with his invalid mistress, waking her in the morning with his kisses, sharing her meals of chicken and rice pudding soaked in cream. Elizabeth’s health improves when she meets Robert Browning, though Flush feels neglected at the intrusion, and can’t restrain himself from biting Browning in a fit of jealousy when he calls round one afternoon to pay a visit. Afterward, according to Elizabeth, Flush “came up stairs with a good deal of shame in the bearing of his ears.” His mistress refused to forgive him until eight o’clock in the evening, when, she writes to Browning, having “spoken to me (in the Flush language) & … examined your chair, he suddenly fell into a rapture and reminded me that the cakes you left, were on the table.”
Incidentally, Flush has no reason to complain of being displaced by Mr. Browning, whom Elizabeth loves very differently from the way she loves Flush. In many ways, the dog always comes first in her affections, but her love for Flush is more protective and maternal than erotic. Elizabeth writes to Mary Mitford that unlike other dogs, Flush dislikes bones; prefers sponge cake, coffee, and partridge cut into small pieces fed to him with a fork; and will drink only from a china cup even though it makes him sneeze. His mistress sheds tears when Flush is kidnapped—as actually happened three times in real life (see BULL’S-EYE), though Woolf conflates the events into one incident—yet her grief is considered ridiculous (“I was accused so loudly of ‘silliness & childishness’ afterwards that I was glad to dry my eyes & forget my misfortunes by way of rescuing my reputation”). She finds it necessary, in a letter to Browning, to justify her tears: “After all it was excusable that I cried. Flushie is my friend—my companion—& loves me more than he loves the sunshine.”
Men often seem to feel uncomfortable around “excessive” displays of emotion, especially those evoked by dogs. While he may not have ridiculed her tears, Robert Browning tried to persuade Elizabeth not to pay the ransom that was demanded for Flush when he was stolen. Elizabeth, in what was considered a reckless move by Browning and her family, went by carriage with Wilson, her maid, to the slums of Whitechapel to negotiate with the dog thieves. After five days and a payment of twenty pounds, much disapproved of by Barrett’s father and her fiancé, Flush was returned to Wimpole Street. It seems interesting to note in this context that Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, appeared to share Robert Browning’s attitude. Though he loved dogs, Leonard Woolf took a Cesar Millan–style approach to their training, intimidating them into “calm submission” before offering any sign of friendliness. His method was hardly a great success—the Woolfs’ dog Hans was notorious for interrupting parties by getting sick on the rug, and Pinka, the dog Virginia Woolf used as the model for Flush, apparently ate a set of Leonard’s proofs and urinated on the carpet eight times in a single day.
According to the social reformer Henry Mayhew, stealing dogs was in fact a commonplace racket in Victorian London. “They steal fancy dogs ladies are fond of,” wrote Mayhew in 1861, “spaniels, poodles, and terriers.” Jane Welsh Carlyle, the wife of the essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, was also a victim of these cruel swindlers (see NERO). One day in June 1851, when Mrs. Carlyle was out walking with her husband and her Maltese dog Nero, “the poor little creature was snapt up by two men and run off with into space!” She doesn’t want to give in to the gang, she writes, “for if they find I am ready to buy him back at any price (as I am) they will always be stealing him—till I have not a penny left!” Nero was stolen and returned three times, once managing heroically to escape and make his way home under his own steam. Later in the same letter, however, we discover why the dog thieves had such an easy time of it. Mrs. Carlyle complains that she might have to start keeping Nero on a chain when they leave the house (“and that is so sad a Life for the poor dog”), an observation that suggests he was seldom leashed. While there was far less traffic at that time than there is today, and while horse-drawn vehicles rarely reached the speed of automobiles, there were surely plenty of opportunities for dogs to get into trouble, quite apart from being snatched up by kidnappers. Leashes may be a drag, but city dogs aren’t safe without them—in any century.
Barrett Browning never mentions any of her dreams, but since Flush slept in her bed (against doctor’s orders), he no doubt played an active role in her dream life. Grisby appears in my dreams all the time, though not always in his usual form (and in dreams, as in life, he has to be taken out to answer the call of nature). Once I dreamed there were two Grisbys, identical twins who sat under my chair like little Cerberuses. In another dream, a larger dog followed him around everywhere. When I asked this dog’s owner what his breed was, she replied, “He’s a shadowboxer.” This nocturnal doubling and shape-shifting seem unsurprising; as Freud himself remarks, in our dreams, “we are not in the least surprised when a dog quotes a line of poetry,” though when we wake, we can’t help trying to make sense of these strange transfigurations.
Most of my Grisby dreams, in fact, are nightmares—the expression, I assume, of all my repressed anxieties. They’re always the same, and they return me to a primitive, prelinguistic level of distress—the kind of primal pain experienced by the child taken from its mother, or by the mother who loses her child. In my nightmares, Grisby is missing. I’m devastated, torn between going in search of him and getting a new dog right away, to cushion the pain. Sometimes I do one, sometimes the other, but whenever I get a new dog, it’s always another male French bulldog, and I name him Grisby, too. Time passes. I grow to love my new Grisby. The old Grisby is forgotten. Then comes the moment of horror: All of a sudden, I realize the original Grisby’s still out there somewhere, all alone, lost, trying to get back to me. How could I have abandoned him? I’ll wake in a sweat, and it always takes me a moment to realize that Grisby is right there in bed with me—the original Grisby, whimpering in his sleep. Does he dream of losing me? Has he moved on to a new Mikita, leaving me lost, dogless, alone?
Flush, too, moves on. By the time the Brownings have settled in Florence, he’s grown accustomed to his new master, Robert, successfully making the transition from lapdog to family dog—something Grisby has never been able to do. Though he’s lived with David all his life, Grisby is, categorically, my pet. “Your French bulldog,” according to the author of How to Raise and Train a French Bulldog, “will bond with one member of the family,” a line that David often repeats in a slightly affronted tone.
In the wider culture, this exclusivity is largely considered unwholesome; I’ve heard Grisby called a “mommy’s boy,” and when I wear a long skirt, he sometimes likes to hide under it. It’s far healthier, according to popular opinion, for a dog to be part of the family. Family dogs are regarded as genial and good-natured, keeping guard over hearth and home. Free from pampering and protection, they romp with the kids each morning, nap in the sun all afternoon, then fetch Dad’s slippers when he gets home from work. Unsurprisingly, family dogs appear most often in children’s books, in which they love everyone unstintingly, demonstrating their loyalty by dragging old folks from burning buildings and saving kids from floods. Dogs like Lassie and Old Yeller spend their lives teaching families wonderful, life-enhancing lessons, and then, when they’re no longer needed, go gently to the grave.
Unlike the snippy, jealous lapdog, the family dog loves everyone, regardless of age. In J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan, Nana, a kind and docile black-and-white Newfoundland, keeps a close eye on the three Darling children, whose parents can’t afford a real nanny. When the children are flying away, Nana howls to alert their parents, but her warnings are ignored, leaving Mr. Darling so remorseful that he sleeps in the kennel himself, until their safe return. Nana, usually played by an actor in a dog suit, was based on Barrie’s own dog Luath, also a black-and-white Newfoundland, though, unlike Nana, Luath was a male. The author claimed he wrote Peter Pan “with that great dog waiting for me to stop, not complaining, for he knew it was thus we made our living.” Still, when Luath discovered he’d been given a sex change in the play, wrote Barrie, he couldn’t help expressing his feeling with “a look.”
Other family dogs care for the elderly. In John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, the dog Balthasar, a “friendly and cynical
