Representing Animals in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: natural history, narrative sympathy, and animal and human rights

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This research investigates the representation of non-human animals in British literature in 1760--1800, a time when people's understanding of their relationship to animals significantly changed. The mythical element pervading earlier animal representation was replaced by naturalistic accounts of a wide range of species, incorporating recent explorers' discoveries and the close local studies made by observers such as Gilbert White. Pet-keeping spread widely, and pets figured extensively in English writing, from William Cowper's poems on his hares to the cats, dogs, and small birds portrayed in a rapidly-growing educational literature. Opposition to the cruelties involved in hunting, animal--baiting, and the treatment of coach-horses was expressed in sermons, poetry and fiction, feeding into calls for protective legislation which were to bear fruit in the following century. The project contends that the idea of sympathy emerging from the work of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith played an important part in encouraging and making possible the articulation of the growing sense of human fellowship with animals that lay behind these developments. It aims to demonstrate the emergence of a new construction of animal nature in this period, based on scientific investigation and naturalist observation and incorporating an empathetic attitude to animal experience.Changing representation of animals will be set in the context of other significant developments in the period, in particular the growth of natural rights discourse. The anti-slavery campaign and the work of Enlightenment feminism overlapped with advocacy of kindness to animals, a number of people acting in more than one of these movements. However, those advocating rights for slaves or women had to counter the view that members of these groups were too close to animal nature to be accorded the status of fully rational human beings. Analysing the tensions produced in anti-slavery and feminist writing by the question of animals, the project aims towards a fuller understanding of the history of human rights and its complex relationship with the notion of rights for animals.The project is divided into four strands. It will issue in a linked series of articles, exploring its general questions in relation to distinct areas of writing.1) Sympathy and educational narrative. Literary historians have established links between the philosophy of sympathy and sentimental narrative techniques, and narratologists have theorised the representation of characters' minds in, but these insights have not yet been applied to animal narratives. This strand will investigate animals in educational writers including Anna Letitia Barbauld, Sarah Trimmer, Thomas Day, Dorothy Kilner, and Edward Augustus Kendall, arguing that they develop innovative narrative techniques for creating reader empathy with animal characters.2) Animals and Enlightenment feminism. This strand focuses on the work of Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Mary Hays, examining the implications for Enlightenment feminism of the parallels commonly drawn between women and animals as creatures of lesser reason than man.3) Natural history writing and the representation of animals. Focusing on English translations of the French naturalist Buffon,on the work of English naturalists White and Thomas Pennant, and on natural histories for children, this strand will examine the effects of the discourse of natural history on the understanding of human-animal relations and on sympathy for animals.4) Anti-slavery discourse and animal writing. This strand analyses intersections and tensions between campaigns against slavery and against cruelty to animals, focusing on Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Day, Hannah More, William Cowper, Anna Letitia Barbauld, pamphlets on the slave-trade, and parliamentary debates.This research forms the first stage of a long term project on animals in the Enlightenment.