While the layers
of symbolism and signification in Barbauld’s poem are numerous and varied, as
the previous discussion suggests, the reading public latched onto the final
question of the morality of animal experimentation with no consideration of the
other, more socially aimed readings of Barbauld’s poem that focused on justice
for oppressed people instead of captured animals. Despite the fact that
Barbauld’s friendship with the Priestleys’ was widely known and that she wrote
other poems about Priestley that praised the work he was doing, the critics
immediately considered the poem as a vehement attack on Priestley and they
joined in on the attack. A writer at the Critical
Review praised Barbauld’s petition with the following declaration:
We heartily commend the lady’s
humanity for endeavouring to extricate the
little wretch from misery, and
gladly take this opportunity to testify our
abhorrence of the cruelty practiced
by experimental philosophers, who seem
to think the brute creation void of
sensibility, or created only for them to
torment.[1]
The public attacks on Priestley
grew to such an extent that Barbauld issued a disclaimer about the poem in the
third, fourth, and fifth editions of her Poems
to distance herself from faultfinding over Priestley’s experiments.[2]
This disclaimer read, “The Author is concerned to find, that what was intended
as a petition of mercy against justice, has been construed as the pleas of
humanity against cruelty. She is certain that cruelty could never be
apprehended from the Gentleman to whom this is addressed; and the poor animal
would have suffered more as the victim of domestic economy, than of
philosophical curiosity.”[3]
While this disclaimer encourages attention to the social commentary of the
poem, it also serves as a negation of the message of sympathy Barbauld develops
throughout the poem and the question of the morality of animal experimentation
for acquisition of greater knowledge. Her rapid backpedaling with a disclaimer
that seems to contradict much of her message in the poem suggests not an
amendment of Barbauld’s opinions on the moral ambiguity of animal
experimentation, but a hasty effort to stop the condemnation of her friend in
various news sources. While the disclaimer was meant to turn people away from
the complete condemnation of Priestley, natural philosophers in general, and
their use of animal experimentation, the original opinion that pervaded
critical responses to the poem remained, leading eventually to the poem’s
eventual use in lessons to teach children the value of kindness towards
animals.
Around
the time of the publication of Barbauld’s poem, the role of science in culture
began to change. As naturalists started bringing species back to England and
scientific experimentation began to increase, a general fear of where such
pursuits for knowledge would lead humanity arose. Edmund Burke articulated this fear in his Letter to a Noble Lord, in which he
denounced radical scientists who “bring […] dispositions that make them worse
than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes, which are the supports of
the moral world.”[4]
This fear of scientists’ indifference was augmented further into the fear that
“these philosophers [would] consider men in their experiments no more than they
do mice in an air pump, or in a recipient of mephitic gas,” turning the cruelty
enacted towards animals onto their fellow man.[5]
Burke essentially imagined Priestley’s experimentation on mice being enacted on
humans, an imagining that Mary Shelley extended when she wrote Frankenstein in 1814. At the time,
science was enthralling, but it was also extremely frightening as fundamental
beliefs were rocked and questions of human morality in the face of the pursuit
of knowledge came to light.
As science
education increased in schools following this increased public focus on science,
a general sense developed that children also needed to be taught sympathy,
leading to the use of Barbauld’s Petition
as a moralizing poem to be memorized at home supplementary to the experiments
they were being exposed to in school. This development largely came out of the
female-driven antivivisectionist movements of the nineteenth century. During
this period, movements were being made to change the legal protection towards
animals. Prior to 1800, the punishment of cruelty towards animals was connected
with “the animals’ role as human property.”[6]
Any legal movements to protect animals had to do with the mistreatment of
agricultural animals or animals used in baiting sports.[7]
Discouragement of animal experimentation largely came from women concerned
about the effects that vivisection would have on their children. Fearing particularly
“the male potential for cruelty,” literature from the female-produced
antivivisection literature was filled with images of “schoolboys who already
have callous tendencies and must be shielded from the hardening effect of
vivisection in the classroom; medical students for whom cutting up animals has
become a kind of intoxication; [and] brutalized scientists who have wholly
succumbed to a ‘mania’ for vivisection and are no longer capable of any
kindness or mercy.”[8]
Believing such “brutalized scientists” to be already lost, antivivisectionists
turned to school children, particularly boys, hoping that they could improve
their moral character and prevent them from “[descending] into callousness and
cruelty.”[9]
Female antivivisectionists believed that “the key to bringing up boys was to
stop their childish acts of cruelty to animals and instruct them in kindness
instead.”[10] Barbauld’s
writings were vital for such instruction.
Much
of Barbauld’s later life was dedicated to the education of children. After her
marriage to Rochemont Barbauld, the two set up a boys’ school together. Her
husband’s illness eventually necessitated closing the school, but Barbauld
continued to devote her time to teaching children, especially through her
writing. She published Lessons for
Children and Hymns in Prose for
Children in 1778 to 1779 and 1781 respectively. These works were so popular
among children and their teachers in school and at home that William Hazlitt
recalled that he read her books “before those of any other author … , when I
was learning to spell words of one syllable.”[11]
The creation of these works specifically targeted towards children led mothers
and schoolteachers to look into Barbauld’s larger body of work, pulling out The Mouse’s Petition as another exemplary
piece of literature for teaching children to exhibit the sympathy towards
animals that the mouse so ardently calls for. The image of an anthropomorphic
mouse was easily entertaining for children and for those children who had to
memorize Barbauld’s poem, as was common at the time, the alternating lines of
eight and six syllables and the abcb
rhyme scheme would have made the task of memorization much easier. Sir Jerom
Murch recalls learning “The Mouse’s Petition” in this manner during his
childhood in his 1877 paper Mrs. Barbauld
and Her Contemporaries, indicating that even over fifty years after her death
in 1825, students who had learned her poem in childhood remembered her mouse
and the lessons it taught.[12]
Even
though Barbauld’s “Petition” was initially meant as a larger social commentary rather
than simply a criticism of using animals in scientific experimentation or even
a criticism of animal cruelty in general, the poem’s envelopment in popular
culture meant that those contemporary social commentaries, such as her
allusions to anti-slavery movements and revolutions, eventually fell away as
the poem entered into the larger literary canon of the Romantics writers and
continued to be read and studied years after its initial publication. What
remained of the poem was the moral that animals, even the smallest mouse,
should not be treated cruelly because they had the capacity to think, feel, and
experience suffering as much as any human did. Even as more laws developed to
stop animal cruelty and the late twentieth century saw the introduction of
animal testing regulations, the spirit of Barbauld’s poem remained influential
on other poets, social reformers, and animal rights activists alike. Barbauld’s
mouse may have influenced Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse” and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge wrote, “thanks to Mrs. Barbauld,… it has become universally fashionable to teach lessons of
compassion towards animals,” two years prior to writing what Lawrence Buell
calls “the great English romantic poem about the consequences of mistreating
the animal kingdom,” The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner.[13]
The poem was reprinted frequently around the time of its writing, including in
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Female Reader from
1789, and the most recent reprint in 1976, over two hundred years after
Barbauld wrote the poem, was a limited edition “in aid of the World Wildlife
Fund to mark Animal Welfare Year.”[14]
Thus, Barbauld’s commentary on the morality of Priestley’s science, filtered
through the form of poetry, saved that mouse in 1771, but the poem’s life after
publication may have changed opinions about the treatment of animals for years
after the mouse in a cage offered its “Petition.”
[1] “Review of Poems
[by Anna Letitia Aikin]”, Critical Review
35 (March 1773): 193.
[2] Bellanca, “Science,” 60
[3] Anna Letitia Barbauld, Poems (London: Printed for Joseph Johnson, 1773), 37. Quoted in
McCarthy and Kraft, Poems, 245.
[4] Edmund Burke, The
Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke,
edited by Paul Langford, 9 vols. (Oxford: Claredon, 1991), ix.
[5] Burke, Writings
and Speeches, 177.
[6] Nandita Batra, “Dominion, Empathy, and Symbiosis:
Gender and Anthropocentrism in Romanticism,” The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003, edited by Michael P.
Branch and Scott Slovic, (Athens, GA, Universiy of Georgia Press, 2003), 159.
[7] Batra, “Dominion, Empathy, and Symbiosis,” 159.
[8] Craig Buettinger, “Women and Antivivisection in Late
Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of
Social History 30.4 (1997), 864.
[9] Buettinger, “Women and Antivivisection,” 864.
[11] “Anna Letitia Barbauld: 1743-1825,” Author
Introduction, The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, 9th ed, Vol. D, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, (New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 39.
[12] Sir Jerom Murch, Mrs.
Barbauld and Her Contemporaries: A Paper (London: Longman, 1877), from the
Digital Archive of Oxford University, https://archive.org/details/mrsbarbauld
andh01murcgoog, accessed 23 April 2014, 72.
[13] Bellanca, “Science,” 48; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton, vol. 2
of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 313; Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau,
Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 185.
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