With jogging as with walking, Grisby likes to keep his own pace; sometimes he’ll run ahead of me, sometimes he’ll fall behind. He likes to investigate wayside smells, chase squirrels and rabbits, take shortcuts, and greet strangers. On this particular path, people generally have their dogs off leash, and we always go early, when we’re least likely to run into people who might not appreciate a French bulldog’s exuberant greeting. For this reason, too, we stick to the more secluded areas of the park. The northern end, which contains some of the oldest forest growth in the state of Maryland, is a natural wooded habitat. Here, undergrowth covers a crumbling man-made pond, and the roads are closed to traffic. Sometimes we meet stray dogs wandering around in the woods; there’s apparently a small feral population, mostly pit bulls; they’ve all been friendly so far.
Our morning run, when we have one, is always the best part of my day. Nothing ever goes wrong. Grisby’s enthusiasm is never dampened. Then I go home or to work, and life goes on in the usual fashion, which is to say it’s full of drawbacks, hesitations, disappointments, arguments, and anxieties, the kinds of things that never bother me when I’m running with Grisby. I love being in the park with him; he loves being there with me. It’s really as easy as that.
“HE & I ARE inseparable companions,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett of her cocker spaniel, Flush, “and I have vowed him my perpetual society in exchange for his devotion.” The poet kept her promise and remained committed to her pampered spaniel until he died, at a healthy old age. Her loyalty was, she wrote, the very least she could do, since Flush had “given up the sunshine for her sake.”
The young spaniel was originally a gift from Elizabeth Barrett’s friend Mary Mitford in 1842, given partly to help ease the poet’s grief after losing two of her brothers in one year and partly to relieve her loneliness, as she was bedridden with symptoms of consumption. When Flush arrived in her life, Barrett, aged thirty-five, was spending almost all her time in an upstairs room in her family’s London home at 50 Wimpole Street; her delicate health meant she rarely saw anyone other than her immediate family and their household servants. The popular perception of Barrett before her marriage, like that of her contemporary Jane Welsh Carlyle (see NERO), is of a lonely, childless, unhappy middle-aged woman for whom her dog was a compensation and substitute for human love, yet the situation of both women was far more subtle and indeterminate than this easy cliché suggests.
Flush is best known to us not through Barrett’s letters, in which he plays a major role, but through Virginia Woolf’s Flush: A Biography (1933), created, in part, as a playful parody of the popular Victorian life histories written by her friend Lytton Strachey—books like Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth and Essex. In this charming story, told from the spaniel’s perspective, Woolf makes use whenever possible of Elizabeth Barrett’s and Robert Browning’s own words, drawn mainly from their letters. “This you’ll call sentimental—perhaps—but then a dog somehow represents—no I can’t think of the word—the private side of life—the play side,” she wrote to a friend, which perhaps explains why she later dismissed Flush as “silly … a waste of time.” Nevertheless, it remains one of her most popular books.
Part of the reason for its popularity, I’d suggest, is that Flush is really and truly about Flush, and not his human companions. Without wanting to generalize too much, I’ve noticed that dog books often have much more to say about humans than they do about dogs. In many cases, it seems, those who write about their dogs are actually writing about something else entirely—their families, their childhoods, or their bonds with nature. Or perhaps they’re writing about dogs as a way to remind us to appreciate the simple things in life, to enjoy the kinship claim of animals, or to accept the latter half of life with grace and dignity. In such books, the dog’s purpose is to catch the attention of the reader and, like Hitchcock’s famous MacGuffin, to drive forward the human plot. “Much more than a dog story,” reviewers will say, as if a dog story by itself is so very little.
In Woolf’s version of the tale, after a playful puppyhood spent in the English countryside, Flush soon reconciles himself to a quiet life 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