Letters from New York: Second Series (1847)

AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria

Woolman, John.
 

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

Like the first series of letters, this collection features material previously published in serialized form, in the Boston Courier and the National Anti-Slavery Standard. And as in the first volume, some letters advocate for animal welfare. Commenting on Jacob Driesbach, a well-known nineteenth-century lion tamer, Child writes in “Letter XI”:

It is certainly exciting to see Driesbach dash across the area in his chariot drawn by lions; or sleep on a bed of living leopards, with a crouching tiger for his pillow; or offering his hand to the mouth of a panther, as he would to the caresses of a kitten. But I could not help questioning whether it were right for a man to risk so much, or for animals to suffer so much, for the purposes of amusement and pecuniary profit. I pitied the poor beasts; for they seemed very sad, and their passive obedience was evidently the result of terror. Seeing plainly, as I do, that coercion, with all its discords, is a complete reversal of the divine law of attraction, and the harmonies it evolves, this caravan, with its wonderful exhibition of subdued ferocity and imitated intelligence, appeared to me like a small apartment of the infernal regions (109).

Contemplating the fate of a llama in the menagerie, Child adds: “It is, I believe, the only animal which man has never been able to subdue by blows. When beaten, it weeps and dies, but will not obey. Its extreme susceptibility to music, shows that it embodies some of the gentler affections. Its countenance and motions vary incessantly with the changing tune, and when the strain is plaintive, it stands motionless and listening, till the beautiful eyes are suffused with tears” (110). Child's advocacy of animal welfare does not preclude her belief in a clear hierarchy of beings with humans constituting the pinnacle of creation. To counteract human cruelty to animals thus necessitates the acknowledgment and submission of the animal within: “When this process is completed,” she writes, “man, being at peace with himself, will be in harmony with Nature, and the obedience of inferior creatures will become freedom and joy, through the divine law of attraction” (110). Her religious sentiment still acknowledges the inferiority of animals. But she insists that their submission has to be a result of love not force.

Child then goes on to criticize “the Eccaleobion, a machine for hatching eggs by artificial warmth,” which she thinks is “an ultimate form of the mechanical spirit of this age” (110). Child's interest in animal welfare is part of a larger religious or spiritual morality, an all-encompassing ethics of love in the Transcendentalist vein of A. Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.

Prompted by thoughts about animals' “wretched existence in cities,” including the plight of “lean and lacerated omnibus-horses” and of “dogs fighting in the streets” (139), a plight that Child thinks is largely due to “a most lamentable deficiency in education” exemplified in “allowing boys to encourage dog-fights” (140), “Letter XV” discusses the status of animals in Quaker theology and communities: “Blessed is the lot of animals that come under the care of that friendly sect” (139), Child writes, for “they inculcate the greatest possible tenderness toward the brute creation” (140). In this context, Child also references John Woolman and his remorse at having killed a robin as a child. The letter also presents several Quaker anecdotes (fictional and, purportedly, factual) that emphasize animal sentience and cognition. Child also voices her conviction that “[i]f human souls were in a pure and healthy state … the understanding between man and animals would improve to a degree that would now seem miraculous” (142). She credits Pythagoras as an early example for this kind of thought, “at one with God and nature” (143). This is so because animals “have in fact our own nature, flattened a semi-tone,” she contends, as “[i]n the great tune of creation, the same notes are ever recurring in different keys” (143). Hence her hopes for “a perfectly beautiful and harmonious relation between ourselves and animals” (144).