At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain by Philip Howell (review)

Luce Irigaray has suggested that a zoological place exists through which humans may understand the grace and gift of the nonhuman animal that in turn inspires pure altruism and a communion with the living. Irigaray argues that the animal does not belong to the human nor in the human space but in another space appropriate to its life and territory. When thinking about her idea with respect to the domestic dog, many might scoff at the notion that the dog does not belong in the human home. Philip Howell is not one of them. In At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain, Howell upsets the common belief that dogs naturally belong in a human home. This study of the dog in Victorian Britain is a welcome academic contribution because it begins the academic work that allows us to see the dog in its own zoological space.

Howell's study does not pretend to refute the existence of a deep-seated dog-human bond, but it does a wonderful job of historicizing the relationship between the dog and the home by tracing the complexity of the notion of domesticity in nineteenth century England. The home acquired a specific meaning in the context of Victorian England, and, as Howell cogently shows, the meaning of home was linked to the social role of the dog in that space. The book points to the ways in which wandering street dogs came to be understood as astray, that is, lost and homeless. As they were policed out of public space, their role as loved pets in the bourgeois home materialized more concretely in social practice. The book is replete with historical examples of emerging social practices associated with canines, such as the paying of ransom to dog thieves.

Howell is a geographer and he is at is best when he theorizes the urban environment in light of the animal—what he terms the "animal turn in geography." Aside from his comments on the rise of dog stealing for ransom, of special note are his comments on: the emergence of the concept of the stray dog in the city; the creation of homes and shelters for dogs; the creation of pet cemeteries; and the practice of dog walking. Likewise, his study examines social practices that go part and parcel with other forms of Victorian-slanted dog domesticity grafted on the urban landscape, such as muzzling orders, the policing of rabies, and animal experimentation, particularly canine vivisection.

In pointing to how the dog was overdetermined by the material and imaginative geography of the bourgeois home of the Victorian era, Howell elucidates how Victorian England offers a visualization of the animal as part of the ideology of home. His study is not only a critique of sentimentality toward the dog as domestic pets in the late Victorian moral imagination. Most importantly, Howell looks outside of straight-jacketing anthropocentrism by adeptly tracing historic and literary moments, however tentative they be, that offer an alternative to the very anthropocentric ethics that the Victorian age established. For instance, it is wrong to think of the pet cemetery as merely the superfluity of a middle-class culture sentimentally devoted to the pet. It is also a deliberate boundary transgression that embraces nonhuman animals in a shared moral community through the practice of mourning.

The book includes an introduction, six chapters, a conclusion, notes, bibliography, and index. It also includes sixteen fascinating illustrations of dogs from the period. The cover image, for instance, shows a dog looking fondly up at three police officers while waiting for a verdict on its fate during a campaign against stray dogs. Howell integrates scholarly work from animal studies related to the fields of geography, anthropology, and literary studies, as well as more general sources such as Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, and Donna Haraway. He deftly integrates these secondary sources into a tapestry that displays the fundamental role of the...