Dogs Encountered

Between Timber’s death and Dickens’s acquisition of the first of his big dogs, there was an interval of two and a half or three years; but in the late summer of 1856, some months before Turk arrived in the Gad’s Hill stable yard, Dickens did accept another canine charge. He and his family had just returned from their third summer at Boulogne where, according to Mamie, his ‘love for dogs led him into a strange friendship’ ¹ with the cobbler who lived down the lane from their villa, ² and who sat at his cottage window ‘working all day with his dog – a Pomeranian – on the table beside him’. ³ Mamie recalled that it was because of the dog’s intelligence ⁴ that Dickens became interested in his owner. However it came about, Dickens’s interest in both dog and cobbler began to develop in 1853, during his first Boulogne sojourn. It was an interest that was clearly shared by Wilkie Collins, who had spent the whole of that August with the Dickens family; for Dickens reported to him from Boulogne the following July telling him that the poor man had ‘been ill these many months, and unable to work – has had a Carbuncle in his back, and has it cut three times a week. The little dog sits at the door so unhappy and anxious to help that I every day expect to see him beginning a pair of top boots’ ⁵ (P VII, p. 367).