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Animals are ubiquitous in the literature and culture of Victorian Britain. To varying degrees of visibility, they were part of the everyday lives of the Victorians as raw material, labour, transport, food, clothing, entertainment, companionship, and scientific knowledge produced through animal observation and experimentation. Correspondingly, a remarkable menagerie of creatures can be found across all Victorian literary genres, whether in sympathetic interdependence with, or as objects of instrumental use by, humans: apes, cattle and sheep, rodents, reptiles and saurians, sea creatures, insects and birds, wolves and hyenas, zebras and elephants, large and small cats, and the most storied of all animals the horse and the dog. Beyond such recognizable species, there are human/animal hybrids that trouble biological and social taxonomies: Robert Browning's Caliban, Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli, and - toward the end of the century - such imaginary transmutations as H. G. Wells's "Beast People" and Morlocks and Robert Louis Stevenson's Mr. Hyde. The impact of animals on Victorian Britain's imagination and artistic practices, therefore, has significant implications for an understanding of its social and cultural life. |
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