"Beastly sights": the treatment of animals as a moral theme in representations of London, c. 1820-1850.

During the first half of the nineteenth century London grew at a phenomenal rate. It nearly trebled its population, and the built-up area spread so far that in Engels's words, writing of the mid-1840s, `a man may wander for hours together without reaching the beginning of the end, without meeting the slightest hint which could lead to the inference that there is open country within reach.' Yet during this same period, when the life of many British people seemed increasingly divorced from the experience of the natural world, the treatment of animals became a national preoccupation. A succession of bills, from 1800 onwards, resulted in the first anticruelty law in 1822. It covered only cattle and horses, and a more comprehensive law superseded it in 1835. In the intervening period, a number of groups were established, which aimed to enforce and extend this legislation, and to arouse public indignation about the abuse of animals. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later the RSPCA) was founded in 1824. By the early 1830s there were two breakaway groups, the Association for Promoting Rational Humanity towards the Animal Creation, and the Animals' Friend Society. Each produced a magazine, respectively the Voice of Humanity and the Animals' Friend, and from 1832 the SPCA also issued printed annual reports. There is much evidence that public interest in the issues involved went far beyond the devoted circles among whom these periodicals first circulated. In the popular mainstream publications of the time, including illustrated magazines and fiction issued in parts, man's relationship with animals is a recurring theme, and, as this article will show, it was often represented in imagery of remarkable force and interest. Many of these publications referred to London in their titles, and, in varying degrees, evoked metropolitan life in their contents. What, then, is the connection, if any, between rapid urbanization and the repeated attempts to reform public opinion on the treatment of animals? Many writers have defined it in paradoxical terms: it was their very distance from the brutal realities of nature and agriculture and the increasing marginality of animals in the life of the metropolis, that enabled city dwellers to cultivate a gentler attitude towards them. The most influential formulation of this view can be found in Keith Thomas's Man and the Natural World of 1984: `The triumph of the new attitude was closely linked to the growth of towns . . . first expressed . . . by well-to-do townsmen, remote from the agricultural process and inclined to think of animals as pets rather than as working livestock.' Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 22 No. 4 November 1999 pp. 514±544