Abstract
Where are “real” animals to be found: in Edward Tyson’s anatomical study of the chimpanzee (Anatomy of a Pygmie), the praise poems for lapdogs that document the rise of the “companion animal”, Lord Monboddo’s linguistic treatise on the orangutan (Origin and Progress of Language), or the fate of the first-person dog narrator of The Biography of a Spaniel? “Real” and represented animals have a complex connection that challenges literary critique today, just as it challenged the representations of the non-human in the eighteenth century.
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Notes
- 1.
Claims of access to “real” animals have been powerfully expressed as forms of advocacy or intimacy by Shevelow, Love of Animals; Singer, Animal Liberation; Regan, Case for Animal Rights; Haraway, When Species Meet; de Waal, Primates and Philosophers; Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds.
- 2.
Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 1; Menely, The Animal Claim, 6, 1.
- 3.
Weil, Thinking Animals, 17; Fudge, “Introduction”, in Renaissance Beasts, 3, 13.
- 4.
Copeland, “Literary Animal Studies”, s91–s105, s91–s105, s98.
- 5.
Gavin, “Real Robinson Crusoe”, 301–325, 320.
- 6.
Janson, Apes, 336. My account of Tyson draws upon my study of apes in Homeless Dogs, ch. 2.
- 7.
Tyson, Orang-outang, Preface.
- 8.
This is my translation of Tyson’s Latin quotation from Jakob de Bondt. See Iacobi Bontii (Jacobus Bontius), Medici Civitatis, 5:84. The last phrase here—“nothing human was lacking”—alludes to Terence’s “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”, a well-known catch phrase of the cult of sensibility.
- 9.
le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires. The 1737 English translation is virtually identical to that quoted by Tyson. le Comte, Memoirs, 509–510.
- 10.
Brown, Homeless Dogs, ch. 3.
- 11.
Brown, “Lap-dog”, lines 1–4, in Works, 333.
- 12.
Mr. Bavius, “Lapdog”, lines 1–4, in Grub-Street Miscellany, 45.
- 13.
For the history of the Circe story, see Alkemeyer, “Remembering”, 1149–1165.
- 14.
Hewitt, “Upon Cælia’s”, lines 1–4, in Miscellanies, 29.
- 15.
James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, Origin and Progress, 347. Although by the time of Monboddo’s writing other differentiated terminology for the great apes is more available, Monboddo uses the term “orangutan” to refer broadly to the anthropoid ape. The beings whom he is most centrally describing are the African chimpanzee and gorilla. For a summary of Monboddo’s chapters on the great ape, the relationship of his ideas to those of Rousseau and Hobbes, and his significance in the rise of evolutionary thought in England, see Lovejoy, “Rousseau and Monboddo”, 275–296. Lovejoy notes Monboddo’s focus on the natural benevolence of the orangutan (285). My account of Monboddo draws upon my Homeless Dogs, ch. 2.
- 16.
Here Monboddo refers to the Papal Bull of Pope Paul III of 1537, which recognized Indians and all other indigenous peoples as humans, rather than brutes, and therefore protected from exploitation.
- 17.
Brown, Homeless Dogs, ch. 5.
- 18.
Gatty, Worlds Not Realized, 168–169.
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de Waal, Frans. 2006. Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hewitt, John. 1727. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse. Bristol: Penn.
Janson, H.W. 1952. Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: The Warburg Institute.
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le Comte, Lewis. 1737. Memoirs and Remarks Geographical, Historical,... and Ecclesiastical, made in Above Ten Years Travels Through the Empire of China. London: J. Hughs.
le Comte, Louis Daniel. 1739. A Compleat History of the Empire of China: Being the Observations of above Ten Years Travels through that Country: Containing Memoirs and Remarks. London: James Hodges.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1933. Rousseau and Monboddo. Modern Philology 30: 275–296.
Menely, Tobias. 2015. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Regan, Tom. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Shevelow, Kathryn. 2008. For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animals Protection Movement. New York: Henry Holt.
Singer, Peter. 1990. Animal Liberation. New York: Random House.
Tyson, Edward. 1699. Orang-outang: Sive Homo Sylvestris, or, The Anatomy of a Pygmie: Facsimile ed. London: Dawsons.
Weil, Kari. 2012. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now. New York: Columbia University Press.
Recommended Further Reading
Cole, Lucinda. 2016. Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Keenleyside, Heather. 2017. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Menely, Tobias. 2015. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tague, Ingrid. 2015. Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press.
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Brown, L. (2021). “Real” Animals and the Eighteenth-Century Literary Imagination. In: McHugh, S., McKay, R., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39773-9_15
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