For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement

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ONE AFTERNOON in late May 1667, an oversized black coach with ducal arms emblazoned on its doors lumbered through the London streets, a multitude of tassels bobbing festively from its horses' harnesses. As it rolled into the mud- and manure-clogged thoroughfare of the Strand, the coach was mobbed by excited crowds straining to catch a glimpse of its passenger. Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, always attracted a crowd when, on her rare trips to London, she sallied forth from the family's grand Clerkenwell town house. Though she had arrived at the relatively advanced age of forty-four, the duchess was still a handsome woman. But it was her eccentricity as a controversial writer, her flamboyant dress, and her wholesale flouting of feminine niceties that made her a public sensation-along with her exalted rank, which allowed her to get away with this behavior in the first place.

Earlier that spring, Samuel Pepys, the notable diarist (and equally notable philanderer), had tried very hard to get a look at Cavendish, who fascinated him. "All the town-talk is now-a-days of her extravagancies," he confided to his diary. "The whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she does isromantic." Once he and his friend Sir William Penn heard that she would be taking the air in St. James's Park and rushed there to see her, only to get caught in a horse-and-carriage traffic jam, all "horrid dust, and number of coaches, without pleasure or order." Half of London, it seemed, had come to see the duchess, as a result of which, Pepys reported sourly, "we could not, she being followed and crowded upon by coaches all the way she went, that nobody could come near her." On another day, he caught a glimpse of her coach ahead of him and tried to overtake it, but his way was blocked by "100 boys and girls running looking upon her."

Margaret Cavendish had earned this degree of fame-of notoriety-because, almost astonishingly for a seventeenth-century woman, she was a prolific published writer who over the span of many years issued a torrent of contentious, brilliant, and singular books. Her literary output consisted not only of poems and fiction but also of discourses on a variety of topics in the masculine realms of "natural philosophy"-what we today call science-and philosophy. And she had much to say about the arrogance and downright stupidity of the beliefs most people in her day held about animals.

Cavendish lived in a world where the majority assumed that animals existed only to serve human needs; concern for animal suffering or animal welfare seldom arose, either in the bear gardens and cockpits, in the rural fields and forests, or in the city streets and slaughterhouses. In her writing, the duchess confronted these attitudes directly, arguing in defense of the sensibility and intellect of beasts. Nonhuman creatures might not be able to speak or devise mathematical rules, she wrote, "yet may their perceptions and observations be as wise as men's, and they may have as much intelligence and commerce betwixt each other, after their own manner and way, as men have after theirs." As the historian Keith Thomas observes, "in the seventeenth century, no one had greater faith in animal capacity than Margaret Cavendish."

Cavendish published her unconventional opinions in an age before widespread literacy, when only a minority of women, primarily within the upper classes, were able to read and write at all, and very few were given anything resembling a formal education. (This was also true of men, though a higher percentage of men were literate, and a much higher percentage were actually educated.) Those women who did write produced mostly letters; if they wrote poems and devotions, they usually shared these only with a small circle of family and friends. Very few women dared-or even wished-to see their writing in print, since publication was deemed both indelicate for a woman and vulgar for an aristocrat.

Unsurprisingly, then, for all the public's fascination with her, many of Cavendish's contemporaries considered the duchess arrogant and exhibitionistic. Some even called her mad, including other women who saw her as a disgrace to their sex. (As her biographer Katie Whitaker has shown, however, the disparaging nickname by which she is still sometimes known, Mad Madge, was actually not bestowed upon her until the nineteenth century.) After accompanying her husband to Newcastle House, Mary Evelyn, the wife of Samuel Pepys's friend John Evelyn, another well-known diarist of the period, acknowledged that their hostess had a good figure; however, she sneered, the duchess was vainer about her face than she had any right to be, and her talk was "as airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity." Mary expressed astonishment that there were supposedly wise and learned men (including, apparently, her own husband) who actually admired this monstrous female; "yet I hope," she remarked acidly, referring to Margaret's childlessness, "as she is an original, she may never have a copy."

Cavendish's writing was as wildly original as everything else about her: her extraordinary narrative The Blazing World, in which she imagined another world inhabited by Bear-men, Fox-men, Wild-goose-men, Ant-men, Spider-men, and other types of wise and peaceable beast-people, is among the earliest science fiction. In her books on philosophy and science, she dared to engage and attack the work of some of England's, and Europe's, leading intellectuals, all of them male. Cavendish flouted both old orthodoxies and the new, emerging systems of knowledge that were to transform Europe. She was a fierce critic of many of the practices and principles of the "new science" that was developing in her day, finding much about it to be arrogant, including its introduction of what we now call the scientific method, with its emphasis upon experimentation rather than abstract theorizing, and its reliance upon newfangled instruments such as the microscope.

Bracing herself against the intellectual waves of the future, the duchess of Newcastle was not so much conservative as utterly idiosyncratic; her writings would quickly fade into obscurity. But despite her flamboyance, hers was a loud, often brilliant voice, and in some senses also a humble one, particularly when she addressed the topic of animals. Since other creatures do not display intelligence "the same manner or way as man," she observed, "man denies they can do it at all." But just because beasts cannot speak, "should we conclude they have neither knowledge, sense, reason, or intelligence?" This, she scoffed, is "a very weak argument." Despite Cavendish's resistance to modernity, her views of the natural world, which were considered extreme by her contemporaries, can seem to us today both sympathetic and perceptive.

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ON THAT PARTICULAR May afternoon in 1667, Cavendish was crossing London not to take the air in St. James's Park or to pay a social call on another aristocratic lady, but to make history of a sort. She was on her way to a meeting of the Royal Society, the organization that more than any other institution in Britain was the representative of the new science. The Royal Society had been founded in 1660 for the purpose of promoting discussion and experimentation in natural philosophy, Cavendish was the first woman permitted to attend a meeting. (No woman was allowed to deliver her own paper until 1904, and women members were not admitted until 1945.) The gentlemen and peers who made up the Royal Society had granted Cavendish's request to visit after much debate and with considerable trepidation. Some fellows objected that the society, already the target of criticism and satire, would suffer more ridicule for opening its doors to a woman, and especially to this one. They feared that, as Pepys said, "the town will be full of ballads of it," making fun of both the duchess and her hosts. Cavendish had some powerful aristocratic friends within the society, however, and they convinced the majority to grant her wish.

Her coach rumbled to a stop in the courtyard of Arundel House, in the Strand. The society had been meeting at the great estate of the earls of Arundel, on the bank of the Thames, since its previous quarters had burned in the Great Fire, which had consumed nearly all of old London the year before. The place was unusually crowded, for Royal Society fellows were not immune to the lure of notoriety and spectacle. Mary Evelyn's husband, John, was there, as was Samuel Pepys, eager to get his long-awaited view of the duchess. Cavendish did not disappoint her spectators as she descended from her coach. Escorted by a group of noblemen, John Evelyn reported, she made her stately progress into the house with "great pomp."

Pomp, indeed. For her visit, the duchess had chosen a gown with an eight-foot train, carried by six female attendants. Cavendish topped her gown with a "justaucorps," a knee-length coat tightly fitted through the torso with skirts that flared stiffly from the waist. In 1667, the justaucorps, or "pirate jacket," was on the cutting edge of fashion-men's fashion. On this occasion the duchess seems to have matched her man's coat, as she often did, with a cavalier's wide-brimmed hat. Quasi-masculine dress was modish at this time among royalist women, but Cavendish, who designed her own clothes, put her own ostentatious spin on the prevailing style. "I endeavour," she remarked in one of the great understatements of fashion history, "to be as singular as I can." John Evelyn, who considered the duchess to be akin to the warrior queen Zenobia, memorialized her Royal Society visit in a ballad (just as Pepys had predicted). She looked "so like a Cavelier," he wrote, "but that she had no beard."

Beards were otherwise much in evidence that day in the primarily male crowd. But to the great disappointment of Pepys, who seems to have expected some kind of scene, Margaret seemed uncharacteristically muted in these surroundings and said little. This extravagant aristocrat, so bold in writing, was actually shy and awkward in company. She was possibly all the more intimidated by the presence of the society's most celebrated fellows, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, both of whom she had attacked in print. Pepys, that incorrigible scrutinizer of the fair sex, found the duchess to be "a good, comely woman; but her dress so antick, and her deportment so ordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say any thing that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration, all admiration." The fellows treated their admiring guest to a display of the kind of scientific experiments that were the centerpieces of their meetings, including looking at a louse through a microscope and dissolving a piece of mutton in a liquid that, Pepys reported, turned it "into pure blood, which was very rare." ("Rare" had the scientific meaning of "thin"; let us accept the pun as intentional.)

The society's experiments often involved an air pump, a new, expensive device commissioned and redesigned by Boyle that pumped air out of a globe so that researchers could observe the effects of a vacuum on the object within it. On that day, the society used the pump to show Cavendish how to determine the weight of air and how marble disks could be made to cohere. On other occasions, they put the air pump to different uses, including experiments on "animal respiration," when the object placed in the globe might be a mouse, a frog, or a sparrow whose struggles and gasps for breath were dispassionately noted in the record books and published in the society's journal, Philosophical Transactions. Sometimes the animals were brought to the point of suffocation and then revived; usually, they died. Animal experiments involving the bell jar, the injection of poisons, and the dissection of live animals were often on the agenda at Royal Society meetings, but the members refrained from them that day, perhaps in deference to the duchess, whose sympathies were well known.

The fellows of the Royal Society, as well as countless other gentlemen natural philosophers who experimented on live animals in their homes, were not particularly hard-hearted men; some of them acknowledged, and regretted, the suffering of their experimental animals. Occasionally, a fellow might even put compassion ahead of science and terminate an experiment examining what happened to an animal trapped in a bell jar as the air was pumped out of it, if the animal happened to survive the first few evacuations. However, many of these experimenters, along with most others in the Western world at that time, believed that the essential differences between humans and beasts allowed humans to claim superiority to, and dominion over, other creatures. Animals existed to provide humans with food, clothing, implements, labor, and, in the case of science, knowledge. In the opinion of Francis Bacon, the intellectual father of the Royal Society, "Man, if we look to final causes, may be regarded as the centre of the world; insomuch that if man were taken away from the world, the rest would seem to be all astray, without aim or purpose." All things in the world work to man's service so completely, he wrote, that they "seem to be going about man's business and not their own."

Bacon was not unsympathetic to animals; he believed that man's God-given dominion over nature must be tempered by the equally God-given quality of compassion: only "narrow and degenerate spirits," he wrote, ignore the instruction of Proverbs, "A just man is merciful to the life of his beast" (12:10). But his science required the exploitation of nature nonetheless, and the language in which he wrote about it can be quite disturbing to modern ears. The advancement of knowledge, Bacon thought, required men to force nature to reveal "her" secrets: nature was routinely represented as female, and Bacon characteristically used imagery of rape and torture to describe his scientific project. Once man had penetrated nature's secret places, he wrote, he would be able to master her, to break her to human service-to make her his slave.

Echoing Bacon's idea that the progress of science necessitated the mastery of man over nature, Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle celebrated the ability of new technologies such as the microscope and the air pump to give humans greater knowledge of, and therefore power over, the natural world-if only they were not barred by ancient scruples and superstitions. "The veneration wherewith men are imbued for what they call nature has been a discouraging impediment to the empire of man over the inferior creatures of God," Boyle complained.

Margaret Cavendish was probably not so eccentric (or so populist) as to join the wild and often radical ranks of seventeenth-century vegetarians (some of whom, such as the religious radicals Roger Crab, the self-described "English hermit," and Thomas Tryon, a merchant and prolific author, would have been both politically and socially repellent to her). But Cavendish did scoff at the notion that the world exists solely for the benefit of humans. She would have agreed with the twentieth-century scholar Arthur Lovejoy, who called this idea "one of the most curious monuments of human imbecility." She also rejected the power relationships and sense of hierarchy presupposed by the new science. Cavendish was one of a small number of intellectuals who believed that all creatures possess their own kinds of knowledge, which are by definition limited to their spheres-and that this is true of humans, too. Rather than superior knowledge, it is actually "the ignorance of men concerning other creatures," Cavendish wrote, that permits them to despise nonhuman animals, considering themselves "petty Gods in Nature." The duchess expressed her contempt for this self-importance in her speech, in her prose, and, most eloquently, in her poems:

[Man] is so Proud, thinks onely he shall live, That God a God-like Nature did him give. And that all Creatures for his sake alone, Was made for him, to Tyrannize upon.

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SIX YEARS AFTER he witnessed Margaret Cavendish's visit to the Royal Society, John Evelyn went to see an exhibition called Paradise, a mechanical reenactment of the creation of the world. Evelyn admired "the representations of all sorts of animals, handsomely painted on boards or cloth, & so cut out & made to stand & move, fly, crawl, roar & make their several cries, as was not unpretty." Clockwork scenes such as this were extremely popular throughout the eighteenth century (and after), whether exhibited at shops and private showrooms or amazing the crowds at Bartholomew Fair. In the early 1700s, the clockmaker Christopher Pinchbeck became particularly celebrated for his remarkable mechanical extravaganzas. The "Wonderful and Magnificent MACHINE" he displayed in 1729, for instance, featured, among several other marvels, a scene of Orpheus charming the wild beasts and an "Aviary of Birds," whose song (or so Pinchbeck's advertisement boasted) was "imitated to so great Perfection as not to be distinguished from Nature itself." The machine also contained a dog and a duck playing, fish jumping in the sea, and a river in which swans swam, fished, and fledged, "their Motions as natural as tho' really alive."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from FOR THE LOVE OF ANIMALS by Kathryn Shevelow
Copyright © 2008 by Kathryn Shevelow. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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