Animals in the Age of Revolution by Jane Spencer (review)

Impressively researched and argued, Jane Spencer's Animals in the Age of Revolution cuts across natural history, Enlightenment philosophy, and legislative debates about human rights to tease out animals' uncertain moral status in eighteenth-century legislation and literary texts. Spencer argues that the era's "shift in attitudes to human–animal relations was intimately bound up with the emergence of radical political claims based on the concept of universal human rights" (6). Consequently, "human social aims and genuine engagement with the claims of nonhuman animals were mixed together" (3). Throughout the book, Spencer builds from the uncertain status of both people and animals to investigate how interspecies encounters shaped culture, science, and politics in post–Revolution England.

The book's opening chapter demonstrates how recent discoveries of biological continuity between humans and other animals provoked broad disagreement about whether the species boundary represented a difference in degree or kind (30). Some naturalists, such as William Smellie, acknowledged that "[t]here is, perhaps, a greater difference between the mental powers of some animals than between those of man and the most sagacious brutes" (quoted in Spencer 30). Others insisted on humanity's dominion over other creatures. Naturalists who contested the hard limit between humans and other animals were further split between those who espoused racist theories of human biology to exclude non-whites from humanity and abolitionists who condemned hierarchies that reduced their fellow men to "apes" or brute beasts (Spencer 30).

Spencer's analysis reveals how uncertainty about the species boundary coincided with fierce debates about human rights at the turn of the century. Demands for parliamentary reform—fueled by controversies about freedom, equality, and popular sovereignty—emerged from earlier debates concerning "natural" rights and duties in civil society, whereby individuals were expected to yield some degree of freedom to secure social equality. According to Spencer, eighteenth century advocates for the humane treatment of animals used animal "rights" as a rhetorical device that spoke to the times. However, she adds, compassion for other species unequivocally prioritized human interests over and above those of animals. Barring a few exceptions, proponents for the moral status of animals argued that humans could hold captive, displace, or slaughter other creatures so long as they did not needlessly harm them. However—and Spencer's ensuing argument rests on this premise—"any discussion of rights bore the whiff of revolution" (36). Although counter-revolutionary attitudes characterized parliamentary politics by the turn of the eighteenth century, the spirit of 1688 and 1789 still loomed over England's popular imagination. Taking the instability of post–Revolution human and animal "rights" as its point of departure, the book draws on legislative and literary texts to track the subtle, yet pervasive, remnants of revolutionary fervour that underscored moral claims for animals beyond the right to "humanely" dominate them in post–Revolution England.

With the introductory chapter's context in place, chapter 2 situates the story of Balaam's ass in the Book of Numbers and Apuleis' Metamorphoses—a second century novel featuring a protagonist who transforms into a donkey—in dialogue with literary donkeys by Laurence Sterne, J.M. Coetzee, Ovid, John Clare, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge. Spencer investigates the donkey as a figure of both scorn and wisdom to draw out its potential for "sympathy" and "sentiment"—key literary devices in Romantic writing. Sympathy and sentiment likewise inform the children's stories in chapter 3. While attending to the ways that representations of animal subjectivity in children's literature far outclassed literary animals in writing for adults, Spencer focuses on the implications of how eighteenth-century children, who enjoyed the "right to grow up" (77), complicated the special status of animals in these texts as sentient beings deserving of compassion.

Chapter 4 stands out. Here, Spencer draws on texts by Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macauley, Mary Hays, and Mary Robinson to demonstrate how ongoing questions about women's equality intersected with natural history and the moral status of animals at the turn of the century. [End Page 138...