Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

Page 63

Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller

been brought up at Oxford, too. The dog kept the gentleman

entirely for his glorification, and the gentleman never talked

about anything but the terrier. This, however, was not in a shy

neighbourhood, and is a digression consequently.

There are a great many dogs in shy neighbourhoods, who keep boys.

I have my eye on a mongrel in Somerstown who keeps three boys. He

feigns that he can bring down sparrows, and unburrow rats (he can

do neither), and he takes the boys out on sporting pretences into

all sorts of suburban fields. He has likewise made them believe

that he possesses some mysterious knowledge of the art of fishing,

and they consider themselves incompletely equipped for the

Hampstead ponds, with a pickle-jar and wide-mouthed bottle, unless

he is with them and barking tremendously. There is a dog residing

in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind man. He may be seen,

most days, in Oxford-street, haling the blind man away on

expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the

man: wholly of the dog’s conception and execution. Contrariwise,

when the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded

thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the moneytray

like an easy collar, instead of offering it to the public,

taking the man against his will, on the invitation of a

disreputable cur, apparently to visit a dog at Harrow – he was so

intent on that direction. The north wall of Burlington House

Gardens, between the Arcade and the Albany, offers a shy spot for

appointments among blind men at about two or three o’clock in the

afternoon. They sit (very uncomfortably) on a sloping stone there,

and compare notes. Their dogs may always be observed at the same

time, openly disparaging the men they keep, to one another, and

settling where they shall respectively take their men when they

begin to move again. At a small butcher’s, in a shy neighbourhood

(there is no reason for suppressing the name; it is by Nottinghill,

and gives upon the district called the Potteries), I know a

shaggy black and white dog who keeps a drover. He is a dog of an

easy disposition, and too frequently allows this drover to get

drunk. On these occasions, it is the dog’s custom to sit outside

the public-house, keeping his eye on a few sheep, and thinking. I

have seen him with six sheep, plainly casting up in his mind how

many he began with when he left the market, and at what places he

has left the rest. I have seen him perplexed by not being able to

account to himself for certain particular sheep. A light has

gradually broken on him, he has remembered at what butcher’s he

left them, and in a burst of grave satisfaction has caught a fly

off his nose, and shown himself much relieved. If I could at any

time have doubted the fact that it was he who kept the drover, and

not the drover who kept him, it would have been abundantly proved

by his way of taking undivided charge of the six sheep, when the

drover came out besmeared with red ochre and beer, and gave him

wrong directions, which he calmly disregarded. He has taken the

sheep entirely into his own hands, has merely remarked with

respectful firmness, ‘That instruction would place them under an

omnibus; you had better confine your attention to yourself – you

will want it all;’ and has driven his charge away, with an

intelligence of ears and tail, and a knowledge of business, that

has left his lout of a man very, very far behind.

As the dogs of shy neighbourhoods usually betray a slinking

consciousness of being in poor circumstances – for the most part

manifested in an aspect of anxiety, an awkwardness in their play,

and a misgiving that somebody is going to harness them to

something, to pick up a living – so the cats of shy neighbourhoods

exhibit a strong tendency to relapse into barbarism. Not only are

they made selfishly ferocious by ruminating on the surplus

population around them, and on the densely crowded state of all the

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