Civilised by Beasts: Animals and Urban Change in Nineteenth-Century Dublin

Abstract

By focusing on Dublin's nonhuman inhabitants in the nineteenth century, Juliana Adelman offers a new and fascinating perspective on the city that also speaks to wider histories of human-animal relationships and development in the nineteenth century. What began as a book about “zoology in Dublin,” grew into five deeply researched and diverse chapters that explore many layers of Dublin's nineteenth-century human and animal life. “Historians of Dublin have ignored the city's beasts and in doing so they have missed much about urban life during the nineteenth century,” she writes (1). In Adelman's hands, the history of Dublin's nineteenth-century animal city is very much alive (and sometimes very much dead).There are parts of Dublin's animal history that are familiar across other urban animal histories in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth century: the establishment of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; growing restrictions on livestock and animal industries downtown; and the development of zoos and domestic pet culture. Yet Adelman's Dublin also provides historians with distinction and nuance in thinking about urban change in nineteenth-century Europe and America.Civilised by Beasts is an expansive social history that engages with urban, political, environmental, and cultural history. In early chapters, the reader encounters the contemporaneous development of two prominent animal institutions: the Dublin Zoological Society (established in 1830) and the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (DSPCA) (established in 1840). The Zoological Society thrived with its popular gardens, but the DSPCA struggled to gain a following. Here, Dublin seems to have a somewhat distinct place in the transnational Humane Movement, as many Dubliners saw the DSPCA as Anglo-Protestant and anti-Catholic, and therefore resisted its influence.In later sections, Adelman explores the class meanings of pig keeping and interconnected efforts at social control through the city's porcine residents. “Middle-class reformers used animals to help them identify what it was to be truly human and applied these ideas to efforts to reform the lives of the urban poor,” writes Adelman (64). Though many Dubliners had “rational economic reasons” for keeping pigs, the practice often became “an indictment of a person's moral and intellectual character” (78). Here Adelman expands on Catherine McNeur's “swinish multitudes” of Manhattan to suggest “a prejudice across Western societies against the character of the pig,” and the people who kept them (77). As in New York, reformers were successful; by the 1850s, Dublin authorities had significantly reduced urban pig populations.In later chapters, Adelman turns her attention to the Dublin Cattle Market and policing animals in the second half of the 1800s. A center of live cattle production and trade, Dublin faced growing reform efforts shaped by “hardening middle-class attitudes to the dangers of meat production” (95). Here again Dublin seems somewhat distinctive as a city that did not eliminate or conceal the cattle industry from the urban environment. Cattle and the Cattle Market were part of the city's identity, and “Dublin embraced its status as an urban cowtown, Ireland's market metropolis” (93). The city did institute new rules on livestock and slaughter (licenses and inspectors, for example) and new means of enforcement and inspection. But authorities did not profoundly reorder livestock space as we see in other cities at the same time. Adelman argues that the “net result” of these reforms was “conservative,” as “slaughterhouses tended to stay in the neighbourhoods where they had always been” (103). In Dublin, nineteenth-century reforms “did not inevitably result in the concealment of animal exploitation,” and in fact some reforms made cattle “more permanently embedded in the urban landscape” (119).Adelman's history of Dublin now joins a spate of single-city studies of animals and nineteenth-century urban environments, which includes compelling cases of Seattle, New York, London, and more. What happens when we assemble these histories into one frame? There is notable overlap and coincidence but also distinction and room for contrasts across American and European cities. How do we explain these areas of convergence and distinction? Adelman's valuable contribution helps address these questions and affirms that we can no longer write urban histories without paying attention to nonhuman inhabitants.Civilised by Beasts is quite spatial and geographic, and the book would have benefited from additional maps and visualizations. (There would certainly be excellent visual material for a companion website.) Adelman introduces the reader to the booming demand for pet portraits, for instance, but the reader does not have the enjoyment of seeing these images. “I want to give readers a fuller sense of what it was like to live in nineteenth-century Dublin and who its residents were,” Adelman writes (11). On that point—and many others—she has succeeded.