Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 [1st ed.] 9783030327910, 9783030327927

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Introduction (Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, Anne Milne)....Pages 1-15
Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Lucy Collins)....Pages 17-37
Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (Leslie Aronson)....Pages 39-50
‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of Naturalism (D. T. Walker)....Pages 51-70
Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale (Bethan Roberts)....Pages 71-89
The Labouring-Class Bird (Nancy M. Derbyshire)....Pages 91-110
The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language (Francesca Mackenney)....Pages 111-129
‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility (Alex Wetmore)....Pages 131-150
Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and Bewick’s History of British Birds (Anne Milne)....Pages 151-171
The Literary Gilbert White (Brycchan Carey)....Pages 173-192
When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna (Sayre Greenfield)....Pages 193-209
Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800 (George T. Newberry)....Pages 211-229
‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton Mather’s Birds (Nicholas Junkerman)....Pages 231-246
The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of Plenitude (Kevin Joel Berland)....Pages 247-267
Back Matter ....Pages 269-284

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840 Edited by Brycchan Carey Sayre Greenfield Anne Milne

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature Series Editors Susan McHugh Department of English University of New England Biddeford, ME, USA Robert McKay School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK John Miller School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-­ disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages. Series Board Karl Steel (Brooklyn College) Erica Fudge (Strathclyde) Kevin Hutchings (UNBC) Philip Armstrong (Canterbury) Carrie Rohman (Lafayette) Wendy Woodward (Western Cape) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649

Brycchan Carey  •  Sayre Greenfield Anne Milne Editors

Birds in EighteenthCentury Literature Reason, Emotion, and Ornithology, 1700–1840

Editors Brycchan Carey Department of Humanities Northumbria University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Sayre Greenfield Division of Humanities University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg Greensburg, PA, USA

Anne Milne Department of English University of Toronto Scarborough Toronto, ON, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ISBN 978-3-030-32791-0    ISBN 978-3-030-32792-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: ‘Portrait of Master Hare (with bird)’ Unknown artist after Sir Joshua Reynolds. From The Connoisseur Volume L (January-April, 1918): 182 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book addresses the topic of the eighteenth-century bird in literature by examining literary representations of birds from across the world in an age of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new perspectives into the ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning in a variety of literary and non-literary genres from 1700 to 1840 as well as throughout a broad range of ecosystems and bioregions. It considers a wide range of authors, including some of the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and Gilbert White.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne 2 Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland 17 Lucy Collins 3 Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones 39 Leslie Aronson 4 ‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of Naturalism 51 D. T. Walker 5 Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale 71 Bethan Roberts 6 The Labouring-Class Bird 91 Nancy M. Derbyshire

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7 The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language111 Francesca Mackenney 8 ‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility131 Alex Wetmore 9 Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and Bewick’s History of British Birds151 Anne Milne 10 The Literary Gilbert White173 Brycchan Carey 11 When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna193 Sayre Greenfield 12 Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800211 George T. Newberry 13 ‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton Mather’s Birds231 Nicholas Junkerman 14 The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of Plenitude247 Kevin Joel Berland Index269

Notes on Contributors

Leslie Aronson  is an independent scholar based in Michigan. Her 2014 PhD thesis was titled ‘Fictions of Consumption: Novels of the Long Eighteenth Century, 1749–1817’. She is revising it for publication. Kevin  Joel  Berland  is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature, the Pennsylvania State University. He is the editor of The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover (2013). Brycchan Carey  is Professor of English at Northumbria University. The author of numerous publications on eighteenth-century literature and culture, his books include British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005) and From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658–1761 (2014). Lucy  Collins is Associate Professor of English at University College Dublin. Recent books include The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics (2014) and a monograph Contemporary Irish Women Poets: Memory and Estrangement (2015). Her articles on ecocritical topics have appeared in C21 Literature, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and Green Letters. Nancy  M.  Derbyshire is an assistant professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY.  She is the author of several essays, including ‘The License of Listening’ (John Clare Society Journal,

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July 2018), ‘The Purposive Emptiness of Elizabeth Bentley’ (Women’s Writing, January 2019), and John’s Clare’s ‘Dawnings of Genius’ (The Explicator, forthcoming). Sayre Greenfield  is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg. He has been a research fellow at Chawton House Library and has recently contributed an essay on Shakespearean allusions to The Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia and various essays on Austen to Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal. He is also the co-editor of Jane Austen in Hollywood (2001) and the author of The Ends of Allegory (1998). Nicholas  Junkerman is Assistant Professor of English at Skidmore College. He writes on early American literature, religion, and the representation of disability. He is completing a book manuscript on Protestant miracle discourse in early America. His article ‘“Confined Unto a Low Chair”: Reading the Particulars of Disability in Cotton Mather’s Miracle Narratives’ has appeared in Early American Literature. Francesca Mackenney  completed her PhD at the University of Bristol, where she now serves as a research associate. She has also taught as a visiting tutor at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written on the figure of the talking bird in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (2015) and on birdsong in the poetry of John Clare (2020). She is particularly interested in the history of representations of animals in literature and philosophy. Anne Milne  is a lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She was a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany (2011) and published ‘Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-­ Century British Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry (2008). Her research highlights animals, environment, and local cultural production in eighteenth-­century British poetry. George  T.  Newberry  is Honorary Research Associate in the History Department at the University of Sheffield. His PhD thesis titled ‘Representations of “Race” in British Science and Culture During the Eighteenth Century’ was completed there in 2011. Since then he has lectured at Sheffield, the University of Nottingham, and Bishop Grosseteste University, and has also worked in commercial ecology. His article on

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evolutionary psychology and race theory has appeared most recently in History Compass. Bethan  Roberts  is William Noble Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the English Department, University of Liverpool. She is the author of Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Tradition and Place (2019). She is researching nightingales in literature, science, and ecology in the long eighteenth century, and writing Nightingale for the Reaktion Press Animal series. D.  T.  Walker  holds a PhD in English from Princeton University. His book project explores the intersections of epistemology and moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Britain, with particular emphasis on forms of sociability that emerge under doubt. Further areas of research include maps and cartography, digital humanities, Gothic affect, and film adaptations of eighteenth-century texts. He has written on Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Jane Austen, Thomas Hobbes, and others. Alex  Wetmore  is an assistant professor in the English Department at University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave, 2013), and his research focuses on sites where machines and machine-­like phenomena intersect with emotion in the 1700s.

List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4

Isaac Cruikshank. Fellow Feeling. 1801. Print on wove paper, 23 × 28 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 134 The Gouty Husband and His Young Wife. 1760. Etching on laid paper, 13 × 21 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 143 High Life at Noon. 1769. Etching with engraving, 23 × 33 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)144 Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 1 of the History of British Birds. 1797. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 156 Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 2 of the History of British Birds. 1804. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 157 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Golden Eagle’. From History of British Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 161 Thomas Bewick. ‘The Yellow Wagtail’. From History of British Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 191. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) 162

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Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6

Thomas Bewick. ‘The Redstart’. From History of British Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 209. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto) Thomas Bewick. ‘Tailpiece’. From History of British Birds, vol. 2 (1804), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction Brycchan Carey, Sayre Greenfield, and Anne Milne

Birds and words: of all the attributes birds have—song, colour, flavour, and those distinctive modified scales, feathers—one thing they do not have, except by human imposition, is words. This book is about that imposition—about the conjunction of two very different sorts of species at a time when their relationship was changing drastically. The chapters in this volume map out many aspects of that change. Some focus on a single species, or even an individual bird. Others consider literary representations of birds more broadly or alongside other forms of writing about nature. All explore the tension in literature of this period between a utilitarian view of birds B. Carey (*) Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. Greenfield Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Greensburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Milne Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_1

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and the trend towards granting birds their own ontological status. That is, birds move from serving mankind (literally, metaphorically, or even spiritually) to birds having their own independent existence that humans can perceive, sympathise with, rhapsodise about, or categorise, but that is indeed separate. One might say that birds start as feathered extensions of human concerns but, paradoxically at a time of accelerating scientific understanding, become a highly visible and audible way for the eighteenth century to grasp, a little, its own incomprehension of the natural world. From a modern point of view, the most significant development of the eighteenth century so far as changing attitudes to birds is concerned is the scientific one. The view of birds as part of God’s creation maintains itself in this period, but, as the details of ornithology accumulate, the power of birds to illustrate divine power and ingenuity becomes less foregrounded among the details of avian life. Literature, by nature conservative in its preservation of metaphoric applications of birds and its repetition of avian motifs, may seem somewhat detached from this movement. Pre-Christian and early Christian applications of bird images and medieval motifs repeat themselves, but with an increasing difference that makes it harder and harder, as the century proceeds, to dissolve the birds into their metaphors. Birds gain an everincreasing life of their own, not just part of the divine world or the human world, but with an existence in the natural world that demands increasing attention. That natural world, too, becomes increasingly dynamic in the avian-enhanced view, not existing in the same state throughout human experience, but changing by its own rhythms and with human interference. Inevitably, literature is called to account. For example, in 1777, John Aikin urges studious poetic engagement with natural history in An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. He praises James Thomson as the only ‘painter of rural beauty’ since Theocritus to have ‘look[ed] abroad into the face of nature’.1 Despite this anthropomorphic metaphor, Aikin meticulously documents a series of erroneous literary renderings of animal behaviours and natural phenomena, pointing out the disfiguring effects of figurative language. Aikin is well aware that his call is further compromised by the creative impulses of some self-styled natural historians. In one example, he specifically points to Oliver Goldsmith, suggesting that Goldsmith is ‘a Naturalist only of the Bookseller’s making [who] has many descriptions in his History of Animated Nature that are wrought with peculiar warmth of fancy and strength of colouring’.2 While Aikin lands firmly on the side of science informing literature, his admonishment of Goldsmith invites greater critical engagement with the experiential

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processes and underlying practices of representing nature. Such an ecocritical turn at the end of the eighteenth century points to the complexity of unpacking and engaging with literary relationships with birds. The aim of this collection is both to detail bird-human interactions as they were experienced in the eighteenth century and to join a complementary conversation with other recent animal studies, ecocritical, and ecofeminist monographs and collections that focus on British and American cultures of nature before 1900. To that end, this collection enacts the dynamic movement from what Lawrence Buell calls ‘first-wave ecocriticism’, which tends towards identifying and celebrating representations of nature in literary works, to what he calls ‘second-wave ecocriticism’, a development in the discipline that enacts greater scepticism and critical engagement with the relationships between environmental science, environmental political ‘movements’, and literary and cultural products.3 While all of the chapters in this collection can be described as ecocritical, some do the ‘first-wave’ work of identifying (and indeed celebrating) representations of birds in eighteenth-­century literature, while others, especially those by Collins  (Chap. 2), Aronson  (Chap. 3), Derbyshire  (Chap. 6), Milne  (Chap. 9), and Newberry (Chap. 12), engage directly with issues current in animal studies, ecofeminism, bioregionalism, and intersectional analysis. What all the chapters in the collection enthusiastically respond to is the ‘largely untapped’ potential ‘for ecocritical approaches to [mostly] British literature between 1660 and 1800’ forcefully underlined by Christopher Hitt in his 2004 essay, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’.4 If broad ecocritical studies of the long eighteenth century remain scarce, critical literature dealing specifically with birds in this period is even sparser, despite the appearance in recent years of a small number of important interventions from the wider perspective of animal studies. There are, in fact, few book-length studies of birds in the literature of any period, and none that the editors are aware of that specifically address the eighteenth century. Of those that consider the bird in literature more generally, most are aimed at a popular audience, often simply anthologising poetry and quotations from longer works. A small number have attempted to synthesise the contributions of birds to British culture more broadly. Of these, Edward A. Armstrong’s The Life and Lore of the Bird in Nature, Art, Myth, and Literature (1975), Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey’s Birds Britannica (2005), and Cocker’s Birds and People (2013) have been most successful, but all include eighteenth-century material alongside material from the whole of British cultural history and are often stronger on

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folklore than literature (Armstrong also contributed the important Folklore of Birds to the New Naturalists series in 1958). Leonard Lutwack’s Birds in Literature (1994) remains the best-known general scholarly study but is not strong on eighteenth-century literature. Several books deal with birds in the literature of Romanticism, at least in passing, including David Perkins’s Romanticism and Animal Rights (2003), Dewey W.  Hall’s, Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789–1912 (2014), and, less convincingly, Thomas C. Gannon’s Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (2009). In addition, there have been several studies of birds in the poetry of John Clare, most notably Eric Robinson and Richard Fitter’s John Clare’s Birds (1982). At the other end of the eighteenth century, there are also a handful of studies of the bird in medieval and early modern literature including, predictably, several that deal with birds in Shakespeare. Studies of animals in eighteenth-century culture are nevertheless on the increase, although important recent books such as Nathaniel Wolloch’s Subjugated Animals: Animals And Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (2006) and Laura Brown’s Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (2010) have been distinctly mammalian and mostly disregard birds. A 2010 special issue of The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, edited by Glynis Ridley and containing fifteen fine essays on eighteenth-­ century animals, finds room for only one essay that discuses birds any more than in passing—an essay on the poetry of William Cowper by Conrad Brunström and Katherine Turner. In Tobias Menely’s important The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (2015), however, birds appear as a minor but consistent theme throughout, as they do in Anne Milne’s ‘Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry (2008) and in John Morillo’s, The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature Between Descartes and Darwin (2018), particularly in his reading of the bird poetry of William Cowper. Heather Keenleyside’s Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (2016) contains a valuable analysis of parrots and other speaking birds in the philosophy of John Locke and the literature of Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne. Perhaps the most important recent discussion of eighteenth-­ century literary birds can be found in Ingrid H.  Tague’s

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Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2015), although her illuminating discussion of the practical and moral implications of caging and buying birds of course deals with the animals as pets, rather than in the wild. Overall, therefore, while some work has been done, there nevertheless remains much potential for further investigation, both of eighteenth-century birds and of eighteenth-century animals more broadly. The primary question posed by most recent literary animal studies, albeit often framed in complex and highly theorised terms, is simply what do animals signify in human discourse? It is readily apparent that representations of birds have always had a role in literature (and culture more broadly) as similes and metaphors for attributes such as speed, unboundedness, or keen-sightedness, or as symbols for peace, wisdom, or the soul. In this way, argues one school of thought, literature appropriates animals as metaphors to serve narrowly human interests, needs, and desires— much as animals themselves are exploited as food, as beasts of burden, or as captive companions. Posthumanist analyses ask us to consider, or attempt to consider, animals on their own terms and with their own interests, needs, and desires. Some scholars of eighteenth-century literature ask, however, how these patterns of signification are negotiated in a period which sought to extend the boundaries of sympathy through discourses of sentiment and sensibility while simultaneously asserting the idea of the interrelatedness of all living things through comparative investigation of anatomy, physiology, and taxonomy. Birds, indeed all animals, come in and out of focus in recent criticism as ideas, metaphors, symbols on the one hand and as autonomous living beings on the other. ‘Rhetorical conventions’, argues Heather Keenleyside, ‘make real-world claims’ while animal metaphors are less about ‘changing things to persons’ and more about restoring ‘an original animality’. Eighteenth-century writers, she suggests, increasingly rejected the Cartesian notion of animals as machines, and instead directly compared their own experiences to those of animals. ‘The possibility that animals are people like me’, she contends, ‘is one that eighteenth-­century writers repeatedly register by way of the figure of personification’.5 Tobias Menely argues ‘for an understanding of sensibility, and particularly of the dynamics of sympathy, as oriented around questions of communication’. The key is the eighteenth-century’s ‘interest in the thorny problem of conceptualising the relation of natural signs (such as “countenances, gestures, voices, and sounds”) to instituted signs (arbitrary, conventional, and symbolic)’.6 As Keenleyside shows at length,

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speaking birds such as parrots and starlings challenged any simple dichotomy between the natural and the instituted sign, and forced eighteenth-­ century writers to question what constituted ‘personhood’ itself. As Nancy M. Derbyshire puts it in Chap. 6 of this collection, ‘at the heart of this debate between posthumanism and humanism is the question of whether animal figuration is exclusively anthropomorphic’. The authors whose chapters make up this collection pay attention to these and other recent developments in animal studies, but just as often approach the texts from the critical position of eighteenth-century literary history. This is perhaps unavoidable since scholarly discussion of birds in the literature of this period is scarce, whereas approaches grounded in close reading, historicism, and cultural materialism are numerous. But even these more traditional approaches can have much to say when turned towards new objects of attention. In this collection, we consider a close reading of a poem about a nightingale or a study of an ornithologist’s literary sources and influences of as much value as a highly theorised ecocritical study of avian semiotics. Indeed, while poets and scholars have asked what birds mean, most people simply ask what are they good for? What uses do they have? The answers to this question run from issues of selfishness to salvation. That is, as eighteenth-century writers remind us time and again, birds can serve as food, as tools, as physical ornaments, as ornaments of language, and as connections to the divine. They can connect humans with the state of their environment or detach them from that environment. Some chapters collected here, especially those by Aronson (Chap. 3), Greenfield (Chap. 11), and Berland (Chap. 14), consider birds as something that humans ingest. Sustenance or taste, however, does not fully explain the literary uses of birds as food—that is, even this most utilitarian of attitudes to birds is not entirely so. A taste of the wild adds savour because the birds can be more difficult to obtain. This attitude was established before the long eighteenth century, as in Ben Jonson’s ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’:         with a short-legged hen,      If we can get her, full of eggs, and then Lemons and wine for sauce …. ……………………………………… And though fowl, now, be scarce, yet there are clerks,      The sky not falling, think we may have larks. I’ll tell you of more, and lie, so you will come:      Of partridge, pheasant, woodcock, of which some

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May yet be there; and godwit, if we can,      Knat, rail, and ruff, too.7

All fowl, those of the farm and those of the fields and mudflats, are food for Jonson’s table. Yet here the merely speculative wild birds seem greater attractions for the guests than the chicken. In eighteenth-century literature, that added menu value of wild birds grows—and also grows more problematic. Jonson’s birds fall from the sky and simply appear on the bill of fare. Eighteenth-century literary texts often emphasise the hunting of birds, much more literally than the metaphoric uses of trapping in the Renaissance, such as Polonius’s ‘springes to catch woodcocks’ (Hamlet 2.3.115). The added value in many of these texts is the human effort, and that brings with it moral concerns, ranging from the destruction of species to the callous killing of individual birds. And yet, even the most sentimental of eighteenth-century poets and protagonists are found hunting. The narrator of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling is introduced with a gun in his hand and a dog at his side in pursuit of gamebirds.8 William Cowper, perhaps the poet most sympathetic to birds as autonomous, feeling beings, offers a dialogue between himself and his spaniel Beau, admonishing the dog for killing a young bird, not because birds should not be killed but simply because it was neither a pest nor a gamebird: Nor was he of the thievish sort,   Or one whom blood allures, But innocent was all his sport   Whom you have torn for yours.9

Beau’s defence is that ‘’Twas nature, sir, whose strong behest/Impell’d me to the deed’. That poets and men of feeling should keep dogs for pointing, flushing, and retrieving gamebirds is presented as equally natural—although the fashion for hawking, a medieval sport, was decidedly on the decline in the eighteenth century. In fact, the main utility of birds for literature has always been illustrating human concerns, with birds functioning as metaphors, as investigated in the chapters of Walker (Chap. 4), Roberts (Chap. 5), Derbyshire (Chap. 6), and Newberry (Chap. 12). The longevity of such metaphors, indeed, becomes a source of aesthetic complaint in the later eighteenth century, as Greenfield’s chapter notes (Chap. 11), and it is certainly true that doves and nightingales continue to represent love and falcons and eagles

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continue to perch at the top of the human social order. The metaphors of the eighteenth century, however, are not exactly continuations of those from earlier periods because the relationship of humans to birds has changed. In the eighteenth century, writers are more aware of the effort of mankind to modify the avian world, even when read metaphorically, by shooting doves, banishing eagles to remote regions, and identifying more strongly and personally with the nightingales. The natural order cannot be a neutral model for society or individuals because eighteenth-century writers are more aware than were previous generations that humans shape their environment. Eighteenth-century bird metaphors frequently extend into the metonymies of the birds, their associations rather than their features. That is, the situations surrounding the birds themselves in their environments often come to control the interpretations of the birds, not the resemblance of characteristics in the birds to those in types of humans. Derbyshire’s chapter (Chap. 6) illustrates how the English robin’s surroundings, in gardens and villages, and its non-migratory habits, more than the features of the bird itself, make the bird suitable as an emblem of the labouring-class poets. Here and elsewhere, the voices of birds inspire comparisons with human speech: poets often invoke likenesses of skylarks and nightingales to themselves. Voices of birds and their human equivalents feature in a number of chapters, including those by Roberts (Chap. 5) on the nightingale and Mackenney (Chap. 7) on cage birds. However, when the gift of speech is passed on to parrots, the comparative effect is often less pleasant, as Newberry’s chapter (Chap. 12)  on racial denigration and Wetmore’s (Chap. 8) on mechanical copying investigate. Collins (Chap. 2), however, finds a parrot that was considered as superior to humans in some respects, but then the lory is a non-speaking variety. That species does not confront us with ourselves but points to something beyond human experience. Birds, indeed, connect people to what many believe lies beyond the human domain, that is, with the divine. The religious worldview, although not universal, was widespread in the eighteenth century and, while increasingly challenged by scientific conceptions of the cosmos, movements such as Methodism, Evangelicalism, and the Great Awakening showed that religious faith was far from in decline. Birds function in Christian discourse in two main ways: as metaphors, with flying birds and particularly the skylark and the dove representing the ascending soul, and as examples, with the plenitude and variety of birds indicating to believers the greatness of God’s creation. In metaphors, those avian features that more blatantly reflect human features tend to turn birds by analogy into us: the visually and

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vocally obvious courtship displays can stand in for human courtship, birdsong can stand in for poetic expression, and the pecking order (or preying order) can substitute for human social order. When the avian feature has no clear human equivalent—the birds’ wings, for instance—the useful metaphor must stretch humans beyond themselves. Of course, morphologically, the wing is analogous to the arm, but the power of directed flight for the eighteenth century exceeded human experience. Thus, that avian aspect must play as a metaphor for the imagination or the soul rising to God or something outside of normal human experience. As examples, birds considered collectively could be considered by religious observers to connect the soul to the divine by showing the power and the imagination of the divine spirit to fill the world with such a variety of dazzling creatures, a sense ever-growing during the eighteenth century as more and more of the world was opened up to ornithological exploration. The chapters by Collins (Chap. 2), Walker (Chap. 4), and, in particular, Junkerman (Chap. 13) explore birds as a way of providing links to nature’s God. After all, many of the most prominent ornithologists of the eighteenth century, from John Ray (1627–1705) to Gilbert White (1720–1793), were clergymen. If birds inspired some observers to reach for the divine, they prompted others to search within themselves (although one might argue that using birds to seek a connection to divinity still reflects the human gaze at birds back upon itself). In the eighteenth century, as Menely and others have noted, birds inspired, created, or were at least the occasion for articulating particular sorts of emotion within the mode of sensibility. To create sustained feelings of sympathy towards birds, eighteenth-century culture needed face-to-face opportunities of observation—birds in the fields fleeing human approach will not do. Also, such sympathy required birds in situations that evoked pity. One can, indeed, find expressions of pity for captured or dead birds in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britain, but the situations are often ones of trapping birds—the liming of birds by fowlers—or images of birds captured or killed by hawks or cats. In these cases, people may mark the fall of sparrows, but the suffering of the birds is not prolonged—death follows swiftly. The clamour is nonetheless considerable in the most famous instance, that depicted as coming from young Jane Scroop in John Skelton’s Philip Sparrow, written during the first decade of the sixteenth century: Whan I remember again How my Philip was slain, Never half the pain

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Was between you twain, Pyramus and Thisbe, As than befell to me. I wept and wailed, The tears down hailed; But nothing it availed To call Philip again, Whom Gib, our cat, hath slain.10

Though Jane’s sorrow appears at considerable length, it is hard to take this voiced concern entirely seriously, and Skelton, as the poet, is much more diverted with displaying his wide reading in classical and English literature, as well as natural history, with a long list of birds attending the sparrow’s funeral service. Intellectual showmanship does not promote a feeling of sincerity, nor does the eroticism. The relationship between the young woman and the sparrow is intimate in the classical tradition, and thus the bond to the pet is strong: For it would come and go And flee so to and fro; And on me it would leap Whan I was asleep, And his feathers shake, Wherewith he would make Me often for to wake, And for to take him in Upon my naked skin. God wot, we thought no sin: What though he crept so low?11

The sparrow is an excuse for intellectual and erotic display more than a legitimate object of emotion. Philip Sparrow is also not caged, but flies and hops at will. That situation is very different in the caged-bird poetry of the eighteenth century. With a live bird in a cage, as with Laurence Sterne’s famous starling, one can talk back to the bird, establishing an ongoing relationship. Wetmore (Chap. 8), among the following chapters, considers this increased eighteenth-century fashion for caged birds as pets. Certainly, birdcages are of long standing—one is mentioned in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale (line 611)—but searches through Early English Books Online for ‘bird cage’ or ‘birdcage’ find the expression is a relatively

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rare one in print, with few examples before 1660, although ‘cagebird’ can be found as listed as an English word as far back as Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarie of 1582.12 After 1660 and throughout the eighteenth century, the term ‘birdcage’ becomes increasingly common. The caged bird, even without putting ‘all Heaven in a Rage’, as William Blake so powerfully expressed it in ‘Auguries of Innocence’, has a number of uses explored in this volume, as in the political images discussed by Collins or the studies of birdsong explored by Mackenney (Chap. 7).13 In these cases, birds can evoke a feeling of identification or trans-species sympathy. Birds are caged or turned into pets because they are inferior beings, but once in their cage and attended to with the proper sensibility, they become like humans, especially through their song and denied freedom. In the cage, birds turn into expressive and suffering individuals that can take people out of their own perspectives as the birds are sentimentally reimagined as other humans. Even Beau, Cowper’s bird-killing spaniel, recognises the poet’s caged linnet as semi-human, ‘a sacred thing,/not destined to my tooth’, while sardonically recounting his efforts to revive the bird by licking it clean after ‘Passing his prison door,/[the linnet] had fluttered all his strength away’. The most egregious example from Cowper’s oeuvre is his mock-heroic ode ‘On the Death of Mrs Throckmorton’s Bullfinch’ in which the bird is anthropomorphically ‘assassin’d by a thief’ rather than, as was actually the case, attacked by a rat. The tragic incident prompts a macabre, yet bathetic outbreak of neoclassical sensibility: Maria weeps, the Muses mourn— So, when by Bacchanalians torn   On Thracian Hebrus’ side The tree-enchanter Orpheus fell, His head alone remain’d to tell   The cruel death he died.14

The bird might have survived had it not been caged. Cowper appears to demonstrate little sympathy for the decapitated bullfinch, even as he, albeit facetiously, commiserates with Maria Throckmorton. But her distress, one supposes, was genuine. Away from sentimental verse, truly adopting—or attempting to understand—a perspective that is as alien as it is avian requires less personal involvement. The eighteenth century is a period of both identification with birds and identification of birds. For confronting what truly belongs

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to birds perhaps the latter is more profitable, but recognition of the avian other is not easy to achieve. Some of the chapters here look at the scientific understanding of birds as applied to literature. This may occur on as limited a scale as recognising the sex of the singing nightingale (Roberts, Chap. 5) or as complicated an issue as figuring out the motivations for and nature of birdsong and whether it is analogous to human speech (Mackenney, Chap. 7). Birds are often extracted from their habitats, such as happens to those in cages, but the eighteenth century also makes some steps to understand that birds are not independent of supporting environments (Milne, Chap. 9). Attempts to capture intellectually the literal elusiveness of birds—the fact that they disappear from what was thought of as their habitats for entire seasons—led to much speculation on the migration patterns or hibernation patterns of various bird species (Walker, Chap. 4; Carey, Chap. 10). In their complex behaviours, birds remain a fascinating mystery, and that mystery can feed into their literary presentation. Ornithologists try to work against the mystery, and those earlier tabulators of birds in this period do so through both a categorising and a totalising impulse: they want to understand what bird species are and they want to collect them all. This impulse seen in early ornithological manuals serves both a scientific and a religious end: indeed, the two are not split, as Junkerman notes (Chap. 13). It is an attempt to assert human control over nature, and, after all, the naming of the animals is one of the earliest injunctions of the Bible. Eighteenth-century ornithologists saw themselves as continuing Adam’s work. Such control is fleeting, however, for as more and more birds are named with greater precision, so ever more new birds are being discovered. This new abundance occurs through more careful observation such as that of Gilbert White, when through close measurement and attention to song he splits the chiffchaff from the willow warbler and from the wood warbler, still a tricky business for the modern birdwatcher (see Carey, Chap. 10). Or the increasing variety of species may occur through the explorations of regions of the world far from the British Isles (Greenfield, Chap. 11; Berland, Chap. 14). The attempt to master the natural world succeeds ultimately in reminding ornithologists that there are more birds on earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy and that the categories used to contain the birds constantly burst their bounds. Indeed, the dynamics of scientific investigation with its collecting of specimens may not be so different from those of caging birds: an attempt to constrain the birds leads to minute examination, which gives the birds a surprising power to disconcert us.

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The elusiveness of birds tempts our control, creating a tension conducive to literary effects: their songs inspire our words, their feathers inspire our descriptions, and their flight takes our imagination beyond itself. In the eighteenth century, the relationship of birds to humans seems at a conscious breaking point, the attempts to categorise and list the birds overmatched by continual discoveries of new species, the harvesting of avian abundance registered by the diminution of birdlife, the appropriation of birds metaphorically challenged by the overuse of such imagery, and the admiration of birds for their obvious freedom in flight—that supremely non-human avian quality—undercut by the ownership and caging and shooting of the birds so admired. Yet some escape to take a portion of the literary imagination with them.

Notes 1. John Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (London: J. Johnson, 1773), 5. 2. Ibid., 54. 3. Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 17. 4. Christopher Hitt, ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’, College Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 123–47. 5. Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1, 3, 6. 6. Tobias Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3. 7. Ben Jonson, ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper’, in Seventeenth-Century British Poetry: 1603–1660, ed. John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin (New York: Norton, 2006), 89. 8. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009), 4. 9. William Cowper, ‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau, Killing a Young Bird’ and ‘Beau’s Reply’ (1793) in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980–1995), III, 201–3. 10. John Skelton, Philip Sparrow, in The Renaissance in England: Non-­ dramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Hyder E. Rollins and Herschel Baker (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992). 11. Skelton, 74.

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12. Richard Mulcaster, The first part of the elementarie vvhich entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung, set furth by Richard Mulcaster (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582), 177. 13. William Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’ in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, Newly Revised Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1988), 490. 14. William Cowper, ‘On the Death of Mrs Throckmorton’s Bullfinch’ (1788) in Poems, ed. Baird and Ryskamp, III, 30–32.

Bibliography Aikin, John. An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. London: J. Johnson, 1773. Armstrong, Edward A. The Folklore of Birds: An Enquiry into the Origin and Distribution of some Magico-religious Traditions. London: Collins New Naturalists, 1958. Armstrong, Edward A. The Life and Lore of the Bird in Nature, Art, Myth, and Literature. New York: Crown Publishers, 1975. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed David V. Erdman. Newly Revised Edition. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Cocker, Mark. Birds and People. London: Jonathan Cape, 2013. Cocker, Mark, and Richard Mabey. Birds Britannica. London: Chatto and Windus, 2005. Cowper, William. The Poems of William Cowper. Edited by John D.  Baird and Charles Ryskamp. 3 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980–1995. Gannon, Thomas C. Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Hall, Dewey W. Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists: An Ecocritical Study, 1789–1912. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Hitt, Christopher. ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century.’ College Literature 31, no. 3 (2004): 123–47. Jonson, Ben. ‘Inviting a Friend to Supper.’ In Seventeenth-Century British Poetry: 1603–1660. Edited by John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, 89. New York: Norton, 2006. Keenleyside, Heather. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

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Lutwack, Leonard. Birds in Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling. Edited by Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009. Menely, Tobias. The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Milne, Anne. ‘Lactilla Tends Her Fav’rite Cow’: Ecocritical Readings of Animals and Women in Eighteenth-Century British Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008. Morillo, John. The Rise of Animals and Descent of Man, 1660–1800: Toward Posthumanism in British Literature Between Descartes and Darwin. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2018. Mulcaster, Richard. The first part of the elementarie vvhich entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung, set furth by Richard Mulcaster. London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1582. Perkins, David. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Robinson, Eric and Richard Fitter. John Clare’s Birds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Skelton, John. Philip Sparrow. In The Renaissance in England: Non-dramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century. Edited by Hyder E.  Rollins and Herschel Baker. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1992. Tague, Ingrid H. Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015. Wolloch, Nathaniel. Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture. Amherst: Humanity Books, 2006.

CHAPTER 2

Avian Encounters and Moral Sentiment in Poetry from Eighteenth-Century Ireland Lucy Collins

The relationship between human and animal worlds has a long history of literary and artistic representation in Ireland, which was intensified by the cultural and intellectual changes of the eighteenth century. The transition from a Cartesian understanding of animals as without capacity for reason and feeling to one that could accommodate the animal as an individuated subject is reflected in the imaginative writings of the period. These increasingly represent the enmeshed character of human-animal relations, acknowledging the significance of animal life in the construction of human meaning, but reminding us that it is always mediated by human representation.1 The bird was a popular subject for poetry during the eighteenth century; from allegorical verse to poems of religious feeling, human encounters with the avian Other indicate changing attitudes towards animal life, but must also be set within a framework of increasingly complex political and social relationships. Of particular significance in this context is the rise of moral philosophy and its implications for public discourse

L. Collins (*) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_2

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across the British Isles. This chapter argues that the eighteenth-century bird poem illuminates this important intersection of aesthetic, intellectual, and social debates. In Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the complex dynamics of Gaelic, Old English, and New English communities yielded diverse attitudes towards the natural world, which were expressed in distinctive ways.2 From medieval texts in Irish and in Latin to the widely read texts from the Renaissance period—those of Giraldus Cambrensis, Sir John Davies, and Edmund Spenser—the representation of animal life in Ireland signalled the contested nature of cultural identities. Certain formal expectations shape the ways in which these texts are written and read and they are also inflected by the specific political and social conditions. The original colonists of the Tudor and Elizabethan plantations saw themselves as pioneers, bringing civilisation and Protestantism to a backward land and, in many texts from this period, the boundaries between animal and human life in Ireland were deliberately blurred to emphasise the ‘barbarous’ nature of the Irish people. Poems such as John Derrick’s ‘Image of Irelande’ from 1581 celebrate the country’s natural world while denigrating its human inhabitants, yet in the poem the presence of literary precursors can also be detected—Derrick’s praise of Ireland’s birds of prey is linked to their importance in late medieval Ireland: The Goshauke first of the Crewe, deserves to have the name, The Faucon next for high attemptes, in glorie and in fame.3

Other poems read nature as evidence of the divine: the anonymous ‘A Battell of Birds’ (1622) recalls the spectacle of a large number of starlings attacking one another in the skies over Cork City, an event assumed to signal divine displeasure.4 The texts of this period form an important foundation for this discussion of avian representation in eighteenth-century Ireland because they indicate the depiction of the animal world as expressive of a range of personal, political, and religious concerns. Though written in seventeenth-century Ireland, most probably around 1663, Sir William Temple’s poem ‘On My Lady Giffard’s Loory’ likewise foreshadows many important aspects of the eighteenth-century bird poem in Ireland. Written for his sister on the death of her beloved bird, Temple’s poem also gestures towards the grieving process that this woman had

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lately undergone on the death of her husband.5 The depiction of the Loory, or Lory (probably one of the lorikeets, bright parrotlike birds native to East Asia), first emphasises the bird’s exotic characteristics. His ‘longish hawked bill’, ‘jetty eyes’, and ‘swelling breast’ are sharply delineated, while the description of his plumage—‘His back a scarlet mantle cover’d o’er. … All down his belly a deep violet hue’—shows his brilliance to be greater than the most sumptuous garments. The belief that beauty in nature exceeded human creative ingenuity was already in circulation at this time, and is expressed in the emphasis on descriptive detail here, which is given priority over poetic convention.6 If the bird’s physical appearance is remarkable, his temperament is even more so: No passion moving in a human breast Was plainer seen, or livelier exprest. No wit or learning, eloquence or song, Acknowledg’d kindness, or complain’d of wrong, With accents half so feeling.7

Here it is the bird’s apparent equality with—even superiority to—a human sensibility that animates the verse and sanctions his intimacy with his owner: he is ‘fed with her hands … nested in her bed’.8 Yet it is his unique relation to bird life as a whole that makes this special relationship possible, and that signals the lory as deserving of this treatment, in life and in verse. By integrating him into human society, Temple allows this poem to speak of the bereavement suffered by his sister in indirect terms. As well as exploring every dimension of the bird’s life in the household—in this case, the world of an important Anglo-Irish family—the poem obliquely considers the power of metaphor itself: the vivid, exemplary figure that epitomizes imaginative expression. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, key debates about human relationship to a non-human other are reflected in poetry, and the next 150 years would see an increasing imaginative engagement with animal life. Awareness of the interdependency of man and animal was intensified by developments in natural philosophy, which shed new light on creaturely experience. Humans dwelt in proximity to their non-human counterparts, observing them and integrating these reflections into an understanding of their own place in the world. Across the early modern period, avian conduct provided unique ways of reading animal skills and behaviour. The multiple roles of the bird as exotic object, close

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companion and intelligent life form, are all to be found in Temple’s text and are taken up by other poets in both conventional and innovative ways. The bird becomes a familiar motif for readers in England and Ireland, but it is not until the mid-eighteenth century that it is used to explore both the idea and expression of emotion. By the late 1720s, significant new philosophical writings began to investigate the concept of feeling and its impact on human development. This sensitivity to the relationship between self and other would shape the representation of animals in lasting ways. The Irish Enlightenment, though national in character, was influenced by European thought and facilitated by a growth in Ireland’s book trade as well as by the reprinting of foreign texts for Irish readers.9 Critics such as Luke Gibbons and Michael Neill have characterised this participation as a form of ‘postcolonial enlightenment’: ‘In this theoretical model, Ireland and the Irish are significant to the international movement because, in the philosophical imagination, they served as some of the colonized, dialectical “Others” helping to define the Enlightened subject’.10 These ‘Others’ included animals and, like the Irish, they could no longer be seen as stable, subordinate subjects. In Keith Thomas’s view, it was the close contact between humans and their companion animals that altered philosophical and scientific thinking on the latter’s agency: ‘[T]here is no doubt that it was the observation of household pets which buttressed the claims for animal intelligence and character’.11 The contained space of the poem would become a key site for the exploration of these relationships. Though inherited symbolic codes positioned the animal as merely a vehicle for human concerns, the rise of moral sentiment encouraged readers to respond with sensitivity and compassion to creaturely experience. Key thinkers of the period were pivotal to this representational change. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) was one of the most important philosophers of his day, and his work would have a profound influence on two later figures: David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790). Born in Ulster and educated in Scotland, it was in Dublin between 1719 and 1730 that Hutcheson’s most significant writings on moral sentiment were completed.12 In the era of the Penal Laws, the exercise of power by one group over another was relevant to Presbyterians such as Hutcheson, as well as to Roman Catholics, who formed the majority of those living in Ireland. The fact that three of the most gifted moral philosophers were Scottish or Irish suggests that their distance from the centre of empire may have influenced their intellectual formation.13 Indeed, the role of sympathy in the imperial project was a matter for debate, and the question of

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whether it constituted a resistance to empire, or a means by which subjects could be brought under imperial control, remains contentious. This context undoubtedly highlights the impact of this new thinking on political dynamics and, with this, on power relations between races, genders, and species. Although thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville read benevolence towards others as a product of self-love, for Hutcheson approval or condemnation and the pleasure or pain derived from them precede rational thought and therefore self-interest.14 We cannot, he argues, will ourselves to feel compassion.15 Championing the right of private judgement, he saw moral action as generative of personal happiness: ‘We have a secret sense of pleasure accompanying such of our own actions as we call virtuous, even when we expect no other advantage from them’.16 Hutcheson, whose reading of human nature was considerably more positive than that of many of his peers, held drama and epic poetry to be effective vehicles for moral instruction, since their characters were identified as either good or evil. Most readers, he argued, would prefer ‘the most lively image’ of an object, so ‘the epic poem, or tragedy, gives a far greater pleasure than the writings of philosophers, tho’ both aim at recommending virtue’.17 The correlation between pleasure and virtue draws attention to the affective power of poetry and emphasises the role of aesthetics in shaping the representation of the human-animal bond. This, in turn, suggests that evolving philosophical thought may demand significant changes in the form and style of imaginative texts. From the 1720s onwards, the increasing significance of ideas of feeling and sympathy influenced the way the Other was conceived, and this in turn shaped contemporary representations of avian life. Though the breeding of birds for food and ornament, and the hunting of wild birds, remained important pastimes in Ireland, these practices co-existed with the representation of birds as objects of human feeling throughout the long eighteenth century. This observation may be equally traced in the visual arts, especially in the case of Charles Collins (c. 1680–1744), who lived and worked in Ireland, and has been described as the greatest bird painter of the period.18 Though he first became famous for his still-life treatment of animals, Collins later demonstrated his skill in depicting birds in nature. This crossing of generic boundaries exemplifies a flexible imaginative response to avian life in various art forms at this time and suggests too their value as status objects. Toby Barnard has explored the presence of birds in Ireland’s commodity culture, noting both the taming of wild birds and the keeping of exotic animals, including parrots and canaries, as

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pets.19 In this respect Irish landowners, and the growing middle class, replicated the fashions of their English counterparts. This concern with identity and social position inflected the poetry of the period, in which an increasing consciousness of contemporary material culture mingled with classical conventions. So, the deepening reflection on sympathy—on how the Other may be understood—led to the co-existence of poems where the bird is rendered in real and immediate terms, with texts where the metaphorical power of the creature, and its long literary tradition, is clearly the most important aspect. The representation of wild birds from this period is a key area for the advancement of ideas about human stewardship of the natural world. The widespread practice of shooting birds becomes a preoccupation for many Irish poets: some celebrate the value of tradition, as well as the excitement of the pursuit itself; others are equivocal or explicitly critical of the killing. The co-existence of texts depicting real avian encounters with those that draw on a classical or literary lineage encourages some poets to play with the relationship between these modes. Laetitia Pilkington’s 1725 poem ‘The Petition of the Birds’ gives voice to the experience of birds killed for sport. Written when Laetitia and her husband Matthew, the poet and art historian, were on their honeymoon, it explicitly addressed to her husband ‘on his return from shooting’, juxtaposing public action with private feeling. As one poet writing to another, Pilkington uses literary conventions to powerful effect, placing the ethics of cross-species care in the larger moral context of human relationships: Ah Shepherd, gentle Shepherd! spare Us plum’d Inhabitants of Air That hop, and inoffensive rove From Tree to Tree, from Grove to Grove; What Phrensy has possess’d your mind? To be destructive of your Kind? Admire not if we Kindred Claim Our sep’rate natures are the same. To each of us thou ow’st a Part To grace thy Person, Head or Heart;20

The poem figures the act of shooting as a form of madness, and Pilkington here appeals to rational thought rather than instinctive action. She uses personification to appeal to masculine ideals, but the argument of the

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poem rests on the reconfiguring of normative behaviour to take into account the non-human perspective. In describing human and bird as kindred, she registers her own anxieties at her husband’s deeds but extends this sympathy beyond the human realm. The poem, which she wrote at a country house near Ashbourne, Co. Meath, goes on to list the attributes that the human draws from the avian world, such as sweetness of temper, courage, and the power of observation. Her recognition of the resonance of these associations shows a capacity to combine metaphorical and literal readings of the lives of others. Later in the poem, Pilkington lists many different types of birds—dove, eagle, finch, hawk, swan, robin, and stork— and in doing so draws attention to the authenticity of representation, at the same time as she uses formal conventions appropriate to poetic tradition. The act of calling the animals by name evokes the story of creation but it also has a textual function, showing the power of language itself to elicit feeling in the listener. As an integral part of Pilkington’s memoirs, the poem draws particular attention to the boundaries between private and public, reality and artifice. The text closes by asserting the reciprocity of feeling between human and animal: in showing clemency the poet’s husband will benefit from the gratitude of other living creatures and, through the resurrection image of the phoenix, himself ascend to a higher moral condition. This dual function aptly expresses the layered meanings of the poem as a whole, and the extent to which poetry united personal perspectives with shared currents of feeling. The carelessness that attends the killing of birds for pleasure, rather than necessity, is linked to an increasing interest in leisure and consumption during this period. ‘On the Ortolans’, a poem that can be dated to the second half of the 1720s, takes as its subject the preparation of songbirds for the table at Dublin Castle.21 This setting frames the bird as a delicacy within a culture of privilege, and speaks to other texts from the period praising or celebrating the Lords Lieutenant of Ireland. The poet reflects on the fate of the birds and the ‘honour’ of their death, which is greater than either captivity or life in the wild: Go then, my Birds, your Lives with pleasure yield, And prove yourselves the choicest of the Field; It is more Honour for you thus to die, Than live in Prison, or away to fly. The Muse, regarded by them, has prevail’d, And now they go as fast as Ship e’er sail’d; Not dreading any thing they haste along, And twittle to themselves a kind of Song.22

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The poem simultaneously insists on the passive virtue of the birds’ sacrifice and on their agency—their power to ‘yield’ their lives to the waiting diners. The ortolans, however, are oblivious to their fate; their innocent song gives voice to their animal nature but does not communicate directly with the human listener, affirming Adam Smith’s reservations concerning the attribution of feeling to non-verbal animals. The poem does possess affective power, however, creating a tension between the artifice of the text and its capacity to express the lives of others. Within fifteen years of the publication of this poem the significant impact of moral issues on human feeling had been explored by David Hume in Part III of his Treatise of Human Nature: ‘An action, or sentiment, or character, is virtuous or vicious; why? Because its view causes a pleasure or uneasiness of a particular kind.’23 For Hume, direct perception of an action or object is insufficient to determine whether it is good or evil; this can only be understood by the sentiment it prompts in the observer. Later, Adam Smith, in his seminal work, A Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), asks why the mind prefers one form of conduct over another; why it ‘denominates the one right and the other wrong; considers the one as the object of approbation, honour, and reward, and the other of blame, censure, and punishment?’24 Sympathy … does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it. We sometimes feel for another, a passion of which he himself seems to be altogether incapable; because, when we put ourselves in his case, the passion arises in our breast from the imagination, though it does not in his from the reality.25

The power of imagination to excite sympathy, even in the absence of evident feeling in the suffering subject, is an important extension of my exploration of the influence of moral sentiment on the poetic representation of birds. In these texts from Ireland, the poet voices a sympathetic bond with the avian Other that particularises non-human experience, at the same time as it allows larger issues of moral responsibility to be considered. This act of representation—insofar as it purports to speak for the animal Other—is controversial, yet it also gives form to the kind of instinctive response envisaged by both Hume and Smith. Though a moral judgement is expressive of the speaker’s perspective and experience, it cannot be limited to mere autobiography. In Hume’s argument, this initial reaction could later be modified by the rational mind, allowing us ‘to consider the

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type of character or action in general, neglecting individuating features’.26 This qualification draws attention to the relationship between the individual and the group, between the encounter of human and bird in a particular context, and the larger question of interspecies connection. As James Chandler has pointed out, the capacity to reflect on one’s sensations, rather than simply being impressed by them, is essential to this thinking.27 The felt response is a prerequisite for moral judgement, however, and the power of poetry to prompt feeling, but not to be limited by it, is of importance here. The dynamic relationship between subject matter, poet, and reader suggests that the role of observer can be two-fold and that the feeling that first inspired the creative act may also be invoked in the reader, not through his or her identification with the speaker in the poem, but rather by the revelatory power of language itself. The recognition of feeling as essential to moral judgement takes many forms in the Irish poetry of this period and is often expressed through the adoption of a dialectical mode. ‘The Linnet and Goldfinch’ is a political parable dedicated to Mr Latouche, who was deprived of his seat as MP for the City of Dublin in 1749.28 The image of the caged songbirds reflects their popularity as pets during the period,29 but also confirms the longstanding symbolic value of specific subspecies. This poem is just one of a number of Irish poems from the period to put such symbolism to specific political use. Framed as a dialogue between linnet and goldfinch—the one flying free, the other caged—this poem debates the value of reason over custom. Here the power of independent thought is equated with freedom; most people give up their independence in exchange for immediate reward. This contention is explored though the tropes of the poem: the heat of ‘sickly summer’ has an enervating effect, just as Chloe’s love for her caged bird is a form of oppression—‘What Pomp could give, his Chloe gave;/Thus oft a palace holds a slave.’30 The linnet celebrates his freedom; unlike the goldfinch, he claims to be led by justice and reason: Oh! rouze to Virtue, hear my Call, Live free, or with thy Freedom fall; Awake thy Soul, thy Shackles spurn, To Liberty, or Dust, return.31

Both birds assert the morality of their position but the conclusion gives most weight to the independent spirit, to action over passivity, nature over artifice, freedom over subjection.

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Allegorical readings place birds once again at the service of human meaning. In practical ways too, birds remained useful to humans for survival and entertainment throughout the eighteenth century, and sometimes poets sought to combine these elements in a single text. An anonymous Irish poem from 1777, ‘The Cock’, draws its power from the participative nature of blood sports and the responsibility that each reader bears in relation to shared cultural experiences. Animal combats were sometimes judged to have an educational quality: George Wilson’s Commendation of Cockes, and Cock-fighting (1607) interpreted the birds not as living creatures but rather as ‘symbols of manly virtue’.32 Later writers were clearer about the real context for this sport: ‘No animal in the world has greater courage than the cock when opposed to one of his own species; and in every part of the world where refinement and polished manners have not entirely taken place, cock fighting is a principle diversion’, wrote Oliver Goldsmith in 1776.33 ‘The Cock’ uses a regular rhythm and alternating rhyme to express this bravery and the bird’s natural desire to protect his young: Stately bird of dauntless courage! See him with his cackling train, Strutting o’er the busy farm-yard, Picking up the scattered grain. Should a neighbouring foe, advancing, Thro’ the fence, invade his right; Straight, indignant, he attacks him, Death the combat ends, or flight.34

Later the human power to distort these qualities emerges: Men, miscall’d, of brutal feelings, Who in bar’brous sports delight, Joy to make more gen’rous creatures Join in fierce, unnatural fight.35

While making its disgust at those who enjoy these inhumane pursuits clear, the poem combines several other interesting features.36 The spectacular appearance of the cock with ‘steel’d martial weapons’ on his legs leads to a reference to Chaucer, and these elements heighten the reader’s sense of an animal removed from the natural habitat depicted at the opening of the poem, as well as underpinning the text’s literary precursors. Another

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interesting dimension is the juxtaposition of the singular and collective entities in the poem. Contrary to the normal current of representation, it is the animal that is seen as the singular figure: the cock is individualised, the humans in the poem remain ‘the gaping croud’, ‘the madd’ning rabble’.37 Bidding the muse leave the scene of depravity, the anonymous poet—like others of the period—highlights the ways in which the poetic process mediates, and takes responsibility for mediating, the ethical judgements of its readers. This poem highlights the implications of gendered identity, both for animal and spectator. The image of the captive bird, in literature and art, has long been linked to the representation of women and became a significant trope in the work of women poets from the Romantic period, as Paula Feldman points out: Birds permeate verse by women … not simply as a symbol for ecstatic poetic creation as in Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ or Shelley’s ‘To a Sky-Lark’ (though women certainly wrote their share of verse in this popular vein) but also as a perfect metaphor to explore the conflicting desires for freedom and for safety.38

In particular, the bird elegy offered a mode within which a female subject could engage with this tension though a legitimate expression of emotion. Mourning the loss of animals requires an acknowledgement of their individuality, as Juliana Schiesari argues: ‘by the act of “naming” what historically and philosophically did not have a proper name (the animal), we can begin an act of mourning that can lead us to creative frontiers that radically revise our relation to the Other’.39 The Irish poem ‘An Elegie on the Death of Two Goldfinches’, published in 1774, mourns a pair of (named) birds given to the anonymous poet by Lady Mary Leslie, once his pupil. Two memories are thus interwoven: a recollection of the birds and of their previous owner. This modifies the problematic relation to sympathy that the exaggerated grief for the dead animal can sometimes suggest. Here the sorrow at the death of these creatures invokes the feelings of loss that the poet registered at Lady Mary’s marriage and departure. He justifies his theme by affirming the virtue of feeling for its own sake: Affection with Virtue is join’d It dwells with the Brave and the Free, It warms, and ennobles the Mind, Then, is it a Weakness in me?40

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The role of sentiment in the poem is a complex one. It is prominent in Lady Mary’s original motivation to rescue the nestlings and to bring them home: Soft Transport quick glanc’d from your Eye, Sweet Innocence lisp’d on your Tongue; They chirrup’d—you wish’d, with a Sigh, To protect both the Nest and the Young.41

The poet affirms the appropriateness of the girl’s action and the happiness of the creatures in her care.42 Her subsequent gift of the birds to him represents an exchange of feeling that is affirmed through the act of mourning as well as through its expression in verse. In addition, the birds themselves are emblematic of enduring love. Though the male goldfinch escapes through an open window, he returns at dusk at the call of his mate. This lasting affection of the birds for each other indicates the poet’s own feelings for the young woman, inseparable from those he expresses for the avian Other. The identification of the bird with the power of feeling is an indication of an increasing ‘romantic’ strain in Irish poetry at the close of the eighteenth century. ‘The Lamentation of Cara Pluma, a Female Pheasant’ depicts the game bird mourning her ‘husband’ after he was killed by a fowler. The poem was published anonymously in Belfast in 1790 in the Universal Magazine.43 It is dedicated to the gunsmith Robert McCormick, providing a sentimental work with a clear interpretative context.44 Like Pilkington’s text, this poem is voiced by a bird, but where the earlier text makes a rational argument against the sport as a whole, this poem appeals more directly to the sympathy of the reader. Using the poet as her mouthpiece the pheasant begins by justifying her decision to speak: ‘And must I still my grief restrain,/And not my keenest woes impart?’45 Equating avian with human feeling, the bereaved bird draws emotional sustenance from the landscape she shared with her mate, even though this is a place of threat: Now scatter’d wide our children roam, To ’scape the bloody spaniel’s way; The bush-clad bank we call’d our home, The sportsman plunders for his prey.46

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Not only the human but also the hunting dog is feared, and the involvement of non-human species in the practice of the hunt is abhorred. The pheasant’s desire for both security and freedom can be aligned with the characterisation of this bird in natural history: it has ‘continued its attachment to native freedom; and now wild among us, makes the most envied ornament of our parks and forests, where he feeds upon acorns and berries, and the scanty produce of our chilling climate’.47 The dialectic of the wild and caged bird is used in many different contexts in eighteenth-century poetry in Ireland. In subtle ways, the movement between the representation of wild birds and texts depicting birds as pets is suggestive of a shifting cultural relationship between Britain and Ireland during a period of increasing political upheaval prior to the Act of Union in 1801. The role played by a discourse of sympathy in exploring the relationship between the two islands shows the interweaving of philosophical and political concerns and this process is evident in the poetry of the period.48 The fear of the revolutionary potential of feeling was registered at the time but could be countered by asserting the close sisterly bonds between the two islands. These affinities can be traced in textual terms too, in the printing of poems of a specifically Irish character alongside work imitating English literary modes.49 The extent to which poetry from Ireland could be both distinct from, and readily assimilated into, English literary production indicates the complex political and cultural dynamics of the time. Questions of intimacy were crucial to animal representation too. The domestication of birds is a transformative process: dominance and affection shape the human-animal relationship in this setting.50 The pet is not only a tame animal but also one whose relationship with humans offers pleasure and companionship. This is why the bird is both the object of admiration and affection, and functions as a conduit for emotions in the poetry of the period. Though it has been argued that animals colluded in their own domestication, since this represented the best opportunity for survival,51 humans bear responsibility for the way in which this relationship has evolved. Even those with benign intentions use pets for their own gratification; poets use birds as an inspiration for their art. Human power over the animal is expressed through the breeding of species for profit or pleasure. Donna Haraway has noted the long history of utilitarian relationships between human and animal and, as Friedrich Engels argued before her, these continuous ties marked a significant change in social relations over time.52

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The plight of the captive bird has exercised commentators since antiquity, but it did not give rise to widespread concern until the late eighteenth century. When, in 1780, Jeremy Bentham asked, ‘The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but Can they suffer?’, he exposed the key debates concerning the status of animals at this time.53 The removal of the bird from its natural habitat profoundly alters the pleasure that the bird takes in nature, and poets—most notably William Blake—would refute the notion that suffering strengthens the avian and, by extension, the human spirit.54 The capacity for close scrutiny that the caging of birds afforded was linked to man’s education in the natural sciences and, domestically too, the pet was perceived as an educator, encouraging feelings of responsibility in the young.55 Yet the presence of animals in domestic settings may also result in the careless exercise of power over them, or even in instances of cruelty.56 The treatment of birds in captivity raised moral questions that were viewed by some poets in specifically religious terms. A poem by the Ulster poet William M’Elroy, written in the first decade of the nineteenth century, specifically frames its argument around man’s usurpation of the divine right of control over all living things.57 Its title, ‘The Blind Bird’s Mournful Lamentation to the Bird Blinders’, links it to ‘The Lamentation of Cara Pluma’ and to others that choose to personify animal life in a bid to address the rights of the non-human. Yet this text blurs the line between subject and object—it addresses ‘Man’ as Other, yet it does not represent the position of the bird itself: When shall that sympathetic tender power Find entrance in thy cruel bower; To thee O Man, to thee I speak, When shall thy feeling powers awake. That lovely bird that mourns its sight, Thy cruel dart prolongs its night; Its chirping cries for help in vain, Its righteous plaints no entrance gain, Into thy hard unfeeling breast.58

The need for man to open himself to feeling as a powerful ethical force is clearly addressed in the poem, suggesting the circulation of ideas of sympathy at this time. Yet though the reader is called to account, the expression of distress at the suffering of animals can affirm not equality between the species but rather human beings’ specific capacity for higher

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feeling.59 The importance of speech in bearing witness to cruelty, and in exhorting the listener to change his behaviour, expresses the immediacy of the moral encounter. It is mimicked in the blinded bird’s cry for help; again, the bird seeks to communicate with the reader through the agency of the poet, and the failure to be receptive to its pleas compounds the act of physical cruelty. The poem is palimpsestic in structure: two sentences, one of four lines and one of five, are reversed in the second half of the poem. The text therefore combines the power of rational argument with the appeal to emotions—thought and feeling are united in ways suited to the pantheistic thrust of the work. The impulse to have God, man, and nature in harmony here is strong. In its second stanza, the poem dwells specifically on the containment of the bird, not just its injury. The reference to Samson, blinded and chained by the Philistines, is also an image of retribution: his recovering strength enabled him to revenge himself against those who caused his suffering. Here the postscript, reminding the listener that God cares for all living creatures, suggests that a price will be exacted for this action. The biblical reference enters the text into the larger world of language quoted and known, internalised by the speaker. The role of birds in the varied poetic representations of eighteenth-­ century Ireland speaks of their imaginative significance for the poetic act itself. Connected both to inspiration and verbal expression, these animals suggest the close links between philosophical thought and poetic creation, as well as the ways in which changing attitudes are represented, and modified, by particular aesthetic choices. These poems show that conventional and innovative modes of composition remain entwined throughout the century, though individual texts reflect changing attitudes towards both human and non-human Others. Many of these poems effectively belong to an English poetic tradition, but others speak directly to an Irish political sphere, as well as with a consciousness of the fate of those far from the centre of power. Poets domiciled in Ireland wrote from within a society that felt badly treated: just as caged or blinded birds are powerless in the face of human aggression, so the people of Ireland felt powerless against the self-interest of English mercantile and political behaviour towards them. The growth of sympathy in the course of the period is an important way in which poets and their readers can cross the boundary between species to seek to understand bird life more fully, as well as to broaden the range of emotional responses possible. In this way, the bird poems of eighteenth-­century Ireland invite an examination of the act of reading itself and its lasting moral effects.

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Notes 1. Erica Fudge has discussed the difficulties inherent in accessing animals in history since they are only available to us in documents written by humans. An emphasis on the purely textual can make the real animal disappear. Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals’, in Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), loc. 228–41. 2. Texts written in English, Irish, and Latin date from this period. These offer differing perspectives on the relationship between humans and their environment. Almost all of the poems under consideration here are the work of educated Protestants. See The Irish Poet and the Natural World: An Anthology of Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics, eds Andrew Carpenter and Lucy Collins (Cork: Cork University Press, 2014), 1–15; 63–107. 3. The poem praises the falcon, and more specifically the goshawk, the merlin, and the sparrowhawk. John Derricke, ‘From: The First Part of the Image of Irelande,’ in The Irish Poet and the Natural World, eds Carpenter and Collins. For a general discussion of the history of poetry in Ireland during this period, see Andrew Carpenter, ‘Poetry in English, 1690–1800’, in The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vols, eds Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, 282–319. 4. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 77–80. 5. Sir William Temple and his sister Martha were brought up in Dublin where their father, Sir John Temple, was Master of the Rolls. Martha married Sir Thomas Giffard in Dublin in 1662, but he died a week later. As well as being the most famous diplomat of his age, William Temple was a writer of distinction. His essays on diverse subjects, from political theory to grief, reveal the range of his interests. See Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 108–11. 6. Erica Fudge identifies Godfrey Goodman’s Fall of Man (1616) as one source for this conviction. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 100. 7. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 109. 8. Ibid., 111. The question of interspecies intimacy is explored by Laura Brown in ‘Immoderate Love: The Lady and the Lapdog,’ Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 65–90. 9. For further detail on the Irish print trade during the Enlightenment, see Máire Kennedy, French Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and ‘Reading the Enlightenment in Ireland,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45.3 (Spring 2012), 355–78.

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10. Sean Moore, ‘Introduction: Ireland and Enlightenment,’ Eighteenth-­ Century Studies, 45.3 (Spring 2012), 348. 11. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes to England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1983), 121 12. Hutcheson is best known for two works: An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725) and An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London, 1728). See Michael Brown, Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–1739 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002). 13. In Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832, Evan Gottlieb notes the importance of marginal groups in the construction of sympathetic Britishness in the long eighteenth century. 14. Thomas Duddy contrasts Hutcheson’s willingness to see virtue in the human endeavour with what he calls the ‘unflattering moralities’ of Hobbes and Mandeville. See Duddy, ‘Against the Selfish Philosophers: Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, and James Usher’, A History of Irish Thought (London: Routledge, 2002), 170. 15. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1772), 126–27. 16. Hutcheson, Inquiry, 105. 17. Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 239–40. 18. Collins was described thus by Iolo Williams, who collected his work. Though born in England, Collins was active in Ireland for part of his career. See Nicola Figgis in The Art and Architecture of Ireland, vol. 2 (London: Yale University Press), 212. 19. Toby Barnard, Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 241. 20. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 161. Pilkington’s poems, together with those of some of her friends, are embedded in her three-volume Memoirs of Laetitia Pilkington (1748–1754). 21. The author of the poem, Mr B-------r, was probably Mr Belcher, holder of minor offices at Dublin Castle. The poem is dedicated to Lady Cartaret; Lord Cartaret was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1724 to 1730. 22. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 163. 23. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, analytical index by L.A. SelbyBigge, revised by P.  H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 471. 24. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley, intr. Amartya Sen (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 232.

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25. Smith, Moral Sentiments, 7. My italics. 26. Daniel Shaw, ‘Hume’s Moral Sentimentalism.’ Hume Studies 19.1 (April 1993): 34. 27. James Chandler, ‘The Politics of Sentiment: Towards a New Account’, Studies in Romanticism, 14 (2010): 561. 28. James Digges Latouche stood for parliament in 1749 but was deemed not duly elected as a consequence of his association with the radical Dr Charles Lucas. 29. Keith Thomas notes that the popularity of caged birds was such that, in the eighteenth century ‘jays, thrushes, bullfinches, starlings, wrens, cuckoos and wild birds of every kind were captured and sold in the London bird markets’ (Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 111). A bird market reputedly took place on New Bride Street in Dublin until the 1950s. 30. Samuel Whyte, Poems on Various Subjects (Dublin, 1795), 435. 31. Ibid., 437. 32. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 111–12. 33. Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, vol. 5 (Dublin: Printed for James Williams, 1776–1777), 163. 34. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 303. 35. Ibid., 303. 36. For an analysis of this poem within the context of blood sports in Ireland during this period, see Lucy Collins, ‘“Our Sep’rate Natures are the Same”: Reading Bloodsports in Irish Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Animals in Irish Literature and Culture, eds Borbala Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 13–25. 37. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 304. 38. Paula R. Feldman, ‘Introduction’, in British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xxviii–xxix. 39. Juliana Schiesari, ‘Melancholia and Mourning Animals’, in The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern, eds Martin Middeke and Christina Wald (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 224. 40. Samuel Whyte, The Shamrock: or Hibernian Cresses (Dublin, 1772), 446. 41. Ibid., 447. 42. For a discussion of the affection expressed towards caged birds by their owners, see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 111. 43. The full title of this publication—the Universal Magazine and Review or Repository of Literature containing the Literature, History, Manners, Arts and Amusements of the Age—emphasises the circulation of ideas and tropes through different forms of text during the period. 44. Advertisements in the Belfast Newsletter show McCormick conducting business as a gun-maker there from 1784. In 1794 he moved the business to Dublin.

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45. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 312. 46. Ibid., 313. 47. Goldsmith, History of the Earth, 186. 48. My thanks to Colleen English for sharing her ideas on this subject. Her PhD thesis, ‘Writing the Dead: Epitaphs, Elegies and Communities of Sentiment in Romantic Ireland’, was completed at University College Dublin in 2015. 49. Samuel Whyte’s The Shamrock: or Hibernian Cresses (1772) claimed to be the first anthology of exclusively Irish poems. 50. Yi Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 51. Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 56. 52. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), loc. 4326. 53. Jeremy Bentham, ‘An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation’, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838), 143. 54. See David Perkins, ‘Animal Rights and “Auguries of Innocence”’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 33 (1999): 4–11. 55. Samantha Hurd, Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 99. 56. Hurd, Humans and Other Animals, 99–100. 57. William M’Elroy, from Fintona in Co. Tyrone, displayed his religious zeal in his published work, which included copious biblical quotation. 58. Carpenter and Collins, The Irish Poet and the Natural World, 356. 59. ‘No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathise with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to, our own’ (Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 688). See also Markman Ellis, ‘Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility’, in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 92–94.

Bibliography Barnard, Toby. Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010.

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Brown, Michael. Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–1739. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002. Carpenter, Andrew. ‘Poetry in English, 1690–1800.’ In The Cambridge History of Irish Literature, 2 vols, edited by Margaret Kelleher and Philip O’Leary, I, 282–319. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Carpenter, Andrew, and Lucy Collins, eds. The Irish Poet and the Natural World: Verse in English from the Tudors to the Romantics. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014. Chandler, James. ‘The Politics of Sentiment: Towards a New Account.’ Studies in Romanticism 14 (2010): 553–75. Collins, Lucy. ‘“Our Sep’rate Natures are the Same”: Reading Bloodsports in Irish Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century.’ In Animals in Irish Literature and Culture, edited by Borbala Faragó and Kathryn Kirkpatrick, 13–25. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Duddy, Thomas. A History of Irish Thought. London: Routledge, 2002. Ellis, Markman. ‘Suffering Things: Lapdogs, Slaves, and Counter-Sensibility.’ In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-narratives in Eighteenth-­ century England, edited by Mark Blackwell, 92–113. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. English, Colleen. ‘Writing the Dead: Epitaphs, Elegies and Communities of Sentiment in Romantic Ireland.’ PhD diss., University College Dublin, 2015. Feldman, Paula R. ‘Introduction.’ In British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology, edited by Paula R.  Feldman, xxviii–xxix. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Figgis, Nicola. ‘Charles Collins.’ In The Art and Architecture of Ireland, 5 vols, edited by Nicola Figgis, II, 212–13. London: Yale University Press, 2014. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Fudge, Erica. ‘A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals.’ In Representing Animals, edited by Nigel Rothfels, loc. 228–41. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002. Kindle. Goldsmith, Oliver. An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 8 vols. Dublin: Printed for James Williams, 1776–1777. Gottlieb, Evan. Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832. Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Harraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, analytical index by L. A. Selby-Bigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Hurd, Samantha. Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions. London: Pluto Press, 2012.

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Hutcheson, Francis. An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions with Illustrations on the Moral Sense. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971. Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry Concerning the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Glasgow: R. and A. Foulis, 1772. Kennedy, Máire. French Books in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kennedy, Máire. ‘Reading the Enlightenment in Ireland.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 355–78. Moore, Sean. ‘Introduction: Ireland and Enlightenment.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 345–54. Perkins, David. ‘Animal Rights and “Auguries of Innocence”.’ Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly, 33 (1999): 4–11. Schiesari, Juliana. ‘Melancholia and Mourning Animals.’ In The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern, edited by Martin Middeke and Christina Wald, 222–71. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Shaw, Daniel. ‘Hume’s Moral Sentimentalism.’ Hume Studies 19, no. 1 (April 1993): 31–54. Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by Ryan Patrick Hanley and introduced by Amartya Sen. New York: Penguin 2009. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Penguin, 1983. Tuan, Yi Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Weil, Kari. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New  York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Whyte, Samuel. Poems on Various Subjects. Dublin, 1795. Whyte, Samuel. The Shamrock: or Hibernian Cresses. A Collection of Poems, Songs, Epigrams, &c. Latin as well as English, the Original Production of Ireland. Dublin, 1772.

CHAPTER 3

Ortolans, Partridges, and Pullets: Birds as Prey in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones Leslie Aronson

The slang word ‘bird’ is intended, according to the OED, as a familiar or disparaging term for women but only arose in that particular usage around 1915. Today of course we are more familiar with it through the popular culture of the 1960s and later reinvigorations through movies such as Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). Prior to the early twentieth century, however, referring to a woman as a bird was perhaps a conflation with ‘burd’, a poetic term, possibly related to the word ‘bride’, used to describe women as early as 1205.1 Associations between women and birds, however hazy the etymology, nevertheless connect to the patriarchal perception of women as vulnerable and fragile, or delicate— like a bird. Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel, Tom Jones, employs a wealth of bird images—the fragile and the hunted as well as birds of prey. Bird imagery circulates throughout the novel, but those surrounding the novel’s heroine, Sophia Western, and the eponymous hero’s sidekick, Partridge, are of particular interest here. Bird imagery is used in the novel when describing

L. Aronson (*) Ferndale, MI, USA © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_3

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Sophia, particularly in terms of her relationships with the men who surround her. Indeed, after spending a significant portion of the novel in search of Sophia, Partridge refers to her as ‘the lost bird’ who has finally been found.2 Sophia is pursued throughout the latter half of the novel by both her father, after running away from home to avoid an odious marriage, and her lover, Tom Jones, who has offended Sophia and is alternately compelled in his pursuit to make it up to her or forget about her and sleep with other women. As this chapter shows, despite consistently affiliating her with vulnerable and fragile birds and hunted prey, Fielding’s novel allows for Sophia’s subversion of these associations and offers, at the very least, a reassessment of normalised gender stereotypes. Substantial and broad as is the scholarly canon on Fielding and Tom Jones, a thorough investigation of Fielding’s use of bird imagery is lacking, as is any kind of ecofeminist reading of the text. Ecofeminism connects the treatment of animals and the earth to the treatment of women; our society’s profligate exploitation of the earth, its resources, and its animals is synonymous with centuries of female exploitation and subjugation. While this chapter does not attempt to offer a definitive or exhaustive investigation of all of these connections, it is a small opening of that door. Tom Jones is rife with bird imagery. One of the earliest references comes in the second chapter of book three where Allworthy’s gamekeeper, Black George, and Tom are caught poaching partridges on Squire Western’s land. This action has a variety of repercussions, but, most importantly for our purposes, introduces the recurrent image of Tom poaching Squire Western’s property. Despite the partridges originating on Allworthy’s land, the problematic shooting occurs on Squire Western’s. Hunting in the eighteenth century was considered a pastime for the wealthy; squires did not depend on meat taken in a hunt for their daily sustenance, but rather would regard whatever they hunted as a trophy. In The Real History of Tom Jones, John Allen Stevenson discusses the significance of hunting, and more specifically poaching, in the context of Tom Jones. The Game Law, as Stevenson makes clear, allowed any gentleman, that is, any man freeholding property valued over £100, to hunt wherever he liked, whereas men with land valued under £100 could not even hunt on their own property, much less on someone else’s, or prevent someone else from hunting on theirs.3 As Stevenson notes, there is an element of social mimesis in hunting/poaching in that there is a degree of social reaching or imitation in hunting where not qualified via the law4; Tom’s aspiration to wed Sophia is an extension of this, and a pursuit perhaps more easily

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understood by Squire Western than others, which is made particularly clear after he finally gives his consent to let the two marry at the novel’s end. At the novel’s conclusion, when the lovers have finally been reunited and Tom kisses Sophia ‘with an ardour he had never ventured before’, Squire Western then ‘burst into the room, and with his hunting voice and phrase, cried out, “To her, boy, to her, go to her.—That’s it, little honeys, O that’s it.”’5 However, now that Tom is no longer a ‘nobody’, an unclaimed bastard, Western no longer sees him as ‘poaching’ his ‘meat’, but gladly invites Tom to engage in the ‘sport’. More than merely encouraging Tom to kiss Sophia, Western’s comical intrusion on this intimate scene is also a rather vulgar blessing on Tom’s eventual sexual consumption of Sophia. Well before this scene however, Squire Western remarks to Allworthy, ‘“Little did I think when I used to love him for a sportsman that he was all the while a-poaching after my daughter”’.6 Earlier in the novel he jokes with Tom to ‘not poach up the game in his warren’,7 mistakenly thinking that Tom is interested in Sophia’s maid, Mrs. Honour. General references to women as consumable objects recur throughout the novel, not just in reference to Sophia. The narrator acknowledges the barbarity of the pursuit of women in the marriage market when he extends the metaphor of women as consumable meat to women as hunted prey: ‘But if a plump doe be discovered to have escaped from the forest, and to repose herself in some field or grove, the whole parish is presently alarmed, every man is ready to set his dogs after her; and, if she is preserved from the rest by the good squire, it is only that he may secure her for his own eating’.8 The narrator compares this doe to a ‘very fine young woman of fortune and fashion’ who has strayed ‘from the pale of her nursery’,9 indicating the hazards present to wealthy young women when they first appear in society where every man seems ready to snatch her up. Rather than rescuing the doe/woman and releasing her into the protection of her family, the narrator’s squire uses her for his own enjoyment, thus calling into question the squire’s ‘good’ status, while simultaneously acknowledging that a ‘good’ squire could perform this kind of ‘consumption’ and still retain the nomenclature of ‘good’. Interestingly, however, this metaphor focuses not only on the eagerness with which men pursue their prey but on the indication that the pursued creature is to be eaten rather than taken purely in sport. That Sophia’s own father refers to her as a consumable, huntable object is problematic; that he later physically undertakes this previously only figurative action speaks to Sophia’s vulnerable position.

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The vulnerability of birds in particular is conveyed in the incident of Sophia’s pet bird. Unlike exotic pet birds explored by Ingrid H. Tague, Sophia’s is a song bird and, rather than an ornament or extension of her material consumption, it is a beloved plaything.10 Given to her by Tom at age thirteen, and subsequently named after him, the bird is among Sophia’s favourite companions, which Blifil, motivated by jealousy at Sophia’s preference for Tom, releases from its confinement. The bird is then swiftly consumed by a hawk. That Sophia confines her pet bird and trains it to eat out of her hand more broadly extends the metaphor of female confinement. Sophia engages in the very behaviour against which she ultimately rebels when she initially escapes from her father’s house. Just as her father confines her, thinking it is for her own safety, so too does Sophia confine her pet bird; just as Sophia trains her bird to eat out of her hand, Sophia herself accepts the patriarchal institutions and teachings to which she has been trained and that ultimately confines her. Escape from confinement, and acquiring the freedom seemingly longed for by both, ultimately ends in the demise of the bird; so too, in the near rape of Sophia by Lord Fellamar, which culminates in her rescue by her father. In this extended metaphor, the novel seems to suggest that stepping out of accepted boundaries can only end in tragedy. As a metonymic stand-in for Tom, the pet bird’s demise through the direct action of Blifil becomes more significant later as the antagonism between the two, particularly their rivalry over Sophia, comes to the foreground. Blifil’s association with cruelty to birds continues later in the novel when his desire for Sophia becomes more serious: Though Mr. Blifil was not of the complexion of Jones, nor ready to eat every woman he saw; yet he was far from being destitute of that appetite which is said to be the common property of all animals. With this, he had likewise that distinguishing taste which serves to direct men in their choice of the objects or food of their several appetites; and this taught him to consider Sophia as a most delicious morsel, indeed to regard her with the same desires which an ortolan inspires into the soul of an epicure. … Blifil therefore looked on this human ortolan with greater desire than when he viewed her last.11

Of perhaps far more discerning tastes than Tom, Blifil’s sense of refinement does not prevent him from viewing Sophia as something to consume; this kind of consumption is undertaken to indulge in sensory

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pleasure rather than consuming for sustenance. Blifil considers Sophia ‘as a most delicious morsel’, driving home the idea that while a pleasure to consume, there is a little weight or substance behind it. While Blifil may anticipate his enjoyment in ‘consuming’ her, the taste will not satisfy for long. The narrator relates that Sophia is seen by Blifil as a delicacy, the consumption of which should be relished much as an epicure enjoys an ortolan. Although ortolans were indeed considered delicacies (even up until the end of the twentieth century) they were not intended as a hearty dish, but rather one that made a statement about the consumer. Fielding makes reference to the insubstantiality of ortolans in The Journey of the Voyage to Lisbon, writing that the ortolan, among other creatures, ‘may titillate the throat, but will never convey happiness to the heart or cheerfulness to the countenance’.12 The word ‘titillate’ is significant here in the context of Blifil’s sexual desire for Sophia. Daniel Defoe similarly writes in A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain that the ortolan has ‘the most delicious taste for one mouthful (for it is hardly more) that can be imagined’.13 David Hume refers to ortolans as items of luxury, relatively speaking: ‘The value, which all men put upon any particular pleasure, depends on comparison and experience; nor is a porter less greedy of money, which he spends on bacon and brandy, than a courtier, who purchases champagne and ortolans’.14 Ortolans are birds of the bunting family which were often force fed grain in order to fatten them, then drowned in brandy and roasted whole, after which diners would eat them, bones and all, with a large napkin draped over their heads in order to confine the aroma of the dish, thus heightening the sensory experience for the diner or perhaps to limit the visual spectacle, ‘and, some believe, to hide from God’.15 In 1762 Richard Bradley’s posthumously published sixth edition of The Country Housewife instructed on the most effective way of cooking ortolans: The Ortolan is a bird brought from France, and is fed in large Cages with Canary-Seeds til they become a Lump of Fat; and when they are fully fatted, they must be killed, or else they will feed upon their own Flesh. When you kill them, take them by the Beak, and holding it close with your Finger and Thumb, the Bird will be stifled in about a Minute. Roast them quick, with the Heads on (without drawing) setting small toasts under them to drip upon.16

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The cruel treatment of the animal prior to death, and the specific and almost barbaric tradition of eating this ‘delicacy’, becomes absolutely chilling when mirrored as Blifil’s desire for Sophia. His sexual desire is mixed with a kind of sadistic cruelty, which is paralleled in their childhood experience when Blifil kills Sophia’s pet bird. The vulgarity in Blifil’s desire for Sophia is less about his desire to sexually consume her than it is about his vitriolic spite for Tom and his desire for power and dominance: Blifil therefore looked on this human ortolan with greater desire than when he viewed her last; nor was his desire at all lessened by the aversion which he discovered in her to himself. On the contrary, this served rather to heighten the pleasure he proposed in rifling her charms, as it added triumph to lust; nay, he had some further views, from obtaining the absolute possession of her person, which we detest too much even to mention; and revenge itself was not without its share in the gratifications which he promised himself. The rivalling poor Jones, and supplanting him in her affections, added another spur to his pursuit, and promised another additional rapture to his enjoyment.17

The narrator’s omission, ‘we detest too much even to mention’, is particularly telling. As Stephen Dobranski discusses in ‘What Fielding Doesn’t Say in Tom Jones’, the intentional omissions on the part of the narrator reveal a good deal about what is actually being emphasised. In calling attention to the omission of any detail regarding Blifil’s intended sexual conquest of Sophia while providing significantly more description of other conquests in the novel, Fielding then invites the reader to share in the resultant horror of this potential union. In conjunction with the ortolan comparison, which reiterates Sophia’s perceived insubstantiality, her self-abnegation further emphasises her perceived lack. When confined to her room after returning from her quest to find Tom, Sophia ‘ate but little, yet she was regularly served with her meals’18; the servants ‘were afraid she would be starved; for she had scarce swallowed a single morsel in the last forty hours’,19 not for an unavailability or restriction of food but because she refuses or is unable to eat. The use of ‘morsel’ here harkens back to the earlier instance where she is the morsel to be eaten by Blifil, while in this later one she asserts control in not eating a morsel. The shift that occurs between these two repetitions of the word reflects Sophia’s assertion of her own agency in refusing to marry Blifil, that is, in refusing to be ‘consumed’ against her will. The image of

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the anorectic woman reiterates the stereotype of female frailty or insubstantiality. While I am not suggesting that Sophia has an eating disorder, her eating or lack thereof seems to be tied not only to her love life and subsequent anxieties about Tom but also to her association with birds. The phrase ‘to eat like a bird’ was first used in 1856,20 but to ‘peck’ at one’s food was used as early as 1536.21 Lack of appetite in Tom Jones indicates more about worry or mental preoccupation than anything else; this preoccupation, resulting in lack of appetite and failure to consume, reinforces her bird association. Sophia’s association with birds is further made conspicuous by the fact that the key element of her favourite dish is comprised of eggs. In an attempt to entice her to eat, Black George provides Sophia with an egg-­ stuffed chicken which is her ‘favourite dainty]’, though ‘Sophia would have had him take the pullet back, saying she could not eat’.22 In fact, the ‘eggs of pullets, partridges, pheasants, &c., were … the most favourite dainties of Sophia’.23 Black George’s attempt at enticement initially works, as the narrator reports that she ‘began to dissect the fowl’24; however, when she discovers a letter from Tom among the eggs stuffed into the belly of the bird, ‘Sophia, notwithstanding her long fast, and notwithstanding her favourite dish was there before her, no sooner saw the letter than she immediately snatched it up, tore it open, and read’.25 The reader never discovers whether or not Sophia eventually eats her favourite dish, but initially this hardly seems to matter as the letter from Tom serves as a replacement for the as yet untouched meal, which she consumes more voraciously than any food she touches throughout the novel. The narrator emphasises the fact that Sophia should be hungry and should, realistically, at least be tempted by the food before her, yet the letter, and by extension its author, takes precedence over her own physical wants and needs. This subversion of the self further underscores her seeming insubstantiality. It is significant that Black George is the one to deliver this dish. As gamekeeper, employed first by Allworthy and later by Squire Western, Black George’s job is to maintain the game on the estate. The role of gamekeeper can be multi-faceted and a bit tricky, but George’s job is essentially to ensure that the game on the estate stays there, or is only removed by those given express and legal permission. Squire Western is very much concerned with not only maintaining the (actual) game on his estate for his own amusement and that of his friends, but he regards his daughter in much the same light; no one is to ‘poach’ his ‘meat’, whether literal or figurative. Among the other game, George protects Squire

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Western’s birds as well as his ‘bird’ daughter from unsanctioned ‘consumption’. Despite aiding communication between Tom and Sophia, George tacitly consents to contribute to Sophia’s confinement and imprisonment. He is the keeper of Squire Western’s game, as well as his ‘game’, which is vaguely ironic considering the trouble that ensued when he poached partridges with Tom earlier in the novel. Knowing as he does that eggs are Sophia’s favourite food, George essentially offers Sophia a representation of her own confinement and subjugation. The pullet representing her own vulnerability is filled with eggs, a far more fragile form of bird. There is, indeed, an element of masochism in Sophia’s favourite food in that she consumes the tangible symbol of her unjust pigeonholing. Yet, Sophia’s abstention from her favourite dish proves to be essential to her figurative rejection of the novel’s bird associations. Despite the problematic elements of her food preference, Sophia ultimately prizes the letter from Tom more highly than her favourite food despite the reality of her hunger. Though the precedence Tom takes here is problematic in that it implies that Sophia neglects her own health and well-being for the sake of maintaining communication with him, the fact that she does not consume the dish creates a little distance between Sophia and her association with fragile and insubstantial birds. Given the import of the letter and Tom’s declarations of love within it, and given what we know of Sophia’s previous behaviour regarding food, in that she does not consume much of anything through the course of the novel, it is safe to assume that she does not, in fact, return to finish her pullet or the eggs within it. In the letter, Tom expresses his wish that Sophia be ‘the happiest of women’,26 but perhaps more importantly articulates that Sophia has a choice in the continuance of their relationship and that he will be guided by that choice. He acknowledges her agency, unlike most other characters in the novel, and given the significance of this rare acknowledgement, it is perhaps no wonder that Sophia prizes the letter over all else, especially the layered symbol of vulnerability and inevitability on the plate before her. Among the list of eggs deemed to be among Sophia’s favourites are those of partridges, which leads to the other apparent bird association in this novel—Benjamin Partridge, Tom’s friend and sidekick. Popular hunting prey, partridges are largely land dwellers, building their nests and foraging on the ground. Like his namesake, Partridge is similarly, if figuratively, hunted. Beleaguered and physically abused by his wife as well as unjustly accused of fathering a bastard with the maid, Jenny Jones, Partridge’s reputation is ruined through the false accusations of his wife and the

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zealous pursuit by Allworthy’s housekeeper, Mrs. Deborah Wilkins. After Allworthy finds him guilty and cancels Partridge’s annuity, the Partridges’ tenuous economic situation becomes dire and he slips into indolence and despair as a result, eventually leaving town after his wife dies of smallpox. Partridge’s birdlike vulnerability is economic: he and his wife rely not only on the annuity supplied by Allworthy but on Partridge’s ability to maintain his little school. With the loss of reputation and the blow of losing the annuity, Partridge succumbs to his own seemingly inherent fragility. It is significant that shortly after Partridge’s trial, economic demise, and subsequent departure from the area, Tom and Black George are discovered poaching partridges, particularly because at this point in the novel it is believed that Partridge has fathered Tom. This scenario hints at an almost Oedipal kind of complication where Tom hunts his own father, which adds further vulnerability to Partridge’s birdlike qualities. Though not of a sexual or predatory nature, as we have seen is often the case with Sophia, Partridge’s fragility is also a physical one. In addition to being economically abandoned, Partridge is vulnerable to abuse from his wife and neighbours. The novel reiterates that Partridge is ‘one of the best-natured fellows in the world’,27 yet because of the jealous nature of his wife he is perpetually henpecked and berated. Yet, it must also be acknowledged that Partridge marries his wife for the small fortune of £20 she amassed while working in Allworthy’s kitchen, so while her abuse is unkind and unwarranted, Partridge is not blameless in creating their infelicity. His initial economic dependence on his wife, however, coupled with the fact that he falls apart rather quickly after losing his annuity further reiterates his economic fragility. He is similarly vulnerable to the elements; throughout his journey with Tom, Partridge perpetually complains of the cold and of his hunger. While Tom soliloquises about his love for Sophia, Partridge complains that he would rather be inside with something warm to eat: They now travelled some miles without speaking to each other, during which suspense of discourse Jones often sighed, and Partridge groaned as bitterly, though from a very different reason. At length Jones made a full stop, and turning about, cried, ‘Who knows, Partridge, but the loveliest creature in the universe may have her eyes now fixed on that very moon which I behold at this instant!’ ‘Very likely, sir’, answered Partridge; ‘and if my eyes were fixed on a good sirloin of roast beef, the devil might take the moon and her horns into the bargain’.28

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Perhaps because he is not insulated by romantic attachments, Partridge feels cold and hunger far more profoundly than Tom. Yet, it is the repetition of these complaints which lead to the perception of Partridge as a more vulnerable individual. It would be easy to simply blame Partridge’s wife for all of his physical and economic troubles, and while she is clearly a force to be reckoned with, so too is Mrs. Wilkins. Significantly, the narrator compares her to a bird of prey when she goes to investigate Tom’s parentage: Not otherwise than when a kite, tremendous bird, is beheld by the feathered generation soaring aloft, and hovering over their heads, the amorous dove, and every innocent little bird, spread wide the alarm, and fly trembling to their hiding-places. He proudly beats the air, conscious of his dignity, and meditates intended mischief. So when the approach of Mrs. Deborah was proclaimed through the street, all the inhabitants ran trembling into their houses, each matron dreading lest the visit should fall to her lot. She with stately steps proudly advances over the field: aloft she bears her towering head, filled with conceit of her own pre-eminence, and schemes to effect her intended discovery. It is my intention, therefore, to signify, that, as it is the nature of a kite to devour little birds, so is it the nature of such persons as Mrs. Wilkins to insult and tyrannize over little people. This being indeed the means which they use to recompense to themselves their extreme servility and condescension to their superiors; for nothing can be more reasonable, than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them, which they themselves pay to all above them.29

Unlike Sophia or Partridge, who are compared to more docile breeds or birds in general, Mrs. Wilkins is compared to a bird of prey. Not only does she prey on and manipulate those smaller or weaker than her, but she is readily recognised as such; her neighbours fear her because of the small amount of power her position allows her to wield. Rather than a symbol of the oppression or objectification of her gender, Mrs. Wilkins represents the aggressor, intent on maintaining her place in the status quo and using power dynamics and the social hierarchy to do so. While Mrs. Wilkins is not a particularly likeable character, she does present an alternative representation of female agency. Playing long-term odds, Mrs. Wilkins attempts to curry favour with the man she assumes will be her future employer, Allworthy’s brother-in-law Captain Blifil. While her actions are morally questionable and her attitude towards Tom is certainly self-serving, she is

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also clever in the way in which she attempts to manipulate situations in her favour. She is refreshingly intelligent and proactive—a true bird of prey who takes what she needs when she sees the opportunity. The many layers of bird references and associations overlap and intersect throughout Tom Jones, complicating extended metaphors and symbolism. The pursuit of Sophia, affiliated as she is with bird imagery, creates the idea of her as a hunted animal. Sophia’s own role in this chase is complicated as well; she is both complicit through her acceptance of Tom and the gender strictures assigned her as well as rebelling against it in her initial rejection of Blifil and the future assigned her by her father. The novel’s conventional conclusion of wedded bliss does not suggest a progressive or proto-feminist message on the part of its author, yet its intricate handling of gendered symbols only proves that despite its long-held place within the literary canon and the mountains of scholarship already in existence, Tom Jones can still surprise.

Notes 1. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Bird’ n.1d and ‘Burd’. 2. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, eds. John Bender and Simon Stern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 729. 3. John Allen Stevenson, The Real History of ‘Tom Jones’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 78–79. 4. Ibid., 97. 5. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 864. 6. Ibid., 266. 7. Ibid., 194. 8. Ibid., 783. 9. Ibid. 10. Ingrid H.  Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015), especially 23–36, 44–48, 83–88. 11. Fielding, Tom Jones, 301. 12. Henry Fielding, The Journey of the Voyage to Lisbon (London: A.  Millar, 1755), 101. 13. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, 5th edition (London, 1753), 184. 14. David Hume, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 276.

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15. ‘France Bans an Old Culinary Tradition.’ Wine Spectator. Wine Spectator Online. 30 June 1999. 16. Richard Bradley, The Country Housewife, 6th edition (London: 1762), 152. 17. Fielding, Tom Jones, 301. 18. Ibid., 741. 19. Ibid., 742. 20. OED ‘eat like a bird’ v. draft addition 2004. 21. OED ‘peck’ v1.4. 22. Fielding, Tom Jones, 742. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 743. 26. Ibid., 744. 27. Fielding, Tom Jones, 71. 28. Ibid., 379. 29. Ibid., 40–41.

Bibliography Bradley, Richard. The Country Housewife. 6th edition. London. 1762. Defoe, Daniel. A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. 5th edition. London, 1753. Dobranski, Stephen. ‘What Fielding Doesn’t Say in Tom Jones’. Modern Philology 107, no. 4 (2010): 632–53. Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. Edited by John Bender and Simon Stern. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Fielding, Henry. The Journey of a Voyage to Lisbon. London, 1755. ‘France Bans an Old Culinary Tradition’. Wine Spectator. Wine Spectator Online. 30 June 1999. Online at https://www.winespectator.com/magazine/show/ id/8222. 2 April 2013. Hume, David. ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985. 268–80. Stevenson, John Allen. The Real History of Tom Jones. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Tague, Ingrid H. Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in EighteenthCentury Britain. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015.

CHAPTER 4

‘In Clouds Unnumber’d’: Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Birds and Insects’, Speculative Ecology, and the Politics of Naturalism D. T. Walker

The writings of Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) have lately emerged as key texts for animal studies in the British eighteenth century, but her treatment of birds—consisting chiefly in one poem of some 130 lines— deserves more notice than it has hitherto attracted.1 Written to her friend Mary Priestley around 1767, accompanied by some lost sketches, and later published in her Poems of 1773, ‘To Mrs. P[riestley], with some Drawings of Birds and Insects’ is the earliest text from Barbauld’s collected verse that we might call a nature poem. Presented as a friendly diversion ‘to cheat the lonely hour’, it is nonetheless one of her most considered verse engagements with the naturalist discourses of her time. And it is remarkable for its varied depictions of birds’ relations with the environment; what we might today call their ecology:

D. T. Walker (*) Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_4

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These cleave the crumbling bark for insect food; Those dip their crooked beak in kindred blood: Some haunt the rushy moor, the lonely woods; Some bathe their silver plumage in the floods.2

Barbauld’s regard for animals here is not couched in liberal rhetoric of sensibility and rights, as in her better-known poem ‘The Mouse’s Petition’. Rather, it is the complexity and concealment of birds’ positions in space that drive her wonder and interest in the animals. I want to examine, then, how she and her contemporaries harnessed bird ecology, as poetic and scientific subject matter, to make political arguments. Birds, to be sure, are not Barbauld’s only concern, or mine, in her poem. Their status as both emblematic and elusive creatures, however, whose positions in biological and representational systems are simultaneously available and unavailable to observers, affords her a singular opportunity to interrogate the political values underlying various modes of empirical inquiry. Birds’ shifting relations to place, I will argue, inform a larger, speculative ethos of subjectivity and place that we can trace across Barbauld’s career and which ultimately furnishes her with models of fraught cultural as well as natural worlds. Barbauld’s use of science as a vehicle for larger critiques of eighteenth-­ century culture and politics is well documented.3 She understands science writing as a repository of moral commitments as well as knowledge claims. These moral and epistemic aspects of scientific inquiry notably converge in ecology, a discipline tasked with sorting out the locations in space, hierarchical relationships, and material needs of various species.4 Birds, in their mobility and range of habitat, therefore offer Barbauld an interesting case. Her first extended bird description in ‘Birds and Insects’, that of an eagle, fixes animal behaviours to definite points and features of the ecosphere, thereby elaborating both the biological and political hierarchies that such description implies: The tawny EAGLE seats his callow brood High on the cliff, and feasts his young with blood. On Snowden’s rocks, or Orkney’s wide domain, Whose beetling cliffs o’erhang the western main, The royal bird his lonely kingdom forms Amidst the gathering clouds, and sullen storms; Thro’ the wide waste of air he darts his sight And holds his sounding pinions pois’d for flight; With cruel eye premeditates the war,

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And marks his destin’d victim from afar: Descending in a whirlwind to the ground, His pinions like the rush of waters sound; The fairest of the fold he bears away, And to his nest compels the struggling prey.5

Barbauld’s eagle has two identifiable ancestors. Many ecological details in this passage, as William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft have noted, match descriptions of the golden eagle in Thomas Pennant’s 1766 work British Zoology. A Welshman, ornithological pioneer, and correspondent of Barbauld’s brother John Aikin, Pennant exhorts British poets to draw their metaphors and images ‘from the face of nature, which is the only fund of great ideas’—a suggestion McCarthy and Kraft believe could have influenced Barbauld to pen ‘Birds and Insects’.6 But Barbauld’s poem is also a study of nature metaphor itself, in that it borrows extensively from the period’s most influential nature poem, The Seasons of James Thomson (completed 1746). Her ascription of noble, even sovereign qualities to the eagle, and to its hunt the dynamics of war or imperialism, particularly recalls Thomson’s ‘royal eagle’, who nests on The summit of a craggy cliff, Hung o’er the deep, such as amazing frowns On utmost Kilda’s shore, …………………………………… [in] the towering seat For ages of his empire—which in peace Unstained he holds, while many a league to sea He wings his course, and preys in distant isles.7

For Thomson, the eagle, traditionally a symbol of both divine and temporal sovereignty,8 and explicitly placed in Scotland’s outer archipelago, comes to affirm the secure position of the British nation: formidable, aloof, and at the head of God’s ordered world. What Barbauld omits from this vision, or rather adds to it, is telling. Whereas she describes the violence of the eagle’s hunt at some length, Thomson passes over it quickly and uncharacteristically, placing it in ‘distant isles’. In this metaphorical containment, moreover, he anticipates the ornithology of Pennant, who asserts that eagles’ numbers in Britain are limited due to ‘providence denying a large increase to rapacious birds’.9 By pinpointing the raptor in space,

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both men elaborate a natural and geopolitical order in which Britons, too, have a defined and assured ‘seat’ of ‘peace’. Barbauld’s eagle borrowings therefore document—without undersigning—not only the national myths and metaphors drawn from ornithology but those drawn on by it as well. As Laura Brown has noted, the moralistic registers long evident in fabular and emblematic animal writing had, by the eighteenth century, largely been absorbed into the observationally grounded writings of natural philosophers.10 In The British Zoology, Pennant urges the study of native fauna as a matter of both pride and methodology: ‘[A]s few countries receive more advantages from their natural breed of quadrupeds, unmixed with any ravenous creatures, so few can boast a greater variety of birds, whether local, or migratory’. Britain’s animals are simultaneously evidence of God’s ‘divine munificence’ and objects of study whereby the nation might attain rational and material progress.11 These, indeed, are two aspects of the same Enlightenment optimism. Pennant writes, Utility, truth and certainty, should alone be the point at which science should aim; and what knowledge can be more useful than of those objects with which we are most intimately connected? and where can we reason with greater certainty than in our own country? where a constant recourse may be had to every object.12

In basing knowledge on proximity and being ‘intimately connected’, Pennant defines zoology and ornithology as disciplines rooted in the philosophical empiricism of the period, which regarded experience as the origin of all ideas. But certainty in these sciences is likewise bound up with the providential position of the British observer, who possesses as such a degree of eminence and authority. Through the natural sciences, for example, Britons might ‘preserve [their] superiority in manufactures and commerce’ over ‘[their] rivals the French’.13 As for the eagle, so for the scientist: to see keenly is to exploit well. Epistemological and geopolitical fortunes thus go hand in hand. McCarthy’s description of Pennant as ‘patriotic naturalist’ is succinct14; indeed, the insistently local character of Pennant’s science—the central premise, in other words, of his empiricism—makes it difficult to separate the naturalist from the patriot. In Barbauld’s ornithological source material, birds and their place in the ecosphere mediate humans’ own relationships to nature, God, and the political world. In this sense, her adaptation of Pennant and Thomson

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lends support to both McCarthy’s reading of ‘Birds and Insects’ as a modernist work drawing on the newest available science and Daniel Watkins’s recent reading which takes the poem as a metaphorical treatment of human political and cultural relations.15 These two accounts, however, are jointly symptomatic of what Brown has identified as a ‘tendency either to alienation or to association’ in animal studies, whereby other species’ subjectivity is alternately presumed to be outside the scope of exact science, on the one hand, and subsumed through anthropomorphism into familiar human concerns on the other.16 Barbauld, for her part, defies this dichotomy. If her poem is empirically oriented, its brand of empiricism is attached to neither certainty nor place; if it is political, it is because Barbauld’s birds are ultimately the tenors, rather than vehicles, of an ethical metaphor. The migratory birds she describes in another scene are unnamed and presented indistinctly, indexed neither to a taxonomic order, a moral order, nor to defined geographical space: When winter bites upon the naked plain, Nor food nor shelter in the groves remain; By instinct led, a firm united band, As marshall’d by some skilful general’s hand, The congregated nations wing their way In dusky columns o’er the trackless sea; In clouds unnumber’d annual hover o’er The craggy Bass, or Kilda’s utmost shore: Thence spread their sails to meet the southern wind, And leave the gathering tempest far behind; Pursue the circling sun’s indulgent ray, Course the swift seasons, and o’ertake the day.17

Aside from tonal ambiguity, this scene prominently features uncertainties of space, body, and position. Barbauld’s borrowed toponyms—Thomson describes his eagle nesting on ‘utmost Kilda’s shore’, and Pennant ‘the clouds of Soland geese on the Bass island’18—this time serve to disrupt sense of place. Thanks to her impressionistic writing, birds become indistinguishable from background: they ‘hover’, without absolute relation to Bass Rock, St. Kilda, or any other site, and more importantly, they share adjectival traits—‘dusky’, ‘unnumber’d’, and their gathering into ‘clouds’—with the sky itself. The imagery of the last couplets is, to draw a fine distinction, more optical than visual, emphasising scattering light and shifting air. Finally, Barbauld’s choice to depict migratory birds resonates

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ecologically and politically: ‘congregated nations … o’er the trackless sea’ calls human migration, colonisation, and potentially slavery to mind. If these creatures hail from Britain, they are nonetheless denizens of the world. In a sharp break from Pennant and Thomson, whose descriptions of nature are in part exercises in certainty and nationalism, Barbauld here takes pains not to fix these birds to a precise locale. Leonard Lutwack has argued that authors are drawn to birds because they are readily observable and, to the extent that they are mysterious, carry supernatural associations.19 Barbauld complicates this account in ‘Birds and Insects’, for her treatment of migratory birds argues above all else their hiddenness and mutability. These traits are further developed in the poem’s subsequent lines, where Barbauld shifts her focus from birds to insects, evoking the sudden manifestation of previously latent life forms: Entomb’d, beneath the filmy web they lie, And wait the influence of a kinder sky; When vernal sun-beams pierce their dark retreat, The heaving tomb distends with vital heat; The full-form’d brood impatient of their cell Start from their trance, and burst their silken shell; ……………………………………………… So when Rinaldo struck the conscious rind, He found a nymph in every trunk confin’d; The forest labours with convulsive throes, The bursting trees the lovely births disclose, And a gay troop of damsels round him stood, Where late was rugged bark and lifeless wood.20

In representing metamorphosis—a phenomenon still not universally understood in the mid-eighteenth century—Barbauld again shows herself engaged with the science of her moment. She casts metamorphosis, though, as more than a transition between life stages. It is from a ‘tomb’ that ‘vital heat’ and ‘lovely births’ paradoxically emerge. Similarly, in the allusion to Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, used to recount the incubation of larvae, ostensibly ‘lifeless’ background proves to be suffused with ‘conscious’ creatures. Barbauld’s account, though explicitly of metamorphosis, sounds perhaps more like a concept it had recently displaced: namely, the Aristotelian theory of spontaneous generation, in which insects emerged from dead matter.21 In acknowledging yet complicating the zoological paradigms of her day, Barbauld insinuates that dividing the environment

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into sentient and insentient components is not as straightforward as that science has supposed. With her insects, as with her migratory birds, there is an uncertainty in the distinction between subject and substrate. What is the cultural milieu of this ecology? Isobel Armstrong has made a helpful case for the influence of Joseph Priestley, Mary’s husband, on Barbauld’s ‘Unitarian poetics’, insofar as he believed ‘that the world was vital, even seemingly inanimate matter’, and that one might therefore achieve ‘the expansion of the world through the association of ideas’.22 Heather Keenleyside has likewise shown, in the syntax of Thomson’s Seasons, a resistance to ‘efforts to separate mind from motion or moving from being moved’.23 These familiar sources, undoubtedly important for Barbauld, nonetheless do not account for the specifically spatial, ecological dimensions of ‘Birds and Insects’, nor their possible precursors in mainstream empiricist thought. Among the more radical ideas in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is his speculation that ‘some degrees of sense, perception, and thought’ might be attributes of ‘created sensless matter’ itself, and not confined to what we call organisms: ‘[W]hat reason have we to conclude, that [God] could not order [pleasure and pain] to be produced in a subject we cannot conceive capable of them, as well as in a Subject we cannot conceive the motion of Matter can any way operate upon?’24 The mind-body problem in Lockean empiricism leaves him unable to say how perception subsists in a material world but also, in an ecological sense, where. Arguing in proto-evolutionary terms that the mental faculties of an organism are adapted to its habitat and survival strategy, Locke traces gradations of sentience from humans to barely perceptive oysters, inviting the inference that each niche might foster its own forms of sensitivity.25 Locke’s philosophical suggestions in the Essay bore popular fruit some twenty years later when, in one of the most remarkable passages of the Spectator, Joseph Addison richly imagined nature as a spatially complex system of latent interdependencies: If we consider those Parts of the Material World which lie the nearest to us, and are therefore subject to our Observations and Enquiries, it is amazing to consider the Infinity of Animals with which it is stocked. Every part of Matter is peopled: Every green Leaf swarms with Inhabitants. There is scarce a single Humour in the Body of a Man, or of any other Animal, in which our Glasses do not discover Myriads of living Creatures. The Surface of Animals is also covered with other Animals, which are in the same manner the Basis of other Animals that live upon it; nay, we find in the most solid

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Bodies, as in marble it self, innumerable Cells and Cavities that are crouded with such imperceptible Inhabitants, as are too little for the naked Eye to discover.26

Barbauld, as editor of a Spectator anthology later in life, surely knew this passage, though she did not select for inclusion the essay containing it. Addison, moreover, cites in this number Bernard Fontenelle’s speculative, popular Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, a work Barbauld knew well from childhood and which inspired her in Hymns in Prose for Children to muse on unknowable creatures living tenuously on distant planets, who ‘hang upon [God] as a child upon the breast of its mother’.27 On the balance, then, Barbauld’s ecology might likewise be deemed speculative. Rooted in the senses, it exceeds the strictly sensory. Like Locke’s empiricism, Barbauld’s is sceptical towards the adequacy of the categories through which we view the world; like Addison’s, it relies on imagination to push at their bounds; like Fontenelle’s, it takes possibility seriously. As Keenleyside has noted, numerous eighteenth-century authors attest to the insufficiency of natural philosophy alone for understanding animal life.28 Barbauld takes the aesthetic and ethical consequences of this insight as far as she can. The overall effect of ‘Birds and Insects’ is a form of pareidolia—the apprehension, among its images, of meaningful patterns suggestive of life, specifically of sentient bodies ensconced across land and sky. Whereas even Addison concludes that ‘[m]atter is only made as the Basis and Support of Animals’, the chain of being—that metaphysical division, scientifically codified as animal-vegetable-mineral by such scientists as Pennant and Carl Linnaeus—is not so simple for Barbauld.29 In her ecology, birds so blend with clouds, and insects with plants, as to be functionally coextensive. As McCarthy reports, ‘she is said to have disliked picking flowers lest she injure a feeling creature’.30 ‘Birds and Insects’ in this way reveals an almost paralysing ethical impulse, with roots in British Empiricism yet also similar in some respects to the Jain doctrine of ahimsa: a recognition of the possibility that any movement, however innocuous, is of the gravest consequence to some  body or other. If her better-known poem ‘The Mouse’s Petition’ describes a small animal’s plight in strikingly political terms, it is only enacting a more general and persistent concern of hers: If mind, as ancient sages taught, A never dying flame,

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Still shifts thro’ matter’s varying forms, In every form the same, Beware, lest in the worm you crush A brother’s soul you find; And tremble lest thy luckless hand Dislodge a kindred mind.31

It is a ubiquitous threat. In yet another early poem, ‘The Invitation’, Barbauld describes the breaking of ground for canals as a penetrative act and emphasises the destruction threatened by the inquiries of naturalists: Some trace with curious search the hidden cause Of nature’s changes, and her various laws; Untwist her beauteous web, disrobe her charms, And hunt her to her elemental forms.32

She is as averse epistemologically to such experiments as she is ethically. Resisting ultimate reduction of the sensory world to a clear spatial or hierarchical framework, Barbauld’s brand of empiricism is heavy on observation and association but light on the finalities of induction. It is open to the uncertain ‘kindred mind’ flitting just out of view. With respect to contemporary ecocriticism, her bird poetics might be read as an early attempt to represent both an ‘ecological other’ excluded from environmental discourse through the policing of its body and the ‘slow violence’ inflicted too gradually and remotely on ecosystems to be readily and compellingly exposed.33 In fashioning this speculative ecology, Barbauld confronts a split in empiricist theories of perception and association, and particularly in the roles imagination was thought to play in these processes. Effectively, she expands the purview of sympathy, the process by which humans form ties, to encompass animals in the landscape as well. Even David Hume, who more than any eighteenth-century philosopher lays bare the constitutive role of imagination in human ideation and experience, stops short, in The Natural History of Religion, of the capacious awareness with which Barbauld views ecosystems: There is an universal tendency amongst mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We

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find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds. … Hence the frequency and beauty of the prosopopœia in poetry, where trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion.34

Hume dismisses pareidolia, if taken more than figuratively, as a form of superstition, remote from the properly ethical domain of human sympathy. By his own account in the Treatise of Human Nature, however, sympathy likewise depends on the perception of familiar external patterns: any feeling we posit in another person ‘is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it’, and only afterwards ‘conceiv’d to belong to another person, as we conceive any other matter of fact’.35 Sympathy happens, that is, when hints of resemblance among a flux of data impel the observer to organise ‘objects’ into living patterns—a leap based in custom, Hume characteristically insists, rather than exact reasoning. And more forcefully than most of his contemporaries, he argues that human observers can and do attribute passional and rational states to other species through a similar process: ‘’tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours’.36 Yet Hume, sceptic that he is, is too credulous of his own imaginative taxonomy to afford equal priority to ambient or poetic suggestions of mental life, precisely those cases in which the status of the organism is most in question. Barbauld’s assumptions about associationism and materiality preclude many distinctions traditionally made between human and nonhuman.37 Her techniques for representing birds and insects, for instance, overlap explicitly with those she uses to address Mary Priestley, the ‘Amanda’ of the poem. Even conversing with her friend entails a kind of ecological thinking, or prosopopoeia, in which she must implicitly theorise intangible phenomena like life and consciousness within an observable world of matter. Barbauld frames this problem at the poem’s outset as a relation between visual and literary art or, in more philosophical terms, between ‘form’ and ‘mind’: Painting and poetry are near allied; The kindred arts two sister Muses guide; …………………………………………… This with a silent touch enchants our eyes,

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And bids a gayer brighter world arise: That, less allied to sense, with deeper art Can pierce the close recesses of the heart; By well set syllables, and potent sound, Can rouse, can chill the breast, can sooth, can wound; To life adds motion, and to beauty soul, And breathes a spirit through the finish’d whole: Each perfects each, in friendly union join’d; This gives Amanda’s form, and that her mind.38

This division of arts—a commonplace of aesthetic theory in the period, borrowed in this case from Alexander Pope—raises new questions in the context of ecology. Barbauld aims on the one hand—with her poem, perhaps, as well as her drawings—at an idealised picture of nature, a ‘gayer brighter world’. Her mimetic images, however, are suffused with a vitality that is uniquely the province of poetry. Barbauld proffers an intimate representation of ‘mind’ that is ‘close’ and ‘piercing’, able to ‘sooth’ and ‘wound’. At the same time, an absence of pronouns complicates the psychic implications of such representation: ‘the heart’, ‘the breast’, and ‘a spirit’ have abstract, indefinite reference. Barbauld invites elision between Priestley, the beloved companion whom she addresses, and the animals she actually spends most of the poem describing. Although intimate, the address is thus not entirely personal, but suggests a more diffusive solicitude that extends beyond Priestley alone. Even in this moment of friendly, directed speech, ‘mind’ is more ineffable than the ‘form’ of the poem supposes. Science and sociability are part of the same utterance; whether speaking of ladies or larvae, sympathy remains mediate and imaginative. Barbauld’s literary evocation of scattered and submerged psyches is no empirically extraneous poetic ornament, as Hume might suggest, but rather forms ‘a fundamental part of our descriptive and conceptual repertoire … that is essential to apprehending certain kinds of beings, to distinguishing them from things’.39 As ‘Birds and Insects’ makes amply clear, her sensory conjuration of other animals in the landscape overlaps, aesthetically and cognitively, with her cultivation of empathy for fellow humans. That sentience and vulnerability, human as well as animal, are latent all around us is a proposition that, by the time of the French Revolution, came to inform Barbauld’s polemical writings. Her increasingly overt rejection of British military, commercial, and technological endeavours in

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later years, therefore, does not mark a break from some youthful period of Enlightenment orthodoxy, as some critics have held.40 Rather, it is a deliberate extension, into political and institutional spheres, of the same speculative ecology that characterises ‘Birds and Insects’ and her other early nature poetry. Barbauld’s conceptual understanding of these animals contributes to her mature critiques of larger social, scientific, and political projects by calling attention to the fragility and complexity of the social fabric on which these purport to work. This sociable regard for fragility is detectable in such diverse works as the ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce’, ‘The Rights of Women’, and the political essay ‘Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation’, all of which temper the confident meliorism of the Dissenting Enlightenment in deeply unsettling ways by suggesting the dark attritions that might occur under even the most salutary reform attempts.41 And it is likewise detectable in the odd fact that the militancy of her early poem ‘Corsica’ did not reappear forty-five years later when France threatened another island. The poem Barbauld wrote in response to the Napoleonic Wars, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, infamously features a vision of a future Britain in ruins. It opens, though, with an allegorical representation of the war that would not be out of place in a poem like Thomson’s Liberty: Colossal Power with overwhelming force Bears down each fort of Freedom in its course; Prostrate she lies beneath the Despot’s sway, While the hushed nations curse him—and obey.

With huge personification figures and states en masse cast as the actors in war, the complexities of conflict are rendered two-dimensional: Oft o’er the daily page some soft-one bends To learn the fate of husband, brothers, friends, Or the spread map with anxious eye explores, Its dotted boundaries and penciled shores, Asks where the spot that wrecked her bliss is found, And learns its name but to detest the sound.42

This is piteous, but exclusively on one side; foes appear as a ‘spot’ to be ‘detested’, while the ‘daily page’ and ‘spread map’ provide technocratic mediation. This parcelled landscape lacks the positional instabilities of the

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habitats in ‘Birds and Insects’, and, correlatively, the ethical uncertainties embedded in them. It is easy to distance oneself from French claims and hardships glibly, as Edmund Burke did at the outset of the Revolution,43 when they are so severely delineated. But like ‘Birds and Insects’, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’ quickly veers away from the registers of certainty and nationalism. Whereas the huge sociohistorical forces that open the poem resemble Barbauld’s eagle—indomitable figures of militant imperial power—those present by its end are more like her migratory birds. Found in a desert are ‘limbs disjointed of gigantic power’,44 and found flitting through the sky is the ‘Spirit’ or ‘Genius’ who governs the rise and fall of civilisations. Critics have not managed to agree on what force or entity this genius represents; at least one has proposed that its vagueness is central to its function.45 The genius is unnamed, transient, and lacks assured ties to any place: he ‘soars’ to ‘other climes’ than Europe, and when he alights in the Andes he appears in clouds, ‘midst mountains wrapt in storm’, and ‘shrouds his awful form’. His movements among nations are disjointed and erratic: Northward he throws the animating ray, O’er Celtic nations bursts the mental day: And, as some playful child the mirror turns, Now here now there the moving lustre burns.46

This is not the linear Whig history espoused by Thomson and others, that ‘largest of Enlightenment clichés’ in which Britain is the heir of history’s accumulating westward progress47; as with Barbauld’s birds, the genius’s relation to place—and to known geopolitical events—is more unstable.48 In the most infamous review of the poem, John Wilson Croker excoriated it precisely for its counterfactual view of history.49 But Barbauld’s prophecy, if we can call it that, is not haughty or foreordained. It is protean; speculative. Countries, correspondingly, are not monoliths, and history is not a teleological flight, but an aggregate of inscrutable paths and mutable agents. And its psychic effects, in the political as in the ecological fabric, are submerged and indistinct things beyond prediction or control.50 If Rome was Britain’s intellectual progenitor, it was also its successful invader and subjugator:

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And now, where Caesar saw with proud disdain The wattled hut and skin of azure stain, Corinthian columns rear their graceful forms, And light varandas brave the wintry storms, While British tongues the fading fame prolong Of Tully’s eloquence and Maro’s song. Where once Bonduca whirled the scythed car, And the fierce matrons raised the shriek of war, Light forms beneath transparent muslins float, And tutored voices swell the artful note. Light-leaved acacias and the shady plane And spreading cedar grace the woodland reign; While crystal walls the tenderer plants confine, The fragrant orange and the nectared pine.51

Britain’s formation was marked by strife and uncertainty that Whig history glosses over. Barbauld juxtaposes the strife with the gloss; images of rough climate, Roman invasion, and Celtic resistance with fragile textures. Just as the imported pheasant in ‘Birds and Insects’ finds itself ‘oppress’d by bondage, and our chilly spring’,52 the airiness of Britain’s imported fashions leaves it all too exposed to the harsh realities of its situation. This delicate environment anticipates in some ways the pleasure-dome in Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’: it is a palimpsest, a sanitised cultural legacy papering over vicissitudes of conflict and statecraft. Sites of atrocity, whose names are learned just to detest the sound, finally become coextensive with home. ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’ thus exposes a speculative ecology underlying political systems. Britain’s landscape, alternately ‘crystal’, ‘transparent’, ‘tender’, and in rough ruins, may endure the same looming bodily hardships as any netted bird—or any distant nation. It is, Barbauld recognises, the procedure of scientific paradigms as well as providential ones to assimilate foreign and unintelligible occurrences within the framework of an ideological status quo.53 The counterrevolutionary claim of British exceptionalism during Napoleon’s onslaught, and concomitant deafness to dissent, owed a great deal to Burke’s defence of the English constitution on empirical grounds: ‘The circumstances’, he writes in Reflections on the Revolution, ‘are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind’. Burke infamously describes the state as an organic entity—the aggregate fruit of experience, maximally suited to the needs of the nation—and expressions of sympathy for the French cause as an ‘importunate chink’ of ‘grasshoppers’, a false

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and shrill alarm sounded over ‘thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, [that] chew the cud and are silent’.54 Bovine citizens are his answer to France’s swinish multitude; ecology and nuance are invoked to make a case for monolithic allegiance. It is fitting, then, that Thomas Pennant, in claiming that ‘experience is another term for knowledge’, cites a youthful Burke.55 Barbauld’s critique of the statesman’s experiential authority originates in important ways with her critique of the zoologist’s. The pressure exerted by poetry on environmental and cultural ‘circumstances’ leaves eighteenth-century naturalism and its students, to use Ursula Heise’s words, ‘tenuously suspended between the assertion that the local provides a familiar ground from which to expand one’s awareness to larger scales and the uneasy realization that the local itself … may be as epistemologically unfathomable in its entirety as larger entities such as the nation or the globe’.56 Heise here bears ecocritical witness to something like the anxiety that Thomson, according to Keenleyside, feels when considering ‘wilderness’, atomism and disharmony in nature, which often crops up unsettlingly close to home.57 But for Barbauld such wilderness and, indeed, its encroachments on human affairs are ethical resources. Her poetry challenges us to think alienation and affiliation together, and to take doubt and solicitude as active principles of sociability. Close examination of circumstances does not clarify natural or geopolitical hierarchies; it complicates them. The consideration of particularity as a naturalist finally leads Barbauld away from scientific induction, to dispute the utility and legitimacy of political arrangements that encompass less, and more, than they disclose.

Notes 1. To my knowledge, ‘To Mrs. P[riestley], with some Drawings of Birds and Insects’ has received more than passing mention three times: see Melissa Bailes, Questioning Nature: British Women’s Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750–1830 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 27–30; Daniel P. Watkins, Anna Letitia Barbauld and EighteenthCentury Visionary Poetics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 94–104; and William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 109. Of these, only Watkins discusses the poem at length. 2. Barbauld, ‘To Mrs. P[riestley], With some Drawings of Birds and Insects’, in The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, ed. William McCarthy and

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Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 6–9, lines 121, 23–26. Volume cited hereafter as PALB. 3. See for instance Dometa Wiegand, ‘Barbauld: “Embryo Systems and Unkindled Suns”’, in The New Science and Women’s Literary Discourse: Prefiguring ‘Frankenstein’, ed. Judy A.  Hayden (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 201–17; and Mary Ellen Bellanca, ‘Science, Animal Sympathy, and Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition”’, Eighteenth Century Studies 37, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 47–67. 4. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xi. 5. Barbauld, ‘Birds and Insects’, lines 31–44. 6. Pennant, The British Zoology. Class I. Quadrupeds. II. Birds (London: J. and J. March, 1766), [iv], accessed 27 November 2015, http://nrs.harvard. edu/urn-3:FMUS.MCZ:9358095; McCarthy and Kraft, note to ‘Birds and Insects’, in PALB, 226–27n57ff. Pennant’s preface is unpaginated. Elements of Barbauld’s portrait evidently drawn from Pennant include the eagle’s habitat, range, sharp vision, ‘tawny’ coloration, and hunting of game and livestock: see British Zoology, 61–62. 7. Thomson, ‘Spring’, in The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 2–34, lines 755–65. 8. Beryl Rowland, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 51–54. 9. Pennant, British Zoology, 61. 10. Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 22. 11. Pennant, British Zoology, [iii]. 12. Ibid., [i]. 13. Ibid., [v]. 14. McCarthy, Voice of the Enlightenment, 109. 15. Ibid.; Watkins, Visionary Poetics, 99–104. 16. Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes, 9. 17. Barbauld, ‘Birds and Insects’, lines 61–72. 18. Pennant, British Zoology, [iii]; see also 160–61. The ‘Soland goose’ is the northern gannet. 19. Lutwack, Birds in Literature (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), x–xi. 20. Barbauld, ‘Birds and Insects’, lines 75–90. 21. See Aristotle, History of Animals, vol. 2, Books 4–6, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library 438 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 171–87, accessed 29 November 2015, http://www.loebclassics.com/ view/LCL438/1970/volume.xml. For the supersession of abiogenesis,

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see Max Beier, ‘The Early Naturalists and Anatomists During the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century’, in History of Entomology, ed. Ray F. Smith, Thomas E. Mittler, and Carroll N. Smith (Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 1973), 89. 22. Armstrong, ‘Anna Letitia Barbauld: A Unitarian Poetics?’ in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 68. 23. Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 34. 24. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 541. 25. Ibid., 148. 26. Addison, No. 519 (26 October 1712), in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 4:346. 27. McCarthy, Voice of the Enlightenment, 44–45; Barbauld, Hymns in Prose for Children, in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002), 255. 28. Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 7. 29. Addison, Spectator 519, 4:347. 30. McCarthy, Voice of the Enlightenment, xi. 31. Barbauld, ‘The Mouse’s Petition’, in PALB, 36–37, lines 29–36. 32. Barbauld, ‘The Invitation: To Miss B*****’, in PALB, 9–15, lines 159–62. 33. See Sarah Jaquette Ray, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 5–11; Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2–3. 34. Hume, The Natural History of Religion, ed. A.  Wayne Colver, in The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 33–34. 35. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206, 208. 36. Ibid., 118. 37. See Joanna Wharton, ‘“The Things Themselves”: Sensible Images in Lessons for Children and Hymns in Prose’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, 107–26; Sonia Hofkosh, ‘Materiality, Affect, Event: Barbauld’s Poetics of the Everyday’, in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, 83–105. 38. Barbauld, ‘Birds and Insects’, lines 5–18. 39. Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 7. 40. Cf. for instance William Keach, ‘A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld’s Career’, Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 577.

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41. Barbauld, ‘Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade’, in PALB, 114–18, lines 41–44; ‘The Rights of Women’, in PALB, 121–22; ‘Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation’, in Selected Poetry and Prose, 303–5. 42. Barbauld, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, a Poem’, in PALB, 152–61, lines 7–10, 31–38. 43. For an especially glib instance, see Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Revolutionary Writings: ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ and the First ‘Letter on a Regicide Peace’, ed. Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 71. 44. Barbauld, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, line 254. 45. Penny Bradshaw, ‘Gendering the Enlightenment: Conflicting Images of Progress in the Poetry of Anna Lætitia Barbauld’, Women’s Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 365–67. 46. Barbauld, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, lines 321, 323–24, 261–64. 47. Geoffrey Hartman, ‘Romantic Poetry and the Genius Loci’, in Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958–1970 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 318. 48. Cf. William Levine, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Jeremiad and Progress-­ Piece Traditions in Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”’, Women’s Writing 12, no. 2 (2005): 177–86; and Emily Rohrbach, ‘Anna Barbauld’s History of the Future: A Deviant Way to Poetic Agency’, European Romantic Review 17, no. 2 (April 2006): 179–87. 49. Croker, unsigned review of ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, Quarterly Review 7 (1812): 310. For Croker’s authorship see McCarthy, Voice of the Enlightenment, 654n64. 50. Cf. Laura Mandell, ‘“Those Limbs Disjointed of Gigantic Power”: Barbauld’s Personifications and the (Mis)Attribution of Political Agency’, Studies in Romanticism 37, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 41. 51. Barbauld, ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’, lines 283–96. 52. Barbauld, ‘Birds and Insects’, line 54. 53. For the classic account, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Foundations of the Unity of Science, vol. 2, no. 2, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), chaps. 4 and 6. 54. Burke, Reflections, 8, 88. 55. Pennant, British Zoology, [iv]. 56. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 41. 57. Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 43–46.

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Bibliography Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. Edited by Donald F.  Bond. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1965. Aristotle. History of Animals. Vol. 2, Books 4–6, translated by A.  L. Peck. Loeb Classical Library 438. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. http://www.loebclassics.com/view/LCL438/1970/volume.xml. Bailes, Melissa. Questioning Nature: British Women’s Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750–1830. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Barbauld, Anna Letitia. Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002. Beier, Max. ‘The Early Naturalists and Anatomists During the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century’. In History of Entomology, edited by Ray F.  Smith, Thomas E.  Mittler, and Carroll N.  Smith, 81–94. Palo Alto, CA: Annual Reviews, 1973. Bellanca, Mary Ellen. ‘Science, Animal Sympathy, and Anna Barbauld’s “The Mouse’s Petition”’. Eighteenth Century Studies 37, no. 1 (2003): 47–67. Bradshaw, Penny. ‘Gendering the Enlightenment: Conflicting Images of Progress in the Poetry of Anna Lætitia Barbauld’. Women’s Writing 5, no. 3 (1998): 353–71. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. In Revolutionary Writings: ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ and the First ‘Letter on a Regicide Peace’, edited by Iain Hampsher-Monk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [Croker, John Wilson.] Unsigned review of ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven’. Quarterly Review 7 (1812): 309–13. Hartman, Geoffrey. Beyond Formalism: Literary Essays 1958-1970. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Hume, David. The Natural History of Religion. Edited by A. Wayne Colver. In The Natural History of Religion and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, edited by A. Wayne Colver and John Valdimir Price. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Keach, William. ‘A Regency Prophecy and the End of Anna Barbauld’s Career’. Studies in Romanticism 33, no. 4 (1994): 569–77.

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Keenleyside, Heather. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Foundations of the Unity of Science, vol. 2, no. 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Levine, William. ‘The Eighteenth-Century Jeremiad and Progress-Piece Traditions in Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven”’. Women’s Writing 12, no. 2 (2005): 177–86. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975. Lutwack, Leonard. Birds in Literature. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Mandell, Laura. ‘“Those Limbs Disjointed of Gigantic Power”: Barbauld’s Personifications and the (Mis)Attribution of Political Agency’. Studies in Romanticism 37, no. 1 (1998): 27–41. McCarthy, William. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. McCarthy, William and Olivia Murphy, eds. Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pennant, Thomas. The British Zoology. Class I. Quadrupeds. II. Birds. … Illustrated with One Hundred and Seven Copper Plates. London: J. and J. March, 1766. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:FMUS.MCZ:9358095. Ray, Sarah Jaquette. The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. Rohrbach, Emily. ‘Anna Barbauld’s History of the Future: A Deviant Way to Poetic Agency.’ European Romantic Review 17, no. 2 (2006): 179–87. Rowland, Beryl. Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978. Thomson, James. The Seasons and The Castle of Indolence. Edited by James Sambrook. Oxford: Clarendon, 1972. Watkins, Daniel P. Anna Letitia Barbauld and Eighteenth-Century Visionary Poetics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012.

CHAPTER 5

Charlotte Smith and the Nightingale Bethan Roberts

Nightingales bookend Charlotte Smith’s literary career. The first edition of her Elegiac Sonnets (1784) includes two sonnets on the nightingale, and her posthumous work for children The Natural History of Birds (1807) includes a section on the bird. This chapter will consider the significance of the nightingale in Smith’s writing, and its wider literary and natural history context. It shows that, for Smith, the natural and literary worlds were intrinsically bound, affording her an influential place in the history of nature writing. Smith is often credited with reviving the sonnet form in the late eighteenth century and celebrated as the first ‘Romantic’ poet, for her poetic innovation, for ‘making it new’. However, Smith’s verse also displays a deep and constitutive engagement with the literary past.1 I suggest that Smith’s sonnets rely on a knowledge of the literary traditions they engage with for meaning. As well as connecting with tradition through the sonnet form and via the quotations and intertextual references of her poems, she also does so through the subjects of her sonnets: the literary associations of the sites, settings, flora, and fauna of Smith’s sonnets are a constitutive aspect of them. This is nowhere more apparent

B. Roberts (*) University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_5

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than in her nightingale sonnets, which take as their subject the most versified bird in the history of poetry, and the bird Smith most frequently writes about in her poems. Smith spent most of her life living in various locations in the Southeast of England, where the nightingale would be an annual visitor in the spring and summer months. For her, to hear the bird in its natural habitat was a cultural experience, bringing to mind its literary life. Thus, although Smith’s engagement with place is often associated with her newness—as Wordsworth stated in 1833, Smith ‘wrote … with true feeling for rural nature, at a time when nature was not much regarded by English poets’—for Smith, the natural world was bound to the poetic past.2 As well as literary history, Smith was also deeply learned in natural history and towards the end of her career turned increasingly to this mode of engaging with nature in her works. As she wrote in Birds, ‘The philosopher and poet should both be naturalists’, giving the examples of Homer, Virgil, John Milton, and William Shakespeare as natural history experts.3 Smith published a number of natural history works for children—Rural Walks (1795), Rambles Farther (1796), Minor Morals (1798), and Conversations Introducing Poetry (1804) precede Birds. Like writers such as Gilbert White and John Clare, Smith took the majority of her observations from first-hand observation. She had no time for the birds of museums and collections, ‘stuffed and set on wires’, and her works take the form of field guides infused with literary as well as scientific references.4 Through a focus on Smith’s works on the nightingale, this chapter will illuminate the rich interrelations between literary and natural history, poetry and science in the eighteenth century. Indeed, these interrelations are particularly tightly bound when it comes to the nightingale: throughout cultural history, the nightingale has been characterised as female, melancholy, and heard singing at night, at odds with the facts, for it is the male bird which sings, both day and night. A number of critics, especially since the burgeoning of ecocriticism, have highlighted how throughout literary history birds have tended to be vehicles for anthropocentric concerns, ‘exploitative’ symbols, whereby the ‘actual autonomous being in is indigenous environment, is at once cancelled out’, and have urged reading bird poems with an eye to ornithological accuracy, a practice complicated in the eighteenth century by to the tendency for ornithological accounts to draw on and perpetuate the myths of literature.5 Thomas C. Gannon has extended this approach to a recuperation of birds as a non-human Other. In relation to Smith, he draws attention to the complexity of ‘Other-that-is-woman writing about

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Other-that-is-nature’, whereby nature is conflated with the human abject: ‘[W]omen and children are allowed a special relationship with other species but are at the same time juvenilised and feminised for such an easy, porous cross-species intersubjectivity’.6 At the same time, he highlights Smith’s ‘naturalist edge’, and the ‘scientific accuracy of her avian poetics’—which as Gannon rightly says puts her on a par with contemporary male nature writers—while the intertextuality of her verse also led ‘to an adoption of typical Augustan animal tropes’.7 This chapter shows how Smith herself instructs us to read across the intricate weave of nature and culture—and thus animal-human relations—as she writes as a poet negotiating literary tradition, and as a natural historian, across her works, with an ear always to the ‘real’ nightingale in its natural habitat.

Literary History In her sonnets, Smith presents her relationship with literary tradition in various playful ways.8 She frequently draws on and simultaneously departs from her sources, and invokes a range of predominantly male authors, only to present her own position in relation to them as inferior. The nightingale is particularly suited to Smith, as a poetic subject and as an emblem of authorship. In Birds, Smith relates the ‘mournful story’ of the Ovidian Philomela myth—the chief Western literary connection with the bird— and also observes how the nightingale has been ‘celebrated by the poets more than any other of the feathered race’ (337 and 334). She includes quotations from poems by Petrarch, Milton, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, James Thomson, Erasmus Darwin, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, together with her own sonnets III and VII. The invocation of the nightingale permits Smith to locate herself within a strong literary lineage, yet through the Philomela myth, the bird’s song comes to represent a specifically female, elegiac voice and in a sense encodes the position of the woman writer. As Smith tells the tale, it is one about the suppression of voice: when Philomela threatens to make her rape known, Tereus is provoked ‘by the eloquence of her sorrow, and the justness of her indignation’, to cut out her tongue (337). She first finds a voice by weaving her story in a tapestry for her sister, who is struck by her ‘dumb eloquence’ (337). At the end of the tale, Philomela’s voice, her ‘eloquence’, is finally restored fully through her transformation in to the bird with its expressive and melancholy song. The Philomela myth—inherited and recycled by Shakespeare, Milton among many others—has had a peculiar hold over

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understandings of the nightingale, as female and melancholy, whereas it is the male bird which sings, of course, to attract a mate and to defend territory. The long-standing association of the singing bird as melancholy befits Smith’s morose speaker in Elegiac Sonnets who sets out the relationship between pain and artistic expression in the first sonnet of the sequence, for ‘those paint sorrow best—who feel it most!’.9 The misreading of the bird as female, and its elegiac, mythical associations, inspired several women poets to draw on the nightingale-Philomela as poetic subject or persona in the eighteenth century: Elizabeth Singer Rowe published under the nom de plume ‘Philomela’, while Anne Finch, Sarah Nixon, and Catherine Talbot addressed the bird in their poems. Writing about the nightingale permits them a reticent, self-effacing means to public poetic expression. In Birds, Smith’s own two sonnets on the nightingale appear under the playful introduction of ‘an inferior poet, to whom you may notwithstanding be partial’ (340), a typical self-­ marginalising statement contradicted by the juxtaposition of her own sonnets with those of Petrarch and Milton. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook finds the swallow to be a personally appropriate emblem of authorship for Smith: the nightingale is ‘too passive and too eroticized’, whereas the domestic, maternal swallow ‘authorizes and legitimates Smith’s publications’.10 However, Smith’s identification in Elegiac Sonnets is certainly with the nightingale, and she evades any erotic element, drawing on its passivity, while its literary associations authorise and legitimise her authorship in a different way. The first of Smith’s nightingale sonnets is sonnet III ‘To a nightingale’: Poor melancholy bird—that all night long Tell’st to the Moon thy tale of tender woe; From what sad cause can such sweet sorrow flow, And whence this mournful melody of song? Thy poet’s musing fancy would translate What mean the sounds that swell thy little breast, When still at dewy eve thou leavest thy nest, Thus to the listening Night to sing thy fate? Pale Sorrow’s victims wert thou once among, Tho’ now released in woodlands wild to rove? Say—hast thou felt from friends some cruel wrong, Or died’st thou—martyr of disastrous love? Ah! songstress sad! that such my lot might be, To sigh, and sing at liberty—like thee! (18)

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The cultural connotations of birdsong are immediately apparent, as the nightingale is presented as ‘melancholy’, ‘sad’, and ‘mournful’, singing with ‘woe’ and ‘sorrow’ all in the first stanza. The third edition of Elegiac Sonnets (1786) gives a specific provenance, informing the reader that ‘the idea [is] from the 43d sonnet of Petrarch’ (18), 311 in modern editions, in which Petrarch hears and attempts to decipher the—unusually, male— nightingale’s song: ‘That nightingale that so sweetly weeps, perhaps for his children or for his dear consort, fills the sky and the fields with sweetness in so many grieving, skilful notes, || and all night he seems to accompany me and remind me of my harsh fate’.11 This is thus the ‘idea’ Smith takes from Petrarch, as her sonnet also considers the source of the nightingale’s supposed sadness. For Petrarch, the song is a reminder of his ‘harsh fate’, for this is one of Petrarch’s ‘in morte’ sonnets, written following the death of Laura. Although Smith does not transpose this aspect to her own sonnet, the elegiac context is apposite. Smith’s eldest son had died in 1777, in his eleventh year. Petrarch’s male nightingale weeps for ‘his children’ and his sonnet draws on an episode in book four of Virgil’s Georgics in which the grief of Orpheus is compared to that of a female nightingale which has lost her children. The literary history of Smith’s sonnet is thus involved in shifting genders and subjectivities (Petrarch’s male nightingale becomes a ‘songstress sad’), and the nightingale is fluid and mercurial in its transformations between them. Smith also departs from Petrarch in form taking the unusual abba cddc effegg rhyme scheme, a practice she continues in the ‘translations from Petrarch’ included in later editions of Elegiac Sonnets, central to her playful approach to her literary forbears. Smith’s sonnets are animated by the complexities that arise for the women poet encountering and appropriating male literary tradition. Here, literary tradition is simultaneously dispossessing and empowering, as through Petrarch’s male nightingale, aligned with the male poet’s grief over the dead, voiceless female subject, her sonnet reaches back through and inherits the song of a grieving mother bird with access to Orphic power. There are interesting parallels between Smith’s sonnet III and a ‘Sonnet In ye Manner of Petrarch –’ by Catherine Talbot (written 1758–1761). Although Smith could not have known of Talbot’s sonnet, unpublished in her lifetime, the similarities between them demonstrate the ways in which the nightingale was appropriated as a pertinent trope for the exploration of voice for the woman poet. The poem opens thus:

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The nightingale that sits on Yonder spray, Tho’ all of night she plains her hapless Fate, Yet since she can in liberty relate Her griefs, that freedom does those griefs allay.— But I, aye me! must all the livelong day, Conceal with sembled cheer a cheerless state.12

As in Smith’s sonnet, a contrast is established between the nightingale, at liberty to sing of her ‘hapless Fate’, and the speaker, who is not. In both poems, the nightingale is an idealised version of the woman poet, rather than one the speaker can identify with. Both poems are poised between expression and restraint, as their speakers—to an extent—express grief, although they may profess they are not at liberty to do so. A similar approach to the nightingale and Philomela can be seen in other poems by eighteenth-­century women poets. Anne Finch praises the nightingale’s song, and aspires to ‘set my Numbers to thy layes’, again celebrating the liberty of the bird: ‘Free as thine shall be my song’, at its ‘pleasing best when unconfin’d’.13 Yet, despite attempting to match the bird’s song, the attempt fails, with the implication that the speaker is not as ‘free’ or ‘unconfined’ as the bird. Sarah Dixon’s ‘The Nightingal’ (1740) similarly celebrates the nightingale while disestablishing the speaker from it. She addresses Philomela, to whom the Gods ‘Gave in Exchange, for a frail Woman’s Tongue,/A lasting Power to please with thy inimitable song’.14 The poem perversely celebrates Philomela’s violation as woman’s ‘frail’ voice has been replaced with one of ‘power’: something, it is suggested, Nixon’s own voice lacks. By contrast, in poems by contemporary male poets, the nightingale’s song is invoked to the spirit of the poem without suggestion of deference or failure, as James Thomson writes in Spring (1728): Lend me your song, ye nightingales! oh, pour The mazy-running soul of melody Into my various verse!15

Throughout literary history, the nightingale’s song has of course been aligned with poetic voice, and, in the eighteenth century, Milton was most closely associated with the bird, especially through his invocation in book three of Paradise Lost (1667). His depiction of the nightingale as ‘Philomel’

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in ‘Il Penseroso’ (1645)—which furthered the association between the bird and night and melancholy—was also widely referenced. The keenly literary nature of Smith’s sonnet III notwithstanding, we get the strong impression that the speaker is located outdoors and encounters the nightingale in its natural habitat, amid ‘woodlands wild’. This impression is accentuated by the natural detail of other sonnets in the volume, such as VIII ‘To spring’, another woodland poem, in which The young leaves, unfolding, scarce conceal Beneath their early shade, the half-formed nest Of finch or woodlark. (21, lines 2–4)

In his 1777 essay ‘An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry’ John Aikin urged poets to take to the fields for their poetic materials, with a new attention to and emphasis on precision and accuracy. He argued that ‘the accurate and scientific study of nature would obviate many of the defects usually discoverable in poetical compositions’, defects which include ‘supineness and servile imitation’.16 Smith first began writing poems in the year in which Aiken’s essay was published, and Elegiac Sonnets answers its call, evincing the rare ‘true feeling for rural nature’ celebrated by Wordsworth. Smith’s poems very much present us with a speaker-poet in the natural world, keenly aware of literary tradition, yet with an eye always to the natural history detail of their surroundings. Smith’s second nightingale sonnet VII ‘On the departure of the nightingale’ invokes Milton, as noted, the chief literary association with the nightingale at this time. Befitting Smith’s first edition of sonnets, the sonnet she quotes from is Milton’s own first sonnet written early in his poetic career (c. 1629). In his first sonnet Milton assumes the role of an artless young lover typical of his early poems: O nightingale, that on yon bloomy spray Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still, Thou with fresh hope the lover’s heart dost fill, While the jolly hours lead on propitious May, Thy liquid notes that close the eye of day, First heard before the shallow cuckoo’s bill Portend success in love.17

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The sonnet alludes to the idea that it is good luck in love to hear the nightingale before the cuckoo. Through the nightingale the poet announces allegiance to both poetry and love, as the sonnet ends: Whether the Muse, or Love call thee his mate, Both them I serve, and of their train am I.18

It is this announcement that Smith transposes to her own sonnet VII: Sweet poet of the woods!—a long adieu! Farewel, soft minstrel of the early year! Ah! ’twill be long ere thou shalt sing anew, And pour thy music on ‘the Night’s dull ear’. Whether on Spring thy wandering flights await, Or whether silent in our groves you dwell, The pensive Muse shall own you for her mate, And still protect the song she loves so well. With cautious step the love-lorn youth shall glide Through the lone brake that shades thy mossy nest; And shepherd girls from eyes profane shall hide The gentle bird, who sings of pity best: For still thy voice shall soft affections move, And still be dear to Sorrow, and to Love! (21)

Again, a natural history impression is given by the evocation of the secretive nightingale’s habitat: ‘[T]he lone brake … shades thy mossy nest’. The reference to Milton’s sonnet is made in line seven, whereby a note at the end of the line directs the reader to the final two lines of Milton’s sonnet. Within Smith’s sonnet, the lines have been revised, however: the ‘pensive Muse’ is a mate of the nightingale, but not ‘Love’, although the final line of Smith’s sonnet restores the amorous association and adds ‘Sorrow’ (the more Smithian sentiment) to the nightingale’s remit. The relationship between the two sonnets is an uneasy one. While Milton’s poet welcomes and wishes for the nightingale’s song and presence, Smith’s sonnet focuses on the ‘departure’ or silence of the bird. As Milton presents his poetic project as jointly concerned with love and poetry, dependent on hearing the nightingale, the nightingale’s disappearance in the octave and the suppression of ‘love’ from the textual borrowing in Smith’s sonnet subtly displaces Milton’s authority, as her sonnet takes the English sonnet form. This seems particularly significant, for poets that did precede Smith

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in the eighteenth century in using the sonnet—Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, and Thomas Edwards—wrote in the Italian form, largely through the influence of Milton. Smith took the sonnet in a different formal direction with her use of the English and irregular sonnet forms. Thus, sonnet VII dramatises its ‘departure’ from Milton—and it does so formally through its English form—while appearing to herald his influence through the quotation. The nightingale features in one further sonnet—LV ‘The Return of the Nightingale. Written in May 1791’, published in the sixth edition of Elegiac Sonnets (1791): With transport, once, sweet bird! I hail’d thy lay, And bade thee welcome to our shades again, To charm the wandering poet’s pensive way And soothe the solitary lover’s pain; But now!—such evils in my lot combine, As shut my languid sense—to Hope’s dear voice and thine! (48, lines 9–14)

The sonnet is unusual in its treatment of the poetic figure as the nightingale now seems redundant to the speaker whose suffering has gone beyond that which the nightingale is capable of soothing or symbolising. The first two lines refer back to a previous poetic self when the bird was ‘hail’d’ and welcomed. Unlike the majority of Smith’s sonnets, LV does not include the intertextual reference which usually animates them. Thus, while earlier sonnet VII may be based around the departure of the nightingale, the bird does still ‘charm’ the poet, while its literary history underpins the poem. Contrastingly, LV is ‘on’ the bird’s return, yet the poem in a sense denies it a meaning and the lack of literary allusion implies its redundancy to Smith’s poetic project. Smith’s sonnets are involved in a complex set of ‘migrations’, steeped in Smith’s natural history knowledge of course: a note to sonnet VII refers us to ‘the supposed migration of the nightingale’ (more of which below). The bird itself, along with its literary history and relevance as a poetic figure, comes and goes across the two poems as its migration and Smith’s complex use of the bird interleave.

Natural History Smith’s A Natural History of Birds was published after the success of her earlier natural history works for children: as she writes in the first letter,

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Our late conferences on various subjects of Natural History have awakened your curiosity, my children, and as you wish to hear more of the varieties of Birds, their habits, and history, I will communicate the observations I have made, and consult the books I have about me, and endeavour to give you a general idea of these animals. (243)

The work takes the epistolary, rather than the ‘conversation’ form of her preceding works—between a maternal, Smith-like character and her wards—yet the impression is given of continuation here in audience and subject, and the work similarly blends ‘observation’, fieldwork, and ‘books’—both of poetry and natural history. Smith follows the taxonomy of Linnaeus ‘the best authority’ rather than the rival system of GeorgesLouis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon and stresses the importance of ‘orders, classes, and species’, which ‘give a precise and determinate idea of the objects we desire to understand’ (244). Birds joined a vast number of ornithological and natural history publications which had flooded the literary marketplace in the eighteenth century. The accuracy of many of these texts varies, and the nightingale has a special place in ornithological discourse due to its deep-rooted mythological associations. Many works recycle previous texts and include poems among their sources, permitting inaccuracies to be perpetuated. John Ray and Francis Willughby in their Ornithology (1678), and Thomas Pennant in his British Zoology (1768), quote from Pliny’s Natural History (in translation) in their accounts, for example, in which the singing bird is characterised as female. Pennant draws on Pliny regardless that he only ‘in general’ expresses ‘the truth’, and he also introduces Milton ‘as the best judge of melody’, including a number of quotations from poems ‘Il Penseroso’ and Paradise Lost in which the nightingale is female and sings at night.19 By contrast, George Montagu, writing on the nightingale in his Ornithological Dictionary (1802), in which the nightingale is gendered male, notes that ‘we confine our pen to the facts … we must refer our readers to the British Zoology, for the more classical and elegant information’, as elegance gives way to truth and accuracy.20 Indeed, from the late eighteenth century onwards, the singing bird is described as and understood to be male more frequently. In an essay of 1773 Daines Barrington observes that it is the male nightingale which sings, and he also attempts to affix ‘precise ideas’ to its ‘celebrated descriptions’.21 He produces a table in which singing birds are given marks in different categories, and the nightingale clearly wins: in a turn aside from the poetical and mythological, Barrington in a supposedly

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scientific way deduces that the nightingale’s song is superlative, and is ‘plaintive’, a category in which it excels.22 It is also more frequently and clearly stated that the male nightingale sings to attract the female. As Buffon notes (the continued anthropomorphism notwithstanding), the male bird, ‘stimulated to court the joys of love … warble[s] his amorous tales’.23 Despite pronouncing that only the male bird sings, Buffon still refers to a singing, caged hen nightingale, however, and to a ‘sweet Philomela’, as the two genders and different versions of the bird seem able to coincide, propagated by the inclusion and amalgamation of a variety of previous works.24 In Thomas Bewick’s popular British Birds (1797), the singing bird is again male, entertaining the female during the incubation period ‘with his beautiful singing’.25 The year after Bewick’s Birds, Coleridge’s ‘The Nightingale. A Conversational Poem’—included in Smith’s nightingale genealogy—was published, marking a major turning point in the poetical life of the bird, for it is also male here. Coleridge undoes the connection with Milton, between the nightingale and melancholy, and indeed with poetic tradition and myth. Hearing the nightingale’s song, he muses ‘“Most musical, most melancholy” Bird!/A melancholy Bird? O idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy.’26 He traces and locates the source of the connection with melancholy to a ‘night-wandering Man’, ‘And many a poet echoes the conceit’.27 Jettisoning ‘Philomela’s pity-pleading strains’, he promotes ‘a different lore’ of: The merry Nightingale That crowds, and hurries and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes As he were fearful, that an April night Would be too short for him to utter forth His love chaunt.28

Coleridge’s poem is a response and corrective to the melancholy, Philomela nightingale poems which precede it, including Smith’s own, as the male nightingale is appropriated by male poet in a mutually supportive turn in both natural and literary history. Indeed, in Birds when she introduces Coleridge’s poem following her own two sonnets, Smith writes that ‘[t]here are poets, however, who consider these tones as being indicative of joy, rather than melancholy’, nodding to the way in which Coleridge departs from her. Coleridge’s poem is steeped in male conversation,

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between male nightingales and male poets, from Wordsworth, to whom the poem is partially addressed, to John Keats who composed his ‘Ode to the Nightingale’ (1819) a month after he met Coleridge, and discussed nightingales and poetry. James C. McKusick has argued that ‘Elegiac Sonnets witnessed … the return of the nightingale’, as well as the sonnet form to English poetry, together with Coleridge’s conversation poem, ‘rescu[ing the bird] from its mythic associations’, and—while it may still retain an element of the literary—presents instead ‘real’ birds that inhabit ‘real’ English groves.29 However, for Smith the nightingale should never be freed from its literary associations, and for her to encounter the ‘real’ bird is to encounter the literary past. In Birds the status of the nightingale as the most celebrated and poeticised of birds is almost its most salient feature. Whereas Coleridge seeks to disentangle the nightingale from literary tradition and myth, promoting the different ‘lore’ of the natural world, Smith, perhaps more than any other poet, holds the two overtly in dialogue. Indeed, Coleridge’s attempt to disentangle the nightingale from literary tradition appears somewhat disingenuous when literary tradition is shown to be so much part of what the bird is about. As Nick Groom writes, ‘In spite of Coleridge’s attempts to demystify the nightingale, the bird’s very being is defined by its cultural identity’.30 Coleridge himself acknowledges this in the verse note he included with his poem when he initially sent it to Wordsworth: ‘In stale blank verse a subject stale. I send per post my Nightingale’, undercutting the way he undoes the poetical trappings of the bird within the poem.31 Moreover, the source and nature of Coleridge’s ornithological knowledge is intriguing. While we do not know for certain that he read Buffon, we know that he read Gilbert White and William Bartram, and the poetic originality of Coleridge’s nightingales suggests a different and additional sort of knowledge beyond that which can be gleaned from stretching out beside a mossy forest-dell. Even if Coleridge has relinquished books—as recommended in another Lyrical Ballads poem ‘The Tables Turned’—his poem evinces something of a scientific mode of observation and engagement required in order to deduce important aspects such as the sex of the singing bird, when and why it sings. Debbie Sly has drawn attention to this aspect of Coleridge’s poem and also questions the provenance of its knowledge, deeming that the poem presents an ‘impossible project’, presenting a ‘mediated’ experience, while

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purporting not to.32 Coleridge’s poem is variously implicated and in dialogue with nature’s lore, natural history, literary tradition, and myth. Smith was well read in natural history, and Birds makes reference to a number of precedents. Her main sources are two anonymous works: The Natural History of Birds (1791) and The Elements of Natural History (1802). In her own Birds, Smith gathers different accounts, mediating between them and her own observations. Remarks are often introduced in a deferent way, qualified by ‘perhaps’ and ‘it seems’. Noting that ‘It is said’ that nightingales are not found north of Yorkshire she writes that ‘I am not indeed sure that this is the fact, but I have often known it asserted’ (335): she is always careful where she is unable to confirm reliably or observe first hand. Commenting on migration, a matter on which ornithologists were still at odds, Smith is only able to state that ‘doubts have arisen, whether the Nightingale really retire into other countries, or remain silent in this country from the middle of June’, while we get the strong sense that Smith herself has observed that ‘the Nightingale is a solitary bird, and though it really sings all day, is usually celebrated for it’s [sic] song during the night’ (335). She departs from The Elements of Natural History here, in which it is stated that the nightingale sings only at night. Finally, while ‘the voice of the Nightingale is considered generally as expressive of melancholy’, she finds that ‘some of it’s [sic] various notes are certainly very cheerful’ (335). (Like Coleridge, she delves into the reasons behind the nightingale’s melancholy associations: ‘Perhaps the impression is given by the mournful story told of the metamorphosis of an unhappy virgin into this bird’ (337).) Smith’s tone is non-committal, ambivalent. Smith does not comment on the sex of the bird, but in her main sources, it is observed that while both sing, ‘The males always sing better, as well as louder’, and ‘Female nightingales have been known to sing, but their song is inferior’.33 While Smith may curiously avoid this issue, her reference to herself as ‘an inferior poet’ may again be playful in this context: natural history—as it was understood at the time—echoes Smith’s sense of her place in literary history. Whereas in other contexts these moments of ambivalence might appear suggestive of a lack or as befitting a woman writer hesitantly entering into a male domain, they increase rather than take away from Smith’s authority. She writes at a time when ornithology was still emerging as a scientific discipline and in which much erroneous material, stated as fact, was still being reiterated and produced. Stating moments of doubt only, albeit

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paradoxically, serves to strengthen her reliability. John Clare perceived that Smith ‘wrote more from what she had seen of nature then [sic] from what she had read of it’, an approach to writing about nature championed by Gilbert White, who professed ‘to be an outdoor naturalist, one that takes his observations from the subject itself, and not from the writings of others’.34 Yet Smith also shared with Clare the joy of ‘look[ing] on nature with a poetic feeling’, as Clare wrote, taking delight in occasions ‘when an object in nature brings up in ones mind an image of poetry that describes it from some favourite author’.35 Like Smith, Clare had no time for ‘carcasses in glass cases’ or ‘collections of dryed specimens’, preferring to encounter the nightingale in is natural environment. Smith’s Birds is underpinned by this rare combination of observation and accuracy in the field, with a ‘poetic feeling’ involving both a love of the environment and a keen awareness of how nature and culture are intertwined. Thus, Smith’s Birds has an important place in the history of nature writing; beyond Clare (whose prose natural history works went unpublished in his lifetime), it finds a legacy in the work of ‘new’ nature writers such as Tim Dee, Richard Mabey, and Mark Cocker whose prose—infused with ‘poetic feeling’— combines field work and literary history. Turning back to Smith’s sonnets, the close relationship between literary and natural history in Smith’s work becomes further apparent. As well as reworking sonnets named in Birds, they also raise some of the same ornithological points and display a similar ambivalence. In the first sonnet, the poet’s ‘fancy’ must translate the bird’s song. Smith draws attention to the role of the poet—and perhaps scientist—in interpreting the natural world and highlighting the fact that this will always be steeped in subjectivity and ‘lore’. While Smith hears and judges the song to be melancholy as a poet— aware of the Ovidian myth—she is also able to deduce cheerful notes based on empirical observation, and her sonnet depends on being able to ‘translate’ and interpret across nature and culture. The second sonnet holds natural and literary history more closely in dialogue. There is the same indeterminacy about migration present in her later natural history: ‘Whether on Spring thy wandering flights await,/Or whether silent in our groves you dwell’, whatever the facts regarding migration, ‘The pensive Muse shall own thee for her mate’: Smith’s interest in ornithological knowledge is in balance with that of poetry. Again, this is bound up with Smith’s sense of literary tradition; the way she positions herself in relation to Milton relies on the bird’s ‘departure’ or silence, the later sonnet LV on its return for the construction of Smith’s authorial persona and position.

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Clare may have perceived that Smith ‘wrote more from what she had seen of nature then from what she had read of it’, but only ‘more from’. At variance with Wordsworth’s ‘The Tables Turned’, ‘Science and of Art’ should combine with ‘a heart/That watches and receives’.36 To Smith the natural world was also experienced alongside what she had read—in works of poetry and natural history—and like the nightingale itself, she too should be encountered across all three.

Notes 1. Smith’s relationship with literary tradition can thus appear contradictory. In Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Stuart Curran showed how poets of the period engaged with the forms of earlier poetry much more than had been understood. However, in celebrating Smith as a ‘Romantic’ poet, she became aligned with a literary-­historical model prevalent since M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) whereby Romantic writers appear to break with the past. For other accounts of Smith as a ‘Romantic’ poet see Jacqueline Labbe, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2003) and Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 2. William Wordsworth, note to ‘Stanzas suggested in a Steamboat off St. Bees’ Head, on the coast of Cumberland’ (1833), in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 403. 3. Charlotte Smith, A Natural History of Birds, Intended Chiefly for Young Persons, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, 14 vols., Pickering Masters (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 13: 244. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically within the text. 4. Smith, Conversations Introducing Poetry, 13: 179. 5. Tony Pinkney, ‘Romantic Ecology’, in A Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 411–19: 414. See also John Rowlett, ‘Ornithological Knowledge and Literary Understanding’, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 30 (1999): 625–47 and James C.  McKusick, ‘The Return of the Nightingale’, The Wordsworth Circle, 38 (2007), 34–40. 6. Thomas C. Gannon, Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 2009), 79.

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7. Gannon, 83. 8. Part of this section has appeared, in a longer form, in Bethan Roberts, Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Place, Tradition and Form (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). 9. Smith, Poems, in The Works of Charlotte Smith, 13: 17, line 14. Subsequent references are to this edition and appear parenthetically within the text. 10. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, ‘Charlotte Smith and “The Swallow”: Migration and Romantic Authorship’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 72 (2009), 48–67: 61 and 66. 11. Francesco Petrarca, ‘311’, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M.  Durling (London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 490. 12. Catherine Talbot, ‘Sonnet: In the Manner of Petrarch –’, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology, ed. Paula R.  Backscheider and Catherine E.  Ingrassia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 861, lines 1–6. 13. Anne Finch, ‘To the Nightingale’, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, 860, lines 4, 5, 8. 14. Sarah Dixon, ‘The Nightingal’, British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century, 861, lines 8–9. 15. James Thomson, ‘Spring’, Poetical Works, ed. by J.  Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 25, lines 76–78. 16. John Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (London: J. Johnson, 1777), 33. 17. John Milton, ‘Sonnet I’, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn (London: Longman, 1997), 92, lines 1–7. 18. Milton, 93, lines 13–14. 19. Thomas Pennant, British Zoology, 4 vols (London: Benjamin White, 1768), 2, 255–56. 20. George Montagu, Ornithological Dictionary; Or, Alphabetical Synopsis of British Birds, 2 vols (London: J. White, 1802), 1, s.v. ‘Nightingale’. 21. Daines Barrington, ‘XXXI. Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds’, Philosophical Transactions: Giving Some Account of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours, of the Ingenious, in many Considerable Parts of the World, LXIII, part I (London: Locker Davies, 1773), 249–91: 281. 22. Barrington, 282. 23. Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Natural History of Birds, Fish, Insects and Reptiles, 5 vols (London: J. S. Barr, 1793), 5, 81. 24. Buffon, 84.

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25. Ralph Beilby and Thomas Bewick, History of British Birds. The Figures Engraved on Wood by T.  Bewick. Vol. I.  Containing the History and Description of Land Birds (Newcastle: 1797), 201. 26. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale; A Conversational Poem’, Written in April, 1798, in Lyrical Ballads, ed. by R. L Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1991), 41, lines 12–15. 27. Coleridge, 41, lines 16, 23. 28. Coleridge, 42, lines 41, 43–45, 48. 29. McKusick, 37 and 39. 30. Nick Groom, ‘Plastic Daffodils: The Pastoral, the Picturesque, and Cultural Environmentalism’, Climate Change and the Humanities: Historical, Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Contemporary Environmental Crisis, ed. Alexander Elliott, James Cullis, Vinita Damodaran (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 120. 31. Debbie Sly, ‘“With Skirmish and Capricious Passagings”: Ornithological and Poetic Discourse in the Nightingale Poems of Coleridge and Clare’, Worcester Papers in English and Cultural Studies, 3 (2005), 6–19: 10. 32. Coleridge, quoted by Brett and Jones in Lyrical Ballads, 279. 33. Elements of Natural History: Being an Introduction to the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus, 2 vols (London: Cadell and Davies, 1802), 2, 144; The Natural History of Birds: Containing a Variety of Facts Selected from Several Writers, and Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Children, 3 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1791), 3, 127. 34. John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 34; Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (London: Penguin, 1987). 35. Clare, 39. 36. William Wordsworth, ‘The Tables Turned’, Lyrical Ballads, 104, lines 29–32.

Bibliography Elements of Natural History; Being an Introduction to the Systema Naturae of Linnaeus, 2 vols. London: Cadell and Davies, 1802. The Natural History of Birds; Containing a Variety of Facts Selected from Several Writers, and Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Children, 3 vols. London: J. Johnson, 1791. Aikin, John. An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. London: J. Johnson, 1777. Backscheider, Paula R., and Catherine E. Ingrassia, eds. British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

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Barrington, Daines. ‘XXXI.  Experiments and Observations on the Singing of Birds’, Philosophical Transactions: Giving Some Account of the Present Undertakings, Studies, and Labours, of the Ingenious, in many Considerable Parts of the World, LXIII, part I. London: Locker Davies, 1773. Bewick, Thomas, and Ralph Beilby. History of British Birds. The Figures Engraved on Wood by T. Bewick. Vol. I. Containing the History and Description of Land Birds. Newcastle: Sol. Hodgson for Beilby & Bewick; London: G.  G. & J. Robinson, London, 1797. Clare, John. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Edited by Margaret Grainger. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads. Edited by R. L Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 1991. Comte de Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc. Natural History of Birds, Fish, Insects and Reptiles, 5 vols. London: J. S. Barr, 1793. Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn. ‘Charlotte Smith and “The Swallow”: Migration and Romantic Authorship’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 72 (2009): 48–67. Curran, Stuart. Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) Gannon, Thomas C. Skylark Meets Meadowlark: Reimagining the Bird in British Romantic and Contemporary Native American Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Groom, Nick. ‘Plastic Daffodils: The Pastoral, the Picturesque, and Cultural Environmentalism’. In Climate Change and the Humanities: Historical, Philosophical and Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Contemporary Environmental Crisis. Edited by Alexander Elliott, James Cullis, Vinita Damodaran. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Labbe, Jacqueline. Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Labbe, Jacqueline. Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. McKusick, James C. ‘The Return of the Nightingale’, The Wordsworth Circle, 38 (2007): 34–40. Milton, John. Complete Shorter Poems. Edited by John Carey. 2nd edn. London: Longman, 1997. Montagu, George. Ornithological Dictionary; Or, Alphabetical Synopsis of British Birds. 2 vols. London: J. White, 1802. Pennant, Thomas. British Zoology. 4 vols. London: Benjamin White, 1768. Petrarca, Francesco. Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics. Translated and edited by Robert M.  Durling. London: Harvard University Press, 1976. Pinkney, Tony. ‘Romantic Ecology’. In A Companion to Romanticism. Edited by Duncan Wu. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001: 411–19.

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Rowlett, John. ‘Ornithological Knowledge and Literary Understanding’, New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 30 (1999): 625–47. Sly, Debbie. ‘“With Skirmish and Capricious Passagings”: Ornithological and Poetic Discourse in the Nightingale Poems of Coleridge and Clare’, Worcester Papers in English and Cultural Studies, 3 (2005): 6–19. Smith, Charlotte. The Works of Charlotte Smith. General Editor Stuart Curran. 14 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005–2007. Thomson, James. Poetical Works. Edited by J. Logie Robertson. London: Oxford University Press, 1971. White, Gilbert. The Natural History of Selborne. Edited by Richard Mabey. London: Penguin, 1987. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by Ernest de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947.

CHAPTER 6

The Labouring-Class Bird Nancy M. Derbyshire

In June 1827, Robert Southey received a letter from ‘an old servant’ named John Jones requesting the laureate’s opinion of some verses, the last of which Jones humbly refers to as ‘my poor little Robin’.1 Though Southey had been inconvenienced by many similar requests, Jones was able to obtain a favourable reply partly because he adopted the subservient discourse established by his labouring-class forbears Stephen Duck and Robert Dodsley. Displaying requisite gratitude, humility, obedience, and lack of aspiration, Jones sparked Southey’s long-time desire to say something of ‘the poets in low life’, those ‘certain low and untaught rhymers’, who ‘with more or less good fortune had obtained notice in their day’.2 In response, Southey organised a subscription list and saw Jones to publication. However, another aspect of Jones’s petition deserves close attention: his use of birds, specifically the European robin, to posture himself as a viable candidate for publication. This trope allowed Jones, and other eighteenth-­century English labouring-class poets, to tap into the contemporary discourse of original genius and the growing marketability of rural

N. M. Derbyshire (*) Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_6

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authenticity, portray hardship and cultivate sympathy, and propose a symbolic patron-client relation characterised by an admixture of dependence and independence. Jones employs a figurative strategy comparing himself to the robin, one of the most common and sympathetic birds in England. Attaching his verses, he writes, Seeing in a Leeds paper, Sir, that you were at Harrowgate, I avail myself of the opportunity it affords me of soliciting the favour of your perusal of them                … The last of my humble attempts, Sir, occurred to me from seeing a lady of the family collecting the crumbs from the breakfast-table, and putting them by to await the coming of a little red-breast, who never failed to solicit them at the window during the winter months; … and though, Sir, I can hardly hope that my poor little Robin possesses any trait of beauty worthy of your admiration, I do hope, Sir, that its harmless simplicity will obtain for me your pardon for the liberty I have taken in thus addressing you, and with that hope, Sir, I subscribe myself             Your most respectful                 And most dutiful servant,                         John Jones.3

Jones’s metonymic gesture compares his poetic ambition to the needy but welcome robin, and it solicits charity by modelling the lady’s consideration. This bird has special resonance in English labouring-class poetry during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Though handled differently by several labouring-class poets, the robin is a symbolic cue to readers to extend assistance and consideration. Jones’s posture of earnest solicitation and ‘harmless simplicity’ reaffirms a dependent relation, but other practitioners of this trope wield it in more politically subversive ways. The labouring-class poetic tradition came of age in the final decades of the eighteenth century, and with it the labouring-class bird. The celebrity of Robert Burns and Robert Bloomfield, a rise in literacy, the vogue for primitivism, and theories of natural genius—all of these led to the emergence of more labouring-class poets than ever before. From this context, the works of late-century plebeian poets illustrate birds as prevalent symbols of labouring-class poetic sensibility and experience. Bridget Keegan has recently elucidated a labouring-class poetic tradition surrounding nature poetry and pointed to the ways in which self-taught poets from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries both work with and against generic

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conventions in nature poetry.4 The bird poem is certainly not unique to labouring-class authors, though it offers them an opportunity to convey anxieties and wishes about authorship as well as model critical behaviours for readers. The robin is singled out as a domestic and humble bird worthy of attention by labouring-class poets such as Elizabeth Bentley, Robert Anderson, William Lane, Ann Yearsley, Edward Rushton, and John Clare. These poets adopted a style of poem in which the speaker addresses a robin in order to model sympathetic behaviours and attitudes for potential patrons and assert varying degrees of independence. The European robin encapsulates a variety of attitudes, ranging from dependence to independence, which can be applied to the relationship between labouring-class poets and their patrons. The reasons for this range vary. First, robins are effective vehicles to address the vulnerable nature of plebeian life. They dwell in the same habitat year-round and face starvation and death throughout winter. Their cultural associations with death, fire, blood, and imprisonment underscore this vulnerability. Secondly, year-round singing (by both sexes) and early and late warbling imply constant labour. Thirdly, the robin is a sociable bird with a widespread habitat. Taken together, its frequent warbling and pervasiveness have led to its protection from English hunters, which has in turn caused the species to become bolder with humans, more populous, and easily tamed. Continental robins are not nearly as friendly because they are hunted and eaten.5 Lastly, the bird’s status as a non-migratory species in the United Kingdom makes it a symbol of dwelling, and therefore resistance to enclosure, emparkments, and forced migration. However, labouring-class poets also hold the redbreast up as a symbol of their spirit of song, cultivating a class-wide authorial persona that emphasises purity of song and motive. Though its effects were somewhat liberating, this persona reaffirmed a notion of the poet as born not made— born with a robin-like sociability and spirit for song rather than wealth, status, or privilege. Some labouring-class poets, though, present the robin less as an essentialising symbol of some inborn peasant value and more as a marker of privation, strife, and independence. Though this debate was not explicit, labouring-class poets made conscious figural choices in how they presented robins that revealed their attitudes and misgivings about finding their way to print and attaining visibility. The work of various scholars, such as Donna Landry, John Goodridge, Tim Burke, William J. Christmas, and Bridget Keegan, has demonstrated the ways in which labouring-class authors from the eighteenth and

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nineteenth centuries have turned to natural images, poetic forms and traditions, and linguistic styles to represent plebeian life. For Keegan, the labouring-class ‘turn to nature, in all of its connotations’ allows poets ‘to write about themselves’, address important aesthetic debates of their age, and uncover ‘political dimensions that might at first glance, seem to be missing from their work’.6 Robins play a part in this strategic appropriation of nature. For some animal studies theorists, however, this symbolic appropriation is problematic. Critics like Donna Haraway, Erica Fudge, and Laurie Shannon see rhetorical figuration as an extension of human tyranny over other species. Fudge acknowledges that anthropomorphism is the only way humans can ‘comprehend and represent the presence of an animal’.7 Yet for Fudge, this is a problem that needs to be explored because throughout the history of our cultural representations of animals, the human-­ exceptionalist stance has been ‘simultanoeously [sic] upset and reinforced’.8 Other voices in the recent animal turn, such as Tobias Menely, Laura Brown, and Heather Keenleyside, argue that the ‘symbolic labor’ of animals can produce positive effects in meaning which are conducive to cross-­ species equality and ethical relation.9 Keenleyside, for instance, examines the ways that various eighteenth-century writers personify animals to ‘explore the problems and the possibilities of a multispecies sociality’.10 At the heart of this debate between posthumanism and humanism is the question of whether animal figuration is exclusively anthropomorphic. Lucinda Cole has helped to show how ‘[t]he early modern literary era has been an especially fulsome one for scholars of animal studies’ because ‘eighteenth-century writers are deeply occupied with the distinctions between human and non-human animals’.11 But, it is not clear that late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century plebeian poets earnestly participated in this same discursive tradition—what Keenleyside calls the ‘restorative effort’ of writers like John Locke, Daniel Defoe, and James Thomson to sort out ‘the epistemological and ontological questions of other people’ and the ‘possibility … that … animals may … be people like me’.12 Still, labouring-class poets benefit from its tailwind. The fact that animals emphasise both the individual and the species makes them, to adopt Levi-­ Strauss’s phrase, ‘good to think with’.13 Keenleyside adds that the ‘“specific” character of animals’ (e.g., the species of the European robin) facilitates ‘thinking about social arrangements in particular’.14 ‘[L]iterary animal figures’, she continues, ‘provide a direct perception of a class that is not coterminous with any given or natural-historical sense of species,

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but that comes into being by way of representation and reading’.15 Thus, plebeian poetry’s animal figures abstract real animal lives in order to represent labouring-class poets as a distinct literary class and vocational phenomenon. Since I treat the robin as a symbol of labouring-class life, and plebeian poetry more specifically, this study does not constitute animal studies proper. However, labouring-class poets’ selection of this species over others does invite questions about what Keenleyside would call the ‘specificity’ of the robin, over against other bird species. For example, is their use of the redbreast an instance of complicity with speciesist attitudes or authentic concern for robins? Though an analysis of plebeian bird imagery cannot settle the ethical and methodological conflicts between humanism and posthumanism, I will sketch two interpretive possibilities in response to this question. First, the robin conceit calls upon a variety of traditions (sympathy, sentimentality, the bird poem) as well as a rise in liberationist discourses (abolitionism, animal rights). In a variety of ways, plebeian authors co-opt this discursive framework to voice their own political and social claims for justice (however humanist those claims may be). The presence of an animal (or peasant) causes polite readers to re-evaluate their hierarchical understanding of their humanity and class position. Laura Brown’s work on the ‘lady and lapdog’ genre elucidates the literary opportunities in the rise of companion species; in this light, the labouring-class use of robins as quasi-pets or strays shares a similar motive of questioning ‘the absolute antithesis of beings’.16 So, the degree of difference between human and non-human becomes an index of the presumed difference between the polite and working classes. This egalitarian motive shares liberatory concerns common to animal studies as well as gender studies and postcolonialism. Although posthumanist scholars would argue that the portrayal of robins as class emblems and recipients of charity upholds human mastery, such a reading forgoes the possibility of literal description of robins. In another interpretation, one which is borne out by John Clare’s assiduous attention to bird species throughout his natural history prose and poems about robins (among other avian species), these poets choose to describe real robins, which are, after all, quite easy to spot for the busy labourer. Ultimately, though some of the poets discussed here do attend to specific robins (in one poem Clare warns the robin of the peasant’s gun), they all use redbreast imagery to address overriding literary-professional concerns.

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As the eighteenth-century literary marketplace expanded and authors became increasingly professionalised, the trope uniting birds and poets was used more reflexively to refer to the conditions of inspiration and composition. Comparisons between birds and the muse (seen in the work of Mark Akenside, Isaac Watts, Thomas Gray, and James Thomson) became a popular way to pay homage to the tradition of invoking the muse. The bird apostrophe (e.g., Anne Finch’s ‘To the Nightingale’) proved particularly useful as a way to display sympathy and sensibility. There was an active tradition of poems addressing robins before the robin ‘came into its own’ because of its association with autumn and melancholy.17 Samples include William Cowper’s ‘Invitation to the Redbreast’, John Langhorne’s ‘A Welcome to a Robin Redbreast’, Burns’s ‘The Redbreast’, James Grahame’s ‘To a Redbreast, that Flew in at my Window’, and Edward Jenner’s ‘Address to a Robin’. The labouring-class parallel tradition plays an important part in this swell and deserves further study. Feminist and postcolonial criticism, as well as scholarship by Landry and Keegan, has shown that copying cultural forms is part of a larger process of resistance and liberation.18 In adapting the bird apostrophe, labouring-­class poets challenge the notion that bird poetry, or any form of poetry treating the relationship between man and nature, is the exclusive domain of the leisured classes. Secondly, imitation is a tool for social equality. Skill in this particular poetic idiom exhibits the sort of ‘proper aesthetic responses to the natural world’ that were used to endorse ‘gentlemanly’ authority and governance19; but it also showcases alternative responses like charity and heedfulness that undermine the practice of such authority. According to Keegan, self-taught poets faced many difficulties in finding their way to and staying in print. These ranged from needing to please and not offend patrons; maintaining patronage relationships; displaying a requisite degree of piety, submission, and gratitude; adhering to traditional and popular styles; and avoiding explicitly political rhetoric that could lead to censorship or failure. In response, labouring-class poets used ‘natural imagery to explore questions of poetic aspiration and vocation’ and turned to ‘the codes and convention of nature poetry’ to ‘examine questions that are ultimately, though not always immediately, political’.20 Bentley, Anderson, Lane, Rushton, and Clare demonstrate command of a particular form—the bird apostrophe poem—as a way to expose their own cultural and economic marginalisation, and that of others like them. One labouring-class poet who imitates bird poems to represent concerns that affect peasant life is Norwich schoolteacher Elizabeth Bentley

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(1767–1839). In ‘To a Redbreast, That Flew into the House, and Suffered Itself to be Taken by the Hand of the Authoress’ (1821), the speaker portrays a human-animal relationship characterised by liberty and equality rather than exploitation and cruelty.21 In ‘To the Redbreast’ (1821), Bentley introduces standard robin motifs such as sociability, morning and twilight appearance, tireless warbling, winter hunger, and charity. The lines present a straightforward account of a redbreast perching near some human habitation, but certain phrases imply a subtext of labour and hardship. The bird is said to ‘forsak’st’ its rest ‘when first the morning twilight peeps’, sing a ‘constant ditty’, and ‘peck’ its ‘pittance from the floor’.22 The speaker further notes that while other species avoid nest-building near men, the robin chooses crowded areas. Tim Burke has acknowledged Bentley’s possible ‘affinity with the many poets of labouring origins who also celebrate the redbreast’s presence in areas densely populated by the working poor’.23 Another labouring-class poet who uses robin imagery to imitate popular forms and garner sympathy is Robert Anderson (1770–1833), a calico printer from Cumberland. In his 1796 sonnet ‘To a Redbreast, Which Visited the Author Daily for Some Months’, he adapts the Renaissance trope linking birds and lovers: Emblem of Poverty! how hard thy fate When the wild tempests scowl along the sky! E’en now methinks thou wail’st thy absent mate, Singing thy love-lorn song:—just so do I.24

Anderson’s poem raises political concerns by associating the bird’s poverty with the speaker’s. Yet this impoverishment, characteristically marked by severe weather and mortality, does not subdue the bird’s prevailing voice. Though the robin’s physical welfare is often stressed in such addresses, its steady and uplifting song evokes the creative spirit of the working poor. Ann Yearsley (1753–1806), the milkwoman of Bristol, uses the redbreast to present moral claims and establish an association between song and suffering. Her 1785 prospect poem ‘Clifton Hill’ runs counter to popular tradition by presenting the non-human world as a source of support rather than as a force to be dominated. The opening verse presents the robin as a figure of morality, taste, and distress. The beauteous red-brest, tender in her frame,

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Whose murder marks the fool with treble shame, Near the low cottage door, in pensive mood, Complains, and mourns her brothers of the wood. Her song oft wak’d the soul to gentle joys, All but his ruthless soul whose gun destroys. For this, rough clown, long pains on thee shall wait, And freezing want avenge their hapless fate;25

In distinguishing her sensibility from that of others in her class, Yearsley follows her labouring-class forbears Henry Jones and Thomas Chatterton (who also wrote Clifton Hill prospect poems). However, the speaker’s moralising includes an ironic subtext that reaffirms labouring-class hardship. The lines’ emphasis upon ignorance and cruelty highlights the harsh conditions endured by the starving clown; ‘freezing want’ seems a redundant punishment. Moreover, ‘the fate of the mundane songbird’, Keegan observes, ‘offers an ominous foreshadowing of the poet’s possible future’.26 In another poem, ‘To Mr ****, an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved’ (1787), Yearsley’s bird imagery invigorates the peasant pen: Like thee, estrang’d From Science, and old Wisdom’s classic lore, I’ve patient trod the wild entangled path Of unimprov’d Idea. Dauntless Thought I eager seiz’d, no formal Rule e’er aw’d; No Precedent controul’d; no Custom fix’d My independent spirit: on the wing She still shall guideless soar, nor shall the Fool, Wounding her pow’rs, e’er bring her to the ground.27

The contrast of earthbound treading with skyward soaring denotes a conflict between the alienating strictures of classical education and the liberated ‘independent spirit’ of the uneducated peasant poet. The speaker defiantly rejects censure and harm—here figured as grounding—and proclaims the rise of plebeian speech. William Lane (born 1744), a ‘poor labouring man of Flackwell Heath’, uses bird imagery to elucidate class differences.28 His 1818 poem ‘On Reading a Poem, Entitled Modern Parnassus’ explores the symbolic implications of a bird’s flight in order to foreground the context of class difference and the dilemma of labouring-class literary prospects:

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But larks with soaring wing, and warbling throat Do not forbid the robbin’s feeble note! The birds, tho’ taught by nature to ascend, Do not alike their notes and wings extend; Tho’ formed for flight, and some round our houses hop, And scarcely dare ascend the chimney top; While some sublimely soar and reach a hieght [sic], Beyond the utmost stretch of human sight.29

The conceit comparing poets to different types of birds illustrates differences in access to publication. Keegan reads a form of advocacy: ‘he argues that just as we celebrate the natural diversity of species of birds, each with their particular song and plumage, so too ought a diversity of poetic voices and educational pedigrees be honoured’.30 The poets in this study utilise the robin address, with its performed relation between speaker and bird, to create various impressions of labouring-­class authorship and its complex relationship to patrons and the literary public. A rough continuum exists between versions of the peasant poet: the dependent charity case and the independent survivor. Certainly, aspects overlap, but a trend can be noted in which late century peasant poets assert a larger degree of autonomy in their relationships with handlers and in their poetry. For instance, at one end, Jones’s and Bentley’s robins make complaisant pleas for assistance from potential benefactors. This solicitation becomes slightly more caustic in the moral appeals of Ann Yearsley. Next, the robin’s strife and inborn spirit of song are emphasised by Bentley, Anderson, Rushton, and Clare. Moving closer to the opposite end, robins’ labour correlates with anger rather than pity in poems by Rushton and Clare. Then, robins’ flight and elevation are singled out by Yearsley, Lane, Rushton, and Clare in ways that emphasise class affiliation. Lastly, robins are portrayed as self-sustaining (if suffering) protagonists by Rushton and Clare. Thus, labouring-class robins figure in a long-standing debate about the relative independence of the author. The increased emphasis upon autonomy appears in the poetry of Rushton and Clare, but is also present in the poetry and publication choices (e.g., prefaces, reception of potential patrons, transfer to alternate patrons, and treatment of existing patrons) of Yearsley, Burns, and Bloomfield (who published without subscription and outsold Lyrical Ballads). It corresponds with research by Annette Wheeler Cafarelli and

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Betty Rizzo on the patronage and publicity of eighteenth-century peasant poets. Cafarelli sketches the transformation of the labouring-class poet into the peasant poet, noting ‘three phases in the history of marketing working-­ class poetic identity from 1730 to 1830, in which the tolerant sponsorship of cultural curiosities mediated by private patronage, evolved to a position of strength in which working-class poets could reappropriate their own intellectual lineage to sell poetry directly to the public’.31 Popular speculation about theories of natural genius, which enabled poets to be perceived as a sort of ‘laboratory’ for separating ‘the effects of natural genius from the effects of education or art’, paired with enclosure, agrarian reform, and a resulting demand for ‘Arcadian idealizations’ of British rural life, helped to bring about this evolution.32 The increased separation is traceable to the labouring-class ‘merchandising [of] pastoral tropes’ and use of ‘the intellectual capital of being a peasant poet’.33 The robin apostrophe poem plays a part in this ongoing campaign to gain notoriety. Rizzo also indicates the increasing recalcitrance and independence of these poets, though she asserts they depended upon traditional patronage relationships that served a ‘deradicalizing function’.34 She emphasises the ulterior motives of certain patrons, who wanted to topple the neo-classical literary hierarchy rather than reposition inferiors. Whether looking at labouring-class poets from the position of increasing strength or from the view of the immobile dependent, we begin to see the relevance of the different portraits of robins presented in their poems. An ambiguous figure, the robin is both primitive and tame. It serves as an ironic reminder of the competing allegiances of peasant poets. In its acceptance of charity and choice to dwell near benefactors, it illustrates the ‘planned parasitism’ of certain labouring-class poets (such as James Woodhouse, who became Elizabeth Montagu’s steward) and the stasis enacted by those relations.35 However, the bird’s unique skill at adaptation and sociability illustrate the sort of savvy self-promotion of Burns and Bloomfield. These shades of independence are noticeable in the robins of Bentley, Lane, and Yearsley, but Rushton and Clare carry the trope to its furthest potential. Edward Rushton (1756–1814), a patronless labouring-class poet who gained notoriety for his abolitionist verse in the 1780s, uses robin imagery in provocative and class-conscious ways. In ‘Neglected Genius: Or, Tributary Stanzas to the Memory of the Unfortunate Chatterton (1787)’, Rushton compares the ‘uncolleg’d’ poet to a baby bird: ‘And Oh! twas

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thine, with unfledg’d Wings to soar/Upborne by native Fire, to Heights untry’d before’.36 This height reference, and the emphasis upon impeded flight, revises conventional approaches to bird description. In ‘To the Memory of Robert Burns’ (1806), for instance, Rushton refers to the ‘eagle-wing’d’ soaring of the ‘high-perch’d storm-cock’ as he ‘pours his song’.37 He then adjusts the trope to the level of biological class to convey solidarity amongst all aspiring plebeian poets: ‘Haply some wing in these our days,/Has higher soar’d’.38 Rushton revives the height motif to suggest the natural rising effect of Chatterton and attack critical dogmatism: No Want of Languages, or Rules, Nor all the pedant Pride of Schools; No Lack of Friends, nor Fortune’s Frown, Can keep the mighty Magic down: O wond’rous Chatterton! untimely lost, Nature’s unequal’d Work, and england’s Shame and Boast.39

The directional contrast accentuates the speaker’s exasperation with critics’ power. Yet the image of Chatterton as a wondrous bird in nature problematically resorts to a familiar hierarchy. The poet, like the bird, is born not made (poeta nascitur non fit). This sort of thinking repeats the dynasty of inheritance and undermines the role of industry. Keegan has argued that ‘appeals to the “natural order” were used to explain and rationalize the poets’ social oppression’, obfuscating their ‘hard won efforts at literacy’.40 In ‘To a Redbreast In November, Written near one of the Docks of Liverpool’ (1806), Rushton describes a displaced robin, its wasted song, and its hard-earned survival; all imply the uprooted labourer. Stanza one introduces a time contrast to emphasise displacement: ‘Remembering how, in times of yore,/The babes with leaves were covered o’er’.41 The ‘poor bird’ now must ‘roam’ far from its ‘sequester’d home’ to Liverpool, ‘this filth, this crash of trade’. Stanza two contrasts bird species such as the skylark, song thrush or throstle, and blackbird. Each bird’s physical placement corresponds to a poetic form: The Lark may reach the rosy cloud, And strike his epic lyre aloud; The high perch’d Throstle, clear and strong

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May roll his nervous ode along; The blackbird from the briery bower His deep ton’d elegy may pour;

The birds’ perches are high, as are their esteemed literary forms. These details signify the varied origins and prospects of versifiers. The robin, by contrast, is described in terms of its song, perch, and weather conditions: Yet these could never soothe my ear Like thee, delightful sonneteer; Like thee, who thro’ the raw and gusty day Chaunt’st from yon lofty pile, thy brief, thy pensive lay.

The poetical verb chaunt’st and words like sonneteer, pensive, and lay ascribe an authorial quality to the redbreast, which perches on a comparatively lower ‘lofty pile’. Harsh weather follows the bird in stanza three. As a sign of the tough physical conditions endured by peasants, these weather references join with corporeal images to ennoble the robin. And thus, full oft, in shades obscure, Th’ unbending minstrel, proud and poor, All shivering in misfortune’s storm, While half nutrition wastes his form, From fancy’s heights beholds the crowd below, And spite of varied ills, uncheck’d his raptures flow.

The bird’s inauspicious circumstances and hardship—invectives of economic inequality—contrast with its rapturous force of song to present an image of strong and sonorous independence. Rushton’s 1806 sonnet ‘The Swallow’ literalises the issue of poetic origins in its address to affluent patrons to ‘raise the woe-worn wretch’.42 Contrasting images of rising and lowness represent the material conditions of labouring-class poets who, like the swallow, struggle to rise when placed ‘on yon turfy bed’. But ‘Go raise him even with the daisy’s head’, the speaker charges, ‘And the poor flutterer like an arrow flies’. The speaker uses the bird-bard analogy to imply the unnatural predicament that labouring-class talent faces: to be capable of flight yet grounded all the same:

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So, oft thro’ life, the man of powers and worth, Haply the caterer for an infant train, Like Burns, must struggle on the bare-worn earth, While all his efforts to arise are vain.

The analogy has political and moral implications. First, the attribution of ‘powers and worth’ to the labouring-class poet upsets comfortable social divisions. Secondly, poverty ceases to be a moral stain or some charm belonging to the peasant; rather it is a call to action for the ‘relative, or friend’ to ‘lift the suffering wight’. Clare evinces a similar ethos in ‘The Robin’ (1808–1810): ‘In duty I’m bound to show mercy on thee’.43 In these poems, Rushton uses avian imagery to indict inequality and encourage aid. This advocacy is closely tied to an abiding sense of class-conscious authorship that eschews servile posturing and claims bold heroic flight. John Clare (1793–1864), the Northamptonshire peasant poet, received some schooling before becoming an agricultural labourer and servant at a very young age. Throughout his writing, robins demonstrate key aspects of labouring-class life. First, as common birds that survive year-round in a single habitat, robins are useful figures for a demotic aesthetic. He calls them ‘old tennants’ in ‘The Robin’s Nest’ (1832); and in ‘The Robin’, the bird visits men: As much as to say “I would venture in if I could find a way “I’m starv’d and I want to get out of the cold “O! make me a passage and think me not bold”44

Secondly, robins’ autumnal and winter warbling provides opportunities for speakers to model heedful listening. This is why the proposed exchanges between birds and men are so crucial. When Clare’s speaker assures the robin ‘a welcome reception’ or declares that ‘old neglect lives patron & befriends’ wild birds, he shows an underlying concern with careless reception and he models an ethic of responsibility and care.45 Throughout his natural history prose and poetry, Clare shows deep admiration for what he terms nature’s ‘trifles’. Clare’s trifling aesthetic causes him to make countless references to the lowness of various human and non-human subjects. Contrary to sublime aesthetics, this taste expresses awe in everyday objects and scenes. The idea, advanced by Richard Payne Knight and Edmund Burke, that sympathy requires

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obscurity poses a difficulty for this aesthetic. According to Burke’s thinking, clarity counteracts the imagination whereas concealment stimulates it.46 This criterion fits oddly with the trifling aesthetic, which elucidates familiar objects while emphasising their obscurity. In his ‘Essay on Instinct’, Clare disputes Burke by arguing that ‘little things excite the astonishment’ because they can be grasped.47 ‘[G]reat things’, he continues, ‘exite [sic] no wonder at all because we have no comprehension to understand them & what is worse ignorance often excites derision’. Clare’s conception of obscurity is not visual or physiological; it is socio-cultural. The unknown subjects in his poems are not invisible, they are just ignored because of habit. Clare foregrounds their anonymity and smallness as he paradoxically negates them. In ‘The Robin’, for example, he describes a ‘poor little creature’ with ‘its wings drooping down and rough feathers undrest’. Adam Phillips has addressed the paradox between insignificance and acknowledgement, noting ‘Clare’s distinctive clarity is always accompanied by a more paradoxical and protective celebration of obscurity, and silence and mist’.48 The robin’s voluntary visitations mitigate this intrusiveness. In visiting humans it leaves in-tact its own dwelling, prompting plebeian poets to be simultaneously bold and guarded with readers and patrons. In ‘The Autumn Robin’ (1829) Clare attempts to revise the taste that esteems the nightingale over the robin. He begins with a spatial contrast of various bird species in the style of Rushton and Lane. The swallow in the chimney tier The tittering martin in the eaves With half of love & half of fear Their mortared dwelling shyly weaves The sparrows in the thatch will shield … But thourt less timid than the wren Domestic & confiding bird49

Perches reveal disposition to sociability and bravery. Though some birds roost at a safe height, the robin descends to visit men and even courts danger. It steals ‘so near’ the presence of the gipsy boy, hops upon the ditcher’s spade, and prunes its wings at the ‘gipseys camp’ before they share ‘littered crumbs’.50 Such scrappy behaviour illustrates a key survival tactic of the redbreast and the peasant—precarious proximity to sources of sustenance and opportunity.

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The robin’s demotic association is enhanced by Clare’s repeated references to its domesticity and commonness, and by its visits with community members. These benefactor figures are also affected by poverty and hunger, but they toil and give regardless, and in so doing demonstrate consideration and responsiveness. The wishful notion, prevalent throughout Clare’s poetry, of mutual interspecies responsiveness suggests the felicitous conditions obtaining between patrons and poets in an idealised literary marketplace. When a song competition ensues between various birds, the redbreast’s lower-class significance further develops: Sweet favoured bird thy under notes In summers music grows unknown The consert [sic] from a thousand throats Leaves thee as if to pipe alone No listening ear the shepherd lends The simple ploughman marks thee not & then by all thy autumn friends Thourt missing & forgot51

This aural contrast, and string of humbling modifiers like under notes, unknown, and under song, continues the poem’s work of promoting disadvantaged voices. With the appearance of a nightingale, Clare’s labouring-­ class advocacy becomes pronounced: The far famed nightingale that shares Cold public praise from every tongue The popular voice of music heirs & injures much thy under song Yet then my walks thy theme salutes & finds their autumn favoured guest Gay piping on the hazel roots Above thy mossy nest52

This contrast between species presents a professional grievance. The robin’s autumnal warbling, which differs from its spring song, is not heeded. Nor is the robin treated by poets as frequently as the nightingale or lark are. Those birds’ prominence in English and Romantic poetry betokens a sort of symbolic class warfare between robins and other bird species, and Clare’s political and militaristic language (public, popular, heirs, injures,

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and salutes) intensifies the conflict. The speaker attempts to remedy the robin’s seasonal devaluation by introducing temporal contrast. For: Tis wrong that thou shouldst be despised When these gay fickle birds appear They sing when summers flowers are prized Thou at the dull & dying year53

The bird’s reception is menacingly tied to when it sings, and time is an unequal asset. The speaker defiantly rejects such fair-weather taste, offering instead the robin’s industry and independence: ‘The joy thou stealest from sorrows day/Is more to thee than praise’.54 As a symbol of the peasant poet’s self-fashioning, the robin disregards flimsy applause, sings constantly, and endures misery. The labouring-class poet’s presence becomes literal at the poem’s conclusion when the speaker proposes a swap with the bird: & could my notes win aught from thine My words but imitate thy lay Time would not then his charge resign Nor throw the meanest verse away But ever at this mellow time He should thy autumn praise prolong So would they share the happy prime Of thy eternal song55

The speaker’s desire for his notes to be like the ‘eternal song’ of the robin replaces human literary tradition and authority with another source of value. In his elevation of the autumn robin to the position of timeless muse, he appeals to the ‘happy prime’ of its music over the volatility of human tastes. This contrasts with the dependent robin portrayed by earlier poets. Clare’s treatment of birds is multi-faceted and complex; it should not be considered according to one interpretive paradigm. However, I have tried to show how select instances of his bird imagery signify a variety of attitudes about literary reception. ‘The Autumn Robin’, in this case, reveals a daring vision of the poet’s liberation from the unstable conditions underlying literary patronage and critical reception; whereas, in ‘Helpstone’ (1820), the opening poem to Clare’s first published volume, the image of little birds attempting to fly and sing during a winter storm serve as a

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comparison for the speaker’s vain delusions for success.56 In the range of attitudes about audience, birds enable Clare to propose fictional listeners and compeers, and thus set up alternative scenarios of utterance and reception. Labouring-class poets employed various strategies to foreground their social position in British society, including the revision of dominant poetic forms. Plebeian bird poetry was one strategy to cultivate sympathy and assert authorial independence. I have demonstrated how these poets used aspects of bird imagery to show the afflictions associated with poverty, to denote their social position and vocational struggles, and furthermore to comment upon critical attitudes and reception behaviours. One goal in singling out the robin was to encourage recognition and differentiation between a variety of voices, including those of the poor and uneducated. A second aspect worth pointing out is the careful selection and courtship of the redbreast as a species rather than an individual. After all, as Jeremy Mynott points out, humans are ‘more interested in the bird as a representative of a species rather than as an individual’.57 In this regard, the robin’s prominence in plebeian poetry exemplifies William J. Christmas’s observation that a self-conscious literary tradition grows amongst labouring-class writers throughout the course of the eighteenth century.58

Notes 1. Quoted in Robert Southey, The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets (London: Humphrey Milford, 1925), 2. 2. Ibid., 12, viii, 12. 3. Ibid., 1–2. 4. Bridget Keegan, British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See also Bridget Keegan, introduction to Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-­Class Poets, 1700–1800, vol. 2: 1740–1780, ed. Bridget Keegan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003). 5. Jeremy Mynott, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 34. 6. Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 4. 7. Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 76. 8. Ibid., 83. 9. Tobias Menely quoted in Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 213.

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10. Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 21. Donna Landry points out that Keenleyside’s account overlooks labouring-class voices, particularly ‘Thomson’s opposite number,’ John Clare (23). Donna Landry, ‘Book Review of Animals and Other People,’ Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 9, no. 1 (2017): 23. 11. Lucinda Cole, ‘Introduction: Human-Animal Studies and the Eighteenth Century,’ The Eighteenth Century 52, no. 1 (2011): 2, 5. 12. John Clare is a noted exception. Keenleyside, Animals and Other People, 6. 13. Ibid., 16. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 76. 17. Andrew Lack, Redbreast: The Robin in Life and Literature (Pulborough: SMH Books, 2008), 90. 18. See Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Keegan, British Labouring-Class. 19. Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 39. 20. Ibid., 175, 4, and 4. 21. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology, ed. Paula R. Feldman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 89–90. 22. Eighteenth Century English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700–1800, vol. 3: 1780–1800, ed. Tim Burke (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 200–1. 23. Ibid., 194. 24. Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 3, 318. 25. Ann Yearsley, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1785), 107–27, lines 23–30. 26. Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 78. 27. Ann Yearsley, Poems, on Various Subjects (London, 1787), 77–82, lines 33–41. 28. William Lane, Poems on Various Subjects (London, 1795), title page. 29. Quoted in Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 91. 30. Ibid. 31. Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, ‘The Romantic “Peasant” Poets and their Patrons,’ The Wordsworth Circle 26, no. 2 (1995): 78. 32. Betty Rizzo, ‘The Patron as Poet Maker: The Politics of Benefaction,’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1991): 241. Cafarelli, ‘Romantic “Peasant,”’ 81. 33. Cafarelli, ‘Romantic “Peasant,”’ 81. 34. Rizzo, ‘The Patron,’ 254, 242, and 260.

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35. Cafarelli, ‘Romantic “Peasant,”’ 79. 36. Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 3, 15–16, lines 32 and 11–12. 37. Ibid., 32–34, lines 7 and 74. The ‘storm-cock’ is the mistle thrush (Turdus viscivorus). 38. Ibid., 34, lines 81–82. 39. Ibid., 16, lines 43–48. 40. Keegan, British Labouring-Class, 2. 41. Labouring-Class Poets, vol. 3, 28. 42. Ibid., 35. 43. The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–1822, vol. 1, eds. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 125, line 35. 44. John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837, vol. 3, eds. Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 534, line 67. Early Poems, vol. 1, 124, lines 5–8. 45. ‘The Robin,’ Early Poems, vol. 1, 124. ‘The Robin’s Nest,’ Middle Period, vol. 3, 534, line 50. 46. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), Part II, Sections III–IV. 47. John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings, 1793–1864, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 281. 48. Adam Phillips, ‘The Exposure of John Clare,’ in John Clare in Context, eds. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips, and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 181. 49. Middle Period, vol. 3, 291–92, lines 73–77 and 81–82. 50. Ibid., 290, lines 44, 53, and 56. 51. Ibid., 292–93, lines 89–96. 52. Ibid., 293, lines 97–104. 53. Ibid., lines 105–8. 54. Ibid., 294, lines 111–12. 55. Ibid., 294–95, lines 113–20. 56. Early Poems, vol. 1, 157–58, lines 23–46. 57. Mynott, Birdscapes, 58–59. 58. William J.  Christmas, ‘Introduction: An Eighteenth-Century Laboring-­ Class Tradition,’ The Eighteenth Century 42, no. 3 (2001): 187.

Bibliography Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Robert and James Dodsley, 1757.

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Christmas, William J. ‘Introduction: An Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Tradition.’ The Eighteenth Century, 42, no. 3 (2001): 187–94. Clare, John. The Early Poems of John Clare, 1804–1822. 2 vols. Edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Clare, John. Poems of the Middle Period, 1822–1837. 5 vols. Edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P.M.S. Dawson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Clare, John. The Natural History Prose Writings, 1793–1864. Edited by Margaret Grainger. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983. Cole, Lucinda. ‘Introduction: Human-Animal Studies and the Eighteenth Century.’ The Eighteenth Century 52, no. 1 (2011): 1–10. Feldman, Paula R., ed. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Fudge, Erica. Animal. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Goodridge, John, and Simon Kövesi, eds. Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-­ Class Poets. 3 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003. Keegan, Bridget. British Labouring-Class Nature Poetry, 1730–1837. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Keenleyside, Heather. Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Lack, Andrew. Redbreast: The Robin in Life and Literature. Pulborough: SMH Books, 2008. Landry, Donna. The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Landry, Donna. ‘Review of Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century, by Heather Keenleyside.’ Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and His Contemporaries 9, no. 1 (2017): 23. Lane, William. Poems on Various Subjects. London: A. Paris, 1795. Mynott, Jeremy. Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Phillips, Adam. ‘The Exposure of John Clare.’ In John Clare in Context. Eds. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips, and Geoffrey Summerfield, 178–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rizzo, Betty. ‘The Patron as Poet Maker: The Politics of Benefaction.’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 20 (1991): 241–66. Southey, Robert. The Lives and Works of the Uneducated Poets. London: Humphrey Milford, 1925. Wheeler Cafarelli, Annette. ‘The Romantic “Peasant” Poets and their Patrons.’ The Wordsworth Circle 26, no. 2 (1995): 77–87. Yearsley, Ann. Poems on Several Occasions. London: T. Cadell, 1785. Yearsley, Ann. Poems, on Various Subjects. London: printed for the Author, 1797.

CHAPTER 7

The Language of Birds and the Language of Real Men: Wordsworth, Coleridge and the ‘Best Part’ of Language Francesca Mackenney

The language of birds is very ancient, and, like other ancient modes of speech, very elliptical; little is said, but much is meant and understood.1

When Gilbert White examined the ‘language of birds’ in The Natural History of Selborne (1789), he distinguished his own approach from that of the poets, seers and ‘viziers’ of old (216). He alluded specifically to an ancient Turkish tale, which Joseph Addison had previously cited in the Spectator magazine as a ‘pretty instance’ of the ‘art of giving advice’. According to the tale, a vizier to the Sultan Mahmoud claimed to have learned of a device by which to interpret ‘word-for-word’ the conversations of birds. In the midst of war, ruin and the desolation of the Ottoman Empire under Mahmoud’s rule, the tyrannous sultan is said to have requested his vizier to interpret for him the conversation of two neighbouring owls perched upon a rubbish heap. As the vizier ‘translates’ this

F. Mackenney (*) University of Bristol, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_7

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conversation, in which the owls appear to be negotiating the dowry for their children’s forthcoming wedding, The father of the son said to the father of the daughter, in my hearing— ‘Brother, I consent to this marriage, provided you will settle upon your daughter fifty ruined villages for her portion’. To which the father of the daughter replied— ‘Instead of fifty I will give her five hundred, if you please. God grant a long life to Sultan Mahmoud; whilst he reigns over us, we shall never want ruined villages.’

The sultan is said to have been so moved by this account ‘that he rebuilt the towns and villages which had been destroyed, and from that time forward consulted the good of his people’.2 In alluding to this tale, White demonstrates his awareness of how the poets and seers of antiquity have commonly spoken through and for the talking birds and other animals of the fable tradition in order to indirectly express his or her own criticism of sultans, kings, and human society as a whole. In this respect, White intercepts and acknowledges the ‘irresistible’ tendency which recent scholarship has observed in poetic renderings of birds and their sounds: the tendency, that is, not only to impose human meanings and values upon an animal which exists properly outside the poet’s frame of reference, but also, on a deeper and more fundamental level, to inevitably ‘(mis-)translate’ a non-human sound into human forms of signification—words, music, and poetry.3 Although White did not ‘pretend’ to possess the same wonderful abilities as the vizier, he did suggest an alternative, and in many ways more controversial, approach to interpreting ‘the language of birds’: ‘I would be thought only to mean’, the naturalist explains, ‘that many of the winged tribes have various sounds and voices adapted to express their various passions, wants, and feelings, such as anger, fear, love, hatred, hunger, and the like’ (216). White delineates in detail the various and ‘important sounds’ which make up the white owl’s ‘considerable vocabulary’ (216, 218): the familiar ‘hooting’ which ‘seems to express complacency and rivalry among the males’, the ‘quick call and horrible scream’ which ‘will answer the intention of intimidating’, the ‘snore and hiss’ through which the birds signal they ‘mean  to menace’, and the meaningful silence in which these expert hunters ‘steal through the air unheard upon a nimble and watchful quarry’ (216, 144,  145). In the close attentiveness which he paid to these significant sounds, White

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provides a method for interpreting what the birds might be saying, not to poets and kings, but to each other. Ironically, in doing so, he reveals the underlying and essential ‘passions’ which human beings share in common with other animals (‘anger, fear, love, hatred, hunger, and the like’). While recent scholarship has emphasised the differences between the bird’s own voice and the human forms which attempt, in John Clare’s words, to ‘syllable the sounds’, in this chapter I seek to draw attention to the continuities which White and others in this period discovered between the ‘language of birds’ and an ancient, tonal, and ‘elliptical’ mode of human speech.4 In their joint project Lyrical Ballads (1796), William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge each demonstrate a heightened awareness of the poet’s propensity to make the sounds of nature, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘tell back the tale/Of his own sorrows’.5 In this chapter I place Wordsworth and Coleridge’s poems in the context of a heated debate regarding non-­ human animal and particularly avian ‘language’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; I explore White’s influence on the early writings of both poets, and  further argue that this debate foregrounds the fervid dispute which arose between the two poets regarding what Wordsworth considered to be ‘the best part of language’ and what Coleridge more strictly defined as ‘the best part of human language, properly so called’.6

I Scientific analyses of the ‘language of birds’ drew from an old and deep well of popular knowledge and experience. Naturalists relied on a mass of supporting evidence from an ancient and evidently lucrative trade in singing birds. As J.  M. Bechstein explains in his Natural History of Caged Birds (1795), ‘a good bird catcher ought to know not only the different modes of taking birds, but also all the calls for attracting the different species and sexes’; the ‘science’ of the bird-catcher’s trade depended on his being able to distinguish the chaffinch’s call to its companions, ‘iack iack’, from ‘treef treef’, as an ‘expression of sorrow’.7 The most detailed account of the bird-catcher’s ingenious profession is given by Henry Mayhew, who recorded the following interview with one of London’s most notorious animal traders, Mr Jack Black:

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‘I know the sounds of all the English birds, and what they say. I could tell you about the nightingale, the black cap, hedge warbler, garden warbler, petty chat, red start—a beautiful song-bird—the willow wren—little warblers they are—linnets, or any of them, for I have got their sounds in my ear and my mouth.’ As if to prove this, he drew from a side-pocket a couple of tin bird-­ whistles, which were attached by a string to a button-hole. He instantly began to imitate the different birds, commencing with their call, and then explaining how, when answered to in such a way, they gave another note, and how, if still responded to, they uttered a different sound. In fact, he gave me the whole of the conversation he usually carried on with the different kinds of birds, each one being as it were in a different language. He also showed me how he allured them to him, when they were in the air singing in the distance, and he did this by giving their entire song. His cheeks and throat seemed to be in constant motion as he filled the room with his loud imitations of the lark, and so closely did he resemble the notes of the bird, that it was no longer any wonder how the little things could be deceived. In the same manner he illustrated the songs of the nightingale, and so many birds, that I did not recognise the names of some of them. He knew all their habits as well as notes, and repeated to me the peculiar chirp they make on rising from the ground, as well as the sound by which he distinguishes that it is ‘uneasy with curiosity’, or that it has settled on a tree. Indeed, he appeared to be acquainted with all the chirps which distinguished any action in the bird up to the point when, as he told me, it ‘circles about, and then falls like a stone to the ground with its pitch’.8

To the surprise of his auditor, the bird-catcher demonstrates his capacity to both interpret and converse in these diverse and sophisticated ‘languages’ of birds. In some cases, the bird-catcher is able to match the sound with a particular object or action; for example, the ‘peculiar’ chirp which the nightingale makes when settling on a tree or rising from the ground. In others, the sound is understood to reflect complex emotional states, such as being ‘uneasy with curiosity’. Like the bird-catcher, bird-nesting boys similarly learned to distinguish, mimic and respond to the notes of the birds whose nests they hunted. As Clare keenly recalled these boyhood experiences: ‘Wherever birds but make a noise/Anticipation sees a nest’.9 Wordsworth also fondly remembered the popular pastime of blowing ‘mimic hootings’ to the owls in the poetical fragment ‘There Was a Boy’; as he later explained in a note to this poem, the ‘practice of making an instrument with their fingers is known to most boys, though some are

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more skilful at it than others’.10 These boyhood pastimes are associated with a mode of attention and comprehension which poets, like Wordsworth and Clare, actively seek to recapture both in and through their poetry. These popular pastimes and pursuits provided much of the groundwork and the vocabulary for studies in ornithology. Scientists and natural historians commonly called upon the bird-catcher as an authority in their analysis of the sounds and songs of birds. A determined group of ‘curious’ men and women began to investigate, question and reflect upon the complexity of these diverse and sophisticated avian ‘languages’. In a seemingly trivial and eccentric episode in The Natural History of Selborne, White questioned whether all owls hoot in the same musical key: A friend remarks that many (most) of his owls hoot in B flat; but that one went almost half a note below A. … A neighbour of mine, who is said to have a nice ear, remarks that the owls about this village hoot in three different keys, in G flat or F sharp, in B flat, and A flat. He heard two hooting to each other, the one in A flat, and the other in B flat. Query: Do these different notes proceed from different species, or only from various individuals? (134–5)

Since White was writing some years before the invention of modern recording technologies, the process of ‘distinguishing’ these sounds depends upon the ‘nice ear’ of musical friends and acquaintances. Yet the act of distinguishing in itself represents a critical shift; rather than reading natural historical details according to a general theory or principle, the particular instance leads White to a ‘query’ which is left open to further analysis, debate and reflection. White’s note set off a series of other notes, including in Coleridge’s own notebooks, in which the poet similarly disputed the musical key of neighbouring owls.11 Yet his influence is perhaps most strongly felt in the mode of listening, questioning and ‘querying’ which informs the approach of scientists, naturalists, and poets throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Charles Darwin. White interprets the ‘important sounds’ of birds in the context of their complex and tempestuous social lives: the ‘sexual distinction of voice’ (217), the twittering ‘complacency’ of parent swallows (168), and the ‘little inward moan’ of the hen at the sight of predators which White distinguishes from the ‘earnest and alarming’ tones of her ‘redoubled’ notes at her adversary’s approach (218). His emphasis on these emotive,

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expressive and social aspects of voice may be seen to inform Dorothy Wordsworth’s highly attentive and sympathetic descriptions of birds and their sounds. As she describes the behaviour and habits of a family of swallows, which had built their nest outside her bedroom window: When they first came about the window they used to hang against the panes, with their white Bellies & their forked tails looking like fish, but then they fluttered & sang their own little twittering song. … I watched them one morning when William was at Eusemere, for more than an hour. Every now & then there was a feeling motion in their wings a sort of tremulousness & they sang a low song to one another.12

Dorothy registers in the low ‘twittering song’ of swallows an expression of emotion, complacency and, most especially, parental and familial bonds. While naturalists discerned shades of meaning in these intricate patterns of sound, philologists also speculated on the underlying connections between the ‘language of birds’ and an ancient ‘elliptical’ mode of human speech.

II Through all the woods they heard the charming noise Of chirping birds, and tried to frame their voice And imitate. Thus birds instructed man And taught him songs before his art began.13

Philologists have often speculated on the possible animal origins of human speech. Although many remained sceptical of what Johann Gottfried Herder dismissed as the Lucretian ‘monstrosity’ of primitive man ‘aping the nightingale’, over the course of the eighteenth century there emerged a broad consensus that the first humans communicated through a form of musical protolanguage that was closer to the expressive prosody of birdsong than it was to the grammatical discourse of modern societies.14 From James Burnett Lord Monboddo to Hugh Blair, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau to Lindley Murray, grammarians and linguists of all backgrounds and political persuasions affirmed the increasingly dominant view that sound preceded sense, and that poetry came before prose. The eighteenth century witnessed a major shift in focus from the divine to the animal, passionate and sexual origins of language. Lord Monboddo

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gave the authority of the ‘ingenious’ Thomas Blacklock of Edinburgh, who argued that ‘the first language among men was music, and that, before our ideas were expressed by articulate sounds, they were communicated by tones, varied according to different degrees of gravity or acuteness’, which, Monboddo further argued, were ‘first learned by imitation of the birds’.15 Lucretius’ theory of ‘the invention of music’ was ‘confirmed’ to Monboddo by what he ‘learned’ from the ‘wild girl’ he encountered in France, who, he claimed, ‘told me, that the only music of the people of her country, was the imitation of singing birds’ (I: 493). Although many debated the particulars of Monboddo’s argument, linguists broadly recognised the remains or ‘vestiges’ of an original ‘language of nature’ in man’s sighs, lamentations, interjections and other ‘sounds of feeling’ (Herder, 90-1). White’s description of the ‘language of birds’ echoes Herder’s earlier account of this primitive ‘language of feeling’: ‘These sounds do not speak much, but what they speak is strong’ (90). As Rousseau further speculated, ‘the first languages were singable and passionate before they became simple and methodical’.16 In a highly speculative and increasingly problematic line of argument, linguists relied upon the evidence of primitive aural cultures and ancient languages: the ‘guttural’ accents of the Hurons in North America (Monboddo, I: 480), the accentual stresses which modify the sense in Latin and Greek (Rousseau, 69), and the ‘tonal’ languages of the Orient in which, Herder remarked, ‘a minor sound, accent, breath changes the whole meaning’ (Herder 164). Although Lindley Murray drew hard and fast lines between ‘human language’ and ‘the voices of animals’, he nonetheless recognised the need for ‘other signs than words’ and a ‘language of emotion’ which, Murray acknowledged, was not peculiar to man alone.17 In this respect the sounds of words represented an alternative mode of signification, distinct from their semantic content, and it was this ‘reaction’, not to ‘thoughts but to syllables’, in which Herder perceived the ‘magic power’ of the poet who ‘returned us to being children’ (98). As linguists recognised significant continuities between the sounds of birds and human speech, they also, however, increasingly turned their attention to the inward mental faculties as the distinguishing characteristics of an evolved and uniquely human language. As Hans Aarsleff observes, linguistics in the eighteenth century was dominated by a theory of ‘Universal Grammar’ which commonly presented language as the external mirror reflecting the mind’s inner workings.18 According to this principle the ‘lower’ animals could be and were regularly denied basic cognitive

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capacities, the ‘inferior’ races and classes deemed incapable of higher forms of abstract thought and thus excluded from participation in a wider public discourse. In The Politics of Language: 1791–1819, Olivia Smith observes that Monboddo and other universal grammarians separated the mind into two basic faculties, ‘reflection and sensation’, and used these categories to separate human speakers into classes: ‘those who think’ and ‘those who sense’.19 Throughout linguistics in this period ‘barbarous nations’ are consistently placed at an intermediary stage between human and non-human animals: ‘from savage men’, writes Monboddo, ‘we are naturally led to consider the condition of the brutes; betwixt whom and the savages there is such a resemblance, that there are many who will hardly admit of any difference’ (I: 146). If the utterances of animals expressed their passions and material wants, the vernacular dialects and idioms of the English working classes were defined and objected to in much the same terms. As Smith points out, ‘vulgar’ speech was characterised by an inability ‘to transcend the concerns of the present, an interest in material objects, and the dominance of the passions’(2–3). This inability to look or think beyond present conditions and material wants represented the most ‘degraded’ form of human intelligence because, as Monboddo’s distinguished friend, James Harris, remarked, ‘it is necessarily common to all animal Beings, and reaches even to Zoophytes, as far as they possess Sensation’.20 At the same time that ‘articulate’ and ‘distinct’ sounds were being recognised as a form of communication among the ‘lower’ animals, and most especially birds, these findings did not so much raise the animal closer to the human, as push some kinds of human down to ‘brute’ status. This separation of language into human and animal ‘parts’ informs, in complex and troubling ways, the fervid dispute which arose between Wordsworth and his friend regarding what each considered to be the ‘best part’ of language.

III Do you ask what the birds say? The sparrow, the dove, The linnet and thrush say, ‘I love and I love!’ In the winter they’re silent—the wind is so strong; What it says, I don’t know, but it sings a loud song. But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather, And singing, and loving—all come back together. But the lark is so brimful of gladness and love,

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The green fields below him, the blue sky above, That he sings, and he sings; and for ever sings he— ‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me!’21

Coleridge first published this poem in The Morning Post (1802) under the title ‘The Language of Birds; lines spoken extempore, to a child, in early spring’. Although he made few changes to the poem itself, significantly he did change the title, which was first shortened to ‘Extempore— To a Child of Six Years Old’ and finally reformulated as ‘Answer to a Child’s Question’. In substance, the poem stays close to White’s interpretation of ‘the language of birds’ as an expression of passion and most especially sexual ‘love’; the thrush and the linnet do not have a conversation in the same way as the owls do in the Turkish tale, for instance, and this change of approach is clearly designed to educate the child reader about their relationship with the natural world: what we know, and what we cannot ‘know’, about what the birds and the wind might ‘say’. In his playful use of rhyme, repetition, and alliteration, Coleridge draws connections between this passionate language of birds, the lisping of infants, and the sounds of poetry: ‘I love my Love, and my Love loves me’. Although he suggests underlying continuities between the expressive prosody of birdsong and the aural, musical, and non-semantic aspects of poetic language, the changes which Coleridge made to the title of his poem reflect a growing unease with what he eventually came to regard as an improper use of that word ‘language’. In the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth claimed that he had chosen rustic subjects ‘because such men communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived’ (290). To this claim, Coleridge responded in no uncertain terms: I deny that the words and combinations of words derived from the objects with which the rustic is familiar, can be said to form the best part of language. It is more than probable that many classes of the brute creation possess discriminating sounds by which they can convey to each other notices of such objects as concern their food, shelter or safety. Yet we hesitate to call the aggregate of such sounds a language otherwise than metaphorically. The best part of human language, properly so called, is derived from reflections on the acts of the mind itself. It is formed by a voluntary appropriation of fixed symbols to internal acts, to processes and results of imagination, the greater part of which have no place in the consciousness of uneducated man; though in civilised society, by imitation and passive remembrance of what

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they hear from their religious instructors and other superiors, the most uneducated share in the harvest which they neither sowed nor reaped. (Biographia Literaria, 342)

On one level, Coleridge appears to draw a harsh dividing line between the ‘discriminating sounds’ of ‘the brute creation’ and ‘human language, properly so called’; on another, however, a syntactical slippage suggests that ‘uneducated man’ exists somewhere between these two linguistic categories. The ‘discriminating sounds’ of birds and other animals refer mainly to such ‘objects as concern their food, shelter or safety’; in much the same terms, Coleridge argues that the rustic’s ‘scanty vocabulary’ predominantly concerns ‘the few things, and modes of action, requisite for his bodily conveniences’ (342). In this respect Coleridge follows Universal Grammarians, such as Monboddo, in characterising vulgar speech as confined to the bodily passions, to particular ‘things’ and ‘objects’ (Monboddo I: 162–3). While the ‘uneducated’ classes of British society possess ‘a number of confused, general terms’, those terms have mainly been derived, as Monboddo similarly argued, from passive imitation of their social superiors (Biographia Literaria, 342; also see Monboddo IV: 406). In further proof of this argument, Coleridge cited the ‘extreme difficulty’ which ‘our most adroit missionaries’ had experienced in finding ‘words for the simplest moral and intellectual processes in the languages of uncivilised tribes’ (198). In this respect, Coleridge’s philosophical prose seeks to draw the differentiating and dividing lines which Wordsworth actively sought to unsettle in his poetry: his desire, that is, to awaken the human heart ‘to feeling for all forms that Life can take’ and create a ‘wider sympathy’ that ‘sees not any line where being ends’.22

IV And with the owls began my song, And with the owls must end. (Wordsworth, ‘The Idiot Boy’, Lyrical Ballads, 445–6)

Along with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth’s ‘The Idiot Boy’ is one of only two poems to have its own separate title page in the Lyrical Ballads. Consequently, scholars have long recognised the poem’s significance to Wordsworth’s developing theory of language and

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his contribution to the Lyrical Ballads project as a whole. ‘The Idiot Boy’ is one of several poems and fragments in which Wordsworth traces the beginning of poetry in a young child’s first experience of listening to, and emulating, the sounds and songs of birds. In poems such as ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘There Was a Boy’, the young protagonists learn the lesson which the ‘mad mother’ aspires to teach to her son: ‘I’ll teach my boy the sweetest things/I’ll teach him how the owlet sings’ (‘The Mad Mother’, Lyrical Ballads, 81–2). As contextual readings by Alan Bewell, Alan Richardson and others have shown, Wordsworth’s representation of the ‘poor idiot’ of Johnny Foy is informed by his reading in eighteenth-­ century linguistics and theories of the mind.23 When Wordsworth described Johnny listening and responding to the surrounding chorus of owlets, he was not only recalling his own childhood experiences and boyhood amusements; he was also searching further back to the awakening of human consciousness and its earliest forms of poetic expression. Throughout ‘The Idiot Boy’ the owlets act as a kind of chorus part to the unfolding human drama. The poem begins with a description of the owlet calling in the moonlight air: ’Tis eight o’clock,—a clear March night, The moon is up—the sky is blue, The owlet in the moonlight air, He shouts from nobody knows where; He lengthens out his lonely shout, Halloo! halloo! a long halloo! (1–6)

Like Coleridge in ‘The Language of Birds’, in this poem Wordsworth both acknowledges and respects that which nobody knows or ever can know about these obscure linguistic origins: ‘he shouts from nobody knows where’. Like Coleridge also, however, Wordsworth evokes the passionate, emotional, and social origins of voice: the owlet’s long halloo appears as ‘a going out towards other creatures’, in Herder’s phrase (87). Wordsworth pays particular attention to the modulations of the bird’s call: the owlet’s ‘lonely shout’ is ‘lengthened out’, and this prolonged note is not simply mimicked by, but more closely associated with, accentual syllabic metre. As an alternative mode of signification or ‘sign of feeling’, the metrical arrangement of words operates separately from, with, or against, the semantic content of the words themselves. In this respect, poetic metre may be said to return the poet and reader to a state in which the mind

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reacts, not simply to words, but to their sounds and intonations. Wordsworth presents the young poet, as Alexander von Humboldt described primitive man, as ‘a singing creature, only associating thoughts with the tones’.24 Johnny’s inarticulate sounds and gestures are throughout the poem set within the wider chorus of merry owlets: And Johnny’s in a merry tune, The owlets hoot, the owlets curr, And Johnny’s lips they burr, burr, burr And on he goes beneath the moon. (113–16)

Coleridge, and many other readers, objected to what they perceived as the ‘disgusting image’ of ‘morbid idiocy’ conjured up the ‘burr, burr, burr’ of Johnny’s lips.25 Although these inarticulate sounds place Johnny Foy outside the limits of language, definition, and comprehension, Wordsworth emphasises the shared origins of human speech and the continuities that exist between articulate and inarticulate modes of being and expression. It is not that the idiot boy himself is singing ‘in tune’, but that his ‘burring’ lips play one part in a larger melody, a natural chorus through which Wordsworth seeks to create a ‘wider sympathy’ which includes such poor inarticulate things as idiot boys and birds. As Richardson observes, however, the ‘burr’ of Johnny’s lips ‘connects rather than isolates him from other speakers’ in the poem and throughout the Lyrical Ballads as a whole: the repetitions, interjections, and other ‘extrasemantic yet meaningful sounds’ that are both ‘emotionally expressive and other-directed’ (164). Throughout the tale Wordsworth emphasises the physical, bodily origins of vocal expression and speech, the inarticulate sounds and gestures which are common to both human beings and other animals, learned doctors, and idiot boys. ‘Poor Susan moans, poor Susan groans’, the narrator writes of ‘poor old Susan Gale’, whose very name evokes the inarticulate sounds of natural forces outside of human comprehension and control (152, 131). Betty Foy is inarticulate in her maternal anxieties (‘O woe is me! O woe is me! … /O cruel’; 272, 289), as in her joy: ‘She looks again—her arms are up—/She screams— she cannot move for joy’ (372–3). Seemingly the most educated and rational figure in the poem, the doctor, is neither able to understand the mother’s frantic questioning nor respond sympathetically to her cries. As

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she pleads for news of her poor boy who’s ‘not so wise as some folk be’, the doctor interrupts her: ‘The devil take his wisdom!’ said The Doctor, looking somewhat grim, ‘What, woman! should I know of him?’ And, grumbling, he went back to bed. (267–71)

The man of parts and learning regresses into curses, exclamations, and the inarticulate mutterings associated with the essential, physical needs of the body: ‘and, grumbling, he went back to bed’. Characters of all backgrounds and levels of education commonly express their emotions through interjections and inarticulate cries; conversely, Wordsworth also draws attention to, and parodically undermines, attempts to rationally explain irrational emotions. In her maternal anxiety, the mother neglects to inform the doctor of the main reason for her visit: ‘She quite forgot to send the Doctor,/To comfort poor old Susan Gale’ (285–6). And again the chorus of owlets seems to comically comment upon and even parody this ongoing search for understanding and sympathy, which neither language nor education appear able to satisfy: Fond lovers, yet not quite hob nob, They lengthen out the tremulous sob That echoes far from hill to hill. (299–301)

At various points in the poem, Wordsworth introduces a number of ‘educated’ terms which seem jarringly out of place’s in the poem’s rustic setting. As the narrator describes the mother’s rising tension, And Susan’s growing worse and worse, And Betty’s in a sad quandary; And then there’s nobody to say If she must go or she must stay: —She’s in a sad quandary. (177–81)

In later editions painstakingly overseen by the poet himself, the word ‘quandary’ is either italicised or placed in quotation marks. Wordsworth’s biographer Stephen Gill observes the ‘fresh scrutiny’ to which the poems were subjected when the poet revised them ‘right down to the commas and semi-colons’ for the 1827 edition of his Poetical Works; this

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near-­obsessive degree of alteration notoriously became a point of contention between Wordsworth and his publishers.26 Wordsworth marks the word ‘quandary’ out from the text as an intrusive alien voice. Although Betty Foy is unlikely to describe her maternal anguish in such Latinate terms, she is, as the surrounding context suggests, familiar with the underlying feeling or emotion which that term denotes. Betty’s sense of her own dilemma is expressed, not through words, but through movement and gesture: ‘And there’s nobody to say/If she must go or she must stay’. In this respect the poem evinces Wordsworth’s views regarding poetic ‘tautology’ which he expounded in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads; here, Wordsworth defended direct repetition as preferable to a prevailing from of ‘virtual tautology’ which consisted in ‘using different words when their meaning is exactly the same’ (332–3). In ‘The Idiot Boy’, Wordsworth may be seen to draw attention to the ways in which inarticulate expressions and gestures may more forcibly communicate the same essential passions than any ‘learned’ or ‘educated’ vocabulary. In ‘The Idiot Boy’, all forms of language come back to the same universal passions and emotions. The poem concludes, as it began, with the ‘tuneful concert’ of owlets: The owls have hardly sung their last, While our four travellers homeward wend; The owls have hooted all night long, And with the owls began my song, And with the owls must end. For while they all were travelling home, Cried Betty, ‘Tell us Johnny, do, ‘Where all this long night you have been, ‘What you have heard, what you have seen, ‘And Johnny, mind you tell us true.’ Now Johnny all night long had heard The owls in tuneful concert strive; No doubt too he the moon had seen; For in the moonlight he had been From eight o’clock till five.

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And thus to Betty’s question, he Made answer, like a traveller bold, (His very words I give to you,) ‘The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the sun did shine so cold.’ —Thus answered Johnny in his glory, And that was all his traveller’s story. (442–63)

As Bewell observes, the poem serves, at least on one level, as a ‘devastating burlesque’ of empiricist arguments and philosophical speculations (325). The fond mother’s questions to her son are laughably close to the philosopher’s own insistent demands to ‘know’ where the idiot had been, what he had seen and what he might ‘tell’ us about the origins of man. According to Bewell, Wordsworth’s departure from empiricist philosophy is further signalled by his introduction of the idea of ‘nature’s educative power’; since the boy is able to give ‘a retrospective account’ of his journey in the forest, Bewell argues that this ‘rudimentary power of memory’ has been acquired through his engagement with the natural world (333). Yet this implied narrative of mental and linguistic ‘progress’ seems in conflict with the poem’s structural ironies, in a song which not only begins, but also emphatically ends, with a ‘tuneful concert’ of owlets. Although Johnny Foy cannot provide the reader with narrative tale or ‘story’ in the conventional sense, ironically in one sense his words do offer a more ‘truthful’ account of his experiences: ‘The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo,/And the sun did shine so cold’. The idiot speaks a language which is illustrative as opposed to explanatory, figurative as opposed to abstract, and in this respect poetic as opposed to philosophical. Whereas Coleridge perceived the ‘scanty vocabulary’ of uneducated rustics as an indication of an impoverished and underdeveloped intellect, Wordsworth draws attention to the ways in different outward forms express the same essential and underlying passions: ‘we all of us have one human heart’ (‘Old Cumberland Beggar’, Lyrical Ballads, 146). The circular narrative of ‘The Idiot Boy’ may consequently be read as a parodic commentary upon eighteenth-­century narratives of linguistic ‘progress’. The poem repeatedly comes back to an underlying sameness, the same essential passions and desires, from which Wordsworth believed all language to have been originally derived: ‘And with the owls began my song,/And with the owls must end’.

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Notes 1. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (London: Penguin, 1977), 216. 2. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 512 (17 October 1712). 3. Daniel Karlin, The Figure of the Singer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 59. For a full account of the ways in which human beings have attempted to interpret, represent, and understand the sounds of birds, see David Rothenberg, Why Birds Sing (London: Penguin, 2005), and Jeremy Mynott, Birdscapes: Birds in our Imagination and Experience (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), esp. 145–81. 4. John Clare, The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 312. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Nightingale’ in Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Routledge, 2005), 20–1. 6. William Wordsworth, 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 290; Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in The Major Works, ed. H.  J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 342. 7. J. M. Bechstein, The Natural History of Cage Birds, trans. unknown, new edn. (London: 1837), 24. 8. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols (London: 1861), III, 14–15. Black’s ‘hedge warbler’ is the dunnock while his ‘willow wren’ is the willow warbler. The ‘petty chat’ is most likely the chiffchaff. 9. Clare, ‘Birds Nesting’  in Poems of the Middle Period 1822–37, ed. Eric Robinson, David Powell and P. M. S. Dawson, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996–2003), II, 15–16. 10. Wordsworth, ‘There Was a Boy’, Lyrical Ballads, 10; see Wordsworth’s note to the poem in The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), 60. 11. Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 double vols [Text and Notes], ed. Kathleen Coburn and Merten Christensen (London: Princeton University Press, 1957–90), III, 3959. 12. Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals, ed. Pamela Woof (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 115. 13. Lucretius, Titus Lucretius Carus. The Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum Done into English Verse with Notes, trans. Thomas Creech (Oxford: 1682), V.1379–1412. 14. Johann Gottfriend Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, trans. John H.  Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 136. 15. James Burnett Lord Monboddo, On the Origin and Progress of Language, 8 vols, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: 1774–92), I, 469–70.

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16. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origins of Languages in Two Essays on the Origins of Language, ibid, 12. 17. Lindley Murray, An English Grammar, 2 vols (London: 1808), I, 23, 347–8. 18. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Connecticut: Greenswood, 1967), 3. 19. Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language: 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 22. 20. James Harris, Hermes; Or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (London: 1751), 113. 21. Coleridge, ‘Answer to a Child’s Question’ in Poetical Works, ed. J.  C. C.  Mays, 6 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), II, 694. 22. Wordsworth, An Evening Walk, ed. James Averill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 127–8. 23. Alan Bewell, ‘Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages’ in ELH 50/2 (Summer, 1983), 321–46 (325), Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 164–70. Also see Avital Ronnel, Stupidity (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2003), esp. 246–64. For a detailed analysis of the figure of the idiot in eighteenth-century thought and literature, and its influence on Wordsworth’s representation of Johnny Foy, see Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), esp. 24–49. 24. Alexander von Humboldt, quoted in W.  Tecumseh Fitch, ‘Musical Protolanguage: Darwin’s Theory of Language Evolution Revisited’ in Birdsong, Speech and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain, ed. Johan J.  Bolhuis and Martin Everaert (Cambridge: MIT, 2013), 489–504 (495). 25. See Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 339. In his review of Lyrical Ballads, Robert Southey objected to the poet’s choice of subject matter in ‘The Idiot Boy’ and concluded that ‘No tale less deserved the labour that appears to have been bestowed on it’; qtd. in Lyrical Ballads, 337. The critic John Wilson similarly criticised Wordsworth for choosing to delineate feelings which ‘though natural, do not please, but which create a certain disgust or contempt’; qtd. in Lyrical Ballads, 394. 26. For example, see versions of this stanza in ‘The Idiot Boy’ in The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth, 4 vols (London: 1820), I, 250, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 5 vols (London: 1827), I, 232, and The Poems of William Wordsworth (London: 1845), 9. I have given page numbers, as opposed to line numbers, in accordance with the editions’ own conventions. For Wordsworth’s obsessive tendencies in revising his poems, see Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 366–7, 388–9.

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Bibliography Aarsleff, Hans. The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860. Connecticut: Greenswood, 1967. Addison, Joseph. The Spectator, no. 512 (17 October 1712). Bechstein, J.  M. The Natural History of Cage Birds. Translator unknown. New edition. London: 1837. Bewell, Alan. ‘Wordsworth’s Primal Scene: Retrospective Tales of Idiots, Wild Children, and Savages’ in ELH 50/2 (Summer, 1983), 321–46. Bolhuis, Johan J. and Martin Everaert, eds. Birdsong, Speech and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Clare, John. The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare. Edited by Margaret Grainger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Clare, John. Poems of the Middle Period 1822–37. Edited by Eric Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson. 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996–2003. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Major Works. Edited by H.  J. Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 double vols. Edited by Kathleen Coburn and Merten Christensen. London: Princeton University Press, 1957–90. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Poetical Works. Edited by J.  C. C.  Mays. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Gill, Stephen. William Wordsworth: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Harris, James. Hermes; Or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar. London: 1751. Herder, Johann Gottfriend, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Two Essays on the Origin of Language. Translated by John H.  Moran and Alexander Gode. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Karlin, Daniel. The Figure of the Singer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Lucretius. Titus Lucretius Carus, The Epicurean Philosopher, His Six Books De Natura Rerum Done into English Verse with Notes. Translated. by Thomas Creech. Oxford: 1682. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. 4 vols. London: 1861. McDonagh, Patrick. Idiocy: A Cultural History. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008. Murray, Lindley. An English Grammar. 2 vols. London: 1808. Mynott, Jeremy. Birdscapes: Birds in our Imagination and Experience. Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Richardson, Alan. British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Ronnel, Avital. Stupidity. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Rothenberg, David. Why Birds Sing. London: Penguin, 2005.

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Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language: 1791–1819. Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. White, Gilbert. The Natural History of Selborne. Edited by Richard Mabey. London: Penguin, 1977. Wordsworth, Dorothy. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. Edited by Pamela Woof. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Wordsworth, William. An Evening Walk. Edited by James Averill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Wordsworth, William. The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth. Edited by Jared Curtis. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993. Wordsworth, William. The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth. 4 vols. London: 1820. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. 5 vols. London: 1827. Wordsworth, William. The Poems of William Wordsworth. London: 1845. Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. Edited by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones. London: Routledge, 2005.

CHAPTER 8

‘No Parrot, Either in Morality or Sentiment’: Talking Birds and Mechanical Copying in the Age of Sensibility Alex Wetmore

On 9 May 2014, the top post on the website Reddit was as follows: TIL1 There was an African grey parrot that learned over 100 English words, which he could use and combine approprately [sic]. His last words to his handler were ‘You be good. I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

The post linked to an obituary, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, of Dr. Irene Pepperberg’s famous parrot, Alex, who had gained notoriety for a remarkable facility with language which Pepperberg claimed challenged prevailing views of the limitations of animal intelligence.2 Debate exists whether Alex fully understood the words he used, but that debate itself shows our continued interest in talking birds for the questions they raise about language, cognition, and the borders of the human, as well as for their figural potential as symbolic markers of the contested border between authentic original and illegitimate copy. But the last part of the

A. Wetmore (*) University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC, Canada © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_8

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Reddit post, which focuses on Alex’s reputed final words, is also worth noting. They are poignant, reflecting a simple call to benevolence (‘be good’); they express emotion (‘I love you’); and they also convey a naïve, tragically innocent unawareness of fate (‘see you tomorrow’). In including these last words, the post unites Alex’s status as an intellectual curiosity with his sentimental potential as a dead pet. This Reddit post thus links two long-standing—but generally distinct— tendencies in Western culture, in which parrots and other talking birds are represented alternately as objects of knowledge or as objects of sympathy. In the classical era, as Bruce Thomas Boehrer explores in Parrot Culture (2004), parrots were studied by Aristotle in History of Animals and Pliny the Elder in Natural History as remarkable ‘human-tongued’ creatures,3 yet dead parrots also inspired elegies from Ovid and Statius.4 As this paper explores, in the long eighteenth century, these two pre-existing potentialities within Western representations of parrots—and other species of birds able to imitate human speech—begin to intersect and blur in new ways. In exploring these links, the discussion which follows is informed by the work of some key scholars from the field of animal studies, Boehrer, Laura Brown, Louise Robbins, and Keith Thomas, among others. However, in the background is also a set of assumptions informed by recent work in the similarly interdisciplinary field of print culture. With the help of print culture scholars and historians, the eighteenth century has been increasingly viewed as the site of a profound media revolution, in which the unprecedented expansion of the mechanical reproduction of texts and images destabilised the traditional order of things. As will be explored, eighteenth-­ century representations of talking birds might be productively positioned simultaneously within shifting discourses of the animal and within shifting perceptions of the spread of print technology and mechanical reproduction. Talking birds figure prominently in Enlightenment intellectual debates surrounding matter, souls, and reason, as scholars including Keith Thomas, Peter Walmsley, and Thomas Dipiero have explored.5 Descartes uses the parrot as evidence against animal intelligence, noting in Discours de la Méthode (1637) that ‘parrots can utter words just like we can, and yet they cannot speak as we do—that is, they cannot attest that they think what they say’.6 Working against this view is John Locke, who draws on anecdotal evidence from William Temple about an eloquent Brazilian parrot to suggest in Essay Concerning Human Understanding that animals may, in fact, be capable of rational thought.7 Julien Offrey de La Mettrie takes Locke’s materialist leanings provocatively further in L’Homme Machine

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(1748) and invokes birds who can ‘learn to talk and sing’ as evidence of the thin divide between supposedly rational humans, on the one hand, and animals and machines on the other.8 However, references to parrots and other talking birds proliferate as well in the literature and cultural material associated with the turn away from Enlightenment rationalism and toward sensibility and emotion in the literature and culture of the mid-1700s. Literary examples, some of which I will return to shortly, include Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768); Jean-­ Marie-­Jérôme Fleuriot, the Marquis de Langle’s A Sentimental Journey through Spain (originally published in 1784 as Voyage de Figaro en Espagne); Sarah Fielding’s Familiar Letters (1752), a sequel to her famous sentimental novel David Simple; and Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753).9 Talking birds even become stock elements in visual representations of the sentimental turn, as seen in Isaac Cruikshank’s Fellow Feeling from 1801, an attack on sensibility included here (Fig. 8.1). Cruikshank’s image recalls critiques of what Laura Brown terms the ‘frivolity of the upper-class female’ from earlier in the period, including Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1717) and Addison’s Spectator no. 343 (1712), both of which mock women’s purported fondness for ‘Parrots, Monkeys, and Lap Dogs’.10 The dialogue at the bottom of the print reads: ‘Good lack a day John, what are you doing? you have broke all the tea things. “I can’t help it Ma’am, that nasty cur of yours has bit my leg.” Bit your leg! has he? dear me; I hope the pretty little creature won’t be sick after it!!’ The humour derives from the absurd juxtaposition of the woman’s sympathetic concern for the health of her pets with her callous lack of concern for the well-­being of her human servant. Despite the satirical tone, the parrot’s presence in an attack on the concept of “fellow feeling,” a key term in the sentimental lexicon, points to the creature’s associations with the eighteenth-­century’s fashion for sensibility.

‘They Overthrew All My Systematic Reasonings’ The significance of these creatures to the discourse of sentimentalism can be hard to fully determine, however, as texts often appear inconsistent, wavering between conflicting representational paradigms of parrots, magpies, crows, and other loquacious avian creatures. A few quick examples help illustrate the situation. One of the most well-known references to a talking bird in the literature of sensibility occurs in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, when Parson Yorick

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Fig. 8.1  Isaac Cruikshank. Fellow Feeling. 1801. Print on wove paper, 23  ×  28  cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

encounters a starling ‘hung in a little cage’. As this caged starling repeats the phrase ‘I can’t get out—I can’t get out’, Yorick exclaims ‘I vow, I never had my affections more tenderly awakened’.11 This man of feeling’s ‘affections’ have never been ‘more tenderly awakened’, and yet he is also aware that the bird repeats the phrase automatically. The parson reflects, ‘Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings’.12 As Judith Frank has noted, ‘the mechanical or imitated emotion of the caged starling produces in Yorick an involuntary pity that weakens and unnerves him’.13 In reaction to the deep yet ‘involuntary’ impact the starling’s ‘mechanical’ notes have on his sensibilities, Yorick retreats to his room to contemplate the nature of imprisonment and slavery. His servant then purchases the bird and they bring it to England, where it becomes a

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touring curiosity. Eventually, Yorick reveals that he has incorporated the animal into his family crest and, in a characteristically playful manipulation of print convention, Sterne inserts an illustration.14 Yorick incorporates the bird into the symbolic representation of his name, linking the starling with the printed emblem of his own identity. Yet Yorick is identifying himself most intimately with a creature that inspires virtuous and sympathetic sentiments through actions that are not spontaneous or genuine but overtly imitative and mechanical.

‘Listen to My Parrot, and Thou Wilt Be Confounded’ The scene above was briefly discussed in a chapter from my recent book Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature to show how the figure of the ‘Man of Feeling’ merges traditional (and masculine) high neoclassical values of benevolent virtue with the traditional low (and often feminised) realm of embodied feeling. What was not discussed then, however, were further allusions to talking birds in works inspired by Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, including A Sentimental Journey through Spain (translated from French in 1786), by the Marquis de Langle. This work makes two prominent references to talking birds, in this case parrots rather than starlings. The first reference comes in an editor’s prefatory note to the reader, which describes the work in conflicting terms, as at once very much in line with Sterne’s text and, at the same time, entirely unique. The editor promises that ‘If you have found pleasure in the Sentimental Journey of Sterne, read this Traveller.—You will be highly entertained;—you will find mirth, vivacity and sentiment.’ Yet, at the same time, this sentimental journey is ‘the Marquis’s Journey, entirely his own journey, and a journey peculiar to himself’. For the Marquis, the editor adds, is ‘no parrot, either in morality or sentiment’.15 While the ‘parrot’ is invoked here negatively as a symbol for mindless copying, intriguingly this meaning is complicated when A Sentimental Journey through Spain eventually engages with parrots more directly, casting the creatures in a different light. A later scene opens by mentioning that Catherine de Medici ‘had a parrot that remembered every thing; could repeat, talk, and articulate, so like a human being, that people were sometimes deceived’.16 The author claims to have recently purchased a parrot that surpasses de Medici’s’ fabled pet. His new acquisition ‘remembers a multiplicity of things, an incredible number of stories and

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anecdotes’, including ‘some verses of Racine’. He is also an irrepressible copyist, who ‘never ceases talking; he repeats everything he knows’.17 In fact, the parrot’s impulse to repeat poses a possible threat to the Marquis. To the author’s initial amusement, the pet bird sits near an open window and spouts opinions on political issues, but soon the Marquis ‘trembles lest somebody should have overheard’ the creature’s controversial comments on Algiers. This remarkable animal raises questions for the author of A Sentimental Journey through Spain about whether parrots do in fact ‘parrot’ human speech or whether they are, instead, intelligent creatures. He concludes his anecdote by imploring ‘thou who has denied understanding to all other animals but man, come to my house, listen to my Parrot, and thou wilt be confounded’. Notably, as with Yorick’s speaking starling, this chatty bird has become a valued companion for the sentimental traveller. The Marquis asserts ‘He cost me eight guineas, is worth thirty, but I would not part with him for an hundred’.18 In both the ‘sentimental journeys’ of Sterne and the Marquis de Langle, talking birds are invoked as emblems of automatism, as figures for mindless imitation, literary hackwork and empty chatter. Sterne acknowledges that his bird’s notes are unconscious and mechanical; the Marquis de Langle is proclaimed no mere ‘parrot’ to distance himself from possible accusations of copying Sterne too closely, and therefore mechanically. On the other hand, talking birds are also represented in these same texts as capable of evoking genuine sympathy and affection in their protagonists, remarkably through the very same practice of compulsively copying words. These texts thus imply that talking birds are able to inspire powerful emotional bonds with humans, despite—or even as a consequence of—their mechanical nature.

Situating the Sentimental Talking Bird If we take these and other examples together, we find a consistent pattern: the texts and images associated with sentimentalism oscillate between invoking these creatures as symbols of (often illegitimate) automatism and as recipients of (often legitimate) sympathy. These two tropes of the talking bird are not just distinct but might be presumed incompatible: while the first depends on considering these animals primarily as akin to machines, the second depends on privileging their proximity (whether affective, intellectual or otherwise) to humans. The first trope can also be seen as backward-looking, traceable to earlier rational-dualist Cartesian

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views of animals as unconscious automatons—views still prevalent though not universally supported in mid-1700s medical, theological, and philosophical discourse—as well as to neoclassical anxieties about the impact of print. Meanwhile, the second trope, that of the talking bird as object of affection, appears to look forward to the Romantic turn, which saw a general widening of sympathies, the first efforts to legally recognise animal rights, and the rise of a cult of nature.19 And yet sentimental texts and images consistently adopt both approaches, representing animals as both machine-like and legitimately sympathetic, within the same work or sometimes even the same passage. Looking closely at figurations of the talking bird in sentimental art and literature, therefore, reveals an affective relationship to mechanical phenomena that cannot be fully accounted for either as a residue of neoclassical rationalism or as an anticipation of Romanticism. Moreover, if it was possible, following Descartes, to regard animals as unconscious machines, then parrots, starlings, magpies, and other talking birds were specifically copying machines. Like a printing press, these creatures had the capacity to automatically reproduce copies of human language. As a result, it is important to consider how the mimicking practices of talking birds resonate with broader anxieties in this era surrounding the spread and commercialisation of print technology. Indeed, Boehrer’s timeline for the cultural history of the parrot seems to invite a deeper consideration of the links between representations of talking birds and the history of the mechanical reproduction of texts and images. Boehrer notes that an ‘older, reverential view of the parrot’ from the Middle Ages ‘largely seems to disappear’ in the early modern period and instead these birds appear ‘again and again in satirical verse, prose, and drama’. Parrots become associated with ‘idiots rather than kings’ and with ‘the small and the base and the stupid’.20 He credits Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson with establishing this new satirical symbolic regime. In 1596, Nashe complains that a literary rival, Gabriel Harvey, ‘would do nothing but crake and parret in Print’.21 A few years later, Ben Jonson connects parrots to ‘uncomprehending mimicry’ and ‘plagiarism’ in an epigram produced between 1612 and 1613, titled ‘On Court-Parrat’.22 Around the turn of the seventeenth century, then, parrots were already aligned with illicit textual copying and even more specifically, as Nashe’s quote illustrates, with the medium of print. By the early eighteenth century, as scholars of print culture have noted, Britain and Europe were in the midst of an unprecedented print

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explosion,23 celebrated by some but also mercilessly attacked by neoclassical satires of the literary marketplace like Pope’s The Dunciad and Swift’s Tale of a Tub. At this juncture, fables and playfully fantastic narratives involving talking birds can often be read as parables for anxieties about copying practices getting out of control. To give one example, JeanBaptiste-Louis Gresset’s 1736 poem Ver-Vert, or the Nunnery Parrot (translated into English in 1759), tells the story of a male bird named ‘Ver-Vert’ (Green-­Green) who lives happily and piously in a French convent and learns to quote scripture from the nuns who care for him.24 As the narrator remarks, ‘Our Ver-Vert was a saint in grain … who never uttered a word prophane’.25 Unfortunately, when he is transported by ship to a different convent, he then learns the blasphemous language and manners of sailors, which he imitates in front of the nuns who receive him, just as he had once imitated pious words and virtuous habits. This leads to accusations that the parrot is possessed by the devil, and, eventually, to the parrot’s tragic death. Though the tone of the poem is generally lightly comical, it ends with a sentimental account of the nuns’ solemn reactions to Ver-Vert’s death. A portrait is commissioned, and mourners are described as painting the picture frame with tears.26 As Dipiero has noted in his recent article ‘Voltaire’s Parrot; or, How to Do Things With Birds’, Gresset’s poem ‘gently mocks religion’ by ‘confounding mindless chatter with fervent devotion’.27 Babbling or chatter migrates back and forth across species, troubling any clear sense of a distinction between authentic speech and unconscious, rote imitation. This practice is on peculiar display in the poem’s concluding act, where the dead parrot’s spirit and ‘caquet’ (or ‘prattle’), in Dipiero’s phrasing, infects the souls of the nuns and thus ‘inhabits people like a virus’.28 The tone wavers between satirical and sentimental as undisciplined copying leads to fatal consequences for Ver-Vert, whose spirit and voice nonetheless continue to haunt (and infect) the human inhabitants of his convent. Talking birds, and parrots in particular, could be linked either overtly or implicitly to broader cultural concerns surrounding the spread of mechanical copying in an era increasingly preoccupied with the disruptive expansion of print. However, during this same period, as scholars such as Robbins, Brown, Boehrer, and Thomas have noted, the ability to use language also helped these creatures to become more intimate with humans as cherished companions. As increasingly popular and affordable exotic pets imported from India and the New World to Britain and Europe, these animals participated in the rise of pet-­keeping, a development that Thomas

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aligns with the growth of compassion for non-human creatures in the latter eighteenth century.29 Focusing on exotic animals in France, Robbins observes in Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots a similar trend toward forming close emotional bonds with animals: in particular, she notes the frequent announcements placed in Affiches de Paris between 1745 and 1778 by distraught owners searching for their lost parrots.30 Talking birds thus occupy contested and conflicting symbolic terrain— as signs of animal intelligence and figures for mindless chatter, as human-­ like intimate companions and as threateningly inhuman automatons, as inspirers of sincere affection and instruments of satiric irony—yet droves of chatty parrots, speaking starlings, and other expressive avian creatures populate the cultural ecosystem of eighteenth-century sentimental writing. One explanation for the consistent presence of these birds is that, despite their ambiguous status, they can serve as suitable emblems of the sentimental aesthetic itself, which tends to filter the dissemination of sympathetic feeling through rhetorical and literary strategies that emphasise repetition and imitation. Consider how Barbara Benedict describes the stylistic characteristics of sentimental fiction in Framing Feeling: ‘Despite endorsing impulse, sentimental texts rely on stock phrases and images to elicit predictable responses, responses not fresh or spontaneous but conventional’.31 Janet Todd similarly remarks that ‘The arousal of pathos through conventional situations, stock familial characters and rhetorical devices is the mark of sentimental literature’.32 Even the sentimental moral philosophy of the time can be seen as deeply invested in the power of copying. Deidre Lynch notes that ‘what interests David Hume about sympathy is that it can guarantee social harmony by rendering people copies of one another’.33 The trope of the talking bird, then, appears part of a broader pattern in sentimental cultural discourse in which copying, imitation, repetition, and other ‘mechanical’ practices are understood to be included among the proper engines of benevolently sympathetic and affective exchange.

‘A Species Apart’: Parrots, Virtue, and Pen-Prattle in Sir Charles Grandison One text where copying, sentimentalism, and talking birds intersect in illustrative ways is Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Indeed, Richardson’s late attempt at an epistolary novel representing a ‘Man of

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TRUE HONOUR’ is a veritable aviary of bird allusions.34 When Harriet Byron is rescued by Sir Charles Grandison, Grandison draws a classical analogy, saying she was like the ‘frighted bird’ described by Pliny the Elder, who, ‘pursued by a hawk, flew for protection into the bosom of a man passing by’.35 Sir Charles himself is described by Harriet as a ‘black swan’ for his rare moral qualities.36 Whenever conversations begin to gravitate toward the differences between men and women, birds offer the most common point of comparison. Mr. Walden asks Byron if she knows of any women with typically male education in Latin and Greek, and Harriet responds that one unhappy learned woman finds herself ‘so much an owl among birds, that she wants of all things to be thought to have unlearned them’.37 When the subject of sexual difference returns, Sir Charles Grandison admits that women and men are too often viewed as a ‘species apart’ but nevertheless asserts that there are some differences, drawing on analogies with nature by asking, ‘Why gave [Nature] a distinction, both in qualities and plumage, to the different sexes of the feathered race?’38 Parrots are alluded to most frequently. On the margins of the Grandison social circle, Aunt Nell owns one, as does Lady Finlay. They are most notably among the favoured companions of Sir Charles’s sister, Charlotte. In an early reference to this affinity, Harriet Byron, newly acquainted with the Grandison family, is invited to see a collection of Lord G’s insects, and Charlotte expresses disinterest in joining them. Sir Charles explains that ‘Charlotte thinks nothing less than men and women worthy of her notice, her parrot and squirrel, the one for its prattle, the other for its vivacity, excepted’.39 True to the model of a modern urban lady of quality, Charlotte is described by her brother as concerned with the human, social realm rather than the scientific (and conventionally male) study of insects and natural knowledge. The only exceptions are her fashionable pets—a squirrel and a parrot—but even these only seem to interest her because of their resemblance to recognisably human (and stereotypically feminine) qualities: ‘prattle’ and ‘vivacity’. In a later volume, Charlotte begins to soften to her new husband (Lord G.) when, after a series of confrontations, he procures her a parrot and a parakeet as a gift. She exclaims in a letter to Harriet, The Parrot is the finest talker! He had great difficulty, he said, in getting them. He had observed, that I was much taken with Lady Finlay’s Parrot.

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Lady Finlay had a Marmouset too. I wonder the poor man did not bring me a Monkey.40

A key word to note among these passages is ‘prattle’. In the same letter in which Charlotte recounts her husband’s gift of a bouquet of pet birds, she also remarks ‘and what is the design of my pen-prattle, but to make my sweet Harriet smile?’41 Like Ver-Vert’s craquet among the nuns, ‘prattle’ migrates from talking birds to the women who own and care for them. It is tempting, at first, to interpret the role of parrots here as part of yet another satire of the ‘frivolity of the upper-class female’, but this reading is complicated by a variety of factors. First, Charlotte is no empty-headed, vacuous lady of fashion. Charlotte Grandison energetically and vociferously resists the gender constraints of her time, even when they are defended by her revered brother. Sir Charles may concede that women are too often considered a ‘species apart’ from men, but he also reinforces that their souls, while equal, are, as a general rule, housed in ‘different machines’ (i.e. differently constructed physical bodies) suited to different spheres.42 Charlotte unhappily interprets this to mean that women are merely to be thought of as domesticated birds: ‘we are only, after all, to be allowed, as far as I can find, in this temporary state, like tame doves, to go about the house, and so forth’.43 As Betty Schellenberg remarks, passages like these indicate that ‘the boundedness and domesticity which reflects woman’s very essence are paradoxically what [Charlotte’s] wandering instinct most resists’.44 While her affection for Lord G. grows after he buys her a parrot as a gesture of reconciliation, inspiring Charlotte to candidly admit to Harriet that ‘I love the man better every day than the former’,45 her overall resistance to gender conventions and marital subservience nevertheless stands in stark contrast to Sir Charles Grandison’s blandly heteronormative masculinity, and resists easy characterisation as superficial or frivolous. Charlotte is also not alone in the novel in using the term ‘prattle’ to describe her writing. In fact, she seems to have been inspired by Harriet Byron, Sir Charles Grandison’s love interest, and a moral exemplar in her own right. Charlotte playfully alludes to Harriet’s influence by stating, ‘I believe I shall become as arrant a scribbler as Somebody else. I begin to like writing.’46 And Harriet Byron describes her own writing as ‘prattle’ when, in typical Richardsonian fashion, pages of a letter go missing in a garden and find their way into Sir Charles Grandison’s hands. An anguished Byron exclaims: ‘All my own heart is laid open too!—Such prattling

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also!’47 When the charge of parrot-like ‘prattling’ extends to the otherwise admirable and virtuous Harriet Byron, or when we consider how prone in general are Richardson’s sentimental female narrators to lengthy epistles, it is not easy to characterise the reference as pure satire or critique. Parrots and prattling are still invoked in ways aligned with automatism, but they also appear within scenes that align talking birds with exemplars of moral virtue and with expressions of heartfelt sensibility. The satirical valence of parrots in the novel is further complicated when we consider Richardson’s framing of his main protagonist, the titular Sir Charles Grandison. Sir Charles is explicitly cast as an artificial model to be copied, however imperfectly, by the novel’s readers. As Richardson asserts in his concluding note, Grandison is ‘in the general tenor of his principles and conduct … proposed for an Example’. So perfect and careful is he in his manner that he lacks the impulsive volatility of other male protagonists in the sentimental tradition. Yet, as Richardson himself remarks, Sir Charles Grandison is not meant to be a psychologically plausible character, but a target for virtue-driven emulation: ‘No man can write after too perfect and good a copy; and tho’ he can never reach the perfection of it, yet he is like to learn more, than by one less perfect’. Citing a sermon from Bishop Tillotson, Richardson concludes, ‘And, tho’ he can never hope to equal the Examples before him, yet he will endeavour to come as near it as he can’.48 Even as the novel pulls from a satirical legacy of comparing women to talking birds, such moments in the text are counterbalanced by the fact that the novel’s most virtuous characters are celebrated and rewarded for their ‘prattle’, and that the novel is designed to inspire its readers to essentially parrot its main character, to wilfully render themselves mere imperfect copies of his benevolent literary original. As seen through the filter of its representations of birds, the spread of copying is not a source of anxiety for Richardson’s sentimental novel. By contrast, parroting and mechanical copying are built right into the text’s moralaesthetic design. Contrary to the defensive words of the editor in A Sentimental Journey through Spain, Richardson appears to welcome the possibility that his characters and readers become parrots of morality and sentiment.

Going Viral in Eighteenth-Century Print Media This final section will conclude by returning to a consideration of the visual representations of talking birds, and specifically to two prints which can be found in the Lewis Walpole Library’s admirable collection of

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satirical images, and which exhibit some striking parallels. Both prints in question are anonymous, both expose modern vices, and both include a talking parrot in the top-right corner of the image uttering the exact same phrase; they are titled, respectively, The Gouty Husband and His Young Wife from 1760 (see Fig.  8.2) and High Life at Noon from 1769 (see Fig. 8.3). Though these images are unquestionably satirical in tone, they were both produced at the height of the cult of feeling, and each can be linked in different ways to the sentimental turn. The first print, for instance, satirises one of the many ailments, gout, aligned with a predisposition to nervous sensibility. In Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker the curmudgeonly sentimental Matthew Bramble notably suffers from gout, linked to his mercurial temper and delicate nerves. The second print, meanwhile, alludes once again to Laurence Sterne, a key author in the sentimental tradition. The monkey in the foreground is reading a ‘dissertation’ by Tristram Shandy ‘on winding up the clock’, a not-so-veiled reference to the opening lines of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in which the eponymous narrator’s own conception occurs on the same day that his father, Walter, winds up the clocks in the house, linking sexual reproduction and

Fig. 8.2  The Gouty Husband and His Young Wife. 1760. Etching on laid paper, 13  ×  21  cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

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Fig. 8.3  High Life at Noon. 1769. Etching with engraving, 23 × 33 cm. (Source: Image courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

clockwork mechanics. Not only is this third instance a reference to talking birds that can be traced back to Sterne, it also connects talking birds to a slightly different understanding of the phrase ‘mechanical reproduction’. Remarkably, the parrot in High Life at Noon is repeating verbatim the words of the parrot from The Gouty Husband and His Young Wife, which is ‘Caesar and Pompey were both of them Horned’. The pairing of prints taken together thus achieve a second order of parroting: a parrot is parroting another parrot. The likely inspiration for the repeated phrase, as it turns out, derives from a popular comic folk song titled ‘Cuckoldom’.49 What follows is a representative verse: He that a cuckold is, let it not grieve him; For in his wants there is one to relieve him: He may sleep quietly when his wife’s waking. And he may be free from care, void of pains-taking: And his condition is not to be scorn’d, Caesar and Pompey were both of them horn’d.

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Other verses in this song focus on men from different walks of life (lawyers, politicians, merchants), but all end with the same final line. The message of the song can be loosely translated as: do not mock cuckolds, since many good and prominent men have had unfaithful wives. The message travels from oral folk culture into popular print culture through the reiteration of one parrot and then, nine years later, another. Despite rehearsing prefabricated words, though, these printed parrots, like the talking birds of sentimental fiction of the same era, are not exclusively emblems of automatism. They also carry authority, standing above the humans in the images physically, but also rhetorically, as knowing commenters on the scenes depicted. Like the animal protagonists of popular it-narratives of the era, another literary genre with links to sentimentalism (as Mark Blackwell has shown),50 these pets have privileged perspectives from which to critique modern human society. The specific phrase the parrots repeat (‘Caesar and Pompey were both of them Horned’) is also significant, as it addresses the shame associated with cuckoldom by invoking previous iterations of the same experience, using the power of copies, as it were, to displace feelings of scorn with feelings of pity and fellow feeling. Thomas Dipiero, as we have seen, has recently alluded to the ‘viral’ potential of eighteenth-century parrots in his analysis of Ver-Vert. Taking that as inspiration, could we venture to say that these printed parrots, and talking birds more broadly, went viral in the popular media (novels, satirical prints, ballad collections) of the age of sensibility? Parrots, starlings, and other talking birds populate the cultural terrain of eighteenth-century sentimentalism for a number of intersecting reasons. For one, before the sentimental turn, they already served a purpose in intellectual debates as ‘good to think with’ (in Levi-Strauss’s oft-­repeated phrase among animal studies scholars) about language, reason, and the borders of the human. They had also been subject to a forced migration in recent decades into the territory of satire from their previously exalted perches as semi-mystic, exotic objects of medieval reverence. Not coincidentally, this fall from iconic grace occurs at the same time print is taking wing throughout England and Europe. As concerns about the impact of print become more widespread, ‘parroting’ becomes tied more closely to the mindless, automatic, derivative copying of hacks and fools. While the satirical trope of the talking bird as mechanical copyist, resembling both an unchecked printing press and a plagiarizing hack, continues to be invoked in

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literature and art linked to the sentimental turn, we also see a rise in references to the legitimate compassion these creatures are capable of inspiring in their human companions. These two visions of the talking bird may seem naturally opposed, but in sentimental discourse they are often blended or united in the same work, suggesting a distinct understanding of the relations between affect and artifice, mechanical and sentimental, automatic repetition and authentic feeling. In sentimental discourse, one need not believe that animals are more than mere machines to feel deeply about them or close affinity to them. There are a variety of ways in which this is significant beyond its uncanny posthumanism: for example, we can better understand the characteristic style of sentimental literature, which places a high value on stock scenes, character archetypes, moral emulation, and emotional and linguistic clichés. Sentimental art embraces the power of parroting to spread benevolent feeling through mechanical reproduction, and perhaps this is why allusions to parrots and talking birds become themselves one of the recurring stock elements of the culture of sensibility.

Notes 1. ‘TIL’ is an abbreviation of ‘Today I Learned,’ a popular genre of Reddit post in which users share recently acquired information. 2. David Chandler, ‘Farewell to a Famous Parrot,’ Nature, September 11, 2007, https://doi.org/10.1038/news070910-4, http://www.nature. com/news/2007/070910/full/news070910-4.html; Irene Pepperberg, ‘In Search of King Solomon’s Ring: Cognitive and Communicative Studies of Grey Parrots (Psittacus Erithacus),’ Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, 59, no. 1–2 (2002), 64. 3. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, Parrot Culture: Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 4–5. 4. Ibid., 16–17. 5. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); Peter Walmsley, ‘Prince Maurice’s Rational Parrot: Civil Discourse in Locke’s Essay,’ Eighteenth-­ Century Studies, 28, no. 4 (1995): 413–25, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2739467; Thomas Dipiero, ‘Voltaire’s Parrot; or, How to Do Things with Birds,’ Modern Language Quarterly, 70, no. 3 (2009): 341–62, https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-2009-003. 6. Translation from Dipiero, ‘Voltaire’s Parrot,’ 342.

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7. Walmsley notes that ‘Locke’s Essay is not an unlikely habitat for a talking parrot’ both because he follows the model of ‘virtuosi’ of his period by populating his learned discourse with new exotic creatures from the ‘frontiers of empire’ and because he follows his friend and mentor, the anatomist Thomas Willis, in rejecting Descartes’s categorisation of animals as ‘bare Machins’ (418). 8. Julien Offray de la Mettrie and Ann Thomson, Machine Man and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11. 9. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. Ian Hack (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Marquis de Langle, A Sentimental Journey through Spain (London, 1786); Sarah Fielding, Familiar Letters Between the Principal Characters in David Simple, and Some Others (London, 1752); Samuel Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison, ed. Jocelyn Harris (London: Oxford University Press, 1972). 10. Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 223. 11. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 71. 12. Ibid., 72, emphasis added. 13. Frank, Judith. Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century Satiric Fiction and the Poor (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), 78. 14. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 75. 15. de Langle, Sentimental Journey through Spain, A2r, iv. 16. Ibid., 122. 17. Ibid., 124. 18. Ibid., 123–24. 19. As Christine Kenyon-Jones summarises in Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-period Writing (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), the ‘new emphasis on nature’ of the Romantic era was in part a reaction against ‘the industrialization of large areas of the countryside’ which ‘began to be countered by strong statements by poets in particular about the importance of the natural world’ (2). These statements were part of a broader cultural shift that allowed for more widespread and serious consideration of the rights of animals. 20. Boehrer, Parrot Culture, 62. 21. Ibid., 61. 22. Ibid., 68. 23. A number of scholars have examined the print explosion of the period, but two helpful recent examples are Christopher Flint, The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Richard Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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24. Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gresset, Ver-Vert, or The Nunnery Parrot (London, 1759). 25. Gresset, Ver-Vert, 2:16–18. 26. Ibid., 4:245. 27. Dipiero, ‘Voltaire’s Parrot,’ 350. 28. Ibid., 350. 29. Ibid., 110. 30. Louise Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 123. 31. Barbara Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994), 13. 32. Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 2. 33. Deidre Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 95. 34. Richardson, Grandison, 1:4. 35. Ibid., 1:141. 36. Ibid., 2:227. 37. Ibid., 1:49. 38. Ibid., 2:247. 39. Ibid., 2:237. 40. Ibid., 5:553. 41. Ibid., 5:550. 42. Ibid., 6:250. 43. Ibid., 6:251. 44. Betty A.  Schellenberg, ‘Using “Femalities” to ‘Make Fine Men’: Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and the Feminization of Narrative,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 34, no. 3 (1994), 602. 45. Richardson, Grandison, 5:554. 46. Ibid., 5:433. 47. Ibid., 1:105. 48. Ibid., 7:466. 49. ‘Cuckoldom’ in The Encyclopedia of Comic Songs (London, 1820), 190; also included as ‘Song no. 183’ in The Merry Man’s Companion, and Evenings Agreeable Entertainer (London, 1750), 157. 50. Mark Blackwell, ‘Hackwork: It-Narratives and Iteration’ in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 187–217.

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Bibliography Boehrer, Bruce Thomas. Parrot Culture: Our 2,500-Year-Long Fascination with the World’s Most Talkative Bird. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Benedict, Barbara. Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800. New York: AMS Press, 1994. Blackwell, Mark. ‘Hackwork: It-Narratives and Iteration.’ In The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007, 187–217. Brown, Laura. Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Chandler, David. ‘Farewell to a Famous Parrot.’ Nature, September 11, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1038/news070910-4. Online at http://www.nature. com/news/2007/070910/full/news070910-4.html. ‘Cuckoldom.’ In The Encyclopedia of Comic Songs. London, 1820. de Langle, Marquis. A Sentimental Journey through Spain. London, 1786. Dipiero, Thomas. ‘Voltaire’s Parrot; or, How to Do Things with Birds.’ Modern Language Quarterly, 70, no. 3 (2009): 341–62, https://doi. org/10.1215/00267929-2009-003. Fielding, Sarah. Familiar Letters Between the Principal Characters in David Simple, and Some Others. London, 1752. Flint, Christopher. The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Frank, Judith. Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century Satiric Fiction and the Poor. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Gresset, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine. Ver-Vert, or The Nunnery Parrot. London, 1756. Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-period Writing. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001. la Mettrie, Julien Offray de, and Ann Thomson. Machine Man and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lynch, Deidre. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pepperberg, Irene. ‘In Search of King Solomon’s Ring: Cognitive and Communicative Studies of Grey Parrots ( Psittacus Erithacus).’ Brain, Behavior, and Evolution 59, no. 1–2 (2002): 54–67. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Sir Charles Grandison. ed. Jocelyn Harris. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Robbins, Louise. Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

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Schellenberg, Betty A. ‘Using “Femalities” to “Make Fine Men”: Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and the Feminization of Narrative.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34, no. 3 (1994), 599–616. Sher, Richard. The Enlightenment and the Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ‘Song no. 183’. In The Merry Man’s Companion, and Evenings Agreeable Entertainer. London, 1750. Sterne, Laurence. A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. ed. Ian Hack. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Todd, Janet. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen, 1986. Walmsley, Peter. ‘Prince Maurice’s Rational Parrot: Civil Discourse in Locke’s Essay’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 4 (1995): 413–25.

CHAPTER 9

Placing Birds in Place: Reading Habitat in Beilby’s and Bewick’s History of British Birds Anne Milne

The focus in readings of Thomas Bewick’s work generally centres on his masterful skill and accuracy as a wood engraver and observer of animals and birds. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries look at the History of British Birds from a perspective elevated by art critics in the nineteenth century who promoted (and not without justification) the prowess and beauty of Bewick’s wood engravings as art.1 Considered the pioneer and master of his specialised branch of printmaking, Bewick and all of his output as a wood engraver in Newcastle upon Tyne between 1767 and 1828 have become the ‘property’ of art history and the history of printmaking. But what this art historical contextualisation neglects is Bewick’s and his business partner Ralph Beilby’s shared engagement with the commerce of nature’s classification: their History of British Birds is specifically situated in the popular and relatively new natural history market. In his Memoir of

A. Milne (*) Department of English, University of Toronto Scarborough, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_9

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Thomas Bewick, Bewick lists ‘“Brookes and Miller’s Natural History” and “Dr. Smellie’s Abridgement of Buffon” … “Albin’s History of Birds”, Belon’s very old book, Willoughby and Ray, &c.,’ as well as ‘Gesner’s Natural History’, Buffon’s ‘Planche Enluminée’, ‘Edward’s Natural History’, ‘White’s History of Selborne’, and Col. George Montagu’s ‘Ornithological Dictionary’ as among his influences. ‘With some of these’, Bewick reports: I was in raptures. Willoughby and Ray struck me as having led the way to truth, and to British Ornithology. … Pennant, however, opened out the largest field of information, and on his works I bestowed the most attention. Latham seems to have wound up the whole, and I have often lamented that it was not—by being embellished with correct figures—made a great national work, like the Count de Buffon’s.2

Since Bewick’s and Beilby’s business is in reproduction, Bewick’s renderings of local Northumberland and imagined British nature-cultures come to materially illustrate the nation (and ultimately its past) through repetition and replication. For it is possible to suggest that this impulse to represent nature extends to the treatment of Bewick himself. Peter Quinn elaborates that the colonisation of Bewick in the nineteenth century generates a limited view of Bewick as Northumberland’s ‘strongest pine’, as ‘the [Robert] Burns of Art’, as a ‘son of Nature’, and as nature itself.3 In one example of this, Bewick’s friend, John Dovaston’s 1830 tribute describes his mind as Like the sun in his annual and diurnal rounds, … cunningly catching unthought of objects, and piercing nooks and corners unnoticed; … thus not only calling the eye to what it would otherwise miss, but shedding on the most common objects, for the time, a soothing and a celestial gleam.4

Quinn goes further to suggest that the characterisation of Bewick as a natural genius not only isolates him but ‘rob[s] regional culture of any credit as a force in the shaping of his vision’.5 As an anomaly, Bewick can be palatably consumed as a kind of ‘noble savage’ engendered out of a ‘wild, savage and largely rural land’.6 Furthermore, Quinn asserts that Bewick’s regional, labouring-class politics, expressed most strongly in the engraved tail-pieces that ornament white spaces throughout both volumes of the History of British Birds and comprise some of his most famous and

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beloved engravings, are used by Victorian critics such as Julia Boyd to support a ‘popular eugenics’, where Bewick’s work becomes the naïve embodiment of a ‘strong moral purpose’ and Bewick himself is turned into a rough, Northern, yeoman archetype.7 Quinn’s critique is certainly borne out by Adrian Searle’s 2009 Guardian tribute to Bewick’s tail-­ pieces which simultaneously valorises and diminishes them (and those whose lives they depict) as ‘cheeky’ ‘snatches of folk song’ from a region ‘Populated by a cast of fools and drunks, fishers and hunters … full of disconcerting, captivating incident’.8 Quinn’s assessment demands new readings of Bewick’s work. Here I reconsider Bewick’s works as cohesive productions uniting text and image, foreground and background, bird and habitat. To separate Bewick’s artwork from its textual and printed context is to forget that one of the things wood engraving as a print technique allowed printers to do at this time was to set type and illustration together on the same plate because the wood could be cut to the same height as the type. This change revolutionised graphic design and book publishing by allowing more illustrations to be used and therefore enabling a closer relationship between text and image. This also means that the History of British Birds warrants consideration as a literary text. Indeed, once his partnership with Ralph Beilby was dissolved in 1798, Bewick was obliged ‘from necessity, not choice, to commence author’.9 What were his authorial inclinations? I also want to celebrate the pervasive view of Bewick’s natural talent as extraordinary, his working-class status as relevant and revelatory, rather than contain his contribution to ‘snatches of folk song’. John Dovaston’s description of Bewick as ‘like the sun’ recognises the creaturely in Bewick as does Nigel Tattersfield when he connects Bewick’s rootedness in ‘the soil of the Tyne Valley’ to ‘the development of [his] talent as a wood engraver’. Tattersfield goes on to say that ‘the longer Bewick stayed put the deeper roots penetrated and the more sustenance—and inspiration— they derived from their surroundings’.10 In his Memoir, Bewick also reflects on his own creaturely nature in nature through detailed descriptions of his always fully embodied boyhood antics and of his ‘wild goose chase’ walking adventure in the Scottish Highlands where he ‘bent [his] way, in many a zig-zag direction’, as well as his description of the effects on his body of his self-imposed regimen of temperance and outdoor exercise often under punishing weather conditions and his later initiation into drinking alcohol.11 In his Memoir, Bewick describes his ‘propensity for drawing’ as ‘rooted’, so rooted that ‘nothing could deter me from

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persevering in it’.12 He also connects drawing to a growing intellectual engagement with ‘the history and character of the domestic animals, but also with those that roamed at large’ developed experientially through ‘the rude and lengthened narratives’ of the ‘Nimrods of that day’.13 Bewick’s immersion in these experiential myriad forms of creatureliness can be explored fulsomely as ‘something not to be overcome but rather given voice to’.14 Reading Bewick’s creatureliness in the context of his own visual and literary renderings of birds draws greater attention to their creatureliness as well. His anxiety about representation is indicative of a deeply experienced, place-based ethics of care. In this chapter, I look specifically at habitats as a way into both discussions: of Bewick as artist and writer and of creatureliness (both in the artist and in the birds depicted). Habitat matters to animal studies precisely because it is often ignored in favour of a ‘purer’ focus on the representation of or question of the animals. This compartmentalisation neglects not just the bioregion or physical environment that nurtures, supports, and provides context for the animal, it ignores the growing evidence that animals possess and participate in geographical and species-specific material cultures.15 Habitat and being cannot be easily disentangled. To discuss habitat, I examine the visual, material, and textual contexts for several of Bewick’s bird portraits in the History of British Birds, the two-volume publication that Bewick produced in collaboration with Ralph Beilby, who wrote the text for Volume I and directed and published the initial part of the project. Bewick had a long association with Beilby. He had been apprenticed as an engraver to Beilby at the age of fourteen in 1767, and, in 1777, he and Beilby became business partners. The History of British Birds started out as a more ambitious project intended to expand and supplement Beilby’s and Bewick’s General History of the Quadrupeds, which they had published to great acclaim in 1790. By this time, both partners were aware that any publication illustrated by Bewick could be marketed and sold without difficulty. But due to the dissolution of their partnership in January 1798, the History of British Birds ended up as a less ambitious two-volume publication. Volume I, subtitled History and Description of Land Birds, was published in 1797, and Volume II, History and Description of Water Birds, was published in 1804.16 Placing the two volumes of the History of British Birds in a conceptual framework focused on habitat shows a movement from Volume I’s incremental inclusion of habitat to a much fuller and integrated inclusion in the Bewick-directed

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Volume II, which promotes habitat as a very specific local and integrated nature-culture and muddies animal-human distinctions. Volume I begins with an emphasis on the bird itself. Initially, habitat is absent but as the volume progresses so does the incursion of habitat on the bird plates. While this speaks to workflow patterns in the Beilby and Bewick workshop, Bewick’s experiential place-based knowledge drives such an integration. In the History of British Birds, local, national, international, and ornithological issues all compete actively for the readers’ attention. The dominant position of Northumberland suggests an immediacy of place and attentiveness to fundamental bioregional principles such as dwelling, sustainability, and reinhabitation, principles that become increasingly displaced by modern discourses of wildlife conservation and animal care in the nineteenth century.17 Bewick and Beilby are part of this change that Peter Quinn notes includes a ‘new normal’ of ‘incorporat[ing] industry into an aesthetic of the local’.18 The cuts Bewick made for the frontispieces of both volumes reflect this. He includes both industrial and military iconography. The History of British Birds also upends conventional representations of birds against plain white backgrounds and is instructive in reminding us of the integral place of habitat in discourses of nature. The printed text serves to reproduce, generate, and engage in multilayered discourses of wildlife habitats dependent upon a community of respected natural historians and amateurs Bewick knew who shared his lived experience in the outdoors (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2). The interrelatedness of knowledge extends to the textual relationship between wood engraving and type in The History of British Birds to construct an additional habitat that merits an integrated critical approach. Whereas seminal and influential works such as John Latham’s 1781 A General Synopsis of Birds, Volume I, include full-page hand-coloured plates, these plates are inserted among a larger number of pages devoted to taxonomic summary descriptions for the entire genus. The entry for the grackle, for example, includes fourteen pages of text outlining eleven named species, but only one colour plate (Plate XVIII) inserted facing page 460, depicts the ‘Boat-Tailed Grakle’ (Gracula barita, now Quiscalus major), highlighting its ‘singularity’ among birds, which Latham has ‘observed in no other, which is, the folding up of the tail feathers, totally different than birds in general’.19 This editorial emphasis on the ‘singular’ bird is in direct contrast with Beilby’s and Bewick’s focus on British birds and a national kind of belonging. In the Latham (and other) texts, the limitations of colour-illustration insertions ‘colours’ the editorial process

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Fig. 9.1  Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 1 of the History of British Birds. 1797. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

to the exclusion of the ‘ordinary’ and the lived experience of birds in place or places, even as the questions always linger as to whether migratory birds are ever really British, who claims this, and how such claims are made. Indeed, while wood engraving offers the flexibility through illustrated works pairing text and art, wood engraving’s reliance on imported natural materials, especially Turkish boxwood, complicates the text’s associations

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Fig. 9.2  Thomas Bewick. Frontispiece to volume 2 of the History of British Birds. 1804. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

with that natural world as well as with claims to local culture and nationhood. Expanding critique to include considerations of material nature in representations of nature is essential because Bewick’s work is so influential and implicated in shaping, packaging, and even creating epistemologies of nature. Such epistemologies contribute to constructions of Britishness in the context of rapid urbanisation at the end of the eighteenth century, in the construction of Britishness in the context of European conflicts, in the context of the changing aesthetics of illustrated

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natural histories as national histories, and extends to a consideration of what ‘crimes against habitat’ are incurred through the colonisation of foreign habitats and the importation of raw materials from elsewhere. On top of this, illustrating bird books with ‘local’ habitats dismisses migratory behaviours that place birds elsewhere in the world, in other locals’ locales. The text of the History of British Birds refers to migration; the engravings do not. This image-text split raises questions of how local landscapes visually and textually propagate. Connected to this is the question of how Beilby and Bewick contribute to a more generalised imaginary geography of Britain that incorporates and shapes what might be called ‘British values’ using ‘British birds’. Since Bewick’s visual renderings of local landscapes enter directly into the process of representing Britain-as-place, his representative vision of birds and bird habitats become a discursive standard. William Wordsworth captures this aesthetic turn from natural to national in his apostrophe to Bewick in ‘The Two Thieves; Or, The Last Stage of Avarice’, from Volume II of the 1800 Lyrical Ballads. For Wordsworth, Bewick possesses not only ‘genius’ but, as one who learned his skill ‘on the banks of the Tyne’ (2), he is also a genius loci. Wordsworth asserts that Bewick’s vernacular of wood engraving is a ‘feast’ one could hope to see on the walls of ‘every ale-house’ (8) to aesthetically nourish us and supplant the ‘troublesome calls’ of ‘hunger and thirst’ (7). Claiming in an 1800 variant of the poem that wood engraving surpasses even oil painting’s representational capacity, that Bewick used ‘rude tools with more fortunate toil / Than Reynolds e’er brought to his canvas and his oil’ (3–4) and underlining in the published version of the poem that if ‘the genius of Bewick were mine… I’d take my last leave both of verse and of prose’ (1–4), Wordsworth asserts that Bewick’s poetry and ‘magical hand’ (5) has viscerally engendered the very aesthetic for Britain Wordsworth himself aspires to, albeit in the specific material contexts of ‘the boxwood and the graver’… ‘on the banks of the Tyne’ (1).20 Bewick’s site-specific nature-cultures expertly, lovingly observed and reproduced are internalised as quintessentially British. This is a canonisation. Wordsworth’s assessment valorises the rustic and the handmade as a political aesthetic, drawing attention to the printed book’s means of production as ‘against the grain’, where wood engraving’s revolutionary approach to carving across the endgrain end of a piece of hardwood using metal-engraver’s tools both prevents splintering and enables carving from any direction for increased flexibility, detail, and workflow. Especially

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through the use of white-line techniques, a skilled wood engraver like Bewick could bring an attention to detail that had previously been open only to the metal and copper plate engraver. Both volumes of the History of British Birds take advantage of this potential and are also a testament to Bewick’s and his assistants’ collective stamina (since as journeymen they were obviously engaged with other projects in the shop simultaneously). Habitat and creatureliness are also worth considering in the context of Bewick’s preliminary sketches and pre-production process for the project. In the lead up, Bewick was invited by Marmaduke Tunstall’s heir, Francis Sheldon, to come to Wycliffe for several months and sketch his private collection of over 800 stuffed birds from around the world. Bewick walked the 33 miles to Wycliffe from Newcastle in July 1791. In his Memoir, he complains that the trip is ultimately unsatisfactory because there is a: Very great difference between preserved specimens and those from Nature; no regard having been paid, at that time, to fix the former in their proper attitudes nor to place the different series of the feathers so as to fall properly upon each other. It has always given me a great deal of trouble to get at the markings of the dishevelled plumage; and, when done with every pains, I never felt satisfied with them.21

Since he preferred not to etch from the Wycliffe sketches, he and Beilby focused on British birds drawn from life or from freshly killed specimens, which a plethora of local volunteers and friends ‘from various parts of the Kingdom’ were more than willing to supply to him.22 Bewick’s disappointment with the stuffed specimens underlines his integrity to representation, to the need for accuracy in natural history, to his own place in the emerging canon of natural histories, and to the birds themselves.23 This reveals an integral experiential commitment to place that informs Bewick’s work. Bewick’s aesthetic setback at Wycliffe is also significant in the context of the reconfiguration of his and Beilby’s business. Increasing tensions ultimately led to the dissolution of their partnership in January 1798. This was just after the publication of the first volume. The second volume, under Bewick’s editorial and artistic eye, History and Description of Water Birds, followed in 1804.24 The delay in publication separates the two volumes of the History of British Birds along the fault lines of Beilby’s and Bewick’s business partnership, and Volume Two becomes much more localised as Bewick’s own production.

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In the pages devoted to the golden eagle, the first bird featured in the History of British Birds, Beilby and Bewick structurally mimic earlier books such as Eleazar Albin’s 1731 A Natural History of Birds and Thomas Pennant’s 1766–1768 British Zoology. Bewick’s ‘Golden Eagle’ (Falco chrysætos) engraving is featured without any background or foreground. The only evidence of habitat is a branch used to display the bird’s feet. The textual description sketchily references habitat and two lines of text on the illustrated page asserting that this bird ‘Is the largest of the genus’ and continuing with a measured assessment of the golden eagle’s size ‘from gestures to the bird’s migratory patterns and geographical diversity: the golden eagle ‘abounds most in the warmer regions’, ‘is known to breed in the mountainous parts of Ireland’, and ‘formerly had its aery on the highest and steepest part of Cheviot’. Graphically, the bird takes up most of the space on the page with only two lines of text on the illustrated page asserting that this bird ‘Is the largest of the genus’ and continuing with a measured assessment of the Golden Eagle’s size ‘from the point of the bill to the extremity of the toes’. The lack of habitat diminishes the bird’s positive creatureliness by decontextualizing the eagle and pulling it firmly into the realms of representation, iconography, and symbol (Fig. 9.3). By placing the bird in an environment shared by humans and nature, Bewick’s engraving for ‘The Yellow Wagtail’ (Motacilla flava) emphasises his interest in ‘birds in relation to men’,25 where the bird is seen wedged between descriptions of the previous entry for ‘The Grey Wagtail’ (Motacilla boarula) and its own description. This engraving includes a fully integrated and cultivated nature-culture, moving from a singular foreground of the bird in profile on a large rock, to the river, hills, fields, and even a rendering of tiny human figures at the plow placed and seen directly in the centre background of the engraving over the bird’s body. Indeed, the written text below the engraving seems subsumed by the cohesive visual description. It begins as a list fragmented by punctuation and then extended into fuller description: ‘Length, six inches and a half: Bill black; eyes hazel; the head and all the upper parts of the body are an olive green, palest on the rump’.26 The engraving for ‘The Redstart’ (Motacilla phœnicurus) further emphasises the bird-human interface, emphasising the Redstart’s predilection for nesting in urban spaces and in old buildings, ‘always chusing the most difficult and inaccessible places for its residence’ (Figs. 9.4 and 9.5).27 The text and the authority of the text changes character from Volume I to Volume II. Volume I is clearly presented as natural history where adherence to taxonomy provides the primary framework for organizing and cataloguing birds. This is despite the fact that Bewick and Beilby were not

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Fig. 9.3  Thomas Bewick. ‘The Golden Eagle’. From History of British Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

scientists and branded themselves as part of the pictorial-textual natural history community of Pennant, White, and the Comte de Buffon. Asserting the non-scientific in their prefatory remarks, Beilby and Bewick praise Pennant’s ‘useful labours’ which provide ‘a fund of the most rational entertainment’ and reject a strictly systematised scheme in favour of a more sociable model, advocating for ‘Something like a society in each county, for the purposes of collecting a variety of these observations’ so

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Fig. 9.4  Thomas Bewick. ‘The Yellow Wagtail’. From History of British Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 191. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

that ‘changes which are continually taking place’ can be ascertained.28 Despite this assertion, the illustrations follow convention with profile views of the birds, and the textual descriptions written by Beilby follow an orderly template of bird description (length, colour, and shape), distinctions between male and female birds, nesting habitats, migratory patterns, egg descriptions, and so on. Beilby and Bewick are also careful in their preface to distinguish themselves from the less attractive qualities of Buffon’s work where: It must, however, be allowed, that … that ingenious philosopher has overstepped the bounds of Nature, and, in giving the reins to his own luxuriant fancy, has been too frequently hurried into the wild paths of conjecture and romance.29

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Fig. 9.5  Thomas Bewick. ‘The Redstart’. From History of British Birds, vol. 1 (1797), p. 209. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

But Beilby and Bewick do acknowledge their debt to Buffon, and they often prefer his nomenclature to that of other natural historians. Their entry for ‘The Fauvette (Motacilla hippolais)’ begins with a conventional physical description but then turns to a confession about the difficulty of identifying and naming this bird (which was most likely a species of warbler). It is ‘seldom to be seen’, ‘truly a mocking bird, imitating the notes of various kinds’, and irregular in its appearances in its ‘usual haunts’.30 Beilby and Bewick ‘suppose this [bird] to be the same with the Fauvette of M. Buffon’, but in a note admit that they cannot really identify the bird:

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We apprehend this to be the Flycatcher of Mr. Pennant … and the Lesser Pettichaps of Latham, which he says is known in Yorkshire by the name of the Beam-bird; but he does not speak from his own knowledge of the bird. It certainly is but little known, and has no common name in this country.31

The aversion to ‘the wild paths of conjecture and romance’ is overstated. This acknowledgement, paired with Beilby’s and Bewick’s eagerness to classify a bird that neither they nor Pennant has their ‘own knowledge of’, suggests that the demands of the genre and of the market that control which birds are represented and how they are represented are in conflict with Bewick’s habits, tendencies, and preferences, Bewick’s self-­ in-­nature (e.g. his devotion to walking), and how this trickles through his practice of engraving (a fully embodied and inherently creaturely practice) and onto the page. In the context of bird field guides used after 1800, Michael Lynch and John Law illuminate how ‘natural order’ is discovered and organised. Lynch and Law emphasise the mediation, translations, and durability that develop around the place during the rather complex and surprisingly subtle negotiations bird-watchers make with the natural world via their consultations with authoritative texts and argue that field guides not only guide the reader to nature, they ‘impose durability upon local bird sightings by translating them into a canonical and normalised form’. Further, Lynch and Law argue that field guides not only guide the reader to nature, but ‘networks of local description develop over time’ and shape nature ‘[b]ecause the concrete configuration of naturalistic observation depends so heavily upon the textual, interactional, and authoritative production of lists, it cannot be reduced to a relationship between individual perception/cognition and the natural world’.32 Paradoxically, as Bewick’s authority-involvement increases, the authoritative tone of the work diminishes; Bewick’s active voice signals that the ‘scientist’ is no longer ‘removed from the sentence’.33 In the Bewick-­ directed Volume II, the reader sees even more of the experiential and relational interchange between human and nature and evidence of Bewick’s eye for detail from his own perspective. Bewick recollects his methodology once he took over the author function from Beilby: As soon as each bird was finished on the wood, I set about describing it from my specimen and at the same time consulted every authority I could meet with, to know what had been said; and this together with what I knew from

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my own knowledge, were then compared; and in this way, I finished as truly as I could the second volume of the History of Birds.34

In this way, Bewick’s umwelt (the local culture generated from the material space Bewick creates through his own functioning in nature as an organism) and especially the special qualities of a man gifted with superior eyesight and fine motor skills are highlighted. In her life of Bewick, Jenny Uglow refers to how Bewick ‘seemed to see the birds, as if he were standing silently nearby’.35 Bewick’s method of relying upon and acknowledging his natural history precursors and influences, even as he is able to integrate his own experiences and observations, underlines his understanding of natural history as a dynamic practice reflective of an inclusive nature-culture continually subject to change and revision. But this attributive imaginative capacity needs to be more fully contextualised. Despite reservations about engraving from sketches of stuffed birds, some of his most evocative ‘Water Birds’ are engraved without Bewick’s having ever seen the bird, much less in its habitat. Indeed, he admits that several of his ‘British Birds’ are rarely, if ever, seen in England. Bewick also repeats and further editorialises upon anthropomorphic assessments of birds’ characters in his written descriptions. For example, in ‘Of the Heron’, he repeats the view of ‘some ornithologists’ that the Heron’s ‘character … is stigmatized with cowardice and rapacity, indolence, and yet insatiable hunger: they are, indeed, excessively voracious and destructive’.36 Bewick connects this negative character assessment to taxonomy by suggesting that disagreements about whether Cranes, Storks, and Herons should be classed together as in the Linnaean system, which would ‘make them amount to above eighty distinct species’ could be settled by grouping them together, united in their rapacity.37 He further extends this confusion of taxonomy with a hint of exasperation in ‘Of the Snipe’. The text enumerates disagreements between ornithologists on matters of classification that Bewick characterises as partly arbitrary, but ultimately and more significantly, as standing as real evidence of the unity and wholeness of all species and by implication, their integration without regard for classification in various systems: In these sub-divisions ornithologists may vary their classifications without end. As in a chain doubly suspended, the rings of which gradually diminish towards the middle, the leading features of some particular bird may point it out as a head to a tribe, others … will form … the connecting links; and

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those which may be said to compose the curvature of the bottom, by gradations equally minute, will rise to the last ring of the other end, which as the head of another tribe, will be marked with characters very different from the first.38

This revelation finally seems to liberate Bewick from strict adherence to taxonomy and when he does have access to the live bird, as with the ‘Lesser Guillemot’ (Uria aalge), he concludes his two-page entry by narrating the circumstances under which he rescued, sketched the bird, observed its relaxed response to being under a table ‘not the least alarmed at the peeping curiosity of the children who surrounded it’. He reports that when his ‘business was finished’, he released the Guillemot ‘upon an open part of the shore, where … as soon as it reached its beloved element, it flapped its wings, darted through the surge, dived, and appeared in that place no more’.39 Such personal touches are further enhanced in both volumes by Bewick’s creation and use of transitional tail-pieces designed to ornament, fill white space, and divide the sections of both volumes. These exquisitely engraved and detailed tail-pieces generate an enriched record of local landscapes replete with humour and the implications of lives lived in place. While the majority of the tail-pieces highlight human activities, Bewick generates an overall portrait of an entwined nature-culture often through the use of visual juxtapositions and puns. The entry for the ‘Long-legged Plover’ (Charadrius himantopus, now known as the black-winged stilt, Himantopus himantopus), for example, concludes with a tail piece of a hunter awkwardly crossing a stream on stilts (Fig. 9.6). Thinking about Beilby’s and Bewick’s History of British Birds with a focus on habitat and on Bewick’s importance as a conjuror of British landscape that is site-specific and creaturely expands the ability to read, understand, and value place-in-time and the dynamic lived histories of the natural world. The engraved surface itself fixes and replicates place. It makes place static and narrowly orients the viewer’s perception. Yet the pages themselves with integrated text and image offer opportunities for contextualised readings that enable close readers to extrapolate towards new, expanded imaginings of the bioregions we creatures including perhaps some of those same birds, but certainly not all, inhabit today.

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Fig. 9.6  Thomas Bewick. ‘Tailpiece’. From History of British Birds, vol. 2 (1804), p. 5. (Source: Image courtesy of The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto)

Notes 1. An online search reveals that Bewick is remembered in the twenty-first century as only an illustrator: images from the History of British Birds typically are not page images but are cropped to show Bewick’s wood engravings and not the accompanying texts. 2. Thomas Bewick, A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), 153–54. 3. The three quotations are from John Ruskin, Aridane Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving (Orpington and Lond: George Allen, 1890, p. 247); Robert Spence Watson, ‘An Address to the Members of the Bewick Club’, 4 Nov. 1885; and John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 5 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1835), 3:304. All are quoted in Peter Quinn, ‘“Their strongest pine”: Thomas Bewick and Regional Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century’ in Bewick Studies: Essays in Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of Thomas Bewick, ed. David Gardner-­Medwin (Newcastle and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2003), 112, 127, 112. 4. John F. M. Dovaston, ‘Some Account of the Life, Genius, and Personal Habits of the Late Thomas Bewick, the Celebrated Artist and Engraver on Wood. By His Friend John F.  M. Dovaston, Esq. A.  M., of Westfelton,

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near Shrewsbury.’ The Magazine of Natural History and Journal of Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology, and Meteorology 3 (1830), 100. 5. Quinn, 130. 6. Ibid., 117–18. 7. Ibid., 115–17. 8. Adrian Searle, ‘Thomas Bewick’s Cheeky Woodcuts,’ The Guardian (15 April 2009), n.p. 9. Bewick, Memoir, 164. 10. Nigel Tattersfield, Thomas Bewick: The Complete Illustrative Work. Vol. 1. 3 vols. (Oak Knoll Press, 2011), 63. 11. Bewick, Memoir, 87, 112–14. 12. Ibid., 7. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 180. 15. See, for example, Carel P Van Schaik, et al., ‘Orangutan Cultures and the Evolution of Material Culture.’ In The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writing, edited by Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald, 104–10 (Berg, 2007). 16. Thomas Bewick, History of British Birds. Volume 2: Containing the History and Description of Water Birds (Newcastle, 1804), iv. In the ‘Advertisement’ to Vol. 2, Bewick explains that ‘a separation of interests took place between the editors, and the compilation and completion of the present work devolved upon one alone’. His footnote to the advertisement acknowledges the help of the Reverend Henry Cotes ‘for his literary corrections’. 17. The explication of these bioregional principles is rooted in the work of Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann in the 1970s to ‘address matters of a pressing environmental concern through a politics derived from a local sense of place’. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds., The Bioregional Imagination: Literary, Ecology, and Place (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 2. 18. Quinn, 124. 19. John Latham, A General Synopsis of Birds, Vol. 1 (London: Benjamin White, 1781), 461. 20. William Wordsworth, ‘The Two Thieves; or, the Last Stage of Avarice,’ The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. 2, ed. William Knight (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896), 60–61. 21. Bewick, Memoir, 161. 22. Ibid., 162. 23. The trip to Wycliffe was not a complete washout and some of the sketches done there were engraved. For example, Bewick’s engraving of ‘The Sea Eagle (Falco Ossifragus…)’ in Vol. I, p.  11, is labelled Wycliffe, 1791.

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Ralph Beilby, History of British Birds. The Figures Engraved on Wood by T. Bewick. Volume 2. Containing the History and Description of Land Birds (Newcastle: Beilby and Bewick, 1797). 24. Bewick begins Volume 2 with an Advertisement signed ‘Thomas Bewick’ and dated July 3 1804 to explain ‘that drawings were taken from the stuffed specimens’ in the ‘splendid Museum of the late Marmaduke Tunstall, of Wycliffe, Esq.’ but with a disclaimer that ‘stuffed subjects commonly bear only an imperfect resemblance’ to the ‘dead and living specimens of the birds themselves’ (Bewick, History of British Birds, vol. 2), iii. 25. Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), 297. 26. Beilby, 191. 27. Ibid., 209. 28. Beilby, iv–v. 29. Ibid., iv. 30. Ibid., 210. 31. Ibid. In his ‘Advertisement’ to Volume II, Bewick more formally acknowledges Buffon’s guidance noting that the ‘voluminous folios of the celebrated Count de Buffon, containing one thousand and one … coloured prints of Birds, &c. were kindly lent to aid the work by Michael Bryan, of London, Esq.; these like an index, were constantly at hand, to be referred to and compared with the birds themselves … and were often of great service, by enabling [the editors] to ascertain the names, and to identify each species, in an examination of the subjects before them, when compared with the figures and doubtful nomenclature of other ornithologists’ (Bewick, History, vol. 2, iii–iv). ‘Lesser Pettichaps’ was a dialect term for the chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita). 32. Michael Lynch and John Law, ‘Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching’, in The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (London: Routledge, 1999), 319–22. 33. Lynda Birke, ‘Exploring the Boundaries: Feminism, Animals, and Science’, in Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, eds. Carol J. Adams and Josephine Donovan (Duke University Press, 1995), 44. 34. Bewick, Memoir, 165. 35. Uglow, 300. 36. Bewick, History, 36. 37. Ibid., 36. 38. Ibid., 59. 39. Ibid., 178.

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Bibliography Aikin, John. An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. Warrington: J. Johnson, 1777. Audubon, John James. Ornithological Biography. 5 vols. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1835. Bewick, Thomas. History of British Birds: The Figures Engraved on Wood. V2. Containing the History and Description of Water Birds. Newcastle: Printed by E. Walker, for T. Bewick, sold by him, and Longman and Rees, 1804. Bewick, Thomas. A Memoir of Thomas Bewick, Written by Himself. London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1862. Bewick, Thomas, and Ralph Beilby. History of British Birds: The Figures Engraved on Wood. V1. Containing the History and Description of Land Birds. Newcastle: Printed by S. Hodgson, for Beilby and Bewick, sold by them, and G.G. and J. Robinson, 1797. Birke, Lynda. ‘Exploring the Boundaries: Feminism, Animals, and Science’. In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations. Edited by Carol   J. Adams and Josephine Donovan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, 32–54. Dovaston, John. ‘Some Account of the Life, Genius, and Personal Habits of the Late Thomas Bewick, the Celebrated Artist and Engraver on Wood. By His Friend John F. M. Dovaston, Esq. A. M., of Westfelton, near Shrewsbury’. The Magazine of Natural History and Journal of Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology, and Meteorology 3 (1830): 97–105. Hitt, Christopher. ‘Ecocriticism and the Long Eighteenth Century’. College Literature 31, no 3 (2004): 123–47. Latham, John. A General Synopsis of Birds. 3 vols. London: Benj. White, 1781–1785. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Lynch, Michael, and John Law. ‘Pictures, Texts, and Objects: The Literary Language Game of Bird-Watching’. In The Science Studies Reader. Edited by Mario Biagioli. London: Routledge, 1999, 317–41. Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012. Quinn, Peter. ‘“Their Strongest Pine”: Thomas Bewick and Regional Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century’. In Bewick Studies: Essays in Celebration of the 250th Anniversary of the Birth of Thomas Bewick, edited by David GardnerMedwin. Newcastle and London: Oak Knoll Press and The British Library, 2003, 111–30.

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Ruskin, John. Aridane Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving. Orpington and London: George Allen, 1890. Searle, Adrian. ‘Thomas Bewick’s Cheeky Woodcuts’. The Guardian, April 15, 2009. Tattersfield, Nigel. Thomas Bewick: The Complete Illustrative Work. 3 vols. Oak Knoll Press, 2011. Uglow, Jenny. Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick. London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Van Schaik, Carel P., Marc Ancrenaz, and Gwendolyn Borgen. ‘Orangutan Cultures and the Evolution of Material Culture’. In The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writing. Edited by Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald. Oxford: Berg, 2007, 104–10. Watson, Robert Spence. ‘An Address to the Members of the Bewick Club’. November 4, 1885. Wordsworth, William. ‘The Two Thieves; or, the Last Stage of Avarice’. In The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Edited by William Knight. London: Macmillan and Co., 1896, 2: 60–61.

CHAPTER 10

The Literary Gilbert White Brycchan Carey

For many readers, natural history is a merely utilitarian genre of writing, providing information and instruction, but enjoyment only for those readers who themselves take pleasure in observing and recording the natural world. It is rarely considered as one of the genres of creative writing, and still less so as literary writing in any highly aesthetic sense. An exception to this rule has always been the Natural History of Selborne (1789) which, in the view of David Elliston Allen, is ‘the one literary classic, universally acknowledged, that the subject in all its years of existence has so far managed to produce’.1 Made up of letters from the clergyman and amateur naturalist Gilbert White (1720–93) to the natural historian Thomas Pennant (1726–98) and the naturalist and antiquarian Daines Barrington (c. 1728–1800), Selborne has inspired botanists and birdwatchers for more than two centuries as well as readers more attuned to its vivid descriptive language and ability to intensely evoke its location. It is famed both for the direct emotional attachment the book forges between observer and observed and, more practically, for being an exemplar of the ‘local patch’

B. Carey (*) Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_10

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approach adopted by many British amateur naturalists, birdwatchers in particular, even if, as Tim Birkhead points out, field ornithology, as opposed to museum-based taxonomy, was considered a marginal and amateurish pursuit until well into the twentieth century.2 White’s ‘idea of parochial history, which, he thinks, ought to consist of natural productions and occurrences as well as antiquities’ may not have been quite as original as some have claimed, but it was certainly influential.3 Following White, guidebooks and local histories routinely included and continue to include descriptions not merely of the cultural interest of a location—White’s ‘antiquities’—but also of its natural heritage. At the same time, studies of natural history and, later, ecology frequently revolve around the extended examination of the diversity and phenology of defined area. Many birdwatchers, like White, continue to record bird movements and behaviour in their local patch, often submitting their findings through blogs, websites, and social media; today’s version of the letters that comprise White’s Selborne. Extravagant claims have accordingly been made for the book, including that it has never been out of print, that it has appeared in several hundred editions, and that it is the fourth most published book in English.4 Some of these claims are not entirely secure, but it is certainly true that the book has been widely available and widely read, that it enjoyed something approaching cult status in the nineteenth century, and that it has continued to remain popular today when other natural histories of the period have fallen by the wayside.5 The reasons for the success of White’s Selborne may be many and are almost certainly complex. The popularity of a text is not necessarily correlated with its quality and cult literature is often as much about group identity as literary merit. One is mindful of Paul G.  M. Foster’s assertion that ‘to ask whether Selborne is a scientific or a literary record is a fragile and inconsequential enquiry’.6 That is indeed true. The book is quite clearly both, and most readers would say all the better for it. Nevertheless, this chapter proceeds from that often-made but rarely developed observation that much of White’s success can be attributed to his skill as a literary writer as much as to his ability as a natural historian which, while seemingly self-evident, has apparently never been established through close reading. This chapter accordingly explores White’s literary credentials by textual analysis as well as by investigating his literary context and influences. Focusing on White’s descriptions of birds and bird behaviour, it concludes that throughout his work White displayed a practised and nuanced use of language clearly informed by an interest in rhetoric and poetics as well as natural history.

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White’s editors, biographers, and critics are fond of demonstrating the enormous influence he exerted on later literature and culture. As Richard Mabey puts it, Selborne has ‘become an institution … part of that curious concoction of ideas and artefacts which are seen as somehow defining “the English way of life”’.7 Mary Ellen Bellanca, in an extended study of that concoction, observes that ‘White was imitated, eulogized, and canonized, and his book was zestfully expanded, annotated, prefaced, plagiarized, and bowdlerized’.8 More prosaically, but quite accurately, Anne Secord notes that ‘Selborne provided amateur naturalists with a model and a justification for local studies’ and provides thirty pages of ‘responses’ to Selborne, ranging from contemporary reviews to poems by such influential figures as W.H.  Auden.9 These are among dozens of studies that demonstrate White’s influence on others and his continuing legacy into the nineteenth century and beyond. Few modern critics or biographers, by contrast, have investigated White’s own sources and influences or assessed where he was located in relation to contemporary literature even though White’s own contemporaries immediately measured him up against more traditionally ‘literary’ writers. Wondering whether some people might consider the minute examination of British birdlife a ‘trivial’ pursuit, the reviewer in the Gentleman’s Magazine asks us to: Consider how the studious have employed themselves in their closets. In a former century the minds of the learned were engaged in determining whether the name of the Roman poet should be spelt Vergilius or Virgilius; and the number of letters in the name of Shakespeare still remains a matter of much solicitude and criticism. Nor can we but think that conjectures about the migration of Hirundines are full as interesting as the Chattertonian controversy.10

The anonymous reviewer, who was in fact Gilbert’s brother Thomas Holt White (1724–97), insisted that White’s Selborne is an improvement on the navel-gazing of literary critics and this no doubt endeared the book to gardeners, farmers, and men and women of science.11 It also reminds us that the White family were deeply immersed in the world of literary scholarship; Thomas White was a regular contributor to the reviews section of The Gentleman’s Magazine.12 Another contemporary reviewer, writing in The Topographer, was even clearer on the point. In his estimation, the strength of Selborne lay in its ‘attentive observations to nature itself, which are told not only with the precision of a philosopher, but with that happy

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selection of circumstances, which mark the poet. Throughout therefore, not only the understanding is informed, but the imagination touched’.13 For this reviewer, White’s talents as a creative writer were equal to his abilities as a scientist. These responses should not surprise us. Twenty-first-century readers may imagine that the gap between the ‘two cultures’ of science and literature was as wide in eighteenth century as it allegedly is today. In fact, even though the age of Renaissance men equally versed in all branches of knowledge and culture was well over (if it ever truly existed) eighteenth-­ century science and culture were not necessarily far removed from one another.14 In White’s day, natural history might be presented by non-­ specialist authors, such as the poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) whose popular, though largely derivative, History of the Earth and Animated Nature was published in 1774.15 It might also be offered in a variety of genres; in the same year that Selborne appeared, for example, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) tentatively presented ideas about evolution in an extended poetic treatise on botany.16 The boundary between the literary and the scientific was exceedingly permeable. Any search for White’s literary influences nevertheless begins at the scientific end of that spectrum. White clearly drew his primary stylistic inspiration from the many writers of natural history who had preceded him, in particular, those who had written extensively or influentially about birds. We can be sure that he read widely in recent and contemporary natural history because the pages of Selborne are liberally strewn with references to British naturalists such as John Ray (1627–1705), Francis Willughby (1635–72), and, of course, his correspondent Thomas Pennant. White’s reading extended beyond England, and beyond English. He was familiar with the work of French zoologists Mathurin Jacques Brisson (1723–1806) and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88). He read the work of the celebrated Swedish taxonomist Carl Linneaus (1707–78) and scrutinised the ideas of Italian naturalist Giovanni Antonio Scopoli (1723–88). Throughout Selborne he reads, quotes from, critiques, and engages with these and many other natural historians and, indeed, the letters themselves constitute such an engagement: Pennant was an important and celebrated natural historian while Barrington, though better known as an antiquarian, had also published works on ornithology. White was without doubt thoroughly immersed in the scientific discourse of his day, but any cursory reading of The Natural History of Selborne, even omitting the now rarely published Antiquities of Selborne,

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shows that he was a keen consumer of both ancient and modern literature, poetry in particular. Among the ancients, Virgil (70–19 BCE) is his particular favourite. This is scarcely surprising given that the Eclogues and Georgics are foundational texts of European rural literature, but White also quotes extensively from the Aeneid. Most of White’s quotations from Virgil concern birds, and he even concludes his correspondence to Pennant with Virgil’s description of a dove from Book 5 of the Aeneid rather than in his own words (p. 92). After Virgil, Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE) has the next most mentions, followed by a selection of mostly Roman poets, orators, and historians including ‘a lovely quotation’ from Lucretius (c. 99–c. 55 BCE) and discussion of the elder Pliny (23–79 CE), whose Naturalis Historia is a wide-ranging compendium of information and observations not merely confined to what White would have understood as natural history. None of these authors is unexpected or obscure, but White’s enthusiasm for Latin verse, Virgil especially, appears deep and genuine. This is matched by wide reading in modern poetry. White was by no means unusual in his affection for the poetry of John Milton (1608–74). Quotations from Paradise Lost abound in natural histories by eighteenth-­ century parson-naturalists, probably because Milton, a classical scholar and political theorist who had met the astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), offered just the right blend of scientific observation and religious sentiment to appeal to clergymen with an interest in the natural world. White quotes from him more than from any other modern author, including lines from Paradise Lost on the nightingale (p. 98), the swallow (p.  117), and the cockerel (p.  193). He also quotes from John Philips (1676–1709), James Thomson (1700–48), and William Shakespeare (1564–1616), among others. White’s literary quotations are no mere shows of erudition. Very often, he quotes from poets when looking for evidence to support his observations of natural phenomena that lie beyond strict taxonomy. These include country ways, but also animal behaviour and what we might term protoecology, albeit in an agricultural context. For example, he notes that cattle ‘retire constantly to the water during the hotter hours’ where ‘they drop much dung, in which insects nestle; and so supply food for the fish, which would be poorly subsisted but from this contingency. Thus nature, who is a great economist, converts the recreation of one animal to the support of another!’ (p. 21) White is here attempting to describe what to today we would refer to as animal behaviour and nutrient cycling through the food web. Without access to either a literature of ethology or ecology, however,

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his understanding is necessarily rudimentary and his sources either anecdotal or literary. He accordingly chooses to support his claims about bovine behaviour with an extract from ‘Thomson, who was a nice observer of natural occurrences, [who] did not let this pleasing circumstance escape him’. The quotation, from Thomson’s ‘Summer’, describes cattle who lie ‘Half in the flood, and, often bending, sip / The circling surface’. The circles that mark the surface of an English pond are likely to be caused by insects and the small fish that prey on them, which exactly corresponds to White’s insight. Similar quotations are also used to support observations of bird behaviour. He quotes from but takes issue with Milton, who in Book Seven of Paradise Lost had described birds migrating in formation and at a high altitude.17 Milton probably had geese in mind, but White instead notes that many birds, ‘particularly the swallow kind … scout and hurry along in little detached parties of six or seven in a company; and sweeping low, just over the surface of the land and water’ (p. 117). As with his classical allusions, White’s references to Milton, Thomson, and Shakespeare are neither unexpected nor obscure, but carefully deployed either to supply anecdotal evidence for his insights into environmental phenomena or to provide sounding boards for his own observations. The letters to Thomas Pennant that fill the first half of Selborne have a smattering of literary allusion. The first two letters to Daines Barrington, by contrast, contain long lists of breeding and migratory birds in Selborne, presented with little inflection or interpretation, suggesting that White initially set out to establish himself as an observational and descriptive natural historian. Quickly, however, the letters become more discursive, more personal, and more literary. Letter three, in which White expresses his delight at Barrington’s approval of his ‘little methodus of birds’, evolves into a discussion of the musical qualities of birdsong, supported by a quotation from Shakespeare (p. 102). Thereafter, the letters become markedly more literary in form and content than those to Pennant, and White even displays his poetic skills to interpret a topological feature. Writing in February 1778, at a time of year when ornithological pursuits were perhaps at their least rewarding, White noted that ‘In a district so diversified as this, so full of hollow vales, and hanging woods, it is no wonder that echoes should abound. Many we have discovered that return the cry of a pack of dogs, the notes of a hunting-horn, a tunable ring of bells, or the melody of birds very agreeably’. The search was on, however, for ‘a polysyllabical, articulate echo’. This was at last located, and tested in the following poetic manner:

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This echo in an evening, before rural noises cease, would repeat ten syllables most articulately and distinctly, especially if quick dactyls were chosen. The last syllables of    Tityre, tu patulae recubans… were as audibly and intelligibly returned as the first…. Quick dactyls, we observed, succeeded best; for when we came to try its powers in slow, heavy, embarrassed spondees of the same number of syllables,    Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens… we could perceive a return but of four or five. (pp. 178–79)

The letter demonstrates White’s skill at versification, as well as his appreciation of Virgil’s Eclogues and Aeneid, but it is also playful in a way that the eighteenth century would have recognised as Shandean, after Laurence Sterne (1713–68), another country parson who became a publishing phenomenon. More recent literary critics might call the passage ‘writerly’. It shows the author at work and the underlying structure of the writing is exposed in much the same way that White revealed the gizzard or oviduct of the birds he occasionally dissected. The idea of feeding the echo with a poetic meter is not merely Shandean whimsy, however, it is also a direct attempt to communicate with the environment in a poetic register—an attempt, as we shall see, that he returns to more subtly in his letters to Barrington on the jizz and song of his neighbourhood birds. White’s literary interests were not particularly unusual for a well-­ educated clergyman with the time to read and the wealth to buy books. His delight in language, and his interest in poetry in particular, do however seem strongly rooted. Wherever he may have originally acquired a taste for reading, his knowledge and skills at literary disputation were clearly honed while he was a student at Oxford and sustained thereafter by correspondence with Oxford friends. As Paul Foster has pointed out, the letters which White received from John Mulso (1721–91), his friend and fellow student at Oriel, are replete with literary references. ‘From the way Mulso writes’, argues Foster, ‘it becomes clear that the Oxford years were in part devoted to extensive reading in the literary field, mention of things to do with science, theology, politics, even of natural history being noticeably infrequent’. White’s replies have not survived, and Foster notes that, ‘this bias to the literary must reflect the leanings of the writer, but the allusions to one author after another fall from Mulso’s pen in such a fashion that there can be little doubt he was writing within a shared

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understanding and an interest on which he could rely’.18 As Foster and others have observed, Mulso’s interest was as much social as intellectual: he was friends with poets Edward Young (1683–1765) and William Collins (1721–59), the poet and critic Thomas Warton (1728–90), and, perhaps most significantly for White’s project, Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), whose Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) had put the epistolary novel at the centre of mid-eighteenth-century literary culture. How far White shared in Mulso’s literary friendships is unclear, but Mulso does discuss Richardson in several of his letters to White and there can be little doubt that White understood the requirements and conventions of the epistolary novel when he set out to order his findings and present them to the world in the form of letters even though, as Alan Bewell has pointed out, ‘over most of its history, the book has not been seen as a crafted epistolary narrative, but as an unmediated response to a historical reality’.19 Nevertheless, although parts of the book, the opening letters to Pennant, in particular, have clearly been fabricated to serve as an introduction, it would be an exaggeration to claim that Selborne was in fact a novel, or any kind of fiction, epistolary or otherwise. There is, however, a relationship. As John Richetti has noted, ‘the divide between fact and fiction that we are pretty confident about [today] is hard to locate in narratives from earlier centuries, and the eighteenth-century novel played with that still blurry division, often presenting fiction as fact and dramatizing fact in ways we would find more appropriate to fiction’.20 As with the novel, so with the natural history. Lines are blurred and facts are deployed strategically to serve a bigger narrative. The composition of Selborne nevertheless suggests that White was influenced by the novel of letters in several important respects. First of all, obviously, the book is made up of letters, but this was nothing new. As Secord points out, ‘communications to scientific societies and publication in periodicals usually took the form of correspondence’. The epistolary novel, however, is more than simply a collection of letters. It adds several extra dimensions including plot, motive, interiority, and what Secord calls the ‘heightened emotion’ created by the immediacy of the letters.21 These points of personal connection elevate the epistolary novel from being simply a recitation of related incidents in a protagonist’s life, to a complex account of the development of character with a psychological depth and realism that inspires in its readers a sustained and sometimes profound emotional engagement. Many readers have apparently found that Selborne meets precisely that emotional need in a way that other natural histories fail to do.

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If the three principle hallmarks of the novel are realism, narrative, and character development, we find that Selborne meets the criteria. It is set in a particular place at a particular time and is inhabited by characters who are named by everyday conventions rather than by their moral character and who go about their daily business in ways that obey the laws of time and space. Although we assume that most of these characters are in fact real rather than merely realistic, this assumption is not without problems. Memoirs and letter collections are notoriously full of exaggerated, edited, and fabricated anecdotes and clearly White selects the incidents that interest him. Some of the letters, particular the scene-setting letters at the start, are obviously not ‘real’ in the strict sense, since it is clear that White retrospectively added them to orient the reader. Nevertheless, Selborne is realistic in that all his anecdotes and even the opening letters obey the laws and conventions of nature and society, even when they are not strictly verifiable. The book’s narrative is less easy to discern. Clearly, it is no page-turning thriller nor is there a hidden truth waiting to be revealed. Novels of that type were indeed written in eighteenth-century England, but narrative was often a secondary consideration; ‘if you were to read Richardson for the story’, quipped Samuel Johnson (1709–84), ‘your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment’.22 The same is true of Selborne, although the sentiment arises from White’s passion for knowledge rather than from the emotional complexities of the marriage market. Observing White’s intense curiosity grow and change through the course of the letters is at once both narrative and character development and one of the principle reasons why the book retains our attention. Moreover, throughout Selborne, we witness a tension between geographic constraint and discursive movement which is highly suggestive of the constraints placed upon the letter-writing protagonists of sentimental epistolary novels. Although White was not entirely chained to his parish, he appears to have travelled beyond Hampshire rather less than his letters imply he might have wished. While Selborne is often praised for its rootedness and sense of place, as Tobias Menely has persuasively argued, movement was in fact central to White’s observations of his local birdlife which ‘drew his attention to the fact that Selborne was itself a crossroads for nature’s extensive circulation, effected through both human commerce and natural migration’.23 White’s favourite birds are all migratory, from the warblers he deduced were separate species from their different songs to the

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martins, swifts, and swallows whose appearances and disappearances he meticulously recorded in the attempt to definitively solve the old mystery of whether they migrated or hibernated.24 While this is in part because their movements allow him to observe the phenology of his local patch, one also detects a somewhat wistful desire for mobility from a man largely constrained to one geographical location; a desire that is sublimated in the vicarious enjoyments of avian migration. While a treatise on hibernating or migratory birds—the scientific endeavour arguably at the heart of Selborne—need not have been presented in a series of letters, the interiority and immediacy of the epistolary form were more fitted to describe White’s imaginative identification with the birds he observed. This sympathetic bond is what Johnson would have called ‘sentiment’ and it is the key feature that allies Selborne to the eighteenth-century novel of letters. Selborne’s affinity with the epistolary novel, although significant, is not alone sufficient to explain its popularity. White’s poetic language, sustained throughout his career as a natural historian, is another important criterion. We should recall that the letters that comprise The Natural History of Selborne represent just one part of White’s project, which occupied him for more than three decades and which gave rise to a Garden Kalendar, a Flora Selborniensis, and a detailed naturalist’s journal. This daily record of the fauna and flora of Selborne was written on a pre-printed form that had been invented by Daines Barrington and published in 1767 as The Naturalist’s Journal.25 The idea was to create a standard set of observations for natural historians across the country to use so that their observations were directly comparable. This depended on the data being added methodically and consistently, which was not White’s way. In Mabey’s view, White’s entries are ‘haphazard to the point of being whimsical … with the exception of the weather tables and the logging of the hirundines’ movements’.26 More sympathetically, Francesca Greenoak notes that White ‘drew on the resources of English and classical poetry, prose and science as he wrote the apparently simple journal notes which read so vividly’.27 This vividness manifests itself in the curiously intense and poetic language of the otherwise terse daily notes. Indeed, were White’s journal entries to be anachronistically published in a collection of imagist verse, they would no doubt be applauded for the clarity of their vision and the richness of their language. Take the entry for Monday 15 February 1768 (I, 228), for example, which but for an additional syllable in the middle line is a perfectly formed haiku:

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Earthworms engender. Cucumber-plants shew two rough leaves. Forward turneps rot.28

The poetry does not merely derive from a modern reader’s awareness of the form, however. The movement from the life-giving earthworms to the death and decay of precocious turnips is delicate and balanced, poised on the image of the cucumber’s first two true leaves that any gardener would understand to be paradoxically rough to the touch, but delicate in respect of frosts, slugs, and other hazards of a British garden in April. Such intensity of vision applies particularly to White’s entries on birds. On Wed 11 April 1770, White observed that: Kite sits. Raven has young. Swallows amidst frost & snow.29

White’s terse, dissonant, ‘Kite sits’ records that the bird is incubating its eggs but invokes little of the wonder of a large raptor, probably nesting ten or more metres up in the trees, bringing forth new life. Another powerful bird, the raven, is introduced in equally stark terms as having young, not engendering them like the earthworm under the cucumber plants, nor raising or rearing them in any active terms. The passivity, mirroring the stationary, sitting kite, is eerie, unnatural somehow, emphasised by the raven’s traditional association with death rather than new life. The final line explains all. Those symbols of summer, warmth, and movement, White’s beloved swallows, are here seen against a backdrop of frost and snow. Either the swallow is too early or the snow is too late, but either way something is out of joint. The opposite, perhaps, is true of White’s entry for Sunday 3 February 1771, although the weather it records is every bit as contrary: Hens sit. Hedge-sparrow sings. Soft, spring-like weather. Rooks resort to their nest-trees.30

This recalls Beowulf or Piers Plowman with its alliteration and its caesurae. It is unlikely indeed that White was familiar with the former, although in the now rarely reproduced Antiquities of Selborne he demonstrates a basic

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knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon language. By contrast, he certainly was familiar with Piers Plowman, despite noting that the visions of ‘Robert Langeland … are but in few hands’. He reproduces fifteen lines of the poem, calling it ‘one of the keenest pieces of satire now perhaps subsisting in any language, ancient or modern’.31 An interest in and enjoyment of William Langland (c. 1332–c. 1386) was certainly unusual in 1789 and reminds us that White was as deeply interested in the cultural past as he was in the natural present. The journal entries show us that he was also a poetic writer even in his sparsest notes, setting down his observations in poised and careful language as rich and evocative as any English verse. White’s poetry in his journal may have been accidental, but his poeticism was not, and at other times he was self-consciously a poet. ‘The Invitation to Selborne’, an ode of 82 lines of heroic couplets, only occasionally appears in editions of Selborne.32 ‘The Naturalist’s Summer-­ evening Walk’, dedicated and delivered to Thomas Pennant in a letter written in May 1769, is by contrast always included and offers the observations of a naturalist recast in rhyming couplets. The poem, of just over forty lines, begins with Selborne’s birds: When day declining sheds a milder gleam, What time the may-fly haunts the pool or stream; When the still owl skims round the grassy mead, What time the timorous hare limps forth to feed; Then be the time to steal adown the vale, And listen to the vagrant cuckoo’s tale; To hear the clamorous curlew call his mate, Or the soft quail his tender pain relate; To see the swallow sweep the dark’ning plain Belated, to support her infant train; To mark the swift in rapid giddy ring Dash round the steeple, unsubdu’d of wing: Amusive birds!—say where your hid retreat When the frost rages and the tempests beat; Whence your return, by such nice instinct led, When spring, soft season, lifts her bloomy head? Such baffled searches mock man’s prying pride, The god of nature is your secret guide! (pp. 55–6)

The poem has genuine substance. In addition to the pleasing pastoral scene, it presents White’s emotional connection with the landscape and

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birds of a summer evening and his scientific musings on the nature of bird migration. The versification is admittedly clunky at times. The chaotic pentameter of the third line, ‘When the still owl skims round the grassy mead’, has a dissonance that does not relate well to the meaning. On the other hand, the unexpected opening trochee of the fourteenth line, ‘When the frost rages and the tempests beat’ adds an energy that reflects the violent weather being described, which like the reversed meter is the reverse of the summer evening that is the subject of the poem. White’s control of meter is in general at least competent and has touches of flair. The language, in common with most poetry of the period, is rich in poetic diction, but while phrases such as ‘grassy mead’, ‘dark’ning plain’, and ‘infant train’ are conventionally ornate, White’s diction rarely obscures the meaning. As with his journal entries, he is extremely fond of alliteration but makes limited use of other forms of figurative language. All in all, the poetry is accomplished and enjoyable, if light and somewhat limited in technique; in accord with the fashions of the day but advancing a position in the long-running scientific debate about bird migration. Undoubtedly, it is the work of an author in touch with both literary history and literary fashion. A similar judgement can be made about White’s writing style in Selborne more broadly. As with his poetics, his prose style is sometimes awkward; he can be repetitious and he is much given to exaggeration. The word ‘vast’ appears around 60 times in the book, for instance, most famously when he refers to the South Downs, a picturesque but modest set of chalk hills in southern England, as ‘a vast range of mountains’ (p. 7). The word is used in other contexts too, often in relation to birds. ‘The blue titmouse’, asserts White, ‘is a vast admirer of suet’ (p.  86), British agriculture has witnessed a ‘vast increase of turnips’ which are devoured by flocks of wood pigeons ‘so vast’ they are a mile long in the air (pp. 90, 91), while it is a matter of wonder that ‘the hedge-sparrows, etc., can be induced to sit at all on the egg of the cuckoo without being scandalized at the vast disproportioned size of the supposititious egg’.33 Without doubt, the word ‘vast’ is vastly overused in Selborne. Despite such moments of awkwardness, the book also contains many passages of rhetorical brilliance, often where birds are involved. One early example occurs in the second letter to Pennant, when White tells an anecdote about a pair of ravens which nested in ‘a small wood called Losel’s’:

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In the centre of this grove there stood an oak, which, though shapely and tall on the whole, bulged out into a large excrescence about the middle of the stem. On this a pair of ravens had fixed their residence for such a series of years, that the oak was distinguished by the title of the Raven-tree. Many were the attempts of the neighbouring youths to get at this eyry: the difficulty whetted their inclinations, and each was ambitious of surmounting the arduous task. But, when they arrived at the swelling, it jutted out so in their way, and was so far beyond their grasp, that the most daring lads were awed, and acknowledged the undertaking to be too hazardous. So the ravens built on, nest upon nest, in perfect security, till the fatal day arrived in which the wood was to be levelled. It was in the month of February, when those birds usually sit. The saw was applied to the butt, the wedges were inserted into the opening, the woods echoed to the heavy blows of the beetle or mallet, the tree nodded to its fall; but still the dam sat on. At last, when it gave way, the bird was flung from her nest; and, though her parental affection deserved a better fate, was whipped down by the twigs, which brought her dead to the ground. (p. 10)

This short anecdote is complex and effective, marked by compressed language, vivid imagery, a powerful narrative, and a thought-provoking moral. White is able to conjure up in the mind all the sound and movement of a large tree being felled in only thirty or so words, many of them technical terms describing equipment such as saws, wedges, and ‘the beetle or mallet’.34 Against the bustle of this human activity, White’s anthropomorphic oak tree nods drowsily to its end; a horrid contrast to the sudden violence of the raven being ‘flung from her nest’ and ‘whipped down by the twigs’. If the language is intense, the story is even more so. White invites sympathy both for the tree and the bird while distancing our affections from the ironically named ‘daring lads’ who try to rob the nest but fail, finding it beyond their abilities. While nature begins the story seemingly with the upper hand, the relentless march of human industry proves implacable—eighteenth-century woods were sources of fuel and building materials, not nature reserves. The raven is helpless in the face of determined woodcutters, but the moral of the story is not merely admiration of the strength of the bird’s ‘parental affection’ in the face of overwhelming odds. This is also, as far as can be possible in an eighteenth-century context, an environmental parable that dramatises the deleterious impact humans have on the landscape and its flora and fauna. Its early appearance in the text also alerts the reader that Selborne will be no dry collation of

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nature notes and taxonomic speculations, but rather a personal engagement with the habitats it describes. Even when White does simply describe what is around him, the writing can be as lyrical as his poetry; indeed, often more so. He wrote, for example, two very poetic letters to Barrington in the late summer of 1778 that describe bird movement and birdsong. They are too long to examine entire, but in the first he argues that ‘A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air as well as by their colours and shape’ (p.  188). Birdwatchers today call this the bird’s ‘jizz’—its characteristic movement, whether in the air or on the ground. Practised birdwatchers can tell apart almost identical species at a glance simply by the way they perch, walk, feed, or take to the air. White was such an observer, and in this letter he piles up images of bird movement in language that is rich in imagery and metaphor and which carries the reader along with a subtle but insistent rhythm: Some birds have movements peculiar to the season of love: thus ring-doves, though strong and rapid at other times, yet in the spring hang about on the wing in a toying and playful manner; thus the cock-snipe, while breeding, forgetting his former flight, fans the air like the wind-hover; and the green-­ finch in particular exhibits such languishing and faltering gestures as to appear like a wounded and dying bird; the king-fisher darts along like an arrow; fern-owls, or goat-suckers, glance in the dusk over the tops of trees like a meteor; starlings as it were swim along, while missal-thrushes use a wild and desultory flight; swallows sweep over the surface of the ground and water, and distinguish themselves by rapid turns and quick evolutions; swifts dash round in circles; and the bank-martin moves with frequent vacillations like a butterfly.35 (pp. 189–90)

This is descriptive prose writing at its most poetic. White’s close personal identification with the species he describes is signalled by the frequent use of anthropomorphism: birds toy, play, hang, languish, and vacillate. The verbs are all active, many concerning movement, but White evokes the particular movement of each bird during the breeding season by paradoxically deploying language that suggests arrested movement: ‘hang’, ‘languishing’, ‘faltering’, ‘desultory’, and ‘vacillations’. The greenfinch even appears ‘like a wounded and dying bird’. While this amatory behaviour is portrayed as faltering, the underlying rhythm and piling up of clause after clause engender a sense only of life and activity.

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A similar energy and poeticism is displayed in the birdsong letter that immediately follows this one and which is replete with sonorous language, classical allusion, and a quotation from Milton. White diverges sharply from the precise observation of a scientist to speculate on the emotional states and motives of Selborne’s birds: ‘many of the winged tribes’, he suggests, ‘have various sounds and voices adapted to express their various passions, wants, and feelings; such as anger, fear, love, hatred, hunger, and the like’. This personification of the birds he loves is sustained throughout the letter, as when he observes that: Doves coo in an amorous and mournful manner, and are emblems of despairing lovers; the wood-pecker sets up a sort of loud and hearty laugh; the fern-owl, or goat-sucker, from the dusk till day-break, serenades his mate with the clattering of castanets. All the tuneful passeres express their complacency by sweet modulations, and a variety of melody. (pp. 191–3)36

As with his journal entries and poetry, White is fond of alliteration, of multiple clauses, of anthropomorphism, and of poetic diction. The passage is a pleasure to read, regardless of its scientific merit, but it remains of scientific value regardless of its literary merit. His rhetorical skills heighten and extend his ornithological account from being merely a thing of much use to one also of great beauty. This poetic ability, we may conclude, combined with his choice of the epistolary form that allowed him to both explore and display his emotional attachment to his subject, in large measure accounts for the popularity and longevity of the book, where other works of eighteenth-century natural history have long since passed out of sight.

Notes 1. David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (London: Allen Lane, 1976), 50. 2. Tim Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). See in particular Chapter 6, ‘The Novelty of Field Work’, 205–36. 3. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (1789) ed. Anne Secord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3. All further references are to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text. 4. For the publishing history before 1970, see Edward A.  Martin, A Bibliography of Gilbert White (Folkestone: Dawsons, 1970). Elsewhere, the

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‘three’ books more published than Selborne are variously given as the Bible, The Book of Common Prayer, The Pilgrim’s Progress, the complete works of Shakespeare, and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. If the ‘fourth most published’ status ever in fact applied to Selborne, it certainly does no longer with several recent publishing phenomena such as Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series comprehensively overtaking it. 5. For the status of Selborne in the nineteenth century, see in particular Mary Ellen Bellanca, Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 78–107. 6. Paul G.M.  Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), 159. 7. Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (1986) new edn (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 6. 8. Bellanca, Daybooks of Discovery, 78. 9. Anne Secord, ‘Introduction’ to The Natural History of Selborne, xxvii, 241–70. 10. Gentleman’s Magazine, 59, I (1789), 62–3. The ‘Chattertonian controversy’ concerned whether the work published as Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century (London: T. Payne and Son, 1777) was genuinely by Thomas Rowley or in fact the work of the recently deceased Thomas Chatterton (1752–70), which they were. 11. For the identification of Thomas White as the reviewer, see Mabey, Gilbert White, 207. 12. ODNB. 13. The Topographer, I (1789), 40–44. 14. C.P.  Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture, 1959 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 15. Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 8 vols (London: J. Nourse, 1774). 16. [Erasmus Darwin], The botanic garden, part II. containing the loves of the plants, a poem (Lichfield: J. Jackson and J. Johnson, 1789). 17. The birds ‘ranged in figure wedge their way, / Intelligent of seasons’ and ‘high over seas / Flying’, Paradise Lost, VII, 426–29. 18. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 15. Foster’s discussion of White’s literary tastes occupies 14–16. 19. John Mulso, The Letters to Gilbert White of Selborne from his intimate friend and contemporary the Rev. John Mulso, ed. Rashleigh Holt-White (London: R.H.  Porter, 1907), passim; Alan Bewell, Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 162.

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20. John Richetti, ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 2. 21. Secord, ‘Introduction’, xvi. 22. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W.  Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904, reprinted 1980), 480. 23. Tobias Menely, ‘Traveling in Place: Gilbert White’s Cosmopolitan Parochialism’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 23 (2004): 46–65, 57. 24. White’s changing position in the migration v. hibernation debate is explored in depth by Ted Dadswell in The Selborne Pioneer: Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist, a Re-examination, revised edition (London: Centaur Press, 2006), 38–49. 25. [Daines Barrington], The naturalist’s journal (London: W. Sandby, 1767). 26. Mabey, Gilbert White, 111. 27. The Journals of Gilbert White, 1754–1793, ed Francesca Greenoak, 3 vols (London: Century Hutchinson, 1986–89), I, 10. 28. White, Journals, I, 228. 29. White, Journals, I. 319. 30. White, Journals, I. 351. The ‘hedge-sparrow’ is an older name for the dunnock, Prunella modularis. 31. Gilbert White, The natural history and antiquities of Selborne, in the county of Southampton: with engravings, and an appendix (London: Benjamin White, 1789), 311, 381–82. Rarely included now, the antiquities are the second half of the original book. 32. It is reproduced in Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 209–11. 33. White’s ‘blue titmouse’ is the blue tit, Cyanistes caeruleus. The ‘hedge-­ sparrow’ (dunnock) is frequently parasitised by the common cuckoo. The wood pigeon remains one of the most numerous birds in the British Isles. 34. ‘Beetle: An implement consisting of a heavy weight or ‘head,’ usually of wood, with a handle or stock, used for driving wedges or pegs’. OED. 35. Several of the birds White lists are given different names today. These are: ‘ring-doves’, the wood pigeon, Columba palumbus; ‘cock-snipe’, the male common snipe Gallinago gallinago; ‘wind-hover’, the common kestrel, Falco tinnunculus; ‘fern-owls or goat-suckers’, the European nightjar, Caprimulgus europaeus; ‘missal-thrushes’, the mistle thrush, Turdus viscivorus; ‘bank-martin’, the European sand martin, Riparia riparia. 36. White’s doves might be any of several species, but the ‘mournful manner’ probably identifies it as the wood pigeon, C. palumbus, or the rock dove, C. livia, better known as the domesticated pigeon. The ‘wood-pecker’ is the European green woodpecker, Picus viridis, familiar for its loud laughing call, known as a ‘yaffle’.

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Bibliography Allen, David Elliston. The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History. London: Allen Lane, 1976. Barrington, Daines. The naturalist’s journal. London: W. Sandby, 1767. Bellanca, Mary Ellen. Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Bewell, Alan. Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Birkhead, Tim. The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Boswell, James. Life of Johnson. Edited by R.W.  Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904; reprinted 1980. Chatterton, Thomas. Poems supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others, in the Fifteenth Century. London: T. Payne and Son, 1777. Dadswell, Ted. The Selborne Pioneer: Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist, a Re-examination, revised edition. London: Centaur Press, 2006. Darwin, Erasmus. The botanic garden, part II. containing the loves of the plants, a poem. Lichfield: J. Jackson and J. Johnson, 1789. Foster, Paul G.M. Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography. London: Christopher Helm, 1988. Goldsmith, Oliver. An History of the Earth and Animated Nature. 8 vols. London: J. Nourse, 1774. Mabey, Richard. Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne. New edition. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Martin, Edward A. A Bibliography of Gilbert White. Folkestone: Dawsons, 1970. Menely, Tobias. ‘Traveling in Place: Gilbert White’s Cosmopolitan Parochialism’. Eighteenth-Century Life 23 (2004): 46–65. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Alastair Fowler. London: Longman, 1971. Mulso, John. The Letters to Gilbert White of Selborne from his intimate friend and contemporary the Rev. John Mulso. Edited by Rashleigh Holt-White. London: R.H. Porter, 1907. ‘Review of Gilbert White, The natural history and antiquities of Selborne’. The Topographer I (1789): 40–44. Richetti, John. ‘Introduction’. In The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-­ Century Novel. Edited by John Richetti. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution: The Rede Lecture, 1959. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. White, Gilbert. The Journals of Gilbert White, 1754–1793. Edited by Francesca Greenoak. 3 vols. London: Century Hutchinson, 1986–89.

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White, Gilbert. The natural history and antiquities of Selborne, in the county of Southampton: with engravings, and an appendix. London: Benjamin White, 1789a. White, Gilbert. The Natural History of Selborne. Edited by Anne Secord. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. White, Thomas Holt. ‘Review of Gilbert White, The natural history and antiquities of Selborne’. Gentleman’s Magazine 59, part I (1789b): 62–3.

CHAPTER 11

When Poet Meets Penguin: British Verse Confronts Exotic Avifauna Sayre Greenfield

John Aikin’s Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry, 1777, complains of the staleness and inaccuracy of natural descriptions in modern poetry: ‘While the votary of science is continually gratified with new objects opening to his view, the lover of poetry is wearied and disgusted with a perpetual repetition of the same images, clad in almost the same language.’1 He laments ‘those false representations of nature which ancient error or fable first introduced, but which, having been made the foundation of ingenious figures and pleasing allusions, the poets of every age have adopted. Such are, the song of the dying swan; the halcyon’s nest; … the pelican’s feeding her young with her blood; and the whole existence of the phœnix’ (24). The potency of these tropes, he judges, ‘must have long since been exhausted; and the revival of them at present is as much a proof of barren invention as of false taste’ (25). Aikin attempts to promote in poets a closer poetic attention ‘to the real state of nature in their own country’ (139) to reinvigorate the genre: ‘the poet should think it

S. Greenfield (*) Division of Humanities, University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Greensburg, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_11

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incumbent upon him to discover and investigate new facts, as well as to frame new combinations of words’ (132). Aikin concludes by suggesting that most productive of novelty in verse would be attention to ‘the polar and tropical parts of the globe’ (140), and here, ‘were they sufficiently qualified by their own observation, or the authentic accounts of others’ (139–40), then, ‘What infinite scope for new and striking description would the animal history of these countries afford to the poet who should be able to draw it from original sources!’ (148–49). Eight years later, in 1785, a minor poet, Henry Headley (1765–1788), attempts to follow this advice. He had presumably been reading Aikin, and the next year he commends Aikin’s Essay in a review of Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology: ‘the great use natural history is of to a poet, I need not mention; after what has been said by Dr. Aikin in his Essay, which (though upon too confined a scale) is most happily calculated to replenish the stores of descriptive poetry, to improve our taste, and to explode the common-place imagery of the day, by substituting nature and novelty in the room of art and imitation’.2 Headley’s application of Aikin’s principle to a poem of his own, however, had unfortunate results. In An Invocation to Melancholy. A Fragment, Headley portrays how ‘Young Fancy’ operates: Lo, at her call, New Zealand’s wastes arise, Casting their shadows far along the main, Whose brows cloud-cap’d in joyless Majesty No human foot hath trod since Time began; Here Death-like Silence ever brooding dwells, Save when the watching Sailor startled hears, Far from his native land, at darksome night, The shril-ton’d Petrel, or the Penguin’s voice, That skim their trackless flight on lonely wing, Thro’ the bleak regions of the nameless main….3

The shrill-voiced petrel skimming the waves is about right, except that petrels are generally silent away from their breeding grounds,4 but we may smile at the penguin’s ‘lonely wing’ and ‘trackless flight’, as the poet tries to take the exceptional bird, the penguin, and fit it back into the model of the typical, flying bird. Headley follows here a pattern in confronting exotic avifauna that is general even in more successful poetry of this sort. It proves hard to accommodate strange birds into poetry while maintaining the accuracy of

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observation that Aikin desires. Aikin’s two imperatives, to be new and to be accurate about nature, prove poetically incompatible. To incorporate new birds, poets represent them in overly familiar or simplified ways. Without traditional associations, birds have a little emotional or symbolic impact in verse. In a reversal of Viktor Shklovsky’s concept of literary defamiliarisation that makes things we take for granted seem strange,5 late eighteenth-century poetic practice often familiarises exotic birds, reshaping them to make alien nature comprehensible on recognisable terms. Sometimes, characteristics of common birds appear inappropriately; sometimes, colours, for instance, are purified so that birds can be assimilated to the symbolic systems established within Western culture. One difficulty for Aikin’s theory and Headley’s practice is that birds can create poetic interest only if they come with cultural traditions and webs of intertextuality. Another difficulty comes from ‘the authentic accounts of others’ Aikin mentions—that is, the exploratory journals most easily available to the British poets in the late eighteenth century. Headley was only nineteen when he wrote his poetic fragment, and he cannot have encountered his penguin in British Zoology, as the word ‘penguin’ there is associated with the great auk of the North Atlantic (Pinguinus impennis).6 His source may be James Cook’s A Voyage towards the South Pole (1777), where the call of penguins is mentioned as heard from shipboard: ‘In the evening, and several times in the night, penguins were heard.’7 Headley would not find here direct mentions of flightlessness, as Cook assumes his readers are familiar with that feature. Cook implies that condition in a number of places, however, including the following: ‘The penguin is an amphibious bird so well known to most people, that I shall only observe, they are here in prodigious numbers; so that we could knock down as many as we pleased with a stick. I cannot say they are good eating. I have indeed made several good meals of them; but it was for want of better victuals’ (2:204). Texts from exploratory voyages do not tee up the birds for poetic assimilation. The explorers have their own ways of assimilating ornithological discoveries—by eating them. Poetic absorption of exotic birds must be more refined, and it tends to occur through a rejection of the differences that make the birds seem strange in the first place. The principle holds in more than poetry. Birdwatchers habitually seek the exotic and then, at least if they are like me as a birder, almost instantly remove the exceptional in what they see. On the last evening of my first trip to New Zealand, I ran across a flock of Mohoua albicilla, whiteheads, a species of songbird not particularly related

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to anything else except two other New Zealand members of the same genus. I immediately commented that these birds clambering about in tall shrubs were like bushtits (Psaltriparus minimus), a bird I had grown up with in the American Pacific Northwest and closely related to the long-­ tailed tit (Aegithalos caudatus) of England, Europe, and northern Asia. In truth, the whiteheads were very little like bushtits, except for flocking and feeding among small branches. The whiteheads are brown and white, not grey, bulkier, with larger bodies and shorter tails, and the beaks are considerably stouter. To assimilate them into my own mental bank of birds, however, I automatically made them familiar through a comparison, erasing what is distinctive. Indeed, the ornithological history of New Zealand since the arrival of the Maori a thousand or seven hundred years ago has been the erasure of the distinctive, and, since the arrival of Captain Cook, the replacing of avian features of the land by what is familiar. This is why getting a native songbird is a treat for the visitor. Instead, one sees and hears British birds: the song thrush (Turdus philomelos) with its full-hearted evensong of joy illimited, the skylark (Alauda arvensis) that sings hymns at heaven’s gate, and the chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) singing on the orchard bough, in New Zealand now. The introduced species are not just visually familiar to the British settlers; they are culturally familiar. More people probably already know the cultural significance of birds (often at odds with natural fact) than know any ornithological details. Poets and settlers do not know what to do symbolically with unknown avifauna, so in that sense it is more comfortable to import the old. Exotic birds create trouble for British poets by their cultural unfamiliarity. The skylark provides an image of the link between the earthly and the divine, but how does one react poetically to a species without a tradition surrounding it? One can neither efficiently impose meaning nor borrow a mythology. The New Zealand whitehead, it turns out, can serve in Maori culture a similar function to the skylark, linking the human and the divine, as a messenger to the gods. Elsdon Best describes one ceremony: Among the Takitumu folk the birds employed in this and other ceremonial [performances] were the miromiro (Petroeca toitoi) [the North Island tomtit, Petroica macrocephala toitoi] and the tatahore, or whitehead…. When a new pa (fortified place) of importance was opened by means of a religious function, at one juncture of the proceedings two priestly experts took stand at two corners of the defences, each holding a captive bird in his hand….

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Here the two birds were released and allowed to fly away. It is said that the meaning of this act was a symbolic communication to the gods that the supplicants craved for the new village such prosperity and welfare as was represented in the escape and freedom of the two birds.8

Such a cultural import, even if the late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-­ century Europeans had known about it, would scarcely be feasible for a European audience. The idea of a bird that feeds in bushes as linked to the divine still strikes a westerner as odd, unlike the lark that sings as it ascends the sky. Yet if one merely saw the skylark as it often appears, the grass-­ coloured streaky bird walking on the dirt and fluttering a little distance, it might seem equally an odd choice to represent the ascent to divinity. The poet confronting avian exoticism has limited options for giving birds significance. A poem that provides a good illustration of those limits is Anna Seward’s 1780 Elegy on Captain Cook, adapting material from James Cook’s voyage journals directly into verse. In one part of the poem, after Cook leaves New Zealand, Seward depicts two personified abstractions on an unapproachable island that seems a natural temple. These are Flora and Fauna, and the latter has a variety of animal followers: —Next Fauna treads, in youthful beauty’s pride, A playful Kangroo bounding by her side; Around the Nymph her beauteous Pois display Their varied plumes, and trill the dulcet lay….9

The bird here, the poi—what birders would now call by its Maori name, the tui (Prosthemadera novaeseelandiae)—is one of these few native songbirds of New Zealand one can easily see in the present day. Seward was probably struck by this species because it receives a full-page illustration in Cook’s 1777 A Voyage towards the South Pole, from which Seward is working.10 All that Seward can do with the species poetically is attach it to a personification of the abstract concept of animal life, note its beautiful plumage, song, and provide a lengthy footnote that quotes Cook’s journal. This note describes the ‘feathers of a fine mazarine blue’, the two tufts of white feathers hanging at the throat, and the ‘exquisite melody of its note’. Seward omits the journal’s next sentence, about the tastiness of the bird: ‘The flesh is also most delicious, and was the greatest luxury the woods afforded us’ (1:98). She wishes to show Cook and his men appreciating the land and contributing to it, not taking anything from it.

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Poetically, then, what the bird can indicate in the retinue of Fauna is exoticism itself, with a kangaroo in front and a fruit-bat following. Another bird new to European ornithology, accompanying another feminine personification, manages a little more symbolic force, though to gain that force, the natural history must be distorted. The general deity of Seward’s Elegy, watching over Cook, is Humanity, changed in a later edition to Benevolence. In the first edition, Humanity appears thus: Lo!—deck’d with vermeil youth and beamy grace, Hope in her step, and gladness in her face, Light on the icy rock, with outstretch’d hands, The Goddess of the new Columbus stands. Round her bright head the plumy Peterels soar, Blue as her robe, that sweeps the frozen shore….11

Two features of this species stand out here: the petrels are blue and they soar. Both aspects, colour and height in the sky, can connect with heaven, but more particularly blue invokes Hope, explicitly named. The use of blue for hope has precedent, for example, in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where, in Book One’s House of Holiness, we meet the virgin Faith and then ‘Her younger sister, that Speranza hight, / Was clad in blew, that her beseemed well’ (1.10.14).12 In Seward’s poem, the unfamiliar bird is given some meaning by traditional associations of colour and positioning. To create the effect, however, Seward has had to distort the observations of nature. Her footnote indicates, of the petrel, that ‘its neck and tail are white, and its wings of a bright blue’. In Cook’s published journal, there are quite a few references to these ‘blue peterels’, but the first major notice shows Seward’s distortion of the hue: Mr. Forster, who went in the boat, shot some of the small grey birds before mentioned, which were of the peterel tribe, and about the size of a small pigeon. Their back, and upper side of their wings, their feet and bills, are of a blue grey colour. Their bellies, and under side of their wings, are white, a little tinged with blue. The upper side of their quill feathers is a dark blue tinged with black. A streak is formed by feathers nearly of this colour, along the upper parts of the wings, and crossing the back a little above the tail. The end of the tail feathers is also of the same colour…. These blue peterels, as I shall call them, are seen no where but in the southern hemisphere, from the latitude of 28°, and upwards. (1:29–30)

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The birds are clearly what we would now label prions, one of five species of the genus Pachyptila, but as Cook notes, they are really more grey or blue-grey than blue. Another species mentioned later in the journal, labelled ‘Blue Petrel’ in the modern day, Halobaena caerulea, receives a mention noting ‘the ends of their tail feathers were tipped with white instead of dark blue’ (1:32), but they are no more overall blue than the prions. Yet blue is the symbolic colour and so must be foregrounded in the poem. These species of seabirds also, it should be noted, do not soar, but stick close to the surface of the ocean, a point mentioned neither one way nor the other by the journal, but ‘soar’ is a feature Seward needs to add for rhyme and connotation. References to birds already established within the western tradition possess more complicated referential power within the poem. When Cook finds some friendly New Zealanders, he leaves, as Seward’s footnote explains, ‘various kinds of animals upon this coast, together with garden-­ seeds, &c. The Zealanders had hitherto subsisted upon fish, and such coarse vegetables as their climate produced; and this want of better provision, it is supposed, induced them to the horrid practice of eating human flesh.’13 Among the creatures introduced are cattle: ‘Stern moves the Bull along th’affrighted shores, / And countless nations tremble as he roars’— this animal may indicate John Bull himself, that is England, asserting its power. A rooster and the goose provide the domestic birds. The former is named so as to suggest the invasion of European force and the dawning of enlightenment: ‘And sounds his clarion loud the Bird of day’—trumpeting and bringing light. The goose receives a feminine personification: ‘The downy Goose her ruffled bosom laves, / Trims her white wing, and wantons in the waves….’ The goose is a bird sacred to Juno,14 who, as the goddess of childbirth, might suggest the eventual arrival of British settlers on the island. The goose, clean, trim, and relaxed, provides a soft, domestic, feminine counterpart to the militaristic masculine rooster. Together, they foretell British settlement. Even so unlikely a bird as a goose has complex cultural associations to consider. One may interpret birds used metaphorically more surely. Cook himself becomes a bird in the verse paragraph that precedes the unloading of his ark of useful animals upon New Zealand’s coast, and of course, with the Noah imagery in mind, that bird is a dove: And now antarctic Zealand’s drear domain Frowns, and o’erhangs th’inhospitable main.

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On it’s chill beach this dove of human-kind For his long-wand’ring foot short rest shall find, Bear to the coast the olive-branch in vain, And quit on wearied wing the hostile plain.—15

The natives, it turns out, would rather make dinner of than peace with their British visitors. But the dove functions in complex fashion, linking in one direction as an emblem of peace, and making Cook a man of peace, and in the other direction linking to his seafaring and introduction of animals to the land. Seward’s Elegy on Captain Cook has its best symbolic success with traditional rather than exotic birds. Hanging around the neck of my argument for the difficulty of creating novel avian significance, however, is Coleridge’s albatross, an undeniably successful use of an exotic bird in late eighteenth-century poetry, investing a relatively unfamiliar bird with meaning that has lasted for two centuries. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner itself privileges novelty: ‘We were the first that ever burst / Into that silent Sea’ (lines 101–2).16 The problem of the meaning of the bird is itself foregrounded. Is this the bird, as the sailors speculate, ‘That made the Breeze to blow’ or one ‘That brought the fog and mist’ (lines 92, 96)? Whatever the bird may be, it is not much like an albatross except insofar as it is found in South Polar regions. Most importantly, there is a size difference. The northern royal albatrosses nesting on New Zealand’s Otago Peninsula (Diomedea sanfordi) have ten-and-a-half-foot wingspans (about 3.25  metres), with a body about a metre long. The more poetically named wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) has approximately the same dimensions. Such a size would rather inhibit the Mariner’s movements onboard the ship, and, as he leans over the rail to bless the water snakes, the bird’s corpse could not be dangling over the water to fall off, and sink ‘Like lead into the sea’ (line 293). John Livingston Lowes in 1927, trying to save the image for scientific accuracy, so that ‘neither ornithological fact nor poetic truth moults a feather’,17 notes a passage in George Shelvocke’s Voyage round the World (1726) that refers to a black albatross being shot. Lowes decides the reference is to ‘the so-called “sooty albatross” (once Diomedea fuliginosa, now, in scientific parlance, Phœbetria palpebrata antarctica)’ (206),18 a smaller bird—that is, with six-and-a-half-foot wings (two metres)—which ‘might readily enough, as I know from experiment, have been carried suspended from a sailor’s neck’ (207). One imagines Lowes, in the Museum of

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Comparative Zoology, trying on stuffed specimens of various albatross species for size.19 The switch in species, however, is desperate, and the corpse would still be unwieldy. The complex interplay of voyage accounts, ornithological facts, literary texts, and critical responses is worth further investigation, as, to gain its poetic power, Coleridge’s albatross must be simultaneously exaggerated and shrunken in magnitude, blackened and whitened, preserved and consumed. What the albatross cannot be is accurately observed. In terms of textual sources, Lowes may be correct that the original of Coleridge’s albatross was blackish. He makes a compelling case for Shelvocke as Coleridge’s inspiration. Lowes quotes William Wordsworth’s 1843 account of the creation of the Rime, in the prefatory note to ‘We are Seven’: ‘I had been reading in Shelvocke’s Voyages, a day or two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. “Suppose,” said I, “you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime”.’20 As Lowes notes, in reconstructing the decades-earlier conversation Wordsworth is consulting Shelvocke’s text on the spot (206). Indeed, Shelvocke describes other albatrosses seen off the coast of Patagonia as ‘the largest sort of sea-fowls, some of them extending their wings 12 or 13  foot’.21 The details from Shelvocke also in many ways correspond to Coleridge’s poem: In short, one would think it impossible that any thing living could subsist in so rigid a climate; and, indeed, we all observed, that we had not the sight of one fish of any kind, since we were come to the Southward of the streights of le Mair, nor one sea-bird, except a disconsolate black Albitross, who accompanied us for several days, hovering about us as if he had lost himself, till Hatley, (my second Captain) observing, in one of his melancholy fits, that this bird was always hovering near us, imagin’d, from his colour, that it might be some ill omen. That which, I suppose, induced him the more to encourage his superstition, was the continued series of contrary tempestuous winds, which had oppress’d us ever since we had got into this sea. But be that as it would, he, after some fruitless attempts, at length, shot the Albitross, not doubting (perhaps) that we should have a fair wind after it.22

Given the location off Cape Horn, the dark albatross must be the light-­ mantled albatross (Phoebetria palpebrata), now separated by ornithologists from the sooty albatross (P. fusca). It is visually distinguished by

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having a grey back, but otherwise it is almost all blackish brown, like the sooty, and of similarly smaller dimensions contrasted with the Diomedea albatrosses. Yet the fascination of the albatross as a poetic subject for Wordsworth and presumably for Coleridge is the large size of the bird— the feature that makes it notable. George Whalley explains the attraction: ‘apart from practical considerations of plot or versification, the albatross was exactly what Coleridge was looking for. It was a rare species of bird, of exceptional size, solitary, haunting a limited and strange and, for Coleridge, evocative zone, harmless yet by tradition beneficent.’23 Indeed, in describing the Diomedea albatrosses a few pages earlier, Shelvocke has exaggerated the wingspan to render the birds more impressive. Later critics push the dimensions even farther, as when Paul Fry, advocating for Coleridge’s source as ‘one of the smaller, grayish-black albatrosses mentioned in fact by Shelvocke’ contrasts these species with ‘one of the majestic white ones with a fifteen-foot wingspan’.24 The albatross dimensions must be increased by observers of the poem and the birds to be worthy of attention and imaginatively reduced to fit the source and the mariner’s torso. Albatrosses must be treated in the mind as one avian family to inspire the poem and split as to precise species for critical commentary. The colour also splits in two directions, and the birds must appear both blacker and whiter than in nature. If Shelvocke’s account is to be trusted, the second captain shot his bird because of its black colour. Yet that colour and motivation vanishes from Coleridge’s poem. The reader is left to assume the bird is white with that prominent alba- to start the name. Who can resist imagining the form of a giant white bird sitting upon the mast? In mist or cloud on mast or shroud   It perch’d for vespers nine, Whiles all the night thro’ fog smoke-white   Glimmer’d the white moon-shine. (lines 73–76)

One may safely say readers want the albatross to be white. Herman Melville does, in Moby Dick, in the chapter on ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’: ‘Bethink thee of the albatross: whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations? Not Coleridge first threw that spell; but God’s great, unflattering laureate, Nature.’ Lowes references Melville’s own footnote to this passage: ‘I saw a regal, feathery thing of unspotted whiteness…. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself; the white thing was so white, its wings so wide, and in those for  ever exiled waters, I had lost the miserable

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warping memories of traditions and of towns. Long I gazed at that prodigy of plumage.’ Ishmael also insists his strong reaction to the bird is not tempered by Coleridge: ‘For neither had I then read the Rhyme, nor knew the bird to be an albatross.’25 Of course, Melville in writing this has read his Coleridge and wants to project the size and whiteness back upon the poem. The poetic imagination wants to project those features back onto nature, too. In fact, no albatross ever possesses such ‘unspotted whiteness’. On the adult male wandering albatross, ‘The whitest of all albatrosses’,26 the trailing edge of the secondaries and primaries and the entire wing tips are black. Such complexities of plumage are not imaginatively convenient for a bird linked to the angels, no more so than the shades of brown and grey on the ‘disconsolate black Albitross’ that Shelvocke’s second captain shot were convenient for his musings upon ill omens. Even etymologically the albatross is not so pure. Albatrosses, Melville or his Ishmael feels, should have that purity of colour: ‘in the wondrous bodily whiteness of the bird chiefly lurks the secret of the spell; a truth the more evinced in this, that by a solecism of terms there are birds called grey albatrosses; and these I have frequently seen, but never with such emotions as when I beheld the Antarctic fowl’.27 Melville feels the term albatross should not properly apply to non-white members of the family, such as the Phoebetria albatrosses or perhaps some of those in the now newly constituted Thalassarche genus, which have distinctly grey heads and necks and black backs, wings, and tails. There is more complexity in nature than is dreamt of in poetic ornithology. The alba- implies whiteness to Melville and most who encounter the term, but that is a false etymology. The modern word, ultimately from Arabic sources, more immediately derives from ‘Portuguese alcatraz, to refer to the general class of sea fowl’28 with, so the OED notes, ‘alteration of the first syllable probably by folk-­etymological association with classical Latin albus white’. For literary albatrosses, as with Seward’s blue petrels, it is hard to resist simplifying colour schemes if the birds are to have symbolic value. The unity of colour makes them comprehensible and thus, for all their strangeness, familiar to our ways of thinking. Other types of familiarity are achieved in a more straightforward way, even with such an ungainly bird as an albatross. Coleridge gives his bird its value in the poem and makes it more intellectually digestible to his readers in part by domesticating it. One of the first things we find out about the albatross is that ‘It ate the food it ne’er had eat’ (line 67 in the 1817 version)29—or more precisely but just as unlikely in the 1798 version ‘The

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Marineres gave it biscuit-worms’ (line 65). Here, Coleridge explicitly presents its behaviour as unnatural. Nor are the physical abilities of the bird possible: ‘In mist or cloud on mast or shroud / It perch’d for vespers nine’ (lines 73–74). Albatrosses cannot perch. Coleridge may not have known that, but why add that particular detail? Tim Low’s recent book on bird evolution, Where Song Began, provides relevant information: ‘All the world’s birds have been arranged into more than forty orders, but more than half of all species alive today, and a large majority of individuals, fall into just one—that of the perching birds, order Passeriformes, also known as passerines. They are the outstanding success story among birds, taking their name from the sparrow, which is passer in Latin.’30 Tim Low goes on to quote Alfred Russel Wallace on the subject in 1856: ‘The Passerine order comprises at once the most perfect, the most beautiful, and the most familiar of birds. … we therefore involuntarily derive from them that ideal or typical form of animal life with which we connect the general term, Bird.’31 John Livingston Lowes acknowledges that some readers may complain that Coleridge refigures the albatross ‘as if it had the tastes and the dimensions of a wren’ (207). Lowes’s exaggeration attempts to disarm reproof, but Coleridge does take the albatross and domesticate it to a perching bird taking food at human hands, like a familiar sparrow. That reshaping confirms the virtue of the bird. Eighteenth-century explorer-journalists and poets approach exotic birds from different angles, making the migration of birds from one type of text to the other problematic. Sailors could have their poetic moods in responding to the birds they encountered. On the whole, however, their response to the unknown was more straightforward, and a strange fowl landing on a ship provoked contemplations not of what it eats, but when it is to be eaten. William Empson, extending and perhaps parodying Lowes’s investigations, reacts to the central action of Coleridge’s poem as follows: Nobody who had been reading travellers’ reports in bulk could doubt the motive of the mariner after that; he shot it for food. All good explorers try out new sources of food; it is part of their scientific aspect, which gives them the dignity of Faust; and the darker Albatross mentioned in the anecdote of Shelvocke, which is just small enough to be hung round a man’s neck, does, I am told, make a tolerable soup which would help to keep off scurvy. Probably this soup was made and drunk, so that only the externals of the Albatross were hung round the Mariner’s neck later on; it would be easier to do.32

Empson’s argument, soup and all, is swallowed as sincere by Warren Stevenson, even as he argues against it.33 Empson’s account is read as

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more tongue-in-cheek by Paul Fry, referring to ‘Empson in his best deadpan’ here.34 Poets have other ways to make exotic birds more digestible, simplifying their characteristics and reformulating them more towards the norm of birds. Certainly, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner managed to give its bird symbolic power, but the poem remoulded the albatross’s form and habits to create a poetic success. In the long term, however, the cultural position of the albatross does not follow Coleridge’s complexity of significance. An albatross, in the idiomatic expression, is a burden, something one wants to get rid of. Our cultural reaction has been reduced to the negative, not so far from what the mass of sailors on the ship feel when they change their minds and congratulate the mariner on killing it: ‘’Twas right, said they, such birds to slay’ (line 97). An albatross around the neck is what you want to get rid of. It seems possible to create a mythology for a new species, but not so easy to control that mythology. Late eighteenth-century British poetry had a difficult time with its exotic ornithology. The newly discovered places of the world and their wildlife had great appeal, but a scientific imperative could not readily merge with poetic dictates to create an accurate poetry of avian nature. Birds had to be tamed, reshaped in the imagination to fit the demands of poetry. Descriptions of birds tend to revert to purified images with familiar forms and associations. Even modern poetry can tend this way, as seen in one of the most famous American ornithological poems, May Swenson’s ‘Goodbye, Goldeneye’ (1984). The waterbirds here form a list of loss in the face of the ‘steam shovel, bulldozer, cement mixer’ that will soon appear: So, goodbye, goldeneye, and grebe and scaup and loon. …  Goodbye, kingfisher, little green, black-crowned heron, snowy egret. And, goodbye, oh faithful pair of swans that used to glide—god and goddess shapes of purity—over the wide water.35

The white of the Mute Swans (Cygnus olor, introduced to North America from Europe, unlike the other, native birds in the poem) can, conventionally, stand for purity. For all that John Aikin was complaining two hundred and forty years ago about the narrow poetic ways in which nature is repeatedly represented, poets observing the avian world still cannot avoid those traditions. Within Swenson’s poem, after all, this last appearance of that final pair of birds is, predictably enough, their swan song.

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Notes 1. J[ohn] Aikin, An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry (Warrington: J. Johnson, 1777), 1–2. 2. C.  T. O. [Henry Headley], ‘Mr. Pennant’s Zoology considered,’ Gentleman’s Magazine 56 (1786): 839. 3. [Henry Headley], An Invocation to Melancholy. A Fragment (Oxford: [no publ.], 1785), 12. 4. Josep del Hoyo, Andrew Elliott, and Jordi Sargatal, eds., Handbook of the Birds of the World (Barcelona: Lynx Edicions, 1992), 1:222. 5. Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917), trans. Lee T.  Lemon and Marion J. Reis, in Critical Theory since Plato, 3rd ed., ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005), 796–805. 6. Thomas Pennant, British Zoology (London: Benjamin White, 1768), 2:401, 407, 517. 7. James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole, and round the World, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777), 1:50. 8. Elsdon Best, Maori Religion and Mythology, Part 1 (1924; reprint Wellington: A. R. Shearer, 1976), 346–47. 9. [Anna] Seward, Elegy on Captain Cook. To which is added, An Ode to the Sun (London: J. Dodsley, 1780), 12. 10. The illustrative plate, labelled ‘Poe-bird, New Zeeland’, comes between pp. 96 and 97. In the published journal text, the bird is spelled ‘poy-bird’. 11. Seward, Elegy, 6. 12. Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, 11 vols. ed. Edwin Greenlaw et  al. (London: Oxford University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932), 1:127. 13. Seward, Elegy, 9. 14. See Benj[amin] Martin, Bibliotheca Technologica: or, a Philological Library of Literary Arts and Sciences (London: John Noon, 1737), 112: ‘Among the Birds, the Hawk was sacred to Apollo; the Eagle to Jove; the Goose to Juno….’ 15. Seward, Elegy, 8. 16. [Samuel T.  Coleridge], ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere,’ in Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London: J. & A.  Arch, 1798), 12. Quotations are from this first published version unless otherwise specified. 17. John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (1927; New York: Vintage, 1959), 208. 18. The Sooty Albatross is now in 2016 designated as Phoebetria fusca. 19. ‘I shall not thank by name my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology for expert information entrusted to a layman; they might not thank me’ (Lowes, Road to Xanadu, 484).

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20. Lowes, Road to Xanadu, 203. 21. George Shelvocke, A Voyage round the World by Way of the Great South Sea (London: J. Senex, 1726), 60. 22. Shelvocke, Voyage, 72–73. 23. George Whalley, ‘The Mariner and the Albatross,’ Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 44. 24. Paul H.  Fry, ‘Biographical and Historical Contexts,’ in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Paul H.  Fry (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 20. 25. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, the Whale (1851; reprint, New  York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 164–65. 26. Julian Fitter and Don Merton, A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 22. 27. Melville, Moby-Dick, 165. 28. Edward S.  Gruson, Words for Birds: A Lexicon of North American Birds (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972), 7. 29. S.  T. Coleridge, Esq., ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ in Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems (London: Rest Fenner, 1817), 6. 30. Tim Low, Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World (Australia: Viking-Penguin, 2014), 63. 31. Alfred R.  Wallace, ‘Attempts at a Natural Arrangement of Birds,’ The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 2nd ser. 18 (1856): 194. 32. William Empson, ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (1964), in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 22–23. 33. Warren Stevenson, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as Epic Symbol’ (1976), in Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 54. 34. Fry, Rime, 20. 35. May Swenson, ‘Goodbye, Goldeneye,’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, shorter 4th edition, eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 883.

Bibliography Aikin, John. An Essay on the Application of Natural History to Poetry. Warrington: J. Johnson, 1777. Best, Elsdon. Maori Religion and Mythology, Part 1. 1924. Wellington: A. R. Shearer, 1976. Coleridge, Samuel T. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere. In Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, 5–51. London: J. & A. Arch, 1798.

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Coleridge, Samuel T. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Sibylline Leaves: A Collection of Poems, 3–39. London: Rest Fenner, 1817. Cook, James. A Voyage towards the South Pole, and round the World. 2 vols. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777. del Hoyo, Josep, Andrew Elliott, and Jordi Sargatal, eds., Handbook of the Birds of the World. Vol. 1, Ostrich to Ducks. Barcelona: Lynx Edicions, 1992. Gruson, Edward S. Words for Birds: A Lexicon of North American Birds. New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972. Empson, William. ‘The Ancient Mariner.’ 1964. In Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Edited by Harold Bloom, 19–43. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Fitter, Julian, and Don Merton, A Field Guide to the Birds of New Zealand. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Fry, Paul H. ‘Biographical and Historical Contexts.’ In Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Edited by Paul H.  Fry, 3–24. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. Headley, Henry. An Invocation to Melancholy: A Fragment. Oxford: [no publ.], 1785. Headley, Henry [C.  T. O., pseud.] ‘Mr. Pennant’s Zoology Considered.’ Gentleman’s Magazine 56 (1786): 838–40. Low, Tim. Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World. Australia: Viking-Penguin, 2014. Lowes, John Livingston. The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination. 1927. New York: Vintage, 1959. Martin, Benjamin. Bibliotheca Technologica; or, a Philological Library of Literary Arts and Sciences. London: John Noon, 1737. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, the Whale. 1851. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Pennant, Thomas. British Zoology. Vol. 2: Birds. London: Benjamin White, 1768. Seward, Anna. Elegy on Captain Cook. To which is added, An Ode to the Sun. London: J. Dodsley, 1780. Shelvocke, George. A Voyage round the World by Way of the Great South Sea. London: J. Senex, 1726. Shklovsky, Viktor. ‘Art as Technique.’ 1917. Trans Lee T.  Lemon and Marion J. Reis. In Critical Theory since Plato. 3rd ed. Edited by Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, 796–805. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005. Spenser, Edmund. The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition. Vol. 1: The Faerie Queene: Book One. Edited by Edwin Greenlaw et al. London: Oxford University Press; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932. Stevenson, Warren. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as Epic Symbol.’ 1976. In Modern Critical Interpretations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Edited by Harold Bloom, 51–56. New  York: Chelsea House, 1986.

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Swenson, May. ‘Goodbye, Goldeneye.’ In The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter 4th ed. Edited by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, 882–83. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Wallace, Alfred R. ‘Attempts at a Natural Arrangement of Birds.’ The Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 2nd ser. 18 (1856): 193–216. Whalley, George. ‘The Mariner and the Albatross.’ In Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by Kathleen Coburn, 32–50. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967.

CHAPTER 12

Bird Metaphors in Racialised Ethnographic Description, c. 1700–1800 George T. Newberry

Animal metaphors were notoriously rife in Enlightenment ethnography and racial science. Most famously, certain non-Europeans—frequently African peoples—were compared physiologically and behaviourally with apes. As Justin E.H. Smith has recently argued, ‘the history of thinking about human-ape kinship is deeply interwoven with the history of the rise of modern scientific racism’.1 These early modern ape comparisons have been closely studied by numerous scholars. To some, such as Winthrop D. Jordan, these were the unfortunate result of coincidence: ‘it happened that Englishmen were introduced to the anthropoid apes and to Negroes at the same time and in the same place’, meaning it was ‘virtually inevitable that Englishmen should discern similarity between the man-like beasts and the beast-like men of Africa’.2 In subsequent histories the development of ape-like description was reconfigured as a more deliberate and detrimental phenomenon, often giving it a central position in dramatic perceptual shifts regarding non-European ‘others’ during this period.

G. T. Newberry (*) University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_12

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Dror Wahrman, in Making of the Modern Self, uses a chapter on philosophical investigation into the nature of the ape to argue that by the last decades of the eighteenth century the ‘distinction between humans and all animals was now insisted upon in ways that it had not been in the earlier decades of the eighteenth century’.3 Gustav Jahoda also perceives a ‘shift in perspective away from the question of the relationship between humans and apes, and towards an ordering of human races according to the supposed degree of proximity to apes [which was] indicative of a shift from Enlightenment values towards racial intolerance’.4 Other scholars present evidence suggesting that the relationship between apes and humans is important in comprehending the notion of humanity as a whole during the long eighteenth century. David Bindman explores the use of ape-­ likeness in eighteenth-century art and illustrations by those seeking to create an aesthetic hierarchy of humanity in which white Europeans were distinguished from black Africans by their lesser animality.5 Robert Wokler likewise investigates how changing understandings of the relationship between apes and humans in Scottish Enlightenment discourse brought an end to a particular ‘tradition of scientific speculation on human nature’.6 In more recent literature, the use of ape analogies has come to be seen as political as well as intellectual in scope: Andrew S. Curran, for instance, notes that such animal-related ‘slander’ directed towards Caribbean slaves in French discourse escalated notably in the context of slave revolts in Saint-Domingue in 1791.7 Clearly, discussions over the boundaries between humans and apes were common in early modern literature, and evidently reached a critical stage in the eighteenth century. It is demonstrated here, however, that other animal families also provided rich imagery for dehumanising non-­European population groups at this time. The ape metaphor having been thoroughly explored by scholars, this chapter suggests that concentrated study on the (to modern minds) more alien ways of thinking about human differences is also rewarding. It is the purpose of this chapter to explore how bird analogies, in particular, allowed eighteenth-century European observers greater opportunities to understand and figuratively represent the bodies, behaviours, and intellectual capacities of non-Europeans than did apes alone. Historians of eighteenth-century fashion have already noted how extravagant bird feathers were thought to emblematise difference and racial ‘otherness’.8 This chapter broadens that analysis to demonstrate how some of the most important philosophers, scientists, medical practitioners,

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and travellers of the period used references to birds in their works to support racialist conclusions. This is a chapter primarily about how human beings and their phenotypic and cultural differences were understood during the Enlightenment, but the study also draws upon recent developments in animal studies. The discussion of human variety in this period was inevitably entangled with the contexts of imperialism and colonialism. Much recent literature has identified a significant connection between these phenomena and attitudes towards the natural world in general. It has been noted that ‘imperialism has long been contingent on non-human animals’, and efforts have been made to uncover the hidden histories of animals within the framework of imperial history.9 This interest extends not only to physical creatures which once lived and breathed, but also symbolic animals. Scholars in animal studies have, for instance, explored linguistic parallels between slavery and animal domestication; state-driven violence and hunting; and the conquest of land and livestock farming—all components of typical colonial behaviour.10 In these accounts, actions taken against newly discovered lands and peoples, and common behaviours concerning animals, were frequently justified (and sometimes opposed) using very similar language and logic. Empire and colonialism were thus contingent too upon the strategic deployment of animalising metaphors to dehumanise and subjugate non-European populations: as Tobias Menely, paraphrasing Jacques Derrida, states, ‘the concept of “human rights”, with its promise of universal applicability, has “presumed the subjection … of the animal”, the exception. To be animalised—identified as a beast, swine, brute, vermin, or savage—is to be excluded from ethical consideration and juridical protection.’11 What tells us more about the use of animal analogies in racial theory, therefore, also sheds further light on Enlightenment ideas concerning animals, and the ways they were felt to differ physically and symbolically from human beings. This chapter thus illustrates some important symbolic and physical understandings of birds in Enlightenment discourse, using avian comparisons with human beings as a key point of inquiry. At the very end of the eighteenth century, bird analogies were highly relevant to the ongoing study of human variety. Charles White, described by Dror Wahrman as a ‘founding father in the pantheon of modern British racism’,12 published On the Regular Gradation of Man, and Other Animals in 1799. In this, White—an anatomist and midwife by trade—offered a comprehensive and repetitive breakdown of the comparative anatomy

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between black subjects and white subjects, proceeding bone by bone, organ by organ, faculty by faculty through the human body, and always returning to a singular refrain: that at each anatomical level the archetypal African more closely resembled the ape than the European. This is all linked to White’s fundamental conception of the world; a scientific elaboration of the great chain of being, represented most conspicuously by ‘facial angle’. He maintained there exists a: Beautiful gradation … among created beings, from the highest to the lowest. From man down to the smallest reptile … Nature exhibits to our view an immense chain of beings, endued with various degrees of intelligence and active powers, suited to their stations in the general system … the angle made by the facial line may be estimated as follows: that the European, from 90 to 80°; of the Asiatic, from 80 to 75° … of the American, from 75 to 70°; of the African negro, from 70 to 60°; of the orang, from 60 to 50°; of the common monkey, from 50 to 40°. It is less in the dog, and still more so in birds.—There is, therefore, a perfect and regular gradation in the inclination of the face, from the perpendicular line of the European man, to the horizontal one of the snipe or woodcock.13

While it is clear that apes play a significant part in his scale of being, most commentators have overlooked the entity which occupies the lowest place on White’s table: the snipe has been chosen as the most representative facial angle for birds. From this, then, can quickly be seen the potential impact of bird analogies in White’s worldview: to move a group of people closer to the bird kingdom in a scientific fashion is to move them closer to what was perceived as one of the lowest orders of being in the universe, and thus to move them even further from humanity than ape comparisons would do alone. It certainly does not take long for direct bird comparisons to appear in White’s text. They become particularly apparent in relation to his discussion of the human senses. White notes that ‘in those particular respects, in which brutes excel mankind, the African excels the European: these are chiefly the senses of SEEING,—HEARING,—and SMELLING’.14 These three capacities highlight the complexity of animal metaphors in ethnography at this point. Hearing is attributed to the ape-likeness of Africans, with White explaining that the ‘external ears of the Negroes are … small and round, and have no lobes. This is the case with many monkeys.’ Smelling, conversely, is attributed to dog-like features: ‘It is observable

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that negroes have wider nostrils than Europeans … But dogs possess this sense in the greatest perfection.’15 African animality, apparently, is not yet completely entrenched in the ape analogy, but instead is flexible, and can be evidenced with whatever commonly known animal provides the greatest degree of figurative meaning. Thus, when he comes to discuss eyesight, White draws not upon apes, who had little reputation for their vision at that time, but rather upon birds. He quotes German physician Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, stating that ‘“the olfactory and optic nerves, and those of the 5th pair, are uncommonly large in the African.” Neither Calmucks nor negroes, however, can be compared with hawks, eagles, and some other birds, in acuteness of vision.’16 When the common stereotypes of the apes fail to provide an adequate analogy for African sight, birds quickly become a useful source of comparison with animals, drawing Africans closer to the bottom of the chain of being. This is not, however, simply a shoehorned improvisation on White’s behalf, designed to plug a gap in his central thesis. White is responding to a tradition of medicine which argued that human beings are at their most vigorous and sensate when existing in the state of nature. This motif can be seen, for instance, in the 1704 work of physician Robert Pitt, who argued that the ‘Health, which is acquir’d by living according to the uncorrupted Dictates of Nature, is perfect beyond any Description … The Organs of all the Senses are perfect and clear from any kind of foulness. The Eye is able, like the Eagle, to view and regard the Sun … The Perception of all Objects is bright and distinct’17 The eagle is clearly a useful simile for the representation of pure, uncorrupted animal sight, and the comparison gives us interesting information about contemporary medical perceptions of the raptor’s physical capabilities. Moreover, it shows us another instance in which alternate animal senses could not be expressed using ape metaphors. The notion of superior sensory capabilities in a ‘natural’ environment was pervasive, and many examples can be found throughout eighteenth-century travel literature and natural history. These are most frequently found in relation to descriptions of Native Americans, whose continent had often been described as untainted and Edenic during the colonial era.18 The chapter ‘Reflections on the War with the Savages of North America’, taken from a 1767 compendium of travelogues, voices the thoughts of Colonel Henry Bouquet, who marched against the ‘Ohio Indians’ in 1764. Bouquet talks of the ‘advantages of these savages over civilised nations’, which he breaks into two categories: ‘natural and acquired’.19 Among those qualities the author perceives as being ingrained

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in the ‘Indian’ nature are their ‘piercing eye and quick ear, which are of great service to them in the woods. Like Beasts of Prey, they are patient, deceitful, and rendered by habit almost insensible to the common feelings of humanity.’20 Although these comments do not specifically invoke bird comparisons, the same relationship as advocated in Charles White’s statements above is clearly present: as the sense of sight becomes more animal-­ like, true human qualities are diminished. Earlier still, in 1704, Lionel Wafer used representations of visual difference in describing the populations of the Isthmus of America. Of special interest is Wafer’s description of a group he calls White Indians—‘though … not of such a White as those of fair People among Europeans’—whose apparently owl-like eyes ‘see not very well the Sun, poring in the clearest Day … yet when Moon shiny Nights come, they are all Life and Activity … running as fast by Moon-light, even in the Gloom and Shade of the Woods, as the other Indians by Day’.21 This alternate sensory capacity also leads to a direct animal comparison, as they are said to be ‘skipping about like Wild-Bucks’.22 The motif is quite recurrent. In John Lawson’s 1709 A New Voyage to Carolina, he describes Native American eyesight ‘as much strengthened and quicker, thereby, to discern the Game in Hunting at larger Distance, and so never miss’d of becoming expert Hunters, the Perfection of which they all aim at’.23 In several texts exploring American peoples, the act of and aptitude for hunting, at least out of necessity rather than sport, emphasises their closer proximity to the animal, to nature, and to natural environments. Another good example comes from John Newhoff’s Travels to Brazil, first published in 1732. A passage about the ‘Taypoyer’ people of that region states that: ‘They dwell for the most part among the woods, and live upon hunting, in which perhaps they excel all other nations; for they will shoot a bird flying with their arrows.’ This is followed immediately by the seemingly unconnected sentence: ‘So soon as a woman has conceived, she abstains from her husband; after she is brought to bed, she goes into the next wood, where she cuts the child’s navel string, with a shell, boils it afterwards with the after-burthen, and eats them both.’24 In fact, as several scholars have noted, this stereotype of easy, open-air woodland births is common in early modern ethnography, and often provided evidence for the supposed animal-like savagery of non-­ European populations.25 The relationship between heightened senses and animal nature is again upheld. The capacity to match and defeat birds in terms of hunting as described above is also a recurrent metaphor for many authors: it is a standard test

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for the skill and senses of non-European peoples, which simultaneously reduces them to the same natural historical sphere of knowledge. It is significant to observe that this relationship with birds in several instances provides a key distinction between African and American native populations in travel literature. In Francis Moore’s 1738 travelogue Travels to the Inland part of Africa, it is noted that ‘HERE is a sort of Screech-Owls, which in the Night make a very dismal Noise; and are taken by the Natives for Witches: If one of these Birds happens to come into a Town at Night, the People are all firing up at it; and as I do not find that they ever had the good Fortune to shoot any of them, the poor Creatures still continue in the Opinion of their being Witches.’26 This passage is loaded with interesting ethnographical bird-related meaning, but the key factor in this discussion is that, unlike the Americans described previously, the native Africans repeatedly missed their bird target. Other eighteenth-century authors also report the failure of African aim. Perhaps the most notable of these is Edward Long, whose infamous 1774 natural and political history of Jamaica has been described by Gustav Jahoda as a ‘watershed’ work in British racialism.27 Long also conferred on Africans superior sensory capacities: ‘their corporeal sensations’, he wrote, ‘are in general of the grossest frame; their sight is acute’,28 but it is ‘not correct; they will rarely miss a standing object, but they have no notion of shooting birds on the wing, nor can they project a straight line, nor lay any substance square with another’.29 The superior sight granted is thus rendered ineffectual, as the improved sensory data gathered is useless due to what Long saw as a racial inability to interpret and rationalise the input. The rendering impotent of ‘Negroe’ sight is significant because at the end of the eighteenth century the senses were hierarchical—and indeed had a long tradition of being so—within intellectual and scientific literature. Sander Gilman describes a scale of the senses, in which ‘the highest, [is] the realm of sight (and art), and the lowest, [is] the realm of touch (and sexuality)’.30 This metaphorical understanding has been commented upon by other scholars, such as Elizabeth Sears and Ludmilla Jordanova.31 Several eighteenth-century philosophers discussed these meanings at length: James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, for instance, praised the ‘two senses whereby we perceive beautiful objects … the senses of feeling and hearing’.32 Sight was deeply connected with the act of interpretive and intellectual understanding: it was the sense of art, and it was also ‘the icon of the rational … a rationality acquired through a physical distance from the object perceived’.33 Sight’s power was to remove the mind from the

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animal sexuality of close contact, while ‘the crude individual will perceive the world in a base manner, and this baseness will be reflected in the coarseness of his skin’.34 The implications for the crossover between racial and sensorial hierarchies become most obvious here. It would seem logical, indeed, that the medical and philosophical authors who consolidated racial thought into a scientific format would especially esteem sight above all other senses in their depictions of Europeans, who as shall be seen were often presented as the pinnacle of humanity in terms of intellect. And yet it was non-Europeans, whether African or American, that were most frequently claimed to have superiority in that faculty. The sight of non-Europeans was bird-like in that it did not connote any greater intellectual or artistic meaning: it was rather simply a physical, functional fact of their difference on a biological level. European authors were of course aware that certain animals possessed greater eyesight than a human, and they did not expect these animals to be accordingly intellectually equal or superior. Non-Europeans were similarly considered; with regards to the senses they were not being judged entirely on a human scale of difference. A strange kind of circular illogic had emerged: Americans were considered more animal in nature to many European observers because their eyesight and skill at hunting rendered them closer to the natural world, while Africans were more like animals because their eyesight and lack of hunting skill proved their bestial stupidity. Both had been removed from the traditional sphere of human anthropological observation and its associated vocabulary. They were viewed instead with the eye of the taxonomist. One obstacle many ethnographers faced in animalising non-Europeans was the fact that all such groups possessed one nearly incontrovertible claim to humanity: namely the capacity for speech and language. As Dror Wahrman has pointed out, by the 1770s the notion that apes could be trained to talk had been almost entirely discredited within most respected academic and gentlemanly circles, thus apparently damaging claims for the ape-like inferiority of population groups who did possess the ability to speak.35 In the bird, however, there was another animal that had been proven capable of forming human words, and of having a highly complex system of verbal communication itself. Erica Fudge has shown that ‘parroting’—the ‘repetition of words without a comprehension of their meaning’—was a significant trope in early modern debates over the key differences between humans and animals.36 Late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-­ century philosophy isolates the ‘rational soul’ as a

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fundamental point of definition for humanity, with physiological differences ‘always merely a sign of other, more significant, mental division’.37 The ‘parroting’ motif remained imbedded in European intellectual culture, and was notably employed by John Locke in his An Essay Considering Humane Understanding of 1690. His chapter ‘Of Words or Language in General’ begins: GOD having designed Man for a sociable Creature, made him not only with an inclination, and under a necessity to have fellowship with those of his own kind; but furnished him also with Language, which was to be the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society. Man therefore had by Nature his Organs so fashioned, as to be fit to frame articulate Sounds, which we call Words. But this was not enough to produce Language; for Parrots, and several other Birds, will be taught to make articulate Sounds distinct enough, which yet, by no means, are capable of Language.38

Parrots, then, were a benchmark against which human discourse was to be defined: the act of speech in itself was not representative of language, nor of intelligence. Critically for our discussion of racial metaphor, however, bird-like use of words was not confined to the avian kingdom. Some people also displayed parrot-like intelligence in their use of speech. For Locke, ideas preceded language: words were ‘arbitrary’ symbols attached to deeper concepts, or ‘sensible Marks of Ideas’.39 To use a word without comprehension of its meaning was to not fully engage in a ‘linguistic’ enterprise. It was, rather, to do something altogether more animal-like, as Locke went on to argue: ‘because Words are many of them learn’d, before the Ideas are known for which they stand: Therefore some, not only Children, but Men, speak several Words, no otherwise than Parrots do, only because they have learn’d them, and have been accustomed to those Sounds.’40 The potential implications of this notion for racialist thought now become clear: to repeat words emptily and without comprehension renders a person or people as less than human: as the early modern tradition implies, only the ‘possession of a rational soul precedes and allows for language and speech’.41 This becomes apparent in the eighteenth century through the heated debates over the intellectual accomplishments of the few educated black men and women in Europe. Francis Williams, a black Jamaican who attended university at Cambridge and was said to excel ‘in mathematics and the classics’, was used by several authors to argue that

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such individuals could in the right circumstances match and even exceed white Europeans with regards to intelligence and reasoning.42 This claim provoked David Hume’s now infamously racist footnote to ‘Of National Characters’, in which he vehemently belittled the intelligence of non-­ Europeans. ‘I Am apt to suspect’, he wrote, ‘the negroes, and in general all other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.’ The vitriol continues for another four sentences in a similar vein, before finally concluding: ‘In JAMAICA, indeed, they talk of one negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.’43 Drawing upon the philosophical tradition of parrots as vacuous imitators who speak from habit rather than comprehension, Hume dismisses Williams’s qualifications and accomplishments—indeed those of his entire ‘species’—in a single invocation of the motif. It is the killing-blow of his racist attack. Edward Long, in his natural historical survey of Jamaican society, repeated Hume’s claim, and indeed took it even further by combining it with a simultaneous ape analogy. He claimed it would be ‘astonishing’ to him if, with the right education, an ‘orang-­ utan should not be found capable of uttering sounds resembling the human, just as well as a natural idiot, or a parrot, can produce them without agency of thought’, since orang-utans do not ‘seem at all inferior in the intellectual faculties to many of the Negroe race’.44 Overall, then, this representation corresponds with his previous observations on black African sight: they are afforded the physical capacity of speech and language, but not the intellectual ability to use it in a way which would be considered fully human by many eighteenth-century observers. Accordingly, some African languages were said to resemble the sounds of birds. In Long’s work, the language of the Khoikhoi people, then labelled the ‘Hottentots’, is said to resemble the ‘gabbling of turkies’.45 This sentiment is repeated in Charles White’s anatomical work, which offers a paragraph of description culled from the works of three different travel writers: ‘The language, which frequently is almost the only thing that distinguishes the indolent Hottentot from the brute creation, is poor, unlike any other in the world … their language resembles the clucking of a turkey.’46 Turkeys here are instrumental in diminishing the humanity of particular groups and indeed come with their own set of tropes which further this significance. Oliver Goldsmith’s natural historical work, for instance, noted turkeys as ‘a vain, querulous tribe, apt enough to quarrel among themselves’.47 Yet the motif of bird-like languages reaches its most

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pronounced eighteenth-century form in Monboddo’s epic six-volume Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773–1787). Monboddo’s work is a complex one, but essentially it presents a progressional concept of humanity, with certain groups more advanced than others based on the complexity and artistic beauty of their language. Ancient Greek is considered by Monboddo to be the most beautiful of languages, while that of the North American ‘Hurons’ is the most proximate to the ‘language of inarticulate cries, by which the brutes signify their appetites and desires’.48 Bird analogies are used often to diminish the complexity and beauty of non-­European languages, and thus to increase the animality of those who speak them: it is supposed by Monboddo that humanity in its natural state ‘learnt first to build from the swallow … from the spider to weave; and from the birds to sing’.49 Thus he notes, of the music of the Hurons, that it ‘is of very small compass [and] does not rise above a fourth, the ordinary compass of the music of birds, from which, in all probability, it was copied’.50 It is not, however, only the language and culture of the peoples Monboddo determines to be ‘savage’ which is qualified using bird analogy. Even the Chinese, who were regarded by many European observers as being relatively civilised at this point, were differentiated from speakers of European languages in a similar manner. In establishing the superiority of ‘perfect’ Greek over Chinese, Monboddo writes: ‘the music of their language must resemble somewhat the music of birds, which is within a small compass, but nevertheless of great variety of notes’.51 This is something Monboddo compounds in his later work Antient Metaphysics, in which it is argued that early humanity ‘made songs in imitation of the birds. I am, therefore, persuaded, that the first languages were all more or less musical, as the Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit were; and as the Chinese and the languages of North America are to this day.’52 Chinese, he concedes, has a ‘good deal of articulation, and a wonderful variety of tones’; however, it is ‘altogether unfit for communicating matters of art and science’.53 In a discourse on a facet of human nature in which apes have only a limited relevance, birds here have become one of the central metaphors in expressing the deficiencies of entire populations. In Monboddo’s usage, the animalism of bird-like languages comes to represent the body more broadly, to the extent that Robert Wokler sees Origin and the Progress of Language as ‘contributing to the discipline of physical anthropology’.54 The difference between black and white people, for instance, not only becomes apparent through language, but is also imparted with proto-evolutionary rhetoric. Monboddo argued that ‘I

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have had occasion to observe, that a black that came from a country in Africa near to the settlement of Goree, when he was so old that he never learned English well, could not pronounce two mute consonants together … Thus we see, the progress has been from the use of single consonants in syllables to the use of two or more.55 This ‘progress’ towards less bird-like language is, for Monboddo, beyond a process of culture or education. It is also an emblem of the decline of animal interiority, of movement upwards on a chain of being. One would think the interpretation of Monboddo’s ideas as racial could be questioned by the cultural nature of language: an African in Europe could learn a European language from birth and thus escape the animalistic stigma placed upon them by Monboddo, regardless of bodily differences. The divisions created by his linguistic theories, however, take on an element of biological determinism under closer scrutiny. Monboddo writes: For the habits and dispositions of mind, and, by consequence, the aptitude to learn any thing, are qualities which go to the race, as well as the shape and other bodily qualities. And it is for this reason, that the offspring of a savage animal will never be so tame, whatever pains may be taken upon him, as the offspring of a tame animal … And, accordingly, Kolben, in his account of the Hottentots, tells us, that it is not possible to tame a Hottentot, and reconcile him to Dutch manners, though taken quite young, and bred up in the European way; and he says, the experiment has often been tried, but never succeeded.56

Physical variations thus come to be symptomatic of internal deficiencies: while bodily differences in Monboddo’s philosophy are climatic, and therefore potentially malleable, they are still stable enough to provide a concrete measure of categorical difference for several generations to come. Linguistic comparisons with birds take on a much more serious significance in this light. In The Complexion of Race, Roxann Wheeler argues that Charles White ‘contends that gradation among several races was a better principle than variety in one race. In his usage, gradation means that there are people with more humanity than others, a minority belief at the time.’57 In light of the eighteenth-century bird analogies offered in this chapter, this idea needs to be reconsidered. For many ethnographers, birds offered a rich vein of signification, more visible and established in European minds than that of apes, which could be used to diminish the humanity of people in a

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greater variety and sophistry of ways than using ape imagery alone. Bird-­ like stereotypes were recurrent throughout the century, and were used by natural historians, travel writers, anatomists, and philosophers alike. The academic debate over human variety has long been framed by the post-­ Darwinian world, in which the relationship between humans and other apes seems overwhelmingly logical. Although the physical similarities between humans and apes were readily apparent to eighteenth-century observers, by only examining the ape analogies we miss more alien elements of Enlightenment discourse which have now fallen away or into less common usage in racist parlance. And, to paraphrase Robert Darnton, it is often the most opaque, alien parts of a culture which tell us the most.58 It is true, of course, that the figurative language of birds in the eighteenth century offered a much richer range of cultural resonance than is recounted here. A soaring bird on the wing could represent the essence of freedom, but a pet canary in a cage could become an excellent analogy for human slavery.59 Comparisons between humans and birds might have served not only to dehumanise, but to elevate also. Birds of prey, as part of a recognised tradition in which ‘sovereignty has found its most potent symbolism in association with alpha predators’, had a deep legacy of connotation with nobility and power.60 The famous hierarchy of the fifteenth-­ century Book of St. Albans, which paired emperor with eagle, king with gyrfalcon, and so on down to the priest’s sparrowhawk, had long-since taxonomised this imagery.61 By the time Oliver Goldsmith came to discuss raptors in his natural history of 1774, it seemed only natural that he should think of eagles as noble, terrible, prideful, and to possess ‘an empire over their fellows of the forest’. Yet they are also ‘magnanimous … and only pursue animals worthy the conquest’.62 This common symbolic admiration for raptors, however, belies the fact that the eighteenth century saw the exponential growth of the systematic persecution and eradication of native British birds of prey as ‘vermin’ wherever they came into conflict with the commercial interests of increased sheep farming and game bird hunting.63 Raptors were ultimately only animals, although their behaviour or capacities could sometimes be understood in anthropomorphised ways: people in the eighteenth century had little trouble justifying their subjugation or extermination. There was a colonialist imperative at home as well as abroad, with wildlife and nature rather than racial ‘Others’ the victims. This parallel was even consciously observed by a few contemporaries: as Menely notes, referring to Alexander Pope’s poem Windsor-Forest: ‘By hunting animals … men are transformed into savage tyrants, and such

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tyrants in turn regard men as animals. The English swains treat birds and beasts much as the British army treats an annexed city.’64 As potent a symbol as birds were, they were rarely understood as legitimate beings entitled to an existence free from human interests in this era. The old Adamic law by which humanity claimed dominion over the earth and its creatures continued with little dissent, and indeed by extending animal qualities to non-Europeans eighteenth-century writers broadened their dominion even further. Non-European people were represented as animal-like by the concerted cultural efforts of anthropologists, ethnographers, and anatomists, and the sense of inferiority and difference furthered by bird metaphors in their description played an important part in their construction as dehumanised colonial objects.

Notes 1. Justin E.H. Smith, Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 137. 2. Winthrop D.  Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Williamsburg: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 29. 3. Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2004), 141. 4. Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), 53. 5. David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 190–221. 6. Robert Wokler, ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man’, in Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Peter Jones (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1988), 163. 7. Andrew S. Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: John Hoskins University Press, 2011), 207. 8. Caitlin Blackwell, ‘“The Feather’d Fair in a Fright”: The Emblem of the Feather in Graphic Satire of 1776’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36: 3 (2013), 371–72. 9. Aaron Skabelund, ‘Animals and Imperialism: Recent Historiographical Trends’ History Compass 11:10 (2013), 801. 10. Ingrid H. Tague, ‘Companions, Servants, or Slaves?: Considering Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010), 111–30; Tobias Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the

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Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33:4 (2010), 576; Skabelund, ‘Animals and Imperialism’, 802. 11. Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal’, 570. 12. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 130. 13. Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in Different Animals and Vegetables (London: C. Dilly, 1799), 51. 14. Ibid., 80. 15. Ibid., 81–82. 16. Ibid., 81. 17. Robert Pitt, The antidote: Or, The Preservative of Health and Life, And the Restorative of Physick to its Sincerity and Perfection (London: John Nutt, 1704), 75–76. 18. J.H. Elliot, The Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 24–25. 19. Henry Bouquet, ‘Reflections on the War with the Savages of North America’, in A New Collection of Voyages, Discoveries and Travels: Containing whatever is worthy of Notice in EUROPE, ASIA, AFRICA and AMERICA (London: J. Knox, 1767), Vol. II, 212. 20. Ibid. 21. Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (London: James Knapton, 1704), 107–8. 22. Ibid., 108. 23. John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London: 1709), 34. 24. John Nieuhoff, ‘Remarkable voyages and travels into Brazil, and the best parts of the East-Indies’, in A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts (London: John Walthoe, 1732), 143. 25. See Jennifer L. Morgan, ‘“Some could suckle over their shoulder”: Male Travellers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770’ The William and Mary Quarterly 54: 1 (1997), 167–92. 26. Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: D. Henry and R. Cave, 1738), 107. 27. Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages, 55. 28. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica … In Three Volumes (London: T. Lowndes, 1774), Vol. II, 383. 29. Ibid., 383. 30. Sander Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 35. 31. Elizabeth Sears, ‘Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival’, in Medicine and the Five Senses, eds. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 26;

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Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘The Art and Science of Seeing in Medicine’, in Ibid., 132. 32. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics. Volume Fifth. Containing the History of Man in the Civilised State (Edinburgh, Bell and Bradfute; London: T. Cadell and Jun. and W. Davies, 1797), 120. 33. Gilman, Inscribing the Other, 37. 34. Ibid., 38. 35. Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, 136–37. 36. Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 14. 37. Ibid., 7. 38. John Locke, Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: 1710), Book III, 1. 39. Ibid., 4. 40. Ibid., 7. 41. Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 14. 42. Londa Schiebinger, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 23:4 (1990), 401. 43. David Hume, ‘Of National Characters,’ in Essay and Treatises on Several Subjects. In Four Volumes (London: T. Cadell, 1770), Vol. I, 329. 44. Long, History of Jamaica, Vol. II, 370. 45. Ibid. 46. From ‘Dr. Thunberg’, ‘Gamon’ and ‘Spitsbergh’, in White, Regular Gradation, 67. 47. Oliver Goldsmith, An History of Earth and Animated Nature (London: J. Nourse, 1774), Vol. V, 180. 48. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and W. Creech, 1773), Vol. I, 6. 49. Ibid., 208. 50. Ibid., 496. 51. Ibid., Vol. II, 442. 52. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics. Volume Fourth. Containing the History of Man (Edinburgh, Bell and Bradfute; London: T. Cadell, 1795), 107. 53. Ibid. 54. Wokler, ‘Apes and Races’, 162. 55. Burnett, Origin and Progress, Vol. I (Second Edition, 1774), 505. 56. Ibid., 300–1. ‘Kolben’ is the Dutch surveyor of South Africa, Peter Kolbe (1675–1726). 57. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 293.

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58. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984; 2009), 78. 59. Tague, ‘Companions, Servants, or Slaves?’, 119. 60. Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal’, 568. 61. William Blades, ‘Introduction’, in Juliana Berners, The Boke of Saint Albans (Facsimile Edition, 1486; London: Elliot Stock, 1881), 26. 62. Goldsmith, An History of Earth, vol. V, 88–89. Sensory superiority is one of the first aspects of the eagle described here, interestingly: ‘The sight and sense of smelling are very acute.’ 63. Roger Lovegrove, Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s Wildlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 45–48; 116–40. 64. Menely, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal’, 576.

Bibliography Berners, Juliana. The Boke of Saint Albans. London: Elliot Stock, 1486; 1881 facsimile edition. Bindman, David. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Blackwell, Caitlin, ‘“The Feather’d Fair in a Fright”: The Emblem of the Feather in Graphic Satire of 1776.’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 3 (2013): 353–76. Bouquet, Henry. ‘Reflections on the War with the Savages of North America.’ In A New Collection of Voyages, Discoveries and Travels: Containing whatever is worthy of Notice in EUROPE, ASIA, AFRICA and AMERICA. 7 vols. Vol. II, 211–27. London: J. Knox, 1767. Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo. Antient Metaphysics. 6 vols. London: T. Cadell, T. Cadell, Jun., and W. Davies, 1779–99. Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo. Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols. Edinburgh: A. Kincaid and W. Creech, 1773–92. Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York: Basic Books, 1984; 2009. Elliot, J.H., The Old World and the New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Gilman, Sander. Inscribing the Other. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. Goldsmith, Oliver. An History of Earth and Animated Nature. 8 vols. London: J. Nourse, 1774.

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Hume, David. ‘Of National Characters.’ In Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects. In Four Volumes, Vol. I, 247–69. London: T. Cadell, 1770. Jahoda, Gustav. Images of Savages: Ancient Roots of Modern Prejudice in Western Culture. London: Routledge, 1999. Jordan, Winthrop D. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812. Williamsburg: The University of North Carolina Press, 1969. Jordanova, Ludmilla. ‘The Art and Science of Seeing in Medicine.’ In Medicine and the Five Senses. Eds. W.F.  Bynum and Roy Porter, 122–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lawson, John. A New Voyage to Carolina. London: 1709. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. Book III. London: 1710. Long, Edward. The History of Jamaica or, General survey of the antient and modern state of the island: with reflections on its situation settlements, inhabitants, climate, products, commerce, laws, and government. 3 vols. London: T. Lowndes, 1774. Lovegrove, Roger. Silent Fields: The Long Decline of a Nation’s Wildlife. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Menely, Tobias. ‘Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest.’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 4 (2010): 567–82. Moore, Francis. Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa. London: D. Henry and R. Cave, 1738. Morgan, Jennifer L. ‘“Some could suckle over their shoulder”: Male Travellers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770.’ The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (1997): 167–92. Nieuhoff, John. ‘Remarkable voyages and travels into Brazil, and the best parts of the East-Indies.’ In A Collection of Voyages and Travels, Some Now First Printed from Original Manuscripts. 6 vols, Vol. II, 1–328. London: John Walthoe, 1732. Pitt, Robert. The antidote: Or, The Preservative of Health and Life, And the Restorative of Physick to its Sincerity and Perfection. London: John Nutt, 1704. Schiebinger, Londa, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-­ Century Science.’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, no. 4 (1990): 387–405. Sears, Elizabeth. ‘Sensory Perception and its Metaphors in the Time of Richard of Fournival.’ In Medicine and the Five Senses. Eds. W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, 17–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Skabelund, Aaron. ‘Animals and Imperialism: Recent Historiographical Trends.’ History Compass 11, no. 10 (2013): 801–7. Smith, Justin E.H. Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

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Tague, Ingrid H. ‘Companions, Servants, or Slaves? Considering Animals in Eighteenth-Century Britain.’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 39 (2010): 111–30. Wafer, Lionel. A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America. London: James Knapton, 1704. Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-­ Century England. London: Yale University Press, 2004. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-­ Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. White, Charles. An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in Different Animals and Vegetables. London: C. Dilly, 1799. Wokler, Robert. ‘Apes and Races in the Scottish Enlightenment: Monboddo and Kames on the Nature of Man.’ In Philosophy and Science in the Scottish Enlightenment. Ed. Peter Jones, 145–68. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1988.

CHAPTER 13

‘The Incomparable Curiosity of Every Feather!’: Cotton Mather’s Birds Nicholas Junkerman

In 1702, in the ‘black month of December’, Cotton Mather buried Abigail, his wife of sixteen years. At her funeral he distributed improving books, with the twelve-line poem he had written in her honour pasted at the beginning. The first six lines transform his departed wife into a bird: Go then, my Dove, but now no longer mine; Leave Earth, and now in heavenly Glory shine. Bright for thy Wisdome, Goodness, Beauty here; Now brighter in a more angelick Sphœre. Jesus, with whom thy Soul did long to be, Into His Ark, and Arms, has taken thee.1

The grief that Mather expresses in his diary is profound and particular. The poem, however (in a mode that is common in Mather’s public reflections on tragedy), engages in a scriptural typification that generalises both the subject of the grief and the image that describes her. The dove, in

N. Junkerman (*) Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_13

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other words, seems to be part of a simple analogical formula. Leaving aside a discussion of Puritan grieving practices, would it make sense to say that this poem is actually about a bird? Does Mather’s use of a figural dove tell us anything in particular about the status of birds in American writing at the turn of the eighteenth century? I will argue that it does, but only when taken in the context of Mather’s other examinations of birds. The dove, and most particularly Noah’s faithful dove, is a commonplace in Mather’s writing, appearing not just in his expressions of grief but also in his letters to friends, his scientific reports, and his addresses to his flock. A careful examination of these bird writings will indicate how Mather adapted the age-old figure to a range of discursive contexts, some of them quite new. My approach recognises the growing importance of animal studies, and the value of building more complex histories of the interactions between human and non-human animals. However, Mather’s primary concern is always with the transformation of physical birds into discursive objects. In focusing on that tendency, my ultimate aim is not to describe fully how Mather understands the animal. Rather I want to show how attending to Cotton Mather’s birds reveals a surprisingly harmonious interaction between theology and natural history in early America. Mather’s most extensive writings about birds appeared in the early 1720s, in the final years of his life. They preceded by about a decade one of the signal achievements of early American ornithology, Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, the first volume of which was published in 1731. The publication of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America was still more than a century off. Writers on the subject have contested Mather’s place in this famous American ornithological lineage. In Elsa Guerdrum Allen’s major 1951 study, ‘The History of American Ornithology Before Audubon’, Mather appears only once. In a footnote to a discussion of the seventeenth-century natural historian John Josselyn, Allen remarks that ‘Cotton Mather was much interested in natural history’ and published ‘some paragraphs on the “feathered kind” … all with appropriate religious interpretations’.2 Allen’s account privileges a developmental narrative of early American bird writing in which credulity declines and accuracy increases as the eighteenth century proceeds. Her neglect of Mather (especially when contrasted with her lengthy account of Catesby’s life and work) makes it implicitly clear how unimportant those ‘appropriate religious interpretations’ are to this narrative.

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Kevin McNamara, in his 1990 article ‘The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800’, offers an alternative to Allen’s approach, and in so doing spends a good deal more time on Mather’s ornithological contributions. While he defers to Allen on the breadth of her contributions, he also suggests that her definition of ornithological study is overly restrictive, and thus misses important contributions to the colonial study of birds. In response to what he sees as an unnecessarily teleological approach, McNamara promises that ‘this article takes seriously the intentions of the early field reporters and the contexts in which they wrote, rather than extracting what predicts current ornithology and discarding the rest as eccentric’.3 In other words, he proposes an inquiry into those ‘“non-ornithological” discourses brushed aside in our desire to tell a (hi)story’.4 He largely keeps his promise, although in the case of Mather, McNamara is unable to resist identifying (and rewarding) what looks like a kind of modern discernment. In his reading of Mather’s physico-theological work, he notes approvingly that ‘[t]o his credit, Mather resisted wholeheartedly assenting to fantastic stories, even when they redounded to the glory of God’.5 This impulse to distinguish between auspicious scepticism and disappointing credulity remains something of a feature of Mather studies. Even as interest in his scientific thought increases and broadens, scholars continue to privilege his prescient rationalism on some topics (his support for smallpox inoculation is the classic example) and to regret his lingering attachment to an older providentialist system. Carla Mulford sees a link between this atavistic attachment and what she calls the ‘cultural lag’ between America and Britain. This lag, Mulford argues, was ‘exacerbated when church leaders such as Mather, well read in the new science, turned to occult interpretation rather than rational explanation’.6 Thus Mather’s commitment to the religious interpretation of natural data becomes both symptomatic and productive of colonial backwardness. This sorting approach to Mather’s thought makes sense if one hopes to trace the emergence of scientific rationalism (or the modern science of ornithology) in America. At the same time, it has a tendency to obscure the moments of compelling synthesis across Mather’s writing, which could only have been produced by his particular combination of attachments and interests, both ‘scientific’ and otherwise. Towards that end, I will examine how birds function as polysemous objects across the genres and forms of Mather’s late-career writing. Recent work in the editing and interpretation of some of Mather’s most important scientific and

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theological works has made it easier than ever to see the shape of his thought in this period. In particular, a massive editing project is finally bringing into print Mather’s vast bible commentary Biblia Americana. Thanks to the efforts of the editors of this project, a fuller picture is emerging of the breadth of Mather’s scientific interest and erudition, and the relationship of those studies to his theology. This essay proposes to consider bird material from the Biblia alongside his sermons and physico-­ theological writing from the same period. This effort to trace both the variety and consistency in Mather’s discourses on birds has implications beyond the refinement of an element of his intellectual biography. Mather’s birds—in their various guises as species, specimens, types and metaphors— are worth examining precisely because they help to highlight the intersection of genres and discourses in his early eighteenth-century-intellectual milieu. Mather is plainly drawn to metaphorical uses of birds because of their totemic Christian significance. Yet this theological investment is amplified and transformed, rather than eroded, by his engagements with natural philosophy. Rather than an epistemic struggle, I see a relatively calm and generative interaction between Mather’s natural and scriptural ornithologies.

The Physico-Theological Bird The most extensive evidence of Mather’s interest in the emergent scientific study of birds appears in his physico-theological treatise The Christian Philosopher (1721). In the thirtieth chapter of that book, entitled ‘Of the Feathered’, Mather covers a range of ornithological information, with a particular focus on physical structure and its relation to behaviour and life history. In this text, Mather acts almost entirely as an assembler and a reframer of bird data, rather than a primary investigator. The majority of his information on birds is culled from other published sources—sometimes redacted, sometimes reprinted verbatim. Thanks to Winton Solberg’s meticulous annotations in his edition of The Christian Philosopher, we can see that Mather relied primarily in this chapter on two earlier texts, John Ray’s The Wisdom of God and William Derham’s Physico-Theology. Of these two, The Wisdom of God is a particularly interesting source, given Ray’s established place at the origins of scientific ornithology. Ray had collaborated with Francis Willughby in the production of the pioneering Ornithology (1676), and it was Ray who edited it and brought it to press after the death of his friend. In the preface to the 1678 English edition,

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Ray famously promised that the birds treated in the text had been cleansed of any accumulated irrelevant information: we have wholly omitted what we find in other Authors concerning Homonymous and Synonymous words, or the divers names of Birds, Hieroglyphics, Emblems, Morals, Fables, Presages, or ought else appertaining to Divinity, Ethics, Grammar, or any sort of Humane Leaning: And present him only with what properly relates to their Natural History.7

It would be hard to imagine a project in natural history more frankly committed to what Foucault framed as the ‘[i]mmense reorganization of culture’ initiated by the turn into the Classical episteme.8 What Ray describes here is an explicit and polemical effort to separate the method and language of ornithology from the totalizing, worldwide system of linguistic correspondences. In this text at least, Ray found the primary use and pleasure of textual birds in the processes of examination, description and classification, while setting aside the associative pleasures of hieroglyphic correspondence. Mather was not, however, copying and summarizing out of Ray’s Ornithology. His source, again, was Ray’s later text, The Wisdom of God (1691).9 In that volume, Ray seeks to join his ministerial training with his curiosity, feeling himself ‘obliged to write something in Divinity, having written so much on other Subjects’.10 Ray’s conscious generic shift from natural philosophy to divinity represents at least a partial return to hieroglyphics, to the understanding of nature as signifying higher things. In The Wisdom of God, birds are instances and examples, condensations of their copious and self-sufficient presences in the Ornithology. Yet the obligation to experimentalist rigour seems undiminished. The variety of God’s arrangements for animal digestion is described in part by the author’s repeated dissection of birds’ crops, and a discourse on the God-given power of birds to sense number is verified by means of an extended egg-­ stealing experiment.11 This accords with Peter Harrison’s reminder that the central religious imperative of physico-theology was as much about investigation as it was about admiration. Following from the principles laid down by Bacon, the pious investigator was called not merely to marvel at the creation but to dig into it: ‘Scripture not only commends God’s works, William Derham reminded his reader, but also those “curious and ingenious Enquirers that Seek them out, or pry into them.”’12 Mather certainly sympathised with the compulsion to pry and furthered its ends.

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As a member of the Royal Society, he transmitted American ornithological observations to his English correspondents, speculating on the mysteries of migration and offering anecdotes about the vast quantity of pigeons in America.13 We have the occasional tantalizing hint that he may have himself dissected birds, (as in his discussion of the crops of male passenger pigeons), but it is unclear how much direct, physical prying Mather did.14 Certainly his continual habit of uncredited borrowing should make us suspicious of any implicit claim to self-generated empirical knowledge. Even when Mather is contributing avian material unknown to natural history, his work seems to lie in reading, digesting and reframing. Mather recapitulates both Ray’s and Derham’s delight at the fruits of dissection, marvelling along with them, for example, at the structure of the preen gland. However, a survey of all three authors’ books makes it clear that Mather’s discourse on birds has a different affective centre of gravity from its major source texts. He takes up the fruits of minute investigation, but his pleasure in them has more to do with ecstatic connection than with the intimacies of design. What is at issue here are the multiple formal possibilities of physico-theology and the design argument. In Ray’s Wisdom of God, the minuteness of the examples serves the purposes of natural philosophy, but the repeated links to divinity can come to seem less a means of re-demonstration than (to my mind at least) a kind of brutalizing catechism. The principle of the design argument is immediately apprehensible, one of its obvious virtues. Consequently, the proliferation of examples in Ray’s and Derham’s texts does not alter the logic of the conclusion—that God made the world. In fact, it may intentionally deaden the surprise of hieroglyphic connection, the pleasure of linking the sign to its maker, in favour of a focus on natural data. Mather takes a somewhat different approach. His textual practice in recapitulating previous authors consists in separating and reducing such observations, then linking them together with rhapsodies of his own invention, which rehearse the pleasure of hieroglyphic connection. To take a particular formal case, Ray avoids the exclamation point, Derham uses it sparingly, and Mather applies it liberally. On occasion, he transforms an observational line from the source texts into an exclamation. Derham’s remark, ‘And here it is observable, with what incomparable curiosity every Feather is made’, is followed by a semicolon—it is a pious introduction to the more important material of feather morphology.15 In Mather’s text, it becomes a rhapsodic interjection: ‘The incomparable Curiosity of every Feather!’16 An invitation to an investigation is

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transformed into an injunction to pause, to contemplate and to enjoy that moment of ecstatic realisation. Jeffrey Jeske reads these theophanic rhapsodies as a mask for an essentially mechanistic worldview. In his view, Mather’s persona in the Christian Philosopher is marked by ‘a lessening of the sacerdotal and affective preoccupations characterizing his other works, even those dealing with scientific topics’.17 In other words, such expressions of awe belie the depth of his commitment to the new science, and the ‘curiosity of the feather’ lies more in the delicacy of its mechanism than in its signification of the divine. Reiner Smolinski, with the benefit of his careful study of the Biblia Americana, emphasises Mather’s commitment to maintaining an orthodox position on scientific matters: ‘he manifestly struggled to maintain a theocenteric orbit even as he gravitated toward the trajectory of new cosmogonies rising in the Northern hemisphere…. Signs of storm and stress are visible throughout “Biblia Americana”’.18 Smolinski’s Mather is curious, enterprising, and anxious. Following this line of interpretation, we might think of Mather’s physico-theological exclamations as a passionate, almost reflexive response to the discomforts of epistemic drift. Mather, constitutionally opposed to the corrosive naturalism of Spinoza and the English deists, nonetheless feels himself led farther and farther away from the certainties of his fathers, especially on questions having to do with the nature of the creation and the organisation of the cosmos.19 This essay, in focusing on Mather’s bird writing, exposes a less fraught corner of Mather’s scientific interest. Consequently, it gives me an opportunity to take Mather’s exclamations of pleasure somewhat more at face value. In his meditations on the gentle dove, in particular, I find him moving rather casually and comfortably between physical and theological speculation. He certainly seems to take considerable pleasure in both. The nature of that pleasure can be best understood by returning to the sermons he prepared and published around the time that his Christian Philosopher appeared in print.

The Scriptural Bird The physico-theological elaboration on ‘the Feathered’ was part of a considerable late-career expansion in Mather’s natural historical output. Yet his intellectual growth in this moment was more accretive than transformational. This tendency to add to his discursive range, rather than to abandon previous modes, is made especially clear by the sermons he

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published in the last decade of his life. Even as he collected and reported contemporary avian observations, both in print and to his local and transatlantic correspondence networks, he expanded upon his typological and figural writings about scriptural birds. For the Mather of the 1720s, in other words, birds were both a curiosity and a pastoral resource. In his sermons, he made use of them primarily as figures for the nature and proper activity of the soul. In 1722, he published ‘The Soul upon the Wing: An Essay on The State of the Dead.’ At the centre of the text is an elaborate comparison between the death of the body and the hatching of an egg. This offers an occasion initially to denigrate the body and eventually to wonder at the resurrection of the discarded shell: ‘We shall see that which we never saw befalling a Broken Shell. It will not be lost; it shall be repaired & restored.’20 With another twist on the avian metaphor, Mather moves farther from the materiality of natural historical observation. In a similar vein, earlier that same year Mather published a sermon entitled ‘Columbanus, or The Doves Flying to the Windows of their Saviour.’ Here, as in the ‘Soul Upon the Wing’, the bird, and particularly the dove, is taken up as a vehicle for pious exhortation. More generally, the sermon centres on a rather elaborate play on the mutable significance of the biblical bird. Mather’s text is Isaiah 60:8, ‘Who are these that fly as a Cloud, and as the Doves to their Windows?’21 The vision of the returning cloud of doves initially conjures an apocalyptic association, wherein the coming of the kingdom would prompt a rush of souls to God. Mather expected the happy event imminently. Yet in the space of this sermon, he quickly reduces the scale of his address from the global to the individual level, building on an ancient analogy between soul and bird: ‘As a Bird which wandreth from her Nest, so is a Soul that wandreth from its GOD!’22 If that outcast soul is figured as a general bird, the returning soul is somewhat more particularly described—it is a dove, especially the gentle, ‘murmuring’ turtle dove, submissive and penitent: ‘Let my Soul be as a Turtle Dove unto thee, and O deliver my Soul from a multitude of wretched Circumstances.’ Mather credits this particular figure of the turtle dove to Psalm 74, and he complements it with the threat issued to the reprobate, another avian image from Ezekiel 39:4: ‘I will give thee unto the Ravenous Birds of every sort, and to the beasts of the Field to be devoured.’23 This division between good, cleanly birds and destroying, unclean ones structures the remainder of the sermon. Yet the terms of this dyadic structure are constantly changing, as Christ becomes a bird himself, a kind of sheltering brood hen, and then the goodly cedar of Ezekiel. Bad birds are similarly

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variable, constituting either a vicious threat to the safety of the faithful (eagles and vultures) or an unregenerate portion of the flock (cormorant, bittern, owl and raven). Ultimately, Mather’s ‘Columbanus’ might seem to be something of a pastiche of scriptural bird imagery, churned up as needed for the pastoral occasion. Birds, as an important part of the rich store of scriptural imagery, make convenient metaphorical vehicles for a message of repentance. The differences between this kind of textual work with birds and his physico-­ theology are significant. In one sense, this homiletic writing operates on a different temporal principle from Mather’s more explicitly natural historical work. There is, in rhetorical and intellectual terms, nothing to be worked out about these scriptural birds. As in ‘Columbanus’, their meanings are endlessly recombinable but also fixed, both by the bounded nature of scripture and the larger divine structure of nature. Consequently, some of Mather’s homiletic uses of birds are strikingly similar at both the beginning and the end of his career. He ends his ‘Columbanus’ with an injunction that hearers/readers should ‘Be not like the Raven that went out from Noah, and Fed upon Carrion. Be the Dove, which cannot be content at a distance from thy SAVIOUR.’24 More than three decades earlier, he had written similarly in his ‘Work Upon the Ark’ (1689): ‘You that instead of your old Entertainments in the House of God, are now Gormandising upon the Carrions of the world; O come back; do not play the Raven so…. O be those Doves, that cannot find a Rest for their Foot, any where but in the Church of the Living God.’25 The idea is ancient. Augustine makes quite a similar use of the raven and the dove in his Tractates on the Gospel of John: ‘If the ark symbolized the church, you see, of course, that it is necessary for the church of this world to contain each kind, both the raven and the dove. Who are the ravens? They who seek the things that are their own. Who are the doves? They who seek the things that are Christ’s.’26 Thus Mather, in 1722, is making active and urgent pastoral use of birds in ways that date not just from the beginning of his career but from the formative centuries of Christianity. How then, in Mather’s writing about birds, does this homiletic tendency to return to the past interact with his desire to catalogue and present new observations for a transatlantic scientific audience? One final example—that of the mysterious ‘water dove’— offers a way of thinking about how Mather managed the integration of these two major drives.

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The Water Dove In the context of his ongoing efforts to find new curiosities to report to the Royal Society, Mather maintained a correspondence with John Winthrop (1681–1747). Winthrop, like Mather, was the descendant of eminent colonial ancestors, being the great-grandson and namesake of the famous governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It is plain in Mather’s letters to Winthrop that the work of gathering American data and the life-­ long labour of maintaining and strengthening the personal affiliations of the colonial elite went hand in hand. Mather’s tone with his younger friend is warm, solicitous and ever so slightly fraught—he offers continual praise, little presents and teasing remarks, mixed with spikes of petulance about his correspondent’s failure to respond. Susan Scott Parrish has written at length about the affective dimensions of transatlantic correspondence networks, emphasizing how ‘these men understood their science to be generated from and preserving affective friendship, purified by apolitical pastoral associations and a “seraphic” love of nature and governed by an episteme of socially generous “candor”’.27 The concurrent publication of sermons like ‘Columbanus’ should serve as a reminder that Mather’s sense of the ‘pastoral’ and the ‘seraphic’ had more evangelical (and less genteel and disinterested) connotations than they might have for the bulk of Parrish’s correspondents, most of whom were active later in the century. Yet the primacy of the category of elite male friendship, and the sense that it both precedes and subtends all the other purposes of the correspondence, is evident throughout Mather’s letters to Winthrop. Their membership in the larger world of socially regulated scientific inquiry (Mather as a current Fellow of the Royal Society, Winthrop as a future one) was reaffirmed through the exchange of letters and objects. As Parrish puts it, ‘[t]he letter and the specimen gift were the medium of this transatlantic coterie’.28 The abstraction of both male affection and natural historical knowledge is solidified in the material of the letter, and (in the case of Mather and Winthrop) in the body of a dead bird. In a letter dated November 30, 1719, Mather asks that Winthrop forward him ‘as punctual a description as you can of your water-dove, that so my account may be authentic as well as punctual…. Yea, if you can, let it be written with a quill which the wing of the bird shall afford you.’29 Mather’s emphasis on minute observation and authenticity suggests a relationship between the form and the destination of the account. He sent a description of the bird as one of a packet of letters (now lost) to John

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Chamberlyn of the Royal Society, in February of 1720.30 Winthrop obliges, and then some, sending a description and a specimen: the male of a pair of ‘water doves’ (the female was apparently shredded by a cat).31 The species description Winthrop sends is thorough, but not, as Ray might have preferred, unmixed with hieroglyphic meaning: ‘The Hen is Blue & full of small White Spotts all over the Body. But the Cock has a fine Topple Crowne which Lookes better when they are alive. And has one of the Gravest Coulers of the Rainbow Under its Wings; and by its being spotted spek’t or Ring-Streaked seems to appertain to one of the Flocks of the Old Patriarch!’32 After observations on the flavour of the meat (‘tender sweet and good’) and on their vocalisations, Winthrop notes their habit of carrying cedar sprigs in their bills. With this, he returns to and emphasises his reference to Noah: Whether they Eate the Buds thereof, or it be the Emblem of that wood the Arke was made of, which they pull off or pick up under those never Rotting Trees to support themselves withal, I Leave you to Determine. Be sure they are one sort of Dove which anciently was Sheltered in that Vast Floate; and its very Rationall to Suppose so skillfull a Marriner and Wise Pilott, as Admiral Noah! was, would send forth a Fowle that could Swim as well as Flye.33

The description received, Mather replies in January: ‘I sweat under the load of your kindnesses…. I have assigned our dear Soogelande a very fair lodging in our Biblia Americana, with an honorable mention and character of the generous hand which like another Noah, sends him forth to us.’34 Here Mather teasingly hints at his endorsement of Winthrop’s biblical link. As he had promised Winthrop, he also placed a description of the bird in the Biblia. The text of that entry largely follows that of Winthrop’s letter, reprising his descriptions of the appearance of the male and female, their voice, flavour, etc. He is still concerned, it is important to note, with being ‘punctual’ in his transmission of bird data. Yet Mather’s purpose with this particular bird, in the context of his bible commentary, is to turn the material of natural history to the ends of the great hieroglyph that dominates his avian material. Prompted by Winthrop’s notion, Mather’s version of this bird will offer not merely a natural curiosity but a full-­ throated confirmation of the physical reality of the story of Noah’s dove:

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When they swim about our shores, they often come upon the Land and they are very frequently seen to have in their Bills, a Small-Branch of our long-­ lived Cedar…. Our Indians call them Coecoe-on-Sogelande; which is as much as to say, The Messenger at the Great Rain. This is a little surprizing. And my Friend from whom I have this Communication, together with the agreeable Sight of the Bird, concludes with this Remark, ‘That be sure, they are one sort of Dove, that found a Shelter, in the Ark; and it is Rational to suppose, that so wise a pilot as Admiral Noah might send forth a Fowl, that could Swim as well as Flie, on the great Occasion we have been appraised of.’ Upon the whole, I confess myself proselyted unto the Opinion, That This was the Dove. This, that I have now in my Study before me.35

Mather is evidently charmed by the way in which multiple currents, including his friend’s letter, Native American knowledge, the body and the beauty of the bird, and the supremely important material of scripture have run together in this moment. Modern readers may be less charmed by the association and more frustrated by this blue and white crested water bird’s failure to correspond to any known bird in existence today. A pure fabrication seems unlikely, given the corresponding descriptions by Winthrop and Mather, both of whom claim to have seen physical examples of the bird. It is entirely possible that further research, physical and/or textual, may solve the puzzle. Yet I think it is useful (if perhaps not satisfying) to point out that the issue of identification is not particularly crucial to the study of birds as practised by Mather. At least in the context of the Biblia Americana, he is not attempting to fix a taxonomic place for this bird. Rather, it is the sparking leap of association, brought on by the intersection of physical evidence, shared curiosity, and layers of writing that Mather values most. It is this element that typifies the syncretic presence of birds in Cotton Mather’s texts. That last repetition, ‘This, that I have now in my Study before me’, clinches, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, Mather’s celebration and defence of textual pre-eminence. Certainly, it was the emergent system of scientific observation and communication that made it possible to ground this reading of Genesis 8 in new physical data. Yet Mather is never entirely willing to assign importance to birds based on their novelty or their physical characteristics. His method always tends towards the correspondence of that physical discovery with the hieroglyphic past. Indeed, experiment in the Biblia Americana appears as a transhistorical, enduring category, and Noah himself becomes a type of the Christian philosopher. As Mather

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reminds us, the patriarch’s first emissary to find dry land, a raven, does not return. And so, Mather tells us: ‘The next experiment he made, was upon a Dove, a Docible Bird, and Sociable to Man.’36 For Mather, the wisdom of Noah takes on an ornithological aspect. The ‘wise pilot’ adjusts his experimental use of animals on the basis of his observation of their characteristics. The dove is selected for its docility. That characteristic will be loaded with metaphorical freight in other contexts, but here it functions as a practical, empirical consideration. Yet the real interest of Mather’s syncretic ornithology lies in his refusal to restrict himself to one mode of knowing. It is not the presence of the dove in Genesis, or its peaceful reputation, or the language of experiment, or the work of bird dissection, or even the sight of the bird on his desk, which is the ultimate object of his meditations. It is the textual moment of coincidence, the fact that all of the strands can only come together, and can only really operate, in writing, that produces the pleasure and the predominant significance of birds for Cotton Mather.

Notes 1. Cotton Mather, Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 7th Series, vol. 7 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911), 450. 2. Elsa Guerdrum Allen, ‘The History of American Ornithology before Audubon,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 41, no. 3 (1951): 458n6. 3. Kevin R. McNamara, ‘The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800,’ The William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1990): 212. 4. Ibid., 213. 5. Ibid., 217. 6. Carla Mulford, ‘“Pox and Hell Fire”: Boston’s Smallpox Controversy, the New Science, and Early Modern Liberalism’, in Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Mark Kamrath and Sharon M.  Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 15. 7. John Ray and Francis Willughby, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby (London, 1678), preface; McNamara, ‘The Feathered Scribe,’ 214. 8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 43. 9. According to Winton Solberg, Mather relied on the 5th edition of Ray’s text, published in London in 1709. Winton U. Solberg, ‘Introduction,’ in

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The Christian Philosopher, by Cotton Mather (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), liv. 10. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation, 5th ed. (London, 1709), preface. 11. Ibid., 29–30,137. 12. Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 167. 13. Mather’s pigeon observations were brought to the attention of the modern ornithological community through a series of articles in the Auk: Arlie Schorger, ‘Unpublished Manuscripts by Cotton Mather on the Passenger Pigeon,’ Auk 55, no. 3 (1938): 471–77; Frederic T. Lewis, ‘The Passenger Pigeon As Observed by the Rev. Cotton Mather,’ Auk 61, no. 4 (1944): 587–92; Frederic T.  Lewis, ‘Cotton Mather’s Manuscript References to the Passenger Pigeon,’ Auk 62, no. 2 (1945): 306–7. 14. Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher, ed. Winton U. Solberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 206–7. 15. William Derham, Physico-Theology (London, 1713), 374. 16. Mather, The Christian Philosopher, 194. 17. Jeffrey Jeske, ‘Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 4 (1986): 591. 18. Reiner Smolinski, ‘How to Go to Heaven, or How Heaven Goes? Natural Science and Interpretation in Cotton Mather’s ‘Biblia Americana’ (1693–1728),’ The New England Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2008): 307. 19. Winton U.  Solberg, ‘Cotton Mather, the “Biblia Americana” and the Enlightenment,’ in Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana—America’s First Bible Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal, Eds. Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 183–202. 20. Cotton Mather, The Soul upon the Wing: An Essay on The State of the Dead (Boston, 1722), 12. 21. Cotton Mather, Columbanus, or the Doves Flying to the Windows of Their Saviour (Boston, 1722), 1. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Ibid., 5–6. 24. Ibid., 22. 25. Cotton Mather, Work upon the Ark: Meditations Upon the Ark as a Type of the Church (Boston, 1689), 38. 26. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 1–10, trans. John W.  Rettig (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 131. 27. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 136. 28. Ibid.

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29. Cotton Mather, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, ed. Kenneth Silverman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), 300. 30. George Lyman Kittredge, ‘Cotton Mather’s Scientific Communications to the Royal Society,’ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 26 (1916): 45. 31. Kenneth Silverman, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 247. 32. ‘Letter from John Winthrop (New London) to Cotton Mather Describing His Gift of Sogelander Doves,’ December 29, 1719, Benjamin Colman Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 33. Ibid. 34. Mather, Selected Letters of Cotton Mather, 301. 35. Cotton Mather, Biblia Americana: America’s First Bible Commentary: A Synoptic Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, ed. Reiner Smolinski, vol. 1: Genesis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 644. 36. Ibid., 654.

Bibliography Allen, Elsa Guerdrum. ‘The History of American Ornithology before Audubon.’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 41, no. 3 (1951): 385–591. Augustine. Tractates on the Gospel of John, 1–10. Translated by John W.  Rettig. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000. Derham, William. Physico-Theology. London, 1713. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things; an Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Harrison, Peter. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Jeske, Jeffrey. ‘Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian.’ Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 4 (1986): 583–94. Kittredge, George Lyman. ‘Cotton Mather’s Scientific Communications to the Royal Society.’ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 26, no. 1. (1916): 18–57. Lewis, Frederic T. ‘Cotton Mather’s Manuscript References to the Passenger Pigeon.’ Auk 62, no. 2 (1945): 306–7. Lewis, Frederic T. ‘The Passenger Pigeon As Observed by the Rev. Cotton Mather.’ Auk 61, no. 4 (1944): 587–92. Mather, Cotton. Biblia Americana: America’s First Bible Commentary: A Synoptic Commentary on the Old and New Testaments. Vol. 1, Genesis. Edited by Reiner Smolinski. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010.

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Mather, Cotton. The Christian Philosopher. Edited by Winton U. Solberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Mather, Cotton. Columbanus, or the Doves Flying to the Windows of Their Saviour. Boston, 1722. Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708. Edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911. Mather, Cotton. Selected Letters of Cotton Mather. Edited by Kenneth Silverman. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971. Mather, Cotton. The Soul upon the Wing: An Essay on The State of the Dead. Boston, 1722. Mather, Cotton. Work upon the Ark: Meditations Upon the Ark as a Type of the Church. Boston, 1689. McNamara, Kevin R. ‘The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800.’ The William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 2 (1990): 210–34. Mulford, Carla. ‘“Pox and Hell-Fire”: Boston’s Smallpox Controversy, the New Science, and Early Modern Liberalism.’ In Periodical Literature in Eighteenth– Century America. Edited by Mark Kamrath and Sharon M.  Harris, 7–27. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005. Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Ray, John. The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. 5th ed. London, 1709. Ray, John, and Francis Willughby. The Ornithology of Francis Willughby. London, 1678. Schorger, Arlie. ‘Unpublished Manuscripts by Cotton Mather on the Passenger Pigeon.’ Auk 55, no. 3 (1938): 471–77. Silverman, Kenneth. The Life and Times of Cotton Mather. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. Smolinski, Reiner. ‘How to Go to Heaven, or How Heaven Goes? Natural Science and Interpretation in Cotton Mather’s “Biblia Americana”’ (1693–1728).’ The New England Quarterly 81, no. 2 (2008): 278–329. Solberg, Winton U. ‘Cotton Mather, the “Biblia Americana” and the Enlightenment.’ In Cotton Mather and Biblia Americana—America’s First Bible Commentary: Essays in Reappraisal. Edited by Reiner Smolinski and Jan Stievermann, 183–202. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010. Winthrop, John. ‘Letter from John Winthrop (New London) to Cotton Mather Describing His Gift of Sogelander Doves’, December 29, 1719. Benjamin Colman Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

CHAPTER 14

The Passenger Pigeon and the New World Myth of Plenitude Kevin Joel Berland

Once there were billions of passenger pigeons. Their astonishing mass flights in search of forage and breeding grounds left observers with a lasting impression of numbers beyond measure. The way explorers and colonists framed this phenomenon is telling: it was one of the most striking instances of New World natural bounty of nature. From the earliest days of discovery and the subsequent campaigns to promote settlement in the New World, the profusion of natural resources, especially food—game animals, fish, fowl, fruit, vegetables, and native grains—was a principal attraction. Reporting to Sir Walter Raleigh about his 1584 voyage to the coast of what would soon be named Virginia, Captain Arthur Barlow marvelled at the lush growth running nearly to the banks of a tidal river. The soil there was sandy: But so full of grapes, as the very beating and surge of the Sea ouerflowed them, of which we found such plentie, as well there as in all places else, both on the sand and on the greene soile on the hils, as in the plaines, as well on

K. J. Berland (*) The Pennsylvania State University, Jersey City, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7_14

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euery little shrubbe, as also climing towardes the tops of high Cedars, that I thinke in all the world the like abundance is not to be found: and my selfe hauing seene those parts of Europe that most abound, find such difference as were incredible to be written.1

Barlow’s terms—plenty, abundance, incredible variety—are early instances of the language of plenitude that runs first through exploration narratives and then through settlement literature. The doctrine of plenitude, a tenet of eighteenth-century natural theology, instances ‘the extent and diversity of creation … as illustrations of God’s power and benevolence’.2 The New World’s providential superabundance of resources—and especially food—served both to underwrite the colonial project and to foster a sense of entitlement among Euro-Americans, especially since (in their view) the resources were not properly used by the indigenous population. A signal manifestation of divine benevolence was the profusion of birds in the New World, figuring in every transatlantic description of the phenomenal variety of flora and fauna. John Brereton’s 1602 ‘Treatise, conteining important inducements for the planting in these parts’ listed the best reasons to settle in Virginia: good soil, plentiful game, and ‘Fowles both of the water and land, infinit store and varietie’.3 In the marshes at the confluence of two Virginia rivers, Captain John Smith observed, ‘more plentie of swannes, cranes, geese, duckes, and mallards, & diuers sorts of fowles none would desire’, again emphasising the infinite store and variety.4 Early writers about New France were similarly wonder-struck by nature’s plenty. Jean Alphonse de Xanctoigne reported in 1542, ‘Fowle there are in abundance, as bustards, wilde geese, cranes, turtle doues, rauens, crowes, and many other birds’.5 Marc Lescarbot wrote that the limitless avian population included ‘Partridges, Parrats, Pigeons, Stocke-­ doues, Turtle-doues, Blacke-birds, Crowes, Tiercelets, Faulcons, Laniers, Hernes, Cranes, Storckes, Wilde-geese, Mallards, Cormorans, white Aigrets, red, blacke, and gray ones, and infinite sorts of foule’.6 Tiring of a diet of water-fowl, Baron Lahontan’s expedition resolved to hunt ‘the Turtle-Doves’ in a nearby meadow: In the Neighbourhood of which, the Trees were cover’d with that sort of Fowl, more than the Leaves: For just then ’twas the season in which they retire from the North Countries, and repair to the Southern Climates; and

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one would have thought, that all the Turtle-Doves upon earth had chose to pass thro’ this place. For the eighteen or twenty days that we stay’d there, I firmly believe that a thousand Men might have fed upon ’em heartily, without putting themselves to any trouble.7

For promoters of colonial settlement, the plenty of the new lands bespoke a providential dispensation. Robert Johnson praised the ‘earthly Paradice’ of Nova Britannia, explaining that ‘the land yeeldeth naturally for the sustentation of man: abundance of fish, both scale and shel: of land and water-fowles infinite store’.8 In London, William Symonds preached to the Virginia Company about God’s expectation that his beneficence be seen and praised. Planting settlements, therefore, was a pious work, for it allowed Christians to witness and testify to God’s New World plenty: ‘The reason why God will haue his to fill the earth is, because the Lord would haue his workes to be knowne. Now in diuers Countries God hath his diuers workes, of hearbes, and trees, and beastes, and fishes, and fowles, and serpents, &c. which (if the people of God come not there) cannot praise the Creator’.9 Writers strained to communicate the vast extent of the avian population, registering their amazement at the ease with which wild fowl could be harvested for the table. Lescarbot reported one such occasion on a coastal island: Where such quantitie of them are … that it is a woonderfull thing, yea that which … will seeme to some altogether vncredible. When we were vpon our returne into France, being yet beyond Campseau, wee passed by some of those Ilands, where in the space of a quarter of an houre, we laded our barke with them, wee had no need but to strike downe with staues, and not to go about to gather vntill one were wearie a striking.10

The widespread effects of the myth of plenitude might have been limited by the example of the ‘Starving Time’ in Virginia over the winter of 1609–1610. ‘The founders of Jamestown were astonished by the profusion of wildlife in America. Even so, their colony nearly starved to death’.11 Still, colonial projectors continued to stress the fruitfulness of the ‘boundless’ territories; the anonymous author of the 1610 True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia discovered ‘in Virginia a sufficient meanes (in all abundance) to sustaine the life of man’, sustenance furnished by fertile soil and copious game. Moreover, ‘the riuers from August, or

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September, till February, are couered with flocks of Wildfoule … in such abundance, as are not in all the world to be equalled’.12 In a similar vein, Ralph Hamor declared, True it is, that the Land is stored with plenty and variety of wilde beasts, Lions, Bears, Deere of all sorts, (onely differing from ours in their increase, hauing vsuall, three or foure Fawnes at a time … I rather impute their fecundity to the prouidence of God, who for euery mouth prouideth meate, and if this increase were not, the Naturalls would assuredly starue: for of the Deere (they kill as doe wee Beetles in England) all the yeer long…. There are foule of diuers sorts, Eagles, wild Turkeis much bigger then our English, Cranes, Herons white and russet, Hawkes, wilde Pigeons (in winter beyond number or imagination, my selfe haue seene three or four houres together flockes in the aire, so thicke that euen they haue shaddowed the skie from vs).

After this early mention of passenger pigeons, Hamor lists a score of other birds, fish that crowd the rivers, and plenteous native crops.13 Fundamental to Hamor’s understanding of the natural world of Virginia was a tacit belief that resources were limitless, a view evidenced in his account of the unusual fertility of Virginia deer, a single day’s haul of fish that filled an entire frigate, and the flight of pigeons that darkened the sky for hours. A similar pattern may be found in early writings about New England, where John Smith reported ‘an incredible aboundance of fish, fowle, wilde fruites, and good timber’.14 Smith followed the same train of reasoning as other colonial projectors, assuming the natural productions of the earth were providentially supplied to suit the settlers’ needs. The New Plymouth colonists, searching for the best location to settle their community, discovered that Massachusetts Bay provided ‘the greatest store of fowle that euer we saw’, concluding it was ‘a most hopefull place, innumerable store of fowle, and excellent good’, with assured supply in fish, game, and other necessities.15 Passenger pigeons figured largely in accounts of New England’s abundance; William Wood describes their passage in New Englands Prospect as follows: These Birds come into the Countrey, to goe to the North parts in the beginning of our Spring, at which time (if I may be counted worthy, to be beleeved in a thing that is not so strange as true) I have seene them fly as if the Ayerie regiment had beene Pigeons; seeing neyther beginning nor ending, length, or breadth of these Millions of Millions. The shouting of people, the ratling of Gunnes, and pelting of small shotte could not drive them

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out of their course, but so they continued for foure or five houres together: yet it must not be concluded, that it is thus often; for it is but at the beginning of the Spring, and at Michaelmas, when they returne backe to the Southward.16

Similarly, Edgar Winslow describes ‘Ayre darkening sholes of pigeons’ that feed on summer berries in his poem Good News from New England.17 Some over-flights were seasonal migrations, as Wood asserts. Crèvecœur reports, ‘We have twice a year the pleasure of catching pigeons, whose numbers are sometimes so astonishing as to obscure the sun in their flight’.18 More often these mass flights were journeys in search of forage. Modern ornithology has established that the pigeons flew from feeding ground to feeding ground, consuming the mast that was their primary diet, nesting temporarily, and rarely returning to the same spot. The largest recorded passenger pigeon nesting area, according to Joel Greenburg, took up 850  square miles.19 This pattern of mass foraging and nesting encouraged the exponential growth of the flocks, for passenger pigeons could hatch more than one brood a year, until at the peak population there were an estimated five billion of them. The ornithologist Alexander Wilson calculated that the pigeons he had seen himself in the breeding grounds and flights during his 1810 expedition through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee numbered 2,230,272,000.20 Today, long after the death of the last passenger pigeon, it is hard to grapple with the immensity of the population and hard to conceive of the scale of what Mark Avery has aptly called ‘lost abundance’.21 The astonishing scale of passenger pigeon flocks was no easier to take in for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century observers. Indeed, without personally having witnessed the mass fly-overs, some writers were wary of trusting the reports of others. Although the Royal Society preferred eyewitness reports of natural phenomena, they were willing to publish second-hand accounts vetted by reliable correspondents, as when the Virginia naturalist Rev. John Clayton wrote in 1693, There’s the strangest Story of a vast number of these Pigeons that came in a Flock a few Years before I came thither; they say they came through New England, New York and Virginia, and were so prodigious in number as to darken the Sky for several Hours in the place over which they flew, and brake massie Bows where they light; and many like things which I have had asserted to me by many Eye-witnesses of Credit, that to me it was without

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doubt, the Relaters being very sober Persons, and all agreeing in a Story: nothing of the like ever happen’d since, nor did I ever see past Ten in a Flock together that I remember. I am not fond of such Stories, and had suppressed the relating of it, but that I have heard the same from very many.22

Clayton did not himself witness a mass over-flight in the Chesapeake, probably because the passenger pigeons required fresh forest tracts for foraging. In this way, first-hand observations were supplemented with the experience of others. The Swedish naturalist Pehr Kalm did witness a flight of pigeons ‘in numbers beyond conception’, adding that others had reported still more birds: ‘I was assured that they were more plentiful in a cold winter’.23 It is instructive to consider Kalm’s rhetoric: first, he asks his readers to imagine a practically infinite number—and then he asks them to add still more. An indication of the general public’s familiarity with passenger pigeon flights may be seen in their appearance in metaphor; a letter in the Maryland Gazette warned of the danger of the French fortifications along the waterways to the west of the English settlements, where the ‘agreeable Climate’ will tempt many Canadians, eager to avoid ‘the severity of tedious Winters’, to migrate in great numbers, indeed, ‘to flock thither like Pigeons’.24 Experiencing the air-darkening flights must have been exceedingly strange. Cotton Mather was sufficiently puzzled about the sudden appearance of innumerable pigeons to propose a curious theory about where the ‘Itinerant’ birds vanished to when they were not dimming the light of the sky. Philosophical Transactions, which published several summaries of Mather’s correspondence, mentioned that he ‘takes notice of vast Flights of Pigeons, coming and departing at certain Seasons: And as to this, he has a particular Fancy of their repairing to some undiscovered Satellite, accompanying the Earth at a near distance’.25 Others proposed less fantastical accounts of the birds’ movements, usually suggesting migratory patterns out of Canada. In 1729, Philosophical Transactions reported on Mark Catesby’s work towards a natural history of Carolina. Under the heading ‘the Pigeon of Passage’, it is noted ‘They are supposed to come far North of the River St. Lawrence’.26 William Byrd, who wrote of flocks ‘so amazingly great sometimes that they darken the Sky’, probably relied on Catesby when he observed, ‘These wild Pigeons commonly breed in the uninhabited Parts of Canada, and as the Cold approaches assemble their Armies, and bend their Course Southerly,

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shifting their Quarters like many of the winged Kind according to the Season’.27 It is only a short step from witnessing such abundance to concluding superfluity. The pigeons were so incalculably numerous, their flights stretched out uninterrupted for so many miles, and when they settled among the trees they were so densely crowded together that even the seemingly limitless forest could not accommodate them. The naturalist John Banister reported, ‘I cannot omit (though it be allmost incredible) to relate, that here are some years such clouds of pidgeons, they darken the air, the wind of their wings is like the noise of great waters, & they sit so thick, where they roost that their weight break down great limbs of trees’.28 Subsequent naturalists corroborated and elaborated on these images. The Carolina surveyor and naturalist John Lawson described ‘the great and infinite Numbers of these Fowl’ in the western territories where they come to feed on small acorns: ‘I saw such prodigious Flocks of these Pigeons … that they had broke down the Limbs of a great many large Trees all over those Woods, where they chanced to sit and roost’.29 William Byrd enriched his account of the 1728 expedition to fix the VirginiaNorth Carolina border with passages scavenged from accounts of earlier expeditions, such as the description of pigeons alighting ‘in such Numbers on the Larger Limbs of Mulberry-Trees, and Oaks as to break them down’. Byrd also complains that the pigeons consume mast that otherwise would feed the settlers’ pigs.30 Such comments emphasise the waste and damage to the woodlands inflicted by the pigeons. Despite the destruction the flocks left in their wake, their passage provided a wealth of meat for the table. Some observers reflected on ways of making use of the unparalleled resource; in his 1749 inventory of useful flora and fauna of British North America, William Douglass observed that the numerous ‘wild Pigeon, Pigeon of Passage, or ring Dove’ offered an important social benefit: ‘These are plenty at certain Seasons, all over America, and of great Benefit in feeding the Poor’.31 Harvesting pigeons was evidently very easy, requiring only that one needed to be where the birds happened to be. As Roger Williams noted in his 1643 ‘Key into the Language of America’, the indigenous people of New England spoke of the ‘pigeon grounds’ where the fowl bred and feasted on strawberries in the old fields. ‘They are a delicate fowle, and because of their abundance, and the facility of killing them, they are and may be plentifully fed on’.32 William Wood observed that in the spring pigeons roosting in nearby pine forests join nest to nest and tree to tree,

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‘so that the Sunne never sees the ground in that place, from whence the Indians fetch whole loades of them’.33 As such accounts make clear, pigeons were easily captured and killed. Wood’s descriptive term, ‘whole loads’, suggests a quantity beyond measure (though there is no historical evidence that Indians felt entitled to take more than they could use). Rather, Wood’s language reflects the settlers’ viewpoint, firmly grounded on the notion of a providential dispensation of plenty. All they had to do was to place a ladder against a tree in a brooding area and lift the young birds from their nests. One report from Canada will indicate the extent of such practices: A Mr. B. Russel was hunting in the woods in the beginning of last May, and found a large extent of ground, where the trees were universally covered with Pigeon nests, containing the young. On his return home, his account was not credited by his neighbours.—About a fortnight after, several of them accompanied him, and found his account did not equal what they there beheld!—A large extent of land of several miles, thro’ which they passed, (how much farther they know not) the trees on which were entirely covered with Pigeon nests. The young were mostly in their nests, but ready to fly. There was but one in a nest, still they took four dozen from a tree.— They took from 50 to 100 doz. in a day.34

When the pigeons were foraging on the ground or nesting in trees, it was a simple matter to knock them down with ‘stave’, as Lescarbot noted. Over a century later, Isaac Weld observed that the pigeons ‘are so unwary, that a man with a short stick might easily knock them down by hundreds’.35 What began in the seventeenth century as religious belief in abundance as a providential dispensation was secularised in the eighteenth century. The religious conviction that God had created new-world abundance to nourish dissenting settlers faded, but the perception of natural abundance persisted, as did the general sense of entitlement. The view of birds as commodities underwriting Euro-American development persisted; a 1786 survey of South Carolina’s wildlife boasts of ‘vast numbers of winged fowls found in the country, many of which [are fit] for human use and subsistence’. The useful birds include ‘wild turkeys, pigeons, black birds, woodcocks, little partridges, plovers, curlieus, and turtle-doves, in great numbers, and also incredible flocks of wild geese, ducks, teal, snipes, and rice birds’.36

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The most common manner of hunting pigeons was with fowling pieces, muskets that fired a charge of small lead pellets or pigeon shot. Their deadly practicality is illustrated by a newspaper report about a woman in Vermont, who ‘having for some days observed the pigeons to be very thick round a certain salt spring, near her house, charged a musket, and lay in ambush till a favorable opportunity presented for a shot, when on the discharge of her gun, she killed thirtyone fine pigeons’.37 Admiration obviously suffuses this late eighteenth-century narrative, but today we may wonder at the celebration of such thrifty slaughter. The benefits to the colonial diet were significant, and yet the hunt presented certain dangers. Not only could it be highly disruptive and noisy, but heavy gunfire had been known to set fire to people’s houses. A 1740 letter to a Boston newspaper complained: As the Pigeons fly early and wild, so the Town shoots this Week; tho’tless of the Infirm and Sick who after restless Nights may want sleep in the Morning; and forgetful of the need they may have of their Powder for Self-defence; and also of the Prints last Year which told us how the Town was once seen in a fearful Blaze by this same kind of Shooting.38

Another letter charged that immoderate gunfire damaged valuable orchard trees, ‘by the wantonness of Boys and idle Gunners, who spend much of their Time shooting them’.39 Newspapers occasionally reported accidental injuries caused by faulty guns or careless firing.40 A 1760 Pennsylvania act prohibited shooting in an urban setting: ‘no Person whatsoever shall presume to shoot at, or kill, with a Fire-arm, any Pigeon, Dove, Partridge, or other Fowl, in the open Streets of the City of Philadelphia’, or in the gardens, orchards, or enclosures attached to houses in the city or anywhere else in the colony.41 Shooting large numbers of pigeons was so familiar an experience that it became a journalistic metaphor. A letter in the loyalist Massachusetts Spy described a ‘seditious mob in Boston’ who ‘riotously stood in the way’ of British soldiers. They struck at them with their swords, ‘and afterwards fired them down like pigeons’.42 Pigeons were also captured live with large nets fashioned for this purpose, as Crèvecœur describes: We catch them with a net extended on the ground, to which they are allured by what we call a tame wild pigeon, made blind, and fastened to a long string; his short flights, and his repeated calls, never fail to bring them down.

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The greatest number I ever catched, was fourteen dozen, though much larger quantities have often been trapped. I have frequently seen them at the market so cheap, that for a penny you might have as many as you could carry away; and yet from the extreme cheapness you must not conclude, that they are but an ordinary food; on the contrary, I think they are excellent.43

Passenger pigeons were hunted and ensnared by amateur and professional alike; as Crèvecœur notes, they were a frequent market commodity. The ready integration of wild pigeons into the marketplace was no doubt eased by long-established traditions of domestic pigeon breeding (nearly every colonial farm and plantation had its own pigeon house). That nature supplied wild pigeons for the table was clearly an amazing feature of the New World. Interestingly, abundance could be exploited and commodified in various ways. The flocks inevitably left their mark on the landscape as they stopped to feed, roost, and breed. John Lawson noted that they roosted at night in trees ‘under which their Dung commonly lies half a Foot thick, and kills every thing that grows where it falls’.44 Similarly, William Byrd observed, ‘In their Travels they … wast whole Forrests in a short Time, and leave a Famine behind them for most other Creatures and under some Trees, where they light, it is no strange thing to find the Ground cover’d three Inches thick with their Dung’.45 Although a sense of destruction and waste runs through many accounts of the passenger pigeon, the abundance of dung could be viewed as an exploitable commodity. In 1756, a proposal for a consolidating peaceful and prosperous trade with the Five Nations set out to establish an official trading garrison for each colony. In addition to a monopoly on trade, each undertaker would be granted use of all the land in a radius of ten or twelve miles: With the absolute Property in all Mines, Minerals, &c. without Exception, and an exclusive Grant for all new Manufactories … for a certain Number of Years, such as the Making of Wampum, Pot-ash and Gun-powder, of which, if I am rightly informed, a Quantity sufficient to supply the whole Continent may be collected from those immense Beds of Wild Pigeons Dung, which has been increasing, for any Thing I know, since the Creation of the World.46

Pigeon dung, free for the shovelling and transporting, could easily be turned to profit as agricultural fertiliser or saltpetre.

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The harvesting of passenger pigeons for the table escalated in the eighteenth century as colonial settlements expanded, though it did not reach its peak until the next century. Few observers registered a general diminution in numbers, though some noted local shifts in avian population. Kalm records the complaint of old settlers that ‘there were not near so many birds fit for eating at present, as there were when they were children, and that their decrease was visible’. The quantity of game birds (he does not here mention pigeons) has diminished because of the clearing of the forests, and the exposure of birds to constant trapping and shooting.47 The New Hampshire clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap in 1792 recalled accounts of flights fifty years earlier in western New England, when between five hundred and five thousand birds roosted on a single tree. But, he adds, ‘Since the clearing of the woods, the number of pigeons is diminished’.48 Several others attributed the shrinking pigeon population to deforestation. An anonymous correspondent writing in the Boston Evening Post traced the decrease of several species of birds to ‘the Trees being too many of them destroyed near the Sea-Coasts and great Towns’.49 While some eighteenth-century authors noted the smaller numbers of pigeons in particular locations, few if any concluded that the population was approaching a perilous state. Rather, they recommended local measures to restore the supply, for instance, by placing limits on taking pigeons during the spring breeding season. In 1795, an anonymous correspondent wrote to a Boston newspaper approving legislation preventing overfishing of shad and alewives, and recommending a similar provision to ‘prevent the extinction of a no less useful source of livelihood to many of the citizens of this Commonwealth: I mean wild Pigeons’. Their numbers were threatened by wholesale slaughter that interrupted the natural replenishment of the flock: It is a fact that they have decreased in numbers for many years past, every year; and the reason is this: They spread around the country about the middle of April, in order to build their nests and lay their eggs. As soon as they appear, the pigeon-catchers lay their baits, and decoy them from their nests for a considerable distance around; and when any considerable number are collected, they either shoot them, or catch them with nets. By which means, their eggs and young ones are left exposed, and millions in the course of a season are destroyed.

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A law stipulating ‘that no pigeons should be shot, caught, baited, or otherwise destroyed’ during the breeding season (April–June) would restore the population to its former plenty.50 Local shortages notwithstanding, the common perception of a limitless supply of passenger pigeons persisted. The concept of species extinction was rarely evoked, perhaps because it runs counter to the fundamental tenet of providential nature, well explained in the notes to the first American edition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden: ‘As the works of nature are governed by general laws, this exuberant re-production prevents the accidental extinction of the species, at the same time that they serve for food for the higher orders of animation’.51 Though this passage refers to abundant seed production, the general law extends to other forms of exuberant reproduction. A general consensus about providential plenitude almost certainly prevented all but local concern about bird populations. As ecological historian Frank N.  Egerton recently observed, ‘American wildlife was often seen as too numerous to worry about their numbers’.52 Estimates of unabated flocks of pigeons continued well into the nineteenth century; language describing passenger pigeons usually echoes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers. In 1800, Isaac Weld provided an instance of the marvellous flights of ‘pigeon years’, relating a flight over Lake Ontario extending over eighty miles.53 In 1848, one ‘Professor Frost’ wrote in Graham’s Magazine that the passenger pigeon, ‘the marvel of the whole Pigeon race’, is a true ‘child of wild nature’. Its ‘chief wonder … is in its multitudes; multitudes which no man can number’.54 And in 1874, William H.  G. Kingston rhapsodised, ‘Flights of locusts are often seen passing through the air, like vast clouds, obscuring the sky. The passenger-­ pigeon of America appears in almost equal numbers. The accounts of their vast flights would be incredible, were they not thoroughly authenticated’.55 It was not until the last decade of the century that alarming reports were registered, though they were apparently not widely circulated. Scattered observers wrote to bird journals of the visit of a few pigeons where once there had been thousands, even millions.56 The final stages of the decline came remarkably quickly. The year 1900 marked the last recorded wild pigeon shooting. In 1914, the last captive passenger pigeon, an ancient female named Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo.57 Passenger pigeons were decimated by a two-pronged assault, both driven by the myth of abundance. Clearing the forests that once stretched from the

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Atlantic coast to the edge of the Great Plains was the inevitable outcome of the colonists’ view that they were meant to transform the wilderness into a fruitful land. There was little or no sense of how this would affect the pigeons that had flown in their incomprehensible numbers to feed on acorns, beech-mast, and the plentiful wild food that made their numbers possible. Further, indiscriminate killing of nestlings and mass slaughter of their parents seemed reasonable to people who never dreamed the supply would ever shrink or vanish altogether. Extinction, then, was the unintended consequence of a limitless human appetite for exploiting and consuming the miraculous natural wealth of the New World, turning abundance to their own use.

Notes 1. Richard Hakluyt, ed., The Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Robert Barker, 1599), 246. For parallels in the literature of discovery of New France, see A. W. Schorger, The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 3–4, 10–11. 2. Richard R.  Yeo, ‘The Principle of Plenitude and Natural Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, British Journal for the History of Science, 19, 3 (November 1986), 264. There is not sufficient space here to survey the historical and theoretical scholarship on the notion of New World plenitude; rather, my study will focus on the topos of plenitude in primary sources across multiple print genres over time, to demonstrate how the notion affected the general population. A few secondary references must suffice; seven decades ago, Howard Mumford Jones first called texts that promised New World colonists an infinite supply of resources ‘promotion’ literature, contributing to the drive for colonisation; The Literature of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964), 31. For a recent comprehensive survey, see Karen Schramm, ‘Promotion Literature’, in Kevin J. Hayes, The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 69–89. Clayton R. Koppes has usefully noted three key assumptions: that abundant unclaimed natural resources existed, that these resources were inexhaustible, and that it was best to use them immediately; ‘Efficiency, Equity, Esthetics: Shifting Themes in American Conservation’, in Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 231. For more on the myth of plenitude, see Catherine Armstrong, Landscape and

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Identity in North America’s Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745 (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); and Monica L. Smith, Abundance: The Archaeology of Plenitude (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017). 3. John Brereton, A Briefe and true Relation of the Discouerie of the North part of Virginia being a most pleasant, fruitfull and commodious soile (London: Geor. Bishop, 1602), 16–17. 4. John Smith, A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony (London: Printed for John Tappe, 1608), sig. B3r. See Kevin R. McNamara, ‘The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800’, William and Mary Quarterly, 47, 2 (April 1990), 210–234. McNamara observes that early colonial tracts commodified birds, listing them ‘primarily to assure potential settlers of an adequate food supply’ (210). 5. Jean Alphonse de Xanctoigne, ‘Here followeth the course from Belle Isle, Carpont, and the Grand Bay in Newfoundland vp The Riuer of Canada’, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation (London: George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Robert Barker, 1599), 240. 6. Marc Lescarbot, Noua Francia: Or the Description of that part of New France, which is one continent with Virginia (London: George Bishop, 1609), 259. 7. Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North America. Vol. 1 (London: Printed for H. Bonwicke, et al., 1703), 61–62. 8. Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia. Offering Most Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia (London: Printed for Samuel Macham, 1609), sig. B2r, B[4]v. 9. William Symonds, Virginia. A Sermon Preached at White-Chappel, In The presence of many, Honourable and Worshipfull, the Aduenturers and Planters for Virginia (London: Printed by I. Windet, for Eleazar Edgar, and William Welby, 1609), 71. 10. Lescarbot, Noua Francia, 259. 11. Cary Carson, Joanne Bowen, Willie Graham, Martha McCartney, and Lorena Walsh, ‘New World, Real World: Improvising English Culture in Seventeenth-Century Virginia’, Journal of Southern History, 74, 1 (February 2008), 39. Similarly, Timothy Silver observes that although the Jamestown settlers anticipated ‘an easy abundance in an Eden-like wilderness’, over the first winter nearly two-thirds of them died from disease and malnutrition; ‘Learning to Live With Nature: Colonial Historians and the Southern Environment’, Journal of Southern History, 73, 3 (August 2007), 539. 12. Counseil for Virginia, A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (London: Printed for William Barret, 1610), 30.

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13. Ralph Hamor, A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia (London: Printed by John Beale for William Welby, 1615), sig. D2r. 14. John Smith, New England’s Trials (London: Printed by William Jones, 1620), sig. B[1]r. 15. William Bradford, A Relation or Iournall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England (London: Printed for John Bellamie, 1622), sig. C[2]v, 21. 16. William Wood, New Englands Prospect (London: Printed by Tho. Cotes, for John Bellamie, 1634), 28. 17. Edgar Winslow, Good News from New England (London: Printed by Matthew Simmons, 1648), 8. 18. J.  Hector St. John Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer (Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1793), 36. 19. Joel Greenburg, A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1. 20. Frank L.  Burns, ‘Alexander Wilson. IV.  The Making of the American Ornithology’, The Wilson Bulletin 20, 4 (December 1908), 180. 21. Mark Avery, A Message from Martha: The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and Its Relevance Today (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 54. After detailed hypothetical reconstruction of breeding, feeding, and migrating patterns, Avery concludes that the primary cause of extinction was deforestation— habitat loss—combined with aggressive nineteenth-century commercial hunting, 169. Alfred W. Crosby, in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) attributes extinction to the disappearance of mast-­ producing ‘heavy woods’, noting ‘As the European frontiersman advanced, with torch and ax and livestock, North America became more suitable for sparrows and starlings, and less and less so for passenger pigeons’ (293). 22. ‘Mr. John Clayton, Rector of Crofton at Wake-Field, His Letter to the Royal Society, Giving a Farther Account of the Soil, and Other Observables of Virginia,’ Philosophical Transactions 17 (1693), 992–93. 23. Pehr Kalm, Travels into North America; Containing its Natural History, and a Circumstantial Account of its Plantations and Agriculture in general, tr. John Reinhold Forster, 2nd ed., Vol. 1 (London: Printed for T. Lowndes, 1772), 374–76. 24. From the Maryland Gazette, reprinted in the Boston Weekly News-Letter 2749 (March 13, 1755). 25. ‘An Extract of several Letters from Cotton Mather, D.D., to John Woodward, M.D. and Richard Waller, Esq; S. R. Secr.’, Philosophical Transactions 29 (1714–1716), 64. More empirically grounded, however, is Mather’s observation of the architecture of pigeon nests in The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, With Religious Improvements

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(London: Printed for Eman. Matthews, 1721), where he notes that the interweaving of sticks that affords both security and ventilation for the eggs, 188. 26. Cromwell Mortimer, ‘An Account of Mr. Mark Catesby’s Essay Towards the Natural History of Carolina and the Bahama Islands, with Some Extracts out of the First Three Sets’, Philosophical Transactions 36 (1729–1730), 428. In the completed work itself, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands, vol. I (London: Printed for Charles Marsh, Thomas Wilcox, and Benjamin Stichall, 1754), Catesby concedes, ‘The only information I have had from whence they come, and their places of breeding, was from a Canada Indian, who told me he had seen them make their Nests in Rocks by the sides of Rivers and Lakes far North of the River St. Lawrence, where he said he shot them’, 115. On migration from Canada, see also J. R. Forster, ‘An Account of the Birds Sent from Hudson Bay; With Observations Relative to Their Natural History’, Philosophical Transactions 62 (1772), 398. 27. The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover, ed. Kevin Joel Berland (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 157. 28. John Banister and His Natural History of Virginia 1678–1692, ed. Joseph and Nesta Ewan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), 355. 29. John Lawson, The History of Carolina (London: Printed for W. Taylor, and J. Baker, 1714), 141. 30. Byrd, The Dividing Line Histories, 157. 31. William Douglass, A Summary, Historical and Political, Of the first Planting, progressive Improvements, and present State of the British Settlements in North-America, vol. I. (Boston: Printed and Sold by Rogers and Fowle, 1749), 126. 32. A Key into the Language of America: Or, An help to the Language of the Natives in that Part of America, called New-England (London: Printed by Gregory Dexter, 1643), 93–94. 33. New England’s Prospect, 28. 34. The Connecticut Courant 26, 1381 (July 11, 1791). 35. Isaac Weld, Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797, vol. 2 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1807), 44. 36. ‘A General Description of the Animals, Fish, Birds, Reptiles, and Insects of South-Carolina’, State Gazette of South Carolina 45, 2425 (March 8, 1786). The ‘rice bird’ is most likely the bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus). 37. Vermont Gazette 9 (May 30, 1791). 38. Boston Weekly News-Letter 1893 (June 26–July 3, 1740). 39. Boston Evening Post 744 (November 13, 1749).

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40. Ezra Curtis of Stratford was grievously injured while pigeon-hunting when his musket burst; New Haven Gazette, and Connecticut Magazine 1, 18 (June 15, 1786). 41. The Pennsylvania Gazette 1634 (April 18, 1760). 42. The Massachusetts Spy, 1, 3 (March 21, 1771). 43. Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, 26. The dimensions of such nets are furnished in an advertisement for ‘Pigeon Nets, Eight feet wide, twelve feet long’, in Portland, Maine’s Eastern Herald (June 14, 1794). 44. Lawson, The History of Carolina, 142. 45. Byrd, The Dividing Line Histories, 157. 46. Proposals for Securing the Friendship of the Five Nations (New York: Printed and Sold by J. Parker and W. Weyman, 1756), 6–7. 47. Travels into North America, vol. 1, 291. 48. Jeremy Belknap, A History of New Hampshire, Vol. III (Boston: Printed by Belknap and Young, for the Author, 1792), 172. 49. Boston Evening Post 744 (November 13, 1749). 50. Republished from the Boston Independent Chronicle, in The Providence Gazette 32, 36 (June 27, 1759). 51. [Erasmus Darwin], The Botanic Garden … with Philosophic Notes (New York: Printed by T. and J. Swords, 1798), 135. 52. Frank N.  Egerton, ‘History of Ecological Sciences, Part 55: Animal Population Ecology’, Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 96, 4 (October 2015), 608. 53. Weld, Travels, Vol. 2, 51–52. 54. ‘Game Birds of America, No. IX.  The Passenger Pigeon’, Graham’s Magazine 32, 3 (1848), 185. 55. William H. G. Kingston, The Western World: Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North and South America (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1874), 200. 56. See, for example, Benj. T. Gault, ‘The Passenger Pigeon in Aitkin County, Minn., with a Recent Record for Northeastern Illinois’, The Auk 12, 1 (January 1895), 80. Gault notes that recently the passenger pigeon ‘has become extremely rare in Northeastern Illinois’. 57. Barry Yeoman, ‘From Billions to None’, Audubon 116, 3 (May–June 2014), 28–33; Greenberg, A Feathered River Across the Sky, 187; Avery, A Message from Martha; John H.  Schulz, David L.  Otis, and Stanley A.  Temple, ‘100th Anniversary of the Passenger Pigeon Extinction: Lessons for a Complex and Uncertain Future,’ Wildlife Society Bulletin, 38, 3 (September 2014), 445–50.

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Bibliography ‘A General Description of the Animals, Fish, Birds, Reptiles, and Insects of South-­ Carolina.’ State Gazette of South Carolina 45, 2425 (March 8, 1786). A Key into the Language of America: Or, An help to the Language of the Natives in that Part of America, called New-England. London: Printed by Gregory Dexter, 1643. ‘An Extract of several Letters from Cotton Mather, D.D., to John Woodward, M.D. and Richard Waller, Esq; S. R. Secr.’ Philosophical Transactions 29, no. 339 (1714–1716): 62–71. Armstrong, Catherine. Landscape and Identity in North America’s Southern Colonies from 1660 to 1745. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Avery, Mark. A Message from Martha: The Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon and Its Relevance Today. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Banister, John. John Banister and His Natural History of Virginia 1678–1692. Edited by Joseph and Nesta Ewan. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970. Belknap, Jeremy. A History of New Hampshire. 3 vols. Boston: Printed by Belknap and Young, for the Author, 1790–1792. Boston Evening Post 744 (November 13, 1749). Boston Weekly News-Letter 1893 (June 26–July 3, 1740). Boston Weekly News-Letter 2749 (March 13, 1755). Bradford, William. A Relation or Iournall of the beginning and proceedings of the English Plantation setled at Plimoth in New England. London: Printed for Iohn Bellamie, 1622. Brereton, John. A Briefe and true Relation of the Discouerie of the North part of Virginia being a most pleasant, fruitfull and commodious soile. London: Geor. Bishop, 1602. Burns, Frank L. ‘Alexander Wilson. IV. The Making of the American Ornithology.’ The Wilson Bulletin 20, no. 4 (December 1908): 165–85. Byrd, William. The Dividing Line Histories of William Byrd II of Westover. Edited by Kevin Joel Berland. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Carson, Cary, Joanne Bowen, Willie Graham, Martha McCartney, and Lorena Walsh. ‘New World, Real World: Improvising English Culture in Seventeenth-­ Century Virginia.’ Journal of Southern History 74, no. 1 (February 2008): 31–88. Catesby, Mark. The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. 2 vols. London: Printed for Charles Marsh, Thomas Wilcox, and Benjamin Stichall, 1754. Counseil for Virginia. A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia. London: Printed for William Barret, 1610. Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. Philadelphia: Matthew Carey, 1793.

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Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. [Darwin, Erasmus]. The Botanic Garden … with Philosophic Notes. New  York: Printed by T. and J. Swords, 1798. Douglass, William. A Summary, Historical and Political, Of the first Planting, progressive Improvements, and present State of the British Settlements in North-­ America. 2 vols. Boston: Printed and Sold by Rogers and Fowle, 1749–1752. Egerton, Frank N. ‘History of Ecological Sciences, Part 55: Animal Population Ecology.’ Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 96, no. 4 (October 2015): 560–626. Federal Gazette and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser 6, no. 839 (June 12, 1791). Forster, J. R. ‘An Account of the Birds Sent from Hudson Bay; With Observations Relative to Their Natural History.’ Philosophical Transactions 62 (1772): 382–433. ‘Game Birds of America, No. IX. The Passenger Pigeon.’ Graham’s Magazine 32, no. 3 (1848): 185. Gault, Benj T. ‘The Passenger Pigeon in Aitkin County, Minn., with a Recent Record for Northeastern Illinois.’ The Auk 12, no. 1 (January 1895): 80. Greenburg, Joel. A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hakluyt, Richard, ed. The Principal Nauigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, 2nd ed. London: Printed by George Bishop, Ralph Newberie, and Robert Barker, 1599. Hamor, Ralph. A True Discourse of the Present State of Virginia. London: Printed by Iohn Beale for William Welby, 1615. Johnson, Robert. Nova Britannia. Offering Most Excellent fruites by Planting in Virginia. London: Printed for Samuel Macham, 1609. Jones, Howard Mumford. The Literature of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. 2nd ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1964. Kalm, Pehr. Travels into North America; Containing its Natural History, and a Circumstantial Account of its Plantations and Agriculture in general. Translated by John Reinhold Forster, 2nd ed. 2 vols. London: Printed for T. Lowndes, 1772. Kingston, William H.  G. The Western World: Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North and South America. London: T.  Nelson and Sons, 1874. Koppes, Clayton R. ‘Efficiency, Equity, Esthetics: Shifting Themes in American Conservation.’ In The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History. Edited by Donald Worster: 230–51. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Lawson, John. The History of Carolina. London: Printed for W.  Taylor, and J. Baker, 1714.

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Lescarbot, Marc. Noua Francia: Or the Description of that part of New France, which is one continent with Virginia. London: George Bishop, 1609. Lom d’Arce, Louis Armand de, Baron de Lahontan. New Voyages to North America. 2 vols. London: Printed for H. Bonwicke, et al., 1703. McNamara, Kevin R. ‘The Feathered Scribe: The Discourses of American Ornithology before 1800.’ William and Mary Quarterly, 47, no. 2 (April 1990): 210–34. Mather, Cotton. The Christian Philosopher: A Collection of the Best Discoveries in Nature, With Religious Improvements. London: Printed for Eman. Matthews, 1721. ‘Mr. John Clayton, Rector of Crofton at Wake-Field, His Letter to the Royal Society, Giving a Farther Account of the Soil, and Other Observables of Virginia.’ Philosophical Transactions 17, no. 206 (1693): 992–93. Mortimer, Cromwell. ‘An Account of Mr. Mark Catesby’s Essay Towards the Natural History of Carolina and the Bahama Islands, with Some Extracts out of the First Three Sets.’ Philosophical Transactions 36, no. 415 (1729–1730): 425–34. New Haven Gazette, and Connecticut Magazine 1, no. 18 (June 15, 1786). ‘Pigeon Nets, Eight feet wide, twelve feet long.’ Eastern Herald (June 14, 1794). Proposals for Securing the Friendship of the Five Nations. New  York: Printed and Sold by J. Parker and W. Weyman, 1756. Schorger, A. W. The Passenger Pigeon: Its Natural History and Extinction. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Schramm, Karen. ‘Promotion Literature.’ In The Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature. Edited by Kevin J.  Hayes, 69–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Schulz John H., David L. Otis, and Stanley A. Temple. ‘100th Anniversary of the Passenger Pigeon Extinction: Lessons for a Complex and Uncertain Future.’ Wildlife Society Bulletin 38, no. 3 (September 2014): 445–50. Silver, Timothy. ‘Learning to Live With Nature: Colonial Historians and the Southern Environment.’ Journal of Southern History 73, no. 3 (August 2007): 539–52. Smith, John. A True Relation of such occurrences and accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of that Collony. London: Printed for John Tappe, 1608. Smith, John. New England’s Trials. London: Printed by William Jones, 1620. Smith, Monica L. Abundance: The Archaeology of Plenitude. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2017. Symonds, William. Virginia. A Sermon Preached at White-Chappel, In The presence of many, Honourable and Worshipfull, the Aduenturers and Planters for Virginia. London: Printed by I. Windet, for Eleazar Edgar, and William Welby, 1609. The Connecticut Courant 26, no. 1381 (July 11, 1791).

14  THE PASSENGER PIGEON AND THE NEW WORLD MYTH OF PLENITUDE 

267

The Massachusetts Spy 1, no. 3 (March 21, 1771). The Pennsylvania Gazette 1634 (April 18, 1760). The Providence Gazette 32, no. 36 (June 27, 1759). Weld, Isaac. Travels through the States of North America, and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797. 2 vols. London: Printed for John Stockdale, 1807. Winslow, Edgar. Good News from New-England. London: Printed by Matthew Simmons, 1648.

Index1

A Aarsleff, Hans, 117 Abolitionism, 95, 100 See also Slavery Abraham (biblical figure), 202 Abrams, M.H., 85n1 Act of Union (Great Britain and Ireland) 1801, 29 Adam (biblical figure), 12, 224 Addison, Joseph, 58, 111, 133 Aesthetics, 61 Africa, 211, 222 African people, 212, 214–222 Agriculture, 103, 160, 175, 177, 185, 213, 223 Aikin, Anna Letitia, see Barbauld, Anna Letitia Aikin, John, 2, 53, 77, 193–195, 205 Akenside, Mark, 96 Albatross, 200–205 Albin, Eleazar, 152, 160 Alex (parrot), 131

Algiers, 136 Allegory, 26 Allen, David Elliston, 173 Allen, Elsa Guerdrum, 232 America, 117, 138, 196, 215, 216, 221, 231–243, 247–259 See also Native American people Anatomy, 5, 213, 224 Anderson, Robert, 93, 96, 97, 99 Andes, 63 Anglo-Saxon, 184 Animals behaviour of, 2, 177 distinction between animals and humans, 118, 133, 212, 218 (see also individual species) as food, 247, 249, 250 as individuated subjects, 2, 5–6, 17 as metaphor, 5, 213 as pets, 20–22, 29, 133 predatory, 115 relationships with humans, 20, 213

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 B. Carey et al. (eds.), Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32792-7

269

270 

INDEX

Animals (cont.) rights of, 95, 137 wild, 5, 21, 155, 205, 216, 249, 250 Animal studies, 3–7, 51, 55, 94–95, 145, 213, 232 Anthropology, 221, 224 Anthropomorphism, 2, 6, 55, 72–73, 94, 165, 187, 223 Antiquarianism, 174, 176 Ape, 211–215, 218, 220–222 See also Monkey; Orangutan Apostrophe, 96, 100 Aristotle, 56, 132 Armstrong, Edward A., 3, 4 Armstrong, Isobel, 57 Asia, 19 Asian people and language, 117, 214 Atlantic, 195, 240 Auden, W.H., 175 Audubon, John James, 232 Augustine, 239 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, 39 Avery, Mark, 251, 261n21 B Banister, John, 253 Bank martin, see Sand martin Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 51–65 ‘Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,’ 62–64 Hymns in Prose for Children, 58 ‘The Invitation,’ 59 ‘The Mouse’s Petition,’ 52, 58 ‘To Mrs. P[riestley], with some Drawings of Birds and Insects,’ 51–61 Barlow, Arthur, 247 Barnard, Toby, 21 Barn owl, 112

Barn swallow, see Swallow Barrington, Daines, 80, 173, 176, 178, 179, 182, 187 Bartram, William, 82 Bass Rock, 55 Bat, 198 A Battell of Birds’ (Anon.), 18 Beam bird, see Chiffchaff Bear, 250 Beau (dog), 7, 11 Bechstein, J.M., 113 Beetle, 250 Beilby, Ralph, 151–166 Belcher, Mr, 33n21 Belfast, 28 Belknap, Jeremy, 257 Bellanca, Mary Ellen, 175 Belon, Pierre, 152 Benedict, Barbara, 139 Bentham, Jeremy, 30 Bentley, Elizabeth, 93, 96–97, 99, 100 Beowulf, 183 Bereavement, see Death Best, Elsdon, 196 Bewell, Alan, 121, 125 Bewick, Thomas General History of the Quadrupeds, 154 History of British Birds, 81, 151–166 Memoir of Thomas Bewick, 154 Bible, 12, 31, 35n57, 224, 238, 239, 241, 243 Bindman, David, 212 Biodiversity, 99, 174 Birdcage, see Cages Birds behaviour of, 12, 178, 196, 204 communication between, 111–120 as food, 6–7, 23, 43–46, 93, 195, 197, 204, 241, 247, 249, 253–254, 257 domestication of, 21, 29, 199

 INDEX 

hibernation of, 12, 182 (see also individual species) as metaphor, 1–2, 5–9, 22, 49, 53–56, 95, 102, 214–224, 234, 239, 252, 255 migration of, 12, 54–57, 63, 83, 156, 158, 160, 162, 175, 178, 181, 182, 185, 248, 250–253 as pets, 9–12, 42, 95, 131, 138, 223 of prey, 18, 39, 48, 49, 52–54, 215, 223 stuffed, 72, 84, 159, 201 talking, 8, 10, 112, 131–146, 218–220 the word ‘bird’ as slang, 39 Birds’ nests, see Nests Birdsong, 24, 83, 93, 112 as communication, 11, 12, 113–116, 118, 188 in literature, 72, 75, 76, 79–82, 105, 106, 197 musical qualities of, 116, 178 use in bird identification, 12, 99, 114, 179 Birdwatching, 12, 164, 173, 174, 187, 195 See also Ornithology Birkhead, Tim, 174 Bittern, 239 Black, Jack, 113 Blackbird, 102, 248, 254 Blackcap, 114 Black-crowned heron, 205 Blacklock, Thomas, 117 Black-winged stilt, 166 Blair, Hugh, 116 Blake, William, 11, 30 Bloomfield, Robert, 92, 99, 100 Blue tit, 185 Bobolink, 254 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 132, 137, 138

271

Book of St. Albans, 223 Book trade, 20, 151 See also Print culture Boston, 255, 257 Boston Evening Post, 257 Botany, 173, 176 Boudica, 64 Bouquet, Henry, 215 Boyd, Julia, 153 Bradley, Richard, 43 Brazil, 216 Brereton, John, 248 Brisson, Mathurin Jacques, 176 Bristol, 97 Brookes, Richard, 152 Brown, Laura, 4, 54, 94, 132, 133, 138 Brunström, Conrad, 4 Bryan, Michael, 169n31 Buell, Lawrence, 3 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de, 80–82, 152, 161, 162, 169n31, 176 Bullfinch, 11, 34n29 Burke, Edmund, 63–65, 103 Burke, Tim, 93, 97 Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo, 116–118, 217, 220–222 Burns, Robert, 92, 96, 99, 100, 103, 152 Bushtit, 196 Bustard, 248 Butterfly, 187 Byrd, William, 252, 253, 256 C Caesar, Julius, 64, 144 Cafarelli, Annette Wheeler, 99, 100 Cages, 8–12, 25, 30, 34n29, 81, 134, 223 Calmuck people, 215

272 

INDEX

Cambridge University, 219 Canada, 252, 262n26 Canals, 59 Canary, 21, 223 Cannibalism, 199 Canso, 249 Cape Horn, 201 Captivity, 30–31 See also Cages Cara Pluma (pheasant), 28, 30 Caribbean, 212 Carolina, 252–254 Cartaret, John, 2nd Earl Granville, 33n21 Catesby, Mark, 232, 252, 262n26 Cats, 9, 10, 241 Cattle, 65, 177, 178, 199 Celt, Celtic, 63 Chaffinch, 113, 196 Chain of being, see Great chain of being Chamberlyn, John, 240–241 Chandler, James, 25 Chatterton, Thomas, 98, 100, 101, 175 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 10, 26 Chesapeake Bay, 252 Cheviot Hills, 160 Chicken, 6, 45, 115, 183, 238 See also Cock; Cockfighting Chiffchaff, 12, 114, 164, 169n31 Children, 79, 112, 114, 117, 166, 186 Chinese people and language, 221 Christ, see Jesus Christianity, 2, 8–9, 234, 239, 249 Christmas, William J., 93, 107 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 64 Cincinnati Zoo, 258 Clare, John, 4, 72, 84, 85, 93, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103–107, 113 ‘The Autumn Robin,’ 104–106 ‘Birds Nesting,’ 114

‘Essay on Instinct,’ 104 ‘Helpstone,’ 106 ‘The Robin,’ 103, 104 ‘The Robin’s Nest,’ 103 Classification, see Taxonomy Clayton, John, 251–252 Clergy, 177, 179, 257 The Cock’ (Anon.), 26–27 Cock, cockerel, 26, 125, 177, 199 See also Chicken; Cockfighting Cocker, Mark, 3, 84 Cockfighting, 26–27 Cock snipe, see Snipe Cole, Lucinda, 94 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 73, 83, 115, 125 ‘Answer to a Child’s Question,’ 119, 121 Biographia Literaria, 119–120, 122 ‘Kubla Khan,’ 64 Lyrical Ballads, 99, 113 ‘The Nightingale,’ 81–83, 113 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 120, 200–205 ‘The Tables Turned,’ 82 Collecting, 12, 140, 159, 238 Collins, Charles, 21 Collins, William, 180 Colonialism, 18, 20, 56, 199, 213, 233, 240, 247–249, 254 See also Empire; Postcolonialism Columbus, Christopher, 198 Companion animals, see Pets Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn, 74 Cook, James, 195–200 Cork, 18 Cormorant, 239, 248 Cotes, Henry, 168n16 Cowper, William, 4, 11 ‘Beau’s Reply,’ 7, 11 ‘Invitation to the Redbreast,’ 96

 INDEX 

‘On a Spaniel, Called Beau, Killing a Young Bird,’ 7 ‘On the Death of Mrs Throckmorton’s Bullfinch,’ 11 Crane, 165, 248, 250 Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John, 251, 255, 256 Croker, John Wilson, 63 Crosby, Alfred W., 261n21 Crow, 133, 248 Cruelty, 30, 42, 44 Cruikshank, Isaac, 133 Cuckoldom’ (Anon), 144 Cuckoo, 34n29, 184, 185 Cumberland, 97 Curlew, 184, 254 Curran, Andrew S., 212 Curran, Stuart, 85n1 D Darnton, Robert, 223 Darwin, Charles, 115, 223 Darwin, Erasmus, 73, 176, 258 Davies, Sir John, 18 Death, 183 of birds, 11, 26–29 of people, 18–19, 75, 231 Dee, Tim, 84 Deer, 41, 216, 250 Defamiliarisation, 195 Defoe, Daniel, 4, 43, 94 Derrick, John, 18, 32n3 Derrida, Jacques, 213 Descartes, René, 5, 17, 132, 136, 137, 147n7 Dipiero, Thomas, 132, 138, 145 Diver, 205 Dixon, Sarah, 76 Dobranski, Stephen, 44 Dodsley, Robert, 91 Doe, see Deer

273

Dogs, 6–7, 11, 28, 41, 95, 133, 178, 214 Douglass, William, 253 Dovaston, John, 152, 153 Dove, 7, 23, 118, 188, 199, 200, 231, 238–243, 255 ring dove (see Wood pigeon) stock dove, 248 turtle dove, 238, 248, 249, 254 water dove, 239–243 Dublin, 20, 23, 25, 32n5, 34n29 Duck, 254 See also Fowl; Mallard; Teal Duck, Stephen, 91 Duddy, Thomas, 33n14 Dung, 177, 256 Dunnock, 114, 183, 185 E Eagle, 7, 23, 63, 101, 215, 223, 239, 250 See also Golden eagle Early English Books Online, 10 Echo, 178–179 Ecocriticism, 2–4, 59, 72 Ecofeminism, see Feminist criticism Ecology, 51, 52, 57–58, 61, 174, 177–178 Ecosystem, see Ecology; Habitat Edinburgh, 117 Education, 30, 100 Edwards, George, 152 Egerton, Frank N., 258 Eggs, 6, 45–47, 162, 183, 238, 257, 262n25 Egret, 205, 248 An Elegie on the Death of Two Goldfinches, 27–28 Elegy, 27 Elements of Natural History, 83 Empire, 20–21, 213 See also Colonialism; Postcolonialism

274 

INDEX

Empson, William, 204 Enclosure, 93, 100 Engels, Friedrich, 29 England, 92, 185, 199 Engraving, see Printmaking Enlightenment, 54, 62, 212, 213, 223 Irish, 20–21 Environment, see Habitat Epistles, epistolarity, see Letters Ethnography, 211, 214, 216, 218, 222, 224 Ethology, 177 Europe, 63 European people and language, 214, 218, 222 Evangelicalism, 8 Evolution, 57, 221, 223 Extinction, 258–259 Ezekiel (biblical figure), 238 F Fable, 112, 138, 193 Falcon, 7, 18, 32n3, 248 Farming, farmland, see Agriculture Fauvette, 163 Feathers, 1, 19, 99, 159, 197, 198, 203, 212 Feeling, see Sensibility; Sympathy Feldman, Paula, 27 Feminist criticism, 40, 96 Fern owl, see Nightjar Field guides, 164 Fielding, Henry Journey of the Voyage to Lisbon, 43 Tom Jones, 39–49 Fielding, Sarah, 133 Finch, 23, 77 See also Bullfinch; Chaffinch; Goldfinch; Greenfinch; Linnet Finch, Anne, 74, 96 Fintona, 35n57

Fish, 177, 178, 199, 201, 247, 249, 250, 257 Fitter, Richard, 4 Five Nations, 256 Flackwell Heath, 98 Fleuriot, Jean-Marie-Jérôme, marquis de Langle, 133, 135–136 Flowers, 58, 106 Flycatcher, 164 Fontenelle, Bernard, 58 Forest, 29, 41, 216, 252, 253, 256–258 See also Woodland Foster, Paul G.M., 174, 179 Fowl, 6, 7, 45, 247–250, 255 See also individual species; Game; Hunting; Shooting France, 43, 54, 62, 138, 212, 249 See also French Revolution Frank, Judith, 134 Freedom, 25, 223 French Revolution, 61, 63, 64 Frost, Professor, 258 Fruit, 29, 247, 250, 253, 255 Fry, Paul, 202, 205 Fudge, Erica, 32n1, 94, 218 G Galileo Galilei, 177 Game, 40, 45–46, 223, 247, 250, 257 See also Duck; Partridge; Pheasant; Poaching Gannet, 55 Gannon, Thomas C., 4, 72 Gardens, 8, 141, 175, 183, 255 Garden warbler, 114 Gentleman’s Magazine, 175 Gerald of Wales, see Giraldus Cambrensis Gessner, Conrad, 152 Gibbons, Luke, 20

 INDEX 

Giffard, Sir Thomas, 32n5 Gill, Stephen, 123 Gilman, Sander, 217 Giraldus Cambrensis, 18 Goatsucker, see Nightjar God, 8–9, 31, 43, 53, 54, 233, 238, 250 as creator, 2, 8, 23, 248, 254 as instigator of natural phenomena, 18, 202 as providence, 54, 248–250, 258 Godwit, 7 Golden eagle, 52–54, 160 Goldeneye, 205 Goldfinch, 25, 27 Goldsmith, Oliver, 2, 26, 176, 220, 223 Goodridge, John, 93 Goose, 178, 199, 248, 254 Goree, 222 Goshawk, 18, 32n3 The Gouty Husband and His Young Wife, 143, 144 Grackle, 155 Grahame, James, 96 Graham’s Magazine, 258 Grasshoppers, 64 Gray, Thomas, 96 Great auk, 195 Great Awakening, 8 Great Britain, 157, 158, 233 Great chain of being, 58, 214, 222 Grebe, 205 Greek, 117, 140, 221 Greenburg, Joel, 251 Greenfinch, 187 Greenoak, Francesca, 182 Gresset, Jean-Baptiste-Louis, 137–138, 141, 145 Grey parrot, 131 Grey wagtail, 160

275

Groom, Nick, 82 Guillemot, 166 Gyrfalcon, 223 H Habitat, 12, 59, 63, 154–155, 160, 166 Haiku, 182 Halcyon, see Kingfisher Hamor, Ralph, 249–250 Hampshire, 181 See also Selborne Haraway, Donna, 29, 94 Hare, 184 Harris, James, 118 Harrogate, 92 Harvey, Gabriel, 137 Hatley, Captain, 201 Hawk, 23, 42, 140, 215, 250 Hawking, 7 See also Hunting Headley, Henry, 194–195 Hedge sparrow, hedge warbler, see Dunnock Heise, Ursula, 65 Hen, see Chicken Herder, Johann Gottfried, 116, 117, 121 Heron, 165, 205, 248, 250 See also Bittern; Egret; Little green heron; Snowy egret High Life at Noon, 143, 144 Hirundinidae, 175, 182 See also House martin; Sand martin; Swallow Hitt, Christopher, 3 Hobbes, Thomas, 21 Homer, 72 Hottentot, see Khoikhoi people House martin, 104 Humanism, see Posthumanism

276 

INDEX

Humboldt, Alexander von, 122 Hume, David, 20, 24–25, 43, 59–61, 139, 219–220 Hunting, 6–7, 9–11, 40–41, 93, 178, 213, 216, 218, 223, 253–257 See also Dogs; Hawking; Shooting; Traps Huron people, 117, 221 Hutcheson, Francis, 20, 21, 33n14 I Imagination, 9, 20, 24, 59, 60, 104, 165, 176 Imagism, 182 India, 138 Insanity, see Mental illness Insects, 52, 56–58, 140, 177 See also individual species Ireland, 17–31, 160 It-narrative, 145 J Jahoda, Gustav, 212 Jamaica, 219, 220 Jamestown, 249, 260n11 Jay, 34n29 Jenner, Edward, 96 Jesus, 231, 238 Jizz, 114, 179, 187 John Bull, 199 Johnson, Robert, 249 Johnson, Samuel, 181 Jones, Henry, 98 Jones, Howard Mumford, 259n2 Jones, John, 91–92, 99 Jonson, Ben, 6, 137 Jordan, Winthrop D., 211 Jordanova, Ludmilla, 217 Josselyn, John, 232 Juno, 199

K Kalm, Pehr, 252, 257 Kalmyk people, 215 Kangaroo, 197, 198 Keats, John, 27, 82 Keegan, Bridget, 92, 93, 96, 98, 101 Keenleyside, Heather, 4, 5, 57, 58, 65, 94–95 Kentucky, 251 Kenyon-Jones, Christine, 147n19 Kestrel, 190n35 Khoikhoi people, 220, 222 Kingfisher, 187, 193, 205 Kingston, William H.G., 258 Kite, see Red kite Knight, Richard Payne, 103 Knot, 7 Kolbe, Peter, 222 Koppes, Clayton, R., 259n2 Kraft, Elizabeth, 53 L La Mettrie, Julien Offrey de, 132 Labouring class, 118, 152 Labouring-class writers, 8, 91–107 Lake Ontario, 258 The Lamentation of Cara Pluma, a Female Pheasant’ (Anon.), 28–30 Landry, Donna, 93, 96 Lane, William, 93, 96, 98–100, 104 Langhorne, John, 96 Langland, William, 183–184 Langle, marquis de, see Fleuriot, Jean-Marie-Jérôme, marquis de Langle Language of birds, 111–125, 188 of humans, 116–118, 122, 137, 218–222 Lark, see Skylark; Woodlark Latham, John, 152, 155

 INDEX 

Latin, 18, 117, 124, 140, 177, 203, 204, 221 Latouche, James Digges, 25, 34n28 Law biblical, 224 civil and criminal, 20, 40 (see also Poaching) Law, John, 164 Lawson, John, 253, 256 Leeds, 92 Le Maire Strait, 201 Lescarbot, Marc, 248, 249, 254 Leslie, Lady Mary, 27 Lesser guillemot, see Guillemot Letters, 80, 174, 179–182, 188, 240–242 Lewis Walpole Library, 142 Liberty, see Freedom Light-mantled albatross, 201 Linnaeus, Carl, 58, 80, 165, 176 Linnet, 11, 25, 114, 118 The Linnet and Goldfinch’ (Anon), 25 Lion, 250 Little green heron, 205 Liverpool, 101 Locke, John, 4, 57–58, 94, 132, 147n7, 218–219 Locust, 258 London, 34n29, 249 Long, Edward, 220 Long-legged plover, see Black-­ winged stilt Long-tailed tit, 196 Loon, 205 Lorikeet, see Lory Lory, 8, 18–19 Losel’s Wood, 185 Love between birds, 28, 74, 81, 104, 112, 118, 123, 187, 188 between friends, 61 of birds, 18, 25, 42, 183, 188

277

birds loving humans, 131 of nature, 84, 240 romantic, 7, 28, 40, 41, 45–47, 77–79, 97, 141 of self, 21 Low, Tim, 204 Lowes, John Livingston, 200–202, 204 Lucas, Charles, 34n28 Lucretius, 116, 117, 177 Lutwack, Leonard, 4, 56 Lynch, Deidre, 139 Lynch, Michael, 164 M Mabey, Richard, 3, 84, 175, 182 McCarthy, William, 53, 55 McCormick, Robert, 28 Mckenzie, Henry, 7 McKusick, James C., 82 McNamara, Kevin, 233 Madness, see Mental illness Magpie, 133, 137 Mallard, 248 Mandeville, Bernard, 21 Maori people and language, 196, 197 Marmoset, 141 Martha (passenger pigeon), 258 Martin, 182 See also House martin; Sand martin Maryland Gazette, 252 Masculinity, 22, 26, 141, 199 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 240, 250 Massachusetts Spy, 255 Mather, Abigail, 231 Mather, Cotton, 231–243, 252, 261n25 Biblia Americana, 234, 240–243 ‘Columbanus,’ 238–240 ‘The Soul upon the Wing,’ 238 ‘Work Upon the Ark,’ 239

278 

INDEX

Mayfly, 184 Mayhew, Henry, 113 Medici, Catherine de, 135 Medicine, 215, 218 M’Elroy, William, 30–31, 35n57 Melville, Herman, 202, 203 Menely, Tobias, 4, 5, 9, 94, 181, 213, 223 Mental illness, 22, 45 Merlin, 32n3 Metamorphosis, 56 Metaphor, 2, 19, 41, 187 See also Allegory; Anthropomorphism; Birds, as metaphor; Parable; Personification; Simile Methodism, 8 Metonymy, 8, 42 Migration, human, 56 Migration of birds, see under Birds, migration of Miller, John Frederick, 152 Milne, Anne, 4 Milton, John, 72–74, 84, 188 ‘Il Penseroso,’ 77, 80 Paradise Lost, 76, 80, 177, 178 ‘Sonnet 1, O nightingale,’ 77–79, 81 Miromiro, see North Island tomtit Mistle thrush, 101, 187 Monboddo, Lord, see Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo Monkey, 133, 141, 214 See also Ape Montagu, Elizabeth, 100 Montagu, George, 80, 152 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 73 Moorland, 52 Morillo, John, 4 Mountains, 52, 160, 185 Mourning, see Death Mouse, 58

Mulcaster, Richard, 11 Mulford, Carla, 233 Mulso, John, 179–180 Murray, Lindley, 116, 117, 127n17 Museum of Comparative Zoology, Boston, 201 Museums, 72, 174 Music, 115–117, 220–221 Mynott, Jeremy, 107 Mythology, 80, 81, 196, 205 N Napoleonic War, 62, 64 Nashe, Thomas, 137 Native American people, 117, 214–216, 218, 221, 242, 248, 254, 256, 262n26 Natural history, 232 influence on literature, 71–72 as literary genre, 2, 103, 151, 161, 173, 176, 177, 180 and physico-theology, 241 as scientific discipline, 54, 59, 79–81, 115, 155, 165, 174, 232, 240 Natural History of Birds, 83 Naturalists, see Natural history Natural philosophy, see Science Natural theology, see Physico-theology Nature writing, 84, 173 Neill, Michael, 20 Nests, 74, 114, 162, 186, 251, 253, 254, 257, 261n25 Netherlands, 222 Newcastle upon Tyne, 151, 159 New England, 251, 253, 257 New France, 248 New Hampshire, 257 Newhoff, John, 216 New nature writing, see Nature writing New Plymouth, 250

 INDEX 

New World, see America New York, 251 New Zealand, 194–200 Nightingale, 7, 8, 12, 27, 71–85, 96, 105, 114, 116, 177 Nightjar, 187, 188 Nixon. Sarah, 74 Noah (biblical figure), 232, 240–242 Northamptonshire, 103 Northern royal albatross, 200 North Island tomtit, 196 Northumberland, 152, 155, 160 Norwich, 96 Nova Britannia, 249 Novel, as form, 179–183 O Ohio, 251 Ohio people, 215 Orangutan, 220 Oriel College, Oxford, 179 Orkney, 52 Ornithology, 12, 53, 54, 72, 80, 83, 165, 174, 176, 187, 205, 232–234, 243, 251 See also Birdwatching Ortolan, 23–24, 42–45 Otago Peninsula, 200 Ovid, 73, 84, 132, 177 Owl, 111, 114, 120–122, 124, 140, 184, 216, 239 See also Barn owl; Screech-Owl Oxford University, 179 P Painting, see Visual arts Parable, 186 Parakeet, 140 Pareidolia, 58, 60 Parkland, 29 Parrish, Susan Scott, 240

279

Parrot, 8, 19, 21, 132, 133, 135–146, 218–220, 248 See also Lory; Grey parrot Partridge, 6, 40, 45–47, 248, 254, 255 Passenger pigeon, 247, 249–259 Passeriformes, 204 Pastoral, 184, 240 Patagonia, 201 Pelican, 193 Penguin, 194, 195 Pennant, Thomas, 58, 152, 161 British Zoology, 53, 54, 56, 65, 80, 160, 194, 195 as recipient of letters from Gilbert White, 173, 176, 178, 180, 184 Pennsylvania, 251, 255 Pepperberg, Irene, 131 Perkins, David, 4 Personification, 22, 62, 188, 197 Petrarch, 73–75 Petrel, 194, 198–199, 203 Pets, see Animals, as pets; Birds, as pets; Cats; Dogs Pettichap, petty chat, see Chiffchaff Pheasant, 6, 28–29, 45 Phenology, 174, 182 Philadelphia, 255 Philip (sparrow), 9 Philips, John, 177 Philistines, 31 Phillips, Adam, 104 Philomela, see Rowe, Elizabeth Singer; Nightingale; Ovid Phoenix, 193 Physico-theology, 233–237, 248 Physiology, 5 Pig, 253 Pigeon, 248, 250 See also Dove; Passenger pigeon; Wood pigeon Pilkington, Laetitia, 22–23, 28

280 

INDEX

Pilkington, Matthew, 22, 23 Pitt, Robert, 215 Plants, see Flowers; Trees; Vegetables Plenitude, 248, 259n2 Pliny, the Elder, 80, 132, 140, 177 Plover, 254 Plumage, see Feathers Poaching, 40–41, 45, 47 Poetics, 31, 59, 61, 75, 96, 119, 121, 174, 178, 182–185, 188, 193 Poetry, see under individual poets; Poetics Poi, see Tui Pompey, 144 Pope, Alexander, 61, 133, 138, 223 Postcolonialism, 20, 96 See also Colonialism; Empire Posthumanism, 5, 94, 95, 146 Presbyterianism, 20 Priestley, Joseph, 57 Priestley, Mary, 51, 60, 61 Print culture, 29, 93, 96, 132, 135, 137–139, 145, 174 Printmaking, 151–160 Prion, 199 Prosopopoeia, 60 Protestantism, 18 Pullet, see Chicken Puritanism, 232 Q Quail, 184 Quinn, Peter, 152, 155 R Racial ideology, 8, 211–224 Racine, Jean, 136 Rail, see Water rail Raleigh, Sir Walter, 247 Rape, 42 Raptor, see under Birds, of prey

Rat, 11 Raven, 183, 185–187, 239, 243, 248 Ray, John, 9, 80, 152, 176 Reddit, see Social media Red kite, 48–49, 183 Redstart, 114, 160 Religion, 8–11, 138, 177, 196, 199, 231–243 See also God; individual faiths and denominations; Theology Reynolds, Joshua, 158 Rice bird, 254 Richardson, Alan, 121 Richardson, Samuel, 181 Clarissa, 180 Pamela, 180 Sir Charles Grandison, 133, 139–142 Richetti, John, 180 Ridley, Glynis, 4 Rizzo, Betty, 100 Robbins, Louise, 132, 138, 139 Robin (European), 8, 23, 91–107 Robinson, Eric, 4 Roman Catholicism, 20 Roman Empire, 63, 64 Romanticism, 137, 147n19 Rook, 183 Rooster, see Cock Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 116, 117 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer, 74 Royal Society, 240, 241, 251, 252 Ruff, 7 Rushton, Edward, 93, 96, 99–104 ‘Neglected Genius, Or, Tributary Stanzas to the Memory of the Unfortunate Chatterton,’ 100 ‘To a Redbreast In November, Written near one of the Docks of Liverpool,’ 101 ‘To the Memory of Robert Burns,’ 101 Russel, Mr. B, 254

 INDEX 

S Saint-Domingue, 212 Samson (biblical figure), 31 Sand martin, 187 Sanskrit, 221 Satire, 133, 137–138, 141–146, 184, 204 Scaup, 205 Schellenberg, Betty, 141 Schiesari, Juliana, 27 Science, 2, 11–12, 52, 54, 58, 64, 161, 164, 176, 188, 200, 212, 233–234, 242 See also Ecology; Natural history; Ornithology Scopoli, Giovanni Antonio, 176 Scotland, 20, 52–56, 153, 212 Screech-Owl, 217 Scurvy, 204 Searle, Adrian, 153 Sears, Elizabeth, 217 Secord, Anne, 175, 180 Selborne, 173–174, 178–179, 185–188 Senses, 214–218 Sensibility, 5–7, 9–11, 20, 58, 95, 96, 98, 132–136, 139, 141–142, 145–146, 181 See also Sympathy Sentiment, see Sensibility Sermons, 234, 237–239 Seward, Anna, 197–200, 203 Sexuality, human, 9–11, 42–45, 217 Shakespeare, William, 4, 72, 175, 177, 178 Hamlet, 7 Shannon, Laurie, 94 Sheldon, Francis, 159 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 27 Shelvocke, George, 200–204 Shklovsky, Viktor, 195

281

Shooting, 22–23, 28, 40, 95, 98, 198, 202, 250, 255, 257, 258 Silver, Timothy, 260n11 Simile, 5 Singing (human), 12, 122 Skelton, John, 9–11 Skylark, 6, 8, 27, 101, 105, 114, 118, 196, 197 Slavery, 25, 56, 134, 212, 213, 223 See also Abolitionism Smellie, William, 152 Smith, Adam, 20, 24–25 Smith, Charlotte, 71–85 Conversations Introducing Poetry, 72 Elegiac Sonnets, 71, 73–79, 82 Minor Morals, 72 Natural History of Birds, 71–74, 79–84 Rambles Farther, 72 Rural Walks, 72 Smith, John, 250 Smith, Justin E.H., 211 Smith, Olivia, 118 Smollett, Tobias, 143 Snake, 200, 249 Snipe, 165, 187, 214, 254 Snow, C.P., 176 Snowdon, 52 Snowy egret, 205 Social media, 131, 174 Soland goose, see Gannet Sömmerring, Samuel Thomas von, 215 Song, see Birdsong; Music; Singing (human) Song thrush, 101, 196 Sonnet, 71, 73–79, 97 Sooty albatross, 200, 201 South Downs, 185 Southey, Robert, 91, 127n25 Sparrow, 9–11, 104, 118, 204, 261n21

282 

INDEX

Sparrowhawk, 32n3, 223 Spenser, Edmund, 18, 198 Spider, 221 Spontaneous generation, 56 Squirrel, 140 St Kilda, 53, 55 St. Lawrence River, 252, 262n26 Starling, 10, 18, 34n29, 134, 136, 137, 139, 145, 187, 261n21 Statius, 132 Sterne, Laurence, 4 Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 143, 179 A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 10, 133–136 Stevenson, John Allen, 40 Stevenson, Warren, 204 Stork, 23, 165, 248 Stormcock, see Mistle thrush Strauss, Levi, 94, 145 Sublime, 103 Suffering, 30 Swallow, 74, 102, 104, 116, 177, 178, 182–184, 187, 221 Swan, 23, 140, 193, 205, 248 Swenson, May, 205 Swift, 182, 184, 187 Swift, Jonathan, 138 Symbolism, 5–6, 49, 53, 93–95, 106, 135, 195, 196, 205, 213 Symonds, William, 249 Sympathy, 59–60 birds used to generate, 107 (see also Sensibility) as discourse, 29 as philosophical category, 20–22, 24–25, 31, 61, 95, 103 toward birds, 9–11, 22–23, 27–28, 30, 132, 136, 182, 186

T Tague, Ingrid H., 4, 42 Takitumu, 196 Talbot, Catherine, 74–77 Tasso, Torquato, 56 Tatahore, see Whitehead Tattersfield, Nigel, 153 Taxidermy, see under Birds, stuffed Taxonomy, 5, 80, 151, 155, 160, 165, 166, 174, 177, 218, 223, 242 Teal, 254 Temple, Martha, 32n5 Temple, Sir John, 32n5 Temple, Sir William, 18–20, 32n5, 132 Tennessee, 251 Theocritus, 2 Theology, 232, 234 See also Physico-theology Thomas, Keith, 20, 34n29, 132, 138 Thomson, James, 2, 53–54, 56, 57, 62, 63, 65, 73, 76, 94, 96, 177, 178 Throstle, see Song thrush Thrush, 34n29, 118 See also Blackbird; Mistle thrush; Song thrush Todd, Janet, 139 Topographer, 175 Traps, 7, 9 Trees, 64, 65, 186, 238, 241, 248–250, 253–257 See also Forest; Woodland True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, 249 Tui, 197 Tunstall, Marmaduke, 159, 169n24 Turkey (bird), 220, 250, 254 Turkey (country), 111 Turner, Katherine, 4 Tyne, River, 153, 158 Tyrone, 35n57

 INDEX 

U Uglow, Jenny, 165 Ulster, 20, 30 Unitarianism, 57 V Vegetables, 183, 199, 247, 249 Vermont, 255 Virgil, 64, 72, 175 Aeneid, 177, 179 Eclogues, 177, 179 Georgics, 75, 177 Virginia, 247, 249–251, 253 Visual arts, 21, 60, 133, 151, 158, 212, 217 See also Printmaking; Satire Vulture, 239 W Wafer, Lionel, 216 Wagtail, 160 Wahrman, Dror, 212, 213, 218 Wales, 52, 53 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 204 Walmsley, Peter, 132, 147n7 Wandering albatross, 200, 203 Warbler, 163, 181 See also Blackcap; Chiffchaff; Garden warbler; Willow warbler; Wood warbler Warton, Thomas, 180 Water rail, 7 Watkins, Daniel, 55 Watts, Isaac, 96 Weather, 102, 153, 177, 183, 184, 201 Weld, Isaac, 254, 258 Whalley, George, 202 Wheeler, Roxann, 222 Whig history, 63, 64

283

White, Charles, 213–216, 220, 222 White, Gilbert, 9, 12, 72, 82, 84, 152, 161, 173–188 Antiquities of Selborne, 174, 183 Flora Selborniensis, 182 Garden Kalendar, 182 Journal, 182–185 ‘The Invitation to Selborne,’ 184 Natural History of Selborne, 111–113, 115, 173–182, 185–188 ‘The Naturalist’s Summer-evening Walk,” 184–185 White, Thomas Holt, 175 Whitehead, 195, 196 Wilberforce, William, 62 Wilderness, 65 Wildfowl, see Fowl Williams, Francis, 219, 220 Williams, Iolo, 33n18 Williams, Roger, 253 Willis, Thomas, 147n7 Willow warbler, 12, 114 Willow wren, see Willow warbler Willughby, Francis, 80, 152, 176 Wilson, Alexander, 251 Wilson, George, 26 Wilson, John, 127n25 Windhover, see Kestrel Winslow, Edgar, 251 Winthrop, John, 241, 242 Wokler, Robert, 212, 221 Wolloch, Nathaniel, 4 Women in literature, 27, 39–41, 62, 139–142 as writers, 27–28, 75–77, 83 (see also Feminist criticism) Wood, William, 250 Woodcock, 6, 214, 254 Woodhouse, James, 100

284 

INDEX

Woodland, 52, 64, 74, 77, 178, 185, 186, 216, 253, 254, 257 See also Forest Woodlark, 77 Woodpecker, 188 Wood pigeon, 185, 187 Wood warbler, 12 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 115–116 Wordsworth, William, 72, 77, 82, 85, 118 ‘The Idiot Boy,’ 120–125 Lyrical Ballads, 99, 113, 119, 120, 124 ‘The Mad Mother,’ 121 Poetical Works, 123 ‘There Was a Boy,’ 114, 121 ‘The Two Thieves,’ 158 ‘We are Seven,’ 201, 202 Working class, see Labouring class Worm, 59, 204

Wren, 34n29, 204 Wycliffe, 159, 168n23 X Xanctoigne, Jean Alphonse de, 248 Y Yearsley, Ann, 93, 97–100 ‘Clifton Hill, 97 ‘To Mr ****, an Unlettered Poet, on Genius Unimproved,’ 98 Yellow wagtail, 160 Yorkshire, 83, 92 Young, Edward, 180 Z Zoology, 53, 54