Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
8
Ironically, while such a spaniel might derive its value from its distinguishing marks, or
'properties'
, it did not necessarily qualify as
legal
property.
9
These distinctions were all reassessed by the Criminal Code Commissioners of 1879,
who simplified the law on theft by making all tame living creatures (except pigeons, if
not in a dovecote or on their owner's land) equally capable of being stolen (see
Stephen 1883:163).
10
Other opponents of the dog-stealing bill insisted, rather less scrupulously, that dogs
were simply a great nuisance, 'generally speaking, of the most deteriorated species,
and, like Indian idols, they were prized on account of their ugliness…. [T]here were
more instances of human beings dying through hydrophobia from the bite of dogs of
the pet class than from the bite of any other' (
The Times,
26 June 1845:3).
11
Liddell wanted it to be considered in the first offence a misdemeanour, and only in the
second offence a matter of seven years' transportation. Graham advised against holding
out for transportation, which was a barrier to parliamentary acceptance of the new
legislation.
12
The Times
(11 November 1844:5), before it changed its mind on the seriousness of the
question, lamented that 'nothing is too trivial or too ludicrously absurd to be made the
subject of Parliamentary discussion or inquiry'. When Sir James Graham regretted the
inconvenient summer timing of the session, one wit piped up from the back benches,
to laughter, that he was referring to the 'dog days' (
Hansard,
LXXVI, 1844:556).
Punch
noted with rather less wit that the report on dog-stealing was presented to the
House in a terribly dog-eared state (see
The
Times,
8 August 1844:5).
13
Thomas (1984:102) notes that the 'passion for unnecessary dogs' was a marker of class
distinction, but it was also crucially a gendered issue. It is better to think of class and
gender in this respect as mutually articulated categories.
14
Note the importance for domestication discourse of the virtue attached to submitting
to 'man's' dominion, with the dog as the very emblem of servility and subordination,
physically malleable and genetically manipulable. This is clearly matched by the
gender hierarchies and proprieties of the Victorian age.
15
Lorenz, in his topic on human—canine relations,
Man Meets Dog
(1954:142), quotes
Elizabeth Barrett Browning to this effect: 'If thou must love me, let it be for nought/
Except for love's sake only.'
16
A character in Wilson's
Gentlemen in England
(1986:318, emphasis in original) notes
that Elizabeth Barrett Browning 'couldn't write poetry any more than her…husband
but she was a pet'.
17
Of course this is why the escape to Italy, for Flush and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, is
so significant. Italy represented, for both, an escape from the confining class, gender
and racial oppressions of Victorian London. Flush, in Italy, is divested of his
'aristocratic' pedigree along with his domestic captivity. Freed from dog-stealers and
from patriarchal tyranny alike, he, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and like her
creation Aurora Leigh, is given access to a new type of city life, democratic, affective,
'marked by equality between genders and classes' (Squier 1985: 134). Ironically, in the
home of the real
banditti,
in a land of mongrels, there was nothing to be feared from
dog-stealers. Without domestic oppression, the menace of the dog-stealer melts away.
As Flush realises: 'Where were chains now?… Gone, with the dog-stealers…. He was
the friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers. He had no need of a chain
in this new world; he had no need of protection' (Woolf 1933:110).
