Barbarism

• Perhaps you came across one in your garden and wondered at its little hands, glossy skin and what looked very much like a contented smile.
• As our research has found, the history of human-frog relations is long and complicated – and not all of it is nice.

Why we love frogs

• There is a rich history of people really loving frogs.
• This is interesting, because many people much prefer mammals and birds over reptiles and amphibians.
• Frogs are truly among the jewels of the natural world, unlike toads which – with their more mundane colours and “warty skins” – do not usually inspire the same sense of enchantment.

Dissecting human feelings for frogs

Yet relationships between people and frogs haven’t always been so positive. In fact, frogs occupy complicated places across cultures all over the world. In the Western tradition, the legacy of biblical and classical sources was both negative and longstanding. References to frogs in the Bible rendered them the instrument of divine anger as a swarming plague.

• Frogs challenged early modern zoological taxonomies, moving between classification as serpent, insect or reptile.
• In modern science, they sit in a branch of zoology, herpetology, that brings frogs together as “creeping animals” with snakes and lizards.
• Italian scientist Luigi Galvani, for example, did experiments in the late 18th century on legs of frogs to investigate what he thought of as “animal electricity”.

• In time, experiments with frogs moved beyond the laboratory into the classroom.
• In the 1930s, schoolchildren were expected to find frogs and bring them to school for dissection in biology classes.

Recognising the fragility of frogs

• From the frogs of Aesop’s Fables to the meme Pepe the Frog, we have projected our own feelings and frustrations onto frogs, and exploited them for science and education.
• Frogs have also borne the brunt of our failures as environmental stewards.
• In 2022, over 40% of amphibian species (of which frogs and toads are by far the largest group) were threatened with extinction.

Susan Broomhall receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Andrea Gaynor receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Andy Flack does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

• The result is a stunning, well-studied examination of Victorian colonial England and some of its inhabitants.
• However, Smith breathes life anew into them and through them, a portrait of Victorian England’s literary scene is painted.

Remembered

• Her relationships with her cousin William Ainsworth and his first and second wives are written with humour and heart.
• Through her, we witness the hypocrisy of her environment – the nepotism, the false friends, the pretence, the fraud.
• Smith’s description of Jamaican plantation life is nuanced and deftly crafted, and its horrors are made plain without excessive graphic detail.

Empire and connection

• The reader encounters so many characters that engage in self-deception and hypocrisy that we might question exactly who the titular fraud is.
• The novel is also, I think, about empire and connection.
• Nothing that happens in Jamaica is at all disconnected from what is happening in England.
• Towards the end of the novel, the narrator describes England as “not a real place … an elaborate alibi”.

• Coverage over the past winter months, for example, has focused on how Ukrainians are fighting in WWI-like muddy trenches in Bakhmut, while Russia suffers almost WWI levels of casualties.
• Many of the WWI comparisons stress the unmodern nature of what is happening on Ukraine’s battlefields.
• And, most importantly, by making these kinds of historical comparisons, we detach ourselves from the war’s horrors and violence.

Unmodern and modern war

• In these comparisons, WWI does not serve as the benchmark of modern war, but as the haunted image of primitive industrial warfare from more than a century ago.
• What’s so characteristic of WWI, and seems so unmodern, is its lack of progress.
• And while we have seen drones and other hi-tech tools of war on the news, we haven´t seen much progress on pushing back the frontline.

Underestimating Russia’s objectives

• The unmodern is, of course, closely associated not just with the war in general, but especially with Russia’s conduct.
• But by tying Russia’s conduct to a stereotypical image of WWI fighting, we might stop analysing the full context.
• One might also lose sight of the toll the current fight might be taking on the “more modern” Ukraine’s forces.
• Is it a war against Ukraine, or a war against the west that happens to be fought in and over Ukraine?

Disengaging from reality

• But that is a dangerous and misleading thought, as it isolates what is happening in Ukraine from our own times.
• What we see in Ukraine is not a historical horror show, it is the ugly face of full-scale modern war.
• Over the past decades, western society has become strangely unaware of what happens in a modern war.