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The Danger Zone: a picture story. Cats say so much with their little faces. Also, I love their little faces!

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Love love this. Want it on my wall. 🤡

Pee Wee has been a huge influence on me. I still think about his energy and interactions with people often. Thank you, Pee Wee. ❤️💔

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“Arsenic And Old Lace"  (1944)

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Student art work gifted to me. She got extra credit and ended with an A (cause it rocks).

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Mamie Dickens wrote that her father loved animals, flowers and birds which endears the author to me even so much more. Happy #nationaldogday

Victorians & Their Dogs: Some (Unimaginative) Names

For #NationalDogDay, it seems appropriate to look over the number of beloved Victorian pets kept by various figures. And let’s just say, if you were looking for inspiring names for your own pup, you might have to keep looking…

Perhaps most famous is poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush. [Row 2 above, beside EBB herself (portrait with her son, 1860): they do say owners begin to look like their animals.] Virginia Woolf wrote a ‘biography’ from Flush’s perspective of the author – which captures so amusingly and earnestly the feelings of a cherished pet, it’s well worth reading (here).

George Eliot’s publisher, John Blackwood, sent the author and her husband/de facto agent George Henry Lewes a pug – at least, that’s the breed they knew it as, since they named him… Pug. [Row 1, top-left, via NPG (1864) – one of two great images of Lewes and Pug.] 

‘The Famous Dog WESSEX, Aug 1913 - 27 Dec 1926, Faithful, Unflinching’ reads the gravemarker in the Max Gate pet cemetery. Thomas Hardy, well-known animal lover, hand-made his own tombstones for Wessex (who, apart from being famous, was apparently a biter) as well as other cats and dogs buried nearby [Row 3 above, including a photo of Hardy and second wife Florence with Wessex – evidently some sort of terrier]. Other loyal pets included Snowdove (cat), Marky, Kitsey, Tippety, Chips, and – in the years since the house became the Hardy Museum – Henry (d. 2009).

Not Victorian, but second-generation Romantic poet Lord Byron composed (in typical style) an Epitaph to a Dog for his fluffy, enormous pet Boatswain, a Landseer Newfie [see Row 4 above, including a painting of the breed by Sir Edward Landseer, 1838; and pics of Byron’s tomb to Boatswain at Newstead Abbey.] The final lines of the poem would bring tears to the eyes of most dog lovers: ‘Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn, Pass on—it honours none you wish to mourn: To mark a Friend’s remains these stones arise; I never knew but one,—and here he lies.’

While she wasn’t exactly a people person, Emily Brontë was emphatically an animal person, so much so that her family often tried to put a lid on the number of pets – a cat called Flossie, some hunting and water birds, possibly mice – she brought in from the cold. She pretty much ignored them. Probably most cherished was Keeper, a pretty terrifying mastiff, who Emily kept in line sometimes by brutal force as much as love. [See her drawing of ‘Keeper from Life – April 24th 1838 – Emily Jane Brontë –’, Row 1, top-right.] Later, Charlotte Brontë found the old, ailing dog a somber reminder after her sister’s death.

Charles Dickens not only wrote about but also owned several dogs in his lifetime, including – as Claire Tomalin reviewed in the Guardian – the first, a white spaniel, Timber, followed later by the famous Turk [last image above, Row 5], Sultan (warning: not a happy ending), and Don, all big St. Bernard’s, bloodhounds, or Newfies. (To be fair, he also kept a pet raven, Grip, so… there’s that.) To understand Dickens’s feelings, in life and in his fiction, towards dogs took historian Beryl Gray a whole book.

The list goes on. Poets, politicians, even Queen Victoria kept dogs for pets – see beloved her Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Dash, Irish Wolfhouse Nero, and Greyhound Hector in another Landseer painting (yes, including a parrot; 1837):

Helpfully, the Victorians were a little more inventive with their fictional dog names: Pilot, Rochester’s beloved dog in Jane Eyre; Gyp belongs to the title character of Eliot’s Adam Bede, not to be confused with Jip in Dickens’s David Copperfield; Boxer (one can only assume, a boxer) in A Christmas Carol; Bulls-eye belongs to the abusive Bill Sykes in Oliver Twist (don’t read that unless you’re prepared for animal and human things to get dark); Lion, the loyal hound in Little Dorrit (another bad ending); Diogenes shows up in Dombey and Son; Laska, the fantastically narrated hunting spaniel owned by Levin in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and countless other dogs that loyally remain near their narrative human familiars. 

Animal Studies is an incredibly interesting area within other cultural fields. Often within Victorian studies, dogs and other animals provide bodies for love or abuse, thus allowing authors – especially women – to discuss the cruelty of mankind in an era of increasing interest in ‘animal welfare’ and the interiority of non-human creatures, and which created the (later R)SPCA, founded 1824. 

For some wonderful, heartfelt, brilliant reading on how the Victorians thought about, were inspired by, cared for, and grieved over their animals, start off with Victorian Animal Dreams, eds. Deborah D. Morse and Martin A. Danahay (2007); and Shaggy Muses, by Maureen Adams (2009).

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A fear submitted by Uli to deep dark fears. The new Deep Dark Fears book is now available for pre-order at Amazon, B&N, IndieBound, iBooks, and Google Books. Thanks!

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7 Layer Burrito and pinto beans and rice. .__.

The Unemployment Diaries No1

Shop | Patreon

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"Pumpkin Eyes" Hypothesis No. 3, Josh Roper (again I know). "Trivial Pursuit."

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I resonate with this

A submission from gjava-vont for deep dark fears.

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"Pumpkin Eyes" hypothesis number 2, Sydney Lietz. "Sock Par-tay"

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Just a thought for today's gray London afternoon.

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"Pumpkin Eyes" Hypothesis No. 1, Josh Roper

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My next comic installment, "Pumpkin Eyes."  Inspired by my friend, Josh Roper's musings on the subject and with help from my friends (who will be credited with their hypotheses. 

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Pickle face!

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My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you’re never around assholes. That’s the two things to really fight for in life.

John Waters  (via detailsdetales)

My sentiments exactly.

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The conclusion to "I'm Hungry" starring Oatmeal.  Enjoy!

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"I'm Hungry" continues with Oatmeal attempting to place his order.