The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture by Anna Feuerstein (review)

Anna Feuerstein's The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture demonstrates how domesticated animals (working animals and pets, both contested terms) were made into liberal subjects during the Victorian era, and how novels that focused on the everyday lives of Victorians contested the entwined anthropocentric, class-based, and imperial limits of the particular liberal subjectivities assigned to animals. Feuerstein theorizes Victorian animal subjectivity and animal agency through the prism of literature and politics, contributing to Victorian studies, animal studies, and liberal political analysis in doing so.

There are six topical chapters spread out over three parts. In the first two chapters, the author analyzes British anti-cruelty legislation in the nineteenth century and the surrounding animal welfare discourse in civil society through Foucauldian theories of governmentality, biopower, and pastoral power. Feuerstein unpacks how politicians and animal welfare organizations advocated against prevailing Lockean views of animals as property for human use, but only through reinforcing prevailing liberal expectations about proper character for humans and animals. She shows how legislative debates and activist literature, particularly the increasingly influential Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) publication Animal World (c. 1869–79), sought to inculcate compassion for animals among the working and middle classes. They did this by emphasizing the pastoral power of the government over animals (expecting humans to care for and be kind toward animals) and animals' desire to submit to human governance and thus abide by liberal dictates about moral character and individualism (animals were presented as content to provide their labor or companionship, asking only to be treated well). Feuerstein identifies the paradoxical nature of such liberal advocacy that challenges animals' political exclusion and individual property rights at the same time that it shores up the anthropocentric foundation of liberalism. She juxtaposes the liberal, "silent on vegetarianism" (85) position of Animal World with the non-liberal, socialist "animal politics" of the London Vegetarian Society that claimed kinship with animals (90).

But it is to Victorian "novels that purport to represent quotidian life" that Feuerstein primarily turns in her remaining four chapters to showcase contestation of liberal ideologies about human-animal relations (9), even as these novels confirm that "liberalism's obsession with cognition and its [governmental] regulation extended to the animal world" (11). In part two, "Democracy, Education, and Alternative Subjectivity," Feuerstein shows how ascending liberal narratives about democracy, education, and civilization directed at middle and lower classes as well as children emphasized kindness to (some) animals. In part three, "The Biopolitics of Animal Capital," Feuerstein highlights the biopolitical management of animals at home (cows and sheep) and abroad in settler colonies (ostriches in South Africa). All four chapters reveal how liberal anthropocentric ideas that denied animals their alterity bolstered ideologies about class, race, and gender. Such ideologies framed human Others as ideal citizens who accepted humanity's dominion over animals but also respected the property and power of the upper classes and consolidated British national identity and imperial sovereignty. In the second half of each chapter, Feuerstein demonstrates how novels challenged the liberal regulation into which animals' lives were inscribed, contributing a critical animal studies angle to the readings that these novels have attracted heretofore.

The book shines in these analyses. For example, Feuerstein traces an anti-liberal animal character and alternative subjectivities in Charles Dickens's rendering of minor animal characters in Oliver Twist (1838), Barnaby Rudge (1841), and Hard Times (1854), distilling a radical politics that nuances previous literary discussion of Dickens's investment in shoring up middle-class virtue. Feuerstein notes how Dickens challenges the pastoral power in legislation and RSPCA advocacy through contradicting dominant expectations for animal loyalty and virtuous conduct by ascribing agency and anti-class-hierarchy sensibility to animal characters. Feuerstein thus counters the sentimental and melodramatic classifications in Poor Law literature that Dickens's works otherwise have...