Literature & art about dogs & animals & JR Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip as a Bloomsbury take

No these are not dogs practicing social distancing ….

I’ve written a companion piece to my blog on cat stories, cat pictures, and a literature about cats: I make the case that dogs have been used and depicted, especially in fiction and legend as examples making a strong case for animal rights, their animal’s consciousness as somehow equivalent to people … Stories about dogs are focuses in the development of feelings and arguments on behalf of abolishing cruelty, respecting animals as we would want to be respected …. The second half I go into wonderful later 19th century novels, stories for children, and then recently a new breed which is non-fiction meant for adults, not sentimental sometimes with the dog as POV — from Woolf’s “Gypsy, a mongrel,” to Auster’s Timbuktu (about a dog living with a homeless man who is dying, both of them poignantly worried about the near future), to Garnett’s Lady into Fox, and finally Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and the wonderful animated film.

A photograph of Ackerley’s female German shepherd, Queenie, re-named Tulip in the memoir

What strained and anxious lives dogs must lead, so emotionally involved in the world of humans, whose affections they strive endlessly to secure, whose authority they are expected unquestioningly to obey, and whose mind they never can do more than imperfectly reach and comprehend. Stupidly loved, stupidly hated, acquired without thought, reared and ruled without understanding, passed on or “put to sleep” without care, did they, I wondered, these descendants of the creatures who, thousands of years ago in the primeval forests, laid siege to the heart of man, took him under their protection, tried to tame him, and failed — did they suffer headaches? — from Fierlinger’s animated masterpiece film My Dog Tulip

Dear friends and readers.

Here is a companion piece to my Cat stories, cat pictures, cat poetry: there is a literature of cats (no those cats are not practicing social distancing), though the two do not quite correspond. In cat stories I tried to single out what distinguishes the way people write about cats, especially when the cat is your pet, from the way they write about pets and animals in general, some quality and feeling evidenced in the stories (as admiration for them in situations where it’s a question of endurance, understanding, something that provokes resilience, resourcefulness, a stalwart demeanor, at the time time as having the tenderest fondness for them as adorably affectionate). I also cited scholarly studies of art and poetry about cats.

In this blog I am not going to single out a dog’s or dog traits because so far as I can tell stories about dogs, photos, art do not marvel at this animal nor have I to hand (because I have not read) a history of the depiction of dogs (I think it would be long). Instead I mean to make the case that they have been used and depicted, especially in fiction and legend as examples making a strong case for animal rights, their animal’s consciousness as somehow equivalent to people. I think of how Montaigne wrote of a dog coming to a crossroads, and having to decide which was to go next, “the dog discourseth to itself thus … “. Stories about dogs are focuses in the development of feelings and arguments on behalf of abolishing cruelty, respecting animals as we would want to be respected. Why? because they publicly, shamelessly love us, yearn for us, are faithful, hard-working, constant, single-hearted, incorruptible. They deserve rights …

An ancient Roman mosaic

I begin with the earliest part of human history: non-human animals often pictured on caves, usually ones people hunted, religious rituals where animals signal aspects of humanity people want to develop, admire, increase, and so ingest – where the earliest dogs are pictured as companions, fellow hunters, with men as the leader of the pack. Unlike early cat pictures, these are about human beings: people using animals to define themselves, caring about animals insofar as they relate to us, aid us, are our friends. The second early manifestation I’ll mention is an opposing kind: satire, the beast fable, Aesop’s fables which are satiric classical stories: you reduce people to animals to expose us. Chicken Little an American story, the ant and the grasshopper (I’m with the grasshopper and think the ant a self-righteous prig), fox and grapes – many many of these, all with morals, sometimes ironic. Are any of these about dogs? One 18th century anomalous novel is: Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little, or the Life and adventures of a Lapdog. It is a bitter send-up of humanity, a variation on the “it-story” so favored by semi-pornographers of the era (stories where a sofa tells all, a necklace), except (significantly) the dog is given a consciousness, becomes narrator and will worry human-like questions, for example, is a dog property? is owning a dog wrong? Alas, Coventry never takes this far enough to be an abolitionist of slavery. The form of beast fable, Aesop tale (as in the brilliant poetry of La Fontaine) did have a resurgence in the 18th century, but its concern is not non-human animals but people.

It’s when you begin to find depictions of a dog saving people, of their attachment to us, and ours to them, we begin to see the turn taken towards the development of animal rights — Edward Landseer made a career out of this: if you click, you’ll find as many pictures of people with horses as dogs

Attachment (1892) – he was a foremost animal painter in the 19th century, specializing in dogs

There is more than a core truth about this focus: it is the center of Ackerley’s brilliant 1956 My Dog Ackerley — continually Tulip fixes our hero with her “anxious bright eyes.”

This is also the core of the 1970s poignant also somewhat comic tale by Paul Auster, Timbuktu about Mr Bones, who loves his master dearly, accompanies Willy G. Christmas, a homeless mentally disabled man everywhere, with his (the dog’s) heart-breaking because Willy is dying. Willy’s mission is to find an English teacher he last communicated with shortly after leaving college, who encouraged and respected him: they are seeking out a 20 year old address in Baltimore in the hope she will take Mr Bones in, for Willy fears for Mr Bones’s life and spends much time warning him to stay away from “shelter” people. Meanwhile Mr Bones has gathered there is an afterlife called Timbuktu and Mr Bones fears he will not be able to get in.  What Auster does is imitate the state of mind he imagines that a homeless person must know — loinliness, aimlessness, coming near death through accidents, alienation — and mate that to Mr Bones’s faithful loving state of mind. Half-way through Mr Bones dies (in a half-dream sequence) and Mr Bones is on his own: we are into a (to me) deeply engaging picaro narrative invested with extraordinary depth.  The dog tried to kill a pigeon in order not to starve but does not know how.  Eventually he feeds on thrown away ice–creams, garbage. Just before taken in by a boy (first adventure) he begins to howl. Piercing unforgettable moment.

I think of how I’ve watched a psychiatrist succeed in communicating with a withdraw child by taking out an animal puppet who is reminiscent of a dog. Not threatening. So early on in children’s literature (in Dickens, as in the disabled Barnaby Rudge and his raven), there is deep camaraderie in a child and his or her dog — and animals are made to talk.

Barnaby and his Raven by Fred Barnard

By the later 19th century when fine literature for children emerges beautiful tales: usually the animal is badly oppressed or abused and child loves her and the animal the child: so Anna Sewell about cruelty to a horse in Black Beauty (often a horse substitutes for a dog, or vice versa), or Wilson Rawls on two faithful loving dogs and a boy (Where the Red Fern Grows – socialist really, pro Indian). A Canadian early classic, Margaret Saunders’s Beautiful Joe about a real dog who endured terrible cruelty – as many non-human animals do.

Behind this a history of people in the Enlightenment first valuing non-human animals for themselves, keeping them as pets, companions, and legislation for animal rights – they are still owned by people and people have complete control. Earliest legislation on behalf of the dreadfully badly treated horse. People don’t want to hear what happens to make a horse race. Kathryn Shevelow’s book For the Love of Animals traces the rise of the animal proection movement memorably. We have not solved the problem of stopping human beings being cruel to animals for fun, torturing animals to madden and terrify them. No rooster was born with a steel spurs in its head (as Winston Graham’s Demelza tells Ross Poldark in Poldark) — Graham’s books manifest a real identification with and concern for all animals’ vulnerability.

For longer than the last half-century, a specialty in animals studies is the woman scientist who goes to live with a group of animals to study and observe them — from Jane Goodall’s wonderful books about her 30+ years with chimpanzees, to Diane Fossey with gorillas, Birute Gildikas with orangutans, and lesser known, Sy Mongomery’s several studies, e.g., Walking with Great Apes. Women are willing to give up their ego and identity to be with the animal. Sooner or later, they take on the role of protector.

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This was what I found myself developing when I sought to introduce the peculiar take of the Bloomsbury circles when they came to write memoirs of pets and about animals — as context for Ackerley’s peculiar memoir. As usual, they took angles that led to new insights — or so they tried to. They wrote wrote pro-animal imaginative literature for adults that is not sentimental. Or they try not to be. It is not instructional: Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes books about the nature of dogs and how you take of them, ditto for cats. You don’t read My Dog Tulip, or Francis Power Cobbe’s The Confessions of a Lost Dog, Woolf’s Flush, a biography; or David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox or the recent Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (see above) for advice on how to take care of your dog. All of them are about us too, about our nature, and how we are aligned to, closely related to animals, they are critiques of us, our society through the animal’s life and personality alongside of and observing us.

The earliest edition of Flush: A biography resembled the layout and picture of Cobbe’s dog and book

Earliest version of this comes before the Bloomsbury 1910 date:

by Francis Power Cobbe, an important suffragette, who was among the first to try to stop useless and cruel animal experiments, especially vivisection, the use of animals for experiments; her slender novella anticipates Woolf’s Flush, and I would be much surprised if Woolf had not read Hajjin’s story. The Confessions of a Lost Dog include being taken in by a very genteel controlled single lady, and both have as the central incident how the dog is kidnapped held up for ransom, mistreated and nearly killed. Because that happened a lot in Victorian England. Cobbe also wrote non-fiction, “The Consciousness of Dogs” (Quarterly Review), then “Dogs I have Met,” which dogs have sometimes had very bad times (boys’ careless cruelty, eminent scientist’s’ deliberate torture, a man who kept a rat pit in Paddington and aristocrats shooting pigeons sprung from traps).

Flush was a present from Sackville-West; and Woolf’s book is a researched biography of both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her dog, from a dog’s point of view insofar as Woolf could do it. There are letters, documents, and Woolf is brilliant at not overstepping so that the dog somehow understands others the way a dog might (not through language). I taught the book as a canonical modernist biography. To this I have added (for the class I’m teaching) from Woolf’s The Complete Fiction, a touching short fictional memoir,

“Gypsy, a mongrel,” about Tom Bagot’s memories of a dog he loved, whom he tried to kill and could not (because of the way she looked into his eyes and grinned), who was a burden, bothering the cats, getting into mischief, but then falling in love (it seems) with a pedigree male, Hector, and when Hector was removed (as too much of a burden) so pined for him, that she disappeared one day in search of him. The retrospective memoir begins after Gypsy has vanished and is by turns poignant and funny.

Woolf had a dog who one day just disappeared.

Then there’s Bunny or David Garnett’s (yes he is Constance Garnett the translator’s son) Lady Into Fox.

It is a chilling book (not horrifying in the way of Kafka’s Metamorphosis where a man wakes up one morning to find he’s become a cockroach in body). One morning the narrator’s wife wakes to find herself become a fox. The first thing Garnett has to do is kill two perfectly fine dogs lest they kill his wife — we feel these as murder. She is regarded by all the world as vermin, as there to be killed. Gradually her eyes and whole demeanor become less and less human woman, more and more a fox as she mingles with other foxes, has a liter. Our narrator tries to become fox-like too Doesn’t work. He is not accepted. The book has a tragically felt ending.

It is sometimes printed with Garnett’s The People in the Zoo (in this one you see the original origin of animal literature in the satiric beast fable.)

So to come to Ackerley’s comic masterpiece; he might be said not to practice so much as to undermine the dog memoir. It is a love story, the story of his devotion to his female German shepherd whom he wants to have full life – not to miss out on anything, and that means for him, mating, sex, pups. As told it is surely a man’s idea of what sex is, and the obsessiveness of the quest (and graphically told failures) reveal Ackerley’s purpose as also to make fun of heterosexual sentimentalities about sex and marriage (as well as homosexual ones). As in portrait biographies, we also learn as much about Ackerley as Tulip. The humor is exquisite: it’s a matter of language and tone: our narrator is every so polite and impeccable, very dignified in the language he chooses; also startling and inventive: he began to think he had an “undoctorable dog.” He shows the cruelty indifference and urge to master and make others bend to your will in how many owners treat their ever so yearning dogs. I began to realize how many dogs might be emotionally abused.

Here is Dean Flower from the Hudson Review:

As he put it in his autobiography, My Father and Myself, “peace and contentment reached me in the shape of an animal, an Alsatian bitch … [who] entered my life . . . and entirely transformed it”:

She offered me what I had never found in my sexual life, constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which it is in the nature of dogs to offer. She placed herself entirely under my control.

From the moment she established herself in my heart and home, obsession with sex fell wholly away from me. The pubs I had spent much of my time in were never revisited, my single desire was to get back to her, to her waiting love and unstaling welcome. So urgent was my longing every day to rejoin her that I would often take taxis way, even the whole way, home to Putney from my London office, rather than endure the dawdling of buses and the rush-hour traffic jams in Park Lane. I sang with joy at the thought of seeing her.

Here is the language of a man in love, for the first time and irrevocably. The scales fell from his eyes. This was love, as he had never understood it before. He does not voice it so directly in My Dog Tulip, choosing rather to dwell on his own innocent confusions and anxieties—a con firmed bachelor of refined tastes at the center of London’s literary life, driven to care for a creature who cared so utterly for him. For Ackerley, loving Tulip (whose actual name, Queenie, was deemed too prosaic for the book) meant understanding her desires, her emotions and charac ter, her spiritual as well as her sexual and excretory nature, her myste rious and essential beauty as well as her irreducible dogginess. Inevi tably, that led to some comic incongruities, which Ackerley skillfully played. … Recent admirers too have commented on Ackerley’s excessive, perhaps ironic use of Renaissance sonnets as sources for these bursts of eloquence:

Her ears are tall and pointed, like the ears of Anubis. How she manages to hold them constantly erect, as though starched, I do not know, for with their fine covering of mouse-gray fur they are soft and flimsy; when she stands with her back to the sun it shines through the delicate tissue, so that they glow shell-pink as though incandescent. Her face also is long and pointed, basically stone-gray but the and lower jaw are jet black. Jet, too, are the rims of her amber eyes, though heavily mascara’d, and the tiny mobile eyebrow tufts that set like accents above them. And in the midst of her forehead is a kind of Indian caste-mark, a black diamond suspended there, like the jewel on the brow of Pegasus in Mantegna’s Parnassus, by a fine dark thread, no more than a penciled line, which is drawn from it right over her poll midway between the tall ears . . . her skull, bisected by the thread, is two primrose pools, the center of her face light gray, the bridge of her nose above the long black lips fawn, and upon each a patte de mouche has been tastefully set.

But here again the language of love is unmistakable. The elaborate anatomizing, the fine penciling and drawing, the chiaroscuro, the classical allusions and chiasmus (“are jet . . . Jet are”) all attest to the lover’s devout gaze. What may be harder to see is that Ackerley had no wish to be witty or extravagant in passages like these, least of all ironic. He put all his art and heart into them. Yet many readers were disgusted nevertheless. Why did Ackerley have to focus so relentlessly on feces and urine; or in the chapters concern ing sex, i.e., his efforts (all failures) to find Tulip a mate, why did he have to dwell on vaginal lubricants and penile stimulation and the odors of a bitch in heat? The answer is at least threefold: (a) nothing—again —is by love debarred; (b) the problem is with humans, not dogs; and (c) Ackerley chose that means to demonstrate something fundamental about love and sex. As to (a), Ackerley earnestly sought to understand the facts of canine sex, on Tulip’s behalf. He consulted her most trusted veterinarians, but also dog breeders and other self-professed experts, plus all the books available, and learned that the process of “marrying” two dogs is not simple or straightforward, and that a great deal of ignorance, misinformation, and mystery still surrounds it.

On the film, from “One man and his dog,” The Spectator (V315, #9532, 7 May 2011, p. 48 — no author cited)

a labour of love, the visuals mesh with the words perfectly and capture all the various moods, from melancholy and autumnal, to comic and skittish. The film comprises nearly 60,000 drawings hand-drawn digitally (that is, on to a computer), and are just so lovely, like the best ever watercolours come to life … Tulip has her foibles. Tulip can be flirtatious one minute and fiercely possessive the next. Tulip can be infuriating. Tulip sometimes earns herself a biff on the nose. But, all the while, Ackerley marvels at her every detail, rhapsodising not just about her beauty and constancy, but also her defecations and urinations. There isn’t a bit of Tulip he doesn’t find fascinating, or isn’t curious about. Occasionally, the animation leeches into black and white pencil sketches where Tulip appears half human wearing a little skirt and holding court. … The film, like the book, does not directly address Ackerley’s loneliness and homosexuality and childlessness, but it is there in the chinks … It’s marvellous, probably the best dog-flick you are ever going to see, based on the best dog-lit you are ever going to read. What more can I say?

There are three levels of cartoon:  beyond the beautiful colored pictures, which dissolve at the edges and turn into black-and-white satirical exposures of the less than admirable passions and impulses driving the characters, which turn into lovely lines of classical gods (now archetypally psychoanalysing).

Once again here is the vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/264796405

Ellen

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The Bloomsbury Novel: a summer syllabus for an online OLLI at Mason class

Mecklenburgh Square (in the Bloomsbury area), by Margaret Joliffe (1935)

For a 6 week summer course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Wednesday mid-day, 11:45 am to 1:15 pm,
June 24 to July 29
Zoom, Virtual Classroom
Institutional location: 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

Online at:

Description of course:

This course will examine novels & art included in the term Bloomsbury through the fiction of four of the novel writers: we’ll read E.M. Forster’s Maurice; J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip; Virginia Woolf’s short fictions taken from two books: The Complete Short Fiction (which includes Memoirs of a Novelist) and The Death of the Moth and other essays; and Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent. Bloomsbury books (non-fiction, biography, essays, poetry) are written by people who belonged to an amorphous early to mid 20th century creative group, associated with a specific area in London, who were friends and associates, or whose works were printed at the Hogarth Press. The group lasted a long time, going through several phases, and left a rich legacy in books and people writing in alignment with the original goals and aesthetics, political and economic and social ideas. Thie works produced by this group are splendidly interesting, different, quirkly, at an angle from the mainstream, critiquingit, and remain strongly influential until today, are in various genres, often subversive and original texts. You don’t forget them. There are good movies to watch for Maurice, My Dog Ackerley, & All Passion Spent. I ask everyone before class to read E.M. Forster’s “What I Believe.”

Dora Carrington (1893-1932), The Mill at Tidmarsh (her most famous picture)

Required texts (in the order we will read them):

E. M. Forster, “What I Believe,” Online at http://spichtinger.net/otexts/believe.html or https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/what-i-believe-by-e-m-forster (if you want to buy, it’s reprinted in Two Cheers for Democracy. Harcourt, Brace, 1951; rpt. many times)
E.M. Forster, Maurice, ed., P. N. Furbank, introd., notes by David Leavitt. Penguin 1971; rpt 2003. ISBN 978-0=141-44113-9.
J.R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip, introd. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. New York Review of Books classic, 1999. ISBN 978-1-59017-414-2
Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed., introd. Susan Dick. Harvest book, 1989. ISBN 978-0-15-621250-2 (this contains the whole of Memoirs of a Novelist).
————–, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. I will send the whole book by attachment. It used to available at an Australian University of Adelaide site and is still on an Australian Gutenberg site:  http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html. It exists in book form: The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harcourt, Brace, 1970 ISBN 0-15-625234-1
Vita Sackville-West. All Passion Spent, introd. Joanna Lumley. Virago 1982; rpt 2011. ISBN 978-0-86068-358-2.

Format: lecture and discussions

June 24th: Defining Bloomsbury philosophy, ethic, describing the aesthetic. “What I believe.” We will begin Forster’s Maurice
July 1st: Forster and his posthumous novel, Maurice.
July 8th: Pro-animal literature & Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip. Read also for this day Woolf’s “Gypsy, the Mongrel” (in Complete Fiction) and “Sporting Party.”
July 15th: For this week read Woolf and her “Mysterious Case of Miss V,” “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” “Memoirs of a Novelist,” “The Widow and the Parrot” (all in The Complete Fiction); then “Art of Biograpahy and “Professions for Women” (from Death of a Moth). I’ll tell of Andre Maurois’s Aspects of Biography.
July 22nd: Experimental fiction & feminist poetry: Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth,” “Twelfth Night at the Old Vic,” “Street Haunting,” “Thoughts on Peace During an Air Raid” (from The Death of the Moth), then Woolf’s “Kew Gardens,” “The String Quartet,” Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street,” “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Shooting Party,”  from Appendix C, “The Dog,” “Ghosts,” and “English Youth” (in Complete Fiction). I will send by attachment poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, & Sackville-West.
July 29th: Vita Sackville-West, her life, scholarly editions & biographies, poetry and All Passion Spent.

James Wilby as the ebullient sincere young Maurice

Hugh Grant as the hardened self-depriving older Clive

Recommended: 5 movies

All Passion Spent. Directed by Martin Friend. Screenplay Peter Buckman. Perf. Wendy Hiller, Maurice Denham, Harry Andrews, Eileen Way, Phyllis Calvert. 3 part (hour each) series. BBC, Masterpiece Theater, 1986. On YouTube. Delicate gentle comic poignant masterpiece of a TV series.

Carrington. Directed by John McGrath. Screenplay Christopher Hampton. Perf. Jonathan Pryce, Emma Thomson, Rufus Dewell, Samuel West, Penelope Wilton. Le Studio Canal, 1995. It’s literally accurate in some ways, but it panders to myths about the Bloomsbury people. Grim, with a caricature of Strachey.
Maurice. Dir.James Ivory. Screenplay Kit Hesketh-Harvey Perf. James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Phoebe Nicholls, Simon Callow, Ben Kingsley, Judy Parfitt, Denholm Elliot. Merchant-Ivory, 1987. Available as Prime Video on Amazon. Fine mostly faithful movie.
My Dog Tulip. Animated artistic Film written, drawn, edited by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. Voices Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave. Produced by Howard Kaminsky. Axiom, New Yorker film, 1999. It is available as a Vimeo if you keep searching for it. A masterpiece of tenderness, comedy, strongly pro-animal rights.

https://vimeo.com/264796405

To the Lighthouse. Dir Colin Gregg. Script Hugh Stoddard. Perf. Rosemary Harris, Michael Gough, Suzanne Bertish, Kenneth Branagh, Lyndsey Baxter, Pippa Guard. BBC, 1983. Online at YouTube. Brilliant combination of Woolf’s novel of the same name, aspects of her family life, and filmic versions of her novel techniques.

Other online texts: by Woolf
Granite and Rainbow (contains “The new Biography”)
To the Lighthouse

Available as complete, unabridged audiobooks:

E. M. Forster, Maurice, read by Peter Firth for Audiobooks. MP3. 978-1531874155
J. R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip, read by Ralph Cosham for Audiobooks. MP3. 978-1441786401
Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, read by Wendy Hiller, for Cover-to-Cover. Audio CDs. 978-1445801582 (hard to find, out of print, but just inimitable beautiful poignant funny)

Recent edition

General Studies, life-writing, other Bloomsbury and connected people:

Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Cambridge: Harvard, 2000.
Brennan, Gerald. The Face of Spain. Farrar, Strauss, 1956.
Cavafy, C. P. Poems, ed, trans. Avi Sharon. NY: Penguin, 2008.
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her life and work. NY: Ballantine Books, 1989.
Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1979.                 Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life. NY: Norton, 1989.                                           Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury Group: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey. Noonday Press, 1954
Moffatt, Wendy. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. NY: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2010.
Power, Eileen. Medieval People. 1924: NY: Harper Perennial, 1963
Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford, 1993.
Shone, Richard, ed. The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant. Tate Gallery, Princeton UP, 1999.
Summers, Claude J. E.M. Forster. NY: Ungar, 1983.
Rosenbaum. S. P. ed. The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of Memoirs & Commentaries. All sort of essays by many Bloomsbury people. Rev. Toronto Press, 1995.
Rosner, Victoria, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group.  NY: Cambridge UP, 2014. Covers ground by typologies, themes, perspectives.
Sackville-West, Vita, ed. Mary Ann Caws. Selected Writings of Vita Sackville-West. NY: Palgrave, 2002.
Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. LA: Univ of California Press, 1980.                         Stansky, Peter. On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury & Its Intimate World. Harvard, 1997.
Wade, Francesca. Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars. Faber & Faber, 2020.

A few of my blogs:

Thinking about biography: Andre Maurois’s Aspects of Biography
Upon first reading Virginia Woolf’s
Death of a Moth”
Virginia Woolf’s Flush as canonical modernist biography

Bridge over the Allier c.1933 Roger Fry (1866-1934)

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A summer syllabus: The Bloomsbury Novel at OLLI at AU

Ackerley as busy editor of The Listener, nearby Tulip (the movie)

For a 4 week summer course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Monday afternoons, 1:45 to 3:15 pm,
June 1 to June 22
Zoom, Virtual Classroom
Institutional location: 4801 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D.C. 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Online at: https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2020/02/16/a-spring-syllabus-the-novels-of-e-m-forster-at-olli-at-au/

Description of course:

This course will examine novels & art included in the term Bloomsbury through the fiction of four of the novel writers: we’ll read E.M. Forster’s Maurice, J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, Virginia Woolf’s short fictions taken from two books: The Complete Short Fiction (which includes Memoirs of a Novelist) and The Death of the Moth and other essays, and Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent. Bloomsbury books (non-fiction, biography, essays, poetry) are written by people who belonged to an amorphous early to mid 20th century creative group, associated with a specific area in London, who were friends and associates, or whose works were printed at the Hogarth Press. This works produced by this group are splendidly interesting, remain strongly influential until today, are in various genres highly original texts of powerful art. There are good movies to watch for Maurice, My Dog Ackerley, & All Passion Spent. I ask everyone before class to read E.M. Forster’s “What I Believe.”

Dora Carrington (1893-1932), The Mill at Tidmarsh (her most famous picture)

Required texts (in the order we will read them):

E. M. Forster, “What I Believe,” Online at http://spichtinger.net/otexts/believe.html or https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/what-i-believe-by-e-m-forster (if you want to buy, it’s reprinted in Two Cheers for Democracy. Harcourt, Brace, 1951; rpt. many times)
E.M. Forster, Maurice, ed., P. N. Furbank, introd., notes by David Leavitt. Penguin 1971; rpt 2003. ISBN 978-0=141-44113-9.
J.R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip, introd. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. New York Review of Books classic, 1999. ISBN 978-1-59017-414-2
Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed., introd. Susan Dick. Harvest book, 1989. ISBN 978-0-15-621250-2 (this contains the whole of Memoirs of a Novelist).
————–, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. I will send the whole book by attachment. It used to available at an Australian University of Adelaide site and is still on an Australian Gutenberg site:  http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html. It exists in book form: The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harcourt, Brace, 1970 ISBN 0-15-625234-1
Vita Sackville-West. All Passion Spent, introd. Joanna Lumley. Virago 1982; rpt 2011. ISBN 978-0-86068-358-2.

Format: lecture and discussions

June 1st: Defining Bloomsbury philosophy, ethic, describing the aesthetic. “What I believe.” We will begin Forster’s Maurice
June 8th: Forster’s Maurice; beginning JR Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip. Read also for this day Woolf’s “Gypsy, the Mongrel” (in Complete Fiction) and “The Art of Biography (in Death of the Moth)
June 15th: My Dog Tulip, book & animated movie. Woolf’s “Mysterious Case of Miss V,” “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” “Memoirs of a Novelist,” “Kew Gardens,” “The String Quartet,” “The Widow and the Parrot,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Shooting Party,”  from Appendix C, “The Dog,” “Ghosts,” and “English Youth” in The Complete Fiction). Then “The Death of the Moth,” “Twelfth Night at the Old Vic,” Professions for Women,” “Thoughts on Peace During an Air Raid” (in Death of the Moth and Other Essays).
June 22nd: First half of period: Woolf, biography, experimental fiction; Sackville-West & biography & fiction; her All Passion Spent.

James Wilby as the ebullient sincere young Maurice

Hugh Grant as the hardened self-depriving older Clive

Recommended: 4 movies

All Passion Spent. Directed by Martin Friend. Screenplay Peter Buckman. Perf. Wendy Hiller, Maurice Denham, Harry Andrews, Eileen Way, Phyllis Calvert. 3 part (hour each) series. BBC, Masterpiece Theater, 1986. On YouTube.

Carrington. Directed by John McGrath. Screenplay Christopher Hampton. Perf. Jonathan Pryce, Emma Thomson, Rufus Dewell, Samuel West, Penelope Wilton. Le Studio Canal, 1995.
Maurice. Dir.James Ivory. Screenplay Kit Hesketh-Harvey Perf. James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Phoebe Nicholls, Simon Callow, Ben Kingsley, Judy Parfitt, Denholm Elliot. Merchant-Ivory, 1987. Available as Prime Video on Amazon.
My Dog Tulip. Cartoon Film written, drawn, edited by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. Voices Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave. Produced by Howard Kaminsky. Axiom, New Yorker film, 1999. It is available as a Vimeo if you keep searching for it:

https://vimeo.com/264796405

To the Lighthouse. Dir Colin Gregg. Script Hugh Stoddard. Perf. Rosemary Harris, Michael Gough, Suzanne Bertish, Kenneth Branagh, Lyndsey Baxter, Pippa Guard. BBC, 1983. Online at YouTube

General Studies & life-writing:

Ackerley, J. R. My Father and Myself, introd. W. H. Auden. NYRB classic, 1999.
Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury Group: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey. Noonday Press, 1954
Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford, 1993.
Shone, Richard, ed. The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant. Tate Gallery, Princeton UP, 1999.
Summers, Claude J. E.M. Forster. NY: Ungar, 1983.
Rosenbaum. S. P. ed. The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of Memoirs & Commentaries. All sort of essays by many Bloomsbury people. Rev. Toronto Press, 1995.
Wade, Francesca. Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars. Faber & Faber, 2020.

Bridge over the Allier c.1933 Roger Fry (1866-1934)

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Cat stories, cat pictures, cat poetry: there is a literature of cats

A still from Keri (Cats of/in Istanbul) – touching movie as much about the people who care for the cats as the cats themselves – they are waiting for fishing ships from Greece

Charles Burton Barber, Coaxing Is Better than Teasing (1883) — didactic Victorian narrative art

For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit
— Christopher Smart, My Cat Geoffrey

Friends,

I’ve been wanting to write a blog on the literature of cats, about cat stories, cat pictures, cat poetry, so as to suggest that there is a particular quality to stories about cats, poetry about them, even pictures that distinguishes the “kind” from stories about animals in general, other animals, dogs, people, a sort of tone or stance that underlies and unites them all. Well, stories, images and movies not hostile to cats, not produced by crazy people who in history have conducted massacres (see Robert Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre” in a book named after this essay) and persecuted the cat (cats endured a long period of persecution in Europe, starting in the twelfth century and ending only sometime in the nineteenth). I kept putting this off. No longer.

George Morland, The Artist’s Cat Drinking (1792)

The quality is admiration, admiration for their resilience, for their individual and group persistent survival. Stories told of stressed cats, of how against all probability, great odds, seeming counterproductive behavior, and sometimes (to the reader and poor creature enduring it) inflicted torture, they carry on. We marvel at their individuality — since there is a continual repetitive catness about their casually observed postures, stances, relationships with us.

I am moved to make this seemingly unprovable assertion and cite some of the best writing I’ve read by a given author (cat as muse), as well as about the cat, because I just read and then re-read, savoring as I went V. S. Naipaul’s The Strangeness of Grief, posted online December 30th, 2019 and printed January 6th in the New Yorker.

Naipaul, a wonderfully poignant ironic writer (deserved his Nobel, and the one Booker) begins with his father’s death but his essay morphs into the calamitous deaths of two cats, one carelessly murdered (the mother), the other torn to bits by desert dogs (its kitten), and then a long history of the life and death of a kitten whom the author adopts, brings up, provides for, is companion, staff, lover and finally protector and life-prolonger of: Augustus. Augustus a cat whose life has been at risk, and near extinguished several times, but saved again and again by a vet.

My simple-minded take-away is that an outdoor cat is in very great danger of loss of life and that modern human life also presents real dangers to a cat it can’t recognize for itself. Also how fragile they are. That they have been such a successful species as a species is because they have evolved to be women’s best lover … Naipaul whose work is characterized by a deep kindness and melancholy.

Henriette Ronner-Knip (1878) — famous for her luxurious cats, this one may have been a real one she owned

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Minette the Kitten (1894)

My favorite, maybe the best book by Doris Lessing is her On Cats, which also opens with cat massacres that occurred periodically in the South Africa of Lessing’s childhood, after which she goes on to be the biographer of a Grey Cat and Black Puss, then Rufus the Survivor, and finally “the old age of el magnifico.” I wrote an appreciative essay on this book (scroll to the bottom to read her magnficent peroration) more than eight years ago: From this essay:

The closing stories are the most moving of all “Rufus the Survivor” is about a cat who has a bad home. He is mistreated. He is shut out during the day; he is too thin; it’s clear he is sometimes hit. He is cowed and has learnt to be a sycophant. It’s a story of how slowly he insinuates himself into Lessing’s home and gradually ever so gradually gets first her to allow him to stay, and then to stay for a while, and hen to live there. How he has to maneuver to get grey and black cat to accept him. How she takes him to the doctor for his ills and how he does not like it ever. Gradually he becomes braver and more confident and leaves the house to make friends. He even probably visits his ex-owner. She worries about this, but it seems the ex-owner does not try to keep Rufus. Rufus learns to show love and allow others to love him.

El Magnifico is a hero’s story. As the cat grows older, he gets cancer, and in order to have more years of life Lessing must amputate one of his legs. He cannot of course understand this. He assumes that she has utterly betrayed him not just in taking him to the Vet, but allowing this terrifically painful thing to be done. Ever after he has the worst troubles going to his litter box just outside the house (in a garden or yard), going up and down stairs, climbing things. But she cannot explain she is giving him more life.

Manning’s Miou

Then there’s Olivia Manning’s Extraordinary Cats: Lessing had tough cats; Manning had vulnerable ones. I wrote an essay on Manning’s book too (scroll all the way down). The central core of Manning’s book is a life history of specific cats she has owned and their personalities, how they interacted with other cats. She is (unexpectedly) more inward than Lessing. There are many fine deeply humane moments — a love of these animals that is deeply empathetic making the reader their valuable lives. Manning also offers real insights into the interrelationships of people and cats.

By now the reader may be saying, ‘This is ridiculous. She writes of cats as though they were humans.’ But are they so very different? The fact is that when an animal, any animal, enters one’s home, it becomes something more than an animal. The change is brought about not merely by human fantasy and human need: the animal itself is drawn out of its animal world and advances to meet our wider understanding.

Desmond Morris’s Cats in Art is the best general philosophical art history I’ve read.

The text is better than my other omnibus volume: Caroline Bugler’s The Cat: 3500 years of the Cat in Art has more pictures but her text soon gives out into a catalogue which is sheerly informative and descriptive of a particular image and they are not so well-chosen, do not delight or interest as Morris’s continually do. Morris too critiques and presents attitudes towards the cat and what we can know of the lives of the domestic cat since we have first proof of their existence. Early on they were seen as “working” animals in the sense that they attacked small animals people considered vermin; but they were also early on companions and associated with women. Then the medieval period where horrendous persecution of cats began or was first recorded. It seems to begin with the decline of learning, a deep resentment of nuns using cats as companions, and male fantasies of witches. Especially endangered (and still in danger) are black cats. The cats’ pigment system was another element that led to human cruelty in times or places where people find enjoyment in animal torture. I was roused to indignation on their behalf and getting a fuller picture of what lies behind 18th century and the kind of mass shooting of cats, throwing them from great heights recorded in the 19th century as well as by Doris Lessing. And the pictures unexplained by Bugler fall into place. I hope he traces the growth of decent behavior towards non-human animals across the 19th century. I have found talking to people today they resist the application of the word “persecution” to systematic cruelty towards cats. Throughout his book Morris uses this kind of language for not only cats but all the animals he includes: mostly domesticated, for his topic is human relationships with cats as revealed in pictures.

Paul Gaugin’s Mimi and her cat (1890)

He shows how expensive cats are the ones most painted with super-rich people in the 19th century. He is tracing art movements, and it’s telling that impressionism consciously focuses on moods of cats, their relationship to the world. The post-impressionistic yield surprises: I don’t know a number of these painters loved cats. There is a painting Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley (to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets to a gay young man may be addressed) while in prison with his cat Trixie nearby; they have the same expression. Morris describes all the cats carefully — he gives In choosing non-realistic images he is wonderfully intuitive about what speaks to us, giving them equal importance with any human animal, aware they too have a burden of existence too. I wish I could scan in them all — but you must buy and then love and savor this piece of cat literature.

Bunny and Kipper by Beryl Cook

I have too many books to talk of so now must be content now to cite but a few more of the best: by a professional vet: Nicholas Dodman, The Cat Who Cried for Help (the obtuse cruelty of owners is chilling, one removed her cat’s voice-box because the sound of the crying grated on her nerves), about attitudes, emotions, psychology of cats; Jenni Diski begins and ends with her cat, Bundy, What I Don’t Know About Animals

She calls herself “post-domestic. ” A “domestic” life in animal studies means you grew up with working animals around you (cows, chickens, horses). So her first experience of animals includes watching her mother buy, cook and then serve a chicken for the family to eat. She says soon after she felt impelled to save a baby bird from a nest who was not grateful but terrified. The bird couldn’t understand what she was aiming at, could not trust, much less love her. The result was the poor bird hid behind the stove in their small kitchen where it was dangerous, and they had to pull it out by force. By the time they prodded it out, it was badly wounded; Jenny ended up wishing the bird would die immediately. The point was how vulnerable animals are to us in our habitats.

Rosa Brett, The Hayloft (1828-82), pre-Raphaelite artist

Most books about living with animals are by women, but this very good one A Cat is Watching is by Roger A Caras: his idea is to try to enable us to see how a cat sees us; this is an enjoyable and informative book filled with revealing photos of cats at play, eating, sleeping, frightened and many black-and-white drawings and illustrations. A wee bit dull in the writing, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s The Tribe of the Tiger has much to tell of the inward life of the whole tribe of cats. Different species brought together, cats in different milieus and a myriad of questions and tentative answers. I suggest Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room is a (morally stupid) book which pretends to be sympathetic to cats, and keeping animals as companions (pets) but is a stealth attack on cats as ruining our environment. Don’t be fooled. Rather like Kate Chisholm’s Hunger Games is a ferocious attack on anorexics by someone claiming to have been anorexic, Tucker pretends to be a cat lover while telling us all much that we believe about having a relationship with cats is a delusion. I know how Jane Goodall would reply.

To conclude, or as to cat poetry, don’t miss Stevie Smith’s Cats in Colour or Marge Piercy’s Sleeping with Cats. This poem is from an anthology I bought as a memento from the Charlotte Smith conference (in a shop in Sussex), Cats: A Literary Anthology ed. Carolyn M. Jones (from medieval and Montaigne, to French and recent, to science, to comic chapters in novels)

Cats sleep anywhere
Any table, any chair,
Top of piano,
Window-ledge,
In the middle,
On the edge,
Open drawer,
Empty shoe,
Anybody’s lap will do,
Fitted in a cardboard box,
In the cupboard
With your frocks–
Anywhere.
They don’t care!
Cats sleep anywhere.
— Eleanor Farjeon

Les Aristochats — popular French Cartoon

I collect books about and with images of cats, from Edward Gorey to Kliban cats to Susan Herbert’s quiet parodies of “great art” and famous scenes or photographes. Here’s Gene Kelly cat in Singing in the Rain:

This has ended up a cheerful blog.

Ellen

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Kathryn Shevelow’s For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement

Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years’ experience of my care
Has made at last familiar, she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine …
I have gained thy confidence, have pledged
All that is human in me to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love
— William Cowper, to his hareThe Task

If I had a donkey wot wouldn’t go
D’ye think I’d wallop him? no, no, no!
But gentle means I’d try, d’ye see,
Because I hate all cruelty;
If all had been like me, in fact,
There’d have been no occasion for Martin’s Act,
Dumb animals to prevent being crack’d
On the head
— Musical hall song after the 1822 passage of the Martin’s bill protecting animal rights

Dear friends and readers,

A few weeks ago on C18-l, a listserv dedicated to the 18th century, a thread on when and how people began to treat dogs as satisfying companions, produced several book titles, among them Ingrid Tague’s Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in 18th century Britain and Kathryn Shevelow’s For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement. The latter much more in my budget range and with a deeply appealing picture of a dog rather than its human friend on its cover, suggesting a focus I wanted. I bought and have read it. As I sit with one of my beloved cats on my lap tonight and the other not far away, I feel more people reading it might do some good.

It’s not just another academic history, but belongs to a sub-genre: books by women on animals they lived among, cared and worked for, and become a good friend to, whose rights they passionately proselytize for. Women are willing to put aside ego, pride, a sense of superiority and power too to live with animals as equals in order to study them. I’d align Shevelow with Jane Goodall, Diane Fosse, Birute Galdikas, Sy Montgomery and Temple Grandin and others I used to read with students in Writing about the natural Sciences and Tech classes. Books on specific species seem most often to be by women, of course especially cats (until very recently not valued partly because of this connection): Doris Lessing, Olivia Manning, Tanquil Le Clerc; hard to classify cultural books like Jenny Diski’s What I Don’t Know About Animals, not to omit specialty painters, e.g., George Stubbs and Henrietta Ronner (and books thereon, viz, Caroline Bugler’s 3500 Years of the Cat in Art)

The subject is a serious one; you just need to watch Frederick Wiseman’s Primates or read any of Goodall’s recent exposures of the cruelty of researchers to animals they keep prisoners in solitary confinement ready for the next “experiment.”

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Shevelow’s book opens with a woman! The first women writer fully on record writing out of a principle on animal equality is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a great poet. Many will know her poem The Hunting of the Hare, but may not know she also wrote against against cruel experiments in her essays — another reason for calling her mad and ridiculous.

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Margaret’s arguments provide a jumping off point for Shevelow’s detailing how animals were commonly regarded in print from medieval to later 17th century times. What has been used against them from the beginning of writing is they don’t talk (“dumb animals”). Thus it was easy to assert theologically they have no souls, are not rational, despite manifesting many emotions like humans they were said not to feel these for real. The world was by God (or the Gods) made for people and we should use what comes to us just as we please. (The same justification was used for slavery; hierarchy for exploiting lower class people, women too.) Shevelow summarizes several treatises: Aquinas allowed that animals feel pain (good of him), OTOH, Descartes was especially mean. Some Jewish traditions from the Hebrew Bible exhorted humane behavior.

Her second chapter is the densest in the book about showing the way people tortured animals for enjoyment. It reminded me of Lessing’s first chapter on how people have for centuries shot and killed cats carelessly and on sprees. The most common enjoyment was to force animals to fight to the death; to terrify one with packs of others attacking it and then rejoice in the traumatized hysteria and crazed antics of the animal. Late in the book Shevelow has witnesses in the 19th century finally testifying to how bears just before bear-baiting sessions were to come (they knew) would moan, groan, quiver and cry, would try to escape, hang back until whipped into it. One incident well-documented later was of a dog and monkey driven to bite each others lower jaws off. “Blood sports” were especially prevalent in the UK.

In case you assume all people today find these sports abhorrent or are unwilling to admit they regard them complacently, think again: listen to the tone of Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre; I finished a book last week on Chardin by a respectable woman art historian who quoted a chief of police and inspector in France in the early 19th century who found blood sports much amusing as an authority whose taste in buying prints she took respectfully and seriously into account. What can one say of human beings who set up killing fields, coerce slave-labor and run rape academies justified by their “religion.”

As might be predicted Shevelow argues (and demonstrates) that enlightenment thought first spread the feeling among a minority of people (but there) that animals should be treated humanely. Her thesis, though, is that while increasing numbers of people were willing to countenance and say generally as a principle that animals should be protected from the cruelty and violence of people, what really spread active change in the condition of the lives of animals (I almost said unfortunate enough to be) in contact with people was the real spread of keeping animals as companions — pets. She says that when an animal becomes our companion, when we start to see say Clarycat (to mention my cat)’s feelings working with our own, when we notice their individual patterns of behavior, when we what’s called anthropomorphize them (Goodall argues a loaded falsifying term), then the individual doing that is going to treat the animal decently. As more and more people did that, then there was a genuine building up of identification, bonding, love.

George Morland (1763?-1804): The Artist’s Cat Drinking

Shevelow’s book falls off for a time because after she has shown the barbarity of animal treatment in the 18th century, her way of “proving” that it was the spread of people really having relationships with animals as companions is through entertaining anecdotes. The problem is not that they are many of them designedly funny, but the humor comes from our and Shevelow’s perception of incongruity. The problem may be how do you demonstrate such an argument? Johnson loved animals and had several cats but Boswell quotes him as saying: “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs.” Then she produces equivocal arguments, e.g., people regarded animals as people because animals could be accused of murder or heinous crimes and then treated as heinously as people. I had a student who had been assigned to write about Thomas More’s Utopia and casting about to look like a feminist and find feminism in this treatise came up with idea women could be enslaved too, beaten for adultery as severely as men. Gee thanks. Shevelow cites the way people regarded birth deformities as showing we recognize animal connections with ourselves as animal imagery and analogies were produced. But it equally be that the use of the animal term shows just how debased this “freak” deformity was regarded.

A 20th century photo of family life among chimpanzees

I was surprised that Shevelow did not bring up how easier travel brought people into contact with chimpanzees and orangutans (she did cite Lord Monboddo’s work) and there people acknowledged cousinship, reluctantly but it was seen. It’s seen in novels, in memoirs, Anne Boleyn refused to keep a money because it appalled her as being too like. In Graham’s last novel, Bella, he uses the shipping of orangutans to Europe because they have white irises in their eyes and flat nails and their standing posture made people call the men. She brings up zoos as putting people on contract with exotic animals but this too is so far from her companion thesis. Circuses are places where people have practiced real cruelty to animals. She appeared to have lost her way.

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With “Nature’s Cry” Shevelow got back into on track, in powerful gear and the book became excellent again thereafter: Shevelow is strongest when she is producing arguments for animal rights and describing the politics surrounding this, and (paradoxically, conversely) showing the wanton (to use the 19th century term that had purchase) cruelty and horrible fun and rage people could and did inflict on animals.

A sculpture of Hogarth’s dog — he was another man who loved animals

First, Shevelow carefully examines the most powerful of Hogarth’s allegories: the four stages of cruelty, where he shows the progress of a hero from torturing animals to killing a servant girl and along the way the four sketches have many analogous images of cruelty to animals, each showing how this behavior is pervasive in the society, usually coming back to horrific treatment of animals. Often they are small ones; cats, smaller dogs, roosters, rabbits. The point of the four is to show how cruelty to animals is part of and leads to the overall violence of people to one another. The moral lesson is one must teach children when they are young that animals have the right be treated the way a child might want to be treated. It is the first time I’d heard of this. She believes they had an effect.

The third stage

She then returns to philosophers, artists, scientists, treatises and writing of all sorts showing a growing acceptance of the idea that animals have rights. Part I included ideas I assume my reader knows, Locke’s naturalistic view of the species, found also in his Thoughts Concerning Education. In Part II she moves on to writers who forthrightly produced powerful original indictments, e.g., Humphry Primate’s A dissertation on the duty of mercy and and the sin of cruelty to Brute Animals. Primate was the son of a clergyman and his became a central text of the animal protection movement, still cited today. Primate argued argued animals have the right to happiness (!) and enjoyment (companionship) just like human beings and it’s our limitation that makes us deny them this.

Those who know about 18th century medicine and psychiatry know the importance of the work of George Cheyne. He was an enormously fat man before he launched his career as a reformer and one of the thing he gave up was eating animals. Shevelow has a long chapter on his work, influence and protests. Thomas Young, another clergyman wrote an essay that achieved some readership: An Essay on Humanity to Animals; he conceded the uncomfortable truth that vegetarianism can come from not wanting to kill or hurt animals but this movement unfortunately ammunition to those who want to deny animals rights to say you are going overboard. OTOH, at the close of the 18th century and into the 19th the vivisection movement had begun and as a propaganda tool, it was effective — these experiments horrified some of those who saw them, and the feel of unnaturalness made the anti-vivisection pro-animal feeling spread.

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The last part of Shevelow’s book covers parliamentary debates and teases out underlying values by tracing the kind of examples that in such debates often become electrifying litmus tests.

19th century print of bull-baiting

The first bill she says (in the history of mankind) to protect animals was introduced on April 2, 1800 by Sir William Pulteney, restrained, cautious wealthy property-developer: it was a bill to end the “savage custom of Bull-baiting.” In the debate that followed some classic arguments we hear today over gov’t’s reach, what is the function of law, can you legislate morality. I remember in the 1950s when conservative Republicans objected to social legislation on behalf of the poor as “meddling.” Never hear that now. Sheridan spoke eloquently but Shevelow shows how the emphasis was on stopping people from brutalizing themselves, and was not in sympathy with the dogs. It was too limited in scope and its focus not animals as such. It went down to defeat because the opposition was there and strong (Evangelicals are killjoys — Wilberforce was for the bill) of Wm Windham who brought out the Jacobin analogy – they are too radical against “so-called oppression.”

Sir Edwin Landseer, Attachment — Foxey guarding her master’s body

One of the stories which hit sore spots and became a focus of the debates (visualized by Landseer above) was of a dog who mourned a dying master and the question arose whether the dog tried to eat the master. The idea of the opponents of the bill was to show animals are not “gentle” and not worth protecting” to attack the dog was central as this domestic animal had more constituency than any others.

Shevelow briefly covers the poetry and prose of the period which encourages sympathy with others in distress, for animals, Burns’s use of the mouse, Blake, Cowper and his hares; protests poems against vivisection. Children’s books encouraged children to be kind to pets (Anna Barbauld, Sarah Hare). Blake:

A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human Blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear.

And it was brought out by Jeremy Bentham and others that people treated their slaves as animals. She does not begin to have enough room for all the varied material she could have. The other day I read Dickens’s preface to Barnaby Rudge, which has touching portraits of two ravens somewhat comically described in human terms. I think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice refusing to eat a piece of meat once they are introduced.

A big boost was the passage of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, and Sir William Erskine steps onto the stage. He was known as a great lover of animals, over dinner one night he even introduced his guests to his pet leeches who had saved his life. A strong successful attorney who saved the lives of several people prosecuted in the 1970s; he was gregarious, a keen wit, intelligent, and he defended one of the early whistleblower cases where a gov’t (the English gov’t) tried to put the person who revealed corruption and secrets and incompetence in jail.

1900: photo of horse left to die in a NYC slum road

On May 5, 1809 Erskine introduced “an Act to prevent malicious and wanton Cruelty to animals.” It was immediately prompted by an incident in the streets where he saw a deeply crippled, suffering starving horse being further beaten. He bought that horse, but it was just the one, In slaughterhouses it was common for horses to start eating one another out of trauma and distress and hunger. What distinguished his bill was it was not about humans but about preventing cruelty to animals. He did not seek to teach human beings to be better or end any particular practice but stop “malicious and wanton cruelty” and he maintained magistrates would recognize that when they saw it. His focus was on working animals, especially horses (treated very badly as race horses Southey maintained).

The quality of people’s petty minds against him is caught up by this doggerel:

For dogs and hares
And bulls and bears
Let Pulteney still make laws,
For sure I be
That none but he
So well can plead their cause.
Of all the house,
Of man and mouse,
No one stands him before,
To represent in Parliament
The brutes, for he’s a boar [bore]

Now the debate engaged the issues involved directly Erskine tried to make prosecutions fall on masters and owners of working places. Erskine won in the house, but went down to defeat in the Lords and the opposition was once again led by Windham who had modified his stance somewhat: he acknowledged the suffering of animals was terrible, but the particular incidents fought over show that the people arguing were talking about the human beings involved and did not take seriously the idea that an infliction of an injury on an animal should be called a criminal offense.

A blind cat taken care of in an animal shelter

On the Net recently a veterinarian (great fool) photographed herself killing a cat (for pleasure, including the cat’s terror); she has been prosecuted. I fear the man who killed the lion was not. I believe all hunting of animals should be outlawed. That all places manufacturing meat for humans to eat should be monitored carefully.

Pamphlets were written that circulated widely (by John Lamb a countering the idea this kind of bill was “a dangerous precedent”) and in Liverpool the first society for the prevention of cruelty to animals was started, had noble aims but disappeared (no money, not enough people getting involved). Erskine went back to being the people’s champion, Windham died, now known as the man who protected bull baiting.

The stage is set for Richard Humanity Dick Martin. It was after Erskin’s bill failed to pass that Richard Martin becomes individually pro-active.

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Colonel Richard — Humanity Dick Martin (1754-1834, Irish politician-reformer

The most effective man most responsible for getting people to support animal rights at the time was Richard Martin, a very rich Anglo-Irish man. He comes into public record first when he fought a duel with someone who had murdered a dog owned by a member of his family – to get back at the member. I’ve seen too many times in the historical record and have come across cases in my life where I’m told someone deliberately hurt (not killed) an animal to get back at its owner. The man George Fitzgerald was a violent bully, would provoke others with a cudgel, and enjoyed shooting dogs. (Boswell tells us about one of Johnson’s associates who enjoyed shooting and killing cats; Lessing opens her book on cats on such people in South Africa when she was a girl.

Martin was known for his love of animals, including oxen (working animals); he was a domineering landowner in Connemarra – thought he knew what was good for others; his father, Robert instilled in him a deep sense of the injustice inflicted on Ireland by the English; the father not only wanted liberty and equal rights for Irish Catholics but to get rid of the crippling tariffs on Ireland, the whole range of behaviors, laws and customs that made it into an exploited miserable country. He said smuggling was the result of these. He sent Richard to Harrow where he came under the influence of Samuel Parr, a “jacobinical parson;” someone with radical and romantic sympathies.

Hogarth’s insight that the desire to treat animals as having equal rights with people goes with a deep sense of justice and rights for all people is vindicated in Martin’s story politicking in the early 19th century to speak for animals. Martin traveled to Jamaica and identified with the subaltern people; he came back to Parliament and became active, married Elizabeth Vesey who he is said to have neglected (as well as his property) and she became Wolfe Tone’s mistress (the children’s tutor at the time). He inherited a large beautiful estate but was no good as a businessman; none of his schemes (he tried for a copper mine) ever succeeded and he was continually in debt, having to find creditors and patronage. He was known for his great benevolence as a friend and master. He was sympathetic to the Irish Catholics especially during the attempt to throw off the English in 1798 and somehow managed not to be himself accused of treason; he went for compromise as did other Irish people since famous (Daniel O’Connell for example) and was for the union, and when he got to London to the parliament and saw how corrupt it was, he was taken aback, and regrouped to enlist people to help him.

Julien Dupre — a painting of a cow at pasture in a poor farm

Now Martin shepherded yet a third bill, May 24, 1822 introduced to the parliamentary floor against “the Ill Treatment of Cattle.” The arguments against this are those we hear today (though muted). Still, what was happening was a gradual change in sentiment so if you saw a man deliberately shoot out the eyes of a horse, you were horrified and tried to save the horse by killing it outright. Tellingly during debates it usually seemed as if the animal rights people were in a real minority, but when it came to a vote, again and again surprisingly more and more people would vote for this legislation. It was finally killed and again the Lords — the great obstruction for all sorts of decent social legislation.

And again there is a good insight; Shevelow now adds to her insight that the development of real companionship between people and animals heralds the first real work for improvement for animals’ lives; the second wasthe spread of cities, of people living in close proximity: like TV in the US where we watched in the 1960s cops whipping and hosing black people, beating them up, and again recently spray painting them with some terrible stuff and now simply murdering them viciously, enough people have better instincts and a sense of their own safety to protest.

Shevelow gives examples of the kind of thing seen in streets and reported during parliamentary debates. For example, a man shooting the eyes of a horse would not have been seen by many before cities; mulitiply such incidents even daily on working animals and you have another pressure not to give animals equal rights, but at least stop this kind of horrific behavior which human beings (we and they knew) are capable of doing to one another.

When Richard Martin got up to defend and argue for his bill, he described in detail particular instances of wanton cruelty — as I read these I can hardly repeat them. One concerned a monkey and dog driven to bite each other’s lower jaw off. Another was an early first description by someone with some decency of how a bull acted and felt before baiting. The person said the bull recognized signs it was about to happen and would moan and groan and shiver and look afraid. The bull dreaded this and didn’t want to do this at all in a intense way. As Martin told his stories, many members of parliament laughed. He impugned them for laughing but they laughed all the harder and no one stopped them.

And yet finally the bill was passed on July 22nd by a substantial margin. Many members sitting quietly when the mockery of Martin was going forward nonetheless voted with him. The Ill-Treatment of Cattle Act, the world’s first protective legislation for animals became a reality.

A comic print of Martin bringing a man to trial for savagely beating his donkey

Now of course one had to enforce it. She has a sort of gift for humor — she needs it, and ends on Martin’s almost single-handed crusade to get the laws enforced. He went about the streets and wherever he had wind of a cruel event and had the person indicted. Martin would pay part of people’s fines because not too would hurt working class people unfairly. Martin hated how the upper classes said he was hurting the entertianment of the lower orders when they attended the same events and were just as cruel during their own.

Now an obstacle to indictment was the law was just about cattle and judges while seeing horrific cruelty to dogs say could do nothing. But if you said you wanted to extend the protection to other species, you’d get mocking rejoinder, next thing he’ll want to protect cats. Until recently cats have not been seen as worthy as dogs since they neither protect nor can they be guide cats for say blind people. The ploy to stop legislation continued to be to say in reply something absolutist so that the small step you wanted would be thrown out.

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At this point Shevelow’s book suddenly draws to a close in a kind of huddled ending. The fight goes on. There is a final coda on the origins and early development of the SPCA and ASPCA. Temple Grandin and Jane Goodall get a look in as people who had done unusual good for working animals and those we eat and fighting the horrific abuse that goes on in experimentation — it’s easier to pass protective legislation for pets and animals in zoos. She reprints important parts of the text of Martin’s Act, there are extensive notes and a good bibliography.

Detail from George Stubbs’s Bay Horse and White Dogs (18th century)

Progress is slow. One night walking in Old Town a few years ago Jim pointed out to me a dog who looked terrified of his master, who quivered before that man and said we could do nothing for the poor creature. When a teenager, I saw a teenage boy drop a cat from a roof. My daughter, Caroline, rescued two cats who had been abused (one would gnaw part of her stomach). There’s also plain neglect.

Philippe Mercier, Girl holding a cat (1745)

For the last couple of years of Jim’s life we made a habit when we would go to an art exhibit of seeking out depictions of cats in the paintings — or any other animal seen as a companion-pet we could glimpse.

In the streets of the cities I’ve lived in and read about nothing like the daily infliction of pain and miserable treatment once meted out to animals goes on. The new problem is a lot of cruelty to animals is not visible, and some agricultural industries have gotten legislation passed forbidding the taking of photos at their mass farms. They label animal rights’ activists terrorists and some of these people have been imprisoned for exposing wanton cruelty at factory farms and butcheries. At the close of her book Shevelow reprints the text of Martin’s act and offers addresses for important animal rights organizations if one wants to contribute or go over to work for them. I’ve written this blog so people will know about her book.

The statue of Johnson’s cat, Hodge, in Gouge Square in front of “Dr Johnson’s house”

The progress of reformation is gradual and silent, as the extension of evening shadows; we know that they were short at noon, and are long at sun-set, but our senses were not able to discern their increase — Samuel Johnson.

Sleeping kitten

Ellen

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