It is important, however, to stress that ‘stray’ becomes a general figure and metaphor, not merely confined to the ranks of fallen women and street children but extending to
the poor in general. For evidence, see the work of the artist John Charles Dollman, and his visits to the Dogs Home in or around 1875, soon after it had removed to Battersea.
Dollman’s pathetic portrayal of a street tyke, ‘supported by voluntary contributions’, as one of his prints has it, has some fun – a serious, sentimental, somewhat troubling kind of fun – with the comparison with human indigents, and the message is obvious enough. We have the contrast between life on the streets and life in the home. But the title puts the work of the animal charity on the same plane as human institutions, making the plea for domesticity in the same register. Both animals and humans can be saved from a life on the streets.
Consider too an early and significant statement of support for the work of the Dogs Home, from the pen of John Hollingshead, published in Dickens’s family magazine All the Year Round.29 In this 1862 article Hollingshead neatly counterpoints the spectacle of a dog show in Islington (a similarly recent innovation, the conformation dog show having begun only in 1859) with the work of the Dogs Home round the corner in Holloway, founded just eighteen months later. For Hollingshead the near-simultaneous appearance of the dog show and the Dogs Home suggests a ready complementarity between the genteel world of pedigreed pooches and their unfortunate cousins, between the pampered ‘pet’ and the pathetic ‘stray’. Tellingly, Hollingshead talks of not one but two dog shows, for the dogs in the rescue home are every bit as on display as those in the exhibition hall, since (like all dog shelters seeking to rehome their inmates) the Dogs Home had to make the dogs available for inspection – enabling owners to be reunited with their pets, or prospective families to judge whether they could offer a home to an unwanted animal or a stray. We would today think of the variety of ‘exhibitionary complexes’ by which both animals and humans are rendered visible, and the visual regimes and conventions that organize and narrate these exhibits and their meaning.30 But there is another aspect of exhibition that links the fate of stray animals with that of the human poor. Hollingshead is indulging in the well-recognized and historically situated practice of ‘slumming’
– that is, visiting and viewing those less fortunate than ourselves, for purposes of philanthropy or titillation, or both.31 Here it is given a cross-species makeover (a practice that I would like to call ‘beastly slumming’), and it is complemented by the visits of several other journalists, sketch-writers and artists, all of whom, inevitably, portray the work of the Home and the plight of its inhabitants in comparison to the human world, not merely as idle anthropomorphism, for these accounts not only help to animalize the human as well as humanize the animal but provide also a point of comparison and comparability that underwrites their ostensible and inadvertent political messages.
Hollingshead provides the key example here. He makes much of the commonplace doctrine of canine plasticity, which suggests that humans and their pets, exhibit similarities and exchange characteristics:
It has been said that every individual member of the human race bears in his outward form a resemblance to some animal. … But what is more remarkable is, that there is one single tribe of animals, and that the most mixed up with man of all, whose different members recall to us constantly, different types of
Between Wild and Domestic, Animal and Human, Life and Death 151 humanity. It is impossible to see a large collection of dogs together, without being continually reminded of the countenances of people you have met or known; of their countenances, and of their ways.32
Naturally enough, Hollingshead has some fun with this, in his observations of a snooty spaniel, a lily-livered Italian Greyhound and a put-upon Pomeranian paterfamilias, all on display at the dog show, whose triumphs and disasters seem inextricably intertwined with that of their human companions. But the most pointed animal–
human comparisons, the moment when the precarity and liminality of canine and human lives really presses, comes when he is dealing by contrast with the residents of the Dogs Home, which is portrayed as a strange mixture of the privileged and only temporarily distressed, the lost, fancy animals, momentarily separated from their well-to-do owners, and the true canine poor, the famishing and distressed. Here it is the canine poor who predominate, as Hollingshead makes clear in a subsequent account of the Dogs Home:
It is a melancholy fact, and one not at all peculiar to animals generally, that the most worthless dogs have the largest appetites, and make the most noise. The keeper knows about a dozen of his large-headed, thick-limbed, gaping, shambling pensioners by the title of the ‘wolves’, and, to use his own words, ‘they are a precious sample’. They form the ‘dangerous classes’ of the Refuge; they do nothing but eat and yell, are never likely to be reclaimed, and belong to that family of gift dogs which people never will look in the mouth.33
As with the phrase ‘supported by voluntary contributions’ mentioned earlier, but rather more perniciously, the language of ‘dangerous classes’ aligns even this sympathetic account with the worst condescension towards that great spectre at the Victorian feast, the undeserving poor, who turn up here in canine guise. The Dogs Home is repeatedly and persistently portrayed in these beastly slumming accounts as a mongrel institution home to few pedigreed boarders, whereas the poor dogs are boundless.
The Dogs Home is open to all – ‘whatever be his race, his social rank, or his religious creed’ is how the Illustrated London News puts it – but it is only to be expected that the permanently homeless dog will preponderate.34 The Dogs Home is filled not with fancy dogs, accidental strays unwittingly slumming it, rather but with tramps and vagrants and otherwise wilful strays.
The point is that the comparison to the human vagrant is enticing, not merely passively unresisted but actively embraced by the Victorian essayist. In the charged context of mid-nineteenth-century welfare reform, with the intractable problem of the casual poor always to the fore, the implications of this comparison of human and animal ‘strays’ are simultaneously reassuring and disturbing. Reassuring, even charming, because the stray dog can be portrayed as an equivalent urban wanderer similarly worthy of sympathy and charity – indeed the wholly ‘innocent’ animal can be rather easier to portray as an example of the deserving poor than his more beastly human kin, with all his and her vices. But disturbing too, because these accounts persistently dehumanize the vagrant poor in the act of extending humanity to animals.
This is particularly explicit in George Augustus Sala’s contribution, ‘The Key of the Street’, in which he inhabits the persona of a homeless vagrant, and in so doing subjects himself to a transformation from human to dog: ‘I feel my feet shuffle, my shoulders rise towards my ears; my head goes on one side; I hold my hands in a crouching position before me; I no longer walk, I prowl.’35 As I have put it in my own work, in such an account, ‘Vagrancy carries with it the taste and the taint of transmogrification, the fear and the thrill of “becoming-animal”.’36
Sala’s is a particularly striking and imaginative account of the experience of the human–animal stray, but the liminality of animal and human lives on the Victorian streets is a common trope in this era, where tramps and vagrants and other human wanderers were consistently portrayed as living ‘outside civilization in “anachronistic space” in which the boundary between humans and animals was all too easily crossed’.37 We see it once again in an article on the Dogs’ Home written by the crusading journalist James Greenwood, published in 1866 under the inevitable title, ‘Going to the dogs’.38 Greenwood – who in the same year published his famous exposé of a visit to a casual ward (‘A Night in the Workhouse’) recapitulates his analysis of brutalizing poverty through a reflection on animal others, albeit without feeling the urge to spend the night in the Dogs Home undercover, nor indeed to provide any of the ‘startling particulars’ that spiced up the workhouse exposé. Greenwood’s account of the work of the Dogs’ Home is like so many examples of ‘beastly slumming’ broadly sympathetic, and he shares the conviction that the luckiest dogs are those that find their way to proper homes. But his analysis draws such a deep draught of anthropomorphism that he cannot help but cast the beastliness of the dogs back upon the human waifs and strays who provide him with the precise point of comparison. Without even the ability to ask these canine strays for an account of their condition, Greenwood has to fall back on observation and speculation: the incongruous sight of two sheepdogs encourages Greenwood for instance to imagine that they had somehow conspired to run away from their drover masters in the search of a more comfortable home, and that their appearing to be complete strangers to each other is simply artful dissembling.
They have in other words wilfully ‘gone astray’.39 Moreover, the workhouse world of institutionalized dishonesty is transposed more or less directly to the inhabitants of the Dogs Home. The by no means dominant ‘honest’ dog is constantly in danger of being demoralized by the sharps and cadgers who are their fellow inmates: ‘Other dogs, contemptible curs, all teeth and belly, may endeavour to persuade these honest creatures that nothing can be more foolish than to thrust themselves forward to be owned out of such snug quarters, retired from the cares and anxieties of the world, and nothing to do but eat and sleep’.40 The inhabitants of the workhouse – the incorrigible, work-shy, thoroughly undeserving poor – are made the model for understanding the milieu of the lost and starving dog: but of course only at the expense of acknowledging the moral descent into animality implied by the business of ‘going to the dogs’. In other words, by aligning the extension of ‘philanthropy’ and ‘humanitarianism’ to animal welfare, the practitioners of beastly slumming can hardly resist calling into question the division between animals and humans, and thus to produce and reproduce
‘liminal lives’.
Between Wild and Domestic, Animal and Human, Life and Death 153