ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the debates on animal experimentation and especially vivisection in the 1820s, not to trace direct influences on Mary Shelley and her famous book, but to give context to the book and its contemporary readers. It introduces animals into the historical picture while showing that animals served as proxies to talk about other issues, as they had for centuries. Despite radical rhetoric, animal protection was a profoundly conservative cause: it portrayed the present as threatened by an inhuman science and the increasingly intrusive working class. Anatomical demonstration and experimentation on animals has a long history dating back to antiquity. Aristotle established an analogy between human and animal bodies that justified the use of animals to explore human structure and function. Many historians have viewed the 1824 visit of the French physiologist Francois Magendie to London as a trigger for a nascent antivivisection movement.
