Surveying representations of nonhuman animals in the literature of eighteenth-century Britain, Laura Brown’s Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes argues that these representations should force us to reconsider the terms of current debate on the relationship between human beings and other species. Brown initially makes this claim in the introduction to her work, where she offers an overview of recent theory on the human-animal relationship, characterizing it as divided between “the two main positions … of anthropomorphism or alterity” (2), that is, between the essentially Darwinian view that human beings and nonhuman animals share a genetic heritage and the fundamentals of consciousness and the contrasting Cartesian view that human beings exist in a category unto themselves by virtue of their unique rational capacities. After tracing the lineage of these two positions to the contemporary animal-studies theory of Donna Haraway and Vicki Hearne, on one hand, and Paul Shepherd and Deleuze and Guattari, on the other, Brown proceeds to the main business of her book: tracking the treatment of nonhuman animal nature in four selected sites of eighteenth-century literary representation.

The first of these sites involves the discovery and textual portrayal of the orangutan and other species of hominoid ape more generally. Here Brown concentrates on eighteenth-century scientific accounts of the orangutan, such as those of Linnaeus, Buffon, and most particularly Edward Tyson. In their various efforts to make sense of the relationship between human being and hominoid ape, these scientific texts anticipate such belletristic works as the Scriblerian Essay … Concerning the Origine of Sciences, Gulliver’s Travels, and Frankenstein, all of which “display … the confusion or ambivalence generated in this period by the idea of the proximity between human- and animal-kind” (48).

From here, Brown proceeds to a chapter on the composite figure of the lady and the lap-dog, as this emerges within the obsessive, bourgeois pet-keeping culture of eighteenth-century Europe. Brown understands the association of ladies and lapdogs as initially an erotic trope, so that for poets like Henry Carey, Isaac Thompson, and John Gay, “the lapdog seems to be both an inappropriate or perverse sexual partner for the woman, and also a metonym for female sexuality” more generally (72). Moving into nineteenth-century fiction as well, Brown then traces this same cross-species trope to Dickens’s Little Dorritt, Dombey and Son, and David Copperfield, where the motif of the lady and her lapdog loses its association with “sexual innuendo” and attaches instead to “an alternative realm of affection” situated on the boundary between species (85).

Moving onward, Brown’s next chapter revisits her interest in eighteenth-century companion animals, this time by focusing on the pet monkeys littering the Augustan literary landscape. These creatures, Brown declares, supply “the missing link between satiric treatments of marriage in the early eighteenth-century comedy of manners” and “the major canonical idealizations of marriage in the domestic novel of the latter part of the century” (91). Thus the monkeys that abound in the comedies of Farquhar, Cibber, and their contemporaries reemerge in Frances Burney’s Evelina, where the fop Lovel is forced into contact with just such a beast in a way that calls into question his own humanity.

Finally, Brown returns in her concluding chapter to her interest in dogs so as to supply an account of the rise, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of what she calls the English “dog narrative” (115): the tales of canine wandering, suffering, loyalty, and love that have become a fixture of modern children’s fiction and the sentimental novel. Brown traces the development of this genre from Cervantes’s Coloquio de los perros of 1613 to its recent appearance in Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (2000), but her primary interest lies in eighteenth-century translations, adaptations, and imitations of Cervantes’s novella, such as those of Harry Bridges, Robert Goadby, and Charles Gildon. These works provide the impetus for a range of successor novels, such as Francis Coventry’s History of Pompey the Little (1751) and Elizabeth Fenwick’s Life of the Famous Dog Carlo (1804), that Brown describes as offering their readers a “loop-hole of possibility” (139) that dogs can possess personality as well as human beings.

This may be so, but the loophole in question is not nearly as promising as Brown seems to believe. In her introduction, Brown claims that the books she studies “provide … an alternative model” to “the contrasting positions of anthropomorphism or alterity” that have come to distinguish twenty-first-century thinking on the question of animal consciousness (2). But she never attempts to define the alternative model in question or describe its attributes, and with good reason: at bottom, it does not exist. On the contrary, in fact, the most interesting feature of the literature Brown surveys is one she herself largely ignores: it is virtually all the product of subaltern literary genres such as satire, the novel of sentiment, and children’s fiction, genres that define themselves, along with their audience and/or subject matter, against an implicit standard of rational, masculine humanity that accords with Descartes’s understanding of the species divide. Since their own condition of generic possibility derives from this standard, these works may fret and complain about the standard, but they are hardly in a position to offer an alternative to it. Indeed, the dog narratives that Brown examines could not exist apart from a single enabling literary device, which the OED describes as the “ascription of a human attribute or personality to anything impersonal or irrational.” The OED’s name for this device is “anthropomorphism” (OED, s.v. “anthropomorphism,” 1b).

Apart from the fact that her chapters do not amount to her thesis, Brown has written a book with much to commend it. The individual stories she tells—about early modern Europe’s efforts to make sense of hominoid apes, about the rise of the companion animal in eighteenth-century bourgeois society, and so on—are compelling and deserve a broader audience than they have had heretofore. Brown’s prose is elegant and precise. And the works she surveys—perhaps especially Gulliver’s Travels—are unquestionably enriched by juxtaposition with the uncertainties and anxieties arising from early modern culture’s efforts to define the human. To this extent, Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes should make a welcome addition to our current scholarship on animal consciousness and its literary manifestations.