The Innovative Animals of Children’s Fiction

This chapter discusses the animals of early children’s fiction, showing that their didactic and affective purposes are rooted in the period’s conception of childhood as a time of special closeness to animal being. Children’s writers teach children to grow away from animality, but also use animals to encourage the child reader’s sympathy. The fiction’s message of kindness to animals depends both on reminding children of feelings they share with nonhuman creatures and on explaining human superiority. The chapter argues that children’s writers make a distinct contribution to a developing literature of animal subjectivity. They make significant innovations in narrative techniques for representing nonhuman viewpoints, not only in their use of animal narrators but in third-person narrative access to non-linguistic animal minds. Writers include Dorothy Kilner, Thomas Day, Sarah Trimmer, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, Dorothy Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, and Edward Augustus Kendall.

Making an Ass of Yourself in Narrative

Through close readings of literary asses in Sterne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Clare, this chapter argues that the development of sympathetic animal representation is marked by an ambivalence emblematized by the figure of the donkey. The chapter outlines the donkey’s ambiguous cultural status, discussing narratives from two different traditions: the Judeo-Christian tradition in which the meek ass is revered for its lowliness, and the classical tradition in which it is scorned. The biblical story of Balaam’s ass, in which the ass speaks against her master’s cruelty, is interpreted literally in the eighteenth century as teaching compassion to animals. In Apuleius’ ancient novel The Golden Ass the narrator, transformed into an ass, is a low, lustful, stupid beast. Both narratives influence the eighteenth-century donkey representations discussed here. The writers’ tonal complexities are traced to the fear that to sympathize with animals is to be transformed, like Apuleius’ narrator, into an ass.

Conclusion

Drawing together the threads of the previous chapters, these pages reflect on the way the entangled development of the concepts of human rights and animal rights made the human–animal border a site of political tension. During the eighteenth century people were exploring the similarities between human and nonhuman animals in new ways, encouraged by developments in natural history and the cultural spread of sympathy. The concept of animal rights was an almost inevitable (if uncertain) extension of the concept of human rights, and made the borderline between human and animal a site of great political tension. That animals are like humans, and that humans are (like) animals, were propositions brought together, two sides of the same coin, but what that might mean for human politics and for human–animal relations was debatable and debated, then as now. As we have seen, both the possibility that human–animal kinship could inspire greater kindness, and the danger that the animalization of human groups could be used to rationalize oppression, were realized during the period. The work concludes with a brief consideration of the legacy of eighteenth-century writing in contemporary animal representation, highlighting the continuing importance of storytelling to the creation of respect for nonhuman animals.

Learned Pigs

Considering both writing and visual propaganda, this chapter argues that nonhuman animals were central to the 1790s political reform movement both as sources of metaphor and as fellow creatures also demanding freedom from oppression. Several species of animals are treated, the pig being the most important. Firstly the chapter shows how Burke’s characterization of revolutionaries as a swinish multitude, combined with the reputation of the performing animal known as the learned pig, made the pig the radicals’ emblem, defiantly adopted by Thomas Spence, Daniel Isaac Eaton, Richard Porson, and others to energize their campaign. Secondly, the question of sympathy for real-life pigs within radical discourse is raised through a discussion of Southey’s pig poems. Thirdly, the chapter considers the extension of the rights of man to nonhuman animals in the work of John Oswald and Joseph Ritson, who combined a commitment to vegetarianism with revolutionary politics.

Woman and Brute in Feminism

This chapter treats 1790s feminist writing by Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Mary Robinson, tracing conflicts in their thought created by the question of the animal. Faced by the animalization of women based on their identification with the sexual and reproductive body, feminists appealed to a disembodied reason to argue for their equality with men; but their sympathy with nonhuman animals as sharing in their victimization by men encouraged some revaluation of animality. Wollstonecraft’s foundational work on the rights of woman makes an anthropocentric commitment to unique human rationality, and reveals anxieties attributable to her reading of natural history discourses that naturalized the subordination of women. Robinson shows greater confidence in disembodied reason as guarantor of gender equality. The chapter traces the development of sympathetic responses both to human animality and nonhuman animals in Macaulay, Hays, and in Wollstonecraft’s own later work.

Introduction

This chapter places nonhuman animals at the centre of the age of revolution, outlining the naturalistic and sympathetic perspectives on animal life underpinning emergent animal rights discourses. Firstly it shows how eighteenth-century natural history influenced a shift from symbolic to literal animal representation. Secondly it argues that David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s philosophies of sympathy each encouraged anthropomorphism in animal representation, Hume’s by blurring the distinction between rationality and animality, Smith’s by opening up the possibility of imaginative projection into nonhuman experiences. Thirdly, it traces the radicalization of the idea of natural rights, showing how the concept of human rights was locked in a complex and fraught relationship with that of animal rights. Human demands for rights entailed claims to a fully human rationality distinct from animality, but the concept of universal natural rights for man and woman was extended beyond the human.

The Orang-outang System: Animals and Abolition

This chapter examines the effects on abolition debates of racial theories positing a special closeness between African and ‘orang-outang’ or ape, and shows how Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano deployed literary animals to underscore their own humanity and consider the implications of freedom. Firstly it considers writing on the ‘orang-outang’, arguing that anatomical and behavioural observations with the potential to challenge human exceptionalism were diverted into support for emergent racialist theories. The orang-outang was rhetorically used to create the starkest animalization applied to any human group. Secondly it considers comparisons between slaves and cattleo, invoked both in pro- and anti-slavery arguments to characterize the institution and practices of slavery. Thirdly it discusses the complex use of literary animals in Afro-British writing, including Sancho’s Sternian sympathy with donkeys, Cugoano’s revaluation of common animal metaphors, and Equiano’s exploration of the relation between human freedom and trade in nonhuman animals.

The Rights of Beasts in the Early Nineteenth Century

This chapter argues that the parliamentary animal welfare campaign of the early nineteenth century, culminating in Martin’s Act (1822), was the heir to the radical movements of the 1790s. The literary representation of animals as feeling subjects, and the complex relationship between human and animal rights, both had profound effects on the anti-cruelty debate. Focusing on contributions by John Lawrence, an early exponent of legal rights for animals, Thomas Erskine, who introduced an unsuccessful Cruelty to Animals bill in 1809, and Margaret Cullen, who brought the debate about animals into the domestic novel, I show how they used and adapted radical political ideas in the service of animal welfare. The literature of animal subjectivity underpinned the anti-cruelty campaign and helped achieve legislation; but success depended on melding new attitudes with old hierarchies and turning away from the more radical implications of the reassessment of animal life.