Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture 2019952888, 9780367416102, 9781003004035

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Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture

Whether a secularized morality, biblical worldview, or unstated set of mores, the Victorian period can and always will be distinguished from those before and after for its pervasive sense of the “proper way” of thinking, speaking, doing, and acting. Animals in literature taught Victorian children how to be behave. If you are a postmodern posthumanist, you might argue, “But the animals in literature did not write their own accounts.” Animal characters may be the creations of writers’ imagination, but animals did and do exist in their own right, as did and do humans. The original essays in Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture explore the representation of animals in children’s literature by resisting an anthropomorphized perception of them. Instead of focusing on the domestication of animals, this book analyzes how animals in literature “civilize” children, teaching them how to get along with fellow creatures—both human and nonhuman. Dr. Brenda Ayres, once Full Professor on the graduate faculty of English, is now teaching online as Adjunct Professor for Liberty University and Southern New Hampshire University. Dr. Sarah E. Maier is Full Professor of English and Comparative Literature, as well as Director of Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies, at the University of New Brunswick.

Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture Series Editor: Karen Raber, University of Mississippi, USA

Literary and cultural criticism has ventured into a brave new world in recent decades: posthumanism, ecocriticism, critical animal studies, the new materialisms, the new vitalism, and other related approaches have transformed the critical environment, reinvigorating our encounters with familiar texts, and inviting us to take note of new or neglected ones. A vast array of nonhuman creatures, things, and forces are now emerging as important agents in their own right. Inspired by human concern for an ailing planet, ecocriticism has grappled with the question of how important works of art can be to the preservation of something we have traditionally called “nature.” Yet literature’s capacity to take us on unexpected journeys through the networks of affiliation and affinity we share with the earth on which we dwell—and without which we die—and to confront us with the drama of our common struggle to survive and thrive has not diminished in the face of what Lyn White Jr. called “our ecological crisis.” From animals to androids, nonhuman creatures and objects populate critical analyses in increasingly complex ways, complicating our conception of the cosmos by dethroning the individual subject and dismantling the comfortable categories through which we have interpreted our existence. Until now, however, the elements that compose this wave of scholarship on nonhuman entities have had limited places to gather to be nurtured as a collective project. “Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture” provides that local habitation. In this series, readers will find creatures of all descriptions, as well as every other form of biological life; they will also meet the non-biological, the microscopic, the ethereal, the intangible. It is our goal for the series to provide an encounter zone where all forms of human engagement with the nonhuman in all periods and national literatures can be explored, and where the discoveries that result can speak to one another, as well as to scholars and students.

Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture Edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier Ghost, Android, Animal Trauma and Literature Beyond the Human Tony M. Vinci For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Perspectives-on-the-Non-Human-in-Literature-and-Culture/ book-series/PNHLC

Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture

Edited by Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952888 ISBN: 978-0-367-41610-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00403-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

To my beloved cockers: Lyssie (or Lysistrata), Gracie, Annie, and Libby —Brenda Ayres To my beloved child: Violet

—Sarah E. Maier

Contents

List of Figures Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Little Beasts on Tight Leashes

ix xi 1

B R E N DA AY R E S A N D S A R A H E . M A I E R

1 Why Did the Cow Jump Over the Moon? Animals (But Mostly Pussies) in Nursery Rhymes

12

B R E N DA AY R E S

2 Wanted Dead or Alive: Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature

31

KER IDI A NA CHEZ

3 “In Friendly Chat with Bird or Beast … Mixing Together Things Grave and Gay”: Desireful Animals and Humans in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

50

A N N A KO U S T I N O U D I

4 A Brotherhood of Wolves: Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales

66

L I N D S AY K AT Z I R A N D B R A N D O N K AT Z I R

5 Advocating for the Least of These: Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate

87

A LISA CLA PP-I T N Y R E

6 Bush Animals, Developmental Time, and Colonial Identity in Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction CHRISTIE HARNER

106

viii Contents 7 The Serpent; or, the Real King of the Jungle

125

ST EPH EN BASDEO

8 Learning Masculinity: Education, Boyhood, and the Animal in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days

142

A L I C I A A LV E S

9 Unruly Females on the Farm: Domestic Animal Mothers and the Dismantling of the Species Hierarchy in Nineteenth-Century Literature for Children

160

S TAC Y H O U LT- S A RO S

10 The Child Is Father of the Man: Lessons Animals Teach Children in George Eliot’s Writings

180

C O N S TA N C E M . F U L M E R

11 Neither Brutes nor Beasts: Animals, Children, and Young Persons and/in the Brontës

196

SA R A H E . M A IER

12 Children, Animals, and the Fantasies of the Circus

215

SUSA N NA NCE

13 Imperial Pets: Monkey-Girls, Man-Cubs, and Dog-Faced Boys on Exhibition in Victorian Britain

237

SH A N NON SCOT T

Note on Contributors Index

257 261

Figures

12.1 A table manners routine that involved ringing of bells, imagined here with a trained monkey and mule for a children’s book depicting an American show in Britain. “Wonderful Trained Donkeys and Monkeys” by Dudley Hardy in Barnum’s Great Show: The Only Toy Book (London: Dean and Son, 1888), 8 223 12.2 “Subduing an Unruly Elephant” with manacles, ropes, hooks, sharpened stakes, and men. Harper’s Young People, An Illustrated Weekly (1885) 227 12.3 Jumbo elephant toy, dog, and children at tea party. Ellen Cyr, A Children’s Primer, 1892 231 13.1 Krao and Guillermo Antonio Farini (born William Leonard Hunt), circa 1885. http://racingnelliebly. com/2-krao-10/ 242 13.2 Adrian and Fedor Jeftichew, n.d., https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adrian-and-Fedor-Jeftichewby-Lumiere-c1875.png 249

Preface and Acknowledgments

Routledge was so gracious to publish a collection of essays in 2019 titled Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (2019) and suggested that I (Brenda Ayres) produce another volume that focused on animals in children’s literature. Sarah E. Maier, who partnered with me to produce Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-first Century (Anthem 2019), was amenable to coediting such a collection for Routledge. We are ­grateful to each other for the comradery and complimentary collaboration that produced Animals and Their Children. The scholarly connection of like minds across the miles is, as Sarah says, exhilarating and brings joy to the work. Avery M. Powers, a Liberty University student, joined our team as an intern. Her eagle eye for details and impeccable editing skills were an invaluable asset to this project. We are also grateful to Jennifer Abbott of Taylor & Francis for her support and enthusiasm in publishing this project. We want to express our great appreciation for the contributors of essays for this volume: Alicia Alves, Stephen Basdeo, Keridiana Chez, Alisa Clapp-Itnyre, Constance Fulmer, Christie Harner, Stacy Hoult-­Saros, Lindsay Katzir, Brandon Katzir, Anna Koustinoudi, Susan Nance, and Shannon Scott. Their perspectives and passion for scholarship made this project so rewarding. Sarah and I have a love relationship with words and knowledge, thanks to some key people in our lives. I started school when I was five, at Shrewsbury Elementary in York County, Pennsylvania, and took to reading like a duck to water (forgive the cliché, but no other animal metaphor serves as well). Before long, I had ingested every book in our tiny library several times over, and Miss Mabel Bortner, my first-grade teacher, dragged a box of musky-smelling books out of a closet. They were readers from the nineteenth century. I will never forget those magical books, with their beautiful illustrations and illuminated fonts. I not only read them—I fell in love with them. They may be the reason that I decided to devote my life to the study of Victorian literature. Sarah voraciously devoured all of her Mom (Valerie)’s huge books— the more pages, the better—when they would sit quietly together for hours with cups of tea in hand supplied by her Dad (Patrick). Now, she

xii  Preface and Acknowledgments sits with daughter Violet at her side, reading big books and drinking tea, still supplied by her Dad, who is now Gido. She fully believes that her Mom is still reading all the longest novels, while she watches us all carry on our family’s great love of words, story, and art. It is a good thing we love to read for, in order to write the introduction and the chapters in this volume, and then edit the other chapters, we had to digest about 150 books on animal studies as well as on children’s literature. Animal studies is a burgeoning field in academe, and scholarship is flourishing throughout the disciplines in the form of articles and books. There are several scholars, however, that we wish to especially thank for their attention to the relationship between animals and humans, beginning with Harriet Ritvo and The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harvard University Press 1987), followed by these that are a must-read for anyone who wants to learn more about animals and the Victorians: Tess Cosslett and Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Ashgate, 2006), Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay and Victorian Animal Dreams: Representation of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (Ashgate, 2007), Laura Brown and her Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2010), Sarah Amato and Beastly Possessions: Animals in Consumer Culture (University of Toronto, 2015), Monica Flegel and Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (Routledge, 2015), Keridiana Chez (who is contributing a chapter to this volume) and Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Ohio State University, 2017), and Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison and Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). I have known and loved animals all my life. I do not care if anyone accuses me of anthropomorphizing them, but I talked to cows, horses, sheep, dogs, cats, rabbits, and chickens as soon as my legs were mobile enough to take me and keep me out of doors, and like Adam, I named each and every one of them. I bawled every time a wounded bird that I tried to heal died on me. The deaths of my cats were even worse. When Lyssie, my first cocker spaniel passed after nearly 20 years of companionship, I thought I would not survive it and probably would not have if I had not adopted Annie and then Gracie (two rescue cockers) in quick order. Sarah’s life from childhood to now has had a family of many ponies, horses, and basset hounds who have provided challenge, love, kindness, comfort, and companionship, for which she will always be grateful. They are all still greatly missed, but they provided her with many valuable lessons to share with her own beautiful child. As for children’s literature, aside from what I read as a kid, I never had children, never taught children, never taught children’s literature at

Preface and Acknowledgments  xiii any university, and never wrote on the subject except for an article on To Kill a Mockingbird and for my book The Emperor’s Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney’s Magic Kingdom (Peter Lang, 2003)—until now. The research I did to write my own chapter in this collection on nursery rhymes was exhilarating, perhaps because it took me back to Miss Bortner’s class, when we were expected to stand before the class and recite a nursery rhyme every week. That was when life made sense to me because I knew what I knew through my relationships with animals. Sarah has a long relationship with books about animals and with reading, teaching, and writing about children’s literature. The two of us are happy to share with our students and fellow scholars the power of how what we read as children shapes creative expression and imaginative lives, not to mention our views on ourselves in relation to others—human and nonhumans alike—for the better in a world that needs us to learn from animals.

Introduction Little Beasts on Tight Leashes Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier

Supposedly we are in the post-postmodern, postfeminist, post-­industrial, post-religion, post-secular, post-Victorian, post-capitalist, post-­nationalist, post-Communist, post-literacy, and of most interest to this book, posthuman and maybe also postanthropocentric age. Patricia Waugh calls it an “era of belatedness, of a generalized ‘post’-condition” (1995: 33) in which the only thing anyone might really understand about the signs of our times is that if a term has the prefix “post” and if it is not hyphenated, then it has either been invented or endorsed by academics or at least considered the latest trend in theorizing the human—and the nonhuman—condition. The editors of Animals and Their Children do understand that posthumanism does not mean “after the human” or else how could it be that humans are writing about posthumanism? That humans are not necessarily the center of the universe is something the editors can accept, but given the intimacy and interconnectivity of animals and humans, neither can they conceive of a world in which animals are at its center without humans. In his review of Vincent B. Leitch’s Literary Theory in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance, Jeffrey R. Di Leo begins with “Word on the street is that theory is dead.” “Gone,” he proclaims, “are theory stallwarts such as deconstruction, Marxism, and feminism” so that in their place are studies galore “of everything and anything from Barbie dolls and Beyoncé to biopolitics and books” (2015: 412). He must have a real dispute with both Leitch and Barbie dolls, for in his “Can Theory Save the Planet,” he repeats the question in his title and suggests that “We already know that it can provide readings of everything from Baudelaire to Barbie Dolls, but what can it do with tsunamis, droughts, and floods?” (2013: 27). The question might equally be asked how, in a post-­everything world, do we relate to the nonhuman animals who also inhabit our world but who have not yet been signified by an “ism” that can be post-ed. Leitch concedes that the theory that we have all been taught and with which we are told to undergird our scholarship, such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and the like, was a “twentieth-­ century phenomenon”; however, he is optimistic that we are in a “theory

2  Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier renaissance,” one that “takes a characteristically postmodern form, namely disorganization or disaggregation of many subdisciplines, fields and topics” (2014: vi). No longer a “shocking and disruptive vanguard,” nevertheless, theory will continue to be useful, but only “as an adjunct, a helpful toolkit” (vii). Stimulated by and authorized by the power elite of academe of post or more officially known as “after” theories, animal studies has become the fastest emerging and growing interdisciplinary program with publications in academe. “Legal scholars, political theorists, cultural critics, historians, anthropologists, religion scholars, sociologists, and literary critics have undertaken a rigorous examination of ‘the question of the animal’ in its relation to their respective fields,” observes Colleen Glenney Boggs in her Animalia Americana (2013: 3). Like any other trendy Zeitgeist, animal studies is abstruse, messy, and lubricous, all of which warrants yet another collection of essays that will try to make sense of this convoluted and paradoxical but essential relationship between human and nonhuman animals, which is why the editors put together this collection, this time recognizing the need to bring together for consideration two “Othered” or thingified comparables: animals and their children. In our posthuman period, there are those scholars who accuse others of being hegemonical colonizers if they study and use animals in human cultures. The charge is against those who, by the very act of writing about animals in books and articles, assume that they are either at the pinnacle of the chain of being or at the center of the universe. The inference is that these critics are abusing animals by their act of having voice about animals when animals do not get to have a voice of their own. Do we silence animals by writing them into literature in our efforts to make sense of life, using them as backfill or atmospheric detail without a consideration of their plight? Do animals appear in literature only because we put them into the text? Or are they there because they are so much a part of our lives, and vice versa? Brian Massumi (2014) assures us that despite the doom and gloom prophesied by such writers as Georgio Agamben, who suggests that we are nearing posthistory or ultrahistory, a time after the human (3–21), we are so intrinsically intertwined with animals that posthumanism is impossible. We cannot have posthumanism any more than we can have postanimalism; at best we can become “more-than-human,” but we will always by the reality of natural existence have relationships with nonhuman animals (2014: 92). It would appear that the thrust behind posthuman studies is the concern that human animals, because they have had the capacity to dominate other species, should be charged with what Jodey Castricano describes succinctly as “hegemonic marginalization of the non-human” (2008: 3). One aspect of posthumanism is that humans should be past the moment

Introduction  3 when we think that it is alright to colonize the rest of the universe that includes plants, animals, and automation. Apparently, most of us do not qualify to be card-carrying posthumanists if we continue to mow our lawns and thereby cut down innocent grass and weeds. We are even more shameful if we eat bacon, and type our own thoughts into a laptop. Furthermore, we do think that only in academe is there such irony that we can use language and do use it to say that we are not superior or central to anyone or anything. An even greater irony is that much of literary theory cannot be understood by other humans, posthuman or otherwise, animal or otherwise. Except for convoluted and invent-as-you-go semantics, we humans may practice a language that can be understood by other humans but we are certain that other creatures practice languages of their own. To assume that the spoken language is the only means of communication is presumptuous; anyone with a nonhuman animal companion knows his/her wants, and needs are expressed in a myriad of ways. That ability on our part and their part does not make most of us pause, though, before sinking our teeth into a Big Mac. Still, this is not necessarily an ethical dilemma when a pack of coyotes probably do not hold any conscience-raising sessions before they take down an elk for dinner either. Charles Darwin’s own thoughts on evolution—the intense affinity he feels for the little ape and the confusion of faith he feels when he is upending God for the Victorians—demonstrates the consciousness that his theories will cause a change in interspecies understanding. After all, it is harder to derogate a being to whom you have an evolutionary relationship at least as a fellow developing being; for that reason, the ideas expressed in his notebooks move beyond natural theology to a rebuttal of anthropocentrism (Goff 1984: 488). More recently, the film Creation (2009) directly conflates, via camera shots and cut ins, Darwin’s excruciating helplessness when his daughter, Anne, dies of scarlet fever with the compassion he experiences with death of the little ape. Moving from Darwin’s own belief in animal subjectivity, in her 1953 novel, Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy, Professor Clement Darrelhyde is studying the mating behavior of a pair of apes in captivity. When the male ape is to be sent into space, Darrelhyde implores Post (note the name), the Coordinator of Scientific Studies, to intervene. Post says, “But you must adapt yourself to life. You must accept things” (61). As the unsympathetic man uses the language of Darwinian evolution about adaptation, he continues to argue that Evolution (capitalized in the novel) works by the strong’s exploitation of the weak (61). Brophy (who also appreciates irony) writes: Darrelhyde’s “Evolutionary belief had itself been evolving in these last months. It no longer seemed to him that Evolution proceeded by strengthening the strong: rather it used as its vessel the weak and inadequate, as though they possessed some special felicity that was more fertile than strength” (61–62).1

4  Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier Equally alarmed by humans’ exploitation and inhumane domination of animals as was Professor Darrelhyde, in the 1970s Peter Singer initiated the animal liberation movement. On what he considers “probably the decisive formative experience” of his life, Singer had lunch with Richard Keshen who refused to eat spaghetti sauce that contained meat (Singer, 2009: 15–16); then, Singer became aware of Richard Ryder’s flyer that coined a new word, “speciesism,” and in which, as did ­Brophy, he compared the attitudes of humans toward animals with racism and sexism (Singer 2011). Joined by Rosalind and Stanley Godlovitch, John Harris, David Wood, Richard Ryder, and Professor Richard Hare, they came to form the Oxford Group to raise the moral rights of animals (Phelps 2007: 206). When Singer was still a graduate student at the University of Oxford, he began working through animal ethics with his peers, Richard Keshen and Roslind Godlovitch (who would publish “Animals and Morals” and co-edit Animals, Men, and Morals in 1971), and then produced what would become a seminal book, Animal Liberation (1975), that argued for vegetarianism. Currently, Singer is the Ira W. ­DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Center for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He is the cofounder of Animals Australia and the founder of The Life You Can Save. Of course, there were others who were activists for animal rights long before the emergence of the Oxford Group, including those in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but Singer’s work can be credited for launching the academic propensity to theorize the position of animals inside and outside the human domain. Charles Foster calls anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism a “sin,” a term that is rather surprising because most postmodernists do not embrace the concept of sin. Writers guilty of the first sin “describe the natural world as it appears to humans,” but he does concede, logically, that since writers write books to be read by humans and not by animals, that it is “commercially shrewd” to do so but also “rather dull” (2016: 2). The latter assume that animals are like humans and dress them up like humans, as did Beatrix Potter. Some use them as literary metaphors, as did Henry Williamson, according to Foster. Williamson was the author of numerous novels that emphasized wildlife and is best known for Tarka the Otter (1928), which won the Hawthornden Prize for literature in 1928. He died while a company was filming the death scene of Tarka for a movie that would be released in 1978. Are we or are we not co-players with animals, both strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage? Our fellow academians tell us that to regard animals anthropocentrically is nothing short of horrific, insensitive, and ignorant. Many of them, like Agamben, prophesy that we will get our just desserts for this hegemony because we are doomed to become animals ourselves (2004: 6) since “the total humanization of the animal coincides with a total

Introduction  5 animalization of man” (77). For now, we are still “Homo sapiens,” as Linnaeus dubbed us, but that means to Agamben that we are simply a machine with the capability to read itself (26). To Christoph Cox, we have reached a state that is even worse than that: “We are now fusions of flesh and machine, wetware and software” (2005: 18). Is it really so taboo to think of animals in human terms when the act is salutary to both man and beast? Most recently, Laura Brown has noted and dismissed a preoccupation of posthuman animal studies that attacks anthropomorphism and anthropocentricism, while she, in her Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes (2017), refuses to deal with the “post-structuralist topic of the aporia of nonhuman difference” (ix). Instead she investigates how imaginary animals “offer opportunities for disruption, innovation, and even transcendence,” in their real involvement with human experience (ix). Boggs does not apologize either for her lack of concern that there are those who might call her study Animalia Americana (2013) anthropocentric or might accuse her of being an insensitive colonizer. She argues that there is “no centering of the human” in a study of animals in human culture because “the human is a relational category that cannot be separated from the animal” (27). She is not interested in any antipoles with animals versus humans such as “subject and object,” or “psychological versus physiological or real versus symbolic” (19); instead, she is interested in relationships between the two where distinctions are blurred (28). The collection of essays in this volume, Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture does not ignore the theoretical fray, but its objective is on relationships between animals and children thereby tendering to ongoing debates in animal studies. By analyzing the breadth of representations of animals in children’s literature, the essayists do touch on children’s inculcation at an early age to embrace Victorian values and proper codes of behavior, but this theme has been explored in many earlier publications. They are more interested in what values animals teach children about animals. While exploring this pedagogy, the contributors additionally want to investigate works and nineteenth-century cultures that have not been studied much or at all, or else they want to take approaches that will introduce different perspectives from what has been published before. The title of this collection, Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, is an intentional inversion of the words of the previous volume, exploring not the anthropocentric use of animals in a culture, but instead—to a less anthropocentric degree—the influence of animals in Victorian children’s lives to “civilize” the children by teaching them moral ethics and proper Victorian behavior, but especially in regard to their treatment of animals. By “Victorian,” we are using the word broadly to reflect a set of values that the world has come to know as distinctly Victorian, regardless of where it is practiced.

6  Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier In his “Why the Notion of Victorian Britain Does Make Sense” (2006), Martin Hewitt offers the following definition; it is one that is nested in a litany of definitions of Victorianism or what he calls, with invested caution, “assemblages” (397) to borrow a Deleuze and Guattari term. 2 Hewitt appropriates the term to refer to “compounds of technologies, practices, institutions, knowledges, meanings, values, and ideologies” (397). He writes: “Victorian culture remained pervaded by religion along with its modes, morals, aesthetic values, and social judgments—a pervasiveness that intensified at the start of the period, when remnants of eighteenth-century and Regency salaciousness were closed down and reasserted itself” (423). Regardless of denominational conflicts, the Oxford Movement, Darwinism, church corruption, church reform, church attendance, and any other religious or anti-religious sentiment, regardless of any other characteristic one has, can, or refuses to ascribe to Victoriana, to the average Victorian, morality colored all other considerations. Whether a secularized morality, biblical worldview, or unstated set of mores, the Victorian period can and always will be distinguished from those before and after for its pervasive sense of the “proper way” of thinking, speaking, doing, and acting. Animals taught Victorians how to be behave. You might argue, “But the animals in literature did not write their own accounts,” and you would be correct. Even though humans are the writers, they are just the writers. Animal characters may be creations of writers’ imagination, but animals did and do exist in their own right, as did and do humans. Granted, this instruction often took the form of how not to act like an animal. Suppressing the beast within one’s self was strongly encouraged and articulated as major themes in literature. In fact, some writers, like Charles Dickens, de-anthropomorphized animals. For example, in Our Mutual Friend (1864), Rogue Riderhood acts like “a roused bird of prey” and Lady Tippins’s throat “has a ‘certain yellow play’ that resembles ‘the legs of scratching poultry’” (quoted in Lane 2004: 80). In equal disdain, Henry Mayhew’s famous London Labour and the London Poor (1854) insists that we humans are “compound animals” but can be enticed to “delight in beauty instead of beastiality” (42). That is, if laborers in Liverpool were offered affordable admission to concerts instead of cheap gin, they might become more cultivated and raised to higher moral ground: “from the beauty of nature to that of thought— from thought to feeling, from feeling to action, and lastly to the fountain of all goodness,” and then he lists different aspects of God’s creation. Significantly one of these is “instincts of the beasts,” and by this he probably means the biblical references to animals worshipping God (42). Regardless of the direction—whether we should or should not behave like animals, or in Mayhew’s excerpt, when we should or should not behave like animals—Victorian culture was an animal culture, one in which the lives of animals and humans were inextricably bound, be it with

Introduction  7 carthorses on the roads, pets in the home, birdsellers in the street, exotic animals in the zoo, or exploited animals in the circus. John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? (2009) argues that “Children in the industrialized world are surrounded by animal imagery: toys, cartoons, pictures, decorations of every sort. No other source of imagery can begin to compete with that of animals” (67). This childhood exposure to animals began in the nineteenth century when animal-saturated literature for children inculcated the value of all living creatures. Erica Fudge astutely suggests that a study of animals in literature “undermines the apparently antithetical binary of animal and human. … Reading about animals is always reading through humans, and … reading about humans is reading through animals” (2002: 3). Beginning with the eighteenth century and reaching its zenith in the nineteenth century, animals have perpetuated Western literature, as illustrated in Ivan Kreilkamp’s book, Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel (2018). The history of English domestic fiction cannot be separated from the history of “humanization and animalization” because of the infusion of animals in human life as depicted in the novels (2). Kreilkamp offers a book-length study, he says, that is a “corrective to the fundamental anthropocentrism of our understanding of the Victorian novel,” for “anthropocentrically reading distorts and blinds us to other forms of relation, models of personhood, and distinctions that a less purely human-focused approach would allow us to see in the novels” (1). Do animals have their own sets of morality, ethics, mores, decorum, or do we humans impose our own upon them or view them through our own? Traditionally, most people have assumed that animals are innocent and have no consciences and do not think in terms of good and evil. In a similar vein, Agamben insists that animals cannot know supernatural or mystical knowledge (2004: 77). However, in Western Christian tradition alone, there are so many texts in the Bible that tell of animals hearing and obeying God, and teaching humans morality. One example is when God directs the ravens to feed Elijah (1 Kings 17: 4–6). Another example is when Balaam’s ass sees an angel when his human master can not (Numbers 22: 21–33). In fact, Job 12: 7–10 supports the perspective that animals can teach humans spiritual truths. In Revelations 4 and 5, and throughout the psalms, animals worship God and can do so through singing, and these are not just the birds. In one extensive didactic lesson on how to do what is ethically right, sometimes with humans guided by an animal, Numbers 22 is about a diviner, or someone who seeks to gain supernatural insight through reading of signs or omens or through contact with a being in the spiritual world, named Balaam. An Aramean, he is sought by Balak, the king of the Moabites (offshoots of the illicit liaison between Lot’s elder daughter) to curse the Israelites since the king feared their number—a

8  Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier service for which Balaam would be greatly rewarded (1–7). God informs Balaam that he must not curse the Israelites “for they are blessed” (12) and that he should stay away from the Moabites. Initially, Balaam obeys God, but then he is enticed to join them (21). Angry with Balaam, God sends an angel, with drawn sword, to deter Balaam, but Balaam, blinded by his own spiritual darkness, cannot see the angel: however, his donkey does and turns aside to avoid the angel (23). Balaam beats the donkey, but the donkey still witnesses the angel and pushes herself against a wall that causes Balaam’s foot to be crushed (25). Furious, Balaam beats her again. When the donkey realizes that she is unable to turn left or right because of the angel, she sits down. At this point, Balaam is ready to kill her, but the donkey asks why his master beat her three times. Balaam is so angry that he does not respond with shock that his donkey can actually talk. The donkey says, “Am not I thine donkey, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? Was I ever wont to [mock] thee?” Balaam’s answer is one of the funniest in the entire Bible. He says, “Nay” (30). The ass and Balaam story is a perfect example of the interchange between human and animal in which the animal is the teacher and the superior species, and the human acts like “a dumb animal.” This reversal of who reproduces “humane” values in whom is what intrigues the writers of the essays in this volume. The preponderance of literature for Victorian children that featured teaching animals is undeniable and begs for analysis of how and in what ways animals influenced the morality and character formation of the Victorians, beginning with their childhood exposure to animals in literature as well as their oft-marginalized status as little creatures on their own. Although a plethora of analysis has been published on fairy tales, on dogs and horses that have appeared in children’s literature, and on zoos and circuses, very little treatment has been made on other animals in other forms of children’s culture. None of the chapters in this volume reproduce what has been published before other than to draw upon some of the latest theoretical explorations of the relationship between humans and nonhumans. No article or book, for example, has analyzed animals in nursery rhymes—other than to identify how the animals represent certain historical people; therefore, the first chapter ventures into largely unexplored terrain. Also inceptive is Lindsay and Brandon Katzir’s study of animals in Yiddish literature for children and in its identification of the wolf not as a villain, as is its usual depiction, but as a fellow creature who has often been regarded and persecuted as an outsider, like the Jews. Another pioneering exploration is Christie Harner’s work with Australian children’s literature, fixing mostly on bush life and shared human-animal temporalities. Very little has been written about the Bands of Mercy before Alisa Clapp-Itnyre’s chapter. With a periodical, The Advocate, the Bands was an organization established in 1875 to

Introduction  9 teach Victorian children how to be kind to animals. Another topic that is unique is Stephen Basdeo’s investigation of snakes in penny dreadfuls that challenge a Victorian assumption of human superiority. Several chapters touch on familiar works that have received critical attention before, but each scholar offers a significant twist. Although many published articles discuss animals as pets and friends to children, Alves observes that boys in preparatory schools were reeducated to understand that being kind to animals was a girly thing, while the masculine male must be the ruthless hunter of animals. Keridiana Chez, author of Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men (2017), for one, points out the glaring contradictions in the portrayals of rabbits in Mathilde Sandras’s Snowdrop; or, The Adventures of a White Rabbit (1873) in the works by Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. Anna Koustinoudi’s reading of Carroll’s books considers the implications of a post-Darwinian culture that is addled over a (nurture)/nature controversy and its impact on child development and behavior. Most scholarship agrees that children’s literature was meant to teach children the proper ways to behave, but Shannon Scott wonders if Rudyard Kipling’s depiction of a feral child teaches just the opposite, that the best life is to live in the uncivilized wild. The volume provides a wide variety of kinds of animals and media used to educate children. Susan Nance, well known for her books on animals (particularly on elephants), argues that circuses trained children and adults to be kind to animals and to understand that animals (including humans) are much improved by being domesticated. Applying Marxist and psychoanalytical literary theories, Stacy Hoult-Saros looks at children’s literature regarding farm animals, in particular, mothers, concluding that the behavior of these animals severely undermines the notion of natural dominance and animal hierarchy. Constance Fulmer, an expert on George Eliot, observes that Eliot’s novels satirize Victorian culture that treat children like animals and treat animals like children. Also interested in prominent Victorian novelists like the Brontë sisters and in psychological inquiry, Sarah E. Maier notes a similar flip in which children abuse animals in the way that they themselves have been abused. It is the sincere hope of the contributors for this collection that the essays not only advance animal studies but also alter how we perceive the Victorians because of the prevalence of animals in their lives and literature, offered when they were the most innocent, open, and malleable, as children.

Notes 1 Quoted in Linzey and Linzey 4 from Brophy’s “A Darwinist’s Dilemma” (63). A few years after Hackenfeller’s Ape, Brophy published “The Rights of Animals” in the Sunday Times, with the intention to “deliberately associate the case for animals with that ‘clutch of egalitarian or libertarian ideas

10  Brenda Ayres and Sarah E. Maier which have sporadically … come to the rescue of other oppressed classes, such as slaves, or homosexuals or women’” (1979). 2 In note 3, Hewitt writes, “I borrow and develop the idea of “assemblages” from Deleuze and Guattari.” The term appears in A Thousand Plateaus (1980, 1987: 71, 100, 111, 325, 333, and 407).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? New York: Penguin, 2009. Boggs, Colleen Glenny. Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Brophy, Brigid. “A Darwinist’s Dilemma.” In Animals Rights—A Symposium, edited by David Paterson and Richard Dudley Ryder, 63–72. London: Centaur Press, 1979. Brophy, Brigid. Hackenfeller’s Ape. New York: Ransom House, 1953. Brophy, Brigid. “The Rights of Animals.” Sunday Times. October 10, 1965. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017. Castricano, Jodey. “Introduction: Animal Subjects in a Posthuman World.” In Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Postmodern World, edited by Jodey Castricano, 1–32. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008. Collee, John, and Jon Amiel. Creation. Directed by Jon Amiel. BBC, 2009. Cox, Christoph. “Of Humans, Animals, and Monsters.” In Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom, edited by Nato Thompson and Christoph Cox, 18–25. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. “Can Theory Save the Planet? Critical Climate Change and the Limits of Theory.” Symploke 21, no. 1 (2013): 27–36, 430. Retrieved from http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy. liberty.edu/docview/1474178959?accountid=12085. Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Review of Literary Theory in the 21st Century: Theory Renaissance by Vincent B. Leitch. Comparatist 39 (October 2015): 412–15. doi: 10.1353/com.2015.0016. Foster, Charles. Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016. Fudge, Erica. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Godlovitch, Roslind. “Animals and Morals.” Philosophy 46 (January 1971): 23–33. Godlovitch, Stanley, Roslind Godlovitch, and John Harris, eds. Animals, Men, and Morals. New York: Grove Press, 1971. Goff, Barbara Munson. “Between Natural Theolofy and Natural Selection.” Victorian Studies 27, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 477–508.

Introduction  11 Hewitt, Martin. “Why the Notion of Victorian Britain Does Make Sense.” Victorian Studies 48, no. 3 (2006): 395–439. World History in Context. http://link.galegroup.com.ezproxy.liberty.edu /apps/doc/A151189113/ WHIC?u=vic_liberty&sid=WHIC&xid=33730d03. Kreilkamp, Ivan. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Lane, Christopher. Hatred and Civility: The Antisocial Life in Victorian England. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Leitch, Vincent B. Literary Criticism in the 21st Century. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Linzey, Andrew, and Clair Linzey. “Introduction: The Challenge of Animal Ethics.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics, edited by Andrew Linzey and Clair Linzey, 1–24. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Massumi, Brian. What Animals Teach Us About Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Mayhew, Henry. The London Street-Folk, Book the First. Vol. 1. 3 vols. In London Labour and the London Poor: A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of Those That “Will” Work, Those That “Cannot” Work, and Those That “Will Not” Work. London: Henry Mayhew, 1851. https://books. google.com/books?id=pmZRAAAAMAAJ. Phelps, Norm. The Longest Struggle: Animal Advocacy from Pythagoras to PETA. New York: Lantern Books, 2007. Singer, Peter. “An Intellectual Autobiography.” In Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics, edited by Jeffrey A. Schaler, 1–74. Peru, IL: Carus Publishing, 2009. Singer, Peter. “Foreward.” In Speciesism, Painism and Happiness: A Morality for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Richard D. Ryder, n.p. 2011. Digitized by Andrews UK Limited, 2017. Waugh, Patricia. Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and Its Background 1960–1990. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

1 Why Did the Cow Jump Over the Moon? Animals (But Mostly Pussies) in Nursery Rhymes Brenda Ayres Why did the cow jump over the moon? You probably do not lie awake at night grappling with this question, but since you’re reading this book and specifically this chapter, most likely you have engaged in the current intellectual aporia of anthropomorphism and anthropocentricism and might as well deal with the cow question. After all, for those of us interested in animal studies and posthumanism, Derrida has had us pondering about his cat and its gazing at Derrida’s naked self for the past two decades. Derrida’s cat is mentioned in nearly every book and article published on and in the burgeoning field of posthumanism and animal studies. At the 1997 Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a tenhour address on the subject of the autobiographical animal and then published an essay about it titled “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” In it, he tells of the cat that was “gazing” at him “in silence” (2008: 3). The “silence” part is important because of a misguided notion that animals cannot communicate. Then, of course, “the gaze” has much currency as a word signifying who identifies whom as what, a word invested by Sartre, Lacan, Foucault, Mulvey, and Butler. Apparently, Derrida was naked at the time he caught his cat gazing at him, and it caused him to feel ashamed and afterward to feel ashamed of feeling ashamed once he realized he was not seeing himself through the eyes of a cat but through the eyes of an anthropomorphized cat. An animal, Derrida reasoned, does not think in terms of nakedness (3–7). This failure to appreciate the cat as the cat turns the cat into the “Other” (12) and relegates it as “the animal,” the “nonhuman,” one of the “living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers” (34). Are all nonhuman animals really so different from us? I read ­somewhere—probably a translation of Heidegger—that animals don’t think of themselves as humans. I remember responding out loud, “Tell that to my dogs.” I recall one of my cocker spaniels staring in a mirror and barking at the image because she thought she was looking at a dog. I doubt if she ever thought she was anything different from human, with all the rights and privileges thereof. Derrida seems to think that “with the exception of man, no animal has ever thought to dress itself” (5). With all due respect, I wonder if

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  13 Derrida ever watched a bird preen itself or do any of the other amazing “puttin’ on the Ritz” that birds (and other animals) do to attract a mate or ward off a competitor.1 In a delightful chapter titled “Inferior Animals,” Margaret Gatty tells a story about some noisy rooks who have gathered to discuss the problem of cohabitating with humans. “Now all common observation is against the superiority of man,” the one rook avows (1896: 221). Rooks can soar amongst the clouds, but the poor pathetic human creature creeps on the ground and must always have at least one of his two legs on the ground. Furthermore, whereas the rook has “a natural thick, glossy plumage, available equally for summer or winter,” the man has to wear clothes in an attempt to supply himself with feathers (221–22). Although one often assumes that man’s “wanton cruelty” is evidence of superiority (223), instead it is further evidence of his fallen condition; he is a “fallen rook.” The worse problem is “the sounds he emits now from his bill-less mouth are, in truth, an unmeaning jargon, to which it is absolutely painful to listen” (232). With that lesson in human inferiority, let’s return to our original jargon/jingle about the cow and the moon with this question: Do animals exist in nursery rhymes for the sole reason of educating children how to behave as good humans, and if so, is that a hegemonical act that makes those who are involved in writing, teaching, reading, studying, or reciting nursery rhymes presumptuous colonizers of animals (and children)? Do we discriminate by denying animals’ autonomy and right to self-identification, even if the animals are only imaginary? Can a cow jump over the moon? In the imagination of a child, yes, a cow can jump over the moon. To an adult human, figuratively, a cow can jump over the moon. Can a cow imagine herself jumping over the moon, and if so, why would she imagine it, much less do it? We know that many animals do possess imagination as illustrated in their play. In analyzing the ludic fight of two wolf cubs, for example, Gregory Bateson observes that they do not actually bite each other, that the bite is metaphoric for inflicting wounds necessary in actual combat. Thus, animals are capable of creativity and understanding such abstractions as metaphors (2000: 180–83). Furthermore, given that wolves howl at the moon, why would it be so hard to imagine that a cow might want to jump over it? It may be both anthropomorphic and anthropocentric to ask what a cow’s jumping over the moon means to a child or to an adult and how it informs the rest of the rhyme, but is that a bad thing? Is the cow really anthropomorphized? After all, even a human, dependent on only a set of bipeds, cannot jump over the moon except in his or her mind, so putting a cow in a human suit will not enable her to jump over the moon and thus put her in any kind of physical or psychological danger. Does the rhyme oppress the cow in any way? Would it be fairer to ask a cow if she could jump over the moon, would she want to and if so, why? If the cow cannot answer in a language that we can understand

14  Brenda Ayres (but this is not a problem for an anthropomorphized cow), then should we at least try to deduce the cow’s needs, desires, and capabilities from the cow’s behavior, and stop taking away her milk? Have you ever been around a cow that has gone a day or two without having been milked? The bellowing is clear communication of pain. Many urban children are not so blessed as to have ever seen or heard a real cow or have romped with animals in their homes. Nonetheless, Gillian Rudd reminds us that young humans make their earliest encounters with animals in fables (2018: 88). It is true that many children are no longer made to recite nursery rhymes as were we baby boomers. Too many of the rhymes have become politically incorrect or deemed psychologically or sociologically unhealthy for children. Still, today’s children watch Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, cartoon animals, and animals in Disney’s film animation. They are often read or do read fables, fairy tales, and other animal stories, and they often color animals in their coloring books. Other children will experientially know a domestic pet, but an introduction to an elephant or an octopus is going to come through the page or television (or maybe a trip to a zoo or aquarium). How that animal is represented to the child is going to mold the child’s attitude toward nonhuman fellows with which he or she cohabits this planet. Just as significantly, those animals will teach children how humans are to behave to fellow humans. Myriad nursery rhymes do urge kindness, but they do not attempt to reconcile the quandary of humans’ eating of meat, wearing animal skins, and so forth. I echo Sarah Amato’s observation and can hear Cowardly Lion’s “Ain’t it the truth?”2 (usually said twice for emphasis by the lion who must be a New York lion, judging from his accent). Amato says, “As Victorian Britons go about their daily routines, we watch them fuss over pets and express concern about the arrangement of taxidermy” (2015:  5). A few years ago, Hal Herzog wrote Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals, posing this question: “How can 60% of Americans believe simultaneously that animals have the right to live and that people have the right to eat them?” (2010: 13). The Wizard of Oz awards the Scarecrow the “Doctor of Thinkology” (again, in the 1939 movie), but even that or because of that, the boundary between nonhuman and human continues to be permeable although cannibalism continues to be anathema. Imaginary cows and other animals, as Laura Brown argues in her Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes (2010) “provide a new lens through which to examine the significance of the nonhuman being for human identity, human experience, and human history” (x). “Within literary text and forms, these animals offer opportunities for disruption, innovation, and even transcendence,” Brown suggests (x). My chapter intends to look at some of those disruptions, innovations, and transcendence in

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  15 the performance of animals within the nursery rhymes taught to Victorian children and the resulting formation of their attitudes toward animals and their subsequent treatment of animals. Amato supports such a perspective; “Encountering representations of animals in visual, literary, and material culture informed the Victorian world view and dictated, often unconsciously, codes of conduct” (7), just as Kelly Oliver, in Animal Lessons, reckons that animals in literature “teach us to be human” (2009: 5). In her Animal Stories, Susan McHugh writes: “Never simply capturing the voice of the past, fiction localizes mutable historically and physically contingent perspectives” (2011: 1). Scholars may have had good reason to accuse the representations of animals in literature of fragmenting or perverting the identity of animals, but McHugh is optimistic that current scholarship is “mapping more permeable species boundaries,” that “through their very indeterminacy, narrative processes thus appear to concern the very conditions of possibility for human (always along with other) ways of being” (2). The representation of animals in literature has had consequences for animals, both negative and positive. Take Jaws by Peter Benchley (1974), that, in hardback, was on The New York Times Best Seller list for 44 weeks (Crump 2018: 44) and then sold millions of copies. Steven Spielberg’s film, released on June 1, 1975, grossed over seven million dollars in the first three days (Francis 2012: 47). After the release of the movie, “A collective testosterone rush certainly swept through the East Coast of the U.S.,”3 with a killing spree of any and all sharks to the tune of 20– 100 million a year (McCullough 2016).4 In reality, there are three species of shark responsible for nearly two-thirds of shark attacks around the world: the bull, great white, and tiger. Ironically, as George Burgess, who was the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, attributed male testosterone to be the cause for men to acquire shark trophies, the bull shark “has the highest level of testosterone of any animal on earth” (Eilperin 2011: 52). However, according to Burgess, worldwide, sharks kill fewer than five people a year (54). Despite the negative outcome of mass shark slaughter, the book and movie did ignite scientific research on sharks, especially in their role in marine ecology (45). Later, in Finding Nemo (2003), children were introduced to Bruce who declares himself “a nice shark” and concludes, like a human, that he has to change his diet and start seeing other fish as friends, instead of food. He must become more “human/civilized” (Lerberg 2016: 43–44). His representation, though, also signals to children that they should stop perceiving sharks as monsters. Finding Nemo, therefore, demonstrates that, even if anthropomorphic and anthropocentric, the portrayal of animals in children’s media can teach them to respect animals.

16  Brenda Ayres Perhaps the first book written for children that would change the world forever about more humane treatment of animals is Black Beauty (1907 [1877]). Its depiction of cruelty to working horses provoked such an outcry in Britain and America that both countries abolished checkreins or bearing reins. As demonstrated in Black Beauty, tight-reining forced the head to be held high and rigid cruppers kept the tails up (Sewell 104– 109, 132–33) strictly for aesthetic purposes, but in so doing, damaged the windpipe, was extremely painful to the horse, and often cut off the horse’s ability to breathe (Dorré 2006: 100–102). Did Black Beauty have a voice in his own autobiography? Adrienne E. Gavin says no. Beauty “rarely portrays himself experiencing negative emotions: rage against injustice, desire for vengeance, or despair at suffering” (2018: 57). Sewell intentionally gave him self-control, so that his suffering would evoke an outcry from his readers (Gavin 56–58). Regardless, schools authorized Black Beauty as a reading primer (Lansbury 1985: 5). Black Beauty has long been considered the most “influential anticruelty novel of all time” (Unti 2013 [2998]: 313) and has often been compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in its social protest against slavery (Johnson and Johnson 2002: 252). As a child’s book, it did more than advance animal activation in America and Britain (Ramey 2011: 54); it taught many important lessons besides compassion for animals, seemingly through the animal’s point of view as to be expected from an animal autobiography. Since others have written on these lessons and the credibility and effect of animal autobiography, 5 it is time for me to speak about other species in another form of literature: pussies in nursery rhymes. William S. Baring-Gould and his wife, Ceil, were arguably the foremost experts on nursery rhymes, so any question about them should take us to their seminal The Annotated Mother Goose (1967 [1962]). They define the subgenre as “rhymes that were created by just plain ‘folk’— rhymes to be repeated by their children while playing active games, from knee-dandling to skip-rope, from hoop-rolling and ball-bouncing to seesaw and the ride on the rocking-horse” (11). Some were taught to children so that they could learn their numbers, alphabet, and morality. Some were meant as lullabies. Some were political statements not meant for children. Some were bar songs (11). An earlier leading scholar on nursery rhymes was the brilliant Katherine Elwes Thomas (1930) who explains the grim and dark historico-political meanings of many of the rhymes, and summarizes them: Love, politics and religion are the three inexhaustible themes upon which the changes are incessantly rung. The caustic wits of many ages, kings, courtiers, scholars, dilettante lords and ladies of high degree have contributed this wonderful collection [of Mother Goose rhymes] of unrivaled brilliance. Long-forgotten plays, mummings,

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  17 and masques abound in the familiar verses which, in many cases, had been verbally current generations before in the United Kingdom. (30–31) She then identifies sixteen rhymes that were either penned by Shakespeare or were quoted by him in his plays (31–32). Rhymes to lull children to sleep can be dated to the thirteenth century. The earliest collection of nursery rhymes for children appeared in 1744 with Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book, published by Mary Cooper. The phrase “nursery rhyme” first appeared in a titled collection published between 1780 and 1790 in London, as “Printed for the Booksellers.”6 “Mother Goose” is often used interchangeably or in concert with “nursery rhymes”: Charles Perrault is usually credited for the creation of Mother Goose, but “Conte de la Mère Oye” has been in use since the mid-seventeenth century (Hahn 2015: 399). During the Victorian Period, from 1835 to 1901, 299 books of nursery rhymes were published.7 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some nursery rhymes were produced in what were called cheap-books, later to be called chapbooks.8 With A Book for Boys and Girls (1686), the Puritans were the first to use poetry to teach children morality (Hahn 465). Although not all nursery rhymes include animals, most of them do. Children are attracted to fuzzy, cute animals more than they are to humans. Adults, as they wrote the rhymes, set them within the context of this children/animal bond recalled childhood. Margaret Blount, author of Animal Land, theorizes that it is a matter of “nostalgia,” a term she used in 1975 before it became an academic buzzword for postmodern theorists. Humans look to the past as if it had been a better time, and for most of us, that means that we are nostalgic about our childhoods. Those of us who are baby boomers fell in love with Lady in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (1955), a story set in the nineteenth century and reflected nostalgia for the past Victorian period. We post-industrialists, which would include readers from the eighteenth century onward, are nostalgic for a lost Eden, a place, Blount muses, “populated by small, indigenous animals is many people’s wish, hope, and memory; but such a place, if it is to give imaginative satisfaction, has to be happy and romanticised” (131). “Giving these small animals human qualities is to put them out of reach of inevitable fear, pain and death which is their natural lot” (131), and then Blount continues with this remarkable perspective: “But the device also waves a magic wand and makes humans small, giving them animal qualities and cutting them off from human miseries and frustrations, sexual pangs, jealousy, bitterness and revenge, so that these minute societies have the best of both worlds” (131–32). “We still have longings for Eden,” Blount presumes, “when the beasts could speak, or understand without speech, our equals and partners, our second, good selves” (323).

18  Brenda Ayres Another theory that Blount proffers is that animals are an acceptable disguise—as they have always been—for plain speaking, leaving the reader the choice of appreciating what is said at its face value or letting it affect him more deeply. If animals are concerned the moral may be twofold, involving the truth for which the animals are symbols, and the no less important truth that they share the living world with humans and should be treated accordingly. (58) A rhyme that I will discuss below begins with “I like little Pussy.” Why does it not begin with “I like little Jane”? What can a child learn from Pussy that cannot be learned from a fellow human like Jane or about Jane? Because a kitten might be more physically intimate, obviously vulnerable, and innocent, maybe children can relate more to it than they can to fellow humans, especially the tall ones. Babies come into this world wailing with good reason; it is a hostile, unsafe world, one in which infants are defenseless and cannot control. For months if they have dirty diapers, they have to live in them until someone changes them. If they are cold, they cannot put on clothes or pull up a blanket. They cannot secure their own food. They are totally dependent on other humans to care for their most basic needs. Their own bodies hurt as they experience growing pains and as their teeth push through their gums. As they struggle to walk, they hurt when they fall. However, from day one, they can snuggle against a pet dog or cat, so they don’t feel alone or threatened in any way. It is no wonder then that they tend to trust animals more than they do other humans and that they may learn from animals in ways they cannot from humans. Then, too, as I discussed in my article on cats in George Eliot’s novels (in my Victorians and Their Animals), throughout history and in most cultures, cats have been associated with females (whereas dogs have been associated with males) (Ayres 2019: 129–33). With the earlier centuries’ predilection for regarding the woman as powerless, pure, and untainted by the public sphere since she was banned from it, and also as weak and in need of male protection; the kitten is a symbol for the developing young woman who not only does not threaten but also begs to be protected. Regardless of the reasons for populating animals in nursery rhymes, I am going to discuss just a few that have to do with cats. Baring-Goulds’ collection includes 884 rhymes, and for me to deal with each animal species, I would need the space of a book. Besides, what I want to say about cats applies to most other species. Additionally, I figure that the pussy—the kitten—is most likely the animal that chubby little hands can grab hold of and relate to best as if they were stuffed toys, in contrast

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  19 to birds that fly away or puppies that might not be as physically flexible and accommodating. Lessons taught about how to behave with animals are more practical if the animal scenarios are realistic, as they are for the many children who have access to kittens.9 To start, let’s look at a nursery rhyme that opens with “Ding, dong, bell,” a line from The Tempest (1.2) and The Merchant of Venice (3.2) and one that teaches children onomatopoeia (Alchin 2013: 20). The twentieth-century version of the rhyme continues with The Cat is in the Well, Who put her in? Little Johnny Green, Who pulled her out? Little Tommy Stout. What a naughty Boy was that, To drown Poor Pussy Cat, Who never did any Harm, And kill’d the Mice in his Father’s Barn.10 The rhyme hails from the sixteenth century along with other rhymes about a boy by the name of Tam Linn of Scottish romance, who would later morph into Tom o’ Linne in Noel Turner’s collection of nursery rhymes in 1797, and then into Thom o’ Lyne in Sir Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet (1824)11 before it would morph again into Tommy Linn (Eckenstein 1906: 54). The rhyme has undergone several changes in the boy’s name12 before he is Johnny Green in John Newbery’s 1764 edition. Lina Eckenstein explains the boy’s treatment of the cat as a test to see if it is a familiar spirit or a witch that transformed into a cat (54), for the sixteenth-century tales of the boy do indeed have him championing against the powers of witches. This folklore reflects a historical ambivalence that males had to females. Medieval chivalry would dictate that men protect the powerless, especially the powerless female (made powerless in the first place by men), but a woman who usurped power was so threatening, she was called a witch and had to be destroyed. Regardless of the reason for drowning the cat, the Victorians would not tolerate it in a rhyme and tended to exclude this rhyme from their collections altogether. Most likely this ban was not spurred by any great love for cats. Robert Darnton, in his The Great Cat Massacre, points out that a favorite European pastime—for adults as well as children—was to torture animals “especially cats” (1984: 90). The issue for Victorian adults was the understanding that if children are cruel to animals, they will grow up to be cruel to humans. John Locke, still widely read in the nineteenth century, conveys this very philosophy much earlier in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). He first notes that children are

20  Brenda Ayres innately cruel to “any poor Creature”: “They often torment, and treat very roughly young Birds, Butterflies, and such other poor Animals, which fall into their Hands, and that with a seeming kind of Pleasure” (130). They must be corrected, or if they don’t, this “custom of tormenting and killing of Beasts will, by degrees, harden their Minds even towards Men” (130). By 1833, Tommy Green is drowning the cat followed by Tommy Stout’s rescue of the cat (The Only True Mother Goose Melodies 54). Every Victorian boy would have known that “Tommy” represents “everyboy,”13 that “green” means being “immature” and “cowardly,” and that “stout” means being “brave” or “valiant.” If the cat was considered representative of the human females, then, too, the Victorians taught little boys that being manly meant protecting those of the weaker sex. The Halliwell 1842 edition, though, has the kitten rescued by what was usually a nemesis, a dog, and in this scenario, “dog with long snout” (80), teaching children that even natural enemies are capable of harmony and acts of mercy. In the twentieth century, adults were concerned that the rhyme might encourage children to drown kittens (Baring-Gould and Baring-Gould 1967: 55). The 1967 version with Tommy Stout is quoted above, but the Baring-Goulds’s 1962 edition makes the rhyme even less pernicious with the cat playing “with the mice in his father’s barn” instead of eating the mice (1962: 55). Earlier, right after World War II and therefore for a reading population that was all too aware and exhausted by violence, Geoffrey Halle published New Nursery Rhymes for Old (1949) and had Little Johnny Hare take Pussy to the well (but he does not throw her in), and then had Little Tommy Thin—that “jolly boy”—get some milk for her (Rogers 1998: 91). Newbery titled the poem “Plato’s Song” in Mother Goose’s Melody: Or Sonnets for the Cradle and added this maxim: “He that injures one threatens an Hundred” (1880 [1764]: 25). The moral is obvious: We should do no harm to animals especially if they are not doing harm to us and, even more especially, if they benefit us. The Newberry title (“Plato’s Song”) adds a significant dimension; Michael Naas argues that Plato’s perception of man, anthrōpos, is indeed anthropocentric in his borrowing of the Protagoras dictum that “man is the measure of all things,” including man’s relationship with animals. It is man’s song and dance, which he shares with the gods, that distinguishes him from animals, according to Plato (2019: 73–76). Man may be just below the gods and, therefore, may have dominion over the animals beneath him, but just as he would have the gods above him treat him with kindness and mercy, so should man treat animals with kindness and mercy. Victorian boys—even the poor ones—were taught the classics, including Plato,14 so they would have been familiar with Plato’s song reference and they would have understood the theme of the title.

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  21 A rhyme with a similar theme first appeared anonymously in the 1830 Child’s Song Book: I like little Pussy, her coat is so warm, And if I don’t hurt her she’ll do me no harm; So I’ll not pull her tail, nor drive her away, But pussy and I very gently will play. She shall sit by my side and I’ll give her some food, And she loves me because I am gentle and good. (22) Derrida was wrong: The cat does wear a coat. Because kittens are cuddly (like stuffed toys) but better because they are warm and wiggly, children are very attracted to them. “On the whole,” Major Egerton Leigh wrote in 1859, “there is something humanizing in a Pet, which makes the heart open to genial warmth and kindness” (6). They are good object lessons for children. If children are gentle with a kitten, she will purr and show lots of love, but if they threaten or hurt her, she is equipped with sharp claws and even teeth that, unlike stuffed toys, will inflict pain that quickly lets children know they have done wrong. The animal is not going to tolerate tail pulling either. The second verse is less known and not widely quoted. It goes: I’ll pat pretty Pussy, and then she will purr; And thus show her thanks for my kindness to her. But I’ll not pinch her ears, nor tread on her paw, Les I should provoke her to use her sharp claw. I never will vex her nor make her displeased:— For Pussy don’t like to be worried and teaz’d.15 Becoming aware of a world greater than one’s self is an essential stage in healthy growth. Children learn this when they interact with animals dependent on humans for food and shelter. Caring for animals teaches them to be sensitive to the needs of others over themselves. They discover that other creatures (with claws and teeth) will not tolerate certain treatment. Sarah Trimmer’s The History of the Robins, first published in 1786, but widely read during the Victorian period, created a bird family to “convey a moral instruction” for children. Trimmer writes in her introduction that besides teaching morals, animals in children’s literature “excite compassion and tenderness for those interesting and delightful creatures, on which such wanton cruelties are frequently inflicted, and recommend universal benevolence” (1–2). “But, as every living creature can feel,” Trimmer’s Mrs. Benson instructs, “we should have a constant regard to those feelings, and strive to give happiness rather than be the cause of misery” (25). Later, she reminds little Lucy that God made animals just

22  Brenda Ayres as He made children, and that if she wants mercy from God, she must not be “wantonly cruel to innocent creatures” but show them mercy (41–42). Impressed with Trimmer’s stories, Mary Wollstonecraft has them read by her fictional character Mrs. Mason (10) in Original Stories from Real Life (1788). To teach self-sacrifice, Mrs. Mason relays how a hen tears out her own feathers to make a nest for her eggs, and that before she eats, she beats the grain with her bill and feeds it to her chicks (12). Her book was widely read in the late eighteenth century, at a time when children’s books were just beginning to become popular, and writers like Wollstonecraft and Maria Edgeworth were writing their philosophies of education for children. Because of Wollstonecraft’s falling out of moral favor in the nineteenth century, her book was not circulated much among the Victorians and went out of print for several decades beginning in 1835. Regardless, Amato remarks, nineteenth-century children were given pets “to foster their softer emotions. Learning kindness to animals during the childhood years was believed to develop character, leading to moral righteousness in adulthood” (46). Historian Katherine Grier refers to the use of pets to teach kindness and self-control as “the domestic ethic of kindness” (2006: 153). Jane Taylor, most likely the author of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and her sister, Ann, as well as John O’Keeffe’s daughter, Adelaide, compiled Original Poems, for Infant Minds, by Several Young Persons in 1800. It has not been out of print ever since and has been republished over 250 times. In this collection, the Taylors wrote several poems about cats. In “The Frolicsome Kitten,” a little girl is obviously imitating her mother. The little girl says, “Dear kitten, do lie still, I say, / I really want you to be quiet” (1877 [1804]: 1–2). The kitten’s claws catch on her frock and tear it. The little girl whines that her mother will have to patch it, and therefore, she intends to give that kitten “a right earnest knock” (7). But then the narrator changes to be the mother who explains to the child to refrain because the cat will not understand the discipline. The cat will think that every time the child would “give a pat” to the cat (11), the child would only be playing. But then, as if not really referring to the pussy anymore but to the child instead, the narrator gives this warning that if the lesson of wrongdoing is understood, and one “did not choose to be so good,” then “She’d be, indeed, a naughty creature” (15–16). Now not every child and not every adult were kind to cats. Helen Maria Winslow wrote Concerning Cats: My Own and Some Others in 1900. She recounts a visit with a friend—“a devout Christian”—when the friend’s child appeared swinging an emaciated kitten by its ears. After taking a seat, she proceeded to poke her finger into the kitten’s eyes and ears. When Winslow asked the mother why she did not remonstrate with the five-year old, the mother assured her that the kitten didn’t mind, and thus “was deliberately educating that child in cruelty and selfishness, and developing a stony-hearted indifference to suffering” (264–65).

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  23 Ann Taylor thought that an autobiographical account of a cat would reveal the realistic life of the suffering of most cats in English. She penned “The Last Dying Speech and Confession of Poor Puss” (1806 [1805]). The poem is addressed to “Kind masters and misses.” Asking for mercy as on her deathbed, a cat tells of her “many misfortunes and miseries great.” She was born in a barn and almost perished because of the cold. But she survived and “moused in the hay-loft” and “ran after my tail, which I took for a bird” until the farmer’s boy cut off her tail and ears. After she healed, Miss Fanny held her so tightly that she almost killed the cat. Once she was a designated house cat, her “sorrows arose; / Wherever I went I was followed with blows” and kicked for no reason and flogged. Her other great sorrow was that the young master often set his massive dog on her cat. One day she gave birth to “three sweet little kittens” and was so happy until the next morning, when she found them “lying dead by the horse-pond, all mangled and drowned.” She tried to revive them without success. After some time, she recovered from her grief and returned to mousing and became “gay and content” until that fateful night: Having been starved, the cat ate Miss Fanny’s canary. The poor cat had learned from her mother that “birds and mice were on purpose for eating.” Miss Fanny was so angry, she beat the cat to death. Before dying, however, the cat forgave her little mistress (83–84). Not all nursery rhymes, therefore, evoked warm and fuzzy feelings. They did attempt to instruct not only human morality but also animal morality that might have been even more difficult for a child to understand. Margaret Blount has noticed that of all animals listed in nursery rhymes, the mouse appears most often, probably because he is small, cute, furry, and so intricately involved in human life without being invisible, as mice inhabit our furniture and clothes and eat our food (152). In a rhyme that begins with “Six little mice sat down to spin” coats for gentlemen (Baring-Gould and Baring-Gould 130–31), Pussy “peep[s] in and offers to cut off their threads” (2–5). The mice are astute to know that a cat eats mice and they forbid Pussy to enter, for she will “bite off” their heads instead of the threads (6). Pussy praises the mice for being so “wondrous wise” (9) and for having “the nicest house” (11). Flattered, the mice let her in, “And Pussy soon had them all dead on the floor” (14). What a shocking ending, but Victorian children knew that the major reason why so many people had cats in the first place was to keep homes and barns free of mice. But there are other important lessons here for children: Be leery of flattery; it can cause you to make foolish decisions. Also, the world is not always a safe place for all creatures. Mice have natural predators, and as in Ann Taylor’s story above, one must not fault a cat for doing what comes natural to her and is beneficial to humans. Maybe there is a hidden message that it is okay for humans to eat meat, given that cats eat mice and birds. There is also a warning here about the existence of natural predators in a child’s

24  Brenda Ayres world, that they need to be on guard of strangers who promise to be helpful but have evil intentions. Another sobering pussy rhyme is about the “two cats of Kilkenny” when “Each thought there was one cat too many” (Baring-Gould 315). They fought each other until “there weren’t any.” Victorian human siblings fought just as siblings have done ever since Cain killed Abel. But in Kilkenny, the moral is much more ominous: There is no surviving Cain. There is never a victor—cursed or otherwise—when there is fighting. When there is a battle, no one wins. The backstory of the Kilkenny cats may be about the battle over boundary rights between Kilkenny and Irishtown during the seventeenth century, after which the battles left both greatly “impoverished” (Choron, Choron, and Moore 2010: 50). Another possible story is about Hessian soldiers stationed in Kilkenny who entertained themselves by tying the tails of two cats together and then throwing them across a clothesline. The soldiers bet on which cat would survive the fight. The officers banned the practice, but afterward, a soldier was caught holding two cats in preparation for the illegal sport. The soldier sliced off the tails and the evidence escaped. When asked what he was doing with two bloody tails, the soldier said that the cats had devoured each other and the only remains were their tails (50). Ever since the popularity of the rhyme in the nineteenth century, the phrase “Kilkenny cats” has been used by adults as shorthand reference to the folly of battle. Now coming to the end of my discourse, I feel it only right that I should chase my tail and return to the “Hey Diddle Diddle” rhyme with the cow and the moon. Since I was unable to satisfactorily explain even to myself why a cow would (or would not, for that matter) want to jump over the moon, I will try my hand with the second line about “the cat and the fiddle.” Apparently “the Cat and the Fiddle” was a common name for pubs in the sixteenth century (Dictionary of Pub Names 2006: 76). Others have written that the phrase is a corruption of Caton le fidèle, the English Governor of Calais, but what the governor has to do with pubs in the sixteenth century, no one seems to address. According to the Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (1894) also doubts the association with the governor and suggests that it refers only to La Chatte Fidèle, a sign in Farringdon (Devon) for a faithful cat, or that it simply indicates to patrons that the pub provides a game of cat (trap-ball) and dancing to a fiddle (2001 [1880]: 223). When James Orchard included this rhyme in his collection, he also provided “the Quaker’s commentary” that called the first two lines “nonsense,” and the rest came with a chastisement to avoid falsehoods (1886: 222–23). Numerous people throughout the years have suggested a myriad interpretation to the rhyme,16 so many and some so farfetched that J.R.R. Tolkien satirized the attempts in a ballad that Frodo recites in Chapter 9 of The Fellowship of the Ring (2012 [1923]: 179–81).

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  25 In 1842, James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps published The Nursery Rhymes of England, which he revised and enlarged for republication in 1843, 1844, 1846, 1853, and 1860 with a sequel in 1849 (Baring-Gould and Baring-Gould 141). In his 1853 preface to the fifth edition (here reprinted in the 6th edition), he notes: The great encouragement which has been given by the public to the previous editions of this little work satisfactorily proves that, notwithstanding the extension of serious education to all but the very earliest periods of life, there still exists an undying love for the popular remnants of the ancient Scandinavian nursery literature. The infants and children of the nineteenth century have not, then deserted the rhymes chanted so many ages since by the mother of the North. This is a “great nursery fact”—a proof that there is contained in some of these traditional nonsense-rhymes a meaning and a romance, possibly intelligible only to very young minds, that exercise an influence on the fancy of children. (iv) Besides indicating the persistence of nursery rhymes and their didactic influence on Victorian children, he also bemoans that parents feel they must teach children to understand that the proverbial cow must be “under” and not “over” the moon, and that the dog barks and does not laugh (iv). What is the moral to those of us who are not children but are analysts of nursery rhymes? When we read a rhyme that begins with “Hey Diddle Diddle,” perhaps we should not take things seriously all the time. Animals can definitely teach us very important life lessons, and perhaps we would be much better off if we were more like the dog who “laughed/ To see such sport” and simply let the dish run away with the spoon and not ask how or why.

Notes 1 If you don’t have much contact with nature and have, like Derrida, failed to notice the courtship fashions of animals, watch the 2013 PBS DVD, Love in the Animal Kingdom. 2 I was surprised—but not too surprised—to discover that this sentence does not appear in Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.(Perhaps Baum was being careful not to perpetuate the slang with “ain’t.”) It is, however, in the 1939 musical film in the unforgettable New Yorkish voice of Bert Lahr. 3 A quote from George Burgess, Director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. See Choi (2010). 4 The statistics were offered by Marc Lapadula, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Yale. 5 I’ll offer just two here. Kristen Guest points out that Black Beauty’s suffering began when his owner felt that he had to sell him because of his knees, “his

26  Brenda Ayres scars as evidence of questionable character” (2010: 14–15), thus teaching both boys and girls the vanity of physical appearance—the danger of prioritizing physical appearance. The Victorians were all about the physical, such as judging someone’s intellectual abilities through phrenology and physiognomy. Sewell’s teaching countermined such notions. On another subject, Gina Dorré considers the graphic description of the bearing rein a warning against women’s wearing tight corsets (2002). 6 The dates are significant, for by the end of the eighteenth century, literature for children began to flourish as did literature about children. William Blake, for example, published his Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794). The Romantics would idealize childhood as Wordsworth did in “We Are Seven” (1798), “My Heart Leaps Up” (1802), and Intimations on Immortality (1804). I am thankful to Sarah E. Maier for this observation. 7 In the World Catalog, if one types “Nursery Rhymes” and set the dates for 1835–1901, one gets a listing of 299 books. 8 Probably in the middle of the eighteenth century, although the first occurrence is listed in the OED as 1824. 9 Choron, Choron, and Moore list 85 songs about cats, but many of them were written in the twentieth century. 10 In Baring-Gould and Baring-Gould 56. The earliest recorded rendition was by John Lant, the organist of Winchester Cathedral in 1580 (Opie and Opie 149). 11 As it appears in the Rev. Baptist Noel Turner’s Infant Institutes (1797). See Rimbault 442. Edward F. Rimbault (1816–1876) was a book collector and musicologist. 12 See Eckenstein 51–56. 13 Just as John Doe and GI-Joe are considered generic names for American men, Tommy has been the same for the British down through the centuries. By 1815, it was a common name for the British soldier, becoming more famous during World War 1 (Rasor 2004: 215). The Victorians had their Tommies as well. Kipling wrote about the common soldier in his poem “Tommy” (1892). The young chimney sweeper in Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1862–1863) is named Tom. There was also Tom Hughes’s Tom Brown (1857–1859). Tom Thumb is one of the oldest characters in children’s literature. Most likely it was brought to England by the Vikings but first appeared in Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 (Kready 1916: 278) and then was published in Richard Johnson’s chapbook, The History of Tom Thumbe, the Little in 1621. Halliwell mentions him in Nursery Rhymes of England (1842: 39, 166). 14 They were taught both Latin and Greek, and in some schools, Hebrew as well (Leach 1908: 342, 356, 358, 360, 363, 367–68). The most common Greek book was Analecta Graeca Minora and Majora, and they would have used the Greek dictionary by Ainsworth (1736) (Leach 316). 15 The first four lines appear next in the 1833 edition of The Only True Mother Goose Melodies (96). 16 Some examples are listed in Choron and Choron, and Moore 44.

Bibliography Alchin, Linda Kathryn. Secret History of Nursery Rhymes. N.p.: Linda Alchin, 2013. Amato, Sarah. Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  27 Ayres, Brenda. “It’s Raining Cats and Dogs in George Eliot’s Novels.” In Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, edited by Brenda Ayres, 119–40. New York: Routledge, 2019. Baring-Gould, Sabine. A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes. London: Methuen, 1895. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c047802922&view= 1up&seq=14. Baring-Gould, William S., and Ceil Baring-Gould. The Annotated Mother Goose. New York: Bramhall House, 1962. https://archive.org/details/ annotatedmotherg00bari/page/54. Baring-Gould, William S., and Ceil Baring-Gould. The Annotated Mother Goose. 1962. New York: World Publishing, 1967. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Urbana, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Baum, Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chicago: George M. Hill Company, 1900. https://books.google.com/books?id=x5DQpIufcP4C. Benchley, Peter. Jaws: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Blount, Margaret. Animal Land: The Creatures of Children’s Fiction. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1975. Brewer, Ebenezer Cobham. Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: The Quintessential Guide to Myth, Folklore, Legend and Literature. 1880. Herfordshire: Wordsworth Edition, 2001. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Choi, Charles Q. “How ‘Jaws’ Forever Changed Our View of Great White Sharks.” Live Science, June 20, 2010, www.livescience.com/culture/jaws-­ impact-great-white-sharks-100620.html. Choron, Sandra, Harry Choron, and Arden Moore. Planet Cat: A Cat-Alog. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. Cooper, Mary. Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book: For all Little Masters and Misses…. London: Mary Cooper, 1744. Crump, Marty. A Year with Nature: An Almanac. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet and translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Dictionary of Pub Names. Wordsworth Reference Series. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2006. Dorré, Gina Marlene. “Horses and Corsets: Black Beauty, Dress Reform, and the Fashioning of the Victorian Woman.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 1 (2002): 157–78. doi: 10.1017/S1060150302301086. Dorré, Gina Marlene. Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Eckenstein, Lina. Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. London: Duckworth, 1906. https://books.google.com/books?id=oRfO2tE10poC.

28  Brenda Ayres Egerton, Leigh. Pets: A Paper Dedicated to All Who Do Not Spell Pets—Pests. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859. Accessed May 17, 2017. https://books.google.com/books?id=wcdDAQAAMAAJ. Eilperin, Juliet. Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011. Francis, Beryl. “Before and after Jaws: Changing Representations of Shark Attacks.” The Great Circle 34, no. 2 (2012): 44–64. www.jstor.org/ stable/23622226. Gatty, Margaret. “Inferior Animals.” 1855. In Parables from Nature, 213–34. London: George Bell and Sons, 1896. https://books.google.com/ books?id=WuY1AQAAMAAJ. Gavin, Adrienne E. “‘Feeling Is Believing’: Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and the Power of Emotion.” In Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults, edited by Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen, 52–65. New York: Routledge, 2018. Grier, Katherine C. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Guest, Kristen. “Black Beauty: Masculinity and the Market for Horseflesh.” Victorian Institute Journal 38 (January 2010): 9–22. http://ezproxy.­liberty. edu/login?url= http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh& AN=61341498&site=ehost-live&scope=site. Hahn, Daniel. The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, ed. The Nursery Rhymes of England. London: T. Richards, 1842. https://books.google.com/books?id=DdNTAAAAcAAJ. Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, ed. The Nursery Rhymes of England: Collected Chiefly from Oral Tradition. 6th ed. London: John Russell Smith, 1853. https://books.google.com/books?id=J4oFAAAAQAAJ. Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard, ed. The Nursery Rhymes of England. 1842. London: Frederick Warne and Company, 1886. https://books.google. com/books?id=zGsKAAAAIAAJ. Herzog, Hal. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Johnson, Claudia Durst, and Vernon Elso Johnson. The Social Impact of the Novel: A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Kready, Laura F. A Study of Fairy Tales. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1916. https://books.google.com/books?id=gEUKAAAAIAAJ. Lansbury, Coral. The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Leach, Arthur Francis. “Schools.” In The Victoria History of the County of Warwick, vol. 2, edited by William Page, 297–369. London: Archibald Constable, 1908. https://books.google.com/books?id=Qp44AQAAMAAJ. Lerberg, Matthew. “Jabbering Jaws: Reimagining Representations of Sharks Post-Jaws.” In Screening the Nonhuman: Representations of Animal Others in Media, edited by Amber E. George and J. L. Schatz, 33–47. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education. London: A. and F. Churchill, 1693. https://books.google.com/books?id=OCUCAAAAQAAJ.

Animals in Nursery Rhymes  29 McCullough, Susannah Bragg. “Ask the Professor: Did ‘Jaws’ Demonize Sharks?” The Take, Presented by ScreenPrism, June 8, 2016, http://­ screenprism.com/insights/article/did-jaws-demonize-sharks. McHugh, Susan. Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2011. Naas, Michael. “Song and Dance Man: Plato and the Limits of the Human.” In Anituqities Beyond Humanism, edited by Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, and Brooke Holmes, 73–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Newbery, John. Mother Goose’s Melody: Or Sonnets for the Cradle. 1764. 2nd Worcester ed. Worcester, MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1794. https://books.google. com/books?id=OG7YAAAAMAAJ. Newbery, John. The Original Mother Goose’s Melody: As First Issued by John Newbery, of London, about A.D., 1700. Introduction by William H. ­W hitmore. Albany, NY: Jeol Munsell’s Sons, 1880. https://books.google. com/books?id=5I5BAAAAYAAJ. Nursery Rhymes. London: “Printed for the Booksellers,” 1780 to 1790. https://­babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mcg.ark:/13960/t7vm5wq74&view= 1up&seq=1. Oliver, Kelly. Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. The Only True Mother Goose Melodies. Boston, MA: Munroe and Francis, 1833. www.gutenberg.org/files/28687/28687-h/28687-h.htm. Opie, Iona and Peter Opie, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. 1951. 2nd Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Perrault, Charles. Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose. 1697. Translated by Robert Samber. London: B. LeFrancq, 1785. “Pussy.” In Child’s Song Book, for the Use of Schools and Families: Being a Selection of Favourite Airs, with Hymns and Moral Songs, Suitable for Infant Instruction, 22. Boston, MA: Richardson, Lord and Holbrook, 1830. http:// commons.ptsem.edu/id/childssongbookfo00bost. Ramey, David W. “A Historical Survey of Human–Equine Interactions.” In Equine Welfare, edited by C. Wayne McIlwraith and Bernard E. Rollin, 22–58. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Rimbault, Edward F. “Nursery Rhymes.” Notes and Queries: A Medium of Inter-Communication of Literary Men, General Readers, Etc 51 (June 5, 1875): 441–42. https://books.google.com/books?id=cLWaRa_BA8UC. Rogers, Katharine M. The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Rudd, Gillian. “Lions, Mice, and Learning from Animals in Henryson’s Fables.” In Animals, Animality, and Literature, edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand, and Brian Massumi, 88–104. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse. 1877. New York: Rand, McNally and Company, 1907. https://books.google.com/ books?id=hBvR90iHUsQC. Taylor, Ann. “Last Dying Speech and Confession of Poor Puss.” 1805. In Original Poems: For Infant Minds, by Several Young Persons, vol. 2, edited by Ann Taylor and Jane Taylor, 6–9. 3rd ed. London: Darton and Harvey, 1806. https://books.google.com/books?id=_fASAAAAIAAJ.

30  Brenda Ayres Taylor, Jane. “Folicsome Kitten.” 1804. In The Poetical Works of Ann and Jane Taylor, 319. London: Ward, Lock, and Tyler, 1877. https://books.google. com/books?id=8XQCAAAAQAAJ. Thomas, Katherine Elwes. The Real Personages of Mother Goose. Boston, MA: Lothrop, Lee and Shephard Company, 1930. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=mdp.39015009210710&view=1up&seq=11. Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel. “The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late.” In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. In The Fellowship of the Ring, 179–81. 1923. Boston, MA: Mariner Books, 2012. Trimmer, Sarah. Fabulous Histories: The History of the Robins. 1786. London: Griffith and Farran, 1870. https://archive.org/details/ historyofrobinsf00trimrich/page/n6. Turner, Noel. Infant Institutes, Part of the First; or, a Nurserical Essay on the Poetry, Lyric and Allegorical, of the Earliest Ages, &c. London: F. and C. Rivingtons, 1797. Unti, Bernard. “Sewell, Anna.” 1998. In Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Warfare, edited by Marc Bekoff and Carron A. Meaney, 313. ­London: Routledge, 2013. Winslow, Helen Marie. Concerning Cats: My Own and Some Others. Boston, MA: Lothrop Publishing, 1900. https://books.google.com/ books?id=2lI8AAAAMAAJ. The Wizard of Oz. Script by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf. Prod. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Original Stories from Real Life: With Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. London: J. Johnson, 1796. https://books.google.com/ books?id=e3c4AAAAMAAJ.

2 Wanted Dead or Alive Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature Keridiana Chez

As the narrator of Mathilde Sandras’s Snowdrop; or, The Adventures of a White Rabbit (1873) expressed, rabbits were presumed dimwitted “­because, ordinarily, we remain motionless, and with eyes fixed” (v). But for a nose twitch, Snowdrop explained, “People [would] often would think we are dead” (v), and this liminality between dead and alive, love object and food, was produced by popular children’s texts. The broader context of how rabbits were variously represented in nineteenth-century children’s literature reveals a particular case of categorical fluidity. The anthrozoologist Hal Herzog (2010) has described how we have classified animals as either those we love, hate, or eat, but in the case of rabbits, the Victorians seemed to consider the rabbit as equally available for any such use—seemingly as likely to be a pet as to be pie. Looking at and beyond the canonical rabbits of Beatrix Potter and Lewis Carroll, we find in children’s periodicals and now forgotten tales that rabbits were represented as the sweetest pets as well as the sweetest flesh. To consider the inconsistencies of Victorian attitudes toward a single species, the rabbit, is to consider the power of children’s literature to legitimize even the most glaring discursive contradictions in our treatment of nonhuman Others. While representations of the Victorian rabbit may not seem likely to reveal theoretical secrets hitherto undiscovered, looking at apparently less significant animals can tell us a lot about how we represent nonhuman animals. The centrality of rabbits in so many aspects of nineteenth-­ century life—as food, pet, fur—meant that their ubiquity had to be managed and made meaningful, which understanding was done in no small part via literature about rabbits. At the same time, rabbits were deeply unimportant and easily dismissed. Because of the rabbit’s relative insignificance, Victorians did not care enough to be careful, to sew up all the seams, to conceal all the inconsistencies. As such, the way that Victorians represented the rabbit offers a particularly clear example of our schizophrenic ways and means of interspecies relating. My discussion also speaks to broader questions of the field, the first of which is how does looking at Victorian representations of the rabbit tell us more about the human project to distinguish ourselves from our

32  Keridiana Chez animal kin? The boundary between human and animal is, according to Erica Fudge, hewn over “two apparently antithetical ideas: similarity and absolute difference” (2002: 68), and so our aversion to recognizing interspecies kinship motivates the drive to “annihilate the fear” through “[m]astery—control, domination” (8). Fudge posited that “[w]e are horrified that there is a kinship between us and them … and we wish to wipe it out” (8), but from whence this fear? After all, the degradation of all that is animal (including all that is animal in ourselves) has been produced by us, and I suspect that the impetus for the degradation has been the desire to exploit nonhuman beings. In turn, a conflicted recognition of kinship has fueled the need to rationalize the exploitation. The dynamic makes more sense reversed, particularly when speaking of the Victorians who redefined humanity by its measure of humaneness to other animals: The desire to master everything else, to our benefit, complicated by the desire to do so without guilt, has driven much of human behavior. Ironically, the moral scruples that humans might claim as proof of species superiority may have led to some of our worst treatment of other animals. We have not festooned the rabbit with the full slew of horrible meanings typically associated with the beast because fluffy little herbivores do not lend themselves to radical demonization. To some degree, as Eric Savoy has noted, rabbits have been vilified by association with sexual perversion, found guilty of “not only a predatory, insatiably perverse sexuality, but also an uncategorizable slippage between genders” (1995: 192).1 On the whole, however, rabbits make for poor “beasts”: They do not seem prone to furious passions and violent savagery. Instead, they sit quite still, twitch a nose, and generally behave in such a way that the most common adjectives used to describe them are “gentle” or “timid.” Unfortunately, “[e]ndearment doesn’t guarantee much in the animal world” (Davis and DeMello 2003: 1), nor is cuteness supposed to be relevant if one claims to be rational and sober in ethics (Herzog 37). As Susan Davis and Margo DeMello explained, “[A]nimals that flee, like rabbits and timid songbirds, repel us or attract us only by virtue of their seemingly ‘childlike’ nature” (2003: 19). There is little fear either in the sense of “this is a wild man-eating beast I need to dominate for my own safety” or “this is a nasty beast from which I need to violently distinguish myself.” With animals that we liken to a farmable plant crop—the rabbit and its carrot, for our purposes one and the same—we are more likely to be motivated to hew the separation and shore up the categorical walls not because of fear of kinship per se, nor fear of the animal itself, but because we dread recognizing the ethical inconsistency of equating the rabbit and the carrot (and yet know that the rabbit is not quite a carrot). The second question that the nineteenth-century rabbit speaks to is how we categorize all nonhuman animals by their usefulness to ourselves.

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  33 Indeed, most animals are classified according to a single story—loved, eaten, or hated—and typically without crossover. Whether the animal can be grieved for in death and the corpse safeguarded from consumption indelibly mark which category an animal is in, as the higher up the hierarchy one is, the more likely one’s body would be protected from sliding into the category of having a consumable corpse. Our interspecies politics are supposedly built on a framework of ontological facts, applying across intimate and stranger beings based on who/what their bodies “make” them. According to this, all the rules that apply to, say, the category of the human, are supposed to apply equally to all humans regardless of skin color or national origin; similarly, all ethics that apply to the category of the rabbit should likewise be consistent across all rabbit bodies. We do not have an ethics that admits to being subjective that allows us to feel consistent and fair in declaring that this rabbit that I know is special and not to be eaten, but that stranger rabbit can be pie. But inconsistency and paradox have always been the norm rather than the exception, and rabbits offer stark proof. Rabbit tales highlight the Victorians’ mixed feelings about exploiting animals that are gentle, cute, and innocuous, so the exploitation went against their “instincts” and then increasingly their cultural mores. The rabbit was wanted dead or alive: desired as a love object and marked as a creature to be hunted. A necessarily incomplete survey, this chapter focuses on how the rabbit was used as a surrogate for gender training, particularly for boys, and how this construction of a rabbit as deserving of human attention was forged alongside discourses that still defined rabbits as food- or pelts-in-waiting. Unlike the nineteenth-century horse, which, as I have written about elsewhere, 2 would be rendered into dog chow when it ceased to serve its primary living function (carrying humans and human things), the rabbit’s primary living function was, for the vast majority, to live long enough to be killed for its fur and flesh, and then for a select few, a temporary living function as a pet—which was not, for the rabbit, a reprieve from an ignominious death. Rabbits were long associated with women and femininity (Davis and DeMello 141), and so in an arrangement of gendered surrogacy, rabbits in the nineteenth century were considered to be boys’ pets; “[o]f all domesticated animals dear to the British school-boy’s heart, the Rabbit is, perhaps, the most general favourite” (Wood 1870: 263), making the rabbit “preeminently a boy’s animal” (White 1859: 19). This popularity might have been due to the widely held belief, especially because of the humane movement, that the care of pets had a beneficial influence on the character of children. Indeed, these periodicals might have oversold the popularity of these animals as part of a public education campaign, believing as they did that pet-keeping would be morally salubrious, especially for boys, who were thought innately prone to sanguinity and vice.3 Given the entertainment options of the period, rabbits were a

34  Keridiana Chez fairly cheap way to deter one’s sons from spending their childhood in idleness, or worse still, among bad associates. Even a boy “who did not care much to read stories” “would have something to amuse himself with the whole day long” with pet rabbits (Cupples 1876: 110). As one writer put it, “perhaps, if you are a boy, you have managed to make a hutch for them to live in” (Weir 1879: n.p.), the prerequisite for such an achievement being maleness. Boys would be required to develop the discipline of getting up early to feed the rabbits, for example (107), and to provide release time and protection for the rabbits “taken out and put on the grass, and watched that they might not run away” (108, 116). Then rabbits would also “find a boy plenty of occupation when he takes a country walk,” during which he would have the goal of gathering greens for pets who stayed home safe in their hutches (Wood 1860: 99). Thus, the rabbits “find” the boys work, even when they were not in company of the rabbits. In training the rabbits, the boys were in fact training themselves to fulfill their future social roles as heads of households who worked outside the home to provide shelter, food, and protection for their safely hutched wives and children. A boy could gather stray flora on a walk, proudly acquiring “a delicious breakfast for my numerous family” (Josephine 1865: 94). In this dynamic of interspecies surrogacy, boys were the fathers; rabbits were in the weird position of alternatively serving as surrogate wives or children. For girls, unsurprisingly, rabbits offered practice for future children, for which they would play the role of primary caregiver. While boys built and maintained the “home” and provided the food, a good girl “always likes to feed them herself, and is never tired of looking after their wants, knowing nothing makes a pet so happy, healthy, and contented as giving regular attention to them in every possible way” (Browne 1884: 52). Yet alongside this cultural push toward rabbit-keeping were a myriad counternarratives seeking to check this interspecies investment. This concern was motivated at least in part because of the uncomfortable suspicion that rabbits were incapable of loving humans, and if so then humans ought to be wary of the one-sidedness of their affection. Amy’s rabbit certainly did not care to be caught and turned into a surrogate baby. Many Victorians remained unconvinced of the rabbit’s capacity for affection. While “tame rabbits are pretty pets,” a writer noted, and a boy might be presumed to be “very fond” of his (Weir n.p.), the presumption was that they were essentially at best a pleasant and low-key life form, and at worst, a waste of human time and affection. “Those most foolish of created beings, rabbits” were, to the author of “Cats, Dogs, and Other Household Pets” (1881), “[m]ere stupid crawling creatures” that “seem to exist only by instinct” (338). “I never saw the remotest glimmer of understanding in any one of them,” the writer continued, and given this insupportable stupidity, they concluded that rabbits were

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  35 “utterly selfish noodles” (339). In fact, the only relationship a human could hope to have was one where the human pointlessly engaged in “eternal contemplation” of a being that, “if you were to die to-morrow… would never miss you, so long as he was fed” (339). While the dog was the very measure of “suprahuman” devotion (Kete 1994: 29), the Victorians seemed more reluctant to believe that a mere rabbit could return a human’s affection, and this perceived disparity in affection, which translated to a disparity in power, angered some commentators. As an animal with a communication style that was less intelligible to untrained human senses, the rabbit inhabited a liminality between living animal and mere thing that was particularly precarious, almost as if it was both simultaneously, rather than an animal that became a thing after it was killed. Its deficiencies as a pet—on a shamelessly anthropocentric scale—were plenty: “It is not very clever,” charged a critic, “and does not do much we can tell about” (Weir n.p.). A rabbit fared little better being compared to a “block of wood or a mass of wax carved or modelled into a doll,” that “cannot nestle against you, snuggle to you, and show by a many pretty endearing ways how fond it is of you, as a dear little rabbit does, that is warm and soft” (Miller 1868: 90). As Snowdrop, the titular pseudo-autobiographer of The Adventures of a White Rabbit 4 noted, “As a rule, the world does not allow any large amount of intelligence to individuals of my race, because, ordinarily, we remain motionless, and with eyes fixed” (v). That little bit of nose movement was apparently the only way that a human could distinguish that the rabbit was alive, a living thing, that counted. Insufficiently interactive, with an inscrutable expression of unshakeable placidity even as it ran for its life, a rabbit might have approached a plant: that is, to human eyes, as a living being without a brain worth respecting. Its actions were reducible to almost spastic quirks: They were “such odd, quaint, ludicrous animals” because their behavior was apparently senseless to the human observer and were “full of such comical little coquetries, and such absurd airs of assumed dignity” (Jackson 1870: 144). Another writer remarked that rabbits look at humans “very comically” (Browne 52) when actually humans were the ones doing the looking and declaring. Even Beatrix Potter poked fun at her “shallow and absurdly transparent” pet rabbits (quoted in Lanes 1971: 11). In essence, rabbits, especially in the wild, were thought “the funniest creatures in the world” (Jackson 142) because they could not be understood. The salient affect was absurdity which was then inscribed onto the rabbit in a way that decreed the species ridiculous and thus not deserving of substantive consideration. Most texts that promoted rabbit-keeping attempted to convince its readership that rabbits loved to be pets—and here was trouble, given the rabbits’ relative inexpressiveness. A realistically rendered rabbit— one described with fidelity to observable rabbit behavior—simply did

36  Keridiana Chez not make for an interesting subject in human terms. We might, as Fudge has said, try to arrive at a “sense” of an animal’s “inner-being” through careful observation (2008: 39), but in anthropocentric terms the outer rabbit did not appear agential. Jennifer McDonell has, among others, noted that “the notion of agency in literature still conveys the classic understanding of agency as rational, intentional, and premeditated,” which “derives from an anthropocentric paradigm of enlightenment humanism wherein these traits came to define the human” (2017: 121). In Snowdrop, we see the workings of a text desperate to render a sufficiently interesting and sympathetic rabbit character that remained “realistic.” Your “very humble and affectionate servant” (vi), Snowdrop’s “adventures” consist of a record of the comings and goings of a small young ladies’ boarding school. The rabbit autobiographer immediately stated in the preface that he recognized that humans linked mobility with activity with agency, and the animals that did not appear frenetic did not appear “lively”—approaching plant sessility, which could easily be interpreted as death (“People often would think we were dead”[v]). Typical of animal autobiographies (Flegel 2017: 147), the subject is a unique animal distinguished from his peers by physical attractiveness. While “[t]o be beautiful is to be offered a kind of personhood,” as we see with the special animal singled out, it is “also a form of objectification” (147), and thus what appeared as generous on the part of the text was part of what dooms an animal character to ultimate inconsequence. Across the entire work—a tedious read, because we expect our protagonists to do and engage with their world, rather than appear to simply observe—the author took pains to reconcile that the rabbit “did” little but “thought” much: “What could I do in my burrow, if I did not sit and think?” (Sandras v). He did, at times, aspire for more, perhaps so the child reader would appreciate the privilege of the human position: The children could learn in school how to be “wise, obedient, and industrious” whereas the rabbit could only be secretly “learned” (v), receiving no recognition for it. Pondering their school prizes, he thought, “That is fine, and I should very well like to be in my young friend’s place” (14). In the accompanying illustration, he (improbably) holds an open book as evidence of his ability to read and write. The rabbit is positioned as a “real” rabbit might, on all fours in front of a conveniently open book, with no attempt to indicate how the rabbit propped up the book or turned its pages—or read. The text thus invited the reader to reinterpret the still body that failed to be sufficiently animated and interactive in human terms: Like any philosopher, he was simply less physically active. Fulfilling the main duty of any good petted animal, Snowdrop rewarded dedicated humans with reciprocated affections, but repeatedly the text struggled to prove this affection existed when a rabbit’s observable behavior did not fit in with the expectations of demonstrated love.

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  37 When Leontine, the girl who most doted on him, returned to school after a break, she greeted him like a person, but he at first failed to respond: “What, are you there, my Snowdrop! How big you are grown! Come quickly, and say ‘How do you do?’” A feeling of shame possessed me, and I was literally unable to move. “Do you no longer love me, then? I thought you had more sense and feeling than common rabbits.” (Sandras 39) The text proffered the realistic possibility that a rabbit would not rush to greet a human after an absence as a dog might, attempting to legitimize this apparent indifference: In fact, the text asserted, the rabbit was complicated enough to feel shame as well as affection. Challenged to prove that he deserved his special position as pet not food, however, he “soon showed her that she was not forgotten” by “lick[ing] her hands with so much eagerness that she and her parents soon ceased to doubt the faithfulness of my memory and the nature of my sentiments” (39). This moment emphasized the risk faced by the undemonstrative pet: If doubted, if there was nothing special in “sense and feeling” about this one to distinguish it from the “common rabbits,” Snowdrop would be supper. When he did move, Snowdrop was wrong to do so. In Chapter 14, having scampered out of bounds, he met a “wild” rabbit “of a dull reddish-­gray” fur that “contrasted strangely with the dazzling whiteness of mine” (Sandras 164). “In a few minutes” of swift communion, during which Snowdrop suggested they move over to some moss and the wild rabbit assents, “the stranger and I were like two brothers, and he made every effort to induce me to link my existence to his” (164). This scene reaffirmed the rightness of pet-keeping, because Snowdrop resisted this “temptation” (165), this Satan in the forest, to renounce petdom. The wild rabbit bemoaned Snowdrop’s “narrow hutch” and the “inactivity and grief” attendant to such an incarcerated existence (165), but Snowdrop recognized that “by way of compensation, I enjoy perfect security” (22) in that he was “not exposed to the danger of perishing by the hunter’s gun” and “handed over to the remorseless cook” (22). In other words, although he was almost perpetually underfed and incarcerated, it is the lesser of two evils, because if he were to fall from this conditional exception of petdom, he would be treated as rabbits were supposed to be treated—he would be food. He was palpably reminded of this when, as a casual joke, a cook complimented him on being a “splendid ­animal”—not for any of the virtues recognized by Leontine, but because he was “plump” and “would make a famous stew” (148): “Come, come, let us knock him on the head, and strip his skin off” (148). It was quite a barbed joke, because while he was returned to the

38  Keridiana Chez safety of a hutch, he could “tell by the scent” that other rabbits were being cooked, presumably consumed even by Leontine (152). The rabbit’s body was indelibly marked as food, and in this anthropocentric world, he could be considered lucky to choose between serving as imprisoned lover or as prey. Perhaps Snowdrop was lucky that no one coveted his beautiful white fur, for every part of the rabbit’s body was marked for consumption. “Rabbits [we]re very useful animals,” but to be this “useful” they must die: “[I]ts flesh is good to eat, the fur is used to make hats, and the skin is made into gloves” (Dunkin 1880: 38). As pets, rabbits could “be made tame, affectionate, and playful; as curiosities, they [could] be modified, by careful breeding, into the oddest shapes and most eccentric colouring; while, as a commercial speculation, they [could], with proper care and forethought, be rendered extremely profitable” (Wood 1870: 263–64). As if they were raw material harvested from nature to be processed for human uses, rabbits were “made,” “modified,” or “rendered” into this or that. The “harmless” animal was in fact “very useful to mankind,” but not by great virtue of apparent personality, strength, or intelligence: rather, as an easily harvested creature (Berquin 101). Four rabbits equaled a factory farm: “Three does and a buck will give you a rabbit to eat for every three days in the year” (quoted in Dickenson 2014: 70). One author lamented the possibility that “a boy of a hard an obdurate heart” would be willing to “gormandize on [the] haunches” of “the dear pet that knew you, and fed from your hand, and frisked around you, and came at your call, and looked happy when it saw you” (Martin 1865: 235), but many texts suggested that it was actually common and acceptable to eat one’s erstwhile companions, or at least, that one ought always be ready to do so. The rabbit, in contrast to the pet dog or cat, which upon death might be buried, or the horse, which was perhaps looking like glue as it aged (Chez 2016: 146), was always already consumable. As Davis and DeMello explain, “many of these rabbits may have been destined, ultimately, for the family stew pot” (67). Perhaps symbolizing the rabbit’s presumed and inalienable edibility, an 1874 painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, Queen Victoria’s favored animal portraitist, depicts a girl hugging a fat white rabbit, with her coy gaze toward the viewer. Five other rabbits gather on a stool, four of them in the dish with the lettuce and the fifth halfway in. While the dish is ostensibly the dish for the rabbits’ food, it is a stark reminder of the likely reality of those rabbits’ fate—the stew pot. The one that has been selected as a pet is special solely because of the temporary safety afforded by the girl’s interest, and the one halfway in the dish is in the act of crossing over into being categorized as food. Her brother stands by with a rabbit in a sling bag. Is it headed to the kitchen? Even the one in her arms might be for offer, and all part of the life cycle of the rabbit in the Victorian mind: “Not only were rabbits nourishing and economical, but they gave pleasure to children, and once eaten they could be worn” (Dickenson 71).

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  39 At the same time, children’s devotion toward their rabbits must be kept in check. In Charlotte Maria Tucker’s The Children’s Garland (1875), the moral was that for children to become too attached to rabbits was self-­ indulgent. A girl who complained about having to go to school and learn grammar, Amy evaded her responsibilities to gather flowers. Suddenly, a wild rabbit ran across her path, eliciting “an exclamation of pleasure and surprise” (45), an obvious Alice in Wonderland allusion. This was not her first time encountering a rabbit, for “She had seen rabbits hung up in poulterers’ shops, and cooked rabbit served up for dinner; but a live rabbit, a free rabbit, not hung up by its little legs, but running upon them, Amy never before had seen” (45–46). She flung the flowers “[a]way to right and left … as she rushed with eager speed” in pursuit (46). The narrator ridiculed her subject for seizing upon a grandiose plan, immediately having “had her heart set on catching a live rabbit with long ears, and carrying it in triumph to Bristol,” where she would refuse to use it for food (46): “I’ll not give it to the poulterer… it shall never be cooked and put into a dish; but my bunny shall lie in dolly’s cradle, and I’ll feed it with bread and milk, and it shall be my pet rabbit as long as it lives” (46). The wild, live rabbit inspired Amy to greedy impulsivity, and in this delusion, Amy got lost: “Hither and thither the little girl wandered, exploring and peeping. Amy did not succeed in finding the rabbit, but she succeeded in losing herself” (46). Defeated, she accepted that her duty was not to run away with rabbits, but to do her lessons. A brief story in Natural History in Stories for Little Children made a similar point from another angle: Do not bring the rabbit completely into the human space where it does not belong. In the story, a young boy wishes to bring his pet rabbit Lizzie into the house, and to teach him a lesson, his Aunt told him a story about some children who dared to do the same, and so lost their rabbit: “[T]he long darning-needle that Sarah had been mending her stockings with, had run into its little heart” (Claude 1854: 49). The Aunt reminded them, “I never liked to see children carry their pets about out of their proper places” (49). While avidly encouraging rabbit-­keeping as surrogates for future wives and children, the counter concern was that such interspecies affection would lead to rabbits being improperly elevated to the level of the human. Stories such as these aimed to set limits on the very investment encouraged by other texts. Given that rabbits must always already be killable, some Victorians were concerned about the possibility that a child might fail to transfer his affective training across species, from rabbit to human female, as would be eventually expected. In a rather disturbing serialized story in The Children’s Friend, “Harry’s First School-Days” (1874), a young boy was described as lacking the ability to express positive emotions, and in his awkwardness, he became unusually attached to a pretty rabbit named Marion. For love of this rabbit, Harry behaved in the prescribed ways, caring for it with all the measures of masculine devotion. The rabbit Marion thus fulfilled expectations by inspiring the necessary affection

40  Keridiana Chez to motivate the idle child into industry and responsibility. Yet something was amiss: Young Harry was too attached to his precious. “[O]f all the lovely rabbits she was the most lovely; white as milk, pure as snow, with the softest velvet paws, the longest drooping ears, and such eyes! Such sweet brown eyes!,” and here the narrator seemed to be channeling some of Harry’s feelings, but then distinguished themselves from Harry by immediately interrupting their rhapsodic praise with “I had almost said as bright as Harry’s; but no, Harry had a soul to shine through his, and no rabbit’s eyes could have been so full of meaning” (70). Unlike Harry, the narrator could distinguish a rabbit from a person, and the child’s confusion was symbolized by the fact that his beloved rabbit shared the name of his beloved governess, Marion Grey. Overcompensating with the rabbit surrogate, Harry found it hard to express affection toward the right object, the human Marion: Harry did not generally show affection for anybody or anything; he could not have offered his governess a flower, to have gone up to her and kissed her as some of you do your governess, but often, when he felt that he loved her very much, he fondled and petted Marion the rabbit for half an hour together, and he sometimes ended by being not quite sure himself which of the two Marions it was he loved so dearly. (70) The “her” that he “loved …very much” was the human Marion, as implied by the syntax, but the rabbit Marion received the undue caresses. The last part of the sentence made it clear that the story deemed it impossible that Harry loved both Marions. Only one Marion was deserving, and the other Marion must be given up. To rectify his interspecies confusion, Harry was made to literally sacrifice one for the sake of the other. Harry’s mother first naturalized the anthropocentrism of rabbit disposability and consumption by having him focus on humans enjoy possessing a rabbit as a purchase or gift. This prompted him to say, “I wish I had something to give Miss Grey!” (71). His older brother casually suggested the obvious, that Marion could serve as a gift. At first, he was appalled: “Give away Marion! His playfellow! His pet! His treasure!” (71). These initial instincts would have been praised by advocates of the humane treatment of animals, but as The Children’s Friend was not particularly concerned with animal welfare, what actually happened was that Harry’s thoughts tumble in quick succession to a complete reversal of all humane sentiment: “This was Harry’s first thought; his next, that he had never heard so cruel a proposal; his next, that in all the wide, wide world, so beautiful a present could not be found for Miss Grey as Marion; his next, that she should have her” (71).

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  41 The process was presented like a natural transference, and once transferred, it became frightfully easy to convince him that only a dead rabbit made a suitable gift. Harry was told that a rabbit would not make a “very nice present” unless it were “a dead one for a pie” (72) because a living creature would be a burden. The narrator expressed “almost heartache” in sympathy for Harry’s feelings (85), but not heartache, for Harry’s dilemma was cast as a choice in which the rabbit did not figure at all for its own sake. The poor boy lied awake all night, grappling with what the narrator described as “the great battle…we must all fight …[:] the love of self, and the love of another, [we]re struggling in his soul for mastery” (86). In other words, to this author, Harry’s excessive love for rabbit Marion was a shameful self-indulgence. To love a pet rabbit was not only to fail to love another human, but to express an almost onanistically selfish love. The narrator interrupted the text to counsel the reader, “Johnny,” to have “patience” while he presented a long aside to “the little girls” who were “still crying” over the prospect of killing rabbit Marion—the girls who were presumably taking longer to conquer their self-love. The narrator did not exhort them to cease crying; rather, they were welcome to do so, perhaps expected to exhibit the failings of their gender. As for Harry, the rabbit was killed while he was from home, and then put in a basket for him to take to Miss Grey’s. On this errand, he “walked steadily on with a firm step, as he would have done if he had been carrying a coffin; indeed it was a coffin to him” (87), emphasizing that Harry had the correct feelings even as they were discordant with what were deemed to be the correct actions. In essence, he was supposed to sacrifice the rabbit and feel terrible. While the crying little girls could go on crying, it is for the “brave little hero” Harry that the narrator begged for “three ringing cheers” (87). Not only must the animal die to be useful, but it could not be mourned as beloveds typically deserved. As Chloë Taylor said of the general prohibition against mourning animal death, “The ethical apartheid between humans and nonhuman animals reserves mourning for humans and infantilises and thereby pathologises those who violate the rule” (2013: 97). For his emotional growth, Harry must choose the human over the rabbit, and must participate in the process, suppressing his own impulse to grieve the animal’s death. Even tales with anthropomorphized rabbits did not stray far from the premise of a rabbit’s default/inalienable edibility: The danger was ever-present. Potter’s rabbits, like most of her other animal characters, wore clothing, prompting much scholarship to focus on wardrobe as allegories of the Victorians balking at civilization’s repressive effects (Scott 1992; Harris 1997; Kutzer 1997; Scheftel 2014). While W. C. Harris perceived Peter’s understanding of his body as the site of his self as a glorious moment, for a rabbit, the reality of their bodies put them at a distinct disadvantage (82). For one, they had to feed their bodies, bodies that produced very large litters—and their world was precariously

42  Keridiana Chez food scarce. From “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” (1902), we know that Mrs. Rabbit, deprived of a Mr. Rabbit, made ends meet by selling such domestically producible things as rabbit tobacco (lavender), and from the later story, “The Tale of the Benjamin Rabbit” (1904), we learn that Rabbits grew their own food and that it was not always plentiful. Only by trespassing and stealing from Farmer McGregor could Peter achieve a “fat little” body (Potter 16), which in turn made him all the more tantalizing to the Farmer. In fact, their rabbit bodies were always in danger of being eaten: Everyone from the McGregors to their cat saw them as a walking meal. The human was, of course, the greatest threat to a rabbit, which was shown when the Farmer who had been “on his hands and knees” planting—in the position of animal while Peter walked on two hind feet (12)—sprang into full power as soon as he saw Peter: He “jumped up and ran after Peter, waving a rake and calling out, ‘Stop thief!’” (12). In other words, he shifted from animal to language-­ capable, tool-wielding human, wasting words yelling after a rabbit that would not understand. We are told that the reason why Mrs. Rabbit is a widow is that Mr. ­Rabbit “had an accident” when he broke into the human garden: “he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor” (9). Of course, a rabbit does not accidentally fall into a pie. It sounds how a protective mother might have concealed an ugly truth, but effectively undercut the real violence rabbits suffered for human suppers. Moreover, rabbit fur was highly coveted. As Monica Flegel said in her discussion of the double-edgedness of beauty for an animal, “beautiful animals risk the greatest possibility 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” (Potter 148). After all, Mrs. Rabbit also “earned her living by knitting rabbit-wool mittens and muffetees” (56), thus turning her body and possibly her children’s bodies into commodities, but at least in this way they were valuable by remaining alive. Their skin was always in danger of becoming human clothing, as Mrs. McGregor announced in “The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies” (1909): “I shall skin them and cut off their heads” and use their skins to “line my old cloak” (206). In the end, “Mrs. McGregor did not get her rabbit skins” (the pronoun suggesting how much she already believed their skins to be rightfully hers), but the mouse who saved the Flopsy Bunnies sack was rewarded with “enough rabbit-wool to make herself a cloak and a hood, and a handsome muff and a pair of warm mittens” (208). To not wear human clothing exposed the rabbit body as one that could be eaten and skinned, to become themselves clothing for human bodies. To don complicated layers of clothing was, in turn, at least to some degree, an assumption of unusual power on the part of an animal character. From the onset, Peter was distinguished as a more humanesque rabbit by his gender which granted him special clothes. While his

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  43 three sisters all wore identical red cloaks—a simple item of clothing, with no sleeves, legs, or buttons—Peter donned a “blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new” (Potter 13). He was further distinguished by his human name while his sisters were dubbed cutesy names that insistently alluded to their rabbitty bodies: Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cotton-tail. In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty, whose name was literally written all over his body, pointed out that names “must” “mean something” (1897 [1871]: 115–16). In his case, his name “mean[t] the shape [he was],” as compared to the name Alice, which was confusing because she “might be any shape, almost” (116). Human names did not denote nor limit them in their morphology, and Humpty Dumpty failed to recognize this as a form of power usually reserved for humans. Peter’s mother also had a humanesque name, Josephine, as if the stories seamlessly conflated adulthood, selfhood, and humanness with clothing. According to Susan Scheftel, “In many of Potter’s books, the animals are on their hind legs when dressed, but on four legs and ultimately undressed when under threat or needing to escape from predators…. When they are not dressed or when they have lost their clothing, Potter’s animal protagonists look more like animals in a state of nature, fighting for survival” (165). Tellingly, Peter’s lost clothes were weaponizable against other animals as the Farmer constructed a scarecrow “to frighten the birds” (Potter 19). In “Benjamin Rabbit,” we find that his lost clothes have not been replaced. The formerly adventurous Peter now cowered at home, clumsily wrapped in “a red cotton pocket-handkerchief” (56): something less than clothes, even less than the simple capes worn by his sisters. Without his clothes, “[h]e looked poorly” (56). Things felt decidedly righted when he snuck back into the garden to recover his clothes (68). Benjamin also referred to his own outfit—a jacket and a pair of clogs—as “people’s clothes” (59), defining himself as a person by wearing clothes. To what extent could a rabbit become a “person” by wearing “people’s clothes”? In fact, the Farmer could not recognize that it was a rabbit who had trod on his garden because Benjamin’s clogs had confused the prints. To the human, the shoe prints signified humanity, and yet “the foot-marks were too ridiculously little!” (67). (To the child reader with equally little footmarks, this moment might have further encouraged their identification with animal characters.) At the same time, “clothing and an upright posture, which signify domestication and civility, become a liability under the wrong circumstances” (Scheftel 165). When the girls gathered blackberries, they took off their capes and proceeded naked, perhaps because the clothing would be in the way. Peter found that his clothing hampered his escape from the dangerous, but delectably tempting, human space, as he shed first one shoe and then the other (Potter 13). Initially, that felt like a loss, but “[a]fter losing them, he ran on four legs and went faster, so that I think

44  Keridiana Chez he might have got away altogether” (13). Alas, he was ensnarled by a gooseberry net, “caught by the large buttons on his jacket” (13), the last of the perfidious clothing. With the encouragement of “some friendly sparrows,” he managed to escape by “leaving his jacket behind him” (14). Having lost all the human trappings, Peter is “safe at last in the wood outside the garden” (18). Thus, Peter’s body was equally at risk because of his human vestments as he would have been if he had bared his fat little body au naturel, suggesting that an animal attempting to claim human-like power or privileges was not necessarily safer than one that is treated as a mere animal. In a case of damned with clothes, damned without, Peter’s experience can be an allegory of the Victorian treatment of rabbits: They were dead animals walking, and receiving human favor could be no favor at all. Another text that employed the figure of a clothed rabbit to experiment with inversions in the hierarchy of predation and prey, powerful and vulnerable, was Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). Nina Auerbach has described Carroll’s Alice as “one image of the Victorian middle-class child” (2013: 315), and for us, one of the most enduring. “[P]rim and earnest in pinafore and pumps, confronting a world out of control by looking for the rules and murmuring her lessons” (315), Alice was a child on the cusp of womanhood, looking at her future through a not-yet-matured lens. While the White Rabbit did not have an especially prevalent role in Alice in Wonderland, he was symbolically important as Alice’s entry into a world where the human-animal boundary became flexible to the point of meaninglessness.5 Alice’s bored stupor was interrupted when the White Rabbit “suddenly[…]ran close by her” (Carroll 2013 [1865]: 7)—the animal’s approach sparked the novel’s action. Her reaction was delayed, as she first thought that there was “nothing so very remarkable in that” (7). After all, it was only a rabbit, so it was not a closeness that she had been taught to fear. She was apparently unsurprised by the fact that the rabbit walked on his hind feet talking aloud to himself, for she did not “think it so very much out of the way” (7). A talking rabbit was out of the common way, but not excessively so to a child who was immersed in literature featuring talking animals: “it all seemed quite natural” (7). The double meaning of the idiom also suggested the opposite: The rabbit was at least somewhat inconvenient, and it would have been better if it were more sufficiently “out of the way.” The rabbit crossed Alice’s line of acceptable inconvenience by wearing a waistcoat and using a watch, goading her into pursuing—we might say policing—the transgression. In turn, her attempt to police the transgression precipitated her descent down the proverbial rabbit-hole. “[M]ost of the Wonderland animals stand in some danger of being exploited or eaten” (Auerbach 320), but it was not always clear that

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  45 Alice was safe, because being human no longer meant the same thing. This alternate world was extremely “confusing” because “all the things [were] alive” (Carroll 2013 [1865]: 65), turning a simple game of croquet into chaos. The living flamingoes resisted being instrumentalized as mallets, the hedgehog balls evaded putting, and the pickets walked off. Every expected relation was in question, so that Alice began by wondering “Do cats eat bats?” and then immediately considered the inverse possibility, “Do bats eat cats?” (9). Any being, and thing, may eat any other being or thing, essentially upending the anthropocentric interspecies hierarchy of Alice’s Victorian world. In his second appearance, the White Rabbit transgressed expectations even further, for he was yet more “splendidly dressed,” carrying a tool (a fan) and “a pair of white kid-gloves” (14). The non-carnivore rabbit appropriated human power over other animals in wearing the pelt of another (much larger) animal. Yet worse, the double entendre with gloves of “kid” ominously intimated that a rabbit might dare to wear the skin of a human child. When the Rabbit confused Alice for his maid, she instinctively rejected the imposition, because as a human being she felt immediately “How queer it seem[ed]… to be going messages for a rabbit!” (26). Would this inversion cross over, would Dinah be “sending me on messages next” (26)? She entertained this possibility, but concluded that in the Victorian world “I don’t think…that they’d let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people about like that!” (26; my emphasis). Significantly, prior to this, Alice had referred to Dinah, “the best cat in the world” (25), exclusively as “she,” but at this moment of frightful loss of power in relation to the Rabbit, she reasserted the anthropocentric allocation of pronoun for things to her erstwhile companion. As the animals’ power (to use and exploit, to not be used or exploited) rose, Alice’s diminished, shrinking alongside her size as she sampled different foods and drinks. At one point, she exclaimed plaintively that she might have shrunk to the point that her personhood might be in question: “Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!” (Carroll 12). Her attempts to establish her identity were tied up with asserting power based on her ontology, as she later wondered “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle” (15). Perhaps, she conjectured, she had become another little girl she knew, but she rejected this unappealing possibility, “for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh, she knows such a very little!” (15). This led her to immediately conclude, “Besides, she’s she, and I’m I” (15). But pronouns could not save her now. As she continued to spiral, she saw perhaps the advantage of apparently having so much agency in the question, and cleverly concluded that she would “stay down here” until she acquired a more desirable identity: and if “I like being that person, I’ll come up” (16). Meanwhile, her body shrank so much that it chose, of its own accord, to take the position of

46  Keridiana Chez the Rabbit: “As she said this she looked down at her hands, and was surprised to see that she had put on one of the Rabbit’s little white kidgloves while she was talking” (17). At this moment, she could have been the Rabbit and the Rabbit could have been her. This bout of shrinking was, she realized, due to her use of the Rabbit’s fan—again a less-thanconscious choice to behave like an animal that in turn was behaving like a human—and she ceased “just in time to save herself from shrinking away altogether” (17). Although she resisted every instance of relative powerlessness, Alice was also uncomfortable with thinking of herself as significantly more powerful in relation to other species in Wonderland. Accused by the Pigeon of being a Serpent, for example, she vehemently rejected the assignation. At this point she had attained a great size, towering over the forest canopy, and was forced to admit that “little girls eat eggs quite as much as serpents do” (Carroll 42). The Pigeon concluded that therefore little girls must be “a kind of serpent: that’s all I can say” (42). In essence, Alice found it distasteful to be less powerful yet refused to admit that this would necessarily mean that she possessed and desired more power, which power was typically asserted through the consumption of other species. Ultimately, Alice woke herself back to the seemingly stable reality of human supremacy by reasserting her “full size” (95). The card soldiers and their willful Queen were dismissed by her declaration, “Who cares for you? [….] You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” (95). Though posited as an uncontrolled fall, the White Rabbit’s alternate universe had been a choice all along, and a choice she had the prerogative to escape. In its relative unimportance, the nineteenth-century rabbit exposes how remarkably easy it is for the rational human animal to not only live with arbitrary inconsistency but to quite openly articulate such inconsistencies without any apparent damage to an impregnable sense of human moral, agential, and cognitive superiority. Despite the very chartable shiftiness of these boundaries, the Victorians maintained the illusion that they were clear, fixed, and reasonably justified, but looking at the nineteenth-century rabbit what we see are the fissures and self-serving motives barely concealed, a less bashful anthropocentrism that we have since covered over with several more layers of guilt-motivated rationalizations. Perhaps because of their particular constellation of traits—cute, warm, and soft but apparently inexpressive and non-agential—rabbits’ lives were complicated, and cut short by what was declared to be the animal’s greater “usefulness” as a dead corpse rather than a living creature. The exploitation of animal bodies inexorably shaped the treatment of living animals and for rabbits, such that in an unusual transgression of the taboo on eating what we love, those conditional exceptions who were useful as beloved pets remained exceptions only until they were used as pie.

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  47

Notes 1 Rabbits likely gained this reputation because of their propensity to produce large and frequent litters, which “partly compensates for [their] vulnerability”: annual warren mortality rates can reachninety percent, with wild European rabbits only having about a 50 percent chance of surviving past eight months of age (Davis and DeMello 2003: 13). 2 See my chapter titled “Creating Carnivores and Cannibals: Animal Feed and the Regulation of Grief.” 3 See 93 and Chapter 8 in this volume. 4 Published in London, translated from French. 5 For a different take, see Anna Kerchy’s “Alice’s Non-Anthropocentric Ethics: Lewis Carroll as a Defender of Animal Rights” in Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 88 (Autumn 2018), at https://journals.openedition.org/ cve/3909.

Bibliography Auerbach, Nina. “Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child.” In Alice in Wonderland, edited by Donald J. Gray, 315–22. New York: Norton, 2013. Berquin, Arnaud. “The Rabbit.” In The Children’s Friend, edited by William C. Wilson, 101. London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1861. https://books. google.com/books?id=YR0FAAAAQAAJ. Browne, Maggie. My Own Album of Animals. London: Cassell, 1884. https:// books.google.com/books?id=aQwGAAAAQAAJ. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: and Through the Looking-­ Glass. New York: Macmillan Company, 1897. https://books.google.com/ books?id=XlsVAQAAIAAJ. Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. 1871. Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company, 1897. “Cats, Dogs, and Other Household Pets.” In The Boys’ and Girls’ Book of Science, 333–39. London: Strahan, 1881. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t8rb6xv5b. Chez, Keridiana. “Creating Carnivores and Cannibals: Animal Feed and the Regulation of Grief.” In Mourning Animals: Rituals and Practices Surrounding Animal Death, edited by Margo De Mello, 143–49. East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2016. Claude, Mary S. Natural History in Stories for Little Children. London: Addey, 1854. https://books.google.com/books?id=OAEGAAAAQAAJ. Cupples, Mrs. George. Mamma’s Stories about Domestic Pets. London: Nelson, 1876. https://books.google.com/books?id=n-lDAQAAMAAJ. Davis, Susan E., and Margo DeMello. Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature. New York: Lantern, 2003. Dickenson, Victoria. Rabbit. London: Reaktion, 2014. Dunkin, Henry William. “About Rabbits.” In Golden Childhood: The Little People’s Own Pleasure-Book of Delight and Instruction, 38–39. London: Ward, Lock, and Company, 1880. https://archive.org/details/ keepsakepictureb00londiala/page/n10. Flegel, Monica. “‘I Declare I Never Saw so Lovely an Animal!’: Beauty, Individuality, and Objectification in Nineteenth-Century Animal Autobiographies.”

48  Keridiana Chez In Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, 147–66. London: Palgrave, 2017. Fudge, Erica. Animal. London: Reaktion, 2002. Fudge, Erica. Pets. London: Acumen, 2008. Fudge, Erica. “Renaissance Animal Things.” In Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective, edited by Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist, 41–56. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012. Harris, W. C. “Undifferentiated Bunnies: Setting Psychic Boundaries in the Animal Stories of Beatrix Potter, Jack London, and Ernest Seton.” Victorian Review 23, no. 1 (Summer, 1997): 62–113. “Harry’s First School-Days.” In The Children’s Prize, edited by J. Erskine Clarke. London: Gardner, 50–51, 70–73, 84–88, 1874. https://books.google. com/books?id=QCYGAAAAQAAJ. Herzog, Hal. Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard to Think Straight About Animals. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. Jackson, Thomas. Our Dumb Neighbours; or, Conversations of a Father with His Children on Domestic and Other Animals. London: Partridge, 1870. https://books.google.com/books?id=D6BbAAAAQAAJ. Josephine (pseud.). Our Children’s Pets. London: Partridge, 1865. https:// books.google.com/books?id=EcYBAAAAQAAJ. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Kutzer, M. Daphne. “A Wildness Inside: Domestic Space in the Work of Beatrix Potter.” Lion and the Unicorn 21, no. 2 (April, 1997): 201–14. Lanes Selma G. Down the Rabbit Hole: Adventures and Misadventures in the Realm of Children’s Literature. New York: Atheneum 1971. Martin, William. The Holiday Book. London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1865. https://books.google.com/books?id=tSTxkKMfkGkC. McDonell, Jennifer. “Bull’s-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide in Oliver Twist.” In Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, 109–28. London: Palgrave, 2017. Miller, Thomas. The Child’s Country Story Book. London: Routledge, 1868. https://books.google.com/books?id=ftgBAAAAQAAJ. Potter, Beatrix. The Complete Tales. New York: Penguin, 2006. Sandras, Mathilde. Snowdrop; or, The Adventures of a White Rabbit. London: Nelson, 1873. https://books.google.com/books?id=o5oNAAAAQAAJ. Savoy, Eric. “The Signifying Rabbit.” Narratives 32 (1995): 188–209. Scott, Carole. “Between Me and the World: Clothes as Mediator between Self and Society in the Work of Beatrix Potter.” Lion and the Unicorn 16, no. 2 (December, 1992): 192–98. Scheftel, Susan. “The Child’s Child: Theory of Mind in the Work of Beatrix Potter.” American Imago 17, no. 2 (Summer, 2014): 161–72. Taylor, Chloë. “The Precarious Lives of Animals: Butler, Coetzee, and Animal Ethics.” Philosophy Today 52 (2008): 60–72. Taylor, Chloë. “Respect for the Animal Dead.” In Animal Death, edited by Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, 85–101. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013.

Rabbits in Victorian Children’s Literature  49 Tucker, Charlotte Maria (pseud. A.L.O.E.). The Children’s Garland: A  Picture Story Book. London: Nelson, 1875. https://books.google.com/books? id=A2AOAAAAQAAJ. Weir, Harrison. Harrison Weir’s Pictures of Birds and Other Family Pets. London: Religious Tract Society, 1879. https://books.google.com/books? id=FFAOAAAAQAAJ. White, Adam. The Instructive Picture Book, or a Few Attractive Lessons from the Natural History of Animals. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1859. https://books.google.com/books?id=ofBhAAAAcAAJ. Wood, John George. “Rabbits.” In Young Angler, Naturalist, and Pigeon and Rabbit Fancier, 99–110. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, 1860. https://books.google.com/books?id=uqUXAAAAYAAJ. Wood, John George. Our Domestic Pets. London: Routledge, 1870. https:// books.google.com/books?id=h0oDAAAAQAAJ.

3 “In Friendly Chat with Bird or Beast … Mixing Together Things Grave and Gay” Desireful Animals and Humans in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass Anna Koustinoudi I wish the creatures wouldn’t be so easily offended! (Carroll 1916 [1865]: 47)

In his introductory, untitled rhyme-song to his first Alice book, Lewis Carroll makes a significant statement of purpose in terms of presenting his readership with the thematic core of his book. This concerns “the dream-child moving through a land / Of wonders wild and new, / In friendly chat with bird or beast—/ and half believe it true” (11), thus placing his young heroine, right from the beginning, within the context of an encounter, one between a human child and an array of nonhuman animals. He also sets the terms for such an encounter, announcing it to be one of mutual exchange, in the form of “a friendly chat with bird or beast.” He consequently positions the two parties (as well as himself) within a dialectical relationship informed by the function and politics of the desiring gaze, which as he later on claims in his “AN EASTER GREETING TO EVERY CHILD WHO LOVES ‘ALICE,’” engages in “mixing together things grave and gay” (Carroll 240). Such an endeavor, as Carroll is quick to explain, does not clash with the period’s pervasive religious ethic, for as he says that he does not “believe God means us thus to divide life into two halves—to wear a grave face on Sunday, and to think it out-of-place to even so much mention Him on a weekday” (241). This is a rather enigmatic and, at a first glance, redundant explanation when, in both Alice books, there is no reference whatsoever to any sort of religious discourse. On the contrary, the human-animal encounter and the ensuing mutuality of gazing at each other are mostly imbued with a materialist ethos and an empiricist rationale (though in the realm of the fantastic) rarely to be found, if at all, in most children’s literary texts of the time.

Desireful Animals in Carroll  51 Naturally, the emphasis of the Enlightenment on the sovereignty of reason and empirical observation, as well as the scientific and industrial practices that followed, produced powerful forms of reaction and resistance on the part of an up-to-that time dominant Creationist world­ view, of which Carroll, as an accomplished scientist (and polymath), was well aware, along with his religious background and clerical status. This might partly be the reason why Carroll saw it fit to explain his literary intentions in advance. He thus paved the way to the creation of a novel, anti-didactic trend of literary writing for the young readers of his day, which reads peculiarly proto-modernist, not only in terms of its thematic concerns, but also because of its positing an authentic visual relationship between human and animal that reiterates the concerns of today’s capitalist modernity. This proto-modernist exchange of gazes between child and beast is characterized by mutuality and difference, for in the Alice books, “both human and animal look across an abyss of non-­ comprehension; they are familiar but not the same; their knowledge and their ignorance of each other are similar but not identical; there is recognition but also distinction; address but secrecy; expectation but also surprise” (Armstrong 2011: 183).1 According to Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, “Victorian literature, strongly influenced by developments in science and by a scientific or empirical worldview, represents a remarkable opportunity to trace the history of what Derrida calls the ‘rupture’ between human and nonhuman” (2002: 4). Over time, the fields of literature and literary studies have been among those which have been proven particularly prolific in producing a plethora of texts, including children’s literature, written for the education as well as the entertainment of the young offspring of humankind. Throughout the eighteenth century2 and during the Victorian period, many of these texts attempted to question, problematize, and rethink the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presence and agency, both of which have loomed, often uncannily, in the interstices of human civilization and its cultural output.3 In particular, literary texts intended for and addressed to children, from fables and fairy tales to contemporary children’s literature, have abounded with animal figures, real, mythical, and/or imagined. With an eye to educate, instruct, and gradually initiate children into the world of adulthood, but also to sensitize them to contemporary social, environmental, and identity issues, literary texts for children—through linguistic play, allegory, and parody— have also aimed at familiarizing adults with the vicissitudes of childhood desires and psychic state(s) of children, and, as in the case of Carroll’s Alice books, also with those of animals. Although they officially belong to the field of children’s literature, written for and marketed with the very young reader in mind, they also serve as explanatory paths toward understanding child psychology through the use of characters from the

52  Anna Koustinoudi animal kingdom with anthropomorphism being the most common attribute of these animal characters. The very title of this anthology, Victorian Animals and Their Children in Victorian Culture, implies an alternative hierarchy. It reflects a less anthropocentric position, adopting, rather, a more zoocentric stance within the animal-human studies debate, namely a focus on the way animals, as subjects in their own right, treat, react, and respond to humans, rather than vice-versa, thus clearly placing the term/category “animal” and its related agency issues on a par with or above that of “human” within a proper Victorian context, but, unavoidably, from a postmodern and/or posthuman perspective. The title, therefore, strengthens the book’s emphasis on the animal perspective in the literary texts under examination. This less anthropocentric perspective is definitely present in Carroll’s Alice books, where the so-called “Three Great Kingdoms” of (nonhuman) animal, vegetable, and mineral not only underlie their organization, but are also placed in a position of power—they systematically acquire almost complete power over the human animal (a human child in our case)—often assuming an instructive position toward her, but, quite often, also toward each other. It is more than once throughout the Alice books that the young heroine voices her amazement as she acknowledges her Wonderland animal companions to be her uncannily erudite teachers as, for instance, during her encounter with the Mock Turtle when she thinks: “How the creatures order one about, and make one repeat lessons! … I might as well be at school at once” (95), as well as when she is engaged in a lengthy conversation with the Mouse, which reprimands her for failing to attend in proper studently fashion: “You are not attending!” said the mouse to Alice severely, “What are you thinking of?” (33). The creatures, moreover, turn out to be well versed in the art of irony and sarcasm, while they are often seen to be posing philosophical questions and dilemmas that become real mind traps for the human child as, for example, with Alice’s encounter with Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—­ that’s all.” Alice was too much puzzled to say anything…. (186) Prior to our contemporary, hyper-globalized, postmodern times, the long nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented period of intense industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, a time when a diversity of

Desireful Animals in Carroll  53 new trends challenged the dominant worldviews of the mid-1860s, when Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was first published. For the Victorians living through this transitional period, shifts in perception became imperative; technical marvels rendered the transport of people and goods considerably faster and far-off lands more accessible, while new scientific paradigms challenged old assumptions about the natural order and the, up to that time, almost undisputable hierarchies postulated by the creationist model of the Great Chain of Being. It is within this historical, cultural, scientific, and religious context that Carroll, in his uniquely humorous and witty ways, sends his Alice “underground” on a journey to the Antipodes in order for her (and for him) to examine some of the most puzzling conundrums of the human condition. While the Alice books were primarily addressed to a child audience, they soon started to attract the attention of an adult audience, thus rendering Carroll “a crossover writer,” a term that Mike Cadden uses to refer to the writer who writes for both children and adults (2004: 141). The mid-nineteenth century has often been characterized as a prime time, “a first Golden Age” of children’s literature (Purchase 2006: 16), with middle-class families keeping their children at home or at school much longer. With literacy rates having considerably expanded, along with the development of more advanced printing and publishing methods, there was a notable increase in Victorian readership, which also had an impact on the sheer number of books produced for Children.4 Childhood came to be viewed as more and more a distinct state, with its own proper interests, pastimes, and pleasures. Although middle-class children were essentially sheltered from the world of adults, they were all the while undergoing constant preparation to enter its challenges properly educated and meticulously imbued with all those Victorian values that would ensure the smooth, unobstructed continuity of the British Empire. Middle-class parents were willing to spend money on books— there were, as yet, no children’s libraries—and for the first time, a large number of books other than works of information and moral instruction were written for children.5 Many of the classics of children’s literature which were produced in the Victorian period were not the kind of books offered to the majority of children of the time, certainly not to those of the working class who lacked basic literacy skills, targeting, instead, those of the aristocracy and the middle class.6 However, when writing for children began to be taken more seriously, it was not as an art, but as an instrument of moral suasion, practical instruction, Christian propaganda, and social control. In the meantime, influential commentators of the period such as John Ruskin in his essay “Fairy Stories” (1868) began to voice fears that some children’s literature, particularly that of an overly didactic nature, might actually disturb what he called “the sweet peace of youth” (quoted in Purchase 155). It was within this context that Carroll’s Alice books heralded a departure from familiar religious and

54  Anna Koustinoudi moral stereotypes, questioning Victorian values and certainties, while also introducing scientific skepticism and an alternative purposeless, fragmented world full of diverse creatures and endless possibilities. Struggling with issues of alterity, identity, and alternative versions of logic in her effort to make sense of the intricate nature-culture relations between her up to now unchallenged human status and an unusually articulate, often aggressive and rude multispecies world around her, Carroll’s Alice comes to realize that “she had never been so much contradicted in her life before, and she felt that she was losing her temper” (47). Experiencing such ambivalent feelings is only natural for the human child heroine who finds herself placed in a world where rabbit holes turn out to be intense mind-bending experiences, and mirrors, as transparent mediums, fail to reflect familiar reality but, on the contrary, an underside of it, firmly placed in the domain (and in the grip) of fantasy, exposed in “a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind every day experience” (Carter 1974: 122). Being at the mercy of numerous nonhuman creatures, indigenous, exotic,7 and extinct, Alice, immersed in uncertainty and full of surprise, but at the same time duly articulate and replete with spontaneous human confidence, becomes a witness (and a co-protagonist in) to a prolonged course of events during which familiar hierarchies are overturned, species are grotesquely mingled and/or hybridized, and linguistic properties and conventions are severely challenged. At the same time, recurrent behavioral patterns displayed by representative species of the so-called animal kingdom oscillate between a humane and inhumane course of action. The famous Walrus and the Carpenter poem scene, where both a human and a nonhuman creature jointly engage in an act of utter violence against another species (the oysters), is particularly telling of this as it reiterates, by re-enacting, the survival of the fittest Darwinian discourse of the period: “It seems a shame,” the Walrus said, “To play them such a trick, After we’ve brought them out so far, And made them trot so quick!” The Carpenter said nothing but The butter’s spread too thick! “I weep for you,” the Walrus said: “I deeply sympathize.” With sobs and tears he sorted out Those of the largest size, Holding his pocket-handkerchief Before his streaming eyes.

Desireful Animals in Carroll  55 “O Oysters,” said the Carpenter, “You’ve had a pleasant run! Shall we be trotting home again?” But answer came there none— And this was scarcely odd, because They’d eaten every one. (161) Carroll’s textual, microcosmic menagerie of creatures is not only given its own distinct voice, but almost total authority and agency over Alice Liddell. Speaking of and for themselves, the creatures resist familiar modes of classification and categorization,8 perform only at their own will and not because they have been trained to do so, behaving as speaking subjects in their own right. To Hayden White’s question, “[if we could] ever narrativize without moralizing” (1980: 2), the answer could be a positive one, when it comes to such “defining cultural myth[s] of distorted reality” (Parker 2010: 137) as those created by the logician, mathematician, and word player Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.9 Published in the aftermath of Charles Darwin’s publication of Origin of Species (1859), Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass (1871) did not respond directly, of course, to the scientific evolutionary debate of the time; through the subterfuge of fantasy, Carroll used his Alice texts as spaces of exploration on the possibilities and implications of a post-Darwinian understanding of his own era’s cultural nurture/nature controversy and its impact on child development and behavior. Inundated with numerous land, sea, and flying animal characters, whose names/signifiers are all written with a capital first letter, thus being endowed with full character status in a world of subversion where nothing seems to be the way it looks, the Alice books pose fundamental questions of (child) identity formation, self-discovery processes, power relation tactics and regimes, representation, Otherness, and desire in the realm of fantasy. Fantasy resists the self/other distinction, often playing out the eruption of Otherness into the carefully guarded world of reality, employing word-play, parody, and inverse modes of logic (as in the cases of the Caucus Race and Alice’s conversation with the Gnat) amidst a constant process of physical and linguistic displacement. Ιn the words of Gillian Beer: The Alice books present not so much the carnivalesque “world upside down” as the world sideways on, an egalitarian zone in which everything becomes possible and nothing is unlikely because all forms of being have presence and can argue: doors, time, eggs, queens, caterpillars, cats and hatters, oysters, gnats, and little girls—all have their say. Alice herself is the radical principle of the books: she

56  Anna Koustinoudi represents infinite readiness. She is always curious, always inquiring, and always able to reason her way through the predicaments she finds herself in. (2016: 4) Alice’s two journeys, first to the Wonderland and then to the specular kingdom of the other side of the Looking-Glass, constitute a process of constant displacement (both physical and linguistic) and permanent deferral. The fundamental query about the meaning of being human in relation to the status of being an animal traverses both texts as a constant theme throughout, while the entrenched notion of human exceptionalism over every other form of life is constantly made to stand upon its head through inversion, subversion, and alternative perspectives of looking at things. Right from the start, Alice, is not only subjected into a process of constant physical change, but is simultaneously thrown into the habit of drawing parallels as she embarks on a series of unavoidable comparisons between her newly discovered underside surroundings and her familiar human world. “How queer it seems,” Alice keeps thinking, “to be going messages for a rabbit!”10 She supposes that Dinah will “be sending [her] on messages next.” only she does not suppose, “that they would let Dinah stop in the house if it began ordering people like that!” (36). At the same time, the human child instinctively realizes, with genuine Darwinian insight, that if she is to keep body and soul together, it is important to learn to properly adapt to these creaturely heterotopias by exploiting every means at her disposal toward the goal of survival. “It is, therefore, of the highest importance to gain a clear insight into the means of modification and coadaptation” (Darwin 1997 [1859]: 18), to use Darwin’s own terms, which she does, all the while being aware of how “everything is so-out-of-the-way down here” (22), but also, how painfully imperative modification and coadaptation seem to be for all species. For Alice, as well as for her creaturely companions, moods and emotions are under a constant process of fluctuation along with her bodily shape and size as well as her mental state. Certainty alternates with doubt, faith with distrust, self-confidence with fear, and curiosity gives in to mild anger and regret for her having chosen to follow the White Rabbit, after all, yet it is human curiosity and the spirit of adventure that finally prevail and propel the narrative: “‘It was much pleasanter at home,’ thought poor Alice, ‘When one wasn’t always growing larger and smaller, and being ordered about by mice and rabbits. I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit-hole—and yet—and yet—it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me!’” (37). Carroll initiates his reader into his Alice books through the device of seduction. Alice’s very first animal encounter with the White Rabbit is crucially decisive, as it marks a passage, a transition into the Otherness

Desireful Animals in Carroll  57 of the Wonderland, whereas in Through the Looking-Glass it is under the pretext of the black kitten’s getting into mischief that the charm of the drawing-room mirror, as an opening leading to the other side, is triggered. The scene of Alice’s descent to what lies at the far end of the rabbit hole could certainly be described as one of seduction, with the anthropomorphic White Rabbit (dressed in a waistcoat and holding a watch) functioning as a skillful seducer. Once it has lured its victim down the rabbit hole, it disappears, leaving her behind to wander about its creaturely madness and inverse logic. Far from resisting, Alice is all too willing to be seduced, and subsequently (albeit with occasional reluctance), abused, but also instructed by a world in which familiar certainties falter and human supremacy is placed at the mercy of and to the test of a variety of species: Mammals, serpents, sea animals, amphibians, insects, winged, even impossible hybrids (e.g., the Mock Turtle), “and several other curious creatures” (27). The Caterpillar scene is one, among various others, where identity issues as viewed by a human and nonhuman animal come to the fore. Alice’s perception of selfhood and identity is to be seriously questioned and redefined in most-modern fashion by what could be seen as an inferior species representative. The Cartesian notion of an authentic, transcendent, atomic self as a stable ontological given are challenged, only to be replaced by the notion of the human subject as a decentered entity, as a mere effect of the signifier: The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning but I think I must have been changed several times since then.” “What do you mean by that?” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!” “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.” “I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar. “I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” “It isn’t,” said the Caterpillar. “Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,” said Alice; “but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know— and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?”

58  Anna Koustinoudi “Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar. “Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,” said Alice; “all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.” “You!” said the Caterpillar contemptuously. “Who are you?” (44–45) A postmodern reading of Alice’s encounter and subsequent conversation with the caterpillar would place the Cartesian “I think therefore I am” model into a wholly new dimension11 and within a different frame of interpretation. Paradoxically, it is through the mouth of a nonhuman creature, which insists on repeating the crucial question “Who are you?” that the problematic of the self in its multifarious manifestations, becomes a recurrent motif—and a very disconcerting one it is—in Carroll’s Wonderland. The principle of the rational, unified, stable, sharply delimited subject, as famously theorized by the philosophers of the Enlightenment no longer holds. It receives a severe blow to its narcissistic infrastructure and becomes terra incognita for the child, since it is exposed to be only partially accessible, susceptible to forces beyond its own cognition. Sigmund Freud observed in the 1930s, echoing the eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-century philosophers’ conviction, “there is nothing we are more certain of than the feeling of our self, our own ego” (Freud 1997 [1930]: 2), though he was quick to add that this is “a deceptive appearance” thus echoing the psychoanalytic turn in the field of the existential debate. The human child’s attempts to convince the Caterpillar, and soon after the Pigeon, of the importance of one’s sense of selfhood are only met with scornful indifference (“Not a bit,” said the Caterpillar)12 for an unstable ever-changing “selfhood” leading to total metamorphosis is a familiar process to the specific species and thus no source for concern. As for the pigeon’s reaction, it is one of total disbelief against Alice’s assertion of her being a little girl, rather than a serpent: “Ugh, Serpent!” “But I’m not a serpent, I tell you!” said Alice. “I’m a—I’m a—” “Well! What are you?” said the Pigeon. “I can see you are trying to invent something!” “I—I’m a little girl,” said Alice, rather doubtfully, as she remembered the number of changes she had gone though, that day. (50) As with the Rabbit hole, once she has entered the other side of the Looking-­Glass and just before her encounter with the talking flowers, Alice is once again haunted by doubt and regret about getting there in the first place, still she has no intention of getting back home, driven by the desire to know what lies there: “‘It’s no use talking about it now,’ ­A lice said, looking up at the house and pretending it was arguing

Desireful Animals in Carroll  59 with her. ‘I’m not going in again yet. I know I should have to get through the Looking-glass again—back into the old room—and there’d be an end of all my adventures!’” (133). As has often been suggested, the second Alice book Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There “functions as an intricate metaphor of what happens to Alice as she becomes a subject / object” (Coats 2004: 84). This is far from being a smooth process for there is a counter force at work toward inverting completion and the animal kingdom factor has a lot to do with it, since Alice is persistently contradicted as regards her ontological status. The Lion and the Unicorn scene, where the two are fighting for the crown, is particularly telling on the subject. The Unicorn is the winner of the fight and as he is sauntering by: “[H]is eye happened to fall upon Alice: he turned round instantly, and stood for some time looking at her with an air of the deepest disgust.” “What—is—this?” he said at last. “This is a child!” Haigha replied eagerly, coming in front of Alice to introduce her, and spreading out both his hands toward her in an Anglo-Saxon attitude. “We only found it today. It’s as large as life, and twice as natural.” “I always thought they were fabulous monsters!” said the Unicorn. “Is it alive?” “It can talk,” said Haigha solemnly. The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said “Talk, child.” Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: “Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!” “Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “if you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” “Yes, if you like,” said Alice.… The Lion had joined them while this was going on: he looked very tired and sleepy, and his eyes were half shut. “What’s this!” he said, blinking lazily at Alice, and speaking in a deep hollow tone that sounded like the tolling of a great bell. “Ah, what is it now?” the Unicorn cried eagerly. “You’ll never guess! I couldn’t.” The Lion looked at Alice wearily. “Are you animal—or v­ egetable— or mineral?” he said, yawning at every other word. “It’s a fabulous monster!” the Unicorn cried out, before Alice could reply. (199–200) By means of a Carrollian gesture of inversion, Alice is placed in the disadvantageous position of a guinea pig to be tested under the scientific

60  Anna Koustinoudi microscope of the creatures, in their eagerness to classify her species. The mythical Unicorn looks at Alice “dreamily,” but it is in a rather masterly tone that he curtly orders Alice to speak (“Talk, child”). He subsequently objectifies Alice by calling her “a fabulous monster,” just like Alice of course, when she admits to believing too “that Unicorns were fabulous monsters,” while the Lion, echoing the Darwinian scientific discourse of the period poses the ontologically significant question: “Are you animal—or vegetable—or mineral?,” only to receive the Lion’s, loud assertion: “it’s a fabulous master,” with Alice silently remaining in the margins of the conversation unable to answer for herself. Throughout Carroll’s two books, Alice is struggling not only to rethink and revise received notions of interpreting the world around her, but, moreover, to develop and enhance her adaptation skills in her encounters with different species and to conform to their rationale and habits of story-telling, while these occur in quick succession and in various forms amidst an ever-changing spatial context. At the same time, Alice is marked as that desiring, non-specular, objectified subject exposed to the all-seeing gaze of the specular kingdom of both Wonderland and Looking-Glass land that causes both her creaturely masters and us, as readers, to desire, while at the same time, “ensuring the perpetuation of that desire precisely because it is impossible to attain, and not merely prohibited” (Coats 9).13 As Seth Lerer puts it: Notions, things, or creatures are animated into action. And once animated, they become not friends or playmates but superiors. We stand, in Carroll’s words, subordinate, submissive, and in waiting to the “sovereign will and pleasure” of these creatures—a condition vivified to brilliant narrative throughout the Alice books. For there, the very life of Wonderland lies in the ways in which strange things not only come alive—playing cards or toys—but how they come alive to rule. (2008: 196) After various mishaps and near-death experiences, Alice masters the “rules,” the conventions and the regulations of the two Wonderlands, by learning to control her growth and mental capacities—“putting herself into an ideal functional relation with the physical world around her” (Beer 42). In other words, she becomes adept in the Darwinian art of adaptation that secures her survival, in a predominantly hostile environment ruled by a host of curious creatures by means of her social skills of ingratiation and flattery in order to cope with their all-seeing gaze of authority. The child, who is much more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of culture and language than is the adult, has to become a prodigiously open creature, using the challenges of creaturely Otherness to organize her inner

Desireful Animals in Carroll  61 as well as her outer world in order to co-exist harmoniously with all life species. As Derrida would have it: As with every bottomless gaze, as with the eyes of the other, the gaze called “animal” offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the a-human, the ends of man, that is to say, the border crossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself. And in these moments of nakedness, as regards the animal, everything can happen to me, I am like a child ready for the apocalypse, I am (following) the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling and the verdict. (381) As dialogic texts, Carroll’s books are constructed not as a whole of a single consciousness simply absorbing other consciousnesses (those of the animal and the mineral kingdom), but as a whole that is informed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other. “The animal,” Foucault argues, in The Order of Things “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” (1970: 277). Carroll, who was well versed in the scientific debates of his time, clearly echoes these ideas when he places his child heroine under the rule and instruction of his Wonderland creatures, thus reversing the stereotypical human-animal hierarchies. He knew, indeed, what he was doing when he sent her on her journey to the creatures’ territorial dominion, where “already the knowing animals are aware that we [as humans] are not really at home in our interpreted world” (Rilke 1987: 151).

Notes 1 As John Berger was to observe much later: The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary… Man becomes aware of himself returning the look. The animal scrutinizes him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension This is why the man can surprise the animal Yet the animal—even if domesticated—can also surprise the man The man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension… [w]hen he is being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him His recognition of this is what makes the look of the animal familiar And yet the animal is distinct, and can never be confused with man Thus, a power is ascribed to the animal, comparable with human power but never coinciding with it The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man. (1980: 2–3)

62  Anna Koustinoudi 2 Keith Thomas observes that it was mainly during the eighteenth century that an anthropocentric perspective of the natural world began to give way, partly through the rise of natural history, to a less human-centered view of existence. Although it was generally believed within both the classical and Christian traditions that man was more perfect than other creatures, “there was a marked lack of agreement,” he notes, “as to just where man’s unique superiority lay” (1983: 31). 3 As Donna Haraway notes, “Outside the security checkpoint of bright reason, outside the apparatuses of reproduction of the sacred image of the same, these “others” have a remarkable capacity to induce panic in the centers of power and self-certainty. Terrors are regularly expressed in hyperphilias and hyperphobias, and examples of this are no richer than in the panics roused by the Great Divide between animals (lapdogs) and machines (laptops) in the early twenty-first century C.E.” (2008: 10). 4 As Sean Purchase observes, “Child literacy was further encouraged after the Education Act (1870) had made education compulsory” (154). However, it was well before that time, by the 1850s, when “children’s books became more and more lavishly illustrated, offer[ing] children a new sort of pleasure, one beyond moral and religious instruction, although typically Victorian controversies over the purpose of children’s literature lingered through the century” (154–55). 5 According to J. A. Cuddon (1997: 138–39), until about the middle of the eighteenth century there was little in the way of books specifically for children, except for didactic works of one sort and another like text books, books of etiquette and work moral edification. For entertainment and diversion middle-class children had Aesop’s Fables, romances, travel books, chapbooks, broadside ballads, or any adult reading they could lay their hands on. In England one of the first people to realize that there was a demand for children’s books was John Newbery, a bookseller who issued a variety of works illustrated with woodcuts or engravings at low prices. His two best-known publications were A Little Pretty Pocket-Book (1744) and The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765). From this point on we find an ever-increasing number of publications for children in Europe and America. Outstanding works are: Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1823); Catherine Sinclair’s Holiday House (1839); Edward Lear’s A Book of Nonsense (1846); Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales, which were translated into English in 1846; Lane’s version of The Arabian Nights (1839–1841); Ruskin’s Kings of the Golden River (1851); Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring (1855); Kingsley’s Water Babies (1853); Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869); and George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871). Probably, however, none of these is as famous as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). 6 The miseries of Victorian childhood are well documented. Being a child in the nineteenth century was often synonymous with a cruel and brutal experience, with huge numbers of working-class children leading impoverished and deprived lives. Those who were lucky enough to escape an early death, either because of malnutrition or disease, were forced to prolonged labor, working, along with their parents in the nation’s factories, mills, and mines, in agriculture, as domestic servants, street vendors, chimney sweeps, and generally under all kinds of hazardous and unhygienic conditions. Vagrancy and crime scored high among them and literacy rates were notoriously low, in fact, almost absent in the entirely of the working class. It was only after Education Act (1870) (see note above), that literacy rates began to rise.

Desireful Animals in Carroll  63 7 According to Celia Brown, “Carroll himself appeared in Alice’s Adventures in the guise of a bird from the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. He pictured himself for the original handwritten version of the story Alice’s Adventures Under Ground as a Dodo swimming along behind Alice in a pool of her own tears, accompanied by a bizarre throng of beasts” (2015: 270). 8 The practice of classifying and the need for creating taxonomies, not just as sources of epistemophilic pleasure, but out of scientific necessity, have always been of paramount importance for humans in general and for the Victorians in particular, especially in view of the scientific advancements of the period. The classifying processes of clustering and sorting, arraying, and discriminating allowed for comparisons that led to the discovery of relationships among species that aren’t immediately obvious as Harriet (1997) and Rebecca Stott (2012) have argued in their respective works. 9 See Mary Jackson’s study of English children’s books up to 1839, Engines of Instruction, Mischief, and Magic (1989), which constitutes an in-depth approach to the transitional books of the mid- and late eighteenth century. Her work takes into account the importance of middle-class virtues and propriety in the development of children’s literature in the eighteenth century (especially in its last two decades). Jackson views the changing attitudes toward what has historically been considered as appropriate children’s reading as a battleground between the stern-faced forces of conservatism and didacticism, and the fun-loving forces of fantasy and levity. She notes: “Children’s books were largely propagandistic in nature. They were tools for social, moral, religious and political conditioning. They represented the enormously powerful collusive efforts of parents, producers of books, an and indeed most adults—in a word of society—to program the young, to engineer conformity to the prevailing cultural values” (16). 10 The White Rabbit teaches Alice one more lesson when he mistakenly addresses her as his housemaid, Mary Ann, which allows her to wonder into the neat little house with a brass plate on the door engraved “W. Rabbit” (36). This induces Alice to think how surprised he will be when he realizes who she really is. To be mistaken by the White Rabbit as belonging to the laboring class sounds half amusing and half disturbing for Alice, however, when the Mock Turtle insinuates that Alice might have learned the domestic task of washing at school, Alice is clearly annoyed. She flatly denies it by indignantly responding, “Certainly not” (87) thus refusing to be placed in the inferior position of a working-class girl. As Jan Susina notes, “Carroll re-­ emphasizes the absurd notion, that members of the upper-middle class might take orders from anyone socially below them by suggesting that it is the equivalent to Alice’s pet cat, Dinah, giving orders to her owners” (2010: 76). 11 The Cartesian “I think therefore I am” model of the rational subject has been re-articulated by Lacan in “The Agency of the Letter in the Un conscious or Reason since Freud” as “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” (1997: 166), thus underscoring the instability of the human subject and its divided nature in terms of the gap opened between the speaking subject and the subject of speech. It is in the same vain that, as he argues, “it’s not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak” (165). This is the exact context in which Carroll haw Alice articulate her doubts and fears prompted as she is by the Caterpillar’s sarcastic attitude. 12 The Caterpillar scene, as well as that other one of Alice’s encounter with the Cheshire cat, bears similarities to Derrida’s account of his cat, whose

64  Anna Koustinoudi indifferent gaze at his naked body in the bathroom causes the philosopher to rethink the concepts of nakedness and shame from a feline perspective, that has no sense of its own “nakedness” nor of the symbolic value that humans attach to the genital area of the human body. In fact, Derrida also makes reference to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland “where Alice observes that it is impossible to have a conversation with cats because whatever you say to them, kittens only purr, rather than purring for ‘yes’ and mewing for ‘no’” (quoted in Simmons and Armstrong 36). 13 Alice’s desire is constantly displaced, never fulfilled and always regulated by the creatures around her, however it drives her on for this is the nature desire. See, for instance, the “Wool and Water” chapter where the Sheep has the upper hand: The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things—but the oddest part of it all was, that whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite empty: though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold. “Things flow about so here!’ she said at last in a plaintive tone, after she had spent a minute or so in vainly pursuing a large bright thing, that looked sometimes like a doll and sometimes like a work-box, and was always in the shelf next above the one she was looking at. “And this one is the most provoking of all—but I’ll tell you what—” she added, as a sudden thought struck her, “I’ll follow it up to the very top shelf of all. It’ll puzzle it to go through the ceiling, I expect!” But even this plan failed: the “thing” went through the ceiling as quietly as possible, as if it were quite used to it.” (95–96) It is quite similar with the scented rushes, which fade and lose their scent once she catches them, while as Alice observes, “there was always a more lovely one that she couldn’t reach” and “The prettiest are always further!” (99).

Bibliography Armstrong, Philip. “The Gaze of Animals.” In Theorizing Animals: Re-­thinking Humanimal Relations, edited by Nik Taylor and Tania Signal, 175–98. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Beer, Gillian. Alice in Space. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Berger, John. About Looking. New York: Random House, 1980. Brown, Celia. “Alice’s Journey Across the Globe into Mysterious Realms: The Significance of the Exotic Animals in Wonderland.” Libri & Liberi 4, no. 2: (2015): 269–90. Cadden, Mike. Ursula K. Le Guin Beyond Genre: Fiction for Children and Adults. New York: Routledge, 2004. Carroll, Lewis. “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass.” 1865 and 1871, respectively. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company, 1916. https://books.google.com/books?id=vYM2AQAAMAAJ. Carter, Angela. Fireworks. London: Vintage, 1974. Coats, Karen. Looking-Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire and Subjectivity in Children’s Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Cuddon, John Anthony. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1977.

Desireful Animals in Carroll  65 Darwin, Charles. On The Origin of Species. 1859. London: Elecbook, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” Translated by David Willis. Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002): 369–418. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1930. Translated by Joan Riviere. New York: Dover Publications, 1994. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Jackson, Mary V. Engines of Destruction, Mischief, and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from Its Beginnings to 1839. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Keith, Thomas. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Penguin, 1983. Lacan, Jacques. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud.” In Écrits: A Selection, edited and translated by Alan Sheridan, 146– 78. London: Routledge, 1997. Lerer, Seth. Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Mazzeno, Laurence W., and Morrison Ronald D., eds. Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017. Parker, Scott. “How Deep Does the Rabbit-Hole Go?: Drugs and Dreams, Perception and Reality.” In Alice and Philosophy: Curiouser and Curiouser, edited by Richard Brian Davies, 137–51. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2010. Purchase, Sean. Key Concepts in Victorian Literature. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006. Rilke, Reiner Maria. The Duino Elegies. New York: Petrarch Press, 1987. Ritvo, Harriet. The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Simmons, Laurence, and Armstrong Philip, eds. Knowing Animals. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Stott, Rebecca. Darwin’s Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Susina, Jan. The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2010. White, Hayden. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 5–27.

4 A Brotherhood of Wolves Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir

Humans have long regarded wolves as pests that kill their livestock, or worse, as bloodthirsty and rapacious outsiders that haunt the borders of towns, hungering for their children. Therefore, in early-modern England, wolves were completely exterminated (Arnds 2015: 86). Today, England still “considers all wild wolves as distinctly foreign and invasive” (93). From the well-known fairytale “Little Red Riding Hood” to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), European and British literature has portrayed these animals in kind. Much like wolves, Jews—who had faced their own expulsion from England in 1290—were believed to prey upon innocent Christians. British literature has thus portrayed the Jews as outsiders to Christian society, perhaps most famously in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1600) and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1839). Images of Jews as animals in European literature could not help but influence Jewish perspectives on animality and identity, and Jewish writers themselves made use of these tropes. But by characterizing Jews as lowly animals, they did not necessarily mean to validate anti-Semitic stereotypes propagated by Europeans (Pines 2018: xv–xvi). Jewish writers also used animals, generally, to critique social issues; Yiddish fables, in particular, endow animals with human qualities to teach moral lessons. For instance, wolves might represent the resilience of Jews who have been persecuted by their Christian neighbors. Overall, Jewish tradition treats wolves positively. Well-known Jewish names include Ze’ev (Hebrew) and Velvel (Yiddish), both of which mean “wolf,” and according to Rabbi Nissan Mindel (1989), a Jewish custom like naming children after animals “is sacred because it is based on the Torah.” Mindel appreciates wolves because “[they] live among their own kind, in a peaceful manner … very often the whole pack happens to be one large family” (n.p.). And in their folktales, Israel Zangwill and Samuel Gordon, Anglo-­ Jewish writers of the late nineteenth century, depict their coreligionists as just such a brotherhood. Jewish folktales have communicated important cultural values for centuries. Every major historical and cultural period of Jewish history has

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  67 created, inherited, and transmitted folktales, beginning with the Hebrew Bible and Israelite folklore and including folk narratives of the Talmud and Midrash; medieval Jewish folktales written in vernacular languages such as Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, and Yiddish; Kabbalistic and Hasidic story-telling; and modern, secular tales of Jewish and Israeli life (Yassif 2015). Yiddish literary themes range from realistic to religious— even supernatural—but the most commonly known are allegorical. Like the Yiddish fabulists, Zangwill and Gordon used animals to symbolize cultural values. British Jews had to contend with Christian perspectives of their community which, in literature, often revolved around images of villainous Jews victimizing British Christians. In their children’s stories, Zangwill and Gordon highlight the importance of community in part by subverting the British stereotype of the Jew as a lone wolf. Instead, they use the fact that wolves are pack animals to teach Jewish communal and religious values. Keeping with Jewish literary traditions and anticipating new directions in Jewish children’s literature, Zangwill’s and Gordon’s folktales inspire love and loyalty with their moral lessons of devotion to the Jewish people.

Classical Jewish Literature Like Jews in other lands and across the generations, Zangwill and Gordon were schooled in religious literature, wherein various animals have particular characteristics that can be compared to human traits. One of the best-known uses of animal symbolism in Jewish literature is found in Genesis. As Jacob, the last of the biblical patriarchs, lay dying in the land of Egypt, he blessed each of one of his sons. In his blessing he compares six of the 12 sons to animals: Judah to a lion, Issachar to a donkey, Dan to a serpent, Naphtali to a deer, Joseph to a wild donkey, and Benjamin to a wolf. The lion and the wolf differ categorically from the other animals listed in Jacob’s blessing. For one, donkeys and deer are domestic herbivores while lions and wolves are hunters. Jacob compares the latter to Judah, who redeemed himself and his brothers from slavery, and Benjamin, the last child of Jacob’s favorite wife, Rachel and, alongside Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son. With Judah, the biblical imagery is clear: The lion denotes regality. Jacob promises that Judah’s brothers will bow to him and that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet” (Gen. 49:10, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures). But with Benjamin, Jacob simply observes, “Benjamin is a rapacious wolf. By morning, he consumes the foe; in the evening, he divides the spoil” (Gen. 49:27). Though the biblical text renders the role of the wolf ambiguous, centuries of commentators have offered interpretations of Benjamin’s blessing. Rashi, the greatest and most universally respected of the medieval

68  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir Torah commentators, points to Onkelos, an ancient Aramaic commentary on the Torah, which provides the following elucidation of Benjamin’s blessing: Benjamin is a strong tribe, (like) the wolf (with) his prey. In his land will dwell the [presence] of the Lord of the world, and the house of the sanctuary will be his inheritance. In the morning the priests offer the lamb continually until the fourth hour, and between the evenings the second lamb, and at eventide will they [the wolves] divide the residue remaining of the offering, and eat, every man, his portion. (Targum Onkelos on Gen. 49:27) Benjamin’s blessing promises that the altar in the Temple will be built in his territory and that holy sacrifices will be made atop the Temple Mount. Mindel clarifies that, like a wolf, “The Altar ‘devoured’ meat and fat, which was offered up to God, reminding the human being to devote his best energies and abilities to the service of the Almighty.” Rashi also suggests that Benjamin’s blessing foreshadows Saul, the future Benjaminite king who “consumed the foe” by “[waging] war on every side against all his enemies … and wherever he turned he defeated them” (1  Sam. 14:47). He observes that two other Benjaminites—Mordecai and Esther—“divide the spoil” of Haman after preventing the genocide of the Jews (Midrash Tanchuma Veyechi 14).1 In sum, the Bible predicts that Benjamin and his descendants will be zealous warriors on behalf of the Jewish people. References to wolves also appear throughout prophetic literature. Beginning with Jeremiah 5, God speaks to the prophet about those Israelites who appear righteous but are, in fact, hypocritical: So I will go to the wealthy and speak with them, Surely they know the way of the Lord, the rules of their God. But they as well had broken the yoke, had snapped the bonds. Therefore, the lion of the forest strikes them down, The wolf of the desert ravages them. A leopard lies in wait by their towns; Whoever leaves them will be torn in pieces. For their transgressions are many, their rebellious acts unnumbered. (Jer. 5:5–6) Ronald Isaacs argues that the wolf “is usually represented as fierce and savage,” and pointing to Jeremiah 5:6, claims it frequently symbolizes corrupt rulers and enemies (2000: 19–20). But here, the wolf is not portrayed as a corrupt ruler; rather, the wolf, along with the lion, functions

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  69 as an instrument of divine justice, a rebuke to the Israelites for failing to serve God. The wolf’s rapaciousness may be all-­consuming, but it acts as an agent of God. The political allegories of prophetic literature commonly portray even the empires that conquered Judea and Samaria as such instruments. The same is true in Habakkuk 1:8, which Isaacs also uses as evidence of wolves’ association with cruelty and corruption. Here, the horses of the Chaldean warriors “are swifter than leopards, fleeter than wolves of the steppe.” Acting on behalf of God, the Chaldean warriors are brought forth in response to the sins of the Israelites (Hab. 1:6). The wolf also figures symbolically in the Midrash, a rabbinical commentary on the Bible. For example, Shabbat is described as “a wolf that preys on that which is before him and behind him” (Mechilta D’Rabbi Yishmael, Yitro, Parasha 7). Technically, Shabbat begins at sundown on Friday evening and lasts until nightfall on Saturday. But in comparing Shabbat to a wolf, the Midrash implies that the “wolf” of Shabbat should “prey” on the hours before sundown Friday or after nightfall Saturday, which would “add from the non-holy to the holy.” Like Benjamin, the holiness of time is “rapacious,” looking to overwhelm and absorb its surroundings. Just as the altar is like a wolf because it consumes meat for holy purposes, so Shabbat is like a wolf because it should consume the non-sacred time surrounding sundown and nightfall. The wolf has thus been depicted in positive ways throughout biblical and prophetic texts. In 1 Samuel and Esther, wolves defend and protect the Jewish people. In Jeremiah and Habakkuk, they might seem vicious at first, but in fact, they perform God’s will when the Israelites stray from righteousness. In rabbinical literature, the wolf sanctifies the profane. Understanding the wolf’s role in these particular texts makes clearer the famous verse from Isaiah 11:6, which reads, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid; the calf, the beast of prey, and the fatling together, with a little boy to herd them.” This verse is traditionally read as an allegory for the coming of the messiah. But rather than representing the wolf as an evil force to be overcome by the messiah, the Bible notes that, at this time, the wolf will simply cease its function as a divine actor. As the Midrash predicts, “In the world to come, the wolf will spin silk and the dog will open gates” (Eccles. Rabbah 1).

Early Modern Yiddish Fables While Jewish life in the Holy Land dwindled in antiquity, by the late middle ages, the locus of Jewish intellectual life was shifting from the broader Middle East to the Rhine Valley and, eventually, to all of central and eastern Europe, which came to be known in Hebrew and Yiddish as Ashkenaz. Though Ashkenaz had no political ruler or fixed geography,

70  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir it had developed an unofficial national language: Yiddish. Hebrew was the medium of prayer, sacred texts, legal affairs, and learned men. Yiddish was the language of everyday, blending elements of Hebrew and Aramaic but also borrowing extensively from Middle High German, proto-Romance, and Slavic languages and written in Hebrew script (Stroumsa 2009: 18). In their sojourns from the Holy Land to North Africa to Europe, Jews had taken with them Judaism as well as Hebrew and the already millennia old textual tradition of stories, poetry, sacred texts, and commentaries, and so the development of Yiddish gave rise to a linguistic and literary tradition that was mostly, but not completely, independent from European literature and culture. Since Ashkenazi Jews were unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet, they typically spoke, read, and wrote in Yiddish, and the first Yiddish book was published in the 1530s (Dauber 2010: 7). Mussar (ethical) texts, religious codes, and biblical commentaries were especially popular, but so were genres of literature more familiar to the wider European world such as fables, chivalric romances, and folktales. Jeremy Dauber observes that “Jewish vernaculars” like Yiddish “combined … grammatical and lexical aspects of the coterritorial language with the sacred Hebrew language” (5). Thus, Yiddish essentially served as a mediator between coterritorial cultures and “a Jewish community often linguistically incapable of textual encounters with non-Jewish neighbors” (6). According to Eli Katz, Yiddish literature is “the product of cultural fusion” because it borrows from the vast Jewish textual tradition but also incorporates genres and conventions of coterritorial literature (1994: 13). Nevertheless, publishing in Yiddish ensured that non-Jewish literature would undergo a certain degree of cultural translation before reaching Jewish audiences. Fables, in particular, illustrate this cultural fusion. In 1697, Rabbi Moses ben Eliezer Wallich published a collection of Yiddish-language fables entitled Seyfer Mesholim, which was an adaptation of a “1591 collection published in Verona called the Ku-bukh,” or Cow Book (Dauber 88). Like most early Yiddish literature, Ku-bukh is loquacious, earthy, humorous, and centered on “the quotidian life of Jews” (Katz 10). Didactic and rhetorical in form, its publication was “not entirely unrelated to the contemporary upsurge in the popularity of anecdotal literature in Germany and elsewhere in Europe” (17). Wallich incorporated many of Ku-bukh’s fables into Seyfer Mesholim, which also includes tales from the Aesopian, Arabic, and German literary traditions (10). The product of cultural fusion, Seyfer Mesholim has much in common with fables from around the world. For example, like most fables, it features a host of talking animals. The Jews of early modern Europe were familiar with animal tales, which had reached them through Jewish and local oral traditions, traditional aggadic (story) collections, and

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  71 European beast epics (Dov Noy 2008). Although fables from non-­Jewish traditions appear in Seyfer Mesholim, Wallich emphasized elements of Jewish folk culture in order to appeal to his audience, comprising parents and children reading (and listening) for the purpose of moral instruction (Katz 22, Dauber 16). Yiddish animal tales are almost always concerned with issues like Jewish communal conduct and are “suited for such explorations behind the veil of allegory” (Dauber 37). Wallich included two fables that revolve around wolves as symbols of communal conduct. As in the Bible, Seyfer Mesholim’s wolves always appear alongside lions. In Fable XV, the lion (who is king of the natural world) is sick, and all the animals of the forest come to his side to try and help him recover. Only the fox appears to be absent; in reality, he is hiding because he is afraid of the wolf (who hates him). Noticing his absence, the wolf exclaims, “Most gracious noble lord … Here are all the beasts, but I see nothing of the fox. He has not stood by you in time of trouble. Therefore send him abroad to foreign lands; to Tortona and Lombardy to find a remedy; to Candia for good malmsey. They will refresh you and you will soon be well. The fox is very good at such things. He is prompt and runs fast. He’ll bring everything back in a hurry.” The wolf thought to himself: “I’ll have my revenge against the fox … He will lose his life, although I would rather have done it with my own hands.” (Wallich 94) The fox overhears and, thinking “with all his cunning,” approaches the lion, reporting that he had indeed been abroad in search of a remedy for his illness. The fox claims, “You will never get well unless you prepare for yourself a wolf-skin garment and put it on while still warm, as soon as it is flayed” (94). The lion consents, leaving the wolf “standing naked and bare” with great shame, suffering “sorrow and disgrace…. As he had intended to case his companion into a deep pit, so it was done unto him. God gave him his just reward” (96). Wallich concludes each of the fables with a moral. In this case, he castigates the wolf as one who “thinks constantly of how he may deprive [his good fellow] of life and property” (96). Of course, the misfortune is directed at the wolf, instead. According to the fabulist, the innocent fox has simply defended himself against the machinations of the cruel wolf, and God punished the wolf accordingly. In Fable XVIII, which is an adaptation of Aesop’s “The Wolf and the Lamb,” the lion installs the wolf as a judge, and he swears to judge each case fairly. A stag and a sheep come before the wolf, seeking resolution of a financial dispute; the stag claims the sheep owes him money and is

72  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir thus entitled to the sheep’s valuable wool. After the stag lays out his case, the sheep begins his retort: One man’s speech is only half spoken, unless one hears both sides … therefore you should see to it that the truth prevails and wait a bit until you have heard the case properly and hear my side as well. Do not have designs on my life, but render justice even to a poor save like me. You should not hold me to the old debt because I have already repaid all that I owed him. I hope you will protect him from me. (Wallich 112) But the stag brings false witnesses, and the wolf, who was already “partial to the stag, … wouldn’t let the sheep speak. The poor thing had to stand there mute. His words counted for nothing. They dealt with him dishonestly. The poor thing begged for his life” (112). The wolf rules in favor of the stag, and the sheep is shorn and almost freezes to death. Wallich’s exposition of this fable concentrates on justice and corruption. He argues, “Many sit in judgment to whom justice is a wheel. And they turn it according to their will and often according to the wishes of someone who will pay.… Justice has completely fled [and] Lies have made people blind so they don’t want to pay attention to justice” (112). This moral synopsis differs from Fable XV, where the moral was concerned with actions or schemes directed at another person. In Fable XVIII, the wolf represents a larger social problem: the corruption and corruptibility of judges and, consequently, the total absence of justice in the Jewish world. In biblical and prophetic texts, wolves are aggressive and rapacious; they are hunters, and they are prone to violence. Benjamin’s blessing, Saul’s military prowess, the warnings of the prophet Jeremiah, and the rabbinical commentaries on Shabbat represent wolves (or their analogues) as divine agents. Their aggression, violence, and acquisitiveness turn the mundane into the sacred, protect the Israelites from their enemies, or punish them at God’s decree. The wolf of Seyfer Mesholim embodies those same characteristics but unmoored from divine providence. In Fable XV, the wolf plots the demise of the fox for no reason other than personal animus; the violence is purposeless and, according to Wallich, the wolf gains nothing from it. He pursues wanton aggression against his fellow creature and, for that, “God turned it back on him” (35). Worse still is Fable XVIII. Although in the Bible wolves represent justice, Seyfer Mesholim portrays the wolf as a corrupt judge whose aggression and acquisitiveness benefits himself only. Because rabbinical courts govern much of daily orthodox life, presiding over weddings, divorces, financial disputes, and dietary laws, there are countless injunctions in the Bible and Talmud about corrupt judges, a fact that Wallich illustrates with his fables.

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  73 If Yiddish represented the fusion of European and Jewish cultures, then the wolves of Yiddish literature sprang from that union. Peter Arnds notes that the wolf is a central figure in German mythology and folklore, arguing that “the association of war and wolf implies both the idea of respect for the wolf as a creature of strength and ferocity, but also that of a general moral decline” (6). The fables of Ashkenaz blend traditional Jewish perspectives with common European representations of the wolf. In the Bible wolves often use their powers positively, but in Seyfer Mesholim, instead of guarding or correcting, the wolf plots the deaths of his fellow creatures. Instead of enacting God’s justice, the wolf acts injudiciously, ignoring pleas for fairness and, in Wallich’s words, causing justice to flee. In Wallich’s simple moral tales for children, wolves represent the collapse of sacred community.

European Christian Representations Since the Talmudic era, Jewish literature has been subject to external influences (Katz 14). Zangwill’s and Gordon’s folktales are no exception, and they were clearly shaped by a number of literary traditions, including biblical and Yiddish, but also Christian and British. For one, Christianity has long associated Jews with animality. In 1 Corinthians 10:18, Paul describes the Jews as fleshly, recounting their “historical existence as carnal, physical, material, and literal” (Pines xii). According to Paul, “Jews can only read [faith] according to the flesh” (xii). He likens their “obsession” with ritual to the behavior of canines, warning Christians to “Beware of the dogs, beware of the evildoers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh” (Phil. 3:2–3, New Oxford Annotated Bible). Channeling Paul, John Chrysostom, a late fourth-century church father, also compared Jews to dogs. Looking at Matthew 15:26, he asserts, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” (quoted in Pines xiii). In this passage, Jews are the carnal dogs and Christians the innocent children (xiii). In the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church conflated the devil with witches, werewolves, and Jews, and Christians demonized Jews as unassimilated, rootless wanderers and condemned them as thieves and kidnappers (Arnds 70). Their association of rootlessness, foreignness, and criminality with wolves augmented their notions of Jews and Judaism, and later writers often replicated these motifs. With The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare helped to shape how the British public saw Jews for centuries by portraying Shylock as a rapacious wolf with unholy desires: O, be thou damn’d, inexecrable dog! And for thy life let justice be accused! Thou almost makest me waver in my faith To hold opinion with Pythagoras,

74  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And, whilst thou lay’st in thy unhallow’d dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous. (4.1.130–140) Gratiano likens Shylock to a wolf that was executed for murder, “recalling the old myth of the werewolf that was prevalent in many Germanic and Anglo-Saxon medieval sources, in which an outlaw banned from human society was depicted as a man with a wolf’s head” (Pines xvi– xvii). Although Shylock lived and worked among Christians, they saw him as an outsider, a threat to their society that must be excised. Britons increasingly saw Jews as financial, political, and social threats to their nation, and some nineteenth-century writers depicted them as voracious in their accumulation of material wealth (Arnds 70). For instance, in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), the Jewish moneylender Isaac is called the “whelp of a she-wolf” and a “dog of an unbeliever” (quoted in Davison 2004: 178n19). So pervasive was the image of the Jew as an avaricious outsider that, in “The Prussian Vase,” from Moral Tales for Young People (1805), Maria Edgeworth portrays a Jewish art dealer named Solomon as “an outsider subjected to prejudice even though he pursues a loftier profession than moneylending and his son serves in the army as a loyal citizen” (Travis 2013: 15). For these authors, the wolf symbolized fears of Jewish assimilation (Arnds 69–70). In Victorian Britain, The Merchant of Venice “was considered to represent the height of Shakespeare’s comic achievement and to be a universally acknowledged masterpiece of literature” (Rozmovits 1995: 97). At this time, Shylock was one of the most prominent and enduring Jewish stereotypes, rivaled only by Dickens’s Fagin. In fact, Zangwill claimed, “The conception of a Jew in the mind of the average Christian is a mixture of Fagin, Shylock, Rothschild and the caricatures of the American comic papers” (1892: 3:86), and so British Jews had to contend with the image of these two as wolves in sheep’s clothing. The archetype of the avaricious Jew, Fagin, in particular, posed a threat to Christian children. In Oliver Twist, Bill Sikes calls him “a ‘blackhearted wolf’ who possesses ‘withered old claw[s]’ for hands and ‘fangs as should have been a dog’s’” (quoted in Davison 178n19). After Oliver escapes from and is returned to his clutches, Fagin claims to be “delighted to see you looking so well, my dear,” an address that, as Richard Dellamora (1996) observes, “recalls that of the Grimms’ wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’” (70). With Fagin, Dickens replicates the old motif of the wolf stealing Christian children, and Fagin uses stolen

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  75 children like Oliver to further his criminal gains. Dellamora argues that Dickens purifies Oliver by “removing [him] from the creatural satisfactions afforded by Fagin’s den,” a claim that evokes Paul’s description of Jews as carnal dogs and even equates Fagin’s lodgings to a wolf’s den (57). By the 1880s, Eastern European Jews were immigrating to Britain in larger numbers than ever before and were being represented in literature as foreign invaders (Penslar 2001: 92). More so than Germany, “Britain associates wolves with foreign, primarily Eastern invaders,” an association that is dramatized perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Arnds 88). Stoker associates the Count with wolves in several different ways. Dracula employs wolves (and dogs), both in Transylvania and in England, as the agents of his will, a direct perversion of biblical tradition. He calls their wild howling “music” and relates to them as fellow hunters. A bloodthirsty villain who, like Fagin, is a predator, Dracula is confronted by a woman whose child he has stolen, and in response, he sends his wolves after her. Mina Harker describes him as if he were the wolf of “Little Red Riding Hood”: “His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s” (quoted in Davison 144). Dracula even refers to his Berserker ancestors as “werewolves,” and like the wolves he commands, they were lawless outsiders to Christian society (Arnds 89). Dracula himself was born from Victorian fears of racial pollution, financial control, and criminal invasion by Jewish immigrants (94). Like Victorian literature, generally, Victorian children’s literature represented the Jews as a separate nationality with distinctive traits, languages, and values. As Madelyn Travis asserts, these Jewish characters almost always embody one or more of the following stereotypes: an avaricious and miserly moneylender or a wealthy capitalist who serves his own ends or exploits others; a peddler whose seemingly respectable profession conceals financially motivated criminal activity, or who appears poor but hoards his wealth; … an ugly, bent, hook-nosed, bearded elderly man dressed in a black gabardine; and those whose accent or lisp marks them as Jewish even if they were English-born. (10) Jessica R. Valdez (2014) observes that their use of languages like Yiddish “marked Jews as different from mainstream Europe” (323).2 In fact, several children’s authors utilized tropes that “sought to define and contain Jews and Jewishness within religious, ‘racial’ and/or national boundaries that differentiated them from the English” (Travis 10). Travis points out that “notions of Jewish difference found convenient expression in

76  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir the image of the poor-yet-wealthy immigrant that accompanied the influx of Ashkenazi refugees” (24), and it was these “outsiders” to British society that populate Zangwill’s and Gordon’s colorful tales of Jewish life in London’s East End.

Anglo-Jewish Folktales Israel Zangwill and Samuel Gordon were both at home in London’s East End, the “ghetto” of their folktales. The late Victorian Jewish community of the East End comprised mostly immigrants, many of whom had left their homes in the Russian Empire as a consequence of increasingly oppressive laws. Linda Rozmovits explains that Russian Jews were disproportionately taxed, restricted from owning property and pursuing certain trades, expelled from cities and forced to live within the Pale of Settlement, and compelled to surrender their sons to military service (99). The children of Russian immigrants, Zangwill and Gordon wrote many folktales that center on the experiences of Russian Jews, and despite their Russian setting, they tend to reflect “questions of assimilation and acculturation that presented themselves to turn-of-the-century British Jews” (Rochelson 2008: 120). Unlike Christian authors, Zangwill and Gordon represent wolves as communal animals. Zangwill was born in Whitechapel. His father, Moses, was from a small Russian town and escaped military conscription by immigrating to Britain, where he worked as a peddler (Udelson 1990: 60). Zangwill was educated at the Jews’ Free School, a secondary school that, at the time, served mostly immigrant families (Zatlin 1981: 114). Meri-Jane Rochelson points out that, “although Zangwill himself was not of the 1880 immigrant generation he described in his 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto, he experienced in many ways the East End life of his novel’s immigrant children” (10). Jewish immigrants of the ghetto spoke almost no English, and the largely orthodox population rarely interacted with native-born Britons or left their familiar neighborhoods, developing an insular community that Zangwill referred to as “the brotherhood.” According to Todd M. Endelman, “[British] circles and institutions that were quite willing to tolerate Jews as intimate associates were not willing to endorse the perpetuation of a separate Jewish culture” (1990: 209), a position that Zangwill and Gordon both challenge with their tales of Jewish particularity. In 1921 Zangwill’s friend Nina Salaman, a poet, translator, and social activist, released a gift book for Jewish children called Apples and Honey that included two of Zangwill’s folktales. In the preface to the anthology, Salaman notes, “This book has been compiled more particularly for boys and girls of about ten to fifteen years, who will themselves quickly discover which portions are the most suitable to their own particular age and taste,” and she thanks Zangwill, to whom she “owe[s]

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  77 the title, which I think should appeal to all children, both for its pleasant associations and for spiritual reasons” (vii). But Apples and Honey also contains many works that handle unpleasant topics like assimilation and apostasy, and so Salaman urges her young readers to cling to “the hope  … of establishing a home of Freedom, Justice and Peace on the mountains of Judea,” where the Jews can come together as one people (viii). As a Jewish nationalist, Zangwill must have approved of the Zionist scope of Salaman’s collection, and his two folktales, which had originally been published in Children of the Ghetto (1892) and Ghetto Tragedies (1899), warn against the dissolution of Jewish community.3 First appearing in 1890 and later in 1899, “Diary of a Meshumad” purports to be the translation of a Russian-Jewish apostate’s journal and, unlike many of Zangwill’s other folktales, was written for an entirely Jewish readership (Udelson 70; Rochelson 120). As in Wallich’s fables, the wolves of “Diary of a Meshumad” are symbols of Jewish communal values. But instead of representing the collapse of the Jewish community, they represent the connectedness of the Jewish people. In the beginning, the titular character, Demetrius, describes his childhood, a time when Jewish practices felt like “hideous chains on the free limbs” of youth (1899: 408). As a child, “it galled me to feel that I was one of that detested race … that, with little sympathy with my people, I was yet destined to partake of its burdens and its disabilities” (409). Though Demetrius has already rejected Judaism, he knows that he will always be considered Jewish unless he renounces all communal ties, so he converts to Christianity, marries a Christian woman, and raises a Christian child. Keeping his true identity a secret, Demetrius lives most of his life as “a good Russian, a good Christian,” which means he never “stirred my little finger to help the Jews in their many and grievous afflictions. They were nothing to me. Over the vodka and the champagne I have joined in the laugh against them, without even feeling I was of them” (411). But Demetrius eventually realizes he cannot outrun his Jewishness, and with his story Zangwill “aims to expose the futility and ironic betrayal of illusion harbored in acts of religious conversion” (Udelson 70). Just as Solomon ibn Gabirol claims in the Mivchar Hapeninim, the “wolf changes its coat, but not its nature,” so Demetrius lives outwardly as a Russian Christian and conceals his true identity (1859: 59–61). He comes to regret his conversion, “that fatal mistake of ignorant and ambitious youth” that severed his connection to his roots, and even feels “guilt of this loss [of his son] to Judaism, too” (Zangwill 1899: 409, 412). Demetrius craves human connection, generally, but in particular, he wants to “take up again and retwine the severed strands” between himself and his community (403, 422). Feeling the loss of his ethnic and communal ties, Demetrius plans to reconnect with his heritage, noting, “Even if I shared few of the Jew’s beliefs, it should have been my duty—and my proud duty—to proclaim myself of the race. … My poor

78  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir brethren, sore indeed has been your travail, and your cry of pain pierces the centuries” (412). For Zangwill, the brotherhood of world Jewry surmounts all other human connections, a fact that Demetrius discovers when he befriends Nicholas Alexandrovitch, a doctor who has also concealed his Jewishness. Demetrius describes how they “read the mutual secret in each other’s eyes; a magnetic impulse linked our hands together in a friendly clasp, and we felt that we were brothers,” and he muses over “how strange and mysterious is this latent brotherhood which binds our race together through all differences of rank, country, and even faith” (427). That spark of brotherhood inspires him to leave his Christian life behind and to live publicly as a Jew. Still, Demetrius is hounded by guilt, especially over his relationship with his son, Paul. Named for the Christian missionary and equal to him in religious fervor, Paul is blind to the positive qualities of Judaism. To him, Jews are like the carnal dogs of the New Testament. “Sunk in squalor, dishonesty, and rapacity,” they “take the bread out of the mouths of honest Christians” (417). At one point, Paul declares, I have no patience with anyone who has any patience with these bloodsuckers of the State. Every true Russian must abhor them. They despise the true faith, and are indifferent to our ideals. They sneak out of the conscription. They live for themselves, and regard us as their natural prey. Our peasantry are corrupted by their brandy-shops, squeezed by their money-lenders, and roused to discontent by the insidious utterances of their peddlers, damned wandering Jews. (420) Paul’s tirade on bloodthirsty Jews who prey upon Christians reflects the prejudices of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Stoker, but unlike them, it also condemns Jews for their cultural insularity. Demetrius responds by identifying with the Jews, claiming, “They are what the Russians—what we Russians—have made them. Who has pent them into their foul cellars and reeking dens? They work with their brains, and you—we—abuse them for not working with their hands” (420). For Demetrius, their treatment by the Russians recalls Aesop’s “The Wolf and the Lamb,” where the lamb symbolizes the Jews (420). But for Paul, “the wolf is the Jew [because] the Jew can always be trusted to take care of himself. His cunning is devilish” (420). Paul’s analogy dismisses Jewish values like loyalty that Zangwill treats positively. Scorning the Jews as outsiders, Paul recommends that, like wolves, “these vermin, they must be poisoned off for the sake of Russia and humanity at large” (420). But Demetrius appreciates the Jews’ insularity. To Paul, he praises their “fidelity to the faith of their ancestors, … their staunchness to one another, … [and] their heroic endurance of every form of torment, vilification, contempt” (420–21). But his son refuses to consider his perspective,

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  79 and so Demetrius decides to abandon him. He becomes hopeful that Paul might join him as a Jew once he discovers that his son has fallen in love with a Jewish girl named Rachel, and he imagines, “The news that he [Paul] is a Jew will revolutionize him. His love will flame up afresh and take on the guise and glamour of duty. Love, posing as logic, will whisper in his ear that no bars of early training can avail to keep him from the race to which he belongs by blood and by his father’s faith” (438–39). Both father and son agree that Jews belong to a close-knit family, but Paul is not yet aware that he belongs to that family, a fact that causes his relationship with Rachel to crumble. After all, “a Jewess could only wed a Jew” (450). Rachel considers converting to Christianity, which Paul sees as impossible. He would “as well expect the sheep to howl like the wolf. Blood was thicker than baptismal water. Her heart would always cleave to her own religion” (450). Just as a lamb cannot become a wolf, in Zangwill, racial and religious identity is immutable. As his story draws to a close, Demetrius, who has been living among the Jews of St. Petersburg, discovers that Paul has become the editor of the government’s anti-Semitic newspaper, Novae Vremia. Now permanently divided from his father, “Paul would pen day after day those envenomed leaders” which, Demetrius predicts correctly, would “goad on the mob to turn and rend their Jewish fellow citizens” (444). Upon hearing the mob outside his door, Demetrius swears his final fidelity to the Jewish people: “Ah, God, they have captured Rabbi Isaac and are dragging him along by his white beard toward the barracks. My place is by his side. I will rouse my brethren. We are not a few. We will turn on these dogs and rend them. … Farewell! I go to proclaim the Unity” (454). Like Benjamin and his descendent Saul, Demetrius bravely defends the Jewish people against their aggressors, and although he lived as a Christian, he dies as a Jew. Thus, “Diary of a Meshumad” teaches the gravity of communal loyalty to young readers. As Rochelson notes, Demetrius shows “ultimate loyalty to the Judaism of his youth” (13), and Udelson argues that it illustrates Zangwill’s belief in “repentance for faithlessness and disloyalty” (70). Ultimately, Demetrius redeems himself through his love and sacrifice for his people. Gordon replicates the ending of “Diary of a Meshumad” in “The Fourth Dimension” (1897), a Russian folktale about a Jewish father, named Tarphon, whose son, Ephraim, was born “in the same winking of the eye” as his synagogue’s new Torah scroll (115). Tarphon is horrified to discover that his son and the scroll share the same physical life because, at the moment of discovery, the synagogue, which houses the scroll, burst into flames. Like the fearless wolves of the Bible, “Tarphon dashed on with wolf-like eyes and gnashing teeth, and … before they could hold him, he had rushed into the flaming chaos of destruction, … and out again he came, like a demon who has burst his chains,” holding the charred remains of the scroll (126–27). In “The Fourth Dimension,”

80  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir Ephraim, who dies before he can become the great communal leader his father had prayed for, symbolizes the Jews, and the Torah, the foundation of Jewish life, symbolizes kehillah, community. As in “Diary of a Meshumad,” in Gordon, Jews cannot survive without community. Gordon was born in Bavaria, and he immigrated to England with his parents when he was 12 (Rubinstein and Jollies 2011: 360). His Russian father, Abraham Elias Gordon, was the cantor of London’s prestigious Great Synagogue, which inspired Gordon to become actively involved in Jewish communal life (Hess, Samuels, and Valman 2013: 123). Between 1894 and 1913, Gordon served as secretary of the Great Synagogue, a congregation that included “the established elite of Anglo-Jewry as well as recent immigrants living in the nearby East End” (123). In fact, Gordon, who was fluent in Yiddish, was a familiar figure in the East End (Rubinstein and Jollies 360). Unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that Eastern European Jews were “a resource of Jewish moral and racial vitality” (Hess, Samuels, and Valman 123), and so most of his tales of national renewal center on their lives. A talented writer and gifted linguist, Gordon “was among the first generation of Jews to graduate from Cambridge University,” and in 1894, he began to publish short stories such as “The Fourth Dimension” that were based on his mother’s Russian folktales (123; Cheyette 2004: 326). According to Bryan Cheyette, “Gordon established himself as a significant British-Jewish novelist who was writing in the tradition of Israel Zangwill … [and] could command a large readership,” most of whom were Jews (Cheyette 326). As an author and activist, Gordon hoped to “eliminate the ghetto mentality of immigrant Jews but not to erase their collective allegiance” (Hess, Samuels, and Valman 124). In 1897 Leopold Greenberg, a well-known journalist and Zionist, launched Young Israel, a monthly magazine for Jewish youth, as the Jewish alternative to British boys’ and girls’ papers (Cesarani 1994: 107; Travis 34). David Cesarani points out that, “with its echo of Young Ireland and Young Italy, Young Israel was intended to assert Jewish values and identity” (107). One letter to the editor “laments that the bookshelves of middle-class Jews held the works of Eliot, Scott, Dickens, Lewis Carroll and the Arabian Nights, rather than specifically Jewish material” (Travis 39). Like Zangwill and Salaman, Greenberg and Young Israel served an important communal function at a time when Jewish children were expected to conform to the manners and morals of their Christian schools and peers. Greenberg’s periodicals reflect his Zionist beliefs, but “his devotion to Jewish nationalism was driven as much by the belief that it was vital to fight assimilation as by the need to create a Jewish state” (Cesarani 106). An anti-assimilationist and Jewish nationalist himself, Gordon published many stories in Young Israel, including “On the Road to Zion” (1898), which also appeared in his popular collection of folktales, Daughters of Shem (1898). Comprised of

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  81 Yiddish folktales about Jews living in the Pale of Settlement, Daughters of Shem warns against the erosion of Jewish community. “On the Road to Zion” follows the misadventures of four ten-yearold Russian-Jewish boys, Noah, Leib, Hirsh, and Wolf, each of whom is named for an animal, or, in the case of Noah, for Judaism’s great savior of the world’s animals. In Jewish culture, names hold meaning, and in “On the Road to Zion,” Wolf embodies the characteristics of the wolves of Jewish tradition. At the beginning of the story, Noah describes a recent meeting of the Brothers of Zion, a local Zionist organization, to his friends. He tells them that he was impressed by the “wonderful Maggid [itinerant preacher] that’s been all over the world, trying to preach us Jews back into Jerusalem” (316). He then relates how he was thrown out of the meeting because he interrupted the next, less charismatic, speaker, and bewails “[being] called a woe and a disgrace to Israel” (316). Resolved to reclaim his place in the Jewish community, and, hoping to impress the adults, he proposes that the four friends reclaim the Land of Israel for the Jewish people. Noah’s plan emphasizes the glory of their mission, a lofty ideal that appeals to the rapacious Wolf. First, Noah explains that he “got the idea of it from what the Maggid said last night … he said this wasn’t our proper home, and that we had no business to live anywhere but in Jerusalem,” but that Palestine’s Muslims were preventing the Jews’ resettlement of the land (316). Noah suggests that the friends walk to Palestine and ask for their land back, or else “we’ll send you Moses, and he’ll make it lively for you with plagues” (316). If they fail, “we’ve got to stick here and give money to the burgomaster [town magistrate] not to let the Christians smash our windows” (316). Wolf acknowledges the injustice of their situation, but he presses Noah to clarify the role of glory in their mission. Noah responds that, once they succeed, “we’ll come back and tell our people: It’s all right about Jerusalem—we’ve got it. Pack up your bundles and say good-bye to the burgomaster. He’ll be sorry to see you go; he won’t have anybody to give him roubles now” (317). Upon their return from Palestine, “we’ll all be petted and stuffed with honey-cake–just as the Maggid is now—and when we grow up they’ll make us wardens of the Synagogue” (317). The boys each aspire to become communal leaders like the biblical Moses, and so they are excited by the prospect of securing exalted positions within the synagogue. As in the Bible and Wallich, lions and wolves are paired in “On the Road to Zion.” Leib is convinced to participate in Noah’s scheme when Wolf reminds him that, aside from the glory, “it would give us something to do for the day” (317). Leib, Wolf, and Hirsh produce a tin sabre, a trumpet, and 11 copecks, respectively, and thus “the skimpy little band [was transformed] into … a devastating army” (317). They “immediately formed themselves into a council of war” and, weighing the importance of each accessory, decide

82  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir that all four should be captains of their brigade (317). Determined to unite the Jewish people under one national banner, “the four mighty adventurers started on their mission of conquest. They felt brisk and buoyant; the consciousness of their high purpose annihilated all possibility of failure” (317). The most committed to the cause, Wolf urges his friends to “walk faster [because] the days aren’t so long now,” hoping to complete their glorious adventure by dinnertime (317). After walking for several hours and suffering from several misfortunes, the boys come across a group of large granaries, which they assume are the battlements of Jerusalem. Like the prophet Joshua, whose legions captured the land of Israel from the Canaanites, Wolf plans to use his trumpet “to blow down the walls as they did at Jericho” (317). He “tried hard to beat down the sinful pride that throbbed through his bosom at the [idea that] he was the greatest of them; it was he who was going to gain his nation entrance into their heritage” (318). After two blasts from his trumpet, “Wolf was just in the middle of the third, a glorious success,” when Noah notices “the brickwork near one of the windows tottering” (318). But rather than walls crumbling to admit the intrepid heroes, windows open to reveal an angry Russian. He throws heads of cabbage at them, hitting Wolf, and the four retreat, feeling defeated. Like the Israelites, who repeatedly rebelled against Moses during their desert wanderings, Hirsh, Leib, and Wolf grow tired of Noah’s leadership. Noah ignores the grumblings of his fellows until “he found that Wolf had also joined the conclave, then he knew that there was need of quick action to avert his evil destiny” (319). Noah fears his rapacious friend when it becomes clear that Wolf is no longer acting for the greater good but according to his own desires. Feeling the most maligned over the loss of his money, Hirsh shoves Noah, and, as a team, “Wolf and Leib were not long in reinforcing Hirsh’s efforts” (319). At that moment, Noah is rescued by his parents, and the boys are each taken home, having failed in their attempts to recapture Palestine. In the tradition of the Yiddish fabulists, Gordon concludes “The Road to Zion” with a moral lesson for the readers of Young Israel: Religion itself is deathless, because it is the outcome of a permanent tendency and the satisfaction of an ineradicable want of human nature. It is indestructible, because it is the embodiment of a spiritual instinct, which survives in the general heart of the race, and which, if it ever seems to die, is immediately raised again from the dead, and lives on through a thousand changes. (319) Using Wolf as an example of the consequences of acting for oneself rather than for one’s community, Gordon teaches that the spirit of brotherhood prevails as an immutable characteristic of the Jewish people.

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  83 In a tale from Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto, a character named Wolf is also held responsible for the survival of the community. Simon Wolf is known as “the great Jewish labour-leader,” and he claims to have “stirred up the East-End Jews and sent the echo of their cry into Parliament” (1892: 2:98–100). Wolf plans to organize a strike among them, “but it seems impossible to get unity among them; a large section appears to mistrust me, though … I am actuated by nothing but an unselfish desire for their good” (2:103). In order to earn the trust of the orthodox Jews, his “poor brethren,” Wolf, who is vehemently anti-religious, writes a speech that is sincerely respectful of the Jewish faith (2:99). Moreover, in order to reach them, he argues that “these speeches must be in Yiddish” (2:105). Although he writes in English, Zangwill uses “the conversational and associative structure of Yiddish” (Valdez 321), which would have been appealing to his as well as Wolf’s audience. Wolf calls out to his brothers in Yiddish, vowing that “it pains me much to note how disunited we are. … How can we hope to succeed unless we are thoroughly organized?” (2:110). He observes that “he had scored a victory,” leaving “his audience in a frenzy of resolution and loyalty” and himself feeling confident that he successfully unified the community (2:114). But Zangwill often suffered from “the disillusionment that results when ideals are confounded by reality” (Udelson 62), and so communal infighting “unceremoniously elbow[ed] Simon Wolf out of his central position” as community leader (2:123). As these parables reveal, Jews are stronger, and more successful, when they remain loyal to one another.

Conclusion Since the nineteenth century, the wolf of Jewish literature has continued to evolve in myriad and sometimes competing ways. The early twentieth century saw the flowering of Yiddish and Hebrew writings, which, in turn, expanded the genres of Jewish literature from shtetl tales to Yiddish novels set in New York or Warsaw; to Hebrew novels set in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and kibbutzim; to modernist poetry, painful reminiscences of pogroms, and the Holocaust; and to sometimes exhilarating and sometimes tragic early Israeli fiction. Such works, though innovative, were largely informed by Jewish textual traditions. For example, Eliezer Shtaynbarg wrote fables in the tradition of earlier writers like Wallich. Born in Romania in 1880, Shtaynbarg became “the central figure of Yiddish culture in Romania, and his fables … achieved a near-cult status in the Yiddish literary world” (Shtaynbarg xii). Shtaynbarg’s fables “point in two directions. On the one hand, they transport us back to the earliest form of the oral narrative,” when stories would be recounted to audiences that included children, but “on the other, their technique is decidedly modernistic” (xv). While many of Shtaynbarg’s fables feature

84  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir dogs, “Di Geulah” gives prominence to a wolf. “The Salvation,” which is written in verse, describes how The wolf [runs] to the tzaddik, the saint of the field, To get advice and knowledge revealed. And who’s the tzaddik? The fox, as if one didn’t know. To hear a bon mot from him miles they’ll go. (149) Ever the trickster, the fox convinces the wolf to fill a pit with the livers of “rabbit and lamb, chicken, wild turkey,” pronouncing it as the key to redemption. He explains that if the wolf fills the pit with food for the fox, “then all the wolves and dogs and bears will become honest, pious, good, and from underground at that great hour, salvation will come and flower like green grass and buds in the wood” (151). The wolf acquiesces, and the fabulist relates how “a flood, yes, pools of blood and tears were spilled. Because they all want to bring on salvation” (151). The wolf hopes to bring salvation to the community but instead brings destruction. Shtaynbarg’s popular collection of modern Yiddish fables replicates motifs from earlier Jewish literature. Here, the wolf is powerful, rapacious, and aggressive. But unlike Wallich, whose wolf is cunning, Shtaynbarg’s fox is the one who pursues evil. Like Zangwill and Gordon, Shtaynbarg’s simple wolf seeks salvation, but it ends in destruction. In “The Salvation,” the wolf represents the tam, the simple Jew, a concept that resonates with innocent and sincere, if unintellectual, religiosity. Submitting to the tzaddik with the hope of bringing about the messiah and thus, the end of exile, the wolf employs his strength on behalf of the greater good, or so he believes. Although he had hoped to bring the Jewish people together in the Land of Israel, the wolf has instead wrought the destruction of his community. Ultimately, the wolf of Jewish folktales symbolizes the essential place of community in Judaism, a lesson that has been taught to Jewish children for generations. With this chapter, we have reconsidered the definition of Victorian children’s literature. According to J. S. Bratton (2015), the two most popular genres in Victorian Britain were “evangelical tales concerning waifs and strays saved from sin in the streets of London and adventures in the south seas where natives are rescued from the evils of cannibalism and English youths from shipwreck” (20). Other popular genres included fantasy and mystery. Although several Victorian children’s authors dealt with the harsh realities of working life, most seem to have focused on fantasies, whereas Jewish children’s authors stressed the constant existential threat to Jewish life in the diaspora, which sometimes manifested as tales of demonic possession or crushing, inescapable, poverty. Victorian children, generally, would most likely have learned to read using the Bible, but orthodox Jews have always expected their children,

Loyalty in Yiddish and Anglo-Jewish Folktales  85 sometimes as young as six, to learn complex texts such as Leviticus. Today, most Jewish children encounter disturbing tales of the Holocaust before they become b’nei mitzvah. In sum, Jewish children’s literature is often instructive, even upsetting, rather than exciting. One commonality is that, in the nineteenth century, children’s authors “desire[d] to explore and convey his or her own perception of the world … as an explicitly didactic intention to teach certain moral and social attitudes” (Bratton 20). Jews have always used literature to teach religious and cultural values to children, and we have found that, in Jewish literature, common literary animals like wolves took on a more dynamic role than in Victorian literature, generally. Zangwill and Gordon used wolves to emphasize community and togetherness at a time when modernity and assimilation threatened the cohesion and the future of the Jewish people.

Notes 1 All citations of rabbinical literature come from sefaria.org and, unless otherwise noted, maintain sefaria.org’s English translation. 2 Valdez is referring to Sander Gilman’s claim that World War II Germans considered Yiddish “the clearest sign of the peculiar degeneration of the Jews,” and accused the Jews of “misappropriation and destruction of a cultural language and its transformation into a language of haggling and bartering” (1991: 310). 3 The two folktales discussed in this chapter are identical in theme, tone, and scope as those appearing in Salaman.

Bibliography Arnds, Peter. Lycanthropy in German Literature. New York: Springer, 2015. Bratton, J.S. The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction. London: Routledge, 2015. Cesarani, David. The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Cheyette, Bryan. “Gordon, Samuel (1871–1927).” In Encyclopedia of Modern Jewish Culture, edited by Glenda Abramson. Routledge, 326–27. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. Dauber, Jeremy Asher. In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Davison, Carol. Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Dellamora, Richard. “Pure Oliver: Or, Representation without Agency.” In Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires, and Other Histories, edited by John Schad, 55–79. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1996. Endelman, Todd. Radical Assimilation in Anglo-Jewish History, 1656–1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Hess, Jonathan M., Maurice Samuels, and Nadia Valman, eds. Nineteenth-­ Century Jewish Literature. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Gordon, Samuel. “On the Road to Zion.” Young Israel Magazine 1 (1898): 315–19.

86  Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir ———. A Handful of Exotics: Scenes and Incidents Chiefly of Russo-Jewish Life. London: Methuen & Co., 1897. Ibn Gabirol, Solomon. A Choice of Pearls [Mivchar Hapeninim]. Translated by Jehuda ibn Tibbon and B. H. Ascher. London: Trübner and Company, 1859. https://books.google.com/books?id=pM4UAAAAQAAJ. Isaacs, Ronald H. Animals in Jewish Thought and Tradition. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, 2000. Jackson, Alice. Oliver Twist. Retold for Boys & Girls. London: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1910.Katz, Eli, ed. Seyfer Mesholim by Moshe Wallich. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Mindel, Nissan. “The Wolf.” Jewish Kids, Chabad.org (blog). www.chabad. org/kids/article_cdo/aid/114787/jewish/Wolf.htm. The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Noy, Dov. “Animal Tales.” In Encyclopedia Judaica, jewishvirtuallibrary.org. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/animal-tales, 2008. Penslar, Derek. Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pines, Noam. The Infrahuman: Animality in Modern Jewish Literature. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018. Rochelson, Meri-Jane. A Jew in the Public Arena: The Career of Israel Zangwill. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2008. Rozmovits, Linda. “The Wolf and the Lamb: An Image and Its Afterlife.” Art History 18 (1995): 97–111. Rubinstein, W., and Michael Jolles, eds. “Gordon, Samuel.” In The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History, 360. New York: Palgrave, 2011. Salaman, Nina, ed. Apples and Honey. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1921. Shakespeare, William. Merchant of Venice. Edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Folger Shakespeare Library. www.folgerdigitaltexts.org. Shtaynbarg, Eliezer. The Jewish Book of Fables: The Selected Works of Eliezer Shtaynbarg. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Stroumsa, Sarah. Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem: Jewish Publication Society, 1985. Travis, Madelyn. Jews and Jewishness in British Children’s Literature. London: Routledge, 2013. Udelson, Joseph H. Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. Valdez, Jessica. “How to Write Yiddish in English, or Israel Zangwill and Multilingualism in Children of the Ghetto.” Studies in the Novel 46, no. 3 (2014): 315–34. Wallich, Moshe. Seyfer Mesholim. Edited by Eli Katz. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994. Yassif, Eli. “Jewish Folktales.” In Oxford Bibliographies. www.oxford bibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-97801998407310108.xml. Zangwill, Israel. Children of the Ghetto. London: William Heinemann, 1892. Zangwill, Israel. “Diary of a Meshumad.” In Ghetto Tragedies, 403–54. New York: Macmillan, 1899 Zatlin, Linda Gertner. The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel. Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1981.

5 Advocating for the Least of These Empowering Children and Animals in The Band of Mercy Advocate Alisa Clapp-Itnyre An immensely popular organization in late Victorian England, the Bands of Mercy drew thousands of children from around the country to champion the rights of animals. Modeled after the Band of Hope of the temperance movement, the Bands of Mercy were established in 1875 by Catherine Smithies as local, monthly gatherings for boys and girl to learn and sing about the kind treatment of wild, work, and domesticated animals. Due to their success, the Bands were brought under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in 1882.1 Their periodical, The Band of Mercy Advocate (hereafter, The Advocate), was established in 1879 and ran for another 50-some years to educate and entertain children with professional engravings, fully scored songs, stories of heroic animals and children, and non-fiction essays teaching on a considerable array of animals. The Band holds an important, if unacknowledged, role in the history of the animal rights movement;2 here, I will consider the critical ideologies it presented through the pages of The Advocate.3 Specifically, I argue that while society linked the nonhuman animal and human children in terms of their bodily vulnerability, muteness, and passivity, The Advocate renegotiated this association to ultimately give both animals and children bodily value despite their smallness, a recognized voice for change, and a powerful agency.

A Shared History: Small, Voiceless, and Passive Children and Animals Certainly, a powerful Victorian narrative existed which defined the child body, and animals of likewise diminutive sizes, as a weakness and a vulnerability. Lynn Vallone argues that “size, as a crucial marker of difference often overlooked, informs human identity and culture…. We use human scale to judge normality, goodness, and beauty” (2017: 1). She explores within a postcolonial context “the often fraught relationship once ‘small’ is typed as inferior” (131), especially how children’s

88  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre smallness made them victims of “easy exploitation” of the mining and textile industries of the early nineteenth century, their smallness visually set again “big machines” (194). Though animals are not a part of Vallone’s study, certainly the size of animals, from the rabbit to the fox, made them especially vulnerable to hunting and abuse during the English modern era. This sense of bodily vulnerability of children and animals alike was very pronounced in the Victorian mind. Lewis Carroll shows a child’s confusion and vulnerability based on size when Alice grows to the size of a room, then shrinks smaller than a dog, “terribly frightened all the time at the thought that it [the dog] might be hungry, in which case it would be very likely to eat her” (1992 [1897]: 32). Charles Dickens especially revealed the vulnerability of children, often linking it with that of animals based on their small size: Jennifer McDonell describes both Oliver Twist and Bull’s-eye, Bill Sikes’s dog, as having a “bare life,” both being “equally vulnerable to violation by others: they are subjected to various forms of imprisonment, bodily harm, and death without recourse to social justice” (2017: 110). Oliver, like Bull’s-eye, has no political voice to complain, as his infamous “please, Sir, I want some more” (ch. 2) makes painfully clear. As the Workhouse scene confirms, certainly Victorian children were exhorted to be seen but not heard. Likewise, rational thought in the earlier centuries wrested power away from animals for their supposed lack of language: René Descartes focused singularly on the mental ability to speak as dividing animals from humans which lowered them to “mindless automata which operate without higher thought or consciousness” (quoted in DeMello 2013: 5).4 In this debate, Jeremy Bentham clearly made the case for animal rights based not on speech, in his famous 1789 contention that “the question is not Can they reason? or Can they talk? but Can they suffer?” (144). Still, animals could not voice outrage for their suffering any more than could children. As Monica Flegel notes, by the nineteenth century, children and animals were depicted “as sharing a kind of mute innocence that made them particularly defenseless against cruelty” (2009: 65) for certainly neither could claim a voice against their oppressors. Flegel has done vital work in considering the common linkage between children and animals in English social history; her conclusions very often showcase a weakened state for both: eroticized bodies, “petted” states, and certainly a penchant for cruelty at the hands of powerful adults.5 In “Household Pets, Waifs, and Strays” in Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015), Flegel argues that there is “something specifically and intrinsically English in Victorian England’s linkage of children and animals as beloved objects of investment” (2015: 143) and that pet-keeping specifically could teach children not only the proper behavior of a “pet” but also to become dominant over the pet as a stage toward adulthood (149). From the “charm” of eroticism to

Empowering Children and Animals  89 the tragedy of neglect (2015: 142, 162), Flegel charts a strong linkage between animal and child passivity and vulnerability. When the RSPCA (est. 1824) and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC, ironically established much later, in 1884) intervened to attempt to work together to save both animal and child, ideologies got in the way. The NSPCC could not understand placing animal protection on the same level as that for children, while they also struggled to defend the reputations of children seen as “savage” and “cruel” in contrast to the empathy given animals: “If an ill-mannered child was an unattractive object of charity, then the dangerous, ‘savage’ child of the poor and of the streets was even more so” (Flegel 2009: 69). I would qualify Flegel’s point a bit, however, since clearly the “savage” reputations of many animals fared no better. Harriet Ritvo, in examining natural history books for children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, describes the myths presented to children of beasts of prey as “both dangerous and depraved…. Even small creatures that could not directly defy human power were castigated for their predatory propensities [like the weasel]” (1985: 87). Ritvo makes the connection with “socially excluded or alien human groups” (87), but the connection with unruly children is just as relevant. So, a third link between children and animals in the Victorian mind was their action and agency: insignificant at best, savage at worst. In short, the very defining qualities of children and many animals— their bodily smallness, their inability to speak (or be listened to, in the case of children), and the supposed insignificance, or harm, of their ­actions—literally or symbolically maligned children and animals for several centuries. Into this history the Bands of Mercy stood out in their efforts to reverse these degrading ideologies of animals and children, instead praising their real lives and actual selves. Specifically, children’s bodies were completely visible in leading Bands of Mercy meetings, while their voices led the way both in recitation and in song. Action, both vitally personal and publicly focused, is built into the creed of the Bands. For one, the Bands were entirely focused on children and open to any child of any age between the ages of six and fourteen. Though originating amongst middle-class reformers, the Bands often worked in working-class Sunday schools; further, their inclusion in public schools allowed all classes of children to experience Bands culture. Their meetings could be monthly, semi-monthly, or weekly, as convened by philanthropic parents, schoolteachers, or citizens; however, usually parents and other adults were only invited three to four times a year (The Advocate 1883: 5:15). Clearly the main priority was to engage children, mentally and physically; a typical meeting might include the singing of songs and hymns, reading stories about animals, or enjoying a magic lantern show (5:15). “Children’s meetings,” in fact, featured children who would “recite and read pieces on kindness to animals,” as described in their News

90  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Column (5:15). Following the Band of Hope temperance template, sometimes children would take to the streets, singing and agitating for animal welfare in a very public forum, their singing voices heard by many. Thus, social action, not often asked of children, was promoted at every meeting where children signed or recited the Bands of Mercy Pledge, its language highlighting, first, personal resolve, then, outward action: “We agree to do all in our power to protect animals from cruel usage, and to promote as far as we can their humane treatment.”6 Medals were given to children for exemplary recitation, best essays on kindness to animals, and personal commitment. As stated in their Rules for the Formation of a Band of Mercy, kindness to animals should spill over into gentleness to each other: “It is hoped that all the members will not only endeavor to promote the special objects of this Society, but will avoid the use of all angry or harsh words to one another” (1880: 2:39). Thus, through writing and singing, pledges and medals, the Bands encouraged critical thinking, personal resolve, and social activism. These ideologies privileged animal lives, voices, and action, too. In 1879 the son of Catherine Smithies, Thomas Bywater Smithies, inspired by the Methodist social activism of his mother,7 created The Band of Mercy Advocate as “The Organ of the Band of Mercy Societies for Promoting amongst the Young the Practice of Kindness to Animals” to be a key publication used at Band meetings. The Advocate ran for the next four years under his editorship. In 1882, the Bands and The Advocate came under the auspices of the RSPCA, and, after Mr. Smithies’s death later that year, the RSPCA changed the periodical’s name simply to The Band of Mercy (for the 1883 volume, Vol. 5). In “‘How Does Your Collar Suit Me?’: The Human Animal in the RSPCA’s Animal World and Band of Mercy,” Flegel looks specifically at a number of latter issues of the Band of Mercy, showing how one of the tactics of the RSPCA was “to defamiliarize animal usage by implying a shared experience of suffering” (2012: 247). But Flegel is ultimately very critical of the RSPCA and The Band of Mercy, specifically, for showing “child and animal [as] virtually indistinguishable in terms of their status as adored and adorable object” (253), a status which made both child and animal more coddled, eroticized, and thus vulnerable (254). Even children would learn domination over their pets as in her title story where the boy threatens to whip the dog (256). The story and image, “How Does Your Collar Suit Me,” shows a young boy in a dog collar; it comes from the newer Band of Mercy, Volume 14, 1892 (erroneously given as Bands of Mercy Advocate in the caption Flegel 257) and, in fact, all four of Flegel’s problematic images come from after the transition to the ­RSPCA-led Bands of Mercy in 1883. I would therefore like to distinguish The Advocate of Smithies’s vision from later iterations of the journal under the RSPCA even as I challenge some of Flegel’s arguments about passivity and disempowerment. Possibly due to his Christian social activism

Empowering Children and Animals  91 and conspicuous focus on God’s respect of all creatures—13 poems and statements emphasize this theme in the first volume alone—Smithies’s ideology set a unique course of the first four years. In 2009, Cary Wolfe challenged the discipline of animal studies to recognize the animal or “in-human” at our human core (quoted in Armbruster 2013: 19). This is perhaps easiest said of non-animal children. As animal-behaviorist James Serpell wrote, Adults can be trained to think about animals and animal behavior in objective, non-anthropomorphic terms, but children seem to find this much more difficult. … [O]ne possible reason why children find it so easy to relate to animals is simply because they are no yet fully indoctrinated with all the paraphernalia of culture, and are therefore more animal-like themselves. (1986: 139) I would suggest that exactly this recognition was being made by the Bands of Mercy. Especially under the direction of Smithies, The Advocate renegotiated the Victorian narrative of child and animal helplessness and vulnerability, advocating empowerment for both.

Body Image: Empowering Small Humans and Animals In order to teach children the value of animals, The Advocate contained a wide coverage of animal species: guinea pigs, toads, bees, monkeys, elephants, spiders, camels, grasshoppers, sea lions, and mountain goats are each mentioned throughout the journal. But, quantifiably, the smaller insects and mammals receive the greatest attention. This begins with the tiniest, the “smallest insect of the earth / That looks to God for bread” (1879 1:90). Songs extol bees (“This is the song of the bee; / His legs are of yellow; / A very good fellow, / And yet a great worker is he” (1:48) and poems praise ants (“The ant his labour has begun” 1:87; “The Ants’ Nest” 2:70). Lest a child consider stepping on or killing insects—albeit “useful” ones and not destructive ones—songs and poems helped them consider the small insects’ industry and worth. Likewise, the journal covers smaller, wild animals who may be thought of as pests merely because of their size. “The Farmer’s Friends” (in the June issue, Volume 1) is a case in point; here, the hedgehog, toad, frog, mole, and bird—all considered pests—are absolved of reviling superstitions and valorized for the food they eat and ways they help a farmer: that a hedgehog is “engaging” and that “tales about his milking cows and sucking eggs are most absurd”; that toads eat 20 to 30 insects hourly; that moles will eat destructive wireworms, larvae, and insects; and that birds “are the only enemies capable of battling [insects] victoriously” (1879: 1:42–43). Despite the heroic language and vilifying of

92  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre less desirable insects, the earnest desire simply to let such animals live is noteworthy: “Don’t kill a hedgehog!” and “Don’t kill a toad!” The Advocate expands its coverage to small species beyond British shores, teaching children about the real lives of such animals in their wild environs. For example, in the short essay about “The Guinea-Pig,” the author (“C.”) describes guinea pigs first as pets but also acknowledges their unique animal characteristics, such as short ears and spotted skin, and that “It is not a native of Guinea, as its name might lead us to suppose, but it comes from Brazil, a warm region of South A ­ merica” (1879 1:67). Another essay in the September issue is about “The Chinchilla” from Chili and Peru. Though author “T. C.” acknowledges that it is hunted for muffs, kept as pets, and even is found in England’s Zoological Gardens without comment, he/she attempts to focus on the scientific facts about chinchillas which, in the wild, “live together, and feed on the roots of many sorts of plants” (1879 1:66). Indeed, with this expansive world-view, Smithies suggests young people around the world are also concerned about animal welfare: that while he was in Syria, small boys there asked to join a Band, so Smithies had the “declaration on the cards … translated into Arabic and printed at Beyrout [sic] for distribution there” (1880 2:71). Such sensitivity between children and animals is less based on culture than an innate child-animal bond, he implies. Smallness becomes not a pejorative term but a vital means to connect animals and children. In the first volume of The Advocate alone, “little” describes animals over 22 times—for example, a “little horse” and a dog named “Tiny”—while children are described as “little” 16 times. These stories and songs give power to these “little” creatures, put succinctly in Fanny Cosby’s well-known song for children, “Little Deeds of Kindness”: How many deeds of kindness A little child may do, Although it has so little strength, And little wisdom too. … How many things a child may do For others by his love. (May 1879: 1:34) Small bodies, of child or animal, can do “many things.” The title of one piece, “Little Children’s Work,” is a reminder that children may inspire adults: A little girl stops her brother from tormenting a kitten, who then stops a friend from beating a dog, which inspires a man not to go to the public-house … all as a reminder “that our words and actions—yea, and our thoughts also, are set upon never-ending wheels, rolling on and into the pathway of eternity” (1879: 1:82–83).

Empowering Children and Animals  93 Children’s small bodies will grow into adult bodies, with far-reaching implications to humans. As “Aunt Eliza” warns the readers: Whenever I see a boy cruelly beating a horse or donkey, or throwing stones at a dog or cat, I say to myself, That boy is likely to grow up a bad man. When Nero, the wicked king, was a little boy, he was cruel to dogs, and pulled off the wings of flies, and tormented them in many sad ways. Did he grow up to be a kind man? Sad to tell, he murdered his mother! Boys and girls, let me warn you not to be cruel to animals. (1879 1:67) Devaluing small insect bodies can lead to grave cruelty and devaluing of human life, even one’s own mother, suggesting the potency of little deeds in both kindness and crime. Reciprocally, the daughter of Sir Francis Burdett who loved horses grew up to be a great lady, the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, President of the Ladies’ Committee of the RSPCA (“Sir Francis Burdett and His Little Girl” 1879: 1:43–5). Certainly, pets are the most populous of diminutive animals in the journal because they are most prominent in a child’s life. Smithies’s early volumes contain over four entries on cats; nine on dogs; and various pet bird, rabbit, and guinea pig stories. Albeit, quite a few stories and poems reflect on the harmful doings of children to these pets: “A Plea for Kittens” points out that children will squeeze little kittens, causing internal injuries and even death (1879 1:12); a poem “Protect the Little Birds” asks, “Oh, why destroy the little birds? / With wanton hand why slay?” (1879 1:18); and a boy snips off his dog’s ear (1879: 1:27–28): all problematic moments of a child’s bodily contact (“wanton hand”) to harm the small bodies of creatures around him or her. Too, as has just been described, linking children with pets could be problematic for both in terms of control and objectification (Flegel 2012: 253) and symbolism of a family’s high status: “Petkeeping came to express bourgeois modernity in many significant ways” (Kete 1994: 40). Stories argue a different treatment of one’s pets, as to be discussed shortly. One way The Advocate gives value to small bodies, especially children and their pets, is to show their beauty as a part of God’s handiwork. This message is quoted liberally in the journal, as with this hymn by James Montgomery, “God Made All Things:” The beasts that graze with downward eye, The birds that perch, and sing and fly, The fishes swimming in the sea, God’s creatures are as well as we. (1879: 1:19, lines 13–16)

94  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Children share this divine sanctification. This shared splendor is then shown visually through Smithies’s intentional use of the artistic engraving. In fact, the 1883 volume, in making the transition from Smithies to the RSPCA editor team, acknowledges this in his obituary: In our opinion, Mr. Smithies stood foremost among all editors in his judgment and taste and enterprise, as regards wood engravings. In fact, we are not doing any one injustice by contending that he stimulated, if he did not cause, an entire revolution in the art of wood cutting and wood-cut printing … rewarded not only by the enormous sale of his publications, but by the universal appreciation and approval of cultured persons. (67) Beautiful illustrations of animals and children adorn every page, surely a large appeal for children waiting for their next issue. Significantly, images give realistic detail of animals and birds. Though animals may represent many concepts for children, they also are real, living beings. Laurence Mazzeno and Ronald Morrison urge distinguishing the “representational” from the “real” animal (2017: 4), as the latter may often become lost by the former, but Smithies is clearly attempting to honor the real animal (4). One way is through realistic illustrations. Avoiding caricatures or stock images of cheap chapbooks, Smithies’s artists worked to portray the real animal in authentic environments. Dogs are sketched to portray their breed; birds are shown in clusters in trees; robust cows are depicted in fields. Often animals are shown in “family” units—sheep and lambs (1879: 1:26), rabbit and young (1879: 1:47), a cow and calf (1879: 1:57), squirrels in a fir-tree (1879: 1:74)—but always a realistic sketch, every fur and feather intricately lined, to feature the animal’s intricacy and beauty. Children, too, are portrayed in true likeness, helping and engaging with the animals around them. As discussed earlier, Flegel argues that children and animals are shown as “aesthetic objects” and “posed carefully as objects for the viewer’s enjoyment” (2015: 141),8 but I suggest that Smithies’s illustrations belie objectification since child and beast most often are shown interacting, not posing. Furthermore, children are the viewers, not adults. They would see themselves in vital connection and active agency with animal life: girls holding kittens (1879: 1:14), a boy carrying his guinea pigs (1879: 1:21), girls feeding a donkey (1879: 1:66), and a child carried on a dog’s back (1880 2:61). Sometimes animals and children are in such close proximity that their physical bodies become symbolically enjoined, completing, and empowering the other. Two pictures bear this out. In the November 1879 issue, affixed to the poem “My Dear Little Kitty” (1:85), a young girl holds a black cat with both sets of eyes gazing back at the viewer, arms entwined.

Empowering Children and Animals  95 Purposely, it appears, the cat wears the bonnet while the young girl is bonnet-less, hair clipped nearly as short as the cat’s fur. Both are small, both bearing further debasing stereotypes of culture: the girl’s androgyny, the cat’s blackness. But neither are degrading qualities now; their bodies are made beautiful by art. In the artwork, both cat and girl are linked literally and symbolically, as a mighty force challenging the culture that marginalizes them. Likewise, the April 1879 issue of the first volume contains a story about an impoverished boy hawking matches to save his dog “Pincher” but only after the boy has allowed “Sandy Lloyd” to cut off an ear to “make him look sharp.” The narrator notes the dog’s subsequent “oddity and ugliness” (1879: 1:27), yet the illustrator has transformed both the deformed dog and impoverished boy into an image of affection and beauty. Indeed, the boy holds the dog so close that they almost form one body, the boy’s left ear replacing the dog’s missing ear, the paws and hands so intertwined that the dog- and child-bodies truly complete each other. The illustration rectifies the “ugliness” of smallness, abuse, and poverty and makes both small bodies beautiful. Animals and children might share bodily smallness and vulnerability, but Smithies’s authors and illustrators have attempted to reclaim “normality, goodness, and beauty,” to quote Vallone (2017: 1), for both creatures in the pages of The Advocate.

Speaking for the Speechless: Child and Animal Voices If children and animals are given bodily empowerment, then it follows that the symbolic voice is restored for both child and animal in the journal’s pages as well. Though its stories may be didactic, rarely are adults preaching to children as in morality stories. Instead, children often teach the adult, as when a son scolds his father for shooting a bird: “Father, that bird will never sing again” (1879: 1:67). Significantly, actual child-readers are given a voice in the articles published in The Advocate like “The Frog, by a Little Girl, Aged 11 Years”—“Some people will … boast of a dog…. But I choose to write of a frog,” the young girl proudly proclaims (1880: 2:34). This poem is followed by a call for readers to submit their own poems to be printed in the journal (1880: 2:38). Words are power, and “One Gentle Word” (1879: 1:19), “Strength of a Kind Word” (1879: 1:36), “A Little Word” (1879: 1:63), and “Speak Kindly” (1879: 1:83) are poems and stories all emphasizing the power of speech to create change, as children speak in kindness to other humans but also for animals who cannot speak themselves. Yet animals do speak in The Advocate if, albeit, through the technique of anthropomorphism. Such a technique of making animals speak and act like humans is contentious, of course. Lisa Rowe Fraustino (2014) speaks to the complicated nature of contemporary anthropomorphic stories and picture books which nearly write out the animal in order to give

96  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre children relatable human stories.9 Karla Armbruster also ­acknowledges that this tactic can be “terrible for human relations with other animals, relying on the grossest anthropomorphism, lapsing into worn-out (and often destructive) stereotypes about all species involved, and confirming a sense of humanity’s ultimate superiority over other creatures” (2013: 18). However, she asks, “is it not possible that, running through every poem, novel, film, and silly news segment featuring talking animals, there is at least a trace of a desire to know and better understand the real otherness of animals, to uncenter from our human perspective and— in whatever limited way we can—open ourselves to the nonhuman?” (19). As Tess Cosslett explores with nineteenth-century animal autobiographies, “the genre invites human readers to ‘change situations’ with the animal protagonist, and imagine its feelings” (2006: 63).10 Just as Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) spoke in first person to an entire nation about cruelties to horses, The Advocate, only two years later, was asking its young readers to “change situations” with the many animals and birds in order to effect widespread change. Petitions are signed by “All Horses, Donkeys, and Dogs” requesting fresh water throughout the summer months (1879: 1:45), and sermons are signed by “A Sparrow” (1879: 1:47). By “speaking” in first person, animals make direct connection with children to share their own suffering: “I ought to know what a sparrow is, being a sparrow myself” begins “The Sparrow’s Sermon” which proceeds to share that “I know what your words mean, I can read frowning faces and sulky looks … but I should like to tell you of something which happened to me this year, as I think you may learn from it what real trouble is” (1879: 1:38), telling us of the loss of his children, as the Sparrow closes the gap between suffering experienced by children and by bird life (1:38–39, 46–47).11 Much of this connection is achieved through anthropomorphic relationships where a family of brown squirrels contains a Father, Mother, and children (1879: 1:74), for instance. By exposing relationships among the animal kingdom, The Advocate writers help children to “imagine the feelings” of the animal life they threaten through poems and songs: “What would you feel/ And your dear mother too / If to your bed some thief should steal / And hurry off with you” (v. 2, “Bird’s Petition,” 1879: 1:24) or “Think, oh think, how she will moan, / When she finds her darlings gone” (“Bird’s Nest,” 1879: 1:40). The “Band of Mercy Narrative Series” features a “lady blackbird” and her “husband blackbird” who are “newly wed” and quickly become “parents” but face near-tragedy when their youngest falls from the nest. A human girl, Sylvia, saves the baby bird by voicing her concerns to a young neighbor boy about to kill it. Almost imperceptibly, the story shifts from the narration of the blackbirds to that of Sylvia as child now speaks for the birds. Bands of Mercy were especially focused on bird welfare, with Bird Days a part of their calendar. Birdsong comes closest to human song;

Empowering Children and Animals  97 music becomes a medium for inter-species aesthetic appreciation. Indeed, human music, writes an author for The Advocate, is “not equal to those of the blackbird, the thrush, and the nightingale. Our country-side has a finer orchestra, morning and evening in early summer, than can be found in London or Paris. And don’t tell us it is wild and uncultivated” (1:43). Music also becomes the medium for change. A song about animal welfare is printed in every issue of The Advocate and many are voiced by birds, helping singers to become more sensitive to bird lives. For example, the January 1879 issue ends with “The Sparrows’ Petition” who ask for “meals to share” (1879: 1:8) during the chill of winter since “Hunger and frost are hard to bear” (1:8). Children are urged to see their similarities with birds in that “We all were hatched, and so, you see, / Are members of the family” (1:8), both human and animal. In quick 6/8 time, the tune by T. Crampton keeps a fast, engaging pace mimicking the flitting of birds. A second “Bird’s Petition” (March 1879), words by S. W. Partridge and music by G. W. Martin, is also a first-person appeal, now to “my little boy … do not rob my nest; / Why should you, for a moment’s joy/ My happy brood molest?” (1879: 1:24). In the repeated refrain, she intones, “if you take them from my side, / They soon will pine and die” (1:24), the notes reaching up to C2 in the upper register to denote the notes of a bird. Since children themselves will be singing these songs, at meetings and certainly in public situations before adults, they are literally taking on the voices of the birds on their behalf. Thus, music not only stands in for birds’ calls; it allows children to sing for the birds and other animals and, ultimately, becomes the medium for saving them. Margo DeMello suggests how increasingly today “animals are allowed to speak for themselves, demonstrating a new awareness of animal subjectivity” (4), but actually Smithies and his writers were doing so 150 years prior. Novelist Arundhati Roy has written that “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”12 Stories in The Advocate asked that both animals and children be heard.

Commendable Action: Animal-Child Agency The animal welfare movement of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both successful and failed action. From the establishment of the RSPCA in 1824 and Martin’s Act of 1835, advocates saw success in animal protections and various bird acts of the 1840s through the 1870s, even while several high-profile species were hunted to extinction, such as the great auk and quagga.13 Romantic authors such as Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Temperance Society purists, had paved the way for a meatless diet by this point; the Vegetarian Society of the UK was founded in 1847.14 However, reformers hit intense resistance when taking on vivisection in the 1870s since suddenly they

98  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre were in opposition to scientists and the educated of their own class, “an insult to an educated and scientific body of men.”15 By the end of the century, the RSPCA gave up divisive political issues altogether, turning instead to such innocuous work as “teaching children to be kind to pets and birds and caring for stray dogs,” writes James Turner, referring to such organizations as the Bands of Mercy (1980: 122).16 Indeed, the Bands rarely entered into divisive issues like vegetarianism17 or vivisection. They might insist on the dignity and kind treatment of animals, but neither they did not challenge the system of animal-usage, such as horses pulling carts, chickens laying eggs, and cows providing meat for humans. “Pets of the Poultry” (1879: 1:60) were not questioned nor was caring for a turkey “A Month Before Christmas” (Illustration, 1883: 5:5), as long as empathy was granted in the process. According to stories in The Advocate, donkeys and horses could be happy in servitude, as long as they were not whipped (1879: 1:82), and bears could be very contented in zoos (as shown in “Old Bruin at the Zoo,” the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park, 1883: 5:93). Children themselves are often perpetrators of great harm to animals; they were shown abusing pets and killing birds. In fact, this cruel behavior was quite often gendered male, reinforcing stereotypes of masculine aggressiveness as suggested in “An Appeal to Boys” (1:29), “Sylvia and the Blackbird,” and the poem “The Boy and the Nest” (1:11) which all depict boys’ cruelty to birds. In contrast, another entry praises “the kindness of these dear little girls” to their donkeys (1:66), also tapping into the feminine-nurture ideals of the era. This is not across the board, however: a girl is shown leering over a bird’s nest in the illustration to the song “The Bird’s Nest” (1879: 1:40), while Peter selflessly sells his guinea pigs for money to help his sick sister, in “Peter’s Pets” (1879: 1:21–23). So, child-readers of both sexes must reckon with their own culpability, but they also learn kindness, even and especially the boys. For example, “The Boy” with the nest comes to the realization “not [to] steal the nest” since “God did not make these birds for me” (1:11). As these stories show, action on behalf of animals is very often predicated on Christian values but re-interpreted to make Scripture much less anthropocentric. Consider the “Catechism on Humanity to Animals, by a Clergyman,” which lays the groundwork in the first (1879) volume of The Advocate. Referencing Old Testament stories, the clergyman makes a case for humane action to animals: the covenant between God and the animals (Gen. 9:10), Jacob’s concern for his animals (Gen. 33:13–14), and commands not to muzzle the ox (Deut. 25:4) and to be kind to horses (Prov. 12:10; 1879: 1:50–51, 58–59). The Catechism next appeals to modern-day science, that “animals [are] sensible of pain and suffering. … Acutely so; for as all sensation is performed by the nerves, so the sense of feeling is performed by the nerves” (1:59). Aligning religion with a “progressive march of humanity,” the clergyman quotes the Rev. W.

Empowering Children and Animals  99 Jones that “religion disclaims and detests it [cruelty] as an insult upon the majesty and goodness of God” (1:59). These final words are to be repeated by children: We will “seek for ourselves, and for all classes of the nation, a truly Christian education” and “show humanity in my daily conduct towards the animal creation” (1:59). The Bands thus worked against social and religious creeds by reinterpreting them, expanding Christian grace to the nonhuman “animal creation” (also “all classes”) while emboldening children to “seek for ourselves.” When Jesus is highlighted as the Lamb (1:59), this animal-allusion now resonates differently with readers. It does not seem a far cry to envision the Bands’ teaching His sermon, “inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” (Matt. 25:40, AV). Kind action to animals begins with appreciating the noble actions of animals themselves. Many stories chronicle the actual, if astonishing, antics of animals: “Brave Bobby” (a dog) saves a girl from drowning (1879: 1:2), “‘Jerry,’ the Clever Pony” knows every customer’s house on his milk errands (1:10), a dog protects a chicken’s eggs from foxes (1879: 1:20), in “A Cat’s Affection and Sagacity” a cat cares for another sick cat (1879: 1:35), “Old Jack” the horse pulls his master out of the ale-house before he becomes too drunk to work (1879: 1:36), while Nep the dog saves a ship by warning the sleeping captain of a dangerous rock (1879: 1:87). “Do you wonder that the captain thinks his dog is worth his weight in gold?” (1:87) ends the piece, which does not reverse the idea of animal-ownership but does emphasize the vital worth of animals. These stories do not rely on anthropocentric actions: they seek to represent real moments of animal intellect and bravery. The cumulative effect is to posit animal action to inspire children, ­animal-centric in many ways, since humans are encouraged to take on the heroic qualities of animals. Consider moments of animal-inspiration, as in “A Morning Hymn”: Do birds their morning praises bring, So early rise, so sweetly sing? And shall a child forget to raise Its waking voice in note of praise? (1879: 1:55) Not quite suggesting that birds worship, as Christopher Smart might, the hymn yet gives birds the natural instinct of praise for children to follow. Likewise, the story of a dog rescuing another ends with this human moral: “Now, if dogs are so kind to each other, and so helpful to each other, when in trouble, how much more should little boys and girls be!” (1879: 1:76). And, indeed, many children follow suit, becoming heroes of their own stories throughout the pages of The Advocate. “Daniel Webster’s First

100  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Plea” narrates the story of the child Daniel successfully “defending” a squirrel about to be killed by his brother at a family court (1879: 1:26). In “Edwin Gray’s Reasons Against Bird-Nesting,” Edwin convinces all his friends not to take birds’ nests in their play (1879: 1:3). “Louisa at the Seaside” stops the donkey-boy from beating her donkey and teaches him how to coax with food instead (1879: 1.54). This focus on the childhero builds to a new feature introduced in the RSPCA’s The Advocate, “What Even a Child Can Do,” a series of stories focused exactly on this concept of child-doing, their first example being Kate Johnson who refuses to ride in a carriage whose horses use bearing reins (1883: 5:67), not unlike the powerful message against bearing reins in Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877: 80–85). But whereas these crippling instruments are, in the novel, harnessed on horses by adults, in The Advocate’s story they are removed by a child. Given the Bands’ reputation for avoiding contentious topics, it is significant that Smithies includes commentary on the evils of vivisection slipped into news from the “Band of Mercy Meeting at Earlham Grove”: At Florence, the Countess Baldelli, an English lady, has long worked in the cause of humanity, and she and her friends have succeeded in bringing to light the cruelty and waste of life connected with vivisection. By simply publishing a statement of these experiments whenever they heard of them, without comment, they have had many laws amended, and been the means of saving the lives of animals. (1880: 2:71) Given the dramatic increase in vivisection for scientific purposes, and animal welfare groups’ often futile war against science (Harrison 1982: 89–90), it is a bold move. It is also bold in encouraging children to become politically active for, indeed, children may be inspired by Countess Baldelli to also “bring to light the cruelty and waste of life connected with vivisection” and subsequently “laws [may be] amended” in the process (1880: 2:71). At the core of these concerns is, as the catechism taught, a vital concern for animals’ suffering and loss of life, and a call for children and humanity to curtail both. Bentham’s question “but can they suffer?” was “paradigm-shifting” (Milne 163) because it taught humans to imagine the suffering of animals as their own. Throughout The Advocate, children act to save animals from thirst, beatings, or even death. They do so by imagining the grief and death from the animal’s perspective, as does the boy with the nest: “The sparrows both might die of grief / If they their darlings did not see” (1879: 1:11). Animal death is disproportionately caused by humans and sometimes The Advocate becomes political in pointing out society’s institutional cruelty. “A Pet Fox” portrays a rescued fox set free but still killed by hunting dogs: “Is not hunting a cruel sport?” asks “T.C.” as the story ends (95). No

Empowering Children and Animals  101 more is said, but it is a haunting question because children are asked to imagine the chase from the fox’s perspective. Pain and death are shared amongst all animal species; as Armbruster writes, death “dethrones humans from our accustomed position of superiority and puts us into intimate relationship with … all other forms of life” (2013: 27). Smithies’s insistence that children perceive pain and death from the animal’s perspective is shown in perhaps one of his most poignant stories in The Advocate, “The Shot Monkey.” Children read of a man “travelling East [who] brought down a monkey from a high tree” (1879: 1:52). The hunter is then stunned to see the similarities with a human: “he was shocked to see it, as large as a fine child.” The slippage of terms— animal with child—would touch the very sensibilities of the actual child-readers. And even though the monkey cannot speak, the author amplifies its feelings by suggesting that the monkey had “an expression that seemed to imply, ‘What have I ever done to you, that you should kill me?’” The illustrator accentuates this painful moment by showing the man clasping the dying monkey in his arms. The continued suffering, along with the monkey’s “expression of reproach” and “eyes wide open” as it dies, touches the hunter immensely, and “[f]rom that day he never used his gun” (1:54). The message against hunting is overt, and species-crossing is punctuated by the fact that “the child” the hunter holds could be his own. As the story also shows, sometimes death is the most humane, Christian course of action, and Mrs. Smithies was known to purchase and humanely kill overworked horses (1879: 1:6). Children, whether rural or urban, working class or middle class, were not sheltered from the death of pets, work animals, or wild animals. Various stories show animals dying as the child watches on, as the story of “The Dying Horse and the Kind Boys” reveals. Feeding and offering water to a horse severely hurt in an accident, the boys must watch the horse die. The writer yet praises them for this humanity seen at the last: “Blessings on you, kind little boys! … for He who in your hearts raised the wish to succor that poor perishing horse, looked down with approving smile” (1879: 1:38). Marianna Burt writes of the animal as a timeless “alter ego, or double” for humans throughout literature and art (1988: 118), but human children seem to be the most direct double for animals, sharing a political irrelevance because of smallness and voicelessness for much of modern history. Thus, Thomas Smithies and his writers for The Advocate created a new ideological, moral framework for English society, bolstered, in fact, by Christian faith, as summed up in this poem: O Lord, help Thou a little child, To speak the truth alway [sic]. … But always strictly truthful be In all I do or say. (1879: 1:71)

102  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre Though “little,” a child can “speak” and “do” in powerful ways as supported by a confidence-giving God. Throughout the journal’s pages, visual aesthetics complement and connect the small bodies of children and animals, and anthropomorphic stories and song give voice to both. Ultimately, children and animals are given vital agency and significance to their actions of bravery and even political worth. Kindness to animals reflected a kindness needed by all humanity, the Bands particularly taking aim at suffering, abuse, and killing. Children recited these stories, sang these songs, imbibed these messages, and disseminated them outward to adult society. Progress was slow in animal welfare policies but Wild Fowl Protection Acts (of 1872 and 1876) had their success primarily due to the RSPCA. By 1884, five years after The Advocate was published, members of the RSPCA founded the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, so that society would formally protect young children, too. In 1975, Peter Singer refuted a common criticism of the animal rights movement, that “those who care about nonhumans do not care about humans,” by pointing out this important intersection between members of the RSPCA and NSPCA (1990: 218).18 The Bands of Mercy is another important moment of child-animal interconnection and activism and needs a place in the scholarship of animal welfare, children’s rights, and power struggles of the Victorian era.

Notes 1 Catherine Smithies established the first Band in 1875, Wood Green, Middlesex, England. Being a Wesleyan Methodist and philanthropist, Smithies extended her Evangelical-humanitarian principles outward, to educate about and promote kind treatment of animals among children within a Christian context. Other towns quickly established their own Bands; and by 1892, there were 800 chapters throughout England. These represented thousands of children in that each chapter could include 100–400 children; the Ipswich Band, “one of the most flourishing Bands,” registered 700 members in 1883 (The Band of Mercy 1883: 5:15). They also inspired George T. Angell and Rev. Thomas Timmins to establish the American Band of Mercy organization in 1882 which became extremely successful. 2 Among many histories and contributions to the animal rights movement, see Singer (1975), Turner (1980), Harrison (1982), Serpell (1986), Rowen (1988), Wand (2003), Taylor (2017), and Thompson (2018). Of Victorian animal studies scholarship, see Ritvo (1987), Morse and Danahay (2007), and Mazeno and Morrison (2017), among many others. None of these books mentions the Bands of Mercy organization. 3 In Chapter 5 of British Hymn Books for Children (2016), I consider the music and hymns of the Bands of Mercy movement. 4 As Bernard E. Rollin points out, Rene Descartes linked reason with language acquisition, thus aiding the century’s growing scientific experimentation by providing “a convenient rationale for ignoring the ‘apparent’ suffering that experimentation engendered” (2003: 132). Harriet Ritvo argues in The Animal Estate that when the mystic of animals was laid bare by science, the animal’s power was greatly diminished by the Victorian period, mass hunting and scientific co-opting following (2–3).

Empowering Children and Animals  103 5 Flegel has important contributions to animal-child studies as chapters in her Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England (2009), Ch. 2, and Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015), Ch. 4, and such articles as “How Does Your Collar Suit Me?” (2012) and “Mistresses as Masters” (2013). 6 This was the “Declaration” found on Cards of Membership. One example of a Card, fully engraved with images of birds and horses, is given in the first volume, p. 37, costing readers two pence. It should be noted that Bands organizers were very aware of cost for their young members and when issuing new medals in 1883, they state that the “greatest efforts have been made to obtain [them] at the lowest possible cost” (1883: 5.35). The design, too, was executed “under the personal direction of Her Majesty the Queen for the R.S.P.C.A.” (5.35). 7 Volume 5 included an obituary to Smithies, acknowledging his devotion to his mother, his rigid Sabbatarianism, Wesleyan Methodism, teetotaler, and humanitarianism. These commitments can be seen in the expanse of his editing projects: In addition to The Advocate, Mr. Smithies edited British Workman; Band of Hope Review; Welcome, Family Friend; Children’s Friend; Infant’s Magazine; and Friendly Visitor. It should be noted that The Advocate was published anonymously, as “by the editor of ‘British Workman.’” 8 In later issues, under RSPCA control, this seems true: Children staged in fine clothes and doll-like fashion at times. Consider a boy in smart suit and hat alongside his faithful dog, same height, gazing directly at the viewer; a young girl in fancy hat and coat feeding a turkey, each animal gazing at the other, for example, in Vol. 5 (1883: 5.4–5). Smithies’s illustrations, though surely “staged,” use more natural settings and animated actions. 9 See her “The Rights and Wrongs of Anthropomorphism in Picture Books.” It is interesting that Fraustino suggests that books of earlier traditions succeed better, like those by Beatrix Potter, because they retained enough of the animal’s natural world; Potter (born 1866) might well indeed have been reading The Advocate when a child. Of other scholars who take on the anthropomorphic or anthropocentric debate, see Karla Armbruster’s and other essays in Speaking for Animals (2013), edited by Margo DeMello, and Tess Cosslett’s Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction (2006). 10 Cosslett is using this phrase from Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories which she quotes at length in an earlier chapter: “a good way to accustom one’s self, before one kills anything, to change situations with it in imagination…” (quoted in 2006: 42). 11 The classic talking bird book is, of course, Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (later, The Story of the Robins), from 1786, in which Trimmer parallels the lives of the Benson family and a robin family. As Cosslett explains, “While Mrs. Benson is sure that animals cannot speak human language, or attain to reason, she is willing to believe they have their own language, to some degree…. The study of birdsong reveals that it is feeling that the animals share with us, and through sympathetic feeling we can interpret their language” (2006: 43). The Advocate’s approach is somewhat more complex in that children sing the birds’ songs which are yet sung in human language, although feeling for the birds’ plight is still the desired goal. 12 Quoted in Taylor 2017: 62 from Arundhati Roy’s 2004 Sydney Pease Prize lecture delivered at the Seymour Theatre Center, the University of Sydney, November 4, 2004. 13 The Great Auk, a large flightless bird of the North Atlantic, was hunted to extinction by 1844; the quagga, a type of zebra found in South Africa, was heavily hunted by Europeans and extinct by 1883.

104  Alisa Clapp-Itnyre 14 For more, see James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-century Britain (2007) and Jon Gregerson, Vegetarianism: A History (1994). 15 Spoken by contemporary Robert Lowe, quoted in Harrison 90. 16 See Brian Harrison, Chapter 2 in Peaceable Kingdom and James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast for thorough histories of the animal-welfare movement in the Victorian era. 17 Gregerson writes that “one cannot but be astonished that the animal welfare and protection movement in its various guises … did not, at least eventually, become wholely vegetarian in its operation” (1994: 75). Even today, many animal studies critics are neither vegetarian nor vegan. 18 In Chapter 2 of Conceptualizing Cruelty, Flegel fleshes out the nuances of the RSPCA and the NSPCC relationship and how the latter eventually broke ties to prioritize cruelties to humans; Flegel notes that “by severing the child from the animal, the NSPCC failed to recognize the ways in which narratives of child-animal suffering might help to illuminate problems of power, cruelty, and domination” (2009: 72).

Bibliography Armbruster, Karla. “What Do We Want from Talking Animals? Reflections on Literary Representations of Animal Voices and Minds.” In DeMello, 17–34, 2013. The Band of Mercy Advocate. Vols. 1–5. Edited by the Editor of The British Workman.” Illustrated by Harrison Weir, et al. London: S. W. Partridge, 1879–1883. Bentham, Jeremy. 1789. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, edited by Jonathan Bennett. 2017. www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/ pdfs/bentham1780.pdf. Burt, Marianna R. “The Animal as Alter Ego: Cruelty, Altruism, and the Work of Art.” In Animals and People Sharing the World, edited by Andrew N. Rowan, 117–35. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. Carroll, Lewis. 1897. Alice in Wonderland. A Norton Critical Edition, edited by Donald J. Gray. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1992. Clapp-Itnyre, Alisa. British Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2016. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2006. DeMello, Margo, ed. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing. Routledge Advances in Sociology Series. New York: Routledge, 2013. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. Philadelphia, PA: Lea and Blanchard, 1839. Project Gutenberg Ebook. www.gutenberg.org/ ebooks/46675. Flegel, Monica. Conceptualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-Century England: Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC. Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700–Present. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. Flegel, Monica. “‘How Does Your Collar Suit Me?’ The Human Animal in the RSPCA’s Animal World and Band of Mercy.” Victorian Literature and Culture 40, no. 1 (2012): 247–62.

Empowering Children and Animals  105 Flegel, Monica. “Mistresses as Masters: Voicing Female Power through the Subject Animal in Two Nineteenth-Century Animal Autobiographies.” In ­DeMello, 89–101, 2013. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. New York: Routledge, 2015. Fraustino, Lisa Rowe. “The Rights and Wrongs of Anthropomorphism in Picture Books.” In Ethics and Children’s Literature, edited by Claudia Mills, 145–62. Surrey: Ashgate/Routledge, 2014. Gregerson, Jon. Vegetarianism: A History. Fremont, CA: Jain, 1994. Gregory, James. Of Victorians and Vegetarians: The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-century Britain. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. Harrison, Brian. Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. McDonell, Jennifer. “Bull’s-eye, Agency, and the Species Divide in Oliver Twist: A Cur’s-Eye View.” In Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, 109–28. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Milne, Anne. “The Power of Testimony: The Speaking Animal’s Please for Understanding in a Selection of Eighteenth-century British Poetry.” In DeMello, 17–34, 2013. Morse, Deborah Denenholz, and Martin A. Danahay, ed. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Ritvo, Harriet. “Learning from Animals: Natural History for Children in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Children’s Literature 13 (1985): 72–93. Rollin, Bernard E. “Animals are Moral Creatures Deserving of Fair Treatment.” In The Animal Rights Movement, edited by Kelly Wand, 129–138. San ­Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2003. Rowan, Andrew N., ed. Animals and People Sharing the World. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1988. Serpell, James. In the Company of Animals. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty. 1877. San Diego: Canterbury Classics, 2014. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation (1975). 2nd edition. New York: Random House, 1990. Taylor, Sunaura. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: New Press, 2017. Thompson, Hilary. Novel Creatures: Animal Life and the New Millennium. New York: Routledge, 2018. Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Vallone, Lynne. Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Wand, Kelly, ed. The Animal Rights Movement. San Diego: Greenhaven, 2003.

6 Bush Animals, Developmental Time, and Colonial Identity in Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction Christie Harner In John Howard Clark’s Bertie and the Bullfrogs: An Australian Story for Big and Little Children (1873), first published anonymously in the South Australian Adelaide Observer, a young boy tumbles into a creek.1 He does not drown: Instead, suspended in time and space, he exchanges poetic songs and conversations with several animal species, including bullfrogs, opossums, and owls. Twenty-six years later, in Ethel Pedley’s 1899 Dot and the Kangaroo, a girl loses her way in the bush near her home. 2 Over six days, a motherly kangaroo introduces her to the experiences and philosophies of nonhuman bush inhabitants. Both originally published in the Australian colonies, for native-born and recently immigrated children, the texts ostensibly use the trope of speech-endowed animals to acquaint youths with indigenous species and characterize the bush landscape as “home.” As such, they manifest in part what scholars have identified in other genres as the emergence of a salient “bush mythology” in Australian literature from the second half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, despite their light-heartedness and child-friendly tones, they participate to an extent in the ubiquitous ­nineteenth-century Australian sub-genre of the lost-child narrative. Yet, as this essay argues, the stories complicate the inclusion of the “lost child” in bush mythologies and call for the re-­interpretation of both genres, first through the interpretive scales of animal studies and eco-criticism and then through reflections on children’s literature as a genre with distinct characteristics and modes of address. In both tales, absence—the time in which the child is “lost” from the perspective of the human community—is contiguous with nonhuman animal eco-temporalities that complicate the settlers’ relationship to the land. Perhaps since 1893, when journalist Francis Adams proclaimed the “bushman” as the “one powerful and unique type yet produced in Australia,” nineteenth-century literature from the colony has been aligned with or in tension to the advent of the bush legend (163). Broadly defined, bush mythology claims that “the authentic, distinctive, typical, or essential Australia” will only be found in the outback (Carter 2017: 42). It subverts the classical ideologies of the Euro-centric pastoral,

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  107 a “frictionless space devoid of labor with an abundance of nature’s gifts in a calm and leisurely setting,” and proffers instead a cast of roughhewn, industrious, and straight-speaking characters, almost always but not exclusively men (Hoorn 2007: 9). The bush figures, “heroic drovers or stoic drovers’ wives, pastoralists or struggling small farmers, solitary swagmen or unionized workers,” do not tame the bush so much as they assimilate into it, either successfully or not (Carter 43). As depicted in ballads, poetry, and fiction by authors such as Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson, Marcus Clarke, Barbara Baynton, and Miles Franklin, the characters live and work, and often die, outside urban or suburban areas, in bushlands that are sparsely settled rather than virginal, on selections and settlements that range from a small plot to hundreds of thousands of acres, and that can easily be a day’s ride from the nearest town or neighbor. Depending on how they occupy that land and to what ends, the mythology may be marshalled for distinct, sometimes antithetical, causes: Australian nationalism and republicanism (up to and following federation in 1901), British imperialism and loyalism, conservative white supremacy and masculinist “mate-ship,” quasi-socialist ideologies of communal living, etc. In each instance, despite their obvious contradictions, representations of the bush fundamentally altered and then came to stand in for nascent Australian definitions of the self as a part and product of the land. The subgenre of the lost child sat alongside bush mythology, at times uncomfortably, as it represented both the frailty and the potential of the coming generation. As Peter Pierce (1999), Kim Torney (2005), and Elspeth Tilley (2012) have argued, tales of youths lost in the bush became “the dominant image of the Australian child’s experience with the land” (Torney 13).3 To an extent, the storyline found its basis in a concrete reality: The Argus Index for even a single decade (1860–1869) reports “approximately 70 cases of children being fatally lost in the bush” (13).4 Specific instances became prototypes for literary elaborations on the same themes. For example, the recovery of the Duff children (aged three, seven, and nine) in August 1864, after eight days in Victoria bushlands, inspired a series of textual and visual adaptations, most addressed at adult readers, including verse narratives (the anonymous The Australian Babes in the Wood, published in London in 1866), visual representations (in the Illustrated Australian News and the Illustrated Melbourne Post), and novels (O. F. Timms’s Station Dangerous: or, The Settlers in Central Australia, a Tale Founded on Facts [1866]). Unlike European counterparts, like the Brothers Grimm’s “Hansel and Gretel,” written primarily for child readers, the Australian lost-child stories focus less on a malign human threat and more on disorienting natural landscapes, in which children are cast as “passive victims” to environmental conditions that overwhelm them (Pierce 33). As evidenced by incidents like that of the “Daylesford children” (three boys, six years old and younger, found

108  Christie Harner dead in rural Victoria in September 1867), climatic exposure, dehydration, and starvation posed severe threats to juvenile bodies: These were “children lost to, rather than in, the bush” (Torney 42). The Australian lost-child narrative, as manifested in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, followed what became a fairly rote sequence of events and a largely bifurcated structure, one that epitomizes some of the contradictions of the bush legend. The first half seems to borrow the “Romantic associations between childhood and nature” but translates it into a colonial context in which the child is a product of and akin to the indigenous landscape (Smith 2016: 196). Rather than evoking bucolic scenes of innocent youths with equally wide-eyed baby animals, these stories insist on the unique characteristics of the “wild little bush child … as fearless as a lion,” as Henry Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn characterizes James Grewer’s son (1859: 315): the much loved offspring of the cast of bush figures identified earlier, children unfamiliar with their parents’ pasts in Britain and possessing instead the antipodean “qualities of a developing Australian type” (Pierce 19).5 Pretty Dick, in Marcus Clarke’s eponymous tale, first published in the Melbourne Colonial Monthly, “could drive up a refractory cow with anybody,” talk to “Ah Yung, the Chinaman cook,” and take tea in a billy to his father (1896: n.p.). His skin, tanned by the southern sun, is “the colour of the ripe chestnuts his father used to gather in England years ago” (n.p.). Defined by their Australian predilections, the youths are enticed by the native landscape. The young protagonist in Geoffrey Hamlyn, drawn to the wild quantongs, fancies that “he could see other children far up the vistas beckoning him to cross and play in that merry land of shifting lights and shadows” (315), and Pretty Dick tracks a “strange intoxicating smell, evolved from the heat and the water,” into the bush (n.p.). In Henry Lawson’s turn-of-the-century poem and short story (1899 and 1901), both titled “The Babies in the Bush,” the siblings search for buttercups, “out on the flat” (in the poem) or “under a clump of blue-gums in a corner of the home paddock” (in the story) (n.p.). While the first part of the lost-child narrative thus speaks to the allure and promise of the landscape for its settlers, the second reflects deep-seated anxieties about its dangers: “a potentially perilous future in an inimical environment which does not easily accommodate the white colonial society of which the child is the representative” (Vaughan-Pow 2001: 119). Innocent and joyous at first, the children inevitably lose their direction, doing “deeper and deeper into the bush every moment,” as happens to the three siblings, modeled on the Duffs, in Robert Richardson’s A Little Australian Girl; or, The Babes in the Bush (1881: 13), first published in Edinburgh. Often, the process of being lost necessitates “a physical or psychological threshold-crossing such as a sleep-­ episode, creek-crossing, fence-broaching, or violent storm” (­Tilley 163). Richardson’s heroes wander away from the creek that marked the route

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  109 homeward; Pretty Dick breaches set boundaries at a location called, pointedly, “The Crossing Place.” Once the protagonists are lost, the narratives rarely focus on their travails; the dangers posed by the bush are less specific than nebulous, threatening in their unknowability. The youths are found, either dead or alive, by adults (often by aboriginal trackers), and the fictional tales provide scant details of their liminal experiences or physical suffering—with the occasional exception of attention given to the sacrifices of the eldest, often female child, who protects those younger than herself.6 Together, the two facets of the lost-child narrative are said to evoke “the discourse of young Australia,” its latent capacities, “moral and spiritual superiority,” and as-yet-undetermined futures (Pierce 8; Vaughan-Pow 114). As bush literature interpolates its characters as emblematic types, the child lost in the bush becomes the archetypal Australian youth. Bertie and the Bullfrogs and Dot and the Kangaroo replicate in some respects the teleologies of these lost-child narratives but depart substantially in others and suggest, in doing so, that the role of children’s fictions in the canon of bush literature needs to be rethought. Bertie and Dot are Australian youths enticed by local flora and fauna: The former leaves the safety of his family’s rural verandah to listen more closely to the sound of bullfrogs in the creek, and as she is gathering bush flowers, Dot runs after a hare and away from her family’s selection.7 Both children are rescued: Bertie by his mother (who pulls him out of the water) and Dot by a series of animals who lead her home. These tales differ markedly from the rest of the genre, however, in two key respects. First, they explicitly address a young audience, unlike most lost-child fictions, and bush narratives more broadly, which typically appeared in adult periodicals or were included within adult texts. Second, their récits center not on beginnings and ends, on the processes of being adrift and found, but on the escapades that the children have while they are lost. In this respect, they would seem to borrow formulae popularized by earlier, very widely read British children’s stories: Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies (1863) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). As in the Australian texts, the precedents open and conclude with a recognizable nineteenth-century present but devote the majority of their pages to adventures had in alternative, fantastical realities. In the texts by Clark and Pedley, those interludes, as they are adapted from British children’s fiction, have elements that do not appear in other Australian lost-child narratives: talking animals and suspended temporalities, nonhuman heterochromia that refigure the tenor of the children’s exploits and what it might mean for them to be “lost.” In Bertie and Dot, animal protagonists serve to introduce developmental causalities, evolutionary systems, and geological deep time—ecological subjects that complicate interpretations of bush mythology and its place in Australian consciousness.

110  Christie Harner Following influential feminist critics who have argued that dominant bush legends of the nineteenth century relegated women to the margins, this essay aims to suggest that children’s bush fictions have been understudied or too long assigned only to the subgenre of the “lost child.”8 In analyzing how interspecies relations and temporalities inform the representations of Australia and coloniality in Clark and Pedley’s stories, this piece argues that Bertie and Dot cannot simply be read as lost-child narratives but must be resituated within the bush literature tradition—a canon to which they bring interpretive challenges. It suggests that the tales define lost as oriented toward iterations of “bush time,” asking readers to reimagine colonial identities alongside models of nonhuman change rather than through practical human attention to seasonal droughts and agricultural cycles.9 In Bertie, the child’s fall inverts spatial and circadian rhythms and, in doing so, prompts a reconsideration of evolutionary progress and theories of recapitulation. The amusing Christmas “number” is also a contemplation on multiple vectors of nonhuman time as they are made visible in the bushlands. In Dot, indigenous species speculate, as the white settlers are not able to do, on geological deep time and extinction. As the animals help Dot to find her appropriate place in the historical/colonial present, they remap relationalities onto much longer, deeper timescales. In both tales, the caesuras, the times/spaces in which the children are “lost,” open up what Timothy Clark (2015) terms “de-humanizing” potentials, critical reformulations of the links between human and nonhuman colonial inhabitants. Clark’s Christmas story opens with a dedication to Lewis Carroll and a holiday pun on his surname. He, as author, “plucks this poor twig from out thy crown of laurel to plant it in the far Australian land, and grow, inspired by thee, a Christmas Carroll” (1873: 14). Marked in this way, the tale is recognizable both as the successor of the Alice books and as a distinctively colonial product, adapting the topsy-turvy realm of Wonderland to the “land down under.” Certainly, it shares tonal characteristics and plot elements with its predecessor. Almost precisely like Alice, who falls “down, down, down” the rabbit-hole, so far that she begins “to wonder what was going to happen next,” Bertie, tumbling into the creek, “went down, down, down, till he wondered when he should get to the bottom” (Carroll 2009: 10). Further like Carroll’s protagonist, the young Bertie metamorphoses away from his normal size: having peered into the large-end of the owl’s spectacles (i.e., field-glass), he sees how “he himself [is] so much smaller,” small enough to fit into the child opossum’s bed (14). In parallel to Alice, who recites verses that are “not quite right,” in which “some of the words have got altered,” Bertie listens to the animals’ renditions of familiar rhymes, made eerie by changed lyrics (Carroll 45)—including “Little Boy Blue,” Benjamin Franklin’s “Early to bed,” and Isaac Watts’s “Let dogs delight to bark and bite.” The aquatic sphere in which Bertie is “lost” is, like

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  111 Wonderland, a heterotopia of opposites and upheavals, a “liquid world” embodying the “spontaneity and liberty of the Wordsworthian spirit of childhood” (Ang 2000: 25–26). In some respects, Clark’s tale also follows Alice’s Adventures and Kingsley’s Water-Babies in their katabatic structure. Taken from the Greek katá (downwards) and baínõ (go), this narratological term applies to texts that depict “a protagonist’s descent…in search either of a prize (for example, Orpheus’s descent to rescue Eurydice) or knowledge (as with Aeneas and Odysseus)” (Eames 2017: 201). Alice’s fall precipitates a series of lessons about self-possession and childhood agency; Tom’s physiological and psychological transformation, as taught to him by the fairies, produces an entirely new individual, one who is morally “fit to go with [Ellie], and be a man; because he has done the thing he did not like” (Kingsley 2013: 179). Like Tom, the chimney-sweep who falls into the cool stream because he “longed so to be clean for once,” Bertie wishes to change his outward form (Kingsley 33); in Clark’s more comical, less moralistic prose, he “saw the bright crimson of the sky shining in the still waterhole and thought how nice it would be to bathe there and come out that beautiful color all over” (14). After his experiences as a water-baby, Tom cleanses himself of moral and physical filth; likewise, following his fall, Bertie arguably takes on the shades of the bush landscape, finding an appropriate place within the Australian ecosystem. In all three stories, the katabatic structure works alongside an evolutionary teleology, one in which the child protagonists learn, in crucial respects, how to be human. Alice begins her time in Wonderland by emerging from “the bath of tears” (which represents both the “sea of life” and “amniotic fluid”), in such a way that “ontogeny then repeats phylogeny,” and “a whole Noah’s ark gets out of the sea with her” (Empson 1974: 255). By first becoming animal (i.e. claiming kin with the Duck, Dodo, Lory, Eaglet, and “other curious creatures”), and then developing back into a little girl, she learns to differentiate herself from nonhuman species while she gains empathy for them (­Carroll 23). Likewise, as Jessica Straley (2007) argues, once transformed into a ­water-baby, Tom “must evolve back into a boy by discovering the natural laws of survival and by learning to be kind to the other underwater creatures” (584). For Straley, Kingsley’s novel “thus layers a moral teleology onto the then-popular evolutionary doctrine” that ontogeny (the development of a single individual, from an embryo) reiterates phylogeny (the evolution of the species): put simply, “good boys evolve into men while naughty ones remain beasts” (584). Both British children’s tales layer a belief in recapitulation, in which individual development is a “brief, compressed reproduction of the long series of forms through which the animal ancestors of that organism…have passed from the earliest periods,” with Victorian pedagogical theories (Haeckel 1903: 6–7). As Herbert Spencer influentially put forth, first in lectures and then in his

112  Christie Harner Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861), moral and intellectual acquisition should be recognized as a “process of self-­evolution,” in which students progress (not unlike developing organisms) “from simple to complex, from indefinite to definite, and from concrete to abstract” (100). For Bertie, whose fall repositions him as animal, his journey back to his family, as well as toward what might be seen as an ecological education, seems to require progression through a succession of non-­ obvious evolutionary stages: the bullfrog, the opossum, the owl, and the technologically savvy riders of a stream train (including a lizard, cicada, crayfish, and grasshopper). In Alice’s Adventures and Water-Babies, the focus on a human protagonist, and on the lessons learned by that child, reaffirms the distinctiveness of humanity: as the children grow into maturity, so too did the human species evolve into the privileged position that it holds. By contrast, in the Australian Bertie, the complexity of the stages through which the protagonist passes challenges any straightforward reading of human exceptionality. As Bertie begins his journey, the evolutionary phases, as presented, are technically correct but markedly difficult to follow. After his fall into the creek, he first encounters the bullfrog, an amphibian and a species that belongs to a comparatively early stage of animal evolution. From the amphibian evolved all other tetrapods, including birds, reptiles, and mammals: a classification recognized by Aristotle and later formulized in Carl Linnaeus’s System Naturae (1735). The story next introduces the opossum and the owl in the same sequence, with the marsupial appearing first. As Bertie physically ascends “the old gum tree that stands in the creek at the bottom of the garden,” what becomes difficult to parse is the branching of the evolutionary “tree,” in which the synapsids (ancestors of mammals) and the sauropsids (the predecessors of reptiles and birds) both developed from the amniotes (animals that lay eggs on land), which arose from amphibians (14). In other words, the marsupial/mammal and owl/bird represent two branches of development that succeeded from the amphibian, with the bird’s slightly later appearance signifying that it evolved not directly from the amniote but from an intermediary reptilian ancestor. Arguably, the absence of the reptile from this part of the story is only possible following on Thomas Henry Huxley’s assertion, in his Comparative Anatomy (1864), that birds and reptiles both evolved from sauropsids. Although scientifically accurate, the teleology as it is presented is difficult to follow—arguably all the more so given the inclusion of the marsupial, which took a prominent position in debates that were as-yet-unsettled in the nineteenth century. As Charles Darwin and others explained, the marsupial stood at the crux of the alternative theorizations of monophyletic versus successive origins of living mammals: most simply, the disagreement about whether placentals and marsupials shared a common ancestor or if one had evolved from the other.10 Bertie’s ascent “up” the developmental

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  113 tree thus works in two ways at once, befitting its publication in a serial read by children and adults. Even as its scientific accuracy points to the intricacy of evolutionary debates, and to the rejection of any straightforward human-centered trajectory, it would for the same reasons far exceed the knowledge of child readers (and that of many adults)—making it scientifically complex and seemingly nonsensical all at once. This combination of the illogical, and the silly, with sound scientific knowledge continues throughout the story and further complicates its representation of developmental “bush time”: the forms of temporality that complicate the chronology in which Bertie is lost and undermine any assertion of human exceptionality. At the top of the gum tree, Bertie awakes “on a railway-platform,” with the next departure “the down train on the branch line” (14). He thus ascends the evolutionary “tree” only to descend, before reinserting himself in a human world—a twist that raises intriguing questions about the position of the human species as a “branch” of the tree. On the steam train, which might seem to mark the most advanced nineteenth-century technology, he meets a series of less evolved animals, including the lizard (the previously “missing” reptilian link) and three species that belong to the even more ancient phylum of arthropoda, the earliest identifiable land animals (the cicada, crayfish, and grasshopper). Yet even this nonsensical evolutionary paradox (the pairing of the most with the least advanced) contains accurate biological details, including reference to a lizard’s ability to regenerate its tail and the abbreviated lifespan of the cicada. At other points, the animal species seem to replicate human developmental time; for example, they engage in pedagogic rituals and in courting customs, as when bullfrog Jem dresses “in his best clothes, with a shiny hat on one side of his head, a new pair of gloves in one hand, and a little walking cane in the other,” to stroll with Polly Wog (14). The anthropomorphizing of the animals renders uncanny these human temporalities, but it also intertwines them with nonhuman developmental forms that are grounded in scientific knowledge likely familiar to child audiences: i.e., that nocturnal opossums are awake (and in school, in this instance) at night and asleep in the day, and that amphibians pass through a larval stage with fins and external gills. Unlike Carroll’s and Kingsley’s novels, which prioritize their protagonists’ steady acquisition of lessons taught to them, Clarke’s story interweaves Bertie’s experiences with the life-cycles and evolutionary trajectories of its nonhuman figures, animals who are often unconcerned with or even oblivious to the child’s existence. Regardless of whether the multi-scale animal teleologies are seen as nonsensical or accurate, and perhaps even more so if those readings are compounded, they subvert any human-centered “progression,” either of the individual (Bertie) or the species. After his fall, Bertie travels up and then down, only to return to a recognizable setting (the grass of his family’s plot) not as a

114  Christie Harner human but as a rodent-sized animal, natural prey for the domesticated duck and cat that would otherwise be his pets. The inversion of power relations underscores the fact that these are invasive species, in a story otherwise marked by its indigenous animals, to further emphasize processes of ecological upheaval. That is to say, if Bertie does “grow up” in this story, so as to learn his lessons about the Australian bush, he does so alongside and in opposition to the developmental processes of the nonhuman species, biological organisms in no way assimilated into or compared with the evolution of an individual human or the species as a whole. As Clark’s tale perpetually reminds readers, human timescales are non-continuous with those of the nonhuman. In the story’s final lines, Bertie’s mother pulls him from the creek, so rapidly that he was in the water “not more than half a minute, for [she] ran down and caught hold first of the wattle branch and then of [his] arm” (14). Hearing her version of what happened, the child queries “how so many strange things could have happened in so short a time” (14). What the story suggests, ultimately, is that the time of being “lost” is not a single span but an opening up of temporalities, a narrative break in which to recognize the multiple vectors of time that exist in the bushlands. Alongside the course of a child’s progress, and the much longer terms of human evolution, lie other temporalities of the natural world: nocturnal and diurnal behaviors, nonhuman lifespans, and models of species development. A vital lesson of Clark’s tale is not only that the biological and social lives of humans are part of the natural world, rather than separate from it, but also that they are inconsonant with the temporalities of that natural world. Neither can be mapped onto or contained within the other. As will be the case in Pedley’s Dot, the time spent “lost” in the bush facilitates what Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley characterize as the eco-postcolonial recuperation of “the alterity of both history and nature, without reducing either to the other” (2011: 4). The stakes of such a recuperation, as the conclusion will suggest, entail a re-inscription of the lost child into Australian bush mythology and, more broadly, into eco-poetic readings of an environment that was already “postcolonial” in the late nineteenth century. Like Bertie, Pedley’s Dot makes explicit references to Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in a manner “not simply derivative” but adapted to the context of the Australian bush (Wighton 1963: 30).11 Such gestures herald Carroll’s story as an integral precedent, and arguably claim a literary authority for the colonial novel that might otherwise be withheld, but they also pointedly rescript the canonical elements into the service of Australian bush ecologies.12 The details are critical: It is not simply a rabbit/ hare but an introduced, invasive species that “leads her astray,” as Ulla Rahbek (2007) has noted, and, placed on trial by the animals, Dot faces conviction for the wrongs that “Bush creatures have suffered from the

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  115 cruelties of White Humans” (Rahbek n.p.; Pedley 83). Even more forcefully than in Clark’s dedication to Carroll, Pedley’s opening page insists on antipodean origins and eco-politics: “to the children of Australia,” it reads, “in the hope of enlisting their sympathies for the many beautiful, amiable, and frolicsome creatures of their fair land, whose extinction, through ruthless destruction, is being surely accomplished” (3). The links made between extinction and animal rights activism or ­proto-environmentalism, in the prefatory dedication and throughout Pedley’s novel, invite further comparisons to Carroll’s 1865 fiction and its inclusion of the long-extinct dodo. Nonexistent since the Dutch colonizers in Mauritius hunted it to extinction in the seventeenth century, the bird was known to Victorian readers only from isolated images and the remains of one specimen held in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Carroll was familiar with the taxidermied holding through his friendship with Sir Henry Acland, the museum’s director and curator and the supposed model for the White Rabbit.13 In the context of Alice’s story, moreover, the allusions to extinction sit alongside an often subtle insistence on animal rights. Alice first meets the dodo because she has nearly drowned herself and other small animals in a pool of tears; while in the waters, she threatens the Mouse by mentioning her cat Dinah (and fails to recognize why a mouse would not want to befriend her pet feline). Back on dry land, the dodo organizes a futile race in which the contestants run in circles, after which the prizes of small candies nearly choke its avian participants. In the subsequent section, after Alice unwittingly threatens the Mouse again, she is trapped in the Rabbit’s house, too large to escape. Faced with the prospect of the residence burning down around her, she knocks the Rabbit into a cucumber frame and kicks Bill the lizard up the chimney. The sequence of scenes suggests two things; first, that, as she shifts sizes and therefore positions within the food chain, Alice is a danger to the inhabitants of Wonderland; and second, that as a human-animal, she is subject to some of the same threats as the other species, including drowning and enclosure in inhospitable spaces. The mention of the dodo signals the inevitable if extreme result of animal suffering—a conclusion Carroll anticipated for human and nonhuman species in his 1875 campaign against the practices of vivisection.14 In both fictions, questions of animal rights provoke inquiries into relevant timescales: the temporalities of extinction. The entirety of Alice’s Adventures takes place in the span of a dream, so that its characters, including Alice, exist in an atemporal suspension. For the extinct dodo, that suspension allows for a form of revivification that brings species death into an uncomfortable proximity with the trajectory of childhood development, a collision that aligns Alice’s process of “growing up” with her dawning awareness of animal rights and sympathy toward other species. In Dot, by contrast, extinction exists on two timescales at once,

116  Christie Harner both of which intersect with the span in which the child is lost, and which together demand a reevaluation of cross-species chronologies. In Pedley’s novel the first scale of extinction is that of the adjacent, or at least conceivable, future, in which specifically white humans (i.e. British settlers) bring irrevocable harm to the native species. Unlike the aboriginal communities, whom the kangaroo perceives as killing for sustenance, arguably as part of an indigenous food web, the settlers “delight in taking our lives, and torturing us just as an amusement” (22). The newcomers devastate even those species they have chosen to represent themselves: the emu and the kangaroo, opposite figures on the Australian coat of arms.15 In 1899, two years before the National Federation, in Pedley’s book the two nonhuman representatives of the colonial project, forecast unification and independence but more significantly, species extinction. The emu reports that humans are laying poison in campgrounds, the kangaroo reiterates how her species is hunted for sport, and in the words of the former, “the time will come, friend, when there will be neither Emu nor Kangaroo for Australia’s Arms; no creature will be left to represent the land but the Bunny Rabbit and the Sheep” (77). The inclusion of introduced, invasive species—both arrived with the First Fleet in 1788—functions as an implicit critique of the settler indigenizing myth, in that domestication is inseparable from genocide and ecological destruction.16 At the same time, the extinction of the species that define an as-yet-­anticipated nation seems to presage the elimination of that state and the demise of its human inhabitants: an invocation of deep time taken up in other parts of the novel. Thus, while one version of extinction correlates with and ensues from the temporalities of colonialism, a second draws on nineteenth-century science to theorize nearly unfathomable extents of time. Early in Pedley’s novel, the kangaroo seems to borrow language used by Charles Darwin, in his On the Origin of Species, to describe the impossibility of comprehending the immensity of the geological record, a “history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect” (2008 [1859]: 229). As the motherly creature hops to the water-hole, she explains to Dot how she follows a path marked out by rocks “rubbed for thousands of years by the soft feet and tails of millions of Kangaroos” (Pedley 13). The traces, she adds, will outlast those who created them. They provide “a history book,” evidence of their presence “long long after the time when there will be no more kangaroos, and no more humans” (13). Though the geological language is child-friendly rather than scientific, it narrativizes a timescale that is at once familiar and unfamiliar, existing in our consciousness as a fact of the geological record and yet incomprehensible in its immensity. Like Dot, who responds to the kangaroo’s words with solemnity, in which “she felt such a very little girl,” readers cannot quite grasp the sublimity of a chronology that exceeds their perception (13). Within that scale, the evolutionary lifespan of the human species, from

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  117 its origins, derided by the platypus as “post-glacial,” to its projected extinction, registers as a blip (32). By contrast, the egg-laying monotreme, the only living representative of its family and genus, can “trace [its] ancestry back to the oolite age,” or “millions of years before the ignorant Humans came on the earth at all!” (31, 30). In his strident condemnations of “inquisitive, pushing, and dangerous” humans, the platypus confusingly conflates biblical and geological time, recalling friends that are now “fossils” and “thinking of the Iguanodon and ichthyosaurus, and of the good old days before the Flood” (37). The statement is jarring in its uncomfortable combination of science (references to oolites, Jurassic age sedimentary rocks) and avowedly anti-evolutionary interpretations of the Bible: the suggestion that the dinosaur species, recognizable to nineteenth-century readers from relatively recent fossil discoveries, failed to board Noah’s ark.17 Yet, in either temporal schema, the point is the same: the human species is an insignificant upstart, newly emergent within evolutionary timescales and/or de-centered from biblical accounts. Chronologies, in either scenario, are “necessarily uncanny,” as Timothy Morton (2013) has argued in his definition of hyperobjects: “time-stretched to such a vast extent that they become almost impossible to hold in mind” (58). Dot identifies and then sustains three timescales that fit within and act upon each other. In the smallest, the passing of time is experienced in terms of days: the six days in which Dot is lost, the two days in which the Bronze-Wing birds have not “dared to get a drink,” after a number were shot by humans at the water-hole, and the diurnal or nocturnal tendencies of the cited species (14). Dot’s worries, that she may be unable to relocate her family’s plot, are contiguous with the equally genuine distress of the birds: both impinge, in very concrete ways, on the survival of the individuals involved. The second register shifts from the level of the individual to the species, to the projected extinction of the emu, kangaroo, and human, to the apocryphal demise of a nation-state anticipated but not yet in existence in 1899. Far from being “consoling, redemptive, or regenerative for white society,” as Tilley describes prototypical lost-child fictions, the white settlers’ conquest in this case destroys the ecosystem upon which it was built, then erases itself in the process (35). The third and broadest temporal gauge is that of deep time, in which geological strata, evolutionary genera, and biblical histories surpass assertions of individuals, species, and geopolitical states. The three chronological scales do not so much collide as they layer or nestle, one within the other, insisting that they be read as interrelated rather than independent vectors. Dot is, of course, a story about an eponymous protagonist who loses and then finds her way home. And yet, as Timothy Clark has suggested, an eco-poetic analysis, in which readers consider “a far broader temporal and spatial scale,” “render[s] the more familiar, manifest drama of character, plot and so on mildly epiphenomenal”

118  Christie Harner (130). The human, whether that be the lost child, her family, or the emergent nation-state of which she is a part, is only one component of the “broader impersonal dynamics” that emerge from the environment and that play out alongside individual lives even while they are “invisible to the way those [individuals] see themselves and their goals” (130). In a statement that is provocatively suggestive for Pedley’s novel and its representation of the bush ecosystem, Donna Haraway explains how the “temporalities of companion species comprehend all the possibilities activated in becoming with” other species, from the manifold and “heterogeneous scales of evolutionary time” to the “rhythms of conjoined process” (2008: 25). Dot and the kangaroo may well be read as companion species or even, when the child settles into its pouch, as a “hybrid girl-kangaroo” (Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor 2015: 58). In that sense, the children’s story is fundamentally a lesson in alterity, in forms of becoming with the bush animals that would protect nonhuman species even as settlers’ territory extended away from the Australian coastline and encroached onto their habitats. When Dot returns home, she teaches her parents to respect the bush animals. No more kangaroos are hunted, and the young girl’s father builds a dam where “all the thirsty creatures come to drink in safety” (107). At the same time, as in Clark’s earlier tale, the multiple temporal vectors extend beyond the production of individual or cross-species empathies. The invocation of deep time, of hyper-chronologies that overpower individual and historical/colonial scales, problematize any simple reading of the lost-child tale as an indigenizing myth of belonging, ecologically inflected or not. As further elaborated in the conclusion, the “time” of being lost paradoxically shifts the scope of the narrative from that of the missing child—here figured as the drama for the coming-of-age of the new nation—to a much wider company of species, evolutionary models, and relationalities. Dot is not one but many tales of loss: in the past, present, and projected future. The multi-scalar narratives of Bertie and Dot de-center an anthropocentric view of the bush environment, transferring readers’ attention from the human protagonists to the ecosystem writ large, including its animal inhabitants and their evolutionary developments. Though they largely follow the adventures of their eponymous human child, they do so to make visible the intersection of individual teleologies with other, specifically nonhuman vectors. Markedly unlike other lost-child fictions, they operate outside the scope of a single person or a small group missing for a measurable amount of time: as such, they eschew humanizing sentimentality, or fears for the imperiled youth, and substitute cross-species relations. Furthermore, while they sit alongside other late nineteenth-century bush fictions in some respects, they do not prioritize any instantiation of human belonging to the land: emergent nationalism, the implementation of European agriculture against unfamiliar climatic conditions, or the development of a new “type” befitting a new country.

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  119 Even so, the tales by Clark and Pedley are unabashedly Australian, intent on distinguishing themselves in both form and content from their British predecessors. An attention to nonhuman temporalities does not remove these stories from the specificities of the bush; if anything, it more firmly situates them within an unambiguously colonial and antipodean ecosystem. What, then, are the critical implications of identifying narratives within the nineteenth-century bush mythology that are not solely oriented around human protagonists and concerns? Recent criticism has already challenged the “masculinist” and racialized imperatives of bush authors, reinserting women into the canon and shifting readers’ gaze to the occluded indigenous populations that exist slightly within or outside their narrative frames. An analytical attention to bush ecologies, and to the interplay of native and invasive animal species within landscapes both developed by settlers and not, would go one step f­ urther—away from the postcolonial focus on human-to-human discourses of power and subordination. Certainly, though neither Bertie nor Dot pay extensive attention to aboriginal populations (which appear only in a stereotyped manner in the latter), they do insist on the negative impact of colonization on the local environment, most clearly through the depiction of introduced animals. In representing the bush species, moreover, both texts shift readers’ interpretive framework yet further, to a multi-­ temporal gauge that reclassifies the importance of individual, species, and colony/nation-state. As a result, they shift the current emphasis in eco-­postcolonialism from an “alterity of both history and nature” to the multiple intersecting timescales of each (DeLoughrey and Handley 4). This “dehumanizing” and multi-scalar reading also has methodological repercussions for the inclusion of children’s literature in the textual canon of Australian bush mythology. It displaces the excessive scholarly attention on the “lost child,” all too often a mere cipher for adult concerns, and points to the specific potentialities of literature written for child audiences. Fiction addressed to children is often tasked with an important pedagogic function alongside its entertainment value— one that facilitates, in this case, an attention to ecology and environmentalism. Additionally, its medium has an inherent fluidity, as Susan Ang suggests, from which emerge “new permutational possibilities” and representational capabilities (79). As such, more readily than modes of nineteenth-century realism and romanticism addressed to more fully constituted subjects, it operates across multiple experiential vectors, shifting unpredictably and even capriciously between them. In many cases, and certainly in both Bertie and Dot, children’s fiction also employs a dual or double address, speaking either at once or at different times to distinct adult and child audiences: a modality that by definition is multi-directional. Children’s literature, whether in the context of bush mythologies or other genres, does not simply introduce the child as a

120  Christie Harner character, either as embryonic-adult or symbol for the future. It fundamentally alters the kind of stories that can be told and the narratological forms that they take. Timothy Clark has argued, bluntly, that “even in 1901, Australia stands out as a particularly stark exemplar of the challenges of the Anthropocene,” given the “extensively destructive” effects of the white settlers on the landscape and its indigenous inhabitants (116). For him and other eco-postcolonial scholars, our current ecological awareness demands a re-interpretation of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts from the colony and then commonwealth: a reading that moves away from human concerns toward nonhuman animals, geographies, and chronologies. What this essay suggests, partially in response, is that such a reading already exists in the Australian children’s literature of the nineteenth century—in versions of the bush legend that decenter the individual (whether a person, species, or colony/nation) in favor of entanglement, cross-species exchange, and multiple timescales. Here is another iteration of belonging to the bush: in, amidst, and betwixt.

Notes 1 Bertie and the Bullfrogs first appeared in the Adelaide Observer on Saturday, December 27, 1873. It was subsequently reprinted in the South Australian Register (December 29) and Evening Journal (December 31), both based in Adelaide. None of these publications included the name of the author, newspaperman, and editor John Howard Clark. 2 Dot and the Kangaroo was first published in Sydney by Angus and Robertson, Ltd. Targeted very specifically at colonial readers, its first edition contained a list of “Australian Publications” for children and adults, including titles on domestic architecture, art criticism by the director of the National Art Gallery in New South Wales (opened in 1874), and poems by Henry Lawson. 3 Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (2018) argues that the lost-child narrative was not unique to Australia but also existed throughout Canada, the United States and South Africa as a marker of “settler guilt … suppressed fears and uncomfortable feelings of settlement” (159). That said, she does acknowledge that the stories proliferated more in Australia than in other colonies. 4 For the purposes of comparison, in the same span of time, the Argus Index lists 205 cases of death by drowning and 117 accidental fatalities (including children hit by a falling tree or branch). Ethel Turner’s 1894 Seven Little Australians has its female protagonist killed by a ringbarked tree while on a picnic. 5 Kingsley’s The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn does not immediately seem to fit within the genre of the lost-child narrative. Chapter 30, however, focuses almost exclusively on the tale of a child lost in the Australian bush. Macmillan, the London publishers of the episodic novel, later issued the chapter separately, in 1871, as an illustrated book for children. Directed at British rather than colonial readers, its ostensible purpose was to “introduce young British readers to one of the characteristic perils, or excitements, of life in colonial Australia” (Pierce 16). Although the majority of the parental figures in the fictions are settlers, other stock bush characters appear, including the stock drover and the aboriginal tracker. Henry Lawson’s 1901 short

Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  121 story includes the lone stockman (as narrator) as well as the drover and his wife, former squatters (bush land holders). 6 The details of this sub-plot borrow from the experiences of the Duff children, in which Jane (the second oldest but only female) carried her younger brother (aged three) and covered both brothers with her clothing at night. Clarke’s “Pretty Dick” is a marked exception to the general trend of omitting the suffering of the children, in that it does detail the protagonist’s traumatic experiences of seeking aid (and spotting someone on horseback who cannot see or hear him). 7 In nineteenth-century Australia, a series of land acts were passed, beginning in the 1860s, that allowed settlers with limited financial means to “select” and inhabit crown land for agricultural purposes. 8 See for example feminist criticism by Kay Schaffer (1988) and Debra Adelaide (1988) as well as the edited collection by Susan Magarey (1993), which includes Sue Rowley, and Susan Sheridan. In recent years, scholars have begun to recover Australian nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century women writers, including Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Miles Franklin, and Rosa Praed. 9 The term “bush time” may in twenty-first-century culture remind readers of the phrase “walkabout,” which refers to a rite of passage in Australian Aboriginal society. During “walkabout,” adolescent males live alone in the wilderness for a period of some months to facilitate the journey into adulthood. In Australian culture, the term has been used in a derogatory manner to describe aboriginal men as transient and unwilling to work steady jobs. Although the term “walkabout” thus resonates with “bush time” in its unfamiliarity to white settler culture, this essay uses the latter phrase exclusively to refer to nonhuman rhythms. 10 As J. David Archibald (2014) has explained, Darwin created two developmental trees that represented the relationships between marsupials and placentals according to these two different models of evolution. As he wrote in a letter to Charles Lyell, Darwin “preferred” the first diagram, which included a common ancestor, unless further study of the embryological brain of marsupials should prove its resemblance to the placentals (106). Scientists now know the first model to be correct. 11 Just as Alice follows the White Rabbit, running across a field and jumping into its hole, having “never once considered how in the world she was to get out again,” Dot trails a hare that “suddenly started at her feet and sprang away into the bush” (Carroll 10; Pedley 2016 [1899]: 5). She does not think about where she is headed, and “when she found that she could not catch the hare, she discovered that she could no longer see the cottage” (5). Once Dot emerges in the semi-fantastical bushlands, in which she can speak to other animals with the aid of magic berries, Pedley’s “styles of humor,” and particularly her use of child-friendly puns, also seem to be “derived from Carroll”: a kangaroo “jumps” to conclusions, and Dot’s “way” home takes on material form when the other creatures understand it as “lost” in the sense of an object (Foster 1995: 11; Pedley 10 and 8). Further, like Alice’s Adventures, Dot reaches its climax with a “farcical scene” in which the nonhuman species put the young girl on trial (Smith 195). 12 Foster and Wighton agree on this point. As Foster argues, “Pedley also demonstrated a nationalist confidence in her willingness to adapt features of a cultural icon, such as Alice in Wonderland, to enhance her writing” (11). Wighton identifies Dot as “an important book in the development of Australian children’s fiction,” in which “the animals are presented to the child’s imagination as the real Australians, the real owners of the Bush” (30).

122  Christie Harner 13 On this point, see David Day, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Decoded (2015). 14 See Marc Bekoff and Carron A. Meaney, Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare (2013). 15 The Australian Arms did not officially exist in 1899, as it was not granted until 1908, by King Edward VII, following upon federation in 1901. However, images of the emu and the kangaroo, as representatives of Australia, were widely circulated. The 1806 Bowman Flag, designed in New South Wales, included both species and is believed to have been an inspiration for the national coat of arms. 16 In Ecological Imperialism (2015), Alfred Crosby emphasizes how the arrival of the rabbits in particular was unintended but rather a byproduct of global transportation. In his argument, this “seems to indicate that the humans were seldom masters of the biological changes they triggered in the Neo-­ Europes. They benefited from the great majority of these changes, but benefit or not, their role often was less a matter of judgment and choice than of being downstream of a bursting dam” (192). 17 English geologist Gideon Mantell named the Iguanodon genus in 1825, based on fossilized tooth discoveries in Sussex; a more complete specimen was found in Kent in 1834. The first complete fossil of an ichthyosaurus was discovering in Dorset by Mary Anning in 1811.

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Victorian Australian Children’s Fiction  123 Clarke, Marcus. “Pretty Dick.” Australian Tales, 1896. www.telelib.com/­ authors/C/ClarkeMarcus/prose/AustalianTales/index.html. Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. 2nd Edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 1859. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Day, David. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Decoded. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2015. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Handley. “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, 3–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Eames, Rachel Fountain. “Geological Katabasis: Geology and the Christian Underworld in Kingsley’s The Water-Babies.” Victoriographies 7, no. 3 (2017): 195–209. Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions, 1974. Foster, John, et al. Australian Children’s Literature: An Exploration of Genre and Theme. Wagga Wagga, NSW: Centre for Information Studies, 1995. Fry, Sarah Marie. The Australian Babes in the Wood. London: Griffith and Farren, 1866. https://books.google.com/books?id=i08CAAAAQAAJ. Haeckel, Ernst. The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principal Points of Human Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Vol. 1. 1874. New York: D. ­Appleton and Company, 1903. Hoorn, Jeanette. Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007. Kingsley, Charles. The Water-Babies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kingsley, Henry. The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn. Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1859. Lawson, Henry. “The Babies in the Bush.” Joe Wilson and His Mates, 1901. www. telelib.com/authors/L/LawsonHenry/prose/joewilsonandmates/index.html. Lawson, Henry. “The Babies in the Bush.” The Poetry of Henry Lawson, Ironbark Resources. www.ironbarkresources.com/henrylawson/­BabiesInTheBush.html. Magarey, Susan, et al., eds. Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s. St. Leonards: Allen, 1993. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Pacini-Ketchabaw, Veronica, and Affrica Taylor. “Unsettling Pedagogies Through Common World Encounters: Grappling with (Post-)Colonial Legacies in Canadian Forests and Australian Bushlands.” In Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education, edited by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw and Affrica Taylor, 43–62. New York: Routledge, 2015. Pedley, Ethel. Dot and the Kangaroo. 1899. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016. Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Rahbek, Ulla. “Revisiting Dot and the Kangaroo: Finding a Way in the Australian Bush.” Australian Humanities Review (2007): n.p.

124  Christie Harner Richardson, Robert. A Little Australian Girl; or, The Babes in the Bush. Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1881. https://archive.org/details/ alittleaustrali00richgoog. Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Smith, Michelle J. “Transforming Narratives of Colonial Danger: Imagining the Environments of New Zealand and Australia in Children’s Literature, 1862–1899.” In Children, Childhood, and Youth in the British World, edited by Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight, 183–200. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Spencer, Herbert. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical. London: G. Manwaring, 1861. https://books.google.com/books?id=-x0CAAAAQAAJ& dq=spencer%20education%3A%20intellectual%2C%20moral%20and%20 physical&pg=RA1-PR3#v=onepage&q&f=false. Straley, Jessica. “Of Beast and Boys: Kingsley, Spencer, and the Theory of Recapitulation.” Victorian Studies 49, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 583–609. Tilley, Elspeth. White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2012. Timms, O. F. Station Dangerous; or, The Settlers in Central Australia, A Tale Founded on Facts. Sydney, 1866. Torney, Kim. Babes in the Bush: The Making of an Australian Image. Freemantle: Curtin University Books, 2005. Turner, Ethel. Seven Little Australians. Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg. org/files/4731/4731-h/4731-h.htm. Vaughan-Pow, Catharine. “Was Lost Gip Really Lost?: Some Representations of the Lost Child in Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Childhood.” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 7 (2001): 110–21. Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. Frontier Fictions: Settler Sagas and Postcolonial Guilt. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Wighton, Rosemary. Early Australian Children’s Literature. Melbourne: ­Oxford University Press, 1963.

7 The Serpent; or, the Real King of the Jungle Stephen Basdeo

During the days of the British Empire, colonial officers and civil servants enjoyed hunting wild animals: Tigers, lions, bears, and elephants found themselves on the end of a bullet. To hunt such an animal was an exciting experience. However, this pastime was about more than simply “the thrill of the chase”; the sport promoted camaraderie and fostered a spirit of fair play among the participants that was integral to the late Victorian and Edwardian imperialist “games ethic” (Mangan 1986: 18). Most importantly, the events were a public spectacle which signified colonialists’ dominance over the colonial environment. The numbers of animals which the upper-class colonialists killed were staggering: John Hewitt, the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces, India, shot over 150 tigers before his retirement in 1912 (Mosley 2010: 23). Like their counterparts in real life, the heroes of popular literature were always good wild game hunters. We first meet the rugged Allan Quatermain in H.  Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1886) laid up in bed having been in a scrap with a lion. The lion may have just gotten the better of him on this occasion, but it is no matter; over his lifetime brags that he has shot nearly 50 lions (Haggard 2016: 1). Lions have traditionally been thought of as the “king of the jungle” but this chapter analyzes portrayals of the serpent—arguably a more deadly foe than the majestic lion—found in late Victorian boys’ magazines such as The Boys of England and Sons of Britannia and other penny periodicals. It contextualizes these stories alongside newspaper reports of encounters with serpents and develops a typology of snakes illustrating how snakes were represented in popular literature. This will help us to further understand the various ways in which Victorians viewed these animals because younger readers, from a variety of social classes, would have received their understanding of animals from penny magazines and novelettes. They would not have bought the latest scientific paper on snakes published in journals such as Nature (established in 1869 and still going strong) or the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (founded in 1834 and continues to flourish). The three ways in which snakes were portrayed in popular literary works, then, are as follows: The snake was a tool of natives’ treachery; the snakes were invaders of

126  Stephen Basdeo the human realm; and finally, the snake appeared whenever adventurers had strayed too far into the jungle. In popular literary works, the serpent was the real king of the jungle.

The Generic Idea of the Serpent In Western culture, snakes have a long history of being stereotyped as villainous. It was a serpent in the book of Genesis who beguiled Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit. Medusa had venomous snakes in place of human hair. Virgil’s famous lines latet anguis in herba meaning “a snake hides in the grass” has come down to us in modern parlance as “snake in the grass” to mean someone who is villainous or deceitful. In the European Middle Ages, an Irish legend surrounding Saint Patrick emerged, in which he is said to have chased all the snakes out of Ireland because they tried to attack him when he had been fasting for 40 days (Owen 2014). In the same period, Isabella de Seville’s “De serpentibus” in Etymologiae identified the features of the fearsome basilisk, or “King of the Serpents.” In the same book, Seville also wrote about vipers who were so evil that, while they were inside their mother’s wombs, gnaw at and forcibly tear open their mother’s body in order to get out, thus killing their own parent. There was no love lost between vipers either, for Seville tells us that once the male viper has spit his seed into a female viper, the female’s passion turns from lust to rage and she bites the male’s head off (2006: 255). Snakes were also a handy trope for dispatching political opponents. The anonymous Ragnars Saga Loðbrókar and Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, both of which were written down in the thirteenth century, allege that c. 850, the Anglo-Saxon King Aelle murdered Ragnar Loðbrók by imprisoning him into a snake pit with predictable results (Schlauch 1978). European snake legends such as those featuring Ragnar Loðbrók were reprinted in the Georgian and Victorian periods when scholars’ interests turned toward the history of northern European nations.1 With some exceptions, snakes continued to be portrayed negatively in popular fiction. Late Victorian popular fiction writers cared little for identifying the actual species of snake that they featured, even though a lot of scientific research was carried out in the Victorian era into these fascinating creatures. More distinguished writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it is true, were specific in identifying the types of serpents used in their novels, but for penny novelists, there were large snakes, and there were smaller venomous snakes. For large snakes, writers probably had in mind the reticulated python (malayopython reticulatus), which can reach 21 feet and weigh 165 pounds (Shine et al. 1998: 248–58). Although the green anaconda (eunectes murinus), which can grow to 17 feet and weigh 154 pounds, could well be a candidate—both species of snakes have been known to attack humans, if only rarely—however,

Snakes and Children  127 the fact that the anaconda is native only to South America and that the heroes of boys’ magazines rarely went to that continent make this snake an unlikely candidate (Wallace 1889: 33–34). Venomous snakes were generalized and, as with the constrictor snakes, there was rarely an attempt by any writer to identify a specific species in spite of the fact that, in academic journals, much research was being published which aimed to expand Europeans’ knowledge of these venomous animals, which of course were populous in their overseas colonies. Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1836, for example, published one essay on the king cobra (Ophiophagus Hannah) which included highly detailed color illustrations of the animal’s head and body, and sketches of its vertebrae (Cantor 86–96; “Large Venomous Snake” 65). Even when boys’ magazines reported on true accounts of snake encounters—for they printed both short stories and interesting news items in their columns—they were sometimes very general when it came to identifying the species; the color might be mentioned, as might its length and whether or not it was venomous. In Sons of Britannia, for example, we have a report of “a desperate fight with a black snake” and few other details given (“Desperate Fight with a Black Snake” 1874: 30). Novelists in the same magazine likewise did not need nuance, for they just needed a monster. The serpent, big or small, constricting or venomous, would suffice for their purposes. There were, of course, exceptions to this typology, which is not at all meant to be exhaustive, and we should note that this applies only to popular literature or those stories that appeared in the various late Victorian and Edwardian boys’ magazines, printed in a hurry with poor quality materials and selling for a penny or less (Carnelos 2019). There were political uses of snakes to be found, for example, in Chartist poetry, where the snake was on one occasion used to represent a devious and treacherous establishment (“The Lion and the Serpent” n.d.: 276). Moreover, serpent symbolism in jewelry was highly prized by the Victorians, especially after Prince Albert presented Queen Victoria with a golden serpent ring because it was an Ancient Roman symbol of everlasting love, and the snake design was thereafter imitated by many jewelers (Stutesman 2005: 187). Rider Haggard often likened his “dangerous” female protagonists such as Cleopatra and Ayesha to serpents in some of his novels (Mabilat 2006: 108). The serpent had a variety of functions in Victorian culture, but in popular literature, they were useful animals for writers to use when they needed a monster who had to be overcome by the heroism of a colonial adventurer.

Snakes as Tools of Natives’ Treachery The snake as a tool of native treachery more often than not appeared when serpent charmers entered the narrative of an adventure story. These were not new tropes in the late Victorian era when boys’ periodicals

128  Stephen Basdeo flourished. Articles on snakes and snake charmers were featured in the early nineteenth-century Penny Magazine and Saturday Magazine. With subtly racist language, writers implied that the men who practiced these trades were rogues and not to be trusted. The piece published in the Penny Magazine, for example, said that “the professed snake catchers in India are of the lowest caste of Hindoos” (“Charmers of Serpents” 1833: 49). The article in The Saturday Magazine was similarly critical of the class of people who took to snake charming; the charmers were “tribes of vagrants … universally despised … universally dreaded … who infest the villages and fairs, exhibiting their snakes” (“The Indian Snake Charmers” 1835: 146). Other magazines said that whatever money these charmers got “is almost immediately spent in the purchase of arrack and other intoxicating liquors” (Gogerly 1837: 1–2). Various similar articles on snake charmers, which were often illustrated, followed in The Illustrated London News during the 1840s and 1850s. 2 An interesting feature of several articles on snake charmers is snakes themselves are not condemned, but that the charmers are conmen who deceive “unthinking” Indians into hiring their often-expensive services by convincing them that their villages or houses have a snake infestation for which their services are required to lead the snakes away. There is never any mention of white colonists being deceived into hiring their services because white men would presumably have had the “presence of mind” not to be deceived by villainous natives. So, the charmers are a cunning kind of Pied Piper (“Charmers of Serpents” 49). There is certainly more research for those interested in portrayals of snakes to undertake an examination of what I might tentatively call a serpent charmer “craze” in periodicals of the 1830s through the 1850s; the most cursory online search reveals a large number of essays devoted to these men in this period. These “despised and dreaded vagrants,” who were able to tame one of nature’s most fearsome animals, captivated the reading public back home in Britain. When snake charmers were brought to the Reptile House at the London Zoological Gardens in 1849, they were a sensation. Charles Darwin is reported to have flinched at seeing one of the serpents attempt to attack his master even though the snakes were defanged and safely behind a glass screen. It was Englishmen’s inability to tame these creatures, perhaps combined with an historic aversion to serpents from the Edenic narrative onward, which “contributed directly to the typecasting of snakes and their charmers as villainous characters in Victorian fiction and beyond” (Hall 2015: 360). English colonists may have been able to dominate the colonies in political terms but in snake charmers they met people who were able to control an animal which was characterized as dangerous. It is the non-white snake charmers who are the villains in these scenarios. The snakes are fearsome by themselves, of course, but were doubly so when they might be made to attack white colonists at the charmers’

Snakes and Children  129 bidding. In late Victorian popular literature, “villainous” snake charmers were regularly depicted as treacherous, ever-ready to betray their own people as well as Europeans. For example, in the adventure story of “The Sacred Sapphire”—the story of a search for a rare diamond— English explorers, led by a man named Ralph, find themselves lost in the Indian jungle. Coming across a seemingly helpless Hindu man who prostrates himself at their feet and begs for their help, the author builds tension by giving the reader clues as to why Ralph should not trust this man by saying that “he had an evil, saturnine expression” (1890: 297). Just as Ralph is about to pledge his help, “casting a look of deadly hatred at [him],” venomous serpents coil themselves around the Hindu’s limbs, and he springs to attack Ralph. Luckily, Ralph anticipates this and decapitates the serpents with his hunting knife (297). Likewise, at the court of an Indian ruler in Paul Herring’s “Comrades in Peril,” a snake charmer, dissatisfied with his master’s favoring Europeans at his royal court, decides to put on a show of snake charming in order to direct one of the serpents to attack one of the Europeans. Yet Sidney, the European protagonist, anticipates this and just as the serpent is about to strike, he beheads it with a knife (Herring 1897: 5). The serpent charmers in these stories ingratiate themselves with the “noble” English characters and then use their snakes to attack them. The treachery of the “native” snake charmers is then contrasted with the nobility of a white colonist who in popular literature would never betray a friend. Colonists were, after all, supposedly committed to the idea of fair play and chivalry in all of their dealings with “natives,” even enemies.3 The characterization of snake charmers and their animals as villainous was in keeping with the Orientalist discourse which was prevalent in European writings about the East and articulated by Edward Said who argued that, during the heyday of European imperialism, people from the West built amassed knowledge about the East and its people (2003: 44). As a result, a number of racialist stereotypes of the people and culture of “the Orient” emerged. It was stereotyped as a backward place and paintings from the era depict it as a region which had not progressed since biblical times. This was a place where, if one were to believe Western artists and writers, people still lived in mud or clay huts and rode camels. They were not “‘civilized” like Europeans. Arab men, in particular, were subjected to stereotypes; they were either childlike and in need of a Westerners’ care and guidance, or inherently cunning, mischievous, and treacherous. The latter points regarding treachery and cunning are particularly relevant for our discussion here: Said points to a passage in Lord Cromer’s Modern Egypt (1908) in which Cromer, who had spent much of his career in Egypt during the British occupation of the country and rose to the rank of British Controller-General of Egypt, made the following remarks about men of the Orient. They are “[g]ullible, ‘devoid of energy and initiative,’ much given to ‘fulsome flattery’ … ‘intrigue,

130  Stephen Basdeo cunning’.… Orientals are inveterate liars, they are ‘lethargic and suspicious,’ and in everything they oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the Anglo-Saxon race” (Baring 1908: 146–67; Said 39–40). A “scientific” article in the 1880s classified the various peoples of India according to how similar or dissimilar they were to cunning serpents (Hewitt 1889: 187–359). When The Friend of India reported on these “scientific” findings, it simply confirmed the fact that Indians were “ten times more the children of the devil.” The two snake charmer incidents cited above correlate with stereotypes of Orientals as treacherous, we should note that in “The Sacred Sapphire” there is an interracial love affair between an Indian queen named Ayesha and a British adventurer and that there are honorable Indians in both stories. Furthermore, in another serial in The Boys of England, “Mahmoud the Snake Charmer,” the title character is the hero of the tale who comes to the aid of Europeans in danger (1898: 1–8). There were exceptions to such stereotypes of snake charmers, then, which is why applying an Orientalist lens to such seemingly simplistic popular literary texts can be unhelpful and misleading because not every popular literary work recycled negative stereotypes of colonial subjects. This is something which we will encounter below, for in some stories it is, in fact, the Englishman’s “native” companion who takes charge of dispatching the serpent and saving his white friends from the serpent’s grasp.

The Snake as an Invader of the Human Realm Snakes would much rather avoid human contact altogether, although they will, on occasion, find their way into people’s houses. Newspapers often carried stories of snakes invading people’s homes.4 Frederick Whymper said that all British colonists who venture out to India could at some point during their stay expect to find a serpent “in your bed, your cupboard, your boots” (Whymper 1885: 783). The Melbourne Punch joked in the 1870s that the public seemed to like snake stories so much that “a certain fortune would reward the industry of any person who would take the trouble to look over the newspaper files of the last few years, extract the snake stories therefrom, and publish them in a collected form” (“Waking Snakes” 1875: 28). In their factual reporting of snake sightings, The Boys of England were a bit more skeptical as to the length of snakes people had apparently found in their houses: “A citizen of Delhi recently saw a snake in the bushes near his house, twenty feet long and as big round as a whisky keg. We do not dispute his statement, but we do believe he saw the whisky keg before he saw the snake” (“Citizen of Delhi” 1876: 92). It was cobras and not constrictors, however, that seemed to be repeat offenders in these home invasions because their smaller size enabled them

Snakes and Children  131 to easily slither into dwellings unnoticed, placing the lives of children and adults in jeopardy (“A Citizen of Delhi” 92). Other seemingly harmless snakes could be just as dangerous when they entered people’s homes. The Boys of England published a factual report in its news section of a whipsnake (hierophis viridiflavus) that poisoned and killed a poor Spanish man living in a small American coastal town (“The Whip Snake” 1870: 186). When it came to portrayals of the whipsnake as venomous, Victorian writers were ahead of our modern scientists; until 2013, the whip snake had largely been thought of among the scientific community as a non-venomous and relatively harmless snake until a “secret venom gland” or Duvernoy’s gland, was “discovered” by scientists (Dutto, Goyffon, Ineich, and Bedry 2013: 207). The researchers from 2013, however, noted that such a snake would have to have its fangs inserted into a human’s skin for between five and ten minutes before enough venom was released to kill someone, while the Spanish victim in The Boys of England article is seen to die but minutes after having been bitten. The scenario of a cobra invading a family home also occurred in fiction. A notable instance is Rudyard Kipling’s “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” (in his Jungle Book, 1894) which tells the story of two fearsome cobras, Nag and Nagaina, who invade an Anglo-Indian family’s home but are defeated by the brave mongoose, Rikki. Kipling certainly knew how to build suspense when introducing snakes to his readers: At the foot of the bush there came a low hiss—a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-Tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from head to tail. When he lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion-tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-Tikki with the wicked snake’s eyes that never change their expression.… “I am Nag … Look, and be afraid!” (Kipling 1920 [1894]: 182) Lisa Lewis argues that Kipling’s tale was a “parable” for the Indian Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, a proto-nationalist uprising against the British East India Company. The humans represent the British, Rikki Tikki represent the Sepoys who stayed loyal to the British, while the cobras signify the rebellious sepoys (2013: 129–41). This would account for Kipling’s nuanced attitude toward the cobras, who did not want to believe that all Indians were evil. Nag and his wife, Nagaina, were of course the villains of the story, but from Nagaina’s point of view, all she wanted to do was to protect her family from people whom she saw as invaders. Kipling’s story is similar to an account of a real-life battle between a mongoose and a cobra which occurred in 1874, the graphic proceedings

132  Stephen Basdeo of which were reported in both Anglo-Indian magazine The Friend of India which reprinted it from Nature: The snake was a large cobra 4ft. 10 ½ in. in length, the most formidable cobra I have seen. He was turned into an enclosed outer room, or verandah, about 20ft. by 12ft., and at once coiled himself up, with head erect, about ten or twelve inches from the ground, and began to hiss loudly. The mongoose was a small one of its kind, very tame and quiet, but exceedingly active. When the mongoose was put into the rectangle, it seemed scarcely to notice the cobra; but the latter, on the contrary, appeared at once to recognise its enemy … the mongoose, to the surprise of all, made a sudden spring at the cobra, and bit it in the inside of the upper jaw, about the fang, and instantly jumped back again. Blood flowed in large drops from the mouth of the cobra … it was now easy to see how the fight would end. (“Fight Between a Cobra and a Mongoose” 1872: 149) To digress briefly, it is interesting that Isabella de Seville in “De serpentibus” said that a weasel—an animal very similar in kind to a ­mongoose— was the only type of animal who could defeat the basilisk (255). This suggests, perhaps, that throughout history, Europeans have heard of such encounters between snakes and these smaller animals since at least the early medieval period. Home invasions by snakes in Victorian boys’ magazines are less complex than Kipling’s tale, and in the former the snake is an animal to be feared. They are never given human speech and they are never maternal like Nagaina. Instead, the appearance of the snake in a home is a means through which the heroic male protagonist is able to demonstrate his chivalric behavior in being willing to protect more vulnerable members of his household. In some respects, then, he imitates Rikki-Tikki’s chivalry in protects those under his care from snakes. “Imprisoned by a Serpent” (1888) published in the Boy’s Comic Journal, recounts the tale of a quiet town in West Africa where snakes could regularly be found in merchants’ warehouses, and the narrow escape from death of an old trader named Walter who gallantly fought off a venomous serpent to protect his associates (as in other stories, the species is never identified) (398–99). “Roughing it in Van Dieman’s Land,” published in Good Things (1880) tells the story of a hardy old soldier named Syme who is called on by a family to rid them of the snakes in their garden; most of the snakes he charms away, having learned the practice when he was in India, but there is another snake—a large venomous black one—that succeeds in biting him. Although he goes through terrible convulsions, however, he miraculously survives (122–23). There was one fictional boy hero who, try as he might, he just could not get away from snakes. It is hard for us at a distance of over a

Snakes and Children  133 century to appreciate just how popular the penny dreadful serial about Harkaway was with readers who grew up in the Victorian and Edwardian era; in many ways, he was the Harry Potter of the late Victorian period, a character who basked in worldwide fame and who well into the 1950s was not just popular with children but also adults (“The Most Exciting Boat Race” 1960: 14). So high was demand among newsagents for the latest instalment of a Jack Harkaway that they battled with each other outside the Edwin J. Brett’s offices—the publisher of The Boys of England—to obtain copies which they could then sell to their younger customers (Banham 2006: 61). Hemyng’s first Harkaway serial, entitled Jack Harkaway’s Schooldays was originally published in 1871 in the columns of Brett’s The Boys of England, a penny magazine for younger readers. Within months, the publishers of The Boys of England knew that they were on to a hit: It had already appeared in the United States in several periodicals by the end of that year, and two years later it was being reprinted in both the United Kingdom and the United States in different magazines. The London-based publisher Hogarth House decided to then issue the first run of serials in clothbound library editions, while similar publishers in America decided to follow suit. So frequent were Harkaway’s encounters with snakes that, in one of the later stories, when Harkaway’s son asks Professor Mole to tell him a story, the professor replies gleefully that “it shall be a snake story and, haha!—a whopper!” (Hemyng 1879: 292, 1904: 199). Let us examine, then, one of Harkaway’s “whopper” snake stories. Let us make no mistake: Jack Harkaway was a rascal. In Jack Harkaway After Schooldays (1873), Jack and his adoptive father, Professor Mole, join the crew of a sailing ship in the West Indies, but Jack learns that a scientist has brought a large snake on board as a specimen to study when they return to England. Ever reckless, he decides that he will release the snake from its box and then prank his professor by telling him someone wants to see him down below. It does not go as planned for the snake was Fully fifteen long … the snake, astonished at his unexpected freedom, raised his ugly head and glared savagely at Jack, who picked himself up and retreated to a safe distance. “Morning, Governor,” he said, nodding his head, “how do you find yourself?” The python’s only reply to this was to uncoil himself and glide out of his box on to the floor. Jack was rather astonished at his prodigious size; he did not think he was half so big or formidable, and was rather sorry he’d let him out. (25–26) Jack decides to scarper from the cabin and go up on deck. A few minutes later, a crewman comes running out on deck screaming about the huge

134  Stephen Basdeo serpent he has just spotted. Here is where Harkaway can demonstrate his true bravery as an Englishman: Every other member of the crew, which is composed of people from several countries, is too scared to deal with the snake and so, saying a final goodbye to his friends “just in case,” Jack descends into the cabin to meet his scaly foe head-on, like a man. Although it was Harkaway who caused the problem in the first place, his willingness to protect those more vulnerable than him on the ship, such as some of the older passengers, is a chivalrous act. Harkaway was a rascal, undoubtedly, and certainly less respectable than the protagonists who featured in the contemporary works of authors such as G. A. Henty, but he was still an Englishman and would defend anyone from danger.

The Snake as the Real King of the Jungle The people of the colonies may have been racially stereotyped as dangerous and treacherous. For would-be colonial adventurers in the many boys’ periodicals, the physical environment posed a greater danger due to disease—Africa, in particular, was dubbed, from the early 1800s, as the “White Man’s Grave” and because of the dangerous animals which lurked in the jungle. In literary works, the snake was the animal to be most afraid of when people had ventured too far into the wild. The jungle was the serpent’s domain where he was king and this plotline was used by various writers in the early-to-mid-Victorian period. George William MacArthur Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844–1845), to take one example, sees one of the criminals, Crankey Jem, transported to Van Dieman’s Land. Together with some fellow transportees, he escapes from the penal colony but, in order not to get as far away as possible from the soldiers, they have to venture into uncharted territory. Unfortunately for one of them who goes farther into the forests to procure some food, he is killed by a large serpent: Then Blackley rose, and went farther into the wood … at length there was a strange rustling amongst the trees at a little distance; and then the cries of indescribable agony fell upon our ears … in a short time the cries ceased altogether … His fate was that which we had suspected: an enormous snake was coiled around the wretches corpse—licking it with its long tongue, to cover it with saliva for the purpose of deglutition … its huge coils had actually squeezed our comrade to death. (Reynolds 1856: 181–82) This would not be the last time Reynolds used a serpent in his story to attack unwary travelers who ventured too far into the forests. One of the protagonists in Wagner the Wehr-Wolf (1846–1847) likewise encounters

Snakes and Children  135 “A monstrous snake—suspending itself by the tail to one of the lower boughs, and disporting playfully with its hideous head toward the ground. Then, with a sudden coil, it drew itself back into the tree, the entire foliage of which was shaken with the horrible gambolings of the reptile” (Reynolds 1865: 70). In Reynolds’s adult story, however, the protagonist makes the wise decision to simply run as far away as possible, and his protagonists boast none of the bravado in their encounters with snakes which would characterize those found in boys’ penny magazines. The snake as the real king of the jungle is a theme that continued in several serials in boys’ penny magazines. In “Three Daring Boys; or, The Cruise of the Island Queen,” published in Sons of Britannia, three young lads go on an adventure overseas. While exploring a tropical forest, they encounter a large snake. The image accompanying one instalment sees two lads in the middle of the jungle; the weaker of two has fainted in fright, but the bigger, braver boy has decided to take on the snake, striking the reptile dead with one sweep of a stick (“Three Daring Boys” 1877: 377). In “Paquita,” published in the Boy’s Comic Journal, the writer builds tension by having a naïve professor disappear into the densest part of the jungle. Suddenly, his cries for help are heard by his companions on the outskirts. The professor’s companion rushes in to behold a horrific sight: A boa constrictor—again we have a generalized idea of a big snake and no specific mention of the species—has coiled itself around him, although due to the quick thinking of his companion who beats the snake to death, the professor is saved (“Paquita” 1894: 132). It is in such encounters in the wild that explorers can usually show off their strength and athletic prowess, and thus demonstrate to the young Victorian reader the value of physical fitness when surviving in the colonies. This was the era, of course, which witnessed the diffusion of the public school ethos—which promoted the values of athleticism, muscular Christianity, fair play and patriotism—into popular literature to build “a new generation of men not characterized by literary accomplishment or varnish of culture, but disciplined and strong” (Mangan 1986: 26). We see such principles shine through in encounters with snakes because the adventurers have to be strong enough to beat the animals in mortal combat, but they need the presence of mind, bravery, and to think quickly. An episode in “In Search of Gold,” published in the Boy’s Comic Journal in 1896, depicts the hero Ben Baxter come face to face with a large serpent who pounces on him; were it not for Ben’s swiftness and agility, the serpent might have coiled himself around the young explorer. Ben lives to see another day and plunges his blade repeatedly into the serpent’s head and kills it (“In Search of Gold” 1896: 236–37). While strength and agility served one well in encounters with big snakes, but one had to be brave and have the presence of mind to fight off the snake and win. A serial in The Gentleman’s Journal and Youth’s Miscellany entitled “Gold Mountain; or, the African Talisman”

136  Stephen Basdeo (1880)—which interestingly calls the serpent, not the lion, “the monarch of the African jungle”—sees an explorer in the same situation as Ben Baxter found himself, with a serpent coiled around him ready to devour (389). Likewise, “British Jack and Yankee Doodle” (1880), published in The Boys of England, featured a protagonist who was almost a ­carbon-copy of Jack Harkaway, where the explorers venture too far into the American swamps. In the course of just one chapter, the explorers’ boat capsizes, they are attacked by alligators, then by crazed pigs, and finally a large serpent coils itself around Jack’s old professor, Zeke (249). In both accounts, the explorers’ strength and “presence of mind” enables them to either escape the grip of the serpent or rescue their friend (249). Reaching for his revolver while in the grip of death, the explorer in “Gold Mountain” fires it straight into the snake’s mouth and kills it instantly (“Gold Mountain” 389). Bravery was a buttress of the empire: The “presence of mind” demonstrated by the explorers on these occasions place them firmly within the sphere of military heroes such as Henry Havelock, General Gordon, and Lord Kitchener, all of whom—if one believed their portrayals in popular literature—faced adversity with a manly fortitude and overcame any obstacle (Jones et al. 2014: 789). After all, admiration of the hero who possessed an ability to stand over others and overcome adversity—be it on the battlefield or in the ­jungle— was part of what Walter Houghton has called “the Victorian frame of mind,” which began with Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero Worship (1840) (Houghton 1957: 310). The explorers’ bravery separated them from earlier depictions of men wandering too far into the jungle. In Reynolds’s Mysteries of London, the poor convict gets crushed to death by the snake and is not saved by any strong, quick-thinking, and chivalrous companions, while in Reynolds’s Wagner the Wehr-Wolf, the man who encounters a snake simply runs away. Of course, Reynolds’s convicts in The Mysteries of London were a different class of people to the heroes of late Victorian adventure fiction; the latter were supposed to be examples of virtue, heroism, and bravery for young readers to admire (Cubitt 2000: 3). For this reason, in none of the late Victorian boys’ adventure stories do the boys or their companions actually get killed by the snakes. This simply would not have been appropriate in an era when popular literature was promoting the idea of the hardy, tough English adventurer going abroad and depicting imperial service or exploration as a means of both character development and projecting British power across the world. Interestingly, in one Jack Harkaway story, it is the native who has to save his English masters from the snake. This is a further complication, in one of the most popular serials no less, of contemporary stereotypes of natives as weak and cowardly. This scenario occurs when Jack Harkaway and several of his companions when they are forced to find accommodation in a cave in an unspecified colony in Jack Harkaway’s

Snakes and Children  137 Adventures Afloat and Ashore, the sequel to Jack Harkaway After Schooldays. Unbeknownst to the lads who have sought refuge in the cave, a large snake, “fully twelve feet long and very thick,” has also made its home there (Hemyng 1900 [1871]: 62). It is Harkaway’s friend Monday—a character based on Defoe’s Man Friday in Robinson Crusoe (1719)—who steps up to the task of dispatching the serpent (63). Monday bravely grabs the snake by its neck and carries it out of the cave. Harkaway and another associate follow him out and the three of them beat the snake to death. While many Harkaway serials regularly use racist words to describe “native” characters, when it came to battling with snakes, such characters were as brave and equal to the task of any Englishman. Lions do not actually live in jungles but in the savannas where they can prey upon larger animals such as antelope. It would have made little sense for late Victorian writers to feature lions in their fictional jungles. As far as I can ascertain, there are no stories where a lion goes into battle against a snake. There was one story published in The Boy’s Comic Journal, in which an explorer ventures too far into the forest and encounters another big cat, a black panther, who seems ready to pounce on him. However, in the nick of time, a large constrictor appears—the species is unidentified—and coils itself around the panther (“Saved by a Serpent” 1894: 373). As far as Victorian penny novelists were concerned, therefore, the snake was truly the king of the unchartered forests of the colonies. To some extent, two of these tropes are still with us in popular culture. Snake charmers may have lost their threatening allure, although we do find some movies feature snake-handling villains, primarily of black or ethnic minority origin, using serpents to harm others. The film Stanley (1972) sees a Native American man use a rattlesnake to take vengeance on those whom he believes has wronged him, while other cult classics such as Natural Born Killers (1994) likewise see a Native American man able to somehow control a rattlesnake. The James Bond movie Live and Let Die (1973) features a deadly voodoo cult whose members use snakes to assassinate people. Stories involving serpents invading human domains remain popular. On occasion, moviemakers have taken up the trope of snakes invading human domains: A cult classic movie entitled Venom (1981) sees a black mamba invade a family home at the same time as burglars with deadly consequence for all involved. A similar movie was Fair Game (1988), in which a jilted man locks the object of his affection in her house and releases a black mamba into it. A more recent example might be the film Snakes on a Plane (2006) (there was actually an Italian illustrated boys’ magazine from the 1920s which featured the story of a king cobra terrorizing a pilot on a plane, thus anticipating the more recent film) (“In Brutta Compagnia” 1929: 16). In some respect these films are much

138  Stephen Basdeo like the Victorian magazines we have studied in this chapter: cheap horrors and actions movies, certainly not “quality” cinema. Perhaps we might make the case that, at least in some action films, the snake has displaced the lion as the king of the jungle. The Anaconda quadrilogy (1997–2004) sees explorers venture into tropical rainforests where they are stalked by a larger-than-life green anaconda. The snake was always the monster in Victorian popular literature. It was, as Harkaway calls the large snake whom Monday had carried out of the cave, a “brute,” and one which needed to be defeated at all costs. The lack of any sympathetic regard for an animal should not surprise us for, after all, since the dawn of Western civilization, the serpent has been feared because of its role in convincing Eve to commit her original sin. As this chapter has shown, snakes were fearsome animals in popular literary works because of how they were appropriated: as tools of natives’ treachery; as invaders of the family home; and as a symbol of when colonial explorers had ventured too far into the jungle.

Notes 1 See Percy (1770); Downman (1781); Wawn (2000) and Basdeo (2019). 2 Examples include “Snake Charming at Cairo” 1842: 239; “The Snake Charmers” 1859: 574; “Serpent Charmers” 1865: 161–62. 3 See Newbolt (1917: 279); Mangan (1986: 55–56); Basdeo (2020: 78–92) and Mangan (1981). 4 See “Destruction of a Serpent” (1841: 6), “Killing a Serpent” (1851: 130–31), “Page for the Young” (1874: 46–47) and “For the Young” (1868: 43).

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140  Stephen Basdeo Houghton, Walter. The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957. “Imprisoned by a Serpent.” Boy’s Comic Journal 11, no. 284 (1888): 398–99. “In Brutta Compagnia.” La Domenica del Corriere, May 20, 1929: 16. “The Indian Snake Charmers.” The Saturday Magazine 6 (May 1835): 186. “In Search of Gold.” The Boy’s Comic Journal 27, no. 684 (1896): 236–37. Jones, Max, et al. “Decolonising Imperial Heroes: Britain and France.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45, no. 5 (2014): 787–825. “Killing a Serpent.” The Wesleyan Juvenile Offering, November 1, 1851: 130–31. Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. New York: The Century Company, 1920. “Large Venomous Snake.” The Asiatic Journal (October 1, 1836): 65. Lewis, Lisa. “‘Rikki–Tikki–Tavi’ and Indian History.” In In Time’s eye: Essays on Rudyard Kipling, edited by Jan Montefiore. 129–41. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. “The Lion and the Serpent.” The English Chartist Circular, n.d.: 276. Mabilat, Claire. “British Orientalism and Representations of Music in the Long Nineteenth Century Ideas of Music, Otherness, Sexuality and Gender in the Popular Arts.” PhD diss., Durham University, 2006, http://etheses.dur. ac.uk/2703/. “Mahmoud the Snake Charmer.” The Boys of England, June 10, 1898: 1–8. Mangan, James Anthony. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School: The Emergence and Consolidation of an Educational Ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Mangan, James Anthony. The Games Ethic and Imperialism. New York: Viking, 1986. Michals, Teresa. Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Mosley, Stephen. The Environment in World History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010. “The Most Exciting Boat Race: No Wonder Jack Harkaway Felt a Bit Baked After Oxford’s Win.” The Times, March 31, 1960: 14. Newbolt, Henry. The Book of the Happy Warrior. London: Longmans, 1917. Owen, James. “Did St. Patrick Really Drive Snakes Out of Ireland? It’s the stuff of legend: The reptiles never existed on the Emerald Isle.” National Geographic (March 15, 2014). news.nationalgeographic.com “Page for the Young.” Illustrated Missionary News, April 1, 1874: 46–47. “Paquita.” The Boy’s Comic Journal, March 10, 1894: 132. Percy, Thomas. Northern Antiquities. London: J. Dodsley, 1770. Reynolds, George William MacArthur. 1844–1845. The Mysteries of London. 2 vols. L ­ ondon: G. Vickers, 1856. Reynolds, George William MacArthur. Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. 1846–1847. London: John Dicks, 1865. “Roughing it in Van Dieman’s Land.” Good Things, 1880, 122–23. Ryan, Derek. “Following Snakes and Moths: Modernist Ethics and Posthumanism.” Twentieth-Century Literature 61, no. 3 (2015): 287–304. “The Sacred Sapphire.” The Boys of England, May 2, 1890: 297–98. Said, Edward. Orientalism, 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 2003. “Saved by a Serpent.” The Boy’s Comic Journal, June 23, 1894: 373.

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8 Learning Masculinity Education, Boyhood, and the Animal in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days Alicia Alves In Thomas Hughes’s 1857 novel Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom’s father debates what to tell his son before he leaves for school. He is sending his son not to be “a good scholar,” but to “turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want” (Hughes 1857: 80).1 Squire Brown’s main hope for his son is focused on nationality, class-based manhood, and spiritual manhood, linking Tom to the English gentleman and to muscular Christianity. Squire Brown’s goal for his son at Rugby is not formal education but character building, specifically building masculinity. Tom Brown learns his lessons about ideal English, Christian manhood among other boys in the school who are similarly learning these lessons. These future gentlemen teach Tom about which relationships with animals are deemed proper for his own status and which are not through popular acceptance of human control over animals and denigration for human/animal kinship that does not fall under traditional pethood. Through these lessons, Tom cements his place at the top of the human/animal hierarchy, reflecting the biblical reference to human dominion over animals (Gen. 1:26, AV). Tom’s changing relationship with animals throughout the novel demonstrates that Tom needs to maintain a balance between sentiment and power to reach ideal manhood as a gentleman. 2 Tom must avoid excess in cruelty and in sentiment to maintain his position in the hierarchy. Although much has been discussed about the novel’s depiction of masculinity, the role of animals in the novel has been largely understudied.3 The animals reflect Tom’s relationships with other boys, his complicated position to the feminine, his sportsmanship, and his masculinity. Animals guide Tom through boyhood to manhood and are positioned to teach him proper masculinity but to the detriment of Tom’s relationship with them. Tom is initially close to animals as a small child, but even at home he learns to separate himself from them. At Rugby, his education, both formal and informal, revolves around hierarchal relationships with animals that reflect his status as a gentleman. He learns these ideals through his relationships with other boys at the school and by observing which behaviors are considering normative and maintain human control over animals, including hunting and fishing, and which are not

Learning Masculinity  143 normative and maintain close kinship between humans and animals, such as close relationships like Martin’s or Jacob’s. Tom Brown’s education in manliness is based on the at times conflicting gentlemanliness and the emerging idea of muscular Christianity. While John Henry Newman examined the figure of the gentleman in The Idea of a University (1893), Donald E. Hall notes that “Muscular Christianity originated as a response to John Henry Newman and the Tractarians, whose mysticism and attraction to asceticism was loudly and summarily branded ‘weak’ and ‘effeminate’ by the muscular Christians” (1993: 329). Tom balances the moral aspect of gentlemanliness for his class status with the games culture of what would be later termed “muscular Christianity,” since the novel is set in the 1830s. Kingsley’s “masculinist image of an imperial English nation” in his creation of the term muscular Christianity in the 1850s (Wee 1994: 66) reflects the term’s link to learning both masculinity and Englishness. However, Tom learns gentlemanliness alongside these values, in which “earlier understandings of the gentleman [describe it] as a triumph of moral discipline” (Adams 1995: 152). Robin Gilmour describes the complexity of the term “gentleman” for the Victorians as a mixing of moral virtues and class status: it was true: the man of noble birth, or of good family, was a gentleman by right … But between these and other time-honoured ranks, and those who aspired to the status, lay the universal assumption that gentlemanliness was important and that its importance transcended rank because it was a moral and not just a social category. (1981: 3) While “birth alone could not make the complete gentleman,” it did create “greater opportunit[ies] for acquiring gentle manners and practising gentle behaviour” (4). Tom’s connection to the gentleman is as moral status and class status. Describing the public school’s role in learning gentlemanly masculinity, Gilmour notes, “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century it was almost universally accepted that a traditional liberal education at a reputable public school should qualify a man as a gentleman, whatever his father’s origins or occupation” (8), and James Eli Adams points out that “The public school … offered the experience of a comprehensive discipline, which turned out not only young men of privilege but Christian gentlemen” (68). Thus, the public school imparts the games culture tied with muscular Christianity and the morality of the gentleman. Public school education prompts boys to become men, but their state of boyishness is not wholly negative. Tom is described as a “hero, who had nothing whatever remarkable about him except excess of boyishness; by which I mean … good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker”

144  Alicia Alves (Hughes 1857: 159; my emphasis). Boyish “good nature,” then, includes honesty and “hatred of injustice,” but its excess includes thoughtlessness, and it is this thoughtlessness that must be tempered. Indeed, Squire Brown’s hope for his son to become “a brave, helpful, truth-telling ­Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian” (80) reflects a need to temper some of this boyishness. The epigraph to Tom Brown’s School Days from Rugby Magazine on the novel’s title page points to the boys’ transitions into men through the school setting: “As on the one hand it should ever be remembered that we are boys, and boys at school, so on the other hand we must bear in mind that we form a complete social body. … a society, in which, by the nature of the case, we must not only learn, but act and live; and act and live not only as boys, but as boys who will be men.” Furthermore, the boyish desire to avoid injustice echoes John Henry Newman’s description of a gentleman as a man “who never inflicts pain” (2008: 208) and whose “great concern … [is] to make every one at their ease and at home” (209). Although Newman’s focus in The Idea of a University (1852) is on the gentleman’s relationships with people, this avoidance of excessive pain similarly applies to animals in Tom Brown’s School Days and is one of the thoughtless actions of boyhood that the students must overcome. Transitioning from boyhood to manhood required some form of education, whether this was formal education or lessons from other men. For instance, Thomas Arnold points to “the elevating effect of a great and ancient foundation” of education in his Sermons (1970b: 46). Although Tom’s father’s goal for him is not strictly about formal education, these spaces are sites of character-building lessons as well as formal ones. John Tosh explains in his monograph A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, “Boys became men … by cultivating the essential manly attributes—in a word, manliness. … Sometimes there was an implied claim to natural endowment; more often a manly bearing was taken to be the outcome of self-­ improvement and self-discipline” (1999: 111). Thus, while some boys could claim a natural manliness, most needed to work on their manliness and to learn it through “self-improvement and self-discipline.” Monica Flegel points out in her article “Everything I Wanted to Know about Sex I Learned from My Cat: Animal Stories, Working-Class ‘Life Troubles,’ and the Child Reader in Victorian England” that animals could teach children about gendered and sexual roles and about “sympathy for animals” (2016: 121). While Flegel focuses on animal autobiographies and on animal-focused stories in her analysis, this paper examines the ways children and animals outside of these types of narratives engage with each other and the ways children learn from these animals as well. A concern for animal pain was associated with the Victorian animal movement more broadly, but further to a budding definition of Englishness defined as sympathy for animals. In The Animal Estate: The

Learning Masculinity  145 English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Harriet Ritvo says about the early decades of the nineteenth century, “The connection between Englishness and kindness to animals was forged during this difficult and uncertain period in the development of the humane movement” (1987: 129). Ritvo further explains that advocates for animal welfare took this association of Englishness with caring for animals to include excluding those who did not have this sympathy: “More controversially, the identification of animal protection with solid English virtue could also function as an instrument of marginalization. Those who violated the canons of what was often called ‘humanity’ by its most eloquent advocates were not only sinful but also, in at least a rhetorical sense, excluded from the national community” (130). Thus, Englishness, part of Squire Brown’s hope for his son at Rugby (Hughes 1857: 80), can be associated with “kindness to animals” and associates the gentleman with some level of sympathy for animals. Indeed, Gilmour points out, “Before the growth of the stiff upper lip in the late Victorian public school, manliness was also associated with the capacity to show feeling” (86), and further that “Gentleness … and manliness went together, and both received equal stress in the new Victorian concept of the gentleman” (86). Gentlemanly masculinity, then, incorporates sympathy and emotion as well as dominion over animals. Near the beginning of the novel, Tom’s relationship with animals is a fairly intimate one. As a small child, Tom takes curds that he is not supposed to eat and then when caught “would break cover, hands and mouth full of curds, and take refuge on the shaky surface of the great muck reservoir in the middle of the yard, disturbing the repose of the great pigs” (Hughes 1857: 26). Tom’s safe space to avoid punishment is with the pigs because “no grown person could follow without getting over their knees” (26). In her discussion of domesticity and pets, Flegel examines how children and pets are linked with each other in Victorian conceptions of them, but children needed to grow out of this association to learn their future roles appropriately: “Called upon to be ‘pets’ within the affective relations of the home, children in the nineteenth century nevertheless also had to learn to be masters and mistresses, with too close an association with the domestic pet spelling disaster for the child’s eventual transition into proper, authoritative adulthood” (2015: 139). Although Tom at the very beginning of his journey finds safety with the pigs, the domestic ideology about child/pet relations asserts that his ultimate place is at the top of the human/animal hierarchy and thus his journey toward manliness will need to teach him human and male responsibility and superiority. For this reason, Tom cannot maintain close kinship with animals, though he must have sympathy. In childhood, Tom is led away from his previous association with animals and toward a more manly association with them through sports. Although a certain amount of compassion is necessary for manliness

146  Alicia Alves in the novel, as Hall argues, the novel also reflects “[b]rutal misogyny” (1993: 327). Andy Harvey points to the novel’s link to the later emerging “athletic masculinity” and how this ideal “by the fin de siècle had helped to bring into existence a culture of homophobia” (2012: 17). Manliness, in terms of muscular Christianity,4 is connected with “physical strength, religious certainty, and the ability to shape and control the world around oneself. Acts such as hunting, doctoring, and twisting were inextricably linked with ‘self’-construction” (Hall 1994: 7). Similarly, Tosh notes, “Popular forms of sport, or ‘manly exercises,’ kept men in a state of alertness and physical fitness, ranging from fox-hunting and cricket to archery and rowing” (111). Thus, these sports, which Tom learns in childhood and hones during his time at school, reflect the gaining and maintenance of manliness. These activities, though, exclude the feminine in defining masculinity and are centered around control over animals and an assertion of supposed human primacy. In excluding the feminine from these sports, the novel suggests that girls’ growth into womanhood is not marked by the same distance from animals. Even before arriving at Rugby, Tom is educated in these manly activities as an effort to extract him from the supposed damaging influence of female characters as being in opposition to the sports Tom learns. Maureen M. Martin has argued, “Regardless of Hughes’s admiration for the virtues associated with femininity, in the novel learning how to be a man is not a quest for androgyny; rather it involves learning how not to be a woman” (2002: 486) and points to a shift in the ideal boy in the decades after the novel’s publication from the “angelic Arthur” to Tom Brown (486). However, Soyoun Kim and Claudia Nelson point out that “leaving home does not require rejecting home, that masculinity flourishes when emotional bonds are strong, and that empire profits when it resembles domesticity” (2018: 324) and further that the novel “us[es] glimpses of the idealized home to encourage schoolboys to reach manhood” (328).5 While Tom must distance himself from female relations while he is learning manliness, as Kim and Nelson note, the masculine is not wholly separate from spaces such as domesticity. Old Benjy is the one who leads Tom away from Charity and the other women and teaches him manly skills such as hunting and fishing.6 In fact, “Benjy … saddled Tom’s first pony, and instructed him in the mysteries of horsemanship” while simultaneously promoting the disruption of girls’ education by riding the horse into their schoolroom (Hughes 1857: 29).7 Benjy struggles with his rheumatism so that he can teach Tom to fish (49–50). Kim and Nelson argue that “Tom’s relationship to his home is always about leaving it for the wider world” including “the local canal” where he learns to fish (326). Thus, this fishing trip links Tom to his budding masculinity through the very act of fishing as a masculine sport, but the river further reflects his masculine mobility. Benjy constructs maintaining the divide between Tom’s budding masculinity and separating him from the

Learning Masculinity  147 feminine influence of the domestic space as his job. In fact, Hall argues, “Benjy … personifies misogyny and violence” and his home is set up to support this misogyny (1993: 331). Benjy’s rheumatism concerns him because it may impact his ability to perform his task and causes him much anxiety: “He feared much too lest Master Tom should fall back again into the hands of Charity and the women” (Hughes 1857: 50). Through a revised relationship with animals that includes riding horses and fishing instead of finding safety away from adults with animals, Tom learns manliness before even setting foot in school. While this manliness is dependent on changing his relationship with animals, it is further dependent on a certain distance from women. Although manliness incorporates a certain level of sympathy for animals, it is an excess of sympathy or kinship that is constructed as improper for future manhood. In Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind, James Turner refers to the growing sympathy for animals and disdain for abuse in the nineteenth century (1980: 22–23)8 and the ways in which children’s literature could be didactic for proper treatment of animals (19). For instance, Turner explains, “In 1800 sympathy was … tenuous … [but] [b]y 1900 compassion for suffering was second nature” (139). Ritvo similarly refers to children’s literature as didactic for the proper treatment of animals and the idea that treating animals badly reflected a fear that the child would grow into a violent and dangerous adult (131–32). However, in learning his place in the human/animal hierarchy, Tom must ensure he does not move too far into sympathy. When leaving for Rugby, Tom’s friends each give him a gift, including “peg-tops, white marbles …, screws, birds’eggs, whipcord, jews’-harps, and other miscellaneous boys’ wealth” (Hughes 1857: 67). But another friend, “Jacob Doodle-calf, in floods of tears, had pressed upon him with spluttering earnestness his lame pet hedgehog (he had always some poor broken-down beast or bird by him); but this Tom had been obliged to refuse by the Squire’s order” (67). The “birds-eggs” are nestled in among other toys which indicates that the boys see them as part of their play. The only gift that is constructed as sentimental is Jacob’s pet hedgehog, which singles him out as unusually attached to improper pets. Jacob’s gift is the only one that Tom must leave behind because it does not align with his masculine and classbased education at Rugby. During his childhood, Tom struggles with exerting power despite still being interested in animals. When Tom meets Farmer Ives who is “a horse and cow doctor” (52) and Ives sees Tom’s interest in animals when he pets them, Farmer Ives “gave a call, which brought a flock of pigeons wheeling and dashing through the birch-trees. They settled down in clusters on the farmer’s arms and shoulders, making love to him and scrambling over one another’s backs to get to his face” (55). In response to Farmer Ives’s closeness with the birds and the birds’ response to Ives,

148  Alicia Alves “Tom begged to be taught how to make all the pigs and cows and poultry in our village tame, at which the farmer only gave one of his grim chuckles” (55). Tom is impressed by the animals’ tameness, but the animals react this way to Ives because the farmer has created a safe space for them to gather. Although Farmer Ives does not disrupt the human/ animal hierarchy, he heals animals and uses his position to help them. Since Farmer Ives is not of Tom’s class, he is able to maintain his closeness with animals as a part of his job whereas Tom cannot because it does not align with his class as gentry. Despite Tom’s initial safe space with the pigs (26), after his time with Benjy he still is interested in animals but is additionally interested in control. However, Ives will not share his secret because Tom is not ready since Tom’s desire to control animals exceeds the limit of maintaining the human/animal hierarchy. Furthermore, Hall asserts, “Tom Brown’s Schooldays … fits into a pattern of anxious and often violent expressions of desire for control, a pattern that virtually defines the mid-nineteenth century phenomenon known as ‘muscular Christianity’” (1993: 327–28). Tom must learn both human primacy and avoiding excessive control over animals. While Ives offers an example of these lessons, his relationship to animals is not one Tom can fully inhabit as a gentleman. During his childhood in the village, Tom learns violent games with the other boys, and these games position him against animals, not alongside them. Tom plays games with the other village boys that are “trials of skill and strength,” in which “Some of them would catch the Shetland pony who was turned out in the field, and get two or three together on his back, and the little rogue, enjoying the fun, would gallop off for fifty yards and then turn round, or stop short and shoot them on to the turf, and then graze quietly on till he felt another load” (Hughes 1857: 63–64). The boys’ play also includes searching for rabbits and birds’ eggs (66). A ­ nimals become something to hunt, to kill, or to display as prizes in these games of “skill and strength.” The animals resist the boys’ construction of them as prizes by engaging in the games with them, becoming players instead of prizes. The pony takes part in the game that the boys play and throws them off or gives chase. Later, at Rugby, a bird takes part in the boys’ game in a similar way, despite the real danger to his life since the boys throw rocks in an effort to harm birds (301). During this game, the boys encounter “an old blackbird (who was evidently used to the thing and enjoyed the fun, for he would wait till they came close to him and then fly on for forty yards or so, and, with an impudent flicker of his tail dart into the depths of the quickset)” (301). The blackbird is accustomed to boys’ violent games and refuses the power the boys exert over him and instead levels the hierarchy by engaging with their game. For instance, Tess Cosslett says about talking animals in children’s literature that “the language spoken by the animals can at times be understood by human characters, going against

Learning Masculinity  149 a long-standing tradition in children’s animal stories. These devices blur the animal/human distinction” (2006: 151). The boys’ disregard for the animals since the boys do not try to engage them in their play negates the potential for blurring binaries that human/animal play offers. The boys not only seek to conquer the animals, but they do so in a physically violent way. Instead, it is the animal who works to blur the binary through a relationship. When Tom spends a brief amount of time at a private school before moving on to Rugby, the games become more violent than the village games he played before. At this school the games result in skinning animals and destroying their homes: Then others of the boys spread over the downs, looking for the holes of humble-bees and mice, which they dug up without mercy, often (I regret to say) killing and skinning the unlucky mice, and (I do not regret to say) getting well stung by the humble-bees. Others went after butterflies and birds’-eggs in their seasons; and Tom found on Hazeldown for the first time the beautiful little blue butterfly, with golden spots on his wings, which he had never seen on his own downs, and dug out his first sand-martin’s nest. This latter achievement resulted in a flogging, for the sand-martins built in a high bank close to the village, consequently out of bounds. (Hughes 1857: 72–73) The boys’ cruelty in the first game is their skinning of the animals for the sake of exerting their power and reflects Ritvo’s point about the connection between sympathy for animals’ pain and Englishness (129).9 Here again the animals (or rather insects) fight back and sting the boys who interfere with their space, and these animals have the narrator’s support because of the boys’ behavior. However, Tom’s conduct in the second example in “[digging] out his first sand-martin’s nest” becomes a problem because he is out of school bounds not because he has disrupted an animal’s nest and home. Gentlemanly behavior means both sympathy and control over animals, illustrated in these two examples. When Tom does arrive at Rugby, his eagerness “to become a public school-boy as fast as possible” (Hughes 1857: 77) and his advice to Arthur to never “talk about home, or your mother and sisters” (246) demonstrate Tom’s desire to continue the style of education he received back home and to continue to distance himself from female familial relations. Tom’s education here reflects Thomas Arnold’s assertion that “Public schools are made up of the very same persons whom we have known, a few years earlier, to be pure-minded and obedient c­ hildren— whom we know, a few years later, to be at least decent and useful men” (1970a: 50). While Thomas Arnold’s description depends on well-­ behaved boys becoming the bare minimum of acceptable manliness,

150  Alicia Alves this transition is one for which public schools were increasingly known. These public schools, like Harrow and Eton, were a space for the upper classes and were thus different than the American idea of public schools; “the rank for which, above all others, Rugby catered … [was] the gentry” (Gilmour 95). With the rise of middle-class boys attending public schools later in the century and due to Thomas Arnold’s reforms, “the public school … [became] seen as an opportunity for middle-class boys to acquire the accomplishments of a gentleman” and thus “was a matter of social status” (Tosh 117). Tosh explains, “In the 1830s public school was far from being the typical education of middle-class boys, apart from the sons of the clergy. But as the number and standing of the public schools rose, the very distinctive masculine socialization which they offered became the defining experience of the upper middle class” (105). Tosh further asserts that the public school’s increasing popularity with the middle classes reflects its status “in complete contrast to the atmosphere of home and family [and that] they offered a crash course in manliness” (118). Tom’s eagerness to “become a public school-boy as fast as possible” demonstrates how his schooling relates directly to his gaining of manliness and to distancing himself from the child he was when he found comfort with animals. At Rugby the boys Tom looks to for models of manliness reflect dominance over animals instead of kinship with them. For instance, in East’s shared room the “shelves and cupboards …[are] filled indiscriminately with school-books, a cup or two, a mousetrap, and brass candlesticks, leather straps, a fustian bag, and some curious-looking articles, which puzzled Tom not a little, until his friend explained that they were climbing irons, and shewed their use. A cricket-bat and small fishing-rod stood up in one corner” (Hughes 1857: 103). The shelves are filled with items that, in their list form, become equal. Instruments for hunting birds’ eggs (a popular schoolboy pastime in this novel) and for catching mice are alongside other items, and the fishing rod is next to the cricket bat, rendering them both equal and legitimate sports for the boys to play and rendering them both equal illustrations of manliness. In Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School, J. A. Mangan explains that before 1845, “The location of the schools in rural surroundings and the absence of bounds meant that a large part of the boys’ free time was spent exploring the countryside, fishing, hunting small animals and nesting” (2000: 18), and some of their games “before the era of athleticism included bird-shooting, nesting, duck-hunting and even for a while, beagling, in addition to cricket, football, racquets and hares and hounds, but the most popular entertainment was ‘toozling’ or chasing and killing birds in the hedgerows” (19). Beyond providing sustenance, then, these sports were a way to learn and demonstrate manliness at school and to bond with the other boys. Paul M. Puccio refers to the importance of “highly emotional [male] friendships, based on shared Christian values”

Learning Masculinity  151 for helping to form boys’ spiritual characters (1995: 58–59). Relationships based on sport further help form the boys’ gentlemanliness and manly character. Tom engages with the other boys in animal-based sport such as fishing and hunting birds, and he is punished for not obeying rules.10 The boys see fishing as their right, despite the fact that they fish in a part of the river that is out of bounds for Rugby students and thus “as a protest against this tyranny and cutting short of their lawful amusements, took to fishing in all ways, and especially by means of night-lines” (Hughes 1857: 222). Similarly, Rugby boys steal poultry from a nearby farmer, which is an established practice by the students (301–2). Tom and East steal a duck from this farmer but are unable to stealthily cook the bird at Rugby and must hide the carcass (302–3). Tom, wishing he and East “were rid of the brute,” then “thro[ws] him on the table in disgust. And after a day or two more it became clear, that got rid of he must be; so they packed him and sealed him up in brown paper, and put him in the cupboard of an unoccupied study, where he was found in the holidays by the matron, a grewsome body” (303). The boys uphold the bird’s subjecthood through gendered pronouns, but the boys’ treatment of his body is as an object. Indeed, the boys are punished because of the theft when they are later discovered throwing rocks at birds at the farmer’s space, not for being connected to the “grewsome body” they left behind earlier (308–9). Mangan explains, these problems of “poaching, trespassing, and general lawlessness” were part of public schools as a whole during the mid-century (22). The problem is disregard for others’ property, not hunting since this is a gentlemanly pursuit. Similarly, the boys are punished for their fishing because Tom and the other boys have ignored the rules set in place and fish where they are not supposed to. In “Young England: Muscular Christianity and the Politics of the Body in Tom Brown’s Schooldays,” Dennis W. Allen reads poaching and the representation of “the boys … [as] symbolically equivalent to the land” primarily in terms of class relations (1994: 122–23). While their class and association with the land give the boys a sense of ownership over the land, the boys must still navigate the rules of sport. Along with having sympathy and skill in sport, growing gentlemen must demonstrate obedience. At Rugby the boys’ relationship with animals is not only one of violence and domination; Martin illustrates the other extreme of kinship. Tom describes Martin as “mad” because of his close association with animals that is unlike the other boys at Rugby: “He’s a very good fellow, but as mad as a hatter. He’s called madman, you know” (Hughes 1857: 272). Tom continues: “He tamed two snakes last half, and used to carry them about in his pocket, and I’ll be bound he’s got some hedgehogs and rats in his cupboard now, and no one knows what besides” (272). Martin’s “madness” derives from his relationship with animals, which

152  Alicia Alves does not match that of the other boys. For instance, when Tom, East, Martin, and Arthur hunt for birds’ eggs, East calls to Martin to “Take ‘em all,” and Martin does except for one (299); the boys then “examined the prizes” (300). In contrast, when Martin takes Arthur for the same quest earlier, they “left eleven eggs in [the nest]; they’ll be hatched in a day or two” (293). Martin is not only interested in science; he also forms relationships with the animals, instead of only observing them scientifically. The reference to Martin’s pet hedgehog (among other improper pets) links him with Jacob from the village whose gift of his pet hedgehog was deemed inappropriate for Tom (67). However, Martin’s position at Rugby indicates his class status as a gentleman and thus differentiates him from characters like Farmer Ives and Jacob who conserve their kinship with animals. Instead, Martin does not fit into Rugby because of this kinship, unlike Farmer Ives who is able to uphold this affinity. Unlike East’s shelves that contain instruments to trap animals like mousetraps and fishing rods (103), Martin’s rooms are filled with animals themselves: “The other shelves, where they had not been cut away and used by the owner for other purposes, were fitted up for the abiding places of birds, beasts, and reptiles” (279) and in “his tin candle-box, … he was for the time being endeavouring to raise a hopeful young family of field-mice” (279). The narrator deems Martin as one of those boys who are “quite out of their places at a public-school. If we knew how to use our boys, Martin would have been seized upon and educated as a natural philosopher” (275). However, Martin’s relationship to animals is still too sentimental for proper manliness as an adult. Despite Martin’s unfitness to be at a public school that teaches, among other things, proper English gentlemanly masculinity, his position with his animals is not an uncomplicated one. Ritvo points out that the “taxonomic enterprise … embodied a sweeping human claim to intellectual mastery of the natural world” (12), and Hall refers to Martin’s nursing of animals when this is “scorned in women” as an example of “aggrandizement of power” (1993: 335). Martin, though separated from the other boys in terms of proper human/animal relations, still occupies a privileged position through class, gender, and species in the text that differentiates him from characters like Jacob and Farmer Ives. At the very beginning of the novel, Hughes sets up the masculine ideal as one of a balanced approach to the natural world. Referring to “Young England,” Hughes writes, “All I say is, you don’t know your own lanes and woods and fields. Though you may be chock full of science, not one in twenty of you knows where to find the wood sorrel, or the bee-orchis, which grow in the next wood, or on the down three miles off, or what the bog-bean and wood-sage are good for” (1857: 6–7). Furthermore, Hughes quotes “‘Gaarge Ridler,’ the old west-country yeoman” who refers to exploring the land “my dog and I” (18). Allen argues that this description reflects a strong link between Englishness, maleness, and

Learning Masculinity  153 the land: “Despite the specific identification of Tom and Arthur with their individual counties, the novel as a whole insists on a larger link between English boys and the English land. This is nowhere clearer than in the novel’s first chapter, where Hughes presents the intimate connection between a boy and his native landscape as an ideal that has been neglected” (118). English boyhood and growing manliness, then, is linked to the land,11 but in a way that the boys know the land and their place in it, not to include too much sentiment with improper pets or with becoming too close to the animals around them. These boys, following the description, would know the use for the natural elements around them and view them as useful and would be proper pet owners. This version of manliness is one that links Englishness and masculinity with dominion over nature. By the end of Tom Brown’s School Days, Tom learns which games and sports are proper for his growing masculine identity. The narrator describes him at the end of this journey: “It is Tom Brown, grown into a young man nineteen years old, a præpostor and captain of the eleven, spending his last day as a Rugby boy, and let us hope as much wiser as he is bigger since we last had the pleasure of coming across him” (Hughes 1857: 390). He is still only a “young man” and not fully yet a man, but he has changed much since his young days with the pigs or wanting to overpower all of the animals around him. In fact, Tom’s relationship with Arthur, which was “the making of … [them] both” (405) and a relationship that gained Tom “manliness and thoughtfulness” (406), resulted in Arthur’s mom gifting Tom a fishing rod of his own (357). Tom’s growth renders him more secure in manliness and dominion over animals without the excessive desire to control all animals around him. Tom ends the novel, in fact, fishing with other men when he finds out about Doctor Arnold’s death in the summer of 1842 (410–13). With the death of his mentor comes the reassurance that Tom is doing well in terms of learning manliness since he is fishing among men instead of hunting birds’ eggs among boys. Tom continues his education of manliness and gentlemanliness in the sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1861). Hughes introduces Tom Brown by referring to the manly skills he has gained since his time at Rugby: “for the first time in his life he was having his fill of hunting and shooting” (1861 [1859]: 1:1), and “He was a better horseman and shot, but the total relaxation of all the healthy discipline of school … had certainly thrown him back in other ways” (1:2). Despite these manly skills, Hughes notes, “The whole man had not grown; so that we must not be surprised to find him quite as boyish, now that we fall in with him again” (1:2). Tom, then, has gained skill in the important sports and games that he honed as a boy, but still the “whole man had not grown” and thus he continues his manly education at university. Oxford follows in the tradition of public schools as an institution that teaches manliness alongside formal

154  Alicia Alves education. Going to St. Ambrose, for instance, “was as distinguished for learning, morality, and respectability, as any in the university” (1:4), and “The St. Ambrose undergraduates at one time had carried off almost all the university prizes, and filled the class lists, while maintaining at the same time the highest character for manliness and gentlemanly conduct” (1:4). Tom’s time at Oxford, then, will only hone the skills he has learned at Rugby and he will move further from close kinship with animals in his continuing masculine education. The young men at Oxford do not harbor improper relationships with animals. Instead, Oxford reinforces the gentlemanly relationship between human and animal as one of master and pet. When Tom recognizes his friend Drysdale’s dog, Jack, Tom notes, “I hope I never forget a dog or a horse I have once known” (2:408). Tom’s assertion reflects this novel’s focus on animals such as horses and dogs as opposed to finding birds’ eggs, navigating improper relationships like Martin’s, or other wild animals. In fact, Drysdale “had the look and manners of a thoroughly well-bred gentleman” (1:35) and thus models proper gentlemanly human/animal relations for Tom to follow. Drysdale’s other male friends similarly serve to model this behavior. Drysdale says about his gentlemen friends, “they happen to do the things I like doing, and live up here as I like to live. I like hunting and driving, and drawing badgers and playing cards, and good wines and cigars. They hunt and drive, and keep dogs and good cellars” (1:79). While Tom began to learn these relations at Rugby, he can now hone these skills among other gentlemen at Oxford. His new models of manliness serve to illustrate how Tom needs to continue to grow in manliness: manly sports and pet ownership. At Oxford, Tom’s focus is on “the manly instinct of sport which is so strong in all of us Englishmen” such as hunting (1:279). The contents of Drysdale’s rooms reinforce this focus on proper, manly animal-based sports: Several tandem and riding whips, mounted in heavy silver, and a double-barrelled gun, and fishing rods, occupied one corner, and a polished copper cask, holding about five gallons of mild ale, stood in another … [and] a cupboard … stood half open, and contained, besides, half-emptied decanters, and large pewters, and dog-collars, and packs of cards, and all sorts of miscellaneous articles to serve as an antidote [to books]. (1:35) Drysdale’s shelves are a grown-up manly version of East’s shelves (Hughes 1857: 103), containing instruments for hunting, fishing, and pet ownership, but not mousetraps or articles for finding birds’ eggs. For instance, Blake, another model of gentlemanly behavior and one of Drysdale’s friends, “is a wonderful rider, and tennis-player, and shot”

Learning Masculinity  155 (1861: 1:54). Tom’s focus now is on gaining the same level of skill in these sports as the other gentlemen. Indeed, Tom even stops a poacher at the river, in contrast to his own boyish poaching that he has evidently grown out of in his manly education (2:236–38). Tom grows in proper gentlemanly manliness through observing the rules of these sports and in gaining skill in these activities. Despite his new focus, Tom does still take pleasure in watching wild animals, but only from a distance to maintain separate relations. Tom Brown at Oxford includes a beast show in which the spectators are violent toward the animals and during which Drysdale takes delight in the spectacle: “Well, this is a lark! We’re just in for all the fun of the fair” (1:173). Although the beast show reflects some of the existing violence in these gentlemen toward animals, this chapter focuses on their relationship to animals through gentlemanly sport and proper kinship in pet ownership. While Tom is outdoors watching various animals in the space around him, including birds, fish, and cows, he finds peace in their activity: “All living things seemed to be disporting themselves, and enjoying, after their kind, the last gleams of the sunset, which were making the whole vault of heaven glow and shimmer; and, as he watched them, Tom blessed his stars as he contrasted the river side with the glare of lamps and the click of balls in the noisy pool-room” (2:228). Tom still finds peace in and respect for animals in the world around him, but he no longer engages with them directly. While Tom is walking with his horse outdoors, his thoughts were interrupted by the proceedings of the rabbits, which were out by hundreds all along the sides of the plantations, and round the great trees. A few of the nearest just deigned to notice him by scampering to their holes under the roots of the antlered oaks, into which some of them popped with a disdainful kick of their hind legs, while others turned round, sat up, and looked at him. (2:159) Tom is unable to maintain his own thoughts, but he takes joy in watching the animals. However, these animals are “disdainful,” look directly at Tom, and “deig[n] to notice him” as he walks past (2:159). Although Tom has learned to maintain his own separateness from animals, the animals have done the same. Instead of engaging with Tom in play as they had done previously, the animals gaze directly at him, disrupting his own masculine gaze, and otherwise ignore him. While Tom learns gentlemanly masculinity at school, the animals learn which humans they choose to pursue kinship with, such as Farmer Ives, and which to ignore, such as Tom Brown. Tom’s journey has led him to construct a barrier between human and nonhuman animals to uphold his own power as a man in the hierarchy.

156  Alicia Alves John Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies asserts that education linked men more firmly to their moral kingly duties: “I wish you to see that both well-directed moral training and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of a power over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the measure of it, in the truest sense, kingly; conferring indeed the purest kingship that can exist among men” (1865: 120) and further “that all literature and all education are only useful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and therefore kingly, power” (122). Ruskin echoes Tom’s experience of education lending itself to learning manliness and his own place in the hierarchy as a human and as a man. Hughes similarly refers to man’s place in the hierarchy, but he struggles with the human need for a kingdom: But man of all ages is a selfish animal, and unreasonable in his selfishness. … We are conscious in our innermost souls that man is the rightful lord of creation; and, starting from this eternal principle, and ignoring, each man-child of us in turn, the qualifying truth that it is to man in general, including woman, and not to Thomas Brown in particular, that the earth has been given, we set about asserting our kingships … from our own little ant-hills of thrones. And then come the strugglings and the downfallings, and some of us learn our lesson and some learn it not. But what lesson? That we have been dreaming in the golden hours when the vision of a kingdom rose before us? That there is, in short, no kingdom at all, or that, if there be we are no heirs of it? (1861: 2:58) He continues, “No—I take it that, while we make nothing better than that out of our lesson, we shall have to go on spelling at it … till we make our last stumble, and take our final header out of this riddle of a world, which we once dreamed we were to rule over … But man’s spirit will never be satisfied without a kingdom, and was never intended to be satisfied so” (2:59). Although humans feel they need their kingdoms and need to “rule over” animals, Hughes does not allow for excessive violence or show of power over animals at the private school when the narrator punishes the boys for their misbehavior and cruelty (Hughes 1857: 72–73). However, Allen links some level of control over nature with masculinity in the novel since “Tom is identified with a vaguely pastoral scene that implies the transformation of nature by human effort … that Hughes continually insisted was one of the physical tasks of the muscular Christian” (117). Thus, human intervention in nature is not wholly negative in the novel, but needs to be transformative, not violent, and is related to the physicality of manliness as one of the duties of “muscular Christian” manliness.

Learning Masculinity  157 The final words of the novel echo this supposed human primacy. Hughes ends Tom Brown’s School Days thusly: “For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that we can come to the knowledge of Him” (1857: 419–20). It is through proper human relationships and proper masculine performance that boys can find this knowledge of God and what He represents to muscular Christianity. Hall relates this “growth toward moral responsibility” to “a movement toward a gender omnipotence” (1993: 336). However, this growth is additionally about learning to navigate male relations toward animals to arrive at this supposed manly and human superiority. To fulfill proper gentlemanly masculinity in the novel, boys need to learn a balance between caring for animals in their place in the hierarchy and not causing excessive violence toward them through boyish games. Through this educational process these boys must learn to privilege human relationships above animal ones, but the animals will similarly exert their right to privilege relationships that are beneficial to them.

Notes 1 In his discussion of Victorian masculinity, John Tosh explains the importance of “the transmission of masculine attributes and masculine status to the next generation” (114) because “the father’s own manhood was at stake, mortgaged to the future” (115). Although Squire Brown’s relationship to his son’s masculinity can be seen to reflect his anxieties about his own masculinity, this article focuses on Tom Brown’s acquiring of manliness through his relationship with animals. 2 First serialized in Macmillan Magazine in 1859 and then published in two volumes by Macmillan in 1861. 3 Suyin Olguin’s article “Feasting & Bonding Like a Man: Tom Brown’s Consumption of the English Masculine Ideal” (2017) focuses on food and masculinity in the novel and can thus be linked to a discourse around animals as meat; however, my article focuses on live animals and the novel’s depiction of human/animal relations. See Olguin for more on the role of meat and food in the novel. 4 Donald E. Hall explains, “The tag ‘muscular Christianity’ originated in a review of Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857) written by T. C. Sandars for the Saturday Review” (1994: 7). Thomas Hughes refers to muscular Christianity in the novel’s 1861 sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford (1: 168–70). 5 For more on domesticity’s importance to Victorian, middle-class masculinity, see Tosh. 6 Claudia Nelson argues that the Victorians were interested in old age as well as childhood and in fact linked the two life stages (2012: 2). In this way, Benjy’s connection to the young Tom Brown is even closer than teaching him masculinity. 7 Tosh refers to children’s aging as specifically gendered, including wearing pants and starting school outside of the home at a young age (103–4).

158  Alicia Alves 8 The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) was formed in 1824 (Turner 40). 9 Another example of a boy’s violence against animals is Tom Bloomfield’s violence against birds, which is not checked by his immediate family in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847), leaving his governess to teach him more compassionate relations between humans and animals (1998: 43–46). 10 For a discussion of the novel’s use of violence as discipline, see Robert Dingley (1996: 1–3). 11 In “The ‘Race of Real Children’ and Beyond in Tom Brown’s School Days,” Samuel Pickering Jr. connects knowledge, nature, and Wordsworth with childhood (1984: 37–38).

Bibliography Adams, James Eli. Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Allen, Dennis W. “Young England: Muscular Christianity and the Politics of the Body in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.” In Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, edited by Donald E. Hall, 114–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Arnold, Thomas. “Public Schools as the Nurseries of Vice.” In Thomas Arnold on Education: A Selection from His Writings, edited by A. C. F. Beales, A. V. Judges, and J. P. C. Roach, with introductory material by T. W. Bamford, 48–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970a. Arnold, Thomas. “Public-school Education; the Value of Historical Connections and Size; School Traditions.” In Thomas Arnold on Education: A Selection from His Writings, edited by A. C. F. Beales, A. V. Judges, and J. P. C. Roach, with introductory material by T. W. Bamford, 45–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970b. Brontë, Anne. Agnes Grey. Edited by Robert Inglesfield and Hilda Marsden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Dingley, Robert. “Shades of the Prison House: Discipline and Surveillance in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.” Victorian Review 22, no. 1 (Summer 1996): 1–12. doi: 10.1353/vcr.1996.0035. Flegel, Monica. “Everything I Wanted to Know about Sex I Learned from My Cat: Animal Stories, Working-Class ‘Life Troubles,’ and the Child Reader in Victorian England.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 121–41. doi: 10.1353/chq.2016.0019. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. New York: Routledge, 2015. Gilmour, Robin. The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel. London: George Allen and Unwin Publishers Limited, 1981. Hall, Donald E. “Muscular Anxiety: Degradation and Appropriation in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.” Victorian Literature and Culture 21 (1993): 327–43. http://proxy.queensu.ca/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com /login. aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1994025575&site=ehost-live.

Learning Masculinity  159 Hall, Donald E. “Muscular Christianity: Reading and Writing the Male Social Body.” In Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, edited by Donald E. Hall, 3–13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Harvey, Andy. “Tom Brown’s Schooldays: ‘Sportsex’ in Victorian Britain.” Sporting Victorians, special issue of Critical Survey 24, no. 1 (2012): 17–29. doi: 10.3167/cs.2012.240102. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown at Oxford. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/2753050.html. Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown’s School Days. Cambridge: Macmillan and Company, 1857. https://books.google.com/books?id=gN0NAAAAQAAJ. Kim, Soyoun, and Claudia Nelson. “Navigating between Home and Empire: Mobility and Male Friendship in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and The Three Midshipmen.” Children’s Literature in Education 49, no. 3 (2018): 323–37. doi: 10.1007/s10583-017-9321-y. Mangan, James Anthony. Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Martin, Maureen M. “‘Boys Who Will Be Men’: Desire in Tom Brown’s Schooldays.” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 2 (2002): 483–502. doi: 10.1017/S1060150302302067h. Nelson, Claudia. Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2012. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg, 2008. Retrieved July 11, 2019, from www.gutenberg.org/ files/24526/24526-h/24526-h.html. Olguin, Suyin. “Feasting & Bonding Like a Man: Tom Brown’s Consumption of the English Masculine Ideal.” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 13, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 23–36. www.ncgsjournal.com/. Pickering, Samuel, Jr. “The ‘Race of Real Children’ and Beyond in Tom Brown’s School Days.” The Arnoldian: A Review of Mid-Victorian Culture 11, no.  2 (Spring 1984): 36–46. http://proxy.queensu.ca/login?url=http://search.­ ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=1985008391&site= ehost-live. Puccio, Paul M. “At the Heart of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays’: Thomas Arnold and Christian Friendship.” Modern Language Studies 25, no. 4 (Autumn 1995): 57–74. www.jstor.org/stable/3195488. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures Delivered at Manchester in 1864. London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1865. Tosh, John. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. London: Yale University Press, 1999. Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1980. Wee, C. J. W. -L. “Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of a Racially ‘Pure’ Nation.” In Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, edited by Donald E. Hall, 66–88. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

9 Unruly Females on the Farm Domestic Animal Mothers and the Dismantling of the Species Hierarchy in NineteenthCentury Literature for Children Stacy Hoult-Saros Like today’s young readers, nineteenth-century children encountered farm and domestic animals in a range of texts designed to educate, entertain, and model social norms for them. During a time of urbanization and diminished contact with real nonhuman creatures, mother hens, ducks, and geese joined cows, sows, ewes, and nanny goats in the pages of stories and rhymes intended to instruct young readers in the challenges and virtues of motherhood. These farmyard mothers are variously held up as examples of idealized, self-sacrificing nurturers; extolled for their utilitarian value as food products and producers; and critiqued or punished for their occasional refusal to meet human expectations for obedience and productivity in different forms. At the same time, texts exploring the daily realities of farm females and their relationships with human owners and consumers foreground maternal animal exceptionalism by dwelling on the bodily products that the vegan-feminist theologian Carol J. Adams has termed “feminized protein” like eggs and dairy products (2018). In some cases, female animal characters’ unexpected responses to human expectations and evolving agricultural practices (like the use of incubators for chicks) subvert nineteenth-century beliefs about the hierarchy of species, ­challenging notions of human superiority on which assumptions about natural dominance were founded. As Maija-Liisa Harju and Dawn Rouse have noted, “children and animals were often equated as being uncontrollable and in need of adult authority” (2018: 453–54).1 Similar processes of control and containment are at work in literary texts in which adult female animals are presented as transgressive figures in need of guidance and discipline. Poetic voices in verses for children thus address their lessons not only to young nonhuman animal characters, and, by extension, to human children, but also to the animal mothers charged with nurturing, protecting, teaching, and modeling positive behaviors. Children’s rhymes about animal mothers depict both matrons and offspring exhibiting a combination of dutiful and nonconforming behaviors, rendering both generational categories

Unruly Females on the Farm  161 more complex and less “domesticated” than human owners (and moralizing writers) would prefer to believe. Erica Fudge ponders the persuasive potential of introducing the child reader to animal lives: if we don’t believe that in some way we can communicate with and understand animals, what is to make us stop and think as we experiment upon them, eat them, put them in cages? By gaining access to the world of animals, [children’s classics about animals] offer a way of thinking about human-animal relations more generally, and potentially more positively. (2002: 76–77) Poetic texts populated by familiar animal figures presented Victorian children with a great deal to think about. In their uncanny disturbances of the dynamics between humans and their most common nonhuman domestic companions, they prefigure the non-hierarchical thinking and boundary-blurring devices of the most radical posthuman treatments of interspecies relations. Of course, there was no dearth of edifying material for nineteenth-century children in need of models of sainted motherhood. Images of deeply concerned, committed mothers abound in rhymes and stories featuring both human and diverse nonhuman characters. To take one representative example, Mrs. Abdy’s “My Mother” extolls the maternal figure’s self-sacrificing nature, efforts in nurturing and discipline, and devotion to family unity. The idealized mother is unselfish to a fault: “Your time is given to us alone, / Scarcely a moment seems your own” (1970 [1848]: 5–6). 2 The accompanying illustration, attributed to G. Measom, both underlines and troubles the grateful child’s observations: The mother stares inscrutably into space, wearing a vaguely tired expression, as her two offspring vie aggressively for her attention. Whatever the toll on her time and energy, the object of the poetic subject’s praise unfailingly provides what is needed in response to the full range of parenting challenges: You wisely train each well-loved child, Gently you chide the rash and wild, You tenderly support the meek, And give protection to the weak (9–12) The “infant band” (2), like the farm animal babies in many nineteenth-­ century poems, is characterized as plentiful, loud, demanding, and in need of the training and guidance that will equip its members to form part of a happy and unified clan. Similar visions of idealized motherhood, articulated in an ungendered, childlike register, for Mrs. Abdy’s tender tribute manifest in praise directed at animal mothers who embody

162  Stacy Hoult-Saros similar characteristics (in particular, a calm demeanor in the presence of childish noise and frolic and an ability to impart wise lessons and curb unrestrained behavior). Conversely, animal mothers who display indifference, disobedience, and occasional open resistance to human ownership and control are subjected to harsh condemnation. Their refusal to follow human orders puts them at odds with the mild, self-denying maternal figures of poems meant to cultivate a grateful disposition and good behavior in the mothers of tomorrow. The rigid parent/child hierarchy is reinforced through frequent reminders of gratitude owed to the mother and of the folly of straying from the paths laid out in her patiently administered lessons. Writers of didactic texts for children have often sought to transmit these exalted family values by linking them with female farm or domestic animals associated with motherhood and related activities, with cows and hens most frequently conscripted into moralizing rhymes as models of propriety. As Linda Kalof affirms, “Vignettes or relationships between animals and humans were established means of teaching conformity and obedience to assertive women and the working class” (2007: 144). Another popular domestic creature renowned for an independent spirit and a general disregard for human directives, the cat, also figures prominently in literary explorations of the joys and trials of motherhood. In Christopher P. Cranch’s “An Old Cat’s Confessions,” a wellworn feline relates a range of experiences, from injury and abuse at the hands of humans to her current occupation of drowsing by the fire, but chooses to define herself from the beginning by her status as a mother: “I have had about fifty kittens / So I think that I mustn’t complain” (2014 [1870]: 3–4). Despite the cruel realities of pet overpopulation, the cat (named Tabitha Jane) counts herself fortunate to have led a life of fecundity that would appear overwhelming to most readers. Her grateful opening assertion aside, however, the venerable cat’s fruitfulness is soon revealed to be the source of deep sorrow resulting from human-administered punishments for the very productivity she acknowledges as most significant and meaningful, when human owners “drowned seventeen of my babies, / Which came near breaking my heart” (7–8). At her advanced age, the cat’s specificity in commemorating exactly 17 of the 50 testifies to her loving connection and sincere motherly concern with each individual of her long series of litters. She goes on to chronicle other troubles—a set of singed whiskers, a dog bite, a stoning by a group of boys and even a bullet to her back—but, turning to the balance of her achievements and confessed shortcomings, she affirms success in key areas of feline responsibility, as “a pretty good mouser” (33) and as an experienced mother who has “brought up my frolicsome kittens / As a dutiful mother-­cat ought” (35–36). Like Mrs. Abdy’s model of maternal responsibility, Tabitha Jane has contended with her share of roughhousing

Unruly Females on the Farm  163 while fulfilling her duties, even as a single parent balancing loving discipline with other exigencies of life as a domestic feline. The cat’s place in the Great Chain of Being has made her a killer and devourer of other creatures, just as her status as nonhuman domestic companion has left her vulnerable to the whims of the nineteenth-century humans through whose spaces she moves freely until old age drives her inside: While she openly confesses her disdain for her human housemates, her love for a warm fire and “occasional herring and mouse” (44) allows this independent female to accept her semi-dependent status after her own work as a mother is complete. The animal’s framing of her domestic situation as her own choice confirms her place in the history of representations of cats as liminal figures, kept as pets but never entirely tamed. As Brenda Ayres notes in “Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency,” “Though domesticated, the cat is another one of those animals that tenaciously exercises agency and resists being controlled or threatened” (2019: 37). The only duties fully owned and claimed by this veteran of the vicissitudes of life among humans are those mandated by her position as mother to vulnerable beings dependent on her for their survival and development into (presumably) dutiful adult cats. The old cat’s steadfast refusal to be anthropomorphized (even as she relates her lived experiences in a rhymed narrative that mixes the poetic with the picaresque) only adds to the overall message of respect. While Anne Milne has read poetic forms imposed on animal autobiographical voices as a form of control or containment in eighteenth-century texts (2008: 164), 3 Cranch’s poem guides the child reader to admire Tabitha Jane for her commitment to mothering and to respect her as a remarkably resilient, autonomous other who acts of her own volition. Child readers are privy to the verbal instructions of a similarly beleaguered mother cat for her own frolicsome brood in Eliza Grove’s “A Cat to her Kittens.” Grove, a poet and advocate for individuals with mental illness, channels with unusual sensitivity the shifting mood of a loving but exhausted mother reduced to begging her little ones to be quiet: “Am I to be worried and harass’d by you, / Till I really don’t know what to think or to do?” (1908: 9–10).4 While the cat attributes her negative mood in the opening stanza to her litter’s unruly behaviors, the underlying affection that drives her to spend long hours in attempts to procure their food is evident in the language she uses to soften her motherly mandates: She “desires” that Muff release her paw; the constantly jumping Prinny is given the polite title of “miss”; and her request that Tiny exercise discretion is qualified with “if you can” (5–8). The mother’s responses to her kittens’ active play and vocalizations recall Gene Myers’s observation that “[a]nimals have been used symbolically (and without good ethological basis) to represent the innateness of antisocial tendencies in the child. The imposition of a civilized state is necessary,

164  Stacy Hoult-Saros even though the animal within remains unmodified and frustrated” (2007: 24). Having catalogued the individual misbehaviors that try her patience as she struggles to procure mice for her out-of-control infants, the unnamed mother desires only to orchestrate a quiet, affectionate scene of family unity with the aim of transforming the exasperated matriarch back into a “a nice happy cat” (14). Her reframing of her justified irritation as merely a passing state unrelated to the kittens’ triggering behaviors might be read as a gently subversive alternative to stricter, more rigid models of motherly discipline. Her capacity for controlling her emotional responses ultimately positions her closer to humans, as it far exceeds expectations for acting on “instinct” alone. The mother’s difficult lot becomes the emotional focus for the child reader, who, no longer vicariously threatened by the possibility of punishment, is left to conclude that mothers have earned the elusive peace and quiet for which they openly yearn. The identification through naming and titles of at least some of the kittens as female may hold a special appeal for girls who find themselves on the receiving end of verbal discipline for rowdiness. Further evidence of cats’ natural maternal abilities is offered in Mary E. Sharpe’s well-anthologized “Dame Wiggins of Lee,” which, 5 like “An Old Cat’s Confessions,” positions felines at the intersection of two extremes: unfettered freedom and a supremely dutiful approach to caregiving. The eponymous Dame, who purportedly keeps seven cats due to an antipathy to rodents, eventually sends her prodigious pets to school and later observes lovingly as they engage in a series of unusual activities, including carpet mending, skating, singing, and riding on the backs of sheep. Unlike the singular cat mothers who tell their own stories in the previous poems, the Wiggins seven speak only once, in response to the beautiful voices of the birds who endeavor to give them singing lessons (1908 [1823]: 66). The story of their lives with the Dame unfolds through a third-person narrative that places considerable weight on their owner’s opinions and interpretations. The cats’ most impressive accomplishment involves collectively nursing an ailing lamb back to health after transporting the youngster to their owner’s home in a wheelbarrow. After noting approvingly their efforts in warming and neatening the bed, Dame Wiggins extrapolates their abilities to human care: “I shall ne’er want a nurse, “I shall ne’re want a nurse” (85–88). The lamb’s health restored, Dame Wiggins dances with pleasure, and the seven unlikely nurses are rewarded by the farmer with a carriage ride, followed by a repast of field mice, raspberry cream, and other coveted treats. Curiously, the poetic voice’s few references to the cats’ gender suggests that they may be male; they are referred to as “[e]ach purring tommie” (102) while receiving pets from the Dame and, in the penultimate stanza, as “fine fellows” (150) in the lamb’s owner’s grateful speech. These gendered epithets are jarring, given the cats’ stereotypically feminine accomplishment in needlework and lamb care, and add

Unruly Females on the Farm  165 to the ambiguity previously generated by the mix of species-appropriate and more specifically human edible rewards they receive for their efforts. While the Wiggins pets unfailingly act and are treated as a collective with no efforts to distinguish them from each other as individuals with agency or unique dispositions, their distinctly un-catlike abilities (like turning up bed-clothes neatly) move their owner to elevate them to the status of skilled human caregivers. The destabilizing of species boundaries allows readers as well as the titular human to imagine her in the place of the most vulnerable character, the sick lamb, inviting multiple levels of identification with human and nonhuman figures. Though the antics of Dame Wiggins’s feminized brood are markedly different from the more restrained activities of the autobiographical mother cats of “An Old Cat’s Confessions” and “A Cat to Her Kittens,” all these feline characters are united by their conflicting impulses to maintain their independence while caring for the young and the weak. Writing on gendered children’s texts, Elizabeth Segel notes of girls’ fiction that “the interest derives from the tension between the heroine’s drive to activity and autonomy, and the pressure exerted by society to thwart these drives and clip her wings, so to speak. The obedience, self-sacrifice, and docility expected of the young woman in this fiction are the virtues of a dependent” (2007: 517). The cats’ actions represent a curious mix of anthropomorphic and realistic cat behaviors (such as jumping on the backs of the grateful Farmer’s geese) that signal a continuing need for supervision from the human woman who stands in for their absent mother(s). While the outlandish plot and humorous imagery suggest that their tale’s main purpose is to entertain, the cats (whatever their biological gender) are clearly rewarded for behavior befitting obedient little girls and dutiful homemakers. For the loving care offered to the lamb, they are not only given the royal treatment by the farmer, but also praised by Dame Wiggins for their “humanity” (19). The unpredictability of their comings and goings creates an illusion of freedom belied by their near complete subjugation to their owner, who uses positive reinforcement to encourage more refined manners, in accordance with her apparently upper-class status. If cats exhibit a diverse array of strategies for and emotional responses to parenting, then the full range of farm nonhumans encompasses an even broader continuum of mothering behaviors, from selfless nurturing to the sometimes violent subversion of expectations imposed by their peers and, more frequently, by their human owners. A sequence of illustrated verses with accompanying sheet music portrays the misadventures of a farmer beset with unruly livestock in “Cobler! stick to your last; or, The Adventures of Joe Dobson,” attributed mysteriously to “B.A.T.” After an ill-advised boast to his “Dame” about his ability to outdo her in the realm of domestic work, the overly confident Joe undertakes her round of daily chores, only to find himself scalded by the laundry water,

166  Stacy Hoult-Saros stricken with a severe backache from kneading the bread dough, and injured by the animals whose care and feeding have heretofore fallen within his spouse’s purview because Loud crowed the Cocks, the Turkeys screamed, The Geese and Ducks now quacked, Enraged for food, which Joe forgot, He was by all attacked. (1969 [1807]: 45–48) The illustration below depicts the genuinely bewildered-looking human victim nearly forced out of the frame by an assortment of farmyard fowl facing him down with a range of stern expressions and belligerent postures. Together with this fanciful visual image, the emphasis on the menacing sounds produced by four distinct farm species as expressions of justifiable rage diminishes the empathy the reader might otherwise feel for the hapless Joe; the strength in numbers that allows the birds a brief moment of dominance reinforces the righteousness of their cause and the ineptitude of their inexperienced caregiver. The would-be farmer’s negligence is further punished when his sincere effort to provide proper care for the farm’s porcine inhabitants is frustrated by the matron: “The old Sow tripped him in the mud / In spite of all his heed” (51–52). The poetic voice’s sympathetic treatment of “poor Dobson” (48), who becomes the object of screaming, quacking and tripping despite his best efforts to emulate his wife’s nurturing actions, threatens to reinforce stereotypes of animals as uncontrollable and hostile to benevolent human caregivers. The mishap with the pig feeding, however, is given a different spin in the illustration, that shows a trio of the animals apparently oblivious to Joe as they rush to the trough; the offending sow, her maternal status clearly depicted through an exaggerated teat line, seems unaware of the human falling over her back with outstretched arms and an expression of innocent astonishment. Sows are less abundant (and less respected) in farm animal rhymes than other farmyard mothers, likely because, as Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris assert, “The presence of a pig in art or literature was usually an antidote to serious or elevated sentiments. …They were usually seen as incompatible with whatever was admirable or dignified or honourable in life” (1998: 8). In this instance, though, the stanza’s final line is ironized by the reality of the farmer’s failure to avoid tripping over one of three large animals (hardly the “little pigs” of the accompanying stanza) with whom he shares the limited space of the illustration. In allowing himself to be dominated by an animal that routinely occupies the lower strata of the hierarchy of farm animals in the human imagination, Joe validates the angry judgment of the poultry mob. The poem’s animal mothers are unified in rejecting his unsuccessful attempts to care for them, but is

Unruly Females on the Farm  167 their anger rooted in his failure to nurture them, or are they empowered to act out by his perceived inability to keep them under control? With little information on Mrs. Dobson’s approach to animal husbandry, the child reader may read Joe’s series of punishments as frighteningly arbitrary, though the lesson appears to be encompassed in his acknowledgment, in the final stanza, that wives are simply better at housework. At the opposite extreme, rhymes featuring hens and other avian mothers more often lift up these barnyard citizens as exemplars of the qualities most valued in maternal humans. In “Beasts, Birds and Fishes,”6 the essentializing poetic subject undertakes to instruct young readers (further specified as “Lads,” though the illustration depicts male and female silhouettes facing each other) on the defining characteristics of different animals, clarifying through terse characterizations which members of the animal kingdom were to be admired, and which merited only contempt from humans. After writing admiringly of the male Swan’s and Peacock’s justifiable pride in aspects of their physical appearance, the poetic voice observes that “[t]he Hen guards well her little chicks” (1813: 29). In contrast to some images of farm poultry in verse, the different species are treated here as separate categories, with ducks and geese subjected to indifferent or negative stereotyping: “The Duck will gobble in the mud” (43) while “[t]he Goose on grass will feed” (48). The latter two creatures are treated as gender-neutral, as opposed to the hen, who is fully defined by her role as protector of her offspring, rendered more vulnerable by the redundant adjective “little.” While she distinguishes herself by engaging in the human-approved activity of carefully protecting her brood, the other “food” animals (as opposed to the rarely consumed swan and peafowl) are defined by selfish actions that distance them from human children, with the latter group’s imposed expectations of cleanliness and impeccable dining habits. Both extremes of avian internalization of human societal norms are encountered in Marian Douglass’s “The Motherless Turkeys,” which traces the melodrama that ensues when a mother turkey expires, leaving four offspring with no means of support. While the Peacock, remarkably, deigns to fold his tail as a sign of respect and shared sorrow, his wife quickly turns to the more practical concerns of the care and nurturing of the orphans: And his plainer wife said, “Now the old bird is dead, Who will tend her poor chicks on the morrow? And when evening around them comes dreary and chill Who above them will watchfully hover?”7 (2014 [1900]: 7–10) Heartfelt as it sounds, this outpouring from the “plainer” female half of the aristocratic pair is unaccompanied by any action; the peahen leaves

168  Stacy Hoult-Saros all the work to her even less ostentatious peers, whose presence in the barnyard is predicated not on their aesthetic value, but on the products of their bodies. The divergent responses of these lower-class avian mothers to the young turkeys’ urgent need for ongoing care reflect the value placed on unselfish devotion and the harsh judgment directed at females perceived as unwilling to take on the difficult labor of mothering. While the Goose, the Duck and the Dorking offer to share the additional work of bringing up the endangered turkeys, another member of the community (known only as “the Hen with one chicken”) complains at length about her excessive workload, insisting, against all appearances, that she is “the most overburdened of mothers” (30) and that the orphaned brood must make their own way without depending on others to feed them. Unsurprisingly, the uncooperative Hen becomes the object of derisive barnyard gossip: She went by with a cluck, and the Goose to the Duck Exclaimed, in surprise, “Well, I never!” Said the Duck, “I declare, those who have the least care, You will find, are complaining forever!” (33–36) Hen is maligned by her peers, and by the poetic voice, for her resistance to the traditional feminine role that Peter Hunt and Karen Sands characterize as “the idea of woman as the stable (and essentially passive) center from which men could explore the exotic (and erotic) Empire” (2000: 44). The absence of any judgment directed at male inhabitants of the farm space, including the “exotic” Peacock whose show of concern offers little comfort to the young creatures in need, equally bolsters Claudia Nelson’s argument that “most mid-Victorian commentators saw womanliness as so powerful that it controlled the nature of femaleness, while manliness had a harder struggle against maleness” (1991: 1–2). Even the peahen, defined only as the Peacock’s wife (and, unlike all the other characters, denied a capitalized name), cannot suppress the emotional reaction that frames the ensuing conversation on the chicks’ care. While the Peacock’s physical show of mourning is privileged as the poem’s first recorded response, he, and other male birds notable for their absence from the emotionally charged scene, are free to go about their business, while the labors assigned to the mothers by biology and socialization make them vulnerable to further exploitation and constraints on their time and energy through adoptive parenting. Also strikingly missing from the poem are the voices of the orphaned turkeys themselves, whose desperate situation (and indirect, but negative, portrayal as helpless and labor-intensive) must strike a chord of fear in child readers. For female readers at least, the terror of being left motherless is compounded by the frightening prospect of universal condemnation for shirking or complaining.

Unruly Females on the Farm  169 Key differences between two categories of poultry drive the tragic plot of Jane Taylor’s “The Pond,” which contains a cautionary tale about disregarding parental advice to engage in trans-species behaviors. The poetic “I” sets a peaceful, orderly scene through two stanzas, describing the idyllic pond and the ducks that assembled there before confessing to an inability to decode their conversations: “For though I’ve oft listened, in hopes of discerning, / I own ‘tis a matter that baffles my learning” (1868: 11–12). The poetic voice’s observing (and largely uncomprehending) eye turns next to a young chicken whose envy of the ducks’ enjoyment of the water leads her to conclude, through a bout of questionable reasoning, that she, too, should give swimming a try: “Wings and feathers have ducks, and so have I too; And my feet, what’s the reason that they will not do? Though my beak is pointed, and their beaks are round, Is that any reason that I should be drowned?”8 (21–24) Like a small child, the youngster wrestles with an internal struggle between the desires for freedom and fun, an inner voice that echoes the warnings of a knowing parent, and a budding intellectual capacity demonstrated through solid cross-species comparisons. The poetic subject’s choice of title and foregrounding of the setting, with details on the beauty of the surrounding flora, only enhance the reader’s identification with the young bird’s dilemma. In the end, the chick’s fondness for water (“spite of all that her mother had taught her” [27]) overcomes all well-founded doubt, with the predictable result of a harrowing and ultimately fatal ending for the youngster, who “slowly sunk down to the bottom and died!” (36). The sorrowful tale’s didactic aim is reinforced through the human observer’s projection of human moralizing on the protagonist’s demise: The ducks, I perceived, began loudly to quack, When they saw the poor fowl floating dead on its back; And by their grave gestures and looks ‘twas apparent They discoursed on the sin of not minding a parent. (37–40) The ducks’ horrified vocal expressions are ascribed by the observer not to the death of a fellow creature, but rather to the chicken’s ill-advised decision to disregard maternal advice and to venture away from the safety provided by home and family. As Ann Alston affirms of English children’s literature, “The sanctity of the family home, the warmth and domesticity implicit in the very word itself, the continuity and security inherent in the cultural—and literary—construction of family, are often contrasted with the insecurity and unpleasantness of the wider world”

170  Stacy Hoult-Saros (2008: 27). The judgment directed at the chicken’s “sin” by aquatic avians who, unlike her, limit their ranging to the spaces for which they are anatomically suited, hammers home the lesson about obedience and the perils of resisting parental control: The child reader must learn to curb dangerous impulses and defer to the superior reasoning of an experienced adult. At the same time, the seriousness of the poem’s events and message is potentially undercut by the poetic voice’s elevation of the ducks’ quacking to the level of grave discourse, contrasting with ducks’ lowly status in other texts. Whether the humor is intended to mitigate the trauma of animal death or to render the chick’s demise even more mortifying, the image of her floating corpse would surely stick with any child in danger of yielding to similar temptations. Another rhymed tale that veers between the comical and the ominous, Rose Terry Cooke’s generically titled “Chickens,”9 unexpectedly turns a round of bickering between sibling chicks about their origins (young Chip refuses to believe the more knowing, female Peep’s account of the former’s emergence from an egg) into an unfavorable comparison of the less noble attributes of humankind to those of the indomitable Mother Dorking’s troublesome offspring: “You’re bad as the two-legs that don’t have wings, Nor feathers nor combs—the wretched things! That’s the way they fight and talk For what isn’t worth a mullein-stalk.” (2014 [1875]: 49–54) The hen justifies her tough-love approach to discipline (striking the bickering pair with her beak) by invoking humans, defined by the absence of distinctive physical characteristics associated with chickens and by undesirable behaviors. At the same time, her summary dismissal of her chicks’ disagreements on origins may reflect a human-like mother’s desire to keep her children innocent of the details of their species’ life cycles. As in the feline Tabitha Jane’s confessions, then hen reveals herself to be both subtly anthropomorphized, through speech and sentiment, and defiantly animal. The poetic subject’s non-judgmental, even lightly humorous, account of the hen’s physical abuse of her offspring, while not atypical of earlier eras in literary and literal parenting practices, lends weight to the moral lesson about the human propensity for conflict. Like any overwhelmed mother, Mother Dorking longs for peace and quiet, and the child reader is encouraged to conclude that she is right to discipline the chicks in a manner that would be shocking if applied to human babies. Her scolding even takes on nineteenth-century racist overtones when she adds another cross-species comparison, admonishing her progeny not to be “geese” (60). Cooke’s rhymed narrative both relies on and ultimately upends the common practice of casting

Unruly Females on the Farm  171 aspersion on animal behaviors with the purpose of influencing children to act in more civilized ways. Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s “The Hen’s Complaint”10 gives voice (notably, through the use of human-like speech) to an aspiring mother’s anguish at finding herself replaced by nineteenth-century technology. Gazing at an incubator she addresses as “[u]nfeeling monster” (2014 [1892]: 7), she rails against the grim efficiency of the machinery that threatens to usurp her as caregiver to future broods: My aching wings which long to cover A chirping brood of nestlings over, No more may know that comfort sweet, Since chickens may be hatched by heat. Three weeks of quiet expectation (Full many a flighty hen’s salvation) I am denied, for now men say A hen should be content to lay, (11–18) The tragic figure of the hen, doubly defeated by man and machine, displays a level of angst that eerily prefigures the terror of posthuman relationships to technologies as detailed by N. Katherine Hayles in How We Became Posthuman: “Humans may enter into symbiotic relationships with intelligent machines …; they may be displaced by intelligent machines …; but there is a limit to how seamlessly humans can be articulated with intelligent machines, which remain distinctively different from humans in their embodiments” (1999: 284). The protagonist’s addressing of the incubator as a personified “you” shifts the contraption that threatens to displace her into this last category, producing deep emotional and physical pain for the would-be mother of imagined broods. Her impassioned self-advocacy is met with physical violence and humiliation as her speech is cut short by the brutal intervention of a human hand that douses her in a tub. Claudia Marquis concurs with Lissa Paul’s characterization of “the way girls in Victorian fiction interest the reader by their resistance to the settled social order of things, but also how this resistance must end.”11 While the hen’s eloquently perceptive verbal resistance does end abruptly, by invoking human (male) discourse on the evolution of hens’ proper roles, the deprived mother anticipates Marxian arguments like Bob Torres’: “The bodies and functions of animals have been completely appropriated by capital, and, subsequently, put to use in a single way only, subordinating the total animal being to this single productive activity. Henare meant to lay eggs” (2007: 40).12

172  Stacy Hoult-Saros The hen’s unmistakable vocation, to protect her “chirping brood” (even the inevitable noisiness of chick parenting is encompassed in her longing) is thwarted by the owner’s efficiency-conscious reduction of her role to “furnishing” eggs (19). This focus on productivity endangers not only the satisfaction of her maternal desires, but also her very survival, a reality alluded to by her recognition that “setting hens are out of date” (20). While the message to young readers is unmistakable—females that speak out against the ruling order are punished by unfeeling human society—whether the hen’s punishment is meant to shock readers into regarding her plight with compassion or merely provide comic relief, as with the chick abuse in “Chickens,” is unclear. The exaggerated pathos and elevated speech of her discourse may be read as humorous, but the single-minded devotion to the ideals of motherhood would certainly have resonated reassuringly with young readers. Like their avian counterparts, cows appear at both ends of the spectrum of dutiful motherhood, with some held up for their usefulness and others condemned for insubordination. The first task tackled by the overly confident Joe Dobson in the piece discussed above is to milk the cow and while his choice to begin his day of farm labor with the milking appears consistent with best practices, the results are harrowingly true to life: “She tossed the pail and kicked his leg / The blood ran down his shin” (15–16). The cow’s violent rejection of her owner’s intended expropriation of her bodily fluid, accompanied by an illustration that depicts the affronted animal (unlike the heedless sow in a later verse) as fully conscious of the impact of her actions, may be read as a reaction against the intrusion of a stranger in place of her usual milker, Joe’s wife. The full series of abusive behaviors exhibited by the Dobsons’s animals hints at tensions between the spouses that may run deeper than their brief recorded dialogues would suggest. As Martin A. Danahay posits in “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Animals and Violence in Victorian Art,” While the Victorians were increasingly comfortable with the idea of animals as passive sufferers who were in need of protection by their human mentors, the idea that domestic animals could themselves act violently became increasingly problematic. Representations of domestic animals acting violently in Victorian art bring into conjunction categories that were increasingly viewed as separate, and make the animal the vehicle for an exploration of conflicting ideological codes of domesticity and aggression. (2007: 98) The cow’s angry eruption may be read, then, as symbolic of Mrs. ­Dobson’s own emotions regarding both the burdens of domestic labor and her husband’s dismissal of the challenges involved. For the child reader, the text both reinforces gender stereotypes, by affirming that housework is

Unruly Females on the Farm  173 women’s work, and unexpectedly disturbs that traditionalist message by emphasizing the challenges and complications of domestic work. The cow, like the sow and most of the avian characters, is simultaneously mother and mothered, inviting layers of identification with the bovine as both in need of proper care and deserving of respect for her status as adult and parent. Children may not grasp the full implications of the cruelly humorous feminist messaging, but the only hint of anthropomorphism—­the angry expressions on the faces of the cow and some of the birds—is impossible to miss. The animals’ outraged responses find a counterpart in the anguished emoting of owners of wayward literary animals raised for food production. The imploring voice conjured by Anna Maria Wells in “The CowBoy’s Song” resorts to emotional manipulation to coax a disobedient cow to come home for milking. After declaring that he has been sent after hours to fetch her, he confirms the source of her human owners’ interest: Your udders are full, and the milkmaid is there, And the children all waiting their supper to share. I have let the long bars down,—why don’t you pass through?’ The mooly cow only said, “Moo-o-o!” (2014 [1866]: 5–8) The cow’s refusal to comply with the speaker’s wishes is punctuated in each of the four stanzas by the same vocalization, even as the would-be herder reminds her of the human-provided pleasures of the green pastures, the warm barn, the meals of hay and the kindly milkmaid’s attentions (unsurprisingly, without reference to a calf, or to why this solitary cow might possess full udders). Human benevolence, a common theme in farm animal stories of all periods, is taken to an improbable extreme in the image of children eager to share their own food with the reticent Mooly. The cowboy’s insistence on a mutually beneficial relationship echoes Nerissa Russell’s observation that “[a]pproaching domestication as a symbiotic relationship erases human intentionality and seemingly empowers animals while drawing attention away from the issue of exploitation” (2002: 289). In his frustration at the cow’s inexplicably oppositional behavior, the self-pitying cattle driver attributes willful intractability to an animal whose inscrutable gaze suggests that her attention has been diverted by something more interesting, or that she has something more important on her mind: “What can you be staring at, mooly? You know / That we ought to have gone home an hour ago” (29–30). In Mooly’s case, her reticence might be explained away as a childlike desire to remain in the pasture with its refreshing brook and enticing clover, or as a more complex mix of emotions stemming from her status as deprived mother and as sentient property whose physical being and

174  Stacy Hoult-Saros movements are controlled by humans. The cowboy reminds her at length of the milk-maid’s acts of loving care, including patting, stroking, and kind words that make of her a substitute mother figure whose patience ought to be rewarded with bovine compliance. While children reading (or hearing) the song may not independently make the connections between lactation and calf birthing, they will certainly relate to the cow’s defiance of parental expectations. Unsurprisingly, the poem’s eponymous speaker/ singer stops short of reading the cow’s enigmatic gaze as evidence of a thought process, for, as Pramod K. Nayar points out in Posthumanism, “How and what the cow’s thinking processes are will not be deemed to be ‘thoughts,’ and this allows us to consume the cow” (2014: 88). As a final example, in a selection from A. R. Merrifield’s Juvenile Poems, a conversation between two young human siblings sheds light on Mooly’s perceived stubbornness while oddly prefiguring a prominent thread of twenty-first-century farm animal advocacy. In “What Is Veal?” the reader encounters a riddle with a shocking solution: “WILLIAM asked how veal was made. His little sister smiled, It grew in foreign climes, she said, And call’d him silly child.’ (1969 [1841]: 1–4) Carol J. Adams points out the distancing effect of the euphemisms commonly used to cover the origins of animal bodily parts marketed and consumed as meat: “In examining the reactions of children to the literal truth about meat eating, we can see how our language is a distancing device from the literal facts. Children, fresh observers of the dominant culture, raise issues about meat eating using a literal viewpoint” (1990: 75). William’s sister’s dismissive answer to his innocent question, displacing veal production to “foreign climes,” suggests a level of subconscious repression quickly dispelled by a third character’s graphic correction. Just as surprising as Eliza’s revelation of the secret (the death of a calf) is the laughter that echoes unexpectedly throughout the conversation. The female sibling’s unheralded reference to the calf’s mother in the final stanza (as Adams might put it, an absent referent once removed) may serve merely to connect the dots for William, but it also draws the reader’s attention away from the calf’s experience to that of the maternal figure separated from her offspring by the unfeeling practices of the dairy industry: WELL, brother, I have had my laugh, And you shall have yours now, Veal, when live, was call’d a calf— Its mother was a cow. (Merrifield 13–16)

Unruly Females on the Farm  175 The use of a gendered pronoun stands in stark contrast to the objectification of the calf (“it” seems to refer equally to the meat product and to the living being), further guiding the reader to a deeper level of identification with the mother animal. What passes for an illustration for Merrifield’s poem, a small image of two nearly identical bovines standing side to side between title and text, is similarly ambiguous, calling to mind Steve Baker’s work on the visual image as Derridean supplement to the animal narrative: “It is apparently exterior to the narrative, but it disturbs the logic and consistency of the whole. It has the effect of bringing to light the disruptive potential of the story’s animal content” (2001: 139). If, as children’s book author Alison Lurie insists, “The style of children’s book illustration is a changing guide, not so much to what children are like in any generation, but to how adults perceive them, or would like to perceive them” (2003: 160), then what does this puzzling double image say about the poem’s audience as imagined by the illustrator? The perceived necessity of a graphic script activator parallels Eliza’s seemingly gratuitous line at the end; if “veal” does not immediately conjure up a clear image, the more familiar “cow” will certainly serve the purpose of situating this category of meat for its young consumers while simultaneously, and creepily, encouraging the child’s identification with the animal to be consumed. The inclusion of the drawings, like the young girl’s concluding clarification, appears to undermine the distancing effect of the use of words like “veal,” while the slightly fainter appearance of the figure on the right (simulating a second woodcut image from the same block) ambiguously invokes both the veal calf’s absent mother and the loss of the bereaved cow’s precious offspring. Though the poetic subject elects not to record young William’s reaction to his sister’s second unheralded revelation, one would expect his sudden connection of a meat product to a grieving mother to elicit an empathic response quite unlike the laughter predicted by his teasing sibling. Farm animal rhymes trouble the relationship between the child reader and the animal characters through shifting sets of identifications, at times between children and animal offspring in desperate need of mothering, and at others between readers and the mothers who model virtuous characteristics to which all children ought to aspire. Gail F. Melson has observed of animal images in children’s materials that “[b]ecause adults create them, these symbolic images are … a window into a culture’s ideas about children and animals and how they are related” (2001: 18) while David Rudd points out in “Animal and object stories,” the Cartesian impulse to distance humanity from other animals is always open to challenge. For, in that children are so regularly associated with animals (‘kids’, ‘little beasts’), one can argue that they are thereby given licence to behave so (as not properly human); yet, if this is the case, adult humans are themselves compromised, especially when they seek to use animals as exemplary figures. (2009: 243)

176  Stacy Hoult-Saros Such literary uses of animals are further complicated by portrayals of (partially) domesticated mothers who speak and act out against human control of their bodies and bodily products, and in defense of their young, born into a system that denies them the wholesome upbringing that only mothers of their species can provide. The human right to dominion over other species is repeatedly called into question through texts that privilege animal knowledge of mothering over practices invented by farmers who seek dominance in pursuit of profit. Writing on Mary Wollstonecraft’s educational texts, Barbara K. Seeber posits that [w]hile the comparisons between animals and children can be seen as inscribing human dominance and stewardship of the animal world, they simultaneously destabilize the hierarchical power relations of the human/animal divide. If animals and children are comparable, then animals’ ethical status is surely increased in significant ways. (2008: 226) The nineteenth-century child reader encountered myriad texts in which animals were linked through words and images both to children and to women whose natural waywardness needed to be checked. The animal content provides readers with a means of exploring the consequences of restraining or indulging impulses to transgress societal and familial norms. The deceptively lighthearted dialogue of “What Is Veal?” draws a direct line between the sacrifice of an infant animal other and the suffering of animal mothers, robbed of their babies and bodily products before they, too, are sacrificed for the enjoyment of human consumers. In texts that broach these harsh realities, children learned, and may continue to learn, from animals who (through their speech, their actions, or their absence) defamiliarize everyday interactions, unsettling assumptions about the distance between humans and their closest nonhuman companions.

Notes 1 In “‘Keeping Some Wildness Always Alive’: Posthumanism and the Animality of Children’s Literature and Play,” in Lyon Clark and Higonnet. Harju and Dawn Rouse cite Blount (1974) and Demers and Moyles (2008). 2 Originally published in Green’s Nursery Album (1848) and included in Temple. 3 In “The Power of Testimony: The Speaking Animal’s Plea for Understanding in a Selection of Eighteenth-Century British Poetry” in DeMello. 4 Included but undated in Coussens. 5 Most often attributed to “A Lady of Ninety,” with additional verses by editor John Ruskin, originally published in 1823 and included in Coussens. 6 From Original Poems with Pictures for Children (1813), included in Tuer and given a bracketed attribution to Adelaide O’Keeffe in the Bodleian Libraries system.

Unruly Females on the Farm  177 7 Originally published in Our Young Folks, 1867. 8 Originally published in Original Poems for Infant Minds. By Several Young Authors in 1821 and included in Tuer; author unknown. 9 Originally published in St. Nicholas, 1875, and included in Kilcup and Sorby. 10 Originally published in The Beautiful Land of Nod, 1892, and included in Kilcup and Sorby. 11 Quoted in 1999: 62–63 from Lissa Paul’s “Enigma Variations” 154. 12 Torres is summarizing Barbara Noske’s stages of animal alienation in Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights.

Bibliography Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990. Adams, Carol J. “Why Vegan-Feminist?” Carol J. Adams. 2018. https://­ caroljadams.com/why-vegan-feminist. Abdy, Mrs. “My Mother.” 1848. In Seen and Not Heard: A Garland of Fancies for Victorian Children, edited by Nigel Temple, 16. New York: The Dial, 1970. Alston, Ann. The Family in English Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge, 2008. Ayres, Brenda. “Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency.” In Victorians and their Animals: Beast on a Leash, edited by Brenda Ayres, 23–44. New York: Routledge, 2019. B.A.T. “Cobler! stick to your last; or, The Adventures of Joe Dobson.” 1807. In Tuer 1969, 65–84. Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation. ­Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. “Beasts, Birds and Fishes.” 1813. In Tuer 1969, 200–204. Cooke, Rose Terry. “Chickens.” 1875. In Kilcup and Sorby 2014, 144–45. Coussens, Penrhyn W., ed. Poems Children Love: A Collection of Poems Arranged for Children and Young People of Various Ages. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1908. Cranch, Christopher P. “An Old Cat’s Confessions.” 1870. In Kilcup and Sorby 2014, 130–31. Danahay, Martin A. “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in Victorian Art.” In Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Deborah Deneholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, 97–119. New York: Routledge, 2007. Douglass, Marian. “The Motherless Turkeys.” 1900. In Kilcup and Sorby 2014, 143. Fudge, Erica. Animal. London: Reaktion, 2002. Grove, Eliza. “A Cat to Her Kittens.” In Coussens 1908, 37–38. Harju, Maija-Liisa, and Dawn Rouse. “‘Keeping Some Wildness Always Alive’: Posthumanism and the Animality of Children’s Literature and Play.” Children’s Literature in Education 49 (2018): 447–66. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cibernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

178  Stacy Hoult-Saros Hunt, Peter, and Karen Sands. “The View from the Center: British Empire and Post-Empire Children’s Literature.” In Voices of the Other: Children’s Literature and the Postcolonial Context, edited by Roderick McGillis, 39–53. New York: Garland, 2000. Kalof, Linda. Looking at Animals in Human History. London: Reaktion, 2007. Kilcup, Karen L., and Angela Sorby, eds. Over the River and through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Lurie, Alison. Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics from Cinderella to Harry Potter. New York: Penguin, 2003. Malcomson, Robert, and Stephanos Mastoris. The English Pig: A History. Rio Grande, OH: Hambledon, 1998. Marquis, Claudia. “Romancing the Home: Gender, Empire and the South Pacific.” In Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Gender in Children’s Literature and Culture, edited by Beverly Lyon Clark and Margaret R. Higonnet, 53–67. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Melson, Gail F. Why the Wild Things Are: Animals in the Lives of Children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Merrifield, A. R. “What Is Veal?” 1841. In Pictures and Stories from Forgotten Children’s Books, edited by Arnold Arnold, 169. New York: Dover, 1969. Milne, Anne. “The Power of Testimony: The Speaking Animal’s Plea for Understanding in a Selection of Eighteenth-Century British Poetry.” In Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing, edited by Margo DeMello, 163–67. New York: Routledge, 2013. Myers, Gene. Children and Animals: Social Development and Our Connections to Other Species. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007. Nayar, Pramod K. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Nelson, Claudia. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Noske, Barbara. Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals. Montreal: Black Rose, 1997. Paul, Lissa. “Enigma Variations; What Feminist Criticism Knows about Children’s Literature.” Signal 54 (1987): 186–201. Rudd, David. “Animal and Object Stories.” In The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature, edited by M.O. Grenby and Andrea Immel, 242–57. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Russell, Nerissa. “The Wild Side of Animal Domestication.” Society & Animals 10, no. 3 (2012): 285–92. Seeber, Barbara K. “‘I Sympathize in Their Pains and Pleasures’: Women and Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft.” In Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, edited by Jodey Castricano, 223–40. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008. Segel, Elizabeth. “‘As the Twig Is Bent …’: Gender and Childhood Reading.” In Crosscurrents of Children’s Literature: An Anthology of Texts and Criticism, edited by J. D. Stahl, Tina L. Hanlon, and Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, 512–24. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Sharpe, Mary E. “Dame Wiggins of Lee, and Her Seven Wonderful Cats.” 1823. In Coussens 1908, 16–21.

Unruly Females on the Farm  179 Taylor, Jane. “The Pond.” 1868. Coussens 1908, 89–90. Torres, Bob. Making a Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights. Oakland, CA: AK, 2007. Tuer, Andrew W., ed. Stories from Old-fashioned Children’s Books. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969. Wells, Anna Maria. “The Cow-Boy’s Song.” 1866. In Kilcup and Sorby 2014, 146–47. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. “The Hen’s Complaint.” 1892. In Kilcup and Sorby 2014, 145–46.

10 The Child Is Father of the Man Lessons Animals Teach Children in George Eliot’s Writings Constance M. Fulmer Everything George Eliot wrote reflects her moral philosophy, and every detail of her art is designed to teach moral truth as she defined it. This is certainly true in the ways she depicts animals and children. One of the basic principles of George Eliot’s morality is exemplified by sympathetic understanding, the need to reach out to others, or fellow feeling. Her animals teach these lessons to children as they react to their animals and to one another. She uses animals as metaphors, mirrors, modifiers, and plot devices to teach her children and her readers what moral maturity is and what it is not and demonstrates what it is and what it is not when characters are kind and generous toward animals and in scenes where individuals are cruel and spiteful toward animals and mistreat them or use them in selfish ways. Ivan Kreilkamp in Minor Creatures suggests that in Middlemarch George Eliot stages scenes involving animals “as an ethical test or judgment of those human characters who can—or ­cannot—demonstrate a proper concern for the helpless beings in their care” (2018: 106). All her scenes are designed as ethical and moral lessons for her readers. George Eliot hopes to inspire the reaction in all her readers with which Keridiana Chez opens her chapter entitled “Canine Connections in George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Middlemarch.” Chez quotes the reaction that Jane Welsh Carlyle had to Middlemarch in an 1858 letter to George Eliot: “In truth, it is a beautiful most human book! Every Dog in it, not to say every man woman and child in it, brought home to one’s ‘business and bosom,’ an individual fellow-creature! I found myself in charity with the whole human race” (quoted in 2017: 53). Chez explains how in Middlemarch (1872), “dog discourse serves as a tacit reference point, shaping major characters and critical events” (54) and how the canines in Adam Bede (1859) help the characters to grow in sympathetic understanding (60). This study of animals and children fits into the numerous and varied theoretical approaches currently being taken in the field of animal studies by focusing on what children learn from animals, and what animals and

George Eliot’s Animals  181 children have in common. Brenda Ayres provides an overview of these approaches in her introduction to her collection of essays entitled Victorians and Their Animals (2019a). Two works which do not specifically discuss George Eliot but are helpful in understanding the way she depicts animals and children are Literature and Animal Studies by Mario Ortiz Robles, in which he describes how animals are used as tropes in literature to help “make sense of the world” (2016: 19) and the collection of essays edited by Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt, Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Animal Relations (2011). The line “The Child is Father of the Man” from William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up” (1807) comes to mind when I think of George Eliot’s animals and children. Its principle is clearly illustrated in the way the relationships between the animals in her novels and their children characterizes their behavior and accurately predicts the level of moral maturity that they will demonstrate as adults. Even when she does not actually depict the adult that the child becomes, childhood attitudes and actions are an accurate predictor of the moral maturity of the adult. In other cases, George Eliot uses comparisons to animals to indicate which adults remain morally immature in their animal-like and childlike behavior. It is interesting to think about George Eliot’s own relationship with animals when she was a child. In her article, “Riding Horses in Middlemarch,” Beryl Gray comments on Eliot’s childhood affinity with “an affection for horses” (2016: 9–10). In her biography of George Eliot, Rosemary Ashton mentions that as a child she was allowed to ride with her father on his horse as he managed the Newdigate estate (1996: 15) as well as her fascination with the coaches between Stamford and Birmingham that passed up and down the Coventry Road twice a day before the extension of the railway to that area (12). Mary Ann was also well-­ acquainted with the cows in the dairy at Griff. As an adult George Eliot continued to love horses and dogs. She and George Henry Lewes mention her delight in her dog Pug more than twodozen times in the letters which Haight published (1954–1978). She associates horses and dogs with the happy times in her childhood and uses them to teach the vital importance of sympathetic understanding and feeling with and for other creatures. George Eliot makes her belief that the child is father of the man unmistakable when in the same novel she depicts relationships between her animals and her children and allows the characters to grow into adults. These children who grow up include Eppie in Silas Marner (1861); Maggie and Tom Tulliver, Lucy Deane, Bob Jakin, and Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss (1860); Latimer and Charles Meunier in The Lifted Veil (1859); and Dickey in “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton” (1858). In Silas Marner Silas begins to grow toward moral maturity when a small animal-like child wanders in like a stray dog to warm herself

182  Constance M. Fulmer on the hearth in Silas’s cottage. She is compared to a new-hatched gosling when she makes “many inarticulate communications to the cheerful fire” (109). From her earliest childhood memory, Eppie is attune to all the animals around her. She turns her ear to sudden bird-notes (126), and when she escapes Silas’s attempted punishment and runs into the fields, he finds her being observed by a red-headed calf (128). Silas grows in moral maturity as he learns the lesson that she has learned from animals: “There was love between him and the child that blent them into one, and there was love between the child and the world,” which included the red lady-birds (130). In Part II of the novel, Eppie is 18 and is still completely in sympathy with the animals in her life, and they with her. In one scene which depicts their home life, Silas speaks to Eppie “with the mild passive happiness of love-crowned age in his face” and calls her a little puss (140). As Eppie entreats her future husband, Aaron Winthrop, to help her create a little garden, she is aware that she is being watched by “a friendly donkey, … a meek donkey, not scornfully critical of human trivialities, but thankful to share in them, if possible, by getting his nose scratched,” and the narrator adds that Eppie does not fail to gratify him (141). When she enters the home that she shares with Silas, Eppie is greeted by a sharp bark, which was “the sign of an excited welcome that was awaiting them from a knowing brown terrier, who, after dancing at their legs in a hysterical manner, rushed with a worrying noise at a ­tortoise-shell kitten under the loom” (141). At the same time, “the lady-­ mother of the kitten sat sunning her white bosom in the window, and looked round with a sleepy air of expecting caresses, though she was not going to take any trouble for them” (141). At dinner Silas sat and watched Eppie enjoy the presence of this happy animal life with a satisfied gaze, “watching half-abstractedly Eppie’s play with Snap and the cat, by which her own dining was made rather a lengthy business.” Eppie was “laughing merrily as the kitten held on with her four claws to one shoulder, … while Snap on the right hand and Puss on the other put up their paws towards a morsel which she held out of the reach of both … till Eppie relented, caressed them both, and divided the morsel between them” (142). With regard to this scene, Ayres comments that the way Eppie disciplines her pets shows that she has been disciplined herself (2019b: 122). Godfrey Cass comes to declare himself as Eppie’s father and to attempt to take her away from Silas. In response Eppie drops a curtsy— first to Godfrey, and then one to his wife, Nancy, and says, “Thank you, ma’am—thank you, sir. But I can’t leave my father, nor own anybody nearer than him. And I don’t want to be a lady—thank you all the same” (here Eppie drops another curtsy). She adds, “I couldn’t give up the folks I’ve been used to” (169). Godfrey and Nancy leave the cottage realizing that Godfrey has turned a blessing from his door that cannot be

George Eliot’s Animals  183 reclaimed (174). The whole community realizes that Silas has “brought a blessing on himself by acting like a father to this lone motherless child” (181). Eppie has accentuated that blessing by loving him with the same simple and unqualified love with which she loved the animals about her—first as a child and now as an adult. As children in the company of animals, Maggie and Tom Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss have opportunities to learn these essential moral values, which they retain as they grow into adulthood. George Eliot describes a delightful day in Maggie and Tom’s childhood just before Tom is sent away to school when they are fishing together in the Round Pool. Maggie delights in “the light dipping sounds of the rising fish” while Tom watches the water-rats. But the narrator observes, “Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives” (94). Maggie is very much like Tom’s dog, Yap, with whom she shares her affection for and devotion to Tom. Yap is a “queer white-and-brown terrier, with one ear turned back.” Just before Tom returns from school, Maggie is dancing with Yap—“whirling round like a Pythoness, and singing as she whirled, ‘Yap, Yap, Tom’s coming home!’” At the same time, “Yap danced and barked round her, as much as to say, if there was any noise wanted he was the dog for it” (79). Ayres makes the point that, on this occasion, Maggie is metaphorically predicting her own death since having too much love for her brother leads both of them to die in the flood when Maggie attempts to rescue Tom (2019b: 136–37). Maggie is frequently compared to an animal: She shakes water from her black locks like a Skye terrier (78) and tosses her mane like a Shetland pony (62). Maggie is very different from her cousin Lucy; as children, while Maggie is like “a rough dark overgrown puppy” (61), Lucy is compared to a “white kitten” (117). The grown-up Lucy is charming and self-contained; she spends her days spoiling her little spaniel, Minny, and feeding Sinbad, her chestnut horse, as well as canaries and mice. And the comment is made of Lucy: “She was fond of feeding dependent creatures” (477). Maggie loves animals of all kinds and wants to share her pleasure in reading as well as her knowledge of animals with the miller, Luke. She exuberantly offers to let him read her book called “Animated Nature,” which is about “elephants and kangaroos, and the civet-cat, and the sunfish, and a bird sitting on its tail.” She adds, “There are countries full of those creatures, instead of horses and cows, you know. Shouldn’t you like to know about them, Luke?” (81). Unfortunately, she does not change Luke’s attitude toward animals or books any more than she does Tom’s, but her own enthusiasm for learning from the animals is unmistakable. Maggie and Tom always prefer to be frolicking about outside with the animals rather than inside with the adults. On the occasion when

184  Constance M. Fulmer Maggie appears before her aunts and uncles who are having dinner with the Tullivers after having cut her own hair, she is humiliated and denounced. She “seemed to be listening to a chorus of reproach and derision” (126). She hides her face on her father’s shoulder, and he comforts her as he would a small fuzzy animal. Fortunately, “With the dessert there came entire deliverance for Maggie, for the children were told they might have their nuts and wine in the summer-house, … and they scampered out among the budding bushes of the garden with the alacrity of small animals” (126). When Maggie upsets a project he is building, he reacts with the coldness and disapproval which will characterize his behavior to Maggie when he is an adult. On this occasion, Maggie and Lucy also behave in ways that define their mature personalities: “Maggie stood in dismay and terror, while Tom got up from the floor and walked away, pale, from the scattered ruins of his pagoda, and Lucy looked on mutely, like a kitten pausing from its lapping” (147). And worse still, while Tom is away at school, Maggie carelessly allows his rabbits to die from ­starvation (82). Throughout the novel, Maggie is constantly in trouble because she is impetuous and has too much imagination. In decisive moments, Maggie is never able to temper her enthusiasm with a sense of responsibility. These same traits are manifested as an adult when she runs away with Stephen Guest, whom Lucy intends to marry. When Maggie returns from her escapade with Stephen Guest, Tom is living in the family home with their mother. In his moral indignation, Tom refuses to let her enter her own home, so she goes to Bob Jakin and Mumps. Bob welcomes her. Bob’s gentleness and Tom’s harshness were clearly foreshadowed as boys in the ways they treat their dogs. In many ways Tom’s dog Yap is his alter ego, and Bob Jakin has a similar mutual consciousness and close relationship with his dog, Mumps, who is “a bull-terrier of brindled coat and defiant aspect” (373); however, in adulthood and in contrast to Tom, Bob is kind and generous to Maggie and visits her unexpectedly, bringing a gift of books (374). She is touched and says, “I am very thankful to you for thinking of me. … I haven’t many friends” (375). He immediately advises her to get a dog and says, “they’re better friends nor any Christian” (375). He offers to bring her a puppy named Toby who is “nought but a mongrel” (376) but adds that Mumps is “as fine a cross as you’ll see anywhere along the Floss” (377). In an essay entitled “‘The Crossing o’ Breeds’ in The Mill on the Floss” (2007), Mary Jane Corbett discusses in this context the implications of breeding and crossbreeding for Bob, Tom, and Maggie. One incident defines the moral differences in Bob Jakin and Tom when they are children. Tom and his dog go rat-catching with Bob and Mumps. Tom’s sense of moral superiority leads him to kick Yap because Bob pronounces Yap a coward where rat-catching is concerned. Tom “feels humiliated as a sportsman to possess so poor-spirited an animal”

George Eliot’s Animals  185 (102). Yap appears to be more morally mature than his owner and immediately forgives him and defends him by biting Bob’s leg when the two disagree (105). Because his pride has been hurt, Tom childishly refuses to associate with Bob and gives up the rat-catching which he enjoys. In her essay entitled “The Functions of Dogs in George Eliot’s Fiction,” Sara Håkansson discusses how “Yap’s adoration for Tom reflects Maggie’s feelings towards her brother” and how “Neither Yap nor Maggie lives up to Tom’s standards, and as a result, he turns his back on them both.” Håkansson attributes this to the fact that “the importance to him of pride and honor leaves him inescapably open to feelings of indignation” (2019: 222). Tom is disappointed and downcast at this outcome but thinks “I’d do just the same again” (107). The narrator reflects, “That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions, whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different” (107). Maggie is frequently referred to as childlike and childish in her innocence and absent-mindedness; however, she is always unselfish and puts the welfare of others before her own. She is thinking of how much her marrying Stephen Guest would hurt her cousin Lucy and Philip Wakem when she leaves him and returns home in disgrace. In spite of Tom’s hardness of heart toward her, Maggie’s first thought in the flood is to rescue Tom, and George Eliot assures us that “In death they were not divided” (657). One of the major sources of disagreement between Tom and Maggie is her relationship to Philip Wakem, whose father was the bitter enemy of Mr. Tulliver. Philip joins Tom at school, and Tom is uncomfortable with him from the very beginning because of his deformity, which resulted from an accident in infancy, and because he was a bad man’s son; however, the fact that Philip is so adept at drawing impresses him. Tom looks at Philip’s paper and exclaims: “Why, that’s a donkey with panniers, and a spaniel, and partridges in the corn!” (234) When Maggie visits Tom, she and Philip have an immediate sense of comradeship and shared consciousness. When they meet again as adults, Maggie is filled for the moment with “nothing but the memory of her child’s feelings, —a memory that was always strong in her” (394). In George Eliot’s story The Lifted Veil, Latimer, who is the narrator, contrasts himself to his brother. The two brothers who have the same father but different mothers are contrasted largely in terms of their relationships to horses and dogs. On the one hand, Latimer is extremely delicate and sensitive and remembers the tender caresses of his mother. In telling his story Latimer says, “That unequalled love soon vanished out of my life, and even to my childish consciousness it was as if that life had become more chill.” He misses the way his mother petted him like a small animal, but says “I rode my little white pony with the groom by my side as before, but there were no loving eyes looking at me as I mounted, no glad arms opened to me when I came back.” He goes on to say, “I was

186  Constance M. Fulmer certainly a very sensitive child. I remember still the mingled trepidation and delicious excitement with which I was affected by the tramping of the horses on the pavement in the echoing stables, by the loud resonance of the groom’s voices, by the booming bark of the dogs as my father’s carriage thundered under the archway of the courtyard” (4–5). He says that “the very dogs shunned me, and fawned on the happier people about me”; the only dog that ever took notice of him was “lazy old Cæsar, a Newfoundland almost blind with age” (25). In her article “‘Nomen Fit Omen’: George Eliot’s Use of Biblical Names,” June Szirotny (2019) says that old Cæsar is named for Cæsar Augustus who, in old age, could not see very well and who neglected business (Luke 2:1, 30–31). Latimer recalls one morning when he was patting Caesar, and his “florid, broad-chested, and self-complacent” brother appeared and said “in a tone of compassionate cordiality, ‘what a pity it is you don’t have a run with the hounds now and then! The finest thing in the world for low spirits!’ ‘Low spirits!’ I thought bitterly, as he rode away; ‘that is the sort of phrase with which coarse, narrow natures like yours think to describe experience of which you can know no more than your horse knows’” (25). Later that morning Latimer learned that his “brother was dead—had been pitched from his horse, and killed on the spot by a concussion of the brain” (27). The two never came to have any shared experiences or feelings. Even in George Eliot’s first published work of fiction “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” Dickey’s experiences with animals help him to learn the moral attributes that he exhibits as an adult. Dickey and Chubby are two siblings who do not have access to a real horse but play with their headless stick horse. Even though Dickey intends to supersede Chubby in the guidance of the horse (27), he is very respectful and can be as quiet as a mouse as he sits beside his mother’s deathbed (42). After his mother dies, a neighbor, Mrs. Hackit, begs that she might have Dickey to stay with her, and “great was the enlargement of Dickey’s experience from that visit” (70). Every morning he was allowed “to run loose in the cow and poultry yard, to persecute the turkey-cock by satirical imitations of his gobble-gobble.” Then Mr. Hackit would take Dickey up on horseback when he rode round his farm (70). By the end of the story Dickey has matured into a fine young engineer who goes by the name of Richard and is “a thoroughly good fellow” (73). No doubt his time with the Hackits and their animals contributed to this outcome. In her long verse drama, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), George Eliot creates a delightful animal and child who function almost as identical twins: the monkey, Annibal, and little lame Pablo. George Eliot does not allow them to become adults but rather contrasts the way Pablo’s morally immature father, Roldan, treats them both as animals who are his personal property with the way the morally mature Sephardo treats them both with tenderness, love, and respect. Pablo and Annibal are introduced,

George Eliot’s Animals  187 along with the other inhabitants who live in Bedmar, outside the royal palace in which Fedalma has lived since she was captured from her gypsy tribe at the age of three. Fedalma takes advantage of the absence of her intended husband, Don Silva, who is the heir to the Spanish throne, to leave the palace and to dance in the streets with the common people. Just before Fedalma arrives in the Plaça Santiago, we are introduced to Juan, who plays the lute and sings, and Roldan, who juggles and performs magical tricks. Roldan’s wife has died and left him with a son who has been lame since his birth. Pablo, who is now 12, is accompanied by a dog and the monkey Annibal. Pablo is part of the musical troupe; he plays the viol and “sings like a bird” (219). As the musicians play, Annibal “performs entertaining tricks, jumps through the hoops, and carries round the hat” (214). He is described as “a misanthropic monkey” and “a serious ape whom none take seriously, / Obliged in this fool’s world to earn his nuts / By hard buffoonery” (214). When Pablo “awakes his viol” with “rarest skill,” “The winged sounds exalt the thick-pressed crowd / With a new pulse in common, blending all / The gazing life into one larger soul” (242). Then Pablo begins to sing a song describing the joys of spring, which include the singing of sweet birds (243). Pablo’s song expresses the hope that the voice of the “sweetly-wooing linnet” will live on in him (247). This little lame boy is thoroughly in touch with the sweet birds, and his shared consciousness with them inspires his song as he sings intermittently while Fedalma dances before the crowd. The whole scene is a tangible demonstration of the sense of solidarity, and the crowd’s mutual response to music is a compelling metaphor for sympathetic understanding in action. Szirotny suggests that Pablo is like the apostle Paul in the New Testament by having a thorn in his flesh in being lame, in travelling about with his father, and in being a “God-taught” singer and an “exiled spirit” (73). Pablo and Annibal are both little loving animals. They reappear when Silva is sitting in Fedalma’s deserted chamber when Pablo’s “sad young voice” is brought by “aërial wings” to comfort him (325). Silva finds him with Roldan and Annibal. Silva sends Roldan as his envoy to search for Fedalma. Roldan is concerned about leaving them behind and makes it clear that he thinks of both of them as his property and expresses his fear that someone else should profit from owning them (329). Silva takes them to his former tutor and dear friend, the Jewish Sephardo, who is an astrologer and lives in a tower in the Spanish palace with Puss, his grey cat (330). When Silva enters with Pablo and Annibal, the cat exits, and Silva presents his small guests and tells Sephardo, “I am pledged to keep them safely; so I bring them to you, / Trusting your friendship for small animals” (331). The cautious Annibal, who is wearing a Moorish tunic and turban, “leaps into Sephardo’s lap,” chattering and peeping at Pablo who is sitting at his feet. Sephardo launches into a lengthy defense of the wisdom of animals (332).

188  Constance M. Fulmer A tender scene occurs when Sephardo gets up to examine his parchment in order to read Silva’s fate. He asks Annibal’s leave to rise and places the sleeping Annibal on Pablo’s lap. Pablo is also sleeping and does not wake; Annibal wakes up in alarm but “shuts his eyes quickly again and pretends to sleep” (340). The loving way Sephardo treats Annibal and Pablo shows his moral maturity and sharply contrasts the way Roldan views them both as his property and the source of his livelihood. In Felix Holt (1866), two young boys and their relationship with one another and with animals are compared and contrasted. One is Harold Transome, who has returned without his son, Harry, from a 15-year sojourn in the East; when his mother asks about him, Harold replies, “My man Dominic will bring him, with the rest of the luggage” (18). Harold clearly thinks of his son as an animal; Harry is “foreign.” His mother— now deceased—was a Greek who, according to Harold, “had been a slave—was bought, in fact” (421). Harold is egotistical and self-centered and has little or no regard for anyone else. Even when Harold enters his home after learning that Jermyn is his father, “there were the voice and the trotting feet of little Harry as usual, and the rush to clasp his father’s leg and make his joyful puppy-like noises. Harold just touched the boy’s head, and then said to Dominic in a weary voice—‘Take the child away’” (457). From the time he arrives, Harry is described in terms suggesting he is a small animal and, for making sounds rather than saying words, an untamed, biting one at that. Since he has been treated as an animal by his father, he treats Mrs. Transome’s rather feeble-minded husband like a horse. In one scene the narrator describes the two of them: “a blackmaned little boy about three years old” is urging Mr. Transome on with “occasional thumps from a stick” (93). Then Harry turns on the old Blenheim spaniel who gives a little snap, at which Mrs. Transome says, “Go, go, Harry; let poor Puff alone—he’ll bite you.” In response, Harry immediately bites his grandmother on the arm “with all his might” (94). Mr. Transome and his black retriever, Nimrod, are Harry’s constant companions (112). According to Szirotny, Nimrod also has a biblical name; Nimrod was “a mighty hunter” in the book of Genesis (72). The narrator comments: “Whomsoever Harry liked, it followed that Mr. Transome must like: ‘Gappa,’ along with Nimrod the retriever, was part of the menagerie, and perhaps endured more than all the other live creatures in the way of being tumbled about” (378). Mr. Transome is limited in many ways, but the little animal Harry brings delight to his life, and he gives Harry the unconditional love and companionship which he has never had. Another of the happy scenes which Harry and Mr. Transome share describes him “playing horse to little Harry, who roared and flogged behind him, while Moro yapped in a puppy voice at their heels” (403). As circumstances unfold, it becomes apparent that Esther Lyon is actually the legal heir to the Transome estate, and Harold and his mother

George Eliot’s Animals  189 invite Esther for an extended visit in their home. Harry has never seen “another specimen” like Esther nor she like him; he viewed her like a new sort of bird (377). When he first sees Esther, Harry is quite taken with her. He “stared at this new comer with the gravity of a wild animal.” When he approached her and found “that she laughed, tossed him back, kissed, and pretended to bite him—in fact, was an animal that understood fun—he rushed off and made Dominic bring a small menagerie of white mice, squirrels, and birds, with Moro, the black spaniel, to make her acquaintance” (377). The other little boy who is contrasted with Harry is the little orphan Job Trudge. He is “a small fellow about five, with a germinal nose, large round blue eyes, and red hair that curled close to his head like the wool on the back of an infantine lamb.” Felix explains to Esther that Job has a delicate chest and says that “the little white-faced monkey” might not live long (257). Because of his sympathy and compassion for the child, Felix has brought Job to his mother, and both of them are very good to the orphan Job (363). While Esther is visiting the Transomes, Mrs. Holt brings Job to the Transome estate on an afternoon when Esther and Harold are walking about. Harry “was dragging a toy vehicle, on the seat of which he had insisted on tying Moro with a piece of scarlet drapery round him, making him look like a barbaric prince in a chariot. Moro, having little imagination, objected to this, and barked with feeble snappishness as the tyrannous lad ran forward” (409). The narrator comments that “even the dogs, who showed various degrees of curiosity, especially as to what kind of game the smaller animal Job might prove to be” (412). The two boys carefully examine each other: Harry was “struck even more than the dogs by the appearance of Job Tudge” (412). Harry is thinking that “Job would make a good horse for him to beat, and would run faster than Gappa” (415). Esther invites Mrs. Holt and Job to come into the house “by way of breaking this awkward scene” (415). Harry and Job enjoy a game of hide-and-seek and are entertained by “the climbing powers of the two pet squirrels” (422). As Mrs. Holt looks on, Little Harry discerns in her “a hostile aspect,” and so he proceeds “first to beat her with his mimic jockey’s whip, and then … to set his teeth in her arm. While Dominic rebuked him and pulled him off, Nimrod began to bark anxiously, and the scene was becoming alarming even to the squirrels, which scrambled as far off as possible” (424–25). Harry hates to see Job leave; from his perspective, Job had seemed an “invaluable addition to the menagerie of tamed creatures” (425). Another character who is treated as an animal and not valued as a human being is Caterina in “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” the second of the Scenes of Clerical Life (1858). Caterina was born in Milan, Italy, and her own father treats her “like a kitten, in a large basket” (104). He dies, and the Cheverels, who are visiting in Milan, bring her home with

190  Constance M. Fulmer them (106). Sir Christopher loves “the little black-eyed monkey” (106). But neither he nor Lady Cheverel has any idea of adopting her as their daughter and giving her their own rank in life. The narrator says, “She became the pet of the household, thrusting Sir Christopher’s favourite bloodhound of that day, Mrs. Bellamy’s two canaries, and Mr. Bates’s largest Dorking hen, into a merely secondary position” (111). She sat “like a frog” among the drying sheets and “there was always some one who had nothing better to do than to play with Tina. So that the little southern bird had its northern nest lined with tenderness, and caresses, and pretty things” (112). As an adult she runs away when she thinks she has murdered Sir Christopher’s chosen heir, Captain Wybrow. Caterina loves him, but her heart is broken when he becomes engaged to the woman Sir Christopher has chosen for him. Caterina decides to kill Anthony; however, as she goes out with a dagger to look for him, she finds him already dead but feels that, because of her intentions to kill him, she is guilty and fears that she will be held responsible for his death (170). Sir Christopher finally realizes that Caterina was in love with Anthony; he says, “Poor dear little one! God help me! I thought I saw everything, and was stone-blind all the while” (176). Several of George Eliot’s characters—like Caterina—never attain moral maturity as indicated by their animal-like characteristics. In Romola (1863), Romola grows toward moral maturity when she cares for the needy souls in her neighborhood in Florence, along with the children and adults who are suffering from the plague; by the end of the novel, she adopts the morally immature Tessa, who is the mistress of Romola’s husband, Tito, and their children and creates a family for them. Tessa not only has a kitten face but also a kitten mentality. When Tito rescues her from the conjuror in the marketplace, she feels that she is escaping the roar of wild beasts (104). Tessa is so simple-minded that she never realizes she is not really married to Tito, who takes advantage of her dove-like innocence even as he pets her and calls her his pretty bird (109), pretty little Pigeon (107), kitten (292), and little goose (309). She equally adores Tito, her mules, her little black-faced goat, and her precious babies (107), and she is completely good in a sort of subhuman way. George Eliot not only refers to Tessa as “a large image of a sweet sleepy child” but also as “a creature … without moral judgment” (145). Even after Romola rescues Tessa and cares for her and her two children, Tessa is referred to as a puss-faced minx (568), and she happily remains a lovable little animal who is easily manipulated and readily satisfied. Tessa is better morally than Hetty in Adam Bede. Hetty is Totty’s aunt and is assigned to take care of Totty, though she always resents having to do anything for her. Hetty is very immature morally; she is selfish and childish and is referred to as having a butterfly soul (134), as being pigeon-like (153), kitten-like, and like a tropical bird (129). She is also constantly compared to little lambs, downy ducks, and other soft fuzzy

George Eliot’s Animals  191 animals. Hetty hated the leveret (135), is like a frightened bird (136), and a bright-eyed spaniel (136). Hetty has a hard heart within her; she has no sympathy with animals or people and does not even “care to know the difficulties of ant life” (222). After learning that she takes no pity on baby chicks, it is not surprising to George Eliot’s readers that she leaves her own baby in the woods to die. When she is in prison for the murder of her child, Hetty is, at first, “like an animal that gazes and gazes and keeps aloof” (448). Then she is moved by Dinah’s sympathetic understanding to tell Dinah that she hated the baby which was “like a heavy weight hanging around her neck” (454). Her own child becomes her albatross, and her hardness of heart and total lack of sympathetic understanding are obvious. In her article, Monica Flegel (2015) refers to the statement which George Eliot made that “Hetty would have been glad to hear that she should never see a child again; they were worse than the nasty little lambs that the shepherd was always bringing in,” but at least “the lambs were got rid of sooner or later.”1 In her chapter “‘I  Declare I Never Saw so Lovely an Animal!’: Beauty, Individuality, and Objectification in Nineteenth-Century Animal Autobiographies,” Flegel suggests that “Eliot links together women, animals, and extreme youth” to suggest that she believes “this kind of beauty” to be “found in those without great social power” (2017: 150). The only other woman in George Eliot’s writing who outdoes Hetty in her hardness of heart and lack of sympathy is Daniel Deronda’s mother, the Countess Czerlaski, who gives her son to Sir Mallinger like an adopted puppy. Her self-centeredness and egotism are obvious as she describes to Deronda her brilliant career: “I was a great singer, and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside me. Men followed me from one country to another.” And she tells him plainly, “I did not want a child” (626). To make matters worse, during Deronda’s childhood and young adulthood, Sir Mallinger gives him no explanation and allows him to grow up wondering about his parentage. In contrast to his mother’s lack of maturity, Deronda himself is mature enough to reach out to several others, including Gwendolen Harleth, and to assist them in their moral growth. The first chapter in Daniel Deronda (1876) is called “The Spoiled Child” and introduces the morally immature Gwendolen Harleth. It is interesting to note that George Eliot does not use references to animals as she did with Hetty and Tessa to convey Gwendolen’s selfishness and egotism. Instead, on more than 200 occasions, Gwendolen’s mother refers to her as her child or as being childish or childlike even though Gwendolen is an adult. And it is significant that the narrator mentions that as a child Gwendolen manifests the same morally immature traits since she strangled her sister’s canary-bird (25). Throughout the novel Gwendolen’s self-centeredness and desire for mastery are shown in her attitudes toward and interactions with horses. By choosing to marry

192  Constance M. Fulmer Grandcourt, Gwendolen selfishly deprives Lydia Glasher and her children of their rightful inheritance from their father. The gravity of Gwendolen’s mistake is accentuated in the scene in which George Eliot describes Lydia and Grandcourt’s children happily playing with their animals when he comes to tell her he has decided to marry Gwendolen. When Grandcourt arrives, Mrs. Glasher is seated with her four children around her. The boy, Henleigh, is playing with animals from a Noah’s ark, “admonishing them separately in a voice of threatening command” and behaving like a little animal by “occasionally licking the spotted ones to see if the colors would hold” (344). He is disappointed when Grandcourt arrives rather than the miller bringing him a donkey (344). In order to talk with Grandcourt, Mrs. Glasher sends the children outside, and they are “presently dancing and chatting with the dogs” (345). George Eliot created two happy families in which the animals are loved and adored as well as the children and in which the children are compared to animals and are happiest when in the company of animals. Ayres discusses “the happy family” scenes so frequently depicted in Victorian paintings in which pets are included (2019b: 119–22). In her study Beastly Possessions Sarah Amato discusses the ways Victorians use animal behaviors as moral exemplars for human conduct (2015: 7). The animals signaled the characteristics of the people who owned them, were harbingers of household harmony, and helped to develop children’s character and morality (6). She identifies one of the most significant moral lessons which George Eliot’s animals teach by saying that there is something humanizing about a pet that opens the heart to warmth and kindness (39). In George Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede, the Poysers enjoy their Sunday morning walk to church with their “little uns” which included “Marty and Tommy, boys of nine and seven, in little fustian tailed coats and knee-breeches, relieved by rosy cheeks and black eyes, looking as much like their father as a very small elephant is like a very large one” (187). Their sister, Totty, walked between them. The narrator says, “this Sunday walk through the fields was fraught with great excitement to Marty and Tommy, who saw a perpetual drama going on in the hedgerows, and could no more refrain from stopping and peeping than if they had been a couple of spaniels or terriers,” and “Marty was quite sure he saw a yellow-hammer on the boughs of the great ash, and while he was peeping, he missed the sight of a white-throated stoat, which had run across the path and was described with much fervor: “[T]here was a little greenfinch, just fledged, fluttering along the ground, and it seemed quite possible to catch it, till it managed to flutter under the blackberry bush.” Both boys are delighted when they find “a speckled turkey’s nest” (192). The boys are always excited about animals, and in one of his attempts to win the love of Hetty, Adam promises to take the boys to see squirrels

George Eliot’s Animals  193 (357). Their younger sister, Totty, has “a sort of waddling run, and an amount of fat on the nape of her neck which made her look like the metamorphosis of a white suckling pig” (77); her mother calls her “my chicken” (482), and she watches her brothers “with a puppylike air of contemplation” (322). In Middlemarch the members of the Garth family are also very compassionate to animals and respectful of them. The Garth household demonstrates the relationships with animals to which Philip Howell is referring in his text entitled At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain when he explains that animals were “familiars— part of the family” (16). He goes on to say that “teaching middle-class children to care for animals” is “one of the first steps on the road to becoming successful, self-disciplined, respectable adults” (17). The Garth animals are always involved in their cheerful domestic scenes, as is Fred Vincy, who is loved and forgiven by the morally mature Garths who care for him in spite of his moral failings, which include cruelty to his horse. Their love and acceptance help Fred to mature morally to the extent that he is accepted in marriage by Mary, the eldest Garth child. The young Ben Garth obviously admires Fred and associates him with his horse; one day when Fred comes into the Garth’s kitchen, Ben immediately takes Fred’s whip and “tries its efficiency” on Tortoise the cat and then asks Fred if he can ride his horse (246). On another occasion, Fred arrives at the Garth home to find the family group, including dogs and cats, under the great apple-tree in the orchard. It is a festival with Mrs. Garth, held because her eldest son, Christy, her peculiar pride and joy, has come home for a short holiday. Christy is “a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition of his mother not much higher than Fred’s shoulder” (571). Despite his own academic accomplishments, Christy “thought no more of Fred’s disinclination to scholarship than of a giraffe’s, wishing that he himself were more of the same height” (571). Christy is lying on the ground by his mother’s chair, and Jim is on the other side reading aloud. Ben, who has fetched his old bow and arrows is begging all present to observe his random shots, which no one wishes to do except Brownie, “the active-minded but probably shallow mongrel, while the grizzled Newfoundland lying in the sun looked on with the dull-eyed neutrality of extreme old age” (572). Before Fred leaves, Ben throws down his bow and—like a little ­animal—“bounces across the grass with Brownie at his heels” (575). Seeing the kitten dragging the knitting by a lengthening line of wool, Ben shouts and claps his hands; Brownie barks, the kitten jumps on the tea-table and upsets the milk, then jumps down again. Ben snatches up the half-knitted sock-top and fits it over the kitten’s head as a new source of madness, while Letty cries out to her mother against this cruelty (575). In these ways George Eliot uses animals and children in order to give her moral principles a tangible representation. She said that “every aspect

194  Constance M. Fulmer of her art” was “consciously devoted to the deepest moral problems” (Haight 1954: 4:220), and she uses scenes involving animals to teach sympathetic understanding and to warn against selfishness and egotism. As suggested by the title of Kelly Oliver’s book Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (2009), George Eliot’s lessons teach us to be more morally mature as humans.

Note 1 Flegel quotes from Adam Bede 154 on 20–21.

Bibliography Amato, Sarah. Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Ashton, Rosemary. George Eliot: A Life. London: The Penguin Press, 1996. Ayres, Brenda. Introduction to Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, edited by Brenda Ayres, 1–22. New York and London: Routledge, 2019a. Ayres, Brenda. “It’s Raining Cats and Dogs in the Novels of George Eliot.” In Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, edited by Brenda Ayres, 119–40. New York and London: Routledge, 2019b. Chez, Keridiana W. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2017. Corbett, Mary Jean. “The Crossing o’ Breeds in The Mill on the Floss.” In Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, 21–44. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. 1859. Edited by Stephen Gill. London: Penguin Books, 1985. Eliot, George. Daniel Deronda. 1876. Edited by Terence Cave. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Eliot, George. Felix Holt. 1866. Edited by Lynda Mugglestone. London: Penguin Books, 1995. Eliot, George. “The Lifted Veil” and “Brother Jacob.” 1859 and 1865, respectively. Oxford World’s Classics. Edited by Helen Small. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Eliot, George. Middlemarch. 1871–1872. Edited by Rosemary Ashton. London: Penguin Books, 1994. Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Edited by A. S. Byatt. London: Penguin Books, 1980. Eliot, George. Romola. 1862–63. Edited by Dorothea Barrett. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Eliot, George. Scenes of Clerical Life. 1857. Edited by Graham Handley. ­London: J. M. Dent, 1994. Eliot, George. Silas Marner. 1861. Edited by David Carroll. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

George Eliot’s Animals  195 Eliot, George. “The Spanish Gypsy. In George Eliot: Collected Poems, edited by Lucien Jenkins, 203–453. London: Skoob Books, 1989. Flegel, Monica. “‘I Declare I Never Saw so Lovely an Animal!’: Beauty, Individuality, and Objectification in Nineteenth-century Animal Autobiographies.” In Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, 147–66. London: Palgrave, 2017. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. New York: Routledge, 2015. Freeman, Carol, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt, editors. Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human-Animal Studies. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Gray, Beryl. “Riding Horses in Middlemarch.” George Eliot Review 47 (2016): 7–17. Haight, Gordon S., ed. The George Eliot Letters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, vols. 1–6, 1954; 7, 1955; 8–9, 1978. Håkansson, Sara. “The Functions of Dogs in George Eliot’s Fiction.” In George Eliot: Interdisciplinary Studies, edited by Jean Arnold and Lila Marz Harper, 213–30. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Howell, Philip. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Kreilkamp, Ivan. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Oliver, Kelly. Animal Letters: How They Teach Us to Be Human. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Robles, Mario Ortiz. Literature and Animal Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Szirotny, June Skye. “‘Nomen Fit Omen’: George Eliot’s Use of Biblical Persons.” George Eliot—George Henry Lewes Studies 71, no. 1 (2019): 18–90. Wordsworth, William. “My Heart Leaps Up.” 1807. In Poems in Two Volumes, 44. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807. https://books.google. com/books?id=pzgJAAAAQAAJ.

11 Neither Brutes nor Beasts Animals, Children, and Young Persons and/in the Brontës Sarah E. Maier …supposing I could be so generous as to take delight in this, still it is only a child; and I can’t centre all my hopes in a child; that is only one degree better than devoting one’s self to a dog. A. Brontë (1847: 185)

The Brontë siblings were lovers of nature and of animals. From family birds to Emily’s falcon, Anne’s terrier to Emily’s mastiff, the young Brontës had great sympathy for animals; indeed, Emily’s real-life attachment to her dog is legendary. In their fictions, animals and children are significant. In Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the child orphan is paralleled with birds in the opening sequence; the isolated orphan dreams of escape while contemplating avian pictures and later, her young woman’s mind is captured by the fairy tale ideal of a man on horseback. In Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), animals are essential to a consideration of the turn from the Romanticized ideal of innocent youth to the Victorian, sometimes cruel reality of the powerlessness of animals and/as young persons, while Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) unleashes the human animal upon both nonhuman animals and children. For the Brontës— Anne, Charlotte, and Emily—their affinity in childhood and into young adulthood for animals leads them to engage with portraits of children and animals to construct them as neither brutes nor beasts; rather, this chapter considers what happens when a basic truth—kindness to animals as well as children and young persons—is an obligation thrown aside by adults. It will further consider the ways nonhuman animals and children are treated, and/or how children treat nonhuman animals, and the way children are treated as nonhuman animals in the fictions of the Brontës. Romantic considerations of nature saw a positive connection between children and animals that saw them both as “close to nature, uncorrupted, a conduit to truth” (Pearson 2011: 31), but the transition to ­middle-class domesticity began to link them together as “children and dumb animals” (quoted in Pearson 22), with both relegated as inferior

Animals and Children and Brontës  197 to adult humans. Society institutionalizes the link; animal protection societies like the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824, laws against cruelty to animals was passed in 1835 but there was no protection for abuse of children until the creation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s formation in 1884 followed by the Children’s Charter of 1889. According to Susan Pearson, to “some members of the general public, and to some anticruelty reformers, extending animal protection services to children made sense from a procedural standpoint: anticruelty organizations were specially empowered by the law in ways that could benefit children as well as animals” (2011: 24). Until that time, the common concerns for those beings vulnerable to cruelty was expressed in the extension of animal welfare organizations to contiguously care for children in need. Although these social facts are seemingly at a distance from nineteenth-­ century fictional narratives, the Brontës’ lives and their writings demonstrate a combined interest in children and nonhuman animals. Their own childhood was both joyful and painful. Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) offers much insight into the lives of this extraordinary family who lived in the Parsonage at Haworth. To say that they had a complex childhood would be an understatement. The Reverend Patrick Brontë (née Brunty) and Maria (née Branwell) Brontë had six children; Maria, the eldest, was precocious beyond her years who was delicate and small in appearance capable of what Gaskell calls “the deeper life of reflection—the subjective” (84). As the eldest, much of Maria’s early personal traits gave the other children—Elizabeth, Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, and Anne—comfort when their mother became ill. Although their Aunt Branwell came to live and care for them during and after her illness, the children “were grave and silent beyond their years; subdued, probably, by the presence of serious illness in the house” to a point where “[y]ou would not have known there was a child in the house, they were such still, noiseless, good little creatures” (Gaskell 87). After Maria’s death in 1821, their father increased his strong belief in physical well-being; as an active walker Reverend Brontë would see that his “six little creatures used to walk out, and in hand, towards the glorious wild moors, which in after days they loved so passionately; the elder ones taking thoughtful care for the toddling wee things” (86). Gaskell suggests that “Mr Brontë must have formed some of his opinions on the management of children” from Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Day (87) whose ideas on education rely on the simplicity of nature and its importance in the life of children as well as the recognition of children as exemplars of a natural life. The Brontë children were “all in all to each other” and “did not want society” of others (Gaskell 93). Their education flourished with their father’s encouragement to read newspapers, periodicals, politics, poetry, classics, novels, and anything else they might rapaciously devour. From

198  Sarah E. Maier childhood, the Brontë family was a haven for many nonhuman animals including the cats Tom and Tiger; the canary Dick; the dogs Rainbow, Diamond, Snowflake, and Jasper; a pheasant as well as three geese, two of which were named Victoria and Adelaide. The family was later joined by Anne’s spaniel, Flossy, alongside Emily’s terrier, Grasper, then her huge mastiff, Keeper, with the unusual addition of Emily’s wild merlin, Nero, amongst others. Keeper is the companion with whom Emily is most associated; once an unwanted stray, he accompanies his human friend on her many walks on the moors where she finds other animals to bring home and bring back to health.1 The Brontë family clearly values nonhuman animals of all types. Charlotte and Anne had affinities with domestic pets, while Emily was “drawn to fierce creatures with wild, unyielding natures”; indeed, Deborah Lutz believes dogs “opened up a well of emotion in her” (2015: 104) while she rarely showed any regard for humans. 2 When the two eldest girls were sent to Cowan Bridge School, the idyllic life of the younger children’s minds continued with the creation of the worlds of Glasstown, Angria, and Gondal until the next two girls followed suit in their educational path. The shocking deaths of Maria and Elizabeth from tuberculosis, ages ten and nine, respectively, caused Reverend Brontë to re-ensconce his family at the Parsonage where he could oversee both their well-being and their education. Surrounded by family animals, the Brontës’ writing is as much a product of the Romantic ideals when it positions “animals in a similar symbolic space with children: close to nature, uncorrupted, a conduit to truth” (Pearson 31) that could be positive for society and domestic life. Certainly, in their own lives, the Brontës valued their nonhuman animal friends. Perhaps out of a sense of escape, the remaining children initiated their fictional wor(l)ds which divided them eventually into writing pairs: Anne with Emily in the creation of Gondal, and Charlotte with Branwell in the creation of the Glasstown sagas, stories that began as juvenilia but continued to be intellectually explored until their deaths. In those texts, animals often represent the character of the individuals involved; it is early work toward a full understanding of the need to represent animals in and of themselves, as well as to understand how often Victorian literature sees the diminution of animals as mere props to their human counterparts or to express human vulgarity. In one such incident found in the story of the young girl, Caroline Vernon, Northangerland inquires if a man is “‘a better horse-jockey or cow-jobber?’ … ‘Does he kill his own meant or he buys it? Does he feed pigs Mary?’”; he continues, “‘I should like to see him riding home a horse-back, after driving a hard bargain down at Grantley there, about a calf which he is to bring home in a rope’” (C. Brontë 1839: 235), thereby demonstrating his indifference to animals other than as a means to measure a man.

Animals and Children and Brontës  199 Charlotte and Emily’s time at the Pensionnat Héger in Brussels from 1842 to 1843 provides the opportunity to see how the young women view nonhuman animals via their devoirs created at the instruction of Constantin Héger, their teacher.3 These works are “crucially important” to their development because they provide “a missing link between the juvenilia and [their] adult novels” on subjects that the young women later confront in their later fiction: “identity, genius, self-restraint and self-­assertion, and survival in an often hostile world” (Lonoff 1989: 387–88). Charlotte addresses many of her writings to the first three topics while Emily’s writings are noteworthy on the penultimate and last issues. Two assignments in particular are on the subject of animals: “Le Chat” and “Le Papillon.” In the first, Emily directly addresses her relation as a person to two nonhuman animals: the dog who is too good to compare to humans and the cat. The cat is “an animal who has more human feelings than almost any other being. We cannot sustain a comparison with the dog, it is infinitely too good; but the cat … is extremely like us in disposition” including its “excessive hypocrisy, cruelty, and ingratitude; [which are] detestable vices in our race” (Lonoff 1996: 54–58). This discussion of these nonhuman animals is not anthropomorphic but reflective discursive language on the relative merits or defects of character specifically in both humans and nonhuman animals as having particular characteristics that are shared by both species. While not advocating in any way, Emily does seem to understand that “movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture” (Haraway 1991: 152); in this case, it is clear that she views that cat as more because the “cat’s hypocrisy is what humans call politeness” to disguise true feelings in society (Barker 2010: 455). But Emily notes in her essay “L’amour filial” (1842) on the commandment to honor thy parents that it is “a principle of nature that parents love their children … yet the voice of thunder cries ‘Honour your parents or you will die!” while she simultaneously includes a plea for “[w]hat power can save the miserable man?” (quoted in Barker 456), an early reference to the conflation between her feelings on humans, nonhuman animals and the confusion of nature seen in the later Wuthering Heights. Writing while among the “pets” of the Pensionnat—the younger girls sent by their families for appropriate training to get just enough education to become young wives—Emily sees the parallels, not to anthropomorphize the girls but to empathize with animals who are criticized for their honest existence. The younger Brontë sister posits that the animals are, in fact, comfortable in themselves and do not dissemble or assume a mask for society; rather, she sees that for young women in society, domination by others was expected to the point where, according to Brenda Ayres in Victorians and their Animals (2019), they “accepted

200  Sarah E. Maier an obligation to dominate the animal within themselves and others. This is one reason, but not the only one, that most Victorians were extremely strict with their children, especially teachers in school: They were committed to putting a leash on the beast; suppressing the animal in children, in animals, and in adults” (11). A former student at Law Hill School recalled how Emily once openly expressed a preference for canine companionship with “her devotion to the house-dog, which she once told her little pupils was dearer to her than they were” (Chadwick 1914: 124). Much has been made of her supposed misanthropy; perhaps it is more a preference for nonhumans who intuitively understood companionship and strength in resistance to domination or dependence. In the siblings’ novels, it is significant that the exploration of children and animals covers a spectrum of empathy and understanding to abuse and trauma. It may be the case that the nineteenth-century novel “participates in a process of dividing up the world into humans” (individuals capable, ideally or supposedly, of becoming protagonists or full-fledged characters) and nonhumans (things and animals that fall below the threshold of the characterological) particularly in the Victorian realist novel because it uses this dichotomous separation to use the “animal, that being who defines the outer limit of who or what can count as a protagonist or even as a character” (Kreilkamp 2–3). That said, not all novels do so; certainly, these Brontë novels do seek to “disclose the participation and presence of nonhumans in the human world of the nineteenth-century novel” (3) and, in particular, encourage the reader to see the connections between children and nonhuman animals. Status, treatment, class, and gender are equally applicable to the child/ young adult and the animal. In their fictions, the sisters follow popular and humanitarian literature that “identified children and animals as similar, capable of forming intense emotional bonds and reciprocal relations” and in some cases, “incorporated animals-as-pets into the emotional order of domesticity” (Pearson 21). It is true that authors of fiction “were critiquing humans’ treatment of animals, reflecting their domestication of them, recording their fascination of them, and questioning ‘man’s’ capacity to be humane to other creatures, both great, small, and equal, both animal and fellow ‘man’” (Ayres 12); that said, Harriet Ritvo claims nature “ceased to be a constant antagonist” (1987: 3). Agreed; but what if, instead of having nature “viewed with affection and even, as the scales tipped to the human side, with nostalgia” (3), it is not sentimentalized in the Brontës’ writing but is, as represented in the form of child and animal, a site of abuse and trauma that gives the lie to early Victorian conceptions of happy domestic home life. The close relationship between nonhuman animals and children is expressed in many of the Brontës’ mature fiction; in each case, the narratives seek to establish what Linda Kaloff calls “agency” or the ability to “engage in self-directed and purposeful action in their environments and

Animals and Children and Brontës  201 in relationships with other agents” in a distinct and parallel set of “characteristics that all animals (humans, dogs, apes, horses, cats) have in varying degrees” (2017: 8). Ayres’s recognition that such agency allows the children, other characters and several animals to “mutually mediate for each other in an environment in which neither has hegemony” (25) is significant for the Brontës in that there is a distinct understanding between the species of the need for compassion and empathy in light of brutal treatment. Such interdependence and comparative distress illustrate the “capacity for animals to animalize humans and for humans to humanize animals” in “mutual and mutational animal agency” (38). Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre opens with the admonition of an opinionated orphan who is, like the governess she is later, in but not of the family. Reprimanded for an unknown transgression, the girlchild Jane Eyre asks what she has done; Mrs. Reed’s response sets her in her place in the Victorian adult to child hierarchy with “Jane, I don’t like cavillers or questioners; besides, there is something truly forbidding in a child taking up her elders in that manner. Be seated somewhere; and until you can speak pleasantly, remain silent” (C. Brontë 1847: 39). Jane is labelled as less than the others of import, as a thing that “increases the sense of Jane as unknowable, unnameable, perhaps even not-quitehuman” (­Losano 2014: 52).4 Like an animal punished, Jane retreats to a window-­seat where, “having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close” she is contained between the disdain of the family and the possibilities presented by the window where she sees a “storm-beat shrub” with “ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast” (40). With neither appealing in their callousness, her chosen option is to read Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds (vol. 1: 1797 and vol. 2: 1804) to contemplate the “haunts of sea-fowl” and a “black, horned thing seated aloof on a rock” (40) and the habitats that express their solitary natures. Jane admits “I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive” (40). The birds have an uncaged agency for which the child Jane seemingly longs. Quickly, Jane realizes that her entrapment is actually a place of safety from the predatory John Reed. She “wished fervently he might not discover my hiding-place” as she heard “Master Reed” who angrily comments to his mother that Jane “is run out into the rain—bad animal!” (41). She knows that when he finds her, “he will soon strike”; she was “dreading the blow”— “the volume was flung” (40) to chase her away like an unwanted nonhuman animal. A pattern of abuse is clear because Jane admits that although she acts “habitually obedient” to the small Master, he “bullied and punished [her]; not two or three times in the week, nor once or twice in a day, but continually: every nerve [she] had feared him, and every morsel of flesh…shrank when he came near” (42). Jane falls, strikes her “head against the door” and the cut “bled, the pain

202  Sarah E. Maier was sharp” with “pungent suffering” that briefly “predominated over fear” as he further demeans her with the epithet, “Rat! Rat” (42–43). Rather than being received with empathy and compassion by her Aunt, the young child feels four hands laid upon her and she is locked away in the death room of her Uncle: the red-room. No appeal is possible; the adults have participated in the abuse, adding punishment to the display of masculine entitlement. The adults have abdicated their responsibility of protection over the weak and the small. To the female servants, Miss Abbot and Bessie, who are somewhat sympathetic to her circumstances, Jane’s “shocking conduct … to strike a young gentleman” is the equivalent action to “a mad cat” (44). They threaten to tie her up but dismiss her as undeserving of consideration until she assumes the proper, appropriate submissive stance due to her station as “less than a servant” (44). The “servants did not like to offend their young master by taking [Jane’s] part against him, and Mrs Reed was blind and deaf on the subject; she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me, though he did both now and then in her very presence” (42). Like most victims, who begin to see themselves as a possessed object, Jane erroneously places the blame for the physical and emotional abuse on herself, that if she had not been “a useless thing … a noxious thing” but a “brilliant, careless, exacting, handsome, romping child” (47) they all would have cared for her. The abusive individuals instead condemn Jane’s actions when she dares act “a fury to fly at” (43) her tormentor. The ten-year old Jane’s empathetic understanding for the birds whose flight she admires is a direct reflection of her own lack of agency within a circle of violence. Jane suffers further indifference, abuse, and hideous conditions during her traumatic time at the institutional Lowood School where, again, adult officials like Mr. Brocklehurst betray the children in their care to give “Less fortunate children … the doubtful benefit of early admission to the adult world, but only in order to fulfil certain practical needs for the adults” (Banerjee 1984: 482) like when Jane is no longer pupil but is made a teacher to continue educating the young women into subservience. It is the female companionship of Miss Temple and Helen Burns that ultimately give Jane the strength of character to seek an independent life. Once a young woman, Jane takes up the position of governess at Thornfield Hall; in her first discussion with her young pupil, Miss Adèle Verens, the girl’s freedom is expressed in the walks she likes to take every day to the park where there are “many children” who play by “a pond with beautiful birds in it” (133) in an opposite reflection to Jane’s own childhood of confinement. Now settled in with her guardian, Mr. Rochester, after a complex (perhaps illegitimate) early childhood, Adèle exemplifies the petted child, a role “as cherished and dependent, [where] both animals and children were designated as ‘pets’ throughout the nineteenth century” in a signification of “preciousness rather

Animals and Children and Brontës  203 than petulance” (Pearson 33). Hoping to impress her new governess, it is ironic that one of the ways she chooses to demonstrate her education to date is to not only sing inappropriate songs but to recite “La Ligue des Rats” (1692), a fable by Jean de La Fontaine that begins with a mouse who lives in fear of a cat much like Jane had done at Gateshead Hall. Stories and experiences of childhood are often didactic, no less so because they are fantastical or based in the fairy tale realm. Jane Eyre is often analyzed for its Bluebeard motif, but often ignored are the fireside tales of the servants that entertain the young girlchild. Contrary to the heroism of Charlotte Brontë’s juvenilia that sees horses equated with nobility, military might, and heroism in the figure of Wellington, one of the fictional autobiography’s most important episodes casts the Master, Mr. Rochester, as an ambiguous fallen hero—literally fallen off his horse unable to keep his seat. The reader is reminded of the relative youth of Jane, now only 18, when she walks in the moonlight and hears the approach of a horse. The sounds and atmosphere immediately remind her of childhood tales told by Bessie of a “Gytrash”5 found “in the form of horse, mule, or large dog, haunted solitary ways,” the remembrance of which makes her fearful in the dark because “youth added to them a vigour and vividness beyond what childhood could give” (143). When the great black and white dog that appears with “a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge head” and “pretercanine eyes” is followed by a “tall steed” (144) with a rider, the childhood memory of the supernatural Gytrash is given the lie but allows for a throwing off of childhood for the life that awaits in her time at and beyond Thornfield Hall. Conversely, the compassion demonstrated by the dog for his master’s injury enlists Jane’s assistance; indeed, Rochester is cast to be his companion’s equivalent to Jane: “I could see him plainly. His figure was enveloped in a riding cloak, fur collared and steel clasped; its details were not apparent, but I traced the general points of middle height, and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now” (144). With his fur collared, Rochester might be the companion of the folkloric gytrash, nonhuman animal like his dog, Pilot, or grizzled human, and Jane’s empathy leads her to lend her assistance to the fallen being. The final coming together of Jane and Rochester relies on images and intuitions of Romantic, youthful narratives about connections between the human and the nonhuman. Their story concludes with Jane’s visit in the dark through a “gloomy wood”; he has changed, with a look “desperate and brooding—that reminded [her] of some wronged and fettered wild beast or bird, dangerous to approach in his sullen woe. The caged eagle, whose gold-ringed eyes cruelty has extinguished” into “blind ferocity” (456). Rochester has now become the caged bird of Jane’s childhood, trapped in Ferndean’s desolation, alone. Jane, again unafraid, joins Pilot who, like Rochester, is “coiled up as if afraid” until

204  Sarah E. Maier he sees her; then Pilot “jumped up with a yelp and a whine, and bounded towards” (458) Jane, encouraging her willingness to comfort him and his Master with her presence. Their reunion is a reacquaintance of sorts with man and animal; Jane sees it is “time someone undertook to rehumanize” him as she parts his “thick and long uncut locks” because she believes he’s is “being metamorphosed into a lion” with hair of “eagles’ feathers” and nails perhaps grown “like bird’s claws” (461). The next day she looks to “comb out this shaggy black mane” (462) because he is rather alarming, perhaps fairy, perhaps a brownie, part man or part horse, a liminal being who exists in between society and seclusion. In addition to the child-tale references, and the return of Adèle to the family unit, two different childhood memories are invoked here; first, Jane’s childhood trauma is drawn in parallel to Rochester’s own. In each case, they are individual birds wishing to escape the confines placed upon them due to no fault of their own. In the second, empathy learned by Jane as a child for those who suffer leads her to care equally for Pilot and his Master which effectively erases the hierarchies between woman, man, and nonhuman animal. Kinship for her fellow creatures, as demonstrated in Jane Eyre, is a more nuanced theme complicated in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey and Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In the first text, the narrative focuses on a young girl, Agnes, who is one of only two children who “survived the perils of infancy and early childhood” to become “the child, and the pet of the family” that render her “helpless and dependent, too unfit for buffeting with the cares and turmoils of life” (2). Unlike Jane, Agnes is kept at home but her father, “whose temper [is] neither tranquil nor cheerful” (3) who lives beyond his means until he succumbs to “his morbid imagination” (6). The family’s “well-fed pony” has to be sold while Agnes is dismissed to “play with the kitten” (7), dismissed as lesser-than other family members and equated with a tiny pet, Agnes must wait to become a governess. Still close enough to childhood both because of her age and close association with children, the young governess is idealistic and believes that she need only “turn from [her] little pupils to [herself] at their age” and she will “know, at once, how to win their confidence and affections; how to waken the contrition of the erring; how to embolden the timid, and console the afflicted” (9); clearly, she seeks to be a mindful, positive influence on the children in her care. What Agnes does not expect is the behavior of the children she must govern: Master Tom Bloomfield, Mary Ann, Fanny, and Harriet. “Master” Tom instantly stakes his territory—the schoolroom, books, and toys are shown to her but “They’re mine” (16) according to the young exemplar of masculine entitlement. To emphasize his point, he mounts his rocking horse and “made [Agnes] stand for ten minutes, watching how manfully he used his whip and spurs” while Agnes hopes “he would not use his whip and spurs so much when he rode a real pony” (17)—the inference is, of course, that Tom will treat both wooden rocking-horse

Animals and Children and Brontës  205 and live pony equally as things and/or property. Rather than worry for herself, the governess shudders at the potential harm that might come to the pony. In her own life, several biographers and her own letters make clear that Anne Brontë was in sympathy with nonhuman animals used as beasts of burden; on her last trip to Scarborough, days before she died there, she requested to drive her own cart to insure that the animal was not mistreated by a driver when “worried that the boy would drive the donkey too hard, and hating as always any cruelty to one of God’s creatures, she took the reins herself and drove off slowly down the beach” (Holland 2016: 250). It is not difficult to see her own love of animals exemplified in Agnes. Tom’s additional and horrific exclamation that he would strike his sister because he is “obliged to do it now and then to keep her in order” resembles a “consequential little gentleman” (17) seeking to dominate those beings potentially under his care, an impression that is solidified by his treatment of birds. Birds are an integral part of the Brontë’s life and literary imagery symbolizing freedom of constraint and freedom of flight. Victorian educational theory, found in Kindness to Animals (1877), an anonymous collection of appropriate tales for instruction, posited that “Nothing will possibly be so efficacious in softening the feelings of children towards animals … as to bring them up in the society of domestic pets, such as a gentle-tempered dog, a cat, or a bird” (182), an idea Agnes seems to believe. When Tom catches birds in traps and proudly explains, “Sometimes I give them to the cat; sometimes I cut them in pieces with my penknife; but the next, I mean to roast alive … to see how long it will live—and then to see what it will taste like” (18), Agnes is horrified. She seeks to raise his fellow feeling for his victims both past and future; she asks if he might realize “the birds can feel as well as you, and think, how would you like it yourself?” (18). There is no question for Agnes of the nonhuman animals’ ability to suffer the pain of Tom’s violence. That said, his father, and his uncle—who have also pulled “off legs and wings and heads” in their own lives—ignore the chilling admissions when Tom escalates his cruelty to claim dominion over weasels then a “rough colt” which “had been bred on purpose for him” (18–19) to dominate. Agnes’s discouragement culminates with “This, I thought, was reversing the order of things” (21) where cruelty is encouraged and compassion absent. She seeks to sympathize with her pupils over their “habitual fear of their father’s peevish temper, and the dread of the punishments he was wont to inflict when irritated” and of “their mother’s anger” (24). The father’s rage explodes when Agnes refuses to rule over the children in any way that replicates the domestic abuse rampant in the household over children and animals. To evoke terror in the children, demanding they obey him, he bellows: “’Come in with you, you filthy brats; or I’ll horsewhip you every one!’ roared he; and the children instantly obeyed” (35) clearly out of fear, not desire implicating the reader in a voyeuristic episode that exemplifies the abusive nature of the children’s life.

206  Sarah E. Maier Loveless and without remorse, this combination of inhumanity and disregard for nonhuman animals culminates when Mr. Robson, Mrs. Bloomfield’s brother, is dreaded by Agnes for “the harm he did the ­children—encouraging all their evil propensities” (42). A drunkard who encourages his nephew to manifest a “bold and manly spirit” (43), Robson brings his dogs for a hunt. Agnes expresses her sorrow for the nonhuman animals because “he treated them so brutally that, poor as I was, I would have given a sovereign any day to see one of the bite him, provided the animal could have done it with impunity” (43) much in the same way she wishes she could speak up to stop the abusive treatment of herself, the children and the animals in her life. When the young governess can take no more, she defends the birds Tom is about to torture; when she sees it is impossible to “persuade the little tyrant to let the birds be carried back” because he chooses to list off a great many torments he had in store, she “dropped the stone upon his intended victims, and crushed them flat beneath it” (44) in an act of euthanasia to save their immanent suffering. Agnes’s disruption of the male sport results in Robson kicking his dog, Juno, rather than attacking Agnes whom he believes has unacceptably overstepped social boundaries because first, she is a female, and second, she is a servant. Any idea that “teaching children that relations with animals were governed by the same rules as those with humans, middle-class parents” could naturalize “an idealized version of family life” to prepare “children to assume their future roles as tender-hearted, self-disciplined mothers and fathers” (Pearson 33–34) is impossible in the Bloomfield worldview. Summoned before Mrs. Bloomfield, the two women debate nonhuman animal sentience. Mrs. Bloomfield is upset that “Master Bloomfield’s amusements” to cause him much distress, Agnes replies calmly that when his amusements “consist in injuring sentient creatures” she feels it is her “duty to interfere;” the mistress retorts that the “creatures were all created for our convenience”: “If they were, we have no right to torment them for our amusement.” “I think,” said she, “a child’s amusement is scarcely to be weighed against the welfare of a soulless brute.” “But for the child’s own sake, it ought not to be encouraged to have such amusements,” answered I, as meekly as I could, to make up for such unusual pertinacity. “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.”6 “Oh, of course! But that refers to our conduct towards each other.” “The merciful man shews mercy to his beast,”7 I ventured to add. (Brontë 45–46)

Animals and Children and Brontës  207 This exchange is, perhaps, exemplary of an early Victorian view from Genesis 1:26 that seemingly grants man dominion over the animals, or it may be a pre-Romantic vision of animals as brutes to be controlled by mankind, a view of society’s confusion over the interpretation of faith as it reacts to a pre-Darwinian identification of the nonhuman animal’s right to nonsuffering existence. In some ways a fictional model of the paradigm-shifting ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Robert Chambers, and Charles Darwin’s theories of species that witnessed “a crucial shift in understandings of the human-animal boundary that was also accelerated by many of the century’s key historical developments” (McKechnie and Miller 437), Agnes sees no contradiction between faith and kindness to all creatures. Agnes, now relieved of her duties, moves on to work for family of a higher class but experiences equally abject versions of childhood and nonhuman animal treatment. Years later, the reader sees Agnes alone at Ashby Park when she visits Rosalie Murray, now Lady Ashby, who confesses her husband to be a “brute” (184) after her socially advantageous, loveless marriage. Ironically, her sister Matilda, although unfeminine in behavior, seeks “amusement in the companionship of dogs and horses” (113), which at least demonstrates an understanding of lesser beings, even if rough and non-maternal.8 Rosalie, in contrast, disdains her own child or her company because the baby may die and because “it is a little girl” who will “grow up to eclipse” her mother” (185). Recognizing her own entrapment in the conventions of unsympathetic relations between humans and humans, as well as humans and nonhumans, Agnes again encounters birds. In “the shadow of the distant hills … so lately bathed in glorious light … such birds as soared above the rest might still receive the lustre on their wings, which imparted to their sable plumage the hue and brilliance of deep red gold” but with their disappearance, Agnes “became more weary, and wished [she] were going home” (181). After she does return home, on her morning walk she “heard a snuggling sound … and then a dog came frisking and wriggling” to her. It is, of course, the little terrier Snap who had been taken from her in an act of vengeance by one of her pupils. It is safely in the companionship of Mr. Weston who is happy to see that the “dog remembers [her] well” (189).9 At their parting, Snap is unclear who to follow, “his old mistress or his new master”; in the eyes of their shared nonhuman companion, they are equal, and Agnes leaves them both “full of gratitude to Heaven for so much bliss” (192). Shortly thereafter, the trio of man, woman and terrier live happily together to raise their own children who “promise well” (198) in a family of kindred spirits. While the later Tenant of Wildfell Hall continues Anne Brontë’s exploration of childhood, domestic violence and nonhuman animals as compassionate companions, here I turn to the final of the 1847 trio of novels, Wuthering Heights. If “animals are simply the latest candidates in an endless procession of victims—women, minorities, the poor—clamoring

208  Sarah E. Maier for rights and justice, or just a modicum of decent treatment” (Mitchell 2003: xi), then it begs the question of what to make of the “sinister menagerie” (Cooper 2015: 252) of children and animals found in Emily Brontë’s naturalistic narrative. Purposely multi-generational, with several species in the mix, abused victimhood(s) and survivor potentialities manifest for both the human and nonhuman animals of the text. Brontë’s narrative moves into the ideas now found in posthumanism to explore how “there is no longer any good reason to take for granted” the “subject is automatically coterminous with the species distinction between Homo sapiens and everything” (Wolfe 1)—or every animal—else. In most novels of the Victorian age, “the construction of [the] family… mirrors the middle-class Victorian home, centered as it is around child and pet” (Flegel 2015: 1) who are the “cherished object of emotional investment” (Pearson 57). At Wuthering Heights, and even at Thrushcross Grange, children and pets are simultaneously or variously abused and petted but they are not cherished nor are the adults surrounding them emotionally invested in their survival. It is often the case that the “ventriloquization of human wants and needs” are communicated “through a mute animal” which complicates human and nonhuman relations but “also speak[s] to unequal and disempower positions occupied by humans” (Flegel 2015: 35), particularly children at risk in non-normative, abusive situations: orphans and unwanted children. Monica Flegel rightly points out in her Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015) that “the child’s class status played an important role in terms of negotiating their supposed proximity to the animal world, with lower-class waifs and strays linked to animals both in their capacity for savagery and their potential to be salvaged through domestication” (14). Wuthering Heights points to the falsity of the “ideological separation of the ideal of the peaceful domestic sphere and the eruption of brutality [that] is violated in the representation of pets” (Danahay 2016: 98) as well as in the abuse of both nonhuman animals and children. Ideological codes of domesticity and aggression were to be separate, not co-exist, within the sanctuary of hearth and home. Martin Danahay points out how New Women writers like Mona Caird later used an “elaborate simile between women and domesticated dogs” (100) while Lisa Surridge’s excellent argument makes clear the important parallels between violence against animals and the domestic violence inflicted upon women in the Victorian novel because by “developing the analogy between wives and pets, these novels drew attention to the connection between wife battery and women’s legal powerlessness, thus anticipating” the later legislation and an “understanding of spousal assault” (1994: 27). To follow the “next in line” idea, it is imperative to investigate—­ however fictionally—the abuse of both children and nonhuman animals that is rampant in Wuthering Heights. The patriarch, Mr. Earnshaw,

Animals and Children and Brontës  209 leaves for Liverpool where he promises to bring his 14-year old young son, Hindley, a fiddle, but at “hardly six years old, [Miss Cathy] could ride any horse in the stable, and she chose a whip” (E. Brontë 1847: 128) which gives the reader an indication of the varied personalities of the young children of the house. The disruption to the household occurs when he returns from a walk on which “he was nearly killed” in the “dark almost as if it came from the devil” bearing a live gift—“a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk—indeed its face looked older than ­Catherine’s—yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again, some gibberish that nobody could understand” (128–29). The reaction by the mother figure, Mrs. Earnshaw, it “to fling it out of doors; she did fly up—asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house” asking “what he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad?” (129). It is no matter that Earnshaw explains “it” was starving and homeless even after he “inquired for its owner” but not “a soul knew to whom it belonged” (129). There is a strong, relevant argument regarding the equation of children and animal association as well as waifs and strays who, whether loved or abused, if too closely associated in the lower classes, they “threaten proper domesticity through their ‘excess’ status because, as supplements to the domestic space, the stray child and pet threaten its sanctity and wholeness” (Flegel 2015: 162). While one can argue whether or not the domestic space of Brontë’s novel was ever sanctified or whole, it is clear that the orphan child is a disruptive influence that shifts the potentialities of blurring human and nonhuman boundaries. Othered and disdained from arrival, the family further gains ownership over the animal-like thing by naming him after a dead child— Heathcliff—a singular name that leaves him in a liminal space, with neither a name of his own nor a surname that makes him part of the family. Hated by Hindley, he was a “sullen, patient child; hardened, perhaps, to ill treatment: he would stand Hindley’s blows without winking or shedding a tear” while the servant narrator, Nelly Dean, admits that her own “pinched moved him only to draw in a breath” (130) since he remained as “uncomplaining as a lamb” (131). Mrs. Earnshaw sees the abuse, but “never put in a word on his behalf, when she saw him wronged” (130). The abdication of familial responsibility for one of its children—whether by orphan status, ward or birth—is, once again, blamed on the child victim because Heathcliff “[breeds] bad feeling in the house” (131). When Heathcliff bests Hindley over a pair of colts from the father, Hindley cries “Off dog!” then threatens him with an iron weight and promised more thrashings to follow; Nelly encourages Heathcliff to be deceitful and “lay the blame of his bruises on the horse” (132), a shameful expectation of a child of whom the adult should stand fast in defense.

210  Sarah E. Maier Cathy and Heathcliff are inseparable as Hindley becomes tyrannical forcing him into labor like a farm animal and the children to play on the moors where they “promised fair to grow up as rude as savages”; however, what he does not understand is that starving Cathy and flogging Heathcliff like disobedient, “unfriended creatures” (138) equates them with the mistreatment of the nonhuman animals under his care. Mr. Linton says as much when Cathy is hurt; the “absolute heathenism” of Cathy and the derogation of Heathcliff as “a little Lascar” (142) is telling since a Lascar might be a South-Asian or Arabian sailor or, more significantly, a working dog. Cathy later returns to the Heights to encounter Heathcliff who, at this point, is reminiscent of Rochester at the end of Jane Eyre with. His “clothes, which had seen three month’s service in mire and dust, and his thick uncombed hair; the surface of his face and hands was dismally beclouded” as he skulks in the background contrasted next to “the glossy coat of the new pony in the stable, and feeding the other beasts” (146–47) where he lives to avoid further abuse. Hindley becomes both “master” and Tyrant” who insists on “sobriety and silence” (111) and a sense of “right place” (113) from children and animals. When Master Linton sees him, he, too, comments Heathcliff’s hair is “like a colt’s mane” (151) to which he rebels. Hindley snatches him up and “administered a rough remedy to cool the fit of passion” after which he “reappeared red and breathless” (151) from the beating of Heathcliff. This act is the first of many to degrade the child Heathcliff as “worse than a brute” as Hindley becomes more “notable for [the] savage sullenness and ferocity” with which he treats the boychild. Hindley’s own child by the young Frances Earnshaw, Hareton, exists on the same level as the nonhuman animals with his “baby features” distorted “into a shocking expression of malignity” (203); he follows Nelly everywhere as he traverses the floor, sobbing which “[draws] her fury on to his unlucky head: she seize[s] his shoulders. And [shakes] him till the poor child waxe[s] livid” (163), reminiscent of the puppies hanged when unwanted or in the way. Each child is, on many occasions, reprimanded or branded as a nonhuman animal; rarely are the terms sympathetic and only unusually do they evoke positive ideals for behavior or kindness.10 Human and nonhuman animals at Wuthering Heights are treated in equally appalling fashion and are equated with Emily Brontë’s careful use of language. The equation of the two is perhaps best exemplified when the baby Hareton is declared an “unnatural cub” who “would be handsomer cropped” because Hindley declares “it makes a dog fiercer” (166) before he drops him off the landing over the rails. This comment makes clear that Hindley happily crops his dogs, perhaps to encourage their ferocity but more likely to make clear his sadistic dominance over them rather than see them as equal beings entitled to companionship. It worsens when Heathcliff returns after his unknown absent journey that sees him claim ownership of the Heights. He sees by the fire a “ruffianly

Animals and Children and Brontës  211 child, strong in limb, and dirty in garb” who sits beside Throttler, the “half-bred bull-dog” in “its lair in a corner” (231). It is made clear that neither dogs nor children are treated as pets or petted at Wuthering Heights. The children are uncared for and under constant threat of or the brunt of real violence. Even the dogs’ names, like Gnasher, Wolf, etc., are given to provoke fear in any who intrude on the wildly dysfunctional family. For example, the novel opens with an unwanted, uninvited, voyeuristic, and always passive guest, Mr. Lockwood. Although he tries the patience of the older Heathcliff, he is immediately put on silent notice by the presence of the dogs that are constrained under a dresser, one of which is a “huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies” while “other dogs haunted other recesses” (95). Men like the returned and recast misanthropic Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights cannot be made acceptable; although she is referencing Charles Dickens’s Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, Flegel points out they cannot “be tolerated as presences within a society that, by the mid-Victorian period, firmly structured masculinity around and toward domesticity” because they, and their dogs, “represent a savagery that cannot be subsumed within the middle-class version of domesticity and the concomitant versions of manhood being constructed” (2015: 119). The reader sees the danger of both the dogs and the rabid danger exuded by Heathcliff. Lockwood’s effeminate initial attempt at kindness to the mother dog is met with her “sneaking wolfishly to the back of [his]legs, her lip curled up, and her white teeth watering for a snatch” while she shows her fangs. His reactionary fear awakes the “half-adozen four-footed fiends, of various sizes, and ages” that come forward until Lockwood feels himself the subject of assault (97) by beasts that have “malignant masters” (107), again strong with the implication that the dogs themselves are maltreated and abused. The dogs are declared swine and “a brood of tigers” emulate the behavior they have received; Heathcliff admits that “Guests are so exceedingly rare in this house that I and my dogs, I am willing to own, hardly know how to receive them” (98). This unknowingness of civilized behavior is equally true of the human and nonhuman animals of Wuthering Heights. Mastery over his animals reminds Heathcliff of the mastery others have had over himself; he repeats a cycle of abuse over his animals and children, abuse that he endured as a child cast, like the dogs, as “not accustomed to be spoiled—not kept for a pet” (97). The result is that the abusive male behavior is paralleled by Cathy’s improper behavior. She is not the angel in the house, keeper of hearth and home. Cathy tears a pillow with her teeth; in another instance, “she lay, dashing her head against the arm of the sofa and grinding her teeth, so that you might fancy she would crush them to splinters. Mr. Linton stood looking at her in a sudden compunction and fear” (212).11 His astonishment at how Cathy physically acts

212  Sarah E. Maier out her anger mirrors the earlier incident with the female dog. Her behavior is far more frightening to Lockwood than Heathcliff’s f­ erocity— female behavior outside the proper normative convention leads men like Linton to see her as disruptive in that it refuses passivity. Again, abuse begets abuse. Even Mrs. Heathcliff, his daughter-in-law via his son Linton, is “scarcely past girlhood” (101) and is by the hearth, “like a child” or one of the dogs in a “pet” who is equated with what is misunderstood as cats by her side; rather, it is a “heap of dead rabbits” (101–2). Her demeanor “hovered between scorn and a kind of desperation, singularly unnatural to be detected there” (101) like a woman or nonhuman animal who is often victimized; certainly, when “Heathcliff lifted his hand” she “sprang to a safer distance, obviously acquainted with its weight” (122–23). Lockwood has “no desire to be entertained by a cat and dog combat” (123) and does not offer assistance to the young woman, nor to the animals living in such a state of fear. When Lockwood references the “misbehaviour of a pack of curs” (98), he makes a cross-species comment that pertains as much to the human as the nonhuman inhabitants of Wuthering Heights who are “[w]retched inmates!” who “deserve perpetual isolation from your species” (99). It is not the weather, or the physical decay that makes Wuthering Heights a torment. It is the cross-species violence and violence toward children makes it uninhabitable. The Brontë sisters’ own love of animals as part of their family gives them each a strong awareness of the potentialities for understanding humanity through the human-animal bond as well as the lessons that might be learned from the cruelty and inhumanity often shared by human and nonhuman beings. Neither should be treated as brutes nor beasts; rather, all beings should be help as unique exemplars of themselves. Their compassion for animals is met with the understanding of their deaths by their own animals Flossy and Keeper; Keeper “follow[ed] her funeral to the vault lying in the pew couched at our feet while the burial service was being read—and Anne’s little spaniel” Flossy “may look wistfully round for Anne” (C. Brontë 1849: 224) while Charlotte understands her new role as their fellow mourner, united in grief over the loss of their sisters.

Notes 1 Lucasta Miller dispels myths of Emily taking out her rage on her beloved dog that had been circulated by Gaskell (2002: 205), and the more recent look at Emily Brontë by Claire O’Callaghan rightly makes the case that the sadistic encounter where Emily is said to have beat Keeper in a “violent overreaction also sits counter to everything else we do know (for certain) about Emily and her relationship to animals” and her “deep sensitivity to animals and suffering” (2018: 111). 2 Lutz’s fascinating book makes the point that one of the “objects” that speaks to her of Emily’s personality and love of animals is Keeper’s collar, “an

Animals and Children and Brontës  213 inexpensive version of what most dogs of the time wore,” a “heavy metal collar” with an brass strip that “has been extended to its largest setting, in order to fit around a massive neck” (112). By way of contrast, Anne’s dog, Flossy, had a collar whose “brass has a high shine, while Keeper’s has scuffs, dents, and tears as if from numerous scuffles and adventures” (115) with both exemplary of their companions’ inclinations to inside or outside activities. 3 In order to improve the chances for success in their desire to create a school at the Parsonage, the two eldest sisters left England to learn French. At the time, Charlotte was 25 and Emily was 23. 4 See Antonia Losano (2014) for an excellent interpretation of material culture and “thingness” in Jane Eyre that combines things, attitudes, children, and animals. 5 According to the OED, a gytrash or a guytrash is “An apparition, spectre, ghost, generally taking the form of an animal.” Interestingly, the first reference the OED lists is from Jane Eyre. The term then appears in Reverend E. Cobham Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870) where it refers to “A north-of-England spirit, which, in the form of horse, mule or large dog, haunts solitary ways, and sometimes comes upon the belated travellers” (436) before it, too, quotes from Jane Eyre. 6 See Matthew 5:7. 7 See Proverbs 12:10. 8 I do not mean to infer that Matilda is a positive model of femininity only that she has at least an understanding of young beings; far from it such as when she relishes the chase of a hare for sport without concern for the animal’s suffering. 9 Monica Flegel comments on how an “animal’s muteness” can be used to advantage as the characters engage in “flirtation through the animal, relying on a species hierarch that renders the animal an object of use within human affective relations” (12). This argument is a strong one and equally valid for Anne Brontë’s two novels; Emily Brontë’s novel has one such instance that will be considered here. 10 For a very good, detailed discussion of this animal metaphor for the various characters in Wuthering Heights by Graeme Tytler (2002). 11 A thank you to Ayres for pointing out Cathy’s behaviors that replicate a cycle of abusive behavior.

Bibliography Anonymous. Kindness to Animals. Illustrated by Stories and Anecdotes. ­London: W. and R. Chambers, 1877. Ayres, Brenda. Introduction to Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, edited by Brenda Ayres, 1–22. New York and London: Routledge, 2019. Bentham, Jeremy. The Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1789. https://archive.org/details/anintroductiont01bentgoog/page/n7. Brewers, Rev. E. Cobham. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952[?]. https://archive.org/details/brewersdictionar 000544mbp/page/n5. Brontë, Anne. Agnes Grey. 1847. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Brontë, Charlotte. “Letter to W. S. Williams on 25 June 1849.” In The Letters of Charlotte Brontë Vol II, edited by Margaret Smith, 223–24. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

214  Sarah E. Maier Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. 1847. New York: Penguin, 1984. Brontë, Emily. “Le Chat.” In The Belgian Essays, edited and translated by Sue Lonoff, 56–58. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002. Chadwick, Ellis. In the Footsteps of the Brontës. London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons Ltd., 1914. https://archive.org/details/infootstepsofbro00chadrich/ page/n6. Cooper, Isabella. “The Sinister Menagerie: Animality and Antipathy in Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Studies 40, no. 3 (September 2015): 252–62. Danahay, Martin. “Nature Red in Hoof and Paw: Domestic Animals and Violence in Victorian Art.” In Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Martin Danahay and Deborah Denenholz Morse, 97–121. New York: Routledge, 2016. Flegel, Monica. Contextualizing Cruelty to Children in Nineteenth-century England: Literature, Representation, and the NSPCC. New York: Routledge, 2016. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. New York: Routledge, 2015. Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 1857. London: Penguin, 1985. Locke, John. Some Thoughts on Education. London: A. and F. Churchill, 1693. https://books.google.com/books?id=OCUCAAAAQAAJ. Lonoff, Sue. “Charlotte Brontë’s Belgian Essays: The Discourse of Empowerment.” Victorian Studies 32, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 387–490. Losano, Antonia. “Thing Jane: Objects and Animals in Jane Eyre.” Victorians Journal 125 (Spring 2014): 51–75. Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë Cabinet. New York: Norton, 2015. McKechnie, Claire Charlotte, and Miller, John. “Victorian Animals: Introduction.” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 5 (December 2012): 436–41. Mitchell, William John Thomas. “Foreword: The Rights of Things.” In Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, edited by Cary Wolfe, ix–xiv. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Vintage, 2002. O’Callaghan, Claire. Emily Brontë Reappraised: A View from the Twenty-first Century. Salford: Saraband, 2018. Pearson, Susan. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Golden Age America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Surridge, Lisa. “Dogs’/Bodies, Women’s Bodies: Wives as Pets in Mid-­ Nineteenth-century Narratives of Domestic Violence.” Victorian Review 20, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 1–34. Tytler, Graeme. “Animals in Wuthering Heights.” Bronte Studies 27, no. 2 (July 2002) 121–30. Wordsworth, William. “My Heart Leaps Up.” 1807. www.bl.uk/collection-items/ manuscript-of-my-heart-leaps-up-when-i-behold-by-wordsworth.

12 Children, Animals, and the Fantasies of the Circus Susan Nance

In the nineteenth century, circuses were culturally and materially challenging—­dangerous even—since they presented to the public unconventional people and lifestyles, and because so often things went terribly wrong. At three-ring show, one might find women in pink tights and heavy makeup displaying their bodies in provocatively acrobatic poses while just a few feet away a trained tiger abandoned his mark to chase his trainer. Consequently, many people understood circus entertainment to be an adult entertainment. Children saw it differently, of course, and were fixtures among visitors to the show on circus day. Equally, circus impresarios knew that their job was to sell tickets to the broadest possible audience, especially families. Thus, unlike the acrobats, clowns, and other human staples of circus shows, many companies specifically marketed their animal presentations as educational and child oriented. That patter was mostly window dressing designed to deflect criticism from clergy and other social authorities. Certainly, parents and many people in publishing and toy manufacturing suspected that children held their own, sometimes subversive, views of circus life and circus animals. Children found animals of the circus in three venues, broadly speaking: live shows, circus products for sale at the show, and spin-off items depicting animals of the circus but produced independently of the circus companies. Collectively these forms offered messages about humanity’s privilege—especially white humanity’s privilege—in making use of animals and the global environment in self-interested and, we now know, environmentally naïve ways. Circus presentations of captive animals schooled children in a culture of consumption and exploitation that told them that, as citizens of great nations, it was their right to expect more. Circus ventures operated in societies ignorant of animal ethology or the science of extinction and reliant upon a false belief that there was an endless bounty of wild and exotic animals to capture and manipulate in whatever way one wished (Barrow 2009). Circuses also falsely told children that animals were improved by human control, that captivity was a sort of charity to them. Essentially, this was a biopolitics of human

216  Susan Nance supremacy, and it blossomed that century and the next, in part, due to traveling animal menageries and circuses.1 This essay explores those messages as conveyed by American circuses, which toured in the United States, Canada, Britain, and continental Europe. It additionally raises a question that is more difficult to answer, namely, beyond the prescribed and scripted messages adults may have intended, what did animals at the circus show and tell children? The nature of that communication is difficult to know, first, because firsthand testimony by nineteenth-century children about what they saw at circuses or how they understood representations of circus animals in popular culture is essentially unknown. Equally, the agency of animals in circuses was circumscribed by their human handlers. Held in confinement in socially deprived management systems with little opportunity to practice species-typical behaviors, the animals people saw at the circus were a shadow of their kin at large in Asia, Africa, or North America. Employing a posthumanist approach informed by animal welfare science, those conditions as central to the story of what circus animals communicated, unknowingly, to children, and how adults sought to shape and give meaning to those communications. 2 Historians of the circus certainly discuss children as audience members and the moral panics that sometimes dogged circus shows that parents or clergy deemed too adult for child patrons.3 Yet, they do not explain or examine the historical record for signs of the circuses’ captive animals as living, historically contingent beings. These animals had agency, to be sure, but no power since unable to comprehend or collectively counter human measures that kept them captive. Hence, what children knew of these beings was not a product of some kind of pure, unmediated, one-on-one interaction. Nor was it an observation of those animals autonomous at large in their natural habitats. Instead, children saw these animals constrained by the staging of circus trainers or by the generally deprived nature of circus captivity, which divorced them from their kin and ability to practice species-typical behaviors. Thus, the circuses served as a training ground for children’s internalization of what scholar Erica Fudge calls the misrecognition and misinterpretation of animals, their needs, and behavior (2002: 25–27). In societies reliant politically, religiously, and materially on animal exploitation, the intersection of animal behavior and circus practice produced spectacles that justified further captivity, even if children had their own ideas about how that captivity might or should take place. Circuses were an early form of globalized entertainment that developed out of age-old traditions of live shows presenting acrobats, jugglers, trick horse riders, and other human performers, some offering a few trained domesticated animals. Beginning in the eighteenth century, European exploration and colonization of other regions of the world made it possible to bring a steady supply of wild and exotic animals into Europe

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  217 and the United States. Many of these animals did not survive for long but became central to first the traveling menageries, an early precursor of the city zoo and the modern circus. Highly mobile, they might bring a single elephant, plus a series of horse-drawn crates containing wild animals, foreign and domestic. In the United States, by mid-century, those companies had been put out of business by traveling circuses, which appropriated displays of both trained and untrained animals. By the 1880s, a few American circuses had become so large, they offered dozens of different kinds of animals and enormous, logically sophisticated productions no other nation could match. They would begin touring in Europe as well as North America, where they competed against local circus productions likewise featuring trained and untrained animals. Initially, people encountered animal exhibitions and menageries marketed variously as an exotic novelty and a moral lesson in the amazing diversity of God’s creation, amusing and educational at the same time. In 1790s Salem, local minister William Bentley had already reported visiting a surprising range exhibitions that billed their captives as natural curiosities and vehicles for considering the wonder of God’s creation: bison, an alligator, a young moose, a juvenile “Catamount” (a North American cougar), castrated ostensibly to make him more docile, and various other large cats, including a leopard and a tiger (1905: 2:34, 247, 356–57). At the turn of the nineteenth century, Americans noted the experimental nature of such animal shows, whose entrepreneurial exhibitors might also include a calf with more than four legs, side by side with imported monkeys, camels, lions, and wild animals from the fringes of Euro-American settlement.4 A steady rumble of patriotic background noise accompanied those animal shows since exhibitors linked show-­ going to national identity and worldliness by routinely reminding audiences that they were seeing the first of this or that kind of animal in their town or “in America.” The welfare of the animals at these shows was routinely terrible, and customers often grumbled that the beings they saw on display appeared unwell, frightened, or depressed. Bentley was himself disappointed by an animal display at Boston’s Bowen’s Museum where he found, “a bear sleeping & slumbering with an insolent contempt of every visitor. A Baboon, more fond of entertaining his guests, an affronted porcupine, & two owls who gave us no share of their notice” (2:261). His experience was typical of what people saw when they walked down to a menagerie or happened upon one traveling on the road wherein the animals might or might not be prepared to engage with visitors. Of course, the men who made up the handbills and fence-broadsides depicted the animals of the exhibition drawn standing free of chains or cages looking perky and healthy. In person, they often provided merely lethargic critters in a barn or box, who clearly did not know or care that ticket buyers craved to look them in the eye, feed, or pet them.

218  Susan Nance A half-century later, equestrian circuses and traveling menageries had merged into the combined circuses that soon would feature three-ring shows put up in mobile tents. The Raymond & Waring Company was like many that understood citizens might still complain that a spectacle of trained or caged animals was immoral. When they showed at New York’s Niblo’s Garden in 1846, they advertised their show with patter that tied together the older curiosity exhibit mode of presentation, the Bible, and the progress of nations: In the beginning of the world, as we are taught by the Holy Scriptures, God said unto man, “And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I surrender to thee control; and thou shalt have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowls of the air, and over every thing that moveth upon the earth, shalt thou have dominion.” When this power and dominion was given by the Almighty to man, it was intended by his wisdom that he unto whom he had confided so much should become acquainted and familiar with the subjects over which he should exercise his rule. Hence it became necessary that man should study the history of animated nature, make himself master of a science on which his own happiness depended, …England, France, Italy, Germany—in fact all modern Europe—have, for centuries back, paid unremitting attention to this subject: and that nation in Europe which has not its Natural Historical Institute is regarded as on the backward course that leads, in the end, to semi-barbaric ignorance and folly. Admittance, 25 cents.5 (quoted in Nance 2013: 63–64.) Raymond & Waring suggested that visitors symbolically enact their God-given “dominion” over other species by paying to see a menagerie. These kinds of marketing appeals insisted that there was much at stake since citizens who improved themselves morally made the nation wealthier and more secure by avoiding the “backward course” that led to “semi-barbaric ignorance and folly,” in some parts of Europe ostensibly.6 Certainly, many observers snickered about that appeal. Most understood that animal shows were not spiritual outreach, but money-making operations grounded in curiosity and spectacle. In any event, children loved these productions and families were common there, whether for education and spiritual uplift or not. Unknowingly, the depressed, sick, or frightened beings people saw in those productions may have encouraged the idea that animals should be captive to humankind since improved by it, and that that ostensible improvement justified human control. A generation later, a number of dominant ventures like the Dan Rice Circus, Sands and Lent Company, John Robinson’s Circus, and the various ventures run by William Coup

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  219 and P. T. Barnum had prospered by monopolizing markets and purchasing rivals. Travelling by train with hundreds of logistical staff members, performers, horses, trained and captive animals, they were the largest entertainment companies people had ever seen.7 Life was still grim for many of the animals in their collections. The year Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” acquired the famous African elephant Jumbo from the London Zoo, one circus publicist wrote in Harper’s Monthly about what he found at the company’s expansive winter quarters: In one of the rooms, about one hundred feet square, are ranged twenty elephants, nearly all moving about in the restless manner so peculiar to them…. Nearly all the animals have a characteristic motion. The elephants move their heads in and out, from side to side, with a kind of figure of 8 movement; the sloth-bear jumps straight up and down; tigers and lions jump over each other in quick succession, as you may have seen the acrobats do in the show; foxes “weave” in and out with a snake-like movement, and so on. (“Barnum’s Show” 1882) Many circus press agents, circus fans, and some circus workers accepted the swaying of the elephants as a “characteristic,” if curious, elephant behavior. “We call it ‘weaving,’” said one of the elephant trainers for Barnum & Bailey shows to the press agent that day in 1882, noting how knowledge of the phenomenon had become a basic element of circus subculture. Today known as stereotypy or abnormal repetitive behavior (with terminology dependent on the scholar and his or her theory of what is happening in the brains of such animals), such activity is explained as a “repetitive, unvarying behaviour with no obvious goal or function” (Mason 2006: 325). In other kinds of animals, stereotypies include cage pacing, chronic grooming or chewing, repeated jumping or tumbling, actions which the press and menagerie and circus customers had been noting for decades. Over the last 35 years, animal welfare science researchers investigating the phenomenon have argued that stereotypic behaviors help animals cope with the stress of confinement by reducing the anxiety caused by an inability to practice species-typical and strongly motivated in-born behaviors. Although the complete mechanism behind this phenomenon is not fully documented, today it is known to correlate with suppressed immune systems, unpredictable aggression, and often, early death.8 In the nineteenth century, few people visiting a traveling menagerie or, later, a combined circus featuring trained or caged animals would have understood those animal actions as highly visible indicators of underfunded management programs they were. Nonetheless, many animals unknowingly revealed that they were subject to training regimes employing intimidation and punishment, poor diet, social deprivation,

220  Susan Nance or lack of veterinary care and proper exercise, even if the kids and adults who witnessed those signs were trained by circuses and menageries to misunderstand what they meant. Is it any wonder, then, that when visitors saw some of these physiologically and psychologically deprived creatures that they found their habits seemed to be so pointless and mechanical yet, when trained and performing for an audience in the ring, seemingly improved and reformed by human tutelage? And there was plenty of training afoot. To innovate their entertainment offerings in a competitive market, menagerie and, later, circus men trained various species for a broad array of tricks. Some of those saw the trainer and animal cooperating, and told audiences those creatures had a theatrical, humorous nature. The Macomber & Company menagerie used the young bull elephant Mogul to deliver such impressions to their customers and make a claim for the uniqueness of their entertainment offerings. Mogul was incredible among elephants in the United States because he “surpasses all others in magnitude and strength” while “more gentle and tractable,” Mogul’s newspaper publicity insisted (“The Elephant” 1835: 1). Warning Americans not to miss out on a show that was a defining cultural event of the moment, Mogul’s advertising challenged readers: “His performances would scarcely be credited, were they not daily witnessed by hundreds” (1). Mogul’s act had him, in effect, impersonating a dog: “He caresses his master in his best manner, and will not so readily obey another person. He knows his voice and can distinguish between the terms of command, of commendation and of anger. He received orders with attention, and executes them cheerfully, though with great deliberation. All his motions are grave, majestic, regular and cautions, partaking in character somewhat of the gravity of his body” (1). For a dog to perform these movements would not have been so novel, but Mogul’s size gave the show a sensational element and, in effect, asserted it was possible to domesticate a wild-born elephant. Trainers working for the Macomber circus further trained Mogul to perform acts that were legitimately dangerous but, when performed without anyone being injured, conveyed the idea that the elephant chose to live peacefully with humans. The commercial gossip framing Mogul explained that his love of show business was evident in his demonstrations of nimble and careful manipulation of his own body, one reporter said, He kneels on either side, raises his master to his back with his trunk or tusks as directed; reclines at length in the ring, or walks over the prostrate body of the keeper at the proper bidding. This last scene is one of the most impressive we have ever witnessed. From the situation of his eyes, he cannot see his fore feet, and calculate the distance to the object over which he is to pass without injury; so he carefully

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  221 measures the space back and forth with this trunk, then divides the distance so accurately that the last step before reaching the body is just near enough to afford him opportunity, with a long stride, to accomplish his feat to the wonder of every beholder. All this is done with so much care and wisdom, that it would seem to proceed from a higher impulse than that of mere animal instinct. (1; my emphasis) Here the interest, for adults and children, was in the contrast between the elephant’s great power and the gentleness and discipline manifested in his behavior by human tutelage. Mogul and other powerful animals employed in similar acts in which they cooperated with and did not harm a human performer were what Harriet Ritvo has identified as “sagacious” animal characters, beings who are imagined to understand human goals and seek to serve them. and seek to people imagine intelligent and powerful beings who sought human masters (1987: 25–26, 37). Undoubtedly, the sight must additionally have inspired a plain sense of “how did they get the elephant to do that?!” for children in the audience who looked in wonder on animal trainers who could apparently communicate with such a strange and powerful being. Moreover, in societies whose members imagined “domestication as a virtue,” Mogul and similarly trained animals, be they zebras, horses, dogs, or bears, were transformed from wild, supposedly irrational animals into consumer-friendly individuals with human friends and desire to entertain Americans (Ayres 2019: 21). As a contrast to such friendly animal acts, the menageries often presented big cats and other wild predators in ways that encouraged children and adults to perceive those wild animals as sworn enemies of mankind, no matter how long in captivity. Initially the form had menageries presenting tigers, lions, leopards, and cougars in large traveling cages on wheels, and warning visitors not to reach a hand inside between the bars. Later in the century, big cats appeared in “fighting” shows inside a round cage in the ring. A human performer would incite these cats to appear ferocious by inserting whips or other objects through the bars of the cage. Other performers like famous big cat man Isaac VanAmburgh actually entered the cage to “deliberately violate [a cat’s] personal area—the ‘flight distance’ or space that it needs for any escape in order to provoke a violent response” (Stokes 2004: 145). The point of a big cat act was to have the huge felines apparently threatening the trainer and, by extension, the audience. Advertising materials and show patter often called leopards, tigers, and lions “ferocious” or “wild,” wherein “the primary emphasis was on the man’s fearlessness, not the animals’ cleverness” (Joys 1983: 1, 11, 17–21; Stokes 2004: 140). As with the cage-free acts that offered animals as domesticated and sagacious friends, equally these shows of apparent animal aggression held

222  Susan Nance the same underlying message that animal behavior needed to be shaped and controlled by humanity. As the circuses competed for variety and novelty over the century, people would direct captive animals in an expanding repertoire of fantastic action that came to include comedic and acrobatic acts that appealed specifically to kids and straddled the fuzzy divide between education and entertainment. These were spectacles that asserted a citizen’s right to be a consumer of animals and the exotic, while functioning as children’s morality tales in a kind of performed animal fable. A common act in this genre was the apple and fork trick, which capitalized on the dexterity of an elephant’s trunk but told a story about the need for proper table manners, among other things. The act had a clown and a decorated elephant apparently eating together at a table set for a meal with dishes, cutlery, and food, including apples and bread. The elephant’s part was to sit at the table by “squatting on his haunches” and eat the apples on the table using a large fork bearing two prongs held with the trunk (Haney 1869: 123). Trainers in this formulation proposed that they had removed an elephant from his unrefined state much as parents and school teachers sought to do by educating children or industrious citizens sought to do by going to lyceum lectures or Sunday church service.9 Circus producers and animal trainers would thereafter tackle the artistic issue of how to create a beginning, middle and end to stories built around trained animal behaviors structured as comedic but moral narratives about cleverness, pride, or patience. In such formulations employing elephants, the animal could be a trickster seen apparently outsmarting the clown with his back turned by emptying an apparent wine bottle brought by another clown dressed as a waiter, a bottle that actually contained a molasses and water mixture. Other gags had the elephant making a buffoon of the clown by appearing to put on airs and ringing a bell to summon the clown waiter, or stealing the clown’s food then fanning herself with a paper fan held in the trunk so as to appear satirically innocent.10 Humor was a very powerful means for engaging audiences and had the effect of making more palatable and natural the underlying premise of these bits, namely that the animal actor affirmed human privilege and the right of entertainment companies to own and display exotic animals. For instance, a bit known as “Ringing the Bell” was a circus standard. Circus historian John Kunzog described Ringing the Bell as performed in the 1850s by circus impresario Dan Rice with “Old Put,” (1961: 116– 17), a probable Indian Rhinoceros (Reynolds 1968: 12–13): Rice made his entrance followed at a distance of ten feet by the rhinoceros, heavily shackled and led by an attendant. The chains were removed as the animal entered the ring. A pair of platform stairs, three steps in height, were placed in the ring which “old Put”

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  223

Figure 12.1  A table manners routine that involved ringing of bells, imagined here with a trained monkey and mule for a children’s book depicting an American show in Britain. “Wonderful Trained Donkeys and Monkeys” by Dudley Hardy in Barnum’s Great Show: The Only Toy Book (London: Dean and Son, 1888), 8.

would ascend and standing at the top would let out a deafening bellow when Rice asked: “Did I train you to obey my commands?” While the animal stood on the platform Rice lighted some red fire inside a small paper house. “Fire,” he yelled, “ring the bell.” At which command the animal clambered down from the steps, ran to a rod on which hung a swinging bell and would toll it with his horn. This alarm brought out the clown fire department riding in a pig-drawn cart. (Kunzog 116–17) There was a distinctly anthropocentric sense of the absurd in such an act in which an animal—rhinoceros or otherwise—awkwardly performed such human-oriented tasks only to alert clowns in a vehicle drawn by pigs. The bit must have had multiple meanings. On the face of it, the routine satirized the allegedly undisciplined fire companies of the nineteenth century, just as likely to loot a burning house as put out the fire within it.

224  Susan Nance It essentially displayed the anthropocentric judgment that other species would never seriously approach the assumed perfection of the human form and mind, so serving “the human need for animals to prove [the viewer’s] humanity” (Knowles 2004: 140).11 The animal who performed human behaviors—regardless of all the incredulous-sounding menagerie marketing talk about animal sagacity, grandeur and power—emulated humans awkwardly. He or she was only extraordinary because not evaluated primarily for his or her own nature. Setting human abilities as normative and most highly developed, such animal acts of human-styled behaviors must have endeared these animal performers to audiences, although assuring the viewer that they would never really measure up to humankind. Such shows additionally painted trained animal behaviors with human stories and meanings that told viewers exactly how to misinterpret and misrecognize them (Fudge 25–27). The tiger who bared his teeth and swatted the air was perhaps more afraid and tired than angry or inherently violent, which the elephant who stole and drank the molasses water from the wine bottle perhaps had had water withheld for some hours before the show, so was thirsty rather than a thief. From the very beginning, there were detractors. Some worried animals were being forced to perform dangerous stunts against their wills such that animal tricks were a crass manipulation of public sentiment for profit. By and large, nineteenth-century Americans and Britons would troop enthusiastically to the shows because they believed God had given man power over the natural world to exploit as he saw fit. A narrative emerged in the nineteenth century (and animal exhibitions still employ it today) that all circus animal training was done by “kindness,” that is by repetition of command for particular behavior, which the trainer rewarded with food or pats and affection. By this argument, all that was required to get a monkey to ride a pony, for instance, was practice, praise, and pile of apples. Audiences loved this flattering and familiar idea since they might train a pet dog to shake a paw just so, and it helped to recast wild and exotic animal captivity as a kind of animal “education” and improvement. From the showman’s perspective, the idea of “kindness” training edited out the ugly logistical realities of working with animals, many of whom weighed hundreds or thousands of pounds, wielded claws and powerful jaws full of sharp teeth, and became increasingly unpredictable or outright aggressive as they entered adulthood. Formally, circus shows and their marketing materials ignored that reality. Circus Day was a day to celebrate, especially in smaller communities where people often left work early or took children out of school or away from their chores to attend, and certainly facilitated some spending by and for kids. Hence, circus broadside posters, handbills, and branded merchandise like children’s books for sale at the show did not depict

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  225 circus animal training but instead well-known sources of fun that veiled any didactic function people imagined they had in whimsy.12 Indeed, there was heavy overlap between circus-commissioned merchandise and the small but growing children’s literature and toy market of the second half of the century. And, children had a modest but increasing role as direct consumers, not just recipients of products handed down or chosen by parents to reflected adult perceptions of the nature of children.13 For artists, authors, designers, publishers, and manufacturers, the menagerie and circus genre was a dependable one to which to turn and allowed for colorful graphics and designs. Circuses and for-profit publishers additionally produced books in the circus menagerie genre, which offered more idealized representations of animals in a combination of natural or overseas settings and circus performance. A series of pages depicting animals in their natural habitat (kangaroos in Australia, seals in the arctic with an Inuit hunter approaching, a tiger with teeth bared striding through jungle cover) might be followed by circus scenes (monkeys, rabbits, cats, and owls having a party inside a large zoo enclosure, or a scene of a human clown and a bear dancing in a circus ring before a crowd). With large, colorful illustrations, sparse text, and depictions of children as patrons of the circus, these publications were aimed at ­children—or perhaps more correctly, their parents, or at least were broadly construed enough not to alienate any particular customer.14 The children’s literature market was diverse, though, and it is there that we see hints that, perhaps, not all children or parents were entirely susceptible to the misrecognition and misinterpretation of animal behavior the circuses encouraged. The issue of how humans treated animals was a controversy that many deemed too trivial for the front page of the newspaper or congressional debate but surfaced in public life in the juvenile press. There, it reflected a segment of public opinion that was growing increasingly critical of circuses, many of whose trainers and customers seemed to relish intimidating animals. To be sure, these children’s publications carried stories and other content that acknowledged the destructive power of wild animals. Yet, they celebrated the admirable and helpful behavior of the animal who, “received kind treatment from his keeper,” as Godey’s Ladies Book told it (“Anecdotes” 1855: 300). At the same time, they carried representations of whipping, breaking, or otherwise violent challenges to big cats, bears, or elephants to explain what went on behind the scenes as circus staff, unbeknownst to many well-meaning circus patrons, routinely coped with animals who became “unruly.” Such accounts claimed animal trainers engaged in direct confrontations with animals in which they could not take “no” for an answer from a captive beast. The public nature of this information would provoke the circuses’ critics and expose the long-term rift between, on the one hand, circus people and their (mostly working-class) customers versus, on the other, worried middle and upper-class members of the public.

226  Susan Nance What did children make of these debates? Did they have questions about how circus animal training got done or why some circus animals looked the way they did? Since they did not publish any first-hand accounts, these questions are difficult to know with certainty. Still, we should assume that children held a range of attitudes and, certainly, authors of the children’s press seemed to think so. For instance, the children’s magazine Harper’s Young People weighed in on a newspaper debate over circus elephant management that was afoot on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1880s with textual and graphic depictions of life in the circus that carried contradictory messages to appeal to a broader range of readers. The nature of elephant management by the circuses was of great public interest that decade since circus elephant herds had expanded to as many as 20 elephants in a single production as the largest companies competed for notoriety, press coverage, and ticket sales.15 Editors at Harper’s Young People intervened with a graphic illustration of the process of breaking an elephant resisting human control and direction entitled “Training Elephants.”16 The magazine’s staff no doubt formally intended their illustration of an elephant being subdued to serve as a cautionary tale, striving to engage young readers as aspiring advocates for animal use reform. Indeed, the villain of the montage is a hookand-pointed stake-wielding male trainer, who scowls in every frame. Moreover, the illustration appeared with no real explanation save juxtaposition with a page offering a boostering article about the famed African elephant Jumbo, recently arrived in the country, and his relationship with his dedicated handler, Matthew Scott.17 On its own, the Scott story may have made sense to readers or their parents because of the “domestic ethic of kindness” of the period, a middle-class and children’s literature subculture of teaching young people good manners and respect for living things by instructing them to gently care for pets and other small animals (Grier 2006: 135). Many middling and elite Americans espoused the ethic as they were critical of the ways the profit motive shaped human uses of animals, and for whom “the American home became defined as the one place where beings are cared for regardless of their economic value” (Mason 2005: 13). Similar developments facilitated people’s colloquial and commercial sentimentalization of animals in novels, magazines, and advertising that served to make use of them, or their images at least, to tell human stories that assured young and old alike that humankind was a benign steward of animal life.18 In fact, the front cover of the magazine that June presented a line drawing of a young girl feeding a bird from her hand. The image conveyed the dominant culture of the magazine espousing maternal care and gentle interactions with other species so that children would learn to have sympathy for the suffering of others, human and nonhuman. Such animal narratives were a tried and true mode of progressive literature with deep roots in American culture that advocated for “kindness gendered female, yet it is something boys can learn” (Parris 2003: 40).

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  227

Figure 12.2   “Subduing an Unruly Elephant” with manacles, ropes, hooks, sharpened stakes, and men. Harper’s Young People, An Illustrated Weekly (1885).

Thus, perhaps the depiction of an elephant beaten may have functioned as a kind of Victorian adventure story aimed at boys. This was a broad genre that emphasized personal triumph, rags to riches transformations, and acts of bravery through which young readers could imagine themselves pursuing wild animals, visiting foreign lands, or

228  Susan Nance exploring the American West. Within this body of literature and illustration were plenty of hunting tales providing daring tales of English or American men who felled bull elephants in Asia or Africa.19 They usually appeared in a familiar narrative structure in which a white man aided by non-white guides tracked and confronted any number of animals. The authors of such tales added suspense by describing the event as a perilous struggle in which the hunter is triumphant because brave and intelligent—just like the circus tamer of wild animals. After making his shot, he witnesses the melodramatic death of his prey, who thrash, struggle, bleed, trumpet, roar, strike out at their attackers with claws, tusks or trunks before issuing a dramatic “last breath.”20 In the circus context, such tales of behind the scenes confrontations with captive animals were a corollary to the fighting shows in the ring, while portraying wild animals as essentially irrational and subject to simplistic mental processes that boiled down to obedience or irrational violence. Although in the Harper’s Young People illustration the trainer is cast as a villain by his countenance, subversive readings of the story must have occurred, allowing many readers—largely boys presumably—to vicariously participate in “Subduing an Unruly Elephant” and dominate an angry animal who is ultimately “Conquered” by man. In both hunting tales and story of an elephant subdued, the male protagonist is only so powerful as the virile creature he defeats (Scholtmeijer 1993: 69). The popular commercial representations of the drama of breaking elephants may only have heightened the public idea that circuses were dangerous to boys, who, parents worried, were already tempted to try at home the acrobatic and trick horse riding acts they saw in the ring or on the advertising (Carlyon 2004: 60). Those parents may have had a point in that the circuses published many spin-off magazines, pamphlets and books that were at once hunting tale, naturalist’s account, and circus promotion. P. T. Barnum would release many such books, carrying titles like Lion Jack: A Story of Perilous Adventures among Wild Men and the Capturing of Wild Beasts; Showing How Menageries are Made that presented the acquisition of circus animals as a youthful male adventure. 21 Typical of children’s literature that waded into political debates over the nature of circus animal captivity was an 1884 fictionalized short story for children by John Corvell, “The Romance of a Menagerie,” which appeared in St. Nicholas, “An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks.” Aiming to persuade children against the idea that all wild animals were inherently vicious enemies of humanity, the piece combined a moral lesson with the opinion that circus and menagerie trainers were cruel, ignorant men out for profit. It told the story of a Barnum & Bailey elephant. “Queen is an elephant in a menagerie,” Corvell wrote and added: “How she did hate the trainer! And how much more fiercely she hated her keeper! If it had not been for the sharp-pointed iron prod, of which she was mortally afraid, she would have soon shown the puny

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  229 human beings, who made her do such absurd things in the circus ring, that an elephant was above such antics” (1884: 933). The narrative allowed some vicarious revenge and attempted to explain why elephants harmed humans when they did. It explained that one day Queen picked the keeper up and threw him against a wall out of frustration although she knew she would be punished for it. These circus critics held that the answer to an elephant’s inability to cope peacefully with the confinement and training regimes of these entertainment companies was not punishment, but sympathy. It was also a suggestion about how to recognize and understand animal resistance to training and captivity for what it was: not an unruly defiance of rightful human power, necessarily, but a rejection of unjust exercise of power in unkind treatment by people who abused their power. For some observers, performing animals on stage or in the circus ring seemed exploited especially since not in a position to fully understand the production they enabled and thus unable to give informed consent to participation (Ridout 2004: 60). For child readers, the concept put the menagerie elephant into a sentimental paradigm used by many youth-­ oriented narratives whose characters spoke in the voices of animals in order to voice proposed feelings and experience that many parents may have hoped would encourage young people to sympathize with the sentience of other beings (Parris 32–33). It also pointed readers to the progressive philosophy that interpreted the circus workers’ punishment and painful training of animals as confirmation that animal cruelty, class difference, and capitalism were interdependent. 22 The circus trainer who terrorized his captives to drive the circus toward profitability, or at least who spoke openly to the press about hooking elephants or whipping the tigers, seemed to defy people who judged the circuses to be both cruel and unproductive for citizens. He was not a sympathetic voice who portrayed his captive as wild animal friends, but a masculine advocate for manly control of beasts. The animals held by circuses were sentient and capable of responding to circus managers and trainers so as to survive for periods of months or years; yet, possessing no human understanding of the cultures that built and organized those ventures, they had no real power to challenge their captivity in an organized or lasting manner. All the while, many circus patrons, adult and child, misunderstood the animal behaviors they were seeing at the shows. Circus people banked on that fact. Day after day, year after year, most captive animals acquiesced to human direction by performing on cue. Most refrained from overpowering the circus staff and running away. Circuses had long told adults and children alike that to see such spectacles and participate in the capturing and viewing of exotic and wild animals was their God-given right—recall how Macomber & Company advertised their elephant, Mogul. Later, as the U.S. became more

230  Susan Nance globally prominent, some circuses also told audiences it was a patriotic right. For instance, when impresario P. T. Barnum purchased the male African elephant, Jumbo, from the London Zoo (which was struggling to cope with the elephant’s health problems and destructive behavior), the elephant’s arrival in New York in April of 1881 was a moment many journalists and citizens saw as a sign of American public’s right to have privileged access to whatever the world contained. Britons had been outraged that the elephant, known as the “children’s pet” at the Zoo, was being sold off to an American company. In a widely republished telegram to the editor of the London Telegraph, Barnum insisted the elephant was a right owed to “Fifty-one millions American citizens [for whom] my 40 years’ invariable practice of exhibiting best that money could procure makes Jumbo’s presence here imperative” (“Barnum and His Elephant” 1882). Barnum’s bombastically claimed to spare no expense to flatter his fellow citizens with the most gigantic land animal on earth as a public service as much as his own profit. In effect, Barnum’s advertising told consumers, including kids: Expect more. You deserve it. After Jumbo was killed by the impact of a train in St. Thomas, Ontario in 1882, people looked for ways to remember him as a docile pet, not the increasingly dangerous circus captive he was. Most obvious here were the many Jumbo-styled toys that began to circulate in the 1880s. They included plush toys, rolling coin banks, paper dolls, tinker toys, and more in the shape of an elephant bearing the name “Jumbo” on his side. Parents expressed their own custodial attitudes toward children through gifts of stuffed toys featuring “sign stimuli most appropriate for releasing nurturing behavior in adults,” as the psychologists would explain it, that is, by projecting onto animal-model toys their own feelings toward the children they knew. 23 Still, whether parents, children, or even toy designers drove the remaking of Jumbo and other wild animals into plush and neotenous miniatures is not entirely clear. Yet their ubiquity is indicative of a dramatic shift in attitudes toward wild animals that took place in the last decades of the nineteenth century. As Donna Varga explains, earlier in the century wild and exotic animals were represented as dangerous and in need of control (or extermination), but by the later decades of the century, toys and children’s stories portrayed many wild and exotic animals as admirable due to their similarity to people (2009: 195–99). Here the cultures of parenting and childhood, the business of toy manufacturing, and consumer ideas about non-­domesticated animals converged, bringing infantilized animal forms into countless households and young imaginations. It would not be until late nineteenth century that the “ran away and joined a circus” genre of children’s literature appeared, giving hope to kids stuck in untenable situations or just irritated with parents and teachers on any given day. In these tales, animal characters served as confederates in countering cruel adults in the circus, typically an abusive animal trainer or impresario.24 But they, too, papered over the dangerous

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  231

Figure 12.3  Jumbo elephant toy, dog, and children at tea party. Ellen Cyr, A Children’s Primer, 1892.

reality of circus animals, presenting them in a consumer-oriented guise that told kids wild and exotic animals could be “pets” and “friends.” In the meantime, Ellen Cyr’s ubiquitous and profitable The Children’s Primer, first published in 1891, gives us a sense of how children and parents may have imagined appropriate ways of playing with Jumbo toys and expressing ideas about the utility of wild and exotic animals to

232  Susan Nance humankind. In an era in which the majority of authors for young children’s textbooks were women, Cyr was one of many who designed her volume to appeal to children by reflecting an intersection of white Protestant, middle-class women’s and children’s household cultures.25 Cyr’s classic primer presented a toy Jumbo the elephant, not imprisoned in a bird cage or tied to a stake in the yard but seated at the table along with Rover and the girls (1894: 72–73). In this portrayal of an imaginative tea party, sensible and kind children showed their internalization of the “domestic ethic of kindness” toward animals and a supreme, parental role toward other species by imagining a stuffed Jumbo (and other animal representations) as morally significant family member (Grier 2006: 127–29). Here was a creature that was at once a wild animal and consumer product, distilled into an inexpensive object that could hurt no one and would never age or die. Here was a way to instill in children with innocently custodial attitudes toward the natural world that celebrated the consumer experience and papered over the animal welfare and environmental costs of the growing consumer economy. Even if people argued about the nature of animal training and man’s duty to treat animals with “kindness,” here was something about which most people agreed: The citizens of industrializing nations had a right to take and use animals for their own amusement or gain. The common human supremacist cultures at large in the industrializing world allowed for the violent domination of some species and the infantilization of others by minimization of animals’ unique capacities for autonomous survival. Circuses were accessible to urban, rural, wealthy, poor citizens. They offered a consumer-oriented view of animals as a way of interpreting the world as much as a practice of spending and self-expression. 26 Hence, nineteenth-century circuses were undoubtedly influential shapers of public attitudes toward humankind’s place as rightful stewards of the global environment.

Notes 1 See Ritvo (1987: 130–35) and Nance (2013: 4–9). 2 Largely extinct now is the twentieth-century belief among scientists that nonhuman animals are “stimulus response machines” who exhibit behaviors but are unfeeling and unthinking. Instead, in most general terms, Animal Welfare Science research (AWS) research is driven by a respect for the scientific method and being “led by data not feelings,” as such researchers say. It also contains an ethical and practical argument that all sentient animals should have “five freedoms” (from hunger and thirst; from discomfort, from pain, injury, or disease; from fear and distress; and to express species-typical behaviors). Their findings proceed from the idea that, if the five freedoms are accommodated by people, both human and non-human life are improved. It posits that complex mental lives, including emotions like anxiety, grief, and joy, should be assumed in other species since they promote social cohesion and survival. Lastly, in the AWS field, “animal welfare problems” are

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  233 by definition caused by people (either out of ignorance, inattention, lack of resources, etc.), so AWS has been a way to evaluate the welfare primarily of domesticated and captive animals. Like all scientific work, the ethological and AWS research is a product of particular political and cultural contexts that shape the kinds of questions researchers are interested in exploring. This approach assumes that since animals are products of evolution, they can be trusted to know what is best for them in responding to immediate contexts. The scientific literatures on the welfare of captive wild animals is very large, constantly evolving, and exceed the space available here. See (Ritvo 1987: 130–35) and Nance (2013: 4–9). 3 See Apps (2005), Davis (2002), May (1932), Mosier (1999), Renoff (2008), and Stoddart (2000). 4 See Flint (1981: 18), Mizelle (2005: 221), Mosier (1999: 9), and Vail (1945: 138–42). 5 See “Raymond & Waring’s Immense Menagerie.” 6 Quoted in Nance 2013: 64 from “Raymond & Waring’s Immense Menagerie.” 7 See Davis (2002: 10, 15–25, 41–52, 77–79). 8 See Mason (2008) and Nance (2013: 169–70). 9 See Grier (2006: 135). 10 See Conklin (1921: 124). 11 See also Cataldi (2002), Mizelle (2005: 151), and Peterson (2007: 35). 12 See Cross (2012: 274–75). 13 See Heininger (1984: 13–25) and Cook (2011: 287–88). 14 See Barnum and Burke (1888); Rigney (1889). 15 See Nance (2013: 146–50). 16 See “Training Elephants” (1881: 393). 17 Allegedly written by the elephant’s well-known keeper and trainer, William Scott, the article was probably authored by a company ghostwriter, and handed gratis to the magazine in the hopes child readers might nag their parents about visiting the circus. It is not clear the subduing an elephant montage was supplied by Barnum & Bailey company press agents since it clashed sharply with the warm tone of the Scott story, which anthropomorphized Jumbo as a celebrity and friend to children. See “Personal Reminiscences” (1885: 24). 18 See Laird (2001: 69, 93, 151), Mangum (2002), and Mason: 168. 19 See Davis: 155 and Rothfels (2008: 110–15). 20 See Donald (2006: 60) and Wylie (2009: 83–84). 21 See Barnum (1887) and Barnum (1894). 22 See Mason (2005: 12). 23 See Morris, Reddy, and Bunting (1995); and Hinde and Barden (1985). 24 See Bonehill (1897), Norris (1902), and Otis (1923). 25 See Monaghan (1994: 28–46). 26 See Amato (2015: 9–10) and Nance (2015: 50–53).

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234  Susan Nance Ayres, Brenda. Introduction to Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, edited by Brenda Ayres, 1–22. New York and London: Routledge, 2019. “Barnum and His Elephant Jumba [sic].” New York Times, February 24, 1882. Barnum, Phineas Taylor. Lion Jack: A Story of Perilous Adventures among Wild Men and the Capturing of Wild Beasts; Showing How Menageries are Made. 1876. New York: G. W. Dillingham Company, 1887. Barnum, Phineas Taylor. The Wild Beasts, Birds and Reptiles of the World: The Story of Their Capture. Chicago: Werner Company, 1894. Barnum, Phineas Taylor, and Sarah J. Burke. P. T. Barnum’s Menagerie; Text and Illustrations Arranged for Little People. New York: White and Allen, 1888. https://archive.org/details/ptbarnumsmenager45108gut. Barnum, Phineas Taylor, and Dudley Hardy. Barnum’s Great Show. London: Dean and Son: 1888. http://hdl.handle.net/11134/110002:3919. “Barnum’s Show in Winter Quarters.” Harper’s Weekly 27, no. 1313 (1882): 106. Barrow, Mark V., Jr. Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Barry, Arlene. “Ellen Cyr: Forgotten Author of a Bestselling Reading Series.” Paradigm: Journal of the Textbook Colloquium 3, no. 1 (July 2005): 10–23. Bentley, William. The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts. 4 vols. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1962. Bonehill, Randy. Leo the Circus Boy; or, Life Under the Great White Canvas. New York: W. L. Allison Company, 1897. https://books.google.com/ books?id=Gp9EAQAAMAAJ. Carlyon, David. Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard of. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. Cataldi, Suzanne Laba. “Animals and the Concept of Dignity: Critical Reflections on a Circus Performance.” Ethics and the Environment 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 104–26. Conklin, George. The Ways of the Circus: Being the Memoires and Adventures of George Conklin, Tamer of Lions. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1921. Cook, Daniel Thomas. “Children as Consumers: History and Historiography.” In The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World: Picturing Childhood in the Modern West, edited by Paula S. Fass, 283–95. New York: Routledge, 2012. Corvell, John R. “The Romance of a Menagerie.” St. Nicholas 11, no. 12 (October 1884): 933. Cross, Gary. “Play, Games, and Toys.” In The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World: Picturing Childhood in the Modern West, edited by Paula S. Fass, 274–75. New York: Routledge, 2012. Cyr, Ellen M. The Children’s Primer. 1891. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1894. Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Donald, Diana. “Pangs Watched in Perpetuity: Sir Edwin Landseer’s Pictures of Dying Deer and the Ethos of Victorian Sportsmanship.” In Killing Animals, edited by The Animal Studies Group, 50–68. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. “The Elephant.” Farmer’s Cabinet, April 24, 1835: 1. Flint, Richard W. “Origin of the Circus in America.” Bandwagon 25, no. 2 (March/April 1981): 17–18.

Children, Animals, and Fantasies of Circus  235 Fraser, David. Understanding Animal Welfare: The Science in its Cultural Context. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Fudge, Erica. Animal. New York: Reaktion Books, 2002. Grier, Katherine C. Pets in America: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Haney, Jesse. Haney’s Art of Training Animals. New York: J. Haney, 1869. Heininger, Mary Lynn Stevens. “Children, Childhood, and Change in America 1820–1920.” In A Century of Childhood, 1820–1920, edited by Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger, 13–25. Rochester, NY: Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, 1984. Hinde, Robert A., and Les A. Barden. The Evolution of the Teddy Bear. Animal Behavior 33, no. 4 (1985): 1371–73. Joys, Joanne Carol. The Wild Animal Trainer in America. Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing, 1983. Knowles, James. “‘Can ye Not Tell a Man from a Marmoset?’: Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage.” In Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans and Other Wonderful Creatures, edited by Erica Fudge, 138–63. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Kunzog, John C. One Horse Show: The Life and Times of Dan Rice, Circus Jester and Philanthropist. Jamestown, NY: John C. Kunzog, 1961. Laird, Pamela Walker. Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Mangum, Teresa. “Dog Years, Human Fears.” In Representing Animals, edited by Nigel Rothfels, 35–47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Mason, Georgia. “Stereotypic Behaviour in Captive Animals: Fundamentals and Implications for Welfare and Beyond.” In Stereotypic Animal Behaviour: Fundamentals and Applications to Welfare, edited by Georgia Mason and Jeffrey Rushen and, 325–56. Cambridge, MA: CABI, 2006. Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. May, Earl Chapin. The Circus: From Rome to Ringling. New York: Duffield and Green, 1932. Mizelle, Brett. “Contested Exhibitions: The Debate Over Proper Animal Sights in Post-Revolutionary America.” Worldviews 9, no. 2 (2005): 219–35. Monaghan, E. Jennifer. “Gender and Textbooks: Women Writers of Elementary Readers, 1880–1950.” Publishing Research Quarterly 10, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 28–46. Morris, Paul H., Vasu Reddy, and R. C. Bunting. “The Survival of the Cutest: Who’s Responsible for the Evolution of the Teddy Bear?” Animal Behavior 50, no. 6 (1995): 1697–700. Mosier, Jennifer L. “The Big Attraction: The Circus Elephant and American Culture.” Journal of American Culture 22, no. 2 (1999): 7–18. Nance, Susan. Animal Modernity: Jumbo the Elephant and the Human Dilemma. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Nance, Susan. Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Norris, Stanley. Phil the Showman; or, Life in the Sawdust Ring. New York: Street and Smith, 1902.

236  Susan Nance Otis, James. Toby Tyler; or, Ten Weeks with a Circus. 1881. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923. Parris, Brandy. “Difficult Sympathy in the Reconstruction-Era Animal Stories of Our Young Folks.” Children’s Literature 31 (2003): 25–49. “Personal Reminiscences of Jumbo by His Keeper, Matthew Scott.” Harper’s Young People 7 (November 1885): 24, 26. Peterson, Michael. “The Animal Apparatus: From a Theory of Animal Acting to an Ethics of Animal Acts.” TDR: The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 33–48. “Raymond & Waring’s Immense Menagerie.” Brooklyn Eagle and Kings County Democrat, October 31, 1846. Renoff, Gregory J. The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820–1930. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. Reynolds, Richard J. “Circus Rhinos.” Bandwagon 12, no. 5 (1968): 4–13. Ridout, Nicholas. “Animal Labour in the Theatrical Economy.” Theatre Research International 29, no. 1 (March 2004): 57–65. Rigney, William J. The Great American Menagerie. New York: McLoughlin Brothers, 1889. http://hdl.handle.net/11134/110002:4026. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Rothfels, Nigel. “Elephants, Ethics, and History.” In Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence, edited by Christen Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen Baltimore, 101–19. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Ryder, Richard D., “Measuring Animal Welfare.” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 1, no. 1 (1998): 75–80. Scholtmeijer, Marian Louise. Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Stoddart, Helen. Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Stokes, John. “‘Lion Griefs’: The Wild Animal Act as Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 2 (May 2004): 138–54. “Subduing and Unruly Elephant.” Harper’s Young People 7 (November 1885): 25. Vail, R. W. G. “This Way to the Big Top.” New York Historical Society Quarterly Bulletin 29, no. 3 (October 1945): 137–59. Varga, Donna. “Babes in the Woods: Wilderness Aesthetics in Children’s Stories and Toys, 1830–1915.” Society and Animals 17, no. 3 (2009): 187–205. Wylie, Dan. Elephant. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.

13 Imperial Pets Monkey-Girls, Man-Cubs, and Dog-Faced Boys on Exhibition in Victorian Britain Shannon Scott Late Victorian society expressed a keen interest in wild and feral children, particularly children who blurred the boundaries between animal and human in the name of science or entertainment. The popularity of Rudyard Kipling’s “man-cub,” Mowgli, in The Jungle Book (1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895),1 perhaps best reflects this trend in literature, while “factual” accounts of feral children, or children raised by animal-parents, appeared in periodicals, such as Chambers Edinburgh Journal and Lippincott’s Magazine.2 Circuses and sideshow exhibitions of the time served as another venue for Victorians to observe and occasionally interact with a different kind of wild or feral child, namely a child that was deemed “hybrid,” “trans-species,” or an “animal-child.” Sideshow acts of children with hypertrichosis, an uncontrolled growth of hair on the body, such as “the monkey girl,” “the lion boy,” “the puppy,” “the little bear,” and “the Skye-terrier,” drew large crowds of curious spectators from all classes. The acts often purported to serve scientific advancements in evolutionary theory from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) by revealing the missing link between man and beast in the form of a hirsute child. The use of feral/wild children in fiction and periodicals has been examined by critics3 and is often considered reflective of a Victorian desire to prove racial superiority over colonial subjects, frequently from India and Africa (where most accounts of feral/wild children occur); this perceived British superiority then becomes a justification for racist hierarchies, exploitation, and continued imperial expansion. Kaori Nagai writes, “The figure of the wolf-child, then, provided a rich field of investigation, where facts and imagination, myths and Western anxiety about Man’s place in nature, heightened by the colonial fear of natives as savage animals, all intersected” (2013: xxx). The rhetoric of racial hierarchy in cases of animal-children, like Krao Farini (1876–1926),4 “the monkey girl” or Fedor Jeftichew, “Jo-Jo, the dog-faced boy” (1868– 1904), is similar to that of feral children since many of the sideshow acts were allegedly “rescued” from the “savagery” of their animal-families

238  Shannon Scott living in remote locations in or around the British Empire. The public response to these animal-children was not one of revulsion as it often was for other “freaks” in circus sideshows, some of whom were exhibited based solely on their skin color or hair texture.5 Instead, Victorians considered Krao and Fedor as “transitional species” (Durbach 2009:  95). The public and press deliberately designated these animal-children as separate from and superior to other sideshow performers who were subhuman due to ethnicity or physical deformity. If managers or showman decided to play up the animalistic traits of Krao or Fedor, such as barking, teeth-­gnashing, or grunting, then the primitivism was purely performative since, of course, hypertrichosis does not hinder mental ability or cause anyone to behave in an “ape-like” or “dog-like” manner. The affectation of animal-like behavior for Krao and Fedor served to underscore their child-like qualities of mischievousness and playfulness, perhaps reminding some spectators of their own children, who might indulge in games of “sling the monkey” or “baste the bear” at home (Oneill 2019: 221–22). In the nineteenth century, children were already perceived as closer to animals or “savages” than adults since they had not yet matured or received the civilizing influences of socialization and education. For Victorians, Sally Shuttleworth claims, “children, animals, and ‘savages,’ were set apart, as exemplars of life on the first rungs of the evolutionary ladder” (2004: 111). Both Krao and Fedor were perceived as first-rung species due their hybrid identity as human animals, but particularly their identity as children, who are justifiably more instinctual and spirited than adults. As a result, animal-children were considered quite appealing, causing the press to describe them as beloved pets or adorable baby animals passed in a pet shop window. To audiences, these animal-children or “transitional species” reflected a strong anthropocentric belief system; Krao and Fedor were evidence of British superiority over other cultures, other species, and even their own children, not because Krao and Fedor were irredeemably savage but because they were redeemably young and able to be molded by Victorian etiquette and education. Since circuses and exhibitions toured Britain frequently in the late nineteenth century, there were numerous opportunities for parents and children to view “exotic” humans and animals. For example, spectators could view wild animals from all over the world in menageries; they could also see sideshow performers, some of them children like Fedor and Krao, who acted as animals in sideshow performances. As Matthew Sweet notes, “The exhibition of bizarre curiosities … some animal, some human—was a thriving industry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (2001: 140).6 Some venues provided entertainment in a more intimate setting, such as the lecture hall in Westminster Aquarium, where a spectator could reserve a seat for one shilling, while other sites delivered grand-scale spectacles, like Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest

Imperial Pets  239 Show on Earth, which first came to Britain in 1889. Both large and small circuses catered to the Victorian appetite for a seemingly incongruous combination of exoticism and xenophobia. Audiences could watch P. T. Barnum’s African–American performers from the American South sing minstrel tunes while Indigenous American actors simulated tribal warfare and “Oriental” and “Arab” performers recreated imperial historical events like the Sudanese campaign of 1884–1885. Many critics believe these staged spectacles reinforced Victorian notions regarding their own racial and ethnic superiority over everyone else. According to Brenda Assael, these circuses were not wholesome family entertainment or even escapist amusement: “This juxtaposition of low and high, unnatural and natural, black and white, therefore had meaning that went above and beyond mere curiosity or innocent fun. Rather, it fulfilled a desire to invert characteristics of ‘civilized’ peoples in order to affirm British civility and the benefits of the nation’s civilizing project” (2012: 89). As a result, these events, well-attended by the middle classes, as well as by politicians and royalty, had an agenda to both affirm British supremacy and encourage the imperial project to force that supposed supremacy on other cultures whose lands and resources Britain desired. The intention was similar in sideshows. In addition to the large circus performances, there were smaller “freak exhibitions” that a spectator could visit before the show began, with one of the more popular sideshow novelties being Fedor or Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy (Assael 2012: 95). Instead of rousing empathy for exploited children, Assael claims that “the public’s fascination with curiosities hampered the development of humanitarianism and sentimentality. At the same time, it was propelled by contemporary scientific findings and protoanthropological investigations” (2005: 62). Children who were put on display as animals for Victorian audiences, like Krao and Fedor, became part of that British civilizing effort; they were living proof that savagery, made tangible due to their hirsute exteriors, could be turned to good breeding and proper British values, if caught and corrected in childhood. Krao was six- or seven-years-old when she was taken from Laos, or by some accounts Siam, or modern-day Thailand, and exhibited in Westminster Aquarium’s lecture room in 1883 (Herta 2019: 29). She appeared there every day from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. and again from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m., a grueling schedule for a little girl. Her manager and adoptive father, Guillermo Antonio Farini, formerly William Leonard Hunt, a Canadian showman and manager of sideshow acts, claimed in Krao’s promotional pamphlet that she was “The Missing Link. A Living Proof of Darwin’s Theory of Descent of Man. Krao! Farini’s Wonder of Wonders. Krao! What is it?” (“Krao” 1883). In this instance, “What is it?” becomes not only a scientific query but also a draw for Victorian spectators to determine for themselves, after purchasing a ticket, whether or not Krao is the missing link, or living proof the shared ancestry that

240  Shannon Scott Darwin claimed between man and monkey, or if she is simply a child from Southeast Asia with congenital hypertrichosis; Farini invited audiences to determine the status of a “scientific” specimen so that they all could become amateur anthropologists and solidify their belief of racial superiority over cultural “others.” Farini was one of many self-proclaimed scientists participating in proving evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century.7 In terms of animals, “monkeys … constituted links in the great chain of being” (Assael 2005: 64). As a result, Krao’s alleged identity as “the missing link”—her genetic affiliation with monkeys—was an essential part of her act. To underline this link, she was occasionally exhibited along with primates in her childhood and early adolescence. At the Westminster Aquarium, she would be displayed next to Pongo, a male gorilla supposedly good with children (Gott and Weir 2013: 99). While in Berlin, she was actually put in a cage with other apes as a publicity stunt before “German police” forced the “unscrupulous show promoters” to release her (Hornberger 2005: 116). In later years, with Barnum & Bailey’s circus in the U.S., Krao performed with Joanna the Chimpanzee. Krao’s identity as a “monkey hybrid” could not simply come from highlighting her hirsuteness, as Farini did by always exposing her legs and arms in dresses, or even by constantly placing in front of a faux jungle backdrop, which he also did, but by creating a link to primates by literally exhibiting her with apes. For nineteenth-century spectators, Krao’s proximity to Pongo only heightened her human qualities, making her a “transitional species” that was more inclined toward a kinship with little girls than with adult gorillas. In an important parallel, “What is it?” was also asked in an 1884 pamphlet for actor William Henry Johnson when he appeared as “The Monkey-Man” in Barnum’s American Museum, an exhibit Kevin Young describes as “an indistinct racial grotesque in an artificial jungle landscape” (2017: 38). Although Krao was similarly exhibited surrounded by palm fronds and lush vegetation for promotional photographs, her identity as a “missing link” or “monkey girl” comes across as less “savage” and more innocent due to her age and gender. In addition, Johnson was a legal adult with no mental disability who decided to act the part of “What is it?” and received a paycheck for his efforts. Krao received no compensation for her childhood exhibitions other than her “care.” She was sold by her parents, who did not have hypertrichosis—an account that differs greatly from Krao’s history in her promotional pamphlet, which is riddled with inaccuracies about her childhood—besides the obvious one about her being a “monkey girl” (Durbach 2009: 96). Her parents had already put her on display in Laos before selling her to Farini, who became her legal guardian, acting as the loving “papa,” while simultaneously exploiting her for financial gain. Although there was an “introduction of protective legislation for child performers in 1879,” it

Imperial Pets  241 did not apply to sideshow performers, especially those that were questionably human (Assael 2012: 98). The racism exposed by both Johnson and Krao’s exhibitions is similar when considering the spectators were either fair-skinned British subjects or American citizens gazing at a dark-skinned individual designed to affirm their belief that they are a “higher rung” of civilization. Young states, “Barnum sought to display ‘What is it?’ as a specimen of inferiority in order to stoke American and white superiority; he further suggested they were one and the same” (38). Krao’s status as “the missing link” likewise fueled British evolutionary supremacy over animals as well as those cultural “others” who were deemed “savages.” For Farini, keeping a continuous tension between Krao’s association with lower-rung monkeys and well-mannered little girls was vital to the popularity of her act. Nadja Durbach claims that Farini’s lectures often focused on Krao’s “simian” features, usually exaggerating them significantly, and using quotes from the pamphlet written about her that were completely fraudulent in order to strengthen his “contention that Krao was half human, half monkey” (93). In addition to exaggerating Krao’s simian qualities, Farini likewise played up her girlish attributes. According to Ann Garascia, “Usually decked out in hair bows, patent leather shoes, and freshly unplaited hair, Krao personified ‘cute,’ a term that entered into the national lexicon during the later nineteenth century” (2016: 444). The fact that a wild child or an adorable “missing link” could become not only tame but precious was made evident by the juxtaposition of a little girl in hair bows and a filly frock placed next to Pongo eating a loaf of bread (animal caretakers were not very good about to catering to primate diets yet). To further emphasize her “cuteness,” Farini took publicity photos where Krao appears as the idealized Victorian moppet, albeit with a light covering of hair on her body. In a photo entitled, “‘Krao,’ Farini’s Missing Link,” Krao is seated on a tree stump, smiling up at Farini, who wears a formal black suitcoat open enough to reveal his waistcoat and pocket watch. He returns her smile and meets her eyes with a proud and paternal gaze, his left hand supportively positioned on her back, his right one holding her tiny hand. Krao wears smart black boots, her legs demurely crossed at the ankles as they hang from a perch that is rather high up on the tree stump. She wears a pretty patterned dress that, unlike fashions for Victorian girls, reveals her legs, which are covered with fine, dark hair. She wears a bracelet of what appears to be pearls or shells and her hair is flipped up stylishly at the ends. If one did not know their background or the title of the piece, then one might assume it was father and daughter, their gaze suggestive of deep mutual affection, their pose one where either of them might start singing a tune from a Gilbert and Sullivan musical. Although the photo is clearly staged, it does capture Krao’s growing taste for a middle-class English lifestyle. Garascia discusses how Krao

242  Shannon Scott

Figure 13.1  K rao and Guillermo Antonio Farini (born William Leonard Hunt), circa 1885.  http://racingnelliebly.com/2-krao-10/.

“once observed that a preponderance of shops, toys, and fine dresses dominated England’s landscape, by which she deduced that London was superior to Laos” (446). Krao’s acknowledgment of England being “superior to Laos” shows that she wishes to buy London’s toys and dresses, but she is perhaps also buying the message Britain is selling about their

Imperial Pets  243 superiority over Southeast Asia and the people who live there. It is statements like this one about London’s shops, which may or may not accurately reflect Krao’s true sentiments, and others where Krao claims her greatest fear is to be sent back to Laos and her mother that make Krao a victory of imperial expansion (Garascia 450), which is possibly even more important than her “scientific” role as a “missing link.” Durbach believes Krao’s story “served to underscore the dominant imperial ideology that figured colonial peoples as grateful recipients of Western culture” (102). Certainly, the way Krao is portrayed in the photograph, and her statements on London, make her sound admiring of British culture and indebted to Western intervention. By all accounts, Krao was an exceptionally intelligent child. Besides her elegant manners, Krao spoke six or seven languages fluently and tutored other children and adults at the local library in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when Barnum & Bailey wintered there each year (Davis 2002: 130). Janet Davis discusses the challenges Krao faced as a performer who was very smart but had to act “primitive” and “savage” for expectant, paying audiences. Davis writes, “[Krao] was able to make a good income in a racist society where there were few lucrative employment options for persons of color” (130). In this way, as an adult, Krao’s career does parallel that of William Henry Johnson’s. However, her early childhood “stardom” as a Pongo’s better-bred cousin, along with her billing as a lovable oddity that stirred the heartstrings of an imperialist nation, must have affected her deeply. How did being designated a “monkey-girl” shape her opinions of herself? If her adoptive father and thousands of spectators did not view her treatment as child abuse, then did she ever realize that is was? How does a child survive that kind of trauma? These questions that look back at the Victorians from a twenty-first-century lens are articulated most effectively by Helen Davies: “To what extent can freak show performers be re-membered by neo-Victorian authors/ readers in an ethical manner?” (2015: 8). While Davies is primarily referring to fiction writers, the question also applies to academic writers. Considering Krao’s exploitation without making her into a victim, or attempting to accurately reflect who she was as a person, is difficult since she does not have a voice in historical accounts as the press was primarily interested in her exteriority. The British press got their first introduction to Krao over the Christmas holidays of 1882, when “Farini delivered a lecture to the press on Krao’s simian qualities at a special viewing” (Durbach 93). The opinions of the press, which are included in Farini’s promotional pamphlet about Krao, clearly reveal that they were taken with her, many seeing her as the Nature journalist expressed on January 12, 1883, as “a curious little waif” (“Krao”).8 Krao’s physical description is also included: “From her eyebrows upwards her whole head is adorned with thick jet-black hair, of a rather course texture, while the face, arms, hands, legs, and

244  Shannon Scott feet, and whole body are completely enveloped in a natural soft fur of black hair, entirely covering her dark skin” (“Krao”). The photographs of Krao, which were doctored as well as staged to make her more simian, clearly show that her hair did not “entirely” cover her skin. However, Farini’s lecture highlighted simian traits and therefore influenced press reaction to Krao. The press echoes the tone of Farini’s lecture, overwhelmingly supporting the pamphlet’s assertions that Krao is both human and monkey. However, the press tends to fetishize, and even sexualize, Krao’s female characteristics: “Krao is by no means ill-looking, as her portrait will show. Her eyes are strikingly beautiful—large and full, proclaiming her human affinity. How many a fair lady will envy Krao those full and sparkling eyes! How their dark lustre would be set off by fair skin!” (“Krao”). Krao’s eyes are imaginatively superimposed on a fair-skinned lady, who would covet those “sparkling eyes,” commodifying her features in a bizarre mix-and-match that creates the ideal woman. It is hard to decide what is more disturbing, the male journalists and scientists analyzing Krao as a scientific specimen or admiring her “charms” as a young girl. Ultimately, the writer from Land and Water transgresses boundaries by expounding on Krao’s “silken hair” that is “a veritable fur coat—and evidence of soft, silky manners” (“Krao”). Perhaps her identity as a “monkey-girl” somehow permits this transgression between what is and is not acceptable to express regarding a child’s body. The silkiness of her hair is contrasted with the silkiness of her manners which seems far more sensual than if she had been described as a “well-behaved” or “composed” young lady. Ironically, this girlish charm that veers into comeliness is exactly what caused a negative reaction for Krao when she returned the Aquarium in 1899, when there were vocal claims of indecency in the press due to “concerns over bestiality” (Durbach 113). In addition to her appearance, Krao’s behavior is similarly dissected to determine what belongs in the human category and what resides in the animal category. The pamphlet claims: In her habits Krao is half human, half monkey. As a rule, she is as playful, as gentle, as good tempered as any child could be: she will grin with delight at any one who plays with her, and loves a romp. But let a little thing offend her, and she shoots out her lips, just like a chimpanzee, darts angry looks at her enemy, tairs [sic] her hair, rolls violently on the floor, or utters a moaning sort of cry, or sulks and stands rubbing her eyes with her knuckles. (“Krao”) This example may sound primitive to natural scientists exchanging clinical notes in a lecture hall, but for most parents, Krao’s conduct sounds

Imperial Pets  245 like the typical behavior of a six-year-old. In order for Farini’s contention that Krao is the “missing link” to hold water, Farini strove to find a balance between human and monkey for his audience. A tantrum that involves rolling around on the floor and crying is completely within the bounds of normal childhood behavior; however, the jutting out of her lip and the inarticulate noises she makes, as well as the use of her “knuckles” to rub her eyes, instead of the palms of her hands, evoke further primitive parallels. Certainly, Charles Darwin, who recognized the shared ancestry between humans and primates long before he published On the Origin of Species (1859), considered the throwing tantrums to be typical behavior for both children and primates. When Darwin visited the London Zoo on March 28, 1838 he wrote to his sister after observing Jenny the orangutan: “the keeper showed her an apple, but would not give it to her, whereupon she threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child” (Zimmer 2015: n.p.). Krao’s pamphlet, which is roughly the length of a novella reads much like an imperial adventure narrative.9 It starts with Farini’s desire to discover and capture “men-monkeys” to prove Darwin’s theory of evolution. Farini and Francis Buckland, a popular natural historian, discuss funding the expedition to Burma. The two men joke around with each other, Buckland offering to send his pet monkeys, Hag and Tiny, on the voyage, while Farini suggests enlisting a zookeeper who can “talk Monkey as well as English” in order to convince the “King of Burmah” to let him have the “Men-Monkeys” to “exhibit … in Europe” (“Krao”). In the end, Farini sends Edward T. Sachs on the expedition “with orders to spare no expense and no effort in the endeavor to bring to Europe at least one” (“Krao”). In Burma, Sachs encounters several families of “hairy people” that he is not able to obtain, then he has run-ins with despotic kings, cannibals, and dysentery. Eventually, Sachs is replaced by Carl Bock, who has already completed two expeditions for Farini, including procuring “a troupe of Lapps, whose appearance in London… caused so much excitement in 1878” (“Krao”). Bock ventures into the “Ngiou States … where human monkeys wandered about in a wild state” (“Krao”). He is told by his guide that human monkeys “are as mild as deer, and cannot be easily approached” and eat only “wild fruits and roots” (“Krao”). In the jungle, Bock is able to tell the difference between human monkeys and actual monkeys, claiming he was “surrounded … by various species of monkeys, of whom they [the human monkeys] were, and yet were not, one” (“Krao”). This distinction neatly backs up Farini’s claims that Krao is the missing link between human and monkey, because the hybrid family is distinguishable from other primates, yet they are also “one.” While promotional pamphlets for sideshow acts are notorious for false narratives and exaggeration, the lies they tell are often as revealing as the truth, especially regarding the culture who attends the exhibits

246  Shannon Scott and purchases the pamphlets. We know that Krao was most likely the child of parents who did not have hypertrichosis, who exhibited their daughter and eventually sold her to Bock, acting for Farini. Farini, in turn, purchased/adopted Krao to exhibit her in much the same way as her parents did, albeit to larger crowds and for more money in Europe and America. However, Victorian spectators of these exhibitions did not want to read about this type of ethically questionable transaction. Instead, they wanted a heart-warming scene where animal-parents sent their animals-child to have a better life in the metropole. They also wanted the parents and children to look alike because otherwise genetic anomalies could happen to anyone, including them. Human children sold by their human parents to strange men with sinister financial motives could ruin the fantasy and make spectators uncomfortably aware of their complicity and even culpability in the abuse and exploitation of a child. In order to provide readers with what they wanted, accounts of ­animal-parents, like those of Krao and Fedor,10 are filled with familial affection. The animal-parents act protectively toward their children, paralleling narratives from the nineteenth century of feral children whose animal-parents protected them as ferociously as their own young.11 When Bock’s lieutenant discovers a family of “hairy-people,” who turn out to be Krao and her parents, Bock must first chase, then subdue Krao’s father, who fights “like a demon,” in order to avoid having his family captured (“Krao”). When the father is eventually tied securely with a “rattan rope,” Krao takes over where her father left off: “the little one yonder gave much more trouble, biting and snapping at everyone, and rolling on the ground all the time, till at last it was also secured” (“Krao”). Krao, still an “it” at this point, also fights to protect her nuclear family, and her attempts to avoid capture read much like her “playfulness” as a child that “loves a romp.” During the capture scene, Krao’s mother acts more docile and stereotypically feminine in her unwillingness to physically resist, yet her maternal instincts do not allow her to abandon her family: “The mother, who had been dodging about while the child was being made fast, came boldly forward when she saw no chance of its escape, and was easily secured” (“Krao”). This fabricated account of a human-monkey family that refuses to be separated matches recorded accounts of wild animals that were captured in order to be displayed in circuses and zoos. In the nineteenth century in Southeast Asia, the catching of elephants to sell to circuses was a thriving trade. In relating the capture of Topsy, a baby Asian elephant procured around 1875 for Adam Forepaugh’s circus, Michael Daly claims that once a mother elephant is “straddled and hobbled, the captors would not have needed to bother with the baby. She would have come along wherever the mother was dragged. No rope was required to retain a baby after the mother was tethered to a tree”

Imperial Pets  247 (2013: 7). In this case, it is Krao who is tied up, but the mother and child are a package deal; they cannot be separated. The parallel to an animal capture narrative is intentional, and while it may elicit sympathy from readers, it is meant to once again put the behavior of Krao’s family in the animal category because, whereas humans buy, sell, and abandon their children, animals do not. Furthermore, if the “men-monkeys” are in fact animals and not a human family, then it is no different than reading about the capture of an exotic animal, like Jumbo or Tospy, and then going to see them exhibited at the Zoological Gardens or Coney Island, a popular nineteenth-century pastime, especially for children. If readers of Krao’s promotional pamphlet had any doubts about the hybrid identity of Krao’s parents, then they would have forgotten it completely on the next full-page spread which featured two illustrations of Krao’s mother and father. Each sit separately in a jungle setting and both are covered from head to toe in thick black fur. Krao’s father holds a staff, his expression peaceful, while Krao’s mother holds onto a vine, her breasts clearly visible, and her mouth is a sensual pout, her eyes soft and pretty. The stick and vine that each hold onto serves to expose their four fingers and opposable thumb. They are clearly human in expression and body language, sitting cross-legged and tranquil, a prelapsarian Adam and Eve. Yet their “hairiness” is the defining point of the illustration.12 In Krao’s fictional biography, her father dies shortly after their capture, then her mother begs Prince Kromolat to let her and Krao go with Bock to England: “Krao herself and her mother were anxious, as her father had also been, to accompany Mr. Bock … having been made to understand that if they went with him they would have plenty of food, warm shelter, and kind treatment” (“Krao”). It is an ideal arrangement for a showman—a family chafing to come with him (although the specifics of their exhibition are not mentioned) simply for food and shelter and kindness, with no mention of pay. If the capture of “monkey-men” did not raise any suspicions for readers in terms of the truth of the pamphlet, then this act of altruism for the sake of a child’s future on the part of both parties, without regard to money, absolutely should. The pamphlet goes even further to convince readers that Krao’s removal is not bondage or exploitation but a rare and wonderful opportunity since everyone in the narrative, even the Prince, is convinced that “Krao would be far better cared for in Europe than she possibly could in the wild country, which was her original home” (“Krao”). In order to explain why Krao’s mother does not accompany her on exhibition, the pamphlet mentions, briefly, that she was not allowed to leave Laos. In his promotional pamphlet or pitch book, Fedor Jeftichew (1868– 1903), who performed as Jo-Jo, the Dog-Faced Boy or Man, also comes from a protective home, not in the jungles of Southeast Asia but in the “dense forests of Kostromo” in Russia. Fedor and his father (his mother is not mentioned) “were first discovered by a hunter, who tracked them

248  Shannon Scott to their cave” where “they were subsisting at the time upon wild berries and such small game as could be killed with stones and clubs” (Forster 1885: n.p.). The pamphlet quickly establishes the domestic closeness between father and son, as well as the devolved state they are living in— hunting like primitive or Neolithic Man by using “stones and clubs” to kill the food they cannot forage. This condition places them somewhat higher on the evolutionary ladder than animals, although animals would technically be better able to hunt than weaponless humans, but it plainly shows that they are not as advanced as civilized or evolved humans, who hunt with knives or guns. When the hunters in the pamphlet’s fictional narrative attempt to capture Fedor’s father, he, like Krao’s father, violently resists: “The father was extremely savage and resisted capture in every way in his power” (Forster n.p.). In contrast, Fedor’s inclination to “tameness” strongly differs from both his father and from Krao’s revolt against their respective captors. While Krao rolls and snaps, Fedor does not resist. Instead, he is described as a “very small boy, unable to stand alone,” who is “perfectly docile, susceptible to all kindnesses, and easily managed in every way” (Forster n. p.). While Fedor’s animality would later be exaggerated in Barnum & Bailey sideshows, with the eating of raw meat and barking at crowds, during his childhood, Fedor was portrayed as passive, almost feminine, certainly not the idealized Victorian boy who does not shy away from rough-and-tumble conduct.13 By having Krao act as a stereotypical boy, and Fedor a girl, the pamphlets make the children, who are already perceived as nonhuman “others,” to be “other” in terms of gender as well; they have not yet learned societal norms regarding the acceptable or expected conduct of women and men. In any case, the contrast between a “savage” father and a “tame” son is obviously an important part of the pamphlet’s propaganda; first, because Fedor is the next evolutionary rung on the ladder compared to his father; second, because, like Krao, Fedor is young and still subject to civilizing influences that include gender conformity; and finally, because, as an performing act, the father, who is “perfectly wild and could not be civilized” (Forster n.p.), can play the foil to his sophisticated son for a more profitable show. In reality, Fedor’s father, Adrian Jeftichew, who also suffered from hypertrichosis, was already performing in a sideshow act with his young son, Fedor, in England when promoter Charles Reynolds brought them to P. T. Barnum’s avid attention (Hornberger 2005: 144). An early publicity photo taken around 1873 shows Fedor perched on his father’s knee while his father rests his hand against his cheek. Only their faces, which are covered in hair, and their hands, which are relatively hairless, are visible in the photo. This staging stands in sharp contrast to Krao’s photos, where her arms and legs are exposed, which appealed to Farini and his audiences because their hirsute appearance provided evidence of her

Imperial Pets  249 “monkey” origins and perhaps a leer for readers of Land and Water. Fedor and Adrian are not sexualized or exposed in any inappropriate way; instead, they are dressed as Russian peasants, wearing long black boots, loose clothing, and belted tunics, exotic due to their hirsuteness and “Eastern” attire.

Figure 13.2  Adrian and Fedor Jeftichew, n.d., https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Adrian-and-Fedor-Jeftichew-by-Lumiere-c1875.png.

250  Shannon Scott When Adrian Jeftichew died in 1873, Fedor was put under the charge of Nicholas Foster, much as Krao was adopted by Farini, and Foster sent Fedor “on exhibition” to locations all over Europe and Russia, including “the great Museum of Th. Lent” in St. Petersburg (Forster n.p.). This is significant in the history of “hairy” sideshow acts since Theodore Lent was the husband and manager of Julia Pastrana (1834–1860), a woman with hypertrichosis from Sinaloa, who was dubbed the “bear-lady” or “missing-link” and put on display much like Krao and Fedor. Pastrana died after giving birth to Lent’s son, Esau, who shared his mother’s condition and died shortly after his birth. Lent, who made a fortune exhibiting Pastrana, decided to have both mother and son preserved through a type of taxidermy and put on display postmortem.14 Thus Pastrana continued to tour and was exhibited regularly in Lent’s St. Petersburg museum. Was Fedor put on exhibition in the museum alongside the bodies of Pastrana and her son? What would he have thought of such a display, especially having lost his own father so recently? Once again, Fedor’s thoughts and feelings, like Krao’s, will never be known, although one can speculate on the horror such a scene would evoke in a child. Krao may well have taken note of Pastrana’s fate. The New York Times obituary of Krao Farini writes, “Friends at the funeral service [including Victoria Anderson, or the “leopard girl” and Jim Tarver, the “Texas Giant”] said that sensitiveness to ‘gapers’ led Krao to request cremation” (“Circus Folk Mourn” 1926: 7); in other words, Krao determined that no one would have access to her body after she died, which was a legitimate fear shared by many sideshow performers because the medical establishment desired their bodies as specimens. In 1884, Barnum brought Fedor to the United States and continued to bill him as a “captured feral child” (Nickell 2008: 155–56). Fedor’s pamphlet, like Krao’s, includes press reactions to his first exhibition in the U.S. The animal qualities of his appearance and behavior are repeated with little variation between newspapers.15 The New York Tribune writes: Jo-Jo’s appearance certainly bears a strong resemblance to that of a Skye terrier. His face is completely covered by a thick growth of silky yellow hair, which is especially abundant on each side of his nose. Here, there are two little tufts, like a terrier’s whiskers, while his mild, hazle [sic] eyes have a remarkably canine expression. (quoted in Forster n.p.) Fedor is described as more animalistic is his features and manners than Krao, likely a performance encouraged by Barnum, who profited heavily from Fedor’s animality. To further emphasize Fedor’s identity as a canine or wolf hybrid, the New York Morning Journal reports that his “canine resemblance” is enhanced during his “yawning and closing his jaws with a snap” (quoted in Forster n.p.). Other journalists portray him as more frisky than feral. For example, the headline of The New York

Imperial Pets  251 Sun reads: “His Face like a Skye’s: A Playful Brown-Eyed Puppy Boy Arrives by the City of Chicago.” The Sun claims: He danced about the room in boyish glee… Frequently his voice resembled that of a dog’s growl or bark. His manager says that when angry Jo-Jo snaps and barks. Usually he is as full of play as a puppy, and when he cannot make himself understood in words, he resorts to pantomime. (quoted in Forster n.p.) As with Krao’s portrayal, Fedor’s playfulness is tempered with animalistic quirks. Whereas Krao would use her feet to “pick up any small object from the floor with as much ease as with her hands” (“Krao) to impress crowds and demonstrate her monkey-like skills, Fedor’s “glee” is that of a “puppy’s” as he capers around his room. In an important parallel, neither Krao nor Fedor articulated themselves in words during childhood meetings with the press, and not simply because their first languages were Malaysian and Russian, respectively. Their inability to communicate using human language as opposed to pantomime or barking was a key part of what made audiences see them as animal-children.16 In the nineteenth century, most scientists did not believe animals could communicate, which we now consider absurd;17 however, Krao and Fedor’s inability to communicate illustrated their inferiority as animals. In addition, this lack of language was a total fabrication for Fedor, who, like Krao, was multilingual, reading and writing in at least four languages (French, Russian, German, and English) and devouring Russian novels in his spare time. However, these feral theatrics Fedor put on for journalists were not enough to convince them of his hybrid status. They wanted “proof,” most likely because Barnum was widely known for his hoaxes and humbugs.18 The New York Times writes: “It is said that Jo-Jo snarls and snaps like a dog, but he was perfectly tractable yesterday, allowing his visitors to pull his hair and satisfy themselves that is was not fastened on by artificial means, and to examine his teeth as they would have investigated the molars of a horse on exhibition” (quoted in Forster n.p.). Fedor patiently allowed journalists to confirm his authenticity as a genuine “dog boy,” which, in some ways, makes the horse simile quite fitting. Fedor is a beast of burden, subject to work not of his own choosing, and for which he did not get compensated until adulthood. By 1884, Fedor was a teenager, and had more autonomy than he did as a toddler, but he had known little other than circuses and sideshows in his lifetime, so that show business, and all that it entailed— from allowing people to tug his facial hair to barking like dog—became both ingrained and inevitable. Fedor’s act changed with time, his sweet and placid nature turning to one of increasing ferocity as he hit puberty, and though he donned the dignified uniform of a Russian cavalryman, he began to take on his

252  Shannon Scott father’s “savage” persona to better please audiences. Filip Herza compares the acts of Stephan Bibrowski, or “Lionel, the Lion-Faced Man” (1890–1932), with his hirsute predecessor, Fedor Jeftichew, concluding that by the time Lionel became popular in the twentieth century, the connection between hair and “super masculinity” had shifted, so that substantial facial and body hair no longer signified “some inner animality, supposedly the essence of ‘authentic masculinity’…” (2019: 40). In order to remain popular, Fedor had to “rebrand” his image and transform into a “manly beast” because ultimately “the presentation of Jeftichew was based on the evolution narrative and stressed his savage-like personality, which allegedly cannot be civilized even after he spent many years in the US and Europe…” (Herza 30). However, when Fedor was a child on exhibition, the “evolution narrative” provided in his pamphlet, and in Krao’s, claimed that while they were “savage” animal-children, they could still be “civilized” by Western intervention. That claim disappeared over time. What happened, inevitably, for both of them, was age. The “civilizing influence,” as late nineteenth-century spectators defined it, had succeeded. Krao and Fedor were well-educated and socialized (despite years of demanding schedules and cruel exploitation). Krao tutored students in reading and writing, and Fedor fell love with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and practiced his Russian Orthodox faith. However, as adults they were still billed as “half animals.” The potential for a “civilized” future that had been part of their initial attraction, as had been their “cuteness,” waned for audiences that didn’t want the animal-children to grow up and become equal to them in intelligence but still different in appearance. Victorian audiences were not interested in ceding their superiority to those who were still superficially “animal-like.” As a result, the animalistic behavior of their acts continued but to different effect: Fedor ate raw meat in his cage, and Krao performed in skimpy outfits with a chimpanzee partner while spectators accused her of inciting bestiality. Back when she was a cute “monkey-girl,” Krao’s pamphlet speculated on her future if she had not been “rescued” from “savagery” and placed in the civilizing environment of Western sideshows: “Perhaps Krao, if she had been left in her native home in Laos, might one day have been queen of a kingdom of human monkeys!” (“Krao”) This statement shows that there was nothing civilized about nineteenth-century sideshows or their spectators.

Notes 1 Mowgli has a special status as both animal and child, though his status is granted by the jungle animals and not as a way to prove evolutionary superiority by adult humans. Still, Mowgli’s likeness to monkeys is noted by Kaa, the snake: “‘So this is the manling,’ said Kaa. ‘Very soft is his skin, and he

Imperial Pets  253 is not unlike the Bandar-log. Have a care, manling, that I do not mistake thee for a monkey some twilight…’” (Kipling 2013 [1894]: 45). Yet Mowgli’s fate, as illustrated in the story “In the Rukh,” which Kipling published in 1893 before The Jungle Books, is ultimately to become a “normal” adult, working for the Imperial Forest Department: “For that work there is a payment each month in silver, and at the end, when thou hast gathered a wife and cattle and, maybe, children, a pension” ([1893]: 331). 2 See “Wolf Children” in Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal (1852) and “The Shajehanpur Wolf Boy” in Lippincott’s Magazine (1898). 3 Kaori Nagai claims, “The late 19th century saw a revival of interest in stories of wolf-children as crucial to an exploration of the origin of Man—as well as the borders between humans and animals, culture and nature—in anthropological investigations stimulated by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species” (2013 [1859]: xxix). Bhanu Kapil claims the perception of feral children by civilized society was interchangeable to how they saw “freaks”: “A feral child is freakish” (2009: 1). Finally, Sujit Sivasundaram adds to the discourse examining what it means to be human when race and empire are part of the equation, further inquiring: “How might human subjecthood be approached again from the intersection with the nonhuman?” (2015: 157). 4 According to her promotional pamphlet, “Krao” is the “Siamese and Malay name for monkey” (“Krao” 1883).Why Krao’s parents, who supposedly spoke little to no human language, would name their daughter “monkey” is not explained, but it certainly adds to the idea that most of the pamphlet is complete bunk. 5 I’m thinking of the “Circassian Beauties” that P. T. Barnum exhibited in the American Museum and “The Wonderful Albino Family” (Rudolph Lucasie, his wife, and two children). George and Willie Muse were African American albinos and William Cammell had a depigmentation disorder called vitiligo. 6 Joseph Merrick (1862–1890) also fits in this category of “curiosities” as he was exhibited as “The Elephant Man” in Whitechapel, London, then later at London Hospital. His widespread bodily disfigurement led to his animalistic moniker. 7 One of Farini’s souvenir photos used techniques from spirit photography to add an apparition of Charles Darwin floating above Farini’s head (Durbach 92). 8 The date for each journal is January 12, 1883 and can be found in Krao’s promotional pamphlet. 9 Both Durbach and Garascia contrast depictions of the expedition in Krao’s pamphlet to H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887). 10 Alice Bounds, or “The Bear Lady,” toured in sideshows with her mother and both were exhibited at Coney Island. However, if the parent did not have the same condition as their child, more often the child would be abandoned or sold to sideshows. 11 According to “Wolf Children,” the wolf mother cared for her human child in the same manner that she did with the rest of her litter: “with the same jealous care that an exemplary mother… bestows upon her progeny” (1852: 34) In Victorian fiction, Kipling’s wolf mother, Raksha, instinctively protects Mowgli from harm: “Father Wolf looked on amazed. … Shere Khan might have faced Father Wolf, but he could not stand up against Mother Wolf, for he knew that where he was she had all the advantage of the ground, and would fight to the death” (2013 [1894]: 9). In 1920, two young girls, Kamala and Amala, were allegedly discovered in a wolf’s den in India by Reverend

254  Shannon Scott

12

13

14

15 16

17

Joseph Singh. Although Singh eventually killed the wolf mother, he was impressed by how protective she was of the girls: “A third wolf, however, would not budge from the mound and charged at the diggers, furiously snapping, snarling and not yielding any ground to the invaders. Singh guessed that this must be the mother wolf, acting out of maternal instinct” (Newton 2002: 184). Singh wrote, “I was simply amazed to think that an animal had such a noble feeling, surpassing even that of mankind—the highest form of creation—to bestow all the love and affection of a fond and ideal mother” (Quoted in Newton 184 from Singh 1939). Much like portraits of the Gonzalez family, whose father Petrus Gonzales came to the French court of Henry II from the Canary Islands in the sixteenth century. Petrus had hypertrichosis, and portraits of himself and his hirsute daughters, Francesca, Antoinetta, Maddalena, painted by Lavinia Fontana, were highly coveted in courts throughout Europe, as were his actual daughters. Merry Wiesner-Hanks writes that “when people looked at the Gonzales sisters, or their pictures, they saw beasts and monsters as well as young women…” (2009: 10). Weisner-Hanks adds that during the Renaissance women were “placed between men and animals in the hierarchy of creation, for women … had less reason than men and were therefore more like animals” (10). In A Book About Boys (2016 [1886]), Robert Moncrieff states, “I like the happy, healthy, unsophisticated boy, who is a boy, and not a young gentleman”; he goes on to describe a boy who “climbs trees, tears his trousers, has frequent tumbles, bumps, and bruises, and comes home splashed all over with mud” (quoted in Oneill 2019: 185). In describing her initial discovery of Julia Pastana, Rebecca Stern writes, “When I first came upon these bits of paper, I was intrigued by the illustration of a dark, bearded woman holding a flower in the first advertisement, and then horrified and fascinated by the second depiction of the same woman, dead, embalmed, and propped upright sans flower in a glass cage” (2008: 201). Rosemarie Garland-Thomas discusses the medicalization, or the need for the medical community to categorize Pastrana both before her death and after: “Medical men and naturalists participated in exhibiting her and wrote about her in their publications and memoirs. The souvenir pamphlets accompanying Pastrana’s exhibition recruited men of science to authenticate her and mobilized the language of ethnology to lend authority to the often-­ fraudulent biographies that explained her unusual embodiment” (1999: 93). The date for each newspaper is October 13, 1884 and can be located in Fedor’s promotional pamphlet. In Kipling’s The Jungle Books, while the animals of the jungle communicate with each other, the “Monkey-People,” or Bandar-log, do not have language: “They have no speech of their own, but use the stolen words which they overhear when they listen, and peep, and wait up above the branches” (2013 [1894]: 29). Marina Chapman writes about her experience not only observing animal language but attempting to speak it when she was four-years-old and living in the Colombian jungle with capuchin monkeys: “I was also starved the opportunity to speak and somehow communicating through my voice was a powerful and instinctive need. At first, I imitated the noises the monkeys made for my own amusement, so probably also for the comfort of hearing the sound of my own voice. But I soon realize that sometimes a monkey—or several monkeys—­ would respond, as if we were having a conversation. This galvanized me. It felt like I had been taken notice of, finally. So, I practiced and practiced the sounds that they made, always desperate to get a reaction” (2013: 40).

Imperial Pets  255 18 For example, Barnum’s exhibition of Joice Heth in 1835 claimed her to be the 161-years-old nurse to George Washington and the Feejee mermaid that Barnum exhibited in the 1840s that was not a mermaid, but a monkey sewn to a fish.

Bibliography Assael, Brenda. “The American Circus in Victorian Britain.” In The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth L. Ames, and Matthew Wittmann, 86–105. New Haven, CT: Bard Graduate Center Yale University Press, 2012. http://ezproxy.stthomas.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy. stthomas.edu/docview/1401082318?accountid=14756. Assael, Brenda. The Circus and Victorian Society. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Chapman, Marina, Vanessa James, and Lynn Barrett-Lee. The Girl with No Name: The Incredible Story of a Child Raised by Monkeys. New York: Pegasus, 2013. “Circus Folk Mourn ‘Best-Liked Freak.’” New York Times, April 7, 1926: 7. Daly, Michael. Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013. Davies, Helen. Neo-Victorian Freakery: The Cultural Afterlife of the Victorian Freak Show. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age Culture & Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Durbach, Nadja. Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Forster, Nick. Greatest Wonder in the World: History and Life of Jo-Jo the Dog Face Man. New York: Popular, 1885. Circus World Archives. Garascia, Ann. “The Freak show’s ‘Missing Links’: Krao Farini and the Pleasures of Archiving Prehistory.” Journal of Victorian Culture 21, no. 4 (December 2016): 433–55. doi:10.1080/13555502.2016.1230370. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Narratives of Deviance and Delight: Staring at Julia Pastrana, the ‘Extraordinary Lady.’” In Beyond the Binary: Reconstructing Cultural Identity in a Multicultural Context, edited by Timothy B. Powell, 81–104. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999. http:// ezproxy.stthomas.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.­ stthomas.edu/docview/742225394?accountid=14756. Gott, Ted, and Kathryn Weir. Gorilla. London: Reaktion Books, 2013. Herza, Filip. “Faces of Masculinity: Shaving Practices and Popular Exhibitions of ‘Hairy Wonders’ in Early Twentieth-Century Prague.” In Beauty and the Norm Debating Standardization in Bodily Appearance, edited by Claudia Liebelt, Sarah Böllinger, Ulf Vierke, 23–44. Palgrave Studies in Globalization and Embodiment. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Hornberger, Francine. Carny Folk: The World’s Weirdest Sideshow Acts. New York: Citadel Press, 2005. Kapil, Bhanu. Humanimal: A Project for Future Children. Berkeley, CA: Kelsey Street Press, 2009. Kipling, Rudyard. “In the Rukh.” 1893. In Nagai 2013, 315–37.

256  Shannon Scott Kipling, Rudyard. The Jungle Book. 1894. In Nagai 2013, 1–140. Kipling Rudyard. The Second Jungle Book. 1895. In Nagai 2013, 141–314. “Krao, the Missing Link. A Living Proof of Darwin’s Theory of Descent of Man.” 1883. The Tibbals Circus Collection of Cabinet Cards. Montcrieff, A. R. Hope. A Book About Boys. 1886. Repr., Sydney: Wentworth Press, 2016. Nagai, Kaori, ed. The Jungle Books. London: Penguin, 2013. Nagai, Kaori. Introduction to Nagai 2013, xviv–li. Newton, Michael. Savage Boys and Wild Girls: A History of Feral Children. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Nickell, Joe. Secrets of the Sideshows. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2005. Oneill, Therese. Ungovernable: The Victorian Parent’s Guide to Raising Flawless Children. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2019. Shuttleworth, Sally. “Victorian Childhood.” Journal of Victorian Culture 9, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 107V13. doi:10.3366/jvc.2004.9.1.107. Singh, Joseph Amrito Lal., and Robert Zingg. Wolf-Children and Feral Man. New York: Harper, 1939. Sivasundaram, Sujit. “Imperial Transgressions: The Animal and Human in the Idea of Race.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 1 (2015): 156–72. Stern, Rebecca. “Our Bear Women, Ourselves: Affiliating with Julia Pastrana.” In Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Tromp, Marlene, Kathryn Valerius and Rosemarie Garland-­T homson, 200–33. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. http://ezproxy.­ stthomas.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.stthomas.edu/ docview/742354840?accountid=14756. Sweet, Matthew. Inventing the Victorians. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. “The Shajehanpur Wolf Boy,” Lippincott’s Magazine XLI (1898): 121. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. “Wolf Children.” Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal 446 (July 17, 1852): 33–36. Young, Kevin. Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Postfacts, and Fake News. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017. Zimmer, Carl. “When Darwin Met Another Ape.” In National Geographic. April 21, 2015. www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2015/04/21/ when-darwin-met-another-ape/.

Note on Contributors

Alicia Alves is a doctoral candidate at Queen’s University, Canada. She received her master’s degree from Lakehead University. Her dissertation focuses on human-animal kinship, hybridity, and the intersections between childhood studies, animal studies, and queer theory in late Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature. Her work has been published in SARE: Southeast Asian Review of English. Brenda Ayres is the coeditor of this volume and has edited several collections of essays with the most recent being Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (Routledge, 2019), Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-first Century (Anthem, 2019), and Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2017). Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (Anthem, 2017) is her most recent monograph. To date, she has published a total of 43 books and over 200 articles, primarily on Victorian literature. Currently she teaches English courses through Liberty University Online and Southern New Hampshire University. Stephen Basdeo teaches at Richmond American International University (Leeds RIASA). He has published extensively on Robin Hood, but for this volume, of particular interest is his “Robin Hood and Wat Tyler in Victorian Penny Dreadfuls” in Barbara Gribling’s Pasts at Play: Childhood Encounters with History in British Culture, 1750–1914 (Manchester University Press, 2019). He has also published Life and Legend of a Rebel Leader: Wat Tyler, The Life and Legend of an Outlaw: Robin Hood, and Heroes of the British Empire (Pen and Sword Books, 2018, 2019, and 2020, respectively). Also forthcoming is Robert Southey’s Harold; or, the Castle of Morford: The First Robin Hood Novel (Routledge 2020). Keridiana Chez teaches at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. She is well known for her publications in animal studies, such as Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Ohio State

258  Note on Contributors University Press, 2017), “Man’s Best and Worst Friends: The Politics of Pet Preference at the Turn of the Century” in Dominik Ohrem’s American Beasts: Perspectives on Animals, Animality, and U.S. Culture, 1776–1920 (Neofelis, 2017), and “Creative Carnivores and Cannibals: Animal Feed and the Regulation of Grief” in Margo DeMello’s Mourning Animals (Michigan State University Press, 2016). Alisa Clapp-Itnyre  is Professor of English at Indiana University East, Richmond, Indiana, where she teaches Children’s Literature, YoungAdult Literature, and Victorian literature, etc. She is the author of Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Ohio University Press, 2002). She has published in Victorian Poetry, Victorians Institute Journal, and Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, and coedited with Julie Melynyk “Perplext in Faith:” Essays on Victorian Beliefs and Doubts (Cambridge Scholars, 2015). Her second monograph, for Ashgate’s Studies in Childhood Series: 1700–Present series, Claudia Nelson, editor, is Hymn Books for Children, 1800–1900: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood (Ashgate/Routledge, 2016). Her current project is focused on children’s nineteenth-century diaries. Constance M. Fulmer is the Blanche E. Seaver Chair of English Literature at Seaver College, Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She has published extensively on both George Eliot and Edith Simcox including George Eliot: A Reference Guide, A Monument to the Memory of George Eliot: Edith J. Simcox’s “Autobiography of a Shirtmaker” with Margaret E. Barfield, and George Eliot’s Moral Aesthetic (Routledge, 2019). Recent articles include “Edith Simcox’s Transgendered Self-Image In Her Portraits of George Eliot,” in Reassessing Women’s Writing of the 1880s and 1890; “Edith Simcox as Biographer of George Eliot” in Victorian Periodicals Review; “Irony upon Irony: The Persistence of Gordon Haight’s Perceptions of Edith Simcox (1844–1901) in Biographies of George Eliot” in Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century; and “George Eliot’s Use of Horses in Measuring Moral Maturity” in Victorians and Their Animals. Christie Harner teaches Victorian literature and culture at Dartmouth College, including courses on Darwinism and animal studies, children’s literature, narrative theory, and imperial fictions. She has published on Victorian literature and science in Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and ELN, including recent and forthcoming essays on animal studies and eco-criticism in texts by Rudyard Kipling and Anne Brontë. She has also published and presented papers on British imperial culture, postcolonial theory, and the Australian colonies, subjects that she takes

Note on Contributors  259 up here, including an essay on Trollope and Australia in Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature. Further research on British photography and narratives of the Middle East, funded in Summer 2018 by a fellowship from the Huntington Library, demonstrates her broad scope of analysis. Stacy Hoult-Saros is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Valparaiso University. She has focused much of her recent scholarship on intersections between Humane Education and language teaching, having published articles and chapters on Latin American poetry and narrative and on representations of U.S. Latinx culture in the media and in children’s literature. Her chapter “Beautiful Cockroaches and Featherless Birds: Anthropomorphism in Books for Latinx Children” is included in the forthcoming Our Animals/Ourselves: The Blurred Line between Humans and Animals. Other recent publications include “Harmony and Healing in the Age of Nature Deficit Disorder: an Ecocritical Reading of Lilianet Brintrup’s Poetry,” in Hispanic Journal (2018) and “Say Hello to my Little Friends: Nonhumans as Latinos in U.S. Feature Films for Children,” in Latinos and American Popular Culture (2013). Her book The Mythology of the Animal Farm in Children’s Literature: Over the Fence was published by Lexington Books in 2016. Brandon Katzir  is Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma City University, where he teaches World Literature and Composition. His research focuses on medieval and early modern Jewish literature, especially religious writing. His recent publications have appeared in Rhetor, Rhetorica, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly. Lindsay Katzir is Assistant Professor of English at Langston University, where she teaches British Literature and Composition. Her research centers on issues of race, religion, and gender in nineteenth-century British literature, generally, and in particular, she focuses on Victorian Jewish literature and culture. Recent publications have appeared in Women in Judaism, Jewish Studies Quarterly, and Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (Routledge, 2019). She lives in Oklahoma City with her husband, Brandon Katzir, and son, Avigdor Herschel Katzir. Anna Koustinoudi has taught a number of literary and academic writing courses at Aristotle University in Greece. Her most recent publication is “The Biographer as Biographee: Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865)” in Ayres’s Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 2017). Her monographs, titled The Split Subject of Narration in Elizabeth Gaskell’s First-Person Fiction and Place and Progress in the

260  Note on Contributors Works of Elizabeth Gaskell, were published in 2011 by Lexington Books and in 2016 by Routledge, respectively. Sarah E. Maier is the coeditor of this volume and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of New Brunswick. With Ayres she coedited Marie Corelli: Woman Warrior Writer ­(Anthem, 2019) and included her chapter, “The Muses Are Women; So Are the Fates”: Corelli’s Literary Masquerade(s).” She has published extensively on the Brontës, Barrie, Conan Doyle, Hardy, amongst others, and is coediting with Ayres Neo-Victorian Madness (Palgrave, 2020) and Neo-Gothic Narratives (Anthem, 2020). She is Professor of ­English and Comparative Literature in the Department of Humanities & Languages as well as Director of Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at the University of New Brunswick. Susan Nance is a historian of entertainment, communication, and live performance in the United States. She is Professor in the Department of History and affiliated faculty with the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Rodeo: An Animal History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), The Historical Animal, editor (Syracuse University Press, 2015), and Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Shannon Scott is Professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has published articles and book reviews in Victorian Network, Gothic Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Neo-Victorian Studies. In 2013, she coedited the collection, Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction, 1838–1896. In 2015, her essay, “Female Werewolf as Monstrous Other in Honoré Beaugrand’s ‘The Werewolves’” was published in She-Wolf: A Cultural History of the Female Werewolf by Manchester University Press. Her most recent essay, “Wild Sanctuary: Running into the Forest in Russian Fairy Tales,” will appear in the edited collection In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves, and Wild C ­ hildren— Narratives of Sociality and Animality ­(Manchester University Press, 2019). In addition, her short story, “American House S­ pider,” will appear in the annual anthology, Nightscript, forthcoming.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Aesop 14, 51, 62n5, 65, 70, 71, 72, 78 Africa 70, 103n13, 120n3, 132, 134–6, 139, 216, 219, 226–30, 237–9, 253n5, 256 agency 36, 45, 48, 51, 52, 55, 63n11, 65, 85, 87, 89, 94, 97–102, 105, 111, 163, 165, 177, 200–2, 216, 235, 260 Amato, Sarah xii, 14–15, 22, 26, 192, 194, 233n26, 233 animal rights and legislation 4, 30, 47n5, 87, 88, 102, 102n2, 105, 115, 122n14, 123, 177n12, 179, 199 ants see insects animal studies xii, 2, 5, 9, 12, 91, 102n2, 104n17, 106, 180–1, 195, 234, 257–8 anthropocentrism 1–7, 12–13, 15, 20, 35–46, 47n5, 52, 62n2, 98–9, 118, 120, 122, 223–4, 238 anthropomorphism xii, 4–7, 12–15, 41, 52, 57, 91, 95–6, 102, 103n9, 105, 113, 163, 165, 170, n173, 233n17, 259 apes xii, 3–4, 5, 9n1, 10, 14, 27, 187, 201, 235, 238, 240, 256 Asia 124–40, 210, 216, 228, 240 Ayres, Brenda xi–xiii, 1–11, 12–30, 213n11, 257; Victorians and Their Animals xi, 163, 177, 181, 182, 183, 192, 194, 199–200, 213, 221, 234 Baring-Gould, William 16, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26n10, 27 Barnum, P. T. ix, 215–36, 237–56 Baum, Frank 14, 25n2, 27 bears 84, 98, 125, 217, 221, 225, 235, 237, 238, 250, 253n10, 256

Band(s) of Mercy 87–105; Band of Mercy Advocate 87–105 Bible 7–8, 67–73, 75, 79, 81–6, 99, 117, 129, 142, 186, 188, 195, 196, 218 birds xii, 6, 7, 13, 19–23, 32, 43, 48, 50, 63, 91–100–2, 103n6, 103n11, 103n13, 112, 115, 117, 147–55, 158n9, 164, 166–73, 177, 182, 183, 187–91, 196, 198, 201–7, 218, 226, 232, 234, 259; see also canaries; chickens; ducks; emus; geese; hens; owls; poultry; turkeys Britain see England Brontë, Anne 9, 196–99, 200–1, 205, 211–12, 258; Agnes Grey 158, 158n9, 204–7; Tenant of Wildfell Hall 204–7 Brontë, Charlotte 9, 196–8, 199, 200–1, 205, 212, 214, 260; Jane Eyre 196, 201–4, 207, 213n3, 213n4, 213n5 Brontë, Emily 9, 196–9, 200–1, 205, 212, 214, 260; Wuthering Heights 207, 208–14 Brown, Laura xii, 5, 10, 14–15, 27 butterflies 20, 57–8, 63–4n12, 98–9, 149, 190 canaries 23, 193, 198 Carroll, Lewis 9, 31, 43, 44–6, 47, 47n5, 50–65, 80, 88, 104, 109, 110–15, 121n11, 122; Alice in Wonderland 39, 44–7, 50–65, 104, 121n12; Through the LookingGlass 50–65 cats xii, 12–30, 34, 38, 42, 45, 47, 55, 57, 63–64, 64n12, 93–5, 99, 114, 115, 137, 144, 158, 162–5, 177, 178, 182–4, 187, 193, 194, 198

262 Index Chez, Keridiana xii, 9, 21–49, 189, 257 chickens xii, 84, 98, 99, 166, 168–72, 177, 193; see also hens; poultry Christianity 7, 22, 53, 62n2, 66–7, 73–81, 98–9, 101, 102n1, 103n7, 123, 135, 142–4, 146, 148, 151–2, 156–7, 157n4, 158, 159, 184 circuses 7, 8, 215–36, 237–41, 250–1, 255, 256, 260 class 9–10n1, 44, 53, 63n5, 63n6, 63n9, 80, 89, 98–9, 101, 125, 128, 136, 142, 152, 157n4, 158, 159, 162, 165, 168, 193, 196, 200–11, 225–6, 229, 232, 237, 239, 241–2 classification 55, 60, 112 Cosslett, Tess xii, 96, 103n9, 103n10, 104, 148–9, 158 Cows xii, 12–14, 24, 25, 69, 70, 91, 94, 98, 108, 147–8, 155, 160, 162, 172–5, 181–3, 186, 198, 217 cruelty 13, 16, 22, 69, 88, 93, 98–9, 100, 103n5, 104n18, 104, 142, 149, 156 Cruelty to Animals Act see animal rights and legislation Danahay, Martin A. see Morse, Deborah Denenholz Darwin, Charles 3, 6, 9, 9n1, 10, 54, 65, 112, 122, 121n10, 122, 128, 237, 239–41; Descent of Man; 239, 256; Origin of the Species 55–6, 60, 65, 116, 123, 237, 245 deer 67, 71–2, 234, 245 DeMello, Margo 32, 33, 38, 47, 47n1, 88, 97, 103n9, 104, 105, 176n3, 178 Derrida, Jacques 12–13, 21, 25n1, 27, 51, 61, 63–64n12, 65 Dickens, Charles 6, 78, 80, 85, 88; Oliver Twist 48, 66, 74–6, 88, 105, 211 dogs xii, 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 27, 28, 33–5, 37–8, 47, 69, 73–5, 78, 79, 84, 88, 90, 93–6, 98–100, 103n8, 110, 152, 154, 162, 180–4, 201, 203–14, 220–1, 224, 230, 235, 237–9, 247, 251, 255, 257; see also spaniels dolls 1, 35, 39, 64n13, 103n8, 230 domestication 9, 14, 33, 43–49, 61, 87, 105, 116, 145, 160–79, 198,

205, 207–8, 214, 216, 220, 221, 230, 233n2, 248 domesticity xii, 7, 22, 42, 43, 48, 63, 67, 88, 103, 105, 145, 146, 155n5, 158, 160–79, 193–200, 208–214, 226, 232 donkeys ix, 67, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 182, 185, 192–205, 223 ducks xi, 105, 111, 114, 150–1, 160, 166–70, 190 ecology 15, 27, 106, 109, 111, 122n16, 122, 123, 151 elephants ix, 9, 14, 91, 125, 183, 192, 217–36, 246, 255, 260; see also Jumbo Eliot, George 9, 18, 27, 89, 180–95, 250; Adam Bede 180, 190–4; Daniel Deronda 191–2, 194; Felix Holt 188–9, 194; Lifted Veil 185–6; Middlemarch 185–6, 193–4; Mill on the Floss 181, 183–5, 194; Romola 190, 194; Scenes; 181, 186, 189–90; Silas Marner 181–2; Spanish Gypsy 186, 195 empire see imperialism emus 116–17, 122n15 England 11, 14, 16, 25, 26n13, 33, 62, 65, 66, 67, 74–6, 80, 85, 87–9, 92, 102n1, 103n5, 104, 109, 125–59, 176n3, 178 eroticism see sex Europe 80, 86, 103n13, 107, 118, 122n16, 123, 126–30, 216–18, 245–7, 250–2 evolution see Darwin exotic animals see elephants; emus; kangaroos; lions; monkeys; tigers fables see Aesop fairy tales 8, 14, 26n13, 28, 51, 53, 62n5, 66, 203, 259 family xii, 21, 29, 34, 48, 53, 66, 76, 79, 93–100, 103n7, 103n11, 105, 109, 112–18, 131–77, 184–215, 232, 237, 239, 245–7, 253n4, 253n5, 253–4n11 Farini, Krao ix, 232, 238–48, 250–2, 253n4, 253n7 farm 160–79 femininity 33, 98, 142, 146–7, 164–9, 178, 207, 211, 213n8, 246, 248 feminism 1, 110, 121n8, 123, 160, 173, 177, 178

Index  263 fish 15, 28, 93, 112, 142, 146–7, 150–5, 163, 167, 177, 183, 184, 216, 255; see also sharks Foucault, Michel 12, 61, 65 foxes 71, 72, 84, 88, 99–101, 146, 219 foxhunting see foxes frogs 91, 95, 106, 109–13, 120n1, 122 geese 10, 166–8, 170, 190, 198; see also Mother Goose gender 32–4, 41–3, 140, 144, 151–3, 157, 157n7, 159, 161, 164, 165, 167, 172–3, 175, 178, 200, 226, 235, 240, 248, 258 Gordon, Samuel 66–86 guinea pigs 49, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98 hedgehogs 45, 91–2, 147, 151–2 hens 160, 162, 167, 171–2 horses xii, 7, 8, 16, 23, 27, 28, 29, 33, 38, 69, 92–3, 96–101, 103n6, 121n6, 146–8, 154–5, 181–221, 224, 229, 235, 251, 258 Hughes, Thomas 26n13, 142–59 hunting 88, 100–1, 102n4, 125, 129, 142, 146 illustrations ix, xi, 7, 14, 36, 62n4, 62n5, 94–5, 98, 101, 103n8, 104, 107, 120n5, 127, 128, 137, 140, 141, 161, 166–7, 172, 175, 213, 225, 226–8, 234, 247, 251, 253, 254n14 imperialism 53, 69, 73, 76, 125–41, 237–57, 146, 159, 168, 178, 237–56 India 125–41, 237, 253–4n11 insects 55, 57–8, 91–2, 112, 183, 259; see also ants; bees; butterflies Jeftichew, Fedor 237–40, 248–52 Judaism 8, 66–86, 259 Jumbo ix, 219, 226–32, 233n17, 236, 237, 247 kangaroos 183, 106, 109, 116–18, 120n2, 121n11, 122n15, 123, 183, 225 Kingsley, Charles 26n13, 131–2, 138, 140, 237, 252–3n1, 153–4n11, 254n16, 255–6, 258 Kipling, Rudyard 9, 237

Lacan, Jacques 12, 63n11, 64, 65 lambs see sheep lions 14, 29, 48, 59–60, 67–9, 71, 81, 108, 125, 127, 136–8, 140, 203, 204, 217, 219, 221, 234, 236, 237, 252 masculinity 20, 136, 142–59, 168, 193, 202, 204, 211, 229, 252, 255 Mazzeno, Laurence W. xii, 47, 48, 51, 66, 94, 105, 195 menageries 55, 188–9, 208, 214–21, 224–5, 228–9, 233n5, 233n6, 234, 236, 238 mice see rodents Middle East 66–86, 80, 210, 257 monkeys ix, 91, 101, 186–7, 189, 190, 217, 223, 224, 225, 237–8, 240, 255 morality 4–25, 29, 32–3, 39, 46, 53–5, 62–74, 80, 82, 85, 95, 101, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112, 124, 143–54, 156, 157, 161, 162, 169, 170, 180, 181–94, 213, 216–18, 222, 228, 232, 236, 258 Morrison, Ronald D. see Mazzeno, Laurence W. Morse, Deborah Denenholz xii, 102n2, 104, 177, 194, 214 Mother Goose 16, 17, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30 nationalism 73, 80, 107, 118, 217, 230 Nance, Susan xi, 9, 215–36, 260 North America 15, 16, 26n13, 28, 48, 62n5, 74, 103n1, 120n3, 131–9, 150, 178, 215–36, 239–41, 246, 253n5, 255, 258, 259 nursery rhymes xiii, 8, 12–30 Orient see Asia orphans 167, 168, 189, 196, 201, 208, 209 Others see postcolonialism owls 6, 106, 110, 112, 217, 225 Pedley, Ethel 106–24 penny dreadfuls 9, 125–41, 257 pets xii, 7, 9, 14, 18, 21, 22, 28, 31, 33–49, 63n10, 88, 90–3, 98, 100–15, 142–55, 158, 162–5, 182–214, 217, 224–6, 230–58

264 Index pigs 136, 145, 148, 153, 160, 166, 172–3, 178, 193, 198, 223 pigeons 46, 49, 58, 147, 199 ponies see horses postcolonialism 5, 9–10n1, 12, 13, 23, 31, 87, 106–24, 125–41, 178, 217, 237–57 posthumanism 1–3, 5, 10, 12, 52, 138, 140, 161, 171, 174, 176n1, 177, 178, 208, 216 postmodernism 1, 4, 10, 52–3, 58, 17 Potter, Beatrix 4, 9, 31, 35, 41–4, 48, 103n9 poultry 6, 98, 148, 151, 166, 167, 169, 186 puppies see dogs rabbits xii, 9, 31–49, 55–9, 63n10, 65, 84, 88, 93, 94, 110–16, 121n11, 122n16, 148, 155, 184, 212, 225 race 35, 55, 77–9, 82, 116, 130, 141, 158n11, 159, 199, 253n3, 256 religion 1, 2, 6, 16, 66, 79, 82, 98–9, 259; see also Christianity; Judaism Ritvo, Harriet xii, 65, 89, 102n2, 102n4, 105, 145, 147, 149, 152, 159, 200, 214, 221, 232n1, 232–3n2, 236 rodents: 23, 42, 52, 114, 115, 149–54, 163–4, 183, 186, 203 Russia 66–86, 247–51, 260 RSPCA 87, 89–105

Sandras, Mathilde 31, 35–8, 48 Scott, Sir Walter 74, 80 sex 17, 32, 88, 90, 140, 141, 144, 158, 168, 172, 244, 249 Shakespeare 17, 19, 66, 73–4, 78, 86 sharks 15, 25n3, 27, 28, 29 sheep xii, 78, 64n13, 68, 69, 71–2, 74, 79, 84, 86, 95, 99, 116, 164–5, 189–91, 209 snakes 9, 125–41, 219, 252–3n1 spaniels 12, 94, 96, 100, 142, 189, 192–3 taxonomy see classification tigers 14, 15, 125, 198, 211–29 toads 91–2 Trimmer, Sarah 21, 22, 30, 103n10, 103n11 turkeys 84, 98, 103n8, 166–8, 177, 186, 192 turtles 52, 57, 63n10 vegetarianism 4, 97, 98, 104n14, 104n17, 105, 177 Victoria, Queen 38, 103n6, 127 wolves 66–86, 237, 250, 253n2, 253n3, 253–4n11, 256, 260 Zangwill, Israel 66–86 zoos 7, 8, 14, 92, 98, 103n13, 128, 139, 217–19, 225, 230, 245–7