Thomas Almeroth-Williams's City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London aims to recover the underappreciated role of animals in Britain's metropolis during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Non-human creatures—especially cattle, pigs, horses, and dogs—“underpinned its physical, social, economic and cultural development in diverse and fundamental ways” (5). They “powered, fed and guarded the metropolis . . . and interacted, in one way or another, with the entire population” (13). Londoners, it shows, needed, used, saw, smelled, heard, valued, and thought about animals more than is usually appreciated. City of Beasts succeeds wonderfully at recovering such experiences, taking its place as the most ambitious and most comprehensive treatment of the topic. In this booming, globalizing, industrializing city, animals were present and were crucial to economic and social life. But whether and how this changes our anthropocentric views of social life in this period is less clear, as the significance and implications of animals’ urban presence are not demonstrated entirely convincingly.
City of Beasts is written in an engaging style that should allow it to appeal both to specialists and to more general readers. The introduction, for example, explains in a brisk thirteen pages Almeroth-Williams's debts to the fields of social history, animal studies, and to Bruno Latour's actor-network theory. The seven chapters are sprinkled with well-chosen images of animals, thirty-four in all, drawing the reader into a lively story. Research methods are explained, but historiographical positioning and detailed discussion of archives are omitted or relegated to endnotes. City of Beasts is a monograph that will be enjoyed by nonacademic readers. The reasonable price point assigned by Manchester University Press will further enhance such accessibility.
The opening chapters demonstrate the role of working horses in the urban economy. At least fifty horse-powered mills moved water, ground pigments, churned brick clay, and much more. They were especially visible as draft horses, pulling hundreds of thousands of tons of beer and coal to customers across the city. As London's breweries reached unprecedented sizes after 1750, and its coal consumption reached ever-higher levels, horse transport of bulky goods was essential. The third chapter, “Animal Husbandry,” argues that London's open fields and secluded pens allowed for surprisingly large and sophisticated urban animal farming. The most intriguing discussion here, to this reviewer, focused on the battery farms whose stock was fed by the waste grains of huge urban brewers and distillers. Drawing on the work of Peter Mathias, Almeroth-Williams shows how London's meat-processing facilities (which supplied urban consumers and the Royal Navy) were inextricably bound up with London's globalizing, industrializing market economy. A close investigation of the Smithfield stockyards expands on this discussion, arguing that the hundreds of thousands of cattle, sheep, and pigs sold and killed in the city were highly visible components of urban life, creatures that most Londoners would have encountered in its streets and markets. Two further chapters on horses consider them as contributors to the “consumer revolution” (129). Their care and keeping required expenditure on food, shoes, specialized servants, veterinary care, and increasingly complex arrangements of mews in the West End. This both facilitated and resulted from a “distinctive equestrian culture,” by which Londoners rode enthusiastically in Hyde Park and the countryside (158). A final chapter on guard dogs uses criminal records to assert that dogs were widely used for security. They protected property alongside of—perhaps better than—a slowly professionalizing police force, showing that some creatures could blur the boundary between working animals and pets. This chapter is based in part on criminal records drawn from digitized newspapers and the Old Bailey Online, an example of Almeroth-Williams's desire to explore animal history from the “bottom-up,” using the evidence of daily life—criminal records, legal cases, letters and diaries, advertisements—rather than the literary, philosophical, or normative texts often favored by animal studies scholars.
If the animals’ presence in the Georgian metropolis is richly demonstrated, some of the subsidiary arguments remain less convincing. Discussions of animals’ economic role frequently use imprecise terms like “growing” and “increasing” without sufficient data supplied to demonstrate such claims. There is no attempt to establish what role animals played in the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century city, so persistent assertions that their number or importance was increasing during the “Georgian” period remain vague. To cite one example: London already imported a half million tons of coal per year in 1714, so it is unclear what was new or different about how horses hauled this bulky fuel around the city during the Georgian period as coal use grew further. Most of the book's evidence is (necessarily) anecdotal, so assertions that animals were “essential” in various ways to the urban economy are left without rigorous elaboration, economic arguments offered without reference to the methods of economic history (41). The nature of “Georgian London” itself is unexamined, sometimes referring to the built-up metropolis, but sometimes including several miles of suburban countryside. This is a problem for a study centrally concerned to “blur the traditional boundaries of ‘town’ versus ‘country,’ and ‘urban versus ‘rural’” (4). So is the choice to privilege daily life over representation, which leads Almeroth-Williams to struggle against his sources when they offer “stereotypical” views that he wants to disprove. Instead of explaining or assessing why so many contemporary sources assumed that the city was distinctly opposed to the country—that Londoners must be bad horsemen, for example—City of Beasts focuses on setting the record straight, correcting both modern historians and eighteenth-century people themselves. This is valuable, but why then did they misunderstand their own relationship with animals?
While City of Beasts does not settle the role of animals in processes like industrialization, the consumer revolution, and the rise of modern policing, it does raise them in ways that should continue to be explored. It is an enjoyable and accessible book, a useful and welcome contribution to the study of urban and social history, and required reading for scholars of early modern and modern animal studies.
