In England in the second half of the eighteenth century an unprecedented amount of writing urged kindness to animals. This theme was carried in many genres, from sermons to encyclopedias, from scientific works to literature for children, and in the poetry of Cowper, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Clare and others. Romanticism and Animal Rights discusses the arguments writers used, and the particular meanings of these arguments in a social and economic context so different from the present. After introductory chapters, the material is divided according to specific practices that particularly influenced feeling or aroused protest: pet keeping, hunting, baiting, working animals, eating them, and the various harms inflicted on wild birds. The book shows how extensively English Romantic writing took up issues of what we now call animal rights. In this respect it joins the growing number of studies that seek precedents or affinities in English Romanticism for our own ecological concerns.

August 1781 saw the publication of a manual on fox hunting that would become a classic of its genre. Hugely popular in its own day, Peter Beckford's Thoughts on Hunting is often cited as marking the birth of modern hunting and continues to be quoted from affectionately today by the hunting fraternity. Less stressed is the fact that its subject was immediately controversial, and that a hostile review which appeared on the heels of the manual's publication raised two criticisms of fox hunting that would be repeated over the next two centuries: fox hunting was a cruel sport and a feudal, anachronistic one at that. This study explores the attacks made on fox hunting from 1781 to the legal ban achieved in 2004, as well as assessing the reasons for its continued appeal and post-ban survival. Chapters cover debates in the areas of: class and hunting; concerns over cruelty and animal welfare; party politics; the hunt in literature; and nostalgia. By adopting a thematic approach, the author is able to draw out the wider social and cultural implications of the debates, and to explore what they tell us about national identity, social mores and social relations in modern Britain.