The History of Pompey the Little, or The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog

Francis Coventry

• Publisher: Vintage Dog Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781473331969
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473349704
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

The first English novel with a dog as its hero - and one of the sharpest satires of the age, told from lap height.

Published anonymously in 1751 and the talk of London within weeks, Francis Coventry's The History of Pompey the Little, or The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog follows a Bologna lapdog as he passes from owner to owner through fashionable English and continental society. Pompey observes everything and judges nothing, which leaves his author free to do both: fine ladies, learned men, coffee-house wits and country gentlemen all pass under his nose, and few of them survive it.

Coventry added a dedication to Henry Fielding in the second edition, defending the novel as a form worth taking seriously - a landmark statement in its own right. The book invented a genre: every dog-narrator novel since is descended from this one.

Table of contents

• Dogs in Fiction
• BOOK. I.
• CHAP. II.
• CHAP. III.
• CHAP. IV.
• CHAP. V.
• CHAP. VI.
• CHAP. VII.
• CHAP. VIII.
• CHAP. IX.
• CHAP. X.
• CHAP. XI.
• CHAP. XII.
• CHAP. XIII.
• CHAP. XIV.
• CHAP. XV.
• CHAP. XVI.
• CHAP. XVII.
• CHAP. XVIII.
• Book II.
• CHAP. II.
• CHAP. III.
• CHAP. IV.
• CHAP. V.
• CHAP. VI.
• CHAP. VII.
• CHAP. VIII.
• CHAP. IX.
• CHAP. X.
• CHAP. XI.
• CHAP. XII.
• CHAP. XIII.
• CHAP. XIV.
• CHAP. XV.