list of prices, Fry notes: “The antelope is very
fond of bread but it disagrees with him I almost lost him from giving him
bread. The small vulture is a young bird and has not his proper plumage as
yet which is white, as he become older” (Letterbooks).
The repeated references in the correspondence to the possible death of
these animals and the recurring desire to get them to England alive reflect
the terrible risks the animals and birds were subject to. Death was always
expected. It was part of the cost of trading in animals. No matter what
precautions were taken, there was little guarantee that a creature would
arrive alive. In a letter to Lord Derby, Audubon was among many to admit
that “The difficulties of transmitting objects of Natural History Alive to
Europe are certainly great” (Letterbooks, March 13, 1842).
If an animal or a bird were not wounded, weakened, and abused on the
way to a ship, it often succumbed to the rigors of a nine-week or longer
journey to England. Letters sent to Lord Derby are often matter-of-fact
narratives of loss.
Examples of damage to the animal even before it is put on board are
plentiful. In 1844, Robert H. Schomburgh notified Lord Derby that
“A hartebeest [a large grassland antelope] which I had for months and
which I intended for your Lordship, had reached safely the coast, and was
only awaiting an opportunity to be forwarded from Georgetown [in
Guiana] jumped during one of those freaks through the window three
stories high, where it had followed the children of the house, and naturally
36 A.C. COLLEY
broke its neck” (Tin Trunk). And earlier in 1839 Fry sent Lord Derby a
letter explaining that a springbok (a kind of antelope) last received had an
injury on one of his hind legs from which he has nearly recovered: “He was
very poor but is picking up famously. The barbarian of a farmer who
brought him from the country tied all his legs together whenever he
placed him on the wagon, the consequence was that his legs were cut by
the leather thongs with which he was tied, all are now well except one hind
leg and that nearly so” (Tin Trunk). Often agents had to impart disap-
pointing news. In 1844 Thomson wrote from Belize:
I was almost most unwillingly to communicate to your Lordship my ill

success in preserving alive the Wild Turkies [sic], which I fully expect to
have sent home last month . . . I am sorry to say that notwithstanding every
care . . . they all died of a disease of the eyes, excepting one healthy bird that
throve very well with me, was casting its feathers and gradually being arrayed
in very beautiful plumage, when one night a Tiger cat kept in the neigh-
bourhood broke loose from his chain, entered the house in which the bird
was kept and killed it to my great mortification. (Tin Trunk)
A similar fate awaited a group of birds Bates had collected for his Lordship.
From Belize on February 14, 1843 he wrote: “I have brought down a few
varieties of Orioles & Bustards, Caracoa, a Pair of Partridges one of which
died on the road . . . I procured an Antelope but it died in a few days & I
regret to say that one of the deer at Government House was taken in the
day by an alligator, & although men were sent in boats to its rescue it
was . . . carried . . . off” (Letterbooks). Some creatures suffered from
“dysentery” and others, before boarding ship, fell prey to various weak-
nesses caused by rough treatment or mode of capture.
On board during the long passage to England—sometimes between
two and three months—animals and birds died because there was not
enough or the wrong sort of food; they became victims of cannibalization
(animals attacked each other, and sailors, if stranded at sea, sometimes
killed the creatures for food); severe changes in temperature also did
damage: cold winds (sometimes flannel clothes were put on deer in an
attempt to counteract chilling temperatures) as well as oppressive heat
took their toll (in 1842 Bates reported to Lord Derby that his birds
suffered much from heat), and so did storms, which resulted in the animals
either being injured or washed overboard. In one storm, Bates reported
that a bustard from Guatemala was taken with a kind of vertigo, stood with
its head tucked between its legs, and pathetically lived in that state for a
month until it died. In another bad storm a young male deer being sent
back to Lord Derby broke its leg near its shoulder and then, splinted and
put in a stateroom, damaged its remaining legs. It had to be killed. There
was also the mitigating factor of want of proper care, which resulted in the
birds and animals dying from starvation and disease. During a nine-week
voyage an antelope died from want of food. Other creatures escaped, flew
overboard, and drowned.
Throughout Lord Derby’s correspondence, reports such as the follow-
ing, sent in August 1843 from Whitfield, are not unusual:
I very much regret that all the spur-winged Geese & Whistling Ducks have
died on the Passage (thirty of the former, of the latter less) & in the most
extraordinary way, as they all died in the course of four days with the
exception of one Gander which rallied for about a fortnight & then died.
On opening many of them I found the liver in every instance enormously
large, as well as the Heart, from their attacks with Giddyness, & a greenish
fluid passing from the Nostrils. I presume the cause of Death must be from
Confinement producing a disease of the liver. (Letterbooks)
Death was commerce’s companion. As the letters illustrate, it was a

sobering and omnipresent reality.
CONCLUSION
One lesson from the correspondence is that no matter what privilege, posi-
tion, wealth, or sense of ownership a person such as Lord Derby might have
enjoyed in England, neither he nor others like him ever escaped the risks or
the complexities of journeying to and negotiating with foreign places sup-
posedly under the command of the British Empire. Lord Derby might have
benefited from the opening of routes to other areas of the world, and he
might have had the means to finance expeditions, make demands of his
agents, or through his aristocratic standing be in a position to extract help,
but he still had to deal with enormous difficulties or obstructions that more
often than not compromised or thwarted his efforts to collect and bring back
thousands of specimens to his estate. As the letters demonstrate, neither
Lord Derby nor those working for him were ever under any illusion that they
exerted either power or control over the faraway regions from which they
collected specimens. Indeed, their experiences serve as a corrective to many
38 A.C. COLLEY
postcolonial critics who tend to overlook the kinds of circumstances des-

paired of in these letters and too readily rush to equate Britain’s reach in the
mid-nineteenth century with the exercise of authority and management.
They forget the accompanying impotence and helplessness.
Looking more closely through the correspondence, one gains a more
complete understanding of the chaos that daily impeded the metropole’s
attempts to survey, collect, and arrange the natural life of these distant
and relatively unknown places. No such order was available when John
Bates, for example, trudged through Belize in search of animals and birds
that Lord Derby desired. After reading through the letters sent to Lord
Derby, which record troubles with the post, predators, insects, disease,
political dilemmas, disputes among groups, accidents, injuries, ignorance
about a specimen’s needs, as well as anxieties about whom to trust, sea
voyages, and dangers accompanying routes across land, one better com-
prehends the disorienting, nitty-gritty experience of landing, collecting,
and negotiating in a foreign land. The notion of power and control
seems almost alien. Indeed, if it had not been for overwhelming dedica-
tion to their scientific curiosity, people like Lord Derby would not have
been able to bear the twists and turns of their odyssey and to proceed any
further.
It is impossible to conclude this chapter without also acknowledging
the sad lesson that emerges from this correspondence, and that is the
vulnerability of creatures who roam this earth and are too often sacrificed
and subjected to ambition and desire. The image of the bustard with its
head between its legs and waiting to die is wrenching.
NOTES
1. The letters to which I refer in this chapter are from the correspondence of
Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, housed in the World Museum in
Liverpool, an institution founded by Lord Derby (hereafter cited as
Letterbooks) and from The Collection of Lord Derby at Knowsley Hall,
Liverpool (hereafter cited as Tin Trunk).
2. One exception in the correspondence I consulted is a February 5, 1843
letter from Calcutta in which J.M. McClelland describes the capturing of a
stag. He writes: “Mr. Frith and his party shot an old stag of the same
species. . . . a noble fearless creature . . . the elephants upon which the sports-
men were mounted approached quite close to it when it broke slowly away a
short distance before it was shot. None of the party had ever seen such a
species before” (Letterbooks).
3. Between 1832 and 1850, Lord Derby had nearly 50 agents. Lord Derby
meticulously copied every letter he received from his collectors. Unfortunately
none of his letters to his collectors in the field are present, but occasionally Lord
Derby made notes on the letters he received from his agents.
4. For a full description of the menagerie, see Fisher 2002.
5. The 13th Earl of Derby’s interest in natural history was partially indebted to
his father’s avid interest in the subject. A thoroughly researched collection of
essays on Lord Derby’s interest can be found in Fisher 2002.
6. On November 19, 1844, Whitfield complained: “My Lord, not having
heard from your Lordship relative to the Skins etc. etc. . . . I am disposed
to think that my last letter did not reach your Lordship . . . ” (Letterbooks).
7. The Reverend John Fry (1801–1861), Anglican clergyman and naval cha-
plain, lived in the Cape of Good Hope. He was a keen naturalist. For a short
time he was Curator of the South African Museum and President of the
Zoological Society.
8. In a August 2, 1842 letter, Joseph Burke writes: “My Lord . . . The main
object of a Collector is to satisfy his Patron & to do that a Collector should
not go along where . . . he has the least doubt that he will succeed”
(Letterbooks).
9. On August 29, 1834 Thomas Horsfield (an employee of the East India
House) advised Lord Derby, for instance, that he should set up a corre-
spondence with establishments and residences in various Dutch possessions
and in that way be in a position to add to his collection of exotic birds (Tin
Trunk).
10. Rajandra Mullick was an extremely wealthy merchant who had been adopted
by a rich family. In 1835, at age 16, he began construction of his Marble Palace
(completed in 1840). When the Zoological Gardens in Calcutta were set up in
1876, he donated many birds and animals from his personal collection.
11. For a fuller account of the practice and meaning of collecting skins, see
Colley 2014.
12. Blyth was aware of the fact that Lord Derby did not require a tiger. In the
same letter he wrote that he knows “your Lordship did not require
Carnivores” but that he had sent a few, “thinking they would meet with a
ready sale in England” (Tin Trunk).
WORKS CITED
Colley, Ann C. 2014. Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections,
Portraits, and Maps. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Fisher, Clemency. 2002. The Knowsley Aviary & Menagerie. In A Passion for
Natural History: The Life and Legacy of the 13th Earl of Derby, 84–95. National
Museums & Galleries on Merseyside. Liverpool: Bluecoat Press.
40 A.C. COLLEY
Letterbooks. Archives Department/Vertebrate Zoology, National Museums

Liverpool. 920 (DER) 13.
Tin Trunk. The Collection of Lord Derby, Knowsley Hall, Liverpool.
Ann C. Colley is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY College at Buffalo.

She has published numerous articles and books, including Wild Animal Skins in
Victorian Britain: Zoos, Collections, Portraits, and Maps; Victorians in the
Mountains: Sinking the Sublime; Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial
Imagination; Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture; The Search for
Synthesis in Literature and Art: The Paradox of Space, Edward Lear and the
Critics; and Tennyson and Madness.
CHAPTER 3
Dickens, Household Words,

and the Smithfield Controversy
at the Time of the Great Exhibition
Ronald D. Morrison
Animals, so often invested with powerful and complex symbolic significance,

remained present in a literal sense for Victorian writers in ways that are not
entirely imaginable for twenty-first-century readers. Once one begins look-
ing for them, animals become omnipresent in Dickens’s fiction and journal-
ism, just as they were omnipresent in Victorian culture, from the countryside
to the very heart of the metropolis of London. Why Dickens expressed
concern for the suffering of animals remains open to speculation, although
an initial answer is that in his works animals quite often provide an index of
human suffering and, more abstractly, they provide an index for the condi-
tion of England. As I will demonstrate, through his dual roles as both writer
and editor of Household Words, Dickens played an active role in the
magazine’s rather substantial engagement with humane issues in the mid-
Victorian era. I focus on a series of articles from the early 1850s that advocate
for the relocation of London’s Smithfield Market from the old City to the
suburbs. Scholars of Dickens’s journalism often categorize these articles
R.D. Morrison (*)

English Department, Morehead State University, Morehead, KY, USA
e-mail: r.morris@moreheadstate.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_3
42 R.D. MORRISON
under the general heading of “sanitary reform,” since his treatment of

Smithfield includes dire warnings about contagious diseases spreading
through London sewers because of the offal dumped from the slaughter-
houses surrounding the market. But these articles, written by Dickens and a
handful of other writers in the first few volumes of Household Words, reveal
that a general concern for the humane treatment of animals had become an
increasingly mainstream position at the midpoint of the nineteenth century,
and this ideological position both reflected and shaped the sensibilities of the
magazine’s middle-class readers. In certain respects, the humane ideology
articulated by Dickens and other writers in Household Words expresses many
of the common elements that Harriet Ritvo (1987) argues are the under-
lying purposes in discussions of animals in the Victorian era: the policing of
the lives of the poor, the enforcement of middle-class values, and the
exploitation of the symbolic value of many animals to promote a sense of
British superiority over its imperial rivals. But these articles, in turn, also
challenge some key elements of humane ideology and use the specter of
international competition and generalized fears of degeneration to argue for
the relocation of Smithfield, while suggesting a more general reconsideration
of the ways in which humans interacted with animals.
Dickens’s attitudes towards animals remain difficult to characterize. In
his history of the RSPCA, Arthur Moss (1961) claims that Dickens was
“a member and a great supporter” of the organization (46), but there seems
to be no strong evidence to bolster this claim. In 1864, the RSPCA invited
Dickens to speak at a meeting of the organization in Rochester. In his polite
letter declining the offer because of his busy schedule, Dickens assures the
Society’s Secretary, John Colam, that “I have a high opinion of the Society
you represent, and believe that it does a great deal of good” (Dickens 1965,
10: 359). Nevertheless, it seems likely that Dickens would remain suspicious
of an organization classified in Henry Mayhew’s (1862) London Labour and
the London Poor as a “Repressive and Punitive” agency (xxxiv), and at mid-
century, in fact, the organization focused most of its energies on prosecut-
ing members of the poor and working classes. Regardless of the exact nature
or degree of Dickens’s support for the RSPCA or other humane organiza-
tions, it was impossible for a writer attuned to both popular culture and the
history of reform legislation in England to remain unaware of the various
attempts at crafting animal protection legislation, as well as the high-profile
activities of the RSPCA and its leaders.
Like any other inhabitant of the metropolis, Dickens was also very
much aware of the problems created by Smithfield Market.1 A popular
3 HOUSEHOLD WORDS AND THE SMITHFIELD CONTROVERSY 43
London tourist attraction for visitors but also a long-standing safety and
moral hazard for residents, Smithfield appears with some regularity in
Dickens’s fiction and journalism. Not surprisingly, his descriptions of the
market echo the complaints expressed in other articles in Household
Words.2 It was in the late 1840s and early 1850s that concerns over
Smithfield came to a head. Reformers of several types grew increasingly
distressed over the noisy and bloody spectacle of the sprawling market and
the numerous slaughterhouses that surrounded it, and these concerns are
expressed both as abstract moral arguments, as well as calls for
specific reforms of the economic, safety, and sanitation issues created by
the market. Reformers argued that the very heart of the “Capital of the
World” was no place for such an establishment, and they called for
the creation of a new market in the suburbs. Conservative voices, in con-
trast, vigorously defended Smithfield as a venerable cultural institution
dating back to the Middle Ages and as a powerful symbol of English
superiority over its imperial rivals—in particular the French, whose diet
and morals equally attracted the bitter scorn of the British. During this
period, in his capacity as editor of Household Words, Dickens published
several articles by diverse hands, one of which he authored in its entirety
and another which he co-authored, calling for the relocation of Smithfield
and raising troubling questions about cruelty to animals under the existing
market system. The first of these articles to appear, “The Heart of Mid-
London,” was jointly authored by Dickens and the magazine’s sub-editor,
W. H. Wills,3 and the next two years saw the appearance of a string of
articles on the proper treatment of animals authored by Wills, Richard
Horne, and other contributors.4 In the spring of 1851, Dickens himself
waded back into the Smithfield controversy by publishing an article entitled
“A Monument of French Folly.” Certainly, the presence of these articles in
Household Words illustrates that the Victorian humane movement had
emerged as a mainstream social movement by the 1850s. But the debates
over Smithfield Market both confirm and challenge the rhetoric of the
emerging humane movement; moreover, they often express profound
doubts regarding British claims for imperial and moral superiority in the
years in which London prepared for and hosted the Great Exhibition.5
Nineteenth-century debates about animals and their proper treatment
often served as a means for British culture to explore issues as diverse as the
rise of science and technology, Britain’s superiority over its imperial rivals,
and the maintenance of the existing social order. Throughout the nine-
teenth century beef cattle figure prominently in these debates, a fact which
44 R.D. MORRISON
seems ironic in a country figuratively represented by John Bull and the

English beef-eater. But the symbolic potential of beef becomes extraordi-
narily complicated during this period and deserves additional discussion.
As Ritvo (1987) explains, in the nineteenth century prize livestock—most
particularly cattle—came to serve as an important symbol of British super-
iority over its imperial rivals. A “cult of beef” developed in the early part of
the nineteenth century, as fat cattle were used to create a “metonymic
association with agricultural improvement” (46) in general, and, she
further notes, “Meat was a particularly valuable commodity in interna-
tional competition, because the ability of especially urban industrial work-
ers to buy it was an index of British commercial prowess, and because,
according to popular belief, it was the consumption of red meat that
distinguished brave and brawny English soldiers from puny, sniveling
Frenchmen” (47).
Intriguingly, from its inception the nineteenth-century humane move-
ment had also focused on the proper treatment of cattle. In fact, the
campaigns to outlaw bull baiting (and the less common practice of bull
running that sometimes accompanied it in rural areas) had helped to
galvanize a few early calls for reform into a relatively coherent social and
political movement. After the drawn out and highly contentious campaign
to outlaw bull baiting was finally successful in 1835, humane reformers
turned their attention to other examples of animal abuse—nearly all of
which were closely linked to the behaviors of the lower classes—while
consistently ignoring upper-class amusements such as horse racing, fox
hunting, and the wholesale slaughter of game birds on private estates. By
mid-century the reformation of slaughterhouses became a popular target
of the humane movement, but, in fact, concern over the location and
operations of slaughterhouses, prompted in part by health and sanitation
worries, had been a hotly debated topic in British cities for several cen-
turies and had been under the RSPCA’s close scrutiny since the found-
ing of that organization (Moss 1961, 23). Keith Thomas (1983) explains
that, because of the widespread popular belief that the slaughter of animals
had a “brutalizing effect upon the human character,” by “Victorian times
the slaughtermen were frequently said by social investigators to be the
most demoralized class of all” (295). The Victorian repugnance toward
slaughterhouses prompted the RSPCA to campaign to have all slaughter-
houses moved to the outskirts of cities. The cruelties of Smithfield were
also commonly known in the early nineteenth century, and, when com-
bined with class prejudice against workers at Smithfield and the surrounding
slaughterhouses, firmly established in the public imagination that drovers—

most especially Smithfield drovers—were dangerously depraved, largely
because their actions were in full view of the public.6
By 1850, the number of animals moving through Smithfield had grown
so large and the problems associated with the market had become so
serious that many Londoners began to see the necessity of moving it,
despite the symbolic value of having it situated in the heart of the city. As
K. J. Bonser (1970) reports, in 1849 various newspapers sharply criticized
the problems in Smithfield and attempted to have the City utilize the New
Market at Islington (222–223).7 Even a cursory glance at the articles from
1850 to 1852 indicates that Dickens and his staff writers clearly assumed
that the middle-class readers of Household Words were also acutely aware of
the debates over the location of Smithfield Market—and indeed Dickens
and his staff could also assume some basic level of agreement on the proper
treatment of animals, especially since these standards were often closely
linked to social class. As Peter Ackroyd (1992) comments, Household
Words “was unashamedly popular or middle-class in tone and inspiration”
(591), and Dickens’s thorough understanding of his audience and his
willingness to shape the magazine for them, is evident throughout the
magazine’s history. As Ackroyd describes it, Dickens “always emphasised
the need for liveliness and brightness in even the most humble pieces”
(595). That the extraordinarily dark and sometimes grisly descriptions of
Smithfield (detailed below) often break this editorial prime directive is
striking, and suggests that while Dickens might assume some level of
agreement among his readers, he still felt the need to jolt them out of
complacency on this and other social issues.8 While in his role as editor
Dickens remained concerned that ideas considered radical (such as those
at times expressed by Wilkie Collins in his contributions to the magazine)
should be toned down by Wills and himself to prevent them from being
“offensive to the middle class” (Dickens 1965–2002, 8: 669), Dickens
generally took a utilitarian approach, using gentle satire and humor as a
means of exposing various social problems to avoid losing his readership.9
However, the descriptions of animal abuse in Smithfield remain disturb-
ingly graphic and suggest that Dickens hoped his middle-class readers
might see beyond the easy platitudes suggested by the humane rhetoric
of the day, as well as commit to the immediate goal of removing the cattle
market from central London.
Dickens’s and Wills’s “The Heart of Mid-London” appeared in the
May 4, 1850 issue of Household Words. Harry Stone’s (1968) general
46 R.D. MORRISON
comment about Dickens’s choice of a title serves as a useful place to begin:

“‘The Heart of Mid-London’ echoes Scott’s The Heart of Mid-Lothian,
but it also gives a correct geographical designation, makes an ironic com-
ment about London’s heart—or rather its lack of heart—and then, since
the heart of London is the bloody Smithfield cattle market, rings changes
on the fact that London’s heart is bestial and crassly commercial” (42).
While there can be little doubt that Dickens uses Smithfield as a means to
criticize Victorian capitalism in general, in the course of only a few pages,
Dickens reiterates several key issues in Victorian debates about the humane
treatment of animals. Dickens and Wills create as their spokesperson Mr
Thomas Bovington, a gentleman-farmer recently retired from the tanning
trade, who is shocked and disgusted by what he witnesses in Smithfield
when he takes his carefully nurtured livestock there for sale. As a new
member of the upper-middle class, Mr Bovington becomes particularly
troubled by the actions of the drovers, who appear to delight in beating
and goading the animals at Smithfield. These class concerns are typical
of the ideology of the early humane movement, which consistently por-
trayed cruelty to animals as “a lower-class propensity” (Ritvo 1987, 135).
As his name playfully suggests, Mr Bovington should be regarded as a
thoroughly modern John Bull, who, although possessing only modest
resources, nevertheless emulates the socially elite beef breeders that
became an important source of pride in eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-
tury England. At his country estate in Buckinghamshire, Mr Bovington
spares neither expense nor ingenuity in producing prize livestock for
market according to the most advanced agricultural and scientific princi-
ples of the day. Not only is Mr Bovington exceedingly kind to his
livestock—for example, he has made something of a pet of his favorite, a
West Highland bull—but, in Dickens’s description, he also represents
those advanced agriculturalists who “administered their food out of the
scientific dietaries of Liebig; who had built their sheds after the manner of
Huxtable; who had stalled and herded them in imitation of Pusey; who
had littered them out of ‘Stevens’s Book of the Farm’ . . . ” (Dickens and
Wills 1850, 121). While the first author mentioned (Liebig) refers to a
German chemist, the other three refer to standard English writers on
agriculture in the nineteenth century, further emphasizing the purported
technological superiority of British beef producers.10 Following these
models, Mr Bovington has also become an “admirable book-keeper”
(121) who has calculated his feeding costs down to the last farthing.
Thus far he has been successful in breeding sheep and has only recently
made a foray into the more prestigious arena of beef production.

Mr Bovington may be mildly disappointed by the projected market prices
at Smithfield, but, the narrator remarks, “Mr. Bovington’s object was less
profit than fame. As a beginner, he wanted to establish a first-class char-
acter in the market” (121), and only then will he concern himself with
minor matters of profit and loss. Some outward manifestations of
Mr Bovington’s “first-class character” include the humane treatment of
his livestock, his concern that they receive the best quality fodder while at
Smithfield, and his desire that, in his own words, they be “killed ‘comfor-
tably,’” which he considers no less than his “sacred duty” (121). This
small detail might also reveal the influence of humane ideology, since
organizations such as the RSPCA expressed the need to develop humane
slaughter techniques from the early years of the nineteenth century.11 He
naively asks Mr Whelter, the ominously named master-drover, that his
stock be handled by “humane drovers” (122)—which Mr Bovington
learns simply do not exist in Smithfield, despite the fact that all drovers
must be licensed by the City. Thus far, Dickens and Wills seem largely to
be following standard humane rhetoric, attributing kindness toward ani-
mals to the upper classes and cruelty to the lower classes, as if these
qualities are entirely class dependent rather than connected to stark eco-
nomic realities.
Although at times the authors flirt with satire in their descriptions of
Mr Bovington, as the gentleman-farmer eventually learns some hard les-
sons from his experiences, it becomes clear that the authors’ primary target
is Smithfield itself, which creates horrific conditions for animals and
humans alike. In an allusion to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner,” Dickens and Wills (1850) report that Mr Bovington eventually
returns home “a ‘wiser,’ though certainly not—commercially speaking—a
‘better’ man” (125). For example, Mr Bovington becomes distraught that
his sheep are denied food and water, and his cattle have been savagely
goaded and beaten into ridiculously crowded pens, where potential buyers
can scarcely see how they have profited from his advanced breeding and
feeding methods. Throughout the disturbing scenes that follow,
Mr Bovington reacts in disgust to the actions of the drovers, who, as
Ritvo (1987) records, were often the focus of RSPCA annual reports,
which often chronicled their cruelty in excruciating detail (138–140). As
the scene reaches a ghastly conclusion, the article’s language becomes
increasingly extravagant, and the two authors rely on two consistent
patterns of related images. Perhaps alluding to an early nineteenth-century
48 R.D. MORRISON
expression that “England is the hell of dumb animals” (Ritvo 1987, 126),
Dickens and Wills (1850) explicitly use images of hell and its torments in
describing Smithfield Market. For example, at one point they describe the
market as “Pandemonium,” and later they call it a “panorama of cruelty
and suffering.” In another description, they portray the drovers as drop-
ping burning pitch on the backs of frantic livestock (122). Victorian
readers could hardly fail to notice that the “Market of the Capital of the
World” has transformed itself into “a ghastly and blasphemous
Nightmare” (123), hardly befitting a Christian country. Somewhat less
obvious in these descriptions are images of “savages,” implying that
drovers are akin to natives from the “darkest” parts of the expanding
British Empire. As Dickens and Wills describe them, the drovers “raved,
shouted, screamed, swore, whooped, whistled, danced like savages”
(122). The narrator is particularly horror stricken to realize that “the
gate of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital was in the midst of this devilry”
(122), emphasizing that the profound ways in which Smithfield and all
that occurs there pose a devastating counterargument to claims of British
technological or moral superiority at mid-century. Moore (2004) notes
that “To image the urban poor as a separate and savage race was a popular
trope employed by many Victorian novelists and campaigners for social
reform,” but she uses Dickens’s depiction of Jo in Bleak House as an
example of the way in which Dickens might employ this trope only to
subvert it in order to call attention to pressing domestic social problems (31).
Dickens and Wills employ a similar strategy here. Although the drovers are
described as “savages,” in sharp contrast to the mission of St. Bartholomew’s
Hospital, Dickens and Wills also make it abundantly clear that the drovers—
although they often commit cruel acts—are not responsible for the market
system. Like the Great Exhibition, Smithfield Market ideally should stand for
Britain’s technical superiority, but in reality it has become an abomination
that underscores Britain’s moral as well as technological failures.12
To develop this point further, Dickens and Wills (1850) arrange for
Mr Bovington to meet a Mr Brumpton, a former buyer at Smithfield, who
has been forced out for “giving evidence against it before Parliament.”
Mr Brumpton, in fact, expresses considerable sympathy for the drovers,
especially given the appalling conditions under which they are forced to
work, and he explains to Mr Bovington that “Even the labour their cruelty
costs them is terrible. . . . None of them ever live long” (123). Mr Brumpton
refers to the fact that the work at Smithfield is physically exhausting for the
men and boys employed there, but he also maintains that the work exacts a
psychological or moral toll on the workforce. In light of typical Victorian
attitudes toward drovers and slaughtermen, such a view is unusual in portray-
ing the drovers as victimized by a hopelessly corrupt, and, as Mr Brumpton
continually emphasizes, outdated and inefficient system. A bit later in the
piece, in a clumsy bit of didacticism, Mr Brumpton offers his opinion that the
market should be removed to the suburbs: “Deal with a new cattle-market
as the Board of Health proposes to deal with cemeteries. Isolate it” (125).
Mr Brumpton recognizes that the brutalizing effects of the livestock market
are not likely to be ameliorated, but removing it to the suburbs is one way
of limiting its most pernicious effects, which are here compared to the
contagion spread by the foul burying grounds in slum areas of London.
Mr Brumpton, a much less sentimental fellow than Mr Bovington, has
additional practical reasons for complaining about Smithfield. As an
experienced livestock producer himself, Mr Brumpton reports that
butchers routinely deduct 10–15% from the selling price of the animals
coming out of Smithfield because the meat is severely bruised and often
must be discarded (124). Mr Brumpton also knows from a friend in the
tanning business that the hides of animals sold at Smithfield are generally
covered with holes because of the animals’ treatment in the market, and
thus their hides are jokingly referred to as “Smithfield Cullanders” (123).
As the piece nears its conclusion, readers are told that Mr Bovington has
given up entirely on Smithfield and that he “regards it as a place accursed.
In distant Reigns, he says, it was an odious spot, associated with cruelty,
fanaticism, wickedness and torture; and in these later days it is worthy of its
ancient reputation” (Dickens and Wills 1850, 125). In medieval London,
it was entirely a practical matter that a livestock market came to be estab-
lished in what was then a green space immediately outside the walls of the
City, but in Dickens’s day every adult Londoner knew that Smithfield also
served as the location where, through the centuries, individuals convicted
of treason, heresy, and other capital crimes were publicly tortured and
executed—two of the most famous being William Wallace and Wat
Tyler.13 In several places throughout the piece, Dickens and Wills call
attention to the cruelties of the past—cruelties that the most advanced
nation in the world should have eradicated but which still tend to erupt
in places such as Smithfield, which Mr Bovington regards as a “stron-
ghold . . . of prejudice, ignorance, cupidity, and stupidity” (125). Earlier
in the piece, Mr Bovington remarks that the vicious actions of the drovers
50 R.D. MORRISON
“might have made a treat for Nero” (124). David Perkins (2003) points
out it was a common rhetorical strategy in the nineteenth century to
consider animal cruelty as “not only unnatural but also anachronistic,
atavistic, characteristic of an unenlightened past” (31). Here Dickens and
Wills relentlessly expose the fact that such hellish cruelties still erupt in the
heart of the modern English metropolis, while subtly reminding readers
that it had been common practice to bait bulls in Smithfield (and across
England) for centuries and that the practice had only been eradicated a
decade and a half earlier. Another common strategy of humane rhetoric
involves associating “cruelty to animals with foreigners, especially those
from southern, Catholic countries” (Ritvo 1987, 127). Mr Bovington,
who withdraws in disgust from Smithfield, described by the authors as
“the arena of innumerable bull-fights,” concludes “I don’t think we are so
much better than those people in Spain after all . . . ” (Dickens and Wills
1850, 124), associating the market with England’s inferior rivals on the
Continent rather than with the strongest imperial power on earth.
Toward the end of the piece, Mr Bovington’s prized West Highland
bull, goaded by the drovers until he becomes mad, causes considerable
damage as he races wildly through the nearby neighborhood before finally
being cornered in a tripe shop and slaughtered on the spot. While animals
escaping from the market were common enough sights on market days,
the running of the bull through the city streets recalls the English tradition
of bull running and bull baiting, the very activities that prompted many
early attempts at animal protection laws of the 1820s and 1830s. The
practice of bull running, largely forgotten today, was once considered an
honorable rural custom that, by the mid-nineteenth century, had become
disreputable and illegal alongside bull baiting, with which the practice was
commonly associated. In the earliest years of the nineteenth century, such
“sports” appealed to a cross-section of English society, and in fact bull
running was frequently defended by members of the upper classes, but as
the humane movement gained momentum and respectability, bull run-
ning and bull baiting came to be associated exclusively with rustics and the
lower classes.14 And thus, as Dickens and Wills make clear, in its everyday
activities Smithfield Market obliterates a half-century of progress and
allows the cruelties of the past to erupt on the city streets of the modern
metropolis only a year away from the highly anticipated Great
Exhibition.15
Other articles not written by Dickens but almost certainly commis-
sioned by him carry similar indictments.16 In the June 29, 1850 issue of
Household Words, Richard Horne, little remembered today but a prolific

nineteenth-century journalist, critic, and author, published an article
entitled “The Cattle-Road to Ruin,” in which he vigorously attacks the
cruelties of Smithfield, the title referring not only to the fate of animals
sold at the market but also the serious threats that Smithfield posed to
public health and safety. In the first half of the article, in a gesture
common in materials produced by humane organizations, Horne (1850)
offers a sentimentalized and agonizingly graphic account of an ox con-
demned to sale and slaughter at Smithfield as he constructs an argument
that much of the metropolis’s meat supply is “not only unwholesome, but
of the worst and most injurious kind” (325). In the essay’s second half,
Horne also describes sheep slaughter and introduces various statistics on
the number of animals coming through Smithfield during this period by
quoting from a pamphlet entitled An Enquiry into the Present State of
Smithfield Cattle Market, and the Dead Meat Markets of the Metropolis, one
of several studies or parliamentary reports on the market cited frequently
in periodicals at the time. Horne attacks the Smithfield system in moral
terms and on practical grounds, just as Dickens and Wills had done in their
earlier piece. For example, Horne’s source expresses considerable concern
about the possibility of diseased meat from the treatment of animals at
Smithfield, and he cites a “practical authority” as concluding that, because
of the actions of Smithfield’s drovers, at least 63,000 pounds per annum
are lost because of bruised meat (and he suggests that much more meat
should be discarded but is instead sold to the poor at reduced prices)
(329). Horne also gives voice to a commonly held religious scruple con-
cerning the market’s operations that also entails a degree of class bias. For
Horne, the operations of the market represent “Sunday desecration”
(330). Because of the horrendously overcrowded conditions of the mar-
ket, much of the livestock for the Monday market had to be delivered on
Sunday, preventing the 2,000 men and boys who worked there from
observing the Sabbath and ensuring that the torments of Smithfield dis-
turbed the Sabbath and caused considerable pain to animals. Although
Dickens was no supporter of Sabbath restrictions, the pieces appearing in
Household Words on Smithfield Market nevertheless consistently focus on
the undesirable aspects of its Sunday operations. Mr Bovington, for exam-
ple, feels guilty about delivering his stock on Sunday before the Monday
market (Dickens and Wills 1850, 121). Such rhetorical tactics again
seem designed to make the operations of Smithfield even more unpalata-
ble to middle-class readers of the magazine and to place the blame for
52 R.D. MORRISON
Smithfield squarely on the shoulders of the civic leaders who refused to

relocate the market to a more appropriate spot.
Also during the height of the Smithfield debates, Dickens wrote “A
Monument of French Folly,” which was published in the March 8, 1851
edition of Household Words. In this article, Dickens contrasts Smithfield
with French livestock markets and slaughterhouses he had visited earlier
that year in preparation for writing the article.17 Throughout the essay,
Dickens mocks conventionally narrow attitudes toward the French and
ultimately presents a convincing argument that the French market system
results in more efficient and humane operations. Such a position seems
remarkable given the general English distrust of all things French at mid-
century. However, as Olga Stuchebrukhov (2005) argues, this article
represents but one of several of Dickens’s pieces from Household Words
that present France as “a model middle-class nation-state that is more
successful than Great Britain at balancing order and control with the
culturally and emotionally satisfying communal life of a nation” (393).18
Certainly Dickens intends to cast doubt on Britain’s alleged superiority at
the time it was set to display before the world the agricultural, technolo-
gical, and cultural signs of its prowess at the Great Exhibition, due to open
in a matter of a few weeks. In “The Great Exhibition and the Little One,”
published in the summer of 1851 after the opening of the Crystal Palace,
Dickens and Horne contrast England with China (their example of a
closed, archaic society cut off from Western progress) to establish that
advanced nations, following England’s lead, “are moving in a right direc-
tion towards some superior condition of society—politically, morally,
intellectually, and religiously . . . ” (Dickens and Horne 1851, 356) and
that the technological advancements cataloged at great length in the essay
display England’s superiority over the rest of the world. Smithfield, in
sharp contrast, stands as an anachronistic disruption that threatens to
undermine England’s claim of political, moral, intellectual, and religious
superiority over its rivals.19
Confident that his readers were aware of the many problems with the
operations at Smithfield—either through their own experience or from
previously published articles in Household Words and elsewhere—Dickens
initially focuses on the slaughterhouses that surround the market. For
example, in “A Monument of French Folly” Dickens (1851b) notes that
most of the slaughterhouses near Smithfield “are surrounded by houses of
a poor description, swarming with inhabitants. Some of them are close to
the worst burial-grounds in London” (553).20 Consistent with his
concerns about sanitary reform, Dickens laments that the offal from
London slaughterhouses inevitably makes its way into the city’s “imperfect
sewers” (554), eventually polluting both the air and water supply of the
metropolis. As Dickens makes clear in a pointed address to his readers,
many of whom were already fearful of cholera and other diseases, this
pollution has both a physical and moral dimension: the corruption from
these slaughterhouses will inevitably “rise, in poisonous gases, into your
houses at night, when your sleeping children will most readily absorb
them, and . . . find its languid way, at last, into the river that you drink”
(554). Furthermore, Dickens notes that Sir Richard Owen, an eminent
Victorian scientist whose name turns up with some frequency in Dickens’s
fiction and journalism and who contributed several articles on scientific
subjects to Household Words, claims that the ill treatment animals receive at
Smithfield results in their developing “fevered blood” (554), which ulti-
mately creates another health concern: a tainted meat supply for the
metropolis. Moreover, Owen claims that hanging thousands of animal
carcasses in the unwholesome air surrounding the market and its environs
further degrades the quality of the meat and vastly increases the potential
for disease. If the production and consumption of meat are signs of
Britain’s alleged superiority, then Owen’s predictions about tainted meat
constitute a particularly ominous indication of the possibility of British
degeneration, even as the French have developed a humane, efficient, and
sanitary system for providing meat to their major cities.
In a disconcerting and potentially confusing rhetorical strategy, Dickens
offers many standard complaints about Smithfield in one narrative voice,
only to dismiss them with the blustery, jingoistic arguments of a member
of the Court of Common Council, whose voice eventually transforms into
a harsh stereotype of John Bull. This figure, for example, pontificates that
the thousands of bloody carcasses hanging in the neighborhood of that
“British bulwark” (Dickens 1851b, 553) Smithfield represent “proof of
prosperity” for the entire British nation. To complaints that cruelty and
slaughter on such a large scale might produce unwholesome moral effects
on the children who live nearby, the councilman laughingly retorts that
“it makes the young rascals hardy” (554). To Professor Owen’s con-
cerns regarding tainted meat, the councilman dismisses the professor as
“an uncommon counselor, so don’t mind him” (554). And when the list
of problems associated with Smithfield piles up in ways that become
impossible to ignore or refute, the councilman simply bellows “but,
the French are a frog-eating people who wear wooden shoes, and it’s
54 R.D. MORRISON
O the roast beef of England, my boy, the jolly old English roast beef!”
(554).21 Dickens has the councilman utilize the song in such a way that
even the most conventional and conservative of his middle-class readers
cannot avoid the irony of his insistent claims of British moral and technical
superiority over the French, who, according to the councilman, have
created a “monument of folly” with their overly regulated meat markets
and slaughterhouses. In the song, the French are mocked because of their
alleged effeminacy, which manifests itself in their dress, speech, and diet.
As James Gregory (2007) asserts, “the association between roast beef and
Englishness was long established, and symbolised ‘manly English virtues’
and the ‘natural,’ against the dietetic other of artifice, luxury, the potage
maigre, or frogs’ legs of the French” (13). Despite the fact that popular
culture representations of the French consistently portray them as morally
suspect, Dickens challenges his readership by asserting that the French, in
their humane treatment of animals and their careful regulation of livestock
markets and slaughterhouses, have indeed become superior to the English.
Dickens devotes more than half of “A Monument of French Folly” to
describing clean and efficient Parisian livestock markets and government-
run slaughterhouses—all discreetly tucked away in the suburbs and meti-
culously regulated by government inspectors. Throughout the essay,
Dickens praises the French system and its effects on both humans and
animals. Although he describes the manners and speech of French butch-
ers with some degree of wry humor, these descriptions are a far cry from
the manner in which he and Wills portray the drovers as demons incarnate
in “The Heart of Mid-London.” Dickens describes the French abattoirs as
superior in every respect to the slaughterhouses surrounding Smithfield in
terms of their spaciousness, cleanliness, and ventilation. He also notes that
in France animals are required by statute to be provided with fresh water
and fodder, bare necessities seldom afforded to animals at Smithfield.
While he sees plenty of blood and killing in the French abattoirs,
Dickens (1851b) remarks that “everywhere, there is an orderly, clean,
well systematized routine of work in progress—horrible work at the best,
if you please; but, so much the greater reason why it should be made the
best of” (557). For Dickens, his staff, and his readers, Smithfield had
become an emblem of the worst aspects of the metropolis and unthinking
British nationalism.
One last piece from Household Words needs to be explored, since it
helps to pull together several of the threads I have been following regard-
ing the magazine and the Smithfield controversy. Although Richard
Horne’s comic poem “The Smithfield Bull to his Cousin of Nineveh,”

published in Household Words in March 1851, has received no scholarly
attention, it complements the themes expressed in other works on
Smithfield in the magazine. Although the ongoing debate over the loca-
tion of Smithfield Market represents one obvious and vital context for
understanding the significance of Horne’s poem, there is an additional
context that readers of Household Words would have found compelling,
since Horne’s poem, at least ostensibly, represents a response to another
work previously published in the magazine. In the February 8, 1851 issue,
W. H. Stone22 had published a brief piece entitled “The Nineveh Bull,” a
prose soliloquy ostensibly spoken by an ancient Assyrian statue of a bull-
god (to the confusion of later readers and scholars, sometimes also
described as a lion) on its way by ship to England. Nineteenth-century
readers of Household Words would have known immediately that Stone’s
“Nineveh Bull” was one of the Assyrian statues in the process of being
shipped to England by Austen Henry Layard, amateur archaeologist and,
in ensuing years, a prominent Member of Parliament. As Andrew M.
Stauffer (2001) explains, the anticipated arrival of these Assyrian statues
created a sensation among the reading public, in part because Layard had
already published popular illustrated accounts of his excavations of
Nineveh (60). Layard sent the statues to England for display at the
Great Exhibition in 1851, due to open in May of the same year, and
eventually the British Museum acquired them. Stauffer notes that over the
next several years, references to Nineveh and its relics turn up in a number
of literary works, including a somewhat puzzling allusion in Tennyson’s
“Maud.” However, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Burden of Nineveh,”
originally composed in 1850 and first published in 1856, stands as the
most significant literary treatment of the statues. Stauffer, who never
mentions Horne’s comic response to Stone, does, however, analyze
some similarities between Stone’s “The Nineveh Bull” and Rossetti’s
poem, concluding that Stone and Rossetti both “meditat[e] on the tran-
sience of empires” in their respective works (Stauffer 2005, 377). In fact, a
similar argument might be made about Horne’s comic poem. In the
March 15, 1851 issue of Household Words, Horne uses public interest in
the Nineveh Bull and other artifacts due to arrive in England from
Layard’s expedition to call attention to the deplorable conditions in
Smithfield Market and to question Britain’s claim that it had triumphed
over the cruelties of the past and surpassed its imperial rivals. In fact,
the Smithfield Bull salutes the Nineveh Bull specifically for arriving for
56 R.D. MORRISON
“Fifty One’s Great Exhibition” (Horne 1851, l. 74; hereafter cited by line
number), at which the Nineveh Bull will serve as an imposing symbol of
the spoils of Empire and British triumph in the ongoing “archeological
rivalry” with France and Germany in the Near East (Brantlinger
1988, 136, 158).
“The Smithfield Bull to his Cousin of Nineveh,” when returned to its
original cultural contexts, illustrates a common tendency in humane
rhetoric in using animals and their treatment to explore contemporary
social issues of the day. The poem’s humor and its playful verse appear to
be excellent illustrations of Dickens’s insistence that articles in Household
Words appeal to middle-class values and largely steer clear of radical
implications. Even though Horne sets up his poem from the point of
view of the Smithfield Bull, neither Horne nor the Bull actually suggests
that eating meat breaks any moral laws; moreover, Horne carefully avoids
any association with the practice of vegetarianism, which, in the nine-
teenth century, was too extreme for Dickens and the vast majority of
readers of Household Words.23 Inspired by his “Bovian Muse” (l. 18),
the Smithfield Bull, explains that he writes to decry
. . . wrongs far worse than eating.

To die is natural—to be eaten,
Earth’s law; but to be basely beaten—
Forming no part of Nature’s rules—
Shows that some men are brutes and fools. (ll. 30–34)
Who are these men characterized as “brutes and fools”? This poem, similar
to other pieces on Smithfield in Household Words, initially suggests that the
actions of Smithfield’s drovers are responsible for the disgraceful display of
“Smithfield blaspheming in its mud” (l. 38), as Horne’s bull vividly
describes it. That there is something diabolical or blasphemous about
Smithfield, as I have noted above, constitutes a common theme in the
periodical pieces devoted to the controversy. Not surprisingly, Horne
continues this theme in his speech of the Smithfield Bull, placing special
emphasis on the cruelty of the drovers:
Drovers, with tuck’d-up sleeves, and faces

Like devils, who wager at grimaces:
The hail of blows—the torches’ glare;
The rushing madness, foulness, flare . . . (ll. 39–42)
But Horne’s complaints extend well beyond the actions of Smithfield’s

drovers. In sharp contrast to the vivid scenes of Smithfield’s cruelties,
Horne’s poem also conjures up a description of
. . . civic magnates [who] sit and dine

On beef—our beef! and o’er their wine,
Declare this murderous market-place
An honour to the human race. (ll. 43–46)
Here Horne extends the blame to the conservative “civic magnates” who
defend Smithfield as a powerful symbol of Britain’s purported moral and
technological superiority, in similar fashion to Dickens’s lampooning of
claims expressed by the councilman in “A Monument of French Folly.”
The pronoun “our” remains intentionally ambiguous in this context,
since, on the one hand, it might be taken to mean that the Smithfield
Bull laments that so many members of his species are treated with heartless
cruelty at Smithfield. Yet the phrase “our beef” may also serve as an appeal
to the readers of Household Words, and indeed the entire English nation,
who allow these seemingly noble animals24—one powerful symbol of
England’s superiority over its rivals—to be treated in a shameful and
disgusting manner hardly befitting a country celebrating its imperial pro-
wess. While humane reformers sought to move Smithfield from its central
location and reduce its potential negative influence on the citizens of
London—especially children and the lower classes, who were viewed as
most vulnerable to such influences—Horne also expresses a more general
concern for the fate of animals consigned to Smithfield, as indeed do
several of the authors published in Household Words during this debate.
Horne’s Smithfield Bull complains that Londoners too often forget where
their meat comes from, but then he adds that they also
. . . forget their fellow-creatures,

In praising Smithfield’s murderous features,
With all the vices, fevers, groans,
That breed a curse beneath its stones. (ll. 59–62)
Toward the end of the poem, the Smithfield Bull goes so far as to hope
that the Nineveh Bull’s “high mission” (l. 73) in journeying across the seas
to England is to reform the livestock market, or, as the Smithfield Bull
58 R.D. MORRISON
puts it, the Nineveh’s Bull goal in appearing in England in the year of the
Great Exhibition
Is not to show your ancient learning,

But into practice knowledge turning;
And therefore you will see us righted,
Although the “City” be benighted. (ll. 75–78)
Appropriate for the celebration of the Great Exhibition, the Smithfield

Bull concludes by describing a model cattle-market proposed by Thomas
Dunhill:
Where pumps for ever may the tun fill;

Where spaces, and allotments, large
Shall sink with shame the City barge;
Where screens shall rise up, broad and high,
For safety, care, and decency . . . (ll. 82–86)
These hopeful lines, which look forward to a more progressive future,

stand in sharp contrast to the descriptions in the earlier Dickens and Wills
piece, in which Mr Bovington points out that Smithfield was “associated
with cruelty, fanaticism, wickedness and torture” (Dickens and Wills
1850, 125). As I have noted above, the strategy of describing cruelty to
animals as an atavistic eruption manifested in the actions of the lower
classes is common in humane rhetoric. But Horne, like Dickens, Wills, and
other writers in Household Words, seems determined to expose the fact that
many cruelties from the past still exist in the heart of the modern English
metropolis even as the Great Exhibition was ready to begin.
Eventually the debate over Smithfield Market ended when, in 1852, the
Smithfield Market Removal Act was passed, which moved the live cattle
market to Islington’s Copenhagen Fields.25 Smithfield itself did not comple-
tely shut down its operations until the summer of 1855, when the last market
was held there on 11 June to the delight of many reformers and to the lament
of many who still saw the market as a vital symbol of England’s prosperity.
Smithfield, which remained unused for several years, eventually became the
central (dead) meat market for London. While various individuals and groups
continued to seek reforms of slaughterhouse conditions and slaughter tech-
niques throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the
removal of Smithfield came to be regarded as a victory for humane activists,
and indeed the campaign over Smithfield came to be overshadowed by the

contentious debate over vivisection that reached its climax in the 1870s. Still,
it is instructive to learn that Household Words played an important role in the
Smithfield controversy and that its involvement indicates how mainstream the
humane movement had become by the 1850s. Dickens’s sharp criticism of
Smithfield and his sympathetic descriptions of French livestock markets and
abattoirs remain a striking example of the way in which the debates over the
humane treatment of animals were used as a way to cast doubt on British
claims of superiority at the time of the Great Exhibition, as these articles both
utilize and challenge standard humane rhetoric of the day.
NOTES
1. Kean (1998) provides an overview of the problems associated with
Smithfield Market (58–64), while Harrison (1982) offers background on
the RSPCA’s attempts to regulate Smithfield (111–113). Ritvo (1987)
provides general analysis of the symbolic significance of Smithfield to the
British meat industry (47, 125, 311 n1).
2. Philpotts (2010) has noted that Dickens refers to the lamentable conditions
in Smithfield in Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak
House, and Great Expectations. Most of his analysis is focused on Dickens’s
novels rather than the journalism; moreover, his conclusions regarding
Dickens’s treatment of Smithfield are rather different from my own.
Philpotts claims that the articles on Smithfield constitute an “orchestrated
attack” on the market (2010, 42 n7).
3. Stone (1968) offers some conjectures about the authorship of individual
sections of “The Heart of Mid-London” (101), but ultimately it remains
impossible to determine with any degree of certainty which sections might
be attributed to Dickens. Following his typical method when researching his
novels and magazine articles, Dickens arranged to tour Smithfield with Wills
in the spring of 1850 (Dickens 1965, 6:62). Lohrli (1993) provides concise
biographical sketches of Wills and all other contributors to Household Words.
For a general analysis of how Dickens regarded Household Words as a
business enterprise, see Nayder (2002, 15–34). While the focus of her
analysis is the relationship between Dickens and Wilkie Collins, she also
discusses Dickens’s relationships with Wills, Horne, and other writers for the
magazine.
4. The humane treatment of animals was one of Wills’s special concerns.
Additional topics addressed by Wills and other writers in Household Words
include feeding methods for veal calves and poultry, as well as slaughter
methods in Britain and abroad.
60 R.D. MORRISON
5. For a discussion of Dickens’s evolving attitudes towards the Great

Exhibition and his brief involvement with the Central Committee of the
Working Classes for the Great Exhibition, see Moore (2004, 26–30).
6. In their centennial history of the RSPCA, Edward G. Fairholme and
Wellsley Pain (1924) report that at the society’s inaugural meeting the
chair, T. Fowell Buxton, specifically addressed the cruelty of Smithfield’s
drovers (55).
7. According to the Chip (or brief article) by Wills (1852), the New Market at
Islington presented its own difficulties—including serious drainage pro-
blems—that prevented it from being an entirely suitable replacement for
Smithfield.
8. Tomalin (2011) asserts that in establishing Household Words Dickens “set
out to raise standards of journalism . . . and, by winning educated readers and
speaking to their consciences, to exert some influence on public matters; and
to this end he himself wrote on many social issues—housing, sanitation,
education, accidents in factories, workhouses, and in defence of the right of
the poor to enjoy Sundays as they chose” (229).
9. Smith (1996) concludes that in Household Words Dickens frequently mixed
“satirical comedy and . . . deadly seriousness” in dealing with his most cher-
ished issues, and that Dickens’s final positions often remain weakly expressed
(79–80). Childers (2006) asserts that in the journalism “Dickens’s political
agenda never materialized in any systematic way, and for this he was often
criticized” (201).
10. The English authors’ full names are Anthony Huxtable, Philip Pusey, and
Henry Stephens (the correct spelling) (Stone 1968, 102, n3–6).
11. Moss (1961) devotes an entire chapter to this subject in his history of the
RSPCA (68–89).
12. See Brantlinger (1988) for an analysis of the ways in which mid-century
rhetoric often conflated the issues of race and class (184).
13. For a history of the development of Smithfield Market from medieval times
to its closing, see (Jones 1976, 99–105).
14. For an overview of bull running in England, see Walsh (1996).
15. Mr Bovington later returns briefly to the pages of Household Words in two
Chips penned by Wills, in which he voices his opinion on potential new sites
for London’s livestock market. These pieces appeared in July 1850 (Wills
1850) and July 1852 (Wills 1852) respectively.
16. Stone (1968) believes Dickens also supplied the title; also see Dickens 1965,
6:69.
17. See Dickens (1965), 6:267 and 6:289.
18. See also Gay (2013) on Dickens’s identification with French cultural values
in “A Monument to French Folly.”
19. In his “The Last Words of the Old Year,” published in January 1851,
Dickens (1851a) claims that “another Exhibition—for a great display of
England’s sins and negligences” needs to be erected alongside the Crystal
Palace (338).
20. Philpotts (2010) discusses the connections between sanitary reform, parti-
cularly the location of burial grounds, and Bleak House (33–35), which
began appearing in serial form in the spring of 1852.
21. This well-known song, originally written for Henry Fielding’s The Grub
Street Opera, came to serve as a popular celebration of the superiority of
the hearty, beef-eating English over the degenerate French at a time of
intense imperial rivalry, but the song retained its popularity throughout
the nineteenth century. For an analysis of the famous song’s evolution, see
Roberts (1964) and Rogers (2003, 76–79).
22. The identity of W.H. Stone remains unknown (Lorhli 1993, 441).
23. Dickens (1851c) ridicules vegetarians, along with teetotalers and pacifists, in
“Whole Hogs” in Household Words in August 1851. For an overview of the
vegetarian movement in Victorian England and mainstream responses to the
practice, see Gregory (2007).
24. In her analysis of annual reports produced by the RSPCA, Ritvo (1987)
notes that the abused animal is typically portrayed as a “noble and selfless
servant” while the abuser is inevitably a “rough member of the urban
proletariat” (138). The elaborate pedigrees of prize beef cattle celebrated
in the Victorian period, along with the long history of beef breeding in
England, give additional resonance to claims of nobility for certain animals.
25. For an account of the broader campaigns to remove the cattle market from
Smithfield and events in subsequent years, see Forshaw and Bergström
(1990, 53–59).
WORKS CITED
Ackroyd, Peter. 1992. Dickens. New York: Harper Collins.
Bonser, K.J. 1970. The Drovers: Who They Were and How They Went: An Epic of the
English Countryside. London: Macmillan.
Brantlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830–1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Childers, Joseph W. 2006. Politicized Dickens: The Journalism of the 1850s. In
Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies, ed. John Bowen and Robert L.
Patten, 198–215. New York: Palgrave.
Dickens, Charles. 1851a. The Last Words of the Old Year. Household Words.
January 4, 337–339.
———. 1851b. A Monument of French Folly. Household Words. March 8, 553–558.
62 R.D. MORRISON
———. 1851c. Whole Hogs. Household Words. August 23, 505–507.

———. 1965–2002. Letters of Charles Dickens. Pilgrim Edition, General Editors
Madeline House, Graham Storey, and Kathleen Tillotson, 12 vols. Clarendon:
Oxford University Press.
Dickens, Charles, and Richard H. Horne. 1851. The Great Exhibition and the
Little One. Household Words, July 5, 356–360.
Dickens, Charles, and W.H. Wills 1850. The Heart of Mid-London. Household
Words, May 4, 121–125.
Fairholme, Edward G., and Wellsley Pain. 1924. A Century of Work for Animals:
The History of the RSPCA, 1824–1924. New York: Dutton.
Forshaw, Alec, and Theo Bergstrom. 1990. Smithfield Past and Present, 2nd edn.
London: Robert Hale.
Gay, Ignacio Ramos. 2013. French Abattoirs, Animal Welfare and the Anti-Smithfield
Campaign in Dickens’ “A Monument to French Folly.” In Charles Dickens and
Europe, ed. Maxime Leroy, 85–95. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Gregory, James. 2007. Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement
in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Tauris Academic Studies.
Harrison, Brian. 1982. Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern
Britain. New York: Oxford University Press.
Horne, Richard H. 1850. The Cattle-Road to Ruin. Household Words June 29,
325–330.
———. 1851. The Smithfield Bull to His Cousin of Nineveh. Household Words,
March 15, 589–590.
Jones, Philip E. 1976. The Butchers of London: A History of the Worshipful
Company of Butchers of the City of London. London: Secker & Warburg.
Kean, Hilda. 1998. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since
1800. London: Reaktion.
Lohrli, Anne. 1993. “Household Words”: A Weekly Journal 1850–59. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Mayhew, Henry. 1862. London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. London:
Griffin, Bohn.
Moore, Grace. 2004. Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and
Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Moss, Arthur W. 1961. Valiant Crusade: The History of the RSPCA. London:
Cassell.
Nayder, Lillian. 2002. Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and
Victorian Authorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Perkins, David. 2003. Romanticism and Animal Rights. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Philpotts, Trey. 2010. Mad Bulls and Dead Meat: Smithfield as Reality and
Symbol. Dickens Studies Annual 41: 25–44.
Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Roberts, Edgar V. 1964. Henry Fielding and Richard Leveridge: Authorship of
the “Roast Beef of Old England.” Huntington Library Quarterly 27: 175–181.
Rogers, Ben. 2003. Beef and Liberty. London: Chatto & Windus.
Smith, Grahame. 1996. Charles Dickens: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s.
Stauffer, Andrew M. 2001. Punch on Nineveh, Catholics, and the P.R.B. The
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 10(1): 58–69.
———. 2005. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Burdens of Nineveh. Victorian
Literature and Culture 33(1): 369–394.
Stone, Harry, ed. 1968. Charles Dickens’ Uncollected Writings from “Household
Words,” 1850–1859, Vol. 1. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Stone, W. H. 1851. The Nineveh Bull. Household Words, February 8, 468–469.
Stuchebrukhov, Olga. 2005. The “Nation-less” State of Great Britain and the
Nation-State of France in Household Words. Victorian Periodicals Review 38(4):
392–413.
Thomas, Keith. 1983. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern
Sensibility. New York: Pantheon.
Tomalin, Claire. 2011. Charles Dickens: A Life. New York: Penguin.
Walsh, Martin W. 1996. November Bull-Running in Stamford, Lincolnshire.
Journal of Popular Culture 30(1): 233–247.
Wills, W.H. 1850. From Mr Thomas Bovington. Household Words, July 13, 377.
———. 1852. Chip: Mr Bovington on the New Cattle-Market. Household Words,
July 17, 422–423.
Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University, where

he teaches courses in Romantic and Victorian literature and literary theory. He is
co-editor, with Laurence W. Mazzeno, of Victorian Writers and the Environment:
Ecocritical Perspectives (Routledge, 2017). In that volume, he also has an essay on
Richard Jefferies, agriculture, and the environment. Recently he has published
essays on Dickens and Smithfield Market in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and
Literature, on Hardy and agriculture in The Hardy Review, and on connections
between ecology and the conception of tragedy in Hardy’s later novels in Twenty-
First Century Perspectives on Victorian Literature. He has published on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century authors in such journals as CEA Critic, Critique:
Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Nineteenth-Century Studies, and the CLA
Journal. He is also a long-time reviewer for Choice.
CHAPTER 4
Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles:

Anthony Trollope and the Australian
Acclimatization Debate
Grace Moore
An intrepid traveler and renowned travel writer, Anthony Trollope made two
visits to the Antipodes, the first between 1871 and 1872, when he spent much
of his time in Australia but also visited New Zealand, and the second in 1875,
when he spent most of his stay in New South Wales. Both of Trollope’s visits
revolved around his son, Frederic, who had emigrated to rural New South
Wales in 1863, buying a sheep station 250 miles west of Sydney, with sig-
nificant financial assistance from his father. The author cannily negotiated with
his publishers to produce a travelogue during his first trip, and this work
became the two-volume Australia and New Zealand, which he completed a
month after his return to England and which was published in 1873.1
Trollope’s work was intended as a guide for would-be migrants and, as such,
it is wide-ranging in its scope. It is clear, though, that he was struck by the
strangeness of Australasian wildlife, and he devoted a considerable degree of
I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council (Project

CE110001011) and the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
G. Moore (*)
University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: gmoo@unimelb.edu.au

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_4
66 G. MOORE
attention to Australian flora and fauna in his writing, while at the same time
dwelling on the “improvements” that Europeans had made to the Antipodean
ecosystem.
For a nineteenth-century traveler as engaged in his surroundings as
Trollope, it was impossible to ignore debates about the impact of
European settlement on Australia’s ecology. Memoirs such as those of
the English cartographer Matthew Flinders (2000), Terra Australis, pub-
lished in 1814, show that while explorers from the northern hemisphere
were fascinated by Australian animals, they also treated them with a
distinct lack of respect. Flinders’s account of his circumnavigation of the
“Great Southern Land” is regularly punctuated with details of the animals
and birds he shot and ate.2 Given that his son had set himself up as a sheep
farmer, it was impossible for Trollope to avoid discussions about the
importation of non-native creatures. However, as he learned more about
life in the colony, Trollope’s attitude towards animals became increasingly
complex and entangled with broader social and political issues.
In this chapter I shall consider Trollope’s representation of the tensions
between indigenous and introduced species in Australia and New Zealand
(Trollope 2002). Examining his engagement with what we would today
term “ecological imperialism,” I shall discuss his representation of Australian
native animals, which Trollope frequently depicts as lacking in vigor, and the
difficulties that they often faced when confronted with species of predators
introduced from Europe. Furthermore, I shall examine what it meant to be a
“pest” in nineteenth-century Australia, while at the same time addressing
how discussions of native animals became a conduit for wider debates
surrounding invasion and imperial guilt. I will also consider the Australian
animal as a commodity and engage with questions of exoticism, seeking to
situate Trollope in relation to the work of regional Acclimatization Societies
within Australia. I also address Trollope’s representation of farming and the
treatment of imported species, particularly sheep, since they were the animals
with which he was most familiar.
* * *
Claudia Brandenstein (2007) has argued that Trollope’s attitude towards

colonial landscapes was frequently proprietorial (19). While Brandenstein
writes primarily of the author’s relationship with the West Indies, Trollope
had a strong emotional investment in the settlement of Australia and believed
that migrants should make a firm commitment to the place, rather than
4 TROLLOPE AND THE AUSTRALIAN ACCLIMATIZATION DEBATE 67
viewing it as somewhere to make money before returning to the mother

country. According to Coral Lansbury (1970), “Trollope saw Australia
through English eyes” (132), but he also saw England as a place of “fading
glory” and believed that these settlements would eventually supersede
England to become what Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke was to term a
“Greater Britain.” This investment in place is a position that Trollope makes
clear in his novella of settler life, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (Trollope 1874),
in which he transposes his son’s sheep station from New South Wales to
Queensland, while depicting some of the tribulations in the life of the settler
farmer. The story charts the aloof Harry’s integration into settler society, as he
learns to trust and depend upon his neighbors. At the same time, though, the
work sheds light on the process of pastoralization in Australia and how both
European animals and ideas of land ownership were imported to the colony
after 1788. Trollope’s narrator offers insights into Harry’s relationship with
his new home when he informs the reader:
He was a breeder of sheep on a Queensland sheep-run, and his flocks ran far
afield over a vast territory of which he was the only lord. His house was near the
river Mary, and beyond the river his domain did not extend; but around him
on his own side of the river he could ride for ten miles in each direction without
getting off his own pastures. He was master, as far as his mastership went, of
120,000 acres—almost an English county—and it was the pride of his heart to
put his foot off his own territory as seldom as possible. (Trollope 1874, 3)
Although Harry is a successful gentleman farmer, Fred Trollope was by no

means so prosperous. His father noted in his autobiography that while he
had subsidized the farm to the tune of several thousand pounds, Fred had
never achieved the success that he deserved. In his 1883 Autobiography
Trollope (1947) wrote of his son’s efforts, “I never knew a man work with
more persistent honesty at his trade than he has done” (317). It is prob-
able that Fred, like many colonial farmers, struggled with the very different
demands involved in caring for sheep in the southern hemisphere, and his
lack of success seems to have been a source of bewilderment to his father.
Fictitious accounts of station life from the period—including Louisa
Atkinson’s (1872) Tressa’s Resolve and many of Henry Lawson’s poems
and short stories3—reveal the aridity of the land, which caused major
difficulties for farmers, whose sheep either dehydrated or died from hun-
ger when grassland dried out. Trollope, though, seems not to have seen
that environmental factors may have hindered his son, and many other
68 G. MOORE
farmers besides. However, as Bruce R. Davidson (1991) has pointed out,

other difficulties faced by migrant-farmers included legislation, which
made it “impossible for a genuine selector to maintain his family” (65),
the difficulty of clearing land for grazing, and the low prices paid for wool
between 1860 and 1880.4 Trollope, nevertheless, saw sheep-farming as an
important aspect of settler life, even going so far as to assert, possibly with
his tongue in his cheek, “sheep become quite a fascination to me as a
subject of conversation.”5
Trollope perceived the introduction of non-native animals for farm-
ing purposes to be enriching Australia. Livestock, when it thrived, was
associated with prosperity, at the same time feeding into a nostalgic
need to make the colonial outpost as much like England as possible by
populating it with familiar species. Furthermore, as Coral Lansbury
(1970) has observed, writers like Samuel Sidney, who supplied articles
for Dickens’s widely read journals Household Words and All the Year
Round, perpetuated an arcadian myth of Australia as a fertile land of
plenty (166). The migrant community’s ability to turn this abundance
to commercial account was frequently invoked as evidence of their
superior abilities as custodians and their own refined adaptability.
Moreover, this idea of adjustability to a new climate was also trans-
posed to the animal world, creating a two-tier approach to native and
non-native species that was underpinned by Darwinian notions of
“fitness.” Darwin (2009) himself was ambivalent on the issue of sud-
den, forced adjustment, asserting that “It is notorious that each species
is adapted to the climate of its own home,” before continuing to argue
that acclimatization could be a somewhat haphazard process (107).
However, he goes on to note,
As I believe that our domestic animals were originally chosen by unciv-
ilized man because they were useful and bred readily under confinement,
and not because they were subsequently found capable of far-extended
transportation, I think the common and extraordinary capacity in our
domestic animals of not only withstanding the most different climates
but of being perfectly fertile (a far severer test) under them, may be used
as an argument that a large proportion of other animals, now in a state
of nature, could easily be brought to bear widely different climates.
(107–108)
Colonists, however, were much more secure in their belief that European birds
and animals would thrive in the Antipodes, and this led to the importation of a
number of creatures which, in different ways, became competitors with local

wildlife, both in terms of their dietary needs and their habitat.
For Trollope acclimatization was a sign of the human and animal
colonists’ vigor. His comments regarding introduced species frequently
conflated European settler cultures with imported flora and fauna, as
exemplified by his assertion that “advancing science has carried out and
acclimatized, not only men and women, but beasts, birds, and fishes,
fruit and vegetables, rich grasses and European trees, with a rapidity and
profusion of which our grandfathers never dreamed, and which even our
fathers hardly ventured to anticipate” (A&NZ 1:3). Trollope’s tone here
is one of admiration, emphasizing the positives associated with trans-
planted people, animals, and plants. However, the more sinister side to
this process involved extensive damage to the Antipodean ecosystem.
While to the modern reader accounts of land clearance and culls of native
animals read as acts of imperialist destruction, to the Victorians they
signified progress and the management and improvement of an unruly
environment. The Terra Nullius (or “nobody’s land”) argument that
was used to justify Australian colonization continued to be invoked to
legitimize the radical changes that settlers made to the world around
them in their efforts to create a home away from home. By asserting that
the land was uninhabited, settlers were able to seize it and to “improve
it” in whatever ways they saw fit, often disregarding the presence of
indigenous people, plants, and animals. Trollope encapsulates the willful
effacement of local ecology when he remarks with characteristic
pragmatism:
New Zealand . . . contained no animal life and no native fruit useful to man
when we first reached its shore. It is now so wonderfully prolific in life and
vegetation imported from Europe that the visitor sees there groves of wild
peach-trees and herds of wild horses. Australia was nearly equally destitute.
Nevertheless, Australian capitalists are already engaged in the task of sending
from Australia European meats to our home markets, and are thus relieving
the wants of those at home who are too destitute to improve their fortunes
by migrating to happier lands. (A&NZ 1:3)
Animals and vegetation are here only significant insofar as they are useful
to settlers and, by extension, to the European export market—even those
lacking in fiscal vigor are able to benefit to some degree from Australian
largesse. While Trollope’s vision here is driven by a compassionate desire
70 G. MOORE
to feed the poor in the old world with meat farmed in the new, he does not
pause to consider the wildlife that is being displaced, nor the ensuing
damage to the landscape.6
The naturalist and hunter W. H. Wheelwright (1861) reveals the degree
to which Australian wildlife was considered to be a “resource” in his Bush
Wanderings of a Naturalist, which was regarded as a handbook for those
wishing to acquaint themselves with life in the Bush. The publication
includes sections devoted to the food and commodities which might be
obtained from animals including possums, platypuses, and kangaroos.
Wheelwright’s writing presents what seems to the modern reader a curious
juxtaposition of field notes and recipes, as exemplified by his discussion of the
kangaroo, which moves from advice on how to cure the best ham from the
marsupials into a discussion of the wallaby as a “shy, solitary animal” (33).
Wheelwright’s position was consistent with that of many migrants, in that he
valued imported species above those which had populated the land in
abundance. Wheelwright observed, “There is no particular wild breed of
cattle, horses, or sheep, indigenous to Australia. In fact it would appear that
this immense island had been left a barren waste upon the face of the globe,
until its hidden resources should be developed by the skill and perseverance
of civilized man, for so genial is its climate, and so peculiar its soil, that almost
any animal or plant will thrive here” (57). Wheelwright continues to outline
the climatic advantages offered by Australia, protesting that it is a land “only
in a primitive era” and arguing that it is far from being “a country fitted by
nature only as a residence for the lowest class of animals, the marsupial” (57).
Like the majority of British settlers at this time, Trollope thought of
animals in terms of commodities, and his approach to Australian wildlife is
akin to that of Wheelwright.7 Trollope noted that the laboring man “eats
meat three times a day in the colonies,” and this meat was generally the
product of introduced species (A&NZ 1:56). The novelist noted with
some regret that “I have also been frowned upon by bright eyes because I
could not eat stewed wallabi [sic],” before continuing, “Now the wallabi is
a little kangaroo, and to my taste is not nice to eat, even when stewed to
the utmost with wine and spices” (A&NZ 1:154). Interestingly, this
passage is Trollope’s only reference to the wallaby and when, elsewhere
in the travelogue, he mentions kangaroos, it is always in the context of
hunting or, in extremis, eating them. However, as Tony Pople and
Gordon Grigg (1999) remind us, in the latter part of the nineteenth
century, kangaroos were regarded as vermin, and the settler population
was encouraged to participate in regular culls.8 Local animals were, for the
most part, regarded as a nuisance to be contained, but not as a viable

source of sustenance. They were seen as lethargic and unproductive, and
commentators such as Trollope frequently anticipated their eradication.
While sheep produced wool and chickens of course laid eggs, livestock
was primarily considered as a source of meat, and the sheer numbers of
animals involved (there were more than 20 million sheep in Australia in
the 1870s) made it easy to think of them in terms of their utility value
rather than as living beings. Trollope was, however, committed to the idea
that those working with the animals should understand them and treat
them well. Writing of the life of a squatter, he asserted, “He should be able
to catch a sheep and handle him almost as a nurse does a baby. He should
learn to kill a sheep, and wash a sheep, and shear a sheep” (A&NZ 1:120).
The list continues with a whole sequence of aspects of the lives of sheep
with which the successful farmer or farmhand should be familiar. Trollope
believed that farm animals should be treated humanely and declared
himself to be “dead against” the washing of sheep (A&NZ 1:123), an
undertaking that he described in graphic terms: “[T]he animal undergoes
the real work of washing,—the bad quarter of an hour of his life. He is
turned backwards and forwards under the spout with great violence,—for
great violence is necessary,—till the fury of the water shall have driven the
dirt from his fleece . . . I think I am justified in saying that the sheep does
not like it” (A&NZ 1:124). Noting the apparent pointlessness of the
exercise, since wool was washed once again when the sheep had been
shorn, Trollope went on to complain, “Washing is very expensive, and the
injury done to sheep by the process is considerable. Two or three in a
thousand are probably drowned” (A&NZ 1:125). Thus, while Trollope
was well aware of the sheep’s commodity value, he also believed in
humane treatment, although this was not a position that he felt able to
take in relation to all animals. Indeed, the section devoted to sheep ends
with the author—who rode to hounds three times a week when he was in
England—reporting on the quality of kangaroo-hunting in the Darling
Downs in an offhand manner, suggesting that the kangaroo was of little
value to him beyond its role as a diversion.9
It is clear that within Trollope’s mind there existed a hierarchy of
animals in which those species which had been imported as livestock
were prized above native creatures. The author was not alone on this
question, and his thinking was almost certainly influenced by the local
Acclimatization Societies, which had been formed in several Australian
states. Chris Tiffin (2007) helpfully explains the role of these organizations
72 G. MOORE
when he notes that “‘Acclimatization’ strictly means the adaptation of

individual specimens to a new environment, but the loose meaning of the
word in the 1860s was the introduction of plants, animals, birds and
insects into areas to which they are not endemic” (165). These associa-
tions were often supported by funding from the British government and as
Tiffin reminds us, “By the mid-nineteenth century some of the settler
colonies of the British Empire, notably Canada and Australia, had already
established whole economic systems on the basis of agricultural and
pastoral imports” (166).
Trollope’s attitude to native animals is uncannily similar to that of the
Acclimatizationists. As Christopher Lever (1992) has expressed it in his
comprehensive study of the Acclimatization movement, “members of the
societies looked on Australia as a country bereft of such attractions as
melodious songbirds and animals of the chase—omissions which they
sought to remedy” (100). Lever’s assertion inadvertently encapsulates
Trollope’s opinions on avian life, when he bemoans, “The sounds from
the birds . . . are very different from those of English birds,—much less
melodious, but clearer, louder, and more continuous, and sometimes very
melancholy” (A&NZ 1:188). While he concedes that he has learned to
love the kookaburra, he then goes on to discuss an emu hunt, expressing
sympathy for the “poor bird in its last struggle” and expressing his wonder
that “They do not attempt to aid themselves with their wings, but toddle
along with their long legs, keeping ever a straight line.” He dismisses other
local game as “dry and flavourless in comparison with European and with
some American birds” (A&NZ 1:189), in the process revealing a utilitar-
ian approach to the creatures around him.
The British Acclimatisation Society, which had been founded in 1860,
had a very clear sense of its mission to disseminate British wildlife across
the empire, noting in its first annual report that one of its purposes was to
promote “the spread of indigenous animals etc from parts of the United
Kingdom where they are already known, to other localities where they are
not known,” along with the “transmission of animals etc from England to
her colonies and foreign parts” (Acclimatisation Society 1861, 4). While
this process was supposed to be a reciprocal one, with wildlife from the
empire being brought back to England, it is evident that the distribution
of English animals was more sustained and systematic than the “transmis-
sion” of colonial beasts, who were mostly treated as curiosities for exhibit,
either dead or alive. As Lever (1992) has remarked, the British Society was
not strongly supported by the scientific community and, “though not
perhaps actually ‘dominated by field sport enthusiasts’ . . . certainly leaned

in that direction” (96). The Society’s French counterpart (founded in
1854) was much more systematic in its examination of the large-scale
commercial possibilities associated with “exotic” animals, promoting, as
Lauren Janes (2016) notes, the incorporation of exotic animals into the
everyday French diet (48).10
The British Society was rather more successful in its support for the
export of plants and animals, and also because it led to the establishment of
a sequence of significantly more active regional Australian societies. These
local organizations represented the interests of settlers who saw their new
homes in Australia as an extension of Europe, and they—and others who
brought animals to the colony—engaged in what Harriet Ritvo (1987) has
astutely labeled “conquest by assimilation” (241). More closely tied to the
interests of the farming community than their British counterparts, the
Australian groups introduced insect-eating birds, but as Lever (1992)
observes, “their detractors claimed that the new arrivals caused more
harm than good . . . In many instances exotic birds tended to displace
native ones, sometimes to the detriment of the latter’s populations”
(100). While there is no evidence to suggest that Trollope or his son
engaged directly with the acclimatizationists, there are many parallels
between the Society’s approach to Australia’s ecology and the author’s
position on native versus non-native species. It is safe to say that Trollope
would have been aware of the British Society’s existence, given that its
proceedings were widely advertised in the periodical press, with advertise-
ments for its activities appearing alongside those for Trollope’s novels in
the magazine he edited, St Paul’s.11 Indeed, in the introduction to
Australia and New Zealand, he declared, “advancing science has carried
out and acclimatized, not only men and women, but beasts, birds, and
fishes, fruit and vegetables, rich grasses and European trees, with a rapidity
and profusion of which our grandfathers never dreamed, and which even
our fathers hardly ventured to anticipate” (A&NZ 1:3).
* * *
With the exception of the dingo (whose native status continues to be

contested), indigenous Australians did not attempt to domesticate
Australian native animals. While willfully misconstrued by Europeans as a
sign of their lack of sophistication, indigenous attitudes towards nonhumans
are much more about tolerance and coexistence, a position that continues
74 G. MOORE
to be at odds with European ideas of hierarchy over nature. The anthro-

pologist Deborah Bird Rose (1996) defines the deeply spiritual relationship
between Aboriginal Australians and “Country,” asserting that,
Animals, trees, rains, sun, moon all are conscious. They watch us humans,
and think about us. No one person, animal, tree or hill knows everything,
and the purposes of much that exists may remain obscure to others. It is
important, therefore, to bear in mind that obscurity, from a human point of
view, is not the same as purposelessness. There is a profound sense that this
world was not created specifically for human beings. Wisdom for humans lies
in being aware of life systems and in behaving responsibly so as to sustain the
created world. Aboriginal people in many parts of Australia see and under-
stand that other living things—birds, kangaroos, flying foxes, Rainbow
Snakes and all the rest of them—also know that wisdom lies in being
aware of life systems and in behaving responsibly. (28)12
What Rose outlines here is an intricate understanding of ecology with a

history dating back tens of thousands of years. Settlers, however, read
indigenous respect for flora and fauna as a form of indolence, and the fact
that Australia did not appear to have been farmed or managed in any way
legitimized its colonization.13 Alfred W. Crosby (2009) has argued that
animal husbandry was a major factor in the success of the European
colonial venture, in an analysis of ecological imperialism which argues
that the “conscription” of “wheat, barley, peas, lentils, donkeys, sheep,
pigs, and goats” began 9,000 years ago (21), with the plowing of land and
the harnessing of animals becoming hallmarks of both land ownership and
its responsible management. Those who did not appear to be engaged in
cultivating the land were, according to the logic of the newly arrived
Europeans, clearly in need of some management themselves.
Trollope’s experiences of Australian ecology were mediated by the idea
that land and animals were for farming, and farming alone. Thus, he
unconsciously transposed the notion of Terra Nullius to the bush, and it
informed his understandings of Australian animal life, enabling him to
write, without a trace of irony, that “The bush in Australia generally is
singularly destitute of life” (A&NZ 2:127). Trollope was en route to Perth
when he made this observation, having complained about the monotony of
travelling through several hundred miles of bush land. He declared:
Once on the journey up, and once on the return, we saw kangaroos, but we
saw no other animal; now and again a magpie was heard in the woods, but
very rarely. The commonest noise is that of the bull-frog, which is very loud,
and altogether unlike the sound of frogs in Europe . . . I have heard frogs at
Albany roaring in such a fashion as to make a stranger think that the hills
were infested with legions of lions, tigers, bears, and rhinoceroses, and that
every lion, tiger, bear, and rhinoceros in the country was just about to spring
at him. I knew they were only frogs, and yet I did not like it. (A&NZ 2:127)
The novelist here describes a vibrant bushscape, only to dismiss it. His
impatience with the noise shows that far from being “destitute of life” the
forests are teeming with activity, but that it is at odds with the expectations
that Trollope brings with him to the environment. Struggling to articulate
the shock of the different, Trollope resorts to expressions of contempt. He
is similarly dismissive of Australia’s deadliest reptiles, commenting, “I do
not think very much of Australian snakes” (A&NZ 1:182) and complain-
ing of their timidity in only attacking as a last resort.14
As Trollope’s account of his experiences with Australian animals
unfolds, it becomes clear that he feels disdain for the retiring qualities
that he associates with Australian wildlife in its many forms. While accept-
ing the servitude of imported livestock, he approaches Australian animals
in a much more critical way, consistent with George Levine’s (1988)
assertion that Trollope is simultaneously “unscientific” and a “Darwinian
novelist” (177). While Trollope famously wrote, “I am afraid of the
subject of Darwin. I am myself so ignorant on it, that I should fear to be
in the position of editing a paper on the subject” (quoted in Levine 1988,
180), Levine demonstrates that Trollope’s plots are driven by principles
that we might identify with those of Darwin and, indeed, with the political
economist Adam Smith.15 While Levine is concerned primarily with his
fiction, I would argue that Trollope brings similar values to his appraisal of
Australia, valuing tenacity and vigor in the face of adversity, a parallel that
Levine almost invites in his comparison of the naturalist and the novelist:
“Darwin . . . describes a world full of aberrations and maladaptations, ‘fri-
gate-birds with webbed feet . . . long-toed corncrakes living in meadows
instead of in swamps . . . woodpeckers where not a tree grows . . . diving—
thrushes and petrels with the habits of auks’ (Origin, 217). Trollope, too,
fills the world with misfits better adapted for life in different places or
times” (Levine 1988, 193). According to Levine’s logic, and the values
that Trollope disseminated through his fiction, we might expect the
author to feel compassion towards the many curious and apparently
maladapted animals he encountered during his time in the Antipodes.
76 G. MOORE
Rather than viewing Australia as a place of ecological diversity, Trollope’s

attitude to the young colony was, as I have argued, to regard it only in
terms of the benefits it might offer to the mother country, which meant
that its indigenous wildlife was of no use at all.
Reflecting on the changes wrought upon the Australian environment by
the settler community, Trollope attributed a greater vigor to those species
imported from the northern hemisphere. He observed, “It is strange but
undoubtedly the fact that animals brought from Europe and acclimatized in
Australia are already thrusting out the aboriginal creatures of the country.
The emus are nearly gone. The kangaroos are departing to make way for
sheep” (A&NZ 1:190). The word “thrusting” goes some way to express
the damage that colonization was causing to local fauna, but Trollope then
undercuts the force of his expression by writing of emus going and kangar-
oos departing, as though the creatures had some choice in the matter. The
author’s tone here is akin to that which he adopts when he discusses
Indigenous Australian peoples and, as I have argued elsewhere (Moore
2016), there is a clear overlap in his thinking about native animals and the
traditional custodians of the land. As Nicholas Birns (1996) has commen-
ted, “The fourth chapter of Australia and New Zealand is full of unadult-
erated racism” (186), and while Trollope moderates his tone later in the
volume, his earliest responses to the displaced Aboriginal community do not
make for pleasant reading. Although he is not an advocate of genocide, he
interprets Indigenous culture through the same lens that he uses to view
Australian wildlife. Trollope draws on the words of the explorers William
Dampier and James Cook to support his dismissal of a culture dating back
tens of thousands of years. Quoting Cook, Trollope presents Indigenous
Australians as few in number and sparsely distributed across the land, “They
did not appear to be numerous . . . nor to live in societies, but like other
animals, were scattered about along the coasts, and in the woods” (Cook
quoted in A&NZ I:61; ellipses mine). Trollope’s narrative then moves from
Cook’s thoughts on the timidity of the Aboriginal people, to anecdotal
evidence which he has compiled regarding their nature.
In a particularly alarming passage, Trollope reports an exchange with a
man who is both a member of parliament and a magistrate, in which he
asks what would happen if “stress of circumstances compelled me to shoot
a black man in the bush” (A&NZ 1:63). The author asks, “Should I go to
some nearest police station, as any one would do who in self-defence had
shot a white man;—or should I go on rejoicing as though I had shot a
tiger or killed a deadly snake?” The response that Trollope receives assures
him that “The aboriginal therefore whom you are called on to kill,—lest
he should kill you or your wife, or because he spears your cattle—is to be
to you the same as a tiger or a snake” (A&NZ 1:73). In addition to
equating indigenous Australians with animals to be hunted, the man’s
reply privileges the lives of cattle, considered “useful” animals, above those
of a human being. Rhetorically, this is an approach that recurs repeatedly
in the travelogue, with Trollope frequently conflating the human and
nonhuman in his discussions of indigeneity, stripping Aboriginals of
their human characteristics, while at the same time reinforcing a narrative
of control and ownership over the animal kingdom.
According to Trollope, the future of both native people and native
species will involve a decline into extinction. While there are, for him, strong
interconnections between the effacement of both humans and animals, he
interprets the situation as an inevitable by-product of Australia’s civilization:
“It was impossible to explain to the natives that a benevolent race of men
had come to live amongst them, who were anxious to teach them all good
things. Their kangaroos and fish were driven away, their land was taken
from them, the strangers assumed to be masters, and the black men did not
see the benevolence” (A&NZ 2:84). This passage is distinctly compassio-
nate when compared with Trollope’s earlier pronouncements on native
peoples, and it goes some way to register the co-dependency underpinning
the idea of “Country.” Nevertheless, Trollope writes with the certainty that
the colonial way will be best for Australia in the long run, and the belief that
“savagery” must be obliterated. There is pathos to his tone, just as there is in
Volume I when he writes almost admiringly of the possum’s tenacity: “As
the blacks die out there is no one to eat him, and he is prolific. He sleeps
soundly, and is very easy to kill with a dog . . . But there is no fun in killing
him, for he neither fights nor runs away” (A&NZ 1:187). For Trollope, the
native people and animals almost merge into each other as he adopts the
same rhetorical strategy to consider their fates. The possum may prosper,
but that is because his lack of resistance in the face of cruelty makes him an
undesirable target. As Trollope’s account demonstrates, kangaroos, walla-
bies, and dingoes were considered to be fair game, while he dismisses
Aboriginals as “savage warriors” (A&NZ 2:84) and “savage and irrespon-
sible as beasts of prey” (A&NZ 2:85).
Deborah Bird Rose (1996) has asserted that “death binds living
beings into an ecological community” (91), and I would argue that
Trollope inadvertently presents his readers with just such a community.
Native humans and animals had long shared a deep interdependency,
78 G. MOORE
which was now turned against them by those seeking to put the land to
work. Australia and New Zealand delineates the conquest of Australian
animal life by the introduction of what we would today term “invasive”
species in a bid to “repair the defects of the indigenous faunas” (Ritvo
2014, 24). It also shows that colonists were themselves a form of invasive
species, spreading devastation across a vast island in the name of improve-
ment. What may have begun as an experiment in coexistence swiftly resulted
in endangerment and extinction. Local animals found themselves unable to
contend with the proliferation of European birds and beasts, competing for
their food, not to mention the newly arrived human animals who altered
their habitat and hunted many of them to death.
For Trollope, Australia is a space of passivity, where even the mosquitoes
are “poor, impotent, and contemptible” when compared with their more
bloodthirsty northern hemisphere counterparts, while the (deadly) snakes
are dismissed as “lethargic” (A&NZ 1:186). Convinced as he is of the need
for Europeans to till and cultivate Australia, Trollope’s travelogue earnestly
maps the nation’s environmental reconfiguration as a triumph of imperial
progress. A term such as “acclimatization” suggests that the process was a
harmonious one. However, Trollope’s account shows that the assimilation
was far from seamless. Australia and New Zealand offers valuable docu-
mentation of a process with a persistent legacy whose effects we continue to
feel, through the loss of native creatures such as the thylacine (about which
Trollope did not write), and the endangerment of many more. Of course,
Trollope could not have known what the full impact of the acclimatization
experiment would be, but this makes his observations all the more remark-
able. On the one hand he offered a candid account of settler life, yet on the
other he captured the sense of entitlement and confidence with which
colonists displaced animals, both domestic and wild. Trollope’s Australia
is a place of new hope for its human migrant community, but as his writings
demonstrate, for its animals and those who are rendered as animals through
language, it is a site of abjection.
NOTES
1. See Fullerton (2009) for a thorough account of the background to Trollope’s
trip and his characteristically energetic approach to describing Australian
settler culture. Fullerton notes, “few visitors to Australia have ever worked so
hard at seeing everything, learning about Australian institutions and customs,
observing locals at work and at play, and covering so much ground, as did
Anthony Trollope” (41). Trollope (1947) writes about his visit to Australia in
Chapter 19 of his Autobiography, where he details relentless travel across
Australia, and his surprise at the travelogue’s success.
2. Flinders’s predecessor, the explorer James Cook, seems to have been more
skeptical about the use value of native animals, commenting of his “endea-
vours for stocking this Country with usefull [sic] Animals” and bemoaning
the fact that indigenous Australians killed and ate creatures intended as
breeding pairs (quoted in Withey 1989, 242).
3. See, for example, Lawson’s “The Bush Undertaker” and “In a Dry Season”
(Lawson, Penguin Henry Lawson).
4. A “selector” was a person who obtained lands held by the Crown in order to
settle on them and engage in agricultural activities. According to Davidson,
the arrival of the European rabbit in 1861 created additional problems for
sheep farmers, as its rapid spread—and burrowing—rendered land unsuita-
ble for flocks. While little is known about how sheep selectors managed to
sustain themselves between 1860 and 1880, Davidson contends that some
kept afloat by working as farmhands for squatters on their enormous sheep
stations, while others lived on the crops they grew and animals they farmed.
For a detailed discussion of sheep farming in Australia, see Davidson
(1991), 56–76.
5. Trollope (1873, 118); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as A&NZ
followed by volume and page number.
6. Trollope seems to have at least partially reconsidered his position in the years
following his visit, presenting a critique of the despoliation of the land
during the gold rush in John Caldigate (Trollope 1879).
7. We know from Grossman and Wright (1976) that Trollope owned eight
books on Australia, which he later culled from his library (52).
8. According to Pople and Grigg (1999), “during 1877–1907, almost eight
million kangaroos and wallaroos were presented for bounty payments in
Queensland”; however, they also observe that these attempts to “manage”
the kangaroo population coincided with a rise in the trading of its skins. It
would therefore seem that through representing the kangaroo as a pest,
settler society was able to justify its slaughter.
9. Towards the end of the autobiographical chapter devoted to his time in
Australia, Trollope (1947) informs his reader, “my mind was full of hunting
as I came back” (216).
10. Lever (1992) notes wryly that the “innate conservatism of the British palate”
presented major difficulties for those wishing to promote colonial wildlife as
an alternative food source (97).
11. See, for instance, the Advertisements page in The Athenaeum, December 26,
1868, 868.
80 G. MOORE
12. The term “Country” is almost ineffable and encompasses not only the land,
but all of its inhabitants, regardless of whether they are native to the climate
or introduced. Rose emphasizes the multidimensionality of Country and its
many interconnections across species and time (8).
13. As historians including Bill Gammage have outlined, indigenous Australians
did “manage” the land, but in a way that was sensitive to its climate—fire,
for example, was used in a controlled manner to clear land and to allow
native trees to seed. See Gammage (2011) for an account of pre-invasion
interactions between humans and flora and fauna.
14. An anonymous reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald expressed great
surprise at Trollope’s assessment of the nation’s ophidiological life, obser-
ving, “What our friend Mr. Gerard Krefft, F.L.S., will say to this St. Patrick
of letters, who has, by a magic stroke of his pen effected the emigration of
nineteen out of the twenty-one ‘venomous snakes,’ of which, according to
Mr. Krefft, we were the possessors, we are at a loss to conceive” (March 31,
1873, 2). While the review’s author enjoys many aspects of Trollope’s
travelogue, he is somewhat scathing in his assessment of Trollope’s attitudes
towards the Australian natural world.
15. The St Paul’s Magazine did not publish any articles on Darwin during
Trollope’s tenure as editor, but Henry Holbeach (1873) wrote a long
piece in response to On Expression in Man and Animals in February 1873.
WORKS CITED
Acclimatisation Society. 1861. First Annual Report of the Society for the
Acclimatisation of Animals, Birds, Fishes, Insects and Vegetables within the
United Kingdom. London: Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals, Birds,
Fishes, Insects and Vegetables within the United Kingdom.
Atkinson, Louisa. (1872) 2004. Tressa’s Resolve. Canberra, ACT: Mulini Press.
Birns, Nicholas. 1996. The Empire Turned Upside Down: The Colonial Fictions
of Anthony Trollope. Ariel 27(3): 7–23.
Brandenstein, Claudia. 2007. Representations of Landscape and Nature in
Anthony Trollope’s The West Indies and the Spanish Main and James
Anthony Froude’s the English in the West Indies. In Five Emus to the King of
Siam: Environment and Empire ed. Helen Tiffin, 15–30. New York: Rodopi.
Crosby, Alfred W. 2009. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of
Europe, 900–1900. Rev. edn. Cambridge: CUP.
Darwin, Charles. (1859) 2009. On the Origin of Species, Rev. edn, ed. Gillian Beer.
Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics.
Davidson, Bruce R. 1991. Land Settlement in Australia Since 1788. In Migrants
in Agricultural Development: A Study of Intrarural Migration, ed. J. A.
Mollett, 55–76. London: Macmillan.
Flinders, Matthew. (1814) 2000. Terra Australis. Melbourne: Text.

Fullerton, Susannah. 2009. Brief Encounters: Literary Travellers in Australia,
1836–1939. Sydney: Picador.
Gammage, Bill. 2011. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made
Australia. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Grossman, R. H., and Andrew Wright. 1976. Anthony Trollope’s Libraries.
Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31(1): 48–64.
Holbeach, Henry. 1873. Mr. Darwin on Expression in Man and Animals. St Paul’s
Magazine 12: 190–211.
Janes, Lauren. 2016. Colonial Food in Interwar Paris: The Taste of Empire.
London: Bloomsbury.
Lansbury, Coral. 1970. Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in
Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press.
Lawson, Henry. 2009. The Penguin Henry Lawson: Short Stories, ed. John Barnes.
Middlesex: Penguin.
Lever, Christopher. 1992. They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation
Societies. London: Quiller Press.
Levine, George. 1988. Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian
Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moore, Grace. 2016. “So Wild and Beautiful a World Around Him”: Trollope and
Australian Ecology. In The Routledge Research Companion to Anthony Trollope, ed.
Deborah Denenholz Morse, Margaret Markwick, and Mark Turner, 399–411. New
York and London: Routledge.
Pople, Tony, and Gordon Grigg. 1999. Commercial Harvesting of Kangaroos in
Australia. http://www.environment.gov.au/node/16676.
Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in
Victorian England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2014. Back Story: Migration, Assimilation and Invasion in the Nineteenth
Century. In Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities,
ed. Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman, 17–30. London: Routledge.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 1996. Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views
of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission.
Tiffin, Chris. 2007. Five Emus to the King of Siam: Acclimatisation and
Colonialism. In Five Emus to the King of Siam: Environment and Empire, ed.
Helen Tiffin, 165–176. New York: Rodopi.
Trollope, Anthony. 1874. Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush-
Life. London: Dodo Press.
———. 1879. John Caldigate. London: Dodo Press.
———. (1883)1947. An Autobiography, by Anthony Trollope. New York: OUP.
———. (1873) 2002. Australia and New Zealand, 2 vols. London: The Trollope
Society.
82 G. MOORE
Wheelwright, H. W. 1861. Bush Wanderings of a Naturalist, or Notes on the Field

Sports and Fauna of Australia Felix by an Old Bushman. London: Routledge,
Warne & Routledge.
Withey, Lynne. 1989. Voyages of Discovery: Captain Cook and the Exploration of
the Pacific. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Grace Moore is a senior research fellow at the Australian Research Council’s

Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Melbourne. Her
book Dickens and Empire was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Award for Literary
Scholarship in 2006. She is also author of The Victorian Novel in Context (2012)
and editor of several collections of essays. She is presently working on a study of
nineteenth-century settlers and bushfires.
CHAPTER 5
Dogs’ Homes and Lethal Chambers,

or, What Was it Like to be a Battersea Dog?
Susan Hamilton
Victorian city streets were full of dogs. Some were collared and walking on
leashes; many more were un-collared, “ownerless” street dogs. With the
establishment of the Battersea Home in 1860, and the later establishment
of Dogs’ Homes in such larger urban centers as Liverpool, Manchester, and
Birmingham, the Victorian city was transformed. Working in concert with
local police under the terms of the 1867 Metropolitan Streets Act and the
1871 Dogs Act, such homes ensured that many dogs disappeared from view.
Animal historian Jonathan Burt (2002) observes, “almost no systematic
research has been conducted on audience responses to animal imagery from
the perspective of a wider cultural concern about animals” (11). Much work
has begun to fill in that gap, including J. Keri Cronin’s (2011) work on the
visual culture of nineteenth-century anti-vivisection, Diana Donald’s (2007)
majestic Picturing Animals in Britain, Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong’s
(2013) on chicken advocacy and visual culture, and Burt’s own.
In this chapter, I use a case study approach to refine Burt’s proposed
area of inquiry and to ask when and how street dogs are visible in the
narrative of the development of nineteenth-century animal welfare and the
S. Hamilton (*)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
e-mail: suhamilt@ualberta.ca

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_5
84 S. HAMILTON
practice of “humane” relations with and care of them. More particularly,

I explore how the transformation of the technology of killing animals
shaped the presentation of the work of dogs’ homes to their publics.
Using photographs of dogs associated with the Battersea Dogs’ Home
published in 1867 and 1895 as my starting points, I examine how institu-
tions that presented themselves as humane centers used the representation
of killing in order to advance, fund, and represent both the care and
feeding of those dogs temporarily within their care (animal welfare) and
the killing of those dogs deemed “excess.”1 In attempting to answer this
question, I have two aims in view: first, to frame photographs and written
materials drawn from the Battersea and Liverpool Temporary Dogs’
Homes’ administration (minute books and annual reports) through differ-
ing histories of technology, particularly the history of photography and the
history of animal euthanasia. Throughout, I am interested in the flow of
communication over time, audiences, and how representations of animals
circulated in the history of formal interventions into “animal care.” What
can such flows of representation tell us about what Burt (2001) has called
“the appropriate seeing of the animal” (208) in Victorian animal welfare?
Second, I wish to respond to the call in Animal Studies scholarship to do
history and/or cultural studies in ways that place animals centrally in the
narratives we tell about them. My hope is to engage in history-making
that, following Erica Fudge’s (2008) wonderfully direct phrasing, seeks to
answer the question: What was it like to be a Battersea dog?
LOST DOGS: 1867

In 1867, the Holloway Home for Lost and Starving Dogs (later known as
the Battersea Home) had been operating for seven years. It faced continual
financial pressures, but had successfully withstood an initially hostile press
reception to establish itself as a practicable animal welfare enterprise, oper-
ating alongside the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.2
That year, a photograph titled “Photographed From Life” (Fig. 5.1)
formed the frontispiece of Confessions of a Lost Dog. The short book was
written by Frances Power Cobbe (1867), who was reunited with her lost
dog at the Home, to earn money and publicity for it. It also aimed at
fostering young people’s interest in the Home’s mission.3 The photograph
is by eminent Victorian photographer Frank Haes, best known now for his
photographs of animals at the London Zoo, including stereo sets of lions in
1864 and photographs of the last quagga in 1870 (Prodger 2003, 107).
5 DOGS’ HOMES AND LETHAL CHAMBERS 85
Fig. 5.1 “Photographed from Life.” Frontispiece, Confessions of a Lost Dog, by

Frances Power Cobbe, 1867
The photograph shows a well-fed dog sitting upon a bench draped

in richly patterned fabric: it is evidently a portrait of a loved family pet.
Like many such photographs, this one is similar to those that, as
Matthew Brower (2010) suggests, are so recognizable that “our con-
temporary ways of seeing may cause us to assimilate [them] too quickly
to familiar categories of interpretation” (5). The story that follows is
86 S. HAMILTON
also familiar, a tale of loss and eventual safe return that appears to need
little interpretation. This dog, Hajjin, was lost on the streets of London
before being taken to the Lost Dogs’ Home where she was quickly
restored to her mistress. This story of reunion reverberates with what
Erica Fudge (2008) argues is one of the defining myths of the mid-
twentieth century, the story of the returning dog, which has its roots in
nineteenth-century stories of loss and recovery such as Hajjin’s. Framed
as a kind of carte de visite (the camera for this format was invented in
1854), the photograph itself also belongs to a familiar genre, part of
the larger trend of photographing domestic animals that had begun in
the 1850s (Harker 1986).
There is an apparent ease to reading the photograph, supported by the
accessibility of the narrative Cobbe weaves on behalf of the Holloway
Dogs’ Home.4 Despite the ease, however, animals were technically chal-
lenging subjects for Victorian photographers and were particularly chal-
lenging for the photographer interested, as Haes was, in capturing
movement. That technical challenge—which had to do with the exposure
times demanded by changing chemical processes—frames the photograph
of Hajjin in compelling ways and allows us to read this deceptively acces-
sible image for what it can tell us about the entangled histories of animal
photography and animal welfare.
Encapsulating that entangled history is the photograph’s caption:
“Photographed from Life.” This caption was frequently appended to
images that purported to capture live action and movement, commonly
known as “instantaneous photography,” which was technically difficult
work and in keen demand from about the 1850s onward. The form
proved to be highly influential in shaping viewers’ expectations of what
could and should be caught photographically (Prodger 2003, 96), and as a
result shaped photographic practice. Photographers eager to respond to
demand for instantaneous photography often resorted to stage-managing
“instantaneous” scenes: jugglers were posed with objects on wires and
street scenes were carefully orchestrated. Victorian photographers of ani-
mals were also keen to share in the lucrative instantaneous-photography
market, despite the long exposure times and cumbersome equipment that
presented significant challenges when photographing animals that were
not captive, trained, or dead. Many photographers were known to use
stuffed specimens—common props for carte-de-visite photographs that
required lengthy exposure times—as part of their elaborately staged
“instantaneous” tableaux.
Importantly, the historical value of these photographs is not simply that

animals were both tricky to work with and compelling subjects for
Victorian viewers. As photography historian Matthew Brower (2010)
argues, animals “presented technical and conceptual problems whose
solution helped advance the technology of film making” (21). Unlike
photographers of humans, who adapted to technological limitations by
providing devices such as back braces for early portraits, photographers of
animals had to push technology to suit the animals’ habits. By the time
Hajjin was photographed, innovations in photographic technology made
it possible to photograph living animals in grippingly new ways. Haes’s
photographs of lions at the London Zoo in 1864 required only 11-second
exposures, substantially less than the 20-minute exposures common two
decades earlier. Yet animal images still demanded inventiveness and ima-
gination. In an 1892 lecture on the history of photography, published in
Photographic News, Haes revealed that his 1860s and 1870s photographs
of animals at the London Zoo depended on exhausting the animals into
stillness, a requirement that allowed accomplished photographs of living
animals to be taken with slow equipment (Prodger 2003, 107).
Hajjin’s photograph did not advance the technology of photography,
and Frank Haes likely did not require elaborate measures to capture an
image of Hajjin, who was probably an obedient sitter. Yet Confessions of a
Lost Dog retains the caption “Photographed from Life” as a trace of the
photographic practice that made visible the heightened labor of “instan-
taneous” animal photography. The seemingly familiar photograph is thus
reframed: on the one hand, the captioned photograph asserts that the
story of Hajjin’s safe return to her owner is authentic. More compellingly,
the caption draws explicitly from the protocols of instantaneous animal
photography to signal overtly that Hajjin is not stuffed and that Frank
Haes had no need to kill her or use a taxidermied animal to take this
photograph.
Brower (2010) suggests that taxidermied animals were not a matter of
general concern to photography’s many audiences at this time, which
“would not have understood the emphasis we put on the distinction
between an image of a live or dead animal” (6), but that read photographs
primarily through conventions drawn from the Romantic picturesque, in
which the status of the animal as alive or dead is inconsequential. The reader
of Cobbe’s text, and the viewer of Haes’s photograph, however, is precisely
concerned with the distinction between living and dead animals. In 1867,
Cobbe and Haes exploit the marketing protocols of instantaneous
88 S. HAMILTON
photography to illuminate the Dogs’ Home’s animal welfare point. Yoking

the excitement that instantaneous photography generated to the still con-
tested interest in dogs’ homes, they choose to remind their audience of
other, deadlier, outcomes for animals, which the history of photography
embodies. Animal historian Vinciane Despret (2013) notes that animals
often emerge in the archive when they do not cooperate: a horse rears up
on his rider; a cow kicks over a pail. Here, a captioned photograph brings
together two practices in the history of animal images: one in which animals
are killed to be captured photographically; another in which killing is no
longer a prerequisite to such an image, and when photographs of cooperat-
ing dogs such as Hajjin sometimes circulated to raise money for their shelter.
The death and life resonances of Hajjin’s photograph and the shifting
story of animal cooperation that it embodies are also framed by the
practices of the Dogs’ Home itself and the numbers of dogs that it
handled. On both matters, 1867 was a significant year. The 1867
Metropolitan Streets Act, which sought to clean up London’s streets by
legislating restrictions on such matters as loading coal and driving cattle
through the streets, also authorized the Metropolitan Police to seize
straying dogs and destroy all unclaimed animals after three days.5 The
police were quickly overwhelmed by this new demand on their time and
space, the Act requiring dogs to be captured and brought to police
stations where they were killed. Conversations between the Dogs’
Home, the Metropolitan Police, and the City of London Police began
to mark out new roles for the Home in the management of London’s stray
dog population. By June 1870, all dogs seized by the police were brought
to the Home, and by 1875, the Home was receiving 3d. for each dog it
received, purportedly to cover the expenses of its food and shelter care. As
Philip Howell (2015) notes, the Dogs’ Home effectively “became an
auxiliary branch of the Metropolitan Police forces” (87).
The money was life-sustaining income for the Home, which had
struggled endlessly in the 15 years since its establishment. But the number
of dogs received by the Home under the auspices of the Metropolitan
Streets Act is also essential to considering Hajjin’s photograph and its
death and life resonances. The Home had contended with the numbers of
animals it accommodated from its inception. Its original 1860 prospectus,
written by founder Mary Tealby, had declared: “The object of this society
is to give humane persons an opportunity to alleviate so much misery,”
and had mapped out principles regarding the return of valuable dogs to
their owners, the sale of dogs “after a reasonable time,” and the giving of
“Common-bred dogs . . . to any person who might require a useful dog,

on promise of taking care of it” (quoted in Jenkins 2010, 42). No clear
plan for what to do with unwanted and unclaimed dogs was specified. Very
quickly, in 1861, the Home adopted new rules, which specified that “Any
dog brought to the Home not identified and claimed within fourteen days
from the date of its admission will, by order of the committee, be sold to
pay expenses or be otherwise disposed of,” to which was swiftly added a
rule requiring that “the number of dogs that have been in the Home
longer than a fortnight be kept down as nearly as possible to forty”
(Jenkins 2010, 51).
Though the early working papers of the Home are not available for
consultation, Battersea’s second official historian Garry Jenkins (2010)
tells us that in 1864, the Dogs’ Home established three more receiving
houses for dogs, hired a veterinarian to “‘superintend the sanatory [sic]
condition of the Home’ for six guineas a year” (70), and received 2,066
dogs. He also informs us that during an 1869 court case for nuisance
noise, brought by neighbors bordering the Home, the keeper of the Dogs’
Home, James Pavitt, revealed that the “‘largest number of dogs he had
had alive was 110’” (88).
Several extrapolations about the numbers of dogs in the Home’s care at
any one time, as well as the numbers that were received by the Home
overall, are here possible. Pavitt’s testimony in 1869 and Jenkins’s num-
bers for 1864 suggests that during this period roughly 80% of the dogs at
Holloway were either claimed or killed. The overall number of dogs
received annually by Battersea would undergo huge changes for decades
to come, even as the technology for killing them would be transformed.
Yet the percentage of those killed constitutes the largest proportion of
dogs at the Dogs’ Home, a statistic that the Home never attempted to
conceal. Though she had been chosen as one of the earliest public images
for the Home’s work, Hajjin, photographed from life in 1867, is a dog
very definitely in the minority. Let me now turn to some of the ways in
which Battersea, and other dogs’ homes established in England, sought to
tell the story—visually and narratively—of those dogs in the majority.
LETHAL CHAMBERS: 1895

The next set of images I want to examine also capture dogs, like Hajjin, in
attitudes of seeming cooperation. Captioned “Going into the Lethal
Chamber” (Fig. 5.2), and “Coming out of the Lethal Chamber”
90 S. HAMILTON
Fig. 5.2 “Going into the Lethal Chamber,” English Illustrated Magazine,
August 1895. Photograph by Walter Brock
(Fig. 5.3), these photographs appeared in the August 1895 issue of the
English Illustrated Magazine (1883–1913), with a five-page article, “The
Dogs’ Home, Battersea,” written by Basil Tozer, a journalist best known
for his hunting and sports writing.
The English Illustrated Magazine was a family-oriented shilling
monthly with an Arts and Crafts feel that ran a combination of serial
fictions, poems, and miscellaneous articles, including celebrity profiles
and articles on sport. It also specialized in first-rate illustration and
photography.6 The August issue included “The Drinking Fountain,” an
illustration of working people, children, and a dog gathered round a
public fountain, and the year’s run included such photographs as “Come
Along—Tea Time” (Fig. 5.4).
Animals were not, however, a particular or specialized feature of the
serial, either as narrative or visual objects. Like the photo of Hajjin, the
photographs of the lethal chamber at Battersea accompany a fund-raising
Fig. 5.3 “Coming out of the Lethal Chamber,” English Illustrated Magazine,
August 1895. Photograph by Walter Brock
text aimed at a more general audience than the 1867 photograph, though
one that would have included junior readers as well as a wider circulation.
The article was picked up by such papers as the daily Evening Telegraph
(August 14, 1895), the Sheffield Independent (July 30, 1895), and the
Eastern Weekly Reader, a Norfolk paper (August 10, 1895).7 These papers
carry Tozer’s story, but do not republish the photographs, which are by
Walter Brock, one of many London photographers whose Wandsworth
studio was not far from the Battersea Home. At this time, I cannot find
anything more distinctive about him.
What is distinctive, at least thus far in my research, is the photographing
of the “lethalized” dogs that these capture, which I conclude was author-
ized by Battersea itself. Battersea’s lethal chamber was well known by the
time of these photographs. Nearly a decade earlier, a full page 1886
illustration, titled “Sketches at the Dogs’ Home, Battersea,” had appeared
in the Illustrated London News, comprising a triptych of panels labeled
92 S. HAMILTON
Fig. 5.4 “Come Along—Tea Time.” English Illustrated Magazine, August

1895. Engraving of image by unknown artist done by Joseph Swain and signed
at bottom right
“Fresh Arrivals,” “Open Air Pens,” and “The Lethal Chamber.” The final
panel in that triptych shows a Battersea keeper pushing a wheeled cage
very like the one photographed in 1895s “Going into the Lethal
Chamber.” The illustration was accompanied by a full column article,
“The Dogs of London,” ruminating on the efficacy of the recently reim-
posed muzzling of all dogs not on a leash, and concluding with an
extensive description of the Battersea Dogs’ Home, its practices of hand-
ling lost dogs, and a technical description of the lethal chamber.
The full-page illustrated panel did not include an image comparable to
“Coming Out of the Lethal Chamber,” yet it is clear that lethalizing was
known to the general public. The most recent Battersea official historian,
quoting from archival papers, tells us that “[m]embers of the public were
allowed in to witness it [the lethal chamber] in use, provided they weren’t

there to ‘gratify curiosity’ or for ‘a love of sensational spectacle’” (Jenkins
2010, 131). Cottesloe too, an earlier Battersea historian, quotes the
account of a contemporary journalist, presumably allowed access to the
lethal chamber, which is kept in Battersea’s archives:
There was a silence of about a minute, after which began a strange,

unearthly wailing cry—just like the sound of some discordant crowd
heard in the far distance. It would be easy to convince yourself that it is a
cry of anguish and despair and piteous suffering. The fact is, however, that
chloroform is an important element of the air of the chamber, and the dogs
are just falling under the influence of it. Medical men recognize in this
doleful wailing cry merely the same effect that chloroform always has upon
human beings . . . There is a steady crescendo and then an equally steady
diminuendo, and in about another minute all is over.
Doggie’s troubles are all at an end, and his faithless friends are all
forgotten. The biter and the bitten are slumbering side by side in peace
and amity never to be broken again. (quoted in Cottesloe 1979, 72)
Highlighting the lethal chamber at Battersea in written reports and notices

for the general public was also standard, and had been since its introduc-
tion at the Home in May 1884. The Times column on the 25th annual
meeting drew heavily from the report on 1885 activities read by Charles
Colam, Secretary for the Battersea Home, to circulate the numbers of
dogs received into the home (25,578), and noted that 2,236 found new
homes while 2,379 were returned to their owners. What happened to the
remaining animals is also clearly indicated, though the specific number of
dogs lethalized (21,963) is nowhere published: “The lethal chamber had
fulfilled all the predictions in its favour, and during the late emergency had
done its work with absolute precision” (Times, April 2, 1886).8
Photographs of lethalized dogs, however, did not receive wide circula-
tion in this way, whether for general newspaper audiences or members of
dogs’ homes organizations themselves. Nor have I found any other photo-
graphs or other illustrations of lethalized dogs in the established press. The
lethal chambers were, nevertheless, a focus of reporting for dogs’ homes
overall, even where they did not yet exist. The Liverpool Temporary
Home, for example, printed lists of individual subscribers to its special
fund to build a lethal chamber in its annual report for 1900, the year in
which it was finally erected. It had itemized the cost of poison used to kill
94 S. HAMILTON
dogs in its annual overview of the budget since 1896. Photographs were
not a routine component of the annual reports during the period under
discussion, and it is not until a special supplement was produced to attract
subscribers in 1903 that photographs of the Liverpool facilities, including
the lethal chamber, were published. These do not present any images of
the working of the chamber, rather showing the Liverpool keeper outside
the Lethal Chamber House, as well as images of the keeper’s office and
staff pictured with the resident dog, a visual contrast to the numbers of
animals killed that the Home charted in its annual report.
The routine reporting of key information about lethal chambers (sub-
scriptions, numbers killed) by both Battersea and Liverpool indicates that
lethalization itself was an established component in the narrative that these
dogs’ homes chose to craft about their enterprises. Yet, if neither the
technology nor the extent of the use of the lethal chamber was new,
why did Battersea authorize photographs of Battersea dogs going into
and coming out of the lethal chamber in 1895?
Like the photograph of Hajjin in 1867, the first of the two 1895
Battersea photographs is an artifact of instantaneous photography’s long
established technological precision, here able to produce an image of at
least 24 living dogs. Both 1895 photographs also document for a general
audience that the Home remains at the forefront of the technology of
animal killing. The lethal chamber we see here is one that had been
designed in 1883 by Benjamin Ward Richardson, pioneering British
anesthesiologist. Though there had been earlier attempts at using gas to
kill animals in England, and the United States had been using lethal
chambers for some time, it was Richardson’s invention, with its careful
calibration of gases, exacting design, and elaborated techniques for opera-
tion, that brought the efficiencies of the latest science to the work of
killing stray dogs.9
The invention was prompted by the 1882–1883 rabies outbreak in
London that tested the capacity of the Battersea facility and led it to
consider how best to destroy large numbers of dogs. Prior to 1883,
Battersea relied on prussic acid to kill dogs (and cats by 1889) that,
under the terms of the 1871 Dogs Act and the 1867 Metropolitan Act,
the Home legally owned, and so could restore to owners, sell, or “dispose
of” as it saw fit. Prussic acid required that animals were killed individually
by oral dosing, and though promoted as a humane killing method, death
by prussic acid was acknowledged by Battersea as potentially prolonged for
the animals, and very certainly exhausting for the keeper. It is also clear
that the lethal chamber was, in part, motivated by the difficulties that cats
represented to quick killing. The trainable dog was more easily dispatched
than the domesticated cat, even by this method. As the Battersea sub-
committee organized to investigate the matter stated:
The administration of the death-dealing drops of prussic acid to a dog was a

hazardous enough business, but administering them to cats was almost
impossible when faced with a cat’s sharp claws and needle like teeth. . . . the
subcommittee points out that the effects of prussic acid, although providing
an almost instantaneous death, were certainly far from painless, and it was
disposed to think that Battersea should follow the lead taken by homes in the
United States of America, where highly successful lethal chambers were
already in daily use. It is evident that public opinion was already swinging
towards this new innovation . . . (Cottesloe 1979, 68–71)
Richardson and Battersea would continue to refine its design, introducing

better protections from noxious gases for the keepers, facilitating the quick
loading of the cage, and, in time, employing a mobile single-use chamber.10
In its continued use of the lethal chamber in 1895, Battersea was also in
another vanguard of sorts: not all dogs’ homes were able to afford the
lethal chamber, as this Special Lethal Chamber Fund Report from
Liverpool makes clear. The Liverpool Home relied on prussic acid until
1900, a practice which it promoted as more humane than the death by
drowning that had preceded it as recently as 1873.11 Noting that the
technology of killing was unevenly available in England reminds us that
Battersea’s long established use of the lethal chamber in 1895 was con-
sidered significant proof of its advanced humane care of animals and well
worth advertising at times of financial need. In remarks to the 1887
Battersea AGM audience, John Colam, secretary to the Home, empha-
sized the dire outcomes for dogs if the lethal chamber were not available:
If this work had been left to the Police, there would have been no lethal
chamber . . . to perform a last act of mercy. The animals would have been
drowned in vats, the water gradually rising to the required height, or
perhaps their brains battered out, or possibly, the work of destruction
might have been carried out by poison, all of which methods have been
followed by Police in other cities. (quoted in Jenkins 2010, 133–134)
Like Colam in this address, initial news coverage of Richardson’s inven-

tion focused on the humane death that lethalizing offered, as well as the
96 S. HAMILTON
efficiencies made possible through a technology that could kill up to 100

dogs at a time. Richardson’s descriptions of his work in lectures and in his
own publications—most strikingly two phrases, “Painless Extinction of
Life” and “Death by Sleep”—were quickly recirculated in newspaper
reportage, often serving as the bolded cross title of the item.12 Strongly
emphasized in this press coverage was the lack of panic and fear that the
dogs experienced at the time of their killing. The dogs “trot” into the lethal
chamber, the Boston Daily Advertiser reported (January 7, 1886). The
“unclaimed curs trot into the lethal chamber . . . they lie down, curl them-
selves round, fall asleep, and so their lives are closed” (Milwaukee Sentinel,
March 2, 1886). “They go to sleep . . . precisely in the same manner as you
and I would if we were about to undergo a surgical operation under
chloroform, with the difference that when they are brought into profound
sleep they are allowed to sleep unto death” (“A Lethal Chamber,”
Cheltenham Chronicle, July 26, 1890, quoting a “letter to a friend” from
Richardson).
The English Illustrated Magazine piece accompanying these photo-
graphs of the lethal chamber has space to present a detailed descrip-
tion of the facilities, processes, and people at the Home. We learn
about the initial intake of dogs (“They are carefully examined, num-
bered, and a minute description of each is inscribed in a register,” and
the “ten kennel-men or attendants, who are fond of their charges and
like the work” [Tozer 1895, 446]). A lengthy description of the
mechanism of the lethal chamber—three of a total ten columns—is
offered as likely to be of “most interest [to] the general public.” We
learn too that the cage holding the dogs runs on eight-inch wheels;
that it has two tiers in order that “it may hold as many animals as
possible and yet not cause them discomfort,” and that the doors at
both sides mean that “It can be filled and emptied . . . very quickly”
(Tozer 1895, 447).
Technological and efficient timing is emphasized in the EIM article,
with more extensive detail than in the Illustrated London News article
nearly a decade before: the cage can be run into the gas chamber “with
great rapidity” and is “quickly enclosed” (Tozer 1895, 447) by the sliding
doors. “Death by sleep,” too, is a timed, efficient, and normalized affair.
Death by anesthetic is the norm for dogs in this representation:
The anaesthetic sleep is induced within one minute, and death takes place
usually within the two minutes that follow, though the cage is never
withdrawn within half an hour. This sort of death is brought about by

anaesthesia and not, as some suppose, by suffocation or asphyxia. . . .
Death by anaesthesia is death by sleep; death by asphyxia is death by
deprivation of air. Death by anaesthesia is typically represented in death
by chloroform; death by asphyxia is typically represented in drowning
and strangulations. When properly carried out, death by anaesthesia is
much the more certain and by far the less violent of the two processes.
The animals sleep into death, as it were, no sign of a spasm or struggle
being ever presented by their dead bodies. (Tozer 1895, 447; emphasis
added)
The photographs are similarly streamlined: Battersea’s thousands of ani-

mals lethalized annually, and the people employed to do the killing, are
visually reduced to this cage, these dogs and the single uniformed figure of
a Battersea keeper. Such compression presents the chamber as a stand-
alone mechanism, stripped of nearly all human/animal worlds but the
scientific design that will dispatch animals quickly. These are images of
technological mastery (look how many dogs can be killed at once; the
perfection of the design), performed in the name of an animal welfare
endeavor that delivers the peaceful and painless death that Richardson,
and all the coverage of the lethal chamber, emphasizes.
DOMESTICATED KILLING
There is little new in the narrative description of lethalizing that Tozer
offers here. “Death by sleep” had been Battersea’s byword (at least in
coverage of its activities in the newspapers) for nearly a decade. Yet, the
photographic representation of 24 dogs’ deaths by a technology long
trumpeted by Battersea in its written reports and annual meetings
demands our attention. The turn to the photographic representation of
animal death in 1895 attests to the ongoing pressure that Battersea faced
to insist, once again, on the modernity, humaneness, and precision of its
work as an animal welfare organization. As the numbers of stray dogs peak,
drop, stabilize, and rise—as the cycle repeats—Battersea chose to present
the lethal chamber and the dogs they killed in it as the singularly arresting
image for animal intervention that it can (re)inscribe for the general
public. Howell (2015) has comprehensively shown the ways in which
the “domestic image of the Battersea Dogs Home . . . helped to paper
over its normal functions of policing, incarceration, and execution” (99),
98 S. HAMILTON
but dissension and controversy were often not far away. Howell recounts
an 1876 exchange in the Morning Post, in which the secretary of the Dogs’
Home attempted to rebut “B.G’s” point that “A real Home for lost and
starving dogs would command the sympathy of every benevolent person. It
is because I thought and still think that the establishment at Battersea is
not such a Home that I have called attention to it” (quoted in Howell
2015, 99). Two decades later, long after the introduction of Richardson’s
lethal chamber, the high-profile Pall Mall Gazette column, “The Wares of
Autolycus,” severely lampooned the Home as a death row for incarcerated
dogs:
We know that Dogs’ ’Ome. The handsomest and gamest Irish terrier that
ever trod English earth died of the vilest kind of distemper after a four days’
sojourn there. We rescued him almost as he was being led to execution, but
it was only a respite; he had taken up the poison of the place. I should like to
assist at the sack and burning of that Dogs’ ’Ome, and rescue of its miserable
prisoners. (February 24, 1896)13
In the face of such criticism, and at a time of financial need, it is a

photograph of dead dogs lethalized at the Battersea Home that is
deemed to compel viewers to sympathize and give money. In his work
on animals in film, particularly the filming of meat industry practices,
Jonathan Burt (2002) has established that “[f]ew films . . . actually
explore the relationship between this revelatory imagery [of slaughter-
ing] and other aspects of culture, preferring instead to reinforce [the]
sense of [its] separateness” (175). The English Illustrated Magazine’s
photographs of the dogs killed by the Battersea lethal chamber, like
films of slaughter, visually present the smooth mechanization and anon-
ymity of mass killing at Battersea as set apart from other human/animal
relations in Victorian culture.14 The single keeper and single cage are
presented unmoored from the larger cultural practices that bring dogs
to homes such as Battersea, separating out some for killing and
others for selling. Yet the general family magazine frame of these images
disrupts the presentation of mechanized violence as separate from the rest
of culture. Nestled in the pages of the EIM, alongside “The Drinking
Fountain” and “Come Along—Tea Time,” these photographs of the lethal
chamber domesticate the mechanical processes of killing dogs, bringing
them closer to the life of the reader of such a family magazine. Killing
unwanted street dogs in the pages of the EIM is not the “confined act”
(Burt 2002, 176) that comes to dominate representation of animal

slaughter. Nor is Battersea here “papering over” its mandate to kill dogs
with images of domesticity, as Howell has traced through so much of
Battersea’s materials. In 1895, domesticity is the frame that legitimizes
killing.
Burt (2001) has argued that how and when animals are visible
determines not only “the style of presentation of animals in the public
domain, but also demarcate[s] the boundaries of how animals should
be treated in a civilized society,” and that the boundaries of treatment
are “highly porous” (207). Hajjin, photographed when dead dogs are
also acceptable props in the photographic studio, allows the Home to
name and show a new civil treatment of dogs in 1867—the return of
lost dogs to their homes—even as the number of dogs killed names a
very different treatment. Photographing the technology of the lethal
chamber, with its solacing promise of death by sleep and the painless
extinction of life, makes powerfully visible the human/animal settle-
ment possible since Richardson’s invention. The photograph of dead
dogs, calm and reposeful in death, reasserts Battersea’s vision of
humane treatment, and its model of a civilized society’s relations
with animals.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO BE A BATTERSEA DOG? READING

AGAINST THE GRAIN WITH PERCIVAL’S DOG
What lies outside smooth mechanization and domesticity? What can
questions of animal experience take us to? The photographs do not
document the time of the lethalizing (the loading of the dogs into the
cage, the maneuvering of the cage into the chamber, the injection of
gas, the removal of the dogs’ bodies) and so carefully exclude any
human interaction with the dogs, living or dead. The captions to
these photographs point to actions (going into/coming out of) that
reference the experience of the dogs solely as objects of the technology,
invoking their time (for what is going and coming but action in time?)
but refusing to represent it, while also erasing the human agent that
catalyzes that experience.
If Battersea’s domesticity does not, in 1895, paper over the matter of
killing, this photograph’s narrow framing does cover over models of
human/animal relations, and the animal behaviors that make those
100 S. HAMILTON
relations possible, so we can query directly: how are the dogs put in the
cage? Do they “trot” willingly, as the papers suggest? The dogs appear to
be looking alertly at the photographer. Did Walter Brock make a sound to
capture their attention? Is this photograph at least in part a product of
their cooperation with humans? The lethal chamber is a technological
response to animal behaviors, after all, from the reproduction of “street
dogs” to the struggles of a dying dog exposed to carbonic acid without
anesthesia to the cat who scratches as prussic acid is pressed on her tongue,
and the animal–human relations that generate categories of excess,
unwanted, unhealthy, dangerous animals.
Erica Fudge (2014) has urged us to consider “that it is possible to
think in terms of animals possessing their own history, culture, and even
tradition, which, in turn, is a reminder that animals, like humans, are actively
constructing their worlds as well as being constructed in them” (16).
What are the stories behind the dogs caged in the chamber? I want to
tread carefully, as no amount of additional interpretative frameworks
can outweigh the fact that Battersea, Liverpool, and other dogs’
homes in Victorian cities were in the business of killing dogs, not
rehoming them. In that sense, the photographs and Tozer’s article are
realistic representations of what it was like to be a Battersea dog. Nor
is the genre of the dogs’ home annual report, from 1884 through to
about 1925, in the business of telling us the stories of animals,
lethalized or not.
Yet there are traces of other outcomes, of dogs who evade the lethal
chamber, that we can turn to in our efforts not to allow the technical
mastery of these photographs to be the only answer to the question:
“What was it like to be a Battersea Dog?” The Liverpool Home Minute
Books register occasional stories about dogs that give us a glimpse.
Dogs were taken, for example, back and forth to court in cases of
cruelty (September 23, 1923). They were recognized as individuals,
and people complained to the Home when it did not follow through
on recognized bonds between humans and specific dogs (“His conten-
tion was that the dog was thoroughly well known to Anderson and
must have been recognized by him as being Bowden’s dog” [Liverpool
Home Minute Books, February 12, 1924, np]). Dogs jumped out of
the carts conveying them from the police stations to the lethal chamber
and ran away. They were sold to one person, only to return to their
previous, no longer legally recognized, home. The Minutes for one
spring meeting of the Liverpool Home committee (the earliest extant

Minute Books for that home) note the following:
A Dog Found: “on June 4th, and SOLD on June 19th, to Mr. Percival, 45
Newsham Drive, had later been lost from there and had gone to Mr. Fred
Smith, 69 Breck Road, Anfield, its original owner, wearing Mr. Percival’s
collar. Mr Smith had removed this new collar and refused to treat with Mr.
Percival or with the Home, simply insisting he would keep the dog. Messrs
Simpson North [solicitor] to be consulted, and their advice acted upon.”
(Minute Books, April 10, 1923, np)
The Minute Books rarely record such events, though all matters requiring
legal advice are noted. Yet this kind of situation happened frequently
enough that the Dogs’ Home regularly printed the terms of the 1871
Act that authorized their activities in their annual reports, also printing
detailed suggestions about how to look for your lost dog.
Though we can read such moments primarily as those places where
dogs appear in the records because their ownership is contested, it is also
precisely such moments when we need to read insistently against the grain.
The individual dog emerges in the Minutes when his property status is
under dispute. If we focus on the alternative frameworks the Minute
Books express, such as these complaints brought against the Home, we
edge closer to alternative meanings. Though we cannot know the meaning
of “home” for Percival’s dog—affective relations with humans? territorial
possession of grounds for the dog? memory of space?—the movements
themselves are worth registering as moments when other ways of reading
break through the framework of the documents themselves. The
Liverpool Home regularly published maps offering direction to its facil-
ities in order to advertise its services, and included them in the year’s
annual report. The controlled movement of people and dogs was at the
heart of this animal welfare endeavor. Percival’s dog and his unlicensed
mobility reminds us that we have more than violent encounters when we
think through the place of dogs in the late Victorian city. Fudge (2014)
proposes that “[h]istories of animals which rely on human representations
can still broaden our understanding of the past to include animals as
animals rather than only as human tools or ideas, and so can give us
glimpses of life that would otherwise remain invisible” (6). Ensuring
that we continue to read across encounters, lethal and otherwise, as we
102 S. HAMILTON
write the history of animals in the Victorian world can provide us with
such a glimpse. Because sometimes a dog breaks free of the controls on his
movements, and heads for other destinations.
NOTES
1. This chapter focuses on materials produced by and about the Battersea
Home for Lost and Starving Dogs. Materials about Battersea discussed
here are, variously, publicly available, written by contemporary third parties,
or referenced in the two general histories of the Home that Battersea has
commissioned, first in 1979 (Cottesloe) and most recently in 2010
(Jenkins). I approach these materials as authorized by Battersea at the time
of their production. I also draw extensively from the official publications and
working papers of the Liverpool Temporary Home for Lost & Starving
Dogs, founded in 1833.
2. For a history of the founding of the Holloway Home, see Jenkins (2010).
Howell (2015) offers an important revision to the standard history of the
Home, especially the role of Charles Dickens in its press reception. See
Howell, especially “Dogs in Dickensland,” and “Finding a Forever Home?”
3. Cobbe was a member of the Home’s governing committee, which oversaw
the operations of the Home, alongside her partner, Mary Lloyd. Though the
date of her initial participation is unknown, Lloyd was instrumental in
resolving the Home’s financial precariousness in 1876, when she took
over its loans and enabled it to complete the move from Holloway to
expanded premises at Battersea. Both Cobbe and Lloyd resigned from
the Home on March 11, 1882 in a row over vivisection. See Jenkins
2010, 85–110, and Mitchell 2004, 286. There is no information on the
print run of Cobbe’s Confessions of a Lost Dog, though it would seem to have
appeared in only one edition, published by Griffith and Farran as part of its
extensive list for young readers.
4. The accessibility of Confessions stems at least in part from the young reader
audience at which it was directed, but also from the building of a narrative of
canine fidelity and loyalty to humans across many print and visual culture
sites since at least the eighteenth century. Dogs’ fidelity to humans is at the
heart of the Dogs’ Home mission. See Shevelow 2008, especially “Pets and
the City,” and “The Unfortunate Tourist’s Dog.” See also Kean 1998,
especially “Continuity and Change: Fallen Dogs and Victorian Tales.”
5. The Act was quickly followed by the 1871 Dogs Act, which extended the
purview of the 1867 legislation to England and Wales, and specified hand-
ling for dangerous and rabid dogs. See Howell 2015, 85.
6. The Hathi Trust offers a complete run online: http://catalog.hathitrust.

org/Record/000045946.
7. The range of newspaper dates here register the availability of the August
issue through wholesale and retail outlets from about July 29 when printers
and publishers supplied sellers with the coming month’s titles. For a brief
description of “Magazine Day,” see Brake and DeMoor 2009.
8. The Times consistently reported Battersea’s annual general meeting. See
Times, March 30, 1896, 4 and Times, February 27, 1905, 2 for other
representative examples.
9. In “Executions at the Dog Pound,” the New York Times draws attention to
the coverage of a severely botched gassing of animals by the Poundmaster in
37th Street, New York City, in which poor understanding of the properties
of carbonic acid gas had led to the “protracted suffering” and “slow torture”
of unclaimed dogs at the pound. The item concludes: “It is somewhat
strange, however, that it should have taken such a length of time to under-
stand the properties of a gas with which the merest amateur in chemistry
must be thoroughly acquainted” (New York Times, June 26, 1874).
10. Liverpool began collecting animals from owners’ homes for lethalization in
1915 (Annual Report 1915). Multiple lethal chambers were in service at
police stations and other public premises in Liverpool by 1923 (Dogs Home
Minute Book, April 10, 1923, np).
11. See Liverpool RSPCA Ladies Committee Minute Book, August 12, 1873, np.
12. See for example, the following drawn from Artemis Primary Sources,
accessed April 2, 2015: “Brief Notice,” Bristol Mercury December 18,
1884; “Painless Extinction of Animal Life, Evening Telegraph, August 21,
1884; “Painless Extinction of Animal Life,” Evening Telegraph, September
5, 1884; “Death by Sleep,” Sheffield Independent, July 30, 1895;
“Richardson’s Lethal process at the Dogs’ Home, London,” Evening
Telegraph, February 4, 1885; “The Lethal Chamber at the Dogs’ Home,”
Evening Telegraph, August 14, 1895.
13. An ongoing column in the Pall Mall Gazette, “The Wares of Autolycus,”
was written by leading women writers invited to contribute, among them
Rosamund Marriott Watson, Alice Meynell, and Edith Nesbit. See Schaffer
2000, 47–48.
14. It was technologically possible for Battersea to film the lethalization of dogs,
though there is no evidence it did so in its official histories. Burt (2001) notes
the long precedent for the killing of animals on film, citing one of the first films
made of a Seville bullfight in 1896, one year after these photographs were
taken (211). He also notes newspaper coverage of a 1910 film made by the
RSPCA to document and protest decrepit horse traffic that was not released to
the public because of its distressing scenes of horse slaughter (212).
104 S. HAMILTON
WORKS CITED
Brake, Laurel, and Marysa DeMoor, eds. 2009. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century
Journalism. London: British Library.
Brower, Matthew. 2010. Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American
Photography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Burt, Jonathan. 2001. The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of
Light and Electricity in Animal Representation. Society and Animals 9(3):
203–228.
———. 2002. Animals in Film. London: Reaktion.
Cobbe, Frances Power. 1867. Confessions of a Lost Dog; Reported by her Mistress.
London: Griffith and Farran.
Cottesloe, Gloria. 1979. The Story of the Battersea Dogs’ Home. London: David &
Charles.
Cronin, Keri J. 2011. “Can’t you Talk?” Voice and Visual Culture in Early Animal
Welfare Campaigns. Early Popular Visual Culture 9(3): 203–223.
Despret, Vinciane. 2013. From Secret Agents to Interagency. History and Theory
54(4): 29–44.
Donald, Diana. 2007. Picturing Animals in Great Britain, 1750–1850. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Fudge, Erica. 2008. Pets. Stocksfield, UK: Acumen.
———. 2014. What was it Like to be a Cow? History and Animal Studies. In
Oxford Handbook of Animal Studies, ed. Linda Kalof, Oxford Handbooks
Online, 2014. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199927142.013.28.
Harker, Margaret. 1986. Animal Photography in the Nineteenth Century. In The
Animal in Photography, 1843–1985, ed. Alexandra Noble, 24–35. London:
Photographers’ Gallery.
Britain. London: University of Virginia Press.
Jenkins, Garry. 2010. A Home of Their Own: The Heart-Warming 150-Year
History of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home. Toronto: Bantam.
Kean, Hilda. 1998. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since
1800. London: Reaktion.
Liverpool Branch, RSPCA 1873–1878. Ladies’ Committee Minute Book. Liverpool
Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.
Liverpool Temporary Home for Lost and Starving Dogs Annual Reports
1883–1943. Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Libraries.
Liverpool Temporary Home Minute Book 1923–1939. Liverpool Record Office,
Liverpool Libraries.
Mitchell, Sally. 2004. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist,
Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Potts, Annie, and Philip Armstrong. 2013. Picturing Cruelty: Chicken Advocacy
and Visual Culture. In Animal Death, ed. Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-
Rapsey, 151–168. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
Prodger, Phillip. 2003. Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous
Photography Movement. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schaffer, Talia. 2000. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-
Victorian England. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Shevelow, Kathryn. 2008. For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal
Protection Movement. New York: Holt.
Sketches at the Dogs’ Home. 1886. Illustrated London News, 2 January, 10.
Tozer, Basil. 1895. The Dogs’ Home, Battersea. English Illustrated Magazine 13,
August: 445–449.
Susan Hamilton is Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at

the University of Alberta, working in the fields of Victorian feminism, animal
studies, and nineteenth-century media. Her recent publications include “Animals
in/as Genre: Serial Genre and Social Action in the Victorian Anti-Vivisection Press
in Journal of Modern Periodicals; “Hajjin” in Victorian Review; and “Cruelty to
Animal Act 1876,” for BRANCH. Her current project attempts a media history of
nineteenth-century animal welfare initiatives.
PART II
Animals in the Victorians’ Literature
Fig. II.1 William Barraud. A Couple of Foxhounds with a Terrier, Property of Lord
Bentinck. c. 1845. Courtesy of Yale Center for British Art
CHAPTER 6
Bull’s-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide

in Oliver Twist: a Cur’s-Eye View
Jennifer McDonell
In a bleak moment in Oliver Twist, the narrator reflects satirically on the

competition for sustenance that preoccupied Thomas Malthus and his
followers.1 Mrs Sowerberry, wife of the undertaker to whom Oliver is
apprenticed, feeds Oliver with scraps that were set aside for her dog, Trip.
Addressing the reader, Dickens asks the “well-fed” proponents of Britain’s
controversial 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the system of union
workhouses it inaugurated, to witness the spectacle of Oliver tearing at
Trip’s leftovers like a dog “with all the ferocity of famine”:
I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall within
him, whose blood is ice, and whose heart is iron, could have seen Oliver
Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected, and wit-
nessed the horrible avidity with which he tore the bits asunder with all the
ferocity of famine; there is only one thing I should like better; and that
would be to see him making the same sort of meal himself, with the same
relish. (24)2
J. McDonell (*)
University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia
e-mail: jmcdonel@une.edu.au

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_6
110 J. McDONELL
The figurative logic of this passage depends on a conception of what

Anat Pick (2011) has termed creatureliness, a condition shared by both
human beings and dogs.3 Stray children and women, like dogs, are shown
in the novel to be equally vulnerable to violation by others: they are
subjected to various forms of imprisonment, bodily harm, and death
without recourse to social justice, and have a particular interest in food.
To be subjected to hunger, thirst, and destitution, to be dependent on a
more powerful person for food, to be devoid of “civilized” etiquette
associated with eating, is to be reduced to a state that Giorgio Agamben
(1998) has called “bare life”—that is to say, life that is wounded, expend-
able, and endangered.4 Bare life “is not simply natural reproductive life,
the zoe of the Greeks, nor bios,” Agamben argues, but rather “a zone of
indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast” (109).
For Agamben, bare life is captured by the political in a double way: first, in
the form of the exclusion from the polis—it is included in the political in
the form of exclusion—and, second, in the form of the unlimited exposure
to violation, which is not recognized as a crime (7–8).
Writing of Oliver Twist, Sally Ledger (2007) has demonstrated that “The
poor’s status as consumers, and the amounts that the poor should be
permitted to consume, are as central to Dickens’s novels from 1837–9 as
they were to the wider body of anti-Poor Law literature” (92). Humans
become meat to each other in Dickens’s satire on political economy and the
workhouses, including the latter’s unregulated apprenticing system.
Orphan-apprentices are “roasted” by Gamfield in order to extricate them
from chimneys, and when the bargain to apprentice Oliver to Gamfield is
agreed, the terrified protagonist is brought an extra “holiday allowance” of
bread and gruel, upon the sight of which “Oliver began to cry very
piteously: thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined
to kill him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to
fatten him up in that way” (12, 14). In the infamous scene in which Oliver
twice politely asks the “fat, healthy” master, “Please, sir, I want some
more,” Dickens suggests with a dark humor that the famine regime of the
workhouse, which effectively imposes a population check on its inhabitants,
could result in children committing that most abhorrent of transgressions,
cannibalism (11).5
In the scheme of the novel, consumption and hunger are framed as
moral and social problems. They appear as the effect of a sovereign
violence that exceeds the force of the law, even as they are anticipated
and authorized by the law.6 This violence is imagined recurrently through
6 AGENCY AND THE SPECIES DIVIDE IN OLIVER TWIST 111
animal metaphor and metonymy which become fully legible only with
reference to the anti-Poor Law movement and contemporaneous percep-
tions of the continuities and differences between animals and humans. The
figure of the starving child as a famished dog, no less than the allusions to
cannibalism, points to the permeability and porousness of species bound-
aries and destabilizes established cultural hierarchies. Cary Wolfe (2003a)
has proposed that species significations in symbolic economies of con-
sumption can be formulated as a “species grid” with “animalized animals”
(those we eat and wear) at the bottom, followed by “humanized animals”
(pets primarily) and “animalized humans” (read Fagin and Sikes), while at
the top is “the wishful category of the humanized human, sovereign and
untroubled” (101). This hierarchy of subjects and values is underscored by
Jacques Derrida’s (1991) theorization of “carnophallogocentrism,” a neo-
logism for the space opened up in discourses of carnivorous patriarchy “for
a noncriminal putting to death” (112). Derrida argues that, as an abstrac-
tion, the word “Animal” does violence to the heterogeneous multiplicity
of the living world. This violence is a “sacrificial structure” that opens up a
space for the “noncriminal putting to death” of the animal, a sacrifice that
allows the transcendence of the human by killing and disavowing the
bodiliness, the materiality, and the animality of the human (113).
Dickens’s recourse to Victorian discourses of animality serves a range of
ideological ends. As in the examples already cited, animal figuration impli-
cates humans—whether petty officials of the state such as Mr Bumble or
inhabitants of London’s criminal underworld such as Bill Sikes, Noah
Claypole, and Fagin—in the various forms of ruthless exploitation that
marked England’s engagement with its disempowered poor. While the
novel presents the destitution of orphaned children as akin to the precar-
iousness of animal life, animal metaphor and metonymy also mark the
radical alterity of those animalized humans who prey on children. That
Gamfield and Sikes growl and scowl is an unmistakable sign that they not
only share physical and behavioral characteristics with animals but are
bestial. Fagin is controversially racialized as a “loathsome reptile, . . . crawl-
ing forth by night in search of some rich offal for a meal,” and has “fangs as
should have been a dog’s or rat’s” (120–121, 317).7 Sikes treats Nancy
“like a dog,” in Fagin’s words (Surridge 2005, 37). Crowds assume the
volatile and dangerous energy that is often attributed to enraged animals.
The crowd that pursues the innocent Oliver following the Artful Dodger’s
theft of Brownlow’s handkerchief has a “passion for hunting something,”
while the mob that pursues Sikes to his death is “snarling with their teeth
112 J. McDONELL
making at him like wild beasts,” suggesting that they are no less bestial than
Sikes (59, 341). On the other hand, Gillian Beer (1985) has argued that “On
the Origin of Species seems to owe a good deal to the example of one of
Darwin’s most frequently read authors, Charles Dickens” (8), and in The
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals Darwin (1872) uses Oliver
Twist’s description of the snarling mob when arguing that human ex-
pressions derive from basic animal behavior (240; see Levine 1998, 121).
R. H. Horne (1844) further underscores middle-class fears regarding the
dangerous, irrational, and possibly revolutionary energies of the underclasses
when in 1843 he described this same crowd as “hell-hounds gnashing and
baying at [Sikes’s] heels” (29). In these ways the always already untenable
human and nonhuman animal divide upon which such gendered, classed,
and racialized constructions rest is produced as an effect of power relation-
ships and shifts according to the dominant.8
Bull’s-eye, possibly the best known of Dickens’s literary animals, is
sympathetically portrayed because he shares with the novel’s orphaned
children the depredations of bare life. Bull’s-eye, unlike the impossibly
pure Oliver, is a determinedly unsentimental figure. Philip Howell (2015)
has convincingly argued that Dickens was “less uncomplicatedly senti-
mental in his attitudes to dogs than is claimed in the presentation of
Dickens as an animal lover” (47). Likewise, Beryl Gray’s (2014) detailed
study of dogs in Dickens’s life and work emphasizes that Dickens “was
rarely sentimental about them [dogs]” and never recognized their inter-
ests as competing with those of the deprived or neglected humans he
championed (1). Dickens’s deployment of discourses of animality in
Oliver Twist highlights the intersectionality of class, gender, and species
as co-constitutive rather than as conflicting ethical choices. Grace Moore’s
(2007) discussion of Bull’s-eye as a “criminal animal,” and his role as an
extension of Sikes’s “irredeemable criminality” and a doppelgänger for
Nancy, underscores attributed beastliness or less-than-humanness as con-
stitutive of class and gender divisions (201–213). Bull’s-eye is metonymi-
cally linked to the battered prostitute, Nancy, and the assorted stray
children of the metropolis, insofar as they are all cast as victims of Sikes’s
violence and criminality.9
In what follows, I want to build on existing accounts of Bull’s-eye’s role
to explore two interrelated problems raised in Oliver Twist: the relation-
ship between biological inheritance and cultural conditioning on the one
hand, and human and nonhuman agency on the other. Bull’s-eye, I will
argue, serves as a figure for the displacement of a contradiction in the
novel about the role of inherited traits and environmental conditioning in

the formation of character—a debate that informed the controversial Poor
Law Legislation. Considered in relation to what Barbara Hardy (1983)
identifies as Dickens’s interest in “the relationship of the individual to his
environment” (30), Bull’s-eye is a more complex literary animal than the
critical literature to date has allowed for. I also want to suggest that Bull’s-
eye is invested with a form of social agency—albeit in uneven and unstable
alliance with humans—which, significantly, is denied to the putative hero
of the novel, Oliver, to whom things simply seem to happen without his
ever having to make them happen.
Dickens’s acute and percipient observation of London’s street life
included a vast array of animals, including dogs of all kinds. The urban
animal caught in a kind of Malthusian struggle for existence is nowhere
more evident than in Dickens’s closely observed portrayal of canine beha-
vior in the character of Bull’s-eye. Sitting by the bed of the violently ill Sikes,
Bull’s-eye keeps guard by “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, attract[s] his attention” (257). The wistful look,
the “pricking” of the ears, and elsewhere Bull’s-eye’s habit of “winking at
his master with both eyes at the same time,” evidence Dickens’s genius for
bringing to life the species-specific traits of dogs (92).10 This is not to deny
that the Bull’s-eye character consists of the same combination of mimetic
representation and theatrical melodrama that characterizes the novel as a
whole. In a self-reflexive moment, the narrator uses the simile of streaky
bacon to defend the generic hybridity of his story:
It is the custom on the stage, in all good, murderous melodramas, to present

the tragic and comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and
white in a side of streaky, well-cured bacon . . . Such changes appear absurd;
but they are by no means unnatural. The transitions in real life from well-
spread boards to death-beds, and from mourning weeds to holiday gar-
ments, are not a whit less startling, only there we are busy actors instead of
passive lookers-on . . . (105)
The stylized, performative aspect of Bull’s-eye’s suicidal leap to death

may have had its genesis in the enormously popular but now almost
completely forgotten Victorian melodramatic theatrical genre of dog
drama, in which trained dogs frequently played a crucial part in the
114 J. McDONELL
play’s action by diving into tanks of water to rescue drowning children or

by attacking murderers and villains.11
Historians of the nineteenth-century Poor Laws and commentators on
Oliver Twist agree that the question of character was at the heart of the
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the decades-long debate about
the status of the poor in England that preceded it. Bull’s-eye complicates
this picture because he embodies the novel’s pre-Darwinian uncertainty
about the extent to which character is a product of nature and nurture,
heredity and environment. To what extent, we may well ask, is Bull’s-eye’s
Sikesian savagery or his Nancy-like loyalty an inherent property or trait,
and to what extent are these qualities a product of human intervention?
Crucially, this is a question that Dickens does not ask in the novel about
the “irredeemably bad” Bill Sikes. Attempting to defend himself against
charges that Oliver Twist romanticized crime and criminality, Dickens
argues in his 1841 “Preface” that, whether by nature or birth, men such
as Sikes lack “the faintest indication of a better nature” (lxiv). If Sikes is
“irredeemably bad,” then the true angels of our better natures are Rose
Maylie, Oliver’s aunt, sister, and double, and Oliver himself. An angel
“enthroned in mortal form” (187), Rose, with her goodness, beauty, and
purity seem to exist outside time and space, particularly when contrasted
with Nancy’s more complex character.
The controversial bastardy clause of the New Poor Law made mothers
financially responsible for their illegitimate children, where under the old
Poor Law a mother could name a father and make him financially respon-
sible for the child.12 As Holly Furneaux (2009) points out, this clause
“heighted anxieties about the knowability of paternity” and revealed that
paternity “functioned as a speech act” (28–29). She notes how, throughout
his career, Dickens “emphasiz[ed] the constructed nature of the family and
endors[ed] nurtured ties over genealogy” (29). While all families in Oliver
Twist can be thought of as fictive or constructed, the novel is ambivalent
about blood-relatedness and determinist conceptions of character and
environment. The narrator tells us that “nature or nurture had planted in
Oliver’s breast a good sturdy spirit” (5). But is Oliver’s resilience a product
of “nature” or “inheritance”? In answering this question Dickens goes to
extraordinary lengths to prove that Oliver is pure and incorruptible despite
his having being born out of wedlock and nurtured in a workhouse. Oliver
has been baby farmed, starved, publicly thrashed, threatened with hanging,
held in solitary confinement, fed on dog’s scraps, forced to sleep with
coffins, and has resided in a squalid, criminal underworld in one of
London’s most infamous rookeries. We are meant to understand that

Oliver’s innate goodness, which others read in his face, is inherited from
his parents (see Waters 1997, 31). It is only when Oliver recovers the
inheritance that he has been fraudulently denied by his half-brother,
Monks, that he can move from the novel’s underworld of crime and poverty
into the safety and security of bourgeois domesticity, where he belongs by
birth and disposition.
Dickens’s anodyne version of pastoral in Oliver Twist, as represented by
the world of the Maylies, is, as Rosemary Bodenheimer (1988) has argued,
a covert protest against the determinist ideology that framed the New
Poor Law: that the poor would be conditioned out of their alleged reliance
on charity, or punitively reformed. Bodenheimer states: “Pointing to a
pre-or posthistorical mode of being, the pastoral rhetoric is there to make
a place for a nonenvironmentalist interpretation of character” (120). In
other words, Dickens’s version of pastoral in the novel allows for “a history
of character that is separate from its social surroundings and actions”
(116). Oliver defies the New Poor Law’s classificatory impulse, implicitly
refuting the idea that the children, the sick, and the poor housed in
workhouses were by birth or temperament inherently idle, vicious, or
stupid. Where the New Poor Law tried to conflate poverty and depravity,
Dickens refuses to allow Oliver to live out the workhouse’s prediction that
he is, in Mrs Sowerberry’s words, “one of these dreadful creeturs, that are
born to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle” (38).
Debate over the New Poor Law was fundamentally preoccupied with how
to classify, define, and represent the poor. Human preoccupations with
heredity, genealogy, and paternity have also shaped the cultural history of
the dog, and the idea of dog hierarchy, dog culture, and dog society as a
touchstone for human status and degree has long been a staple trope in
Western literature.13 What distinguished Victorian England from preceding
and subsequent cultures, as Harriet Ritvo (1987) has authoritatively demon-
strated, is the way breed animals—whether a show dog or prize bull—came
to serve human breeders as a sign of social class, “an index of their paradox-
ical willingness aggressively to reconceive and refashion the social order in
which they coveted a stable place” (115). In other words, the breed of a dog
was for the majority of Victorians a metonym for the breeding of their
human owners: “dogs without breed standing were unquestionably
beyond the pale . . . lumped together by Victorian fanciers in the catch-all
class of mongrels and curs. It was a class about which they had little good
to say” (91). The cultural power of Dickens’s representation of Bull’s-eye
116 J. McDONELL
derives in part from its intertwining of canine physiognomy with social

status in a way that draws on recognizable Victorian perceptions of breed.
The ubiquity of dogs in human societies confounds conventional dis-
tinctions between public and private, inside and outside, human and
animal, and, as I now want to expand, social conditioning and biologically
determined traits. The first two detailed descriptions of Bull’s-eye in the
novel are nuanced and ambiguous portrayals of the animal’s character,
temperament, and environment. Bull’s-eye is introduced in Chapter 13 as
“a white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty different
places” skulking into Fagin’s den behind his master (77). His face reveals,
as Oliver’s decidedly does not, a history of violence and injury. He is later
referred to as a “white coated and red-eyed dog” (92). Dickens’s depiction
of Bull’s-eye is idiosyncratic, perhaps as a consequence of the novel’s
publication history.14 Readerly reception of the Bull’s-eye character is
complicated by George Cruikshank’s accompanying plates depicting
Bull’s-eye as smooth-coated, perhaps as a type of the English bull terrier —
Oliver Claimed by his Affectionate Friends, Oliver’s Reception by Fagin and
the Boys, Sikes Attempting to Destroy his Dog, and The Last Chance.
Cruikshank’s representation of Bull’s-eye is discussed by Beryl Gray
(2014), who notes the irony that, despite Dickens’s objection to
Cruikshank’s illustration Sikes Attempting to Destroy his Dog as “a vile and
disgusting interpolation on the sense and meaning of the tale,” Bull’s-eye’s
image in this illustration has so “predominated that the canine character in
the text is now commonly assumed to be a type of Bull-terrier” (112–113).
Bull’s-eye’s name suggests his ties to the bull and terrier families, which
are thought to be descended from fighting breeds used in bull baiting and
blood sports. If today’s canine bête noire is the “pit bull,” in 1830s
England it was curs and mongrels like Bull’s-eye. In most film versions
of the novel, Bull’s-eye is represented by the breed known today as the
American Bull Terrier, a breed that did not exist in Victorian England.15
Bulldogs in the early nineteenth century were leaner and higher off the
ground, their muzzles were longer, and they had smaller heads and fewer
facial rolls. As with “pit bulls” today, the breed was often classified as
innately vicious and dangerous. In 1845, veterinarian William Youatt
divided types of dogs into divisions, with the bulldog “at the head of
[the] inferior and brutal division” and the bull terrier “superior in appear-
ance and value than either of its progenitors” (98–99). Youatt attributes to
the bulldog an innate viciousness that is unable to distinguish between
“the innocent visitor of his domicile” and “the ferocious intruder”: “The
bull-dog is scarcely capable of any education, and is fitted for nothing but
ferocity and combat” (98). The bull terrier, while still a denizen of the
inferior third division of canine society, is able to “form a steadier friend-
ship” than dogs of the bull and terrier breed despite “the dangerous
irascibility which it occasionally exhibits” (99). The brutal animalization
of humans and the sentimental humanization of animals can be read as
two sides of the same assimilating gesture, and fictions that rely on either
risk the tropological reversal by which persons and animals are bestialized
in order to justify biologisms that naturalize what Derrida (1991) has
called “non-criminal putting to death” (113).
Prior to the founding of the Kennel Club in 1873, dogs had been
classed primarily by the jobs they performed, as illustrated by a tabular
“Synopsis of British Dogs” prepared by the Reverend William Daniel
(1802, 9). This “synopsis,” which is based on sixteenth-century sources,
specifically John Caius’s 1576 treatise De Canibus Britannicis (Caius
2005), places the “most generous kinds” of dogs, notably hunting hounds
and bloodhounds, at the top.16 The order descended through spaniels and
lapdogs to farm animals, while working mongrels such as turnspits are
positioned at the bottom of the hierarchy. In this unforgiving typology,
the value of particular breeds is derived from their original functions,
which had once closely related to the social status of their respective
owners. In short, behind every dog breed there is an ethnography and a
social history as well as a genealogy—the story of a life in culture as well as
a genetic inheritance. The breed-specific bodies of dogs immediately point
to human intervention, both historically through involvement in animal
sexual selection and through literary and visual representation.
As products of a long history of domestication, dogs long ago crossed
over from the outside (the wild) to the inside (the hearth), and have been
patrolling and messing with the boundaries of the species divide ever since.
As interstitial creatures, they oscillate uncomfortably between the roles of
high-status animal and low-status person. Endowed with individual names
like humans, and bearing the burden of a contradictory range of significa-
tions in human language systems, dogs are literally and figuratively a
“breaker of boundaries” to use the anthropologist Edmund Leach’s
(1966) term.17 Bull’s-eye is a boundary breaker in a double sense. As a
criminal he is an outlaw situated outside the symbolic economy of Victorian
bourgeois pet-keeping at a time when domestic dogs were often repre-
sented as obedient, model subjects, object lessons in how good breeding, a
cultural and biological imperative for purebreds, anchors the bourgeois
118 J. McDONELL
home.18 By contrast, Bull’s-eye occupies a dubious role as a pet in Fagin’s

gang, one of a succession of dangerous and dysfunctional alternative families
that includes the baby farm, the workhouse, and the Sowerberrys’ establish-
ment.19 Bull’s-eye is better understood as a working dog in a novel in which
almost no one has a meaningful relation to social production. Bull’s-eye
may refer to the handheld bull’s-eye lantern, which had a round “bulls-eye”
lens on one side, and was used by the police. As part of the burglar’s
professional armory, Bull’s-eye’s role is to see for the group. He is an
unsentimental version of the clever and loyal dog: the Dodger tells Oliver
that the dog is “the downiest” of the lot: “He wouldn’t so much as bark in a
witness box” even if deprived of “vittles” for a fortnight (116). That the
Dodger and his confederates could take professional pride in Bull’s-eye’s
work in the gang is a parodic mirroring of the legitimate mercantile world,
and suggests the way in which criminal activity was based on a reversal of the
usual relation between the bourgeoisie and the city poor.
While Bull’s-eye has a reputation for violence, he is not seen to attack or
bite anyone other than Sikes in the course of the novel. In fact Bull’s-eye’s
temperament is shown to be malleable. After Oliver’s recapture from the
Brownlows, the gang of thieves is crossing Smithfield market, and Sikes
addresses the dog as “young’un!”, in response to which “Bull’s-eye
wagged his tail in acknowledgment of this unusually endearing form of
speech” (98). Bull’s-eye’s propensity to savagery is presented as a response
to cruel treatment by Sikes. In the parlor of the Three Cripples at Saffron
Hill, Sikes kicks and curses “the unoffending animal” to relieve unidenti-
fied dark feelings, and Bull’s-eye retaliates. The accompanying narratorial
comment reflects upon canine nature: “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 teeth into one of the half-boots” (92). This
reflection subscribes to the widespread Victorian view that dogs by nature
are long-suffering but, depending upon circumstance and training, can be
provoked to dangerous acts. That Sikes’s faults of temper are also attrib-
uted to Bull’s-eye elides the fact that the dog’s conditioning is partially
explained whereas Sikes’s is not. The idea that Bull’s-eye is vicious in the
same way as Sikes has to be qualified by the extreme violence of the
encounter at the Three Cripples. Forecasting the brutality of Nancy’s
murder, Sikes seizes a poker, opens a large clasp knife, and orders the
dog to come to him. When Bull’s-eye resists, Sikes uses the poker to beat
him with savage blows. The timely entrance of Fagin allows Bull’s-eye to
escape, whereupon he hides in the backyard, only shrinking out when his
tormenter disappears. In this exchange of violence there is no reciprocity
and Sikes, unlike the dog, dominates others by force.
After the terrifying scene in which Sikes brutally assaults Nancy with a
pistol butt and then staves her head in with a club, the novel transports Sikes
and the reader to the tranquil landscape north of London as Sikes makes his
way to Hatfield. When Sikes realizes that Bull’s-eye’s association with him is
a liability, he decides to kill him. The dog, however, resists and escapes,
largely on the strength of his canine instinct and ability to accurately read
human expression and affect (277). In view of Bull’s-eye’s street-smart
instinct for self-preservation, the perfunctory narration of his apparently
self-inflicted death may come as something of a surprise, especially in its
narrative positioning as the final paragraph of Chapter 50, “The Pursuit and
Escape”: “A dog, which had been concealed till now, ran backwards and
forwards on the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a
spring, jumped for the dead man’s shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into
the ditch, turning completely over as he went, and striking his head against a
stone, dashed out his brains” (428). The scene, of which this passage is the
conclusion, narrates Sikes’ precarious perch on the rooftop from which he
and his dog fall to their deaths. If we accept the consensus of critics that
Bull’s-eye is an alter ego for Sikes, and is complicit in his criminality, then in
terms of an allegorical understanding of Bull’s-eye’s function in the story,
the dog must be destroyed just as Sikes must be destroyed. It is in the nature
of dogs to cling to their owners and even in death Bull’s-eye desperately
attempts to be with Sikes. In this vein Bull’s-eye’s death has been inter-
preted as part of a beastly pattern of conditioned abuse in which Nancy and
the dog believe that they cannot survive without Sikes. As Grace Moore
(2007) has argued, the analogy between Nancy and Bull’s-eye is part of a
triangular relationship of co-dependence in which both dog and woman are
victims but display a complicity in their own abuse (208). The bare facts of
the plot, however, point to important differences in Nancy’s and Bull’s-
eye’s relationship to Sikes. Nancy’s self-destructive loyalty becomes evident
as she refuses to leave Sikes despite his brutal treatment. As a semi-purpose-
ful agent, albeit in uneven alliance with humans, Bull’s-eye, unlike Nancy,
escapes death at Sikes’s hand just as he had succeeded in doing when
attacked by Sikes at the Three Cripples.
The idea of a dog leaping to his death from a considerable height none-
theless seems excessive even by the standards of melodrama, especially
120 J. McDONELL
considering that Bull’s-eye has witnessed Nancy’s murder, trodden in her

blood, cowers in fear at Sikes’s blows, and only narrowly escapes Sikes’s
attempt to drown him. It is as if Bull’s-eye’s highly stylized death had been
conceived for the stage, as a parody of moralistic Victorian stories about
dogs remaining loyal to their masters even after death. In a structure that
relies heavily on the externals of dialogue, description, and the narrator’s
often satirical mediating voice, Bull’s-eye’s suicidal leap for Sikes’s
shoulders, which is narrated as if from the perspective of the spectatorial
crowd gathered below, reads like a performance of loyalty. Bull’s-eye’s
melodramatic death may have recalled to contemporary readers popular
dog dramas of the era such as The Dog of Montargis (1814) by René
Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, which “ran uninterrupted in repertory
for twenty years” (Sternling n.d., 2). Sadler’s Wells Theatre even had a
stage water tank that could accommodate dogs leaping into water to save
drowning children and women.20 Dickens’s enthusiasm for all manner of
spectacle and entertainment is well known, and he appears to have been
familiar with The Dog of Montargis, as suggested by a reference to the play in
“Our School” (Dickens 1851, 156). Dickens’s quip that he could not “rate
high, the thespian talents of an ineptly trained stage dog” further suggests a
familiarity with performing animals on the Victorian stage (Dickens
1947, 98). In a seriocomic moment in Chapter 39, Charley Bates alludes
to precisely this kind of theatrical performance when he declares of Bull’s-
eye: “He’d make his fortun’ on the stage that dog would, and rewive the
drayma besides” (260). In this sense, animality is created, produced, and
performed.
Writing of Dickens’s Great Expectations, Ivan Kreilkamp (2007) states
that animals are “the sub proletariat of the novel” and lack “the robustness
of ideality and agency” in the novel’s diegesis (82). Kreilkamp argues that pet
characters “embody minorness” in both narrative and generic terms in
Victorian fiction at a time when bourgeois pet-keeping was on the increase.21
That Bull’s-eye is more often than not referred to as “the dog” and “his dog”
rather than by his proper name (cf. Gray 2014, 102), taken together with his
function in the novel as a metonymic animal, tends to support this argument.
Bull’s-eye, though, seems to be doing more than skulking in the corners of
the plot. At the simplest level of plot and action, he attacks Sikes, resists
drowning by his master, finds his way to Jacob’s Island, and leaps to his death
rather than be destroyed by Sikes’s hand (as is Nancy) or by the State (as is
Fagin). In this sense, Bull’s-eye can be read as embodying an agency that
cannot be fully accommodated within the confines of allegory.
This agency may be thought of as a kind of feral eruption in the sense

used by Philip Armstrong (2008) to refer to forms of animal resistance to
“modernity’s attempts at civilization, domestication, captivation or manip-
ulation” (227).22 While Bull’s-eye is not “wild” in the traditional sense of
the word “feral,” he takes a number of actions which refuse manipulation
and captivity. His dramatic, suicidal death and his status as a criminal–animal
refuses human orderings, including spatial ones, and transgresses Victorian
notions of the middle-class home as the proper place for domesticated
animals. Mobilizing a concept of animal agency need not imply “assump-
tions about what specifically constitutes animal subjectivity and interiority,
nor does it necessarily mean that an animal consciously wills any specific
change in the narrative” (Burt 2002, 31). Indeed, the conventional under-
standing of agency as a capacity to effect change which combines rational
thought with conscious intention itself derives from an anthropocentric
paradigm of enlightenment humanism wherein these traits came to define
the human.23 Any attempt to take seriously a “more-than-human” agency
must begin with the recognition that nature and animals are not passive in
relation to humans. Writing of animal representation, Chris Philo and Chris
Wilbert (2000) suggest that we need to move beyond seeing animals as
“merely passive surfaces on to which human groups inscribe and project
human imaginings and orderings of all kinds” and attend instead to “the
practices that are enfolded into the making of representations.” They
emphasize that “[t]his question duly raises broader concerns about nonhu-
man agency, about the agency of animals, and the extent to which we can
say that animals destabilise, transgress or even resist our human orderings
including spatial ones” (5).24
While there is not the space here to rehearse, in full, the range of
positions on nonhuman agency, suffice it to say that there are strong
historical and practical reasons for decoupling “being a subject” from
“being an agent,” not least because the notion of agency in literature
still conveys the classic understanding of agency as rational, intentional,
and premeditated. As such, agency is a conception that is deeply
embedded in humanist and Christian conceptions of human exceptional-
ism. I am guided in my reading of animal and human entanglement in
Dickens’s work by Vinciane Despret’s (2013) brilliant explication of inter-
agency and agencement. Reading Darwin’s representation of the recipro-
city between orchids and their animal pollinators through Gilles Deleuze’s
reading of Jakob von Uexküll’s 1934 study, A Foray into the Worlds
of Animals and Humans, Despret recovers and develops the term
122 J. McDONELL
agencement to name the rapport of forces that produces agency (29–44).25

Despret uses the example of animal resistance:
I would suggest that an animal resisting indeed appears as the very subject of
the action, but it is not the same process by which he/she becomes an agent.
“Agenting” (as well as “acting”) is a relational verb that connects and
articulates narratives (and needs articulations), beings of different species,
things and contexts. There is no agency that is not interagency. There is no
agency without agencement, a rapport of forces . . . (44)
The London of Oliver Twist, with all its noise, dirt, and danger, can be
understood as an interdependent network of objects, animals, and humans
responding to the exigencies of environment and the pressures of conflict-
ing agencies. We need only think of Dickens’s stylistic habit of animating
non-living things which threaten to govern the lives of their owners to lay
to rest the conventional definition of agency based on the subjective
experience of autonomous intention.
Dickens’s characterization of Bull’s-eye suggests that the idea of human
and animal continuity, as spectacularly illustrated later in the century in
Darwin’s (1872) The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, was
already well underway by the 1830s.26 As an animal victim, the character
of Bull’s-eye draws attention to the precarious existence of animals in the
city, and brings into focus not only the suffering experienced by creatures
caught deep within scenes of exploitation but also the fragile status of the
human. In the “unnatural history” of human and animal entanglement and
co-constitution that is the world of Oliver Twist, Dickens’s depiction of
Bull’s-eye offers a fleeting opportunity of reading a literary animal as more
than simply a surrogate for human concerns. Framed within Victorian
discourses of animality, Bull’s-eye emerges as an animal agent who reveals
through interagency the paradoxical mix of care, indifference, and violence
that characterized relationships between humans and animals in a pre-
Darwinian society already uneasy about the distinct nature of humanity.
NOTES
1. On the relation between natural science and political economy, see Young
(1969) and Ledger (2007).
2. Oliver Twist (Dickens 1966); subsequent parenthetical references will refer
to this edition.
3. I am thinking here of Anat Pick’s (2011) deployment of the term “creaturely”

to describe critical practices and poetics that are attentive to “the material,
temporal, and vulnerable,” to the bodily and embodied (5).
4. Discussing how changes in Western etiquette reveal a pattern whereby the
“civilizing process” involves the concealment and distancing of different
bodily functions, see Norbert (1994, 102).
5. For a detailed discussion of cannibalism see Carey (1973, 22–24) and Stone
(1994).
6. See Agamben (1998, 64). On the classed dimension of gluttony and hunger
in Oliver Twist, see Houston (1994, 15–37).
7. On Dickens’s anti-Semitic stereotyping of Fagin, see Baumgarten
(1996), Grossman (1996), Meyer (2005, 239–240, 244–246), and
Sicher (2002).
8. The literature devoted to an interrogation of the human/animal dualism is
now vast. See Derrida (2005). On intersectionality see Adams (1994),
Haraway (1989), Kappeler (1995), Plumwood (1993), and Kim (2010).
For an overview of the recent development of animal studies across disci-
plines, see Weil (2012) and Wolfe (2003b), (2009).
9. For a discussion of Nancy in relation to Bull’s-eye, and animal discourse
more generally, see Moore (2007) and Surridge (2005, 37–43).
10. See Gray (2014, 107).
11. On the use of dogs on stage in the nineteenth century, see Altick (1978,
311), Schlicke (1985, 57), and Dobson (2000, 120–124). On melodrama
and the Newgate novels see John (2001).
12. See Zlotnick (2006).
13. See Garber (1996, 166–169).
14. Oliver Twist was published in monthly parts, beginning in February 1837
and concluding in April 1839 and overlapping for nine months with the
serial publication of the Pickwick Papers. The serialization of Oliver Twist,
and the fact that the serialization was interrupted three times, first by the
death of Dickens’s sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth, then by tense negotiations
with his publisher, Bentley’s Miscellany, may account for the inconsistencies
in Dickens’s description of the dog. On the publication history see Slater
(2011, 104–111).
15. Meisha Rosenberg (2011) notes that American pit bulls are routinely asso-
ciated with African American men in contemporary US culture (113). On
the intersection of race and breed in the case of Bandit, a dog of indetermi-
nate breed who was labeled a “pit bull” and sentenced to death in 1987 for
being naturally vicious, see Hearne (2002).
16. Caius’s (2005) identification of breeds and their roles shows as Marjorie
Garber (1996) has observed that “the society of dogs could be seen as a
model for the society of humans in the English Renaissance” (167).
124 J. McDONELL
17. On dogs as boundary-breakers between animal and human, wild and

domestic, nature and culture, see Leach (1966, 322–342) and Fudge
(2008, 8, 17–18).
18. The social meaning of breed hierarchies is evident in the work of Sir Edwin
Landseer, the most popular animal painter of the nineteenth century, parti-
cularly his Windsor Castle in Modern Times (1841–1845), widely repro-
duced in the period, which depicts Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, and the
young Princess Victoria with their pure-bred dogs Eos, Islay, Cairnach, and
Dandie Dinmont.
19. Because of its semantic field the word “pet” is a problematic term. Keith
Thomas (1983) identifies three characteristics of the pet in England
between 1400 and 1800: it was allowed in the house, it was given an
individual name, and it was not eaten (112). The word is used here in the
literal sense of a domesticated animal kept as a favorite.
20. A former butcher’s dog, Carlo, who starred in a dog melodrama entitled The
Caravan or the Driver and his Dog, became a celebrity by this method (Haill
n.d.) See also Donald (2007, 136).
21. On pet-keeping, see Howell (2015), Kete (1994), and Ritvo (1987).
22. Armstrong (2008) discusses ferity (the state or quality of being feral) in a range
of texts including Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver
Travels, and Sinclair Lewis’s The Jungle (34–38, 134–137, 189–200).
23. See Armstrong’s (2008) discussion of agency (3). For a detailed discussion
of nonhuman agency in relation to place and space, see Philo and Wilbert
(2000, 5).
24. Cross-species entanglement can be understood as constituted “intra- and
interaction” (Haraway 1989, 4) and as a network of differentiated agents
within a notion of interactional constitution (Latour 2014, 15).
25. Deleuze had developed von Uexküll’s notion of umwelt, which allows for
animal “point of view,” that is, how an animal perceives according to what
has meaning in its own world. See Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 260, 321)
and von Uexküll (1934), cited in Despret (2013, 31, 37).
26. In The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals, Darwin (1872)
implied that animals not only shared emotions with humans, but also the
physical means of expressing them.
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Jennifer McDonell is Senior Lecturer in English and Deputy Head of the School
of the Arts at the University of New England (Armindale, Australia). A specialist in
Victorian Literature and Culture, contemporary critical theory and practice, and
twentieth-century literature, she has published several articles on animal studies,
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Victorian Literature. She has also published on Robert Browning, including the
Introduction to his Complete Poetical Works (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012).
CHAPTER 7
Performing Animals/Performing Humanity
Antonia Losano
The theatrical display of trained animals has a long history which Victorian
commentators were eager to trace, if only to laud the progress that had
been made in their own era. In an article on “Wild Beast Shows—Small
and Great” published in 1898 in The Speaker, the author comments:
There are many allusions in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists which

show that by the sixteenth century considerable progress had been made
in training animals for public exhibition; their accomplishments seem to
have been the attraction rather than the animals themselves. The tricks of
Banks’s horse, which picked out the greatest rogue in the company, and the
performances of that “well-educated” ape . . . no doubt seemed wonderful
enough to those who witnessed them, though they would excite small
surprise to-day in a penny side-show. (783)
The Victorian era might have seen an improvement in training techniques; it

certainly saw no decrease in public interest in such performances. In the same
article from The Speaker, the writer insists that “there is probably no kind of
exhibition which has greater attractions for the general public than the
A. Losano (*)
Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, USA
e-mail: alosano@middlebury.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_7
130 A. LOSANO
menagerie, using that term to include not only collections of animals in

captivity, but also trained animals” (783). Periodical press articles attest to
this Victorian craze for full-scale performing animal shows, or even for brief
skits involving performing animals within varied theatrical performances. S. L.
Bensusan writes in 1896, “During the past few years the public has developed
a marked liking for the performances of trained animals. In consequence of
the interest displayed, the managers of variety theatres all over Europe have
made the performing animal ‘turn’ a feature of their programme” (25).
Similarly, an article on trained animals in Wallace’s Monthly from 1885 begins,
“During the past year or so there appears been something akin to a fashion-
able craze for performing animals” (“Some Performing Animals 1885,” 358).
Why such popularity? Why did a dog tap-dancing with a cane, or a bear
sitting down to high tea in a top hat and tails, or a tight-rope-walking horse so
captivate Victorian audiences? Significantly, in all these periodical articles, it is
the performance of human actions by animals which garners the most praise.
Harriet Ritvo (1987) tells us that orangutans and chimpanzees were regularly
on display in Victorian England: “They ate with table utensils, supped tea from
cups, and slept under blankets. One orangutan displayed in London’s Exeter
Change Menagerie amused itself by carefully turning the pages of an illu-
strated book. At the Regent’s Park Zoo a chimpanzee named Jenny regularly
appeared in a flannel nightgown and robe” (31). E. A. Brayley Hodgetts
(a name to make Matthew Arnold shudder) records similar phenomena in an
1884 article on a performing animal exhibition:
The “Clown” elephant recently seen in London was peculiarly odd and
quaint in its movements, and the twinkle of mischief that beamed from its
eyes, when it took the chair from under its trainer and then sat down at table
and rang for more muffins, was ludicrous in the extreme . . .
The Siberian bears are really beautiful to look at. They have the most
lovely coats, the most happy faces, and the most ungainly walk. To see them
standing on a swing and “talking” to their master is really killing fun. The
way they will sit down at a table and drink stout out of bottles is an edifying
sight for any total abstainer to see. But perhaps the climax of comicality is
reached when one of these unwieldy creatures has a lady’s straw hat tied to
his head and walks round the stage on M. Permane’s arm, trying hard to kiss
him all the time, and waddling about with all the gracefulness of any mature
maiden lady of uncertain age among my acquaintances.
Perhaps the most amusing monkey is Clown Ruffin’s jockey-monkey,
who rides the porcine wonder. The way that monkey sticks on to the little
pig’s back, while the latter keeps squeaking as though it was being murdered,
7 PERFORMING ANIMALS/PERFORMING HUMANITY 131
and jumps over miniature fences, is a sight for the gods. Occasionally the
jockey falls off, but he gets on again in a jiffy, and the pig continues squeaking
and jumping as if for its very life. (Hodgetts 1894, 610; italics added)
Note the scattered words which suggest that these elephants, bears, and
monkeys aren’t quite up to the task of performing humanity (technically
the pig is being asked to imitate a horse, but isn’t fully successful either). Is
it this discrepancy which makes this a “sight for the gods”? Is it more
amusing to watch a monkey riding a squealing pig, or a bear drinking beer,
if they do it perfectly, or if they do it poorly? Periodical press articles from
the period seem to suggest that performing animals may bring pleasure
not only because we take pride in our ability to train the “lesser” species,
but also because they bring welcome assurance of the inherent superiority
of humanness as we compel nonhuman creatures to execute human beha-
viors at our direction, and significantly not quite as well as humans do. If a
bear can be trained by a human to act precisely like a human, this
destabilizes our position of superiority—after all, if a bear can do it, how
special are humans after all? What is key in these periodical reports, it
becomes clear, is the need for animals to both be and not be human; to be
trainable, but to always fall short of the mark of perfect humanity.
Most Victorian commentators were fascinated by the performances
because of what they could prove about human intelligence as trainers;
fewer were interested (as spectators often are today, as in the case of trained
dolphins or orcas) in what this might say about animal intelligence. Hodgetts
(1894) begins his article with this laudatory statement: “Charles James Fox
defined genius as ‘an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ If this be a true
definition, we must accord to the trainers of animals a front place among the
geniuses of the world. There is assuredly no profession in which more patience
and painstaking work are required” (609). Hodgetts finds performing animals
entertaining and impressive—but impressive not because animals have such
unusual talent but rather because such performances prove that humans
possess the power to manipulate and train animals. In this article, as in so
much of the discourse on performing animals, the discussion becomes an
allegory of the fantasy of human perfectibility. We have evolved so far as
humans, these writers suggest, that we are even able to train animals better
than our ancestors. According to Hodgetts,
The most remarkable of animal trainers is, without doubt, Professor Bonetti,
whose troupe of educated foxes, geese, ducks, fowls, ravens, and dogs are
132 A. LOSANO
marvelous. His foxes jump over hurdles and through hoops, they jump over
ducks and fowls, they feed with these birds, whom it is their nature to feed
on, and they run about the arena with fox-hounds, whom they usually run
away from. . . .
Professor Collin’s bull is another instance of the triumph of mind over
brute force. It is beautiful to see this handsome and noble animal perform-
ing the tricks his trainer has taught him, the most sensational of which, no
doubt, is that of supporting the Professor on his head, while he is standing
with his four hoofs planted on a barrel. (614)
The pleasure here seems to be in perverting the nature of the beast, which
serves to consolidate the superiority of humanity, particularly in a
post-Darwinian world: because humans can train animals out of their
normal behavior and into human behavior, we can, as Hodgetts writes,
“triumph . . . over brute force.” Additionally, human behavior becomes the
gold standard by which all other creatures are measured. (It is on a
spectrum perhaps with Dr Moreau’s pleasure in surgically removing the
beast-like qualities of animals and replacing them with qualities borrowed
from humans.)
Hodgetts seems blissfully unaware of the irony of the phrase “tak-
ing pains,” which in his opening line he quotes from Fox, and the
compound word “painstaking” which he uses himself in the following
sentence. For “taking pains”—the pains of animals, that is—was pre-
cisely what critics of performing animal shows believed to be proble-
matic about the training of animals—that it required cruelty to
prepare animals for public display. Hodgetts insists that trainers are
merely “severe” rather than cruel, but goes on to justify what sounds
very much like cruelty (hitting bears, for example), and even bemoans,
“If cats are too obstinate to stand punishment, elephants are too big.
How are elephants to be punished?” (614). Other writers offer similar
opinions, insisting that severe treatment is both necessary and ethically
acceptable; one article in The Speaker claims that “the performer,
whose bread depends upon his success, must have recourse to strong
measures. The question is at once raised, Who is master, the man or
the beast? So long as the trainer retains the whip hand, and can
compel obedience by punishment, all will go well; but as soon as his
authority is questioned, trouble and danger begin” (“The Perils of Wild
Beast Training” 1899, 685). This writer’s rhetorical question—“Who
is master?”—suggests that what is at issue is more than an ethical
debate over cruelty to animals; what is at issue, as we shall see again and
again, is the tenuous superiority of humans over nonhuman animals.
Periodical press articles from detractors, on the other hand, consistently
bemoan the ill-treatment performing animals receive during their training
and throughout their performing careers. The site of cruelty is made all the
more insidious because it is always “elsewhere”—off stage, or out of the
country entirely. S. L. Bensusan (1896) insists that trainers of performing
animals
come before the footlights smiling and bowing, now and again caressing
their victims, but woe to the one that makes a mistake! Stripes and starva-
tion are the mildest forms of punishment; mutilation is not unheard of.
Look carefully at the proprietor of the dogs that leap all round him in an
agony of excitement and terror, which you, my good Sir or kind Madam,
mistake for joy and friskiness; look carefully and you will see him hit or kick
the nearest animal ever so slyly, you will see him raise his whip to indicate
what is to happen when the performance is over, you will see his cruel eyes
sparkling with anger while the showman’s chronic smile never leaves his
face. (29)
Bensusan continues with an appeal to British pride: “The demand for

trained animals has led to the establishment of houses on the
Continent where they are broken in and trained. With the horrors
that take place there we have nothing to do; the average foreigner has
no soft place in his heart for brute creation. In Southern France,
Spain, Portugal, and Italy sights that would make an Englishman ill
pass unnoticed” (25).
Bensusan’s lengthy and explicit details of cruelty are designed to create
sympathy and outrage, and have much in common with fin de siècle
arguments against vivisection. Yet for all the concern over cruelty to
performing animals, the debates around these animals have a different
ethical tenor than those accompanying the anti-vivisection movement,
which has been widely discussed by recent Animal Studies scholars.
Certainly some of the arguments are familiar, but the vivisected “brown
terrier dog” who became the mascot for Cobbe’s Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals becomes, in the debates around per-
forming animals, a living and overly sentient analog capable of drinking
tea; gone are the easy claims to utility and scientific progress which so
often strengthened the pro-vivisection discourse.
134 A. LOSANO
Another field of Victorian studies pertinent here is that subfield one

might call Zoo Studies, the hybrid offspring of Museum Studies and
Animal Studies exemplified by the writings of Nigel Rothfels, whose
work deals with questions of pleasure and spectacle as well as ethics. Yet
the discourse surrounding performing animals differs in one crucial way
from most of what one finds in discussions of zoo animals: the philoso-
phical question of the boundary between human and animal tends to be
infinitely more fragile and permeable when the subject of performing
animals is raised. As Rothfels (2008) writes, zoos—even of the modern
“Hagenbeck” design—are for humans, not for animals, and humans are
separated from animals by more or less visible barricades (12). Animals in
zoos are expected to be animals, and are of interest to the zoo-going
public precisely because they are being animals—doing what animals
might do “naturally” but now doing it for our edification and enjoyment.
Performing animals have been trained to be something “unnatural.”
The ethics of performing animals is different from discussions of the
ethics of zoos or vivisection because proponents of animal performance by
and large have only public entertainment to advance as a justification for
its existence, whereas zoos could and did make a case for public education
and species preservation, and proponents of vivisection could claim scien-
tific advancement. F. G. Aflalo, writing in 1900, asks:
Wherein lie the advantages of these shows in general, advantages sufficient

to compensate the risk to the performer and the possible cruelty to the
beast? . . . It is not too much to assume that the abstemious lion, the boxing
kangaroo, the dove firing a toy cannon and the monkey leaping through a
flaming hoop are not the products of an education wholly untempered by an
extreme rigour that it would be difficult to distinguish from cruelty. The
biggest charge against performing animal shows is their absolute uselessness
from any and every point of view. (3; italics added)
One proponent of the practice of wild animal training attempts to offer

this justification:
It must be admitted that performances which evidence the mastery of

man over the lower animals give considerable pleasure to large numbers
of people. Moreover they serve one distinctly useful purpose in keeping
up a class of men who, to a greater or less degree, know how to break and
train animals. And their skill in training animals for the entertainment of
man might well be utilised for breaking and training them for his service.
The man who can handle a lion or a leopard ought to have no difficulty
with a horse or a dog. (“The Perils of Wild Beast Training” 1899, 856)
Justifying animal training as a translatable skill (from lion to dog) seems

specious at best, especially given the article’s earlier claim, quoted above,
that severe training techniques are justifiable given the nature of the beasts
in question. If the whip is a standard and necessary part of a trainer’s tool
box when dealing with a lion, how will this help when the animal in
question is a dog?
Recent work on Victorian anti-vivisection—such as Jed Mayer’s (2009)
and others influenced by the rise of Critical Human/Animal Studies—has
focused on the way in which anti-vivisection discourses made visible and
subsequently challenged the anthropocentric bias inherent in proponents
of animal experimentation. Oddly enough, such challenges to anthropo-
centrism are often reversed in the debates over performing animals;
Victorian detractors of the practice urge essentially that we should “let
animals be animals” rather than that we should think of them as our equals
and extend empathy for their suffering. The problem is less cruelty to
animals than the transformation of animals into something they are not.
One such moment of impersonation forced Bensusan (1896) to bemoan
the fact that,
The spectacle of a bear drinking ale from a bottle cannot be attractive to the
well-balanced mind . . . The fact that thousands are to be found who laugh
till their sides ache at the picture of the poor beast degraded to the antics of
his keepers is not so much a compliment to the enlightenment of the race as,
unfortunately, a guarantee that these shows will endure. (26; italics added)
For Bensusan, humans only find it amusing when animals perform human
actions culturally designated as “low” or “degraded” as Bensusan terms
it—the story might be different, for example, were the bear or the pig to
stand and recite Greek philosophy. Victorian audiences laugh as the bear
pretends to be a human—but preferably a rather bearish human, in order
that the humans can be reassured where true humanity lies: not in the bear
but in themselves.
Charles Dickens was one of the many Victorian voices highly critical of
the public display of trained animals, well before the “craze” which hit at
the end of the nineteenth century. In his essay “Horse-Taming” in
Household Words, Dickens (1858) writes, “Circus training has always had
136 A. LOSANO
the idea of cruelty connected with it.” (82). Horse-breaking itself, sug-
gests the article, is a mixture of luck, mild to serious cruelty, and persever-
ance, with only a small portion of true understanding of animal nature.
Only the horse-breaker Mr Rarey, whom Dickens discusses at length in
the article, is described as having “a natural knack and love for horses”
(84), but Dickens concludes that this is not a skill that can be passed on or
shared with others. In other words, the ability to train an animal is not a
general human skill, but an individual human characteristic. Dickens
explicitly states several times in his periodical writings that not all animals
can be trained (he discusses a zebra, for example, which knocked down all
walls erected to restrain him, and numerous horses that remained vicious
no matter how they were treated), but implicit in these articles, and in The
Old Curiosity Shop as we shall see, is the far more complicated assertion
that not all humans can train animals.
The Old Curiosity Shop offers us a fascinating glimpse into Dickens’s
theories of animals and animal training, well before Darwin, the anti-
vivisection movement, or the large-scale agitation for animal rights.
While animals and to a much greater extent animal imagery are prevalent
in most of Dickens’s fictional works, performing animals are relatively rare;
in The Old Curiosity Shop we see considerably more focused attention on
trained animals and, of equal importance, the training of animals. Most of
the animals mentioned specifically by name or otherwise in Dickens’s
other novels are domestic pets, most commonly dogs (Dora’s Jip, Sikes’s
Bull’s Eye, Henry Gowan’s Lion, to name only a few). Merrylegs in Hard
Times (Dickens [1854] 2010), published over a decade after The Old
Curiosity Shop, is one of the only other performing animals mentioned
by Dickens, and is distinguished by the repeated epithet “highly trained.”
But Merrylegs also distinguishes himself by not actually ever being present
in Hard Times (Dickens 2010)—he is introduced as being so well trained
that he doesn’t bark when Sissy returns home, when in fact he isn’t barking
because he isn’t there. He appears, so to speak, only to not be present; at the
novel’s end he “appears” again, except that he doesn’t appear because he’s
already dead. Merrylegs functions in part as a parallel for Sissy, whose
devotion to those who treat her badly mirrors Merrylegs’s own immediate
forgiveness of his master even after Jupe has beaten the dog bloody.
Merrylegs appears (or doesn’t appear) as an already trained animal; we
are not told any details of his training or even much about what precisely
he was trained to do—a curious absence perhaps (as curious as the dog’s
absence itself) in a novel so clearly focused on training and education.
But what we don’t get in Hard Times we do find in The Old Curiosity Shop;
the novel offers a reading of human–animal interactions which repeatedly
looks at the ways in which humans attempt to domesticate and discipline
animals for our own ends, and what these attempts might say about
human species insecurity and the human need to distance ourselves from
the animal kingdom, even in the decades before Darwin. Harriet Ritvo
(1987), Christine Kenyon-Jones (2001), Kathleen Kete (2008), Ivan
Kreilkamp (2007), and others have argued that the nineteenth century
saw an increasing belief in the similarities between humans and animals,
even before the groundbreaking work of Darwin put such ideas squarely in
the public eye. The editors of the seminal collection Victorian Animal
Dreams maintain that the Victorian era was a time of “growing belief in
animal subjectivity” (Morse and Danahay 2007, 1), and remind us that the
period saw the founding of the RSPCA, the rise of the anti-vivisection
movement, and the passage of numerous laws for the prevention of cruelty
to animals.
Kreilkamp (2007) has argued more specifically that Dickens’s repeated
use of animal imagery and tropes to delineate human character suggests
that Dickens was fully on board with the idea that animals and humans
were profoundly similar and used animal imagery—involving the dog in
particular—to negotiate issues of human identity:
Dickens . . . associates [the] 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
[Great Expectations] to lack a narrative, to fail to take hold within others’
language and memories, to lose all solid form . . . 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. . . . Their identity and ethical status are fundamentally
unstable and dependent, in a manner that Dickens’s novel powerfully
evokes. (81)
To be a dog in The Old Curiosity Shop carries similar metonymic weight

but, I will argue, generates rather different philosophical statements about
the nature of human identity. To be a dog—at least one of Jerry’s—does
mean one has solid weight and a narrative, but that narrative is severely
constrained and conscripted: it is a narrative of pure abjection and species
perversion. And to be a horse in The Old Curiosity Shop is a different
matter entirely, as we shall see.
138 A. LOSANO
Jerry’s troupe of performing dogs in The Old Curiosity Shop gets a bit
more show time than Merrylegs, perhaps, but also serve a similar purpose;
they appear in order to compound and intensify narrative concerns already
on the table. Jerry’s dogs are a prime example of what the periodical
writers articulated—the comfort in not-quite-humanness, our control
over nearly sentient beasts. When the dogs come into the Jolly Sandboys
public house in Chapter 18 of The Old Curiosity Shop, they come in on two
legs, looking much like human visitors might:
Nor was this [walking on two legs] the only remarkable circumstance about
these dogs, for each of them wore a kind of little coat of some gaudy colour
trimmed with tarnished spangles, and one of them had a cap upon his head,
tied very carefully under his chin, which had fallen down upon his nose and
completely obscured one eye; add to this, that the gaudy coats were all wet
through and discoloured with rain, and that the wearers were splashed and
dirty, and some idea may be formed of the unusual appearance of these new
visitors to the Jolly Sandboys. (Dickens 2000, 146; hereafter cited parenthe-
tically by page number in the text)
When Jerry himself enters after his dogs, however, “they all dropped down
at once and walked about the room in their natural manner.” The pre-
sence of their master, the man who has trained them to perform humanity,
initiates their reversion to animality. But neither state (human or animal)
can escape the taint of the other. Dickens writes, “This posture [on all
fours] it must be confessed did not much improve their appearance, as
their own personal tails and their coat tails—both capital things in their
way—did not agree together” (146).
In language particularly suggestive of the blurring of the human/
animal divide, the owner of a traveling Punch show, Short, then asks Jerry:
‘Your people don’t usually travel in character, do they?’ said Short, pointing
to the dresses of the dogs. ‘It must come expensive if they do?’
‘No,’ replied Jerry, ‘no, it’s not the custom with us. But we’ve been
playing a little on the road to-day, and we come out with a new wardrobe at
the races, so I didn’t think it worth while to stop to undress. Down, Pedro!’
This was addressed to the dog with the cap on, who being a new member
of the company, and not quite certain of his duty, kept his unobscured eye
anxiously on his master, and was perpetually starting upon his hind legs
when there was no occasion, and falling down again.
Pedro, the “new member,” has not yet ascertained when to be fully
canine, and when to perform humanity. (His confusion is understandable.
Anyone who has a domestic dog with even a modicum of training knows
that it is often harder to teach a dog to stop trying to shake hands than it
was to teach him to shake in the first place.) Pedro, who would have been
accustomed to receiving rewards for standing up like a human, must now
be ordered (with the threat of violence) to sit down.
Jerry’s treatment of one dog who has failed in some aspect of the day’s
performance (we are not told precisely what) is clearly meant to pull at our
heartstrings even while it makes us laugh. The scene continues:
At length the dish was lifted on the table, and mugs of ale having been
previously set round, little Nell ventured to say grace, and supper began. At
this juncture the poor dogs were standing on their hind legs quite surpris-
ingly; the child, having pity on them, was about to cast some morsels of food
to them before she tasted it herself, hungry though she was, when their
master interposed.
‘No, my dear, no, not an atom from anybody’s hand but mine if you
please. That dog,’ said Jerry, pointing out the old leader of the troop, and
speaking in a terrible voice, ‘lost a halfpenny to-day. He goes without his
supper.’
The unfortunate creature dropped upon his fore-legs directly, wagged his
tail, and looked imploringly at his master.
‘You must be more careful, Sir,’ said Jerry, walking coolly to the chair
where he had placed the organ, and setting the stop. ‘Come here. Now, Sir,
you play away at that, while we have supper, and leave off if you dare.’
The dog immediately began to grind most mournful music. His master
having shown him the whip resumed his seat and called up the others, who,
at his directions, formed in a row, standing upright as a file of soldiers.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ said Jerry, looking at them attentively. ‘The dog
whose name’s called, eats. The dogs whose names an’t called, keep quiet.
Carlo!’
The lucky individual whose name was called, snapped up the morsel
thrown towards him, but none of the others moved a muscle. In this manner
they were fed at the discretion of their master. Meanwhile the dog in
disgrace ground hard at the organ, sometimes in quick time, sometimes in
slow, but never leaving off for an instant. When the knives and forks rattled
very much, or any of his fellows got an unusually large piece of fat, he
accompanied the music with a short howl, but he immediately checked it on
his master looking round, and applied himself with increased diligence to
the Old Hundredth. (148)
140 A. LOSANO
Dickens plays up the negative aspects of animal training here and indeed
throughout The Old Curiosity Shop, even though in his periodical writings
he admits that the practice of training performing animals is a combination
of techniques. In a discussion of a trained monkey demonstration, Dickens
(1867) writes, “Here, there has been a mixture of petting and blows. At
any failure, we noticed that poor Jacko looked frightened, and received a
sly cut of the whip; after a successful feat, he had a title sweetmeat from the
pocket of the master of the ring” (105).
If Jerry’s dogs serve as evidence of the unethical human exploitation of
what we might call the “to-be-trained-ness” of animals, drawing parallels
to Quilp’s treatment of his wife and others, the Garland’s pony Whisker
offers a contrasting example with liberatory potential. The representation
of the pony demonstrates Dickens’s commitment to a particular kind of
animal rights—that which ensures an animal freedom from being trained.
Whisker is not a performing animal according to the human conception of
the term; he has not been trained to do what humans want for their use or
their amusement. He is, however, an animal who performs for his own
amusement, and that of the reader. We first meet the pony in Chapter 14,
after Kit has been looking dejectedly at Nell’s empty house:
There approached towards him a little clattering jingling four-wheeled

chaise, drawn by a little obstinate-looking rough-coated pony, and driven
by a little fat placid-faced old gentleman. Beside the little old gentleman sat a
little old lady, plump and placid like himself, and the pony was coming along
at his own pace and doing exactly as he pleased with the whole concern. If
the old gentleman remonstrated by shaking the reins, the pony replied by
shaking his head. It was plain that the utmost the pony would consent to do,
was to go in his own way up any street that the old gentleman particularly
wished to traverse, but that it was an understanding between them that he
must do this after his own fashion or not at all. (115)
Throughout The Old Curiosity Shop Dickens explores the nature of auton-
omy in its most literal meaning: self-rule. Here the pony exhibits an
extreme version of autonomy, save in his relationship to Kit, who exercises
some measure of control over the obstinate animal. But “obstinate” is a
human word, a human criticism of animal or human nature; from
Whisker’s perspective, it might be argued, he is simply participating in
the Garland family as an equal partner, with the right to his opinions and
some freedom of movement and decision-making. Significantly, Dickens
introduces the pony just before Mr Abel signs Kit’s articles, papers which
will put him “in harness” to the social order. Whisker offers an animal
antithesis, a rebelliousness Kit cannot himself express.
We meet Whisker again many chapters later, after Kit’s ability to con-
vince the recalcitrant pony to go (occasionally) where he is ordered has
endeared him to the Garland family. But in fact this is not Kit’s talent at
all. Dickens may tell us that the pony was in Kit’s hands “the meekest and
most tractable of animals,” but this sentimental notion is undercut in the
same paragraph when Dickens insists “even under the guidance of his
[Whisker’s] favorite, he would sometimes perform a great variety of
strange freaks and capers . . . but . . . Kit always represented that this was
only his fun, or a way he had of showing his attachment to his employers”
(290). In other words, Whisker is not meek and tractable, even for Kit.
Rather, Kit has the verbal ability to interpret the pony’s independent
actions such that they are (it seems clear) misread as evidence of “proper”
horse behavior, palatable to a subset of the kinder humans. Other char-
acters demonstrate a different reaction to the horse’s autonomy: upon
seeing the pony, Mr Chuckster “cried ‘Woa-a-a-a-a’—dwelling upon the
note a long time, for the purpose of striking terror into the pony’s heart,
and asserting the supremacy of man over the inferior animals” (290). It is
clear that Kit is to be included in that category of “inferior animals,” as
Chuckster upbraids Kit for asking questions, and then remarks, “If that
pony was mine, I’d break him” (291; italics in original). He abuses the
animal a bit by pulling on his ears and later in the chapter “mentioned as a
general truth that it was expedient to break the heads of Snobs [his term of
insult for Kit], and to tweak their noses” (294), again drawing an implicit
connection between the pony and Kit. Both need “breaking” and “tweak-
ing” to prove Chuckster’s superiority.
Chuckster does not suffer the fate of Bentley Drummle from Great
Expectations (who is killed by a kick from a horse he has mistreated), but
he is humiliated by the animal nonetheless. After Kit goes inside the
notary’s office, Chuckster is left to watch Whisker, whereupon the pony
immediately runs away:
It seemed that Mr Chuckster had been standing with his hands in his
pockets looking carelessly at the pony, and occasionally insulting him with
such admonitions as ‘Stand still,’—‘Be quiet,’—‘Woa-a-a,’ and the like,
which by a pony of spirit cannot be borne. Consequently, the pony being
deterred by no considerations of duty or obedience, and not having before
142 A. LOSANO
him the slightest fear of the human eye, had at length started off, and was at
that moment rattling down the street—Mr Chuckster, with his hat off and a
pen behind his ear, hanging on in the rear of the chaise and making futile
attempts to draw it the other way, to the unspeakable admiration of all
beholders. Even in running away, however, Whisker was perverse, for he had
not gone very far when he suddenly stopped, and before assistance could be
rendered, commenced backing at nearly as quick a pace as he had gone
forward. By these means Mr Chuckster was pushed and hustled to the office
again, in a most inglorious manner, and arrived in a state of great exhaustion
and discomfiture. (295)
Mr Chuckster and Jerry are both clearly criticized—and the former

punished—by Dickens for representing the position that humans do
and more importantly should possess absolute control over animals,
that any errors of animal behavior should be met with strict punishment,
and that any autonomous action performed by an animal undermines
human dominance.
It should come as no surprise that the villain Quilp’s treatment of
animals is similarly harsh. The scene in which Quilp encounters a kenneled
dog is particularly significant in this context:
The dog tore and strained at his chain with starting eyes and furious bark,
but there the dwarf lay, snapping his fingers with gestures of defiance and
contempt. When he had sufficiently recovered from his delight, he rose, and
with his arms a-kimbo, achieved a kind of demon-dance around the kennel,
just without the limits of the chain, driving the dog quite wild. Having by
this means composed his spirits and put himself in a pleasant train, he
returned to his unsuspicious companion . . . (170)
Here Dickens gives us a performance of cross-referentiality, in which the

inhuman human Quilp performs a “demon-dance” to torture a chained
dog; by acting the animal in front of an animal, Quilp solidifies his own
sense of superior humanity. Dickens mentions numerous times the “old
doglike smile” on Quilp’s face; the phrase becomes a kind of ironic
Homeric epithet for the dwarf. That just before he dies he eats steak in a
“savage and cannibal-like manner” suggests—as do so many things in The
Old Curiosity Shop—that the fluidity of the line between humans and
animals was much on Dickens’s mind as he wrote the novel.
John Kucich (1980), in his extraordinary article on death and The Old
Curiosity Shop, has argued that Quilp functions not only as a kind of alter
ego for Dickens, but as a “parallel, rather than opposite,” to Little Nell
(65). Both are, in his words, open to death, but Quilp is a particularly
vibrant example of this:
In fact, it is because of Quilp’s devout commitment to violating limits that

the reader often applauds him . . . the main reason Quilp delights us is the
sheer gratuitousness of his hostility; he is violation for its own sake. Though
he consistently outrages conventional limitations, Quilp never acts out of a
single calculated motive . . . As motiveless as Punch in his violence, Quilp
fulfills no purpose—in fact, he defies purpose, for his exuberant inventive-
ness surpasses our expectation of the reasonable, the gainful. Guided by his
“taste for doing something fantastic and monkey-like” (Ch. ix), Quilp’s
talent for creating new situations for un-remunerative exercises of his malice
consistently takes us by surprise because it defies the normal limits of human
motives and energies . . . (65)
While the parallel between Quilp and Nell is certainly justifiable, Quilp’s
“spontaneous, infantile contempt for restrictions” (66) makes him also
surprisingly similar to the pony Whisker. Whisker’s fate makes it clear that
he does not share—allegorically speaking—the same death drive as Quilp,
but the pony does clearly exhibit the same radical autonomy and contempt
for human-given rules for horse behavior and the pony is, significantly, not
trained out of this behavior by Kit or by anyone else. At the end of the
novel, Whisker is up to the same tricks. In Chapter 65, the Marchioness
observes this scene:
There came dancing up the street, with his legs all wrong, and his head
everywhere by turns, a pony. This pony had a little phaeton behind him,
and a man in it; but neither man nor phaeton seemed to embarrass him in
the least, as he reared up on his hind legs, or stopped, or went on, or
stood still again, or backed, or went side-ways, without the smallest
reference to them—just as the fancy seized him, and as if he were the
freest animal in creation. When they came to the notary’s door, the man
called out in a very respectful manner, ‘Woa then’—intimating that if he
might venture to express a wish, it would be that they stopped there. The
pony made a moment’s pause; but, as if it occurred to him that to stop
when he was required might be to establish an inconvenient and danger-
ous precedent, he immediately started off again, rattled at a fast trot to the
street corner, wheeled round, came back, and then stopped of his own
accord. (486)
144 A. LOSANO
Whisker’s performance of autonomy is as much part of the novel’s last

word as Kit and Barbara’s embryonic love scene, at which Whisker is also
present: Kit first pets and hugs the pony, and then by an easy slippage (“It
may be that there are even better things to caress than ponies” [515])
moves to kissing Barbara. As such, the pony seems to represent both Eros
and Thanatos, or at least that part of Thanatos which involves the over-
turning of rules, species hierarchies, and carts.
Carol Adams (1995), like many Animal Studies theorists, has argued
that animals are often the “absent referent” for our humanity (38),
allowing us to solidify, however erroneously and often cruelly, our belief
in our species distinctness. Derrida (2008), alternately, sees nonhuman
animals as, on the one hand, absolutely alien, unknowable and undefin-
able—and on the other hand, intimately connected to the human,
indeed at the heart of the human. Animals serve as an outward repre-
sentation and incarnation of that which we do not and cannot know
about ourselves. What Ritvo (1987) writes about apes is perhaps more
widely applicable to many nonhuman animals; she argues that, for the
Victorians, apes “were useful to humanity” not as domestic servants or
trained actors, but rather as a “living gloss on human ascendancy” (38–
39): in other words, apes allowed humans to feel intellectually superior
to something that looked more like them than a horse or a dog. If an
ape, with appendages and mobility similar to that of a human, was
nevertheless incapable of higher philosophical thought, then there
must be something inherent in the human brain which conferred
supremacy. Similarly, Carmen Dell’Aversano (2010), in her essay “The
Love that Cannot Be Spoken: Queering the Human/Animal Bond,”
suggests that if we extend theories of queer performativity into Animal
Studies, we can argue that human identity is in part iteratively per-
formed over and across the bodies of animals: “Our humanity as well as
the animality of animals is a performance forced on unwilling actors,
kept up by what we humans do to differentiate ourselves from animals,
and by what we compel animals to do in order to keep them as radically
separate as we can from us” (16). With performing animals the dividing
line between the human and the animal is, I argue, purposely tested not
(as with other explorations of the human/animal divide, such as lan-
guage use) to suggest that humans and animals are surprisingly similar.
Performing animals are a particularly subversive test case for subverting
the dividing line such that it becomes difficult to tell which side of the
barricade belongs to whom.
If we follow Andrew McCann (2011) in reading The Old Curiosity Shop

as potentially radical allegory (rather than regressive sentimental allegory)
and shift the focus from capitalism to animals, the various animal char-
acters take on new significance. Textual animals—as any reader of Animal
Farm knows—are often overwhelmingly allegorical, and they are nearly
always bearers of meaning about humanity—but the mode in which that
meaning is made is radically and unavoidably unstable precisely because of
the nature of the human–animal connection. Are animals metaphors
(or allegories, if we consider allegory to be a species of extended meta-
phor) for human nature, or are they (as Levi-Strauss [1971], for example,
has argued) metonymic representations of humans? Metaphor and meto-
nymy are often considered to be distinct modes of thought; the former
yokes two things from different conceptual domains, drawing new con-
nections where connection has hitherto been unseen or unrecognized and
forges new links between the domains; the latter relies on existing correla-
tions between things, often within the same domain. When the rigid
human/animal divide breaks down—as it has in recent years with the
rise of Animal Studies—textual animals begin to take on metonymic rather
than metaphoric meaning.
Performing animals—in many ways more than other animals we find in
Victorian texts or the Victorian public discourse—are meaningful precisely
because they make visible the slippage between metaphoric and metony-
mic animals. The reader or the viewer initially assumes the animal will be a
metaphor for something—for the kindness or cruelty of humanity, for
example. But one discovers quickly that the animal, because of its training,
is being forced to occupy the same conceptual domain as a human (that is,
civilized educated being) and hence becomes metonymic—and arguably
in that guise more potentially meaningful as a representation of humanity.
We can see this slippage subtly at work in the periodical press articles from
the period, but much more clearly in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Carol. 1995. Woman-Battering and Harm to Animals. In Animals and
Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, ed. Carol Adams and Josephine
Donovan, 55–84. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Aflalo, F. G. 1900. The Ethics of Performing Animals. New York: Tucker.
Bensusan, S. L. 1896. The Torture of Trained Animals. English Illustrated
Magazine 15(No. 151), April, 25–30.
146 A. LOSANO
Dell’Aversano, Carmen. 2010. The Love Whose Name Cannot be Spoken:

Queering the Human Animal Bond. Journal for Critical Animal Studies
8(1/2): 73–125.
Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal that I Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise
Mallet, trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press.
Dickens, Charles. 1858. Horse-Taming. Household Words, July 10, 82–85.
———. 1867. Performing Animals. All the Year Round 17, January 26, 105–106.
———. 2000. The Old Curiosity Shop. London: Penguin.
———. 2010. Hard Times. New York: Norton.
Hodgetts, E. A. Brayley. 1894. The Training of Performing Animals. Strand
Magazine November, 609–616.
Kenyon-Jones, Christine. 2001. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic Period
Writing. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Kete, Kathleen. 2008. Introduction. In A Cultural History of Animals in the Age
of Empire, ed. Kathleen Kete. London: Bloomsbury.
Kreilkamp, Ivan. 2007. Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations. In Morse and
Danahay, 81–94.
Kucich, John. 1980. Death Worship Among the Victorians: The Old Curiosity
Shop. PMLA 95(1): 58–72.
Levi-Straus, Claude. 1971. Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham. New York: Beacon
Press.
Mayer, Jed. 2009. The Vivisection of the Snark. Victorian Poetry 47(2): 429–448.
McCann, Andrew. 2011. Ruins, Refuse, and the Politics of Allegory in the Old
Curiosity Shop. Nineteenth-Century Literature 66(2): 170–194.
Morse, Deborah Denenholz, and Martin Danahay, eds. 2007. Victorian Animal
Dreams. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Ritvo, Harriet. 1987. The Animal Estate. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Rothfels, Nigel. 2008. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
Some Performing Animals. 1885. Wallace’s Monthly 11(5): 358–360.
The Perils of Wild Beast Training. 1899. The Speaker 19, June 17, 685–686
Wild Beast Shows—Great and Small. 1898. The Speaker, December 31, 783.
Antonia Losano is Associate Professor of English and American Literatures at

Middlebury College, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century literature,
gender studies, mystery fiction, and the intersections of literature and the visual
arts. She is the author of The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (Ohio State
University Press, 2008). Her other scholarly work include articles on painters and
painting in the work of Anne and Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, governess
fiction, and travel writing.
CHAPTER 8
“I Declare I Never Saw so Lovely

an Animal!”: Beauty, Individuality,
and Objectification in Nineteenth-Century
Animal Autobiographies
Monica Flegel
At the beginning of numerous Victorian animal autobiographies, the animal

narrator is set apart from his or her animal siblings, often on account of
physical beauty. For example, the speaker of “The Cat that Went to the Cat
Show” explains of her own salvation, “I believe it is to my beauty only that I
owe it, that I did not share the fate of my brothers and sisters, who were all
drowned immediately” (A. E. B. n.d., 85). This narrator’s beauty is far from
incidental; rather, being beautiful means the difference between life and death,
with the beautiful animal spared and those determined to be less aesthetically
pleasing consigned to a watery death. To be beautiful is to be offered a kind of
personhood, an elevation above the ultimate objectification that renders
other animals disposable. Yet to be valued for one’s beauty is also a form of
objectification, and as I will discuss in my analysis of a selection of nineteenth-
century animal autobiographies, the lovely animals who are spared on account
M. Flegel (*)
Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, ON, Canada
e-mail: mflegel@lakeheadu.ca

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_8
148 M. FLEGEL
of their physicality are forced to negotiate a world in which their beauty grants
them some status as individuals, but also in which the loss of that beauty
threatens them with the loss of their fragile personhood.
In part, because the speaking animal often stands in for “paradigmatic
dependent beings” (Pearson 2011, 109), such as the lower classes, racia-
lized others, women, and children, I will argue that beautiful animals and
the role their beauty plays in their construction as both subjects and
objects tells us about the relationship between beauty, individuality, and
power more broadly in the Victorian period. However, my primary focus
here is on how the beautiful animal’s status as animal is distinct from that
occupied by oppressed human beings. While animals share with oppressed
humans a vulnerability in the face of power, in which individuality—
particularly an individuality granted on the basis of objectification—can
be both granted and taken away, beautiful animals risk the greatest possi-
bility of thinghood: literally, the animal body, as a result of its beauty, can
be stuffed, broken down, and rendered so as to continue to exist as a
beautiful thing. Dead, the animal can remain aesthetically pleasing, and
this was particularly true in the Victorian period, when “[a]ny Victorian
household would have at least one or two stuffed birds under glass, a
collection of butterflies, or at least a few shells, feathers, or minerals”
(Poliquin 2012, 68). These animal narrators therefore provide the starkest
example of the limits of beauty’s power in the Victorian period in terms of
granting individuality and value to the oppressed subject. Nevertheless,
these texts also challenge beauty’s power in terms of defining individual
value, by also focusing on the “special relation” (Steiner 2001, xxi)
between human and animal that survives beauty’s loss. With their atten-
tion to how beauty both privileges and makes vulnerable those who are
made objects by it, these texts, I argue, use the animal body as a means of
grappling with thinghood and the vulnerability of identity.
ANIMALS, WOMEN, AND THE MEANING OF BEAUTY

In The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing, Rachel
Poliquin (2012) admits that “Beauty is an awkward word with a long
and problematic history in philosophical aesthetics” (51); moreover, “it
perhaps seems frivolous to talk of animal beauty” (53). Of course, as she
points out, the animal body has often played an essential role in aesthetics;
in the Victorian period, in particular, “animal beauty was not merely
visually satisfying but provided incontestable proof of a benevolent deity,
8 NINETEENTH-CENTURY ANIMAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES 149
and nature’s beauties were held up as all that was good and moral” (69).
The work of theorists such as Rita Freedman (1986), Naomi Wolf (1991),
Bonnie Berry (2007), and Sander Gilman (1999) demonstrates that
beauty has continually been caught up in cultural constructions beyond
the physical: Gilman (1999) traces the historical narrative that “‘good’
character is reflected in the beautiful body” (26), for example, and Wolf
(1991) points out that the “qualities that a given period calls beautiful in
women are merely symbols of the female behavior that that period con-
siders desirable: The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and
not appearance” (13–14; italics in original). Bonnie Berry (2007) further
reminds us that “physical features are artificial markers, with meaning only
as attached by society; meaning: no features are superior or inferior
innately” (xi).
Both women and animals have alike been used to describe beauty, in
part because both women and animals are connected through their embo-
diment. The association of men with the mind/soul/rationality and
women with the body and emotion has a long history, one in which
objectification often accompanies embodiedness—to be a body first, and
a person/subject second, that is, is to be the object of the gaze, as opposed
to the bearer of it. Yi-Fu Tuan (1984) describes how women have often
been, in patriarchal culture, “regard[ed] as objects of prestige, playthings,
and pets” (123), as in the T’ang dynasty, in which women were “like rare
birds or plants . . . picked and sent as gifts and tributes” (124). Tuan’s
linkage of women with animals is not incidental; instead, this connection
is about them both as ornamental creatures who can be “treated as an art
object” (98), supporting his larger thesis that “power has been used to
distort plant, animal, and human nature for aesthetic ends” (4). Beauty
plays a central role in systems of power, with both women and animals
objectified through their shared role as bodies, rather than full subjects.
To be a beautiful body is to be, at least in part, an object of bio-political
power systems.
This is not to say, of course, that to be beautiful is to be powerless. For
those who must occupy the position of being defined by the body, it is
certainly preferable to be a beautiful body, one that has value for those
who gaze upon it. In fact, the desire many of us have to be beautiful, “to
have an outer representation that matches our dreams . . . to have a face
and body that other people want to look at and know” (Etcoff 1999, 14),
speaks forcefully to the non-oppressive aspects of being beautiful—we
would not all long to possess beauty if to be beautiful resulted in
150 M. FLEGEL
objectification alone. And, as scientists, theorists, and historians have

pointed out, being beautiful offers real, material benefits, and “equally
important, ugliness leads to major social disadvantages and discrimina-
tion” (Etcoff 1999, 25). In Beauty Bias, Bonnie Berry (2007) likewise
notes that “Height, skin color, hair texture, eye shape, etc.—along with
the ambiguously defined ‘beauty’—influence the social power that we
possess or are deprived of possessing, including the jobs we get, the salaries
we earn, the clubs we join, the people we marry, the friendships we make,
and the colleges we enter” (3). For nonhuman species, being judged
beautiful (or useful) has been shown to be central to conservation efforts
on a species’ behalf, providing benefits to the aesthetically pleasing that are
not “trickling down” to other endangered and at-risk species (Small 2011).
Rather than seeing beauty simply as something that conveys objectifica-
tion or power, I argue that it often combines both, something that is
captured in George Eliot’s description of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede
(1985): “there is one order of beauty which seems to turn the heads not
only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty
like that of kittens . . . a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that
you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind to
which it throws you, [sic] Hetty Sorrel’s was that kind of beauty” (84).
Here, Eliot links together women, animals, and extreme youth in her
depiction of Hetty’s loveliness, indicating that this “kind of beauty,” at
least, is one found in those without great social power. As such, it is a
complicated kind of beauty—it has control over those who gaze upon it,
certainly, both in its ability to shield the beautiful subject from anger, and
to unseat those who gaze upon it from their own sovereignty of mind.
Nevertheless, it is also a beauty that elicits a violent reaction—the desire to
“crush” it demonstrates the vulnerability that lies at the heart of this kind
of beauty’s peculiar power. In their depictions of animal beauty, these
animal autobiographies represent this complex reaction to the beautiful
animal body: a desire to control and possess, certainly, but also, as
Poliquin (2012) argues, “a longing to access animals, to experience some-
thing of their enigma, beauty, and necessity” (54–55).
BEAUTY, POWER, AND INDIVIDUALITY

Many of the animal narrators in Victorian animal autobiographies describe
their own appearances, demonstrating the central role such beauty plays in
establishing the individuality and significance of the animal speaker. The
constant descriptions of the speaking animal’s beauty at the beginning of

many animal autobiographies suggest that physical appearance is crucial to
authorizing the individual animal’s selfhood. For example, as the title
implies, the protagonist of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty owes his role as a
protagonist to that characteristic that makes him special and unique: his
owners praise that “he is really quite a beauty, and he has such a sweet-
tempered face and such a fine intelligent eye” (Sewell 2016, 52). Other
speakers also pay close attention to their appearance, as seen when Caesar,
in “Memoirs of a Poodle” (1876), describes himself as possessing “a white
and curly coat, a tail growing like a tuft of feathers, delicate paws, sensitive
and moveable ears, and a little face full of character” (12), and Tuppy, of
E. Burrows’s (1860) Tuppy; or, Autobiography of a Donkey rather vainly
observes, “as I saw my image reflected in the water, I was never tired of
admiring my long soft ears, the bright brown of my coat, or the deep black
cross marked out so clearly on my shoulder” (20). Similarly, Bob the
terrier of Harrison Weir’s 1848 novel opens the account of his life with
explicit detail of his physical appearance: “My form was said to be cast in
the mould of elegance, though delicately small; and I was very regularly
marked from head to tail. My prevailing colours were white and brindled
tan, with a beautiful spot of the latter hue in the middle of my forehead”
(14). Such attention to the animal speaker’s physical form suggests that
such details are necessary to grant them the individuality that sets them
apart as something more than “just” an animal, that physical appearance is
a significant aspect of their identity, something that tells us about who
they are. While human autobiographers might use class, gender, nation,
and ethnicity to identify their unique subjectivity, for animal narrators, it is
unique physicality that is indelibly linked to “the sense of being a signifi-
cant agent worthy of the regard of others . . . as well as an individuated
‘ego’ distinct from others” (Gagnier 1998, 267).
But when Black Beauty states, “I was now beginning to grow hand-
some; my coat had grown fine and soft, and was bright black. I had one
white foot, and a pretty white star on my forehead. I was thought very
handsome” (Sewell 2016, 44), he points to an important aspect of animal
beauty: while some of the animals seem to value their own beauty, the
animals in these texts often recognize that their beauty is that which is
“thought very handsome” according to human terms. When the animal
narrators relay detailed descriptions of their physical selves, what they
are highlighting is the value their beauty conveys upon them in
human systems of power. The speaker of the “The Adventures of a Cat
152 M. FLEGEL
Through Her Nine Lives” (1860), for example, often depicts how her
beauty helps her find a “situation”: she describes, “None of the family had
hitherto seen me, and I flatter myself that, as I suddenly made my appear-
ance in their midst, I created rather a sensation; for, at that time, I was
really a handsome cat. My fur was full, and long, and silky; my tail swept
the ground gracefully; and my teeth and whiskers were in their
prime . . . ‘Och! and it’s a beauty she is!’” (212). Through her identity as
a “beauty,” the cat continually succeeds in gaining partial security and care
from humans who value the possession of a beautiful animal. This is seen
again in Autobiography of a Cat (1864), in which the cat protagonist
relates, “Shall I describe the remarks which my appearance excited
amongst the visitors at my master’s house? Shall I mention the broad
hints made to him that if he would but give me away—if he wished to
part with me—if he had too many?—but my master stood firm” (8–9).
The powerlessness of animal life, in which one is often traded, rejected, or
abandoned, is somewhat offset here by the privilege of beauty—while
beautiful animals are commodities, their status as a valuable possession
wins them hope of some measure of a good life. Tuppy similarly highlights
the better treatment his beauty wins for him: “My master, seeing the
admiration I excited by my handsome shape and form, took the greatest
pains to make me look as attractive as possible, in the hope, I suppose, of
increasing his earnings” (Burrows 1860, 62). In all these instances, the
animals’ beauty provides them with an individuality that makes them stand
out from other animals; while still commodities, they are commodities that
have a value that wins them—at least temporarily—a stable home and
proper care and attention.
Such beauty gives these characters selfhood largely by setting them
apart from the more disposable animals, those who are not “distinct
from others” (Gagnier 1998, 267), because they lack the standard of
physical perfection necessary for animal subjectivity that is set and imposed
by humans. Luath, of Gordon Stables’s (1893) Sable and White: The
Autobiography of a Show Collie, relates that he is valued by his master for
being “pretty as paint” (26), but another dog does not enjoy such luck:
“‘Poor Jack,’ said Jim, ‘he never has much to say. He was brought from a
nice home in the country; but Higgins—none of us calls him master—says
he’s a deal too ugly to sell, so he means to hang him’” (23). Later on, the
dogs themselves seem to recognize the power that beauty grants to some
of them; when Luath and Jim journey to find their lost master, Luath’s
beauty is relied upon to get them food: “‘You go in,’ said Jim, ‘you’re
better looking than I am.’ ‘Oh, what a pretty dog,’ said the girl. ‘You
won’t bite, will you?’” (247). In both cases, beauty conveys real, material
benefits to the animals who possess it, both in granting them life and in
winning them the approval of humans who hold the power to help them.
The threat of death for those animals not possessing physical beauty is
particularly clear in cat autobiographies. Mrs Mouser, protagonist of Edis
Searle’s (1875) text of the same name, relates of her new-born kittens:
“One day they carried them all away from me, and when they brought
them back, Fred said to the cook, who was a great friend of mine, ‘We’ve
quite settled, cook, that we’ll keep the white one and the black one;
mamma is sure that they are much the prettiest’” (6). To be “the prettiest”
is to be kept; while it is not clearly stated in this text, the implication is that
the less pretty kittens are drowned. This is made explicit in “The
Adventures of a Cat” (1860) when the narrator describes how she escapes
the drowning of her fellow siblings. The human mother asks her children:
“Come, tell me which one you like best?” The response, “Oh, the tiny
black one there—he’s such a pretty fellow” (23), saves the female cat from
death, bestowing on her a privilege that she herself recognizes as arbitrary:
“Who was the lucky kitten? . . . How I longed for sight . . . At last I could
bear the terrible suspense no longer; so, climbing up to my mother’s ear, I
whispered—‘Mother, please tell me what colour I am’” (24). The
mother’s reply—a “cuff that sent me to the other side of the band-
box”—confirms the kitten’s “lucky” status, for as she surmises, “Had I
been one of the doomed and had asked the question, I should have been
kissed and cried over” (24). From the very first moments of life, this kitten
recognizes the central role that physical beauty plays: it is the source of life
and privilege, but it is also a source of competition between her and her
kind for the arbitrary and cruel exercise of human power over them.
Such competition between animals is related in a number of animal
autobiographies, demonstrating how personal beauty may gain the
“unique” animal a kind of individuality, but often at the cost of social
relations with their own species. The protagonist of “The Adventures of a
Cat through her Nine Lives” (1860) describes how her physical beauty
causes only conflict between herself and her cat husband: “I believe he was
jealous of the notice that was taken of me, and, instead of feeling pride in
my beauty, it seemed to be a reproach to him; for he was continually
taunting me about my ‘ridiculous tail, sweeping up the dirt like a scaven-
ger’s broom,’ and my ears, ‘as long and as ugly as a donkey’s’” (212–213).
Similarly, the sibling pair in Mrs. Mouser find that the humans’ preference
154 M. FLEGEL
of one cat for another—the human children theorize that Smut’s black coat
makes him feel “naughty. . . . It must be bad, indeed, to be always dirty’”
(Searle 1875, 44)—leads to the promise of violence between Smut and
Snowball when Smut threatens to “spoil her beauty for her” (133). In these
instances, the animal characters can be read as stand-ins for both class and
racial conflict: in “The Adventures of a Cat,” the cats are very much
constructed as stand-ins for the English working class, with the male cat
both threatened by and jealous of his wife’s aspirations to a higher class
than he can provide. In the case of Snowball and Smut, the coloring of the
cats—white and black, respectively—is an analog for their personalities,
with Snowball representing the “civilized” and Smut the “savage” in the
racialized discourse of colonization. In these texts, the physical beauty
of the animal characters operates as a marker for class and racial divides
among humans. It also depicts the internalization of class prejudice and the
need for “respectability” as a sign of distinction within the lower classes,
as seen when the protagonist of “The Adventures of a Cat” (1860) relates:
“I hurried along . . . meeting nobody but a policeman, and—I blush to
record it—several of my own species, male and female, in a very draggle-
tailed and disgraceful condition. This, to a respectable and innocent young
cat, as I was then . . . was a most painful sight” (66). Here, the cat speaker
has internalized the connection between beauty and morality—to be beau-
tiful is to be “respectable and innocent,” while to be “draggletailed” is also
to be “disgraceful,” a source of shame for the betters of one’s own kind.1
THE FRAGILITY OF BEAUTY

What this competition between animals indicates is that, as with lower-class
and other oppressed peoples, any “privilege” granted to those who are
singled out among their class is a fragile one: for example, like “respect-
able” lower-class people, beautiful animals are always in danger of
losing their place and, with it, the temporary status it entails them in
society. The protagonist of “The Adventures of a Cat” (1860) might
pride herself on her beauty in comparison to those beneath her, but
by the end of the story, she finds herself on the other side of the equation:
“I am lame, old, grey, have been wounded three or four times, severely
burnt once, had the mange once, my paw broken once, my eyes bad twice”
(32). When she is returned to the home in which she enjoyed the greatest
respectability—sneaking in with a Persian cat who has been chosen on
account of his beauty—she is not recognized by her former mistress:
“Ah, the young rogues must have packed with my beautiful Persian the
ugliest creature they could find, for the sake of contrast” (361). The cat was
once able to look down upon others, but she now has lost her beauty and
must trick and conspire to attain a place that she once won by virtue of her
appearance alone. Similarly, Black Beauty relates attending a horse fair,
describing how he finds himself “in company with the old broken-down
horses—some lame, some broken-winded, some old, and some that . . . it
would have been merciful to shoot” (Sewell 2016, 188). While Beauty
separates himself from them—“I had still a good mane and tail, which did
something for my appearance” (188)—he is nevertheless “in company”
with these horses, however much he wants to distinguish himself from their
abjection. To lose one’s beauty—in this case, an aspect so tied to the
protagonist’s identity as to form part of his name—is to face the loss of
selfhood, and, with that, to experience ultimate vulnerability. So long as
their beauty is what solely sets them apart as significant individuals, separate
from the “draggletailed” (“The Adventures of a Cat” 1860, 66) and the
“wretched” (Burrows 1860, 56) of their own kind, these animal narrators
can believe in their value and their individuality. Once they have lost that
beauty, though, they begin to see their connection to the oppressed of their
own kind.
This is seen particularly in two scenes in which the animal protagonists
have their appearance deliberately altered to rob them of their status.
Tuppy the donkey, who prides himself on his appearance at the beginning
of the text and is valued for his prettiness, himself looks down upon another
donkey, “one of my own family, but so old, and ugly, and wretched-
looking that I turned from her in disgust” (Burrows 1860, 56). Tuppy
acknowledges his connection to the other donkey by virtue of being of the
same “family,” but his “disgust” speaks to the extent to which he has
internalized the separation his human masters have placed between him,
a pampered pet, and her, a mere beast of burden. However, his separation
between them is a false one, because he has “quite for[gotten] [his] own
forlorn look” (57). Tuppy has been newly stolen from the family who cared
for him, his own looks deliberately destroyed by his robbers to protect
them from detection: “My mother not know me! why I did not know
myself! My beautiful coat all clipped, and rough, and ragged, and covered
with great patches of black and dirt; and my mane—that mane my dear
mistress so often praised—oh! what would she have said to it now! . . . Fool
that I was to set such store upon the very thing which has brought me to all
this misery” (54–55).
156 M. FLEGEL
Here, Tuppy begins to realize that the beauty that brought him such value
and privilege has also endangered him by making him valuable to those
outside his master’s family; it is “the very thing that that has brought . . . all
this misery” (55). And because his beauty is the sole source of his personal
identity, he no longer knows himself, a moment echoed in Stables’s (1893)
text when the show collie is similarly transformed. In Luath’s case, he retains
his beauty, but the deliberate alteration of his appearance nevertheless also
robs him of his identity: “I’ll fake him delicately, so that even if his old
master did see him he wouldn’t know him from Adam. . . . I’ll tinge the
ear-tips a pretty brown, and I’ll dye the ear tufts brown, and I’ll draw a
slight ring round each eye, and tinge the tail a bit, and lo! his own mother
wouldn’t know him” (137). Here, only cosmetic changes are required to
transform Luath from Luath to a dog; not only does his master fail to
recognize him (181), but Luath does not recognize himself: “when I saw
the reflection of my face, I positively jumped back and barked” (138).
The alteration of his physical appearance leads to a fundamental loss of
self, unmooring Luath from class, family, and identity.2
Perhaps no text captures the horror of losing one’s identity as a result of
physical degradation as does Sewell’s Black Beauty. Beauty relates meeting
his good friend, Ginger, years after their separation, but at first does not
recognize her, seeing instead only “an old worn-out chestnut, with an ill-
kept coat, and bones that showed plainly through it” (Sewell 2016, 161).
Beauty’s language here reduces Ginger to thinghood, where she is no more
than her “old worn-out” and broken body. Once the two horses recognize
each other, Beauty can only reflect on Ginger’s loss of beauty: “The
beautifully arched and glossy neck was now straight and lank, and fallen
in, the clean straight legs and delicate fetlocks were swelled; the joints were
grown out of shape with hard work; the face, that was once full of spirit and
life, was now full of suffering, and I could tell by the heaving of her sides,
and her frequent cough, how bad her breath was” (161). Ginger’s ill-use
and suffering are written on her body, fundamentally changing her to the
point of making her body one to which life is anathema: as with the “old,
broken-down horses” that Beauty had suggested “it would have been
merciful to shoot” (188), so too does he reflect upon seeing Ginger at
the end: “Oh! if men were more merciful, they would shoot us before we
came to such misery” (162). Most painful of all, Black Beauty cannot even
affirm that the “dead horse” he sees in a cart is, in fact, Ginger; he can only
describe, “The head hung out of the cart-tail, the lifeless tongue was slowly
dropping with blood; and the sunken eyes! but I can’t speak of them, the
sight was too dreadful. It was a chestnut horse with a long thin neck. I saw a
white streak down the forehead. I believe it was Ginger; I hoped it was, for
then her troubles would be over” (162). Here, Ginger, a horse with whom
Black Beauty has shared much intimacy and affection, is reduced to an “it,”
an unrecognizable “dead horse,” whose former beauty has long left her,
leaving her body useful only for rendering.
THE FEAR OF COMPLETE OBJECTIFICATION

The fact that Ginger’s body has a use long after she herself has any value
speaks to that which separates the animal body from the human one, even
from those who are similarly oppressed: animal bodies are commonly used
as raw material for human consumption, making animals subject to a kind
of objectification that humans are not: as Erica Fudge (2012) notes, “a
living animal and animal matter are not separate categories. Like subject
and object, they are utterly intertwined” (42). In some cases, this objecti-
fication occurs after the animal has lost his or her beauty, and can no
longer serve the aesthetic functions for which the beautiful animal gains
some small measure of privilege. After Black Beauty has been ruined by a
bad rider, the Earl, one of the better of Black Beauty’s many owners,
observes that “he must be sold; ’tis a great pity, but I could not have knees
like these in my stables” (Sewell 2016, 119). The linkage of Black Beauty
with his “ruined” body part, his knees that have made him unfit for both a
home and the protection of a kind master, speaks to a central concern of
Sewell’s text; namely, that “fashion” and its accompanying aesthetics take
precedence over the valuing and care of the animal.3
While some animal protagonists find that their loss of beauty is what
diminishes their value, others acknowledge the role that their beauty itself
plays in endangering them. Because their beauty makes them valuable,
these animal protagonists are also vulnerable, singled out as objects of
human competition and greed. Both Tuppy and Luath, as I have discussed,
are stolen because of their beauty: Tuppy’s thief observes that “I have had
my eye on him for some time past” (Burrows 1860, 53), while Dandy Joe,
the Faker who transforms Luath, crows that after Luath has been disguised,
“we’ll enter him at a far-off show. He’s sure to win, and he’s sure to sell”
(Stables 1893, 137). Dandy Joe is meant to be seen as a despicable,
dishonest character, but his rapacious attitude towards Luath is not so
very different from that of the actual dog owners in the novel, who show
their dogs repeatedly in utter disregard for the discomfort this causes
158 M. FLEGEL
the dogs themselves: Luath describes Professor Huxley, a winning dog who
suffers the consequences of his beauty: “The dog was being done to death.
He retained the fine bold carriage, and noble head, nothing could ever
deprive him of these; but his coat grew harsh and his body thin, and there
was a pained expression about his face, and a melancholy in his once bright
eye” (92). The description of the dog “done to death” captures, as in
Sewell’s text, the idea of a body that is being used up, its beauty providing
the justification for the animal’s continual abuse. In both the case of
Professor Huxley and Ginger, the texts describe the animal body’s literal
consumption, with bodies made “thin” (Stables 1893, 92) and “fallen in”
(Sewell 2016, 161), eyes that have lost their brightness, and a “face . . . once
full of spirit and life . . . now full of suffering” (161). For neither Professor
Huxley nor Ginger has their beauty won them good treatment and kind-
ness; instead, it seems that even for privileged animals, the objectification of
the animal body in terms of its use value is inevitable. Even Luath’s master,
who is often idealized, sees Luath’s beauty as a commodity, observing that
Luath’s cruel former master “will want to buy him back again.” Luath’s
response—“How I trembled” (Stables 1893, 27)—shows that Luath, at
least, if his owner is not, is aware of his continued vulnerability as an
aesthetically pleasing, valuable object, and indeed, his experiences at the
dog shows demonstrate that his own, kind master is yet willing for Luath to
suffer on account of his beauty: “They kept prodding us with sticks, and
teasing us in every way to get up and show ourselves. Sleep or rest was out
of the question. The British public had paid their money and they deter-
mined to have their money’s worth, so it was, ‘Get up and show yourself,
Luath,’ or ‘Luath, stand up and show yourself,’ all day long, and I was
heartily glad when night came” (43).
While these animal protagonists are often “done to death” until they
lose their beauty, and their value with it, other animals demonstrate that
death itself is no barrier to the animal’s use as an aesthetic object. In a
system in which the animal can become a literal object, to be beautiful is in
some ways a liability, as their physical selves, rather than their lives, is what
has value. For example, in “The Adventures of a Cat” (1860) the prota-
gonist vividly describes her ordeal when caught by a cat-skinner.
Imprisoned with other cats in a bag, they must all listen while their captors
calculate the value of their fur:
“One on ’em is a torkershell, though; so I shall strip him first, as I knows

where to get ’arf-a-crown for his jacket in a twinklin’!”
“What! a rale tortureshell, without any flaws about him?” . . .

The courage of the cat in question sank during the conversation. “Mi-
ow! mi-ow!” said he; “see what beauty brings you to! I wish I had the
mange!” (110–111)
Having “the mange,” of course, would not have guaranteed this cat any
safety; however, his beauty makes him vulnerable in a particularly grue-
some way: the fact that his skin is called his “jacket” already alludes to the
fact that he will provide the raw material, perhaps, for human clothing.
The beauty of animals, after all, was used throughout the period, then as
now, to adorn humans, who forget that these furs “choked up with
powdered alum, and some limp, glossy, but a few hours since adorn[ed]
living animals!” (111).
Animals are also seen as “adornments” for humans in those pets who
carry on their roles after their deaths, their value not diminished, it seems,
by the lack of life within them. Caesar, the protagonist of Barker (1876),
relates all but the final chapter of his life; in this, he is replaced as narrator
by his former mistress, who assures us that we will be happy to know that
he has been stuffed and placed on a mantle, and that the family maid
carefully takes on the duty of dusting him (333–339). Similarly, a cat
protagonist observes of her master, “I plainly foresaw that from that house
I need never depart as long as I lived, or even after that; for there is no
doubt my master would have had me embalmed (a consummation by no
means desired by me) and stuck up as an ornament in the best parlor”
(“The Adventures of a Cat” 1860, 108). In both cases, the animal remains
as an object of aesthetic value, “an ornament,” long past the point where
their beauty can be of any use to them.
CRITIQUES OF BEAUTY
The depiction of the vulnerable, beautiful animals in these autobiogra-
phies demonstrates that many of these texts use beauty as a critique of
both the speaking animal’s objectification and of vanity itself. In some
cases, as in that of Tuppy, the text’s focus on beauty is a clear criticism of
Tuppy’s shallowness, with the degradation and loss of beauty that Tuppy
suffers offered as a kind of necessary come-uppance, one that teaches the
importance of humility: “I can only humbly hope that what I have lost in
strength and beauty I may have gained in wisdom” (Burrows 1860, 98).
In other texts—such as in Black Beauty, Sable and White, and Memoirs of
160 M. FLEGEL
Bob, the Spotted Terrier—the focus on animal beauty allows for a criticism
of cruel fashions, ones such as tail- and ear-docking that cause great pain to
the animal, all for the sake of an arbitrary aesthetic. Luath describes
with a shudder of horror, that several pure white bull-terriers had their ears
all strangely stuck up, and that their faces were covered with blood, also their
shoulders. These poor things did not make much movement. They cuddled
well down among their dry straw, sometimes emitting a sign or a little moan,
and sometimes shivering all over. Their dishes stood beside them too, with
their breakfast evidently untouched. It was very sad, and every minute now I
felt sadder and sadder. (Stables 1893, 145)
Luath models here for the reader the proper response to the docking of
these animal’s ears, challenging the human taste for style and fashion with
the actual value of empathy; additionally, showing us the animals “covered
with blood” serves to pull the curtain back from fashionable beauty,
revealing the ugliness that is hidden from the public eye so as to produce
a “stylish” animal. Bob the terrier similarly describes, “I early suffered an
amputation of part of my ears and tails; or, in other words, I was cropped
and partially docked. All this was done to increase my beauty; but it
certainly did not add to my comforts, exclusive of the torture it put me
to” (Weir 1848, 14). Likewise, after Ginger describes the torture of the
bearing rein, Black Beauty asks, “Did not your master take any thought for
you?’ . . . ‘No,’ said she, he only cared for a stylish turnout, as they call it’”
(Sewell 2016, 60). In all these cases, the animal autobiography gives voice
to the suffering animal as a means of critiquing the cruelty inherent in the
alteration of the animal body for the purposes of fashion and style alone,
particularly when it causes pain to the animal.4
But other texts go beyond the criticism of the shallowness of fashion to a
critique of the valuing of physical beauty itself; many of these texts use the
passing of the animal’s beauty, and the privilege that comes with it, as a
means of instructing the child reader in the worth of personhood that
should be found beneath the surface. Teresa Mangum (2002) has argued
“that many of these narratives—and the imaginary animals who narrate—
function unexpectedly as affirmations, albeit sentimental, of the value of
‘secondary’ creatures, or at least of their stories” (44). Mangum is particu-
larly interested in how animal narrators stand in for “‘the aged,’ especially
the poor and infirm” (44), but the broken, the disabled, and the damaged
are certainly included in that category of “secondary creatures.” Many of
the beautiful animals here, both the ones who took pride in their beauty
and those who felt endangered by it, live to see that beauty pass, and find
value with their owners nonetheless. When she loses her tail at sea
(a hungry sailor cuts it off to eat it when they are cast adrift), the protago-
nist of “The Adventures of a Cat” (1860) learns a lesson from the master
who saved her life about dignity that endures beyond the loss of beauty:
“I gazed mournfully at the swatched and odd-looking stump, and then at
him reproachfully. I saw that he understood me, for he immediately looked
serious. ‘Well, well, that couldn’t be helped,’ said he. ‘You ain’t the first
chap as has lost a limb at sea’” (358). The cat’s story here links the animal
protagonist to disabled soldiers, fervently arguing that one still has value
despite the loss of beauty, perhaps even more value, as the broken-down
body testifies to the experiences which the person has endured and sur-
vived. This is supported by the ending of the text, in which, even though
the protagonist is ugly, she succeeds in winning those around her, even
above those who possess greater physical beauty: “A jealous eye—two
jealous eyes, indeed, were continually upon me. The eyes belonged to a
great, handsome Persian cat, the property of a cabin passenger. It seemed
that, prior to my arrival, the Persian had carried all before him” (359). The
arrival of the battered but still victorious cat who has survived cat-skinners,
embalmers, and shipwreck leads to a diminishing of attention for the
Persian: “As an ornament he was well enough, but for nothing else. Why,
I’ve seen him finicking over his breast and whiskers for an hour; and as to
catch a rat!—he’d gather up his tail, as I have seen ladies with their skirts,
and scamper off at the sight of one” (359–360). Here, to be an “orna-
ment” is to be useless, associated with debased and weak femininity, and
distinguished utterly from the strength, character, and endurance that the
cat protagonist has shown throughout her nine lives. In the end, her
ugliness is a point of pride, for, despite it, she proves her value through
her character, not her appearance; she wins a home with Miss Fleetwink,
who once valued her for her prettiness, but now appreciates her for some-
thing else entirely: “Miss Fleetwink would not hear of so extraordinary an
animal as myself being treated like a common cat, so I was duly installed in
the private house” (361).
This point is repeated throughout animal autobiographies, suggesting that
the importance of the individual animal’s unique character and personality is
paramount. Tuppy is accepted back into his first family despite the fact that he
will no longer be beautiful: “You do look dreadful bad. Why, I shall never get
that rough, shaggy coat of yours right again. No, not though I groom you for
162 M. FLEGEL
hours at a time” (Burrows 1860, 86–87). And while Luath’s master, upon
their reunion, does think that Luath can be restored to “show form,” he also
promises, “But no more shows, dear Luath, for you and me” (Stables
1893, 278). All of these suggest that there is some truth in Wendy Steiner’s
(2001) assertion that “value is . . . central to the meaning of beauty. We often
say that something or someone is beautiful, in fact, when what we mean is
that they have value for us. . . . In our gratitude towards what moves us so, we
attribute to it the property of beauty, but what we are experiencing is a special
relation between it and ourselves. We discover it as valuable, meaningful,
pleasurable to us” (xxi). In all these cases, the special relationship between the
animals and their masters and mistresses suggests that the intimacy of the
animal/human bond can confer worth beyond simple physical beauty or
exchange/use value. Instead, the idea that one can be considered beautiful
and valuable even when one’s body is broken down and cannot be put to use
offers the hope of winning acceptance through hardship, and gaining true
individuality that goes beyond the physical for these animal narrators.
CONCLUSION: “I WANTED THE OTHER THREE,

MY BEAUTIFUL TABBIES”
Nevertheless, while I agree with Mangum that many animal autobiographies
are about, in part, affirming the value of older, broken, and un-beautiful
bodies, yet these texts are all still haunted by the many disposable animal
bodies of all those who failed to achieve individuality and “personhood.”
There is something of a Pinocchio theme in these texts—the promise that if
one works hard and behaves well, one can be a “real boy”—that suggests the
achievement of individuality is in part a test of one’s character and that to
endure and be one of the few to survive continued oppression is a testing fire
that is necessary for the achievement of the ultimate goal for the animal
protagonist: the reunion scene that Tess Cosslett (2006) identifies as so central
to the animal autobiography as a genre (92). I believe the focus on animals
who retain value once their beauty is gone and their bodies are broken beyond
use reveals an anxious desire to assert individual worth amid what Gina Dorré
(2002) identifies as “the perplexing ephemera of the modern world, where
fashion marks the precarious territory between the self and the non-self”
(158). These animal protagonists remind their human readers of the intang-
ibility of individual worth and identity, and the idea that even animals can be
recognized and valued once they have been stripped of all that gives them
privilege in society is a powerful one in which human identity is also tied to

reproductive and economic fitness. But if these texts participate in a narrative
in which the reader is invited to ward off the fear of disposability and thing-
hood, they also, through the animal protagonists, at times voice the injustice
of having one’s identity and worth assigned by others. Mrs Mouser challenges
the human conceptions of beauty when her kittens are taken from her: while
the humans designate her black and white kittens as “quite the prettiest,” she
mourns instead for those who have not been assigned value:
Though they may have white children or black children, I believe they never
have tabby ones, so they cannot be as happy as I was on that dreadful
night. . . . when I woke, O dear! O dear! three of my dear children were
gone. All my tabby children had vanished, and I had now only the black and
white one. . . . they were gone; and though my other children came running
to me when I called, I didn’t care for them just then, I wanted the other
three, my beautiful tabbies. (Searle 1875, 9)
Mrs Mouser puts the lie to the idea that one can win individuality in an
unequal world in which one’s worth is determined by standards alien to
and separate from her own kind. Animal autobiographies may well express
the worth of “secondary creatures” (Mangum 2002, 44), but so long as
they are “secondary,” the determination of that worth will always be
arbitrary and oppressive for those who are forced to occupy that position.
NOTES
1. Critics have written extensively on the connections made between slaves and
animals in nineteenth-century texts; Ferguson (1998), Pearson (2011), and
Boggs (2013) all address the complex and problematic ways that slaves and
animals were linked in the nineteenth-century imagination, both in racist
discourse and in abolition literature. Black Beauty, in particular, has been
read through the lens of race: Tess Cosslett (2006) notes that the racial
analogy was “clearly recognized at the time of writing: The book was
advertised in America as ‘The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Horse’” (78),
while Moira Ferguson (1998) observes that this reputation continued into
the twentieth century, as Black Beauty was “banned for awhile in South
Africa in the mid-fifties as the South African black struggle was garnering its
forces for future protest about independence” (82).
2. The deliberate alteration of Luath and Tuppy is clearly linked to larger
discourses of beauty and artifice. Tuppy’s transformation at the hands of
164 M. FLEGEL
those who steal him speaks to the degradation of poverty; covered in pitch,
he shares in the filth of those who have captured him, and his own bodily
breakdown is linked to the hardship of the shared lives they live: “Oh, what
places we went into! . . . why, sometimes I could hardly see how to pick
my way along the broken pavement; and as to air, I could not have got up
a bray—no, not if you had promised me a feed of corn to do so. How human
beings could live in such an atmosphere I knew not—it almost killed me to
drag my load along in it” (Burrows 1860, 65). On the other side of the
social spectrum, Luath’s cosmetic alteration, one that allows him to retain
his beauty but obscures his true appearance, is connected to the falsity of
cosmetics, seen in the fact that the one who alters him also provides hair dye
to “a very much over-dressed lady” (Stables 1893, 145, 147).
3. Sewell’s use of Black Beauty to critique the bearing-rein is well known; in
keeping with the argument that beauty is a source of pain and suffering to
those who are expected to be beautiful, Gina Dorré (2002) also argues that
“the body in question—that of ‘Beauty’—is not simply the body of a
bridled, harnessed, eventually broken horse, but is also the corseted and
bustled women in late-Victorian England” (157).
4. Texts such as Autobiography of a Cat (1864) also use depictions of owners
who value their animals for their beauty alone as a means of castigating
shallowness, particularly in stereotypes of the vain, selfish, aristocratic
woman. Lady Drusilla, in “raptures” over the beautiful protagonist, com-
pletely forgets her earlier “pet”—a lower-class child. As well, her love for the
pet cat does not entail proper care of it, as it is spoiled by her attentions:
“The life of inactivity which I led in this situation, soon began to affect my
health; and my appetite became so pampered by delicacies, that I would not
condescend to taste any plain meat . . . it is true, I was still extremely hand-
some, but I was completely beyond a proportionate size; for I was continu-
ally eating, although I had no appetite, until I was so fat I could hardly see
out of my eyes” (85–86). Here, Lady Drusilla ruins the pet with pampering,
while in Black Beauty, beautiful animals are ruined by over-zealous use of the
bearing rein—in both cases, there is an obvious critique of the “lady of
fashion” (Dorré 2002, 164) as the primary driver of modern vanity.
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An Illustrated Magazine for Children, 85–87, 19th Century UK Periodicals
Online.
Autobiography of a Cat; of the Cream of Cats, Too: Illustrating the Truth of the
Proverbs Respecting Them. 1864. London: Emily Faithfull.
Berry, Bonnie. 2007. Beauty Bias: Discrimination and Social Power. Westport,
CT: Praeger.
Boggs, Colleen Glenney. 2013. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations
and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Burrows, E. 1860. Tuppy; or, the Autobiography of a Donkey. London: Griffith and
Farran.
Cosslett, Tess. 2006. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction. Aldershot:
Ashgate.
Dorré, Gina. 2002. Horses and Corsets: “Black Beauty,” Dress Reform, and the
Fashioning of the Victorian Woman. Victorian Literature and Culture 30(1):
157–178.
Eliot, George. 1985. Adam Bede. London: Penguin.
Etcoff, Nancy. 1999. Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty. New York:
Anchor.
Ferguson, Moira. 1998. Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900:
Patriots, Nation, and Empire. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Freedman, Rita. 1986. Beauty Bound. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Fudge, Erica. 2012. Renaissance Animal Things. In Gorgeous Beasts: Animal
Bodies in Historical Perspective, ed. Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and
Paul Youngquist, 41–56. University Park: Penn State University Press.
Gagnier, Regenia. 1998. The Literary Standard, Working-Class Autobiography,
and Gender. In Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith
and Julia Watson, 264–275. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gilman, Sander. 1999. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic
Surgery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mangum, Teresa. 2002. Dog Years, Human Fears. In Representing Animals, ed.
Nigel Rothfels, 35–47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Memoirs of a Poodle. 1876. Little Wide Awake: A Story for Children, ed. Lucy Sale
Barker. London: George Routledge and Sons.
Pearson, Susan J. 2011. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and
Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Poliquin, Rachel. 2012. The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing.
University Park: Penn State University Press.
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Jackson & Halliday.
Sewell, Anna. 2016. Black Beauty, ed. Kristen Guest. Peterborough, Ont.:
Broadview Press.
Small, Ernest. 2011. The New Noah’s Ark: Beautiful and Useful Species Only.
Biodiversity 12(4): 232–247.
Stables, Gordon. 1893. Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Collie.
London: Jarrold & Sons.
Steiner, Wendy. 2001. The Trouble with Beauty. London: Heinemann.
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Vol. 6. London: S. O. Beeton.
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Monica Flegel is an Associate Professor of English at Lakehead University. Her

research is in cultural studies, particularly child studies and animal studies in the
Victorian period. She specializes in analyzing representations of intimacy and
familial relations, and is currently focused on relationships between and with
nonhuman animals. She is the author of Conceptualizing Cruelty in Nineteenth-
Century England (Ashgate 2009) and Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature
and Culture (Routledge 2012).
CHAPTER 9
Cathy’s Whip and Heathcliff’s Snarl:

Control, Violence, Care, and Rights
in Wuthering Heights
Susan Mary Pyke
RELATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS
At many points in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë questions the inequity
between humans and other animals, both by linking physical cruelty to
other forms of oppression and by depicting such oppressions as unaccep-
table, whether enacted against humans or nonhumans. In this way Brontë
goes beyond the nineteenth-century trope of using horses and dogs
merely as mirrors of human characterizations. She creates relational repre-
sentations of the equine and canine in Wuthering Heights, taking the
subjectivity of the dogs and horses in her novel into account, and in the
process encourages better treatment for humans and nonhumans alike.
Her novel’s willingness to account for the rights of nonhumans supports
emerging considerations of animal citizenship.
Ivan Kreilkamp (2005) has helpfully marked the Derridean crossings
between subject and object for the animals in this novel, showing how
Brontë is focused on “the ethical problem and narrative resource of the
S.M. Pyke (*)

University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: smpyke@unimelb.edu.au

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_9
168 S.M. PYKE
suffering animal” (94). The animals that Brontë deals with in this way, I
suggest, include humans as well as nonhumans, for, as Lisa Surridge (1999)
points out, Wuthering Heights refuses to “privilege humans over animals”
(163). Surridge’s perspective expands Barbara Goff’s (1984) argument that
Brontë’s humans are deeply flawed. Goff has described Brontë as a “post
lapsarian” with a sense of the “profound vitiation of the species,” support-
ing her argument through a reading of Heathcliff as a “personal” and
“ruthless” God aligned with Darwinian mechanisms (492). While I believe
Heathcliff’s complexities leave room for further analysis, I agree with the
claim that humans are not well positioned to take the role of leading species
in the world.
Graeme Tytler (2013) ably deals with this contestation of human
superiority in his application of the term “master complex” to Hindley,
Heathcliff, and Cathy (323). I extend Tytler’s interest in these characters’
human/human relations to the mastery also evident in their human/
nonhuman interactions, aligning his scholarship with contemporary eco-
critical arguments that it is not possible to remedy human inequalities
without also seeking greater equality for other living beings. To do other-
wise, Val Plumwood (1993) has argued, perpetuates rather than under-
mines the “master model” that underpins oppressive social systems (23).
Cary Wolfe (2010), in his synthesis of more recent thinking, uses the term
“posthumanism” to describe the “semiotic system” which both “exceeds
and encompasses” boundaries between the humans and other matter
(xviii). As Wolfe’s survey makes clear, the ethical benefits of post-humanism
can only emerge once limiting assumptions of human mastery are sur-
mounted. Brontë’s novel crosses this semiotic boundary, opening the possi-
bility of humans improving their social relations by relinquishing positions of
sovereignty over nonhumans and humans alike.
The nexus between nineteenth-century efforts to increase the rights of
humans and the concurrent work to support the welfare of nonhumans is
well recognized, most recently by Corey Lee Wrenn (2014), who, like
Wolfe, brings together abolitionist reform and the animal rights movement,
carefully noting the sensitivities that surround Marjorie Spiegel’s (1999)
“dreaded comparison” of the treatment of animals to human slavery. Wrenn
argues that these sensitivities relate to the very speciesism which post-
humanism contests. I bring the struggle for human and nonhuman rights
together in this literary context to support Sue Donaldson and Will
Kymlicka’s (2001) recent call for a more universal citizenship that includes
rights for humans and nonhumans. Donaldson and Kymlicka argue that
9 CATHY’S WHIP AND HEATHCLIFF’S SNARL 169
including nonhumans in an “expanded citizenship” will require an “expli-

citly relational account” of human/nonhuman relations, one that “articu-
lates the sorts of relations” between human and nonhuman communities
“that are both feasible and morally defensible” (157). An ontological shift
of this magnitude, they suggest, is necessary to dismantle the “entrenched
apparatus of animal exploitation” (15). I support their contention, and also
argue, with Plumwood, that such exploitations need to be addressed
together with the systems that allow the violation of human rights.
Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, shows how more positive human/
nonhuman interactions might lead to the universal citizenship proposed by
Donaldson and Kymlicka. I argue that the continued positive reception of
Brontë’s novel demonstrates the role post-human literary texts—that is,
those texts that do not privilege the human over other animals—can play in
motivating different human/nonhuman interconnections. Like a number of
other novels of her time, including those by her sisters Anne and Charlotte,
Brontë’s fiction raises questions about the relations between violence toward
and care for both humans and nonhumans by depicting interactions among
humans, dogs, and horses that are marked by violent mastery or coerced
loyalty. Brontë adds to this referential range by emphasizing specific horses
and dogs, exposing the plurality of moral tensions that arise with animal
exploitation and the singularity of hurts entailed in objectivizing horses and
dogs as either slavish workers or items of conspicuous consumption.
Further, while the perspective of the horses and dogs is only intimated in
the various scenes I consider, Brontë also allows for a post-human reading
through her lively application of metaphor. By generalizing traits that might
otherwise be understood as specific to a species, Brontë contests human/
nonhuman boundaries, drawing on her readers’ experiences of nonhuman
animals so they might enter her imaginary world more fully. I note, how-
ever, a bias in her description of different species. Brontë generally positions
horses in the context of human use; they either contribute to the instru-
mental work of transportation or confer privilege. Their companion status is
marginal. They may be stroked, but are more often run to exhaustion. Dogs
are represented differently. They also serve humans, either as companions or
assistants in protecting property, but they have a more individualized pre-
sence in the novel. They are petted and fed titbits, as well as ordered around,
kicked, and hanged. Brontë’s humans are comparable to both species. Like
dogs they can be petted and like horses they can confer privilege. Like
horses they are exploited and like dogs they are hurt. Unlike horses and
dogs, however, humans have a capacity for vengeful cruelty.
170 S.M. PYKE
Brontë’s novel demonstrates an empathetic familiarity with the responses

of horses and, to an even greater extent, the responses of dogs in these socio-
utilitarian contexts. Her depictions of humans and nonhumans as fellow
creatures create a productive ethical position that can further arguments for
increased animal citizenship. As Donaldson and Kymlicka (2001) argue,
once nonhuman animals are given their own “moral significance,” the
“inviolable rights” of the animal emerge (3). Recognition of this signifi-
cance, they argue, is dependent on compassionate interactions between
human and nonhuman animals.
In addition to allowing for singularities among nonhuman creatures,
Wuthering Heights uses anthropomorphic metaphors to create productive
affinities between humans and other species. These occur most often in
the context of destructive and harsh human treatment of humans and
nonhumans, pointing to a vital theme: violence, the narrative suggests,
begets violence, but in the right circumstances this pattern might change.
By using metaphor to further critique masterful violence against dogs and
horses, Brontë points toward contemporary arguments that increasing the
rights of nonhumans will lead to more peaceful human relations.
WINKING AT VIOLENCE
The relationship between violence against humans and violence against
nonhumans is often repeated in Wuthering Heights. In a particularly
colorful scene, Heathcliff incarcerates Nelly, his ex-servant, with
Catherine, the daughter of his beloved and now deceased Cathy. (For
clarity I will use the name Cathy for Cathy Linton née Earnshaw and
Catherine for Catherine Heathcliff née Linton). As Heathcliff holds the
key aloft from them both, Catherine, dog-like, bites his hand, applying
“her teeth, pretty sharply” (Brontë 1995, 270; future references cited
parenthetically by page number). His response is swift and severe. After
he “seized” her and pulled her “on his knee” he “administered,” as a
master does, “a shower of terrific slaps on both sides of the head” (271).
This is not the first time Heathcliff has resorted to violence, but for
Catherine the experience of being beaten is new. As part of the threats
leading up to this beating, Heathcliff tells Catherine to obey or he will
hurt her in a way that will make Nelly “mad” (270). It is a pattern that will
be repeated. When his task is completed and Catherine’s skin a bright red,
Heathcliff “grimly” says, “I know how to chastise children,” suggesting
his actions are a duty performed rightly (271).
Readers have already observed incidents of violent punishment when

Heathcliff and Cathy were children. When Heathcliff is first brought into
the Earnshaw family, Cathy, accustomed to the ways of mastery, is angry
that her whip has been lost in the process of her father’s finding Heathcliff.
When she responds by “grinning and spitting at the stupid little thing,”
her act of emotional violence results in “a sound blow from her father, to
teach her cleaner manners” (37). Mr Earnshaw is described by Nelly as a
man with “a kind heart, though he was rather severe sometimes” (36).
From observing his foster-father, Heathcliff may well have surmised that
beatings were appropriate for a “naughty pet” (271). This crossing of
violence from humans and nonhumans through the blurred term “pet” is
critical. One exploitation leads to the next. A beating can follow a petting,
if a creature refuses to follow a master’s commands, exposing the primarily
subservient role that pets perform.
Brontë’s awareness of the subjugation involved in pet-keeping is also
evident in a celebrated passage in the novel where a “quarrel” between
Edgar and Isabella over “who should hold a heap of warm hair” ends with a
“little dog” “shaking its paw and yelping” from being “nearly pulled in two
between them” (48). Surridge (1999) argues that this scene exposes the
“social habit of pet-keeping” as a “mechanism for enacting power,” includ-
ing both that of “owner over property” and, “by extension, of ownership or
control in the human sphere” (163). Pets must earn their places in a
household, as must workers, although their tasks are different. Surridge’s
analysis reinforces the point made by Plumwood (1993) and Spiegel (1999)
that human mastery cannot be challenged without challenging dominion
over the nonhuman. It is instructive that the masterful Cathy, watching this
incident from outside the window, is not interested in the harmed dog.
With Heathcliff, she “laughed outright at the petted things” (48). Shortly
afterwards, Heathcliff, who recognizes the dog’s pain, is given a less master-
ful perspective than Cathy. I will return to this scene later.
In general, Heathcliff responds to nonhumans as sentient beings
(although not always kindly), as my subsequent discussion reveals. In
contrast, Lockwood, the first narrator of the novel, a man as closed and
unbending as his name, fails in his attempt to befriend a working dog.
Heathcliff is anything but gentle with the dog, quieting it with a “punch
of his foot.” He explains to Lockwood that this is a dog “not accus-
tomed to be spoiled—not kept for a pet” (6), but there is more respect
in this relationship than in the teasing later demonstrated by Lockwood.
The impatient dismissal in Heathcliff’s booting indicates the ways in
172 S.M. PYKE
which he treats his workers. Chastisement is the norm both for pets and
workers; only the degree of coercion is different.
For Heathcliff, a pet is a worker, wastefully spoiled, despite the fact that
during Lockwood’s next visit he notes that one of Heathcliff’s dogs
“snoozled its nose overforwardly” into Catherine’s face as she reads by
firelight while others work around her (30). There is not, then, a marked
progression from Heathcliff slapping Catherine as “naughty pet” to beat-
ing her as an errant worker. After Catherine marries Heathcliff’s son, she
becomes part of Heathcliff’s chattels. Now, when she stands up to
Heathcliff, as worker rather than a pet, refusing to give him her cherished
locket, he hits her so hard that he draws blood. When Linton recounts this
violence he draws a comparison between his father’s harsh treatment of
Catherine and the way Heathcliff treats the other animals that form part of
his property. Linton “winks” as Heathcliff “struck her down” so hard her
cheek is “cut on the inside, against her teeth,” just as he “winks” when he
sees his “father strike a dog or a horse, he does it so hard” (281).
Heathcliff’s undiscriminating violence is illustrated earlier in the novel
when he attempts to hang Isabella’s dog with a handkerchief to ensure his
elopement with her is undetected. Later, Heathcliff refers to his hanging of
Fanny as instructive, saying Isabella “cannot accuse me of showing one bit of
deceitful softness” after she watched him “hang up her little dog” (150). Pet
or worker, for Heathcliff the oppressions are a matter of scale. In this way
Brontë makes clear the connection between human and nonhuman pain.
Brontë does not depict Heathcliff’s actions as an oddity in her fictiona-
lized world. Indeed, her novel suggests that this everyday brutality crosses
species and generations. The “kind” Mr Earnshaw, who taught Heathcliff to
exert such cruelties, was also the father of the masterful Hindley, whose
“tread in the passage” was so terrifying, as Isabella tells it, that the dog
Throttler, who previously greets her with a “nuzzle,” suddenly and fearfully
“tucked in his tail, and pressed to the wall”; Isabella, too, “stole into the
nearest doorway” (143). Under threat Isabella feels solidarity with Throttler,
whom she has earlier recognized as the son of her family’s guard dog,
Skulker. This has evocative implications when Throttler suffers the violence
from Hindley that they both fear. Readers hear of his “prolonged, piteous
yelping” and appreciate that Isabella avoids this pain simply through “better
luck” (143). This explicit connection between human/human violence and
human/nonhuman violence is not represented as outlandish.
Brontë’s depictions of human brutality follow an established nineteenth-
century trope where less sympathetic characters inflict pain on other creatures.
Her work is particularly effective because she makes this pain singular. She also
makes the point that such behavior might be predictable but it is not desirable,
whether directed at humans or nonhumans. This propensity toward indis-
criminate violence is most often seen in the actions of Heathcliff and Hindley.
Both are violent to others and also to themselves. Heathcliff punishes himself
to the point of grinding his bloodied head into the trunk of a tree at the time
of Cathy’s death and Hindley dies “drunk as a lord” at the age of 27 (186).
These behavioral patterns are established quite early in the novel. As adoles-
cents, Heathcliff and Hindley fight over “a couple of colts” when Heathcliff
insists on swapping ownership after his first choice “fell lame” (39). It would
be easy to feel sympathy for Hindley, were it not for the fact that he imme-
diately cuffs Heathcliff over the ears and threatens him with an iron weight.
Heathcliff uses as blackmail the signs of the “three thrashings” he has had
from Hindley, including an arm “black to the shoulder” (39). Heathcliff is not
yet the stronger of the two physically or economically, but he has adequate
psychological power to manipulate Hindley, who responds by applying his
physical advantage in protest, pushing Heathcliff under the feet of the horse
he desires.
There are complex shifts in how these colts are represented in this
struggle. Initially they are objects that confer status, but quickly become
objectivized, merely contested properties. Heathcliff gets up and calmly
sets “loose the beast” he wants, so he can “shift it to his own stall” (39).
When Hindley pushes Heathcliff under the colt, the young horse becomes
a potential agent of harm. There is a further referential shift from “horse”
to “beast,” again reducing the creature to property, as Heathcliff gets up
and attends to the work of “exchanging saddles” (40). Only after these
matters of property are settled does Heathcliff look at the damage
Hindley’s hard blow has done to his body. In the next sentence the colt
becomes subject once more, as Nelly steps in and offers to “lay the blame
of his bruises on the horse” (40). Such vicissitudes make visible the ways
conceptions of the nonhuman can be manipulated, thus encouraging
readers to question the ethics of such constructions.
These crossings between ownership and harm apply equally to humans
in Wuthering Heights. Hindley calls his son an “unnatural cub” and
threatens to crop Hareton’s ears, claiming that such maiming “makes a
dog fiercer, and I love something fierce” (75). In this context Hareton
refuses to kiss him. The scene ends with Hindley threatening that “as I’m
living, I’ll break the brat’s neck” (75). This conflation of harm to nonhu-
mans and humans reinforces the novel’s message that violence is the best
174 S.M. PYKE
predictor of violence against both humans and other animals. The under-
lying suggestion is that such actions are largely socialized. Mr Earnshaw’s
example of sound blows and slaps is taken up by his children, Hindley,
Heathcliff, and Cathy.
CARE AND PROPERTY: “WHO IS TO LOOK AFTER THE HORSES?”

The violent acts Brontë depicts are not her only contestations of the assumed
right of humans to oppress other humans, dogs, and horses. The point is
made repeatedly in the contrasting behavior of masters and servants in caring
for horses. When Lockwood forces both himself and his horse upon the
tightly held privacy of the grounds that surround Wuthering Heights, the
unwelcoming but not yet inhospitable Heathcliff tells him to “walk in,”
while neglecting to open the gate to his farmhouse (3). Lockwood stays
astride, with his “horse’s breast fairly pushing the barrier,” until Heathcliff
lets him in (3). Brontë’s nineteenth-century readers would be aware that a
horse will not push against a fence unless it is very thirsty, hungry, in season,
or spurred on by its rider. One might argue that thirst is causing the horse to
breast the fence, as it is soon after offered a drink. However, more likely
Lockwood’s characteristic yen to be in control of the situation precipitates
the action.
This masterful man, who would make his horse front a fence, feels no
reciprocal duty to provide his tired horse with rest, food, and drink. He
sees this as the work of others, who will also, he expects, look after him.
Lockwood need only attend to his own comfort and Joseph, the servant at
Wuthering Heights, provides him with the means to do so, with his first
requirement being the act of “relieving me of my horse” (4). Lockwood’s
behavior in using his horse without concern for the animal’s condition is
set against the actions of Joseph. When charged to look after Lockwood’s
horse, Joseph complies without question. He punctiliously meets the
needs of the creatures under his control, but protecting property rather
than caring for the horses as sentient beings motivates his actions.
Readers do not yet know that Heathcliff has been a stable hand earlier in
his life, but they soon find that for him, humans have no priority over horses.
Both species are treated with dispassion. During Lockwood’s next visit, his
departure is threatened by weather “so dark” he cannot “see the means of
exit” from a storm that will put all outside the home at risk. Hareton offers to
escort Lockwood back to his tenancy at Thrushcross Grange, but Heathcliff
says Hareton cannot go, for “who is to look after the horses?” (17). Hareton
does not insist, but the more masterful and humanist Catherine says, “A
man’s life is of more consequence than one evening’s neglect of the horses:
somebody must go” (17). For Heathcliff, his human visitor and his nonhu-
man property are of equal status; both represent economic rather than social
capital. However, Lockwood’s position of human privilege is reinforced by
Catherine, despite her new status as chattel.
Lockwood’s self-centered callousness reflects negatively on him to the
very end of the novel. As he departs the inn where he is staying to visit a
friend, he learns from the “ostler” (who is, Lockwood notes, “holding a
pail of water to refresh my horses” [305]) that he is “unexpectedly” only
15 miles from Wuthering Heights. Impulsively he decides to visit, uncon-
cerned for his horses’ well-being. Hubris, not concern, makes him note
how his detour causes “great fatigue” to the horses; he boasts that he has
forced these “beasts” to travel the extra distance in three hours (305).
Heathcliff acts in a similar way when he elopes with Isabella. His lack of
care is observed closely by the blacksmith’s daughter when they stop to
“have a horse’s shoe fastened” (132). She reports that Heathcliff “held
both bridles as they rode on,” leading horses and Isabella according to his
will, and that he “went as fast as the rough roads” allowed (132). In both
cases Brontë uses the critical perspective of a horse’s caregiver to suggest
that pushing horses such distances without rest is inappropriate.
There are subtler criticisms of the overuse of horses in the novel. Nelly
notes that the Earnshaws “often rode to church in winter,” suggesting
by implication that they went by foot in other seasons (38). Similarly,
Mr Earnshaw travelled to Liverpool on foot, despite its being “sixty miles
each way” (36). In comparison, the horses controlled by the wealthier
Lintons are obliged to drag along “the family carriage” weighted down by
Edgar and Isabella, who are heavily “smothered in cloaks and furs” (58).
This effort, connoting considerable prestige, comes at a physical cost to
the horses—while increasing feed costs and requiring extra labor. Of
course, the Earnshaws’ less onerous use of their horses may have been an
economical choice. In Wuthering Heights power is always closely bound to
economic and social circumstances, and this power often relates directly to
the experiences of nonhuman animals.
Even while she only burdens a horse with herself, the masterful Cathy
always uses horses and never cares for them. Her desire for a whip is no
childish folly but an enabler that helps her “ride any horse in the stable”
(36). Her whip illustrates Surridge’s (1999) point that “overt domina-
tion” is crucial to this novel (165). As Cathy wishes for a whip to further
176 S.M. PYKE
her own power, so too does her privileged daughter Catherine find her
own freedom at the cost of a horse’s pain. When Nelly asks the grounds-
keeper if he has seen Catherine, she is told “she would have me to cut her a
hazel switch” so that she might force her horse to jump the hedge and
gallop “out of sight” (192). Catherine has no qualms in overriding her
horse Minny’s preferences which, it would seem, do not extend to the
potentially harmful act of leaping over a hedge. Cathy and Catherine may
not exhaust the horse power they hold as completely as Lockwood or
Heathcliff, but like Lockwood, neither considers a horse’s needs over her
own, just as neither personally tends to a horse’s physical needs.
Hareton, in contrast, does “take care of the horses” and, unlike Joseph,
does so in an emotionally vested way. When he meets Catherine for the
second time, Hareton pats Minny’s neck and calls her “a bonny beast.”
Catherine, suspecting the liberties he takes with this horse might extend to
her, says that if he doesn’t “leave my horse alone” Minny will “kick him”
(249). Hareton, who cared for Minny when Catherine last visited, is not
threatened. He has the measure of Minny’s legs, and says a kick “wouldn’t
do mitch hurt” (249). The ready violence that Hindley and Heathcliff
exhibit toward their horses and dogs points to the cruelties they extend to
other humans; Hareton’s gentleness with Minny suggests his haughty
cousin would do well to reciprocate his interest.
As yet unaware of Hareton’s attractions, Catherine assumes her “unknown
kinsman” is a servant and later imperiously tells him to “get my horse” as if he
were “one of the stable-boys at the Grange” (195). There is a lack of care in
Catherine’s orders, and Hareton is repelled by the double mastery in
Catherine’s possessive “my horse” and her assumed ownership of his actions.
Pride, rather than Minny’s well-being, causes her to tear up “with indigna-
tion” as Hareton refuses to obey her command. She turns to the other worker
in the kitchen and tells her to “bring the pony,” demanding also that she “let
my dog free this moment!” (195). This woman tells Catherine to go softly: “I
was never hired to serve you” (195). Like Joseph and Nelly, this Wuthering
Heights servant is anything but servile.
This household’s challenge to Catherine’s presumption that her orders
will hold sway foreshadows the undermining of her assumption that Minny
is her property. Linton Heathcliff, Isabella and Heathcliff’s sickly offspring,
the cousin that Catherine thinks she loves and will soon feel obliged to
marry, sees Catherine as a means, not an end. He pursues her as wife for the
property she represents, telling Nelly, “papa says everything she has is
mine,” and that this “everything” includes Minny, whose working status
offers Catherine a freedom that will be lost upon her marriage (280).
Previously Catherine has used Minny to discover Wuthering Heights, trick-
ing Nelly by saying she wants to see the view from “the brow of that tallest
point” and that to get there “with my little pony Minny shall take me some
time” (190). Unaware of Catherine’s switch, Nelly wrongly assumes
Catherine will stay within the boundaries of her father’s property gates,
which were “generally locked” (192). Catherine’s escape leads to her
greater confinement. Much like Isabella, and slightly like her more masterful
mother Cathy, Catherine makes a transition from mastery to servitude after
she marries. In her new role Catherine must “do without” Minny, the pony
that up to this point has provided her with a measure of independence.
Heathcliff insists that her “own feet will serve” her needs (291). Like
Catherine, Minny will be put to a different use.
These shifting hierarchies also apply to Heathcliff, most tellingly as he
moves from waif to cherished son to abused servant. Each change influ-
ences the way he interacts with nonhuman animals. When Cathy returns to
Wuthering Heights on a “handsome black pony” (53) Heathcliff, now a
caregiver and not a master of horses, takes to “smoothing the glossy coat
of the new pony in the stable” as well as “feeding the other beasts,
according to custom” (56). Just as Hareton admires Catherine through
the “bonny” Minny, Heathcliff’s attentiveness to “smoothing” the ruffles
made by Cathy’s seat displaces his desire to spend time with the first and
last love of his life. Joseph interacts with this pony very differently. When
Heathcliff leaves all gates open as he flees his home in despair, Joseph
laments the fact that Cathy’s “pony has trodden dahn two rigs o’ corn, and
plottered through, raight o’er into t’ meadow!” (84). As demonstrated by
his reaction to the decision to cut down his cherished currant bushes,
Joseph is troubled by any interference with the food production that will
keep him, the household, and the dogs and horses all in good health. The
pony is part of an objectivized machinery of labor that allows him to
perform his duties. Property maintenance, not care, is Joseph’s dominant
concern, a characteristic that plays out in his willingness to oppress others
when given a chance.
Soon after, Cathy marries Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff returns. Richer
and crueller, he absconds with Edgar’s sister Isabella. When Isabella is
returned to Wuthering Heights, she caustically observes Joseph’s willing-
ness to care for the horses, regretting that she is left to look after herself.
She finds her new status all the more unpalatable for the parallel she now
sees between her new role as wife and the servitude of the horses. After
178 S.M. PYKE
Joseph “took the two horses, and led them into the stables,” he is then
seen “locking the outer gate, as if we lived in an ancient castle” (137).
Both woman and horses must be contained, just as Joseph protects the
ricks of corn with closed gates.
THE UTILITY OF “HORSE-FIT CLATTER” AND THE “JEALOUS

GUARDIANSHIP” OF ALARMING BARKS
When Cathy waits for a visit from the Linton siblings, she is delighted when
“a horse’s feet were heard on the flags” (70). The sound Cathy yearns for
throws Heathcliff into despair. Cathy is sly, says Joseph, in the way she uses
this sound to hide her assignations with Edgar Linton from her brother.
Cathy will “nip up and bolt into th’ house” as soon as she hears Hindley’s
“horse-fit clatter up t’ road” (87). Horse hooves are also mentioned when
the local doctor tells of “the beat of horses’ feet galloping at some distance”
as Heathcliff elopes with Isabella (129). A generation later, too savvy to
allow for the clatter of horse feet, the bribed groomsman Michael takes
Minny, here reduced to “his charge,” from Catherine, so he might lead the
pony “stealthily across the grass towards the stable” (246). In all of these
cases the sound of a horse’s hooves is more important than the horse, and
this helps to reduce these animals from subjectivity to objectivized utility.
Dogs play a less utilitarian role in the novel. Where horses signal
transport, and by extension freedom for humans, dogs are both compa-
nions and guardians. This is vividly portrayed in the scene where Heathcliff
comes to visit Cathy on her deathbed. Nelly “observed a large dog lying
on the sunny grass beneath raise its ears as if about to bark,” but the “wag
of the tail” and the dog’s ears “smoothing” down “announce” that it is
not a stranger that approaches. Cathy responds in a similar way, as she
“bent forward, and listened breathlessly” to the clatter of Heathcliff’s feet
(159). He is both a colt to be mastered with the whip of her desires and a
friend to her guardian pet.
In many scenes dogs, like horses and Heathcliff, are reduced to their
clattering warning. When Catherine escapes Heathcliff by climbing down
from the bedroom window of the Wuthering Heights farmhouse, she
“stole out before break of day,” using the window rather than the door
“lest the dogs should raise an alarm” (284). She is right to be cautious.
Earlier, when courting Linton, she tries to “creep into the house, and up
to Linton’s room, unobserved,” but “the dogs” on guard “gave notice” of
her arrival (252). In the same way, when Lockwood visits Wuthering
Heights on foot, scaling the locked gate and hammering on the closed
door, the “dogs howled” (9). As discussed earlier, Heathcliff expects his
dogs to do this work, but there is a suggestion of subjectivity in his
counter to Lockwood’s discomfort with the “ruffianly bitch and a pair of
grim shaggy sheep-dogs” who share “a jealous guardianship over all my
movements” (6). Heathcliff notes approvingly, “The dogs do right to be
vigilant” (7). During his next visit, when Lockwood wants to leave but
Heathcliff refuses him escort, Lockwood takes a lantern and prepares to go
alone. Joseph calls him thief and sets the dogs upon him: “Hey, Gnasher!
Hey, dog! Hey Wolf, holld him, holld him!” Lockwood falls as “two hairy
monsters flew at my throat, bearing me down, and extinguishing the
light” (17). Lockwood’s terror subsides once he apprehends that “the
beasts seemed more bent on stretching their paws, and yawning, and
flourishing their tails, than devouring me alive.” Demeaned, he is “forced
to lie” under these stretched-out paws until the “masters pleased to deliver
me” (17), his own lack of mastery exposed.
The subjectivity ascribed to the dogs in Wuthering Heights gives readers a
sense of their different relationships with the humans in this novel, signaling
the possibility of more reciprocal human/nonhuman relations. Early in the
novel, Skulker’s unfixed position as guard and pet is revealed when Cathy is
taken into the Linton home. No longer prey, she is “as merry as she could
be, dividing her food between the little dog and Skulker, whose nose she
pinched as he ate” (51). The guard dog is now a pet, ready for Cathy’s
masterful pat. At the same time Heathcliff shifts from being Cathy’s best
friend to a “gypsy,” an “acquisition,” something undefinable, “a little
Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (50). He is considered semi-
indentured, less than a pet and barely a respectable worker. Just before the
interaction between Hindley and Throttler noted above, Isabella, after a
tantrum involving broken plates and spilt porridge, has worked with
Throttler, who “hastened to devour the porridge” as Isabella cleans up
the rest of the mess she has made (143). They are servants, face to face,
together. Ironically, their relationship has matured. Earlier, when Isabella
first comes to Wuthering Heights and tries to befriend Hareton, he threa-
tens “to set Throttler” on her, “rousing a half-bred bull-dog from its lair in
a corner” and “authoritatively” asking, “Now, wilt thou be ganging?”
(137). Isabella has no need to make a friend of Throttler at this point,
when she feels she is still a master of her situation. Only later, when she finds
herself in a subservient position, does she seek out Throttler as an ally.
180 S.M. PYKE
These scenes suggest that the shifting relationships between dogs and
humans in Wuthering Heights are formed by the varying power relations at
work. As Maureen Adams (2000) has argued, Brontë is always aware of
the “power imbalance” inherent in human relationships with dogs (7).
This applies whether they are mainly a pet (Fanny), both pet and worker
(Phoenix, Charlie, Skulker, and Throttler), or mainly workers (Gnasher
and Wolf). The interrelationship between the concept of pet and worker is
apparent when Cathy and Heathcliff spy on the Lintons playing “wish”
with a small dog. Similarly, when Lockwood is knocked down by Gnasher
and Wolf, there is an animal-to-animal equality in the ensuing struggle
between Skulker and Heathcliff. The servant who comes to find them is
also, to Heathcliff, a “beast” (49). In this battle, both humans and dogs
are animals alike.
GNASHING AND “MAD DOG” FOAMING AND THE CHOICE

NOT TO “COOM” AT A “WHISTLE”
Even as they cross between the positions of pet, transporter, or guard,

nonhuman animals in Wuthering Heights are treated as individual beings.
Brontë never assumes humans must be exclusively superior to nonhumans,
but they are not presented as necessarily inferior. For example, Heathcliff
codes the shyness Hareton displays in Catherine’s company as an admirable
form of “brutishness,” celebrating his nephew’s preparedness “to scorn
everything extra-animal as silly and weak” (219). By implication, the nonhu-
man, including through metaphor Heathcliff himself, is sensible and strong.
Heathcliff even takes “Miss Isabella’s springer, Fanny” seriously enough
to try to silence the dog by hanging her (129). However, Heathcliff also
employs nonhuman metaphors to denigrate human relationships. He dis-
misses Cathy’s feelings towards Edgar as “scarcely a degree dearer” than she
might feel for “her dog, or her horse” (148). Similarly, when Heathcliff
speaks of Hindley’s drinking excess, he describes him as “snorting like a
horse” (187). Joseph too is dismissed by Heathcliff as a “toothless hound”
(179). For Heathcliff, humans and nonhumans are always on equal terms.
Edgar more consistently privileges humans over other creatures. He
scathingly reduces Cathy’s love for Heathcliff to the affection she might
have for one of the horses in her stable. When Heathcliff is groomed by
Nelly, his hair neat and clean for the first time in a long time, Edgar
maliciously describes his thick hair as “a colt’s mane over his eyes” (59).
It is no compliment, and Heathcliff responds accordingly. Catherine, like

her masterful father, also uses anthropomorphic metaphor as a form of
reduction. She describes Hareton as “just like a dog . . . or a cart-horse”
who only works, eats, and sleeps and has, as a consequence, “a blank,
dreary mind” (310). She does not seem conscious of the countersugges-
tion at play here that a dog or a horse might not be so dull with more time
for recreation. The conceptions of Edgar and Catherine are built on a
worldview that considers humans naturally superior to all other animals.
Importantly, Hareton only becomes a man worthy of Catherine’s master-
ful love by learning the very human skill of reading.
The theme of animal loyalty emerges through these shifting subject/
object relations, and this quality is both questioned and admired. Brontë is
crucially interested in the commitments human and nonhuman creatures
make to others, within and across species. Generally, devoted loyalty is
dependent on affections that are tied to, yet beyond, mastery. As noted
above, Isabella is complicit in the near hanging of her dog, which Nelly
rescues in the nick of time. Ironically, Fanny continues her work as guard,
not pet, seeking Isabella until Nelly finds the springer “yelping in the garden
yet” (130). Left alone, Fanny creates her own role. When Heathcliff leaves
Wuthering Heights in high dudgeon, after hearing that Cathy loves Edgar—
but before hearing that she loves Heathcliff more deeply—Cathy orders
Joseph to search for him. Joseph tells Cathy, “Awe sud more likker look
for th’ horse” (84). Not only is the night dark, “Hathecliff’s noan t’ chap tuh
coom ut maw whistle” (84). However, as Joseph observes, Heathcliff might
be “less hard uh hearing” if Cathy whistled for him (84). Just as Nelly notes
the loyalty of Isabella’s springer, Joseph knows where Heathcliff’s loyalty lies;
but unlike Nelly, he considers this loyalty demeaning.
Cathy’s imperious daughter also inspires a loyalty that has at its heart a
kind of mastery. During an unauthorized visit to her cousin Linton, when
she hears Heathcliff approach, she “whistled to Minny, who obeyed her
like a dog” (263). In time Catherine generates the same loyalty from
Hareton. Like a guard dog, Hareton protects Catherine from harm, free-
ing her hair from Heathcliff’s grasp and “entreating him not to hurt her”
(320). Catherine may not whistle, but her mode of mastery drives
Hareton to submit to her rather than to the less consistently masterful
Heathcliff.
These instances of unbalanced reciprocity open the boundaries of
communication between human to dog to horse, and also make it clear
that such openings are mediated by hierarchical relations of control. Yet
182 S.M. PYKE
loyalty can also be relational. The choice to attend to a call is available

within and across species, but this choice is situationally constrained.
Minny need not come to Catherine’s whistle, but she might go hungry
if does not attend. Fanny need not fret at the garden gate, but she may lose
her favored status without such displays of affection. Heathcliff need not
be devoted to Cathy before and after her death, but she will taunt or haunt
him if he is not. The assumption that humans and dogs relate on an
equally emotional level implicitly suggests the right to an equivalent
range of choices for both species.
Heathcliff’s devotion to Cathy is the most memorable example of this
unbalanced loyalty that Moore (2007) describes as “distinctly animal” (184).
Heathcliff’s loyalty, like his other nonhuman attributes, is “inextricably con-
nected” to his “social class” (185). Heathcliff is most dog-like when Cathy
nears death. When “in a stride or two [Heathcliff] was at her side, and had her
grasped in his arms,” Nelly approaches, “hurriedly to ascertain if she had
fainted”; Heathcliff “gnashed” then “foamed like a mad dog” as he held
himself close to Cathy, appearing, says Nelly, as no longer “a creature of my
own species” (162). This is not the only time Heathcliff is called a “dog.”
Hindley uses the term when they fight over the colts and again years later
when the two fight as men. While Heathcliff’s attachment to Cathy is con-
textualized earlier by Nelly’s and Hindley’s descriptions of him as a maddened
dog, a fighting dog, Isabella makes the point that there is more than protec-
tion at stake here. She belittles Heathcliff’s grief at Cathy’s death, activating
the well-established Victorian trope of a dog’s desperate devotion to its
human companion. She says, “if I were you, I’d go stretch myself over her
grave and die like a faithful dog” (178). In the context of constrained loyalty,
this action can be read as fulfilling and even going beyond the requirements of
an obedient guard.
Lockwood certainly sees Heathcliff as dog-like from the first, describing
him as part of a pack growling “in unison” (6). Lockwood extends this
view to Hareton, when he visits Wuthering Heights for the last time,
describing him as acting as “the office of watchdog” (299). Dog-like
loyalty is both unreasonable and, at the same time, expected. It creates
the loyal subject’s place in the household.
Canine characterizations are not only directed to masterful men and
they are not always associated with loyalty. Isabella calls Cathy “a dog in
the manger” for keeping Heathcliff to herself like a bone, and Cathy, still
masterful at this point, refuses the metaphor (102). When Heathcliff next
visits, Cathy pushes Isabella to him saying, “I won’t be named a dog in the
manger again” (105). The tables are turned and Isabella becomes dog-like
to Cathy’s command, “You shall stay” (105). At this point Isabella desires
nothing more than to be Heathcliff’s pet. She fails in this, as she fails in
being any sort of useful worker.
Nelly, too, is depicted as dog-like in her efforts to protect Hareton. In
the scene sketched above, when Hindley returns to his home, drunk, and
catches Nelly stowing his son “away in the kitchen cupboard” to protect
him, Hindley pulls her back “by the skin of [her] neck, like a dog” (74). As
with the shove that fells Catherine, the errant servant is treated as a
misbehaving working dog. Nelly is a long way from the days when she
was Hindley’s childhood pet.
To be canine, then, may involve being controlled, but it can also
suggest controlling behavior. Kreilkamp (2005) picks up on this ambiva-
lence when he describes Heathcliff as sometimes a “feral pet” (98) and
sometimes a “vivisector” (99). It is worth remembering, however, that
when Heathcliff is at his cruelest, he is in fact most human. Indeed, as
Brontë makes clear in the case of Hareton’s vulnerable ears, it takes human
interference to create viciousness. This is further supported in the passage
where Hindley takes Nelly by the scruff of her neck. Nelly wonders if
Hindley will display a “wild beast’s fondness or his madman’s rage” (74).
She suggests that violence and cruelty are the domain of the “madman”
and it is the “wild beast” that provides a profusion of love.
The singularity in Brontë’s characterizations gives her work a contemporary
resonance. As Adams (2000) puts it, Wuthering Heights details a “complex
range of emotions” possible in human relations with dogs, including “attach-
ment and companionship, domination and abuse” (13). Heathcliff, Throttler,
Hareton, and Fanny are all loyal in love, but where Heathcliff and Throttler
are fiercely ready to fight, Hareton and Fanny are vulnerable to hurt. In
Adams’s terms, attachment might have an element of companionship, but
dogs and humans are just as likely to be marred by domination and abuse.
These mixed relations are present in the relationships between humans and
horses in Wuthering Heights, but in a less complicated way. Horses largely
provide another’s freedom through their own constraint. While they may
“coom” when whistled for, their loyalty is not emphasized. Metaphorically,
to be horse-like is to display a certain lugubriousness, as in the snorting horse
that Heathcliff sees in Hindley’s drinking and Catherine’s view of Hareton’s
dullness, or the shallow showiness that Edgar derides in his snide remark
about Heathcliff’s coltish locks. Heathcliff brings both attributes together
when he describes Cathy’s affections for Edgar.
184 S.M. PYKE
The more limited range in Brontë’s equine representations may be due

to less exposure to horses in her life. Enid Duthrie (1986) has noted that the
Brontës, like the Earnshaws, generally walked rather than rode (18). In
contrast, Brontë’s penchant for dogs has gained mythical status, largely
through the strategic work of Elizabeth Gaskell in her 1857 biography
(Gaskell 1924). In the article noted above, Kreilkamp (2005) compares
Brontë’s fictional Heathcliff with her dog Keeper, a pet described by
T. Wemyss Reid (1877) as “the fierce old dog whom she had loved better
almost than any human being” (93). This dog also appears as Tarter in
Charlotte Brontë’s (1849) Shirley. Biographers have also enthusiastically
engaged with Gaskell’s dramatic account of Emily’s first belting her dog for
invading the family’s sleeping quarters, then caring for his swelled head.
Gaskell also provides an account of Emily being bitten by a rabies-infected
dog, then cauterizing her own wound to avoid danger to the animal;
however, Lucinda Miller (2001) cautions that the “origins” of this anecdote
are “obscure” (226). Other anecdotes which support the notion that Emily
Brontë had a strong affiliation with dogs include Clement Shorter’s (1896)
poignant description of Emily making sure her dog “always had a share
handed down” of the morning’s “breakfast of Scotch oatmeal and milk”
(179). There are no similar anecdotes focusing on horses; this might, in fact,
explain the closer detail that Wuthering Heights offers to dogs. However,
there is no suggestion in this novel that horses are, in themselves, any lesser
kind of being.
CITIZEN ANIMAL
Brontë’s appreciation of nonhuman animal sentience offers a useful histor-
ical perspective to growing demands for more comprehensive animal rights.
Indeed, Brontë’s early and lasting critique of oppressions exerted on
humans and nonhumans may well have contributed to the increasingly
mainstream claim that humans cannot assume a right to exploit fellow
creatures, human or nonhuman. In this sense, current gains in animal rights
can be linked, although not in a causal way, to the formative cross-species
consideration of rights present in Brontë’s still-popular novel.
In arguing for an extension of animal rights theory to new forms of
citizenship, Donaldson and Kymlicka (2001) point out that the ethical
progression required for this social change will only emerge from positive
experiential relations between humans and nonhumans. I suggest that
narrative fiction provides an important extension to the experiential world
Donaldson and Kymlicka believe necessary for this improvement. I have

made the argument elsewhere (Pyke 2013) that empathetic engagement
can be powerfully extended by productive texts such as Wuthering Heights,
reactivating Heather Walton’s (2007) concept of devotional reading.
Others have worked in similar directions in their application of the idea of
a “sympathetic imagination” (Beierl 2008).1 While explicit arguments for
improved human/nonhuman relations can trigger reactive opposing posi-
tions, fiction that engages the imagination can break through habitual
blockages in the rational mind. In this context, a novel such as Wuthering
Heights has the potential to invite readers into a more mutable internal
world that frees the emotional mind to equate the rights of humans with
those of nonhumans.
Of all Brontë’s human characters, Hareton is the most empathetic; not
coincidentally, he comes closest to treating horses and dogs as co-citizens.
His relational responses to others, both humans and nonhumans, are very
different to Joseph’s managerial actions. Joseph protects his horses and dogs
as he does his currant bushes. It is the potential benefits of his husbandry that
matters, not creature-to-creature interactions. Similarly, for Hindley, Edgar,
and Lockwood, the nonhuman animals they encounter are means to an end.
They do not offer care in any form and compare nonhumans, negatively, to
humans. Cathy, Catherine, and Isabella are largely the same, apart from their
petting dogs; although this is not always benevolent, as evidenced by
Isabella’s tussle for her lapdog and Cathy’s nose pinch. Heathcliff is largely
contemptuous of all creatures apart from his beloved Cathy. However, he
tends the Earnshaw stable with care, and when he visits Cathy on her
deathbed he is welcomed by a dog’s wagging tail. In contrast, Hindley’s
drunken presence provokes a cower. Heathcliff is, however, no stranger to
expedient violence against other beings. Hareton can also be violent. He kills
puppies and rabbits as a matter of course. Yet, when Catherine warns him
that Minny may kick him, he accepts the horse’s right to respond. As
Hareton welcomes exchanges with Minny, so too does he work with
Catherine’s vagaries. He would never pull her apart like a lapdog, as
Heathcliff and Edgar did with Cathy. Rather, he seeks new ways to co-exist
with Catherine, as he does with Heathcliff. He also makes allowances for the
difficult behaviors of the other animals in his life. Hareton is no antiquarian
animal liberationist, but his actions suggest the possibility of less violent
human and nonhuman relations.
In her depiction of more generative human and nonhuman rela-
tions through Hareton, Brontë does away with the vexatious hierarchy
186 S.M. PYKE
of suffering, where one creature’s pain is of more concern than that of

another. All creatures have a singular significance worthy of considera-
tion. Readers are encouraged to find violence against others objec-
tionable and unnecessary. Through her positive representation of
Hareton, Brontë suggests humans are capable of more reciprocal rela-
tions of care with their own and other species than might be the
cultural norm.
Advances in animal welfare laws and increasing comprehension of
nonhuman modes of cognition are beginning to usher in a shift to more
universal animal rights. Brontë, like other writers sympathetic to nonhu-
man rights, has, to an important extent, assisted the emotional prepared-
ness needed for this evolution. Her novel’s strong contestation of human
and nonhuman hierarchies continues to encourage rights-based relation-
ships, not only between humans, but also between humans and nonhu-
mans. In the six generations that have passed since Wuthering Heights was
first published, universal animal rights have become progressively closer to
being accepted, slowly following Hareton’s ability to break patterns of
fostered violence within the space of one generation. I suggest that con-
temporary readers of this powerful novel will, like Hareton, be empowered
to make emotional space for less hierarchical and oppressive human and
nonhuman encounters.
NOTE
1. Animal studies dealing with literature often point to J. M. Coetzee’s
Elizabeth Costello, Anne Sewell’s Black Beauty, and Richard Adams’s
Watership Down.
WORKS CITED
Adams, Maureen B. 2000. Emily Brontë and Dogs: Transformation Within the
Human-Dog Bond. Society and Animals 8(2): 167–181.
Beierl, Barbara. 2008. The Sympathetic Imagination and the Human-Animal
Bond: Fostering Empathy Through Reading Imaginative Literature.
Anthrozoos 21(3): 213–221.
Brontë, Charlotte. 1849. Shirley: A Tale, ed. G. T. B. Melbourne: Ward, Lock
and Co.
Brontë, Emily. 1995. Wuthering Heights, ed. Pauline Nestor. London: Penguin.
Donaldson, Sue, and Will Kymlicka. 2001. Zoopolis. Oxford: OUP.
Duthie, Enid. 1986. The Brontës and Nature. London: Macmillan.
Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1924. Life of Charlotte Brontë. Edinburgh: John Grant.

Goff, Barbara Munson. 1984. Between Natural Theology and Natural Selection:
Breeding the Human Animal in Wuthering Heights. Victorian Studies 27(4):
477–508.
Kreilkamp, Ivan. 2005. Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal. Yale
Journal of Criticism 18(1): 87–110.
Miller, Lucasta. 2001. The Brontë Myth. London: Jonathan Cape.
Moore, Grace 2007. “The Mark of the Beast”: Animals as Sites of Imperial
Encounter from Wuthering Heights to Green Mansions. In Victorian Animal
Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature, ed. Deborah
Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, 181–200. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. New York:
Routledge.
Pyke, Susan. 2013. Healing Words and the Matter of Our Urban and Rural Moor.
Text 20: 1–15.
Reid, T. Wemyss. 1877. Charlotte Brontë: A Monograph. London: Macmillan.
Shorter, Clement. 1896. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle. New York: Dodd Mead.
Spiegel, Marjorie. 1999. The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery.
New York: Mirror Books.
Surridge, Lisa. 1999. Animals and Violence in Wuthering Heights. Brontë Society
Transactions 24(2): 161–173.
Tytler, Graeme. 2013. Masters and Servants in Wuthering Heights. Brontë Studies
38(4): 20–29.
Walton, Heather. 2007. Literature, Theology and Feminism. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism?. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Wrenn, Corey Lee. 2014. Abolition Then and Now: Tactical Comparisons
between the Human Rights Movement and the Modern Nonhuman Animal
Rights Movement in the United States. Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics 27(2): 177–200.
Susan Mary Pyke teaches at the University of Melbourne with the School of
Culture and Communications and the Office for Environmental Programs. She
writes in the shared fields of creative writing, literary criticism, and ecocriticism.
Her most recent critical essays appear in The Human Place in the Natural World:
Essays on Creation and Creatureliness (Fordham University Press, 2015), Southerly
(2013), and the Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (2013).
CHAPTER 10
Creatures on the “Night-Side of Nature”:

James Thomson’s Melancholy Ethics
John Miller
The Victorian poet and essayist James Thomson, not to be confused with
his eighteenth-century namesake,1 was remarkable, above all, for the
darkness of his vision. For William David Schaeffer (1965), Thomson’s
oeuvre was “the classic statement of a pessimist’s creed” (vi). In the title of
Bertram Dobell’s 1910 biography, he was The Laureate of Pessimism, a
phrase in circulation regarding Thomson since 1882, the year of his death,
when William Maccall published an article under the same heading.
Undeniably, Thomson had reasons not to be cheerful. Maccall (1886)
gives a lurid summary of the tormented personality behind Thomson’s
gloomy verse: “The moment he was alone the demon of hypochondriasis
and all kindred and attendant demons seized him and tore and crushed
him in the darkness of his insane phantasy” (11). Hypochondria was only
one of a constellation of issues that inclined Thomson to the “night-side
of nature” as he phrased it in “A Lady of Sorrow,” a prose dialogue (more
on which later) with the personified figure of what we might now loosely
call depression in her three characters of “Angel,” “Siren,” and “Shadow”
(Thomson 1881, 2). From the untimely deaths of his parents, sister,
J. Miller (*)
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England
e-mail: john.miller@sheffield.ac.uk

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_10
190 J. MILLER
and sweetheart, to discharge from the army, unemployment, dipsomania,

penury, insomnia, prison, homelessness, and a gruesome alcohol-related
death at the relatively young age of 48, his work, in the words of the
novelist George Meredith, was “plucked out of the most tragic life in our
literature” (quoted in Salt 1914, 9).
There is no ignoring the correspondence between this anguished his-
tory and the somber emotional texture of the majority of his literary
output. His masterpiece, the 1874 The City of Dreadful Night, articulates
a sense of overwhelming futility that represents the signature of his most
mature and important work: Here, “The world rolls round for ever like a
mill;/It grinds out death and life and good and ill;/It has no purpose,
heart or mind or will” (Canto VIII, ll. 36–38).2 Or, as he asked in one of
his final poems, simply titled “Lines, 1878,” “What profit from all life that
lives on Earth,/What good, what use, what aim?” (ll. 145–146). For
Thomson, ultimately, this was a universe without point, characterized by
inexorable suffering.
It is precisely because of this distinctive, nihilistic cast of mind, I will argue,
that Thomson’s writing comprises a significant contribution to Victorian
ideas about animals. Although inevitably it is impossible to disentangle the
intellectual from the pathological in Thomson’s melancholia, his fascination
with the “night-side of nature” was more than a tragic personal circumstance,
but part of a complex, idiosyncratic, and evolving philosophy that overlaps in
important ways with animal studies as it has developed over the last two
decades or so. The animal turn has been structured to a significant extent
around an interrogation of the assumptions of anthropocentrism, through
which, as Cary Wolfe (2009) describes, “the Western philosophical canon
and its thinking of the animal/human difference are being reconfigured and
reinterpreted” (654), a process which is evidently already underway in
Thomson’s writing, as it was elsewhere in nineteenth-century thought.
Thomson’s uniquely miserable oeuvre is notable for its scathing critique of
prevailing theological accounts of human exceptionalism and for its suspicion
towards emergent secular humanisms, both of which have an important
bearing on understandings of the meaning of the “animal” against which
the “human” is so routinely defined.
Thomson was certainly no sentimentalist when it came to beasts. At
times, his sense of cosmic despair extends to a horror at the violence he
associates (in reality, much too readily) with nonhuman lives. As he contends
at the outset of “Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery”
(1868), another essay to which I will return, nature “has no moral character
10 JAMES THOMSON’S MELANCHOLY ETHICS 191
at all” and the “animals she brings forth (not to speak of the plants and the
minerals) are in many cases ugly, unamiable, ferocious, and tormented with
monstrous appetites, which can only be satisfied by devouring their fellow-
creatures” (Thomson 1881, 60). There is, accordingly, a disproportionate
interest in predatory and abject creatures in Thomson’s writing: not for him
the cute or the companionable. Moreover, Thomson’s oeuvre shows little
evidence of overt animal advocacy or even much sign of interest in living,
extra-textual animals, with the exception perhaps of a reference in his diary,
noted by his biographer Henry Stephens Salt (a prominent Victorian pro-
animal campaigner), to a “poor strange cat” resident in his coal-cellar
(quoted in Salt 1914, 104). Nonetheless, the creatures of Thomson’s
“night-side” generate significant aesthetic and ethical effects crucial to his
counter-anthropocentric philosophy, which in turn yields benefits for the
larger task of animal studies in producing new versions of human/animal
relations.
After briefly sketching some of the key broader currents of Thomson’s
thought, most crucially his infamous antagonism towards Christianity, this
chapter will focus on three aspects of his engagement with questions of the
animal and the human. First, I explore Thomson’s debt to evolutionary
theory. Thomson is on the surface, and hardly surprisingly, one of
Darwin’s gloomiest interpreters, and animals feature recurrently through
natural selection as figures of the malign nature in which his texts’ bleak
psychology unfolds. Although this implies that an oppositional logic is at
work in his drawing of the human/animal boundary, Thomson’s insis-
tence on the capacities of certain creatures and on the privations of man
(an inversion of the more usual supposition of the privations of the animal
and the capacities of the human) reconfigures the barrier between the
human and the nonhuman. Second, I analyze how this post-species inde-
terminacy is enacted in Thomson’s fixation with abyssal depths and under-
worlds. The characteristic movement of Thomson’s writing, in the words
of the 1866 poem “Vane’s Story” is “Down, down into the deepest deep”
(l. 551), a trajectory which operates not only as part of his poetry’s dark
geography, but also in pursuit of an abyssal ontology that connects with
some of the most influential theoretical insights on the human and nonhu-
man, particularly in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Finally, I turn to
the key question that emerges from the previous sections, that of the
ethical weight of Thomson’s writing. Ultimately, Thomson imagines some-
thing like the “dark ecology” coined by Timothy Morton (2007) as “the
‘goth’ assertion . . . that we want to stay with a dying world” (184–185).
192 J. MILLER
Thus, Thomson’s creatural philosophy should not be understood as in any

sense a negation of ethical responsibility, but rather as a deepening of the
basis on which it might flourish.
GOD AND OTHER PROBLEMS

By far the most controversial aspect of Thomson’s writing and philosophy is
his extraordinary hostility towards religion, which he viewed, according to
G. W. Foote (1884) in a preface to a posthumous collection of Thomson’s
prose, mostly contributions to The National Reformer and The Secularist, as
“a disease of the mind engendered by folly and fostered by ignorance and
vanity” (vi).3 Specifically, from 1865 onwards, he was, in Schaeffer’s (1965)
words, involved in a “personal crusade against Christianity” (63). Thomson
had been raised by a devout mother and his early poetry in the 1850s,
although still in many cases inclined towards the melancholy, reflects the
age’s piety. But by the time The City of Dreadful Night was published,
Thomson’s atheism was determined, even evangelical. This long, godless
poem commences from a desolate revision of 1 Corinthians in which the
narrator follows a “shadowlike” walker (Canto II, l. 2) from where “Faith
died, poisoned by this charnel air” (Canto II, l. 12), to where “Love died,
stabbed by its own worshipped pair” (Canto II, l. 18), to where “Hope
died, starved out in its utmost lair” (Canto II, l. 24). A later Canto features a
profane preacher who, addressing a “gloom-arrayed” (Canto XIV, l. 23)
congregation from a “dark pulpit” (Canto XIV, l. 17), informs them
unequivocally that “There is no God; no Fiend with names divine/Made
us and tortures us” (Canto XIV, ll. 40–41). Despite The Athenaeum’s view
of the poem as a “bitter satire upon atheism” (“City of Dreadful Night”
1880, 561), there is no doubt in the sincerity of Thomson’s rejection of
Christianity. As he approached his death, Thomson’s last words in
University College Hospital were apparently “so desperate and so defiant”
that they could not decently be recorded (Morgan 1993, 9), or, as Llewelyn
Powys noted, “they were such as to cause even his friends to look askance”
(quoted in Walker 1950, 172).4
Thomson, of course, was not alone among Victorians in turning away
from religion, though it is notable how many other aspects of social and
political life also drew his scorn. Maccall (1886) recalled how “Thomson’s
contempt for new systems was more bitter than his hatred for expiring
theologies” (10), as his apparent nihilism extended beyond theology to
encompass grand narratives that existed either alongside or, in some
quarters, in place of Christianity. Thomson may justly be claimed as an anti-

capitalist, an anti-imperialist, and an anti-monarchist; Isobel Armstrong
(2002) in her classic study Victorian Poetry has him down as an “atheist,
blasphemer and anarchist” (460). The 1857 “The Doom of the City,”
often thought of as a prototype for The City of Dreadful Night, reveals
Thomson’s iconoclastic spirit flourishing even before he finally lost faith
in the early 1860s, in terms that hint towards an unsettling of the idea of
the human that his vituperation of established verities frequently
involved. Here in a strikingly anti-patriotic moment a Spirit’s voice lam-
basts the idea of a nation “Haughty and wealthy and great, mighty,
magnificent, free” (Part IV, l. 95):
The sumptuous web of thy trade encompassing all the globe

Is fretted by gambling greed like a moth-eaten robe,
Is slimed by creeping fraud, is poisoned by falsehood’s breath,
Is less a garment of life than a shroud of rotting death. (Part IV, ll. 133–136)
The creatural imagery of the Spirit’s revolutionary cri de coeur represents a

somewhat conventional strategy of political critique. Britain (the country
is unnamed but the reference is clear) imagines itself at the apex of a global
hierarchy; the metaphor of the moth eating away the “sumptuous web of
trade,” or of some creature of the undergrowth covering it in slime,
contaminates such apparently enlightened activity with the base operation
of the lowest forms of life. To put it another way, the condemnation of the
secular creeds of imperial and economic expansion proceeds through an
interruption or distortion of the human by an animal presence which
amounts to more than simply metaphorics when taken in the context of
Thomson’s wider thought. Rather, these invertebrate figurations antici-
pate Thomson’s later refusal to identify the human as raised above or
segregated from the nonhuman. Human exceptionalism is an ideology
notably out of place on the “night-side of nature.”
This snub to anthropocentrism receives one of its fullest treatments in
“Proposals for the Speedy Extinction of Evil and Misery,” a remarkable yet
little-read piece in the vein of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” that begins by
positing a scheme to produce a “universal change to perfection of nature
and human nature” (Thomson 1881, 55) and ends by suggesting, among
other things, that “universal” human suicide might be the “best and
most beatific action we could perform for ourselves and our (potential)
posterity and our world in general” (90). Thomson’s satire touches on
194 J. MILLER
many prominent facets of Victorian discourses of progress. At times, for

instance, he ironically echoes Francis Galton’s developing work on eugenics;
among the solutions available to the mooted “Universal Perfection
Company, Unlimited” (80) will be the prompt extermination of any “infer-
ior race” (81).
It is not easy to distill a coherent politics from among the essay’s various
mockeries,5 but it clearly shows Thomson setting himself against optimis-
tic programs for social improvement based on faith in humanity as neces-
sarily privileged over other species. There is a particularly heavy note of
irony in the essay’s initial exposition of human exceptionalism:
It is quite certain, and indeed an axiomatic truth well known and under-
stood by all civilized people, that man . . . is the very crown and head of
nature; that he is so at present, whether or not destined so to continue for
ever. I need not dwell on a proposition so obvious to the clear and impartial
intelligence. Buzzard and ass may be unaware of it, each fondly fancying
itself the supreme model form of life, the true final cause and object of the
world’s existence; but we men know better. We know that all the other
offspring of nature aspire and point to man . . . We know that all her other
works are consecrated with the celestial stamp of use solely in relation to him
and his flourishing life; the chief end of sun, moon, stars, air, ocean, and
earth, being to serve man and glorify him. (Thomson 1881, 87–88)
The reiterated insistence on the self-evidence of man’s pre-eminence (“it is

quite certain, and indeed an axiomatic truth well known and understood
by all”; “I need not dwell on a proposition so obvious”) erodes the
certainty of the pronouncement, and even perhaps hints at the potential
validity of the buzzard’s and ass’s ostensibly absurd assumption of their
own position as “the supreme model form of life.” Certainly, the assertion
that all “the other offspring of nature aspire and point to man,” immedi-
ately following the speculation on the solipsism of the buzzard and ass
(who are evidently not aspiring and pointing to man) has the effect of
undermining Homo sapiens’ hubris. The force of Thomson’s writing is that
“we men” may think we “know better,” but that this narcissistic outlook is
at the very least open to question. Anthropocentrism in Thomson’s
mature thought is always ruptured. Humanity is marked by a vanity
which is both intellectually vulnerable and, as the essay’s extravagant
hypotheses show, ethically dangerous, a view that is clearly of a piece
with Thomson’s anti-theistic impulses. Just as Thomson lost his faith in

God, he also, as Schaeffer (1965) articulates, lost “his faith in man” (115).
EVOLUTION, “THE HUMAN,” AND “THE ANIMAL”

Thomson’s “anti-humanist challenge to Christian transcendence,” as
Armstrong (2002) describes it (474), was profoundly shaped by Darwin’s
influence, a connection that several critics have drawn attention to.6
Importantly, Thomson claimed that he had always been an evolutionist. In
an 1874 review of John Stuart Mill’s Three Essays on Religion, he boasted that
“the theory of natural selection, of Evolution . . . appeared to me the only
true doctrine of the development of Nature, years before it had been
formulated, vindicated, and so splendidly illustrated by our leading contem-
porary philosophers” (quoted in Schaeffer 1965, 159 n20). Certainly, there
is a Darwinian flavor to much of Thomson’s writing. But while Darwin
(2004) insisted in the deliberately rosy conclusion to The Descent of Man
that despite our “lowly origin” we can remain confident in our place at “the
very summit of the organic scale” with our “god-like intellect” and “exalted
powers” (689), Thomson’s version of evolution, was, characteristically, less
upbeat. Man might hope, in Darwin’s view, for a “still higher destiny in the
distant future” (689), but for Thomson the supposed organic precedence of
humankind was on a much less steady footing. In this vein, The City of
Dreadful Night includes a despondent summary of the implications of
evolutionary theory for human history as part of the preacher’s address:
We finish thus; and all our wretched race

Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
To other beings with their own time-doom:
Infinite aeons ere our kind began;
Infinite aeons after the last man
Has joined the mammoth in earth’s tomb and womb.
(Canto XIV, ll. 55–60)
Humanity, then, is located only in a relatively brief window of time

among the world’s “Infinite aeons” and as such exists by virtue of the same
evolutionary forces that govern all organic life. Straightforwardly enough,
as David Seed (1999) summarizes, The City of Dreadful Night evokes a
“secularized evolutionary worldview where humanity is as subject to
196 J. MILLER
change and potential obsolescence as any other species” (99). Joining the
mammoth in “earth’s tomb and womb,” humanity contains nothing
exceptional. As the preacher continues, “We bow down to the universal
laws,/Which never had for man a special clause/Of cruelty or kindness”
(Canto XIV, ll. 61–63).
Unsurprisingly, it is the “cruelty” rather than the “kindness” which
features most prominently in Thomson’s natural philosophy, an inter-
est that frequently materializes in a dark animal aesthetics. Even before
he read Darwin, Thomson was attracted to certain species as generic
figures of natural violence and antipathy to the human. “The Doom of
the City” features a litany of depressing creatures, each of which is
identified as implacably opposed to human cultures in a way that looks
forward to his later conclusion in “The Speedy Extinction of Evil and
Misery” that animal life is largely “ferocious, and tormented with
monstrous appetites”:
If the owl haunts doleful ruins and lives in the sombre night,
Could it joy in the cheerful homes of men, could it love the noonday light?
If the serpent couches in jungles and deserts of burning sand,
Would it rather cast its slough in the peopled corn-rich land?
If the great bear prowls alone in desolate wastes of ice,
Could it joy to range in herded power through a tropic Paradise?
If the vulture gorges on carrion and all abhorrent things,
Would it rather slake with fruits and wine the rush of its obscene wings?
(Part III, ll. 19–26)
The beastly string of rhetorical questions hinges upon a view of nature as

inherently opposed to human fulfillment. These haunting, prowling, gor-
ging creatures constitute an agonistic world that defeats the impulse
towards domestication, imaged as home, agriculture, and ecological sover-
eignty, and in which humanity will never seem at ease. Animality is synon-
ymous with horror; as such, it functions as a trope for a violent planet rather
than as a particular representation of the material lives of animals. This is
“the animal” as philosopheme, embodying a broad and inevitably reductive
view of the nonhuman that nonetheless plays an important structural role in
Thomson’s marginalization of the human in the wake (and to an extent in
anticipation) of Darwin’s great achievements.
There are many more obscene creatures in both Thomson’s poetry
and prose. Vultures, in particular, circle around Thomson’s writing as
signs of a voracious, evolutionary struggle for existence that exceeds and
upsets human ambition. “Lines, 1878” reveals the narrator plodding

“pathless ways” (l. 26) surrounded by “dry bleached bones” (l. 27),
“Or men and camels dying or just dead/With eager vultures hanging
overhead” (ll. 29–30). The City of Dreadful Night accommodates an
obscene vulture too (Canto XIV, l. 64), while the revelatory voice of
the “Lady of Sorrow” in her guise as the Shadow takes the same premise
underwater with this vision of a sea bed: “the gleaming sand was a
loathsome slime whereon and wherein crawled shapes of clammy hid-
eousness” by “a Golgotha of human bones, the bones of men and
women and children devoured by the insatiate sea” (Thomson
1881, 14). On the one hand, these repugnant forms clearly feed a binary
logic through which the animal is pitted against the human. On the other
hand, there is more than simple opposition at work in Thomson’s fram-
ing of these apparently monolithic categories. Humans, for Thomson,
are every bit as loathsome as animals. The Shadow reflects corrosively on
the idea of man as “the image of God” and delivers a scathing inventory
of “the mean stupid faces, the mean dull eyes, the mean puckered fore-
heads” and so on (for some time) of the “mass” of humanity (Thomson
1881, 40). Humanity, crucially, is included in rather than segregated
from a debased, savage nature.
The effect of this evolutionary logic is to level out species differ-
ence so that rather than conceiving of the human and the animal as
divided along a vertical axis from lower to higher forms of life,
Thomson identifies the division between life forms non-hierarchically.
Accordingly, the Shadow continues her anti-humanist rant by derid-
ing Homo sapiens’ unwillingness to “acknowledge [its] relationship
with all the rest of the world and its creatures” (Thomson 1881, 41),
before proceeding to an extended discussion of the equivalent accom-
plishments of humanity and coral:
The coral insects swarm in the sea, of which they know a fraction more than
equivalent to that which man knows of this visible universe; and they are
distinct in their individualities and generations as are the children of men;
and each dies having wrought its cell; and one cell is so much vaster (even to
the thousandth of a line) than any of those around it, that it may well be
long famed amongst them far and wide as a stupendous work; . . . The
ancient Egyptians have left a few tombs, columns, pyramids; these insects
leave behind them hundreds of leagues of reef well-founded from the floors
of the deep sea: which, Egyptians or insects, are more serviceable to the
after-world? You have visited a great library, which is a species of human
198 J. MILLER
coral-reef and you have beheld thousands upon thousands of volumes

closely ranged around: these are the painfully elaborated sepulchral exuviae
of once living human intellects. (Thomson 1881, 41–42)
The depiction here of what would much later become known as the coral’s
extended phenotype (the way an organism expresses its life through
changes to its environment) accomplishes an ironic reversal. Insects, the
Shadow argues (though polyps would be the more accurate designation),
are responsible for mighty edifices equivalent to the great monuments of
human civilization; conversely, the great monuments of our civilization
(be they libraries or pyramids) are to be understood as human exuviae
(that is to say the shed exoskeletons of crustaceans, et cetera—another
zoological misnomer). Apparent in this formulation is a sense of wonder
towards the natural world, which comprises an important note in Darwin’s
work and recuperates the nonhuman from the disgust that elsewhere
pervades Thomson’s representations of animals. But, although the tone
here may be markedly different, the argument from coral complements the
more characteristic negative material. If the “animal” might convention-
ally be defined through lack (of language, self-consciousness, and so on),
Thomson highlights the remarkable capacity of this humble organism in a
way that challenges anthropocentric egotism and continues the work of
adjusting species hierarchies.
Thomson does, importantly, identify one exceptional quality in the
human which complicates the sense of his work as promulgating a reso-
lutely post-species philosophy. Of all creatures, humanity is distinctive for
its alienation from the world. Thomson engages with this property most
explicitly in “The Voice from the Nile,” an 1881 poem written from the
river’s perspective. “Of all the creatures whom I breed and feed,” the Nile
ponders, “One only with his works is strange to me” (ll. 70–71).
Crocodiles are happy in the river’s slime (l. 74); doves are “happy floating
through [its] palms” (l. 90). The “sons of men,” in contrast, are “as the
children of an alien race/ . . . not at home” (ll. 93–94). As the Nile devel-
ops its theme, there is a temptation to see Thomson’s misanthropy as a
precise restatement, albeit in negative terms, of the conventional premises
of human exceptionalism:
For Man, this alien in my family,

Is alien most in this, to cherish dreams
And brood on visions of eternity . . .
My other children live their little lives,

Are born and reach their prime and slowly fail . . .
But Man
Has fear and hope and phantasy and awe,
And wistful yearnings and unsated loves,
That strain beyond the limits of his life. (ll. 142–144; 147–148; 151–154)
“The Voice from the Nile” articulates humanity, then, as a unique mode
of being in the world based on psychological, cognitive, or even spiritual
properties denied other creatures. Such determinations are in marked
tension with the earlier refusals of anthropocentrism, but the negativity
here should not be overlooked. Even the assertion of humanity as the one
being straining beyond the limits of its life manifests as a rejection of
humanity. Human exceptionalism is reconceived as absence rather than
presence, as lack rather than fullness; humanity’s uniqueness inheres in its
existence within a state of crisis and in the susceptibility to psychological
pain of “These sad-eyed peoples of the sons of men” (l. 92).
The threads of Thomson’s adoption and reimagining of evolutionary
science are admittedly a little tangled. To summarize: Darwin’s thought con-
tributes to Thomson’s sense of the brutish nature of human existence and the
insignificance of humanity on a cosmic scale and allows him, perhaps rather
playfully, to posit animals as agents of remarkable cultures. There is thus a
horizontalizing force to Thomson’s counter-anthropocentric discourse of
species. The somewhat antithetical supposition of man as uniquely capable of
alienation, and thus of specific kinds of mental suffering, works with rather than
against his anti-humanism in the way that it contributes to the opening up,
rather than the reductive simplification, of questions around the human and
the animal. A recognition of mankind as radically alien, with all the despon-
dency that brings, articulates an alternative human ontology and, in turn,
facilitates a mode of attention to animals, those other aliens, that goes beyond
the sometimes blunt deployment of certain species as signifiers of violent
evolutionary struggle. This redrawing of the lines of species identity emerges
particularly in Thomson’s bleak version of an often literal descent of man.
“DOWN, DOWN TO THE DEEPEST DEEP”

While Shelley was the most important influence on Thomson’s early work,
Dante was probably the most significant figure in his mature writings.
A remarkable autodidact, Thomson taught himself Italian in order to
200 J. MILLER
appreciate more fully the work of a poet he agreed with Ruskin was the
world’s “central intellect” (Salt 1914, 163). Importantly, The City of
Dreadful Night is explicitly modeled on the Inferno.7 As his first epigraph
Thomson takes Dante’s depiction of the words displayed on the entrance to
Hell: “Per me si va nella città dolente” [“Through me the road to the city of
desolation” (Alighieri 1964, Canto III, l. 1)]. Canto VI of The City of
Dreadful Night sees Thomson’s unnamed first-person narrator encounter a
bodiless voice that returns the poem to the same infernal inscription: “I
reached the portal common spirits fear,/And read the words above it, dark
yet clear,/‘Leave hope behind, all ye who enter here’” (Canto VI, ll. 19–21).
Just as Dante’s great poem is structured around the descent into the inferno,
so Thomson is concerned in The City of Dreadful Night and in many others of
his works with a movement into, or habitation of, various hellish underworlds
beneath the pieties of the Victorian surface. As such, The City of Dreadful
Night utilizes the epic literary device of katabasis, through which the hero
undertakes a descent and return, though with the significant modifications
that the poem lacks a hero in any recognizable sense and denies the possibility
of any going back. The focalizing “I” which appears as the organizing
principle of alternate cantos remains stuck in a nightmarish environment
shut off from “the lucid morning’s fragrant breath” (Canto I, l. 3) in a city
the sun has never visited (Canto I, l. 6).8 The poem’s parting image of its
equivalent to the epic hero shows him lethargically pondering the “cold
majestic face” of the sphinx (Canto XX, l. 47).
At the risk of oversimplification, Thomson’s infernal city functions in
three main ways: psychologically (as a location of melancholy), epistemo-
logically (as a space of the unknown or the uncertain), and, most impor-
tantly for the purpose of this chapter, ontologically (as a zone of identity
crisis). As Rachel Falconer (2004) comments, “Dante was not the first, but
he was certainly the most influential writer to turn the katabatic narrative
into a quest for selfhood” (para. 1). Thomson is very much concerned
with discourses of the self, not in the mode of affirmation or discovery but
more in relation to a kind of emptiness connected to his work’s evolutionary
ambience. That is to say, Thomson’s Dantean underworlds are identifiable
as expressions of a kind of “abyss” (a key term in this context) into which
individual and even species differences disappear. This is complex, and
merits a brief theoretical excursion into more recent animal philosophy.
The question of the animal as constituted by critical theory may be said
to hover around an abyss. Derrida’s (2008) seminal essay “The Animal
That Therefore I Am,” now established as a cardinal reference point for
Animal Studies, recurrently figures the apparent break between the so-
called animal and the so-called human in abyssal terms. Thus, there is an
“abyssal rupture” between “what calls itself man and what he calls the
animal” (30), while the animal gaze opens up the “abyssal limit of the
human” (12). More complicatedly, Derrida asks of this abyssal limit,
“What are the edges of a limit that grows and multiplies by feeding on
an abyss?” (31). The term is also an important one for Heidegger’s
conceptualization of the human/animal division. In his “Letter on
Humanism,” for instance, Heidegger (1993) writes of “living creatures”
that “on the one hand they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and
on the other are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by
an abyss” (230).
The precise nature or texture of this abyss in Derrida’s and Heidegger’s
thought has given rise to a good deal of dispute, which it is beyond the
scope of this chapter to recount in detail. In short, in Matthew Calarco’s
(2008) view, Derrida’s recapitulation of Heidegger’s “hyperbolic rhetoric
of abysses and essential differences” (48) indicates that he “resolutely refuses
to abandon the human-animal” division as expounded by Heidegger (145).
Other critics, perhaps most significantly Ted Toadvine (2010), have identi-
fied Derrida’s position, contra Calarco, as “able to avoid both the homo-
genization of biologism and the discontinuity of a metaphysical opposition”
(253) so that the Derridean abyss might be thought of as neither rigorously
separating nor simplistically merging the human and the animal. Rather,
Toadvine’s position is that in understanding “relations between humans
and animals, between different species and populations of animals, between
animals and plants, between life and the inorganic” abyssally, we insist on
“multiplying and thickening differences that defy objectification, that refuse
to be parsed into either one or many, that remain intimate without con-
gealing into a continuum” (253). Accordingly, to quote Toadvine again, we
can “no longer speak of “lowering” humans to the level of the animals or of
“raising” animals to the level of the human, since the abyssal differences
cannot be arranged hierarchically or teleologically” (254).
The usage of abyss in continental philosophy has a significant precursor
in Victorian thought (in texts such as Jack London [1904] People of the
Abyss, for example) as a signifier for post-Darwinian ontological insecurity
in the context particularly of anxieties around the urban. As Julian
Wolfreys (2007) puts it in an essay on Richard Marsh’s The Beetle, a
prominent example of the gothic resonance of the abyssal imagination,
the metropolis becomes “a figure for absolute alterity [that] leads one to
202 J. MILLER
know the groundlessness of one’s own being” (187). “Abyss” is a term

that features throughout the development of Thomson’s writing. “The
Doom of the City” articulates how “worlds go wheeling far their cycled
courses,/From the fathomless Unbirth of the Abyss” (ll. 374–375);
“A Lady of Sorrow” has the speaker and the “siren” moving through an
abyss; numerous other references might be cited too.
Thomson’s exploration of the groundlessness of being appears in its
most sustained form in Canto XVIII of The City of Dreadful Night in
which the poem’s insomniac wanderer departs into a “suburb of the
north” (l. 1). Significantly, rather than travelling across the city, the
wanderer’s journey also, familiarly, takes him down. Reaching a spot
where “three close lanes led down” (l. 2), “Like deep brook channels,
deep and dark and lown” (l. 4), he chooses the “left-hand lane” and treads
the “earthen footpath” (l. 8), brushing the “humid leafage” (l. 9) as he
moves with “frame downbent” (l. 10). The scene, then, is framed by a
movement down into the wet, fecund ground so that the encounter that
follows takes place as if within the earth’s organic fabric. Continuing his
forlorn odyssey, the wanderer’s gaze is drawn to a figure even further
down in this eldritch landscape:
After a hundred steps I grew aware

Of something crawling in the lane below;
It seemed a wounded creature prostrate there
That sobbed with pangs in making progress slow,
The hind limbs stretched to push, the fore limbs then
To drag; for it would die in its own den. (ll. 13–18)
There is very little initially to suggest humanity in the body and movement
of this curious stranger. “Creature” purposefully evades any question of
species; its crawling on “hind limbs” and “fore limbs” emphasizes the
animality seemingly confirmed by the final desire to “die in its own den.”
There is a deliberate ambiguity, therefore, in Thomson’s introduction of
this benighted being. The next stanza’s revelation of its identity is cur-
iously, and revealingly, phrased: “But coming level with it I discerned/
That it had been a man” (ll. 19–20; emphasis added). This is a creature
suspended between designations, neither man nor animal but caught in a
kind of ontological no-man’s-land crucial in the ensuing exchange.
Somewhat unusually in a poem so concerned with purposelessness, this
is a creature with an agenda. There even briefly seems the possibility of
optimism, despite his desperate predicament, as he reveals his direction to

the wanderer: “I am in the very way at last/To find the long-lost broken
golden thread/Which unites my present with my past” (ll. 49–51). The
creature’s description of the thread’s destination is among the poem’s
most affecting moments:
It leads me back
From this accursed night without a morn,
And through the deserts which have else no track,
And through vast wastes of horror-haunted time,
To Eden innocence in Eden’s clime:
And I become a nursling soft and pure,
An infant cradled on its mother’s knee,
Without a past, love-cherished and secure. (ll. 56–63)
The being’s faded humanity produces the desire to return to a prelapsarian

archetype of tenderness and of a life unblemished by history (“without a
past”) as a condition of primal fullness and completion. If the regressive
impetus apparent in the creature’s fantasy appears humanist in his idealiza-
tion of the mother–child bond, the wanderer’s commentary on the golden
thread complicates and dehumanizes the inevitably doomed quest:
He turned to grope; and I retiring brushed

Thin shreds of gossamer from off my face,
And mused, His life would grow, the germ uncrushed;
He should to antenatal night retrace,
And hide his elements in that large womb
Beyond the reach of man-evolving Doom. (ll. 67–72)
As the creature’s future trajectory is directed, the speaker hypothesizes,

towards “antenatal night,” the poem moves to a central image of
Thomson’s poetry, that of the womb.9 Crucially, the womb for Thomson
is always more than human. For the creature, the retracing of the golden
thread facilitates the evaporation of his organic identity; his elements (that is
to say that which constitutes the creature—we might gloss this now as
genetics) are lost in a space that appears to prevent the reconstitution of
these elements in human form (the creature will be “Beyond the reach of
man-evolving Doom”). This eventuality will come not through death, but
conversely through life in the “germ uncrushed” that will continue to grow.
204 J. MILLER
To situate this more broadly, there is a recurrent interest in Thomson’s

work in thinking of being beyond ideas of individual life and death. When
the preacher of The City of Dreadful Night anticipated the last man joining
the mammoth “in earth’s tomb and womb,” he emphasized a co-dependent
relationship between extinction and emergence also apparent in the earlier
“Vane’s Story.” Like many of Thomson’s poems, “Vane’s Story” incorpo-
rates a dialogue between a first-person speaker and a mysterious, unearthly
(and usually female) voice (the figure of the “Dead Girl-Angel,” in the words
of Schaeffer 1965, and another Dantean resonance [25]). The narrator
requests that the angel take a message to the “steward of the world-estate”
(l. 502), which necessitates a departure
Down, down, into the deepest deep;

. . . Down, down into the central gloom
Whose darkness radiates through the tomb
And fills the universal womb. (ll. 551; 554–557)
The katabatic momentum of “Vane’s Story” involves the same intimacy of

tomb and womb as The City of Dreadful Night and shows the entry to the
underworld collapsing the boundary between death and birth. Existence
in this sense is cyclical rather than teleological and closer, unsurprisingly,
to a Darwinian than to a Christian model. In entering the tomb/womb of
the underworld, Thomson is engaging with an idea of life that both
precedes and comes after its manifestation in specifiable life forms and
which constitutes the creature’s apparent life beyond species. So, as Kevin
Mills (2007) argues, the sought-after golden thread can “be understood
phylogenetically, as the thread of life itself—the evolutionary chain which
connects humanity with its pre-cognitive past and with a possibly post-
cognitive future” (129); the golden thread, in other words, links the
human and the nonhuman.
There is a crucial intimacy, then, between the womb-like and the
abyssal in Thomson’s imagination. Just as the wanderer’s movement
down a lane “deep and dark and lown” circles him with life in the form
of the humid vegetation, so the creature’s even deeper journey takes
him into a kind of creative emptiness: creative because productive of
multiple life forms and empty because no specific life form can be
thought of as fixed on evolutionary timescales. As Thomson’s intro-
ductory note to “A Lady of Sorrow” explains, “the one substance is
eternal, the various forms are ever varying” (Thomson 1881, 2). Life
expresses itself at “the abyssal limit of the human,” to return to

Derrida’s phrasing, not in the sense that a chasm might be assumed
between the human and the nonhuman, but in the sense that differ-
ences are only constituted in and through a radical emptiness that
underpins Thomson’s natural philosophy.
ANIMAL ETHICS IN A DARK ECOLOGY

Consequently, ontology is defined in Thomson’s work by interrelation.
The preacher’s address in The City of Dreadful Night insists on the
entanglement, to use a favorite term of Darwin’s, of all creatures: “all
substance lives and struggles evermore/Through countless shapes con-
tinually at war,/By countless actions interknit” (Canto XIV, ll. 67–69).
It is these relationships that populate the “infinite Mystery, abysmal,
dark/Unlighted ever by the faintest spark/For us the flitting shadows
of a dream” (Canto XIV, ll. 76–78). Being is insubstantial yet constantly,
mysteriously emerging: all organisms are involved with one another in a
way that defies objectification, to recall Toadvine (2010). “To Our
Ladies of Death” from 1863 provides a fuller exposition of Thomson’s
proto-ecological consciousness as the speaker reflects on the significance
of death:
One part of me shall feed a little worm,

And it a bird on which a man may feed;
One lime the mould, one nourish insect-sperm;
One thrill sweet grass, one pulse in bitter weed. (ll. 204–207)
This dispersal of the body into the world, a process later identified as
“cosmic interchange” (l. 211), becomes the basis for what might be
termed a form of secular mysticism incorporating evolutionary theory
along with a pantheism Thomson took, mostly, from his reading of the
Romantics.10 Rather than an abstruse philosophical proposition, this sense
of the organic flow between human and nonhuman is central to the idea of
sympathy that Thomson’s writing consistently returns to.
In this vein, Thomson’s work provides a significant counterpart to that of
another notable Victorian doom-monger, Thomas Hardy, specifically
through Hardy’s contention that “the most far-reaching consequence of
the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical” (quoted in
Cohn 2010, 494). That Thomson’s work had considerable ethical force
206 J. MILLER
was not lost on his Victorian readers. An article in The Academy claimed that
“Profoundest pity for his tragic fellow-beings is the only softer note in
the iron symphony” (“Academy Portraits: James Thomson” 1898, 384).
Salt (1914) aimed towards a similar redemption of Thomson’s often rather
muddy reputation when he asserted that “pessimist though he may be, his
sympathies are entirely human” (166). “Human” here operates as a byword
for ethical consciousness, but does an injustice to the range of Thomson’s
sympathy. The argument might, for instance, be made that the poignant
depiction of the creature’s desperate condition implicitly suggests that
the human need not function as the limit for ethical considerability. For
more explicit signs of sympathy beyond the human we might turn again to
“A Lady of Sorrow,” Thomson’s most Darwinian piece of prose, and the
Shadow’s remarkably inclusive sense of loss at the world’s unfulfilled
potentials. “And what,” she asks, “of the roses that are blighted in the
bud, the lambs that are never sheep, the little unfledged things that never
have their bird life, the saplings, the acorns that never grow into trees, the
number-confounding spawn-germs that never attain definite individual
existence?” (41). If this seems extensive to the point of absurdity, the
Shadow anticipates such objections by countering “Of what use to sneer:
This is not, this shall not be my brother! when you both issued from the
same womb?” (42). Kindred—“fellowship and affiance and mysterious
identity with all the being of the universe” (42) as the Shadow explains
it—necessitates the acknowledgment of every form of life; it would be
irrational in this schema to favor one kind of being and to neglect another.
Perhaps Thomson’s most suggestive (if brief) moment of more-than-
human sympathy, however, appears in the desperate anti-climax to The
City of Dreadful Night in what he described in a letter to W. M. Rossetti
as his “animal stanza” (quoted in Salt 1914, 77). The final canto focuses
ekphrastically on Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 Melencolia 1, represented in the
form of a “stupendous, superhuman,/ . . . bronze colossus of a winged
Woman” (Canto XXI, ll. 5–6) looming over her “Capital of teen and
threne” (l. 74). Dürer’s engraving includes a creature responsible for some
confusion as Thomson approached the final stages of his greatest work. As he
complained to Rossetti, “I find myself bothered by the animal prone at her
feet. Ruskin in one place terms this a wolf, and in another a sleeping wolf-
hound” (quoted in Salt 1914, 77). Art historical orthodoxy has the beast
unequivocally as a canid; Thomson’s view is as evocative as it is idiosyncratic:
“For myself, I have been used to consider it probably a sheep, and as dead,
not sleeping; in fact, a creature awaiting dissection, and suggesting anatomy
as among the pursuits of the labouring and studious Titaness” (quoted in

Salt 1914, 77). The realization that this was not in fact a sheep resulted in the
inclusion of what Thomson called a “villainous makeshift” in the poem’s
published version. While the original draft shows Melencolia with “instru-
ments of carpentry and science/Scattered about her feet, in strange alliance/
With the poor creature for dissection brought” (quoted in Salt 1914, 78),
the final form substitutes the “poor creature” for a “keen wolf-hound
sleeping undistraught” (l. 21).
The difference between these textual variants is striking (the most
notable being the presence or absence of suffering). Thomson’s preference
for the original allows for a reading that includes animal life more affect-
ingly at this critical moment of pathos. Melencolia at the poem’s end
stands as an emblem of absolute futility and meaninglessness. Her labors,
in which Thomson hoped to include anatomy, result from her sorrow
(l. 54), but amount to nothing in a world in which “every struggle brings
defeat/Because Fate holds no prize to crown success” (ll. 64–65). There
can be no redemptive rationale for her anatomical investigations of the
animal’s body. Instead of the humanist glory of scientific endeavor,
Thomson figures only a dead sheep; there is nothing to render it signifi-
cant but its own insignificant form. Attention is drawn, then, to the animal
simply, tragically, as a suffering being.
This refusal of extrinsic forms of value—what the sheep might be for—
gestures towards a kind of nihilism. But, at the risk of departing from the
spirit of Thomson’s bleak vision, this sense of futility may have its uses. in
formulating “dark ecology” Timothy Morton (2007) argues that “Now is a
time for grief to persist, to ring throughout the world” (185). Although
there are doubtless tensions between Morton’s eclectic twenty-first-century
version of ecological thought and Thomson’s Victorian pessimism, the over-
arching effect of Thomson’s work could perhaps stand as something like the
“perverse, melancholy ethics” (195) Morton encourages. Philip Tew (2007)
has argued that the obligatory critical focus on Thomson’s pessimism com-
prises “a convenient critical orthodoxy” that ultimately “de-radicalises him”
(116) by marginalizing the political dimensions of his writing. Certainly, this
has been true of some criticism. Conversely, however, in the context of ideas
of the animal and the human, Thomson’s pessimism is inseparable from his
radicalism, notwithstanding his apparent distance from animal causes (at
least in an explicit political sense). To reprise: pessimism for Thomson
might be glossed as a denial of secular ideologies of progress and metaphy-
sical explanations of existence that operates in tandem with a fixation with
208 J. MILLER
the universality of suffering. The psychological and ontological depths this

produces facilitates the discovery of the indeterminacy between species and
the abyssal uncertainty of the human. In Thomson’s writing, melancholy, as
pessimism’s counterpart, functions as a mode of attention to the world and
its denizens that allows for an underdetermined ethics structured in relation
to the experience of creatures rather than to an overarching ideology that
habitually renders them serviceable to other, often violent ends.
NOTES
1. The later James Thomson is usually distinguished from the earlier as James
Thomson, B.V., after his penname Bysshe Vanolis, constructed from
Shelley’s middle name and an anagram of the German Romantic Novalis.
For simplicity’s sake, I opt to drop the B.V. from the later Thomson’s name
in the following pages.
2. All quotations from Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night are from Thomson
(1993), and hereafter will be cited parenthetically in the text. All quotations
from Thomson’s other poems are from Thomson (1963); hereafter, poems
will be identified by title in the text and cited parenthetically.
3. The National Reformer and The Secularist were the leading vehicles for anti-
religious thought in Victorian Britain and the most consistent outlet for
Thomson’s published work. Charles Bradlaugh founded The National
Reformer in 1859 with the intention that it should “make war on all the
religions of the world . . . That it should advocate atheism [and] that it
should specially attack the Bible” (quoted in Schaeffer 1965, 51–52). It
was here that The City of Dreadful Night was first published, along, as
Dobell (1884) notes, with Thomson’s “most heterodox productions”
(xxvi). The short-lived The Secularist was founded in 1876 and became
Thomson’s main publisher after he had quarreled with Bradlaugh.
4. The question of Thomson’s last words is somewhat vexed. Henry Salt
(1914) suggests that Thomson “expressed the resolve to leave the hospi-
tal . . . even if he left it in his coffin” (142) and promptly fulfilled the wish.
William Sharp, a friend of Thomson’s who was present at his death, records
“the look of profound despair in the eyes of the dying man” and accuses Salt
of a “kindly . . . modification” of the poet’s last words (Sharp 1889, 247).
Imogene Walker’s (1950) reading is that, nervous that he might be thought
to have recanted his atheism at the last, Thomson gave a “dying speech of
such a heretical nature that it could never be so misconstrued” (172).
5. It should be noted that animal rights and vegetarianism are also held up for
ridicule in a manner reminiscent of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, published two
years later in 1870 (on which see Philip Armstrong 2012).
6. See particularly Mills (2007) and Noel-Bentley (1974).

7. For a more detailed account of Thomson’s debt to Dante see Milbank
(1998).
8. While the even-numbered cantos concern the journey of an unnamed first-
person narrator, the odd-numbered cantos provide more impersonal
descriptions of the city and the philosophy it represents.
9. A specific study of the gender implications of Thomson’s womb imagery
would be well worth undertaking, but is beyond the scope of this current
chapter.
10. It is worth pointing out that Thomson’s poetry was infused not just by
Western literary and philosophical influences, but also by an interest in
Buddhism. See Schaffer (1965, 157n5), for a brief intimation of
Thomson’s Buddhist credentials.
WORKS CITED
Academy Portraits: James Thomson. 1898. The Academy, December 3, 383–384.
Alighieri, Dante. 1964. The Divine Comedy I: Hell. Trans. Dorothy Sayers.
London: Penguin.
Armstrong, Isobel. 2002. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics. Abingdon:
Routledge.
Armstrong, Philip. 2012. Samuel Butler’s Sheep. Journal of Victorian Culture
17(4): 442–453.
Calarco, Matthew. 2008. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger
to Derrida. New York: Columbia University Press.
Cohn, Elisha. 2010. “No insignificant creature”: Thomas Hardy’s Ethical Turn.
Nineteenth-Century Literature 64(4): 494–520.
Darwin, Charles. 2004. The Descent of Man. London: Penguin.
Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise
Mallet, trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press.
Dobell, Bertram. 1884. A Memoir of the Author. In James Thomson, A Voice from
the Nile and Other Poems, vii–xlix. Reeves and Turner: London.
———. 1910. The Laureate of Pessimism: A Sketch of the Life and Character of
James Thomson (“BV”). London: The Author.
Falconer, Rachel. 2004. Shape-changing in Hell: Metamorphosis and Katabasis in
Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet. E-rea. Revue Électronique D’études
Sur le Monde Anglophone 2(2). http://erea.revues.org/449. doi: 10.4000/
erea.449.
Foote, G. W. 1884. Preface. In Satires and Profanities, by James Thomson, 5–8.
London: Progressive Publishing.
Heidegger, Martin. 1993. Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco:
Harper.
210 J. MILLER
London, Jack. 1904. People of the Abyss. London: Macmillan.

Maccall, William. 1886. A Nirvana Trilogy: Three Essays on the Career of James
Thomson. London: Watts.
Milbank, Alison. 1998. Dante and the Victorians. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Mills, Kevin. 2007. “The Truth of Midnight”: Apocalyptic Insomnia in James
Thomson’s The City of Dreadful Night. Victorian Literature and Culture
35(1): 121–134.
Morgan, Edwin. 1993. Introduction. In The City of Dreadful Night, by James
Thomson, 7–24. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental
Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Noel-Bentley, Peter C. 1974. “Fronting the Dreadful Mysteries of Time”: Dürer’s
“Melencolia” in Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night. Victorian Poetry 1(3):
193–203.
Salt, Henry. 1914. The Life of James Thomson (B.V). Rev. edn. Watts: London.
Schaeffer, William David. 1965. James Thomson (BV): Beyond “The City.”
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Seed, David. 1999. Hell is a City: Symbolic Systems and Epistemological
Scepticism in The City of Dreadful Night. In Spectral Readings, ed. Glennis
Byron and David Punter, 88–107. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sharp, William. 1889. Life of James Thomson (B.V.), by H. S Salt. The Academy,
April 13, 247.
Tew, Phillip. 2007. James Thomson’s London: Beyond the Apocalyptic Vision
of the City. In A Mighty Mass of Brick and Stone: Victorian and Edwardian
Representations of London, ed. Laurence Phillips, 107–130. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems. 1880. Athenaeum, May 1,
560–562.
Thomson, James. 1881. Essays and Phantasies. London: Reeves and Turner.
———. 1963. Poems and Some Letters of James Thomson. London: Centaur Press.
———. 1993. The City of Dreadful Night. Edinburgh: Canongate.
Toadvine, Ted. 2010. Life Beyond Biologism. Research in Phenomenology 40:
243–266.
Walker, Imogene. 1950. James Thomson (BV). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2009. Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the
Humanities. PMLA 124(2): 564–575.
Wolfreys, Julian. 2007. The Hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle, London, and the
Abyssal Subject. In A Mighty Mass of Brick and Stone: Victorian and Edwardian
Representations of London, ed. Laurence Phillips, 169–192. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
John Miller is a Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the

University of Sheffield. His books include Empire and the Animal Body
(Anthem, 2012) and (with Louise Miller) Walrus (Reaktion, 2014). He is co-
editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, co-convener of ShARC
(Sheffield Animal Research Colloquium), and Secretary of ASLE-UKI
(Association for Study of Literature and the Environment, UK & Ireland). His
current book project is a literary history of fur.
CHAPTER 11
“Come Buy, Come Buy!”: Christina

Rossetti and the Victorian Animal Market
Jed Mayer
Through the cages of the London Zoo, the general public was given a
window onto a global animal trade of extensive proportions. Although the
cheery and music-filled promenades of Regent’s Park did not promote
reflection on the capture and transportation of the animals presented for
the public’s entertainment, as Harriet Ritvo (1987) argues, the simple fact
of collecting and displaying animals from around the globe was itself a
statement of English commercial strength and ingenuity: “Maintaining
exotic animals in captivity was a compelling symbol of human power.
Transporting them safely to England and figuring out how to keep them
alive were triumphs of human skill and intelligence over the contrary
dictates of nature; access to their native territories symbolized English
power and prestige” (232). Whether or not Christina Rossetti perceived
the zoo in this way, she certainly shared in contemporary zoo-goers’ fasci-
nation with the multitude and heterogeneity of the creatures on display. In
his memoirs, brother William Michael Rossetti (1906) recounts the first
time he and his sister encountered a wombat at the London Zoo: “our steps
led us toward a certain enclosure hitherto unknown to us, and little
J. Mayer (*)
SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, USA
e-mail: mayere@newpaltz.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_11
214 J. MAYER
scrutinized by most visitors. Christina, who had as good an eye for a ‘beast’
as Dante Gabriel, caught sight of ‘phascolomys ursinus’ a second before
myself, and exclaimed, ‘Oh look at that delightful object!’ I soon instructed
my brother what part of the Zoological Gardens he should go to in order to
contemplate the form and proportions of the wombat” (285). Like some
natural historian finding a new species in an exotic foreign country,
Rossetti’s anecdote emphasizes the excitement of first contact, and lays
claim to the first sighting of a creature who would later become more
popularly associated with his brother, Dante Gabriel. Indeed, once
William Michael reported the find he and his sister made, the wombat
enjoyed a brief vogue in Pre-Raphaelite circles, even appearing in the ceiling
fresco designs of the Brotherhood’s inaugural production, the mural-paint-
ing of the Oxford Union Library, begun in 1857 (Trumble 2003).
A wombat also appears in Christina Rossetti’s most famous poem,
“Goblin Market,” which may be read as participating in and even as
feeding this wombat mania that spread among the Rossettis and their
friends. As in William Michael’s description of their first wombat encoun-
ter, the poem’s female protagonists are presented as eager spectators of
furtive animal presences. Ignoring cautious Lizzie’s warnings, curious
Laura eagerly watches the goblins entering their glen:
One had a cat’s face,

One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry-scurry.
(Rossetti 2001, 8, ll. 71–76; cited hereafter
by line number)
This curious menagerie mingles the domestic with the exotic, likening the
strange creatures to familiar animals such as cats and rats, while marking
their foreign status by comparing their physiology to the Australian wom-
bat and South African ratel.
The wombat may be seen as an index of the shifting patterns of con-
sumption governing zoological display and spectatorship in Great Britain.
According to John Simons (2008): “A wombat had been born in the
Zoological Society’s Gardens in Regent’s Park in 1856,” and “the first
wombat had arrived there on 26th October 1830” (56). Between these
11 CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND THE VICTORIAN ANIMAL MARKET 215
two dates, the mission of the Zoological Society had changed considerably.
In the 1820s a wombat, like other exotic animals, might just as likely be
considered worthy of being eaten as of being studied. In his First Prospectus
of the Zoological Society of London from March 1, 1825, founder Sir
Stamford Raffles calls for the creation of a space in which to gather and
maintain animals from every corner of the expanding British Empire: “The
great object should be the introduction of new varieties, breeds, and races of
animals, for the purpose of domestication, or for stocking our farm-yards,
woods, pleasure grounds, and wastes” (quoted in Bastin 1970, 381). After
opening in 1829, the Zoo’s mission gradually changed, with a greater
emphasis on observation and study, and later towards education and enter-
tainment when the Zoo opened its gates to the public in 1850 (prior to
1850 the Zoo was open only to members). From this time the Zoo served
as the premier venue for spectatorial consumption of exotic animals, while
the task of raising exotic animals for culinary and other utilitarian purposes
was taken up by the English Acclimatisation Society, founded in 1860 by
traveler and amateur zoologist Frank Buckland, after dining on African
eland with a wealthy group of wild food enthusiasts. Buckland himself
often boasted of having eaten hedgehog, puppy, and crocodile at his
father’s table, and later worked out an arrangement with Regent’s Park’s
keepers whereby he would gladly dispose of any zoo animals that had died.
As Harriet Ritvo (1987) notes, “Guests at his London home might be
treated to panther (dug up after being buried for several days and judged
‘not very good’), elephant trunk soup, or roast giraffe” (238). Buckland’s
Acclimatisation Society claimed as its mission the improvement of British
meat stocks, as well as providing a domestic source for cheap fur and leather.
But, as Warwick Anderson (1992) observes, although the Society “searched
the world for a suitable animal of moderate size . . . which an average English
middle class family might eat with pleasure . . . wombats and antelopes met
with unexpected resistance” from the British public (149). As a commen-
tator in Dickens’s All the Year Round lamented, the efforts of the English
Acclimatisation Society faced a serious obstacle: “popular prejudice—which
we fear will, for a time at least, wall in and imprison many of their efforts”
(“Acclimatisation” 1861, 495). The irony of this carceral metaphor is
presumably unintentional.
The changing function of the London Zoo represents a shift from one
mode of consumption to another: from the acclimatization of foreign
species to be consumed as meat and leather, to the display of exotic
animals to be consumed by avid spectators. After opening the Gardens’
216 J. MAYER
doors to the general public, the Zoological Society of London regarded

their mission as a civilizing one. As Ritvo (1987) observes: “Serious
interest in the Regent’s Park Zoo among the vulgar was both an agent
and an index of their improvement, and hence another symbol of English
progress and enlightenment” (214). Yet the confined and comfortless
conditions of the Zoo’s animals, not to mention their capture and trans-
port, hardly suggest a humane educational purpose. Though the public
face of the Zoo may have changed, its attendant ideology of human
exceptionalism and dominance remained consistent. What had changed
in the institution’s repurposing was not so much the condition of the
animals as their projected mode of consumption by humans, from gusta-
tory to spectatorial. Robert W. Jones (1997) argues that “from the mid-
nineteenth century onwards the animals were regarded not as present
beings but rather as signs and commodities upon which a number of
competing and complementary ideologies, fantasies and dreams were
meticulously inscribed” (5–6). While this is certainly true, it may be
argued that they were thus regarded prior to mid-century as well, and
that the fantasies and dreams they inspired in spectators continued to
respond to and foster an ideology of human dominance.
While the early nineteenth century witnessed the rise of animal welfare
organizations in Great Britain, criticism of the Zoo’s treatment of ani-
mals would remain scarce prior to the formation of the Humanitarian
League in 1891. In an essay for the League’s Humane Review, George
Williamson (1902) describes “the feelings of pain and disgust which
must often be the portion of the visitor to our own Zoological
Gardens in Regent’s Park” (226). Though such feelings did not appear
to be widespread amongst zoo-goers in the 1850s, humane organiza-
tions were beginning to draw connections between a range of abuses,
extending the preoccupation with the protection of domestic animals
into spheres well beyond the more familiar public ones of barn, horse
stall, and dog pit.
The RSPCA, formed in 1824 to address abuses of animals in rural and
urban life, turned its attention, however briefly, to the suffering of animals
under vivisection, in a case that would draw the attention of several key
figures who would later play important roles in the vivisection debates of the
1870s. French correspondents in The Times and other English papers began
reporting in 1863 on the use of live horses in experimental research and
education at the Veterinary College of Alfort in France. In addition to
members of RSPCA, who appealed to Emperor Napoleon III to interfere,
these reports reached the attention of Frances Power Cobbe, who would
shortly afterwards become one of the leading opponents of vivisection in
Great Britain. As Jan Marsh (1994) notes in her biography of Christina
Rossetti, the poet also became aware of the cruelties practiced in the French
veterinary schools, inspiring what would become an abiding concern with
the plight of animals used in scientific research (434). While Marsh dates
Rossetti’s involvement with vivisection to the Alfort controversy of 1863, a
remark made in a letter from Christina to William Rossetti suggests that she
knew of, and decried, the French practices as early as October 25, 1861.
Attending a series of lectures on French travel given by a “Revd Jackson,”
Christina learned that the lecturer “was one of the recent deputation to
Napoleon III on the subject of cruelty to poor horses: and describes the
Emperor’s reception of the deputation as not merely courteous but appar-
ently even cordial. In a week the horror was put an end to” (Rossetti
1908, 27). The similarity between the events referred to here and the
Alfort controversy suggest an ongoing English concern with scientific
cruelties abroad, and Rossetti’s early association with humanitarian objec-
tions to vivisection coincides with the period between the composition of
“Goblin Market” in April 1859 and its publication in 1862.
This same period also marks her intervention into the traffic in women,
through her philanthropic work at the Highgate Penitentiary. As Marsh
(1994) notes, “early in 1859 she became a voluntary worker at the St.
Mary Magdalen Penitentiary in Highgate, supervising young prostitutes
who wished to relinquish a life of shame” (218–219). With its depiction of
curious maidens seduced by masculine temptations, one succumbing with
disastrous results, the poem clearly addresses issues related to the issue of
so-called “fallen women” with which she would become increasingly
familiar. If the poem reflects Rossetti’s increasing awareness of the ways
in which women could be objectified and commodified through the
spectatorial and marketing practices of prostitution, it also suggests a
shift in the poet’s understanding of the place of animals in Victorian
society, and the complicity of spectatorship in rendering animals as objects
of contemplation, whether for amusement, study, or experimentation.
Christina’s brother, Dante Gabriel, likely also served as an influence on
the poem and on her concern with the traffic in women and animals, though
in a more negative way. In 1862, the year that saw the publication of Goblin
Market and Other Poems, Dante Gabriel Rossetti moved to Tudor House
and began filling his spacious Chelsea home and garden with diverse crea-
tures from around the globe. Over the years, the menagerie at 16 Cheyne
218 J. MAYER
Walk included owls, armadillos, rabbits, dormice, a raccoon, peacocks,

parakeets, kangaroos, wallabies, a groundhog, a Japanese salamander, two
jackasses, a small Brahmin bull, and, of course, a wombat (Simons 2008,
63–87). In contemporary terms, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an animal
hoarder. Despite the many fond and amusing anecdotes that came to
circulate about Rossetti’s animals, judging from their drastically foreshor-
tened life spans it is clear that these animals were not given the best of care.
His wombat is a case in point. Purchasing the creature in September 1869,
Rossetti named his new addition “Top,” in gentle mockery of William
Morris, who shared this nickname. It is worth noting that during this period
Dante Gabriel was conducting an affair with Jane Morris, formerly Jane
Burden, and “Top” the wombat was often invoked in their secret letters and
depicted alongside Jane in his humorous sketches. Top’s life at 16 Cheyne
Walk was apparently nasty, brutish, and short, and he died just two months
after his purchase. To be fair to Rossetti, it should be noted that Top was
purchased at Jamrach’s, the seedy East End storefront of Great Britain’s
largest animal dealer. John Simons (2008) bleakly summarizes nineteenth-
century accounts of this notorious shop, which drew many buyers and
window-shoppers to brave the dingy and often dangerous environs of the
infamous Radcliff Highway: “All descriptions of Jamrach’s shop have two
things in common: awe at the sheer spectacle of so many birds and animals
crammed in together and melancholy at the obvious desperation or dejec-
tion of so much of his stock” (107). A writer for Harper’s Magazine, visiting
the shop in 1877, varied his account of the exotic species housed there with
commentary on their dispiriting confinement. In one room, bird “cages
were piled two or three deep from floor to ceiling,” and “not one little heart
was cheery enough to chirp out a note. The death-like stillness of the room
was only broken by the incessant flutter of each in its tiny prison.” In
another, three elephants “were tied, and having no chance to take other
exercise, swayed their bodies to and fro, their heads up and down, inces-
santly, and put out their trunks and feet, to withdraw them again with a
machine-like regularity” (Conway 1877, 106). Despite such responses, the
writer concludes his piece singing the shop’s praises: like many spectators,
the fascination of exotic creatures appeared to outweigh remorse at their
captivity.
The tremendous financial success of Charles Jamrach and other animal
dealers attests to the fact that Rossetti’s own obsession with collecting
animals was hardly unique, and his treatment of the creatures in his collec-
tion not, unfortunately, atypical. Yet the lack of feeling he often showed
towards the members of his menagerie grated against the humanitarian

sentiments of his contemporaries enough to make it a subject worthy of
remark. In his recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter’s studio
assistant Henry T. Dunn (1904) describes an evening when
we sallied out into the garden to see Rossetti’s pets, or his animals rather, as
it would be wrong to describe them as pets. Experience of Rossetti, and
close intercourse with him, led me to the conclusion that the Poet-painter
had not any great love for animals, nor knew much about their habits. It was
simply a passion he had for collecting, just as he had for books, pictures, and
china, which impelled him to convert his house into a sort of miniature
South Kensington Museum and Zoo combined. (38)
Based on other accounts, it would appear that Rossetti would lavish

attention on newly acquired creatures until the novelty wore off, after
which the animal would die from neglect or be given away. Rossetti’s
passion for collecting expressed itself in a variety of ways, including his
scouting of potential studio models, or “stunners” in the parlance of the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. In some public pleasure-spots such as the
infamous Cremorne Gardens, memorably portrayed by Thackeray in
Vanity Fair, the collecting of women and animals could be accomplished
simultaneously. Notorious as a place of prostitution, the Gardens also
hosted numerous “beast shows,” from one of which Rossetti purchased
his Brahmin bull (Simons 2008, 68). Painter Val Prinsep drew a similar, if
unconscious, connection between Rossetti’s various proclivities when
remembering painting the Oxford Union with the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood: “Rossetti was the planet around which we revolved, we
copied his way of speaking. All beautiful women were ‘stunners’ with us.
Wombats were the most beautiful of God’s creatures” (quoted in Trumble
2003). These seemingly distinct examples of Rossetti’s passions, for
women and animals, might be regarded as connected points on a spectrum
of objectification.
The tendency to objectify women and animals was fostered by
Victorian public spaces that presented women and animals as things to
be looked at and purchased for amusement. Though the respectable,
family-friendly promenades of the Zoological Gardens at Regent’s Park
would seem worlds away from the garish surroundings of Cremorne
Gardens or Jamrach’s seedy East End shop, they may be seen as encoura-
ging similar forms of spectatorship. As Ralph Acampora (2005) argues,
220 J. MAYER
“what visits to the zoo instruct and reinforce over and over again is the
not-so-subliminal message that nonhuman animals exist, at least in their
placement in the zoo, specifically to entertain us humans” (74). The use of
animals as objects of spectatorship can be linked, Acampora suggests, to
other forms of objectification, including pornography. Though he does
“not suggest that the average zoo visitor is motivated by sexual attraction
to the animal inhabitants,” Acampora means to suggest “that there is a
certain economy of desire operative that has structural similarities in these
cases . . . We find in both cases fetishes of the exotic, underlying fear of
nature, fantasies of illicit or impossible encounter, and a powerful pre-
sumption of mastery and control” (75). While Acampora’s argument
implies a connection between forms of spectatorship traditionally gen-
dered masculine, zoos, of course, have appealed as much to women as to
men. The “economy of desire” organized by zoos may be seen as plea-
surably confirming a sense of species dominance in a manner similar to the
way that pornography caters to fantasies of sexual dominance in privile-
ging the power of the gaze over the object of spectatorship. Both forms of
objectification may also be regarded as stimulating a desire to possess the
objects of visual desire, suggesting an unlikely link between the traffic in
animals and in women.
Christina Rossetti’s working title for her famous poem was “A Peep at
the Goblins,” and the ways in which the poem describes Laura and
Lizzie’s illicit peeping at the exotic creatures entering their glen certainly
emphasizes the economy of desire surrounding the act of looking. Despite
the aptness of this earlier title, Christina eagerly changed it on the sugges-
tion of Dante Gabriel, agreeing that “Goblin Market” was more appro-
priate to the poem’s subject. I would like to suggest that the poem
explores the relationship between peeping and marketing, and not only
in regard to the gender issues noted by many of the poem’s critics. As has
been well established, Rossetti composed the poem during a period when
she was beginning the charity work that would lead to her appointment at
the Highgate Penitentiary for Fallen Women, and the poem clearly
addresses issues related to the nineteenth-century traffic in women with
which she would become increasingly familiar. This was, as noted earlier,
the same period in which she became aware of the cruelties of vivisection
practices in France, leading to her more extensive involvement with the
anti-vivisection movement during the 1870s and 1880s. If the poem
reflects Rossetti’s increasing awareness of the ways women could be
objectified and commodified through the peeping and marketing practices
of prostitution, it also suggests a shift in her understanding of the place of

animals in Victorian society, and the complicity of spectatorship in render-
ing animals as objects of contemplation, whether for amusement, study, or
experimentation.
“Goblin Market” employs a dazzling variety of animal figures in ways
that often seem contradictory, likening the goblins to those animals to
which the poet herself was drawn, yet also to more threatening creatures
endangering the poem’s protagonists. When the goblins are first seen,
they inspire Laura’s fascination in a manner that clearly parallels the poet’s
own in her role as avid zoo-goer. When the animal-like merchants begin to
make their pitch, their tone is anything but threatening, heard by Laura as
“a voice like voice of doves/Cooing all together” (77–78). She herself is
described as being of the same animal substance, as Laura “stretched her
gleaming neck/Like a rush-imbedded swan” (81–82), the better to peep
at these exotic creatures. Yet as they repeat their cry the goblins become
increasingly “shrill,” and they come to seem more of a threat as they
confer how best to lure their customer:
Leering at each other,

Brother with queer brother;
Signalling each other,
Brother with sly brother. (93–96)
At this moment the sense of kinship between humans and animals splits
into two mutually opposed and gendered groups, the goblin brotherhood
revealed as dangerous to the poem’s idyllic feminine sisterhood. Their
semiotic exchange is rendered as a threatening and alien form of commu-
nication, like pack animals before an attack. As their pitch becomes more
importunate, their sounds are rendered as increasingly seductive and
meaningless:
The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste

In tones as smooth as honey,
The cat-faced purr’d,
The rat-faced spoke a word
Of welcome, and the snail-faced even was heard;
One parrot-voiced and jolly
Cried “Pretty Goblin” still for “Pretty Polly”;—
One whistled like a bird. (108–114)
222 J. MAYER
Significantly, it is precisely when the “parrot-voiced” goblin utters human

speech that the merchants begin to show their more sinister nature, the
smooth and jolly tones exposed as the false notes of seduction. The
goblins may be seen as one kind of beast posing as another in order to
take advantage of those more vulnerable. In the rhetoric of both animal
and women’s welfare movements, as Mary Ann Elston (1987) notes,
“Those who mistreated beasts were themselves ‘beasts,’” and Rossetti’s
charity work for the Highgate Penitentiary, as well as for the anti-vivisec-
tion cause, may be seen as a more general effort towards moral reform, “to
help the helpless and purify the impure” (272).
Ambivalence towards the bestial is a common theme in nineteenth-
century animal welfare rhetoric, as seen in the movement’s focus on
domestic over wild animals, and the frequent identification of perpetra-
tors of animal cruelty with animalistic behavior. Rossetti’s poem reflects
this ambivalence in the shifting role of animal figures and imagery in the
poem, the “goblin men” in particular embodying cruelty attributed to
both callous men and savage beasts. Anti-vivisectionist literature makes
frequent use of this identification in its emphasis on the brutalizing
effects of animal experimentation. Painful experiments made in the
name of medical progress prompted writers such as Mona Caird (1893)
to ask “whether the civilized state is anything more than an elaboration
of barbarism, a new and wider field for the selfishness and brutality of the
human animal” (14). The trope of the bestial vivisector stands ambiva-
lently beside that of the woman turned animal under the speculum of
medical science. As Coral Lansbury (1985) argues, many women “saw
their condition hideously and accurately embodied in the figure of an
animal bound to a table by leather straps with the vivisector’s knife at
work on its body.” Out of this “process of identification” emerged a
literature that mingled “gynaecological, pornographic, and literary” ele-
ments to “capture the subterranean horror of the identification of
women with vivisected animals, and of vivisection with sadistic modes
of sexuality” (415). The zoomorphic imagery of Rossetti’s poem juxta-
poses predator with prey, the wild with the domestic, to create a kind of
fairy tale bestiary in which the sexes are divided along species lines. Ivan
Kreilkamp (2005) describes the ways the Victorian novel often employed
domestic spaces as a kind of “sorting-house for animals: some are thrown
in the basement, some are ‘petted’ and domesticated as useless pets,
others are positioned as sentinels and guards against any uninvited
creatures around the premises” (102). While this is particularly true of
rural novels such as Wuthering Heights, I would argue that “The sorting
of animals into pet and non-pet is in fact a fundamental gesture” (102)
not only of that novel, but of works such as “Goblin Market” that may be
read as processing the conflicted modes of identification and revulsion
that informed zoomorphic imagery of the period.
Although the once-intriguing goblin creatures are revealed as more
threatening, masculine beasts, the poem’s rhetoric does not uniformly
demonize the bestial. Rather, as the focus shifts towards Lizzie and
Laura, a series of poetic comparisons further emphasize feminine sister-
hood in terms of interspecies kinship. After Laura gives a lock of her hair
in exchange for the goblins’ fruits, her symbolic deflowering leaves her
with an insatiable hunger for the wares of the bestial merchant men.
Lizzie tells the story of Jeanie, another girl who fell victim to the
goblins. This fairy-tale parable of a fallen woman emphasizes a sense of
feminine community, the peasant girls beleaguered but struggling on
against the goblin men and their corrupting influence. Jeanie’s fall
resulted in her alienation from nature, marked by the state of her
grave after death, where
To this day no grass will grow

Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
That never blow. (158–161)
This alienation from nature is in contrast to the healthy symbiosis experi-

enced by the poem’s protagonists, who fall peacefully asleep,
Golden head by golden head,

Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings. (184–186)
Despite Laura’s tasting of the forbidden goblin fruits, she remains closely
connected with the nonhuman world, which watches over her and her
sister’s slumbers:
Moon and stars gazed in at them,

Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forbore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
224 J. MAYER
Round their rest:

Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one nest. (192–198)
These peaceful images look forward to the harmonious natural relation-

ships portrayed in Rossetti’s later collection of children’s poetry, Sing
Song. While many of those poems encourage child readers to protect
birds and other animals from harm, here we see animals protectively
watching over and protecting the bird-like sisters during the night.
Given the poem’s emphasis on the dangers of peeping, it should also be
noted that the moon and stars, owls and bats in the poem are not alone in
watching over Laura and Lizzie. The reader is also engaged in the act of
peeping at the girls’ sleeping embrace, the potentially erotic qualities of
which are emphasized in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustration to the title
page of Goblin Market. Given the extensive resemblances drawn between
the goblins and the exotic creatures that the Rossetti clan enjoyed peeping
at in London’s Zoological Gardens, the poem and its illustration may be
read as juxtaposing two kinds of entrapment for the enjoyment of specta-
tors, both framed by desire. To the extent that we can imagine Laura’s
initial curiosity about the animal-like goblins as reflecting the poet’s own
fascination with wombats, ratels, and other creatures to be seen at the
zoo, the poem reflects a common fascination with other life forms—what
E. O. Wilson (1984) would call “biophilia.” Laura’s ostensibly benign
fascination becomes a problem in the poem when hierarchies of power
emerge, and the pleasures of peeping are subjected to the exploitative
machinery of spectatorship. The sisters’ supposed privacy is made into a
spectacle, and they resemble the animal figures with whom they share a
frame in that, as Acampora (2005) argues, they become “visual objects
whose meaning is shaped predominantly by the perversions of a patriarchal
gaze” (75). Laura and Lizzie enjoy a symbiotic relationship with nature that
is then transformed into an exhibit enabling the voyeur to enjoy their
intimacy vicariously. In this respect their sleeping chamber resembles a zoo
exhibit. John Berger (1980) describes the ways such exhibits mask confine-
ment by means of a false naturalism of design that fools neither spectators
nor animals: “Within limits, the animals are free, but both they themselves,
and their spectators, presume on their close confinement. The visibility
through the glass, the spaces between the bars, or the empty air above the
moat, are not what they seem—if they were, then everything would be
changed. Thus visibility, space, air, have been reduced to tokens” (24–25).
The emblematic language of Rossetti’s poetic description of their sleeping

chamber seems to emphasize a similar sense of natural tokenism as one
would find in such a zoo exhibit, pictorialized “moon and stars gaz[ing]
in,” owls and bats rendered statically, all surrounding the maids like a Pre-
Raphaelite mural. As in pornographic representation, which frames and
stages supposedly natural erotic energies, “wildness-fit-for-display is what
zoos offer and their audiences unconsciously seek” (Acampora 2005, 77).
The poem’s portrayal of feminine intimacy-fit-for-display is itself framed by
the sister’s intimate relationship with nature, one which comes to seem
significantly less idyllic once this relationship has been subjected to the
economy of desire. When merchant men enter the picture, biophilia
becomes scopophilia.
The framing of the goblins within the poem positions them as caught
within the same economy of desire in which the sisters are “locked,” and
reflects on the poem’s frequent comparison of them to zoo animals. While
the poem clearly depicts a gendered hierarchy of power in which goblin
men enslave and exploit young women, the transactions conducted
between masculine and feminine figures are themselves governed by spe-
cies hierarchies in which animals are reduced to objects of exchange, and
humans are bestialized. As she yearns for the goblins’ return, Laura comes
to identify their absence with that of absent herd animals, as she fails to see
Even one goblin

Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling;
Let alone the herds
That used to tramp along the glen. (235–239)
Laura becomes increasingly like these absent herd animals, as she yearns
for their fruit and begins to fear that she will never again “such succous
pasture find” (258). Both merchants and consumers are subject to the
laws of supply and demand, and the sudden scarcity of goblin herds makes
Laura’s physical needs more importunate, her behavior and tastes more
animalistic. As Mary Wilson Carpenter (1991) argues, “Rossetti’s poem
presents an explicitly articulated image of a marketplace in which female
‘appetite’ is at stake” (415), and the likening of Laura to an animal serves
to emphasize the dehumanizing effects of this marketplace. Female appe-
tite disrupts the sisters’ next night, as Laura sits up in “a passionate
yearning/And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire” (266–267). While
this portrayal of balked consumer desire bestializes the figure of Laura, to
226 J. MAYER
some degree marking her out as a woman fallen prey to her own animal-
istic desires, it also marks her similarity to the very animals which the
goblins themselves resemble.
This animalistic expression of balked desire also marks a turning point
in the poem, an acute worsening of her condition that drives Lizzie to
confront the goblin merchant men and obtain fruit for Laura. The goblins
are eager to meet her, and in sharp contrast to their previous scarcity they
rush to meet her with a flurry of animal sounds and motions. When Lizzie
refuses to feast with them, they attack, their animalistic qualities again
becoming frightening, as during Laura’s earlier exchange with them. “No
longer wagging, purring,/But visibly demurring /Grunting and snarling”
(391–393), they attack Lizzie in what readers generally have agreed
resembles a rape scene. Though clearly marking the poem’s most pointed
commentary on male sexual dominance, this passage may also be read as
portraying the mutability of forms under the transformative influence of
capital. When selling their wares, the goblins appealingly resemble charm-
ing animals, yet when their own desires are balked they become ferocious
beasts. At the same time, Lizzie’s resistance to their attack is also marked as
animalistic as the poet invokes the familiar adage, “One may lead a horse
to water,/Twenty cannot make him drink” (422–423). Lizzie firmly
resists the goblins’ violence and the exploitative economic system with
which it is associated. Following this point, the goblins no longer appear as
animals, and “At last the evil people,/Worn out by her resistance,/Flung
back her penny” (437–439) and the market is closed for business.
What is at stake in Lizzie’s act of resistance? What kind of a shop has
been closed down? As Victor Mendoza (2006) has noted, trends in
Rossetti criticism from the 1990s onward have placed increased emphasis
“on the complicated ways in which [the poem’s] ‘issues of sexuality and
gender’ are always intimately intertwined with those of Victorian busi-
ness.” Nevertheless, as he also notes, “Purely logistical questions of plot
and motivation remain unanswerable: What kind of market is the goblin
market—that is, what are its means of production and what are its terms of
exchange?” (916). Given the poem’s rich interplay of animal images and
interspecies connections, as well as the poet’s own interest in exotic
animals and in animal welfare during the period of the poem’s composi-
tion and publication, I would argue that the poem addresses the ethical
issues raised by an exotic animal trade with which Rossetti’s brother, and
to some degree the poet herself, were complicit. Mendoza is right to
emphasize the problem of logistics and motivation when addressing this
poem: to some degree the poem’s complexity and ambivalence regarding

human–animal connections may be seen as reflecting the poet’s own
changing attitudes towards the ethical status of animals. But the problem
of logistics is further complicated by the poem’s rich interplay of fantasy
and realism, fairy tale and spiritual allegory. As critics have noted, the
nursery quaintness of its fairy motifs provide a thin discursive veil for the
poem’s complex portrayal of desires and their exploitation. Yet the poem’s
generic indeterminacy also makes it a disarmingly fluid and open text, able
to draw unexpected connections between a wide range of problems and
concerns. As I have observed elsewhere regarding the nonsense language
of Lewis Carroll, such writing “can shift rapidly between diverse sub-
jects, making unexpected connections and collapsing differences. It is a
language through which hybrid forms proliferate” (Mayer 2009, 431).
Carroll was an ardent admirer of Rossetti’s work, and in “Goblin Market”
we find a similar commitment to serious play. The figure of the market in
the poem draws in a diverse range of nineteenth-century consumer prac-
tices, emphasizing the pivotal role of women as both consumers and con-
sumed. Laura is tempted and transformed by the fruits of a goblin market
that can make people into animals and animals into objects. In her resistance
to this kind of exploitative consumerism, Lizzie’s refusal may be read as a
protest against the buying and selling of living beings.
While the poem clearly depicts a gendered hierarchy of power in which
goblin men enslave and exploit young women, the transactions conducted
between masculine and feminine figures are themselves governed by spe-
cies hierarchies in which animals are reduced to objects of exchange and
humans are bestialized. The zoological presence in Rossetti’s “Goblin
Market” is closely tied to spectatorial desire, Laura’s keen gaze reflecting
the poet’s own interest in watching animals. The desire to look, which
begins as biophilic curiosity, is ultimately poisoned by the desire to pos-
sess, as the goblin market makes life forms into commodities. Although
the poem represents exotic animals in a manner that may have encouraged
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other English consumers to “come buy, come
buy” wild animals such as wombats, ratels, and other creatures imported
from around the globe, it also marks an early stage of the poet’s growing
awareness of the vulnerability of animal bodies to exploitation.
Rossetti’s wombat watching, and her response to it in this poem, may
then be seen as a formative stage in the development of her later anti-
vivisection work. She would continue to oppose animal experimentation
through the 1880s, later soliciting signatures for a Memorial intended to
228 J. MAYER
prevent the licensing of an Institute for Preventive Medicine, what would

later become the Lister Institute, founded in 1891 (Bell 1898, 123).
Rossetti’s opposition to the use of animals in preventive medicine research
was part of a larger campaign against vaccination and the researches into
inoculation inspired by the work of the Pasteur Institute during the later
1880s. Mary Ann Elston (1987) has noted the close connections between
these campaigns and those opposing the Contagious Diseases Acts insti-
tuted in the 1860s, which authorized police inspection of women suspected
of carrying sexually transmitted diseases (273–275). Such inspections were,
of course, physically invasive and degrading, with women made to feel like
animals under the speculum of medical authority. As Elston argues, these
acts “allowed men to go unpunished for the consequences of sin, while the
speculum symbolized the moral degradation medicine was imposing on
women” (275). The allegedly sanitary purpose of such inspections could
be regarded as comparable to research into preventive medicine, in which
animals’ bodies served as vessels for the incubation of toxins and anti-toxins.
Women such as Christina Rossetti who protested against such prac-
tices recognized that medical authority increasingly resided in its power
over bodies, human and animal. Such protests were political, in the
manner noted by Foucault (2010) when he argues that in the eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries a new organization of power was emer-
ging in which “biological existence was reflected in political existence;
the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only
emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its
fatality; part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s
sphere of intervention” (264–265). The Contagious Diseases Acts were
a signal instance of the role played by female bodies in consolidating
medical authority, “a thorough medicalization of their bodies and their
sex [which] was carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed
to the health of their children, the solidity of the family institution, and
the safeguarding of society” (268). Like the female body, the animal
body became a central node in the consolidation of nineteenth-century
biopower. “The animal,” Foucault (1970) argues, “discovers fantastic
new powers in the nineteenth century,” becoming the “privileged form”
of scientific knowledge, “with its hidden structures, its buried organs, so
many invisible functions, and that distant force, at the foundation of its
being, which keeps it alive” (277). In nineteenth-century medical and
scientific discourses, female and animal bodies are alike “privileged
forms,” increasingly politicized sites of biopolitical debate. Protesters
against vivisection, vaccination, and the Contagious Diseases Acts

recognized the shared plight of women and animals under biomedical
authority, and sought to reclaim bodies rendered passive under the
invasive scrutiny of scientific investigation.
Anticipating Rossetti’s later protests against vivisection and vaccination,
as well as her charity work with fallen women, the poem concludes by
presenting Laura’s rebirth and liberation in terms which stress the shared
condition of women and animals. Lizzie is ultimately able to “win the fiery
antidote” to Laura’s illness by infecting herself with the goblin’s fruit,
administering the altered substance to her sister in what strangely resem-
bles an act of inoculation, enabling Lizzie to bring “life out of death”
(559, 524). Laura reacts viscerally to her sister’s antidote:
Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,

Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast. (496–499)
Becoming animal is part of the cure, as Laura’s vitality expresses itself in

bestial form. Her “streaming locks” are compared to “the mane of horses
in their flight,” to “an eagle when she stems the light,” until finally Laura
becomes “like a caged thing freed” (501–506). While the sisterly treat-
ment that cures Laura seems surprisingly like the vaccination practices that
Rossetti would later protest against, it may also be read as a reappropria-
tion of the feminine body by the sisters, the “fiery antidote” administered
through loving physical contact between women. If the sisters were once
“locked together in one nest,” their most intimate moments rendered up
to invasive scrutiny, they are now liberated from the debilitating effects of
a goblin market in which women and animals alike may be transformed
into objects of scrutiny and exchange.
WORKS CITED
Acampora, Ralph. 2005. Zoos and Eyes: Contesting Captivity and Seeking
Successor Practices. Society and Animals 13(1): 69–88.
Acclimatisation. 1861. All the Year Round. August 17, 492–496.
Anderson, Warwick. 1992. Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in Nineteenth-
Century France And England. Victorian Studies 35(2): 135–157.
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Bastin, John. 1970. The First Prospectus of the Zoological Society of London:
New Light on the Society’s Origins. Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of
Natural History 5, October: 369–388.
Bell, Mackenzie. 1898. Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study.
Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Berger, John. 1980. Why Look at Animals? In About Looking, 3–28. New York:
Random House.
Caird, Mona. 1893. A Sentimental View of Vivisection. London: William Reeves.
Carpenter, Mary Wilson. 1991. “Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me”: The Consumable
Female Body in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. Victorian Poetry 29(4):
415–434.
Conway, M. D. 1877. Jamrach’s. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December,
104–108.
Dunn, Henry Treffry. 1904. Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Circle.
London: Elkin Matthews.
Elston, Mary Ann. 1987. Women and Anti-Vivisection in Victorian England,
1870–1900. In Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas A. Rupke,
259–294. London: Croom Helm.
Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences. New York: Random House.
———. 2010. Right of Death and Power over Life. In The Foucault Reader, ed.
Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley, 258–272. New York: Vintage.
Jones, Robert W. 1997. “The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime”:
London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic. Journal of Victorian
Culture 2(1): 1–26.
Kreilkamp, Ivan. 2005. Petted Things: Wuthering Heights and the Animal. Yale
Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 18(1): 87–110.
Lansbury, Coral. 1985. Gynaecology, Pornography, and the Antivivisection
Movement. Victorian Studies 28(3): 413–437.
Marsh, Jan. 1994. Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life. New York: Viking.
Mayer, Jed. 2009. The Vivisection of the Snark. Victorian Poetry 47(2): 429–448.
Mendoza, Victor Roman. 2006. “Come Buy”: The Crossing of Sexual and
Consumer Desire in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market. ELH 73(4): 913–947.
Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rossetti, Christina. 1908. The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, ed.
William Michael Rossetti. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
———. 2001. The Complete Poems, ed. R. W. Crump. London: Penguin Classics.
Rossetti, William Michael. 1906. Some Reminiscences. New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons.
Simons, John. 2008. Rossetti’s Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian Animals
in Victorian London. London: Middlesex University Press.
Trumble, Angus. 2003. Rossetti’s Wombat: A Pre-Raphaelite Obsession in

Victorian England. National Library of Australia. https://www.nla.gov.au/
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Wilson, E. O. 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Jed Mayer, Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, is internationally

recognized for his work in the study of animals in literature and culture. He is the
author of “The Nature of the Experimental Animal” in Considering Animals
(Ashgate, 2011), “Representing the Experimental Animal” in Animals and
Agency (Brill, 2009), and articles on animal studies and environmental issues in
Journal of William Morris Studies, Literature Compass, Victorian Poetry, Journal of
Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Victorian Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Victorian
Review.
CHAPTER 12
Black Beauty: The Emotional Work

of Pretend Play
Kathryn Yeniyurt
Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty has been many things to many people.
Children, activists, and scholars alike have found meaning in the expres-
sions of Sewell’s equine narrator/subject since the novel’s publication in
1877. Scholarly assessments have focused in turn upon the interesting
ways in which the novel forges connections between the animal welfare
movement with those that would reform racial, gender, and class
inequalities, including the anti-slavery movement.1 Less critical attention
has been paid to the way the novel worked within the animal welfare
movement itself, perhaps because the quality of its Quaker “plain speak-
ing” has made its strategy so transparent as to seem to obviate the need for
deep scrutiny (see Hollindale 2000). Indeed, Sewell was neither the first to
try to narrate from the perspective of an animal nor the first to reverse the
direction of the human–animal gaze, placing humans and their society as
the subjects of animal observations (see Coslett 2006). Yet both the
publication and incredible success of Black Beauty are strongly suggestive
of some level of historical discontinuity within Anglo-American culture in
the late 1870s. It is hard to imagine that such a novel, “translated from the
K. Yeniyurt (*)
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
e-mail: kly18@scarletmail.rutgers.edu

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_12
234 K. YENIYURT
original equine,” could have existed a century earlier. What is more, it is

arguable that “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the horse,” as the novel was
dubbed by its American publisher, was not unique solely because it was
better written than others that had attempted to appropriate animals’
voices in the past; the parallels that were—and continue to be—drawn
between Black Beauty and other nineteenth-century activist novels seem to
confirm that Sewell was writing from the animal front of a much wider
literary attempt to engage the perspective of the vulnerable.2
It is impossible to prove that Sewell’s novel was actually successful in
promoting action on behalf of horses or other animals. However, it is
undeniable that Black Beauty caused and continues to cause readers to
feel empathy for its equine characters, which describe experiences of scenes
and circumstances surrounding the treatment of horses that would have
been very familiar to many late nineteenth-century readers. These descrip-
tions are often harrowing: Coral Lansbury (1985) has even suggested that
when read in childhood, Black Beauty tends to have the effect of leaving the
impression of the pain of the horses long after the adult may have forgotten
the specifics of the plot (64). In this chapter, I argue that the emotional
work that Sewell requires of the readers of Black Beauty is its innovation and
its contribution to the nineteenth-century animal welfare movement. Black
Beauty’s humane value lies in the way it encourages readers to imagine an
awareness of the bodily pain of an animal. This kind of “pretend play” is
actually a crucial kind of work to be undertaken not lightly, or with joy, but
with fervor and passion, as a means of conversion.
THE AVAILABLE
Sewell’s work of fiction exemplifies the imaginative kind of speculation
promoted by Donna Haraway (2008) in her critique of Jacques Derrida’s
The Animal That Therefore I Am: while Derrida ponders the meaning of
meeting an animal’s gaze, Haraway insists that it is equally important to
consider what that animal might bring to the exchange, and what the
animal’s experience might be. As the result of his deep consideration of his
response to his cat seeing him naked, Derrida (2008) argues that humans
have historically tended to dismiss and to ignore the possibility that a
nonhuman animal could really look at a human, and as such neglected,
whether willfully or through carelessness, the opportunity (or respon-
sibility) of looking back: “They neither wanted nor had the capacity to
draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could,
12 BLACK BEAUTY: THE EMOTIONAL WORK OF PRETEND PLAY 235
facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a

word, address them” (13; italics in original). He refers to his everyday
interactions with his cat, including instances of clear communication
regarding tasks of feline maintenance, in order to demonstrate that
human and nonhuman animals can engage with one another in mean-
ingful ways, and in ways that are deeply suggestive of nonhuman agency
within the cross-species relationship: “my gaze met that of a cat-pussycat
that seemed to be imploring me, asking me clearly for it to go out, as she
did, without waiting, as she often does, for example, when she first follows
me into the bathroom and then immediately regrets her decision” (13).
Such engagements seem to confirm both the individuality and the mor-
tality of the other:
It comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my

space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked.
Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an
existence that refuses to be conceptualized. And a mortal existence, for from
the moment that it has a name, its name survives it. It signs its potential
disappearance. Mine also, and that disappearance, from this moment to that,
is announced each time that, with or without nakedness, one of us leaves the
room. (9; italics in original)
Derrida’s cat is (was) a real individual, but Derrida’s meditation upon the
intersection of their gazes presents her as a stand-in for the individual cats
who look at humans, and in this respect she (or rather, the name that
survives her) serves to advance human thinking about cross-species rela-
tionships, not to mention as a catalyst to inspire those who keep feline
companionship to practice their cat-gazing. It is arguable that Anna Sewell
created her character, Black Beauty, to serve as a kind of compendium of
all of what she learned about the horses with whom she interacted during
the course of her life, and with whose gaze her own intersected. We may
assume that prior to the invention of the literary character, Sewell spent
some time looking at horses who were looking at her.
Haraway (2008) builds upon Derrida’s appreciation of the possibility of
the intersection of the human and nonhuman gaze by critiquing his neglect
of his cat’s own perspective in their exchange. She argues that “with his cat,
Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become
curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or
perhaps making available to him that morning” (20). Though the feline
236 K. YENIYURT
perspective cannot be known by humans through the medium of language,

there may have been much that Derrida’s cat may have been “making
available” to him, which he may have missed, just as others had missed
the experience of meeting the animal gaze. In order for a human to grasp
the full extent of what a cat (or any nonhuman) makes available to that
human, he or she must be prepared to rely upon his or her imagination to
guide and to inform his or her sense experiences. The form of such an
exchange must approximate a kind of “play”: a human may only begin to
imagine the nonhuman perspective after observing (and perhaps responding
to) an extensive series of the animal’s postures, movements, and sounds. It is
improbable that the largest percentage of these are actually intended by the
animal to be communicative (though they may be expressive), just as it is
improbable that in everyday circumstances a human is constantly focused
upon trying to decipher the meaning of each of his or her companion
animal’s actions. Instead, there is typically an absent-mindedness about
the kind of exchange that Haraway describes, which arguably affords a
greater intimacy than would a formal study. Anna Sewell spent a great
deal of time with horses because she had trouble walking and probably
also because she enjoyed their company. Through her novel Black Beauty,
Sewell teaches her readers how to “play” with horses as she has done, in
order that they may grasp all that the horses with whom they interact may
make available to them. I argue that imaginative “play” functions centrally
in the novel and in layers, as its genesis (from all that Sewell learned while
playing with horses), as well as in its processes of plot and character devel-
opment, which are also its lessons. As an activist text, Black Beauty teaches
by levels of example how one should “play” with animals, taking the time to
meet their gaze with curiosity, to observe them with concern, and to
imagine their perspective with the sympathy based upon the shared experi-
ences common to (human and nonhuman) animals.
Sewell’s novel demands its reader to engage with the animal perspec-
tive, teaching that person the process by which one might access what an
animal makes available. Adrienne Gavin (2012) explains that Sewell’s
relations as well as prominent activists and reviewers of Black Beauty all
expressed surprise that someone who was not a veterinarian or profes-
sional horse-worker could demonstrate such an extensive knowledge of
the horse. However, the means by which Sewell acquired her knowledge
of horses is effectively laid bare in the explicitness of her description of
their physical experiences, arguably for the benefit of a reader who might
follow. It is even arguable that after reading Sewell’s novel, it might be
difficult during an encounter with a horse in harness not to imagine what

it is like to wear a bit in his mouth:
It was a nasty thing! Those who have never had a bit in their mouths cannot
think how bad it feels; a great piece of cold hard steel as thick as a man’s
finger to be pushed into one’s mouth, between one’s teeth and over one’s
tongue, with the ends coming out at the corner of your mouth, and held fast
there by straps over your head, under your throat, round your nose, and
under your chin; so that no way in the world can you get rid of the nasty
hard thing; it is very bad! yes, very bad!3
The sight of a horse with a bit and bridle would have been quite common
during the nineteenth century, and the basic kind of bit that Black Beauty
describes in this early chapter about his “breaking in” would not have been
considered particularly troubling to a horse (unlike the pernicious bearing
rein, which figures prominently later in the novel). Not one to overlook
the quotidian experiences of the animal in favor of the more dramatic,
Sewell would have been afforded ample opportunity to observe and ima-
gine what it was like for a horse to wear a basic bit and bridle. The thick
physical descriptions in Black Beauty often amount to thinly veiled reflec-
tions of what horses have taught Sewell about their lives and experiences.
Sewell even imagines what it is like to see, or to be prevented from seeing,
as a horse, in perfect accord with Haraway’s prescription, and in a way that
illuminates Haraway’s philosophical conversation with Derrida concerning
the animal gaze in an exciting way. During a conversation among Black
Beauty, Ginger, Sir Oliver, Justice, and Merrylegs in the orchard at Birtwick
Park, the topic turns to blinkers, and the horses question their purpose and
utility. Black Beauty asks his compatriots their ideas on the subject:
“Can any one tell me the use of blinkers?”

“No!” said Sir Oliver shortly, “because they are no use.”
“They are supposed,” said Justice in his calm way, “to prevent horses
from shying and starting, and getting so frightened as to cause accidents.”
“Then what is the reason they do not put them on riding horses;
especially ladies’ horses?” said I.
“There is no reason at all,” said he quietly, “except the fashion: they say
that a horse would be so frightened to see the wheels of his own cart or
carriage coming behind him, that he would be sure to run away, although of
course when he is ridden, he sees them all about him if the streets are
crowded. I admit they do sometimes come too close to be pleasant, but
238 K. YENIYURT
we don’t run away; we are used to it, and understand it, and if we had never
had blinkers put on, we should never want them; we should see what was
there, and know what was what, and be much less frightened than by only
seeing bits of things, that we can’t understand.” (37–38)
The horses describe their own experiences, but leave room for the possi-
bility of variation in those of other individual horses. Black Beauty con-
siders, in light of this information, whether blinkers might not be
serviceable to some horses: “Of course there may be some nervous horses
who have been hurt or frightened when they were young, and may be the
better for them, but as I never was nervous, I can’t judge” (38). Sir Oliver
contributes, “‘I consider . . . that blinkers are dangerous things in the
night; we horses can see much better in the dark than men can, and
many an accident would never have happened if horses might have had
the full use of their eyes’” (38). In these passages, Sewell demonstrates the
process by which she arrived at her knowledge of the horse experience
through the explanations, guessings, and imaginings of the horses. In
doing so, she also reveals the scaffolding of the writing process. As the
possessor of a pair of eyes, she can imagine what it is like to be partially
deprived of sight.
It is easy to envision Sewell being driven in a carriage (or even just
witnessing one being driven), maintaining a constant state of alertness to
what the horses were making available. What makes the horse’s job easier?
What makes it more difficult? Black Beauty considers what it is like to be
driven by James, a groom who is kind, attentive, and thoughtful:
The first day we travelled thirty-two miles; there were some long heavy hills,
but James drove so carefully and thoughtfully that we were not at all harassed.
He never forgot to put on the drag as we went downhill, nor to take it off at
the right place. He kept our feet on the smoothest part of the road, and if the
uphill was very long, he set the carriage wheels a little across the road, so as
not to run back, and gave us a breathing. All these little things help a horse
very much, particularly if they get kind words in the bargain. (52)
Sewell reveals the way that she has “played” with the horses she has
encountered, imagining their perspectives and essentially pretending to
be the horse. This is the first layer of “play” in Sewell’s novels. The second
level is that of the horse-characters within Black Beauty, who both play
with each other in the sense of pursuing exercise and games with one
another (especially in their youth) and in imagining animal perspectives

that differ from their own. The third is that of the reader, who must follow
the course of these imaginings, often at great emotional cost (a price that
was surely paid by Anna Sewell as she paid such close attention to the
sufferings of horses).
The author’s “play” with the reader is not least signified by the presenta-
tion of her ideas as animal autobiography, “translated from the original
equine,” as Sewell jokes in the subtitle of Black Beauty. Tess Cosslett (2006)
explains that the literary strategy of the “reversal” of human and animal, or
the exploration of what it would be like if a human and animal switched
places, was one that had been practiced in much earlier texts than Black
Beauty (70). Politically speaking, however, I argue that the strategy
employed by Sewell in the writing of Black Beauty was not that of simple
role reversal, but the deployment of imaginative descriptions of horses’
experiences for the purpose of fostering sympathy of horses as individuals
who are in possession of bodies, like humans. Black Beauty experiments and
encourages the reader to experiment with what can be made available to the
human by the animal.
Still, unlike Derrida’s cat, Black Beauty was never a real horse. What is
this creature with which Sewell asks her reader to play? He may be inspired
by real contact and real observations made by Sewell of real individual
horses, but the inconsistency of the rules that govern the mode of commu-
nications within the novel, among the human and nonhuman characters,
and between author and reader, prevent the practice of imaginative play as a
seamless “swapping out” of an individual with access to language for one
who is voiceless. This inconsistency can place the lessons of the novel at an
even greater distance from reality than the mere fictitious nature and “joke”
of the talking horse tend to do. What does the animal understand of the
human world? With whom can the animal communicate? Cosslett (2006)
explains that the answers to these questions, or the “rules” governing
communications, are actually shared by all animal autobiographies, confus-
ing though they are: “The unvarying convention in all of these stories is that
the animals can speak to us and each other, and can also understand human
speech, but humans, apart from the readers, and occasionally children,
cannot understand them” (65). In order to communicate the experiences
of horses, Sewell must sacrifice some of Black Beauty’s believable “horse-
ness.” Coral Lansbury (1985) has further argued that “whatever horses in
general gained from the sympathy accorded Black Beauty was lost when
they failed to measure up to the anthropomorphic equines of fiction” (183).
240 K. YENIYURT
Indeed, the problem of the “super-horse” who can speak (and also not
speak, as Cosslett points out) can act as an obstacle to practical activism,
allowing the reader some room to relegate the sufferings of Black Beauty
and his companions to the world of the novel. I argue, though, that Black
Beauty contains at least a partial solution to this problem in its inducement
of the reader to perform a great deal of emotional work in order to follow
the stories of the imagined horses. In other words, it is not the characters
that must be believable, but the experiences (and particularly the physical
experiences) of the characters that must be so.
Jane Bennett (2001), in The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments,
Crossings, and Ethics, offers us a paradigm by which we may better under-
stand both the function and character of Black Beauty and its eponymous
equine hero: the enchantment of interspecies “crossings.” Bennett counts
the hero of George Miller’s 1995 film, Babe, among her examples of the
kind of “metamorphing creatures” that interest her in their power to
enchant (17). The character of Babe arguably shares many of the incon-
sistent communicative abilities that could possibly confuse a reader into
distancing Black Beauty from his horseness, but for Bennett, such inter-
species crossings are valuable to ethical projects not for their believability
but for their power to enchant. “Enchantment” is for Bennett, “that
energizing and unsettling sense of the great and incredible fact of exis-
tence, [which] reflects a stubborn attachment to life that most bodies seem
to possess” (159). The mood of enchantment reaffirms an affective rela-
tionship with life, which can take the form of delight or disturbance, and
which Bennett believes to be utterly essential to the reform of practices in
accordance with ethical principles:
I think of ethics as requiring both a moral code and a deliberately cultivated

sensibility. A moral code is insufficient to ethics. In addition to the rules of
behavior, one needs an aesthetic disposition hospitable to them, the percep-
tual refinement to apply them to particular cases, the energy or will to live
them out, and the generous mood that enables one to reconsider them in
the face of new and surprising developments. (29)
I argue that the encouragement of such a mood that is open to the plight
of the animal and what can be made available by the animal is the major
achievement of Black Beauty. The disposition to afford the energy to
engage in observant “play” with horses likely resulted in greater benefits
for real horses than any belief that the character of Black Beauty
represented what a horse really thinks and feels. Bennett (2001) describes
the power of interspecies “crossings” to enchant: “To live among or as a
crossing is to have motion called to mind, and this reminding is also a
somatic event . . . hybrids enchant for the same reason that moving one’s
body in space can carry one away. Some of the political potency of the
term freedom might be traced to its association with the pleasure of bodily
mobility” (18; italics in original). Freedom, of course, is an important
theme in Black Beauty, quite possibly in part because of Anna Sewell’s own
impaired physical mobility (Gavin 2012, xi). The figure of a horse gives a
powerful impression of freedom, and to imagine oneself a horse in a
pleasant way is to imagine oneself as running free. However, to imagine
oneself, as Sewell does (perhaps easily, owing to her condition), a horse
unable to run free gives just as powerful an impression of imprisonment
and restrained energy. Black Beauty explains:
For a young horse full of strength and spirits who has been used to some
large field or plain, where he can fling up his head, and toss up his tail and
gallop away at full speed, and back again with a snort to his companions—I
say it is hard never to have a bit more liberty to do as you like. Sometimes,
when I have had less exercise than usual, I have felt so full of life and spring,
that when John has taken me out to exercise, I really could not keep quiet;
do what I would, it seemed as if I must jump, or dance, or prance, and many
a good shake I know I must have given him. (23)
To unleash the imagination and the physical enthusiasm of “play” in

horseness in such a scenario is to engender an openness of the passions
for the reception of what real individual horses make available.
HORSEPLAY
Black Beauty, for his part, must perform the same sort of emotional work
during the course of the novel as Sewell must have done before writing it,
and as readers were expected to do as they read the novel and afterward.
Black Beauty learns to look deeper than what is apparent in order to find
and appreciate hidden suffering. At a horse fair, the young, grand, and
handsome horses were easy to see:
But round in the back ground, there were a number of poor things, sadly
broken down with hard work; with their knees knuckling over, and their
242 K. YENIYURT
hind legs swinging out at every step; and there were some very dejected-
looking old horses, with the under lip hanging down, and the ears laying
back heavily, as if there was no more pleasure in life, and no more hope;
there were some so thin, you might see all their ribs, and some with old sores
on their backs and hips. These were sad sights for a horse to look upon, who
knows not but he may come to the same fate. (103)
The sight may be sad, but Black Beauty looks upon it and imagines that he
may suffer the same fate as these poor horses someday. Since there is
nothing he can do to control or change his fate at the hands of his masters,
it might have been easier to look away, just as it would have been easier for
Sewell to look away from the suffering of horses she could not help. Still,
the only way for the novel to affect the lives of real horses would be for its
lessons to be learned and the trouble to be taken by people to engage with
the perspectives of the horses they encountered in their everyday lives.
The story of Sir Oliver’s tail-docking, and his description of ear-docking
in puppies, cause Black Beauty to feel new emotions and describe them
(rather than his physical feelings) for what is really the first time in the novel.
The usually (and hitherto almost entirely) emotionally reserved Black Beauty
explains the effect that Sir Oliver’s story had upon him (and, incidentally,
upon Ginger): “Sir Oliver, though he was so gentle, was a fiery old fellow,
and what he said was all so new to me and so dreadful, that I found a bitter
feeling toward men rise up in my mind that I never had before. Of course
Ginger was much excited; she flung her head with flashing eyes and dis-
tended nostrils, declaring that men were both brutes and blockheads” (37).
The stories themselves are unsparing in their graphic detail, but what is
more, Sir Oliver explains what it is like to be born with a tail and then to
lose it. Sewell must have thought very carefully about what would be the
worst thing about being deprived of a tail, after the operation of its
removal itself. Sir Oliver explains:
“Dreadful! ah! it was dreadful; but it was not only the pain, though that was
terrible and lasted a long time; it was not only the indignity of having my
best ornament taken from me, though that was bad; but it was this, how
could I ever brush the flies off my sides and my hind legs any more? You who
have tails just whisk the flies off without thinking about it, and you can’t tell
what a torment it is to have them settle upon you and sting and sting, and
have nothing in the world to lash them off with. I tell you it is a life-long
wrong, and a life-long loss.” (36)
This kind of understanding is arguably well beyond what a veterinary

surgeon might learn either in study or through practice. It could have
only been gained by Sewell through a most exacting practice of observation
and imagination, and to dwell upon what it would be like to be stung by
flies but unable to swat them with your tail must have been painful indeed.
Toward the end of the novel, Black Beauty learns to see all fellow horses
as entitled to his attention as if they had been a bosom friend of his. It is
interesting that Black Beauty is never able to identify the dead horse he
sees in a cart as Ginger for certain, though he hopes it was, and that neither
is he able to identify a gray pony who looks like Merrylegs as that pony for
certain:
It often went to my heart to see how the little ponies were used, straining
along with heavy loads, or staggering under heavy blows from some low
cruel boy. Once I saw a little grey pony with a thick mane and a pretty head,
and so much like Merrylegs, that if I had not been in harness, I should have
neighed to him. He was doing his best to pull a heavy cart, while a strong
rough boy was cutting him under the belly with his whip, and chucking
cruelly at his little mouth. Could it be Merrylegs? It was just like him; but
then Mr. Blomefield was never to sell him, and I think he would not do it;
but this might have been quite as good a little fellow, and had as happy a
place when he was young. (133)
Could it be Merrylegs, the handsome, gentle pony who had been the great
favorite of the ladies and children at Birtwick Park? Does it matter if it is?
Of course, Merrylegs matters—the individual friend of Black Beauty’s, just
as it mattered that the dead horse in the cart might have been Ginger,
finally free. However, an emotionally mature Black Beauty takes the reader
beyond caring only for the individual character in the book: every grey
pony suffering under a butcher’s boy may as well be Merrylegs, every
emaciated chestnut mare Ginger, and every old black horse with blem-
ished knees Black Beauty. This is the charitable mood that Bennett claims
is so important to the movement of ethics from principle to action. A lack
of imagination, just as in the ladies “who never think of the weary cabman
waiting on his box, and his patient beast standing, till his legs get stiff with
cold” (145), leads to suffering and abuse.
One of the central formative experiences in Black Beauty’s life takes
place during a moment of play with other young horses. Very early in the
novel, a young Black Beauty is exposed to a group of six young colts with
244 K. YENIYURT
whom he is placed in a meadow: “I used to run with them, and had great
fun; we used to gallop all together round and round the field as hard as we
could go. Sometimes we had rather rough play, for they would frequently
bite and kick as well as gallop” (9). Duchess, Black Beauty’s mother, calls
him away from the play one day in order to explain to him that he is better
bred than these colts, and that she expects him to mind his manners, no
matter what his playmates might do. She tells him:
“The colts who live here are very good colts, but they are cart-horse colts, and
of course, they have not learned manners. You have been well bred and well
born . . . I think you have never seen me kick or bite. I hope you will grow up
gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift
your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play.” (9–10)
Even Ginger, whose is able to tell of no other happiness in her life before
Birtwick Park, fondly recalls playing with other horses in her youth as she
tells Black Beauty of her history: “We had very good fun in the free
meadows, galloping up and down and chasing each other round and
round the field” (25). Since Ginger was taken away from her mother so
early, she would not have had anyone to train her out of the habit of biting
(recall that Merrylegs explains to Black Beauty, when he cannot relate to
Ginger’s biting and snapping, that these are simply bad habits she has
acquired). Play, then, can be seen as a space for the development of temper,
which will be crucial in determining the horses’ identities, their relationships
(both with horses and other humans), and ultimately, through the human
communications regarding the horses’ good or bad “character,” may decide
their fate. In short, “play” in Black Beauty is a space for animal politics.
In What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Brian Massumi (2014) views
politics not as something that is essentially human, but something that
begins with animals in nature: “not a human politics of the animal, but an
integrally animal politics” (2). Human politics emerge from our own ani-
mality. For Massumi, politics begin with “play,” and he places the analysis
of animals’ play-fighting at the center of his study. The gestures of such
play (such as Black Beauty and Ginger indulged in during their youth) are
ludic—spontaneous and without direction—but contain layers of meaning
(the difference between the bite-in-play and the bite-for-real) that consti-
tute, according to Massumi, abstract and reflexive thought: “In play, the
animal elevates itself to the metacommunicational level, where it gains the
capacity to mobilize the possible” (7–8). Moreover, such play endows
instinct with a creative “power of variation,” so that the animal is able to

improvise in lived situations. Creativity and imagination—the “native
hallucinogenic power” of spontaneous improvisation—is an essential
facet of instinct (17). Massumi argues that “there is no reason not to
consider this power of abstraction a kind of reflexivity. The general situa-
tion (plug the burrow) is reflected in the lived singularity (plug this burrow
thus, here and now). This is a lived reflexivity” (14; italics in original).
Massumi’s claims about the centrality of play to animal politics provide an
interesting framework for the consideration of the character development
of Black Beauty: his instincts develop as he learns not to bite during play.
He learns habits of restraint and gentleness, which will inform the stories
that he tells himself of the suffering he sees and hears about in the world
around him, and also of his own suffering. In turn, the reader’s instincts
are also developed.
Perhaps the most striking episode concerning instinct in the novel
occurs when Black Beauty is driven during a storm with John Manly and
Squire Gordon. Upon reaching a bridge, Black Beauty refuses to cross:
We were going along at a good pace, but the moment my feet touched the
first part of the bridge, I felt sure there was something wrong. I dare not go
forward, and I made a dead stop. “Go on, Beauty,” said my master, and he
gave me a touch with the whip, but I dare not stir; he gave me a sharp cut, I
jumped, but I dare not go forward . . . I knew very well that the bridge was
not safe. (44)
When John Manly and Squire Gordon discover that the bridge is broken
in the middle, they continue the drive in silence, likely contemplating what
might have happened if they had been successful in forcing Black Beauty
to cross the bridge, until Squire Gordon remarks gravely in praise of
animal instinct. It is interesting to consider the decision that Black
Beauty had to make as he experienced the competing sensations of the
whip and the unsound wood under his feet. Though he hardly tells the
story as if there was a decision to be made, Black Beauty was in fact
utilizing his “powers of variation” as his instincts weighed the necessity
of maintaining a good relationship with his human master (as his mother
had taught him to do) against the stronger necessity of avoiding the
broken bridge. Each option was signified by an uncomfortable or painful
sensation (the wood versus the whip), and Black Beauty must navigate by
means of improvisation (plug this burrow thus).
246 K. YENIYURT
Black Beauty’s behavior at the bridge is a departure from the submissive

behavior toward humans that has served him so well, but this departure
can be seen as the further development of his instinct. Massumi (2014)
might explain such deviation as a further development of instinct:
“Instinct, in its aspect of expressive activity, has an inborn tendency to
surpass the normal, by dint of enthusiasm of the body. It is animated by an
immanent impetus toward the supernormal” (15; italics in original). How
did Black Beauty know that the bridge was broken? It can be assumed that
the sensitive and observant horse has had some experience with wood
underneath his feet, which over time came to inform his own instincts
about bridges. Massumi explains the uncanny aspect of instinct as also
rooted in play and animal politics: “Intuition grounds instinct’s corporeal
inheritance from the past in the corporeality of the present, enabling it to
grasp the supernormal potential of the situation” (33). Anna Sewell, who
spent so much time riding horses, may well have experienced what
Massumi would call the supernormal activity of a horse, and she might
have even seen evidence of a horse’s instinctive intuition. Over time,
simply playing with horses, spontaneously observing their responses and
responding in turn, arguably had the effect of developing her instincts
about horses until it must have appeared that she was in possession of a
sort of intuition (recall the remarks by reviewers and activists referenced
earlier, which expressed surprise that such a novel could have been written
by someone other than a groom or a veterinary surgeon).
Like Black Beauty (and surely like Sewell herself), the human characters
of Black Beauty also develop their instincts. The best of them develop
good instincts about horses, presumably by playing with them and obser-
ving what they make available in a similar way to that which Sewell must
have done. The businessman whose groom had been stealing Black
Beauty’s oats learned of his groom’s theft only after his gentleman-farmer
friend notices the decline in Black Beauty’s health. After remarking gen-
erally on Black Beauty’s condition, “[he] shook his head slowly, and began
to feel me over. ‘I can’t say who eats your corn, my dear fellow, but I am
much mistaken if your horse gets it’” (98). Only patience, attention, and a
great deal of experience with the bodies of horses in different conditions
and eating different things could enable a horse-person to have developed
his eye and his touch in such a way.
Experience is not an absolute requirement for a human to understand a
horse’s condition, however. Near the end of the novel, when Black Beauty
has fallen into the service of the brutal Nicholas Skinner, a young girl
named Grace and her father disagree about whether Black Beauty will be
capable of carrying their heavy luggage as they board his cab. The child
knows suffering when she sees it, but her father prefers to overlook the
horse’s condition, instead asking the driver whether Black Beauty is up to
the task. Unsatisfied by the driver’s reassurances, Grace continues to plead
with her father:
“Papa, papa, do take a second cab,” said the young girl in a beseeching tone;
“I am sure we are wrong, I am sure it is very cruel.”
“Nonsense, Grace, get in at once and don’t make all this fuss. A pretty
thing it would be, if a man of business had to examine every cab-horse
before he hired it—the man knows his own business of course: there, get in
and hold your tongue!” (155)
When Black Beauty collapses, Grace’s instincts are proven to have been
better than her father’s. Her father, of course, is too busy even to look at
Black Beauty, preferring to ignore what the horse is making plainly avail-
able to the little girl. The father’s instincts have been dulled by his habits of
selfishness and self-importance.
Though the tale of Black Beauty suggests that even the most gentle,
high-bred, and beautiful horses face a bleak downward path in life, he also
meets a fair number of good people who care for him. The positive
relationships Black Beauty forms with his owners and caretakers, such as
Squire Gordon, John Manly, James Howard, Joe Green, and the poor
cab driver Jeremiah Barker and his family, give Beauty hope, even as he is
tempted to fall into despair. When Skinner is persuaded by a farrier to sell
Black Beauty at a horse fair instead of selling him for dog meat, Black
Beauty is hopeful of finding a better position, even in his sorry condition:
“I felt hopeful that any change from my present place must be an improve-
ment, so I held up my head, and hoped for the best” (156). He has
encountered kindness in people often enough to sustain the hope of
finding it yet again—and he does so when Joe Green recognizes him
and secures for him his “last home.”
The message of Black Beauty is a mixed one, suggestive at once of
the overwhelming odds that are stacked against horses, especially as
they age, as well as of the possible happiness that they can find in a
compassionate master. When read as a guide by those who used, hired,
or encountered horses on a regular basis (which, in 1870s England and
America, included most people), Black Beauty had the potential to
248 K. YENIYURT
make a world of difference in the lives of individual horses. By empha-

sizing the importance of “play” in the life of a horse, Sewell encourages
readers to dabble and to play in horsehood, observing and imagining
the experiences of the horses they know. This play will foster an
intimacy with the animal, springing from the willingness and capacity
to grasp what that animal makes available to the human. In play, as
Massumi (2014) argues, the politics of animality emerges as the human
enters “a zone of indiscernibility” with the animal, a zone which
“dramatizes the reciprocal participation of the human and animal,
from both sides” (8). Play, in Black Beauty and because of it, can result
in a deep mutual understanding across species, so that human and
nonhuman may even become, as do Black Beauty and Joe Green in
the course of seeking justice for an abused horse, “of one mind” (66).
NOTES
1. See Lansbury (1985), Dorré (2006), Guest (2010), Moore (2007),
Stoneley (1999), and Cosslett (2006).
2. For a study of several nineteenth-century novels that advance social causes,
see Claybaugh (2007).
3. Sewell (2012, 15); hereafter cited by page number parenthetically in the
text.
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Beauty. Nineteenth-Century Literature 54(1): 53–72.
Kathryn Yeniyurt is Visiting Scholar at the Rutgers British Studies Center,

Rutgers University. Her specialties include the history of social activism,
Victorian British history, the history of the British Empire, global activist net-
works, critical Animal Studies, and women’s history. She is the author of articles in
Social History of Medicine, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Brontë Studies.
CHAPTER 13
Insect Politics in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle
Elizabeth Effinger
Man is by nature a political animal

— Aristotle, Politics
Man still bears in his bodily form the indelible stamp of his lowly origins
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
INTRODUCTION
The central characters of Richard Marsh’s novel The Beetle (1897) are
united by the common bond of politics. Paul Lessingham is a young,
handsome, and respectable British politician with a budding political
career, the fresh face promising political apotheosis. Lessingham is clearly
erected as the novel’s symbol of political virility—described as “well hung”
by the curmudgeonly scientist and inventor Sydney Atherton, who designs
weapons of mass destruction for the British government.1 Marjorie
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada.
E. Effinger (*)
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada
e-mail: eeffinge@gmail.com

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_13
252 E. EFFINGER
Lindon is Lessingham’s fiancée, as well as the daughter of a Tory politician

and someone keenly interested in politics herself, giving a speech at the
Working Women’s Club. Even Robert Holt, a downtrodden unemployed
clerk, confesses that “the great Paul Lessingham” is “the god of [his]
political idolatry” (76). In this late Victorian Gothic novel, everyone who
is bitten by the bug for politics is also insidiously touched by the Beetle,
the novel’s central mysterious figure that Roger Luckhurst (2000) aptly
calls a “liminal man-woman-goddess-beetle-Thing” (160).
This association between the Beetle and politics remains largely over-
looked in scholarship on the novel. Adopting Chiara Bottici’s (2014)
terms, I am interested in politics in a broad sense, “as whatever pertains to
the public,” and in a more restrictive one, “as that part of public life char-
acterized by the threat of recourse to legitimate physical coercion” (10).
In what follows, I consider how politics, in this wide-ranging sense, plays
out within the nineteenth-century imaginary, with agricultural, social, and
gender politics forming a sticky web within Marsh’s novel.
Traditionally, The Beetle has been read as belonging to the genres of the
“Trance-Gothic” (Luckhurst 2000) or the “Imperial Gothic” (Schmitt 1997
after Patrick Brantlinger), a novel concerned with the racial or Oriental
Other (Karschay 2015), or as staging Britain’s ties with Egypt (Harris and
Vernooy 2012). For others, the novel stages the frenetic Victorian metro-
polis (Vuohelainen 2010) and the rapid acceleration of new technologies
(Brophy 2015). Still, for others, the novel’s central preoccupation pertains to
the body: the monstrous female body (Hurley 1996), the “leaky” male body
(Allin 2015), the threat of queer sexuality (Harris and Vernoody 2012), the
precariousness of Victorian masculinity (Wolfreys 2004), and the horror of
dissolution (Byron 2012). Yet common to all these readings is their privile-
ging of the human side of the Beetle’s bifurcated human–nonhuman iden-
tity. While Wolfreys (2004), in his Introduction to the Broadview edition of
The Beetle, cautions against attempting to pin down what the Beetle repre-
sents, this, too, risks papering over many of the rich political, cultural, and
historical details that emerge when we read the Beetle precisely as such,
namely, as a beetle. To put it another way, this chapter takes seriously the
question of the Beetle, and argues that Marsh’s novel presents the insect/
beetle as a figure of critique that exposes the real face of man the political
animal. Simultaneously, the novel, with its suggestive association of insect
and woman, stages the horrors that ensue when the politically abjected strike
back. We begin by considering the vast popular and political terrain occupied
by the insect in the long nineteenth century.
13 INSECT POLITICS IN RICHARD MARSH’S THE BEETLE 253
INSECTS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMAGINATION

Insects, and in particular beetles, occupied dual registers within the
nineteenth-century cultural imagination as both novel objects of beauty and
fashion, and as parasites and pests. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
were host to what Cannon Schmitt (2007) has dubbed “Beetlemania,” his
name for how the activity of “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” (36). Yet the nineteenth century’s fasci-
nation with insects can be situated within a longer tradition of insect entertain-
ment. Like other performing animals—such as learned pigs, and dancing dogs,
horses, and bears—insects were staples within Britain’s popular entertainment
scene. Between 1766 and 1773, Thomas and Daniel Wildman, an uncle and
nephew duo, showcased their performing bees in London.2 As William Carr
(1880) describes in Introduction or Early History of Bees and Honey, Daniel
Wildman’s performance before King George III featured him “standing
upright on horseback, with a swarm of bees suspended in garlands from his
chin, like a great beard, and after transferring them from his chin and breast to
his hand, stretched out to full length, and then on firing a pistol the bees all
swarmed in the air and went back to their hive, with numbers of other equally
wonderful performances” (12). Thomas Wildman also did stunts on horse-
back, and in addition to a beard wore a “bob-wig” or hairpiece made up of
bees, “the bottom locks of which were turned up into bobs or short curls,”
a detail described (and illustrated) on a 1772 advertising broadsheet for
Richard Astley’s Riding-School, where Wildman also performed (Coleman
2006, 124). This intimate proximity of the insect on display in both the
Wildmans’ daring bee attire stages human mastery over the nonhuman
world, and resembles, as Deirdre Coleman (2006) observes, the “Artificiall
Man” of Thomas Hobbes’s frontispiece to Leviathan (1651) “in which the
spectacle of sovereignty consists of a gigantic male monarch whose single body
is composed of a multitude of obedient subjects” (123). In 1888, nearly a
century after the Wildmans’ bee couture, came a similar spectacle of human
sovereignty with the elaborate emerald green dress made from Jewel beetle
wings, famously worn by actress Ellen Terry for the role of Lady Macbeth at
the London Lyceum Theatre.3
However, the insect was more than a fashionable public spectacle; it
was also used by Romantic writers to describe the inner workings of
the mind. Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, compares a “small
254 E. EFFINGER
water-insect” that propels itself forward by a motion of active and

passive movements to the activity of thought itself:
Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect on the surface of

rivulets, which throws a cinque-spotted shadow fringed with prismatic
colours on the sunny bottom of the brook; and will have noticed, how the
little animal wins his way up against the stream, by alternate pulses of active
and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in
order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion.
This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking.
There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are
active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty,
which is at once both active and passive. In philosophical language, we must
denominate this intermediate faculty in all its degrees and determinations,
the IMAGINATION. (Coleridge 1971, 124)
At the same time that the insect was an entertaining spectacle, and a
philosophical metaphor for the Coleridgean imagination, it was also a
carrier for complex political valencies.
INSECTS AND POLITICS

To be sure, the collusion of insects, especially the social insects (ants, bees,
and termites) with politics was not unique to the nineteenth century.
Earlier precedents included the Reverend Samuel Purchas’s A Theatre of
Political Flying Insects (1657), Jan Swammerdam’s A General History of
Insects (1669), and those treatises on the topic of bees which were framed
by the discourse of monarchy, such as Joseph Warder’s The True Amazons,
or The Monarchy of Bees (1712), and the Reverend John Thorley’s “The
Female Monarchy” (1744).
The insect was also a popular figure with which to satirize eminent
cultural and political leaders across Europe. In 1795, James Gillray parodied
Sir Joseph Banks, depicting him with a butterfly body in “The Great South
Sea Caterpillar Transformed into a Bath Butterfly.” Thomas Rowlandson
illustrated a hungry spider with the head of Napoleon chasing two “Spanish
flies” (Charles IV and Ferdinand) in his 1808 print “The Corsican Spider
in His Web.” In Robert Cruikshank’s 1824 print, “A Civic Louse in the
State Bed!!! or the Corporation Conglomerated,” a group of London
aldermen gather around a large louse perched at the foot of the Mansion
House bed. In France, Langlume after J. J. Grandville produced a litho-

graph titled Famille de Scarabees in Les Metamorphoses du Jour (1828–1829)
depicting a long procession of priestly looking scarab beetles on pilgrimage.
In 1848, the German magazine Leuchtkugeln characterized Lola Montez,
the scandalous mistress of King Ludwig who had her own political agenda
for liberalizing university curricula, as a rare species of Spanish fly. In 1881,
the French magazine La Silhouette (April 4, 1881) parodied the censorship
of political caricature as “an old woman with a bottom of lead, eternally
armed with scissors of the same metal” who “devours drawings the same
way that phylloxera [an insect notorious for damaging grapevines] destroys
the vine” (Goldstein 1989, 36).
Moreover, some of the foremost authorities in the growing discipline of
entomology were also involved in politics, such as William Spence, a
political economist. Spence, at the height of his popularity as a political
economist, coauthored with William Kirby the seminal four-volume
Introduction to Entomology (1815–1826). This text, as John F. M. Clark
(2009) in Bugs and the Victorians suggests, was the driving force behind
the nineteenth century’s increasing interest in insects, and helped shape
the new field of entomological science and its attendant institutions, such
as the Entomological Society of London, founded in 1833 (14). For the
core of Spence’s political economy, namely the belief in agriculture as the
key to a nation’s wealth, dovetailed with the concerns of entomological
science, and in particular its subfield of applied entomology which was
aimed at agricultural improvements. “The merits of Entomology have
been so little acknowledged,” write Kirby and Spence (1846) in their
Introduction to Entomology, that
no science . . . in this country, has come off worse than Entomology: her
champions hitherto have been so few, and their efforts so unavailing, that all
her rival sisters have been exalted above her; and I believe there is scarcely any
branch of Natural History that has had fewer British admirers. While Botany
boasts of her hosts, she, though not her inferior either in beauty, symmetry, or
grace, has received the homage of a very slender train indeed. (37)
Structured as a defense of entomology, an undervalued discipline repre-

sented by Kirby and Spence as a “distressed damsel” (37) in need of
saving, Introduction to Entomology’s goal was to point out entomology’s
“comparative advantages, and to remove the veil which has hitherto con-
cealed those attractions, and that grace and beauty, which entitle her to
256 E. EFFINGER
equal admiration at least with her sister branches of Natural History” (38).
One of the grounds for making this judgment is “its utility to society at
large” (38). They continue: “That insects should thus have forestalled us
in our inventions ought to urge us to pay a closer attention to them and
their ways than we have hitherto done, since it is not at all improbable that
the result would be many useful hints for the improvement of our arts and
manufactures, and perhaps for some beneficial discoveries” (45). Thus,
more than just an intensive study of “nature’s favourite 18 productions”
or “an inexhaustible fund of novelty” (45), entomology was also framed as
a discourse of improvement. Insects had political ramifications largely
owing to the disaster and decline they threatened, and by the late nine-
teenth century entomological science was co-opted as part of a larger
biopolitical program of risk management.
BRITAIN’S BEETLE SCARE

In 1877, a substantial agricultural and, in turn, political crisis emerged in
Great Britain with the threatened invasion of the Colorado beetle, a small
yellow insect with ten black stripes running down its wing-cases (elytra).
This North American potato beetle (Doryphora decemlineata) rapidly spread
eastward—at an aggressive rate of 80 miles per year—crossing, likely via
railway or ship, from Michigan (USA) into Ontario, Canada in 1870, and
reaching the Atlantic shore in 1874 (Sorensen 1995, 122).This voracious
and resilient beetle was especially attracted to a certain cultivated potato and
left major agricultural devastation in its wake. The anxiety over the possibi-
lity of this beetle crossing the Atlantic caused numerous European countries
(Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland) to ban the importation of
American potatoes, lest the beetle invade and destroy this important dietary
staple (Clark 2009, 135).
Clark (2009) suggests that anxieties over the agricultural and economic
distress that could be caused by this New World beetle were likely colored
by France’s and America’s earlier “extraordinary entomological crises”: the
American phylloxera aphid that nearly destroyed France’s grapevines and its
wine industry during the 1860s and 1870s, and the Rocky Mountain locusts
that between the 1850s and 1870s threatened the farmland of the American
West. Both France and America responded to “actual large-scale insect
incursions with legislative responses,” which certainly made an impression
on the British public (134). In 1877, one British newspaper colorfully
reported that Kansas and Minnesota “have passed laws by which the
townships can press all adult able-bodied males into an insect-destroying

army” (“The Destructive Insects Bill” 1877, 549; emphasis added). The
same year, Britain followed suit by also responding to the impending inva-
sion through legislative means. Britain’s Commissioners of Customs
ordered officers to immediately squash any beetles found in imported
goods, while destroying by fire any soil and materials that may have come
into contact with them. Greater legislative response followed with the
expedient passing of the Destructive Insects Bill in 1877, an Act that
gave the Privy Council the jurisdiction to identify and destroy any insect
deemed threatening, or any crop suspected to be harboring a pest (Clark
2009, 137–138, 144). While ultimately the Colorado beetle never did
cause widespread devastation in Britain, the country’s political response
to the potentiality of this beetle invasion nevertheless registers an impor-
tant shift away from what Cannon Schmitt (2007) calls Victorian
“Beetlemania” toward a darker entomophobia (fear of the insect)—a
topic ideally suited to a Gothic novel, and consistent with what Glennis
Byron (2012) calls the “invasion scare narratives” (187), a popular mode
of the Gothic in the 1890s.
ECONOMY OF ENTOMOPHOBIA IN THE BEETLE

An extreme, hyper-entomophobic response to the beetle is the affective force
within Marsh’s novel. The first and arguably most graphic encounter with the
Beetle occurs in Book I through the account of Robert Holt. An unemployed
clerk, Holt has the misfortune of being violated by the Beetle after having
taken refuge for the night in a seemingly vacant house. Sensing something in
the dark room with him, Holt first notices the Beetle’s eyes, “two specks of
light” (50) coming towards him. Paralyzed, Holt stands there as the
Beetle mounts him: “I felt something on my boot, and, with a sense of
shrinking, horror, nausea, rendering me momentarily more helpless, I rea-
lized that the creature was beginning to ascend my legs, to climb my body.
Even then what it was I could not tell, —it mounted me, apparently, with
as much ease as if I had been horizontal instead of perpendicular” (51).
Holt explicitly describes this as a kind of invasion: “The helplessness with
which I suffered its invasion was not the least part of my agony” (51).
Yet Holt is doubly invaded, as the Beetle seizes both his body and mind
through the power of mesmerism. With the Beetle climbing his body, Holt
feels the pressure of its legs, “of each separate one. They embraced [him]
softly, stickly, as if the creature glued and unglued them, each time it moved”
258 E. EFFINGER
until it gained his “loins,” and later emitting “an unpleasant, foetid odour” as
it approached his face (51). The hyper-phallic rendering of this scene reaches
its climax with/on Holt’s face, the site of the Beetle’s invasion: “It reached
my chin, it touched my lips,—and I stood still and bore it all, while it
enveloped my face with its huge, slimy, evil-smelling body, and embraced
me with its myriad legs” (52). Following this ejaculatory scene, Holt himself
is rendered “invertebrate,” a description connoting both flaccidity and a
beetle-like classification. While this is suggestive of the Colorado beetle
invasion, which could be understood as a national political drama that plays
out at the site of the mouth (given how it threatened the food staple), this
pornographic register of Marsh’s novel—the way the Beetle mounts and
orally penetrates Holt, or the suggestive moans and noises it makes with
Marjorie behind closed doors—also recalls the nineteenth-century porno-
graphic tradition of obscene human–animal couplings, such as those images
found in Andréa De Nerciat’s (1803) Le Diable au Corps and Gamiani ou
Deux nuits d’excès (1833).4
Marsh’s novel draws more explicit associations with the queer beetles in
Marie De France’s (1987) twelfth-century Fables and suggestive scenes
from eighteenth-century Gothic fiction. In two of de France’s fables, the
beetle wreaks havoc by anally penetrating its victim. In “The Peasant and
the Beetle” (no. 43) a beetle crawls into a man’s anus, and everyone,
including the doctor and the man himself, come to believe that the man
is pregnant. In “The Wolf and the Beetle” (no. 65) a beetle crawls into a
wolf’s anus and makes its way to his stomach to prove to the wolf his power.
This anal association of the beetle carries over into the Beetle’s queerness in
Marsh’s novel, where the Beetle causes terror specifically at orifices. Even
when Marjorie is violated in her room by the Beetle, she refers to herself as
having a “Psalmist” heart, with the Biblical reference to Psalm 22:14: “My
heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels” (206n1). Similarly,
beetles and their kind continue to terrorize victims in eighteenth-century
Gothic fiction. In Matthew Gregory Lewis’s (2004) The Monk, published
in 1796, Agnes, who is imprisoned with the rotting corpse of her dead baby,
describes being “constantly interrupted by some obnoxious insect crawling
over” her.5 Like Lewis’s Agnes who feels the various insects and reptiles on
her breasts, the lizard’s slime on her face, and worms in her hands—a
passage with orgiastic overtones—Marsh’s Holt also feels the beetle at the
erogenous sites of his groin and face. Recognizing The Beetle within this
longer tradition tempers the kinds of claims that critics might make about
the uniqueness of the animal in late Victorian Gothic fiction.6
In addition to the sexual overtones, the Beetle’s noises in Marsh’s novel

also invoke what entomologists Kirby and Spence (1846) identify as the
various “cries of terror” produced by beetles, the “emission of a shrill,
sibilant, or creaking sound . . . produced by rubbing their elytra with the
extremity of their abdomen” (527). Indeed, it is the sound of the Beetle
that first plagues Marjorie. Stripping her clothes off to hide in bed under her
covers, Marjorie hears an insect buzzing around her head and eventually
land on her bed. Like Holt’s account of its slow creep towards his face,
Marjorie describes the Beetle’s travel, “in wobbling fashion, with awkward,
ungainly gait” (206) toward the head of the bed: “When it reached the head
of the bed, what I feared—with what a fear!—would happen, did happen. It
began to find its way inside,—to creep between the sheets; the wonder is I
did not die! I felt it coming nearer and nearer, inch by inch; I knew that it
was upon me, that escape there was none; I felt something touch my hair”
(207). With the Beetle climbing underneath the sheets, the hair that naked
Marjorie may be referring to here could be genital.7 The initial terror caused
by the mere sound of this buzzing insect is further amplified when the
Beetle kidnaps Marjorie, who emits “the shrieks on the railway, and . . . the
wailing noise in the cab” (293), sounds that reach their climax in Mrs
Henderson’s hotel, with sexually suggestive yelling, shrieking, “a-panting,”
and hollering (208–209).
Moreover, like insect metamorphosis, the Beetle has a queer shape-
shifting power, and undergoes a series of transformations from an insect,
to the alluring Egyptian “Woman of the Songs,” to an old “supernatu-
rally ugly” bed-ridden man, although Holt is unable to “decide if it was a
man or a woman” (53). Similarly, Holt narrates his encounter with the
Beetle in discrete stages, attending to specific parts—such as the eyes,
“stickily” legs and “slightly phosphorescent” body (51), yellow wrinkly
skin, beak-like nose, and “blubber lips” (53), a narrative technique that
produces a disorienting effect, akin to a succession of extreme cinematic
close-ups. The gender- and species-bending of the Beetle makes its
physical and psychic violations especially perverse, as the characters can
never definitively say who or what is invading them even when coming
face to face with it. Put another way, the shape-shifting Beetle, as a creature
that slides in and out of bodies, forms, and locations, also emblematizes the
terror of taxonomy, the horror of things not staying in their proper,
classified place. Unlike the cooperative specimens of natural history
found in the drawers of the Reverend Camden Farebrother’s study in
George Eliot’s (1964) Middlemarch, this is one beetle that refuses to be
260 E. EFFINGER
neatly “pinned” down. As we have already seen, the “drawers” into which
Marsh’s Beetle crawls are of an entirely different nature.
Arguably, the novel’s most dramatic entomophobic response to the
Beetle comes from Paul Lessingham, who upon merely hearing the words
“The Beetle” (uttered by a mesmerized Holt), becomes a quivering, emas-
culated figure, akin to a Gothic heroine. Withdrawing into a corner of the
room, and clutching the bookshelves “in the attitude of a man who has
received a staggering blow” (76), Lessingham is acutely affected by the
utterance of these two words: “all the muscles in his face and all the limbs in
his body seemed to be in motion at once; he was like a man afflicted with
the shivering ague,—his very fingers were twitching aimlessly, as they were
stretched out on either side of him, as if seeking for support from the shelves
against which he leaned” (77). Holt scarcely believes this is “the great Paul
Lessingham, the god of my political idolatry” (76). For as Atherton
explains, Lessingham “has the reputation, both in the House and out of
it, of being a man of iron nerve” (108). The mere mention of the words
“The Beetle” conjures up Lessingham’s traumatic past. Lessingham, in
recounting his primal encounter with the Beetle while traveling throughout
Egypt, the “Woman of the Songs,” describes the horror of her kiss: “There
was about her something so unnatural, so inhuman, that I believe even then
I could have destroyed her with as little sense of moral turpitude as if she
had been some noxious insect” (241). That horrific kiss is, as I have earlier
described, a scene repeated with some differences in the subsequent
encounters between the Beetle and its victims (Holt and Marjorie), where
the privileged site of contact continues to be the face. Thus, we might read
the individual hysterical responses to the Beetle as representative of the
larger nineteenth-century cultural and political anxiety over the potentially
devastating impact of the beetle. In this light, the violent ravishment of
these individuals, men and women alike, stages the vulnerability of the
larger state body—the “face of the nation,” if you will—whose integrity
and health is susceptible to invasion by the nonhuman.
BECOMING-BEETLE, BECOMING-WOMAN:
LESSINGHAM AND MARJORIE
Now I turn to a closer consideration of Lessingham and Marjorie, the core
political partnership at the center of this novel, and the couple that is the
focus of the vengeful Beetle. What unfolds throughout the action of the
novel is the becoming-beetle of Lessingham and especially Marjorie. In a

curious feedback loop, it is the victims’ fear of the beetle that renders them
most beetle-like; their hyper-entomophobia makes them “invertebrate” (or
spineless) and, particularly in the cases of Lessingham and Marjorie, is
symbolic of the undoing of political power. We continue to hear in
Champnell’s account of how Lessingham, “this Leader of Men, whose
predominate characteristic in the House of Commons was immobility, was
rapidly approximating to the condition of a hysterical woman” (292).
Moreover, as Leslie Allin (2015) notes, Lessingham already shares the
power of influence with the Beetle insofar as he is, as a suave politician, “a
mesmerizer of the citizenry”(124). But it is Marjorie’s kinship with the
Beetle that warrants further study.
Many critics, most recently W. C. Harris and Dawn Vernooy (2012),
have aligned Marjorie with the Victorian concept of the New Woman, the
term given to women in the late nineteenth century who “often worked
for social, economic, educational, and political equality with men” (345).
For Harris and Vernooy, even though Marjorie shares “liberal political
sympathies with Lessingham’s politics that directly collide with her Tory
father’s conservative values,” she is not as radical as one might like to find
(345). For them, the classification of “New Woman” doesn’t quite fit
Marjorie, whom they suggest is only interested in politics as a way of
pursuing her love object: Lessingham. This, however, is an ungenerous
account of Marjorie’s political attachments. It is only after reading a report
of one of Lessingham’s speeches that Marjorie is drawn to him: “I believe
it is a fact that the first stirring of my pulses was caused by the report of a
speech of his which I read in the Times. It was on the Eight Hours’ Bill. . . .
The speaker’s words showed such knowledge, charity, and sympathy that
they went straight to my heart” (187). Moreover, once they do meet, they
are initially established as both having a voice in politics. Attending a
meeting at a Working Women’s Club in Westminster, Marjorie reports
that “He [Paul] had spoken, and I had spoken too. . . . A formal resolution
had been proposed, and I had seconded it” (188–189). Even though
Marjorie recalls how this event would have upset her father, who “regards
a speechifying woman as a thing of horror” (189), it is worth noting that
she does so anyway.
Although Harris and Vernooy (2012) observe that the description of
Marjorie as “a thing of horror” uncomfortably aligns her political activities
with the “the undefinable predatory sexual acts the Beetle inflicts on her
victims, acts described only as ‘orgies of nameless horrors’” (347), the
262 E. EFFINGER
engagement that follows on the heels of their speech at the Working

Women’s Club hardly frames Marjorie as a sexual predator. Walking
along Westminster Bridge, their conversation leading up to the pro-
posal “was entirely political” (189), talking of the Agricultural
Amendment Act. Here, against the backdrop of the House, it is
Lessingham who is the love bug, repeatedly asking Marjorie to marry
him before she produces a clear answer (190–191). Curiously, Marjorie
derides her hesitancy to respond and eventual crying as the behavior of
a “sentimental chit” (192), which is not only “a derogatory term for a
young, inexperienced woman,” as Wolfreys and Marsh (2004) note
(192n1), but also the term for “the young of a beast” (“chit” OED
2015, n1). Thus, while Marjorie does not fit the profile of the politi-
cally disinterested sexual predator that Harris and Vernooy give her, the
novel does imply that she is a different kind of political animal, framing
the female politician as a beast of a different nature. Enter: insect
politics.
This association brings us close to the quandary at the heart of the
novel: man as the political animal. Perhaps the more appropriate question
is: does the Beetle become the face of political woman? Does the Beetle
function more as the double of Marjorie than Lessingham? After all,
women, like the invertebrate excluded from legislative protectionism,
were excluded in the 1832 Reform Act. While Marjorie’s political agency,
her speech-making, is relatively limited in comparison with that of
Lessingham, her involvement in many ways mirrors that of politically
engaged women of her day. As Sarah Richardson (2013) observes in The
Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth-Century
Britain, petitioning gave women the means to initiate a conversation
with the government, while the creation of special spaces within the
House, such as the Ladies’ Gallery, made a physical space for them to
observe political debates. Created by Charles Barry out of a portion of the
Strangers’ Gallery, and shrouded by trelliswork and windows covered with
heavy metal grilles, the Ladies’ Gallery effectively made women a spectral
presence in the House, masking the faces of politically interested women.
Moreover, the thick glass and metal grilles that framed the Ladies’ Gallery
induced headaches in the female attendees. As Millicent Fawcett notes,
“One great discomfort of the grille was that the interstices of the heavy
brasswork were not large enough to allow the victims who sat behind it to
focus . . . it was like using a gigantic pair of spectacles which did not fit, and
made the Ladies’ Gallery a grand place for getting headaches” (quoted in
“The Ladies Gallery”). One drawing of the Ladies’ Gallery, published in

the Illustrated London News (February 12, 1870), shows the intricate
grilles looking similar to the multi-chambered compound eyes of insects.8
In addition to what we might dub the “insect vision” afforded by the
House’s Ladies’ Gallery, these women were themselves viewed by the
popular presses as insects: see, for example, the cartoon titled “Suffrage
For Both Sexes” published in Punch’s Almanac on April 2, 1870, which
depicts a man and woman walking arm in arm. (See Fig. 13.1.)
From behind, the woman appears to be a beetle, suggesting in a darker
vein than the rest of the article that politically independent women are very
Fig. 13.1 “Suffrage for both sexes.” Punch, April 2, 1870. Photo courtesy of the
British Library
264 E. EFFINGER
different from their male counterparts, and even an altogether different

species. Thus, between the headache-inducing Ladies’ Gallery, and making
politically engaged women into beetles behind their backs, Britain’s political
inhospitality toward women becomes visible. Mapping similar terrain to this
Punch cartoon, Marsh’s novel both radicalizes it and pushes it to its danger-
ous conclusion. Indeed—to skip to the novel’s conclusion—Marjorie’s
hospitalization, after her brush with politics and the Beetle, emphasizes
this inhospitality of the polis. For Marjorie is the only victim pushed to the
point of a mental breakdown, suggesting that a certain extermination, as in
the etymology of ex termine (as a “driving beyond boundaries”) is the
ultimate price of women in politics. The novel appears to stage this very
point in its climax, where both Marjorie and the Beetle speed away by
railway and cab to the edges of London (Limehouse).
The final and most suggestive parallel the novel draws between Marjorie
and the Beetle is their cryptic survival. The Beetle, which disappears myster-
iously after the crash, haunts the afterlife of the narrative as a threat that
continues to live on. “Opinions are divided” about the source of the stains
found in the wreckage; various crime-scene experts pronounce it to be
human or animal blood, paint, or even “some sort of viscid matter, probably
the excretion of some variety of lizard” (318–319). Yet the Beetle’s body is
not among the wreckage, and it “cannot be certainly known that the Thing
is not still existing” (322). Marjorie’s survival is similarly an unsettling
account that depicts her as a shell of her former self. After spending “some-
thing like three years under medical supervision as a lunatic,” Marjorie’s
recovery is described as “entirely satisfactory,” and that following her
father’s death, she possesses the family estates, and becomes the “popular
and universally reverenced wife of one of the greatest statesmen the age has
seen” (319).
But this rather tidy ending for Marjorie is suspect. Although Marjorie has
allegedly recovered, her refusal to speak of the past and simultaneous
compulsion to repetitively write and rewrite it reveals a deeper, traumatized
subjectivity: “She confided to pen and paper what she would not speak of
with her lips. She told, and re-told, and re-told again, the story of her love,
and of her tribulation so far as it is contained in the present volume. Her
MSS. invariably began and ended at the same point. They have all of them
been destroyed, with one exception. That exception is herein placed
before the reader” (322). The surprising twist that we learn in this penulti-
mate paragraph of the novel is that this entire narrative itself has been
Marjorie’s hand all along, and that the novel’s four seemingly distinct
narrators (Robert Holt, Sydney Atherton, Marjorie Lindon, Augustus

Champnell) are, in fact, all products of Marjorie’s own multiple subjectivity.
The narrative concludes with a thin veneer of stability that masks a greater
violence. Tearing through the poorly papered-over scene of political peace
and strength are the ineradicable traces—emblematized in the stains of the
Beetle in the cab, or the written words of Marjorie—of those whose
disappearance is demanded, those who are driven beyond the boundaries
of the phallogopolis.
The Beetle’s unsettled ontology renders it, as Julian Wolfreys (2004)
suggests, a threatening prosopopoeia, “that rhetorical figure for giving
face or voice to what is unrepresentable” (19). As this chapter has argued,
one face the Beetle vexingly takes on—dramatized in its multiple subjec-
tivity (insect, man, and woman)—is the novel’s other pivotal figure: man
the political animal. While the Beetle, in many ways, functions as the
political Other, representing the threatening alterity of the insect or
woman to the polis, it also works, in its obsession with those characters
intimately bound to politics, to show the monstrous face of man, the
political animal. Read in this light, the Beetle is more the outward appear-
ance of the ugliness and horrors found within the deceptively smooth-
faced politicians. When the Beetle attacks its victims, some of the greatest
descriptions of violation occur at the site of the face. Put otherwise, what is
at stake in the unsettling encounter with the Beetle is not simply the loss of
face (as in reputations and identities), but also the way the metamorphic
Beetle shows itself to be the proper face of political man. Throughout this
novel, the return of the politically abjected is a counterpolitical maneuver,
an insidious imagining of the ways female and insect bodies might trium-
phantly violate existing institutions and structures.
NOTES
1. Richard Marsh, The Beetle ([1897] 2004), hereafter cited parenthetically in
the text by the page number.
2. See Wilson (2015, 16) and Altick (1978, 40, 427).
3. This dress was immortalized by the painter John Singer Sargent, and was
restored in 2011 by the UK’s National Trust.
4. Gamiani, attributed to Alfred de Musset, features women having sex with
dogs (58), a caged orangutan (92), and a donkey (102); Le Diable au Corps
features a frontispiece depicting a woman and a dog, and a group of women
with a donkey (176).
266 E. EFFINGER
5. “Sometimes I felt the bloated toad, hideous and pampered with the poiso-
nous vapours of the dungeon, dragging his loathsome length along my
bosom. Sometimes the quick cold lizard roused me, leaving his slimy track
upon my face, and entangling itself in the tresses of my wild and matted hair.
Often have I at waking found my fingers ringed with the long worms which
bred in the corrupted flesh of my infant.” (Lewis 2004), 343.
6. For example, Mario Ortiz-Robles (2015) suggests that in “the script of
eighteenth-century gothic fiction” there are “no animals to speak of”
(15)—a feature that the passage from The Monk cited above clearly
refutes. Moreover, Ortiz-Robles uses Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as his
case study, in a reading that also overlooks how the novel explicitly aligns
the Creature with the animal. For a counterpoint to Ortiz-Robles, see
Effinger (forthcoming).
7. One might also think of the growth during this period in visual repre-
sentations of pubic hair, such as Francisco Goya’s painting La Maja
Desnuda (c. 1797–1800) or Gustave Courbet’s painting L’Origine du
Monde (1866), the latter of which features a close-up view of female
genitals.
8. The image is available at: http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heri
tage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/parliamentary-col
lections/collections-19thc-and-suffragists/ladiesgallery/.
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Although every essay in this collection contains a Works Cited list that provides
information useful in extending one’s study of animals in Victorian literature and
culture, we offer the following list as a supplement to our contributors’ work. We
make no claim to its being comprehensive. We have concentrated on works
published within the past 30 years; we have, however, included some books and
articles that provide historical perspective.
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DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0
270 SOURCES FOR FURTHER STUDY
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INDEX
A Animalistic expression of balked

Abyssal terms, 201 desire, 226
Acampora, Ralph, 219–220, 224–225 Animality, politics of, 248
Ackroyd, Peter, 45 Animal narrators, 148, 150–151, 155,
Acquisition, 25–32 160, 162
Adams, Carol, 144 Animal objectification, 159
Adams, Maureen, 180, 183 Animal play-fighting, 244
“Adventures of a Cat, The,” 151, Animal politics, 244–246
153–154, 158–159, 161 Animal protagonist, 155, 157–158,
Aesthetics, animal role, 148 161–163
Aflalo, F. G., 134 Animal protection
Agamben, Giorgio, 110 laws, 50
Agencement, 121–122 movement, 2
Agricultural Amendment Act, 262 Animal rights, 6, 9, 136, 140, 168,
Alighieri, Dante, 200 184, 186
Allin, Leslie, 261 movement, 168
Anatomical investigations, 207 recognition of, 6
Anderson, Warwick, 215 theory, 184
Animal autobiography, 4, 11–12, Animal skin-collecting, 3
14, 147, 150–151, 153, Animal That Therefore I Am, The, 4,
160–162, 239 12, 200, 234
Animal cruelty laws, 2 Animal trade, 9–10, 213, 226
Animal ethics, 205–208 Animal training, 11, 134–136, 140
Animal experimentation, theories of, 3
opposition, 227 Animal welfare
Animal Farm, 145 development of, 83
Animal genocides, 14 laws, advances in, 186

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0
280 INDEX
Animal welfare (cont.) fragility of, 154–157

movement, 233–234 language, 156
Antelope, 35–37 stylish animal, 160
Anthropocentrism, 190, 194, 199 Beef breeders, 46
Anti-humanism, 199 Beef production, 47
Antipodean ecosystem, 66, 69 Beer, Gillian, 5, 112
Anti-religious thought, 208n3 Beetlemania, 13, 253, 257
Anti-slavery movement, 233 Beetle, The, 4, 13, 201, 251–252, 258,
Anti-vivisectionist literature, 14 260, 264–265
Anti-vivisection movement, 133, economy of entomophobia
136–137, 220 in, 257–260
Armstrong, Isobel, 193, 195 genres of the Trance-Gothic, 252
Armstrong, Philip, 83, 121, 208n5 Beierl, Barbara, 185
Atheism, 192 Bennett, Jane, 240–241, 243
Atkinson, Louisa, 67 Bensusan, S. L., 130, 133, 135
Audubon, John James, 31 Berger, John, 224
Australia and New Zealand, 4, 65–66, Bergström, Theo, 61n25
73, 76, 78 Berry, Bonnie, 149–150
Australia Bildungsroman, 4
acclimatization debate, 10 Biological inheritance, 112
conquest of animal life, 78 Biophilia, 224–225, 227
deadliest reptiles, 75 Birns, Nicholas, 76
settler culture, 78n1 Black Beauty, 8, 12, 151, 155–157,
strangeness of wildlife, 65 159–160, 233–248
Autobiography of a Cat, 152, 164n4 achievement of, 240
character development, 245
contribution to animal welfare
B movement, 234
Bachman, John, 26, 34 empathy for its equine
Banks, Joseph, 254 characters, 234
Barbarism, 222 through the lens of race, 163n1
Bare life, 110, 112 Blyth, Edward, 26, 27–28, 30, 33,
Barker, Lucy Sale, 159 39n12
Barry, Charles, 262 Bodenheimer, Rosemary, 115
Bastin, John, 215 Boggs, Colleen Glenney, 163n1
Bates, John, 25, 38 Bonser, K. J., 45
Battersea dog, 99–101 Boston Daily Advertiser, 96
Battersea Homes, 10–11, 83–84, 91, Bottici, Chiara, 252
93, 98 Bradlaugh, Charles, 208n3
Beauty Brandenstein, Claudia, 66
critiques of, 159–162 Brantlinger, Patrick, 5, 60n12, 252
depictions of, 150 Breed hierarchies, 124
INDEX 281
British Acclimatisation Society, 72 City of Dreadful Night, The, 12, 190,

British Museum, 55 192–193, 195, 197, 200, 202,
Brock, Walter, 90–91, 100 204–206
Brontë, Charlotte, 184 Civilizing process, 123n4
Brontë, Emily, 3, 12, 167–172, Clark, John F. M., 255–257
174–175, 180–181, 183–186 Claypole, Noah, 111
Brophy, Gregory, 252 Cobbe, Frances Power, 8, 11, 14n1,
Brower, Matthew, 85, 87 84–85, 217
Buckland, Frank, 215 Cohn, Elisha, 205
Buddhism, 209n10 Colam, Charles, 93
Bull baiting, 44, 50, 116 Colam, John, 42, 95
Bull-fights, 50 Coleman, D., 253
Bull, John, 44, 46, 53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 47,
Bull running, 44, 50 253–254
Burke, Joseph, 26, 39n8 Colley, Ann C., 5, 9, 21
Burrows, E., 151–152, 155, 157, 159, Collins, Wilkie, 45, 59n3
162, 164n2 Colonial beasts, transmission
Burt, Jonathan, 83–84, 98–99, 121 of, 72
Bush Wanderings of a Naturalist, 70 Confessions of a Lost Dog, 11,
Butler, Samuel, 208n5 84–85, 87
Buxton, T. Fowell, 60n6 Conquest by assimilation, 73
Byron, Glennis, 6, 252, 257 Consumerism, 227
Contagious Diseases Acts, 228–229
Controlled movement of people
C and dogs, 101
Caird, Mona, 222 Conway, M. D., 218
Caius, John, 117 Cook, James, 76
Calarco, Matthew, 201 Coral insects, 197–198
Cannibalism, 110–111, 123n5 Cosslett, Tess, 162, 163n1, 233,
Cape of Good Hope, 27, 30, 39 239–240
Carnophallogocentrism, 111 Cottesloe, Gloria, 93, 95, 102n1
Carpenter, Mary Wilson, 225 Court of Common Council, 53
Carr, William, 253 Cremorne Gardens, 219
Carroll, Lewis, 227 Criminal animal, 112
“Cat that Went to the Cat Show, Cronin, J. Keri, 83
The,” 147 Crosby, Alfred W., 74
Cat protagonist, 152, 159, 161 Cross-species entanglement, 124n24
Cat-skinner, 158, 161 Cross-species relationship, 235
Cheltenham Chronicle, 96 Cruikshank, George, 116
Childers, Joseph W., 60n9 Cruikshank, Robert, 254
Cholera, 53 Crystal Palace, 52, 61n19
Citizen animal, 184–186 Cultural conditioning, 112
282 INDEX
D E
Dampier, William, 76 Earl of Derby, 10, 22
Danahay, Martin A., 3, 8–9, 137 Ecological imperialism, 10, 66, 74
Daniel, William, 117 Effinger, Elizabeth, 4, 13, 251
Dark ecology, 191, 207 Eliot, George, 150, 259
Darwin, Charles, 5, 68, 75, 112, Elston, Mary Ann, 222, 228
121–122, 136–137, 191, English Acclimatisation Society, 215
195–196, 198–199, 205 English Illustrated Magazine, 90–92,
Darwinian mechanisms, 168 96, 98
Darwinism, 2 Entomological Society
Davidson, Bruce R., 68, 79n4 of London, 255
Deleuze, Gilles, 121 Environmental reconfiguration, 78
Dell’Aversano, Carmen, 144 Etcoff, Nancy, 149
Demon-dance, 142 Ethical movements, 12
Derrida, Jacques, 4–6, 11–12, 13, European rabbit, 79n4
111, 117, 144, 191, 200–201, Exotic animals, 22, 73, 213, 215,
205, 234–237, 239 226–227
Descent of Man, The, 195 Expanded citizenship, 169
Despret, Vinciane, 88, 121 Expression of Emotion in Man
Destructive Insects Bill, 257 and Animals, The, 112, 122
Dickens, Charles, 10–11, 13,
41–43, 45–54, 56–59, 68,
102, 109–116, 120–122, F
135–138, 140–145, 215 Fairholme, Edward G., 60n6
RSPCA invitation, 42 Fairy tale, 222, 227
attitudes towards animals, 42 Falconer, Rachel, 200
support for the RSPCA, 42 Fallen women, 13, 217, 229
thorough understanding Fanaticism, 49, 58
of his audience, 45 Fantasy, 131, 203, 227
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 67 Fawcett, Millicent, 262
Dobell, Bertram, 189, 208n3 Feminine body, reappropriation
Dogs Act, 83, 94, 102 of, 229
Dogs’ Homes, 83 Feral pet, 183
Domesticated killing, 97–99 Ferguson, Moira, 8, 163n1
Donald, Diana, 83 Fisher, Clemency, 22, 39n4, 39n5
Donaldson, Sue, 168–170, Flegel, Monica, 4, 9, 11, 147
184–185 Flinders, Matthew, 66
Dorré, Gina, 8, 162, 164n4 Foote, G. W., 192
Dunhill, Thomas, 58 Forshaw, Alec, 61n25
Dunn, Henry T., 219 Foucault, Michel, 228
Dürer, Albrecht, 206 Fraser, Louis, 28
Duthrie, Enid, 184 Freedman, Rita, 149
INDEX 283
Freeman, Carol, 9 Hamilton, Susan, 4, 10, 83

French Acclimatisation Society, Haraway, Donna, 5, 12, 234,
72, 215 234–237
French market system, 52 Hardy, Barbara, 113
French, Richard D., 7 Hardy, Thomas, 13, 205
Fry, Reverend John, 24 Harker, Margaret, 86
Fudge, Erica, 84, 86, 100–101, 157 Harrison, Brian, 7, 59n1
Furneaux, Holly, 114 Harris, W. C., 252, 261–262
Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, 67
Heidegger, Martin, 201
G Highgate Penitentiary, 217,
Gagnier, Regenia, 151–152 220, 222
Galton, Francis, 194 Hobbes, Thomas, 253
Gammage, Bill, 80 Hodgetts, E. A. Brayley, 130–132
Gaskell, Elizabeth, 184 Holbeac, Henry, 80
Gathering and shipping wild Hollindale, Peter, 233
animals, 22 Holloway Dogs’ Home, 86
Gavin, Adrienne, 236, 241 Horne, R. H., 43, 51–52, 55–58, 112
Gay, Ignacio Ramos, 60n18 Horne, Richard R., 52
Gillray, James, 254 Horse-breaking, 136
Gilman, Sander, 149 Horse fair, 241–242
Goblin Market, 5, 214, 217, 220–221, Horseplay, 241–248
223–224, 227 Household Words, 5, 10, 41–43, 45,
Goblin Market and Other Poems, 217 51–59, 68, 135
Goff, Barbara, 168 Howard, James, 247
Goldstein, Robert Justin, 255 Howell, Philip, 8, 88, 97–99, 112
Gothic fiction, 258 Humane drovers, 47
Grandville, J. J., 255 Humane movement, 43–44, 46,
Gray, Beryl, 8, 112, 116 50, 59
Great Exhibition, 10, 41, 43, 48, 50, inception the nineteenth-
52, 55–56, 58–59 century, 44
Great Expectations, 120, 137, 141 rhetoric of the, 43
Gregory, James, 54 Humane reformers, 44, 57
Grigg, Gordon, 70, 79n8 Humane treatment, 2, 10, 42, 46,
Grossman, R. H., 79 54, 59
Guilbert de, Pixérécourt, René Human exceptionalism, 121, 190,
Charles, 120 193–194, 198–199
ideology of, 216
Humanitarian League, 216
H Humanized animals, 111
Haes, Frank, 84, 87 Hurley, Kelly, 252
Hajjin, 86–90, 99 Huxtable, Anthony, 46
284 INDEX
I Lawson, Henry, 67, 79n3

Imperial Gothic, 252 Layard, Austen Henry, 55
Indigenous faunas, 78 Leach, Edmund, 117
Indigenous people, 28, 69 Leane, Elizabeth, 9
Institute for Preventive Medicine, 228 Lear, Edward, 31
Invasive species, 78 Ledger, Sally, 110
Irredeemable criminality, 112 Lessingham, Paul, 251–252, 260
Islington’s Copenhagen Fields, 58 Lethal Chambers, 89–100
mobile single-use chamber, 95
photographing of the “lethalized”
J dogs, 91–93
Jamrach, Charles, 218 routine reporting of key
Janes, Lauren, 73 information, 94
Jenkins, Garry, 89, 93, 95 Lever, Christopher, 72–73, 79n10
Jones, Robert W., 216 Levine, George, 5, 75, 112
Jukes, J. B., 32 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 137, 145
Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 258
Liebig, Justus V., 46
Linnaean Society, 10, 22
K Lister Institute, 228
Kangaroos, 70–71, 74, 76–77, 218 Liverpool Homes, 95, 100–101
Karschay, Stephan, 252 Liverpool Temporary Home, 93, 102
Katabasis, epic literary device, 200 Livestock market, brutalizing
Katabatic narrative, 200, 204 effects of, 49
Kean, Hilda, 59n1 Lloyd, Mary, 102
Kennel Club, 117 Lohrli, Anne, 59n2
Kenyon-Jones, Christine, 6, 137 London, Jack, 201
Kete, Kathleen, 137 London Zoo, 1, 10, 21–22, 84, 87,
Kirby, William, 255, 259 213, 215
Knowsley Hall Aviary and Museum, 31 London Zoological Gardens, 1, 224
Kreilkamp, iv, an120, 137, 167, London Zoological Society, 10, 21–22
183–184, 222 Lord Derby, 22–38
Kucich, John, 142 Losano, Antonia, 11, 129
Kymlicka, Will, 168–170, 184–185 Lost dogs, 84–87
Lost Dogs’ Home, 86
Luckhurst, Roger, 252
L
Ladies’ Gallery, 262–264
Landseer, Edwin, 124n18 M
Langlumé, Joseph, 255 Maccall, William, 189, 192
Lansbury, Coral, 8, 67–68, 222, Malthusian struggle for existence, 113
234, 239 Mangum, Teresa, 160, 162
INDEX 285
Marsh, Richard, 3–4, 13, 201, N

217, 251–252, 257–260, Nayder, Lillian, 59n2
262, 264 Nerciat, Andréa De, 258
Martin’s Act, 6 New Historicism, 2
Massumi, Brian, 244–246, 248 New Market at Islington, 45
Mayer, Jed, 5, 9, 13, 135, New Poor Law, 114–115
213, 227 Night-side of nature, 189–190, 193
Mayhew, Henry, 42 Nihilism, 192, 207
McCann, Andrew, 145 Nineveh Bull, 55–57
McClelland, J. M., 28
McDonell, Jennifer, 5, 11, 109
Mechanization and domesticity, 99
O
Melancholy, 72, 158, 192, 200,
Objectification, fear of, 157–159
207–208, 218
Ogilby, William, 30
Melodramatic theatrical
Old Curiosity Shop, The, 11, 136–138,
genre, 113
140, 142, 145
“Memoirs of a Poodle,” 151
Oliver Twist, 11, 109–110, 112,
Mendoza, Victor, 226
114–115, 120, 122
Meredith, George, 190
Orphan-apprentices, 110
Metropolitan Act, 94
Owen, Richard, 53
Metropolitan Streets Act, 83, 88
Migrant-farmers, 68
Miller, George, 240
Miller, John, 5, 9, 12, 189 P
Miller, Lucinda, 184 Packing and shipping
Mill, John Stuart, 195 of animals, 32–37
Mills, Kevin, 204 Pain, Wellsley, 60n6
Monopolized ports, 33 Parisian livestock markets, 54
Moore, Grace, 4, 10, 60n5, 65, Patriarchal culture, 149
112, 119 Pavitt, James, 89
Morris, Jane Burden, 218 Payne, Mark, 9
Morrison, Ronald D., 1, 10, 41 Pearson, Susan J., 148, 163n1
Morse, Deborah Denenholz, 3, 8–9, Percival’s dog, 101
137, 182 Performing animals, 134, 144–145
Victorian Animal Dreams, 3, “Perils of Wild Beast Training,
8–9, 137 The,” 132, 135
Morton, Timothy, 191, 207 Periodical
Moss, Arthur, 42, 44, 60n11 Athenaeum, The, 192
Mother–child bond, idealization Eastern Weekly Reader, 91
of the, 203 Evening Telegraph, 91
Mullick, Rajandra, 25, 39n10 La Silhouette, 255
Musset Alfred de, 265n4 Leuchtkugeln, 255
286 INDEX
Periodical (cont.) Prodger, Phillip, 84, 86–87

Milwaukee Sentinel, 96 Purchas, Samuel, 254
Morning Post, 98 Pusey, Philip, 46, 60n10
National Reformer, The, 192 Pyke, Susan Mary, 6, 12, 167, 185
Pall Mall Gazette, 98
Secularist, The, 192
Sheffield Independent, 91
Q
Speaker, The, 129, 132
Queer performance theory, 5
Wallace’s Monthly, 130
Queer performativity, 11
Perkins, David, 6, 50
Queer sexuality, 252
Personhood, 147–148, 160, 162
Philo, Chris, 121
Philpotts, Trey, 59n2, 61n20
Photographers, 84, 86–87, 91, 100 R
innovations in photographic Rabies, 94, 184
technology, 87 Racism, 76
instantaneous photography, 86, Raffles, Stamford, 215
88, 94 Realism, 227
marketing protocols, 87–88 Real vs. representational
representation of animal death, 97 animals, 4–5
stuffed specimens, 86 Reform Act (1832), 262
technological limitations, 87 Regent’s Park, 130, 213
Physical beauty, 147, 153–154, Reid, T. Wemyss, 184
160–162 Richardson, Benjamin Ward, 94
Pick, Anat, 12, 110 Richardson, Sarah, 262
Pit bull, 123n15 Risk management, biopolitical
Pixérécourt, R. C. Guilbert de, 120 program, 256
Plumwood, Val, 168–169, 171 Ritvo, Harriet, 1, 3, 7–8, 42, 44,
Poliquin, Rachel, 148, 150 46–48, 50, 59n1, 61n24, 73,
Poor Law, 11, 109–111 78, 115, 130, 137, 144, 213,
Poor Law Amendment Act, 114 215–216
Poor Law Legislation, 113 Roberts, Edgar V., 61n21
Pople, Tony, 70, 79n8 Rogers, Ben, 61n21
Pornography, 14, 220 Romantic aesthetics, Specific
Post-colonial critics, 38 elements of, 7
Posthumanism, 168 Romantic Age, 7
Potts, Annie, 83 Romantic Movement, 6
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 219 Romantics, 205
Pre-Raphaelite mural, 225 Rose, Deborah Bird, 74, 77
Preventive medicine research, Rosenberg, Meisha, 123
animals use, 228 Rossetti, Christina, 3, 5, 13, 213–214,
Prinsep, Val, 219 217, 220, 228
INDEX 287
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 5, 55, 214, Smith, Adam, 75

217–219, 224, 227 Smith, Edward-Stanley, 22
Rossetti, William Michael, 213–214 Smithfield Market, 5, 10, 41–43,
Rothfels, Nigel, 134 45–46, 48, 50–51, 55, 58
Rowlandson, Thomas, 254 Smithfield Market Removal Act, 58
RSPCA (Royal Society for the Smith, Grahame, 60n9
Protection of Animals), 6, 42, 44, Smith, T., 30
47, 84, 137, 216 Social movements, development of, 9
to address abuses of animals, 216 Sorensen, Willis Conner 256
annual reports, 47, 61n24 Special Lethal Chamber Fund
close scrutiny, 44 Report, 95
develop humane slaughter Species grid, 111
techniques, 47 Spence, William, 255, 259
high-profile activities, 42 Spiegel, Marjorie, 168, 171
history of, 42 Spiritual allegory, 227
invitation of Charles Dickens, 42 St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary, 13
Stables, Gordon, 152, 156–158, 160,
162, 164n2
S Stauffer, Andrew M., 55
Salt, Henry Stephens, 14n1, 190–191, Steiner, Wendy, 148, 162
200, 206–207 Stephens, Henry, 14n1, 60n10, 191
Sanitary reform, 41, 53, 61n20 Stoker, Bram, 13
Sargent, John Singer, 265n2 Stone, Harry, 45, 59n3
Savagery, 77, 114, 118 Stone, W. H., 61n22
Schaeffer, William David, 189, 192, Strangers’ Gallery, 262
195, 204 Stuchebrukhov, Olga, 52
Schmitt, Cannon, 252–253, 257 Surridge, Lisa, 111, 168, 171, 175
Schomburgh, Robert H., 35 Swammerdam, Jan, 254
Scott, Sir Walter, 46 Swift, Jonathan, 124n22
Scott, W., 46
Heart of Mid-Lothian, The, 46
Searle, Edis, 153–154, 163 T
Secular mysticism, 205 Tealby, Mary, 88
Seed, David, 195 Tennyson, Alfred, 55
Sewell, Anna, 13, 151, 155–158, 160, Terra Nullius, 69, 74
233–239, 241–243, 246, 248 Territorial disputes, 29–30
Sharp, William, 208n4 Terry, Ellen, 253
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 199 Tew, Philip, 207
Sidney, Samuel, 68 Textual animals, 145
Simons, John, 218–219 Thackeray, W. M., 219
Slaughterhouse, 42–44, 45, 52–54, 58 Thomas, Keith, 44
Small, Ernest, 150 Thomson, Stuart M., 27, 36
288 INDEX
Thomson, James, 3, 12, 27, 36, Walsh, Martin W., 60n14

189–200, 202–207, 208n2 Walton, Heather, 185
Thorley, John, 254 Warder, Joseph, 254
Tiffin, Chris, 71 Watt, Yvette, 9
Toadvine, Ted, 201, 205 Weir, Harrison, 151, 160
Tomalin, Claire, 60n8 Wendy Steiner, 162
Tozer, Bernard, 96–97, 100 Wheelwright, W. H., 70
Transportation of the animals, 213 Whitfield, Thomas, 23–24, 28–29,
Trollope, Anthony, 3, 10, 65, 32–34, 37, 39n6
79n1, 79n9 Wilbert, Chris, 121
Trollope, Fred, 67 Wildman, Daniel, 253
Trumble, Angus, 214, 219 Williamson, George, 216
Tuan, Yi-Fu, 149 Wills, W. H., 43, 46–51, 58
Turner, James, 7 Wilson, E. O., 224
Tyler, Wat, 49 Withey, Lynne, 79n2
Tytler, Graeme, 168 Wolfe, Cary, 111, 168, 190
Wolf, Naomi, 149
Wolfreys, Julian, 201, 252,
U 262, 265
Uexküll, Jakob von, 121 Women’s welfare movements, 222
Wordsworth, William, 6
Wrenn, Corey Lee, 168
V Wright, Andrew, 79
Vaccination, 229 Wuthering Heights, 6, 12, 167–170,
Vegetarianism, 56 174–179, 181–186, 223
Vegetarian movement, 61n23 anthropomorphic metaphors, 170
Vernooy, Dawn, 252, 261–262 citizen animal, 184–186
Veterinary College of Alfort, 216 dogs and humans, shifting
Victorian capitalism, 46 relationships, 180
Victorian erotica, 8 equine in, 167
Victorian Gothic novel, 252 human brutality, 172
Victorian masculinity, 252 human/nonhuman
Victorian photographers, 86 interactions, 169
Vivisection, 83, 216, 229 humans and horses,
opponents of, 217 relationships, 183
Vulnerability, 38, 148, 150, 155, 158, relational representations,
227, 260 167–170
W Y
Walker, Imogene, 208n4 Yeniyurt, Kathryn, 4, 6, 12, 233
Wallace, William, 49 Youatt, William, 116
INDEX 289
Z zoo-goers’ fascination, 213

Zoo Zoological Gardens, 214, 216,
comfortless conditions 219, 224
of animals, 216 Calcutta, 39n10
criticism of the treatment Regent’s Park, 219
of animals, 216 Zoological misnomer, 198
ethics of, 134 Zoological Society, 22, 30,
premier venue for spectatorial 214–216
consumption of exotic Zoomorphic imagery, 222–223
animals, 215

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Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

First and foremost, the editors of Animals in Victorian Literature and

Part I Animals in the Victorians’ World

2 Collecting the Live and the Skinned 21

3 Dickens, Household Words, and the Smithﬁeld Controversy

4 Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Reptiles: Anthony Trollope and

5 Dogs’ Homes and Lethal Chambers, or, What Was it Like

Part II Animals in the Victorians’ Literature

6 Bull’s-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide

7 Performing Animals/Performing Humanity 129

8 “I Declare I Never Saw so Lovely an Animal!”: Beauty,

9 Cathy’s Whip and Heathcliff’s Snarl: Control,

10 Creatures on the “Night-Side of Nature”: James

11 “Come Buy, Come Buy!”: Christina Rossetti

12 Black Beauty: The Emotional Work of Pretend Play 233

13 Insect Politics in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle 251

Sources for Further Study 269

Fig. I.1 Jacques-Laurent Agasse. Old Smithﬁeld Market. 1824.

Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison

L.W. Mazzeno (*)

© The Author(s) 2017 1

enormously inﬂuential The Animal Estate, in Victorian culture discussions

have thoroughly analyzed the problem of applying the term “bildungs-

interdisciplinary approach to the representation of animals opens up many

It is curious why Victorian scholars were somewhat slower to show the

on and Victorian optimism came to be overshadowed by fears of degen-

explores how animal autobiography might be linked to class considera-

twenty-ﬁrst-century Animal Studies. Similarly, in the context of children’s

Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University. He is the

Ronald D. Morrison is Professor of English at Morehead State University, where

essays on Dickens and Smithﬁeld Market in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and

Animals in the Victorians’ World

Collecting the Live and the Skinned

A.C. Colley (*)

© The Author(s) 2017 21

Fig. 2.1 Envelope from Lord Derby’s Letterbooks. By permission of Archives

deferential Fry apologized for exceeding his Lordship’s budget: “The

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that much of the distrust of indigenous

two years to conﬁnement having been taken by a hunting party in the

I am sadly afraid that I shall be able to purchase nothing more at present, it is

Because of the complexity of going out in the ﬁeld, the question of

It is my intention to visit the southernmost parts of the Union especially the

is intended to enable you the better to make choice of a veteran Walker of

PACKING AND SHIPPING

I do not think there would be much trouble in obtaining animals at

Whitﬁeld was concerned that because of monopolized ports, where vessels

Springbok—Cage—etc. as doctor’s bill 5-0-0

I was almost most unwillingly to communicate to your Lordship my ill

Death was commerce’s companion. As the letters illustrate, it was a

postcolonial critics who tend to overlook the kinds of circumstances des-

Letterbooks. Archives Department/Vertebrate Zoology, National Museums

Ann C. Colley is a SUNY Distinguished Professor at SUNY College at Buffalo.

Dickens, Household Words,

Animals, so often invested with powerful and complex symbolic signiﬁcance,

R.D. Morrison (*)