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Victorians and Their Animals

“As expected, this collection validates a concern for the inherent value of
animals. But the additional inclusion of leashing the beast within ourselves
in light of contradictory social impulses adds an interesting and necessary
perspective to a collection on Victorian human/nonhuman relationships.”
—Dr. Randi Pahlau, Malone University, USA

Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash investigates the notion that
British Victorians did see themselves as a naturally dominant species over other
humans and over animals. They were conscientiously, hegemonically determined
to rule those beneath them and the animal within themselves, albeit with varying
degrees of success and failure. The articles in this collection apply posthumanism
and other theories, including queer, postcolonialist, deconstructionist, and
Marxist approaches, in their exploration of Victorian attitudes toward animals.
They study the biopolitical relationships between human and nonhuman animals
in several key Victorian literary works. Some of this book’s chapters deal with
animal ethics and moral aesthetics. Also being studied is the representation of
animals in several Victorian novels as narrative devices to signify class status and
gender dynamics, either to iterate socially acceptable mores, to satirize hypocrisy
or breach of behavior or to voice social protest. All of the chapters analyze the
interdependence of people and animals during the nineteenth century.

Brenda Ayres teaches English for Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and
has previously edited several collections of essays. The most recent is Biographical
Misrepresentations of British Women Writers: A Hall of Mirrors and the Long
Nineteenth Century (2017). Her latest monograph is Betwixt and Between: The
Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017). She published her first article on ani-
mals in Victorian literature in The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Newsletter
(1991), titled “Dogs in George Eliot’s Adam Bede.” She began collecting infor-
mation on the subject when she created a panel at the Southern Conference of
British Studies in 2000 titled “Animals in Victorian Literature” and presented
“The Iconization of Animals in Victorian Culture.” Two years later she
spoke on “Beast on a Leash: Victorian Dominion over the Animal Kingdom”
at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Conference.
Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture
Series Editor: Karen Raber, University of Mississippi, USA

Literary and cultural criticism has ventured into a brave new world in recent decades:
posthumanism, ecocriticism, critical animal studies, Object-Oriented Ontology, the new
vitalism, Actor-Network Theory, and other related approaches have transformed the cri-
tical environment, reinvigorating our encounters with familiar texts, and inviting us to
take note of new or neglected ones. A vast array of non-human creatures, things, and
forces are now emerging as important agents in their own right. Inspired by human con-
cern for an ailing planet, ecocriticism has grappled with the question of how important
works of art can be to the preservation of something we have traditionally called “nature.”
Yet literature’s capacity to take us on unexpected journeys through the networks of
affiliation and affinity we share with the earth on which we dwell—and without which we
die—and to confront us with the drama of our common struggle to survive and thrive has
not diminished in the face of what Lyn White, Jr. called “our ecological crisis.” Animals
have crept, slithered, trotted, swum, and flown away from their customary function as
metaphors, emblems or analogies; now they populate critical analysis in increasingly
complex ways, always in tension with our sense of what it means to be “human,” or
whether it is even possible to claim such a category of life exists. Posthumanism, which
often shares terrain with ecocriticism and animal studies, has further complicated our
conception of the cosmos by dethroning the individual subject and dismantling the com-
fortable categories through which we have interpreted our existence: we find our “selves”
colonized by microbial beings, occupied and enhanced by mechanical inventions and
contraptions, traversed by invisible forces from atmospheric changes to radiation, made
vulnerable to our planet’s sufferings, and inspired by its capacity for renewal. New
materialism, new vitalism and all the permutations of theory that have evolved and are
evolving to account for our entanglements with lively matter have ensured, however, that
our displacement from the center of creation feels less like a demotion than a happy event:
from our previous occupation of the impoverished, isolated space atop the mountain of
creation, we might instead descend into the fecund plenitude of kinship with all things.
Until now, however, the elements that compose this wave of scholarship on non-
human entities have had no place to gather, no home that would nurture them as a
collective project. “Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture” pro-
vides that structure, giving critical treatments of all kinds of non-humans and humans
a local habitation. In this series, readers and fellow critics will find animals of all
descriptions, but also every other form of biological life; they will meet the non-bio-
logical, the microscopic, the ethereal, the intangible. It is our goal for the series to
provide an encounter zone where all forms of human engagement with the non-human
in all periods and national literatures can be explored, and where the discoveries that
result can speak to one another, as well as to readers and students.

Victorians and Their Animals

Beast on a Leash
Brenda Ayres
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Perspectives-on-
the-Non-Human-in-Literature-and-Culture/book-series/PNHLC
Victorians and Their Animals
Beast on a Leash

Edited by
Brenda Ayres
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Brenda Ayres to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-35956-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-42900-2 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Figure Front: Kittens’ Tea and Croquet Party by Walter Potter (1870), photograph
by Phil Brown (3D Phil).
This page intentionally left blank
Dedicated to My Father, Charles L. Ayres (1926–2018), and to
All Other Lovers of Animals
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures xi
Preface and Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Beast on a Leash 1

BRENDA AYRES

1 Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency 23

BRENDA AYRES

2 Old and New Beef: Caring for Animals in Household Words 45

LIAM YOUNG

3 George Eliot’s Use of Horses in Measuring the Moral Maturity

of Characters in Her Novels 67
CONSTANCE M. FULMER

4 Pigs in Great Expectations: Class, Dehumanization, and Marxist

Animal Studies 86
JESSICA KUSKEY

5 Ants, Insects, and Automatons: Classifying Creatures in Hardy’s

The Return of the Native 101
ANNA WEST

6 It’s Raining Cats and Dogs in the Novels of George Eliot 119
BRENDA AYRES

7 A Fine Kettle of Fish: Cultural (and Culinary) Preservation in

Anglo-Jewish Ghetto Stories 141
LINDSAY KATZIR

8 Gendered Metamorphoses in the Natural History Museum and

Trans-Animality in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle 163
PANDORA SYPEREK
x Contents
9 The “Animality” of Speech and Translation in The Jungle
Books 188
CHRISTIE HARNER

List of Contributors 207

Index 210
Figures

Figure Front: Kittens’ Tea and Croquet Party by Walter Potter

(1870), photograph by Phil Brown (3D Phil). v
0.1 Windsor Castle in Modern Times: Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert, with Victoria, Princess Royal by Edwin Henry Landseer
(1841–1843). Credit: Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty
Queen Elizabeth II 2018. 6
6.1 Happy Family by Walter Potter (1870), photograph by Philip
Brown (3D Phil). 120
6.2 Rabbits’ Village School by Walter Potter (1888), photograph by
Philip Brown (3D Phil). 121
6.3 The Kittens’ Wedding by Walter Potter (1890), photograph by
Philip Brown (3D Phil). 132
8.1 Lithinus nigrocristatus on lichen-covered bark, c. 1890. Natural
History Museum, London, photograph by author. 167
8.2 Edward Linley Sambourne, “Next Hideous ‘Sensation
Chignon,’” Punch 53 (November 30, 1867): 219. 172
8.3 Edward Linley Sambourne, “Suffrage For Both Sexes,” Punch 58
(April 2, 1870): 128. 173
8.4 Alice Comyns Carr, Beetle Wing Dress for Ellen Terry, 1888.
Smallhythe Place, photograph by author. 175
This page intentionally left blank
Preface and Acknowledgments

One of the earliest academic conferences I attended was one on George Eliot
held at Northeast Missouri State in Kirksville, Missouri, in 1991. I presented
a paper entitled “Dogs in George Eliot’s Adam Bede.” My paper had a lot of
humor in it, appropriately so because Eliot loved dogs and infused her own
wonderful humor when she wrote about them and their involvement in their
humans’ lives. My audience laughed at the right places, so I felt as validated
as someone auditioning for a comedy spot for a show. Dear Barbara Hardy
was in the audience, and after hearing my presentation, she encouraged me
to write a book on the subject. It would take me three decades before I
would make time for such a project, but I did manage to get the conference
paper published in The George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Newsletter
(September 1991).
The next thing accomplished on this topic was that I organized a panel on
“Animals in Victorian Literature” for the Southern Conference of British
Studies in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2000. I presented a paper with the title of
“The Iconization of Animals in Victorian Culture.” Kurt Koenigsberger was
on my panel and presented a fabulous paper on elephants in Dickens. He
would publish The Novel and the Menagerie: Totality, Englishness, and
Empire in 2007.
Two years after Kentucky, I presented “Beast on a Leash: Victorian
Dominion over the Animal Kingdom” at the Mid-Atlantic Popular Con-
ference in Pittsburgh. Don’t ask me why I didn’t write an entire book on
Victorian animals at that time. I meant to. For years, I wrote down refer-
ences to animals mentioned in every Victorian novel that I read or taught.
My heart failed me every time I saw that a book had been published on “my
subject.” I kept telling myself I must prioritize the project before others
would “steal my thunder.” I am not a procrastinator by nature; I have just
been tied up with the business of teaching and publishing other projects that
seemed more pressing.
2017 witnessed a frenzy of activity on the Victoria Listserv about animals
in Victorian literature and culture, which demonstrated that the subject was
hugely marketable and that if I were going to deliver “the goods,” it was
now or never. Still, I had so many other writing commitments. Furthermore,
xiv Preface and Acknowledgments
I was thinking that the book would be better served if it reflected multiple
interests, theories, approaches, and perspectives instead of being just a
monograph. Therefore, I decided to advertise a call for abstracts through the
Victoria Listserv, organize and edit a collection of essays, and write the
introduction and a chapter or two myself.
Routledge posted a notice that it was interested in publishing monographs
on “Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture.” I emailed
my proposal to the editor of the series, Karen Raber, and she was immedi-
ately interested; however, she encouraged me to foreground posthuman
theory in the work. The world of posthumanism was new terrain for me
which required the reading of dozens of books and articles. All the while I
was groaning, “Why didn’t I write this thing back in the ’90s before every
discipline in the world got interested in animal studies?” Integrating the
scholarship since 1991 (and before) has been a daunting task and then find-
ing something new to say has been like digging for gold after the California
Gold Rush.
Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful for the many works written about
animals in literature that have opened veins of treasure that I would never
have found by myself. Of course, a great debt belongs to Harriet Ritvo who
pioneered such studies with her The Animal Estate: The English and Other
Creatures in the Victorian Age in 1987, which is a good starting point for
anyone who wants to learn about animals in Victorian culture. Another
essential (in my opinion) is Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir. Just
last year (2017) two important collections came out that I also recommend:
Animals in Victorian Literature: Context for Criticism, edited by Laurence
W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison; and Victorian Animal Dreams:
Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by
Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay (first printed in 2007).
Be assured, though, that Victorians and Their Animals tenders much that
has never been published before.
Animal Studies is a hot trend in academe today that attracts every dis-
cipline. If you type in “Animal Studies” in the MLA database, you get 1,834
entries (as of April 2018); “Animals” results in 9,122. If you search “Animal
Studies” in Google Books, you get a staggering 3,080,000 hits, and “ani-
mals,” 10,800,000. “Animals and nineteenth century” produces 2,030,000
hits. “Animals and Victorian” lists 628,000.
Why are we so fascinated with animals? Why do I spend more on my
dogs for food and medical care than I do on myself? Why am I more
enamored with some of the animals in Victorian novels than I am with the
human characters? Why have Animal Studies, Animality Studies, and
Human-Animal Studies (HAS), Anthrozoology, and similar programs
become so popular in academe? What is it about our relationship with ani-
mals that fuels our angst and hopes for the future for all species?
The answers, I am sure, are complex, but the questions signal that there is
more that we can learn about animals and our relationships with them that
 Preface and Acknowledgments xv
warrant another study about them. Our Victorian ancestors were just as
fascinated with animals but perhaps for different reasons.
I am in debt to the contributors of this volume for their insights. It has
been sheer joy to exchange collegial thoughts with them on this subject and
therefore, I give heartfelt thanks to Liam Young, Constance M. Fulmer,
Jessica Kuskey, Anna West, Lindsay Katzir, Pandora Syperek, and Christie
Harner for their chapters to this study.
I also wish to thank my student, an English major at Liberty University,
Rebecca Pickard, who asked if she could help me with the editing. She
offered this without solicitation and without credit and remuneration only
because she loves literature and literary studies and desired to gain experi-
ence being an editor.
Walter Potter (1835–1918) was a taxidermist who displayed his animals
and his anthropomorphic dioramas in his museum in Bramber, Sussex,
England. At the time of his death he had mounted over 10,000 specimens.
The photograph of The Kittens’ Tea Party was contributed by and granted
permission to be used by Philip Brown (3D Phil), as were The Kittens’
Wedding, The Rabbits’ Village School, and The Happy Family published in
the introduction and Chapter 6. A great admirer of Potter’s work, Phil has
generous permitted me to use his photographs.
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
Beast on a Leash
Brenda Ayres

It was the age of Queen Victoria: an age of reign, an age of victory, an age of
the victor—from the perspective of the Victorian Britons who saw themselves
historically and naturally poised to rule the world. Darwin’s theory of natural
selection and Spencer’s terminology for it, “the survival of the fittest,” became
woven into the fabric of Victorian Weltanschauung, as the empire grew.
British nationalism rose to lofty heights by the end of the century when the
empire consisted of 10 million square miles and 400 million people (Read
1994: 350). Just six years after the Queen’s death, the empire occupied more
than one-fifth of the world’s land mass (Fraser 2003: 606). Many Englishmen
believed, by virtue of survival of the fittest, that they were not only superior
to animals, they were also superior to most other humans and therefore it
was their duty and natural and God-given right to dominate others.
With conquest of the seas, a host of English migrants flocked to the
remotest kingdoms of the world to find, name, and conquer the animals
there, even if they had to “exterminate all the brutes,”1 including entire
species and tribes and villages. The information that they gathered about
animals proliferated through the presses. Emily Shore documented twelve
volumes on bird behavior (Gates 1998: 70). Jane Blackburn painted birds,
and Elizabeth Gould illustrated them, but the most famous bird book in the
nineteenth century, a best-seller, was published by Thomas Bewick (Vol.
1 in 1797 and Vol. 2 in 1804) and immortalized in Jane Eyre (Brontë 1848
1–3). Emily Bowes Gosse illustrated underwater life. Margaret Fountaine
identified 22,000 butterflies (Gates 1998: 87). Eleanor Ormerod became the
expert on the botfly and Hessian fly, and she wrote books to gardeners as to
how to differentiate beneficial from injurious insects (88). Henry Walter
Bates returned to England from the Rain Forest with a collection of 14,712
species of insects, 8,000 of them previously unknown (Bates 1892 [1863]:
lxv). Other predominant biologists, whose passion took them into the jungles
and deserts where no Europeans had trod before included: Walter Fitch, Sarah
Bowdich Lee, Mary Kingsley, Henry Guillemand, William Buchell, and
others.
The increasing volume of animals that the British could identify, as well
as the increasing volume of animals and humans that they could dominate
2 Brenda Ayres
seemed to convince them that they were a superior race. Domination was
not just the mentality and act of scientists either; there were more than just
naturalists who tramped through the wilds. This was “the golden age” of
white hunters on safari.2 An exuberant number of animal trophies were
brought back to England, which incited more pride of the empire. Gordon
Cumming, Samuel White Baker, William Cornwallis Harris, William Henry
Drummond, George P. Sanderson, and Horace Gordon Hutchinson, to
name just a few, were notorious baggers of African animals. They nearly
eradicated entire continents of buffalos, elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses,
and hippopotamuses in just a few decades. As for the favorite sport of the
aristocracy at home, there were foxhunting and horse racing. Considered
lower class but attracting scores of gentlemen as well were bull-baiting and
cockfighting. Britons of all classes collected insects, went rockpooling, and
kept home aquariums and terrariums.
Many Westerners lived vicariously through adventures written by Rudyard
Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, G. A.
Hentry, and E. M. Forster. Haggard’s works inspired Edgar Rice Burroughs to
create Tarzan. Women tapped into the literary market through their writing,
illustrating, and painting, made lucrative because of the growing interest in
exotic and extinct animals. Mary Anning and her dog Tray achieved fame
for her collection of Jurassic marine fossils. A pioneer of archaeozoology
was Dorothy Bate (Shindler 2005: 229). As a young woman, she travelled to
Cyprus, and in limestone caves she “was the first to find Pleistocene fossils
of pygmy elephants and hippos” (2). Flora Annie Steel wrote adventure
stories of women in India, the most well-known being her 1896 novel, On
the Face of the Waters (Steel 1896). Isabella Bird became famous for her
explorations and her records of flora and fauna.3
The nineteenth century was a great age of exploration, geographically,
intellectually, and scientifically, that raised more questions than it could
answer. Never before had there been so many readers in England, English
travelers to other countries, and people who were inquisitive about the
world around them and beyond. Men like W. G. Palgrave, David Living-
ston, Sir Henry Morton Stanley, John Hanning Speke, and Richard Francis
Burton were determined to find the source of the Nile. Through writing
about their quest, they made the world accessible to the most provincial.
With the ability to speak forty languages and dialects, Burton traveled
through Africa, Arabia, Ethiopia, and North and South Americas, recording
biology and folklore as he went. He also boasted of learning the language of
the monkey. His translations of works fill seventy volumes, including the
Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (1883) and an unbowdlerized 16-volume edition
of Arabian Nights (1885–1888), which included several animal fables.
It may seem odd that Victorians were enthralled with “uncivilized” peo-
ples and exotic animals since they viewed domestication as a virtue. But by
learning about them, the Victorians were reassured that self-control and the
British proper way of doing things were eminently the irreproachable
 Introduction 3
paragon for the modern age. “The maintenance and study of captive wild
animals,” Harriet Ritvo (1987) theorizes, were “simultaneous emblems of
human mastery over the natural world and of English dominion over remote
territories.” They “offered an especially vivid rhetorical means of reenacting
and extending the work of the empire” (205), and they were “a compelling
symbol of human power” (232). Imported exotic animals were pervasive in
nineteenth-century England. They were exhibited by showmen on the streets
and in coffeehouses and taverns, so that every class of person could see them
(Cowie 2014: 2). Circuses, zoos, menageries, freak shows, and Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West show were major sources of entertainment, especially for the
burgeoning middle class. Having gained equestrian skills while an officer in
the British Calvary, in the 1760s Philip Astley began performing breath-
taking feats on horses that he rode in a circle (Nickell 2005: 7–8). The
eighteenth-century horseman was a hero, so Linda Simon (2014) deduces,
adding that his command over a beast extolled his muscularity and manli-
ness, which may be one of the reasons that Astley’s riding became so pop-
ular (29). Another is because he reenacted battle scenes, thus “fueling
contemporary imaginings of warfare and of Britain’s military prowess”
(Assael 2005: 53). After building Astley’s Amphitheatre Riding House—later
renamed the Royal Amphitheatre (Nickell 2005: 7)—he covered it with
canvas and other more permanent structures to protect visitors from incle-
ment weather (Simon 2014: 31). Added to his show were clowns, a zebra
(31–32), a monkey, and other acts (Velten 2013: 135), and before long he
was running nineteen circuses (Hoh and Rough 1990: 44).4
Astley’s was not the only circus in England. Charles Hughes and Charles
Dibdin formed the English Royal Circus in 1782. Hughes took it to
St. Petersburg in 1790, and it became Russia’s first circus (Neirick 2012: 6).
One of his trick riders, John Bill Ricketts, went to America and started a
circus there (Curnutt 2001: 232). These circuses included elephants, lions,
tigers, and bears. Most managers of circuses and menageries purchased their
exotic animals from ship’s captains (Ritvo 1996: 44).
Menageries, at first called “beast shows” (44), evolved into zoos, begin-
ning with the London Zoo in 1828. Many of the animals became national
pets, but only so long as they behaved themselves like domesticated animals.
Chunee was an Indian elephant brought to England in 1810 who lived in the
Exeter Change. He was beloved by children who “patted and petted him”
(“Death” 1852: 362), including Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, and
Queen Victoria (Bondeson 1999: 78). After sixteen years in captivity, he
started to experience what all Victorian newspapers and journal articles
called “annual paroxysm,” a euphemism for being “sexually excitable.” One
written account also said that he suffered from an infected tusk that went
untreated. In truth he was suffering from a “square foot of toothache”
(Thornbury 1865: 184).5 Although the stories do not agree as to the basic
cause of his drastic change in temperament, he did kill a man. Based on the
write-up in the Annual Register, 6 Richard Altick (1978) spins this account:
4 Brenda Ayres
One of his keepers entered Chunee’s stall with a twelve-foot spear to
keep him occupied while others cleaned his cage. In an act of hubris,
the keeper threw down the spear saying that he didn’t need it.
Chunee picked up the spear and played with it. The keeper then
picked up a broom and started to beat the elephant and ordered him
to turn around. The elephant obeyed and in so doing, accidentally
“thrust his tusk” into the man and killed him. After this, Chunee
“instantly stood sill, and began to tremble, as if conscious of the
mischief he had done.” The coroner’s jury agreed that it was an
accident, but because of previous erratic behavior, the decision was
made to euthanize him.
(311)

They were unsuccessful in killing him with poison, so a company of soldiers

from Somerset House shot at him while he was in his cage. Commanded to
kneel, the giant “actually knelt, and in that position received the balls in the
parts particularly desired to be aimed at” (Hone 1859: 334). It took more
than 150 bullets to end his life (“Death” 1852: 364). The horrendous scene
was illustrated by George Cruikshank7 and kindled an outpouring of
national grief. Sentimental poems appeared in most of the newspapers,
including one that hoped that God would smite the keeper who commanded
the obedient elephant to kneel and receive his death blow (Bondeson 1999:
92). Plays were performed honoring him as a national monument that had
been destroyed. At the same time, his dissection was a public spectacle;
people paid a shilling to watch it. Afterward, his skeleton was put on dis-
play (Altick 1978: 313), but the rest of him “was sold for cat’s meat” (Breese
1885: 660). The Mirror of Literature ran recipes for cooking elephant (Altick
1978: 314).
Some sixty years later, when an African elephant created problems
because of coming into musth (a sexually aroused state when elephants’
testosterone levels can rise to 60 times higher than normal), the zoo sold him
to P. T. Barnum in America (Ritvo 1987: 225–26, 232). The loss of the
beloved Jumbo, upon whom many British children had ridden in Regent’s
Park and who was a favorite of the Queen, struck considerable damage to
British pride. Petitions were signed and prayer vigils held begging for his
rescue. Even officials at London Zoo received death threats if they would
persist in exiling him to America (Harding 2000: 47). But to America he
went, and to the Americans it was a coup, but not before Jumbo and many
other exotic animals had become living emblems of the power of the Vic-
torian empire that had reached into the heart of Africa and had placed the
Queen as Empress of India.
In addition to public zoos and animal shows, private menageries and ela-
borate aviaries, birdhouses, and dovecotes were in vogue (Ruhling and
Freeman 1994: 36). Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Daniel Gabriel Rossetti
had his own menagerie at Cheyne Walk8 that consisted of
 Introduction 5
a Pomeranian puppy, an Irish deerhound, a barn-owl named Jessie,
another owl named Bobby, rabbits, dormice, hedgehogs, two successive
wombats, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, an ordinary marmot,
kangaroos and wallabies, a deer, two or more armadillos, a white
mouse with her brood, a raccoon, squirrels, a mole, peacocks, wood-
owls, Virginian owls, horned owls, a jackdaw, a raven, parakeets, a
talking parrot, chameleons, grey lizards, Japanese salamanders, and a
laughing jackass … and a zebu.
(Marillier 1899: 228)

Edmund Kean, the celebrated Shakespearean actor, often romped with his
friend, a lion—actually an American puma—that he kept in his house
(Cornwall 1835: 134–35, and Jardine 1834: 133–34). Lord Byron was also
known to have given freedom of his hall to giraffes and monkeys.9 Again,
according to the perfectly typical Victorian paradox, the lower classes were
derided for living in animal squalor, but to have a zebra roam one’s mani-
cured lawn was quite fashionable. This sort of paradox is pronounced in
Deerbrook by Harriet Martineau (1872 [1839]). In the “rich country region”
(1) are the gentry with their peacocks and Borzois, their foxhunts and fine
horses; the country is a “pretty situation” (1). But the lower-class country
people believe in druids and witches; then the country is primitive, ignorant,
and uncouth. Control versus being controlled was the difference. Addition-
ally, as Keith Thomas (1983) so astutely remarked, the menagerie of the
aristocracy “symbolized its owner’s triumph over the natural world; some
medieval rulers even demonstrated their valour by fighting against their
captive beasts. Later the zoo became a symbol of colonial conquest as well
as wealth and status” (277).
Although possessing and controlling animals showcased one’s status, one
did not always have to do that with live animals: The Victorians decorated
with animal motifs. The peacock is the perfect bird to describe the Victorians.
Exotic—from the Congo and India—colorful, proud, flaunting—the peacock
(Ruhling and Freeman 1994: 149, 161) and his feathers accessorized clothing
as well as homes. Lion paws (50) and other animal parts were carved in fur-
niture. Animals were stuffed and then exhibited in homes and museums.
Taxidermy had become a veritable, lucrative profession, with 247 men and
122 women in London earning their living this way (Cowie 2014: 2). In 1861
Walter Potter began exhibiting his stuffed animals that he posed in anthro-
pomorphic tableaux. He opened his Museum of Curiosities in 1880 in West
Sussex (Morris and Ebenstein 2014: 4–6). The frontispiece to this book is a
photograph of his The Kittens’ Tea and Croquet Party.10 Potter’s museum
was so popular that the village of Bramber had to lengthen its train platform
to accommodate the crowds that came on weekends (Ketteman n.d.).
Sculptures, paintings, and other artistic media of animals abounded. One
of London’s most famous landmarks is Edwin Landseer’s four bronze lions
at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. As for paintings of
6 Brenda Ayres
animals, no doubt the first image that comes to mind is one of Landseer’s
paintings, especially his Queen Victoria and Her Family at Windsor Castle,
c. 1842, which portrays Victoria and Albert with only one child, but no
fewer than four dogs (Figure 0.1)
Most of the depictions of animals in the arts “informed the Victorian
world view and dictated, often unconsciously, codes of conduct” (Amato
2015: 7). William Lauder Lindsay’s definition of Victorian “domestication”
“implies perfect resignation to man’s power and sovereignty, as well as free
and full companionship or fellowship” (Lindsay 1879: 271). He wrote about
the “Happy families,” a traveling animal show that exhibited a variety of
species living in harmony together though some of them were natural ene-
mies. The exhibit is “most instructive and suggestive as showing man’s
power for good or evil over other animals, the force of discipline, their
capacity for education, and their power of control of their natural propen-
sities or passion” (31–32).
The Landseer painting seems to convey that Victorian domestication
produces a happy family. Eos, a greyhound, was Prince Albert’s favorite
dog, a breed that was considered an emblem of masculinity (Amato 2015:
78), as he perches like a phallus between Albert’s legs. The Queen stands
coyly, demurely, and quietly while holding a nosegay given to her by her

Figure 0.1 Windsor Castle in Modern Times: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert,
with Victoria, Princess Royal by Edwin Henry Landseer (1841–1843).
Credit: Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2018.
 Introduction 7
charming husband. Islay, her favorite Skye terrier, is begging for the Queen’s
attention.
The portrait shows a prospect outside a window where nature has been
subdued and controled. Everything in the painting suggests tranquility and
harmony, observes Keridiana Chez (2017: 28–29). This sounds like a plau-
sible interpretation, except for the little princess’ holding a dead kingfisher
in her hand as if it were some sort of toy. Kingfishers may have been good
eating insofar as their major diet consisted of crabs and perch. But mostly
they were shot and stuffed and displayed in glass cases because of their
beautiful plumage. Their feathers were also used to decorate ladies’ hats,
and they were popular to put on flies for fishing (Smith 1904: 788).
The painting reflects the ambivalence that the Victorians had with animals.
In his lecture to the Mechanic’s Institution at the Music Hall in Chester
(1859), Major Leigh Egerton declared: “The love of Pets is one of the flowers
of civilization” and “on the whole there is something humanizing in a Pet,
which makes the heart open to genial warmth and kindness, like the rose bud
expanding its long folded leaves when kissed the sunbeam” (Egerton 1859: 6).
He may be right; his encomium for pet lovers is apparent in Landseer’s
painting, but how does one explain the contrast between that and the cava-
lier, callous distribution of dead birds that are strewn about in the painting as
if they had been massacred? These are the kind of questions that Victorians
and Their Animals will raise in its investigation of the incongruous attitudes
that the Victorians held toward animals that will dispel some of the assump-
tions that have been published previously and will help the reader arrive at a
clearer understanding of the historical relationship that humans have shared
with animals.
Besides those questions about the relationship between man and beast
during Victoria’s reign, the notion of the happy, harmonious nuclear family
was an ideal but rarely a reality. This is one of the reasons that Monica Flegel
(2015), in her book on pets and domesticity, applies queer theory to her study.
Pets, like servants, were considered family members, but like servants, they
were prohibited from reproducing or creating families of their own. Fur-
thermore, a pet could disrupt the ideal domestic household by being a “de
facto child” (1–2). This was a complaint that Mary Wollstonecraft (1793
[1792]) made several times in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that
women often paid more attention to their lapdogs than they did their
children.11 Laura Brown’s analysis of lapdogs in eighteenth- and nine-
teenth-century culture led her to conclude that many women were anti-
female and treated the lapdog as “both an inappropriate or perverse sexual
partner” (Brown 2010: 72).
Whether one accepts Flegel’s, Wollstonecraft’s, or Brown’s interpretation,
the pampered pet contributed to a “non-normative familial arrangement”
that represented “failed sexuality,” which was particularly apparent (to
Flegel 2015) when so many spinsters and widows coddled their lapdogs as if
they were children (10). In supporting this argument, Flegel quotes Donna
8 Brenda Ayres
Haraway, who wrote the foreword to Hird’s and Giffney’s Queering the Non/
Human. “Queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories,” Haraway
(2008) notes, “and none is more critical than the human/nonhuman sorting
operation.”12 Animals in Victorian literature “stretch our narratives of family
and domesticity in ways that acknowledge alternate sexualities, power struc-
tures, and ways of understanding time” (Flegel 2015: 6).
Alongside idealizing domesticity, albeit problematically so, Landseer’s
painting also promoted nationalism, which formed the basis of most activity
and attitudes toward animals (and other humans perceived as animals) that
prevailed in the nineteenth century. Civilized people like the Britons were
intentional about taming the beasts around them and inside themselves and
inside their fellow humans. Therefore, a reason why Landseer might have
painted so many dead wild birds in stark contrast to the live but domes-
ticated dogs was to say that the royal family can rule the “disorderly king-
dom” of the world outside their home (Chez 2017: 35).
The dogs in this painting are significant in other ways as well. The por-
trait has three Skye terriers, a breed from Scotland who hunted fox but
preferred to stay indoors. The most famous Skye terrier was the one that
legend tells hid under the petticoats of Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was
being executed. He was there to comfort her. The unconfirmed story that
follows is that the little fellow refused to eat afterward and thus died. The
other famous Skye terrier is Greyfriars Bobby, who spent fourteen years
guarding the grave of his master until he himself died. Famous for their
loyalty then, of course they would have been a favorite of Queen Victoria
and would appear in the portrait.
Another very loyal dog was the greyhound, and he was a hunter as well.
Ritvo (1987) believed that an index of an advanced civilization is that its
people do not eat dogs (20–21). Instead they domesticate them and breed
intelligent dogs, although pugs from China, to the Victorians, were con-
sidered stupid (20–21). The greyhound is an extremely intelligent and obe-
dient dog. Landseer asks the eye to draw parallels between Prince Albert and
his greyhound; the dog’s coat is shiny black with a white spot similar to the
shiny black jacket and white shirt worn by his master.
Darwin (1905) himself found no record of “bloodhounds, spaniels, true
greyhounds having been kept by savages,” concluding that they were the
ontogeny of a “long-continued civilisation” (41). Most certainly the grey-
hound has been an emblem of nobility; the breed was a favorite of former
empires such as the Persian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman. Greyhounds were
part of the history of England, having been in great demand by the Celts and
then Anglo Saxons, and were valued so highly by the Normans after they
invaded Britain that they imposed a tax on these dogs, which meant that only
the nobility could possess them (Low 1845: 715–23). Sarah Amato (2015)
noted that dogs were “a source of national pride,” and of all breeds, “the
bulldogs and greyhounds have long been associated with the English because
they epitomized loyalty, strength and nobility of the English character” (25).
 Introduction 9
An additional outcome of Darwinism and theme of Landseer’s painting was
the perception that those who are truly superior rule with kindness and self-
control instead of brute force; however, this was not an ideology that was
consistently practiced even by the upper classes, as also illustrated by Albert’s
dead game birds. No doubt the birds would be served for dinner and the
shooting was not senseless killing. Still, a national icon that one often associ-
ates with the Victorian aristocracy is foxhunting. In Anthony Trollope’s
Eustace Diamonds, Lord George explains “the theory and system of fox-hunt-
ing” to Lizzie. The hounds draw out the fox, the “field” gives chase, and then
the dogs “chop him;” that is to say, they tear him to pieces. Lizzie innocently
asks why the fox didn’t run away, considers him “a stupid beast,” and then
asks, “Do they liked to be chopped?” (Trollope 1873 [1871]: 138–46).
Another irreconcilable conflict between Victorians and their humanity
toward animals has to do with medical research. Even in the nineteenth
century, experiments on animals created intense ethical dilemmas, prompt-
ing a flurry of antivivisection writing by Vernon Lee, Anna Kingsford,
Frances Swiney, Florence Dixie, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, Ouida, and
Frances Power Cobbe. Kerdiana Chez (2017) recounts a story from an 1890
issue of Scientific American, complete with illustration, of a procedure in
which physicians grafted a dog’s bone to a boy’s bone, while keeping the
dog alive. The dog’s vocal chords were removed so as not to disturb the
boy. The dog was permanently attached to the boy’s leg and unable to move
(18–19). One can be amazed at the loyalty of a dog like Greyfriars Bobby,
but can one be anything but appalled at such an anthropocentric act as
physically affixing a dog to a boy’s leg and preventing that poor creature to
move or utter a sound of pain or protest?
Perhaps arguments can be made—and have been made—as to the una-
voidable pain inflicted on animals because they are a necessary source of
meat and labor. However, there are countless stories of heinous cruelty to
animals in nineteenth-century England as well, like boys skinning cats alive,
men pulling wings off live birds for the feathers, men working horses and
dogs to death in pulling carriages and carts, and the like. Elizabeth Heyrick’s
description of the atrocities committed on livestock in the open market of
Smithfield can be reduced to only one phrase that she uses, “a very hell upon
earth!” (Heyrick 1823: 9). Most animals eat other animals, but only the
human animal is capable of such base depravity as to be senseless to, or even
worse, entertained by the pain of other animals, human, or otherwise.
The first animal protection bill to be debated in Parliament was intro-
duced by William Johnstone Pulteney in 1800. A Scottish Member of Par-
liament, he asked for bull-baiting to be made illegal. George Canning, who
would one day be Prime Minster, led the opposition, arguing that “the
sport” allowed the lower classes to expend frustrations that might otherwise
be directed at the upper classes. Furthermore, bull-baiting gave “an athletic,
vigorous tone to the character of the class engaged in it.”13 Two years later
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded, and in
10 Brenda Ayres
1840, with the patronage of the Queen, it became the Royal SPCA. Nearly
every year throughout the nineteenth century, Parliament was asked to pass
some act to prevent cruelty to animals. The very fact that so many bills had
to be proposed indicates that neither humane treatment nor the conviction
that human treatment should be shown to animals was universal. The
ambivalence that the Victorians had about animals and what constitutes
civilization and superiority is best illustrated by Amato’s ironic statement in
her introduction to Beastly Possessions: “As Victorian Britons go about their
daily routines, we watch them fuss over their pets and express concern
about the arrangement of taxidermy” (Amato 2015: 5).
Seemingly oblivious to their own complicity (such as ladies injuring ani-
mals at London Zoo by poking them with their parasols [Schomberg 1957:
35]), many of the parasol women perceived that only the lower classes and
the uncivilized were cruel to animals. Such behavior was not only a violation
of noblesse oblige—a code that demanded the highest, most upright beha-
vior of humans—it put human beings “back in the jungle” (Turner 1980:
69). “Nowhere are the brutish passions of man more displayed than in
cruelty,” an article in Animal World pronounced.

Just so far as a man is cruel does he show less of the human nature and
more of the animal nature which exist together in him—just so far does
he show that he has forgotten that it is the glory of the human to con-
trol the animal nature.14

Not all Victorians accepted Darwin’s theory of animal hierarchy and

struggle for survival of the fittest. In his 1871 Primitive Culture Sir Edward
Tylor coined the term “animism” and defined it as “the doctrine of souls
and other spiritual beings in general” (Tylor 1871: 1:21). It is an

idea of pervading life and will in nature far outside modern limits, a
belief in personal souls animating even what we call inanimate bodies, a
theory of transmigration of souls as well in life as after death, a sense of
crowds of spiritual beings, sometimes flitting through the air, but
sometimes also inhabiting trees and rocks and waterfalls, and so lending
their own personality to such material objects.
(1:260)

Since he and others like him disparaged the doctrine as being primitive and
as being held only by the ancients or uncivilized, his definition has since
become designated as “old animism” (Harvey 2006: vii). Instead of being
critical or condescending, “new animism” holds more respect for animist
views and is more critical of modernity, engaging in debates on ethics con-
cerning environmental issues (vii).15
New Animism is a broad canopy or net (depending upon one’s vantage
point) of ideas that boil down to one metaphysical question: What does it
 Introduction 11
mean to be living? Like any other metaphysical question, before one can
tackle it, one must define terms and question what it means to be alive. Are
rocks alive? Are waterfalls alive? Derrida (2002) asked what it means to be
“living” (and “dying”) in his The Animal That Therefore I Am (380) and
concluded that “speciesism” is all wrong. He traced the history of the “chain
of being” and came to reject a long-standing assumption that humans have
been given dominion over the animal kingdom by God.
There are still those who are convinced that there is an animal that exists
inside all of us, a theory held by many Victorians, or that we are human
animals, as many posthumanists assert. David Abram’s Becoming Animal
expresses his concern that by subjugating the animal within ourselves and
prioritizing the rational, the scientific, and the technological, we have “cut
our lives off from the necessary nourishment of contact and interchange
with other shapes of life” (Abram 2011: 7). Our “animal body,” he insists, is
our “primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains
our primary cosmos” (8).
In a similar vein, Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature, written in 1986,
insists that all individual living beings have intrinsic moral worth. His
theory is that humans are not a superior species, and he argues for equating
the “killing of a wildflower” as “biocentric egalitarianism” (Taylor 1986:
217). An advocate of biocentrism, he claims that “all living things [possess]
inherent worth—the same inherent worth.”16 He goes so far as to equate the
“killing of a wildflower” with the “killing of a human” (Taylor 1983: 242),
which has come to be widely quoted with the suggestion that Taylor’s bio-
centrism is too extreme. However, in his defense, he does say that “this is no
way entails that humans must never kill or harm a wild animal or plant,
must never swat a fly or step on a wildflower,” as long as humans have an
“adequate moral reason that outweighs the wrongness of the act” (242).
Most current theories of posthumanism argue against the marginalization
of animals and resist anthropocentrism. To the contrary, arguably most
Victorians did believe that “man” was the center of the universe, either
divinely ordained to be so or else naturally placed there simply by sheer
“survival of the fittest.” Most Victorians perceived themselves as teetering at
the top of the chain of being, or perhaps, just a bit below God and maybe
above or below the angels. Not only did they accept that humans were
superior to all other species and thereby had the right to make animals serve
them, they—who thought about such things—accepted an obligation to
dominate the animal within themselves and others. This is one reason, but
not the only one, that most Victorians were extremely strict with their
children, especially teachers in schools: They were committed to putting a
leash on the beast; suppressing the animal in children, in animals, and in
adults “could be seen as an index of the extent to which an individual had
managed to control his or her lower urges” (Ritvo 1987: 132).
Animal biographies, animal nursery rhymes, animal fables, animal fairy
tales, and animal stories indoctrinated children with morality, and they were
12 Brenda Ayres
often imbued with political persuasions that spoke to adults as well, such as
Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, Ouida’s Dog of Flanders, Brodie Cowie Wat-
son’s Little Black Sambo, Rudyard Kipling’s books set in India, and Lewis
Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Anna Sewell’s classic Black Beauty,
once published in the United States, evoked such an outcry against the abuse
of horses that in 1876 the U.S. passed the Cruelty to Animals Act.
Fiction writers were critiquing humans’ treatment of animals, reflecting
their domestication of them, recording their fascination of them, and ques-
tioning “man’s” capacity to be humane to other creatures, both great, small,
and equal, both animal and fellow “man.”
Clearly, the Victorians were immersed in an animal culture. Real, live ani-
mals interacted with human lives; dead animals appeared on their plates, in
museums, and in books. Metaphorical animals delighted children in fairy tales
and inculcated adults in novels and other books how to be behave. Para-
doxically, the synergy of beast and man did not always result in humane
treatment of the animal. This book, Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a
Leash, does iterate the notion that most Victorians did see themselves as a
naturally dominant species over other humans and over animals. They con-
scientiously, hegemonically determined to rule those beneath them and the
animal within themselves with varying degrees of success and failure.
Domination within or over the animal kingdom, domination of the
animal within, and anthropomorphism are common enough themes ana-
lyzed by critical articles on Victorian literature. The work of Martin Dana-
hay and Deborah Denenholz Morse, first published in 2007, has definitely
prompted us to reconsider Victorian literature through posthuman theories.
This study—Victorians and Their Animals—invites additional considera-
tions that have thus far eluded scholarly investigations of Victorian per-
spectives and treatments of animal, beginning with Ayres’ chapter on
“Activism and Animal Agency” in the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. The term
“Animal Agency” and posthumanism are perspectives that have stimulated
interdisciplinary scholarship since the 1990s, spawning hundreds of books
and articles that resist an anthropomorphic worldview. This chapter
explores the interrelationships between Gaskell’s animals and humans as
agents that mutually mediate for each other in an environment in which
neither has hegemony. It identifies where and how Gaskell’s animals “sti-
mulate readers’ sympathy” for women and other underdogs, who like ani-
mals were often marginalized in their societies and were regarded as
“others.” Gaskell’s novels illustrate a mutual capacity for animals to ani-
malize humans and for humans to humanize animals. Such agency can only
relieve the suffering of both humans and animals and was championed by
Gaskell for creating a better world.
The second chapter investigates the efficacy of social restraints, in parti-
cular regarding animal ethics. Liam Young studies nineteenth-century atti-
tudes toward meat-animals and its “modern” system of managing animal
life. He details the arguments and logic put forward by Household Words to
 Introduction 13
allay the consciences of middle-class readers who could not bear the sight of
suffering oxen but wanted to eat them anyway. Ultimately, in advocating the
rationalization of slaughter, Dickens’ journal arrives at a biopolitical rela-
tionship between human and nonhuman animals, a relationship in which
humans ruled over their nonhuman “stock” not with the whip but with
biopower, “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and
ordering them” (Foucault 1990: 136). In an era of biopolitics, humanitar-
ianism, and liberal governmentality, violence and domination over nonhu-
man animals could no longer be taken for granted as a natural right but had
to be justified as a political relationship based on mutual recognition, a
relationship through which animals were conscripted into the social con-
tract: In exchange for their obedience and their lives, cattle were “rescued”
from a state of nature. Household Words did raise moral questions about
the practice of killing animals, but it later responded by defending the prin-
ciple. It provided an ideological reasoning that, in the face of the meat
trade’s logistical and ethical problems, allowed readers to look their oxen in
the face in good conscience.
A novelist devoted to aesthetics and ethics was George Eliot. In Chapter
3, the first of two chapters on Eliot, Constance M. Fulmer quotes Eliot as
having said that every aspect of her writing would be “the highest art …
consciously devoted to the deepest moral problems” (Haight 1955: 4:220).
Eliot felt that the effectiveness of her living legacy to coming generations lay
in her ability to inspire in her readers the moral growth that leads to a
feeling of universal solidarity. She intended that not only the theme, struc-
ture, and setting but also every object, every circumstance, and every rela-
tionship in her novels would convey moral truths. Her use of horses is one
example of the way she gives her moral principles a tangible representation.
She treats horses in consistent ways in all of the novels, from Adam Bede to
Daniel Deronda. Her characters are compared to horses in order to indicate
the degree to which they are morally mature or immature. The way both
men and women relate to their horses indicates their degree of pride, self-
ishness, arrogance, cruelty, and the desire to control, as well as their social
status and their level of sexual awareness and responsiveness. A study of
George Eliot’s employment of horses provides significant insight into her
novels and her moral aesthetic.
Despite the Victorians’ propensity to feel certain that they rightfully took
their place at the top of some chain of being including a hierarchy for the
species of humans, Jessica Kuskey argues in Chapter 4 that Dickens’ pigs
reject a human/animal hierarchy and emphasize instead a network of
oppression that exploits humans and animals alike. Kuskey’s analysis con-
tributes to an ongoing study of the cultural meanings of animals in Victor-
ian literature while also mobilizing recent Marxist theorizations to argue for
increased attention to class within the field of animal studies. Her chapter
begins by tracing links between pigs and class struggle in Thomas Spence’s
Pigs’ Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (1793–1796) (Spence 1794)
14 Brenda Ayres
and other contemporary replies to Burke’s remarks on “the swinish multi-
tude” in Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke 1790). This history
explains Carlyle’s later use of the pig in Latter-Day Pamphlets (Carlyle
1850), especially his caustic critique of “Pig Philosophy” (i.e. political econ-
omy) for replacing paternalistic social relations with the “cash-nexus.”
These earlier texts use pigs to represent the dehumanizing effects of capital-
ism, a logic that implies rehumanization is achieved through the assertion of
humanity’s “rightful” position in the human/animal hierarchy.
Great Expectations (Dickens 1861) avoids this difficulty by depicting the
exploitation of humans and animals in overlapping systems of oppression.
Without denying nostalgia for some mythical time before the exploitation of
workers and animals (e.g. the “larks” of labor at Joe’s forge and the
domestic cheer desired by Wemmick’s pig), the novel’s ultimate position on
class is undoubtedly problematic, as its representations of pigs do emphasize
the parallel subjugation of workers and animals under industrial capitalism.
Whereas the eighteenth-century pig lived in the family home, the nineteenth-
century pig was industrially produced and processed, a development that
parallels the spatial relocation of many labor processes from the home to the
factory from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries.
In Chapter 5 Anna West explores notions of ant culture, insect emotion,
and animals (including human ones) as automata in Thomas Hardy’s The
Return of the Native. After the widespread acceptance of the theory of
evolution, the way Victorians organized and viewed the natural world shif-
ted. Traits that were considered to be uniquely human—possession of cul-
ture and the ability to feel emotion, for example—were traced to their roots
in the animal world in works like Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man
(1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) and
George Romanes’ Animal Intelligence (1882) and Mental Evolution in Ani-
mals (1883). At the same time, assumptions about the animal world were
being extended to the human, notably in Thomas Huxley’s 1874 lecture that
reconsidered Cartesian dualism by applying the argument of animals as
automata to humans.
While Darwin’s awe at the mind of an ant may seem difficult to reconcile
with Huxley’s view of humans as automatons, The Return of the Native
(Hardy 1922 [1878]) offers the concept of “creature” as a way to approach
the “whole conscious world collectively,” as Hardy phrased it in a 1909
letter (Hardy 1984: 373).17 Throughout his novels, Hardy uses the word
“creature” to highlight kinship between the human and animal worlds—a
kinship he extends even to the insect world, as his personal writings and his
poem “An August Midnight” indicate. Classification requires boundaries:
indicators of distinction, difference. Hardy’s creatures—like Darwin’s,
Romanes’, and Huxley’s—complicate categorical hierarchies and inverse
Victorian attitudes toward not only the human but also the animal, pointing
toward what Derrida (2002) names as the “unsubstitutable singularity” (378)
of the individual.
 Introduction 15
Categorizing, ranking, and safeguarding hierarchies as if they were sacred
were modus operandi for most Victorians, and thus novels often reflected,
endorsed, promoted, and perpetuated gender and class divisions. George
Eliot’s works, however, frequently challenged and thwarted such hegemonic
ideologies. Her erosion was rarely overt; instead, encoded narrative con-
veyed palatable yet intelligible social protest. One of her strategies was to
use animals to symbolize the unspeakable in Victorian society, producing a
subtext that functioned as a palimpsest underlay of criticism and social
subversion. Instead of horses, this second chapter on Eliot (Chapter 6 by
Ayres) deconstructs the narrative agency of felines and canines in Scenes of a
Clerical Life, The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, Romola, and Silas
Marner as social censure.
Chapter 7 is interested in the representation of animals to signify human
gender dynamics in Anglo-Jewish literature. Fish has long been a staple of
Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine, and the fish has achieved iconic status in Jewish
culture, inevitably appearing at holiday meals throughout the Jewish reli-
gious year. Historically, poor Ashkenazi families have relied on fish as a
cheap and ready source of protein. Aside from fish as food, Jewish literature
has always had a penchant for fish stories. From biblical stories like “Jonah
and the Whale,” to the children’s legend “Joseph and the Sabbath Fish,” to
Larry David’s Fish in the Dark (2015), the image of fish has long permeated
Ashkenazi Jewish cultural consciousness. Lindsay Katzir’s chapter analyzes
images of fish in a select few London ghetto stories by two of the most
prolific Anglo-Jewish writers of the late Victorian period: Israel Zangwill
(1864–1926) and Benjamin Farjeon (1838–1903). Specifically, this chapter
looks at fish as both a metaphor for femininity and as a signifier of Jewish
women’s social class. Not only are fish symbols of fertility in Jewish culture,
but in Zangwill and Farjeon’s ghetto stories, fish symbolize a woman’s
potential marriageability.
Whereas Katzir’s chapter argues that a Jewish woman’s facility with fish
illustrates her value as a wife and her elevated status in the relatively cir-
cumscribed community of lower middle-class, late Victorian Jewry; Pandora
Syperek’s Chapter 8 on beetles identifies attitudes toward the New Woman
through jewelry. Syperek notes that much interest has arisen recently in
Richard Marsh’s 1897 novel The Beetle (Marsh 1917) as an exemplar of fin-
de-siècle Gothic literature’s manifestation of anxieties over the Imperial
Other. However, there has been little attention paid to the figure of the
insect in relation to these anxieties and in the surrounding culture. Her
chapter examines the significance of insects and their morphologies and life
processes in The Beetle via an analysis of natural history display and related
material culture. Unidentifiable in ethnicity or gender, Marsh’s shape-shift-
ing and abject eponymous villain seems a far cry from the static, orderly
insect cabinet. However, Cannon Schmitt (2007) attributes “Victorian Bee-
tlemania” to insects’ “alluring alterity” (36). Rosi Braidotti (2002) connects
the “simultaneous attraction and repulsion, disgust and desire” to
16 Brenda Ayres
monstrous femininity and thus a “women-insects nexus” (149). Indeed, as
the Natural History Museum, London, increasingly featured displays of
metamorphosis, and other, menacing insect processes, including parasitism
and wood destruction, the fashion for beetle jewelry marked the encroach-
ment of otherness: associated with the New Woman and savagery, beetle
jewels were called Cleopatra ornaments. Of Egyptian origin, the literary
Beetle is of a “lower” biological order and race, its transgressions inter-
species as well as interracial and transgender. An invasive species, its mon-
strous hybridity was only imaginable in light of evolutionary descent. Its
mesmeric powers signify an alternative, permeable consciousness redolent of
social insects. Metamorphosis, whether biological or fantastical, constituted
a strong metaphor for radical, often threatening social changes taking place
within Imperial Britain by the end of the century.
In Animal Studies, perhaps no other genre has been analyzed as much as
animals in children’s fiction, especially Victorian. Nevertheless, in Chapter
9, Christie Harner offers some refreshing insights to nonhuman theory in her
postcolonial focus on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books. Some animals,
like the human Mowgli and the White Seal, speak a variety of languages;
other animals, like the bear Baloo, act as translators. The stories ask not
only what linguistic communities exist, but to what extent those groups
would or would not be able to claim kinship. What divisions exist between
tongues? What enables or prevents one group from communicating with
another? What is language? This last question probes the relevance of dia-
lect, cultural difference, anatomical restraints, and social groups. Existing
scholarship on these questions points only to Mowgli’s human speech acts,
using postcolonial criticism to argue that he masters language and serves as
an ideal subaltern for the British colonizers. Harner reads this text instead
through the Derridean “animality” of speech, meaning: First, speech should
be understood as posthuman or post-extrahuman—it belies efforts to con-
tain or govern it. Second, multi-species dialogue points to the porous
boundaries between response and reaction, terms that Lacan uses to distin-
guish between human and animal capacities. She argues that speech acts in
this text challenge pre-set language and species hierarchies: It is the speaking
animal, perhaps surprisingly, that asks us to rethink our definitions of the
postcolonial.
The love/hate relationship that the Victorians bore to animals is one of
the most fascinating paradoxes of the nineteenth century. It was one that
permeated the culture.
Although most Victorians believed that they had “the beast on the leash,”
this collection of articles suggests that this was an unrealistic aspiration, but
it was definitely an aspiration. As to how noble, how natural, how plausible
it was for humans to act humanely, it was an illusion. Mahatma Gandhi
famously said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be
judged by the way its animals are treated” (quoted in Keyes 2006: 74).
Despite earlier published efforts to do so, to arrive at a normative as to how
 Introduction 17
and why the Victorians treated animals and human animals as they did
would be utterly impossible because there was no consistency in ideology,
theory, or practice; however, that very inconsistency is a critique. The fal-
lacy of control in itself is very revealing not only toward a more accurate
understanding of the Victorians, but also of our modern-day efforts to
behave appropriately as members of a global humanity.

Notes
1 Of course this is a quote from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, referring to
Kurtz’s report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Cus-
toms. The “brutes” to which he refers are the African native humans (Conrad
2002 [1896]: 155).
2 See Brian Herne’s book (Herne 2014).
3 Hundreds of women found freedom from traditional Victorian restraints by
writing travelogues. Since there was a growing market of readers who wanted to
learn about other countries, women found themselves in a position of increasing
power from writing these books: It gave them employment. Book sales gave them
money. The traveling gave them an extraordinary measure of independence. See
Shirley Foster and Sara Mills’ An Anthology of Women’s Travel Writing (Foster
and Mills 2002). Also see Precious Stearns’ Women Rewriting Boundaries: Vic-
torian Women Travel Writers (Stearns 2016). Jane Robinson’s Wayward Women
(Robinson 2001a) recounts the travels of over 400 women. See also her Unsui-
table for Ladies: An Anthology of Women Travellers (Robinson 2001b). For a
study of female travelers to the Ottoman Empire, the Balkan states, Russia, and
other European countries, see Evguenia Davidora (2018). For an overview of
critical study of female travelogues, see Olivera Popović (2016).
4 Dickens (1841) describes the famous Astley circus in The Old Curiosity Shop (ch.
39) and refers to it in Chapter 21 of Bleak House (Dickens 1852). Astley was also
the source for his creation of Sleary’s circus in Hard Times (Dickens 1854).
5 As was learned during his necropsy, when he was dissected by the College of
Surgeons (Thornbury 1865: 184).
6 His information came from the Annual Register (1825) Chronicle, 153–58.
7 George Cruikshank, Destruction of the Furious Elephant at Exeter Change, c.
1826.
8 The famous Victorian actress Ellen Terry (1911 [1908])—she of the Beetle Wing
Dress pictured in Chapter 8 of this volume—recounts Rossetti’s woeful negli-
gence toward his menagerie in her autobiography The Story of My Life: Recol-
lections and Reflections.
9 Besides a pet bear and his famous Newfoundland dog named Boatswain, Byron
had four Greek tortoises, a hedgehog, and three Italian geese (Kenyon-Jones
2001: 33). Shelley wrote to Thomas Love Peacock that Byron’s “Circean palace”
in Ravenna included “besides servants,” “ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three
monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon; and all these, except the
horses, walk about the house, which every now and then resounds with their
unarbitrated quarrels, as if they were the masters of it” (quoted in Kenyon-Jones
2001: 30).
10 Photograph used by permission by Phil Brown (3D Phil). See his film, The Cur-
ious World of Walter Potter at https://youtu.be/6MUo8PtHBHw.
11 The strongest objection she makes is in Chapter 12: “she who takes her dogs to
bed, and nurses them with a parade of sensibility, when sick, will suffer her
babes to grow up crooked in a nursery” (Wollstonecraft 1793 [1792]: 227).
18 Brenda Ayres
12 Quoted in Flegel (2015: 10) from Haraway (2008: xxiv).
13 Quoted in Phelps (2007: 97.
14 Quoted in Turner (1980: 69) from Animal World 5 (1874): 6.
15 For a thorough, but controversial rebuttal of early theories, read Nurit Bird-
David’s article “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational
Epistemology,” but also be sure to read the criticism that follows his article that
is included in JSTOR (Bird-David 1999).
16 This is a statement that Taylor asserts frequently throughout his book. See
Taylor (1986) 146, 155, 158, 257, 261, and 267. See also his third section of
Chapter 2 titled “The Concept of Inherent Worth,” 71–80.
17 In a letter written in 1909 that was republished in “Vivisection: From the View-
point of Some Great Minds” for the Vivisection Investigation League of New
York and was later reprinted in Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (Hardy 1984).

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1 Gaskell’s Activism and Animal
Agency
Brenda Ayres

In her account of the massive decimation of hundreds of thousands of cats

and dogs in England during World War II, Hilda Kean (2017) notes, “There
has been a striking absence in scholarly discussion on the role of companion
animals in, for example, the changing nature and composition of the family
or women’s lives, even in the period after this offering” (11). Her implica-
tion was and is still accurate: When one reads writers like Elizabeth Gaskell
with a feminist eye toward both the reinvention of womanhood and the
changing roles of women during Victorian times, we ought to factor in the
agency of animals in the part that they played in effecting these changes.

Animal Agency
The word “agency, n.” (2017) has been in use at least since the early 1600s
and means, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, the “ability or
capacity to act or exert power; active working or operation; action, activity”
and “action or intervention producing a particular effect; means, instru-
mentality, mediation.” The word appears often in Darwin’s writing to
convey the interaction of plants with plants, animals with plants, and ani-
mals with animals for mutual survival. For example, in The Origin of the
Species, Darwin (1861 [1859]) observes that trees provide nourishment to the
mistletoe, which has flowers with separate sexes, which depend upon insects
to gather pollen from them. The insects also depend upon the flowers for
their pollen, and as agents, the insects then pollinate the flowers. He uses the
term “agency” in this process (8); more specifically and more relevant to our
discussion, he often refers to “insect agency.”
Borrowing Darwin’s semantics, this chapter explores the interaction of
insects and other animals with women in Gaskell’s novels. At times the
animals act as agents to “cross-pollinate”—that is to stimulate romance that
leads to marriage—but at other times they are agents that validate and
empower women. In general, literary insects and other animals appear to
symbolize the symbiotic agency of animals and women to secure the right to
their own existence as sentient beings, and the right to freedom and resour-
ces with which to engineer their survival.
24 Brenda Ayres
“Animal agency” suddenly became a buzzword in academe in the 1990s. If
one keys “animal agency” with quotation marks in Google Books, one will
get 9,700 hits.1 Without the quotation marks, there are 2,940,000 hits.
Nearly half of the titles of works that contain these words were published in
the 1990s and the other half in the twenty-first century. The popularity of
the term has to do with its outgrowth from posthumanism, the idea, sim-
plistically put, that humans are not the center of the universe. This shift in
world view radically adjusted the way we understand ourselves in relation
to the others that share our universe. A. Irving Hallowell (1960) coined the
phrase “other-than-human persons” to refer to spiritual and supernatural
beings (21). The title of the science fiction novel More Than Human by
Theodore Sturgeon (1953) introduced another phrase to represent the “next
evolution” of human beings that have been physically and mentally altered
with super enhancements by accident or design or fabrication in the
laboratory. The phrase predates Eugene F. Stoermer’s term Anthropocene,
meaning “the new human.”2 While Stoermer’s jargon still conveys a per-
spective that the global environment is human driven, his emphasis is on
how the global environment has changed because of human bane, and in
turn, how that changing environment is altering humans and animals. The
ontogeny of human animals is also theorized in “transhumanism,” a term
published by Canadian philosopher W. D. Lighthall in 1940 but further
developed by the biologist Julian Huxley (Harrison and Wolyniak 2015:
465). In an article that gives the term’s history, Peter Harrison and Joseph
Wolyniak define “transhumanism” as “a movement that seeks to promote
the evolution of the human race beyond its present limitations through the
use of science and technology” (465).
An elusive and elastic term itself, “posthumanism” has become a catch-all
phrase for the decentralization of the human or for the transcendence or
redefinition of the human. Cary Wolfe (2010) essays a book-length explora-
tion of the word. His understanding of Derrida’s important work “The
Animal That Therefore I Am” contributes a useful definition for my treat-
ment of Gaskell’s novels: As a “semiotic system” or system of signs, post-
humanism “exceeds and encompasses the boundary not just between human
and animal but also between the living or organic and the mechanical or
technical” (Derrida 2002: xviii). When one considers animals as “conscious
beings that form their own perspective regarding the life-worlds” instead of
“mere objects” subordinate to human regulation (Räsänen and Syrjämaa
2017: 2), then we can rethink how nonhuman animals, as agents, affect the
human world and how they affect the way we see the world.
In her co-authored book Animals and Agency, Sarah McFarland construes
“agency” to refer to those animals who have the “intellectual capability and self-
awareness necessary to be considered agents in their one lives” (McFarland
2009: 3). By “agents” she means that they have the cognizant abilities to realize
that they have “the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (1), and
that they have the “free will, ability, rationality, mind, morality, subjectivity” to
 Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency 25
pursue those rights (3). These are phrases and words that reverberated during
the women’s movements in both England and the United States, but here
McFarland is referring to nonhuman animals. She says that Eileen Crist’s work
in Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind interprets Dar-
win’s view—that animals are those beings capable of performing actions—in
light of and in contrast to the common human perception that actions simply
happen to animals.3 From his Encountering the World, Edward Reed (1996)
adds more impetus to the power of an agent: “This is just what agency means:
agents make things happen, they make their way in the world…” (19). In the
same vein as McFarland and Crist believe that animals do not just react to
humans and should not be defined only by humans, Reed argues that animals do
act autonomously from humans, that their actions are “typically self-initiated
and modified” by animals themselves, and this makes them agents (19).
Linda Kalof’s definition, to me, is the clearest and the most comprehen-
sive. She defines “agency” as “the ability to engage in self-directed and pur-
poseful action in their environments and in relationships with other agents”
and it is a “continuum of characteristics that all animals (humans, dogs,
apes, horses, cats) have in varying degrees” (Kaloff 2017: 8). In my Gaskell
study I am interested in the interrelationships between her novels’ animals
and female characters as agents that mutually mediate for each other in an
environment in which neither has hegemony.

Gaskell and Darwin

Charles Darwin was a cousin to Gaskell4 and the model for Roger Hamley
in Wives and Daughters 5 and for Job Leigh in Mary Barton (Endersby 2009:
302).6 In a letter to her editor that outlines her plan to write Wives and
Daughters, Gaskell conveys that she wants to give the surname of Newton
to Roger,7 indicating her intention of creating a quintessential character of
science (Litvack 2004: 729). Even though Roger is of the aristocratic class
but is not the heir apparent, he has not received the best education, and his
worth has been generally depreciated by his parents. Consequently, he has
evolved into a hard-working, highly motivated, and humble naturalist. The
also humble Job is a self-educated weaver, and like Roger, is also a botanist
and an entomologist, one of those men

who may be seen with a rude-looking net, ready to catch any winged
insect, or a kind of dredge, with which they rake the green and slimy
pools; practical, shrewd, hard-working men, who pore over every new
specimen with real scientific delight.
(Gaskell 2008 [ 1853]: Mary Barton 37; ch. 5)

In addition to Darwin’s having been the inspiration for the creation of

Roger, Gaskell’s North and South delineates the theories of life and death”
of her famous cousin (Martin 1983: 91). Carol Martin’s article on Darwin
26 Brenda Ayres
and Gaskell adduces the novel’s demonstration of “survival of the fittest,”
with the struggling agrarian South being unable to compete financially with
the tour de force of industrialization in the North (Martin 1983: 91–92). As
is well known, the term “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert
Spencer in his Principles of Biology (1864) after his having read Origin
(Darwin 1861 [1859]). Darwin’s book came out four years after North and
South, but his theories had been widely disseminated in the 1840s. Further-
more, many of them were not unique but had been proffered by naturalists
in the eighteenth century.
Not only did Darwin’s theories influence Gaskell, but also Gaskell influ-
enced Darwin in the elucidation of his theories. According to his son Fran-
cis, Charles Darwin enjoyed reading novels and listed Mrs. Gaskell as one
of his favorites.8 Martin identifies the “intraspecies struggle” between master
and laborer and between industrialists competing for dominance in the
market (95–98). Mary Noble’s article “Darwin Among the Novelists”
assesses Darwin’s use of novels in his argument that “humans and animals
share behavioral traits which indicate similar states of consciousness” (2011:
99). She deduces this from Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions, published
in 1871. Perhaps even more convincing is Noble’s discovery that Darwin
“viewed fiction as a source of reliable empirical observations, comparable to
the ethnological and travel literature on which he also drew heavily in his
work on human evolution.” Darwin credited novelists as “excellent obser-
vers” (103); in fact, he particularly commended Gaskell for being an
“excellent observer” (Darwin 1873 [1871]: 151) and quoted from Mary
Barton a description of a baby’s crying as she was being fed.9 As Noble
(2011) points out, Darwin’s notebooks in the late 1830s were inscribed with
references to a variety of novels.
Besides the benefit of what he deemed to be empirical observations by
astute novelists, Darwin may have referred to novels to reduce the resistance
readers might have otherwise given to his arguments for an evolution of
expressions of emotions shared by animals and humans (Noble 2011: 112).
Implementing the same strategy as novelists like Gaskell, who used animals
to cross “class, gender, national, and racial boundaries” and to induce
empathy, Darwin asks readers to identify with trans-species and thus accept
the idea that “human morals evolved from animal emotions” (Noble 2011:
115). Darwin understood that novelists express suffering by both human and
nonhuman characters in order to “stimulate readers’ sympathy for alien
groups” (119). Noble refers to the preface to Mary Barton in which Gaskell
states that her purpose for writing such a novel is to reveal the suffering of
factory workers to those unaware (122–23), and in turn to pressure politi-
cians to pass legislation or perform some “merciful deeds” to alleviate such
suffering (Gaskell 2008 [1853]: 5). Whether intentionally or otherwise, Gaskell
also revealed the suffering of women. She employed animals to “stimulate
readers’ sympathy” for women, who like animals, were often marginalized in
their societies and were regarded as Others.
 Gaskell’s Activism and Animal Agency 27
Gaskell would have become familiar with the theories of Darwin if from
no other source than her husband who was an avid reader of articles on
science and who was a member and later chair of the Manchester Literary
and Philosophical Society (Litvack 2004: 730). He subscribed to journals that
published scientific papers, such as: Westminster, Quarterly, Edinburgh,
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Fraser’s, National Review, Fortnightly
Review, British Quarterly Review, and Revue des Deux Mondes (741).
Additionally, the Gaskells socialized with such scientific friends as Francis
Egerton (a patron of Manchester science), Benjamin Brodie (Oxford pro-
fessor of chemistry), Edward Schunck (analytical chemist), William Fair-
bairn (engineer), James Nasmyth (engineer), William Benjamin Carpenter
(physiologist), James Prescott Joule (physicist), William Whewell (scientist),
Jane Marcet (author of books on introductions to science), and Mary Som-
erville (polymath) (Litvack 2004: 730). As mentioned above, she also visited
Charles Darwin. She spent a couple weeks in 1830 sojourning with the
family of William Turner, a distant relative of hers (Secord 2013: 135) and a
prominent Unitarian minister who was also passionate about science. He
lectured often at the three scientific societies in Newcastle, including the
Natural History Society (Uglow 1993: 57–60). His nephew, James Aspinall
Turner, became a friend as well (230). He was a prominent cotton manu-
facturer in Manchester (“Deaths” 1867: 686) but also a renowned entomol-
ogist and founder of the Manchester Field Naturalist Club (Beolens,
Watkins, and Grayson 2011: 269).10 In February 1864, she stayed at the
house of George Allman. He was the husband of an old friend and a pro-
fessor of zoology (Uglow 1992: 559–61). Gaskell’s own husband organized
the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1861 which would
have offered her more than ample opportunity to know a host of scientists
(Boiko 2005: 89).
Therefore, it should not be unreasonable for Phoebe Poon (2010) to the-
orize that Wives and Daughters is a “response” to The Origin of the Species
with its focus on individual struggle and natural selection. She also suggests
that the novel “can be seen to anticipate certain aspects of evolutionary
theory” that appear in Darwin’s later The Descent of Man, and Selection in
Relation to Sex in 1871 (196). However, according to Darwin’s own admis-
sion of the influence of novels on his idea, the opposite may be true: It is
possible that Darwin’s reading of Wives and Daughters contributed to his
formulation of Descent (Darwin 1989 [1871]). Regardless, Poon identifies
Descent as emphasizing the “social instincts and morality,” a theme in
Wives and Daughters, as well as the scientific community’s (Roger’s,
Molly’s, and Mr. Gibson’s) “altruism—the virtue of acting for the good of
others rather than self” (Gaskell 1996 [1866]: 196); thus in Origin, Poon cites
Darwin’s reference to aphids who “voluntarily yield[] their sweet excretion
to ants,”11 not out of conviction of morality but because of cooperation for
the sake of “mutual benefit” (Poon’s verbiage). By the time Darwin wrote
Descent, he focused on instinct that creates and subscribes to an altruistic
28 Brenda Ayres
morality. Poon quotes him as saying, “for those communities, which inclu-
ded the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish
best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.”12 Poon further adds that
Darwin had much to say against primogeniture, in that it awards wealth
and property to the eldest who may or may not have “bodily or mental
superiority.”13 This is exactly Gaskell’s point in demonstrating the infer-
iority of Osborne as the heir of Hamley Hall (Gaskell 1996 [1866]: 201).
Molly, whose mother is dead and whose father is a physician, epitomizes
the feminine Darwin, a combination of fascination for science and love for
the beauty of nature. As a child, she attends the earl and countess’ annual
party, but Molly is uncomfortable with society. Therefore, she is drawn to
the Cumnors’ garden where she is comforted by the song of birds, going
“along without more thought as to her whereabouts than a butterfly has, as
it skims from flower to flower.” Then she leans against a cedar tree and falls
asleep (15; ch. 2).
The novel’s title, Wives and Daughters, is appropriate because Gaskell
conveys that Victorian women are identified only in their relationships to
men. They are oppressed by limitations placed upon them as women and are
unlikely to survive or surmount their struggles if they fail to adapt, as animals
do, to an environment hostile to their existence—although this is a reading
rarely shared by other scholars.14 Hence, instead of adapting through the
“masculine” practice of logic and reasoning followed by Mr. Gibson, Molly,
and Roger in understanding order in the animal kingdom, Hyacinth relies
upon an inadequate system of classification of people by rank. As Karen
Boiko notes, one of the few books that Clare values and reads is one on
peerage (87), most likely Burke’s Peerage (Burke and Burke 1848). Clare and
Lady Harriet consider “scientific men” as “useless” (Gaskell 1996 [1866]: 274–
75; ch. 25) (Boiko 2005: 87). Molly is the woman of the future because she is
more like her father and embraces the value of science.

A Stinging Order of Insects

Molly follows the squire “like a little dog” (Gaskell 1996 [1866]: 71; ch. 6).
The squire tells her that Roger notices twenty times more than most people
do, that he can tell what insect or spider left “a delicate film of a cobweb
upon a leaf” and even more astutely “if it lived in rotten fir-wood, or in a
cranny of good sound timber, or deep down in the ground, or up in the sky,
or anywhere” (73). Unfortunately, Roger lacks the agency to clearly and
accurately classify Cynthia and Molly, but the reader is certain that he will
discover that Molly is the right woman for him. The animals will lead him
to her; they will teach him her true merit. Being such a “great a lover of
nature,” he is careful of “treading unnecessarily on any plant” for who
knows “what long-sought growth or insect might develop itself in that
which now appear[s] but insignificant?” (114; ch. 10). Unfortunately, he is
not so careful or aware when he treads on Molly by choosing Cynthia over
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 Leaves folded upward, ovate or long-oval, peach-like, one and seven-
eighths inches across, five inches long, thin; upper surface smooth and
glossy, with a grooved midrib; lower surface sparingly pubescent; apex
acuminate, base abrupt, margin unevenly serrate, glandular; petiole one
inch long, slender, pubescent along one side, with a tinge of red, with from
one to five very small, globose, brownish glands usually on the stalk.
Blooming season late and long; flowers appearing after the leaves,
thirteen-sixteenths inch across, white, with disagreeable odor; borne in
clusters on lateral buds and spurs, in threes, fours or fives; pedicels
fifteen-sixteenths inch long, very slender, glabrous, green; calyx-tube
greenish, narrowly campanulate, glabrous; calyx-lobes narrow, acute,
erect, lightly pubescent within, serrate and with dark-colored glands;
petals ovate or oval, irregularly crenate, tapering into long, narrow claws
with hairy margins; anthers yellowish; filaments three-eighths inch long;
pistil glabrous, shorter than the stamens.
Fruit very late, season long; one and one-eighth inches by one inch in
size, roundish-ovate narrowing somewhat toward the stem, conical,
slightly compressed, halves equal; cavity medium to deep, narrow, abrupt;
suture usually very shallow and wide, often a distinct line; apex pointed;
color dark currant-red, with inconspicuous, thin bloom; dots numerous,
small to medium, conspicuous, densely clustered about the apex; stem
very slender, five-eighths inch long, glabrous, not adhering to the fruit; skin
thick, tough, clinging but slightly; flesh attractive light yellow; moderately
juicy, coarse, fibrous, rather tender, mildly sweet next the skin but
astringent towards the pit; fair to good; stone clinging, five-eighths inch by
three-eighths inch in size, long-oval, somewhat elongated at the base and
apex, turgid, with rough and pitted surfaces; ventral suture wide, blunt,
faintly ridged; dorsal suture acute, with a narrow, indistinct groove.

WEAVER
Prunus americana

1. Mich. Pom. Soc. Rpt. 267. 1874. 2. Am. Pom. Soc. Cat. 44. 1883. 3.
Mich. Hort. Soc. Rpt. 268. 1885. 4. Minn. Sta. Bul. 5:36, 37 fig. 1889. 5.
Cornell Sta. Bul. 38:45, 86. 1892. 6. Can. Hort. 16:409, Pl. 1893. 7. Mich.
Sta. Bul. 123:21. 1895. 8. Wis. Sta. Bul. 63:24, 62. 1897. 9. Colo. Sta. Bul.
50:46. 1898. 10. Ia. Sta. Bul. 46:291. 1900. 11. Waugh Plum Cult. 166 fig.
1901. 12. Budd-Hansen Am. Hort. Man. 302. 1903. 13. Can. Exp. Farm
 Bul. 43:32. 1903. 14. Ga. Sta. Bul. 67:283. 1904. 15. S. Dak. Sta. Bul.
93:41. 1905.

Weaver is an old and well-known Americana, once one of the

most popular of its species because of its hardiness and
productiveness. It is still listed by many nurserymen and is widely
distributed throughout the country but it is now rapidly passing out of
cultivation, being superseded by sorts producing larger and better
colored fruits.
This variety was found growing wild on the Cedar River, in Iowa,
by a Mr. Weaver. In 1873, Ennis and Patten, Charles City, Iowa,
began its sale to fruit-growers. The American Pomological Society
placed the Weaver on its fruit catalog list in 1883, dropped it in 1891,
and replaced it in 1897. The following description is partly compiled.

Tree large, vigorous, well formed, upright-spreading, unusually hardy,

productive; branches long, slender; branchlets slender, long, with short
internodes, reddish-brown, glabrous, with numerous, conspicuous
lenticels of medium size; leaf-buds small, conical, of average length.
Leaves falling late, four and one-half inches long, two and one-half
inches wide, obovate or oval, firm, thick, leathery; upper surface dark
green, slightly roughened, glabrous, with narrow midrib; lower surface pale
green, pubescent on the midrib and larger veins; apex acuminate, base
somewhat acute, margin deeply and coarsely serrate; petiole five-eighths
inch long, stout, reddish, slightly pubescent along one side, usually with
two large, globose, reddish-brown glands on the stem.
Flowers large, prominently stalked; calyx-lobes conspicuously glandular,
lightly pubescent within.
Fruit mid-season or later; one inch by three-quarters inch in size, large
for a native, oval or roundish-oblong, compressed, halves unequal; cavity
medium to shallow, narrow, rather abrupt; suture shallow, distinct; apex
roundish or depressed; color not uniform, yellowish overlaid with purplish-
red, mottled, covered with thin bloom; dots numerous, small, often
purplish, inconspicuous; skin thick, very tough, astringent, adhering to the
pulp; flesh deep yellow, juicy, firm and meaty, sweet, mild; fair to good;
stone variable in adhesion, three-quarters inch by three-eighths inch in
size, long and narrow, somewhat oval, flattened, obscurely pointed at the
base and apex, smooth.
WHITE BULLACE

WHITE BULLACE

Prunus insititia
 1. Parkinson Par. Ter. 576. 1629. 2. Abercrombie Gard. Ass’t 13. 1786.
3. Forsyth Fr. Trees Am. 21. 1803. 4. Lond. Hort. Soc. Cat. 344. 1831. 5.
Prince Pom. Man. 2:105. 1832. 6. Floy-Lindley Guide Orch. Gard. 300,
383. 1846. 7. Hogg Fruit Man. 385. 1866. 8. Downing Fr. Trees Am. 952.
1869. 9. Thompson Gard. Ass’t 4:160, 161 fig. 960. 1901. 10. Can. Exp.
Farms Rpt. 481. 1904.
Bullace 5. Bullace 7. White Bulleis 1.

The origin of this old sort is unknown. It was cultivated more than
three hundred years ago for Parkinson described it as common in his
time. He says of it “The White and the blacke Bulleis are common in
most Countries, being small round, lesser than Damsons, sharper in
taste, and later ripe.” It is probably one of the first of the cultivated
plums. White Bullace is illustrated and described in full in The Plums
of New York chiefly as a means of comparison between the plums of
three centuries ago and those of the present. It has little value now
for any purpose, though the Europeans still grow it rather commonly
and from seeds, cions or suckers as convenience may dictate.

Tree of medium size and vigor, upright-spreading, dense-topped, hardy,

unproductive; branches ash-gray, nearly smooth, with numerous, small,
inconspicuous lenticels; branchlets thick, above medium in length, with
short internodes, greenish-red changing to dark brownish-red, dull, with
thick pubescence throughout the season, with few, small lenticels; leaf-
buds small, short, stubby, obtuse, strongly appressed.
Leaves flattened, obovate, one and five-eighths inches wide, two and
three-eighths inches long, thick; upper surface dark green, rugose, with
few hairs along the narrow, grooved midrib; lower surface silvery green,
pubescent; apex abruptly pointed or acute, base acute, margin doubly
serrate, eglandular; petiole one-half inch long, green, pubescent,
glandless or with one or two small, globose, greenish-yellow glands
variable in position.
Blooming season medium to late, of average length; flowers appearing
after the leaves, three-quarters inch across, white, scattered on lateral
spurs; usually borne singly; pedicels one-quarter inch long, thick, densely
covered with short hairs, green; calyx-tube reddish-green, campanulate,
glabrous; calyx-lobes acute, lightly pubescent on both surfaces, glandular-
serrate, reflexed; petals obovate, entire, with short, broad claws; anthers
 yellow with red tinge; filaments five-sixteenths inch long; pistil glabrous,
nearly equal to the stamens in length.
Fruit late, ripening season of medium length; about one inch in
diameter, roundish, compressed, truncate at the base; cavity rather deep
and wide, abrupt; suture a line; apex flattened or depressed; color deep
amber-yellow, sometimes with faint pink blush on the exposed cheek,
overspread with moderately thick bloom; dots numerous, white,
inconspicuous; stem one-half inch long, covered with scant pubescence,
adhering strongly to the fruit; skin thin, astringent, slightly adhering; flesh
deep golden-yellow, juicy, coarse, fibrous, firm, sour; poor in quality; stone
clinging, five-eighths inch by one-half inch in size, ovate, turgid, blunt at
the base, acute at the apex, slightly roughened; ventral suture broad,
blunt, shallowly furrowed; dorsal suture with a wide, shallow groove.

WHITE DAMSON
Prunus insititia

1. Parkinson Par. Ter. 578. 1629. 2. Quintinye Com. Gard. 67, 69. 1699.
3. M’Mahon Am. Gard. Cal. 588. 1806. 4. Coxe Cult. Fr. Trees 238, fig. 15.
1817. 5. Lond. Hort. Soc. Cat. 146. 1831. 6. Prince Pom. Man. 2:88. 1832.
7. Downing Fr. Trees Am. 287. 1845. 8. Floy-Lindley Guide Orch. Gard.
300. 1846. 9. Thomas Am. Fruit Cult. 334. 1849. 10. Elliott Fr. Book 430.
1854. 11. Am. Pom. Soc. Rpt. 190, 214. 1856. 12. Hogg Fruit Man. 385.
1866. 13. Downing Fr. Trees Am. 952. 1869. 14. Waugh Plum Cult. 131.
1901.
Frost Plum 6, 13. Late Cluster 6, 13. Late White Damson 6. Late Yellow
Damson 7, 9, 10, 13. Shailer’s White Damson 7, 10, 12, 13. Shailer’s
White Damson 5. Small Round Damson 5. White Damascene 4. White
Damascene 6, 7, 10, 13. White Damask 2. White Damson 6. White Prune
Damson 7, 8, 10, 13. White Winter Damson 6, 13. White Winter Damson
3. Winter Damson 6. Yellow Damson 9.

This old plum, known since the beginning of the Seventeenth

Century, is chiefly of historic interest. Downing thought this a very
desirable addition to our list of plums but nearly all other pomologists
who have seen the fruit of the variety think it of small importance.
Unfortunately it is not in the collection at this Station and can be
neither recommended nor condemned from first hand knowledge.
This plum was first noted in America by M’Mahon in 1806, and fifty
years later it was added to the American Pomological Society list of
promising varieties. For some reason, perhaps for its color, it has
never become so well known as the purple Damsons. Perhaps from
the division of Prunus insititia made in The Plums of New York, this
variety should be known as a Mirabelle rather than as a Damson.
The following description is a compilation:

Tree vigorous, very productive; branches long, slender. Fruit matures

the last of September, season long; small, oval, pale yellow sprinkled with
reddish-brown dots, covered with thin bloom; flesh yellowish, sprightly,
pleasant flavored; good to very good; stone clinging.

WHITE IMPERATRICE
Prunus domestica

1. Kraft Pom. Aust. 2:33, Tab. 181 fig. 2; 2:44, Tab. 197 fig. 2. 1796. 2.
Duhamel Trait. Arb. Fr. 2:106. 1768. 3. Pom. Mag. 1:38, Pl. 1828. 4.
Prince Pom. Man. 2:61. 1832. 5. Downing Fr. Trees Am. 285. 1845. 6.
Floy-Lindley Guide Orch. Gard. 300, 383. 1846. 7. Poiteau Pom. Franc. 1.
1846. 8. Thomas Am. Fruit Cult. 329. 1849. 9. Hogg Fruit Man. 730. 1884.
10. Mathieu Nom. Pom. 454. 1889.
Die Weisse Kaiserpflaume 3, 4, 6, 10 incor. Die Weisse Kaiserpflaume
1. Die Weisse Kaiserinnpflaume 1. Imperatrice Blanche 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8,
9, 10. The White Imperatrice Plum 3. Prune Imperatrice Blanche 7. White
Imperatrice 3, 10. White Empress 5, 8, 10. Weisse Kaiserpflaume 10.

Kraft in his Pomona Austriaca, 1796, described a Weisse

Kaiserpflaume and a Weisse Kaiserinnpflaume and gave Imperatrice
Blanche as a synonym to both of them. The latter he gave as a
variety of the Weisse Kaiserpflaume but it is probable that they are
the same since no other author noted the distinction, and, in fact, the
differences mentioned are wholly insignificant. According to Downing
this variety was little known in this country in 1845 and it is doubtful if
it is now known at all. It is described as follows:
 Compared with the Saint Catherine, which it resembles, it is found to
differ in that its stone is free and its flavor less high; branches smooth;
leaves smaller and less shining; fruit matures in September; of medium
size, obovate; suture indistinct; cavity narrow; skin yellow, spotted with a
little red; bloom thin; flesh yellow, crisp, juicy, sweet.

WHITE PERDRIGON
Prunus domestica

1. Rea Flora 208. 1676. 2. Langley Pomona 92, 93, Pl. XXIII figs. V &
VI. 1729. 3. Miller Gard. Dict. 3. 1754. 4. Duhamel Trait. Arb. Fr. 2:84, Pl.
VIII. 1768. 5. Kraft Pom. Aust. 2:41, Tab. 193 fig. 1. 1796. 6. Lond. Hort.
Soc. Cat. 151. 1831. 7. Prince Pom. Man. 2:52, 64. 1832. 8. Downing Fr.
Trees Am. 287. 1845. 9. Floy-Lindley Guide Orch. Gard. 298, 301, 383.
1846. 10. Hogg Fruit Man. 386. 1866. 11. Mathieu Nom. Pom. 454. 1889.
Brignolle 11. Brignole 6, 8, 10, 11. Die weisse Duranzen pflaume 5.
Diaprée Blanche 11. Maître Claude 2, 3, 7, 9. Perdrigon blanc 4.
Perdrigon blanc 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Maître Claude 8, 10, 11. Weisser
Perdrigon 11. Weisse Diaprée 11. Weisses Rebhuhnerei 11. Prune-Pêche
(of some) 11. White Perdrigon 11.

White Perdrigon is an old French variety grown extensively in the

vicinity of Brignoles, France where it is used in the manufacture of
the famous Brignoles Prunes. Because of its use for this purpose, it
has been badly confused with a similar variety, the Brignole, which
derived its name from the town of Brignoles, where it was first grown.
The variety is probably not known in America and might be worth
introducing. It is described as follows:

The White Perdrigon is a mid-season, medium-sized, oval plum,

tapering slightly towards the base; suture shallow; cavity small; stem
slender; skin rather tough, pale yellow, with thin bloom; dots numerous,
small, whitish; flesh greenish-yellow, melting, juicy, sweet, aromatic; good;
stone small, long-oval, free.

WICKSON
 WICKSON

Prunus triflora × Prunus simonii

1. U. S. D. A. Rpt. 263. 1892. 2. Burbank Cat. 21 fig. 1893. 3. Gard. &

For. 7:420. 1894. 4. Cornell Sta. Bul. 106:63. 1896. 5. Cal. State Bd. Hort.
53. 1897-8. 6. Cornell Sta. Bul. 139:46 fig. 120. 1897. 7. Can. Hort. 21:30
 fig. 1272. 1898. 8. Vt. Sta. An. Rpt. 12:229. 1899. 9. Cornell Sta. Bul.
175:148, 149 fig. 38. 1899. 10. Am. Pom. Soc. Cat. 41. 1899. 11. Kan.
Sta. Bul. 101:125. 1901. 12. Mich. Sta. Bul. 187:77, 80. 1901. 13. Waugh
Plum Cult. 227. 1901. 14. U. S. D. A. Rpt. 387. 1901. 15. Ga. Sta. Bul.
68:13, Pl. IV, 37. 1905. 16. Md. Hort. Soc. Rpt. 85. 1905. 17. Am. Pom.
Soc. Rpt. on Plums etc. 65. 1905.
Eureka 5. Perfection 1, 2. Perfection 4, 14.

It is difficult to estimate the value of Wickson in American

pomology. Probably no plum of recent introduction has been on the
one hand so highly lauded and on the other so condemned as this
one. Its remarkable size, the largest of the Oriental plums if not the
largest of all plums; its handsome color and distinct form; the firm
flesh and peculiar flavor, generally considered pleasant; the narrow
upright tree with its long lanceolate leaves, mark the variety as a new
and for some parts of the country a valuable addition to pomology.
The contradictory evidence as to its desirability arises from the fact
that it can be well grown in comparatively few plum-growing regions,
most of these being on the Pacific Coast and in the South. In New
York, the Wickson has small value other than in private collections.
The variety is a little tender in tree and bud, hardy only in favored
parts of this State and not at all where the peach cannot be grown; it
blooms too early to be safe from frost; it is susceptible to brown-rot;
the trees are late in coming in bearing and are not reliable in fruiting;
the fruits ripen unevenly; and the trees are not of good form for
heavy crops. In California, however, the Wickson is one of the
leading Japanese sorts, possibly the leading one, and is seemingly
growing in favor. Starnes, one of the pomological authorities of the
South, in his bulletin on Japan and Hybrid Plums, speaks of Wickson
as a “grand plum” and as one of the best for Georgia. It is to be
hoped that from the same cross which produced Wickson or from
breeding this variety with some other, a plum of this type well suited
to New York may sometime be offered the plum-growers of this
State.
Wickson is one of the best known of Burbank’s many plums. The
variety was first described in the report of the Secretary of
Agriculture in 1892 under the name Perfection and as a seedling of
Kelsey crossed by Burbank. In 1893 and 1894 Burbank offered for
sale the control and the stock of this variety but found no buyers and
in 1895 introduced it himself. The parentage of the variety is in
doubt. Burbank considered it a Kelsey-Burbank cross; the Pacific
Rural Press described it as offspring of Kelsey and Satsuma; Bailey,
Waugh and the workers at this Station believe it to have Prunus
simonii characters. The foliage, flowers, the tree, the fruiting habit,
the texture of the flesh, all indicate Simon as one of its parents.
According to the report of the Secretary of the California State Board
of Horticulture shipments of this plum were made to New York in the
season of 1897 under the name of Eureka. In 1899 it was placed on
the fruit catalog list of the American Pomological Society.

Tree medium to large, vigorous, with narrow, upright head, dense-

topped, tender to cold, an uncertain bearer; branches medium in
smoothness, the fruit-spurs numerous, dark ash-gray with tinge of brown,
with lenticels of medium size; branchlets thick and long, with short
internodes, greenish-red changing to light chocolate-brown, glossy,
glabrous; lenticels numerous, raised, variable in size; leaf-buds small,
short, obtuse, free.
Leaves folded upward, lanceolate or oblanceolate, one inch wide, three
inches long, thin; upper surface dark green, glossy, glabrous, with a
slightly grooved midrib; lower surface pale green, glabrous, except along
the midrib; apex taper-pointed, base cuneate, margin finely serrate, with
reddish glands; petiole three-eighths inch long, lightly pubescent along
one side, faintly tinged red, glandless or with from one to nine small,
reniform, greenish or yellow glands variable in position.
Blooming season early and of medium length; flowers appearing after
the leaves, intermediate in size, white; borne in clusters on lateral spurs, in
pairs or in threes; pedicels of medium length and thickness, glabrous,
greenish; calyx-tube green, obconic, glabrous; calyx-lobes acute, erect,
glandular-ciliate; petals oval, entire, short-clawed; anthers yellowish;
filaments below medium in length; pistil glabrous, longer than the
stamens.
Fruit early mid-season, period of ripening long; variable in size, the
larger fruits about two and one-eighth inches in diameter, obliquely
cordate, halves unequal; cavity deep, abrupt, with yellowish concentric
rings; suture often prominent and deep, with a prolonged tip at the apex;
color dark red over a yellow ground, indistinctly splashed with darker red,
mottled with thin bloom; dots numerous, small, yellow, inconspicuous,
densely clustered about the apex; stem thick, eleven-sixteenths inch long,
glabrous; skin thin, tender, separating easily; flesh amber-yellow, juicy,
coarse, somewhat fibrous, firm, sweet, pleasant but not high in flavor;
good; stone clinging, one inch by five-eighths inch in size, oval or ovate,
pointed, with pitted surfaces; ventral suture winged; dorsal suture grooved.

WILD GOOSE
 WILD GOOSE

Prunus munsoniana

1. Gard. Mon. 9:105. 1867. 2. Am. Jour. Hort. 5:147. 1869. 3. Am. Pom.
Soc. Rpt. 60. 1869. 4. Am. Hort. An. 78. 1870. 5. Country Gent. 35:166.
1870. 6. Am. Pom. Soc. Rpt. 116. 1871. 7. Ibid. 44. 1875. 8. Am. Pom.
 Soc. Cat. 36. 1875. 9. Am. Pom. Soc. Rpt. 152, 153, 154. 1883. 10.
Mathieu Nom. Pom. 454. 1889. 11. Cornell Sta. Bul. 38:51, fig. 3, 86.
1892. 12. Tex. Sta. Bul. 32:482, fig. 4. 1894. 13. Vt. Sta. An. Rpt. 10:99,
104. 1897. 14. Wis. Sta. Bul. 63:24, 63 fig. 31. 1897. 15. Ala. Col. Sta. Bul.
112:178. 1900. 16. Waugh Plum Cult. 189, 190. 1901. 17. Ga. Sta. Bul.
67:284. 1904. 18. S. Dak. Sta. Bul. 93:42. 1905. 19. Ohio Sta. Bul.
162:258. 1905.
Nolen Plum 10. Suwanee 9. Suwanee ?16.

Wild Goose is the first of the native plums to be generally grown

as a distinct variety though Miner was first known and named. Wild
Goose, too, is probably a parent of more sorts than any other variety
of the several cultivated native species, most of its offspring so
strongly resembling it that its name has been given to a group of its
closely related sorts. In spite of the great number of native plums
that have been introduced in recent years, Wild Goose is still a
favorite—probably more trees of it are now cultivated than of any
other native plum. Its good qualities are: bright attractive color;
tender and melting flesh with a sprightly and refreshing flavor; a
tough skin which fits the variety well for shipment and long-keeping;
comparative freedom from brown-rot and curculio and a large, hardy,
healthy and, when cross-pollinated, a very productive tree. Wild
Goose has been more extensively planted in New York than any
other plum of its kind and in a few cases has proved a fairly
profitable commercial sort. It is doubtful if it is now the best of its
species for this State but it can at least be recommended for home
plantings and in some localities as a market plum. Wherever planted
there should be some other native sort blooming at the same time for
cross-pollination.
The following account of the origin of this variety, more romantic
than credible, is told with several variations. About 1820, M. E.
McCance, who lived near Nashville, Tennessee, shot a wild goose
on his farm; his wife, in dressing the goose, found a plum seed in the
craw, which, planted in the garden, produced the Wild Goose tree.
The merits of the new fruit seem to have been discovered by J. S.
Downer, Fairview, Kentucky, and James Harvey of Columbia,
Tennessee. The former propagated, named and began the
dissemination of Wild Goose to fruit-growers. Many varieties have
been sent out for this plum and much confusion has arisen as to
what the true variety is. Since the characters of Wild Goose, even
when cross-pollinated, are transmitted to its offspring to a
remarkable degree, the name now applies to a class of plums rather
than to a variety. The American Pomological Society placed this
variety on the fruit catalog list of the Society in 1875, dropped it in
1891, and replaced it in 1897.

Tree very large and vigorous, wide-spreading, flat-topped, hardy in New

York, productive; branches rough and shaggy, dark ash-gray, with
numerous, large, elongated lenticels; branchlets slender, long, with
internodes of medium length, greenish-red changing to dull reddish-brown,
glossy, glabrous, with many, conspicuous, large, raised lenticels; leaf-buds
small, short, obtuse, free.
Leaves folded upward, lanceolate, peach-like, four and one-quarter
inches long, one and one-half inches wide, thin; upper surface light or dark
green changing to reddish late in the season, smooth, glabrous, with a
grooved midrib; lower surface pale green, glabrous except along the
midrib and larger veins; apex taper-pointed, base abrupt, margin finely
serrate, with small, reddish-black glands; petiole five-eighths inch long,
slender, pubescent along one side, tinged red, glandless or with from one
to six globose, yellow or reddish-brown glands on the stalk and base of
the leaf.
Blooming season late and long; flowers appearing after the leaves,
three-quarters inch across, white, with disagreeable odor; borne in
clusters on lateral buds and spurs, in threes or fours; pedicels five-eighths
inch long, slender, glabrous, green; calyx-tube greenish, narrowly
campanulate; calyx-lobes narrow, glabrous on the outer surface, lightly
pubescent within, entire, heavily pubescent and with reddish glands on the
margin, erect; petals ovate, entire, long and narrowly clawed; anthers
yellow, with a tinge of red; filaments five-sixteenths inch long; pistil
glabrous, equal to the stamens in length.
Fruit very early, season of medium length; one and three-eighths inches
by one and three-sixteenths inches in size, oval, halves equal; cavity
small, narrow, shallow, rather abrupt; suture an indistinct line; apex
roundish or pointed; color bright red, with thin bloom; dots few in number,
light russet, somewhat conspicuous, clustered about the apex; the stem
attached to a stem-like growth from the fruit-spurs gives the appearance
on the tree of a jointed stem, very slender, three-quarters inch long,
 glabrous, not adhering well to the fruit; skin tough, slightly astringent,
separating readily; flesh yellowish, very juicy and fibrous, tender and
melting, sweet next the skin but sour at the center, sprightly; fair to good;
stone adhering, seven-eighths inch by three-eighths inch in size, long and
narrow-oval, flattened, slightly necked at the base, acute at the apex,
roughened; ventral suture wide, blunt, ridged; dorsal suture acute or with a
shallow, indistinct groove.

WILLARD
Prunus triflora

1. Ohio Hort. Soc. Rpt. 81. 1893. 2. Cornell Sta. Bul. 62:31. 1894. 3.
Ibid. 106:64. 1896. 4. Ibid. 131:194. 1897. 5. Am. Pom. Soc. Cat. 26.
1897. 6. Mich. Sta. Bul. 177:42, 43. 1899. 7. Cornell Sta. Bul. 175:134 fig.
27. 1899. 8. Rural N. Y. 57:515, 530, 595. 1898. 9. Waugh Plum Cult. 140.
1901. 10. Ga. Sta. Bul. 68:33. 1905. 11. Ill. Hort. Soc. Rpt. 420. 1905.
Botan No. 26 2, 3, 9. Botan 1. Botan No. 26 1. Willard Plum 1. Willard
Japan 8.

Willard is about the earliest of the Triflora plums that can be

shipped to the markets. When this is said all is said; as the variety
has little else to recommend it, being very inferior in quality and
having a reputation of being subject to shot-hole fungus. S. D.
Willard, Geneva, New York, procured cions of this variety from
California about 1888 from an importation made by Burbank from
Japan. According to Willard, the plum was received under the name
Botan and he labelled it No. 26 to avoid confusion; in 1893, it was
named Willard by W. F. Heikes of the Huntsville Nurseries,
Huntsville, Alabama. The American Pomological Society placed the
variety on its fruit catalog list in 1897.

Tree medium to large, vigorous, vasiform, productive; leaves falling

early, folded upward, oblanceolate, one and three-eighths inches wide,
three and three-quarters inches long, thin, glabrous; margin finely and
doubly serrate, with very small glands; petiole three-quarters inch long,
with from one to five reniform glands usually on the stalk.
 Fruit early, of medium size, roundish or somewhat oblong, blunt at the
apex, dark red when well grown, covered with thick bloom; stem short,
thick, adhering poorly to the fruit; skin sour; flesh greenish-yellow, rather
firm, sweet, low in flavor; poor in quality; stone variable in adhesion, of
medium size.

WOLF
 WOLF

Prunus americana mollis

1. Ia. Hort. Soc. Rpt. 367. 1883. 2. Rural N. Y. 44:645. 1885. 3. Am.
Pom. Soc. Cat. 40. 1889. 4. Cornell Sta. Bul. 38:45 fig. 2, 87. 1892. 5.
Mich. Sta. Bul. 118:54. 1895. 6. Wis. Sta. Bul. 63:24, 64. 1897. 7. Colo.
 Sta. Bul. 50:47. 1898. 8. Waugh Plum Cult. 167. 1901. 9. Ga. Sta. Bul.
67:284 fig. 1904. 10. S. Dak. Sta. Bul. 93:42. 1905. 11. Ia. Sta. Bul.
114:148 fig. 1910.
Wolf Free 4, 6. Wolf Freestone 11.

Wolf has long maintained a high place among the standard

Americana plums, with which it is usually classed though put in a
sub-species, and from which it differs chiefly in having much more
pubescence on foliage, floral organs and branchlets. It is noted for its
great hardiness, reliability in bearing, attractive and well-flavored
fruits and in being one of the few freestones of its kind. This plum is
remarkably well adapted for the northern part of the Mississippi
Valley and there alone it is worth planting extensively. In New York it
might prove valuable in the coldest parts of the State where the
Domesticas and Insititias cannot be grown.
This variety was raised from a pit of a wild plum planted on the
farm of D. B. Wolf, Wapello County, Iowa, about 1852. Professor J.
L. Budd of the Iowa Agricultural College stated in 1885 that for over
a quarter of a century the original tree had not failed to produce a
partial or large crop annually on the grounds of the originator. A
spurious clingstone type of the Wolf has been propagated in some
nurseries but this false plum is readily distinguished from the true
freestone type. The variety was added to the American Pomological
Society fruit catalog list in 1889, dropped in 1891, and replaced in
1897.

Tree large, vigorous, spreading, low, and open-topped, hardy,

productive, healthy; branches rough and shaggy, thorny, dark ash-gray,
with numerous, small lenticels; branchlets somewhat slender, short,
twiggy, with internodes below medium in length, green changing to dull
brownish-drab, overspread with thick pubescence, with numerous, small
lenticels; leaf-buds very small, short, conical, strongly appressed.
Leaves falling early, oval, one and seven-eighths inches wide, three and
seven-eighths inches long, thin; upper surface medium green, lightly
pubescent, with a narrow groove on the midrib; lower surface silvery-
green, pubescent; apex taper-pointed, margin coarsely and doubly
serrate, eglandular; petiole one-half inch long, velvety, tinged red,
glandless or with one or two small, globose, yellowish glands on the stalk
or base of the leaf.
Blooming season of average length, late; flowers opening after the
leaves, one inch across, the buds tinged yellow changing to white as the
flowers expand; borne on lateral buds and spurs; pedicels nine-sixteenths
inch long, thickly pubescent, green; calyx-tube greenish-red, campanulate,
covered with short, fine pubescence; calyx-lobes narrow, acute, heavily
pubescent on both surfaces, with few marginal glands, reflexed; petals
inclined to curl, long-oval, fringed, long and narrowly clawed; anthers
yellowish; filaments three-eighths inch long; pistil sparingly hairy on the
ovary, equal to or shorter than the stamens, frequently defective.
Fruit mid-season, ripening period short; less than one inch in diameter,
roundish-oval or somewhat obovate, compressed, halves equal; cavity
frequently yellowish, shallow, narrow, abrupt; suture an indistinct line; apex
roundish or flattened; color dull crimson, thickly mottled, overspread with
thick bloom; dots numerous, small, russet, inconspicuous; stem slender,
glabrous, adhering poorly to the fruit; skin thick, tough, slightly roughened,
astringent, adhering; flesh golden-yellow, very juicy, fibrous, tender and
melting, sweet next the skin, but astringent toward the center; fair to good;
stone semi-free to free, five-eighths inch by three-eighths inch in size,
roundish-obovate, tapering at the base, blunt at the apex, with smooth
surfaces; ventral suture winged; dorsal suture acute, or with a faint,
narrow groove.

WOOD
 WOOD

Prunus americana

1. Minn. Hort. Soc. Rpt. 60. 1894. 2. Wis. Sta. Bul. 63:64. 1897. 3. Minn.
Hort. Soc. Rpt. 433. 1898. 4. Waugh Plum Cult. 168. 1901.