Harriet Ritvo is a history professor at MIT. She is the author of Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (2010), The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (2009), The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (1997), and The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987). She is also the co-editor of Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Imperialism, Exoticism (1991), and the editor of Charles Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1998). Her articles and reviews on British cultural history, environmental history, and the history of human-animal relations have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including The London Review of Books, Science, Daedalus, The American Scholar, Technology Review, and The New York Review of Books, as well as scholarly journals in several fields. Ritvo is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and past President of the American Society for Environmental History. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, and the Stanford Humanities Center. She is also the recipient of a Whiting Award in Nonfiction and a Graduate Society Award from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
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The Animal EstateThe English and Other Creatures in Victorian England
When in 1679 a London woman swung at Tyburn for bestiality, her canine partner in crime suffered the same punishment on the same grounds. King James I ordered a bear that had killed a child to be baited to death, and rural shepherds frequently hanged dogs caught worrying their flocks. The Merchant of Venice included a reference to “a wolf, hanged for human slaughter” sufficiently cursory to suggest that Shakespeare’s audience recognized animals as appropriate participants in formal judicial proceedings.
The Animal Estate:The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England -
The Animal EstateThe English and Other Creatures in Victorian England
The ultimate measure of the tiger’s unregeneracy was its fondness for human flesh. Many tigers living in the populated parts of India and Ceylon routinely preyed on domestic animals and occasionally became man-eaters. Some turned to human prey because they were too sick or old to catch faster and less dangerous quarries. Most, however, were thought to be “cattle-lifting tigers” who had once “summoned up courage to attack the herdsmen,” and thereby added a tasty new item to their diet.
The Animal Estate:The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England -
The Animal EstateThe English and Other Creatures in Victorian England
The most natural way for most visitors to interact with the animals was to feed them, an act which symbolized both proprietorship and domination. Most zoos encouraged this activity. The first elephants in the collection of the London Zoo were reported to “have a keen relish for buns and biscuits, which are vended on the spot for their benefit and the gratification of visitors.” Their successors shared the same tastes. When the celebrated Jumbo was about to depart for the United States, his admirers expressed their regret with farewell gifts including fruit, cake, oysters, and a variety of alcoholic beverages.
The Animal Estate:The English and Other Creatures in Victorian England
“Harriet Ritvo is a world authority on the history of animals and a pioneer in the important developing field of animal studies. A number of these essays are classics. Taken together, they reveal an author at the height of her intellectual and interpretive powers.” —Janet Browne, Harvard University, author of Darwin’s “Origin of Species": A Biography [on Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras]
“[An] engaging, offbeat book . . . The Platypus and the Mermaid is a study of a wide range of classificatory practices in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Ritvo is particularly interested in the interplay between learned and popular writing . . . I have thoroughly enjoyed Ritvo's entertaining and informative tour of both the highroads and the hedgerows of natural history.” —Stefan Collini, The New York Times Book 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 animals . . . She tells so many wonderful stories.” —Stephen Jay Gould, New York Review of Books [on The Animal Estate]
Selected Works
