Afterword

The place is the Armstrong Browning Library and Museum, Baylor University, Texas. It is March 2006, and the occasion is a conference entitled "This is Living Art," organized to celebrate the bicentenary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's birth. Victorian Pets and Poetry is primarily concerned with animals that lived in close proximity to humans in domestic spaces: various avian species, cats, and that most over-determined of Victorian pets, the dog. The representational ubiquity of animals across a wide range of poetic genres, including the lyric, ode, elegy, sonnet, epitaph, and ballad, and the dissemination of this poetry in a variety of venues, is in part traceable to the visibility of animals in the everyday lives of the Victorians. Any survey of the Victorian literary historical archive will yield scholarship on animals in the works of major literary figures, some of it reaching back to early years of the discipline: dogs in Dickens, horses in Browning's poetry, and so on.