Adventure classics – 2 boys, 2 dogs & the war on death

A Dog of Flanders, by Louise de la Ramée (Ouida)

Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson

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Last Friday, Adventure classics left young orphan Nello and his milk cart-pulling dog Patrasche alone two days before Christmas in Louise de la Ramée’s 1872 classic, A Dog of Flanders. Following a false accusation by the wealthy local miller, and the death of Nello’s grandfather, boy and dog left friendless and evicted from their tiny cottage. However, Nello still had hopes of winning an arts’ competition whose winner was to be declared on Christmas Eve. Together, Nello and the aging dog Patrasche sets out for the neighboring city of Antwerp to learn whether he has won the prize that will secure his hope of becoming an artist like his idol, Peter Paul Rubens.

His dream is not to be. Hopes dashed, Nello retraces his footsteps, although no home awaits him. On the way, Patrasche finds a satchel dropped in the snow. It bears the name of the miller and inside it are notes for two thousand francs. At this point, I’m cheering for Nello to use what appears to be a divine Christmas gift to buy food and shelter for himself and his dog. Instead, finding the miller out searching for his lost money, the boy returns the money to the miller’s wife, asking only for her to take care of his dog.

I won’t harrow your sensibilities – or your good sense, dear readers -- by writing anymore, except to point out that the entire story is available online here.

Although I would like to trample Ramée to death for writing this story, she’s already been dead for the past century. And however emotionally manipulative her story now seems, it wasn’t out of keeping with the way of death in her era. As last Friday’s post noted, between epidemics that swept newly-industrialized cities and the lack of economic safety nets, the 19^th century’s high mortality rates made mourning a way of life.

But the scientific revolution fostered by the very industrialization that made cities septic, and the social revolution fostered by just such as writers as Ramée, were making their effects felt. By the end of the century, many age-old killers were being tamed by sanitation and nutrition. Others, although still fearful, had names and known histories, and in some cases even preventative inoculations.

I found an example of this change in attitude toward death and disease in a second story about a boy and his dog this month, Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller. Texas author Gipson’s 1956 classic is the, again sob-inducing story about a boy and his faithful dog. But although Old Yeller is set shortly after the deadliest war in U.S. history, our Civil War of 1861-1865, and published little more than a decade after the end of the still more horrific Second World War, the agency that claims the life of the dog at the heart of the story is not inhumanity, not injustice, not human violence. It’s the disease of rabies.

And the boy in Old Yeller doesn’t die. Maybe Gipson didn’t want to inflict that horror on a child. But in truth, readers in the United States at the time of Old Yeller’s writing would have been disgusted by the sheer implausibility of a human stricken by rabies.

I don’t mean to downplay the impact of rabies. Even in a world aware of such animal-transmitted diseases as avian flu and Ebola, rabies has unique overtones of terror. But in the U.S. at least, no more than one or two people die from rabies yearly, most often because they fail to seek treatment, not realizing they had been exposed. One disease on the wane, one less source of child mortality to make readers mourn.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins a March of thrillers and suspense with H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.)

Adventure classics – Kids, dogs & the Victorian death cult

A Dog of Flanders

by Louise de la Ramée (writing as Ouida)

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There I was, pecking away at my laptop’s keyboard last week when—I realized there was no Internet connection at my location in the old Mexican colonial town of San Miguel de Allende. Possibly because the city sits on a 6,000-foot high plateau between two major mountain ranges, Internet connectivity can be slow, problematic or even nonexistent. So be it. Or as the locals say, “ni moto.”

But now I’m back in the flatlands of North Texas and picking up where I left off two weeks ago with Louise de la Ramée’s story of a boy and his dog, the 1872 A Dog of Flanders .

Adventure classics left off the story of the young orphan Nello, his impoverished, crippled grandfather Jehan, and their milk cart dog Patrasche as Nello was nurturing a growing dream of becoming an artist. Self-taught Nello draws a picture of his friend Alois, daughter of the wealthy local miller. The girl’s father offers to buy the portrait. The money would have enough to let Nello pay the fee charged to view the paintings of his Flemish artist-idol Peter Paul Rubens’ paintings in a nearby town. Valuing friendship more than money, Nello gives Alois’s picture away to her father.

Meanwhile, he works on his boyish masterpiece, hoping to enter it in an art contest whose winner will be announced on the coming Christmas Eve. But things go from bad to worse. Alois’s father worries about the growing intimacy between Nello and his budding daughter. As old Jehan grows more feeble, he loses the customers who formerly paid him to cart their milk to the local market. When Jehan dies two days before Christmas, the last of his money goes for his burial, and Nello and the dog Patrasche are left without shelter. Can things get any worse?

Or will they perhaps get better? After all, there’s still the art contest to count on. And a lost purse full of money. . . 

If for Edgar Allan Poe the most poetic subject in world was the death of a beautiful young woman, for animal lovers the most heartrending is the death of an old dog. It’s a story trope at least as old as Homer, who broke his hero Odysseus’s heart with the death of his faithful old hound Argos. Fast forward a couple of millennia to the Victorian idealization of the innocence of both children and animals, and you’ve got a combination that was guaranteed to make tears gush from the eyes of nineteenth-century readers. Even this twenty-first century reader’s eyes grew damp reading A Dog of Flanders.

Then I wondered, is Ramée just manipulating my emotions? The answer apparently is yes, but. As Carol Christ writes in “A Victorian Obsession With Death,” the high mortality rates in Victorian England made mourning a way of life. “Fifty-seven of every 100 children in working class families were dead by five years of age,” Christ writes.

The rituals associated with mourning at least recognized the need for stability in the face of so much loss. It was a need recognized as much by Ramée as by her more famous literary contemporary, Charles Dickens, who was self-traumatized by his own writing of the death of his fictional character Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop.

For Ramée, writing about the sufferings of the cart dog Patrasche may have evoked a similar feeling. Although unmarried and childless, she was devoted to animals to a degree that might be described today as hoarding, sometimes keeping as many as thirty dogs. After her death, her friends memorialized her fittingly by installing a fountain for horses and dogs in her name, where “God’s creatures whom she loved (may) assuage her tender soul as they drink.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics concludes a February of animal adventures with Louise de la Ramée’s A Dog of Flanders.)

Adventure classics – The young, the old, and the big dog

A Dog of Flanders

by Louise de la Ramée (writing as Ouida)

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I hope everybody stocked up on happy during January’s comic Adventure classics memoirs by Agatha Christie and Eleanor Lothrop. Because February is definitely a multiple-handkerchief month. It begins with Louise de la Ramée's 1872 weeper, A Dog of Flanders, featuring a young boy, his elderly grandfather, and a faithful dog getting on in years. The big question: who will be the first to die?

When I first slotted A Dog of Flanders into this month’s schedule, my memory was of one of the several movie versions, with a cute kid, a kindly old man and a big lug of a dog in a landscape of perpetual green summer. Either my memory was faulty or the filmmaker prettied up the story, because after finally reading it, I learned it’s a tearful tale from the first page, a boy and dog “both of the same age by length of years, yet one was still young and the other was already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days: both were orphaned and destitute, and owed their lives to the same hand. It had been the beginning of the tie between them…”

In fact, the denunciation of the work dog culture of the time, where dogs were “beasts of the shafts and the harness, creatures that lived straining their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their hearts on the flints of the streets,” starts out like a canine version of Black Beauty.

Still, as Black Beauty author Anna Sewell, writing at almost the same time as Ramée, decried the misuse of horses, she also sympathized with working people whose economic circumstances put them in a position little better than that of their animals. Ramée too could find humanity, even humanity toward a dog, in aged, crippled soldier Jehan Daas.

While hauling milk to sell in the market, Jehan and young orphaned grandson, Nello, find the dog Patrasche, “yellow of hide, large of head and limb, with wolf-like ears that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the muscular development,” abandoned by the side of the road to die.

The old soldier carries the dog home and nurses him back to health. It is a kindness the animal repays by insisting, as much as any Klondike sled dog in a Jack London story, on taking his place in the milk cart’s harness. As Jehan grows feebler with age, his grandson Nello and the dog will take over the trade.

But although Patrasche aspires no higher than to serve those he loves, Nello is entertaining other ideas. He dreams of becoming an artist. Obsessed with the legend of fellow Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, he longs to see the painter’s pictures in the nearby city of Antwerp but cannot afford the meagre admission fee. And though his grandfather has no money for teachers, Nello teaches himself by drawing everything he sees, including Alois, the young daughter of the local miller, the richest man in their village.

When the miller finds Nello drawing Alois’s portrait on a smoothed slab of wood, he is struck by the likeness and offers to buy it. “I could have seen (Rubens’ paintings) with that franc,” Nello tells Patrasche, “but I could not sell her picture—not even for them.”

Does the growing tenderness between Alois and Nello portend a happy future for both and maybe a well-deserved retirement for both Patrasche and grandfather Jehan? Stay tuned for next week’s installment at Adventure classics. Or if you can’t wait, read ahead or watch any of the several movie versions available online, keeping a box of tissues handy.

(Next week, Adventure classics continues a February of animal adventures with Louise de la Ramée’s A Dog of Flanders.)