“Friends.” Stereoview, Carlton Harlow Graves. Universal Photo Art Company, Philadelphia and Naperville, I, between 1895 and 1910
I recently saw (and enjoyed) the summer hit movie “The Secret Life of Pets,” and it got me thinking about how people gave “voices” to companion animals in the nineteenth century. I’m not thinking about fairy tales or fables here, or even full-blown anthropomorphism, where a dog or cat becomes a little person in a fur suit, living the life of a human being. I was interested in finding images or texts where animals “talked” or wrote about their lives from their points of view.
There are a number of famous autobiographies from the 1800s told in the voice of an animal. In the late nineteenth century, the most famous of these was Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), a story told in the first-person voice of a horse. Black Beauty’s misadventures, and the cruelty with which people treated him (although the story does have a happy ending), made this book a crucial text for the animal welfare movement on both sides of the Atlantic. There were other important animal autobiographies, especially Beautiful Joe: the Autobiography of a Dog (1893), which helped to stigmatize dog fighting. I still can’t read either of these books without weeping.
But I was looking for something different: “diaries” that talked about the everyday life of dogs and cats, often with humor. Here’s one for your perusal.
“Folly Frivolous. A Dog’s Diary,” is a story in Louise Stockton’s 1881 collection The Christmas Thorn, and Other Stories which is available through Google Books. Folly gets into various forms of trouble and is often “whipped” and confined to the coal-shed. He reports, “I have a little place out here where I keep all the bones I get, and one or two other little things that nobody knows about.” The ultimate insult is when he is forced to learn the trick of sitting up: “I have to beg for my ball…and beg for this, and beg for that, until life has got to be pretty much a burden.” Folly has a strong sense of his own interests, and he knows how to manipulate the lady of the house by dropping one ear and looking “solemn.” He seems a lot like the dogs and cats of “The Secret Life of Pets.”
The first page of “From the Diary of a Cat,” with the unnamed protagonist dreaming of a feast of white mice.
Here’s another example, a more complex little work of fiction titled “From the Diary of a Cat.” The full text is available through this link to a pdf: HarpersMagazine-1904-08-0011290 copy
Published in the August 1904 issue of Harper’s Magazine, this story by Edwina Stanton Babcock is told in the voice of an alley cat who has figured out how to survive in the city. Some of his adventures are funny, including his successful foray into a butcher shop looking for meat. The cat experiences hunger and discomfort along with adventure, but he never feels sorry for himself even though he dimly recalls that he “must have been owned.” He speculates whether he actually has nine lives. At the close of the diary, he finds that he is unable to stay in the lap of a little girl who would keep him because he feels “the spell of the streets — a spell that draws me away from mere ease and plenty to the thrill and mystery of a roving life.”
Babcock (1875-1965) was a poet and fiction writer who was popular during her life but seems to be neglected today. The historical context for this “diary” is worth noting, too. At this time, abandoned and feral cats were receiving more attention from animal welfare groups — and also from city animal control officers, who killed hundreds of thousands of cats between 1890 and 1910.
I’ll work on finding other “secret lives” to share. But these two cases suggest that animal-loving Americans in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries wondered about the inner lives of their companions — and came up with funny “takes” on animals’ views of the world — just as we do today.
