A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire 9781350049529, 9781845204105

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illustrations

INTRODUCTION Figure 0.1 Family of Owls. ca. 1898

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Figure 0.2 Children Playing Musical Instruments, accompanied by a dog. n.d.

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Figure 0.3 Successful fox hunting. Sporting Sketches by Henry Alken. 1817.

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Figure 0.4 Tiger taking the water. 1853.

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Figure 0.5 Childrens Fashions for July. 1872.

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Figure 0.6 Shipping Wild Animals in the London Docks. 1864.

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Figure 0.7 Prize Animals of the Smithfield Club Cattle Show. 1860.

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CHAPTER 1 Figure 1.1 Statue of Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh.

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Figure 1.2 Byron and Boatswain near Hyde Park Corner, London.

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Figure 1.3 Hyde Park Cemetery, London.

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Figure 1.4 Infantry War Memorial, outside Palais de Justice, Brussels.

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Figure 1.5 The Man with the Donkey, outside the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne.

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Figure 1.6 John Gray, Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh.

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Figure 1.7 Balto, Central Park, New York City.

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CHAPTER 2 Figure 2.1 Daniel Boone. 1839.

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Figure 2.2 Henry William Herbert near his New Jersey home, the Cedars.

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Figure 2.3 A Hunter’s Dilemma. 1851.

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Figure 2.4 Going Out: Deer Hunting in the Adirondacks. 1862.

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Figure 2.5 The Promised Land—The Grayson Family. 1850.

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Figure 2.6 Manitou House of Manitou Springs, Colorado.

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Figure 2.7 Martha Maxwell’s Colorado diorama, “Women’s Work.” 1876.

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Figure 2.8 Theodore Roosevelt.

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Figure 2.9 “America.” 1876.

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CHAPTER 3 Figure 3.1 Nouveautés parisiennes. 1909.

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Figure 3.2 The Rat Biscuit Company. Rat bis-kit. 1918.

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Figure 3.3 Cattle and sheep. ca. 1907.

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Figure 3.4 The Giraffes in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London. n.d.

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CHAPTER 4 Figure 4.1 Friedrich Seidenstücker, “Brown Bear.”

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Figure 4.2 Washington Park Zoo (Milwaukee) Bear Dens. 1905.

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Figure 4.3 Hagenbeck’s Tierpark, Main Panorama.

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Figure 4.4 Hagenbeck’s Tierpark, Arctic Fjord.

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Figure 4.5 Canary—Carduélis canária. 1864.

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Figure 4.6 Jessie Tarbox Beals, “A little tame canary who always went to sleep in his acorn basket.”

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CHAPTER 5 Figure 5.1 Vignette Title-page. Exotic moths. 1843.

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Figure 5.2 A naturalist being mobbed by Pteroglossus beauharnaesii, curl-crested aracaris.

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Figure 5.3 The Red Bird of Paradise. 1869.

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Figure 5.4 George Albert Boulenger (1858–1937) with spirit jars. 1920s.

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Figure 5.5 The British Museum’s Zoological Gallery.

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CHAPTER 7 Figure 7.1 Rosa Bonheur’s Studio. 1862.

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Figure 7.2 Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. The Wild Cattle at Chillingham. 1876.

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Figure 7.3 Robert Clayton. The Kangaroo. 1836.

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Figure 7.4 The Python Swallowing the Boa at the London Zoological Gardens. 1871.

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Figure 7.5 Van Amburgh, the Brute Tamer of Pompeii! 1838.

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Figure 7.6 Eugene Delacroix. Lion Devouring a Horse. 1844.

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Figure 7.7 The Missionary’s Escape from the Lion. 1857.

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series preface

A Cultural History of Animals is a six-volume series reviewing the changing roles of animals in society and culture throughout history. Each volume follows the same basic structure, and begins with an outline account of the main characteristics of the roles of animals in the period under consideration. Following from that, specialists closely examine major aspects of the subject under seven key headings: symbolism, hunting, domestication, entertainment, science, philosophy, and art. The reader, therefore, has the choice between synchronic and diachronic approaches: A single volume can be read to obtain a thorough knowledge of the subject in a given period from a variety of perspectives, or one of the seven main aspects can be followed through time by reading the relevant chapters of all six volumes, thus providing a thematic understanding of changes and developments over the long term. The six volumes divide the topic as follows: Volume 1: A Cultural History of Animals in Antiquity (2500 bce–1000 ce) Volume 2: A Cultural History of Animals in the Medieval Age (1000–1400) Volume 3: A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance (1400–1600) Volume 4: A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Enlightenment (1600–1800) Volume 5: A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire (1800–1920) Volume 6: A Cultural History of Animals in the Modern Age (1920–2000) General Editors, Linda Kalof and Brigitte Resl

INTRODUCTION

Animals and Human Empire k athleen kete

Would the violence of the French Revolution have occurred if the French were vegetarian? Decidedly not, according to Jean-Antoine Gleizes (1773–1843), a moderate French revolutionary, later romantic, who “recalled the horrific sight of human heads being paraded on pikes and drew attention to the role played by Parisian butchers in stirring up the cruelty of the mob.”1 A bit simplistic, of course, as an explanatory model but helpful in establishing a primary theme of our period in the Cultural History of Animals, which is the link established in the post-Revolutionary “social imaginary” between violence toward animals and violence toward people, especially on the part of the lower classes who, it was imagined in turn, were more susceptible to sense impressions, more impulsive, and more animal-like than their observers. The equation between violence toward animals and political violence prompted France’s first animal protection law, forged in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 and its attendant June Days, when class conflict led to the bloody deaths of thousands on the streets of Paris. “That the spectacle of suffering encourages cruelty, that the child accustomed to bloody pastimes or witnessing cruelty will become a dangerous man, that the vicious carter (le mauvais charretier) is latent in the child,” was a convincing argument to the French National Assembly, which passed the Grammont Law in 1850 prohibiting public cruelty toward animals. It was necessary to leash the mob, this “underclass” (sous-peuple in the poet-politician Alphonse de Lamartine’s words)

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so easily excited by the sight of blood.2 The “suppress[ion] of dangerous elements of human society” was one of the central missions of British animal protectionists as well, responsible for the establishment in 1824 of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), which under the patronage of Queen Victoria became the RSPCA in 1840.3 Regarding the “age of empire” from the point of view of the place of animals within its cultural maps, one finds that the first challenge of nineteenthcentury elites was to assert empire over the animal within the European soul, on European soil, and this struggle was bound up with the class conflicts that marked nineteenth-century politics. It was also implicated in changing definitions of the post-Enlightenment self. As readers will recall, the defeat of Napoleon first in 1814, then definitively at Waterloo, confirmed the importance of conservatism throughout Europe. What the First Empire shared with its enemies and immediate successors throughout the continent was a fear of both working-class politics and revolutionary liberalism. The freedoms of the self, like the imperatives of workers, were understood as destabilizing forces, responsible alike for the excesses of the Terror. We will see below how the problem of determining the human/animal divide, that is, the line between the human and the simply animal, the very question of human nature, weighed on discussions of the future of democracy, whether among those seeking fruitlessly to return Europe to the Old Regime or among those who recognized the future of representative governments—but as governments of order, resting on property rights, expressed as the nation, and legitimated by the promise to keep chaos at bay. That bourgeois culture is in some measure a response to lower-class violence is easily recognized in the narrative of the early animal protection movement.4 Europe’s first animal protection law was the Protectorate Ordinance of 1654, which prohibited cockfighting and cockthrowing. What exercised the ire of Puritans were the blood sports of traditional Europe, cockthrowing (in which contestants took turns throwing rocks at a tethered chicken) and cockfighting, but also dogfighting, bullbaiting, and bullrunning, which took place in villages, towns, and fairgrounds—sites associated with drinking, gambling, and brawls.5 The Ordinance of 1654 was overturned in the subsequent Restoration, but middle-class opinion in eighteenth-century Britain slowly formed against blood sports, at least those of the lower orders. One finds in the British press of the eighteenth century growing repulsion to these activities couched in part as a concern with “public order.”6 By the end of the eighteenth century, many towns were enforcing ordinances against cockthrowing and bullbaiting. These scattered municipal ordinances were followed in 1835 by the comprehensive British Cruelty to Animals Act, which outlawed the “running, baiting, or fighting” of any animal. Clearly, a pattern of mobilization had become established, pitting middle-class reformism against popular violence.

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First the British and then the French, German, Swiss, and Americans, created animal protection societies built on the formula of class in the nineteenth century. The British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824, as we have seen, the French Société protectrice des animaux in 1845, German and Swiss societies in the 1830s and 1840s, the American SPCA in 1866, and a Swedish society in 1875. It is often noted that animals were protected by law in Britain before slavery was abolished and before children were protected from the worst exploitations of industrial capitalism. Martin’s Act, Britain’s first parliamentary law against violence toward animals, was enacted in 1822. Only in 1833, ten years later, were children under the age of nine prohibited from working in factories in Britain and were the work hours of older children limited. Although the slave trade was abolished in 1807, slavery itself was not abolished in the British Empire until 1833. Efforts to protect animals against the depredations of the lower classes helped shape the cultural history of animals in the first half of the nineteenth century, but they were never simply about overt social control. They also modeled a new way of behaving, of acting in the world, which rewarded empathy and sympathy as well as the restraint of angry impulses. Puritanism resonated with a more generally developing middle-class view that was increasingly at odds with popular culture as epitomized by blood sports. Puritans had urged Christian Europe to remember that Adam’s sin had cast animals, too, out of Eden, and that as descendants of Adam and Eve we have a responsibility to take care of the animals now given over to us to ensure our survival. Ours is a stewardship over nature, a kind of trust, a bond, was the argument launched by these careful readers of the Bible.7 Eighteenth-century sensibilities, which we return to below, also left their trace in these later attitudes. A self-described bourgeois morality found kindness to animals axiomatic for itself. The obverse of lower-class violence toward animals, the valorization of kindness to animals came to take on a life of its own as a mark of civilization.8 It became a value that bled into the fabric of the emerging mass culture of the twentieth century to become a globalizing norm. Marx saw how this might work. “Members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals,” like “temperance fanatics,” “organizers of charity,” and “improvers of the condition of the working class,” he wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party on the eve of the continental Revolutions of 1848, “wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best . . .”9 Ritvo cites the chairman of the first meeting of the British animal protection society, who explained its mission as bluntly: “Their object was not only ‘to prevent the exercise of cruelty toward animals,’ ” he explained, “‘but to spread amongst the lower orders of the people . . . a degree of moral feeling which would compel them to think and act like those of a superior class.’ ”10

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The map of post-Revolutionary Europe was set with Britain and France as its powerful core and kindness to animals as one of that core’s distinctions. “As early as the 1830s . . .,” Ritvo explains, “the English humane movement had begun to claim kindness to animals as a native trait and to associate cruelty to animals with foreigners, especially those from southern, Catholic countries.”11 To be kind to animals came to stand high in the index of civilization. Indeed, it formed part of the project of civilization. France and Britain together looked down on the fringes of Europe, for example, Spain, where bullfighting was practiced, and beyond Europe, North Africa and the Levant, where dogs were treated like objects. The barbarian other—the urban working classes, continental peasants, southern Europeans, Catholic Ireland, Russians, Asians, and Turks—was defined in part by its brutality to beasts. During the French Second Empire (1852–1870) the Société protectrice des animaux urged peasant children to be kind to animals. With the support of the government, they held contests that awarded medals to the schoolteachers who best inculcated the principles of animal protection in their charges. Awards were decided on the basis of children’s essays collected by the Prefects of the Departments, forwarded to the Ministry of Education and now lying in boxes in the national archives. “I once was cruel to animals but after the schoolmaster’s teaching, now I am not,” was the exercise’s basic heading. From the 1880s, the Grammont Law was posted in primary-school classrooms, adding kindness to animals to the “catechism of the Third Republic” (1870–1940).12 The French and American societies ran important campaigns directed against the killing of small birds and the destruction of birds’ nests by small boys for fun. Rural children were taught that bird families were like human families, attached to their children. Mother birds are like mothers everywhere. “Would a mother like to have a cruel robber come, and take her little ones out of the cradle or the crib while she has gone out, to get bread for them? Answer this question before you touch these helpless birds,” ran the caption to an American illustration in the 1850s, published by the American Sunday-Schools Union. And boys will be (loving) boys: “Has [the boy] a home, and would not he be grieved if robbers should break into it, and seize his little brothers and sisters and carry them off, and throw the house down or set it on fire? Why then does he not consider that the house of the little birds is dear to them, and that to break it up, is to distress, if not to destroy them?”13 The valorization of kindness to animals in the nineteenth century, a legacy we cherish today, was once explained as a response to urbanization. Modernization, it was understood, led to the increasing size and number of cities. London, for example, had a population of 450,000 in 1700, a million in 1800, and 4.5 million by the 1880s. Paris doubled in size from 550,000 in 1800 to a million by 1850, and then grew to 2.5 million by 1900.14 Manchester, England, was not large compared to these capital cities, but the factory city sustained

INTRODUCTION

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FIGURE 0.1: Adolf Oberländer. Family of Owls. A. Oberländer-Bilderbuch. Ca. 1898.

Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

a six-fold increase in population from the 1770s to 1831, when its population reached 142,000.15 A break with all things rural was assumed to accompany nineteenth-century urbanization and to describe the urban experience. It was supposed that city dwellers were alienated from the day-to-day experience of animals as workers and food providers. The cotton mill town of Manchester described by Charles Dickens, Friedrich Engels, and other observers as almost demonically dominated by its factories lingers into our century as the iconic city of the age.16 In modern cities, therefore, and in societies where they held sway, nostalgia for rural life could develop. In the absence of an instrumentalist approach to animals, a sentimentalized view of them could unfold, as it would seem. This new way of envisioning animals is exemplified in Beatrix Potter’s stories about farmyard animals—The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Flopsy Bunnies, The Tale of Tom Kitten, The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck, and others—which remain seductive in their ability to reconstrue the natural world as cozy and domestic,

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though always on the edge of loss, a genteel image of animals made possible only, some have argued, by a distancing from real farms, real farmers’ gardens, real woods, geese, rabbits, and foxes. It is now clear, however, that urbanization in the nineteenth century increased the presence of utilitarian animals in the city. As Ritvo has explained, “The number of urban horses in Britain increased from about 350,000 in the 1830s to about 1,200,000 at the beginning of the twentieth century; most of the additional animals were used to haul omnibuses and other heavy vehicles in the growing towns.”17 Patrice Higonnet speaks of eighteen thousand horse-drawn carriages crossing the Pont-Neuf in Paris in the 1860s every day.18 Susan D. Jones forcefully explains in a book about veterinarians in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century that “the most densely populated spaces for people also contained the most dense populations of animals in the United States. City dwellers saw, smelled, and benefited from animals every day. Dairy cattle, poultry, and pigs lived in backyards and barns; the stables and carriage houses that sheltered horses and the vehicles they drew lined many alleys. The concentrated numbers of these animals meant that they were a highly visible part of the urban landscape, perhaps even more so than the rural landscape.”19 The moment when kindness toward animals becomes a dominant cultural value precedes, therefore, the material changes of city life—the electric trams and internal combustion engines of the later decades of our period that, for the most part, will remove draft animals from the city and make the family cow anomalous. So we must search for other causes. Is the expression of empathy to animals related to Enlightenment sensibility? It is certainly related to the revolution in European culture that newly privileged the emotions. The importance of empathy in shaping attitudes toward animals in the nineteenth century has been stressed in histories of animal protection movements. Yet this very elision between human and animal is the idea we must pause over and explain, not the premise on which to build, at the very least because it is at the heart of our contemporary concerns about animal rights. It is one of the great unresolved issues in our field. Moreover, recent work in the cultural history of post-Revolutionary Europe has focused on a shift in attitudes away from the display of emotions, or the passions, as they were known, which had shaped political expression at the end of the eighteenth century and were associated from 1799 on with political instability. William Reddy, in his suggestive book on the history of emotions, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, connects the sober rationality of nineteenth-century government to the failure of sentimentalism, or Enlightenment sensibility—the privileging of “impulses of the heart”—to anchor the French Revolutionary state. Sentimentalism recognized “sincere expression [as the] root of virtue” and undertook to

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judge that sincerity by the intensity of its expression. “How did you feel when you heard the news of the king’s death?” was the emblematic Jacobin interrogation. “Were you pleased to see that the nation had been restored to its rights when the goods of the clergy had been confiscated?”20 The British elite shared this sensibility. Linda Colley refers to the “sturmund-drang quality” of British political life in the Revolutionary era, “a special kind of emotionalism and violence” that marked the intensity of the times. Colley describes to this purpose “the Earl of Chatham collapsing in the House of Lords as he made his last manic and incoherent speech against war with America in 1778, [and] Edmund Burke flinging a dagger onto the floor of the House of Commons in December 1792 as a symbol of his departure from the Foxite Whigs, and Charles James Fox bursting into tears in response.”21 Among political elites, therefore, it was not just violence from the lower classes that was understood to be a threat to stable states, but it was the emotional, impassioned elite itself that needed to be tamed, and that emotional, impassioned self that defined it that was to be restrained. This was, above all, effected through a separation of spheres. Emotion in post-Revolutionary Europe was now restricted to the private sphere, and to women and children—to those who, along with workers, were understood as “lacking reflection,” in the terms of the French writer and politician Victor Cousin. The male self of the nineteenth century was grounded in reason and an a priori self not subject to the vicissitudes of the environment. For the materialist ideas of the Enlightenment had posited a self that was malleable—shaped by sensory impressions— and French Revolutionaries had attempted to “regenerate” society by acting on that self through discourse and spectacle. Post-Revolutionaries sought to close the revolutionary opening of self by tethering the self to something outside of (in the case of spiritualism) or prior to (in the case of Cousinian psychology or French Doctrinaire liberalism) the self, but in any case establishing democracy on static grounds.22 This shift in values has an important bearing on our subject. Not only does it ground public life in a more stable, sober, normative self that rejects as feminine or childlike, or at least as private, those aspects of the human that are not demonstrably controlled by reason, but this self is also in active play against the notion of emotional continuity between the human and the animal that the cultural history of animals in our period at first sight reveals. A look at views of childhood can help us understand how the distance between humans and other animals was imagined by elites and what that categorization implied for politics.23 On the one hand, the link between children and animals appears clear and unmediated in the thought of the nineteenth century. The historian and critic Hippolyte Taine argued, for instance, that when a child encounters an object in nature, “animal or tree, she immediately meets it as a person and wants to know its thoughts and words; that is what

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she cares about; by a spontaneous induction she imagines it like herself, like us; she humanizes it.”24 We find these views expressed throughout children’s literature. In the story “Inferior Animals” by Mrs. Gatty, to give an important example, we are directed to “see the little child as she babbles to her cat on the rug, and would fain be friends.”25 The supposed intuitive communication between child and animal shaped one of the most popular images of children and animals in nineteenth-century America. Circulating as a print, the picture, entitled “Can’t You Talk?,” was also found “on cloth in children’s books, molded on majolica pitchers, and even sold as plaster-of-Paris and ceramic figurines.” In this image it is a dog, not a cat, who encounters the baby, but to the same effect: “Both are on all fours, and they look directly into each other’s eyes as equals.”26 Children were like “primitive peoples,” Taine asserted in defense of this view: “This disposition is found among primitive peoples, the more strong [that the disposition is] the more primitive they are; in the Edda [a collection of Old Norse poetry from the thirteenth century], especially in the Mabinogian [medieval Welsh folktales called ‘tales of youth’], animals have also the gift of speech.”27 Gatty mourned the “necessary unlearning” of our childhood instinct for communication with animals, a theme that the Jungle Book stories of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) also address.28 Mowgli’s trajectory from wild child—half animal, half human (“‘I am two Mowglis,’ he sings”)—to adult is, as Tess Cosslett explains in her essay, “Child’s Place in Nature: Talking Animals in Victorian Children’s Fiction” (from which much of this argument is drawn), “part of growing up and leaving the childhood space of play and ambivalence between human and animal natures.”29 As Katherine Grier shows in her essay “‘The Eden of the Home’ ” the image “Can’t You Talk?” is made “poignant by its title. . . . Although it is unclear which creature is, in fact, interrogating the other, the future resolution of the narrative is that the dog and the baby, who see each other as equals for a time and are equals in important ways, will grow away from each other as time passes; the child can grow ‘up’ in a way the animal never can.”30 Children feel an affinity for nature, one that adults, males, we modern people, have lost. As the pronouns employed by Taine and Gatty signal, children were placed in the same category as women, who, in the received wisdom of the day, were closer to nature by virtue of their reproductive and emotional needs than were bourgeois men, whose identity was defined by reason. In the fantasy interactions of child and beast, that infantile, effeminate closeness is recaptured. “Perhaps the child can reclaim as fiction what the adult has to lose as primitive superstition,” Cosslett suggests, explaining this nineteenth-century point of view.31 “Only children, or child-like men . . . have any chance of breaking through the charm which holds nature thus as it were frozen around us, like a petrified magic city,” Novalis offered in an early expression of Romantic views.32

INTRODUCTION

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FIGURE 0.2: Ferdinand Moras. Children Playing Musical Instruments, accompanied by a dog. n.d. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Maturity involves a process of abandoning one’s animal-like tendencies. Erasmus had made much this same point for Europeans as early as 1530 in his On Civility in Children (De civilitate morum puerilium). For the postRevolutionary bourgeoisie, this “education” was class-coded, its lessons durable. For Odile Marcel, who wrote a memoir of growing up bourgeois and Catholic in the 1950s, Une éducation française, “early childhood was an initiation into the distinctions between humanity and bestiality. ‘Don’t eat like a pig,’ Odile and her siblings were told: ‘One must eat properly and act like a human being.’ Satiety was a base pleasure, ‘one must curb one’s animal desires by limiting the signs of their gratification.’ ”33 On the other hand, in the social imagination of elites in the nineteenth century, workers remained in the animal-like state, condemned by their environment.

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At least, they appear as animals in reports on conditions in the factory towns that began to appear in the 1830s. Listen to the words of Louis Villérmé, doctor and reformer, who was employed by the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1835 to investigate the life of workers in Lille, a textile manufacturing center in the north of France. The poor, we are told, live in dank cellars, clearly imaged in his report as (animal) dens where the workers lead an animal-like existence: “Everywhere are piles of garbage, of ashes, of debris from vegetables picked up from the streets, of rotten straw; of animal nests of all sorts; thus, the air is unbreathable. One is exhausted in these hovels, by a stale, nauseating, somewhat piquant odor, odor of filth, odor of garbage . . .” Naked or nearly so, the poor lived covered in dust from the workshops their skin “painted . . . hidden, if you wish, by indistinguishable deposits of diverse exudations.”34 Worse than the living conditions, for Villérmé, as William Sewell explains in Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848, was the “moral degradation” that accompanied them: “I would rather add nothing to this description of hideous things, which reveal, at a glance, the profound misery of these unhappy inhabitants,” Villérmé demurred, only to continue, “but I must say that in several of the beds of which I have just spoken I have seen individuals of both sexes and of very different ages lying together, most of them without nightshirts and repulsively dirty. Father, mother, the aged, children, adults, all pressed, stacked together. I stop. The reader will complete the picture, but I warn him that if he wishes to be accurate, his imagination must not recoil before any of the disgusting mysteries performed on these impure beds, in the midst of obscurity and drunkenness.”35 Sewell explains that “to judge from Villérmé, the life of the poorest workers in the slums of Lille was scarcely recognizable as human . . .” And though Villérmé does explain that only the “very poor lived in cellars,” his reports to the Parisian establishment “end by focusing on cellars—dwellings sunk into the earth, whose darkness, humidity, and similarity to burrows made them compelling symbols of the degradation of humans to the level of animals.”36 The worker as dirty animal, then, was his dominant trope. Another “bourgeois moralist”37 quoted by Sewell found the same conditions in working-class neighborhoods of Paris. “In certain quarters,” we can almost hear him squeal, were “scenes . . . to make one shiver! The faces one meets are full of ferocity and bestiality. The tongue they speak is a fatal tongue, invented to cover thought. Their excesses reach the point of orgies, and it happens everyday that the habitués mingle the blood of their quarrels with the alcohol that revives and consumes their brutalization.”38 Friedrich Engels, though on the left of these bourgeois reformers, depicted workers in Manchester and other industrial cities of Britain in similar, bestial terms.39 The Condition of the Working Class in England describes workers

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who “whether they submit passively to their fate or take to drink . . . are equally no more than animals.”40 The factory system prevents the development of the intellect: “It is obvious that a man must be degraded to the level of a beast if he is condemned to work of this kind.” Furthermore, so, too, do the attendant compensatory stimulations, sex and drink, in equally horrible doses, as Engels explains: “Apart from the over-indulgence in intoxicating liquors, the sexual immorality of many English workers is one of their greatest failings. This, too, inevitably follows from the circumstances in which this class of society is placed.” “The workers have been left to themselves,” Engels charged, “without the moral training necessary for the proper control of their sexual desires. . . . The result is that the workers, in order to get something out of life, are passionately devoted to these two pleasures [‘drink and sexual intercourse’] and indulge in them to excess and in the grossest fashion. If people are relegated to the position of animals, they are left with the alternatives of revolting or sinking into bestiality.”41 Clearly a “rhetorical strategy”42 is being employed. Louis Chevalier has explained that workers were grouped together with criminals—the laboring classes with the dangerous classes—in the first half of the century because the social conditions of capitalism were poorly understood. The propertied classes searched for ways to conceptualize class. Workers were also described as “nomads,” “savages,” “Apaches,” and “Mohicans” for the same reasons.43 These terms both marginalized the workers and the supposed behaviors of this class, as does, we argue here, the association of worker and animal. Likewise, the neighborhoods in which workers lived were dangerously wild. Note the dominating vision of the Thames in Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. Victor Hugo’s Paris, too, was described in organic terms. Readers of Les Misérables will recall Jean Valjean’s desperate flight across Paris in 182444 with the eight-year-old Cosette, recently rescued from the Thénardiers. They run from Javert, who has discovered Valjean living in the southeastern edge of Paris in the Faubourg Saint Marceau, a neighborhood “wilder by night than the forest.”45 They run through medieval streets and ways described as woods, alleys, forests, and cliffs, through the rue Mouffetard across the pont d’Austerlitz to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine on the right bank (neighborhood of the former sans culottes). Valjean was hunted, in Hugo’s words, like a “wild boar” or “lion” or “wolf” or “stag,” as the author imagines for us Javert’s strategy, “fanning out his beaters, in hunting parlance” only to have Valjean escape from a cul-de-sac into a garden (a symbol of civilization, of civilized nature) of the convent of the Perpetual Adoration (itself a retreat from nineteenth-century strife).46 The organic city of this chase was destroyed during the rebuilding of Paris in the Second Empire in the 1850s and 1860s. It was “replaced by broad new streets, amphitheatres, circuses, hippodromes, railway-stations, and a prison— progress accompanied by its corrective,” in Hugo’s ambivalent words.47 The

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death throes of this somatic city are imagined for us by Emile Zola in La Curée, whose title invokes the image of a prey whose parts, still warm, are tossed to the devouring hounds. As is happening in Shanghai in the early twenty-first century, the central neighborhoods of Paris were emptied out, or so it seemed, of workers, now banished to the banlieue (where the poor still languish today) as wide boulevards were cut across the face of Paris. Reason and modernity replaced irregularity and imagination. Urbanization did not lead to a reduction of the number of animals in the nineteenth-century city, we have shown above, but rather to a de-naturalized city, in the sense of artificial, or de-natured, in the sense that some natural, human element was withdrawn, or had been emptied out, at least in the understanding of those poets and painters who have depicted the alienation of modern life—while perhaps benefiting from the removal of slaughterhouses and scaffolds from the central urban districts and from better policing. Overt violence overall was effaced in the later nineteenth century. “Mob violence [was] less acceptable than ever before” on the part of ordinary people, Alain Corbin explains. “People insisted that the authorities protect them in the streets and safeguard them in their homes, and accordingly felt revulsion at the bewildering spectacle of mob violence, with its terrifying spectacle of sudden death,” he explains in Village of Cannibals, a study of the torture and murder of a French noble in August 1870 at a fairgrounds in provincial France in front of hundreds of people fearful of the Prussian invasion. Alain de Monéys was burnt—roasted—possibly while still alive. His killers boasted of having “roasted a fine pig.”48 The killers saw their victim as an animal and were, in turn, seen as animals at their trial: “The chief judge expressed the peculiarity of the ‘heinous crime’ in a striking phrase: it was tantamount, he said, to a denial of the nineteenth century.”49 It was a resurgence of “bloodthirsty beasts,” the attackers were “revoltingly similar to animals,” they were “creatures with human faces.” The murder of Alain de Monéys shocked the French in 1870 because of its retrograde character, its reprise of revolutionary themes. Corbin shows, in a brilliant image, how the murder appears as a “monadnock,” a physical remnant of another era, which tells us by contrast what our new one is like.50 Corbin reminds us that the nineteenth century “was a century of great carnage, of vast battlefields and lethal repression,”51 but this was slaughter effected by the state, the repressions, so many statements of the monopoly of violence on the part of directing elites.52 In the “hunting cult” of upper-class British males we see how the expression of violence in the nineteenth century was reserved for those for whom the exercise of power was both a sign of dominion over the animal (and the animal-like) and a mark of the aggressor’s civility. Since they could so patently rule themselves—maintain their humanness in the face of the animal and their

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own animal practices—hunting declared the imperial elites’ right to rule, or so it was supposed. The contrast between foxhunting and other forms of hunting in Britain demonstrates this point. The Game Act of 1671 in Britain had extended hunting rights to the landed gentry, displacing the monarch as sole owner and protector of game. The Game Reform Act of 1831 opened hunting to anyone with a permit.53 Through the organization of the foxhunt, urban professionals— doctors, lawyers, and civil servants such as one finds romping through the pages of Anthony Trollope’s novels—could participate in this ritual in which only the most intrepid riders would witness the bloody end, the tearing apart of the fox by the hounds. Hunting as practiced on the shooting estates of the very rich on the fringes of the British Isles and in India was something very different. In India, John M. MacKenzie tells us in The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism, the British embraced “some of the spectacular forms of the Mughal Empire and of its inheritor princely States.”54 These were “the great elephant-borne hunts of the northern [Indian] aristocracy,” which mark the memory (and our films) of the period and whose functions, MacKenzie explains, “are readily apparent.”55 “The monarch was displayed to his people in the grandest and most powerful manner imaginable,” and the British, following

FIGURE 0.3: Henry Thomas Alken. Successful fox hunting. Sporting Sketches by Henry Alken. 1817. Plate 11/7. Lithographs—hand-colored. George A. Arents Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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suit, “displayed themselves in the same way.” It was a progress, in the Elizabethan sense, of the empire’s “viceroy’s, governors and visiting royalty.”56 It was about imperial power and surveillance. It was also about asserting control over people through control over beasts. The tiger was the bounty, the prey, and the challenge. The British took up the charge of defending their subjects from tigers, which “often,” MacKenzie explains, “approached the status of the werewolf of European lore.” It is no wonder, perhaps, that the tiger’s place in the British imagination of the Rah was so secure.57 The “romantic rediscovery of the remoter regions of the British Isles and the hunting potential of moors and mountains led to the acquisition of shooting estates and the building of hunting lodges throughout the Highlands and Islands, northern England and some parts of Wales and the West Country,” MacKenzie tells us in his remarkable discussion of the “hunting world” of nineteenth-century Britain.58 There, mechanisms such as “the battue [the beating for game and] the large-scale slaughter of carefully reared birds” were established as the privilege of shooters whose redundant trophies of direct kills (from both at home and abroad) in the form of skins, heads, and horns littered the floors, walls, and mantles of country estates throughout Britain.59

FIGURE 0.4: Thomas Landseer. Tiger taking the water. Engravings of lions, tigers,

panthers, leopards, dogs & c., chiefly after the designs of Sir Edwin Landseer, by his brother, Thomas Landseer. 1853. Plate 37. Engravings. Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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These decorations now stand as empty signifiers in commercial America in Ralph Lauren stores and advertisements. They are our postmodern, dream images of England. The real “violence, aggression, blood and death” of the nineteenth-century hunt of deer and birds is depicted almost hysterically in Sir Edwin Landseer’s painting, The Swannery Invaded by Eagles.60 More typically, MacKenzie explains, Landseer paintings stand as allegories depicting the struggle between “civilization” and “barbarism.” They show the upper-class, imperial male moving between the two states. He is powerful, one concludes, because of his special ability to traverse the divide. He alone, Landseer’s representations of the hunt suggest, can “bring . . . the values of one to bear upon his activities in the other,” without sinking into the other, into the animal-like, which hunting would do to the lower classes.61 As William Pitt the Younger had argued in an earlier debate on Game Reform, “for their own sake, and the sake of society, [these classes] should not be encouraged to engage in such diversions.”62 Daniel Herman, in chapter two of this volume, places the history of hunting in America in its own peculiar framework of cultural power. Can we not see pet keeping, in light of our understanding of the strategies of selective violence in the nineteenth century, as a different kind of ritual enactment of power? As Grier and others point out, the middle-class “ethic of kindness” may be generally conservative with respect to our behaviors toward animals: “The full implications of the metaphors of animal as servant or child, and animal families as like human ones, were never worked through.”63 Pet keeping is kindness toward only a few favored animals. The practice of pet keeping operates in a world where other animals are used for work and food, as we will see more fully elsewhere in this volume. Is not pet keeping, then, another way to hide from ourselves the real violence between humans and animals beneath an image of sensibility, or even a means to deflect us from awareness of the violence between ourselves and others in an age of class conflict and global domination? Corbin hints at this thesis: “The inability to bear the sight of blood is related to the growing intolerance of strong animal odors,”64 odors disguised in the transformation of animal into pet as it was folded into the rhythm of middle-class family life. Placed in this different register, pet keeping appears as a phantasmagoria, a fantasy relationship of human and animal most visible in the trope of the animal as child, the pet as a member of the family, which the nineteenth century inaugurates and which every trip to a veterinarian reminds one of today (and as does the practice of divorce law where pets are increasingly a point of contention and judges are asked to make custodial decisions, which they resolutely refuse to do). The pet who is a child is a de-animalized animal. In this symbolic logic, is not our animal nature, too, denied? That we ourselves might be aggressive and dominating is doubly hidden in the culture of pet keeping.

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FIGURE 0.5: Anonymous. Childrens Fashions for July. 1872. Prints. Picture Collection,

The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

In any case, that pet keeping is a phenomenon of the nineteenth century and one of its most significant expressions of the human/animal relationship is not in doubt. Hilda Kean’s chapter here on “The Moment of Greyfriars Bobby” describes how dogs, especially, came to figure in the popular imagery of urban life. To be sure, Europeans and Americans had pets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and medievalists tell us of the favored animals of the aristocracies. Hounds, hawks, and lap dogs were kept out of love, out of need, and for reasons of status. The forms of pet keeping that define its practice today, however, were established in western Europe and the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. They were innovations linked rhetorically by contemporaries to middle-class life. Pets were understood as a way of completing middle-class life. They stood in as a sign of middle-class life, its signature, as caricaturists of the century understood. Dog breeds were created out of amorphous categories of type—hound dog, mountain dog, bird dog, for instance. Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, the influential French naturalist, described fourteen varieties of dogs in 1788 in his Histoire naturelle. In 1899, Pierre Mégnin discussed two hundred breeds in his three-volume work on Les Races de chiens. Ritvo has shown in her work The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age how dog breeding was regulated by the creation of the Kennel Club and dog shows, institutions copied almost immediately by the French and the Americans. Other innovations included the dog pound for strays and veterinarians for pets. For

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rich dogs, bakeries and clothes were offered, for dead ones, cemeteries, and for hungry ones, commercial dog food—Spratt’s from Britain being the first. Cat breeding and its accessories followed suit. Aquariums were wildly popular from midcentury on, sometimes sharing domestic space with aviaries or at least cages of captured songbirds.65 The element of fantasy in pet-keeping culture is easy to see. The claim that a “pet is a child” is for most people ironic. Less self-conscious fantasies surround the histories of dog breeds. How many people even today believe that their Saint Bernard dog is connected, if only through blood lines, to actual mountain rescues or their sheepdog to sheepherding or their large, lumbering Labradors to birding? And what would this ancestry of work represent in the context of a bourgeois apartment on a boulevard of Paris during the belle epoque or a semidetached house in suburban London? Zoos, too, organized fantasies for bourgeois consumption. Nigel Rothfels, in his book Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo, describes the development of an institution in which animals are kept in ersatz wild spaces, surrounded by moats not bars, but contained, alienated from the wilderness, nonetheless. He also describes the trade in exotic animals in Europe and America and its connection to big-game hunting. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the easiest way to capture exotic animals for zoos was to kill all the adults in a herd, then round up the young. Some hunters’ accounts describe scenes from the nightmares of Babar the Elephant, whose story began with the killing of his mother. Hans Hermann Schomburgk explains in Wild und Wilde im Herzen Afrikas (1910) that after shooting a huge cow elephant, he watched her calf, “the pitiful little baby[,] continuously r[u]n about its mother while hitting her with his trunk as if he wanted to wake her and make their escape.”66 The director of the Bronx Zoo in 1902, William Hornaday, knew that this aspect of the trade must be hidden: “We must keep very still about forty large Indian rhinoceroses being killed in capturing the four young ones. If that should get into the newspapers, either here or in London, there would be things published in condemnation of the whole business of capturing wild animals for exhibition.”67 Indeed. Rothfels has more to say about zoos and consumers’ demands that their captives seem happy in chapter four of this volume. And Narisara Murray will describe the trade in dead animals for display in natural history museums and amateur collections in her chapter on “The Changing Roles of Scientific Specimens.” We signal here the connection between the display of exotic beasts and the display of exotic peoples. Laplanders, Sudanese, Greenlanders (Inuits), Fuegians, and others were shown at venues such as the Jardin d’Acclimation in Paris in the late 1870s and 1880s and “at imperial spectacles in Britain in the period 1886 to 1938.”68 A not-too-subtle confusion of beasts and people, we can surely agree.

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FIGURE 0.6: Anonymous. Shipping Wild Animals in the London Docks. 1864. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

The century’s presenting theme of kindness to animals also contrasts with the treatment of animals in science. The great discoveries of the internal organization of the body in the nineteenth century were based on a presumption of “shared physicality” between humans and animals, and these were achieved through the practice of vivisection. French and German physiologists, especially, privileged knowledge gained through experimentation (on live bodies) over observation (of sick people) toward understanding health and disease and used live animals—horses, rabbits, and cats, but particularly dogs—to conduct their experiments. For instance, Karl Ernst von Baer (1792–1876) “establish[ed] the function of the mammalian ovary, resolving one of the great mysteries of the female reproductive system,” in the words of Roy Porter.69 Von Baer’s experiments on dogs “demonstrat[ed] the essential role of ovulation in mammalian reproduction,”70 putting earlier views to rest and allowing Europeans to begin to understand the timing of human pregnancies. His work on embryos “stressed that the embryos of various species initially share highly analogous and even indistinguishable forms, gradually differentiating, so that in embryonic development general characters appear before special ones,”71 suggesting to contemporaries how closely allied human and animal development are.

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Karl Ludwig (1816–1895), a “dedicated vivisector,”72 invented machines “for recording variations in blood pressure, and the mercurial blood-gas pump . . . for separating the blood from the mixture of gases in it.” “His main investigations,” Georges Canguilhem, the great French historian and philosopher of science, has explained, “were directed to glandular secretions and the part played by the nervous system in circulation; he studied renal permeability . . . endosmosis . . . the behavior of blood-gases during muscular exertion (1861) and the capillary blood-pressure (1875).”73 The important French physiologists include François Magendie (1783– 1855), an early pioneer of vivisection who was professor of medicine at the Collège de France and whose work on spinal nerves was conducted there in his physiological laboratory. Claude Bernard (1813–1878), whose “principal discoveries were in the digestive function of the pancreas (1848) and in the sugar-making (glycogenic) secretion of the liver (1855),” was his most famous successor. We owe to his experiments on dogs the discovery “that diabetes is signified by a disequilibrium of the glucose-content of the blood” and the related conclusions that other scientists would draw with respect to the treatment of this disease. Bernard’s disciples—Paul Bert (1833–1886) and C. E. BrownSéquard (1817–1894)—made other important discoveries through vivisection about the physiology of the nervous system and about endocrinology.74 Of course, one can say much more about developments in physiology in the nineteenth century and how it established the laboratory model for the investigation of diseases. These comments simply sketch some of the achievements in physiology in the nineteenth century to show how they were based on an understanding of the relationship between humans and animals that needs particular attention in the context of our themes. The science could work only insofar as it assumed the likeness of human and animal bodies—which the materialism of the Enlightenment had implied—as well as a radical difference between humans and animals based on a notion of soul, or immaterial substance, or mind, a presumption that modern European culture inherited from traditional thought but had yet to define fully outside the religious context in which it had developed. One did not vivisect humans. Here we bring cultural anthropology to bear on our subject, a discipline that has much to offer because of the close attention it pays to the problem of animals in human cultures. Philippe Descola in Par-Delà Nature et Culture (Beyond nature and culture) (2005) offers a brilliant taxonomy that allows us to see nineteenth-century attitudes toward animals in a global context. As one interpreter has explained, Descola places any civilization’s ideas about animals on two axes, physicality and interiority. Physicality has to do with “views taken about bodies.” Interiority has to do with “ideas about the self, personhood and the mind.” Societies can imagine either a continuity or discontinuity with the animal world on each of these planes. That is, we can believe that we are

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physically similar or dissimilar to animals, and that we are similar or dissimilar when it comes to our mental worlds, or “souls.” A “four-fold scheme” results from these choices, ranging from “totemism” to “animism” to “analogism” to “naturalism,” which distinguishes one ontology (or worldview) from another. Naturalism is “exemplified by the current western ‘scientific’ world-view.” “It insists on the differences between humans and non-humans on the interiority axis (humans alone have cultures in the strict sense) but sees humans and nonhumans linked by their shared physicality. We are all made of the same stuff.”75 However, his reviewer queries, “is it the case that all of us in modern ‘naturalist’ cultures share precisely the same attitudes towards animals, for instance, acknowledging a sharp discontinuity, as the definition of ‘naturalism’ insists, between us and them [animals] in the matter of feelings and even of rights?” Descola himself admits that “more than one ontology may be present in a given community. There will be one dominant ontology, so he claims, but that does not exclude traces of others.”76 The cultural history of animals in the nineteenth century bears out the claim that a mixture of views about the human/animal divide can exist in a single world-system. At the heart of the interpretation offered in this chapter is the recognition that this confusion of views happens in Europe and America where the “naturalist” system first triumphs and appears to trump all others. Physiology was built on the double premise of the physical sameness of animals and people and their moral difference. Yet, as we have seen, widespread support for animal protection and the even greater enthusiasm for pet keeping grew out of beliefs about the similarity of humans and animals on what Descola labels the “interiority axis.” This significant (because institutionalized in law and common practice) claim about a continuity between humans and animals in the realm of emotions and feelings stands beside (if not equal to) the claim that supports the sciences—the continuity between humans and animals in the physical realm. Indeed, it is the intensity of these two views about animals that gives Western ontology its specificity, we conclude, rather than simply the dominance of the scientific view. Moreover, both attitudes toward animals, both claims about the similarity of humans and animals, are drawn, in part, from the same eighteenth-century source. The physical continuity between humans and animals presumed by materialism led animal protectionists in the nineteenth century to conclude that animals experienced the same responses to pain and pleasure as did humans. Pet keeping’s projections about the place of pets in family life may also have been fed by this stream, which Mark Rowland’s chapter on “Philosophy and Animals” in this volume will introduce us to.77 By the second half of the nineteenth century, strongly voiced arguments against vivisection were raised in Britain and more weakly in France. Antivivisection societies were formed there and elsewhere in Europe by the

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turn of the new century, though to little effect. Antivivisectionists claimed that feeling was a better guide to behavior than reason and pitted this claim against the scientific method and its practitioners. Male, rational, and rapacious science was the enemy, an argument that placed antivivisection within the feminist movement but also, in its attack on the primacy of reason, within the current of fin de siècle thought. Though swept up in the general disillusionment with rationality that marks this period, the questions raised about the ethics of animal experimentation remain unresolved today. Social Darwinist ideas also speak to the confusion of boundaries between humans and animals that arise from within science itself, which is one way to pose the problem of vivisection. Indeed, Teresa Mangum shows this to be the root of the problem in her discussion in chapter seven of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), where the mad vivisectionist surgically works to turn animal into human.78 Charles Darwin, of course, solved one of the most interesting nineteenthcentury questions about the natural world—what explains the diversity of life forms both in the present and the past. Lamarck (Jean-Baptiste Antoine Pierre de Monnet, Chevalier de Lamarck, 1744–1829) had famously proposed a theory of acquired characteristics to explain the differences between one species and another. Others proposed separate creations (by God) to explain the fossil evidence of extinct species. Darwin argued that competition led to the favoring of more advantageous characteristics over less advantageous ones, and the subsequent disappearance of the latter. Those individuals with advantageous characteristics survive and breed, while the others do not. Change occurs through natural selection. The borders between species, moreover, were not clear cut and, taking the long-range view of time, were porous. Of course, these few sentences are a simplification of a set of arguments that have been of fundamental importance to the history of science and that were presented by Darwin in his many works, including On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). We simplify here in order to emphasize, as with our discussion of physiology, the importance of the assumption of the physical sameness of humans and animals in the science of the nineteenth century—a point that is often overlooked in cultural histories of animals focused on issues of animal protection and the like—and to show how connected scientific arguments were to more popular notions of the human/animal divide. Harriet Ritvo offers another important example of this relationship in The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination, where she shows how British notions of race in the nineteenth century depended on the developing understanding of animal species. “Although the production of human children was arranged on grounds different from those

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that determined the pairing of pets and livestock,” she wryly notes, “the two forms of breeding evinced an ineluctable relationship.”79 Some studbooks organized relationships among cattle; others organized relationships among the British elite. Ritvo shows that “the same principles were routinely invoked to explain reproduction in both humans and domestic animals. Francis Galton coined the term eugenics because ‘we greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock . . . especially in the case of man.’ ”80 In France, the same arguments were in play. The new discipline of anthropology applied to humans the methods of natural history, as Sigismond Zaborowski-Moindron explained in his Grande Encyclopédie essay on the subject in 1886. Anthropology, “one of the most fertile areas in the philosophic movement of our day, has envisaged man . . . as a being who must be studied according to the same

FIGURE 0.7: Harrison Weir. Prize Animals of the Smithfield Club Cattle Show. 1860. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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methods and classes according to the same principles, that is to say, according to the determination of the same characteristics [as other species].”81 These methods led to arguments about the superiority of Europeans over Africans, Asians, the indigenous peoples of Australia and New Zealand, and so on, backed by a specious science whose legacy is clear today. They also allowed for arguments about the superiority of some Europeans over others, again a legacy with horrendous effects. Ritvo discusses John Beddoe’s The Races of Britain: A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe (1885), showing how the Celts were understood as an inferior race, demonstrating physical traces of “Mongoloid” and “African” influences.82 Joseph Boyer’s 1876 work, Recherches sur les races humaines de l’Auvergne, more wide-ranging in argument than its title might suggest, is another good example of the application of principles deduced from animal breeding to racism. Boyer describes the French “races” of humans in terms similar to those that distinguished types of dogs, in appearance and disposition, and ranked them on a scale of superiority. Boyer’s discussion of dégradation perceived the same danger in a mélange of races that structured pet owners’ attitudes toward breeding and the practice of animal husbandry.83 As Ritvo notes, “whenever human variation was reified as specific or subspecific difference, hybridization became an issue.”84 Dorothee Brantz’s chapter here on the “Domestication of Empire” also addresses these themes. How to understand the difference between humans and animals in the face of arguments about our physical similarity launched by Enlightenment materialism? This is the question we inherit from nineteenth-century people. Although we do not share Social Darwinist fears about “degeneration”—that the social welfare network that developed in modern Europe allows for the survival of unfit people who then pass on their tendencies toward alcoholism, promiscuity, and so on to future generations, thus weakening the national fabric—the field of medical ethics today wrestles with questions about the value of damaged human lives, and eugenics, though discredited by the practice of Nazi science, increasingly forms the backdrop to prenatal choices many parents now face. The question of the line between human and nonhuman animal raised for us by the age of empire can be understood through one final set of examples, the encounter with feral children from the 1720s to the 1920s. The first is the case of Peter, discovered in the German state of Saxony in 1725 and brought to the Hanoverian court of England. There, Daniel Defoe described Peter “as an animal, a human in bestial form, and also as a human-machine, having a human shape but lacking the essential guarantee of the human: that is, the possession of a soul.”85 Victor, the “Wild Boy of Aveyron,” was discovered in France in 1800 and viewed in the context of the failure of the Jacobin Republic. In the aftermath of the Terror, how much was it possible to reshape human nature? For Jean-Marc Itard, Victor’s famous tutor, the attraction of

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working with a feral child was the possibility of establishing the relative weight of innate versus acquired behaviors. Could there be found in this age of observation someone who, “carefully collecting the history of so surprising a creature, would determine what he is and would deduce from what he lacks the hitherto uncalculated sum of knowledge and ideas which man owes to his education”86—a question left unsatisfactorily dangling. In 1920 twin girls raised by wolves were discovered in India by a Reverend Singh. They lapped their food from bowls, slept naked wrapped around each other for warmth like pups, explored their environment by scent, and walked on all fours. Singh focused his rehabilitation project on their physical selves. By making Kamala and Amala act human, would they not be human? Again, inconclusive results.87 Could it be, as their historian suggests, that “humanity [Defoe’s ‘soul’] is something that is not taken from feral children, but rather something that is never bestowed upon them?”88 Wherein does difference lie? We do not have the answer to the question posed by the feral child, “the human that is nearly an animal.” It is on the level of the individual imagination, perhaps (rather than in the social realm where we began this chapter), that we most directly feel today the force of questions raised in the nineteenth century about the human/animal divide. In the lingering power of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders on the Rue Morgue (1841), and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) to speak to our fears of the beast within, are we not recognizably heirs to their doubts?

CHAPTER ONE

The Moment of Greyfriars Bobby The Changing Cultural Position of Animals, 1800–1920 hilda kean

By the eighteenth century, the keeping of pets was widespread in Britain.1 However, changes subsequently occurred in the ways in which humans viewed domestic animals. In particular, the status of different domestic animals and their cultural representation developed in new ways. In exploring such developments I want to draw on the “moment” of the story of Greyfriars Bobby, a small Scottish terrier who lived in Edinburgh in the middle of the nineteenth century. The real dog survived John Gray, his keeper, a policeman (or, in some versions of events, a farmer), and supposedly defied attempts to be “owned” by another human being. The dog became well known for his daily autonomous mapping of his routes around the city. Apparently, the dog was fed every day at Traill’s dining rooms, visited the castle when the guns were fired at lunchtime, and spent the night sleeping on his dead keeper’s grave in the Greyfriars graveyard. Thus, for the next fourteen years, the grave became Bobby’s home. Bobby was given the name of “Greyfriars,” thus being defined by the place where he lived after his keeper’s demise. Narratives were created to explain the terrier’s behavior, and in 1873, a year after Bobby’s death (and some fifteen years after John Gray’s), a small monument was erected. This statue, designed by a fashionable Scottish sculptor, William Brodie, depicted Bobby,

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sitting alone, on top of a marble base with a lengthy inscription and a drinking fountain for dogs at the bottom. It was erected in a public space outside the graveyard in which his keeper was buried. It was paid for by Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, described as the wealthiest woman in Victorian Britain, who was particularly active in exposing ill-treatment of various animals and encouraging new, benign attitudes.2 Greyfriars Bobby’s artistic depiction (and actions) epitomizes several features of the human/nonhuman animal (hereafter animal) relationship within modernity, which will be explored in this chapter. Humans seeing certain animals as fellow living beings and then treating them in ways defined as benign was a feature of modernity. As the very act of seeing became crucial in forming the modern person—who you were as a human being was determined by where you were and what you saw, as well as how you interpreted it3—animals, too, were placed in this visual moral compass. The act of seeing was key in forming

FIGURE 1.1: Statue of Greyfriars Bobby, Edinburgh, by William

Brodie. Photo by Kelly Harris.

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our understanding of the modern animal and marking the break with traditional norms.4 Increasingly, as I shall explore, individual animals were commemorated in public spaces in the form of statues. Their actions had been observed literally— for example, as companion animals or creatures mapping out their own spaces in an often-changing environment—and metaphorically. In turn, new narrative genres, such as autobiography, were developed, in particular, to portray dogs and cats as sentient and emotional beings with a distinctive sense of self. While it is simplistic to suggest that new cultural forms of depiction were a mere reflection of animal behavior, there is, I suggest, a change in the way animals were portrayed that hints at the influence of the animals themselves. Further, the cultural representations of particular animals, for example, in Landseer’s paintings, were employed by animal protectionists to influence the way in which actual animals were treated. Bobby and his statue are but one example of the emerging visual framework of modernity; they characterize the coming together of “real” and “represented” animals during the nineteenth century.

THE ROLE OF SIGHT APPLIED TO HUMAN AND NONHUMAN ANIMALS In the first decades of the nineteenth century, museums, such as London’s National Gallery (established in 1824 and moving to Trafalgar Square in 1832),5 mechanics’ institutes with their “machines, models, minerals and natural history,”6 public gardens, and also the zoological gardens were founded. Underpinning these institutions was the assumption that by seeing morally uplifting artifacts or living creatures, people’s behavior could be changed for the better. As the gazetteer of the Zoological Society argued, the zoo would help to “eradicate those vulgar prejudices which have in too many instances usurped the place of truth and to substitute just ideas, drawn from actual observation” (my emphasis).7 Within the zoo, animals could be observed: Gazing was the only activity needed. Animals normally hunted for food or “sport” became objects of a gaze rather than a gun through their location in a place of sight. This emphasis on observing animals continued as much from the pioneering work of Gilbert White of Selborne, whose journals offered acute observations of the wildlife in his vicinity, as from the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, on which the London Zoo was directly modeled.8 Later in the century, this form of human observation of nonhuman animals was to be found in the new dog (and later cat) shows. As Kathleen Kete has noted, the first dog show in France was held under the auspices of the Zoological Society.9 One reading of this phenomenon of displaying dogs and cats by their particular breed is that this was a eugenicist action. Certainly it is a convenient coincidence that the first dog show in Britain

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took place with the exhibition of setters and pointers at Newcastle upon Tyne in 1859, the same year that saw the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.10 The first dog show in France (in Paris) followed, and the first American show, under the aegis of the Westminster Kennel Club, occurred in New York in 1877.11 But such shows performed other functions as well as being forms of spectacle. The president of the National Cat Club, and initiator of cat shows at London’s Crystal Palace in 1872, was the illustrator and writer Harrison Weir, described by the Illustrated London News as “one of our ablest artists.”12 An enthusiastic promoter of cats at a time when they were still unpopular in some quarters, he suggested that cat shows would affect how ordinary cats were seen. The cat sitting in front of the fire “would then possess a beauty and an attractiveness to its owners unobserved and unknown because uncultivated before.”13 That is, perceptions of an individual cat’s appearance and worth might be influenced by the sight of different breeds of cats. A similar “crossover” from the categorization of dogs by breed to different ways of considering how they should be treated might be found in the work of George Jesse. Jesse was the author of the first comprehensive book on the history of individual breeds of dogs published in 1866. He also appeared as a committed antivivisectionist witness before the Royal Commission on Vivisection in 1875. Here he explained that his views had been “arrived at by intimacy and close friendship with animals, the perusal of books written by vivisectors, and conversations with medical and other men, some of whom have witnessed the torture of animals for so termed scientific objects.”14 Thus, seeing animals as living sculptures in a dog show, so to speak, was not necessarily counterposed to perceiving animals as unworthy objects of experimentation. Rather there was an elision between seeing animals in one location and transferring this sentiment to another context. In a similar vein, Henry Bergh saw no contradiction in addressing a human and canine audience on the opening evening of the first Westminster Kennel Club show in New York, in his capacity as the founder of the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.15 Further, certain breeds of dog might be said to have positively benefited from the actions of the (British) Kennel Club, which opposed the cropping of dogs’ ears for purposes of display.16 The Kennel Club also condemned both vivisection and the public muzzling of dogs to prevent the spread of rabies since, it alleged, this created more instances of hydrophobia.17 Although dogs and cats displayed at shows would be treated as objects of the human gaze, unlike animals in zoos they were living in the same everyday space as humans and would interact with people on a daily basis. It was human–animal interaction of an everyday nature, such as mutual looking or communicating through sound and touch, that would also facilitate particular human actions.

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As I have argued in a previous work, the emphasis on sight, and on witnessing perceived cruelty and injustices toward animals, was a key feature of campaigns for animal protection throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.18 Writing against the harassment of cattle on their way to be slaughtered at the Smithfield cattle market in London in the 1830s, Frances Maria Thompson, a patron of the Animal Friends Society, declared, “The increasing instances of cruelty in our streets have now risen to such a height that it is impossible to go any distance from home without encountering something to wound our feelings.”19 The concept of sight was also developed as an organizing conceit by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the 1870s. Humans had a duty to use this sense, which was shared with animals, in beneficial ways. Speaking from the platform at the RSPCA annual general meeting of 1875, Reverend Haweis encouraged the audience as follows: Every one of us is bound to open his eyes and see what goes on in our London Parks, (cheers) and in our country parks, amongst these poor dumb creatures over which we ourselves are placed, and try to understand them, and consult for them, and put our eyes in the place of their eyes when we make large demands upon them for our pleasure or defence . . . (my emphasis).20 Irrespective of the term “dumb” creatures, sight was being employed here to understand the suffering of animals that was caused by human demands. A similar emphasis on personal witness of the plight of animals as a spur to activity is found in the important work Shambles of Science first published in 1903. Its authors, Louise Lind af Hageby and Liesa Schartau, had registered as students of physiology specifically in order to expose the work of vivisectors at the prestigious University College London.21 As they wrote: The importance of personal experience of the methods of vivisection for those who throw themselves heart and soul into the battle against it cannot be exaggerated. We hope that more and more ardent friends of this cause of mercy will enter the laboratories, see the deeds of darkness tolerated in Christian countries, and tell the world what they have seen. 22 Animals were being seen as sensate beings and the animal–human relationship defined as potentially positive both for the animal and the human. Moreover, the way in which humans represented animals became important in creating particular relationships between human and nonhuman animals. Discussing the concept of representation, Erica Fudge has argued that “a symbolic animal is only a symbol . . . unless it is related to the real.”23 In another work Fudge has described her difficulties in trying to find an immediacy with animal experience

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and recognizing that “I had to look to humans to find the animals, but all that is available to the historian are records of use, edibility, training, exploitation.”24 Continuing this idea in her interesting exploration, Animal, she states, “A visual representation (whether a painting, stained glass window or sculpture) of a wild animal is an image of a wild animal under human control. Framing, in this sense, equates to caging.”25 However, while it is certainly the case that representations by their very nature imply control, I want to suggest that it might also be illuminating to consider the changes that occur in such representations in this period and what they indicate about changing human–animal relationships. Neither the form nor the content of representation—nor the existing types of actual animals represented—was static or timeless. Representation was certainly also used by campaigners to effect a shift in the animal–human continuum.

THE CHANGING POPULARITY AND FORMS OF DIFFERENT DOMESTIC ANIMALS Different breeds of dog became fashionable as the century progressed. In the first years of the nineteenth century, the Newfoundland was frequently depicted in anecdotes as a particularly deserving dog possessing the honorable quality of loyalty.26 These large dogs had also been promoted in Sydenham Edwards’s illustrations as patriotic in that they originated from a part of North America that had been loyal to “king and country.”27 Kenyon-Jones has described perceptions of the Newfoundland as a “notably masculine animal.”28 The Saint Bernard also grew in popularity. No longer simply a symbol of Christian charity (the dogs were originally kept by the monks of Mount Saint Bernard to rescue travelers stuck in the snow), they began to be kept as pets. Despite their large size, they became popular in cities toward the end of the century, no longer acting simply as “working” dogs. The popular novelist Ouida kept a favorite named Isla, while the feminist campaigner Louise Lind af Hageby and the president of the Women’s Freedom League, Charlotte Despard, also enjoyed the company of this breed;29 socialist Annie Besant had the misfortune of having her Saint Bernard stolen from the London streets.30 Similarly, with the introduction of cat shows in England, “new” forms of cat, for example, the Abyssinian, were introduced into Britain.31 The popularity of particular breeds and the interest in their visual depiction was greatly influenced by Queen Victoria and her penchant for different types of dogs.32 In particular, she was fond of small Pomeranians that she bred and showed.33 Other famous devotees of this so-called lady’s dog included Queen Alexandra, with her pet Marco, and Christabel Pankhurst, the suffragette.34 Unfortunately, the spectacle of the small Pomeranian, both at dog shows and in prints, encouraged a change in form, so that the creatures were bred to be

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increasingly tiny, the standard weighing no more than two and a half pounds.35 With her interest in creating a particular idea of Scotland and Scottish landscape, Queen Victoria was also responsible for the popularity of Skye terriers, the same breed as Greyfriars Bobby, previously seen as fairly lowly working dogs. She had as companions three such terriers named Islay, Cairnach, and Dandie Dinmot (the latter also being the name of a breed of terriers).36 Victoria’s Scottish terriers were depicted in a number of paintings of the royal family. Indeed, many of these images feature “working” dogs—terriers or Albert’s greyhound Eos—transformed into domestic pets.37 Although the genre of dog paintings might be said to include different categories of “sporting” or “working” dogs, many images of Queen Victoria’s dogs show them to be household companions. Greyfriars Bobby, as a Skye terrier, was a working dog who had previously accompanied his keeper-policeman on his rounds. But he was also the sort of dog sufficiently favored by royalty to be depicted on canvas by Sir Edwin Landseer, the most influential dog painter in mid-nineteenth-century England.38

CHANGING FORMS AND LOCATION OF ANIMAL REPRESENTATION In this period, animals were increasingly represented in different visual forms and sites of commemoration. The tradition continued of memorializing companion animals in private space, for example, in a dog graveyard within the grounds of a large estate.39 Famously, Boatswain, Lord Byron’s favored Newfoundland dog, was buried in a grand mausoleum in which the poet had also intended to be buried, in his ancestral home in Newstead Abbey. Although interment took place within his private property, such was the fame of Byron and his attachment to his pet animals that this act of commemoration was widely known. It was not simply a private act of grief; in its transmission into stone it became public.40 A similar example of a human and nonhuman animal sharing a site of commemoration in death might be seen in the 1908 gravestone sculpture of Ouida. In the public cemetery in Bagni di Lucca, a once-fashionable spa resort in northern Tuscany, one of her many dogs is depicted sitting at her feet.41 The sculpted form of animals and the location of such depictions also changed. The fashion developed of commissioning sculptures of favorite pet animals since “pets were seen as being worthy of celebration with the visual language of permanence.”42 Queen Victoria, for example, employed William Boehm to carve an image of her aging collie in expectation of his forthcoming death.43 Commemorating favored animals in sculptural form was a practice usually confined to named dogs kept by aristocrats or celebrities, as in the sculpture of novelist Walter Scott, who was depicted by William Scoular in 1838,

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FIGURE 1.2: Byron and Boatswain near Hyde Park Corner, London, by Richard Belt.

Photo by Hilda Kean.

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with his Highland greyhound Maida. The dog has recently been described as “modern culture’s first canine celebrity.”44 A later example in the same genre might be the statue of Lord Byron and Boatswain erected in London’s Park Lane in 1880, nearly sixty years after Byron’s death and over seventy since that of his companion dog.45 As I shall develop later, the statue of Greyfriars Bobby was a break with this tradition, in that the dog himself was famous, gaining his fame after his keeper’s demise. Increasingly, commemoration of animal death took place in social space, where the emotion of grief for a dead animal was displayed publicly by those who could afford to purchase a grave plot in a pet cemetery. The pet cemetery in London’s Hyde Park functioned as an “open” graveyard from 1881 to 1903. Its form was that of a human cemetery with rows of tiny headstones giving the name of the deceased and some indication of sentiment such as “dear little Billy” or “Balu, son of Fritz, poisoned by a cruel Swiss, Berne, 1899.” More grand in design was the later Cimetière des chiens founded at Asnières sur Seine on the outskirts of Paris in 1899 by Marguerite Durand, editor of the feminist journal La Fronde, and by George Harmois, lawyer and animal advocate.46 While burial of a pet in a common grave could be purchased for a small sum, larger payments permitted a private plot for different periods of time.47 More ostentatious than the London example, the Cimetière des chiens functioned both as a site of commemoration and as a gallery of animal sculpture. Thus, on entering the cemetery, the visitor (or mourner) first saw the monument to Barry du Grand Saint Bernard. Although the dog had died in 1814, more than eighty years before the cemetery opened, his legendary good deeds were acknowledged.48 The sculpture of Barry, a small rescued child clinging to his back, was not a marker of the dog’s remains but a specific symbol of canine qualities that would have been acknowledged as laudable features of the concept of dog.49 Sculptures of animals also increased in public thoroughfares and civic locations. Public sculpture had already been established in Britain in the 1700s, and, as Benedict Read has discussed, during the nineteenth century, “all types of figure were commemorated—political, military, literary, industrial, and generally beneficial, quite apart from royalty.”50 They were frequently accompanied by animals. In public thoroughfares, horses frozen in bronze bearing a royal or military leader on their backs could be seen, a context against which working horses plying their trade in city streets might be compared.51 And it was particularly in the city, home of modernity, that increasing numbers of horses would be employed throughout the century, despite the development of railway transport.52 Thus, streets would contain both examples of symbolic equine beauty and of ill-treated horses, in a poignant juxtaposition.53 The tradition of depicting unnamed animals alongside known human figures continued throughout the period of commemoration that followed World

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FIGURE 1.3: Hyde Park Cemetery, London. Photo by Hilda

Kean.

War I.54 There are a number of examples of this particular genre. They include the friezes, depicting a dog and horse employed in war work, in the sculpture outside the Palais de Justice in Brussels, and the representations of horses on the war memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park. In Australia, a donkey was specifically incorporated into the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) legend of an “egalitarian fraternity” of citizen soldiers.55 A legend arose about Simpson, a medical orderly, and his unnamed donkey, on the beaches at Gallipoli. Together they rescued injured men amid heavy bombardment. Simpson, although an Englishman, was appropriated as part of the new Australian identity of the “mateship” of the ordinary working man.56 The donkey—apart from obvious religious connotations—was seen as an ordinary creature suffering the same fate as its human companion. The first small statue of the pair was erected outside the shrine of remembrance along St. Kilda’s road in Melbourne, near the water trough erected as “A tribute to our war horses” by the Purple

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FIGURE 1.4: Infantry War Memorial, outside the Palais de Justice, Brussels. Photo by

Hilda Kean.

Cross.57 Many decades later a larger version was unveiled outside the Australian National Memorial in Canberra.58 From the thoroughbred Copenhagen, represented with the Duke of Wellington in London’s Hyde Park Corner,59 to the lowly donkey with Simpson, we are witnessing significant changes in the status of particular animals in Western cultures. Warfare was seen as an activity facilitated by an alliance of humans and animals. In this context the “high status” of particular domestic animals such as horses was deemed less important than what was seen as a common cause. By the 1920s, ordinary soldiers and ordinary dogs, horses, donkeys, and even camels would be depicted.60 This changing location of representations of animals to places that were both public and designated for human memorials was paralleled by a changing relationship to public space in the actual practices of domestic animals, particularly dogs and cats. Campaigns in Britain for animal protection, as embodied in the key legislation, the so-called Martin’s Act of 1822, emphasized the way in which “farm animals” should be seen and treated on city streets. The way in which dogs traversed streets also changed. The role of (some) dogs as carriers of goods, such as groceries or bread, in handcarts was outlawed in England and Wales by 1854.61 However, this did not mean that dogs were not seen in cities. On the contrary, dogs and cats were accepted,

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FIGURE 1.5: The Man with the Donkey, outside the Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, by William Wallace Anderson. Photo by Hilda Kean.

as Chris Philo phrases it, into the everyday spaces of much human life, while wild and dangerous animals were normally kept at a physical distance from the everyday.62 As the RSPCA explained in 1857, “almost every household has a cat.”63 Moreover, it was certainly common practice in the first part of the nineteenth century for dogs to roam free throughout cities, with a collar citing their address to “protect” them from losing their way (at least in the case of dogs owned by the wealthier scions of society). There were several responses to this aspect of dogs’ behavior. One was a growing problem of theft. As the 1844 Select Committee on Dog Stealing explained, dogs were usually stolen for two reasons. Particular breeds were exported to France, Holland, Belgium, or Hamburg where “fancy” breeds would fetch high prices, or individual dogs were effectively held for ransom since they were highly valued as pets by their

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owners.64 Reporting to the committee, the London commissioner of the metropolitan police noted that sheep and horses were not enticed away like dogs since “you do not find them straying about as dogs do.”65 That dogs were so engaged with public space implied that they were free to create their own routes through the Metropolitan landscape, unfettered by human restraint. This concept of animal autonomy was reinforced by the debates later in the century on the impact of rabies. As a measure of prevention, public muzzling of dogs was made compulsory. This was opposed by the Kennel Club, the National Canine Defence League, and many animal welfare campaigners as being unnecessary and detrimental to dogs’ desire to walk on their own.66 The freedom for dogs to roam was severely curtailed. (This was not an issue with cats.) As one animal supporter argued, dogs living in town were only permitted a regular walk, perhaps twice a day, due to the fear of rabies, and then under conditions of strict surveillance and a muzzle. Freedom to roam as they wished had now been prevented by state legislation.67

ANIMAL LOYALTY AND AGENCY Dogs’ independence or sense of agency might provide a particular context for the notion of them as creatures possessing qualities of fidelity toward humans. That is, we are not merely witnessing a continued promotion of the dog as a creature of fidelity, as exemplified in eighteenth-century painting and verse. Rather, what is being observed is the actual behavior of dogs during the 1800s. The emphasis on the right (or not) to roam suggests, in turn, a greater sense of agency in being loyal to a particular human being. It is not simply the case that dogs are “loyal” because they cannot leave home, but rather choice is, in some way, involved in this practice. Greyfriars Bobby regularly chose to visit Traill’s dining room or went to Edinburgh castle for the daily firing of the cannons. These were routes he mapped through the city for himself.68 Creating diurnal routines was not in itself remarkable for dogs, but Bobby apparently included within his own mapping of the Edinburgh landscape the grave of John Gray, where he slept at night despite being offered alternative accommodation. Free to walk where he wished (prior to the rabies hysteria or dog tax imposition),69 the terrier nevertheless chose a particular way of life, seen as homage to a beloved human. Such behavior was then interpreted as showing that humans could indeed “earn” the respect of animals, irrespective of their own social status. Neither the actions of Bobby in apparently mourning a dead person nor the recording of such behavior was unique. In different localities in this period similar tales are recounted. A Newfoundland dog led the funeral procession in Melton Mowbray; a spaniel resided on his keeper’s grave in St. Bride’s churchyard in London for some three years; Emile Loisset was mourned by her dog

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Turc, who refused all food. An Italian man who had wandered with his organ and a monkey around Liverpool was daily mourned by his dog, who visited the burial ground. Finot, the dog of a Parisian artist, died of hunger and cold while waiting outside the hospital in which his keeper had died; the “black dog of Boulogne” waited on the jetty for the Norwegian baron who had deserted him.70 Buck, a Skye terrier, having moved from Scotland to Paris, attended the funeral of each member of the family in succession. Finally, he “lay down in an agony of despair, and with a mournful cry, which spoke the depth of his emotion, expired . . .”71 As the narrator of this tale, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, William Chambers, a director of the Scottish SPCA and supporter of Greyfriars Bobby, commented, “No one will say that dogs do not sometimes die of a broken heart.”72 Such stories of loyalty, which served to define dogs as human, or at least as possessing qualities defined as human, were not unique to dogs. If it could be said that in this period, “dogs became human,” then, arguably, “cats became dogs.” That is, stories began to be recounted of feline behavior indicating not merely independence of action—a characteristic some thought to detract from a cat’s merit73—but also acts of bravery, loyalty, and fidelity.74 Cats’ usefulness in deterring mice and rats was praised.75 Cats were also included in the literature on the keeping of pets. Although an educational tract of the RSPCA of 1857 was wary of the cat, stating that “even in her best mood she is not always to be depended on,”76 other works praised particular features. Thus, in a text of 1871, The Cat and Her Cousins, cats were defined both in contrast to dogs—being, for example, very clean—and also by their perceived distinctive qualities of making people “comfortable” when seen purring on the hearth-rug.77 Harrison Weir took this stance further by speculating on common understanding between his companion cat and himself. While Weir described what he himself was thinking about, he also speculated on what “gentle and loving” Cossett lying asleep on the sofa was thinking about. “He is not dreaming—his eyes are open and fixed in deep attention—no, he is studying and trying to learn, and inquiring of himself how to understand me and my thoughts.”78 Cats’ intelligence was emphasized through stories of cats returning to places after their keepers had moved.79 Their bravery and fidelity were exemplified by tales of a London cat mewing to indicate a robber hiding up the chimney or of a cat in Lyons who refused to move from the murdered corpse of her dead keeper. When the suspects were brought in, the cat’s hair allegedly bristled; the murderers’ boldness left them, and they were arrested.80 Like dogs, cats became protagonists in fiction for children. This is seen in Eliza Fenwick’s Mary and Her Cat in Words Not Exceeding Two Syllables of 1819. Here old nurse Brown left a little girl a deathbed gift of a cat called Muff: “as pret-ty a

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cat as a-ny in the whole world.” The cat served to remind the child of her dead nurse as well as provide her with companionship.81 Cats were also included in the growing autobiographical genre, a new “animal” genre often used to articulate dog narratives,82 for example, Autobiography of a Cat; Of the Cream of Cats, Too.83 The biographical form was also adopted in works for children designed to protest against cruelty toward wildlife in general and squirrels in particular. Examples included Selous’s Tommy Smith’s Animals, in which a series of animals (including a red squirrel) explain their lifestyle to the little boy, or The Life Story of a Squirrel, proselytizing against human cruelty to squirrels, particularly on the part of gypsies.84 Teresa Mangum has argued that nineteenth-century readers “willingly accept[ed] the fiction of the speaking animal,”85 suggesting that most autobiographical tracts were narrated by elderly dogs. She writes, “The emotions permitted the animal narrator allowed the losses with which late [human] life is so often associated to be expressed.”86 Caesar, the fox terrier companion of Edward VII, both literally followed the dead king’s funeral procession87— mimicking the “urban myths” cited above—and “wrote” his own autobiography. This act suggests that the concept of animals having the authority to perform such cultural works had an impact throughout different echelons of society.88 Indeed, it is significant that autobiography is a genre of modernity fostering a sense of self and the possibility of individual change. It is a form of writing specifically linked to the concept of selfhood and the privileging of personal actions in achieving change. I am not convinced, however, that animal autobiography can be defined merely as an anthropomorphic projection. The use of the genre implied that animals—including dogs, cats, squirrels, and, most famously, a horse in the case of Black Beauty—might be portrayed as individuals with feelings and a sense of their own worth without the genre being seen as unrealistic or fanciful.89 Domestic animal autobiographies, especially in the later years of this period, are not simply those that can be categorized by a sense of age; other interpretations are also possible. Frequently, we are presented with “escape narratives” such as Frances Power Cobbe’s The Confessions of a Lost Dog, Ouida’s Puck, or W. Gordon Stables’s Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog, in which the protagonists are often deprived of self-activity—or liberty—by a violent man, dog thief, or vivisector.90 Escape is often effected through the assistance of either other animals or a kind person. The protagonist of the Autobiography of a Cat, for example, concluded, “I have been starved, beaten, whitewashed, stoned, set upon by dogs and my own species, yet here I am presentable at last, and a standing illustration (though standing only upon three legs) of the truth of the proverb, as many lives as a cat.”91 Such autobiographies also imply that animals have an independence and emotional life as deep as that of their

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human companions, again suggesting a commonality of experience between humans and animals.

SPACE AND LOCATION The “independent actions” of Greyfriars Bobby might not have been new but the idea of animals possessing a sense of self as indicated by autobiographical writing reinforced this. There are no published narratives to suggest that Bobby died of a broken heart pining away after the death of John Gray. Rather, different versions of the narrative concur and stress that he survived and even thrived for some fourteen years after the demise of his keeper.92 However, the story of the dog’s activity was attractive because of where it took place. As Doreen Massey has argued, local spaces are set within, and actively link to, the wider networks of social relations that make up the neighborhood, the borough, the city. It is a “complexity of social interactions and meanings which we constantly build, tear down, and negotiate.”93 And Greyfriars was no ordinary graveyard. Defined by Scott as “the Westminster of Scotland,” it had been the site of the signing of the Protestant National Covenant in 1638.94 Here the Covenanters had pledged the oath of loyalty to their religious cause, “thus testifying to their unbreakable faith in Him, the Almighty Master of all,” and here, too, the Covenanters were imprisoned after their defeat at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge in 1679.95 The place was already a site of Protestant commemoration, of loyalty and steadfastness against the odds, before Bobby began his famous visits.96 In doing so, his story became incorporated into this bigger national—and religious—narrative. Thus the Times could print a story on the plans for a memorial to Bobby with the assumption that his story was widely known. The article confidently stated, “. . . every person who does not know the history of Greyfriars Bobby ought to be ashamed of himself.”97 Greyfriars Bobby had become part of the story of Protestant Scotland through the location of his actions. It is thus unsurprising that the dog was taken up so enthusiastically at this time. Samuel Smiles, the promoter of hard work and the Protestant work ethic, for example, wrote in biblical language of the Scottish dog, “His was a love utterly unselfish, faithful and self-sacrificing. . . . What a lesson of gratitude and love for human beings!”98 The narrative of the life of Greyfriars Bobby epitomized loyalty beyond death, signified both by his refusal to acknowledge a new keeper and a reluctance (for whatever reason) to leave his dead owner’s grave. In his sculptural depiction, Greyfriars Bobby stands alone: The particular human to whom he might turn in begging mode no longer existed.99 He sits with his feet firmly on the ground. In the form of the sculpture, this is arguably the first public monument—at least in Britain—to portray an actually existing animal on his

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own. The dog is portrayed not because of any property relationship with a human keeper—the man himself was of lowly origin and status. The dog’s own actions have created the story. (Indeed, reversing the norm, a stone was erected some years later, paid for by “American lovers of Bobby,” to John Gray, defined as the “master” of Greyfriars Bobby—his human status became elevated because of the animal.)

PUBLIC COMMEMORATION: BOBBY’S LEGACY It is only after the statue of Greyfriars Bobby was erected that other representations of “ordinary” dogs appeared. The loyalty of the canine companion of the artist Charles Gough, who died in 1805 while walking over Helvellyn in the Lake District and whose body was “attended” by his dog, had been celebrated in contemporary verse by Wordsworth and Scott.100 However, no public visual commemoration of this act was made until some years after the Greyfriars Bobby statue was created in 1873. Frances Power Cobbe and the Reverend Rawnsley erected a cairn in 1890 on the Lake District mountain to the dog as a monument to the dog’s “heroic vigil, and to the fidelity and love, no death could quench, of the humble ‘Friend of Man.’ ”101 The words echo those on the base of the statue of the Edinburgh dog, which was dedicated to “the affectionate fidelity of Greyfriars Bobby.” The form of the Bobby statue—a small dog sitting atop a marble base engraved with words—was also deliberately imitated by antivivisectionists who erected a monument in Battersea in London to “the old brown dog” who had been killed in experiments at University College London. The dog and the particular form of his death had acquired fame by its depiction in the Shambles of Science.102 The statue stood on a plinth that echoed in design the Greyfriars Bobby monument. However, the nature of the inscription was very different in tone. Far from suggesting that humans were worthy of the loyalty of dogs, it condemned human behavior toward this—and other—dogs. The inscription on the brown dog memorial famously declared: In memory of the brown terrier dog done to death in the laboratories of University College in February 1903, after having endured vivisection extending over more than 2 months and having been handed over from one vivisector to another till death came to his release. Also in memory of the 232 dogs vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?103 The Liberal MP George Greenwood wrote, noting the controversy this declaration had aroused, that “in the northern capital there stands another monument to a dog bearing an inscription at which no man can cavil.”104 This elision

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FIGURE 1.6: John Gray, Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh. Photo by Brenda

Duddington.

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FIGURE 1.7: Balto, Central Park, New York City, by

Frederick George Richard Roth. Photo by Hilda Kean.

of the behavior of an actually existing ordinary dog and his public representation would be imitated in the twentieth century. Outside Tokyo’s Shibuya Station, bronze Hachiko, an Akita dog, still waits, like Bobby, for his dead master to return from work;105 in New York’s Central Park stands Balto, a blackand-white Alaskan Malamute dog, who helped bring serum to protect the isolated town of Nome, Alaska, from diphtheria.106

A BLURRING OF “THE REAL” AND REPRESENTATION The blurring of the distinctions between narrative, “the real,” and visual representation might be usefully illustrated by the way in which Landseer’s images—divorced from any specific intentions of the artist himself—became appropriated as mechanisms by which the human–animal relationship might be explored. As I noted earlier, the status of Skye terriers changed during the

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nineteenth century. This was partly because of their appropriation by Queen Victoria and because of the way in which this relationship was made public through Landseer’s images.107 Landseer’s paintings were often commissioned by royalty or aristocracy, but his reputation—and that of the subjects of his paintings—grew through engravings. According to Lionel Lambourne, “no fewer than 126 different engravers copied [Landseer’s] work, which went into virtually every cottage and house in the country.”108 Opponents of vivisection had employed the scientists’ own visual images to indicate the way in which cats and dogs and other domestic animals were being ill-treated. Landseer’s images were also used, however. Ruskin had described The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner as “one of the most perfect poems or pictures which modern times have seen.”109 His sentiment was not unique. For example, a narrative around the painting was employed in the antivivisectionist cause. The Animals’ Guardian ran the story of a child being taken to the National Gallery. Here she became enthused once she saw Landseer’s paintings since she recognized the images. However, she became very grave when seeing The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner. The narrator describes the image of the painting thus: “In life the good servant and faithful friend; now death had divided them.” The image of fidelity and companionship severed by death is immediately contrasted in the narrative with evidence allegedly given by a scientist to the Royal Commission on Vivisection, “It is astonishing how deeply I can cut into the back of a shepherd dog before he turns restive.”110 Here the image functions as the “real”: By way of contrast the experimenter is seen to deviate from the “norm” as depicted in the fictional image. Landseer’s actual images were used in National Anti-Vivisection Society propaganda. An engraving of a painting of a dog was juxtaposed with an illustration of a dog muzzled, pinned facedown on its back, awaiting its fate at the hand of the vivisector. Thus the Landseer image Saved—of a big dog at a seaside quay with a little girl whom he presumably saved from drowning—is reproduced under the heading “How we treat dogs.” Next to this image is juxtaposed a drawing, presumably from a scientist’s textbook, of a strapped-down dog being vivisected.111 Such was the emotional resonance of Landseer’s work that his images could be summoned up (without the reproduction of the image) to create particular sentiments. In Our Dumb Animals, a publication of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, “Landseer’s donkeys” were invoked. The young reader was advised that although donkeys are not very intelligent, they should be pitied: “Even the donkey is introduced with a loving touch in Landseer’s pictures.”112 No image is reproduced on the page: The mere evocation of Landseer’s name presumably served to conjure up a visual image in the mind of the reader. The purpose was to support the aims of the Band of Mercy, founded in 1882. These encouraged children to be “kind to all living creatures and [try] to protect them from cruel usage.” A Christian message is

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explicit: “Glory to God, kindness, justice, mercy to all.”113 A Landseer representation was also employed by Frances Power Cobbe to contrast with a “real” human: “A Fuegian who eats his grandmother and can barely count his fingers cannot be pigeon-holed a ‘person’ and at the same time Landseer’s dog a ‘thing,’ except in a medieval mind which has somehow survived preternaturally into the Darwinian period.”114 While Darwin’s scientific findings were acknowledged here in Cobbe’s writing, the words she used to describe this were drawn from the representational world of paintings. Similar devices would be used in future decades by animal rights campaigners, for example, using images by Gabriel von Max or John McLure Hamilton. Some antivivisection societies also created their own visual devices using stuffed animals in their shop windows. The image was certainly seen as effective by opponents. In the years just before World War I, scientists in the Research Defence Society were so fearful of such imagery that they called on Winston Churchill to use his political influence to have antivivisection posters on railway stations removed.115

CONCLUSION At the start of this chapter I noted the idea that visual representation equated to caging. But it seems too easy to counterpose “real” and “representation” in this way. The representations created by Landseer—although they did not depict animals being vivisected or cruelly treated by humans—were employed to create particular sentiments by those campaigning for animal rights or protection. In a similar vein, Greyfriars Bobby, an elision of the “real” and “represented,” was also employed as an image of what could be possible in human–animal relations. Frances Power Cobbe, writing of her hard work in campaigning against the 1876 Act, which regulated (rather than prohibited) animal experiments and exempted vivisectors from prosecution for cruelty, explained her position. She would not begrudge her hard work of the previous two years against vivisection if “a certain hideous series of experiments at Edinburgh have been stopped and a dozen of Greyfriars Bobby’s comrades have been mercifully spared to die in peace.”116 Greyfriars Bobby did exist, trotting around the Edinburgh streets, taking food from Traill’s dining rooms, eating and sleeping in the little shelter erected for him in Greyfriars churchyard—confronting the conventions that forbade animals from entering human graveyards. He also existed in stories, narratives, and visual images including the “first” photograph (still on sale today), the image on the Greyfriars organ, and, of course, the statue.117 There was a “moment of Greyfriars Bobby,” but this had been created by contexts outside the dog’s own behavior. It was not his independent behavior alone, but the time and place in which this occurred and the contexts created by narratives and

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different forms of visual representation that allowed the dog to become remembered. Burt recently reminded us, “the mark of a more civilised society . . . is the way in which a society displays its humanity” (original emphasis).118 As I write, a new film, The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby, has been released.119 And another gravestone has been erected in the churchyard: to James Brown, the former sexton, who died in 1868 and is buried in an unmarked grave “despite,” records the local newspaper, “the part he played in caring for Bobby.”120 The original “moment” has passed in which the actions of the little dog elided with particular emergent views on human–animal behavior and its visual representation. The story, however, is being constantly reinvented for modern times. At its core remains a benign portrayal of the relationship between humans and animals. As such it might still offer insights into the cultural and ethical position of domestic animals—and their keepers.

CHAPTER TWO

From Farmers to Hunters Cultural Evolution in the Nineteenth-Century United States daniel justin herman

In his multivolume history, The Winning of the West, the first volume of which appeared in 1889, Theodore Roosevelt gave voice to what might be called America’s “hunting myth.” Backwoods hunters like Daniel Boone, he wrote, had been the first settlers to “become Americans, one in speech, thought, and character.” Roosevelt noted that those backwoodsmen had been farmers as well as hunters, but he insisted that it was hunting that had made them unique. “The fact that we have been a nation of hunters and frequenters of the forest, plains, and waters,” he explained, accounted for “the virility, clear-sighted common sense and resourcefulness of the American people.”1 To many of his contemporaries, Roosevelt’s assertions seemed self-evident, given that the United States had been peopled by rugged frontiersmen who hunted for subsistence and for market. Strangely, however, few colonial and early national Americans had viewed hunters and hunting as cornerstones of their culture. Many deemed hunting impious, others considered it a threat to social order, and all agreed that the justice of colonization hinged on the right of farmers to acquire the lands of hunters. Taking their cues from Enlightenment thinkers, colonial and early national Americans insisted that hunting societies had always evolved—and invariably must evolve—into the higher stage of farming and commerce. In the nineteenth century, however, the wheels of

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social progress rolled suddenly backward, as Americans proclaimed that they were a hunting people and that hunting had made them great. How, then, did a farming people come to see themselves as a hunting people? How did the shift from farmer icon to hunter icon reflect—and affect—changing constructions of race, gender, and territorial expansion? In viewing themselves as hunters, to what extent did Americans emulate—and influence—their British cousins? What impact, moreover, did the rising popularity of hunting have on the hunted animals themselves? To answer those questions requires us to investigate themes traditionally addressed through the lenses of economic, social, and political history: the market revolution, the Mexican-American War, and late nineteenth-century imperialism. What emerges is a richer understanding of how Americans imagined themselves and how imagination shapes history.

HUNTERS AS ROGUES Judging from promotional literature, one might assume that American colonists were destined to become great hunters. Time and again, seventeenthcentury promoters portrayed the New World as a place where colonists would find plentiful game and easy shooting. The proposed colony of New Albion would offer “millions of Elkes, Stags, Deer, Turkeys, Fowl, [and] Fish” for the taking. Virginia, “Earth’s only paradise,” would yield an “infinite store” of “land and water fowls,” as well as “deer, kain, and fallow, stags, coneys, hares, with many fruits and roots good for meat.” Carolina was a place with “such infinite Herds that the whole Country seems but one continued [game] Park.” Massachusetts similarly offered colonists the chance to “ride a hunting in most places of the land,” provided that they did not fear getting lost.2 Abundant game offered colonists a cheap source of protein as well as a way to make colonization into an amusement rather than an ordeal. Hence colonial proprietors, not to mention the Crown, guaranteed even impoverished colonists the right to hunt and to fish. The idea that colonization could take the form of a hunting excursion, however, did not appeal to all colonists, least of all to those who viewed the New World as a religious refuge. The Puritans, for example, embraced the idea of a chastened, godly community working together to create a “city on a hill.” Their engine of solidarity was not only strict Calvinism but also agriculture. New England colonists, argued cleric John White, “being newly entered into their possessions, and entertained into a naked soile, and enforced thereby to labour, frugality, simplicity, and justice” would have “neither leisure, nor occasion, to decline into idlenesse, riot, wantonesse, fraud, and violence.” “Husbanding . . . unmanured grounds,” he added, would require “justice and affection to the common good.”3 Virtuous

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colonists would put their energies into farms and communities rather than chase deer in the woods. In addition to the fact that hunting might divert men from agricultural labors, it called to mind two groups who represented everything that Puritans were not supposed to be: unconverted aristocrats and savage Indians. Both groups seemed dedicated to indolence, fornication, and hunting rather than to industry, fidelity, and God. The very cornerstone of the colonization project was the idea that farming peoples, especially godly farming peoples, had the right to take lands from pagan hunting peoples, who failed to improve the land. Puritans drew their logic of appropriation—known as vacuum domicilium, or “vacant abode”—from the example of the “ancient Patriarchs” of the Old Testament who had moved from crowded lands to those less peopled. By that logic, argued one critic, Puritans might as well claim the hunting parks of the king. Rather than disappearing in a blaze of reason, however, the concept of vacuum domicilium fired the imaginations of countless colonists and received Enlightenment sanction from John Locke and from Emmerich de Vattel. Colonists—Puritan and non-Puritan alike—told themselves that they deserved the land because they put it to good use.4 The plebeian colonists of New England had one additional reason for not becoming accomplished hunters: They were not good at it. Having been barred from hunting in their homeland, Puritans lacked the experience and skill that might have brought success. The Anglican planters of more southerly colonies, by contrast, showed more skill at hunting and more enthusiasm for the chase. Seeking to emulate English aristocrats, planters enclosed deer parks and purchased expensive dogs for foxhunting.5 On the whole, however, one finds surprisingly few references to sport hunting even in the annals of the colonial South. How do we explain this phenomenon? Perhaps the most important reason that hunting in the colonies lacked the social importance that it had in England was because it was open to rich and poor alike, making it a problematic indicator of social rank. Indeed, the fact that so many impoverished backwoodsmen became hunters magnified the association between hunting and savagery. Consider the observations of William Byrd II, a consummate colonial gentleman who, in the 1720s, had lived on wild game while participating in a survey of the boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. In his satirical memoir of the survey, Byrd noted that after supping on bear, the surveyors were apt to dream of women, the devil, or both. Eating wild game, he added, made the men slothful and slow to decamp. Fortunately, the condition was only temporary for the surveyors, though it was permanent for backwoodsmen like “Epaphroditus Bainton,” who “is said to make great havoc among the deer and other inhabitants of the forest

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not much wilder than himself.”6 The French expatriate J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, in his Letters from an American Farmer (published in 1782 but written mostly before the American Revolution), similarly insisted that Pennsylvania backwoodsmen became “ferocious, gloomy, and unsocial” because of their dependence on “wild meat.” Eating game, he wrote, gave rise to a “lawless profligacy.”7 Only by wedding themselves to the plow could colonists avoid falling from grace. The remarks of Byrd and Crèvecoeur reflected popular social theory of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers from Adam Smith to Anne-RobertJacques Turgot to Thomas Jefferson postulated that societies evolved from a primitive hunting stage to a pastoral stage and finally to an agricultural and commercial stage. In the hunting stage, most agreed, humans held no property, observed no law, and formed no government. Without agriculture, there could be no civilization.8 Hence respectable colonists sought to replace the “wilderness” that supported big game—and the barbaric men who lived on game—with farms and domesticated animals. The complaints about backwoods barbarians reveal, however, that the hunting life attracted a considerable number of men. From New Brunswick to Georgia, “barbaric” and “indolent” white hunters appeared who preyed not only on wild animals but also on the livestock of respectable settlers. The hunting life proved so tempting, indeed, that it seemed to threaten civilization itself. “Once hunters,” warned Crèvecoeur, “farewell to the plow.” To ameliorate this problem, eighteenth-century leaders called for schools to educate poor hunters, roads to connect them to centers of commerce and convert them to farming, and laws requiring them to plant crops before they could hunt. In the 1760s, colonists in South Carolina, calling themselves “regulators,” even resorted to vigilante action to kill or drive out backwoods hunters.9 Such proposals show how little respect frontier hunters received from the powerful and prosperous, or even from the middling masses. To call a man “buckskins” was tantamount to calling him “oaf, clown, or lubberkin,” words that were likely to provoke a duel or, among common men, a “rough-andtumble” fight. Artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not surprisingly, never depicted their subjects in buckskins. What is perhaps more surprising is that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American portrait artists almost never painted their subjects in hunting scenes of any kind, despite the fact that their British counterparts routinely did so. In all of American painting and portraiture of the colonial era, one finds but two hunting scenes, both portraits of aristocratic boys who have taken a few birds. Although one popular American portrait artist, Ralph Earl, painted his patrons in hunting garb in the 1780s, those paintings depicted Englishmen, not Americans. When Earl returned to the United States in 1784, he ceased to paint hunters.10 Dozens, if not hundreds, of paintings depicting hunters—especially hunters

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in buckskins—would appear in nineteenth-century American art, but by then Americans had undergone great changes.

HUNTERS AS HEROES Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, backwoods hunters appeared as Hobbesian figures who lived in a state of war with their fellows, men who lacked respect for property, government, and social authority. That very conception of hunters, however, made them ideal symbols for colonists’ jealous defense of natural rights during the American Revolution. In defending themselves from the heavy hand of Parliament and Crown, colonists came to see themselves as buckskin-clad hunters, men who would brook no tyranny, no arrogant denial of their natural rights, no attempt to “enslave” them to a government that refused to give them representation. The buckskin hunter, moreover, represented spartan self-sufficiency and martial valor at a time when colonists boycotted English luxury goods and prepared for war. Suddenly newspaper articles praised the backwoodsman as a model soldier, a man who needed no provisions but for a little corn and what he “could easily procure in hunting.” Some members of Virginia’s House of Burgesses even donned hunting shirts as a symbol of defiance. Though Loyalists castigated rebels as “buckskins,” they found that the term had become a compliment rather than a sting. The hunting shirt, noted George Washington’s son, became “the venerable emblem of the Revolution.”11 In the first half of the nineteenth century, Americans continued to assert that “it is the order of events, that the hunter must give way to the husbandman.” At the same time, the image of the hunter in buckskins retained popularity as a symbol of independence and martial prowess. As early as 1784—the year that the Treaty of Paris was signed—John Filson’s Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke appeared, a promotional tract that told the story of the great hunter and Indian fighter, “Colonel Daniel Boone.” Boone was a real-life figure who had served as Filson’s guide in Kentucky and who had told Filson of his adventures. Filson presented Boone not only as an intrepid hunter but also as a sort of forest monk who remarks that “felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things.”12 Boone’s wisdom spoke to Americans who were imbued with ascetic Protestantism, yet grew more prosperous with each generation. In the woods, it seemed, Americans might find refuge from greed and guilt; there they could shed their civilized selves and become more like Boone (or, indeed, more like the primitive hunters described by Rousseau, who had not been corrupted by civilization and who retained a sort of brotherly love for one another).13 The idea of a spiritual retreat to nature would inspire thousands of sport hunters in decades to come.

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FIGURE 2.1: Boone appeared in literature and in art as a solitary, “self-possessed” hero of the wilderness. William C. Allan, Daniel Boone, 1839 (oil on canvas, 103 × 64½ inches). Special Collections and Archives, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky.

By fits and starts, Daniel Boone achieved the rank of cultural hero. In 1786, a newspaper editor published an abbreviated version of Filson’s tale that was reprinted widely. In 1813, Boone’s nephew produced an epic poem starring his vaunted uncle as the divinely appointed agent of American settlement. Boone’s popularity peaked in the Jacksonian and antebellum eras. Between 1833 and 1860, at least seven full-length biographies of Boone issued from American presses. One of those biographies—Timothy Flint’s Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky—saw fourteen printings by 1868, making it perhaps the most popular biography of its era.14 Artists, meanwhile, painted and sculpted images of Boone, some of which found a home in the U.S. capitol.15

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We cannot know with certainty who read the Boone literature, but we can make informed suppositions by examining demographic and social patterns. The publishing industry tended to distribute books primarily along major transportation routes. The construction of those transportation routes—turnpikes, canals, and railroads—generated a “market revolution,” which in turn generated an enormous increase in wealth, productivity, and urban growth. Between 1820 and 1860, American towns and cities of more than ten thousand inhabitants grew by 797%, the fastest urban growth rate in U.S. history. As it spawned growth and development, the market revolution weakened old institutions that created social stability. Thousands of young men left the countryside and entered cities and towns to find work. Thousands more went west to find new farms or practice new trades. In so doing, they left behind families, rural communities, and churches. Whereas young men of the colonial era typically learned the trade of a father or uncle, young men of the market revolution could avail themselves of a dizzying array of vocational opportunities, provided only that they were willing to travel. Thanks to the market revolution, Americans became perhaps the most geographically mobile people in the world. Realizing that old institutions of social cohesion no longer held sway, Americans expressed great anxiety over the fate of their young men. In the absence of patriarchal, communal, and ministerial authority, would young men run amok in cities, those dens of vice that Jefferson had hoped to consign to Europe? Would young men lose their way by drinking, gambling, and whoring? Or would they become self-possessed individualists, enterprising men who fortified themselves against sin by developing the muscles of conscience and high purpose? To assist in the latter, the publishing industry produced dozens of books of etiquette and advice—often written by ministers—that warned young men of the dangers they faced and provided ample suggestions for selfimprovement.16 The Boone biographies complemented the advice literature. When one reads the biographies of Boone, one is struck by Boone’s middleclass character. In some, Boone neither smokes nor drinks, unlike the real Boone, who did both. The Flint biography included an illustration of Boone and his wife embracing before he leaves for a hunt, calling to mind the waxing emphasis on affection and consent, rather than patriarchal authority, as the glue that bound the family. Throughout the literature, Boone demonstrates several other noteworthy traits: He is solitary, embarking on journeys that separate him from wife, family, and friends; he is a “pathfinder,” ever on the move to greener pastures; and above all he displays “peculiar self-possession” amid the dangers of the wilderness.17 The youthful readers of the Boone literature, one might posit, sought to become self-possessed pathfinders in the libertarian world of enterprise much as their hero was a self-possessed pathfinder in the libertarian world of the forest. The hunter in buckskins, once a symbol of political independence, now became a symbol of personal independence.

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Perhaps not surprisingly, Boone’s biographers came from the same ranks as advice writers. John Filson was a schoolteacher; James Hall was a jurist and banker; John Mason Peck, John McClung, and Francis Lister Hawks were ministers; and Timothy Flint was a former minister. Even filibusterer and Boone celebrant Charles Wilkins Webber had attended Princeton Theological Seminary. Though only one Boone biographer, Cecil B. Hartley, had written an etiquette manual, all of them wove into their Boone tales the concept of character, which Boone displayed in abundance. Though publishers and authors did not explicitly identify a target audience, textual evidence suggests that they had urban youths in mind. Flint used Boone as an example to those who lived in the “midst of the rivalry, competition, and scramble of populous cities,” while W. H. Bogart noted that “the heavens above [Boone] seemed nearer than to us, who are forever attracted by the crowd around us [emphasis added].” Even more pointed were lectures delivered to New York City audiences by William Henry Milburn, former chaplain to the U.S. Congress. Boone’s sterling character, proclaimed Milburn, had made him “the one white man who dares to trust himself alone with nature.”18 The success of the Boone literature spawned a host of fictitious hunter heroes, from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking to Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods. The real-life Davy Crockett also laid claim to the mantle of Boone, though the Crockett of literature was a trickster and buffoon rather than a gentleman of the forest. Crockett almanacs of the 1830s seemed to encourage young men to engage in illicit behavior rather than to build what one scholar calls a “fortress of conscience.”19 Throughout the nineteenth century, Boone remained a prince among his progeny.

THE RISE OF SPORT HUNTING With the rise of the Boone literature came the rise of sport hunting. Leading the charge to popularize hunting was Henry William Herbert, a man with a different pedigree than Daniel Boone. Herbert, an English expatriate, Cambridge alumnus, and grandson of an earl, arrived in New York City in 1831, where he tried his hand at teaching classics and writing literature. Penury soon drove him to writing “penny-a-liners.” An American editor, having read Herbert’s hunting and fishing sketches, convinced him that his future lay in a field that was well developed in Britain but unplowed in the United States: sporting journalism. Under the pseudonym “Frank Forester,” Herbert subsequently produced dozens of hunting and fishing articles as well as the first genuine American guides to sport hunting and fishing in the 1840s. “No one abler, or elder, seemed willing to stand forth,” wrote Herbert in Frank Forester’s Field Sports, “so . . . I have ventured myself as the champion of American Sport and Sportsmanship.”20

HUNTING

FIGURE 2.2: Henry William Herbert gave sport hunting a new respectability

in the northern and middle states in the 1830s and 1840s. Here Herbert appears near his New Jersey home, the Cedars. Frontis engraving from David W. Judd, ed., Life and Writings of Frank Forester (Henry William Herbert), 2 vols. (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1882). Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

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Prior to his campaign to popularize hunting, wrote Herbert, American sportsmen had been “tabooed, as a species of moral and social pariah.” Young men who admitted to hunting could not expect promotions from merchant employers, while lawyers dared not tell clients of their love of shooting for fear of losing business. William Post Hawes, for instance, who was a New York City attorney, lived in “fear and trembling” lest others see his name on his hunting articles and was compelled to use a pseudonym. In 1885, Forest and Stream editor George Bird Grinnell averred that “a man who went ‘gunnin or fishin’ ” in the early nineteenth century “lost caste among respectable people just about in the same way that one did who got drunk.” Sport hunters, Grinnell explained, had been “looked upon as idlers and ne’er-do-wells, for it was thought that these pursuits were mere excuses for laziness—the avoidance of work.”21 Although others had initiated the struggle for respectability, Herbert launched a moral offensive on behalf of hunting that echoed throughout the century. Ascribing the vigor of the English aristocracy to its passion for blood sport, Herbert argued that hunting would “prevent the demoralization of luxury” and “the growth of effeminacy and sloth” and ensure “the maintenance of a little manhood in an age, the leading characteristics of which are fanaticism, cant, and hypocrisy.” Herbert’s argument followed the lines of the earliest defenses of hunting in the first American sporting journals, which appeared in 1829, 1830, and 1831. Herbert, however, made sport hunting into something of a crusade. Hunting seemed to be the last defense against the social and psychological dissolution that Enlightenment thinkers like Jefferson had associated with prosperity and cities. Hunting would save the “the rich citizen, the man of wealth and luxury, and leisure . . . from driveling down into a mere gluttonous sensualist, or yet worse, a mere effeminate man-milliner.”22 Herbert’s message appealed to middle-class and elite Americans eager to reclaim republican virtue at a time when virtue seemed to be waning. Republican institutions were premised on what the founders called “virtue,” by which they meant simplicity in dress and deportment, disinterested political behavior, and the will to sacrifice one’s individual good for that of the country. In the general eagerness to “get ahead” during the market revolution, republican virtue seemed to falter. Men seemed all too willing to indulge in luxuries and to put personal and partisan interests above patriotism. Despite their economic success, Americans seemed to lack the greatness of purpose of their forebears. Men, moreover, found themselves aswim in a sea of “feminization.” Protestant denominations like the Congregationalists (Puritans) who had once thundered about the wrathful God of the Old Testament now focused on the loving Christ of the New Testament. A sentimentality approaching bathos animated countless sermons, short stories, and novels, which were increasingly aimed at female audiences.23 Women, meanwhile, insinuated themselves into reform movements like temperance and abolition, exercising increasing authority in a

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public sphere that had once been restricted to men. An occasional radical went so far as to suggest that women should hold property in marriage, seek employment outside the home, and even vote. In the middle-class world spawned by the market revolution—where one’s ability to wield the pen was more important than one’s ability to wield the plow—old definitions of republicanism and of gender seemed threatened. That process was especially evident in cities and towns, where the market revolution had its greatest impact. As if on cue, middle-class men urbanites took up sport hunting with gusto. “Throw down your book or your pen, close your ponderous ledger, cast away your briefs . . . and turn your back upon the glare and heat of the city, its eternal jostlings and monotonous noises,” urged a New York City proponent of hunting. Urbanites of the Jacksonian and antebellum decades did just that. When partridge season opened, a writer in the American Turf Register commented in 1834, “two or three coveys are to be contended for by half the lawyers, doctors, schoolmasters, sporting persons, and tradesmen” in town. “God,” insisted an urban correspondent in another new sporting periodical, the Spirit of the Times, “never intended that man should live in brick walls, walk on pavement, and use his nose for no other purpose than to smell the perfume of city gutters.” “How glorious” it was, he recalled, to don a fustian coat and leather moccasins and to sling a rifle over his shoulder.24 If sportsmen could not return to the field as spartan, virtuous farmers, they could at least return to the field as spartan, virtuous hunters. Hunting, after all, was a “rural” sport, the sport of farmers and frontiersmen from the outset of colonization. Writing in the American Turf Register in 1829, the magazine’s first year of publication, one correspondent insisted that American men should “spend their leisure time in the open field, and in manly exercises—instead of seeking to kill time in an oyster cellar, or village stores, drinking still-burnt whiskey, and in other and more pernicious haunts of dissipation.” “I rejoice,” he continued, “that we have at last an elegant repository which will beget a fondness for healthy rural sports, and where no gentleman will be ashamed to see his feats and his name.” Similar statements echoed throughout the antebellum and postbellum sporting press. Forest and Stream, a hugely successful sporting periodical launched in 1873, might brag that its readers were among the wealthiest men in the United States, but it could also brag that “our tastes are rural and our habits of the simplest.”25 In taking up sport hunting, men rejected sentimentality and moral decay— “effemination”—and reclaimed rural virtues of old. One antebellum hunter, writing in the Spirit of the Times, contrasted his stern sport with the decadence of the time: Let some impale the sunny skies, An offering to the muses,

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While others rave o’er ladies’ eyes, Twin obsolete abuses, And bore you with their prosy rhymes, On sun, moon, stars, and flowers, Of gnarled oaks and knotted vines, Boudoirs and shady bowers. I sing a strain of loftier note, A nobler, manlier lesson, Come, with me to the woodlands float, We’ll expiate transgression And there, in lieu of “beauty’s queen,” We’ll sing, unsung to fame, But fame deserving well, I ween, Our trueborn, native game.26 As American hunters entered the woods to “expiate transgression” and to learn a “nobler, manlier lesson,” their cultural message transcended the realm of sport. If middle-class men were hunters, and if the skills necessary for hunting were precisely those needed for success in business and politics, surely women should keep to their homes. Hunting did not create new gender roles, but it anchored existing ones amid the sturm und drang of the market revolution. Hunters responded to the “feminization” of American culture by taking up arms. In entering the precincts of rural America to hunt, sportsmen also rekindled their bond with the “sturdy, honest patriots” of the backwoods, men “who less belie their character of republicans than any other class.” Sportsmen celebrated their bond with these “sturdy, honest patriots” by wearing articles of clothing reminiscent of Daniel Boone. Herbert’s fictive hunter hero, “Harry Archer,” donned both the buckskin shirt of a backwoodsman and the huntsman’s cap of an English aristocrat.27 Meanwhile, a new crop of antebellum hunting artists— foremost among whom was another British expatriate, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait—alternated between painting courageous backwoodsmen and equally courageous gentlemen hunters, as if to underscore the kinship between the two. The new brotherhood, however, was not entirely egalitarian. Though the sportsmen in Tait’s paintings invariably wear some small article betokening their kinship with backwoodsmen, they appear erect and in command, whereas their guides appear bent and subordinate. In paintings, in print, and in the practice of hunting, moreover, sportsmen demonstrated their superiority by demonstrating knowledge of natural history and by adhering to a rigid code of sportsmanship. Herbert, ever the standard-bearer, led the campaign to make sportsmen masters of both. Among Herbert’s chief complaints was the American hunter’s “vulgar, ignorant, slipshod habit” of referring to game animals by vernacular names

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FIGURE 2.3: A heroic backwoods hunter. Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, A Hunter’s Dilemma,

1851 (oil on canvas). Courtesy of the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont.

and his lack of scientific interest in the habits of the prey. In Herbert’s view, scientific knowledge separated sportsmen from “pot hunters,” who hunted for the cooking pot rather than for sport. He insisted that the habit of referring to the ruffed grouse as a “partridge” or a “pheasant” was “unsportsmanlike and unscientific” and even a “stupid barbarism.” Herbert spoke of the “immortal celebrity” of naturalists like Alexander Wilson, John James Audubon, Georges Cuvier, and Louis Agassiz. Herbert even corresponded with Agassiz, the first professor of zoology and geology at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, and sent him specimens of smelt taken on the Passaic River. Herbert also applauded the growing popularity of natural history among “thousands of votaries, in the field, in the forest, in the arid desert.” A friend recalled that Herbert’s knowledge of his environment was so great that a stone “picked up in his wayside ramble . . . became a text from which he would read you an entertaining and instructive lecture on geology or mineralogy.”28 To know natural history was to hold propriety over nature. Scientific knowledge trumped the “superstition” of backwoods rustics, not to mention the “myths” of American Indians. To be a “hunter-naturalist,” then, was to place oneself high on the hierarchy of class as well as to participate in the project of empire. By contributing exotic specimens to scientific institutions and

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FIGURE 2.4: The gentleman hunter in the foreground stands literally and metaphorically above his guide. The gentleman hunter’s fringed knife sheath and half-stock Kentucky rifle, however, identify him as kin to backwoods hunter heroes. Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Going Out: Deer Hunting in the Adirondacks, 1862 (oil on canvas). Courtesy of the Adirondack Museum, Blue Mountain Lake, New York.

museums, hunters like Herbert—or like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, to use an earlier example—testified to their powers of intellect, their physical prowess, and the scientific righteousness of expansion. Colonizing peoples need not cultivate faraway lands with plows to claim them; they merely needed to cultivate faraway lands with science. The ethic of sportsmanship that Herbert championed, meanwhile, gave hunters both an aura of chivalry associated with knights of old and the credentials of humanitarianism associated with the Enlightenment. Unlike mere “pot hunters,” sportsmen sought to give their quarry a fair chance of escape; dispatched animals in the most efficient, humane way possible; refused to kill females with young; adamantly upheld game seasons; and never (in theory) killed animals to excess. The old conception of the hunter as idle, cruel, or savage bore no relation to the “true sportsman.” His triumph was not in killing but in “the vigor, science, and manhood displayed—in the difficulties to be overcome . . . and lastly in the true spirit, the style, the dash, the handsome way of doing what is to be done, and above all, in the unalterable love of fair play.”29 To be a sportsman was to be a model American man: scientific, humane, devoted to fairness, but ever conscious of style and dash.

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FIGURE 2.5: In this family portrait, Andrew Jackson Grayson appears in the guise of backwoods hunter. William S. Jewett (1821–1873), The Promised Land—The Grayson Family, 1850 (oil on canvas, 50¾ ⫻ 64 inches). Terra Foundation for the Arts, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.79; photograph courtesy of Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago.

As they began to view themselves as model Americans, sportsmen began to identify their sport as a way to advance the fortunes of their country. Not only would hunting teach men to be “become more considerate, as well as more prompt, more full of resource, [and] more resolute,” wrote hunting author William Elliott, but it would also teach them to be better soldiers.30 The association between hunting and martial skill stretches into the mists of antiquity, but Americans took new interest in creating a skilled soldiery as they prepared to make war on Mexico in 1846, the year that Elliott’s book was published. Good soldiering indeed would be but one of the services performed by hunters; they would also provide Americans with a new logic of empire. Lieutenant Colonel William H. Emory, as he crossed New Mexico on his topographical reconnaissance in 1846, noted with contempt that Mexicans neglected to hunt the cranes and geese within gunshot distance of their settlements. “No fact proves the indolence and incapacity of the Mexican[s] for sport or for war more glaringly,” he concluded, than their failure to hunt wildfowl. Emory’s observation accorded with the message of Henry William Herbert,

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who insisted that Americans—as opposed to dark-skinned peoples of more southerly climes—were the descendants of the “warrior and hunter races” of northern Europe. “To this day,” wrote Herbert in his Complete Manual for Young Sportsmen, “wherever a drop is to be found of that fierce Northern blood surviving in people’s veins, there you will find, and in no other land, the passion for the chase alive and dominant.”31 Others pushed such logic toward its romantic conclusions. “All the impulsion of our national character,” waxed popular novelist Charles Wilkins Webber in 1851, “all of the hardy, stern, resolute and generous that may be native, we take through the noble blood of our hunter ancestors. That terrible soldiery which devastated Mexico, was composed of hunters almost to a man; the eagle they carried before them was a hunting bird—the fierce-eyed king of the winged hunters!”32 At the end of the war, Americans found themselves in possession of lands stretching from New Mexico west to California and north to Wyoming. Unlike the Oregon country—which was rapidly filling with American farmers—those lands were mostly desert; they were unsuited to the plow. If the old trope of the industrious farmer following his plow into the West failed to justify the acquisition of northern Mexico, a new trope would have to serve: the trope of the chivalrous hunter following big game. The Boone literature had done much to create that new trope. Boone was the “first white man of the West,” according to Timothy Flint, a sort of white indigene who could out-Indian the Indians. Boone rejected the “empire of the cultivator’s axe and plough” and struck out for the wilderness, eager to do noble battle with cougars, bears, and Indians.33 He taught Americans that empire was to be won not through the arduous process of clearing and planting but through the exhilarating combat between man and beast, or even between man and man. Chivalrous conquest, together with scientific understanding, gave Americans a sense of proprietorship over exotic lands. The conquest of Mexico and the celebration of hunting that accompanied it revealed an America utterly transformed since the Revolution. Once, Americans had told themselves that they had the right to appropriate New World lands because they were farmers, whereas those they displaced—Indians—were mere hunters. Now they told themselves that they had the right to appropriate lands because they were hunters, whereas those they displaced—Mexicans— were farmers and herders. Once, Americans had told themselves that all their virtues—“frugality, simplicity, and justice . . . and affection to the common good,” in the words of Puritan cleric John White—came from agriculture. Now, Americans told themselves that their virtues were those of hunters like Boone, “self-possessed” men who must rely on their own keen instincts to survive in a libertarian wilderness (or in a libertarian world of commerce). Once, Americans assured themselves that societies invariably evolved from the hunter stage, to the pastoral, to the agricultural and commercial. Now

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they suggested that social evolution worked in reverse—or at least that they had never lost their hunter roots. The hunter was nothing like the farmer of old. He was stealthy, he was solitary, and he glorified himself through chivalrous combat. The hunter, above all, was Anglo-Saxon. The natural rights and the republican form of government described by the founders were universal, belonging to all humans in all places. American celebrants of empire, by contrast, suggested that only the sharp-witted and sharp-eyed hunters who had descended from northern Europeans could create a great state from the clay of popular rule. The British were coming to the same conclusion as they took charge of an even larger empire. Democracy, or constitutional monarchy, merely complemented racial greatness, allowing “superior” peoples to create powerful nations and powerful empires. One might assume that Americans learned their new logic of empire from Britons, who took the lead in cataloging the world’s natural productions and hunting its exotic game. It was Henry William Herbert, after all, who told Americans that they shared with Britons the “fierce Northern blood” that made them hunters. It would be more accurate, however, to suggest that Americans and Britons worked in concert to create a new logic of empire. Just as American sportsmen read about British hunting exploits in their sporting journals, British hunters read about American hunting exploits in theirs. Just as wealthy American sportsmen journeyed to Africa and to India to participate in the safari and the shikar, wealthy British sportsmen ventured to the American Far West to hunt elk, bison, and grizzly. British imperialism and American imperialism existed in a state of symbiosis.

HUNTING ENSHRINED The popularity of sport hunting in the United States continued to rise after the Civil War, led by men like William H. H. “Adirondack” Murray, a Congregationalist pastor, and George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream. A new sporting press—at least thirty-nine periodicals devoted to outdoor sports appeared between the Civil War and the turn of the century—issued thousands upon thousands of hunting articles. George Armstrong Custer not only posed for photographs in his buckskin costume, standing triumphant over a dead bear, but also contributed numerous articles about his sporting adventures to one of the new magazines, Turf, Field, and Farm. As an intrepid hunter he was not alone among the army brass. Much of the army’s officer corps—like its British counterpart—hunted avidly for sport, insisting that to hunt was to train for war. So, too, many of the country’s businessmen, politicians, and professionals took up sport hunting. Many enclosed private game reserves; others joined gentlemen’s hunting clubs that boasted posh clubhouses and vast hunting grounds.34

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FIGURE 2.6: Manitou House of Manitou Springs, Colorado. Photograph by B. H. Gurnsey (1833–1880); courtesy of the Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, X-1619.

Boys, too, were brought into the hunting fold. Psychologist G. Stanley Hall, updating Enlightenment social theory, argued that humans, like societies, experience distinct stages of development. In one of these stages, wrote Hall, “the child revels in savagery.” Only by encouraging their children’s “tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle playing proclivities” could parents assure them of graduating to a higher stage and becoming happy and productive adults. Without these outlets for their youthful energies, children would lose interest in life, developing “weakness of character” and “slowness of intellect.”35 To promote and capitalize on the child’s need to revel in savagery, Ernest Thompson Seton founded the Woodcraft Indians, and Dan Beard founded the Sons of Daniel Boone. In those organizations, along with Robert BadenPowell’s Boy Scouts, a British organization that subsumed both in the 1910s, American boys learned the skills of tracking, trapping, and taxidermy. Elsewhere,

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boys learned the “elevating” ethic of sportsmanship, which had been the “training school of the greatest nations of ancient and modern times,” according to the American Field. “The man who wishes his boy to get the most benefit from his boyhood, in the way of preparation for later life,” wrote the American Field’s editor in 1904, “will . . . give him an insight into its purest and most remunerative pleasures, by putting into his hands a gun, rifle, or rod.”36 Throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, dozens of hunting novels for boys appeared in libraries and bookstores. Charles Austin Fosdick, or “Harry Castlemon,” wrote the Sportsman’s Club Series, the Rod and Gun Series, and the Boy Hunter Series, while Edward S. Ellis wrote the Deerfoot Series and the Boy Pioneer Series. Together with works by George Bird Grinnell, William Temple Hornaday, Emerson Hough, and Stewart Edward White, these books gave American boys a sense that hunting and pioneering set them apart from less vigorous boys of other countries. British boys similarly read about their own heroes of pioneering and hunting. Women, too, claimed the status of hunter. Realizing the connection between social power and hunting prowess, Martha Maxwell killed, stuffed, and mounted big-game animals of Colorado for display at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. She placed a sign on her display

FIGURE 2.7: A sign on Martha Maxwell’s Colorado diorama at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition read simply “Women’s Work.” From John Filmer and George C. Bell, The Illustrated Catalogue of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876). Photograph by Terry Firman, Jr.

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that read, simply, “Women’s Work.” Other women of the Gilded Age joined trap shooting clubs in huge numbers, thus demonstrating “a complete reversal of the hereditary and instinctive antipathy to firearms” and showing “a spectacular illustration of woman’s changed attitude toward her sphere in life.” Still others sent accounts of deer hunts to outdoor journals, arguing that they, too, had hunting blood in their veins, and that they could see “no reason why women should not enjoy [hunting] as much as men do . . . and derive lasting benefit from the carefree and health-giving experiences of camp life.” The occasional British woman took up sport hunting as well and reported her experiences in print.37 The fact that relatively few women became hunters, or that those who did were not self-consciously feminist, is beside the point. Women needed only to prove that they could succeed at hunting in order to undermine the connection between hunting and patriarchal authority. If hunting could buttress patriarchy, it could also subvert it. The greatest hunter of the era, however, was a fierce proponent of hunting as a school of manliness. In succeeding William McKinley in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt not only became the first U.S. president to hold office for any appreciable length of time in the new century, but also set a precedent for the new century insofar as he embraced progressivism, the philosophy of an activist government that would regulate industry. Nonetheless, Roosevelt was a creature of the nineteenth century. As a youth, he dreamed of becoming an “out-of-doors” naturalist. He rapidly absorbed the tales of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, who became his favorite hunter heroes. As a young man, he purchased a buckskin hunting costume—“the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America”—to wear both while hunting and while being photographed. In later years, he continued to journey frequently into the backwoods to hunt. It was hunting, after all, that had made Americans stern and strong: “No form of labor is harder than the chase, and none is so fascinating or so excellent as a training-school for war.”38 Having absorbed the lessons of the Boone literature, it is not surprising that Roosevelt championed imperial expansion and war as necessary ingredients for a successful nation. As commanding officer of his handpicked “Rough Riders,” who included Indians, frontier hunters, cowboys, and Ivy Leaguers, Roosevelt marched off to fight the Spanish in Cuba in 1898. As assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt had already pushed for the creation of “the Great White Fleet” of steel-hulled vessels. In his presidency, he would duck legality, support the Panamanian Revolution against Colombia, and build the Panama Canal. Immediately after his presidency ended, in 1909, Roosevelt took up the cause of empire in a different way: He ventured to Africa to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institution. He and his party, under the guidance of Roosevelt’s British friend and fellow hunter hero, Frederick Courteney Selous, killed over five hundred animals for sport, meat, and science.39

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One could argue that Roosevelt engaged in a transnational culture of hunting common among the great European powers. German, French, Belgian, and especially British hunters stalked both game and empire on the forests and plains of Asia and Africa. The high-powered, highly accurate hunting guns of Europeans, together with their trains and their factories, and, not least, their scientific understanding of nature seemed to illustrate their superiority to native peoples throughout the world. Roosevelt believed that the United States— which by now could boast the most productive economy in the world—must share in imperial glory. If Roosevelt’s 1909 safari did not initiate an American

FIGURE 2.8: Theodore Roosevelt appears here in what

he called “the most picturesque and distinctively national dress ever worn in America.” From Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches. Homeward Bound Edition (Review of Reviews, New York, 1910). Photograph by Terry Firman, Jr.

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imperial presence in Africa in the political sense, it did allow Roosevelt to display the American flag over exotic lands, thus giving him and his fellow Americans a share in the greatness of Anglo-Saxon imperialism. To be fair to Roosevelt, he lived in an age when the meaning of hunting was shifting, and he embodied that shift. Certainly Roosevelt embodied the old imperial hubris that had pervaded the Boone literature. Americans had invoked Boone as their hero at the very moment that they took possession of the Midwest, the Oregon country, and northern Mexico. Americans continued to invoke Boone as a hero—and occasionally dress in buckskins to emulate him— as they moved to possess Cuba, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines. The idea that hunting triumphs symbolized American greatness, however, declined with game populations. By 1900, caribou and grizzlies in the continental United States had disappeared. Buffalo were confined to private reserves, zoos, and Yellowstone National Park. Elk, antelope, and even white-tailed deer in some states were threatened with extinction. Several species of wildfowl were equally depleted. Recognizing that if American greatness was premised on hunting, Americans could not be great without big game, Roosevelt became perhaps the greatest conservationist president in American history. As early as 1887, Roosevelt had set about creating the Boone & Crockett Club, which required members to have taken each species of American big game in “fair chase,” but also dedicated itself to saving game, by both private means and public. As president, Roosevelt set aside numerous game reserves, national forests, and national monuments. Roosevelt understood that to save hunting as a rite of individualism, he would have to limit the right to hunt. Indeed, he would have to give greater powers to government to mitigate the excess individualism that had led to the decline of game populations. In doing so, Roosevelt and his allies transformed what Louis Warren has called the “local commons”—lands used by local peoples for subsistence hunting and resource collection—into “national” or “state” commons, lands set aside for elite sportsmen. Suddenly governments, both state and federal, began to enforce game seasons and bag limits, thus creating a new sort of criminal, the poacher. The same process occurred in the British Empire where colonial governments, in the face of diminishing game populations, set aside reserves. As in the United States, wealthy hunters benefited, whereas native peoples lost access to critical resources of forest and savannah.40 Even as it energized sportsmen, the trend toward greater restrictions on hunting angered subsistence and market hunters. Since the Jacksonian decades, common-man hunters—men who did not consider themselves sportsmen— had rejected attempts to create game seasons and bag limits. Rather than applauding game laws, according to a correspondent in the American Farmer in 1841, Americans raised “the senseless cry of aristocracy!—privileged orders!— oppression of the poor by the rich!” “The right to hunt wild animals,” explained

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William Elliott, “is held by the great body of the people, whether landholders or otherwise, as one of their franchises,” and “to all limitations” on that right, “they submit with the worst possible grace.” With the stage set by colonial guarantees of hunting rights, Americans had come to identify their nation as a “hunting democracy”—a nation that permitted even the common people to hunt and to govern themselves. Contemptuous of Britain’s aristocratic game laws (fully one-sixth of England’s convicted criminals in 1831 were game-law violators), many Americans viewed the push for game laws in their own country as a stalking horse for aristocracy. Legislature after legislature passed game laws nonetheless, though those laws were seldom enforced until the century’s end.41 Sportsmen claimed—probably correctly—that the alternative to restrictions on hunting was the extinction of game or, equally frightening, the privatization of hunting. Roosevelt stated in 1893 that he would “much regret” to see hunting confined to a “system of large private game preserves, kept for the enjoyment of the very rich”; yet, by 1897, Forest and Stream could write that private “game preserves are now as thoroughly established in this country as they are in the old world.” One popular hunting author went so far as to predict in 1900 that in the not-too-distant future, all hunting in the United States would be restricted to private preserves.42 Thanks to Roosevelt and his fellow conservationists, that prediction never came to pass. What did occur was that the United States put the sport of elites ahead of the livelihoods of common people. In the twentieth century, however, even common people could—and did—take up sport hunting thanks to the preservation of game. In promoting conservation, sportsmen—“hunter-naturalists,” to use the term favored by Roosevelt—helped blaze a trail for modern environmentalism. Not for several decades would Americans and Europeans, along with peoples in other parts of the world, recognize the concept of ecosystems and the value of seemingly insignificant creatures like snail darters and spotted owls. By the time that recognition came, thanks in part to turn-of-the-century sportsmen, nation-states had already become guardians of savannahs, forests, wetlands, prairies, and deserts. To fully assess the impact of hunting in the United States, however, we must go farther back—back all the way to the American Revolution and the Boone literature that followed in its wake. The Revolution, along with the market revolution that followed in the nineteenth century, transformed the barbaric hunters of the backwoods into libertarian heroes of the wilderness. It was an odd phenomenon. Precisely when the United States became more industrial, more urban, more populous, more wealthy, and more literate, it turned its attentions to “primitive” heroes of the forest. The seemingly ineluctable social evolution from hunter to farmer switched suddenly into reverse. In looking fondly back to Daniel Boone, of course, Americans were actually looking forward to a future of middle-class

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FIGURE 2.9: Illustration of exhibit titled “America” at 1876 Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition. From John Filmer and George C. Bell, The Illustrated Catalogue of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876). Photograph by Terry Firman, Jr.

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individualism. Yet Enlightenment thinkers deserve credit for prescience. The lure of hunting did indeed prove irresistible to Americans—not so much to the poor as to the prosperous—thus subverting the eighteenth-century template for civilization. “Once [settlers become] hunters,” as Crèvecoeur had warned, “[they bid] farewell to the plough,” and hello to a society of “barbaric” individualists striving mightily for empire. It was that sort of barbarism, however, that saved game. As Americans came to see themselves as a hunting people, they learned to love wilderness—or at least a modicum of it—rather than wish to see it cleared, plowed, and planted. If history teaches anything, it teaches irony.

CHAPTER THREE

The Domestication of Empire Human–Animal Relations at the Intersection of Civilization, Evolution, and Acclimatization in the Nineteenth Century dorothee brantz

“From a remote period, in all parts of the world, man has subjected many plants and animals to domestication and culture. . . . He unintentionally exposes his animals and plants to various conditions of life, and variability supervenes, which he cannot even prevent or check.”1 This statement, made by the most acclaimed author on the topic of domestication in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin, expresses two central ideas that make domestication relevant to historians—(1) that domestication is not only a biological but also a cultural process and (2) that it is not subject only to human control. Hence, on the one hand, the domestication of animals sheds light on the intricate historical relationship between biology and culture and, on the other hand, it underscores the need to look beyond mere human agency when trying to understand historical developments. Following this premise, this chapter looks at the history of domestication in the nineteenth century by focusing on how the relationship between humans and animals was affected by two new intellectual tenets—the idea of civilization and the concept of evolution, both of which emerged out of the

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Enlightenment and its growing emphasis on science, rational thought, history, and the domination of nature. Both made similar claims insisting on change and progress rather than stability and stasis. In essence, both of these concepts revolved around the historical and scientific redefinition of humanity’s relationship to nature, albeit in radically different ways. Whereas the concept of civilization equated progressive change with purposeful social action and increasing cultural refinement, evolution focused on biological adaptation and transmutation. Even more characteristically, the notion of progress was variably directed toward a defined climax of civilization versus no particular predetermined evolutionary goal at all. Thus, while civilization placed human agency squarely at the center of historical change, evolution integrated human intentionality into a larger framework of natural processes. However, the term civilization should not be understood as an exclusively human-centered concept either, because, as the French Annales historian Fernand Braudel argued, “to discuss civilization is to discuss space, land and its contours, climate, vegetation, animal species and natural or other advantages. It is also to discuss what humanity has made of these basic conditions: agriculture, stock-breeding, food, shelter, clothing, and so on.”2 Thus, the history of civilization, much like that of evolution, is closely engaged with human–animal relations; however, here too they represent opposing standpoints. While evolution brings humans and animals closer together biologically, the concept of civilization drives them further apart socioculturally and intellectually, or so it would seem. This chapter examines how these seemingly contradictory ideas manifested themselves in the relationship between humans and animals, in particular with regard to the phenomenon of domestication. According to a late nineteenth-century source, “domesticated animals are those animals that man has taken into his care, that procreate regularly and thus spread acquired traits to the next generation.”3 They included a variety of livestock and pets, most notably cattle, pigs, goats, horses, dogs, cats, and certain birds. Some controversy existed over the inclusion of certain animals like elephants and rodents such as rats, mice, and guinea pigs that became pets in the late nineteenth century. Another characteristic of domestic animals is their integration into human social life as work animals, pets, and sources of entertainment and, ultimately, of food, clothing, and a myriad of other products.4 Thus, domesticated animals embody elements of both civilization and evolution. As Frederick Zeuner has argued, domestication is a social relation that presupposes a “social medium.” By that he means that the social evolution of a species must have reached a certain level before domestication is possible both for the domesticator and the domesticated.5 Whereas it appears that the process of domestication is premised on the notion of human domination, some scholars like Stephen Budiansky identify domestication “as the evolutionary product of a mutual strategy

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for survival” because it offered advantages not only for humans but also for animals who gained protection and a steady source of food and shelter from their association with humans.6 Budiansky even goes so far as to argue that certain animals “chose” domestication. For humans, the domestication of animals added a wealth of material resources. Moreover, it led to a higher sense of responsibility and sympathy toward creation, which was linked to the idea of civilization and social evolution. Toward the end of the century, Nathaniel Shaler, dean of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, even posed that “it would be interesting to trace, if we could, what share the several domesticated animals have had on the development of the human races.”7 If domestication is mutually advantageous for humans and animals, it is, of course, curious that so few animal species have been domesticated.8 In this regard the nineteenth century is of particular historical interest because it was then that numerous efforts to domesticate further species were made under the name of acclimatization. This chapter looks at the impact of newly emerging discourses about civilization, evolution, and acclimatization to answer the question of how these notions manifested themselves in attitudes toward domesticated animals, particularly at a time when the notion of domestic itself was redefined in light of new meanings of home, the rise of the nation-state, and the expansion of colonial empires.

CIVILIZING THE DOMESTIC The idea of civilization, even though it is often invoked in relation to ancient cultures, did not emerge until the late eighteenth century.9 In his recent book on this topic, Felipe Fernández-Armesto identifies civilization as “a process of collective self-differentiation from a world characterized, implicitly or explicitly, as ‘barbaric’ or ‘savage’ or ‘primitive.’”10 This alleged distinction between civilized and primitive/barbaric lies at the heart of the civilizing process that was at work within Western cultures and the resulting civilizing mission that was exported to their colonies. This drive to civilize was not limited to human social groups, but also extended to the animal kingdom. Indeed, animals fulfilled several crucial functions in this civilizing process. The treatment of animals was often viewed as a way to measure the standard of civilization, both among social classes and among different, especially colonial, populations. Animals were also linked to the overall civilization of humankind not only because humans depended on them for food and clothing, but also because animals were crucial for the advancement of the sciences, arts, spiritualism, and morality.11 In short, there was no civilization without animals. The domestication of animals, which attested to how natural resources could be turned into material wealth and placed in the service of the cultural (re)production of society,

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served as a particular marker of civilization and indicator for the successful domination of nature. Domestication was not only a sign of civilization, according to some nineteenth-century scholars like Nathaniel Shaler, but also helped to advance the civilizing mission because “the effect of domestication when man comes to have his own separate estate in animal life is to separate men from the creatures of the wilderness.”12 Arguments like Shaler’s implied that domestication separated the civilized from the wild. Dividing the animal kingdom into those who lived in close proximity to and those who lived apart from humans, domestication was a means to differentiate between the inside and the outside both with regard to indoors and outdoors as well as the indigenous and the foreign. One place where the interrelationship between the domestication of animals and the concept of civilization manifested itself was the home. As the term already indicates, domestication is closely related to the notion of domus— Latin for “home.” A domesticated animal is an animal that belongs to the household.13 Shaler expressed this connection when he wrote that “the home, indeed, may fairly be said to be the product of the conditions which the process of domestication brought about.”14 The domestication of animals might initially have brought about the notion of home, but it was not until the rise of bourgeois society in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the home was redefined as a distinct sphere of private social interaction. This new idea of the home as a particular harbinger of bourgeois values and social norms also found expression in the changing relationship between humans and animals and in decisions concerning which animals were allowed into the home and which were not.15 Whereas livestock was increasingly removed from the household, particularly as people settled into urban areas, another kind of animal was brought into closer proximity with the home—the pet. Indeed, pets became the quintessential domesticated animal of the nineteenth century because they were most intricately associated with the home. The English scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, even argued that the desire for domestication originated with humans’ pet-keeping tendencies.16 Certainly, pets were an expression of a cultivated nature where the wild was tamed and transformed into a symbol of civilized life. Pets were a distinct type of domesticated animal kept for pleasure, not labor. They were not eaten or turned into other consumable products like clothing or shoes.17 Moreover, they were granted the status of an individual rather than simply being a member of a herd, flock, pack, or, even more generally, a species. As individuals they received names and often were integrated into human families in varying ways. A wide range of animals including dogs, cats, birds, monkeys, and other exotic creatures were kept as pets throughout the nineteenth century, but dogs were, of course, the most popular.18 In many

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ways they became, as Kathleen Kete has argued, “a cliché of modern life.”19 In Paris alone, there was one dog for every twelve humans by the mid-1870s.20 Their popularity extended across the European continent as well as North America. Cats were less prominent. Their main purpose was to catch mice or, as Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire universel put it, “to control another still more disturbing enemy of domestic life that we are unable to hunt ourselves.”21 As pets, cats did not become popular until the later decades of the nineteenth century. Considered too independent, egotistical, and sexually charged, cats were often linked to bohemian lifestyles and hence did not lend themselves as readily to the educational purposes of the middle class.22 Exotic pets, which became increasingly accessible in the nineteenth century due to the expanding trade with far-off regions of the world, also figured into the redefinition of the home as a civilized place—one that bridged the space between the metropole and empire, between the domestic and foreign, as well as between nature and culture.23 Songbirds in particular embodied the fascination with the exotic and the desire to decorate the home with the colors and sounds of distant lands. Larger exotic animals like monkeys and tigers, which also entered European homes as pets, attested not only to the expansion of pet culture but also to the limitations of permanently taming and domesticating the wilderness, particularly once they outgrew their cuddly baby age. According to Katherine Grier, pets in nineteenth-century America were perceived through three main metaphors—animals as servants, animals as children, and animal families as human families.24 Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the first American advocates of animal protection, even equated pets with children.25 As Kete has shown, pets also came to represent the growing emphasis on the home as the domain of emotion, privacy, family, and self.26 Moreover, the home was increasingly understood as a gendered space. Writing about the United States, Katherine Grier described the home as “the primary medium for creating self-disciplined adults, a refuge from the masculine world of economic competition, and a model of the world as it should be, where the threat of naked power was supplanted by moral influence and feminine love.”27 This emphasis on morality and feminine love, which was characteristic for most Western societies, applied in particular to the upbringing of children. Pets played a seminal role in teaching children about responsibility, compassion, and civility, which was deemed significant because of the widespread belief that cruel children might grow up to become criminals. Harriet Beecher Stowe was not alone when she claimed that cruelty to animals was an expression of a “heathen state of mind.”28 As participants in domestic life, pets were supposed to help civilize people, but many of these animals were also themselves incorporated into this allegedly civilized society, especially those that became closely associated with bourgeois society. From Kete’s work on nineteenth-century Paris we know

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FIGURE 3.1: Anonymous. Nouveautés parisiennes. Modes &

manners of the nineteenth century as represented in the pictures and engravings of the times, by Oskar Fischel. 1909. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

that the growing popularity of pets in French society was closely linked to the rise of the bourgeois middle classes and their desire to differentiate themselves from the working classes. Dogs in particular became an expression of social status and that not only in France. According to the German historian Jutta Buchner, the upper classes kept dogs for a range of reasons such as hunting, pleasure, and aristocratic distraction, while the lower classes kept dogs mainly for protection and work.29 For the bourgeois middle class, dogs also served as a status symbol and a sign that one could own the frivolous. As embodiments of what Thorstein Veblen called “demonstrative consumption,” pets were a type of mobile property that could symbolize either social status (hunting dogs), luxury (toy dogs), or good taste (purebred dogs).

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One particularly odd embodiment of this link between bourgeois culture and pets was the practice of dressing up dogs, which was popular in France even if not in Britain and Germany. Much like their owners, some Parisian dogs were dressed in “costumes of a certain richness, pretty embroidered coats, silk jackets, warm outfits for the winter, light ones for the summer.”30 And dogs were not just dressed up, their fur coats, too, were frequently coifed for the sake of fashion and, as Kete argues, “to remove beastly characteristics from animals in the home.”31 Another indicator of how pets were integrated into the mechanisms of civilized society was the growing popularity of painted or photographed portraits of dogs in the company of their human owners or even just by themselves.32 Dogs and cats were not only captured in paintings and photographs, but also became the topic of a wide-ranging literature. Animals had always been the subjects of novels, fables, and other stories, but the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of a new and distinct genre of literature: pet manuals, which offered advice on training, feeding, and general care. The social impact of the civilizing process found its most telling expression, however, in the animal protection societies that sprang up all over Europe and the United States in the course of the nineteenth century. The first society of this type was established in London in 1829. The Parisian Société Protectrice des Animaux was established in 1845, followed by societies in other European cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Moscow. By the late 1860s, numerous Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCAs) had also been founded in American cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, New York, and Buffalo.33 All of them were devoted to notions of progress toward a higher state of civilization. The secretary general of the Parisian animal protection society expressed this sentiment when he stated that the purpose of animal welfare advocacy was “to assure protection of the weak and to strengthen that moral sense without which all the material works of civilization are only useless décor.”34 Underscoring the close connection between civilization and domestication, these societies initially focused their attention on domesticated animals such as horses, livestock, and pets. A more sustained interest in the protection of wild animals, especially birds, emerged only in the later decades of the nineteenth century, when urban animal protection societies got involved with conservation societies. The goal of these societies was to increase the awareness of the plight of many animals that served human society and to improve their living conditions through legal measures and the education of the public, particularly children. It is important, however, to remember that dogs, cats, and other animals were pets only as long as they were attached to a home, owned by humans, and generally integrated into domestic life. Stray cats and dogs quickly lost their standing as pets and become recategorized as “wild” animals, which

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in many instances also meant that their status shifted from that of an animal worthy of protection to one of an animal that had to be eliminated. Signifying the emergence of a new type of civilized wilderness, particularly in quickly growing urban areas, stray animals were often viewed as a threat because they transgressed the boundary between the tame and the wild, between the civilized and the savage/feral; as such, they were often hunted and killed. For example, in turn-of-the-century Berlin, the city employed special dogcatchers to capture roaming dogs and take them to shelters where they would be euthanized if they were not claimed by their owners within a week.35 In France, it was customary to hang stray animals, and in the United States, strays were caught with wire lassos and sometimes clubbed or shot on the spot.36 Curiously, the still-widespread expression “dog days of summer” originated with the customary clubbing to death of stray dogs in late summer, allegedly in order to prevent the spread of rabies. Of course, not everyone agreed with this method of dealing with stray animals. Some even viewed this animal mayhem as a threat to society at large.37 As one New York woman wrote in 1841, “they remind me of the reign of Terror. Whether such brutal scenes do not prepare the minds of the young to take part in bloody riots and revolutions is a serious matter.”38 In general, pets illustrated how even animals were drawn into newly emerging class-based social structures and how a culturally determined animal order was mapped onto biological conceptions of natural order. These cultural classifications divided the animal kingdom into the tame and the wild, the clean and the dirty, and the desired and the unwanted, with the result that some animals were cherished while others were forcefully eliminated. One particularly telling indicator of how the advancement of civilization affected the categorization and subsequent treatment of animals were vermin, especially rats and mice. To be sure, vermin had always been despised and subjected to rigorous hunts, but in the nineteenth century, their place in human social life was substantially reconfigured. Rats are of Asian origin. The brown rat did not spread in Europe in large numbers until the mid-eighteenth century. Arriving via eastern Europe, growing rat populations were reported in Germany and France from the 1750s onwards. By the late eighteenth century they had reached Italy and Spain, and soon thereafter they arrived on the East Coast of the United States.39 They found favorable living conditions in the growing cities of western Europe and North America. With a gestation period of only twenty-two days and a litter size of six to twelve, rat populations grew so quickly that they soon outnumbered human populations. As Robert Sullivan has recently argued, “a rat is an indicator of the presence of man.”40 The same can be said of mice, roaches, and a variety of other

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animals. They lived in close proximity to humans even though, for the most part, they were not really considered domesticated animals because they were not chosen cohabitants of human settlements. They were an unintended consequence of domestication and often viewed as an indicator for the underside of civilization—a symbol of dirt, poverty, and the general lack of hygiene, especially in cities. As a result they were vigorously pursued and exterminated. Already in 1851, there were 2,256 vermin killers in Britain, and it was estimated that in London alone eight to nine thousand rats were killed annually.41 Rats, which Jonathan Burt has labeled “the totem animals of modernity,” might have signified filth and disease, but they also attested to the growing interest in expanding the realm of domesticated animals, in particular through breeding for scientific purposes and popular entertainment.42 For example, rat baiting, a favorite pastime in nineteenth-century England, required such a large number of rats that they had to be specially bred for that purpose. Moreover, a growing number of laboratory sciences relied on animal experiments, which made their breeding necessary.43 A pharmacist in Genoa was the first to breed laboratory mice for inheritance experiments in the early nineteenth century. By the late nineteenth century, they were routinely bred for a quickly expanding number of laboratory experiments, particularly in the newly emerging biomedical sciences.44 Rats might well be “the totem animals of modernity,” particularly with regard to the phenomenon of domestication, because they simultaneously attested to how certain animal species became declared enemies of civilized society, and also to how the process of domestication extended to new species as scientific needs and popular desires further penetrated the animal kingdom. Breeding animals for laboratory purposes was not the only indicator of this process; it is also shown by the fact that mice and rats emerged as a new category of pet animals toward the end of the century.45 In general, when looking at the animals that are typically associated with the household, we see several developments in the nineteenth century. As the home acquired a new meaning as mediator between distinct public and private spheres, pet animals gained in significance both with regard to their numerical presence in households and their sociocultural status within the (bourgeois) family. Moreover, the types of animals that were considered pets expanded to include not only dogs, cats, and birds but also a range of exotic animals as well as the occasional rat or mouse. Thus, the redefinition of the domestic sphere had a notable impact on human–animal relations, leading to closer engagement with some animals that were considered worthy of protection—pets—but also to the growing disassociation with a number of other animals that had traditionally belonged to the household, namely livestock.

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FIGURE 3.2: The Rat Biscuit Company. Rat bis-kit. 1918. Prints. Picture Collection, The

Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

DOMESTICATING THE NATION Farm animals belong to the oldest domesticated animals. The domestication of goats and sheep reaches back to the preagricultural phase of civilization.46 Cattle and pigs have also been domesticated for thousands of years. Other farm animals that technically did not belong to the category of livestock were horses, donkeys, chicken, and geese. Each of them fulfilled a particular function within the farm’s daily economy. They contributed their labor power and products including manure, wool, eggs, milk, meat, leather, and an increasing number of byproducts, all of which were necessary for people’s daily needs. To be sure, despite a certain degree of specialization, many traditional practices continued on countless European farms well into the twentieth century. Whereas cattle and pigs did not necessarily share the houses of their human owners anymore, except in some regions of Scandinavia, many farms were still small-scale, family-oriented operations based on self-sufficiency rather than industrial mass production. Cattle and sheep went to pasture, and pigs often

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still roamed in the woods. Horses and oxen were used for farm labor, and even the smaller animals like chickens and geese were incorporated into the daily economy of these family farms before they were slaughtered for their meat. As the century progressed, a growing number of farms began to specialize and implement breeding and meat production-oriented operations. This was especially the case in the United States, where cattle and hog farming became lucrative enterprises, particularly in the Midwest and the southern states of Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico.47 On both sides of the Atlantic, livestock production added substantially to the gross national product of nations, which found expression in, among other things, the rising number of livestock. For example, in Germany the number of cattle roughly doubled from ten to twenty million between 1800 and 1913. Even more dramatically, the number of pigs rose from 3.8 million to more than 25 million.48 As these figures indicate, the number of livestock rose steadily throughout the nineteenth century not only in Germany, but in most Western nations. At the same time, many people’s personal engagement with livestock diminished as a growing percentage of rural populations moved to urban areas. The nineteenth century was marked by rapid urbanization, which also entailed a substantial reconfiguration of the role of animals in urban areas. Keeping cows and pigs in private households had been outlawed in many cities for centuries, but commercial milk-cow sheds and livestock markets were necessary for the provision of urban populations.49 In many cities livestock were a visible presence in the streets well into the nineteenth century because butchers traditionally slaughtered animals in the back of their shops that were located throughout urban areas; however, the growth of cities and the emergence of a distinct urban conscience led to increasing complaints about the presence of cattle, sheep, and pigs in city streets and about the unhygienic conditions associated with butcher shops. Consequently, the urbanization of Europe went hand in hand with the reform of traditional butchering practices, leading to the establishment of centralized municipal slaughterhouses located at the outskirts of towns.50 Paris was the first city to receive such municipal slaughterhouses in 1818. By the end of the nineteenth century, many European cities had established such facilities, for example, Rouen (1830), Brussels (1840), Marseille (1848), Vienna (1851), Lyon (1858), Milan (1863), Munich (1865), Zurich (1868), and Berlin (1881). As a result, livestock increasingly disappeared from city streets even though the number of livestock actually rose along with the population. For example, the human population of Paris grew from approximately 550,000 to 3 million between 1800 and 1920, while the number of livestock that annually moved through the city rose from approximately 600,000 to 2.8 million. Similarly, in Berlin, the number of people rose from 170,000 to 2.9 million, while the

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FIGURE 3.3: Constant Troyan. Cattle and sheep. ca. 1907. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

annual number of livestock climbed from 200,000 to 2.6 million between 1800 and 1914. Even more dramatic was the expansion of Chicago, whose human population exploded from a few hundred inhabitants when the city was chartered in 1837 to over two million by the end of the century. The number of cattle and pigs jumped even more drastically from hundreds to over twelve

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million annually. This tremendous expansion of Chicago was closely linked to the rise of the Union Stockyards, which opened in 1865 and soon emerged as the largest meatpacking facility in the world. In contrast to European municipal abattoirs, the Chicago stockyards were private enterprises that operated not simply to feed the city but to supply meat to faraway markets including Europe.51 In general, the shift from small private butchering facilities to large industrial-style slaughterhouses also attested to the growing distance between many urban dwellers and the animals that provided their meat and a growing number of byproducts. Thus, even though most people continued to be dependent on domesticated animals, their direct contact with livestock diminished as the century progressed. In addition to mediating between home and nation, livestock attested to the growing interconnection between the forces of biology and the idea of civilization, which manifested itself most distinctly in the rising interest in breeding. Combining biological imperatives with economic goals, specialized animalbreeding practices originated in the late eighteenth century.52 Closely linked to the emergence of public registries that made the exchange of knowledge and its standardization possible, the goal of selective breeding was to improve the physical attributes, abilities, and mental characteristics of domesticated animals. The first animals that were subjected to selective breeding—horses and greyhounds—were bred for speed. Livestock animals were mainly bred to improve their weight, growth rates, and the subsequent quality of their meat. The main principle behind animal breeding was to modify their characteristics through artificial selection. Already in the eighteenth century, British breeders like Robert Bakewell had laid down the foundations for scientific breeding by insisting that the advancement of agricultural animal production should be based on systematic inbreeding and type fixing through male rather than female lines, but in the nineteenth century these ideas were increasingly put into practice in an effort to improve the economic output of domesticated animals.53 For the most part, after 1800 the European method of livestock breeding followed the British practice-oriented bottom-up model based on the principles that Bakewell and his students had developed.54 In addition, during the first half of the nineteenth century, many European breeders abided by a theory that insisted on the need for racial permanence. Known as “constancy theory,” it stated that “nature created races with an unchangeable hereditary power whose characteristics never change. The task of animal breeding is to use such permanent races or create them if they do not exist, because the purer the race, the more secure its hereditary power.”55 This theory was particularly influential in horse breeding, where racial purity had always been an important factor, but it was also used as a guiding principle for breeding cattle and pigs, even though for these types of animals racial purity was less significant until the middle of the century, when a growing number of breeders

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started to doubt the validity of these principles, in part because of their own experiences but also because the overall scientific tenor was changing toward an approach based on variability. No matter to which theory breeders subscribed, their activities attested to how domesticated animals were drawn into discourses about culture, biology, and the human exercise of power over nature. And as Harriet Ritvo has argued, they also paved the way for Darwin’s work on evolution and its subsequent dissemination.56 If the idea of civilization had a substantial effect on the cultural conception of human–animal interactions within society, the theory of evolution permanently altered the biological understanding of human–animal relations. That species evolved over time had already been argued by Larmarck and Buffon, but it was the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 that marked the major turning point in evolutionary thinking.57 Despite some major criticisms, Darwin’s ideas about variability through natural selection were quickly accepted on both sides of the Atlantic not least because they offered a new model for how to think about the relationship between humans and animals.58 In contrast to the concept of civilization, which elevated humans, especially white bourgeois Westerners, above the rest of creation, the theory of evolution challenged the boundary between humans and the animal kingdom, declaring humans to be just another species on the evolutionary ladder. More specifically, the theory of evolution classified humans alongside apes. Moreover, whereas the idea of civilization was premised on cultural conceptions of human domination, evolutionary thinking focused on the centrality of natural forces to which all species, including Homo sapiens, were subject. Consequently, it was not culture but rather the external environment that functioned as the primary motor of change. As Peter Bowler has argued, “The environment determines which shall live and reproduce, and which shall die, thus defining the direction in which the population evolves. Evolution is essentially a process by which species adapt to their environment.”59 This evolutionary dependence of organisms on their environment became even more obvious in the conscious efforts to manipulate these environmental conditions through the practice of acclimatization.

THE EMPIRE OF ACCLIMATIZATION The concept of acclimatization had its origins in the eighteenth century but did not become a sustained effort until the nineteenth century, when acclimatization societies sprang up all over Europe. The English biologist Alfred Russel Wallace defined acclimatization as “the process of adaptation by which animals and plants are gradually rendered capable of surviving and flourishing in countries remote from their original habitats, or under meteorological conditions different from those which they have usually to endure, and which

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are at first injurious.”60 Based on his scientific standpoint, he insisted that acclimatization must be clearly distinguished from domestication and naturalization because “a domesticated animal . . . need not be capable of enduring the severity of the seasons without protection,” while for naturalized animals “there is no evidence of a gradual adaptation to new conditions which were at first injurious.”61 From a cultural perspective, however, acclimatization and domestication were not necessarily opposing phenomena, but rather part of a continuous process, because the ultimate goal of acclimatization was to introduce new (economically valuable) species to their respective countries. In that sense, the acclimatization of animals was an attempt to harness evolutionary forces and integrate them into the socioeconomic landscape of allegedly civilized nations. The term “acclimatization” itself emerged in late eighteenth-century France.62 It came into common English use around the 1820s—at a time when scientists began to show a growing interest in the study of climatic conditions and its role in the life of organisms. As the term indicates, the ability of an animal or plant to acclimatize depended on climatic conditions and the general makeup of the environment as well as dietary requirements and exposure to predators; hence, much like evolution, it hinged heavily on environmental factors. As a practice, acclimatization was both a method and a process “whereby humans exploited the forces of nature, under the guidance of the principles of science, to assist exotic plants and animals to adapt to new circumstances.”63 Thus, on the one hand, to acclimatize an animal or plant meant to bring it under the civilizational forces of a nation and its socioeconomic landscape; yet, on the other hand, it also underscored that nature continued to be the decisive force in acclimatization since humans might bring animals to new habitats, but natural factors like climate, diet, and specific modes of life still determined whether an animal or plant would be able to adapt.64 Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, acclaimed zoologist and since 1841 director of the Jardin des Plantes, argued that “to acclimatize an individual, a race, or a species, after having transported it to another country and therefore outside its natural harmonies is to habituate it to new conditions of existence and to cause it to fall into harmony with them.”65 With this statement, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire implied that the process of acclimatization, to some extent, entailed not only the transfer of organisms to different natural habitats but also their integration into the cultural realm of specific nation-states and their colonial projects. As one nineteenth-century observer claimed, “it may be said that the whole of colonization is a vast deed of acclimatization.”66 This acclimatization operated in two ways—on the one hand, domesticated animals were taken to colonial lands in an effort to “civilize” foreign territories, and on the other hand, exotic animals were shipped to the metropoles of Europe.

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Attempts to acclimatize foreign plants and animals had occurred before the nineteenth century, but they had remained haphazard.67 Already the colonization of America had been premised on the ambition of “civilizing” allegedly savage lands.68 One could argue that livestock was a collaborator in this civilizing mission because the forced establishment of European methods of livestock husbandry was understood as one way to tame Native Americans.69 To once more cite Nathaniel Shaler, whose views expressed the underlying tenor of the civilizing mission with which Europeans went to Africa, the Americas, and Asia: “A little consideration makes it evident to us that the advance of mankind above the original savage state is in several ways favored by the possession of domesticated animals” because “the savage may be defined as a man who cares only for his family and his tribe; the civilized man as one whose kindly interest extends to mankind and beyond to all sentient beings.”70 Hence, keeping domesticated animals was viewed as a sign of civilization. Moreover, under domestication even animals supposedly became more civilized because “the creatures, in a way, take the tone of civilization, and to a great extent abandon those ancient habits of fear and rage which were essential to their life in the wilderness.”71 Nowhere did this civilizing effect on animals become more apparent than in zoological gardens. Bernard-Germain-Etienne de Lacépède, an early supporter of modern zoos, linked the history of zoos to four stages of civilization—“the need of the hunter-warrior, the pride of the dominator, the curiosity of the scientist, and the devotion of the citizen”—and he argued that they reflected the state of civilization of the peoples who maintained them.72 Another advocate even insisted that zoos were necessary “for the dignity of the nation.”73 Hence, it was not surprising that the emergence and spread of modern zoological gardens went hand in hand with the establishment of modern nation-states. Often developing out of royal menageries, zoos emerged all over Europe and North America throughout the nineteenth century.74 The first modern zoo was established in Paris in 1793 as part of the Museum of Natural History. Other cities followed suit in the coming decades, for example, London (1828), Amsterdam (1839), Berlin (1844), Budapest (1866), Chicago (1868), and New York (1873). Zoos were primarily urban institutions meant to educate the public about animals as well as foreign cultures and to serve the advancement of science. In an 1825 article, the director of the Museum of Natural History, Frédéric Cuvier, argued that the study of animals in their natural habitat offered information about their role in nature but that their behavior and intellectual abilities could only be investigated in captivity.75 Moreover, Cuvier thought that wild animals could be tamed and that domestication was not a degeneration of animal nature but rather an improvement. He viewed domestication not in terms of domination but education.76

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Despite the fact that zoo animals were integrated into the principles of domestication in that they were sheltered and fed and that at least some of them were brought to breed in captivity, zoo animals were not domesticated in the biological sense. For one, zoos “domesticated” individual animals, not entire species. Furthermore, the appeal of most zoo animals was based on the opposite—their exotic nature and supposed wildness. The more exotic or wild an animal, the more popular it was among visitors. Tigers, giraffes, and elephants always held greater appeal than the cows, pigs, deer, and fowl that were also on exhibit for the distinct purpose of introducing the public to the indigenous fauna and domesticated species that many urbanites only got to see in this kind of setting. But even exotic animals were certainly domesticated in a cultural sense, as became clear in, among other things, the architecture of zoological gardens. Even though animals did not live in houses in the wild, in northern climates they had to be sheltered. And many exotic animals were not only sheltered but placed in a cultural context that was supposed to teach lessons about their homeland. Berlin’s elephant pagoda was one example.77 Built in 1872, it resembled an Indian temple and was meant to introduce visitors not only to elephants but also to the cultural context from which these animals supposedly came. The irony that this facility housed mostly African elephants probably

FIGURE 3.4: Anonymous. The Giraffes in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London. n.d. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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escaped most visitors. Such exoticist buildings were a popular architectural style that could be found in many zoos, including those in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Frankfurt, London, Paris, and Vienna. Zoos in many ways became a showcase for the domestication of empire. Or, as historian Robert Jones has argued, “Animals were to be viewed as metonyms for imperial triumph, civic pride, the beneficence of God or scientific discovery.”78 Displaying captured exotic animals side by side with those indigenous to a given land was meant to give visitors an impression of the national glory and vastness of empire. Apart from educating the public, zoos served scientific functions, and one of the primary goals was the acclimatization of new species. For instance, the Frankfurt zoo reported that they were acclimatizing herds of zebu, horses, and kangaroos.79 In his memoirs, Carl Hagenbeck, the most prominent European animal trader and founder of the zoo at Hamburg Stellingen, stated that “one of the main goals of my operations at Stellingen was to conduct acclimatization experiments and the establishment of new facilities in zoological gardens.”80 To foster these activities, most zoos were associated with an acclimatization society. Such societies had been founded in many European cities by the 1860s, most notably in France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia. The most active acclimatization society existed in France. The Société Nationale de Protection de la Nature et d’Acclimatation de France, which soon changed its name to Société impériale zoologique d’acclimatation in order to reflect the government’s sponsorship, was founded in February 1854 and existed until World War I.81 In 1860 it even became associated with a special zoo—the Jardin d’Acclimatation. The society’s membership roster, which included scientists, agriculturalists, governmental officials, colonial administrators, and foreign members from across Europe, attested to the rather egalitarian nature of this organization, which was open to all people “who, not only in France, but throughout the globe, are theoretically and practically occupied with the acclimatization and domestication of animals.”82 Over the six decades of its existence, the society numbered more than 4,600 members, making it one of the most successful French scientific societies.83 Its first president, the renowned zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who led the society until his death in 1861, emphasized the truly global ambitions of this society, which centered on “the introduction, acclimatization and domestication of useful or ornamental animal species.”84 As Michael Osborne has shown, the French acclimatization society followed a wide range of pursuits including natural history, anthropological exhibits, the display and sale of exotic animals, consultancies in colonial matters, agricultural development, and wildlife conservation.85 Their efforts even included more domestic projects like dog and cat shows, breeding experiments, and the promotion of horsemeat consumption.86

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Believing in the great economic, scientific, and cultural promise of this work, the associations focused on the introduction of new species to aid their respective nations’ economies and to enhance the agricultural productivity of colonies like Algeria. The Jardin d’Acclimatation experimented with acclimatizing yaks, llamas, and Siamese ponies. In 1861, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire proudly announced that a hemione, which was supposed to plow the fields of France and Algeria, had been bred in France. He wrote that this hemione had become “thoroughly French. It is also completely acclimatized; its stall has never been the least bit heated” even during the worst of winters.87 Other animals that were supposed to be acclimatized included bison, ovibos, foxes, polar bears, seals, and beavers. Moreover, kangaroos were to be acclimatized and eventually domesticated because “they are of considerable size, their flesh is palatable, and their hides useful for leather; they breed rapidly, live on a poor herbage, and are, for wild animals of like strength, very inoffensive.”88 One of the most prominent activities of these societies were the contests that were held in the hope of advancing experimental research in this field. Not surprisingly, most of these contests, which were often advertised internationally, focused on economically useful animals like Asian silkworms and new types of potential livestock that would boost agricultural production in the colonies. Some of the reasons behind acclimatization experiments were more leisureoriented, like the desire to improve the hunting grounds in newly established colonial territories. For example, British colonial officials imported deer, foxes, and upland birds to Australia and New Zealand where, unlike on the North American continent, there were not enough native large animals to support one of their favorite pastimes—hunting.89 The historian Thomas Dunlap argues that acclimatization became so popular in Australia and New Zealand because settlers wanted to remake the landscape to fit their image of home, a sentiment that, according to Dunlap, was greater in Australia and New Zealand than North America.90 But in the United States as well, immigrants imported animals in order to enhance their sense of home. For example, German-Americans had brought some four thousand specimens of twenty species, mostly birds, to the New World.91 Ultimately, however, acclimatization projects fell into disrepute, especially after some introduced animals upset the ecological balance. The most wellknown example was the rabbit plague that affected Australia soon after they had been introduced in the early 1860s.92 By the late 1880s, rabbits had become such a plague that the Intercolonial Royal Commission even offered a special reward of twenty-five thousand pounds to whoever would find a viable method to get rid of the rabbits.93 Whereas the introduction of some animals was “too successful,” most other attempts were not successful enough. Some types of sheep were established in

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Australia, Algeria, and different regions of Europe, but most experiments did not lead to sustainable additions to the natural fauna. Generally, larger animals were easier to acclimatize than small ones because the latter were often more dependent on climatic conditions, particularly ranges in temperatures. Most insects, like the highly desired silkworms, resisted acclimatization. Other factors also intervened. As Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire complained in 1895, whereas the work of the society had accomplished much with regard to transplanting animals from the far reaches of the earth, it had also led to some negative consequences for domestic producers. Blaming the decline of the acclimatization movement on technology, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire pointed to the example of Angora goats, which had been successfully introduced to Algeria, but since South African spun fleece was still cheaper and since new means of transportation made it possible to ship it to France, the Angora goats of Algeria had not become economically viable.94 Even though most acclimatization activities were sooner or later abandoned, they nevertheless attested to the desire to actively alter human engagement with animals from foreign climates and eventually expand the number of domesticated species. That these attempts to acclimatize new species went hand in hand with European colonial expansion was not coincidental but rather an illustration of the growing linkage of biological and cultural processes as well as the domination of nature and society.

CONCLUSION In summary, what can be said about the history of domestication in the nineteenth century and its role in the advancement of society? The nineteenth century witnessed a certain redefinition of domestication and the domestic, most notably with regard to the meaning of home and the place of animals in it. On the one hand, this entailed closer engagement with those animals that could be drawn into the service of civilizing the domestic—pets. On the other hand, it also involved a growing distance from those animals that did not fit that purpose—livestock, vermin, and stray animals. Furthermore, the meaning of domestication also shifted with regard to the nation, its domestic economy, and by extension even the empire, which found its most obvious expression in animal breeding and in the efforts to acclimatize new species. All of these activities underscored the continuous dependence of human society on animals. While humans’ personal dependence on animals might have decreased in the course of the nineteenth century as more and more people moved away from agricultural production and into urban areas, economic and scientific dependence on animals actually intensified. Thus, when thinking about the modern period, one should not just consider the growing distance between humans and the rest of creation but also its closer association, both in the name of civilization and evolution.

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By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the legitimacy of civilizational claims was undermined, first by the violent exploitation of colonial territories and then, after 1914, by the destructive power of machine warfare. Animals played a decisive role in this process of disillusionment as well, be it the dogs that were used to terrorize colonial populations or the trench rats that gave soldiers the impression that civilization had come to an end. To some extent, these violent encounters, which were perpetrated in the name of civilization, brought about a new form of human–animal association. The fact that World War I was compared to a slaughterhouse was not just rhetorical; rather, it demonstrated that the destruction of animals and of people did not necessarily stand in opposition to one another but was part of an ongoing process that linked societal progress to the exploitation of humans and animals—a process that would, in many ways, characterize the twentieth century.

CHAPTER FOUR

How the Caged Bird Sings Animals and Entertainment nigel rothfels

When people today visit particularly stunning zoo exhibits, such as the Congo Gorilla Forest at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo, the Bornean Rainforest at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Zoo, the Masoala Rainforest at the Zurich Zoo, or the Kilimanjaro Safari ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, they are experiencing the newest ideas and technology in immersive zoo exhibits—exhibits designed not only to place animals in synthetic “natural” landscapes, but also to place the human visitor in those landscapes as well.1 Many arguments—about education, science, ethology, and zoo biology—have been put forward by zoos for why these new exhibits are better than the old cages with bars, which have long been seen as hallmarks of nineteenth-century zoos. In this chapter, however, I will argue that these newer exhibits stem much more significantly from a central paradox that largely emerged in the nineteenth century of wanting to both see captive animals and believe that they are somehow happy. Just why we want our captive animals to be happy, or at least content, is a very complex question. Part of the answer lies in a humane movement that became concerned about the effects of animal suffering on humans; another part lies in a sentimental movement that saw animals as innocent victims of human violence and avarice, the sort of ideas behind the enthusiasm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for stuffed toy animals and such heroic animal stories as Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, or even Bambi; and perhaps another part lies in an atavistic desire we all have to recover a closeness to animals that we believe

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we lost in the urbanization of modern capitalism. Perhaps, beyond these, an even deeper and transhistorical part of human nature tries to both dominate and care for nature and animals.2 Whatever the causes, a visit to almost any major zoo today makes clear that we are living amid a particular desire to have an extraordinary assortment of exotic animals around us, while at the same time not wanting to see those animals as the objects of entertainment they quite obviously are. Instead of focusing on our own pleasure, we have been talking now for well over a century about other reasons for keeping animals in cages, especially about science and education, but also, more recently, about conservation. While I acknowledge that these other interests have often been important factors in the development of zoological collections and exhibits, this chapter will focus more on animals as objects of pleasure—visual, tactile, olfactory, and even auditory—for as much as scientific passion, for example, clearly drove the quests of nineteenthcentury comparative morphologists for complete collections of every kind of parrot, it was already clear at the very beginning of the public zoological garden movement that most visitors came because the places were fun, because the animals were entertaining, because it was an extraordinary experience to promenade down a walk lined with parrot stands.3 To be sure, getting a clear sense of just how animals were seen as entertainment in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe and America can be a daunting task. First of all, one must recognize that a century ago animals were present in streets and homes in ways that are often difficult for us to imagine today.4 Horses pulled all manner of conveyances through towns and cities; the butcher and the animals he butchered lived in the neighborhood; and while cockfights, bullbaiting, and the like were becoming more hidden activities, performing animals were still common. Amid this myriad of beastly activity, however, all kinds of animals—both the exotic from overseas and the more quotidian—ended up as the caged and collected, and by focusing on the presence of caged animals in two seemingly very different venues—the zoological garden and the home—it is possible to provide an introduction into how people understood animals as objects of entertainment during a time in which Western ideas about animals’ place and significance in human lives changed significantly.5 Just when the public zoological garden movement started remains open for debate, with most people settling on either the creation of the animal collection at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in 1793, consisting of animals confiscated from private entrepreneurs and aristocratic owners, or the opening of the Zoological Gardens in Regent’s Park in London in 1828. Whichever was first, essentially everyone concedes that the large, publicly supported zoological garden was an invention of the rising bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Even leaving aside many smaller municipal collections, more than two hundred larger zoological gardens existed in major cities around the world by

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1920. In addition to the zoos in Paris and London, among the more prominent earliest zoos of this long list—a list that includes over sixty zoos in the United States alone—would be the gardens in Vienna (a royal collection begun in 1752), Dublin (1831), Bristol (1835), Manchester (1836), Amsterdam (1838), Edinburgh (1839), Antwerp (1843), Berlin (1844), Brussels (1851), Calcutta (1854), Marseille (1855), Frankfurt am Main (1858), Copenhagen (1859), Cologne (1860), Dresden (1861), New York’s Central Park (1861), Melbourne (1861), Hamburg (1863), Moscow (1864), Ho Chi Minh City (1864), Jakarta (1864), St. Petersburg (1865), Wroclaw (1865), Budapest (1866), Madrid (1869), Chicago’s Lincoln Park (1868), Hong Kong (1871), Providence, Rhode Island (1872), Lahore (1872), Philadelphia (1874), Basel (1874), Buffalo (1875), and Cincinnati (1875).6 The origins of these zoological gardens varied. In many cases, a prominent citizens’ group pushed for the creation of a publicly supported zoological collection for the recreation and education of the public and as a resource for scientific research. In other cases, the gardens were built with money raised through a limited stock offering. This sort of stock was not, of course, expected to yield a return, but was more a financial donation by prominent members of the community to support the enhancement of a city’s civic and economic environment—something akin to what we now call a membership. In still other cases, former aristocratic collections and other property were turned over to the management of a group of leading members of the scientific and commercial community, constituted as a zoological society, which then developed the collection according to emerging international standards. When, for example, the zoological gardens in Berlin opened in 1844, most of the animals came from the royal menagerie at the Pfaueninsel built up by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and the man who had managed the private collection for the king, Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein, moved with the animals and became the first director of the Berlin Zoological Gardens.7 The case of Berlin’s gardens and their management raises an obvious question, though: If there were animal collections before the construction of the public zoological gardens, were the two types of collections in any way different from each other? Ever since the nineteenth century, when the enthusiasts and directors of the public zoological gardens began to write the histories of their institutions, there has been an accepted division between what they usually called a menagerie and the more familiar zoological garden or zoo—a popular shorthand expression that emerged in the 1870s. Of the two terms— menagerie and zoo—the former was used to describe all those private collections of captive animals kept mostly for purposes of display or for the aggrandizement of the owner. The term zoological garden, on the other hand, was understood more narrowly as a description of those animal collections, founded and developed by public organizations of some kind, that existed to advance science and public education, provide public recreation, and, by the

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beginning of the twentieth century, promote the preservation or conservation of wild animals. Beyond a distinction between public and private, however, there are other differences between zoological gardens and menageries. This is perhaps especially clear in the case of bears. One of the very first exhibits built for the new Zoological Gardens of London was something called the bear pit. Essentially a deep hole with a large wooden vertical beam anchored in the center, the bear pit was one of the most popular exhibits at the zoo and remained a central feature of the place for seventy-five years. Near the exhibit, there was a small concession booth where visitors could purchase buns for the animals. The bears would then climb the “tree,” and spectators would throw food to the bears. Even those bears who simply sat at the bottom of the pit could be amusing, though, as visitors tried to get the food directly into the bears’ mouths—except, it seems, on some Mondays when the bears were so stuffed from the efforts of weekend visitors that they could not be induced to even open their mouths.8 Enthusiasm for the pits was not limited to London, however. In fact, bear pits of one kind or another were constructed in zoos all over the world. As much as the bear pits were popular at the new zoos, though, their history stretches back hundreds of years. Indeed, the bear pit should probably best be seen as a kind of holdover from an earlier time, or, as a committee at the London zoo put it in 1902 after deciding to demolish the London pit, as a “relic of the Middle Ages.”9 If they were relics, why, then, were they initially put in the new zoos? First of all, people were fascinated with bears in the nineteenth century to a degree that it is difficult for us to appreciate. Bears were the most important animals in children’s stories, hunting tales, and eventually as stuffed toys, and, for as long as anyone could remember, bears had simply always been around.10 Some cities had long traditions of keeping bears in moats and pits, and in every city, from time to time, as can be seen in Friedrich Seidenstücker’s photograph from the 1930s, trained bears had walked the streets, dancing and performing other tricks. Thus, by the time the great public zoological gardens began to be built in the nineteenth century, bears were nothing new, but they were fascinating in ways that other animals were not. When the directors of zoos decided to exhibit bears, they almost universally decided to exhibit them in the same way they had always been exhibited, specifically, in pits. Simply, zoos wanted bears because they were entertaining, and they wanted pits because they were a particularly entertaining way to exhibit bears. With that said, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the pits were clearly going out of style. Quite literally, the way people looked at bears began to change. When Berlin opened its zoological garden, for example, the bears in the king’s pit were moved to the zoo. Importantly, though, because the ground at the new zoo was too wet to dig out a traditional pit, Berlin built its new exhibit from the ground up within a “bear castle,” so that people could both

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FIGURE 4.1: Friedrich Seidenstücker, “Brown Bear.” Courtesy of Werner Kourist.

stand at the top of the building and look down into the cage (a view reminiscent of the pit) or stand in front of the exhibit to see the bears head-on.11 This new way of looking at bears—from in front and through vertical bars, as can be seen from a typical example from the Milwaukee dens built in 1905—became the most common way of exhibiting the animals. Instead of being poked fun at from above, the animals could now be studied more closely as they walked back

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and forth behind bars, with the floor of the cages several feet above ground level. This may seem like a small difference, but from both a bear’s perspective and a human perspective, there are clear differences between a bear fighting for its life against a pack of dogs in an arena, a bear in a pit, a bear behind bars, and a bear in a naturalistic habitat, and those differences signal important changes in how we have thought about animals in captivity. The zoological garden in the nineteenth century, then, is a place of transition. While old-style bear pits and the spectacle of a teased bear remained at the zoo, new ideas about appropriate behavior toward animals and acceptable pleasures were beginning to emerge. The Ursus americanus of the Milwaukee signs, a scientific and educational object, began to replace its performing cousins of the pits. The watershed marked by the replacement of the old traveling and aristocratic menageries with public zoological gardens in the nineteenth century thus also marked the beginnings of important changes in how animals were presented to viewers. In the traveling, aristocratic, and other menageries, animals were displayed in ways that showcased the knowledge, power, wealth, taste, or ingenuity of the owner. The menagerie, in whatever form, whether it was owned by Rudolf II in Prague in the sixteenth century, the Empress Josephine in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or William Randolph Hearst at San Simeon or Michael Jackson at Neverland in the twentieth century, was intended to reflect and enhance the personal prestige of its owner.12 Whereas private menageries were intended to celebrate an individual, the new public

FIGURE 4.2: Washington Park Zoo (Milwaukee) Bear Dens, 1905. Courtesy of the Milwaukee County Zoo.

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gardens were intended to celebrate the bourgeoisie and to extol that class’s values of science, progress, education, the extension of law and commerce, and the importance of public recreation. They were, moreover, intended to reflect the hoped-for status of their home cities on a world stage. As Andrew H. Green of the New York Zoological Society typically put it in an interview with the New York Times in 1895 regarding the proposed garden eventually constructed in the Bronx: “The establishment of a superb zoological collection [is] one of the things necessary to the true greatness of New-York,” and, consequently, it was the “intention” of the Society “to make this new zoological garden the finest in the world.”13 Visitors came to the zoological garden to see the animals, but they also came for conversation or the opportunity to listen to a concert or stroll down long promenades. Although most of the older buildings are disappearing in zoos today, it is still possible, for example, to find the typical long buildings with a row of cages on the outside that were, in many ways, the hallmark of zoos constructed at the height of bourgeois confidence in the late nineteenth century. Along these buildings, the public could walk leisurely, pausing every now and then to look a bit more closely at this or that species and read the labels affixed to the cages—labels clear in the photograph of the Milwaukee bears—with all the information one really needed to know: popular name, scientific name, country of origin, and perhaps the name of the donor. The visit to a zoo in the nineteenth century was a visit to a park where not-too-strenuous outdoor activity, tea parties, and acceptable pleasure could be had against a backdrop of interesting animals. Much as we seem to want to hide the presence of human invention in our animal exhibits today, the great zoos of the nineteenth century celebrated the presence of people and their creations at the zoo. Part of this was done in the very buildings themselves. At the exemplary Berlin zoo, for example, spectacular buildings were constructed for the animals, based on models from civilizations around the world. There was the huge elephant pagoda, built in supposed imitation of a Hindu temple and boasting yellow, brown, and blue domes with elaborate decorative tiling; the ostrich house, designed to resemble an Egyptian temple with paintings of “ancient” figures of men and birds covering both the interior and exterior walls; and the Moorish antelope house with its graceful arches and minarets. Importantly, though, however spectacular the buildings were, the zoological gardens increasingly struggled with a growing sense of disappointment, often signaled, in fact, in plans for the buildings themselves. An editorial in the Daily News of London in 1869, for example, lavished praise on plans for a new lion house while pointing immediately to the inadequacy of the current arrangements for the animals. Writing of the “dreams of everyone interested in Zoology” for “Lions at play, free as their own jungle home; tigers crouching, springing, gamboling, with as little restraint as the low plains of their native India,” the commentator complained: “We are all tired of the dismal menagerie cages. The

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cramped walk, the weary restless movement of the head . . . the bored look, the artificial habits.” Finally, according to the editorial, “a method of displaying lions and tigers, in what may be called by comparison a state of nature, is seriously contemplated at last.”14 In the end, the New Lion House, completed in 1876, still employed the heavy iron bars, which, more than anything else, marked so clearly the captivity of the animals and repeatedly caught the distressed attention of zoo visitors. Almost thirty years after the opening of the New Lion House in London, the problem of bars still worried exhibit designers. When the New York Zoological Park, more popularly known as the Bronx Zoo, opened its new lion house in 1903, proclaimed by the New York Times with typical hyperbole as “the finest building in the world to be erected for such a purpose,” one of the most significant innovations was the replacement of the “iron bars, so suggestive of a prison” with wire netting, “painted a dull olive green, to match the tiling of the interior of the cages.” Along a corridor more than one hundred feet long, spectators looked through the wire netting into exhibits with state-of-the-art interiors with eight-foot walls of “tiling painted a dull olive green, imitating as nearly as possible the native surroundings of the animals,” topped with a border, “in some cases representing the jungle, in others the desert.”15 Four years later, a whole new vision of “imitating as nearly as possible the native surroundings of the animals” was opened in the town of Stellingen, a suburb of the northern German city of Hamburg. After acquiring some agricultural land in 1902, the most successful company in the worldwide trade in exotic animals, the firm of Carl Hagenbeck, began construction of a zoo that, for the first time, would systematically show animals in naturalistic landscapes instead of in elaborate buildings. Through decades of experimenting with different kinds of public spectacles, including circuses and traveling shows of indigenous peoples, Hagenbeck had become convinced that his audience would respond to exhibits that showed animals not from behind bars but in apparent freedom, separated from each other through carefully concealed moats. More than creating a moated enclosure for this or that animal—which would, in itself, have been innovative—Hagenbeck arranged his exhibits so that a succession of enclosures could be observed at once in panoramic landscapes. From a single viewing point, for example, one would look out across a small body of water to an apparent riverbank enjoyed by ducks, flamingos, and small deer. Beyond them, larger antelopes, ostriches, and zebras milled about, seemingly watched from still farther back by lions resting beside water holes or in the shade of “rock” grottos. Dominating the entire panorama, a rugged “cliff” provided habitat for wild goats and vultures. With his designs, Hagenbeck claimed, “ibexes, chamois, and antelopes need not trust their lives in captivity to low cages, but rather could strive for the heights on a cliff-like ridge.”16

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FIGURE 4.3: Hagenbeck’s Tierpark, Main Panorama. Courtesy of Hagenbeck’s Tierpark.

Not surprisingly, ever since the opening of his “Animal Park,” historians interested in zoos have been in the habit of talking about the “Hagenbeck revolution.” At a time when more and more people were bothered by the endless pacing of the large felines and bears, the depressed expressions of primates, and the intense smells inside the buildings at zoos, Hagenbeck gave his visitors open-air exhibits where the animals seemed free to move about and mix with other animals. The public greeted the new park with overwhelming enthusiasm, and although the administrators of the older gardens complained that Hagenbeck’s exhibits were of little scientific value because it was so difficult to observe the individual animals, they grudgingly and quickly began to adopt their own forms of moated enclosures—enclosures that are the direct predecessors of the high-end immersive exhibits at the cutting edge of zoos today. But Hagenbeck’s revolution was more than just the moats and panoramas he created. Beyond any architectural changes, he sought to convince the public that the animals in his exhibits were happier than those in the older zoos—and in this he was largely successful. Even though the animals in Hagenbeck-type moated landscapes were often given an area to roam that was really no bigger than their old cages; even though the animals were often shown in groups where the individuals might suffer increased psychological stress; and even though his zoo was, in part, a showroom for his animal business and the animals there often came and went rather quickly, the public looked out on the landscapes and saw

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edenic tableaus, and the cries of those critics who saw zoos as little more than prisons were muffled. While the older zoological gardens faced more and more difficulty convincing their audiences that it was not so bad to be an animal at the zoo, beginning with Hagenbeck, zoos finally began, more or less successfully, to make the captive lives of animals seem less depressing. What Hagenbeck understood was that for a zoo to be successful, for people to be convinced that what they beheld was truly remarkable, authentic, memorable, or significant, it was less important what was shown than how it was seen. Hagenbeck did not free the animals, but it looked as if he had, and that distinction mattered, especially when it appeared as if he had freed them into their original landscapes. Hagenbeck replaced the bear pit with an arctic landscape where polar bears seemed to look out alternately on a group of caribou on a plateau or on a group of seals and sea lions swimming warily in a pool. The exhibit was made of a concrete material applied to a structure of wood and metal mesh and then molded and painted to look like ice. Looking back, the exhibit seems more than a little hokey. At the time, though, it was nothing less than a revelation to visitors. People talked of being seemingly transported to an arctic fjord where the animals appeared to live in a “natural landscape.” The important point is that Hagenbeck’s park was built within a cultural setting in which people were increasingly seeking more authentic experiences with exotic animals. The era of the amusing bear pit was replaced as a new vision of wild animals, nature, and happiness began to be framed at the zoo. The issue of animal happiness and how it connected to the ability to see the animal as a source of entertainment reached into the private realms of the home, as

FIGURE 4.4: Hagenbeck’s Tierpark, Arctic Fjord. Courtesy of Hagenbeck’s Tierpark.

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well. Perhaps nowhere is this as clear as in the case of the extraordinary popularity of the canary in the nineteenth century. There are many reasons behind the success of the canary as a pet in the West, but most seem to revolve around the bird’s appearance, that it could be bred in captivity relatively easily, and that it was a particularly able singer. As for its appearance, the original birds brought to Europe were not the bright “canary” yellow we think of today.17 The original birds were a duller greenish-yellow, but by careful breeding and by crossing birds with several closely related European finches, the bright-yellow canary was quickly developed, along with an increasing number of varieties marked by their size, color, and feather patterns and qualities. In fact, already by the end of the eighteenth century, there were as many as twenty-nine recognized canary varieties, including birds known as “The Golden Flaxen Canary,” “The Golden Pink Canary,” “The White-Tailed Agate Canary,” “The JonquilBlack Variegated Canary,” and “The Crest Canary,” alongside “The Common Yellow Canary.”18 By the middle of the nineteenth century, other breeds, developed regionally, began to be known by such names as “The Belgian,” “The German,” “The Scotch Fancy,” “The Yorkshire Fancy,” and “The Manchester Coppy,” while still other birds continued to be named for distinctive colors and markings such as “The Cinnamon,” “The Lizard,” and “The Crested.”19 All these varieties grew out of the ease and pleasure of breeding captive canaries, compared to other songbirds. As the late eighteenth-century British naturalist Thomas Bewick put it, “The breeding and rearing of these charming birds form an amusement of the most pleasing kind, and afford a variety of scenes highly interesting and gratifying.”20 Breeding canaries could also be profitable. A well-cared-for female canary, living over ten years and laying up to four clutches of eggs per year, could become an important source of income, especially for those involved in cottage industries—those whose professions allowed them to stay at home and care for the birds while working. As The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds: British and Foreign noted in the late 1870s: The number of amateur breeders who adopt one or more of the many varieties of the Canary as their speciality, and make the development of its beauties their study, is very large, as the index of the catalogue of any public exhibition can attest; but the number produced in this way is but small compared with the continuous stream poured into the London market by those who make a business of it. The city of Norwich, with the surrounding villages and hamlets, counts its breeders by the thousand; while in Coventry, Derby, Northampton, Nottingham, and other towns in the midland district where labour is of a sedentary character, as well as in many towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire, the Canary is the poor man’s savings-bank; the family pig where sanitary laws forbid the

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FIGURE 4.5: Dalziel Brothers. Canary—Carduélis canária. The Illustrated Natural History: Birds by John George Wood. (London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge) 1864. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

erection of a stye. In almost every house where the click of the shuttle is heard, the music of the sewing-machine or other adjunct to home industry, there, above all other sounds, rises the cheerful but noisy music of the bird-room, for small though the cottage be, the birds must have their share of it.21 Rearing canaries was a household industry particularly suited to the nineteenthcentury city. As the New York Times reported in 1869, for example, Certain workingmen in our cities, whose trade is noiseless, and whose time is for the most part spent in their workshops, make handsome additions to their scanty income by attention to the hatching and training of cage-birds. In this City there are many barbers and tailors, of the men, and sowing girls, map painters, photograph colorers, and others among the women-workers, who keep birds, not only for the sweet companionship of their presence and song, but for the money made by selling their several broods of young ones, which oftentimes are two, sometimes three, and occasionally four in the course of a year. For all these canaries, whether imported or home-bred, a ready market is found; and the profit upon the outlay is so great that it might be worth the while of those persons who are so earnestly laboring in the good work of finding proper employment for women, to inquire whether the raising of cage-bred birds is not worthy of their serious attention.22

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If the “beauty of its plumage,” the “readiness with which it breeds in confinement,” and its suitability to the labor and living conditions of the nineteenth century were key aspects in the canary’s success as a pet, its “chief recommendation,” as Johannes Bechstein put it in his Cage and Chamber-Birds of 1795, consisted “beyond doubt, in their loud, lively, and various song, which is continued throughout the year, in some cases, even in the molting seasons.”23 Indeed, the song of the canary seems to have been the most important aspect of the bird’s popularity. Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, likely the most influential naturalist of the eighteenth century, for example, begins his account of the bird in his monumental Natural History by comparing the canary to the great native songbird of Europe, the nightingale.24 His entry begins: If the nightingale be the songster of the grove, the Canary Finch is the musician of the chamber. The melody of the former is derived from Nature alone, that of the latter is directed and improved by our instructions. With a weaker voice, with less extent of modulation, with less variety of notes, the Canary Finch has a finer ear, greater facility of imitation, and a more retentive memory; and, as the characters of animals depend principally on the quality of their perceptions, this delicate bird, alive to every impression, becomes also more social, more gentle; forms acquaintance, and even shews attachment. Its caresses are amiable, its little pets are innocent, and its anger neither hurts nor offends. Its habits, too, approach nearer to our own; it feeds on grain, like the other domestic birds; it is more easily bred than the nightingale, which lives only on flesh and insects, and which requires its meals to be purposely prepared. Its education is attended also with greater success; it readily lays aside the melody of its native airs to adopt the harmony of our voices and instruments; it eagerly follows notes, and improves and heightens their delicacy.25 In short, the canary, for Buffon, was a particularly civilized little creature, with almost humanlike manners . It appeared to enjoy the company of people, it was social and gentle, it was vegetarian and showed no interest in “flesh and insects,” and it was educable. Although its voice was not as strong and complex as that of the nightingale, its ability to learn new songs and mimic sounds made it possible for the apparently happy bird to be improved by instruction— a virtue at the heart of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought. In contrast to the canary, a bird of the city and culture, Buffon continues, the nightingale, proud of its independent warble, seems desirous to preserve its purity; at least he slights our music, and can hardly be brought to learn a few songs. The Canary Finch prattles and whistles; but the

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FIGURE 4.6: Jessie Tarbox Beals, “A little tame canary who always went to sleep in his acorn basket.” Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute.

nightingale despises what he deems the perversion of his talents, and perpetually recurs to the rich beauties of Nature. His ever-varied song can never be altered by man; that of the Canary Finch is more pliant, and can be modelled by our taste. The one, therefore, contributes more than the other to the comforts of society; the Canary Finch sings at all times, recreates our spirits in the gloomiest weather, and even adds to our happiness; it amuses all young people, and is the delight of the recluse; it relieves the languors of the cloister, and infuses cheerfulness into innocent and captive minds.26 Buffon’s contrast between the nightingale and the canary was probably inevitable. First of all, the song of the nightingale was seen by essentially everyone as the most remarkable of the native European birds, and the song of the canary, an imported bird, would naturally be compared to the song Buffon’s readers already knew and appreciated. But there is more to this comparison. For centuries, the elaborate and long song of the nightingale had been associated both with woodlands and with the sentiment of melancholia. Milton, for

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example, turned to the nightingale in his 1645 “Il Penseroso,” a poem largely about the beauty of melancholy: And the mute Silence hist along, ’Less Philomel will daign a song, In her sweetest, saddest plight, Smoothing the rugged brow of Night, While Cynthia checks her dragon yoke Gently o’re the accustomed oak. Sweet Bird, that shunn’st the noise of folly, Most musical, most melancholy! Thee, Chauntress, oft the woods among, I woo, to hear thy even-song; 27 Associated with the coming of night, the moon (Cynthia), and the quiet following the din of day, the nightingale (Philomel), with its poignant and almost enchanted call, a call deep from the forest and a nature that stood apart from and seemingly opposed to the processes of civilization—a feeling carried forward almost two hundred years in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” of 1819—was, in a sense, the opposite of the canary. Where one bird was brightly colored, the other was an unremarkable brown; where one ate grain, the other ate insects; where one bred easily and could be crossed with other birds to create a range of varieties and interesting “mules,” the other could rarely be induced to breed; where one could be taught new songs (even that of a nightingale), the other refused to change its tune; where one seemed, to most observers, happy in its cage, the other had to be slowly accustomed to captivity or else it would dash itself against its cage and die;28 and where one seemed sensitive, friendly, and even sweet with children, the other would not be tamed. Bred and sold all over Europe and America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the canary almost seems to embody ideas of progress, prosperity, and happiness. A singing part of the changing labor practices of the nineteenth century, where regions increasingly specialized in particular industries and products, and large-scale transportation systems moved finished products to buyers around the globe, canaries were bred in towns and cities specializing in distributed, small-scale production centered in homes and small shops. These towns, cities, and whole countries became known for the particular qualities of their birds. Indeed, the motto recorded in a New York Times article from 1875, “Norwich for color, Belgian for shape, and German for song,” indicates the development of the world trade in the bird.29 Unlike most other domestic animals in the period, however, canaries (with the exception of

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those kept in mines to signal problems with the air) were bred, shipped, and sold almost exclusively as objects of entertainment, suitable for almost any home. Simply, the canary was bred and sold for pleasure, particularly the pleasure of its song. It did not guard the house; it did not provide food or labor; it did not catch mice and other vermin; and while it was clearly seen as a way of introducing children to the wonders of nature, it was not kept because it was educational or particularly interesting scientifically. More than anything, the bird seems to have been kept because it was seen as an embodiment of happy and sweet times. Mary Elizabeth Van Lennep recorded in her diary a perfect visit with a friend in New Haven in November 1841, writing, for example: “Every thing is lovely; music and fragrant flowers, and in an adjoining portico, a sweet canary is pouring forth its melodies.”30 The “melodies” of the canary were always of particular concern for buyers, and almost all the great canary manuals included instructions about how to induce the birds to sing particularly beautiful or spectacular songs. The authorities on this matter appeared to be the German breeders, especially those employed by the large canary trading firms of Reiche and Ruhe in Alfeld in Lower Saxony. Evidently, their key to developing especially strong singers was their careful selection of other singing birds as tutors for the young canaries. The method was fairly straightforward: Young birds would be kept in darkened and quiet cages, and then several times a day an adult bird with a particularly outstanding song would be placed in close proximity. Among other things, breeders needed to make certain that the young birds would not hear anything other than the tutor. As Bechstein concluded in his account, “The first and chief thing is, that the young bird should hear none but a good song, and so not be tempted to intermix the notes of other birds with his own. Care must be taken to attain this object, not only at first, but at the first and second moulting season, as the bird is then obliged to relearn his song, and might introduce into it some foreign admixture.”31 As in many other examples of animal breeding in the nineteenth century— most obviously dogs, cattle, and horses—canary aficionados carefully defined standards for the appearance of the assorted recognized varieties, but as much as the look of the canary was important, the most prized birds were always those with the most beautiful or extraordinary songs.32 The song appears to have been so important for at least two reasons: First, because it was so malleable, a good song became a mark of good breeding and rearing; and second, and much more importantly, an apparently happy song became a mark of comfort with captivity. Quite simply, whereas nightingales and other wild birds appeared to suffer and wane in cages, slowly losing their songs, a singing canary always seemed cheerful and content. The simple nineteenth-century answer to the question “Why does the caged bird sing?” was little more than because it was lighthearted. To be sure, not everyone was convinced that a singing bird was necessarily a happy

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bird. In her diary in June 1854, for example, Charlotte Forten Grimké could not help but favorably compare the wild notes of the robin with those of the caged canary. She writes, “Another delightful morning; the sky is cloudless, the sun is shining brightly; and, as I sit by the window, studying, a robin redbreast perched on the large apple tree in the garden, warbles his morning salutation in my ear;—music far sweeter to me than the clearer tones of the Canary birds in their cages, for they are captives, while he is free! I would not keep even a bird in bondage.”33 Easy to breed and listen to, but also as wanting in utility as it was affordable to the burgeoning middle class, the little yellow canary was the perfect pet of the urbanizing nineteenth century. But as lacking in contradictions as the bird may have often seemed, as it sang so pleasantly, it nevertheless signals, as is clear in Grimké’s observations, the same issues of culture, contentedness, and captivity that lay behind the history of zoological gardens in the period. Canaries in cages, like bears in pits, were more than just animals—they were part of a contentious and still-unresolved debate about the nature of the human relationship to animals. Indeed, as much as our interactions with, and ideas about, animals today are different in many ways from a century ago, there is also something clearly familiar about them; that familiarity comes from the fact that we are still grappling with many of the same questions. Today, perhaps, we talk less about singing and more about successful breeding as a sign of animals “flourishing,” but we are still talking about happiness. In 1909, William Hornaday, the director of the Bronx Zoo, noted in the New York Zoological Society’s Annual Report that the society had concluded at the very beginning of its planning that “the Zoological Park should be designed and created on lines of the most far-reaching humanity toward wild creatures that the skill of man could devise.” To that end, he argued, “no expense has been spared, to render the wild-animal population not only comfortable but happy from day to day.” Far from “pining behind their prison bars,” Hornaday insisted, in language echoed ever since by zoo directors around the world, that “the vast majority of [the animals at the zoo] are happier, and better fed and watered, than they would be by their own efforts in a state of nature wherein life is one continuous struggle against hunger and sudden death.”34 Pointing to a generalized notion of a struggle for survival, Hornaday proclaimed the zoo as a last and best refuge for wild animals. In so doing, he underscored a narrative of the civilizing and recuperative effects of urban bourgeois ambitions for the world—through the educated and philanthropic activities of the best members of urban society, the rest of the world’s people and all the world’s animals could find shelter in benevolent care. At the same time, in pointing to the zoo as a place where animals could be both safe and happy, Hornaday attempted to answer a question that had increasingly vexed the proponents of zoos since the very beginning of the public zoological garden movement.

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Sure, zoos in the nineteenth century were often, and perhaps even usually, seen as institutions of science and education, as they are today. With that said, though, Friedrich Knauer’s typical claim in his early twentieth-century account of the history of zoological collections that modern zoos are distinctively compelled by the demands of science and education seems rather overblown. He writes, “The times in which one saw little more in zoological gardens than a menagerie of larger proportions, satisfying only the curiosity of the visitors, are in fact over for a large portion of the population. Today, no one who wants to be taken seriously will doubt the educational and scientific roles of a zoological garden.”35 In fact, throughout most of the nineteenth century and all the way up to today, public zoos have struggled with a problematic mission of entertaining the public with caged animals. The Hagenbeck solution of freeing animals from their cages was an effort to answer the same desires behind the explosion of keeping canaries as pets; in both cases, the public wanted to see the animal as happy or content and thus as an acceptable object of entertainment. To be sure, just as some have never been satisfied that a singing canary was truly happy, some continue to criticize zoos as, in fact, institutions ceaselessly pandering to unacceptable human pleasures. In both cases, the critique even to this day turns largely on a debate about animal happiness that traces back to the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER FIVE

From Birds of Paradise to Drosophila The Changing Roles of Scientific Specimens to 1920 narisara murray

In nineteenth-century Britain, the term scientific specimen might evoke a number of images: iridescent beetles gleaming under glass; velvety bird skins nestled in a naturalist’s drawer; a trio of taxidermy giraffes arching their necks over the staircase of Montagu House, then the home of the British Museum (see image on front cover). Such creatures could be found not only in museums and scientific societies, but also in social settings ranging from a country parsonage to a well-to-do London merchant’s drawing room, an earl’s private collection, or a gathering of interested workers in a local pub. What were these preserved bits of animal bodies doing in these private and public spaces? What did the specimens mean to the people who collected and viewed them? How did these meanings change over time? The display of specimens—in private homes, scientific societies, and museums—held multifaceted meanings that often complemented each other in the eyes of their audiences. These settings emphasized the visual: the ability to comprehend through seeing and to educate through display. Scientifically, these displays privileged those aspects of animal forms that were easily preserved and viewed as well as the relationships between such forms. Hence, they necessarily emphasized the importance of form, pattern, taxonomy, and classification over,

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for example, behavior and physiology. For many, the investigation of scientific specimens helped to reveal patterns of creation and to open a window onto the mind of a creator, while their display echoed the divine order in nature, an order in which humans held an exalted place. In addition, these collections of specimens represented, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, aspects of civilized people’s ascendancy over wild nature and the political globe. This ascendancy was expressed both in the intellectual power to perceive, order, name, describe, and classify, and in the political and economic power to travel, hunt, buy, colonize, and bring back the riches of the world. Thus, the investigation and display of scientific specimens in the nineteenth century reflected a set of pursuits that had religious, social, political, and moral dimensions, as well as scientific ones. By the early twentieth century, the study of living animals had been transformed from the related fields of natural history, comparative anatomy, physiology, and embryology, which were grounded in observation, collection, description, and comparison as well as experimentation, to a more explicitly experiment-driven biology, which included new disciplines such as genetics and ecology. Practitioners self-consciously embraced new techniques, new terminology, and new scientific settings. Scientific specimen was beginning to refer to something quite different from before. Animals were used in experiments in university- or government-supported laboratories; they might be kept alive during part or all of the research; and they were sometimes bred specifically for qualities that their wild counterparts did not possess. Religious connotations were replaced by secular and sometimes aggressively atheistic ones. Some of the cultural connotations of scientific specimens as expressions of human ascendancy over nature and the globe had changed. A similar pattern of dominance (and with it a concomitant resistance) was played out not on an imperial map of the world but on the inner map of the animal body, its innermost workings and invisible building blocks, even its genetic makeup.

THE MAKING OF A NATURAL HISTORY SPECIMEN: FROM FIELD TO CABINET A student of animal life in the early nineteenth century would turn first to natural history, a discipline that encompassed not only the study of animal and plant life but also the earth’s physical characteristics and processes. Natural history was an enormously popular pursuit, possessing many virtues that resonated with the values of the period. It was a productive use of leisure time that could simultaneously provide instruction about the natural world and celebrate the beauty and diversity of God’s creation. For countless practitioners, the goals of natural history went hand in hand with those of natural theology, which sought to understand God through the understanding of his works in nature.

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With regard to animal life, naturalists sought to name and describe all the productions of nature and to understand the patterns and relationships that wove them together. For naturalists, the working out of life’s patterns and relationships was both a fascinating and a seemingly endless process—a collaborative project whose completion could take centuries. Men and women, adults and children, specialists and amateurs, the agnostic as well as the devout, could all be found in fields and seashores with net or gun in hand, seeking to collect beetles, butterflies, birds, and shells for study.1 Natural history’s popularity damaged neither its scientific nor its social prestige. In the eighteenth century, collections of natural history specimens had been the province of aristocrats; only the wealthy could afford them. In the nineteenth century, a small collection was in the financial reach of many but still conferred a certain kind of respectability. Indeed, one strategy of an upwardly striving parvenu was to buy at auction a collection that had been built up over time and claim it as his own.2 These artifacts were treasured variously for the information they contained about the natural world, for the cultural values they indicated, for their rarity and monetary value, for their beauty or strangeness of form, and for the emotions of excitement, pleasure, reverence, curiosity, and wonder that they evoked. The making of a single specimen could involve many hands and many minds, from the time an animal was captured and killed in its native habitat to its use and display as a scientific artifact. A significant number of specimens in Britain were collected initially by a range of indigenous people around the world who had little or no training in the practices of European natural history. Many such hunters and collectors simply placed their goods for sale in local markets. After an animal’s death and preservation, the resulting specimen might be traded and circulated, changing hands a number of times. It could be carried on the back of a donkey, or by oxcart, dugout canoe, mail steamer, or railway car, passing through a number of markets around the world and perhaps finding its way to the major emporia of European capitals, until it reached a relatively final destination in some private collection or museum. There it might be studied, seen, and admired by various investigators and audiences, perhaps even copied in published illustrations, or sold and traded again. Britain’s vast colonial network was crucial to the influx of exotic specimens reaching London, and the trade in animal specimens involved individuals of all classes. British naturalists and collectors working abroad relied on colonial contacts to facilitate their activities.3 Colonial dignitaries and civil servants— who might be avid naturalists or big-game hunters—sent specimens back to societies and museums (and to their personal collections), often gratis, for the honor of nation and science. Ships’ surgeons and naturalists took advantage of their voyages to conduct research and collect specimens from around the world. The British navy probed into every corner of the world, and sailors returning

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FIGURE 5.1: Vignette Title-page. Exotic moths. By James Duncan. (Series: The Naturalist’s Library. Vol. 37, Entomology.) 1843. Etchings hand-colored. General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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from overseas often sold their exotic pets and preserved oddities, some of which they had purchased in order to turn a profit on reaching England’s shores. The practices of Victorian specimen collection were thoroughly intertwined with the commercial, military, and administrative realities of the British Empire.4 Taxidermy was the crucial technology that allowed naturalists to reference and study nature in urban capitals. Zoological natural history specimens (as distinct from mineral or plant specimens) were the preserved remains of living animals. The state in which an animal could most easily be preserved affected the way in which it was studied. Insects were ideal: easy to capture, preserve, store, and display. By pinning them to boards and storing them by dozens in boxes or drawers, a naturalist could easily collect hundreds or thousands for comparison. Mollusks were also easily studied and classified by their hard outer bodies. Shells were eminently collectable; in addition to their beauty and variety, qualities that fired the passions of collectors quite apart from their scientific interest, they were also small, light, and dry, and thus easy to transport and display. The soft, inner bodies of mollusks were sadly neglected by British naturalists. In order to be preserved, these required jars of alcohol, which could break or leak, and were quite expensive until the excise tax on glass was repealed in 1845. Birds were commonly represented by their skins and plumage, as their musculature and organs were often discarded in the field. The upper-class sporting practice of bird hunting shaped and helped to validate the bird-collecting practices of naturalists—whose excessive beetle hunting, however, was a standard object of ridicule. Large quadrupeds, including mammals and reptiles, could be preserved as dry specimens such as skins, skulls, and articulated skeletons or, more rarely, wet specimens such as internal organs or even entire bodies preserved in alcohol. Such beasts, however, were often more dangerous to capture and cumbersome to preserve, transport, and display than shells, birds, and insects. As one naturalist’s textbook tersely advised would-be collectors, “Reptiles and Serpents are best procured by the natives.”5 Collecting animals in the field—hunting and preserving them—was a passion in its own right, and an activity that required significant funds to support. For naturalists who were not independently wealthy, collecting trips abroad often meant putting themselves at financial risk as they sought to sell enough specimens to support their expenses. William Swainson, who had collected extensively in the Mediterranean and South America, warned aspiring naturalists against “indulging any hope, that the sale [of specimens] will at all remunerate him for the trouble, anxiety and expense of their acquisition. . . . let no one think . . . of collecting for profit, or it is ten to one he finds himself a heavy loser.”6 Armed with field notebooks, guns, shot, nets, pins, dissecting knives, jars of alcohol, arsenical soap, and collecting trays and boxes, scientific collectors required “strength and activity of body, a quick and discriminating eye, capable of perceiving at once minute distinctions; with a courageous,

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FIGURE 5.2: A naturalist being mobbed by Pteroglossus beauharnaesii, curl-

crested aracaris. The Natural History Museum, London.

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persevering, and inquiring spirit.”7 At the same time, the pursuit of specimens in wildernesses abroad often meant putting oneself at personal risk, as naturalist collectors endured rough travel, banditry, disease, and all the accidents that could befall a hunter. Obtained under such circumstances, the captured specimens could be the objects of much emotion. “Rejoice with me, for I have found what I sought,” Alfred Russel Wallace wrote in triumph from the remote island of Aru to his natural history agent in London, “I have got the birds of Paradise.” After having devoted a total of more than two years to the search for birds of paradise in the pirate-ridden islands of Southeast Asia, he had found the birds in their native habitat. He observed their mating displays, “discovered their true attitude when displaying their plumes,” and created beautiful specimens.8

FIGURE 5.3: T. W. Wood. The Red Bird of Paradise. 1869. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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“All the native specimens I have seen are miserable, and cannot be properly mounted,” he reported, whereas “mine are magnificent.” More prosaically, he added, “I believe I am the only Englishman who has ever shot and skinned (and ate) birds of Paradise, and the first Englishman who has done so alive, and at his own risk and expense; and I deserve to reap the reward, if any reward is ever to be reaped by the exploring collector.”9 His reward included both the profit he hoped to realize by their sale and the scientific achievement of finding, capturing, and collecting data on this rare species. Without any independent income of his own, Wallace had financed the first fourteen years of his scientific career by the sale of his specimens, a business that was fraught with financial pitfalls. During this period of extensive collecting overseas, he also managed to produce some very interesting observations and theories, including the paper that famously preempted Darwin’s theory of evolution and precipitated the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859. However, most of Wallace’s time in the field was spent collecting specimens for money. He did, in fact, sell his Aru collection of birds of paradise for one thousand pounds, an important windfall at a time when he was short of funds. But birds of paradise were not all about money. They represented Wallace’s ability, unique among European naturalists of the time, to find and study them in the field. They also represented valuable scientific information that he hoped to use to advance his research and his career when he reached London again. The specimens were a much-needed source of food, money, beauty, and the pride and excitement of discovery, ownership, and priority.10 In the field, research and experience were captured in two forms: the collection of physical animal bodies and the compilation of written notes and data. A specimen gained greater scientific value from any information that might accompany it, for example, on its provenance, place of capture, method of preservation, and any field notes on its behavior, individual peculiarities, or geographic range. Information on behavior, geographic distribution, physiology, coloration, and other ephemera was captured in field notebooks, while information on form was captured in the preserved remains of the animal itself. Both physical and written data would be plumbed upon return to the scientific society of Britain, especially London. Darwin’s finches were, in fact, misclassified until John Gould’s description of them in London; it was after returning to England that Darwin was able to consider their significance more thoroughly.11 A naturalist who collected his own specimens could tie them to his detailed observations in the field, whereas those who relied on purchased specimens could rely only on notes that may or may not have been taken by the collector. A specimen, although made from an animal and intended to represent similar animals in nature, was nonetheless an artifact—a “work of art,” or artifice, despite being “based upon a natural substratum,” as one late nineteenth-century observer noted.12 The making of a specimen was a practice shaped by human

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convention and subject to human fallibility. Although naturalists attempted to standardize collecting practices through guides and instructions, varying methods of capture and preservation yielded artificial characteristics that could lead researchers astray. Birds from Bogota, for example, could be recognized not by any natural biogeographic variation but because local preservation methods resulted in “the wings and tail being squeezed up into the body and the whole skin pressed together in a manner which gives them a very different appearance from birds brought from any other country,” naturalist Philip Lutley Sclater observed.13 The value of a specimen to science rested not only in the quality of its preservation but also on the investigator’s ability to interpret the specimen. Wallace’s specimens were so beautifully preserved that when he sent his skins of the great bird of paradise (P. apoda) from the Malay islands to England, the ornithologist George Robert Gray proposed that they be given the variation name Wallaciana and considered them “if not a distinct species, at least a well-marked local variety.”14 Wallace declined the honor, replying that “I cannot consider the Paradisea apoda of Aru a new variety.”15 The difference between his skins and the skins preserved by local islanders—which were the only ones previously available—came not from any natural variation but from Wallace’s “care in covering up the plumes during the period of drying, which preserves their colour, while the natives bleach them by weeks of sunshine.” The “pale colour of the head also is from my specimens not being shrunk and smoked, as all the native ones are,” he explained.16 It required a fine knowledge not only of the natural world but sometimes of local cultural practices to separate those aspects of nature that were accurately represented in a specimen from those that were not. Just as individual specimens could misrepresent the natural world, so, too, could the productions of the specimen market. Wallace complained to his natural history agent Stevens that London collectors critiqued his beetles “almost as if I had made the insects as well as collected them” [original italics].17 The demand for brilliantly colored, showy specimens had nothing to do with accurate biogeographic representation and everything to do with the economics and aesthetics of display. Collectors wanted beautiful specimens, and natural history agents wanted specimens that would sell. Wallace protested the lack of interest in those species—often dully colored and insignificant-looking—that made up the bulk of the natural world. The demand for showy items led to “very erroneous views” about tropical heat producing brilliant colors, he said, mocking “that idea of tropical luxuriance which one obtains by looking over the drawers of a well-filled cabinet.”18 By the nineteenth century, a well-developed specimen industry had sprung up to supply the collections of Europe, which had been mushrooming in terms of both the number of collections and the size of individual collections. The

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natural history specimen industry was fueled by the growing interested public who might display a few specimens at home, as well as by serious naturalists building collections both privately and in museums. The increasing demand for specimens and the burgeoning industry had practical effects on science. Certain kinds of animals lent themselves more easily to collection, transportation, storage, and display and thus became more thoroughly studied. Entomology and ornithology (and oology, the study of eggs) were among the first disciplines to branch off from zoology, due in large part to the availability and durability of enormous quantities of specimens in scientific collections.19 French naturalists, who had the luxury of government-funded salaries and collections, used wet specimens far more frequently and as a result developed a different classification system.20 Conchology, the study of shells, arose relatively early as a specialty in Britain, but maleatology, the study of whole mollusks, including their soft bodies, developed much later in Britain than it did in France. The specimen market was shaped by the demands of individual collectors and by the practicalities of finding and transporting specimens. In turn, the market itself shaped the kinds of specimens available for research and the scientific knowledge that emerged out of that research. The specimen market also directly affected the types of people who were able to make a contribution to science. Trades such as collecting and taxidermy became routes to a scientific career for individuals who would never have been able to afford such a luxury in the previous century. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, there were few professional positions in science, and the distinction between amateur and professional, which was to become so marked later in the century, had a different connotation. The term professional did not necessarily imply higher standards and greater seriousness of purpose; rather, it could imply a step down from the status of an independent gentlemen who could pursue his interests for their own virtues and without being influenced by a desire for profit.21 Those naturalists whom David Allen has called “proto-professionals” were distinguished by the magnitude of their efforts, by their participation in scientific society, by the standards of their work, and by their publications, not by whether they were compensated.22 They worked in their homes, in the field, or in scientific societies, medical colleges, and museums, but their work was self-directed and not funded directly by any one institution, except in rare cases. Both dilettante and serious naturalists not only had to provide (or secure) the time, space, and money to carry out their work, but they participated in shared activities of natural history, used similar tools and methods to capture and preserve specimens, and purchased specimens in the same market. Specimens played a critical role in the scientific and financial lives of struggling naturalists.23 Naturalists Edward Blyth and William Swainson both attempted to parlay their specimen collecting and trading into financially stable

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careers in natural history, but neither of them possessed the entrepreneurial acumen necessary to succeed. Their lives illustrate some of the risks involved in pursuing science without an independent income: Swainson gave up his natural history career and moved to New Zealand to start a new life, while Blyth’s career ended in social and financial disgrace. Ornithologist John Gould illustrates the opposite case: He started his career in taxidermy, but made his fortune and his reputation by publishing lavish and expensive books of illustrations based on his collections of birds. In contrast, Wallace, aided by his natural history agent in London, was able to fund his work through his specimen sales, but he was never entirely financially secure. An unexpected side benefit may have been that Wallace’s unusually extensive specimen collecting—forced on him by his financial needs—sensitized him to the subtleties of variation and their relation to habitat.24 Despite their varied successes, all of these naturalists traded on the value of specimens in different cultural arenas. If moneyed amateurs had not created a market for specimens, these naturalists would not have been able to rely on the specimens they produced to finance their careers, while they, at the same time, pursued their research through their collecting activities. The careers of entrepreneurial naturalists and the production of scientific knowledge were intricately linked in multiple feedback loops with the specimen market, research and fieldwork, the process of creating specimens, and the specimens themselves.

LONDON: SPECIMENS IN COLLECTIONS AND PLACES OF DISPLAY In 1858, the decomposing body of a young gorilla, marinating in a cask of alcohol, arrived at the British Museum. Comparative anatomist Richard Owen, then superintendent of the Natural History Division at the British Museum, gave the task of preserving it for the collection to Abraham Bartlett, the taxidermist and natural history agent (who later became the superintendent of the London Zoological Gardens).25 The gorilla had been “killed by natives in the interior of the Gaboon, and brought down to the port entire: it was at once immersed in a cask of spirits, but no antiseptic having been applied to the skin when fresh . . . decomposition had made some advance.”26 Taxidermy could be a gruesome business. The stench was so strong that the cask was hastily closed, but Bartlett took it to the middle of a large field in Norwood and worked on it with the advantage of fresh air, eventually succeeding in stuffing the animal.27 Gorilla specimens were exceedingly rare. The scientific world had discovered them only twelve years previously, when the species had been named following a missionary’s discovery of a skull and bones by the Gaboon River in Africa in 1846. A couple of skulls and a few bones had reached Owen in 1847, and a full skeleton, the first in Europe, reached the Hunterian Museum

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in 1851.28 In order to obtain a specimen with skin and musculature (relatively) intact, Owen had spent “ten years’ correspondence, appeals, and instructions,” which he “carried on with a view to obtain from the Gaboon the desired materials for acquiring a knowledge of the external characters of the Gorilla.”29 Based on his examination of this specimen, Owen argued in a paper read before the Zoological Society meeting in 1859 (and later published in their lavishly illustrated Transactions) that the gorilla was more closely allied to humans than either orangutans or chimpanzees.30 The case of Owen’s gorilla illustrates the ways in which specimens—their availability or scarcity, their condition, their popularity and price in the marketplace—could shape the development of scientific theory and the methods and practices of a specific discipline. Perhaps ornithology offers the most striking comparison to the study of primates. As a discipline, ornithology branched off fairly early from natural history, in large part because of the availability of large, stable collections of birds, which could be consulted and revisited over long periods of time. This wealth of data, distributed among a variety of privately and publicly held collections, was enough to support the emergence of a new field.31 The influx of information (in the form of animal bodies) was due in large part to the pleasure and ease with which birds could be shot, transported, viewed, and sold. The preservation of this data was significantly aided by advances in taxidermy, including the use of arsenic soap, which greatly reduced the risk of entire collections succumbing to decay or the dreaded dermestes beetles. Nineteenth-century researchers had the luxury of consulting large collections containing multiple specimens of each species, a sampling that would ideally represent both sexes and a variety of ages as well as different geographic varieties. In contrast, a single, imperfect specimen was grounds enough for a reorganization of simian classification by the country’s leading authority.32 When a species was poorly represented by urban specimens, as was the case with the gorilla in the 1850s, a single new specimen could have a profound impact on scientific knowledge. Type specimens are perhaps the extreme example of this kind of crucially important individual specimen. The type specimen was the model and standard that demonstrated the species’s salient physical characteristics and carried the species name. New species were defined by distinguishing them from the type specimens of similar species. Originally, the type specimen was the basis for the first description of a new species. Unfortunately, the descriptions tended to take place when relatively little was known about a new species. As more specimens emerged, it could occur that the type specimen did not physically represent the average morphology of the species. Type specimens could also be in poor shape because of the difficulties of preservation and transportation from the remote areas where new species were often found, “collected perhaps in the middle of Australia, and sent home mildewed, with the legs and toes absent.”33

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Over time, the concept of type specimens and their use grew more complicated. The concept of fixed types meshed seamlessly with the assumptions of natural theology but conflicted with those of evolution, although the practical value of key specimens in stable collections remained. As the collections of Europe grew, naturalists placed increasing emphasis on comprehensive series of specimens, sampling various ages of both sexes and different geographic varieties. Eventually, the term type was applied to several different specimens within the same species, to demonstrate characteristic variations as well as sex and age differences.34 The stability of a type specimen, both in its physical preservation and in its location in a particular collection, was crucial to scientific research. Just as scientists needed to be able to refer to shared books and articles, so they also needed to refer to shared type specimens that could be reliably consulted in future years and decades. In terms of research, type specimens were the most important specimens in any museum or private collection. They were fixed points of reference that could be consulted to resolve scientific disputes, and they served as the “ultimate arbitrator of classification.”35 A type specimen would lend cachet and importance to any private collection, and museums prided themselves on the number of type specimens they possessed. The bulk of animal specimens were not type specimens or rare new finds, however, but instead duplicates of species already available in large numbers in urban collections. These more ordinary specimens gained much of their significance from the collections in which they were displayed, for it was in collections that specimens were put into context with other specimens. In a comprehensive collection, specimens served to illustrate differences and similarities in form between and within species, genera, and other taxonomic categories, and thus to help reveal the patterns and relationships that linked and bound all living creatures. For example, any given specimen could be used to illustrate a number of (often mutually exclusive) theories, for example, Quinarianism, which classified species in linked groups of five, Lamarckian transmutation, Owen’s archetypes, or Darwinian evolution. In a cabinet or collection, specimens became metonymic bits of nature arranged to illustrate and facilitate certain kinds of research and interpretation. Although there were significant differences in the number, type, and display of specimens one would find in private homes and in the transient collections of dealers as compared to collections in scientific societies and museums, these differences were not absolute but ranged along a finely graduated spectrum. Because of their decorative qualities, shells, insects (especially beetles and butterflies), birds, and eggs were the kinds of specimens most commonly on display in private homes, though serious naturalists also amassed enormous collections of these specimens. In drawing-room collections, bird skins would more often be mounted and stuffed, and displayed under glass as an aesthetically pleasing

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representation of nature, while in scientific collections, the unmounted bird skins would be simply rolled into cylinders.36 For the purposes of study and comparison, the rolled skins were far preferable, because they avoided additional errors that could be introduced by stuffing and could be stored by the hundreds in relatively small cabinets. Large, wet, or unattractive specimens were left to dedicated investigators, and even these could be too cumbersome or expensive for all but the most comprehensive collections. Such specimens included jars of alcohol, in which floated the soft bodies of mollusks, the internal organs of vertebrates, and sometimes whole vertebrates, while large mammals and reptiles were often represented by their skins or skeletons. The exception to this were hunting trophies, which were often displayed in homes as skins or mounted heads. Trophies did not necessarily contain much scientific interest, although a rare or novel one might be brought to the meeting of a scientific society for examination and discussion. Individual specimens could move easily—whether traded, lent, or sold—between the various spaces of private homes, auction houses, scientific societies, and museums. Private homes remained acceptable places for scientific investigation for much of the century. Darwin’s Down House, Owen’s quarters on the premises of the Hunterian museum, and Wallace’s private cabinet are only a few of the variety of private spaces dedicated to natural history and zoology. Many important books and articles relied heavily on research conducted with privately held specimens, and monographs might be based entirely on one or two private collections. Building one’s own personal collection of specimens was, as Hugh Strickland advised aspiring ornithologist Philip Lutley Sclater, “the only method of obtaining a correct knowledge” of the animals under study.37 For those who wanted a significant career in natural history, the highest standard of research required extensive firsthand examination, description, and comparison of preserved specimens. Naturalists could do this by studying important private collections, if they could gain sufficient access to them, or comparing museum collections, if they had the means—although, as one naturalist complained, “to ransack the museums of England and the Continent is a work of no trifling expenditure.”38 Building one’s own collection was an expensive and time-consuming matter. Naturalists who were not prepared to venture into the field to collect their own might purchase specimens of varying quality from natural history dealers or might trade specimens with other collectors or develop relationships with naturalists and collectors working in the field, collaborating with them to fulfill special requests. Natural history auction houses were another locus for scientific work as well as informal exchange of information between colleagues. Although their purpose was commercial rather than civic or educational, auction houses could serve as informal museums—ones whose collections were continuously changing. Buyers in the natural history community congregated at auctions, especially in the

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FIGURE 5.4: George Albert Boulenger (1858–1937) with spirit jars, 1920s. The Natural History Museum, London.

“naturalists’ quarter” of auction houses around Great Russell Street. In 1828, for example, the sale of Joshua Brookes’s collection brought together a number of notable naturalists eager to plunder the remains.39 Many of Brookes’s specimens came from the Exeter ‘Change menagerie, owned by his brother.40 Some natural history agents and dealers might employ unscrupulous practices, misrepresenting or altering specimens in order to increase profits, but others, like Wallace’s agent, Samuel Stevens, were themselves avid collectors and naturalists and aided others in establishing scientific careers in natural history.41 Scientific societies might keep a collection of relevant specimens, just as they would keep a respectable library for the use of their fellows. In addition, members might bring in remarkable specimens for description or discussion in the scientific meetings. At the more prestigious and well-funded societies, such discussions or papers would make their way into the scientific record through the publication of a journal. Naturalists living in London could choose between the august but sometimes moribund Linnean, the feisty Zoological Society, or the more specialized societies such as the Entomological Society and the British Ornithologists’ Union, in addition to numerous smaller societies that catered to particular districts of the city such as the societies of South London, North London, and the City of London.42 Devotees of natural history living outside of London might find an outlet in a local field club or naturalists’ society, which could range in activity from social field excursions to scientific meetings that resulted in a published journal.

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In contrast to the informality of the auction houses and the clublike atmosphere of the scientific societies, natural history museums were prestigious public places where naturalists and anatomists came to do research, where students came to be educated, and where audiences came to enjoy the refined pleasures of “rational amusement.” Specimens gained significance from the physical space in which they were displayed and from their audiences’ interpretations of those spaces.43 In the nineteenth century, museums “certainly had few of the pejorative qualities associated with it today by some as mere mausoleums of things ‘dead,’ ‘past,’ and best ‘forgotten,’” but were instead “about modern objects, the latest instruments, the newest methods of manufacture.”44 Within this framework, scientific specimens were “manageable pieces of the natural world” that could be arranged (and rearranged) not only to represent the natural world but also to map the political globe, to illustrate scientific theories, to represent a divine order, and to present objects of entertainment and mesmerizing aesthetic power.45 Victorian audiences perceived the arrangement and presentation of specimens in museums as revealing truths about the natural world and a religious order in nature as well as the political globe and Britain’s place in it. The controversies surrounding the Museum of Natural History in London in the second half of the nineteenth century encapsulated many of the tensions

FIGURE 5.5: The British Museum’s Zoological Gallery. The Natural History Museum,

London.

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and shifts that occurred in the way that scientific investigators and public audiences interacted with natural history, as displayed through scientific specimens. The decision to move the Department of Natural History out of the British Museum in Bloomsbury was a practical decision forced by the enormous collection of specimens, which swelled yearly with new contributions sent from imperial territories around the world. At the same time, many Victorians conceived of the move as a separation of those objects made by humans from those made by God. The creation of the new museum thus carried a great deal of symbolic weight regarding science, religion, nation, and empire. Debates over the museum’s purpose revealed conflicting interpretations of scientific specimens, their proper uses, and the truths they represented. Should all the specimens be made available to the public or only a few, leaving the rest accessible solely to scientific researchers? How should their display reflect the extent and power of the British Empire? Should the specimens represent a secular, evolutionary view or a religious order in nature? Public rhetoric affirmed that a national museum of natural history should represent not only the variety of the kingdom of nature and but also the extent of Britain’s empire. In proposing to house the nation’s natural history collection in its own museum, Richard Owen argued that empire and science were intimately intertwined: Our colonies include parts of the earth where the forms of plants and animals are the most strange. No empire in the world had ever so wide a range for the collection of the various forms of animal life as Great Britain. . . . Naturalists consequently visit England anticipating to find in her capital and in her National Museum the richest and most varied materials for their comparison and deductions. And they ought to be in a state pre-eminently conducive to the advancement of a philosophical zoology, and on a scale commensurate with the greatness of the nation.46 To achieve those goals, Owen wanted an “index museum” showing characteristic specimens, including type specimens, in addition to galleries that would display as many specimens as possible for the fullest scientific value. For example, he wanted to display a specimen of every whale species and every elephant species—a project that required enormous space and expenditure. In his view, only a national museum could afford to offer that research opportunity; smaller kinds of specimens were already on display at other museums.47 His vision, if completed, would have been the apotheosis of Victorian museum building. Owen’s justifications for the enormous space and expense of his museum assumed a high level of interest and a real thirst for scientific knowledge on the part of the average museum-goer. Owen portrayed his concept of the museum as beneficial for the “local collector of birds, bird eggs, shells, insects, fossils, &c.—the

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intelligent wageman, tradesman or professional man, whose tastes may lead him to devote his modicum of leisure to the pursuit of a particular branch of Natural History.” Such visitors, Owen argued, would want to see displayed a “series of exhibited specimens so complete, and so displayed, as to enable him to identify his own specimen with one there ticketed with its proper name and locality.” These desires were not rare, argued Owen, but part of the “general expectation of the British public; and I believe it to be a reasonable one, and based on a well grounded view of one of the uses of their National Collections.” Owen claimed he was basing his belief about the avid interest of the British on his “thirty years’ experience of the requirements of visitors to a public Museum.”48 Few other career naturalists or museum professionals agreed with Owen’s views, either about the display of specimens or the learned interests of the general public. In his address as president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in 1864, John Edward Gray, keeper of zoology at the British Museum, argued strongly for the separation of public education and entertainment from scientific research. Four years later, at the BAAS meeting of 1869, Huxley tackled Owen’s “principle of exhibiting all specimens, of allowing everything to be seen by the public,” a practice that would “involve an enormous unnecessary outlay, [and] make the collections wearisome, and of very little use to the public, and would at the same time, interfere with their usefulness to the working men of science.”49 Huxley’s vision of an ideal natural history museum separated the public and researchers by a wall of glass. The public would enter a long gallery lined with type specimens enclosed behind glass, while researchers could enter the glassed-off section and examine the specimens directly.50 “All of us,” reiterated Huxley, “who are conversant with the organization of museums” were aligned in opposition to Owen’s plan.51 The London Times concurred, complaining that Owen “proceeds to overwhelm us with an army of the bulkiest of these monsters, which leaves us no option between yielding at once and being trampled to death” by the specimens of every known species of whale, elephant, and rhinoceros.52 The relationship between natural history and natural theology, relatively seamless in the early part of the nineteenth century, had become famously fraught with controversy after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Owen’s own alternative evolutionary model—involving a vertebrate archetype and theistic evolution proceeding by natural laws—left a place for a creator, albeit not entirely the one of traditional biblical interpretation.53 Owen’s Museum of Natural History separated specimens of living species from extinct ones, placing them on opposite sides of the building and thus contradicting two decades of work on Darwinian evolutionary theory. This theoretical and religious stance was even built into the physical structure of the museum. Sculptural ornaments on both the interior and exterior depicted extinct animals on the east and living species on the west (and in the index

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museum), with Adam elevated above the animals and looking upward into the heavens. The building was itself a cathedral to science, with its medieval, round-arched style characteristic of a Romanesque church.54 The religious echoes suited many members of the public, but not the new breed of young scientific professionals, the first generation raised on Darwin’s theories of evolution and Huxley’s agnosticism. The leading scientific journal Nature disapproved of the religious overtones: “Greatly as we admire the spacious hall, the grand staircase, the long colonnades, and the picturesque colouring of the whole building, we cannot but feel that the adoption of such a semi-ecclesiastical style was a mistake.”55 Owen had succeeded in building a museum suited for the first half of the century—the project had been proposed in the 1850s but was not completed until 1881, by which time it was drastically out of step with developments in professional science.

EXPERIMENTATION AND LABORATORY ANIMALS The forty years that centered around the turn of the twentieth century saw changes in the landscape of science—within and among the associated fields that dealt with the study of animals, such as natural history, zoology, and biology— and also changes in the relationship between science and its publics. All of these affected the way that scientific specimens were perceived and used. Outside of the professional laboratories, amateur naturalists and lovers of nature felt increasingly excluded from biology, a science that required specialized training and vocabulary. Twentieth-century biologists, unlike nineteenth-century naturalists, wrote predominantly to communicate with each other rather than with a wider audience of amateurs and the interested public. From the 1860s on, British investigators of animal life, led by the energetic Huxley with his emphasis on the professionalization of science, began to see themselves as participating in a new scientific endeavor called biology. One of its distinguishing features was the central role of laboratory experimentation, which drew on techniques in physiological experimentation such as vivisection, as well as laboratory practices learned in the German universities. Although natural history was centrally concerned with observation, description, and classification, at the same time, testing and experimentation were also an essential part of natural history. Historian of science Lynn Nyhart has argued that proponents of biology appropriated aspects of natural history such as experimentation and wrote them out of the history of natural history. Darwin, for example, used experiments to answer questions about the use of animals to spread seeds and the ability of earthworms to aerate soil.56 However, experimentation, particularly in the laboratory, became a primary method of research in biology in a way that was distinct from the role it had played in natural history.

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Although the word biologie was coined around the turn of the nineteenth century, the term was not commonly used in British science until the second half of the century.57 Huxley gave a series of lectures on the principles of biology at the Royal Institution in 1858, and after 1875 biology courses became a standard part of scientific education in British universities and medical colleges.58 The new science of biology was tied to a number of social and scientific commitments: the professionalization of science, the successful strategy of creating new positions for biologists in universities and government institutions, the centrality of experimentation in the laboratory, the exclusion and rejection of amateur naturalists and natural history, and an agnostic and at times aggressively antireligious stance. Naturalists lamented the passing of an era. Natural history was increasingly associated not with exciting advances in knowledge, but with “mumbling, doddery Old Men.”59 “The glory of the field naturalist has departed,” mourned naturalist W. B. Grove. “The biologist or physiologist is the hero of the hour, and looks down with infinite contempt upon the luckless being who is still content to search for species.”60 By 1900, American biologist E. B. Wilson had to ask young biologists to imagine a distant past—ten or twenty years previously—“when there were no oil-immersion-lenses or Abbe illuminators, no automatic microtomes, no ribbon-sections, no chromosomes or centrosomes, no shaking of eggs, no ‘taxes’ or ‘tropisms.’”61 In the face of the prestigious new laboratory sciences, he reminded them of a time when field naturalists encountered their subjects in nature, “when to adopt the career of a naturalist was to face the imminent prospect of extinction in the environment, and to incur the half-admiring, half-contemptuous compassion of one’s relatives and friends.”62 Wilson joked that the “lack of mutual understanding” between naturalists and laboratory scientists led to epithets such as “bug-hunters” and “worm-slicers,” respectively.63 His more serious purposes were to emphasize the value of the often-mocked techniques of description and classification, as well as to remind investigators that the love of nature was the naturalist’s motivating force, both of which he felt were being forgotten in the new prestige of biological experimentation in the laboratory. In the early years of the 1800s, natural history was the field of study for an aspiring “man of science” who wanted to make a significant contribution to the scientific investigation of animal life. Such a man could be something of an autodidact.64 To conduct research, he should visit museum and private collections, join scientific societies, collect specimens and make his own firsthand observations in the field if possible, and build up his own collection—all activities that he could pursue in his leisure time. If he did not have sufficient funds or leisure to indulge his interests, he could use various entrepreneurial strategies to convert some of the products of his work—specimens he collected or stuffed, as well as writings, illustrations, or exhibitions—into funds for his activities.

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By 1910, the most exciting fields for a young student of animal life were in biology, especially experimental embryology and genetics. To learn how to conduct research, he or she—for women were beginning to enter into science in significant numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—must first study and train under professors in a university to learn laboratory techniques involving specialized instruments, and then obtain a paid position in the university or government laboratories that would allow access to the equipment, materials, and funding needed to advance a professional career.65 In response to the changing landscape of science and amateur participation, devotees of natural history sought new ways to organize their endeavors. Interest was shifting from dead specimens to the behavior of living creatures in the wild. Instead of shooting and preserving the animals, some enthusiasts were beginning to photograph them. Beginning in 1906, the British Ornithologists’ Club organized large numbers of amateurs, dispersed across Britain, to report on summer migration patterns of birds. The British Ornithologists’ Union journal, the Ibis, under the editorship of Victorian naturalist Philip Lutley Sclater until his death in 1913, and then under his son William Lutley Sclater, remained devoted to the traditional concerns of natural history such as species description and biogeographic variation. Ornithology remained one of the few scientific fields where amateurs could still make a significant contribution, and a striking example of “how careful we need to be not to equate the professionalizing of a field of learning with its academicization.”66 The relationship between natural history and biology at the turn of the century has been a matter of some debate in the history of science.67 Historian of science Lynn Nyhart has argued that natural history was simultaneously “both growing and declining” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, during a period when biology was unequivocally growing. Natural history was growing in the sense that its institutional base was expanding in museums as well as other institutions. Ironically, toward the end of the nineteenth century, “just when ‘biology’ was said to be moving out of the museum, away from systematics and natural history and into laboratory-based biology, museums were undergoing a boom.”68 At the same time, natural history was declining in the sense that it had been the dominant mode for the study of animals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, whereas by the early twentieth century the “new biology” had opened up new ways of studying animal life such as experimental embryology and genetics. This simultaneous growth and decline was possible because the whole landscape of the life sciences was changing—natural history retained and even expanded its popular audiences, amateur participants, and museum professionals, but these gains paled by comparison to the new vistas that biology had opened up in the laboratory and amid the new army of university- and governmentfunded researchers.

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In laboratories across England and America, researchers were experimenting on animals. Some of the most exciting research focused on animals whose use would not provoke a moral outcry from the public: insects, simple marine organisms, frogs, snails, and vermin. Since the 1870s, biologist and physiologist Michael Foster and the students and colleagues who worked with him at his laboratories at Cambridge had pursued questions about the nature of the heartbeat by experimenting on frogs and snails.69 In the early twentieth century, across the Atlantic, T. H. Morgan’s work on fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, was beginning to yield exciting information about the nature of heredity. Morgan’s work involved inbreeding generations of flies and bombarding them with mutagenic agents. To researchers in genetics, his results seemed applicable not only to the inbred fruit flies in his laboratory but to all living creatures in their natural habitats. Along with mice and rats, Drosophila were well on their way to becoming that peculiar laboratory species: a successful model organism.70

CONCLUSION The meanings that scientific specimens held for their investigators and audiences were not absolute or fixed, but multilayered and changing. These perceived meanings could shift in the eyes of even a single observer, let alone in the perceptions of communities of people who interacted with them—communities as disparate as the urban visitors at the British Museum, a team of laboratory researchers, or a Gloucestershire field club. The overlapping meanings of specimens arose out of their specific cultural contexts, including the sites, practices, and people involved in their production, use, and display. The sites included the animals’ native habitats around the world as well as their unnatural homes: museums, laboratories, natural history auctions, private cabinets, and homes. These places facilitated a range of practices, including hunting and transporting, taxidermy and preservation, buying and selling, dissection and examination, storage and display. The practitioners spanned a range of professions and social backgrounds, including the scientific investigators, collectors, hunters, taxidermists, and commercial agents who handled specimens professionally, as well as the public audiences of different classes who encountered specimens in museums, homes, texts, and images. The place where the specimen was displayed, the people who interacted with it, and the practices in which they engaged, all continuously created and re-created the meanings that the specimen, like a vessel, held for its audiences. Created from living animals, shaped by human artifice, scientific specimens inhabit a border zone between humans and other animals. Collectively, these specimens form an interface through which human beings negotiate, display, and renegotiate their relationship with the natural world.

CHAPTER SIX

Philosophy and Animals in the Age of Empire mark rowl ands

UNDERSTANDING THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY In assessing the relation between philosophy and nonhuman animals (henceforth “animals”) in the age of empire, two things should be borne clearly in mind. First, at least at the level of individual psychology, philosophy rarely motivates people to believe things. It can, however, provide a justification for what people are already, independently, motivated to believe. And at its best, it can provide a good justification for these independently motivated beliefs. Second, exploring or determining the implications of any philosophical system generally takes time, and the more complicated the system, the more time is involved. Moreover, examining the implications of a given philosophical or moral system for animals has not generally been located high on the list of philosophers’ perceived priorities. Accordingly, a time lag, often a significant one, typically occurs between the development of a philosophical system or theory and the seeping of its manifold implications into the general consciousness. Therefore, two questions must be distinguished: 1. What effect did philosophy have on people’s attitudes toward animals during the age of empire?

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2. What effect did the philosophical and moral systems developed during the age of empire have on people’s subsequent thinking about animals? The first question is itself doubly ambiguous. The philosophy cited in that question might be understood as referring to philosophical systems developed during that age, or as referring to systems developed during earlier ages. And the people cited in the question (and in the second one) might be understood as referring to the general public, or to those people who have familiarized themselves at least somewhat with the relevant philosophical and moral systems. In each case, the question will require different answers. For example, if we understand philosophy to refer only to philosophical and moral systems developed during the age of empire, and people to refer to the general public, then the only answer we can give to question number one is, I think, “Very little!” But different ways of disambiguating the question will yield very different answers. In terms of the relation between philosophy and animals, the age of empire was, I shall argue, important in at least two clear respects. First, the age continued the process of determining the precise content of the Enlightenment idea of the moral equality of individuals. Although this idea is one of the constitutive principles of Enlightenment thinking, it is not as if the idea emerged, like Venus from the waves, in mature form. Indeed, the maturation of this idea is almost certainly still taking place. And this process of maturation involves the attempt to understand, explicate, delineate, and render precise the content of this idea. An important part of this process took place during the age of empire. And this maturation had, I think, significant impact on even the general public’s attitude toward animals during this time. Second, during the age of empire, certain complex moral systems emerged that, while exerting only marginal influence on the wider public’s attitude toward animals at the time, came to have a much greater influence—on both professional philosophers and the wider public—in the twentieth century. Indeed, the influence is still felt today, though perhaps in slightly attenuated form. This chapter examines both aspects of the role played by philosophy in the age of empire.

MORAL EQUALITY AND MORAL RECOGNITION With the Enlightenment there emerged—although, to reiterate, not in anything like mature form—an idea of the moral equality of all human beings. Moral equality is not factual equality. A claim of factual equality would be obviously false: People find themselves blessed or cursed with a variety of aptitudes and impairments, and in a variety of circumstances or predicaments. A claim of

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moral equality is a claim concerning how people should be treated, not a claim concerning what people are or how they are in fact treated. Working out the content and ramifications of this idea of moral equality has, in effect, been the great post-Enlightenment project.1 One influential way of developing this idea of moral equality has been in terms of a principle that sounds arcane but is really quite simple: no moral difference without some relevant other difference. Suppose two individuals are treated differently in terms of the goods, resources, opportunities, or liberties they are accorded. The principle “no moral difference without some relevant other difference” claims that this difference can be justified only if there is some other—nonmoral—difference between the two individuals. Perhaps, for example, one of them has forfeited his entitlement to certain sorts of freedom or opportunities due to indiscretions of a criminal nature. Conversely, if no relevant other difference exists between the two individuals, then any difference in the moral treatment they are accorded is unjustified. The implications for animals are clear. If we are to justify a difference between the way we treat animals and the way we treat humans, we must be able to cite some relevant difference between the two categories of being. There are, of course, differences aplenty. But if we are to justify differential treatment of humans and animals, we must be able not only to cite differences but also, crucially, to demonstrate that these differences are morally relevant ones. That is, we must be able to show that these differences are sufficiently significant to add up to a moral justification for our differential treatment. The age of empire was marked by a growing realization that any proposed differences between humans and animals were problematic—falling far short of uncontroversial examples of morally relevant differences. Indeed, by the time of the age of empire, this process was already well under way. Thus, a little over ten years before the age of empire had begun, in a passage that still today provides a rallying cry to animal activists everywhere, Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, had written, “The question is not, can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer?”2 This claim, in fact, occurred in a work only tangentially concerned with animals. Its subject was the basis and justification of punishment, and Bentham used the claim only to illustrate his belief in the universal application of law. Indeed, Bentham argued for legislation that would prohibit “everything which may serve to lead to cruelty,” a prohibition that encompassed bullbaiting, cockfighting, dogfighting, hunting of foxes and hares, and, possibly, fishing, since such events produced “the most painful and lingering death of which we can form any idea.”3 Bentham acknowledges that humans and animals differ in certain obvious and important respects. He denies, however, that these differences add up to morally relevant ones. Their failure to do so is because of a crucial commonality between humans and animals: we suffer. Bentham was working with

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a sentience-based account of moral considerability, according to which it is the ability of a creature to feel pain that is both necessary and sufficient for it to be the legitimate subject of moral claims against others. Therefore, Bentham relegated rational and linguistic capacities to the class of differences that were not morally relevant, and asserted that sentience was the capacity that elevated animals to appropriate objects of moral concern. In this respect, however, Bentham was echoing, rather than instigating, sentiments that had become increasingly common in the preceding two decades. In terms of his ability to reach a mass audience, one of the most important defenders of these sentiments was not Jeremy Bentham but John Wesley, the eighteenthcentury founder of Methodism. Wesley’s arguments were often based on emphasizing the similarities between humans and animals. Contrary to Catholicism and many forms of Anglicanism, Wesley claimed that animals did indeed have an afterlife, thus attacking one of the most commonly accepted criteria for demarcating animals from humans—the possession of a soul. Indeed, for Wesley, the only relevant difference between humans and animals is that the latter are incapable of knowing love and obeying God. And again, Wesley’s arguments were predicated on the claim that these differences, while undoubtedly significant, did not constitute a sufficient basis for denying moral status to animals. In short, they were significant differences, but not morally relevant ones. In his sermons, Wesley consistently emphasized the similarities between humans and animals, describing the behavioral traits of animals in anthropomorphic terms and our treatment of these animals in bestial terms. Thus: [Man] pursues [animals] over the widest plains, and through the thickest forests. He overtakes them in the fields or air, he finds them out in the depths of the sea. Nor are the mild and friendly creatures which still own his sway, and are duteous to his commands, secured thereby from more than brutal violence, from outrage and abuse of various kinds. Is the generous horse, that serves his master’s necessity or pleasure with unwearied diligence—is the faithful dog, that waits for the motion of his hand, or his eye, exempt from this? What returns for their life and faithful service do many of these creatures find? And what a dreadful difference is there, between what they suffer from their fellow brutes, and what they suffer from the tyrant man! The lion, the tiger, or the shark gives them pain, from mere necessity, in order to prolong their own life; and puts them out of their pain at once: But the human shark, without any such necessity, torments them of his own free choice; and perhaps continues their lingering pain till, after months or years, death signs their release.4 Dogs and horses are described as faithful, generous, and diligent. Humans, on the other hand, are compared unfavorably to a shark. The implication is that

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while these descriptions are, respectively, anthropomorphic and bestial, they are not unreasonably or unjustifiably so. According to Wesley, the similarities between humans and animals outweigh the differences. The differences, therefore, while significant, are not morally relevant. The work of Darwin and the newly emerging theory of evolution also played a role in cementing, but of course not instigating, this change in attitudes. One should take care to neither underplay nor overplay the significance of this role. Evolutionary theory is today, and has been since its inception, profoundly important in understanding our relation to animals and, consequently, their moral status.5 However, this inception occurred only in the second half of the age of empire. Darwin’s Origin of Species was not published until 1859. It is true that he had written on many of the subjects contained in this work earlier, and so the implications of his discoveries had almost certainly been rippling outward since the 1830s. For example, in 1837, in an illustration of the kind of reasoning that underwrites the expanding circle, he wrote that animals are “our fellow brethren in pain, disease, death, suffering, and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may all be melted together.”6 This, and remarks like it, can be broken down into two components: a claim of moral recognition or sentiment of the sort outlined above, and an explanation or justification of this claim by way of an appeal to our common evolutionary history. While the explanation or justification was new to Darwin (or, at least, new to the correspondence between Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace of the 1830s), the sentiment was one that preceded this justification by some time. And the sentiment is, once again, very clear: There are important differences between humans and animals, but also crucial similarities. And it may well be, although Darwin did not himself endorse this claim, that what is crucial in determining the moral status of animals is not their differences from us but their similarities to us. This form of argument—an emphasizing of the similarities between humans and animals, and a diminution of the differences—is evident in one of the few philosophical works of the age of empire explicitly directed toward animals: Henry Salt’s Animal’s Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress.7 In the very first sentence, Salt indicates how his argument strategy is going to work: “Have the lower animals ‘rights’? Undoubtedly—if men have. That is the point I wish to make evident in this opening chapter.” And in the very next sentence, he makes it clear that his argument is not going to be based on an examination of the concept of a right, and the subsequent deduction that this concept can be legitimately be applied to animals: “Let it be stated at the outset that I have no intention of discussing the abstract theory of natural rights, which, at the present time, is looked upon with suspicion and disfavour by many social reformers, since it has not infrequently been made to cover the most extravagant

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and contradictory assertions.” In other words, the strategy Salt follows is to argue that if humans have rights or at least “an unmistakable intimation of something very similar,” then animals do also. No morally relevant differences between humans and animals exist that could justify ascribing rights to the former while withholding them from the latter. These sentiments—the recognition of the profound similarities between humans and animals, and the consequent problematization of the idea that there may be morally relevant differences between us and them—underwrite what is sometimes known as the expanding circle. Adult, “normal” human beings— sometimes of a given sex, sometimes of a given race—have historically been regarded as the paradigm bearers of moral status. Therefore, again historically, if other humans have come to be regarded as possessing a similar moral status, this has usually been achieved by way of some form of logical or analogical extension from paradigm cases to new ones. This expanding circle of moral regard has been achieved via the recognition that there are no relevant differences between the paradigm cases and the putative new ones. While differences, even obvious ones, between the two cases may exist—skin color, sexual organs, and so on—these differences are not relevant in one crucial way: They are not sufficient to constitute a difference in moral status. Historically, this form of recognition has proved unreliable, in the sense that it can be rescinded as quickly as it was initially proffered. It is also variable, in the sense that it has occurred in different cultures at different times. And it is haphazard, in the sense that it is difficult to predict when such a form of recognition might occur and even more difficult to explain why it has occurred. Nevertheless, these acts of moral recognition do occur, and if we are frequently unable to explain why, we can nonetheless at least chart the symptoms of their occurrence. This form of moral recognition of animals began before the age of empire, but certainly intensified during that age, and its symptoms, both before and after the beginning of the nineteenth century, can be seen in the pronouncements of reformers like Bentham and Salt, Methodists like Wesley, and scientists like Darwin. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to trace the precise reasons for why this recognition should have occurred during this time. One important reason, although almost certainly not the only one, were the demographic changes that began to accelerate in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain was already an urban country. One result of this was to make the conditions and suffering of animals more visible than they had ever been before. To take just one example, Smithfield market had originally been located on the outskirts of what was the medieval city of London. With growing urbanization and, consequently, the rapid expansion of London, the market came to occupy a much more central location in the city. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Smithfield was surrounded by buildings. Specifically, it was just a walk away from Cheapside, formerly

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a traditional market area but now transformed into an area associated with the sale of luxury goods such as linen and lace. In the other direction was the newly emerging “City”: the Bank of England, stock exchange, and trading houses.8 On the outskirts of the city, animals brought to market were transferred to London drovers, working for the market, who “deprived them of water, food, rest and beat them mercilessly toward their destination.”9 The cruelty was not new to the nineteenth century. What was new was its visibility: The new environment in which the cruelty took place provided passersby with a graphic picture of animal suffering. And, as a general rule of thumb, in terms of its effect on public sentiment, a picture is worth a thousand philosophical, theological, or scientific treatises. It would be tempting to center any account of the relation between philosophy and animals in the age of empire on the massively significant moral and political developments that occurred during this age. To do so, however, would mean ignoring a rather obvious and pressing fact: The moral and political developments that occurred during the age of empire would impact on animals only if animals were already regarded as appropriate objects of moral scrutiny or regard. That is, animals have to first be recognized as the sort of entity that can be the subject of moral claims, or possess moral status, for these moral and political developments to have any implications for them. For whatever reason, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, animals were widely recognized to be appropriate objects of moral concern. It was generally accepted that they made at least some moral claims or possessed at least partial moral status. And this allowed them to be incorporated, at least in some form, into the elegant and sophisticated moral and political machinery of the age of empire. This incorporation was seldom explicit. Only rarely did animals figure overtly in moral and political treatises of the time. However, the effects of this incorporation are still evident today, where some of the most influential arguments for the moral status of animals derive from a moral and conceptual apparatus developed during the age of empire.10 We now turn to a consideration of this apparatus.

LIBERALISM AND COLLECTIVISM Henry Salt’s case for animal rights, published in 1892, was based, albeit nominally, on an apparatus of natural rights that he had inherited from John Locke among others.11 Salt’s case was thus steeped in the liberal tradition, a tradition that, of course, preceded the age of empire by more than two centuries. However, the dominant moral and political theories of the nineteenth century largely eschewed this apparatus—another example of the time-lag effect in philosophy. Instead, the dominant moral and political theory of the nineteenth century was dominated by a form of liberalism that was underpinned specifically by

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utilitarianism rather than natural law theories. However, toward the end of the age of empire, as the nineteenth century slid into the twentieth, a form of essentially communitarian political theory emerged in the form of Marxism and its associated variants. Liberalism and Marxist communitarianism are commonly seen as irreducibly opposed views. However, they do, in fact, share certain significant features. First, they are both meliorist in the sense that they assert that existing social institutions are corrigible and capable of improvement.12 Second, they are both universalist in that they assert the moral unity of all human beings and accord specific ethnic, historical, civic, and cultural associations only a secondary or derivative importance. Much of the important work in both liberal and Marxist political theory was concerned with delineating the precise content of these doctrines of meliorism and universalism. And the extension of moral status to animals was often the result of the subsequent determination that the boundaries of these concepts did not, in any theoretically principled way, coincide with the boundaries of species membership. In other, crucial, respects however, liberalism and Marxism diverge dramatically. Liberalism is fundamentally a reflection of the Enlightenment idea of individualism, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the individual over the claims of the social collective. According to liberalism, the moral claims of collective are always, ultimately, a function of the claims of individuals. Therefore, moral reasoning must start with the claims of individuals, and moral justification must ultimately be traceable back to the claims of individuals. That is, any modification to society can be justified ultimately only by a demonstration that it advances the claims or conditions of individuals within that society. This, finally, distinguishes liberalism from Marxism, though not for the facile (and in fact false) reason that Marxism is not concerned with the claims of individuals. Rather, the divergence stems from the two views’ competing stances on the notion of political community. Marxism embodies the idea that some social structures embody values that are beneficial in that they allow humans to fulfill or perfect their essential nature. The task of political theory is then to identify which social structures embody these values, and the task of the political activist is to attempt to bring these social structures into being or maintain them if already existing. It is characteristic of liberal thought that it has abandoned the project of pursuing the idea of political community in this sense. This is not the result of moral skepticism, but, rather, of the role played by individualism in the liberal political system. One of the foundational tenets of liberalism is the idea that whatever the ultimate nature of good and bad, and whatever the ultimate status of our knowledge of these things, an individual’s life typically goes better when it is led from, so to speak, the inside. That is, a person’s life typically goes better when, as far as this is possible, he or she is allowed to develop his or her own conceptions of the good, or the good life,

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and live, again as far as this is possible, in accordance with this conception. Given that this is so, and given that different people will have very different conceptions of the good, the function of political theory, according to the liberal conception, is to find ways of accommodating these distinct, and often incompatible, conceptions of the good within society. The difference between liberalism and Marxism on this score corresponds quite closely to the distinction between two types of utilitarianism: one officially individualist, the other markedly more collectivist in orientation. The correspondence here is conceptual; one would, I think, look in vain for salient historical connections between the two forms of utilitarianism, on the one hand, and between liberalism and Marxism, on the other. Nevertheless, the correspondence does indicate how utilitarianism can provide a moral underpinning for both forms of political theory that characterize the age of empire.

UTILITARIANISM: “THE GREATEST GOOD FOR THE GREATEST NUMBER” Because of its close association with liberalism, an association that has grown ever tighter in the past two hundred years, it is easy to forget that utilitarianism is, on its most familiar interpretation, an essentially collectivist doctrine. Its collectivist credentials are evident in the well-known (but not entirely accurate) slogan used to express its fundamental claim: the greatest good for the greatest number. In fact, however, there are two quite distinct interpretations of utilitarianism, one amenable to liberal political theory (indeed, almost certainly devised with that theory in mind), the other leading it in a more collectivist direction. This section deals with the basic idea of utilitarianism. The sections to follow examine the competing interpretations. If Jeremy Bentham was the eighteenth-century father of utilitarianism, then John Stuart Mill was almost certainly its most able and influential nineteenthcentury exponent. Mill’s mature and sophisticated development of the utilitarian position dominated the moral landscape of much of that century. Any version of utilitarianism contains two core components: (1) a definition of the good or, as utilitarians often put it, of utility, and (2) a requirement that we maximize utility. Different versions of utilitarianism provide different characterizations of utility. Hedonistic utilitarians identify human good with happiness, where this, in turn, can be interpreted in various ways. Both Bentham and Mill were hedonistic utilitarians in this sense. However, they had different and competing interpretations of the concept of happiness. Bentham identified happiness with, roughly, pleasure. Mill, on the other hand, distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, with the obvious implication that some forms of pleasure were more important in the utilitarian calculus than others. “It is better

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to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied,” he famously claimed, and “better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” And if the fool or pig are of a different opinion, that is only because they have no basis for comparison. Other types of utilitarianism identify utility with different types of mental state. A currently popular version—preference utilitarianism—identifies utility with the satisfaction of preferences, whether this satisfaction brings with it happiness or not.13 Nevertheless, despite these differences in the understanding of utility, some definition of this concept or another is the conceptual starting point for any utilitarian theory. The second central feature of utilitarianism is the requirement that we maximize utility, in whatever way this is ultimately understood. If utility is identified with happiness—as it generally was in the nineteenth century—then utilitarianism requires that we maximize the amount of happiness in the world. Once again, different versions of utilitarianism differ in their understanding of what maximizing utility means. Act utilitarians, for example, understand utilitarianism as the requirement to perform whatever action promotes the maximization of utility. Rule utilitarians, on the other hand, understand utilitarianism as the requirement to follow whatever rule whose general observance promotes maximum utility, even if this means, in particular situations, performing actions that decrease utility. Direct utilitarians understand the theory to entail that moral agents should decide how to act by consciously making utilitarian calculations, by attempting to assess how different actions would affect the maximization of utility. Indirect utilitarians, in contrast, view the idea of maximizing utility as entering only indirectly into the agent’s decision making. That is, while they accept that morally correct actions are those that maximize utility, indirect utilitarians claim that people are more likely to maximize utility by following nonutilitarian rules or habits than by following explicit utilitarian calculations. There are other distinctions, resulting in yet further versions of utilitarianism. In the nineteenth century, these distinctions were present in largely nascent form: It is only in the intervening years that this battery of distinctions has been made explicit. What unites the diverse forms is the following principle: It is morally required to maximize utility—whatever this utility consists in, and however this utility is best promoted. For utilitarians of whatever stripe, what is crucial is that utility be maximized, that is, that the general utility be promoted. It is the promotion of maximum utility that is crucial. And, significantly, precisely who is benefited and who is harmed by this maximization of utility is not directly relevant.

TELEOLOGICAL UTILITARIANISM The focus on the maximization of utility, and the disregard for how this maximization impacts particular individuals, has the potential to drive a wedge

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between liberalism and utilitarianism, propelling the latter in a far more collectivist direction. This collectivist tendency is a characteristic feature of one interpretation of utilitarianism, a version I refer to as the teleological interpretation of utilitarianism. John Rawls defines a teleological moral theory as one that (1) provides an independent definition of the good, and (2) defines justice in terms of the maximization of the good.14 This, according to Rawls, is precisely what utilitarianism does. According to this teleological interpretation of utilitarianism, our primary moral duty is to maximize utility, however this is defined. That is, our primary duty is not to treat people as equals, but to bring about valuable states of affairs, where the idea of value is defined in terms of utility. On this view, people do not have value intrinsically, but may be the bearers of what has value. These intrinsically valuable things will be states such as happiness, or preference-satisfaction, depending on one’s view of what utility is. The prime moral directive of utilitarianism is to maximize these intrinsically valuable things. How we maximize these things, and in particular, in whom we maximize them, is of no direct moral concern. We might compare people to cups that can contain either sweet-tasting (utility) or bitter-tasting (disutility) liquid.15 The primary goal of moral action is to produce as much sweettasting and as little bitter-tasting liquid as possible. It does not matter, at least not directly, into which cups we pour the sweet-tasting liquid as long as we pour as much sweet-tasting liquid into the world as possible. It might, for example, be necessary to fill some cups entirely with bitter-tasting liquid in order to produce the maximum amount of sweet-tasting liquid elsewhere. If so, we are morally required, by the teleological interpretation of utilitarianism, to do so. In this way, so it is argued, the teleological interpretation entails that it is legitimate to completely override the interests of some individuals in order to secure the maximization of overall utility. And this, it is argued, is a decidedly nonliberal idea. A student’s first classroom encounter with utilitarianism is almost certainly with teleological utilitarianism. However, it may well be an interpretation largely foisted on utilitarians by their critics. The teleological interpretation is, in many ways, a strange one. Indeed, it is arguably an unstable one. One of the things a complete moral theory attempts to do is not only spell out a set of duties that a moral agent can reasonably be expected to possess, but also to identify those individuals to whom the agent has these duties. The teleological version of utilitarianism is committed to the claim that we have a duty to maximize valuable states of affairs, but leaves it entirely unclear to whom we have this duty. On the teleological interpretation, there seems to be no identifiable individual or groups of individuals who can plausibly be regarded as a beneficiary of such a duty. It is implausible to claim that we have this duty to the maximally valuable states of affairs themselves, for it is unclear that states

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of affairs are the sorts of things that can have moral claims. The most natural response is to claim that we have the duty to whichever individuals would benefit from the maximization of utility. But then it seems that our primary moral duty is to the individuals, and that we have only a derivative duty to produce maximally valuable states of affairs. And, in this case, the teleological interpretation collapses into another, quite distinct version of utilitarianism.

EGALITARIAN UTILITARIANISM The teleological interpretation of utilitarianism begins with a definition of utility and then, in effect, defines justice as the maximization of this utility. In this way, it makes the concept of utility or welfare primary, and the concept of justice derivative upon it. What we can call the egalitarian interpretation of utilitarianism reverses this order of priority: The concept of justice is taken as basic, and the requirement to maximize utility or welfare is then derived from it. The primary argument for utilitarianism, on this interpretation, looks like this. Each person should be regarded as a moral equal, and we must, therefore, treat everyone with equal consideration and respect. To this end, the interests or preferences of each person should be regarded as having equal weight, regardless of the specific talents, capacities, endowments, and economic circumstances of the person. Giving these interests or preferences equal weight is what is required in order to treat people as equals. Therefore, on the egalitarian interpretation, we can regard the content of utilitarianism as being factored into two components. The first is a formal principle of justice: U1. Each person should be treated with equal consideration and respect. This principle is, of course, not peculiar to utilitarianism. On the contrary, U1 expresses the sort of formal principle of justice as impartiality that is commonly taken to be partly constitutive of the post-Enlightenment moral point of view as such. U1 amounts to the claim that the equal interests of all people, no matter what their abilities and circumstances, should be counted equally for the purposes of moral deliberation and decision making. Different moral theories have different ideas as to precisely what this means or entails. And, accordingly, what is peculiar to utilitarianism, at least to its egalitarian version, is the interpretation it provides of this principle: U2. The maximum possible number of interests should be satisfied. U2 is the interpretation of U1 provided by egalitarian utilitarianism. According to U2, the best way to ensure equal consideration of interests is to

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ensure maximal satisfaction of interests. In short, what defines egalitarian utilitarianism is the claim that equal consideration of interests is equivalent to maximal satisfaction of interests. The crucial difference between the teleological and egalitarian interpretations is this. The teleological version makes maximization of utility constitutive of justice. The egalitarian interpretation, on the other hand, begins with a prior conception of justice—the formal principle of justice expressed in U1—and then interprets this conception as the requirement that utility should be maximized. What is crucial to the egalitarian interpretation is that the requirement to maximize utility is derived entirely from the prior requirement to treat people with equal consideration. This form of utilitarianism achieved prominence in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, arguably its most influential and able exponent was John Stuart Mill.16 Mill’s problem—and, by proxy, the problem for latter-day interpreters of Mill—was to reconcile the emphasis on freedom and individuality found in works such as On Liberty with the unambiguous statement of a (sophisticated) form of utilitarianism found in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government and related works. It is sometimes thought that Mill effects this reconciliation by way of his adoption of a form of indirect, rather than direct, utilitarianism. According to Mill, the maximization of utility should be understood as an axiological principle and not a principle of conduct. That is, the requirement that utility be maximized should be understood as a principle that applies not at the level of rules of conduct that may be, consciously or unconsciously, adopted by individuals but, rather, at the level of entire social systems. In other words, the requirement that utility be maximized is best understood as the requirement to put in place and sustain a social system that maximizes utility. It should not be understood as the requirement that individuals, in their moral deliberations, should perform utilitarian calculations. Therefore, according to Mill, we are at liberty to adopt nonutilitarian maxims to guide our conduct in everyday life. Nonutilitarian maxims can, therefore, be given a utilitarian justification: The maxims will be justified on utilitarian grounds if they lead to or help sustain a social system that maximizes utility. However, this gambit does not get us to the heart of the tension between utilitarianism and liberalism. Indeed, it merely pushes that tension back a stage. Now we have to worry whether social systems—rather than individuals—will license completely overriding the interests or preferences of some individuals so as to secure maximal satisfaction of interests for others—making some individuals into cups that contain entirely bitter-tasting liquid so as to ensure the maximum amount of sweet-tasting liquid elsewhere. The core of Mill’s reconciliation of utilitarianism and liberal principles lies not in the distinction between direct and indirect utilitarianism, but in his emphasis on individuality and freedom and, crucially, the role played by these

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concepts in his overall account of justice. First, according to Mill, individuality must be understood as a necessary condition of human utility. A social system must, therefore, promote individuality if it is to successfully maximize utility. And given that the requirement to maximize utility applies only to social systems as a whole, and not to the rules of conduct adopted by individuals, the general promotion of individuality will satisfy this requirement even if individual attempts at promoting utility do not succeed in maximizing utility. Therefore, according to Mill, one of the conditions of maximizing utility, understood as an axiological principle, is the general production of individuality. Second, Mill argues that individuality requires freedom, and therefore promotion of individuality requires promotion of freedom. Indeed, maximization of utility would seem to involve maximization of individuality, hence maximization of freedom. And maximizing freedom, it seems, requires maximizing the number of people who are free. And this, it seems, requires freedom for all: equal freedom. It is here that the question of interpretation arises: Was Mill an egalitarian utilitarian who sees maximization of utility as a way of safeguarding a prior commitment to a formal principle of justice based on the equal consideration of interests? John Gray has defended such an interpretation of Mill.17 Or was he a teleological utilitarian who sees maximization of freedom and individuality as the most efficient way of underwriting a prior commitment to the maximization of utility? It would almost certainly be a good thing for Mill if he were the former—he would thereby stand a much better chance of reconciling his utilitarianism with his liberalism. However, I see no evidence that Mill actually appreciated the distinction between the two interpretations. The possibility of being an egalitarian utilitarian was, for Mill, moot, since he showed no grasp of the distinction between that and the teleological alternative. Once again, this distinction is a component in the battery of distinctions that emerged only after the age of empire.

PROBLEMS WITH UTILITARIANISM Utilitarianism in either form has its problems. Indeed, arguably the problems are the same in either case. I am going to focus on egalitarian utilitarianism because here the clash with liberalism is at its most subtle and interesting. The principal problem with egalitarian utilitarianism is this: While the motivation for egalitarian utilitarianism is provided by the broad egalitarian principle that each person should be treated with equal consideration and respect, the utilitarian injunction to maximize utility provides a poor interpretation of this principle. Indeed, the utilitarian injunction is actually incompatible with the egalitarian principle. U2 is indeed an interpretation of U1. The problem is that it is a bad interpretation.

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U2 is, in effect, what we might call an aggregation requirement. We are to treat people with equal consideration by giving equal moral weight to all their interests. And we give equal moral weight to all their interests by satisfying the maximum possible number of them. And this means we have to aggregate interests and adopt whatever course of action is required to bring about the maximum number of satisfied interests. However, to understand the concept of equal consideration in terms of this sort of aggregation requirement is to badly misunderstand the concept: The aggregation requirement allows—indeed often requires—some people to be treated as less than equals, as means to other people’s ends. In more detail, the basic argument against utilitarianism looks like this. There are certain classes of desires or preferences—other-directed and selfdirected preferences—that utilitarians are committed to including in their utilitarian calculations concerning how to maximize preference satisfaction. However, these preferences are not, so the argument goes, the sorts of things that should be included in utilitarian calculations. The utilitarian, however, can make no sense of this claim. And, indeed, to make sense of this claim, we require a prior, nonutiliarian standard of justice. This entails rejection of utilitarianism. The relevant sort of other-directed preference is a desire that another person should be deprived of certain goods, resources, opportunities, or liberties (henceforth, goods). Suppose, for example, that I dislike Smith because I am (a) a racist, (b) a sexist, (c) a nationalist, (d) a speciesist, and so on. One central component of our intuitive conception of equal consideration is that the moral entitlements that an individual like Smith possesses do not depend on the attitudes that other individuals bear toward him. In my hostility to Smith, I want him, her, or it to be deprived of certain goods. But my attitude can never, by itself, entail that Smith should in fact be deprived of these goods. If Smith is genuinely entitled to these goods, then my hostility toward him, her, or it can do nothing to change this. Indeed, if everyone in the world harbors inimical feelings toward Smith, this in no way alters his, her, or its moral entitlements. Of course, our hostility toward someone can sometimes be the result of something they have done. Perhaps Smith has committed a heinous crime, one that would justify curtailing certain freedoms. But then it is his actions that condemn Smith, and his loss of freedom is the result of his action, not of the feelings of hostility we have toward him—even though these are a consequence of his actions. An other-directed desire that a person be deprived of certain goods to which they are, in fact, entitled is never, by itself, sufficient to justify depriving them of those goods. The relevant sort of self-directed preference is the other side of the coin: a desire that one have a greater share of goods than others. Again, self-directed preferences, by themselves, can never increase one’s moral entitlements, just as inimical other-directed desires can never decrease them. My preference to

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possess more goods than others is never, by itself, a justification for my possessing more goods than others. This argument has been cast in terms of preferences—and so its natural target is preference utilitarianism. But it can also be cast in terms of happiness. My happiness at Smith’s deprivation of certain goods is never, by itself, a justification for depriving Smith of those goods—crucially, even if, in such a case, my happiness outweighs his unhappiness. The moral entitlements possessed by an individual do not depend on the attitudes that other people bear toward them, or on the attitudes they bear toward themselves. One central problem with egalitarian utilitarianism is that it is simply unable to accommodate these facts. For a utilitarian, what counts as right and wrong can emerge only subsequent to utilitarian calculations. It can make no sense of the idea that some forms of hostility or discrimination might, in themselves, be morally illegitimate. What counts as right or wrong, legitimate or illegitimate, is determined only after the utilitarian calculations have been performed. The utilitarian is committed to taking every preference or form of happiness and throwing it into the utilitarian calculus—no matter how wrong, unfair, perverse, or, indeed, perverted, it might seem. Then, the calculations themselves determine the ultimate moral status of these preferences. However, this seems to sit uncomfortably, to say the least, with our intuitive conception of equality. If we believe that everyone is to be treated as an equal, then we cannot allow that it is acceptable for some people to suffer simply because other people do not want them treated as equals—whether this is because they want less for those others or more for themselves. Thus, our intuitive conception of equality—which supposedly provides the motivation for egalitarian forms of utilitarianism—requires that certain preferences be excluded from utilitarian calculations on the grounds that they are wrong or otherwise morally unwarranted. The utilitarian can make no sense of this requirement, since what counts as right or wrong, warranted or unwarranted, can emerge only after the utilitarian calculations have been made. In other words, our intuitive conception of equality requires a standard of right and wrong that is understood and implemented prior to utilitarian calculations. That is, it requires a pre-utilitarian standard of justice. And this entails the rejection of utilitarianism. Thus, the utilitarian aggregation requirement not only does a poor job of interpreting our intuitive conception of equality, but is also actually incompatible with this conception.

THE LEGACY OF THE AGE OF EMPIRE This problem with utilitarianism is a serious, but not necessarily fatal, one. The debates between utilitarians and their opponents still rage with a fury

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undimmed by utilitarianism’s passing years. Utilitarianism is, I think it is fair to say, still one of the contenders for the title of “best moral theory.” Due to the time-lag effect noted at the beginning of this chapter, utilitarianism played at most a tangential role in shaping people’s attitudes toward animals during the nineteenth century. As we have seen, for example, Henry Salt’s case for animal rights, written toward the end of the age of empire, had its roots in the far older moral tradition based on the idea of natural law. The legacy of utilitarianism, however, is far more pronounced: It provides one of the simplest, clearest, and most immediately recognizable cases for the moral claims of animals. The case was developed by Peter Singer in his seminal book, Animal Liberation. The case is a simple one. Take one human practice involving animals, for example, the rearing and killing of animals for food. Then, take one form of utilitarianism, for example, the currently popular preference utilitarianism. Then, assessing the moral validity of the practice involves weighing the preferences alternately satisfied and frustrated by the practice against the preferences alternately satisfied and frustrated by abandoning the practice. Singer argues that utilitarianism yields a clear and unambiguous conclusion: Since, as I have said, none of these practices [of raising animals intensively] cater for anything more than our pleasures of taste, our practice of rearing and killing other animals in order to eat them is a clear instance of the sacrifice of the most important interests of other beings to satisfy trivial interests of our own . . . we must stop this practice, and each of us has a moral obligation to cease supporting this practice.18 As Singer sees it, the issue is simply one of weighing our relatively trivial preferences for gustatory satisfaction against the preferences of cattle, pigs, chickens, and other animals for a decent life free from undue suffering. And, seen in these terms, it is clear that utilitarianism would license the abandonment of meat eating. Critics of utilitarianism, however, have not been as quick to grant this conclusion. Tom Regan, although a prominent defender of animal rights, sees the conclusions a utilitarian is able to draw in this arena as equivocal at best. The preferences we would have to include in the utilitarian calculus would not be restricted to those for gustatory satisfaction, but would also incorporate those of humans whose vital interests were bound up with the animal husbandry industry, including the interests of their dependents. So human interests as rudimentary as having a job, feeding a family, and so on would also have to be included in the utilitarian calculations. Given that the human interests involved go beyond the merely gustatory, Regan argues, it is far from

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clear that utilitarianism can yield a definitive conclusion even in the apparently straightforward case of animal husbandry. And matters would become even more unclear if we switched our attention to, for example, animal experimentation for medical research. Other recent approaches to understanding and justifying the moral claims of animals, accordingly, trace back to different, older moral traditions. Tom Regan has developed a sophisticated case for the moral claims of animals based on the notion of rights, an approach that can be traced back to natural law theories of the medieval period.19 I, on the other hand, have argued that the moral claims of animals can be justified by way of a form of contractarian moral theory that traces back to the work of Immanuel Kant.20 Nevertheless, the legacy for animals of the age of empire is a clear and important one: providing a moral framework within which the claims of animals can be advanced and vigorously defended.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Narrative Dominion or The Animals Write Back? Animal Genres in Literature and the Arts teresa mangum

Represented animals, like represented humans, often find themselves at the mercy of whatever genres constitute the available repertoire of representations. During the nineteenth-century, character-driven and ideologically charged narratives dominated not only North American, British, and European fiction, but also the visual arts, poetry, and even, one could argue, the narratives of science. The individual, interior life—what we would now describe as interiority, subjectivity, or consciousness—deeply preoccupied American, British, and Continental artists, as it did the thinkers who would shape and define the fields of psychology and sociology during the same centuries. In stylistically and formally distinct artistic works, we see evidence of this intensifying focus on the individual. European and British Romantic poets increasingly turned their gaze from sublime aspects of the natural world to the distinctive character and emotions of ordinary people, previously often deemed beneath the interest of “high” art. By the mid-nineteenth century, writers and artists not only focused on nonelite human beings, but also sought representational strategies commensurate

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with the social turmoil brought on by the transformation of the Western world into an industrial, capitalist economy utterly dependent on laborers. Art suddenly needed to accommodate machines, engines, steam, rural depopulation, urban slums, and filth, as well as campaigns for the vote, for education, for a militaristic rush to secure an empire, and protests against the abuses consequent to imperialism. In Britain, writers like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell and visual artists such as Thomas Faed, Richard Redgrave, and Hubert von Herkomer increasingly turned to a realistic aesthetic grounded in empirical observation and a desire for social reform, while painters such as Rosa Bonheur captured animals on canvas in Europe. The formation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 signaled that, for many, animals were among the oppressed populations in England, and the genres that appealed to artists and audiences with a social reform agenda quickly spilled over to animals. Ironically, however, despite growing interest in animal intelligence, emotions, and even souls, artists and writers sought to comprehend nonhuman species by situating them in narrative forms through which humans were trying to comprehend members of their own species. Not surprisingly, animals posed unique representational problems. Renaissance scholar Erica Fudge describes the difficulties a would-be animal biographer

FIGURE 7.1: Anonymous. Rosa Bonheur’s Studio. 1862. Prints. Picture Collection, The

Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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faces, lamenting the absence of historical evidence on which biographies are built. Lacking language, animals leave no paper trail in their own words.1 A version of this problem also faced the writer, artist, even the scientist in modernizing Europe who sought to represent the “character” of animals and hence animal characters. On one hand, the fate of living animals can be read as a grim story of abjection. René Descartes’s 1637 A Discourse on Method had characterized animals as insensate automata or machines who had no self-conscious awareness of pain. This argument still justified working domestic animals literally to death, well into our period.2 Unrestrained exploitation of land and people in the far reaches of empire extended to animals, some of which were hunted to near extinction. On the other hand, in the eighteenth century, philosophers such as David Hume (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739–1740) or later Jeremy Bentham (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789) and John Stuart Mill (“Three Essays on Religion,” 1874) argued variously for the existence of animal suffering, animal souls, and animals’ right to human respect and care.3 By the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s development of already-circulating conceptions of natural selection in On the Origin of Species (1859) asserted kinship between humans and other animals.4 Animals—as a category and as living beings—were thus mired in the oftencontradictory eighteenth- and nineteenth-century human aesthetic and ideological foundations on which not only science but particular modes and genres in the arts rested. The range and kinds of narrative arts were themselves proliferating in response to the spread of literacy. As a result, a capacious market opened for old and newly emerging imaginative forms, and animals quickly assumed important roles in all of these narrative forms. An optimistic reader might conclude that this merging of human art form and fictional animal demonstrated the growing cultural importance of living animals. A pessimist would counter that the price of that promotion was the obliteration of living animals’ actual physiology, material conditions, and cognition. In fact, few such marked cultural shifts are straightforward or unidirectional. Slanting human genres to accommodate the demands of animal characterization may have won at least small gains for animals themselves. Animal characters secured a place for some species within the human imagination, probably even within human history, by populating human plots. Moreover, powerful observers of animals often found that animal nature, like human nature, exceeded their grasp. While the whale is routinely treated as symbolic of human trials in Herman Melville’s 1851 epic, Moby Dick; or, The Whale, for example, the novel obsessively documents whaling expeditions, the whale’s behavior, its body composition, and its utter inaccessibility to human understanding. In such moments, an animal character’s otherness fleetingly asserts itself.5

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Skeptics then and now deride the mimetic tendency to cloak humans in sheep’s clothing, arguing that such anthropomorphism merely masks human self-absorption in fur and feathers and in so doing further distances art’s consumers from nonhuman animals. In most instances, this criticism rings true. Penned in by the conventions of character and plot that organize genres, animals cannot escape the binary opposition that separates humans from nonhuman animals. Still, the increasingly scientific approach to observation over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the emphasis on imagined thoughts and feelings, quotidian life, and detailed, localized settings often led to productive tensions with anthropomorphic representations of animals in popular literature and art. The great power of the best of these texts is that in their sheer alien otherness, in the quiet yet shocking details of a being’s not-human-ness, the animal characters sometimes baffle conventions of representation, if only via the startling details of their particularity caught by an observant artist’s brush, chisel, camera, or pen. These moments of animal intractability sometimes launch an “animal” commentary on “the human” as a category, analogous to the way studies of queerness produce consciousness of “straightness,” thus uniquely educating the imagination. In this chapter, I offer a too brief, too sweeping consideration of several of the most popular narrative genres into which animals were herded, many of which came to fullest expression in the nineteenth century when the great popularity of the novel nudged poetry and painting into a narrative turn. Harriet Ritvo, James Turner, and Keith Thomas, among others, have discussed the heightened concern about animal suffering and welfare in nineteenth-century Britain, in particular, a preoccupation that filtered into British art and literature of the period.6 Because my own background is in nineteenth-century British literature, my examples will tilt in that direction. One of the great lessons that humanistic animal studies are teaching us is the pervasiveness of animals in the arts throughout history. Even scholars who focus solely on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will therefore find innumerable counterexamples to challenge the aesthetic taxonomy I sketch. In the midst of a heterogeneous, contradictory collection of represented animals, all of which deserve careful study, the aesthetic forms I focus on in this chapter form one powerful current in a deluge of invented animals. With that caveat, I turn to several of the most popular genres of this period. Animals inhabit the vast body of work we too simply categorize as “children’s literature.” A bird can unexpectedly transform an empirical narrative of progress into a “gothic” tableau. The bildungsroman, particularly in the first-person form, required readers to accept an animal as a protagonist, and the attachment to animals manifested in portraits of such animal protagonists motivated elegies for pets. Finally, in the later nineteenth-century, animals play important roles in genres of imperial adventure fiction. Animals also haunt science fiction. When empire

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and technology go terribly wrong, these dystopias unleash the truth about the violence and abuse animals often faced. In each of these forms of art and literature, the human genre tames the animal with an anthropomorphic whip. The humanness of these genres and modes consume, sympathize with, and strain against animalness. Yet animal alterity also bites back, ripping at the human flesh of genres, exposing the amorality of the animal, and inviting the curiosity, fear, shame, and compassion of a writer, painter, reader, or viewer willing to bare the throat of her own imprisoning, anthropocentric expectations.7 Children’s literature, one might argue, lays the groundwork for a lifetime of imaginative expectations. As much an emerging field of publication as a specific genre or form, children’s literature has long included animal narratives. Thomas Boreman, who is likely to have been the first British bookseller of literature explicitly marketed to children, began publication with his own book, A Description of Three Hundred Animals, in 1730. Sarah Trimmer, a popular eighteenth-century writer of moral fiction for children, published Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children Respecting Their Treatment of Animals (a title later softened to The History of the Robins) in 1786. Many of these early books seek an appropriate categorical home for representations of real as well as imagined animals. Options included hymns, light chapbook verse, moral tales, and natural histories for children. Yet even these early stories were also intrigued by the intimacy between humans and nonhuman animals. Sarah Catherine Martin’s playful illustrated book, The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and her dog, published in 1805, remained popular for a century. Both the human and the canine character are treated as amusing eccentrics, but even the use of capital letters in the title maintains a careful hierarchy of species. Tess Cosslett’s important study, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914, offers a rich examination of the importance of literary animals in the formation of children’s subjectivity; Cosslett also argues for the strategic use of anthropomorphism in children’s ethical education.8 The connection between children and animals offers an unexpected bridge from children’s literature to a powerful adult genre painting of science in which the bond between child and animal interrogates the implicit narrative of progress. One of the most provocative animal paintings from the eighteenth century, Joseph Wright’s 1768 oil Experiment on a Bird in the Airpump, employs a telling juxtaposition to create a narrative focused on an animal subject.9 In the painting, a scientist evacuates air from a glass jar that holds a collapsing bird as the audience reacts. An elderly man ponders the experiment, a young man looks attentively, while lovers register indifference. Only the children in the painting look horrified. And the bird? Wright deliberately substitutes the common sparrows generally used in such experiments with a white cockatoo—presumably a family pet. While art historians focus on the picture

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as a portrayal of science and its impact on humans, the painting is also an early animal-centered narrative. The image depends on a crucial fictional trope that recurs in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction from sentimental novels to domestic realism to early and late gothic—the passive heroine overwhelmed by external forces. Here the bird caught in the cage is literally just that, a bird, and yet its central position and the grief of the focalized child witness positions the animal as victimized protagonist. Its white purity, its faintness, its vulnerability and victimization all suggest that the animal has begun to come into its own as a central character in narrative art. The leap in the status of living animals from the eighteenth to the midnineteenth century has been well documented by animal historians such as Brian Harrison, Turner, and Ritvo; in the arts, as in the realm of living animals, better treatment of animals was often bedeviled by contradiction.10 By the mid-nineteenth century, laws forbade centuries-old sports such as bearbaiting, cockfighting, and dogfighting. These legal changes occurred in part due to compassion for animals, but also because such practices threatened to dehumanize human participants. Images like Emile-Edouards Mouchy’s oil painting, A Physiological Experiment with Vivisection of a Dog (1832), argue that vivisection inspired heightened interest in the physical structure (as well as suffering) of animals, even as farmers turned to animal scientists for improved breeding of domestic livestock.11 Farm animals are ubiquitous in paintings of rural life, sometimes serving as key figures or crucial companions to the human “protagonist” of narrative paintings, but more often as stock properties establishing setting and mood, as Christiana Payne notes in regard to sheep in the British pastoral tradition.12 Quite differently, eighteenth-century livestock portraits often used animal subjects to advertise success in breeding experiments rather than to stress the character of animals or situate the subjects in narrative. Their commercial nature and their animal subject matter branded the art as debased for many viewers.13 Even so, the occasional steers, for instance those in Thomas Bewick’s painting of The Chillingham Bull (1789), George Stubbs’s The Lincolnshire Ox (1791), and Thomas Weaver’s The Durham Ox (1802), achieved fame by touring Britain first in the flesh and then on canvas.14 George Stubbs gained renown for paintings of sporting horses, after coming to know animals from the inside out. His meticulous drawings of animal musculature and skeletal structure grounded the portraits. His work demonstrates the intersection of art and “natural history” that characterized the careers of many animal artists of the period, a topic beautifully argued and illustrated in Ann Shelby Blum’s Picturing Nature.15 Creating animal celebrities and accustoming the public to the individuation of an animal—by giving the animal a name and training the depicted animal’s gaze on the spectator—Stubbs and other artists laid the groundwork for the popular animal “autobiographies” of the nineteenth century. By the

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mid-nineteenth century, cattle and other farm animals had secured clear title to portraiture, as one sees in Edwin Landseer’s famous 1867 Wild Cattle of Chillingham, which returns to the white cattle painted by Bewick nearly a century earlier. In Landseer’s large canvas, a muscled bull, juxtaposed against a threatening sky, rears its head alertly over an anxious cow and calf in a silent drama of domestic protection. Advertising and portraiture had given way to animal narrative. The practice was further sanctioned by Queen Victoria’s routine commissions for paintings of innumerable pets. The emerging animal subjectivity in the paintings of Stubbs, Wright, and many other eighteenthcentury artists thus prepared audiences for a flood of animal paintings. No one was more important than Landseer, whose innumerable animal subjects—from Queen Victoria’s pets to dogs of legend and fiction to heroic highland stags— secured the status of “character” for animals in mid- and late nineteenthcentury Britain.16 Animals assume such a crucial role in the narrative imagination that by the nineteenth century they begin to “author” autobiographies and novels. In one of the most famous literary instances—Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877)—an aging horse recalls his cruel past.17 As Moira Ferguson and others have argued, the novel draws on a powerful protest genre from earlier in the period, the “slave narrative,” to criticize violence against animals and to invoke sympathy by transforming a “silent beast” into an eloquent narrator.18 Ironically, the bildungsroman is generally defined as a narrative structured by a person’s moral or spiritual development, both categories of being and consciousness that should have resolutely excluded animals. Sewell’s novel signals a growing desire on the part of writers and visual artists to imagine and articulate the very consciousness, emotions, intelligence, language, and, most controversially, souls that animals were denied by philosophers, theologians, and scientists alike. The goal of the narrative was to change human behavior by challenging the exploitation of laboring animals as well as brutality against humans and their separate but equal other species. As Ferguson points out, “Horses become a decoding machinery that manifest the callousness of the new”; thus the novel carefully inscribes the intimate physical details of horses’ lives, their urban employment drawing cabs and carts, and their inability to comprehend the human vagaries to which they are subject.19 If animals lack language, their imagined experiences offer an alternative semiotics as both story and argument. Present-day readers routinely assume Black Beauty is female, probably due to the name Beauty and possibly because the horse’s dependence on men, victimization, and abject responses so painfully signify as feminine. In part, this abjection results from the intertwining of autobiography and slave narrative. But “animal” also registers as abject because the text challenges the tendency to read against the narrator’s animalness by insisting on the distinctiveness of the animal body. Black Beauty, like a female character, is abused by fashion, but

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FIGURE 7.2: Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. The Wild Cattle at Chillingham. Engravings

from Landseer: Reproduced in heliotype by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. 1876. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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“fashion” here means blinders and a chafing bit on the tongue. Failure translates into a knacker’s yard rather than a street corner. While Sewell situates her speaking horses in the temporalities of the bildungsroman and in the foibles of humans (Black Beauty’s mother tries to instill class pride, for example), his animal nature brands itself on the plot in finite images of animal character such as food (“hot mash”) and sensual pleasures (an off-leash gallop). Like other animal novels identified as autobiographies by their titles, such as the American novel Beautiful Joe: A Dog’s Own Story (1893) by Margaret Marshall Saunders and the British novel Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog (1894) by Gordon Stables, Black Beauty follows the youth-to-maturity trajectory of the bildungsroman.20 But in the case of Black Beauty, the animal-narrator repeatedly describes bodily pain: the flay of the whip in training or the destruction of a horse’s knees by falling. These plot events refuse to collapse an animal character into a human with four legs, despite the novel’s recourse to anthropomorphism to gain readers’ sympathies for a horse. Intriguingly, the dog-narrator in Beautiful Joe, which was published after winning a contest sponsored by an animal welfare organization, actually comments on the power of the interplay of the bildungsroman genre with an animal’s character to move human readers: “I am an old dog now, and writing, or rather getting a friend to write, the story of my life. I have seen my mistress laughing and crying over a little book that she says is a story of a horse’s life, and sometimes she puts the book down close to my nose to let me see the pictures.”21 Fancifully asserting the doglike adoration and incomprehension of the dog-narrator, Beautiful Joe at once romanticizes human and animal attachment and registers each species’s distance from the other. Most important, one animal novel insists on the power of an animal bound into a human genre to inspire change. The same emotional attachments to animals, particularly to pets, that created a market for fictional animal autobiographies must have also motivated the many elegies lamenting the deaths of beloved actual animals. Traditionally, the elegy, a formal lament for the death of a fallen hero, was one of the most elevated forms of poetry, often written in couplets. Elegies traditionally focus on abstract qualities or great accomplishments of the dead, rather than personal details or idiosyncrasies. Ironically, these poems about death motivated narratives of animals’ lives and in so doing inevitably focused on the most common details and quirks of animal character. Christine Kenyon-Jones discusses the famous example of George Gordon, Lord Byron’s “Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog,” which blithely insulted Byron’s human friends by praising his dog Boatswain for possessing “all the virtues of Man without his vices.”22 Popular magazines were replete with what can be loosely defined as dog elegies that ranged from simple plaints to elaborate lyrics, such as “R. G.’s” “My Dog’s Epitaph. By the Subaltern” (1826) and the anonymous

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“Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” (1827), both in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, and Louise Imogen Guiney’s “To a Dog’s Memory” in The Century (1889).23 An entire volume of stories about dogs was collected from the magazine The Spectator in 1895, while a collection entitled The Dog in British Poetry, published in 1893, included over thirty “Elegiac Poems” written to and about lost dogs.24 George R. Jesse’s two-volume History of the British Dog (1866) included not only elegies written to heroic and beloved dogs, but also poems and narrative paintings that imagined how dogs grieving their deceased masters might express their grief if they were given voice.25 Indeed, the frequent appearance in Punch of parodies lampooning such grief may be the best evidence of animal elegies’ ubiquity, as we see in “An Elegy on the Death of a Pet Dog” (1900), in which a caller “peered around the room / And spied a cosy seat— Alas, for little Fido’s doom! ‘Twas Fido’s pet retreat!”26 What these poems share is that in trying to capture a human’s sudden recognition of the depth of loss when an animal companion dies, the narrators are forced to recall the particulars of the animal, its distinctness from humans, its unique animal contributions to the writer’s daily life. In all of the serious poems (Punch aside), the human speaker finds himself or herself fighting to articulate the unique dignity and importance of an animal in part to explain to themselves and to others how a human could feel such deep grief at the loss of a “mere animal.” To that end, the poet reaches for the most noble and profound and traditional of forms, the formal, weighty ode or elegy, a most unlikely home for beings so seldom equated in importance with ordinary humans, much less the heroes or heads of state for whom this form was conventionally reserved. While pets and working animals dominated these domestic genres, exotic animals haunted the margins of respectable art. Wild animals had long been a feature of what Richard Altick calls the Shows of London in his wide-ranging study of street fairs, traveling shows, and animal acts. These shows were forced to the margins of cities like London in the late eighteenth century because of their appeal to the masses and their associations with vulgar display.27 Their removal occurred only decades before the same species reentered the metropolis in the great zoological gardens of London, Paris, and other European capitals.28 While these exotic animals fascinated domestic audiences, fiction invited readers to plunge into distant settings where they, rather than wild animals, were the intruders. The tension concerning who would be the conqueror and who would be the victim kept spectators and readers in a state of anxious pleasure in both paintings and novels. In these works, exotic animals stood in for competing arguments over the acquisitiveness, exploitation, expansion, and national upheaval fomented by imperialism. If Landseer was the master of domestic animals and domesticity, Eugène Delacroix’s sometimes shocking paintings of wild animals at play and at war

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FIGURE 7.3: Robert Clayton. The Kangaroo. 1836. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

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FIGURE 7.4: Anonymous. The Python Swallowing the Boa at the London Zoological

Gardens. 1871. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

caught the elegance, brutality, and sensuality of animals in a way most others seemed only to imitate. The contrast is evident in the differences between Landseer’s 1839 oil, Isaac van Amburgh and His Animals, which represents the “peaceable kingdom” fantasy that harkens back to biblical accounts of paradise, and just a few of Delacroix’s works. In Landseer’s meeting of domestic and imperial tropes, the American Van Amburgh, who allegedly invented the modern animal-tamer act in 1833, lounges in a cage with growling, snarling leopards, tigers, and lions, accompanied by a lamb. As Louise Lippincott and Andreas Blühm point out, spectators of the painting are positioned inside the cage alongside Van Amburgh and his animals. (They also note that in a later painting the lion-tamer wields a crowbar as the animals cower and that the great cats’ violence exploded in 1883, when they mauled Van Amburgh’s daughter to death.)29 Quite differently, in Delacroix’s 1830 painting Jeune tigre jouant avec sa mère (A young lion plays with his mother), two sinuous and striped tiger bodies lie end to end as the large and powerfully muscled young tiger paws his mother’s haunches.30 Delacroix’s 1828 lithograph Cheval sauvage terrassé par un tigre (Wild horse felled by a tiger)31 and both the 1842 Cheval attaqué par

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FIGURE 7.5: Anonymous. Van Amburgh, the Brute Tamer of Pompeii! 1838. Etchings. Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

une lionne (Horse attacked by a lion) and the 1844 Lion devorant un cheval (Lion devouring a horse)32 revel in the terrible differences that mark the predatory nature of animals and the amoral competition that governs their behavior. These paintings explosively document audiences’ simultaneous fear of and longing for access to untamed animal wildness. These contradictory desires drive the plots of painted narratives that feature animal drama as well as the plots of empire adventure novels, which inevitably included violent scenes of animals in India, Africa, and the other world regions exploited by Western intruders. Nowhere is the animal at once so ferocious and so admired as in the genre that has been called empire fiction, empire adventure fiction, and even imperial male romance. Anxieties over the implications of evolution together with anthropological narratives of “savage races” and lost civilizations fueled desires

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FIGURE 7.6: Eugene Delacroix. Lion Devouring a Horse. 1844. Lithograph on chine

collé. University of Iowa Museum of Art Gift of The Friends of the Museum of Art.

and doubts about the place of British adventurers in territories. This was especially true for regions that remained “wild” and thus largely inaccessible to outsiders, as we can see in King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), the best-known novels of H. Rider Haggard.33 Haggard uses animal bodies in selfenclosed, emblematic scenes that condition our responses to the human actions in the novel as a whole. He perfects a technique that had been used by missionary writers before him to inspire donations and that would soon become central to so-called “lost race” novels, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), set on a remote South American island, and later to films like King Kong (1933).34 In both of Haggard’s novels, the main action of the novel halts early on as human violence is temporarily displaced by battling beasts. Intriguingly, surreptitious scenes of animal violence in empire fiction are usually anticipated by hunts in which human characters confidently assume they sit securely at the head of the predatory hierarchy. Their confidence resides in the possession of technology such as guns, but also compasses, wagons, wheels, the means to construct protected camps, and the ability to control the environment through elemental technologies such as building fires. The imperialists’ arrogance gives way in Haggard’s novels not only to fear that humans might become prey, but to the possibility that uncharted wilderness signals a world of unimaginable power, struggle, fury, and shocking death. Popularizations of Darwin’s theories are translated into the idiom of imperial

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FIGURE 7.7: Anonymous. The Missionary’s Escape from the Lion. 1857. Prints. Picture Collection, The Branch Libraries, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

horror as human characters find themselves incidental spectators to animal characters and their stories. In both King Solomon’s Mines and She, these scenes have powerful critical force, even though confined to a few pages early in the progress of the narrative. Each scene threatens the human characters with death but also with other more amorphous dangers, including the impossibility of knowing friends from enemies in the formless confusion of the jungle, the sheer indecipherability of sudden violence, and the threat of being destroyed by one’s own exposed animal “savagery.” Whereas the novels depend on readers’ willingness to choose sides in the inevitable battles toward which the actions build, these apparently gratuitous scenes suggest the arbitrariness of the British intruders’ support for one group of native people against another. The scenes also undermine the confidence of characters and plots alike in Britishness and the codes of behavior it signifies. In the case of King Solomon’s Mines, the three main characters—the African guide and narrator, Allan Quartermain; Lord Henry Curtis, who is searching for his lost brother; and Lord Henry’s companion, Captain John Good—have delayed their search for a relative lost in Africa to indulge in a killing spree. The chapter “Elephant Hunt” opens with a description that transforms Africa into the London zoo. In this “paradise of game,” the three male lead characters give up only when “we were too tired to follow [the elephants], and perhaps also a little sick of the slaughter, eight elephants being a pretty good bag for one day.” In a long day of strange events, the men are deeply shaken by the auditory

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scene of animal combat and its visual aftermath. Hearing “violent scuffling” and “a succession of the most awful roars,” white travelers and black servants alike are stunned by “a confused mass, yellow and black in colour, staggering and struggling towards us.” So mysterious that the moving object can only be referred to as “it,” Quartermain adds, “By this time it had fallen, and was rolling over and over on the ground, and by the time we reached it it struggled no longer, but was quite still.” The narrative and “imperial” confusion caused by the sound and the untranslatable sight of animal combat is evident in the sentence that anticipates the unveiling of the mystery, a sentence that disrupts the action and draws attention to itself as an act of interpretation, “And this was what it was.”35 The narrator continues: On the grass there lay a sable antelope bull—the most beautiful of all the African antelopes—quite dead, and transfixed by its great curved horns was a magnificent black-maned lion, also dead. What had happened evidently was this. The sable antelope had come down to drink at the pool where the lion—no doubt the same we had heard—had been lying in wait. While the antelope was drinking the lion had sprung upon him, but was received upon the sharp curved horns and transfixed. I once saw the same thing happen before. The lion, unable to free himself, had torn and bitten at the back and neck of the bull, which, maddened with fear and pain, had rushed on till it dropped dead.36 Here prey and predator blur into an indistinguishable figure for pain and death. Drawn to the same resource—the water—these wild animals find themselves condemned to unthinking, inexorable mutual destruction. Their mutual attack transcends the usual prey/predator dichotomy as the creatures drive one another to death. The scene provides an oblique figure for encounters between competing cultures, encounters that would conventionally privilege the stronger, better-armed, more cunning participant. To the contrary, these supplementary scenes of battling animals threaten readers and characters alike. The scenes imply that in the wild zones of empire that are the homes of untamed animals and their “domestic” narratives—Africa in this case—European attempts to dominate and control far-flung spaces and beings may have unanticipated and devastating consequences. Even as the British explorers assert their claim on animals, Africans, and Africa itself, this oddly unmotivated miniature animal narrative mirrors human behavior back to the spectators in and outside the novel as bestial violence. The comparable scene in Haggard’s novel She goes further. The scene opens as the middle-aged Cambridge tutor Holly and his young ward, whose name Leo invokes the lion of British royal iconography, attempt to sleep in the heat,

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steam, and mosquito attacks of an African marsh. Realizing that “two dark moving objects” are approaching through the surrounding water, Leo identifies them as lions and shoots the lioness, killing her immediately, thereby once again preventing white men from becoming prey rather than predator. The male lion still threatens; “suddenly the lion gave a most terrific snarling roar and sprang forward onto the bank, dragging something black with him.” The narrator recalls, “ ‘Allah!’ shouted Mahomed, ‘a crocodile has got him by the leg!’ and sure enough he had. We could see the long snout with its gleaming lines of teeth and the reptile body behind it.” Once again, a highly self-conscious sentence marks the moment when the narrator interrupts the narrative to meditate on an emblematic scene of battling beasts: “And then followed an extraordinary scene indeed”: The lion managed to get well on to the bank, the crocodile half standing and half swimming, still nipping his hind leg. He roared till the air quivered with the sound, and then, with a savage, shrieking snarl, turned round the clawed hold of the crocodile’s head. The crocodile shifted his grip, having, as we afterwards discovered, had one of his eyes torn out, and slightly turned over, and instantly the lion got him by the throat and held on, and then over and over they rolled upon the bank struggling hideously. It was impossible to follow their movements, but when next we got a clear view the tables had turned, for the crocodile, whose head seemed to be a mass of gore, had got the lion’s body in his iron jaws just above the hips, and was squeezing him and shaking him to and fro. For his part the tortured brute, roaring in agony, was clawing and biting madly at his enemy’s scaly head, and fixing his great hind claws in the crocodile’s, comparatively speaking, soft throat, ripping it open as one would rip a glove. Then, all of sudden, the end came. The lion’s head fell forward on the crocodile’s back, and with an awful groan he died, and the crocodile, after standing for a minute motionless, slowly rolled over on to his side, his jaws still fixed across the carcasses of the lion, which we afterwards found he had bitten almost in halves. This duel to the death was a wonderful and a shocking sight, and one that I suppose few men have seen—and thus it ended.37 In this scene, the European hunters are at once potential prey and spectators as they watch these predatory species from two worlds. While both lions and crocodiles can function on land or in the water, each is clearly most at home in its own milieu. The animals are not a version of degraded humanity to which humans might fall; they are not equal combatants whose destruction validates that humans have met their match. Caught in human narratives of imperialistic

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conquest, these inset animal stories tell both stories of cycles of life and death outside the bounds of human ethics and stories of gratuitous destruction of victims by humans. The animals’ terrible travail where land and water meet comments, if obliquely, on the inevitable destruction when Europeans encroach on the borders of people, animals, and places for whom “civilization” signals annihilation. Bestial battles in these two novels—and in numerous other empire invasion narratives—thus communicate puzzling, contradictory, fragmentary, but significant resistance to the apparent narrative drive of these Eurocentric (and from our vantage point, animal) plots. Haggard frequently resorts to the embodiment of now-clichéd fears that imperialists are easily overwhelmed by the “savage within” when confronted with what these novels inevitably cast as savagery without. But these emblematic animal scenes also articulate a more profound question at the heart of these nationalistic texts. Venturing into territories that were not only hostile but sufficient unto themselves prompted genuine fear that Europeans were in the worst sense invaders—predators who, far worse than animals, actively chose to act in ways that (ironically) exposed their instinctive violence and domination through their relentless encroachments. Contrary to these rare scenes in Haggard’s novels, empire narratives for the most part celebrate European triumphs over people and creatures across the globe. At the same time that Haggard was writing, photographs document elaborately staged hunting parties in areas of India under British control. These photographs juxtapose carefully posed, cosseted tourists with the achingly beautiful bodies of tigers that have been carelessly stacked at the amateur hunters’ feet. These unintended, highly realistic representations of animal death tell at least two incompatible stories. The imperialist “human” story celebrates bravado, human intelligence, and technological superiority by echoing ancient hunting tales. In direct contradiction, the “animal” story depicts a tragedy of epic proportions, a moral tale of waste and exploitation, and a relatively new and distinctly animal genre of extinction. These competing stories would culminate in the twentieth-century in an entwined and all-too-real tale of the destruction of human and animal life that is hard not to attribute to centuries of European intervention. The same uneasiness over the increasing incompatibility between human and animal characters and plots when these collided in empire fiction also inspired attention to the abuse of animals in late nineteenth-century science fiction. Not surprisingly, Darwinian theory is the master narrative that gives birth to narratives focused on the fragility of distinctions between human and animal. While animals speak in autobiographical fiction and are spoken about in narratives of social realism, the forms most invested in Darwinism threaten readers with the dissolution of the boundaries on which these other genres

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depend. In 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life had shaken the Victorian world by writing humans and animals into the same historical narrative. His later work pushed this project much further. Part science, part sentiment, Darwin’s 1872 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals claims that animals feel and display love, loyalty, anger, and terror.38 While this book demonstrates emotional continuities between animals and humans, Darwin carefully maintains the barriers between civilization and savagery. These barriers secure a privileged place for humans, protecting them from the imperatives of instinctive, reactive violence associated with animals. Though science fiction comes into its own in the late Victorian period, writers had long wrestled with the possibility that the boundary between humans and animals was more fantasy than fact, despite biblical and scientific claims that humans crowned the animal kingdom. In the chapter “A Voyage to the Land of the Houyhnhnms” from his political satire Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift ironically asserted the superiority of animals to humans. Gulliver is humiliated to learn that the Houyhnhnms, who are speaking horses, find humans to be dirty, ignorant, despicable, and repugnant. Gulliver returns to London perversely bestialized by his contact with the Houyhnhnms, but in this case being bestial means that he, too, now finds his own species loathsome in comparison with the superior “beasts.” Stripped of confidence in the distinctions between horses and humans, Gulliver condemns humanity in a satiric mode that is ultimately indifferent to animals themselves. Fear of violations of the order of the animal kingdom, however, repeatedly surfaced throughout the century. The often-sentimental Landseer invoked public anger with his early painting Cat’s Paw (1824). Another terrifying glimpse of cross-species violence, a monkey holds the paw of a shrieking cat to a hot iron stove as another kitten mews, clawing in fear at its basket, and a second cat, presumably the mother, shrinks and hisses from a nearby cabinet top. Clutching the cat’s belly with a fearfully human hand and clenching the cat’s lower body between its legs, the monkey threatens viewers with perverse sexuality as well as violence. No human figures are present. The painting has been attributed to Landseer’s interest in fables, particularly Jean de La Fontaine’s mid-seventeenth-century fable “The Monkey and the Cat.” In the fable a monkey persuades a cat to snatch chestnuts from a stove, which the monkey would then steal from the cat.39 But the image also seems indebted to the popular gothic novels of the late eighteenth century, in which powerful male villains sadistically threaten their young charges. In Landseer’s painting, as in Wright’s earlier painting that dealt explicitly with empirical experimentation, scientific narratives of natural history, the fascination with animals, and the shadowy fears of interspecies contact, violence, and bestiality look back to the gothic novel. But Landseer’s painting, like Wright’s, also anticipates the expression of

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analogous anxieties in the late nineteenth-century form of the science fiction novel. The preeminent example of this later genre is H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). In Wells’s novel of a mad vivisectionist, the clear boundaries and hierarchies that separated humans and animals throughout much of Western history are surgically hybridized. Hyperbolic horror results as Wells recasts the gothic into the terrors of unprincipled science. Dr. Moreau is a vivisectionist gone mad. Stripped of his credentials in Britain due to his brutality to animals, the failed scientist sets up an experimental station on an island. As the shipwrecked narrator gradually discovers, Moreau conducts long, protracted surgeries on animals in an attempt to transform them into humans by carving the “beast” from their very bodies. The narrator is equally horrified by the vague simulacra of humanity he finds in these tortured bodies and their hesitant speech and by his gravitation toward these “beast men” in his loneliness. Finally, the fiercer animals—emboldened by drink—murder Moreau and slowly slide back into their animal natures. Like Gulliver, the human narrator leaves the island but can never leave behind the animals. He, too, becomes a misanthropic recluse, seeing the beast in every human he passes on the street. Similar in effect to the unintended consequences of the animal characters in empire fiction, Wells’s representations of animals, like the genre of science fiction itself, produce a counternarrative to that of the human protagonist. Perversely, for those readers who would have been most engaged with the victims rather than the perpetrators of vivisection, one effect of the novel is to argue for the beauty and desirability of animals in their inherent animalness, once the anthropomorphic tendency of fiction has been exposed in the literalizing of that impulse through the abuse of science. The return of the beast is finally as welcome as it is reassuring. The difference that marks species divisions becomes more than a mere reassertion of human dominance and superiority in the novel. The animalness of the animal has been so violated that it gains value in this futuristic genre that heralded a new century as it closed out the historical period this chapter has surveyed. By the end of the nineteenth century, technological innovations, mass production of images, and advertising further influenced the form and circulation of animal images, animal narratives, and changing assumptions about the nature, meaning, and treatment of living and represented animals. Animals inspired magazine poetry by amateurs and famous writers alike, children’s literature, and novels—from fictional autobiographies that grasped at creature consciousness and fashioned impossible animal voices to social protest fiction, imperial adventure stories, and science fiction. At the same time, genre paintings by Edwin Landseer and others positioned animals as combatants, companions, martyrs, and mourners. Pet cemeteries and cemetery art marked their passing. New visual technologies prompted endless photographs of slain tigers,

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lions, zebras, and elephants, emblematizing European triumph not only over these animals in all their growing representational complexity but also over colonized humans. The insertion of animals into human genres simultaneously demanded forms of sympathy and recognition that threatened fundamental boundaries. These desires could range from fairly scientific attempts to gauge animal intelligence to complex longings to justify the intense attachment humans felt to pets to an anxious search for analogues in the animal world for human aggression and violence. For the most part, these narratives testify to a growing fascination with other species that many Europeans, British, and Americans felt in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Readers, writers, and spectators were particularly drawn to narratives about the animals that lived closest to them, like pets, and narratives about the exotic wild animals of Africa and India that lived farthest away. To render these animals knowable, artists and writers wove them into familiar stories, situations, fictional tropes, and settings. When the artists were most successful, however, even though they were confined to human forms and feelings, the animals wrote back.

notes

Introduction 1. Ceri Crossley, Consumable Metaphors: Attitudes towards Animals and Vegetarianism in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005), p. 39. 2. Maurice Agulhon, “Le Sang des bêtes: Le problème de la protection des animaux en France au XIXème siècle,” Romantisme: Revue du dix-neuvième siècle 31 (1981): 90. Cited in Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in NineteenthCentury Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 5–6. 3. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 131 for the quotation. Other material is from pages 129 and 131. 4. See my essay, “Animals and Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection in Europe,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 19–34. 5. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983). On cockthrowing and bullbaiting especially see Robert Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 34–51. 6. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, pp. 118–122. 7. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, pp. 154 and 150ff. 8. It should be made clear that this binary is ideological. We know from the historical record that workers had pets and involved themselves in the animal protection movement. At the same time, middle-class people were complicit in activities that the animal protection movement was trying to abolish, such as cockfighting and other blood sports. I owe this reminder to Harriet Ritvo’s kind comments on this essay. And, of course, hunting—that blood sport of the wealthy—was not the target of animal protectionists. See Kete, “Animals and Ideology,” p. 22. 9. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, introduction by Eric Hobsbawm (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 70–71. 10. Ritvo, Animal Estate, p. 135.

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11. Ritvo, Animal Estate, p. 127. Ritvo cites Brian Harrison, “Animals and the State,” in Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 12. Archives nationales, Paris, Série F 17 11696 and 11697—Protection des animaux: Encouragements, demandes par la société protectrice des animaux, diffusion de la loi Grammont (circulaire du 10 mars 1894), 1863–1900. 13. Quoted in Katherine C. Grier, “ ‘The Eden of Home’: Changing Understanding of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals in Middle-Class American Households, 1820–1900,” in Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture, ed. Mary J. Henninger-Voss (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), p. 331. 14. Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 182. 15. Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783–1867 (London and New York: Longman, 1979), pp. 88–89. 16. Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) is a caricature of life in Manchester, but has been highly influential in shaping views both then and now of the modern city. Engels’s depiction of working class life is discussed below. 17. Ritvo, Animal Estate, p. 311, n. 1. 18. Higonnet, Paris, p. 187. See also Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). 19. Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 18. 20. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), part 2, pp. 141–314. Reddy is quoting from Patrice Higonnet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 81. 21. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 151. 22. See Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, and Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2005). 23. See Kathleen Kete, “Pets,” in Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, ed. Paula S. Fass (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), vol. 2, pp. 668–672, from which much of following argument about children and pets is drawn. 24. Quoted in Tess Cosslett, “Child’s Place in Nature: Talking Animals in Victorian Children’s Fiction,” in Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 4 (2001): 481. Cosslett gives the name as “Hypolite.” 25. Quoted in Cosslett, “Child’s Place in Nature,” p. 482. 26. Grier, “ ‘The Eden of Home,’ ” p. 345. 27. Cosslett, “Child’s Place in Nature,” p. 481. 28. Cosslett, “Child’s Place in Nature,” p. 487. 29. Cosslett, “Child’s Place in Nature,” p. 487. 30. Grier, “ ‘The Eden of Home,’ ” p. 345. 31. Cosslett, “Child’s Place in Nature,” p. 481.

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32. Cosslett, “Child’s Place in Nature,” p. 483. 33. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 76. 34. Quoted in William H. Sewell, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 224. 35. Sewell, Work and Revolution, pp. 224–225. 36. Sewell, Work and Revolution, p. 14 37. Sewell, Work and Revolution, p. 222. 38. Quoted in Sewell, Work and Revolution, p. 233. 39. N.B.: The English translations of The Condition of the Working Class in England are a bit stronger in their association of workers with animals than the original might always permit. Engels spoke of Bestialität, but his brutalst need not mean bestial unless one allows the leading metaphor to carry the rest. 40. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968), p. 133. 41. Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 134. 42. Ritvo, Animal Estate, p. 129. 43. Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellinek (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973). 44. In March 1824 Javert is alerted to the possibility that Valjean is in Paris. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, trans. Norman Denny (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1982), p. 420. Louis Chevalier says Valjean enters Paris with Cosette at the end of 1823. See Chevalier, Laboring Classes, p. 89. 45. Hugo, Les Misérables, p. 385. 46. Hugo, Les Misérables, p. 423. 47. Hugo, Les Misérables, pp. 403–404. 48. Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 79. 49. Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 87. 50. Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 87. Monadnock is the term used by Corbin in the original French in Le Village des cannibales, 1990. 51. “Between 1,700 and 3,000 people died in Paris in June 1848; between 20,000 and 25,000 died in May 1871 [in the destruction of the Paris Commune].” Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 96. 52. Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 96. 53. On the Game Act of 1671 see P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws, 1671–1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 18–19. On Game Reform Act of 1831, see p 156. 54. John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 168. 55. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, pp. 174–175. 56. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 175. 57. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, pp. 180, 179. 58. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 28. 59. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, pp. 27 and 28ff. for trophies. 60. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 34.

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61. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 34. 62. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 17. MacKenzie cites Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers, p. 129. 63. Grier, “ ‘The Eden of Home,’ ” p. 351. 64. Corbin, Village of Cannibals, p. 149, n. 50. 65. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, pp. 64–65, 76–96; Ritvo, Animal Estate, especially pp. 82–121. On songbirds see Nigel Rothfels’s chapter in this volume. 66. Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 64. 67. Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, p. 64. 68. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature, p. 31. See also Rothfels, Savages and Beasts, and Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 125. 69. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 326. 70. Porter, Greatest Benefit, p. 326. 71. Porter, Greatest Benefit, p. 326. 72. In Porter’s words, Greatest Benefit, p. 329. 73. René Taton, ed., Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. A. J. Pomerans (New York: Basic, 1965). Georges Canguilhem wrote this subsection of “Animal Physiology,” pp. 414–417. Ludwig is discussed on p. 416. 74. Taton, Science, p. 413. Magendie is discussed on page 411. 75. Geoffrey Lloyd, “Pint for the Cat,” review of Par-Delà Nature et Culture, by Philippe Descola (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), Times Literary Supplement, March 17, 2006, p. 22. 76. Lloyd, “Pint for the Cat,” p. 23. 77. Though Rowland’s focus in this chapter is on utilitarianism, which will influence thinking about animal rights in the twentieth century. 78. On vivisection of humans and the history of vivisection in general, see Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 79. Ritvo, Platypus and Mermaid, p. 120. 80. Ritvo, Platypus and Mermaid, p. 121. 81. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 65. 82. Ritvo, Platypus and Mermaid, p. 127. 83. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 65. 84. Ritvo, Platypus and Mermaid, p. 127. 85. See Michael Newton, “Bodies without Souls: The Case of Peter the Wild Boy,” in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 196–197. 86. Douglas Keith Candland, Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 21. Candland is quoting Itard. 87. H. Peter Steeves, “The Familiar Other and Feral Selves: Life at the Human/Animal Boundary,” in The Animal/ Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives, ed. Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 228–264. 88. Steeves, “Familiar Other,” p. 244.

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Chapter 1 1. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), p. 117. 2. Edna Healey, Lady Unknown: The Life of Angela Burdett-Coutts (London: Sedgwick and Jackson, 1978); Diana Orton, Made of Gold: A Biography of Angela Burdett Coutts (London: H. Hamilton, 1980), pp. 213–214. 3. Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998/2000), p. 27. See also Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self (London: Routledge, 1997) and Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Massachusetts: MIT Press 1993). 4. Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 35. 5. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 40. 6. Thomas Kelly, A History of Adult Education in Great Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1962), p. 122. 7. Edward Turner Bennett (ed.), Preface to “Quadrupeds,” in The Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society Delineated–31, ed. Zoological Society (Chiswick: Zoological Society, 1831), p. vi. 8. Kean, Animal Rights, p. 44. 9. Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 67. 10. Edward William Jaquet, The Kennel Club: A History and Record of Its Work (London: Kennel Gazette, 1905), p. 3. 11. Edward C. Ash, Dogs, Their History and Development (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), vol. 1, p. 8; William F. Stifel, The Dog Show: 125 Years of Westminster (New York: The Westminster Kennel Club, 2001), p. 22. 12. Illustrated London News 15 (1849): 33, as quoted in Diana Donald, “ ‘Beastly Sights’: The Treatment of Animals as a Moral Theme in Representations of London, c. 1820–1850,” Art History 22, no. 4 (1999): 540. 13. Harrison Weir, Our Cats and All About Them (Tunbridge Wells: R. Clements and Co., 1889), p. 2. 14. George R. Jesse, Evidence Given before the Royal Commission on Vivisection by George R. Jesse (London, 1875), p. 2. 15. Stifel, Dog Show, p. 24. 16. Jaquet, Kennel Club, p. 121. Also see the debate in Animals’ Guardian, July and August 1891 issues. 17. Jaquet, Kennel Club, p. 8; The Kennel Review 4, no. 40 (December 1885): 191. 18. Kean, Animal Rights, pp. 39–69. 19. Frances Maria Thompson, letter, The Voice of Humanity 1 (1830–1833): 37. 20. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), Annual Report (London: RSPCA, 1875), p. 37. 21. The Royal Commission on Vivisection: Evidence by Miss Lind af Hageby (London: London Anti-Vivisection Council, n.d. [1907]), p. 2. 22. Louise Lind af Hageby and Liesa Schartau, The Shambles of Science, 5th ed. (London: Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society, 1913), p. xii. Also see Hilda Kean, “The Smooth Cool Men of Science: The Feminist and Socialist Response to Vivisection,” History Workshop Journal 40 (autumn 1995): 16–38.

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23. Erica Fudge, “A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,” in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 7, 16. 24. Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 2. 25. Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 152. 26. Joseph Taylor, Canine Gratitude (London, 1808), p. 5. 27. See Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 49. 28. This characteristic may have been perceived through the strong connection between Lord Byron with these types of dogs. Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes, p. 48. 29. Animals Guardian 2, no. 1 (October 1891), p. 4; Louise Lind af Hageby, On Immortality: A Letter to a Dog, 2nd ed. (London: Lind af Hageby, 1916), p. 13; National Canine Defence League, Annual Report (London: National Canine Defence League, 1910), p. 20. 30. Ash, Dogs, vol. 2, p. 604. 31. Weir, Our Cats; Janice Anderson, Cats in Art (Bristol: Parragon, 1996), p. 55. 32. Katherine MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court since the Renaissance (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), pp. 102–103; “Her Majesty’s Favourites,” The Kennel Review 4, no. 41 (December 1885): 212. 33. William Secord, Dog Painting, 1840–1940: A Social History of the Dog in Art (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1992), p. 251. 34. Arthur Croxton Smith, The Power of the Dog in Twenty Plates in Colour by Maud Earl (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911); E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement (1931; repr., London: Virago Press, 1978), p. 51. 35. Croxton Smith, Power of the Dog. 36. This type of terrier was also popularized by the writing of Walter Scott. Although Dandie Dinmot as a breed had apparently existed before, featuring in Scott’s Guy Mannering, the name was given to this breed at this point. The literary connection was further developed with Scott presenting Wordsworth with such a dog: Robert Wood (ed.), The Unfortunate Tourist of Helvellyn and His Faithful Dog: Charles Gough (Grasmere: Wordsworth Trust, 2003), p. 95. 37. See various examples in MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs. 38. William Secord, A Breed Apart: The Art Collections of the American Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001), p. 62. 39. Major Egerton Leigh, Pets: A Paper Read at the Mechanics’ Institution, Chester (1859), p. 30; Taylor, Canine Gratitude, p. 158. 40. Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes, pp. 28–31. 41. See also the monument in memory of Ouida, on the outskirts of her place of birth in Bury St Edmunds in Cambridgeshire, erected by public subscription paid for by readers of the Daily Mirror and by friends and admirers “in all parts of the world.” Symbols of sympathy and courage hold tiny dogs in their arms. 42. Matthew Craske, “Representations of Domestic Animals in Britain, 1730–1840,” in Hounds in Leash: The Dog in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, ed. Jonathan Wood and Stephen Feeke (Leeds: Henry Moore Foundation, 2000), p. 42. See also Rev. Charles Rogers, Monuments and Monumental Inscriptions in Scotland, vol. 1 (London: Charles Griffin, 1871), p. 3. 43. Craske, “Representations,” p. 42. 44. Craske, “Representations,” p. 41.

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45. John Blackwood, London’s Immortals: The Complete Outdoor Commemorative Statues (London: Savoy Press, 1989), pp. 124–125. 46. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 33. 47. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 33. 48. www.chiens-des-champs.com/barry.htm (accessed January 12, 2006). 49. Interestingly, the cemetery has been defined by the French government as a historical monument since 1987. See also the story of the “grave” of Gelert, a “mythical” dog, erected in Beddgelert in Snowdonia in North Wales. Kean, Animal Rights, pp. 85–86. 50. Benedict Read, Victorian Sculpture (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 85. 51. For a number of examples erected in nineteenth-century London, see Blackwood, London’s Immortals. 52. F.M.L. Thompson, Victorian England: The Horse-Drawn Society (Dorset: Castle Cary Press, 1968). 53. See, for example, the ongoing prosecutions for cruelty to working horses enacted by the RSPCA in the 1870s and 1880s as reported in RSPCA, Annual Reports. For Angela Burdett-Coutt’s campaigns in Edinburgh against the ill treatment of tram horses, see Orton, Made of Gold, p. 214. 54. K. S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1999). See also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 55. Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 157–159. 56. Peter Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend (Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 1992) and Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 57. Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 124; William J. Shultz, The Humane Movement in the United States, 1910–1922 (New York, 1924), p. 60. 58. A maquette of Simpson and his donkey is also displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. There are other replicas of various sorts; for example, homages to the man and the donkey, sculpted in the remains of trees, originally erected at Lakes Entrance, a seaside resort in Victoria, in the 1920s to commemorate the local fallen of the First World War. 59. Blackwood, London’s Immortals, pp. 248–249. 60. Kean, Animal Rights, pp. 177–178. 61. Ernest Sackville Turner, All Heaven in a Rage, 2nd ed. (Fontwell: Centaur, 1992), pp. 149–150; Michael McMullan, “The Day the Dogs Died in London,” The London Journal 23, no. 1 (1998): 32–40. 62. Chris Philo, “Animals, Geography, and the City: Notes on Inclusions and Exclusions,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995): 677. 63. Edward G. Fairholme and Wellesley Pain, A Century of Work for Animals (London: John Murray, 1924), p. 60. 64. Parliamentary Select Committee on Dog Stealing (Metropolis), vol. 14 (July 20, 1844), pp. iii–iv, p. 293; See also the painting “Buy a dog Ma’am” by Richard Andsell depicting this practice, as reproduced in Animals in Art: A Celebration of Animals through the Eyes of Artists from Stubbs to Hockney (London: Blue Cross, 1997); and Philip Howell, “Flush and the Banditti: Dog Stealing

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65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

NOTES

in Victorian London,” in Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human–Animal Relations, ed. Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert (London: Routledge, 2000). Statement of Richard Mayne, commissioner of the metropolitan police, to Parliamentary Select Committee on Dog Stealing, p. 301. John K. Walton, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen: The Conflict over Rabies in Late Victorian England,” Journal of Social History 13, no. 2 (1979): 233–235; The Battersea Dogs’ Home, The Dogs’ Home, Battersea, 1860–1960 (London: Battersea Dogs’ Home, 1960), p. 8; The Kennel Review vol. 4, no. 40 (December 1885): 191; Peter Ballard, A Dog Is for Life: Celebrating the First 100 Years of the National Canine Defence League (London: National Canine Defence League, 1990), p. 4. Gertrude Stock, “Respecting Dog Shows: Another Aspect,” Animals’ Guardian 1, no. 11 (August 1891): 124; Ash, Dogs, vol. 1, p. 113. Forbes Macgregor, Greyfriars Bobby: The Real Story at Last, new ed. (Edinburgh: S. Savage, 2002), p. 55. Kean, Animal Rights, pp. 91–95; Walton, “Mad Dogs.” Animals Guardian 3, no. 12 (September 1893): 203; Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 26; Animals Guardian 3, no. 8 (May 1893): 133; Animals’ Guardian 4, no. 6 (March 1894): 89. William Chambers, Story of a Long and Busy Life (Edinburgh and London: W and R Chambers, 1882), p. 53. Chambers, Story, p. 81. RSPCA, Domestic Animals and Their Treatment (London: RSPCA, 1857), p. 60; Animals’ Guardian 1, no. 11 (August 1891): 122–124. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 128; Edith Carrington, The Cat: Her Place in Society and Treatment (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1896). Weir, Our Cats, pp. 2, 87. RSPCA, Domestic Animals, p. 64. The author of curious facts about animals, The Cat and Her Cousins: True Stories about Feline Animals (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1871), pp. 18, 20. Animals Guardian 1, no. 2 (November 1890): 15–16. Cat and Her Cousins, p. 25; W. Gordon Stables, Cats, Their Points and Characteristics (London, 1876), p. 125; RSPCA, Domestic Animals, p. 61. Jane Loudon, Domestic Pets (London, 1851), pp. 49–50. Eliza Fenwick, Mary and Her Cat in Words Not Exceeding Two Syllables (London: William Darton, 1819). E. Burrows, Neptune; Or the Autobiography of a Newfoundland Dog (London: Griffith and Farran, 1869); Frances Power Cobbe, The Confessions of a Lost Dog (London: Griffith and Farran, 1867); W. Gordon Stables, Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1893). Autobiography of a Cat; Of the Cream of Cats Too (London: Emily Faithfull, 1864); Bessie Rayner Parkes, The History of Our Cat, Aspasia (London, 1856). Edmund Selous, Tommy Smith’s Animals (London: Methuen, 1903); Thomas Charles Bridges, The Life Story of a Squirrel (London: A and C Black, 1907). See also Hilda Kean, “Save ‘Our’ Red Squirrel: Kill the American Grey Tree Rat: An Exploration of the Role of the Red and Grey Squirrel in Constructing Ideas of Englishness,” in Seeing History: Public History in Britain Now, ed. Hilda Kean, Paul Martin, and Sally Morgan (London: Francis Boutle, 2000), pp. 51–64.

NOTES

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85. Teresa Mangum, “Dog Years, Human Fears,” in Rothfels, Representing Animals, p. 35. 86. Mangum, “Dog Years,” p. 44. 87. John Wolffe, Great Deaths: Grieving, Religions and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2000), pp. 255–256. 88. Sir John Ernest Hodder Williams, Where’s Master? (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910). This is ostensibly the autobiography of Caesar, the fox terrier companion of the late Edward VII. 89. Much work has been recently developed on women’s autobiographies and also on those of autodidacts from working-class backgrounds, that is, those traditionally marginalized from the dominant discourse of success that the form might imply. See, for example, Tess Coslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield (eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Themes, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000). 90. See, for example, Cobbe, Confessions; Ouida, Puck 3 vols. (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1870); Stables, Sable and White. 91. Autobiography of a Cat, p. 32. 92. Macgregor, Greyfriars Bobby, pp. 25, 35. 93. Doreen Massey, “Space-Time and the Politics of Location,” in Rachel Whiteread House, ed. James Lingwood (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 36. 94. Henry T. Hutton, The True Story of Greyfriars Bobby (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1903), p. 10. 95. The Most Famous Epitaphs and Monumental Inscriptions in the Greyfriars Churchyard Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Waddie and Co., 1893), p. 44; Henry T. Hutton, The True Story of Greyfriars Bobby, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1931), p. 18. 96. For discussion on the relationship between spaces and places, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 117–118. 97. The Times, November 6, 1871 (reproduced from Pall Mall Gazette). 98. Samuel Smiles, Duty (London: John Murray, 1869), p. 36. 99. See, by way of contrast, the image of Queen Victoria’s own terrier Islay begging toward her in Landseer’s depiction of the queen outside Osborne House (MacDonogh, Reigning Cats and Dogs, pp. 102–103). Also see Hilda Kean, “Public History and Two Australian Dogs: Islay and the Dog on the Tucker Box,” Australian Cultural History 24 (2006): 135–162. 100. Wood, Unfortunate Tourist, pp. 18–22. 101. Bob Orrell and Margaret Vincent, Lakeland Monuments, bk. 1, North (Cumbria: Bob Orrell Publications, 1998), pp. 57–59. There had been some controversy over the circumstances of Gough’s remains. It was disputed whether his body had been eaten by birds of prey (the head was never found) or whether the dog herself had nibbled Gough’s dead body in order to survive. 102. Peter Mason, The Brown Dog Affair (London: Two Stevens, 1997), p. 23; Zoophilist 26, no. 6 (October 1906): 113; Kean, Animal Rights, pp. 56 ff; Philip Davies, Troughs and Drinking Fountains: Fountains of Life (London: Chatto and Windus, 1989). 103. Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 42. 104. George Greenwood, Statement Tendered to the Royal Commission (London: NAVS, 1908), p. 17; Hilda Kean, “An Exploration of the Sculptures of Greyfriars Bobby,

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105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

NOTES

Edinburgh, Scotland and the Old Brown Dog in Battersea, South London, England,” Society and Animals: Journal of Human-Animal Studies 11, no. 4 (2003): 353–373. www.media-akita.or.JP/akita-inu/akitas-introd-2E.html (accessed April 9, 2005). Thanks to Ross Smith for drawing my attention to Hachiko. http://www.dog.com/breed/Alaskan-Malamute.asp (accessed February 20, 2006). For discussion of a different, earlier approach by Hogarth, who positively sought to prevent cruelty to animals, see Donald, “Beastly Sights,” p. 526. Lionel Lambourne, Victorian Painting (London: Phaidon Press, 1999), p. 21. Royal Academy of Arts, Paintings and Drawings by Sir Edwin Landseer, 1802– 1873 (London: Royal Academy of Arts Catalogue, 1961), p. iii. Animals Guardian, n.s., 5, no. 1 (January 17, 1903): front page. National Anti-Vivisection Society, How We Treat Dogs (London: NAVS, n.d. [early 1900s?]). Our Dumb Animals 6, no. 3 (1873): 22. No reference is made here to any specific painting, and Landseer was certainly not famed for painting donkeys. Our Dumb Animals 30, no. 8 (January 1898): 91. Frances Power Cobbe, “The Ethics of Zoophily,” Contemporary Review 358 (October 1895): 504. Kean, Animal Rights, p. 149; William Schupbach, “A Select Iconography of Animal Experiment,” in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas A. Rupke (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 340–360. Frances Power Cobbe, Mr Lowe and the Vivisection Act (London: Williams and Norgate, 1877, reprinted from The Contemporary Review [February 1877]: 17.) Kean, “Exploration of the Sculptures.” Burt, Animals in Film, p. 36. The Adventures of Greyfriars Bobby, directed by John Henderson (Universal Pictures, United Kingdom, February 2006). The Herald, February 3, 2006. Thanks to Bob Purdie for forwarding me a copy of this.

Chapter 2 1. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West. Homeward Bound Edition, vol. 1 (New York: The Review of Reviews, 1910), pp. 130–131; Theodore Roosevelt, “The Main Object of the Roosevelt Foundation for the Conservation of Wild Life,” Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA), Record Unit (RU) 7364, Box 8, Folder 9. 2. Beauchamp Plantagenet, A Description of the Province of New Albion . . ., in Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America . . . (1648), comp. Peter Force (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), vol. 2, document no. 7, p. 6; [Robert Johnson], Nova Britannia. Offering the Most Excellent Fruites by Planting in Virginia. Exciting All Such as Be Well Affected to Further the Same (1609), in Force, Tracts, vol. 1, document no. 6, p. 10; Samuel Wilson, An Account of the Province of Carolina (1682), in Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650–1708, ed. Alexander S. Salley, Jr. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959), p. 170; William Wood, New England’s Prospect (1634), ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), pp. 38, 53.

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3. [John White], The Planters Plea. Or, the Grounds of Plantations Examined, and Usual Objections Answered . . . (1630), in Force, Tracts, vol. 2, document no. 3, p. 3; Robert Cushman, Reasons and Considerations Touching the Lawfulness of Removing Out of England into . . . America (1622), in Mourt’s Relation: A Journal of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England, by Certain English Adventurers Both Merchants and Others, ed. Dwight B. Heath (New York: Corinth Books, 1963), pp. 91–93. 4. Roger Williams, Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. 3, p. 416; and Roger Williams, Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (1652), in Complete Writings, vol. 4, p. 29; Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 70–71. 5. Phineas Pratt, “Narrative,” in A Declaration of the Affairs of the English People That First Inhabited New England Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 4th ser., vol. 4 (1858), p. 479; William Bradford, quoted in Patrick M. Malone, The Skulking Way of War: Technology and Tactics among the New England Indians (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 61; Thomas Dudley to Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln, March 12 and 28, 1630[/31], in Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629–1638, ed. Everett Emerson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), p. 75; John Josselyn, A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New-England, ed. Paul J. Lindholdt (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988), p. 62; Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), p. 108; see also Malone, Skulking, pp. 53–54. 6. William Byrd of Westover, “Secret History of the Line,” in The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover: Narratives of a Colonial Virginian, ed. Louis Booker Wright (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1966), pp. 118, 140–141; William Byrd of Westover, “The History of the Dividing Line,” in Prose Works, pp. 230, 278. 7. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (1782) (New York: New American Library, 1963), pp. 70–71. 8. Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 19–20. 9. Crèvecoeur, Letters, pp. 70–72; Patrick Campbell, Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North America in the Years 1791 and 1792 (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1937[1793]), p. 46; J. H. Battle, History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: A. Warner, 1887), pp. 280–290; Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1988), leaf vii; Rachel Klein, Unification of a Slave State: The Rise of the Planter Class in the South Carolina Backcountry, 1760–1808 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 52, 63, 240; G. B., “Letter from a Gentleman in Kentucky to His Friend in this State,” The Boston Magazine 2, no. 12 (September 1785): 344; Peter S. Onuf, “Liberty, Development, and Union: Visions of the West in the 1780s,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 43, no. 2 (April 1986): 188, 189, 195, 197–198; Nicholas Wolfe Proctor, “Bathed in Blood: Hunting in the Antebellum South” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1998), p. 15; Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), chap. 3.

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10. Devereux Jarratt, The Life of Devereux Jarratt, Rector of Bath Parish, Dinwiddie County, Virginia, . . . (Baltimore: Warner & Hanna, 1806), p. 16; Elliott J. Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90 (February 1985): 19; Ralph Earl, Portrait of a Man with a Gun (1784), Description, Early American Paintings in the Worcester Art Museum, http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_ American/Artists/earle_r/Man_with_Gun/discussion.html (accessed May 2002). 11. Pennsylvania Gazette, August 16, 1775; September 6, 1775; September 10, 1777; James C. Ballagh, ed., Letters of Richard Henry Lee, vol. 1 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1912–1914), pp. 130–131; Georgia Bill of Exchange, 1777, National Numismatic Collection, Smithsonian Institution; “The Address of Liberty, to the buckskins of Pennsylvania, on hearing of the intended Provincial Congress” (Philadelphia, 1775), in Early American Imprints, 1st ser., no. 13790; George Washington Parke Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1860), pp. 264–269. 12. William Elliott, Carolina Sports, by Land and Water . . . (Charleston, SC: Burges and James, 1846), p. 283; John Filson, Filson’s Kentucke: A Facsimile Reproduction of the Original Wilmington Edition of 1784, with Paged Critique, Sketch of Filson’s Life and Bibliography (Louisville: J. P. Morgan & Company, 1930), pp. 53–54. 13. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les homes (1754), trans. Franklin Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 14. [ John Filson], The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, ed. John Trumbull (Norwich, CT: John Trumbull, 1786); John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), p. 323. 15. Herman, Hunting, chap. 8. 16. Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 95, 108. On this theme, see especially Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 156; and Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 1–55, 92–123. 17. Timothy Flint, The First White Man of the West, or the Life and Exploits of Col. Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky (1833) (Cincinnati: G. Conclin, 1847), pp. 57, 249; John Mason Peck, Life of Daniel Boone, the Pioneer of Kentucky, in The Library of American Biography, 2nd ser., vol. 13, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1847), pp. 22, 142. The terms “self-possession” and “peculiar self-possession” recur several times in Flint’s descriptions of Boone (First White Man, pp. 21, 68, 79, and 236). Art critic Robert Mills similarly praised Enrico Causici’s relief of Boone for showing the hero’s “cool resolution and selfpossession,” whereas biographer George Canning Hill commented that Boone “felt the peculiar glory there was in trusting to himself, in relying on his own exertions” (Robert Mills, quoted in Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992], p. 35; George Canning Hill, Daniel Boone, The Pioneer of Kentucky [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1865], p. 23). 18. Flint, First White Man, pp. 23, 29, 31, and 41; W. H. Bogart, Daniel Boone, and the Hunters of Kentucky (Auburn and Buffalo, NY: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1854), p. 22; William Henry Milburn, The Rifle, Axe, and Saddle-Bags, and Other Lectures (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1857), pp. 28, 30, 42.

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19. See especially Mark Derr, The Frontiersman: The Real Life and Many Legends of Davy Crockett (New York: W. Morrow, 1993); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 50. 20. [Thomas Picton], “Henry William Herbert [Frank Forester]: The Story of His Life,” in Life and Writings of Frank Forester (Henry William Herbert), ed. David W. Judd, vol. 1 (New York: Orange Judd Company, 1882), pp. 14–16; Henry William Herbert [Frank Forester, pseud.], Frank Forester’s Field Sports of the United States, and British Provinces of North America, 2 vols. (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1849), vol. 1, p. v. 21. Henry William Herbert [Frank Forester, pseud.], The Complete Manual for Young Sportsmen . . . (New York: W. A. Townsend & Adams, 1868[1848]), p. 26; George Bird Grinnell, quoted in John Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (New York: Winchester Press, 1975), p. 25; George Bird Grinnell, “American Game Protection: A Sketch,” in Hunting and Conservation, ed. George Bird Grinnell and Charles Sheldon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925; repr., New York: Arno, 1970), p. 225; “Value of Outdoor Sports,” Outdoor Life 6, no. 2 (August 1900). 22. Herbert, Frank Forester’s Field Sports, vol. 1, pp. v, 26–27; Henry William Herbert, “The Woodcock,” in Judd, Life and Writings, p. 62. 23. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 24. Samuel H. Hammond, Hills, Lakes, and Forest Streams; or, A Tramp in the Chateaugay Woods (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854), p. 14; “Partridge Shooting,” American Turf Register 6, no. 3 (November 1834): 140–142; Vale, “Memories of Two Weeks’ Encampment in the Woods of Pennsylvania,” Spirit of the Times 17, no. 34 (August 7, 1847): 447, col. 1. 25. American Turf Register 1, no. 1 (September 1829): 31; Forest and Stream 1, no. 1 (August 14, 1873): 8. 26. R. D. McE., “Our Game,” Spirit of the Times 20, no. 21 (July 13, 1850): 241, col. 2. 27. Henry William Herbert [Frank Forester, pseud.], The Hitchcock Edition of Frank Forester, ed. Harry Worcester Smith, vol. 4, The Deerstalkers (New York: Derrydale Press, 1930), p. 42. 28. Herbert, Frank Forester’s Field Sports, vol. 1, p. 24; Herbert [Frank Forester, pseud.], “The Game of North America; Its Nomenclature,” Spirit of the Times 15, no. 51 (February 14, 1846): 604, col. 3; Herbert, “Quail,” in Judd, Life and Writings of Frank Forester, vol. 2, p. 70; Herbert, “Memoir of the Smelt of the Passaic River,” in Life and Writings of Frank Forester, vol. 2, pp. 98, 105; Herbert, Frank Forester’s Sporting Scenes and Characters . . ., vol. 1 (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1881), p. 27. 29. Dickey Jones, “A Tour through the Adirondack. No. 2,” Spirit of the Times 23, no. 1 (February 19, 1853): 5; American Sportsman editorial, quoted in John G. Mitchell, “Gentlemen Afield,” American Heritage 29, no. 6 (October–November 1978). 30. Elliott, Carolina Sports, pp. 281–282. 31. Herbert, Complete Manual, p. 22. 32. William H. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California (Washington, DC: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848), p. 49; Charles Wilkins Webber, The Hunter-Naturalist: Romance

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33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

NOTES

of Sporting; or, Wild Scenes and Wild Hunters, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: J. W. Bradley, 1851), pp. 30–31. Flint, First White Man, p. 236. For more on these themes, see Herman, Hunting, chaps. 14, 15, 17, and 18. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. 1 (New York: A. Appleton, 1904), p. x. D. C. Beard, The American Boys Handy Book: What to Do and How to Do It (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1882; repr., New York: C. Scribner’s, 1917), pp. 209, 232; “Early American Impressions,” The American Field: The Sportsman’s Journal 61, no. 17 (April 23, 1904): 389. Maxine Benson, Martha Maxwell: Rocky Mountain Naturalist (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 128–140; D. R. Rutter, “Why Is Trapshooting So Popular?” Country Club Life (July 4, 1914); George Frank Lord, “Why Women Are Learning to Shoot,” Illustrated Sunday Magazine [Philadelphia Record?] (July 12, 1914): 14; Mrs. Arthur F. Rice, “A Woman’s Telling Shot,” Amateur Sportsman 5 (August 1896): 84–85; Nellie Bennett, “My First Deer Hunt,” Outdoor Life 11, no. 2 (February 1903); Callum McKenzie, “ ‘Sadly Neglected’—Hunting and Gendered Identities: A Study of Gender Construction,” International Journal of the History of Sport 22, no. 4 (June 2005): 545–562; Mary Zeiss Stange, Woman the Hunter (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997). Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), p. 47; Thomas L. Altherr, “The American Hunter-Naturalist and the Development of the Code of Sportsmanship,” Journal of Sport History 5, no. 1 (spring 1978): 16; George Baxter Ward III, “Bloodbrothers in the Wilderness: The Sport Hunter and the Buckskin Hunter in the Preservation of the American Wilderness Experience” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1980), p. 348; Theodore Roosevelt, Wilderness Hunter, pp. 146, 147. Theodore Roosevelt, African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist (New York: Scribner, 1910). George Bird Grinnell, ed., Brief History of the Boone and Crockett Club, with Officers, Constitution and List of Members for the Year 1910 (New York: Forest & Stream Pub. Co., 1910); Louis Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press 1997), pp. 1–3; John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 78–81. The American Farmer, 3rd ser., 3 (1841): 25; Elliott, Carolina Sports, 285; Daniel Justin Herman, “Hunting Democracy,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 55, no. 3 (autumn 2005): 23–33. Roosevelt, Wilderness Hunter, p. 270; “American Game Parks: The ‘Forest and Stream’s’ Fourth Annual Report on Game in Preserves. Part One—Fenced Parks,” Forest and Stream 49, no. 5 (July 31, 1897): 85; Dwight W. Huntington, Our Big Game: A Book for Sportsmen and Nature Lovers (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1904), pp. 34–35.

Chapter 3 1. Charles Darwin, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1868), p. 2.

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2. Fernand Braudel, A History of Civilizations (New York: Penguin, 1993), pp. 9–10. 3. Specific attributes that are inherited include physical distinctions such as height, bone structure, and fur colors. One of the most notable characteristics of such acquired peculiarities is albinoism (leucismus), which is quite prevalent among a range of domestic animals. Moreover, the ability to procreate in captivity is one key aspect that distinguishes domestic from tame animals. Eduard Hahn, Die Haustiere und ihre Beziehung zur Wirtschaft des Menschen: Eine geographische Studie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1896), p. 1. 4. Helmut Hemmer, Domestication: The Decline of Environmental Appreciation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 11–12. 5. Frederick Zeuner, A History of Domesticated Animals (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 36–37. 6. Stephen Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 15. 7. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, Domesticated Animals: Their Relation to Man and to His Advancement in Civilization (New York: Scribner, 1895), p. 3. 8. Of the hundreds of animal species, fewer than twenty have been domesticated. 9. The words “civility” and “to civilize” have, however, existed much longer. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). On the emergence of the term civilization, see Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas,” in A New Kind of History and Other Essays, ed. Peter Burke (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 230. Febvre credits Turgot with first using the term in 1752; however, it did not appear in print until 1756, when Victor Riqueti Marquis de Mirabeau, the father of the acclaimed revolutionary Honoré Marquis Mirabeau, mentioned it in L’Ami des homes, ou Traité de la population. According to Febvre, the term came into common use in France in the mid-1760s, the following decade in England, and from there it spread to Germany, where it attained a much more complicated meaning, particularly in contrast to the notion of culture. See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939; Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 9–46. 10. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Civilizations: Culture, Ambition and the Transformation of Nature (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 13. 11. Michel Rousseau, L’Animal civilisateur de l’homme (Paris: Masson et Cie, 1962). 12. Shaler, Domesticated Animals, p. 219. 13. This relationship is even more obvious in German where domesticated animals are called Haustiere—literally, “animals of the house.” 14. Shaler, Domesticated Animals, p. 219. 15. According to Norbert Elias, the civilizing process entailed, among other things, an increasing differentiation regarding which animals were processed in the household. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 98. 16. Francis Galton, Inquiry into Human Faculty and Its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), cited in James Serpell, “Pet-Keeping and Animal Domestication: A Reappraisal,” in The Walking Larder: Patterns of Domestication, Pastoralism, and Predation, ed. Juliet Clutton-Brock (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 10. While some later scholars have endorsed this view, critics argued that since many tamed wild animals that were turned into pets did not breed in captivity, pet keeping did not necessarily lead to domestication. Juliet Clutton-Brock, Domesticated Animals from Early Times (London: British Museum, 1981); J. P. Scott, “Evolution and Domestication of the Dog,” Evolutionary Biology 2 (1968): 243–275.

190

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17. James Serpell, “Pet-Keeping,” pp. 10–21. 18. Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and James Serpell, In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (London: Blackwell, 1986). On the history of dogs, see Wolfgang Wippermann and Wolfgang Berentzen, Die Deutschen und ihre Hunde: Ein Sonderweg der Mentalitätsgeschichte? (Berlin: Btb, 1999); and James Serpell, The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour, and Interactions with People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 19. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 1. The first dogs were domesticated about 6000 bce. 20. Le Petit Moniteur universel (1876), cited in Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 53. 21. This disturbing enemy of domestic life was, of course, the mouse. Pierre Larousse, “Chat,” in Le Grand Dictionnaire universel (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1865–1890). 22. See Robert Delort, Les Animaux ont une histoire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), p. 336; Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, chap. 7; and Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (New York: Viking, 1986). 23. On the history of exotic pets in Paris, see especially Robbins, Elephant Slaves. 24. Katherine C. Grier, “ ‘The Eden of Home’: Changing Understanding of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals in Middle-Class American Households, 1820–1900,” in Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture, ed. Mary J. Henninger-Voss (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), p. 337. 25. Grier, “ ‘Eden of Home,’ ” p. 344. 26. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 52. 27. Grier, “ ‘Eden of Home,’ ” p. 318. 28. Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Rights of Dumb Animals,” Hearth and Home (January 1869): 24. 29. Jutta Buchner, “ ‘Im Wagen saßen zwei Damen mit einem Bologneserhündchen’: Zur städtischen Hundehaltung in der wilhelminischen Klassengesellschaft um 1900,” Hessische Blätter für Volks- und Kulturforschung 27 (1991): 119–138. 30. Alfred Barbou, Le Chien: Son histoire, ses exploits, ses aventures (Paris: Furne, Jouvet et Compagnie, 1883), cited in Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 84. 31. Kete, Beast in the Boudoir, p. 86. 32. Rainer Wick, ed., Hunde vor der Kamera: 150 Jahre Photographie aus der Sammlung Uwe Scheid (Weingarten: Focus Kunstverlag, 1989). 33. Grier, Pets in America, p. 349. 34. Henri Richelot, Bulletin 1 (1855): 111. 35. Buchner, “ ‘Im Wagen saßen zwei Damen,’ ” p. 124. 36. “La Fourrière de Paris,” Revue Britannique 5 (1873): 343–354 and Grier, “ ‘Eden of Home,’ ” p. 334. 37. Grier, “ ‘Eden of Home,’ ” p. 334. 38. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (New York: C.S. Francis, 1843), p. 10. 39. Norbert Benecke, Der Mensch und seine Haustiere: Die Geschichte einer jahrtausendealten Beziehung (Stuttgart: Theiss, 1994), p. 436; and Robert Sullivan,

NOTES

40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

191

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), p. 13. Sullivan, Rats, p. 2. Jonathan Burt, Rat (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 143. Burt, Rat, p. 121. The first laboratory animals were used by Robert Hooke in England in 1664. On the history of laboratory mice and rats, see Martin Hart, Rats (London: Allison and Busby, 1982); and Karen Rader, Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900–1955 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Benecke, Der Mensch und seine Haustiere, p. 436. Burt, Rat, p. 130. Zeuner, History of Domesticated Animals, p. 63. Terry Jordan-Bychkov, North-American Cattle Ranging Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). For the exact figures regarding the development of livestock in Germany, see Gustav Comberg, Die deutsche Tierzucht im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Ulmer Verlag, 1985), p. 28. Roger Horowitz, Jeffrey M. Pilcher, and Sydney Watts, “Meat for the Multitudes: Market Culture in Paris, New York City, and Mexico City over the Long Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review 109 (October 2004): 1055–1083. On the history of slaughterhouses, see the special issue of Food and History edited by Paula Lee (November 2006). On the history of the Union Stockyards, see Keith Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. Norton, 1991); Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–1954 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Thomas Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); and Carroll Louise Wade, Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since 1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. x. Derry, Bred for Perfection, p. 4. Ritvo, Animal Estate, pp. 45–81. Carl Kronacher, Allgemeine Tierzucht: Ein Lehr- und Handbuch für Studierende und Züchter (Berlin: Parey, 1926), p. 28. Harriet Ritvo, “Animal Planet,” Environmental History 9 (April 2004): 115. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), and Variation of Animals and Plants. On the history of evolutionary theories, see Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), and Robert Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). On the reception of Darwin, see Thomas Glick, ed., The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). Bowler, Evolution, p. 10. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Acclimatisation,” in Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature, ed. T. S. Baynes (New York: Samuel Hall, 1878–1889), p. 84.

192

NOTES

61. Wallace, “Acclimatisation.” 62. According to Warwick Anderson the term “acclimater” was first used by the French polemicist G.T.F. Raynal in his Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes (Paris: La Haye, 1776), cited in Warwick Anderson, “Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in NineteenthCentury France and England,” Victorian Studies 35, no. 2 (1992): 135. 63. Michael A. Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 71. 64. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Acclimatation et domestication des animaux utiles (Paris: Librairie Agricole de la Maison Rustique, 1861), p. 255. 65. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Acclimatation et domestication, pp. 143–144. 66. Auguste Hardy, “Importance de l’Algérie comme station d’acclimatation,” in L’Algérie agricole, commerciale, industrielle (Paris, 1860), p. 7. 67. Emma Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 100–102. 68. This argument has been made most forcefully by Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 76. 69. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, p. 93. 70. Shaler, Domesticated Animals, pp. 2 and 4. 71. Shaler, Domesticated Animals, p. 226. 72. Bernard-Germain-Etienne de Lacépède, “Lettre relative aux établissemens publics destinees à renfermer des animaux vivans, et connus sous le nom de menageries,” Décade philosophique 7 (1795): 449–462. 73. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Mémoire sur la nécessité de joindre une ménagerie au Jardin national des plantes de Paris (Paris: Didot, 1792), p. 4. 74. There is a vast literature on the history of zoos. See, for example, Sofia Akerberg, Knowledge and Pleasure at Regent’s Park: The Gardens of the Zoological Society of London during the Nineteenth Century (Umea: Umea University Press, 2001); Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Lothar Dietrich, Dietrich von Engelhardt, and Annelore Rieke-Müller, eds., Die Kulturgeschichte des Zoos (Berlin: VWB, 2001); Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Robert J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 75. Richard W. Burkhardt, “Constructing the Zoo: Science, Society, and Animal Nature at the Paris Menagerie, 1794–1838,” in Henninger-Voss, Animals in Human Histories, p. 243. 76. Frédéric Cuvier, “Essai sur la domesticité des mammifères, précédé de considerations sur les divers états des animaux, dans lesqules il nous est possible d’étudier leurs actions,” Mémoires du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle 13 (1825): 420–421. 77. Heinz-Georg Klös and Ursula Klös, eds., Der Berliner Zoo im Spiegel seiner Bauten, 1841–1989 (Berlin: Heenemann, 1990), pp. 401–403. 78. Robert W. Jones, “ ‘The Sight of Creatures Strange to Our Clime’: London Zoo and the Consumption of the Exotic,” Journal of Victorian Culture 2 (1997): 5. 79. D. F. Weinland, “Was Wir Wollen,” Der Zoologische Garten 1 (1859): 6.

NOTES

193

80. Carl Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen: Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1908), p. 199. On Hagenbeck and his Hamburg zoo, see Rothfels, Savages and Beasts. 81. Napoleon III had declared acclimatization part of public utility. 82. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Acclimatation et domestication, p. 157. On the membership of the society, see Osborne, Nature, pp. 13–21. 83. Robert Fox, “The Savant Confronts His Peers: Scientific Societies in France, 1815– 1914,” in The Organization of Science and Technology in France, 1808–1914, ed. Robert Fox and George Weisz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 241–282. 84. Osborne, Nature, p. 1. 85. Osborne, Nature. 86. Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Lettres sur les substances alimentaires et particulièrement sur la viande de cheval (Paris: Victor Masson, 1856); and Daniel Gade, “Horse Meat as Human Food in France,” Ecology of Food and Nutrition 5 (1976): 1–11. For a more general account of how horsemeat figured in diverse cultures, see Frederick Simoons, Eat Not This Flesh: Food Avoidances from Prehistory to the Present (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), pp. 168–199. 87. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Acclimatation et domestication, pp. 61–62. 88. Shaler, Domesticated Animals, p. 239. 89. Thomas Dunlap, “Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 308. 90. Dunlap, “Remaking the Land,” pp. 303–319. 91. Dunlap, “Remaking the Land,” p. 308. 92. James Matthams, The Rabbit Pest in Australia (Melbourne: Specialty Press, 1921); and David Stead, The Rabbit Menace in New South Wales (Sydney: Government Printer, 1928). 93. One thousand four hundred entries were received from around the world. Over a hundred of them even suggested introducing diseases, which was rejected because some of them would also be fatal to other animals or even humans. France’s acclaimed bacteriologist Louis Pasteur sent an assistant with cultures of chicken cholera to Australia, but he was refused entry into the country. Dunlap, “Remaking the Land,” pp. 311–312. 94. Osborne, Nature, p. 47.

Chapter 4 1. See Jeffrey Hyson, “Jungles of Eden: The Design of American Zoos,” in Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), pp. 23–44. 2. See James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), and Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). On connections between the rise of capitalism and our relationship to animals, see John Berger’s essay, “Why Look at Animals?,” in About Looking, ed. John Berger (London: Writers and Readers, 1980), pp. 1–26. The essay remains one of the most influential interpretations of modern ways of looking at animals in zoos and elsewhere. See also Jonathan Burt, “John Berger’s ‘Why

194

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

NOTES

Look at Animals?’: A Close Reading,” in Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 9, no. 2 (2005): 203–218. See the discussion of the London Zoo and the “parrot walk” in Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 35–37; see also Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Parrot Culture: Our 2500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 96–113. The background literature here is extensive. The classic early works include James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast; Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of a Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987). More recent works include Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); Mary J. Henninger-Voss, ed., Animals in Human Histories: The Mirror of Nature and Culture (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002); and Angela N. H. Creager and William Chester Jordan, eds., The Animal/Human Boundary: Historical Perspectives (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002). See especially Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin, Zoo Culture (1987; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals in Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Hanson, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts; and Katherine C. Grier, Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). See Vernon N. Kisling, Jr., ed., Zoo and Aquarium History: Ancient Animal Collections to Zoological Gardens (Boca Raton, FL: CRC, 2001); Catharine Bell, ed., Encyclopedia of the World’s Zoos (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001); and Robert J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). See Nigel Rothfels, “Introduction: Animals and Zoos and History,” in Captive Beauty: Zoo Portraits, by Frank Noelker (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). John Edwards, London Zoo from Old Photographs, 1852–1914 (London: John Edwards, 1996), p. 48. Edwards, London Zoo, p. 48. See Robert E. Bieder, Bear (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), and Bernd Brunner, Eine kurze Geschichte der Bären (Berlin: Classen, 2005). When this original building was replaced in 1876 with a newer structure, a building that continued to be used until the late 1960s, the idea of viewing from both above and the side was preserved. See the descriptions in Heinz-Georg Klös and

NOTES

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

195

Ursula Klös, eds., Der Berliner Zoo im Spiegel seiner Bauten, 1841–1989 (Berlin: Heenemann, 1990), p. 30. See, especially, Marina Belozerskaya, The Medici Giraffe and Other Tales of Exotic Animals and Power (Boston: Little, Brown, 2006), and Annelore Rieke-Müller and Lothar Dittrich, Unterwegs mit wilden Tieren: Wandermenagerien zwischen Belehrung und Kommerz, 1750–1850 (Marburg/Lahn: Basilisken, 1999). “The Zoological Society Meeting in Order to Arrange for Permanent Organization,” New York Times, May 8, 1895, p. 16. See J. W. Toovey, “150 Years of Building at London Zoo,” in The Zoological Society of London, 1826–1976 and Beyond, ed. Lord Zuckerman, Symposium of the Zoological Society of London 40 (London: Zoological Society of London, 1976), p. 179. “Finest Lion House in the World Will Be Opened This Week in Bronx Zoological Park,” New York Times, February 1, 1903, p. 12. Carl Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen: Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1908). See also Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts. Although much is uncertain about the canary’s early history in Europe, the story that has been passed down for the last couple of centuries claims that the little birds first began to appear in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The birds were brought on purpose and by accident from the Canary Islands, an archipelago of volcanic islands about sixty miles off the Moroccan coast of Africa. Before long, the birds were being widely bred throughout Europe, and by the mid-eighteenth century, there were close to thirty recognized varieties. The brightyellow bird we generally think of when we hear the word canary is, in fact, a result of careful breedings and crossings with several native European finches. The original canaries were an olive-green color. See, for example, J. M. Bechstein, Cage and Chamber-Birds: Their Natural History, Habits, Food, Diseases, Management, and Modes of Capture, trans. Dr. Lehmann (London: H. G. Bohn, 1853), p. 291, or W. A. Blakston, W. Swaysland, and August F. Wiener, The Illustrated Book of Canaries and Cage-Birds: British and Foreign (London: Cassell & Co., 1877–1880), pp. 4–5, for the early history of the birds. These types come from Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, trans. William Smellie (London: Byworth and Ballantine, 1812), vol. 14, pp. 61–62. See, for example, Robert L. Wallace, The Canary Book (London: Upcott Gill, 1893). Thomas Bewick, A History of British Birds, vol. 1, Land Birds, 6th ed. (1826; repr., Newcastle upon Tyne: Ward, 1971), p. 196. Blakston, Swaysland, and Wiener, Illustrated Book of Canaries, p. 3. “Canary Birds: Where They Come From, Their Peculiarities, and Their Market Value,” New York Times, April 14, 1869, p. 2. Bechstein, Cage and Chamber-Birds, p. 289. Only a handful of works of natural history have had as profound an impact on how people in Western countries have thought about the world as Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, published between 1749 and 1789. For a particularly useful discussion of Buffon’s importance, see Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves. Buffon, Natural History, vol. 14, pp. 54–55. Buffon, Natural History, vol. 14, pp. 55–56. John Milton, “Il Penseroso,” in The Complete Poems of John Milton, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: Collier, 1909), p. 36.

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28. According to the entry for the nightingale in The History of Singing Birds (1791): After [nightingales] are taken, their wings should be gently tied with thread to prevent their beating themselves against the cage. It should be hung in a private place, that he may not be disturbed, and he should be fed every two hours at farthest, with sheep’s heart and egg minced very fine, mixing it with meal worms: however, his first food must be worms, ants, caterpillars, or flies: You must take the bird in your hand, and open his bill with a stick made thick at one end, giving him the insects, or four or five bits of food as big as peas; to entice him to eat, his common food should be mixed with ants, so that when he goes to pick the ants, he may pick up some of that with it (pp. 49–50). In Bewick’s History of British Birds, we can read that though timorous and shy,” nightingales “are easily caught; lime twigs and snares of all sorts are laid for them, and generally succeed. Young ones are sometimes brought up from the next, and fed with great care till they are able to sing. It is with great difficulty that old birds are induced to sing after being taken; for a considerable time they refuse to eat, but by great attention to their treatment, and avoiding every thing that might agitate them, they at length resume their song, and continue it during the greater part of the year (p. 233). 29. “English and German Canaries,” New York Times, October 10, 1875, p. 4. 30. Mary Elizabeth Hawes Van Lennep, Memoir of Mrs. Mary E. Van Lennep, Only Daughter of the Rev. Joel Hawes, D.D. (Hartford, CT: Belknap and Hammersley, 1847), p. 132. 31. Bechstein, Cage and Chamber-Birds, p. 290. The authors of the 1877 Illustrated Book of Canaries describe the German techniques more fully: A separate room should always, if possible, be provided for teaching the young birds, which may be hung up close together, but must be entirely prevented from seeing one another, which distracts their attention. It is very necessary to prevent a young one hearing any one but the tutor-bird, as bad notes may be picked up in a single day sufficient to spoil the finest song. . . . The tutors are only allowed to sing for a few hours every day, being covered up the rest of the time, which preserves their song. An hour at morning, mid-day, and evening is a good plan. When the young ones are caged off, they too should be gradually accustomed to be darkened, after which they should be uncovered for a short time every day while the tutor is singing. It is impossible to get a really good song in any other way, the great secret being that the bird is not allowed time to pick up rubbish; but even as it is, some of the birds will acquire bad notes, and all such should be drafted off before they can corrupt the others (Blakston, Swaysland, and Wiener, p. 297). 32. In addition to Ritvo’s Animal Estate, see Margaret E. Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses since 1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 33. Charlotte L. Forten Grimké, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (New York: Dryden Press, 1953), p. 39.

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197

34. William Hornaday, “Twelve Years’ Perspective of the Zoological Park,” Annual Report of the New York Zoological Society 14 (1909): 110–112. 35. Friedrich Knauer, Der Zoologische Garten: Entwicklungsgang, Anlage und Betrieb unserer Tiergärten (Leipzig: Theod. Thomas Verlag, n.d. [ca. 1911]), p. 208.

Chapter 5 1. For an analysis of some of the social worlds involved in natural history in the twentieth century, see Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translation,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387– 420. 2. David Elliston Allen, “On Parallel Lines: Natural History and Biology from the Late Victorian Period,” in Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900, ed. David Elliston Allen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 361–371. 3. See, for example, Jane Camerini, “Remains of the Day: Early Victorians in the Field,” in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard V. Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 354–377. 4. Janet Browne, “Biogeography and Empire,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 305–321. 5. William Swainson, Taxidermy, Bibliography and Biography (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, and John Taylor, 1840), p. 6. 6. Swainson, Taxidermy, p. 96. On Swainson, see Paul Lawrence Farber, “Aspiring Naturalists and Their Frustrations: The Case of William Swainson,” in From Linnaeus to Darwin: Commentaries on the History of Biology and Geology, ed. Alwyne Wheeler and James Henry Price (London: Society for the History of Natural History, 1985), pp. 51–59. 7. Swainson, Taxidermy, p. 2. 8. Alfred Russel Wallace, Letter to his agent Samuel Stevens, dated March 10 and May 25, 1857, Dobbo, Aru Islands, Transactions of the Entomological Society of London 8 (1857): 92–93. 9. Wallace, Letter to Samuel Stevens. 10. A fuller discussion of Wallace’s birds of paradise appears in Narisara Murray, “Lives of the Zoo: Charismatic Animals in the Social Worlds of the London Zoological Gardens, 1850–1897” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2004). 11. Frank J. Sulloway, “Darwin and His Finches: The Evolution of a Legend,” Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1982): 1–53. 12. William Henry Flower, Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History (London: Macmillan and Co., 1898), p. 32. 13. Philip Lutley Sclater, “On the Birds Received in Collections from Santa Fe Di Bogota,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1855): 132. 14. George Robert Gray, “A List of the Birds, with Descriptions of New Species, Obtained by Mr. Alfred R. Wallace in the Aru and Ke Islands,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1858): 181. 15. George Robert Gray, “List of the Birds Lately Sent by Mr. A. R. Wallace from Dorey or Dorery, New Guinea,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1859): 157–158.

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16. Gray, “List of the Birds Lately Sent,” pp. 157–158. 17. Alfred Russel Wallace, “Observations on the Zoology of Borneo,” Zoologist (1856): 5114–5115. 18. Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869), p. 330. 19. Paul Lawrence Farber, The Emergence of Ornithology as a Scientific Discipline, 1760–1850 (Boston: D. Reidel, 1982). 20. Anne Larsen, “Equipment for the Field,” in Jardine, Secord, and Spary, Cultures of Natural History, pp. 358–377. 21. David Elliston Allen, “The Early Professionals in British Natural History,” in Wheeler and Price, From Linnaeus to Darwin, pp. 1–12. 22. Allen, “On Parallel Lines.” 23. See, for example, Christine Brandon-Jones, “Edward Blyth, Charles Darwin, and the Animal Trade in Nineteenth-Century India and Britain,” Journal of the History of Biology 30 (1997): 145–178; Farber, “Aspiring Naturalists”; Paul Lawrence Farber, Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E. O. Wilson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), pp. 24–26; and Peter Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 24. Jim Endersby, “Escaping Darwin’s Shadow,” Journal of the History of Biology 36 (2003): 400. 25. Abraham D. Bartlett and Edward Bartlett, Life among Wild Beasts in the “Zoo”: Being a Continuation of Wild Animals in Captivity with Reminiscences and Anecdotes (London: Chapman and Hall, 1900), p. 3. 26. Richard Owen, Memoir on the Gorilla (London: Taylor and Francis, 1865), p. 5. 27. G.H.O. Burgess, The Eccentric Ark: The Curious World of Frank Buckland (New York: Horizon Press, 1968), p. 54. 28. Nicolaas Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 262. 29. Richard Owen, “On the Gorilla (Troglodytes Gorilla, Sav.),” Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London (1859): 1–23, p. 3. 30. Ibid. 31. Farber, Emergence of Ornithology. 32. A fuller discussion of these issues appears in Murray, “Lives of the Zoo.” 33. “The Collections at the British Museum,” The Times, October 6, 1863. 34. Paul Lawrence Farber, “The Type-Concept in Zoology during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 9, no. 1 (1976): 93–119. 35. Farber, “Type-Concept in Zoology,” p. 99. 36. Swainson, Taxidermy, pp. 84–85. 37. Philip Lutley Sclater, Catalogue of a Collection of American Birds Belonging to Philip Lutley Sclater (London: N. Trubner and Co., 1862), p. iii. 38. W.C.L. Martin, A General History of Humming-Birds or the Trochilidae, with Especial Reference to the Collection of J. Gould, F.R.S., Now Exhibiting in the Gardens of the Zoological Society of London (London: H. G. Bohn, 1861), p. 127. 39. S.J.M.M. Alberti, “Objects and the Museum,” Isis 96 (2005): 564. 40. Alwyne Wheeler, “Zoological Specimens Other Than Insects, Molluscs, and Birds,” in Natural History Auctions: 1700–1972, ed. J. M. Chalmers-Hunt (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1976), pp. 15–19.

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41. David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 170–171. 42. David Elliston Allen, “The Biological Societies of London 1870–1914: Their Interrelations and Their Responses to Change,” in Allen, Naturalists and Society, pp. 23–38. 43. Thomas F. Gieryn, “What Buildings Do,” Theory and Society 31 (2002): 35–74. 44. Sophie Forgan, “The Architecture of Display: Museums, Universities, and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History of Science 32 (1994): 140. 45. Larsen, “Equipment for the Field.” 46. Richard Owen, Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—1858 (London, 1859), p. 48, cited in Carla Yanni, “Divine Display or Secular Science: Defining Nature at the Natural History Museum in London,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55, no. 3 (1996): 278. 47. Nicolaas Rupke, Richard Owen: Victorian Naturalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 34–35. 48. Richard Owen, “On the Extent and Aims of a National Museum of Natural History. Including the Substance of a Discourse on That Subject, Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, on the Evening of Friday, April 26, 1861” (London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1862). 49. Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 129. 50. Yanni, Nature’s Museums. 51. Yanni, Nature’s Museums. 52. “The Crowded State of the British Museum,” The Times, November 4, 1861. 53. Rupke, Richard Owen, pp. 220–222. 54. Yanni, Nature’s Museums. 55. Nature 27 (November 16, 1882): 55, cited in Yanni, “Divine Display,” p. 295. 56. See Lynn K. Nyhart, “Natural History and the ‘New’ Biology,” in Jardine, Secord, and Spary, Cultures of Natural History, pp. 426–443. 57. Joseph A. Caron, “ ‘Biology’ in the Life Sciences: A Historiographical Contribution,” History of Science 26 (1988): 225–226. 58. Caron, “ ‘Biology’ in the Life Sciences,” pp. 248–254. 59. Allen, Naturalist in Britain, p. 165. 60. W. B. Grove, “The Happy Fungus-Hunter,” Midland Naturalist (1892), cited in Graeme Gooday, “‘Nature’ in the Laboratory: Domestication and Discipline with the Microscope in Victorian Life Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 24 (1991): 317. 61. E. B. Wilson, “Aims and Methods of Study in Natural History,” Science 13, no. 314 (1901): 14. 62. Wilson, “Aims and Methods.” 63. Wilson, “Aims and Methods,” p. 19. 64. Career naturalists were largely men in the first half of the nineteenth century, although women participated in natural history in a number of ways. On the significant contributions of women, see, for example, Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 65. On the growing role of women in science, see, for example, Marsha L. Richmond, “ ‘A Lab of One’s Own’: The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women at Cambridge University, 1884–1914,” Isis 88 (1997): 422–455.

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66. Allen, “On Parallel Lines.” 67. Caron, “ ‘Biology’ in the Life Sciences.” For a discussion of biology in America at the turn of the twentieth century, see Garland E. Allen, “Morphology and TwentiethCentury Biology: A Response,” Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 1 (1981): 159–176; Keith R. Benson, “Problems of Individual Development: Descriptive Embryological Morphology in America at the Turn of the Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 1 (1981): 115–128; Frederick B. Churchill, “In Search of the New Biology: An Epilogue,” Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 1 (1981): 177–191; and Jane Maienschein, “Shifting Assumptions in American Biology: Embryology, 1890–1910,” Journal of the History of Biology 14, no. 1 (1981): 89–113. 68. Nyhart, “Natural History,” p. 437. 69. Gerald L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). 70. Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). On model organisms, also see Bonnie Tocher Clause, “The Wistar Rat as a Right Choice: Establishing Mammalian Standards and the Ideal of a Standardized Mammal,” Journal of the History of Biology 26 (1993): 329–349, and Karen A. Rader, Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900–1955 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Chapter 6 1. For a full examination of the role of the idea of moral equality in the case for animal rights, see Mark Rowlands, Animal Rights: A Philosophical Defence (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). And for a slightly breezier version, see my Animals Like Us (London: Verso; New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). For a classic discussion, see also Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: Thorsons, 1975). 2. Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789; New York: Hafner, 1948), chap. 18, sec. 1. 3. Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Penal Law (1838–1843), chap. 16, quoted in Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 22. 4. John Wesley, “Sermon LX: The General Deliverance,” in The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed., ed. Thomas Jackson, vol. 6 (London, 1829), quoted from Kean, Animal Rights, p. 19. 5. See, for example, James Rachels, Descended from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 6. Charles Darwin, The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1887), p. 5. 7. Henry Salt, Animal’s Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (New York: Macmillan, 1894). 8. Kean, Animal Rights, p. 59. 9. Kean, Animal Rights, p. 58. 10. The most obvious example is, of course, Peter Singer’s utilitarian case for the moral claims of animals. See Singer, Animal Liberation.

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11. See John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in The Second Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. J. Gough (1689; London: Blackwell, 1947), and John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Laslett (1679–1680; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963). 12. See John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), for an interesting examination of the parallels between Fukuyaman liberalism and Russian Marxism on this score. 13. As we shall see, Singer’s case for the moral claims of animals is based on a form of preference utilitarianism, a version that he inherited from R. M. Hare. 14. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 24. 15. The analogy is due to Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 208. 16. I say “arguably” not because there were any serious contenders to Mill during the nineteenth century, but because, as we will see shortly, I am not entirely convinced that Mill was, in fact, an egalitarian utilitarian. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. E. Rapaport (1859; Cambridge: Hackett, 1978). This interpretation of Mill as an egalitarian utilitarian is defended by John Gray, Mill on Liberty: A Defence (London: Routledge, 1983). See also Mill, Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government, ed. A. Lindsay (1861; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1968). 17. See Gray, Mill on Liberty. 18. Peter Singer, “All Animals are Equal,” Philosophical Exchange 1, no. 5 (1974): 103–116. 19. Regan, Case for Animal Rights. 20. See my Animal Rights and Animals Like Us.

Chapter 7 1. Erica Fudge, “Animal Lives,” History Today 54, no. 10 (October 2004): 21–27. See also her outstanding introduction to animal studies in the humanities, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). 2. René Descartes, A Discourse on the Method, trans. Ian McLean (1637; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 3. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals: A Critical Edition, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (1739–1740; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), ed. J. H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart, Reprinted with introduction by F. Rosen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). and John Stuart Mill, “Three Essays on Religion” (1874), in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), online edition. 4. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859), in From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, ed. Edward O. Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 5. Herman Melville, Moby Dick, ed. Tony Tanner (1851; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 6. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 125–166; James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind

202

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

NOTES

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of a Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Steve Baker speculates on the ways that present-day animal rights groups have used and might further use these moments of what I call animal intractability as a means of critique and social reform in Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (1993; repr., Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). See also Christine Kenyon-Jones’s chapter on children’s literature of the Romantic period in Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 51–78, in which she describes philosophers’ perspectives on children and animals and analyzes the influence of animals in children’s literature on the Romantic poets, particularly Coleridge. The painting by Joseph Wright (1734–1797) is now held by the National Gallery in London and can be seen at their Web site: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/ collection/features/science/bird.htm. Ritvo, Animal Estate; Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Turner, Reckoning with the Beast; and Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). For changes in the French context, also see, in reference to exotic animals, Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in EighteenthCentury Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and, in reference to pets, Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in NineteenthCentury Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See a reproduction of the painting and a brief essay in Louise Lippincott and Andreas Blühm’s Fierce Friends: Artists and Animals, 1750–1900 (New York: Merrill Publishers, 2005), p. 93. The painting is owned by the Wellcome Library in London. Christiana Payne, “Sheep May Safely Graze: The Pastoral Tradition in British Art,” in Love, Labour and Loss: 300 Years of British Livestock Farming in Art, ed. Clive Adams (Carlisle: Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, 2002), pp. 13–31. Ritvo offers an important historical analysis of the politics of livestock painting in Animal Estate, pp. 45–81. Love, Labour and Loss, published in conjunction with an exhibit of the same title at the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery in 2002, includes excellent examples of farm animals in paintings, including the Bewick’s Chillingham Bull, owned by the Natural History Society of Northumbria (p. 32), Thomas Weaver’s The Durham Ox, which is privately owned (p. 38), and George Stubbs’s The Lincolnshire Ox, owned by the National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (p. 41). Ann Shelby Blum, Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). In addition to numerous publications featuring Landseer’s animal paintings, see also “Landseer and 19th-Century English Dog Painting,” in A Breed Apart: The Art Collections of the American Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog, by William Secord (New York: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001); and Secord, Dog Painting, 1840–1940: A Social History of the Dog in Art (New York: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1992). Anna Sewell, Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse (1877; repr., New York: Sterling, 2004).

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18. See, in particular, Moira Ferguson, “Breaking In Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race and Class,” Women: A Cultural Review 5, no. 1 (1994): 34–52, and Adrienne Gavin, Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (Norwich, VT: Sutton Publishing, 2002). 19. Ferguson, “Breaking In Englishness,” p. 47. 20. Margaret Marshall Saunders, Beautiful Joe: A Dog’s Own Story (1893; repr., Jungle Books, 2006), and Gordon Stables, Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog (1894; repr. as Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Collie [Warwickshire:Vintage Dog Books, 2006]). 21. Saunders, Beautiful Joe, p. 14. 22. Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes, pp. 11–50. See also Susan McHugh’s discussion of mourning for dogs in Dog (London: Reaktion Books, 2004). Kete also discusses Parisian dog cemeteries in Beast in the Boudoir, p. 22. 23. R. G., “My Dog’s Epitaph. By the Subaltern,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 19 (June 1826): 685; “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 22 (October 1827): 439; “A Love of a Dog Lost,” Punch, November 14, 1857, p. 204; and Louise Imogen Guiney, “To a Dog’s Memory,” Century Magazine 38 (October 1889): 947. 24. R. Maynard Leonard, ed., The Dog in English Poetry (1893; repr., San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2005). 25. Many collected essays and illustrations are included in George R. Jesse’s Researches into the History of the British Dog . . . With Engravings Designed and Etched by the Author, 2 vols. (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1866). 26. “An Elegy on the Death of a Pet Dog,” Punch, July 11, 1900, p. 26. For a full discussion of the many expressions of mourning for lost animals, see my article “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets,” in Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 15–34. 27. Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1978); J. St. Loe Strachey, Dog Stories from the Spectator (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896). 28. There are many fine histories of nineteenth-century zoos. A few excellent entry points include the essays in Robert J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds., New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); and Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), among many others. 29. Lippincott and Blühm, Fierce Friends, p. 101. 30. The painting is held by the Louvre Museum. 31. The work is now held by the University of Texas at Austin Blanton Museum. 32. The painting is owned by the Louvre Museum. It is an obvious homage to George Stubbs’s earlier (1770) rendition of this same subject. 33. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, ed. Dennis Butts (1885; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), and She (1887; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 34. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, ed. Ian Duncan (1912; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a voluminous list of “lost race” novels, see the bibliography at http://www.violetbooks.com/lostrace-check-guide.html.

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35. 36. 37. 38.

NOTES

Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, pp. 55–60. Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines, p. 57. Haggard, She, pp. 68–69. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 39. The painting is reproduced in Richard Ormond’s Sir Edwin Landseer (New York: Rizzoli, 1982), p. 56, where he also makes this argument.

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notes on contributors

Dorothee Brantz received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is now an assistant professor at SUNY Buffalo. She is currently completing a book manuscript on the history of slaughterhouses in nineteenth-century Paris, Berlin, and Chicago. She is also the editor of two forthcoming collections: Beastly Natures: Human-Animal Relations at the Crossroads of Cultural and Environmental History and (together with Christof Mauch) Tierisches, allzu Tierisches: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte (scheduled for publication by Schöningh in 2008). Daniel Justin Herman received his Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley and is associate professor of history at Central Washington University. He is the author of Hunting and the American Imagination (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), which won the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Prize in 2002. Herman is currently working on a study of honor and conscience in late nineteenth-century Arizona, a study that includes investigations of the social meanings attached to hunting and rodeo. Hilda Kean is a tutor in history and director of public history and humanities coordinator at Ruskin College, Oxford, United Kingdom. She has published widely on cultural and public history. Her books include Animal Rights. Social and Political Change in Britain since 1800 (Reaktion Books, 1998/2000), London Stories. Personal Lives Public Histories (Rivers Oram Press, 2004), and People and Their Pasts. Public History Today (ed. with Paul Ashton, forthcoming Palgrave MacMillan). Kathleen Kete is associate professor of history at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Her publications include The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in

224

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Nineteenth-Century Paris (University of California Press, 1994), “Animals and Ideology: The Politics of Animal Protection in Europe,” in Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Indiana University Press, 2002), and “Pets” in Paula S. Fass, ed., Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society (Macmillan Reference, 2004). She is also completing a book on the history of ambition and is the author of “Stendhal and the Trials of Ambition in Postrevolutionary France” in French Historical Studies (Summer 2005). Teresa Mangum is associate professor of English and international programs at the University of Iowa. Her publications on animals include “Dog Years, Human Fears” in Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Indiana University Press, 2002) and “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets” in Deborah Morse and Martin Danahay, eds., Victorian Animal Dreams (Ashgate, 2007). She received the 2005 Humane Society Innovation Award for an animal studies service-learning course and she is book review editor of the H-Net list, H-Animal. Narisara Murray is an independent scholar currently working on the biography of a nineteenth-century elephant. She holds a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science from Indiana University and a B.A. from Harvard College. Her dissertation, “Lives of the Zoo,” explores the roles of the animals in the London Zoo and their overlapping cultural meanings as objects of science, entertainment, and curiosity about both the natural world and the political globe. She divides her time between Cambodia and the United States. Nigel Rothfels is the author of a history of the emergence of naturalistic displays in zoological gardens, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), and the editor of the cross-disciplinary collection of essays in Animal Studies, Representing Animals (Indiana University Press, 2002). He has held post-doctoral fellowships from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently writing a cultural history of elephants since the eighteenth century. Mark Rowlands is professor of philosophy at the University of Miami, Florida. He is the author of ten books including, Animal Rights (St. Martin’s Press, 1998), The Body in Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1999), The Nature of Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Animals Like Us (Verso, 2002), and Body Language (MIT Press, 2006). His autobiography of a decade spent living and traveling with a wolf is to be published by Granta in 2008.

index

Alken, Henry Thomas, 13 Allan, William C., 52 Allen, David, 122 Altick, Richard, 162 American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 28 Animal (Fudge), 30 The Animal Estate (Ritvo), 16 Animal Friends Society, 29 Animal Liberation (Singer), 151 animal protectionist movement, 2, 3 animal representation animal death commemorated by, 33 caging v. visual, 45 forms/locations changing of, 31, 32, 33–7, 34–6 genres affecting, 153 in private spaces, 31, 33 in public spaces, 33 of Greyfriars Bobby, 40–1 of unnamed animals alongside known humans, 33–5, 35, 181n58 popularity of genres of, 154 real blurred with, 43–5 sculpted form of, 31, 33 status of breeds changed due to, 43–4 animals agency of, 37–40 as entertainment objects, 96 as moral concern’s appropriate objects, 141

as photographed for science research, 133 as pleasure objects, 96–7 as represented by humans, 29 as suffering, 155–6 biographies of, 154–5 caged, 95–6 celebrity of, 158–9 children’s link to, 7–8 communication with, 8 cruelty to, 137–8 cultural history of, 2–3, 20 cultural representations of, 27 de-animalized, 15–16 differential treatment of humans and, 137 divide with humans, 2 emotional attachments to, 161 emotions of, 38–9 evolution theory affecting relation to, 139 happiness v. entertainment value of, 104–5 humans as dominating/caring for, 96, 193n2 humans dependence on, 92 human similarities with other, 138–40 in cities, 6, 35–6 in class-based social structures, 80 in narrative forms, 155 in narrative imagination, 159

226

in zoos as gaze objects, 27 kindness towards, 4–5, 18 kinship between humans and other, 155 loyalty of, 37 modern, 26–7 moral equality and humans v. other, 137 moral recognition of, 140 narrative genres developed to portray sense of self of, 27 paintings of farm, 158 personal witness of plight of, 29 physical continuity between humans and, 19–20 public commemoration of, 41, 42–3, 43 public cruelty towards, 1–2 role in cities, 35–6 science experiments on, 18–19 sense of self possessed by, 40 statues of, 27 status leap from eighteenth to nineteenth century of, 158 stories about, 38–9 stray, 80 unique representational problems of, 154–5 utilitarian, 6 utilitarianism towards, 151 violence towards, 1, 3, 175n8 see also animal representation, domesticated animals, domestication, laboratory animals ANZAC see Australian and New Zealand Army Corps aquariums, 17 art see animal representation, paintings Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), 34 autobiography, animal, 39– 40, 183n89 Autobiography of a Cat; Of the Cream of Cats, Too (Faithfull), 39 BAAS see British Association for the Advancement of Science Barlett, Abraham, 123

INDEX

Beard, Dan, 64 bear pits, 98–9 bears, 98–9, 100, 194n11 Bechstein, Johannes, 107 Beddoe, John, 23 Belt, Richard, 32, 33 Bentham, Jeremy, 143, 155 on prohibiting cruelty, 137–8 Bergh, Henry, 28 Berlin Zoological Gardens, 97 Bernard, Claude, 19 Bert, Paul, 19 Besant, Annie, 30 Bewick, Thomas, 105, 158 Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky (Flint), 52 biology culture’s historical relationship to, 73 laboratory experimentation as central role of, 131 natural history’s relationship with, 133 naturalists and, 132 birds see canaries Black Beauty (Sewell), 159 Blum, Ann Shelby, 158 Blyth, Edward, 122 Bogart, W. H., 54 Boone, Daniel, 51– 4, 52, 186n17 Boone & Crockett Club, 68 Boreman, Thomas, 157 Boyer, Joseph, 23 Braudel, Fernand, on civilization, 74 breeding canaries, 105–6, 109–10 constancy theory in, 85 dog, 16–17 in zoos, 89 livestock, 85–6 principle behind, 85 racism and animal, 22–3 vermin, 81 British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 130 British Cruelty to Animals Act, 2 British Ornithologists’ Union, 127, 133 British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, 3

INDEX

Brodie, William, Greyfriars Bobby depicted by, 25–6, 26 Bronx Zoo, 95, 101 lion house in, 102 Brooke, Joshua, 127 Brown, James, 45 Brown-Séquard, C. E., 19 Buffon, comte de, 16, 107–8, 195n24 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 26 Burt, Jonathan, 81 canaries, 108 appearances of, 105, 110, 195n17 as pets, 105–7 as wanting in utility, 111 breeding, 105–6, 109–10 ideas embodied by, 109–10 Leclerc on, 107–8, 195n24 nightingale v., 107–9, 196n28 song of, 107–8, 110, 196n31 Canguilhem, Georges, 19 cats, 38–9, 77 cemeteries, pet, 33, 34, 181n49 Chambers, William, 38 Chevalier, Louis, on laboring classes v. dangerous classes, 11 Churchill, Winston, 45 civilization, 74–6, 189n9 Clark, William, 60 class animal violence in lower, 2–3, 175n8 conceptualizing, 11 kindness as ethic of middle, 15 Cobbe, Frances Power, 39, 45 cockfighting, 2 collectivism, 141–3 Colley, Linda, 7 Complete Manual for Young Sportsmen (Herbert), 62 The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels), 10–11 conservatism, 2 Corbin, Alain, on mob violence, 12 Cosslett, Tess, 8, 157 Cousin, Victor, 7 Crockett, Davy, 54 cultural anthropology, 19–20 La Curée (Zola), 12 Custer, George Armstrong, 63

227

Darwin, Charles, 21, 28, 73, 120, 139, 155, 170 Days, June, 1 Defoe, Daniel, 23 Delacroix, Eugéne, wild animal paintings by, 162, 164 Descartes, René, 155 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Darwin), 21 Descola, Philippe, 19–20 Despard, Charlotte, 30 Dickens, Charles, 5 Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (Filson), 51 dogs agency of, 37–40 as status symbol, 30, 78 breed types, 31, 43–4, 180n26 dressing up, 79 in cities, 35 loyalty of, 37–40 portraits of, 79 public muzzling of, 37 routines created by, 37–8 stolen, 36–7 dog shows, 27–8 domesticated animals characteristics of, 74, 189n3 civilization/evolution elements in, 74, 88 exotic, 89 farm animals as, 82–5 home relationship with, 76, 189n13 integration in human social life, 74 livestock v., 78 pets as type of, 76–80, 189n16 popularity/forms changing of different, 30–1 vermin v., 81 working dogs v., 30 zoo animals as, 89 domestication, 73, 75–6 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 166 Durand, Marguerite, 33 Early, Ralph, 50 Edwards, Sydenham, 30 Elliot, William, 61, 68–9 Emory, William H., 61–2

228

The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (MacKenzie), 13 Engels, Friedrich, 5 on sex/drinking of workers, 11 on workers in bestial terms, 10–11, 177n39 Enlightenment, 7 Entomological Society, 127 equality see moral equality eugenics, 22 evolution, 73–4 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin), 21 factories, 10–11 farms, 82–5 Fenwick, Eliza, 38–9 Ferguson, Moira, 159 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, civilization as identified by, 75 Filson, John, 51, 54 Flint, Timothy, 52, 62 The Flopsy Bunnies (Potter), 5–6 Foster, Michael, 134 foxhunting, 13 French Revolution, 1 La Frond, 33 Fudge, Erica, 154–5 on concept of representation, 29–30 Galton, Francis, 22, 76 Game Act of 1671, 13 Game Reform Act of 1831, 13 Gleizes, Jean-Antoine, 1 Gordon, George, 161 Gough, Charles, 41 Gould, John, 120, 123 Grammont Law, 1–2, 4 Gray, George Robert, 121 Gray, John Edward, 130, 148 Grayson, Andrew Jackson, 61 Green, Andrew H., 101 Greenwood, George, 41 Greyfriars Bobby context of, 45–6 depictions of, 25–6, 26, 40–1, 42–3, 43

INDEX

independent actions of, 40 narrative of life of, 40–1 grief, 33 Grier, Katherine, 8, 77 Grimké, Charlotte Forten, 111 Grinnell, George Bird, 56, 63 Grove, W. B., 132 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 162 Hagenbeck, Carl, animal exhibits by, 102–4, 103 Hall, G. Stanley, on children reveling in savagery, 64 Harmois, George, 33 Harrison, Brian, 158 Hartley, Cecil B., 54 Hawes, William Post, 56 Hearst, William Randolph, 100 Herbert, Henry William, 55 hunting message of, 56 hunting popularized by, 54, 56 on Americans as hunters, 61–2 Higonnet, Patrice, 6 Histoire naturelle (Leclerc), 16 Hornaday, William, 17, 111 horses, 33, 181n53 Hugo, Victor, 11–12 Hunters as heroes, 51–4, 52 as rogues, 48–51 backwood, 51 Boone, Daniel, 51, 52 buckskin, 51 farmers v., 47–8 frontier, 50 Herbert on, 61–2 in literature, 54, 65 natural history as known by, 59–60 organizations for children, 64–5 women as, 65–6 see also Boone, Daniel hunting American conquest of Mexico and celebration of, 62–3 antebellum artists depicting, 58 as enshrined, 63–9, 64–5, 67, 70, 71 as rural sport, 57–8 big game, 17, 50 guns, 67

INDEX

in America, 47–50, 51 in Britain, 12–14 in India, 13–14 moral offensive on behalf of, 56 novels, 65 paintings, 15, 50–1 popularity of, 48 Puritans and, 49 restrictions on, 68–9 Roosevelt on, 47, 66–7 social importance of, 49 violence of, 15 see also foxhunting; sport hunting Hyde Park Cemetery, 33, 34, 181n49 The Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells), 21, 172 Itard, Jean-Marc, 23–4 Jackson, Michael, 100 Jardin des Plantes, 96 Jefferson, Thomas, 50 Jesse, George, 28, 162 Jones, Robert, 90 Jones, Susan D., 6 Jungle Book (Kipling), 8 Kant, Immanuel, 152 Kennel Club, 16, 37 Kenyon-Jones, Christine, 161 kindness, 4–6, 15, 18 Kipling, Rudyard, 8 Knauer, Friedrich, 112 laboratory animals, 131–4 Landseer, Thomas as dog painter, 31 civilization v. barbarism shown by, 14, 15 emotional resonance of work by, 44–5 human-animal relation in images by, 43–4 hunting paintings by, 15 Lewis, Meriwether, 60 liberalism, 140–3 Lichtenstein, Martin Hinrich, 97 literature animals in, 156–7, 159, 161, 170–1 Boone in, 62

229

children’s, 156–7 empire fiction in, 165–7, 169–71 hunters in, 54, 65 pets in, 79 science fiction, 156–7, 171 livestock, 78, 83–6 Locke, John, 49, 141–2 The Lost World (Doyle), 166 loyalty, 37–40 Ludwig, Karl, 19 McClung, John, 54 MacKenzie, John M., 13 Magendie, François, spinal nerve work by, 19 maleatology, 122 Mangum, Teresa, on animal stories, 39 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx), 3 Marcel, Odile, 9 Martin, Sara Catherine, 157 Martin’s Act of 1822, 35 Marx, Karl, on animal cruelty, 3 Mary and Her Cat in Words Not Exceeding Two Syllables (Fenwick), 38–9 Massey, Doreen, on local spaces in social relations, 40 Maxwell, Martha, 65–6 Means of Natural Selection (Darwin), 21 Mégnin, Pierre, 16 Melville, Herman, 155–6 Milburn, William Henry, 54 Mill, John Stewart, 143, 155 on individuality, 148 on utilitarianism, 147–8 Les Misérables (Hugo), 11–12 Moby Dick; or, The Whale, 155–6 moral equality, 136–41, 137 moral theory, teleological, 145 Moras, Ferdinand, 9 Morgan, T. H., 134 Mouchy, Emile-Edouards, 158 Murray, William H. H., 63 Museum of Natural History in London, 128, 128–9 museums, 27, 128–31 National Canine Defense League, 37 National Cat Club, 28

230

natural history as popular pursuit, 114 biology’s relationship with, 133 making of, 115 natural theology’s relationship with, 130 research in, 132–3, 199n64 scientific specimens as made, 114–15, 116, 117, 118–19, 119–23 trade in, 115–16 The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Reddy), 6–7 Nyhart, Lynn, 131, 133 Oberlånder, Adolf, 5 On Liberty (Mill), 147 Origin of Species (Darwin), 21, 28, 120, 170 ornithology, 133 Owen, Richard, 123, 129–30 paintings by Landseer, 15, 31, 45 farm animals in, 158 hunting, 15, 50–1 issues with animals depicted in, 158 of animals, 157–8, 165 Par-Delá Nature et Culture (Descola), 19–20 Payne, Christiana, 158 Peck, John Mason, 54 pet keeping as ritual enactment of power, 15 de-animalized animals from, 15–16 fantasy in culture of, 17 forms of, 16 human/animal relationship in, 15–16 kindness of, 15 see also domesticated animals pets see domesticated animals philosophy, 130, 135–6 Porter, Roy, 18 Potter, Beatrix, animals as envisioned by, 5–6 public gardens, 27 public zoological garden movement, 97 Puck (Ouida), 39

INDEX

Puritanism, 3 Les Races de chiens (Mégnin), 16 racism, 22–3 Rawls, John, on teleological moral, 145 Reddy, William, 6–7 Regan, Tom, 151 Ritvo, Harriet on kindness to animals, 4 on notions of race, 21–2 on urbanization increasing utilitarian animals in cities, 6 Roosevelt, Theodore, 47, 67, 67–8 Rothfels, Nigel, 17 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), 29 RSPCA see Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog (Stables), 39 Salt, Henry, 141–2 Saunders, Margaret Marshall, 161 savagery, 64 Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Rothfels), 17 Schartau, Liesa, 29 Schomburgk, Hans Hermann, 17 scientific specimens as artifacts, 120–1 as misrepresenting natural world, 121, 124 birds as, 117 collectors of, 117, 119–20, 122 display of, 113–14, 123–31, 127–8 fixed types of, 125 for money, 120, 122–3 in auction houses, 126–7 in collections, 123–31 in museums, 129–31 making of natural history, 114–15, 116, 117, 118–19, 119–23 market, 121–2 meanings of, 134 ordinary, 125–6 of scientific societies, 127 scientific theory as shaped by, 124

INDEX

scientific value of, 121 type, 125–6 Sclater, Philip Lutley, 121, 126 Scott, Walter, 31–2 Scoular, William, 31 Selous, Frederick Courteney, 66 Seton, Thomas, 64 Sewell, Anna, 159 Sewell, William, 10 Shaler, Nathanial, 76, 88 Simeon, San, 100 Singer, Peter, 151 slaughterhouses, 83 Smith, Adam, 50 social imagination, in animal-like state, 9–10 Société protectrice des animaux, 3, 4 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), 2, 154 Sons of Daniel Boone, 64 SPCA see Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals sport hunting appeal of, 56–7 articles on, 63 children participating in, 64–5 conservation promoted in, 69 cultural message of, 58 effemination rejected by, 57–8 popularity of, 63 rise of, 54, 55, 56–63, 59–61 soldier skills increased by, 61 sportsmanship ethic in, 60–1 Stables, W. Gordon, 39, 161 Stevens, Samuel, 127 Strickland, Hugh, 126 Stubbs, George, 158 Sullivan, Robert, 80 Swainson, William, 122 Taine, Hippolyte, 7–8 Tait, Arthur Fitzwilliam, 58, 59–60 taxidermy, 117, 123–4 Thompson, Frances Maria, on cattle harassment, 29 Trimmer, Sarah, 157 Trollope, Anthony, 13

231

Une éducation française (Marcel), 9 Union Stockyards, 85 urbanization, 4–6, 12 utilitarianism as greatest good for greatest number, 143–4 attitudes towards animals as shaped by, 151 components of, 143–4, 146–7 critics of, 151 direct, 144 egalitarian, 146–9 hedonistic, 143 indirect, 144 in liberalism v. natural law, 140–1 interpretations of, 143–4 moral directive of, 145 preference, 144 problems with, 148–50 rule, 144 teleological, 144–8 utility as maximized in, 144–6 Van Lennep, Mary Elizabeth, 110 Veblen, Thorstein, 78 vermin, 80–1, 82, 191n43 Village of Cannibals (Corbin), 12 Villérmé, Louis, 10 Webber, Charles Wilkins, 54, 62 Weir, Harrison, 22, 28, 38 Wells, H. G., 21, 172 Wesley, John, on humans similarities with animals, 138–40 Westminster Kennel Club, 28 White, Gilbert, 27 Wild und Wilde im Herzen Afrikas (Schomburgk), 17 The Winning of the West (Roosevelt), 47 Woodcraft Indians, 64 Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Sewell), 10 Wright, Joseph, 157 Zaborowski-Moindron, Sigismond, 22–3 Zeuner, Frederick, on domestication as social relation, 74–5

232

Zola, Emile, 12 zoological gardens animals as happy in, 95–6 animals as objects of gaze in, 27 animals bred in, 89 as public organizations, 97–8 as refuge for wild animals, 111 as successful, 104 bears pit in, 98–109, 194n11 big-game hunting as connected to, 17 buildings in, 95, 101–2 civilization as linked with, 88 domestication of animals in, 89 emergence of, 88, 89 entertainment value of animals in, 104–5

INDEX

exotic animals in, 17, 18 fantasies organized by, 17 happiness of animals in, 104–5, 112 immersive exhibits in, 95–6 in nineteenth century as transition point, 100 menagerie v., 97–8 naturalistic landscapes for animals in, 102–4, 103 origin of, 96–7 public education from, 88–9 scientific functions of, 90 Zoological Society, 127 zoos see zoological gardens Zurich Zoo, 95