<scp>Asha Hornsby</scp>, <i>Vivisection and Late-Victorian Literary Culture</i>

As someone who regularly teaches Victorian anti-vivisection texts, I was delighted to review Asha Hornsby’s wide-ranging analysis of anti-vivisection discourse, and I was even more pleased when I realized how important her insightful study is not just for that specific field of Victorian texts, but also for Victorian literature as a whole at the turn of the century. Hornsby’s claim is that the language, tropes, and reading techniques of both the vivisection and anti-vivisection movements influenced literary production and criticism quite broadly, a convincing claim given Hornsby’s thorough discussion of texts both well-known and obscure and her persuasive close readings throughout. Many discussions of Victorian vivisection and anti-vivisection texts focus primarily on their cultural aspects, whether from an animal studies, or from a feminist viewpoint, or both (see Sue Hamilton’s excellent work on the subject, or Cora Lansbury’s influential The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England [2012]). Hornsby’s monograph does indeed attend to the political/cultural aspects of vivisection, but those are not the primary focus; instead, it is the literary/discursive styles that emerged from the vivisection debate that Hornsby primarily addresses. As she states, ‘‘vivisection’ is best understood as at once a particular material practice but also a broader set of metaphorical meanings which were produced, shaped, and contested in a wide variety of texts and contexts’ (p. 282). To support this claim, Hornsby focuses on the discourse found within anti-vivisection publications like the Zoophilist, including poetry such as Christina Rossetti’s ‘A Word for the Dumb’, images of vivisection, and stories that sought to identify the correct audience with titles like ‘A Nursery Rhyme for Grown-up Children (It Might Frighten the Little Ones)’; vivisection and pro-vivisection texts from Claude Bernard, Élie de Cyon, and satirical publications like Punch; and well-known novels like H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau and Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science, alongside lesser-known and delightfully obscure works such as Walter Hadwen’s Dr. Deguerre, Edward Berdoe’s Dying Scientifically, a Key to St. Bernard’s, and the anonymously published A Monomaniac of Love: A Study in the Pathology of Character.

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