TY - JOUR
AU1 - Ridgwell,, Stephen
AB - Abstract In Victorian England poachers and dogs were subject to increasing levels of public interest and engagement. This article considers how their various interactions were represented across a range of printed and visual media and suggests that in establishing the poacher as a largely positive figure the dog had a vital role to play. If a number of other factors worked in favour of the poacher, not least the widespread dislike of the Game Laws, important in this process of legitimation was the poacher’s active link to the canine world. Though ambiguity always surrounded the poacher, and the dog was not always to be found on his side, more often than not it was. The development of this association casts an interesting light on the framing of human-animal relations in the nineteenth century, a critical moment for those concerned with the ‘animal turn’ and notions of non-human agency, and reveals how the dog was more than just the poacher’s ally in the un-official hunting field. As an urban-centred culture acquired a distinctly ruralist orientation, within the popular knowledge economy the idea of the poacher and his dog resonated across boundaries of class and geography. This in turn provides new evidence of how, at the level of culture, the more disreputable sides of life could be accommodated within a society that ostensibly prized respectability. In 1879 Henry Irving appeared at the Lyceum Theatre in his own production of The Iron Chest. In the part of Sir Edward Mortimer, the celebrated actor could be found offering charity to the family of a poacher whose dog had been shot by a gamekeeper. Mortimer’s intervention is prompted by learning the full extent of the poacher’s loss: the ‘rogue’, he is told, had ‘lived this year upon that lurcher’.1 Taking its lead from Irving, this article considers poachers and dogs, closely related subjects of much interest to Victorians. More specifically, it deals with how connections between the two played out across a range of cultural forms in ways that were broadly positive for the poacher. While the principal focus is on representation, the attendant realities are necessarily kept in mind. That the poacher forged unusually close bonds with his chosen animal, and was frequently seen to do so, was critical to the work of cultural construction examined here. In the kind of species blurring common to the period, which saw authors like Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle invest their characters with various canine traits, the well-known Midlands poacher, Edward Taylor, was known as The Lurcher – the natural hunting instincts of the animal morphing into those of the man to create a popular, and one assumes approving, form of identity marker.2 Whether as key auxiliaries in the unofficial hunting field, or as impressive symbols of human-animal cooperation and control, the poacher ‘lived’ on his lurcher in more ways than one. Compared to the poacher’s practices and methods, and the associated workings of the Game Laws, the poacher as an idea – as a represented presence within the so-called ‘imagined community’ – has received little scholarly attention.3 Bringing human and non-human worlds together, I move beyond the culture of poaching to look instead at poaching as culture. Building on the period’s evident fascination in the ‘disreputable’ and the ‘backstage’, I consider how the poacher and his dog, a striking form of interspecies assemblage to which both parties brought agency, helped to legitimize – or at least make more acceptable – what many in authority saw as an insidious and demoralizing form of crime.4 Whatever the dog thought about this we cannot of course know. When it came to the framing of ‘animal-related discourse’ the subject was always mute.5 Dogs could bite, but they could not speak, least of all the famously silently lurcher – which ‘par excellence’, people were told, was the poacher’s dog.6 The influence of the animal ‘other’ upon nineteenth-century life has been firmly established.7 Importantly, the urbanizing process did not necessarily diminish the living presence of animals. According to a major study of rabies in Britain, a disease often linked to the rising number of dogs in urban areas, ‘All kinds of beast were omnipresent in Victorian cities, and links between town and country remained close’.8 Moreover, if the social and economic importance of the countryside was declining, its cultural value was moving in precisely the opposite direction. Within this growingly pervasive urban culture of the countryside, where the ‘essential England was rural’, the poacher had an important role to play.9 For readers of the Wiltshire-born Richard Jefferies, who in books like The Gamekeeper at Home (1878) and The Amateur Poacher (1879) established the template for much of the ruralist writing that followed, ‘Lurcherland’ was a place to be visited often.10 The urban arena was now the principal site for cultural construction and consumption. By 1901 almost 80% of the population inhabited towns or cites, and across an expanding, and increasingly interconnected, representational field it was possible to know all manner of poachers (and their dogs), without ever actually encountering them. However, if as Barry Reay suggests, the nineteenth century’s representation of the rural ‘belongs in the world of urban history’ (Jefferies produced much of his work while living in Surbiton), it was important that at ground level the poacher remained an actively functioning agent.11 A trespasser on land reserved for those species classed as game, and an unsanctioned – but recognized – breeder and handler of dogs, as part of his day-to-day operations the poacher touched upon numerous points of human-animal interest. Whatever the claims that might be made for other animals, the dog was central to the age. More than any other creature, notes Philip Howell, the dog partook of the ‘dense bonds of interdependence, the shared spaces, the complex social and political relationships that we share with other animals’.12 In a way clearly shown by the work of renowned animal painters like Edwin Landseer, the possession of a dog – and the type of dog possessed – may have been deeply classed, but it was also universal. For instance, the noble and erect deerhound that personifies High Life (first shown in 1829) was deliberately paired by the artist with the altogether coarser, but literally more street-wise, butcher’s dog of Low Life.13 From ‘prosperous masters’ to ‘beggars, gypsies, minstrels, soldiers and other itinerants’, in both art and in life, observes Laura Brown, the dog was a uniquely accommodating presence.14 Yet the position of the dog was never entirely settled. Privileged by Darwin with high levels of intelligence and, in the proper circumstances, moral sense, dogs could also go dangerously mad and behave in distinctly anti-social ways. Legislation passed in 1871 enabling the police to seize and impound ‘savage’ or nuisance dogs was primarily designed to give ‘further protection’ against the animal most lauded by Victorians.15 The ambiguities surrounding the dog were to some extent mirrored in contemporary views of the poacher. This quintessentially, though not necessarily, rural figure has been closely scrutinized by historians of nineteenth-century crime and society. Drawing on notions of ‘moral economy’ and ‘social banditry’, much of this work has focused on poaching as a distinctive form of ‘social crime’ – a popularly legitimated assertion of ‘right’ that acquired an extra dimension in the wider struggle for political equality.16 In this sense the poacher could speak as much to the middle-class radical as to the agricultural labourer. However, in a way that documenters of crime like Henry Mayhew would have understood, moves have also been made to explore the kinds of urban-based poaching gang that, as one authority notes, ‘slotted easily into the Victorian stereotypes of the criminal classes’.17 For Mayhew, poaching was just another kind of animal theft to be ranked alongside the stealing of horses, sheep, deer and, appropriately enough, cats and dogs.18 While it was certainly true that poachers and dogs could exist beyond the pale, this widely reported case of human-animal cooperation did much to sustain the idea of the poacher as a genuine example of the English sporting spirit: sport in this case being the skilled pursuit of fur and feather. Indeed, more negative portrayals of this pairing can be read as an attempt to claw back some of the rhetorical ground ceded to the ‘poor innocent poachers’ of popular sentiment.19 Reporting in the autumn of 1900 on the recent spectacle of ‘Dogs versus Poachers’ at the Royal Aquarium, the Gamekeeper noted how a trained mastiff could ‘render a poacher hors de combat’ and so ‘prove to the public that a dog may be used for the purpose of capturing an evil-doer’.20 The intent to ‘prove’ is worth noting. Often regarded as little more than bullying thugs, it mattered for the show’s organizers to reverse the usual narrative by making the dog ‘the poacher’s bête noir’ and the gamekeeper (and his own dog) the servant of the wider community.21 The preservation and shooting of game, it should be emphasized, had a significance out of proportion to the limited numbers of participants involved. Even at its 1902 peak the number of game licence holders in England and Wales totalled less than 63,000, while the countryside’s growing ‘army’ of gamekeepers never totalled more than 17,000.22 Yet as a valued marker of elite social status, or as a graphic demonstration of organized cruelty and waste, the animal-rich sporting estate was never far from view. Traversing this ground was the poacher and his dog. From determinations of class and hierarchy, to criminal (or not) behaviour, to notions of what constituted sport and the proper enjoyment of nature, this singular form of interspecies partnership fed in to a range of contemporary issues and concerns. To more fully explore the ‘relational spaces’ between poachers and dogs, and to recognize the moments when ‘intersection’ became ‘collision’, some examples of negatively presented poacher-dog relations will also be given.23 First, however, we need briefly to consider the legal and institutional framework that surrounded the poacher and his key animal ally. 1. RELATIONAL SPACES: POACHERS, DOGS AND THE LAW IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND In 1831 the tangled mass of English game laws received a major overhaul. Claimed by some to represent ‘a vast alteration in the rights and usages which belong to this subject’, the reality was somewhat different.24 While the hunting (and selling) of game was now open to anyone purchasing the appropriate licence, landowners retained their monopoly via a clause in the Act allowing them to reserve the sporting rights for themselves. On these terms the financial and legal resources devoted to the preservation and shooting of game, and the effects this had upon land use and access, meant that the game question formed an integral part of the wider Land Question – a symbolically loaded subject at the heart of political debate for much of the period.25 There was also Game Law enforcement. Predictably enough, a process in which most poaching cases were heard in summary courts presided over by one or two magistrates, who might themselves be preservers of game, became a ready symbol of ‘Justice’s justice’. The controversial Poaching Prevention Act of 1862 – a measure that allowed the police to serve as ‘auxiliary gamekeepers’ through stopping and searching anyone suspected of the crime – did nothing to alter this view.26 At the same time, the many critics of the Game Laws argued that poaching was an ‘artificial’ crime and that the poacher was committing no moral offence. In one of the most successful Game-Law melodramas of the period the farmer-turned-poacher, Simon Lee, argues in familiar terms that ‘the laws of man’ are not those of nature and the ‘wild inhabitants of the forest and the field, were intended for the subsistence of man and the property of all’.27 The shooting of game could also be criticized for what it revealed about Establishment hypocrisy. Not only did the banning of working-class blood sports such as cockfighting contrast sharply with their upper-class equivalents, to ensure enough targets for the waiting guns many other species were destroyed as vermin and put on show in gamekeeper ‘museums’. Nor did dogs, whether of the poaching kind or not, escape proscription. Though public sensitivities usually saved them from such grisly displays, behind the scenes it was a different story. The popular naturalist, and noted schoolboy poacher, Frank Buckland, claimed that gamekeepers could often produce ‘finer gooseberries, cabbages, &c’ because their gardens were ‘well manured with defunct dogs buried all about’.28 The general failure of established animal welfare groups like the RSPCA to condemn ‘barbarity in high places’, or indeed those who helped facilitate it, was a key factor in the establishment in 1891 of the Humanitarian League.29 Led by the former Eton schoolmaster and Fabian Henry Salt, other prominent figures included the free-thinking poet and anti-materialist Edward Carpenter. Reflecting the heterodox nature of its membership, a flexible approach to humanitarianism was adopted in the League’s many attacks on field sports. Certainly this was the case with the socialist and poacher Jim Connell, author of an 1898 pamphlet on the ‘truth’ about the Game Laws.30 Whatever cruelties the Lewisham-based Connell inflicted on animals (and gamekeepers) during his poaching expeditions into Kent and Surrey, in the eyes of dissenting radicals like Salt they were as nothing to the ‘amateur butchery’ of shooting.31 And if poaching was a form of ‘rough cultural practice’, a demotic irruption into a private world of privilege, then committed poachers like Connell, along with their carefully trained lurchers, were enacting a powerful statement of dissent.32 ‘When, as to-day, Society rests on private property in land, its counter-ideal is the poacher’, claimed the vegetarian Carpenter in his 1889 ‘Defence of Criminals’. ‘Whatever should we do without him?’, he went on to ask.33 Cross-bred from the lordly greyhound, usually with the more plebeian collie or terrier, the ‘bastard’ lurcher was quick, hardy and silent. Above all, the lurcher was known for its exceptional intelligence. Even the Great Detective appreciated the lurcher’s unique abilities. ‘I would rather have Toby’s help than that of the whole detective force of London’, explains Sherlock Holmes of the dog recruited to his cause in The Sign of the Four. In this case Holmes prefers the tracking skills of an ‘ugly . . . lop eared creature’ to those of the more vaunted bloodhound.34 Yet for all its manifest qualities this metaphorically illegitimate animal was shunned by a determinedly hierarchical canine establishment that equated a dog’s appearance and character with human standards of breeding and environment. ‘Cunning and insidious’, this ‘ill-looking’ dog with ‘too much of the Jesuit’ was not recognized by the Kennel Club and was excluded from John Henry Walsh’s influential guide to British dogs (1867).35 Also associated with gypsies, the outsider status of this mongrel breed is neatly revealed in an 1880 table of standards constructed by a prominent breeder of show dogs, Hugh Dalziel (Figure 1). Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Hugh Dalziel, British Dogs: Their Varieties, History, Characteristics, Breeding, Management, and Exhibition (London: Bazaar Office, 1880), ch. XLI. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Hugh Dalziel, British Dogs: Their Varieties, History, Characteristics, Breeding, Management, and Exhibition (London: Bazaar Office, 1880), ch. XLI. From the Forest Laws to the Black Act and beyond, the connection between poaching and the possession of dogs has a long history. In the second half of the eighteenth century, for instance, the belief that labourers kept them primarily to poach with strongly informed debates on the introduction of a dog tax.36 On this occasion the lurcher was conveniently defined as a ‘sporting’ dog and made taxable to the value of 5s per annum. By the time that universal licensing was introduced in the 1860s, dogs were no longer simply mansuetae naturae (generally domestic) but were legally defined as private property.37 In a way that called to mind the ongoing controversy over the Game Laws, the Conservative proposal in 1878 to raise the annual fee to 7s/6d was loudly denounced by opponents as class legislation. Quite apart from the exemption of young foxhounds from the tax, the increased levy, it was claimed, was as much about suppressing poachers and protecting the landlord’s game as it was about reducing the number of ‘useless’ dogs and preventing the spread of hydrophobia.38 Fear of rabies, and in its human form hydrophobia, gripped the Victorian imagination.39 As with incidents involving the Game Laws, outbreaks of the disease were subject to widespread coverage in the press and resulted in a number of Select Committees. In a further demonstration of the anthropomorphic projections that delimited a dog’s moral character, a link was also made between poaching and the kind of animals likely to be rabid. ‘Rabies is propagated nineteen times out of twenty by the cur and the lurcher in the country, and the fighting dog in town’, stated the veterinarian William Youatt in 1830.40 However, by confining lurchers to rural areas, Youatt failed to acknowledge that a great deal of poaching was done by town-based gangs – though their dogs were usually kept out of sight for fear of being seized by the police. ‘It would be in vain to look for the lurcher in the streets’ claimed Dalziel.41 In reality the dogs most commonly infected were the ‘vagrant’ strays found in the most densely populated parts of London and the industrial north.42 The poacher’s dog might be ‘as ugly and unkempt as sin itself’, and it might be in the hands of a gang, but it was far too useful to be rabid.43 2. THE POACHER AT BAY In a society that loved to classify and order, and to find the particular within the general, poachers, like dogs, could not be contained within a single category. ‘The genus of poacher consists of several species’ observed the prison chaplain John Clay.44 The classic poacher typology offered by one of the period’s leading canine authorities, J. H. Walsh, in his Manual of British Rural Sports (first published in 1856) demonstrates the overlaps between the Victorian classification of the natural world and the human.45 Although Walsh’s four-tiered grouping of poacher types would reappear in various combinations, in all essentials the descriptive framework he set out became the template. The varieties of poacher listed by Walsh, who in the following year became editor of the Field, were the ‘systematic London poacher’ (i.e. the urban-based gang poacher), the so-called ‘poaching gent’ (normally respectable men but lacking land of their own), the ‘regular rural poacher’ (the ‘chief bane’), and the ‘poaching labourer’.46 Whatever their type, critical to the success of many poachers was the effective use of dogs. If a poacher’s physical potential could be reduced by nullifying his dog in the hunting field, he might equally be countered in the field of representation. As recent scholarship on the cultural work of animals suggests, in constructing and ‘performing’ human identity the non-human other could ‘undermine, weaken . . . question and reformulate’.47 A useful resource here was Charles Dickens and his most famous canine creation, the ‘abused’ and ‘corrupted’ Bulls-eye of Oliver Twist (1839).48 Unshakably bound to the criminal underworld that simultaneously fascinated and appalled many Victorians, just like its murderous owner Bill Sikes, this irredeemably ugly mongrel is of the ‘very lowest extraction’ and moves in a ‘suspicious, skulking’ way.49 With its ‘sidelong look and slouching gait’, the poacher’s ‘inseparable shadow and counterpart’ was, if required, compared easily to this benighted creature. Even if ‘shut up in a witness box without victuals’, claimed the Encylopaedia of Sport, ‘like Bill Sikes’s dog’ the lurcher would ‘never bark’ for fear of incriminating itself.50 Inhabiting a world of ‘bad language’ and ‘stray kicks’, what might be termed ‘Sike’s lurcher’ was also underfed and deprived of daylight.51 ‘Taught to reverse all the usual orders’, and never to make a sound, these ‘professional poaching dogs’ lived an inverted and dangerous form of life.52 ‘A poacher possessing such an animal seldom keeps him very long’, explained Walsh in 1859, ‘every keeper being on the look out, and putting a charge of shot into him on the first opportunity’.53 ‘Listless by day’, but developing ‘symptoms of activity and intelligence towards night-time’, this unnatural aspect of the lurcher’s existence was often a point for comment.54 For respectable and domesticated dogs (and humans), the hours of darkness were not to be spent in ‘pilfering pursuits’ in the ‘noxious dews of evening’ – a fact that the dogs themselves were reportedly aware of.55 We get a nice flavour of this in George Morley’s 1897 account of some Warwickshire night poachers and their ‘doomed dog’ that, like the ill-starred Bulls-eye, seemingly ‘writhes under a ban that cannot be lifted’.56 Having assembled in the suitably named Black Lane, Morley’s ‘slouching brotherhood’ of wife-abusing poachers set out for their evening’s work, an ‘unearthly’ lurcher moving ‘stealthily’ between their legs. Untroubled by the surrounding darkness the men quietly take up their position. It is at this point that the ‘mysterious instincts of the lurcher are called into play’ and the ‘dark, statue-like thing darts from its position in a shot’. Driving the panicked rabbits towards the waiting net the ‘lurcher is enjoying his saturnalia of power’ while the poachers themselves are ‘having an orgie [sic]’. With dozens of rabbits quickly despatched the poachers begin calculating the price they will fetch. Whether for the pot or commercial gain, rabbits comprised around two-thirds of the poacher’s take and sophisticated networks for disposal existed. Deciding to call it a night, the poachers compliment themselves on their work but have ‘not a word to throw at their dog’. A ‘melancholy’ and shadowy figure once more, the dog trails silently back to the Black Lane.57 If the poacher could evince little regard for his own ‘sore-sided’ dog, he could show even less for those set against him.58 Returning to Dickens we find Household Words reporting in December 1851 on a violent clash in Nottinghamshire between three ‘valiant’ keepers and a gang of poachers.59 Derided by G. W. M. Reynolds as ‘that lickspittle hanger-on to the skirts of aristocracy’s robe’, Dickens was equally dismissive of Reynolds and established his own magazine as a respectable alternative to the publisher’s radical output.60 While Reynolds tended to sympathize with the poacher – the previous month he had used an incident on the Earl of Scarborough’s estate to deliver a stinging denunciation of the Game Laws – his rival gave a different view.61 Central to the story presented by Dickens was the fate of a prize mastiff called Lion. Of ‘great local fame’, its belly was cruelly ‘ripped open’ with a clasp knife. Significantly here the animal had been kept half muzzled throughout the encounter – a symbol of responsible ownership and use, even in extremis. ‘The keepers are recovering, but Lion died on Tuesday morning’, concluded the report with a generous helping of dog-centred pathos.62 Such encounters could produce different outcomes. Early in 1880 the Liberal MP and founder of the Anti-Game Law League, Peter Taylor, informed the Commons that in heavily preserved areas men were regularly being hunted with dogs – a practice that ‘even in the interior of Jamaica’ had ceased. He then told of a case where a poacher had been downed by an ‘immense mastiff’ and then bitten by the ‘ferocious’ animal.63 Although a source of predictable outrage for Taylor and his anti-Game Law allies, such incidents could also be shown more favourably. Typifying what Andrea Korda has usefully described as the ‘heightened immediacy’ of an increasingly visualized press, the Graphic’s illustration of ‘Catching a Poacher’ is unequivocal in its narrative (Figure 2).64 Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Catching a Poacher’. Illustration from the Graphic, 17 October 1874. © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced with permission. Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Catching a Poacher’. Illustration from the Graphic, 17 October 1874. © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced with permission. With the idea of the habitual criminal officially enshrined, and with poaching prosecutions not peaking until the later 1870s, poaching could readily assume a more threatening form.65 For the heads of the recently formed county constabularies and many landowners at least, the Poaching Prevention Act was a necessary response to ‘an intolerable’, and growing, ‘evil’.66 And if the police could be legitimately recruited to the game preserver’s cause, then so too could dogs. Particularly striking in its portrayal of a poacher yielding to a dog is Richard Ansdell’s The Poacher at Bay. Well-regarded for his sporting scenes, Ansdell was an unusually sympathetic painter of gamekeepers and major landowners such as the Earl of Derby were among his clientele. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1865, in the words of one review the picture was ‘one of the gems of the year’ (Figure 3).67 Appearing at a time when physiognomy was widely assumed to reveal character, not only did the ‘hound’s noble grandeur’ stand in marked contrast to the poacher’s ‘sneaking lurcher’, it also counter-posed the ‘ugly’ and ‘repulsive’ features of the brutish figure beneath it.68 Considered to be a ‘gamekeeper’s best companion’, the pure-bred English mastiff was highly valued for the fear that poachers apparently had for them.69 Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Richard Ansdell, The Poacher at Bay, 1865. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ansdell_The_Poacher_At_Bay_1865.png. [accessed 29 January 2018]. Figure 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Richard Ansdell, The Poacher at Bay, 1865. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ansdell_The_Poacher_At_Bay_1865.png. [accessed 29 January 2018]. Rhetorically closed as it appears however, the image is not entirely stable. First, in its unleashed and unmuzzled state the animal carries a disproportionate level of threat. In fact, the dog presented here is strikingly similar to those shown attacking a pair of desperate runaways in the artist’s powerful abolitionist painting of 1861, The Hunted Slaves.70 Second, even when routed by one kind of dog, the poacher can still rely on his own animal whose ‘devotion’ was rendered with ‘truth and effect’.71 It is to this clinching aspect of the poacher-dog relationship that we now turn. 3. ‘WHAT THE HORSE USED TO BE TO THE HIGHWAYMAN’ Nine months before The Poacher at Bay was shown, an incident occurred on the Beauchief Estate in Derbyshire. Although in most respects typical of the clashes between keepers and poachers that were regularly reported in the press, on this occasion novelty was provided by the keeper’s dog as the faithless animal joined forces with the poachers and their own dogs.72 With fidelity taken as a key characteristic of the Victorian dog, the case marked a considerable act of betrayal. Whatever else it was accused of, disloyalty was never on the lurcher’s charge sheet. This point was amply demonstrated in the work of Briton Rivière, a highly successful artist who scored a notable hit in 1866 with The Poacher’s Nurse. Displaying the sort of intense canine devotion that had made Landseer’s The Shepherd’s Chief Mourner (1837) such a phenomenon, the ‘faithful lurcher’ is shown caring for its similarly humble master by tenderly licking his hand.73 At a moment when, in Teresa Mangum’s words, animal subjectivity was being ‘articulated with special force in visual representations of dogs’, Rivière knew his market.74 Regularly compared to Landseer in his technical mastery and subject matter, and commissioned by Darwin to provide illustrations for his own work on animal expression, Rivière returned regularly to poachers and their dogs. In Prisoners (1869), Rivière revisited the theme of the canine helpmate. Although as the review in The Times suggested, it was unlikely that a poacher would be confined with his dog, the picture was nevertheless judged a success.75 Posed in a melodramatically heightened way, the young man suffers the pain of his humiliation as well as his wound – a sense that his dog seems fully to share. While the crudely drawn gallows on the wall suggest the more unsavoury aspects of poaching, the animal’s unbroken loyalty for its master tempers any sermonizing the image might otherwise contain (Figure 4). Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Briton Riviere, Prisoners, 1869. © Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool. The picture was later retitled Fidelity. Reproduced with permission. Figure 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Briton Riviere, Prisoners, 1869. © Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool. The picture was later retitled Fidelity. Reproduced with permission. Retitled Fidelity, the painting was later reproduced as a mass-market colour print.76 In Companions in Misfortune (1883), Rivière goes for a similar effect. Here we see a handsome young poacher lying wounded in the woods. Once again a dog is in mournfully watchful attendance.77The Poacher (1876) offers something of a contrast. Here the artist shows an older man practising his illicit craft. The artist’s gardener was employed as an appropriately bucolic model. Shown successfully at the Dudley Gallery in London, the description later provided by the Strand captures the scene well: The poacher, at whose side are a number of dead rabbits and his gun, has just heard approaching footsteps. He has crept behind the trunk of a tree, and is holding up a warning finger to his dog not to budge and an inch, or to utter a sound which would betray him.78 Left in suspense, the viewer is again inclined towards the poacher and his dog, whose professionalism and teamwork are strongly emphasized. In this movement from passive to more purposeful actors, Rivière anticipated much of the writing on ‘poachers and their ways’ that laid increasing stress on the skills and attributes of its subject. The training of their dogs is ‘of a very high order’, recorded one such account, ‘as upon it almost entirely depends the poacher’s success, and often his own safety’.79 Acting as a pointer, hunter and retriever of game, as a scout and early warning system, the lurcher was both co-worker and best companion. Important here is the notion of sagacity, a form of intelligence almost universally applied to poacher’s dogs. Sagacity was a double-sided quality, however, and while it ascribed agency it also, as Harriet Ritvo notes, ‘made the most sagacious animals the best servants’.80 Songs and poems like ‘The Poacher’s Dog’ (1870) and ‘The Poacher’s Friend’ (1897) relate conscious choice to an inbred need to serve.81 Revealing the ‘interpenetration’ of anthropomorphism and agency common to representations of the period, a book written principally for gamekeepers put it thus: ‘A keen, clever old fellow is he, always prepared for work . . . he seems to recognize the risk of his calling and delight in it accordingly’.82 In this context it is possible to have a different reading of the Black Lane poachers and their ‘unearthly’ animal. Warmly reviewing Morley’s book, a typical example of late-Victorian ruralist culture, the Daily Mail noted how ‘refreshing’ to the ‘city dweller’s jaded mind’ were the ‘descriptions of the life of the poacher and his faithful lurcher’.83 The dog’s devotion to its poaching master would have counted for less if it was not generally viewed as reciprocal. Instances like the murderous Saul Braintree shooting his loyal dog, Ponto, in William Clarke’s story from 1830, were unusual.84 Even here the poacher had to close his eyes to do the deed, while in anti-poaching tracts like The Poacher’s Child (1853) the miscreant’s devotion to his animal is fully conceded.85 Accounts like the one given by the Jefferies-inspired ‘Son of the Marshes’ (Denham Jordan) of a poacher ‘trembling’ for his dog as he contemplates its destruction by a keeper, were much more in the way of things.86 This degree of care was also manifested in the provision, however basic, of a home – the ‘proper place’ for a dog and central to Victorian perceptions of responsible ownership.87 Licensed or not, the poacher’s dog could at least claim a form of domestication and so, to an extent, be normalized. In a Christmas collection of stories by the well-known humourist Tom Hood, Whacky Stinger leaves his bull-terrier called Lady – ‘a poacher born and bred’ – to the local doctor. Recognizing the man’s own expertise with dogs, and as payment for services rendered, the dying poacher acts honourably in passing on his prized possession.88 Emphasizing the limits of conventionality achievable here, the arrangement soon breaks down as the dog persists in associating with its old master’s former partners. A similarly recidivistic canine was later described by the prolific children’s author and dog expert, Gordon Stables, in Our Friend the Dog (1884). Careful not to condone poaching as such, Stables was happy to report on his animal’s ‘naughty ways’ and the illicit hares he consequently enjoyed.89 Increasingly, it seems, pleasure was to be had in this human-animal double-act in which the drolly silent lurcher was ‘a consummate actor’ and ‘pantomimist’.90 As the readers of Dalziel’s guide were reliably informed, ‘They eat, sleep, and thieve together’, and if possible would be ‘drunk for weeks together’.91 With interest in documenting and preserving traditional country practices and folkways running high, and when deepening attachment to the countryside ‘extended easily into love of country life and country people’, an obvious subject for attention was poaching.92 Overlapping with this was the widening enthusiasm for natural history. Promoted as a healthy and socially inclusive pastime, as with the keeping and showing of dogs, it developed into a full-blown Victorian craze with numerous publications, clubs and societies devoted to it.93 Within this milieu the poacher was not only seen as a leading character in the ‘rustic drama of life’, but as a part of nature itself.94 In the exhibition on Sports and Pastimes held at the Crystal Palace in the early 1890s, poaching was featured in the section on natural history. Sadly a poacher’s offer to appear as a living exhibit was declined by the event’s organizers.95 ‘His outdoor life has made him quick, and taught him much ready animal ingenuity’, claimed the Cumbrian naturalist and writer John Watson in 1891, and together with his dog the poacher had been one of the ‘twin institutions of village life’ since the Norman Conquest.96 Further making the point, the frontispiece to Watson’s book is a photograph of two lurchers stood outside a cottage door – a dead rabbit or hare at their feet. While the weight and ‘throw’ of such representations undoubtedly increased over our period, the connection between the poacher’s place within the natural world and his ability to bond with dogs was in part already established. First appearing in the 1820s and reissued many times, Mary Russell Mitford’s sketches of village life described how Tom Cordery ‘put to shame many a professed naturalist’, while the dogs of the neighbourhood ‘knew him, and loved him, and would beat for him almost as soon as for their master’.97 The reference to beating is significant. At this point it was the norm for sportsmen to walk up their game with dogs. Over the coming decades, however, the battue and the drive steadily reduced this more traditional form of shooting and the role of the dog was increasingly focused on retrieving.98 His own formation as a naturalist heavily influenced by the ‘dog and sporting culture’ of his youth, where man and animal worked closely together, over the course of Darwin’s lifetime, writes David Allan Feller, the ‘predatory team’ of shooter and dog was steadily supplanted by ‘industrial efficiency’ and ‘unskilled manpower’.99 In parallel to this, the ability of keepers to train and work a good all-round dog was also called into question.100 Instead, notes Emma Griffin in her modern survey of blood sports, the ‘old skills of tracking prey that had traditionally formed part of the hunter’s art now rested in the hands of the poacher’.101 Compared to the de-natured discipline of the modern game preserve, the poacher therefore represented a skilled, and apparently timeless, presence. The latter idea found ready support in the renewed interest in the Robin Hood legends and the widely held belief that Shakespeare had once been a poacher.102 Understood in these terms, poaching was against the law, but it was also the lore of the land. As popular senses of the past converged with late-Victorian ruralism to spawn a host of antiquarian and cultural preservationist groups, including the Folk Song Society, it is no surprise that with its rousing celebration of ‘shiny nights’ spent in the open air ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ (or whatever its regional variant) became part of an unofficial canon of nationally recognized folk ballads. Although dogs are not mentioned in the words of the song, it is suggestive that in the numerous illustrated versions of the period the animal is invariably included.103 The belief that poaching was an integral part of nature was further supported by connections made to another discursively useful member of the canid family. Each the analogue of the other, the fox was a ‘cunning and inveterate poacher’, while the ‘uncrowned king’ of the poachers in George Bartram’s The People of Clopton had a ‘foxy and agile brain’.104 If the clever and tricksy ways of the fox were subject to what has been termed the ‘Reynardization effect’ – the process by which an animal that was technically vermin was transformed into a quarry more worthy of the huntsman – those of the poacher increasingly bore the traces of ‘ruralization’.105 Together with the sense of a better policed, and more ‘quiet’ countryside (and with Game Law prosecutions in late-century decline), the poacher’s nocturnal courses through the fields and woods, where the dog became ‘all of his senses’, acquired an altogether more inviting aspect (Figure 5).106 Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Rabbit Poaching – Time To Be Off’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 22 January 1898. © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced with permission. Figure 5. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Rabbit Poaching – Time To Be Off’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 22 January 1898. © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library. Reproduced with permission. Peter Henry Emerson’s beautifully composed photographs of Suffolk poachers and their dogs provide eloquent testament to this unfolding process of legitimization through ruralization. In using the latest visual technology to bring the hitherto unfamiliar or hidden before the public gaze, the independently wealthy Emerson was engaged in a distinctly Victorian project.107 Offered as a ‘Natural History of the English Peasantry and Fisherfolk’, his Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888) were claimed to be taken ‘direct from the field’.108 Interested in the marginal and the out of the way, an obvious subject for Emerson was the poacher – shown here as a traditional country craftsman worthy of close attention. By representing the poacher in this way, Emerson was reflecting and shaping a form of popular knowledge economy that sought to put its audience ‘in the know’.109 ‘The poacher, with his lurcher, is working on a common surrounded by dikes’ records the fascinated participant observer in his commentary to ‘The Poacher – Hare in View’ (Figure 6).110 Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Peter Henry Emerson, ‘The Poacher: Hare in View’. Museum number: PH.2114-1896. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The photograph was a medal winning entry at the Royal Photographic Society exhibition for 1887. Reproduced with permission. Figure 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Peter Henry Emerson, ‘The Poacher: Hare in View’. Museum number: PH.2114-1896. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The photograph was a medal winning entry at the Royal Photographic Society exhibition for 1887. Reproduced with permission. Employing his consummate skill with the lens, Emerson merged the poacher and his dog into a single, harmonized, form. Framed between land and sky, the pair have a beguiling liminality. Blink and they are gone. Mimicking the dog shows and field trials from which the lurcher has been excluded, the more sporting aspects of poaching are also emphasized and the hare is effectively being coursed before it is netted. In words that could have been Emerson’s, the Deputy Surveyor of the New Forest, Gerald Lascelles, would later claim how ‘From the sportsman’s point of view, the best and most appreciable form of poaching is that done by the aid of trained lurchers’.111 An author of note, Emerson also visualized the poacher-dog relationship in evocative prose: Along a secluded road some way from the village walks a tall man with a quick gait . . . beside him trots a lurcher – half greyhound, half sheep-dog . . . he stops and lights his pipe by the gate-post, then slowly strolls on, but now no dog is with him. All he said when he lit his pipe was ‘Ovar, owd man,’ and the faithful well-trained dog had required no other sign . . . ‘Are yow thar, owd man?’ asks the idler at the gate, and the faithful dog walks quickly forward to the gate with a hare in his mouth. ‘Drop it, owd man,’ says the idler, and taking the hare, he puts it in his sack [sic].112 Whether taking ground game in the open fields, or pheasants in the ‘bosky depths’ of the night-time woods, the poacher’s ‘owd man’ is always at hand.113 Placing his subject in the realm of popular outlawry, Emerson explained how ‘The dog is to the poacher what the horse used to be to the highwayman’.114 In their actively constituted assemblage, complete with lightly held leash and paid up licence, they are also the embodiment of responsible care and ownership. The same year that Emerson submitted his work to Stationer’s Hall, the Morning Post declared confidently how the ‘man belongs to the dog just as much as the dog to the man’.115 Certainly not intended as such, in all its essentials this had become the perfect description of the poacher and his lurcher. 4. CONCLUSION In 1901 Jim Connell’s Confessions of a Poacher appeared.116 Though intended as a form of political manifesto, for critics of this ‘sordid’ and ‘disgusting’ account the only points of interest were the sections on dogs.117 ‘Do not look to be pleased except in the chapters when Mr Connell writes with knowledge and love of his dogs’, advised the Manchester Guardian.118 Even The Field, usually a scourge of poachers, could warm to this aspect of the book.119 Following the so-called ‘animal turn’, the multiple connections between humans and animals in the nineteenth century, especially in the urban arena, have been well documented. Within this growing field of enquiry, the study of the poacher provides a more urban-rural example of interspecies activity and shows how animal presence could be used to construct and perform identity in significant and lasting ways. In both material and representational terms, the dog was (and remains) an integral part of the poacher’s world. Reviewed in The Times as a work of ‘scandalous charm’, the cover of Bob and Brian Toveys’ The Last English Poachers (2015) has the men standing quietly defiant with their favourite working dogs properly leashed and keen for action.120 While ambiguity always surrounded the poacher, and the dog itself could be a source of concern, examples of the latter acting against the former are much less evident than those of vital support and companionship. This was important and suggests that Victorian culture, at every level, was more than capable of accommodating, and in qualified terms endorsing, outlawed activities like poaching. As recent work on the Victorian rat-catcher suggests – a figure who in his own display of ‘interspecies cunningness’ bore some resemblance to the poacher – through ostensibly marginal figures and pursuits the complexities of human-animal associations, and their social meanings, might be further understood.121 This is particularly the case when the subject has been quantitatively de-marginalized through weight of cultural production and consumption. Across numerous forms of representation, the kind of ‘cross-species sociality’ which could be seen as defining the poacher-dog relationship, itself had a socializing effect.122 Whether this made the poacher a more, or less, subversive force is an interesting question. In a growingly urban, and indeed suburban, world, it was certainly easier to think of the poacher as a wily character, full of country wit and wisdom, if he had a faithful dog in tow. Equally, the ‘outcast of dogdom’ acquired an unconventional measure of status through quality of training and loyalty to its master.123 In Lurcherland, the poacher and the dog each made the other. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would particularly like to thank my PhD supervisor at Sussex, Professor Claire Langhamer, who oversaw much of the research that became this article, and Professor Jane Hamlett at JVC. Thanks also to Professors Peter Stead and Rohan McWilliam and to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Footnotes 1 The Iron Chest (1879), publicity material held in the John Johnson Collection: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:jjohnson:&rft_dat=xri:jjohnson:rec:20020117094549ah [accessed 26 January 2018]. 2 D. J. V. Jones, ‘The Poacher: A Study in Victorian Crime and Protest’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 825–60 (p. 842). 3 Jones, ‘The Poacher’, 825–60. And see Harry Hopkins, The Long Affray: The Poaching Wars in Britain, 1760–1914 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985). 4 Disreputable Pleasures: Less Virtuous Victorians at Play, ed. by Mike Huggins and J. A. Mangan (London: Frank Cass, 2004), pp. ix–xx; Peter K. Andersson, ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20 (2015), 439–52 (p. 450). On human-dog relations as a form of assemblage in which non-human animals ‘play their part’, see Philip Howell, At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2015), pp. 150–52. 5 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 4–5. 6 Hugh Dalziel, British Dogs: Their Varieties, History, Characteristics, Breeding, Management, and Exhibition (London: Bazaar Office, 1880), p. 43. 7 Claire Charlotte Mckenchie and John Miller, ‘Victorian Animals’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17 (2012), 436–41. 8 Neil Pemberton and Michael Warboys, Rabies in Britain: Dogs, Disease and Culture, 1830–2000, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 7. 9 Krishnan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 211. 10 Richard Jefferies, The Gamekeeper at Home (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1878); The Amateur Poacher (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1879). For ‘Lurcherland’ see ch. VI of the latter. 11 Barry Reay, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 192. 12 Howell, At Home and Astray, p. 177. For other recent work on the Victorian dog see Neil Pemberton, “‘Bloodhounds as Detectives”: Dogs, Slum Stench and Late-Victorian Murder Investigation’, Cultural and Social History, 10 (2013), 69–91; Beryl Gray, The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Sarah Amato, Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), pp. 73–87. 13 Landseer produced several pictures of poachers and their dogs, albeit in a Scottish setting. See Richard Ormond, Sir Edwin Landseer (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), pp. 78–9. 14 Laura Brown, Homeless Dogs & Melancholy Apes: Humans and Other Animals in the Modern Literary Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 134. 15 Frederick Lupton, The Law Relating to Dogs (London: Stevens and Sons, 1888), pp. 129–32. 16 Jones, ‘Poacher’, 825–60. And see John E. Archer, “‘A Reckless Spirit of Enterprise”: Game-Preserving and Poaching in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire’, in Crime, Protest and Police in Modern British Society, ed. by David W. Howell and Kenneth O. Morgan (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), pp. 149–75; Harvey Osborne and Michael Winstanley, ‘Rural and Urban Poaching in Victorian England’, Rural History, 17 (2006), 187–212. 17 Archer, ‘“Reckless Spirit”‘, p. 154. 18 Henry Mayhew, ‘Thieves and their Dependants’, London Labour and the London Poor, 23 August 1851, p. 26. 19 ‘The Gamekeepers’ Dog Show’, Gamekeeper, September 1900, 223. The event was also reported in the Shooting Times and the Field. 20 Gamekeeper, September 1900, p. 223. 21 Gamekeeper, September 1900, p. 223. 22 John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes, 1870–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 38; Pamela Horn, Pleasures and Pastimes in Victorian Britain (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), p. 99. 23 Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans and the Study of History, ed. by Dorothee Brantz (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010), p. 5. 24 Humphry W. Woolrych, The Game Laws (London: Stevens and Norton, 1858), p. 1. 25 The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950, ed. by Matthew Cragoe and Paul Readman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 1–18. 26 F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Landowners and the Rural Community’, in The Unquiet Countryside, ed. by Gordon Mingay (Routledge: London, 1989), pp. 80–98 (pp. 82–3). 27 George Dibdin Pitt, Simon Lee; or, The Murder of the Five Fields Copse (London: Dick’s Standard Plays, c.1888), p. 9. The play was first performed in 1839. 28 Richard Girling, The Man Who Ate the Zoo. Frank Buckland: Forgotten Hero of Natural History (London: Vintage, 2017), p. 150. 29 Dan Weinbren, ‘Against All Cruelty: The Humanitarian League, 1891–1919’, History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994), 86–105 (p. 94). 30 J. Connell, The Truth About the Game Laws: A Record of Cruelty, Selfishness and Oppression (London: Humanitarian League Publications, 1898). 31 Henry Salt, Animal Rights Considered in Relation to Social Progress (London: Centaur Press, 1980, first publ. 1892), p. 67. 32 Richard Price, British Society: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 319. 33 Edward Carpenter, Civilisation Its Cause and Its Cure (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1889), pp. 101, 120. 34 Neil Pemberton, ‘Hounding Holmes: Arthur Conan Doyle, Bloodhounds and Sleuthing in the Late-Victorian Imagination’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17 (2012), 454–67 (p. 461). 35 W. C. L. Martin, The History of the Dog: Its Origin, Physical and Moral Characteristics (London: Charles Knight, 1845), p. 165; Charles Hamilton Smith, Dogs (Edinburgh: W. H. Lizars, 1840), p. 179; Daily News, 22 October 1866, p. 2; J. H. Walsh, Dogs of the British Islands (London: Field Office, 1867). 36 Ingrid H. Tague, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Debates on a Dog Tax’, Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 901–20 (pp. 904–9). 37 Howell, At Home and Astray, pp. 61–3. 38 London, British Library. George R. Jesse / A collection of cuttings, etc., relating to Hydrophobia. 39 Pemberton and Warboys, Rabies; Ritvo, Animal Estate, pp. 167–202. And see John Walton, ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen: The Conflict over Rabies in Late Victorian England’, Journal of Social History, 13 (1979), 219–39. 40 William Youatt, On Canine Madness (London: Longman and Co, 1830), pp. 30–31. The claim was repeated in Youatt’s 1845 book on dogs for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (republished in 1879). 41 Dalziel, British Dogs, p. 43. 42 Pemberton and Warboys, Rabies, p. 8. 43 Gordon Stables, Our Friend the Dog (London: Dean and Son, 1884), p. 78. 44 The Prison Chaplain: A Memoir of the Rev. John Clay (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1861), p. 568. 45 John Henry Walsh, Manual of British Rural Sports (Stroud: History Press, 2008, first publ. 1856). 46 Walsh, Manual, pp. 4–7. 47 Animals and Early Modern Identity, ed. by Pia F. Cuneo (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 8. 48 Gray, Dog in the Dickensian Imagination, p. 101. 49 Percy Fitzgerald, ‘Dickens’s Dogs; or, The Landseer of Fiction’, London Society: An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation, 4 (1863), 48–61 (p. 51). 50 Alex Innes Shand, ‘Poachers and Poaching’, in The Encyclopaedia of Sport, ed. by Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire, Hedley Peek, F. G. Aflalo (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1900), pp. 118–19 (p. 118). 51 William Carnegie, How to Trap and Snare (London: Shooting Times Office, c. 1900), p. 106. 52 L’Aigle Cole, ‘Poaching’, Nineteenth Century, 34 (1893), 470–75 (p. 471); Carnegie, How to Trap and Snare, p. 105. 53 ‘Stonehenge’ (J. H. Walsh), The Dog in Health and Disease (London: Longman, 1859), p. 163. 54 Carnegie, How to Trap and Snare, p. 106; Cole, ‘Poaching’, p. 471. 55 Thomas Burgeland Johnson, The Gamekeeper’s Directory (London: Piper Brothers, 1851), pp. 132–3. 56 George Morley, In Russet Mantle Clad: Scenes of Rural Life (London: Skiffington and Son, 1897), p. 75. Very much in step with the prevailing ruralist culture, Morley wrote a number of books on the topography and customs of his home county. 57 Morley, In Russet, pp. 72–94. 58 Morley, In Russet, p. 97. 59 Dickens’ Dreadful Almanac, ed. by Cate Ludlow (Stroud: History Press, 2010), p. 207. 60 Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People, 1790–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 238. 61 ‘Murderous Results of the Vile Game Laws’, Reynolds’ Newspaper, 2 November 1851, p. 12. 62 Ludlow, Dickens’ Dreadful Almanac, p. 207. 63 P. A. Taylor, The Game Laws: Speech of Mr P. A. Taylor in the House of Commons, March 2nd1880 (London: Anti-Game Law League, 1880), pp. 22–4. 64 Andrea Korda, Printing and Painting the News in Victorian London, 1869–1891 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), p. 2. 65 Jones, ‘Poacher’, pp. 830–31. 66 ‘The Poachers and the Police’, Field, 4 January 1862, p. 6. 67 ‘Royal Academy of Arts’, Era, 7 May 1865, p. 10. 68 Era, 7 May 1865, 10; ‘Notes on Art’, Sunday Times, 18 June 1865, p. 5. 69 Dalziel, British Dogs, p. 245. Poachers versus Keepers (Rhyl: Tideline Books, 1983, first publ. 1894), p. 41. 70 The painting is now held by the Slavery Museum in Liverpool. 71 Era, 7 May 1865, p. 10. 72 ‘Desperate Affray with Poachers’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 September 1864, p. 5. On the role played by the popular press in reporting crime, and Lloyd’s especially, see Rosalind Crone, Violent Victorians (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), pp. 209–56. 73 Harry How, ‘Briton Rivière’, Strand Magazine, 11 (1896), 3–16 (p. 7). 74 Teresa Mangum, ‘Dog Years, Human Fears’, in Representing Animals, ed. by Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 35–47 (p. 37). 75 ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, The Times, 11 June 1869, p. 12. 76 Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, ed. by Diana Donald and Jane Munro (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2009), pp. 204–5. 77 Briton Rivière, Companions in Misfortune (1883). Tate Britain. 78 How, ‘Briton Rivière’, p. 10. 79 ‘Poachers and their Ways’, Chambers’ Journal, 86 (1899), 529–31 (p. 529). 80 Ritvo, Animal Estate, p. 37. 81 Henry Ffrench, The Poacher’s Dog (London: Cramer & Co, 1870); Morley, ‘The Poacher’s Friend’ from In Russet Mantle, pp. 97–100. 82 Mckenchie and Miller, ‘Victorian Animals’, p. 439; Poachers versus Keepers, p. 44. 83 ‘The World of Books’, Daily Mail, 13 July 1897, p. 3. 84 William Clarke, ‘The Braintrees’, in Three Courses and a Dessert (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005, first publ. 1830), pp. 63–104 (p. 102). Clarke’s story was adapted by the Chartist writer, Thomas Frost, in his 1848 novel Paul the Poacher. Here, the dog lives. 85 Robert Carrick Wildon, The Poacher’s Child; Founded on Facts (London and Bradford, 1853), p. 40. 86 ‘Son of the Marshes’ (Denham Jordan), ‘Poachers and Poaching’, English Illustrated Magazine, 119 (1893), 811–17 (p. 817). 87 Howell, At Home and Astray, p. 74. 88 Tom Hood, ‘The Dog Tax: The True Story of Caesar and Brutus’, in Rates and Taxes and how they were Collected (London: Groombridge and Son, 1866), pp. 97–115 (pp. 99–100). 89 Stables, Our Friend the Dog, p. 79. 90 H. H. S. Pearse, ‘Tricks of Poachers’, in A Year of Sport and Natural History, ed. by Oswald Crawfurd (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), pp. 133–41 (p. 136). 91 Dalziel, British Dogs, p. 44. 92 Jan Marsh, Back to the Land, The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (London: Quartet Books, 1982), p. 60. 93 John Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 36–7. 94 James Purves, ‘Poachers and Poaching’, Contemporary Review, 44 (1883), 350–59 (p. 352). 95 ‘Sports and Pastimes Exhibition’, Field, 15 July 1893, p. 112; ‘Crystal Palace’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 23 July 1893, p. 7. 96 John Watson, Poachers and Poaching (London: Chapman and Hall, 1891), pp. 8, 17. 97 Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery (London: Whittaker, 1828), p. 168. 98 In a battue the shooters, with accompanying beaters and loaders, advanced in a line towards the birds and shot them on the wing as they were flushed. In the ‘drive’, stationary shooters are positioned outside of the covert as the birds are directed over the waiting guns. 99 David Allan Feller, ‘The Hunter’s Gaze: Charles Darwin and the Role of Dogs and Sport in Nineteenth-Century Natural History (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010), p. 51. 100 Colonel C. C. Hartopp, Shooting and Sport in England: Past and Present (London: Field Office, 1894), pp. 49–50. 101 Emma Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain Since 1066 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 161. 102 Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 153–217; Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 108–14. 103 Bodleian Ballads, Harding Collection: B16 (29b), B11 (383). http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/?query=lincolnshire+poacher [accessed 26 January 2018]. 104 Aubyn Trevor Battye, ‘Gamekeepers’, in A Year of Sport and Natural History, ed. by Oswald Crawfurd (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), pp. 320–26 (p. 325); George Bartram, The People of Clopton (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897), p. 47. 105 Gary Marvin, ‘Unspeakability, Inedibility, and the Structures of Pursuit in the English Foxhunt’, in Representing Animals, pp. 139–58 (pp. 144–5). 106 Watson, Book of the Dog, p. 3. Prosecutions for poaching peaked in 1877 at just under 12,400. By 1901 they had almost halved. See Osborne and Winstanley, ‘Rural and Urban Poaching’, pp. 189–90. 107 Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 2–3. 108 P. H. Emerson, Pictures of East Anglian Life (London: Sampson Low & Co, 1888), preface. 109 Gerry Beegan, The Mass Image: A Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 22. 110 Emerson, Pictures, p. 60. 111 Gerald Lascelles, ‘Shooting the Hare’, in The Hare, ed. by H. A. Macpherson (London: Longmans, 1896), pp. 85–108 (p. 102). 112 Emerson, Pictures, p. 60. 113 Emerson, Pictures, pp. 60–64. 114 Emerson, Pictures, p. 65. 115 Morning Post, 1 April 1886. Quoted in Howell, At Home and Astray, p. 168. 116 Jim Connell, Confessions of a Poacher (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1901). 117 ‘The Sportsman’s Library’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 8 June 1901, p. 931; Manchester Guardian, 28 May 1901, p. 6. 118 Manchester Guardian, 28 May 1901, p. 6. 119 ‘The Library’, Field, 13 April 1901, p. 502. 120 Bob and Brian Tovey, The Last English Poachers (London: Simon and Schuster, 2015); John Lewis-Stempel, ‘The last hedgerow moochers’, The Times, Saturday Review, 30 May 2015, p. 15. 121 Neil Pemberton, ‘The Rat-Catcher’s Prank: Interspecies Cunningness and Scavenging in Henry Mayhew’s London’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19 (2014), 520–35 (pp. 524–6). 122 Donna Haraway, quoted in Emma Mason, ‘Dogs, Detectives and the Famous Sherlock Holmes’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11 (2008), 289–300 (p. 295). 123 Brian Vesey Fitzgerald, The Book of the Dog (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1948), p. 563. © 2019 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Lurcherland: Poachers, Dogs and Animal Presence in English Life and Culture, c. 1831–1901
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1093/jvcult/vcy069
DA - 2019-09-21
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