Idlers and Collaborators: Enter the Dog

Authors

Beryl Gray

Date of this Version

2009

Document Type

Article

Citation

George Eliot Review 40 (Special Issue, 2009)

Comments

Published by The George Eliot Review Online https://GeorgeEliotReview.org

Abstract

Both George Eliot and her older contemporary, Charles Dickens, introduced dogs into their fiction before introducing any into their homes. By the time Dickens was given the first of his many dogs he had invented Ponto, the sagacious pointer described by Jingle in The Pickwick Papers; Bull's-eye for Oliver Twist; and Jerry's performing dogs for The Old Curiosity Shop. Before George Eliot received her first dog - the Pug presented to her by her grateful publisher John Blackwood - the narrator of her first story, 'The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton', had justified in the following terms the unprepossessing curate's fortune in having so lovely and gentle a wife as Milly:

I, for one, do not grudge Amos Barton his sweet wife. I have all my life had a sympathy for mongrel ungainly dogs, who are nobody's pets; and I would rather surprise one of them by a pat and a pleasant morsel, than meet the condescending advances of the loveliest Skye-terrier who has his cushion by my lady 's chair.!