[ Sala / "Tattyboys Rents" ]
George Augustus Sala (1828 - 1895) was an English journalist, painter, and engraver — and a frequent contributor to his friend Charles Dickens' weekly literary and cultural magazine Household Words.
This essay, which appeared in Household Words for 13 May 1854, is a very Dickens-style account of "Tattyboys Rents," a rough London neighborhood which gives its name to this article.
Among the many sordid details of this run-down neighborhood to which Sala devotes his attention are the area's many dogs, one of which is a Newfoundland:
You are not to think that these I have mentioned are all the dogs of which Tattyboys Rents can boast. Many more are they, big dogs and little dogs: from that corpulent Newfoundland dog of Scrutor's, the broker, whose sagacity is so astounding as to lead to his being trusted with baskets and cash, to purchase bread and butcher's meat — the which he does faithfully, bringing back change with scrupulous exactitude — and whose only fault is his rapid rate of locomotion, and defective vision, which lead him to run up against and upset very nearly everybody he meets in his journeys. . . . (IX: 303)