ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the ways in which literature negotiates and reconfigures the inevitable violence of the seal hunt and in doing so elucidates the intersections of literary aesthetics, animal ethics and consumer capitalism. Sealskin’s prominence in Victorian fashion was built on the bodies of northern fur seals, a species resident in the North Pacific with the majority of the population found in the Bering Sea. The fashion for the “softest, warmest, most becoming of all forms of peltry” came, then, at an extraordinary cost. Fur’s allure to the Victorians stands, of course, in marked contrast with its status from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. “The White Seal,” “The Strange Story of a Sealskin” and the reportage of the Victorian popular press all show the figure of the seal demanding an emotional response, but a response involved with contrary political energies.
