Project 2

Marshall Wilkerson
E337L
01/03/08

Black Tales, True Beauty

With the birth of the Victorian era came a newborn focus on personal spiritual introspection, as authors like Carlyle, Mills, and Buckley shared with the literal world fresh views on personal morals and self worth. It would seem out of place then, that at this same time arose a new interest in human interaction with animals in Victorian England, evinced by the creation of organizations such as the Anti-Vivisectionist League and the RSPCA, and expressed through works such as Horace Bushnell's Essays on Animals. Yet, in reading Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, it becomes apparent that human interaction with animals came under greater public scrutiny during this time because human interaction with animals is part of what it is to be human. Under that assertion, let us investigate how Sewell's portrayal of animal life in Victorian England evinced a changing social view of the human condition itself, in both secular and spiritual realms of existence.

In the realm of the material in Victorian England, almost every aspect of life was changing. The Industrial Revolution ushered in massive changes in daily life, as the middle class swelled in numbers and social power, weakening the age-old class system's regime on western civilization. It quickly became apparent that fluid thought and readiness for change would be the necessary attributes of anyone hoping for success, lest they be held back by an accession to traditionalism like Black Beauty's mother, shown by her statement that “we are only horses, and don't know.”1Sewell stresses something becoming apparent to Victorian thinkers at the time, that man must think, that he must reason, that he must question and learn to succeed. Old traditions of servility were dying off, the common man no longer had a lord to do his thinking for him, and therefore had to learn to think for himself, or fall by the wayside.

It was with this growth in thought, first about himself, and then about the world around him, that the common Victorian man found himself thinking about the creatures that populated his life. And with a growing awareness of personal responsibility for their actions, men began to question their own moral right to do as they pleased with their surroundings, to question what was right and wrong about their own actions. It is in this vein of thought that Sewell promotes the idea that it was man's responsibility to do right by any and all in his purview, whether they be human or beast. She stresses the idea of personal responsibility for public interests with assertions such as; “Don't you know that it [ignorance] is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness?”2, “if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.”3, “every man must look after his own soul; you can't lay it at another man's door like a foundling”4, and “Everybody look after himself, and take care of number one...is a selfish heathenish saying”5. Sewell asserts various new moral outlooks that are birthed in the Victorian era's novel view that man is responsible for himself and the world around him, and it is within his power to change that which is wrong. She emphasizes the personal moral power of each individual man, giving outlet to it in the beauty and power of such a gorgeous hero as Black Beauty, depicted here.6 Even more importantly, the concept of wrong is being extended beyond applying to just the human, as mankind begins to accept that he is part of his world, rather than simply master of all he surveys.

Admittedly, none of these moral cautionings would have been able to change mind of the common Victorian man on their own, not when the callous use of animals was a major economic linchpin in England. Knowing this full well themselves, the leaders of the humanitarian movement turned to an all too familiar secular power to further their cause, racism. As a nation, England was known, at the turn of the 19th century, as “the hell of dumb animals”.7 English naturalist Edward Jesse wrote that “of all the nations of Europe, our own countrymen are perhaps the least inclined to treat the brute creation with tenderness.”8 Even Queen Victoria herself is quoted admitting that “the English are inclined to be more cruel to animals than some other civilized nations are.”9 It is strange then, that with such a reputation at the beginning of the century, that Ritvo later quotes that “to an increasing part of the race, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, [a] sentiment of tenderness for those of the sentient lower creatures...has become an element in the spiritual life”.10

While this change of belief was to some small extent due to actual changes in English law concerning animal rights, the real cause of this shift in outlook was purely propaganda. Realizing that the common Victorian man couldn't be persuaded to humane treatment of animals through direct moral argument, true humanitarians turned to manipulation. By asserting that cruelty to animals was a fault of lesser, foreign, non-Anglo peoples, humanitarian leaders began to guilt Englishmen into being kinder. The English, ever egocentric people, jumped at the opportunity to lord yet another positive quality over their neighboring nations, taking every opportunity to show their superior moral tenets in the face of foreigner's savage disregard for the animal kingdom. While the means were less than benevolent, the ends were what humanitarian leaders were interested in, and those ends were met quite nicely.

At the same time that Humanitarians were bending the forces of racism and nationalism to their ends, they drew on the Bible, and religion's dominating power in Victorian England, to serve their ends. As much as the Bible is full of references to arbitrary animal sacrifices in the Old Testament, it was not a difficult proposition to extract from its parables a call for the gentle treatment of the flora and fauna of the world. The New Testament especially emphasized compassion and love for all creation, and depictions of Jesus often involved the animal world, as shown here.11 Dr. Jehuda Feliks states in the introduction of his book The Animal World of the Bible that “to illustrate their words or to beautify their messages, these prophets created images, related parables and fables drawn from the animal and plant world around them”12, a fact which made it easy for Humane Organizations to draw direct passages from the Bible to support their cause. It became, over the course of the 19th century, morally and spiritually deplorable to be openly cruel to animals. While some economic endeavors were able to hold out for a period of time against this tidal wave of changed feeling for the beasts of the world, the crueler aspects of human interaction with animals, such as cock fights and bull-baiting, soon found themselves under increasing legal censure.

This method of relying on animals to tell moral stories was far from limited to the Bible by this point in time. Aesop's Fables, shown at right13, was a famous example of the use of the animal kingdom to tell parables, and the Victorian era's writers became positively prolific on the theme of animals in moral tales, leading us back to Black Beauty. With such proliferation of moral tales, came even greater ease in connecting animals to human morality. Black Beauty didn't limit its reach to purely animal-human interactions, Sewell comments directly, by use of an animal perspective, on temperance, greed, diligence, honesty, and loyalty. She took a whole slew of pressing moral concerns of the age and concentrated them in and around human interaction with animals, emphasizing the point that how man treated beast reflected on how he treated his fellow man. Such a connection served the needs of Humanitarians excellently, as it served to help extend the concept of fairness and kindness to animals in a spiritual and moral sense, the exact goal towards which they were working.

Now, ironic as it is that such a noble enterprise would come with spiritual and moral downsides, the Humanitarian quest did come with a price, and it did have its failings. By using racism and nationalist propaganda to further their ends, the well-wishers of the time created yet another platform from which the English could judge their “savage” neighbors, allowing them another avenue by which to persecute and condemn their fellow man, all in the name of “protecting” the same animals that they themselves were so utterly cruel to. On top of this, by using the Bible, a book largely focused on domesticated animals, Humanitarians failed to create any sort of equality among which animals deserved kindness. Even Sewell's novel, as well-meaning as it is, fails to mention any class of animal apart from large mammals, and this sentiment still remains strongly rooted in western thinking, showing even as late as the late 20th century in a passage from the preface of Lulu Wiley's Mammals of the Bible, where he states “I have limited my subject to zoology, and have narrowed it to the Mammalia, the highest of the classes”.14While it is by no means a failure that Humane thinkers managed to about-face the very idea of animal and human interaction in Victorian England, it is lamentable that they did it in a fashion which brought further detriment to interactions between human and human, and did so only to serve the cause of one small section of the myriad aspects of life all around them.

Be that as it may, the few truly Humane individuals of the time did the best they could with what tools they had at their disposal, and accomplished great things for their cause, because in the end, their cause was a human cause. By bettering the lives of the creatures under his power, man bettered himself, a goal held paramount by the changing morays of social thought and interaction in the Victorian era. Men began to aim to be like the Johnathon Manly of Sewell's novel. They aimed to be strong, independent, self-made, but kinda and gentle to the world around them, men deserving of respect and honor, a concept reserved for the higher classes before this time, and they came to see the humane treatment of animals as a part of that overall idea, much to the betterment of the state of creatures of England.

Word Count: 1807
Quote Count: 197

1Sewell, Black Beauty, page 8
2Sewell, 74
3Sewell, 164
4Sewell, 156
5Sewell, 67
6http://horses-etc.com/images/Anthem_006a.jpg
7Ritvo, Animal Estate, page 126
8Ritvo, 126
9Ritvo, 126
10Ritvo, 126
11http://www.flagsrus.org/images/e/13775.jpg
12Feliks, The Animal World of the Bible, Introduction
13http://aesop.magde.info/images/DDailyIllustr.jpg
14Wiley, Mammals of the Bible, Preface