Human-animal relations and the religious periodical press in late Victorian Britain

Concentrating on debates about the relations between human and other animals, it examines how a range of religious, moral, political and cultural factors influenced editors, authors and readers in their evaluation of scientific knowledge. In so doing, the thesis examines how boundaries between humans and animals were negotiated by religious authors and their readers and seeks to rethink Christian (re-)conceptualisations of animals in light of nineteenth-century scientific developments.

In pursuing this goal, the thesis contributes to recent research on science in periodicals and, more generally, work on the historical geographies of science and religion. Under investigation are the English Roman Catholic weekly The Tablet, the weekly Spectator whose science debates were driven by its religious editor, the carefully-managed Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, and the Evangelical/Nonconformist Good Words. Each chapter reveals a different religious engagement with science, including responses to the growth of British physiology and animal experimentation, debates about animal instinct and intelligence, reactions to human evolution and the study of human origins, and the more popular considerations of human- animal relations in science through the lens of late Victorian natural theology.