Childhood Socialization and Companion Animals: United States, 1820-1870

Katherine C. Grier [1]
University of South Carolina

Between 1820 and 1870, middle-class Americans became convinced of the role nonhuman animals could play in socializing children. Companion animals in and around the household were the medium for training children into self-consciousness about, and abhorrence of, causing pain to other creatures including, ultimately, other people. In an age where the formation of character was perceived as an act of conscious choice and self-control, middle-class Americans understood cruelty to animals as a problem both of individual or familial deficiency and of good and evil. Training children to be self-conscious about kindness became an important task of parenting. Domestic advisors also argued that learning kindness was critical for boys who were developmentally prone to cruelty and whose youthful cruelty had implications both for the future of family life and for the body politic. The practice of pet keeping, where children became stewards of companion animals who were then able to teach young humans such virtues as gratitude and fidelity, became a socially meaningful
Between 1820 and 1870, middle-class Americans became convinced of the role non- human animals could play in socializing children into the virtues of kindness and sympathy. This opinion reflected changing ideas about child rearing. It was part of a new domestic ethic of kindness to animals that grew out of the flourishing culture of professionals, white-collar workers, and independent proprietors and their families in cities and towns. This may be called, to be concise, “Victorian” culture in America (Howe 1976). Because of its preoccupation with the meanings of family life, the domestic ethic of kindness focused especially on the implications of kind or cruel treatment of animals within that context. Animals in and around the household were the medium for training children into self-consciousness about, and abhorrence of, causing pain to other creatures including, ultimately, other people. In an age where the formation of character was perceived as an act of conscious choice and self-control, cruelty to animals was understood as a problem both of individual or familial deficiency and of good and evil. The ideologists of kindness also argued that childhood cruelty to animals had to be understood fundamentally in gendered terms as a problem of raising boys and that failing to raise boys into kindness had worrisome consequences for families as well as for the body politic. Socializing children to be kind to animals thus became an important task of middle-class parenting. Pet keeping, an activity long interpreted and tolerated as a personal indulgence, was transformed into a morally purposive act.

An Old Argument Recast

The arguments for kindness and understanding of the meanings of cruelty that will be outlined in this paper became part of the cultural “common sense” of middle-class Americans. In 1820, the most fundamental premise of these arguments, that cruelty to animals predicted cruelty to humans, was already an old argument. It was recast, however, in light of middle-class culture’s special concerns, particularly a preoccupation with controlling an apparent masculine propensity for violence. Victorian commentators also incorporated traditional wisdom into the domestic ethic of kindness, reviving the ancient argument that animals in and around the household were moral exemplars, even tutors. Thus, household pets became individuals and actors. To a culture that placed special emphasis on feeling—not only distaste for pain but also the ability to love—the faithful dog, the maternal cat, and the bird family all made the emotional structures of the middle-class family perfectly natural. At the same time, this correspondence could be interpreted to mean that such feeling creatures, precisely because of their moral and emotional capacities, were also worthy of particular kindness and care.

By mid-century, the typical apparatus for socializing middle-class children into kindness was parental discipline, perhaps augmented by the formal moral education of Sunday schools and amplified by doses of didactic children’s literature. The latter was part of a dramatic expansion in popular, printed media that helped make the new conversation about animal treatment more influential than any previous discourse on the subject. Arguments in favor of kindness now appeared in magazines, domestic advice books, child rearing literature, poetry, and fiction. The arguments appeared as advice for children in books and periodicals such as Youth’s Companion and even in the imagery of Sunday School lesson prints and picture books. Some of the era’s best-known authors—Hale, the influential editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and the advice and fiction writers Sigourney, Child, and Stowe—as well as many lesser lights produced a steady stream of missives pressing kindness for both children and adults. These sources provide an important means of reconstructing the outlines of the argument about childhood socialization and animals.[2]

Victorian Culture in the United States -- the “Eden of Home

Before turning to the linkage between childhood socialization and pet keeping in more detail, a brief overview of the features of Victorian culture in the United States that more broadly underpinned changes in popular attitudes about animal treatment will be helpful. In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, economic and cultural change together fostered what has been called a “coherent and remarkably vibrant” American middle class (Carnes, 1993, p. 608). The development of national markets and the increasingly complex and competitive world of business encouraged the growth in numbers of independent proprietors and white-collar workers—from lawyers to bankers and clerks—whose households were no longer shaped by the traditional family-based economy of pre-industrial agricultural life. As these men enacted their economic lives outside their households, the roles of their wives also evolved—from mistresses of a unit of economic production to mistresses of a new kind of symbolic production. In their new roles, the wives created the style of living for the family and cultivated properly socialized children who would grow up to succeed in this changed world.

Alternative to Calvinism

Middle-class people in the northeastern United States, where the new culture first became a social force to be reckoned with, tended to embrace a recently articulated form of evangelical Protestantism. Presented as an alternative to orthodox Calvinism, the form, arguing for the importance of emotion over complex theology as the wellspring of faith, had been successful in attracting new adherents (Johnson, 1978).[3] It also encouraged belief in the efficacy of the individual will and in the possibilities of individual and social progress toward perfection, whether in firsthand encounters with the Lord in revival, in the social world outside the church, or in the increasingly private realm of the individual household. Wherever it happened, however, this progress demanded the discipline of personal self-control.

An Argument Adapted

Commentators such as Beecher, America’s most prominent evangelical preacher of the mid-nineteenth century, repeatedly stressed that human beings were subject to “passions” of all kinds. Varied stimuli, carefully differentiated from heartfelt emotion, prompted these passions: alcohol, gambling, romance novel-reading, and “amusements which violently inflame and gratify [men’s] appetites.” The passionate man was dangerous not only to himself but also to other innocent beings, often manifesting passions as violence toward dependent others. This argument, adapted from eighteenth century moral philosophy, was quickly extended to encompass both biped and quadruped sufferers. As we will see, evangelical publications for children found the lives and sufferings of animals at the hands of uncontrolled humans especially useful for lessons on practicing the self-discipline of true Christian love and sympathy.

Domesticity as a Cultural Construct

Kindness to animals also became an integral part of the ideal labeled by one minister, the “Eden of Home,” a metaphor that for some authors explicitly encompassed idyllic relations with animals.[5] This introduces the next factor shaping new attitudes toward kindness, the powerful cultural construct that historians now label “domesticity.” Domesticity made the individual household the primary medium for creating the self-disciplined adults who could live the theology of liberal Protestantism. At the same time, domesticity made the household a refuge from the increasingly separate and competitive masculine world of economic competition and a model of the world as it should be, where the threat of naked power was supplanted by moral influence and feminine love (Cott, 1977; Epstein, 1981).

Mothers Shaping Power

While patriarchal families in the eighteenth century had deferred to fathers for childhood correction, mothers in the new kinds of households now bore the principal responsibility for socialization: They were present to study their children constantly and closely and knew better how to influence young minds. Along with the greater responsibility for child rearing, the conventions of domesticity intimated that, as each woman presided over her “state in miniature,” her conventional feminine attributes—a more feeling nature, gentleness, and the capacity for deep maternal devotion—shaped the particular kind of power she wielded. Her tender feelings and influence in the “softening, sanctifying environments of home” were meant to guide family members gently toward the good.[6]

A “Banknote World” and the Other

Although real life was considerably more complex then the conventions suggested, domesticity organized the world conceptually—by splitting it into two domains that both opposed and paralleled each other. One was rational and hard, commercial, public, and masculine—a “bank-note world” that made no place for ties of the heart (Cott, 1977, p. 68). The other was bound by pleasures and responsibilities of home. That other world was beyond commerce, private, and decidedly feminine. A psychological as well as physical sanctuary, its occupants were connected first by their love for one another. Domesticity also drew on the new theology connecting Heavenly order and Earthly social order through the family. The moral progress of each household was causally linked to a good society. “Home Interests,” an essay that appeared in Youth’s Penny Gazette, a weekly paper published by the American Sunday-School Union, described this equation concisely for young readers:


Our home is a little world. The most important laws of society are as operative in the family as in the town, state, or kingdom. There is authority conferred by God himself upon the parents. There is dependence—the weak upon the strong, and the ignorant upon the wise. There is a little theatre on which all the charities and graces of social life may be beautifully and harmoniously displayed. Hence it is, that one who is known to have been a good father, son, or brother, is relied upon as a good citizen also.[7]
This formulation also makes clear the important point that domesticity did not reject divinely ordained hierarchical relations within families, the operative assumption undergirding family order in patriarchal households of the eighteenth century. A rhetoric of service and duty, however, now softened them. Kindly human stewardship of companion animals at home metaphorically represented the relation of a loving God to humankind. In addition, a kindly stewardship stood, in the socialization of children, for the ideal relations of parents to their children and of men to their families and other social dependents.[8]

Dovetailing Three Cultural Factors

The middle-class theology of feeling and self-discipline and the cultural ideal of domesticity also dovetailed nicely with a broadly secular ideal, gentility. This was the standard of personal excellence that Anglo-American elites fostered during the eighteenth century and that continued to define “good society” through most of the nineteenth (Bushman, 1992). Gentility also affiliated individual self-control and softened feelings in its own taxonomy of experience.

Advocates of kindness argued that improved treatment of animals was evidence of genteel benevolence, the disinterested desire to promote the happiness of others that originated in the undamaged, natural, human “moral sense” but that required appropriate cultivation. Inexpensive manners’ books, published in large numbers throughout the nineteenth century, continued to offer an eighteenth century formula for the “amiable character” that connected “benevolence” with “true delicacy,”—the general impulse to do good with the sensitivity that allowed a genteel person to enter into the feelings of others. The anonymous author of A Manual of Politeness (1837) explained that the best sensibility had “a quick sense of what may give pleasure or pain, and teaches us to pursue the one and avoid the other, and a refined understanding points out the surest means of doing this in different circumstances.”[9]

Creating a Framework

These three cultural factors—liberal Protestantism, domesticity, and gentility—together created a powerful and long-lived framework for reconsidering animal-human interactions. Kindness to other sentient beings became a manifestation of the softened feelings that respectable people valued on multiple counts and thus became a marker of middle-class identity. For the rest of the nineteenth century, the underlying premises of arguments on behalf of animals—claims that guided the creation of the humane education movement—were still based on those wielded by the antebellum commentators whose words appear throughout this essay. The genealogy of their argument for kindness originated in England, dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries; this history has been recounted in detail elsewhere. It seems clear, however, that these popular U.S. commentators had only a fragmentary awareness of their long, if attenuated, history as they cobbled together fragments of Biblical verse, romantic poetry, and philosophy to support a case that they felt deeply (Thomas, 1983).[10]

Learning the “Law of Human Kindness”

A central tenet of liberal advice literature published for parents in the first half of the nineteenth century was the gradual growth of infants into independent moral agency. Authors informed their readers that infants had “natural feelings of kindness,” lacking only the experience and discipline parents could provide.[11] This view of children as innocent, good-hearted beings was part of a profound change in American attitudes toward child rearing, a change first rung in with the publication in 1693 of Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education. Locke’s assumptions were not embraced by many American parents until more than a century later (Calvert, 1992). By the 1840s, Bushnell, author of the popular text Views of Christian Nurture, and other ministers who believed in the “natural pravity of man” informed parents that their “aim, effort, and expectation” should be that their children were born “ as one that is spiritually renewed...seeming, rather, to have loved what is good from his earliest years.”[12]

But how were young children, confined to such a small sphere of action in the world, to learn the “law of human kindness” that inevitably led to general benevolence? Inside the little Eden of the middle-class household, animals played a special role. Sigourney’s popular advice manual, Letters to Mothers (1838), addressed the question of kindness to animals as one of the three fundamental lessons of the “moral code of infancy” that laid the “foundation for a future superstructure of virtue” so necessary for the formation of character. After the lesson of obedience to parents, she suggested, the next lesson for children was “kindness to all around.” The rudiments are best taught by the treatment of animals:

If [a child] seizes a kitten by the back, or pulls its hair, show immediately by your own example, how it may be held properly, and soothed into confidence. Draw back the little hand, lifted to strike the dog. Perhaps it may not understand that it thus inflicts pain. But be strenuous in confirming the opposite habit. Do not permit it to kill flies, or to trouble harmless insects. Check the first buddings of those Domitian tastes. Instruct it that the gift of life, to the poor beetle, or the crawling worm, is from the Great Father above, and not lightly to be trodden out.[13]

Parental Exemplars on the Alert

Fostering the habit of kindness also required adult exemplars. Children learned best by seeing and imitating others, so parents now had to be newly self-conscious of their own everyday relations with animals. Discussing his approach to incorporating moral lessons into children’s lives by “the influence of example” rather than by “exhortation and instruction,” Abbott, author of the enormously popular “Rollo” stories for children, chose a single example, parental treatment of songbirds (one of the iconic animals in discussions of kindness):


If a boy hears his father speaking kindly to a robin in the spring—welcoming its coming and offering it food—there arises at once in his own mind, a feeling of kindness toward the bird and toward all animal creation, which is produced by a sort of sympathetic action, a power somewhat similar to what in physical philosophy is called induction. On the other hand, if the father, instead of feeding the bird, goes eagerly for a gun, in order that he may shoot it, the boy will sympathize with that desire, and...there will be gradually formed within him...a disposition to kill and destroy all helpless beings that come within his power. There is no need of any formal instruction in either case.[14]
Assuming that the parents’ behavior toward animals was exemplary, child-rearing literature still insisted that it was important for middle-class parents to be alert to any childhood behavior that caused pain to other sentient creatures. Because of the direct connection between the moral climate of the individual household and that of the larger community, how children treated animals predicted how, as adults, they would treat other human beings. The cruel child begat an even worse adult. This argument that cruelty to animals was a prelude to cruel treatment of other humans—what sociologist Arluke and his collaborators have called the “violence graduation hypothesis”—was not new (Arluke, Levin, Luke, & Ascione, 1998; Lockwood & Ascione, 1998). As Thomas (1983) and Serpell (1996) have pointed out, Aquinas (1225-1274), no lover of animals, explained the presence of biblical injunctions against cruelty by arguing that their purpose was “for removing a man’s mind from exercising cruelty towards other men, lest anyone, from exercising cruelty upon brutes, should go on hence to human beings....”(Thomas; Serpell).

Picking up the Theme

It appeared again in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century arguments about the effects of experience upon the development of what was believed to be an innate human moral sense. The formula that childhood cruelty to animals portends even worse behavior in adulthood was given its strongest presentation when, in 1750and 1751, Hogarth published his famous series of engravings, “The Four Stages of Cruelty” (Turner, 1980; Paulson, 1996).[15] By the end of the eighteenth century, a new genre of children’s literature picked up the theme. Salzmann’s Elements of Morality for the Use of Children (1782), translated into English by Wollstonecraft and in circulation in America by 1800, used a variation on the same formula. In Chapter XXXII, James, a young boy, is scolded by his father for proposing to punish a mouse as a “little thief” by cutting off the mouse’s ears and tail, parroting earlier punishments for human criminals. Mr. Jones shames him as a “cruel boy” and warns, “He who can torment a harmless animal...accustoms himself by degrees to cruelty, and at last he will find a savage joy in it: and after tormenting animals, will not fail to torment men.”[16]

Embracing Even the Lowly Insect

American advice authors of the first half of the nineteenth century both shared and popularized their predecessors’ concerns about the hardening effects of childhood cruelty, and they took particular pains to embrace all animals, no matter how lowly. Take, for example, their critique of what Muzzy and others, seconding Sigourney, called the “wanton sport of torturing poor insects.”[17] This was an activity that probably seemed harmless enough to harried housekeepers who spent considerable time and effort ridding themselves, their children, and their furnishings and food of swarms of such pests in the days before modern bug sprays or even window screens. Yet Sigourney quoted Cowper, a favorite source for many advocates of the domestic ethic of kindness: “I would not have for my friend...one who carelessly sets foot upon a worm,” Sigourney warned the young audience of her Boy’s Book (1845):


If I see even a young child pull off the wings of an insect, or take pains to set his foot upon a worm, I know that he has not been well-instructed, or else there is something wrong and wicked in his heart.[18]
This rhetoric seems so hyperbolic that it could hardly have reflected actual behavior on the part of parents. Yet when Caroline Cowles, age 14, took a walk through downtown Canandaigua, New York, with her grandfather (her guardian following the death of her mother) on a fine day in April 1856, she received an impromptu lesson on kindness to animals along exactly these lines. She recorded in her diary that it was,


such a beautiful day I felt glad that I was alive….The air was full of tiny little flies, buzzing around and going in circles and semi-circles as though they were practicing calisthenics or dancing a quadrille. I think they were glad they were alive, too. I stepped on a big bug crawling on the walk and Grandfather said I ought to have brushed it aside instead of killing it. I asked him why and he said, “Shakespeare says, ‘The beetle that we tread upon feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.’”[19]
Thus, Cowles’ diary entry recounts an apparently common phenomenon—a middle-class child in Victorian America being brought to consciousness of the feelings of another creature and encouraged to be kind. It wasn’t easy to always think of others, human or nonhuman. Even as she attributed the human emotion of gladness to the insects she observed in flight and humanized them by comparing their flight to a dance or a drill, the girl deliberately killed one in her path. Her grandfather’s admonition (cribbed from Measure for Measure) did not chide her for childish “wickedness” but urged her to think empathetically of the suffering of another creature. That the source of the lesson was only a “big bug” suggested that learning the proper attitudes toward other sentient beings and adhering to them in daily life required a high degree of self-awareness and self-control.[20]


Cowles’ grandfather was not the only adult who took this formula to heart. Clemens, a mother who followed the reformed childbearing practices in which she seems to have been raised, still applied it in the 1880s when she would only allow her youngest daughter, Jean, to create an insect collection with specimens the child found already dead. (This approach lacked a certain charm, and Jean soon fed her “collection” to one of the family cats.)[21]
The “Habit of Cruelty”

Treatment of insects and other “lower animals” became important precisely because that treatment seemed so trifling (authors also singled out frogs, minnows, toads, and snakes as innocent victims of cruelty). It could easily become a “habit of cruelty.” That so thoughtless and small an act led to a more dangerous habit drew on the debate about passions that also underlay antebellum reform efforts against both public and private corporal punishment. The debate peaked between the 1820s and 1850s in widespread public criticism and in the final abolition of public execution. Critics argued that the repeated sight of suffering hardened and debased both the actors and onlookers who, unable to intervene, experienced a weakening of natural sympathy. Even worse, despite the presence of a moral sense, taking pleasure in violence was still a latent human passion that quickly became an addiction, demanding more and more cruelty to satisfy itself. Beecher argued that, addicted to the “intense thrill” of “short-lived excitement,” the cruelist,


…torments for the same reason that a girl reads her tear-bedewed romance, or an inebriate drinks his rum....actual moans, and shrieks, and the writhing of utter agony, just suffice to excite his worn-out sense, and inspire, probably, less emotion than ordinary men have in listening to a tragedy or reading a bloody novel.[22]
Clearly, sparing children corporal punishment at home and intervening against their own small acts of physical violence was vitally important (Halttunen, 1995; Rothman, 1971; Glenn, 1984). Alcott worried his feminine readers with the admonition that “all the larger cruelties of mankind have their origins in the cruelties of infancy and youth.” But, he assured them, “over all these cruelties, you and your sex...have very large control.”[23] The assurance was a relief because boyhood cruelty not only portended the private tyranny of domestic violence but also had worrisome implications for the future of the American republic. Sigourney noted that although she was not certain when early childhood lessons of kindness were actually absorbed, intervention during “infancy” (defined in those days as before the age of six or seven) was essential, citing American history as evidence:


Those baleful dispositions, which desolate human happiness, are often early developed. It was Benedict Arnold, the traitor, who in his boyhood loved to destroy insects, to mutilate toads, to steal the eggs of the mourning bird, and torture quiet, domestic animals, who eventually laid waste the shrinking domestic charities, and would have drained the life-blood of his endangered country.[24]
Thoughtless Boys

If children were not naturally cruel—if, in fact, they had natural feelings of kindness—how could the abuse they apparently heaped upon the animals in their paths be explained? Since children were not evil, child-rearing advice and didactic children’s books were compelled to see the actions of young masters as “thoughtless”—at least the first time something bad happened.

Master Henry’s Rabbit, a small paper-cover children’s book (c. 1840), discussed the problem of thoughtlessness and its cure for young readers. Henry, a boy of seven or eight, is allowed by his uncle, Mr. Dalben, to adopt a rabbit that has been injured by some village boys and their dog. The uncle consents with the condition that Henry have sole responsibility for the rabbit. (Because he is kind, he also asks a servant to be certain that the rabbit “did not want anything necessary to its comfort”—just in case). For a time, Henry cares for the rabbit, but his new kite soon diverts his attention and he forgets to feed his pet, even after being reminded. His uncle finally punishes him: “You are greatly to blame, Henry,” says the uncle.

You would have done better, to have destroyed the little creature at once when you found it in the warren, than to keep it to perish with hunger. Go, careless boy, feed your poor rabbit now; and, in order that you may be able to feel for the poor animal another time, I shall deprive you of your dinner today.

The punishment meted out by Henry’s uncle was intended to foster empathy—in this case through a similar experience of relatively harmless pain—and to encourage self-regulation through self-examination. Young Henry “humbled himself before God for this sin, and prayed earnestly for a better heart.” [25]

Fictional Stories in Children’s Periodicals

Stories of cruelty to animals, guilt at the realization of pain suffered, repentance, and the “lesson of mercy” learned filled children’s periodicals too. Often repentance came only after the death of an innocent creature. Forcing a woodchuck to swim until he drowned, two little boys remembered how,


…he had approached them as though he considered them friends, but they proved to be his murderers. And then his image was before them, as he lay motionless on the bank, now and then looking at them with an expression which seemed to denote nothing but forgiveness.[26]
At least Stowe’s 1858 children’s story, A Talk about Birds, let the victims live, but Stowe used similar assumptions in describing a mother’s discussion with her young son when she catches him trying to stone both song birds and the neighborhood cats. Rather than paddling the miscreant, she “set out to make him think about his acts” by describing the “beautiful contrivances” of the body of Cherry, his pet canary. Her success was measured by the boy’s statement that “it is a great deal worse to kill little birds than it is to break looking glasses, and such things, because little birds can feel you know.”[27]

Girls Portrayed as Sympathetic —Mostly

These fictional examples have featured little boys. Relatively few tales in this genre had girls as their principal protagonists.[28] Youth’s Penny Gazette did publish one story about a thoughtless girl and her neglected canary, worth noting because it is so hair-raising. In “Fanny’s Canary Bird” the little girl neglects her pet despite the explicit warning of her father; as punishment, the disobedient child is sent away to school where she catches fever, and dies).[29] Foreshadowing their adult roles, little girls were usually the untutored voices of sympathy and conscience.[30] The narrator of “My Bird,” for example, mourned that her canary could not “stretch his weary wing” but realized that “the wind and snow/Would kill my bonny bird,” and ended her poem with a promise:

By the first good ship across the main,
We’ll send him to Canary;
And we’ll never keep a bird again—
Say—will you, sister Mary?[31]

Problematic Play

Although discouraging boys from tormenting stray cats and dogs and squashing defenseless toads was praiseworthy, the discourse of middle-class kindness also made problematic some of the most common, if not always most admirable, forms of play by boys of all social classes in nineteenth century America. Young boys spent more time outdoors than their modern counterparts, and hunting and trapping small wild animals provided outlets for youthful energies in both town and country. Phelps (1865-1943), the son of a Connecticut minister, recalled that he “delighted in shooting and killing birds, any bird, edible or otherwise,” especially after he received his first double-barreled shotgun at the age of twelve:


I was not cruel by nature, and could not bear to see any animal ill-treated or in pain. Yet, when I was too small to own a gun, I would get up at dawn, armed with David’s implement, and try to kill robins and bluebirds. On the rare occasions when I succeeded, I felt thrills of joy, unshaded by regret.
Prescriptive accounts of songbird killing attribute no motives to juvenile minds other than thoughtlessness or cruelty, but Phelps interpreted his own motive as a primitive desire to possess the animal:


Not only did I feel a thrill when I shot a bird, but another, keener and quite different thrill when I held the dead body in my hand. The bird is an elusive creature, apparently inaccessible; one never has him near enough to examine completely and leisurely; hence the desire to hold him.[32]
The critique of bird nesting and songbird killing also ran counter to parallel advice that boys become amateur naturalists. Part of the “rational amusement” of natural history; collecting specimens and the creation of amateur “cabinets” almost always involved taking life and making awkward attempts at taxidermy.[33]

Hunting—Rehearsal for Manhood

Boys commonly trapped animals categorized as vermin, such as muskrats, to earn pocket money from their pelts; they trapped barn rats or used them for target practice. Even Beecher, whose worries about the effects of “passions” have already been noted, acknowledged that the sight of a woodchuck had in his youth caused attacks of “venatorial perturbation,” and he winked at his own sons’ efforts to catch and kill them.[34] Killing small wild animals was just something boys did, and they were proud of their ability to outsmart their prey. Miller (1796-1886), of York, Pennsylvania, was so proud of his “first Rabbit” caught “by strategem(sic)” in 1809 that he commemorated it in his sketchbook many years later.[35] By the 1860s, even children’s magazines that promoted kindness as an essential element of their editorial content, such as Our Young Folks (1865-1869) and its successor St. Nicholas routinely included ripping yarns about boyhood hunts. Hunting was still a cultural rehearsal for manhood, even the manhood of white-collar work.

Yet killing for sport—exactly the kind of leisure in which middle-class men engaged since their families no longer required game for subsistence—was particularly suspect because it dealt in blood for the purposes of amusement. Alcott admonished women neither to smile on “these juvenile murderers” nor to “eat the fruit of their doings.”[36] “Fishing and hunting for mere sport” were among the “exciting and pernicious amusements” of the senses targeted by advocates of kindness.[37] It was not that humans weren’t entitled to kill animals. The difficulty came when they exhibited “the love of killing,” a fundamental breakdown in empathy and self-control.[38] Alcott worried that,


“…whatever may be the apology, are not most of the animals around us, whether slain in one way or another—for food or for defence (sic)—are they not slain for sport? Where is the boy or young man to be found who hunts, entraps, fishes, &c., for any better reason...than because it is an amusement to him?”[39] Making “game of the suffering of God’s creatures” hardened the heart and prepared the practitioner for “rapine, murder, and war.”[40]
Violence Against Animals Represents Violence Against Families

This analysis of boys’ “thoughtless” violence toward animals, and its urgent argument that intervention during childhood was critical, could not have been inspired by parental observation of rough play alone. Although a full discussion is beyond the scope of this essay, we should remember that violence enacted upon the bodies of animals in public spaces was routine in both rural and urban America throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—and almost all of it was committed by men (Turner, 1980).[41]

Such violence became newly “visible” to the eyes of sensitized people, and it may have inspired the search for the meanings behind the violent acts of boys and the connection between the violence of boys and the more dangerous violence of men. The deliberate quality of some of the most egregious behavior of adult men could apparently be explained only by postulating a “hardening effect” in presumed past behavior. It was a scary thought, especially since masculine brutality seemed to embrace so many kinds of victims, including women and children. Further, reform efforts against corporal punishment had actually reached their cultural limits in the discussion of wife beating and child abuse. Antebellum reformers could not bring themselves to advocate legal restrictions against parents’ traditional rights to discipline children. Ironically, domesticity’s idealized views of relations within families “posed a crucial ideological barrier to widespread public discussion of wife beating” (Glenn, 1984, p. 80).

Thus, discussions of violence to animals were also often a covert discourse about violence within human families. Sometimes it was not even particularly covert. Picture Lessons, Illustrating Moral Truth, a set of large colored pictures with didactic captions published by the American Sunday-School Union, included “The Young Robbers. The Cruel Boys Robbing the Bird of Her Little Ones” The caption chided,


Harken! My boys, Would a mother like to have a cruel robber come, and take her little ones out of the cradle or the crib while she has gone out, to get bread for them? Answer this question before you touch these helpless birds. Has [the boy] a home, and would not he be grieved if robbers should break into it, and seize his little brothers and sisters and carry them off, and throw the house down or set it on fire? Why then does he not consider that the house of the little birds is dear to them, and that to break it up, is to distress, if not to destroy them?[42]
In its early years, Youth’s Companion repeatedly published anecdotes about the “maternal affection” of whales and cows and the “fervent” love of goats for their kids, usually in settings where “savage” men were attacking their young. Simultaneously both another metaphorical representation of concerns about the safety of human families and a plea for animals, the magazine used terms its readers would presumably understand.[43]

Pet Keeping and Animal Exemplars

As the presence of animals within the domestic circle became a medium for socialization and as other kinds of interactions with animals were stigmatized, apologists for kindness actively promoted pet keeping. The earliest advice on inculcating “kindness to all around” had simply assumed and found useful the presence of animals around middle-class households useful. Now, however, parents were advised to provide their boys with coops of pigeons, cages of songbirds, hutches of bunnies, and rollicking dogs.

In 1868, Hale, the influential editor and author, announced that parents could best foster kindness in boys by actively encouraging, rather than simply tolerating or even proscribing, the presence of companion animals in their households. Hers was certainly not the first statement in support of an already common practice, but it was one of the most explicit in its discussion of its implications. Pet keeping “humanized” boys and was “a great preventative against the thoughtless cruelty and tyranny they are so apt to exercise toward all dependent beings!”. She did not bother to explain why boys were such little tyrants; her readers knew the whole argument.

Hale did admit that girls also benefited from caring for pets, if only because “as sisters and mothers, they must help and teach boys in whatever things are good, tender, and lovely.”[44] Boys seemed to be developmentally prone to cruelty. Practicing his future mastery of the world in an imperfect, thoughtless way, a boy would be tempted to use physical abuse as “a trial of his skill”—at throwing rocks, for example, or aiming an arrow—or as “a proof of his strength.”[45]

A few authors of advice books promoted pet keeping because an “early habit of fondness” led to a lifelong pattern of kind behavior to animals, but most of the authors found in the practice a wider social utility.[46] Affection for pets and the experience of caring for them were regarded as potent agents for cultivating “the love of natural history and intellectual improvement...thoughtful tenderness and moral sensibility.”[47] Muzzy added thoughts on love:


Indeed, love in any form, and to any thing, is an elevating motive....[Who] can doubt that many a heart, both of the happy and sad, has been made better by the multitudes of parrots, lap-dogs, canaries, &c., which have been objects of affection.[48]
Sweet Counsel: A Book for Girls (1866), a set of “letters” about domestic life directed to a fictional young girl named Mary, noted,


…if you wish your little brother and sister to have loving, fond little hearts, do your best to provide them with pets, as you have pets. They are almost, if not quite, as necessary to them as congenial [human] companions....[49]
Apologists for Kindness
Yet animals, although no longer punished in the same ways as criminals, were not viewed simply as the passive recipients of human tenderness. At a time when moral philosophers were insisting that animals, whatever their capacity to feel pain, were “destitute of any moral faculty,” a strong strain of traditional thought, suggesting that household animals were indeed moral actors, survived in the domestic ethic of kindness.[50]

The apologists for kindness could draw on a long tradition of stories, folk beliefs, and popular natural histories when they argued that human beings, especially young ones, actually benefited from daily contact with certain animals because of their exemplary qualities (Ritvo, 1987). Children could learn respect for the family dog by hearing their mother describe “the virtues of his race...their fidelity and enduring gratitude.”

The children also learned that these were valued qualities in people as well.[51] Cats were “very neat” and observant of changes in their environment, a quality “very useful for boys and girls and every body to imitate”.[52] Bird pairs were “emblematical of enduring affection and constant attachment, and afford lessons of love to brothers and sisters.”[53] Stories of virtuous dogs were, of course, the most common account of the moral qualities of animals, appearing frequently in children’s books and papers and as brief anecdotes in magazines, gift books, and anthologies.[54]

In one typical story, a shepherd discovers that his dog had been feeding the shepherd’s lost son until the child could be rescued from a cave. Sacrificing his own small ration of bread, the “faithful dog guarded him like a father, and fed him with a mother’s tenderness.”[55] In 1848, the General Protestant Episcopal Sunday-School Union published The Dog, as an Example of Fidelity, an entire volume of anecdotes published originally in London.[56] Even the ubiquitous dooryard chicken provided a useful, and biblically grounded, model for children. Describing her favorite childhood pet gathering her brood under her wings, the author of “My First Chicken” reminded her readers to “remember who used this tender and lovely scene as a figure of what He would gladly do to those who are weary and have need of rest.”[57]

As they were incorporated into the emotional structures of middle-class families, domestic animals were described as having feelings paralleling those of middle-class humans in both range and intensity—devoted love, happiness, grief, and mental as well as physical suffering. Beecher thought that pets’ displays of affection could “awaken corresponding tenderness and care” in children. When she credited animals with “intuitive perceptions of our emotions which we cannot conceal,” Beecher used language that her readers would have perceived as appropriate to the delicacy of refined people, especially women.[58] And, since they had the capacity for gratitude, both domestic and wild animals provided a model for receiving benevolent treatment,.[59]

Masking and Unmasking Family Life

The author of the Book of Household Pets (1868), which may be the first volume published in the United States devoted exclusively to the general subject, pointed out to his readers that songbirds were gifted with “memory, knowledge, gratitude, affection, and even imagination, for they dream.” Pairs of pigeons,“emblematical of enduring affection and constant attachment,” also could “afford lessons of love to brothers and sisters,” while rabbits were “brisk, merry, and bright-eyed,” like the best human playmates.[60]

As we have seen in the case of bird families, expressions of maternal grief were particularly compelling. An “Anecdote of a Cat,” published in Youth’s Companion in 1828 and in The Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sport in 1832, recounted the efforts of a favorite cat to make her master follow her from a room. When this did not avail, the cat brought “the dead body of her kitten, covered over with cinder dust,” to his feet. The stricken man


…now entered into the entire train of this afflicted cat’s feelings. She had suddenly lost the nursling she doated on, and was resolved to make me acquainted with it—assuredly that I might know her grief, and probably also that I might inquire into the cause...and divide her sorrows with her.[61]
Denial of any gap in either the natural moral standards or emotional make-up between people and certain animals shaped the experience of learning kindness. Pets naturalized the middle-class virtues that antebellum parents were supposed to work so hard to instill. Their dependence on the kindness and steady care of their owners made pet keeping a useful rehearsal for the social stewardship that middle-class boys were expected to assume. Animals’ responsiveness—their ability to thrive physically and to express identifiable emotions—made caring for them an ideal reciprocal relationship of benevolence.

While the “facts” of their emotions and characters helped to insinuate the animals more deeply into the fabric of household routine, they also served the ideological function of masking the historically recent construction of middle-class family life. Pets today are expected to help instill a general, and ungendered, sense of responsibility. Between 1820 and 1870, pet keeping was explicitly meant to help create good men in a culture that worried a great deal about the nature of manhood itself.


Notes

[1] Correspondence should be sent to Katherine C. Grier, Department of History, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 USA. This essay is part of a book-length manuscript-in-progress on the changing relationships of middle-class Americans to domestic animals between 1820 and 1920. The author would like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship Program for College Teachers and Independent Scholars, the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center and the College of Humanities at the University of Utah, and the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens for their fellowship support during the research phases of the project.

[2] Formal “humane education” became another strategy for establishing lifelong patterns of kindness after 1870. Following the national trauma of the Civil War, and the successful abolition of slavery, some reform-minded citizens turned their energies toward the creation of organizations dedicated to fighting cruelty to animals, such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA)(founded 1866). The informal socialization of family life was now augmented by something new: membership organizations for children dedicated to “humane education” and school programs intended either to support the parental message or to supplant inadequate or inappropriate socialization taking place in some families. Speaking directly to children, St. Nicholas Magazine for Girls and Boys founded the “Army of Bird-Defenders” in 1873, a few years after the Massachusetts SPCA initiated school essay contests on the subject of kindness to animals. Following an English model, the organization of “Bands of Mercy” among American school children after 1882, the development of school lesson programs by groups such as the American Humane Education Association (1889), and the American Humane Association at the turn of the century tried not only to socialize children into kindness but to create future activists. For the “Bird-Defenders,” see Katherine C. Grier, At Home with the Animals: Middle-class Families and the Animals in their Lives, 1820-1920 (ms in progress). For information on early organizational humane education efforts see Sydney H. Coleman, Humane Society Leaders in America, with a Sketch of the Early History of the Humane Movement in England (Albany, New York: American Humane Association, 1924).

[3] For a concise account of the principal arguments of the new liberal Protestant theology and an argument for its utility as an instrument of social control in one community, see chapter 5, “Pentecost,” 95-115.

[4] Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men, on Various Important Subjects (1844; 2nd ed.). New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859,148.

[5] The “Eden of Home,” along with a score of other “synonyms” for “home,” may be found in Rev. W. K. Tweedie, Home; or, The Parents’ Assistant and Children’s Friend. Norwich, CT: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1873, 34-41. For an explicit formulation of the “Eden of Home” including animals, who fell when Adam did and could expect Paradise when it was restored for humankind, see Charlotte E. B. Tonna, Kindness to Animals or, the Sin of Cruelty Exposed and Rebuked. Revised by the Committee of Publication of the American Sunday-School Union. (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1845), 9-12.

[6] Reverend A. B. Muzzy, The Fireside: An Aid to Parents. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1854, 8. The secondary sources referenced in the body of the text provide historical perspective on changes in attitudes toward mothering.

[7] “Home Interests,” Youth’s Penny Gazette 8, 24 (20 November 1850), 94. Published by the American Sunday-School Union.

[8] Charlotte E. B. Tonna noted that man was intended to be “a careful and loving ruler over the poor dumb creatures, as the Lord God is a careful and loving ruler over all that He has created.” Kindness to Animals; or, the Sin of Cruelty Rebuked, 9.

[9] A Manual of Politeness. Philadelphia: W. Marshall and Company, 1837, 276.

[10] Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983, remains the most comprehensive account of this genealogy prior to 1800.

[11] Mrs. Louisa Hoare, Hints for the Improvement of Early Education and Nursery Discipline (3rd ed.). Dover: Samuel C. Stevens, 1826, 36.

[12] Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture, and of Subjects Adjacent Thereto (Hartford, CT: Edwin Hunt, 1847), 16, 6.

[13] Lydia Sigourney, Letters to Mothers, 6th ed. (1838; New York: Harper, 1846), 41, 35-36.

[14] Jacob Abbott, Agnes. A Franconia Story, by the Author of the Rollo Books (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), v-vi.

[15] The first print depicts gangs of boys, including the boy Tom Nero whose path is being plotted in the narrative, hanging cats, cockfighting, gouging out the eye of a small bird with a wire, and sexually molesting a dog, among other outrages; the second includes Tom Nero beating a carriage horse, who has been overburdened by a group of thoughtless, obese lawyers and the death at the hands of a drover of a sheep too weak to walk. (In the third, Tom Nero murders his lover; in the fourth his hanged corpse is dissected by doctors while a dog that looks suspiciously like the dog he once abused eats his discarded heart. Paulson offers a discussion of the circumstances surrounding the publication of these prints (Hogarth later commented that he was proud of the series since he believed that it had helped to relieve cruelty to animals), and a detailed visual analysis of the series.

Eighty-five years later, “Cruelty and the Gallows,” a particularly hair-raising piece of admonition in the Youth’s Companion, still used Hogarth’s narrative structure when it informed its readers that a famous murderer, recently gone to the gallows at age nineteen, had admitted that he had liked killing animals “better than anything else”: “Youthful reader! whenever you find yourself delighting in cruelty to any of the creatures which God has made, think of Prescott -- think of the gallows!” “Cruelty and the Gallows,” Youth’s Companion 9, 49 (22 April 1836), 195.

[16] Mary Wollstonecraft, trans. Elements of Morality for the Use of Children, with an Introductory Address [sic] to Parents. Trans. From the German of the Rev. C. G. Salzmann. (American 3rd ed.). Wilmington, DE: Joseph Johnson, 1796. The book was first published in English in 1790.

[17] Rev. A. B. Muzzy, The Fireside, 74. See also “Be Kind to Animals,” Youth’s Companion 4, 2 (2 June 1830), 6; “Cruelty,” Youth’s Companion 6, 10 (25 July 1832), 6; “Kindness to Brutes,” Youth’s Companion 12, 19 (21 September 1838), 74-75.

[18] Lydia Sigourney, The Boy’s Book; Consisting of Original Articles in Prose and Poetry ( New York: Turner, Hughes, and Hayden, 1845), 54, 29. For Cowper as an inspiration to kindness, see also “Stories about Cats,” Youth’s Companion 9, 24 (30 October 1835), 95-96: “A very sweet poet, named Cowper, who loved animals and used to keep hares, a dog, and a cat in his room, and loved to see them sport about so merrily, said, “he would not call that man his friend who would needlessly tread upon a worm.” The Youth’s Companion often reprinted material from other periodicals with credit lines; this story was credited to the “Juvenile Miscellany.” This passage was paraphrased from Cowper’s “The Task” (1784), a 5,000-line work of blank verse that contained a lengthy discussion of cruelty to animals in Book Six: The Winter Walk at Noon, lines 560-567. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, eds. The Poems of William Cowper, II: 1782- 1785 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 251.

[19] Caroline Cowles Richards, Village Life in America 1852-1872. Including the Period of the American Civil War as Told in the Diary of a School-girl (l908; repr. Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1972), 61-62.

[20] Isabella: “...The sense of death is most in apprehension,/And the poor beetle that we treat upon/In corporeal sufferance finds a pang as great/As when a giant dies.” William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act Three, Scene I, lines 79-81.

[21] Charles Neider, ed. Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by Suzy Clemens, His Daughter, Thirteen. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company. 1985, 155-156.

[22] Henry Ward Beecher, Letters to Young Men, 149.

[23] “Against the Abuse of Cattle,” Youth’s Companion 3, 2 (June 1829), 6; Dr. William A. Alcott, Gift Book for Young Ladies; or, Familiar Letters on Their Acquaintances, Male and Female, Employments, Friendships, &c. Auburn and Buffalo: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1854, 272-273.

[24] Lydia Sigourney, Letters to Mothers, 37-38.

[25] Master Henry’s Rabbit (Troy, NY: no listed publisher, n.d.[c.1840]), 10. Master Henry’s Rabbit was first published in England. It was one volume in a series of didactic stores about Henry’s moral progress. On the matter of thoughtlessness (“absence of mind”) and cruelty to animals, see “Tenderness to Animals”, Youth’s Companion 8, 31, (19 December 1834), 125; and “The Woodchuck,” Youth’s Companion 9, 31 (18 December 1835), 123.

[26] “The Woodchuck,” Youth’s Companion, 123.

[27] Harriet Beecher Stowe, “A Talk about Birds,” Our Charlie, and What to Do with Him. Boston: Sampson and Company, 1858. 97, 107.

[28] In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) Mary Wollstonecraft’s discussion of “Benevolence” did include an anecdote about a girl who killed ants “for sport”; Wollstonecraft stopped the child by “adapting Mr. Addison’s account of them to her understanding. Ever after she was careful not to tread on them, lest she should distress the whole community.” Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (London: Joseph Johnson, 1787), 44.

[29] “Fanny’s Canary Bird,” Youth’s Penny Gazette 7, 18 (29 August 1849), 95.

[30] This is a formula previously used by Salzmann in his Elements of Morality for the Use of Children. In the chapter on cruelty to animals, James’ parents are warned of his intention to mutilate the mouse he has caught by the entreaties of his sister. Elements of Morality for the Use of Children, 168-169.

[31] Lydia Maria Child, “My Bird,” in The Girl’s Own Book (New York: Clark Austin & Co., 1833), 244-245. Youth’s Companion featured on the front page of its 12 March 1829 issue a story where a very little girl accidentally tore the wing off a butterfly she wanted to examine and was reprimanded by her older sister. She repented immediately and insisted on burying her victim in a marked grave, which she would show to other children to instruct them about the importance of kindness. “The Birth Day Present,” Youth’s Companion 2, 42 (12 March 1829), 165.

[32] William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters (New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1939), 60-61.

[33] For boys’ taxidermy and amateur “cabinets” as an educational form of play, see Charley’s Museum. A Story for Young People (Philadelphia: H. C. Peck and Theo. Bliss, 1857); William Lyon Phelps, Autobiography with Letters, 54-55; Bellamy Partridge, Big Family (New York and London: Whittlesey House, 1941), 305.

[34] H. H. Delong, Boyhood Reminiscences: Dansville, N.Y., 1855-1865 (Dansville, New York: F. A. Owen Publishing Company, 1913), 56; Claudia L. Bushman (Ed.) “Life Along the Brandywine Between 1880 and 1895 by Samuel Canby Rumford, Part II” Delaware History 23, 3 (Spring Summer 1989), 168, 195; Henry Ward Beecher, “Country Stillness and Woodchucks,” in Eyes and Ears (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 139-141.

[35] Lewis Miller, Sketches and Chronicles: The Reflections of a Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania Folk Artist (York: PA: The Historical Society of York County, 1966), 135.

[36] Dr. William A. Alcott, Gift Book for Young Ladies; or Familiar Letters on Their Acquaintances, Male and female, Employments, Friendships, &c. (Auburn and Buffalo: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1854), 274.

[37] Mrs. L. G. Abell, Woman in Her Various Relations (New York: R. T. Young, 1851), 53.

[38] Alex M. Gow, A.M., Good Morals and Gentle Manners. For School and Families (New York and Cincinnati: Wilson, Hinkle and Company, 1873), 137.

[39] William A. Alcott, Gift Book for Young Ladies, 274.

[40] “Nauticus Agricola” [pseud.], “The Murdered Robin,” Youth’s Companion 11, 6 (23 June 1837), 22.

[41] A fascinating firsthand account of the kind of casual cruelty inflicted on animals by men in the name of amusement in antebellum America can be found in Richard B. Stott, ed. William Otter: History of My Own Times (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 81-84, 146-149, 153, 167. Otter was a mechanic, and sometime slave hunter who recalled his various escapades, which included running horses almost to death and drowning a dog as a joke, with glee in this memoir.

[42]

Picture Lessons, Illustrating Moral Truth. For the Use of Infant Schools, Nurseries, Sunday- Schools, and Family Circles (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, n.d.). The copy in the collection of the Research Library of the Winterthur Museum is inscribed, “Zilpha Clarke/from LaFayette H.(?) S. School/Buffalo Apl 25, 1852.”

[43] “The Cow and Her Calf,” Youth’s Companion 5, 18 (21 September 1831), 72; “Barbarity of Whale Fishing,” Youth’s Companion 1, 6 (4 July 1827), 23; “Remarkable Attachment of a Goat,” Youth’s Companion 4, 46 (6 April 1831), 183.

[44] Sarah Josepha Hale, “Pets and their Uses,” in Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round (1868; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1972), 244. On boy’s “tyranny”, see S. S. Messenger, “Edward and the Cat,” Youth’s Companion 2, 39 (19 February 1829), 153-154: “You were unmerciful to the cat....you were too proud to forgive a dumb beast for not obeying you; and like a little tyrant, would have had her put to death.”

[45] “Against the Abuse of Cattle,” Youth’s Companion 3, 2 (June 1829), 6.

[46] “Children’s Pets,” Godey’s Ladies’ Book 63, 1 (July 1861), 94.

[47] Sarah Josepha Hale, “Pets and their Uses,”244.

[48] Rev. A. B. Muzzy, The Fireside, 141-142.

[49] “Sarah Tyler” (pseud. Henrietta Keddie), Sweet Counsel: A Book for Girls (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1866), 154.

[50] Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science, 395. The most comprehensive account of animal “crime and punishment” remains E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (1906; London: Faber and Faber, 1987). An example of this older strain of thinking about animals survives in the Chronicles of Lewis Henry Miller (1786-1882). A lifelong resident of York County, Pennsylvania, Miller produced an illustrated remembrance of everyday life in his town. He told and illustrated the story of “Mrs. Cath. Weiser frying a sausage, and A hound came and Stole it out of the pan for his breakfast.” Miller warned, “Woman Guard Your Kitchen....teach a dog and put him in a way to fulfill his demands, and you make him a Moral Agent.” Lewis Miller, Lewis Miller: Sketches and Chronicles, 82.

[51] Lydia Sigourney, Letters to Mothers, 98.

[52] “Stories about Cats,” Youth’s Companion 19, 24 (30 October 1835), 95-96.

[53] The Book of Household Pets, and How to Manage Them. New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1866, 42.

[54] The early volumes of Youth’s Companion printed such stories frequently. See, for example,“The Sagacity of a Dog,” Youth’s Companion 1, 48 (25 April 1828) 101; “The Lives of two Children saved by a Dog,”Youth’s Companion 3,17 (16 September 1829), 68; “Faithfulness of Dogs,” Youth’s Companion 7, 13 (14 August 1833), 51.

[55] Lydia Sigourney, The Boy’s Reading-Book, 37. See also “Canine Sagacity,” Youth’s Companion 11, 21 (17 October 1828), 83; “Canine Affection,” Youth’s Companion 11, 19 (3 October 1828), 75; “The Lives of two Children saved by a Dog,” Youth’s Companion 13, 17 (16 September 1829), 68.

[56] The Dog, as an Example of Fidelity. From the London Edition. New York: General Episcopal Sunday School Union, 1848. The copy I have examined is inscribed, “George S. Payne/a token of affection from the Rector./ Grace Church/ Christmas 1848.”

[57] “My First Chicken,” Youth’s Companion 69, 5 (2 February 1860), 1. See also “Thomas and His Chickens,” Youth’s Companion 1, 6 (4 July 1827), 24. This story also makes explicit reference to the biblical verse, Matt. 23:37.

[58] Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (New York: J. B. Ford and Company), 394.

[59] “Animal Gratitude,” Youth’s Companion 1, 42 (14 March 1827), 167 (from “London paper”); “The Grateful Lioness,” Youth’s Companion 3, 52 (19 May 1830), 207 (“From the London Youth’s Magazine”); “A Grateful Cow,” Youth’s Companion 5, 20 (5 October 1831), 70 (from the “Cheltenham Chronicle”).

[60] Anon., The Book of Household Pets (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1988), 5,42, 76. This book appears to be based on an English volume but contains revisions specifically for the U.S. readership.

[61] ”Anecdote of a Cat,” Youth’s Companion 1, 47 (1828), 187; “Anecdote of a Cat,” The Cabinet of Natural History and American Rural Sport, v. 2 (Philadelphia: J. And T. Doughty, 1832), 246. In the latter source, the story is credited to Good’s Book of Nature.
 

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