Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Material Conditions of Pet Keeping
2. Domesticating the Exotic
3. Fashioning the Pet
4. A Privilege or a Right?
5. Pets and Their People
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Ingrid H. Tague is Associate Dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Associate Professor of History at the University of Denver.
“Thanks to animal studies, the difference between ‘animal’ and
‘human’ is neither stable nor certain. Tague approaches this
hierarchy from the human end of the spectrum, finding touching and
significant ways in which human pet owners reified or challenged
the animal-human relationship in the eighteenth century as pet
keeping evolved from a proscribed to an approved cultural
practice.”—Ann-Janine Morey American Historical Review
“Ingrid Tague’s Animal Companions helps us understand the
extraordinary innovation entailed in the rise of pet keeping in
eighteenth-century England. Tague shows how, rather suddenly, the
widespread acceptance of relationships of intimacy between human
and nonhuman animals shaped political, social, and intellectual
views and debates. The rise of pet keeping brought abstract
Enlightenment questions into the realm of concrete debate—around
the nature of the human, the concepts of ownership and slavery,
relationships of affection and alterity, and the exercise of
humanitarianism and the ideal of harmony. Tague’s book gives us new
insights into the role of human-animal relationships in defining
key questions about the human.”—Laura Brown,Cornell University
“It would surprise many in our pet-centered world to know that
keeping pets was once considered a highly suspect practice, a
wasteful, sinful overvaluing of animals that threatened individual
and national character. Ingrid Tague’s history of pet keeping in
eighteenth-century England illustrates how it evolved, by century’s
end, into a broadly accepted, even ‘natural’ part of everyday human
life. Populated by memorable characters, both human and animal, and
characterized by admirable scholarship and insightful analysis,
this wide-ranging and densely detailed historical study
investigates how pets functioned as important vehicles in some of
the most vexed debates of the day concerning consumption, fashion,
morality, sensibility, slavery, gender, and social class.”—Karen
Raber,University of Mississippi
“Ingrid Tague’s study contributes to the animalizing of social
history since the Enlightenment. During the eighteenth century,
global commerce, slavery, and empire made pet keeping newly
possible for many people on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same
time, Enlightenment ideas and the rise of commercial and consumer
society fuelled new desires for the companionship of domestic
animals. Pets ceased to be marginal and became central. Analyzing
the entanglements of pets with class, gender, and slavery, but also
fashion, frivolity, and property, Tague illuminates how
eighteenth-century Britons and their colonial counterparts had
recourse to animals for thinking through the most searching
questions of their time.”—Donna Landry,University of Kent
“Ingrid Tague’s well-documented and clearly written Animal
Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain,
the first systematic treatment of pet keeping in Enlightenment
Britain, traces the evolution of affection toward domestic animals
from the beginning of the century, when pet keeping was stigmatized
as a waste of human resources and feelings, to the end of the
period, when compassion for animals was seen as a necessary sign of
genuine humanness. The discussion of the relation between pet
keeping and racial theory during the Enlightenment is of particular
interest.”—Matthew Senior,Oberlin College
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