Volume 30, Number 9 · June 2, 1983
On the Trail of Nature
By Stuart Hampshire
Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility
by Keith Thomas
Pantheon, 425 pp., $19.95
The Book of Revelation suggested that at the Resurrection, dogs, like other unclean beings, would be excluded from the New Jerusalem; this was accepted in medieval England. Chaucer has nothing good to say about the dog and neither has Shakespeare. Yet there were dogs and dogs, as Keith Thomas notes. Mastiffs and mongrels were called lecherous, incestuous, filthy, and truculent, and the butcher's cur was snarling and sullen. But the hound was noble, sagacious, generous, intelligent, faithful, and obedient. Mr. Thomas guesses that the reason for this distinction was essentially social. An early-eighteenth-century writer noted that people tended to have dogs appropriate to their social position. But the charm of Man and the Natural World is that it does not insist too heavily on socio-historical explanations of this type. Mr. Thomas has a careful honesty as a historian, and a strong feeling for particularities. Having sketched a plausible generalization that might explain a changing attitude to nature in Britain, he forthwith produces a string of interesting counterexamples. He excels in details and in regional variety, and he avoids the heavy, Hegelian periodization that can become a deadening feature of social history.
Review, 3299 words
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