Michael Worboys

The Invention of the Modern Dog

The introduction of this fabulous book opens with a Jilly Cooper quotation “Why are mongrels a dying breed?”. Well on my walk with my four- legged princess, a lovely pure breed black Labrador, I saw a few mongrels, but being a northerner, we love our mongrels up here, might be different down there in Gloucestershire.

This book is an interesting history of the invention and categorisation of dogs since our Victorian forefathers. Before the Victorians started to categorise dogs and breeds, dogs had mainly been kept as working dogs, especially in the countryside. Dogs have been in Britain long before the Victorian era, but they were not defined by breed and they were generally not for our leisure, work and sometimes companionship.

This excellent book looks in depth we see three historians of science explore the ‘origins’ of what is referred to as the modern dog. They explain how for a thousand years before we started to categorise them how dogs were defined by the job that they did, such as pulling people out of snow, or chasing sheep or lap dogs for ladies of substance.

There are fascinating case studies throughout the book and I always knew that the Newfoundland had been developed to breed to specific specifications for body form, size and colour. Over eight chapters the exploration of the modern history of dogs is investigated and explained clearly and concisely for the general reader as well as social historians.

This is a well researched, well written book that has been written with a real passion for their subject.… (més)