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In the late nineteenth century, a number of prominent reformers were influenced by what Edward Carpenter called “the larger socialism,” a philosophy that promised to completely transform society, including the place of animals within it. To open a window on late Victorian ideas about animals, Rod Preece explores what he calls radical idealism and animal sensibility in the work of George Bernard Shaw, the acknowledged prophet of modernism and conscience of his age. Preece examines Shaw’s reformist thought -- particularly the notion of inclusive justice, which aimed to eliminate the suffering of both humans and animals -- in relation to that of fellow reformers such as Edward Carpenter, Annie Besant, and Henry Salt and the Humanitarian League. This fascinating account of the characters and crusades that shaped Shaw’s philosophy sheds new light not only on modernist thought but also on an overlooked aspect of the history of the animal rights movement.

The eighteenth century saw the rise of new and more sympathetic understanding of animals as philosophy, literature, and art argued that animals could feel and therefore possess inalienable rights. This idea gave birth to a diverse movement that affects how we understand our relationship to the natural world. The Cry of Nature details a crucial period in the history of this movement, revealing the significant role art played in the growth of animal rights. Stephen F. Eisenman shows how artists from William Hogarth to Pablo Picasso and Sue Coe have represented the suffering, chastisement, and execution of animals. These artists, he demonstrates, illustrate the lessons of Montaigne, Rousseau, Darwin, Freud, and others—that humans and animals share an evolutionary heritage of sentience, intelligence, and empathy, and thus animals deserve equal access to the domain of moral right. Eisenman also traces the roots of speciesism to the classical world and describes the social role of animals in the demand for emancipation. Instructive, challenging, and always engaging, The Cry of Nature is a book for anyone interested in animal rights, art history, and the history of ideas.

This first book-length story and study of philosopher, activist, inventor, and philanthropist Lewis Gompertz--co-founder of both the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824, ousted in 1832) and the Animals' Friend Society (1832-52)--charts his struggle against likely and unlikely enemies on behalf of other species, women, the poor, apprentices, prisoners, and slaves. Outraging fearful, elitist Christians, his classic Moral Inquiries on the Situation of Man and of Brutes (1824) reveals influences, tenets, and indeed his own situation in attempting to formulate and live by a rational morality for others' benefit, defying religious and structural forces that wanted far less. Power, class, philosophy, history, education, reform, and revolution all play their part in this account of his campaigning work and works (including Fragments in Defence of Animals and The Animals' Friend periodical), exposing the racist, sectarian rhetoric and scheming he endured at a defining moment. This attritional action, by which humane progress was obstructed and for more than a century fixed, is more disturbing than has been made widely detailed until now, in this much-needed, critical introduction.