At the dog show, by Our Special Correspondent
An original newspaper feature written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
This feature, published in a London weekly paper in 1871, describes a visit to one of the large dog shows that had recently become fashionable.
There are, we are told, eleven hundred dogs at the Agricultural Hall this week, and every one of them, with the possible exception of a bloodhound named Solomon, is barking. The noise strikes the visitor at the door like a blow. Within, on long rows of wooden benches divided into stalls, sit the aristocracy of the canine world, each upon its straw or, in the more exalted classes, upon its cushion of crimson velvet, with its name, its price and its pedigree pinned above its head.
It is the owners, rather than the dogs, who reward study. We watched a lady in purple silk feed a Maltese terrier upon chicken breast from a silver fork, while explaining to a friend that the poor creature had been ‘quite prostrated’ by the journey from Bath. We listened to two breeders of bulldogs disputing for twenty minutes over the correct number of wrinkles upon a forehead, with a bitterness that would have been excessive in a disputed will. A prize card, it appears, may be worth fifty guineas to a breeder, and some of the faces at the judging ring wore the expression of men awaiting a verdict at the Old Bailey.
And what, the reader may ask, are the dogs for? A great many of them, it seemed to us, are for nothing whatever except to be looked at. There is a toy spaniel in the third row so small, so flat of face and so protruding of eye that one fears to breathe on it, and it is valued, its owner assured us, at three hundred pounds.
But we should be sorry to leave the impression that the show is all folly. In a quiet corner, among the working dogs, we found an old shepherd from Westmorland sitting on an upturned bucket beside a black and white collie named Fly. She had won nothing, being, as he put it, ‘a bit short in the leg for the judges’. He told us that she had brought three hundred sheep off the fells in a snowstorm the winter before last, without him, while he lay in bed with a broken ankle. Fly listened with her chin upon his boot and looked at him as no lady’s lapdog looks at anyone.
As we left, we saw at the gate a ragged boy of perhaps ten, holding a dog of no breed at all on a length of string, who had been refused admission for want of a pedigree. He did not seem to mind. ‘He’s the best dog in London,’ he told the doorkeeper, and walked off with his head up. We are inclined to think he was right.
“The writer mocks the dog show and everyone connected with it.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.