Introduction to the fight for animal rights in the early nineteenth century.

1. Romantic Conflicts
The Fight for Animal Rights
Romantic Conflicts

2. History of Concern for
Animals
 The suffering of animals became a matter of concern in the 18th century
 Exploitation in transportation of people and goods (horses, donkeys)
 Scientific experiments
 Hunting and baiting
 Slaughterhouse and cooking
 Until 1822, when Parliament passed a bill to “Prevent the Cruel Treatment of
Cattle,” there was almost no legal protection of animals, and even afterthis bill,
there was uncertainty and legal controversy as to what animals were covered.
 See David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge Studies in
Romanticism, CUP, 2003)
Romantic Conflicts

3.  Descartes (1596-1650), had taught that animals were mere organic
machines and did not feel pain
 Enlightenment liberal and republican ideology had distinguished between
‘citizens’ and ‘other groups’ - including women and colonised nations –
who were closer to nature. Animals became linked to these oppressed
human groups and drawn into the debate.
 Among those who addressed the “rights” of animals was Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who argues in his “Discourse on the Origin of Inequality”
(1754) for “the participation of animals in natural law.”
 By 1775 animals could represent innocence, a spontaneous joy in life that
adult human beings lacked.
Romantic Conflicts

4. Jeremy Bentham’s 1789 comments
about animals and slaves
 The French have already discovered that the blackness of
the skin is no reason why a human being should be
abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It
may come one day to be recognized, that the number of the
legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os
sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a
sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace
the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or, perhaps, the
faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond
comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversible animal,
than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But
suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? the
question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but,
Can they suffer?Romantic Conflicts

5. Origins of Ecology and Evolutionary
Theory?
 Carolus Linnaeus and others in the mid-eighteenth century
discussed the’ economy’ of Nature, which in the Romantic period
came to be associated with the idea that human beings had a
special responsibility to preserve the natural world - beginnings of
the ecological movement?
 Another important question was that of the biological relationship
between humans and animals, which (well before Charles Darwin) was
already being met with the suggestions that men and beasts were
descended from a common ancestor.
Romantic Conflicts

6. Romantic Writers and
Animals
 there is a strong tendency – in the Romantic period and
now, still – to conceptualise Nature as ‘good’: friendly to
humankind, essentially green and somewhat holy.
 ‘Animals, however, inevitably complicate that paradigm – animal
Nature cannot necessarily be relied on, as William
Wordsworth believed of the green sort, never to ‘betray / the
heart that loved her’ This sort of Nature can kick, peck, squeak,
kill and bite back. It is not necessarily friendly towards
humankind, or particularly ‘holy’ ‘
Romantic Conflicts

7. passion, she [Nature],
A rapture often, and immediate joy
Ever at hand; he [Man] distant, but a grace
Occasional, and accidental thought,
His hour being not yet come. Far less had then
The inferior creatures, beast or bird, attuned
My spirit to that gentleness of love,
Won from me those minute obeisances
Of tenderness which I may number now
With my first blessings. Nevertheless, on these
The light of beauty did not fall in vain,
Or grandeur circumfuse them to no end.
Wordsworth, The Prelude, book 8 (1805, lines 486–97)
Cf Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) on the sublime and the beautiful
Romantic Conflicts
The sublime= landscape;
the beautiful = animals?

8. Coleridge
Numerous Romantic-era
poems address the idea that
humans are obliged to treat
animals with compassion.
Among the most famous of
these poems is Coleridge’s
“Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” (1798)
 1828, debaters at the Cambridge
Union addressed the question
of whether the “Rime” would
be “effectual in preventing
Cruelty to Animals”
 ‘To a Young Ass’ – second verse
 Poor Ass! they master should have learnt to show
Pity -- best taught by fellowship of Woe!
For much I fear me that He lives like thee,
Half famished in a land of Luxury!
How askingly its footsteps hither bend!
It seems to say, "And have I then one friend?"
Innocent foal! thou poor despised forlorn!
I hail thee Brother -- spite of the fool's scorn!
And fain would take thee with me, in the Dell
Of Peace and mild Equality to dwell,
Where Toil shall call the charmer Health his bride,
And Laughter tickle Plenty's ribless side!
How thou wouldst toss thy heels in gamesome play,
And frisk about, as lamb or kitten gay!
Yea! and more musically sweet to me
Thy dissonant harsh bray of joy would be,
Than warbled melodies that soothe to rest
The aching of pale Fashion's vacant breast!
Romantic Conflicts

9. From ‘The Rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner’
 Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
 Stanza 13.
 O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my
heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
Romantic Conflicts

10. Robert Southey
In his 1790s animal poems, Robert Southey identifies animals’ plight with
that of slaves and other oppressed human groups.
The social pig resigns his natural rights
When first with man he covenants to live;
He barters them for safer stye delights,
For grains and wash, which man alone can give. . . .
And when, at last, the closing hour of life
Arrives (for Pigs must die as well as Man),
When in your throat you feel the long sharp knife,
And the blood trickles to the pudding-pan;
And when, at last, the death-wound yawning wide,
Fainter and fainter grows the expiring cry, Is there no grateful joy, no loyal
pride,
To think that for your master’s good you die?
(‘Ode to a Pig while his Nose was Boring’ lines 17–20, 37–44)
Romantic Conflicts

11. Percy Shelley
Like his verse, Shelley’s life and his prose
such as the long final note to Queen Mab,
which later became A Vindication of the
Natural Diet (1813), demonstrates his
awareness of the connection between
contemporary discourses on food and
eating and the radical politics of tyranny,
power and freedom.
Romantic Conflicts

12. ‘On the Vegetable System
of Diet’
 …If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to the peace of human
society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and barbarity which is exercised toward these
miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag
out a short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be
mutilated, their social feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should
never have existed, than that it should have existed only to endure unmitigated misery.
(The attachment of animals to their young is very strong. The monstrous sophism that
beasts are pure unfeeling machincs, and do not reason, scarcely requires a confutation.)
 Queen Mab canto 8 (211–12) envisages a time when ‘man’ recognises his
essential kinship with animals: ‘No longer now / He slays the lamb that
looks him the face’, while the note glossing this passage sums up Shelley’s
commitment to a vegetarian philosophy and lifestyle: ‘NEVER TAKE
ANY SUBSTANCE INTO THE STOMACH THAT ONCE HAD
LIFE’.Romantic Conflicts

13. Queen Mab (1813),
Prometheus Unbound (1820)
 In book eight of Queen Mab Shelly envisions a
future were humans return to a natural diet
thereby encouraging "kindly passions" "pure
desires" while extinguishing "hatred"
"despair" and "loathing”.
 Immortal upon Earth: No longer now,
He slays the lamb that looks him in the face,
And horribly devours his mangled flesh,
Which, still avenging nature's broken law,
Kindled all putrid humours in his frame,
All evil passions, and all vain belief,
Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind,
The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime. (59)
 From ‘Prometheus
Unbound’:
I wish no living thing
to suffer pain.
Romantic Conflicts

14. Keats
 ‘[I]f a Sparrow comes before my Window, I take part in
its existence and pick about the Gravel’. (letter to
Benjamin Bailey)
 Empathy for animals – the hare that ‘limped trembling
through the frozen grass’ (‘Eve of St Agnes’), the bees
who ‘think warm days will never cease / For summer has
o’er-brimmed their clammy cells’ (‘Ode to Autumn’), the
minnows ‘Staying their wavy bodies ’gainst the streams,
To taste the luxury of sunny beams Tempered with
coolness.’ (‘I stood tip-toe upon a little hill’)
Romantic Conflicts

15. Rural Poets – Burns
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Hath broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion
An’ fellow-mortal! . . .
Still, thou art blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
(‘To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in Her Nest
with the Plough, November 1785’ lines 7–12, 43–
48)
Romantic Conflicts

16. John Clare
‘He runs along and bites at all he meets
They shout and hollo down the noisey streets
He turns about to face the loud uproar
And drives the rebels to their very doors
The frequent stone is hurled where ere they go
When badgers fight and every ones a foe
The dogs are clapt and urged to join the fray
The badger turns and drives them all away
Though scarcly half as big dimute and small
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.’
(‘Badger’ lines 27–36)
 The cornered badger is like his own defiance
of some aspects of society
Romantic Conflicts

17. Legislation
 1800 and 1802 : two unsuccessful attempts by the anti-
slavery campaigner William Wilberforce MP and his
associates to ban bull-baiting
 1809 Lord Erskine’s ‘animal’ bill in the House of Lords
became the first measure to be introduced in any western
legislature to try to bring in legal penalties for cruelty to
animals in general.
Romantic Conflicts

18. From Erskine’s bill
 ‘For every animal which comes in contact with man, and
whose powers, qualities, and instincts are obviously
constructed for his use, nature has taken the same care to
provide, and as carefully and bountifully as for man
himself, organs and feelings for its own enjoyment and
happiness. Almost every sense bestowed upon man is
equally bestowed upon them; seeing, hearing, feeling,
thinking; the sense of pain and pleasure; the passions of
love and anger; sensibility to kindness, and pangs from
unkindness and neglect, are inseparable characteristics of
their natures as much as our own.’
Romantic Conflicts

19.  By 1824 public concern for animal welfare had led to the
founding of The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty
to Animals (the forerunner of the RSPCA, which was
established in 1840).
 This marked a notable shift in British attitudes toward the
non-human world, brought about partly in response to
activism from Romantic writers.
Romantic Conflicts