A Liberal Bestiary
(Paolo Bugliani, University of Pisa)
Animals enjoy a curious status in The Liberal. As often happens in literature, they appear in semi-obscurity, often as vehicles of similes, as in Byron’s Vision of Judgment XXVI, when he describes cherubs hauling “like birds when soars the falcon” (p. 12), or nations’ cries compared to those of “geese” (p. 22). A similar use of animal symbolism occurs in the summoning of mythological beasts such as Cerberus (p. 29), or even biblical ones, like “Balaam’s ass” (p. 33). Byron’s choice of animals is far from ornamental: birds, geese, and monsters sharpen the satirical edge of his allegory, allowing him to deflate the grandeur of kings and courtiers by rendering them ridiculous, bestial, or grotesque. In Romantic-period satire, bestial images “accrued distinctive political meanings,” and even apparently ‘generic’ creatures (birds, reptiles, insects) can become politically readable because their valence is “rooted absolutely in the moment” of publication (Machell 2011: 222). In this sense, Byron’s animals are not simply figures: they are time-stamped satirical shorthand, compressed emblems that make political judgement travel fast.
This political compression also responds to the larger politics of style that governs Romantic satire. Radical verse satire thrives through indirection, “disguise,” and the management of satirical “tendency,” precisely because libel law and its courtroom interpretation focused less on factuality than on a work’s supposed effects (Dyer 1997: 72, 93). In other words, animalisation can function as a tactical mask: it offers a portable vocabulary of degradation (bestial, grotesque, verminous) that can point to the powerful while retaining plausible deniability as metaphor.
Yet recent animal-studies work cautions against treating such figurative displacement as a mere softening: portraying public figures as dogs can make mockery more obvious and, in effect, funnier, precisely because the mapping is both outrageous and legible (Pütz 2023: 42). Read back into The Liberal, the “geese” and “falcon” moments are not simply evasive: they are comic accelerants – an efficient way of making political contempt perceptible at a glance, while still speaking through the safe grammar of simile.
According to a classical account by W. H. Auden on literary animals, this type of animal simile does not embody a moral goal, but becomes “particular embodiments of universal vital forces” (Auden 2012: 214), useful to the author in conveying or strengthening a theme or idea. This is a common trait of Romantic literature as a whole. Romantic writers oscillated between sentimental identification with animals and the instrumental use of animal figures as metaphors for human society (Kenyon-Jones 2009), yet “animals […] inevitably complicate” the familiar Romantic habit of coding Nature as simply good, green, and consolatory: animal nature is brown, furry, feathery, scaled – “a Nature… [that] can kick, peck, squeak, kill and bite back” (Kenyon-Jones 2009: 138). This matters for The Liberal because satire, more than pastoral, requires exactly this capacity for Nature to ‘bite back’: animal figures are structurally suited to aggression, mockery, and counter-attack.
At the same time, culture “does not allow unmediated access to animals themselves,” and for this reason the study of overtly metaphorical literary writing may be more honest than “objective” discourse about the limits of representing animals (Baker 1993: 10). In that account, Romantic texts become arenas for what are called plural “operative fictions”: designedly figurative constructions that different readers can read differently, without mistaking them for reality. Read this way, The Liberal’s bestiary is doubly charged: it is openly rhetorical (hence satirically agile), yet it also keeps alive the unsettling vitality of animal life that exceeds the human allegory it is made to carry. A related framework concerns “becoming-animal,” in which writing is framed as a “zone of exchange” or “proximity” where human and nonhuman can “pass into one another” (Smith and Garlick 2023: 148-49). Importantly, “becoming animal” is not mimicry: the animal one “becomes” may “bear little resemblance” to the animal first imagined. For The Liberal, this helps name what animal similes do at the level of satiric cognition: they do not deliver zoological truth, but they engineer a viewpoint – a temporary, stylised access to “the affective registers of animality” that makes ridicule feel bodily, quick, and contagious (Smith and Garlick 2023: 148-49).
This broader bestiary, moreover, is not confined to explicitly satirical writing – yet it is also rarely (if ever) naturalistic in the sense of sustained observation for its own sake. Animals do appear in descriptive and antiquarian registers, but typically as cultural triggers, temporal markers, or narrative machinery rather than as objects of careful zoological attention. In Hunt’s travel writing, for instance, creatures such as lizards, cicadas, or fire-flies tend to organise atmosphere and recollection (inviting classical or Italian associations) rather than inviting patient scrutiny of behaviour or habitat; they serve as prompts for memory and sensibility, not as the focus of a natural-history gaze. Likewise, in the journal’s engagements with romance and older literature, animals often enter as inherited devices – metamorphic emblems, fable-vehicles, or marvellous instruments – so that even when the satiric lens is not foregrounded, the animal remains a rhetorical hinge. The consequence is methodological: The Liberal’s animals are ubiquitous across genres, but almost never as the subject of a piece devoted to naturalistic observation or careful description.
A striking case is Leigh Hunt’s “Dogs” (Vol. 1, issue 2), where an extended canine metaphor conveys a satire aimed at political and military elites, especially those surrounding the Duke of Wellington. The repeated animal similes – reducing aristocrats, generals, and even whole institutions to “puppies,” “curs,” and “hounds” – are the central devices that drive the poem’s satirical sting. The dogs in the poem function as allegorical masks that, through their very animality, expose the degradation of society and the barbarisation of mankind. This inversion is particularly striking when Hunt contrasts the destiny of soldiers left to starve on the battlefield with Wellington’s pampered hounds. In this light, the satire recalls the classical force of Aesopian fable, where animals embody human vices and follies. Yet unlike Aesop, who reduces human traits into digestible moral lessons, Hunt multiplies and exaggerates the comparison: he creates an epic of dogs, an endless pack whose very proliferation becomes absurd, highlighting the corruption and ridiculousness of the elite. Because animal metaphors can “connect seemingly disparate political events and debates,” the endless canine pack performs more than ridicule: it makes elite power intelligible as a system – a pack, a hierarchy, a kennel logic – whose dehumanisation is itself the poem’s accusation (Machell 2011: 217). Animal satire intensifies this by adding “several levels” to humour through accumulation, exploiting the “outrageousness” of aligning public figures with “uncomplimentary” species (Pütz 2023: 51). In “Dogs,” the very excess of canine typologies (pet, cur, hound, pack) becomes a satiric technology: a way of building a scalable social taxonomy in which elite governance is readable as training, breeding, appetite, and violence.
The poem’s tonal mixture has its own political logic: radical satire characteristically carries “anger implicit within [its] playfulness,” reflecting a commitment to reform (Dyer 1997: 4), and “Dogs” converts that mixture into bestial terms – wit becomes bite, play becomes political aggression, the animal mask the vehicle that lets the poem snarl while it jokes.
If “Dogs” offers a wide-angle satire on the state of Britain, Hunt’s “To a Spider Running Across a Room” (Vol. 2, issue 3) brings the bestiary down to a minute domestic scale. The poem maintains a distinctive satirical tone, as the first part depicts the arachnid as the quintessence of vermin: a “mere lump of poison lifted on starved threads.” Yet by the end of the poem, this stereotypical depiction gives way to a celebration of human piety, as the poetic “I” questions the utility of killing the little beast which, despite its poison, means no real harm. The articulation of the decision for clemency is quintessentially humorous yet profound:
Why should I trample here, and like a beast,
Settle this humblest of them all and least?
The vagrant never injured me or mine,
Wrote no critiques, stabbed at no heart divine,
And as to flies, Collyer himself must dine.
Here Hunt turns to a different target: the true vermin are not spiders but critics – those humans who, in his opinion, are actually harmful and unnecessarily so. In contrast, he recognises the spider’s right to a peaceful life. In the juxtaposition of satirical invective and moral restraint, Hunt anticipates contemporary debates on cruelty to animals and the emergence of animal welfare discourse in the 1820s. The poem sits exactly on a historical hinge: early parliamentary debates on animal welfare were shifting from a rhetoric of “kindness” – which often reasserts human superiority – to an emerging rhetoric of “kinship,” in which animals begin to be imagined as having interests, even rights, beyond property (Kenyon-Jones 2009: 148–49). The spider poem enacts precisely this shift: the speaker begins in disgust (vermin, poison) but ends by refusing a casual killing, precisely because the creature’s harm is revealed as largely rhetorical – whereas human critics do real damage.
What emerges from these examples is that The Liberal’s bestiary is not a marginal ornament but a central rhetorical resource. Byron’s mythological and biblical beasts operate at the level of grand satire, puncturing authority through grotesque reduction. Hunt, by contrast, deploys domestic animals – dogs, spiders – to target specific abuses of power and to question the ethics of human-animal relations. Together, they produce a composite menagerie that embodies the double register of the journal itself: animals serve both as satirical weapons undermining political and cultural elites, and as ethical markers that recognise the vitality shared across species. The Liberal’s animals constitute a repertoire of portable satirical symbols: historically legible, rhetorically flexible, capable of linking political events to bodily and affective registers (Dyer 1997: 93; Machell 2011: 222). The animal mask does not only conceal – it sharpens; animal figures re-route satire through nonhuman sensation and sociality – pack, vermin, flight – so that political critique is felt as embodied, mobile, and suddenly clear (Smith and Garlick 2023: 148–49).
The bestiary of The Liberal thus becomes an emblem of its broader ambition: to rethink politics, morality, and literature through forms of life not limited to the human.
Works cited
Auden, W. H., The Dyer’s Hand, London: Faber & Faber, 2012.
Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993.
Dyer, Gary, British Satire and the Politics of Style, 1789–1832, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Kenyon-Jones, Christine, “British Romanticism and Animals”, Literature Compass 6:1, 2009, pp. 136–152.
Machell, Christopher, The politics of bestial imagery in satire, 1789-1820, Doctoral thesis defended at the School of Arts and Social Sciences (Northumbria University) 2011.
Pütz, Babette. “Dogs in Court and Sheep in the Assembly: Animal Satire in Aristophanes.” In Animal Satire, edited by Susan McHugh and Robert McKay, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 35–54.
Smith, A. J., and B. Garlick, “A green Parrot for a good Speaker”: Writing with a Birds-Eye View in Eliza Haywood’s The Parrot”. In Animal Satire, Robert McKay and Susan McHugh (eds), Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, pp. 148–49.
Ultimo aggiornamento
17.02.2026