When John met Benny: class, pets and family life in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Julie-Marie Strange

doi:10.1080/1081602x.2021.1897028

Abstract

ABSTRACT Histories of human-animal companionship have expanded in recent years but studies of British pet keeping prior to the twentieth century have been skewed towards the middle and upper classes. Such models risk establishing middle-class values and practices as the norm, creating the implicit assumption that working-class difference amounts to deviance or, that middle-class norms ‘trickle down’ the socio-economic scale eventually. While it is broadly acknowledged that working-class families kept birds or animals in domestic settings, there has been little consideration of what animal companionship meant in Victorian and Edwardian working-class family life or, more to the point, the ways in which pet keeping was classed and why this matters. Drawing on three principal methods, this essay explores what pet keeping meant in the financial, spatial and affective context of British working-class family life. It tries to understand how human family members could experience or, at least, articulate a sense of connection with animal members of the household. Resources of time, space and money shaped what pets were possible for people to keep, where they were kept and how relationships with those animals were forged. The choices people made in precarious or restricted material circumstances exposes the classed character of pet keeping and the ‘hierarchical entanglement’ of human-animal relations within a working-class context.

Highlights

Histories of human-animal companionship have expanded in recent years but studies of British pet keeping prior to the twentieth century have been skewed towards the middle and upper classes (e.g., Tague, 2015; Kete, 1994; Grier, 2006)
While it is broadly acknowledged that working-class families kept birds or animals in domestic settings, there has been little consideration of what animal companionship meant in Victorian and Edwardian working-class family life or the ways in which pet keeping was classed and why this matters
If animals have been peripheral to studies of family life in general, the inclusion of pets in working-class histories facilitates reflection on how family, home and affect were classed experiences for humans and animals and how human-animal relations in a working-class environment operated as ‘hierarchical entanglement’ (Saha, 2017)

Summary

Methodology

Most archival material on working-class life in the Victorian and Edwardian period was created by the state or welfare agencies offering Olympian perspectives on the pro blems of poverty while proposing correctives. The omission does not indicate the absence of pet keeping in the authors’ working-class childhood so much as their anxiety to be taken seriously and the perception that pets had no place in such narratives: focused on crafting anthropocentric political subjectivities, few of these authors paid much attention to human-centred relationships either, especially beyond childhood (Gagnier, 1991) The exception to this trend is ‘commemorative’ life stories: accounts that convey detail of everyday life, published or collected largely between the 1960s and 80s (with some later additions) as part of social, family and community historians’ rush to record workingclass lives before the late-Victorian generation died out (Rogers & Cuming, 2018). In Foakes’s memoir, animals highlight warmth and humour in materially precarious lives and draw out the affective loyalties of family life

The economics of pet keeping

Animals at home

Class and animal companions