Mary Robinson and the Costs of Animal Labor

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mary Robinson’s Lyrical Tales (1800) has long been understood as a retort to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first edition of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and has long been admired for its multi-genre presentations of radical social, political, and sexual politics. This essay is on the collection’s understudied poem “The Shepherd’s Dog” and its focus upon the radical relationship between human and animal, colleague and companion, soldier and soldier of the working class. By privileging the working animal’s sentience, his complicated service to humans, and his similarity to revolutionaries, Robinson’s poem functions as a uniquely non-anthropocentric and postsecular precursor to “Michael,” Wordsworth’s famous pastoral poem from the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. This examination of “The Shepherd’s Dog” emphasizes Robinson’s authority among first-generation Romantics and among those she inspired after them, especially the nineteenth-century women writers who continued to assert the value of both the female and non-human gaze.