"What then, poor Beastie!": Gender, Politics, and Animal Experimentation in Anna Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition"

Despite the controversial status of animal experimentation during the eighteenth century, not much poetry of the period deals with this subject. Anna Letitia Barbauld's frequently reprinted poem "The Mouse's Petition" is both a rare and problematic exception. A note informs us that the poem was "found in the trap where . . . [a mouse] had been confined all night by Dr. Priestley, for the sake of making experiments with different kinds of air."¹ Published in Barbauld's Poems (Warrington, 1772), "The Mouse's Petition" was singled out for praise by reviewers in the Monthly Review, a popular liberal miscellany with a growing literary focus, and the Critical Review, which saw itself as a conservative alternative to the Monthly, devoting much of its space to politics but containing reviews of a wide range of contemporary publications. Reviewers applauded Barbauld for denouncing the inhumanity of Joseph Priestley and other experimental philosophers. Barbauld herself denied any such purpose, defending her friend Priestley and explaining that her poem was about "mercy" and "justice" rather than "humanity" and "cruelty." Although she ended her statement of authorial intention there, she had equal reason to complain about the excessively literal reading of her poem. There is evidence to suggest that the situation of the mouse is intended to comment on a variety of hierarchical relationships in Georgian society. Barbauld seems to have had especially in mind the relationship between rich and poor, a subject of common interest with Priestley. The critical reception of the poem succeeded not only in burying her liberal Dissenting agenda, but also in allying her with Priestley's political enemies and arguably fueling the feeling that later culminated in the 1791 Church and King riots. As such, "The Mouse's Petition" marks an important case study in the historical reception of women's writing about animals, warning against a tendency towards distortion and simplification.

Barbauld wrote "The Mouse's Petition" while staying with the Priestleys in 1771. She first met Priestley in 1761 when he became her father's colleague at the Warrington Academy. After marrying Barbauld's close friend Mary Wilkinson, Priestley accepted an offer to head a Dissenting congregation at Leeds. Barbauld made several visits there from 1769 to 1771. In 1771, Priestley was carrying out his experiments on gases, later recorded in Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air (1774). By this point, The History and Present State of Electricity (1767) had already made him internationally famous as a natural philosopher.

This international reputation did not stop the reviewers of Barbauld's Poems from harshly condemning Priestley's animal experimentation. The Critical Review declares,

We heartily commend the lady's humanity for endeavouring to extricate the little wretch from misery, and gladly take this opportunity to testify our abhorrence of the cruelty practised by experimental philosophers, who seem to think the brute creation void of sensibility, or created only for them to torment.²

William Woodfall of the Monthly Review expresses the hope that "The Mouse's Petition" "will be of service to that gentleman as well as to other experimental philosophers, who are not remarkable for their humanity to the poor harmless animals who . . . fall their way."³

Context 1: The History of Humanitarian Sentiment

From a historical perspective, the response of reviewers is not entirely surprising. Although the eighteenth century witnessed many appalling instances of animal cruelty, it was a time of increasing humanitarian sentiment. William Hogarth's celebrated engravings The Four Stages of Cruelty(1750-51) illustrate the continuing currency of the Christian anthropocentric argument against animal cruelty. The essence of this argument was that God discouraged the mistreatment of animals because it might afterwards extend to fellow human beings. Thomas Aquinas first influentially articulated this line of thinking in Summa contra gentiles (ca. 1258-64). Fundamentally, his...