Strange ways of thinking

This chapter examines images of beasts and bestiality in selected fictional and non-fictional writing about the city produced during the second half of the 1880s and 1890s. Some of the texts will be better known than others, but the concentration on animal imagery should provide a new approach to even the most familiar of these and is quite distinct from commentaries on naturalism. The focus will be on London, since the main themes explored in this study are evident in the literature set in the capital; in particular, the East End looms especially large. However, it is important to recognise that different cities have their own characteristics and stories to tell. In London, the population had grown from 1,873,676 in 1841 to 4,232,118 a half century later. The figures represented an increase in the proportion of the population of England and Wales from 11.75 per cent to 14.52 per cent. At the same time, other cities had expanded: in 1837, there were five cities throughout England and Wales with populations of 100,000 or more; in 1891, there were twenty-three cities. Briggs notes that ‘[a]s the cities grew, the separation of middleclass and working-class areas became more and more marked’ (p.64), and social segregation, then, as now, ‘induces strange ways of thinking about other human beings. The fear of the city, like other kinds of fear, was often a fear of the unknown’ (p.62). Although true, Briggs's words understate the extent to which the different classes rubbed shoulders. As we saw in the introduction, Raymond Williams has shown how the creation of what he calls the ‘crisis of the knowable community’ in the mid-nineteenth century led novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell and, above all, Dickens to show how various representatives of the social order were brought into close proximity with one another.

Bestial language infects the literature of the time. It is present in far more cases than are offered here. William Fishman's study of the East End in the late 1880s quotes a number of examples, among them Ben Tillett's memory of the daily struggle of the unemployed to obtain work at the docks: