Critical Animal Studies: Dogs & Animal Imagery in Dickens Novels (Part 1)

Let’s talk about some of my favorite stuff: critical animal studies. And let’s talk about it in the context of one of my favorite authors: Charles Dickens. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in and scholarship about critical animal studies and the use of animals in literature. Significant attention has been paid to Charles Dickens’s own various uses of animal and animal imagery in his works. Dickens often used animals or animal imagery to explore the dehumanization of Victorian England’s poor and working class. Despite its length, Bleak House may be my favorite Dickens novel, in part because it offers one of the most interesting opportunities to think about these questions in particular. Here I’ll look closely at some scholarly pieces on this topic, with the next post delving into my own thoughts and a stronger focus on my favorite character in Bleak House, the orphan Jo.

In “Dickens and Savagery at Home and Abroad,” Valerie Kennedy looks closely at the way in which Dickens uses “savagery” in both his journalism and novels. One way Dickens uses this technique is to bring attention to the status of Victorian Britain's own poor and working class and to criticize the government for failing to effectively address pressing domestic social problems. In At Home and Astray: The Dog in Victorian Britain, Philip Howell presents Dickens’s varied and complex use of animals as reflective of the Victorians’ ambiguous attitudes towards animals in general. Howell pays close attention to the author’s descriptions of stray dogs in particular. Greta Olson does the same in her piece “Dickens’s Animals through the Lenses of Poverty Studies and Posthumanism.” Olson looks specifically to Dickens’s fictional animals to demonstrate the many ways he used animals to make a statement about the condition of the poor and working class in Britain.

Kennedy argues that Dickens uses the concept of savagery in several different ways, but that in each case it is used to turn the critique back on Victorian society and the government’s treatment of domestic social issues. “Dickens’s main focus is on England,” writes Kennedy, “one of the constant features of all his writings is his insistence that the first priority should be the British poor rather than ‘lower’ races abroad” (Kennedy 123). Thus Kennedy sees Dickens as portraying “savagery” at home in the midst of Victorian society in order to criticize those who both enable and then turn away from and do nothing to remedy the deplorable conditions of their fellow Englishmen. This is done to criticize members of the middle- and upper-classes (by depicting “respectable” people behaving badly) and to criticize “the inequality, injustice and neglect which create victims like Jo, the ‘home-made’ savage of Bleak House (Kennedy 124). As such, in Dickens’s novels the “images of savagery are used to criticize a failure of civilization which reduces the urban poor to a state of ‘barbarity’ and ‘savagery’ comparable to that of ‘primitive races’ or even ‘animals’’ (Kennedy 125). This is done to demonstrate how the savagery ever-present in civilized society is the “most pernicious” form of all (Kennedy 132).

Kennedy believes that Dickens uses the depiction of savagery “to depict the poor as being reduced to the status of savages or even animals, since they are victimized by poverty, ignorance and neglect” (Kennedy 133). This is certainly the case with Jo, the homeless orphan boy in Bleak House. Jo is illiterate and gets by in the world by sweeping a street corner and begging passerby for change. The passages about Jo reveal to readers how “Jo is neglected by the novel’s misguided philanthropists because he is English and thus does not benefit from the sentimental view of distant ‘savages’ which depends precisely on their distance” (Kennedy 133). These philanthropists are more concerned with “civilizing” and addressing “savages” in the British colonies and other places abroad. Dickens uses savagery with respect to British children to show how “when education as part of the process of civilization is absent or unsuccessful, individuals are liable to revert to savagery: society has failed in its civilizing mission” (Kennedy 135).

In “Dogs in Dickensland” Philip Howell also explores the way Jo has been reduced to a savage state. Howell is specifically concerned with Dickens’s narrative usage of dogs in general, but especially with the trope of the stray dog as symbolic of the stray child. In doing so, Dickens’s “concern for animal welfare paralleled his plaint against the victimization of vulnerable human beings, particularly children” (Howell 29). Howell argues that Dickens has a tendency to present the problem of the stray dog as “comparable with that of the indigent pauper and the vagrant poor” (Howell 31). Dickens makes this comparison strongest in the case of Jo, who “most pathetically… does not even know what the word ‘home’ means” (Howell 31). In terms of Victorian England and its urban dwellers, then, “humans are constantly in danger of being transmogrified into beasts and brutes” (Howell 32).

Howell points out that Jo shares an interesting passage with a sheepdog in the street at one point in Bleak House. Both dog and boy are listening to street musicians and it is implied that the dog has a more complex interiority than Jo does. As Howell notes, Jo is “viewed as little more than a dog – one that can walk on its hind legs and perform a trick with a broom, but a dog nonetheless. Shuffling around on his crossing, he is not lost, because he has never been missed. He is merely a stray… belonging to no one, he is abjectly disposable (Howell 35).

Greta Olson is also interested in the problem of stray children and dogs in Dickensian works. Olson’s main goal is to look at Dickens’s animals from the angle of both poverty studies and posthumanism because these disciplines “call for a reappraisal of those who have been left out and for an attendant reflection on those who have supported these elisions” (Olson 285). In her article, Olson seeks to “demonstrate how Dickens’s work interacts with these discourses and their critiques of political and representational practices” (Olson 285). She is especially interested in what the animals in Dickens novels can tell readers about the author’s broader critique of the society and government that produces the conditions under which the poor and working class are dehumanized, looked down upon and neglected.

While Olson looks to a passage about Jo in which Dickens uses the opportunity to criticize the government’s failure to help the poor, I feel that there are other (better) passages to look at in which the projection of animal otherness onto Jo is more revealing of a critique of human subjectivity. Jo’s lack of interiority (he knows “no-think”) and his illiteracy are particularly intriguing when thinking about what makes a human “human” and what it means that Jo is lacking these particular qualities. I'll talk more about this in my next post!

Works Cited

Howell, Philip. "Dogs in Dickensland." At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015.

Kennedy, Valerie. "Dickens and Savagery At Home and Abroad: Part I." The Dickensian. 104.475 (Summer 2008): 123-139.

Olson, Greta. "Dickens's Animals through the Lenses of Poverty Studies and Posthumanism." Dickens's Signs, Reader's Designs: New Bearing in Dickens Criticism. Ed. Francesca Orestano and Norbert Lennartz. Rome, Italy: Aracne, 2012.