Mad Dogs and Working Dogs:

Mad Dogs and Steam Engines

To better understand the social and historical position of dogs at the turn of the 20th century and during the rise of literary Naturalism, it’s necessary to liken them to a difficult and non-intuitive metaphorical cousin: the steam engine. On the surface, this conflation; living to nonliving, natural to technological, animal to machine; makes little sense. It’s the sort of comparison one might squint at, a good sport trying to resolve an inkblot, and give up on a few puzzling moments later. But alike they are, and I will seek to connect them here and make sense of their presence in the world of people in the early 1900's.

 

There are many ways to explore dogs and modernity in the context of Naturalist fiction. Much has been written, for example, on the various ways that dogs were harnessed for work in streets, on farms, or at the frontier on sled trails, how their pedigrees were conflated with social Darwinist notions of class, and how it was during this time that domestic dogs took on the multi-dimensional “pet” status they continue to manifest today, in which they act as representational extensions of the humans who care for them (Cummins, Derr, Olson and Husler). This established and well-studied area presents a challenge to the researcher: what new unexplored aspects—of this period, of Naturalism, and especially of the enormous topic of dogs—can be brought to light by scholarly inquiry? In this essay, I take up these subjects using a visual/ historical approach, and a wealth of extant images, cartoons, broadsheets, and historical news articles. We will return, at length, to the comparison of dogs and steam engines, but perhaps the most visually rich historical feature of dogs during this period was an inordinately frightening disease: rabies. Rabies provides a useful thread of inquiry that connects dogs from both Europe and the United States, the 19th and 20th centuries, and parallels the development of the post-Darwinian social and biological notions of human/animal existence that deeply informed Naturalist writers.

 

 

The Curs of Metropolis: British Rabies Panic and the Dog in Art 
 

At the outset, it is important to keep a central and well-substantiated number in mind: between the years 1837 and 1902, exactly 1,225 people died in Britain from “hydrophobia”, the developed symptomatic form of rabies transmitted to humans (Pemberton and Worboys 1). That works out to a bit under 19 people per year. To put this in perspective, an average of 29 people per year are killed in Britain by lightning strikes (Elsom and Webb 3). 19 lives is not the same as zero lives, of course, and hydrophobia differs from lightning by being a slow and horrifically painful way to die, but that number is nevertheless worth acknowledgement. Without it, we might fail to understand the significance of the large body of extant visual rhetoric that surrounded dogs, rabies, hydrophobia, and public health during this time. We might, for instance, wildly overestimate the disease’s reach and biological impact. We might take anecdotes of physicians quietly euthanizing their hydrophobia-stricken human patients at face value, and promote rabies to the stature of smallpox, Spanish influenza, cholera, or any of an array of much deadlier and widespread 19th and early 20th century diseases.

 

This was simply not the case. Rabies and hydrophobia, no matter how strident the visual record, was an exceedingly rare disease for humans to die from, and not for lack of effort on the part of the disease itself; hydrophobia, once symptoms emerge, is almost invariably fatal even today. Instead, rabies captured the social imagination of the 19th century the way a mouse standing in front of a lightbulb casts a ten-foot shadow on a wall. Despite the minor actual threat it represented, rabies had two related characteristics that other 19th century viral and bacteriological terrors did not: 1) it was the only serious disease threat posed to human beings by domesticated dogs and 2) it spread through a very specific method—biting—and was therefore at least theoretically avoidable.

 

That it became associated with dogs is purely a social construction; rabies can spread to humans just as easily through any biting mammal that can carry it, including bats, raccoons, skunks, cats, and even horses and livestock. That it spread through bites was far more problematic: unlike full-blown hydrophobia, simple dog bites were common. Real numbers are difficult to estimate and were probably much lower but even if only one in twenty dog bites actually carried a viral load, doctors were compelled to treat every bite with the only pre-vaccine treatment known to be effective: speedy excision of the wound—usually a large surrounding section of muscle, tendon, or bone—and cauterization, a process that was itself painful, disfiguring, and prone to dangerous secondary infection. A number of post-infection “cures” existed, most of which were patent medicine or the equivalent, but any effectiveness attributed to them was certain to have been a placebo effect from a non-infectious bite. No medicinal treatment prior to the Pasteur vaccine was ever effective in saving the life of a person stricken with hydrophobia once symptoms began.

 

We might forgive, then, some of the high-toned hysteria of the political cartoons and posters in Britain at the time. We might generously characterize lawmakers’ intent when we analyze the municipal response to rabies outbreaks, which often took the form of mass-slayings of stray, loose, or un-collared dogs (Pemberton and Worboys 135). In panic years like 1874 and 1877, abnormally high numbers of rabies deaths were reported (74 and 79 in England, respectively)(Blaisdell 506). But doing so would mask an important deeper social discourse of which man’s best friend was ground zero.

Art historian Alex Potts explores how artistic representations of animals, particularly dogs, in Britain by the late 18th century had transitioned from a form of still-life to dogs posed in human situations such as a well-groomed dog playing a piano (See British painter Philip Reinagle’s Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog, left) or a lapdog privately attending a young woman; both signifying dogs as extensions of the human social order. Late 18th and early 19th century British art made dogs into visual signs of their owners, and by the mid 19th century, artistic renderings often featured groups of owner-signifying dogs instead of just a single animal, posed in settings that represented almost a social, public sphere (Potts 14-18).

 

This trend in the visual arts, argues literary scholar Laura Brown, paralleled trends in popular culture and literature. The dog, says Brown, was beginning to be understood as a foil for urban modernity’s alienating effect, and literary and artistic works during this time served to bolster “strongly positive assumptions about the intelligence, loyalty, affection, gratitude, and courage, of the canine” (69).

The domestic dog then, in a way, was the perfect companion to Naturalist literature. In a movement so preoccupied with the Darwinian underpinnings of a naturally-deterministic existence, in which morality and human-ness were the most fluid of concepts, dogs and their peculiar species-transcending social behavior become even more closely collocated with the value systems of Naturalistic fiction. Darwin himself owned and studied dogs extensively (Chidester 52), and this fact does not seem lost on the writers of Naturalistic fiction, in which dogs frequently appear as characters with as much agency as their human costars.

 

What then, are we to make of cartoons like T. L. Busby's “Mad Dog” and the poster “Notice! Hydrophobia!” which warn of wild dogs, faithful companions gone mad, a terrifying phenomena which could only be stopped by culling the likely offenders by the thousands? How are these two narratives connected?

Dog historian Bryan Cummins recalls in Our Debt to the Dog how the early and mid-19th century radically transformed the social position, visibility, and symbolic meaning of companion animals. Dogs were a favorite pet because of their sociability, utility, and especially affordability but Cummins notes that this is only a partial explanation for their exploding popularity. Dogs became a veritable culture industry unto themselves in major American and European cities in the 1840s with the rise of commercial pet food, collars, toys, and veterinary medicine. Cummins also points out that the affordability of dogs was a multi-dimensional aspect: dog breeding was already a fashionable pastime during this period especially among the middle- and upper-classes, and a variety of popular guides to dog breeds were published at this time featuring high-quality color illustrations. These, Cummins argues, and their respectability across class lines, put the well-bred companion dog within the imaginative, if not always economically realistic, grasp of working and ruling class alike (280-283).

Nor was literature left out of this new animal culture. Popular fiction of this era featuring animal characters had a net positive effect on their esteem. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild (1903) is one such novel, but an earlier novel about a horse, British author Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, (1877) popular in both England and America, reinvigorated support for anti-cruelty social movements by accessing what Barbara Hardy Beierl calls the “sympathetic imagination” toward fictional animals (213-214). Laura Brown notes how in literary figurations of dogs in the nineteenth century, canines sometimes became “exemplary models of human behavior, preferable [even] to humans themselves” (Brown 69), but this is not always the case. Dogs do not have a static role in Naturalistic fiction and are just as frequently vilified as cunning, human-like monsters or even thieves or murderers.

This shifting figurative morality in fictional canines has a rather simple and direct corollary: dogs are imagined in Naturalistic fiction somewhat patronizingly as extensions of the human working-class masses. There are hard-working dogs, loyal dogs, clever, courageous and self-sacrificial dogs, long-suffering dogs, mangy, unhealthy dogs, cunning dogs, conniving dogs, even symbolically rapacious or literally murderous dogs. No other human categorical difference, not race or gender, quite so neatly encapsulates the sociological subtext of the modern dog in Naturalistic fiction. They can’t even really be just beasts, because plenty of humans (usually working- or “criminal”-class to use the post-Lombroso eugenic terminology so favored by Naturalist-era writers) are indistinguishable from beasts in the Naturalist novel.

“Nineteenth century animal pictures,” says Potts, “functioned as a symbolic arena in which irrational social and psychological forces repressed by the dominant ideology of the period could find indirect expression” (20). And this idea is sustained by what we know of the rhetoric behind images like “Notice! Hydrophobia.” According to Pemberton and Worboys, urban British dog ownership was a hotly-contested public arena where the class-spanning practice of keeping companion pets had brought the upper and middle classes into contact (and conflict) with the working class. A mad dog was a criminal dog, a criminal dog was an example of criminal negligence, and criminal negligence was the domain of the impoverished, ignorant, irresponsible “criminal” classes (31). Therefore rabies outbreaks were socially transmuted to a class-based form of inferior personal integrity, an integrity which, through this odd chiastic interaction of man and dog, also transferred class and criminality status to the dogs themselves. The implications of this are many, and cast our visual archive in a new light. “What could not be stated openly about the violences of social being in bourgeoisie society was displaced onto figurations of the animal world” (Potts 20).

 

Lest we imagine that this displacement was short-lived or a purely British phenomena, witness this peculiar scene in American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novel Herland (1915):

“Are these breeds of dogs you have made useful?” they asked.

“Oh—useful! Why, the hunting dogs and watchdogs and sheepdogs are useful—and sleddogs of course!—and ratters, I suppose, but we don’t keep dogs for their usefulness. The dog is ‘the friend of man,’ we say—we love them” (Gilman).

Herland is a Naturalistic utopian novel about a secluded all-female society which has done away with all domestic animals except cats. Here three male visitors around whom the story revolves attempt to defend their keeping of dogs, and one of them inadvertently lets slip that dogs will occasionally bite children.

“Do we understand that you keep an animal—an unmated male animal—that bites children? About how many are there of them, please?”

“Thousands—in a large city,” said Jeff, “and nearly every family has one in the country.”
Terry broke in at this. “You must not imagine they are all dangerous—it’s not one in a hundred that ever bites anybody. Why, they are the best friends of the children—a boy doesn’t have half a chance that hasn’t a dog to play with!" (Gilman)

Here the Herlanders (and Gilman) are building a case against dogs, but they’re also building a case against tolerating criminality encoded as traits of working-class maleness. Herland is structured as a socialist state in most ways, but the absence of dogs suggests more than the absence of social class: Gilman's personal politics were notoriously ever-present in her fiction, and the elimination of a potentially "criminal" class (either dog or human) is in line with her eugenics-influenced personal politics.

 

Little by little they wrung from us the fact that the friend of man, in the city, was a prisoner; was taken out for his meager exercise on a leash; was liable not only to many diseases but to the one destroying horror of rabies; and, in many cases, for the safety of the citizens, had to go muzzled. Jeff maliciously added vivid instances he had known or read of injury and death from mad dogs (Gilman).

This entire passage permits rereading and re-contextualization if dogs and humans are indeed interchangeable social agents, as cultural studies scholar Mark Feldman suggests they are. Feldman calls the literary animal an “epiphenomenon of race, gender, class, modernity or capitalism” (163) and argues that Naturalistic fiction (typified by American writers Jack London and Frank Norris) was an ideal subgenre to explore this socially chiastic human-animal relationship. Most critics, Feldman notes, (Walter Benn Michaels, Mark Seltzer, and others) typically read dogs in Naturalist fiction as representatives of the duality of humanness, rather than looking more closely at how interaction with humans might signify a dog form of duality compatible with Darwin’s actual interpretations of animals (Feldman 162-163). 

 

Rabies and American Frontier Pragmatism 1870-1915

 

Rabies struck a particular chord in the social underpinnings of 19th century Britain, but in the United States the disease was, if not wholly ignored, certainly approached with a more pragmatic and less panicky tone.

LOOK TO YOUR DOGS! Reads an 1871 article in the Chicago Tribune. There is considerable excitement in the city at present in regard to mad dogs. The prevailing clear, cold, dry weather is very favorable to the development of hydrophobia rabies. Some cases of canine madness have already occurred, and it is not unlikely that there may be others. The delusion that hydrophobia only occurs in summer was long ago exploded. The danger would be in a great degree lessened if the dog ordinances were properly enforced. As that excellent precautionary regulation seems to be imperfectly understood, we give a brief compend, that the public may understand their canine rights, and that all interested may govern themselves accordingly. (Chicago Tribune, Dec 28th, 1871)

 

The article continues with a bulleted list of various Chicago city ordinances for taking care of one’s dog. We notice immediately the difference in tone from the British rabies rhetoric; instead of Pemberton and Worboys’ accusatory, class-based reactionism characterized by middle-class outrage, appeals to government officials to “arrest” troublesome dogs, and responsibility diffusely attributed to the “criminal” classes, this story situates the impact, and the responsibility, of such an outbreak on the individual citizen. The rhetorical gymnastics that this writer engages in as an excuse to remind everyone of the fine print of the dog ordinances is remarkable. The headline may seem similar to the British public service announcements in all capital letters with an emphatic exclamation point, but the reporter’s prose suggests something less than a panic: in America, seemingly, rabies is a problem which can be handled on an individual basis so long as everyone “understands” their level of dog-centric civic responsibility and “governs themselves accordingly.”

 

American news stories concerning rabies during this time were, in general, rather staid. Though problematic numbers of stray dogs were periodically culled in larger towns and cities like Pittsburgh, historian John Duffy notes that dog ordinances were difficult to enforce, particularly in frontier America, because they were seen as infringing on private liberties (302). Post-Civil War health boards were constituted in American towns and cities to fight outbreaks of more serious contagion like cholera and smallpox, but these diseases never gained the same widespread foothold in the U.S. as in Europe and Asia, and Duffy recalls an instance where health board meeting minutes said simply “met last night, but there being no sickness in Pittsburgh, adjourned without doing anything” (Duffy 304).

The New York Times ran a story in June of 1874 titled “The Fear of Hydrophobia,” in which the author attempted to flatly debunk some of the wilder mythology surrounding the still-poorly-understood disease. The article sensibly suggests quarantining dogs who have bitten, in order to ascertain whether or not the dog is actually rabid:

 

A dog which has lost its master and its way; which has, perhaps, committed some petty theft; which as been pelted and chased and driven frantic with terror, may probably bite half a dozen people before its career is brought to a close. If the dog is then killed, all those whom it has bitten are condemned to weeks or months of mental torture or anxiety; while if it were shut up and kindly treated, a few hours would often prove that there was no madness in the case, and no harm of any kind to be anticipated. (New York Times,  June 20th, 1874).

Most articles, even those involving human fatalities, were simple, one- or two-paragraph affairs that were buried on the back page alongside legal notices and obituaries. Even stories which did mention one of rabies’ most legitimately frightening aspects—the speed at which it appears to spread among animals—usually downplayed it. “Horse has Hydrophobia” reads one such headline, in the Los Angeles Times, “Death from Hydrophobia” read two others.

 

Veterinary medicine was evolving rapidly in America during the 1880s and 1890s, and agricultural historian John Blaisdell notes that this, too, was an intersection of scientific and social forces. Most American veterinarians, he notes, had actually studied in Britain because American veterinary colleges in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and St. Louis were relative newcomers in the field. Also during this time, the focus of veterinary medicine shifted from concern with large animals and livestock to “companion animals” and Harvard University’s veterinary school reported that for the first time more than half of the animals treated from 1897-1898 were domestic dogs or cats. Blaisdell notes that Pasteur’s work was the most cited new scholarship in the field during these years, particularly his work on rabies (504-505).

Historian Bert Hansen points out that on October 29th, 1885 when the New York Herald broke the story of Pasteur’s vaccine discovery, the news was met with lukewarm interest. Despite the enormous significance of the cure in Europe, the story garnered attention primarily as a talking point for physicians, veterinarians, and representatives of the ASPCA in America, and was quickly forgotten until December, when a rabid dog in New Jersey attacked several other dogs and six children. With a sudden and high-profile incident behind it, the existence of Pasteur’s vaccine became finally newsworthy as the children were rushed across the ocean to Paris to receive immediate treatment (Hansen 373-374). Unfortunately, only four of the six were sent to Pasteur, and the remaining two children did develop full-blown hydrophobia and died. This, John Blaisdell notes, prompted a new round of research for Pasteur, who subsequently created a method to test the brain tissue of biting dogs to speedily determine if they were indeed rabid (Blaisdell 515, 523).

 

Stories like this, particularly ones involving children, are the notable exception to the typical tepidity of rabies outbreak news in America. Dramatic oddities were news, simple outbreaks were generally not. Several stories in the Los Angeles Times from 1890 to 1910 noted instances of adults and children from various cities and small towns who received dog bites and simply ignored them, only to be stricken with the disease weeks or months later and die. A report in September of 1897 detailed a Scranton man who was sent to New York City for vaccination after being bitten by his own stricken and recently-deceased 10-year-old son. A story from May of 1902 tells of a Texas pastor and his 16-year-old son’s stopover in St. Louis on the way to Chicago where the boy would receive the Pasteur vaccine. “Father and son race against death,” the article thrills, “the young man’s arm has swollen to double its natural size.” Not all of these “races” were successful, however. A ghoulish blurb in the Times on January 26, 1906 tells of Arthur Lake, a man on a train from Charleston to Pittsburgh where the vaccine awaited him after a rabid dog bit off his thumb. Just 35 miles from Pittsburgh, Lake began to show symptoms of full blown hydrophobia and died in agony on the train in front of a car full of horrified passengers.

 

Sensational news accounts cannot always be taken at face value. The communicability of rabies through a dog bite is only about 7% (Pemberton and Worboys 12), and the availability of accurate medical diagnostic testing was geographically limited, meaning the Texas father and son’s “race against death” had an excellent chance of just being a story-worthy prophylactic treatment of a non-contagious bite. Because the actual microorganism that transmits rabies was not isolated for many years afterward, and Pasteur’s test was not yet widely available, few cases of reported rabies were certain, few bites unquestionably infectious, until the fatal symptoms appeared. Even in stubbornly-pragmatic late 19th century America, peril and pathos were certain to sell newspapers.

But such stories were the rarer exception and, like “LOOK TO YOUR DOGS!”, articles with catchy headlines such as “Riot of Rabies Feared” (Chicago Tribune, March 1897) meekly admit below the fold that even though eleven people were bitten in the Chicago area, no one actually died from this “riot of rabies” and most of the injuries were probably simple bites from aggressive or overly-excited pets. This presumably came as cold comfort to the bitten, who the article goes on to detail underwent the double-misery of wound cauterization and painful Pasteur-style inoculation, and to the animals, which were invariably destroyed.

By the early 1900s, rabies was positively old-hat as far as American news outlets were concerned. “Experts Seeking Cheap Method of Eradicating Scourge,” reads one Los Angeles Times headline from 1907. The writer complains the that Pasteur vaccine is “efficacious in the case of man before the development of the germ,” but is “too expensive for general use.” The Washington Post ran a lengthy segment in 1908 regarding a decision not to mandate the muzzling of dogs in Washington D.C. and the surrounding suburbs, despite a recent uptick in dog bites and hydrophobic dogs reported and destroyed. The decision was made not to muzzle because, as the writer states, “inasmuch as there have been only two deaths from rabies in the District in the last eleven years, the danger to human life from mad dogs in Washington is much exaggerated.” The tone of such articles is dismissive to the point of sarcasm, and one must almost wonder if phrases like “the danger to human life from mad dogs in Washington” had any additional meaning during a decade characterized by widespread labor unrest and the Roosevelt presidency.

This dismissive tone in the U.S. news media continued to broaden toward the disease. In 1914, the Los Angeles Times derided a father and son who were bitten by a dog and showed up later the same day at a hospital behaving erratically:

 

The elder Christofana was especially wild in his actions and tried to eat his hat when Dr. Roome inquired as to the cause of his apparently abnormal condition. The boy also danced a new expression of the tango and drove his arms and through the air as if possessed of evil spirits (Los Angeles Times, July 21st, 1914).

The father and son were “assured that their sufferings were completely imaginary and were sent home to await the real results” of the testing performed on the offending dog. “Common Sense Should Replace Fear,” reads the subtitle of an article written by a Dr. W. O. Stillman, in the Los Angeles Times in 1915. He estimates “probably not one dog bite in 20,000 is liable to cause hydrophobia,” despite the fear that dog bites prompted. “The public,” Stillman claims, “has been systematically terrorized by rabies literature let loose by departments of agriculture, and by sensational newspaper alarms.”

 

Stillman, though he lacked the benefit of historical perspective and did not realize it, had misspoken; in fact, the extent to which the American news media sensationalized rabies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was nowhere near the persistently-exaggerated nature of British rabies from 1830 until (if we concur with Pemberton and Worboys’ survey) the present.

 

This disparate tendency to exaggerate rabies outbreaks in two countries with such similar cultural origins is fascinating. If we cannot properly call the American response to rabies outbreaks “ambivalence,” then we can at least acknowledge that the visual and news archives present two noticeably different approaches to the same disease. Why? What caused this? Did the social class subtext and discourse of metropolitan humans that dogs wandered into in Britain operate differently in the U.S.? Did Americans simply love their dogs more? To answer this, we must return to that difficult initial simile: Dogs are like steam engines.

 

 

Modern Dog Seeks Gainful Employment, Wholesome Adventure, and Clean Living: the dog in Naturalism as barometer of Modernity

 

In The Railway Journey, Wolfgang Schivelbusch chronicles the ascension of steam power in both the United States and Europe, two very different discursive spaces despite a deeply shared cultural and philosophical history. The railroad, or perhaps more accurately the steam-powered locomotive that rode upon it, represents an emissary of the modern world to Schivelbusch. In Europe this emissary was viewed with some suspicion: would rail replace horse-drawn carriage? What would it be like to travel in something one could not stop or indeed even easily get off of? What sort of space was a passenger-train? A place for luxury? For mingling of the classes? What of the railway station?

In America, the questions were much more straightforward: how far does this line go? How fast? How much can it carry? When will the next station be built? When can I get on it? "The history of the railroad in the United States differs from its history in Europe in that the American railroad was not the industrial successor to a fully-fledged pre-industrial transportation system: in America, the railroad served to open up, for the first time, vast regions of previously unsettled wilderness" (Schivelbusch 89). Trains, for Schivelbush, evoke a very place-specific response, one which depends largely on social attitudes and especially the presence (or absence) of a national frontier.
 

Schivelbusch cites Georg Simmel and others who saw the European adoption of steam rail as a sort of abomination (75); cities ceased to be connected by interstitial countryside and became instead connected by rail stations and the “nowhere” of the rail car (38-40). In the perceptual experience of space, cities became "closer" to where, one article Schivelbusch notes suggests, "our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much better than one immense city" (34). Instead of being able to experience the motion from place to place up close and personally, Schivelbusch argues, rail travelers experienced a deliberate mechanized isolation from the natural world, a “panoramic perception,” where only objects and landscape features in the distance were discernable but landscape close to hand dissolved in the blur of motion seen through the passenger car window (54-61). Passengers in the rail-car-nowhere also were subjected for the first time to close-quarters travel accommodations with strangers of various social classes. Anxiety among middle- and upper-class travelers over the captivity of the rail car led to fantastical fears of being accosted or murdered aboard train where uniformed authorities or other forms of class privilege could not protect them (78-83).

In America, the steam locomotive was imagined very differently. Steam powered shipping extended and accelerated the movement of people and cargo along the Great Lakes, which were the only true high-volume shipping lane in the U.S. at the time. Locomotives, instead of replacing or reconfiguring a long-established series of roadways as happened in Europe, were American trailblazers. The westward expansion of the late 1800s proceeded along rail routes which were often the only standard route to the far frontier. Instead of figuratively annihilating the provincial, rural towns between large European cities, U.S. rail travel reduced the perceived remoteness of the west, bringing the frontier "closer," and with it the frontier’s appeal to 19th century American values of rugged, pragmatic individualism and freedom. In America, writes Schivelbusch, "every form of mechanization was experienced as creative" because it was not "the destruction of a traditional culture, but [...] a means of gaining a new civilization from a hitherto worthless (because inaccessible) wilderness" (90-91). In sum, the steam locomotive was a troublingly modern development in Europe and seen as a symptom of the dehumanizing effects of modernity. In America, the locomotive was a symbol of the promise of the modern, an opportunity for the common man to escape the same dehumanizing effects of the modern metropolis in rapidly-growing and stratifying eastern American cities.

Our meeker, four-footed half of the simile was along for the ride on both continents, sometimes literally, as in the case of the United States' Postal Service mascot "Owney", a mongrel whose likeness has appeared on U.S. postage stamps and was often photographed sleeping on U.S. Mail bags or riding on trains with postal carriers. But dogs shared this in common with trains: they operated in both Europe and America as barometers of modernity; like trains in Europe as sites of anxiety and contemplation of class, especially when the class-complicated scourge of rabies would visit a major city like London, and like trains in America as literal “engines” of frontier power, extending the westward continental expansion beyond the furthest reach of even the mighty locomotive, away from emerging U.S. cities and into the western plains and wilderness in a bid to gain some healthy distance from the metropolis and the urban modern.

Schivelbusch presents a convincing argument that steam power had very different implications for America than it did in Europe, but we would do well to be suspicious of any neatly dichotomous argument where dogs are concerned. The dog’s social history in Britain and the U.S. is simply too broad and inclusive to draw such strong conclusions, and the chiastic tendency of dogs and their owners to be imaginatively interchangeable (a pattern reinforced by the moral and evolutionary politics of literary Naturalism), weaves complex signification of race, class, and even (as Gilman illustrates) gender into the social iconography of the 19th and early 20th century dog.
 

This is where the approach to the topic via a visual archive becomes innovative: the paintings, photographs, cartoons, broadsheets, and newsprint headlines provide a text capable of evolving alongside our understanding of dogs, 19th century social problems (including politically-charged public health issues like rabies), and literary Naturalism. These texts, layered with contingent meaning, are re-interpretable across new and emerging forms of inquiry that will eventually supersede those currently informing the discourse.

 

Works Cited (click)