It would be somewhat surprising if Cowper’s animal fable were wholly indifferent to the lives of actual animals, because elsewhere in his life and work, Cowper paid considerable attention to all kinds of living creatures. In his own day, he was well known for keeping a remarkable range of domestic animals: by one count, his household included three hares, five rabbits, two guinea pigs, two dogs, and no less than twenty-two birds (a magpie, a jay, a starling, a linnet, two goldfinches, and sixteen pigeons).32 Cowper wrote movingly, humorously, and in considerable detail about his pets and those of his friends in his letters and journals, periodical essays, epitaphs, and major long poem, The Task. Many of his animal fables were themselves prompted by reallife incidents involving familiar animals, first recorded in his correspondence and then worked up into verse. And in much of his work, he takes evident care to chronicle the particular preferences and material exigencies of animal lives and activities—as in his “Epitaph on a Hare,” which details the favorite pastimes and foods of Cowper’s pet Tiny: “On twigs of hawthorn he regaled, / On pippins’ russet peel / And, when his juicy salads fail’d, / Sliced carrots pleased him well” (17–20).
Readers interested in the lives of animals might be inclined to turn away from a fable like “Pairing Time,” then, and toward this sort of creaturely tribute to Tiny. Or, they might look to a poem like “The Dog and the Water-Lily: No Fable,” which explicitly repudiates the conventions of fable to recount an incident that occurs during a walk by a river. Cowper’s spaniel, Beau, looks on as Cowper stops to admire a water lily, which he tries and fails to reach. Returning to the same spot a while later, Beau jumps into the water and retrieves the flower, setting it down at the poet’s feet. Poems like “The Dog and the Water-Lily” often earn Cowper a place in a literary-historical story about the modernization of the animal fable, which charts a shift from conventional, generic, and abstract figures (of Cowper’s “Pairing Time,” say) to increasingly naturalistic, particularized, and sympathetic depictions of living or life-like animals (like Beau).33 This narrative of the modernization-qua-naturalization of fable contributes to a larger historical narrative about the eighteenth century and animal life—one that emphasizes sensibility and the rise of ideals of kindness with and toward living things, as well as the emergence of a utilitarian ethics that potentially extends moral standing to any individual (human or nonhuman) capable of pleasure and pain.
This account of changing attitudes toward the lives of animals is an important story, which has been well and variously told by historians Keith Thomas and Ingrid Tague, philosopher Peter Singer, and literary critics and historians like David Perkins, Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kathryn Shevelow, and others.34 It is also a specifically British story, which rightly reminds us that the eighteenth century was a more heterogeneous and in some respects more salutary era for animals than accounts of a human-exceptionalist Enlightenment would suggest. It is not, however, the story of this book. For this historical narrative of cultural, intellectual, and affective transformation very often shares a basic and common logic with the kind of Enlightenment critique it counters. It too understands thinking about (and caring for) the material participation of actual and individual animals to be fundamentally opposed to thinking with abstract rhetorical figures, always and only about human concerns.35 Animals and Other People argues that this opposition occludes much of what is most promising about eighteenth-century approaches to animal life.
In doing so, this book builds on recent work in eighteenth-century studies, which has emerged in recent years as a particularly rich field for work at the intersection of literary and animal studies. For some time, eighteenth-century scholars have been generating exciting work on the way that particular literary forms think both with and about animals—by Frank Palmeri on fable, Anne Milne on laboring-class women’s poetry, Tess Cosslett on children’s fiction, and Markman Ellis and Laura Brown on the it-narrative—without quite arguing for the necessary role of literary form and figure in apprehending the lives of animals, and our obligations to them.36 Tobias Menely’s recent The Animal Claim makes this case more explicitly, as it charts the prehistory of animal rights legislation in the poetry of sensibility. Menely’s argument rests on a nuanced and beautifully rendered account of the capacity of figurative language to translate creaturely voice into human language, and so to bring animal claims before a human public. Menely contrasts this sort of “figurative and passionate” poetic language with a more deleterious sort of figuration: the “figurative power to give life to abstractions” (especially, abstractions like “human” and “animal”). Following Giorgio Agamben, Menely associates this figurative power with sovereign violence: “figure follows force,” as he puts it.37 Menely’s approach brilliantly illuminates the poems of “creaturely advocacy” on which he focuses, like Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, James Thomson’s The Seasons, and Cowper’s The Task.38 It is an approach perfectly suited to a literary tradition of sensibility that, as Richard Nash writes elsewhere (quoting Menely), turns away from the long-standing conventions of animal fable to “read … animals as ‘somatically legible subjects’ rather than as undifferentiated representatives of an animal class.”39
What to do, though, with a writer like Cowper, who writes the sort of creaturely verse that translates “the expressive joy of animals” and also animal fables, poems conspicuously organized around abstractions and animal species, and less clearly meant to reform community by “address[ing] us on the level of affect and association”?40 My sense is that Cowper is quite interested in the role that conceptual abstractions and generic figures might play in “the reformation of community”—in writing poetry that makes us think with animals, as well as feel with them.41 Certainly, the opposition between actual individual animals and generic rhetorical figures does little to account for much of Cowper’s animal poetry, even for a putatively naturalistic poem like “The Dog and the Water-Lily.” Cowper’s subtitle may insist that this is “No Fable,” and the poem might begin from an actual incident between a man and his dog—truly a little dog, this dog, as Derrida might say.42 But this dog is always also “The Dog” of the title; it is at once a particular animal and a figure for the species in general. So too, its proper name, “Beau,” designates a particular living dog and an abstract or typical figure (the incarnation of beauty, or a stock epithet for a canine companion). Throughout the poem, Cowper pictures this/the dog as an actual animal, doing what dogs do—running in the reeds, chasing swallows, “puzzling … his puppy brains.” Despite its real life origins and its lifelike central character, however, “The Dog and the Water-Lily” is very much a fable, its narrative set in service of a final moral lesson meant to “mortify the pride / Of Man’s superior breed”: “myself I will enjoin / Awake at Duty’s call, / To show a Love as prompt as thine, / To Him who gives me all” (39–44). Finally, Cowper’s Beau is at once a subject in his own right and an emblem or figure—for Cowper himself, for the Christian subject before God, for the allegorical virtues of duty and love. This is a poem about animals (and about a particular animal, Cowper’s pet Beau); it is also a poem about all kinds of abstract and fabulous beings (the Dog, the animal, the human, the Christian, Love).43
Poems like “The Dog and the Water-Lily” are more interested in the traffic than the distinction between literal and figurative, individual and general, material and abstract—in literature and also in everyday life. So too, and perhaps especially, is a poem like “Pairing Time Anticipated,” with its narrative of an assembly of birds debating whether to mate out of season, on a warm winter’s day. It may seem—and Cowper’s rejoinder to Rousseau would seem to confirm—that the animal narrative of this apparently conventional fable