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Popular Culture Review
specific dog interred in the tomb; these lines, however, do not praise the
dog as much as elevate the species to inhabit a space in which they can
be considered friends. According to the inscription, while dogs may
exhibit the virtues praised earlier in general terms, this dog can with
certainty claim only friendship, which is only possible in the context of
relationship with another.^ This is the height to which humanity at its
finest aspires, and to which Byron denies the title, friend. It is only the
dog, now dead, for whom the inscription arises, that can be called friend.
This irreplaceably singular dog is now dead and waiting, first to welcome
his master. The inscription mourns, perhaps above all, the relationship,
friendship, that has neither ceased to exist nor can be substituted. The act
of attempted memorial creates a space of perhaps involuntary mourning
in which friendship is preserved with the illusion of lasting. This
animemorial reflects the inability to assimilate the decaying dog that
cannot then move into memory.* It is right to say that a portion of the
author has died with the dog—perhaps the heart that is “his master’s
own.”
If Byron’s epitaph was in any way ironic, as might be suspected
given his frequent adoption of this tone, he sets the idea to rest in a will
executed in 1811. Describing the will to be drawn in an 1811 letter,
“Directions for the Contents of a Will to be Drawn up Immediately,”
Byron directs that:
The body of Lord B. to be buried in the vault of the garden of
Newstead, without any ceremony or burial-service whatever, or
any inscription, save his name and age. His dog not to be
removed from the said vault. (Moore 131)
In legal tone, the will documents demand that the interred fnend will not
rest alone. The corpse of the master would not be far behind.’ Nearly
three years after his dog’s death, Byron still inhabited the space of
friendship preserved by the memorial. That fnendship lasts beyond death
is certainly an idea adopted during the Romantic period; that the
memorial of a dead beast, confronting the living, might preserve the
space for interspecies friendship appears to be a nineteenth-century
phenomenon, but it is eertainly one that has carried forward and that has
shaped our understanding of the place of animals in the twenty-first
century.*
It would be remiss, however, to ignore the connection to the
terrifying outbreaks of rabies plaguing the nineteenth-century, to which