Fascinated by them, unable to ignore them, and imaginatively stimulated by them, Charles Dickens was an acute and unsentimental reporter on the dogs he kept and encountered during a time when they were a burgeoning part of the nineteenth-century urban and domestic scene. As dogs inhabited Dickens s city, so too did they populate his fiction, journalism, and letters. In the first book-length work of criticism on Dickens s relationship to canines, Beryl Gray shows that dogs, real and invented, were intrinsic to Dickens s vision and experience of London and to his representations of its life....