'The Common Gifts of Heaven'

CARDIFF CORVEY: READING THE ROMANTIC TEXT Archived Articles Issue 8, No 2 —————————— ‘THE COMMON GIFTS OF HEAVEN’ Animal Rights and Moral Education in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ and ‘The Caterpillar’ —————————— Amy E. Weldon AMY E. WELDON ‘THE COMMON GIFTS OF HEAVEN’ ‘NOTHING, I think, for centuries past’, Anna Barbauld wrote of the anti-slavery movement in 1789, ‘has done the nation so much honour, because it must have proceeded from the most liberal motives—the purest love of humanity and justice.’1 For many Dissenters, the nascent movement against cruelty to animals could ‘do the nation honour’ for much the same reasons—if it were more fully realised. Whereas the anti-slavery movement had acquired a high profile by the 1790s, what we would call the animal-rights movement, which at this point was often little more than social recognition of the need for kindness to animals, lagged behind. Several cultural currents, however, were in place to anticipate—and in many respects promote—the social movement toward animal rights that began with Parliamentary debate over an anti-bull-baiting bill in 1800 and 1802, continued with the founding of the first Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1809, and led eventually to the Victorian era’s increased awareness of cruelty to animals, which, if it did not totally abolish the problem, helped to stigmatise animal abuse as socially unacceptable in the manner it is stigmatised today. During the late eighteenth century, despite its later emergence as a social problem in its own right, raising human consciousness of cruelty to animals was often piggybacked (pardon the pun) onto a set of social issues centred on liberal consciousness-raising about man’s inhumanity to man— especially slavery.2 For Dissenters in particular, anti-slavery, writes historian David Turley, was ‘part of a religious, philanthropic, and reform complex’ that included pacifism, political reform, and, often, animal rights as well.3 Although direct links between Dissent and the animal rights movement have not been clearly drawn to date, the degree to which humanity towards animals harmonised with Dissenting moral and political beliefs makes it likely that Dissenters generally supported increased awareness of cruelty and measures to prevent it.4 ‘Based on the dissenters’ unitarian concept of life’, writes Marlon Ross, ‘a seamless thread runs from practical experience through moral conduct to political action. To cut that thread at any point would be to alter the character of all three spheres.’5 The implicit foundation unifying these types of activism—a humane extension of sympathy not only to powerless humans but to other subject and powerless animal creatures—owed its emotional dimension not only to generalised ideas of ‘sensibility’ and pity but to Christian ideals of ‘mercy, pity, peace, and love’, in Blake’s terms, that undergirded Dissenting morality and conduct. ‘Whatever we do by another’, wrote George Nicholson in On the Primeval Diet of Man (1801), 1. Quoted in Betsey Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 111. 2. William Wilberforce and Fowell Buxton, leaders of Parliamentary antislavery debates, were also founding members of the SPCA. 3. David Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 6. 4. Religiously based public opposition to cruelty against animals seems to have come mostly from outside the Anglican mainstream: the Puritans appear to have been the first to advance any organised humane or theological objection to bear-baiting, and John Wesley’s Methodism injected sentiment and ideals of mercy not only into standards of man’s treatment of other men but into man’s treatment of animals, earning Methodists the reputation, as E. S. Turner writes, of ‘showing unaccountable tenderness to birds, beasts, and butterflies’: All Heaven in a Rage (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 50. Wesley advanced theological objections to cruelty by asking his followers to consider the relative positions of animals and men before God: ‘What if it should please the All-Wise and All-Gracious Creator to raise [animals] higher in the scale of beings? What if it should please Him when he makes us equal to angels to make them as we are now?’ (quoted in Turner, p. 50). In contrast, Revd James Granger, an Anglican vicar who preached an anti-cruelty sermon entitled (in its published version) ‘An Apology for the Brute Creation, or Abuse of Animals Censured’ (taking as his text Proverbs 12:10, quoted elsewhere in this article) was greeted with ridicule and bewilderment by his congregation: ‘The foregoing discourse gave almost universal disgust to two considerable congregations’, Granger wrote in a bitter postscript to the published version. ‘The mention of dogs and horses was censured as a prostitution of the dignity of the pulpit, and considered as a proof of the Author’s growing insanity’ (quoted in Turner, p. 72). Advocacy for animals, like many other liberal political causes, seems to have been more strongly embraced by Dissenters or other social ‘outsiders’ than by the religious and social establishment, including Anglicans. 5. Marlon B. Ross, ‘Configurations of Feminine Reform: The Woman Writer and the Tradition of Dissent’, in Re- Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 97. – 2 – AMY E. WELDON ‘THE COMMON GIFTS OF HEAVEN’ a tract linking slavery to the consumption of animal flesh, ‘we do by ourselves’. This idea of the mutuality between human beings and their social and natural environments was a staple of Dissenting thought and the basis for much Dissenting activism. In the minds of liberal social activists, including Dissenting activists, anti-slavery and the cause of animal rights became philosophically linked, united by the theological belief in the common subjection of human and animal creation before God. In the eighteenth century, increasing awareness of cruelty to animals and the moral basis of pro-animal activism was reinforced by children’s literature, which throughout the eighteenth century had used animals as prompts to the growth of young readers’ consciences. An educator and a popular writer for children as well as a poet and public intellectual, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743– 1825), a lifelong member of the liberal Dissenting community centred around Warrington Academy and prominent Unitarian intellectuals such as Joseph Priestley, helped to shape and establish this moral mission. Her Hymns in Prose for Children (1781), reprinted in many editions throughout the nineteenth century, makes frequent use of animals and the natural world to impart to children a fairly benevolent but unsentimental view of nature, indicating a belief in the correctness and inevitability of natural hierarchies. ‘[Animals] may thank [God] in their hearts, but we can thank him with our tongues; we are better than they, and can praise him better’, Barbauld writes in Hymn II. ‘Trees that blossom and little lambs that skip about, if you could, you would say how good he is; but you are dumb, we will say it for you.’6 Samuel Johnson, disappointed at what he saw as Barbauld’s waste of her classical education on children’s writing and marriage to ‘a little Presbyterian parson’,7 ridiculed her pedagogical use of animals to reinforce human feelings of superiority: ‘She tells the children’, he writes, ‘ “This is a cat, and that is a dog, with four legs and a tail; see there! You are much better than a cat or a dog, for you can speak.” ’8 Moira Ferguson has pointed out that the education in natural order found in children’s literature of the period is an implicit education in social order as well, training young readers as proper subjects as well as moral beings.9 As her work for children and adults demonstrates, education in social and intellectual ‘order’ and systems of hierarchy was an important aspect of Barbauld’s work as well.10 Thus, writing 6. Hymns in Prose for Children (1781); rptd in Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002), p. 240. 7. Actually, Rochemont Barbauld was Unitarian. 8. Quoted in Rodgers, p. 71. 9. See Moira Ferguson, Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900: Patriots, Nation, and Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Political and nationalistic self-definition and identity formation were frequently contested on the site of cruelty to animals. As Turner indicates, bear-baiting, a favourite sport of royalty—which was also believed by the Elizabethan court to develop the national virtues of courage and ‘manliness’ in common spectators—was a target of Puritans, who sought to end the sport by the dramatic expedient of shooting the bears. (The political motives underlying this apparent humanitarianism are expressed in Macaulay’s famous quip in his History of England that ‘the Puritan hated bear-baiting not because it gave pain to the bear but because it gave pleasure to the spectators’—and because bear-baiting as a sport was associated with the courtly status quo Puritans despised.) Cruelty was even configured, in the convoluted reasoning of Scottish cockfighter William Machrie, as a means to preserve nations from war: ‘[V]illage may be encouraged against village, city against city, kingdom against kingdom; nay, the father against the son’, Machrie wrote in 1705, ‘until all the wars in Europe, wherein so much Christian blood is spilt, be turned into that of the innocent pastime of cocking’ (quoted in Turner, p. 57). 10. Order—whether visual, domestic, natural, spiritual, or a combination of all four—is a significant aspect of Barbauld’s aesthetics. Her poem ‘To the Poor’ (1795) urges the poor to accept stoically their existing social status in order to gain everlasting rewards in Heaven.

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