Ways of Reading Animals in Victorian Literature, Culture and Science

Abstract

AbstractBy decentring the human perspective and shifting focus towards the diverse roles of animals in human culture, the burgeoning field of animal studies is transforming the way we read texts past and present. Since Harriet Ritvo’s groundbreaking work, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Era (1987), the history of animals has been of particular interest to scholars of Victorian literature and culture. Similarly, those interested in the history of animals have frequently turned their attention to this period, which witnessed the emergence of public zoos, animal protection societies and the theory of natural selection. Of particular interest to scholars in a variety of fields have been the vivisection debates of the later‐19th century. Beginning in the 1870s, animal experimentation came to be more widely practiced in British physiological laboratories, bringing into conflict scientific and humanitarian interests in the animal, as antivivisectionists and advocates of animal research debated their right to speak for the nonhuman animal. Although the moral status of the experimental animal was at the centre of these debates, the animal presence has been notably absent from accounts of the period by historians of science. A concern with the ethical problems raised by the human use of animals is also absent or muted in recent scholarship on cultural representations of animals in the Victorian period. This essay considers these animal absences and suggests areas for further inquiry and development, arguing that the subject of the vivisection debates of the later‐19th century could serve as a meeting point for scholars interested in science studies, Victorian literature and culture, and the burgeoning field of animal studies.