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The huge growth of London in the first half of the nineteenth century projected the city’s financial and cultural dominance; but celebrations of ‘improvement’ coexisted with unease over the social effects of laissez-faire capitalism. Thus, the ubiquitous exploitation of animals in London, a direct effect of commercial competition and intensive building, acquired great symbolic force in the imagery of illustration. While efforts to end cruelty to animals apparently testified to the humane and civilizing impulses of the time, their relative failure suggested a fundamental barbarity in capitalism itself, in its heartless commodification of both men and animals. Conflicting impressions of human–animal relationships in nineteenth-century London are exemplified through a range of publications, from the Illustrated London News to George Cruikshank’s books and the journals of the anti-cruelty groups themselves. Animals and their treatment could evoke, at one extreme, the vital energy and aggressively competitive spirit of the capital, at the other its endemic cruelty and alienation from nature and God. The varying conventions of pictorial representation are shown to have had a crucial role in these constructs, particularly in the underlying imagined antithesis between ‘city’ and ‘country’.

The arts of Western Europe in the eighteenth century exude a sense of order. Consider, for example, the characteristic cadences of English literature: the regularity and closure of rhyming couplets; the balancing of phrases and ideas in the orotund prose writing of the period; the preoccupation with correctness and ‘finish’, and the adaptation of style to subject and literary genre. All bespeak an approach which differentiates itself both from the passion and wilfulness of seventeenth-century writing and from the lyrical expressiveness of the Romantic era. In the visual arts of Britain, the symmetry and restraint of buildings in the Palladian or the Neoclassical manner appear to symbolize social order and good taste, making them a frequent model for the postmodern architects of today. Eighteenth-century portraits, with their poise and carefully subordinated grouping of figures, similarly project a confidence both in hierarchy and in family dynasty. The predominating aesthetics of high culture thus provide a counterpart to the rhetoric of politicians and their publicists, when picturing the values supposedly threatened by their antagonists. In the satirical prints of the period, the ‘Temple of Liberty’ and the unwritten ‘British Constitution’ were both symbolized by a perfect, circular, columned structure. Alternatively, the constitution was represented by a tripod: the three legs of King, Lords and Commons lean together, counterbalancing and at the same time reinforcing each other, producing a system of optimal stability and endurance.1