The Victorian invention of dog breeds
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The Victorian invention of dog breeds Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton: The invention of the modern dog: breed and blood in Victorian Britain. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, xviii+282 pp, $39.95 HB William T. Lynch1 Published online: 21 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton have written an important book making the case for the inherent historicity of the concept of dog breeds. While Victorian emphasis on defining dog breeds by their conformation to a set of physical traits is well known, they point out that historians have tended to employ the concept of breeds while trying to read back in time the history of domesticated animals. However, it was only beginning around the 1860s that a shift occurred from dog types defined primarily through behavior to breeds defined through conformation standards specifying an ideal appearance. The concept did not remain abstract but shaped the breeding practices of dogs, replacing a “gradation of forms” with sharp divisions between breeds defined by their form. To define a breed’s conformation, distinct body “points” were specified and subsequent breeding took place with the goal of enforcing uniformity through inbreeding, eliminating intermediate forms. Consequently, Victorian breeders significantly altered the material form of modern dogs, which the authors see as a watershed as significant as the initial domestication of dogs. The characteristics of modern dogs were altered as the result of distinct characteristics of Victorian society, as breeding for competition in dog shows led to specialization and standardization of breeds, commodified for the market by the objectification of dog parts “as being made up of quantifiable parts” (7). In their view, breeds acted as brands that advertised the breeder’s handiwork through carefully chosen visual markers. To be sure, this created a conflict between an emphasis on dogs that were “improved” to excel at a “meritocratic” competition and the emphasis on the purity of a dog’s lineage. They trace modern dog shows, including both sporting and nonsporting dogs, to one in Birmingham in December 1860. Growing out of earlier agricultural shows associated with landowners, and poultry and pigeon shows * William T. Lynch [email protected] 1
Department of History, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
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more popular with the middle and working classes, the dog shows of the 1860s were marred by controversies over sometimes corrupt, but always subjective, judges. John Henry Walsh took up the problem in his Field: The Country Gentlemen’s Newspaper in 1865, developing the first modern conformation standard developed from his pointer, Major. Other standards for other breeds followed in the journal’s pages and were codified in Walsh’s influential The Dogs of the British Islands (1867). Worboys, Strange, and Pemberton note that “if there was a moment when the modern dog was invented, this was it” (83).
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