Kristoffer's Menagerie

panel prep

Preparing for six monthly panel - will update in two weeks!

thomas rowlandson

Today I’ve been thinking about eighteenth-century caricature and political satire. Rowlandson’s physignomy will be useful for charting the use of animal as symbols.

chronological challenge

I’m currently working out how to demonstrate chronological change over the period 1675-1815. Not an easy task. One that involves lots of pretty pens and paper. I’ve got a month to work this out before a big panel meeting.

At first I figured I would trace particular animals through this period. But that doesn’t work. Well I mean as content it works but not as a framework. I think I will work outwards from the idea of animals as objects and show how engagements with these objects changed in this period.

reading

I’m currently reading an interesting little article on lapdogs as objects, slaves, and counter-sensibility in the eighteenth-century. It talks about the links between abolition and animal sympathy. Ellis concludes that although early anti-cruelty legislation sought to use the language of abolition the impact of this language was minimal since “animals remained things…even if they should be treated with the kindness and compassion known as human”.

Markman Ellis “Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility” in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England Bucknell University Press: Lewisburg pp. 92-116

animals in the eighteenth-century

I am looking at animals both living and dead in the eighteenth-century. I am using the ideas of ‘object biographies’ to trace the journeys of these animals from their arrival in Britain to dissection and display in museums and other collections. I am also borrowing from ideas of ‘it-narratives’ in eighteenth-century literature - novels that talk about objects and their circulation. I am interested in applying ideas of animals as ‘things’ (albeit objects that feel and suffer) to a museological look at animal objects.

I do not believe that animals are objects but rather subjects or persons. But I want to show how contemporary ideas about animals as objects and the contradictions that are inherent to this perspective, emerged in the eighteenth-century. I don’t ahere to any progressive historical narrative of increased ‘humane’ attitudes towards animals throughout the eighteenth-century and into the contemporary. Instead I want to demonstrate how animals are culturally configured and contingent. I want to try and write a cultural biography of animals in the eighteenth-century that takes seriously eighteenth-century conceptions of animals. But in this process I hope that my work will reflect on contemporary ideas about animals as objects  - and the challenge this poses to the status of zoological gardens and natural history musuems. More broadly I support a radical reassessment of our relationship with animals and a recognition of animals as autonomous subjects worthy of ethical consideration.

animal commodities, smelling and touching animals

I’ve previously looked at where people could buy and look at exotic animals in eighteenth-century Britain. I’m now trying to write a history of why and when spectators started to touch and ride these animals and what they thought about their smells. I’m trying to link these sensory engagements with the history of commoditised animals.