ABSTRACT
This chapter on cattle and beef in Dickens’ Household Words questions new nineteenth-century attitudes toward meat-animals that were the result of a modern system of managing animal life. The chapter’s aim is to detail the arguments and logic put forward by Household Words to allay the consciences of middle-class readers who could no longer bear the sight of suffering oxen but wanted to eat them anyway. Ultimately, in advocating the rationalization of slaughter, Dickens’ journal arrives at a biopolitical relationship between human and nonhuman animals. In an era of biopolitics, humanitarianism, and liberal governmentality, violence and domination over nonhuman animals could no longer be taken for granted as a natural right but had to be justified as a political relationship based on mutual recognition, a relationship through which animals were conscripted into the social contract: In exchange for their obedience and their lives, cattle were “rescued” from a state of nature. Household Words did raise moral questions about the practice of killing animals, but it later responded by defending the principle. It provided an ideological reasoning that, in the face of the meat trade’s logistical and ethical problems, allowed readers to look their oxen in the face in good conscience.
