Adding to a recent surge of scholarship on human-animal relationships, Philip Howell investigates the problematic material and symbolical place of the dog in British society and its liminal position as a culturally domestic(ated?) animal, both included in the home and excluded from public space. He begins by supposing the Victorian “invention” of the notion of pet dogs, an unstable construct that both reflects and questions the well-known ideology of “separate spheres” of the time and the inseparable issues of gender and class.

In his introduction, Howell reminds the reader of the context of exclusion, marginalization, and enclosure of animals at stake in the urban landscape. By demonstrating the ubiquity of animal life and its proximity to humans, his remarks qualify the so-called purification and desire to tame and control the pollution and wilderness of animality in modern society. The place of “pets” in a human-coded environment ushered in newly defined relationships between man and animal, culture and nature. Indeed, the position of the dog is inextricably linked to the ideological geographies of the time: throughout, Howell works out and clarifies the dichotomy between the familiar dog, associated with affection, protection, care, discipline (located outside the sphere of economy), and the public dog, a potential threat.

The book is organized into six chapters, in each of which Howell tackles a different perspective on the place of domestic dogs in Victorian Britain. He starts by addressing the ambivalence of the Victorian attitude that distinguished between respectable pets and disposable dogs. He compares stray dogs and the vagrant poor, both alienated from a “home” to which they morally belong; and dogs and women, both trained domestically and imprisoned in the ideal Victorian home. His reading of Dickens's depiction of the public space reveals a “breakdown of social and natural order” (32), ushering in a confusion humanity and animality or bestiality. He uses the example of Elizabeth Barrett's spaniel Flush as starting point for a reflection on dog theft and the urban geographies that defined class relations. In this second chapter Howell takes up cultural politics in terms of economy, legislation regarding pets as property, and feminism.

Howell devotes the third chapter to the first animal rescue charity, Holloway Dogs' Home, which he compares to a kind of philanthropic institution in its returning lost or starving dogs from the margins of society to a life of respectability. He links its efforts to that of the police clearing the streets, incarceration of the vagrant, and execution in the form of “domesticated killing” (101), already trying to reduce the suffering of the animals.

Howell proceeds to engage in the controversies over vivisection and the development of experimental science in the light of Darwin's evolutionary theory, George Romanes's and C. Lloyd Morgan's works on animal conscience, and debates over the human faculty to reason. He links evolutionary biology to humanitarian politics, science and sentiment, abolitionism, and animal welfare, while stressing the distinction that should be made between pet dogs and other animals.

The last two chapters are devoted to the less obvious topics of Victorian sentimentalism and modern concerns for science and progress. In chapter 5 he explores the grief and mourning of dead pets as indirect resistance of middle-class women. He also develops the question of the immortality of animals' souls in the Victorian imagination of death and the creation of pet cemeteries as emblematic of an “inclusive eschatological geography” (143). In chapter 6 he focuses on the practice of dog walking, at the crossroads of a disciplinary muzzling of dogs for “biosecurity” (155), reasons linked to the threat of rabies, and a more liberal regulation, whereby the lead or leash is taken as an emblem of the “freedom to be led” (151) by a responsible pet owner. Howell stresses the entanglement of human agency and animal “emergent capacities” (172).

Howell concludes on the “ruthless sentimentality” (175) that considered dogs simultaneously as “pets and pests” (177), arguing that the public debates around the dog question gradually turned domestic(ated) animals into political subjects, although only ever “conditional citizens” (182).

Howell offers a generous overview of the status of domestic dogs in Victorian Britain, focusing on a variety of well-documented aspects. A geographer, Howell draws on numerous facts and figures, newspaper reports, and detailed historical accounts of parliamentary debates to support his arguments, and quotes from landmark scientific, literary, and critical works. In spite of a completely justified use of sociological and philosophical terminology, Howell expresses a wish to “tell” the “stories as clearly as possible” (5), and he includes a variety of anecdotes, illustrations, and pictures that serve his purpose well. An impressive 24-page bibliography completes this thorough work.

Revolving around the geographies of Victorian domestic ideology, Howell constantly seeks to reassert the way in which the status of dogs is emblematic of broader issues at stake at the time—in terms of shifting values, class- and gender-related relationships. Questioning and qualifying widespread assumptions, presenting and reassessing evidence, he successfully debunks false beliefs. Howell's meaningful insights shed a new light on the relationships between dogs and authors, artists, politicians, and middle-class dog owners from the Victorian era, as well as contemporary ones—insights that are relevant as well as revealing regarding our place in society.

More in-depth comparisons with the status of other dogs—rural or working dogs—as well as other pets, such as cats or birds, and animals in general, might have allowed the novice reader a better understanding of the specificity of domestic dogs.

Utterly faithful to its announced line of conduct, the work might have benefited from the perspective allowed by further reference to theoretical works by Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari on “becoming-animal” and Jacques Derrida on animal thought. While Howell acknowledges and supports the shift from anthropocentrism to more complex human-animal relations, an inquiry into the possibility of animal consciousness and its foreshadowed exploration during the Victorian era might have added elements to his argument on the intermingling and proximity of animal and human agencies.