ABSTRACT
The last significant canine role in Dickens’s fiction is shared between the pair of beautifully observed St Bernard dogs whose intelligence leads to the salvation of the hero in No Thoroughfare, the melodramatic AYR Christmas story for 1867 which Dickens wrote in collaboration with Wilkie Collins. 1 Two years earlier, he had attached a sagacious dog to Doctor Marigold (named in honour of the doctor who delivered him), the Cheap Jack (travelling hawker) who is presented as having collected the eight stories which make up Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, the title of the 1865 Christmas (double) number of the magazine. Dickens wrote three of the stories, while five other authors contributed one apiece. His idea was that Marigold – who delivers his sales patter from the footboard of his cart, and was believed by his creator to be ‘wonderfully like the real thing, of course a little refined and humoured’ (P XI, p. 99) – had painstakingly assembled the stories for his beloved deaf and dumb adopted daughter, and given them to her on the completion of her two-year term at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum in London, where she had been taught to read fluently.
