Nineteenth-century literature Professor Nancy Henry grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, home of Churchill Downs and the Kentucky Derby. A self-described “horse-crazy girl,” she read everything she could find about horses. Years later, while teaching at Binghamton University in New York, she revisited her love for horses by volunteering at a local therapeutic riding center. 

When she joined the UT English department in 2008, she adopted an off-the-track, or recently retired, racehorse named Questionnaire (or Q, as Henry affectionately calls her) from Kentucky. The two have been together ever since.

Currently the Nancy Moore Goslee Professor of English, Henry started noticing how ubiquitous horses are in nineteenth-century literature—not just as background or sentimental objects (as they often became in the twentieth century), but as integral elements of the plot. “In Charles Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859), an aristocrat’s carriage runs over and kills a poor child, setting the plot in motion, while in Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), the family cart horse, Prince, is killed by a speeding mail coach, casting the family into poverty,” she noted. In fact, Henry suggested, “horses are so present in this literature that they’re almost invisible to modern readers.”  

Henry’s current book project—Horsepower: Horses in Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture— explores the centrality of horses in nineteenth-century life and literature. One of the myths she’s intent on challenging is the idea that the advent of steam-powered trains rendered horses obsolete. On the contrary, she points out, “the coming of the steam engines created an almost insatiable need for more working horses, as horses continued to transport passengers and goods to and from railway stations along country roads and city streets.” The horse population actually peaked at the end of the nineteenth century, before the arrival of automobiles really did replace them. Until then, as Henry states, “in the nineteenth century almost anyone’s lives would intersect with horses and have some kind of dependence on horses, whether they lived in the country or the city.”

Horsepower addresses a range of issues connected with horses in nineteenth-century real life and literature. Individual chapters cover the transition from horsepower to steam to gasoline; horse accidents in culture, real life, and literature; the emergence of veterinary medicine; women and horses; and the intersection of breed and race during the century. In this last chapter, Henry argues that the language of horse breeding, especially in relation to purebred and thoroughbred horses, informed ideas of racial purity that emerged during the later nineteenth century.

In fall 2023, Henry taught a section of the Junior-Senior Honors Seminar titled Horses in Literature and Culture.  Students studied the representation of horses in literature, art, and film, from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) to Geraldine Brooks’s Horses (2022). After watching Clarence Brown’s film National Velvet (1944), her students viewed materials related to the film in the Clarence Brown Papers in the UT Libraries special collections. As a special treat, Henry invited them to visit Q. “For some,” she said, “that was the first time they had actually met a horse.”