A Dog Named Polly

Neither Charles Darwin nor his dog Polly made it to the cemetery of the St. Mary's churchyard, which was where Darwin had wanted to be buried.  St. Mary's was a centuries-old flint-stone church in the village where he had lived most of his life.  But Charles Darwin did not get his way because people outside his family intervened, convincing his family that his scientific legacy called for his being buried in Westminster Abbey, where scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton, and poets such as Geoffrey Chaucer had been laid to rest centuries before.

With Darwin's burial at Westminster, it was not just a scientist who was laid to rest, but also a veteran dog-lover.  When Charles's future wife Emma was being courted by Charles, one thing that attracted her was the kindness he demonstrated toward dogs and other animals.  During the course of his lifetime, Charles had a dozen different dogs.

Charles's daughter
 Henrietta
with Polly

The last of those dogs, and Charles's favorite, was Polly, a terrier.  She had originally been given to one of Darwin's daughters, Henrietta, but when Henrietta married and moved away, her dog remained behind with the family. Polly would usually accompany Charles on his daily walks on a sandy path around the grounds of the home.  And when he spent hours in his study doing scientific research or recuperating from illness, Polly would often be found nearby, resting on her dog-bed.  Charles's son Francis recalled that his father "was delightfully tender to Polly, and never showed any impatience at the attention she required."

drawing of Polly from
"The Expression of the Emotions"

As with other animals Charles encountered, Polly also became an object for Darwin's scientific observation. (Even Charles and Emma's children could not escape his scientific interest in human and animal behavior.) Darwin's aim was to find similarities between not only the anatomy of humans and animals but also between their bodily behavior and facial expressions -- similarities that would be additional evidence of common ancestry. That decades-long project of Darwin reached its apex in one of the later books of his career, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.  That book contained a drawing of Polly, poised, pointing, with one front paw in the air.  The engraving was titled, "Small dog watching a cat on a table."

Polly, the pet who had become most deeply engraved in the affections of Charles Darwin's heart, died less than a month after he passed away.  Polly was buried under the apple tree near the Darwin home.  Being a dog, she would not really have been a candidate for burial in the graveyard of St. Mary's church, the place where Darwin also did not manage to be buried. And yet, then as now, pets were free of the complexities regarding cemetery plots, burial permissions, death certificates, and wills that can make human life complicated.  Nevertheless, Polly, being a pet, had helped Darwin make the case for his theory of evolution.  By including examples of the behavior of dogs, he had taken advantage of the similarities many readers had already observed between themselves and their pets -- animals with which they also had an emotional kinship.

~~~

Do you have a fond recollection of a particular dog?  What was the dog like?

(The quote by Charles Darwin's son Francis is from his "Reminiscences" in

 Selected Letters and Evolution of Origin of Species, ed. Francis Darwin, © 1892, 1958.  p. 74.)

(The drawing of Polly is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.)