Abstract
Historicizing cultural anxieties about the cruel child, this book chapter examines literary representations of children’s mistreatment of animals in popular works published in England between 1750 and 1800, a key period in the rise of the child reader and the burgeoning animal rights movement. Episodes involving children tormenting other living creatures, often for sport, appear in a range of satiric and didactic fictional works, from Francis Coventry’s The History of Pompey the Little; Or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog (1751) to Memoirs of Dick, the Little Poney (1799). Enacting in miniature brutalities of the adult world, these cruel child-characters are increasingly used in the service of young readers’ moral education, but continue to demonstrate the period’s understanding of the cruel child as the product of a wider culture of socially sanctioned cruelty in eighteenth-century Britain.
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Ladd, H. (2018). “This Sport of Tormenting”: Cruel Children and Their Animals in British Literature, 1750–1800. In: Flegel, M., Parkes, C. (eds) Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures. Critical Approaches to Children's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72275-7_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72275-7_2
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