Overview

When we think about the Victorian age, we usually envision people together with animals: the Queen and her pugs, the sportsman with horses and hounds, the big game hunter with his wild kill, the gentleman farmer with a prize bull. Harriet Ritvo here gives us a vivid picture of how animals figured in English thinking during the nineteenth century and, by extension, how they served as metaphors for human psychological needs and sociopolitical aspirations. Victorian England was a period of burgeoning scientific cattle breeding and newly fashionable dog shows; an age of Empire and big game hunting; an era of reform and reformers that saw the birth of the Royal SPCA. Ritvo examines Victorian thinking about animals in the context of other lines of thought: evolution, class structure, popular science and natural history, imperial domination. The papers and publications of people and organizations concerned with agricultural breeding, veterinary medicine, the world of pets, vivisection and other humane causes, zoos, hunting at home and abroad, all reveal underlying assumptions and deeply held convictions-for example, about Britain's imperial enterprise, social discipline, and the hierarchy of orders, in nature and in human society. Thus this book contributes a new new topic of inquiry to Victorian studies; its combination of rhetorical analysis with more conventional methods of historical research offers a novel perspective on Victorian culture. And because nineteenth-century attitudes and practices were often the ancestors of contemporary ones, this perspective can also inform modern debates about human–animal interactions.

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Reviews

The brilliance of Ritvo's book, my favorite for 1987...[lies] in the particular examples that she has chosen to illustrate the institutional bonds of humans with other animals...She tells so many wonderful stories.--Stephen Jay Gould New York Review of Books

A large and little-explored subject excavated with a curious mixture of insight and narrowness. Ritvo's immediate object is to examine human dealings with animals in 19th-century England. This she carries off solidly, describing the evolution of the London Zoo or the late Victorian dog show with wonderful borrowings from such contemporary sources as breeders' polemical diatribes, naturalists' studies, and the sardonic eye of Punch. But her design is more ambitious. The six complementary aspects of human-animal relations she scrutinizes - cattle breeding, pet breeding, anti-cruelty activism, attitudes toward rabies, wild-animal collections, big-game hunting - are finally meant as metaphors of Englishmen's attitudes toward themselves and the universe. Elephant hunting is an obvious emblem of dominion at the height of imperialism; the humane societies' work on behalf of abused animals was also a disturbing attempt to police what they saw as a vice of the uneducated and inadequately disciplined lower classes. This larger aim is not evenly realized. At her best, Ritvo patiently marshals her primary material into real illuminations - e.g., the insight that the prize pet fancy represented the construction of a toy-world social order in constant need of reaffirmation and implicitly celebrating the desire and ability to manipulate. More often she belabors a few points about class attitudes and the celebration of preeminence, in a conceptual framework top-heavy with terms like metonymic association and nearly devoid of political or socioeconomic analysis. How often do we need to be told, in disapproving accents, that respectable English people thought they deserved to be lords of an often uncooperative universe? One can only be grateful for the energy with which Ritvo has tackled a telling chapter of intellectual history. A pity, though, that she does not bring a livelier range of analytic weapons to the task. (Kirkus Reviews)

The brilliance of Ritvo's book, my favorite for 1987...[lies] in the particular examples that she has chosen to illustrate the institutional bonds of humans with other animals...She tells so many wonderful stories. -- Stephen Jay Gould New York Review of Books

Author Information

Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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