Chapter 6 Lapdogs and Moral Shepherd’s Dogs: Canine and Paid Female Companions in Nineteenth-Century English Literature Lauren N. Hoffer Skill’d in each gentle, each prevailing art, That leads directly to the female heart; A soft partaker of the quiet hour, Friend of the parlour, partner of the bow’r: In health, in sickness, ever faithful found Yet, by no ties, but ties of kindness bound These verses by Samuel Jackson Pratt, excerpted from his epitaph to a lapdog in Liberal Opinions, Upon Animals, Man, and Providence (1775), articulate the function and characteristics of the ideal lapdog in the eighteenth century (quoted in Tague, 2008). A “Skill’d” “Friend,” the “faithful” lapdog offers company and amusement to its, specifically “female,” owner. The strength of the attachment is emphasized through the reference to partnership and the suggestion of intimacy implied by the bower; this diction, coupled with the allusion to common marriage vows in the fifth line of this passage, aligns the lapdog–owner relationship with that of husband and wife, a bond culturally understood as among the strongest connec- tion between human beings. Indeed, this touching ode to “woman’s best friend” could just as easily have been written to describe a human. Not only does the poet anthropomorphize his subject, but the characterization of the lapdog is equally applicable to another common companionate figure in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century England: the paid female companion. Paid female companions were the hired friends of other women and, like the lapdog, they were expected to provide their mistresses with company and entertainment in addition to serving as a confi- dant and chaperone. About seventy-five years after Pratt penned his epitaph, William Makepeace Thackeray drew an explicit connection between canine and paid female companions in his novel Vanity Fair (1847). Becky Sharp states that she requires a “moral shepherd’s dog” or, as she goes on to explain, “A dog to keep the wolves off me, [... ] a companion” who will act as “guardian of her innocence and reputation” (Thackeray, 1847). L.N. Hoffer (B ) Assistant Professor of Victorian Literature, Department of English & Theatre, University of South Carolina Beaufort, Bluffton, SC, USA e-mail: lauren.hoffer@gmail.com 107 C. Blazina et al. (eds.), The Psychology of the Human–Animal Bond, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-9761-6_6, C  Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011