Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914 (review)

The treatment of children in different epochs offers vivid evidence of historical distance, however we theorize that concept. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British educators, authors, and concerned middle-class parents, for instance, denounced fairy stories as dangerously superstitious, responsible for misleading, corrupting, even addling their children. Yet the same adults welcomed stories about talking animals as logical, improving, valuable prompts to the moral imagination. The rationale for this odd distinction has often been rehearsed; Tess Cosslett, along with most scholars, locates it in John Locke's appreciation of Aesop (though she notes, as others have, that Locke recommended Aesop's fables for children because he thought them entertaining, not because he found them moral). Charles Lamb and Charles Dickens famously took the side of the fairy stories banished by the reigning educational theory of their times. Most people nowadays would probably agree with those two dissenters, if we could bring ourselves to understand the distinction between fairies and talking animals that seemed to mean so much a century or two ago.

In Talking Animals in British Children's Fiction, 1786–1914, Cosslett wants to restore the historical—especially literary historical—specificity that made talking animals the fulcrum for ideas about children and the imagination, in part by locating their significance in many more debates than just this one. She surveys talking animals in children's literature from Sarah Trimmer's Fabulous Histories (1786) to Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows (1908). Reading Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877), she argues that, when it comes to what talking animals represent, "the text has many voices" (79); similarly, when she treats Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book (1894) she claims that "the effect here is to reveal animal speech as a fictional device, which can be used in a variety of different ways" (131). She stresses the numerous ways children and animals are compared and connected, the multiple hierarchies in which they are located, and the myriad cultural uses to which talking animals are put: they inculcate benevolence, advocate animal protection, and emphasize natural history, natural theology, and Darwinian evolution. Their flexibility of meaning can assume on the one hand a Romantic child, "valued for something the adult has lost and can only regain through the child" (94) in Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature (1855–71). Kipling's Mowgli, however, represents instead the evolutionary child, with "no clear development from the animal to the human: Mowgli, like Darwinian man, is always, painfully, both" (137).

Cosslett's emphasis on telling particulars is her strongest contribution: she aims to restore in detail the "neglected context" (63) of talking animal fiction in Britain and to remedy the carelessness of "generalizing critics" (181) who get things wrong by overlooking fine distinctions between texts. Her careful attention allows her to correct earlier scholars: for seeing Trimmer as only joyless and hypocritical (39), for overlooking the debt of Charles Kingsley's Darwinian Water Babies (1863) to more orthodox books such as Anna Barbauld's Evenings at Home (1792–96) (118), for mistakenly claiming that Ernest Thompson Seton's supposedly un-anthropomorphic stories, Wild Animals I Have Known (1898), are "entirely new" (142). She also offers useful new readings, locating Barbauld's Evenings as the source for Dickens's parody of the mechanical definition of a horse ("Quadruped. Gramnivorous.") in Hard Times (1854) (28), reading Kipling's writing in the context of his father's (128–32), and juxtaposing the scenes in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-winkle (1905) and Grahame's Wind in the Willows in which both the hedgehog and Toad shrink from human to animal size when exposed as animal (162).

Cosslett is so good at producing literary antecedents that I wish she had overcome her reluctance to generalize, at least enough to discuss American writers (she does actually tackle a few minor ones). I would have liked her to confront that major force Samuel Griswold Goodrich, whose character Peter...