A new book shows the complete mutual devotion between Elizabeth II and her corgis.
A new book shows the complete mutual devotion between Elizabeth II and her corgis.
For those who can’t face the ins and outs of the royal squabbles related in Prince Harry’s memoir, a more attractive prospect may be another new book that details one of the most fulfilling relationships in the life of the late Queen. It is a picture book, written by Caroline L Perry and illustrated by Lydia Corry: The Corgi and the Queen. It tells the story of Susan, the Pembroke corgi puppy who was given to the then-Princess Elizabeth by George VI on her 18th birthday, and from whom all her subsequent corgis were descended.
As with most books about dogs and their owners, it is a tale of complete mutual devotion. And like so many characters in literature, the strait-laced Elizabeth finds herself humanised by the love of a dog – or perhaps “caninised” would be the more appropriate word. She indulges Susan, defending her when she bites the royal clock-winder on the bottom or steals steak from the King’s plate.
Elizabeth is also shown hugging Susan as she weeps privately after the death of her father. As all dog lovers know, these are the occasions on which the unconditional adoration of your pooch truly feels like a blessing. (Try getting a cat to cuddle you in your sorrow when it’s not in the mood.)
Such is the intensity of the dog-human bond – perhaps the strongest inter-species relationship there is – that it is no surprise that literature abounds with closely observed portrayals of canines.
An early favourite for many of us is Timmy, the sole non-human component of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five – the one with the sharpest teeth (useful for nipping gypsies, foreigners and other undesirables), and by my reckoning the third brainiest. What rings true in the books is the strength of the love shown towards Timmy by the tomboyish George, who gives the impression she wouldn’t be over-bothered if any of the other children choked to death on their ginger beer.
From Toto to Lassie, the dogs of children’s literature are slavishly devoted to their masters. In Dodie Smith’s The Starlight Barking (1967), her bizarre sci-fi sequel to The Hundred and One Dalmatians, the Earth’s dog population is invited by Sirius, the Dog Star, to escape a world on the brink of nuclear war and live among the stars: but even the homeless dogs refuse to abandon humankind. (“Most of us can remember homes. Many of those homes weren’t good ones … But we loved the people who treated us so unkindly and we want our chance to belong to someone again.”)
The same note is struck with the earliest named dog to appear in literature, Argos in The Odyssey, which lives on into decrepitude for 20 years while it awaits the return of Odysseus. It expires the moment it finally sets eyes on its newly returned master (having managed, unlike Odysseus’s family and servants, to recognise him).
Personally speaking, however, I find something rather self-regarding about those authors who harp on the theme of loyalty to humans being the be-all and end-all of a dog’s interests. This explains why my favourite fictional pooch as a child was Snowy, which often fails to come to Tintin’s aid in moments of peril because it’s off chasing a cat, or has got drunk on spilt whisky.
It seems typical of Shakespeare’s breezy cynicism that the only dog to appear in his works – Crab in The Two Gentlemen of Verona – is described by his master Launce as “the sourest-natured dog that lives”. When Crab urinates under the Duke of Milan’s table, poor Launce claims to be the culprit to spare the mutt a whipping.
Of course, dogs, like people, can be nice or nasty or anything in between. One recurring theme of canine literature is how dogs’ personalities are shaped by their owners: a notable example being Flush (1933), Virginia Woolf’s “biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, who in Woolf’s hands becomes perhaps the most cultivated dog in all literature. (“Lying with his head pillowed on a Greek lexicon, he came to dislike barking and biting; he came to prefer the silence of the cat to the robustness of the dog.”)
Dickens is particularly good at showing how dogs are drawn to give their fealty to people who resemble them, such as the vicious bull terrier Bullseye which adores Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist (and, unlike in all the film adaptations, comes to a deserved bad end, falling from a building and “dashing his brains out”). Then there is Jip, the annoying lapdog in David Copperfield, which thankfully expires at the same time as its equally pathetic mistress Dora.
When dogs do evil things in fiction, their creators tend to offer excuses for them. Cujo, Stephen King’s killer St Bernard, only goes on a murderous rampage because it is rabid after being bitten on the nose by a bat. The hound of the Baskervilles is only scary because it is kept half-starved by a human psychopath who keeps painting its nose with phosphorus.
The most poignant portrait of a bad dog in fiction is the eponymous wolf-dog in Jack London’s White Fang (1906), who grows up “the enemy of his kind”, a ruthless attacker of other dogs. Eventually it is domesticated, but loses something of its soul – a reflection of London’s own ambiguous feelings about his journey from teenage hoodlum to respectable author.
Virginia Woof: the great modernist’s Flush is a biography of a cocker spaniel. Photo / Supplied
The battiest dog-book of them all, meanwhile, is JR Ackerley’s mad, brilliant memoir My Dog Tulip (1956), a crusty confirmed bachelor’s delineation of the most meaningful relationship in his life, with exhaustive descriptions of his beloved Alsatian’s sex life and bowel movements.
The obsessiveness in the accumulation of detail about Tulip is disturbing at times, and yet, as EM Forster noted, this makes for one of those rare books that manages to depict a dog “as a creature in her own right, as a dog of dogdom and not as an appendage of man”.
Perhaps we like reading about dogs as a confirmation that one species at least finds us lovable, despite our manifest imperfections. But speaking as somebody in between dogs (our cats have been exercising their veto), I think I simply enjoy vicarious canine company.
To return to the late Queen, one remembers the war surgeon David Nott’s account of meeting her and how, when he was overcome by his recollections of his recent experiences in Aleppo, she calmed him down by encouraging him to pat and stroke her corgis: “That’s so much better than talking, isn’t it?”
Reading doggy books has a similar soothing effect: it reminds us that the world can’t be all bad while it has dogs in it.
