Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.

This book offers a panoramic view of Georgian London, redefining the city's role in the industrial, agricultural and consumer revolutions. It does this by examining, for the first time, the huge contribution that horses, cattle, sheep, pigs and dogs made to the world's first modern metropolis, as well as the serious challenges the animals posed.

Late nineteenth-century England witnessed the emergence of a vociferous and well-organzied movement against the use of living animals in scientific research, a protest that threatened the existence of experimental medicine. Richard D. French views the Victorian antivivisection movement as a revealing case study in the attitude of modern society toward science. The author draws on popular pamphlets and newspaper accounts to recreate the structure, tactics, ideology, and personalities of the early antivivisection movement. He argues that at the heart of the antivivisection movement was public concern over the emergence of science and medicine as leading institutions of Victorian society--a concern, he suggests, that has its own contemporary counterparts. In addition to providing a social and cultural history of the Victorian antivivisection movement, the book sheds light on many related areas, including Victorian political and administrative history, the political sociology of scientific communities, social reform and voluntary associations, the psychoanalysis of human attitudes toward animals, and Victorian feminism. Richard D. French is a Science Advisor with the Science Council of Canada. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the nineteenth century, richly-drawn social fiction became one of England’s major cultural exports. At the same time, a surprising companion came to stand alongside the novel as a key embodiment of British identity: the domesticated pet. In works by authors from the Brontës to Eliot, from Dickens to Hardy, animals appeared as markers of domestic coziness and familial kindness. Yet for all their supposed significance, the animals in nineteenth-century fiction were never granted the same fullness of character or consciousness as their human masters: they remain secondary figures. Minor Creatures re-examines a slew of literary classics to show how Victorian notions of domesticity, sympathy, and individuality were shaped in response to the burgeoning pet class. The presence of beloved animals in the home led to a number of welfare-minded political movements, inspired in part by the Darwinian thought that began to sprout at the time. Nineteenth-century animals may not have been the heroes of their own lives but, as Kreilkamp shows, the history of domestic pets deeply influenced the history of the English novel.

The Victorian period witnessed the beginning of a debate on the status of animals that continues today. This volume explicitly acknowledges the way twenty-first-century deliberations about animal rights and the fact of past and prospective animal extinction haunt the discussion of the Victorians' obsession with animals. Combining close attention to historical detail with a sophisticated analytical framework, the contributors examine the various forms of human dominion over animals, including imaginative possession of animals in the realms of fiction, performance, and the visual arts, as well as physical control as manifest in hunting, killing, vivisection and zookeeping. The diverse range of topics, analyzed from a contemporary perspective, makes the volume a significant contribution to Victorian studies. The conclusion by Harriet Ritvo, the pre-eminent authority in the field of Victorian/animal studies, provides valuable insight into the burgeoning field of animal studies and points toward future studies of animals in the Victorian period.

Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.

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