Introduction: Representing Animalsjecs_315 431..436

G LY N I S R I D L E Y

Abstract: Why devote a volume to the representation of animals in theeighteenth century? One answer lies in the doubling of known quadrupedspecies classified at the time, a development that suggested a previouslyunsuspected richness of the natural world and which fuelled debates aboutcompeting taxonomic systems. During the eighteenth century the ‘exotic’ (forexample, elephants and rhinoceroses) became more familiar, even as therange of known exotica increased; and domesticated animals became thefocus of a more sympathetic artistic gaze, even as the bodies of livestockbecame the site of genetic manipulations that could be seen as heraldingmodern agri-business.

Keywords: animals, representation, John Ray, Linnaeus, taxonomy, agri-business, emotion, religion, science

Why devote a volume to the representation of animals in the eighteenthcentury?1 Animals are clearly ubiquitous in both the fiction and the non-fiction of the period, in its art works and scientific treatises. But in this respectthe eighteenth century is no different from any other age. The human animallives surrounded by other animals, and always has done. Indeed, the Judaeo-Christian creation story of Genesis and Darwinian evolutionary theory agreethat the non-human animal was present before Homo sapiens came intobeing. Animals therefore form the inescapable background to a wide varietyof the stories we tell ourselves, from the religious to the scientific. Ubiquityalone should not merit any special consideration.

Dig a little deeper, however, and the difference of the eighteenth-centuryintellectual landscape in respect of animals becomes apparent. In 1693, whenthe English natural historian John Ray (1627-1705) published his catalogueof quadrupeds, the number of known species stood at 150. When Linnaeuspublished his Systema naturae in 1735, the number of species of quadrupedsknown had doubled to 300. By the late nineteenth century an average of1,000 new genera of animals of all kinds were being brought to the attentionof the scientific community each year. As the eminent journal Nature insistedin 1883, this was ‘a simply appalling number’.2 It was appalling in two senses,since the infinite variety of animal life on the planet seemed to resist scientificattempts to systematise the naming of all its species, even as classicists and

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 33 No. 4 (2010)

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theologians struggled to explain how ancient authorities had not known ofthe existence of so many living things.

During the first half of the eighteenth century, then, the number of knownanimal species doubled – many of the new ‘finds’ being accounted for by NewWorld species identified by European colonists or Old World species newlynamed in recently colonised African and Asian lands. At no previous pointhad the natural world appeared to expand so rapidly. And concomitant withthis expansion of animals seen and classified were new ways of seeing, orthinking about, the animal kingdom. The talking animal moralists familiarfrom works such as Aesop’s Fables continued to have a place in literature butwere joined during the eighteenth century by more subtle animal narrators,whose creators experimented with representing an animal’s point of view, toeffect a genuine emotional response on the part of readers. The more fancifulcreations of the bestiaries disappeared, superseded by a range of exotica, oftendrawn at close quarters. And even as showmen and menageries puzzled overthe care of non-European species, farmers began changing the physical formof livestock, breeding sheep and cattle the likes of which no one hadpreviously seen. Far removed from this utilitarian relationship, companionanimals began attracting enough attention to figure in fictions and memoirs,typically as evidence of their owner’s idiosyncrasy in taking a dog or a cat intothe drawing room or the bedroom.

When all this is considered, the eighteenth century was a time not onlyof rapid expansion of the natural world but also of rapidly changingrelationships between human and non-human animals. This volume hopes toreflect all of these changes, while recognising that very few species can beconsidered within its pages, and many more issues remain unexplored. Butwhereas the late nineteenth-century editors of Nature found their inability tocontain discussion of the animal kingdom to be ‘simply appalling’, thepresent volume sees an expanding eighteenth-century view of the animalkingdom as a cause for celebration, suggesting possibilities for many furtherexplorations. The papers that follow are grouped into four thematic sections –Speakers, Subjects, Boundaries and Emotions – examining not only ways inwhich animals were represented during the eighteenth century but also waysin which traditional representations of animals were changing.

The talking animal is a staple of folk tales and children’s stories the worldover and has been, from the twentieth century on, and in animated ordigitised form, a star of the big screen, voicing sentiments designed to appealboth to children and to adults. Under the heading of ‘Speakers’ we see thattalking animals have always played a pivotal role not only in the stories ofinfants but also in myths about the infancy of human culture. Ann Cline Kellyreminds us that the metamorphoses of Graeco-Roman literature caused feweranxieties for eighteenth-century writers and Christian commentators thanthe troubling presence of two talking animals in the Bible. While Classicalmyths could be dismissed as the product of pagan societies, Biblical exegetescould hardly treat the Bible’s two animal speakers in the same way. To deny

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the veracity of the story of Balaam’s ass was one thing: to deny that theserpent spoke to Eve in the Garden of Eden was to question the underpinningsof the book of Genesis itself. In Kelly’s paper we see the commentary that wasdesigned to keep troubling questions about the credibility of talking animalsat bay.

In considering whether even children have ever accepted therepresentation of talking animals uncritically, Conrad Brunström andKatherine Turner illuminate a debate played out between the writings ofJean-Jacques Rousseau and the poems of William Cowper. Their contributionhere invites us to reconsider Cowper’s poetic acts of animal ventriloquism notsimply as whimsy but as a richly nuanced exploration of the means by whichwe learn sympathy for others, different from ourselves. Acknowledging thatCowper’s animal poems are often dismissed as some of his slightest creations,Brunström and Turner ask us to recognise that Cowper’s economy of poeticform does not militate against his use of this form to explore fundamentalquestions about the limits of our ability to imagine other ways of seeing andbeing. In contrast to Cowper’s individual exploration of animal consciousnessin poetry, Jane Spencer considers how late eighteenth-century writers beganwrestling with the representation of animal consciousness in a moreextended form. She charts a shift from the ‘fabular, allegorical and satirical’use of animals in literature to a more ‘naturalistic’, ‘empathetic’ and‘inwardly focused’ portrayal by the century’s end. Suggesting that writersdrew on Henry Fielding’s and Samuel Richardson’s representation of humanconsciousness, Spencer reads Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories and EdwardAugustus Kendall’s Keeper’s Travels as narratives that approach nineteenth-century writers’ extended experiments with free indirect discourse. InKeeper’s Travels, which boldly credits a dog with emotions of sorrow, hope andjoy, which we are invited to share, Spencer identifies a ‘significant moment inthe history of animal representation’.

Of course, the majority of eighteenth-century representations of animalsdo not seek to promote a reader’s or a viewer’s empathy. In ‘Subjects’ fourpapers explore the empirical investigation of the animal kingdom: takentogether, they embrace consideration of everything from the microscopic tothe gigantic. When we talk of ‘animals’, we typically exclude insects, yetinsects are thought to represent perhaps 20% of all the biomass (the weight ofall living things) on Earth. Within the insect kingdom, perhaps one creaturein ten is a beetle, a fact that led the great biologist J. B. S. Haldane to observethat, of all that might be inferred about a creator, we could be certain of ‘aninordinate fondness for beetles’.3 Prefiguring this modern realisation of thesheer scale of the insect kingdom, a number of eighteenth-century writerswere convinced of its importance – and usefulness – as a teaching tool,particularly one that might be used to introduce women to science. SamGeorge focuses on the work of the Quaker educationalist Priscilla Wakefield,whose popular Introduction to Botany was followed – in form and approach –by An Introduction to the Natural History and Classification of Insects in a Series

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of Familiar Letters. As George shows, Wakefield used the form of an epistolaryexchange between women as a vehicle for an entomological education thatwas necessarily also a taxonomic one.

The growth of taxonomy – the mania for classification – is, of course, oftencited as one of the defining features of the Enlightenment. But Jeff Lovelandasks us to reconsider simplistic assumptions about the relationship betweenencyclopaedic publishing projects – the Encyclopédie and the Histoire Naturelle– and the growth of taxonomy during the period. As Loveland reminds us, wefrequently refer to only a handful of works when we rehearse truisms aboutthe eighteenth-century scientific redrawing of the classification of thenatural world. Moving from consideration of the general to the particular,‘Subjects’ concludes with two papers tracing the growth of knowledge aboutparticular species. And those species are ones that, since antiquity, have oftenbeen considered together. From Pliny’s discussion of the elephant and therhinoceros as mortal enemies in his Natural History to the placement of thespecies on the same plate in early nineteenth-century editions of the HistoireNaturelle, these two giants have been the subject of a proportionately largebody of literature. Christopher Plumb provides us with a cultural biography ofthe elephant, showing how changing perceptions of the species are as mucha history of knowledge as a history of the pachyderm itself. In concluding thatincreasing knowledge of the elephant made it more, not less, wondrous,Plumb rejects the idea of the Enlightenment as an age disenchanted with theconcept of the marvellous and the wonderful. As for the elephant’s traditionalantagonist, the rhinoceros, Craig Hanson demonstrates how just a part ofthat creature – here its horn – could become the focus of intense forensicenquiry on the part of the Royal Society. His paper shows how adetermination to test the truth of reports about a single species created a fluidinvestigation across disciplines today identified in opposition to each other, asantiquarianism and empiricism, art and science.

If the pursuit of the truth about a particular species led Royal Societymembers to disregard any notion of subject-specific limits, then the wholeconcept of a fixed boundary between ‘the animal’ and ‘the human’ was alsoplaced under increasing pressure during the Enlightenment. The papers in‘Boundaries’ reflect the liminality that could be attached to the categories ofboth animal and human at the time. Tobias Menely considers the image of thehunt as central to debates about just versus unjust sovereign powers,suggesting how tropes of predatory and amoral animal behaviour mightbecome attached to the monarch, calling into question the notion of a wiseand benevolent ruler. The destabilisation of categories of ‘animal’ and‘human’, ‘savagery’ and ‘civility’, considered by Menely in relation to wildanimals is complemented by Anne Milne’s examination of domestic species.Focusing on the livestock breeding undertaken by Robert Bakewell at NewDishley, Milne shows how the new figure of the animal breeder occupied aliminal space between the gentleman farmer and the traditional yeoman.How was he to be understood? And how were the unfamiliar sheep and cattle

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he bred to be classified? Since we live in an era that promises – or perhapsthreatens – staggering advances in genetic engineering, Milne’s paper offers afascinating insight into the beginning of modern agri-business, with all itsresultant demands on the animal body.

But even as Bakewell’s contemporaries questioned how he – and hislivestock – were to be understood, no economist doubted that increasedagricultural production was good for the wealth – and therefore the health –of the nation. Peter Messer examines the relationship between understandingnative species and the growth of national pride in the early Americanrepublic. As American and European writers wrestled with bizarre claims ofthe absolute inferiority or superiority of New World fauna over its Old Worldcounterparts, Messer sees the emergence of a ‘republican naturalism’. Withan emerging pride in native American species, American writers began toinsist that animals, if understood in their own terms, had much to teachhumans. As Messer invites us to consider the space between New and OldWorld fauna, and between new ideas of ‘republican naturalism’ and aEuropean comparative status quo, Paula Young Lee also considers New Worldpolitical movements and their impact on the representation of animals inEurope. Her subject is ostensibly a bear put on trial in the popular press for the‘murder’ of a man who fell into his cage. Yet as Young Lee adroitly shows, thecase may fairly claim to be a synecdochal manifestation of anxieties aboutthe Haitian revolution, slave uprisings and the brutality of those consideredless than human.

In the final group of papers, ‘Emotions’, contributors explore the difficultiesand confusion that can arise when a writer’s or artist’s desire is to portray notanimals considered as less than human but ones that are clearly meant to beconsidered on a level with their human counterparts. Lisa Berglund showsthe discomfort, incomprehension and – yes – jealousy so obviously felt byJames Boswell and Hester Lynch Piozzi in the face of Samuel Johnson’s carefor his cat. It is easy to assume that special diets for infirm dogs and cats are amodern affectation, but Berglund shows us an embarrassed Johnson stealingout to buy shellfish to tempt his cat, Hodge, excruciatingly conscious of notwishing to place his black servant, Francis Barber, in the position of buyingoysters to be fed to an animal. As someone who recently tried every suitablerecipe in her power to tempt a terminally ill dog to eat, I confess to feelingentirely in sympathy with Johnson here – desperate, and yet awkwardlyaware of the incomprehension of so many people in the face of thesecircumstances. As Berglund shows, Johnson’s concern for Hodge’s needs –and Barber’s feelings – can be read as more than simply a domestic drama inthe Johnson household. Many of those reading of Johnson’s oyster-buyingforays – both today and in the eighteenth century – can only comprehendHodge’s elevation in Johnson’s eyes (and, by extension, the elevation of allcompanion animals) in terms of another’s demotion. Turning from cats todogs, James Carson questions why love is seen as a zero-sum game, and whyan individual’s confession of their love for a dog or cat is interpreted, by some,

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as a sign of eccentricity, lack or an inability to love another human being.Carson’s portrayal of the importance of dogs to Sir Walter Scott’s life – andtheir many functions in his writing – concludes with a question worthpursuing: why are writers in the humanities so unwilling to engage with anexamination of the emotions to which animals – and companion animals inparticular – give rise? If writers have, historically, found it hard to admit to thedepths of their emotional engagement with their animals, artists have alsostruggled with how they might show genuine, recognisable emotion on thepart of animals themselves. The volume concludes with Elizabeth Liebman’sexploration of this subject. Underpinning Liebman’s paper is the fact that it iseasier to empathise with, and be concerned for the fate of, a living, breathingcreature than a two-dimensional image on the page. How, then, could artistsimbue an illustration with plasticity, inviting a viewer’s emotionalengagement through the illusion of potential movement? Examining theconcept of mouvement itself, Liebman suggests that the artistic privileging ofaction over passivity was crucial to the portrayal of animal emotion for arange of eighteenth-century artists.

NOTES1. I would like to thank Chris Mounsey for all his help and patience in putting this volume

together, Professor Peter Singer for kindly agreeing to contribute a foreword, andPriscilla Cabuyao and Matthew Taylor for their keen editorial eyes. The call for papers resultedin my receipt of just under ninety proposals, and I would like to express my gratitude to everyonewho took an interest in the volume. Thanks are also due to Joan Landes and Paula Young Lee,who put together the panels on ‘Representing Animals’ at the 39th annual meeting of theAmerican Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Portland, OR. Finally, I would like to thankmy two border collies, Daisy and Bruno, who herd me out for walks on a regular basis and makeme constantly curious as to what it would be like to see the world through their eyes – and noses.

2. ‘The Zoological Record’, Nature 27 (1883), p.310.3. George Evelyn Hutchinson, ‘Homage to Santa Rosalia, or Why Are There So Many Kinds of

Animals?’, The American Naturalist 93:870 (1959), p.146.

glynis ridley is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisville, KY, and the author ofClara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Atlantic Books,2004). She has recently completed a biography of the first woman to circumnavigate the globe, as abotanist on Bougainville’s expedition of 1766-9: The Discovery of Jeanne Baret will be published byCrown in 2010.

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