To browse Academia. A look at the effects of the demographic revolution of the nineteenth century on non-human animals, from urban pets and performers to the species who became, quite literally, fashion victims.
Rocio Camacho Riestra, ed. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. In this study of the ways in which the surging populations of the nineteenth century were imagined I have suppressed until now one important piece of information: those surging numbers were not exclusively human. This is one facet of the impact of massive urban growth on the animal world.
The narratives, images, and practices of international fashion created a vogue for particular forms of animal couture in the late Victorian period, and together with changing demographics and new technologies, this brought some wild species, living far beyond the city limits, to the verge of extinction. But others felt that something momentous was underway, and that an anthropocene era had dawned.
The demographic imagination at this point shades into the ecological. In the s the reign of the horse in public transport was challenged by electric trams. For individual travellers, the bicycle, which needed neither food nor stabling, began to present an attractive alternative. Other animals lived in the city too, some very briefly, to supply the appetite for meat, poultry and dairy products. In there were estimated to be 13, cows in London. James cows were not alone, though: J.
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Other animals roamed freely in the streets, including pigs, as Friedrich Engels famously describes in his account of Manchester in The Condition of the Working Class in England Charles Dickens gives a vivid account of the wandering swine of Broadway in his American Notes of They are the city scavengers, these pigs.
