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A Review by Benjamin Schwarz

This intelligently edited, deeply researched anthology presents a wealth of writing, from antiquity to the beginning of the twentieth century, on compassion toward animals. Despite the expressions of pity it contains, it is largely a history of obduracy, casual cruelty, and sadism. Although in the 1600s the rational and scientific René Descartes performed experiments on dogs that could only be described as psychopathological, a seemingly modern sympathy for animals, and a revulsion for humanity's brutality toward them, goes back to Plutarch and Lucretius. But Preece's compilation clearly shows that an ethical revolution took place in nineteenth-century Britain -- a society that explored with rigor, moral imagination, and (of course) earnestness both the fact of human beings' viciousness toward other creatures and the idea of humanity's obligation to animal welfare. It is an intellectual feat that remains impressive today. (Certain progressives who cultivate a cheap toughness say they can't muster any sympathy for cute furry creatures so long as human beings anywhere are oppressed. Lest they sneer at Victorian sentimentalism and hypocrisy, they should be reminded that many of those who championed animal protection also led the fights against the slave trade and child labor and abuse.) Preece's anthology -- half of which is devoted to nineteenth-century (mostly British) writers -- can be approached equally as a literary anthology and a historical one, because it contains selections not only from Bentham, Mill, and Darwin, but also from Sheridan, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Christina Rossetti, the Brontės, Dickens, Hardy, Stevenson, John Henry Newman, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Shaw, Twain, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. Readers may want to pair it with James Turner's insightful history Reckoning With the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind, recently reissued by Johns Hopkins University Press.

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