![]() In tandem, a rising Evangelical religious movement placed more emphasis on mothers and fathers in bringing up moral children. This was the clear message behind Frederick George Cotman’s painting, One of the Family, which shows a rural family at the dinner table, accompanied by a pet dog and a horse. Pets were a key part of this celebration of domestic life, appearing in numerous paintings and illustrations and often portrayed as part of the family. ![]() ![]() Responding to the growth of noisy and dirty industrial cities, Victorians began to idealise the home as a sacrosanct space. In part, this was because of the new emphasis Victorians placed on home and domestic life. Matthew Darly's 'Chloe's Cushion or the Cork Rump'/British Museum, CC BY-SA Instead, paintings and illustrations – a good indicator of what was culturally “in” – began to portray pets as an accepted part of domestic life.īig hair, small dog: how pet-keeping was portrayed in 1777. Until then, pets were often seen as an elite extravagance, and small dogs frequently appeared in satirical prints of aristocratic ladies, symbolising frivolity and indulgence.īy the late 18th and early 19th centuries there were fewer of these kinds of images. Humans have interacted and engaged with animals for thousands of years, but pet-keeping didn’t become socially acceptable in Britain until the 18th century. With Julie-Marie Strange and our research team, Luke Kelly, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston, we’ve been exploring archives from the Victorian era and beyond to figure out how and when pets became so prominent in family life. Now, almost 20m cats and dogs have a loving place in the country’s homes, and almost one in two households is accompanied by a furry, scaly, or feathered friend.Īs a historian of family and home life in 19th- and 20th-century Britain, I’ve been trying to find out how this came about. Britain was the first country in the world to start a welfare charity for animals, as early as 1824.
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