An impossible view …

… AbeBooks: Come to Life: It Narratives and Anthropomorphism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The It Narrative as a literary form came into fashion in mid to late 18th-century England. It originated as a serious device to allow writers, through personification, to present outside observation or criticism of human beings and society from a social perspective without introducing a main human character's moralistic standpoint. The literary device also relieved the reader of the assumptions and notions that a human character's class, gender or social standing carried along with it. Particularly in times of great social turmoil or upheaval, a narrator could be seen as unreliable merely by virtue of his or her station in life (particularly in relation to that of the reader or author). So writers turned to non-human narrators and perspectives.