Lord Byron’s Best Friends, from Bulldogs to Boatswain & Beyond by Geoffrey Bond (review)

This splendidly-presented and modestly-priced book is the product of Geoffrey Bond’s great knowledge of and enthusiasm for Byron, his careful custodianship of a house where Byron lived, and his most generous support for the study of the poet over many decades, brought together with the author’s characteristic sense of style. It is also a work of research and erudition, and the first book-length study of the important place held by dogs in Byron’s world, providing a revealing new vantage point from which to view aspects of Byron’s character, work, biography and travels.

Bond uses his wide knowledge of Byron’s letters and journals, together with the biographies of Doris Langley Moore, Leslie Marchand, Roderick Beaton and others, as well as a great variety of nineteenth-century and modern sources, to trace all the references to dogs in Byron’s life, and to provide an informative and engaging commentary on these. The book’s first section is dedicated to a condensed, illustrated biography of Byron, and then each of his dogs is given a brief biography of his own (all except one were male), and these in turn are used to reflect on different aspects of Byron’s life, activities and personality.

There is a wonderful array of illustrations throughout, each introduced by a short, often witty, title and a caption giving some snippet of information about Byron and/or the dogs. The images are reproduced in full colour and at a generous size, and they include work by artists such as Landseer, Turner and Ford Madox Brown, together with many contemporary paintings, prints, illustrations and caricatures, as well as interesting new and specially-commissioned art and photography by Bond’s friend and colleague Nick Hugh McCann. Some of the famous ad vivum portraits of Byron (such as those by George Sanders and Thomas Phillips) are reproduced in better quality here than anywhere else I know, alongside some well-presented lesser-known Byronic images, such as portraits from Bond’s collection, a fine view of Newstead Abbey in 1825 by Cornelius Varley, Byron’s marriage certificate, and a photograph of the inside of Boatswain’s tomb (with the empty plinth that was intended to support Byron’s own coffin).

In particular, the book reproduces for the first time, and in colour, the entire contents – including all 11 drawings – from The Wonderful History of Lord Byron & his Dog, created in 1807 by Byron’s Southwell friend and neighbour, Elizabeth Pigot. This little-known sketchbook contains some of the most intimate and appealing material about the young Byron, showing him as a style-conscious undergraduate down from Cambridge with ultra-fashionable haircut, side-burns, pantaloons, top hat and elaborate cravat, cavorting with his dogs (and also an unfortunate cat); playing cricket; interacting with his neighbours, and resorting to the slipper bath to ‘boil off his fat’. All this makes for a highly entertaining and informative read, and one not-particularly Byronic friend who looked through my copy of the book came away determined to buy a copy for himself.

Byron’s two ‘Newfoundland’ dogs, Boatswain and Lyon, book-end the poet’s adult life. Boatswain died of rabies after several years in Byron’s possession in 1808, when Byron was 20, and Lyon provided friendship in Missolonghi up to Byron’s death in 1824 (and beyond, since Lyon and two other dogs accompanied the coffin by sea to England). In Byron’s youth his dog ownership offered opportunities for what might now be called ‘performance art’ of several kinds: since it was the Cambridge authorities’ ban on Boatswain’s presence at the University that prompted Byron to install a tame bear there instead, and Boatswain’s untimely death that led Byron to create the famous Newstead monument, epitaph and tomb for his dog (and to leave instructions that he was to be buried in it...