Virginia Woolf’s Little-Known Biography of a Cocker Spaniel

Sawrey Gilpin, English Springer Spaniel on a Cushion, 1807

In her 1911 opus , Judith Blunt-Lytton, sixteenth baroness of Wentworth, great-granddaughter of Lord Byron, wrote, “It has cost me years of research both in the British Museum and in the picture galleries of Europe to disentangle the truth from the cocoon of falsehood into which it was spun.” What Blunt-Lytton sought to recuperate from the cobwebs of history was the lapdog’s true form. Blunt-Lytton contended that many breeds had recently strayed from their roots, in large part due to the Victorian proliferation of “dog fancying”: a British term that evokes, at once, a group of people who like dogs and a group people who fluff up dogs’ fur and tie ribbons around their necks. Of the spaniel, Blunt-Lytton asserts that the contemporary model “was introduced comparatively recently, certainly no earlier than the year 1840,” and compiles visual evidence of its transformation. The spaniel in Titian’s is technically correct, as are eighteenth-century pooches painted by George