“HE & I ARE inseparable companions,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett of her cocker spaniel, Flush, “and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion.” The poet kept her promise and remained committed to her pampered spaniel until he died, at a healthy old age. Her loyalty was, she wrote, the very least she could do, since Flush had “given up the sunshine for her sake.”
The young spaniel was originally a gift from Elizabeth Barrett’s friend Mary Mitford in 1842, given partly to help ease the poet’s grief after losing two of her brothers in one year and partly to relieve her loneliness, as she was bedridden with symptoms of consumption. When Flush arrived in her life, Barrett, aged thirty-five, was spending almost all her time in an upstairs room in her family’s London home at 50 Wimpole Street; her delicate health meant she rarely saw anyone other than her immediate family and their household servants. The popular perception of Barrett before her marriage, like that of her contemporary Jane Welsh Carlyle (see NERO), is of a lonely, childless, unhappy middle-aged woman for whom her dog was a compensation and substitute for human love, yet the situation of both women was far more subtle and indeterminate than this easy cliché suggests.
Flush is best known to us not through Barrett’s letters, in which he plays a major role, but through Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), created, in part, as a playful parody of the popular Victorian life histories written by her friend Lytton Strachey—books like Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth and Essex. In this charming story, told from the spaniel’s perspective, Woolf makes use whenever possible of Elizabeth Barrett’s and Robert Browning’s own words, drawn mainly from their letters. “This you’ll call sentimental—perhaps—but then a dog somehow represents—no I can’t think of the word—the private side of life—the play side,” she wrote to a friend, which perhaps explains why she later dismissed Flush as “silly . . . a waste of time.” Nevertheless, it remains one of her most popular books.
Part of the reason for its popularity, I’d suggest, is that Flush is really and truly about Flush, and not his human companions. Without wanting to generalize too much, I’ve noticed that dog books often have much more to say about humans than they do about dogs. In many cases, it seems, those who write about their dogs are actually writing about something else entirely—their families, their childhoods, or their bonds with nature. Or perhaps they’re writing about dogs as a way to remind us to appreciate the simple things in life, to enjoy the kinship claim of animals, or to accept the latter half of life with grace and dignity. In such books, the dog’s purpose is to catch the attention of the reader and, like Hitchcock’s famous MacGuffin, to drive forward the human plot. “Much more than a dog story,” reviewers will say, as if a dog story by itself is so very little.
In Woolf’s version of the tale, after a playful puppyhood spent in the English countryside, Flush soon reconciles himself to a quiet life with his invalid mistress, waking her in the morning with his kisses, sharing her meals of chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. Elizabeth’s health improves when she meets Robert Browning, though Flush feels neglected at the intrusion, and can’t restrain himself from biting Browning in a fit of jealousy when he calls round one afternoon to pay a visit. Afterward, according to Elizabeth, Flush “came up stairs with a good deal of shame in the bearing of his ears.” His mistress refused to forgive him until eight o’clock in the evening, when, she writes to Browning, having “spoken to me (in the Flush language) & . . . examined your chair, he suddenly fell into a rapture and reminded me that the cakes you left, were on the table.”
Incidentally, Flush has no reason to complain of being displaced by Mr. Browning, whom Elizabeth loves very differently from the way she loves Flush. In many ways, the dog always comes first in her affections, but her love for Flush is more protective and maternal than erotic. Elizabeth writes to Mary Mitford that unlike other dogs, Flush dislikes bones; prefers sponge cake, coffee, and partridge cut into small pieces fed to him with a fork; and will drink only from a china cup even though it makes him sneeze. His mistress sheds tears when Flush is kidnapped—as actually happened three times in real life (see BULL’S-EYE), though Woolf conflates the events into one incident—yet her grief is considered ridiculous (“I was accused so loudly of ‘silliness & childishness’ afterwards that I was glad to dry my eyes & forget my misfortunes by way of rescuing my reputation”). She finds it necessary, in a letter to Browning, to justify her tears: “After all it was excusable that I cried. Flushie is my friend—my companion—& loves me more than he loves the sunshine.”
Men often seem to feel uncomfortable around “excessive” displays of emotion, especially those evoked by dogs. While he may not have ridiculed her tears, Robert Browning tried to persuade Elizabeth not to pay the ransom that was demanded for Flush when he was stolen. Elizabeth, in what was considered a reckless move by Browning and her family, went by carriage with Wilson, her maid, to the slums of Whitechapel to negotiate with the dog thieves. After five days and a payment of twenty pounds, much disapproved of by Barrett’s father and her fiancé, Flush was returned to Wimpole Street. It seems interesting to note in this context that Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, appeared to share Robert Browning’s attitude. Though he loved dogs, Leonard Woolf took a Cesar Millan–style approach to their training, intimidating them into “calm submission” before offering any sign of friendliness. His method was hardly a great success—the Woolfs’ dog Hans was notorious for interrupting parties by getting sick on the rug, and Pinka, the dog Virginia Woolf used as the model for Flush, apparently ate a set of Leonard’s proofs and urinated on the carpet eight times in a single day.
According to the social reformer Henry Mayhew, stealing dogs was in fact a commonplace racket in Victorian London. “They steal fancy dogs ladies are fond of,” wrote Mayhew in 1861, “spaniels, poodles, and terriers.” Jane Welsh Carlyle, the wife of the essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, was also a victim of these cruel swindlers (see NERO). One day in June 1851, when Mrs. Carlyle was out walking with her husband and her Maltese dog Nero, “the poor little creature was snapt up by two men and run off with into space!” She doesn’t want to give in to the gang, she writes, “for if they find I am ready to buy him back at any price (as I am) they will always be stealing him—till I have not a penny left!” Nero was stolen and returned three times, once managing heroically to escape and make his way home under his own steam. Later in the same letter, however, we discover why the dog thieves had such an easy time of it. Mrs. Carlyle complains that she might have to start keeping Nero on a chain when they leave the house (“and that is so sad a Life for the poor dog”), an observation that suggests he was seldom leashed. While there was far less traffic at that time than there is today, and while horse-drawn vehicles rarely reached the speed of automobiles, there were surely plenty of opportunities for dogs to get into trouble, quite apart from being snatched up by kidnappers. Leashes may be a drag, but city dogs aren’t safe without them—in any century.
Barrett Browning never mentions any of her dreams, but since Flush slept in her bed (against doctor’s orders), he no doubt played an active role in her dream life. Grisby appears in my dreams all the time, though not always in his usual form (and in dreams, as in life, he has to be taken out to answer the call of nature). Once I dreamed there were two Grisbys, identical twins who sat under my chair like little Cerberuses. In another dream, a larger dog followed him around everywhere. When I asked this dog’s owner what his breed was, she replied, “He’s a shadowboxer.” This nocturnal doubling and shape-shifting seem unsurprising; as Freud himself remarks, in our dreams, “we are not in the least surprised when a dog quotes a line of poetry,” though when we wake, we can’t help trying to make sense of these strange transfigurations.
Most of my Grisby dreams, in fact, are nightmares—the expression, I assume, of all my repressed anxieties. They’re always the same, and they return me to a primitive, prelinguistic level of distress—the kind of primal pain experienced by the child taken from its mother, or by the mother who loses her child. In my nightmares, Grisby is missing. I’m devastated, torn between going in search of him and getting a new dog right away, to cushion the pain. Sometimes I do one, sometimes the other, but whenever I get a new dog, it’s always another male French bulldog, and I name him Grisby, too. Time passes. I grow to love my new Grisby. The old Grisby is forgotten. Then comes the moment of horror: All of a sudden, I realize the original Grisby’s still out there somewhere, all alone, lost, trying to get back to me. How could I have abandoned him? I’ll wake in a sweat, and it always takes me a moment to realize that Grisby is right there in bed with me—the original Grisby, whimpering in his sleep. Does he dream of losing me? Has he moved on to a new Mikita, leaving me lost, dogless, alone?
Flush, too, moves on. By the time the Brownings have settled in Florence, he’s grown accustomed to his new master, Robert, successfully making the transition from lapdog to family dog—something Grisby has never been able to do. Though he’s lived with David all his life, Grisby is, categorically, my pet. “Your French bulldog,” according to the author of How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog, “will bond with one member of the family,” a line that David often repeats in a slightly affronted tone.
In the wider culture, this exclusivity is largely considered unwholesome; I’ve heard Grisby called a “mommy’s boy,” and when I wear a long skirt, he sometimes likes to hide under it. It’s far healthier, according to popular opinion, for a dog to be part of the family. Family dogs are regarded as genial and good-natured, keeping guard over hearth and home. Free from pampering and protection, they romp with the kids each morning, nap in the sun all afternoon, then fetch Dad’s slippers when he gets home from work. Unsurprisingly, family dogs appear most often in children’s books, in which they love everyone unstintingly, demonstrating their loyalty by dragging old folks from burning buildings and saving kids from floods. Dogs like Lassie and Old Yeller spend their lives teaching families wonderful, life-enhancing lessons, and then, when they’re no longer needed, go gently to the grave.
Unlike the snippy, jealous lapdog, the family dog loves everyone, regardless of age. In J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan, Nana, a kind and docile black-and-white Newfoundland, keeps a close eye on the three Darling children, whose parents can’t afford a real nanny. When the children are flying away, Nana howls to alert their parents, but her warnings are ignored, leaving Mr. Darling so remorseful that he sleeps in the kennel himself, until their safe return. Nana, usually played by an actor in a dog suit, was based on Barrie’s own dog Luath, also a black-and-white Newfoundland, though, unlike Nana, Luath was a male. The author claimed he wrote Peter Pan “with that great dog waiting for me to stop, not complaining, for he knew it was thus we made our living.” Still, when Luath discovered he’d been given a sex change in the play, wrote Barrie, he couldn’t help expressing his feeling with “a look.”
Other family dogs care for the elderly. In John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, the dog Balthasar, a “friendly and cynical mongrel,” develops a close relationship with Old Jolyon, the family patriarch. Originally one of a litter of three puppies, all of which looked so wrinkled and old they were named after the three wise men, Balthasar is part Russian poodle and part fox terrier, “trying to be a Pomeranian.” The dog is found sitting protectively at Jolyon’s feet when the old man dies in his sleep one summer afternoon under a tree. In his own memoir, written in later life, Galsworthy meditates on the importance of dogs in his life, speculating that “it is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value. . . . When he just sits, loving and being loved, those are the moments that I think are precious to a dog.”
According to Colette Audry (see DOUCHKA), certain breeds of dog are especially suited to this role. “Family men prefer poodles or cocker spaniels,” she writes, “harmless creatures chosen specially to amuse the children, ‘give them something to play with.’” As a feminist, Audry criticizes the way family patriarchs often reduce their underlings to the status of dogs. “The servant maintained a doglike silence, and the children romped about as though they were puppies,” she writes. “Inevitably, one’s love for one’s wife became confused, up to a point, with the feeling one had toward a favorite dog or horse.” Such a patriarch is the eccentric family farmer Dandie Dinmont in Walter Scott’s novel Guy Mannering. Dinmont owns six long-haired terriers (along with “twa couple of slow-hunds, five grews, and a wheen other dogs”) named “auld Pepper and auld Mustard, and young Pepper and young Mustard and little Pepper and little Mustard.” When asked whether this is not rather “a limited variety of names,” the farmer replies, “O, that’s a fancy of my ain to mark the breed, sir.” His fancy came true; this particular kind of long-haired terrier is now known as the Dandie Dinmont—the only example, to date, of a dog breed named after a literary character.
In Dickens’s Dombey and Son, the loving dog Diogenes, largely democratic in his affections, is passed among the Dombey family. Originally owned by the schoolmaster Dr. Blimber, Diogenes is taken up by Paul Dombey, then given to his sister, Florence, after Paul’s death, even though he is “not a lady’s dog, you know,” as Florence’s admirer Mr. Toots explains, euphemistically. Diogenes is “a blundering, ill-favored, clumsy, bullet-headed dog, continually acting on a wrong idea that there was an enemy in the neighborhood, whom it was meritorious to bark at,” and in order to get him into the cab to deliver him to Florence, Mr. Toots has to pretend there are rats in the straw. As soon as he’s released from the vehicle, Diogenes dives under the furniture in Florence’s house, dragging his long iron chain around the legs of chairs and tables, and almost garroting himself in the process.
Like many dogs in literature, Diogenes serves to indicate the character of the various people he encounters. Affectionate to Florence, Mr. Toots, Captain Cuttle, and Susan Nipper, he dislikes the sour Mrs. Pipchin and howls in her presence. Elsewhere the treatment of literary dogs can foreshadow human conduct. In Joyce Cary’s short story “Growing Up,” for example, the family patriarch returns from a business trip to find his young daughters appear unfamiliar and estranged. They express their violence first by mistreating Snort, the family dog, and then by turning on their father with homicidal aggression. This is the problem with being the household pet. If you belong to everybody, you belong to nobody, and you’re surely better off as a lapdog than a scapegoat, however undignified you might feel.