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Theses and Dissertations

Spring 2018

From sentiment to sagacity to subjectivity: dogs

and genre in nineteenth-century British literature
Michelle Marie Taylor
University of Iowa

Copyright © 2018 Michelle Marie Taylor

This dissertation is available at Iowa Research Online: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6303

Recommended Citation
Taylor, Michelle Marie. "From sentiment to sagacity to subjectivity: dogs and genre in nineteenth-century British literature." PhD
(Doctor of Philosophy) thesis, University of Iowa, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.aa4yzdvq

Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd

Part of the English Language and Literature Commons

FROM SENTIMENT TO SAGACITY TO SUBJECTIVITY: DOGS AND GENRE IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

by

Michelle Marie Taylor

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy
degree in English in the
Graduate College of
The University of Iowa

May 2018

Thesis Supervisor: Professor Teresa Mangum

 Copyright by

MICHELLE MARIE TAYLOR

2018

All Rights Reserved

 Graduate College
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa

CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

____________________________

PH.D. THESIS

_________________

This is to certify that the Ph.D. thesis of

Michelle Marie Taylor

has been approved by the Examining Committee for

the thesis requirement for the Doctor of Philosophy degree
in English at the May 2018 graduation.

Thesis Committee: ____________________________________________

Teresa Mangum, Thesis Supervisor

____________________________________________
Florence Boos

____________________________________________
Garrett Stewart

____________________________________________
Andrew Stauffer

____________________________________________
Matthew E. Hill
For my grandparents

ii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My first and greatest debt is to my director Teresa Mangum, who provided as

much moral support and encouragement as she did careful feedback on every draft of

every component of the project. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for making me a

better writer, not to mention a calmer human being.

For thoughtful feedback on almost every component of my dissertation, I want to

thank Andrew Stauffer. It was so wonderful to have someone to meet with regularly while

I was away from Iowa City. I couldn’t have done this without your help.

My other committee members were also responsible for wonderful feedback at

various junctures. Florence Boos and Matthew E. Hill both provided feedback on parts of

Chapter 1, and Garrett Stewart on Chapter 3. For this I thank you.

My family provided constant moral, financial, and sometimes even intellectual

support. It’s not easy to watch a family member struggle through an endeavor as

challenging as a dissertation, and yet they always had the right thing to say. Thank you for

all the ways you’ve made this dream of mine possible.

I owe much to Brian Harvey, whose dog book collection inspired part of Chapter

2 and all of Chapter 3. Thank you for sharing your collection with me and for becoming

my friend in the process. I also want to thank Greg Prickman and the staff at the

University of Iowa Special Collections for making it so easy for me to use Mr. Harvey’s

materials.

I have had many great teachers along the way who have taught me how to read

better, think critically, research, and improve my writing. This started at my time at Miami

University, where I enjoyed working with Amanda Adams, Katharine Gillespie, Laura

iii
Mandell, and Patrick Murphy. At the University of Virginia I was fortunate enough to

work with Stephen Arata, Alison Booth, Karen Chase, Jerome McGann, and the

aforementioned Andrew Stauffer. At the University of Iowa, I had the honor of working

with Matthew P. Brown and Eric Gidal in addition to all of my wonderful committee

members.

My graduate student friends—now my lifelong friends—at both the University of

Virginia and the University of Iowa were instrumental in my ability to complete my

project. They offered never-ending support, both intellectually and emotionally. Kirsten

Anderson, Kyle Barton, and Sarah Storti all deserve special mentions.

My friend Dan Smith deserves a special thank you for his willingness to talk me

through my ideas late at night when dissertation brain was preventing me from sleeping.

Many of the key ideas of Chapter 2 were formulated with his help.

My coterie of scholar friends on Facebook was invaluable in crowdsourcing

research questions I had, locating quotations, providing translations, and helping with

whatever else I needed. Their knowledge and their generosity with their time never ceased

to amaze me.

Last but never least, I must thank my two dogs and my best friends, Libby and

Link. More than anyone, they were the ones by my side through all of the research and

writing, absorbing and yet relieving my stresses. As my research aims to demonstrate, the

world—literary and otherwise—would not be the same without dogs.

iv
 ABSTRACT

My dissertation takes as its guiding principle that the animals in literature are

significant in and of themselves and should be read and studied accordingly, as subjects.

To that end, I consider three genres and genre clusters from the Romantic and Victorian

eras—epitaphs and elegiac poetry; detective and sensation fiction; and dog

autobiographies—in which dogs in particular are mourned, become characters, or become

protagonists/narrators. In each case, I examine how the addition of the canine as the

subject affects the literary traditions of the genres in which s/he appears (or, in the case of

detective and sensation fiction, how the dog plays a formative role in the creation of a

new genre). These shifting generic conventions dissolve one or more of the alleged

dividing lines between dogs and humans at the same time as those separations were being

questioned by cultural and scientific forces in the nineteenth century. The genres I

examine, in particular, challenge the ideas that humans were the unique possessors of

souls; the sole owners of intelligence and morality; and the only beings with complex

emotions capable of experiencing trauma. Told together, the stories of these genres over

time illustrate a shift in attitudes about animals from objects of sentimental attachment, to

creatures with useful knowledge complementary to humans intelligence, to beings with

subjectivities as rich as our own. In doing so, this literature demonstrates the pressures

that animals put on generic convention to become less anthropocentric.

v
 PUBLIC ABSTRACT

My dissertation examines the ways that canine roles affect genre—the categories

into which we place works of literature, which shape their forms and which in turn shape

our expectations of what we read. For instance, if epitaphs and elegies are at least

partially meant to usher the dead into heaven and praise the dead’s suitability for a

Christian afterlife, what happens when the subject is a dog denied a soul by Christianity?

These are the kinds of questions I address. In addition to epitaphs and elegies, I consider

detective and sensation fiction as well as dog autobiographies—works of fiction written

from the dog’s perspective—to explore how taking the dog as a subject forced the

conventions of certain genres to change, or in the case of detective and sensation fiction,

how dog-like ways of knowing helped to birth a new genre altogether. In either case,

what is important is that the generic changes signal a less human-centered approach to

literature: one which opens animals up to be the possessors of souls, intelligence, and

subjectivity. These changes paved the way for the Victorians to consider animals as

beings worthy of compassion and respect.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES…………………………………………………………………..viii

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………....1

CHAPTER 1: FROM PAGE TO GRAVE: MEMORIALIZING DOGS IN ENGLAND,

1648-1914……………………………………………………………………………….15

CHAPTER 2: “DOGS DON’T MAKE MISTAKES”: MORALITY, SAGACITY,

AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF INSTINCT IN DETECTIVE AND SENSATION
FICTION………………………………………………………………………………74

CHAPTER 3: “GIVING TONGUE” TO CANINE TRAUMA IN NINETEENTH-

CENTURY DOG AUTOBIOGRAPHIES…………………………………………...122

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….....171

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 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Byron’s monument to Boatswain……………………………………………..46

Figure 2: Scott’s effigy of Maida……………………………………………………….63

Figure 3: The soldiers’ dog cemetery at Edinburgh Castle……………………………..65

Figure 4: Statue of Greyfriars Bobby…………………………………………………..66

Figure 5: Hyde Park Pet Cemetery……………………………………………………..68

Figure 6: Whym Chow, Flame of Love ………………………………………………...69

Figure 7: “The Dog Detective”………………………………………………………...115

Figure 8: Edwin Landseer, There’s No Place Like Home……………………………..144

Figure 9: Edwin Landseer, A Jack in Office…………………………………………..144

viii
 INTRODUCTION

Are dogs human? Robert Louis Stevenson once said of his terriers, “You think

those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us”

(Masson 168). His quotation bears witness to a popular nineteenth-century idea that we

still entertain today: that dogs not only exhibit human traits, but are in fact morally

superior to humankind.

Nineteenth-century British writers may not have asked the question about the

humanity of canines in exactly the same way, but certain genres of their works engage

with the question’s implications. Over the centuries thinkers have variously named

reason, cognition, self-awareness, subjectivity, language, the possession of a soul,

religion, and morality, among other things, as the dividing line between human and

animal. Each of the chapters of this dissertation takes up a different Romantic and/or

Victorian genre and explores the way that its practitioners dissolve one or more of these

alleged dividing lines between dogs and humans. Despite the general insistence then and

often now that rigid differences separate species and confirm the superiority of humans,

these genres form a fascinating counterpoint. Whether subtly or explicitly, they suggest

that authors were seriously considering just how fragile these lines were.

This dissertation takes as its premise that the addition of the dog as the subject or

narrator affects the literary traditions of the genres in which s/he appears. That is to say

that at the same time dividing lines between dogs and humans were dissolving, the lines

of the boxes containing genre were dissolving, as well; the cultural ideas about dogs and

the literary forms in which they were presented were both in flux and changed hand-in-

hand. In some cases, the dog plays a formative role in the creation of a new genre. In

1
other cases, taking dogs as subjects or narrators forces genres to create new techniques to

meet their original purposes. In all instances, existing generic conventions must be

confronted and re-evaluated before they can evolve to reflect the nineteenth-century’s

new understanding of human-animal relationships and animal subjectivity.

My dissertation makes two contributions to nineteenth-century studies: one to

literary history and one to animal studies. First, mine is the first full-scale project on

animals and genre. The presence of dogs helps us to see much more clearly and self-

consciously what assumptions genres make and what conventions each possess. The

presence of the dog “character” or subject creates tension and so helps us see the

potential, nature, and limits of each genre. To create this picture of genre, I unearthed an

archive of previously uncollected and unstudied literary works, creating a fuller literary

history. Pulling together many examples of these genres invites future study of them.

The literary-historical work I do here has as a backdrop the cultural history of the

dog and human-dog relationships in the nineteenth century. I argue that these texts

illuminate the nature of human-dog relationships, what humans want out of their

relationships with dogs, what we can learn from dogs and their epistemologies, and what

kind of challenges are inherent in the human-dog relationship—including the difficulty of

knowing the Other. I acknowledge that this backdrop is filtered: we are discussing not

actual dog-human relationships, but the discourse of human-dog relationships in

imaginative literary works. Yet while the dogs may or may not be real dogs, and the

dogs’ thoughts not real dog thoughts, these works reveal the real historical concerns,

anxieties, and curiosities that surrounded the dog in the nineteenth century.

2
 What was the nineteenth century’s new understanding of human-animal

relationships? For one, humans were living both further away from and in closer

proximity to certain nonhuman animals than ever before. Urbanization resulted in

humankind’s separation from the animals that were sourced as food, as Keith Thomas has

pointed out, but the eighteenth century also witnessed the rise of pet-keeping, a

phenomenon that was completely normalized by the nineteenth century, as Kathleen Kete

and Laura Brown have shown. Dogs, especially, were valued like no other animal had

ever been. As geographer Philip Howell puts it,

Dogs became familiar because they came to be associated with the family, and

with the private sphere of the home. These animals were welcomed into the heart

of modern life, indicating the affection in which these animals were held, but also

besides the hearth, welcomed as no other animal has ever been into the actual

space(s) of the home. (17)

Even the other animals with whom the Victorians were closest, their horses, were not

permitted within the domestic space. It was this closeness between dogs and humans that

made writing about them an opportunity for nineteenth-century authors. Just as authors

used psychological realism as a means of imagining how other human beings felt and

experienced the world, they naturally came to imagine the emotions and experiences of

the sharers of their hearths. However, given that these authors could not rely upon

psychological realism for the purpose of representing canine consciousness, they

developed and modified generic conventions to suit the differences between canine and

3
human subjects, even as they affirmed the similarities that made it possible to employ the

same genres in the first place.

More important than the new distance or lack of distance between humans and

other species, however, were the changes in thought occasioned by Darwin’s

predecessors, Darwin himself, and his protégés, all of whom destabilized the boundary

between human and animal with their evolutionary theories. In The Animal Estate: The

English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), historian Harriet Ritvo

describes the Victorian period as a time in which society was insistent on maintaining its

elevated position over the rest of creation despite the shock imposed by Darwin. Even as

On the Origin of Species (1859) led the way for humans to see themselves as highly-

modified or even perfected animals, Darwinian thought could also be used to justify

human dominance over the rest of the animal kingdom—after all, evolution led to

humankind as its culminating achievement. At the same time as some Victorians tried to

assert their wills over animals, others were realizing that their own status as animals

meant that nonhuman animals deserved more attention and better treatment. With the

boundaries between humans and all other species called into question, people began to

study animals and their abilities more closely, to imagine their mental states, and to

consider them as beings with wills of their own. Authors of Victorian fiction were

particularly adept at these thought experiments, and the works I consider in my

dissertation are the direct results of the explorations occasioned by evolutionary thought.

Attempts to dominate dogs played out in several ways that contradict the nature of

the human-dog relationship as portrayed in the genres I discuss. It was not just that the

Victorians were comfortable eating some animals at the same time as they adopted others

4
into their homes; as Philip Howell discusses in his book At Home and Astray: The

Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (2015), their relationships with dogs were also fraught

despite the country’s image as a nation of dog lovers. Stray dogs were destroyed without

compunction when they were rounded up. Because of their compliance, dogs were the

primary victims of vivisection. And, in a much less sinister display of dominance, the

Victorians manipulated their dogs by creating new breeds. Indeed, the Victorian age was

the age of the dog show (the first dog show coincided with the publication of On the

Origin of Species in 1859). For the first time, the focus of breeding was not function

alone—producing a breed that excelled at a certain task, like herding or tracking. Instead,

many breeders were focused largely on aesthetics—producing a breed that merely

pleased the eye. Most of the breeds we know today were created during the Victorian

period, serving as a stark reminder that a dog without a human is just a wolf.

Just as knowledge of evolutionary principles and a desire to control the dog

enabled the Victorians to create new dog breeds, essentially to remake dogs to fulfill

humans’ fantasies of dogs, Victorians also clearly sought to capture dogs and the

complicated feelings, claims, longings, and questions the new nearness of dogs inspired.

Given the diversity of dogs, of sentiments about dogs, and even of a hunger to push past

species otherness and to “know” dogs, it should hardly be surprising that experiments in

representing the dog in literature resulted in dogs’ appearances in various genres, and pre-

eminently in those I examine here. Literary representations of dogs celebrated what the

Victorians wanted dogs to be: loyal companions, especially in the dog epitaphs of

Chapter 1. Though in Chapter 2 I consider texts that present the dog gone rogue, the

reader is always left with a sense of discomfort when the dog does so: the texts expose

5
Victorian fears about dogs, which are in reality fears about what humans have created. In

general, literary representations seek to create the ideal dog, even in far from ideal

circumstances for that dog. In the dog autobiographies of Chapter 3, for instance, the

ideal dog is one that returns to a less-than-ideal human. Every literary dog is in some way

a statement about the human that created him/her, as earnest as attempts to celebrate or

understand the dog may be. This in no way detracts from the fact that authors had pure

intentions in striving to represent dogs: rather, it is a reminder that human concerns have

no choice but to get in the way of the animal. In fact, that tension proves to be very

fruitful. By locating those moments in which the dog’s presence creates tension, we see

most clearly the challenge of reaching beyond the limit of the human—human

conventions, human ways of knowing, human language, human ideas about story logic—

to imagine the animal Other.

According to Ritvo, the animals of the Victorian period—the horses of the

London streets, the flocks of sheep and herds of cattle driven to market, the well-bred

pets, the big cats of menageries, and the game hunted in the colonies—all

“were…manifestly powerless” (5). She adds:

And in the rhetorical sphere, they were less potent still. If the power of discourse

lies in its inevitable restructuring and re-creation of reality, the ability of human

beings to offer counterinterpretations places inevitable limits on the exercise of

that power. Animals, however, never talk back. (5)

6
Yet the lives imagined for animals within the pages of literature suggest that animals may

indeed have had opportunities to talk back. Teresa Mangum has suggested that the

“animals wrote back” instead within the narrative arts, both literary and visual, designed

to depict individualized human subjectivity. By offering an overview of animal

representation in children’s literature, scientific painting, the bildungsroman, the elegy,

imperial adventure fiction, and science fiction, she argues that “the animal characters

sometimes baffle conventions of representation, if only via the startling details of their

particularity caught by an observant artist’s brush, chisel, camera, or pen” (156). Mangum

explains how in painting, animal autobiographies, and elegies, animals begin to take on

full character roles, whereas in the novel subgenres of empire fiction and science fiction,

animals often disturbingly disrupt the human-dominated narratives. My dissertation

examines how such moments of bafflement are overcome in other ways by authors

desiring to represent dogs in literature: by challenging or changing the premise of a genre

(the epitaph and elegy), by helping to form a genre’s featured epistemology (detective

and sensation fiction), or by altering a genre’s methods of description (the fictional

autobiography).

I am not the first to consider how animals and the histories of genres and forms

influence one another. In Animal Stories: Narrating Across Species Lines (2011), Susan

McHugh has examined the ways that twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives—

including but not limited to literary forms—“become inseparable from shifts in the

politics and sciences of species, such that questions about narratives come to concern the

formal and practical futures of all species life” (3). With similarly far-reaching

significance, Mario Ortiz Robles in Literature and Animal Studies (2016) makes two

7
arguments: “an argument for animals based on literature (on the literariness of animals)

and an argument for literature based on animals (on the literal demands animals place on

literary representation)” (xi). Accordingly, he makes the bold claim that “animals as we

know them are a literary invention” (2, emphasis original) and imagines viewing literary

history through different animal-centered lenses, including “genre arranged according to

the presence of animals”; the animal plot; the mode of representation, such as talking

animals, fantastic animals, symbolic animals, and real animals; and by readers, all of

which fall under the broader category of “the history of trope-as-animal” (19). As Ortiz

Robles makes clear, this history has major implications for all of literature: “What if the

history of metaphor—one way of thinking about the history of literature as a whole—

were conceptualized as the history of the species of trope that refers to animals?” (19).

Like Robles’s, my project analyzes the demands that animals place on literature.

In my case, I focus on the generic changes that must accompany any sincere attempt to

represent an animal in literary terms. For this very reason, however, I advocate for a way

of reading literary history that Robles ultimately rejects. He believes that, because the

concentration of the distribution of animals lies mainly in minor genres and therefore tells

us what we already know about their presence in literature (that animals are “marginal

but constant” [2]) genre is a less-than-productive means of classification. I, on the other

hand, contend that animals have the power to alter the conventions of even major

genres—not to mention the fact that “minor” genres are often as worthy of our attention

as those that have heretofore been considered major.

8
 Other scholars, including Laura Brown and Monica Flegel, have analyzed the role

of dogs, specifically, in the plots of novels.1 In Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes:

Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (2010), Brown argues

that narratives with canine protagonists feature plots of itinerancy which “diverge from

the shaped action that has retrospectively come to define the rise of the novel” (116). In

this way, the form participates in a larger goal she sees in early dog narratives, which is

to critique human nature (121). In other words, the dog narrative is an example of what

Mangum would call “animals writing back,” resisting the constraints of the genres in

which they appear by exposing them as inadequate for canine representation and

epistemology. Flegel, in Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2016),

demonstrates how dogs become plot devices in domestic novels, playing important roles

from courtship to parenthood. Dogs act as “a plot device that is simultaneously a

purposeful device on the part of the courting male” (25). Once their purposes have been

served, however—i.e., once they facilitate introductions, become practice children, and

are finally displaced by actual children—they disappear from the narrative. Flegel’s

explanation of the “disappearing pet” phenomenon in domestic novels reminds us that

animals were often secondary or even tertiary characters in Victorian literature, making

the instances (and genres) in which they rise to main subject roles especially worthy of

our notice as markers of both cultural and literary change.

1
Brown and Flegel do not discuss plot in the same way that Robles suggests we consider animal plots. He
imagines the shapes of narratives taking the literal shapes of animals:

There could be a linear though winding serpent plot, a circular though prickly hedgehog plot, a
plot as angular as the legs of a praying mantis, a Bildungsroman plotted from caterpillar to
chrysalis to disillusioned butterfly, an elephantine structure so large as to rival the cetacean plot,
which, perhaps swifter and more buoyant, would also be less memorable. (22)

9
 While the majority of literary animal studies focus on fiction, other genres with an

intimate relationship to the novel were also being reshaped by animals. John MacNeill

Miller has written about the abilities of animal actors to play out preexisting generic

conventions. He argues that melodrama, which is “notorious for its simplified depiction

of good and evil characters embroiled in conflicts that lead to improbable but morally

satisfying conclusions” (531),

capitalize[s] on the mysterious otherness of animals to suggest that animals have

inexplicable but very real knowledge of the cosmic moral order that melodrama

struggles to express. This knowledge makes nonhuman characters integral to the

form, which figures them as quasi-angelic agents, intermediaries who enforce

moral law in the sublunary world of human beings. Animals thus become bodily

representatives of the providential force that is central to melodramatic plotting

but difficult or impossible to realize onstage. (531)

This evidence of “the cosmic moral order” manifests itself when animals (especially

dogs) provide clues to the true nature of morally uncertain characters, either by their

loyalty to good characters or their abandonment of evil ones. But it is even more

pronounced when animals effect dramatic rescues of good characters from the clutches of

evil. Such actions suggest that contemporary critics’ disparagement of animal

melodrama—which consisted of complaints that animals detracted from the illusion of

the theatre—were missing the point. With that very disillusionment, the “playwrights

harnessed estrangement to their own ends, using it to absorb the audience in melodrama’s

10
moral cosmology rather than to undercut that cosmology” (538). Miller ultimately implies

that the subgenre of the animal melodrama was as efficacious as it was popular because

of its ability to put a (furry) face to the providential order that undergirds the genre.

While the above studies consider the role that animals play in their respective

genres, only Brown and Miller consider the ways in which animals necessarily aid or

alter the conventions of the genres themselves. My dissertation examines the role of

animals in three very different genres that span the long nineteenth century, building on

Brown’s and Miller’s successful attempts to create less anthropocentric readings of genre.

Mine is largely a recuperative project, focusing as it does on often-forgotten works of

poetry and fiction. I provide an alternate literary history, one filtered through the lens of

the canine.

Chapter 1, “From Page to Grave: Memorializing Dogs in England, 1648-1914”

considers epitaphs and elegies to pet dogs from the earliest example in English (Robert

Herrick’s “To His Spaniel Tracie”) to World War 1. After providing a literary history of

the dog epitaph, including its role in the eighteenth-century lapdog poetry tradition and

the theriophilic tradition, I argue that as the nineteenth century progressed, it became

more common to erect tombstones and monuments for dogs than to publish literary

epitaphs and elegies for them in periodicals—tributes that were ubiquitous in the

eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This is because the dog epitaph became a place

to contest the Church of England’s belief that dogs and other animals did not possess

souls, or at least a place to examine that claim. The Christian epitaph’s reliance on the

exclusive existence of the human soul was challenged and revised in order to

accommodate the dog as the object of mourning. The dog epitaph also became an index

11
of the nineteenth-century crisis of religion surrounding evolutionary theory, in which

humans questioned whether they could rely on souls of their own; if their own fates were

uncertain, there was less of an issue granting at least provisionary souls to their pets.

Once the idea of canine afterlives was seriously considered, it was more acceptable to

memorialize dogs with lone tombstones/monuments or in more organized pet cemeteries,

such as the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery.2

Chapter 2, “‘Dogs Don’t Make Mistakes’: Morality, Sagacity, and the

Epistemology of Instinct in Detective and Sensation Fiction,” scrutinizes several of the

qualities of which humans have usually been imagined to be the sole possessors and

demonstrates how these qualities, while manifesting differently in dogs, shaped the

development of detective and sensation fiction. The chapter burrows into the term

“sagacity,” a word whose original meaning was “acute sense of smell,” and explores how

its meaning over time came to encompass reason and intelligence in animals as well as

scenting ability. The word, when used (as it often is) to describe dogs in the nineteenth

century, suggests that instinct is not the only way that dogs “know,” that canine

knowledge overlaps with human knowledge when it comes to cognitive function. Where

there is no overlap, what the dog knows is not discoverable by any other source. Part of

this sagacity for dogs, the Victorians believed, is an instinctive morality which comes to

the forefront in detective and sensation fiction when dogs are able to identify a criminal

before anyone else—a knowledge which challenges the idea that only humans have moral

sense. (Miller’s analysis of canine roles in melodrama is helpful here, given that detective

2
I will take this early opportunity to mention that my chapter does not engage with Chase Pielak’s 2015
book, Memorializing Animals during the Romantic Period. Pielak is interested in neither the epitaph as a
genre nor questions of religion, but instead focuses on ways that dead and deadly animals (and notably,
most often not companion animals) “mark moments and practices of rupture—of what is the human, of
how we might live together, of community, and of life itself” (2).
12
fiction is essentially a narrative form of melodrama.) My chapter views canine and human

epistemologies as sometimes different, sometimes similar, but always complementary,

especially in the detective/dog pairs that these genres feature. It is the combined efforts of

human and canine, with their respective epistemologies, that allow so many mysteries to

be solved. Even where no dogs exist, the best detectives are those who act dog-like, who

rely on instinct every bit as much as they rely on reason.

However, instinct does not always act for good in detective and sensation fiction.

The lines between canine, detective, and criminal are blurred in these genres in ways that

suggest the Victorians were highly uncomfortable with instinct as an impetus for action

or as a form of intelligence. That the immorality and even violence that accompanies

instinctive action is not limited to canine characters, but affects detective figures as well,

demonstrates that nineteenth-century writers were not only concerned with helping dogs

to rise above the line separating human from animal; they were also concerned with the

potential for even well-meaning humans to fall below that line.

My third chapter, “‘Giving Tongue’ to Canine Trauma in Nineteenth-Century

Dog Autobiographies,” focuses on a distinctly nineteenth-century subgenre of fiction, the

dog autobiography. Written from the first-person (first-dog?) point of view, these stories

provide a window into what we want to hear dogs say, or in some cases what we would

be afraid they would say. The chapter first tackles the obvious question: how do these

stories account for a canine narrator? In other words, what are the generic conventions

that must be adapted to allow for a canine speaker? The authors of these texts seek to

erase language as a barrier between humans and animals, albeit occasionally in bizarre

ways (take Spot, for example, a dog whose owner clips a device onto his tail which can

13
translate his barks into English). While some dog autobiographies, especially the most

famous one, Beautiful Joe, were written as part of the anti-cruelty and anti-vivisection

movements—in order to create sympathy for the subjects of experimentation—most dog

autobiographies end up featuring trauma to a different end. That is, despite trauma-

inducing treatment at the hands of humans, from vivisectors to circus masters to dog

stealers, dogs end up keeping the faith with their humans and returning home. The

circular nature of many dog autobiographies, despite the many adventures that the dogs

go through, suggests that what most writers of dog autobiographies really want is for

dogs to remain loyal to them and to a species that is inexplicably cruel to them.

My conclusion looks ahead to Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), and I

end by showing how this novel may be the pinnacle of nineteenth-century attempts to

represent canine epistemology and subjectivity in life writing. Taken together, I hope that

the transformations of genre and the reimagining of human-nonhuman animal

relationships that I explore in my dissertation provide an overlooked, if not missing, link

to current scientific studies of animals which have begun to prove the validity of the

Victorians’ conceptions of animal intelligence and subjectivity.

14
 CHAPTER 1
FROM PAGE TO GRAVE: MEMORIALIZING DOGS IN ENGLAND, 1648-1914

“Do not fear to remember too much; only be upon your guard not to forget any thing that

is worthy to be remembered.” –William Godwin (“Essay Upon Epitaphs,” 129)

Here rest the relics of a friend below,

Blest with more sense than half the folks I know:

Fond of his ease, and to no parties prone,

He damn’d no sect, but calmly knaw’d his bone;

Perform’d his functions well in ev’ry way.—

Blush, CHRISTIANS, if you can, and copy Tray. (ll. 15-20)

This pithy epitaph for Tray, a dog, has been quoted and reprinted many times since Peter

Pindar (John Wolcot) wrote it on the cusp of the nineteenth century (1797). It celebrates

the dog’s “sense,” “easy” ways, and, most importantly, his nonpartisanism in both church

and state. What the replications of the poems miss, however, is the epitaph’s context. The

epitaph is one stanza out of nineteen in a poem titled “The Parson, the ‘Squire, and the

Spaniel: A Tale.” This satirical narrative poem tells the following story: Tray’s master, a

squire, buries Tray in a churchyard with the above epitaph on his tombstone, to the shock

of a curate. The curate’s overblown, stanzas-long tirade against Tray’s master concludes

as follows:

‘Oh! by this damned deed how I am hurried!

A dog in Christian ground be buried!

15
 And have an epitaph, forsooth, so civil!

Egad! old maids will presently be found

Clapping their dead ram-cats in holy ground,

And writing verses on each mousing devil.’ (ll. 39-44)

The curate confronts the squire, saying, among other things, that his act proves the squire

“can’t believe in God.” He is consoled, however, when he learns that Tray has left him a

“legacy” of a guinea, and allows the spaniel’s remains to stay in the churchyard. Thus the

poem ends—with a statement about the hypocrisy of England’s religious leaders, who

care more about personal gain than what they believe to be God’s law. The poem’s irony

is that the creature whose burial in the churchyard is illicit is the creature who most

belongs there. Whether or not Wolcot believed that a dog should be able to be buried in

Christian ground is unclear, but there were many contemporary writers of epitaphs to

dogs who believed that their pets had souls and did deserve memorials.

This chapter is in part a history of the sub-genre I call the dog epitaph and is based

on an analysis of close to one hundred examples. With very few exceptions, dog epitaphs

in English were not written until the first half of the eighteenth century. These early

specimens were largely intended as satires on humankind. From the mid-eighteenth

century on, however, epitaphs upon dogs were increasingly genuine laments upon the loss

of precious pets, as Ingrid Tague has argued.3 Along with the more serious subject matter

came a serious question: how could these beloved animals, whose qualities were often

3
As Ingrid Tague has written, epitaphs were written not just for dogs, but also other pets, including cats,
monkeys, and parrots. In addition to carrying her analysis well beyond the eighteenth century, I will be
paying attention to how these epitaphs attempt to negotiate animal soullessness.

16
perceived to be as good as or better than those of the best humans, be denied souls by

Christianity? Epitaphs to dogs raised, negotiated, and attempted to solve this question, all

the while dealing with the real conundrum caused by canine soullessness: the problem of

burial. When dogs were denied entrance into Christian burial grounds, mourning dog

owners found other ways to honor their pets’ remains. As the nineteenth century wore on,

the statuary, monuments, and effigies created by the wealthy for their pets gave way to

new mourning practices, including public pet cemeteries and monuments, and in a few

instances dog-skin-bound books and dog-fur muffs.4 These physical components of

mourning helped owners of all social classes cope with the loss of their pets in the

absence of Christian burial, even as they mimicked mourning practices for humans, such

as hair collecting. That similar efforts were taken to preserve the physical/more animal

remains of human beings and pets alike demonstrates that both were moving together

towards a new formation of the value of physical life, as well as more inclusive

conceptions of the afterlife. The dog epitaph is thus part of a larger Romantic movement

to elevate the common man, who incidentally is often seen to be less morally sound than

his pet.

In order to understand the cultural and literary milieu in which dog epitaphs were

written, I begin by contextualizing the literary epitaph by way of Samuel Johnson’s and

William Wordsworth’s “Essays Upon Epitaphs” and William Godwin’s “Essay upon

Sepulchres.” That context begins to explain the cultural significance of early dog

epitaphs, the roles dogs played in them, and the slowly fading traditions to which they

4
Though I by no means believe it was common, one epitaphic poem by the Rev. J. B. references making
book bindings out of dog-skin: “To effect the Memorial, His Skin, being tann’d for the Purpose, Made the
Covers of two Books.”

17
belong. The heart of this chapter is my repeated discovery that sincere expressions of

grief—often amplified by fears of soullessness—prompted the most heartfelt dog

epitaphs and the erection of many tombstones and monuments. Dog epitaphs offered

authors a space to process and articulate their discontent with and doubt about the

teachings of the Church of England. Over the course of the Romantic era, experience with

dogs in the face of new views of human-animal relations increasingly subverted and then

openly contradicted the theology of the Anglican Church. By the end of the Romantic era,

a different mode had emerged—a doubtful hope and a doubtful faith that animals had

redeemable souls. I argue that the epitaph form had to adapt in order to take on the dog as

a subject. Consequently, it became a form which looks not automatically heavenward, as

contemporary epitaphs for people tend to do, but a form in which an alternate or even

superior type of goodness can be negotiated. I end with a discussion of Michael Field’s

Whym Chow: Flame of Love, a collection of mourning poetry that boldly resolves the

religious fears earlier mourners faced by turning a dog into a divinity.

I: Johnson’s and Wordsworth’s “Essays upon Epitaphs” and Godwin’s “Essay upon

Sepulchres”

Many influential literary figures concerned with epitaphs attempted to define,

dignify, and rescue the genre. Epitaphs were matters of cultural, literary, and—most

importantly—religious concern for Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth, each of

whom wrote at least one “Essay upon Epitaphs.”5 In his 1740 essay in The Gentleman’s

5
Joshua Scodel found in the course of his research that Wordsworth was unaware of Johnson’s essay when
he wrote his own. See The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to
Wordsworth, p. 395, footnote 21.

18
Magazine, Johnson took for granted that epitaphs were to be engraved upon tombstones.

He thereby ignored what we might call the “literary epitaph.” That tombstones were, for

the most part, located in churchyards in Johnson’s time motivates him to state the

necessity of “exclud[ing]…all such allusions as are contrary to the doctrines for the

propagation of which the churches are erected, and to the end for which those who peruse

the monuments must be supposed to come thither” 6 (594). In other words, Johnson

objects to Christians writing epitaphs in the styles of the “heathen mythology” of the

Greeks and Romans. According to him, “…the principal intention of Epitaphs is to

perpetuate the examples of Virtue, that the Tomb of a good Man may supply the Want of

his Presence, and Veneration for his Memory produce the same Effect as the observation

of his Life” (593). Certainly epitaphs praising soulless creatures would fall under the

“allusions…contrary to the doctrines” (593) Johnson warns against. It seems likely that

Johnson’s weighty influence as a critic made some would-be authors rethink writing

epitaphs for their pets.

Wordsworth, too, was primarily concerned with epitaphs as inscriptions on actual

tombs.7 In his first of three “Essays upon Epitaphs,” (1810) he begins: “It needs scarcely

be said, that an Epitaph presupposes a Monument, upon which it is to be engraven” (30).

He believed that the reason humankind desires—and deserves—epitaphs is because of the

immortality of the human soul. Though his discussion of immortality is decidedly not

6
The Gentleman’s Magazine is home to more epitaphs than any other. See Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch for
statistics on the magazine and its epitaphs.
7
Despite his concern with epitaphs on monuments, Wordsworth, like Johnson before him, wrote epitaphs
that we could call “pseudo-inscriptional.”

19
Christian, the connection is nevertheless clear. Notably, Wordsworth includes a contrast

with dogs and other “inferior animals” in the beginning of his essay:

The dog or horse perishes in the field, or in the stall, by the side of his

companions, and is incapable of anticipating the sorrow with which his

surrounding associates shall bemoan his death, or pine for his loss; he cannot pre-

conceive this regret, he can form no thought of it; and therefore cannot possibly

desire to leave such regret or remembrance behind him. Add to the principle of

love which exists in the inferior animals, the faculty of reason which exists in

Man alone; will the conjunction of these account for the desire? Doubtless it is a

necessary consequence of this conjunction; yet not I think a direct result, but only

to be come at through an intermediate thought, viz. that of an intimation or

assurance within us, that some part of our nature is imperishable. (27-28)

Intriguingly, Wordsworth does not question animals’ ability to mourn and to love, though

he denies them reason and foresight. One who reads this passage in isolation could well

conclude that Wordsworth does not deny animals immortality, but simply denies them the

knowledge of that immortality. However, this is not the case. A couple of pages later, he

discusses two different views one can take regarding the human body after death:

Simonides, it is related, upon landing in a strange country, found the corpse of an

unknown person lying by the sea-side; he buried it, and was honoured throughout

Greece for the piety of his act. Another ancient Philosopher, chancing to fix his

20
 eyes upon a dead body, regarded the same with slight, if not with contempt;

saying, “See the shell of the flown bird!” But it is not to be supposed that the

moral and tender-hearted Simonides was incapable of the lofty movements of

thought, to which that other Sage gave way at the moment when his soul was

intent only upon the indestructible being; nor, on the other hand, that he, in whose

sight a lifeless human body was of no more value than the worthless shell from

which the living fowl had departed, would not, in a different mood of mind, have

been affected by those earthly considerations which had incited the philosophic

Poet to the performance of that pious duty. And with regard to this latter we may

be assured that, if he had been destitute of the capability of communing with the

more exalted thoughts that appertain to human nature, he would have cared no

more for the corpse of a seal or porpoise which might have been cast up by the

waves. We respect the corporeal frame of Man, not merely because it is the

habitation of a rational, but of an immortal Soul. (30, emphasis mine)

Simonides’s choice to bury the body is praised, but the choice of the other Philosopher is

not to be chastised, since he is partaking in a “lofty movement of thought” which elevates

the human soul above the physical body. Wordsworth assumes that the other Philosopher

cares more for the body of the human than for that of a seal or porpoise, because he

recognizes the value of humankind’s “immortal Soul.” If there had been any doubt of the

fates of the animals that Wordsworth had—seemingly incongruously—endowed with

fellow-feeling, he took this opportunity to resolve it. He remained consistent. In 1805 he

had written an elegy on his wife’s brother’s dog, named Music, entitled “Tribute to the

21
Memory of the Same Dog.” This “Tribute” was a sequel to the poem “Incident

Characteristic of a Favourite Dog,” about Music’s attempt to save one of his canine

companions from drowning), which begins:

Lie here, without a record of thy worth,

Beneath a covering of the common earth!

It is not from unwillingness to praise,

Or want of love, that here no Stone we raise;

More thou deserv’st; but this man gives to man,

Brother to brother, this is all we can. 8 (ll. 1-6)

Music does not have a commemorating stone, because this is a right that Wordsworth

reserves for humanity. However, there is a tone of deprecation here that is lacking in his

“Essay upon Epitaphs.” The clause “this is all we can” betrays some anxiety about how

paltry mankind’s attempts to memorialize each other really are.

The poem ends on a rather confusing note, with a reference to Music’s “soul of

love”:

8
Christine Kenyon-Jones also juxtaposes Wordsworth’s “Essay upon Epitaphs” with his elegy on Music
and comes to very similar conclusions. However, as our ultimate purposes differ, the points are worth
making a second time.

It should also be noted that Wordsworth was not the first to suggest that man’s meagre offerings to each
other should be upheld as sacred. In 1786, an author going by the initials J. T. wrote “For an Inscription on
a Stone, over the Remains of a Favorite Dog,”which includes the following lines:

Yet spare thy tears, the heaving sigh restrain,

Nor give thy nature one short moment’s pain.
Tributes like these to him can ne’er be due;
To kindred beings these alone we owe.

22
 For love, that comes wherever life and sense

Are given by God, in thee was most intense;

A chain of heart, a feeling of the mind,

A tender sympathy, which did thee bind

Not only to us Men, but to thy Kind:

Yea, for thy fellow brutes in thee we saw

A soul of love, love’s intellectual law:—

Hence, if we wept, it was not done in shame;

Our tears from passion and from reason came,

And, therefore, shalt thou be an honored name! (ll. 27-36)

Wordsworth either contradicts himself, or he believes in different kinds of souls, not all

of which are immortal. Music has “a soul of love,” which Wordsworth believes can

“come wherever life and sense / Are given by God”—thus, to any animal. The mourning

that he and Music’s family share is justified because of Music’s ability to love them and

other animals, as exemplified by Music’s attempt to save his canine friend. But human

grief for a dog is also justified because Music’s mourners are able to use their reason to

observe Music’s heroic behavior. Crying over the death of an animal out of “passion”

alone seems something about which Wordsworth feels equivocal, despite the fact that he

makes space for grief himself.

One contemporaneous author may not have been as opposed as Johnson and

Wordsworth to physical markers for animals. In 1809, one year before Wordsworth’s

essay, William Godwin wrote his lengthy “Essay upon Sepulchres; or, A Proposal for

23
Erecting Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages, On the spot where their

remains have been interred.” He argues for simple and inexpensive markers for as many

of the dead as possible so that their virtues can be remembered, with the governing

principle “Do not fear to remember too much; only be upon your guard not to forget any

thing that is worthy to be remembered.” (He says nothing about the texts to be engraved

on these markers, though it is clear he intends for them to be engraved.) He never

mentions memorials for animals, but his generous spirit allows for the possibility in a

way that Johnson and Wordsworth do not. Godwin’s thinking is in line with Thomas

Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which muses on the potential of the

poor who are humbly buried:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. (ll. 53-60)

A gem lost in the “dark unfathom’d caves of ocean,” a “flow’r…born to blush unseen”:

these are akin to a poor rural worker whose life circumstances will never allow him to

24
rise to the status of a famous Milton or an infamous Cromwell. Though a dog may never

be a poet or politician, the pre-Romantic and Romantic idea that the common man

deserves to be elevated extends to some pet dogs, as well. Certainly most human

companions could imagine their beloved pets as “mute and inglorious” if not

Cromwellian or Miltonian.

Godwin and Gray suggest that times are changing and that people other than the

aristocracy deserve to be remembered, but it is nevertheless against the general advice of

both of these two highly influential critics, Johnson and Wordsworth, that writers of

(inscribed) dog epitaphs expressed their grief.9 In its earliest stages, mourning poetry for

dogs is, as in the elegy for Music, often about the shame that can or should accompany

mourning (especially when the mourner is a woman bemoaning the loss of a lapdog). On

the other hand, for some authors it became a point of pride to violate the sacredness of

“what man gives to man.” Increasingly, as the eighteenth century gave way to the

nineteenth, the epitaph became a place to explore whether the views of critics such as

Johnson and Wordsworth had to be taken into account by presumably rational people

who found themselves feeling irrationally grief stricken by the deaths of their pets. At all

junctures, however, a commitment to the status quo yielded quaint, loving epitaphs which

avoided the subject of animal souls altogether.

II: The First of a Million Tears

One of these quaint poems is also the first known epitaph for a dog written in

English, Robert Herrick’s “Upon His Spaniel Tracie,” published in 1648:

9
Neither Wordsworth nor Godwin nor Johnson wrote about satiric epitaphs, so it is difficult to say how
they felt about the traditions of lapdog poetry and theriophily, which I will discuss in sections III and IV.

25
 Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see

For shape and service spaniel like to thee.

This shall my love do, give thy sad death one

Tear, that deserves of me a million. (144, ll. 1-4)

Herrick’s poem, written about a hundred years before dog epitaphs became popular,

celebrates his spaniel’s beauty and his faithfulness. Herrick mourns Tracie—with an

enjambment which mimics a tear-fall—as a “shape,” which objectifies the dog and

reduces him to a specimen of his breed, and a subordinate. While his restrained grief is

almost certainly attributable to the fact that mourning a dog publicly was not common

practice in the seventeenth century, it is still rather elaborate for a seventeenth-century

dog; even a human servant would probably not warrant this level of grief.10 Here we can

see the train of thought that survived all the way to Wordsworth: there is a degree of

shame in mourning for a dog the way one would for a human.

At least one more sincere poem about dogs was written before the practice

became common. (There is also a satiric example from 1693 which I will discuss in

Section IV.) The second of the early examples is Lord Viscount Robert Molesworth’s

Latin prose epitaph to his dog, written in 1714 to accompany a monument in Doncaster

and copied by an anonymous viewer for publication in The Gentleman’s Magazine in

1804:

10
Joshua Scodel discusses Tracie’s epitaph as well in his chapter “Praising Honest Creatures: Paternalist
Commemoration from the Mid Eighteenth to the Early Nineteenth Century.” He makes the point that
Herrick was the first person to write epitaphs for servants as well for dogs.

26
 Stop a moment, traveler, and don’t be surprised that this departed puppy is

honored so highly in burial—and what a pup! A pup whose remarkable beauty,

snow-white sheen; whose elegant manner and ready playfulness; whose fondness,

obeisance, and loyalty—all these qualities made him the favourite of his master, at

whose side he abided diligently, as life-companion and the sharer of his couch.

With such a dog for a friend, his master’s mind, whenever utterly fatigued, would

regain its muse and renew its purpose. In gratitude for such deserving service, his

master, inconsolably weeping, placed him in this marble urn.

Molesworth saw to this matter, 1714.

[On the other side:] “Don’t knock over this upright column with an offending

foot!”11

11 11
I am grateful to Matthew Carter for this translation. The original Latin reads:

Siste, Viator, nec mirare

Supremo efferri honore
Extinctum Catellum;
Sed qualem
Quem forma insignis, niveusque candor,
Morum gratia, facilesque lusus,
Amor, obsequium, fides,
Domini delicias fecêre;
Cujus lateri adhæsit assiduus
Conviva, sociusque thori.
Illo comite,
Vis animi herilis delassata
Ingenium mentemque novam sumebat
Iftis pro meritis non ingratis herus
Marmorea hác urnâ mortuum
Deflens locavit
R. M. F. C. 1714.

[On the other side]

Injurioso ne pede
Proruas
Stantem columnam.

27
Like Herrick, Molesworth celebrates his dog’s physical appearance (his “remarkable

beauty” and “snow-white sheen”); but his praise goes much further than Herrick’s. He

describes his dog as his “life-companion” and credits him with being his “muse,” almost

as one would a lover. This reading is only intensified by the fact that the dog is the

“sharer of his Couch.” While Herrick offers a single tear for his pet, Molesworth weeps

“inconsolably” at the loss of his.

Molesworth’s epitaph and monument to his unnamed pet, much more so than

Herrick’s, is an elaborate, formal display of grief, and it was treated as such by at least

one critic. The greyhound had saved his master’s life and Molesworth had a good reason

for so highly esteeming him. Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round tells the story:

Mr. Molesworth was about to go to an outhouse, when the dog pulled him by the

flap of his coat and would not let him advance. On a second attempt, the dog

behaved in the same manner. Surprised at this interruption, his master ordered one

of his servants to inspect the place, who, on opening the door, was immediately

shot dead by a concealed robber. (“Doncaster” 20)

This feat of bravery was not enough for one author, who wrote the following epitaph for

Molesworth himself for The London Magazine. It was published in 1775, sixty years after

Molesworth erected the monument to his greyhound and long after Molesworth himself

had died and been buried with his dog:

Under this stone both dog and master lie,

28
 Neither deserv’d to live, nor thought to die.

Do not disturb the happy sleeping pair,

Who once in love, now join’d in burial are.

But here’s the curse, which Molesworth little thought:

He’ll one day rise again, the other not. (“An Epitaph on Mr. Molesworth” ll. 1-6)

The anonymous author paints Molesworth and his dog as lovers, with more than a hint of

bestiality implied. Still, the author assumes that Molesworth has earned a spot in heaven,

an advantage denied to his soulless dog. The author has a laugh at the “lovers’” expense,

since only their bodies, and not their spirits, are coupled. It was at this same time that

other authors began debating within their epitaphs about animal souls, as I will discuss in

Section V. This hint of bestiality suggests the deeper anxieties about the dissolution of

boundaries between species that few authors were willing to name. That threat was much

more likely to be masked with humor that ridiculed intense attachements between humans

and pets.

Even ridicule could be gentle, however, sometimes to the point of being an

effective means of expressing heartfelt affection for a pet that the general public might

find absurd. John Arbuthnot’s 1730 monument to a deceased dog named “Signor Fido”—

perhaps not coincidentally, also a greyhound like Molesworth’s dog—in Stowe,

Buckingham, reads:

To the memory of

SIGNOR FIDO,

29
 an Italian, of good extraction,

who came into England,

not to bite us, like most of his countrymen,

but to gain an honest livelihood.

He hunted not after fame,

yet acquired it;

regardless of the praise of his friends,

but most sensible of their love.

Though he lived among the great,

he neither learnt nor flattered any vice.

He was no Bigot,

Tho’ he doubted none of the 39 Articles;

and if to follow nature

and to respect the laws of society

be philosophy,

he was a perfect philosopher,

a faithful friend,

an agreeable companion,

a loving husband;

distinguished by a numerous offspring,

all of which he lived to see take good courses.

In his old age he retired

to the house of a clergyman in the country,

30
 where he finished his earthly race,

and died an honour and an example to the whole species.

Reader,

this stone is guiltless of flattery;

For he, to whom it is inscribed,

was not a man,

but a

GREYHOUND.12

Despite the epitaph’s jocular tone and its jabs at Italians and the 39 Articles, this is, as a

whole, a loving tribute to a lost pet, one deserving of the “fame” he acquired. However

tongue-in-cheek, the epitaph humanizes Signor Fido to a greater extent than maybe any

other dog epitaph/monument I have found, making him out as it does to be a “loving

husband” to a canine wife and father to his canine children.

Other poets were willing to own their grief, disarming potentially skeptical

readers through a variety of rhetorical strategies. A quarter of a century passed before

Francis Manning wrote “Another upon a favourite Dog” in 1752:

Here Flora lies, alas! from sight remov’d,

Never was dog so plain, so much belov’d.

An Emblem this that ‘tis not outward Grace,

A symmetry of Parts, or beauteous Face,

12
Arbuthnot’s monument to Signor Fido was reprinted in The Kaleidoscope in an article by a Montmorenci
about Lord Byron’s monument to his dog (see Section V). This is the place from which I copied this text.

31
 Breeds Love, but something not to be defin’d,

Some hidden Charm that captivates the Mind.

This made the Whelp, whose Epitaph you read,

Alive so fondled, so lamented dead.13 (ll. 1-8)

Flora’s name belies the fact that she is not an especially attractive dog (unlike Herrick’s

Tracie). Manning admits her seeming ordinariness and thereby sets aside the grounds by

which an unsympathetic reader might dismiss a dog’s right to an epitaph. He then offers

an irrefutable claim: no casual observer can know that his dog merits an epitaph because

of her “hidden Charm.” This pre-Romantic example moralizes that it is not physical

beauty which should be a measure of worth, once again blocking the logical path of

readers who would sniff at grief over an ordinary dog. Similarly, the following “Epitaph

on Juliet, a favourite Lap-Dog,” appeared in the appropriately-titled Sentimental

Magazine in 1774. It, too, praised a dog for her charms, not her looks or pedigree:

Accept, dear Juliet, oh, how quickly gone!

This mournful verse, and monumental stone.

Accept, O fellow dust! the gentle sigh,

Which nature heaves, when kindred mortals die.

Ne’er shalt thou welcome more thy fav’rites home,

Return’d, long absent, to thy once-lov’d dome.

Nor pleas’d, content, wait morning, noon and eve,

13
Though the title indicates that Manning had written a dog epitaph before this one, it is not included in
this collection, nor have I been able to find it elsewhere.

32
 Thy lone but chearful viands to receive.

Nor, taught by instinct, when chill nights require,

Slow drag the willow couch on tow’rds the fire.

Nor ‘tend thy mistress at the early dawn,

To chase the flying fowls along the lawn;

Innocuous chase! thy breath devoid of bile

Pursu’d th’ affrighted flutt’rers with a smile.

Nor, sprightly playful, starting with a bound,

Scent o’er the echoing floor the whistling sound,

Thy hearing lost! O reader, fix’d attend!

And each fond vicious habit learn to mend;

Lest, hearing prov’d a curse! awake thy woes,

When thro’ the astonish’d world the last dread trumpet blows. (ll. 1-20)

Juliet is mourned in all her run-of-the-mill dogginess; her family misses her “welcome” at

the door, her “content[ed]” waiting for dinner, even her “innocuous” bird-chasing. She is

not portrayed as particularly special in any way, as Herrick described Tracie, but the

pedigree of shapeliness is no longer a necessary qualification for grieving a dog. Just as

Thomas Gray and later, the Romantics, claim value for the homely and for purely

domestic virtues in their epitaphs, Juliet’s mourners praise her for her ordinary qualities.

Though “nature” “heaved” a sigh at her passing, Juliet’s epitaph does not suggest an

afterlife for her. However, the occasion of Juliet’s death causes fears about immortality

for humans to take over the poem, especially in its final four lines when the persona

33
anticipates the blowing of the “last dread trumpet.” The precariousness of immortality for

human beings places them on a level similar to dogs like Juliet, for whom immortality is

presumed to be impossible.

As the British formed closer bonds with their pets, it became more socially

acceptable for them to grieve publically over their loss. This is apparent in the differences

between Herrick’s four-line epitaph (actually short enough to be engraved, though to my

knowledge it was not), Flora’s epitaph, and Juliet’s epitaph (which existed alongside an

actual tombstone, according to the poem itself). These differences extend beyond

brevity—though length itself tells us much about the differences between the first

composition and the latter two. As longer works, Flora’s and Julia’s epitaphs accordingly

celebrate their subjects to a much greater extent. During the time difference between

Herrick’s and Flora’s/Juliet’s, it also became more acceptable to compare human conduct

to animal conduct, and for animal conduct to triumph; thus, Juliet’s behavior is viewed as

superior to “the fond vicious habits” of the readers. Juliet’s superiority alludes to another

type of dog epitaph: those of a satirical nature, which I see as a distinct category from the

kinds of gentle humor that ultimately defends a human’s right to mourn a lost pet. Before

returning to epitaphs of grief, I will detour to a brief discussion of these satirical modes

because they are such fascinating generic byways. They also offer an important contrast,

helping us to see the sincere struggles to justify grief for animals in many of the other

epitaphs I have located. Satires can be found first, in the tradition of the lapdog poem, and

second, in the tradition of theriophily.

34
 III: Ladies, Lust, and Lapdogs

Though Juliet’s epitaph exemplifies the grief-filled epitaphs that become common

around the 1770s—including a number about lapdogs—it only tells half the story about

lapdog poetry in general. Because many early epitaphs on dogs are indeed part of the

satirical lapdog tradition, I include them here in the interest of providing a full history of

the dog epitaph. As Laura Brown explains in her book Homeless Dogs and Melancholy

Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination, lapdog poems

were generally written for one, or a combination of, three purposes: 1) to ridicule the

women who treasured and pampered them; 2) to express envy over a lapdog’s position;

and/or 3) to chastise women who prioritized their pets over people. In all three cases, the

poems are part of a larger misogynistic trend in Augustan poetry. The most famous

examples are the Prioress in Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Shock,

Belinda’s dog in Alexander Pope’s mock-epic The Rape of the Lock.

While the comic threat of male bestiality in Molesworth’s poem is fairly unique,

the lapdog is often associated with a woman’s sexual excess. Throughout the 1700s the

image persists and proliferates; male writers frequently imagine the lapdog as a

replacement sexual partner for a woman, relying on hackneyed rhymes like nap and lap,

kiss and bliss, lies and thighs (71). As both Brown and Ingrid Tague have already pointed

out, some of these are also epitaphs on the deaths of lapdogs, which despite their morbid

subject matter ridicule both dog and woman almost as mercilessly as does Pope. Though

these poems usually skirt issues of immortality altogether, they play an important role in

the history of the dog epitaph and thus demand renewed attention.

35
 In the ruthless “On the Death of a Lady’s Lap-Dog, her Favourite and Bedfellow,

Called Trifle” (1790), a misanthropic author-persona, “Mr. Keys, Teacher of Dancing,

&c.,” chastises a woman for her grief, rather than writing an epitaph to memorialize her

pet:

Grieve not your Trifle’s dead—too many live—

See how human trifles every hour deceive;

View gaudy trifles stinking in gay things,

And trifles made of bishops, lords, and kings;

View wretched trifles falling to decay,

And ladies trifle out the live-long day;

Know this ye triflers when all’s said and done,

You’ll rot like Trifle when you are dead and gone. (ll. 1-8)

Though the dog’s name didn’t do him any favors, Mr. Keys relies on the dog and his idle

mistress to exemplify the insignificance of human existence. This is momento mori taken

to its logical extreme: we all rot eventually, and because we do, nothing matters. Mr.

Keys (or the man behind a pseudonym) does not exclude himself from this insignificance;

surely a career teaching dancing would place him in the middle of the trifles he

enumerates, and so he names his profession as a means of driving an extra nail into the

universal coffin.

Mr. Keys seems to relish the fact that Trifle and his mistress will both end as

nothing but earth, and does not gesture towards an afterlife for either one of them. This

36
sets his poem apart from those of his contemporary epitaph-writers, who, if they are

writing epitaphs in sincerity either 1) keep them light enough to avoid Christian matters or

2) deny, question, or affirm animal souls (all while taking for granted that man has one).

By emphasizing the fact that both of them will “rot,” he—perhaps inadvertently—makes

Trifle the equal of his human mistress. In this case, then, the invocation of the lapdog

trope exposes an existential angst.

Even epitaphs which express genuine sorrow for the loss of a lapdog can betray

other intentions. Similar in purpose to the epitaphs that express envy over the dog’s

position, some lapdog epitaphs are primarily gratification for a woman whose pet was

lost. This is all the more true for famous women; consider the final two stanzas of the

following, W. Groves’s “Verses Addressed to Miss [Anna] Seward, on the Sudden Death

of Her Favourite Lap-dog, Sappho”:

Then let thy strains in plaintive accents flow,

So shall thy much-lov’d Sappho still survive;

So shall her beauties shine with brighter glow,

And in thy matchless verse for ages live.

Thus if, perchance, the splendid amber folds

Some tiny insect in its crystal womb,

While its rare form the curious eye beholds,

The reptile shares the glories of its tomb. (ll. 17-24)

37
It is Seward’s poetic acts of remembrance that immortalize Sappho, not any virtues that

the dog had possessed.14 Indeed, even the death of a “tiny insect” would be worth

lamenting if Anna Seward chose to memorialize it. Naming the dog after the ancient

Greek poetess suggests a kind of subversion or willful inhabiting of assumptions about

lapdogs and women’s sexuality.15

The titles of these pandering poems can be giveaways, as they tend to name the

mistress (either specifically, with a name, or generally, with “lady” or “miss”) as

mourner.16 The following two examples are entitled, respectively, “Epitaph on Miss

Barlow’s Dog” (1750) and “Epitaph on a young Lady’s Lap Dog” (1751):

Here Tyger lies, whose frightful name express’d

Fell rage and savage fierceness in the breast;

And whose polite behavior, figure small,

And temper always sweet, delighted all. (ll. 1-4)

***

Interr’d beneath this stone poor Carlo lies,

14
See also “Written on Beholding a Favourite Dog Dead that Belonged to the Beautiful Mrs. Priestly” by
Anthony Pasquin. Mary Priestley and her husband Joseph Priestley were good friends with poet Anna
Letitia Barbauld.
15
Jill Ehnenn suggests to me that readers would not have been aware of Sappho as a figure representative
of lesbian identity and sexuality until H.T. Wharton’s 1885 translation of Sappho.
16
See also Thismiames, “Epitaph Written at the Request of some young Ladies, for the Grave of a beautiful
Spaniel”; the anonymous“Epitaph on Lady Hinchinbroke’s favourite Pug, buried under the Willow-Tree at
Hinchinbroke, in the Grove”; and the anonymous “On the Death of Frolick, a Lap-Dog Belonging to the
Misses S---.”

38
 Whose death drew tears from Leonora’s eyes.

Thrice happy cur, tho’ wrapt in endless sleep,

Whose death could make so fair a creature weep. (ll. 1-4)

It seems clear enough that Tyger, whose name implies a different personality than he

actually possesses, is more mourned by his epitaph’s persona than Carlo is by his (never

has “cur” been a compliment), but the premise is the same in each poem. Read in the

context of lapdog poems, the author-persona acts much as he would in a patronage

relationship; but rather than winning money, he wishes to gain the love (and/or sexual

proximity) of a woman whose heart has a newfound void. For the most part, then, even

seemingly sincere epitaphs are linked to a tradition of satire and seduction projection.

In addition to those that ridicule and those that try to gain a woman’s favor, there

are epitaphs to lapdogs that chastise women for what the authors perceive to be moral

failures. If caring for a dog more than a potential lover is bad, caring for a dog more than

for helpless humans is worse. “An Elegy on the Death of Celia’s Favorite Dog” first

describes Celia’s vain attempts to have her lapdog Pug cured, and then turns to a

discussion of Celia’s lack of concern for a child whose mother lies dying:

Had some poor infant shar’d but half the care

Which to the dying cur was hopeless giv’n,

A nobler strain, oh Celia! should declare

The kind regards of high-rewarding Heav’n! (ll. 25-28)

39
The orphan-to-be should be the one to receive the solicitude of the wealthy Celia, not her

lapdog, chastises the poet. As with the male speaker who hopes to gain a woman’s love

now that her lap is vacant, the speaker of this poem hopes to re-direct Celia’s sympathies

now that Pug is gone. That the poem was published in The Lady’s Monthly Museum

suggests it was meant to be a warning to as many women as possible: do not care less for

other humans than you do your pets, or you risk insulting God. Once again, there is a

sententious strain in the dog epitaph. In a later section I will return to the idea that human

lives are more valuable than animal lives in order to discuss the implications that this

belief had on other pet epitaphs and on memorialization more generally. But for now, I

turn to the other common trend underlying eighteenth and early-nineteenth century dog

epitaphs: theriophily.

IV: The Theriophilic Tradition

The second satiric tradition in dog epitaphs is what we now call theriophily, which

asserts that dogs make better humans than humans themselves, since they possess so

purely the most cherished human values. A fuller definition is as follows:

Theriophily is a word coined in 1933 by [George Boas] to name a complex of

ideas which express an admiration for the ways and character of the animals.

Theriophilists have asserted with various emphases that the beasts are (1) as

rational as men, or less rational than men but better off without reason, or more

rational than men; (2) that they are happier than men, in that Nature is a mother to

them but a cruel stepmother to us; (3) that they are more moral than men.

40
The concerns of theriophily for animal morality, in particular, are important for

considerations of immortality; if dogs are somehow more moral than men, do they not

deserve a place in heaven beside their masters? The prospect of animal rationality, too, is

key for immortality according to thinkers such as Wordsworth. Theriophily takes what

we consider to be most human and applies it to the non-human, upsetting the hierarchies

of the Church of England.

Christine Kenyon-Jones, following in Boas’s footsteps, has provided a survey of

theriophily as it relates to views of immortality of human and animal souls up through the

Romantic period in Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing. As she has

already pointed out, the earliest example of a theriophilic dog epitaph in English (which

is also the second earliest dog epitaph, period) is that by Matthew Prior for Queen Mary

II’s dog True, written in 1693:

If wit or honesty cou’d save

Our mould’ring ashes from the grave,

This stone had still remain’d unmark’d,

I still write prose, and True stil bark’d.

Here lies the mortal part of True;

His deathless virtue must survive;

To better us that are alive.

His prudence and his wit were seen

In that from Mary’s grace and mien,

41
 He own’d the power and lov’d the queen.

By long obedience he confest,

That serving her was to be blest.

Ye murmurers let True evince,

That men are beasts, and dogs have sense.

His faith and truth all Whitehall knows,

He ne’er could fawn or flatter those,

Whom he believed were Mary’s foes;

Ne’er sculk’d from when his sov’reign led him,

Or snarl’d against the hand that fed him.

Read this ye statesmen now in favour,

And mend your own by True’s behaviour. (ll. 1-21)

The poem is overtly didactic beginning with the name of the dog, a sharp contrast to

deceitful, manipulative courtiers. The poem’s spacing highlights its theriophilic nature;

the only indented lines are the two couplets which contrast True’s “honesty,” “virtue,”

“prudence,” “sense,” “obedience,” and “faith” with man’s bestial actions and fawning

obsequiousness. The poem is not so much a patronage poem, like the lapdog patronage

poems, as a snipe at the relationship between the monarchy and the statesmen, who do

not conform to the queen’s wishes as much as a queen would prefer. Like many of the

lapdog poems, it moralizes—except here, it is suggested that grief over True’s death is

justified instead of shameful even as it threatens readers with the death of what is true

more generally if intrigues at court continue unabated.

42
 It wasn’t until nearly a half-century later, in 1734, that the anonymous poem

“Epitaph on a Lady’s Lap-Dog” was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine. Though a

lapdog poem, it belongs more soundly to the category of theriophily. After describing the

pedigreed beauty of the dog, the “lady, Miss Abigail” (with humor that places the poem

well within the lapdog tradition), the epitaph transitions to this mode:

Her acting principle think what you please on,

At least ‘twas next to,—if it was not—Reason.

Whether her Soul belong’d to man or beast,

Let others with Pythagoras contest;

This I’ll affirm: were all dumb brutes like her,

To most that talk the silent I’d prefer.

Was she, because she never spoke, a brute?

How many wou’d appear less such, if mute!

Brute as she was; her actions yet were such,

As to most men must be a warm reproach.

No trust she e’er betray’d, no friend forgot;

Nor fawn’d on persons when she lik’d ‘em not. (ll. 10-21)

Miss Abigail is reasonable, or the closest thing to it; mutely eloquent; well-behaved;

faithful; and a true friend. Her silence makes her preferable company to the chattering

idiocy the anonymous poet attributes to people.

43
 Similar in tone is Thomas Blacklock’s “An Epitaph on an Old Favourite Lap-

Dog,” published twenty years later in 1754:

I never bark’d when out of Season;

I never bit without a Reason;

I ne’er insulted weaker Brother;

Nor wrong’d by Force or Fraud another.

Tho’ Brutes are plac’d a Rank below,

Happy for Man, could he say so.17

Unlike the epitaph to Juliet, these two poems for lapdogs have very little to do with the

dogs they purport to mourn. The “old favourite lapdog” never barks or bites

inappropriately, gives no insult, and commits no crime, while mankind is accused of both

barking and biting “out of Season” and “without a Reason.” Each poem hinges on the fact

that the dogs comported themselves honestly and reasonably—unlike man, who is

supposed to be the only reasonable being. Each also plays with the idea of speech versus

action, accepting human notions of superiority but then inverting who meets which

expectations. These examples prefigure the most famous dog epitaph ever written, which

takes the theriophilic tradition and converts it to a sincere, rather than simply satirical,

model.

17
Anthologizers and periodical editors have titled the poem “A Proud Boast,” which clearly complicates
the text of the poem itself; if a dog is proud, is he really superior to man?

44
 V: Byron and Boatswain

Lord Byron’s epitaph to his Newfoundland Boatswain was engraved on a giant

monument to the dog in the gardens of Newstead Abbey in 1808 [Figure 1]. Kenyon-Jones

refers to it as one of the last poems of the theriophilic tradition. Byron had the corpses of

people buried in the grounds of the Abbey unearthed to make way for a mausoleum for

Boatswain, himself, and his favorite servant, John Murray. Irreverent at best, Byron not

only inters his dog in human burial ground; he removes the bodies already there to make

way for the only being he believes belongs there. Boatswain’s monument, erected just

one decade after “The Parson, the ‘Squire, and the Spaniel,” was something akin to a real-

life version of Wolcot’s poem, since the dog was buried in Abbey grounds.

“Epitaph to a Dog” consists of twelve lines in prose, followed by an epitaphic

poem of twenty-six lines in heroic couplets. When Byron edited the epitaph for print,

removing the prefatory prose, and included it in his collection Imitations and

Translations in 1809, its extreme theriophily supported Byron’s lifelong reputation as a

misanthrope. Byron’s poem also stands out among its predecessors: it is not a poem for or

about the drawing-room, but a poem by a very macho (if not yet infamous) poet. By

representing his love for a dog to the extent that he does, Byron helps to transition even

the theriophilic dog epitaph from a satiric mode to a sincere one, one in which extreme

mourning for a companion animal is acceptable and even exemplary.

The poem also enjoyed a healthy circulation in the periodical press, which

expanded its audience considerably. An examination of the responses it received there

reveals the mixed state of ideas about mourning for pets that characterized the mid-

eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries: some responses were overwhelmingly

45
[Figure 1: Byron’s monument to Boatswain]

46
positive and some overwhelmingly negative. Though long, the epitaph is so important

both as a marker and as a turning point of the genre that it is necessary to quote it in full:

Near this Spot

are deposited the Remains of one

who possessed Beauty without Vanity,

Strength without Insolence,

Courage without Ferocity,

and all the Virtues of Man without his Vices.

This Praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery

if inscribed over human Ashes,

is but a just tribute to the Memory of

B O A T S W A I N, a D O G,

who was born in Newfoundland May 1803

and died at Newstead Novr 18th 1808.

When some proud Son of Man returns to Earth,

Unknown to Glory but upheld by Birth,

The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,

And storied urns record who rests below:

When all is done, upon the Tomb is seen

Not what he was, but what he should have been.

But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,

47
 The first to welcome, foremost to defend,

Whose honest heart is still his Masters own,

Who labours, fights, lives, breaths for him alone,

Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,

Deny'd in heaven the Soul he held on earth:

While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven:

And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven,

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,

Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,

Who knows thee well, must quit thee with disgust,

Degraded mass of animated dust!

Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,

Thy tongue hypocrisy, thy heart deceit,

By nature vile, ennobled but by name,

Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.

Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn,

Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.

To mark a friend's remains these stones arise

I never knew but one -- and here he lies.

The epitaph has much in common with the two examples quoted above, in that it

criticizes humankind for its general lack of morality. Man dies and is celebrated with “the

sculptor’s art” and “storied urns,” while dogs receive nothing. Neither is the problem

48
limited to worldly concerns; the dog has “all the virtues of man without his vices,” and

yet is “deny’d in heaven the soul he held on earth.” However, Byron’s epitaph to

Boatswain differs in tone from the previous two; Boatswain’s death is not merely a

pretense for condemning the flaws of humanity. Byron may be as disgusted with the

humans who remain alive as he is sorrowful at the loss of his Newfoundland, but the

poem’s weightiness leaves no doubt that he is genuinely grieving for the dog who rabies

took from him far too early, at the age of five.18

While the anonymous reader of Molesworth’s epitaph and monument to his

greyhound merely made fun of him, Byron’s readers had wider reactions to this epitaph.

They ranged from disgust at his “attachment to quadrupeds” and his privileging of them

over humankind, to a desire to show him that (specifically female) companionship wasn’t

all that bad:

“…his lordship at once astonished and disgusted the world, and more particularly

the vicinity of his seat, by assigning to a brute a grave amidst the consecrated

tombs of his ancestors, and by erecting to the memory of this canine acquaintance

a superb monument, inscribed with an epitaph the product of his own romantic

brain. (“Lord Byron,” 385)

***

Yet mark, mistaken man, a truth more clear,

18
Other critics disagree with me on this point to varying degrees, largely because Byron’s friend John Cam
Hobhouse claimed to have written the prose portion of the epitaph as a joke. Regardless, Byron chose to
have it engraved on the monument. Kenyon-Jones agrees: what the epitaph “does not do is mock its own
feelings for an apparently inappropriate object, nor—given that its predominant vein is ironical and the
subject is an animal—ironize enough” (12).
49
 He was not form’d to breathe a higher sphere.

True to the task assign’d, his faithful breast

Found, in his Master’s smile, its perfect rest.

Dare not accuse th’ unerring hand of Heaven

His little spark of life was lent, not given. (“To Lord Byron,” ll. 8-13)

In the first quote, a self-proclaimed “censor” marvels at Byron’s audacity in burying his

dog among his ancestors’ tombs, and providing a “superb monument,” no less. This

offense is compounded by the fact that Byron is a nobleman who is supposed to be setting

an example for the lower classes. In the second, a “young lady,” “F. M.,” first praises

Byron for justly celebrating “a faithful friend,” but then claims that Byron goes too far;

she chastises him for suggesting that Boatswain deserves a soul in heaven like that “he

held on earth.” A dog lives and dies only by the relationship he holds with his master, she

writes, and one should not “accuse th’ unerring hand of Heaven” of granting a soul to a

dog. Boatswain’s life was “lent, not given” to him by God; he possesses no eternal life.19

The more common reaction to Byron’s “Epitaph to a Dog,” however, was sympathy and

emulation. Fellow dog-lovers adopted the epitaph and edited it to reflect the details of

their own dogs’ deaths. In 1814, an early example, an anonymous author in The Weekly

Entertainer changes the location and dates of Boatswain’s death to describe his/her own

dog (“Epitaph on a Dog”). Just at the close of the Victorian era, John De Morgan writes

of Pompey, “a dog who was born in 1891 and died at Balgulholly, 1902,” whose

19
In A.A. W.’s “To Lord Byron, Written After Perusing his Epitaph on a Newfoundland Dog,” the author
upbraids Byron for painting such a misanthropic view of human nature. S/he says nothing about Boatswain.

50
monument cites the prose epitaph verbatim.20 That Boatswain’s epitaph was taken

seriously demonstrates a shift that had taken place in dog epitaphs as early as the late

1760s: though the lapdog tradition and the theriophilic tradition would not die out

completely until the 1830s, a movement had begun to mourn pets with sincerity. In fact,

from Byron’s time onward, theriophily itself became less satirical and more sincere.

Rather than laughing at mankind’s deficiencies, dog epitaphs bemoaned, to a greater or

lesser extent, that “man…claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.”

VI: The Question of Animal Souls

Joshua Scodel, in his book The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and

Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth, argues that pet epitaphs increased in the age of

growing social tensions due to the development of the middle class:

It became fashionable for the privileged to compose epitaphs upon their laborers,

domestic servants, and pets. Paternal epitaphs upon the lower classes, or upon pets

that could represent the lower classes, nostalgically reaffirmed the affective bond

between the ostensibly benign elite and the supposedly contented lower

orders…While [epitaphs upon the “great”] increasingly consisted of personal

laments for irreplaceable individuals and extended pleas for the sympathetic

response of strangers, [epitaphs for the lowly] redeployed brief, impersonal

panegyric rhetoric in order to commemorate the simple, generic values of the

lowly. (352)

20
De Morgan himself seems unaware that the words were Byron’s.

51
While Scodel sees late-eighteenth-century pet epitaphs as generic and impersonal

attempts to calm social unrest, I see many of them as genuine expressions of loss. The

sincerity of mourning that began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as

the lapdog and theriophilic traditions subsided was marked in large part by the debate

over animal souls. Animals morphed in the British imagination from “shapely” objects, to

servants, to erotic subjects, to ethical beings, to souls over the course of the seventeenth

through the nineteenth centuries. Other scholars, including Kenyon-Jones and Diana

Donald, have undertaken the history of thought underlying the question of animal souls

from the Greeks to the Romantics. Though the Church of England officially did not grant

animals souls, by the mid-eighteenth century, some religious thinkers backed the claims

of their predecessors Pythagoras, Plutarch, and Michel de Montaigne by believing in

animal immortality. In Picturing Animals in Britain, 1750-1850, Donald names the Revs.

John Hildrop, Richard Dean, and Bishop Joseph Butler as three such progressive

clergymen who published treatises which included discussions of the animal afterlives. I

would add the well-known dissenter John Wesley, who preached a sermon called “The

General Deliverance” in 1781, in which he argued that animals have afterlives. God gave

man dominion over the animal kingdom, making man the link between God and the

animals. After the Fall, Wesley claims, this link was broken, and animals paid for

humans’ sins (not their own, for animals cannot sin according to Wesley), having no

choice but to kill each other for their very survival. They also suffer at the hands of

humans, who should be their guardians, as God is man’s. Wesley does not say that

animals have souls, exactly, but he maintains that, as recompense for their suffering,

52
“something better remains after death” for them. He is careful, however, to emphasize

that while God cares for each of his creatures, he prizes humankind the most.

Interestingly, while Wesley asserts that the only way humans differ from animals is that

they can worship God, he speculates that in the afterlife animals will be elevated to

humankind’s current standing just as humans will be elevated to the angels’: that is, that

animals will be able to worship God in their afterlives.

Unlike Wesley, John Hildrop believed that animals were capable of sin, writing

that animals were “mired in sin by man’s fall from grace” and therefore also “destined for

redemption and eternal life” (qtd. in Donald, 109). Richard Dean’s view matched

Wesley’s; he argued that God would never allow animals “to suffer undeservedly at the

hands of man in their earthly existence without any compensatory justice and

beatification in the beyond” (qtd. in Donald, 109), a view that a poet in this section shares.

Like these treatises, dog epitaphs, too, became spaces to negotiate Christianity’s very

terms—that of immortality, and to whom it belongs.

As I indicated above, Byron’s poem and monument for Boatswain offered

consolation for other dog owners similarly stricken by the loss of the pets. Richard Harris

Barham’s popular The Ingoldsby Legends (1837) prefaces its poem “The Cynotaph” with

a paragraph which ends thus: “Tray was an attached favourite of many years’ standing.

Most people worth loving have had a friend of this kind; Lord Byron said he ‘never had

but one, and here he (the dog, not the nobleman) lies!’” Once the ground had been tread

by a poet as popular as Byron, it was easier (though not yet easy) for other poets and

readers to follow in his footsteps. Barham’s persona in “The Cynotaph” accepts that his

53
pet cannot be interred in Christian grounds, but meditates on how hard it is to bury him

elsewhere:

I am almost tempted to think it hard

That it may not be there, in yon sunny churchyard,

Where the green willows wave,

O’er the peaceful grave,

Which holds all that once was honest and brave,

Kind, and courteous, and faithful, and true;

Qualities, Tray, which were found in you.

But it may not be—yon sacred ground,

By holiest feelings fenced around,

May ne’er within its hollow’d bound

Receive the dust of a soul-less hound. (ll. 10-20)

We cannot be sure that the “holiest feelings” do not belong to Tray’s owner as well as

Christianity at large, and the potential play on “soul-less” (is it that the dog has no soul,

or simply “less” soul, than humankind?) contributes to this sense of uncertainty. The rest

of the poem has a lighter, humorous effect, as Tray’s master decides he doesn’t want Tray

buried in Westminster or St. Paul’s. Eventually he chooses to bury him “At the root of

this gnarl’d and time-worn tree / Where Tray and I / Would often lie” (ll. 167-169).

Though relatively few poems discuss the loss felt when a dog isn’t allowed a

Christian burial, many more approach the question of animal souls in a less material way.

54
In his 1785 epitaph to his “little dog” Sappho, Rev. Thomas Sedgewick Whalley not only

proclaims that animals have souls, but that their eternal lives are recompense from God

for putting them at the mercy of human cruelty:

Was not the animal that licks thy hand

Alike created by the hand of God,

Tho’ form’d the creature of thy proud command,

Bow’d to thy will, and subject of thy nod?

Slave to thy will!—yet canst thou, dar’st thou ween,

That the poor labouring brute, that feels thy sway

In bitterness, as thro’ life’s gloomy scene

He groans, and pants along the weary way;

The blameless victim of thy wanton rage,

And meekly bending to thy tyrant laws;

Dar’st thou suppose his wrongs shall not engage

A righteous God to vindicate his cause?

Pains, sharp as mortal pains, the brute has felt,

By fell disease and cruel want opprest;

Shar’d human misery, tho’ human guilt

Ne’er stained the mansion of his purer breast.

55
 Thus feeling sore the curse of being here,

Has Heaven been deaf to his unconscious cries,

Whose groans of suffering, more than thine severe,

Appeal for equal justice to the skies. (ll. 29-48)

The poem’s persona affirms that the fact that God made an animal means that animals

will be recompensed for the cruelty they endure at human hands. This is all the more true

since “human guilt…[n]e’er stained the mansion of his purer breast.” These were rather

radical opinions for an ordained clergyman and a Cambridge professor of religion.

Perhaps concerned that he will be placed in Wesley’s camp, Whalley plays defense a few

stanzas later, when he declares that his convictions are “far from impious” since “what’s

so plainly spirit cannot die.” Whalley suggests that it is only human short-sightedness that

prevents us from seeing the spirit in all animals, human and nonhuman alike.

Similarly, Robert Southey ends his 1797 epitaph on his childhood spaniel by

declaring that there is a heaven for animals.

But fare thee well! mine is no narrow creed;

And He who gave thee being did not frame

The mystery of life to be the sport

Of merciless man! There is another world

For all that live and move—a better one!

Where the proud bipeds, who would fain confine

56
 Infinite Goodness to the little bounds

Of their own charity, may envy thee! (ll. 30-38)

The poem asserts that animals were not created solely to “be the sport…[of] merciless

man” and that to think this is the case is “narrow.” The better world Southey claims for

animals is a heaven superior to human heaven, where humans will somehow “envy”

animals’ positions.

Similar to Southey’s is an 1875 anonymous poem, “Our Old Dog Jack,” which

speculates about another “planet” for dogs, who lead hard lives at the mercy of

humankind, especially of science:

Old Jack! I sometimes wondering muse

If that thy being can be o’er

Or whether for the canine race

Some planet may not be in store,

Where dogs may have a little peace,

After rough life of kicks and blows,

Scant meals, hard work, and shelter poor;

Some compensation for their woes—

And where the vivisector’s knife

May never meet their pleading eyes,

57
 For Science, blest with finer sense,

Needs not the cruel sacrifice—

Like Rev. Whalley’s poem, the author imagines that animals are compensated for the

hardships they endure thanks to their contact with humans. The late-nineteenth century

concern over vivisection, especially, makes its way into this poem, transforming the dog

into a sacrificial martyr. Though the poem does not imply any sort of sainthood for

vivisected dogs, it would not be much of a stretch to imagine an epitaph in which this was

the case. Indeed, the monument for the Brown Dog in Battersea, South London was

erected in 1906 in order to remember a martyr of vivisection and, in the view of Hilda

Kean, indict mankind with failing to be worthy of canine loyalty.21 In Chapter 3 I will

discuss vivisection in dog autobiographies, in which dogs are given a voice rather than

just their “pleading eyes” to persuade humans not to harm them in the name of science.

Other mourners tried to take comfort in a pagan, rather than Christian, view of

animal afterlives. The theories of Pythagoras, especially, were comforting to some.

Pythagoras believed that the souls of humans and animals alike were immortal and

underwent multiple reincarnations, as in Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle’s 1773 poem

for his spaniel:

And, if Pythagoras hath truly taught,

That future joy by former merit’s brought,

She may perhaps, chang’d to a snow dove,

21
The Brown Dog was not a pet and was more a stand-in for all vivisected animals than for an individual.

58
 Sleep in the bosom of the Queen of love;

Or haply may her beauteous form retain,

To scour with Dian’s Nymphs the verdant plain.

But to her soul should PERFECT bliss be given

For virtues past, she asks no other Heaven,

Than here again midst flowery fields to rove,

And here again to share her Mistress’ love. (ll. 9-18)

The persona imagines the dog as a dove and a nymph, but finally as herself again.

Imagining the dog reincarnated as a dove provides comfort, but it also betrays a lingering

hope in Christian immortality; the dog’s master imagines his dog reincarnated as the

symbol of the Holy Spirit. (As we will see later, the dove was also a source of hope for

Michael Field in Whym Chow: Flame of Love.)

By 1786 animal souls were contemplated often enough that Joseph Williams could

make fun of the idea in his poem on the fate of a dog named Draper:

Yet if the Muse prophetic Pow’rs possess,

(And where’s the Muse but boasts him more or less?)

He shall yet rise, on some warm Summer’s Day,

When full blown Maggots animate his clay,

And wond’rous Change! the new Creation spread,

In busy Crowds, around their wat’ry Bed. (ll. 27-32)

59
Though all of the Muses may “boast” of Draper, the persona imagines him lying in a

damp hole, surrounded and consumed by “busy Crowds” of maggots, at the time of the

Second Coming. Such a poem would not be possible outside of the context of the dog

epitaph and its questions about canine immortality.

Perhaps the most touching dog epitaphs are those that either address the shame of

mourning a pet or those that uphold the status quo by celebrating a dog just as he or she

was, without a recourse to the discussion of souls at all. Just as Barham leans on Byron to

defend his grief, so many other dog owners try to find an appropriate audience with

which to share their tears and beg sympathy. The following verse-letter (1804) is

addressed to “Mrs. Blakeway, of Shrewsbury,” from “S. Edwards”:

To you, dear friend, I make my sorrows known,

Whose mind is fondly partial as my own,

And both alike inferior beings view

Giv’n for our use, our pleasure, comfort too. (ll. 1-4)

To you be freely my regret express’d,

And thus th’ upbraiders of my grief address’d,

Blame not the pitying tears that fill my eyes

For a lov’d fav’rite that now lifeless lies… (ll. 15-18)

Edwards believes in the Christian view that humans are stewards to animals, which are

given for “our use, pleasure, comfort too.” He chooses the audience for his “pitying tears”

60
carefully, and rightly so, given reactions toward Molesworth’s grief and apparently the

reactions he himself received (“the upbraiders of my grief”).

By the end of the new century in which he was writing, however, S. Edwards and

his grief would be in good company. As my examples have demonstrated, dog epitaphs in

the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries did not necessarily form a straightforward

chronological line from satirical to sincere, though this is the general trend; yet by the end

of the nineteenth century, a satirical dog epitaph was hard to find indeed, and S.

Edwards’s sentiments would have been met with near-universal sympathy. Towards the

end of his career, Matthew Arnold wrote two lengthy and highly sincere epitaphs for his

dachshunds, Geist and Kaiser, which demonstrate that grief over lost dogs was a perfectly

sound occasion for poetry by this time.22

As I have shown, epitaphs to dogs, even those pre-Darwin, reflect a faith—or lack

thereof—that questions the reservation of immortality to humans alone. If not outright

declaring that heaven is attainable for dogs, these epitaphs speculate about how “hard” it

is to follow a religion that denies dogs souls. After the advent of evolutionary thought, the

dog provided an index of humans’ uncertainties about their own afterlives: if their own

fates were in doubt, what harm was there in attributing souls to dogs? Whether one

questioned his or her own immortality in the light of Darwin or not, there was a religious

discontent present, one which is based upon the Romantics’ and their predecessors’ ideas

about the value of the lives of the lowly. As published epitaphs decreased, more radical,

because more physical and more public, methods of memorialization increased. It is to

this phenomenon that we now turn.

22
Arnold’s epitaphs to animals are located in the “Later Poems” section of The Works of Matthew Arnold
in Fifteen Volumes, Vol. II.
61
 VII: From Grave to Page: Monumentalizing Merit

As the nineteenth century progressed, the number of published epitaphs for dogs

decreased. Perhaps the novelty of epitaphs to pets had simply worn off, reducing

publishers’ desire to feature epitaphs in their periodicals.23 By the advent of the Victorian

period, what was once curious was now commonplace, and the genre became formulaic

and tired.24 Yet, though fewer epitaphs were printed, physical monuments to dogs

cropped up in greater numbers. Printed epitaphs paved the way of approval for more

expensive, more physical forms of memorialization, especially public (or able to be

visited by the public) burial grounds.

Up until the mid-nineteenth century, monuments to pets had been almost

exclusively the province of the elite and the aristocracy, as we saw with Molesworth and

Byron. That the elite created monuments for their pets eased the problems of Christian

burial: the elite owned their own estates and could do what they pleased with them,

including create memorials for animals. Late-Victorian dog cemeteries can also be found

at Upton House and Country Park in Poole, Abbington Castle Gardens, and at Thomas

Hardy’s home, Max Gate, all in Dorset. The wealthy Sir John Soane, a London architect

who collected ancient and medieval friezes, reliefs, bronzes, and sarcophagi, managed to

create an elaborate memorial for his wife’s spaniel Fanny when she died in 1820. It is a

tall, elaborate monument engraved with the words “Alas! Poor Fanny!” and her birth and

death dates, squeezed into the tiny courtyard of his Lincoln’s Inn Fields home.

23
According to Bernhardt-Kabisch, epitaphs were on the decline more generally after the Romantic period.
24
Scodel argues that all epitaphs become formulaic at this point in literary history as writers turn to more
elegiac modes. He claims that this is especially true of epitaphs to servants and dogs.

62
Even before the dog died, Sir Walter Scott had an effigy sculpted for his favorite

deerhound, Maida. The life-sized sculpture sat to the right of the entrance to Abbotsford,

Scott’s estate. When Maida passed away in 1824, Scott had him buried beneath his effigy,

which reads: “Maidae marmorea dormis sub imagine Maida / Ante fores domini sit tibi

terra levis,” translated as “Beneath the sculptured form which late you bore, / Sleep

soundly Maida at your master’s door [Figure 2].”25 The direct address to Maida indicates

that he thinks of him as residing underground, rather than as a spirit in heaven, and that

Scott himself is his “master” rather than God.

[Figure 2: Scott’s effigy of Maida]

This is not to say that only the very wealthy buried their pets. The Brontë family

buried Keeper, Emily’s mastiff, and Flossie, Anne’s spaniel, in their garden in Haworth,
25
Scott claimed that “an eminent hand…Englished” his epitaph to Maida. I have been unable to ascertain
whether this was a way to work around his own egoism (which seems most likely) or if someone else
actually translated it.

63
North Yorkshire. On the other side of this garden, separated by a brick wall, is the

cemetery of the church of which Patrick Brontë was curate and where all the Brontës

except Anne are buried.26 Here there is, quite literally, a dividing line between those with

souls and those without. Beginning in the 1840s, however—just at the time that literary

epitaphs to dogs decreased—more public pet memorials began to crop up.27 Edinburgh

Castle opened up a small cemetery for soldiers’ dogs, which could be visited by anyone

who came to the castle. Canine sacrifices were not at the same level as those of their

masters, but they did begin to warrant preferential treatment and honored tombs in high-

status locations—though, notably, still not in holy ground. [Figure 3]

The most famous dog monument is also in Edinburgh: that for Greyfriars Bobby,

the Edinburgh Skye terrier who reputedly lay on the grave of his dead master for fourteen

years. In 1873 the Baroness Burdett-Coutts paid for William Brodie to sculpt a statue of

Bobby, which was placed outside the gates of Greyfriars Kirkyard on Candlemaker Row

[Figure 4]. In this case, then, a woman of means chose to create a public monument, one

which could be shared by all of Edinburgh. As Hilda Kean has demonstrated, this

monument was as much a celebration of mankind as of Bobby; Bobby’s faithful waiting

proved what a good master his had been and therefore painted humankind in a positive

light. Young or old, rich or poor, mourning Bobby’s faithfulness brought Edinburgh

together. The egalitarian nature of the statue was enhanced by the fact that it originally

had two running fountains: a high one for people and a low one for dogs.

26
The tombstones, if there ever were any, are not visible today. It is possible that Rev. John Wade, the
person who bought the estate after the Brontës had died, gardened over any tombstones that had existed.
However, there is a tombstone, hidden by flowers, for Thomas, his cat.
27
Teresa Mangum has argued that Queen Victoria’s elaborate grief for King Albert—including the giant
monument erected for him—helped Victorians become comfortable with their own intense grief for pets.

64
[Figure 3: The soldiers’ dog cemetery at Edinburgh Castle]

65
 [Figure 4: Statue of Greyfriars Bobby]

The kirkyard plays an important role in the legend of Greyfriars Bobby. Bobby,

like all dogs, was not allowed in the kirkyard, but he snuck in night after night until the

authorities gave up on trying to keep him out. (Not only were dogs not allowed to be

buried in churchyards; they were not allowed to set foot into most of them, for fear that

they would dig up graves.) When Bobby died in 1872, it seemed right to bury him next to

his master, where he had spent all but his first two years of life. However, as this could

not be done, Bobby was buried in a flowerpot at the bottom of the churchyard gates—

similar to the way the Brontës’ pets were buried as close to the churchyard as possible.28

It was not until 1981 that the Dog Aid Society of Scotland erected a tombstone for Bobby

28
I have not read about the flowerpot anywhere, but this was the version of the story a tour guide gave me.
In a legend with so many different versions, this burial place seems as likely as any other.

66
within the kirkyard, which reads: “Let his loyalty & devotion be a lesson to us all.” This

tomb, which hearkens back to the idea that dogs have qualities superior to humans’, is the

first one sees upon setting foot in the yard. Its prominence is a reminder of how much

ideas about animal souls have changed in the past hundred years.

In 1881, around the same time as Bobby’s death, the first dog was buried in what is

now known as the Hyde Park Pet Cemetery [Figure 5]. The story goes that a horse

carriage ran over a Maltese, Cherry, whose owners were frequent visitors to Hyde Park.29

The keeper of the Victoria Gate Lodge, Mr. Winbridge, offered to bury him in the

Lodge’s garden. There was a funeral ceremony, and the dog’s tombstone read, “Poor

Cherry. Died April 28, 1881.” A contemporary visitor to the cemetery wrote that “[s]o

intelligent and so amiable a dog assuredly deserved a Christian burial” (630). What began

as a single favor escalated to over 300 graves in under a twenty-year period as other pet

owners asked that their animals, whether trodden by carriages or not, be buried in the

garden as well. Winbridge took on the responsibility of most of the burials and tombstone

erections himself, sometimes even footing the costs. For the first time, then, grieving pet

owners of all classes had a place to bury their dead, despite any monetary concerns.

Though the Lodge grounds were not sacred, dog owners frequently chose to engrave the

tombs with Bible passages. “Every beast of the field is thine, saith the Lord” (Genesis

3:14) reads one; another, “Not one of them is forgotten before God” (Luke 12:6). Taken

all together, the tombstones become a bold defense against the exclusions of Christianity.

29
As with Greyfriars Bobby, there are different versions of this story. In the version of the story told by the
Royal Parks today, Cherry was run over by a carriage. However, a contemporaneous account of the
cemetery claims that the dog run over was named Kaiser, and that he shared a tombstone with Cherry. See
E.A. Hodgetts, “A Cemetery for Dogs.”

67
This is also the case for the collection of poetry to which I now turn: Whym Chow, Flame

of Love.

[Figure 5: Hyde Park Pet Cemetery]

VIII: God Spelled Backwards: Whym Chow, Flame of Love

Whym Chow: Flame of Love is a collection of poems mourning a Chow-Chow. Its

authors were the aunt/niece lesbian couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who

wrote under the pseudonym Michael Field. Both Bradley and Cooper were proud

paganists up until the time of the dog’s death. Upon the event of—in fact, because of—

his death, however, something strange happened: Bradley and Cooper decided to convert

to Catholicism. Their collection of poetry intertwines their pagan past with their Catholic

present in order to comfort themselves for the loss of Whym, whom they see as both
68
Bacchus and a member of the Holy Trinity. Michael Field claims an afterlife for Whym

via these roles, and the book of poetry itself becomes a relic, a physical link to Whym

after his death. The book is a very notable object; it was bound in russet-colored suede to

mimic the dog’s coat, emphasizing the Fields’ obsession with the dog’s body [Figure 6].

It is a mourning object, a less-gruesome version of dog-skin books and muffs.

[Figure 6: Whym Chow, Flame of Love]

The dog himself was deeply connected to feelings of loss. In 1897 Cooper’s father

died while hiking in the Alps and Bradley gave Cooper a Chow puppy to console her

partner. Named “Whym Chow” after Edward Whymper, a hiker who searched for the

69
father’s body, the Chow became much more than a consolatory companion: he became a

divinity. After his death in 1906 Bradley and Cooper (but mostly Cooper) composed

Whym Chow: Flame of Love in his memory. The poems were not published until 1914, a

year after Cooper’s death and shortly before Bradley’s. Even then only twenty-seven

copies were printed by the Eragny Press.

This thirty-poem sequence, written loosely in the form of a Latin requiem mass, is

usually treated as a mere oddity, a case of extreme and bizarre devotion to a dog even in

an age of intense sentimental attachment to pets. But, in addition to other roles, the poems

represent the culmination of poems about canine immortality, both Christian and pagan.30

Poem VI imagines Whym Chow’s entrance into heaven:

What is the other name of Love?

Has Love another name?

Yea, one that, when he came

To his Creator’s feet above,

Met his lone ear and thrilled

His grievous want, and filled

The chamber of his birth with new live fire.

«Response, my Answer» was God’s cry.

30
The handful of critics who have seriously addressed the book have mostly considered how desire for the
dog represents alternative objects of romantic/sexual desire in general. Additionally, Jill R. Ehnenn argues
that when Whym Chow dies, the Fields’ elegiac mode changes: “…because the (queer) function of the
Michaels’ relationship with the chow renders it different than their relationship with other loved ones,
mourning him creates problems that the coauthors attempt to negotiate with literary tropes that diverge
from those in their earlier elegies.”
70
 O gift of joy to hear

The Godhead’s welcome clear… (VI, ll. 1-10)

Here, Whym Chow is synonymous with Love, or with God/Christ (1 John 4:8 and 1 John

4:16 both say that God is Love). Such claims about Whym are typical of the poems as a

whole. The dog is made whole again by his ascendance into Heaven (“thrilled…His

grievous want” and “filled / The chamber of his birth with new live fire”), much like

Christ is when he ascends after his crucifixion. The poems do not at all question Whym

Chow’s immortality, but brazenly stake out the dog’s place as a (mutable) member of the

Holy Trinity: he is sometimes God, sometimes Christ, and sometimes the Holy Spirit/a

dove. The Fields defend this view with a poem called “Trinity,”

O God, no blasphemy

It is to feel we loved in trinity,

To tell Thee that I loved him as Thy Dove

Is loved, and is Thy own… (V, ll. 3-6)

If God is Love, the poem suggests, then for the two Fields and Whym Chow to love

together is not blasphemy, but Godlike.

The end of poem XVII, “Created,” celebrates Whym Chow’s “unfettered soul”:

For all that is created bears

A limit scarcely to be borne,

71
 Till out of it, though unawares,

A Spirit of new life is drawn:

So thy love’s unfettered soul

Deathless through thy body stole,

Levying on thy days its toll

Of subjection—So to-day

Dead, thou takest living way,

And with my soul its freedom shares. (XVII, ll. 21-30)

After death (“A limit scarcely to be borne”), a new “Spirit” is birthed, which “deathless”

“steals” through Whym Chow’s body. Though dead, Whym Chow is only now alive and

free in soul.

Finally, in poem XX, Whym Chow is reimagined as a constellation:

Doomed little wanderer, doomed to move

As Lion or Bear in heaven above

O little star, our woe!...

Thou wert not of a god en-starred,

When on thee fell that fortune hard

To wander here as in the sky

Those shining Beasts that no more die,

But in constellations spin.

Thou wert mortal to begin

72
 An endless movement so! (XX, ll. 1-10)

The view is less sanguine here, however, as Whym Chow is “doomed” to become “an

endless movement.” The poems often shift in tone from joyful optimism about the dog’s

spirit to despair over his absence, but Whym Chow’s immortality is never questioned.

By World War I, then, mourners were largely able to reconcile the idea of their

animals’ afterlives with their Christian beliefs (if less eccentrically than the Fields).

Indeed, the prominence of the pet cemetery today—and other pet-mourning practices,

such as cremation jewelry, stuffed replicas, and even taxidermy—speaks to the efficacy

of the Victorians’ means of dignifying their pets, who had become such crucial members

of the family over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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 CHAPTER 2

“DOGS DON’T MAKE MISTAKES”: MORALITY, SAGACITY, AND THE

EPISTEMOLOGY OF INSTINCT IN DETECTIVE AND SENSATION FICTION

Dog epitaphs praised dogs to high heaven. Midcentury, two new genres built

around dog-like behaviors—detective and sensation fiction—reinforced the idea that dogs

and their instincts were capable of great good. That is, when their instincts serve as an

alternate epistemology that dog-human teams, official or unofficial, could employ in order

to illuminate and/or fight crime. But the genres also tempered this praise by showing the

potential dangers of instinctive behavior in humans and animals alike. These paradoxical

ideas are the foundation for Victorian concerns about instinct and about using dogs to

fight crime.

Not all information in detective fiction is of the rational kind, despite what

decades of criticism would leave us to believe. Doctor Watson’s repeated comparison of

Sherlock Holmes—often considered the epitome of rationality—to a dog offers a starting

point for this chapter: describing Holmes’ process in The Sign of Four, Watson uneasily

reflects: “So swift, silent, and furtive were his movements, like those of a trained

bloodhound picking out a scent, that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he

would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law, instead of

exerting them in its defense” (44).

This chapter examines the role of dogs and the dog-like in sensation and detective

fiction. My archive includes actual canine detectives—such as those found in the fiction

of Arthur Conan Doyle, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Charles Dickens—

as well as Holmes himself. I argue that the connection Watson makes between Holmes as

74
detective and as potential criminal is a connection that is a sign of Holmes’s canine

nature. Instinct is key to all three roles in the overlapping roles of criminal, detective, and

dog. All have tightly linked roles, because all rely on instinct, to some degree—and

instinct is as indifferent to morality as it is to reason, meaning that it can lead one to do

things of varied moral standing.

I begin by investigating ideas about instinct and the related-but-crucially different

term “sagacity” during the period. Then I move to a discussion of how canine instinct is

often capable of dominating or at least assisting human abilities in detection and

sensation fiction, becoming as important to the narratives as ratiocination. The interest in

instinct does not end neatly here, however: dogs in Conan Doyle’s detective fiction do

not always act admirably, a problem that echoes the amorality or immorality of the

criminal and detective figures. These genres are ostensibly about punishing immoral

behavior and restoring order, but in Sherlock Holmes those acting instinctively, human

and animal alike, generally fail to uphold the standards that are so central to the narratives

of these two genres. This challenge to accepted procedures repeatedly reminds us why

Victorian readers were so discomfited by reliance on “instinct.”

I: Instinct

In the decades leading up to the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,

thinkers from the pedestrian to the professional contributed to a growing discussion: what

is instinct, and what is its relationship to reason? Often (and often confusedly) the two are

pictured either on a continuum or as complementary and interactive rather than in

opposition to one another. This was not the case with William Paley, however. In his

75
Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), Paley

described instinct as “a propensity, prior to experience, and independent of instruction”

(324). Paley uses birds as his example: they cannot reason, he states outright, and yet they

build nests and keep their eggs warm. This is true even when the eggs are not fertilized.

Surely if they could reason, they would not sit on unfertilized eggs, claims Paley; this is

how he eliminates learning from observation and/or instruction as possible explanations

for birds’ behavior. Under Paley’s definition, animals appear as puppets in the hand of

Mother Nature, lacking any mental faculty at all. He also anticipates Darwin in equating

instinct with “an anxiety for the general preservation of the species; a kind of patriotism;

a solicitude lest the…race should cease from the creation” (335).

Likely responding to Paley’s and other similar statements, in 1847 Jonathan

Couch, a member of the Royal Geological Society, summarized many of the threads of

the pre-Darwinian discussion in Illustrations of Instinct Deduced from the Habits of

British Animals:

English Poets and Philosophers have said, that in his actions Man is governed by

Reason, as Animals by Instinct; and they represent the latter principle as an

unreflecting impulse, which, under all circumstances, “must go right,” without

consciousness or control in the creature possessing it. It is a consequence of this

mode of regarding the subject, that some striking displays of intelligent action

among animals have been passed over with little or no attention; and we have lost

the advantage of lessons they might have taught us in the philosophy of even the

human understanding. (v)

76
Here Couch considers the blanket term “instinct” an obstacle to humans’ ability to

recognize actual animal intelligence. However, when he defines reason in animals, he

writes that “its sole appropriation is as the servant of Instinct, to guide the latter in its

development.” For man, on the other hand, instincts “are only designed to be the servants,

not the masters of his reason, to whose perfection they contribute” (163). In other words,

humans can choose to either follow or ignore their instincts after their reason vets them.

Any attempt Couch makes to dignify animal instinct and grant animals reason is muddled

by his division between the ways instinct serves humans and animals differently. To

make matters even more confusing, he writes the following of the titular “illustrations of

instinct”: “animals are capable of pursuing a process of reasoning from facts or principles

recognized by themselves” (197, emphasis mine). The implication is that these

“principles” would be unrecognizable to humans.

Couch’s ideas were somewhat similar to Darwin’s. Darwin struggled to explain

instincts in the insects he studied, but ultimately came to the conclusion that they were

indeed inherited evolutionarily, despite some appearances to the contrary.31 Yet he still

refers to instinct as a “mental faculty” (240):

An action, which we ourselves require experience to enable us to perform, when

performed by an animal, more especially by a very young one, without

experience, and when performed by many individuals in the same way, without

their knowing for what purpose it is performed, is usually said to be instinctive.

31
See Chapter 7 of On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s trouble explaining the behaviors of colonial insects
with sterile workers is what led him to the group theory of natural selection.
77
 But I could show that none of these characters are universal. A little dose of

judgment or reason, as Pierre Huber expresses it, often comes into play, even with

animals low in the scale of nature. (262)

Like Couch, Darwin tries to have it both ways: he simultaneously limits instinct by

referring to it as an evolutionarily inherited process, and dignifies it by declaring it a

mental process. If instincts were merely passed down from generation to generation, then

animals could receive no credit for their actions as Couch (at least nominally) suggests

they should.

Darwin was later more generous with his attribution of mental capacity to

animals: he claimed in The Descent of Man (1871) that dogs, especially, could reason, and

was sanguine enough to say that “[o]nly a few persons now dispute that animals possess

some power of reasoning” (96). He cites the example of sledge dogs, who fan out when

approaching thin ice. “Now, did the dogs act thus from the experience of each individual,

or from the example of the older and wiser dogs, or from an inherited habit, that is from

instinct?” (96), he asks, leaving his own question open-ended. Here, the concern is as

much about where instinct comes from as what it allows animals to know and do. Though

deeming animal instinct the sign of mental capacity, thinkers like Couch and Darwin

were both hesitant to attribute animals mental capacities similar or equal to those of

humans, and desirous to do so.

The instinct/reason debate was continued by Darwin’s friend and much younger

protégé George Romanes twenty-odd years after On the Origin of Species. In his works

Animal Intelligence (1882) and Mental Evolution of Animals (1883) Romanes strove to

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follow the mental and emotional Line of Descent rather than just the physical, and he had

Darwin’s own notes to work with. Romanes writes in Animal Intelligence that

instinct involves mental operations; for this is the only point that serves to

distinguish instinctive action from reflex. Reflex action, as already explained, is

non-mental neuromuscular adaptation to appropriate stimuli; but instinctive action

is this and something more; there is in it the element of mind. (11)

Romanes still distinguishes instinct from reason, however, claiming that it is “formally

exclusive, on the one hand of reflex action, and on the other of reason” (12). Reason, for

Romanes, is “the faculty of deducing inferences from a perceived equivalency of

relations,” and “intelligence” is “the designation of [reason’s] lower manifestations

[when] it sounds somewhat unusual to employ the word reason” (14). Perhaps

unsurprisingly, given his predecessors Couch and Darwin, Romanes credits animals with

“intelligence” instead of reason:

…it sounds less unusual to speak of the oyster as displaying intelligence than as

displaying reason…I shall always speak of intelligence and intellect in antithesis

to instinct, emotion, and the rest, as implying mental faculties the same in kind as

those which in ourselves we call rational.” (14-15)

Romanes says that he will use words that he essentially considers to be synonyms in

different ways when he refers to animals versus when he refers to humans. It would seem

as though the Victorians were afraid to concede that animals, with whom they knew

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themselves to be more closely linked than ever in a post-Darwinian age, actually shared

the same faculties with them.

From the early nineteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, then, definitions

of instinct evolved from something akin to a reflex to a (at least partially) mental

operation, which no thinker was willing to compare to human reason in an unequivocal,

unqualified way. However, as Darwin more optimistically posited, most people believed

that animals did possess at least some semblance of reason. The hestitation to declare

animals reasonable beings is understandable if we recall Harriet Ritvo’s landmark book

The Animal Estate, in which she describes the Victorian period as a time in which

“animals never talked back” (5)—a time in which mankind was insistent on maintaining

its elevated position over the rest of creation despite the shock imposed by Darwin. Even

though humans were forced to view themselves as animals after the publication of On the

Origin of Species, Darwinian thought could even be used to justify man’s dominance

over the rest of the animal kingdom: after all, evolution led to man as its culminating

achievement. That mankind was obsessed with preserving his dominance is evident in

these thinkers’ hesitations; yet, on the other hand, I would suggest that even to consider

the possibility of animal reasoning—or at the very least to view instinct alone as a worthy

epistemology—opened up the floodgates to considering dogs as possible partners, in

detection and crime fighting or otherwise. Philip Howell has already pointed out that

Darwin employed dogs and dog anecdotes, more so than any other animal, as a means of

domesticating his research and his arguments, and I will argue that this locating of the

dog in the study is akin to locating him on the streets as a partner in detection.32

32
See Howell, Chapter 4.
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 However, the threat of irrational and instinctive behavior still loomed large,

despite any advances Couch, Darwin, and Romanes made for the advancement of animal

instinct. In the late 1870s the emerging field of criminal anthropology further pinned

down and analyzed the fear inherent in recognizing such a human-animal kinship. In his

1879 Criminal Man, the famous Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso

describes his discovery of a depression in the skull of a notorious criminal:

At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain

under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being

who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the

inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, solitary

lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found

in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight,

tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving of evil for

its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the

corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood. (xiv-xv)

The extremely vivid picture drawn by the description of the criminal skull betrays more

than a hint of panic about the powers of instinct run wild in humans. Indeed, the over-the-

top rhetoric paints criminal behavior as much worse than animal behavior, because

presumably animals are not “craving of evil for its own sake.”

As suggested by these representative examples, the Victorians painted at least

three pictures of instinct. In one, animals and their instincts have something to teach us if

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we just pay attention; their behaviors should not merely be dismissed, even if they are

unconscious acts. In the second, Darwinian view, instincts are a fascinating but neutral

part of an evolutionary heritage; or, later in his career, a way that animals are more like

us in mind than we may feel comfortable admitting. Similarly, for Romanes, animal

instincts show at least some evidence of mental processes like ours and work in tandem

with animal “intelligence.” And finally, for Lombroso, instincts have an ugly side

(though Lombroso also believed that criminals could be cured). That one word has three

distinct connotations suggests how much views of instinct were in flux in the Victorian

period. Such flux has been well-accounted for by Kathleen Frederickson, who asserts that

reason and instinct were not, in fact, opposites in the nineteenth century; rather, “instinct

could appear as an alternative to, a pre-condition for, or a defining feature of civilized,

self-conscious rationality” (3). Frederickson is ultimately interested in instinct’s role in

governance, however, leaving room for a discussion on the line between instinct and

rationality with regards to animals and animalized people like Sherlock Holmes. In fact,

it is the very animalization of Holmes which makes him the detective he is.

II: Sagacity

There is another term applied to animals in the nineteenth century almost as often

as instinct: “sagacity.” A search in Google Ngrams shows that the two terms were used

about equally in English in the mid 1830s, though before 1835 sagacity was the more

popular term, and afterwards instinct was used much more heavily. (I suspect that

sagacity was replaced with the word reason when it came to animal intelligence as the

century progressed.) But what is the relationship between the two words? I argue that if

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we view instinct and reason as opposite poles, sagacity aligns much more closely with

reason—and that this word, rather than “reason,” became the one that people were

comfortable attributing to animals. “Sagacity,” though it was in actuality used in

reference to humans about as often as it was used for animals, seemed a safer term,

secure as it was from the contested terms of the instinct versus reason debate.33 Yet, for

animals, it may be most accurate to view sagacity as a term that encompasses both reason

and instinct: a term which marries the mind with the body, and acknowledges the

strength of multiple epistemologies working in conjunction with each other. Similarly,

just as we often associate sagacity today with wisdom in old age, we are usually referring

not only knowledge, but also the intuition that develops from long experience. Given that

smell is connected to instinct in its embodiedness, the multiple definitions of the word in

the Oxford English Dictionary make a great deal of sense:

The quality of being sagacious

1. Acute sense of smell.

2. a. Acuteness of mental discernment; aptitude for investigation or

discovery; keenness and soundness of judgement in the estimation of persons and

conditions, and in the adaptation of means to ends; penetration, shrewdness.

b. pl. Sagacious observations.

3. Of animals: Exceptional intelligence; skill in the adaptation of means to

ends.

33
For instance, of the top ten results for “sagacity” using Google Ngrams from 1812 to 1887, five refer to
animals.
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Notably, Definition 3 was first used in 1555 to describe a dog. Definition 1 was used

throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; by the nineteenth, “sagacity” was

never used exclusively as a synonym for the power of scent. By 1800, then, for animals,

intelligence gained via scenting was subsumed into a different, more celebral kind of

intelligence. Taken in sum, these definitions for “sagacity” give animals more credit than

the definition for “instinct,” since they allow for mental processes (“exceptional

intelligence”) as well as physical ones—shrewdness as well as smell.

For these reasons, when Watson says of Holmes, “I could not but think what a

terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the

law, instead of exerting them in its defense,” he effectively links Holmes’s hound-like

nature with his acuteness of mind. Holmes himself points to this acuity in a later story,

when his boredom over a lack of interesting cases has him meditating about his own

criminal potential: “This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than

[petty theft]…it is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal…how long could

I survive my own pursuit?” (913-914)

Sagacity appears as a title-word for a whole genre of anecdotes, which we can call

tales of canine sagacity. These tales proliferated in the decades up to and during the

nineteenth century, especially in newspapers and periodicals. Entire books collecting

such tales were published, as well, including a well-known one anthology edited by

Edward Jesse, Anecdotes of Dogs (1846). Jesse’s book uses the word “sagacity” to

describe dogs an astounding eighty-five times. Indeed, though Romanes claims to want to

limit anecdote in his scientific text, he too relies heavily upon anecdotal evidence. These

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tales generally tell stories about dogs who locate lost objects/lost or injured persons,

travel hundreds of miles home to their masters, apprehend murderers, or perform unusual

tricks. But some stand out, such as the tale of Cæsar:

The following is an instance of the sagacity of a Dog, and of his capability of

measuring time, if I may so call it.

There were two friends, one living in London, and the other at Guildford.

These friends were on terms of great intimacy; and for many years it had been the

custom of the London family to pass the Christmas at Guildford; and their

uniform practice was to arrive to dinner the day before Christmas-day, and to be

accompanied by a large spaniel, who was as great a favourite with the visited as

with the visiters. At the end of about seven years after this plan had been adhered

to, the two families had an unfortunate misunderstanding, which occasioned an

omission of the usual Christmas invitation. About an hour before dinner, on the

day before Christmas-day, the Guildford gentleman, standing at his window,

exclaimed to his wife, “Well, my dear, the W——’s have thought better of it; for I

declare they are coming as usual, although we did not invite them. Here comes

Cæsar to announce them!” and the dog came trotting up to the door, and was

admitted, as usual, to the parlour. The lady of the house gave orders to prepare

beds; dinner waited an hour; but no guests arrived. Caesar, after staying the exact

number of days he had been accustomed to, set off for home, and reached it in

safety. The correspondence which of necessity occurred, had the happy effect of

renewing the intercourse of the estranged friends; and as long as Cæsar lived, he

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 paid the annual visit in company with his master and mistress. (Saturday

Magazine, 240)

Cæsar’s apparent ability to tell time on such a large scale—he doesn’t simply know when

it’s dinner time, for instance—would seem to have little to do with any of the usual feats

in tales of canine sagacity. He is not exhibiting loyalty to a master or following a master’s

instructions; rather, he has a mind of his own and is acting accordingly. Such examples

allow us to see dogs at their most intelligent, their most “human.”

Sagacity may allude primarily to mental ability such as Cæsar demonstrates, but it

is important to note that the Victorians did not devalue or discount scent as a way of

knowing—or, as Vicki Hearne would have it—believing, in the way that for humans

seeing is believing:

For dogs, scenting is believing. Dogs’ noses are to ours as a map of the surface of

our brains is to a map of the surface of an egg. A dog who did comparative

psychology might easily worry about our consciousness or lack thereof, the way

we worry about the consciousness of a squid. (79)

Hearne continues: “[Scent] is a metonymy for knowledge usually, the way the notion of a

Bloodhound nose is used in detective fiction to refer to intuition” (80). For Hearne, as for

the definition of sagacity, knowledge is not equated with—or at least not exclusively

with—reason; rather, it consists partially of what can be ascertained by our senses. This is

true of humans with sight as much as it is true of dogs with scent.

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 Hearne brings another word into the equation: intuition. Of the modern definitions

in the Oxford English Dictionary, these two seem to directly contradict each other:

5a. The immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention

of any reasoning process; a particular act of such apprehension.

b. Immediate apprehension by the intellect alone; a particular act of such

apprehension.

How can something be apprehended without the use of reason but also be apprehended

by the intellect alone? The slippage between the two opposing definitions further points to

the difficulty in distinguishing between reason and instinct and in fact suggests that the

two are not the polar opposites that they are sometimes made out to be. Sagacity, then,

can be viewed as a sort of bridge term between the two. When Holmes claims that he is

operating under intuition, he is uniting his two modes of knowing, reason and instinct,

under one roof—just like the term sagacity unites them for dogs. As Jesse writes, “In the

dog…the sense of smell predominates; and we accordingly find that, through the medium

of this sense, his mental faculties are most commonly exercised” (323).

III: Breeding Instinct

The Victorians believed that they could maximize the powers of instinct (and

other qualities) by selective breeding. Foxhounds bred for hunting and bloodhounds bred

for tracking are the most notable examples. In this way the powers of canine instinct were

also tied up in discussions of purity and pure breed superiority. Expectedly, then, most of

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the dogs I will discuss in the sections below are purebred in their respective novels.

However, we see this confidence about breed challenged in the Holmes canon. Looking

back to my introduction, we can see that while only Holmes himself is described as a

purebred, he also is the “dog” most deficient in the necessary skill set for tracking. The

best tracker is paradoxically a mongrel, Toby—the half spaniel, half lurcher from The

Sign of Four. And Toby is not the only dog that Holmes employs for his nosework. In

“The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter” (1904) he borrows Pompey, a “squat, lop-

eared, white-and-tan dog, something between a beagle and a foxhound” who helps

Holmes and Watson on the track. (Holmes had doused the wheels of the carriage in

question with aniseed to give Pompey a scent to follow.) Given the obsession with dog

breeding in the Victorian era, it is interesting that neither of the tracking dogs Holmes

uses are bloodhounds or even purebreds and that Watson describes only Holmes himself

as a purebred dog. The Victorians remarked often upon different breeds’ propensities for

different jobs and related it to the concept of instinct. Take, for example, the following:

The performances of the shepherd’s dog, which would seem to be the

result of little less than human intelligence, are much too artificial, and too much

in opposition to the nature of the animal, to be attributed to instinct, and yet the

young dogs of this breed appear to have a propensity to the performance of these

services, or as the shepherds say, a thorough-bred one will take to them naturally.

I do not believe that the same things could be taught to dogs of other

breeds, such as the hound, the greyhound, or the pointer, by the most skillful

training…from these observations, and from many others that might perhaps not

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 be intelligible to those who have not attended to the habits of the brute creation, I

am led to conclude, that by far the greater part of the propensities that are

generally supposed to be instinctive, are not implanted in animals by nature, but

that they are the result of long experience, acquired and accumulated through

many generations, so as in the course of time to assume the character of instinct.

(12-16)

Here instincts and propensities that “assume the character of instinct” amount to the same

thing; but what stands out is the insistence on rigid breed categories for determining a

dog’s success. Despite his poor breeding, Pompey does succeed in leading Holmes and

Watson to the cottage where the missing man and his dead wife are to be found. It would

seem that Conan Doyle is making a statement against the dog fancy while also admitting

Holmes’s human limitations.

Breeding purebred dogs to make up for human deficiency was also in the

spotlight given the public’s ambivalence about the use of bloodhounds in tracking

humans around the time of Jack the Ripper’s Reign of Terror. Neil Pemberton has traced

the history of the bloodhound in nineteenth-century debates about appropriate policing

techniques. According to Pemberton, some Victorians demanded the use of bloodhounds

during the search for Jack the Ripper, while others feared that employing a potentially

violent force against the Ripper would only cause regression to a less civilized state, one

which hearkened back to medieval times when the breed was used to intimidate the

subjects of colonial pursuit. Americans had also used bloodhounds to keep slaves in line,

and at the time of the Ripper trials they were used to guard Black men in American

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penitentiaries. Some members of the British public were hesitant to employ such violent

means; others felt it was the only way to find the heinous murderer who was Jack the

Ripper. As it turned out, the two bloodhounds selected for the task of finding the Ripper

were never employed; Sir Charles, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police,

resigned in disgrace over his inability to solve the case, and the dogs were taken back by

the breeder once he realized that he was not to be compensated for the dogs’ services

(“Bloodhounds”). In any event, the purebred dogs were disappointments, and Conan

Doyle’s invention of dogs like those in Holmes—without pedigree but with

perspicacity—suggest that good breeding was not necessary for instinct to work its

wonders.

IV: Morality

There is a longstanding trope in fiction that dogs are able to sense things in people

that other people cannot. (Of course, we often make the same assumption in life, as well.)

If a dog doesn’t like a character in a novel—or worse, is outright violent towards him—

then that is a cue to the reader to beware that character. Here, we see knowledge

stemming from a moral sense possessed by the animal. For John MacNeill Miller, this

moral sense is nothing short of providential, a “knowledge of the cosmic moral order”

(531) which brings justice to the evil characters by the end of a melodrama.34 As detective

fiction is a narrative form of melodrama, Miller and I reach similar conclusions.

Darwin agreed with the Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz that dogs

possessed “something very like a conscience” (Descent, 127), and Romanes granted dogs

34
Miller mentions the word “sagacity” in reference to animal moral knowledge without ever defining it; his
linkage of the two concepts lends credence to my idea that morality is part of sagacity.
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and apes the highest rung on his ladder of intellectual development (besides humans),

claiming that they have “indefinite morals” (Mental Evolution, 352). Morality is generally

considered to be a sign of intellectual development, as it is for Romanes, and yet dogs’

ability to instantly discern someone’s true character would seem to belong to the category

of instinct as well. Morality, then, seems to be a result of sagacity, uniting as it does both

reason and instinct. Romanes died before he was able to write the book in which he had

promised to define the term “indefinite morals” more clearly, so we can only speculate as

to his exact meaning; but it would seem that he was hesitant to delineate, in either

direction, the level of morality dogs and apes could attain. He provided examples in

Animal Intelligence of dogs acting deceitfully, so there is no question that he considered

deceit a moral failure into which dogs could fall:

[A King Charles spaniel] having hurt his foot he became lame for a time, during

which he received more pity and attention than usual. For months after he had

recovered, whenever he was harshly spoken to, he commenced hobbling about the

room as if lame and suffering pain from his foot. He only gave up the practice

when he gradually perceived that it was unsuccessful. (Animal Intelligence, 444)

This idea of a dog miming injury was far less serious than charges levied against stray

dogs by Percy Fitzgerald, who claimed that ownerless street dogs were morally culpable

for their survival tactics:

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 But these [ownerless dogs]…are the paupers and spendthrifts, the rakes and

mauvais sujets of their order, who have taken to evil courses and spend their all,

and who are now eking out a precarious livelihood by shifty ways amd dishonest

tricks—specifically in the neighbourhood of butchers’ stalls, where police are

inefficient—have forfeited that fair esteem and protection to which a righteous

course of life would have led them. (49)

Philip Howell uses this Fitzgerald quote in his book At Home and Astray: The Domestic

Dog in Victorian Britain (in which he describes the origin of what he sees as the

precarious role of dogs in the Victorian period) to establish the discomfort Victorians had

over stray and homeless dogs—that is, dogs who existed outside the domestic space.

Howell writes that a dog has an “innate moral sense that tells him that he rightly belongs

in the domestic sphere” (19). Dogs that chose not to reside in domestic places (the

Victorians did often make it seem like a choice when dogs escaped capture by the

authorities) were associated with criminals: “The ‘bad’ dog—loose, dirty, dangerous,

diseased, alien—was likewise linked to its human associates in the unrespectable and

criminal classes” (20). Fitzgerald paints these dogs as (ir)responsible beings, equivalent

to and indecipherable from to pauper criminals who need to be policed. The level of

moral weight attributed to them is striking, almost alarming—they constitute a whole

new criminal class whose monitoring cannot be accomplished.

Romanes and Fitzgerald offer a stark contrast to the dog epitaphs and elegies in

which dogs were often explicitly lauded for their honesty. Sir Walter Scott, writer of dog

epitaphs, said in The Talisman: “Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be

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companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and

incapable of deceit” (235). The idea that dogs could do wrong, however hilariously, was

thus new to the landscape. The extent to which dogs are capable of even more serious

immoral acts is a question I will return to later as I examine dogs in the literature of

detection.

In the second half of this chapter, I consider how each of the biological and

psychological categories of animal intelligence I discussed above—instinct, sagacity, and

morality—surfaces in Victorian detective and sensation fiction. These genres of fiction

provided a site for Victorians to work through the ambiguities they felt about instinct: its

uncertain relationship to reason, its connection to animality, and its role in (im)moral

action. This discomfort with instinct in part lies in the fact that the line between the

instinct-driven figures of detective, criminal, and animal is so blurry, as detective and

sensation fiction makes clear. In the following sections, I examine both that blurriness

and the the ways that distinctly canine epistemologies aid in the process of detection,

whether the detective be canine or human.

V: Holmes the Hound

Why is it that Sherlock Holmes, the detective we most associate with cold, logical

calculation, is also considered dog-like? The answer lies in the fact that logic is not the

only epistemology employed in detective fiction. Beth Seltzer, in her 2015 dissertation

Not Just the Facts: Victorian Detective Fiction’s Critique of Information, claims that the

dominance of Sherlock Holmes and other, rational detectives in late Victorian detective

fiction makes it easy to forget that earlier detectives were “self-conscious…of

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information’s limits and contradictions” (11). In other words, in many detective novels,

reason and human-gathered information alone fail to solve the crime—even, it turns out,

for the great Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps the greatest example of this failure is the turning

point in the discovery of the crime in Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes

mystery The Sign of Four (1890), when Holmes realizes that Jonathan Small’s accomplice

has dragged his foot in creosote. Here, a dog’s way of gathering information produces

the solution to the case. Holmes can dip a handkerchief in the chemical and give it to the

borrowed dog Toby—“an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half

lurcher, brown and white in color, with a very clumsy, waddling gait” (52)—to trace his

way to the criminals’ location. Despite his initial exultation at the discovery, however,

Holmes is ambivalent about the nature of the clue he has found. He says to Watson:

“Do not imagine…that I depend for my success in this case upon the mere chance

of one of these fellows having put his foot in the chemical. I have knowledge now

which would enable me to trace them in many different ways. This, however, is

the readiest, and since fortune has put it into our hands, I should be culpable if I

neglected it. It has, however, prevented the case from becoming the pretty little

intellectual problem which it at one time promised to be. There might have been

some credit to be gained out of it but for this too palpable clue.” (56)

The “too palpable clue” means that a dog can resolve the case, that it is no longer an

“intellectual problem.” However, the divide between the reasoning of Holmes and the

instinct of his canine assistants is never hard and fast. For one, Holmes chooses to take

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the easier route, thereby sharing the credit that he alone might have gained with the dog.

Worth a second mention is Watson’s description of Holmes as a bloodhound in the

moment immediately before he discovers the creosote footprint: “So swift, silent, and

furtive were his movements, like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent, that I

could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy

and sagacity against the law, instead of exerting them in its defense” (44). This is only

one of almost countless times that Watson draws a comparison between Holmes and a

dog on a scent. He had already done so twice in the first Holmes mystery A Study in

Scarlet (1887), alternating between describing him as “well-trained” (“a pure-blooded,

well-trained foxhound as it dashes backwards and forwards through the covert, whining

in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent” [28]) and “amateur” (“an amateur

bloodhound” [37]). As an amateur bloodhound, Holmes is the inferior solver of

mysteries; he cannot track as well as a real bloodhound (and he is at least a little

dismayed by this). The most extended description of Holmes as a dog is as follows, from

“The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (Adventures, 1892):

Sherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon a scent such as this.

Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would

have failed to recognize him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were

drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with

a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips

compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His

nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was

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 absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him, that a question or remark fell

unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in

reply. (95-96)

Holmes is “bent downward” like a dog on the trail, his nose is dilated to imitate a dog’s,

and he “snarls” at anyone who tries to interrupt him. Indeed, Holmes’s nose is extremely

well-developed; he says in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), “There are seventy-five

perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish

from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended

upon their prompt recognition” (165). Holmes’s ability to differentiate between so many

scents likens him to a modern-day dog trained to sniff narcotics.

Regardless of the hierarchy between a real bloodhound and a metaphorical one, if

he is a metaphorical dog, then Toby and the other dogs he employs in the course of the

Sherlock Holmes canon would seem to be extensions of himself rather than

representations of reason—an epistemology normally considered to be at the other end of

the spectrum. As Neil Pemberton writes, we need to “reimagin[e] Holmes not as the

straightforward embodiment of scientific rationality, but as a more complex and

ambiguous detective, associated with hunting, instinctual knowledge, and animal

behaviour” (“Hounding Holmes,” 466). In other words, Holmes embodies the ambiguity

of intelligence itself in the nineteenth century, poised as it was between instinct and

reason, unconscious and conscious knowledge.

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 VI: Dogs and Moral Intelligence in Fiction

The debates over the value of instinct, intelligence, and sagacity merge in various

ways in Victorian detective fiction, including the pressing question of whether any of the

above render dogs capable of moral judgment. More simply, many novels adapt the

general belief that dogs can “scent” human character while differing in their assumptions

about whether that ability is due to instinct, reason, or sagacity. For instance, one of the

biggest clues that Lady Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s 1862 sensation novel Lady

Audley’s Secret is not who she purports to be comes from her interaction with her step-

daughter Alicia’s dog:

Alicia had just dismounted from her mare, and stood in the low-arched doorway,

with her great Newfoundland dog by her side.

The dog, which had never liked my lady, showed his teeth with a

suppressed growl.

“Send that horrid animal away, Alicia,” Lady Audley said impatiently.

“The brute knows that I am frightened of him, and takes advantage of my terror.

And yet they call the creatures generous and noble-natured! Bah, Cæsar; I hate

you, and you hate me; and if you met me in the dark in some narrow passage you

would fly at my throat and strangle me, wouldn’t you?” (114)

Lady Audley assumes the dog hates her just because she hates him, and the vivid detail of

the murder she suggests that she would likely be the one to strangle him instead.

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 Here Lady Audley’s disdain for an animal deliberately bred to be compatible with

humans reveals her character just as well as the dog’s reaction. Newfoundlands are gentle

giants who were (and are still) particularly celebrated for their ability to save drowning

people—this was, indeed, one of the qualities that Victorians sought to promote through

breeding—as well as for being “generous and noble-natured,” as Lady Audley scoffs.

Anecdotes of heroic Newfoundlands abounded in the periodical press, and Sir Edwin

Landseer painted them so often that the black-and-white variety came to be known as

Landseers. In addition to their heroism, Newfoundlands were considered to be so gentle

that in 1902 J. M. Barrie would choose Nana the Newfoundland to be Peter Pan’s

guardian. Lady Audley’s fear of and disgust for Cæsar, and his mistrust of her, is a clear

signal that Lady Audley is far from angelic. Cæsar’s knowledge is also a model for the

novel’s detection as a whole: the novel’s true detective, Robert Audley, lives in an

apartment full of animals. Being in tune with the animal is what makes him a successful

detective.

In Wilkie Collins’s 1860 sensation novel The Woman in White, an Italian

greyhound named Nina displays a similar moral intelligence. She is afraid of one of the

villains, Sir Percival Glyde. The solicitor—with his characteristic obliviousness—

describes the situation:

The little beast, cowardly and cross-grained as pet-dogs usually are,

looked up at him sharply, shrank away from his outstretched hand, whined,

shivered, and hid itself under a sofa. It was scarcely possible that he could have

been put out by such a trifle as a dog's reception of him – but I observed,

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 nevertheless, that he walked away towards the window very suddenly. Perhaps

his temper is irritable at times. If so, I can sympathise with him. My temper is

irritable at times too. (133)

Even though Mr. Gilmore is unaware of the import of the dog’s behavior, Sir Percival

himself is not. Sir Percival realizes that it is best to make friends with the dog so his fear

doesn’t expose him for what he really is—a dangerous schemer who wants to use Laura

for her money and is willing to put her in an insane asylum to obtain it. The dog’s

mistrust of Sir Percival may be his only role in the book, but it serves well to reveal his

true character at an early point in the narrative.35Cæsar’s aggression and Nina’s fear

prove to be accurate assessments of the characters that provoke these instinctive

responses. In both cases, the humans in the scene are unaware of the true nature of the

antagonists and do not take the warning hints of the dogs. Both in literature and in

(nonfiction) tales of canine sagacity, failure to notice canine instinctive response leads to

criminal activity that could have been prevented.

In Dickens’s Little Dorrit, another Newfoundland’s instinctive morality is

challenged—and triumphs. Lion is able to read two humans’ actions at once, to interpret

what those reactions mean, and to decide which human to trust. Dickens’s works are only

irregularly lumped in the detective fiction category, but Arthur and Pancks in Little

Dorrit (1857) are definitely detective-like figures, discovering as they do the Dorrit

family money. Little Dorrit (Amy) is visiting a family friend, Pet, who has recently been

35
There is another dog in The Woman in White, as well: Mrs. Catherick’s black-and-white spaniel whom
the keeper Baxter shoots when he is separated from his mistress. His death illustrates the tenderness of
Laura’s character and the character of Baxter: killing animals, especially those that mean no harm, is a sign
of a lack of humanity.
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married to the artist Mr. Gowan. Also visiting is Blandois (real name Rigaud), who is,

unbeknownst to his companions, a murderer. The scene in which Lion attempts to attack

Blandois is only half told, and without some extrapolation from the details provided, it is

not clear what Blandois has done to provoke the dog. Moments before Lion lunges, his

master is painting, using Blandois for a model. Forced to stand still and listen to Gowan

facetiously list the figures he could be representing (including the all-too-accurate

“murderer after the fact”), Blandois is uncharacteristically not in control of the situation.

The repressed aggression causes his hands—which Gowan insists remain outside his

cloak—to shake, despite his attempts to steady them. The only mobile part of his body is

his eyes, which he fixes on Amy (likely to re-establish a sense of control):

Once attracted by his peculiar eyes, she could not remove her own, and they had

looked at each other all the time. She trembled now; Gowan, feeling it, and

supposing her to be alarmed by the large dog beside him, whose head she

caressed in her hand, and who had just uttered a low growl, glanced at her to say,

“He won’t hurt you, Miss Dorrit.”

“I am not afraid of him,” she returned, in the same breath; “but will you

look at him?”

In a moment Gowan had thrown down his brush, and seized the dog with

both hands by the collar.

“Blandois! How can you be such a fool as to provoke him! By Heaven,

and the other place too, he’ll tear you to bits! Lie down! Lion! Do you hear my

voice, you rebel!”

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 The great dog, regardless of being half-choked by his collar, was

obdurately pulling with his dead weight against his master, resolved to get across

the room. He had been crouching for a spring, at the moment when his master had

caught him. (413)

Lion is responding not to one, but to two trembling bodies: that of the man on the

platform and that of the girl whose hand rests on his head. Lion is able to tell that the

same bodily reaction has very different sources. Sensing both Blandois’s aggression and

Amy’s fear of that aggression, he lashes out in the way his provoker cannot, partly to

confront Blandois’s unnatural behavior and partly to protect Amy. If Lion had been

acting only in response to Blandois’s strangeness, he would have attacked earlier, since

Blandois had been acting strangely before he made eye contact with Amy. It is not until

he feels (literally) the effect of one human on another that he reacts. He can differentiate

between the trembling of suppressed aggression and the trembling of fear and acts in

defense of the more vulnerable. The illustration that accompanies the scene reads,

“Instinct stronger than training,” making the case that Lion’s instinctive desire to protect

is stronger than his will to obey any command that Gowan gives him. Unfortunately,

Lion’s instinct, when turned against Blandois, earns him his death at that man’s hands;

Blandois sees Lion as too much of a threat and poisons him. That is, Lion’s instinct is so

spot-on that Blandois has no choice but to kill him lest his human associates catch on to

Lion’s warnings. Blandois’s actions only confirm Lion’s assessment of him. Though

Lion has intelligence enough to know that Blandois is evil, he doesn’t have the

intelligence to know that outing the criminal will result in his own demise

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 VII: Hudographical Detection

In addition to their moral intelligence, dogs’ closeness to humans makes them

useful aids in detection. Even when Holmes is not using a Toby or a Pompey to track

someone or something, dogs are sometimes instrumental to the solving of his cases.

Beyond the astonishing power of their noses, there is the fact that dogs co-evolved with

humans, resulting in a close inter-species relationship in which dogs’ cooperation, trust,

and faithfulness provide innumerable clues to human conduct. Geographers David Bell

and Craig Young refer to mutually-illuminating relationships between dogs and humans

as “hudography.”36 This chapter follows Emma Mason in taking human-dog detection as

another example of hudography, which include, as Mason has summarized, “Melinda

Meade’s (2006) research on the importance of human–dog bonds in the aftermath of

Hurricane Katrina, Philip Howell’s (2006) work on the humanizing impact of dog-

walking on the Victorian city, Ritvo’s (1987) research into Victorian dog shows, and

Garber’s (1996) cultural history of what she calls ‘dog love’” (291). I argue that the

hudographical relationship enables dogs to develop more refined instincts and senses of

morality, granting them an additional intelligence. For example, it is the dog Tommie in

Wilkie Collins’s My Lady’s Money (1879) who finds the pocketbook which contains

proof of Isabel Miller’s innocence. By virtue of his presence in a shared dog-human

space, Tommie is able to provide the key to the novel’s mystery.

Dogs’ presence make them key players in several more detective stories,

including Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” (Memoirs, 1892), which is the

36
Hudography is not a term in wide use. Its initiation was in a CFP for the Association of American
Geographers Annual Meeting in Chicago, 7th-11th March 2006. The CFP claimed that “the papers in this
session will critically interrogate the spaces and places of dog-human co-evolution and cohabitation.”
Emma Mason and Philip Howell are the only critics to use the term in published work.
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origin of the famous phrase “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.” In this

story a horse faker (someone who disguises a horse so that he can pass him off as another

horse) steals a prizewinning favorite before a big race. Holmes is able to figure out that

John Straker, an employee of the horse’s owner, is responsible for the horse’s

disappearance, because a dog in the stable did not bark the night that the horse was led

from the premises; therefore, the dog must have known the thief. What is most curious of

all about this case, however, is not the dog’s failure to bark, but the dog’s inability to

determine that his acquaintance is not to be trusted in the first place. In this case, it is not

only the failure to bark, but the failure of instinct that marks the solving of the crime.

This latter failure links the nameless dog of “Silver Blaze” to dogs who are loyal to their

masters despite the fact that their masters are bad people, which I will discuss in Section

VI.

However, all other Holmesian dogs are gifted with the power of scenting, which

is part of the power of instinct. In “The Adventure of Old Shoscombe Place” (Case-Book,

1927) a spaniel clinches Holmes’s ability to solve a case. (Indeed, the story was originally

titled “The Adventure of the Black Spaniel.”) Worried about the bets he’s staked on one

of his horses, a baron tries to hide the fact that his sister (on whom he depends) has died.

An imposter plays the role of the deceased woman, but her spaniel almost gives his plot

away by recognizing this imposter. The baron then gives the spaniel away to an inn-

keeper to try to keep a lid on his secret. Holmes, however, locates and borrows the

spaniel and brings it back to the estate, where the following ensues:

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 With a joyous cry it dashed forward to the carriage and sprang upon the step.

Then in a moment its eager greeting changed to furious rage, and it snapped at the

back skirt above it.

“Well, Watson, that’s done it,” said Holmes, as he fastened the lead to the

neck of the excited spaniel. “He thought it was his mistress, and he found it was a

stranger. Dogs don’t make mistakes.”

The level of trust he places in dogs is clear in the line “Dogs don’t make mistakes.”

Holmes surely trusts the spaniel because her nose (if not her eyes) can accurately discern

that the stranger smells differently than her mistress.

The capability of dogs’ noses is only one way that dogs become useful aids for

detection. Other ways are founded in hudographical relations. Canine faithfulness is

important in “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” (Case-Book, 1927), in which a giant

species of jellyfish attacks and kills a swimmer. His dog returns to the spot of his

master’s death to mourn him and is also attacked, tipping Holmes off to the nature of the

killer. Like scent, this dog’s loyalty is also an instinctive phenomenon; instinct and

loyalty are best seen as two points on a hudographical continuum. This continuum

represents that, for domesticated dogs, instinctual reactions often have some basis in

centuries of canine socialization with humans. That is, a dog’s loyalty to its master can

itself be instinctual: the domesticated dog’s equivalent to a pack of wolves’ adherence to

its leader.

This instinctive loyalty can also lead to danger for dogs within the domestic unit.

In the Holmes story “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire” (Case-Book, 1927), a man

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believes his wife is a vampire because he catches her sucking blood from a wound in

their infant son’s neck. It turns out that the man’s son from his first wife, a jealous boy,

has poisoned his step-brother and that his step-mother is attempting to save the baby by

extracting the poison. The boy had first practiced on the family spaniel, who is partially

paralyzed as a result. It is the dog’s unquestioning loyalty to his human family members

that allows him to fall victim to the poisoning. As with Lion in Little Dorrit, a human

poisons a dog and in the process reveals that character’s true—evil—self.

However, dogs’ tractability also allows them to get on the wrong side of morality

occasionally, especially when their masters or handlers are on the wrong side of the law

themselves. As Holmes says, “A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in

a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs,

dangerous people have dangerous ones” (Case-Book, 51). This is where we turn next.

VIII: Immorality

As humans and dogs have continued to become more intertwined within their

hudographical communities, moral questions that might seem preposterous to ask of

many other animals become more reasonable to ask of dogs. Can dogs be moral, as

Romanes suggested, and therefore also immoral? Are instinctive actions morally suspect?

Can dogs turn their sagacity to criminal ends? Questions about the morality of detectives

were being asked at the same time as Romanes posed that dogs possessed “indefinite

morality.” Accordingly, detective fiction sometimes posed questions about the morality

of detectives and dogs alike. Ian Ousby has discussed at length in his book Bloodhounds

of Heaven: The English Detective from Godwin to Doyle how the British public viewed

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the detective figure throughout the nineteenth century. There was a deep connection

between thieves and “thief-takers,” those who turned thieves in. It was common for

thieves to turn against each other for rewards so that the takers were actually thieves

themselves. According to Ousby, the 1830s and 40s saw a shift in literature in which the

detective increasingly became associated with middle-class values, at the same time as

actual detective forces were assembled. By the 1850s “the police detective…frequently

became the object of an admiration which verged on hero-worship” (65). This is the age

of Inspector Bucket of Bleak House. In the 1870s and 80s, a handful of scandals left the

policeman to be shown in a “vein of disillusionment and cynicism” (128). People began to

turn increasingly to private detectives, whom they trusted more…but not entirely. On a

similar note, Christopher Pittard argues that when dirt becomes a metaphor for crime,

detectives become dirty as a result of their work: “If detectives cleansed social dirt, then

some of that mess moved onto them” (20). In this way, detectives themselves become

morally suspect.

Traces of this mistrust linger in the Holmes canon as Holmes’s own amorality or

immorality is often apparent. This is especially true in A Study in Scarlet, as Martin

Willis has pointed out. In the first Holmes story, he poisons a sickly dog to prove a

hypothesis, and Stamford also details to Watson the way that Holmes beats dead corpses

to “verify how far bruises may be produced after death” (qtd. in Willis, 146). Holmes’s

medical and scientific interests made him easy to compare to Jack the Ripper, and Willis

argues that “[after A Study in Scarlet, which was written before the Whitechapel murders,

Conan Doyle attempted to eradicate the subtle associations to [Jack the Ripper] in both

his heroic detective and his detective fiction” (145). However, Willis goes on to say that

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Conan Doyle was not entirely successful in his attempts—as we have already seen—the

stories continue to link Holmes the detective to the criminals he so expertly tracks. (The

most innocuous of these ways is Holmes’s use of disguise, a tactic he borrows from his

own prey.)

Even after A Study in Scarlet, however, Holmes has minimal interest in justice.

Part of his doglike nature can be seen in his amorality. If dogs are driven to (or desire to)

follow trails until their instincts are satisfied, Holmes primarily cares about meeting his

own intellectual needs with complex criminal puzzles. A striking example of this

potentially canine amorality is in the story “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”

(Return, 1904). At the end of this story we learn that a Captain Croker has killed the

husband of a woman he loves because the husband has ill-treated her. Holmes solves the

mystery but immediately decides not to turn Croker in. While the situation is murky at

best—was Croker’s action defensible?—it is clear enough that Holmes does not act as

law enforcement would. In fact, much of Holmes’s work is done to keep family secrets

hushed up so that they don’t have to be resolved in court settings. Like the early

detectives Ousby describes, Holmes is acting amorally or even immorally—almost like

the criminal he and Watson meditate he could so easily become. There are other

examples of this: in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and “The Adventure of the Devil’s

Foot” (Last Bow, 1917) Holmes lets murderers go, and in “The Adventure of the Blue

Carbuncle” (Adventures, 1892) he lets a diamond thief go. His rationale in the “The Blue

Carbuncle” is as follows:

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 “After all, Watson,” said Holmes…I am not retained by the police to supply their

deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing, but this fellow

will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am

committing a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will

not go wrong again. He is too terribly frightened. Send him to gaol now, and he

becomes a gaolbird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. (181)

Holmes takes on the rule of judge in the absence of the proper authorities, weaseling his

way out of any guilt by reasoning that the case would have fallen apart anyway. In “The

Boscombe Valley Mystery” he has mercy on the murderer because his health is already

rapidly failing him, and in “The Devil’s Foot” the murderer had acted out of love for a

woman, just like Captain Croker (he, too, planned on leaving the country). Holmes stands

outside the law, deciding in which cases crime is acceptable and when it deserves to be

punished. Like a dog, he responds instinctively to criminal behavior, reminding us that

not only can dogs be detectives, but detectives can be dogs.

These questions of morality are only exacerbated by canine “criminals” who act

out violently. Ousby, among others, has demonstrated that one of the origins of detective

fiction was The Newgate Calendar, and it is generally accepted that Dickens’s Oliver

Twist owes much to this genre. In this novel we see the fears of the criminal

anthropologists realized. Sikes kills Nancy in a purely instinctive, animalistic rage. There

is no premeditation; he lashes out just as his dog Bull’s-Eye lashes out when provoked by

his master. When we first meet the dog in the novel, he is being abused by Sikes. As a

sort of misdirected reaction, Bull’s-Eye “by a certain malicious licking of his lips seemed

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to be meditating an attack upon the legs of the first gentleman or lady he might encounter

in the streets when he went out” (96). Grace Moore has written about Sikes and Bull’s-

Eye as partners in crime: Bull’s-Eye carries evidence of Nancy’s murder, his bloody

paws leaving traces all over the lodgings. She reads Bull’s-Eye as an urban criminal

animal, a double for both Sikes and Nancy and a mediator between these two human

criminals. Bull’s-Eye “emphasize[s] Sikes’s irredeemable criminality” (203) by reflecting

and developing the housebreaker’s own pernicious traits (i.e. by being available to be

beaten). Like Nancy, the dog is also a disturbingly complicit victim of Sikes’s constant

abuse until it brings about his death. In fact, Moore argues, Bull’s-Eye’s continued

loyalty “makes Sikes’s magnetic hold over Nancy more credible, since he too is unable to

leave despite a lifetime of cruel treatment” (206).This suggests the other side of the coin:

if dogs can be used for the public good by detectives, they can also be used for evil by

criminals, because the same loyalty that binds a dog to a human can exist whether that

human works for good or for evil. Perhaps the true concern is how malleable a dog’s

morality really is, if it can be manipulated as a tool by an owner or handler. However, it

is difficult to imagine that a dog is merely a blank slate, given their alleged abilities to

determine who is morally suspect at first sniff.

The possibility of canine immorality (as opposed to amorality) is raised in two

Holmes short stories and in The Hound of the Baskervilles. In all three, dogs feature as

murderous beasts who are shot or almost shot by Watson. In “The Adventure of the

Copper Beeches” (Adventures, 1824), a man named Rucastle locks up his daughter to

prevent her from marrying a man who would then be entitled to some of her money.

Rucastle keeps a half-starved guard dog to keep the man off the property. The dog’s

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instincts are harnessed for criminal ends, as he would eat almost anyone alive. In the end,

the dog—who can only be controlled by one of the servants—attacks and nearly kills

Rucastle, though ultimately Watson shoots the dog and Rucastle lives. The death of

Rucastle’s dog raises a series of questions. Does the dog do right or wrong by attacking

his master, who is clearly an immoral person? Does the dog have any moral sense of his

own actions, of the “indefinite” kind proposed by Romanes? Should a dog remain loyal

to his master no matter what, as so many tales of canine sagacity suggest? Was the

Victorians’ dog-love potentially dangerous, if one’s own dog could turn on one with fatal

effect? And most importantly: could a dog be at all to blame for doing what he was bred

and trained to do? By killing off the dog, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

suggests that he is at least somewhat culpable and should know better than to brutalize

his master. It is possible to imagine that Doyle is making a statement about the

misfortune of dogs to be put to cruel uses by cruel human beings, but the survival of

Rucastle seems to lessen this possibility; it is difficult to read the story as a tragedy when

only a nameless dog dies and no one mourns his death. “Dogs don’t make mistakes” does

not then translate into “dogs are always right,” in a moral sense. Ultimately, the dog in

“The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” is fated to die because he violates an ideal the

Victorians treasured: that of the faithful dog. Without this ideal in place, the Victorians

could be sharing their homes and lives with vicious beings, a possibility that Doyle does

not allow to stand.

The later novel The Hound of the Baskervilles features a similarly half-starved

bloodhound/mastiff cross. Here, even more explicitly, a dog’s instinctual, potentially

sagacious nature is deliberately warped by a human. The outcome is so extreme that

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what first seems a monster, ultimately becomes a victim. Though it would be a bit

hyperbolic, one could almost call this process a kind of psychological vivisection, a cruel

operation on the canine characteristics I have been examining in this chapter. This dog is

loosed on the moors by Stapleton, with phosphorus smeared around his eyes and mouth

so that he scares Sir Baskerville to death (Stapleton is Baskerville’s second heir). Later,

the dog kills, not his master, but Selden, a criminal hiding out on the moors, because he

had been wearing the clothes of the person the hound was supposed to be pursuing next

(Sir Baskerville’s nephew). Like Rucastle’s dog, the Hound of the Baskervilles is also

ultimately shot by Watson. Also like Rucastle’s dog, the Hound is only partially to

blame, since the humans whose care he was under was intentionally brutalizing and

starving him. As a consequence of human intervention and warping of instinct, this dog is

a far cry from the helpful, faithful animals who help Holmes track criminals. As Holmes

himself does, these “bad dogs” are, in their own perverse way, also doing justice by

killing or at least attacking criminals. However, it is nevertheless unsettling to the reader

that wearing the wrong clothes could lead to one’s death at the mouth of a hound. What if

a dog attacked the wrong person—led by instinct to make horrific misjudgments?

Perhaps more frighteningly, can we ever really be certain that characteristics are fixed?

Just as a detective might revert to being a criminal, what if behind every dog a wolf is

still panting? Is it ever “right” for a dog to attack even a guilty person? These questions

constitute the very real fear of the public when they debated whether bloodhounds should

be used in murder investigations. This was despite the fact that many Victorian breeders

of bloodhounds insisted that the dogs were trained not to harm those they tracked, as

bloodhounds of the past were, but merely to locate them. In this scenario, bloodhounds

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could potentially be heroes, as they are described in the London Evening News during the

Reign of Terror. George R. Krehl, kennel editor to the Stockkeeper and Fancier’s

Chronicle, wrote, anticipating the success of the two bloodhounds being trained to find

the Ripper: “Then when London rings the news of his capture, humanity will be under

another obligation to the service of man’s best friend, the most intelligent of the brute

creation, our dogs.”

What does it take for a Holmesian dog with attack capabilities to escape death at

Watson’s hand? There is one who falls between the spectrum of helpful and hellhound,

and his case is perhaps the most illuminating of all. This is Roy, the dog of “The

Adventure of the Creeping Man” (Case-Book, 1927) who suddenly begins biting his

master Professor Presbury at regular intervals. These intervals help Holmes figure out

what is wrong with the master, which is that he takes a serum derived from a monkey

every ninth day. This serum is supposed to be the Elixir of Life, but it instead makes

Presbury act like a monkey every night he takes it. He taunts Roy to the point of madness

on one of these occasions and is severely bitten, but this time, both master and dog

survive—and one wonders whether his helpfulness in solving the case is why Conan

Doyle allows Roy to live instead of being shot like his counterparts. More to the point,

however, is the fact that Roy is trained, not as a guard dog, but as a companion; and that

he was heavily provoked. In a sense, he was not biting his master per se—he was biting a

monkefied version. It would seem that Holmes’s stories reflect the Victorian concern

about potentially violent dogs, and that Roy is exempted by virtue of his domestic nature.

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 The opposite of the well-adjusted domestic dog also appears in the work of

Helena Mary Fortune.37 Writing under the pseudonym Waif Wander (or W.W.), she

published short detective fiction, among other things, in the Australian Journal in the late

1800s and early 1900s under the column “The Detective’s Album.” Her stories regularly

feature dogs, one almost as fearsome as the Hound of the Baskervilles. This Baskerville-

esque dog appears in “Bloodhound Parker,” in which a bloodhound named Lightening

mauls and kills a bigamist, Archibald Orme, before being shot himself by police.

Lightening’s owner, Parker (really Jose Rico), is also shot. In this case, the dog is not

working for a detective, but for a criminal who holds an unknown grudge against Orme

and is blackmailing him. The story ends happily for the characters with whom we are

supposed to sympathize, leaving the reader to feel that all is well—that the deaths of both

Orme and Parker, as well as Lightening, are justified. “Thank heaven he’s past killing

another man!” (224) one of the policeman exclaims of Lightening, and the statement

could have easily been applied to the Hound of the Baskervilles. All of the criminals,

human and canine, die—and once again, we are left to question the image of a dog, who,

like Stapleton’s Hound, brings justice to a criminal at the extent of violating the image of

a perfectly domestic, well-behaved Victorian dog. The threat of violent dogs reappears in

Fortune’s “Towser’s Teeth” and “Dog Bruff’s Discovery.” Even Fortune’s most innocent

dog, Growl in “The Dog Detective” (seemingly based off of Bull’s-Eye in Oliver Twist),

cannot escape the image of the dangerous dog: in the two-third-page illustration

accompanying the story, Growl is pictured sinking his teeth into a criminal’s leg (Figure

1). In the text, however, he merely howls every time he sees the criminal. The figure of

37
I am indebted to Kate Watson’s essay for introducing me to Helena Mary Fortune’s works.
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the violent dog becomes as prevalent in detective fiction as the helpful dog, then—and

sometimes they are one and the same, as I will soon show.

As Chapter 1 has demonstrated and Chapter 3 will show, dogs in nineteenth-

century literature were generally not portrayed as dangerous killers, but as celebrated,

loving, and loyal companions. Arthur Conan Doyle’s dogs in “The Adventure of the

Copper Beeches,” The Hound of the Baskervilles, and “The Adventure of the Creeping

Man,” stand out, then, as anomalies, as do Fortune’s dogs. So what is the reason for

turning the image of man’s best friend on its head? One explanation, of course, stems

from the very theory that gave animals morality in the first place. If a dog is capable of

morality, instinctive, “indefinite” or otherwise, then he is also capable of immorality

(despite what the writers of epitaphs to dogs believed). Conan Doyle’s misbehaving

mutts explore the possibilities of animals having the moral powers with which Romanes

credits them: harming or killing those who are acting with criminal intent, at the risk of

becoming immoral themselves. This recalls the ambivalence about using bloodhounds to

track Jack the Ripper: would both the dogs and the dogs’ handlers, as well as the whole

English state, be guilty of animal brutality? These dogs demonstrate the dangers of

instinct being harnessed by the wrong hands in spaces outside the purely domestic. Like

Howell’s recognition of the discomfort Victorians had over stray and homeless dogs,

dogs who act outside the accepted model of faithful and moral companions of the hearth

were also the cause of unease.

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 [Figure 7: “The Dog Detective”]

IV: Dirk, the Dog Detective

In the latter half of 1895, Stanhope Sprigg published a short serialized novel

entitled Dirk, the Dog Detective in the Illustrated Chips magazine. Dirk marks a

departure from the dogs of the Sherlock Holmes stories in multiple ways. Perhaps most

obviously, he is the novel’s title character and protagonist. Accordingly, he embodies the

pinnacle of instinct’s role in detective fiction by being in charge of detection more so

than the novel’s human detective, Paul Sleuth. Sleuth is no Holmes (though he does

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pretend to be mad and think himself Holmes in order to gain admission into a lunatic

asylum). Despite Sprigg’s attempts to paint him as a cool and collected character, he

frequently lets his animal instincts get the better of him. What is more, he doesn’t have

many detective skills to speak of; the reader is often a step ahead of him. Dirk’s sagacity

(for this is the word always used) leads the way through the streets of London and

through the novel as he, Paul, and Guy Denton track the murderer of Guy’s mother. The

trio faces a countless number of near-death experiences, but after each one, Dirk is

always able to find the trail again and take off after the murderer with renewed vigor. If

ever a question arises as to whose instincts are correct, Dirk’s always win: Guy,

especially, may be doubtful as to where Dirk may lead them, but Paul always gives his

canine partner the benefit of that doubt, with ideal results. His abilities are an answer to

Victorian concerns about bloodhounds’ capacities: as Pemberton has documented, the

Victorian police harbored many doubts as to a bloodhound’s skills in London, where the

number of smells was so great as to almost guarantee that a dog would lose his track.

Presumably it is Dirk’s nose that is primarily responsible for the success of the chase, but

Paul’s confidence in his dog, and the dog’s success, elevates his sagacity to a fully-

fledged epistemology—one which surpasses the human detective’s in its ability to trace

crime. The problem, however, is that Dirk’s nose does not supplement his brain, but

supplants it. Sagacity here is not so much instinct married to reason, then, as instinct

replacing reason, which leads to highly questionable moral actions on Dirk’s (and the

humans’) part.

While no one could argue that Dirk, the Dog Detective is a piece of high-quality

literature, it does shed light on the ambiguity Victorians felt about instinct and dog

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detection. Dirk, though friendly to those he knows, is vicious to those whom he

instinctively senses are his and his master’s enemies. Dirk maims and possibly kills (we

don’t ever actually find out the fates of some of his victims) at least three criminals or

would-be criminals in the course of the novel. He acts before his master commands him

to, and often refuses to be called off once he is commanded to. One example will suffice

to demonstrate the gruesome details Sprigg gives:

A terrible, long drawn-out growl showed that now Dirk was not to be

restrained. Leaping forward, the bloodhound sprang, still snarling, at the man’s

throat. A crash! The wild curses and execrations of a desperate man! The sharp,

savage pantings of the huge dog as he tore at the man’s throat!…

Soon, however, the curses changed to heart-rending moans. Vainly Paul

tried to call Dirk off. The dog’s blood was up, and in horror they could only lie

motionless and wait until he should have wreaked his unreasoning vengeance.

Crash! There was the sound of a man’s body falling to the floor.

“Paul! Paul!” It was Mona’s [Paul’s sister’s] voice. “This is too horrible.

Here are some matches. Go forward. For heaven’s sake put an end to this terrible

struggle!”

As the tiny flame illuminated the darkness Paul crept forward. Beating the

hound off, he saw that before him lay the senseless body of a man—a man of

mature years, with grey, bristly hair, and bloated, drink-stained countenance,

rendered the more repulsive by the fact that Dirk, in his fury, had bitten away half

of his cheek.” (no. 248, 7)

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In this case, the attacked man had recently shot into the room where Paul and his

companions were located, and Dirk was of course acting defensively. The group leaves

the man for dead, and neither they nor the reader knows whether he lives or dies. These

instances are fictional embodiments of the Victorian debate over using violence to fight

violence, bloodhounds to track murderers. This is especially true since instinct is here

portrayed as “unreasoning vengeance.” This vengeance makes Dirk as close to evil as a

dog can get. Perhaps Dirk is more wolflike than doglike, because he fails to take

advantage of the hudographical relationship in order to make judgments about human

behavior before acting. Paul and Guy, too, frequently give into their instincts the way

Dirk does. Guy throws a policeman over a high railing, killing him. After a man refuses

to tell him how to descend through a trapdoor into a cellar, Paul in “fiendish rage” holds

him over the trapdoor, threatening to drop him if he does not speak. The man gives in,

only to attack Paul the moment he is put down. At this Paul sets Dirk on him. But this is

not enough for Paul in his instinctive fury:

Like a log the fellow lay prone upon the floor, senseless, with the ominous

marks of the dog’s strong, white fangs in his throat. Paul, with a muttered curse,

raised the body and flung it down the yawning cavity, which, black and

foreboding, seemed like the entrance to the nether world itself. (no. 268, 3)

The entirely unnecessary act of flinging the body down the trapdoor leaves the reader

feeling uneasy about Paul and about crime fighting in general. In Paul Sleuth we have

drifted a long way from the questionable actions of Sherlock Holmes, who allows

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murderers to escape; here we have a detective inflicting violence upon already

incapacitated criminals. Detection in Dirk, the Dog Detective sometimes goes beyond

seeking justice for wrongdoing. Ironically, though Dirk claims to be a novel about

bringing criminals to justice, it is actually more morally fraught than any of the Holmes

stories. More a manhunt than a mystery, Dirk brings to light both the Victorians’ greatest

hopes and greatest fears for the use of dogs in crime fighting. Yet the reader’s undeniable

discomfort at Dirk’s and Paul’s actions only reinforce the idea that dogs employed

outside the proper domestic space were a danger to society, and that even those who

deserved to be punished shouldn’t be subjected to an animal as savage as the Hound of

the Baskervilles or Dirk.

At the conclusions of many detective and sensation novels, a sense of order and

well-being is restored to an increasingly urbanized and criminal world. Indeed, this is the

point of detective fiction, by some measure: Stephen Knight remarks that “major

examples of crime fiction not only create an idea (or a hope, or a dream) about

controlling crime, but both realize and validate a whole view of the world, one shared by

the people who become the central audience to buy, read and find comfort in a particular

variety of crime fiction” (2). Yet instinct complicates these resolutions with its suspected

amorality; if instinct, which both causes and corrects crime, is amoral, or even immoral,

then it is beyond our control after all. If a reliance on instinct makes detectives and

criminals just as alike as they are different, then this sense of well-being cannot hold.

The thin, blurred line between detective and criminal is not the only unsettling

thing. Troubling, too, is the way that detective fiction exposes the similarly thin, blurred

line between human and animal. Intelligence is not reserved only for human characters,

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and humans fall back upon instinct, an epistemology that we wish we had left behind in

our evolutionary trajectory. Sagacity offers a way to describe this in-between state, one

which acknowledges both the differences and the commonalities in human and animal

epistemologies—as long as we don’t ignore the roots of sagacity in scenting and come to

associate it only with qualities of intellect and wisdom. As with Dirk, it can be equally

dangerous to associate sagacity only with scenting. The word’s current definition, which

marries scenting and instinctive action with intellect, best describes the kind of work

done by not only the dogs of detective fiction, but the detectives as well.

Later detective fiction would much more often feature dogs who successfully

solve crimes, just as in the real world dogs would play a much greater role in police

forces; but, for the Victorians, instinct was still an untrustworthy thing, in all of its

manifestations: criminals acting out their supposedly base instincts, detectives solving

cases using methodologies similar to the criminals they are attempting to thwart, or ever-

tractable dogs whose instinct and sagacity are employed by one or the other. Instinct also

placed at stake the image of the loyal, moral dog cherished by the dog epitaph—an

inherited idol the Victorians were loath to lose, and indeed kept very much alive by the

dog autobiographies I will discuss in Chapter 3.

The morality of the dog as played out in detective fiction has turned out to have

some basis in science. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce point out in Wild Justice: The

Moral Lives of Animals (2009) that it wasn’t until the twentieth century that science

began questioning Darwin’s argument that animals are moral beings—a skepticism that

persisted until recent decades. Today, ethologists such as Bekoff once again believe that

animals have morality, albeit a species-specific morality that may not exactly match our

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own. Still, Bekoff and other scientists see in animal behavior many of the components of

morality: cooperation, empathy, and justice. When it comes to dogs specifically, it is

useful to keep in mind Frans de Waal’s contention in Are We Smart Enough to Know

How Smart Animals Are? (2017) that their intelligence be treated differently in scientific

testing because of their coevolution with humans. Whereas de Waal is an advocate for

designing tests that uniquely suit the particular ecology of the species being evaluated,

against other members of that same species—“testing apes with apes, wolves with

wolves, and children with human adults”—he declares dogs an exception: “Humans

testing dog cognition may actually be a wise thing to do” (156).While dogs are still social

animals that follow moral codes within their own canine groups, the implication is that

their attention and sensitivity to us means that their intelligence—including their moral

intelligence—has developed alongside ours and follows closely at our heels.38 Present-

day science, then, suggests that the Victorians were right to be so amazed by canine

sagacity.

38
Alexandra Horowitz points out that dogs are also very sensitive to humans’ anxiety and fear, which have
distinct chemical odors. This likely aids dogs’ ability to tell when something is wrong with a person in a
normal social situation.
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 CHAPTER 3

“GIVING TONGUE” TO CANINE TRAUMA IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY

DOG AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

In Chapter 2, I argued that the Victorians’ ambiguity about instinct was influenced

by their fear that canine instinct could act against the interest of humans. On the other

hand, another contemporaneous genre, the dog autobiography, harnessed this same fear to

re-imagine dogs as subjects completely loyal to their humans and their desires, even to

the point of trauma. Sometimes the trauma results when dogs are asked to ignore their

instincts to bow to human ends. Some late-century examples of this genre, such as the

well-known Beautiful Joe, put the well-being of dogs into human hands, suggesting that

it is the responsibility of humankind to prevent animals from experiencing trauma

whenever possible, and certainly not to be the cause of it. But many other dog

autobiographies envisage canine trauma as a necessary byproduct of the dog-human

relationship.

What is trauma, exactly? In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History

(1996), trauma theorist Cathy Caruth remarks that “there is no firm definition,” (145) but

herself describes it as “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in

which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive

appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11-12). Trauma, Caruth

claims, “is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to

tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (4). In other words, it differs

from other forms of psychological distress by its delayed nature and its tendency to reveal

truth after the fact.

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 The delayed nature of trauma is especially interesting when we consider whether

dogs can have traumatic experiences or even the clinical extension, post-traumatic stress

disorder. Animals, for the majority of history (and even now) were supposed to live

entirely in the moment, without the ability to reflect on the past or plan for the future. By

exploring the possibilities of canine trauma in fiction, the Victorians were challenging

this longstanding belief. Of course, it must be noted that trauma as we refer to it today

was the brainchild of Sigmund Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) and

Moses and Monotheism (1939), so most Victorians were not thinking of and diagnosing

trauma in the same way as we do today; yet they accurately describe the phenomenon in

fiction.39 That some of this fiction is about dogs implies that the Victorians granted dogs

more than souls and sagacity—they granted them memories, an unconscious (including

the dreams that accompany an unconscious), and the capacity for psychological as well as

physical pain. In short, they granted them subjectivity.

By showcasing examples of the Victorians imagining canine trauma, I am not

attempting to diagnose trauma. Rather, I am examining how Victorian fiction extends the

human experience of trauma to animals as a way to try to understand their behavior and

emotions. Even more important than this understanding, however, is its implications: our

obligations to the animals whose pain we imagine. Though the dog autobiography may

ultimately reveal that the Victorians wanted dogs to be loyal despite trauma induced by

humans, the very act of writing trauma into the canine experience signals a leap forward

for the representation of human-dog relationships.

39
Many scientists today have argued that animals can experience trauma and PTSD. See, for example,
Marc Bekoff, “Do Wild Animals Suffer From PTSD and Other Psychological Disorders?” Others agree
that all animals, wild or domestic, can suffer from trauma.
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 The genre of dog autobiography has its roots in the eighteenth-century novel but

is a distinctly nineteenth-century phenomenon. Laura Brown has pinned down 1801 as

possibly the year of the first dog autobiography, The Dog of Knowledge; or, Memoirs of

Bob the Spotted Terrier: Supposed to be Written by Himself. However, the majority of

nineteenth-century dog autobiographies were written in the 1880s, 90s, and early 1900s.

This is in part because the books often coincided with the anti-vivisection and other

animal welfare movements, though as I have already mentioned, less politically-

motivated examples also abound. Whether intended to be protests or not, most dog

autobiographies share their emphasis on canine trauma.

In this chapter, I ask why humans—writers and readers—needed trauma as a

crucial structuring dynamic when they imagined human-canine relationships. Examining

the representation of trauma in over twenty dog autobiographies ranging from 1801 to

1914, I argue that Victorian readers desire canine resilience in the face of trauma. At the

same time, they wish for humanity to be the core of canine life. In other words, these

novels are rooted in Victorian readers’ desire to believe themselves worthy of the trauma

that the bond between dogs and humans so often brought about.40 This is true even as

some dog autobiographies reflect on the failures of humankind. I begin with the genre’s

origin story/stories, then enter into a discussion about language: how are problems of

canine versus human language negotiated narratologically? Finally, I delve into

individual stories of trauma and the ways they reveal human attempts, sometimes to

understand and empathize with, but often just to normalize, canine suffering.

40
It is worth noting that two-thirds of these dog autobiographies were written by women. This is consistent
with the fact that the majority of animal welfare activists were women. See Coral Lansbury’s book The Old
Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin
Press, 1985). Interestingly, on the other hand (and with only one exception), they feature male dogs.
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 I: Eighteenth-Century Origins

Is the dog an “it” or an “I?” In terms of genre history, the answer is that he or she

is something of both, a hybrid. A dog character begins as an unfeeling “it,” but by the

nineteenth century morphs into a feeling “I,” just as people began to value animals as

pets. The animal autobiography’s eighteenth-century origins are twofold, hearkening

back to two genres. Though I will focus primarily on the genre’s relationship to the

“personal histories” of eighteenth-century giants Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson, there

is another genre to which the animal autobiography is heavily indebted: the “it-narrative,”

also called the “novel of circulation” or “object-narrative.” In fact, Francis Coventry’s

The History of Pompey the Little; or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-dog (1751) is one

of the early examples of the it-narrative, though the genre would later focus as much on

inanimate objects as animate beings. Other popular it-narrative titles include Edward

Phillips’s The Adventures of a Black Coat (1760), Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal; or, The

Adventures of a Golden Guinea (1760), and Tobias Smollett’s The History and

Adventures of an Atom (1769).

Like the novel in general, the it-narrative sub-genre is difficult to define. Liz

Bellamy has claimed that the it-narrative encompasses both its object and animal

protagonists. The it-narrative possesses one or both of the following characteristics: first,

it focuses on the (primarily economic) distribution and circulation of objects or animals

through society, and, second, these animals or objects lack agency or autonomy. In

Pompey, for example, a spaniel is handed from owner to owner, becoming a unique form

of currency. He is a gift, a wager, and a payment, variously the property of an aristocratic

widow, a shopkeeper, and a beggar (to name just a few of his dozens of owners). Indeed,

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scholars of eighteenth-century literature have agreed that one of the it-narrative’s primary

benefits is its ability to move between unconnected characters of different classes,

thereby providing a supposedly unbiased perspective of a variety of social figures. This

fluidity is what lends the genre both its tendency to social satire and its general

plotlessness; the narrative uses an object or animal as an excuse to bounce from society’s

elite to its most unfortunate and back again, leaving little opportunity for an overarching

storyline.

What is the difference between an it-narrative told from a dog’s perspective—

either in first or third person, for both exist—and what I call a dog autobiography?

Engaging directly with Bellamy’s definition helps to alleviate some of the difficulty, even

if she tends to classify as it-narratives what I would call dog autobiographies. First, a dog

autobiography is not primarily concerned with economic transactions, even if a dog is

sold and/or stolen and resold (as we shall see later, dog-stealing is a recurring plot

element of the genre). Rather, it is intended to convey the animal’s observations of

human society and the animal’s feelings about the (often cruel) treatment he receives at

the hand of humans. This is made all the more prominent given how many people the

dogs encounter: the narratives feature ever-active protagonists in loosely connected

sequences which not only mimic dogs’ dynamic ways of life, but also highlight how

many humans treat animals reprehensibly. It is true that these animals’ observations can

sometimes be satirical, even in an otherwise very earnest novel, and that a dog often

comes to be owned by several masters at various points on the social scale. Here, in its

occasionally-satiric tone and its “circulating” or traveling protagonist, the genre’s

indebtedness to the it-narrative is clear. It is the second portion of Bellamy’s definition

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that enables a clearer distinction, however: the dog autobiography does not feature an

animal who lacks agency or autonomy (though, much like any human protagonist, he or

she occasionally lacks agency in a particular situation). Unlike a coat, or a guinea, an

animal can move of his or her own accord. What is so striking about the it-narrative

Pompey and its counterparts is how little movement the animal makes on his own;

Pompey is a passive observer of his own life, carried everywhere, hatching no plans for

escape from his most dismal experiences. The effect is intensified by the fact that the

narrative is, somewhat unusually, told in third-person and that Pompey himself

disappears from the story, sometimes for chapters at a time.41 Though some early dog

autobiographies—the aforementioned Bob the Spotted Terrier (1801), for instance—retain

the plot of a small dog being carried from place to place and traded from master to master

without the dog’s volition, this is quite rare, especially as the century progresses. Even

Bob develops his own sense of autonomy by the end of his autobiography, when he helps

to saves his final master, the appropriately named Mr. Allworthy, from a pit into which

he and his horse have fallen. This is something the witless Pompey could never have

dreamed of doing. Indeed, in Coventry’s novel and those like it, there is little difference

between Pompey the lapdog and a coat or guinea.

Autonomous movement does not necessarily require autonomous thought, but the

dogs of dog autobiographies are thinking for themselves—and more importantly, feeling

for themselves. It is much less a stretch to imagine a dog’s thoughts and feelings than

those of an inanimate object. What is more, there is a reason for such imaginings. The

dog autobiography has a real interest in understanding its protagonist, whether out of

41
In his introduction to Pompey, Nicholas Hudson discusses the changes Coventry made for the novel’s
third edition, many of which were designed to decrease any sense that Pompey has a canine consciousness.
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mere curiosity for what happens in a beloved pet’s head; a desire to instigate social

change in the face of animal cruelty and experimentation; or a desire to affirm humans’

belief that they are worthy of canine affection. The dog autobiography does not exist

primarily as a device for traversing social hierarchies, even if it retains some of the

benefits of this it-narrative device. For this reason, the dog autobiography more closely

resembles the more mainstream eighteenth-century “personal history” novel than it does

the it-narrative. Perhaps the best testament that a canine subject is better suited to the

former category is the fact that very few canine-centered it-narratives exist. Though Bob

the Spotted Terrier retained many elements of its it-narrative heritage, other dog

narratives that followed closely on its heels did not. The Life of the Famous Dog Carlo

(1804?) and Cato, or Interesting Adventures of a Dog of Sentiment (1816) have much

more in common with their Victorian counterparts than with Pompey.

In the early nineteenth century, the very concept of the novel, even from the

human perspective, was not yet stable. Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders, Tristram

Shandy: these early novels purported to be “lives” or “personal histories,” relying on the

nonfiction autobiography as models and thereby entwining the origins of the novel with

autobiography ever after. According to J. Paul Hunter in Before Novels: The Cultural

Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990), early novels inherited two things

from the newborn genre of the secular autobiography: first, their tendency to focus on an

individual life (a tendency that stood unchallenged until the very end of the eighteenth

century, when Romantic-era novels began to consider “relationships, or sponsoring

ideas, or settings, or symbols” [329]) and second, their “capacity for introspection, self-

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awareness, and subjectivity” (329). In this way, the autobiography and the novel looked

very much alike and indeed even influenced one another in content and form.

H. Porter Abbott explains that the difference between autobiography and the

“novel cast as autobiography” is one of suspicion: we are suspicious of the author of an

autobiography. We recognize the act of writing in time (hence Abbott’s desire to

subsume autobiography under the broader category of “autography”) and are thus attuned

to the author’s motives in shaping his or her life in a certain way, which ultimately leads

to our hesitation in embracing Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” Fiction, on

the other hand, we acknowledge as such, and we can therefore adopt a less suspicious

mode of reading. Of course, for us to make these choices about reception, we first have to

be aware that a work of fiction is indeed fiction. One way to signal this is the presence of

two names, that of author and that of the first-person narrator whose “history” the author

gives us. However, when Defoe’s name is missing from the title page and we have only

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe…Written by Himself, the

line between autobiography and fiction is heavily blurred. Switching codes between

autobiography and the early novel must have been standard practice for eighteenth-

century readers in a way that is no longer true for us today.

The nineteenth-century novel continued in the traditions of the eighteenth century,

but generally did so in a less veiled fashion. For instance, David Copperfield’s full title is

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the

Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account),

which rather explicitly acknowledges the book’s eighteenth-century inheritance by the

“personal history” element of the title and the title’s length. Still, Dickens’s name has

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always appeared as author, and there is no temptation to read the book as anything but

fiction. But such transparency is not always the case. For the purposes of discussing dog

“autobiographies,” Jane Eyre is the best case study. Subtitled “An Autobiography” and

“edited by Currer Bell,” it received reviews which emphasize just how blurry the

distinction between novel and autobiography still was in the mid-nineteenth century. It is

the “edited by” part that deserves our greatest attention; Brontë masquerades the book as

nonfiction in a way that Dickens never does with David Copperfield. This is not to say

that the book’s subtitle fooled readers well-schooled in the eighteenth-century novel

tradition. Rather, the book was discussed as an autobiography despite the fact that it was

fiction; or, more accurately, it was declared to be more successful as an autobiography

than as a novel. G. H. Lewes’s famous review in The Examiner reads:

Taken as a novel or history of events, the book is obviously defective; but as an

analysis of a single mind, as an elucidation of its progress from childhood to full

age, it may claim comparison with any work of the same species…It should be

rather placed by the side of the autobiographies of Godwin and his successors.

For Lewes, Jane Eyre is less successful as a novel or history than as an autobiography.

Similarly, a Fraser’s reviewer from the same time period writes, “It is an

autobiography,—not, perhaps, in the naked facts and circumstances, but the actual

suffering and experience.” Both reviews seem to be operating on a definition of

autobiography which privileges “the analysis of a single mind” outside of “naked facts.”

For them, autobiography is not literal truth so much as a mode of truth: a mode that bears

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the mark of reality. Here, autobiographical status is extended to fictive “I” subjects, just

as I will show later on that animal narrators shift from “it” to “I” in dog autobiographies.

What is so strange about praising Jane Eyre as an autobiography is that its

supernatural elements must be necessarily overlooked to do so. It is not just that tales

about fairies occupy such a prominent place in the narrative; the novel’s happy ending

hinges on Jane hearing Rochester’s voice calling her from another realm. We can accept

the supernatural in a (creative) novel, but are not inclined to trust the autobiography of

someone who sees apparitions and hears voices. Robert James Merrett has argued that

Jane Eyre is a kind of spiritual autobiography, and this reading undeniably has its merits.

However, what is most striking about the novel’s supernatural elements is the extent to

which they ultimately require the same willing suspension of disbelief as reading a dog

“autobiography” does. Abbott’s “novel cast as autobiography” may in such cases be

rephrased to what I would call “fictional autobiography,” clarifying that we know the

work is fiction by means intrinsic to the text itself and not simply by the presence of an

author’s name on a title page.

Jane Eyre has no preface to justify its status as autobiography. The story begins:

we have to decide whether or not it is a fictional autobiography. The dog autobiography,

which is of course necessarily fictional, is not always as comfortable with its status as

autobiography as Jane Eyre is. It often calls attention to its troubled status, either trying

to assuage the difficulties inherent in a dog telling his story or flaunting those problems in

an attempt to naturalize the dog-as-narrator. There are three methods of calling attention

to the difficulty: a preface by a non-canine voice, which either implicitly acknowledges

the difficulties of the genre in an attempt to justify it, or explicitly rejects the opportunity

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for justification; a frame tale which includes an extradiegetic, presumably human,

narrator; or a declaration that the work has been translated by a human author. An

example of this second method is Sable and White: The Autobiography of a Show Dog

(1894) by Gordon Stables, M.D., which features dogs who can literally speak in their

diegetic world, thereby dramatizing the act of telling to the greatest possible extent. The

story is introduced by and ends with an extradiegetic human narrator who narrates only a

few paragraphs at each point. This allows the narrative to zoom out and focus on a group

of three dogs lying on a lawn talking. The narrator describes a couple looking at them:

He looks up now and his wife’s eyes follow his.

“Wouldn’t you really think, dear?” she says, “they were talking of old times?”

“Yes, but note, it is the Newfoundland who is listening, and also, with half-closed

eyes, Mr. Consequential, the pug, and Luath, honest old Luath, is telling the story

of his life.” (14)42

Though the couple is teasing, Luath is indeed the sable-and-white show dog whose

dialogue is almost the entire narrative, save these opening and closing paragraphs. Like

Wuthering Heights, Lord Jim, and other Victorian novels with frame tales, the auditors

are an active feature of the narrative. Nero the Newfoundland and “Mr.

Consequential”/Chummie the pug (later revealed to be Jim, one of Luath’s friends from

his show dog days) are constantly addressed by Luath during the telling of his tale. To

cite a representative example: “I wonder, Chummie, whether human bipeds—human

42
Gordon Stables was a surgeon in the Royal Navy until 1875 and wrote over 130 books, mostly boys’
adventure fiction.
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beings, I mean—ever do think and feel as deeply and acutely as we kings of the canine

race do?” (29). Two paragraphs later Luath directs a comment at Nero. It is impossible to

forget that Luath is not only the narrator of the story, but a literally speaking dog

addressing other dogs who can also speak. The effect of this is naturalization: it is not a

problem that the dogs talk. It is only humorous that the human lookers-on do not both

realize immediately that this is the case. Yet the dogs don’t allow this to be an easy

realization, either: within the story Luath tells, and in some other dog autobiographies as

well, the dogs hide their speech from the human characters.

There is also a fourth possibility for negotiating the language barrier, which is the

most popular. This is the method of naturalization by silence, or naturalization by

ignoring the problem. In other words, the narrative begins, either with a canine preface or

the first chapter, with no attempt whatsoever to try to account for the dog as speaker.43

More extreme examples of naturalization—including The Dog of Knowledge; or,

Memoirs of Bob the Spotted Terrier: Supposed to be Written by Himself, the earliest

autobiography—flaunt the same problems that other autobiographies try so hard to

mitigate. The only human listed on the title page is that of the illustrator, and in the

frontispiece, Bob is pictured sitting upright at a desk, pen in hand. This method simply

bypasses all of the problems which the first three methods try to account for.44

43
Tess Cosslett shares my findings; she asserts that if writing of animal autobiographies is not presented as
a joke, it can be either “stumbled over,” addressed by a frame table, or elided completely. Cosslett is the
critic who has treated animal autobiography in the greatest depth in her book Talking Animals in British
Children’s Fiction, 1786-1914. She is primarily concerned with how autobiographies morphed to fit the
changing requirements of children’s education.
44
In Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing, Nancy Babb details the difficulties in
recognizing animal authors in library catalogs. Within the MARC Authority Format for Subjects, animal
authors can be listed only under subject headings, under “deities, mythological, legendary, and fictitious
characters and places.”
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 But Bob’s case is anomalous. Like Dickens’s name on David Copperfield, the

author of a dog autobiography is usually acknowledged on the title page even in a fully

naturalized autobiography, and we usually have no reason to suspect that the voice of the

preface is any other than the author’s. The most famous nineteenth-century dog

autobiography, Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1893), is one of the most

straightforward examples of this phenomenon. Its preface reads:

Beautiful Joe is a real dog, and “Beautiful Joe” is his real name. He

belonged during the first part of his life to a cruel master, who mutilated him in

the manner described in the story. He was rescued from him and is now living in a

happy home with pleasant surroundings, and enjoys a wide local celebrity.

The character of Laura is drawn from life, and to the smallest detail is

truthfully depicted. The Morris family has its counterparts in real life, and nearly

all the incidents in the story are founded on fact.—The Author.45

In addition to this signed preface, there is a dedication to George Thorndike Angell, the

president of the American Humane Education Society, and an introduction by a Humane

Society representative. Beautiful Joe strives to be as realistic as possible because it is

based on a “real dog” in a real family. It is not a novel cast as autobiography so much as a

fictional autobiography with a real-dog model, and the preface’s emphasis on its reality is

Saunders’s attempt to justify the work. Similar prefatory notes appear in Cat and Dog;

Or, Memoirs of Puss and the Captain. A Story founded on Fact (1854), Neptune; or the

45
Margaret Marshall Saunders was a prolific novelist whose works often dealt with major social issues.
134
Autobiography of a Newfoundland Dog (1869), and Fairy: The Autobiography of a Real

Dog (1904).

The relationship between author and real dog doesn’t end here, however.

Saunders is not just imagining the life of a dog whose story she knows and allowing him

to narrate it; the act of Joe’s communicating the story works its way into the narrative

itself rather than being confined to the paratextual materials, reminding us of the troubles

inherent in the dog autobiography. He says, “I am an old dog now, and am writing, or

rather getting a friend to write, the story of my life…I think it will please [my mistress] if

I write the story of my life” (14). Joe’s “friend” is not his mistress, then, but Saunders (or

even a fourth party). In this way, dog autobiographies more often ask that their authors

play the scribal or editorial role of “Currer Bell” than the creative role of Charles

Dickens. For instance, in the 1895 Spot: An Autobiography (the title page renames it “An

Autobidography,” [emphasis original], Spot’s master has taken on an editorial role by

virtue of a “cynograph,” which he explains as follows:

As there may be some persons inclined to question the authenticity of

these memoirs, I had better explain beforehand how the latter came into my

possession.

For several years past, my brother-in-law…has been engaged in perfecting

an instrument, somewhat on the principle of the Electric Telegraph, for recording

mental processes by means of those vibrations in the nervous system which

follow their inception in the brain. To this instrument has been given the name of

the Cynograph, probably from its having been hitherto applied exclusively to the

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 investigation of mental phenomena occurring in dogs. As he has not yet taken a

patent for the invention, I am, of course, precluded from entering into the details

of its construction; but I may state that the vibrations, as they occur and are

transmitted by the electric current, cause a needle on the face of the instrument to

deflect, more or less, in proportion to their intensity, and that such deflections are

recorded, in a manner familiar to those acquainted with telegraphy, upon specially

prepared charts. From experiments made upon his dog (the Rollo of “Spot’s”

narrative) he has succeeded in framing a code of what he terms “Thought-

equivalents”; and this he kindly placed at my disposal when I expressed a wish to

test his invention upon my own dog. By its aid I have been enabled—though with

some difficulty—owing to the dislike which “Spot” evinced to electrical contact

in any shape or form—to compile the following narrative.46

Spot’s and Rollo’s thoughts are made readable by the most modern of technologies. This

science-fiction like opening is followed by several more pages on the processes, as well

as Spot’s responses to them, by which the “thought-equivalents” are translated into

English.

This idea of translation is also present in the preface to the sixth edition of The

Life of a Foxhound (1848). The human narrator writes: “It matters little how I became

possessed of Ringwood’s papers, or in what particular tongue they were originally

written…” “Tongue” here not only refers to a foreign language, but a particularly canine

foreign language; when a foxhound draws the scent of a fox, he barks, or “gives tongue,”

46
Aldin was a British writer, artist, and illustrator best known for his paintings and sketches of animals,
sports, and rural life.
136
to alert the huntsman and whippers-in that the fox is near. In this way, Foxhound

metaphorizes the act of canine storytelling more successfully than many of its

counterparts. Both this novel and Spot recognize that the language is foreign and that any

attempt to communicate it is necessarily a translation.

II: Overcoming the Language Barrier

That the dogs require translation at all points to another telling belief that the

Victorians were breaking down: that language is one of the dividing lines between

humans and animals. Like the questioning of the exclusivity of the human soul, granting

dogs language becomes another way for the Victorians to dissolve boundaries historically

imposed to protect the superiority of humankind. And not only do these dogs have a

language of their own to translate: they also understand humans’ language. For instance,

although Spot’s “thought-equivalents” must be translated for his master to understand

them, Spot himself has mastered the English language. Another portion of the preface

reads:

As the work progressed I was more and more astonished—not at finding

proofs of keen and intelligent observation, for these qualities I already knew the

dog possessed; but at the wonderful knowledge of human speech which he

displayed. I leave to wiser heads than mine the question whether this

knowledge—shared, as it appears to be, by other domestic animals—should be

regarded as intuitive or acquired. The mere fact of its existence is sufficiently

startling, and gives rise to uncomfortable reflections.

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Spot’s master’s reflections on Spot’s “wonderful knowledge” invoke the question of

instinct, asking as he does whether the knowledge is intuitive or acquired. The query is

rather bizarre at first glance: how could puppies be born knowing English? But upon

further investigation, it becomes apparent that the answer is really “both.” Dogs

instinctively pay attention to and bond with humans due to our coevolutionary history,

and learning some of our language is a part of that. Though their understanding of words

is obviously limited, today we know that they are experts at reading tone. Frans de Waal

discusses “magic wells,” special abilities each species possesses, and he maintains that

linguistics and symbolic language are the magic wells of human beings. Yet language in

some of its forms is part of canine understanding.47 That this is disconcerting to Spot’s

master betrays more than just a fictional discomfort: breaking the boundaries between

humans and animals is indeed a scary thing for some and indeed accounts for some of the

nineteenth century’s animal abuse, since domination can create the illusion of

superiority.48 It is interesting that the most realistic portrayal of the canine English (a

translating machine rather than a pen-wielding dog) comes from the same author who is

uneasy about his dog’s abilities: while other authors of dog autobiographies are granting

dogs language as a means of imagining canine experience, Cecil Aldin ponders the real—

and alarming—possibilities of dogs and language.

Intuitive, acquired or both, Spot’s “knowledge of human speech” is much the

norm in the dog autobiography. In Diomed: The Life, Travels, and Observations of a Dog

47
Neither are we limiting dogs’ capabilities further by dispossessing them of linguistics: language is not
necessary for cognition, as de Waal argues.
48
For more on this idea, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the
Victorian Age (1987).
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(1899), Diomed explains: “Human language and conduct are not only thoroughly

understood by dogs, but they comprehend them at a much earlier age than do humans,

because, I presume, of our much shorter lives and earlier maturity.”49 Even texts without

this authoritativeness about dogs’ capacities emphasize that, if dogs don’t understand

every word, they can at least gather the sense of human speech, which is part of a

universal language. As Diomed says:

Though every animal makes use of a dialect of its own, so different as to appear

to men a distinct language for each race,—or instance, the barking of a dog, the

mewing of a cat, the bellowing of a bull, &c.,—still a general mode of expression

is common to all, and all can understand and be understood by one another. The

reason of this is, that the universal language is that of feeling only, which is alike

to every one, and can be made evident by the most inarticulate sounds. (47)

For Diomed, even if different species have different dialects, feeling is a universal

language in and of itself. This sentiment was also being explored by Victorian scientists,

including none other than Darwin himself in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and

Animals (1872).50

Other autobiographies imagine that the animal kingdom has an additional shared

language from which humans are excluded. Spot and his feline housemate call this “the

silent language,” interpreted by Spot’s owner in an editorial footnote: “Here ‘Spot’

49
Wise was a lieutenant in the Confederate Army, a lawyer, and a Congressman in the Readjuster Party of
Virginia.
50
Today’s scientists, especially ethologists, tend to agree with Darwin. See, for example, Marc Bekoff, The
Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why
They Matter (2008) and Barbara King, How Animals Grieve (2013).
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evidently refers to some occult means which animals possess of communicating with

each other noiselessly and, as far as can be observed, without change of movement” (25).

Still others imagine that all species share unique languages that must be learned by every

other species to communicate properly even within the animal kingdom. Of course, in

order for the dog autobiography to exist at all, dogs must possess some knowledge of

human language, and just how much they can understand is a point of play in these

texts.51 Even in the case of the cynograph, Spot’s connection with his master is partially

based on his ability to understand human speech. The most outspokenly ignorant canine

protagonist of all, Beautiful Joe, learns to “say the alphabet” by performing different

tricks for letters his mistress holds up on cards, while on the other end of the spectrum,

Bob is depicted at desk, pen in hand, in the frontispiece. In Captain Fritz by Emily

Huntington Miller, Captain Fritz and his magpie friend can also both read and write:

“[The magpie] can also read and write, but that is a secret. He learned it from a sermon

which he found one day lying upon a table. He carried it away to his nest and studied it

for two years, so now he knows quite as much as the rector” (6).

As this crack at the rector suggests, dogs’ grasp of language also provides an

opportunity of poking fun at human use of language. There is a running joke in the genre

that dogs cannot understand (or at least scorn) cursing, for example, with the underlying

suggestion that dogs are morally superior to humans in some ways, just like the dog

epitaphs of Chapter 1 would have us believe. It is jokes like these that “lead the reader to

a critical view of human-kind and, beyond that, to the contemplation of another realm of

existence” (133), according to Laura Brown.

51
Cosslett agrees: “The unvarying convention in all of these stories is that the animals can speak to us and
to each other, and can also understand human speech, but humans, apart from the readers, and occasionally
children, cannot understand them” (65).
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 Surely part of the pleasure of reading dog autobiographies is the humor: both that

which results from extreme anthropomorphism and that which results from allowing dogs

to call attention to our own deficiencies and faults.52 Yet as often as authors give dogs the

chance to voice their criticism at humankind—their inferior senses of smell, the

encumbrance of their possessions, the pointlessness of their preference for tricks—most

of these texts are not intended to be simply humorous or even “cute.” The humor is

mixed with a wry understanding about what it means for dogs to share our lives and

language (however small a part of language this is in reality). For instance, Sable and

White’s Luath, a Collie who can trace his ancestry to the Scottish Highlands, is true to his

roots and a lover of Robert Burns. Indeed, his name comes from Burns’s “The Twa

Dogs,” and the novel’s epigraph is from this poem: “I’ve often wondered, honest Luath, /

What sort of a life poor dogs like you have.” We may laugh at the absurdity of Luath’s

quotation of Burns, but our attention is quickly recalled to the insistence of the authorial

imagination, which asserts that dogs can understand our language but we cannot

understand theirs. Our own imagined deficiencies loom large, and they loom even larger

when we think about how Luath’s “poor life” came to be. For Sable and White is far from

the only dog autobiography to feature moments of trauma—we might even say, a plot of

trauma. At their best, these trauma narratives are intended to make us reconsider how we

treat our canine companions. Bringing together language, affect, and autobiographical

form, these novels perform serious cultural work on behalf of animals even as they

entertain. Inspiring change is the use to which the translated language is put; this is the

most important reason for “giving tongue.”

52
If writing is not presented as a joke, it can be either “stumbled over” or addressed by a frame tale.
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 III: Trauma

Dog autobiographies that intend to inspire change, to make canine trauma

preventable, succeed by making that canine trauma seem accessible and real. Following

in the tradition of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave narratives, which were often

validated by former owners or other white men with the authority to bestow cultural

value, the trauma of dog autobiographies needed to seem genuine even in their necessary

fictiveness. That is, “actual suffering and experience” had to be credible to effect change.

It is here that the advantage (or claim) of narrating a “real dog’s” life, like that of

Beautiful Joe, gains special resonance—we can all the better “see as animals see, and to

feel as animals feel,” as the Humane Society representative says of that novel. But while

many autobiographies exist simply to remind us that the answer to Bentham’s key

question, “Can they [animals] suffer?” is an unequivocal “yes,” others move beyond what

animals see and feel in the moment to address a wider subjective experience shared by

dogs and humans alike: the lasting psychological effects of trauma. It is in this

psychological exploration that dogs are granted full subjectivity as literary protagonists;

if a dog can reflect on or experience the lingering damage caused by trauma, his

subjectivity is legitimated as well as any human protagonist’s. Alternately, narrative

repetitions, such as repeated dreams or parallels between dreams and reality, can suggest

to the (always human) reader that trauma causes resounding echoes, even if the dog does

not seem to pick up on or acknowledge the significance of his story’s own repetitions.

These autobiographies of lasting trauma are those to which we will turn our attention.

The Life of a Foxhound (1848) may be the earliest example of extensive trauma in

a dog autobiography. By this mid-century point, however, the path for trauma art had

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already been paved by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer. Landseer’s animal paintings had been

popular with the middle and aristocratic classes since the late 1820s. His paintings of

dogs, in particular, fall into several categories, some serious and some humorous, all

discussed at length by Diana Donald in her book Picturing Animals in Britain, 1750-1850.

Many of Landseer’s more serious dog paintings feature dogs who are suffering. In

Attachment (1829), Landseer’s contribution to the Romantics’ artistic interpretations of

the Helvellyn story, a terrier paws at the chest of his deceased master, the glint in his eye

suggestive of tears clearly visible even in profile.53 Indeed, the theme of the mourning

dog was pervasive for Landseer, surfacing again multiple times before a decade had

passed in The Faithful Hound (1830) and The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (1837). In

the former, a bloodhound howls over the bodies of his master—a soldier—and his

master’s horse. In the latter, the best known of any of the paintings I will be discussing, a

hound slumps besides his master’s casket, resting his chin on its top. It seems that the

dog’s desire to maintain contact with the top of the casket is the only thing keeping him

from sliding onto the dirty floor in absolute, abject surrender.

Landseer’s images of dogs grieving the losses of their masters successfully make

the point that dogs are emotional creatures. Yet he makes equally powerful statements

about canine emotion in paintings which depict dogs alone (or only with other dogs and

not with humans).

53
Along with Landseer’s Attachment, Scott’s “Helvellyn” (1806) and Wordsworth’s “Fidelity” (1815)
celebrate the loyalty of Charles Gough’s spaniel. Gough died hiking on Mount Helvellyn in April 1805.
Three months later, his dog was discovered guarding his master’s bones.
143
[Figure 8, Edwin Landseer, There’s No Place Like Home]

[Figure 9, Edwin Landseer, A Jack in Office]

144
Landseer’s paintings of dogs independent of their human masters or other human

associates has an effect similar to that of giving dogs their own voices in narrative; they

are visual it-narratives. Not that Landseer was breaking new ground in his subjects; by

Landseer’s time, owners had been commissioning paintings of their animals, especially

dogs and horses, for centuries. So often, however, these paintings pictured animals as the

pieces of property that they were considered to be—they look more like still-life

paintings of inanimate objects than paintings of individual animals with distinct

personalities. As realistic and as anatomically correct as are, say, George Stubbs’s

paintings from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, they lack the sense of the dog as

an emotive being. Landseer’s attention to the dynamism of dogs’ eyes and to their myriad

postures gave his subjects not only life, but also subjectivity.

The terrier’s pleading eyes and deferential posture in There’s No Place Like

Home (Figure 7) are the canine equivalent of Oliver Twist’s famous line “Please, sir, I

want some more.” The broken and empty dish suggests that the dog is hungry in more

ways than one; he is underfed and neglected by someone who is either uninterested in

replacing, or is unable to replace, his broken vessel. His slinking posture makes clear the

fearfulness with which he begs for more, as if he is going to be kicked for daring to ask.

This dog’s vulnerability is echoed in the snail, the shape of whose shell matches the dog’s

posture.

That the dog’s home life is far from ideal is reinforced by the painting’s title,

which ironizes the lyrics from the popular song “Home! Sweet Home!”:

Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,

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 Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home;

A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there,

Which seek thro’ the world, is ne’er met elsewhere.

Home! Home! Sweet, sweet home!

There's no place like home, there's no place like home.54

This terrier’s home may indeed be humble, but sweet it most certainly is not. Unlike the

snail, whose “home,” or shell, is on his back and provides constant protection, the dog

must come out of his shelter to beg for food.55 As a domesticated creature, he is reliant on

humans for food, shelter, and everything else. The downside of this dependence is

explored in many dog autobiographies, as we will see.

The second painting I want to discuss also depicts hungry dogs. A Jack in Office

(Figure 8) pictures a rotund and self-satisfied Jack Russell Terrier guarding his owner’s

horsemeat from five other dogs. The most memorable figure is the emaciated pointer in

the right foreground. Her sagging teats indicate that she is a new mother, scrounging for

food not only for herself, but for a litter of pups. Despite her submissive posture—

bowing, tail tucked as far between her legs as physically possible—the pointer’s bared

teeth reveal that she is willing to fight for the scraps if necessary. Like with the terrier in

There’s No Place Like Home, the pointer’s eyes do as much work as her posture. She

won’t look up at the Jack Russell who stands between her and the meat and instead stares

at the ground, betraying her struggle between necessity and fear.

54
These lyrics were written by American John Howard Payne as part of the opera Clari, or The Maid of
Milan, which debuted in London on May 8, 1823.
55
See William Cowper’s mid-eighteenth-century poem “The Snail” (exact date unknown), which
celebrates the snail’s supreme self-sufficiency. I am grateful to several astute friends for suggestions about
the snail’s role in this painting.
146
 Landseer’s paintings create sympathy in a different way than dog autobiographies

do. Diana Donald describes this difference as follows:

Visual representations, whether they are visions of the physical splendour of

animals or exposés of cruel abuse, exert a power that is denied to verbal

communication. At the simplest level, they have a materiality that brings ‘real’

animals before our eyes: running free, resting, displaying, snarling, fighting,

toiling, howling and dying…The sight of an animal suffering at the hands of man,

or snatched by a predator, excites emotions in a way that verbal reports seldom

do. By extension, visual images of animals have a unique power to move the

spectator – to pity, vicarious suffering, gratification of aggressive impulses or

sadistic pleasure…

Donald’s claim that visual portrayals of animals “have a unique power to move the

spectator” holds true even with images considerably less sentimental than Landseer’s

paintings. Visuals were especially important for the various publications of the anti-

vivisection movement, such as Francis Power Cobbe’s pamphlet Light in Dark Places,

published by the Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection

in 1891. This pamphlet features no cowering dogs with glints in their eyes suggestive of

tears, but rather, in Cobbe’s words, “Every illustration is a reproduction…of the

engravings and wood-cuts in the standard works of the most eminent physiologists” (3).

As sterile as the images might seem to the scientific eye, Cobbe knew that, for a

layperson, even the most un-sentimentalized of images would arouse feelings of

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“vicarious suffering.” This is because, even though some of the images are mere outlines

of an animal’s head or body, many of them portray dogs (and other animals, especially

rabbits) with facial features intact. Even though their faces are not expressive like

Landseer’s, by choosing these images, Cobbe draws a parallel between his art and the art

of the physiological handbooks.

Though The Life of a Foxhound seems to be the first dog autobiography to

describe the lasting effects of trauma, it is not an anti-vivisection narrative; rather, this

text was motivated by the desire to know a foxhound’s perspective for the benefit of the

hunt, more so than for the dog’s own sake. That is, of all the dog autobiographies

discussed here, Foxhound has the most human-centered approach. The advertisements

present in the book’s sixth edition make this clear: they are all for other “sporting books”

on hunting, fishing, and racing. Ringwood’s Bildungsroman is the story of his training as

a foxhound as he is mentored by Trimbush, a more experienced dog. Trimbush corrects

Ringwood’s faults, warns him of the consequences of repeated offenses, and, most

importantly, explains the errors of human huntsman in not allowing the dogs to control

the hunt as much as possible. Accordingly, the preface to the first and second editions

(1848 and 1863, respectively) reads:

Trimbush told his story—the story of his life—long ago, and a generation of

sportsmen having, probably, been succeeded by another since then, the

autobiography of that old and sagacious hound is now presented to the notice of

those who may have been denied the opportunity of profiting either by his sage

advice or experience.

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The “advice and experience” that Trimbush has to offer sportsmen, narrated by the young

Ringwood, is one of the strongest examples of the dog autobiography’s common conceit

that dogs know better than humans do. As I discussed in Chapter 2, canine “sagacity”

suggests that dogs like Trimbush have their own epistemology which differs from that of

humans. The sense that dogs have their own, perhaps superior, world of knowledge is

heightened by the fact that the narrative is transferred between generations of dogs even

before the canine tale is passed on to the human realm. Ever uncomfortable with its own

status, however, Foxhound justifies Trimbush’s voice and advice by having Trimbush

extensively quote articles written by contemporary foxhunting experts. The effect is

circular: Trimbush is so intelligent not only because he relies upon his own experience as

a hunting dog, but because he knows the right ideas to quote—those published by the

human experts.

Interestingly, the book’s sixth edition (1933) has an altogether different preface,

omitting Trimbush and instead focusing on Ringwood:

…I am persuaded that few of the readers of this memoir will differ in opinion as

to the right and title of Ringwood to be called an ‘experienced dog.’ Whatever

may be deemed his faults of commission and omission, still the most skeptical

cannot doubt that his learning was acquired by practical knowledge, and his

accomplishments gained by the study of facts rather than by theory. He was not

deeply versed in the lore of books: he drew his information from what he actually

saw and participated in.

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The effect of this new preface is quite different from its predecessor. Unlike Trimbush,

Ringwood is not book smart. While the absurdity of this statement echoes the comedy of

the idea that Fritz and the magpie know more than the rector, its point stands: practical

rather than theoretical knowledge is traditionally associated with dogs (though in Chapter

2 I argued that the term “sagacity” is, when used in regards to dogs, actually a uniting of

instinct and intellect). According to this preface to Foxhound, however, dogs embody the

privileging of instinct over intellect, which in some autobiographies comes to stand for

human language itself. Nearly a century before Virginia Woolf’s biography of the

Brownings’ dog, Flush (1933), in which Flush’s perspective is based on scent instead of

sight, Foxhound is an attempt to identify how a dog would narrate if he could. Of course,

the modernist novel, with its generally more impressionistic, less plot-centered

techniques, is better suited to represent how a dog likely sees the world. Laura Brown

also sees the wandering protagonist and disconnected sequences as staple features of “the

dog narrative,” which is “a novel of itinerancy.” She writes that “[i]n the history of realist

fiction in this period, the dog’s itinerancy generates a narrative form that diverges from

the shaped action that has retrospectively come to define the rise of the novel” (116). Yet

by focusing on adventure and picaresque novel modes rather than the modes of the

heavily plotted Victorian novel, the nineteenth-century dog autobiography finds its own

way to imitate a canine way of life: by emphasizing constant movement and activity. This

theory is well supported by the fact that Foxhound is a Bildungsroman structured by

various hunts/chases and Sable and White is a picaresque novel much in the spirit of

Oliver Twist. Moreover, I would argue that what Brown sees as a lack of order in the

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main plot of the narrative is more than compensated for by both the standard collection of

events that occur at some point, and by the novels’ endings, which emphasize a return to

origins.

Like the undercutting of Trimbush’s canine authority (instinct) by his quotation of

human authors (intellect), Ringwood’s practical knowledge at the heart of the book’s

narration is undermined by the book’s ending, in which Ringwood tells Trimbush that he

wants “to let his tongue appear in print” (209, italics original). Trimbush then recites to

Ringwood a four-stanza poem celebrating the Squire, who owns all of the foxhounds.

The book ends with Ringwood agreeing to include Trimbush’s poem in his story. Then

Ringwood’s “biographer” steps into the story for the first and only time:

Having doubtlessly made every note of value which could be drawn from

his experience, Ringwood’s memoir here ends from want of material, and the

earnest disposition on the part of the biographer of wishing to prove neither

monotonous nor wearisome. It was deemed by that wise hound that a history or

tale, when told, should, like a fox, when killed, be broken up and finished. To this,

therefore, we will give an appropriate one in a ringing WHO-WHOOP! (212)

This could have been an epilogue, but it is not. While the biographer’s opening comments

were contained within the preface, he must have the final word in the book proper. In

other words, this is an example of both extradiegetic and narrative framing. This is not to

say that the dog autobiography is a fruitless endeavor because human experts must trump

or justify canine ones and human ways of knowing must triumph over canine ways of

151
knowing; rather, it demonstrates that the genre finds ways to blend human and canine

epistemology. There is always a tension between human language and canine instinct that

the dog autobiography calls our attention to, if not attempts to resolve.

The preface’s parallel of the finished tale and the killed fox reiterates this

blending: the tale, composed of language, ends like death on the field, a more literal or

instinctual understanding of death. And this is an appropriate metaphor with which to

“kill” the book; for, despite the thrill of the chase that dominates Ringwood’s story, the

narrative is often haunted by images and threats of death. Death surfaces at the narrative

level, bubbling just beneath the surface if not always fully embraced or processed by

Ringwood himself. Still, the result is that we cannot feel entirely easily about

Ringwood’s future by the end.

The first warning that the foxhound kennel could well be a place of death occurs

almost immediately. In the first chapter Trimbush tells the amateur Ringwood the tragic

story of a different puppy who was once in Ringwood’s position as a hound-in-training:

“There was a shy, broken-spirited puppy entered the same season with me, and

whenever any of us began a bit of fun with him, he’d shriek and howl ‘pen-an-

ink’56 just as if he was being murdered. This, of course, led every one to take

advantage, and this poor devil never had any peace of mind or body. One day,

however, when a few of us had pinned him in a corner of the court, and were

baiting him for sport, who should step in but Ned Adams, the second whip. How

he paid us off, to be sure! Not one escaped but with every bone in his body aching

fit to split.”
56
“Pen-and-ink” is Cockney rhyming slang for “stink.” Thank you to Andrew Stauffer for this explanation.
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 “But it served all of you right,” interrupted I [Ringwood].

“Perhaps it did,” rejoined Trimbush; “but we thought otherwise, and no sooner

had [the whip] turned his back than we commenced making a retaliation upon the

cur who had caused us such a drubbing. We had scarcely begun, however, when

Ned again made his unwelcome appearance, and flogged us until every stroke

from his double-thong seemed to soak right through our bodies. Before the cock

gave notice of the coming day,” continued Trimbush, significantly, “Tricksy—for

that was the name of the hound—was disposed of so as to leave no trace behind.”

“Eaten!” I ejaculated.

“We didn’t leave,” replied my friend deliberately, and dropping his words like

peas from his jaws, “even his head. […] There’s an adage, that a dead dog may

tell how he was killed, […] but an eaten one never can.” (9-11, original

emphases)

Trimbush obviously evinces a pleasure in scaring Ringwood with this story of the hounds

eating the weakest link, and the horror is all on the young hound’s side. Neither dog ever

mentions the incident again, but that it was a real concern is clear in a footnote which

says that this event actually occurred “some years since in Mr. Conyer’s kennel, at

Copthall, Essex” (11). Later on Trimbush tells another tale about a victim of crazed

kennel dogs, in which a new whipper-in is eaten by the hounds when he comes to “quell a

row” among them in the middle of the night: “…scarcely had he lifted the latch of the

entrance, when—not recognizing his voice or his person—he was seized by the throat;

and before morning light, there was nothing left but a cleanly picked skeleton” (57).

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Trimbush “cooly” admits to having “had a hand in the supper” (56). Like Jane Eyre, the

story temporarily becomes (canine) gothic.

Ringwood is also warned early on that puppies who don’t follow directions are

hung by master’s order. Trimbush tells the story of a puppy who barked excessively: “He

was led out of the court the next day, with a rope round his neck, to suffer from his

repeated offence. It made us very sad to see him taken away; but no caution or

punishment could break him of the habit, and his example was a shocking one for the

young entry” (113). The expression “hang me if…” or “hang them if…” features

prominently in the novel, always reminding us of the threat for misstepping.

The third incident in which the environment of the kennel itself leads to death is

when one of the dogs goes mad towards the end of the novel. After showing sure signs of

madness, the hound Gameboy is shot; the dog’s feeder “dr[ives] the charge crashing

through [his] brain” (192). Rather than simply reacting to the shock of this experience, as

Ringwood did upon the story of the pup’s hanging and the cases of the Tricksy and the

whipper-in being eaten, he is directly influenced by this unfortunate event. Because he

had a laceration under his ear from scratching a flea earlier in the day, Ringwood is

almost shot as a precaution. Luckily, the huntsman convinces the other kennel leaders to

quarantine him for six weeks instead, and Ringwood escapes an untimely death. Though

the thrill of the chase dominates the autobiography, the reader is never able to escape the

underlying fear of death that permeates the narrative, even if Ringwood does not dream

of his death threats or show other signs of lasting trauma. We understand that his very

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silence may indicate future psychological haunting, a thought made more disconcerting

since Ringwood is still a young dog with many years afield ahead of him.57

Other later, more representative dog autobiographies also acknowledge the

atrocities of foxhunting. Rather than manifesting fears in the narrative unconscious,

however, Spot’s fears in Spot: An Autobiography fears manifest in his own psychic

unconscious. Spot dreams that he is taken on a hunt where some of the dogs are whipped

for misbehavior. He concludes the chapter:

But the oddest thing about this dream is that I have never forgotten it, like my

other dreams; so that even now, when I hear any sound like the crack of a whip, I

think of those poor dogs who were so cruelly beaten, and wince as if the lash were

about to be applied to my own back. I cannot get over this weakness, though it

causes me much unhappiness, for my master becomes angry when I show signs of

fear. (56)

Spot’s winces for his fellow dogs replicate the ideal reader’s response to reading dog

autobiographies: we should feel for him as he has felt for the other dogs on the hunt. This

paragraph teaches us how to read canine trauma and react via projective empathy.

Spot’s fear of being whipped is actualized in Cat and Dog (1854), another early

autobiography by Julia Charlotte Maitland, in which the canine narrator Captain, a bird-

hunting dog, gets shot on the field by a careless hunter.

57
Interestingly, the fox is never considered for what he really is: dogs’ cousin, also condemned to a violent
death.
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 In due time I recovered, and was as strong and handsome as ever; but, strange to

say, I no longer felt like the same dog. My own sufferings had suggested some

serious reflections as to whether being shot might not be as unpleasant to the birds

as to me; and I really began quite to pity them. So far the change was for the

better; but it did not stop there: not only was my love for field-sports

extinguished, but it had given place to a timidity which neither threats nor

caresses could overcome. I shuddered at the very sight of a gun, and no amount of

reward or punishment could induce me again to brave its effects. Under all other

circumstances I was as courageous as before: I would have attacked a wild beast,

or defended the house against a robber, without the slightest fear; but I could not

stand fire; and the moment I saw a gun pointed, there was no help for it, I fairly

turned tail and ran off.58

Here the fear inspired by Spot’s dream is actualized; and there is no doubt that after being

shot, Captain has developed canine post-traumatic stress disorder. From Foxhound to

Spot to Cat and Dog, then, we have witnessed three differently ways of conceptualizing

canine trauma: from the narrative level, to the dream, to the actual pain. Each of these

conceptualizations works to help us imagine dogs as victims of enduring, not temporary,

suffering—suffering that affects the mind even more than the body.

This idea of the dog autobiography as a narrative of trauma harmonizes with the

fact that dog autobiographies are usually picaresque novels, as I mentioned above. The

58
Maitland was a British author of children’s fiction and the great-niece of the novelist sisters Frances and
Sarah Burney.
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genre has many reoccurring events or near-events whose sequence is arbitrary, which I

identify as the following:

1) tail docking/ear cropping

2) separation from mother and siblings

3) burglary (to which the dog is an alarm or deterrent)

4) dog-stealing and “dog-faking” (disguising a dog so that he can be sold

unrecognized)

5) dog-show performance (forced or otherwise)

6) forced circus/traveling show performance

7) vivisection

The work of the novel, then, is to detail the dog’s continued escapes. Though the first two

of these seven occur near the outset, the other five may appear in any order. Some novels,

like Sable and White, feature all of these events, while others only a few. Of course, these

are not all of the dangers/traumas to which a dog can be exposed, but they are the most

common. As the movement from the narrative level, to the dream, to the actual pain

makes clear, not all dogs suffer severe consequences of their trauma like Captain does,

but there are often lasting marks nevertheless.

Bonny Prince: The Autobiography of a Collie Dog (1906) by Marion Sewall

follows a different mode of narrative, one that contributes to an idea of greater aesthetic

wholeness than more picaresque narratives. Rather than focusing primarily on present

action and the effects the past has on the present, Bonny Prince extends the experience of

trauma to the future. Prince has dreams that both reflect on past and predict future

trauma. Early on, soon after he has been separated from his canine family and has joined

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his new, human family, he dreams he is herding sheep, which drown before he can rescue

them. His very nonchalant attitude towards the separation is quite different from most

other autobiographies, which imagine the surprise separation as traumatic. This dream

about failed herding seems to be a displacement of this trauma.

Later, violent actions against other animals are again the source of trauma. Prince

is entreated by his family to kill his first mole. Though at first resistant, he soon

accomplishes the task and is praised by his human family. He then brags, eerily:

Aunt Lucy seemed very proud of me when Howard told her that I had not left a

whole bone in the mole’s body, but the jolliest thing of all was my dream the next

night. I thought I had slain enough moles to build a mountain, and had killed

Rover, the neighbor’s dog, by mistake.

Prince’s dream of killing the moles and the neighbor’s dog—the “jolly thing”—comes

back in the second half of the novel. Prince’s happy life is broken up by Howard’s

father’s money troubles, and Prince ends up with an indifferent family friend until

Howard’s father can get back on his feet. The night before the separation occurs, Prince

has bad dreams, again suggesting that the canine unconscious is prophetic.59 As the

picaresque plot is set into motion, and Prince is captured by gypsies, his initial resistance

to mole-killing returns in full force. He is amazed at his own decline as a result of

association with gypsies and the struggle for survival. He begins to kill rabbits, quail,

chickens, and turkeys to satisfy his hunger, but is disgusted with himself and his

immorality: “As I grew to be an expert thief I gained favor daily with the gypsies and in
59
For the history of dogs as prophets, see, for example, Susan McHugh, Dog.
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time I became a respected member of the company” (100). Cursing soon thereafter ceases

to affect him: “…a couple of years before [the vulgar sentences] would have caused me

to yelp with moral pain, but this tenderness of conscience was beginning to be a thing of

the past, so I merely lolled out my cracked tongue and looked helplessly about” (103).

Here, the human fault of cursing also comes back as a marker of Prince’s fallen

condition.

Towards the novel’s end, when Prince has changed hands for a fifth time and

actually is responsible for guarding sheep, his flock are slaughtered in the night and he is

beaten. His punishment is all the more violent because he had been covered with wool—

not because he was guilty, but because he was trying to save a lamb that got stuck in a

fence. Each of Prince’s three dreams, then, are both predictive and reflective: the trauma

of the separation from his mother manifests itself in a dream of sheep-loss, which in turn

becomes actual sheep-loss; the mountain of dead moles indicates both his actual-mole

killing and his future status as depraved hunter; and his dream of separation from Howard

is both immediately and ultimately true.

So far the most extreme case of trauma we have seen is Captain’s post-traumatic

stress disorder from Cat and Dog, the result of a physical injury that ruins his career as a

hunting dog. But this most haunted dog of all is a different Captain, the aforementioned

Captain Fritz, who never recovers from his separation from his mother and whose

continued separations from human owners reflect this original trauma. We find out that

Fritz, the pick of the litter of poodles, will be sold to put money towards medicine for

Fritz’s human family’s baby. The human mother sympathizes with Fritz’s mother: “Poor

Lady! I wonder if you care for your babies as I do for mine. I wonder if it breaks your

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heart to lose them!” (8). But the family’s little boy does not sympathize at all; as he

carries Fritz away from Lady, he says, “‘She’ll [Lady] forget all about you in a couple of

days,’ he said, pulling my ears; ‘it would be very different now with my mother if the

baby should go, but then, babies are of more consequence” (11). Fritz, of course, is

skeptical of this idea from the start. Early in his new life Fritz dreams that he plays with

his three siblings and mother again, and when he wakes up, he’s sad at the memory (29).

This first separation had been hard enough on him, but when he runs away after his

young new mistress’s grandmother threatens to give away or kill him because he fights

with the cat, he can never overcome his depression, nor gains a permanent home. His fine

collar is taken by a homeless man for its resale value, and Fritz reflects:

Another thing I lost. I do not know the name of it, but it seemed to be inside of

me. It made me love to run and race, and tear and shake things. It made

everything seem full of fun. There were always little heads nodding and little

faces laughing at me, in the trees and the bushes and the curtains, and everything

moved and swung. There were voices that whistled and called me, but I had to

rush after them up and down the yard, but I never found them. (53)

Fritz is depressed and deeply haunted, to the point of seeing visions and hearing voices.

Later, alone and wandering, Fritz sees Elsie and her grandmother in the street, but Elsie

doesn’t recognize him; instead, she scorns him for his dirtiness and is even appalled by

him. When her grandmother points out Fritz’s similarity to her lost puppy, she merely

asserts that she has found “better things to break one’s heart over” (106). Fritz is soon

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thereafter captured by the police himself and taken to the pound, where he is rescued by a

blind old man who had been friends with his latest master. This homeless man is Fritz’s

friend till the end of his days, which unfortunately come very quickly. Loyal to the only

one who remained loyal to him, Fritz makes his home in the cemetery where the man is

buried. Again he sees visions: “…when I shut my eyes I saw great shining things sailing

along in the dark, like lanterns, only some of them had faces—the face of the man who

beat me, and of my old master, and of the boy who made me turn the wheel” (117). These

are distinct from the actual bad dreams he has in the next chapter, on which he meditates

with the magpie:

I cannot quite understand about dreams, though the magpie says it is very plain to

him, and that it is only the shadow-people having our good times and our bad

times over again. I can understand about the good times, but what do they want of

the bad ones? How do they know where to find us, and when we die are they dead

too?... (123)

Fritz is full of philosophical questions that indicate his depression, such as “why does the

wind cry?” (124). Though it is formally very similar to all the other dog autobiographies,

his is by far the most haunted, the most powerful attempt to imagine debilitating canine

trauma.

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 IV: Overcoming Instinct

Trauma is intensified when one has no time to prepare for it, when it occurs

unexpectedly or as accident. This is one of the points that Caruth emphasizes about

Freud’s discussion of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). However, canine

instinct is often considered to be precisely that which diminishes unpreparedness: dogs

can sense danger before their human counterparts. As I discussed in Chapter 2, in

detective and sensation fiction, dogs are often the earliest and best detectors of criminals.

If this is the case, then it would seem that dogs would be at least somewhat impervious to

accident. Trials of instinct are a commonly plotted moment in dog autobiographies,

especially the arrival of the dog-stealer or burglar, and the result of his favored bait, a

hunk of meat. In Cat and Dog, for example, a burglar tries to get into the yard by

distracting Captain with meat, but he doesn’t fall for it. He says: “I need scarcely say that

I indignantly rejected his bribe—for such I knew it was, meant to entice me in some way

or other to neglect my duty; so I growled and snarled, and watched him well as he passed

on” (26). This scene presupposes Captain’s familiarity with deceitful human behavior,

despite his lack of experience with it. His instinct, then, is so finely tuned that it requires

no schooling at all. The same is true of Hero of Hero’s Story: The Autobiography of a

Newfoundland Dog (1890) by Harriet Boultwood, who doesn’t want to follow a gypsy

woman because he doesn’t want “to be stolen for the sake of ‘a reward.’”60 Similarly,

when the gypsy woman’s son tries to rob the house and attempts to poison Hero with

meat, Hero sniffs the meat and knows not to eat it.

Paradoxically, however, it is also the closeness of the human-dog relationship that

compromises the power of instinct and makes trauma possible. Captain cannot stand the
60
Harriet Boultwood and her sister Emma both wrote children’s fiction under the pseudonym Emma Leslie.
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man who accidentally (nonfatally) shoots him, but overcomes his instinctive dislike to

please his master, who wishes him to show off his hunting skills. Captain describes their

meeting thus:

A young gentleman arrived at our house whom my master and mistress treated

much better than I thought he deserved. At the first glance I penetrated into the

state of his mind, and should have liked to hear my master growl, and my mistress

bark at him; instead of which they said they were glad to see him, and hoped he

had had a pleasant journey. (12)

Because his master and mistress welcome the guest, Captain ignores his ability to

“penetrate into the state of [the gentleman’s] mind.” Overcoming instinct in this way only

results in injury and trauma for Captain, however.

The whole of Spot’s misfortunes are also a result of the silencing of instinct. He

recalls the experience of taking a dog-stealer’s bait as follows: “Had I but listened to the

promptings of my own conscience; had I allowed the dictates of that natural instinct

which warns all dogs against having dealings with strangers to prevail over degrading

appetite, I had been spared the misery I have undergone!” (130). Here, conscience—what

I call moral intelligence (part of what comprises sagacity) in Chapter 2—is portrayed as

innate, part of canine instinct. Just as some believe that humans innately know right from

wrong, dogs have their own inborn ability to tell who to trust and who not to. Indeed, it is

this failure to resist temptation that sets Spot’s adventures in motion: he is stolen, sold to

a pet store owner, bought by a woman who over-pampers him, is separated from her,

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ends up at the Battersea Dogs’ Home, is purchased by a vivisector, and only narrowly

escapes becoming the subject of a painful experiment by finding his way back to his

original home.

Though the power of instinct is compromised by the human-dog bond, there is a

result of this connection that helps strengthen a dog’s ability to avoid some types of

trauma: the understanding of language. It is his knowledge of language which prevents

Diomed from suffering Fritz’s trauma of separation: he overhears his human family

talking about the dissolution of his canine one, and reflects: “Such family separations are

not looked forward to with sorrow and apprehension among dogs as among human

beings. They are anticipated as a matter of course, and as the opportunity to a good dog to

secure a good master, and do his allotted work in life” (4). When Diomed is left with his

trainer, Mr. Turner, he knows from their conversation that his master will be back for him

and he therefore doesn’t worry. In other words, what would otherwise be an “accident” in

Freud’s terms is an expected event for Di because of language.

But it is also for language’s sake that dogs are subject to trauma. Spot puts up

with the continual tail-pinching by the cynograph in the hopes of telling his story to his

people:

I longed so to tell them everything; but alas! it was out of my power. And for

many a day it grieved me to think that neither he nor my dear mistress were ever

likely to find out how I had been taken away from them, and all the wonderful

and terrible adventures I had gone through. But, perhaps, they will know it now:

at least, I hope so! (208)

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Spot so desperately wants his mistress to know the reason for his disappearance that he

withstands lengthy pain to chance such a revelation. The pain to Spot’s tail literally

affects an already sore spot: early on, Spot said that his “tail-stump” had “quite healed”

after it had been docked (20). He does take great offense when his feline friend makes fun

of his short his tail, however: “This heartless reference to a misfortune which had

befallen me in early youth would have provoked many a dog to extreme measures; but I

bore it all for the sake of my dear, kind people….” (45). In other words, he refrains from

attacking the cat for her cruelty. But the tail docking itself is something Spot has borne

for the “sake of his people,” as is the continued pain to his tail caused by the cynograph.

In a harrowing footnote that comes within a page of the novel’s conclusion,

Spot’s master tells us that Rollo endured more than just pain to his tail: “Rollo was a

martyr to Science. The Cynograph killed him” (234). If the knowledge of human

language can prevent trauma, the desire of both humans and (as humans imagine it) of

dogs to null the language barrier can be not only traumatic, but fatal.

V: The Return Home

The trauma of Spot’s narration (not to mention Rollo’s sacrifice) is itself an

attempt to recount the trauma of his “wonderful and terrible adventures.” For, after

experiencing all but one of the seven most common traumatic experiences in dog

autobiographies, Spot returns to his original home. Though Spot blames his adventures

on his lapse in instinct, everything he has borne has ultimately been the result of human

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greed or cruelty. And yet he has returned; and yet he bears more for the sake of telling of

his great return to his family.

In his Freudian study of plot and readers’ psychomatic responses to plottedness,

Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Peter Brooks aligns the pleasure

principle with the desire to continue reading and the death drive with the desire to get to

the end. The “dilatory space” in the middle is where the erotics of the text play out: we

want to reach the end, but it should not come too soon lest we feel cheated. The plot, or

the delay to the end, should be pleasurable. We desire to reach the end so that we have

found a way to bind meaning, to organize the chaos of life into something that makes

sense. At the same time, when we reach the end, we have also returned to origins, to the

beginning: we are back in what Brooks calls “the quiescence of death.” This is akin to the

post-traumatic experience: we replay the moment of accident over and over, in visions

and in dreams, attempting to create meaning out of what happened, in order to process

the event and create closure. Like in Foxhound or Bonny Prince, moments of repetition,

of confrontation with death, are attempts to process the accident, to understand how we

almost reached the end, as well as the desire to finally do so.

Most readers of dog autobiography will not be satisfied until the dog returns home

after his traumatic adventures. Here, then, the “return to origins" is less metaphorical than

literalized. Though the dogs telling their stories are invariably sagacious because of their

worldly experiences, they are also stuck: unlike in Jane Eyre, there is no Rochester to be

had, only a return to Gateshead, if not the Red Room. The instinct for return is the

equivalent of the Freudian death drive for Brooks: a return to the same-but different of

quiescence. This is not to say that the lives of the dogs with their human families are

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unhappy. But it is nonetheless true that, well before Lassie, the dog autobiography

celebrates the animal’s homecoming. What we want is for the dog to return to us through

every obstacle, the more harrowing, the better. Monica Flegel—who reads Francis Power

Cobbe’s Confessions of a Lost Dog (1867) autobiographically on Cobbe’s part—

corroborates this by describing how Cobbe leads her dog Hajjin to believe she is

drowning: “Hajjin is deliberately placed in a state of great discomfort so as to experience

the joys of being ‘rewarded’ with her mistress’s love, while the mistress herself freely

chooses to terrorize her charge so as to confirm for herself the dog’s devotion” (95).

Cobbe “revel[s] in the pleasure that can be produced through exerting control over the

animal” (89). Similarly, the more the dog goes through, the more rewarding it is (and the

dilatory space is) when he returns. This is quite different from Laura Brown’s ideas about

the dog narrative; her assertion that this genre stands outside the established literary order

is challenged by the ultimately circular plot that encloses a meandering middle.

The return home is not always an unambiguous celebration, however, and

questions of loyalty, both human and canine, are called into question. Not every dog’s

return is celebrated, and even less often do owners search down their stolen or missing

dogs, like Plato’s determined mistress in My Dog Plato (1890?). Some dogs return home

to be hardly noticed or even rejected. Others end up being loyal to someone different than

their original masters. And one returns to nothing but a grave. Taken together, these

different outcomes suggest that endings are spaces to work out anxieties about canine

loyalty as well as to reassure the readers of this loyalty. This is related to the questions

raised about instinct: autobiographies place a high value on canine instinct but also depict

moments of its failure, especially failures that work in a human’s favor.

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 Inviting further comparison with Jane Eyre, Luath in Sable and White

miraculously returns home to Daisy Bank, only to discover that the Bank was destroyed

in a fire and the family has moved elsewhere. Too depressed to leave the area, Luath

sticks around with a cottager, only to come into contact with one of the Bank’s former

servants within the week. The happy reunion Luath shares with his family concludes the

novel. Similarly, Spot returns home and is able to solve a family mystery by knocking

over and breaking a jar containing a will. His family becomes rich in consequence, and so

for both Luath and Spot, the return home is a return to glory.

But Prince of Bonny Prince doesn’t fare as well. After the brutal beating he

receives for his supposed sheep-slaughter, he wanders into the city, where he finds a

family friend. She reunites him with Howard when Howard next comes home to visit. He

is surprised by his old dog, but he’s not as overjoyed as one might wish; he’s a stately,

even-keeled lawyer who has outgrown his boyhood attachment to Prince. The

aforementioned incident of Elsie’s rejection of Fritz when she sees him in the street is

much more severe, but is another example of a dog’s continued loyalty to a disloyal

master. Fritz’s and his elderly master’s mutual adoption is less a moment of triumphant

joy than a desperate desire for companionship in a broken world. Fritz’s narrative, at the

same time as it is perhaps the greatest example of loyalty since he spends the rest of his

life guarding his late master’s grave, also lacks the circularity of the other

autobiographies, leaving us with the feeling that Fritz is doomed to wander forever. Even

though Carl, the grandson of his late master, returns from war and plans to marry the

cemetery keeper’s daughter, Fritz’s despondency is clear: “He says he is Carl, and

sometimes I believe it is true; but I do not quite know” (128). Fritz’s narrative seems

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closer to Brown’s idea of the true “itinerancy narrative,” one in which the unsettledness

continues, in mind if not in body.61

Like Fritz, other dogs pass from owner to owner and develop some sense of

loyalty to each in turn—even dogs who ultimately return to their original homes. Before

Spot’s return, he had tried his best to be faithful to two other masters encountered on his

travels. He grows curiously attached to his dog-napper before being dropped off at the pet

shop and hopes he can stay with this, his captor: “Strange as it may seem, I grew to love

him in that instant” (135). And after he is purchased from the store by a pampering old

woman, he says: “Upon the whole I liked her and resolved to do my duty by her, for was

she not my mistress now? So I licked her hand and, cuddling up close to her, laid my

head upon her lap” (155). Though we know that Spot’s affections really belong to his

original family, this autobiography questions the value of lifelong devotedness,

suggesting that not only humans but dogs can outgrow or move on from previous

relationships. Nonetheless, is it notable that, rather than mistrusting all of humankind or

becoming otherwise misanthropic after being maltreated, dogs still serve human interests

by loving the new humans in their lives—even those who are their captors. This, is as

Spot says, is his “duty”: loyalty to humankind, if not to one particular human.

While the original goal of certain late-century dog autobiographies was to realize

our ideas about canine subjectivity in order to better dogs’ lives, the dogs’ experiences of

61
In her essay on dog autobiographies, “Dog Years, Human Fears,” (2002), Teresa Mangum emphasizes
that the majority of narrators are elderly dogs who are looking back on their lives. Dog narrators allowed
writers to displace their own concerns about aging onto their companion animals. She argues convincingly
that the discoveries of Darwinian thought—the discomfort both of learning that humans and animals share
the same origin, and of the contemplation of animal subjectivity—created the conditions for these dog
narratives, which are full of “powerful emotion, victimization, domestic displacement, and heretofore mute
eloquence. Collectively, these characteristics not only produced the speaking dogs but attached that figure
to very human fears of passing time, changing values, loss, and even death” (43-4). We can best see these
elements in Fritz, whose isolation in his old age echoes that of lonely, elderly humans.
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trauma ultimately reveal a different motive. This is not to de-emphasize the fact that

some narratives work tirelessly to demonstrate how we should (or rather, should not) treat

animals. Especially by associating both instinct and loyalty—qualities which both we and

the Victorian texts prize in dogs—with trauma, nineteenth-century dog autobiographies

highlight, sometimes didactically, our responsibility to prevent traumatic experience so

far as we are able. This is especially true when the protagonists are “real dogs” or are

appealing to the tradition of a “real history.” Yet the canine voice is bound in a plot of

loyalty and return that advocates an image of ourselves as ultimately infallible or at least

irresistible (an image that is again more forcible in the case of a “real dog”). That is,

despite the fact that humans are at the root of canine trauma; despite the fact that we

demand dogs ignore the instinctive knowledge we claim to value, such as accurate human

character judgment; and despite the fact that we may not be loyal in return, when we

imagine dogs “giving tongue,” we are actually imagining that their trauma is worth it “for

sake of their people.” Rollo might imagine otherwise.

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 CONCLUSION

Today it is no longer accurate to claim that critics neglect Virginia Woolf’s

Flush: A Biography (1931). Though once intent on reducing the book into little more than

an allegory of the repression of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Victorian women in

general, scholars now identify it as a key text for literary animal studies. Flush offers a

fitting conclusion to my dissertation in several ways. The novel offers a modernist

retrospective on Victorians and on a famous relationship between a human—an author,

no less—and her dog. Flush is threaded through with questions I address throughout my

dissertation. How did the Victorians understand and represent their relationships with

dogs? How were those relationships memorialized? Where and when do Victorian

authors begin to use their literary imagination to probe the interior life of dogs, their

affect, their intelligence, and their alterity? And how can the failures to imagine another

species’s interiority, as well as the imaginative successes that get beyond our species

blinders, help us at least to grasp the possibility of another species’s consciousness?

Critical arguments about Flush fall into two camps: those who believe that Woolf

has painted a “caninocentric” (to borrow Mario Ortiz Robles’s term) point of view, and

those who believe that she has failed to do so (or, in other words, that Flush is in fact

intentionally or unintentionally anthropocentric). Closely related for critics is whether or

not, and to what degree, Woolf is anthropomorphizing her subject.

In keeping with my dissertation’s discussion of generic convention and with

Chapter 3’s argument about trauma and the anthropocentric objectives of the nineteenth-

century dog autobiography, I would argue that Flush is a progressive attempt to adopt a

canine perspective, one which ultimately disavows the anthropocentric ends of its

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autobiographical predecessors. Flush demonstrates what the literary explorations of

caninity in the nineteenth century made possible for later authors. The novel also tries to

overcome the anthropocentrism of its nineteenth-century predecessors by focusing on

“the bedroom school,” the painful education by which we humans so often warp and

diminish our companion animals: keeping them indoors, restricting their natural

behaviors, and trying to tame their instincts.

Flush does not succeed by settling into a simplistic, fantastical biographical form.

The question of Flush’s genre has perplexed modernists who study the Lytton Strachey

model of biography, which occasionally attempts to peer into the minds of its subjects.

Hilary Newman is interested in whether Flush should be read more as a biography or as a

novel and, to get to her answer, recounts Woolf’s views of the two genres, in general and

about Flush in particular, in her letters and diaries. She concludes that although “Woolf

originally thought of Flush as biography rather than fiction” (30) in the end “Flush is

better read as a short novel than as a biography” (37). Though the subtitle of the book is,

in fact, “A Biography,” it recalls the same model of fiction-writing that developed the

autobiographical novel tradition I discussed in Chapter 3. More important to consider

than whether the book is a novel or a biography, then, is an acknowledgment that it is

distinctly fictional biography instead of fictional autobiography. We are at a remove from

the subject, a move I see as Woolf’s attempt to respect Flush’s alterity and reduce any

unnecessary anthropomorphism. By refusing to narrate from Flush’s own perspective,

and in fact adopting an omniscient narrator “whose consciousness,” as Jutta Ittner writes,

“freely moves in and out of the spaniel’s, at times empathically merging, at other times

creating a distance,” Woolf leaves space for the unknowable within the dog’s mind (183).

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Whereas Ittner points out that the narrator “constantly blurs the boundaries between the

canine and the human mind, be it the narrator’s or the poet’s” (183) and seems to believe

that this diminishes the attempt to create a caninocentric narration, I would suggest that

this narrative omniscience places the dog and the human on an equal footing: for Woolf,

both species have minds worth exploring.

In part, this “omniscience” is achieved through Woolf’s attention to the realities

that matter most to a dog. As Alison Booth and Dan Wylie, among others, have shown,

Flush relies very heavily on scent to experience the world. There is a vast improvement

over the nineteenth-century dog autobiography, which tends to remain focused on sight,

the dominant human epistemology. Take, for example, the following passage:

Then what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his

nostrils; strong smells of earth; sweet smells of flowers; nameless smells of leaf

and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the road; pungent smells as they entered

bean-fields. But suddenly down the wind came tearing a smell sharper, stronger,

more lacerating than any—a smell that ripped across his brain stirring a thousand

instincts, releasing a million memories—the smell of hare, the smell of fox. (12)

Wylie notes that the adjectives Woolf uses to describe scent are weak, and asserts that, in

using the adjective “nameless,” one of her “underlying presumptions” is that “only

linguistic naming is adequate to recognizable cognition” (118). Yet Woolf’s attempt to

describe smell is done in good faith, with an all-too-keen understanding of the fact that

she would fall short.

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 Flush also harnesses Woolf’s penchant for pointing to the limits of language in

order to suggest the impossibility of describing Flush’s ways of being and knowing. As

Karalyn Kendall-Morwick puts it, Woolf “pil[es] on descriptive phrases and figurative

appeals to humans’ limited senses of smell and touch…pushing the reader to imagine

sensations beyond human capabilities” (517). In this way, “Woolf’s narrator…posits

language as a confirmation of the finitude of the human Umwelt, turning on its head the

characterization of animal being as a state of deprivation” (520). Similarly, Wylie (though

ever on the fence about Woolf’s success with the novel) notes the times when Woolf’s

analogies “underline difference” (118) and when her omniscient narrator “steps back a

little, almost as if she is in Flush’s space, unable to make that ineffable connection with

an ‘other mind’” (120). Both Kendall-Morwick and Wylie identify times when Woolf

recognizes the failures of language to portray the animal mind, yet attempts to write

difference regardless. In this way, Woolf’s decision to write difference is similar to many

of today’s thinkers, who believe that some degree of anthropomorphism is necessary for

human efforts to bridge the gap between human and animal.

Woolf’s innovations in describing canine epistemology in Flush—her use of

biography instead of autobiography to create a representative distance, her attention to

scent over sight, her recognition of the limits of language—mark the progress literary

modernism made in imagining the canine world. But how does the actual content of

Flush: A Biography compare to that of its earlier autobiographical counterparts?

Other critics have suggested that Flush, unlike its autobiographical predecessors,

is not that concerned with suffering. In demonstrating that Flush is a Bildungsroman,

Kendall-Morwick argues that Woolf “shares the Victorian animal autobiography’s

174
interest in nonhuman experience but privileges the development of canine character over

the cultivation of sympathy for animal suffering” (508). Similarly, Craig Smith claims

that Flush, “in contrast to other classics of the animal story genre, is neither specifically

humane nor specifically humanistic in its agenda” (349). Certainly “the bedroom school”

to which Flush is subjected comprises an education, but education and suffering are not at

all mutually exclusive. And any depiction of suffering, to any degree, is a call to reform

the cause of that suffering.

However, I would argue that what is perhaps most progressive about Flush is not

its generic revisions of the animal autobiography but its attention to what, in canine

education, constitutes suffering. Indeed, I am talking not about Flush’s dognapping—

which could have been lifted from a nineteenth-century dog autobiography and does

cause him considerable trauma—but about the aforementioned “bedroom school”:

To resign, to control, to suppress the most violent instincts of his nature—that was

the prime lesson of the bedroom school, and it was one of such portentous

difficulty that many scholars have learnt Greek with less—many battles have been

won that cost their generals not half so much pain. But then, Miss Barrett was the

teacher. Between them, Flush felt more and more strongly, as the weeks wore on,

was a bond, an uncomfortable yet thrilling tightness; so that if his pleasure was

her pain, then his pleasure was pleasure no longer but three parts pain. The truth

of this was proven every day. Somebody opened the door and whistled him to

come. Why should he not go out? He longed for air and exercise; his limbs were

cramped with lying on the sofa. He had never grown altogether used to the smell

175
 of eau de cologne. But no—though the door stood open, he would not leave Miss

Barrett. He hesitated halfway to the door and then went back to the sofa. (34-35)

While it is true that Flush could go out for short periods and doesn’t, he has been taught

by the bedroom school not to. And, most importantly, Miss Barrett delights in his

forfeiture of “the sun and the air”: “‘Flushie,’ wrote Miss Barrett, ‘is my friend—my

companion—and loves me better than the sunshine without” (35). Like the authors of the

nineteenth-century dog autobiography, Miss Barrett wants to imagine that the sacrifices

and hardships that dogs undergo are worth it for their humans’ sakes. Discomfort

somehow becomes thrilling in the name of the dog-human bond.

Once the Brownings leave for Italy, of course, everything changes. Miss Barrett

recovers her health, and Flush is permitted to roam freely, even more freely than he did

when he lived with Miss Mitford at Three Mile Cross. As Flush’s freedom expands, so

does his focus: Barrett-Browning is not his whole world, but only one part of it. He forms

relationships with other dogs, sexual and otherwise. He has other human friends that he

regularly visits. And, most tellingly of all, as Craig Smith has already mentioned, his final

dreams as imagined hypothetically by Woolf are not dreams of his mistress at all, but

dreams of hunting rabbits and being back in Whitechapel with “the knife at his throat

again” (159). His trauma resurfaces, but his joy at being with Barrett Browning does not.

This makes sense, given that once Browning enters her life, she and Flush are no longer

the inseparable companions they once had been. But far from being a sad experience for

Flush, this distancing permits him the opportunity to rediscover his “dogginess” and to be

fully happy once more. Anna Feuerstein also implies that there is a link between the

176
exercise of Flush’s epistemology and his domestication; that is, his nose is keener and his

alterity stronger once he experiences freedom in Italy. For Feuerstein, the troubles

inherent in pet-keeping diminish once Flush is able to roam freely and experience the

world as he was meant to.

What Flush ultimately does, then, is expose and modify the anthropocentric ends

of the nineteenth-century dog autobiography. It revises these goals by attempting, within

the parameters of linguistic ability, to imagine a more caninocentric world, even if—

especially if—humans are not always included. It also reminds us of the difficulties of pet

keeping today, in which fewer and fewer Western dogs have the chance to roam free than

ever before in the name of safety, both theirs and ours. Far from being without moral

ends, Flush has the power to make us question contemporary as well as nineteenth-

century petkeeping. In doing so it ultimately eschews the sentimentality of the dog

epitaph, instead combining the canine epistemology I discuss in Chapter 2 with the

canine perspective of Chapter 3—demonstrating how over a century’s worth of dog

literature led us to a place where we could imagine dogs on their own terms.

177
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