The Evolving Forms of Victorian Animal Studies

The Evolving Forms of Victorian Animal Studies John Miller (bio) The following books are under consideration in this review: Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash, edited by Brenda Ayres; pp. xv + 212. New York and London: Routledge, 2019, $155.00, £120.00. Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914, by J. Keri Cronin; pp. xii + 247. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018, $94.95, $34.95 paper. Animal Labor and Colonial Warfare, by James L. Hevia; pp. xiv + 328. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, $87.88, $30.00 paper, £67.50, £22.50 paper. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel, by Ivan Kreilkamp; pp. vii + 219. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018, $86.00, $30.00 paper, £68.00, £23.00 paper. The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800–1900, by Rebecca Woods; pp. xiii + 233. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press: $90.00, $32.95 paper. The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain, by Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton; pp. viii + 282. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, $39.95. Since Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay edited Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture in 2007, there have been over thirty monographs and volumes of essays concerned with animals and the Victorians, plus a large number of essays (I estimate at least fifty) [End Page 306] on the topic in academic journals and in edited collections without an exclusive animal focus. Add to that the significant scholarly work on Charles Darwin, which connects—sometimes tangentially, sometimes directly—with the conceptualization of nonhuman creatures, and an expanding body of Victorian ecocriticism and environmental history that frames discussions of animals in ecological contexts, and it is clear that Victorian studies and animal studies have a meaningful relationship. This essay surveys six recent books on animals and the Victorians—two works of literary studies, one of art history, and three of history—in order to assess provisionally the state and scope of Victorian animal studies and to sketch future avenues of inquiry. Morse and Danahay's book is worth returning to as something like an origin point for the new wave of Victorian animal studies. Victorian Animal Dreams emerged not only in relation to scholarship on nineteenth-century historical contexts, but also in response to the theoretical reformulation of questions around the animal in the work of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe, among others. As such, Victorian Animal Dreams demonstrates how historical and theoretical perspectives intertwine in thinking about Victorian creatures. Victorian studies does, of course, contain some notable precursors to Victorian Animal Dreams that illustrate that is not just posthumanism and continental philosophy that underpin its turn toward the nonhuman. In their introduction, Morse and Danahay acknowledge Harriet Ritvo's The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1989) as the source to which they owe the "greatest debt" (3). James Turner's Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (1980) gets a mention too as an important volume for understanding the rise of the Victorian humane movement (a continuing focus of Victorian animal scholarship). A prominent text that does not feature in Morse and Danahay's summary of the field—but which has exerted an extensive influence, especially on literary animal studies—is Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), which examines the ways in which the formal properties of fiction emerge out of natural history and thus shows how the non-human is woven into the text of Victorian writing. In foregrounding the theoretical influences on their collection, Morse and Danahay helped to deepen the investigation of the ethics and politics of human-animal relations in the Victorian period, implicit (and for sure at times also explicit) in the historical work of Ritvo, Turner, and Beer. Animal studies is a large and cumbersome enterprise that contains several distinct critical and political projects. For the most part, animal studies is conceived

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