Editor's note: This is the first in a series of columns highlighting some of the unusual treasures to be found in the U of G Library's Archival and Special Collections.
BY ANDREW VOWLES
The china dogs survived their Atlantic voyage intact. But here in Canada, Gog and Magog proved no match for several youngsters whose spirits apparently exceeded even those of Lucy Maud Montgomery's irrepressible Anne of Green Gables.
After having spent years boxed up in a basement, the dogs' shattered selves were nearly relegated to the dump more than a quarter-century ago. But that fate was averted by a chance visit to the writer's family by now-retired English professor Mary Rubio.
Today both dogs — their heads glued back together, although none too discreetly — occupy a banker's box in the U of G Library. They're part of the University's extensive L.M. Montgomery Collection — the only dogs in that collection and, indeed, the only dogs in the entire library archives, says department head Lorne Bruce.
Seated erect to their full 16-inch height, they're obviously a matched pair: off-white bodies with gold-coloured spots and black-lined staring eyes that give them a slightly startled expression. Rubio calls them spaniels, although their creator probably took some licence. Prof. Lynne O'Sullivan, Clinical Studies, checked the dogs during a seminar at the library this summer and calls them “a generic small-breed dog, spaniel-like perhaps but not specific enough.”
Whatever they are, one sits with its body facing to the right, the other facing to the left — just as Anne Shirley was reminded when she received a pair of china dogs as a wedding gift from her former rooming-house landlady. In Anne's House of Dreams, it was at Miss Patty's home that Anne — then a college student living away from home — had first fallen for the dogs. Writes Miss Patty: “You will not have forgotten that Gog looks to the right and Magog to the left.”
That's also the way the dogs — not the fictional ones received by the red-haired Green Gables heroine but the Staffordshire china ones brought back home by her famous creator — were displayed in the parlour of the Presbyterian manse in Leaskdale, Ont., where Montgomery unpacked them after returning from a three-month honeymoon trip to England in 1911.
The pair was about a century old when she spotted them in a shop in the city of York. By then, Montgomery and her new husband, Rev. Ewan Macdonald, had been abroad for nearly two months. During their travels, she'd kept an eye open for china dogs akin to the pair in her grandfather's home she'd remembered from childhood.
In a diary entry for late August, she writes with something of Anne Shirley's own overwrought style: “Yesterday in a little antique shop near the Minster, I found two pairs of lovely dogs and bought them on the spot, lest they be enchanted dogs which would vanish forever if I made them not mine immediately.”
Gog and Magog — believed to be named for evil kings who launched an end-times attack against Israel — sailed across the Atlantic during Montgomery's first-class passage aboard a White Star steamer.
In Leaskdale, they guarded either side of a bookcase in the manse. Writes Rubio in the manuscript of her upcoming Montgomery biography: “This was appropriate in a symbolic sense: Ewan's world was of theology and Maud's world was that of the imagination, of books and of literature. Perhaps she saw her dogs as protecting her corner of the room against too much theology.”
The dogs could have used some protection against inquisitive and none-too-careful fingers. A 1939 diary entry in Montgomery's selected journals, edited by Rubio and English professor emerita Elizabeth Waterston, relates how an afternoon was spoilt when a visiting child dropped Gog. “The head and shoulders were smashed to smithereens. I could hardly keep the tears back.”
Years later, both dogs ended up broken again, this time by Montgomery's then teenaged grandsons. After that, their bodies and shattered heads were boxed up at the home of Stuart Macdonald, Montgomery's younger son. Rubio remembers visiting the home around 1979 while Stuart's wife, Ruth, was cleaning out the basement.
Says Rubio: “She brought the box of shards up and asked Stuart if it was OK to discard it in the other rubbish. I saw what they were and gasped — and begged the Macdonalds not to even consider discarding them, so the shards went back downstairs and stayed there until the University of Guelph bought them and everything else from the Macdonalds. I shall always be glad that I happened to be there that fateful day because I'm quite sure I saved a valuable relic from the garbage.”
The dogs arrived at U of G in 1983 and were glued together once more in the archives. Bruce says the collected pair provides a glimpse not just into Montgomery's writer side but also into her domestic life. “It indicates that she was a collector.”
