95
Childhood
United
Socialization
States,
Katherine
UNIVERSITY
and
Companion
Animals:
1820-1870
C. Grier1
OF SOUTH CAROLINA
Between 1820 and 1870, middle-class Americans became convinced of the
role nonhuman animals could play in socializing children. Companion
animals in and around the household were the medium for training
children into self-consciousness
about, and abhorrence
of, causing pain to
other creatures including, ultimately, other people. In an age where the
formation of character was perceived as an act of conscious choice and
self-control, middle-class Americans understood cruelty to animals as a
problem both of individual or familial deficiency and of good and evil.
about kindness became an imporTraining children to be self-conscious
tant task of parenting.
Domestic advisors also argued that learning
kindness was critical for boys who were developmentally prone to cruelty
and whose youthful cruelty had implications both for the future of family
life and for the body politic. The practice of pet keeping, where children
became stewards of companion animals who were then able to teach young
humans such virtues as gratitude and fidelity, became a socially meaningful act.
Between 1820 and 1870, middle-class Americans became convinced of the role
non- human animals could play in socializing children into the virtues of kindness
and sympathy. This opinion reflected changing ideas about child rearing. It was part
of a new domestic ethic of kindness to animals that grew out of the flourishing
white-collar workers, and independent proprietors and
culture of professionals,
their families in cities and towns. This may be called, to be concise, "Victorian"
culture in America (Howe 1976). Because of its preoccupation
with the meanings
of family life, the domestic ethic of kindness focused especially on the implications
of kind or cruel treatment of animals within that context. Animals in and around the
household were the medium for training children into self-consciousness
about,
and abhorrence of, causing pain to other creatures including, ultimately, other
people. In an age where the formation of character was perceived as an act of
96
conscious choice and self-control, cruelty to animals was understood as a problem
both of individual or familial deficiency and of good and evil. The ideologists of
kindness also argued that childhood cruelty to animals had to be understood
in gendered terms as a problem of raising boys and that failing to
fundamentally
raise boys into kindness had worrisome consequences for families as well as for the
body politic. Socializing children to be kind to animals thus became an important
task of middle-class
parenting. Pet keeping, an activity long interpreted and
tolerated as a personal indulgence, was transformed into a morally purposive act.
An Old Argument
Recast
The arguments for kindness and understanding of the meanings of cruelty that will
be outlined in this paper became part of the cultural "common sense" of middle-class
Americans. In 1820, the most fundamental premise of these arguments, that cruelty
to animals predicted cruelty to humans, was already an old argument. It was recast,
however, in light of middle-class culture's special concerns, particularly a preoccupation with controlling an apparent masculine propensity for violence. Victorian
also incorporated
traditional wisdom into the domestic ethic of
commentators
the
ancient
kindness, reviving
argument that animals in and around the household
were moral exemplars, even tutors. Thus, household pets became individuals and
actors. To a culture that placed special emphasis on feeling-not
only distaste for
but
also
the
to
love-the
faithful
the
maternal
and the bird
cat,
ability
dog,
pain
all
made
the
emotional
structures
the
of
middle-class
family
family perfectly
natural. At the same time, this correspondence
could be interpreted to mean that
such feeling creatures, precisely because of their moral and emotional capacities,
were also worthy of particular kindness and care.
the typical apparatus for socializing middle-class
children
By mid-century,
into kindness was parental discipline, perhaps augmented by the formal moral
education of Sunday schools and amplified by doses of didactic children's
literature. The latter was part of a dramatic expansion in popular, printed media that
helped make the new conversation about animal treatment more influential than
in favor of kindness now
any previous discourse on the subject. Arguments
in
domestic
advice
child
books,
magazines,
rearing literature, poetry, and
appeared
fiction. The arguments appeared as advice for children in books and periodicals
such as Youth's Companion and even in the imagery of Sunday School lesson prints
and picture books. Some of the era's best-known authors-Hale,
the influential
editor of Godey's Lady's Book, and the advice and fiction writers Sigourney, Child,
97
well as many lesser lights produced a steady stream of missives
and Stowe-as
for both children and adults. These sources provide an important
kindness
pressing
means of reconstructing the outlines of the argument about childhood socialization
and animals.2
Victorian
Culture
in the United
States-the
"Eden
of Home"
Before turning to the linkage between childhood socialization and pet keeping in
more detail, a brief overview of the features of Victorian culture in the United States
that more broadly underpinned changes in popular attitudes about animal treatment
will be helpful. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, economic and
cultural change together fostered what has been called a "coherent and remarkably
of
vibrant" American middle class (Carnes, 1993, p. 608). The development
national markets and the increasingly complex and competitive world of business
encouraged the growth in numbers of independent proprietors and white-collar
workers-from
households were no longer
lawyers to bankers and clerks-whose
shaped by the traditional family-based economy of pre-industrial
agricultural life.
As these men enacted their economic lives outside their households, the roles of
their wives also evolved-from
mistresses of a unit of economic production to
mistresses of a new kind of symbolic production. In their new roles, the wives
created the style of living for the family and cultivated properly socialized children
who would grow up to succeed in this changed world.
Alternative
to Calvinism
Middle-class people in the northeastern United States, where the new culture first
became a social force to be reckoned with, tended to embrace a recently articulated
form of evangelical Protestantism. Presented as an alternative to orthodox Calvinism, the form, arguing for the importance of emotion over complex theology as the
wellspring of faith, had been successful in attracting new adherents (Johnson,
1978).3 It also encouraged belief in the efficacy of the individual will and in the
of individual and social progress toward perfection,
whether in
possibilities
firsthand encounters with the Lord in revival, in the social world outside the church,
or in the increasingly
private realm of the individual household. Wherever it
this
happened, however,
progress demanded the discipline of personal self-control.
98
An Argument
Adapted
such as Beecher, America's most prominent evangelical preacher
Commentators
of the mid-nineteenth
century, repeatedly stressed that human beings were subject
to "passions" of all kinds. Varied stimuli, carefully differentiated
from heartfelt
these
romance
emotion, prompted
novel-reading, and
passions: alcohol, gambling,
"amusements
which violently inflame and gratify [men's] appetites."'
The passionate man was dangerous not only to himself but also to other innocent beings,
often manifesting passions as violence toward dependent others. This argument,
was quickly extended to
adapted from eighteenth century moral philosophy,
both biped and quadruped sufferers. As we will see, evangelical
encompass
publications for children found the lives and sufferings of animals at the hands of
uncontrolled humans especially useful for lessons on practicing the self-discipline
of true Christian love and sympathy.
Domesticity
Kindness
as a Cultural
Construct
to animals
the "Eden
also became an integral part of the ideal labeled by one
of Home," a metaphor that for some authors explicitly
the next factor
encompassed
idyllic relations with animals.5 This introduces
shaping new attitudes toward kindness, the powerful cultural construct that
historians now label "domesticity." Domesticity made the individual household the
primary medium for creating the self-disciplined adults who could live the theology
of liberal Protestantism. At the same time, domesticity made the household a refuge
from the increasingly
masculine world of economic
separate and competitive
of
and
a
model
the
world
it
as
should
be, where the threat of naked
competition
was
moral
influence
and
feminine
love (Cott, 1977; Epstein,
power
supplanted by
minister,
1981).
Mothers
Shaping
Power
While patriarchal families in the eighteenth century had deferred to fathers for
childhood correction,
mothers in the new kinds of households
now bore the
principal responsibility for socialization: they were present to study their children
constantly and closely and knew better how to influence young minds. Along with
the greater responsibility
for child rearing, the conventions of domesticity intimated that, as each woman presided over her "state in miniature," her conventional
99
feminine
maternal
attributes-a
more feeling nature, gentleness, and the capacity for deep
the particular kind of power she wielded. Her tender
devotion-shaped
feelings and influence in the "softening, sanctifying environments of home" were
meant to guide family members gently toward the good.66
A "Banknote
World"
and the Other
Although real life was considerably more complex then the conventions suggested,
domesticity organized the world conceptually by splitting it into two domains that
both opposed and paralleled each other. One was rational and hard, commercial,
"bank-note world" that made no place for ties of the heart
public, and masculine-a
of home.
(Cott, 1977, p. 68). The other was bound by pleasures and responsibilities
That other world was beyond commerce, private, and decidedly feminine. A
as well as physical sanctuary, its occupants were connected first by
psychological
their love for one another. Domesticity also drew on the new theology connecting
Heavenly order and Earthly social order through the family. The moral progress of
each household was causally linked to a good society. "Home Interests," an essay
that appeared in Youth's Penny Gazette, a weekly paper published by the American
Union, described this equation concisely for young readers:
Sunday-School
Our home is a little world. The most important laws of society are as
operative in the family as in the town, state, or kingdom. There is authority
conferred by God himself upon the parents. There is dependence-the
weak upon the strong, and the ignorant upon the wise. There is a little
theatre on which all the charities and graces of social life may be
beautifully and harmoniously displayed. Hence it is, that one who is known
to have been a good father, son, or brother, is relied upon as a good citizen
also.'
This formulation
also makes clear the important point that domesticity did not
ordained
hierarchical relations within families, the operative asreject divinely
sumption undergirding
family order in patriarchal households of the eighteenth
A
rhetoric
of
service
and duty, however, now softened them. Kindly
century.
human stewardship of companion animals at home metaphorically
represented the
relation of a loving God to humankind. In addition, a kindly stewardship stood, in
the socialization of children, for the ideal relations of parents to their children and
of men to their families and other social dependents.8
100
Dovetailing
Three
Cultural
Factors
and the cultural ideal of
The middle-class theology of feeling and self-discipline
with
secular
also
dovetailed
a
ideal,
gentility. This was
nicely
broadly
domesticity
elites fostered during the
the standard of personal excellence that Anglo-American
eighteenth century and that continued to define "good society" through most of the
nineteenth (Bushman, 1992). Gentility also affiliated individual self-control and
softened feelings in its own taxonomy of experience.
Advocates of kindness argued that improved treatment of animals was evidence of genteel benevolence, the disinterested desire to promote the happiness of
others that originated in the undamaged, natural, human "moral sense" but that
required appropriate cultivation. Inexpensive books of manners, published in large
the nineteenth century, continued to offer an eighteenth
numbers throughout
with
for
the
"amiable character" that connected "benevolence"
formula
century
that
allowed
do
with
the
to
"true delicacy,"-the
sensitivity
general impulse
good
a genteel person to enter into the feelings of others. The anonymous author of A
Manual of Politeness ( 1837) explained that the best sensibility had "a quick sense
of what may give pleasure or pain, and teaches us to pursue the one and avoid the
other, and a refined understanding
points out the surest means of doing this in
different
circumstances."9
Creating
a Framework
These three cultural factors-liberal
Protestantism,
domesticity, and gentilityframework
for reconsidering
created
a
and
long-lived
powerful
together
a manifesother
sentient
became
animal-human
interactions. Kindness to
beings
tation of the softened feelings that respectable people valued on multiple counts and
thus became a marker of middle-class
identity. For the rest of the nineteenth
that
of
the
arguments on behalf of animals-claims
century,
underlying premises
still based on those
guided the creation of the humane education movement-were
whose words appear throughout this
wielded by the antebellum commentators
essay. The genealogy of their argument for kindness originated in England, dating
this history has been recounted in
from the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries;
detail elsewhere. It seems clear, however, that these popular U.S. commentators
awareness of their long, if attenuated, history as they
had only a fragmentary
cobbled together fragments of Biblical verse, romantic poetry, and philosophy to
support a case that they felt deeply (Thomas,
1983).'°
101
Learning
the "Law of Human
Kindness "
A central tenet of liberal advice literature published for parents in the first half of
the nineteenth century was the gradual growth of infants into independent moral
agency. Authors informed their readers that infants had "natural feelings of
kindness," lacking only the experience and discipline parents could provides. 11l This
view of children as innocent, good-hearted beings was part of a profound change
in American attitudes toward child rearing, a change first rung in with the
Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke's s
publication in 1693 of Locke's
were not embraced by many American parents until more than a
assumptions
century later (Calvert, 1992). By the 1840s, Bushnell, author of the popular text
Views of Christian Nurture, and other ministers who still believed in the "natural
pravity of man" informed parents that their "aim, effort, and expectation" should
be that their children were born " as one that is spiritually renewed... seeming,
rather,
to have loved what is good from his earliest years." 12
But how were young children, confined to such a small sphere of action in the
world, to learn the "law of human kindness" that inevitably led to general
benevolence? Inside the little Eden of the middle-class household, animals played
a special role. Sigourney's
popular advice manual, Letters to Mothers ( 1838),
addressed the question of kindness to animals as one of the three fundamental
for a future
lessons of the "moral code of infancy" that laid the "foundation
of
virtue"
for
the
formation
character.
so
of
After the
superstructure
necessary
lesson of obedience to parents, she suggested, the next lesson for children was
"kindness to all around." The rudiments are best taught by the treatment of animals:
If [a child] seizes a kitten by the back, or pulls its hair, show immediately
by your own example, how it may be held properly, and soothed into
confidence. Draw back the little hand, lifted to strike the dog. Perhaps it
may not understand that it thus inflicts pain. But be strenuous in confirming
the opposite habit. Do not permit it to kill flies, or to trouble harmless
insects. Check the first buddings of those Domitian tastes. Instruct it that
the gift of life, to the poor beetle, or the crawling worm, is from the Great
Father above, and not lightly to be trodden out. '
Parental
Exemplars
on the Alert
Fostering the habit of kindness also required adult exemplars. Children learned best
of
by seeing and imitating others, so parents now had to be newly self-conscious
102
their own everyday relations with animals. Discussing his approach to incorporating moral lessons into children's lives by "the influence of example" rather than by
"exhortation and instruction," Abbott, author of the enormously popular "Rollo"
stories for children, chose a single example, parental treatment of songbirds (one
of the iconic animals in discussions of kindness):
If a boy hears his father speaking kindly to a robin in the springarises at once in his own
welcoming its coming and offering it food-there
mind, a feeling of kindness toward the bird and toward all the animal
action, a power
creation, which is produced by a sort of sympathetic
somewhat similar to what in physical philosophy is called induction. On
the other hand, if the father, instead of feeding the bird, goes eagerly for a
gun, in order that he may shoot it, the boy will sympathize with that desire,
and...there will be gradually formed within him...a disposition to kill and
destroy all helpless beings that come within his power. There is no need of
any formal instruction in either case. 14
Assuming that the parents' behavior toward animals was exemplary, child-rearing
literature still insisted that it was important for middle-class parents to be alert to
any childhood behavior that caused pain to other sentient creatures. Because of the
direct connection between the moral climate of the individual household and that
of the larger community, how children treated animals predicted how, as adults,
they would treat other human beings. The cruel child begat an even worse adult.
This argument that cruelty to animals was a prelude to cruel treatment of other
humans-what
sociologist Arluke and his collaborators have called the "violence
not new (Arluke, Levin, Luke, & Ascione, 1998;
graduation hypothesis"-was
Lockwood & Ascione, 1998). As Thomas (1983) and Serpell (1996) have pointed
out, Aquinas (1225-1274), no lover of animals, explained the presence of biblical
injunctions against cruelty by arguing that their purpose was "for removing a man's s
mind from exercising cruelty towards other men, lest anyone, from exercising
cruelty upon brutes, should go on hence to human beings...."(Thomas;
Serpell).
Picking
up the Theme
It appeared again in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
arguments about the
effects of experience upon the development of what was believed to be an innate
human moral sense. The formula that childhood cruelty to animals portends even
worse behavior in adulthood was given its strongest presentation when, in 1750 and
1751, Hogarth published his famous series of engravings, "The Four Stages of
103
Cruelty" (Turner, 1980; Paulson, 1 996). ' By the end of the eighteenth century, a
new genre of children's literature picked up the theme. Salzmann's Elements of
Use of Children ( 1782), translated into English by Wollstonecraft
Morality for the
and in circulation in America by 1800, used a variation on the same formula. In
Chapter XXXII, James, a young boy, is scolded by his father for proposing to
punish a mouse as a "little thief by cutting off the mouse's ears and tail, parroting
earlier punishments for human criminals. Mr. Jones shames him as a "cruel boy"
and warns, "He who can tormenta harmless animal...accustoms
himself by degrees
to cruelty, and at last he will find a savage joy in it: and after tormenting animals,
will not fail to torment men."'6
Embracing
Even the Lowly Insect
advice authors of the first half of the nineteenth century both shared and
concerns about the hardening effects of childhood
popularized their predecessors'
cruelty, and they took particular pains to embrace all animals, no matter how lowly.
Take, for example, their critique of what Muzzy and others, seconding Sigourney,
called the "wanton sport of torturing poor insects."" This was an activity that
probably seemed harmless enough to harried housekeepers who spent considerable
time and effort ridding themselves, their children, and their furnishings and food of
swarms of such pests in the days before modern bug sprays or even window screens.
Yet Sigourney quoted Cowper, a favorite source for many advocates of the
domestic ethic of kindness: "I would not have for my friend...one who carelessly
sets foot upon a worm." She warned the young audience of her Boy's Book ( 1845):
American
If I see even a young child pull off the wings of an insect, or take pains to
set his foot upon a worm, I know that he has not been well-instructed,
or
else there is something wrong and wicked in his heart. 18
This rhetoric seems so hyperbolic that it could hardly have reflected actual behavior
on the part of parents. Yet when Caroline Cowles, age 14, took a walk through
downtown Canandaigua, New York, with her grandfather (her guardian following
the death of her mother) on a fine day in April 1856, she received an impromptu
lesson on kindness to animals along exactly these lines. She recorded in her diary
that it was,
such a beautiful day I felt glad that I was alive....The
air was full of tiny
little flies, buzzing around and going in circles and semi-circles as though
they were practicing calisthenics or dancing a quadrille. I think they were
104
glad they were alive, too. I stepped on a big bug crawling on the walk and
Grandfather said I ought to have brushed it aside instead of killing it. I
asked him why and he said, "Shakespeare
says, 'The beetle that we tread
a
as
when
a
feels
as
upon
pang
giant dies."'19
great
Thus, Cowles' diary entry recounts an apparently common phenomenon-a
of the
child in Victorian America being brought to consciousness
middle-class
feelings of another creature and encouraged to be kind. It wasn't easy to always
think of others, human or nonhuman. Even as she attributed the human emotion of
gladness to the insects she observed in flight and humanized them by comparing
their flight to a dance or a drill, the girl deliberately killed one in her path. Her
admonition (cribbed from Measure for Measure) did not chide her
grandfather's
of the suffering of
for childish "wickedness" but urged her to think empathetically
another creature. That the source of the lesson was only a "big bug" suggested that
learning the proper attitudes toward other sentient beings and adhering to them in
and self-control.2°
daily life required a high degree of self-awareness
Cowles' grandfather was not the only adult who took this formula to heart.
Clemens, a mother who followed the reformed childbearing practices in which she
seems to have been raised, still applied it in the 1880s when she would only allow
her youngest daughter, Jean, to create an insect collection with specimens the child
found already dead. (This approach lacked a certain charm, and Jean soon fed her
"collection" to one of the family cats.)21
The "Habit
of Cruelty"
Treatment of insects and other "lower animals" became important precisely
because that treatment seemed so trifling (authors also singled out frogs, minnows,
toads, and snakes as innocent victims of cruelty). It could easily become a "habit
of cruelty." That so thoughtless and small an act led to a more dangerous habit drew
on the debate about passions that also underlay antebellum reform efforts against
both public and private corporal punishment. The debate peaked between the 1820s
and 1850s in widespread public criticism and in the final abolition of public
execution. Critics argued that the repeated sight of suffering hardened and debased
both the actors and onlookers who, unable to intervene, experienced a weakening
of natural sympathy. Even worse, despite the presence of a moral sense, taking
pleasure in violence was still a latent human passion that quickly became an
addiction, demanding more and more cruelty to satisfy itself. Beecher argued that,
105
addicted
to the "intense
thrill" of "short-lived
excitement,"
the cruelist,
... torments for the same reason that a girl reads her tear-bedewed romance,
or an inebriate drinks his rum....actual moans, and shrieks, and the writhing
of utter agony, just suffice to excite his wom-out sense, and inspire,
probably, less emotion than ordinary men have in listening to a tragedy or
reading a bloody novel."
Clearly, sparing children corporal punishment at home and intervening against
their own small acts of physical violence was vitally important (Halttunen, 1995;
Rothman,
1971; Glenn, 1984). Alcott worried his feminine readers with the
admonition
that "all the larger cruelties of mankind have their origins in the
cruelties of infancy and youth." But, he assured them, "over all these cruelties, you
and your sex...have very large control."23 The assurance was a relief because
boyhood cruelty not only portended the private tyranny of domestic violence but
also had worrisome implications for the future of the American republic. Sigourney
noted that although she was not certain when early childhood lessons of kindness
were actually absorbed, intervention during "infancy" (defined in those days as
before the age of six or seven) was essential, citing American history as evidence:
Those baleful
which desolate human happiness, are often
dispositions,
It
was
Benedict
Arnold, the traitor, who in his boyhood
early developed.
loved to destroy insects, to mutilate toads, to steal the eggs of the mourning
bird, and torture quiet, domestic animals, who eventually laid waste the
shrinking domestic charities, and would have drained the life-blood of his
endangered
Thoughtless
country. 24
Boys
If children were not naturally cruel-if,
in fact, they had natural feelings of
could the abuse they apparently heaped upon the animals in their
kindness-how
paths be explained? Since children were not evil, child-rearing advice and didactic
children's books were compelled to see the actions of young masters as "thoughtless"-at
least the first time something bad happened.
Master Henry's Rabbit, a small paper-cover children's book (c. 1840), discussed the problem of thoughtlessness
and its cure for young readers. Henry, a boy
of seven or eight, is allowed by his uncle, Mr. Dalben, to adopt a rabbit that has been
injured by some village boys and their dog. The uncle consents with the condition
106
that Henry have sole responsibility for the rabbit. (Because he is kind, he also asks
a servant to be certain that the rabbit "did not want anything necessary to its
in case). For a time, Henry cares for the rabbit, but his new kite soon
comfort"-just
diverts his attention and he forgets to feed his pet, even after being reminded. His
uncle finally punishes him: "You are greatly to blame, Henry," says the uncle.
You would have done better, to have destroyed the little creature at once
when you found it in the warren, than to keep it to perish with hunger. Go,
careless boy, feed your poor rabbit now; and, in order that you may be able
to feel for the poor animal another time, I shall deprive you of your dinner
today.
The punishment meted out by Henry's uncle was intended to foster empathy-in
to encourthis case through a similar experience of relatively harmless pain-and
age self-regulation
through self-examination.
Young Henry "humbled himself
before God for this sin, and prayed earnestly for a better heart."25
Fictional
Stories
in Children's
Periodicals
Stories of cruelty to animals, guilt at the realization of pain suffered, repentance,
and the "lesson of mercy" learned filled children's periodicals too. Often repentance came only after the death of an innocent creature. Forcing a woodchuck to
swim until he drowned, two little boys remembered how,
... he had approached them as though he considered them friends, but they
proved to be his murderers. And then his image was before them, as he lay
motionless on the bank, now and then looking at them with an expression
which seemed to denote nothing but forgiveness.26
At least Stowe's 1858 children's story, A Talk about Birds, let the victims live, but
Stowe used similar assumptions in describing a mother's discussion with her young
son when she catches him trying to stone both song birds and the neighborhood cats.
Rather than paddling the miscreant, she "set out to make him think about his acts"
of the body of Cherry, his pet canary.
by describing the "beautiful contrivances"
Her success was measured by the boy's statement that "it is a great deal worse to
kill little birds than it is to break looking glasses, and such things, because little birds
can feel you know."27
107
Girls
as Sympathetic
Portrayed
-Mostly
These fictional examples have featured little boys. Relatively few tales in this genre
had girls as their principal protagonists.28 Youth's Penny Gazette did publish one
story about a thoughtless girl and her neglected canary, worth noting because it is
so hair-raising. In "Fanny's Canary Bird" the little girl neglects her pet despite the
explicit warning of her father; as punishment, the disobedient child is sent away to
their adult roles, little
school where she catches fever, and dies.29 Foreshadowing
were
the
untutored
voices
of
and
conscience.3°
The narrator
girls
usually
sympathy
of "My Bird," for example, mourned that her canary could not "stretch his weary
wing" but realized that "the wind and snow/Would kill my bonny bird," and ended
her poem with a promise:
By the first good ship across the main,
We'll send him to Canary;
And we'll never keep a bird againSay-will
you, sister Mary?"
Problematic
Play
Although discouraging boys from tormenting stray cats and dogs and squashing
defenseless toads was praiseworthy,
the discourse of middle-class kindness also
made problematic some of the most common, if not always most admirable, forms
of play by boys of all social classes in nineteenth century America. Young boys
spent more time outdoors than their modern counterparts, and hunting and trapping
small wild animals provided outlets for youthful energies in both town and country.
Phelps (1865-1943), the son of a Connecticut minister, recalled that he "delighted
in shooting and killing birds, any bird, edible or otherwise," especially after he
received his first double-barreled
shotgun at the age of twelve:
I was not cruel by nature, and could not bear to see any animal ill-treated
or in pain. Yet, when I was too small to own a gun, I would get up at dawn,
armed with David's implement, and try to kill robins and bluebirds. On the
rare occasions when I succeeded, I felt thrills of joy, unshaded by regret.
Prescriptive accounts of songbird killing attribute no motives to juvenile minds
other than thoughtlessness
or cruelty, but Phelps interpreted his own motive as a
primitive desire to possess the animal:
108
Not only did I feel a thrill when I shot a bird, but another, keener and quite
different thrill when I held the dead body in my hand. The bird is an elusive
one never has him near enough to
creature, apparently inaccessible;
examine completely and leisurely; hence the desire to hold him.?2
The critique of bird nesting and songbird killing also ran counter to parallel advice
that boys become amateur naturalists. Part of the "rational amusement" of natural
history, collecting specimens and the creation of amateur "cabinets," almost always
involved taking life and making awkward attempts at taxidermy.33
Hunting-Rehearsal for
Manhood
Boys commonly trapped animals categorized as vermin, such as muskrats, to earn
pocket money from their pelts; they trapped barn rats or used them for target
practice. Even Beecher, whose worries about the effects of "passions" have already
that the sight of a woodchuck had in his youth caused
been noted, acknowledged
attacks of "venatorial perturbation," and he winked at his own sons' efforts to catch
and kill them.34 Killing small wild animals was just something boys did, and they
were proud of their ability to outsmart their prey. Miller (1796-1886), of York,
in 1809
Pennsylvania, was so proud of his "first Rabbit" caught "by strategem(sic)"
it in his sketchbook many years later.35 By the 1860s, even
that he commemorated
children's
magazines that promoted kindness as an essential element of their
editorial content, such as Our Young Folks (1865-1873)
and its successor St.
Nicholas routinely included ripping yarns about boyhood hunts. Hunting was still
a cultural rehearsal for manhood, even the manhood of white-collar work.
Yet killing for sport-exactly
the kind of leisure in which middle-class men
since
their
no
families
engaged
longer required game for subsistence-was
particularly suspect because it dealt in blood for the purposes of amusement. Alcott
admonished women neither to smile on "these juvenile murderers" nor to "eat the
fruit of their doings."36 "Fishing and hunting for mere sport" were among the
of the senses targeted by advocates of
"exciting and pernicious amusements"
kindness." It was not that humans weren't entitled to kill animals. The difficulty
came when they exhibited "the love of killing," a fundamental
breakdown in
and
self-control.
38
Alcott
worried
that,
empathy
"...whatever
may be the apology, are not most of the animals around us,
whether slain in one way or another-for
food or for defence (sic)-are
or
not
slain
for
Where
is
the
they
sport?
boy
young man to be found who
109
hunts, entraps, fishes, &c., for any better reason...than
amusement to him ?"39
because
Making "game of the suffering of God's creatures" hardened
prepared the practitioner for "rapine, murder, and war."40
Violence
Against
Animals
Represents
Violence
Against
it is an
the heart and
Families
This analysis of boys' "thoughtless"
violence toward animals, and its urgent
that
intervention
childhood
was critical, could not have been
during
argument
inspired by parental observation of rough play alone. Although a full discussion is
beyond the scope of this essay, we should remember that violence enacted upon the
bodies of animals in public spaces was routine in both rural and urban America
almost all of it was
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries-and
committed by men (Turner, 1980).4'
Such violence became newly "visible" to the eyes of sensitized people, and it
may have inspired the search for the meanings behind the violent acts of boys and
the connection between the violence of boys and the more dangerous violence of
men. The deliberate quality of some of the most egregious behavior of adult men
could apparently be explained only by postulating a "hardening effect" in presumed
past behavior. It was a scary thought, especially since masculine brutality seemed
to embrace so many kinds of victims, including women and children. Further,
reform efforts against corporal punishment had actually reached their cultural
limits in the discussion of wife beating and child abuse. Antebellum reformers
could not bring themselves to advocate legal restrictions against parents' traditional
idealized views of relations
rights to discipline children. Ironically, domesticity's
within families "posed a crucial ideological barrier to widespread public discussion
of wife beating" (Glenn, 1984, p. 80).
Thus, discussions of violence to animals were also often a covert discourse
about violence within human families. Sometimes it was not even particularly
covert. Picture Les.sons, Illustrating Moral Truth, a set of large colored pictures
with didactic captions published by the American Sunday-School
Union, included
"The Young Robbers. The Cruel Boys Robbing the Bird of Her Little Ones" The
caption chided,
Harken! My boys, Would a mother like to have a cruel robber come, and
take her little ones out of the cradle or the crib while she has gone out, to
110
get bread for them? Answer this question before you touch these helpless
birds. Has [the boy] a home, and would not he be grieved if robbers should
break into it, and seize his little brothers and sisters and carry them off, and
throw the house down or set it on fire? Why then does he not consider that
the house of the little birds is dear to them, and that to break it up, is to
distress, if not to destroy them?42
In its early years, Youth's Companion repeatedly published anecdotes about the
"maternal affection" of whales and cows and the "fervent" love of goats for their
kids, usually in settings where "savage" men were attacking their young. Simultaof concerns about the safety of
neously both another metaphorical representation
human families and a plea for animals, the magazine used terms its readers would
presumably understand.43
Pet Keeping
and Animal
Exemplars
As the presence of animals within the domestic circle became a medium for
socialization
and as other kinds of interactions with animals were stigmatized,
for
kindness actively promoted pet keeping. The earliest advice on
apologists
"kindness
to all around" had simply assumed and found useful the
inculcating
presence of animals around middle-class households. Now, however, parents were
advised to provide their boys with coops of pigeons, cages of songbirds, hutches of
bunnies, and rollicking dogs.
In 1868, Hale, the influential editor and author, announced that parents could
best foster kindness in boys by actively encouraging, rather than simply tolerating
or even proscribing, the presence of companion animals in their households. Hers
was certainly not the first statement in support of an already common practice, but
it was one of the most explicit in its discussion of its implications. Pet keeping
"humanized" boys and was "a great preventative against the thoughtless cruelty and
tyranny they are so apt to exercise toward all dependent beings !". She did not bother
to explain why boys were such little tyrants; her readers knew the whole argument.
Hale did admit that girls also benefited from caring for pets, if only because "as
sisters and mothers, they must help and teach boys in whatever things are good,
tender, and lovely."44 Boys seemed to be developmentally
prone to cruelty.
his
future
of
the
world
in
an
Practicing
mastery
imperfect, thoughtless way, a boy
would be tempted to use physical abuse as "a trial of his skill"-at
throwing rocks,
for example, or aiming an arrow-or
as "a proof of his strength. 1141
111
A few authors of advice books promoted pet keeping because
of fondness" led to a lifelong pattern of kind behavior to animals,
authors found in the practice a wider social utility.46 Affection
experience of caring for them were regarded as potent agents for
love of natural history and intellectual improvement...thoughtful
moral sensibility."47 Muzzy added thoughts on love:
an "early habit
but most of the
for pets and the
cultivating "the
tenderness and
Indeed, love in any form, and to any thing, is an elevating motive.... [Who]
can doubt that many a heart, both of the happy and sad, has been made
better by the multitudes of parrots, lap-dogs, canaries, &c., which have
been objects of affection."
Sweet Counsel: A Book for Girls (1866), a set of "letters"
directed to a fictional young girl named Mary, noted,
about domestic
life
...if you wish your little brother and sister to have loving, fond little hearts,
do your best to provide them with pets, as you have pets. They are almost,
if not quite, as necessary to them as congenial [human] companions....49
Apologists
for Kindness
Yet animals, although no longer punished in the same ways as criminals, were not
viewed simply as the passive recipients of human tenderness. At a time when moral
philosophers were insisting that animals, whatever their capacity to feel pain, were
"destitute of any moral faculty," a strong strain of traditional thought, suggesting
that household animals were indeed moral actors, survived in the domestic ethic of
kindness.5o
The apologists for kindness could draw on a long tradition of stories, folk
beliefs, and popular natural histories when they argued that human beings,
especially young ones, actually benefited from daily contact with certain animals
because of their exemplary qualities (Ritvo, 1987). Children could learn respect for
the family dog by hearing their mother describe "the virtues of his race...their
fidelity and enduring gratitude."
The children also learned that these were valued qualities in people as well.5 1
a quality
Cats were "very neat" and observant of changes in their environment,
useful
for
and
and
to
imitate".52
Bird
pairs were
"very
boys
girls
every body
of enduring affection and constant attachment, and afford lessons
"emblematical
of love to brothers and sisters."53 Stories of virtuous dogs were, of course, the most
112
common
children's
account of the moral qualities of animals, appearing frequently in
books and papers and as brief anecdotes in magazines, gift books, and
anthologies.54
In one typical story, a shepherd discovers that his dog had been feeding the
shepherd's lost son until the child could be rescued from a cave. Sacrificing his own
small ration of bread, the "faithful dog guarded him like a father, and fed him with
a mother's tenderness."''
In 1848, the General Protestant Episcopal Sunday-School
Union published The Dog, as an Example of Fidelity, an entire volume of anecdotes
published originally in London.56 Even the ubiquitous dooryard chicken provided
a useful, and biblically grounded, model for children. Describing her favorite
childhood pet gathering her brood under her wings, the author of "My First
Chicken" reminded her readers to "remember who used this tender and lovely scene
as a figure of what He would gladly do to those who are weary and have need of
rest."5'
As they were incorporated
into the emotional structures of middle-class
families, domestic animals were described as having feelings paralleling those of
middle-class humans in both range and intensity-devoted
love, happiness, grief,
and mental as well as physical suffering. Beecher thought that pets' displays of
affection could "awaken corresponding tenderness and care" in children. When she
credited animals with "intuitive perceptions of our emotions which we cannot
conceal," Beecher used language that her readers would have perceived as
appropriate to the delicacy of refined people, especially women. 58 And, since they
had the capacity for gratitude, both domestic and wild animals provided a model for
receiving benevolent treatment.59
Masking
and Unmasking
Family Life
The author of the Book of Household Pets ( 1868), which may be the first volume
published in the United States devoted exclusively to the general subject, pointed
out to his readers that songbirds were gifted with "memory, knowledge, gratitude,
affection, and even imagination, for they dream." Pairs of pigeons,"emblematical
of enduring affection and constant attachment," also could "afford lessons of love
to brothers and sisters," while rabbits were "brisk, merry, and bright-eyed," like the
best human playmates.6o
As we have seen in the case of bird families, expressions of maternal grief were
particularly compelling. An "Anecdote of a Cat," published in Youth's Companion
in 1828 and in The Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sport in 1832,
recounted the efforts of a favorite cat to make her master follow her from a room.
113
When this did not avail, the cat brought "the dead body of her kitten, covered over
with cinder dust," to his feet. The stricken man
...now entered into the entire train of this afflicted cat's feelings. She had
suddenly lost the nursling she doated on, and was resolved to make me
that I might know her grief, and probably
acquainted with it-assuredly
also that I might inquire into the cause...and divide her sorrows with her.61
Denial of any gap in either the natural moral standards or emotional make-up
between people and certain animals shaped the experience of learning kindness.
Pets naturalized the middle-class virtues that antebellum parents were supposed to
work so hard to instill. Their dependence on the kindness and steady care of their
owners made pet keeping a useful rehearsal for the social stewardship
that
middle-class
boys were expected to assume. Animals'
responsiveness-their
ability to thrive physically and to express identifiable emotions-made
caring for
them an ideal reciprocal relationship of benevolence.
While the "facts" of their emotions and characters helped to insinuate the
animals more deeply into the fabric of household routine, they also served the
ideological function of masking the historically recent construction of middle-class
family life. Pets today are expected to help instill a general, and ungendered, sense
of responsibility. Between 1820 and 1870, pet keeping was explicitly meant to help
create good men in a culture that worried a great deal about the nature of manhood
itself.
Notes
1. Correspondence should be sent to Katherine C. Grier, Department of History, University
of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 USA. This essay is part of a book-length
manuscript-in-progress on the changing relationships of middle-class Americans to domestic animals between 1820 and 1920. The author would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship Program for College Teachers and Independent
Scholars, the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center and the College of
Humanities at the University of Utah, and the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum,
Library, and Gardens for their fellowship support during the research phases of the project,
and the Shelby Cullom Davies Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, for
suport for research and writing.
2. Formal "humane education" became another strategy for establishing lifelong patterns of
kindness after 1870. Following the national trauma of the Civil War, and the successful
abolition of slavery, some reform-minded citizens turned their energies toward the creation
of organizations dedicated to fighting cruelty to animals, such as the American Society for
114
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA)(founded 1866). The informal socialization
of family life was now augmented by something new: membership organizations for
children dedicated to "humane education" and school programs intended either to support
the parental message or to supplant inadequate or inappropriate socialization taking place
in some families. Speaking directly to children, St. Nicholas Magazine for Girls and Boys
founded the "Army of Bird-Defenders" in 1873, a few years after the Massachusetts SPCA
initiated school essay contests on the subject of kindness to animals. Following an English
model, the organization of "Bands of Mercy" among American school children after 1882,
the development of school lesson programs by groups such as the American Humane
Education Association (1889), and the American Humane Association at the turn of the
century tried not only to socialize children into kindness but to create future activists. For
the "Bird-Defenders," see Katherine C. Grier, At Home with the Animals: Middle-class
Families and the Animals in their Lives, 1820-1920 (ms in progress). For information on
early organizational humane education efforts see Sydney H. Coleman, Humane Society
Leaders in America, with a Sketch of the Early History of the Humane Movement in England
(Albany, New York: American Humane Association, 1924).
3. For a concise account of the principal arguments of the new liberal Protestant theology
and an argument for its utility as an instrument of social control in one community, see
chapter 5, "Pentecost," 95-115.
4. Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects ( 1844; 2nd
ed.). New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859,148.
5. The "Eden of Home," along with a score of other "synonyms" for "home," may be found
in Rev. W. K. Tweedie, Home; or, The Parents' Assistant and Children's Friend. Norwich,
CT: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1873, 34-41. For an explicit formulation of the
"Eden of Home" including animals, who fell when Adam did and could expect Paradise
when it was restored for humankind, see Charlotte E. B. Tonna, Kindness to Animals or, the
Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked. Revised by the Committee of Publication of the
American Sunday-School Union. (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1845),
9-12.
6. Reverend A. B. Muzzy, The Fireside: An Aid to Parents. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and
Company, 1854, 8. The secondary sources referenced in the body of the text provide
historical perspective on changes in attitudes toward mothering.
7. "Home Interests," Youth's Penny Gazette 8, 24 (20 November 1850), 94. Published by
the American Sunday-School Union.
8. Charlotte E. B. Tonna noted that man was intended to be "a careful and loving ruler over
the poor dumb creatures, as the Lord God is a careful and loving ruler over all that He has
created." Kindness to Animals; or, the Sin of Cruelty Rebuked, 9.
9. A Manual of Politeness. Philadelphia: W. Marshall and Company, 1837, 276.
10. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1983, remains the most comprehensive account of this genealogy
prior to 1800.
115
11. Mrs. Louisa Hoare, Hints for the Improvement of Early Education and Nurserv
Discipline (3rd ed.). Dover: Samuel C. Stevens, 1826, 36.
12. Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto
(Hartford, CT: Edwin Hunt, 1847), 16, 6.
13. Lydia Sigoumey, Letters to Mothers, 6th ed. (1838; New York: Harper, 1846), 41,
35-36.
14. Jacob Abbott, Agnes. A Franconia Story, by the Author of the Rollo Books (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1853), v-vi.
15. The first print depicts gangs of boys, including the boy Tom Nero whose path is being
plotted in the narrative, hanging cats, cockfighting, gouging out the eye of a small bird with
a wire, and sexually molesting a dog, among other outrages; the second includes Tom Nero
beating a carriage horse, who has been overburdened by a group of thoughtless, obese
lawyers and the death at the hands of a drover of a sheep too weak to walk. (In the third, Tom
Nero murders his lover; in the fourth his hanged corpse is dissected by doctors while a dog
that looks suspiciously like the dog he once abused eats his discarded heart. Paulson offers
a discussion of the circumstances surrounding the publication of these prints (Hogarth later
commented that he was proud of the series since he believed that it had helped to relieve
cruelty to animals), and a detailed visual analysis of the series.
Eighty-five years later, "Cruelty and the Gallows," a particularly hair-raising piece of
admonition in the Youth's Companion, still used Hogarth's narrative structure when it
informed its readers that a famous murderer, recently gone to the gallows at age nineteen,
had admitted that he had liked killing animals "better than anything else": "Youthful reader!
whenever you find yourself delighting in cruelty to any of the creatures which God has
made, think of Prescott -- think of the gallows!" "Cruelty and the Gallows," Youth's
Companion 9, 49 (22 April 1836), 195.
16. Mary Wollstonecraft, trans. Elements of Morality for the Use of Children, with an
IntroductoryAddress [sic] to Parents. Trans. From the German of the Rev. C. G. Salzmann.
(American 3rd ed.). Wilmington, DE: Joseph Johnson, 1796. The book was first published
in English in 1790.
17. Rev. A. B. Muzzy, The Fireside, 74. See also "Be Kind to Animals," Youth's
Companion 4, 2 (2 June 1830), 6; "Cruelty," Youth's Companion 6, 10 (25 July 1832), 6;
"Kindness to Brutes," Youth's Companion 12, 19 (21 September 1838), 74-75.
18. Lydia Sigourney, The Boy's Book; Consisting of Original Articles in Prose and Poetry
( New York: Turner, Hughes, and Hayden, 1845), 54, 29. For Cowper as an inspiration to
kindness, see also "Stories about Cats," Youth's Companion 9, 24 (30 October 1835), 95-96:
"A very sweet poet, named Cowper, who loved animals and used to keep hares, a dog, and
a cat in his room, and loved to see them sport about so merrily, said, "he would not call that
man his friend who would needlessly tread upon a worm." The Youth's Companion often
reprinted material from other periodicals with credit lines; this story was credited to the
"Juvenile Miscellany." This passage was paraphrased from Cowper's "The Task" (1784),
a 5,000-line work of blank verse that contained a lengthy discussion of cruelty to animals
116
in Book Six: The Winter Walk at Noon, lines 560-567. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp,
eds. The Poems of William Cowper, II: 1782- 1785 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 251.
19. Caroline Cowles Richards, Village Life in America 1852-1872. Including the Period of
the American Civil War as Told in the Diary of a School-girl (1908; repr. Williamstown,
MA: Comer House Publishers, 1972), 61-62.
20. Isabella: "...The sense of death is most in apprehension,/And the poor beetle that we
tread upon/In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great/As when a giant dies." William
Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act Three, Scene I, lines 79-81.
21. Charles Neider, ed. Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by Suzy Clemens, His
Daughter, Thirteen. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company. 1985, 1 5-156.
22. Henry Ward Beecher, Letters to Young Men, 149.
23. "Against the Abuse of Cattle," Youth's Companion 3, 2 (June 1829), 6; Dr. William A.
Alcott, Gift Book for Young Ladies; or, Familiar Letters on TheirAcquaintances, Male and
Female, Employments, Friendships, &c Auburn and Buffalo: Miller, Orton and Mulligan,
1854, 272-273.
24. Lydia Sigoumey, Letters to Mothers, 37-38.
25. Master Henry's Rabbit (Troy, NY: no listed publisher, n.d.[c.1840]), 10. Master
Henry's Rabbit was first published in England. It was one volume in a series of didactic
stores about Henry's moral progress. On the matter of thoughtlessness ("absence of mind")
and cruelty to animals, see "Tenderness to Animals", Youth's Companion 8, 31, (19
December 1834), 125; and "The Woodchuck," Youth's Companion 9, 31 (18 December
1835), 123.
26. "The Woodchuck," Youth's Companion, 123.
27. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "A Talk about Birds," Our Charlie, and What to Do with Him.
Boston: Sampson and Company, 1858. 97, 107.
28. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters ( 1787) Mary Wollstonecraft's discussion
of "Benevolence" did include an anecdote about a girl who killed ants "for sport";
Wollstonecraft stopped the child by "adapting Mr. Addison's account of them to her
understanding. Ever after she was careful not to tread on them, lest she should distress the
whole community." Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with
Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of L?fe (London: Joseph
Johnson, 1787), 44.
29. "Fanny's Canary Bird," Youth's Penny Gazette 7, 18 (29 August 1849), 95.
30. This is a formula previously used by Salzmann in his Elements of Morality for the Use
of Children. In the chapter on cruelty to animals, James' parents are warned of his intention
to mutilate the mouse he has caught by the entreaties of his sister. Elements of Morality for
the Use of Children, 168-169.
31. Lydia Maria Child, "My Bird," in The Girl's Own Book (New York: Clark Austin & Co.,
1833), 244-245. Youth's Companion featured on the front page of its 12 March 1829 issue
a story where a very little girl accidentally tore the wing off a butterfly she wanted to
examine and was reprimanded by her older sister. She repented immediately and insisted
117
on burying her victim in a marked grave, which she would show to other children to instruct
them about the importance of kindness. "The Birth Day Present," Youth's Companion 2, 42
(12 March 1829), 165.
32. William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York, London, Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 1939), 60-61.
33. For boys' taxidermy and amateur "cabinets" as an educational form of play, see
Charley's Museum. A Story for Young People (Philadelphia: H. C. Peck and Theo. Bliss,
1857); William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters, 54-55; Bellamy Partridge, Big
Family (New York and London: Whittlesey House, 1941 ), 305.
34. H. H. Delong, Boyhood Reminiscences: Dan.sville, N. Y., 1855-1865 (Dansville, New
York: F. A. Owen Publishing Company, 1913), 56; Claudia L. Bushman (Ed.) "Life Along
the Brandywine Between 1880 and 1895 by Samuel Canby Rumford, Part II" Delaware
History 23, 3 (Spring Summer 1989), 168, 195; Henry Ward Beecher, "Country Stillness
and Woodchucks," in Eyes and Ears (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 139-141.
35. Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles: The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century
Pennsylvania Folk Artist (York: PA: The Historical Society of York County, 1966), 135.
36. Dr. William A. Alcott, Gift Book for Young Ladies; or Familiar Letters on Their
Acquaintances, Male and female, Employments, Friendships, &c. (Auburn and Buffalo:
Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), 274.
37. Mrs. L. G. Abell, Woman in Her Various Relations (New York: R. T. Young, 1851 ), 53.
38. Alex M. Gow, A.M., Good Morals and Gentle Manners. For School and Families (New
York and Cincinnati: Wilson, Hinkle and Company, 1873), 137.
39. William A. Alcott, Gift Book for Young Ladies, 274.
40. "Nauticus Agricola" [pseud.], "The Murdered Robin," Youth'.s Companion 11, 6 (23
June 1837), 22.
41. A fascinating firsthand account of the kind of casual cruelty inflicted on animals by men
in the name of amusement in antebellum America can be found in Richard B. Stott, ed.
William Otter: History of My Own Time.s (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1995), 81-84, 146-149, 153, 167. Otter was a mechanic, and sometime slave hunter who
recalled his various escapades, which included running horses almost to death and
drowning a dog as a joke, with glee in this memoir.
42. Picture Lessons, Illustrating Moral Truth. For the Use of Infant Schools, Nurserie.s,
Sunday- Schools, and Family Circles (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union,
n.d.). The copy in the collection of the Research Library of the Winterthur Museum is
inscribed, "Zilpha Clarke/from LaFayette H.(?) S. School/Buffalo Apl 25, 1852."
43. "The Cow and Her Calf," Youth's Companion 5,18 (21 September 1831 ), 72; "Barbarity
of Whale Fishing," Youth's Companion 1, 6 (4 July 1827), 23; "Remarkable Attachment of
a Goat," Youth's Companion 4, 46 (6 April 1831), 183.
44. Sarah Josepha Hale, "Pets and their Uses," in Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good
Society All the Year Round ( 1868; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1972), 244. On boys'
"tyranny", see S. S. Messenger, "Edward and the Cat," Youth's Companion 2, 39 (19
118
February 1829), 153-154: "You were unmerciful to the cat....you were too proud to forgive
a dumb beast for not obeying you; and like a little tyrant, would have had her put to death."
45. "Against the Abuse of Cattle," Youth's Companion 3, 2 (June 1829), 6.
46. "Children's Pets," Godey's Ladies' Book 63, 1 (July 1861), 94.
47. Sarah Josepha Hale, "Pets and their Uses,"244.
48. Rev. A. B. Muzzy, The Fireside, 141-142.
49. "Sarah Tyler" (pseud. Henrietta Keddie), Sweet Counsel: A Book for Girls (Boston:
Roberts Bros., 1866), 154.
50. Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science, 395. The most comprehensive
account of animal "crime and punishment" remains E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution
and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906; London: Faber and Faber, 1987). An example
of this older strain of thinking about animals survives in the Chronicles of Lewis Henry
Miller ( 1786-1882). A lifelong resident of York County, Pennsylvania, Miller produced an
illustrated remembrance of everyday life in his town. He told and illustrated the story of
"Mrs. Cath. Weiser frying a sausage, and A hound came and Stole it out of the pan for his
breakfast." Miller warned, "Woman Guard Your Kitchen....teach a dog and put him in a way
to fulfill his demands, and you make him a Moral Agent." Lewis Miller, Lewis Miller:
Sketches and Chror2icles, 82.
51. Lydia Sigourney, Letters to Mothers, 98.
52. "Stories about Cats," Youth's Companion 19, 24 (30 October 1835), 95-96.
53. The Book of Household Pets, and How to Manage Them. New York: Dick and
Fitzgerald, 1866, 42.
54. The early volumes of Youth's Companion printed such stories frequently. See, for
example,"The Sagacity of a Dog," Youth's Companion 1, 48 (25 April 1828) 101; "The
Lives of two Children saved by a Dog," Youth's Companion 3,17 ( 16 September 1829), 68;
"Faithfulness of Dogs," Youth's Companion 7, 13 ( 14 August 1833), 51.
55. Lydia Sigourney, The Boy's Reading-Book, 37. See also "Canine Sagacity," Youth's
Companion 11, 21 (17 October 1828), 83; "Canine Affection," Youth's Companion 11, 19
(3 October 1828), 75; "The Lives of two Children saved by a Dog," Youth's Companion 13,
17 (16 September 1829), 68.
56. The Dog, as an Example of Fidelity. From the London Edition. New York: General
Episcopal Sunday School Union, 1848. The copy I have examined is inscribed, "George S.
Payne/a token of affection from the Rector./ Grace Church/ Christmas 1848."
57. "My First Chicken," Youth's Companion 69, 5 (2 February 1860), 1. See also "Thomas
and His Chickens," Youth's Companion l, 6 (4 July I 827), 24. This story also makes explicit
reference to the biblical verse, Matt. 23:37.
58. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman's Home (New
York: J. B. Ford and Company), 394.
59. "Animal Gratitude," Youth's Companion l, 42 (14 March 1827), 167 (from "London
paper"); "The Grateful Lioness," Youth's Companion 3, 52 ( 19 May 1830), 207 ("From the
119
London Youth's Magazine"); "A Grateful Cow," Yoi<th 's Companion 5, 20 (5 October
1831), 70 (from the "Cheltenham Chronicle").
60. Anon., The Book of Household Pets (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1988), 5,42, 76.
This book appears to be based on an English volume but contains revisions specifically for
the U.S. readership.
61. "Anecdote of a Cat," Youth's Companion 1, 47 (1828), 187; "Anecdote of a Cat," The
Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sport, v. 2 (Philadelphia: J. And T.
Doughty, 1832), 246. In the latter source, the story is credited to Good's Book of Nature.
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