Perambulating Mice and the Confluence of Sympathy and Moral Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Shawna Lichtenwalner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The late eighteenth century was the locus of a burgeoning interest in animal rights. This essay examines the critical role that children’s literature had in the evolution of more consideration for animal welfare. The use of animals in the works of writers such as Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Dorothy Kilner helped create a form of animal subjectivity as a means of teaching children compassion through the creation of sympathy for nonhuman animals. By fostering compassion for the needs of so-called “dumb creatures” children could also be taught, by extension, to have more consideration for other people. In particular, Dorothy Kilner’s animal autobiography The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse offers a new way of viewing animals who are neither physical nor affectional slaves as worthy of both consideration and compassion.

scholarly journals Hospitality and the Nation in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Jennifer Wawrzinek
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Commercial Exchange ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
And Control ◽  
National Borders

<p>In the summer of 1795, when Mary Wollstonecraft journeyed to Scandinavia, she was disillusioned with human society and the possibility of meaningful relation with others. She had recently been in Paris, where she had seen many of her moderate revolutionary friends executed under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, and by the time of her arrival in Scandinavia her unsatisfactory relationship with Gilbert Imlay was coming to an end. The book that resulted from this journey, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, is remarkable for its critique of sovereignty and the reification of difference inherent to the construction of national borders and the drives of commercial exchange. The article argues that Wollstonecraft insists upon openness to the people and cultures she encounters through configuring epistemology as a twin process of experiential contact and sceptical inquiry. This a process that remains inherently and necessarily ethical because it resists the structures of tyranny, domination, and control, which Wollstonecraft perceives to be afflicting late-eighteenth-century Europe, whilst simultaneously allowing for a re-conception of politics and justice according to the demands both of the present and the not-yet-formalised future.</p>

scholarly journals Visions of the Daughters of Albion: The Influence of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Life and Career on William Blake

2014 ◽  
Vol 40 ◽  
pp. 48-63
Author(s):  
Ramin Keshavarzian ◽  
Pyeaam Abbasi
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Of Color ◽  
William Blake ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The present study discussed the influence of one of the eighteenth-century British women of color, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, on William Blake. By adopting a biographical and also a comparative approach, the authors tried to highlight the influences of Wollstonecraft‟s personal life, character, and career, chiefly her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), on one of William Blake‟s less-referred-to poems Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). The study will help readers to both know Wollstonecraft‟s prominence and also to grasp more of William Blake and his poetry. The authors also attempted to show that William Blake was part of the early feminism of the late eighteenth century.

The Satire of Walker's Vagabond on Rousseau and Godwin

PMLA ◽  
1937 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh H. MacMullan
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
View Point ◽  
Large Section ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Century Thought

George Walker, a London bookseller and publisher, author of several Gothic tales, printed in 1799 a satirical novel, The Vagabond, directed against the Jacobins and their philosophic forerunners. The author's purpose was a serious one, to refute and counteract the works that had poured from the Jacobin presses. As a result the novel, though amusing and fanciful in the manner of the Anti-Jacobin, represents a consistent view-point and an earnest desire to show the beauties of society as then organized. In its way, it is a summary of the reactionary position, and, by giving the opinions of the opponents of Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Holcroft, Paine, William Godwin, and others, illustrates a large section of late eighteenth-century thought.

“The Bird was a Valuable One”

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 592-609
Author(s):  
Nancy Cushing ◽  
Kevin Markwell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Introduced Species ◽  
General Pattern ◽  
Free Living ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Direct Benefits ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Commercial Trade

AbstractAustralian native, nonhuman animals at first intrigued and then disappointed newcomers as Australia was colonized by the British in the late eighteenth century. They were disparaged as unproductive and unpalatable oddities, killed as competitors to introduced species, or harvested as a source of fur and feathers for export. Focusing on the period 1803 to 1939, this paper examines one exception to this general pattern: the keeping of native animals as “pets.” Contemporary newspaper articles and advertisements are drawn upon to demonstrate that the Australian native fauna kept as pets were highly valued both emotionally by their “owners” and economically in the commercial trade and the courts. This valuation had few direct benefits to species overall because it remained focused on individual pets and was not shared with free-living animals, but it did keep alive an interest in native animals that greatly expanded in the mid-twentieth century.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document