"Above, below and beside us". Urban rodents and urban poor in C.M. Tucker's Rambles of a rat (1857)

This essay explores one of the few texts for children that featured rat protagonists in the mid-Victorian period, Charlotte Maria Tucker's Rambles of a Rat (1857). Tucker's book is worth looking at for a number of reasons: in the first place, for the very choice of rats as positive characters. Victorian children's literature often used animals to teach moral lessons, in particular by increasingly addressing anti-cruelty concerns. Children's books, however, mostly featured domestic species; Tucker's choice to focus on a wild animal that was generally seen as neither useful nor innocent is therefore an intriguing (and rather daring) one. Even more so, as she declares in the introduction that her aim is to present a more balanced and scientifically 'accurate' image of the much-despised rodent, re-elaborating the information she found in an article recently published in the Quarterly Review. Yet, in the course of Tucker's story this rather straightforward purpose merges with another goal, and the text soon moves far beyond the mere fictional transposition of rat biology and habits, as rats are also used to discuss her most compelling concern: the issue of the urban poor. Thus, the animal characters are meant to 'faithfully' represent their species, but also human types. The essay investigates the way in which Tucker tries to balance her two goals while engaging with current assumptions and stereotypes about both rats and destitute humans. In particular, I will discuss how she handles resonant associations between poverty, dirt and criminality by using her rodent community as a touchstone for the human one. But she also discusses and problematizes the relation between the two species, including an attempt to consider the issue of pest control from the rats' perspective - an approach by no means common at the time.