Hayes, Rosalind Catherine; (2022) ‘Look To Your Eating’: Animals, Meat and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1880-1910. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text RosalindHayes_PhD thesis_edited version.docx.pdf - Accepted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 September 2032. Download (1MB)

Abstract

This thesis asks what the changing means of transforming animals into meat did to visual culture – and the notion of vision itself – at the end of the nineteenth century. Encompassing photography, print, painting, architecture, scientific diagrams, and the illustrated press produced between 1880 and 1910, the chapters move through successive stages of the meat production cycle, from pasture to product. Beginning with photographs of the meat industry in Australia, I consider how the subject matter and medium push against traditional tropes of the pastoral genre. Further, I discuss the shared vulnerability of colonial meat and gelatine-based photographic dry plates to high temperatures. The second chapter examines multimedia depictions of American cattle ships which transported live animals across the Atlantic to Britain for slaughter and sale. I argue that transatlantic cattle ships were a particularly modern site of morality, and a fertile ground for exploring and extending Victorian Britons’ politics of interspecies relations and care. Issues of animal welfare are also central to the third chapter about slaughter in Britain. Just as modern infrastructural and procedural changes were introduced to Britain’s slaughtering halls, sight became of paramount importance to its regulation, which I explore from human and nonhuman perspectives through photographs and architectural designs. Finally, in relation to the advertising ephemera of the meat extract Bovril, I consider how the nutritional qualities of nonhuman flesh were concentrated into visual forms. Within the context of an expansive selection of techniques for making and reproducing mass images, the adverts interacted with wider discourses about art production and display. As meat consumption rates continue to rise globally, this thesis returns to the point when a global meat supply became viable to explore the importance of animal matter and its consumption to the visual representation of imperial Britain.

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