ABSTRACT
In the long nineteenth century, animal autobiography is one of the most persistent and popular genres of animal story, from Dorothy Kilner’s Life and Perambulations of a Mouse (1783) right through to Pussy Meow: The Autobiography of a Cat, by S. Louise Patteson (1901).1 In these stories an animal, usually domestic or in close relation to humans, gives a first-person account of their life and experiences. The most famous of these stories, and the only one still popular today, is Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, published in 1877, but Black Beauty is part of a long tradition, and one aim of this chapter is to restore this neglected context. Black Beauty is not the earliest animal life-story to call itself an ‘autobiography’, and it shares many actual scenes with Arabella Argus’s 1815 The Adventures of a Donkey. The project of the animal autobiography is nearly always to argue for the better treatment of animals by humans: they actualise Trimmer’s resolve to speak up for a ‘dumb’ animal, and to think ‘what it would say for itself if able to speak’. The full-scale autobiography is after all only a longer development of the life-stories father and mother robin tell each other in Trimmer’s book. While the genre invites human readers to ‘change situations’ with the animal protagonist, and imagine its feelings, this is done in a realistic mode, not in the fantastic, comic mode of the Topsy-Turvy poems. The only fantastic element in the animal autobiography is the ability of the animal narrator to speak to the reader. Animals speak, but they do not turn round and force humans into animal situations, though they may take their revenge in more realistic ways, by throwing off a cruel rider for instance.
