Fifteen Eighty Four

In 1885, John Ruskin resigned as Slade Professor of Art to protest the establishment a laboratory for experimental physiology at Oxford University. ‘I cannot lecture in the next room to a shrieking cat’, he announced, ‘nor address myself to the men who have been – there is no word for it.’ The word that Ruskin found unspeakable was ‘vivisection’ – a now outdated and somewhat unfamiliar synonym for animal experimentation. For the Victorians, however, ‘vivisection’ did not simply describe a new scientific method; it raised powerful ethical, spiritual, and social questions, provoked strong feelings, and ultimately became a matter of heated public debate that had far-reaching implications – not least for literary culture.

Perhaps surprisingly, vivisection preoccupied a range of nineteenth-century authors, poets, and playwrights many of whom attended meetings, signed petitions, contributed funds, and lent their pens to the cause. To do so was to risk critical humiliation. The Atheneum, for instance, dismissed Christina Rossetti’s antivivisectionist verses as ‘a crust of nonsense’ and described Lewis Carroll’s efforts as ‘scolding…and not effective’.  Meanwhile, when G. B. Shaw compared vivisection to ‘boiling babies for the sake of knowledge’, H. G. Wells decried his ‘screaming, wildly foolish denunciation of vivisection’ and slanderous depiction of humane scientists as ‘imaginary monsters’. Yet, the eponymous experimenter of Wells’s novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau,had modelled precisely the kind of cruel vivisector that, according to commentators like Shaw, was by no means confined to fiction.

Why did this issue fascinate so many diverse writers, from Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson to Wilkie Collins and Ouida, not to mention a slew of non-professional poets and writers of short stories? Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture argues that motivations extended beyond sympathy for animals and a desire to address their (mis)treatment – although these remained important factors. Animal experimentation, the book argues, offered peculiar formal and imaginative opportunities beyond a straightforward concern with animal welfare. During a period in which realism flourished, the literature of vivisection was preoccupied with what, for many, lay beyond the empirical: the vivisector worked behind laboratory walls, his feelings and motivations were inscrutable, his victims could not testify, and the language of vivisection itself readily slipped from the literal to the figurative. The representational problems created by vivisection debates – such as that of depicting animal pain – often sat uneasily alongside a socio-political commitment to animal protection.

These challenges presented exciting opportunities for writers – both those invested in aiding the antivivisection cause and those drawn to the issue for its aesthetic and linguistic possibilities. Some adapted novelistic and poetic conventions while others experimented with new literary forms such as animal-centred criticism and the peculiarly popular genre of the ‘animalography’ or animal autobiography. The controversy also stimulated hybrid texts which readily interspersed ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ and thereby raised questions about the boundaries of each. The language of textual dissection and incisive reading, especially when taken up by naturalist writers like Émile Zola as well as a range of British literary critics, proved difficult to extricate from laboratory operations; the figure of the fictional vivisector raised uneasy questions concerning the legibility of surfaces and access to characters’ interiors; the relationship between reading, feeling, and humanitarian action proved unmanageable; and the elusiveness of non-human pain frequently highlighted an uneasy rift between experience and expression. Despite concerted efforts to present writing and vivisecting as rivalrous activities, author and experimenter, pen and scalpel, often resembled each other.

Because literary representations of vivisection fed off and back into non-literary forms, Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture takes in a variety of texts including propaganda, scientific writings, government reports, and non-fiction material appearing in the newspaper and periodical press. It also takes in illustrations which formed a key part of contemporary print culture, and which could also make possible new and often disconcerting ways of reimagining human-animal relationships. Take, for instance, the colour lithograph, published in the German satirical magazine Lustige Blätter (Comic Pages), which is displayed on the book’s cover. A spectacled doctor or scientist lies helplessly bound to an operating table surrounded by dogs, rabbits, mice, and frogs. These typical subjects of vivisection are smartly dressed, and they peer down from the benches of the operating theatre with expressions ranging from intrigue, disgust, and sympathy. The rabbit conducting the operation grips a saw: ‘Now no phoney sentimentality!’, he cautions onlookers, ‘The principle of free research requires that I vivisect this human for the health of the entire animal world!’. As both a material practice and a metaphorised term for a range of stances, attitudes, and representative methods, ‘vivisection’ threatened to break established boundaries and unsettle longstanding hierarchies – including those which governed humans and animals, readers and writers, and even literature and science.

Vivisection and Late-Victorian
Literary Culture by Asha Hornsby