Pets and the eighteenth-century British family

ABSTRACT Pets became increasingly common members of British families over the course of the eighteenth century. This was also a period of change in the meaning and makeup of the human family, and attitudes toward pets reflected differences in the ways the family was defined. This article draws on literary, archival, and visual sources to trace the variety of ways pets were depicted throughout the eighteenth century, with attention to continuity and change over time. In Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), animals form the basis of a patriarchal political family, with pets acting simultaneously as subjects, servants, and companions. In the most common analogy of the eighteenth century, animals were servants within the family, yet pets complicated this analogy because they did not engage in visible labor. Pets thus might be seen as toadies – useless and potentially dangerous companions to women – or as competitors to human servants. Elite pet owners might instead depict their pets as part of an aristocratic family network of lineage and kinship, relying on parallels between animal and human breeding. The rise of the cultures of sensibility and domesticity in the later eighteenth century fostered a model of pets as family members that heightened their emotional roles in the realm of a family also defined by close emotional ties.