[ Tarkington / The Magnificent Ambersons ]
Booth Tarkington (1869- 1946) was an award-winning American novelist and dramatist, quite popular in his day though now he is probably best remembered as the author behind the 1942 Orson Welles' movie The Magnificent Ambersons, Wells' follow-up to his most famous film, Citizen Kane. (The book was first filmed, as a silent, in 1925, and was adapted for television in 2002.)
The Magnificent Ambersons, which earned Tarkington one of his two Pulitzer Prizes for literature, was first published in 1918 (New York: Doubleday, Page)
The novel, about the decline of the once-wealthy and aristocratic Amberson family as America rapidly industrializes at the turn of the 20th Century, features only two brief and indirect references to Newfoundlands. The first comes in the novel's first paragraph, and plays on the long-standing association of Newfoundlands with more well-to-do families: Newfoundlands as 19th-Century status symbols, essentially.
Major Amberson had "made a fortune" in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then. Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative . . .
and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place. Their splendour lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city, but reached its topmost during the period when every prosperous family with children kept a Newfoundland dog.
The second and final reference comes at the end of the first chapter, during a discussion of how the Amberson's conspicuous consumption is causing other townsfolks to start emulating the Ambersons:
Seems Miss Isabel Amberson’s got some kind of a dog — they call it a Saint Bernard — and Fanny was bound to have one, too. Well, old Aleck told her he didn’t like dogs except rat-terriers, because a rat-terrier cleans up the mice, but she kept on at him, and finally he said all right she could have one. Then, by George! she says Ambersons bought their dog, and you can’t get one without paying for it: they cost from fifty to a hundred dollars up! Old Aleck wanted to know if I ever heard of anybody buyin’ a dog before, because, of course, even a Newfoundland or a setter you can usually get somebody to give you one.