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Dogs in Books: A Celebration of Dog Illustration Through the Ages

By Catherine Britton

The most perspicacious of the school of Marx – namely, Groucho – quipped that ‘Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read’.  I wonder, then, what he might make of the illuminating possibilities in a book about dogs in books.  But such are the questions of paradise.

Catherine Britton’s Dogs in Books: A Celebration of Dog Illustration Through the Ages, constellates of few of brightest in canine stardom.  As senior editor at the British Library, Britton had an embarrassment of offerings from which to select her examples of the dog in books.  The book’s selections range widely. It opens with Cerberus, the three-headed gate-keeping dog of Hades, and closes with Blue Dog, the saucer-eyed terrier spaniel that has become the iconic image of George Rodrigue’s painting.  Curled between these bookends are over 30 other examples of dogs in books; each choice is tidily arranged with an image on one page, a brief explanation facing it. 

The images are richly rendered, providing superbly detailed illustrations of their source texts.  Several of these illustrations are so familiar that we tend to overlook their strange beauty. John Tenniel’s illustration of ‘the dear little puppy’ from Alice in Wonderland captures playfulness of both pup and prose, but as with Carroll’s story, the fun can turn sinister within a line.  The frisky pose of the puppy is stopped just before he lunges at the shrunken Alice, and she seems unwitting in her offer of a stick to a puppy many times her size. 

Other images demonstrate the loving patience that the artists paid to their rendering of dogs.  Cecil Aldin’s dogs are depicted with the sensitivity of an owner so enamoured with his pet that, in 1937, he penned the dog’s obituary in The Times.  The simple grace of these drawings speaks as much to the artist’s adoration of his pet as it does to the variety of expressions that a dog possesses.  Indeed, a reader might easily flip through this slim volume simply to see the many faces of a dog. These range from menace (in the case of Bill Sykes’ Bull’s Eye from Oliver Twist), to serenity (Aileen in W G Smedley’s illustration of Mark Twain’s A Dog’s Tale), all by way of ebullience (Timmy in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five).  And were one to stretch the descriptions to include literary aspirations, we could also include Charles Shulz’s Snoopy, whose efforts on the page begin – and end – with a quotation, ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.  A noble effort – even for a beagle.

As with Britton’s earlier publication, Cats in Books, the selections of famous pets immediately prompts howls over omission.  Is there no place for James Joyce’s Garryowen from Ulysses (who wouldn’t want to add a character that delivers a speech in a pub?); Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush, remembered in a biography by Virginia Woolf; or Steinbeck’s travelling companion in Travels with Charlie?  Mythic dogs also might feature: the Welsh hound, Gelert, for whom a grave stands in Snowdonia, or even Cuchulain, the Irish hero whose had to change his name from Setanta to become, literally, the ‘dog of Cullan’ after slaying that king’s guard dog.  Perhaps closer to home, Jerome K. Jerome’s companion in Three Men and a Boat seems a sorry absence; Montmorency seems more complex than the titular trio. 

But such a criticism misses the point of this small volume’s achievement.  Brief essays balance the images, and they illustrate the many meanings and significances that writers and artists have continually discovered in dogs.  A charming work for lovers of dogs and books alike, Dogs in Books will, like the many animals of its title, sit by quietly and patiently, and will reward energetically even the most cursory of attentions.

Dogs in Books: A Celebration of Dog Illustration Through the Ages by Catherine Britton is published by the  British Library and Mark Batty, 2011. £7.95.