This chapter argues that through narrating the specific experiences of enslaved women and their freedom practices, from alternative kinship practices and strategic sexual relationships to knowledge of the slave economy and its reproductive logic, The History of Mary Prince imagines future freedoms while critiquing white inhumanity and the place of enslaved women within slavery’s rape culture. The chapter examines how enslaved women created and held onto kinship; how they used their sexuality to navigate their confinement and challenge ownership over their bodies; how Prince critiques white supremacy and its practices, including rape culture and the inability of white people to have sympathy for the enslaved; and how Prince imagined future freedoms, such as moving back to Antigua as a free woman, and freedom for all enslaved people. Through this analysis the chapter argues that Prince’s narrative challenges the silence of the colonial archive and allows us to see enslaved women beyond the violence they faced.

This chapter accounts for how animals appear in Victorian literature in connection with two overarching themes: shifting definitions of the animal and the human, especially in relationship to racialization and empire, and the incorporation of animals into the political sphere, especially as they proliferate throughout daily life. Both themes offer a productive and foundational lens to analyze the vast representations of animals across Victorian literature, and relate to a variety of other topics such as care and control, domesticity and the family, class and gender, and imperial strategies. Through examining a range of genres, from realist texts and animal autobiography to travel narratives and the literature of empire, this chapter demonstrates how relationships with animals shifted how Victorians saw themselves, their animals, and those across the empire. The chapter argues that texts by authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Anna Sewell, Thomas Hardy, Olive Schriener, H. Rider Haggard, Mary Kingsley, and Richard Marsh, among others, illuminate the broader implications of extending political care to animals, controlling them across the empire, and using them to account for human difference through demarcating racial categories and structuring the borders of the human.

This chapter analyzes animal welfare texts published by the RSPCA in the late 1830s and written by William Drummon, John Styles, and William Youatt; articles from the RSPCA’s journal Animal World; and the discourse from the Vegetarian Society and London Vegetarian Society. I argue that the RSPCA constructed animal subjectivity within forms of pastoral power that reinforced their subjection. At the same time, the RSPCA’s construction of animals as subjects with thoughts, feelings, character, and individuality cultivated a striking liberalized animal subject that both challenged and reinforced the anthropocentric logic structuring Victorian liberalism. Taken together, all three organizations demonstrate the extent to which animals were influenced by nineteenth-century political thought and affected by governmentality, yet at times succeeded in challenging the primacy of a liberal human subject and the dominance of Victorian liberalism.

This chapter examines the political uses of animals in children’s literature, and connects them to understandings of alterity in mid-Victorian demands for democracy and debates over national education. I examine John Locke’s discussion of animals in children’s literature and education in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, to show how the inclusion of animals in children’s education positions them as educational and financial capital. I then analyze mid-Victorian debates about education in relationship to demands for democracy and show how theorists such as John Stuart Mill similarly brought alterity into the political sphere only to reject it. Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, however, revises the role of animals in children’s literature and of alternative subjectivity in the political sphere. Instead of instructing children to conform to liberal ideology, Carroll’s unconventional animals educate Alice in undoing liberal subjectivity and appreciating the political potential of alternative subjectivities. The novel thus teaches readers that alterity is excluded from the political sphere precisely due to its ability to disrupt liberal ideology.

The Introduction lays out the book’s argument, intervention, theoretical framework, and relationship with previous scholarship. It gives an overview of previous work on Victorian animals and Victorian liberalism, and explains how the book engages with both conversations. It also shows how the argument is indebted to theoretical work in animal studies and posthumanism.

This chapter examines nineteenth-century parliamentary debates over anti-cruelty legislation, and argues that while attempts to bring animals into a liberal political community challenged notions of the law, government, property, and human sovereignty, they often reinforce animal subjection. I use the lens of governmentality to show how the debates project regulatory strategies of liberalism onto the animal world, and argue these laws were often less liberating than has been previously discussed. At the same time, however, drives for more legislation led to new understandings of the law, and conceptualizations of certain animals as political subjects challenged major aspects of liberal political thought, such as understandings of property, the role of government, and laissez-faire ideology. These debates, as they took place within parliament and the wider public sphere, constructed a liberalized animal subject with character, simultaneously reinforcing and reinventing the liberal subject.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.

In this chapter I examine how indigenous South African animals, especially those used for capital, reinforced or rejected liberal imperial ideologies. I focus on the ostrich, native to South Africa and first domesticated by British colonists in the 1860s, and argue that even though ostriches were seen as ungovernable, colonists fostered their lives; as such both animal minds and bodies were controlled by British liberal imperialism. I then show how Oliver Schreiner’s essays, letters, and best-selling novel The Story of an African Farm conceptualize animals outside liberal imperial discourses and suggest that animality – in the form of animal–animal relationships and animal epistemology – offers alternate political models for human relationships within the space of empire especially. Through her portrayal of the ostrich, meerkats, and birds, Schreiner offers an animal politics that invites readers to rethink negative conceptions of animality and, by extension, liberal imperial discourses that operate within a speciesist logic.

This chapter explores intersections between animals produced for human consumption, liberal inclusion, and biopolitics, another strategy of governmentality. I first examine mid-century cattle industry reform and concerns over the treatment of animals raised for human consumption. By embracing notions of animal capital and profit to better regulate animal lives, animal welfare discourse showed how animal bodies can negatively or positively affect the wealth of the nation, depending on their treatment. I contrast this biopolitical discourse with Thomas Hardy’s concerns over the treatment of cattle, and his desire for animal justice and equality. After examining his own animal welfare, especially concerns about the cattle industry, I analyze his novel about shepherding and pastoral power, Far from the Madding Crowd, which employs what I call an affirmative biopolitical realism. Through focusing on the lives of sheep and enhancing them with his biopolitical realist techniques, Hardy offers an alternative ethic for relating with animals that values animals outside capitalist discourses of profit, ultimately positing a liberal inclusion that welcomes animals.

This chapter analyzes Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, Oliver Twist, and Barnaby Rudge to show how the Dickensian novel includes animals in its political critiques, questions the belief that humans have access to animal subjectivity, and cultivates an alternate form of animal character. Although Dickens rarely removes himself from ideologies of pastoral power, his animals often function outside it. Dickens’s animal characters critique dominant notions of liberal character and the character of government, offering a way out from animalizing discourses of both animal and working-class character. This chapter engages with discourse surrounding the New Poor Law and Chartism, and shows how Dickens’s animal characters can be considered minor characters who reflect demands for democracy throughout the period. These three novels highlight the radical nature of Dickens’s animal politics, as they challenge larger constructions of liberal character and posit alternate animal subjectivities within a more democratic political community.

This chapter explores intersections between animals produced for human consumption, liberal inclusion, and biopolitics, another strategy of governmentality. I first examine mid-century cattle industry reform and concerns over the treatment of animals raised for human consumption. By embracing notions of animal capital and profit to better regulate animal lives, animal welfare discourse showed how animal bodies can negatively or positively affect the wealth of the nation, depending on their treatment. I contrast this biopolitical discourse with Thomas Hardy’s concerns over the treatment of cattle, and his desire for animal justice and equality. After examining his own animal welfare, especially concerns about the cattle industry, I analyze his novel about shepherding and pastoral power, Far from the Madding Crowd, which employs what I call an affirmative biopolitical realism. Through focusing on the lives of sheep and enhancing them with his biopolitical realist techniques, Hardy offers an alternative ethic for relating with animals that values animals outside capitalist discourses of profit, ultimately positing a liberal inclusion that welcomes animals.

This chapter examines nineteenth-century parliamentary debates over anti-cruelty legislation, and argues that while attempts to bring animals into a liberal political community challenged notions of the law, government, property, and human sovereignty, they often reinforce animal subjection. I use the lens of governmentality to show how the debates project regulatory strategies of liberalism onto the animal world, and argue these laws were often less liberating than has been previously discussed. At the same time, however, drives for more legislation led to new understandings of the law, and conceptualizations of certain animals as political subjects challenged major aspects of liberal political thought, such as understandings of property, the role of government, and laissez-faire ideology. These debates, as they took place within parliament and the wider public sphere, constructed a liberalized animal subject with character, simultaneously reinforcing and reinventing the liberal subject.