The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 368 pages
• Published by: Harvard University Press March 1989
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0674037073
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0674037076
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.3 pounds

Product Review
The brilliance of Ritvo's book, my favorite for 1987[lies] in the particular examples that she has chosen to illustrate the institutional bonds of humans with other animalsShe tells so many wonderful stories.
--Stephen Jay Gould (New York Review of Books )

This is both an amusing and a valuable bookHarriet Ritvo is concerned primarily with the discussion, use, display of animals as part of a rhetoric of human and class ascendancy. But the material presented here with impressive lucidity and control should interest virtually any reader. And the book is intriguingly and lavishly illustrated, mostly with engravings and woodcuts from sources ranging from Punch to natural histories, stockbreeders' publications, newspapers and paintingsAn important book for anyone with an interest in the sociology of animals, and in the more general social history that emerges from its gorgeously presented wealth of detail.
--Vicki Hearne (New York Times Book Review )

An unusual social history of Victorian EnglandDeftly written and generously illustrated, The Animal Estate details the spectrum of Victorian animal concerns: the antivivisection movement, the popularity of zoology, the hunt, the rabies panic (not unlike today's pit bull hysteria), and more. The reader will come out with a fuller understanding of the Victorian people and the development of our bonds with animals. (Animals )

This is a remarkable book about how, in a uniquely exploitative age, animals became surrogates for human aspirations. Ritvo is not content with theoretical interpretation of human-animal interaction; she looks at the attitudes of the people who actually had animals in their charge: pet owners, farmers, sportsmen, zoologists. It is a book of extraordinary timeliness.
--Coral Lansbury, Rutgers University

Product Review
This is a remarkable book about how, in a uniquely exploitative age, animals became surrogates for human aspirations. Ritvo is not content with theoretical interpretation of human-animal interaction; she looks at the attitudes of the people who actually had animals in their charge: pet owners, farmers, sportsmen, zoologists. It is a book of extraordinary timeliness.
--Coral Lansbury, Rutgers University --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.