"Champion of Dumb Animals": Marshall Saunders
Margaret Marshall Saunders (1861–1947) was a prolific Canadian author of children’s books and romance novels, but she is most famous for the novel Beautiful Joe (1893). The author wrote under “Marshall Saunders” to appease the male-dominated publishing industry, although she often also uses the name in private correspondence. Beautiful Joe tells the true story of a dog from Meaford, Ontario, whose abusive owner mutilated him as a puppy, cutting off his tail and both ears. When the owner abandoned Joe to die, he was rescued by a Meaford family whose lives he later saved. The novel, subtitled “The Autobiography of a Dog,” was influenced by the success of Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877) and the string of animal autobiographies that followed. Saunders reset Joe’s story in Maine so that it qualified for the American Humane Education Society Prize Competition “Kind and Cruel Treatment of Domestic Animals and Birds in the Northern States,” winning a prize of two hundred dollars. When the American Baptist Publication Society released the novel in 1893, it quickly became the first Canadian book to sell over one million copies.
Saunders, Marshall. Beautiful Joe. 1893. Philadelphia: Banes, 1894. [lp PS8537 .A86 B4 1894b]
The frontispiece of this early edition is a photograph of the real Beautiful Joe, posed to showcase his missing ears and tail. The book is dedicated to George Thorndike Angell, a lawyer and animal rights advocate who co-founded the American Bands of Mercy, which feature prominently in the novel. Hezekiah Butterworth, a member of the Humane Society that awarded Saunders her prize, provides an introduction in which he writes that “the story speaks not for the dog alone, but for the whole animal kingdom. Through it we enter the animal world, and are made to see as animals see, and to feel as animals feel.” Such empathic sentimentality characterized animal autobiographies by Saunders and other nineteenth-century women writers, causing many of their male contemporaries to trivialize and disparage the genre.
---. Beautiful Joe [Holiday Edition]. Philadelphia: Banes, 1894. [PS8537 .A86 B4]
This so-called “Holiday Edition” of Beautiful Joe has a more ornate cover than other editions and would probably have sold for a higher price. Marketed toward adults as Christmas presents for children, holiday editions of popular books were fashionable in nineteenth-century society because the extravagance of their bindings was thought to reflect the wealth and status of the giver. That a holiday edition of Beautiful Joe existed so soon after its publication is indicative of the novel’s immediate success. The author signed this copy on 17 September 1894 in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Pasted next to Saunders’s signature is a pamphlet advertising two lectures given by her youngest sister, Grace Hart Saunders. The lectures are titled “Marshall Saunders and Her Pets” and “Marshall Saunders: Her Life and Literary Adventures.” On the front of the pamphlet is a photo of Grace and her dog Fiji, under which Saunders has written, “My sister who lectures for me. I still speak in public but don’t go off on lecture tours.” Grace was heavily involved in her famous sister’s career, especially as Saunders’s health began to fail.
---. Beautiful Joe. 1893. Toronto: Baptist Book Room, 1894. [PS8537 .A86 B4 1894a]
This first Canadian edition of Beautiful Joe includes an introductory note by Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, who was a British author and the viceregal consort of Canada from 1893 to 1898. Aberdeen’s introduction staunchly positions Saunders as a Canadian author and activist, asserting that “Canada has every reason to be proud that one of her daughters should prove herself so able a champion of the claims of the faithful creatures who so constantly minister to our wants and pleasures.” The edition further emphasizes Saunders’s nationality in small but significant changes, such as specifying that the author’s preface was written in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this way, the publisher reminds Canadian readers that Saunders is one of them, despite the American setting of her most famous novel.
---. Beautiful Joe. 1893. A. L. Burt, 1920. [PS8537 .A86 B4 1920]
In 1934, Saunders gave this later American edition of Beautiful Joe to Lorne Pierce, claiming it was one of only three copies in Canada. Saunders believed Pierce would be interested in the edition because of its dustjacket, on which “dear old Joe is looking across the waters of the Georgian Bay.” The author’s inscription also alludes to the construction of a playground in Joe’s name, which became the Beautiful Joe Park in Meaford, Ontario. Next to the inscription, Saunders has pasted a photo of herself with John Elson and a student. She draws Pierce’s attention to the chair in the background surrounded by birds, where her sister Grace (the photographer) “has just fed her pigeons.”
---. Bela Joe: Autobiografio de Hundo. Translated by J. Blaikie and N. Hohlov. Brita Esperantista Asocio, 1929. [PS8537 .A86 B4192]
Following Beautiful Joe’s global popularity, Saunders asked her friend James Blaikie to translate the novel into Esperanto, an artificial language constructed in 1887 by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof and intended for use as an international auxiliary language. Blaikie learned Esperanto in 1905, the same year Zamenhof established the language’s basic principles in Fundamento de Esperanto, and subsequently translated Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling.” In the introductory note to Bela Joe (1929), Blaikie recalls that “not being young anymore,” he asked Russian Esperantist Nikolao Hohlov to perform the first translation of Saunders’s novel. Blaikie prepared the translation for printing with help from the British Esperantist Association and died later that year.
---. Beautiful Joe’s Paradise or, The Island of Brotherly Love. 1902. Jarrold & Sons, 1905. [PS8537 .A86 B44 1905]
Beautiful Joe’s Paradise (1902) is set in what Saunders calls “the happy republic where the animals f[ind] themselves after death.” It describes the afterlives of many of the characters from her earlier books, including Beautiful Joe. Saunders hesitated to include Joe in another story because to do so, she felt, would be “trading … on the popularity of the dear old animal.” She changed her mind, however, after the deaths of her dog Rita and the real Beautiful Joe. Her preface offers an “apology for a sequel … which in many ways is of doubtful discretion,” and the book is “affectionately dedicated” to Rita’s memory “by her sorrowing Mistress.” Saunders’s conception of an eternal paradise for dogs suggests animals can have souls, an idea that must have seemed heretical to many of her Christian contemporaries. Significantly, Saunders gives animals their own paradise rather than have them share that of humans, but she does not restrict this paradise to animals kept as pets. On the contrary, Charles Livingston Bull’s illustrations for the novel depict not only dogs on the “Island of Brotherly Love” but also cats, birds, horses, lambs, monkeys, elephants, and tigers.
---. My Pets: Real Happenings in My Aviary. Griffith & Rowland, 1908. [QL676 .S2]
Saunders based My Pets (1908) on her diaries, dedicating the book to her “boy and girl friends who are never satisfied with a story unless it is entirely true.” She claims in the dedication that many of the birds in the book are still living and “always glad to see any girls and boys who call on them, if they do not come in too great numbers at one time.” The book is divided into chapters on animals such as robins, canaries, cardinals, and finches, as well as rabbits, guinea pigs, rats, and squirrels, all of whom Saunders had either in or around her houses in Nova Scotia and Ontario. This edition is illustrated by Charles Copeland, who provided illustrations for many books by—among others—Marshall Saunders, Charles G. D. Roberts, and Johanna Spyri. The end pages are blank except for the title “A Record of My Pets,” encouraging children to observe and document the behaviours of animals in their own lives.
This copy of My Pets belonged to Lorne Pierce and was signed by Grace Hart Saunders in November 1932, probably at one of the lectures she gave on her sister’s behalf. Pasted opposite the first chapter is an advertisement, possibly cut from the book’s original dustjacket, claiming that “such intelligence is shown by these little people in feathers and fur that it is difficult to think, as some recent expounders of natural history would have us believe, that animals do not reason.”
---. Pussy Black-Face or, The Story of a Kitten and Her Friends: A Book for Boys and Girls. 1913. L. C. Page, 1931. [Child PZ5 no.1771]
Pussy Black-Face (1913) is Saunders’s only contribution to cat autobiographies, which in the early twentieth century were much less popular than those of dogs. Indeed, the American Baptist Publication Society initially rejected Saunders’s proposal for a companion novel to Beautiful Joe from a cat’s perspective because they believed it would interest children far less than stories about dogs and horses.
This copy was signed in December 1932 by Saunders, who pasted a photo of a goat inside the front cover. Under the photo, the author has written, “Dear old Nannie was our pet goat in Halifax. She had a little kid, and I think Helen Rosemary Royce would have been amused to see them play together and then go into a big dog kennel to sleep.” Helen Royce was presumably the book’s original owner, as its back flyleaf is inscribed to her “From Uncle Carlyle and Auntie Jean, Christmas 1932.”
---. Boy, The Wandering Dog. Grosset & Dunlap, 1916. [PS8537 .A86 B63]
Boy, The Wandering Dog (1916), one of several dog “autobiographies” Saunders wrote after the success of Beautiful Joe, tells the story of a stray fox terrier in New York City who, like most of Saunders’s animal protagonists, is eventually adopted by a generous and loving family. Saunders dedicated Boy to her fellow members of the American Humane Association for their “noble work for children and animals.” In the early twentieth century, many humane societies advocated for the ethical treatment of both children and animals, as both were considered the “property” of adults and thus vulnerable to exploitation. The novel is illustrated with photos—rather than drawings or paintings—of dogs and cats set against blank backgrounds, contrasting the more ostentatious designs of earlier children’s books. The illustrations’ captions further emphasize the story’s educational value as they identify the specific breed of animal in each photo.
---. Golden Dicky: The Story of a Canary and His Friends. Stokes, 1919. [PS8537 .A86 G6]
Saunders was an avid bird enthusiast and, at one time, had as many as twenty-eight canaries in her home. Golden Dicky (1919) is the “autobiography” of one such canary, but the novel features several species of birds and other animals. Before the story begins, Saunders provides a list of “Principal Characters,” such as Dicky-Dick the canary, a sparrow named Chummy Hole-in-the-Wall, Slow-Boy the pigeon, a bad squirrel named Squirrie, and a good squirrel named Chickari. Canadian author Edward S. Caswell supplies an introduction in which he writes that Golden Dicky “illustrate[s] the kindly relations which should obtain between man and the beasts of the field and the fowl of the air, over which the Creator has given him the responsibility of dominion.”
Saunders gave this copy of Golden Dicky to Lorne Pierce in 1935, including inside it a photo of her with her sister-in-law as well as a lengthy inscription in which she tells Pierce that the novel “is a partly true story, for many of the birds and beasts were inhabitants of my aviary in Halifax or lived in my house here in Toronto.” In the photo, Saunders is holding a dog named Fiji (after a fraternity house at the University of Maine) and standing next to Louise Moore, wife of Saunders’s brother and owner of the real Beautiful Joe.
