Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture begins with a series of vignettes: a taxidermist in Hampshire examines the contents of his bird trap; a Londoner reads the notice of Jim, a missing cat, in the newspaper; a terrier naps on a chair “upholstered with the skin of a baby giraffe” (3); the keepers at the London Zoological Gardens prepare animals for transport to India; Marion in Market Deeping writes an advertisement bartering her dog Flo for a sewing machine; and, lastly, a suffragette receives a postcard illustrated with a cat. This vivid opening not only announces the focus on animals as objects of exchange but also sets the tone of Sarah Amato's highly engaging book, filled with fascinating examples of animals and their representations in Victorian consumer culture.

Amato establishes that the commodification of animals in pet keeping, zoos, and taxidermy was pervasive in England between 1820 and 1914 and that “Human-animal encounters became forums for exploring and expressing Victorian social hierarchies and intersections of class, gender, and race, as well as human and animal” (7). The conspicuous consumption of nonhuman animals bestowed rank on the human ones, and while this argument has been made before in terms of the upper and middle classes, Amato sheds new light on the discussion by including the working class. Furthermore, rather than subsuming the diversity of species within the category of the “animal,” Amato is attuned to the gendering, classing, and racializing of specific species. For example, there is a chapter that focuses on the gendered implications of cats and dogs, and Amato demonstrates that pet keeping also included rabbits, hedgehogs, canaries, mice, rats, squirrels, and snakes. She draws on a wide range of texts, including newspapers, guidebooks, photographs, advertisements, zoological guides, satirical cartoons, novels, stationary, and toys. In Beastly Possessions, Amato presents an impressively diverse account of animals in Victorian consumer culture, and her book makes an important contribution to the emerging canon on animals in human society.

Amato's range of discussion provides one of the book's considerable strengths, but also, predictably, its principal weakness. The first two chapters, on pet keeping, are followed by a chapter on zoos, then one on Toung Taloung, Barnum's “white elephant” exhibited in the London Zoological Gardens, and, lastly, one on taxidermy. While the latter “also serves as the conclusion” (182), the book still seems to end somewhat abruptly, having covered so many topics. (Oddly, too, the discussion becomes repetitive at times, despite its varied materials.) Amato is at her best when offering tight sections of analysis. The chapter on Toung Taloung, for example, is particularly well focused and detailed. There are times when Amato pauses to fully explore the significance of a specific artefact (for example, the photograph, titled “Caged,” of a woman leaning out of the window of a London dwelling to feed birds housed in over a dozen cages installed on the outside wall, or an image from the Pears soap advertising campaign), and those readings are compelling. But at other times, the book could profit from a more developed argumentative arc. Each chapter “stands on its own or can be read as part of the broader whole” (16), and the discussion is held together by the claim that human-animal relationships in Victorian culture were “complex, halting, and multifaceted” (16; also see 23 and 107); but while one cannot disagree with this statement, it is somewhat general.

In her introduction, Amato notes that “Then as now, animals thwarted the intentions of the humans with whom they came into contact … The disciplining of animals in order to make them trustful, compliant, and orderly became especially important because animals were understood to signal the characteristics of the people who owned … them” (6). Amato is concerned with the latter point; she very briefly mentions “the most recent scholarship on the history of human-animal relations,” which seeks “to recover animals as historical actors in their own right,” but her own work focuses on “the way animals and representations of animals affected people” (15). While Beastly Possessions will be of strong interest to anyone working in animal studies and will become a valuable resource, it does not directly engage with the growing fields of animal studies, critical animal studies, or posthumanism. Amato also presents a somewhat one-sided view. The practices Amato explores were part of mass culture, but they were not universally applauded. There are a couple of very brief references to “alternative views” (192), but the voices of dissent are largely occluded. Similarly, while pet keeping certainly is part of consumer society and although animals sometimes suffer within an institution famously described by Yi-Fu Tuan as “dominance and affection” (in his seminal 1984 book of that title), she largely overlooks the possibility of the affective bond between humans and nonhumans, as she does also the connections between pet keeping and the rise of animal advocacy. While she promises in the introduction that “in each chapter, we experience the joys and anxieties of Victorian relations to animals” (5), the picture she provides throughout struck me as rather bleak.

Beastly Possessions will find a wide audience. It is relevant across both periods (Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist eras) and disciplines (history, literary studies, visual culture, animal studies). Very well illustrated and written in an accessible, jargon-free way, it will appeal to not only the specialist and academic but also the general reader.