Juliana Adelman's Civilised by Beasts adds to a growing array of urban histories that explore non-human animals’ central roles in shaping everyday life as large cities evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her work both highlights common themes in the literature on urban animals, while also documenting what made Dublin different. The result is a lively examination of animals, urban life and economic transformation within the fraught political setting of Irish–British relations.
At one level, Civilised by Beasts offers a familiar account of domesticated animals’ challenging, disruptive presence in urban settings. Horse-drawn transportation, livestock drives, free-ranging pigs and vagrant dogs made the nineteenth-century city a difficult place to navigate, and urban residents from all walks of life had to cope with a certain robust chaos whenever they ventured out of doors. Bemused complaints about errant pigs and their predilections have become a bit of a cliché in the historical literature, and Dublin certainly had its fair share of such animals. Animals on the loose also became a cultural lens for measuring cities’ civilizational status, and they fuelled class-based conflicts. Catherine McNeur, for example, has detailed how hogs and pigs in the streets and neighbourhoods of nineteenth-century New York City pitted working-class subsistence needs against middle-class perceptions of nuisance. Urban animals’ untidy meanderings also served as a basis for New York elites’ attack on ‘the swinish multitudes’, which equated proximity to animals with the moral degradation of those commonly referred to as ‘the vicious and disorderly classes’. Dubliners, in Adelman's account, waged similar battles over urban poverty. As Adelman observes of mid-nineteenth-century Dublin, ‘[T]he desire to make life in poverty less beastly revealed an assumption that the poor were, if not animals, at least lesser humans’ (p. 83).
Every city, however, also reflects its own specific historical and cultural conditions, and here is where Adelman's account of Dublin shines. Struggles over Ireland's political status, the wrenching horrors of the Great Famine and the subsequent political economy of beef made for reckonings with animals that were marked by Dublin's unique history and social circumstances. Although Adelman does not invoke colonialism directly as an analytical device, her study amply demonstrates how Ireland's subordinate status cast long shadows over Dubliners’ efforts to contend with the city's animal-based order. Civilised by Beasts also provides important insights about the rural–urban interface, an oft-neglected topic in urban histories.
The question of greater Irish autonomy, whether through repeal of the Union Act or via other means, lent a distinctive spin to civilizational anxieties surrounding animals. Middle- and upper-class Dubliners, like their counterparts in other global cities, viewed the poor in animalistic terms. At the same time, however, one senses from Adelman's narrative that city boosters also sought a civilized image for Dublin in order to counter Britons’ racialized and colonial attitudes towards the Irish. Hence the mission of the Zoological Society to advance, as Adelman puts it, ‘civic and national improvement’ (p. 27). Animal welfare advocacy similarly promised to demonstrate Dublin's civilized status, although critics warned that it did so at the risk of prioritizing the alleviation of animal suffering ahead of human woes. In particular, the politics of repeal suggested that on the one hand, British advancements in legalizing protections for animals underscored the cruelty of policies that impoverished people in Ireland and denied them basic rights. On the other hand, however, some advocates of repeal also considered Irish animal welfare advocacy a distraction from more pressing political matters. In either case, the relationship between people and animals provided discourses and cultural ammunition for addressing Ireland's national question.
The famine years amplified such matters while also precipitating a fundamental agricultural transformation towards beef production. First of all, the famine exacerbated well-established discourses about poverty and human animality when increasingly desperate peasants sank further and further into immiseration. The worst came when death by starvation, combined with social breakdowns, left bodies to be consumed by scavengers. ‘To become food for dogs and wild animals’, Adelman observes, ‘was to be robbed of humanity’ (p. 65). Scenes of fatted cattle on display for export while countless people lacked sustenance further underscored the price of life without home rule. But the potato blight also shifted Irish agriculture towards livestock production, which turned Dublin into ‘an urban cowtown, Ireland's market metropolis’ (p. 93).
Civilised by Beasts is one of the few urban animal histories that deals directly and at length with the agricultural–urban nexus, its political economy and its spatial transformations. Irish beef slated for British markets meant Dublin became the key point of transfer in the shipment of cattle from Irish fields to Liverpool and onward to English markets. As Adelman tartly observes, ‘If post-Famine Ireland was becoming an English grazing farm, then Dublin was becoming its barn’ (p. 106). This economic transition had major infrastructural implications, in the form of railroad lines and quays. Moreover, it fixed Dublin's livestock-oriented spatiality for more than a century. Decades after major US cities had removed livestock from downtown cores, or from city limits altogether, ‘Dublin retained a cattle market within the city limits until 1973, complete with cattle driven across town to the port and a population of city-dwelling drovers’ (p. 113). Private slaughterhouses could still be found in Dublin in the early 1980s, and city leaders were still pushing to remove the remaining piggeries from the city in the early 1990s. In an animal history literature that tends to emphasize the gradual exclusion of livestock from urban spaces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the longevity of large animals in Dublin is striking and suggests the need for further study of livestock economies and their urban dimensions.
Civilised by Beasts offers a rich account of how Irish historical currents shaped Dublin's animal history. As Adelman shows, even as Dubliners responded at times to animals’ presence in ways typical of other large cities, their experiences also reflected the specificities of their own urban and national settings. Readers interested in animals, urban history, the history of agriculture and food production, and even the history of colonialism, will find much of interest in this careful and discerning study.
