Further Victorian Animals

Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj Shefali Rajamannar, Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, , xix +212 pp., £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 0230114490 Timothy Clark reminded us as recently as 2007 that thinking seriously about the value and significance of other creatures still carries with it something approaching a kind of stigma: ‘Tell many people that you are working on an article about animals and they will smile gently, as if they wanted to give you a pat on the head’.1 Clark's comments are well-judged. For all the mounting, cross-disciplinary interest in animals and animality, there remains for the most part a deeply entrenched conviction that the proper topic for the humanities (with admittedly the benefit of a certain literal-minded straightforwardness) is the human. The indulgent pat Clark imagines may, thinking optimistically, suggest an acceptance of the twenty-first century academy's ‘animal turn’, but it

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