“What then, poor Beastie!”: Gender, Politics, and Animal Experimentation in Anna Barbauld's “The Mouse's Petition”

Abstract

�Despite the controversial status of animal experimentation during the eighteenth century, not much poetry of the period deals with this subject. Anna Letitia Barbauld’s frequently reprinted poem “The Mouse’s Petition” is both a rare and problematic exception. A note informs us that the poem was “found in the trap where . . . [a mouse] had been confined all night by Dr .P riestley, for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air.” 1 Published in Barbauld’s Poems (Warrington, 1772), “The Mouse’s Petition” was singled out for praise by reviewers in the Monthly Review ,a popular liberal miscellany with a growing literary focus, and the Critical Review, which saw itself as a conservative alternative to the Monthly ,d evoting much of its space to politics but containing reviews of a wide range of contemporary publications. Reviewers applauded Barbauld for denouncing the inhumanity of Joseph Priestley and other experimental philosophers. Barbauld herself denied any such purpose, defending her friend Priestley and explaining that her poem was about “mercy” and “justice” rather than “humanity” and “cruelty.” Although she ended her statement of authorial intention there, she had equal reason to complain about the excessively literal reading of her poem. There is evidence to suggest that the situation of the mouse is intended to comment on a variety of hierarchical relationships