The Spotted Dog

The Spotted Dog by Anthony Trollope

A struggling literary man named Julius Mackenzie writes to the narrator, a magazine editor, begging for work, describing his education at Cambridge (from which he was rusticated), his abandoned study for the Chancery Bar, his fluency in languages, his lost faith, his poverty, his wife and four children, and his current drudgery writing "blood and nastiness" for the "Penny Dreadfuls" at Cucumber Court, Gray's Inn Lane, asking that replies be addressed care of Mr. Grimes at the Spotted Dog public-house in Liquorpond Street. The narrator, intrigued and moved despite suspicion, decides to test him rather than dismiss the letter. He has been offered £25 to codify and index a learned manuscript on Greek dramatic metres belonging to a wealthy scholarly friend, "the Doctor," a task too poorly paid for a proper scholar but a godsend to Mackenzie. He summons Mackenzie, who arrives gaunt, ragged, crooked, with a strikingly red nose, and proves fiercely intelligent, blunt, and unashamed, admitting he was thought a drunkard and had indeed once been one. To vet him, the narrator visits Mr. Grimes and his young, warm-hearted wife at the Spotted Dog. Mrs. Grimes praises Mackenzie extravagantly as a gentleman and scholar ruined by a degraded, gin-soaked wife who neglects and robs her own children; Mr. Grimes confirms Mackenzie's honesty and hard circumstances. The narrator also visits the "Penny Dreadful" office, where an editor dismisses Mackenzie as a "drunken blackguard" earning forty-five shillings weekly and doubts the narrator's offer will hold. Despite misgivings, the narrator introduces Mackenzie to the Doctor, an elderly, benevolent, gaitered clergyman devoted to his manuscript. The Doctor is charmed by Mackenzie's scholarship, advances him £10, and the arrangement proceeds: since Mackenzie's home is unfit and the taproom too noisy, Mrs. Grimes offers her own bedroom as a workspace, over her husband's muted reluctance. Mackenzie works there for a month, making real progress, sustained partly by Mrs. Grimes's watchful care, while periodically his wife appears at the pub, drunk and demanding money or clothes, straining the Grimeses' patience. One evening the narrator finds Mackenzie drunk and despairing in Mrs. Grimes's bedroom after a public street brawl with his wife, delivering a long, eloquent, nihilistic tirade about the misery of his life, the impossibility of manly endurance, and the justification of ending his and his family's suffering. The narrator walks him through London — past Cucumber Court, Gray's Inn, Lincoln's Inn, the Temple — hearing more of his history, including his rustication for assaulting his tutor and his quarrel with his family over religion and his marriage "beneath" him, undertaken deliberately to escape "conventional thraldom." They share a meal; Mackenzie vows to finish the Doctor's work regardless of what becomes of him. Weeks later, returning to the Spotted Dog, the narrator finds Grimes has barred Mackenzie from the premises after a violent public scene in which Mackenzie, drunk, wrestled his equally drunk wife in the street; Mackenzie had already removed the manuscript box. Accompanied by Grimes, the narrator goes to the squalid Cucumber Court lodging, finds Mackenzie's children alone and neglected, and Mackenzie himself unconscious in drunken stupor, having been fetched home by a neighbor after his wife was taken by police. In the outer room they discover the Doctor's manuscript half-burned in the fireplace — the wife's doing while in a rage — and salvage the charred remains. The next day, before the narrator can break the news, the Doctor arrives at the office; the narrator confesses the manuscript's destruction, and the Doctor bears it with remarkable Christian forbearance, comparing himself to Newton, whose papers were also burned. Then Mrs. Grimes arrives with worse news: Mackenzie has cut his own throat and is dead at the Spotted Dog. The narrator and the Doctor attend the inquest, where Mackenzie's body lies on the same table once used for his manuscript work, his wife appears in ill-fitting borrowed mourning clothes, seemingly numb rather than grief-stricken, and the jury quickly rules death by temporary insanity brought on by intoxication. The Doctor returns home with the surviving fragments in the narrator's old despatch box, later writing to formally abandon any plan to reconstruct his ruined life's work, likening his loss to Mackenzie's fate and inviting the narrator to visit, an invitation never taken up. Mackenzie's widow and children vanish from the neighborhood untraced. The Grimeses eventually sell the Spotted Dog and retire to a small farm near Colchester, ending the narrator's connection to Liquorpond Street.

By Anthony Trollope · First published 1873 · Genre: Crime, Mystery, Drama · 24,211 words

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Some few years since we received the following letter: --

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The Spotted Dog is listed on Textopian as a novella by Anthony Trollope, dated 1873 CE.

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fiction · 19th century · British literature · social commentary · class struggle · humor · satire · character study · relationships · family dynamics · rural life · moral dilemmas

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