Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914, and: Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786-1914, and: Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse Zoe Jaques (bio) Tess Cosslet , Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 205 pages, hardback, £45 (ISBN 0 7546 3656 9); Gina M. Dorré , Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) 179 pages, hardback, £47.50 (ISBN 0 7546 5515 6). The nineteenth century saw a significant rise in animal-welfare groups, including the SPCA in 1824 and the anti-vivisectionist Victoria League in 1876, a cause supported by Lewis Carroll's Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection (1875). The emergence of ecocritical and post-human theory has led to a renewed interest in the place of animals in this period. Although differently positioned in their relation to post-humanism, Tess Cosslett's Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914and Gina M. Dorré's Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse are both clearly influenced by animal-rights agendas and work to complicate naturalised relationships between humans and animals. While Cosslett is more interested in animals themselves, Dorré focuses on how animals relate to human identities. [End Page 354] Across six chronologically ordered chapters, and in what is essentially a series of readings of grouped and paired texts, Cosslett critiquesa range of work from Rousseau's Émile (1762) to Grahame's The Windin the Willows (1908). In her opening chapter, Cosslett sees SarahTrimmer's An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (1770) as standing out from other late eighteenth-century works (such as Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton (1783–9), Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life (1788), and Anna Barbauld and John Aikin's Evenings at Home (1792–6)), by advocating a more positive treatment of animals. Trimmer here exemplifies an early animal-rights tension by attempting to reconcile Man's God-given superiority with the need to be sympathetic towards animals (18). Although Cosslett finds tracesof political debates (36) in these stories, she argues that they largely reinforce traditional hierarchies both between humans and at the intersections of human-animal relations. Cosslett's second discussion focuses on Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1786) (later published as The Story of the Robins) and the fanciful Papillonades, a group of poems so named by Mary V. Jackson, which are all 'sequels to or imitations of William Roscoe's (1807) The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast' (Cosslett, 40).1 Cosslett frames thischapter around the question: '… how and why does anyone write stories about talking animals for children in an age of Enlightenment and Reason, of Progress and Modernity?' (37). Her answer is simply that these authors wished '… to amuse and interest a juvenile audience, and to arouse their sympathy and benevolent instincts' (39), a Horation aim typical of the period. Cosslett teases out a range of tensions expressed by the authors, however, and this is where the strength ofthe chapter lies. Here she argues against Mary V. Jackson's political bifurcation of children's literature as either conservative or socially mobile. Instead, Cosslett sees these talking-animal stories as occupying a middle ground, whereby carnivalesque elements fracture attempts at full social stability. The third chapter situates Black Beauty within its talking-animal contexts. Cosslett shows how a range of books, including Argus's The Adventures of a Donkey (1815), Cobbe's Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867), and Stables's Sable and White: the Autobiography of a Show Dog (1894), work against seeing animals as mere machines. She also shows how such 'animal autobiography' has striking similarities with contemporary slave narratives, in offering first-hand accounts of abuse, invoking sympathy, and making readers empathise against large gaps in identity. Because the early chapters are at least partially engaged with the recovery of several forgotten works, they tend to lack detailed textual [End Page 355] analysis. Chapters four, five and six, however, redress this deficiency. Chapter four considers Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature and Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies in critically orthodox terms, whereby Gatty opposes evolutionary theory and Kingsley reconciles it withnatural theology. Cosslett's originality, however...