Romanticism and Animal Rights (review)

In Romanticism and Animal Rights, David Perkins unites two highly influential late-eighteenth-century phenomena in an exciting and focused study that illuminates what he notes as a "changing climate of opinion" (xii) about the rights of animals in Britain. The timing of this change leads Perkins to suspect that popular, contemporary views of animals are reflected in the poetry of the age and that, further, while most Romantic poets did not overtly embrace animal rights, their cultural contributions to the discourses on animals "gradually had practical results" (xii). Perkins combines insightful readings of less well known literary texts, such as John Clare's badger sonnets and Charles Lamb's "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig," with fresh perspectives on much-read work by Burns, Cowper, Smart, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Perkins broadens the literary ecocritical readings of Romantic poetry to create a more holistic view as he successfully and succinctly recounts the familiar story of the tortuously slow progress of legal rights for animals in Britain through an interwoven and interlocked cultural/political lens. The historical and political facts tell much of the tale as various bills were brought forward and lobbied for and against, using the rights rhetoric of the day and the counter-rhetoric of ridicule and fear-mongering. But what Perkins adds is a discussion of how the familiar story was internalized and culturally re-represented. In many cases, this cultural re-representation aided in delaying legislated animal rights by exposing complexities and subtleties inherent to all human-centred discussions of animals, and it enabled effective doubts, stakeholder claims, and counter-arguments to emerge. What he also does differently in Romanticism and Animal Rights is to remain firmly focused on animal rights despite obvious cultural connections with other rights struggles at the end of the eighteenth century. He does this in order to highlight the potentially exploitative or diversionary quality of such associations, especially in twentieth-century allegorical readings of animal rights struggles as mere reflections of other oppressions and literary critical readings that refuse to recognize animal subjectivity.

Perkins appropriately structures his book chronologically, thematically, and by poet. He does this, in part, to bolster his claim that cultural and social changes occurring in Britain at this time spill over onto questions of cruelty to animals and animal rights. His approach also allows grounds for comparing and contrasting the work of poets writing about similar topics at different moments in the eighteenth century. As so many others have done, he posits a movement towards sentimentality and a new notion of kindness as natural. But he further highlights fresh nuances and easily demonstrates the factions at work in the debates around, for example, pet keeping, through an examination of the poetry of Cowper, Smart, and Burns. Expanding the scope of human-animal relationships from the individual, intimate, and emotional into the public domain, Perkins then devotes two chapters to a discussion of "savage amusements," such as hunting, baiting, and cock fighting. Here, he uses John Clare's badger sonnets to discuss both the labouring-class view of baiting and the pressure that labouring-class poets often felt to take on poetic conventions and paradoxically internalize underlying assumptions regarding hunting and baiting contrary to their true view of the issue. This section of Romanticism and Animal Rights foregrounds a bold, new reading of Wordsworth's "Hart-Leap Well" that convincingly demonstrates Wordsworth's sympathy for the stag. Perkins's reading of this popular poem also exposes how other readings have consistently effaced any animal-centred emphasis, and he wonders why literary criticism so commonly recognizes animal representations but so rarely interrogates the meanings of such representations. Additional chapters focus on attitudes towards working animals and those raised for food. In this latter chapter, Perkins uses Cowper's poetry once again as well as the essays of Charles Lamb to discuss the heightened level of debate around animals used for food and how those advocating animal rights rarely extended their advocacy to practising vegetarianism. He contrasts Charles Lamb...