ABSTRACT
Collaborative agency is an important but by no means the only aspect of Thomas Hardy’s representation of animals. In a scathing critique of Far from the Madding Crowd, Henry James described Hardy’s human characters as “factitious and insubstantial,” whereas “the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs”. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, the Victorian age is mostly seen as the era of industrialization, marked by the spread of the railway, the steam ship, and the telegraph. Human animality is a sustained position in Hardy’s writings, which can be connected to his interest in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Nonhuman creatures function as indicators of various characters’ degree of acceptance of a shared existence that encompasses all living beings, and consequently, an ethics that transcends anthropocentrism.
