[ "Two Dog Shows" ]
This anonymous article first appeared in the August 2, 1862, issue of All the Year Round, a weekly literary and cultural magazine owned and edited by Charles Dickens.
This essay begins by remarking on the fact animals often remind us of people we know or of certain types or classes of people; the author uses the occasion of a recent dog show in London to explore this idea. That dog show is contrasted with the dogs of an animal shelter where lost or stray dogs found on the streets of London are kept. Extremely anthropomorphic to modern sensibilities, this essay does provide a reasonably accurate sense of mid-Victorian attitudes not only toward animals but of the degree to which the world was, for Victorians, a "moralized" place, with even mere physical appearance being regarded, by Victorians, as valid indication of innate moral character.
Remarking that most of the dogs in the shelter are of mixed breed, the author does note there are a few examples of purebred dogs:
Among the unappreciated and lost dogs of Holloway, on the other hand, there seemed a sort of fellowship of misery, whilst their urbane and sociable qualities were perfectly irresistible. They were not conspicuous in the matter of breed, it must be owned. A tolerable Newfoundland dog, a deer-hound of some pretensions, a setter, and one or two decent terriers, were among the company; but for the most part the architecture of these canine vagrants was decidedly of the composite order. (VII: 496).
The author concludes by noting that the shelter is "an extraordinary monument of the remarkable affection with which English people regard the race of dogs; an evidence of that hidden fund of feeling which survives in some hearts even the rough ordeal of London life in the nineteenth century." (VII: 497).