Abstract
This chapter examines the cultural significance of performing animals in nineteenth-century Britain, a period when commentators praised progress made by contemporaries in improving training techniques, although many ostensible improvements focused on trainers’ effectiveness rather than actions reducing cruelty to animals. These performances regularly blurred the line between human and animal, often at what Victorian commentators pinpoint as the moment of pleasure. Performances make visible the slippage between metaphoric and metonymic animals, a slippage evident in The Old Curiosity Shop, which offers a fascinating glimpse into Dickens’s views of animals and animal training. The contrast between the treatment of dogs being trained for public performance and the pony that seems untrainable allows Dickens to explore the nature of autonomy in its most literal sense, as self-rule.
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Losano, A. (2017). Performing Animals/Performing Humanity. In: Mazzeno, L., Morrison, R. (eds) Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60219-0_7
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