Tea & Automatons

Today we have more anthropomorphism, but this time there is an even darker aspect to it.  Subjugation.  One type of animal using the other as a mount or making it pull his cart.  I suspect that this didn’t even seem odd to the Victorians at the time, a time of extreme inequity among classes of humans, and these were just animals after all. A rabbit riding a chicken in a duel probably didn’t seem all that odd.

The fourth one showing a rabbit using not only a chicken but another rabbit to pull his cart is very odd.  The other rabbit does not merit clothes apparently.  And would that arrangement not make the cart quite unbalanced?  I would half expect to see it going in circles!

Then we have a rabbit riding a poodle.  Um. Moving on.

The last one depicts a couple of rabbits in an automobile.  The crash has dislodged the chick from the giant egg in front of the car, but the puzzling part is why it was there.  It almost looks as if the egg and chick were the engine for the vehicle, since the regular sized eggs were stored in back and there could not be any other space for an engine.  I am quite uncertain as to how a chick in an egg could be used to power a vehicle, but it does seem like a rather temporary and difficult solution.

So the Victorian artists didn’t seem to take a lot of time to think through these concepts, but the art is nice.  I hope that the odd images didn’t give the Victorian children any pause or worse yet nightmares.  “But mummy, why does one rabbit get clothes and the other has to pull his cart alongside a chicken?”