As several historians have noted, efforts to recover animal history have parallels to, and have learned from, the recovery of working-class history (Kean, pp. 58–60). Most recently, Anna Feuerstein has argued that animals are central to the development of Victorian liberalism: ‘Beginning in the nineteenth century, alongside the rise of anti-cruelty legislation, certain animals – mostly domestic – were increasingly liberalized; not only were they viewed as subjects with thought and feeling but they were frequently represented with liberal qualities such as reason, character, and disinterest’ (p. 5). As she notes, Victorian legislators and commentators sought to reform ‘animal’ qualities ‘such as instinct, wildness, appetite and brutality’ which were widely attributed to ‘racialized subjects and the lower class’ (p. 3). Harriet Ritvo’s foundational 1987 study observed that embodying the lower classes as different groups of animals justified ‘the authority and responsibility exercised by their social superiors’ and ‘the need for their masters to exercise strict discipline’ (p. 16). However, as Feuerstein’s study suggests, both animals and the working classes were also subject to a logic which suggested that giving them greater rights and agency would render them better, because more docile, workers.

Exploring miners’ literary writings about animals in the mines, this chapter traces the character of working-class responses to these discourses. In the substantial body of work on animals in Victorian literature, working-class writing has not been studied as a genre. Jason Hribal’s arguments that ‘animals are part of the working class’ (2007, p. 109) briefly mention and cite Samuel Bamford and Thomas Cooper (Hribal, 2003, p. 453), and Coral Lansbury, in her seminal study of Victorian animal welfare activism, notes that the ‘occasional text by a worker’ might reveal a very different picture of worker–animal relationships than emerges from mainstream commentary (p. 42). Yet investigations of Victorian literary animals, particularly animals that operate in man-made spaces, generally draw from Dickens or other established authors’ work or lives as key examples: consequently, they also tend to be London-centric. The small selection of literary work I discuss here, by Scottish and Northern miners, is therefore unusual in Victorian animal studies both because of the authors’ background and circumstances, and because of the locations in which these animal encounters happen.

Among middle-class commentators, the encounter between animals and humans in the space of the mine tended to elicit a specific kind of unease about the status of the latter (both in terms of their animality, and in terms of their mechanisation) (Ketabgian, p. 77). The entanglement of animals and industrial workers, I will argue here, looks different when the animals are perceived and represented by an industrial worker, especially when that worker is well aware of this unease. Evidence of such reflections appears throughout the poetry recently unearthed in the ‘Piston, Pen and Press’ project (focusing on locating writing by industrial workers produced between the 1840s and the 1920s), which is almost certainly representative of a much larger body of work on the same theme, either lost or still awaiting recovery. This essay therefore also supplies insight into an archive which could be used to think further and more broadly about the zoogeographies of the industrial workspace, and how non-working animals, less pets than ‘pests’, operated within it.

Focusing on poetry, the genre most likely to be produced by workers, additionally demonstrates the intertextuality of every literary representation of a ‘real’ animal encounter. When a literate collier in Scotland, the north of England, or beyond, saw a mouse, they saw not only the live creature in front of them but the mouse Robert Burns had turned up in a field in 1785, and they were very alert to the differences and similarities in the encounter. This alertness comprises, as it did for Burns, the fact that the ability to write a poem to commemorate and communicate this encounter is never available to the mouse – and not always available to the worker, given literacy rates for industrial workers for most of the nineteenth century. Tobias Menely, focusing on eighteenth-century writers like William Cowper, whose poems were known to well-read Victorian workers, suggests that the poetry of sensibility is distinct from earlier representations of animals in that it ‘took on the vocation of representing animal voice in an emerging public sphere and of thereby speaking for animals in a specifically political sense’ (p. 16). This remains true for the mid-Victorian to early twentieth-century poems discussed here, all of which draw heavily on a long tradition of ‘sensibility’ in animal poems. But a literary work which speaks for a disenfranchised and silenced animal from the perspective of a classically educated and well-connected poet has an obvious and different resonance than a literary work written by a disenfranchised miner, with no expectation that it could reach an audience beyond their local and immediate context. The strong awareness that, like the animal they describe, the working-class poet has little say in the public sphere and is part of a group commonly represented as ‘dumb’, and needing to be spoken for, is part of the impetus to produce such poems. In a nineteenth-century context, this renders such poems always political, enmeshed in movements for reform and enfranchisement.

As coal mining rapidly expanded and grew in scale, animals moved into the mines. From the 1842 commissioners’ reports onwards, animals are included in descriptions of the mining ‘community’ in periodical and other accounts:

The community consists of men and boys – and, in some, of women – horses, and asses. Rats and mice find their way in the provender; and cats are brought down to keep these in check. The cricket is chirping everywhere; the midge, and sundry varieties of insects, are found. (‘Colliers and Collieries’, 1842, p. 162)

Moths, flies, and gnats – some, doubtless, of a novel kind – are attracted to this newly discovered yet so ancient region. The rats, too, soon find their way thither, to the great discomfort of the miners: they eat their crusts, and nibble their candle-ends, and are met with everywhere scampering along the levels, or timidly hiding beneath the stays […]. The bat, too, finds a congenial home in abandoned workings, which are warm, damp, and quiet. (‘Mines and Miners’, 1870, p. 31)

There is a distinction, in these reports, between the animals that are ‘brought down’ for a purpose, like ponies and cats, and the creatures which find their own way into the mines and can make use of their advantages (heat, damp and plenty of space, for instance). In the accounts of miners themselves, especially the accounts of child miners in the 1842 Children’s Employment Commission reports, animals are fairly frequent. A particularly notable set of responses from the South Durham coalfield, in which a number of young respondents discuss animals, may have been the result of sub-commissioner Dr James Mitchell’s interest in the topic, as he specifically addresses the animals’ presence in his introductory report in order to demonstrate that the air in the pit is of good quality:

Midges are in millions. Wood-lice are not uncommon, nor the insects called forty-legs; and beetles are found in all parts of the pit […]. A few stray mice coming down in the hay multiply and swarm in every part of the pits, wherever the men and boys work. (Appendix to First Report, p. 135)

His South Durham interviewees agreed that they were working amid a host of lively animal life. Trapper William Laws, aged ten, ‘sets mice-trap in the pits, and catches two sometimes; brings them to the cat in the stable of the pit. There are midges in the pit which fly at the candles’ (p. 161). Thomas Hoggins, aged fifteen, recalled of his first working years:

There were swarms of mice in the pit and I could sometimes take them by a cut of the whip: midges were abundant; they sometimes put out the candle. The pit is choke full of black clocks (beetles) creeping all about; they are nasty things; they never bit me. (p. 157)

Thomas Lawton, an older collier working in the same mine as Laws, remembered his work as a trapper in terms of his encounters with the mine animals:

The mice are numerous in the pit. They get at your bait-bags, that is, the victual, and they get at the horse’s corn. Cats breed sometimes in the pit, and the young ones grow up healthy. Black clocks breed in the pit […]. A great many midges came about when I had a candle. (p. 161)

Other than Hoggins’s memory that the beetles were ‘nasty’, there is little sense of positive or negative emotional investment in animals from these reports. Largely the child workers’ interests (at least as reported by the commissioners) are in animals as a source of inconvenience (stealing food, putting out candles) or alternatively sporting entertainment, with a number of reports about catching, torturing and killing mice and rats. For these child miners, animal interactions are reported as an integral part of working life in the mines. From the commissioners’ perspective, however, animals are only relevant in so far as they show (ironically) that the mine can be a healthy environment for ‘young ones’, and because reports of animal cruelty practised by child miners spoke to anxieties about child labour creating a generation of amoral and brutish adults.

Unsurprisingly given Burns’s influence, the majority of literary works which consider these animal presences focus on the interaction between a miner and a mouse. Such poems ask questions about whether mice are ‘problem’ animals, or whether they have a place in the mine economy. As Jerolmack notes, ‘examining how species of animals are defined as problems can mirror and inform processes of how human groups are constructed as problematic’ (p. 73), and in all these miner – mice encounters, there is a recognition that the mouse’s ambiguous value may mirror the way in which colliers are perceived by the surface world.

The first two poems I will consider were both written in Ayrshire, in the 1880s: there is no evidence that the authors knew each other’s work, but it is not unlikely. In his ‘The Wee Pit Moose’, published in 1883, George McMurdo, a miner since the age of twelve in Muirkirk, Ayrshire, opens with a statement of companionship and sympathy:

The wee pit moose, my cronie lang,

My present theme shall be:

Tae plead its cause, wi a’ my poo’r,

I’ll raise my voice wi’ glee.

Wi’ danger hemm’d a’ roun’ and roun’.

Just like the miner’s sel’;

But whaur tae creep frae open scaith,

The beastie canna tell. (p. 24)

Trapped underground in the darkness, away from the ‘safe retreat’ of a domestic space and a ‘cosie nest’, the mouse, like the miners, lives in a state of precarity and danger. McMurdo, addressing not the mouse but his fellow-workers, makes the case that the similarities between mouse and miner mean that the mouse is worthy of their support, and they should not begrudge it enough to live on. His poem is explicitly against animal cruelty on these grounds:

Oh, dinna lift the cruel fit,

Nor fling the deadly coal –

Forgie the scamp’rin’, frichted thing,

For hunger’s ill tae thole.

And what are we, that’s whiles sae prood?

On wha dae we depend?

As circumstances carve the line,

We rise, or we descend. (p. 25)

By composing a poem that pleads with his fellow miners for kindness to those weaker and worse off than themselves, McMurdo also indicates that he possesses sensibility and feeling – a form of cultural capital rarely attributed to Scottish colliers in wider discourses of the period. In describing the mouse as a ‘cronie lang’ (long-term friend) and reflecting on how hard its life is underground, McMurdo also incorporates a politicised reflection on the working conditions and pay of the collier. ‘Rise’ and ‘descend’, while used in a broad sense, relate to the descent into the mine, a descent from which miners did not always return. Like the mouse, the miner ‘maun dae’ his best in a space marked by darkness and danger, and like the mouse, he knows what it means to suffer (‘thole’) hunger. Though the ‘who’ in ‘on wha dae we depend?’ may refer to God, it also refers to the masters and mine-owners. The poem invites the reader to consider whether their power over the miners’ lives – which, of course, can also include power over the domestic lives and leisure time of the miners in this period, through company housing, shops and amenities – is equivalent to the power differential between miner and mouse.

McMurdo’s poem is not about the perspective of one mouse, but about mice and men in this specific environment, and the ways in which they might peacefully co-exist and acknowledge their shared situation. Arthur Wilson’s ‘Lines Addressed to a Mouse’, in contrast, is, like Burns’s poem, addressed to a specific mouse, caught ‘inside my bread napkin’ in the Ryesholm Pit, Dalry (Ayrshire) in 1881.¹ ‘Lines Addressed to a Mouse’ is also written, following Burns’s poem, in the habbie stanza. It follows the miner’s thoughts as he moves from irritation on finding that the mouse has ripped his napkin, eaten his lunch, and bitten him, to sympathy and a willingness to let the mouse escape. The turning point in the poem is when the miner admires the mouse’s enterprise and daring:

My certie! But ye had a speel –

In faith, but ye hae climbed weel;

It’s clear four fit untae the nail

Whaur hung the napkin;

An’ hoo ye managed it – atweel,

It’s past my reckonin’ (1884, p. 51).

The mouse’s intelligence and bravery in scaling (‘speel’) the pit prop to reach food arouse the miner’s approbation, reflected in the surprise and admiration in his opening exclamation. He moves to a consideration of what the mouse has brought to his working hours, and then to a determination to treat it henceforward as a companion animal:

Hoo aft I’ve wrocht and nae ane near me

Tae help tae wile the time sae dreary;

The hours they wad hae been gey weary

Wer’t not for thee;

Yer presence it did oftimes cheer me

Right merrily.

[…]

An’ come, wee moosie, come each mornin’,

Aboot the happy hour o’ cornin’,

Ye’ll get yer fill, withooten girnin’

O’ Cheddar sweet;

We’ll leeve on frien’ship, never spurnin’

Frien’ships’ meet. (1884, p. 52)

As I have examined elsewhere, Victorian working-class writers often rework ‘To a Mouse’ by offering concrete help and assistance to the small creatures who populate their poems, as Burns does not (Blair). In the mine, as opposed to Burns’s ploughed field, this assistance is possible, since the mice are in close daily proximity to the miners and rely on them for food. Although the mouse’s presence in the mine (and in the miner’s lunch napkin) is initially seen as transgressive and harmful, Wilson’s poem shifts towards a position of solidarity and mutual aid. Significantly, Wilson revised this poem in later editions to induce greater sympathy for the mouse. By his 1916 edition, it is now a ‘Wee, trembling’ creature, driven to steal by the ‘hunger-squeals’ of ‘A wheen o’ youngsters’ in a nest (pp. 45, 46). At this point, Wilson had advanced from being a Scottish collier to being a Labour politician in Australia, where he continued campaigns for better health and safety in the mines. His revisions make this poem both more respectable, and more politically charged, since rather than the collier and the mouse finding common ground in their boldness and daring in the face of a dangerous environment, they now find common ground as creatures subjected to danger in the cause of feeding their families. Both versions emphasise the loneliness of pit labour and the function of a mouse as a companion animal, but the later versions have a clearer ideological bent.

The last and latest ‘mouse’ poem I have located, Frederick J. Kitt’s ‘The Pit Moose’, was written in Northumberland rather than in Scotland, where Kitt was part of an active group of local miner-poets (and Burns fans) who operated in the Blyth area, north of Newcastle upon Tyne. Kitt’s poem does not appear to have been published in a collection and its first appearance is unknown: it was reprinted in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle’s 1915 series on pitmen poets. (The version here is taken from a clipping from this series, in the newspaper scrapbook of Kitt’s friend and fellow Earsdon miner-poet, John Hume.) Unlike McMurdo and Wilson, Kitt represents himself as surprised to see a mouse in the pit, where it seems out of place and terrified: ‘What d’ye think aa saa | Doon the pit? | Wey, just a freetened moose’ (1915). The poet immediately pauses in his labour (‘glance’ is the blow of the pick) to give the mouse a chance to escape:

Aa stopped t’ gie’t a chance

Doon the pit,

To get clear uv me glance

Doon the pit.

Ind when it went belaa,

Then wiv surprise aa saa

It wasn’t flaid at aa

Doon the pit.

The poet, on observing the mouse more closely, revises his opinion of its feelings, because the mouse does not appear to be at all frightened (‘flaid’) by the working environment of the mine. The remainder of the poem contrasts the suffering mouse, whose chances of survival are slim, but who does not experience the misery and fear this should invoke, with the miner, who is able to recognise that things are not what they could be:

Thowt aa – Though poor me

Doon the pit,

Aa hev life’s bettor share

Doon the pit

Than thoo, poor little sprite,

Thit gits full many a fright,

Ind hes for life to fight

Doon the pit.

Yor chance uv life is smaal

Doon the pit,

It isn’t lang it all

Doon the pit.

Thoo grummels nowt like mi

Aboot hoo things shud be,

Thoo feels nee misery

Doon the pit.

Although the overt message of these stanzas is that the mouse is more to be pitied than the miner, the implicit point being made is that miners do feel misery and dissatisfaction (‘grummels’, or grumbles) with their work. And while their chances at survival might be higher than the mouse’s, mining work is still a threat to long-term health and safety. The ability to recognise that things should be better than they are is represented here as a distinctive human trait. The poem ends with the same rhetorical move as Wilson, in identifying the mouse as a friend and fellow worker who should be entitled to subsistence:

What if thoo steals me bait

Doon the pit,

Wey, moose, thoo is me mate

Doon the pit.

Through the repeated refrain of ‘Doon the pit’, hierarchies between human and non-human animal, mouse and man, are dissolved through their unique shared experience of surviving this environment. Like Wilson, Kitt was heavily involved in (local) politics and trade unionism, as well as the co-operative movement. This poem’s emphasis on the mouse as ‘mate’, on the need for friendship, co-working and support even across species barriers, speaks to themes of class unity, of the need for those who are ignored by the rest of society to support one another.

It is not surprising that there are surviving literary accounts of pit mice, building on the mouse’s long presence in English literature. It is perhaps more surprising to find one poem that deals with the midge, by the late nineteenth-century Fife miner-poet Robert Macleod. Midges, tiny biting flies particularly common in Scotland, were a significant inconvenience or even workplace hazard for the miners. While usually perceived as a minor nuisance for humans, usually dispersed by bright light and the slightest breeze, midges could be a much more significant problem in a warm, enclosed space. If a coal mine is perceived as an ‘indoor’ space, then the midge is an instance of a boundary-crossing animal. Macleod’s comic poem, ‘The Miner Tae the Midge’, again in Scots, probably dates from the early twentieth century (its original place of publication, if it was published, is not yet known). By this point, open candles would have no longer been used and so the danger of clouds of midges extinguishing the flame (as mentioned by miner Thomas Hoggins, cited earlier) might be less immediate. Substantive technological developments in mining, however, had little effect on keeping out small pests like the midge. But did the miners want to be rid of them? Macleod’s opening lines identify the midge as ‘Wee harmless craiter wi glossy wings’, managing not only to defend the midge but to find something attractive about it. Though it is a ‘bother’, the poem is affectionate, and the midge is ‘oor freend’:

But still we ken ye’ll dae nae hairm,

As ye go creepin up oor airm,

Ye keep us on the move I’m shair,

Hoo ye bother us little dae ye care. (p. 40)

As in the poems on enterprising mice, Macleod is impressed by the midge’s resilience and cunning, ‘Ye hae us gey often in a fidge, | Although ye’re only a wee pit midge’ (p. 40):

Ye little buzzer, ye’re aye on the mooch,

What impudence gaun intae a collier’s pooch!

But the thing that puts us in a hoax,

Hoo the devil ye get in oor piece box? (p. 41)

The ‘impudence’ of the midge is an admirable trait. Though it is a tiny creature, it holds its own against the miners and manages to play ‘pranks’ on them in thieving their food, like the mouse climbing into the miner’s napkin. The narrative of the poem ends with the midge stuck and accidentally killed in the miner’s jam sandwich, leading to a slightly tongue-in-cheek moral about greed:

Wee silly craiter whit makes ye sae greedy,

Frae a simple miner sae puir and needy?

On him for yer mite ye hae depended,

And yer short life ye noo hae ended. (p. 41)

Like these other literary accounts of animals in the mine, this conclusion is about interdependence in a hostile environment with limited resources to share. In return for the midge’s ‘company’, the miner was prepared to share his food, but the midge has gone too far and suffered the consequences.

Are mice and midges ‘pests’, and if so, from whose perspective? Dawn Day Biehler’s 2013 history of ‘pests in the city’ examines how the histories of creatures like flies, and the attempts to control them, are bound up with those of poor and marginalised communities. During the Victorian period, while there was considerable agitation about mining safety, as well as about the morals and behaviour of ‘impudent’ miners, there was no particular legislative attention to or major effort to suppress mice, rats, midges, beetles and other liminal creatures in the mine economy, because their effect on productivity was minimal, and because, unlike pests in the city, they were invisible to the respectable above-ground populace. Only the miners encounter these creatures first-hand and are pestered by them: these poems and other reports are the closest that non-mineworkers can get to them. What happened in the mines between human and animal stayed in the mines, as an 1895 RSPCA report, complaining about mines being closed to its inspectors, noted (cited by Ritvo, p. 145) – and the RSPCA inspectors were concerned about pit ponies, not any other animals that might happen to be living underground.

These literary works, as well as some of the other accounts by miners and factory workers, are important precisely because they suggest that, to the miners, there is a significant ambiguity as to whether a midge or a mouse is a pest to be destroyed or a companion animal to be protected. Kendra Coulter has noted that:

It is true that workplaces are where the most widespread and extreme examples of violence against animals occur. But spaces of work are also sites of compassion, devotion, learning, resistance, and possibility. In multispecies relationships, we can see the best in people, how much and how many humans benefit from animals, and examples of how people could act more ethically. (p. 1)

In common with other considerations of animals in the workplace, Coulter focuses only on working animals, but her argument about ‘spaces of work’ is also applicable to the animals who encounter working humans, yet are not ‘working’ in the same sense themselves. Industrial workers were profoundly dehumanised by Victorian mechanistic discourse, as were many working animals.² They were also, like these border-crossing ‘pests’, seen as relatively harmless as individuals, yet highly dangerous in combination. The persistence, cunning, adaptability and capacity to bother people with greater power, displayed by the midge and the mice, supply an evident parallel with the miners themselves, in relation to how they were also perceived as nuisances by authorities, especially due to their engagement in industrial disputes.

Yet there is a designed contrast between the individual, literate miner-poet, writing about an individual mouse, and a threatening collective of either mice or men. Indeed, these literary texts are explicitly designed to have a humanising effect through the concentration on one person and one animal, and to show that industrial workers are capable of thoughtfulness and often kindness to animals, thus inducing sympathy for their plight. Moreover, all the poems adopt an argument about power relations which is reliant on sympathy and charity. The mouse’s position in relation to the miner is like the miner’s position in relation to the authorities, and kindness shown by the miner should be mirrored by kindness shown to him. Structural arguments about broader needs for changes in industrial relations, in workplace health or safety, or in hierarchies of mining labour, are implicit rather than explicit. Similarly, sympathy with the transgressive mice and midges, found in surprising and unexpected locations, might be transferred to the miner poet, boldly attempting to access literary spaces.

Mice and midges in these poems are ‘in between’ animals, ‘curiously transgressive beings, neither purely wild nor purely tame’ (Philo and Wilbert, p. 21), who inhabit spaces that were alien to most middle-class Victorians, yet essential to the maintenance of British national, imperial and colonial projects, due to the dependency of new networks of transportation and industry on coal-powered steam. As Elizabeth Carolyn Miller has recently examined, ‘industrial extraction […] transformed humans’ relation to and perception of the natural world’ (p. 2): while Miller does not discuss writings by miners’ themselves, this genre of poems is a significant contribution to reflections on a new relationship between worker and animal formed through extraction. Like the animals represented in them, these poems themselves are also liminal, border-crossing in terms of their linguistic communities and perceived audiences. They use local forms of language which might, to some extent, be unintelligible to the established literary world of this period, but they also position themselves as knowledgeable about an existing literary canon and the forms it took. They were published regionally, but in the case of some of these works, like Wilson’s, circulated globally. And in the act of producing a poem, these industrial workers themselves crossed into a different world of labour, one that displayed their distinctiveness – both from animals and from some of their human colleagues – even as their poems argue for likeness and solidarity. These lesser-known texts exemplify how literary works set in industrial spaces portray animals and humans as ‘subjects to be negotiated with’ (Fudge, p. 265), serving as intricate, imaginative sites for exploring agency, resistance, exploitation and interspecies collaboration within the working communities of these emerging industrial environments.