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vulnerable. These were not, of course, the rigidly separated spheres of Victorian
bourgeois ideology. However much they tried, the Victorian bourgeoisie could
never prevent these spaces from mixing and merging into one another. And it was
not simply that the domestic sphere allowed the pressures of the market economy to
be temporarily suspended and resolved (Armstrong 1987; Poovey 1988). As
Nunokawa (1994) has emphasised, the zones of circulation associated with the
public world of the marketplace were intimately connected to the zones of
possession associated with the home. Property, being ephemeral and vulnerable, flew
in the face of the protocols of propriety that the Victorians taught as the virtue of
the home. The domestic sphere, in other words, was not a refuge from the market,
as the Victorians liked to imagine. It was both a prop to the workings of the public
world of men and the marketplace, and constantly, necessarily, infused with the
values of the market. The concept of domestic security, presided over by the female
'angel of the house', was nothing more therefore than an elaborate ideological
fiction which attempted to shield the Victorian bourgeois imagination from the
forces of commodification associated with the world of property. Domesticity was
thus a decisively
gendered
discourse that marked out a particular bourgeois world
which stood for values
beyond
price at the same time as it was constantly shot
through and threatened by a world in which everything was shown to have a price.
Dog-stealing brought both this threat to domestic virtues, and the exposure of the
market value of domesticity, uncomfortably and cruelly to the surface: it testified to
the vulnerability of domestic property and the siege mentality which characterised
the Victorian discourse of domesticity. As Nunokawa (1994:4) puts it, resonantly,
'everywhere the shades of the countinghouse fall upon the home.'
The gendered nature of the parliamentary debate about dog-stealing is revealing
of these ambiguities surrounding the issue of domesticity, utility and property.
While supporters of the dog-stealing bill did their best to pose the problem as an
outrage against
men's
property, with Liddell insisting that 'no man's dog was safe a
moment— and the more valuable it was the more certain it was to be stolen'
(
Hansard,
LXXVI, 1844:555), the bill's opponents were quick to express their
reservations about legislating in the realm of womanly sentimentality.
12
In a general
chorus of resentment at the ridiculousness of extending protection 'to the poodles
and lap-dogs of the metropolis' (
Hansard,
LXCI, 1844:691), unsympathetic MPs
insisted that dog-stealing was already punishable by fine, imprisonment and
whipping, 'and surely that was enough to protect the pug-dogs of the old ladies of
England' (
Hansard,
LXXXI, 1845:385). Dog-stealing was difficult to combat, then,
precisely because the question of property, founded on the principle of utility, was
preeminently a gendered issue.
13
This was not simply because lapdogs, the most
'useless' and vulnerable of pets, typically belonged to women. More than this, the
association of non-useful animals with women confined to the house as domestic
essence and ornament was particularly telling.
14
The bourgeois ideal of domesticity, so crucial to constructions of femininity, was
at the centre of these concerns. Indeed, the link between the ideal of domesticity
and the highly charged social-symbolic process of animal domestication (Anderson
