Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Obviously there is great art in dog stealing. The skulking vagabonds whom
one meets in the streets, carrying puppies under their arms, are too clever for
the general public. They belong to a society. If they sell a dog, they know how
to regain it in less than a month. They suffer a sufficient interval to elapse for
the owner to become attached to his purchase, and then the dog is safely
lodged at the office of some 'society.' In due time the inevitable advertisement
appears, the reward is secured, and the dog is returned…. [T]hus we see how
it is that people gain a livelihood by dogs. They are perpetually on the
lookout for favourable specimens of that interesting tribe. They know exactly
when a handsome dog may be picked up at any moment.
(
London Review,
quoted in
The Times,
7 October 1861:9)
The second notable element was the viciousness, implied or actual, of the dog-
stealers' trade. As well as Elizabeth Barrett's story 'of a lady…having her dog's head
sent to her in a parcel' (Karlin 1990:304), we might note the experience of a Miss
Mildmay whose dog was threatened with ill treatment if she did not pay a ransom
of 61., or the Miss Brown of Bolton Street, who came 'in great terror' to William
Bishop saying that 'to have the poor dumb animal's throat cut was a very frightful
affair' and who was supposed to have subsequently quitted the country as a result
(
Report:
26). Such casual cruelty was visited in cases like these on women made
vulnerable precisely by their capacity for emotion and tenderness, and on their dogs,
themselves noted for their loyalty and nobility.
6
It is not hard to see why the dog-
stealers were so reviled.
The class and even racial significance of dog-stealing ought then to be
immediately evident. The 1840s were revolutionary times, of course, and, as
markers of class distinction, pets were functional to the symbolic economy of the
bourgeois city. The dog-stealers in their turn figured equally as a class enemy and as
an alien threat—thus note Barrett's use of the words
'banditti'
or 'philistines' when
referring to these representatives of London's criminal underworld. Dog-stealing
may be taken to raise the spectre of class conflict, something that the proximity of
Wimpole Street and Whitechapel also suggested most forcefully. We might also see,
in the whole dreadful business of dog-stealing, the threat of regression as well as
revolution, for, if Turner (1980:78) is right to argue that compassion for animals
'quelled the fears of man's bestial past' and 'served as an emblem of the heart and an
example to the human race', so that kindness to animals was the
sine
qua non
of
civilisation itself, then dog-stealing threatened to take this civility away and bring to
the surface the tensions induced by human kinship with animals. Dog-stealing
ultimately suggested the inversion of social hierarchies, putting human dependence
on animals at the centre of the problem; people were dominated and exploited
through their dependence on animals and their own affections and sentiments,
which could not be excluded wholly from their lives. Dog-stealing was thus a
phenomenon that called into question conventional assumptions about human
relations with animals: it recognised that, as in Dickens's
Great Expectations,
'the
uncivilized may be banished but may return' (Munich 1996:140).
