<1>Keridiana W. Chez’s Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men: Affect and Animals in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture is a thoughtful new addition to the field of Victorian animal studies and to the body of work which considers the human-dog relationship, specifically. Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men melds nicely with recent books such as At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain (2015) by Philip Howell, Pets and Domesticity in Victorian Literature and Culture: Animality, Queer Relations, and the Victorian Family (2016) by Monica Flegel, and The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (2018) by Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton. Joining other narratives about the changing status of the dog in the Victorian period, Chez argues that Victorian dogs, once employed for physical labor such as cart-pulling and treadmill-running, began to be valued instead for their affective uses. Indeed, the book’s primary argument is that the “bourgeoisie developed the use of animal companions as emotional prostheses, attaching dogs to themselves to enhance their affective capacities and to complete their humanity” (2). Further, Chez writes, “these new attitudes and practices toward animals was not, as it would first appear, to use animals as surrogates to fill emotional vacancies but rather to renew connections between humans via the dog” (2-3). Chez sees these connections as especially necessary for men, whose lives were more subject to the “social fracturing” of the nineteenth-century public sphere: a sphere which privileged capitalism and self-interest. Women, on the other hand, “were assumed abundantly emotional” (3) and were deemed less in need of canine prostheses. However, Chez sells herself short—despite this distinction, and despite the title’s focus, the book tells us almost as much about women as about men and is thus a well-rounded addition to the field of gender studies as well as to the field of animal studies.

<2>Chapters One and Two trace the canine as familial and individual prosthesis in Dickens and Eliot, respectively. In Chapter 1, Jip in David Copperfield (1849-1850) and Bull’s-Eye in Oliver Twist (1837-1839) become examples of pets “placating conflict between household members” (32). Jip is a symbol of Dora’s ineptitude as Angel of the House and David’s failure to be the master of his own house, but he is also a means of assuaging the tensions that these failures cause. Ultimately, Chez argues, the “pets” Jip and Dora allow David to practice his masculinity in preparation for his life with Agnes. In Oliver Twist, Bull’s-Eye functions more as a readerly prosthesis, “encourag[ing] the reader to sympathize with [Sikes and Nancy] and feel some investment in both” (51). Chez admits that Jip is much more successful than Bull’s-Eye at mitigating household discord, yet maintains that “the pet may not have actually conciliated [the family], but…acted as ‘social cement’ for the household’s ‘naturally’ unharmonious members” (32). Still, to flesh out her argument, it would have been helpful for Chez to have included at least one more familial prosthesis who placates like Jip does.

<3>Chapter Two concentrates on “canine connections” in Adam Bede (1859) and Middlemarch (1871-1872), arguing that in Eliot’s novels Gyp and Dorothea become individual canine prostheses. A being distinct from yet intimately connected to Adam, Gyp helps his emotionally stunted master develop his relationships by becoming a point of connection, most notably between Adam and his mother Lisbeth and between Adam and his future wife Dinah. Middlemarch’s Dorothea may reject the Maltese puppy offered to her by Sir James Chettam, but Chez argues that she becomes a canine prosthesis herself upon her marriages. In her marriage to Casaubon, she fails to be the prosthesis she sets out to be; she wants “to be his eyes and hands, to support his failing body, to supplement his intellectual work” but ends up “relegated to the passive role of mere canine affection” (74). In her rightful marriage with Will, however, she fulfills the role of prosthesis, “producing positive affect and disseminating it to her whole community” (74).

<4>The final three chapters of Victorian Dogs, Victorian Men mark a shift, featuring more historically-inflected arguments and also becoming increasingly attentive to gender. Chapter Three, which focuses least on dog-as-prosthesis, places Margaret Marshall Saunders’s dog autobiography Beautiful Joe (1893) in the context of the transatlantic humane protection movement, demonstrating that the movement was designed to showcase masculine virility by teaching men to protect and defend helpless (that is, feminized) beings. In constructing a masculine canine subjectivity in Beautiful Joe, a book designed especially for young male readers, Saunders teaches children how to become humane in gender-appropriate ways.

<5>In Chapter Four, Chez focuses on Bram Stoker’s rejection of the idea of the canine prosthesis in Dracula (1897). Chez places Dracula in the context of the rabies scares of the nineteenth century, arguing that Stoker equates women with the rabid dogs and wolves that haunt the novel’s periphery. The novel echoed contemporary fears that close relationships with dogs were dangerous, especially in the case of upper-class women coddling and refusing to muzzle their lapdogs; according to common belief, lapdogs’ uselessness and “over-refinement” made them more susceptible to the disease. (As Chez points out, this accusation takes Dorothea’s concerns about the parasitic nature of lapdogs in Middlemarch one step further.) Chez’s phrase “deceptive docility” describes the way that both idle dogs and idle women, especially Lucy Westenra, pose threats to men who become too attached to their canine prostheses.

<6>Chapter Five centers on Jack London’s two most famous dog books, The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), in the context of the nineteenth-century “nature-faking” debate. As people worried about human influence “ruining” dogs by overfeminizing them and making them obsequious, London created what Chez calls “the bare-dog” (borrowing from Agamben’s concept of “bare-life”): “the dog stripped of humanity” (130). London’s Buck and White Fang are hyper-masculine dogs capable of attaching themselves to only one man, the “love-master”—a man who has to earn the love of the highly independent bare-dog. Chez argues that London’s concept of “love-mastery” changed the prosthetic relationship from a merely companionate to a homoerotic bond. However, Chez emphasizes that this new bond is ultimately just as enslaving for the dog as merely companionate relationships, prompting an unfortunately too-brief conclusion in which she discusses the ethical concerns inherent in the human-dog relationship.

<7>As Chapters Three, Four, and Five, especially, make clear, Chez’s book is to be valued as a work just as much about nineteenth-century history and culture as about literature. This is especially apparent in its wonderful through-lines about lapdogs, which make the book almost a micro-history of this element of petkeeping. Its historical bent places it squarely within the highly interdisciplinary field of animal studies and anyone interested in this field will want to read it. The idea of the canine prosthesis, though not always equally distributed throughout the book’s chapters, is original and enables us to think about the human-dog relationship in new ways. Rather than building an understanding of human-dog relationships on the ways we differ from animals, as so many philosophical texts have done, the prosthesis argument forces us to think through the ways in which we function in the world together, for better or for worse.