Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period

Chase Pielak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317097839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Early nineteenth-century British literature is overpopulated with images of dead and deadly animals, as Chase Pielak observes in his study of animal encounters in the works of Charles and Mary Lamb, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and William Wordsworth. These encounters, Pielak suggests, coincide with anxieties over living alongside both animals and cemeteries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries. Pielak traces the linguistic, physical, and psychological interruptions occasioned by animal encounters from the heart of communal life, the table, to the countryside, and finally into and beyond the wild cemetery. He argues that Romantic period writers use language that ultimately betrays itself in beastly disruptions exposing anxiety over what it means to be human, what happens at death, the consequences of living together, and the significance of being remembered. Extending his discussion past an emphasis on animal rights to an examination of animals in their social context, Pielak shows that these animal representations are both inherently important and a foreshadowing of the ways we continue to need images of dead and deadly Romantic beasts.

Chapter 1
Beasts at the Table: Charles and Mary Lamb and Roast Animals

How often did we cut into the haunch of letters, while we discussed the haunch of mutton on the table!

—Hazlitt¹

Charles Lamb, the Romantic familiar essayist and occasional poet, was also a congenial host, avid reader, and prolific reviewer. William Hazlitt’s epigraphic line pokes at the marrow of this chapter: the relationship between Lamb, his friends, and his creatures. Lamb’s creatures turn out to be proverbial wolves wearing woolen disguises; refusing to be eaten, animals populate his writings as figures for living together and death, themes that underlie animal representations throughout the Romantic period, and expose the difficulties inherent in all relationships, human and animal alike. Lamb’s animals interrupt with satirically shattering presence. They disrupt friendship by acting on the self and the other, the possible friend.

Several recent texts have consequently situated Lamb at the head of the table and as a center of Romanticism. As Simon Hull argues, Lamb’s essays, published in popular periodicals, participate in the metropolitan spirit of the age (2). Felicity James argues that works of Lamb, Coleridge, and Wordsworth are “meshed together through allusion, quotation, echo, and personal reference” and that they “create a larger conversation of friendship: coded, deeply allusive, politically inflected” (4). And though Lamb’s work confronts numerous beasts, there has yet to be a sustained critical approach to Lamb’s frequent uses of animal imagery. After only mentioning three animal images in his poetry in the 1790s—a “matin bird;” a wandering “jaded steer” (that reflects his own denied vacation to visit with Sara and S.T. Coleridge); and an oblique reference to “man, bird, beast” as familiar objects²— animals provide a centerpiece at the table connecting his friends by the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Lamb contributed to several collections of poetry before writing, under the cover of the penname Elia, 53 essays in The London Magazine from 1820–26. Elia is a product of his context, a social surrogate, and a scapegoat for the author.³ Elia’s “Popular Fallacies,” a series of short essays published in New Monthly Magazine in 1826, include: “That You Must Love Me and Love My Dog,” “That We Should Lie Down With The Lamb,” and “That We Should Rise With The Lark.” Each relies on animal imagery to figure moments in which the narrator can no longer be a social animal. The theme of animal inclusion into human society figures prominently in Lamb’s best known Elian essay, “Dissertation Upon Roast Pig” (1822), as well as in three key poems: “The Beasts and the Tower,” “The Boy and the Skylark,” and “The Rook and the Sparrows.” These animal poems (all written with Mary Lamb and published in Poetry for Children (1809), predating the Elian essays by more than a decade) set forth Lamb’s most interesting and impossible animal representations and offer an underexplored entry point into Romantic animal imagery.

Before considering Lamb’s poetry, we need to ask, which Lamb? The volume Poetry For Children was initially published anonymously, attributed only by reference to an earlier volume: “By the Author of Mrs. Leicester’s School.” Mrs. Leicester’s School, like Poetry for Children, was co-written by Mary and Charles Lamb. In Charles Lamb’s 2 Jan. 1810 letter to Thomas Manning, Lamb writes of Poetry for Children that “the best you may suppose mine; the next best are my coadjutor’s; you may amuse yourself in guessing them out; but I must tell you mine are but one-third in quantity of the whole” (Lucas V.430). Charles Lamb refused to identify which poems he authored in Poetry for Children (though he later named three of the poems as belonging to each author, none of which are treated here). Charles is characteristically sheepish on this topic. It may be that he felt so close to his sister (whom he repeatedly calls “best friend” in his letters) that it was hard to separate who wrote which. In an 1805 letter to William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles ends the poem in the letter: “I have absolutely not another line. No more has Mary” (Lucas V.333). Perhaps Charles offers the best explanation of his authorial relationship in his 18 Feb. 1818 letter to Mrs. William Wordsworth: “I am never C.L. but always C.L. and Co.” (Lucas V.539). Mary deserves credit for her (lion’s) share of the poems, though we do not know which are hers. She also, however, deserves credit for her membership in C.L. and Co. as influence and inspiration—even for the poems she did not author. This essay, therefore, names the Lambs together as authors of the poems. In any discussion of Charles’ poetry, Mary’s ghost is present. Lucas notes in The Life of Charles Lamb that “although the poems are unsigned, it is not difficult to apportion most of the pieces to their respective writers” (406). Yet even in Lucas’s assignments of exemplary poems, we find qualifying phrases like, “which I should like to think was from Mary Lamb’s pen” and “probably from Charles Lamb’s pen” (emphasis mine). Adriana Craciun dismisses the question as she considers “The Beasts in the Tower”: “Regardless of authorship, this poem clearly engages with the problem of Mary’s violence through an allegory of ferocious beasts caged in a tower menagerie (perhaps the Tower of London, which served as a menagerie for such beasts for centuries).”⁴ I agree, though it seems equally clear to me that Charles Lamb would have been intimately aware of the East India Company’s role in acquiring actual beasts for the menagerie. At the very least, as a helpful anonymous reader from Nineteenth-Century Studies suggested, Charles Lamb appropriated Mary’s work and allowed it to be associated with his name—even as he claimed the best of it as his own. It seems fair and necessary for the sake of discussion to conflate the concerns of Charles and Mary Lamb, while crediting both together for authorship of these poems. And even in recognizing Lamb as the author behind the figure of Elia, Mary very likely deserves credit as an influence.

Perhaps given his relationship with his sister, and his station as host for the gatherings of his friends, it is not surprising that Lamb is, in his popular fallacies and other essays, concerned with living together. The fallacies treat the stories we tell ourselves about sympathizing with others, bullying, ill-gotten gain, temper, humor, aesthetics, and appropriate class behavior. These themes pepper the Elian essays and form almost the entire basis for the Lambs’ children’s poetry. Social responsibility—the construction of community—becomes Lamb’s lifelong interest; it pervades his work, as James argues, following his falling out with Coleridge in 1798 over some ill-conceived attempts at humor.⁵ He turns to animals as one means of enacting this community and engaging his friends. Friendly community, the hope projected through Lamb’s writing, turns on itself at and around the site of animal inclusion; it demands responsible members: those who have a real choice to participate. Social responsibility includes, for Lamb, the ability to choose how one will be a companion, with whom, and while doing what. A good companion (who is not selfish and accommodates others) acts with taste, which entails upholding normative social values while seeking exemplarity, and perhaps more importantly, while acting with sympathy. According to James, this is Lamb’s great struggle following the murder of his mother and his subsequent agreement to care for his sister: the “difficulties of fully understanding the nature of one’s own—or another’s—feelings” plague Lamb following his mother’s tragic end.⁶ This complex negotiation between the self and other informs the presence of animals in his texts following this early period, and the “articulations of desolation and loneliness in Blank Verse echo through later Romantic period literature”⁷ (James 129). Lamb radically extends empathy, the practice of imagining oneself in the place of the other, to animal life, granting responsibility. A responsible participant in community sympathizes. An irresponsible participant in society simply obeys social expectations or is too selfish to find the other.

As peripheral participants but constantly present creatures, animals highlight the end of the possibility of living together with responsible others. Lamb injected animals into his social system to break it, opening and hiding behind the mask of the animal the possibility of real responsibility. Lamb is, therefore, not attempting to perform some version of the authorial escapism (hiding behind the narrator) that Hull and James so convincingly argue against, but to engage and to performatively create a new metropolitanism.⁸ This revolutionary vision is generated by his circle of friends in the 1790s, and Coleridge termed it Pantisocracy (a society built around chosen kinship, “mutual esteem and shared property”).⁹ This subjects kinship to the possibility of responsibility: the friend is chosen by a real decision, making the chooser responsible for the choice. Coleridge echoes this move in “Address to a Young Jack-Ass, And its Tether’d Mother, In Familiar Verse” by extending the possibility of brotherhood to the ass: “I hail thee Brother, ‘spite of the Fool’s scorn” (emphasis original). Kinship thus stands in stark contrast to species alienation.

Lamb’s writing frequently includes two types of animal images, those living with humans (friendly animals, speaking animals, and captive animals) and those confronting humans as dead animals. Both types press the possibility of responsible social actions and destabilize the possibility of living together. One such exemplary animal appears in “The Boy and the Snake,” which explicitly addresses living with an animal as it threatens social order when a boy communes with a snake—terrifying his mother. Lamb cannot face living irresponsibly (within prescribed social expectations, without choice) so he paints animal faces onto relationships in order to both traumatize social expectations and to obscure the indigestible trauma of the event, the surprising encounter with the other, outside social order. The event is indigestible in that it, like the traumatic animal irritant, cannot be assimilated. It cannot be worked into the self; we cannot make sense of the surprising animal encounter; it remains irreducibly uncomfortable. Lamb thus invites the possibility of making a responsible decision by invoking the animal other, social or dead, which operates outside the human social order, disrupting the possibility of living irresponsibly.

Lamb’s writing attempts to restore a stable social order in which human life is safe;¹⁰ however, he undermines this apparent project in two ways: first, he effaces the human/animal distinction by incorporating animals into human society (threatening human life); second, he frees the animal by enacting a fabulous reality in which humans and animals can interact and experience each other outside of reality (thereby threatening human life). Both techniques work through the way in which we tell ourselves stories about the events that happen in our lives. Social reality is the result of these stories. Slavoj Zizek suggests that social reality is guided by “fetishistic illusion,” the idea that we substitute (on purpose) a fantasy of reality in order to avoid processing it as it is. We substitute the story that we tell ourselves about something as reality, knowing full well that we are engaged in obscuring and avoiding some aspect of reality (32–3). Lamb recognizes that we engage in these fallacies: we tell ourselves that because we have captured the king of beasts, we are powerful and capable rulers; that we can be friends except for a biting dog; and that if only birds could talk, they would talk to us. These stories repurpose the fable: the fantastic short story operating in a parallel reality in which animals speak intelligible human language with native fluency, while didactically upholding social standards. The fable is a “form of proverbial wisdom spoken by many tongues,” animal and human alike (Lonsdale 403). Rachel Poliquin points out that animal stories work to particularly simplify the complexity of human society: “the beast fable belongs to the ancient tradition of telling stories about humans with animals. Not just any sort of stories, but stories about needs, weaknesses, and desires purified and pared down by the perfect simplicity of animal form” (171). Lamb is certainly telling stories with his beasts, which purify and pare down, but they paradoxically also complicate—Lamb’s fables are not simple or straightforward. They rely on both a cultural inculcation and a willingness to look askance at cultural practice. Lamb’s pseudo-fables establish a disjunct between knowing and doing, between knowing that fundamentally non-human animals are not human and cannot speak, and treating them (and writing them) as if they are human and can speak.¹¹ This is the basis for Lamb’s fabulous new metropolitan reality. Though he is never explicitly writing fables, his prose makes use of fabular parallel realities to collapse the difference between worlds in which animals can speak and the one in which they do not; and the Lambs’ poetry, which borders even more closely on didacticism without apparent irony, reenacts the fabular move to rethink animality by exposing the stories that we tell ourselves about our dealings with animals.

Violent Responsibility

To begin with the short essay exposing the popular fallacy, “That You Must Love Me and Love My Dog,” Lamb explores broken friendship through a “canine appendage” named Test.¹² The title itself enacts the illusory hopefulness that proves fallacious. “That You Must Love Me and Love My Dog” is a narrative essay concerned with the canine appendages that attach themselves as conditions to friendships. Test stands in as a social mediator between two would-be friends, acting as a (painful) condition that must be accepted in order to establish friendship. Lamb develops the exchange between the potential friends and the dog carefully in a dialogue that is relatively underrepresented in Romantic reading lists, and therefore worth reproducing at length:

‘Good sir, or madam, as it may be—we most willingly embrace the offer of your friendship. We long have known your excellent qualities. We have wished to have you nearer to us; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our heart. … We have been long looking for such a friend. Quick—let us disburthen our troubles into each other’s bosom—let us make our single joys shine by reduplication—But yap, yap, yap!—what is this confounded cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the bluntest, just in the fleshy part of my leg.’ ‘It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, Test—Test—Test!’ ‘But he has bitten me.’ ‘Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have had him three years. He never bites me.’ ‘Yap, yap, yap!’ –‘He is at it again.’ ‘Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to be kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself.’ ‘But do you always take him out with you, when you go a friendship-hunting?’ ‘Invariably. ‘Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-conditioned animal. I call him my test—the touchstone by which I try a friend. No one can properly be said to love me, who does not love him.’ ‘Excuse us, dear sir—or madam aforesaid—if upon further consideration we are obliged to decline the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs … .’

In the intercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these canine appendages. They do not always come in the shape of dogs; they sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friend’s friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friendship—not to speak of more delicate correspondences—however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some impertinent cl...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction: Exhuming Beasts
• 1. Beasts at the Table: Charles and Mary Lamb and Roast Animals
• 2. Living Together:John Clare’s Creature Community
• 3. Mourning in Eden’s Churchyard:Clare’s Animal Bodies
• 4. Dead(ly) Beasts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Wandering Cemetery
• 5. Eccentric Beasts: Byron’s Animal Taboo and Transgression
• 6. Landed Beasts:William Wordsworth, the White Doe, and the Cuckoo
• References
• Index