Abstract
In the winter of 1785, after a successful summer tour of provincial cities, the Learned Pig made its London debut to great acclaim and sensation. Touted for its erudition and clever methods—‘he reads, writes, and casts accounts by means of typographical cards, in the same manner that a printer composes and by the same method’—the performing pig quickly became a fashionable attraction, moving to Sadler’s Wells in the summer as the main act. Evidence of the pig’s popularity comes from a variety of contemporary diaries, letters and press accounts; as the anonymous author of London Unmask’d declares, ‘it would be quite monstrous and ill-bred not to follow the ton, and go see the wonderful Learned Pig; it being the trite question in all polite circles, Pray, my Lord, my Lady, Sir John, Madam, or Miss, have you seen the Learned Pig?’
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- 1.
Publicity handbill quoted in Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 44. See also Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 173, and Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington’s Times (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 308.
- 2.
London Unmask’d: Or the New Town Spy. Exhibiting a Striking Picture of the World as It Goes (London: William Adlard, 1787[?]), 141–142.
- 3.
William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 210.
- 4.
Robert Southey, Letters from England (London: The Cresset Press, 1951), 340.
- 5.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual; Or The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight (Burlington: Chauncey Goodrich, 1832), 51.
- 6.
Ibid., 51.
- 7.
Ibid., 49–50.
- 8.
Wordsworth, Prelude, 210–211.
- 9.
Ibid., 210–211.
- 10.
Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce, and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 178.
- 11.
Keen, Literature, 167.
- 12.
Tess Cosslett, Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 9.
- 13.
Ibid., 2.
- 14.
I have discussed other aspects of literature, development and becoming human elsewhere; see Ann Wierda Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood: The Infantilization of British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 109–157.
- 15.
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), quoted in Jayne Lewis, The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 40. For discussions of Locke’s influence on children’s literature, see Cosslett, Talking Animals, 9–11, and Samuel F. Pickering, John Locke and Children’s Books in Eighteenth-Century England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).
- 16.
Lewis, The English Fable, 40.
- 17.
Ibid., 41.
- 18.
Cosslett, Talking Animals, 1.
- 19.
John Locke, Letters to Edward Clarke on Education, quoted in Cosslett, Talking Animals, 10.
- 20.
Sarah Trimmer, An Easy Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature (London: T. Longman, 10th ed., 1799), 37.
- 21.
Harriet Ritvo, Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: Essays on Animals and History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 37.
- 22.
Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 51–58. See also Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-period Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 57–58; and Cosslett, Talking Animals, 14–15 & 18.
- 23.
Trimmer, Easy Introduction, 44–45.
- 24.
Heather Klemann, ‘How to Think with Animals in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories and The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria,’ The Lion and the Unicorn 39 (2015): 3.
- 25.
Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories: Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals (London: T. Longman, 1786), vii.
- 26.
Ibid., x. Dorothy Kilner’s Rational Brutes begins with the same cautionary reminder; see Dorothy Kilner, The Rational Brutes; or Talking Animals (London: Vernor and Hood, Poultry, 1799), 7.
- 27.
Sarah Trimmer, The Guardian of Education (London: J. Hatchard, 1803–1806), Vol. I: 304); quoted in Darren Howard, ‘Talking Animals and Reading Children: Teaching (dis)Obedience in John Aikin and Anna Barbauld’s Evenings at Home,’ Studies in Romanticism, 48 (Winter 2009): 644.
- 28.
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 135.
- 29.
James Burnet Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language (Edinburgh: J. Balfour, 1774), Vol. 1, 494, 208. Vocal mimicry is still considered the basis of human language.
- 30.
For a longer examination of Enlightenment histories of language and how this discourse defines the human, the relationship between child and animal and the philosophical conception of infancy, see Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, 67–157.
- 31.
For discussions of how alphabet books from Comenius onward used animals to usher children into language and letters, see Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000) 26–38, and Klemann, ‘How to Think with Animals,’ 4–5.
- 32.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, 60.
- 33.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Original Stories from Real Life (1791) (Otley: Woodstock Books, 2001), 12, 9.
- 34.
Ibid., 13.
- 35.
Howard, ‘Talking Animals,’ 650.
- 36.
Wollstonecraft, Original Stories, 13.
- 37.
Ibid., 30 & 5.
- 38.
Ibid., 16–17 (emphasis in original).
- 39.
Ibid., 14.
- 40.
Ritvo, Noble Cows, 5.
- 41.
For a more thorough discussion about the emergence of development in the eighteenth century as the dominant way of describing change over time, see Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, 25–66.
- 42.
Howard, ‘Talking Animals,’ 653.
- 43.
Rowland, Romanticism and Childhood, 109–11; and Howard, ‘Talking Animals,’ 647.
- 44.
Crain, The Story of A, 103.
- 45.
Anna Letitia Barbauld, Lessons for Children: Part III Being the Second for Children of Three Years Old (London: J. Johnson, 1795), 6–7.
- 46.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, 67.
- 47.
Ibid., 71.
- 48.
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes; Otherwise called Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes, 3rd Edition (London: J. Newberry, 1766), 31.
- 49.
Ibid., 72.
- 50.
Trimmer, Fabulous Histories, 72.
- 51.
The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, 72.
- 52.
Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by Michael N. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 87–88.
- 53.
Ibid., 95.
- 54.
Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 5.
- 55.
Herder, Philosophical Writings, 81.
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Rowland, A.W. (2018). Learned Pigs and Literate Children: Becoming Human in Eighteenth-Century Literary Cultures. In: O'Malley, A. (eds) Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94737-2_6
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