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  • Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel by Ivan Kreilkamp, and: The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture by Anna Feuerstein
  • Benjamin Westwood (bio)
Ivan Kreilkamp. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. U of Chicago P, 2018. Pp. viii + 219. $30. ISBN 978-022-657637-4 (pb).
Anna Feuerstein. The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2019. Pp. xi + 250. £75. ISBN 978-1-108-49296-6.

In the first chapter of David Copperfield, David's aunt notes the strange misnomer of Blunderstone Rookery: "'In the name of Heaven,' said Miss Betsey, suddenly, 'why Rookery?'" David's mother replies that it was her husband's choice: "When he bought the house, he liked to think that there were rooks about it." Pressed on what has become of the rooks, Clara admits that "There have not been any since we have lived here, […] We thought – Mr Copperfield thought – it was quite a large rookery; but the nests were very old ones, and the birds have deserted them a long while." It's not a perfect analogy, but for too long critics of the Victorian novel assumed that their objects of study were similarly deserted. These two studies by Ivan Kreilkamp and Anna Feuerstein continue the corrective work of the "animal turn" in the humanities over the last twenty years, returning the rooks (figuratively) to Blunderstone. Illuminating the animal presence at the heart of Victorian Britain's domestic and political spheres, they represent welcome efforts to examine the formative (and deforming) role that animals played in the development of two ideological pillars of the period: liberalism and domesticity.

Minor Creatures shows how the increasing presence of animals in the home [End Page 446] during the nineteenth century, predominantly as pets, is legible also in the period's domestic fiction. Illuminating a corresponding rise in the quantity and complexity of animal representations in the novels of the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, Conan Doyle, and Olive Schreiner, he traces how the moral principles of Victorian domesticity were challenged, extended, and delineated by this new presence. In welcoming certain animals into the domestic sphere as well as the domestic novel, the ideals that governed both had to stretch to accommodate this new presence. One of the consequences of this phenomenon, he argues, was the invention of a new kind of character (the "minor creatures" of the study's title). Hovering somewhere between fully realized rational subjects and unthinking Cartesian automatons, these minor creatures prompt difficult questions regarding the nature of our moral responsibilities towards them – negotiations that are, of course, both enabled and complicated by their status as fictional creations. The study draws out the subtle gradations of sympathy, compassion, and pity extended to other animals by the Victorian novel, at the same time as it redraws the critical and characterological taxonomies that we might use in such investigations.

Anna Feuerstein's monograph, The Political Lives of Victorian Animals, addresses a gap in the history of animal–human relations in the period by examining the role of animals in liberal politics. Whereas the individual subject imagined by liberalism is often defined in binary opposition to other animals – along axes such as reason vs. instinct, response vs. reaction, articulacy vs. dumbness – the remarkable success of the animal welfare movement in the nineteenth century challenged politicians to find ways of bringing nonhuman animals and their treatment more fully under the rule of law. This presented a difficulty, as Feuerstein shows, for animals could be incorporated within what Foucault called liberalism's "governmentality" only at the cost of some deformation to the foundations of liberalism itself. Domestic pets and livestock, in particular (which are the focus of both Feuerstein's and Kreilkamp's studies), since they demonstrate some characteristics of the individual imagined by liberalism but not others, were a troublingly marginal case. They were sensible to pain and pleasure, and capable of acting accordingly; a growing body of anecdotal evidence suggested that animals were also possessed of a range of complex moral and intellectual attributes: loyalty, altruism, sagacity, memory. But their lack of human language meant that they could...

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