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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Birds in
Eighteenth-Century
Literature
Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology,
1700–1840

Edited by
Brycchan Carey
Sayre Greenfield
Anne Milne
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing
an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of
human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences
that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology
and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-­
disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the sepa-
ration of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political
stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and
understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as
the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have
codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly
other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to ani-
malise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of ani-
mals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as
objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human con-
cerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary
animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material
lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to
or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic
engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate
natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary
texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the disci-
pline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses
on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of
the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine
art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with
which English studies now engages.

Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
 Brycchan Carey • Sayre Greenfield
Anne Milne
Editors

Birds in Eighteenth-
Century Literature
Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840
Editors
Brycchan Carey Sayre Greenfield
Department of Humanities Division of Humanities
Northumbria University University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Greensburg, PA, USA

Anne Milne
Department of English
University of Toronto Scarborough
Toronto, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-32791-0    ISBN 978-3-030-32792-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: ‘Portrait of Master Hare (with bird)’ Unknown artist after Sir Joshua
Reynolds. From The Connoisseur Volume L (January-April, 1918): 182

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book addresses the topic of the eighteenth-century bird in literature
by examining literary representations of birds from across the world in an
age of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new
perspectives into the ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning
in a variety of literary and non-literary genres from 1700 to 1840 as well
as throughout a broad range of ecosystems and bioregions. It considers a
wide range of authors, including some of the most celebrated figures in
eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding,
Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, Mary
Wollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth,
and Gilbert White.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1
Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne

2 Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from

Eighteenth-Century Ireland 17
Lucy Collins

3 Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry

Fielding’s Tom Jones 39
Leslie Aronson

4 ‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds

and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of
Naturalism 51
D. T. Walker

5 Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale 71

Bethan Roberts

6 The Labouring-Class Bird 91

Nancy M. Derbyshire

vii
viii Contents

7 The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men:

Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language111
Francesca Mackenney

8 ‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking

Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility131
Alex Wetmore

9 Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and

Bewick’s History of British Birds151
Anne Milne

10 The Literary Gilbert White173

Brycchan Carey

11 When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts

Exotic Avifauna193
Sayre Greenfield

12 Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description,

c. 1700–1800211
George T. Newberry

13 ‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton

Mather’s Birds231
Nicholas Junkerman

14 The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of

Plenitude247
Kevin Joel Berland

Index269
 Notes on Contributors

Leslie Aronson is an independent scholar based in Michigan. Her 2014

PhD thesis was titled ‘Fictions of Consumption: Novels of the Long
Eighteenth Century, 1749–1817’. She is revising it for publication.
Kevin Joel Berland is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative
Literature, the Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of The
Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover (2013).
Brycchan Carey is Professor of English at Northumbria University. The
author of numerous publications on eighteenth-century literature and cul-
ture, his books include British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility:
Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005) and From
Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery,
1658–1761 (2014).
Lucy Collins is Associate Professor of English at University College
Dublin. Recent books include The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An
Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (2014) and
a monograph Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement
(2015). Her articles on ecocritical topics have appeared in C21
Literature, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and Green Letters.
Nancy M. Derbyshire is an assistant professor at the Borough of
Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She is the author of several
essays, including ‘The License of Listening’ (John Clare Society Journal,

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

July 2018), ‘The Purposive Emptiness of Elizabeth Bentley’ (Women’s

Writing, January 2019), and John’s Clare’s ‘Dawnings of Genius’ (The
Explicator, forthcoming).
Sayre Greenfield is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh
at Greensburg. He has been a research fellow at Chawton House Library
and has recently contributed an essay on Shakespearean allusions to The
Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia and various essays on Austen to
Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal. He is also the co-editor of Jane
Austen in Hollywood (2001) and the author of The Ends of Allegory (1998).
Nicholas Junkerman is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore
College. He writes on early American literature, religion, and the repre-
sentation of disability. He is completing a book manuscript on Protestant
miracle discourse in early America. His article ‘“Confined Unto a Low
Chair”: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle
Narratives’ has appeared in Early American Literature.
Francesca Mackenney completed her PhD at the University of Bristol,
where she now serves as a research associate. She has also taught as a visit-
ing tutor at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written on the
figure of the talking bird in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (2015) and
on birdsong in the poetry of John Clare (2020). She is particularly inter-
ested in the history of representations of animals in literature and
philosophy.
Anne Milne is a lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She
was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and
Society in Munich, Germany (2011) and published ‘Lactilla Tends Her
Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-­
Century British Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry (2008). Her research
highlights animals, environment, and local cultural production in
eighteenth-­century British poetry.
George T. Newberry is Honorary Research Associate in the History
Department at the University of Sheffield. His PhD thesis titled
‘Representations of “Race” in British Science and Culture During the
Eighteenth Century’ was completed there in 2011. Since then he has lec-
tured at Sheffield, the University of Nottingham, and Bishop Grosseteste
University, and has also worked in commercial ecology. His article on
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

evolutionary psychology and race theory has appeared most recently in

History Compass.
Bethan Roberts is William Noble Post-Doctoral Research Associate in
the English Department, University of Liverpool. She is the author of
Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Tradition and Place (2019). She is
researching nightingales in literature, science, and ecology in the long
eighteenth century, and writing Nightingale for the Reaktion Press
Animal series.
D. T. Walker holds a PhD in English from Princeton University. His
book project explores the intersections of epistemology and moral phi-
losophy in eighteenth-century Britain, with particular emphasis on forms
of sociability that emerge under doubt. Further areas of research include
maps and cartography, digital humanities, Gothic affect, and film
adaptations of eighteenth-century texts. He has written on Laurence
Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen, Thomas Hobbes,
and others.
Alex Wetmore is an assistant professor in the English Department at
University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in British Columbia, Canada. He is
the author of Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave,
2013), and his research focuses on sites where machines and machine-­like
phenomena intersect with emotion in the 1700s.
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Isaac Cruikshank. Fellow Feeling. 1801. Print on wove paper,
23 × 28 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole
Library, Yale University) 134
Fig. 8.2 The Gouty Husband and His Young Wife. 1760. Etching on laid
paper, 13 × 21 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis
Walpole Library, Yale University) 143
Fig. 8.3 High Life at Noon. 1769. Etching with engraving, 23 × 33 cm.
(Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale
University)144
Fig. 9.1 Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 1 of the History of
British Birds. 1797. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 156
Fig. 9.2 Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 2 of the History of
British Birds. 1804. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 157
Fig. 9.3 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Golden Eagle’. From History of British
Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 161
Fig. 9.4 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Yellow Wagtail’. From History of British
Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 191. (Source: Image courtesy of The
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 162

xiii
xiv List of Figures

Fig. 9.5 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Redstart’. From History of British Birds,
vol. 1 (1797), p. 209. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas
Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 163
Fig. 9.6 Thomas Bewick. ‘Tailpiece’. From History of British Birds, vol.
2 (1804), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 167
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne

Birds and words: of all the attributes birds have—song, colour, flavour, and
those distinctive modified scales, feathers—one thing they do not have,
except by human imposition, is words. This book is about that imposi-
tion—about the conjunction of two very different sorts of species at a time
when their relationship was changing drastically. The chapters in this vol-
ume map out many aspects of that change. Some focus on a single species,
or even an individual bird. Others consider literary representations of birds
more broadly or alongside other forms of writing about nature. All explore
the tension in literature of this period between a utilitarian view of birds

B. Carey (*)
Department of Humanities, Northumbria University,
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
e-mail: brycchan@brycchancarey.com
S. Greenfield
Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg,
Greensburg, PA, USA
e-mail: sng6@pitt.edu
A. Milne
Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough,
Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: anne.milne@utoronto.ca

© The Author(s) 2020 1

B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_1
2 B. CAREY ET AL.

and the trend towards granting birds their own ontological status. That is,
birds move from serving mankind (literally, metaphorically, or even spiritu-
ally) to birds having their own independent existence that humans can per-
ceive, sympathise with, rhapsodise about, or categorise, but that is indeed
separate. One might say that birds start as feathered extensions of human
concerns but, paradoxically at a time of accelerating scientific understand-
ing, become a highly visible and audible way for the eighteenth century to
grasp, a little, its own incomprehension of the natural world.
From a modern point of view, the most significant development of the
eighteenth century so far as changing attitudes to birds is concerned is the
scientific one. The view of birds as part of God’s creation maintains itself in
this period, but, as the details of ornithology accumulate, the power of birds
to illustrate divine power and ingenuity becomes less foregrounded among
the details of avian life. Literature, by nature conservative in its preservation
of metaphoric applications of birds and its repetition of avian motifs, may
seem somewhat detached from this movement. Pre-Christian and early
Christian applications of bird images and medieval motifs repeat themselves,
but with an increasing difference that makes it harder and harder, as the cen-
tury proceeds, to dissolve the birds into their metaphors. Birds gain an ever-
increasing life of their own, not just part of the divine world or the human
world, but with an existence in the natural world that demands increasing
attention. That natural world, too, becomes increasingly dynamic in the
avian-enhanced view, not existing in the same state throughout human expe-
rience, but changing by its own rhythms and with human interference.
Inevitably, literature is called to account. For example, in 1777, John
Aikin urges studious poetic engagement with natural history in An Essay
on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. He praises James Thomson
as the only ‘painter of rural beauty’ since Theocritus to have ‘look[ed]
abroad into the face of nature’.1 Despite this anthropomorphic metaphor,
Aikin meticulously documents a series of erroneous literary renderings of
animal behaviours and natural phenomena, pointing out the disfiguring
effects of figurative language. Aikin is well aware that his call is further
compromised by the creative impulses of some self-styled natural histori-
ans. In one example, he specifically points to Oliver Goldsmith, suggesting
that Goldsmith is ‘a Naturalist only of the Bookseller’s making [who] has
many descriptions in his History of Animated Nature that are wrought
with peculiar warmth of fancy and strength of colouring’.2 While Aikin
lands firmly on the side of science informing literature, his admonishment
of Goldsmith invites greater critical engagement with the experiential
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

processes and underlying practices of representing nature. Such an eco-

critical turn at the end of the eighteenth century points to the complexity
of unpacking and engaging with literary relationships with birds. The aim
of this collection is both to detail bird-human interactions as they were
experienced in the eighteenth century and to join a complementary con-
versation with other recent animal studies, ecocritical, and ecofeminist
monographs and collections that focus on British and American cultures
of nature before 1900.
To that end, this collection enacts the dynamic movement from what
Lawrence Buell calls ‘first-wave ecocriticism’, which tends towards identi-
fying and celebrating representations of nature in literary works, to what
he calls ‘second-wave ecocriticism’, a development in the discipline that
enacts greater scepticism and critical engagement with the relationships
between environmental science, environmental political ‘movements’, and
literary and cultural products.3 While all of the chapters in this collection
can be described as ecocritical, some do the ‘first-wave’ work of identify-
ing (and indeed celebrating) representations of birds in eighteenth-­century
literature, while others, especially those by Collins (Chap. 2),
Aronson (Chap. 3), Derbyshire (Chap. 6), Milne (Chap. 9), and
Newberry (Chap. 12), engage directly with issues current in animal stud-
ies, ecofeminism, bioregionalism, and intersectional analysis. What all the
chapters in the collection enthusiastically respond to is the ‘largely
untapped’ potential ‘for ecocritical approaches to [mostly] British litera-
ture between 1660 and 1800’ forcefully underlined by Christopher Hitt
in his 2004 essay, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’.4
If broad ecocritical studies of the long eighteenth century remain
scarce, critical literature dealing specifically with birds in this period is even
sparser, despite the appearance in recent years of a small number of impor-
tant interventions from the wider perspective of animal studies. There are,
in fact, few book-length studies of birds in the literature of any period, and
none that the editors are aware of that specifically address the eighteenth
century. Of those that consider the bird in literature more generally, most
are aimed at a popular audience, often simply anthologising poetry and
quotations from longer works. A small number have attempted to synthe-
sise the contributions of birds to British culture more broadly. Of these,
Edward A. Armstrong’s The Life and Lore of the Bird in Nature, Art, Myth,
and Literature (1975), Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey’s Birds
Britannica (2005), and Cocker’s Birds and People (2013) have been most
successful, but all include eighteenth-century material alongside material
from the whole of British cultural history and are often stronger on
4 B. CAREY ET AL.

folklore than literature (Armstrong also contributed the important Folklore

of Birds to the New Naturalists series in 1958). Leonard Lutwack’s Birds
in Literature (1994) remains the best-known general scholarly study but
is not strong on eighteenth-century literature. Several books deal with
birds in the literature of Romanticism, at least in passing, including David
Perkins’s Romanticism and Animal Rights (2003), Dewey W. Hall’s,
Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study,
1789–1912 (2014), and, less convincingly, Thomas C. Gannon’s Skylark
Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and
Contemporary Native American Literature (2009). In addition, there
have been several studies of birds in the poetry of John Clare, most nota-
bly Eric Robinson and Richard Fitter’s John Clare’s Birds (1982). At the
other end of the eighteenth century, there are also a handful of studies of
the bird in medieval and early modern literature including, predictably,
several that deal with birds in Shakespeare.
Studies of animals in eighteenth-century culture are nevertheless on the
increase, although important recent books such as Nathaniel Wolloch’s
Subjugated Animals: Animals And Anthropocentrism in Early Modern
European Culture (2006) and Laura Brown’s Homeless Dogs and
Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary
Imagination (2010) have been distinctly mammalian and mostly disregard
birds. A 2010 special issue of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies,
edited by Glynis Ridley and containing fifteen fine essays on eighteenth-­
century animals, finds room for only one essay that discuses birds any
more than in passing—an essay on the poetry of William Cowper by
Conrad Brunström and Katherine Turner. In Tobias Menely’s important
The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (2015), however,
birds appear as a minor but consistent theme throughout, as they do in
Anne Milne’s ‘Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of
Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class
Women’s Poetry (2008) and in John Morillo’s, The Rise of Animals and
Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature
Between Descartes and Darwin (2018), particularly in his reading of the
bird poetry of William Cowper. Heather Keenleyside’s Animals and Other
People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century
(2016) contains a valuable analysis of parrots and other speaking birds in
the philosophy of John Locke and the literature of Daniel Defoe and
Laurence Sterne. Perhaps the most important recent discussion of
eighteenth-­ century literary birds can be found in Ingrid H. Tague’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century

Britain (2015), although her illuminating discussion of the practical and
moral implications of caging and buying birds of course deals with the
animals as pets, rather than in the wild. Overall, therefore, while some
work has been done, there nevertheless remains much potential for further
investigation, both of eighteenth-century birds and of eighteenth-century
animals more broadly.
The primary question posed by most recent literary animal studies,
albeit often framed in complex and highly theorised terms, is simply what
do animals signify in human discourse? It is readily apparent that represen-
tations of birds have always had a role in literature (and culture more
broadly) as similes and metaphors for attributes such as speed, unbound-
edness, or keen-sightedness, or as symbols for peace, wisdom, or the soul.
In this way, argues one school of thought, literature appropriates animals
as metaphors to serve narrowly human interests, needs, and desires—
much as animals themselves are exploited as food, as beasts of burden, or
as captive companions. Posthumanist analyses ask us to consider, or
attempt to consider, animals on their own terms and with their own inter-
ests, needs, and desires. Some scholars of eighteenth-century literature
ask, however, how these patterns of signification are negotiated in a period
which sought to extend the boundaries of sympathy through discourses of
sentiment and sensibility while simultaneously asserting the idea of the
interrelatedness of all living things through comparative investigation of
anatomy, physiology, and taxonomy. Birds, indeed all animals, come in
and out of focus in recent criticism as ideas, metaphors, symbols on the
one hand and as autonomous living beings on the other. ‘Rhetorical con-
ventions’, argues Heather Keenleyside, ‘make real-world claims’ while ani-
mal metaphors are less about ‘changing things to persons’ and more about
restoring ‘an original animality’. Eighteenth-century writers, she suggests,
increasingly rejected the Cartesian notion of animals as machines, and
instead directly compared their own experiences to those of animals. ‘The
possibility that animals are people like me’, she contends, ‘is one that
eighteenth-­century writers repeatedly register by way of the figure of per-
sonification’.5 Tobias Menely argues ‘for an understanding of sensibility,
and particularly of the dynamics of sympathy, as oriented around questions
of communication’. The key is the eighteenth-century’s ‘interest in the
thorny problem of conceptualising the relation of natural signs (such as
“countenances, gestures, voices, and sounds”) to instituted signs (arbi-
trary, conventional, and symbolic)’.6 As Keenleyside shows at length,
6 B. CAREY ET AL.

speaking birds such as parrots and starlings challenged any simple dichot-
omy between the natural and the instituted sign, and forced eighteenth-­
century writers to question what constituted ‘personhood’ itself. As Nancy
M. Derbyshire puts it in Chap. 6 of this collection, ‘at the heart of this
debate between posthumanism and humanism is the question of whether
animal figuration is exclusively anthropomorphic’.
The authors whose chapters make up this collection pay attention to
these and other recent developments in animal studies, but just as often
approach the texts from the critical position of eighteenth-century literary
history. This is perhaps unavoidable since scholarly discussion of birds in
the literature of this period is scarce, whereas approaches grounded in
close reading, historicism, and cultural materialism are numerous. But
even these more traditional approaches can have much to say when turned
towards new objects of attention. In this collection, we consider a close
reading of a poem about a nightingale or a study of an ornithologist’s lit-
erary sources and influences of as much value as a highly theorised eco-
critical study of avian semiotics. Indeed, while poets and scholars have
asked what birds mean, most people simply ask what are they good for?
What uses do they have? The answers to this question run from issues of
selfishness to salvation. That is, as eighteenth-century writers remind us
time and again, birds can serve as food, as tools, as physical ornaments, as
ornaments of language, and as connections to the divine. They can con-
nect humans with the state of their environment or detach them from that
environment. Some chapters collected here, especially those by
Aronson (Chap. 3), Greenfield (Chap. 11), and Berland (Chap. 14), con-
sider birds as something that humans ingest. Sustenance or taste, however,
does not fully explain the literary uses of birds as food—that is, even this
most utilitarian of attitudes to birds is not entirely so. A taste of the wild
adds savour because the birds can be more difficult to obtain. This attitude
was established before the long eighteenth century, as in Ben Jonson’s
‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’:

        with a short-legged hen,

     If we can get her, full of eggs, and then
Lemons and wine for sauce ….
………………………………………
And though fowl, now, be scarce, yet there are clerks,
     The sky not falling, think we may have larks.
I’ll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come:
     Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

May yet be there; and godwit, if we can,

     Knat, rail, and ruff, too.7

All fowl, those of the farm and those of the fields and mudflats, are food
for Jonson’s table. Yet here the merely speculative wild birds seem greater
attractions for the guests than the chicken. In eighteenth-century litera-
ture, that added menu value of wild birds grows—and also grows more
problematic. Jonson’s birds fall from the sky and simply appear on the bill
of fare. Eighteenth-century literary texts often emphasise the hunting of
birds, much more literally than the metaphoric uses of trapping in the
Renaissance, such as Polonius’s ‘springes to catch woodcocks’ (Hamlet
2.3.115). The added value in many of these texts is the human effort, and
that brings with it moral concerns, ranging from the destruction of species
to the callous killing of individual birds. And yet, even the most sentimen-
tal of eighteenth-century poets and protagonists are found hunting. The
narrator of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling is introduced with a gun in
his hand and a dog at his side in pursuit of gamebirds.8 William Cowper,
perhaps the poet most sympathetic to birds as autonomous, feeling beings,
offers a dialogue between himself and his spaniel Beau, admonishing the
dog for killing a young bird, not because birds should not be killed but
simply because it was neither a pest nor a gamebird:

Nor was he of the thievish sort,

Or one whom blood allures,
But innocent was all his sport
Whom you have torn for yours.9

Beau’s defence is that ‘’Twas nature, sir, whose strong behest/Impell’d

me to the deed’. That poets and men of feeling should keep dogs for
pointing, flushing, and retrieving gamebirds is presented as equally natu-
ral—although the fashion for hawking, a medieval sport, was decidedly on
the decline in the eighteenth century.
In fact, the main utility of birds for literature has always been illustrat-
ing human concerns, with birds functioning as metaphors, as investigated
in the chapters of Walker (Chap. 4), Roberts (Chap. 5), Derbyshire (Chap.
6), and Newberry (Chap. 12). The longevity of such metaphors, indeed,
becomes a source of aesthetic complaint in the later eighteenth century, as
Greenfield’s chapter notes (Chap. 11), and it is certainly true that doves
and nightingales continue to represent love and falcons and eagles
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 PLATE II.
[Photo by W. Cottrell
Hightown, Manchester.]
EXTERNAL CHIMNEY SCAFFOLD.
Erected for the Willesden Electric Lighting Works, under the supervision of E.
Willis, Esq., a.m.i.c.e., etc.
When the chimney is to be erected by external scaffolding the
ordinary mason’s or bricklayer’s scaffold is used. Owing to the small
area of the erection the outside frames of the scaffold have a quick
return. This makes it practically impossible for the scaffold to fail by
breaking away from the building under the influence of the loads it
may carry. Shoring or tying is therefore not so important. Wind
pressures have, however, a greater effect, especially when the
direction is not at right angles to one of the faces of the scaffold. If in
that direction, the tied putlogs would offer resistance. Braces are
therefore imperative, and they should be fixed at right angles to each
other, each pair thus bracing a portion of the height of the scaffold
equal to its width. (See plate 2.)
For the repair of chimney shafts without scaffolding from the
ground level, means have to be taken to bring, first the mechanic,
and afterwards his material, within reach of the work.
 Fig. 27
The preliminary process of kite-flying is now rarely seen, except
for square-topped chimneys, and even in these cases the delay that
may arise while waiting for a suitable steady wind is a drawback to
its practice. The kites used are about 10 feet long and 8 feet wide.
They are held at four points by cords which continue for a distance of
about 16 feet, and then unite into one. Near this point on the single
rope another cord is attached, which serves to manipulate the kite
into position.
Stronger ropes or chains are then pulled over the shaft, after
which a workman ascends, and the necessary pulley wheels and
timbers to form a regular means of ascent are sent up after him.
A light line carried up in the interior of the shaft by a hot-air balloon
is another means of communication.
The most certain and safest method of ascent is to raise on the
exterior of the shaft a series of light ladders, which are lashed to
each other and firmly fixed to the chimney as they ascend.
The ladders have parallel sides, and are used up to 22 feet in
length.
One method of fixing is as follows:—
A ladder is placed against the shaft on its soundest side. It rests at
its top end against a block of wood slightly longer than the width of
the ladder, and which keeps it from 7 to 9 inches away from the wall.
This space allows room for the workmen’s feet when climbing. The
ladder is then fixed by two hooks of round steel driven into the wall,
one on each side immediately under the blocks, the hooks turning in
and clipping the sides of the ladder (fig. 28). The hooks, which have
straight shanks of 7⁄8-inch diameter with wedge-shaped points, are
driven well home, as the stability of the erection depends upon their
holding firmly.
Above the top end of the ladder a steel hook is driven into the wall
on which a pulley block can be hung, or instead, a pin with a ring in
its head can be so fixed. A rope from the ground level is passed
through this block or ring, and reaches downward again for
connection to the ladder next required. The connection is made by
lashing the rope to the top rung and tying the end to the seventh or
eighth rung from the bottom; this causes the ladder to rise
perpendicularly. The steeplejack who is standing on the already fixed
ladder cuts the top lashing as the hoisted ladder reaches him, and
guides it into its place as it rises. When the rung to which the rope is
tied reaches the pulley block, the ladders should overlap about 5
feet. They are at once lashed together at the sides, not round the
rungs.
 Fig. 28
The workmen can now climb higher, driving in hooks round the
sides, and under the rungs of the ladder alternately, lashings being
made at each point. A wooden block is placed under the top end of
the last ladder and fixed as before. The hoisting rope, which has
been kept taut meanwhile, is now loosened and the process
repeated.
The ladders rise in this manner until the coping of the shaft is
reached. Here, owing to the projection of the cap which throws the
ladders out of line, it is impossible to lash the top ladder to the lower.
To overcome the difficulty, the wall is drilled in two places
immediately over the topmost fixed ladder, and expansion bolts are
fitted therein. To these bolts the lower end of the top ladder is tied.
The hoisting rope is then tightened sufficiently to hold the ladder, and
by this means the workmen are enabled to reach the top of the shaft.
A variation of this method of climbing is to replace the wooden
blocks by iron dogs with 9-inch spikes, which should be driven well
into the wall. Short ladders of about 10 feet in length are then used,
these being lashed to the dogs as they rise.
Another method of fixing the ladders is shown in fig. 29.
 Fig. 29
In this case eye-bolts are driven horizontally into the wall in pairs,
rather wider apart than the width of the ladders.
Iron rods hook into these and are fastened to the ladder sides by
thumb screws.
The ladders rise above each other and are connected by 3-inch
sockets.
When fixed, they stand about 18 inches from the wall. This is an
advantage, as it enables the workmen to climb on the inside of the
ladders, thus lessening the strain on the eye-bolts, and the ladder
can more easily pass a projecting chimney cap.
On the other hand, the whole weight of the ladders rests upon the
bottom length, so that if through any cause it gave way, for instance
under accidental concussion, the entire length would most certainly
collapse.
This danger could be avoided if the ladders were supported on
brackets as fig. 30. No reliance should be placed upon the thumb
screws, as they may work loose under vibration. Danger from this
source would be avoided if the slot in which the ladder peg moved
was made as shown in fig. 30.

Fig. 30
 The necessary repairs can be carried out by means of boats,
cradles, or scaffolding.
Cradles and boats are swung from balk timbers laid across the top
of the shaft, or from hooks where the design of the chimney permits,
as shown in fig. 31.
The common method of fixing light scaffolds round a chimney or
steeple is shown in fig. 32. They are most easily fixed to square or
other flat-sided erections. The scaffolder having by means of ladders
or boats reached the desired height, fixes a putlog by means of
holdfasts to one of the walls. Another putlog is then fixed on the
opposite side of the building at the same level. The two are next
bolted together by 1-inch iron bolts of the required length. The bolts
are kept as near to the wall as possible. The process is repeated
again about 6 feet higher on the building. The boards for the
platforms are next laid. The first are placed at right angles to the
putlogs and project sufficiently to carry the boards which are laid
parallel to the putlogs. To prevent the boards rising when weight is
applied at one side of the scaffold, iron plates bolted together (fig.
33) are fixed at the corners, and clips (fig. 34) connect them to the
putlogs.
Fig. 31

Fig. 32
 Fig. 33
The stability of these scaffolds depends upon fixing at least two
sets of putlogs, connected by means of stays as shown in fig. 32.
Bracing is unnecessary if the putlogs and bolts tightly grip the
building. When these scaffolds are used on circular chimneys,
chucks have to be fitted on the inside of the putlogs to prevent them
being drawn by the bolts to a curve. The chucks (fig. 35) can be
fastened to the putlogs before they are fixed, if the curve of the
building is accurately known. When this is not the case, the putlogs
are fixed by a holdfast at their centre. The chucks are then placed in
position, and clamped to the putlogs as shown in fig. 36.
Additional holdfasts are then driven into the wall immediately
under the chucks, so that the putlogs are kept level.
 Fig. 34

Fig. 35
The putlogs are fixed on edge, and when not exceeding 16 feet in
length are 7 in. by 3 in. Above that length they are 9 in. by 3 in. The
stays should be 4 in. by 2 in., and connected to the putlogs by 5⁄8-
inch iron bolts. The platform is usually of three boards 11 in. by 2 in.
Fig. 36
 Fig. 37
Hollow towers are erected or repaired in the same manner as
chimney shafts, except that climbing ladders are not often required.
External or internal scaffolds may be erected. Towers being usually
of larger area than chimney shafts, the putlogs for internal
scaffolding are often of short poles from 6 to 8 inches diameter. Even
these may require extra support. This is gained by carrying
standards from the ground level or other solid foundation and tying to
the putlogs. If of great height the standards may be unable to carry
their own weight. For the cases where danger might be apprehended
from this cause, fig. 37 shows a system of framing, which, being
supported by the set-back in the thickness of the wall, will carry the
upper standards.
Steeples are generally built by the aid of external scaffolds, which,
as in the case of chimney shafts, should be well braced. The lower
portion may also be repaired in this way, the standards rising from
the ground level, or, if so designed, from the top of the tower. A
series of needles could be arranged for the higher portions.

Fig. 38

Domes and arches.—The scaffolding for domes and arches

consists of a series of standards standing upon the area covered by
the building, and connected by ledgers and braces in directions at
right angles to each other. The platform is laid on the top ledgers.
 When the building is of large span square timbers are often used,
balks for standards and runners, and half timbers for struts and
braces.
Fig. 38 shows a design for repairing roofs and arches where a
roadway has to be kept below.

Swinging scaffolds. Painters’ boats or cradles.—Painters’

boats are useful scaffolds for the repair of buildings, more especially
where the work is light. Fig. 39 shows the general construction. They
are suspended from jibs, fixed usually on the roof for outside work,
and by means of blocks and falls they can be moved in a vertical
direction by the workmen when in the boat.

Fig. 39
The boats are fitted with guard boards and rails, and their safety,
providing the jibs are well fixed by balancing weights, is in their
favour. They are not self-supporting, and there is a distinct danger of
their running down if the sustaining ropes are not securely fastened
off. The wind causes them to sway considerably, and their use is
confined chiefly to façade work. An improved cradle is now in
general use, which is slung by head blocks from a wire cable running
between two jibs (see fig. 40). By the aid of guy lines movement in
this case can be also obtained horizontally, which removes the
necessity of shifting the jibs or employing a greater number of boats
as in the older method.

Fig. 40
 Fig. 41
Another cradle as shown in fig. 41 has advantages which cannot
be ignored. It has steel cables with a breaking weight of 15 cwt.
instead of fibre ropes, and the cradle is raised and lowered by
means of gearing and a drum fixed in the gear case A. It is self-
supporting, and therefore safer than the cradle mentioned above.
The lower ends of the cable are fastened to the drum, and the
gearing gives sufficient mechanical advantage for one man to raise
the scaffold by turning the handle B. The uprights and rails are of
angle steel or barrel and will take apart and fold.
 Fig. 42
The boatswain’s boat (see fig. 42) is useful under some
circumstances, especially for making examinations of buildings for
possible damage. It is dangerous and awkward to work from, and is
also acted upon considerably by the wind.
The boat is slung from a single needle. The workman has no
control over its movement, as he has to be raised or lowered as
required by men having charge of the other end of the fall.