The “animal” can mean many different things, as the stunning array of visual images in this study of representations of birds, beasts, and people demonstrates. Scientists, hunters, zookeepers, and breeders of dogs all have very different interests in the “animal,” and they are all cataloged in this book at some point. As Donald says, the book is, however, about “a single species: the human race” (1) because the “animal” is most often used to define the “human.” One leaves Donald's 305 pages and 277 figures with the sense that the range of issues represented by humans through animals is as varied and complex as the Earth's ecosystem itself.

It is difficult therefore to give an overview of the book as a whole; it follows a roughly chronological sequence and notes the scientific paradigm shifts in the nineteenth century in order, moving from Thomas Malthus to Charles Lyell to Charles Darwin. Donald begins her study with a discussion of Joseph Wright's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump to characterize the view of animals and nature informed by a belief in God, which was to be radically challenged by the later theories of Lyell and Darwin. Donald argues that the painting “encapsulates many of the ambivalences and contradictions in human attitudes to other species” (26) and cannot be given a single, unproblematic reading. This is also emblematic of her method in this study; she charts the ambivalences and contradictions in various genres and settings but eschews any definitive statements on their meaning.

Part I of Picturing Animals in Britain deals mainly with scientific attitudes to animals, while Part II delves into what she terms “the psychology of beasthood,” with much attention paid to Edwin Landseer's images. Landseer appears in Part I in the context of depictions of “the struggle for existence” in such paintings as Deer and Deerhounds in a Mountain Torrent in which violence is foregrounded. She devotes a chapter to Landseer's dogs to chart the move from “anthropocentrism to anthropomorphism” in such paintings as A Jack in Office. That Landseer appears in both these categories shows how this most famous of Victorian painters of animals can all by himself represent the contradictions in nineteenth-century attitudes to animals. Dogs in Landseer's art can be heroic, as in The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner, savage, or just downright cute.

In Part III Donald turns her attention to zoos and the distinction between the “wild” and “tame.” Here issues of collection, domination, and imperialism come to the fore. The creation of zoos registers a desire to collect made possible by the increased range of the empire and its explorers and hunters. Once again, Landseer rears his masterful head though his images of lion tamers and big cats. The chapter on zoos jumps rather surprisingly into one on horses, when the trajectory of the book would seem to lead to hunting. Donald seems to have felt compelled to address the horse, given its practical and symbolic value for the nineteenth century, but this is the least satisfying chapter of the book.

In Part IV Donald gets back on track by addressing hunting, which allows her to extend her analysis into the issues of cruelty and compassion that she had addressed in earlier chapters. George Stubbs is of course evoked, as he was earlier in the book for his numerous studies of a lion attacking a horse. Overall Donald shows herself sensitive to the contradictory and conflicted attitudes of many artists, noting the “dual consciousness” of many commentators on the sport of hunting (256). She examines both celebratory “sporting art” (whose practitioners bemoaned its lack of high status) and their place in “hunting culture,” and also attacks on hunting. Once again the multifaceted Landseer makes an appearance with his The Otter Speared, which provoked John Ruskin's famous attack in Modern Painters (296). There is, it seems, no aspect of British attitudes to animals that Landseer did not explore. Hunting in the nineteenth century, as it was in Britain in the twentieth century, was the site of political and class conflicts over the human relationship to animals. Donald artfully places images of hunting in their political and social contexts, which not surprisingly favors the landed gentry over the rest of the population. However, a surprising number of artists seem to have combined painting and killing animals, which leads to some fascinatingly self-divided statements.

And then the book ends. This is the most surprising aspect of this comprehensive study of animals in the nineteenth century, that it lacks a conclusion. I laid down the book with a sense of having been shown a vast, rich, incredibly contradictory range of images, and I am grateful to Donald for amassing them in such a lovely book. I will treasure this book always, but will also remember its ending with a touch of disappointment. Forgive me if I twist and bend T. S. Eliot's famous line, but “after such knowledge, so what?” What are we to make of all these ambiguities and contradictions? Or is it enough to note that the terrain of animal images is vast and fissured, and that we have here a map of many of its most fascinating features? Like Donald, I will have to leave the question unanswered and simply point the interested reader to a treasure trove of animal images in Picturing Animals in Britain.