Francis Coventry's satire of pet keeping, The History of Pompey the Little (1751), ends abruptly when Pompey, the canine protagonist, becomes the subject of a legal conundrum: two ladies claim ownership over him but cannot prove it. In desperation, one consults with a lawyer to prosecute her rival for theft. Pompey is her property, she claims. The lawyer disagrees. He explains that lapdogs’ following nature impedes their classification as property. Before the dispute is resolved, Pompey dies. The History of Pompey the Little's unsettled conclusion is representative of eighteenth-century debates over the status of pets, whether treated as fashion accessories, dining companions, currency, or mere objects; or represented as monsters, parasites, or devoted companions. This kaleidoscopic status is central to studies on the origins of modern pet keeping, which generally attribute its rise to three cultural shifts: the onslaught of industrialization, the rise of the middle class and its concomitant consumerism, and the culture of sensibility. Animal Companions, Ingrid H. Tague's superb book, accounts for these shifts in exhaustive detail and without flattening their complexities. Her focus on the conflicts surrounding pet keeping makes this study invaluable.
Tague draws from a vast array of materials, ranging from eighteenth-century scientific and literary genres (natural history, novels, poetry, newspapers) and visual culture (prints and portraits) to legal and philosophical documents (legislative debates, animal rights treatises) and testimonies from pet owners. This archive supports her twofold approach to the study of pet keeping. She conceives of pets as both a vehicle whereby Britons pondered the central questions of their time and as living beings whose increasing centrality encouraged Britons to explore the nature of species and other socially constructed boundaries. To avoid telling a simple narrative of progress, Tague structures her book around four areas of conflict: domestication, gender, class, and sensibility.
An examination of the material conditions of pet keeping frames the study and reveals a lively picture of the variety of species, from turtles to harlequin dogs, sold at miscellaneous stores. This diversity was made possible by Britain's expanding trade with Asia, Africa, and America, indicating the entanglement between pet keeping and Britain's ongoing exposure to, and enslavement of, people deemed foreign. Indeed, Tague's most scintillating chapter foregrounds the overlaps between debates about the domestication of exotic and local animals and debates about human slavery. Oliver Goldsmith's definition of “domestic” as an animal taken “into friendship” or “reduced to obedience,” and “savage” as an animal who still preserves a “natural independence and ferocity” intimates the dilemma that domestication posed for naturalists (62). Some writers argued that while enslaving working animals is necessary for human survival, pets are enslaved for no reason. Tague's exploration of the resonances between animal and human slavery leads into her examination of François Le Vaillant's expedition to South Africa with Kees, his chacma baboon. Her analysis of this elaborate relationship—where companionship and servitude commingle—foregrounds how ideas of racial difference and species difference intersect in arguments about human power over animals and human power over other humans.
Slaves and pets could be conflated in part because they were associated with femininity and feminine luxury. Many of the vices associated with pet keeping were projected onto women, usually represented as overenthusiastic, morally corrupt fashionable ladies. Tague studies a familiar corpus of satires to expand our understanding of the overlaps between the rise in pet keeping and changing constructions of femininity and masculinity. Satirical poetry, paintings—such as Joseph Wright of Derby's eerie “Dressing the Kitten” (1768–70)—and prints depict girls, ladies, and spinsters alongside lapdogs, monkeys, cockatoos, and cats to condemn women's lascivious affection for their pets as well as highlight their idleness. Visual and textual satires also attack men—for example, by sending up the dancing master's suspect masculinity as he teaches pets how to dance. And yet, as Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch evinces, by the end of the century the image of a man and his dog locked in an embrace no longer connotes emasculation. Instead, the portrait celebrates a new masculine sensibility that finds companionship and worthiness in a pet. Indeed, in Horace Walpole's correspondence, human-animal affection is a means to assert homosocial bonds of affection. When Walpole's friend, John Chute, asks him to tell his dog, Patapan, he'll “kiss him an hour the first time” he sees him, Patapan serves as a “surrogate to express affection” (221).
Walpole's is one among many firsthand testimonials that Tague draws on to map the rise of pet keeping. But these letters also highlight the dearth of nonelite experiences available to the historian of human-animal relations. Tague recognizes that her study cannot attest fully to the experiences of poor and working-class pet keepers. However, her analysis of the 1796 dog tax reveals how debates over pet keeping are often informed by problematic assumptions about the poor and whether or not they had a right to animal companionship. Some tax proponents believed pets were luxuries the poor could not afford; others were concerned that the poor would go without food in order to nourish their pets. Oftentimes these views found their source in paternalist assumptions about the poor's inability to manage their financial needs. Ultimately, though, the dog tax suggested a kind of victory for both the poor and their pets: the wealthy were liable for the tax; the poor were not and were given the right to animal companionship.
The connections that Animal Companions unravels invite us to ponder the ethical dilemmas inherent to contemporary human-animal relations. Pet keeping might be a more democratic practice today, but human-animal relations continue to inflect sexism, racism, and classism, while human rights are seen as being in tension with animal rights. Crucially, Tague's epilogue reminds us that even though we have a better understanding of the dilemmas inherent to pet keeping, one remains unresolved: we might know what our pets mean to us, but we struggle daily to explain how this relationship is meaningful to them.
