This article has been peer-reviewed under the direction of Kristen Guest (University of Northern British Columbia) and Ronja Frank (Memorial University, St John's, Newfoundland). It forms part of the Equine Breed and the Making of Modern Identity project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
he so-called Early Anthropocene period, associated with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, witnessed significant changes in the use of horses. The development of the English novel during this period reflects these changes, with horses often serving as central figures in the narrative landscape. In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, horses facilitate key plot developments and character interactions, symbolizing broader themes of mobility and social status.
In Northanger Abbey, horses are essential to Catherine Morland’s adventures, representing both physical and social mobility (Akıllı, "Rise" 105–6). Catherine's direct and indirect experiences with horses underscore her journey from a sheltered life to one of greater independence and self-awareness in this typical bildungsroman. At the same time, Austen — whose two brothers were deployed as officers in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars — also established the patriotic image of the English gentleman traversing the countryside on the back of a fine horse. John Thorpe’s boasting about his horse is significant in this context. In an attempt to impress Catherine, he urges her: "Do but look at my horse; did you ever see an animal so made for speed in your life? . . . Such true blood!" (33). He confidently measures distances by the speed of his horse and protests when Catherine’s brother challenges his calculation: "But look at his forehead; look at his loins; only see how he moves; that horse cannot go less than ten miles an hour; tie his legs, and he will get on" (33). Such characterizations position the Thoroughbred horse—itself an "English" invention, as Donna Landry influentially demonstrates &emdash; as an emblem of Thorpe’s own classed, gendered, and nationalized identity.
Similarly, the ponies in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights work to shape character and character dynamics (Akıllı, “Rise” 106–7). Thus, for example, Catherine Earnshaw’s riding skills and her request for a whip symbolize her wild, untamed nature, while her return home from the Lintons on the back of "a handsome black pony" (46) suggests the transformation she has undergone during her stay. Heathcliff's association with ponies likewise underscores his outsider status and inherent wildness, as when he is insulted by Edgar Linton who suggests his untamed hair looks like "a colt’s mane over his eyes!" (41). Linton’s description of Heathcliff characterizes him almost exactly like a Galloway pony: a strong multipurpose black or bay pony breed originating in Scotland and northern England, known for its significantly long mane and widely used by local laborers. It is clear from the historical tax records that Emily Brontë saw Galloways laboring on a daily basis, and in Wuthering Heights, she responds to this observation by according them narrative agency as she explores themes of class, race, and gender.
The Agency of Dead Horses
Over the course of the Victorian era, horses were indispensable to both urban and rural life, but their value also extended beyond economic utility. In the nineteenth-century novel, this took shape in symbolic representations that amplified matters of human status and identity, but also more directly in plots that make clear their agency. This latter is often explored through the effects of equine deaths on the lives of human characters. In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and George Eliot’s Silas Marner, for example, horses play pivotal roles via the impact of their deaths (Akıllı, “Agency” 52–3).
In stagnant blackness they waited through an interval which seemed endless. Illustration to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles by D. A. Wehrschmidt.
Hardy’s portrayal of Prince, the family’s cart horse in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, exemplifies this. Prince’s death in a mail cart accident is a significant event that marks the beginning of Tess’s tragic journey and sets off a chain reaction affecting the entire narrative. As a catalyst, it highlights the precariousness of human dependence on equine labor and the socio-economic ramifications of losing a vital resource. It thus signifies both the vulnerability of human and animal lives in a rapidly industrializing world and the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman fates.
In Eliot’s Silas Marner, the death of Wildfire, Godfrey Cass’s prized horse, also serves as a critical turning point in the narrative that links the novel's subplots and underscores the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman lives. Wildfire's death as a result of Dunstan Cass's reckless behavior not only impacts the Cass family but also intertwines with Silas Marner's story, ultimately leading to the revelation of hidden truths and the restoration of justice.
These examples illustrate how the deaths of horses in these novels shape lives of the human characters in unexpected ways. The narrative agency of horses in these novels also extends to their material significance: Bill Brown’s theory of "thingness" suggests that objects, including animals, gain agency when they cease to function within human systems of production and consumption (4). In line with this theory, Prince's and Wildfire's deaths transform them from laboring animals into "things" with profound narrative significance.
The portrayal of horses in these novels thus reveals the changing attitudes towards animals during this period: The increasing mechanization of society and the rise of industrialization led to a shift in the human-animal relationship, where animals were increasingly seen as expendable commodities. In the novels of Hardy and Eliot, the deaths of horses serve as critiques of this devaluation of animal lives as well as reminders of species interconnection and shared vulnerability of humans and animals.
Bibliography
Akıllı, Sinan. “The Agency and the Matter of the Dead Horse in the Victorian Novel.” In Equestrian Cultures: Horses, Human Society, and the Discourse of Modernity, edited by Kristen Guest and Monica Mattfeld, 39-43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019.
--. “The Rise of the Novel and the Narrative Labor of Horses in the English Novel of the Early Anthropocene.” In Planet Work: Rethinking Labor and Leisure in the Anthropocene, edited by Ryan Hediger, 95-112. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2023.
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. (1817) Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2008.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. (1847) London: Penguin, 2003.
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
Eliot, George. (1861) Silas Marner. London: Penguin, 1994.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d'Urbervilles. (1891) Penguin Books, 1994.
Landry, Donna. Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
Created 13 June 2025