Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition.

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In light of animal rights. Pro-pieta
1. English Dissenters were Protestants who separated from the church of England in the
17th and 18th centuries. Since they dissented from the ethos of the mainstream Anglican
Christian Church they were known as dissenters. These dissenters were basically 'woke'
people. They were the liberals of the early romantic period. Dissenters played an
instrumental role in raising awareness about cruelty against animals. Their humanity towards
non-human others was grounded in their reformist moral credo and they acted as a
consciousness raising group bringing up the curtain on man's inhumanity to animals and
supported measures to prevent it. The ideology fuelling the activism of these dissenters was
rooted in the notion of a humane extension of sympathy towards animals which in turn was
rooted in the Christian ideals of mercy, pity and love. This type of emphasis on the mutuality
between humans and animals was the staple of dissenting thoughts and constituted the
basis of their pro-animal activism. In the minds of these egalitarian Dissenters the cause of
animal rights was a cause worth upholding as they had a form conviction in the common
subjection of human and animal to God. According to them, human and animal are creations
of God and hence the former should not mistreat the later. This was the theological tenant
advocated by the Dissenters. Anna Leticia Barbauld was a lifelong member of the dissenting
community centred around Warrington academy, a teaching establishment in Warrington
and like most Dissenters took a keen interest in animals. Her 1781 children's book Hymns in
Prose for Children which was immensely popular during the Romantic period makes
frequent use of animals to impart to children a sense of benevolence towards animals.
Inculcating in them compassion for animals. It is a didactic text meant to train young
minds/readers in following the golden rule of "be kind to animals". This sentiment of kindness
was dear to the Romantic Dissenters and they wanted to create a new generation of kind
humans who would empathise with non-humans.
2. Animal abuse was omnipresent in late 18th century Britain. 6 instances in this instance: i.
Visitors to the zoo at the Tower of London would often bring live cat or dog as food for the
tigers and lions imprisoned there. Visitors did this to save the price of admission. Since they
were feeding the wild animals the authorities at the Tower of London would excuse their
admission fees. ii. Larks were routinely captured and sold for food in the market. iii. Horses
had their ears and tails cropped for stylish appearance. iv. Pigs, intended to be eaten were
beaten to death with knotted ropes to tenderise their flesh. v. In the name of science or
pseudo-science animals or live animals of all sorts were surgically examined or tortured by
vivisectors. vi. The practice of bull-baiting was rampant. It was a blood sport involving the
putting of a bull against dogs with the aim of subduing and attacking the bull by biting and
holding onto its nose or necks which of course resulted in the death of the bull. Outrage over
this heinous custom of bull baiting prompted the founding of the first SPCA on 22nd October
1809.
3. Published in 1773 The Mouse's Petition was composed by Barbauld when she had visited
her friend Joseph Priestly who was one of the leading scientists of the day famous for his
discovery of the existence of Oxygen at the university of Leeds and found a mouse caught in
a trap that Priestly was going to experiment with. Each stanza if the poem is composed of
four lines, every stanza is a quatrain. The speaker of the poem is a mouse, the poem offers
his first-person point of view. The mouse is speaking to a scientist, presumably Priestly who
has locked him up and has the agency to free him as well. So, the poem can be called a
dramatic monologue of sorts. The mouse is the monologist and the scientist is the implied
audience. Also notice that the rhyme scheme of the poem is abcb. In each stanza the
second- and fourth-lines rhyme. Throughout the poem the mouse makes several appeals to
convince the scientist to release him. In the first stanza the mouse takes recourse to the
Romantic concept of "liberty". The idea that we are born with an innate right to remain
unshackled, the revolutions in America and France had opened up people's eyes to the fact
that liberty is of paramount importance. If the scientist does not pay attention to the plea of
the mouse seeking liberty, if the scientist shuts his heart, then the obvious implication is that
he is against "liberty". A poetic device used in this opening stanza is alliteration, it is the
repetition of the initial consonant of words in close proximity. The consonant 'p' is repeated
twice in the first line. In the second stanza Barbauld paints the picture of the mouse as being
acutely afraid of the "approaching morn" when he will be sacrificed for the sake of scientific
experimentation. This mouse in a cage, in a "wiry grate", this mouse can be emblematic of a
captive at the Tower of London awaiting to be beheaded by the headsman's axe or a captive
in the Bastille of France awaiting to be beheaded with the guillotine. Bastille was fortress
prison in France famously stormed in during the French Revolution. Like the cage in the
poem Bastille is symbolic of oppression. The thirst stanza repeats the theme of the first
stanza i.e., freedom is to be cherished and chains of tyranny must be broken. Animals
should not be detained and slaughtered, as akin to humans animals are born free. Petitions
must be made to end violence against animals. In the fourth stanza the mouse states that
the scientist should not stain his beautiful home, his "hospitable hearth" with guilt which he
invariably will suffer from by killing a little mouse. There is no prize in store for the scientist in
overcoming a creature so tiny as a mouse. The mouse is innocent and therefore
undeserving of punishment in the form of death. In the fifth stanza the mouse says that he is
a small animal who needs only a crumb of food to keep himself alive however if the scientist
has an unrelenting heart i.e., if the scientist has no commiseration for fellow living creatures,
then he might as well deny food to the mouse. The mouse is indirectly stating that if the
scientist does not offer food to him then he must be a bad person, a man with "unrelenting
heart". In the sixth stanza the mouse argues that nature evoked by the two phrases "cheerful
light" and "vital air" is a gift bestowed by god/heaven and the scientist has no right what so
ever to keep that from him. Both the scientist and the mouse are equally entitled to enjoy
nature or access nature and the mouse can enjoy the gifts if nature provided that he's not
executed by the scientist. The noun "commoner" is significant, here the mouse is aligning
himself with the English commoners who had very few privileges back in the day. Perhaps
Barbauld is alluding to the unfair treatment of the English commoners by the nation state.
The mouse is maltreated by the scientist similarly the proletariat commoners were
maltreated by the ruling class.In seventh stanza the mouse states that an educated
intelligent man with "a well taught philosophic mind" ought to treat everyone justly and care
about everything that has life in it. In the Romantic age reincarnation was a much-debated
topic. Barbauld alludes to reincarnation in stanzas 8, 9 and 10 i.e., from lines 29-40. Mind is
"a never dying flame". In case reincarnation is real then by killing the mouse the scientist
could be killing a brother a "kindred mind". The mouse could be a reincarnated avatar of a
relative or brother of the scientist and in case reincarnation is not real even then why should
the scientist deprive the mouse of its brief life? The message of the last two stanzas is "you
reap what you sow". If the scientist helps the mouse today then someone will help the
scientist in future. The scientist should do good and the good he does will come back to him.
In other words, life is all about Karma. The mouse also asks the scientist to step into his
shoes i.e., what if one day the scientist is reduced to a helpless being trapped by a powerful
man of course the scientist will expect this powerful man to show mercy to him. By the same
logic the scientist should show mercy to the mouse and spare its life. So, in a series of
argumentative petitions the mouse tries his utmost best to persuade the scientist to spare
him and not snatch away his life. Interestingly the phrase "all of life we share" in stanza 10,
this phrase aptly encapsulates the core faith of the Dissenters. Which is the
interconnectedness of humans and animals. Humans and animals as part of a shared
Christian universe, all animated by the same breath of life. The idea of mutuality between
humans and animals. “The mouse's Petition” is not the only animal poem written by
Barbauld, she also wrote another animal poem, "The caterpillar" in which Barbauld debates
weather or not humans are justified in destroying caterpillars with the help of pesticides, in
this poem too the caterpillar is the speaker.