Flush and the banditti - Animal Spaces, Beastly Places - page 50

calculated by the rule of “Just so much as it will bring in market overt”'. The legal
fiction of pricelessness, which shielded the dog-stealers and their trade, was matched
by an equivalent domestic fiction which both made the trade possible and prompted
bourgeois outrage. A correspondent to The Times (28 March 1845:5) summed up
the problem succinctly:
Of all the combinations of rascals which infest this mighty city, there is not
one, in my opinion, more hateful than the dog-stealer. Other thieves take our
property,—these rob us of our friends…. They make trade of our affections.
They take from us one whose good qualities we should be happy to recognize
in many of our human friends; and they compel us to a course of sordid
bargaining with a knife at our favourite's throat.
And that this is a gendered question, shot through with the bourgeois ideal of
domestic womanhood, is made plain by the Parliamentary Report: 'A worse plan
could not be laid, even to set fire to premises, than is laid to get possession of dogs,
such as pet dogs belonging to ladies' ( Report: 30).
What made dog-stealing such a dreadful activity, we might thus conclude, was
that it mixed up in a peculiarly outrageous way, for the connected norms of gender
and class, the worlds of sentiment and the market, the private and the public
worlds. The central problem was putting a price on love and affection, forcing pet
owners to assess the monetary value of a pet to them and to their families. In Flush's
case, Elizabeth Barrett fiercely rebuked Robert Browning for advising defiance of
the dog-stealers and their demands, arguing to him that '[a] man may love justice
intensely; but the love of an abstract principle is not the strongest love—now is it?'
(Karlin 1990:306). 15 Stealing dogs put that 'feminine', emotional argument
dramatically to the test, revealing pets to their bourgeois owners as a special form of
property rather than just innocent domestic companions. The phenomenon of dog-
stealing thus revealed nothing less than the boundaries of an affective or sentimental
economy in which capitalism and culture were complexly interwined. Things which
were not supposed to be valued in monetary terms could be revealed as intimately
penetrated by market values, so that the simple domestication of animals acted as a
marker of the terrible vulnerability of the domestic realm to the public world of
cash, commerce and calculation.
The most critical aspect of this penetration of the values of the market into the very
world which was supposed to be shielded from it is arguably the position of women
within a patriarchal society. Dog-stealing revealed not just the absence of domestic
security, but also the ambivalent status of women within that household, a status
which women shared with their pets. Squier (1985:125) in this regard has amply
demonstrated the elision in Victorian society of women and their pets, both of
whom were 'routinely relegated to a marginal position in modern urban society'. 16
For Squier, in direct reference to Woolf's Flush: A Biography, Elizabeth Barrett and
her dog were alike victims of a patriarchal society which confined them to a
suffocating domestic captivity. The removal from Wimpole Street, in Flush's case