Christine Kenyon-Jones. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. ISBN: 0754603326. Price: US$99. David Perkins. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge: CUP, 2003. ISBN: 0521829410. Price: US$7.95.

Given the increasing range of thematic approaches to Romantic period literature, and the extent to which that literature deals with animals; and given, too, the current level of interest in our relationship to the animal kingdom, and the whole tangled issue of “animal rights,” it is no surprise to find two animal-focused studies of Romanticism emerging almost simultaneously. What is surprising, perhaps, and pleasantly so, is that the two studies, which at first glance seem to be exploring similar territory, actually overlap very little, interrogate different sets of materials, and bring diverse emphases to bear on them. Reading Christine Kenyon-Jones’s Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing and David Perkins’s Romanticism and Animal Rights together is a lesson in how rich a field of enquiry the animal in Romantic literature is. Anyone approaching the topic in the future will need to read and digest both these fine studies, as well as the book which to some extent lies behind and enables them both, Keith Thomas’s seminal Man and the Natural World, two decades old and certainly not overused by scholars of literature. Christine Kenyon-Jones’s and David Perkins’s studies have comparable strengths. Both are carefully researched, introduce a wide range of primary source material, and are more concerned with putting that material in context, and questioning it, than imposing arguments and conclusions on the reader. They are “open,” highly discussable books that will appeal not just to experts, but to undergraduates looking for something to argue about, as well as ordinary readers with an interest in animals. They make the reader think: and not just about literature, but about the importance of animals, and how and why we understand and treat them as we do. Both scholars, but especially Perkins, also make the reader feel that this is a subject which really matters. The greater emotional “edge” in Perkins’s book derives from his narrower concern with cruelty to animals. Strategically positioned through his study are horrifying accounts of how animals were treated two centuries ago: donkeys or asses cut so as to produce open wounds for the whip (14); badgers having their lower jaws amputated prior to being baited (90); calves slowly bled to death; poultry for “cramming” having their feet nailed to a board (117). And much more. It is ugly, shocking, sickening. One readily accepts that the many writers who, in the face of such routine cruelty, took up the cause of animals were doing something important and admirable. Perkins never lets his reader lose sight of this, though he is prepared to expose the inconsistencies, illogicalities, and occasional hypocrisy of those who championed animals. Kenyon-Jones’s study has a broader brief. Although she does discuss cruelty to animals, she is more generally concerned with “animals as objects in human culture” (1) and the way humans understand their relations to animals. Both books make clear that the latter half of the eighteenth century witnessed an extraordinary increase in the amount of writing about animals. An obvious starting question might be “why?” though this detains neither scholar very much. Kenyon-Jones, merely gives a summary sketch of what we all think we know, that is that in the “Romantic era” there was “a new emphasis on nature” brought about by industrialization and urbanization (2). Perkins goes further, noting that “many social, economic, and cultural developments underlie this literature” (xii), and though this is not the main focus of his book, he opens up some suggestive perspectives (many of them admittedly anticipated by Keith Thomas). There was, for example, the tendency of the expanding middle class to associate cruelty to animals with the …