Victorian Pets and Poetry 9780367768805, 9780367768843, 9781003168782

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Victorian Pets and Poetry

Some of the most celebrated poets of the Victorian era wrote—at times movingly or humorously—about their pets. They did so in a wider literary context, for poetry about pets was ubiquitous in the period. Animal welfare organizations utilized poems about canine and feline suffering in institutional publications to call attention to various abuses. Elegies and epitaphs over the loss of a beloved cat, songbird, or dog were printed on funeral cards, tombstones, and appeared in mass-produced poetry collections as well as those intended for an intimate circle of friends. Yet poems about pets, as well as attendant issues such as breeding and overpopulation, have not received the kind of critical analysis devoted to fictional works and short stories. With an introduction, afterword, and eight chapters offering new perspectives on significant as well as lesser known poems, Victorian Pets and Poetry remedies this omission. Kevin A. Morrison is Provincial Chair Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Professor of British Literature in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University. His many publications include the Modern Language Association award-winning Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place as well as A Micro-History of Victorian Liberal Parenting: John Morley’s “Discreet Indifference” and Study Abroad Pedagogy, Dark Tourism, and Historical Reenactment: In the Footsteps of Jack the Ripper and His Victims.

Routledge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature

“Music Makers” and World Creators The Forms and Functions of Embedded Poems in British Fantasy Narratives Michaela Hausmann The Bohemian Republic Transnational Literary Networks in the Nineteenth Century James Gatheral The Nineteenth Century Revis(it)ed The New Historical Fiction Ina Bergmann Jane Austen and Literary Theory Shawn Normandin Robert Seymour and Nineteenth-Century Print Culture Sketches by Seymour and Comic Illustration Brian Maidment Victorian Pets and Poetry Kevin A. Morrison The Nineteenth Century Periodical Press and the Development of Detective Fiction Samuel Saunders Doctrine and Difference Readings in Classic American Literature Michael J. Colacurcio For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Nineteenth-Century-Literature/book-series/RSNCL

Victorian Pets and Poetry

Edited by Kevin A. Morrison

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Kevin A. Morrison to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-76880-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-76884-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-16878-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments List of Contributors A Note on Spelling and Dating Pet and Poet

vii viii ix xi 1

KEVIN A. MORRISON

PART I

“Pedigree, Breed, and Verse” 1 Rethinking Pedigree in Victorian Women’s Dog Poems

21 23

FABIENNE MOINE

2 “Easily domesticated and bred”: Canary Poetry in Victorian Periodicals

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CATHERINE BURTON

3 Empathy and Kinship: Animal Poetry and Humane Societies during the Victorian Age

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CHELSEA MEDLOCK

PART II

“Illness, Death, and Companion Species” 4 “Darling, Darling Little Flushie”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Dog Love

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KEVIN A. MORRISON

5 Still Lives: Apologetic Mourning in Victorian Dog Elegies KERIDIANA CHEZ

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Contents

6 Grave Thoughts: Thomas Hardy’s Elegies for Pets

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CHRISTINE ROTH

PART III

“Decadence, Symbolism, and the Dog” 7 Dog and Dogma: Canine Catholicism in Michael Field’s Whym Chow: Flame of Love

147 149

MATTHEW MARGINI

8 The Symbolist Dog: Arthur Symons Mourns Api

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JOHN STOKES

9 Afterword

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JENNIFER MCDONELL

Index

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Figures

0.1 Frontispiece to Hedley Peek, ed., The Poetry of Sport (1896). © The British Library Board (2270.cc.21) 0.2 Matthew Arnold with his dachshund Max. Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo 0.3 Michael Field, Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914; written in 1906). © The British Library Board (c_99_e_21) 2.1 Illustration of a breeding cage in Robert L. Wallace’s The Canary Book (1875) © The British Library Board (7293_cc_46) 2.2 Mary Had a Pretty Bird. Illustration for Aunt Louisa’s London Picture Book (Frederick Warne, 1866). Illustrations printed by Kronheim. © Look and Learn 4.1 James E. McConnell, Famous Dogs: The Faithful Friend. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her cocker spaniel Flush. © Look and Learn 6.1 Thomas Hardy and a feline friend. Thomas Hardy Collection (D-DCM TH/PH1). © Dorset County Museum 7.1 Cover of Michael Field, Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914; written in 1906). © The British Library Board (c_99_e_21) 7.2 Lorenzo Monaco, The Intercession of Christ and the Virgin (before 1402). Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters Collection, 1953 8.1 Arthur Symons and Api at Island Cottage. Courtesy of Princeton University Library

2 10 12 49

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101 134 151

163 175

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of chapter two appeared as “Poeticizing the ‘Pet of the Parlor’: Domesticated Canaries in Victorian Periodicals,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 39:1 (2017): 15–31. DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2017.1251066. An earlier version of chapter four appeared as “Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Dog Days,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 30.1 (2011): 93–115. We are grateful to both journals for permission to reproduce these essays in different form. The volume’s editor also wishes to acknowledge the incomparable support of Henan University’s Dean of the School of Foreign Languages Chaojun Yang and Vice-Deans Taotao Zhao and Francis Fu Jiangtao as well as the administrative assistance of Jianyuan Hong. The Henan University Distinguished Professor Research Fund provided financial support for illustrations.

Contributors

Catherine (Katie) Burton is a public humanities educator committed to access and empowerment. Her work in higher education, museums, and racial equity consulting emphasizes the power of narrative in community building. Her research on canaries has also been published in NineteenthCentury Contexts and Victorian Review. Burton holds a Ph.D. in English, with a focus in literature and social justice, from Lehigh University. Keridiana Chez is Associate Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her work focuses on representations of human–animal relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Matthew Margini completed a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2018, specializing in Victorian literature and its animal representations. His dissertation, “Incoherent Beasts: Victorian Literature and the Problem of Species,” investigates how Victorian literature responded to the destabilization of species categories. He has also written a book-length critical study of the game “Red Dead Redemption” for Boss Fight Books. He currently teaches English at the Ransom Everglades School in Miami, Florida. Jennifer McDonell is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of New England, where she is also Head of the Department of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. She has published widely on animals in Victorian literature, is co-editor of several collections of essays, including a special journal issue on animals and literature (Australian Literary Studies 23.1 [June 2010]), and her article, “The Animal Turn, Literary Studies and the Academy” is reprinted in Literary Theory: An Anthology, 3rd Edition (Blackwell, 2017). Chelsea Medlock graduated with her doctorate in Modern European history and the history of human–animal relations from Oklahoma State University in 2015. Her manuscript, “The Forgotten Legions: Veteranization and British War Horses since the Crimean War,” is under contract with Brill Publishing. She also holds degrees in history and genetics from the

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List of contributors University of Kansas. Chelsea works as an independent scholar in Kansas City and recently completed an internship in museum studies at the National World War I Museum and Memorial.

Fabienne Moine is Professor of British Studies at the Université de Paris Est Créteil (France). Her research interests range across Victorian poetry, particularly women’s poems and the poetical forms of social history. Her Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry (Routledge, 2016) presents nature and animal poems as sites of social and cultural resistance. She is currently examining popular verse about cultural practices in the workhouse and in the workplace, with a special focus on Victorian notions of paternalism. Kevin A. Morrison is Provincial Chair Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Professor of British Literature in the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University. He is the author of Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), A Micro-History of Victorian Liberal Parenting: John Morley’s “Discreet Indifference” (Palgrave, 2018), and Study Abroad Pedagogy, Dark Tourism, and Historical Reenactment: In the Footsteps of Jack the Ripper and His Victims (Palgrave, 2019). Christine Roth is Associate Professor of English and Environmental Studies and director of the graduate program in English at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Her recent work in Victorian animal studies includes “The Zoocentric Ecology of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry” in Victorian Writers and the Environment (Routledge 2017). Contributions on other topics include articles in Nineteenth Century Studies, CEA Critic, and ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. John Stokes is Emeritus Professor of Modern British Literature at King’s College London. He has written widely on the culture of the fin de siècle; his books include Oscar Wilde: Myths, Miracles, and Imitations (1996) and two volumes of Oscar Wilde’s journalism for the Oxford English Texts edition of The Complete Works (2013), co-edited with Mark W. Turner.

A Note on Spelling and Dating

Over the years, scholars have used the variant spellings Katherine and Katharine Harris Bradley, who collaborated with her niece Edith Cooper in publishing poetry under the pseudonym Michael Field. On her birth record, the poet’s given name is Catharine. Her tombstone and probate record list her as Katharine, but her name is spelled Katherine on her death record. She is registered in the 1911 census as Katherine. Unless quoting from other sources, the essays in this volume use Katharine. The original publication dates of poems discussed in each chapter are, when available, provided parenthetically.

Pet and Poet Kevin A. Morrison

There is an open secret in nineteenth-century studies. Some of the most celebrated poets of the era wrote—at times movingly or humorously—about their pets. They did so in a wider literary context, for poetry about pets was ubiquitous in Victorian culture. Songs of steeple-chasing and formalized racing ballads fêted greyhounds for their speed and horses for their dexterity. Elegies and epitaphs over the loss of a beloved feline, songbird, or dog appeared on funeral cards, tombstones, and in poetry collections printed for the mass market or intended for a coterie of friends. Animal welfare organizations, such as humane societies and rehoming centers, utilized poems about animal suffering in institutional publications—ranging from educational pamphlets and fundraising materials to annual reports and newsletters—to call attention to the consequences of breeding. Illustrated gift books and literary annuals extolled the virtues of domesticity for which the family pet often served as a primary signifier. Indeed, versified celebrations of pets as keepers of the hearth, particularly canine fidelity, circulated widely in periodicals. For many in the nineteenth century, pets became a way of relieving the pressures of modern life; they were companions who were not only passive recipients of love but also primary givers. Beginning with the apostrophe “Poor dog, and art thou dead!,” the 1827 poem “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” illustrates the attitudes and perspectives on petkeeping that the Victorians inherited and made their own. Anonymously published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the elegy appeared during a period dominated by the domestic idyll, which featured pastoral scenes of wedded bliss and familial contentment.1 At a time when the ideal of domesticity was rapidly ascending in British culture, the poem mourns the loss of that “kind companionship” the pet was thought to embody, “which would / But for … [the dog’s] presence, have been [a life of] solitude” (lines 63– 64). The dog becomes the conduit toward which and through which the constituent members of the family express their affections: And all the household love thee,—thou to them Wert as a love-link, a domestic gem;

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Figure 0.1 Frontispiece to Hedley Peek, ed., The Poetry of Sport (1896) © The British Library Board (2270.cc.21)

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In thee bound up was many a cherish’d thought, And home-sensations by thy sight were brought. (31–34) As a “love-link,” the speaker’s pet makes familial cohesion possible and continually stirs sensations of the home as a place of safety, security, and contentedness. By generating warm regard among family members, the dog is the means by which the home is closed off from the outside world. Whereas domestic animals were once perceived as instruments of labor— either, in René Descartes’s view, automata without minds and souls or, according to Immanuel Kant, a means to an end rather than ends themselves—the Victorians, building on decades of cultural changes toward the natural world, established far more intimate relations.2 The practice of petkeeping evolved coevally with a rapidly urbanizing, commercial society; it was in large part a response to modern atomism. As Keith Thomas persuasively argues, petkeeping reflects the “tendency of modern men and women to withdraw into their own small family unit for their greatest emotional satisfactions” (119). Certainly, the speaker of “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” voices precisely this sentiment, declaring that the dog solidifies the concept of home as “A nook of calm, amid a world of strife; / A sheltering haven from the storms of life” (37–38). But these lines also echo another vaunted figure in Victorian culture: the ethereal angel in the house.3 Victorian family life, which relies on a heteronormative perspective on gender complementarity, can be seen as being further aided and abetted by the pet. In Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s view, pets are not animals but human constructs fabricated in our own image. They enable one to inhabit roles and identities prescribed both socially and institutionally: “individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog” (240). Like the domestic goddess, the pet held out the possibility of “a better, more manageable version of the world” (Kete 2). The speaker of “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” ascribes selflessness and beneficent motivations to his canine friend in ways that resonate with the emerging cultural ideal of femininity. (The relationship between the so-called Victorian woman question and notions of breeding and pedigree are explored more fully by Fabienne Moine in her contribution to this collection.) As the speaker intones: Yet can I e’er forget how, night and day, When sickness held me, by my couch you lay, Unwearied, uncomplaining; and how kind, When first I rose, you lick’d my hand and whined. (25–28) In its patience, fidelity, and tender ministrations, the pet is figured here as representing all those qualities that were becoming associated with the angel

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figure. Moreover, because the dog embodies those qualities of the domestic ideal, it assumes a pedagogical role closely aligned to the feminine. In his “honest bark,” “warm heart,” and “eyes that beam’d with love,” the dog reminds the speaker of his own potential for moral cultivation: A precious lesson let my spirit find, And learn to be as pure as thou wert kind, To keep in faith as firm, from fault as free, And cling to Virtue, as thou didst to me! (85–88) Although the dog was “[l]ast week all strength, and now a thing of clay,” he lives on as a kind of role model for which the speaker strives. “Thy love, thy care, thy steadfastness of heart,” the speaker exclaims in celebrating the dog’s many virtues (46). While admitting emotional reciprocity (“Partaker of my gladness and my gloom”), the speaker of “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” refuses to collapse the distinctions between the human and the nonhuman animal. The dog may appear as the speaker’s equal or his better, but the species distinction is nevertheless preserved in the very title of the poem: the favorite dog, which is to say, the pet. The concept of the pet has been characterized as a form of speciesist thinking. Peter Singer provides the formative definition of speciesism as a bias toward Homo sapiens and against other species (6). As an entity that is owned, a pet plays a subordinate role to the human on whom it relies for care. Keith Thomas argues that the pet is singularly distinguished from animals in general on three grounds: the pet is allowed to inhabit the home, is given an individual name, and is never eaten (112–115). In this poem, and despite the commonalities he identifies between himself and his pet, the writer continues to privilege the category of the human. Although his canine friend is virtuous, the poem refers to him as an “obsequious slave” and, in his death, a “vanish’d toy.”

Beast, Bird, Biography It is one thing to analyze in an anonymously published poem the tropes of difference characteristic of post-Enlightenment thought that prop up a conception of the higher nature of humans. It is quite another to examine such figurative language, as well as the rhetoric of sentimentality, that imagines animals as playing familial roles in poems written by some of the most recognizable names in British literature, including—to name only a few—Matthew Arnold, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michael Field, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, George Meredith, John Ruskin, and Arthur Symons. Insofar as petkeeping is generally perceived as inconsequential, Victorian poems about pets have engendered in literary critics a mixture of anxiety and embarrassment. These poems—from sonnets and

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ballads to elegies and epitaphs—have made literary critics anxious because, unlike those on a variety of other topics, they seem to elicit, indeed even require, biographical readings. Such readings, in turn, trigger embarrassment because they provide glimpses of (what is perceived as) mawkish domesticity. Thus, critics have largely dismissed these poems as engaged in the conventions of maudlin, sentimental anthropomorphism from which modernist writers—praised for inaugurating a process of seriously rethinking human and nonhuman animal relations in terms of reciprocity and responsibility with which contemporary critics align themselves—are seen to depart.4 For their part, biographers have typically taken one of two tacks. Because of their seemingly trivial subject matter, poems about pets often do not fit with the account of the life the biographer hopes to render. Such poems are, therefore, often glossed over or ignored. In collections of letters, or other kinds of compendiums that can be generally classified under the rubric of lifewriting, references to pets (and indeed to poems about pets) cannot be easily overlooked. They can, however, be paratextually framed by editors in ways that minimize their importance. To take one example: James Gibson’s Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections discusses the English novelist and poet’s love of animals by providing an extensive quotation from a letter by E. M. Forster: T. H. showed me the graves of his pets, all overgrown with ivy, their names on their headstones. ‘This is Snowbell – she was run over by a train … . this is Kitkin, she was cut clean in two, clean in two’ – ‘How is it that so many of your cats have been run over, Mr. Hardy?’ … I could scarcely keep grave. (166–167) For Gibson, the quotation “is worth publishing because of its satirical humour and amusing exaggeration” (166). In order to elaborate on the foregoing observations, I will look now in greater depth at how literary critics and biographers have approached several Victorian writers who wrote about their pets. Although the poems are numerically insignificant when measured against the overall literary output of these four writers, these pets had outsized significance to their owners’ thinking: Elizabeth Barrett Browning—whom several contributors to this volume discuss—wrote a poems about Flush, her beloved cocker spaniel; Rudyard Kipling immortalized his Aberdeen terrier in the frequently anthologized “The Power of the Dog”; Matthew Arnold grieved repeatedly for his companions—a three-legged Persian feline, Atossa, dachshunds Kaiser and Geist, and other canines Max and Rover—and took up his pen when daughter Emily’s pet canary passed away; and Katharine Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, who, writing together under the name Michael Field, published a collection of poems about their chow-chow that circulated among friends.

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In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s case, the importance of Flush’s life to hers was considerable enough for Virginia Woolf to write one of the most famous biographies of a literary dog. In Flush (1933), Woolf speculates on the co-constitutive relationship between Barrett Browning and the eponymous pet: Heavy curls hung down on either side of Miss Barrett’s face; large bright eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy ears hung down on either side of Flush’s face; his eyes, too, were large and bright: his mouth was wide. There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I—and then each felt: But how different! Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy. Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been—all that; and he—But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. (18–19) Woolf’s representation of the moment of introduction between the ailing poet and the eager pup captures an initial sense of possibility—of a reciprocity across the species divide that acknowledges both sameness and difference. Although her biography takes seriously the necessity of questioning the hierarchy of human over nonhuman animal, Woolf later dismissed it as “that silly book” (Diary 153).5 Most subsequent literary critics have disagreed: through Flush, they have argued, Woolf takes up issues ranging from canonicity (Caughie), to social marginalization (Flint), to urban life (Faris, Squier), to the human impulse to chronicle individual lives (Griffiths). Instead, critics, it might be said, have dismissed Barrett Browning’s ballad “To Flush, My Dog” and sonnet “Flush or Faunus” as silly poems. That is to say, Woolf’s Flush has been seen not so much as genealogically connected to Barrett Browning in the urgency with which it explores aspects of the creaturely but as a prototypically modernist reassessment of the Victorian period. All the insight is ascribed to Woolf and none to Barrett Browning. This is, perhaps, why Dorothy Mermin, in her landmark reassessment, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry, mentions the cocker spaniel only in passing and rushes past the Flush poems in a single sentence. Mermin sought to recover Barrett Browning from decades of critical neglect and widespread exclusion from literary anthologies by repositioning her as central to the development of women’s literature. To do so, Mermin insisted on the importance of biographical readings of Barrett Browning’s poetry. Only when detailed considerations of Barrett Browning’s life are brought to bear on the poems, Mermin argued, can one view her status as a woman writer as a significant component of her art. The pet

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poems simply do not fit within an understanding of Barrett Browning as a serious poet and thinker who tackled complex philosophical and social issues, which Mermin inaugurates and most scholars and biographers follow. By contrast, Rudyard Kipling has not suffered critical neglect, and “The Power of the Dog” (1909) has been widely anthologized. The poem begins with the speaker wondering aloud why humans form attachments to canines: There is sorrow enough in the natural way From men and women to fill our day; And when we are certain of sorrow in store, Why do we always arrange for more? Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear. (1–6) Because men and women are already subject to love and loss in relationships, why do humans add to their sorrow by forming attachments with nonhuman animals? The answer to this question, for Kipling, is that the dog represents many human qualities but in purer form: “Love unflinching that cannot lie – / Perfect passion and worship fed / By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head” (8–10). Regardless of how one might treat a pet dog, an owner is assured of unconditional love. While a kick in the ribs would qualify as abuse or assault between humans, it has no effect on the dog’s “perfect passion” for and “worship” of its human owner; hence, the responsibility to act with compassion and kindness rests solely with the owner. Such intense and devoted love, according to Kipling’s poem, captivates the human heart. The consequences, however, are severe. The speaker, in directly addressing the reader, warns that the pet’s decline in health—from “asthma, or tumour, or fits”—after the passage of “fourteen years,” or the average lifespan of a dog, will shock the owner into an awareness of “how much you care.” He continues: We’ve sorrow enough in the natural way, When it comes to burying Christian clay. Our loves are not given, but only lent, At compound interest of cent per cent, Though it is not always the case, I believe, That the longer we’ve kept ’em, the more do we grieve; For, when debts are payable, right or wrong, A short-time loan is as bad as a long— So why in—Heaven (before we are there) Should we give our hearts to a dog to tear? (25–34)

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With a play on words, Kipling not only asks “why in Heaven” do humans give their hearts to animals. He also holds out the promise of an afterlife for a beloved pet. Heaven is a place to which animals go after “fourteen years” and to which, he imagines, human souls will travel as well. Indeed, in a 1932 poem titled “Dinah in Heaven: ‘The Woman in His Life,’” Kipling suggests that if a pet’s “godless innocence of heart / That never heard of sin” is not enough to allow her access to heaven, then what hope have humans (47–48)? Most biographers prefer to ignore such straightforwardly sentimental verses. Charles Carrington’s Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work, a touchstone for all subsequent biographers, makes no direct mention of “The Power of the Dog.” Instead, Carrington quotes a single line from the poem to illustrate in passing Kipling’s love of animals. He then turns to Kipling’s ostensibly more complex animal representations: It is an old joke in the book trade that two classes of books will always find a market in England, books about doctors and books about dogs. After his medical stories Rudyard indeed turned to the other category and enjoyed his success with dog stories, in a new mode. He had always been a dog-lover and, from his earliest days as a writer, had introduced some favourite dogs into his stories about people. In “Garm, a Hostage” and “The Dog Hervey,” the dogs had been among the leading characters, but dogs seen through the human eye. His beasts, in the Jungle Book, and elsewhere, had been treated allegorically, in another traditional style, as characters personified appropriately, like Circe’s swine, in some animal garb that suited them. Thy Servant a Dog, published in 1930, was not a beast fable in the conventional form, but a genuine attempt to present a dog’s point of view, in a simplified vocabulary which seemed adequate to a dog’s intelligence, an experiment in the rudiments of language. (476) By focusing on Kipling’s prose works, Carrington can largely sidestep the key biographical considerations that the poem raises. Instead of discussing Kipling’s intimate relationship with his Aberdeen terriers, for which the poem serves as evidence, he analyzes the portrayal of animals in the short stories in terms of generic conventions and literary traditions. Similarly, neither Andrew Lycett nor Martin Seymour-Smith mentions the poem in their respective studies of Kipling. Both, however, following Carrington’s lead in devoting several pages to Kipling’s dog stories, see them— particularly the somewhat puzzling and opaque “The Dog Hervey,” published in the April 1914 issue of the Century Magazine—as offering intriguing biographical elements. In these moments, the biographers reveal themselves to be more interested in the interpretative act itself—how aspects of a life can be teased out from complicated prose works—than in discussing Kipling’s plainly stated, and uncomfortably personal, feelings toward his

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canine companions. As with previous biographers, David Gilmour briefly alludes to the poem in The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. Yet in Gilmour’s grand sweep of Kipling’s life against the backdrop of the British empire at its pinnacle to the period of decolonization, there is no place for an extended discussion of a deeply personal poem that revels in human and nonhuman intimacy. Among Matthew Arnold’s contemporaries, pet poems were generally well-received. (Indeed, as Chelsea Medlock demonstrates in her chapter, poems about pets and animals more generally were mobilized to support an emergent animal welfare movement.) When his daughter’s canary passed away, Arnold picked up his pen: “Now thy mistress brings thee here / Says it fits that I rehearse, / Tribute due to thee, a verse.” “Poor Matthias,” which Catherine Burton discusses more fully in her chapter, appeared in the December 1882 issue of Macmillan’s. “Geist’s Grave” (1881), an elegy to his son’s canine, and “Kaiser Dead” (1887), which he wrote on the death of his own dachshund border collie mix, were published in the venerable Fortnightly Review. Writing to his son from the Athenaeum Club, where he often sought solace from the cares and concerns of the world around him,6 Arnold explained that “Geist’s Grave” was not simply a tribute to the “dear, dear little” dachshund. It was a way of keeping Geist and his memory alive: “I like to think of all the newspapers having his dear little name in them when the Christmas number of the Fortnightly Review is advertised, and I hope people will like the lines, and that will lead to his being more mentioned and talked about, which seems to be a sort of continuation of him in life, … though it is but a hollow and shadowy one” (Arnold, “To Richard Penrose” 215). By the time that posthumous assessments of Arnold’s life and thought had begun, however, his pet poems were excluded from the narratives biographers and critics sought to construct. In Matthew Arnold, a volume in John Morley’s English Men of Letters series for Macmillan, Herbert W. Paul felt it necessary to “omit all mention of the pretty, facile lyrics in which he paid tribute to his beloved dogs and birds” (160). When these poems have been the subject of comment or analysis, however, most read right over the animals themselves. Instead, the poems are seen to offer a glimpse of Arnold’s humaneness. “Arnold himself and his family were fond of animals,” asserts G. C. Macaulay, “and these elegies … have a surprising degree of tenderness” (161). Twentieth-century commentators have tended to follow this line of thinking. Thus, for C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry, the poems can be read as evidence of Arnold’s “personality” and perhaps as a response to critics of his earlier poetry, which was perceived as “somewhat austere and coldly intellectual.” When Lionel Trilling set out to resuscitate Matthew Arnold’s socio-political thought, he noted that after 1867, as Arnold transitioned from poetry to prose, he wrote only one “considerable” poem, “Westminster Abbey.” Trilling acknowledged, however, that there was also “Thyrsis,” apparently less significant (because adjective-free). As an

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Figure 0.2 Matthew Arnold with his dachshund Max Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

afterthought, Trilling adds in a footnote: “This is not to mention the animal elegies: ‘Geist’s Grave’ and ‘Kaiser Dead,’ for dogs and ‘Poor Matthias’ for a canary” (388). Epitaphs and elegies written on the death of a pet—which, in their respective ways, Keridiana Chez and Christine Roth explore more fully in this volume—have been seen by some biographers and literary critics as unsettling because the seriousness of the grief expressed appears to be

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disproportionate to the love object mourned. In Victorian Poetry Now, Valentine Cunningham divides his discussion of elegy among a number of distinct variants. Elegies for pets and other creatures, he insists, “are full of the patent affection the English commonly feel for their dumb friends, rooted in impossible anthropomorphism and a kindly but irrational pathetic fallacy.” Although these elegies “memorialize earnestly,” Cunningham continues, they “never manage to sound much more than parodic of the genre, just as those animal tombstones look and read like pastiches of human tombstones which, of course, they were.” For Cunningham, Arnold, whose pet elegies he singles out as representative of the genre, must surely be “sniggering” (337). By contrast, in his authoritative biography, Park Honan takes Arnold’s love of animals seriously. He suggests that Arnold’s “inner isolation” and lapses in fatherhood led him to “dote on his responsive dogs.” However, Honan quickly adds, “They were less to him than his real children, and so he could be ironic and bring all his feelings into play with them” (374). This somewhat defensive comment underscores Honan’s discomfort with animals assuming imitatively human roles. But it also points toward another way in which biographers have discussed the role of the pet in a poet’s life. On some occasions, they have utilized the psychoanalytic category of substitution when recounting the relationship between a given verse writer and one’s pet.7 In so doing, the pet is often seen as a stand-in for an absent human referent: a lover, sibling, or child. (I discuss this more fully in my contribution to this volume.) Of all the poems written to mourn the loss of a pet, perhaps Michael Field topped them all. In 1914, they published Whym Chow: Flame of Love, a collection of poems that celebrate, in spectacular fashion, the eight years spent with their long-red-and-gold-haired Chinese chow. Indeed, with a subtitle that refers to both John of the Cross and the color of Whym’s coat, the poems fuse pagan and religious imagery in their alternating descriptions of the pet as a “[w]ild Bacchic Creature” and as the Paraclete, the material embodiment of the Holy Spirit (XIX, line 1; “Trinity,” line 5). In Holly Laird’s estimation, such mourning makes sense in a very specific context: Bradley and Cooper “set up house together, [and] they became attached to a dog, Whym Chow, for whom they felt as passionately as for a child” (120). But Bradley and Cooper, alert to the power of names, never use this appellation for their chow-chow. Instead, they attempt to give Whym new names. Staging a dialogue with God in poem six, they ask: “What is the other name of Love? / Has Love another name?” (“VI”, lines 1–2). God responds by naming their dog love. The chow is figured by them as their “hidden Soul” (“III,” line 14) and elsewhere, in “Whym Chow,” a poem that appears several years earlier in Wild Honey: From Various Thyme, as the speaker’s “eternal attribute,” the “essence of the thing I am” (lines 1, 3). Although their collection of poems has attracted critical attention, its central purpose—which Matthew Margini analyzes in his chapter—has largely been ignored. In her compelling and persuasive reading, Marion Thain

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Figure 0.3 Michael Field, Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914; written in 1906) © The British Library Board (c_99_e_21)

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argues that the chow enabled the two women “to overcome significant anxieties about their erotic relationship in the context of their Catholic conversion” (“Damnable” 324). “If they are lover and beloved respectively,” Thain argues in her reading of one of their poems, “then Whym Chow is pure love. Together, the three of them comprise the image of the Holy Trinity by which Augustine believes we can apprehend God” (“Damnable” 325). David Banash similarly contends that while the book is “ostensibly an elegiac series of meditations, each devoted to the Chow,” it is actually a “strategy to develop and legitimate alternative forms of desire” (205). Both Thain and Banash, therefore, attempt to reach beyond the apparently sentimental subject of the collection in order to reveal far greater complexity and self-consciousness. For Thain, the “deliriously camp quality” of the book is strategic; the “russet suede” of its cover, mimicking “the dead dog’s coat,” signals a selfconscious decision on Bradley and Cooper’s part not to become unconsciously swept away with exorbitant grief (“Damnable” 330). For Banash, the poems are not about death but about “lives and desires” (205). Yet regardless of their possible insights into matters of religious faith or sexual desire, these poems are foremost about the love for and the loss of a beloved pet. Part of the suffering that the speaker experiences, as described in “Adveni, Creator Spiritus!,” is a loss of sensual affection: the tactile pleasures of running one’s hand through the soft fur and the visual and aural gratification of the chow running toward her with a bark of affection: My arms, my arms are void: Nothing created touches their embrace; The substance of embrace hath been destroyed; What it clings round, what gives it place— As shell around the ruddy chestnut takes A mould and station, the red fruit forsakes. (1–6) While on the death of her beloved pet the speaker’s arms are left empty, her heart remains full: “My heart, my heart,” she exclaims (19). “Core of my love there art thou ever hard – / There clasped, there heard, there seen in constant glow” (20–21). The question of the nonhuman animal soul—to which John Stokes returns in his chapter—was the subject of extended debate in the period. For Bradley and Cooper, there is no question that Whym Chow will obtain an afterlife. “That into thee a soul was breathed,” they write in “Created” (12). Possessing a soul, the Chow, like all “created” beings, encounters a “limit scarcely to be borne / Till out of it, though unawares, / A spirit of new life is drawn” (22–24). The first poem in the book, “Requiescat,” opens with I call along the Halls of Suffering! Hark! Down each aisle reverberated cries

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Kevin A. Morrison Out of deep wounds, out of each fiery spring Of nerve, or piteous anguish of surprise. (1–4)

The halls of suffering that constitute the earthly realm, and thus that to which the speaker is consigned, is a “Hades of the living” (9). Where the speaker once traversed these “grand vaults” (5), knowing that the “patter of thy feet, my little, Chow” were not far behind (6), she is now bereft of such solace. By invoking in its title “Requiescat” a prayer for the souls of the dead, the poem alludes to Whym Chow’s ascent into heaven: Forth, Forth! Away! He is not of these Halls— No motion of him there, Whym Chow no sound: His ruby head shall never strike their walls, And nowhere by a cry shall he be found. (17–20) Grief does not arise from eternal separation from the chow. Rather, it stems from the period in which the speaker must wait in the halls of suffering for reunion with him in the afterlife. The sensual descriptions of physical affection and the transformative effect of the chow’s loss, expressed in terms normally reserved for human lovers, may have seemed to some then, as they do to some now, decidedly inappropriate. These poems generate readerly embarrassment because they offend a sense of propriety about the pet-and-owner relationship. For the poems ask, what makes certain lives grievable? If our relationships are defined by affections, then is the appropriateness of our grief solely to be measured by the names—human and animal—that we give to our love objects?8

Chapter and Verse Victorian poetry about pets, therefore, may reflect speciesist assumptions and relegate the nonhuman animal to a subordinate role. Just as often, however, verses from the period unsettle, question, or challenge these distinctions. Yet despite their wide circulation in the print culture of the time, poems about pets as well as attendant issues such as breeding and overpopulation have not received the kind of critical analysis devoted to fictional works and short stories. Victorian Pets and Poetry remedies this omission. This is the first collection to provide sustained attention to Victorian poems about pets as serious objects of study. It complements a number of monographs and collections published in recent years that have helped to shape what might be called Victorian animal studies. Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate (1987) first sketched out the broad terrain by ranging across diverse forms of human–nonhuman animal relations: from practices, such as

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cattle-breeding and petkeeping, to longstanding and emergent sciences, such as naturalism and zoology. The essays in Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay’s foundational Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (2007) reveals the diverse ways in which the animal has been imaginatively harnessed for a number of “aesthetic and political ends” (Morse and Danahay 5). Other capacious collections, such as Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison’s Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism (2017) and Brenda Ayres’s Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash (2019), indicate some of the many ways in which animals—familial and feral, real and representational, domestic or colonial—are being studied today. Although individual essays in these collections nod to both poetry and petkeeping practices, the focus of each volume is wider. Conversely, monographs such as Fabienne Moine’s Women Poets in the Victorian Era (2015) and Mark Payne’s The Animal Part (2011) are both specifically concerned with analyzing poetic genre, but the domestic animal is only one element of their broader arguments. Important work on individual Victorian poets or on facets of nineteenthcentury culture has also considered the relationship between a verse writer and one’s pet. In her “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle (2007), Marion Thain analyzes Whym Chow: Flame of Love in the context of Bradley and Cooper’s literary output, while in Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (2002), Frederick Roden considers the poems in terms of religious discourse. Monica Flegel’s Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture (2015) and Kathleen Kete’s The Beast in the Boudoir (1994) focus squarely on the domestic pet but as it appears in a wide range of poetic and nonpoetic texts. Moreover, Kete’s specific focus is nineteenth-century France, although many of the petkeeping practices she examines have their counterparts in England. Domesticity and petkeeping are at the heart of several other recent studies as well. Hailing from the discipline of geography, Philip Howell’s At Home and Astray (2015) considers the “place” of the dog in British society (3): from homes and alleys to animal shelters and pet cemeteries. Keridiana W. Chez’s Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men (2017) brings together the insights of affect studies and animal studies to examine interspecies relationships. Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton consider a crucial element in petkeeping: breeding. In The Invention of the Modern Dog (2018), they “ask when, where, why, and how breed became the principal way of thinking about and producing dogs that were modern” (2). Lastly, Victorian poetry about pets has been subject to critical scrutiny in theoretically oriented work. Alice A. Kuzniar, in Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on our Animal Kinship (2006), argues that “because pet keeping is generally ridiculed as trivial and sentimental, and the animal held to be a lesser being, psychoanalysis has dismissed the powerful implications of canine-human relations” (8). While Kuzniar’s study is not historically

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focused, the period and its writers are nevertheless relevant insofar as, building on eighteenth-century trends, petkeeping assumed its modern form in the 1800s. The essays in Victorian Pets and Poetry are indebted to these and many other works. The focus of this volume as a whole, however, facilitates connections across the Victorian period and among a variety of poets. Although the dog (so often referred to as “man’s best friend”) is privileged by contributors to this collection, other pets, including canaries and cats, are analyzed as well. The volume is divided into three sections. Part I, “Pedigree, Breed, and Verse,” opens with Fabienne Moine’s “Rethinking Pedigree in Victorian Women’s Dog Poems,” which explores three lines of inquiry picked up by the essays that follow: the aesthetic and emotional aspects of canine selection and the attendant issues of pedigree and breed; female poets’ interrogation of the basis for selection; and—in their denunciation of animal breeding and their exploration of a dog’s afterlife—the question of moral pedigree. The two other essays in this section, Catherine Burton’s “‘Easily domesticated and bred’: Canary Poetry in Victorian Periodicals,” and Chelsea Medlock’s “Empathy and Kinship: Animal Poetry and Humane Societies during the Victorian Age,” consider in their respective ways the consequences of breeding by attending to the uses to which animal poems are put in newspapers and journals, educational pamphlets, fundraising materials, annual reports, and newsletters of Victorian animal welfare organizations. The essays in Part II, “Illness, Death, and Companion Species,” turn from stray, abandoned, and surrendered dogs in danger of being euthanized to consider those canines and felines selected and housed by humans as pets. Many of the poems written in the Victorian period about pets concern either animal responses to human suffering in times of illness or human responses to the death of a beloved animal. In “‘Darling, Darling Little Flushie’: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Dog Love,” I read Barrett Browning’s poems about her cocker spaniel, which she wrote while coping with chronic illness and depression, with and against psychoanalytic theory. The next two essays in this section focus not on human illness but on animal death. In “Still Lives: Apologetic Mourning in Victorian Dog Elegies,” Keridiana Chez examines poems of mourning that foreground the tension between a speaker’s attempt to legitimize devotion to one’s pet and the concurrent anxieties one may feel about seemingly excessive attachments. Where Chez’s essay highlights contradictions in poems of mourning, Christine Roth considers how Thomas Hardy sought to reconcile them. In “Grave Thoughts: Thomas Hardy’s Elegies for Pets,” Roth argues that the poet’s many attempts to memorialize his beloved companions also upend hierarchies and disrupt the divisions between human and nonhuman animals. Instead of examining individual poems, the essays in Part III, “Decadence, Symbolism, and the Dog” consider the late-nineteenth and early twentiethcentury phenomenon of the verse collection. In “Dog and Dogma: Canine

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Catholicism in Michael Field’s Whym Chow: Flame of Love,” Matthew Margini focuses on the poems by Michael Field (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper) about their deceased chow. As this introduction has indicated, that collection of poems has often been considered highly idiosyncratic, even outrageous, in expressing adoration for a pet through the idiom of decadent Catholicism. Yet Bradley and Cooper’s lyrics should be placed, Margini demonstrates, in a much longer literary history. In “The Symbolist Dog,” John Stokes is also concerned with literary history: placing Arthur Symons’s memorial verses and prose poem sequences about his deceased pet Api within a wider elegiac tradition. As Stokes shows, Symons’s Api may have been anthropomorphized into a symbolic lost child, but on entering poetic tradition as a “symbolist dog” he reassumed his canine identity. The volume concludes with an afterword by Jennifer McDonell, who reflects on the essays and on the state of Victorian poetry about pets today.

Notes 1 The poem is by David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851). 2 While differing in his view from Descartes, Kant held that, as nonrational beings, animals have “only a relative value and are consequently called things” (Groundwork 96). Animals, lacking the capacity for rational thought and the intellectual discernment necessary for making moral judgments, are simply “means to an end”—and that end, Kant insists, “is man” (“Duties” 239). 3 Coventry Patmore’s term for the middle-class mother and wife, whose “disposition is devout” and “countenance angelical” (“Rose,” canto 2, lines 11–12). 4 As Jennifer McDonell points out, the “pejorative connotations” of “sentiment and sentimentality,” which are an inevitable part of discussions about Victorian pets, “have ensured that both pet keeping, and [especially] women’s relationships to pets, have been downplayed in scholarly discussions” (17). 5 Indeed, as Flint demonstrates in her introduction to Flush, the biography of the cocker spaniel tackles a number of themes that are consistent across Woolf’s literary output, making her dismissal of the book somewhat disingenuous (xv–xliv). 6 On the importance of the Athenaeum Club to Arnold’s life and thought, see Morrison 78–129. 7 Sigmund Freud argues that one’s instincts for pleasure and self-preservation become conflated while the child nurses at the mother’s breast. As “the child’s first and most vital activity,” nursing is essential for nourishment, but Freud notices that the child insists on sucking on the breast long after the mother’s supply of milk has been depleted (47). He suggests this is evidence that “sexual activity attaches itself to functions serving the purpose of self-preservation” (48). Indeed, he notes, “No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life” (48). For Freud, therefore, relationships in one’s later adult life are a series of substitutions for the lost object of childhood. Sucking at the mother’s breast becomes the prototype, he insists, “of every relation of love,” and thus “the finding of an object” in later life “is in fact a refinding of it” (88). 8 For Jacques Derrida, the term animal wields enormous power: “The animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living creature” (392).

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References Anonymous. “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1827, p. 439. Arnold, Matthew. “To Richard Penrose.” 3 December 1880. Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848–1888, edited by George W. E. Russell, vol. 2, Macmillan, 1901, pp. 214–216. Ayres, Brenda. Victorians and Their Animals: Beast on a Leash. Routledge, 2019. Banash, David. “To the Other: The Animal and Desire in Michael Field’s Whym Chow: Flame of Love.” Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, edited by Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater, Palgrave, 2005, pp. 195–205. Carrington, Charles. Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work. Macmillan, 1955. Caughie, Pamela L. “Flush and the Literary Canon: Oh Where Oh Where Has that Little Dog Gone?” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 10, 1991, pp. 47–66. Chez, Keridiana W. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Ohio State University Press, 2017. Cunningham, Valentine. Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Denenholz Morse, Deborah, and Martin A. Danahay. “Introduction.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and culture, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 1–12. Derrida, Jacques. “The Animal that I Am (More to Follow).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 369–418. Faris, Wendy B. “Bloomsbury’s Beasts: The Presence of Animals in the Texts and Lives of Bloomsbury.” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2007, pp. 106–125. Field, Michael. “Whym Chow.” Wild Honey: From Various Thyme. Unwin, 1908, p. 191. Field, Michael. Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny, 1914. Field, Michael. “III. ” Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny, 1914, pp. 12–13. Field, Michael. “VI.” Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny, 1914, p. 14. Field, Michael. “Adveni, Creator Spiritus!” Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny, 1914, pp. 40–41. Field, Michael. “Created.” Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny, 1914, p. 33. Field, Michael. “Requiescat.” Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny, 1914, p. 9. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. Routledge, 2015. Flint, Kate. “Introduction.” Flush: A Biography, edited by Kate Flint, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. xv–xliv. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2000. Gibson, James. Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections. St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Gilmour, David. The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. Penguin, 2019.

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Griffiths, Jacqui. “Almost Human: Indeterminate Children and Dogs in Flush and The Sound and the Fury.” Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 32, 2002, pp. 163–176. Honan, Park. Matthew Arnold: A Life. McGraw-Hill, 1981. Howell, Philip. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Kant, Immanuel. “Duties to Animals and Spirits.” Lectures on Ethics, translated by Louis Infield, Harper, 1963. Kant, Immanuel. The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by H. J. Paton, Harper, 1964. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. University of California Press, 1994. Kipling, Rudyard. “The Power of the Dog.” Collected Dog Stories. Stratus, 2001, pp. 28–29. Kipling, Rudyard. “The Woman in His Life: Dinah in Heaven.” Collected Dog Stories. Stratus, 2001, pp. 75–77. Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on our Animal Kinship. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Laird, Holly. “Contradictory Legacies: Michael Field and Feminist Restoration.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 33, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 111–128. Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1999. Macaulay, G. C. Poems by Matthew Arnold: Selected and Edited. London: Macmillan, 1896. Mazzeno, Laurence W., and Ronald D. Morrison, eds. Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism. Palgrave, 2017. McDonell, Jennifer. “Ladies’ Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2010, pp. 17–34. Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. University of Chicago Press, 1989. Moine, Fabienne. Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry. Ashgate, 2015. Morrison, Kevin A. Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Patmore, Coventry. “Rose of the World.” Victorian Affections and Domesticities: Writings on Victorian Family Life, edited by Kevin A. Morrison, Cognella, 2016. Paul, Herbert W. Matthew Arnold. Macmillan, 1902. Payne, Mark. The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Harvard University Press, 1987. Roden, Frederick. Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. Palgrave, 2002. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Rudyard Kipling. Queen Anne Press, 1989. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. Ecco, 2002. Squier, Susan M. Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City. University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Thain, Marion. “‘Damnable Aestheticism’ and the Turn to Rome: John Gray, Michael Field, and a Poetics of Conversion.” The Fin de Siècle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s, edited by Joseph Bristow, Ohio University Press, 2005, pp. 311–336.

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Thain, Marion. “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500– 1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Tinker, C. B., and H. F. Lowry. The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary. London: Oxford University Press, 1950. Trilling, Lionel. Matthew Arnold. Meridian, 1955. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, vol. 4, 1931–1935, Harvest, 1982. Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography, edited by Kate Flint, Oxford University Press, 2009. Worboys, Michael, et al. The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

Part I

“Pedigree, Breed, and Verse”

1

Rethinking Pedigree in Victorian Women’s Dog Poems Fabienne Moine

Researchers in Victorian culture have understood for some time the potential of studying animals, signaling what has been termed an “animal turn” in academic research. That being said, there have been few attempts to explore animal representations in literature and the arts, despite the fact that they are arguably central for an understanding of nineteenth-century Britain and its intertwined social, economic, or scientific contexts.1 These representations fueled Victorian debates on one of the major issues of their time—the treatment of animals—but they also made contributions to related fields such as gender and social class. Questions relating to animals were addressed through a wide range of artistic forms, including poetry, which became a regular forum for exchanging views and building bridges between literary animals and their flesh-and-blood counterparts. This essay deals uniquely with poems about dogs, a regular though not common subject matter in poetry throughout the Victorian era.2 Tess Cosslett remarks that the dog is a key player in Victorian literature, as it “provides a ‘vantage point’ from which to tell a human story” (64). With dogs featuring as recurrent central characters in Victorian fiction, and even as narrators in their own fake autobiographies, Teresa Mangum underlines that they were endowed with a point of view, a voice, and a conscience. In short, “dogs in Victorian Britain came to be saturated in subjectivity” (“Dog Years” 36). The poem also proved a well-adapted format for those seeking to seize moments of complicity and depict in an emotional way the cheerful or painful episodes they shared with their beloved dog. The form offers an easy means of tapping into the intimacy of the dog/mistress couple, sometimes even making their identities and voices overlap. Women of all social classes produced a large quantity of poems, disseminated in the press or in book form. This body of work represents a priceless testimony, still largely unexplored, of Victorian women’s way of life, their practices, and their opinions about contemporary issues. Many of the poems dealing with domestic issues such as the relationship between owner and pet are far from conventional, and indeed often present a progressive or even transgressive point of view. This study aims to explore in particular how, through their poems about dogs, breeds, and pedigrees, women contributed to broader debates about

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distinction and selection, central issues for those Victorians obsessed with classification and ranking. The fascination with pedigree—or, in other terms, with purity or impurity—is equally visible among scientists, sociologists, and breeders, all of whom used typology and selection to classify species and to posit the evolution of societies (or its lack), be they human or animal. Faced with their aristocratic betters and galvanized into fighting their way up the social scale, members of the middle class also drew on the codes of social distinction as they strove to improve their social recognition. In particular, middle-class dog fanciers and owners were eager for “the incorporation of dogs into the rhetoric of social aspiration” (Ritvo 87). Following the model of the aristocracy, for whom well-bred dogs had long been emblems of distinction, they adopted two selective practices: the organization of dog shows and the creation of canine clubs, both extremely successful from the 1850s.3 In this way, the nouveaux riches were able to rub shoulders with the canine purebreds and their equally well-bred owners, thus raising their own social profile, since “a well-bred dog metonymically allied its owner with the upper ranges of society” (Ritvo 93). These very select clubs preserved the reputation of the shows, prevented fraud, and protected their members from the intrusion of undesirable social elements. The Kennel Club, the first dog club in Britain, had its own Stud Book from 1874, and from 1884, its journal, the Kennel Gazette, established itself as one of the official organs of British respectability. With the development of new breeds and the selection of the best features, breeds—and particularly canine breeds—became assimilated with species, as if there were different “dog species” with distinctive traits, whereas in reality they were merely phenotypes or hereditary characteristics. The specimens (though belonging to the same species) were considered radically different and ranked according to their conformity to the standards approved by breeders, much like the “racial” distinctions elaborated by polygenist anthropologists. Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton note that “[d]og breeds were thoroughly Victorian inventions, influenced by industrialization, commercialization, class, and gender attitudes, the rise of leisure, and evolutionary thinking” (7). A pedigree dog was thus a very valuable dog, even if the recent decoding of the dog genome has proved that all dogs are 99.8% the same! By selecting the most highly ranked specimens and discarding the allegedly sickly or misshapen creatures, the middle class sought to legitimize its own status. Practices of selection became practices of distinction, a way “to reconceive and refashion the social order” (Ritvo 115). Indeed, following Bourdieu’s terminology, selection resulted in “distinction” in both senses of the word, namely differentiation and eminence. The improvement of breeds according to officially approved standards also impacted Victorian domestic practices. However, in the domestic space, selection of the most appropriate pet dogs was made according to both aesthetic and emotional criteria. While this essay is dedicated exclusively to the study of women’s dog poems, this does not mean of course that only women were pet owners or that they were the only ones to write dog poems. However, there are

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significant differences between women’s and men’s dog poems in the thematic and stylistic choices made, choices which very often typify the relationships between masters, mistresses, and pets. As will be shown, the question of breed and pedigree was central to women’s poems, as it facilitated their contribution to related debates on gender and class differences, two major issues of the day that could be more easily addressed in seemingly innocuous poems. It is noteworthy in this context that women strove to achieve positions of leadership in animal welfare organizations, speaking out in the public sphere for the wellbeing of animals and in some cases advocating the advancement of animal rights. They also played a major role in challenging existing power structures within canine societies such as the Ladies Kennel Club, founded in 1894 and conceived as a female alternative to the all-male Kennel Club. In short, Victorian women presented “themselves as moral interpreters and authorities on animal suffering” (Worboys et al. 205).4 We will therefore explore the links between the notions of breeding and pedigree on the one hand and the more general issue of the woman question on the other, two debates that were gaining momentum simultaneously. Women populated their dog poems with the pets they interacted with most in their immediate environment. Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton observe that “[m]iddle-class interiors were not commodious, and smaller dogs were less obtrusive in parlors packed with furniture and objects” (49). Indeed, pet dogs played a major role in the lives of their poet mistresses. The importance of such bonds is now well-established and strikingly illustrated by the long-lasting relationships between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush, Emily Brontë and Keeper, Emily Dickinson and Carlo, Eliza Cook and Pincher, and Michael Field and Whym Chow, to name only the most famous four-legged friends.5 By interrogating the type of relations between dogs and mistresses, Victorian women poets shone a light on the social practices of their era, questioning notions of domesticity and challenging relations between the sexes. Furthermore, in calling into question the primacy of pedigree, grounded only in bloodlines or breed standards, they also denounced, often with humor and wit, certain forms of domestic and social domination. Thus, women’s dog poems offer an opportunity to explore Victorian intimacy from a new perspective. The literary examples cited above may give the impression that all the dogs in these women’s lives and poems were lapdogs, and that all women poets were firmly ensconced in their parlors. The reality was very different. Indeed, there are many interesting cases of dog poems set in the open air, which convey a very different message from those in animal fiction that mainly testify to women’s affinity with oppressed creatures and that aim to moralize and educate the young into socializing with and being kind to animals. We shall see that in a significant number of women’s poems—for example in the verse of Eliza Cook about rowdy runaways outside Victorian homes—the message is dramatically different, with the dog poems adopting a very challenging approach to typical Victorian feminine behavior.

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This chapter will concentrate on Victorian women’s responses to the fetishization of breed and pedigree and to the question of the dog’s value. Victorian women poets often discarded the practice of remodeling dogs in a way intended to enhance their owner’s social status. This explains why mongrels are overrepresented and frequently celebrated in women’s poems, particularly in the first decades of the Victorian era. Such non-pedigree pals are the subject of the first part. In her dog poems—or perhaps we should call them “cur poems”—Eliza Cook, an early Victorian pet owner close to the Chartist movement, draws on her dogs’ companionship to help her reject certain gender and social constraints. By questioning the real value of dogs and the validity of pedigree, her canine poems also raise the possibility of a classless society. The second part will focus on the dog poems written in the mid-Victorian period. They often depict dogs as exceptional individuals, from a sentimental and/or moral point of view; that is to say, dogs with a first-class emotional pedigree. Women poets praise these emotionally enhanced canine friends to the point of portraying them as superior to humans and certainly more respectable than men. Lastly, the study will turn to poems published in the last decades of the Victorian era and consider the question of canine “personality,” the ultimate stage in terms of distinction. While exploring the “humanimal family,” these works widen the preconceived limits of canine conscience, posit the possible existence of a dog soul, and praise the value of a pedigree they deem exceptional.

The Value of Mongrels The dog poems of Eliza Cook (1818?–1889) convey a double message: first, that her domestic environment, behind closed doors, is unsatisfactory both to her and to her beloved dogs, and second, that breed purity is not an appropriate selection criterion for measuring the value of one’s furry friend. To reach this double objective, she discards the notion of pedigree, considering it an inappropriate tool for measuring the value of her dogs and thereby assessing the value of a life worth living. Cook offers new selection criteria that she considers more legitimate and less elitist. In doing so, she rejects the supremacy of social status and the relevance of class and gender differences. Thus, Cook’s dog poems intertwine her Chartist sensitivities, her commitment to empowering Victorian working-class women, and her interest in animal welfare, three major causes she addressed in her poems and her journal from a progressive and often feminist perspective. While a dog’s breed was widely viewed as an indicator of social status, Cook’s dissenting voice denounces the domination of breed as a metonymy of class. “Breeds are nothing but inventions,” Michael Brandow notes in his book on the history of breeding (46). Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton have insisted on the fact that mongrels were seen as literal underdogs, as they resulted from inappropriate couplings that had downgraded their very nature: they “were the product of multiple, promiscuous matings and

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showed no recognizable breed conformation. Accordingly, within the dog fancy, mongrel increasingly became a pejorative term, and it was this meaning that spread into popular usage for ‘nonbreed’ dogs” (189). And yet curs, tramps, mutts, and mongrels are dogs, just as purebred dogs are. Breed discourse allowed broader discussion on gender and class in genuine Chartist poems.6 Six dog poems were included in The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook, the most complete collection of her poems, published in 1870. “Old Pincher” (1838) and “On the Death of a Favourite Hound” (1845) take the form of dog elegies that praise Pincher’s mongrel nature and the animal’s capacity to draw the young Cook out of the confined social spaces her sex had locked her in. Pincher, as it were, “mongrelizes” space by making indoor and outdoor spaces porous and social and gender standards inadequate forms of evaluation. “Old Pincher” tells how she saved Pincher from imminent death, due to its low status as a “brute” or “cur.” The puppy was not to be considered as a “gold-purchased toy” (101) but was nevertheless “all fair” (102), endorsing the idea that beauty is not socially determined but only to be located in the eye of the beholder. This fuels both Cook’s social and proto-feminist messages, as she denounces inappropriate value standards when it comes to assessing true moral worth. Her mongrel dog is worthier than a purebred, a “rare treasure, possession divine” (102), as this creature without lineage provides mobility and personal freedom, both unattainable for those Victorian women confined to the home. Cook has little regard for any kind of “Poodle, spaniel, and greyhound” (103), all fragile pedigree dogs generally associated with cozy interiors and good manners. Although crossbred curs were regularly—and wrongly—described as a source of disease (Degeling 27), Cook’s mongrel is healthy and makes Cook more robust too, both in a physical and moral sense, and also certainly less ladylike, as Pincher’s presence helps liberate her from sickly interiors. Cook’s cur is excluded from respectable circles, but as such the animal draws its mistress into forbidden runaways, as “Together we rambled, together we grew” (102). Pincher and Cook share moments of glory that are interpreted as mischievous by the rest of the household, ready to tar “that dog and that girl” with the same brush (102). Mutual love and loyalty are not conceived as forms of oppression or domestication resulting from breeding practices or romances. With the affixes attached to the words related to these practices, Cook insists on the existence of an authentic emotional and non-hierarchical codependence with Pincher, a willful partner in her rebellion against domestic order: “Unkenneled and chainless, yet truly he served; / No serfdom was known, yet his faith never swerved” (102). Cook resumes her denunciation of restrictive social practices in the second poem to be considered here, “On the Death of a Favourite Hound.” It is preceded by an epigraph from Thomas Campbell’s long poem “The Harper” (1799), which concerns Tray, the musician’s faithful companion. Like Tray and the harper, Pincher and his mistress are travel companions; but here, unlike the harper who needs his dog to fit into his new urban environment,

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the girl is encouraged to take social by-roads. In this poem, Pincher’s faithfulness, “True as few else but dogs can be” (300), cannot be the product of human-made manipulation. Indeed, Cook denounces the commodification of the dog, molded into a pet or a prize-winner and trained into serving its master, in a manner not dissimilar to that endured by some dutiful Victorian wives. For Marjorie Garber, the mongrel is a “self-made dog” (201), unsurprisingly driving Cook to social transgression. Cook’s dog poems exhort female readers to choose more appropriate emotional partners, certainly not ones selected according to their social status. Cook’s argument against animal pedigree supports the social message that the class system is failing. Like other working-class female poets, she uses the untamed character of the cur that cannot be pigeon-holed—or rather unkenneled—to argue against the validity of social categories. The association of curs with the poorest members of the population is unequivocal, according to Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton: If the indolent poor were the lowest of the low in the Victorian human hierarchy, curs held the same status among dogs. The association of curs with the urban and rural poor extended to the idea that they shared physical and mental attributes: both were unruly and impulsive, dirty, disease carrying, and threatening. (51) Cook’s poems “The Dog of the Alps” (1845) and “To Bran” (1864) rely on this association, which is denounced in anti-pedigree rhetoric. The first poem is a eulogy for St Bernard dogs, although the breed is never in fact mentioned in the text. The story of Barry, the rescue dog that saved the lives of many a mountaineer, and depicted in Edwin Landseer’s subsequent painting, Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler (1820), had circulated widely and promoted this dog as a model of self-sacrifice.7 Cook contributed to transforming the legendary mountain dog with the brandy barrel into a Christ-like figure, saving those in grave danger, regardless of their social status: “’Tis the dumb and the faithful, the saviour of many, / The brave and the beautiful Dog of the Alps” (316). The dog’s feats are akin to those seen in Christ’s miracles: “The Dog of the Alps comes with life to the dying; / With warmth to the frozen, and hope to despair” (317). For Cook, selfless heroism cannot be attributed to the dog’s breed. Unlike the highly prized animals in the agricultural fairs of Cook’s time, “He toils for no trophy, he speaks for no fame” (317). While this heroic dog “asks not the wide world to blazon his name” (317), Bran, a Scottish deerhound with a prestigious or “blazoned descent” (547), feels entitled to selfishly enjoy all that is offered by its breed and status. The image of the noble deerhound would have been familiar to those of Cook’s readers who had had the chance to admire William Allan’s Sir Walter Scott in his Study with His Dog “Maida” (1831) or Landseer’s deer and

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deerhounds in A Mountain Torrent (1832). Cook’s poem is thus full of irony, offering as it were an anti-blazon of the deerhound dog, written in mock heroic verse. She shows that its baseness comes precisely from its bloodline. The pedigree traits of a so-called purebred are deconstructed, the animal’s purity tarnished by “a taint of something base” (547). The poem starts by eulogizing the hound in the first stanza, recalling its “rare pedigree” and the dignity of its “Ancient race” (547), but then moves on to engage in an amused but bitter diatribe against the blue-blooded dog. Cook addresses the supposed qualities deriving from the dog’s pedigree one by one, but the numerous puns indicate that the dog’s value is merely artifice. With its strong fangs meant for hunting, it could “swallow that pound of butter” (547); the strength of its paws gives it a higher chance of gaining access to the pantry; and thanks to its exceptional eyes, it casts a “stealing glance” (547) over the appetizing plates. Similarly, it “gives tongue” (548), not as a warning sign but when it is left alone with a veal cutlet. In spite of its frivolous tone, the poem is social criticism, aimed at those who mistake a noble lineage for a noble soul. It is noteworthy that the original poem, published in Eliza Cook’s Journal on 27 May 1854 as “To Kenneth,” ended with the anaphoric verse “Dog of an ancient race.” When she republished it ten years later in her volume of poems, she changed the last line to “Man of an ancient race.” Cook’s word choice clearly associates the upper class with thieves and gives her apparently mundane dog poem a thoroughly Chartist twist. Lastly, on this point, Cook’s last two dog poems complement her social discourse by presenting the spotless morality of a pedigreeless dog. “The Poor Man’s Grave” (1845), certainly inspired by another painting by Landseer, The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (1837), depicts a mongrel dog, the only creature to follow its penniless master’s coffin and to show signs of “dogmanity,” a term coined by Horace Walpole (Tague 223).8 As for “A Song for the Dog” (1870),9 one of the many songs Cook wrote about destitute figures, it is typical of her Chartist rhetoric, with each stanza presenting one of the dog’s numerous social roles: saving children, leading the blind, guarding sheep, helping the hunter, or being beggars’ only friend. The reader is cautioned against overlooking the true value of curs: “Take some heed how ye sneer at the cur o’er his bone, / Whose good work, fairly weighed, might outbalance your own” (344). In these two poems, curs are depicted with a high degree of morality and a strong sense of civic duty, two core values among poets with Chartist sensitivities. While working-class Victorian poets often valued dogs more than men, their middle-class counterparts expected their furry companions to incarnate respectable values, particularly those congruent with a bourgeois lifestyle. Petkeeping draws on selection practices, too, this time built on the standard of sentiment. The plasticity of dogs, due to their specific physical and behavioral traits, made them ideal companions; models of loyalty, devotion, and self-sacrifice, once they had been refashioned to

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meet the general Victorian standards of domesticity and the specific values of their mistresses. Most poems by mid-Victorian middle-class women present their dogs as creatures above humans or, more precisely, they depict them as morally enhanced humans.

From Selection to Distinction Praising the character, rather than the appearance, of dogs was not unique to the Victorians, of course. Had not Lord Byron’s elegy for Boatswain engraved on the Newfoundland’s monument recalled that he possessed “all the virtues of Man without the Vices”? For later writers, there was no value in beauty either. For example, Victorian animal autobiographies, according to Monica Flegel, suggest “that the importance of the individual animal’s unique character and personality is paramount” (2017, 161) and that “the intimacy of the animal/human bond can confer worth beyond simple physical beauty or exchange/use value” (162). The dog’s exceptional character acts as a yardstick to measure human worth and, particularly for Victorian women, to assess men’s moral qualities. The pet becomes a key signifier circulating in the home, helping to make visible what happens behind closed doors. Animal poems can thus be read as “metanarratives on the ‘weightiest’ subjects” (McDonell, “Ladies” 18), with female/canine affect making gender relations prominent. In most women’s dog poems that delegitimize pedigree, Canis familiaris, so close to its mistress, becomes a magnifying glass through which to observe Victorian romance. Dog characteristics are chosen according to sentimental and moral criteria. According to Kathleen Kete, the Victorian dog had become a “love machine” (55), on both the giving and receiving end of love. She adds that “[e]nsconced within the family, the dog had become an affective end in itself. Not so much a replacement person, a metaphor, but an adjunct, a dream image” (55). Poems present the whole range of sentiments from filial love to romantic passion, from friendship to patriotic fervor. Canine love elevates dogs to a position of supremacy with respect to both human and animal lives. Dog poems thus present the character traits of an ideal male partner, as dogs move easily from loyal companions to the perfect match and often stand as substitutes for unfulfilling forms of romance. The poems generally portray an interspecies partnership more balanced and egalitarian than traditional heterosexual romance, since this interspecies couple is built on harmonious exchanges of sentiment, far removed from patriarchal norms. Selection gives way to exception, as the dog reveals the flawless moral pedigree that makes it a beau of superlative quality. In most women’s dog poems, the love machine rolls into action to transform any social situation into a discourse based on sentiment. James Turner observes that “the pet encapsulated the virtues of the heart, unsullied by skeptical calculating intellect” (76). Indeed, kind-hearted dogs embody a form of non-hegemonic masculinity, grounded in virtuous action rather than

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in the display of physical or symbolic force. For Victorian women poets, the dog is constructed as a perfect man, morally enhanced by its chivalrous ideals, as previously shown in Cook’s St Bernard poem. Courage and loyalty are placed at the center of poems, where man’s best friend becomes his superior. “Match me his equal, any one who will,” writes Alice E. Argent in “My Dog and I” (1890). Similarly, in one of her children’s poems, “Three Companions” (1881), Dinah Craik (1826–1887) portrays a dog which is opposed to a human brute, a feral double of the truly gentleman-like dog: Baby’s a little lady, Dog is a gentleman brave: If he had two legs as you have He’d kneel to her like a slave; As it is he loves and protects her, As dog and gentleman can; I’d rather be a king doggie, I think, than a brute of a man. (116) Men should learn from dogs, we are told, as the latter combine those moral qualities rarely seen in a single human being. Julia Kerr Yellowlees’s (d. 1888) collie dogs give a lesson to humans, reduced to the status of pupils in “My Collies” (1889): […] It may be That silently to you and me, These members of the canine race, With gentle dignity and grace, Bring some true lessons. Let us bend Our too proud natures, and attend, Despising not (if learning aught) To be by even a collie, taught. (103) Dog poems are also sometimes used to denounce inappropriate male behavior leading to the symbolic domination of men over women. For example, in “Monsieur Henry and His Dog” (1894), the Scottish poet Mrs Murray (Joanna Gregory Laing, 1823–1883?) speaks out against domestic violence. Here the gentleman is warned against treating his wife as he does his dog: When I saw Monsieur Carlo, your joy and your pride, Just wander a moment in sport from your side, I thought when your blows to your friend were so rife, It is thus you would manage a beautiful wife. (85)

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While men are downgraded in dog poems, their Victorian canine counterparts are often praised in terms of “favorites.” This word is regularly used in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century animal poetry. In the eighteenth century, its use was highly ironic, as in “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” (1747). This poem by Thomas Gray (1716–1771), about Selima, Horace Walpole’s greedy cat, which drowned in a fishbowl, is a combination of sexist and compassionate discourse, as indeed were many animal poems before the rise of Victorian sentimental poetry. A century later, dog elegies would be feminized and no longer consist of witty sayings, while the term “favorite” regained its full meaning in the mistresses’ eulogies.10 As in the world of the dog fancier, dogs can be favorites if they embody all the characteristics needed to compete for champion status. Unlike Gray, who ends his poem by regretting that “A favourite has no friend,” Scottish poet Dorothea Ogilvy (1823–1895), in “On ‘Ned’ a Favourite Dog” (1873), insists on the affection heaped on the eponymous dog by each member of the family. This dog, a collie, won the highest sentimental award within the domestic sphere, thanks to its countless meritorious traits; traits which derive not from its pedigree but from its noble character. In the final line, the dog has become a champion to be praised: “Would you the hero see? Come hither, ‘Ned’!” (209). In Louisa Campbell’s “The Mastiff and the Cur” (1861), the dog’s heroic masculinity brings it closer to a demi-god than to a man. Though a mastiff, it has no resemblance to the dogs trained for bull-fighting, since, as a “Christian knight” (99), it refuses to fight the weak. The dignity of the animal, also described as “favorite,” comes not from its breed, which brings merely the qualities of a fierce adversary, but from its inborn Christian virtues. Campbell compares the dog to biblical kings whose moral strength is never tarnished by physical force: Desire of power is little, For the sake of power alone; And those who’ve wished, and wielded it, Have ever “little” shown, There is an inner rising, An upward-bearing power, Which, to ourselves uprising, Gains David’s own “High Towers”; (100) Dogs are not only ready to protect orphans and widows; they may also replace unfit husbands. It goes without saying that animal sexuality is censored in fiction and almost as invisible in poetry.11 That being said, the dog’s sex is highly significant in poems that are rewritings of heterosexual romance. Male dogs are depicted as model companions, particularly for idle or invalid women, as was Jane Carlyle’s Nero (McDonell, “A la lisière”).

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The best-known interspecies romance in verse is certainly that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) and her spaniel Flush, presented in “To Flush, My Dog” (1844) and “Flush, or Faunus” (1850) as the ideal partner before Robert Browning enters the scene. Much has been written on this human/ canine relation, whether about Flush as a devoted healer (Adams) or as an interspecies go-between “at the edges of both nature and culture” (McDonell, “Ladies” 33).12 In the context of our discussion of dogs’ sentimental preeminence, Flush can also be seen as an exemplary romantic substitute. “To Flush, My Dog” resembles an unconventional if not subversive blazon, as the object of desire is a male canine muse. The poem identifies the dog’s physical qualities as perfectly matching the invalid’s desires, with his exceptional body, tail, ears, and paws, but most of all it underlines his romantic qualities, for not only is Flush praised for his patience, loyalty, and unconditional love, he is also eulogized because he stimulates the poet’s equal love in return and induces a balanced romantic relationship. This is illustrated through the following polyptoton: loved “with a love that answers thine, / Loving fellow-creature!” (120). The sonnet “Flush, or Faunus” goes a step further in the poet’s quest for a loving partner and in the description of physical proximity. Welcomed into the poet’s bed, Flush is always ready to wipe away her tears with his own ears and take away her sorrow. Compared to Faunus—a hypersexualized half-man, half-goat divinity generally linked with the Lupercalia, an ancient fertility rite—Flush invites himself into the bridal bed and takes her to “heights of love” (121). No doubt Barrett Browning’s poem is meant to be both amusing and ironic, subjecting Flush’s exclusive love to ridicule. However, the work also confirms the changing status, even nature, of dogs in the eyes of mid-Victorian women poets, with dogs coming to be seen as capable of experiencing human feelings and emotions, which means they can be appraised in accordance with their “human” pedigree. With the humanization of one’s favorite pets, conventional selection criteria and value systems are fatally undermined, allowing philosophical speculations, supported by scientific advances, to challenge the strict opposition between instinct and intelligence or action and behavior. Charles Darwin in particular argued that all human faculties can also be found in “lower animals,” but to a different degree. And even if more elaborate abilities such as moral sense, articulated language, or belief in God were considered as specific to humans, simple forms could be identified in animals, too. Late Victorian women’s poems are shaped by these often heated debates on the interspecies continuum that brought dogs one step closer to human animals. In particular, the attribution of animal consciousness and, a fortiori, an animal soul disrupts the hierarchy of species and places some animals on an equal footing with humans. Women poets deliberately opened the doors of Heaven to their dearly loved dogs and by doing so assigned them exceptional status.

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From Selection to Election In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the debates over animal consciousness raged between those who defended animal welfare and condemned vivisection and those who justified the human domination of nature. With The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin contributed to this debate by giving scientific authority to the notion of animal moral sense. Women poets participated fully in these ideological debates, as their work discusses the morality and even the spirituality of the dog through their dog poems. Their verses function as polemical tracts, condemning the materialism of selection or species pedigree and advancing the cause of election and individual disposition. What characterizes this body of late Victorian female poetry above all is the proximity it posits between dogs and human beings, bridging the gap between instinct and reason and between mind and soul that distinguishes animals from humans. Women poets fueled the scientific debates of their day by transcribing the empirical observations of their dogs from the perspective of their boudoirs. While not all of them joined the ranks of the antivivisectionists, the vast majority supported the idea that dogs were not simply unthinking machines, blindly obeying their instincts. They did so by arguing that dogs’ reasoning faculty had outgrown their mechanical instincts. In order to defend this point of view, they often referred to the dog’s “sagacity,” a term that applies both to a keen sense of smell and to a “more diffuse kind of mental power” (Ritvo 37). And as they bridged the gap between the physical and the mental functions of dogs, women poets also cautiously ventured down the path of canine reason. In other words, they no longer conceived of dogs as merely specimens but as individuals. The exceptional character of the dog was not assessed by selective processes grounded in breed and pedigree but was attached to elective affinity that constructs its personality. Kathleen Kete and Philip Howell have already shown that dogs were veritable members of the Victorian family. Poems also testify strikingly to this elevated status, often connecting dogs and humans and thereby reinforcing “the extended humanimal family” (Mangum, “Animal Angst” 18). But the moment when dogs are closest to the humans is paradoxically at the time of the former’s deaths, when elegies turned the favorite pet into a fully fledged family member. There are numerous examples of dog elegies presenting loss and mourning modeled on the feelings of the idealized Victorian family. “Mourning and Unmourned” (1877), by Emily Australie Manning Heron (1845–1890) using the pseudonym of “Australie,” is one such poem, an elegy that turns a dog, once dead, into a legitimate member of the family. In this work, a woman sits on the steps of a workhouse lamenting the death of her dog, her only companion in life and a double of her dead child. Though only “a mongrel cur” (115), therefore an absolute underdog with unclear origins, it was loved for its generous heart: “He would soothe her

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heart with his sympathy dumb / And watch her with care unfailing” (115). As a complete “love machine” and “a specially convenient emblem of the loss of all loved ones” (Howell 128), it filled the sentimental gap left by the child’s loss and, in its death, allowed its mistress to become a mother again by mourning a second time. The emotional void left by death is acutely described in late nineteenth-century poems that deal with dog burial, the cemetery being a symbolic boundary between the physical world and what lies beyond. For many Victorians, and particularly for poets at the turn of the nineteenth century, dead dogs were not disposable waste but deserved a human-like funeral, a family-like plot of land and perhaps a place in the hereafter. Indeed, Hilda Kean has shown in her study of the commemoration of animals after death that “cemeteries are places of overlapping … in which human and animal are blurred in various ways” (31). Dog burial substantiates the idea that dogs are not so different from humans and certainly can be good Christians. Like Byron’s Boatswain, dogs were buried in private soil—with the less privileged ones relegated to common graves, like paupers. At least this was the case until hygienist legislation in the 1870s began controlling dog burials and making them a serious sanitary issue. This was before pet cemeteries were built in Europe, such as the London Hyde Park Cemetery (1880) and the Cimetière des chiens, founded by French feminist and journalist Marguerite Durand (1864–1936), at Asnières-sur-Seine in 1899. It is therefore no surprise that some women poets in the 1870s examined—and sought to justify—the burial of dogs in their own gardens, particularly those who belonged to antivivisection societies. Philip Howell and Hilda Kean have discussed in detail the headstone epitaphs, which stress the exceptional quality of the treasured dogs, and the place that was reserved for them within the model Victorian family. If some women’s books of elegies function as literary cemeteries, dog poems are often like epitaphs, praising their exceptional qualities in accordance with what might be expected from any family member. By praising their dogs and by assessing their loyalty and morality according to Christian standards, women poets also tended to reduce the interspecies gap. Catherine Macleod’s elegy “In Memoriam” (1873) is no exception. In this piece, she pays homage to her beloved Pinn, “Thou bonny gem of my sweet home” (31), whose death will leave an empty emotional space within the Christian family and home environment. This vacant space is turned into a burial plot within the family compound, near the greenhouse. Although physically absent, the dog returns in the emotional and religious discourse that supports family values. Macleod’s poem literally turns into an epitaph, making absence visible, as it finally reads “Poor Pinn lies here below!” (31) written on the headstone. And let nobody deny the dog its family plot, made sacred by its selfless devotion to its mistress. Indeed, for Macleod, it was God’s will and His “heavenly plan” that had made the dog an “Associate of the human race, / Protector, guardian, faithful guide” (31) and therefore legitimized its burial following Christian rites.

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Not only are these poems elegies to a treasured pet, but they also become literal epitaphs, mirroring the carved inscriptions on the headstones. By reproducing the epitaphs, some poets wish “to memorialize dead pets, to dignify their passing” (Howell 126), sacralizing them, unlike those who get rid of their dead dogs by disposing of their bodies on dust heaps. Some women’s dog elegies borrow certain components from Thomas Gray’s meditation on death, “Elegy Written in a Country-Churchyard” (1751), and his inclusion of the description of the poet’s grave and of his epitaph at the conclusion of the poem. This is certainly one way to come to grips with painful loss. But the epitaph-poem also provides a place of honor for the deceased dog, elevated to the rank of an exceptional individual. This was the intention of Elizabeth Haigh Gilstrap (1822–1891) when she wrote “Lines to My Skye Terrier, ‘Squib’,” who had died and was elegized in 1873, twenty-one years before the publication of her volume of poems. Squib, certainly named for its unbridled energy, was also a “filler” in the poet’s life. The emotional void left after its death was thus filled a second time in verse, leading the poet to overrepresent first her dog’s body, then its invisible presence. The poem is constructed like a collection of dead pet memorabilia, accumulating references to the cherished dog within the macabre framework of the elegy, thus making loss visible and perhaps less painful. The poem is preceded by a picture of Squib and his mistress and followed by a representation of both the headstone called “Epitaph to ‘Squib’, a dog” and the inscriptions on it. The body of the dog visible in the picture gradually fades in the poem, existing only in filigree through allusions to its gradual absence in memories: “My dog Squib, memory’s sunshine oft shall retrace / In the haunts that delight me, thy fun-loving face” (38). The dog is missing from the picture of the headstone but is to be fully memorialized and remembered in the epitaph.13 The representation of epitaphs in poems thus serves to materialize the loss of an exceptional individual. By burying their dogs, in the earth and in the poem, Victorian women expressed the hope, and sometimes the assurance, of a post-mortem family reunion in heaven (Howell 126). The use of epitaphs thus heralds the possibility of an afterlife. For French historian Eric Baratay, dog burials validate “their entry into the salvation economy” (2001, 30),14 narrowing even more the gulf between humans and animals. Their poems about canine death and burial set the stage for the possible existence of a dog soul. Assigning one’s dog a soul is the ultimate step in Victorian discussions of animal distinction and in the attribution of a unique pedigree. With Darwin’s theory establishing the principle of a continuum among species, the anthropocentric considerations that had hitherto supported religious dogmas were now called into question. Perhaps possessing a soul was not a uniquely human prerogative after all. With the famous anecdote of his dog barking at the parasol moved by a gentle breeze, Darwin sought to provide an explanation for the belief of animals and “savages” in “the presence of a strange living agent” and “in the existence of one or more gods” (148). By proving a

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distant resemblance between human and animal forms of spirituality, it was only a small step to accepting animal abstract thinking and contemplating the existence of a dog soul. Howell has argued that the belief in a dog soul also challenged Victorian spiritual and theological orthodoxies about the possibility of a hereafter for animals. He has identified several reasons why an animal soul and a spiritual reunion in Heaven became possible options for the Victorians: The characteristic eclecticism of the case put forward for the immortality of animal souls—the scriptural authority and theological precedents, the argument by analogy between man and beast, the anecdotes of sagacity and higher powers, the doctrine of compensation for present suffering—served to throw doubt upon the authority of orthodox religious and ethical thinking. The message is that there is no convincing proof that animals are excluded from heaven, and much to suggest— emotionally, intellectually, empirically, ethically—that they are not. (142) The place that owners constructed “for their [pets’] putative souls” (147) was also discussed among women poets. They argued with conviction in their poems not only in favor of the existence of a dog soul but also engaged in disputes on the persistence, and therefore the immortality, of the dog soul after death. Following the post-Darwinian scientific and ethical debates on the animal soul as well as other unorthodox religious paths, some women poets in the last decades of the nineteenth century thus embraced the concept of the canine soul.15 Violet Fane (1843–1905), the pseudonym of Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie, a late Victorian poet born into privilege, made a significant contribution to contemporary reflections on this subject. Contrary to those of her social rank who used pedigree to justify the value of their dogs, Fane never took breed into account when praising her remarkable dogs. She explored their exceptional character through her own observations, not of visible signs but of characteristics made perceptible only through interspecies communion. In her 1896 sonnets on Niko, a Pekinese or a Chow-Chow, two much appreciated Chinese breeds in the late nineteenth century, she argues in favor of the exceptional qualities of her dog. Thus, in “To Niko,” she remembers that the dog’s arrival “from the East” (82) took away her sorrow. While the octet presents the incongruous presence of the dog in its new British environment, the sestet depicts its formidable therapeutic value thanks to “some pow’r Superior to man’s.” In the second sonnet, “Niko’s Faith,” she describes her dog’s perfect faith, grounded neither in sin nor repentance, in neither regret nor fear of death. Instead, it takes the spiritual form of pure love for its mistress: Yours is the better part, that, on the brink Of Death’s dark mystery, need never sigh

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Fabienne Moine For joys o’er past, but deeming life all sweet And love eternal, only eat and drink And merry-make, and know not you must die! (84)

Fane pursues her observations of her dog’s psychology in “‘Only a Dog’” (1900). The single inverted commas clearly indicate that the title is intended to be ironical. How could she believe that her dog is ordinary while its behavior and emotions not only point to its exceptional qualities but are proof of the existence of its soul? This poem thus takes the form of a demonstration that dog souls do exist. Fane argues first that dogs and humans are not fundamentally different, since “Is it not that same spark which […] / animates with flame / The greatest and the lowest”(75). The “breath of life” infuses bodies in a similar way, as it is The special mechanism that controls And thro’ each subtle valve of nerve and cell Elaborates what mortals call their “souls”? (75) The reference to biomechanics seeks to challenge the Cartesian beastmachine theory in which animals, like humans, are machines that are moved by means of the arrangement of parts. But unlike humans, they function like clockwork without reason, not to mention a soul. While she admits that the body is a “mechanism” (75), she refuses to support Descartes’s opinion that only humans have been given a rational—and immortal—soul. In the second part of the poem, Fane first appears to concede that canine love limits the power of its consciousness and of its soul. Blinded by the love for its master that circumscribes its soul, it may not have access to a superior level of reason. But Fane is quick to point out that her observations, grounded in her own form of positivism, have convinced her that her own pet does have a soul and that it is of divine character. Fane contributes to the debates on the animal soul when she suggests that dog souls have a spiritual form, but she denies the fact that their souls are of a lower degree. In making this argument, she only partially follows Darwin’s belief that the difference between human and animal mental powers is a matter of degree, not of kind, as she postulates that it is only the manifestation of the soul that differs from one being to another. In the end, she affirms that her dog is not deprived of a soul: “I feel some ray of the Eternal Light, / Some note divine, is surely here indeed” (76).

Conclusion This essay on the Victorian women poets’ approach to pedigree is intended to complement recent studies on dog breeds in Victorian Britain. The dog

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poems discussed above transcend the limitations of gender or class, challenge religious doctrines and scientific principles, and question the validity of the social practices of selection. In doing so, they fundamentally undermine the central Victorian concept of value. One example is the way in which women’s poems explore alternative family models. Monica Flegel has recently shown how animal autobiographies in particular question and transgress middle-class heteronormativity by presenting unorthodox family models. Dog poems, too, present a form of resistance to established norms such as heteronormativity and dominant masculinity within the family unit. However, one should not overlook the fact that dog poems subvert and reinforce mainstream thought at the same time, since the Victorian quest for social progress was often rooted in conservative morality. What women’s dog poems reveal, unlike other artistic forms, is a value system of their own, rooted in what women considered more egalitarian and inclusive exchanges and more balanced power relations, especially between genders. Instead of objectifying their favorite pets, capitalizing on their economic worth or enhancing their own status by proxy, Victorian women poets challenged economic and social power structures within the class system. There is thus something to be said for the suggestion that even their most innocuous dog poems must be interpreted with an eye to their social and political dimensions. Writing from their spaces of intimacy and observing through the lens of their “humanimality,” women poets took a positive stance in favor of humane animal treatment, animal reasoning faculties, animal rights, or more simply interspecies relations—all subjects that prefigure highly topical issues in our own day.

Notes 1 See Morse and Danahay; Mazzeno and Morrison. 2 For a review of animal species in Victorian women’s poetry, see Moine 157–158. 3 On the institutionalization of the dog fancy, see Ritvo 93–104 and Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton. 4 In the April–September 1901 issue of the American magazine Outing, Ellen Oughton Giles reaches the same conclusion on women’s moral responsibility within the Ladies’ Kennel Association of America: “No doubt it will be the same here and women will be able, through the Ladies’ Kennel Association, to wield a great power for good. To use it wisely and well and by their example, social power and presence, raise the standard of dog showing, thereby rendering it an amusement in which all may indulge without meeting with objectionable practices, will be their mission” (67). 5 For an analysis of some of these intimate relationships, see Adams. 6 Yet none of Cook’s dog poems were reprinted in the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star. The newspaper did, however, publish several of Cook’s poems evidencing a more open commitment to the Chartist cause. 7 Late Victorian poets replaced St Bernard dogs with collie dogs, more popular at that time but praised in the same way for their sense of sacrifice. See, for example, Free Lance’s “The Collie Dog” (1899) or Julia Kerr Yellowlees’s “My Collies” (1889).

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8 Agnes R. Howell wrote a poem about the same subject in 1875, “The Shepherd’s Chief Mourner.” There is no reference to its breed, but its faithfulness makes it a “noble dog” (62). 9 “A Song for the Dog” may have been published earlier in one the many magazines to which Cook contributed. 10 See, for example, Alice Clare McDonell’s “On the Death of a Favourite Dog” (1896) or Charlotte Oates’s “Lines on the Death of a Favourite Dog” (1898). 11 For the influence of pets on sexualities in fiction, see Flegel, Pets. 12 For further discussion of this relationship, see also the essays in this volume by Keridiana Chez, Kevin A. Morrison, and Matthew Margini. 13 “Greyfriar’s Bobby” (1873) by Dunbar poet Catherine Miller Mitchell (dates unknown) is also about the memorialization of an exceptional dog. Bobby would continue to live through the widely disseminated picture by noted animal painter Gourlay Steell as well as through her own poem, which offered “A lasting and a highly prized memorial” (19). A few months after the publication of her volume of verse, Baroness Burdett-Coutts paid for a life-size statue to be placed on top of the Greyfriars Bobby fountain in Edinburgh. 14 In France, dog burials are sometimes accompanied by prayers or masses. See Baratay, “Le christianisme et l’animal,” 134. 15 Eric Baratay has shown that the question of life in the hereafter also inspired many late nineteenth-century French poets who dreamed of “a next life for their animal companion but whose description remains unclear.” See Baratay, L’église et l’animal, 223.

References Adams, Maureen. Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton and Emily Brontë. Ballantyne, 2007. Argent, Alice E. Poems. Chelmsford: Edmund Durrant & Co., 1890. Australie (Emily Australie Manning Heron). The Balance of Pain, and Other Poems. London: George Bell and Sons, 1877. Baratay, Eric. L’église et l’animal (France, XVIIe–XXe siècle). Les éditions du Cerf, 1996. Baratay, Eric. “De l’équarissage à la sépulture. La dépouille animale en milieu catholique: l’exemple français.” La Sépulture des animaux: concepts, usages et pratiques à travers le temps et l’espace. Contribution à l’étude de l’animalité. Université de Liège, 2001, pp. 15–35. Baratay, Eric. “Le christianisme et l’animal, une histoire difficile.” Ecozona, European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 120–138. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Poems and Letters. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Brandow, Michael. A Matter of Breeding: A Biting History of Pedigree Dogs and How the Quest for Status Has Harmed Man’s Best Friend. Beacon Press, 2015. Campbell, Louisa. One Hundred Voices from Nature, or Apples of Gold in a NetWork of Silver. London: Longman & Co., 1861. Cook, Eliza. The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook. London: Frederick Warne and Co., 1870. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Ashgate, 2006.

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Craik, Dinah Mulock. Children’s Poetry by the Author of ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’. London: Macmillan and Co., 1881. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex: The Concise Edition. 1871, edited by Carl Zimmer, Penguin, 2007. Degeling, Chris. “Canines, Consanguinity, and One-Medicine: All the Qualities of a Dog Except Loyalty.” Health and History, vol. 10, no. 2, 2008, pp. 23–47. Denenholz Morse, Deborah, and Martin A. Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ashgate, 2007. Fane, Violet. Under Cross and Crescent: Poems by Violet Fane. London: John C. Nimmo, 1896. Fane, Violet. Betwixt Two Seas: Poems and Ballads. London: John C. Nimmo, 1900. Flegel, Monica. Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family. Routledge, 2015. Flegel, Monica. “‘I Declare I Never Saw so Lovely an Animal!’: Beauty, Individuality, and Objectification in Nineteenth-Century Animal Autobiographies.” Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 147–166. Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. Touchstone, 1996. Haigh Gilstrap, Elizabeth. The Harp of Colne. Ilkeston Pioneer Printing Company, 1894. Howell, Agnes R. Through the Woods. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1875. Howell, Philip. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Kean, Hilda. “Human and Animal Space in Historic ‘Pet’ Cemeteries in London, New York and Paris.” Animal Death, edited by Jay Johnston and Fiona ProbynRapsey, Sydney University Press, 2013, pp. 21–42. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir. University of California Press, 1994. Macleod, Catherine. A Memorial for the Friends: Being Some Occasional Thoughts in Verse by the Late Catherine Macleod. Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1875. Mangum, Teresa. “Dog Years, Human Fears.” Representing Animals, edited by Nigel Rothfels, Indiana University Press, 2002, pp. 35–47. Mangum, Teresa. “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 15–34. Mazzeno, Laurence W., and Ronald D. Morrison, eds. Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts for Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. McDonell, Jennifer. “Ladies’ Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2010, pp. 17–34. McDonell, Jennifer. “A la lisière de l’humanité: Chiens, affect et division des espèces dans l’Angleterre du XIXe siècle.” Aux frontières de l’animal: Mises en scène et réflexivité, edited by Annik Dubied, Librairie Droz, 2012, pp. 119–141. Miller Mitchell, Catherine. Sea Weeds. Dunbar, 1873. Moine, Fabienne. Victorian Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry. Routledge, 2016. Mrs Murray (Joanna Gregory Laing). Poems by the Late Mrs Murray. Edinburgh: J. Gardner Hitt, 1894.

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Ogilvy, Dorothea Maria. Poems. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1873. Oughton Giles, Ellen. “American and English Women Dog Fanciers.” Outing, vol. 38, Apr.–Sept. 1901, pp. 65–67. Ritvo, Harriett. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Harvard University Press, 1987. Tague, Ingrid H. Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Penn State University Press, 2015. Turner, James. Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Worboys, Michael, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton. The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.

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“Easily domesticated and bred” Canary Poetry in Victorian Periodicals Catherine Burton

A pretty little bird I sing, Of crested poll and verdant wing, In manners blithe and airy; Not always in a cage confin’d, For he might roam whene’er inclin’d— A lovely green canary … —From T. S. A.’s “The Green Canary” (1838)

In the April 1838 edition of The Mirror, sandwiched between a brief report on the joys of spring and a fact-checking letter to the editor, a poem written by an author identified only as T. S. A. sweetly sings the story of a cherished pet canary.1 In “The Green Canary,” the eponymous bird is initially described in terms of liveliness and individuality. Joey is a “blithe and airy” (3) pet whose playful antics cannot fail to charm his owner and her guests. His tameness is something to marvel at, and his affection toward his “mistress” is undeniable (11). However, the last stanza of the poem recategorizes his role, as the reader discovers that it is not the canary himself who matters, but rather what that canary—and indeed, what all canaries—ostensibly represents: domestic goodness and fidelity. The canary is transformed from a living creature to a moral lesson, as the poet implores the reader to “learn of him” (34): “Be ever as sincere as he, / And love our homes as dearly” (35–36). Instead of a celebration of a particular animal, the poem is a reiteration of an all too familiar recipe for the domestic ideal. Despite its narrow focus, “The Green Canary” is representative of a surprisingly substantial group of canary poems that emerged throughout the nineteenth century in many popular British literary periodicals.2 Publications featuring canary poetry were often geared toward a literate, middle- or aspiring middle-class reader and billed themselves as generalist literary magazines. The periodicals’ emphasis on miscellany, accessibility, and reader amusement distinguished them from publications interested in the promotion of so-called “serious” literature. These popular periodicals— Chambers’s Journal, Bentley’s Miscellany, and The London Reader, among

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others—had huge audiences and played a dramatic role in shaping the social identities and cultural beliefs of the emerging middle class.3 Certainly, didactic elegies about “dear little Dicky” and enthusiastic odes to “golden-feathered fairies” do not signal conventional or “serious” poetry in the same ways as iconic poems immortalizing the likes of Keats’s nightingale or Hardy’s thrush. The household commonness of the canary works against its consideration as anything more than ordinary; like a teapot or a doily, the bird is hopelessly mundane, even for the poets who dedicate lines to the songsters. The apparent triviality of this poetic trend, however, belies its importance in responding to and reiterating important nineteenth-century discussions of domesticity, domestication, and animality. Scholars such as Linda K. Hughes have worked to revise understandings of the purpose of periodical poems, which were previously dismissed as “trite or sentimental ‘filler’ worth no one’s time” (90). Hughes argues for an appreciation of these verses as more substantial and meaningful components of the publications. The inclusion of poetry in periodicals, she claims, “could enhance the cultural value and prestige of the periodical itself” (94) and the appeal of “pious, sentimental poetry”—like many canary poems—“could help mediate and rationalize … creating in the midst of cheap print a form of sacred space in which death, love, God, family, nature, and, in more up-market titles, art, philosophy, and metaphysics could be contemplated” (100). A space for contemplation would be especially important for Victorians as they worked through evolving attitudes about domesticity and domestication. Periodicals were active sites of cultural contestation, if for no other reason than for the broad array of topics included in their pages (see, e.g., Peterson). Even politically and morally conservative magazines were not able to completely suppress progressive sentiments—especially when carefully selected literature might be found on the same page as news about national activism efforts or crime and death notices that implicitly worked to disrupt idealized notions of Victorian morality and happiness. In particular, I will demonstrate here how canary poems mark the intersection of two major discourses of the era: notions of the idealized domestic space and humans’ inherent superiority over animals. Teresa Mangum explains that “the devaluing of most animal life, on one hand, and the heightened attachment to pets, on the other, is a crucial and inherent contradiction in nineteenth-century human-animal relations” (18). In periodical canary poetry, the cultural contradiction Mangum identifies emerges through the tendency of poets to simultaneously celebrate and objectify canaries, shaping human nature through comparisons with a specifically animal other.4 The birds in poems such as “The Green Canary” are glorified as the embodiment of the domestic ideal, and through their depiction as willing and easily bred captives, the pets are used to domesticate human audiences.5 The capable canaries express didactic lessons to the men, women, and children who own and read about them by demonstrating certain behaviors and

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6

attitudes most suited for a lifetime of captivity. However, my analysis uncovers an inherent tension within poetic depictions of the didactic canary. As cultural icons promoting the happiness of the home and guiding their human companions, the canaries depicted here appear to be lively and influential creatures. Yet poets simultaneously deny the canaries’ purported vivacity—highlighting their supposed obliviousness while suppressing their wildness—in order to control the birds’ cultural power and influence. In order to be used in such specific ways, canaries must be domesticated to the point of objectification. Poets thus preference human desires and perceptions and in the process deny canaries sentience: despite valuing qualities such as cheerfulness and singing—which would certainly imply avian abilities to feel and think—writers claim canaries are oblivious to nuanced emotional experiences and ignore the birds’ potential for physical sensation. Close readings of canary poems expose how authors contain the birds through linguistic and physical domination: acts of “taming” in part facilitated by the poets’ attempts to ignore, erase, or justify avian (and by extension, human) suffering as merely a necessary component of the processes of domestication.7 Thus, throughout this essay, “domestic” and “domestication” always deliberately invoke the words’ complexity for human and nonhuman animals; they simultaneously denote ideals of civilized behavior, implicit and ever-present wildness, and the cruel and often violent practices of enforced conversion.

Devotion and Domestication: A Brief Cultural History of the Victorian Canary According to Victorian bird enthusiasts, the canary was the ne plus ultra of domestic animals. Most accounts of the bird’s origin story claim canaries were first introduced to Europe from the Canary Islands around 1478, when Henry the Navigator brought them back to Spain.8 The oft-repeated legend goes on to describe how the birds were eventually dispersed throughout the rest of Europe in the seventeenth century, when a shipment of canaries supposedly wrecked off the coast of Italy were subsequently caught and sold to a variety of European countries. By the time the Comte de Buffon included canaries in his widely read The Natural History of Birds in 1793, canaries were well-established household pets across Europe. Victorians, however, took canary-keeping to new heights. In 1893, Robert L. Wallace, author of The Canary Book, explained, “There is probably no bird so well known and so universally admired throughout the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as the canary. It may without hesitation be pronounced the ‘household pet,’ as it is beloved and esteemed by all classes” (209). He then described reasons why the canary earned such a place of honor in the homes of so many Victorians: “I will venture to say that there is no bird more engaging in manner than a canary; nor any more gay, happy, and cheerful in confinement, and withal so harmonious; their power

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of memory and imitation is perfectly wonderful, and the attachment of many of those birds to the individuals who supply their daily wants and treat them kindly is widely known” (209–210). Charming, affectionate, and refined, canaries appealed to Victorian pet owners seeking domestic animals who would help reify prevailing behavioral norms. The numbers support Wallace’s grandiose claims: throughout the nineteenth century, British bird traders ran a brisk business in canaries, importing anywhere between ten and fifty thousand of the birds per year from their native home in the Canary Islands as well as from the Harz Mountain region in Germany, the global center for canary breeding.9 British breeders and fanciers also established and bred new varieties of canaries, adding thousands more colorful songsters to the constant influx of birds sourced from outside the country. The market demand for the birds was enormous, and dealers could barely keep up with the numbers of men, women, and children from all social classes who clamored to secure their own canary companion. The primary reason given by Victorian bird owners for the extreme popularity of canaries (whether explicitly or implicitly) was how uniquely pliable the animals were under the pressures of domestication, easily undergoing the transformation from wild and untamed to civilized and trained.10 In the bird manual Cage and Singing Birds (1854), Henry Gardiner Adams observes that the canary excels where other birds fail: in situations of domestication, “most foreign birds, introduced into this country, degenerate and lose their spirits; but the canary finch rises in colour, feathers, and song” (101). George Henry Holden, another bird manual author, builds on this claim, explaining to readers of Canaries and Cage-Birds (1888) that canary popularity is a direct result of the animal’s effortless transformation: “Easily domesticated and bred, he became at once the cage-bird to which the most care was given, and upon which the greatest attention was lavished” (11). Writers offered a wide range of examples of canaries’ civilized behaviors—especially compared to other pet birds—including their attention to tidiness and offspring-rearing and their melodious, rather than raucous, voices. Manual authors and canary owners most explicitly demonstrated their adoration of canaries’ easy domestication in the thriving industry of bird shows. The primary market for the huge numbers of canaries entering England was the thousands of men who identified as bird fanciers. Their demands and preferences determined the market, and first and foremost on most fanciers’ lists was a desire for specific aesthetic qualities. Cheerfulness, melodious song, companionship—all these were acknowledged to be positive canary attributes, but for the majority of fanciers, and even for many casual pet owners, the birds were most valued for their physical beauty. Dozens of canary societies held annual exhibitions at venues such as the Crystal Palace. Much like twenty-first century dog shows, in these serious competitions birds were separated into categories based on variety and then judged by elaborate rating systems of physical characteristics. Points were

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earned or lost based on the bird’s poise, vibrancy, and consistency of color, and shape of body, head, feathers, and crest, among other factors (Wallace 216 ff.). Fanciers considered themselves discerning art critics, dismissing the multitudes of average canaries and instantly spotting the aesthetic perfection of an admirable specimen. Problematically, however, these men also believed in their ability to create canary “art.” Malleability was a crucial component of this pursuit of aesthetic accomplishment, since the birds had to undergo drastic transformations from their wild state in order to meet exhibition standards. Fanciers presented their intent to physically and sometimes painfully manipulate the birds quite matter-of-factly, without any sense of guilt or shame. Inevitably, in writings about canary breeding and exhibition, authors depicted the canary as an object: a non-sentient pet or product that could be manipulated to ensure the happiness and gratification of its owners. The movement from critic to creator resulted in fanciers’ blatant disregard for canaries’ physical integrity, and many canaries suffered and even died at the hands of men, whose aggressive breeding techniques distorted birds’ bodies in an attempt to achieve the ideal look. Moreover, these same breeding and exhibition discussions also reveal the very real limits of the canary’s supposedly limitless flexibility, as manuals casually describe the deaths of dozens of overbred birds due to sickness and physical disability. Far removed from this macabre reality, however, most assessments of the canary’s aesthetic accomplishment focused on the beauty that the birds could bring to their domestic environments. Although some canary owners described the bird as a household decoration, to many devotees of canarykeeping, the birds were frequently conceived as a more elevated form of decoration—as a form of art. In The Canary Book (1893), Wallace succinctly explains this valuation of bird-as-art: “I consider a good bird worthy of a good cage, upon the same principle as I contend that a good picture is deserving of a good frame” (2). The comparison illustrates how the author/ fancier determines the bird’s worth—and its deserving an attractive cage— based on aesthetic qualities. The Rev. Francis Smith, an Englishman whose popular text The Canary was released in its third edition in 1872, provides a more detailed version of the comparison. He cautions against the dangers of an overly decorative cage, and in doing so equates the bird to a piece of jewelry: “if a cage be too elaborate and ornamental in its design and workmanship, the effect will be to fasten the attention rather on the casket than on the jewel it is meant to enshrine” (138). As if the canary were a lifeless relic, the goal of the cage is to enshrine, to preserve, and protect a beauty that must remain observed but untouched. Smith then goes on—less ambiguously but still metaphorically—to describe the canary as art(ificial), insisting that, when truly dedicated fanciers see canaries in elaborate cages, we always feel very much what an artist in some picture exhibition, standing near his own production to hear the criticisms of the public,

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Catherine Burton may be supposed to feel, as he hears some unsophisticated party exclaim, ‘Oh my! what a beautiful frame!’ (139)

The canary is stripped of sentience and independence: according to Smith, the bird is a product, made and owned by humans, just as a piece of artwork is the product of its artist. The belief that fanciers “created” different varieties of canaries was quite common, and manual authors—intent on describing the domesticating possibilities available to eager fanciers—often appeared unconcerned with, or perhaps oblivious to, the potential cruelty and limitations of their breeding advice. Many of the most popular and professionally admired varieties of canaries were those that had undergone dramatic physical transformations from their wild state, transformations that made them prone to injury or illness. One of the most extreme examples is the Belgian canary, touted by those in the know as the “nobility of the canary race” (Wallace 212). Breeders praised this variety of bird the most, and they also inflicted the most radical manipulations upon the variety, demonstrating the birds’ malleability and their own powers of domestication. Authors such as Holden and Wallace prized the Belgian for its extreme angularity: breeders determined that the ideal body shape of this canary was one in which head and shoulders were almost completely level with each other, the head jutting out from the body at a right angle. Such construction made regular movement incredibly difficult for the bird, as it was unable to walk steadily with its head so far bowed down in front of it. Both Holden and Wallace detail the dramatically unnatural distortion of this variety of bird, as well as offer illustrations to demonstrate the Belgian’s unusual shape. However, their descriptions are not at all attuned to the bird’s probable suffering. Instead, they express admiration for the variety’s extreme shaping, with an occasional chuckle at the birds’ distorted bodies and attempts at normal movement. Holden cheerfully describes how the full-blooded Belgian, when viewed in any position except when on his perch, is an awkward-looking fellow at the best. When hopping along the bottom of the cage pecking at his seeds his movements are such as might be made by a two-legged camel moving rapidly if such an animal can be imagined. (19) His whimsical comparison of the “awkward-looking fellow” lightheartedly dismisses any notion of breeders’ deliberate cruelty in achieving this shape, even while it acknowledges the unnaturalness and physiological inefficiency of the body type. Holden also avers that such a creature as the Belgian is unimaginable, even unnatural: in fact, the bird’s unnaturalness is apparently what contributes most to Holden’s glee. In many ways, these fanciers viewed themselves as God-like, taking satisfaction in the power that came

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from creation, regardless of—or perhaps dependent on—the monstrosities and suffering that result. Intense breeding practices inevitably produced physically weak canaries. Manual authors readily acknowledged this consequence, but they also expressed no concern over the enfeebled birds. In fact, many fanciers adopted the attitude that such practices were their right as dedicated, even scientific, men experimenting and achieving successes in their chosen profession: any casualties along the way were collateral damage. Their justifications are steeped in colonialist attitudes. For instance, fanciers bred the Scotch Fancy canary to mimic the shape of a “half circle,” a contortion that often made movement difficult and seriously inhibited balance. Holden assures his reader that, despite these consequences, breeders are well within their rights to breed to such extremes: “We mean no disrespect to the rugged Highland breeders. This variety is their choice and fancy, and they should be allowed their indulgence” (25). Holden’s language strips sentience from the canaries upon which these breeding techniques are utilized. He refers to the living birds as the property—the “choice” and “fancy”—of men, who exercise complete control over them. The cruelties of extreme breeding and its resultant distortions are recast as human “indulgences,” a term that emphasizes the domesticating rights of an unquestionably superior species.

Figure 2.1 Illustration of a breeding cage in Robert L. Wallace’s The Canary Book (1875) © The British Library Board (7293_cc_46)

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In a clear echo of contemporary paternalistic justifications of colonization, some fanciers also defended themselves against imagined charges of cruelty by depicting their human care and domesticated conditions as more beneficial to the birds’ health. British canary manual author Peter Boswell explained in 1842 that “In a state of nature [canaries] are liable to many misfortunes … In a state of domestication their health can be better observed, and more carefully attended to” (150), while William Kidd insisted in 1854 that domestication made a previously “tender, delicate, and difficult” bird into a “robust” species of bird, “among the heartiest of the feathered tribe” (50–51). Manual authors depict the human owner as a beneficent presence whose care far surpasses any bird’s ability to care for itself in the wild. Throughout the nineteenth century, then, the canary won favor for the responsiveness of its body and disposition to human efforts at domestication: in other words, humans clamored for an easily conquerable animal. Rather than simply representing the practice of taming an animal, “domestication” in these contexts referred to the dominating practices employed by bird owners to contort the canary into a useful object, disregarding its sentience. Conceptual as well as physical efforts at domestication were seen as all the more important in the canary’s primary role and figuration as a pet, where the bird was a fixture of the domestic sphere. A wild, or “uncivilized,” canary would disrupt the idealized calm and order of the home, and so, manual authors insisted, birds had to be thoroughly tamed. In 1842, Boswell christened the canary “the pet of the parlour” (101), a name that would follow the bird throughout the century, appearing frequently in subsequent care manuals, newspaper and periodical articles, and other literary texts. The title explicitly linked the identity of the bird to the civilized space of the home, and in particular to the room which most commonly came to represent middle- to upper-class status and values. As a result, the canary became an emblem of all things domestic and sacred: happiness, security, constancy, affection, and even morality. In fact, its ability to symbolize such traits quickly developed into a veritable embodiment and even dissemination of those traits; through much of the nineteenth century, the canary was also believed to transmit, inspire, or reveal such values in its human owners.11 Transformed from an uncontrollably wild bird into a didactic tool for guiding human thoughts and behaviors, the canary wielded significant cultural power when invoked in various Victorian attempts at guiding morality. No individual or group was exempt from being targeted in this way; canary manuals, for instance, claimed that canaries—“healthful to our souls as well as our bodies,” according to one manual author (Wood v)—provided important lessons in moral and physical improvement for populations as disparate as invalids, young children, unmarried women, criminals, and the poor. Many of these lessons, logically enough, were grounded in ideals of bourgeois identity: manual author the Rev. Francis Smith claims that

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children watching canaries “may silently learn those invaluable lessons of kindness, and love, and patience” (5), and he later identifies the ways in which canaries can “save” the lower classes from degeneracy by helping people “be reclaimed from the haunts of vice and crime; by degrees they would imitate the example of those above them; by degrees they would be found filling our churches and keeping the Sabbath” (35). Here, not only is the canary credited with rescuing impressionable young children and social and moral miscreants from lives of vice, but it is also believed to turn subjects into “proper” middle-class citizens. Children were a frequent audience for such admonitions: parents often gifted boys and girls with pet canaries, and authors wrote narratives about canaries for children in order to influence young people’s emergent morality. The presence of canaries in the home, contributing an influx of physical beauty and song, supposedly made human inhabitants happier as well as healthier in body and spirit. The canary’s status as a paragon of domesticity perched cheerfully in the Victorian parlor caused the bird to have a permanent linguistic home in the pages of numerous cultural and literary texts of the period. Canary manuals laid out in minute detail descriptions of the ways in which owners could care for, train, and breed their birds. Newspapers and periodicals dedicated articles to the same topics, regularly featuring “interesting” and “new” bits of information about the origin and uses of the birds in contemporary culture. Novels, short stories, and children’s books often referred to canaries in passing—for example, when describing the interior of a home or a character’s fondness for pets—and occasionally specific examples of domestic fiction and children’s literature devoted significant time to canary–human relationships.12 Lastly, a variety of poems sang the praises, or mourned the losses, of these cherished pets. Throughout the period, bird manuals and children’s texts included numerous poems dedicated to the small birds, but the most common outlet for these poems was the periodical. The poems—primarily attributed to anonymous and/or unknown poets—varied in tenor and intent and were just as likely to attempt to evoke serious contemplation or even grief as laughter. Despite minor variations in style, the poets of these texts worked with a limited and consistent series of tropes about the specific characteristics and functions of canaries as pets. Here, the canary’s culturally constructed identity as a perpetually cheerful songster, a beautiful and charming companion, and—most importantly—an animal perfectly suited to and representative of the domestic sphere, was constantly reiterated and relied upon.

A “charming little household bird” In her popular sentimental poem “The Domestic Affections” (1812), Felicia Hemans reverently pronounces the home a place “where pure affection glows, / That shrine of bliss! asylum of repose!” (121–122), a “serene

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retreat, / Where calm and pure, the mild affections meet” (187–188). Such idealized notions of security and sacredness existed throughout the nineteenth century, permeating and influencing almost every facet of Victorian culture to some degree, even if such values were largely fictional and non-representative expressions of class-based ideology. The discourse of the canary was no exception to the scope of this influence, and domestic beliefs were clearly the basis for the bird’s construction in the many periodical poems in which it played a starring role. As John Ruskin famously proclaims at the height of the Victorian era in Sesame and Lilies (1865), the “true nature of home” is that “it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division … a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth” (85). Ruskin’s enthusiastic endorsement of the home relies on his powerful articulation of the separate sphere doctrine so prominent throughout the period. He insists that man must “encounter all peril and trial” in the “open world,” with the goal of “guarding the woman from all this, within his house” (84). The canary, in its embodiment of constant cheer, beauty, and companionship, reinforced Ruskin’s depiction of untroubled security within the home. It also worked to uphold the importance of separate spheres through its repeated reassurances that the home is a happy and safe space, a refuge from the unpredictable wilds and dangers that characterize canary experiences beyond the home. The canary’s perceived happiness made it the ultimate tool for exemplifying and spreading notions of domestic satisfaction. The unfaltering cheerfulness of the canary is its chief attraction to many of the periodical poets. Repeatedly, writers celebrate the bird’s ability to sing happily no matter what was happening around it. In “The Green Canary,” the bird is “blithe and airy” (3), while the canary in “To My Canary in His Cage” (1851), published in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, “sing[s] with merry heart” (21). The bird of I. O. P. H.’s “My Canary” (1874) in The London Reader lives a “life so gay” (16), and in “The Canary,” appearing in an 1867 issue of Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, readers find the good mood of the “charming little household bird” (1) contagious: “Where’er his pleasant voice is heard, / His owner must feel cheery” (3–4). The combination of happiness and constancy demonstrated in such descriptions ensured that the canary emphasized the stable nature of the happy home; the canary could always be relied upon for cheer, never ceasing to exude and transmit contentment, just as the idealized domestic space was meant to provide its residents with joy and peace. Canary poems also celebrated the birds’ ability to impart beauty into the home, whether through physical appearance or melodious song. As a refuge from the physical and moral dirtiness of the public sphere, Victorians expected the home to be a meticulously maintained space of aesthetic appeal; canary poets, much like the bird fanciers described above, consistently worked to demonstrate how the bird beautified its surroundings, like a piece of artwork or a floral arrangement. References to the canary’s

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bright yellow coloring abound. In “The Canary” (1867), the bird is described as “A golden-feathered fairy” (2) and a “yellow-coated friend” (13), and both the poets of “To My Canary” (F. F. 206)—published in an 1880 edition of Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts—and “On the Death of the Speaking Canary Bird” (227)—published in an 1839 edition of The Mirror—celebrate “golden wings” (15, 2), with the latter poem also reveling in the bird’s “gilded plume and feather” (6). Other writers emphasize canary beauty through imagery interspersed with bourgeois implications of wealth and leisure. For instance, the light-hearted poet of “To My Canary” (1890), writing in The Cornhill Magazine, imagines the beauty of his pet as equivalent to women’s evening wear: 13

O Lady Betty, pert and bold, In dainty gown of palest gold, And fine pink stockings showing … (1–3) The grieving narrator of Quiver’s “Elegy on a Canary Bird” (1863) equates the appearance of his/her bird to menswear, a “quaint suit of yellow” (8). All of these poems emphasize a pet whose body acts as a decorative object, imparting joy for its owners through visual, materialistic gratification. Similarly, writers praise canaries for the pleasure and beauty the birds’ vocal accomplishments produce, suggesting the sacred space of the home is made even more peaceful and cheerful when augmented by canary “tunes and tones delicious” (“On the Death of the Speaking Canary Bird” 10). Writing in The Lady’s Monthly Museum, Mr. Hackett—poet of “Epitaph on a Canary Bird” (1805)—extolls the musical virtues of his canary, whose voice could “charm away a tedious hour / With silver sounds of dulcet pow’r” (3–4). Similarly, in “To a Canary Bird,” appearing in an 1845 edition of The London Journal and attributed to the “late Mrs. James Gray,” the canary’s “gladsome tone” (37) is so incredible as to be, literally, divine. It is described as a sound that “hath power / To lighten many a lonely hour” (31–32), filling the home with sweetness, love, and beauty. The poet enthuses, “Sing, little bird, rejoice and sing, / Thy songs arise from a heavenly spring” (39–40). Both texts speak to the power of the pet to combat negative feelings—a primary goal of the home—and the latter connects the bird’s purpose to a pursuit of divine peace integral to such conceptions of the domestic as Hemans’s “shrine of bliss” or Ruskin’s “temple of the hearth.” Additionally, poets often describe the canary as a warm and friendly companion to its masters, mirroring the characterization of the Victorian home as a center for unwavering love and affection. Many of the poems elevate canary status beyond that of “pet,” using terms of endearment typical of relationships between humans: the bird of “The Canary” (1867) is described by the poet as a “true beloved friend” whose “heart ne’er seems to vary” (25–26), while others are called “my beloved” (“Elegy on a Canary Bird” 2) and even

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“like a human soul” (“To My Canary in His Cage” 15). Of course, the affectionate verbal platitudes are one-way expressions of companionship, as only human poets and pet owners are capable of the language needed to generate them. However, several poems demonstrate (and/or manufacture) reciprocal feelings of love by depicting physically demonstrative birds. Joey, the darling bird from “The Green Canary” who “loves sincerely” (33), has a habit of exchanging kisses with his mistress: he’d ope his ivory beak, And softly press her rosy cheek, And peck and play discreetly. (13–15) Likewise, the “city bird” of F. F.’s “To My Canary” (1880) is encouraged to fulfill its desire to calm its “fluttering breast” (60) by “nestling” into its mistress’s “bosom” (58). These displays of kissing and cuddling, characterized as chaste rather than sexualized, call to mind the numerous invocations of the home’s ability to nurture by embracing, drawing its members around the warmth and security of the hearth. By deliberately fashioning an understanding of the canary as an icon of the ideal home, these poems—along with the numerous other texts and practices of petkeeping of the period—necessarily objectify the birds. In an effort to maintain the ideological fixity necessary to stabilize the domestic ideal, poets depicted canaries as non-sentient, ignoring the ways the birds perceived and responded to their environment for fear that doing so might reveal problems with the ideal. The poems therefore became a site of active domestication wherein once-wild and sentient animals were transformed into mere symbols. Significantly, many of the poems articulate and struggle with the processes of objectification that are necessary in order to tame the canary and use it for specific conventional reifications. An example of purposeful poetic objectification can be seen in “To My Canary in His Cage” (1851). The speaker seems to recognize his/her duty as poet after reflecting on the endless happiness of his/her canary. The bird’s song, she/he claims, can be boiled down to one specific sentiment: “Howsoe’er thy lot’s assigned, / Bear it with a cheerful mind” (41–42). To say the least, the claim is reductive; despite being masked by glowing praise for the bird, it strips the canary of its variability. It can only be cheerful (even if, the poet implies, it is captive), unable to be interpreted any other way. One of the most apparent examples of this symbolic reduction is the trend to imply that the canary’s invariable happiness demonstrates an obliviousness to its surroundings. Here the inherent paradox of canary poetry— characterized by authorial desire to construct but simultaneously control these culturally influential models of domesticity—reveals itself in dramatic fashion. Such a claim reinforces the animal’s characterization as fundamentally non-sentient, stripping it of its wildness. A canary unable to perceive or

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react to its environment was far removed from the birds of, say, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) that must always be alert and adaptive in the “universal struggle for life” (108). In a clearly contradictory attempt to insist on both canary animation and objectification, poets repeatedly wax rhapsodic about the bird’s failure to be influenced by negativity. As shown above, “My Canary” (1874) constructs its featured bird as a consistently cheerful pet. However, the poet also articulates how such consistency might translate into the blissful ignorance of a lower, non-thinking animal. The narrator opens the poem with a series of dramatic questions: “Have you a heart, my sweet canary?” (1), followed by the incredulous, “Know you aught of care and sorrow? / Have you forethought for the morrow?” (9–10). Each question is implicitly answered in the negative, to both the chagrin and envy of the poet. The canary’s willingness to “sing the livelong day” (3) convinces its owner that the bird has neither a sense of feeling nor futurity. Other poems reiterate this claim, even pointing to the ways in which canary obliviousness makes the birds physically and emotionally insensitive to their own human masters. According to some poets, owners might be able to exact enjoyment from their objectified pets in the form of cheer and beauty, but they could not apparently count on it to respond to the varying emotional cues of humans.14 In “My Canary Who Cares for Nothing”— published in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1859—George Walter Thornbury bemoans the inattention of his canary: Little sister went to sleep In the churchyard, dearest Clary! Though we cry, he sings all day, Carelessly—our pet canary. (9–12)15 This charge of “carelessness” distinguished the conception of the canary from that of other domestic animals popular at the time. The canary’s supposed failure to perceive and respond sympathetically to its owners made it more objectified than pets credited with affective abilities. Scientific and popular writers frequently described dogs, cats, and even horses as sensitive animals attuned to—and even going as far as assuming—the melancholic or angry moods of their owners.16 The quality of sensitivity was highly valued by pet owners, as it reinforced traditional notions of human superiority: validating the importance of the human and the service of the animal. When put in the context of more general conversations about the abilities of animals, however, insensitive canaries fell squarely within accepted notions of the mental inferiority of the non-human animal. The obliviousness of the canary translated into an inability to conceptualize the future: an animal trait that was widely accepted by most Victorians. An early example of such a perspective appears in William Wordsworth’s “Upon Epitaphs”

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(1810), where he claims that no epitaphs should be written for animals, because the animal “is incapable of anticipating the sorrow with which his surrounding associates shall bemoan his death, or pine for his; he cannot pre-conceive this regret, he can form no thought of it; and therefore cannot possibly have a desire to leave such regret or remembrance behind him” (28). Victorian scientific wisdom also subscribed to the idea that animals were unable to process ideas in any temporal realm other than the present. In Descent of Man (1871), Darwin uses forward thinking-ness as one of the particular qualities which separated (and elevated) humans from animals; he claims that morality is a uniquely human trait, and his description of morality is based almost entirely on the ability to reflect and project, “looking backwards and comparing the impressions of past events and actions” while also “continually look[ing] forward” (392). The result of such thinking, he explains, means that after some temporary desire or passion has mastered his social instincts, [man] will reflect and compare the now weakened impression of such past impulses, with the ever present social instinct, and he will then feel that sense of dissatisfaction which all unsatisfied instincts leave behind them. Consequently he resolves to act different for the future—and this is conscience. (392) The superior mental phenomenon of conscience, according to the scientist, is not found in animals; otherwise, he insists, “A pointer dog, if able to reflect on his past conduct, would say to himself, I ought (as indeed we say of him) to have pointed at that hare and not have yielded to the passing temptation of hunting it” (392). Darwin’s conclusions imply that an animal is unable to perceive a sense of self, and particularly a moral self, because it lacks the necessary mental tools to situate its awareness within an everchanging sense of temporality. His parenthetical aside also illustrates the human impulse to identify with, and even feel a sense of superiority over, the lack within the animal. Poetic depictions of canaries do the same things, as they fix the birds in the present and remove the opportunity for sentience.

Lessons Learned: The Didactic Relationship between Bird and Reader Once established in the implicit project of objectification, many of these poems expressed a desire to extend the fixed qualities of the canary to humans, as the so-called virtues of the canary were traits that several poets speculated could work well for humans.17 More tellingly, perhaps, the virtues were qualities that humans were consistently failing to meet. The canary’s happiness and lack of sentience—or more precisely, the deliberate creation of a domestic pet with such qualities—made it the ultimate tool for teaching its human companions to be likewise unquestioningly satisfied: in

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the words of the poet of “To a Canary” (1815), “Do not thy tuneful lessons tend / To teach repining man content?” (19–20). This poem, appearing in The European Magazine, and London Review—which targeted an educated readership with articles and news on a wide array of topics—as one of the earliest examples of periodical canary poetry, is crucial for understanding the cultural work of the canary in future texts, as here the poet self-consciously and explicitly attempts to discover what exactly the canary communicates through its “notes so shrill, so gay” (2). Seemingly at a loss to understand why the bird in question could be so jubilant in its captivity, the narrator discards several options before settling triumphantly on the solution, as quoted above: the bird sings in order to serve its masters, to teach listeners important moral lessons. She/he closes the poem by reiterating the purpose and benefit of such “instructive melody” (34), as she/he avers that “in thy warbling songs are shewn / The ties of social sympathy” (35–36). Such ties, directly linked to the contentment of earlier lines, stress the importance of a certain kind of morality connected expressly to notions of domestic happiness. “To a Canary” is followed in theme by several other poetic attempts that ultimately identify the canary’s purpose as one of moral and ideological instruction. In “The Green Canary” (1838), poet T. S. A. begs his/her audience to heed the message of his/her pet: let us learn of him—may we Be ever as sincere as he, And love our homes as dearly. (34–36) Thirty years later that sentiment is reiterated in “The Canary” (1867), where the poet declares: like a true beloved friend, His heart ne’er seems to vary— Oh, many a one some lesson sweet Might learn of my canary. (25–28) These “discoveries” of the bird’s primary function, reiterated so many times over, solidify the notion that canaries were essentially automata: producing charming movement and sound but void of the ability to feel, emotionally or physically. In order to serve the supposedly more noble purposes of catering to and guiding human concerns, then, the birds are stripped of sentience. The inherently didactic nature of the domesticated canary in Victorian poetry is one of the most enduring qualities of the bird, in both periodical poems and larger cultural discussions. Poetic attempts at transferring canary qualities to human owners ultimately reveal a pervasive anxiety about human satisfaction—or lack thereof—within the home. In order to manage

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this anxiety, poets created canaries which could essentially model coping strategies: ways of existing within and adapting to the private sphere in order to remain satisfied with the inherently unsatisfying conditions of ideal domesticity. For instance, the constantly cheerful and thus oblivious bird of “My Canary” (1874) demonstrates an alternative for humans feeling overwhelmed by the “dark and gloom” (4) of everyday existence. The narrator confesses his/her jealousy of the bird’s carefree nature, as well as a desire to mimic canary obliviousness: “Would I could live without forethought / And for to-morrow’s skies care naught” (17–18).18 Such an admission, coupled with authorial admiration of the canary’s failure to perceive potential sadnesses or dangers, affirms the presence of threats in the ostensibly inviolate domestic sphere. But the canary offers a potential way out; the narrator must learn to accept domestication passively, to live only in the (presumably happy) moment: Drink life’s elixir to-day. While the golden sunbeams play … Making time a glorious dream, Life a joy, love a duty, And all the world a thing of beauty. (19–20, 22–24) Essentially, the canary’s prescription is to embrace the dream (read: the domestic ideal), even if it does not exist, and delight in the blissful ignorance of such a choice. Despite advocating a very specific and very restrictive role for their readers, however, canary poets do not escape a sense of guilt in relegating both birds and humans to an objectified status. Many of the poems struggle to defend their depiction of the home as a safe and sacred place against emerging claims—articulated especially through rapidly growing animal and women’s rights movements—that such a space was in fact a prison, characterized by the emotional and physical violence of forced domestication. Periodical poets often attempt to “resolve” the issue of fraught domestic ideals, rather dubiously, by contending that the canary (and therefore the analogous Victorian reader), in its state of limited perception, was in fact happier and safer within the confines of the home. Such a version of domestication denies the canary’s ability to make choices for itself and simultaneously denies any kind of suffering that could come from imprisonment, rendering the birds artificial and by extension eliminating the possibility that humans might also feel restricted under such conditions. Repeatedly, then, these poems emphasize how happy and satisfied canaries are despite their confinement: in “To My Canary in His Cage” (1851), the poet marvels, “Yet my birdie, you’re content / In your tiny cage” (15– 16), and in the description of “The Green Canary” (1838) the poet insists,

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Figure 2.2 Mary Had a Pretty Bird. Illustration for Aunt Louisa’s London Picture Book (Frederick Warne, 1866). Illustrations printed by Kronheim © Look and Learn

“So tame was he—so much at home” (10). Even the gilded cages the birds were often housed in are reimagined as snug, comfortable homes that allow canaries to focus on singing and pleasing their owners. In an 1815 issue of British Lady’s Magazine, the author of “To Mary’s Canary Bird” coos to his/her bird, “A cage like thine, who would not love it? / Bonds like thine, who would not covet?” (Poetaster 36–37), and “To a Canary Bird Escaped from its Cage,” appearing in 1829 in The Edinburgh Literary Journal, the Scottish writer Alexander Balfour describes his bird as living in “a snug and cosie hame, / Wi’ comforts mair than I can name” (8–9).19 Implicit in the descriptions is the belief that a bird not understood as a feeling creature

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would not perceive the deprivation of such small living quarters. The poets vehemently deny any sense of spatial, emotional, and/or intellectual claustrophobia that might occur for any living being relegated to a private sphere. Instead of restriction, the authors substitute euphemisms and redirect perspectives, emphasizing instead how the spaces actually provide security and comfort. Particularly in the poems written in the first half of the nineteenth century, poets insist on the proper place of canaries within the safety of the home. One of the most dramatic examples of this occurs in “The Canary that Foresook its Home,” which appeared in a January 1836 issue of The Saturday Magazine. The poet, identified only as M., constructs an elaborate narrative about a canary who thinks he would be happier in the wild. The canary escapes in order to pursue the “sport and play” (16) only available outside of the home but quickly regrets the move. Without mincing words, the poet shows the reader that the canary is ill-suited to the outdoors and can only find true happiness in its cage: … evening came, and cold, and pain, With hunger, in the dismal rain: Then, lone and motionless he pined, In want of all he’d left behind: And when the midnight dews came on, The little sufferer’s life was gone! (23–28) The outside world is not welcoming and invigorating, as it might be for a “real” bird; instead, it is cruel, even painful for a bird that is, supposedly, more suited to the regulated interiors of the home. Speaking to the canary’s corpse, the poet chastises it for its rashness: Why burst the gentle, silken ties, That bound thee to thy owner’s hand? … And vain this wide expanse of sky, For cold hath chained thee to the bough. (37–38, 47–48) Of course, the canary’s death is semi-ironic, if the bird is already constructed as an object. However, it also emphasizes how far removed the domesticated bird is from wild birds: so altered as to be unable to survive without the protections and provisions of a human-made environment. Additionally, the bird demonstrates no ability to think in terms of the past, as doing so would have reminded it of its happiness in the home, or the future, and have made it predict and realize that it would be miserable without the home’s safety and warmth. The author makes clear that this narrative is also meant as a warning to humans who,

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Unmoved by home-felt sympathies, Unchecked by duty’s sterner ties, Would rashly fly the sheltering roof. (3–5) The poem rather ruthlessly reinforces the certainty that the domestic sphere is a protective and nurturing space for canaries and humans alike.20 Dissatisfaction with canary living arrangements, when it appears at all, appears in the form of the author’s reactions to confinement. But such strategic protest—always quickly refuted with a contrived bird’s-eye perspective making a convincing case for caging—merely allowed poets who may have felt guilty about their role in objectifying the canary to air their concerns without ever truly subverting social norms. Thus in some poems, canaries often “surprise” authors by insisting on the happiness to be found within a cage. Later poetry, in particular, reflects this trend of authorial absolution. In poems such as “To My Canary” (1880), the poet F. F. expresses a desire to free his or her canary into its natural environment, where it supposedly wants desperately to be. However, reluctantly, the poet comes to the conclusion that the bird in fact can no longer become wild again, as its domestication has rendered it suitable (and happiest) only within the home.21 In “To My Canary,” the process of justification begins with the poet’s sympathetic lamentation of the plight of the captive bird: The sun on thee, through cloudless sky, Did never smile; Dull bricks and mortar have been thy Canary Isle. (17–20) Initially, it seems, the voyage of domestication is presented as a negative one, with the wilds of the canary’s place of origin in sharp contrast to the stifling limitations of the home. The depiction is put in place, however, as a strategy for actually reaffirming both the denial of sentience and the process of domestication. Responding to a perceived injustice, the poet aligns him/ herself as a friend to the bird, insisting that if for freedom thou dost sigh, My captive pet, I’ll loose thy wings, and help thee fly. (21–23) Conveniently, within the narrative of this poem, the canary does not in fact want freedom. The speaker watches sadly as the bird refuses to fly from the opened cage door, asking, “Why hesitant? why so dismayed / To know

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you’re out?” (43–44). The speaker realizes that the absolute goodness of the home keeps the bird from leaving: Thy years of caged ease have brought Such days of dreams, That liberty with labour fraught Worse bondage seems. (49–52) This reading erases any notion of domestication as a violent and dominating process and instead deflects the violence to the dangers of the outdoors. Such a move mimics Victorian efforts to maintain separate spheres by insisting on the safety of the home in comparison to the corruption of public spaces. It also implicitly acknowledges that the wild, or natural, features of the bird have been dulled; clearly, domestication does have violent and/or unnatural implications. By the end of the poem, the speaker has maintained his/her desire to do what is best for the bird and yet still manages to retain the canary as a pet without incurring blame. She/he coos, Then come, my sweet, and safe from harm Securely rest, And nestling in my bosom, calm Thy fluttering breast. And to this cage, with memories fond, Thy voice recall, And love shall knit its tenderest bond In willing thrall. (57–64) Whereas initially the speaker sang a rousing cry of “Emancipate!” (29), now she/he rebrands him/herself as a conscientious pet owner. But the impulse to calm the canary’s “fluttering breast,” while ostensibly meant to help, also reveals the master’s more devious domesticating instinct to render the bird inorganic. By stifling the canary with both “Dull bricks and mortar” (19) and the smothering breast of the human master, the bird is redefined and reduced from a wild and living bird to a thoroughly domesticated and non-living canary. The poet opens the poem by describing the bird as “Half Nature and half Art” (1),22 but spends the majority of the time convincing him/herself, as well as the reader, that the canary is, in fact, entirely artificial. Initially, poems like “To My Canary” might seem to completely contradict the accepted cultural construction of the canary. To desire freedom for a caged bird should be a revolutionary concept fueled by a sincere investment in the feelings and desires of a living creature. But in reality, the poems remain deeply entrenched in the process of literarily stripping the canary of its sentience. The poetic bird rejects the world outside of its home, and the

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poet never really believes she/he is dealing with a creature with needs of its own. The poet who lovingly accepts a bird’s wishes to remain in captivity absolves him- or herself of all blame—the effort was made, but the bird was simply not suited to and not happy in the wild outdoors—but that poet cannot truly be removed from the widespread, willful, and unethical practice of symbolic domestication.

Suffering and Sentience in Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias” As demonstrated above, canary poets built conceptualizations of a cheerful yet non-sentient and objectified bird whose contentment in confinement served a didactic purpose for humans. But the concepts on which such poets relied—idealized domesticity and inherent human superiority over animals—were highly unstable, especially as the century progressed, due to the increasing pressure put on biological hierarchies and separate spheres by advances in scientific research and social reform. Thus, canary poems provide glimpses of the ways in which Victorians struggled with and against these advances; the poets’ insistence on consistent depictions of a non-sentient canary and a sanctified home is repeatedly undercut by their own misgivings about such “fixtures.” Not all poetic contemplations of canaries subscribed to such beliefs, however. I close by briefly considering a poem that dared to defy the conventional attitudes espoused by the majority of periodical canary poems: Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias,” a little-known elegy written by the canonical author in the last years of his life. Like the other poetry assembled here, “Poor Matthias” was first published in a periodical, appearing in the December 1882 issue of Macmillan’s Magazine. The piece represented a brief and publicly welcome return to poetry for Arnold, who had for some time been focused primarily on essays and criticism. Macmillan’s was a well-respected monthly periodical that billed itself as a publication dedicated to serious literature and commentary, and many well-known British poems and novels were featured in its pages. According to George J. Worth, the Macmillan brothers prided themselves on creating a literary magazine that preferred quality over quantity, and that ethos was diligently maintained throughout the periodical’s 48-year run (3). Macmillan’s also emphasized author accountability rather than the more popular trend of authorial anonymity appearing in most periodicals of the time, and it insisted on earnestness from its contributors; as stated by Thomas Hughes, one of the magazine’s founders, “no flippancy or abuse allowed” (9). When compared to the multitude of canary poems appearing anonymously in less prestigious or less literarily rigorous periodicals such as Chambers’s Journal and Bentley’s Miscellany, the context for “Poor Matthias” was strikingly different. Like those periodicals, however, Macmillan’s Magazine was directed toward a middle-class audience with interests firmly rooted in domestic concerns. Worth explains that Macmillan’s became one of the first periodicals to cater to

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a “middlebrow” audience interested in neither the “august and relatively expensive quarterlies or by the modest penny weeklies addressed to a workingclass audience” (2). This was done through an editorial philosophy of respectability that included careful selection of “first-class literary matter” (3) and adherence to certain standards of topic decorum and decency. The combination of a serious writer such as Arnold and a familiar and much-beloved topic made “Poor Matthias” a mildly well-received contribution to the magazine. But Arnold’s poetic return was never characterized as a re-emergence of the power of his earlier work. A review in The Academy—a monthly periodical devoted to reviewing recent developments in various fields—published in the same month as “Poor Matthias” testified that the poem “lets us into the secret of [Arnold’s] domestic pets even further … It is simple with dignity, and intimate without affectation” (“Magazines and Reviews” 416). This review reveals how the poem captivated in two ways: in part, readers’ enjoyment came from an articulation of the special bonds between humans and their animal companions, and in part, the thrill of reading came from the ability to delve into the private domestic life of such a famous person. However, the claims that Arnold made about the dangers of petkeeping and the realities of domesticity were not generally recognized by even this intellectually savvy audience of Macmillan’s: readers were more willing to (mis) read the poem as another iteration of the more typical canary or pet poetry at the time. But typical is exactly what this poem is not, in large part because of Arnold’s substantial experience as both a professional critic and poet. Though there exists a long-standing critical tradition of dismissing “Poor Matthias” as the sentimental musings of an old man,23 Arnold’s ability to discern and deliver his powerful message of canary sentience in “Poor Matthias” is clearly indebted to the writer’s long immersion in practices of poetics and literary criticism. Recognizing these influences is crucial to revaluing the poem: “Poor Matthias” is not just simple, sweet, facile verse—it is a serious, intellectual contemplation of what it might mean to understand a pet canary from a disinterested perspective. While all other canary poets depict their birds as non-sentient, Arnold bravely acknowledges and accepts the consequences of the intellectual and emotional capacity of his pet. The poem is a self-conscious reassessment of the cultural and literary conventions surrounding the canary, as Arnold articulates a perspective that acknowledges both the cultural and biological importance of his bird. In his poem, the canary is sentient: a thinking, suffering being whose existence is made all the more painful for the careless ignorance of his owners. Arnold’s ability to see Matthias as an organic being, rather than as a parlor knickknack, demolishes idealized conceptions of domestication and domesticity. Instead, through Arnold’s reading, humans, rather than animals, are revealed to be the unfeeling brutes, and violence is revealed to be an integral part of the process of domesticating.

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To this end, Arnold does not avoid representing moments of disconcerting violence throughout the poem in order to more vividly make his readers appreciate the canary’s ordeal. The opening scene of the elegy, where the poet relates his daughter’s discovery of Matthias’s dying body, depicts the gruesome result of Matthias’s secret suffering: “Found him stiff, you say, though warm— / All convulsed his little form?” (3–4). Indeed, throughout the poem, Arnold continually attempts to evoke a sympathetic response to the bird’s legitimate feeling and suffering from his readers: the refrain “Poor Matthias!” appears five times, insistently demanding the reader subscribe to Arnold’s own attribution of pity. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Arnold’s poem is his acknowledgement of Matthias’s abilities of perception. Unwilling to reify the objectification of animals, Arnold depicts canaries as possessing the ability to see further than humans. He urges his reader to Witness their unworldly song! Proof they give, too, primal powers, Of a prescience more than ours. (136–38) In doing so he makes the revolutionary claim that these birds are able to see the future. According to the poet, on an individual level, Matthias knows that he will die and that his owners will fail to see him decline and thus do nothing to help him. Subject to the violence of a stifling enclosed environment and an equally damaging reliance on humans who cannot sense his needs, Matthias sits on his perch with a sense of resigned martyrdom and “mute regard” (121) while he slowly dies. At a species-wide level, birds’ ability to chart the future has already been a feature humans have relied on for generations, though perhaps never fully admitted. Birds, Arnold explains, Teach us, while they come and go, When to sail, and when to sow … Mark the seasons, map our year, As they show and disappear. (139–140, 145–146) Not only can birds assess situations based on an awareness of futurity, but their own actions aid humans in our ability to understand future events. The perceptiveness of the birds, Arnold says, is even more dramatic when contrasted with the inability of humans to read clear signs of suffering or to predict when and how suffering might occur, even when it is so clearly depicted in front of them. By drawing attention to the underappreciated cultural richness of periodical poetry and canary petkeeping, this essay highlights the need for increased

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scholarly consideration of the quotidian details of Victorian life, especially when attempting to understand the nuances of human/non-human animal relations. Though in many ways dramatically different, “Poor Matthias” and the other canary poems vividly illustrate the ways in which nineteenth-century periodical poetry participated in, perpetuated, and advanced significant cultural conversations about human estimations of the animal other. Far from “worthless,”24 the poems often self-consciously assess their engagement with and contributions to larger Victorian ideas, “contending,” as Linda H. Peterson insists, “with serious social and political issues” (309). These poems also collectively point to the importance and centrality of canaries to nineteenth-century culture. While various studies on Romantics, Victorians, and their pets have emerged in recent years, to date there has been no sustained examination of the formidable role of the diminutive canary during this era. Though enduringly appealing animals such as dogs and cats have garnered much of our recent critical and historical attention, we should also consider the enormous impact of some of the numerous other non-human participants in Victorian culture (see, e.g., Schwartz). Canaries were not simply parlor ornaments: widely available, relatively inexpensive, endlessly agreeable, and incredibly malleable, the birds were a living and symbolic presence in almost every facet of nineteenth-century daily life. They provided provocative and productive connections between private and public sphere discourses, and they pushed Victorian boundaries of domestication and domesticity. The existence of numerous periodical poems dedicated to the bird gestures to its illustrious history, pointing out potential avenues for future cultural and literary studies and suggesting in particular its relevancy in emerging conversations about the role of animal studies in Victorian literature.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Michael Kramp, Emily Shreve, and David Fine for their generous and insightful feedback. I have deeply appreciated their support throughout my efforts to “put a bird on it.” This essay would also not have been possible without Aaron Burton, whose patience and love have sustained me and my writing for many years. 2 Archival work in digitized periodical databases such as British Periodicals I and II turned up at least two dozen poems explicitly addressed to or featuring canaries between 1830 and 1900, as well as several more poems within this time frame that have other topics but still include significant discussion of a canary. The same methodology uncovered at least ten canary poems published in similar fashion between the 1800s and 1830s, and a few post-1900. These numbers are by no means comprehensive, and so my goal here is to introduce and begin to characterize this trend toward poeticizing the birds. 3 Many recent studies of the nineteenth-century periodical press approach this notion of influence as a given. Early studies such as Richard D. Altick’s seminal work The English Common Reader laid the groundwork for ascertaining the role of such reading material for the emerging middle class. Altick’s work historicizes the mutually constitutive relationships between periodicals and “the common reader,” defined as “the numerous portion of the English people who became

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day-by-day readers for the first time in this period … a member of the working class, or … the ever-expanding bourgeoisie” (7). He claims that the periodical’s most notable feature was its ability to democratize society’s access to the printed word, regardless of whether it was sought out for improvement or entertainment. Much of Altick’s description of the cultural effects of periodicals focuses on broad and irresolvable tensions of influence: the tensions between reading for “diversion and instruction,” and between social pessimism and hope—pessimism toward the seeming inevitably of readers to seek out “bad” reading materials (i.e., sensational, trivial, and/or “vacuous” texts) and the hope that periodicals could help improve the tastes, manners, morality, and intellects of their Victorian readers. Specific studies of certain periodicals and/or more narrowly defined audiences are plentiful, and those studies make more nuanced claims for the kinds of influence produced by the texts. But the common thread uniting these studies is more generalized: the contents of periodicals had the power to dramatically shape and inform popular opinion. Thus, noted periodical scholars such as J. Don Vann and Rosemary VanArsdel proclaim that the “ubiquitous nature” and “pervasiveness” of nineteenth-century periodicals put audiences in touch with a variety of sources and endless information and opinions, and thus “informed, instructed, and amused virtually all of the people in the many segments of Victorian life” (3). However, periodical poetry is rarely included in these claims of cultural influence. While scholars point to the importance of news, opinion pieces, serialized and sensational novels, illustrations, and even advertisements, they almost universally overlook the poetry featured regularly in these publications. For more on the literary and cultural work of animals in the nineteenth century, see Ritvo, Shefer, Kete, Kenyon-Jones, Perkins, Cosslett, Morse and Danahay, Dawson, and Schwartz, among others. The conceptualization of the canary as a paragon of the private sphere was cut from the same cloth as another Victorian cultural figure: the angel in the house. Despite the established British literary tradition of poetic comparisons between socially restricted women and caged birds, however, few canary periodical poems focus expressly on female readers. In British Victorian Women’s Periodicals (2009), Kathryn Ledbetter theorizes that nineteenth-century periodical poetry matters because it is “a short-track to ideology of its moment,” a “prolific testament to the utility of sentiment, patriotism, domestic ideology, and traditional values” (9). The texts included within this category of canary poetry embody this function. Similar attention to language extends to my usage of terminology relating to canaries. In The Animal that Therefore I Am (2007), Jacques Derrida cautions readers against the linguistic violence of reducing a multitude of creatures to one term (namely, “the animal” instead of “animals”). In recognition of this important nuance, herein I use “the canary” when describing/identifying authors’ reductive representations of the avian species and “canaries” to describe the multitude of animals involved in certain discourses and transactions. The former acknowledges deliberate symbolism; the latter is attuned to sentience. Additionally, I take my cues about pronoun usage from individual texts: when a writer refers to a bird as an object—describing the creature as “it” or “that”—I adopt similar language. If a writer attributes gender or subjecthood to a canary— describing the bird as “he” or “she,” or using “who”—then I do the same in discussions of that text. The story of the domesticated canary’s origins frequently appeared in bird manuals, natural histories, periodicals, and newspapers, where it described the birds’ fortuitous transportation out of the wilds and subsequent distribution

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Catherine Burton throughout Europe. See, for instance, “Canaries. Their Origin and History— Raising and Caring for the Birds” (1883). An article in an 1887 volume of All the Year Round claims that “in 1882, singing canary cocks were imported from Germany … to England, thirty thousand” (“How Canaries Came to Saint Andreasberg”). This figure is a low estimate for the number of canaries imported into England in that year, as it does not take into account imported German hens, nor does it consider the numerous Canary Island imports. The practical as well as conceptual parallels to contemporary processes of colonization here are obvious. Such a conviction testifies to the extraordinary cultural power of the processes of domestication, when a wild bird was believed to be transformed into an ideal example of the most sacred form of national identity. See, for instance, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Birds of Prey (1867), Mrs. M. H. G. Buckle’s Fifi, or Memoirs of a Canary-Bird (1865), and Anson D. F. Randolph’s Autobiography of a Canary Bird (1866). Wild canaries were usually light green or gray, but British canary fanciers bred the birds in order to achieve more brilliant colors. Yellow was the most popular color of choice for pet owners, perhaps especially since the color seemed most appropriate to reflect the birds’ “sunny” dispositions. This failure of perception starkly contrasts with depictions of canaries in other nineteenth-century texts. Canary care manuals, as well as novels, short stories, and children’s literature, often claimed that the birds were adept at ascertaining humans’ inherent morality (or lack thereof). The discrepancy may be caused by the poems’ more overt insistence on the sanctity and reification of the domestic ideal. George Walter Thornbury (1828–1876)—an English journalist who dabbled in a variety of genres—is one of the few named canary poets. As Sherlock Holmes declares in “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” (1923), “A dog reflects the family life … Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing moods may reflect the passing moods of others.” Surprisingly, humans targeted in these didactic efforts are not frequently gendered either male or female. The canary poet’s desire for oblivion channels John Keats’s desperate yearning in “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) to “quite forget / … The weariness, the fever, and the fret” (21, 23). Alexander Balfour experienced mild success as an author in the 1810s and 20s. This tale of canary rashness and regret is similarly expressed in Balfour’s poem. According to the poet, any canary—or, later, human—who dares to leave its “wiry bower” (line 1) will all too soon “rue the hour,” “repent it,” and “lament it” (lines 1, 88, 90). David Perkins notes this trend in the more literal bird poetry of writers such as William Cowper, to whom “the world seemed so perilous that there could be no question of releasing loved creatures into it … If a bird were exotic, injured, or otherwise unable to survive in [the] English countryside, to keep it in a cage might be the best one could do, hence poetically acceptable as an act of pity” (137). Another instance of a canary poet channeling Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” Tracy Miller argues convincingly that, “Despite his best efforts, Arnold’s elegies were largely ignored by contemporary critics and remain unexamined in our own time” (148). “Poor Matthias,” doubly cursed as an elegy about a pet canary, seems to have escaped serious critical consideration due to its “trivial” topic.

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24 Infamously, the original editors of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals omitted poetry because “[t]o have included verse would have added an enormous number of worthless items” (Houghton xvi).

References Adams, Henry Gardiner. Cage and Singing Birds. George Routledge and Co., 1854. Altick, Richard D. The English Common Reader. University of Chicago Press, 1957. Balfour, Alexander. “To a Canary Bird Escaped from its Cage.” The Edinburgh Literary Journal, Oct. 1829, p. 283. Boswell, Peter. Bees, Pigeons, Rabbits, and The Canary Bird. Wiley and Putnam, 1842. Braddon, Mary Elizabeth. Birds of Prey. Ward, Lock, and Taylor, 1868. Buckle, Mrs.M. H. G. Fifi, or Memoirs of a Canary-Bird. Edward Bumpus, 1865. “Canaries. Their Origin and History—Raising and Caring for the Birds.” Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, 4 July 1883. Collins, Wilkie. The Woman in White. 1860. Penguin, 2003. Conan Doyle, SirArthur. “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.” The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories, edited by Leslie S. Klinger, Norton, 2005. Cosslett, Tess. Talking Animals in British Children’s Fiction, 1786–1914. Routledge, 2006. Darwin, Charles. Darwin (Norton Critical Editions). 3rd ed., edited by Philip Appleman, Norton, 2000. Dawson, Gowan. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-Louis Mallet, translated by David Wills, Fordham University Press, 2008. Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853. Vintage, 2008. “Elegy on a Canary Bird.” Quiver, July 1863, p. 272. F. F. “To My Canary.” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, vol. 851, 17 April 1880, p. 256. Gray, Mrs.James. “To a Canary Bird.” The London Journal, Nov. 1845, p. 144. Hackett, Mr. “Epitaph on a Canary Bird.” The Lady’s Monthly Museum, Feb. 1805, p. 142. Hemans, Felicia. “The Domestic Affections.” The Domestic Affections, and Other Poems. J. M’Creery, 1812, Davis British Women Romantic Poets Project. Holden, George Henry. Canaries and Cage-Birds. 2nd ed., George H. Holden, 1888. Houghton, Walter E. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900. Vol. 2. University of Toronto Press, 1972. “How Canaries Came to Saint Andreasberg.” All the Year Round, 12 Feb. 1887, pp. 90–93. Hughes, Linda K. “What the Wellesley Index Left Out: Why Poetry Matters to Periodical Studies.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 40, no. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 91–125. I. O. P. H. “My Canary.” The London Reader, vol. 23, no. 576, 16 May 1874, p. 71. Keats, John. “Ode to a Nightingale.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2. 8th ed., edited by Stephen Greenblattet al., Norton, 2006. Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes. Routledge, 2001.

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Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Nineteenth-Century Pet-keeping in Paris. University of California Press, 1994. Kidd, William. Kidd’s Popular Treatises on Cage-Birds: The Canary. London: Groombridge and Sons, 1854. Ledbetter, Kathryn. British Victorian Women’s Periodicals. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. “Magazines and Reviews.” The Academy, no. 553, 9 Dec. 1882, p. 416. Mangum, Teresa. “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets.” Victorian Animal Dreams, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 15–34. Miller, Tracy. “What Remains: Matthew Arnold’s Poetics of Place and the Victorian Elegy.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 50, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 147–165. Morse, Deborah Denenholz, and Martin A. Danahay, eds. Victorian Animal Dreams. Ashgate, 2007. “On the Death of the Speaking Canary Bird.” The Mirror, Oct. 1839. Perkins, David. Romanticism and Animal Rights. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Peterson, Linda H. “Victorian Poets, Politics, and Networks: A Response.” Victorian Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, Winter 2013, pp. 309–316. Poetaster. “To Mary’s Canary Bird.” British Lady’s Magazine, July 1815, p. 31. Randolph, Anson D. F. Autobiography of a Canary Bird. Anson D. F. Randolph, 1866. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate. Harvard University Press, 1989. Ruskin, John. Sesame and Lilies, edited by Agnes Spofford Cook, Silver Burdett Co., 1900. Schwartz, Janelle. Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Shefer, Elaine. Birds, Cages, and Women in Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite Art. American University Studies Series XX, Vol. 12, Peter Lang Publishers, 1990. Smith, The Rev. Francis. The Canary: Its Varieties, Management and Breeding. 3rd ed., Groombridge and Sons, 1872. “The Canary.” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, vol. 96, 28 Sep. 1867, p. 624. Thornbury, George Walter. “My Canary Who Cares for Nothing.” Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 45, Jan. 1859, p. 52. “To a Canary.” The European Magazine, and London Review, Feb. 1815, p. 157. “To My Canary.” The Cornhill Magazine, June 1890, p. 638. “To My Canary in His Cage.” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, vol. 410, 8 Nov. 1851, p. 304. T. S. A. “The Green Canary.” The Mirror, vol. 31, 7 April 1838. Vann, J. Don, and Rosemary VanArsdel. Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society. University of Toronto Press, 1994. Wallace, Robert. The Canary Book. 3rd ed., L. Upcott Gill, 1893. Wood, Mary S. Canary Birds. William Wood & Co., 1869. Wordsworth, William. “Upon Epitaphs.” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. Edward Moxon, Son, and Co., 1876. Worth, George J. Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1907: “No Flippancy or Abuse Allowed.” Ashgate, 2003.

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Empathy and Kinship Animal Poetry and Humane Societies during the Victorian Age Chelsea Medlock

I am the voice of the voiceless: Through me, the dumb shall speak; Till the deaf world’s ear be made to hear The cry of the wordless weak. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Voice of the Voiceless”

During the Victorian era, British animal welfare societies worked tirelessly to promote the humane treatment of animals through education and the cultivation of empathy. Beginning in 1822, with the passage of the Martin’s Law (explained below), the animal welfare movement blossomed, particularly under the patronage of Queen Victoria. Many animal welfare societies, including the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, employed a variety of strategies and tactics to promote the humane treatment of animals throughout the British Empire; these tactics included the publication of periodicals, educational pamphlets, posters, artwork, flyers, and organized community events. One of the most fascinating strategies of these welfare organizations was the publication of animal-centric poetry. Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s 1910 poem opens with the powerful lines quoted above, demonstrating the importance of poetry as a common thread and language woven throughout the animal welfare movement in the long nineteenth century. These humane poems served a dual purpose for societies such as the SPCA: to generate empathy and kinship between humans and animals, and to promote human education in society. The Society (later the RSPCA after receiving a Royal designation in 1840) routinely published animal poetry to inspire human–animal kinship as well as showcase middle-class values of humanitarianism and moral reform, relying on commonplace animals to advocate society’s endeavors and values. While the debate surrounding the moral status and treatment of animals has existed since ancient times, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that it received new emphasis on the status of animals in the “new” age of scientific thought and experimentation, particularly as a response to the theories of Descartes and other philosopher-scientists of the period. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the theories and policies of the modern animal welfare

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movement were influenced and informed by the work of writers and philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, John Wesley, and William Wilberforce. Their writings on utilitarianism, humanitarianism, and moral reform helped the modern animal welfare movement coalesce around a centralized philosophy, allowing for the birth of active animal welfare societies and legislation. Adding to these extended theories of humane treatment were the inclusion of domesticity, the spread of literacy and access to published material, and the rise of widespread petkeeping practices among the middle and lower classes. These theories and practices created the perfect crucible for the rise of organized animal welfare movements throughout the British Empire under Queen Victoria (Medlock 145–151). One of the most prominent ideas of the late Enlightenment/Romantic period was the principle that cruelty to humans and animals alike was a moral vice or deficiency; this theory was the basis for much of the animal welfare movement and continues to play an active role in contemporary animal welfare today. Prior to the 1850s, the treatment and welfare of animals was viewed as a vehicle for the religious and for the reform of British society more generally, particularly for the reform and education of the lower classes (Elston 273). During the early years of the Victorian era, animal welfare was predominately the sphere of the middle- and upper-class women, a natural extension of their sphere of domesticity during the period. Animal welfare was included in the domestic realm because of its connection to religious and moral education and the realm of nurturing/mothering endeavors related to vulnerable individuals, including children and the sick. The animal welfare movement was also connected to the ideas of sentimentality and emotions through this theory of women as society’s nurturers. Middle- and upper-class women found respectability in the philanthropy of organizations focused on helping to save children, animals, and “fallen” women from the vices and cruelty of male-dominated British society (Medlock 151; Elston 269–270). In the eyes of most animal welfare organizations, the humane education of the public focused on the general vices of society as well as on specific class-based vices. The focus was almost exclusively on the visible cruelties in the cities and the daily lives of the lower classes, with a few exceptions made for upperclass blood sports and fashions, which was more a criticism of the excesses of the aristocracy. But rarely did policies influence or affect the daily lives of the middle- and upper-classes until the passage of the 1911 Protection of Animals Act (Ryder 96). With the rise of literacy and the increased accessibility of all classes to published materials during the Industrial Revolution, the increase in petkeeping during the Romantic period among the middle classes and even lower classes led to the rise of animal sentimentality. The result was humanized accounts both written and in visual media that were widely consumed by the public. This increase in petkeeping literature (both fictional and nonfictional) educated all levels of British society throughout the Empire on the humane treatment of animals and pets as a means of illustrating mortality in British society (Ritvo 83–121).

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The confluence of philosophies and ideologies discussed above led to a revolution in animal-welfare-specific legislation during the long nineteenth century. The first major attempt at animal welfare legislation in Britain came in 1800 with a bill against bullbaiting that failed to pass through Parliament. A second bill in 1809, known as the first Anti-Cruelty Bill, attempted to pass animal welfare legislation, but, like its predecessor, failed. The Anti-Cruelty Bill was the first formal legislation to state that animals have rights and deserve humane treatment and protections based on their mortal status in society; its failure was most likely due to its being perceived as too radical. It was not until 1822 that Britain finally passed animal welfare legislation, the Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle, commonly known as the Martin’s Act of 1822 after Richard Martin, its creator. This bill legislated the humane treatment of horses and other livestock and was the basis for all similar bills passed during the Victorian period, culminating in 1911 with the Protection of Animals Act. Two years after the passage of the Martin’s Act, Arthur Broome, Richard Martin, William Wilberforce, and other influential leaders of the new animal welfare movement created the first, official animal welfare society: The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The SPCA gained visibility, respectability, and momentum in 1837 when Victoria, the soon-to-be queen, gave her patronage to the society. The SPCA gained its Royal prefix in 1840, following Victoria’s coronation in 1838. The rest of the long nineteenth century saw a flurry of animal welfare legislation tasked with gradually redefining and extending welfare policies across the board: from the 1835 bill focused on all domestic animals, the 1845 bill on pets, and the 1876 Anti-Cruelty/Anti-Vivisection bill. The 1911 Protection of Animals Act became the standard for universal animal welfare throughout the British Empire until the bill was updated in 2006 to accommodate changes in industrial agriculture and postmodern lifestyles since the Cold War (Medlock 143–144). During the long nineteenth century, the RSPCA was a hub of publications for animal welfare ideas and education. Of the major animal welfare organizations created during the Victorian period, the RSPCA was the most visible and most active in the creation of lasting political and social change through its activism and a variety of techniques used to spread its message of humane education and treatment, both written and visual; for example, animal-welfare-themed narratives and animal-centric, humane poetry included class-based virtues and pursuits to advocate for moral and educational social reform. The RSPCA included poetry in its various publications and public activities, the most notable being its annual reports and meetings, essay competitions, and monthly educational entertainment publications such as The Animal World magazine. In its annual reports, the RSPCA routinely used poetry to promote and advocate for animal welfare policies, justifying humane education and moral reform through art and art references. One example of the use of poetry at annual meetings can be found on many of the title pages of the reports. The RSPCA often printed an excerpt from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime

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of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) to open the published records of annual summer meetings. For example, one of these excerpts was printed as the opening line for the 1877 report, published the following year. One of the most famous poems of the nineteenth century, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” chronicles the experiences of a sailor as he recounts his long voyage, in particular his killing of an albatross. The excerpt in question focuses on the lesson the mariner learned after the death of the albatross: He prayeth well, who loveth well, Both man, and bird, and beast; He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us, He made and loveth all. (RSPCA, Annual Report, 1877 5) The use of this excerpt plays on the widespread knowledge of the poem and promotes the society’s advocacy of the humane treatment of animals through religious themes and doctrine. The RSPCA also used poetry as supportive evidence within internal discourse. In its 1897 report, George Samuel Measom, RSPCA Treasurer during this period, used excerpts from “Ode to the Skylark” and William Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned” as evidence in his speech to the assembly on the virtue and work of women in animal welfare advocacy against the use of feathers in fashion. In his speech, Measom states that, Women have known for years that the wearing of feathers, other than of birds bred and killed for food is unworthy of their womanhood … If fashion so ordered it, not a feather would be sold … or worn in England. If fashion so orders it, neither religion nor morals, nor good taste, nor good sense affords any restraint potent enough to withstand the … decrees of this arbitrary and brutal authority. Measom goes on to quote “To a Skylark”: Hail to the blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert, Which from heaven, or near it, Pourest thy full heart In strains of unpremeditated art. He then bids his audience to recall Wordsworth’s poem: And hark! How blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher:

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Come forth into the light of things, Let nature be your teacher. (RSPCA, Annual Report, 1897 161–162) Quotations from influential poets tie the animal welfare movement to Britishness and give legitimacy and mainstream respectability to the RSPCA’s work while at the same time connect the Society’s leadership to its members in ways they would be familiar with, particularly regarding Victorian, middle-class education and virtues. As in the annual reports, many writers involved in the RSPCA’s essay competitions used poetry to support their theses. In 1838, the Society hosted an essay competition that garnered the support of the larger animal welfare movement. This competition produced numerous widely circulated publications on the policies and philosophies of the Society, including essays written by society members William Drummond, a clergyman, and William Youatt, a veterinarian. Both men submitted entries to the competition, though neither won the top prize of £100; that honor went to an essay by Reverend John Styles, an RSPCA committee member (Drummond xiv). In his essay “The Rights of Animals and Man’s Obligation to Treat Them with Humanity,” Drummond writes about the religious obligations humans have to treat animals with kindness and compassion, as dictated by the Bible. He uses poetry, scripture, literature, plays, philosophy, and history to support his arguments on the moral virtue of kindness to animals and on cruelty as a moral vice (Ibid.), arguing that man’s dominion over animals does not give him the right to cruelty (Ibid., 2). Like many in the RSPCA during its early years, Drummond advocates that cruelty to both people and animals is a violation of one’s humanity and thus is a crime against God (Ibid., 3). He further states that, like humans, animals possess “passions, feelings, and sensibilities” and therefore that their moral status is justified, as is their humane treatment (Ibid., 5–6). In general, Drummond advocates for man’s role as an educator and as a voice for those without one, a sentiment, albeit not a new concept, associated with Wilcox’s poem “The Voice of the Voiceless” (Ibid., 7). In his essay, Drummond includes references to the poetry of James Thomson, Alexander Pope, and even his own published poems. Two prominent examples are Thomson’s “The Seasons” (1730) and Pope’s “An Essay on Man” (1733–34). In his discourse on blood sports (i.e., hunting), Drummond supports his arguments with an excerpt from Thomson: The stock-dove only thro’ the forest coos Mournfully hoarse; oft ceasing from his plaint Short interval of weary wo; again The sad idea of his murdered mate Struck from his side by savage fowler’s guile, Across his fancy comes; and then resounds A louder song of sorrow thro’ the grove. (Ibid., 63)

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Drummond connects Thomson’s poem about the pain felt by the dove to that of humans, the sorrow both feel when losing a mate, a sentiment used to humanize animals and promote the agenda of the RSPCA, and indeed the greater animal welfare movement, through the lens of sentimentality, emotions, and kinship with animals to help readers perceive the moral status of animals through their shared likeness with humans. Drummond also includes a selection from “An Essay on Man” to link kinship between humans and nature to the importance of nature as humanity’s teacher in life: Go: from the creatures thy instruction take: Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield; Learn from the beasts the physic of the field; Thy arts of building from the bee receive, Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave; Learn of the little Nautilus to sail, Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale. (Ibid., 90) Much like the previous themes of morality and kindness, this sentiment is a common trope in RSPCA publications and carried over into a variety of publications and activities aimed at the education of the British public, a way of shocking audiences into active awareness and moral reform. Like Drummond, William Youatt entered the RSPCA essay competition in 1838 without success (Youatt 36). Youatt, a veterinarian, became the Honorary Veterinary Surgeon for the Society in 1835. During his tenure with the RSPCA, he presented educational lectures, published veterinary tracts, and edited a veterinary magazine (Ibid., ix). Youatt’s essay is in stark contrast to Drummond’s. While both men used religious and cultural texts as evidence for the humane treatment of animals, the majority of Youatt’s musings emphasize the use of utilitarianism and scientific thought as justification for animals’ moral status in society (Ibid., xiii). He does so through their possession of “senses, emotions, consciousness, attention, memory, sagacity, docility, association of idea imagination, instinct, social affections, the moral qualities [of] friendship and loyalty” (Ibid. xxxvii–xxxviii). Throughout his essay, Youatt refers to or quotes from well-known authors, poets, playwrights, philosophers, historians, scientists, and political figures. He includes the writings of such notables as Shakespeare, John Wesley, Cowper, Homer, James Hogg, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, and Pope (Ibid.). Two of Youatt’s most prominent examples are excerpts from poems by William Cowper and James Hogg. Youatt includes an excerpt from Cowper’s “The Task” (1785), which discusses the selective cruelty of humans to creatures they consider pests:

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The creeping vermin, loathsome to the sight, And charg’d perhaps with venom, that intrudes, Sacred to neatness and repose, may die. Not so when, held within their proper bounds, And guiltless of offence, they range the air, Or take their pastime in the spacious field; They there are privileged. The sum is this: If man’s convenience, Health, or safety, interfere, his rights and claims Are paramount, and must extinguish theirs. (Ibid., 29) Youatt includes Cowper’s work not only for its visibility and notoriety but also because it calls into question humanity’s views on animals and its abuses and cruelties to animals based on its beliefs about certain creatures. This was another common trope in RSPCA writings: the call for universal humane treatment of animals, particularly within the bounds of utilitarianism and kinship. Lastly, similar to Drummond’s use of Pope, Youatt uses the following selection from Musae Seatonianae as a reference for nature as a teacher of humanity: Behold a bird’s nest Mark it well, within, without. No tool had he that wrought it; no knife to cut, No nail to fix, no needle to insert, No glue to join: his little beak was all. And yet how neatly finished! What nice hand, With every implement and means of art, Could compass such another? (Ibid., 60) This poem follows the same line of evidence as Pope’s work in using sentiment, emotion, and kinship to cultivate a connection with a sentient nature that has much to teach humanity. Both Drummond and Youatt use poetry to bolster their animal welfare ideologies. They use poems much as scientists use data: to support and advance their theses in a way that deeply resonates with their audience. While each approached the topic of animal welfare from a different perspective, both used poetry to reinforce the ideology of the RSPCA, choosing to interject their work with examples emphasizing both the connection between humans and animals and the humane treatment animals deserve based on their similarities to humans. The last example of poetry being used by the RSPCA is found in its monthly magazines for educational entertainment. Along with other animal welfare groups, the RSPCA used “stories, poems, and visual images” to influence the

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public’s view of animals and to educate the public on the moral treatment of animals, pets, and working animals; these magazines primarily targeted the lower classes and children (Kean 88). The RSPCA published two magazines during the Victorian period: The Animal World and Bands of Mercy, both with different focuses and audiences. Of the two, The Animal World was the most widely published and distributed throughout the British Empire. The inaugural monthly number appeared on 1 October 1869; the magazine’s goal was to promote animal welfare and humane education using entertaining articles, images, and activities for the public, especially for children (Moss 204). In 1870 alone, the RSPCA issued over 25,000 copies of The Animal World and distributed them to schools, prisons, hospitals, workhouses, and even to the military (RSPCA, Annual Report, 1870 18). In general, The Animal World used poetry either as supporting evidence for articles or as educational entertainment in its poetry section. Much of that poetry can be classified into three thematic categories: support for the moral status of animals through religious tropes, human–animal kinship and bonding poetry, and humane education. Like much of the early animal welfare literature of the nineteenth century, the first category published by the RSPCA emphasizes the moral status of animals based on religious philosophy. The inaugural number of The Animal World included the previously used excerpt from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to set the tone for the magazine. The poem was placed at the top, immediately beneath the title, naturally drawing the reader’s eye (Animal World, Oct. 1869, 1). A few months later, in the January 1870 number, the editors included the poem “In Winter Scatter Your Crumbs” by Arthur Crowquill, a melodic example that promotes kindness to both humans and animals during harsh times, a sentiment routinely associated with Christian teachings: Amidst the freezing sleet and snow, The timid robin comes; In pity drive him not away, But scatter out your crumbs. … And leave your door upon the latch For whosoever comes. The poorer they, more welcome give, And scatter out your crumbs. All have to spare, none are too poor, When want with winter comes; The loaf is never half your own, Then scatter out the crumbs. Soon winter falls upon your life, The day of reckoning comes: Against your sins, by high decree, Are weighed those scattered crumbs. (Animal World, Jan. 1870, 70)

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While the poem could be understood as an allegory for kindness and charity to one’s fellow humans, the use of the poem by the RSPCA is intended to specifically extend this teaching to animals in light of Christian virtue and doctrine. This style of poetry extends into the early years of the twentieth century with two interesting examples: one in the December 1904 number and the other in the December 1905 number of The Animal World. The December 1904 number published “Suggestions on Our Duty to Animals,” by “J. F. M.” The author writes about the moral status of animals using Christian doctrine, harking back to the early writings of Wesley and Drummond, to name a few: When in God’s Holy Word we read Of how He doth His creatures feed, ’Tis well for us to bear in mind How we to them should all be kind. He who doth reign in Heaven above Saith in His Word that “God is Love.” That God is Love indeed we know: Do we true love in actions show? Oh, let us all by words and deeds Give help to creatures in their needs; And thus by acts of kindness show That we in paths of love do go. (Animal World, Dec. 1904, 191) J. F. M. views humans and animals as equally deserving love and kindness, saying that to be a good Christian is to love all of God’s creatures and to treat all animals humanely, emphasizing the importance of this aspect of animal welfare ideology in terms that most readers would understand, while also advocating for moral reform. Lastly, in December 1905, The Animal World included “The Animals’ Magna Charta” by F. W. Orde Ward. The poem begins by referencing Romans chapter 14, verse 7—“For none of us lives for ourselves alone and none of us dies for ourselves alone”—before using the Bible and Christian philosophy to extend a moral status to animals and thus humane treatment as a virtue, evoking the most important influences in British Society since the medieval period: the Bible and the Magna Carta. Ward’s poem reads: By all the pretty beasts that stood Around the cradle where Christ lay, And claimed with Him a Brotherhood In suffering on the world’s Birthday; That saw the manger was the throne

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Chelsea Medlock Of very God, and bending down Proclaimed Him King of Love alone, And gave their homage as a crown; Know kindness offered them is done Unto their Maker and is sweet, And thou if merciful to one Art washing then the Master’s Feet. By all the pretty beasts and birds And creatures that Christ loved so much, His living lines and winged words, That answered his least tone or touch; And by the Blessed Ass that wears His sacred symbol on its back, Our glory and our shame, and bears Burdens for us along His track; Know that they suffer too for us In every idle work or whim, And charity to them is thus Though even in darkness done to Him. By all the pretty things that fly Or helpless creep about the earth, And challenge that broad chivalry Which drew from Bethlehem its birth; And by the nameless woes and pangs Of drudges that keep suffering on, The Cross on which the Master hangs Until both sin and death are gone; Know they have ever lived and died Like little saviours with each breath, And we who love the Crucified Must love and serve them unto death. By all the pretty lives that live A daily dying, bird or beast, And of their bounty freely give Fruits of Christ’s Passion in the least; That minister to us by pains To earn but scorn or pity scant, And in the bondage of our chains Have entered in the Covenant; Know that the Charter which He wrought Was love and liberty for all, And God in Goodness left out nought— Who heeds the humble sparrow’s fall. (Animal World, Dec. 1905, 26)

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Ward’s poem connects animals to important moments in the life of Jesus Christ from his birth to his death, showing the innate partnership of animals with humans within a Christian universe. Ward shows that animals have served Christ since the beginning and therefore are a sacred link between humans and God and thus deserve humane treatment by Christians. A natural extension of the religiously based moral status argument is the use of animal welfare poetry to showcase and promote the emotional bonds between humans and animals as a fundamental principle of the animal welfare movement. The Animal World produced numerous examples of this style of poetry. In the January 1870 number, the editors included a poem by “F. S. M.” entitled “The Artist’s Dog,” about the bond between an owner and his dog and the sense of loss at the death of a beloved pet, evoking the theme of petkeeping in Victorian society and the natural bond between human beings and animals: The sun was sinking to his rest On board Atlantic’s heaving breast, Flooding with gold the rolling waves, And lighting Cornwall’s gloomy caves. The rocks that guard that storm-swept coast, In wondrous beauty stood embossed; Their rugged forms in colours new, And varied as the rainbow’s hue. ’Twas such a scene as well might claim A painter’s skill of noblest fame; Vainly might younger artist try To paint the sea, that gorgeous sky. So thought young Claude, as down he laid His oft-used pencil, and a shade Of disappointment crossed his face, Which Ethel sought, with smiles, to chase. He sat and watched, with his fair bride, The setting sun and swelling tide; A lonely rock their place of rest, Commanding all the glorious west. The golden orb sank down at last, The magic scene was fading fast, Each glowing tint soon passed away, And nought remained but chilly grey. A faithful dog of Collie breed, Brought from the hills beyond the Tweed, Lay stretched beside his mistress’ feet, Ready a kind caress to greet. But now he started in alarm, And barked, and pulled at Ethel’s arm;

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Chelsea Medlock She turned, and, pale with fear, perceived The rising flood that round them heaved. Clasping her hands, “Oh, Claude:” she cried, “We are encircled by the tide!” He felt the threatened peril too, But saw they yet might venture through. “Come, trust your husband, love,” he said; “If Heaven protect there’s nought to dread; But not a moment must we stay, I fear no danger but delay.” He bore her through the surging tide, The fond dog swimming close beside; Joyful they gained the nearest sand— Later, they ne’er had reached the land. “Thank God for Rupert!” Ethel said, Her hand upon his upturned head. “But for the quick alarm be gave, That treach’rous sea had been our grave!” Twelve months passed over, and again They looked upon the Cornish main; Sadly they trod that rocky shore, For faithful Rupert was no more. (Animal World, Jan. 1870, 71)

Another poem, “Leo” (1870), discusses the bond between human and pet in anthropomorphic terms, giving the reader an animal’s perspective on human–animal relations. The poem promotes the theory of kinship and also sentimentalism, and the humane treatment of animals, as the dog, Leo, pleads with the reader: I am, kind sir, a little dog With white and curly hair,— At least as white as well can be In London’s smoky air. My name is “Leo,” but I am By nature very meek, As needs must be ’mid comb and brush And “tubbing” twice a week! But then, sir, always patted with Such kind and gentle touch, That all these toilet troubles I Don’t mind so very much. But oh! How sad that other dogs, And sheep and grazing stock, Have nothing of this tender care,

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But many a thoughtless knock; And go about ’mid cold and heat, As if ’twas all the same; Heedless of parching tongue and lip, Or whether sound or lame. But since, kind sir, you’ve taken up Their cause with so much zeal, You cannot think how very much Your kindness we all feel; And, therefore, while you battle thus, And act your noble part; I’ll greet you with my tiny paw Upon my thankful heart; And cheer you on to clear away The wrongs you hear and see; And prove how grateful to their friends Dumb Animals can be. (Animal World, Nov. 1870, 23) “Leo” illustrates that humane treatment and kindness are virtues and are, therefore, woven into the fabric of human mortality. The dog goes on to mention his gratitude for his kind treatment and laments the lack of humane treatment of other animals, connecting the idea of the humane treatment of animals to positive emotions and consequences. This narrative advances the idea that animals deserve kindness and are actively grateful for their interactions with humans. Lastly, The Animal World also uses poetry as a vehicle for the Society’s policy of humane education and moral reform. Its March 1870 number published a poem about the cruelty inflicted on caged birds in which author Richard Wilton laments the capture of wild birds and their life without freedom: Oh, set them free! Kind-hearted man have pity On the poor cage-birds, snatched from hedge, or tree, Or open field, to pine in smoky city. Set the birds free; Their joy is in the meadows, At will to wander with the murmuring bee, Or sit and sing amid the happy shadows. What right hast thou To lure the golden finches, Or the red linnets, from the wildwood bough, And cage them within bars of six square inches? Who gives thee leave

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By the 1870s, the RSPCA had turned its focus to the abuse of birds as pets and for fashion. The inclusion of this poem adds an emotional and poetic dimension to the debate on the capture and selling of wild birds for pets and fashion and provides the reader with an animal’s perspective on captivity and helplessness. That same month, March 1870, the magazine published “Careful and Kind” by S. H. Browne, wherein the reader is reminded to be gentle and kind to animals, for they are mute and helpless and deserve love, compassion, and care. Much like Wilcox’s poem, Browne’s induces readers to connect with animals on a human level, to change their own thoughts and behaviors toward animals: Pray be gentle, little sister; Softly touch those painted wings! Butterflies and moths, remember, Are such very tender things! Carefully, my pretty one, Press the sheltering twigs aside, Just to view the naked nestlings Safely sleeping side by side. Gently stroke the playful kittens, Kindly pat the patient dog; Let your unmolesting mercy Spare the worm, the snake, the frog. Wide is God’s great world around us, Room enough for all to live; Mar no creature’s brief enjoyment— Take not what you cannot give.

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Ever let your heart be tender, For the mute and helpless plead; Pitying leads to prompt relieving, Kindly thought to kindly deed. (Ibid.) The poem encourages readers to treat animals with kindness and gentleness and also advocates for the virtue of the humane treatment of animals as a stepping stone to further moral reform throughout the social classes. The most significant line of the poem closes it; “Kindly thought to kindly deed” is the very crux of the animal welfare movement during the Victorian period. Like F. S. M., one “W. R.” submitted a poem to The Animal World in March 1870. It is about standing up to cruelty and is titled “An Appeal for Justice to Animals.” It is an impassioned plea, a rallying cry for the animal welfare movement to save animals from cruelty through reform and education: What cruelty to harass and alarm Poor senseless brutes who cannot mean to harm. What base ingratitude, to pay with blows, The friends who live and die for thy repose. What cowardice to put thy beast to pain, Who cannot speak, and will not turn again. The horse and ass that strain to do thee good, The sheep and ox that give thee warmth and food. Torment thy beast no more, or look to see, The Lord of man and beast tormenting thee! (Ibid.) W. R. equates animal cruelty to moral vice and dysfunction, harking back to the early days of the animal welfare movement in Britain while pointedly denouncing cruelty as morally divisive and deserving of major reform across all levels of society. The inclusion of poetry in the activism of the RSCPA illustrates many things, from the importance of poetry as a form of entertainment and education to its use in moral reform during the nineteenth century. Poetry connects activism, education, and culture, making it a vehicle to help demonstrate and legitimize the activism of the animal welfare movement in Britain at large. Poetry and famous poets and writers added further respectability to the movement during this early period in the Society’s history, a time when both the RSPCA and the animal welfare movement were finding their footing in the face of major economic, political, and social transformations in British society. Poetry gave the RSPCA an artistic pulpit from which to spread its message to all levels of society, to educate as well as entertain.

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References Drummond, William H. The Rights of Animals and Man’s Obligation to Treat Them with Humanity. London: John Mason, 1838. Elston, Mary Ann. “Women and Anti-Vivisection in Victorian England.” Vivisection in Historical Perspective, edited by Nicolaas A. Rupke, New York: Croom Helm, 1987. Kean, Hilda. Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800. Reaktion Books, 1998. Medlock, Chelsea. “Remembering the Forgotten Legions: The Veteranization of British War Horses, 1850–1950.” Ph.D. diss., Oklahoma State University, 2015. Moss, A. W. RSPCA: Valiant Crusade: The History of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Cassell, 1961. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Harvard University Press, 1987. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Animal World. London: RSPCA, October 1869. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Animal World. London: RSPCA, January 1870. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Animal World. London: RSPCA, March 1870. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Animal World. London: RSPCA, November 1870. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Animal World. London: RSPCA, December 1904. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The Animal World. London: RSPCA, December 1905. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Annual Report, 1870. London: RSPCA, 1871. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Annual Report, 1877. London: RSPCA, 1878. Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Annual Report, 1897. London: RSPCA, 1898. Ryder, Richard D. Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes towards Speciesism. Berg, 2000. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler. “The Voice of the Voiceless.” Poems of Experience, London: Gay and Hancock, 1910. Youatt, William. The Obligation and Extent of Humanity to Brutes Principally Considered with Reference to the Domestic Animals (1839), edited by Rod Preece, Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

Part II

“Illness, Death, and Companion Species”

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“Darling, Darling Little Flushie” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Dog Love Kevin A. Morrison

I Critics and biographers of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, although rarely invoking Sigmund Freud, often draw loosely on the psychoanalytic category of substitution when recounting key details of her life.1 According to this line of thinking, her brother Edward (or “Bro,” as she affectionately called him) constitutes the prototype of every subsequent relationship she entered into after his drowning in 1840 at the age of thirty-three off the southern coast of Devonshire. There is, of course, much evidence for this assertion. Barrett frequently defined her relationship with Bro in terms of harmony and organic wholeness. “There was no harsh word, no unkind look” from her brother throughout her life, she once recounted; “A leaf never shook till the tree fell. The shade was over me softly till it fell.”2 The poet considered Bro her “best beloved” and her “first and chiefest affection”; she loved him “best in the world beyond comparison and rivalship” and received from him nothing but “the tenderest affection.”3 Hence, critics have repeatedly concluded that in every subsequent relationship, Barrett attempted to find a suitable replacement for the lost object of her affections.4 Enter Mary Russell Mitford and her cocker spaniel Flush. Four years before Bro’s drowning, Mitford was already providing Barrett with a sounding board for her ideas and serving as an increasingly significant source of moral and intellectual support. After Bro’s death, Mitford was in a position to help Barrett “turn again to life and to high poetic aspirations” (Stone 24). Dorothy Mermin has pointed out that “Miss Mitford gave her young friend what she needed: flowers, … letters full of warmth and affection and the daily bustle of life, and literary encouragement” (Elizabeth Barrett Browning 81). Perhaps the greatest gift that Mitford gave Barrett, however, was the puppy of her own dog, each bearing the name Flush. Margaret Forster remarks that “Mitford empathised completely with [Barrett’s] anguish” over Bro’s death and believed that the cocker spaniel would provide, “if not anything as insulting as distraction, an outlet for her distress, [and] some tangible comfort” (100). In such accounts, Flush becomes a substitute for “the tenderest affection[s]” Barrett received from and showered on Bro: “Even when perfectly aware that she was being faintly ridiculous Elizabeth could not restrain herself: all the demonstrative love of which

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she was capable gushed out over Flush” (101). Peter Dally similarly remarks that although her “loss was irreparable” and “no one could take Bro’s place,” Barrett “now had a companion who spent much of his time on her bed” (75). Flush, on the one hand, is often figured by biographers as bestowing physical affection on and generating much amusement for Barrett. Mitford, on the other hand, is often seen as drawing out Elizabeth’s poetic sensibilities, which prepares her to enter upon her union with Robert Browning on an equal literary footing. Both helped to ease Barrett’s pain. When she meets and ultimately marries Robert Browning, the chain of substitutions is both extended and completed. According to Dally, Elizabeth knew for certain that Robert could combine the rôles of teacher and companion, and become the person for whom she had long held ‘blind hopes,’ who could stand in place of Bro, and provide the mental stimulation she so much lacked. (101) Unlike Mitford and Flush, it seems, who are at best partial replacements, Robert is an amalgam of both, uniting in one person all the qualities and characteristics Barrett previously associated with her brother. These biographical accounts have inevitably shaped the way we read Barrett Browning’s poems about Flush, reflecting, as they seem to do, largely commonplace ideas of a dog’s unconditional love, loyalty, and steadfastness toward its owner.5 The poems have come collectively to signify Barrett’s relationships with Mitford and Flush as intermediary or transitional and to stand as symbols of the comfort she received from them during a period of pronounced depression. Perhaps one reason for the discomfort evinced by critics and biographers alike over Barrett’s attachment to Flush, and hence the frequent dismissal of the poems as unexceptional lyrics, is that adults with intense and sustained emotional ties to animals cannot be positively accounted for in psychoanalytic theory.6 In classical psychoanalysis, adult attachments to a love object are understood to be normal when they are between two culturally sanctioned subject positions: male and female. The reproductive capacity of that relationship is key to its normality. The point of proper objects, after all, is to make us recognizable subjects. One of the problems with the idiom of classical psychoanalysis, even if it is only rudimentarily deployed in the biographies that I have just cited, is its inability to account for relationships outside these parameters. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have argued, the cultural machine of psychoanalysis insists on seeing affection as substitution within an Oedipalized framework.7 The only legitimate, legible, and codified relationships are those that are mappable onto a human, and indeed distinctly reproductive, grid. However, the Oedipal notion of substitutive love obscures the unmappable relationships with which these poems are concerned: that is,

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Barrett’s ties to Flush and her epistolary friendship with Mitford. In fact, the tendency to see Flush as a substitute for Bro ignores both the prominent role that the cocker spaniel plays in the expressions of love between Mitford and Barrett and the specificity of the human and nonhuman animal relationship. In contrast to the logic of substitution, therefore, I argue for the more flexible and non-teleological notion of the supplement. I suggest that Barrett Browning conceives of love as initially involving both substitution and accretion before it evolves toward a unique specificity. What I wish to call supplementary love undermines the logic of substitution that has governed biographical accounts of her life. My essay proceeds in two parts. In the first section, I contend that the emotional intensity of Barrett and Mitford’s relationship is largely transacted through Flush. The unorthodox intimacy and kinship between women of different generations is displaced onto the equally unorthodox relationship they have to their respective cocker spaniels. Yet, as I go on to suggest, Barrett refuses the proposition that Flush is merely a stand-in for the geographically distant Mitford, whose ministrations are themselves often seen by critics and biographers as a replacement for Bro’s affections. Flush emerges as a subject to be loved in his own right. In the second section, I situate two of Barrett Browning’s poems, “To Flush, My Dog” (1843) and “Flush or Faunus” (1850), within the larger context of her struggle with the epistemology and the phenomenology of love in order to demonstrate how the poems grapple with new ways of conceiving relations between human and nonhuman animals in terms of reciprocity and relationality.8

II Introduced by the writer John Kenyon in 1836, Mitford and Barrett were immediately captivated with each other. Both Barrett and her father had long admired Mitford’s Our Village: Sketches of Rural Life and Scenery, a series of literary essays on the English countryside published in biennial volumes between 1824 and 1832, as well as her famously steadfast devotion to her ailing, invalid father, with whom she lived at Three Mile Cross, Berkshire. When Kenyon arranged for the two to spend an afternoon at the Diorama and Zoological Gardens in London, the nearly star-struck Barrett “spent the morning walking up and down the house, too agitated to read or write” (Forster 81). As soon as they met, Barrett took Mitford into her confidence as a friend and, especially, as a literary guide. In her sonnet “Mary Russell Mitford in Her Garden,” Barrett contrasts her own verse with that of her mentor’s, “in whose dear writings drops the dew / And blow the natural airs”: What time I lay these rhymes anear thy feet, Benignant friend, I will not proudly say As better poets use, “The flowers I lay,”

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Kevin A. Morrison Because I would not wrong thy roses sweet, Blaspheming so their name.9

Refusing to equate her rhyme with the beautiful and natural profusion of flowers in the garden, she nevertheless notes the tenderness with which Mitford approaches both. In the sonnet, Mitford, whose love of gardening surpasses all other pleasures, is portrayed as saying Low-rooted verse may reach some heavenly heat, Even my blossoms, if as nature-true Though not as precious. (52) For Barrett, however, the real comparison is between Mitford’s sunny outlook, in its nurturing fullness, and the natural world itself: “thou, who art next / To nature’s self in cheering the world’s view” (52). Mitford, in turn, is instantaneously captivated by the younger woman’s beauty and literary potential. Recounting her first impression of Barrett in Recollections of a Literary Life, she writes: “Of a slight, delicate figure, with a shower of dark curls falling on either side of a most expressive face, large tender eyes, richly fringed by dark eyelashes, a smile like a sunbeam”—echoing the natural imagery Barrett uses in the poem cited above—“and such a look of youthfulness” (Mitford 155). The two soon began a largely epistolary friendship that would last for nearly twenty years. At the time of their initial correspondence, Barrett was thirty and still struggling to write poetry. Mitford, at the age of forty-nine, had already achieved success as a writer of literary sketches and dramatic literature. Finding her career increasingly on the wane, Mitford could devote much of her energy to encouraging her protégée. The intense emotional intimacy they achieved, perhaps because of and not despite the epistolary medium, is evinced in the sheer range of topics they discussed: politics, gossip, literature, various physical ailments, love, and loss. “To no other correspondent,” Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan point out, does Barrett tell so much about her remorse over Bro’s death and its effect on her already complex relationship with her father; her fascination with George Sand as a writer and a woman; … her chafing at the overbearing behavior of a visitor, and hopeful suitor, Rev. George B. Hunter; and her appetite for sensational French novels and for gossip about the marriage prospects of Horne, Kenyon, and Tennyson.10 Through letters addressed to each other as “dearest” and “darling,” as well as gifts, including a “precious ringlet” of Mitford’s hair mailed to Barrett at her request, the two strengthened their artistic and emotional ties.11 Following Bro’s drowning, Mitford was one of the few who could penetrate the shroud of grief that enveloped Barrett.12 A continual stream of

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flowers flowed into Torquay, where Barrett was convalescing, from Mitford’s garden in Berkshire. “My dear Love,” Mitford addresses her, “Oh, how I wish we could transport you into the garden where they grow!”13 These were flowers about which Barrett often thought she should “sing instead of say,”14 as she does in “A Flower in a Letter”: By Loddon’s stream the flowers are fair That meet one gifted lady’s care With prodigal rewarding: (For Beauty is too used to run To Mitford’s bower—to want the sun To light her through the garden).15 Mitford’s bouquets were, in fact, the only ones Barrett admitted to her room: “I have looked at them & seen you in them, & borne for your sake that some of them shd be put into a vase in my room.”16 The flowers serve here as metonymic extensions of Mitford herself; Barrett declares, “There have been no more flowers in my room [since Bro’s death a year earlier] until now… . I denied nature, but could not deny you!” (1:274). To Mitford, Barrett insists, she owed “a new spring” (1:274). With that fresh season came a return to verse. Throughout the period of Barrett’s convalescence, Mitford continued to nurture her younger friend’s poetic sensibilities: “My love and my ambition for you often seems [sic] to be more like that of a mother for a son, or a father for a daughter (the two fondest of natural emotions), than the common bonds of even a close friendship between two women of different ages and similar pursuits… . It is a strange feeling, but one of indescribable pleasure.”17 In her gloss on this passage, Marjorie Stone remarks that “Mitford played a vital role in fostering Barrett’s ambition—in effect, ‘mothering’ the poet’s mind … as the Brownings later did for each other” (24).18 With her usual acuity, Stone emphasizes how, in contradistinction to the prevalent scholarly assumption, “Mitford significantly contributed to [the renaissance of verse in Elizabeth’s life] well before Barrett ever met Browning” (25). By using the term “mothering,” however, to signify less the “oceanic feelings” that psychoanalysis ascribes to the bond between mother and child than a transitional phase of preparation for Barrett’s later marriage to Robert, Stone inadvertently reinforces a teleological Oedipal narrative: Mitford prepares Elizabeth to enter into a reciprocal relationship with Robert. However, Mitford’s appeal to the “natural emotions” of a father or mother in articulating her own understanding of that relationship is suggestive of the conceptual difficulties that women often faced in articulating such a “strange” but indescribably pleasurable bond. The familial idiom was one way of framing forms of companionship and kinship that flourished outside of normative strictures and regulating categories. Barrett repeatedly struggles with the question of how to account for her relationship with Mitford. When Mitford suggests that, after Bro’s drowning,

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Barrett could turn to the large network of family and friends around her for support, she replies, “True that I have still a broad circle of family affection,— even now—even with these gaps in it—the dearest of the dearest [Bro] away!— but how wrong you wd be, how you wd wrong me, should you suppose for such a reason that I cd love you less.”19 Members of the family have been looking after her, Barrett acknowledges, but this fact does not immediately translate into emotional intimacy or psychological comfort. She tells Mitford, “What heaps of cousins & uncles & aunts I have, whom, for love’s sake, I shd be ashamed to mention in the same page with you … . Hearts wont branch out after the pattern of genealogical trees” (1:265). How, then, to describe this relationship that supersedes familial ties? Unlike Mitford, who draws on the familial idiom, Barrett figures their bond as indefinable: “You hold a place all to yourself in my affection & power of appreciation, dear in a manner peculiar” (1:265). Although this sentence would seem to invite a symptomatic reading, the term “peculiar” registers the individuality or particularity of their relationship for which the familial idiom and notions of substitutive love are inadequate. Critics have found it difficult to appreciate the peculiarity of Mitford and Barrett’s relationship on its own terms, as they themselves have noted, without immediately describing it as transitional; it seems to me that this difficulty is due in part to the prominent role Flush played in their lives. A large percentage of Barrett and Mitford’s correspondence, much to the bemusement and embarrassment of critics and biographers alike, is devoted to the cocker spaniel’s various exploits. Additionally, the shared pet was often central to female marriages and romantic friendships. The relationships of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper and of Emma Stebbins and Charlotte Cushman are only two of many in which a pet dog was central.20 As such, any consideration of the triangulated relationship of Barrett, Mitford, and Flush would detract from the spectacular love story of Elizabeth and Robert with which so much criticism is invested. While the relationship of Mitford and Barrett is certainly not comparable to Bradley and Cooper’s or Stebbins and Cushman’s, it does evince a kind of intense emotional intimacy that has caused some critics at least to pause and note its contours. Martha Vicinus has suggested that “Barrett Browning’s long-standing friendship with Mary Mitford did not threaten the status quo; she could pour her emotions onto paper without any threatening physical proximity” (356). For Vicinus, in other words, the precariousness of the relationship is measured by its physicality. While Barrett and Mitford’s relationship was largely epistolary, owing to ill health and geographical separation, the difficulty of navigating their “peculiar” intimacy nevertheless persisted. They frequently displace their feelings onto Flush, who becomes the means by which to negotiate their bond, with Barrett repeatedly describing Flush as a stand-in for or constant reminder of Mitford. Although reluctant to take on the responsibility of raising Flush so soon after Bro’s death, Barrett warmed to the idea. Contemplating Flush’s arrival

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at Torquay, Barrett insists to Mitford that “he is sure to be loved” the moment he arrives: “The logic is so strong!—There is no escape from the conclusion of love.”21 At least initially, however, the “logic” of love seems to figure Flush as a kind of replacement for the absent Mitford: “I must love him, coming from you—pretty or not—ears or not! The love is a certainty whatever the beauty may be—and if I am to see in his eyes, as you say, your affectionate feelings towards me, why the beauty must be a certainty too.”22 In one of her lengthy letters to Mitford about Flush, Barrett exclaims after he had settled in with her: “If many of my thoughts end in you, this of Flush must. How he makes me think of you! How every pleasure he gives me, is one drawn from you! How I love him for your sake!—which is the sure way of loving him dearly.”23 Recounting Flush’s arrival, Barrett enthuses to Mitford: “The first person who comes to wake me in the morning is Flush,—to wake me & remind me of you!”24 Dog love, then, serves as a means of expressing same-sex intimacy: I dreamt of you two or three nights ago. Is it strange that I shd dream of you? Yes—because for very very long, it is strange whenever I dream pleasantly… . I have no sunshine in sleep—nothing but broken hidious [sic] shadows … . But two or three nights ago I dreamt of you.. dreamt of seeing you at Three Mile Cross [Mitford’s home]. I was there.. in your sitting room.. and what do you think I did? Sate down on your sofa, drawing up my feet beside me in my old lazy way (how impudent!—) and then said … “Now let us talk about FLUSH”.!!! I dont deserve to dream of you.25 Here Mitford is described, much as she is in Barrett’s poems, through a naturalistic idiom, as a harbinger of light that keeps the nightmares at bay and enables Barrett to dream. Yet her solacing presence in Barrett’s life is soon displaced onto Flush: “‘Now let us talk about FLUSH’.!” As the means of expressing the deeply felt bond the two had forged, Flush also becomes a way of talking about the physicality of love. Barrett asks Mitford, “Does little Flush keep close to you? My Flush never sees me shed tears without running to kiss me & rub his little brown ears against my face.”26 The dog’s comforting touch is immediately attributed to Mitford; she continues, “He learnt love from you. There is no wonder that he shd be complete in his lesson. Believe, my beloved friend, how near I am to you in thought, in prayer, in sympathy of tender affection” (2:117). If each of their Flushes keeps close to them, then they will both have a physical reminder of the emotional proximity they have themselves achieved. Dog love is a symbol of the emotional propinquity between women that redefines notions of kinship as well as significant otherness. Over time, however, Barrett’s letters increasingly reflect on the unique and specific nature of her relationship to Flush by no longer figuring him as a proxy for her distant friend. As Jennifer McDonell compellingly observes,

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“These letters numbering in the hundreds cover Flush’s entire life and show that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s relationship with him was one of her most significant” (18). Barrett’s attempts to describe the precise nature of her relationship with Flush, as critics have uncomfortably noticed, are somewhat over the top. Barrett confides to Mitford: “My Flush is very fond of pity … . Who says that vanity, coquetry & affectations are peculiar to our humanity?— I dont, since I know Flush.”27 As an example of the dog’s “pleasure at being praised,” Barrett notes that he will “hold his head still, & his mouth half open, for minutes, until you have exhausted your admiration on his teeth” (2:259). Besides his vanity, Flush apparently insists on eating as his owner does: Did I ever tell you how he was once affronted by a piece of raw meat being thrown at him in charity? Why if his chicken & partridge are not cut up infinitesimally, he turns away his head & wont touch anything on the plate! My Flush is crême de la crême!—What!—eat a rabbit? uncooked? in the fields?—My Flush wdnt eat even his favourite diet, spunge cake, out of doors.28 Fully domesticated to the point of ludicrous refinement and adhering to daily routine, Flush even seems to have been partial to finishing his meals with dessert: “They have brought me a strawberry cream ice,—& Flushie has been helping me to eat it. Oh! he likes it very much indeed.”29 In the evenings, the two would always retire together to the bedroom. “We are great friends,” she tells Mitford, recounting the many ways in which she and the cocker spaniel understand each other.30 Barrett’s letters, in fact, often insist on the unswerving loyalty of her nonhuman companion: To the rest of the household he is decidedly hostile—will scarcely bestow a mark of courtesy upon either of my sisters, runs away from my brothers, & is coldly disdainful to one little page who has done everything possible to please him. (1:213) All he lacks is a recognizable language with which to communicate, and at times Barrett is not so sure even of this lack: “He is however, I think, trying to speak … . already he deals in all sorts of inarticulate sounds—low & not inharmonious for the most part.”31 In psychoanalytic terms, Barrett’s statements demonstrate the overestimation of the object, in which owners ascribe selfless and beneficent motivations to a pet and then tautologically see those qualities confirmed when the animal responds to their physical state or body language. Marjorie Garber observes that this transformation of an animal into a human substitute is “more often than not” associated with “women and gay men” (Garber 135). She writes, “The spectacle of an adult person, male or female, whose chief emotional ties are with a pet animal tends to elicit from many

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observers responses ranging from pity to condescension” (135). Among critics and biographers, the lure of figuring the relationship with Flush in similar terms has been great given the length and severity of Barrett’s depression. Forster, for example, repeats the views of various members of the Barrett family, largely without comment, that Elizabeth’s activities with Flush— attempting to teach him arithmetic by holding up pieces of cake and counting or reading to him in the hopes that he might begin to recognize printed words on the page—represented the outer limits of sanity, while literary critics have alternately referred to the sonnet “Flush or Faunus” as “strange” or, in an attempt to explain its “oddness” away, as a veiled representation of Robert Browning (Forster 119). I want to suggest that what accounts for the shift in Barrett’s correspondence, from describing Flush primarily as a transitional object to a subject in his own right, is the logic of supplementarity. To be fair, psychoanalysis itself does not necessarily see an opposition between a logic of substitution and a recognition of subjects in and of themselves, but the very term “substitute” does imply a less than full appreciation for the unique specificity of a given love object. Substitution figures love objects as complementary. By contrast, supplementarity, which involves both substitution and accretion, requires an acknowledgment of that which, by virtue of its foreignness, exceeds the other— opening up possibilities for mutual transformation. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida defines the supplement as both a replacement and an addition: The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude … . But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void… . its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. (144–145) For Derrida, the ratio of the substitute to the surplus is impossible to fix; supplementarity is thus necessarily indeterminate. As we have seen in Barrett’s letters, love is figured by her as initially both substitutive and accretive; Flush functions, on the one hand, as the means of representing her relationship to Mitford while, on the other hand, increasingly becoming a figure who supplements it. Writing to Mitford in December 1840, she declares: “there is nothing to be done but to love him at all moments, for your sake, until we reach the ‘inherent merit,’ the loveability for his own.”32 Two years later he had. To Mitford she proclaims in May 1842, “I love him—dear little Flushie—as far as dog-love can go—& that is farther than I supposed possible before I had knowledge of him.”33 Unlike Derrida, therefore, she suggests that indeterminacy gives way to a unique specificity— what she calls here the “inherent merit” of individual love objects. As with the embarrassment with which scholars once approached Sonnets from the Portuguese, seeing them as, in Mermin’s summation of this view,

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“awkward, mawkish, and indecently personal,” it has been difficult for critics to recognize much complexity in Barrett Browning’s poems about Flush, much less her discussion of him in prose.34 The inevitability of having to confront Victorian “sentiment and sentimentality,” with all of its “pejorative connotations,” has “ensured that both pet keeping, and women’s relationships to pets, have been downplayed in scholarly discussions” (McDonell 17). Yet taken together these scattered writings on the topic may be seen as themselves attempting to articulate a theory of love rather than as illustrative of certain psychoanalytic concepts.

III I want now, by turning to Barrett Browning’s “To Flush, My Dog” and “Flush or Faunus,” to look more closely at how she develops what I am calling supplementary love. Irreducibly autobiographical, these poems help us to see what she imagines to be the effects of the transformative power of love untethered from regulating categories of gender, sexuality, and species. “To Flush, My Dog” begins with a burst of affection: Loving friend, the gift of one Who her own true faith has run Through thy lower nature, Be my benediction said With my hand upon thy head, Gentle fellow-creature!35 The higher nature of Mitford’s “own true faith,” running through the “lower nature” of the cocker spaniel, elevates Flush from the status of animal to that of “gentle fellow-creature” and “loving friend.” The “sleek curls” of Flush’s coat, with their “burnished fulness,” remind the speaker of “a lady’s ringlets brown”—as much a reference to Mitford with her noted curls as to Barrett herself, who, as Woolf depicts it, bore a resemblance to her canine companion (163). Thus, at least initially, Flush appears in the poem as a “love-link,” serving a facilitative function for Barrett’s emotional expressions toward an absent mentor and a lost brother.36 Barrett herself conveys an awareness of Flush’s function, noting how immediately responsive the animal is to her emotional distress: And if one or two quick tears Dropped upon his glossy ears Or a sigh came double, Up he sprang in eager haste, Fawning, fondling, breathing fast, In a tender trouble. (163)

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Assuming the role of emotional caretaker, a position previously held by Bro during Elizabeth’s convalescence in Torquay and partially filled by Mitford, Flush might be seen here as a substitute for the object of lost or distant affections—that is, Barrett’s deceased brother, for whom she grieves, with her tears dropping on Flush’s “glossy ears,” and Mitford, for whose tenderness and affection she yearns. The shadow of these presences in the poem, however, quickly fades as the speaker begins to particularize the relationship between the human and nonhuman animal. At least initially, the speaker is remarkably interested in the corporeality of her canine companion and expresses that interest by deploying tropes of difference and otherness. Taking joy in the canine’s frenetic activity, the speaker exclaims: Leap! thy broad tail waves a light, Leap! thy slender feet are bright, Canopied in fringes; Leap! those tasseled ears of thine Flicker strangely, fair and fine Down their golden inches. (163) Flush’s mobility, which the ailing Barrett lacks, is not the reason that Flush is praised: “Yet, my pretty, sportive friend, / Little is’t to such an end / That I praise thy rareness” (163). Instead the poem repeatedly speaks of Flush’s capacity for love and emotional acuity in ways that tend to deemphasize the physical differences between human and nonhuman animals established in the lines quoted above. Here Flush, whose love outlasts the lives of cut flowers, rises almost to the level of abstraction, acquiring an illuminative power: Roses, gathered for a vase, In that chamber died apace, Beam and breeze resigning; This dog only, waited on, Knowing that when light is gone Love remains for shining. (163) Flush becomes what Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer would call a “humanized animal,” or a pet, made possible through Mitford’s “own true faith” running through the dog’s “lower nature.”37 The discourse of exceptionalism, which characterizes the economy of the pet, becomes a way to establish proper or socially acceptable relations with nonhuman beings. Indeed, an individual’s relationship to a pet differs from one’s relationship toward nonhuman animals in general. As Marc Shell points out, family pets

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are exceptional in that they are figured as “familial kin” (126). In singling out Flush for distinction, the speaker notes: Other dogs in thymy dew Tracked the hares and followed through Sunny moor or meadow; This dog only, crept and crept Next a languid cheek that slept, Sharing in the shadow. (163) Here the meter of the stanza perfectly mirrors its content. The long vowel sounds and smooth consonants of the three lines preceding the semicolon advance at a brisk pace as the speaker describes the generality of animals. That speed is interrupted, however, by the abrupt adjectival “this” and further slowed by the harder consonant sounds that make up the phrase “crept and crept.” The meter becomes more measured, in other words, as the speaker lavishes praise on a particular animal, the pet. Standing as the exception or the rareness of which the poem speaks, the pet is exempted from the human/animal binary and ideologically conceived as endowed with human-like features or qualities such as steadfastness and devotion. Dismissing Barrett Browning’s emphasis on Flush’s likeness to herself as merely (and narcissistically) anthropomorphic would, of course, be easy. In this view, the only appropriate response to nonhuman otherness is to revel in alterity. Often code for sentimentality, the charge of anthropomorphism can, however unwittingly, actually reinforce the notion of human exceptionalism. As Diana Fuss observes, “Sameness, not difference, provokes our greatest anxiety (and our greatest fascination) with the ‘almost human,’” and “whenever we are called to become ‘more human’ we are reminded that the human is never adequate to itself.”38 In other words, foregrounding similarities between human and nonhuman animals undermines the primacy accorded to the former and suggests that the latter can, by embodying idealized qualities and characteristics, be more human than humans themselves.39 There is a long tradition of writing about domestic animals—frequently dismissed by critics today for its sentimental projections of human emotions—that, in highlighting similarities between pet and owner, call into question the delimited and supposedly self-evident category of human.40 “To Flush, My Dog,” as well as the sonnet “Flush or Faunus,” which appears a few years later, move beyond the category of the pet in order to give a different valence to the human/nonhuman animal relationship. These poems stress not only similarity but also difference before finally gesturing toward relationality and reciprocity. Barrett Browning’s effort to conceive of her relationship to Flush in terms of significant otherness is obscured by the familiar images of a dog’s staunch fidelity that both poems deploy. Barrett Browning herself understood this

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Figure 4.1 James E. McConnell, Famous Dogs: The Faithful Friend. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her cocker spaniel Flush © Look and Learn

problem; Sonnets from the Portuguese is, in part, an attempt to describe love outside of the literary tropes and conventions that force a feeling into words. While crafting her sonnet sequence within the courtly love tradition, Barrett Browning does not play faithfully by its rules. Blunt rather than coy, the speaker calls on the auditor not to love her for ephemeral aspects of the self: “Do not say,” she instructs him in Sonnet XIV, “‘I love her for her smile—her look—her way / Of speaking gently.’”41 Even the physical tokens of her affection deny generic expectations. The opening of Sonnet XVIII seems to imply that she will make a familiar amatory offering to him: “I never gave a lock of hair away / To a man, Dearest, except this to thee” (218). Yet, this lock of hair, it turns out, has an association with a love just as strong—that of her mother, who has since passed away: I thought the funeral-shears Would take this first, but Love is justified,—

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Like Flush, in whom traces of Mitford remain even as the relationship develops toward a unique specificity, the precious gift the speaker offers to the auditor also signifies another bond—that between a daughter and her deceased mother. Displacement is clearly operative here, yet in Sonnet XLII, Barrett Browning also insists: I seek no copy now of life’s first half: Leave here the pages with long musing curled, And write me new my future’s epigraph, New angel mine, unhoped for in the world! (223) The Flush poems, I would suggest, struggle with similar problems: first, how to account for the epistemology of love by recognizing the precise nature of one bond while refusing to see it as either completely substituting for or supplanting another; and second, how to account for the phenomenological experience of love between humans and nonhuman animals on their own terms yet knowing that the full expression remains elusive because it must be depicted in ways that are overly familiar.42 As in “To Flush, My Dog,” the speaker of “Flush or Faunus” draws on familiar images of a dog’s rareness and emotional perceptiveness. Barrett Browning deifies the canine, however, in an attempt to develop a different vocabulary for describing love across species. She also devises a means of recognizing the specificity of their relationship as something other than or aside from that of simply an owner to the thing that is owned: You see this dog; it was but yesterday I mused forgetful of his presence here, Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear: When from the pillow where wet-cheeked I lay, A head as hairy as Faunus thrust its way Right sudden against my face, two golden-clear Great eyes astonished mine, a dropping ear Did flap me on either cheek to dry the spray! I started first as some Arcadian Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove: But as the bearded vision closelier ran My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above Surprise and sadness,—thanking the true PAN Who by low creatures leads to heights of love.43

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In her “biography” of Flush, Virginia Woolf remarks that this episode between Barrett and her canine was momentarily transformative: “She was lying, thinking; she had forgotten Flush altogether, and her thoughts were so sad that the tears fell upon the pillow. Then suddenly a hairy head was pressed against her; large bright eyes shone in hers; and she started. Was it Flush, or was it Pan?”44 Writing at a time when the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii were uncovering images of physical love between and among different species, Barrett Browning uses the image of Greek and Roman Gods to invert the affective relationship between human and nonhuman animals. Her insistence on the possibility of friendship across species, expressed by the dog’s flapping his ears across her face to dry her tears, is reflected in the mythological figure she uses to represent this relationship: the Greek God Pan and his Roman counterpart Faunus.45 Figuring Flush as one who presides over his flock, Barrett Browning describes the relationship as fundamentally pastoral: “If he sees me cry, he throws himself upon me as consoler general.”46 Her moment of reverie, with Flush taking on the qualities of a god who comes to individuals in their sleep, enables Barrett Browning to invert the human and nonhuman animal hierarchy. Whereas speciesism relegates the nonhuman animal to a subordinate role, Barrett Browning elevates the cocker spaniel as if to more fully emphasize his alterity: “Flushie was my Faunus, & powerful for the occasion” (2:316). Woolf captures this moment of inversion and the questions it raises: “Was she no longer an invalid in Wimpole Street, but a Greek nymph in some dim grove in Arcady?” Woolf concludes: “she was a nymph and Flush was Pan” (Woolf 27). If Flush is Pan, however, then the reference to low creatures is not entirely clear. Does our love for animals, representing a lower order than ourselves, lead to the true heights of love? Or are we the lower-order creatures who are enabled to attain those heights? Although at the end of the poem Barrett Browning pulls back from the ultimate implications of these questions, praising the “true Pan,” who, through animals, leads humans to experience depths of love, the blurring of the boundaries between humanity and animality—and, indeed, divinity—is suggestive. “To Flush, My Dog” contains a similar ambiguity. As I have noted, the poem vacillates between representing Flush as similar (endowed with human-like qualities) and different. Toward the end of the poem, Barrett Browning replaces both with the notion of reciprocity and responsivity. She and Flush strain beyond their respective limitations in order to mutually transform themselves: And because he loves me so, Better than his kind will do Often man or woman, Give I back more love again Than dogs often take of men, Leaning from my Human. (164)

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Referencing both the physical action of bending from a vertical position and the metaphorical act of reaching beyond the human, signified by the capital letter “H,” toward some other form of existence, the last line of the stanza complicates any reading of the poem as simply lighthearted fun. To be sure, the speaker’s invocation of vertical difference between human and nonhuman animals in the phrase “leaning from my Human” retains a notion of hierarchy.47 However, it seems to me that this phrase is simply an acknowledgment that inequality inevitably marks any relationship in which one is more dependent on another for care rather than an insistence on humanity’s exemption from the web of species dependencies. How else might we account for the repeated refrain of “fellow-creature”?48 Barrett Browning’s writings about Flush are both insightful and serious because they are contiguous with the larger theoretical concerns about love, kinship, and intimacy that occupy much of her literary and epistolary output. For Barrett Browning, love is a governing force—“The earthly good of this world is its happiness; & its happiness … issues from its affections”49—under whose sway, as her letter to Mitford quoted earlier indicates, come all creatures: “The logic is so strong!—There is no escape from the conclusion of love.” So vital for her is the feeling, and the intersubjective relations it grounds, that in her appropriately titled sonnet “Love” she writes: “We cannot live, except thus mutually.”50 In this view, life is a domain of entanglement, a space of intra-acting where, to borrow a phrase from Donna Haraway, “becoming is always becoming with” (244). Love is what enables a transposition from base life, which is to say mere living or an atomistic struggle for survival, to a meaningful state of being: But when a soul, by choice and conscience, doth Throw out her full force on another soul, The conscience and the concentration both Make mere life, Love. (“Love” 198) Mutually constitutive relations and the feeling that makes them possible are for Barrett Browning life itself: For Life in perfect whole And aim consummated, is Love in sooth, As Nature’s magnet-heat rounds pole with pole. (“Love” 198) There is every reason for us to take Barrett’s writings about Flush as extensions of these philosophical preoccupations and as precursors to her more well-known poems.

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IV Yet criticism has forestalled any real analysis of how Victorian women writers themselves, and Barrett Browning in particular, actively inquired into the epistemology and phenomenology of love. By sharply differentiating between Victorian and modernist writers, with the latter singled out for their more complicated understandings of human and nonhuman animal relations, critics have also largely bypassed the ways in which such inquiries, extending to relationships across the species divide, were as likely to fashion a welcomed ontological insecurity—“leaning from my Human”—as to establish its obverse. What Barrett Browning seems to grasp, as reflected in the chiasmus of “To Flush, My Dog” (Flush straining beyond animality, Barrett Browning leaning from her human), is that the category of the human, much like the animal, is not fixed; rather, what gets to count as human and nonhuman is culturally constructed, and the boundaries between the two can, at times, be highly porous. To take seriously the speaker’s claim in “To Flush, My Dog,” then, requires us to question the cultural processes by which the category of the human comes into existence. One of these processes is substitutive love, which has frequently served as a mechanism for mapping individuals onto a familiar trajectory by charting the subject’s development from an early attachment, to a series of replacements with varying degrees of adequacy, to, finally, the closest approximation to the prototypical love object, the spouse. Through the psychoanalytic conception of substitutive love, intense and sometimes excessively emotional and physical relationships between human and nonhuman animals, and also between women, are understood to be secondary experiences. Yet conceiving of love as primarily substitutive within an Oedipal framework ignores its many forms within and across the species divide. Effacing what Barrett Browning calls the “inherent merit” of individual love objects, the logic of substitution narrowly defines kinship, family, and significant others within humanist and sexually reproductive frameworks. Barrett Browning’s notion of supplementarity figures a variety of love relationships as constituting adult experience itself rather than resting stations on the road to maturity and adulthood—a road whose terminus and telos are signified in the cultural imaginary by the expression “man and wife.” Indeed, she asks us to see affective relationships—such as the bonds between her and Mary Russell Mitford, between her and Flush, or between her and Robert Browning—not as links in a substitutive chain that goes back to a lost primary love, but as stages in a continual process of learning how to feel with and for another.51

Notes 1 In this chapter, I use the name Elizabeth Barrett whenever I discuss biographical or historical events in the author’s life and poems published—under the name Elizabeth Barrett Barrett—before 1846, the year that she married Robert

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4 5 6

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9 10 11 12 13 14

Kevin A. Morrison Browning. I use Elizabeth Barrett Browning when referring generally to the authorial persona or to poems published after 1846. This is, admittedly, a little unwieldy, but it would be historically imprecise to use a last name she did not assume until 1846. Elizabeth Barrett Barrett to Mary Russell Mitford, 14 June 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836–1854, 1:225. Barrett to Robert Browning, 25 August 1845, in The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1:175. Gardner B. Taplin provides the following gloss, which emphasizes Bro’s role as an emotional caretaker to Elizabeth: “However much she loved her father, her sisters, and her brothers, she acutely missed the companionship and understanding she received from [Bro]”; see Taplin, The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 80. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Many critics and biographers draw quite loosely on this model to suggest that Bro is the prototype for Barrett’s subsequent relationships. See, for example, Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, 221, and Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, 228. As Alice A. Kuzniar argues in her study of human attachments to dogs, “because pet keeping is generally ridiculed as trivial and sentimental, and the animal held to be a lesser being, psychoanalysis has dismissed the powerful implications of canine-human relations”; see Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog, 8. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari are not entirely accurate in their assessment of psychoanalysis insofar as they fail to account for either oceanic feelings, which are decidedly not a part of individuated subjectivity because, as some theorists posit, they dissolve the boundaries between subject and object, or various branches of psychoanalysis, including object-relations psychology. Moreover, their polemical attack on pet owners— “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool”—suggests that affection for animals entails a kind of fetishistic attachment to the feral (240). The value of their insight, to me, is in seeing how human and nonhuman animal relations become subsumed into an Oedipal narrative, one that tends to discount same-sex friendships or relationships between humans and nonhuman animals. On Barrett Browning’s philosophical explorations of love, see Stephenson, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love,” and Rebecca Stott, “‘How Do I Love Thee?’: Love and Marriage,” in Avery and Stott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 134–155. As Adela Pinch also points out in her reading of Sonnets from the Portuguese, Barrett Browning approaches love as both an affective and an analytical process, signaled to the reader by the first verb in the sequence: think; see “Thinking About the Other in Romantic Love,” in Fay, Romantic Passions. Barrett Browning, “To Mary Russell Mitford in Her Garden,” in Preston, The Complete Poetical Works of Mrs. Browning, 52. Subsequent references to this poem will be cited parenthetically in the text. Meredith B. Raymond and Mary Rose Sullivan, introduction to Women of Letters, x. Barrett to Mitford, 50 Wimpole Street, 13 September 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:273. Although Bro’s death was emotionally devastating on its own, its effect was compounded by the loss of Barrett’s brother Sam, who succumbed to fever while in Jamaica earlier that year. Mitford to Barrett, Three Mile Cross, 10 June 1842, in Kelley and Hudson, The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 6, 8. Barrett to Mitford, 12 November 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:304.

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15 Barrett Browning, “A Flower in a Letter,” in The Complete Poetical Works, 166. 16 Barrett Browning to Mitford, 21 September 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:274. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically in the text. 17 Mitford to Barrett, Three Mile Cross, 27? March 1842, in Kelley and Hudson, The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 5, 275. 18 Stone borrows the concept of “mothering” from Ruth Perry, who suggests that the supposedly female capacity to nurture and inspire, associated with the figure of the mother, is available to both women and men who encourage others in the creative process. According to Perry, mothering the mind is associated with and patterned on the beginnings of a life: “An infant first experiences itself in the presence of—and in relation to—the mother or primary caretaker who holds it, feeds it, cleans it, and so on. This regular intervention permits the infant the experience … of a ‘self with a past, present and future’”; see Perry’s introduction to Perry and Brownley, Mothering the Mind, 6. 19 Barrett to Mitford, 25 August 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:265. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically in the text. 20 See Field, Whym Chow, and Matthew Margini’s essay in this volume. See also Cushman, Charlotte Cushman, 126–127; Marcus, Between Women; and Vanita, Sappho, 13, 216–217, 228–229. 21 Barrett to Mitford, December 1840, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:208. 22 Barrett to Mitford, 2 January 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:211. 23 Barrett to Mitford, 5 August 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:259. 24 Barrett to Mitford, March 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:218. 25 Barrett to Mitford, 9 February 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:215. 26 Barrett to Mitford, 11 [12] December 1842, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2:117–118. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically in the text. 27 Barrett to Mitford, 30 June 1843, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2:258. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically in the text. 28 Barrett to Mitford, 11 April 1843, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2:204. 29 Barrett to Mitford, 22 June 1842, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:427. 30 Barrett to Mitford, 21? January 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:213. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically in the text. 31 Barrett to Mitford, 25 August 1841, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:267. Barrett appears to be suggesting that Flush is attempting to acquire human speech rather than using his own system of communication, but she nevertheless acknowledges that his barking and murmuring are something resembling language. In so doing, she moves beyond mere anthropomorphism, in which the cocker spaniel would be solely a projection of her hopes and fears. Instead, as I will shortly develop, she acknowledges him as a significant other with whom she is engaged in practices of “becoming with”—a phrase used by Donna Haraway to describe the “lively knottings [of interhuman as well as

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Kevin A. Morrison human and nonhuman animal relationships] that tie together the world”; see Haraway, When Species Meet, vii. Barrett to Mitford, December 1840, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:208. Barrett to Mitford, [7 May 1842] in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1: 405. Mermin, “The Female Poet,” 352. As Tricia Lootens has argued, perhaps the sonnets are embarrassing “because the experience of reading them reveals the extent to which we, and not they, rely upon dreams of simple, innocently sentimental Victorian love”; see Lootens, Lost Saints, 120. My argument suggests that this insight can be extended to the Flush poems as well. Barrett Browning, “To Flush, My Dog,” in The Complete Poetical Works, 163. Subsequent references to this poem will be cited parenthetically in the text. The phrase “love-link” appears in the anonymously published “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1827, 439. See Wolfe with Elmer, “Subject to Sacrifice,” in Wolfe, Animal Rites, 101. Fuss, introduction to Human, All Too Human, 3. Establishing emotional commonalities between human and nonhuman animals is not without its difficulties. As Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson points out, “we can never claim that we know precisely what a dog feels”; see Masson, Dogs Never Lie about Love, xvi. However, this is very different from saying that, as Thomas Nagel once contended, any effort to understand the experience of a nonhuman animal is always already anthropomorphic; see Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?” On animal emotions more generally, see Bekoff, Minding Animals. Much of this work originated in the eighteenth century. For a general discussion of this development, see Brown, Fables of Modernity, especially 227–228. Barrett Browning, “Sonnets from the Portuguese,” in The Complete Poetical Works, 217. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text. Stott has made a compelling case for understanding Barrett Browning’s poetry as frequently wrestling with the epistemology of love: “how do we know the loved person; how do we know love … ?”; see Stott, “‘How Do I Love Thee?,’” 135. I would add that the poems are just as concerned with the phenomenology of love: how do we experience it? Barrett Browning, “Flush or Faunus,” in The Complete Poetical Works, 196. Woolf, Flush, 27. Barrett’s record of the experience is contained in one of her letters to Mitford, 2 October 1843, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2:316: [Recently, I sought a] moment of solitude, to cry in it very bitterly. Suddenly a little hairy head thrust itself from behind my pillow into my face, rubbing its ears & nose against me in a responsive agitation, & drying the tears as they came. I had forgotten Flushie, & was startled at the apparition, or rather the sensation, of the hairy head—it was a Faunus or a Pan! In a few moments however, my heart was led away from itself into an assuaging of Flushie, who, if I were determined to cry, was bent upon crying too. Of course, Barrett Browning frequently wrote about Pan to address a range of concerns. On the importance of the mythological figure in her work, see, among others, Chapman, “‘In our own blood drenched the pen’,” and Morlier, “The Death of Pan,” in Donaldson. Barrett to Mitford, 2 October 1843, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 2:316. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically in the text. In her contribution to this volume, Keridiana Chez explores the possible implications of this hierarchy: stilled life.

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48 One might push this point further to argue that Barrett Browning anticipates Haraway’s conception of “companion species”: an intertwined, mutually constitutive relation of signifying others; see When Species Meet, 3–44. 49 Barrett to Mitford, 74 Gloucester Place, 1837, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1:27. 50 Barrett Browning, “Love,” in The Complete Poetical Works, 198. Subsequent references to this poem will be cited parenthetically in the text. 51 For their comments on an earlier version of this essay, I am grateful to Eileen Gillooly, John Glavin, Natalie M. Houston, John O. Jordan, Jill Matus, Katharine E. Maus, Helena Michie, Linda Pollock, Meredith Skura, Molly Slattery, and the two exceptional readers for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (30.1: 93–115), where it appeared in different form.

References Avery, Rebecca, and Simon Stott. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. London: Longman, 2003. Bekoff, Marc. Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart. Oxford University Press, 2002. Brown, Laura. Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. Cornell University Press, 2001. Chapman, Alison. “‘In our own blood drenched the pen’: Italy and Sensibility in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Last Poems (1862).” Women’s Writing, vol. 10, 2003, pp. 269–286. Cushman, Charlotte. Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life, edited by Emma Stebbins, Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878. Dally, Peter. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Psychological Portrait. Macmillan, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed., Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Fay, Elizabeth, ed. Romantic Passions. Romantic Circles Praxis Series, edited by Orrin N. C. Wang, College Park: University of Maryland, 1998, http://www.rc.umd. edu/praxis/passions/pinch/pinch.html. Field, Michael. Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny Press, 1914. Forster, Margaret. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography. Chatto and Windus, 1988. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2000. Fuss, Diana. “Introduction.” Human, All Too Human. Routledge, 1996. Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. Simon and Schuster, 1996. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Kelly, Philip, and Ronald Hudson, eds. The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 5, January 1841–May 1842, Letters 784–966. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1987. Kelly, Philip, and Ronald Hudson. The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 6, June 1842–March 1843, Letters 967–1173. Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1988. Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. University of Chicago Press, 2006.

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Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. University Press of Virginia, 1992. Lootens, Tricia. Lost Saints: Silence, Gender, and Victorian Literary Canonization. University Press of Virginia, 1996. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton University Press, 2007. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Dogs Never Lie about Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs. Three Rivers Press, 1998. McDonell, Jennifer. “Ladies’ Pets and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 2010, pp. 17–34. Mermin, Dorothy. Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry. University of Chicago Press, 1989. Mermin, Dorothy. “The Female Poet and the Embarrassed Reader: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.” ELH, 48, 1981, pp. 351–367. Mitford, Mary Russell. Recollections of a Literary Life; and Selections from my Favourite Poets and Prose Writers. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1883. Morlier, Margaret M. “The Death of Pan: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Romantic Ego.” Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Sandra Donaldson and G. K. Hall, 1999, pp. 258–274. Nagel, Thomas. “What is it Like to be a Bat?” Philosophical Review, vol. 83, 1974, pp. 435–450. Perry, Ruth, and Martine Watson Brownley, eds. Mothering the Mind: Twelve Studies of Writers and Their Silent Partners. Holmes and Meier, 1984. Preston, Harriet Waters, ed. The Complete Poetical Works of Mrs. Browning. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900. Raymond, Meredith B., and Mary Rose Sullivan. “Introduction.” Women of Letters: Selected Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mary Russell Mitford. Twayne, 1987. Raymond, Meredith B., and Mary Rose Sullivan, eds. The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, 1836–1854. 3 vols., Winfield, KS: Wedgestone Press, 1983. Raymond, Meredith B., and Mary Rose Sullivan, eds. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Longman, 2003. Shell, Marc. “The Family Pet.” Representations, vol. 15, 1986, pp. 121–153. Stephenson, Glennis. “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love.” Ph.D. diss. University of Alberta, 1988, ProQuest (252085916). Stone, Marjorie. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Macmillan, 1995. Taplin, Gardner B. The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yale University Press, 1957. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 2 vols., Murray, 1946. Vanita, Ruth. Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination. Columbia University Press, 1996. Vicinus, Martha. “Laocoöning in Rome: Harriet Hosmer and Romantic Friendship.” Women’s Writing, vol. 10, no. 2, 2003, pp. 353–366. Wolfe, Cary, with Jonathan Elmer, “Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.” Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory, Cary Wolfe, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 97–121. Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography, edited by Kate Flint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

5

Still Lives Apologetic Mourning in Victorian Dog Elegies Keridiana Chez

In the course of the nineteenth century, interspecies connections became a ubiquitous practice, and dogs in particular were elevated to the roles we now recognize them to hold: beloved companions and family members. With these heightened intimacies, it followed that humans had ample occasion to mourn the passing of their canine favorites—and to face the challenge of making sense of very intense attachments for beings of other species. Recent scholarship on mourning animal death, and the related question of what uses are deemed acceptable for animal corpses, has sparked productive discussion about grievability: how much grieving is expected and allowed for any death, and what such restrictions reflect about the valuing of lives. Amidst exuberant pet mania, dissenting Victorian voices rejected the extent to which humans were attached to nonhuman animals. The performance of compassion for animal suffering and interest in petkeeping were encouraged and expected, but this rise in interspecies esteem was also subjected to limits based solely on species grounds. Dumb, incapable of reason, and of a “lesser” species, dogs were good enough to use for emotional purposes but ultimately considered undeserving of human levels of love. At the heartwrenching moment of eulogy, poets commemorating the loss of a beloved pet grappled with the awkward task of having to legitimize their suspiciously excessive attachments to animals. This chapter explores Victorian poetic representations of masters and pets in mourning, foregrounding the tension between the humans’ desire to express and excuse their socially inappropriate degree of devotion for their pets. Inundated with real grief, mourners were hemmed in by the high likelihood of public ridicule, and to navigate this dilemma they deployed certain narrative tropes: their poems emphasize that the animal was first to transgress the species line with its irrepressible adoration, alongside different kinds of proofs that the particular animal deserved to be singled out—as an exception to the general rule, which remained not being deserving. I will also trace a tendency to present the animal in parts, usually avoiding the word “dog,” and to reduce it to the function of loving its master and/or mistress—all in the service of mourning apologetically.

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Why apologetic mourning? The general ethos would appear to have been completely accepting of interspecies intimacy by the nineteenth century. In a study of eighteenth-century elegies to dead pets, Ingrid H. Tague documents a noticeable shift from satirical skepticism regarding the validity of mourning a mere animal to increasingly individualized and sincere accounts of grief. Christine Kenyon-Jones describes the Romantic poetry that questioned Cartesian and religious assumptions about the easy dismissability of animal death. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the humane movement and petkeeping proliferated internationally, intense attachments for those pets were increasingly considered valid. Following this trend, Victorians gave greater latitude to the mourning of animal death. Indeed, the height of Victorian doggy mania was prominently on display in the unprecedented allowances made for the mourning of dead pets, as evidenced by the establishment and recognition of pet cemeteries in London (1880), New York (1896), and Paris (1899) (Kean 21).1 This is not to say that no pets had not been carefully buried before, but rather that the notion of community spaces set aside for the respectful burial of animals was new to the British. Consider how nonstandard this has been for most nonhuman beings, whose main purpose for being kept alive has usually been to be killed at the right time for the reaping of their corpses for our nutrimental or ornamental consumption. Affection was granted within the domestic realm to a select few, but the corpses of most other animals were still systematically rendered into some sort of product for human use (Chez, “Creating Carnivores” 146). The bodies of petted animals were increasingly deemed to merit protection and preservation through burial, and although these cemeteries were relatively small, it speaks to the conflicted ethos that even these modest mourning sites became the subject of public debate and even international news. For the most part, Victorian mourning rituals for dead pets mimicked human rites, though typically with less pomp and circumstance. London’s little Hyde Park cemetery, as described by an American visitor in 1897, was a quiet area with “about two hundred graves” bearing inscriptions to “Darling,” “Dear,” “Constant Companion[s],” who were “Faithful unto death” (Fulton 343). Just four years or so earlier, there were only thirty-nine such “tiny marble tokens of affection” (Hodgetts 625). The caretaker was paid by mourners to conduct the ceremony (“but only rarely in the presence of the bereaved owners of the lamented pet, who are mostly too much overcome with grief to be able to face this last cruel parting”) and to maintain the plots so that “not one looks neglected” (625). The corpses would be “mostly sewn up in canvas bags”; there were very few in coffins (625) but that did not stop another commentator from fixating on the more lavish examples. In William Fitzgerald’s oft-quoted 1896 article in The Strand, a few pages of derisive description are devoted to the ways in which some human mourners granted to their deceased pets the honors ordinarily due to humankind, such as spending significant sums, constructing elaborate coffins or urns, and having humans “follow” in procession (550).

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In the same vein, poetic lines were penned to blasphemously assert that precious animal companions were capable of an afterlife, if not alongside humanity then at least in some sort of lesser heaven. “For most of the nineteenth century, the idea that animals might have afterlives was a decidedly unchristian one” (Bates 43), and asserting otherwise was highly transgressive. William Hurrell Mallock’s “Lines on the Death of a Pet Dog”2 (c.1878) wonders at how the “Life, that so faithfully dwelt with us, / Played with us, fed with us, felt with us”—in other words, a life that lived so closely with humans—could possibly meet such a different end after death, such that “all that is left of you” is “One little grave, and a pang to us” (123). Mortimer Collins’s six lines on “Tory, A Puppy” (c.1893) assume that his dog possessed a “spirit” but avoid concluding that its place was in human heaven (192). “It was God who made him—God knows best” where the spirit resides (Collins 192). Some, like Sir Francis Hastings Doyle’s “Epitaph on a Favourite Dog”3 (c.1866), also claim the existence of canine souls, based on the idea that a being capable of that much love for a human must surely possess a soul: “If God be love, what sleeps below was not / Without a spark divine” (282). The experience of such an intimate relationship led many to believe that surely one’s dog was less inconsequential than common dead animals: “All that was THOU can not be there,” lying underground. “Perchance in some far happier sphere / Thy loving soul may yet be found!” (Doyle 282), the poem wistfully proclaims. James Payn’s “On Our Dog Jock” (c.1853) exemplifies the compromise position that dogs have souls that are not quite on par with human ones, and so pass on to a nonhuman heaven: Our old friend’s dead, but we all well know He’s gone to the Kennels where the good dogs go, Where the cooks be not, but the beef-bones be. (79) Many poets wished for canine afterlife expressly to secure their own pleasure in reuniting, one day, with their dearly departed—more for their own soul’s sake than for the animal’s spiritual well-being. H. Knight Horsfield’s “Old Rocket” (c.1893) describes a mourning human that dares to “drea [m],” even at the risk of being mistaken for “a hopeless heathen,” of “wander[ing] through the heather in the ‘unknown far away,’ / With his good old dog before him as of old” (197). These “afterlives” poems would appear at first glance to be further evidence of Victorian excess, but even in this excess what is also clear is the conservatism—the reluctance to loudly proclaim the existence of nonhuman souls or to allow them into human Heaven. Overall, the poems assume human superiority and express themselves either as wishful thinking or as courageously challenging the predominant view of animal soullessness, taking for granted that public opprobrium would follow.

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There is no doubt that in unprecedented and myriad ways dogs had become elevated to the point that as a species they were the subject of increased protection and, at least nominally, of public veneration, whether in the form of textual, visual, or material culture—but always within limits. These extensive intertextual iterations reflect what I describe elsewhere as the use of dogs as emotional prostheses. Emphasizing the Victorians’ development of affectively charged, intercorporeal connections between human and dog, the theory posits that humans reduced the dog to the perfect lover—unconditionally and monogamously devoted to its master or mistress—in order to foster intensely intimate attachments wherein the dog served as the emotional prosthesis for its human user (Chez, Victorian Dogs 17). While only reciprocation could create such a dynamic, by design it was tightly regulated to be unequal: the dog was to remain a tool that the human could instrumentalize and discard at any point (Ibid., 20). Reports of extravagant mourning might lead to the misimpression that the adoration of pet animals was the norm, but many Victorians still vocally disapproved of the public mourning of mere animals, and even the apparent excess of proanimal feeling was riddled with anxieties of speaking and behaving against the general grain. The Hyde Park cemetery was “so hidden by shrubs and trees that one would never suspect its being there” (Fulton 343), such that “[t]he general public who frequent Hyde Park little suspect that this Royal pleasance contains a dogs’ cemetery” (Hodgetts 625). Even though it was a very modest space for select animal burial, another writer complained that while the London poor are carted off to the potter’s field, and their last resting places marked with a board, if at all, a special and high-toned cemetery is laid out in exclusive Hyde Park for the pets of the fashionable rich. (“London’s Queer Dog Cemetery” 33) Even the earlier quoted writer, who was generally positive, found it reassuringly appropriate that “[t]here is at least nothing obtrusive or objectionable about the modest canine Elysian-field of Hyde Park” (Hodgetts 625). Significantly, Fitzgerald’s satirical article commenting on the ridiculous funeral rites for deceased “dandy dogs” makes little of the circumstances of these animals’ deaths—one dog had been kicked to death by its owner for howling while locked in a hotel room (549)—because to the offended author, the much greater crime is the fact that “pet dogs are treated by their mistresses almost precisely as though they were human members of the family” (550). The memorializing of deceased pets might have “helped restore family unity,” as Fabienne Moine argues, eternally preserving the interspecies bourgeois family for the mourner, and also served to “reaffir[m] that they deserved to be cared for as humans were,” much to the consternation of a vocal contingent (196, 198). The nineteenth century was far from univocal, and its petkeeping mania was not without its detractors, who

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were particularly vehement when it came to the extent to which humans came to mourn their pets. The rejection of those who dared to mourn deceased pets varied in degree, from light satire to peals of alarm. The early eighteenth-century satire that Tague discussed remained a tune of choice well into the nineteenth century; Teresa Mangum notes “the frequent appearance in Punch of parodies lampooning such grief” (27). “On Some Elegies on a Lap Dog” (c.1812) derides the poetry devoted to departed pets by challenging the sincerity of the sentiments: Poor dog, whom Rival Poets strive To celebrate in plaintive strains; If thou hadst howl’d so when alive, Thou hadst been beaten for thy pains. (Anonymous 428) Others questioned the intensity of mourners’ feelings on the assumption that the occasion simply did not warrant it. Lord Ashtown’s “On Being Shown the Tomb of a Favourite Dog” (c.1831) chastises the urge to mourn a mere dog by discounting the dog’s life and death compared to the more portentous, romanticized notion of human life and death. Not only is death “the lot of all,” so “why lament your favourite’s doom[?],” but also the dog’s life was presumably a simple and happy one: Beloved she lived, and blameless died, What greater bliss can fate bestow? A bliss to man so oft denied:— To sink to rest unvexed by woe. (Trench 438) This imagined blamelessness and peace at death depends on understanding the animal as lacking the capacity to think and feel as humans would, and as was common enough, this text expresses envy for such supposed inferiority. What sounds like envy was also a reminder of human superiority. The poem then directs the reader’s attention to the narrator’s own eventual death, which he could only hope will be “Such soft repose” as the dog’s. Animal lovers thus remained the subject of derision when they behaved toward other species in ways that suggested terms of equality—or worse, superior favor. For Margaret Miller Davidson to have mourned in her 1837 “Elegy Upon Leo, an Old House-Dog” the loss of one “Who, though a dog, could love for love alone” was especially pointed, because she adds: “This is a world where faithful hearts are few, / Where love too oft is vain, too oft untrue” (Irving 289). While the idea that animals being faithful might have been generally palatable, this assertion that animals (“whos” and not “whats”) provided superior companionship to a human was problematic; to

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many, it was offensive to value an animal the same as or more than a human. Tellingly, an 1883 story published in Young England complained of a silly man named Merton, “who bestowed as much affection on a favourite dog or horse as the majority of men do on their wives” (“Harry” 12). The narrator, who admittedly was “not particularly fond of animals” (12), became legitimately worried when Merton summoned immediate medical assistance for Harry, whom he knew as Merton’s brother. He and another friend dropped every business, because “our affection conquered every other consideration,” and even the “blinding hail shower and muddy pathways,” the “seven-mile tramp,” were borne (12). However, the alarm was merely for Merton’s dog, also named Harry: “It was a bloodhound! … Why, man, I thought it was your brother. Would I have left a human patient for this”— the answer, clearly, was no. Merton had just bought the dog the previous day, but ludicrously declared it “the best dog,” raising undue alarm and diverting human attentions from human subjects. The dog was ceremoniously buried, with a headstone and a brief epitaph, which the narrator found an inane conclusion to an inane episode. What the “Harry” story suggests is that part of the offense of mourning nonhuman death lies in the power of such rituals to call others to feelings of respect—feelings that were thought wasted on subjects undeserving because of their species. Grievability is reflective of the social worth of lives: a finely gradated hierarchy that closely coincides with the allocation of rights, privileges, and power. As per Judith Butler, a life that cannot be mourned “is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note” (34). Butler was speaking of human lives, but scholars such as Chloë Taylor have extended the discussion. “If animal lives do not count as lives, their deaths cannot count as deaths,” says Taylor, “and thus would not be deaths that we could mourn, nor deaths at all” (“Precarious Lives” 63). One of the paradoxes of the period is that the Victorians both promoted and sought to limit emotional investment in animals, but this is less paradoxical when one considers that the impetus for both was to preserve anthropocentric ways of life: while using animals as emotional prostheses would benefit human emotional well-being (Chez, Victorian Dogs 6–7), caring for one’s prostheses to the point of treating them as equals would diminish our self-granted license to exploit them (Ibid., 122). Grievability set the terms of a competitive hierarchy: in a zero-sum game, greater power to another necessarily appeared as diminished power to oneself. Mourning nonhuman animals was perceived as a direct threat to human status because if such honors were available to all, it would mean the loss of a powerful avenue for demarcating human superiority over other species. Moreover, if the doors were to be opened to allow nonhumans into the zone of grievability, it would make it easier to query whether other nonhuman bodies ought to be afforded protection from consumption. Public mourning in particular is a privilege reserved for very few losses, and the grander and more onerous the funeral rites, the more significant that

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life and its loss was likely regarded by that culture. When public mourning is accorded to the loss of those whom a culture has deemed undeserving, it contravenes important norms, as the value of such honors rests largely on the rarity of their bestowal. Public mourning also enables the forging of “a legitimizing community” (Mangum 17), as the Young England article alludes to in closing with the mention of the disgruntled narrator returning to Harry’s neighborhood and finding the dog’s gravestone. Just as he is called upon to care for Harry when he thought it was a human, the narrator is compelled by the gravestone and epitaph to care, to note a death, only to find, to his consternation, that he has been made to care for something that is not worth his while. Matthew Arnold’s “Geist’s Grave” (1881) ends with this explicit point: the beloved dog’s grave is well situated to encounter “travelers on the Portsmouth road,” who Shall see thy grave upon the grass, And stop before the stone, and say: People who lived here long ago Did by this stone, it seems, intend To name for future times to know The dachs-hound Geist, their little friend. (Arnold 205–206) Like the physical memorial, Arnold’s elegy calls upon readers to stop, respect the human–dog bond, and grieve with him for an animal’s death. Both headstone and elegy momentarily produce sympathetic mourning, and thus create value, extracting affect even from the unwilling. As Taylor notes, “the ethical apartheid between humans and nonhuman animals reserves mourning for humans,” and for defying this rule one might be “infantili[zed] and thereby pathologi[zed]” (“Respect” 97). Not only might a mourner of inappropriate subjects be deemed pathologically infantile but also accused of infantility’s close cousins—hyperfemininity, irrationality, selfishness—and this ridicule existed to disempower these women and to control men through the threat of being considered anything like such women. The same applied to the policing of mourning: the taint would attach to the ridiculed mourners, demoting them in the hierarchy perhaps permanently. At one’s moment of sharp loss, then, society made impossible the free expression of grief for that loss. The consequences went beyond feeling ridiculed and alone in one’s bereavement: the errant mourner would be denied the respect due to those deemed to be rational persons, would cease to be taken seriously or to fully count. The inappropriate mourner became, like the animal, dismissable.4 To many, as Alice Kuzniar found with later writers, what makes the mourning of pets unique is … the inordinate affection for them, an affection that one resists… Indeed, it often seems as if the

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Expressing this real grief was hampered by the understanding that its expression evidenced affections that the human ought to have resisted. In the face of the Victorian push to both encourage and limit interspecies intimacies, poetic mourners were already courting ridicule by edifying a deceased pet with a traditionally elevated poetic form, the elegy. Underneath these celebrations of the interspecies bond ran a self-conscious urgency to explain the human’s sense of grief and loss while safely maintaining special status as human. Perhaps in some cases the poets’ narrative strategies manifest their internalized shame or perhaps were strategic—one cannot be sure. There is cause for compassion for their position but not for ignoring the diminutions and erasures to which these shamed lovers resorted. In this next set of poems, we see the various textual strategies deployed to navigate this murky terrain. Victorians were taken with the idea of inconsolable dogs waiting by the graves or bodies of their dead owners, typically rejecting food and drink or alternative owners. Agnes Howell’s reply (c.1875) to Sir Edwin Landseer’s The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (1837), one of his paintings depicting a mourning dog in wait,5 begins by intoning that at his death, the human is apparently “Alone,” as all human mourners move on and “leave”: “No wife, no child, not e’en a friend, / is sadly watching here” (62). “[N]one to mourn are found” except “say not so—for lo! / His faithful dog is near[,]” the exclamation point marking the miracle: that the dog’s instinctual “faith than human faith more true” can safely be relied upon where humans fail each other (Howell 62). As Mangum notes, “nearly obsessive depictions of dogs overwhelmed by grief for lost masters and mistresses or faithfully attached to places associated with the dead may be the most powerful, if also the most oblique, animal memorial projects of all” (19). Unlike every human, the mourning dog cannot move on. The human owner was presumed irreplaceable, as—in the emotional prosthesis logic—the animal had merely been a living instrument that did not have its own reason for existence if not attached to a human user. The uniqueness of the relationship between human and pet operated as a compliment to the animal that also doomed it to disposability. When that person died, the mourning animal had no more purpose. Lives suspended in mourning, these animals forewent their instincts or desires to hold endless vigil by their deceased masters’ bodies or representatives thereof. In turn, poets mourning their animals tended to downplay their own failure to move on and cease mourning, even as the writing of the poems itself proved that humans were beholden to their “excessive” grief. Poems mourning the loss of a beloved dog deployed the same trope of the stilled, waiting animal, posited as a loving, not-quite-complete creature that desperately seeks to physically connect with its human, and becomes uniquely deserving only on such terms.

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While not an elegy, “We Meet at Morn, my Dog and I” (c.1893) by the clergyman Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley sets the stage for this part of the discussion. The poem encapsulates a daily ritual of interspecies intimacy initiated by the dog begging for, and gaining entry into, the human space to attach itself to the human body. The sleeping human is not, technically, being mourned, but the dog’s enforced separation overnight creates the conditions of a temporary loss. The poem’s arc represents the dog as it anxiously anticipates the opening of the bedroom door so it can greet its master after the long night’s separation. The animal’s slow approach serves as a metaphor for the transgression of the species barrier that is required for a human and a dog to come close enough to “embrace” (Rawnsley 284). The dog begins as mere sound (“a patter coming nearer and more near, / And then upon my chamber door / A gentle tapping”) and employs a variety of bodily noises to communicate its desire that the door be opened (283). The dog cannot breach the barrier: “though proud,” dogs “are poor,” able only to use their tails to attempt to “give command” for the door to open, a command that fails (283). In the next lines, the dog continues to consist of sound: “after that a cry, half sneeze, half yapping, / And next a scuffle” (284). At this point, the human “know[s]” that “the creature lies to watch” in wait for the maid to open the door; by the human’s “knowing,” “the creature” comes to being as more than sound (284). Once the threshold of the door is crossed—once the human has chosen to recognize the “creature”—the dog’s rise in status is quickly undercut: The impatient thing Into the room Its whole glad heart doth fling, (284) Speaking of nineteenth-century Paris, Kathleen Kete has described the dog’s increasing role as a “machine d’aimer” (55), an idea that seems literally enacted here: a thing flings a heart toward a human. And it has a magnificent effect: “ere the gloom / Melts into light” (Rawnsley 284). Awkwardly, the master still shuts his eyes, as if he were playing dead to push the dog into mourning mode: I feel a creeping toward me—a soft head, And on my face A tender nose, and cold— (284) The human remains in quiet control as the creature creeps closer and closer. Reduced to sounds, sensations, and body parts, the dog prods with a nose to make corporeal intimate contact with the human that has chosen to open the door. By the end of the short poem, man and dog have “met and sworn /

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Fresh love and fealty for another morn” (284). Man and dog re-pledge love and faithfulness—but the pact seems to be understood to last only through another day, leaving open the gaping possibility that on another morn the human may not open the door. Similarly, William Watson’s “His Epitaph” (1882) emphasizes that the animal approaches first, transgressing the interspecies line to cross into the higher human plane: My hand will miss the insinuated nose Mine eyes the tail that wagged contempt at Fate. (167) This dog is represented as a nose—again a body part—that makes contact with the human body without invitation. In turn, the human eyes seamlessly merge into the dog’s tail by the omission of the verb (“Mine eyes [miss] the tail” becomes “Mine eyes [are] the tail”). The animal’s incompleteness in these poems dovetails with the humane movement discourse that posits dogs, as a species, as happily predisposed to serve as our emotional prostheses because they are made to love humanity. Arnold’s “Geist’s Grave” (1881), an elegy to his dog departed four years previously, also presents the dog in parts—“That loving heart, that patient soul,” “That liquid, melancholy eye” (203, 204)—and as having a single purpose: to provide a stream of love to its human: “To run their course, and reach their goal, / And read their homily to man” (203). The narrator asserts that the dog can live on so long as its humans “keep thee in our heart … fix our favorite on the scene, / Nor let thee utterly depart / And be as if thou ne’er hadst been” (204). The metaphorical incorporation of the dog into the human bodies—the affixing of the dog onto the human hearts—is what secures that the dog “shalt live as long as we” (205). Henry Willett’s “In Memoriam” (c.1902) also begins by praising the dog in parts, the parts that express the dog’s affection for her human: I I I I

miss miss miss miss

the the the the

little wagging tail; plaintive, pleading wail; wistful, loving glance; circling welcome-dance. (168)

Like Rawnsley’s, this elegy focuses on the morning ritual where the dog expresses its wish to be allowed past the locked door into the otherwise forbidden human space of the bedroom. Again the dog comes “pleading” and “wistful” as a supplicant to the human, then breaches the metaphorical and literal boundary with “eyes that, watching, sued” (Willett 168). Again the human controls access and opens the door only after the transgressive dog has proven its unique devotion:

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I miss the pertinacious scratch (Continued till I raised the latch Each morning), waiting at my door. (168) Evidencing the stark self-consciousness of the mourning human, the poem dedicates the next three stanzas to rebutting the detractors who accused petkeepers of excessive interspecies affection. “What folly!,” he imagines “the cynic mind” declaring, “Plenty of snarling things are left” (169). The cynic declares all dogs the same, disposable and easily replaceable “snarling things,” and so the human mourner is not only being irrational in mourning for the deceased pet but also a fool to have kept a pet so closely at all. “You should have sought a human friend,” the cynic chides, because the human friend would have a “life eternal” and their “gifts of intellect and grace / Bereavement never could efface” (168). The narrator counters that he would not trade “heart” for “intellect,” as “’Tis not my head that feels the smart” (169). The relative worth of the species is therefore measured not by brain power or an eternal soul, but rather by the capacity to love and be loved; this “love that’s true” brings parity between the species (169). In turn, “So long my heart will feel a void,” the human will feel a grief with which his “mind will be employed” (169)—both the poet (mind overwhelmed by grief) and the cynic (“So let the cynic snarl or smile”) become the animal by the last stanza (169). The poem seems preoccupied with the awareness that antianthropocentric positions render the poet vulnerable to critique, and its braver conclusion was perhaps facilitated by positing the dog as the wagging tail, etc., that pleadingly approaches. Elegies and odes written from the point of view of mourning masters or mourning pets thus reiterate a fantasy of loving animals perpetually in wait, memorializing the experience of the pet waiting outside the bedroom door for the human to waken—every night the dog waits, and every morning it creeps in impertinent supplication to attach itself to its human if the human chooses to open the door.6 On the one hand, the trope of physical reunification—typically, the dog’s nose makes intimate contact with the human hand—emphasizes the intercorporeal intimacy of the taboo relation. On the other, the suspension of animal lives into the one dimension of lover-inwaiting on the other side of the locked door serves to reassure the humans that they are masters—of their own emotions. Elevating these animals to such a complimentary point served to rationalize why, at the moment, the human was so crippled with feeling as to devote poetry to a mere nonhuman. In other words, such poems can be considered as both expressions of gratitude and heartfelt reciprocity as well as anxious justifications motivated by the Victorian ambivalence for interspecies attachments. These motifs are also evident in Gerald Massey’s “The Dead Boy’s Portrait and His Dog” (c.1893), where the mourner is the animal, addressing the graven image of his deceased master, as if failing to recognize that the

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portrait is not the boy. The dog is “Wistfully wondering where you are at,” the verb tense suggesting that for the dog the wondering is ongoing and possibly without end (Massey 31). It poses confused questions with elevated vocabulary but content that denotes a simple mind: Why have they placed you on the wall… . Why do I never hear my name? Why are you fastened in a frame? You are the same, and not the same. (31) Like a child, the dog wonders if it has done something to deserve this grief: “What has your little doggie done?” (31). Several moments emphasize that the dog is experiencing the loss of a connection that used to be intercorporeally intimate. The dog recalls that the human’s touch would illuminate its “life”— “You used to pat me, and a glow / Of pleasure through my life would go!” (31)—and that in turn its tail “was once a waving flag / Of welcome” (32). Its own body is incapacitated by the loss of its human owner: Now I cannot wag It for the weight I have to drag. I know not what has come to me. (32) The emphasis is on lacking movement, staying still and endlessly wistful, and wondering: “I watch the door, I watch the gate; I am watching early, watching late, / Your doggie still!—I watch and wait” (32). Perched in vigil by the image of a dead master, the loving pet remains perpetually “watch [ing] and wait[ing],” “Your doggie still!” Quite literally, the animal cannot move, cannot leave, is frozen perpetually in the place of mourning. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “To Flush, My Dog” (1843) also features a mourning element in the way that the dog waits, a stilled life, by the owner’s sick chamber. As Kevin A. Morrison notes in his essay included in this volume, both the female friend who gifted Barrett the dog and the dog itself have typically been interpreted as substitutes for the rightful targets of her affections—her beloved brother, who drowned, and her future husband, Robert. Perhaps such interpretations stem from a continuing reluctance to value an interspecies relationship to the same degree as one between humans, but the poem invites this by depicting Flush as unique because he is unusually humanized. From the onset, Barrett calls Flush her “Loving friend” and posits that through the dog’s “lower nature” runs the “true faith” of the human friend who gifted her the dog (Barrett Browning 80), suggesting the dog was graced with a faith the poet identifies as inherently human. The intercorporeality also flows the other way; the human gives the animal something in return, rendering this animal as more-than-animal. Barrett Browning also physically likens Flush to a human: his ears are “Like

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a lady’s ringlets brown” alongside his “silver-suited breast” (80). After the bodily inventory, she applauds Flush’s playful energy, building up to the predictable praise of the dog’s faithfulness. Like the dogs that wait outside the bedroom door night after night, Flush proves her devotion by waiting by his mistress’s sickbed. “[O]f thee it shall be said, / This dog watched beside a bed / Day and night unweary,—” within “a curtained room / Where no sunbeam brake the gloom, / Round the sick and dreary” (81–82). Even while other things refused to attend—the roses “died apace” and even the “Bean and breeze resigning”—this dog remains: “This dog only waited on” (82). The next two stanzas compare the work of hunting or sporting dogs that “[t]racked the hares, and followed through / Sunny moor or meadow” and “Bounded at the whistle clear / Up the woodside hieing” with the work of this special dog: This dog only crept and crept Next a languid cheek that slept, Sharing in the shadow…. This dog only watched in reach Of a faintly uttered speech, Or a louder sighing. (82) While this repetition emphasizes the individuality of this special dog, the “only” one to perform this emotional labor, the syntax also reduces the dog to “only” creeping, “only” watching—another stilled life. The thirst for companionship is wholly projected onto the animal: the dog creeps in as a supplicant, rather than a desperately wished-for companion for an intensely isolated and vulnerable human. The premise of canine unconditional love required further demonstration, so it followed that “this dog was satisfied” if his sick owner would just offer one caress and refused to leave the sickroom even when called “to blither choice” (Barrett Browning 83). This dog loves with unusual devotion—“he loves me so, / Better than his kind will do / Often man or woman”—and “because” of this, in exchange for this that was first given by the dog to the human, “Give I back more love again / Than dogs often take of men, / Leaning from my human” (84). This line recognizes that in loving a dog so intensely, she marks herself as being unlike any other human; she is “leaning [away] from” those who would sneer. Alternatively, it is the dog, not her, that’s “leaning from” her humanity, graced by her humanity to be more-than-animal. Both the poet and Flush, as Morrison notes in his chapter to this volume, “strain beyond their respective limitations in order to mutually transform themselves,” but Browning acknowledges that the two are still inevitably not equal. For three stanzas, the poet calls for blessings upon the dog, naming specific things that must have been particular to Flush, such as a hatred of cologne (Barrett Browning 85) or his “feast-day macaroons,” then pauses again in apparent

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self-consciousness. In stanza nineteen, the narrator pityingly questions whether the dog, “made so straitly,” can receive such ample blessings: “Little canst thou joy or do / Thou who lovest greatly.” Given such limitations, she then generally wishes that the dog might be “blessed to the height / Of all good and all delight / Pervious to thy nature”: in short, the dog’s reward is to be “Only loved beyond that line,” that human-defined species line, “With a love that answers thine, / Loving fellow-creature!” (85). Thus the only reward humans can give to even the most special and human-like dog is love; this heartwarming declaration explicitly limits humans from otherwise improving their treatment of animals. These mourning poems highlight the contradictions in Victorian attitudes to nonhuman Others: a dynamic of self-affirmation alongside ongoing emotional appropriation. The graveside and chamberside pets reveal the fantasy of interspecies intercorporeal attachment: the animal’s love was so great, and so single-minded, that if the human were out of the picture (dead or asleep), the animal lacked its own existence. The ways in which these relationships were allowed to be celebrated were limited by a tacit warning against excess—many lines that could not be crossed. What appears a compliment to the animal—how loyal, this deserving animal—becomes harmful: a placing on a pedestal that limits the receiver of praise to that for which it is being praised. In attempting, consciously or not, to justify a deep attachment at the moment of loss, these poems that appear to epitomize the Victorians’ excessive pet mania also underscore the strength of the underlying premise: that few, if any, nonhumans are truly worth humanity’s while. The disposability of the nonhuman, without any dispensation for grief or acknowledgment of loss via mourning, is tantamount to saying that no loss happened—that everything should carry on as usual. Restricting the public mourning of nonhumans is about setting limits so that animals can be used for any purpose and easily replaced, and attempts to increase the recognition of the value of these interspecies relationships and animal lives will clash against those regressive forces that, consciously or not, work to preserve anthropocentrism. Ironically, last rites are the front lines. Mourning, after all, does not only mark the value of the deceased; mourning also creates value for existing and future beings deemed similar to the deceased. Grievability thus shapes the quality of existing and future lives. Reversing the assumption that we grieve what we care for, this stance suggests that we cannot care for what we cannot grieve for. As such, how nonhuman beings were mourned and how the Victorians defined the boundaries of acceptable mourning for even their most treasured nonhuman family members also circumscribed the extent to which animals could be loved in life. These regressive forces stand fast against the possibility that an interspecies relationship could ever rival or supplant any sort of relationship between humans, demanding that speciesism function as a fierce form of species loyalty. Perhaps because there is no real argument to support the idea that relationships between humans are necessarily more rewarding or fulfilling than interspecies ones, and no valid reasoning for exploitation that

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does not come down to self-interest, one could only appeal to the apparent naturalness of speciesism, of like going with like. Speciesism is thus not only the practice of prioritizing humans over nonhumans but also the requirement that all humans adhere to the norms that value humans over nonhumans. Like any rabid -ism, speciesism demands public pledges of allegiance and punishes those who appear to betray its demands with threats of expulsion: favor humans over all nonhumans or risk ceasing to be treated as a full human. Underneath this call for blind species allegiance is the fear that if humans were allowed to prioritize nonhumans over fellow humans, human practices toward nonhumans would also likely change. Perhaps mourning rites will not lead to rights, but the ability to recognize animal death as a legitimate loss may be a start.

Notes 1 See also Howell’s “A Place for the Animal Dead.” 2 The poem is alternatively titled “To a Dead Dog,” in Mallock’s 1893 collection, Verses (37), and “Questions,” in The Dog in British Poetry, edited by Robert Maynard Leonard (195). 3 The poem is alternatively titled “A Spark Divine,” in The Dog in British Poetry, edited by Robert Maynard Leonard (195). 4 Breeanna Spain, Lisel O’Dwyer, and Stephen Moston discuss similar contemporary attitudes in “Pet Loss.” 5 The other Landseer paintings with the same theme are Attachment (1829) and The Poor Dog (The Shepherd’s Grave) (1829). 6 An interesting exception to this pattern is Thomas Hardy’s elegy to “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household,” published in 1928, well after the Victorian era but clearly its product. Not only is the dog the speaker, but he is no supplicant: instead, he chastises his humans for failing to sufficiently mourn him. In the first stanza, he badgers them by demanding “Do you think of me at all … ?” and in the second “Do you look for me at times … ?” (Hardy 915, 916). In particular, he wants to know if the “Wistful ones” still look for him “Strained and still” (916). This poem flips the script, positioning the humans as the ones who wait in stilled lives and who pine for a dog that will no longer offer itself: Should you call as when I knew you, I shall not turn to view you, I shall not listen to you, Shall not come. (916) Wessex merited two elegies (“A Popular Personage at Home” [1924] is the other), and Hardy also eulogized a pet cat (“Last Words to a Dumb Friend,” 1904). See—in addition to her chapter in this volume—Roth’s “The Zoocentric Ecology of Hardy’s Poetic Consciousness” and West’s Thomas Hardy and Animals.

References Anonymous. “On Some Elegies on a Lap Dog.” The Poetical Register, and Repository of Fugitive Poetry, for 1808–1809, London: Law and Gilbert, 1812, p. 428.

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Arnold, Matthew. “Geist’s Grave.” English Elegies, edited by J. C. Bailey, John Lane, 1900, pp. 203–206. Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. “To Flush, My Dog.” The Dog’s Book of Verse, edited by J. Earl Clauson, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1916, pp. 80–85. Bates, A. W. H. Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain: A Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 43–67. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Chez, Keridiana. “Creating Carnivores and Cannibals: Animal Feed and the Regulation of Grief.” Mourning Animals: Rituals and Practices Surrounding Animal Death, edited by Margo DeMello, Michigan State University Press, 2016, pp. 143–149. Chez, Keridiana. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in NineteenthCentury Literature and Culture. Ohio State University Press, 2017. Collins, Mortimer. “Tory, a Puppy.” The Dog in British Poetry, edited by Robert Maynard Leonard, London: David Nutt, 1893, p. 192. Doyle, Francis Hastings. “Epitaph on a Favourite Dog.” The Return of the Guards, and Other Poems, London: Macmillan and Co., 1866, p. 282. Fitzgerald, William G. “Dandy Dogs.” Strand Magazine, vol. 11, Jan.–Jun. 1896, pp. 538–550. Fulton, Gertrude R. “A Visit to the Dog Cemetery.” American Primary Teacher, vol. 14, Sept. 1896–Jun. 1897, New England Publishing Co., 1897, p. 343. Hardy, Thomas. “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household.” Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems, edited by James Gibson, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, pp. 915–916. “Harry.” Young England. London: Young England Office, 1883, p. 12. Hodgetts, E. A. Brayley. “A Cemetery for Dogs.” Strand Magazine, vol. 6, edited by George Newnes, George Newnes, 1893, p. 625. Horsfield, H. Knight. “Old Rocket.” The Dog in British Poetry, edited by Robert Maynard Leonard, London: David Nutt, 1893, pp. 195–197. Howell, Agnes R. “The Shepherd’s Chief Mourner.” Through the Woods: A Volume of Original Poems. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co., 1875, p. 62. Howell, Philip. “A Place for the Animal Dead: Pets, Pet Cemeteries and Animal Ethics in Late Victorian Britain.” Ethics, Place & Environment, vol. 5, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–22. Irving, Washington. Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson. London: T. Allman, 1842. Kean, Hilda. “Human and Animal Space in Historic ‘Pet’ Cemeteries in London, New York, and Paris.” Animal Death, edited by Jay Johnston and Fiona ProbynRapsey, Sydney University Press, 2013, pp. 21–42. Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing. Ashgate, 2001. Kete, Kathleen. The Beast in the Boudoir: Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris. University of California Press, 1994. Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship. University of Chicago Press, 2006. “London’s Queer Dog Cemetery.” Reporter, no. 10, Oct. 1900, p. 33. Mallock, William Hurrell. “Lines on the Death of a Pet Dog.” Poems, London: Chatto & Windus, 1880, p. 123. Mallock, William Hurrell. Verses. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1893. Mangum, Teresa. “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture,

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edited by Deborah Deneholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 15–34. Massey, Gerald. “The Dead Boy’s Portrait and His Dog.” The Dog’s Book of Verse, edited by J. Earl Clauson, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1916, pp. 31–32. Moine, Fabienne. Women Poets in the Victorian Era: Cultural Practices and Nature Poetry. Ashgate, 2015. Nettle, George H. “The Bond.” The Dog’s Book of Verse, edited by J. Earl Clauson, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1916, p. 147. Payn, James. “On Our Dog Jock.” Poems, Cambridge: Macmillan & Co., 1853, p. 79. Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond. “We Meet at Morn, my Dog and I.” The Dog in British Poetry, edited by Robert Maynard Leonard, London: David Nutt, 1893, pp. 283–284. Roth, Christine. “The Zoocentric Ecology of Hardy’s Poetic Consciousness.” Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, Routledge, 2017. Spain, Breeanna, Lisel O’Dwyer, and Stephen Moston. “Pet Loss: Understanding Disenfranchised Grief, Memorial Use, and Posttraumatic Growth.” Anthrozoös, vol. 32, no. 4, 2019, pp. 555–568. Tague, Ingrid H. “Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, Spring 2008, pp. 289–306. Taylor, Chloë. “The Precarious Lives of Animals: Butler, Coetzee, and Animal Ethics.” Philosophy Today, vol. 52, 2008, pp. 60–72. Taylor, Chloë. “Respect for the (Animal) Dead.” Animal Death, edited by Jay Johnston and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Sydney University Press, 2013, pp. 85–101. Trench, Frederick (Lord Ashtown). “On Being Shown the Tomb of a Favourite Dog.” Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, vol. 101, July-December 1831, p. 438. Watson, William. “His Epitaph.” The Dog’s Book of Verse, edited by J. Earl Clauson, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1916, p. 167. West, Anna. Thomas Hardy and Animals. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Willett, Henry. “In Memoriam.” The Dog’s Book of Verse, edited by J. Earl Clauson, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1916, pp. 168–169.

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Grave Thoughts Thomas Hardy’s Elegies for Pets Christine Roth

Both as a poet and an activist, Thomas Hardy consistently challenged the prevailing Victorian attitudes about the place of the “animal” in the world. Finding in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species an “ethically intense attention to the whole range of nature,” Hardy asserted that “the discovery of the law of evolution, which revealed that all organic creatures are of one family, shifted the centre of altruism from humanity to the whole conscious world” (Levine 37). Hardy then went on to argue in a 1910 letter to the Humanitarian League that [f]ew people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching consequence of the establishment of the common origin of the species is ethical; that it logically involves a readjustment of altruistic morals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has been called ‘The Golden Rule’ beyond the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. (Millgate, Life and Work 376–377) Hardy believed we owe to our animal neighbors the same charity that we owe to our human neighbors. We live with all other animals in a continuum of empirical and spiritual being. Not coincidentally, as he was grappling with and writing about postDarwinian ethics, Hardy began memorializing family pets. All the pets who died while Hardy was living at Max Gate between 1885 and 1928 are buried in a pet cemetery on the left side of the front garden. Each grave has its own tombstone, and all but one were carved by Thomas Hardy himself. In doing so, he not only guarded the animals’ dignity after death: he elevated them as sentient subjects, each with an individual identity. Whatever anthropomorphizing surely occurs with pets, Hardy sought to preserve the unique personhood of each of his nonhuman companions. Such a gesture sprang in part from the earlier efforts of the Romantics, from Burke and Blake to Schiller and Shelley, to reconnect human society to its primal roots, to escape the crass rationalism that was sweeping through industrialized Europe. Hardy now had the preeminent biologist of the nineteenth century on the side of that reconnection. Yet, well before Darwin, Sir Walter Scott

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commissioned a statue of his dog, and William Wordsworth wrote two tributes in memory of Music, his brother-in-law’s dog, in 1805. In 1808, Lord Byron wrote an epitaph for his Newfoundland dog Boatswain, and the monument on the dog’s tomb is larger than Byron’s own. Later, Matthew Arnold wrote epitaphs for his two dachshunds, Geist and Kaiser. Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramé) wrote eulogies such as “My Dog’s Epitaph” (1826) and “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” (1827).1 And the Brontës’ dogs, Keeper and Flossie, are buried just yards from where all the Brontës themselves (except Anne) are buried. The world was animated beyond recognition by industrialized society; it was brimming with nonhuman desires and fears and affections. Not simply following the nineteenth-century fashion for all things funerary, Hardy carried over this concern for the kinship of animals and the resulting treatment of them by challenging anthropocentric assumptions about nonhuman animals in mourning and memorializing his pets as individual personalities. As Michael Millgate explains, Hardy possessed an “extraordinary capacity for imaginative identification” and “an almost morbid sensitivity to the sufferings of others” (Biography Revisited 380). Nowhere was this sensitivity more evident and more galvanizing than when Hardy was considering the status and welfare of nonhuman animals. When his favorite cat was “mutilated by the mail train” in 1901, he wrote to Sir George Douglas: A gloom has been cast over us here since yesterday by the loss of a favourite cat… . The violent death of dumb creature[s] always makes me revile the contingencies of a world in which animals are in the best of cases pitiable for their limitations. (Hardy, Selected Letters 144) By carving a tombstone for his pet, Hardy moved beyond the pity for the animal’s limitations in favor of a sense of communal grief at the death of a fellow creature, a friend. He does not look down on the deceased pet but instead looks across, in solidarity and sympathy, at a lost companion. Hardy’s dog Moss was the first pet to be interred in the pet cemetery at Max Gate. Prior to engraving the first tombstone, though, Hardy was already looking for ways to memorialize his pets, to keep them ever-present to the world. In fact, immediately following Moss’s death in September 1890, he wrote to Edmund Gosse, hoping to secure a photographic relic: We are quite in grief today. Our poor dog Moss died this morning, and we have buried her under the trees by the lawn. It was singular that your last photo included her. That happens to be the only portrait of any sort that was taken of her: so if you could let us have it when developed (even if not a good picture in itself), we should be glad. You see, there was a fate at work in your securing Moss, though you missed Kiddleywinkempoops… . (Hardy, Collected Letters 217)

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Even years later, when their pet cat Kitsey was found strangled in a rabbit’s snare on Conquer Barrow, something that Hardy described as “an entirely gratuitous & unlooked for blow,” Hardy’s grief and despair were assuaged only by the “melancholy pleasure” he took in memorializing his pets justly and resolutely, as he did by carving the headstones himself (Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, 65). Hardy also wrote memorial poems, such as “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” and “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household.” Seeming to heed his wife’s call in an 1898 article in Animals’ Friend to “attend to [the animal’s] voice, remembering that he has not language but a cry,” Hardy carves these poems with explicit detail and, surprisingly and disarmingly, with the first-person voice of the pets themselves, emphasizing their unique personalities and inscribing the voices of these “lesser” creatures as indices for remembrance, reflection, and insight. Like Hardy’s fifty or so elegies for his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford Hardy, who died in 1912, the elegies for his pets “trace and explore mourning, memory, guilt, repentance, and acceptance” (Edmond 152) in ways befitting full personhood, exercising a formal mastery that signals to readers a seriousness of purpose—to the point that, in the case of Kitsy’s elegy, Florence Hardy complained that Hardy’s all-consuming mourning for the cat and belief that the lost pet was his “only friend” smacked of “hideous ingratitude” (West 181–182). To some extent, the tombstones and the elegies fit within the nineteenthcentury fashion for pet memorials and within Hardy’s own morbidity. Lady Cynthia Asquith reports that Hardy was “preoccup[ied] with his plans for his own burial—plans which were perpetually being changed,” and she reports that Hardy took J. M. Barrie “to see the place where he want[ed] most to be buried” one day, then took him the following day “to see the place where he would like next best to be buried,” and even took the second Mrs. Hardy to see “the bench on which he used to sit while he was courting her predecessor” (qtd. in Ray 245). In July 1922, E. M. Forster described an afternoon at Max Gate during which Hardy showed him “the graves of his pets, all overgrown with ivy, their names on the head stones. Such a dolorous muddle” (Gibson 166). Forster recalls Hardy, “like a caricature of his own novels or poems,” explaining, “‘This is Snowbell—she was run over by a train … this is Pella, the same thing happened to her … this is Kitkin, she was cut clean in two, clean in two—’” (166). Read in isolation, Hardy’s graphic description of animals’ deaths and his perceived eagerness to wallow in the pathos of the cemetery might appear to be gratuitous and lurid, or at least self-indulgent and sentimental, but, in the context of his vigorous activism on behalf of animals—especially his numerous published letters condemning vivisection, the plumage trade, the inhumane treatment of zoo and sport animals, and the unnecessarily cruel slaughtering methods—and in the context of his belief in these animals’ kinship with human beings, Hardy’s memorials press an altogether different—and larger—ideological campaign to transform “one animal into all animals” (Mangum 31). Like the memorials at the famous Hyde Park dogs’ cemetery in London, Hardy’s pets

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call into question “the established boundaries of anthropocentric orthodoxy” and create “an intertwined geography of humans and other animals … not simply in material form but beyond this in emotion and imagination, reason and reflection, grief and hope” (Howell 148). The poet’s morbidity is the personal expression of a deeply political solidarity. While the elegies—both those written in stone and those written in ink— inscribe monuments to specific pets and emphasize their individuality, they also speak for all nonhuman animals who have looked around with “a much-amazed reproachful stare, / As at unnatural kin, / For bringing him to a sinister scene / So strange, unhomelike, hungry, mean” (Hardy, “Bags of Meat”). The elegies and monuments bring animals into the consideration and deference that affirms the value of all life within a universal system of kinship. Like the passages in Hardy’s novels that, according to Anna Feuerstein, “thro[w] off human pretensions through [their] intricate focus on animal life,” these monuments offer a kind of accounting and restitution for the ways that “humans have ignored animal kin, and continue to control their lives while simultaneously denying them” (Feuerstein 197). In this way, we can recognize grief for pet animals in Hardy’s memorializing that is more than just an overflow for draining emotion. It is also a springboard for awakening our moral concern for the millions of creatures who have intrinsic value, whose lives are wasted and twisted at our hands, and yet for whom no tears are shed. (Rollin, qtd. in Howell 149) In this way, “grief and mourning for pets is a demonstration of the attribution of personhood to animals, companion species being transformed into second selves” (Howell 127). Celebrating and identifying with animals as “second selves” may be anthropomorphic, but it is not necessarily reductive or dismissive. In these cases, the blurring of human–animal distinctions—as Kevin A. Morrison argues elsewhere in this volume—“undermines the primacy” accorded to humans and, “in highlighting the similarities between pet and owner, call[s] into question the delimited and supposedly self-evident category of human.” Moreover, by attributing interiority and virtues traditionally associated strictly with humans, this anthropomorphic construction of the deceased animal can also “lesse[n] the gap between animals and humans and, if only to a certain extent, destabiliz[e] human sovereignty” (Feuerstein 57). By upsetting the hierarchies we impose on nonhuman animals, the anthropomorphizing of pets triggers the simple tension we feel between a past that contained the pet and a present that doesn’t, between memory and forgetting, presence and absence, comfort and grief. In his poem “The Roman Gravemounds” (1910), written in memory of Kitsey, Hardy focuses on a man who, like himself, has come to make a grave for his beloved cat. Choosing a spot among Rome’s “dim relics” where “Caesar’s warriors lie,”

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the man “carries a basket and spade” and “delves in the ancient dead’s long home.” To the world, the cat in the poem seems insignificant. Yet, for the man in the poem, the memory of this “little white furred thing, stiff of limb, / Whose life never won from the world a thought” displaces the greatest of human legacies: [M]y little white cat was my only friend! Could she but live, might the record die Of Caesar, his legions, his aims, his end! Verging on bathos, the poem nonetheless strikes a note that rings true for anyone who has mourned a beloved pet who was, at the very same time, regarded by outside observers as no more than part of the domestic décor, a “little white furred thing” that existed, as a living being, only inside the person who loved it—vanishing in a moment of disregard. Hardy might be answering Wordsworth’s “Tribute to the Memory of the Same Dog” (1807): 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. (lines 1–7) Animals, like other dispossessed groups, were granted neither the rites of sacralization nor the rights of civilization, and their membership in the new Darwinian “family” of creatures granted them nothing further; they are like dead children who have been exhumed and “packed … away in the general foss / With hundreds more” to make way for a new drain (“In the Cemetery” [1911]). With the children unceremoniously removed to a ditch, their parents are left to “cry over a new-laid drain / As anything else, to ease [their] pain.” Burial and memorialization were articulations of the dead’s significance to society, of their place in a community. By giving his pets a private burial and carving their tombstones with names and, in some cases, epitaphs about their personalities, Hardy also carves out a space for the animals in a social, spiritual hierarchy of creatures. So, although the world in general saw the cat in “The Roman Gravemounds” as no more than “a small furred life [who] was worth no one’s pen,” Hardy (as both mourner and elegist) returned to him a status he had been denied by society. Indeed, both Hardy and his future wife found Kitsey’s life worth their pen. Florence repeatedly mentioned Kitsey’s death in her letters to Edward Clodd in 1910, noting that Hardy was “in the depths of despair at the death of a pet cat” and that he lamented, “Was there ever so sad a life as mine?” (qtd. in West 181). In this way, the animal cemetery is a “celebration of a particular personal cross-species relationship” for which

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[j]ustification is not needed; nor are measures to convince the unsympathetic of the existence of the sentience of animals. Animals do not need to ‘speak’ from beyond the grave to convince particular humans that they have consciousness—in this context it is a given. (Kean 35) The pet memorial combines the public affirmation of an animal’s rightful place in the kinship of creatures with the tender, personal affection between fellow creatures. And it celebrates both a humaneness and a humanity— kindness, benevolence, sympathy—that binds human and nonhuman creatures as family. For Hardy, in overturning hierarchies and destabilizing divisions between human and nonhuman animals, poems memorializing the death of an animal were practically interchangeable with poems memorializing humans. “The Death of Regret” (1914), for example, was also originally written for a cat found “strangled in a rabbit wire on the barrow in sight of [Max Gate],” but, according to Florence, Hardy revised it “to apply to a person” (qtd. in Pinion 405 and Emma Hardy 105). In the poem, Hardy’s speaker gazes at a hill outside his window at sunrise and “heartily griev[es] for the comrade / Who wandered up there to die”—the “long valued one” who “trod up that rise in the twilight, / And never came down again.” Immediately following the death of his “comrade,” the speaker “let in the morn on the morrow, and failed not to think of him then.” But when he opens the shutter a week later he briefly fails to remember “his last departure / By the upland there discerned.” He gradually begins to “forget him all the day,” until he confesses that “seldom now do I ponder / At the window as heretofore”: As daily I flung back the shutter In the same blank bald routine He scarcely once rose to remembrance Through a month of my facing the scene. The cat in this poem, like several of Hardy’s other cats who “had a fatal tendency to wander onto the railway line behind Max Gate,” was found already deceased (Showalter 18). He “died yonder,” as the poem reminds us. And now, he “wastes by the sycamore” in the pet cemetery next to Max Gate. The speaker in the poem is haunted by these details, and the feelings of guilt and regret about his failure as a “friend” drive the poem forward. Indeed, the word “comrade” is an ironically Marxist moniker for a being “owned” by the speaker, and Hardy seems to be grappling with the tension between his communal/familial relationship with the cat and the economic one. But what is striking is that the guilt seems at first to be assuaged by forgetfulness. It is actually a revelation: the speaker is confessing that his “routine,” previously filled with the mundane activities of his cat, has been emptied of purpose; it is “blank” and “bald.” The world, like the speaker’s

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own mind, has been drained of that activity, and so the speaker has himself become the robotic “thing” occupying the house, seeing himself in exactly the way outsiders see other people’s pets. If Thomas Hobbes is correct in arguing that feelings of pity and grief stem from recognition and fellow feeling—a condition of sympathy that fits

Figure 6.1 Thomas Hardy and a feline friend. Thomas Hardy Collection (D-DCM TH/PH1) © Dorset County Museum

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entirely within the modern evolutionary model—then anthropomorphizing neither erases nor falsifies the real animal (Hobbes 53). Instead, it forces readers to see him, to hear her. Our instinctive pity and grief toward nonhuman animals are clues to what our language has obscured. Yet, while Hardy uses anthropocentric language, he does not base the moral worth of dogs and cats solely on their likeness to humans. For example, in the elegy to his cat Snowdove, titled “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” (1904), Hardy imagines the pet as surpassing ordinary humans in profound ways. No pet was ever mourned like this one, he says, and then borrows a phrase from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (a play driven by scenes of mourning and lamentation) to mark him, playfully, as a “Purrer of the spotless hue,” alluding to the “palliament of white and spotless hue” or long white robe of the emperor in Titus. And yet Hardy also recites the various ways that the cat made himself present—walking down the stairs, sitting in a favorite chair, climbing a “claw-worn pine-tree”—so that the grave mound, placed so near the house, continues the mundane presence of the animal within this domestic space. Like the cat in “The Death of Regret,” Snowdove was killed on the railway line, so the speaker must first come to terms with a violent death outside anyone’s view. It’s a painful realization for the speaker, and his first instinct is to push it away. Hardy desires to “bid his memory fade,” to “blot each mark he made,” and to “[s]elfishly escape distress / By contrived forgetfulness.” If, as Peter Sacks argues, the “elegy conventionally repeats, by statement and often by narrative, the death that it mourns … [which] arises partly from the mourner’s need to break down his own denial of the actual death” (Sacks 239), we can see Hardy wrestling with the reality of this death that happened “yonder” or out of sight, the “vacan[cy] and “blankness” that now occupy “the chair whereon he sat,” and Snowdove’s simultaneous absence and presence as a “small mound beneath the tree”: Housemate, I can think you still Bounding to the window-sill, Over which I vaguely see Your small mound beneath the tree, Showing in the autumn shade That you moulder where you played. The mundane “routine” is resumed, brimming with vitality, but only in his imagination, so vacancy and “blankness” overtake the scene, and Hardy wants the feeling to stop, even as he knows that his heartache connects him to the nonhuman person he has lost. Like Shakespeare’s Titus, the speaker here “recount[s] [his] sorrows to a stone” until he has “not another tear to shed” (III.i.1156, 1407). We find this sort of agonizing pathos among the stones in Hardy’s elegies to his wife as well. In “Rain on a Grave” (1914), for example, Hardy writes of Emma’s grave,

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By refusing to look away from the grave, Hardy’s “desire to forget is posited against the ethical and emotional urge to remember and resist death’s finality” (Benziman 135). Hardy, a man who lived covered in and surrounded by cats, cloaks the entire scene with Snowdove’s memory.2 As a result, he erases the “hurtful absence” so that the cat’s “movements now seem to make [him] omnipresent, charmingly dispersed around him” (Ramazani 967): Strange it is this speechless thing, Subject to our mastering, Subject for his life and food To our gift, and time, and mood; Timid pensioner of us Powers, His existence ruled by ours, Should—by crossing at a breath Into safe and shielded death, By the merely taking hence Of his insignificance— Loom as largened to the sense, Shape as part, above man’s will, Of the Imperturbable. As I have argued previously, the language of mourning here anthropomorphizes the cat, but it also compensates for the creature’s otherwise diminutive role.3 The death of this pet throws the poem’s speaker into an ontological crisis that, as he points out, directly contradicts the animal’s subaltern position in the household. The speaker first describes the cat as a “Timid pensioner of us Powers” and a “speechless thing, / Subject to our mastering, / Subject for his life and food / To our gift, and time, and mood.” After death, though, when the cat “[takes] hence of its insignificance,” it “[looms] as largened to the sense, / Shape as part, above man’s will, / Of the Imperturbable.” Hardy’s rhetoric of the sublime elevates the creature to the realm of Shelley’s skylark—an imperturbable or “blithe Spirit” that “deem [s] / Things more true and deep / Than we mortals dream (Shelley II. 1, 88– 90)—while also recognizing it as a real cat buried in the backyard. The elegy and the burial challenge any anthropocentric notions of how and for whom a person mourns for a being who means something that cannot be measured fully in human terms. The details of the cat’s life recognize the animal’s dependence on Hardy for sustenance, but they do not suggest “a sense of

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imperial mastery over animals” that Randy Malamud identifies as the “predominant trope that undercuts the value of most animal poetry” (27). Hardy was always playing with the roles of pets in his household and challenging the idea that he was “master” over them. He referred to them more often as companions than as subordinates. Indeed, in a 1926 letter to Sydney Cockerell, Hardy alludes to the importance of being able to converse with his more-than-a-dog Wessex: “Of course he was merely a dog, and not a good dog always, but thousands (actually thousands) of afternoons and evenings I would have been alone but for him, and had always him to speak to” (Meynell 314). And, if to be a dog is “to lack a narrative, to fail to take hold within others’ language and memories,” as Ivan Kreilkamp notes about dogs in Dickens’s Great Expectations (Kreilkamp 81), then Hardy makes the final push here toward recognizing Wessex’s personhood, albeit a ventriloquized one. The “dog of such strong character,” the dog who “flopp[ed] on the floor” and “subsided into silence” when Hardy read poetry aloud, the dog who “howled to the point of disruption” if he missed his favorite radio show, Children’s Hour, on the BBC, the dog who “shared his home” for thirteen years—Hardy imagines this dog as finally, after death, crossing the boundary between human and nonhuman animals and speaking back to him (Personal Notebooks 284; Ray 244). Such a rhetorical device may at first seem to go so far beyond the language of mastery to smack of what Randy Malamud mockingly refers to as humans’ “heroic march toward omniscience and unbounded experiential conquest” at the cost of “paus[ing] to reflect on what it means for us to know (or try to know) animals,” or what Teresa Mangum calls “the dubiously humane process of ‘humanizing’ animals,” and goes on to identify as a processs that does not “respond to an animal as truly other, truly itself” (Malamud 40; Mangum 21). But while the pets were familiar to Hardy and his wife, he periodically called attention to their Otherness, and friends regularly commented on their mysterious, even supernatural qualities. Walking with publisher Newman Flower, Hardy once gazed at his kitten Cobweb (or “Cobby,” a gift to console Hardy after Wessex’s death) and commented, “Flower, I often wonder how much animals know that we don’t know” (Flower 195). And, in a famous anecdote, Ellen Titterington, a parlor maid at Max Gate from 1921 to 1928, tells the often repeated story of one November evening when Wessex ran to the door but, upon seeing William Watkins (founder of the society of Dorset Men in London), “stopped snarling, and with its coat bristling, whined, then retreated in the house with every appearance of fear” (Gibson 151). The next day the household learned that the man had died during the night. When Titterington told T. E. Lawrence about Wessex’s behavior, Lawrence responded, “I am not surprised. There is an Arab proverb that says: ‘The dog sees the Angel of Death first’, and that is what he saw” (151). It is therefore ironic that in “Popular Personage at Home” (1924) Wessex is oblivious to the specter of his own death. He lives as a Keatsian creature “not born for death,” pleasantly unaware of his own mortality, at the center

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of a memento mori. As he watches the dog move around the landscape, Hardy literally remembers that everyone dies. As with “Last Words to a Dumb Friend,” the prosopopeia enables Hardy “to ‘enter’ [the dog’s] consciousness, or rather preten[d] to intrude upon theirs by adopting or inventing their point of view” (Benziman 73). But, before that, he begins by characterizing Wessex as not only an individual personality but as an elevated “personage” of distinction: I live here: ‘Wessex’ is my name: I am a dog known rather well. I guard the house; but how that came To be my whim I cannot tell… . The word “here” in the first line mimics the “Here lies …” epitaph so popular for tombstones, blurring the lines of exactly where Wessex now exists—whether he is “here” or elsewhere, present or absent, a spirit/ memory in the house or a body in the grave. In what might be called an “anticipatory elegy,” Wessex is inseparable from Max Gate, and the poem looks ahead to when the space now inhabited by the living dog will transform into a focal point for mourning and remembrance of the deceased one. Emphasizing his name reminds readers that he is part of a human community. He guards the house, but he wonders aloud at what led him to that “whim”—a word choice that again emphasizes the dog’s sentience. He is not acting on instinct or from a sense of obedience; he acts on capricious desires and odd fancies. In the middle stanzas, Hardy then balances Wessex’s anthropomorphized thought process with a celebration of what precisely makes him a dog. Wessex cheekily refers to Hardy and the rest of the household as “the folk I let live here with me,” but he also runs, leaps, takes walks, and sniffs out the “rarest smells.” Hardy also establishes a setting saturated with the dog’s presence—a presence that will provide a focal point for Hardy’s elegy for him two years later: No doubt I shall always cross this sill, And turn the corner, and stand steady, … And that this meadow with its brook And bulrush, even as it appears As I plunge by with hasty look, Will stay the same a thousand years. Wessex, a dog named after the fictionalized reimagining of southwest England, becomes almost synonymous with the land around Max Gate—the sill of the house, the water meadows around southwest Dorset, and the bulrushes (the Schoenopletus lacustris native to the area). Within this scene, Hardy immerses the reader in the dog’s consciousness, oblivious to the very mortality that occasioned the poem. Wessex guards the house, takes walks,

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and sniffs to find the “rarest smells.” In the last stanza, however, Hardy, who would die just thirteen months after Wessex, introduces death into the dog’s narrative: At times informs his steadfast eye, Just for a trice, as though to say, “Yet will this pass, and pass shall I?” While the poem clearly speaks to the grief and anxieties of the living, it also consistently attempts to speak from an animal-centered position. Just as the speaker in “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” remembers how the cat “humoured our queer ways” or waited for humans “who loitered around” (not understanding an apparent purpose for their activity), the poem clearly positions human behavior as the extrinsic, the mysterious, the Other. The pet is something real, tangible, comprehensible—domesticated. But the fact that Hardy can only conjecture and imagine what the dog is thinking acknowledges the part of the animal that is still unknowable, the part that remains free from human familiarity and domination. Hardy’s narrations ask readers to acknowledge that what the dog thinks is important, even if we can’t be sure what exactly he is thinking. So, while Hardy may be guilty in some ways of what Randy Malamud identifies as the “too-prominent presence of the poet” in animal poetry, he also attempts Malamud’s proposed “higher aspiration”: a scenario that “situate[s] poet/reader and animal as coterminous; cohabitant; simultaneous; and thus ecologically and experientially equal” (34, 33). By doing so, Hardy does not “signify the closure of the relationship between person and animal,” but, instead, he “initiate[s] and inspire[s] the beginning of an imaginative consideration and reformulation of who these animals are and how we share the world” (33–34). Hardy’s anticipatory elegy to Wessex is about sentience, about consciousness, and at the end of the poem the dog experiences a glimpse of his mortality and the transience of life. Specifically, Hardy imagines detecting a glimmer of doubt and uncertainty about mortality in Wessex for just an instant (a “trice”). This awareness has traditionally been a sign that one is human, which is perhaps why Hardy detects and narrates the dog’s mortality crisis from the outside instead of simply ascribing the words to the dog. Wessex did, in fact, die two years later at 6:30 pm on 27 December 1926, and in his elegiacal soliloquy “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household” (1928), Hardy continues to recognize the agency and, in many ways, the personhood of the animal. Wessex, a wire-haired terrier who regularly trespassed conventional animal–human boundaries himself, was beloved in the household but, according to Lady Asquith, he was also “the most despotic dog guests had ever suffered under” (qtd. in Ray 244). He walked on the dining table unchecked, challenging guests for each mouthful of food; slept on an eiderdown bed in Hardy’s study or in Hardy’s bedroom; and ate goose and plum pudding at Christmas (Millgate, Biography 489). He was a

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ubiquitous presence in the house. So, when he died, Hardy came to terms with his physical absence in stages, first acknowledging his death, then his burial, and finally his new place outside: 27 December. Our famous dog “Wessex” died at ½ past 6 in the evening, thirteen years of age. 28 Wessex buried. 28. Night. Wessex sleeps outside the house the first time for thirteen years. Hardy repeats that last point in a letter of 29 December 1926 to Harley Granville Barker: Our devoted (and masterful) dog Wessex died on the 27th, and last night had his bed outside the house under the trees for the first time in 13 years. We miss him greatly, but he was in such misery with swelling and paralysis that it was a relief when a kind breath of chloroform administered in his sleep by 2 good-natured Doctors (not vets) made his sleep an endless one— A dog of such strong character required human doctors! (Personal Notebooks 284) The narrative of Wessex’s death emphasizes his identity as more-than-dog. He died not as a generic animal but as a fellow creature deserving of relief, compassion, and respect. The elegies to Wessex that followed emphasize the dog’s place in the titular “household” and grapple with the reality of his absence not just from the world in general but from that household specifically. The speaker addresses Wessex’s vital—both lively and significant—co-presence in the household again in the final stanza of the poem when he imagines Wessex saying that he would not come “Should you call as when I knew you, / Shared your home” (lines 27–28). In this way, Hardy undermines the codification of human–nonhuman animal relationship as “hierarchical and fundamentally impermeable” and disrupts the assumption that “we are in here, they are out there” (Malamud 3). Even the epitaph on Wessex’s grave sets him apart from other creatures. He is “famous,” greater-than, worthy of monument. And the personality traits that characterize him combine the best of modesty and strength. He is “faithful” but also “unflinching.” He is a model of human virtues in his devotion, his resoluteness—his doggedness: THE FAMOUS DOG WESSEX August 1913–27 Dec. 1926 Faithful. Unflinching. The “notion of canine fidelity, which reached its apogee in the Victorian years,” was “principally organized around the issue of death or dying”

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(Howell 127). The words “faithful” and “unflinching” align Wessex with dogs such as Greyfriars Bobby and the canine subjects of Landseer paintings such as The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner and The Faithful Hound—figures that Philip Howell identifies as models of “faithfulness in a faithless world” (127). It is therefore no surprise that the voice of faithful Wessex recalls the “faithful phantom” from “The Haunter” in Hardy’s elegiac sequence from 1912–1913, immediately following Emma’s death. Written for Hardy’s deceased wife, the poem could work as a pet elegy as well. In it, the voice of Emma speaks to Hardy from beyond the grave, repeatedly noting that she is not able to answer when he calls. She can only listen. The voice of Emma imagines taking a “journey” to where the “night rooks go,” just as Wessex narrates a walk among the evening “sky-birds” in his elegy. In both cases, the poems focus on the faithfulness of these spectral companions. Recalling the scene in which a dog helps the pregnant and dying Fanny Robin to an inn in Far From the Madding Crowd, Wessex’s and other dogs’ fidelity is also a nostalgic reminder of a simpler, more virtuous past—an emblem of an ethical nobility that felt lost in the uncharitable, dehumanizing world of nineteenth-century materialism and progress. The scene works as a “test case” for “Darwin’s argument that the moral sense must originate in the social instincts common to both human and nonhuman animals” (West 49), and it is all the more fitting that Hardy switches places with a faithful dog and holds vigil at the dog’s grave, instead of the other way around. In “Dead Wessex,” Hardy imagines the dog asking the family if they think about him, look for him, or hear noises that remind them of him. He writes, “Do you think of me at all / At the creep of evenfall, / Or when the skybirds call / As they fly?” The allusions here to both the “creep of evenfall” and the walks that Florence Hardy recalls Hardy taking with Wessex in “summer evenings or winter afternoons” to “the stile that led into Came Plantation” imagine endings and the dying of light (Florence Hardy 435). In this context, even the image of “sky-birds call[ing] as they fly” suggests an autumnal migration before the arrival of winter. In the next stanza, Wessex goes on to ask if they look for him as they move around the house and grounds. In these repeated searchings for Wessex, as in Hardy’s repeated reminders that Wessex now lies outside of his house, we can sense not only a sadness over Wessex’s death but an element of bewilderment as well. The speaker is processing the reality of the loss—a process that might explain why, in the original manuscript, Wessex addresses his family as “wondering ones,” not “wistful ones.” They are astonished by his absence, and they marvel at their grief as they move from consternation (wonder) to resignation (wistfulness): Do you look for me at times, Wistful ones? Do you look for me at times Strained and still?

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Christine Roth Do you look for me at times, When the hour for walking chimes, On that grassy path that climbs Up the hill?

Hardy’s desire to call, to see, and to hear Wessex after death is remarkable given that he responded to his cat’s death almost 25 years earlier by trying to find “better blankness,” to “better bid his memory fade,” to “better blot each mark he made,” and to “escape distress” by forgetting the pet altogether. The chain of adjectives (“wistful,” “strained,” “still”) describing the bereaved in this stanza evokes an almost palpable sense of loss and nostalgia. The scene is saturated with the melancholy presence of absence. The “wistful” family is understandably “strained and still” as they take the walk they had so often taken with their pet. But, once again, Hardy is also crossing boundaries between species and identifying the humans with the dog, for it was, in fact, Wessex who was famous for his concentrated looks during these excursions. Emma Hardy remembers how Wessex “gaze[d] at the landscape, ‘as if,’ to quote Hardy’s oft-repeated comment on this, ‘it were the right thing to do’” (Emma Hardy 435). And, almost seeming to anticipate the lines in this poem, Cynthia Asquith recalls how Wessex had a habit of pelting on ahead [during these walks], and then, as if in sudden misgiving, stopping at intervals to look back at his master with an anxious, questioning expression. Hardy said he had often noticed this enquiring, apprehensive look in the eyes of dogs. (qtd. in Ray 246) According to John Berger, animals look at humans in an “attentive and wary” way (Berger 13). And while an “animal may well look at other species in the same way,” only humans will recognize that look as familiar: “Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look” (13). In the next stanza, the voice of dead Wessex connects the speaker’s personal grief with a pathetic nostalgia for times past. As Hardy recites the quotidian details of his life with Wessex, the memories “‘ontologically shift’ as they lose their everydayness and become quasi-sacrosanct” so that “what is sacred turn[s] domestic and what is domestic turn[s] sacred,” and “homeliness and homely thoughts” work as “means of assuagement” (Badrideen 81, 82, 87): You may hear a jump or trot, Wistful ones, You may hear a jump or trot — Mine, as ’twere — You may hear a jump or trot

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On the stair or path or plot; But I shall cause it not, Be not there. The humans’ actions move from thinking about and looking for Wessex in the previous stanzas (recognizing his absence) to supposing that they see and hear him (imagining his presence). Here we see the grief process. The poem moves Wessex from life into death: from inside the house (“the stair”) to outside of the house (the “path”) and then to the grave (the “plot”). By associating these spaces with the memory of Wessex, Hardy redefines the scene around the dog’s absence, and the whole landscape becomes a memorial to Wessex’s legacy. It seems all the more fitting that Wessex was replaced with a “lazy smoke-coloured Persian cat—appropriately named Cobweb” (Gibson 238). Wessex has become a reminder of the past, a sticking place, that suggests both stasis and the passage of time. In all these elegies, real animals, not caricatures or one-dimensional symbols, share in Hardy’s “plot.” Mundane activities and scenes take on a ritualistic and sacred dimension. And the ethical and existential argument Hardy pursues extends far beyond the scope of a personal commemoration of a deceased friend; he is confronting—and contesting—the Victorian conception itself of the “animal.”

Notes 1 See Mangum, “Animal Angst,” for this information and more about writers’ memorials for their deceased pets. 2 Noted Yale professor William Lyon Phelps, who visited Max Gate in September 1900, observed Hardy “almost covered in cats,” adding that “[t]hree or four cats were on various parts of his person, other cats were near at hand, and [that he] noticed saucers of milk placed at strategic points in the shrubbery” for both Hardy’s own cats and the “cats who come regularly to have tea” (Gibson 64). 3 See Roth, “Zoocentric Ecology,” for the complete version of this argument about “Last Words to a Dumb Friend.”

References Badrideen, Ahmed. “Home and Domesticity in Contemporary Elegy.” English Studies, vol. 97, no. 1, 2016, pp. 78–93. Benziman, Galia. Thomas Hardy’s Elegiac Prose and Poetry: Codes of Bereavement. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Berger, John. Why Look at Animals? Penguin, 2009. Edmond, Rod. “Death Sequences: Patmore, Hardy, and the New Domestic Elegy.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 19, no. 2, 1981, pp. 151–165. Feuerstein, Anna. The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2019. Flower, Newman. “Walks and Talks with Thomas Hardy.” Countryman, vol. 34, 1946, pp. 193–195.

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Gibson, James, ed. Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Hall, Louisa. “An Alternative to the Architectural Elegy: Hardy’s Unhoused Poems of 1912–1913.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 50, no. 2, 2012, pp. 207–225. Hardy, Emma. “The Egyptian Pet.” Animals’ Friend, March 1898, pp. 108–109. Hardy, Emma, and Florence. Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate, Clarendon Press, 1996. Hardy, Florence Emily. The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928. Macmillan & Co., 1983. Hardy, Thomas. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy Vol. 1: 1840–1892, edited by Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, Oxford University Press, 1978. Hardy, Thomas. The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, edited by Richard Taylor, Columbia University Press, 1979. Hardy, Thomas. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, edited by James Gibson, Macmillan, 1982. Hardy, Thomas. Thomas Hardy: Selected Letters, edited by Michael Millgate, Clarendon Press, 1990. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a CommonWealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil. 1651. Simon and Schuster, 2008. Howell, Philip. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Kean, Hilda. “Human and Animal Space in Historic ‘Pet’ Cemeteries in London, New York and Paris.” Animal Death, edited by Jay Johnston and Fiona ProbynRapsey, Sydney University Press, 2013, pp. 21–42. Kenyon-Jones, Christine. Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing. Routledge, 2018. Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 81–94. Levine, George. “Hardy and Darwin: An Enchanting Hardy.” A Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Keith Wilson, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 36–53. Malamud, Randy. Poetic Animals and Animal Souls. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Mangum, Teresa. “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize their Pets.” Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 15–34. Meynell, Viola. Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell. Jonathan Cape, 1940. Millgate, Michael. The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, 1984. Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2004. Norman, Andrew. Thomas Hardy: Behind the Mask. Cheltenham: The History Press Ltd., 2011. Pinion, F. B. A Hardy Companion: A Guide to the Works of Thomas Hardy. St. Martin’s Press, 1968. Ramazani, Jahan. “Hardy and the Poetics of Melancholia: Poems of 1912–13 and Other Elegies for Emma.” ELH, vol. 58, no. 4, 1991, pp. 957–977. Ray, Martin. Thomas Hardy Remembered. Routledge, 2017. Roth, Christine. “The Zoocentric Ecology of Thomas Hardy’s Poetic Consciousness.” Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspectives, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, Routledge, 2017, pp. 79–96.

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Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Showalter, Elaine. “His Only Friend.” London Review of Books, vol. 16, no. 17, 1994, pp. 18–19. Tague, Ingrid. “Dead Pets: Satire and Sentiment in British Elegies and Epitaphs for Animals.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2008, pp. 289–306. West, Anna. Thomas Hardy and Animals. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Part III

“Decadence, Symbolism, and the Dog”

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Dog and Dogma Canine Catholicism in Michael Field’s Whym Chow: Flame of Love Matthew Margini

In 1893, Robert Maynard Leonard, the editor of a new anthology of British dog poetry, argued that the canine canon had gone through three waves since its inception. Before the eighteenth century, dog poems were about sport; they were narratives of the hunt. In the eighteenth century, he observed, “We find the hound giving place to the lap-dog”; dog poems receded from the masculine realm of the hunting grounds to enter the feminine realm of the bourgeois interior (even though they were still mostly written by men). But it was in the nineteenth century, according to Leonard, that they took a very different turn, becoming simultaneously more intimate and more spiritual. The “more modern poets” have focused on representing two things, he wrote: the relationship between human and dog, and a distinct “belief” in “canine immortality” (ix). If only he had encountered Michael Field’s Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914; written in 1906). It is, by my estimation, both the most pious and the most blasphemous book of dog poems ever written in English. To call it “high church” would be an understatement; its thirty lyrics are replete with the imagery and rhetoric of Roman Catholicism, and it presents the dog at its center, a fiery red Chow Chow, as a figure not only immortal but godlike. The lyrics describe Whym Chow as every person in the Trinity: he is God the Father, booming with a voice of power; he is Christ the Son, dying for our sins; he is the Holy Spirit, mediating between two lovers— Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt/niece duo who wrote under the name Michael Field—in an eternal dance of triangulated desire. The poems flirt with paganism as well, identifying Whym Chow as Bacchus and Prometheus, his dancing fur become a “gift of flame.” He is everything. Yet he is also nothing: a yawning absence mourned by poets who lament the limitedness of their powers of reanimation. The authors construct a dizzyingly convoluted set of allegories to account for his presence in their lives—and, more specifically, the way he formed one part of an affective trinity between them, an identity-in-relationship. They also undermine their own representational apparatus and its various mechanisms of mausoleum-like encasement, wondering aloud: Will poetry ever allow us to meet this dog again?

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Whym Chow is the kind of work that seems sui generis, unique to the sensibility of the authors and their particular erotic, spiritual, and poetic situation. Yet it is much more bound to historical and discursive context than it would initially appear. Situated, like Thomas Hardy’s “Darkling Thrush” (1900), on a retrospective precipice overlooking the strange joys and even stranger vicissitudes of nineteenth-century British pet culture, it is the apotheosis of two larger representational and philosophical projects: on the one hand, a search for the canine soul that had increased in intensity and urgency with the destabilization of species categories and the controversies surrounding vivisection; on the other hand, a century-long struggle among poets—particularly Elizabeth Barrett Browning—to articulate the nature of the dog and the inarticulable eroticisms of interspecies love. The eponymous chow that Whym Chow celebrates was a birthday gift from Bradley to Cooper on 26 January 1898 and was named after a family friend, Edward Whymper (Kuzniar 157). When the dog died in 1906,1 the authors were distraught; according to biographer Emma Donoghue, they believed that “the intensity of [Whym’s] love had caused his life to be ‘consumed’ after only eight years, and that he was now their ‘guardian angel’ or ‘spirit guide’” (122). One response to the dog’s death was Whym Chow, a collection of 30 lyrics that they composed shortly after but refrained from publishing until Katharine decided to put out a limited edition of 27 copies for their friends in 1914, a year after Edith had died of cancer—and only a few months before Katharine’s own death. The poems were bound in luxurious, red-gold terracotta suede that was apparently chosen to mimic the look and feel of the dog’s fur; Marion Thain has memorably called it “a kind of textual taxidermy” (198). They also responded to the dog’s death by converting to Catholicism in 1907, which their shared journal narrates as an event directly precipitated by Whym Chow’s “sacrifice.” The journal describes how they met a priest in Edinburgh and spoke of their “joy in Benediction,” to which he responded that “it was nothing beside the Mass”; how they started to read missals until it became a daily routine (“my natural food”); and how, finally, they went to Mass and found it to be a profoundly unshackling experience: At last, on Dec. 2nd, I resolve—we resolve—our apprehension is made an act. We go together to Mass. On Saturday evening we had been as mad, and without hope, blaspheming our fellowship with reproaches— the very chaff of Hell. We went to Mass, and the prison walls of our life fell as we prostrated ourselves before the one perfect symbol, and all we love was with us, included and jubilant. (Works and Days 271)2 This moment of conversion is followed by a paragraph that names its two greatest catalysts, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Whym Chow:

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Figure 7.1 Cover of Michael Field, Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914; written in 1906) © The British Library Board (c_99_e_21)

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Oscillating between first person (“I/me”) and third person (“Michael”), singular and plural, the journal attests to the paradoxical and irreducible identity of the authors themselves. But this selection also begins to show us what they saw in both Catholicism and Whym Chow—what they saw overlapping between dog and dogma, such that one could lead them to the other. They celebrate the possibility of “all we love” being included in “the one perfect symbol”; they refer to the necessity of “subsuming sacrificed divinities under the one divine sacrifice.” The great theme of this account is the mysterious coexistence of multiplicity in unity: an ontological conundrum of Godhood that meets, and maps onto, the ontological conundrum of doghood. What is a dog? As Canis familiaris became increasingly familiaris over the course of the nineteenth century, moving into the home and assuming the status of what Ivan Kreilkamp, borrowing a term from Claude Lévi-Strauss, has called “metonymical human beings,” this question became increasingly important to answer—and increasingly difficult (“Dying like a Dog in Great Expectations” 82). In 1839, mid-century natural history columnist W. J. Broderip found it impossible to ascertain where the dog came from: Your good cynogenealogist will trace out for you the pedigree of any particular race, … but it will be difficult to find one who will give you any authority for the existence of a primitive race of dogs, in the common acceptation of the term. (“Recreations in Natural History” 63) In 1845, William Youatt’s The Dog (1845), at the time a widely respected natural history and veterinary reference, defined the dog as “the only animal that is capable of disinterested affection”: He is the only one that regards the human being as his companion, and follows him as his friend; the only one that seems to possess a natural desire to be useful to him, or from a spontaneous impulse attaches himself to man… . Many an expressive action tells us how much he is pleased and thankful. He shares in our abundance, and he is content with the scantiest and most humble fare. He loves us while living, and has been known to pine away on the grave of his master. (2)

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The definition seems reasonable enough. But Youatt can only cite what “seems” to be a natural inclination, a “spontaneous impulse”; his language betrays its own basis in conjecture and in two forms of reading: the interpretation of “expressive actions” and the compilation of representative anecdotes. In a similar way, Thomas Bewick’s General History of Quadrupeds (1790), a staple of popular natural history throughout the nineteenth century, betrays a good deal of uncertainty in its celebration of the dog, which spans many more pages than the entry for any other animal: Of all animals, the Dog seems most susceptible to change, and most easily modified by difference of climate, food, and education; not only the figure of his body, but his faculties, habits, and dispositions, vary in a surprising manner: Nothing appears constant in them but their internal conformation, which is alike in all. (325) The dog is an inchoate mess of body types, plastic in the extreme. Its mutability might be its truest essence. And yet, Youatt’s invocation of the dog as an eternal “he” that loves us unconditionally, that “shares in our abundance,” and Bewick’s proposal that all dogs have a universal “internal conformation” despite their external plasticity, reveal another side of these natural historical descriptions: their desire to elaborate an ontological or archetypal definition of the dog, over and against the vagueness and instability of the biological species. This definition of the capital-D Dog is, of course, an ancient idea, going back at least to the Dorian Gray-like fate of The Odyssey’s Argos. But in nineteenth-century Britain, it drew particular strength from dog poems, which were everywhere: disseminated in periodicals, inscribed on tombstones, exchanged in letters, recited in public, collected in anthologies. As dogs entered the home, they became even more readily the subjects of lyric appreciation—including, to an increasing extent, lyric genres typically reserved for humans: elegy, ode, epitaph, love poem. In a strange but consistent way, however, these poetic figurations also tended to shun the domestic space from which they sprang; instead of dogs at home, they depicted heroic dogs, masculinized dogs, assisting their male masters—or saving helpless female figures—on the precipice between life and death. Wordsworth’s “Fidelity” recapitulates a common trope of the genre: in a mountainous “savage place,” a dog stands vigil over the body of its master, accompanying him even into the afterlife. In Byron’s “Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog” (1808), an epitaph to his departed dog Boatswain that stands outside his estate at Newstead Abbey, the poet describes what being “A DOG” means: Near this Spot are deposited the Remains of one

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Byron’s poem gives its reader very little of an impression of what Boatswain was like as an individual; what he was takes precedence over who he was. But individuality is not the poem’s goal. The poem elaborates an archetype concordant with the eternal “he” in Youatt: an image of the ideal Dog as faithful, courageous, strong, and (always implicitly) male.4 The authors belong to a countertradition that emerged in the wake of, and in contrast to, this style of poetic appreciation. They belong to a group of writers who pushed back against both the masculine vision of doghood and the very idea that doghood could be defined and encapsulated at all, embracing instead some of the vagueness—the ontological liminality, the categorical confusion—that archetypal dog poetry was so determined to circumvent. Rather than focusing on the moral exemplarity of their subjects, these poems focus on the basic physical details of cohabitation and interspecies entanglement; they present their subjects as vivid presences and enveloping sources of affective energy, knowable through touch more than vision. And yet, these poems also ceaselessly and self-consciously stage their own inability to capture those presences, those relationships; they foreground their own mediation, as well as their own unfortunate tendency to transform the dog into an abstract allegory. Mary Russell Mitford’s dog poems belong to this tradition, as do Emily Dickinson’s vague and enigmatic evocations of her Newfoundland dog Carlo, which capture him as a shadowy presence stalking the margins of her poetic consciousness. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s mid-century poems about Flush, her cocker spaniel, are the clearest and most vivid examples—and the clearest progenitors of Whym Chow. 5 In 1889, the anticruelty activist Frances Power Cobbe opened her own anthology of dog poetry, The Friend of Man—and His Friends, the Poets, with the overt claim that poetry’s power—its epistemological role, even—is to locate virtues within the dog that “men of Science” cannot recognize (10). “Blinded over their microscopes,” they see “only so much bone and tissue”; the Poets, by contrast, “behold in those humble forms, Courage, Patience, Faithfulness unto death and after death” (10). To corroborate her theory of poetic perception, Cobbe invokes the opening lines of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet “The Poet” (1850): “The poet hath the child’s sight in his breast, / And sees all new. What oftenest he has viewed / He views with the first glory” (353). Cobbe suggests, via Barrett Browning, that the job of the dog poet is to see the true essence of the species in the actions of the individual. The irony of this invocation is that the sonnet Barrett Browning actually wrote about her dog, “Flush or Faunus,” published in the same 1850 collection

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as “The Poet,” is considerably less self-confident and more self-conscious about what the poet is able to see in her companion. It is indeed a poem of sight, but it is also a poem of “bearded vision,” filled with images of both blindness and amnesia: You see this dog. It was but yesterday I mused forgetful of his presence here Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear, When from the pillow, where wet-cheeked I lay, A head as hairy as Faunus, thrust its way Right sudden against my face,—two golden-clear Great eyes astonished mine,—a drooping ear Did flap me on either cheek to dry the spray! I started first, as some Arcadian, Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove; But, as the bearded vision closelier ran My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above Surprise and sadness,—thanking the true PAN, Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love. (187) The opening line announces that the sonnet will be a clear, confident representation, correcting for the “forgetfulness” she experienced “but yesterday” (1–2). As Laura Brown points out, the poet places the dog “at a comfortable and familiar distance in the composition of the scene of the poem,”—in the frame, in focus, in the traditional position of a lyric portrait (Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes 66). But this optic is quickly overturned, becoming only the first of three different and equally unsatisfactory poetic gazes. Like a child refusing to sit still for his school picture, Flush leaps out of the frame and comes too close, just after the first line establishes focus: she recollects his head “thrust[ing] its way / Right sudden against my face” (5–6). Her vision blurs, and everything else with it: suddenly, he is not a coherent form but a collection of body parts moving and acting independently (“a head”; “two golden-clear / Great eyes”; “a drooping ear”); suddenly, he intrudes upon the gaze of the poet with his own inscrutable and magnificent eyes; suddenly, there is movement—an entangling of bodies and affects—that she can barely contain in a grammar of broken phrases. This chaotic poetic frame conveys much more intimacy than the phrase “You see this dog,” with its implied positioning of the speaker at a David Attenborough-esque observational distance. And yet, paradoxically, it also heightens Flush’s alterity: the closer he is, the hairier and less human he seems. The last gaze, after the sonnet’s volta, seems to bring resolution to the epistemological and optical confusion of the poem’s middle section. The poet is finally able to stabilize an image of Flush through the upward, or inward, gaze of allegorical comparison—an imaginative gaze that places him

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and her in another realm entirely, a “twilight grove” where her “Arcadian” meets his “goatly god” (10–11). The phrase “bearded vision” aptly encapsulates the ambiguities of the poem’s middle section, in which his hairy body envelops her and blinds her the “closelier” he gets, blurring the boundaries of species, anatomy, and even gender. But it could refer just as easily to the “bearded vision” of Pan that she arrives at: a “vision” in the imaginative sense, the conceptual sense, that dries her tears by lending ontological coherence both to Flush and to the entire situation. She renders him abstract, replacing physical dog with metaphysical god, physical intimacy with imagined twilight encounter. She interprets him, and comes to believe in her interpretation: the comparison begins in the contingent grammar of metaphor (“A head as hairy as Faunus”), but it ends as a confident declaration of identity: “I knew Flush, and rose above / Surprise and sadness— thanking the true PAN, / Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love” (12–14). The “heights of love” here are indisputable, but the poem’s verticality at this stage (see also “I rose above / Surprise and sadness”) also suggests a problem: her metaphorical flight has taken her far beyond the scene of interspecies entanglement that she struggled to fit into poetic language just a moment ago. The “Arcadian grove” is not the couch where Flush thrusts himself into her frame of mind; it is a place of abstraction and solipsistic intellection, removed from everything that she struggled to recollect in the first place. She “thank[s] the true PAN” because the mythic figure has provided her with an apparatus of conceptual stabilization, but the poem is shadowed by the implication that this comparison is a false one, an instinctual and habitual way to withdraw from him rather than communing with him. Even before they completely intermingle, her mind is already racing to compare his head to the hairy head of “Faunus”; her mind is reaching for something that might keep him in that more comfortable middle distance, where he can be apprehended, individuated, and ultimately differentiated from herself. The volta re-establishes distance and is itself a mechanism of that distance. The poem as a whole—poetry itself—ends up recapitulating the problem that produces it in the first place: she “muse[s] forgetful of his presence” all over again, the verb “muse” cannily connoting both poetic inspiration and abstract thinking (2).6 The poet finds herself faced with the awkward asymmetries of the lyric situation: the fact that she is lavishing language upon a creature that does not have the same language, and the fact that her mind cannot help but impose an elaborate conceptual and allegorical apparatus upon him that has nothing to do with his profoundly different subjectivity. Like Barrett Browning’s sonnet, Whym Chow begins in a mode of poetic self-effacement, even self-negation, lamenting an inexorable misfitting between its anthropomorphic language and its zoomorphic subject. “I CALL along the Halls of Suffering,” it begins, describing “grand vaults” the poet must “traverse” in order to “hear / The patter of thy feet, little Chow” (9).

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Yet that very disjunction between the loftiness of poetic discourse and the littleness of doghood leads to a moment of acknowledged misapprehension, of representational absence: Forth, Forth! Away! He is not of these Halls— No motion of him there. Whym Chow no sound: His ruby head shall never strike their walls, And nowhere by a cry shall he be found. (9) “Do words say everything? Can words say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that lies beyond the reach of words?” (Flush 37). So wonders the fictionalized Barrett Browning in Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933); so wonders the real Barrett Browning in her poems about him. So wonder Michael Field as well, it seems, and perhaps for similar reasons: Whym Chow is acknowledged to be “beyond the reach” of poetic representation because his presence will always exceed it. The authors construct a lavish, encrusted mausoleum and announce its echoing vacancy. Even the materiality of the book itself calls attention to its own perverse, frozen approximation of the living, breathing creature. The poets suggest the failure of their representational apparatus most vividly in Lyric XX, where they lament that Whym Chow is “doomed” to live on as a constellation among other celestial archetypes: 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 constellation spin. Thou wert mortal to begin An endless movement so! (38) As the poets admit in the first line, these celestial archetypes “move”: they revolve around the earth in “endless movement,” shining down upon the human world. It would certainly seem to be a kind of honor for Whym Chow to be among “those shining Beasts that no more die,” as immutable and iconic as a Zodiac sign or a Jungian archetype. But that very immutability is framed by the poets as an unfortunate (and inexorable) fate: the movement of these figures is stasis in comparison to the movement of Whym Chow during his life, which they figure constantly—here and in other lyrics—using the language of liquidity, embodiment, and warmth. Whym

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Chow was a flame-like presence; they want to stave off his transformation into a poetic and conceptual abstraction, a figure of thought rather than a figure of life. In the lyric, they imagine themselves literally holding him in “our arms” while his spirit tries to float away into the cosmos, “breaking through / Our protection from the great / Doom of thy unearthly fate” (38). The problem at the core of Whym Chow is that the authors find it difficult not to facilitate this ascension themselves, through the very act of writing about him. Like Barrett Browning, they cannot seem to resist transforming him into an elevated allegorical figure—sometimes even a similar one: just as their predecessor reached for Pan, they reach for Dionysus, a god who seems apt both in his boundary-crossings and his liquidity.7 But these figurations are always haunted by their own abstraction, their own ways of extracting the dog from everything that made him special in the terrestrial world. The poets continually ask: How is what they’re doing different from turning him into a “constellation” after all? And yet, Whym Chow does not merely approach this problem of figuration through authorial self-effacement. The paradoxical project of the text is that it tries to avoid reducing Whym Chow to a constellation-like figure, not only by questioning its own allegorical propensities but also by extensively elaborating another form of allegory altogether: a sincere comparison between Whym Chow and the Holy Trinity. In Whym Chow, the essence of the dog defies poetic representation precisely because it is, in the most dogmatic (albeit blasphemous) sense, a Trinitarian paradox. This idea proceeds directly from the way Michael Field perceived their relationship with Whym Chow when he was still alive. In Works and Days, Edith reports that “for years I have worshipped the Holy Trinity,” and she connects the concept to the dog explicitly when she avows that “closer than ever was this worship when Whymmie died” (271). The basis of this link becomes clear when she mentions that there are two Trinities: on the one hand, “the little earthly Trinity, Whym Chow, Hennie and Michael” (“Hennie” referring to Edith; “Michael” referring to Katharine); on the other hand, “the ineffable Divine Trinity—that symbol all creators must adore, who attain to its fastness of Life” (271). Whym Chow describes this “earthly Trinity” overtly in its expressions of triangulated (and interspecies) affection; it is a relationship in which the dog, mediating between the Father-like Katharine and the Sonlike Edith, approximates something like the Holy Spirit. In a neo-Platonic way, their “earthly Trinity” constitutes a terrestrial, less-than-perfect version of the “Divine Trinity” and its ontological conflations: the metaphor bespeaks a desire for their three souls to be consubstantial. And yet, the metaphor does not only describe the relationship between the two humans and their dog; with even more frequency and fervor, the lyrics apply Trinitarian imagery to Whym Chow himself. The soul of the dog is not just a “Great Perhaps”; it is a sacred mystery.8 The fifth lyric, titled “Trinity,” makes Whym Chow’s Holy Spirit-like mediation abundantly clear:

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I DID not love him for myself alone: I loved him that he loved my dearest love. 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, That comforted the moan Of Thy Beloved, when earth could give no balm And in Thy Presence makes His tenderest calm. So I possess this creature of Love’s flame, So loving what I love he lives from me; Not white, a thing of fire, Of seraph-plumèd limbs and one desire, That is my heart’s own, and shall ever be: An animal—with aim Thy Dove avers the same … O symbol of our perfect union, strange Unconscious Bearer of Love’s interchange. (15) The dove, the flame, the idea that Whym Chow lives (or proceeds) “from” Katharine and Edith as the “unconscious” medium of their love for each other: the Holy Spirit references pile up in an ostentatious display of metaphoric identification. The speaker even goes so far as to argue that it is “no blasphemy” against God “to feel we loved in trinity.” There is the ever-so-subtle implication, however, that it might be a blasphemy against Whym Chow himself, precisely because of his animality. The poem gains an air of hesitance for the first time when it invokes the word “animal” and compares him to “Thy Dove,” a comparison that ends with an ellipsis and is interrupted by a dash. Suddenly, the speaker seems to be grappling with a problem: the dove, less a real animal than a metaphoric one, has intention (“with aim”); whether Whym Chow has intention is impossible to ascertain. The vocabulary of the last two lines shifts ever so slightly from telling a story of true identification (Whym Chow “is” the Holy Spirit, the same way Flush “is” Pan) to telling a story of projection, of naming that could be going against the indiscernible will of the dog. We see, held in apposition, the words “symbol,” “strange,” and “unconscious,” implying a lack of certainty. “Trinity” begins by establishing him as the Holy Spirit; it ends by wondering whether he really is the Holy Spirit, which leads into the question that begins the (suggestively unnamed) Lyric VI: “WHAT is the other name of Love? Has Love another name?” (16). As it turns out, Love (or Whym Chow) does, at least, have another possible Trinitarian identity: lyric VI stages a scenario that elevates him to the level of “Godhead” (16). Whym Chow approaches “his Creator’s feet above” and somehow fulfills a “grievous want” for joy and vivacity. The second stanza describes the Father’s response without actually repeating it verbatim:

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In Hebrew scripture, the name “Yahweh” is not a name but a placeholder for the unnamable. The way the poet inserts “Response, my Answer” in place of God’s response performs the same anti-identifying move: what God utters is akin, in its ineffability, to the identity of God himself. And Whym Chow is akin to the Creator precisely because he, too, encapsulates this dual paradox, irreducible to language both in that his nature is unnamable and his “Responses” are not speech. The third stanza rhapsodizes about these “Responses”: Response! O little Love, O little Chow! O Answer! What is Love’s most answering bliss? What is Love’s happiness alert but this To welcome? And thy rage of welcome how Should words tell dim— What some might call the dog’s “muteness” becomes, in this equation, his most divine quality: the fact that he “responds” not with “dim” words but with a booming “rage of welcome.” In “The Animal that Therefore I Am” (2002), Jacques Derrida remarks that the way to get past a logocentric worldview that dismisses the animal because it is linguistically impoverished—the kind of worldview that has produced a term like “animal” in the first place, grouping together under a single name all creatures that are not human— would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation. (126) In Whym Chow, “the absence of the name and of the word” is not only “something other than a privation” but precisely what brings the dog close to the position of God Himself. One could say that the Trinity of Whym Chow is determined by three Ms, all of which are qualities both animal and divine. He is like the Holy Spirit in his mediation; he is like the Father in his muteness; and he is like the Son in his mortality, as both the emphasis on his earthly “sacrifice” in

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their journal and the poems in Whym Chow attest. Lyric XIII (“My Cup”) describes how the dog “hast drunk the bitter cup,” a “sacramental” and sacrificial grail that kills him so that his spirit, and their love, might be eternally free (28).9 Lyric XVII (“Created”) depicts him as the exemplar of embodiment in general, demonstrating the fact that all that is created bears A limit scarcely to be borne, Till out of it, though unawares, A Spirit of new life is drawn. (33) Activists like Cobbe found dogmatic Catholicism (as well as high-church Anglicanism) irreconcilable with anticruelty largely because of its strict dualism of soul and body: if animals did not have souls, their suffering could not truly be considered suffering. As Gauri Viswanathan has noted, this “crisis of belief in Christianity” is what led several of the most famous anticruelty activists to seek systems of belief and moral reasoning—foremost among them, Theosophy—that flattened the distinction and focused on the body in pain (“Have Animals Souls?” 444). Here, at least, the Fields keep Catholic dualism alive, not only asserting that Whym Chow is a “Spirit” trapped within the limitations of an earthly body10 but comparing his suffering to the pain of Christ. Lyric VII, however, which directly follows the poems that compare Whym Chow and the Holy Spirit (V) and Whym Chow and Godhead (VI), offers the most compellingly intricate identification between the dog and Jesus Christ—or, rather, a distinctly Christlike humanity. Linking back to VI, it begins in the space of God the Father, the void of creation: “It is so old and deep a thing, / The being fond of animals—so far / It goes back to when earth was just beginning” (18). Here, however, animals are depicted not as proxies (or interlocutors) for the Creator himself but as creations that emerge alongside man, filling a deep-seated “loneliness of soul” (18).11 The last stanza explains why we must seek to place ourselves at their level, why theirs is a state we must emulate: God in His spaces overhead Seeks not the powers and angels for His heart: From these in passion ever is He parted, And with our mortal ignorance hath part. Our wild, divining simpleness entrances, And in the solace of our upward glances The truth of His own mystery prevails. So is it when the creatures of the Earth What was and shall be in ourselves reveal From eyes that pierce us not: where love avails

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In Lorenzo Monaco’s fourteenth-century painting The Intercession of Christ and the Virgin, Christ appears as the fulcrum in a triangle of gazes: humans look to him; he looks up at God. Lyric VII of Whym Chow presents a similar configuration with different players: like Christ, the dog is an intercessor between humanity and divinity who bridges realms through eye contact. Man looks down at the animal. The animal, in its “divining simpleness,” looks up—not into man (“from eyes that pierce us not”) but at a being that exceeds its “apprehension” and judgment. Thus, the poem invites us to live by the animal’s example: to look up at God in the way that animals look up at us (and in a way that, furthermore, defies the downward and discriminatory logic of empiricism). It is in this way that their meekness, their mortality, “entrances” in two senses of the word, commanding our attention and offering a path to the divine. Accounts of the nature or character of dogs from the mid-Victorian period often repeat the same phrase: “Man is the god of the dog.”12 One attributes it to Burns (Youatt 10), another to Bacon (Massie 476); others leave it unattributed (Broderip 60) in a way that suggests that it is a cliché of indeterminate origin (much like the dog itself). In this lyric, at least, the poets seem to express the same basic analogy, aligning the human above the dog with the God above the human. But Whym Chow presents several challenges to this assumption—to any worldview, for that matter, that would place the dog definitively “lower” than the human in a species hierarchy or chain of being. Even in the arrangement that implicitly places him below humans, Whym Chow is still more divine—divine in the sense that Christ is divine, in the sense that he quite literally embodies a meekness and an orientation toward the heavens that can redeem humans if they emulate it. Furthermore, he is like God not only in that he is like Christ but in that he is like every other person of the Trinity, and like the Trinity itself in his simultaneous occupation of multiple ontological states. In their seamlessly interconnected form, the poems enact cycles of transfiguration: dog as mediator becomes dog as creator becomes dog as created thing. In the most complete and exuberant way possible, Whym Chow reverses the cliché: “Dog is the God of Man.” Viewing the poems through a psychoanalytic lens, Alice Kuzniar maintains that their stained-glass ornateness is an overcompensation for the dog’s loss. The loss of the dog is such an acute and jarring event, so difficult to translate into language, that it often leads to attempts at “resurrection in

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Figure 7.2 Lorenzo Monaco, The Intercession of Christ and the Virgin (before 1402) Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters Collection, 1953

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signs”—again, the Christ parallel is clear (Melancholia’s Dog 143). Even if “language is always haunted by its own uncertainties and imprecision, especially with regards to a species who does not share it,” Kuzniar writes, “at least in bringing a dead pet back to life through signs, language can seem to triumph” (143). In its linguistic exuberance and its constant attempts to make the dog “present” to the reader, she sees Whym Chow as what Julia Kristeva would call “a veritable Verneinung or negation of loss: I have not lost my pet, for it is recovered through poetry” (156). She is not wrong. But it would be one thing if Bradley and Cooper had simply mined Catholicism for a suitably decadent aesthetic to apply to the vicissitudes of interspecies affection. It is entirely another matter that they seem to have found, in Catholicism, the right aesthetic as well as the right ontology—a concept of the being of God Himself that corresponds with their concept of Whym Chow (and vice versa). Kuzniar aligns Kristeva’s Verneinung with another German coinage: Walter Benjamin’s Überbenennung or “over-naming.” The tragedy of attempts to resurrect the lost pet through language, she says, is often that this language “needlessly, superfluously, and disproportionately squanders itself… . If nature is solemnly mute, then human speech immoderately babbles” (26). Yet in Whym Chow, “over-naming” is not merely a linguistic quality located on the surface of poetic form; it is a quality that speaks to the multifarious and metamorphic nature of the dog as the poets conceive it, a nature defined by the simultaneous occupation of multiple modes of being. In Lyric XV, the speaker expresses a wish to be “present in life’s mystery” and fulfills it with a stanza that encapsulates the “mystery” of Whym Chow’s “presence”: O Now, Now! Little Love, God’s Moment, bright, Ever with us, yearning bright In thine every leap of light, In thy spring of instant glance, Clear from ebb of circumstance, Animate from birth to birth. Of Life’s Moment new on earth. Thou art here as sparkling sun In thy presence, brightest One. (31) Whym Chow is “One”; Whym Chow is also many, as the stanza suggests in several ways: with the word “sun,” which situates him in the clouds but also connotes the Son of Man; with the dual appellations “God’s Moment” and “Life’s Moment”; with the implication that he is a being situated both outside “the ebb of circumstance” and in the temporal world. “One” is the word that ends the stanza, but the predominant idea that runs through it is

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simultaneity—the momentariness of Whym Chow, the inapprehensible immediacy of his presence. It is in this way that he is truly flamelike (or a “gemlike flame” à la Pater): because, like fire and God, he is an overabundant force whose flickering presentness cannot be grasped. It can only be looked at with wonder, with “eyes that pierce [it] not” (18). In some ways, the images of Whym Chow as a being both of multiplicity and of inapprehensible light recall the end of Dante’s Paradiso, when the pilgrim’s eyes drink in an “eternal Light” that is both the Trinity—“I saw three circles, of three colors and one circumference”—and the ceaseless movement of love itself (XXXIII.115). Why render Whym Chow divine? Why exalt him to the point of unknowability? One could certainly read Whym Chow as the logical extension (or reductio ad absurdum) of bourgeois Victorian pet-worship. If, as Harriet Ritvo has argued in The Animal Estate, Victorian dog fanciers operated under the implicit assumption that “keeping a well-bred dog metonymically allied its owner with the upper ranges of society,” perhaps on some level Bradley and Cooper transpose the same metonymic logic into a more religious key, sacralizing (or even sacrificing) the dog so as to bring themselves, by extension, closer to the divine. Or perhaps he redounds upon them in another way, his irreducible multiplicity serving as a totem for their enmeshed, multiplicitous identity-in-relationship. Derrida and Cary Wolfe, among others, have discussed how the differentiation of animals from humans—“the fundamental sacrifice of nonhuman animals”—undergirds all forms of differentiation among humans.13 Perhaps Whym Chow is “sacrificed,” rendered blissfully and divinely incoherent, not for our sins but for the rigidity of our selves. More likely, however, the divinity of Whym Chow is a response to something else: the discourse of antivivisection, and its fight against the Catholic Church to establish the canine soul. A few years after Barrett Browning’s death (and the death of Flush, too), Robert Browning published a poem that, in a much more satirical register, meditates on the same conflict that his wife dramatized in “Flush or Faunus”: the irreducible peculiarity of canine nature, and the obsessive folly with which humans try to encase it in prisons of knowledge. The difference is that the poem, “Tray— A Hero,” published in his 1879 collection Dramatic Idyls, centers not on a loving mistress but on a vicious and misguided vivisectionist. The poem tells the tale of “a mere instinctive dog” (19) named Tray who saves a beggar child who has fallen into a nearby stream. The deed is heroic enough, but then he dives in again to save the child’s doll. The crowd finds Tray’s behavior laughably inexplicable; as one onlooker puts it, “Reason reigns / In man alone” (33–34). One scientist, however, “prerogatived / With reason, reason[s]” a way to explain it: “‘John, go and catch—or, if needs be, Purchase—that animal for me! By vivisection, at expense

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Matthew Margini Of half-an-hour and eighteenpence, How brain secretes dog’s soul we’ll see!’” (41–45)

Although callous vivisectionists are its ostensible target, along with their insistence that all animal behavior is governed by “instinct,” this poem is not merely an attack on their depraved and mechanistic approach to gathering knowledge. Like “Flush or Faunus,” it is a poem about knowledge itself, a poem whose ostentatiously circumlocutive structure—a crowd of speakers standing and speaking around the dog’s unaccountable behavior— establishes the animal’s internal essence as an impenetrable lacuna, one that the vivisectionist is desperate to penetrate. Browning’s poem displays his ethical convictions at the time: by 1879 he was an outspoken member of the Victorian anticruelty movement and a prominent defender of the lives of dogs and cats, having remarked in 1875 that “I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, as far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence of sparing me a twinge or two.”14 Yet the poem is also the product of a cultural and intellectual climate in which the same question that had vexed poets and natural historians for decades—how do we explain the dog and its nature? What is the canine soul?—had become an urgent moral imperative. Some of the most well-known animal anticruelty activists defended their position on theological grounds, with arguments asserting the necessity of extending the circle of Christian sympathy—extending Christianity itself—to the lower beasts.15 In the foreword to her anthology of dog poems, Cobbe aligns herself explicitly with that project, describing how the collection is intended to correct for the soullessness of vivisectionists, “the disciples of Darwin,” and even the Catholic Church, which had maintained a distressingly Cartesian view of animal life.16 In her autobiography, Cobbe describes a conversation with Cardinal Henry Manning, a Catholic leader who actually supported her cause, on “the Catholic doctrine of the origin of Souls” (II.494). The Cardinal immediately responded “that each [Soul] is a distinct creation of God,” but could not locate these “Souls” in the bodies of animals (II.494). In Cobbe’s view, the canon of dog poetry, attesting to centuries of canine goodness, could establish the souls of dogs—and, therefore, their suffering—much more clearly and urgently than any church. Whym Chow is an outgrowth of this project; at the same time, it is, in so many ways, a rebuke of the very idea that the canine soul can be apprehended and identified. The paradox of Whym Chow is that it renders the dog divine while insisting, like Barrett Browning, on the failure of its representational mechanisms. Any argument that defines it in metaphoric or metonymic terms must grapple with the fact that it rejects its own capacity for metaphor or metonymy, even as it uses both in overabundance: O Chow, the glory and the gold-furred state That smote beyond the strength of any verse,

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And all its pride in gold, even to rehearse— The state that surged around a daily chance, If thy Beloved should enter: in thy Dance A worship; in thy light, a universe. (17) Whym Chow’s “state” exceeds “the strength of any verse” because it is like a “dance”—because, like nothing less than the Trinity, he is one and many things at the same time. But this passage also depicts another dance, a dance of epistemological (as opposed to ontological) oscillation: the dance of the poet herself. It begins with “O Chow,” the gesture of poetic identification par excellence. It moves, just as quickly, into a negation of poetry in general. But then, in response to the dog’s own “surge” of activity, it stages (or “rehearses”) a surge of signifiers: the words “dance,” “worship,” “light,” and “universe” explode around the ostensibly un-representable canine. This is the same dance rehearsed by “Flush or Faunus”: a confident expression of lyric identification (“You see this dog”), followed by an expression of imaginative failure (“I mused forgetful of his presence”), followed by a surge of metaphor that implicitly admits its own uncertainty (“The true PAN”). This is also a dance that implies an epistemology, a way of relating to animals conceptually that sees their irreconcilability to human language—what Derrida calls “the absence of the name and of the word”—not as a problem but as the occasion for an agonistic creative process that is also a form of worship, a poetics of flickering efficacy that follows their lead. “Eros is lack,” writes Anne Carson, because “its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them,” both in the sense of facilitation and obstruction (Eros the Bittersweet 16). In many ways, Whym Chow is “that which comes between” Bradley and Cooper. He mediates; he completes their “earthly Trinity.” The mystery of his nature is something that obstructs, creating in their “perfect union” some of the friction (or what Carson calls “lack”) that makes it erotic in the first place (Whym Chow 15). Yet the eroticism of Whym Chow lies not only in the way the dog “comes between” the poets but in the way language “comes between” the poets and their subject, creating a different kind of “lack.” Lyric XXV repeats a simple, direct refrain: I want you with your resolute, fine jaw Snapped down to hold one love, one love no more, Not mine, but hers we love: your glance, the spark Prometheus stole as fire, … I want you, when to guard our door you rushed, In whirlwind loyalty; … I want you with the gold-set, fearful stress

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“I want you,” the speaker repeats, and what she wants is not only the dog himself: she wants a poetry that might capture him in his manifold aspects, a poetry that is impossible to achieve. The repetition alone makes it clear that she finds herself mute (or as Kuzniar might say, “babbling”) before a creature whose muteness speaks volumes. And yet, just as imagined absence once assisted in the definition of the dog, representational absence—the “lack” that defines Whym Chow—assists here in the creation of a poetry that is both erotic and interspecific, that is erotic precisely in and through its interspecificity. Whym Chow creates a space of reverence for the profound, almost divine unfamiliarity of Canis familiaris. It reminds us that Canis familiaris itself, like any name, is an erotic and poetic construct: based in faith, incomplete in its mediations, and metaphoric despite its desire to be otherwise.

Notes 1 Apparently he became morbidly ill on the same day he was given to Cooper, eight years later (26 January 1906). Donoghue writes: [Katharine] went home that night and found Whym Chow walking into walls. Eight years old, he was suddenly blind and in great pain, evidently ‘stricken of some awful brain disease.’ She and Edith nursed him round the clock, and wrote to [their friend and illustrator Charles] Ricketts of their terror. Two days later, they decided to have Whym put down. Katherine wanted it to be done with one clean bullet, but guns were forbidden in Richmond; after six hours of bungled efforts with sleeping draughts, he died. By terrible luck, it was just then that they received Ricketts’ answer to their last letter; he told them he was sick of their ‘morbid preoccupation’ with the petty illness of their spoiled pet. ‘Well may he be jealous,’ Edith raged; ‘Michael & I love Chow as we have loved no human being’ (We Are Michael Field 120). 2 This entry is written by Edith. 3 A mausoleum larger, in fact, than Byron’s own tomb. 4 Sarah Amato further discusses how dogs served as “models of masculinity” in Beastly Possessions, 73–76. 5 For additional considerations of these poems, see the essays by Keridiana Chez and Kevin A. Morrison in this volume. 6 The poem’s dramatization of the failure of the allegorizing intellect resonates with one of the meditations in Colin Dayan’s book With Dogs at the Edge of Life: Dogs take their breath at the limits of the mental and the physical. There they live out their lives suspended between themselves and their humans. Their knowing has everything to do with perception, an unprecedented attentiveness to the sensual world. They unleash intelligibility beyond the human world, beyond the resources of rational inquiry (98).

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7 Like Whym Chow, Dionysus in Euripides’s The Bacchae is a figure of fire, liquidity, and intercession. 8 The term “mystery” repeats throughout Whym Chow, recalling both Catholic theology and a famous phrase Darwin used to describe the origin of species: “that mystery of mysteries” (On the Origin of Species 11). 9 Bradley and Cooper tried to euthanize him several times with sleeping draughts, to no avail. 10 This aligns them, in a way, with Anna Kingsford, “the leading antivivisectionist among the Theosophists,” who converted to Roman Catholicism before pursuing a more idiosyncratic mixture of occult belief systems (Viswanathan 444–445). 11 In “Why Look at Animals?” John Berger writes: “With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species” (6). 12 “I have Own God called Master,” claims the canine narrator in Rudyard Kipling’s story “Thy Servant a Dog” (1930) (102). 13 Wolfe, Animal Rites, 101. Wolfe goes on to note that the pet, as a “humanized animal,” is a creature “we exempt from the sacrificial regime” that only ends up reaffirming it. Precisely because it is the “sole exception” to the logic of absolute differentiation between animals and humans, it proves the rule (104). 14 Qtd. in Preece, Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb, 322. Browning was, at one point, the vice president of the Victoria Street Society, the first antivivisection organization in the country (founded by Cobbe in 1875). 15 For a rich account of the tensions and debates between the Catholic Church and British anticruelty, see Tuker, “Cruelty to Animals and Theology.” 16 As Cobbe would complain in her loftily titled treatise The Hope of the Human Race, “To this hour, in all Romish countries, the sneer, ‘You talk as if the brute were a Christian,’ or the simple statement, ‘Non è Cristiano,’ is understood to dispose finally of a remonstrance against overloading a horse, skinning a goat alive, or plucking the quills of a living fowl” (260). As her emphasis on “Romish countries” makes clear, moreover, the targets of anticruelty rhetoric were not just men of science: after Pope Pius IX refused a British request to open a branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Rome on the grounds that it was “a theological error to suppose that man owes any duty to the animal” (Cobbe, Life of Frances Cobbe II.489), the Catholic Church became a particularly obstinate, entrenched bête noire.

References Adams, Maureen B. Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Brontë. Ballantine Books, 2007. Amato, Sarah. Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture. University of Toronto Press, 2015. Besant, Annie Wood. Vivisection. A. Besant and C. Bradlaugh, 1882. Bewick, Thomas. A General History of Quadrupeds. 1st American Edition, G & R Waite, 1804. Broderip, W. J. “Recreations in Natural History – No. VIII.” New Monthly Magazine and Humorist, vol. 2, Henry Colburn, 1839, pp. 60–72. Brown, Laura. Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination. Cornell University Press, 2010. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems. Vol. 2, Edward Moxon, 1844.

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Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “The Poet.” Poems in Two Volumes, vol. 1, London: Chapman & Hall, 1850, p. 353. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. “Flush or Faunus.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Selected Poems, edited by Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor. Broadview Press, 2009, p. 187. Browning, Robert. “Tray – A Hero.” The Dog in British Poetry, edited by Robert Maynard Leonard, David Nutt, 1893, pp. 78–79. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Cobbe, Frances Power. The Hope of the Human Race, Hereafter and Here. New York, 1876. Cobbe, Frances Power. The Friend of Man—and His Friends, the Poets. Bell, 1889. Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Cobbe, As Told By Herself. Vol. 2, Bentley, 1894. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species, edited by Gillian Beer, revised edition, Oxford University Press, 2009. Dayan, Colin. With Dogs at the Edge of Life. Columbia University Press, 2015. Donoghue, Emma. We Are Michael Field. Absolute Press, 1998. Field, Michael. Whym Chow: Flame of Love. Eragny Press, 1914. Field, Michael. Works and Days, from the Journal of Michael Field, edited by T. & D. C. Sturge Moore, J. Murray, 1933. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage Books, 1973. Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. Herman, David. “Modernist Life Writing and Nonhuman Lives: Ecologies of Experience in Virginia Woolf’s Flush.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 59, no. 3, 2013, pp. 547–568. Kipling, Rudyard. Collected Dog Stories. House of Stratus, 2008. Kreilkamp, Ivan. “Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations.” Victorian Animal Dreams, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, Ashgate, 2007. Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Leonard, Robert Maynard. The Dog in British Poetry. David Nutt, 1893. Mangum, Teresa. “Animal Angst: Victorians Memorialize Their Pets.” Victorian Animal Dreams, edited by Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin Danahay, Ashgate, 2007. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton University Press, 2007. Massie, John. “Dogs of Literature.” Temple Bar : A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers, vol. 61, Apr. 1881, pp. 476–500. Preece, Rod. Awe for the Tiger, Love for the Lamb: A Chronicle of Sensibility to Animals. UBC Press, 2002. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Harvard University Press, 1987. Thain, Marion. “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Tuker, M. A. R. “Cruelty to Animals and Theology.” Humane Review, vol. 4, April 1903, pp. 1–10. Viswanathan, Gauri. “‘Have Animals Souls?’: Theosophy and the Suffering Body.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2, Mar. 2011, pp. 440–447.

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Wolfe, Cary. Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Woolf, Virginia. Flush: A Biography. Harcourt, 1983. Wordsworth, William. “Fidelity.” The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth, Wordsworth Editions, 1995, p. 586. Youatt, William. The Dog. Charles Knight, 1845.

8

The Symbolist Dog Arthur Symons Mourns Api John Stokes

The nineteenth century saw not only the growth of petkeeping in general but a burgeoning humanitarian movement devoted to protecting its casualties. Dogs were at the forefront of both developments. At the same time, the drive to define breed standards that had resulted in the establishment of the Kennel Club in 1873 encouraged a spirit of competitiveness. Yet the significance of dogs as evidence of domestic stability, in addition to being valued pieces of property, was also on the increase. No longer primarily the field workers that they had been in the past, but domestic companions, they were now to be treated as Harriet Ritvo and Philip Howell have shown, and the familiar formula would have it, like one of the family. This process of canine embourgeoisement mirrored changes throughout European culture, and it inevitably produced a rebellious antitype, the ideal dog envisioned by le monde bohème. In a late, short, autobiographical piece, a tribute to Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “Les Bons Chiens” (Baudelaire 2: 360–361), which had delighted in the street dogs of Brussels, the poet Paul Verlaine concocted his own version. “Le chien bohème” was “noceur, innocemment entretenu, mais pas souteneur du tout, le chien de café, de brasserie, de caboulot ou de la verne, flâneur et fier dans son genre qui est le bon” (Verlaine 23). (“The Bohemian dog, night creature, innocently maintained, but no pimp, a dog of the café, the brasserie, the bar or the drinking den, a flâneur, proud of his excellent kind.”)1 Gazing down at a crowded boulevard, Verlaine recalled his admiration for a superb Newfoundland, black as a crow but without the bird’s viciousness, who—caught in mid-coitus—had remained quite unperturbed by the surrounding traffic. A canine Don Juan, his frank display of sexuality had attracted a crowd: quand la cruelle nature, une fois satisfaite, le retient dans le dos-à-dos traditionnel auprès de l’objet chéri du moment, son regard rouge et ses belles dents, que corrobore un gron, dément dont je ne vous dis que cela, font autour d’eux un large cercle d’apprentis et de trottins. Once the cruel hand of Nature has fulfilled its function, it makes the dog—with its bloody look and its handsome teeth—remain in the traditional back-to-back position with the current object of its affection,

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emitting what I can only describe as a menacing noise. Around them there gathers a large crowd of apprentices and trainees. (Verlaine 24) Verlaine liked to shock, and he notes the comment of a fellow poet who, on passing the scene, had asked himself, rather cynically, whether anyone caught in that situation would not have behaved in much the same way as the dog. For Verlaine and Baudelaire, urban dogs were true flâneurs, driven by smell rather than sight, in some ways a projection of the footloose poets who admired them, yet still retaining that quality of animal “otherness” that made them so compelling to observe. “Le mien de chien” (“the deportment of the dog”), as Verlaine termed it, was more than just sexual swagger: it had an ancestral quality. It was the latter aspect, above all, that made dogs so attractive to other writers in the Symbolist mode who strove to go beyond an image of the disreputable tramp. The Symbolist dog wasn’t simply a creature of the night, a homeless denizen of the street, it could also resemble a spirit guide, an archaic visitant from another world, trailing recollections of previous states and cultures, incarnations of what had been lost and repressed in modern life. Although its origins lay in France, Symbolism had developed in the late nineteenth century into a cosmopolitan tendency based around a number of shared principles, of which the most powerful was the belief that through their material creations artists might generate a sense of the numinous and of what lay behind the surface of life. Symbolism was syncretic; it sought the universal in an accumulation of diverse historical particulars. Moreover, as the English proponent of Symbolism, Arthur Symons, put it in his compendious survey The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899; rev. ed. 1908), the essential characteristic of the new literary development was that “in speaking to us so intimately, so solemnly, as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, it becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual” (Symbolist Movement 9). This was at a time when “there is a great, silent conspiracy between us to forget death; all our lives are spent in busily forgetting death” (Symbolist Movement 171). Mortality, as Symbolist beliefs would have it, is something we share with the whole of the animal creation, preeminently—at least for some writers— dogs. In 1906, Maurice Maeterlinck, the Flemish author, who Symons claimed had realized “better than anyone else, the significance, in life and art, of mystery” (Symbolist Movement 158), devoted a short book, Sur la mort d’un petit chien (Our Friend the Dog), to the memory of Pelléas, a French bulldog who had died young. Pelléas, Maeterlinck acknowledged, had shown himself to be subject to mortality. But unlike a human being who has no confirmation of an external God but merely of the possibility of a divine force controlling life in a deterministic fashion, Pelléas, being a dog, had known God directly because he had lived with his own human deities.

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Maeterlinck’s view of the canine condition threatened to deprive the animal of its autonomy, and he certainly wouldn’t win the approval of today’s progressive animal behaviorists. Nevertheless, he did succeed in turning Pelléas into a metaphysical hero; the dog as species has crossed “the enormous zone of darkness, ice and silence that isolates each category of existence in nature’s unintelligible plan” (Maeterlinck 48). Similarly, Paul Adam, French novelist and founder of the magazine Le Symboliste in 1886, a keen defender of the Symbolist cause, testified that his pet dog was not just a comfort in troubled times who helped him to appreciate the beauty of life, it inspired within him “les évocations d’un rêve ancien et gracieux,” which actually “me sauvèrent” (Lestrange 129) (“evocations of an ancient and benevolent dream which saved me”). As with Maeterlinck, mutually empathic communication between human and dog unites creation as a whole, resulting in a quasi-religious revelation that is Symbolist in both mood and meaning.

Api In February 1906, Arthur Symons and his wife, Rhoda, took possession of a small black puppy of no obvious breed or distinction that they named Api. On Christmas Day of that same year Api died. Some seven years later, Symons published two limited edition pamphlets entitled respectively For Api and Songs for Api: fifteen prose passages of varying lengths in the former and eleven Songs, very short lyrics, in the latter. The contents of both were reprinted in the third volume of the three-volume Poems, part of the 1924 edition of Symons’s Collected Works: twenty-six items in all. It is hard to be absolutely certain when the Api pieces were written, but the title page of the 1913 Songs for Api suggests 1907 to 1908. Api was the Symons’s first dog, as he was to be their last, and there’s an air of wonder in Arthur’s descriptions of behavior that most owners would probably see as doggily commonplace, if typically endearing. Nonetheless, Symons’s meditation on Api’s short life can be read as a comprehensive summation of Symbolist thinking about dogs—in complicated ways. In 1908, Symons experienced a severe mental breakdown from which he never fully recovered, and his subsequent writings tend to be rearrangements, cut-and-paste collages, of previously published items. Not surprisingly, they are frequently incoherent and, on the very few occasions when it has been discussed, the Api material has been judged as the emotional outpourings of a disturbed mind. Roger Lhombreaud writes of Symons’s love for his dog and its love for him as “yet another flight towards the impossible” through which, nevertheless, “he began to be

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Figure 8.1 Arthur Symons and Api at Island Cottage Courtesy of Princeton University Library

conscious of the links that bound him to humanity” (228–289). Karl Beckson’s authoritative biography passes by Api rather hastily as the Symons’s “surrogate child” (248), although it does acknowledge the part that his death continued to play in the lives of the couple: “the fantasy of a lost child, ritualized in their imaginations, an emotionally charged symbol uniting them” (277). These judgments are accurate only in part. The slim volumes dedicated to Api were more than the products of a troubled period in their author’s life; their apparent chaos can be read as literary bricolage, a patchwork form curiously appropriate to the ways in which Api was seen by his owner. Api wasn’t simply a “symbol”: he was symboliste.

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Afterlife The first six prose items in the Api sequence refer to the dog in the present tense as if he were still living; his death is announced in the seventh; the remaining texts, prose and poetry, are all, in one sense or another, “elegies.” Laments for dead dogs have, of course, a long history going back at least to Homer and his commemoration of Ulysses’s hound Argos; Symons reminds us of this when he notes that dogs “are our friends. Argus was the faithful friend of any man in Greece” (Collected Works 302). Among British Romantics, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron all wrote in memory of their dogs. Like Argos the hunter—but unlike Api—these tended to be working animals as well as pets, and they died in relative old age. Symons’s Api died young and seems to have had no particular aptitude or training. For Api is prefaced by two epitaphs (Collected Works 300): a pantheistic quotation from Walt Whitman and a rapturous fragment from the metaphysical and Catholic poet Richard Crashaw. “To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movement of all animals, and the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside.” – WALT WHITMAN “Vine of youth’s life, and the sweet deaths of love.” – CRASHAW The text proper then sets down Api’s lineage at some length: He is older than the time of Christ, and the Christian religion has nothing to say about him. Was it, at the beginning, because he has been a god or idol among the heathens, and then, as now, was nature nothing that could possibly be regenerated? In our days the Spaniards are cruel to him because they say he is not a Christian. A Catholic bishop in England has said, I believe, much the same irrelevant nonsense. How should anything in nature become Christian, or become any the less perfect in its unconsciousness, because being a dog or flower it has no mind that we can reason with? It is one of the world’s joys that there are beings which cannot speak, and so cannot talk or intrude on the mind. Beauty in all but animals is troubling, a hallucination, a snare, a thing which can be cruel and drive men mad. “Helen,” I have been reading in an old chap book of “The destruction of Troy,” “was the most exact beauty,” but, being “wanton and amorous,” set Troy town on fire. Burroughs, is it not, has told you that animals cannot think. Why should they? Instinct is deeper than thought, in us, and why not deep enough in them to remove the need of thought? Thought was made by reason, which came, a stranger into nature, and has been a leash and trouble there in our own part of it ever since. The beasts are spared, yet they have foresight and memory, and they live, like Epicureans, in the

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day. Their beauty is a useless thing made for love and admiration, and it suffices to itself, having four aids of beauty in life: strength, energy, the joy of movement, the ecstasy of repose. They are our models to us, how to live in that part of us which will never be taught. Let them still be our idols, let them be as they were to the heathens, little gods made out of men. (Collected Works 301–302) This is such a densely inter-textual passage that it requires annotation. The very first sentence is a distant but unmistakable echo of Walter Pater’s celebrated passage on Leonardo’s Mona Lisa in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance of 1873: “she is older than the rocks among which she sits …” (70). This immediately places Api in an established historiographical tradition. Next, the references to Catholic Spain and the bishop evoke a longstanding battle between secular humanitarians and Catholic theologians that was still simmering in the late nineteenth century when Pope Pius IX forbade a branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Rome on the grounds that animals’ inferiority to humans deprived them of rights. In England, both Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning had pronounced more charitably on the status of animals within God’s creation; the more recent Catholic bishop referred to by Symons was very likely Bishop Bagshawe of Nottingham, who had pronounced that although animals had no rights because they had no free will, humans did nonetheless have duties toward them which precluded cruelty (Vaughan 144). The perennial question was (and in some circles still is) whether animals could be said to possess “souls” and, specifically, the question felt most intensely by grief-stricken pet owners, whether they could actually go to heaven. (Later on in For Api, Symons will quote Robert Browning’s line in “Toccata at Galuppi’s”: “The soul doubtless is immortal, if a soul can be discerned,” commenting “I had no more doubt about Api’s soul than about mine. Either mine does not exist or his does” [Collected Works 319]). Further on in this paragraph, Symons’s reference to Helen of Troy can be read in conjunction with his erotic poem “The Serpent” of 7 July 1907, which invokes her “eyes of death and wantonness” (Collected Works 27). The distinction between the silence of the nonhuman world and an archetypal femme fatale remains unelucidated at this point in the Api sequence but clearly connects with the absence of animal “reason,” an established topic at the time as it had been since the Renaissance. Symons registers his awareness of a complex and ongoing debate by mentioning “Burroughs” who, he says, believes that animals “cannot think.” The American John Burroughs (1837–1921), a famous naturalist, writer on conservation, and friend of Walt Whitman, held strong views about the anthropomorphism of popular fictions based on animals, as epitomized in the work of Ernest Thompson Seton. This culminated in the notorious “nature fakers” controversy starting in 1903 that eventually drew in Theodore Roosevelt. In

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1905, Burroughs published Ways of Nature, in which he expressed his partially revised views on animal intelligence. Dogs, for instance, do not experience shame and guilt; they do not have “anything like our higher and more complex emotional nature,” although they were unquestionably developed in some ways—capable of thought and reflection (144). Nevertheless, even Burroughs, the skeptic, admitted to being an admirer of Maeterlinck’s writing about Pelléas, and he allowed dogs levels of understanding that lay deeper than reason: Our interest is awakened, and our sympathies are moved, by seeing the world presented to the dog as it presents itself to us, or by putting ourselves in the dog’s place. It is not false natural history, it is a fund of true human sentiment awakened by the contemplation of the dog’s life and character. (193) But Burroughs has only a marginal place in the network of ideas that are being drawn upon by Symons. He is there along with far more potent thinkers, all of them attractive to the Symbolist sensibility. Symons’s introductory paragraph concludes with a tribute to the “four aids of beauty in life: strength, energy, the joy of movement, the ecstasy of repose” (Collected Works 301), a broad recognition of the importance of unconscious, physical impulses in animal life that reflected his recent work on a substantial study of William Blake as well as his new-found enthusiasm for the vitalism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Physicality was already a central component within the philosophical aesthetic that he brought to bear upon Api.

Celticism Api’s burial is described very briefly, perhaps because Symons assumed a shared afterlife. In section VII of For Api, he announces CHRISTMAS DAY, 1907, Api died. He was born on December 21, 1906, and came to us on February 26, 1907. The late winter sun was on the little green mound of his grave, and he lay happy and comfortable there. He is to have a Cornish Cross at his head with these words cut into the stone: Here Api waits for you and me Under this little apple-tree. (Collected Works 309) The Cornish cross was appropriate in several ways. Symons was proud of his own West Country origins, but, more to the point, Celticism played a significant part in the construction of the Symbolist dog. West Country folk myths, for instance, which were of increasing antiquarian interest in the late

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nineteenth century, are densely populated with dogs. This widespread cultural fascination culminated in the “huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral” (Conan Doyle 22) that roams Dartmoor in The Hound of the Baskervilles and is said to have been inspired by a folktale that the creator of Sherlock Holmes picked up locally (Conan Doyle xii). In Ireland, Celticism had been boosted by the folk-story collections compiled by Lady Wilde (Oscar’s mother), by Lady Augusta Gregory, and by W. B. Yeats, friend of Symons and by far the most important poet writing in English to have been influenced by Symbolist tradition. Yeats’s collection of folk tales, Irish Fairy Tales (1892), includes the story of “The Fairy Greyhound” (69–76), who tricks a naïve, greedy peasant and who, like the black dog in Goethe’s Faust, is, in fact, the Devil in disguise. In the Celtic folk stories, retrieved in the late nineteenth century but with origins dating to pre-Christian times, dogs have mixed associations. They can be both faithful companions and formidable foes, as well as natural healers who nevertheless bring messages of death. In the saga of Cuchulain, which was to inspire some of W. B. Yeats’s greatest plays and poems, the Celtic hero gains his name by first overcoming a dog and then assuming its identity. Accordingly, in Lady Gregory’s version of the legend, Cuchulain of Muirtheme, published in 1902, a blacksmith named Culain owns “a great hound who protects him and keeps watch … everyone was in dread of him, he was so fierce and so cruel and so savage” (10). Once, when the hound heard the approach of a young stranger, he began such a fierce yelling that he might have been heard through all Ulster, and he sprang at him as if he had a mind not to stop and tear him up at all, but to swallow him at the one mouthful. (10) Although the young man possessed no weapons, he was carrying a hurley stick and ball. Seeing the hound come at him, “he struck the ball with such force that it went down his throat, and through his body. Then he seized him by the hind legs and dashed him against a rock until there was no life in him.” Overcome with grief, Culain berates the young man, telling him that he “‘was a good member of my family … for he was the protector of my goods and my flocks and my herds and of all that I had’” (11). In recompense, the young man offers to find a whelp of the same line as the deceased, to rear and train it. Until that time, he himself would act as the smith’s watchdog. The offer is approved, and the young man is named “Cuchulain,” Culain’s hound. Overcoming and replacing a terrifying dog leads to the making of a mythic hero. Lady Wilde’s collection, entitled Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland and published in 1887, not only associates dogs with death but states that “The Egyptians, Hebrews, Greeks, and Germans all looked on the howling of the dog as ominous. The very word howling may

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be traced in the Latin ululu, the Greek holuluzo, the Hebrew hululue, and the Irish ulluloo” (2:2). Lady Wilde even claims that the orchestrated weeping known as “keening” that still took place in funeral ceremonies in the West of Ireland (a famous feature of J. M. Synge’s play Riders to the Sea of 1904) took its name from the Greek for “dog.” She traced the death superstition back to Ancient Egypt, where “dogs and dog-faced gods” ruled over funerals (2:3). As was common at the time, Lady Wilde believed that Irish specimens were the descendants of Mediterranean, possibly Egyptian, hunting dogs brought over to Ireland in the long distant past. The Celtic dog was, not surprisingly, heroic, supernatural, deathly, and yet, as Lady Wilde also concedes, “of all animals, the dog has the noblest qualities, the highest intelligence, and the most enduring affection for man” (2:4). The ancient ancestry of the Celtic dog was linked with Middle Eastern types because it was widely believed at the time—indeed, the belief still holds today—that it was descended from hunting dogs imported from that part of the world. Although now disproved by the canine genome project, which has shown that, in fact, the dogs came to Ireland from Northern Europe, the idea had considerable potency at the time. It linked disparate cultures in terms of hunting rituals and, most importantly, immersion in the spirit world, a realm that was always of interest to writers who, like Arthur Symons, were of a Symbolist turn of mind.

Egyptian Mysteries Symons’s choice of name for his pet is unexplained, although it may have been a deliberate echo, presumably ironical, of “Apis,” the bull god of the ancient Egyptians who was associated with fertility. Likewise, when Symons wrote of the canine kind as having served as “a god or idol among heathens” (Collected Works 301), he must have been thinking not only of Walter Pater and the Mona Lisa, and of beliefs “older than the time of Christ” in general, but of Anubis, the dog- or jackal-headed god of the ancient Egyptians who guided souls to the underworld. According to the ancient historian Plutarch, Anubis was “a deity of the lower world as well as a god of Olympus” (107), and for Symbolists he took his place alongside other typological, half-human and half-animal types such as the Sphinx and the Chimera. Anubis was part of that same widespread fascination with oriental and mythic figures, particularly those to be found in religion, and he was often seen as a pagan precursor of the Judeo-Christian trust in survival after death. Although Symbolism typically took a syncretic approach to religion, more conventional historians of religion liked to make it clear that Anubis and the death ritual had been superseded by Christianity. While Frazer’s influential The Golden Bough (1890) connects dogs in general with fertility cults and ideas of resurrection (2:3), Andrew Lang, in Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887), having acknowledged that Egyptian anthropomorphism was still

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little understood, goes on to note that “animal-worship was interpreted as symbolical; it was not the beast, but the qualities he personified that were adored.” His example is Anubis, who “really a jackal, is a dog in the explanation of Plutarch, and is said to be worshipped for his fidelity, or because he can see in the night, or because he is the image of time” (2:98). Lang nevertheless prefaces his discussion of animal-gods with the comment that the oldest tombs held “a stock of gods who remained in credit till ‘the dog Anubis’ fled from the Star of Bethlehem” (2:92). Even the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, having established the god’s “sepulchral character” and noted that he was the “opener of the roads” or “paths,” which were supposed to lead to heaven, had placed him very firmly in an earlier age (146): His worship commenced at the earliest period of Egyptian history, and continued, in one form or another, till Egyptian paganism was superseded by Christianity. He was, in fact, one of the oldest, if not the oldest deity of the paganism of the world. (147) Symbolists tended to see matters differently, and they stressed Egyptian religion for its syncretic potential rather than simply as a precursor of Christianity, seizing an opportunity for the kind of special effect, both morbid and sensual, that they loved to re-create. Oscar Wilde’s long poem The Sphinx, composed between the late 1870s and the mid-1880s, takes a considerably more ironical view than that implied by Lang’s “Star of Bethlehem”: Away to Egypt! Have no fear. Only one God has ever died. Only one God has let his side be wounded by a soldier’s spear. But These, thy lovers, are not dead. Still by the hundred-cubit gate Dog-faced Anubis sits in state with lotus-lilies for thy head. (191) In Wilde’s understanding of the evolution of religions, Anubis actually survives his replacement by Christ; in typical Symbolist fashion the poet’s vision is of an accumulative and composite history. The major inspiration (to put it charitably) for Wilde’s The Sphinx was Gustave Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of St. Antony) of 1874, possibly the most syncretic of all nineteenth-century texts. Here Anubis is not only an iconic survivor who as a public monument shares a place in an Alexandrian square with an image of the Greek Hermes (77), he is also given a lively presence: “With pricked ears Anubis bounded around me, yapping and rummaging with his muzzle in the tamarind clumps” (182). For all the exoticism, there’s an authenticity about this portrait, so that Anubis remains vestigially recognizable as any neighborhood dog—despite his hieratic status in the pantheon of Middle Eastern deities.

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For all their Orientalism, Wilde and Flaubert seem relatively decorous in their representations of Anubis when they are put alongside Stéphane Mallarmé, acknowledged by Arthur Symons as Symbolism’s supreme theoretician. In his dark and syntactically challenging elegy for a great forerunner, “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire,” Mallarmé exploits the possibilities of canine alterity to the full. The poem opens with a vision of a multilayered hell presided over by Anubis, the dog-god himself: Le temple enseveli divulgue par la bouche Sépulcrale d’égout bavant boue et rubis Abominablememt quelque idole Anubis Tout le museau flambé comme un aboi farouche The buried shrine disgorges through its foul sepulchral sewer-mouth slobbering sod and ruby vilely some Anubis-god its muzzle blazing like a savage howl. (70–72) Mallarmé discovers Anubis in an underground burial place that resembles a sewer. The dog-god is, as usual, ambiguously placed between life and death, but in this case in a distinctly Baudelairean way because he guides the dead toward eternity and yet is associated with filth. Like “les fleurs du mal” themselves, he represents the liberating ecstasy that accompanies metaphysical cruelty. And like the poet he is memoralizing, like both Flaubert and Wilde, Mallarmé reverses the process by which Christianity is seen as superseding yet fulfilling pagan or Judaic prophecy; he adds a scandalous touch by connecting religious feeling with the transgressive delights of modern urban degeneration, specifically with the plague of prostitution. “Le temple enseveli” (“buried shrine”) harks back to pagan Egypt; the word “sépulcrale” evokes Christian sanctity (the holy sepulcher); the sewer is unmistakably Parisian, both literally and metaphorically indicative of moral corruption. These disparate underground places jostle against one another and are, in a sense, all on one level. At the same time, the first two lines of the poem’s opening quatrain contain an extraordinary double metonymy that brings the sight of the doggod—its blazing muzzle—together with the sound—its savage howl—to create an appalling image of an aggressive animal. The ferocity that Mallarmé managed to compact into a few words tends to be lacking in Symons’s own personal and practical engagements with Baudelaire, though he did acknowledge the earlier poet’s “deliberate science of sensual perversity,” the way he brought “irritant of cruelty, the very odours and colours of corruption, to the creation and adornment of a sort of religion, in which an eternal mass is served before a veiled altar” (Symbolist Movement 94). While Api, Symons’s pet, the gamboling puppy, might seem a very distant relative indeed of Anubis, the savage god, even Api could, in Symons’s own éloge,

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on occasion, display signs of his ancient ancestry: “When a dog is distinguished, he is without grace or sense of gracious things” concludes the third section of For Api, “because he is a savage” (Collected Works 305).

Symbolic Relations Near the end of the Songs for Api sequence there’s an imitation of “Adonais,” Shelley’s elegy for John Keats; Symons creates a pastoral scene in which Api, the prematurely deceased animal, replaces the prematurely deceased poet. This has a pantheistic refrain delivered collectively by birds, flowers, sheep, grass and trees: “Weep for Api; he is dead” (Collected Works 330–31). Absorbed into nature as a whole, Api achieves a comparable transcendence to that of Keats. Nevertheless, the mourning process has been slow and gradual. In classic fashion, Symons’s grief has focused on talismanic objects: the childish but now redundant toy of a blue balloon bought as a Christmas present, a traveling rug to be used as a pillow, a small coat. Exactly according to Freudian formula, the lost companion, though objectified by death, remains incorporated within the psyche of the living subject. Symons remembers the dog’s presence in every corner of his house: And he remains, a permanent image in the eyes—in all the places in the house. I see him at the top of the stairs, his little wise black head turned to look through the white bannisters in the hope that I was going out. And then the soft precipitated scramble, and the whole eager body laughing with the thought of the open air. (Collected Works 310) Like John Donne’s “Mistress Elizabeth Drury” whose “body thought” (294), Api possesses the organic wholeness—in Yeatsian terms, the “Unity of Being” (Autobiographies 164)—of the dancers so admired by Symbolist spectators, including Symons himself, who insisted, in an essay entitled “The World as Ballet,” that “the dance is life, animal life, having its own way passionately” (Studies in Seven Arts 387). Unfortunately, it is at this precise point that Symons allows some all-toocharacteristic misogyny to infiltrate his grief: Is there reason why one’s love for a dog is so like what one’s love may be for a woman, that they are so near a part of the earth, and so have a kind of wonder for us, and a desire for impossible possession? Both are in their way helpless and speechless, and touch us by what is unconscious in them, and a savour [sic] that does not seem to us, judging by ourselves, quite human. They draw out of us all our love and all our cruelty. To possess them may be an anguish; but to be without them is not to live at all. (Collected Works 322)

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This, unquestionably, is the most truly embarrassing moment in the whole Api sequence. It is also, regrettably, the undeniable voice of that later Symons whom the recent editors of his Selected Early Poems call a “conjuror of gynophobic nightmares” whose imagination, in their words, collapses “into lurid bombast” (Symons, Selected 20). The animal/woman analogy develops out of those Baudelairean women of the 1890s: Zulia who is “my little cat … A dainty animal,” for example (Selected 118), and those other Venetian women who are “small, dark, cat-like creatures, with their small black eyes, vivid as the eyes of a wild animal …” (Cities 80). Passages like the one above which compare Api to a “helpless and speechless” woman may be unacceptable, repugnant even, yet entangled within them lies an idea of the essential nature of all pet ownership: that it is both anthropomorphic and polymorphic, that there’s an inherent instability in our relationships with cherished animals that both enhances and bedevils our dealings with one another. We should note that even in his most mesmerized and hyperbolic passages Symons does not simply cast Api in the role of a child. Far from it, as the misogynistic trope of the supposed “natural woman” demonstrates. The common assumption, implicitly endorsed by Karl Beckson, who had no doubt that Api was the Symons’s lost infant, is that our pets are our children, and, quite frequently, that they “substitute” for the offspring that we have lost or have never had. This is, at most, only an occasional or partial truth. There are other contenders for the pet relationship, and at times Symons himself admits as much. So, for instance, he describes Api as “my friend and lover and her [i.e., Rhoda’s] playfellow” (Collected Works 314); he says that through love for the dog “our two lives intermingled” (Collected Works 318). When Symons does invoke children it is often to stress relative difference. Api is “nearer and more helpless than a child” (Collected Works 321). Dogs may well be one of the family, but it is not always clear which one. Did Arthur and Rhoda even comprise a “family” before Api’s arrival? The several possibilities inherent in human/dog relationships that are implicit within Symons’s tributes have been confirmed by more recent writers. In her bravely titled Dog Love, Marjorie Garber has written that “the point is perhaps not to argue about whether dog love is a substitute for human love, but rather to detach the notion of ‘substitute’ from its presumed inferiority to a ‘real thing.’”2 She asks “Don’t all loves function, in a sense, within a chain of substitutions? … To distinguish between primary and substitutive loves is to understand little about the complexity of human emotions” (135). Garber’s passage has been quoted by Alice A. Kuzniar in her book titled, with equal honesty, Melancholia’s Dog. Kuzniar adds her own clarification, claiming that “the relation to the dog cannot be restricted to the singular role of guardian, lover, companion, or child but incorporates all of those modalities and shifts among them” (109). Arthur Symons may have been personally and culturally misogynistic but he was not entirely ignorant of

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the “substituting” and “shifting” modalities of human/animal relations. We find a similar awareness in contemporaries who shared his Symbolist tendencies. Whym Chow, a magnificent red dog owned by “Michael Field,” pen name of the lesbian couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, died in 1906, the same year as Api, and he is memorialized in another odd collection, Whym Chow: Flame of Love, published in 1914. As with Symons’s and Maeterlinck’s, these elegiac poems recognize an ancient history: It is so old and deep a thing The being fond of animals—so far It goes back to when the earth was first beginning. (Field 18) And, like Symons and Maeterlinck, Bradley and Cooper are intent on celebrating the unique physical beauty of their companion—although they do so in an opulent and highly metaphoric way, very different from Symons’s precise but emotive detail. Just as Api bonded Arthur and Rhoda to one another, so Whym Chow solidifies the relations between the two women. The dog’s love for the one is as strong as his love for the other. Once again, Anubis, spiritual guardian, makes an appearance: My loved One is away—my cry! Be at my side, unseen, Alert, like strange Anubis, toward the sky, As you so oft have been O Chow, my little love, you watch above her; Watch still beside me, be with me her lover! (Field 23) By confirming a loving relationship, the dog completes a symbolic “trinity.”3 Whym Chow is by turns Anubis-like and a figure of Christ-like redemption whose death prefigures conversion to Catholicism, his russet coat resembling the blood and the wine. As Marion Thain notes in her book on “Michael Field,” by the time of his memorialization, he “had become completely aestheticized and enmeshed with that holy aestheticist trinity: love, art and religion” (14). These, of course, are among the perennial touchstones of much fin-desiècle literature encouraging us to speak generically of a Symbolist dog who has an ancient aura, is aesthetically appealing, beautiful even when ugly (which would allow us to include Pelléas, Maeterlinck’s French bulldog), with wonderfully deep eyes and a lustrous coat. Symbolist dogs live at home; they don’t work and they are as likely as their owners to go to heaven. Perhaps in an era so preoccupied with “otherness” as the fin de siècle, with thoughts of death and the hereafter, it is not surprising that so

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much should have been made of these beloved animals. They came to occupy a borderland not unlike that between humans and the spirit world. With its impenetrable silence, its inscrutable ways, and what Symons calls its “sacred body,” the Symbolist dog was an avatar of what lay beyond, a mysterious messenger who returned power to both poet and pet.

Notes 1 This and all subsequent translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine. 2 This is the same Freudian idea of emotional substitution applied to animals that has been expanded and critiqued by Kevin A. Morrison in his essay about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush in this volume. 3 That the women were capable of applying a theological construct to their shared life is thoroughly demonstrated by Matthew Margini’s essay included in this volume.

References Baudelaire, Charles. “Les Bons Chiens.” Œuvres complètes, 2 vols., Gallimard, 1975. Beckson, Karl. Arthur Symons, A Life. Clarendon Press, 1987. Burroughs, John. Ways of Nature. Archibald Constable, 1905. Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Hound of the Baskervilles, edited by W. W. Robson, Oxford World’s Classics, 2008. Donne, John. “Of the Progress of the Soul.” The Complete Poems, edited by A. J. Smith, Allen Lane, 1974. Encyclopædia Britannica, 9th ed., vol. 2, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1875. Field, Michael. Whym Chow: Flame of Love. London: Eragny Press, 1914. Flaubert, Gustave. The Temptation of St Antony, translated by Keytty Mrosovsky, Penguin, 1987. Frazer, J. G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols., London: Macmillan and Co., 1890. Garber, Marjorie. Dog Love. Hamish Hamilton, 1996. Gregory, Lady Augusta. Cuchulain of Muirtheme. John Murray, 1902. Howell, Philip. At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Kuzniar, Alice A. Melancholia’s Dog. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Lang, Andrew. Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1899. 2 vols., London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1887. Lestrange, Robert. Les animaux dans la littérature et dans l’histoire. Éditions Ophrys Gap, 1937. Lhombreaud, Roger. Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography. Unicorn Press, 1963. Maeterlinck, Maurice. Our Friend the Dog. George Allen and Unwin, 1906. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Poems and Other Verse, new translations by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore, Oxford World’s Classics, 2006. Pater, Walter. Studies in the History of the Renaissance, edited by Matthew Beaumont, Oxford World’s Classics, 2010. Plutarch. “Isis and Osiris.” Plutarch’s Moralia, vol. 5, edited by T. E. Page, E. Capps, and W. H. D. Rouse, The Loeb Classical Library, William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1936.

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Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures. Harvard University Press, 1987. Symons, Arthur. Cities. J. M. Dent, 1903. Symons, Arthur. “The World as Ballet.” Studies in Seven Arts, Archibald Constable, 1906. Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature, rev. ed., Archibald Constable, 1908. Symons, Arthur. The Collected Works, Poems: Volume Three. Martin Secker, 1924. Symons, Arthur. Selected Early Poems. MHRA Jewelled Tortoise, vol. 3, edited by Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017. Thain, Marion. “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Vaughan, John S. “Cruelty to Animals and Theology: A Reply.” The Humane Review, vol. 4, July 1903, pp. 142–145. Verlaine, Paul. “Chiens.” Les mémoires d’un veuf. Paris: Léon Vanier, 1886. Wilde, Lady Jane. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland, 2 vols., London: Ward and Downey, 1887. Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 1, edited by Bobby Fong and Karl Beckson, Poems and Poems in Prose, Oxford University Press, 2000. Yeats, W. B. Irish Fairy Tales of Ireland. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892. Yeats, W. B. “Four Years: 1887–1891.” Autobiographies, edited by William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Scribner, 1999, pp. 116–168.

9

Afterword Jennifer McDonell

The place is the Armstrong Browning Library and Museum, Baylor University, Texas. It is March 2006, and the occasion is a conference entitled “This is Living Art,” organized to celebrate the bicentenary of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s birth. The ABL, for those unfamiliar with it, is a grand architectural memorial to Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a quasi-sacred space of rich timbers, Italian bronze-work, and ambient light filtered through sixty-two cathedral-high stained-glass windows depicting scenes from the Brownings’ poems.1 My paper is scheduled alongside that of a young doctoral candidate from Rice University, Kevin Morrison. We are both talking about Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her pet cocker spaniel, Flush: I on the gendered affective politics of Barrett’s epistolary elaborations about Flush’s multiple kidnappings by London dog thieves, and Kevin on her poems “To Flush, My Dog” and “Flush and Faunus” in a paper that contained the seeds of his chapter in this collection. Once the shock of discovering that I was not the only Victorianist in the world working on women writers and petkeeping had worn off, I came to understand that our papers foregrounded a pattern in literary history, a pattern thrown into high relief by the recuperative work of Victorian Pets and Poetry. 2 Just as Flush was lost and found, and lost and found again, so too poems about pets that were once popular and widely disseminated in Victorian Britain have lain buried in the archive, lost to literary history in the twentieth century, only to be found again by a curious new generation of scholars, some of whom are represented in this collection. In 2006, the subject of EBB and her pet dog may have been affectively engaging in an outré kind of way, but it remained, on the whole, politically imperceptible and poetically inaudible to mainstream EBB literary scholarship. Unsurprisingly, the EBB Bicentenary issue of the leading poetry journal in the Victorian field, Victorian Poetry, was silent on the question of the animal, by which I mean critical questions directed at the characterizations, representations, and utilizations of human–animal relations in the poet’s life and works.3 Fifteen years is a long time in literary scholarship, and as Morrison, Chez, Moine, and Margini’s essays illustrate, EBB’s writing about Flush—helped along by Virginia Woolf’s cynomorphic narrative about him—has elevated

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this celebrity couple to almost canonical status in the burgeoning field of Victorian literary animal studies. That is as it should be: EBB’s poetic and epistolary writing betrays a smart understanding that poesis or poemmaking (from the Greek ποιέω, “to make”) and pet-making are interconnected forms of “living art.” The trope of lost and found animals might be used to describe the process by which poets and poems are lost and found and remembered throughout history, much as with the reception history of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, much read and loved until about the 1920s, but then a little forgotten, sidelined by Modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century and by New Criticism in the 40s and 50s, only to be found again by feminist critics from the 1970s onwards. If you have come to this Afterword after reading this book’s preceding chapters, then you are now in possession of a range of perspectives that speak to the centrality of the domestic pet to negotiations of gender, power, and sexuality within the Victorian home; to the ways in which petkeeping both reifies and challenges the imaginary structure known as the natural family in the period. Household “pets,” those intermediary creatures that anthropologist Edmund Leach dubbed “man-animals,” were central to Victorian constructions of domesticity as a material and discursive space (Leach 45, qtd. in Fudge, Pets 8). Pets are, as Leach suggests, border crossers who tend to confound the boundaries between inside and outside, animal and human. Yet dominant discourses of domesticity, as mass produced and circulated by the Victorians, “always relied in the first place,” as Ivan Krielkamp points out, “on the existence of pets in the home and on the page” (30, Krielkamp’s emphasis). Modern petkeeping, of course, is a contested construct. Legal scholar Gary Francione argues that pets are capitalist commodities, victims of ownership and control, while geographer Yi-Fu Tuan controversially describes a pet as “a diminished being, whether in the figurative or literal sense. It serves not so much the essential needs as the vanity and pleasure of its possessor” (Francione 169; Tuan 139). Alternatively, Erica Fudge argues that the pet “offers philosophers new ways of thinking,” that the pet is “not just the object of thought but is also the producer” (Pets 9), which I take to mean that pets can be agents in the production of human thinking processes. The range of poetry on display in this volume, by canonical and non-canonical authors alike, raises these and other important questions about how the Victorians lived with domestic animals, and how they thought about them in ways not possible by writers and thinkers in earlier times. Victorian Pets and Poetry is primarily concerned with animals that lived in close proximity to humans in domestic spaces: various avian species (Burton and Medlock), cats (Roth), and that most overdetermined of Victorian pets, the dog (Morrison, Chez, Roth, Margini, Stokes, and Moine). It is worth recalling that with imperial expansion, unregulated private ownership of exotic animals became common in Victorian England, and in addition to those animals commonly associated with the domestic sphere, wild animals were kept as pets. Robert Browning owned a pet owl which had

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free reign of his home in Warwick Crescent, London, while his son Pen threatened to import an American alligator into England, to which his father improbably replied “I … fear the news is too good to be true” and immediately asked the director of the Zoological Gardens how to care for the reptile.4 Infamously, Dante Gabriel Rossetti imported a wombat from Tasmania called Topsy (named after William Morris) that briefly formed a part of his Tudor House menagerie, which included owls, kangaroos, wallabies, a deer, armadillos, parakeets, peacocks, a raccoon, a Canadian marmot or woodchuck, a Japanese salamander, two laughing jackasses, a zebu or small Brahaminee bull, and one other wombat (see Simons, Rossetti’s Wombat 68–87). By the end of the nineteenth century dealers in wild animals proliferated in London as well as in other English cities, such as Liverpool, Bath, and Bristol (see, e.g., Simons, The Tiger). Chelsea Medlock’s examination of poetry that appeared in RSPCA annual reports and meetings, essay competitions, and monthly educational entertainment publications such as The Animal World and Bands of Mercy shows that appeals to sympathetic fellow feeling for animals relegated to spaces beyond the home—“beasts” and “dumb friends” generically conceived—also relied on structures of feeling that were associated with the home and therefore were gendered as feminine. She argues that Victorian animal welfare sentiment was seen as “a natural extension of domesticity” primarily because “of its connection to religious and moral education and the realm of nurturing/mothering endeavors related to vulnerable individuals, including children and the sick.” Not coincidentally, the relationship between women and irrational sentiment toward animals was entrenched at a time when the independent women’s movement had gained ground and women had become increasingly active in the spheres of both animal advocacy and suffrage. The suffrage movement was, of course, based on an entirely rational political platform, principally the right to vote, as was the humanitarian current that advanced human rights, including the anti-slavery movement that grew in tandem with the animal protection movement. The intersectionality of species, gender, and racial oppressions is underscored by the binaristic construction of emotion and sentiment in opposition to science and reason in the nineteenth century. The mainstream twentieth-century animal rights movement inherited this bias and attempted to distance itself from the identity of the so-called “animal lover,” which many regarded as a legacy of overly sentimental nineteenth-century welfare discourses.5 In the 1975 “Preface” to Animal Liberation, a cauterizing text for the animal rights movement, Peter Singer states that “[t]he portrayal of those who protest against cruelty to animals as sentimental, emotional ‘animal lovers’ has had the effect of excluding the entire issue of our treatment of non-humans from serious political and moral discussion” (xxi). The representational ubiquity of animals across a wide range of poetic genres, including the lyric, ode, elegy, sonnet, epitaph, and ballad, and the

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dissemination of this poetry in a variety of venues, is in part traceable to the visibility of animals in the everyday lives of the Victorians. In the private sphere, a “Victorian cult of pets” had developed by mid-century, and British cities had become, in every sense, anthrozootic spaces (Ritvo 86). Nonetheless, George Levine could observe of Victorian literature that “one looks hard to find encounters with animals that register the integrity of the animal itself” (251). The disparity between representing the “integrity” of real animals and literary abstractions of “the animal” is related to a problem to which contributors to this volume allude: the difficulty of representing nonhuman animals in human language, shaped by human intentions and attitudes. Laura Jean McKay’s novel, The Animals in That Country (2020), confronts precisely this problem. It presents a world in which a “zooflu” pandemic enables animals to speak. McKay explores the limits of language across species lines with the result that questions about language inflect all other questions about human– animal co-existence: What is an animal? What is a family? That language is a continuum stretching across the spectrum of animality finds form in McKay’s practice of identifying individual animals’ communications in bold font, as short gnomic poems that hover between concrete poetry and a bad translation app: The one made of bones and biscuits. The (Yesterday) party. I’m here for the Queen. [emphasis in the original] This is Sue the dingo’s attempt to communicate with the novel’s main human protagonist, Jean (her former captor at the Zoo), when Sue is released from her enclosure and is able to speak (83). If human empathy, objective phenomenology, and conversational language cannot bridge the species divide, maybe poetic inventiveness can? Is it conceivable that language, the traditional (and highly questionable) dividing line between human and animal, might paradoxically be a privileged portal to registering if not “the integrity of the animal itself” then an approximation of becominganimal. Maybe this poetry would have to be a “new” language, like Sue the dingo’s cryptic utterances. This thought experiment about what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying, points to an ongoing challenge for scholars working at the intersection of Victorian animal studies and literary analysis: how to think about animals as animals rather than simply as symbols or metaphors to explain primarily human concerns. In this sense, “the animal turn” in humanities and social sciences scholarship evinces, as Kari Weil has observed, how “nonhuman animals have become a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power” (5). Any survey of the Victorian literary historical archive will yield scholarship on animals in the works of major literary figures, some of it reaching back to early years of the discipline: dogs in Dickens, horses in Browning’s

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poetry, and so on. But as Cary Wolfe argues, an engaged animal studies has to be more than “mere thematics” because it “fundamentally challenges the schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings, sustained and reproduced in the current disciplinary protocols of cultural studies (not to mention literary studies)” (568–569).6 The task of such literary animal studies ought to redress, as this collection most certainly does, the occlusions of literary historiography itself, in which animals have been silenced, while not shrinking from critiquing representations that are disrespectful to animals. As Catherine Burton demonstrates, the vogue for canary poems that emerged throughout the nineteenth century in many popular British literary periodicals—such as Chambers’s Journal, Bentley’s Miscellany, and The London Reader—is shadowed by the genetic engineering that created disabled but ornate captive birds that were reified for selective traits such as physical beauty (bright yellow instead of gray and green), attention to tidiness, offspring-rearing, and their melodious, rather than raucous, voices. In doing so, their cultural meanings—in print and in the material space of the home—were policed to bolster Victorian ideologies of gender and class, home and family, and, ultimately, human exceptionalism. In this way, Victorian poetry about pets reveals the paradoxical mix of care, sentiment, indifference, and violence that might be said to typify relationships between humans and animals in a society profoundly uneasy about the distinct nature of humanity. Despite his support for the animal welfare movements of his time and evident sensitivity to the lifeworlds of his pets and animals of all species, Thomas Hardy could blandly write to his wife, Emma, in 1908 of his intention to drown a litter of kittens, an incident that recalls other acts of “noncriminal putting to death” of animals by humanitarian progressives.7 Dickens’s reputation as a canophile, for example, is complicated by his decision to have a favorite dog, Sultan, shot for attacking a young girl. Robert Browning, standing on questions of “justice” and “abstract principle” as appropriate ethical imperatives, was, at least hypothetically, prepared to sacrifice Flush to the dog-stealing “banditti” rather than approve of Barrett’s paying a ransom for his return (see McDonell, “‘Ladies’ pets’”). While poetry about pets evinces an ethics of caregiving and interspecies communication, canine domestication by definition reveals “a mix of moralities of control and care”: just as there is no simple imposition of mastery, there can be no unproblematic ethics of care between humans and domestic animals. There is a further dimension to this argument in that bourgeois domesticity cannot be divorced from the domination inherent in domestication itself, and domestication must be taken quite literally in the case of pets.8 If the disciplinary protocols of literary studies are to be interrogated from an animal-centric perspective, as Cary Wolfe advocates, in the Victorian field this project would, of necessity, entail a re-evaluation of interspecies structures of feeling, rather than uncritically dismissing such engagements as substitutive or sentimental. After all, sentimentality, as an

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affective structure, is almost axiomatically Victorian, and human–pet relationships are its locus classicus. To this end, Kevin A. Morrison’s chapter addresses a tendency in Barrett Browning scholarship to see Flush as a substitute for a more significant human loss. Flush was gifted to Barrett by her friend Mary Russell Mitford at a time when Elizabeth was cast into depression, physical as well as psychological, by the death first of her brother Sam, of a fever in Jamaica while engaged in managing the Barrett estates, and then of her favorite brother “Bro,” who mysteriously drowned in calm seas off the coast of Torquay. Morrison argues for a “more flexible and non-teleological notion of the supplement” and suggests that “Barrett Browning conceives of love as initially involving both substitution and accretion” but comes to understand dog love as “a unique specificity.” This line of inquiry in effect challenges the “substitutive” view of pets as influentially proposed by Yi-Fu Tuan, Keith Thomas, Kathleen Kete, John Berger, and Adrian Franklin, among others: that in the face of increasing social isolation and fragmentation (as an effect of industrialization and urbanization), pets become a substitute for “normal” forms of human sociability and solidarity otherwise provided for by friends, family, and community. Re-evaluating EBB’s writing about Flush in this way allows us to move away from a tendency to see animals “as passive, unthinking presences in the active, thoughtful lives of humans” toward understanding how “humans construct and are constructed by animals in the past” (Fudge, “History”). The emotional intensity of Barrett and Mitford’s relationship may have been largely transacted through Flush, but he cannot be read simply as a passive, unwitting cipher for the transmission of merely human concerns: he emerges as a producer of thought and an agent in a friendship that was not only important to both women but that also included him. The resurgence of interest in the history of the emotions, including the place of sentiment and sentimentality in Victorian literature and culture, has begun to produce more historically nuanced critiques of such categories as “emotion” and “sentimentality,” and such actions as crying and tearfulness.9 As a “structure of feeling,” sentimentality, from the early nineteenth century onwards, as the voluminous literature on the topic shows, has been associated with the least authoritative expressions of cultural life: femininity, simple-mindedness, childishness, “fancy,” and idealism.10 In light of common literary understandings of sentimentality, the idea that mourning for an animal is inherently sentimental in a pejorative sense rests on the speciesist assumption that passionate, individualized feeling toward nonhuman animals involves inappropriate or excessive feeling bestowed upon unworthy objects. As I have argued elsewhere, this insight can be brought to bear on the way in which the discourse of sentimentality has functioned to disavow mourning for animal lives (see McDonell, “‘This you’ll call’,” and also Parry). In recent decades, literary historians have also argued that sentimental texts are atypically self-conscious about their ambition to “radically reconceive civil relationships and collective obligations by disclosing the

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voices and interests of marginalised social subjects” (Menely 246; Tompkins xi). Such reconsiderations of Victorian sentiment and sentimentality have not generally included animals, whose lives have historically and definitionally been deemed less mournable than those of human animals. Yet, as the extensive discussion of animal death in this volume shows, elegies and eulogies lamenting the death of pets proliferated throughout the nineteenth century, with even so unlikely a candidate as Matthew Arnold writing elegies on the deaths of his dachshunds, Geist and Kaiser, and his canary, Matthias (“Geist’s Grave” [1881], “Poor Matthias” [1882], and “Kaiser Dead” [1887]).11 Christine Roth discusses Thomas Hardy’s tombstones and elegies for his animal companions, which are not only consonant with the nineteenth-century fashion for memorializing pets—in stone as well as in writing—but also contest and confront dominant Victorian constructions of the “animal.” In “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household,” Hardy, Roth argues, recognizes the agency and, in many ways, the personhood of the dog. Such situated accounts of the intense attachment, love, gratitude, regret, grief, and despair felt by pet owners over the loss of their animal companions both reinforces and disrupts the cultural work attributed to sentimentality and sentimental texts in the period, and as several contributors to this volume suggest, also challenge the orthodox Christian belief in humans’ possession of an immortal soul and animals’ lack of one. In Michael Field’s sonnet sequence on the death of their beloved pet dog, Whym Chow, in the thirty poems of Whym Chow: Flame of Love (1914; written in 1906), strong feelings of love and grief tip over into defiance of authority, of patriarchal norms, and lead to the adoption of unorthodox religious beliefs. In these poems, the elegiac mode presses up against the amatory and a complex theology, all suffused with a “camp” sensibility in the sense defined by Susan Sontag in her seminal 1964 essay as the “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” (515). Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper attributed their conversion to Catholicism in 1907 to the death of Whym Chow. Cooper wrote that Whym Chow’s death was “the worst loss of my life—yes, worse than that of beloved Mother or the tragic father” (qtd. in Field 32), a sentiment that transgresses the priorities common to kin and kind but one we have no reason to doubt. The thirty lyrics of Whym Chow: Flame of Love enact a transgressive politics in which the dog is elevated to godlike status, transmogrified, as Matthew Margini observes in this volume, into “every person in the Trinity: he is God the Father, booming with a voice of power; he is Christ the Son, dying for our sins; he is the Holy Spirit, mediating between two lovers.” Keridiana Chez’s chapter on Victorian pet elegies suggests that pets, particularly dogs, served as emotional prostheses for their human users while remaining a tool subject to instrumentalization and abandonment and even death (Chez, Victorian Dogs 17, 20). Taken together, these analyses of poems written about the death of pets complicate the self/other and subject/object binaries that have long haunted attempts to theorize human/animal relations.

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Within our histories of loss—whether they involve lost pets, poems, or repressed animal–human histories—lies the art of remembering, as when one returns to a loved poem to encounter it again, as if for the first time. EBB’s sonnet “Flush or Faunus,” cited several times in this volume, is for me this kind of poem. It reads: You see this dog. It was but yesterday I mused, forgetful of his presence here, Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear; When from the pillow, where wet-cheeked I lay, A head as hairy as Faunus, thrust its way Right sudden against my face,—two golden-clear Large eyes astonished mine,—a drooping ear Did flap me on either cheek, to dry the spray! I started first, as some Arcadian Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove: But as my bearded vision closelier ran My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above Surprise and sadness; thanking the true Pan, Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love. These lines record how Flush lifts the poet’s spirits, first by instinctively sensing her misery but also by giving her a moment of pure panic—that is, panic in the original meaning of the word, when the humanimal presence of the god Pan could frighten human beings out of their social contract, and Flush wiping away his mistress’s tears with his floppy ears is suddenly perceived as a “goatly god in twilight grove.” Pan is a figure from another place, of strangeness, sexuality, and nature in the raw. A dog, after all, is a boundary-crossing creature, both domestic and wild, human and beastly, at once neighbor and stranger, both familiar and enigmatic, hovering at the edges of human understanding while occupying the intimate recesses of the imagination; he embodies an otherness that is relative, not absolute. Dog, of course, is the reverse spelling of God, and Flush in this poem becomes Faunus, god of the woodland and farmland associated by the Greeks with the god Pan. The goat-god Pan also makes an appearance in “A Musical Instrument,” EBB’s late, great poem about the creative process. The poem is about attempted rape, violence, and destruction, but it is also about creation, power, and music. The poem looks unflinchingly at the killing antics and ecological destruction wreaked by Pan, the god who turned the nymph Syrinx into a reed and the reed into pan pipes. The speaker in the earlier “Flush or Faunus” offers a redeeming Christian message, capitalizing the pagan God into “the true Pan, / Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love,” whereas in “A Musical Instrument,” “The true gods” who “sigh for the cost and pain” in the final stanza are un-capitalized, as if they were less “true” and more pagan. Yet it is the pagan Pan who makes music, and

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with laughter rather than tears, carelessly rather than carefully. EBB was thoroughly acquainted with Classical literature because she’d insisted upon being taught Greek along with her brothers; but perhaps it was, after all, Miss Mitford’s spaniel that contributed to this vision of creativity as something animal-like and not licensed by the true Gods. EBB’s contemporary Emily Brontë was perceived by some of her contemporaries as ferocious and animal-like. A servant described four-year-old Emily as having the “eyes of a half-tamed creature,” as a misanthropist who was only “happy with animal pets” (qtd. in Adams, Shaggy Muses 56). After the death of his wife and two children, Patrick Brontë bought a huge mongrel mastiff to protect his young family from possible Luddite attacks. Locals described this dog as “a savage brute” liable to take an intruder by the throat and prone to fighting with other dogs.12 He was named Keeper, and he became Emily’s constant companion. Emily and her siblings produced some poignant sketches of Keeper lying peaceably by the hearth with Emily reading a book, her arm around him. This combination of savagery and gentleness is what Emily captures in Heathcliff, a kind of human mongrel of unknown origin capable of great love and loyalty but also violence and brutality. A contemporary reviewer went so far as to imagine that Wuthering Heights might have been written by Keeper: If the respectable bull-dog Keeper could have been endowed with the ambition and the power to describe graphically the passions of his race – if you could put a pen in his hand and tell him to delineate the springs and impulses which prompt the displays of dog nature, with the outer workings of which we are alone familiar – if he could tell us the secret causes of every yelp, bark, and snarl, and spring, and bite, which we know now only in their effects – he would write precisely such a book as Wuthering Heights. 13 For this reviewer, Wuthering Heights is not merely a novel that represents animalized humans and animalized animals but one that is imbued with animality, the extended conceit playing on a substitutive logic of dog for master. The reviewer incorrectly refers to Keeper as a “bull-dog,” and in doing so draws upon Victorian discourses about dangerous dog breeds, which were often predicated on the denial of the species-specific traits of particular animals. Fabienne Moine’s discussion of how women’s poetry about dogs, breeds, and pedigrees contributed to broader debates about distinction and selection and shows how the fetishization of breed and pedigree mapped onto Victorian constructions of gender and domesticity. Chartist poet Eliza Cook’s rejection of pedigree as a standard of canine distinction, as her poems for her dog Pincher demonstrate, can be read as a rejection of gendered forms of domestic and social domination, particularly breed purity as a metonymy of class and race. The sight of Emily Brontë striding across the Yorkshire moors with Keeper beside her is what Haworth locals most often remembered after her death, and at her funeral

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the huge dog lay between the pews and joined the procession to the vault where she was buried. Most critics, if they do comment on Keeper, point out that there are no poems about him. However, the Gondal manuscript includes a long poem written by Emily which narrates how the hero, Julian, travels down into the dark vaults of a grave to find the woman who is captive there. This grim dungeon crypt is guarded by a surly jailer: I heard and heard not the surly Keeper growl, I saw and did not see the flagstones damp and foul, The Keeper to and fro paced by the bolted door And shivered as he walked, and as he shivered, swore. (II. 97–100)14 This is poetry on high alert, hackles up, and teeth bared. In the manuscript version of this passage, Keeper is identified by a capital K: “the surly Keeper growls.”15 Can it be coincidental that this jailing keeper of the vault carries the name of Emily’s dog? If this is a vision of the imagination, then it is a vision that relies on a beastly, prowling porter at hell’s gate who keeps the captive in her visionary crypt. What is described as a dark doomed place is also a place of inspiration, much as in EBB’s “A Musical Instrument.” Knowing what it is like to come and go in these dark places of the imagination, this poet-captive relies on the surly gatekeeper to guard the entrance to the underworld just as in classical mythology the entrance to Hades is guarded by another canine keeper, the three-headed dog Cerberus. While dogs like Keeper and Flush were practical solutions to the restrictions of their mistresses’ lives, they also enabled imaginative openings beyond those lives, openings into the wild unlicensed places of creative work. Just as dogs served as intermediaries to places of creative freedom for EBB, Michael Field, and Emily Brontë, the Symbolist dog, John Stokes argues, “was an avatar of what lay beyond, a mysterious messenger who returned power to both poet and pet.” Mallarmé discovers Anubis in an underground burial place that resembles a sewer, and no less than Brontë’s real and poetic Keeper, Arthur Symons’s dog Api becomes “a savage.”16 Stokes suggests that Api’s literary genealogy can be traced to Celtic myth, to the ferocious Cuchulain, Culain’s hound. Cuchulain incidentally reappears in Stevie Smith’s poem “The Hound of Ulster,” where the front part of a seemingly innocuous puppy shop hides “cold shadows at the back” in which Cuchulain “lies tethered,” with closed eyes and pale lips. The poem’s final line issues an ominous warning to prospective shoppers: “hurry little boy he is not for sale” (9). Poetic texts such as those discussed in this volume often refuse to fit neatly into the dominant paradigms proposed for thinking about human beings and animals in the nineteenth century. For example, Matthew Calarco explains that, historically, there are two main ways of thinking about human–animal relations (at least in the modern era). The first is the episteme-defining

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Darwinian understanding of human nature within a biological–zoological framework, an approach that simultaneously acknowledges that human and animal existence is a continuum. The second, he goes on to say, is the conception of human nature that derives from metaphysical humanism; here, human beings are seen as animals with some special capacity (reason, language, moral agency, awareness of death, and so on) that ultimately distinguishes [them] from all other animals. (248–249) What if it is the play between seemingly contradictory discourses and positions that makes Victorian poetry about pets worthy of scholarly inquiry in the first place? A representational mythos of the animal, as figured in EBB’s “Flush or Faunus” and Emily Brontë’s carceral Keeper, can be, but is not necessarily disrespectful to, a particular species. Brian Massumi explains that because “empirical creatures have been translated, by literary artifice, into abstract characters,” it becomes possible for each to exemplify “an integral of affect in matrixial imbrication with others” (176). If this kind of transformation refuses a purely I-centered anthropocentric motivation, space is created for a relational ethics that is deeply intersubjective, for rethinking subjectivity as affectively shared. What if humanness is and always was bounded by the haunting possibility of becoming animal, by the radical contingency of both human animality and nonhuman animality and in ways that draw attention to the always and already unstable distinction of human and animal in human signifying systems? Letting go of literal animals can come at multiple costs, as the Victorian enthusiasm for pet elegies, pet cemeteries, and epitaphs amply demonstrates. Likewise, there is much to be lost by devaluing literariness in deference to “real” animals. Pets, whose lives are often transient, have a way of focusing the life/death dialectic. In Massumi’s words, “[i]t is when life is in the balance, already figuring its own death, at once itself and the specter of itself—and pulsing all the more for that intensity—that the world’s matrixial plenitude is most hauntingly felt” (276). This somber reflection on the shared creaturely mortality of humans and animals brings me sharply into the historical present, to a world gripped by a deadly global pandemic, a world that makes the reflections on the EBB bicentenary, with which this Afterword began, appear to belong to a distant, more innocent time and place. The rupture of the COVID19 pandemic, if nothing else, serves as an urgent reminder that humankind is fatally enmeshed in the goings-on of nature, that the creaturely world includes trillions of reviled, largely invisible animals, including those that constitute the human virome and microbiome. That a virus can bring down world economies is a potent reminder of the matrixial interspecies imbrication of which Massumi speaks, and that all animals, whether beloved pets or unloved viruses, serve constitutive, biopolitical roles in shaping human societies, a reality we repress at our own peril.

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Notes 1 The name Elizabeth Barrett Barrett is used to refer to biographical or historical events in the author’s life and poems published before 1846, the year that she married Robert Browning. I use EBB for Elizabeth Barrett Browning when referring generally to the authorial persona or to poems published after 1846. 2 Philip Howell’s account of EBB and dog stealing in the context of gendered human–animal spatial orderings and the interconnected geographies of sentiment and economy appeared in one of the key publications that launched animal geography in the late 1990s. See his “Flush and the Banditti.” 3 See Victorian Poetry, vol. 44, no. 4, Winter 2006. 4 Griffin and Minchin, The Life of Robert Browning, 36; Letters of Robert Browning, 289. Qtd. in Reese, 801. 5 Molloy 18. See also Susan Fraiman, who argues that the bias against “liking animals” has been reinstated in what she sees as the gendered reification of posthumanist theory over the politicised interventions of feminist theorists. 6 See Susan Fraiman’s critique of Wolfe’s PMLA essay in her “Pussy Panic.” 7 Derrida’s description of the sacrificial fate of nonhuman animals and animalized humans. See his “Eating Well,” 278. 8 Contrary to the argument that the ethic of care and affection is another form of domination, Kay Anderson argues that while the social-symbolic process of domestication is problematic, it involves a mix of control and care. See her essay “A Walk on the Wild Side.” For further discussion of this point, see Howell, “Flush and the Banditti,” 51 and 54 n. 20. 9 See, for example, works by Kaplan, Stedman, Bown, Burdett, Carney, Mason, and Berlant. 10 For Raymond Williams, literature provides “often the only fully available articulation … of structures of feeling which as living processes are much more widely experienced” (133). Philip Armstrong has used Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling,” referring to “lived” or “practical consciousness” prior to its ideological codification, to clarify how intimately the emergence of dispositions such as sympathy, sentimentalism, and nostalgia for nature have been tied up with human–animal relations in specific historical contexts and mediated through texts; see Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fictions of Modernity, 4. For a discussion of Philip Fisher’s understanding of sentimentality as “a politically radical technique,” see Armstrong, 165–167. 11 See, in this volume, chapters by Christine Roth, Keridiana Chez, Matthew Margini, Chelsea Medlock, and John Stokes, all of whom discuss poems about the death of pets. 12 See, for example, Gérin 2–3. For an extended discussion of Emily’s relationship with Keeper, see Adams, Shaggy Muses, 19–96. 13 Unsigned review in The Christian Remembrancer, no. 97, July 1857, 87–145, in The Brontës: the Critical Heritage, 367. See Adams, “Emily Brontë and Dogs.” 14 No. 165, “Julian M. and A. G. Rochelle” in Emily Brontë, Complete Poems, 180. 15 On the subject of italicization, see Alexander, who notes that capitalization in the Brontës’ juvenilia is idiosyncratic but is not corrected in the poetry because “it is less idiosyncratic” and may “carry meaning” (xlvi). 16 From Symons, “For Api,” Collected Works 305, qtd. by Stokes in this volume.

References Adams, Maureen. “Emily Brontë and Dogs: Transformation within the Human-Dog Bond.” Brontë Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 2004, pp. 43–52.

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Adams, Maureen. Shaggy Muses: The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, and Emily Brontë. New York and London: Ballantine, 2007. Alexander, Christine. “Notes on the Text.” The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Early Writings, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford, 2010, pp. xliv–xlviii. Anderson, Kay. “A Walk on the Wild Side: A Critical Geography of Domestication.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 21, no. 4, 1997, pp. 463–485. Anonymous. Review from The Christian Remembrancer, no. 97, July 1857, in The Brontës: the Critical Heritage, edited by Miriam Allott, London: Routledge, 1974, pp. 364–370. Armstrong, Philip. What Animals Mean in the Fictions of Modernity. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2008. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Bown, Nicola, ed. “Rethinking Victorian Sentimentality.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 4, 2007, https://19.bbk.ac.uk/issue/124/ info/. Brontë, Emily. Complete Poems, edited and with an introduction by Janet Gezari, Penguin, 1992. Browning, Robert. Letters of Robert Browning, collected by T. J. Wise, edited by T. L. Hood, New Haven, 1933. Burdett, Carolyn. “New Agenda: Sentimentalities: Introduction.” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 16, no. 2, 2011, pp. 187–274. Calarco, Matthew. “Theorizing Animals: Heidegger, Derrida, Agamben.” Animals, Animality, and Literature, edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand, and Brian Massumi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 248–264. Carney, Bethan. “Introduction: ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’: Dickens and Feeling.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 14, 2012, https://doi. org/10.16995/ntn.644. Chez, Keridiana. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in NineteenthCentury Literature and Culture. Ohio State University Press, 2017. Derrida, Jacques. “Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject.” Points: Interviews 1974–1994, edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 255–287. Fraiman, Susan. “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals: Tracking Gender in Animal Studies.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 39, no. 1, 2012, pp. 89–115. Francione, Gary. Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. Fudge, Erica. Pets. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008. Fudge, Erica. “The History of Animals.” H-Animal, https://networks.h-net.org/node/ 16560/pages/32226/history-animals-erica-fudge. Accessed 16 October 2020. Gérin, Winifred. Emily Brontë: A Biography. Oxford: Clarendon, 1971. Griffin, W. H., and H. C. Minchin. The Life of Robert Browning. London: Methuen, 1910. Howell, Philip. “Flush and the Banditti: Dog Stealing in Victorian London.” Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human–Animal Relations, edited by Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 35–55.

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Kaplan, Fred. Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Krielkamp, Ivan. Minor Creatures: Persons, Animals, and the Victorian Novel. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” New Directions in the Study of Language, edited by E. H. Lenneberg, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966. Levine, George. Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Mason, Jennifer. Civilized Creatures: Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Massumi, Brian. “Becoming-Animal in the Literary Field.” Animals, Animality, and Literature, edited by Bruce Boehrer, Molly Hand, and Brian Massumi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. McDonell, Jennifer. “‘Ladies’ pets’ and the Politics of Affect: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Jane Welsh Carlyle.” Australian Literary Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2010, pp. 17–34. McDonell, Jennifer. “‘This you’ll call sentimental, perhaps’: Animal Death and the Propriety of Mourning.” Victorian Vocabularies, edited by Jessica Gildersleeve, Macquarie University, Sydney: Macquarie Lighthouse Publishing, 2013, pp. 111–132. McKay, Laura Jean. The Animals in That Country. Scribe Publications, 2020. Menely, Tobias. “Zoöphilpsychosis: Why Animals Are What’s Wrong with Sentimentality.” Symploke, vol. 15, nos. 1–2, 2007. Molloy, Claire. Popular Media and Animals. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Parry, José. “Sentimentality and the Enemies of Animal Protection.” Anthrozoös, vol. 24, no. 2, 2011, pp. 117–133. Reese, Gertrude. “Robert Browning and his Son.” PMLA, vol. 61, no. 3, Sept. 1946, pp. 784–803. Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Simons, John. Rossetti’s Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian Animals in Victorian England. London: Middlesex University Press, 2008. Simons, John. The Tiger That Swallowed the Boy: Exotic Animals in Victorian England. Oxford: Libri Publishing, 2012. Singer, Peter. “Preface to the 1975 Edition.” Animal Liberation. New York: Ecco, 2002, pp. i–xxv. Smith, Stevie. “The Hound of Ulster.” A Good Time Was Had by All. Jonathan Cape, 1937. Sontag, Susan. “Notes on ‘Camp’.” Partisan Review, vol. 31, no. 4, Fall 1964, pp. 515–530. Stedman, Gesa. Stemming the Torrent: Emotion and Control in Victorian Discourses on Emotion 1830–1872. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790– 1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Victorian Poetry, vol. 44, no. 4, Winter 2006.

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Weil, Kari. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wolfe, Cary. “Human, All Too Human: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2, 2009, pp. 564–575.

Index

Academy, The 64 Adam, Paul: Le Symboliste 174 Adams, Henry Gardiner: Cage and Singing Birds 46 Allan, William: Sir Walter Scott in his Study with His Dog “Maida” 28 All the Year Round 68n9 Altick, Richard D.: The English Common Reader 66n3 Animals’ Friend 130 animal (or nonhuman) soul 8, 13, 26, 33, 36–38, 54, 113, 150, 158, 161, 165, 166, 177, 194 “animal turn” in academic research 23, 191 animal welfare see humane societies Animal World, The 73, 78–85, 190 Anonymous (David Macbeth Moir): “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” 1–2 Anonymous: “The Canary” 52, 53, 57; “Elegy on a Canary Bird” 53; “Leo” 82–83; “On Some Elegies on a Lap Dog” 115; “On the Death of the Speaking Canary Bird” 53; “To a Canary” 57; “To Mary’s Canary Bird” 59; “To My Canary in His Cage” 52 anthropomorphism 5, 11, 17, 24, 36, 82, 100, 107n31, 108n39, 116, 121, 124, 128, 129, 131, 135, 136, 138, 156, 177, 180, 184, 192, 198 antivivisection 73, 165, 169n10&14; see also vivisection Anubis 180–182, 185, 197 Argent, Alice E.: “My Dog and I” 31 Arnold, Matthew 4, 5, 9, 11, 63–65, 68n23, 129, 194; “Geist’s Grave” 9–10, 117, 120, 194; “Kaiser Dead”

9, 10, 194; “Poor Matthias” 9, 10, 63–66, 68n23, 194; “Thyrsis” 9; “Westminster Abbey” 9 Ashtown, Lord: “On Being Shown the Tomb of a Favourite Dog” 115 Asquith, Lady Cynthia 130, 139, 142 Athenaeum Club 9, 17n6 Bacchus 149 Bacon, Francis 162 Bagshawe, Edward Gilpin, Bishop 177 Balfour, Alexander: “To a Canary Bird Escaped from its Cage” 59–60, 68n20 Bands of Mercy 78, 190 Barrett, Edward (“Bro”) 89–94, 98, 99, 106nn3,4&11 Barrett, Sam 106n12 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth 4, 5, 6–7, 16, 25, 33, 89–105, 122, 123, 150, 154, 156, 157, 158, 166, 188, 189, 193, 196; “A Flower in a Letter” 93; “Flush or Faunus” 6, 33, 91, 97, 98, 100–103, 154, 165, 166, 167, 195, 198; “Mary Russell Mitford in Her Garden” 91–92; “A Musical Instrument” 195– 197; “The Poet” 154–155; Sonnets from the Portuguese 97–98, 101–102, 106n8; “To Flush, My Dog” 6, 33, 91, 98–100, 102, 103–104, 105, 122, 188 Barrie, J. M. 130 Baudelaire, Charles 172, 173, 182, 184; “Les Bons Chiens” 172 Benjamin, Walter 164 Bentham, Jeremy 72 Bentley’s Miscellany 43, 55, 63, 192 Bewick, Thomas: General History of Quadrupeds 153 Bible, the 75, 79 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1

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Blake, William 128, 178 Boswell, Peter 50 Bourdieu, Pierre 24 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth: Birds of Prey 68 British Lady’s Magazine 59 Broderip, William John 152 Brontë, Anne 129 Brontë, Charlotte 129 Brontë, Emily 25, 129, 196–197, 198; Wuthering Heights 196 Brontë, Patrick 129, 196 Broome, Arthur 73 Browne, S. H.: “Careful and Kind” 84–85 Browning, Robert 33, 90, 93, 97, 105, 165, 166, 169n14, 177, 188, 189–190, 192; “Toccata at Galuppi’s” 177 Buckle, Mrs. M. H. G.: Fifi, or Memoirs of a Canary-Bird 68 Burdett-Coutts, Angela, Baroness 40n13 Burke, Edmund 128 Burns, Robert 162 Burroughs, John 176, 177–178; Ways of Nature 178 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 76, 176; “Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog” 30, 35, 129, 153–154 Campbell, Louisa: “The Mastiff and the Cur” 32 Campbell, Thomas: “The Harper” 27 canaries 5, 9, 10, 16, 43–68, 192, 194; breeding of 46–49; and cages 43, 46, 47, 48, 58, 59, 60, 61–62, 67n5, 68n21, 83; Matthew Arnold’s canary, 9, 10, 63–66, 68n23, 194; see also Anonymous canine breeds: chow-chow 5, 11, 37, 149; cocker spaniels 5, 6, 16, 17n5, 89, 91, 94, 96, 98, 101, 103, 107n31, 154, 188; collie 31, 32, 39n7, 81; dachshund 5, 9, 10, 117, 129, 194; greyhound 1, 27, 179; Pekinese 37; poodle 27; St Bernard 28, 31, 39n7; terrier 5, 8, 36, 139; see also mongrels canine clubs: Kennel Club 24, 25, 172; Ladies’ Kennel Association of America 39n4; Ladies Kennel Club 25 canine companionship 1, 5, 9, 26, 27, 30, 32, 34, 96, 98, 99, 111, 115, 123, 129, 137, 152, 172, 179, 183, 184, 194, 196 canine fidelity 1, 3, 100, 140, 141, 153, 181

canine poems and poetry 23–40, 149, 153, 154, 166 canines see dog Carlyle, Jane 32 cats 5, 16, 32, 55, 66, 106n7, 129–130, 131–133, 135–136, 139, 142, 143&n2, 166, 184, 189 Catholicism see religion Celticism and Celtic folk stories 178–180, 197 Century Magazine 8 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 52 Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 43, 52, 53, 192 Chartism 26, 27, 29, 39n6, 196 Children’s Hour (BBC radio program) 137 Christianity see religion Clodd, Edward 132 Cobbe, Frances Power 161, 166, 169nn14&16; The Friend of Man—and His Friends, the Poets 154 Cockerell, Sydney 137 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 73, 76; “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 73–74 Collins, Mortimer: “Tory, A Puppy” 113 Collins, Wilkie: The Woman in White 68 Cook, Eliza, 25, 26–29, 31, 39n6, 196; “The Dog of the Alps” 28; “Old Pincher” 27; “On the Death of a Favourite Hound” 27; “The Poor Man’s Grave” 29; “A Song for the Dog” 29; “To Bran” 28; “To Kenneth” 29 Cornhill Magazine, The 53 Cowper, William 68n21, 76; “The Task” 76–77 Craik, Dinah: “Three Companions” 31 Crashaw, Richard 176 Crowquill, Arthur: “In Winter Scatter Your Crumbs” 78–79 Crystal Palace (London) 46 Cushman, Charlotte 94 Dante, Paradiso 165 Darwin, Charles 33, 36, 38, 128, 141, 166, 198; Descent of Man 34, 56; On the Origin of Species 55, 128, 169n8; The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals 34 Davidson, Margaret Miller: “Elegy Upon Leo, an Old House-Dog” 115

Index de Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte: The Natural History of Birds 45 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari 3, 90, 106n7 Derrida, Jacques 17n8, 67n7, 160, 165, 167, 199; “The Animal that Therefore I Am” 160; The Animal that Therefore I Am 67n7; Of Grammatology 97 Descartes, René 3, 17n2, 38, 71 Dickens, Charles 191, 192; Bleak House 68n12; Great Expectations 137, 152 Dickinson, Emily 25, 154 Dionysus 158, 169n7 dog: as “love machine” 30, 35; dog love 30, 38, 95, 97, 184, 193; see also canine domestication see pets domesticity 1, 5, 15, 25, 30, 44, 51, 54, 58, 63, 64, 66, 72, 189, 190, 192, 196 Donne, John: “Mistress Elizabeth Drury” 183 Douglas, Sir George 129 Doyle, Arthur Conan: “The Adventure of the Creeping Man” 68n16; The Hound of the Baskervilles 179 Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings: “Epitaph on a Favourite Dog” 113 Drummond, William: “The Rights of Animals and Man’s Obligation to Treat Them with Humanity” 75 Durand, Marguerite 35 Edinburgh Literary Journal, The 59 Eliza Cook’s Journal 29 European Magazine, and London Review, The 57 euthanization 16, 169n9 Fane, Violet (Lady Mary Montgomerie Currie) 37; “Niko’s Faith” 37; “To Niko” 37 F. F.: “To My Canary” 53, 54, 61–62 Field, Michael (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) and ‘Bradley and Cooper’ xi, 5, 11, 13, 15, 17, 25, 94, 149–169, 185, 194, 197; “Adveni, Creator Spiritus!” 13; conversion to Catholicism 13, 150, 194; the Holy Trinity 11, 13, 149, 158–160, 161, 162, 165, 167, 185, 194; “Requiescat 13–14; Whym Chow: Flame of Love 11, 15, 17, 149–168, 169n8, 185, 194; Wild

205

Honey: From Various Thyme 11; Works and Days 158 Flaubert, Gustave 182; La tentation de Saint Antoine 181 Flower, Newman 137 Forster, E. M. 5, 130 Fortnightly Review, The 9 Frazer, Sir James: The Golden Bough 150–151, 180; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 106n4 Freud, Sigmund 17n7, 89, 106n4 183, 186n2 F. S. M.: “The Artist’s Dog” 81–82 Giles, Ellen Oughton 39n4 Gilstrap, Elizabeth Haigh: “Lines to My Skye Terrier, ‘Squib’” 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Faust 179 Gosse, Edmund 129 Granville-Barker, Harley 140 Gray, Mrs. James: “To a Canary Bird” 53 Gray, Thomas: “Elegy Written in a Country-Churchyard” 36; “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” 32 Gregory, Lady Augusta 179; Cuchulain of Muirtheme 179 Greyfriars Bobby 40n13, 141 grief and grieving 5, 7, 10, 13, 14, 51, 53, 84, 92, 99, 121, 122, 124, 129, 131, 134–135, 139, 141, 142, 143, 177, 183, 194; see also mourning grievability 14, 111, 116–118, 124–125 Hackett, Mr.: “Epitaph on a Canary Bird” 53 Hardy, Emma Lavinia Gifford 130, 135, 141, 142, 192 Hardy, Florence 130, 132, 133–134, 141 Hardy, Thomas 4, 5, 16, 128–143, 192, 194; “The Darkling Thrush” 44, 150; “Dead ‘Wessex’ the Dog to the Household” 125n6, 130, 137–143, 194; “The Death of Regret” 133, 135; Far From the Madding Crowd 141; Hardy’s pet cemetery 128, 129, 130, 132–133; “In the Cemetery” 132; “Last Words to a Dumb Friend” 125n6, 130, 135, 138, 139; “Popular Personage at Home” 125n6, 137; “Rain on a Grave” 135–136; “The Roman Gravemounds” 131, 132 Helen of Troy 177

206

Index

Hemans, Felicia: “The Domestic Affections” 51–52, 53 Heron, Emily Australie Manning (pseud. “Australie”): “Mourning and Unmourned” 34 Hobbes, Thomas 134–135 Hogg, James 76 Holden, George Henry 48–49; Canaries and Cage-Birds 46 home: pets in relation to 3, 4, 30, 35, 45, 50–54, 57, 58, 59, 60–62, 63, 137, 140, 142, 153, 185, 189, 190, 192 Homer 76, 176; The Odyssey 153 Horne, Richard Henry 92 horses 1, 55, 73, 85, 116, 169n16, 191 Horsfield, H. Knight: “Old Rocket” 113 Howell, Agnes R. 118; “The Shepherd’s Chief Mourner” 40n8 Hughes, Thomas 63 humane societies 71–85: The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA; later RSPCA) 71, 73–79, 84, 85, 169n16, 177, 190 humanimality 39 Humanitarian League 128 Hunter, Rev. George B. 92 intercorporeality 114, 121, 122, 124 J. F. M.: “Suggestions on Our Duty to Animals” 79 John of the Cross 11 Kant, Immanuel 3, 17n2 Keats, John 183; “Ode to a Nightingale” 44, 68nn18&22 Kennel Gazette 24 Kenyon, John 91, 92 Kidd, William 50 Kingsford, Anna 169n10 Kipling, Rudyard 4, 5, 7–9; “Dinah in Heaven: ‘The Woman in His Life’” 8; “Garm, a Hostage” 8; “The Dog Hervey” 8; The Jungle Book 8; “The Power of the Dog” 5, 7–8; Thy Servant a Dog 8 Kristeva, Julia 164 Lady’s Monthly Museum, The 53 Lance, Free: “The Collie Dog” 39n7 Landseer, Sir Edwin: Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveler 28; A Mountain Torrent 28–9; Attachment 125n5; The Faithful

Hound 141; The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner 29, 118, 141; The Poor Dog (The Shepherd’s Grave) 125n5 Lang, Andrew: Myth, Ritual and Religion 180–181; “Star of Bethlehem” 181 Lawrence, T. E. 137 legislation: Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle (1822) 73; Anti Cruelty/Anti-Vivisection bill (1876) 73; Martin’s Law 71, 73; Protection of Animals Act (1911) 72, 73 Leonard, Robert Maynard 149 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 152 London Journal, The 53 London Reader, The 43, 52, 192 M.: “The Canary that Foresook its Home” 60–61 Macleod, Catherine: “In Memoriam” 35 Macmillan’s Magazine 63–64 Mallarmé, Stéphane 182, 197; “Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire” 182 Mallock, William Hurrell: “Lines on the Death of a Pet Dog” 113 Manning, Henry Edward, Cardinal 166, 177 Martin, Richard 73 Martin’s Law see legislation Massey, Gerald: “The Dead Boy’s Portrait and His Dog” 121–122 Max Gate (Thomas Hardy’s home) 128, 129, 130, 133, 137, 138, 143n2 McDonell, Alice Clare: “On the Death of a Favourite Dog” 40 McKay, Laura Jean: The Animals in That Country 191 Measom, George Samuel 74 Maeterlinck, Maurice 174, 178, 185; Sur la mort d’un petit chien 173–174, 178 Meredith, George 4 Mill, John Stuart 72 Mirror, The 43, 53 Mitchell, Catherine Miller: “Greyfriar’s Bobby” 40n13 Mitford, Mary Russell 89–99, 102, 104, 105, 154, 193, 196; Our Village: Sketches of Rural Life and Scenery 91; Recollections of a Literary Life 92 Mona Lisa 177 Monaco, Lorenzo: The Intercession of Christ and the Virgin 162, 163 mongrels 26–29, 34, 196

Index Morley, John 9 Morris, William 190 mourning 11, 16, 34, 35, 51, 111–125, 125n6, 130, 131, 132, 135–136, 138, 183, 193–4; see also grief and grieving Murray, Mrs (Joanna Gregory Laing): “Monsieur Henry and His Dog” 31 myth and legend: Cuchulain 179, 197; Egyptian 180–183; Greek and Roman 103, 181, 195; see also Anubis, Celticism, Pan Newman, John Henry, Cardinal 177 Nietzsche, Friedrich 178 Northern Star 39n6 Oates, Charlotte: “Lines on the Death of a Favourite Dog” 40 Ogilvy, Dorothea: “On ‘Ned’ a Favourite Dog” 32 O. P. H.: “My Canary” 52 Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramé): “Lines to the Memory of a Favourite Dog” 129; “My Dog’s Epitaph” 129 Outing 39 Pan 102, 103, 108n44&45, 155, 156, 158, 159, 167, 195 Pater, Walter 165, 180; Studies in the History of the Renaissance 177 Patmore, Coventry, 17n3 Payn, James: “Our Dog Jock” 113 periodicals and journals: The Academy 64; All the Year Round 68n9; Animals’ Friend 130; The Animal World 73, 78–85, 190; Bands of Mercy 78, 190; Bentley’s Miscellany 43, 55, 63, 192; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 1; British Lady’s Magazine 59; Century Magazine 8; Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 52; Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 43, 52, 53, 192; Cornhill Magazine 53; The Edinburgh Literary Journal 59; Eliza Cook’s Journal 29; The European Magazine, and London Review 57; The Fortnightly Review 9; Kennel Gazette 24; The Lady’s Monthly Museum 53; The London Journal 53; The London Reader 43, 52, 192; Macmillan’s Magazine 63–64; The Mirror 43, 53; Northern Star 39n6; Outing 39; Punch 115; The Saturday Magazine 60; Le Symboliste 174; Young England 116, 117

207

pet burials 35–36, 40n14, 112, 114, 116, 128, 129, 132, 136, 140, 178, 182, 197 pet cemeteries 35, 128–129, 130, 133; Cimetière des chiens (Paris) 35; Hartsdale Canine Cemetery (New York) 112; Hyde Park Cemetery (London) 35, 112, 114, 130 pet elegies 1, 9, 10, 11, 16, 27, 30, 32, 34, 36, 36, 44, 63, 65, 111–125, 128–143, 176, 194, 198 pet epitaphs 1, 10, 35–36, 56, 116, 117, 129, 132, 138, 140, 153, 176, 198 pet eulogies 28, 29, 32, 33, 111, 125n6, 129, 194 pet funerals 35, 114 petkeeping 3, 4, 15–16, 29, 54, 64, 65, 72, 81, 96, 111, 112, 114–115, 172, 188, 189, 192, 199n8 pet pedigrees 16, 23–30, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 152, 196; fetishization of 26, 196 pets as spiritual beings 34, 37, 38, 113, 128, 132, 142, 150; see also Field, Michael pets, cruelty to 45, 48, 49, 50, 60, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 83, 85, 130, 161, 166, 169nn15&16, 177, 190 pets, domestication of 27, 44, 45–46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61–62, 63, 64, 66, 67n8, 68n11 pet tombstones 1, 11, 128, 129, 130, 132, 138, 153, 194 Pius IX (Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti), Pope 169n16, 177 Pope, Alexander 77; “An Essay on Man” 75, 76 Prometheus 149, 167 Punch 115 Quiver 53 Randolph, Anson D. F.: Autobiography of a Canary Bird 68n12 Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond 120; “We Meet at Morn, my Dog and I” 119–120 religion: Catholic Church 165, 166, 169nn15&16; Catholicism 17, 149, 150, 152, 161, 164, 169n10, 185, 194; Christianity and Christian doctrine 32, 35, 78, 79, 81, 161, 166, 169n16, 176, 180, 181, 182, 194, 195; Heaven 7–8, 14, 33, 36, 37, 74, 79, 82, 113, 157, 177, 181, 185; Hebrew scripture 160; immortality 37, 38, 149, 177,

208

Index

194; the soul 3, 8, 11, 13–14, 26, 33, 34, 36, 37, 38, 54, 113, 121, 150, 158, 161, 165, 166, 177, 194; see also Field, Michael Ricketts, Charles 168n1 Roosevelt, Theodore 177 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 190 RSPCA see humane societies Ruskin, John 4, 53; Sesame and Lilies 52 Saturday Magazine, The 60 Schiller, Friedrich 128 Scott, Sir Walter 128–129, 176 Seton, Ernest Thompson 177 Shakespeare, William 176; Titus Andronicus 135 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 128; “Adonais” 183; “To a Skylark” 74, 136 Singer, Peter 4, 190 Smith, Rev. Francis 50–51 Smith, Stevie: “The Hound of Ulster” 197 soul see animal (or nonhuman) soul SPCA see humane societies speciesism 4, 103, 124–125 Stebbins, Emma 94 Steell, Gourlay 40n13 Styles, Rev. John 75 Symbolism (literary movement) 17, 173, 174, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183 Symbolist dog 17, 172, 173, 178–179, 185–186 Symons, Arthur 4, 17, 172–186; Collected Works 174; Selected Early Poems 184; “The Serpent” 177; Songs for Api 174, 183; The Symbolist Movement in Literature 173; “The World as Ballet” 183 Symons, Rhoda 174, 184, 185 Synge, John Millington: Riders to the Sea 180 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 92 Titterington, Ellen 137 Thomas, Keith 3, 4, 193 Thomson, James 76; “The Seasons” 75 Thornbury, George Walter: “My Canary Who Cares for Nothing” 55

Trilling, Lionel 9–10 T. S. A.: “The Green Canary” 43, 57 Verlaine, Paul 173; “Le chien bohème” 172–173 Victoria, Queen 71, 72, 73 vivisection, 34, 35, 130, 150, 165–166, 169nn10&14; see also antivivisection Wallace, Robert L. 46, 48; The Canary Book 45–46, 47, 49 Walpole, Horace 29, 32 Ward, F. W. Orde: “The Animals’ Magna Charta” 79–80 Watkins, William 137 Watson, William: “His Epitaph” 120 Wesley, John 72, 76, 79 Whitman, Walt 176, 177 Whymper, Edward 150 Wilberforce, William 72, 73 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler: “Voice of the Voiceless” 71, 75, 84 Wilde, Lady Jane 180; Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland 179–180 Wilde, Oscar 179, 181, 182; The Sphinx 181 Willett, Henry: “In Memoriam” 120–121 Wilton, Richard: untitled poem on cruelty to caged birds 83–84 Woolf, Virginia 6, 98, 103, 188; Flush 6, 17n5, 103, 157 Wordsworth, William 76, 129, 176; “Fidelity” 153; “The Tables Turned” 74; “Tribute to the Memory of the Same Dog” 132; “Upon Epitaphs” 55–56 W. R.: “An Appeal for Justice to Animals” 85 Yeats, William Butler 183; “The Fairy Greyhound” 179; Irish Fairy Tales 179 Yellowlees, Julia Kerr: “My Collies” 31 Youatt, William: The Dog 75–77, 152–153, 154 Young England 116, 117