Animals in the family mini-special issue introduction and historiographical review

Abstract

In Britain today, pets are often at the heart of family life, but we know relatively little about the roles they played in families in the past. From the early nineteenth century, pets were a central focus of middle- and working-class homes in Britain but are almost completely unremarked in historical studies of the home and family. In this mini-special issue we present four new essays, developed from papers given at the panel, exploring the evolving relationship between pets and family life in Britain in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Taken together they demonstrate the relationship between changes in the way the family was understood and experienced and the development of pet keeping practices. In our introduction we bring together two important strands of recent scholarship–the history of the family and histories of animals. We will review the development of animal histories–paying attention to how they might usefully be brought to bear on the study of the family. As there has been significant research on the role of pet animals in family life across the social sciences, we will also review some of the key work in sociology, social geography and psychology, thinking through the implications of these studies for historians. Finally, we reflect on the cumulative findings of the four essays–and how they add a new dimension to our understandings of modern British family life.