ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the dynamic in Victorian poetic representations of pets and masters in mourning, foregrounding the tension between the humans’ desire to justify their socially inappropriate devotion for their pets and their anxieties over the intensity of this attachment. While the performance of interest in pets was encouraged and expected, this rise in interspecies esteem was also subject to limits. In this context, expressions of mourning were often urgently sincere yet plagued by the need to conceal interspecies intimacy. At the heart-wrenching moment of eulogy, these poems grapple with the awkward task of legitimating suspiciously excessive attachments for animals.
