Victorians and Their Animals

Brenda Ayres teaches English for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and has previously edited several collections of essays. The most recent is Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long Nineteenth Century (2017). Her latest monograph is Betwixt and Between: The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017). She published her first article on animals in Victorian literature in The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Newsletter (1991), titled "Dogs in George Eliot’s Adam Bede." She began collecting information on the subject when she created a panel at the Southern Conference of British Studies in 2000 titled "Animals in Victorian Literature" and presented "The Iconization of Animals in Victorian Culture." Two years later she spoke on "Beast on a Leash: Victorian Dominion over the Animal Kingdom" at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Conference.

"As expected, this collection validates a concern for the inherent value of animals. But the additional inclusion of leashing the beast within ourselves in light of contradictory social impulses adds an interesting and necessary perspective to a collection on Victorian human/nonhuman relationships."Dr. Randi Pahlau, Malone University, USA"As people today grapple with issues like their own humanity, their responsibility for the planet, their relationships to other species along with various kinds of reciprocity, how humans have considered these relations in the past is becoming more relevant – and in fact, more urgent to think deeply about. As Ayres explains, the conflicted and conflicting Victorian ideas about animals are valuable as twenty-first-century people consider our fraught relations with the planet today."Heather Fitzsimmons Frey, York University, Canada

• List of FiguresPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Beast on a LeashBRENDA AYRES1 Gaskell’s Activism and Animal AgencyBRENDA AYRES2 Old and New Beef: Caring for Animals in Household WordsLIAM YOUNG3 George Eliot’s Use of Horses in Measuring the Moral Maturity of Characters in Her NovelsCONSTANCE M. FULMER4 Pigs in Great Expectations: Class, Dehumanization, and Marxist Animal StudiesJESSICA KUSKEY5 Ants, Insects, and Automatons: Classifying Creatures in Hardy's The Return of the NativeANNA WEST6 It’s Raining Cats and Dogs in the Novels of George EliotBRENDA AYRES7 A Fine Kettle of Fish: Cultural (and Culinary) Preservation in Anglo-Jewish Ghetto StoriesLINDSAY KATZIR8 Gendered Metamorphoses in the Natural History Museum and Trans-Animality in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle PANDORA SYPEREK9 The "Animality" of Speech and Translation in The Jungle BooksCHRISTIE HARNERNotes on ContributorsIndex