Edith Carrington
Quick Facts
Biography
Edith Carrington (1853–1929) was a prominent English animal rights activist and promoter of vegetarianism. She was for sometime an artist but began to write books on animals from 1889. She was a vocal opponent of Eleanor Anne Ormerod's campaign seeking the extermination of the house sparrow and was an anti-vivisectionist.
Carrington was born in Swainswick, Bath, Somerset to Henry Edmund Carrington and Emily Heywood Johns (1814–1890). Coming from a wealthy family, she was influenced by Charles Kingsley who introduced her to study natural history and took on herself the "wish for no higher mission than to live and die in the cause of God's beautiful and sinless mute creatures." She wrote regularly in The Animals' Friend (established in 1894) and was a collaborator of Henry Stephens Salt and was a participant in the Humanitarian League (established 1891).
Carrington's first book Stories for Somebody was written when she was thirty-five. She later wrote a number of animal stories. One series Animal Life Readers edited by Carrington and Ernest Bell was illustrated by Harrison Weir and others. She also ran a children's magazine called Our Animal Brothers.
Selected publications
- Workers without Wage (1893)
- The Farmer and the Birds (1898)
- Spare the Sparrow (1897)
- Man's Helpers (1897)
- Wonderful Tools (1897)
- Nobody's Business (1891)
- Stories for Somebody
- Flower Folk
- Friendship of Animals
- Ten Tales Without a Title
- Bread and Butter Stories
- Appeals on behalf of the Speechless: A Series of Tracts
- The Extermination of Birds
- A Narrow, Narrow World
- A Story of Wings
- Five Stars in a Little Pool
- The Dog, his Rights and Wrongs
- The Cat, her Place in Society and Treatment
- Animals in the Wrong Place
- Anecdotes of Horses
- The Ass, his Welfare, Wants, and Woes
- Ages Ago
- Mrs Trimmer's History of the Robins and Keeper's Travels (1895)
- From Many Lands (1895)
- Dick and His Cat (1895)