Our book today, Felicity Wigan’s oversized 1987 treat The English Dog at Home (with beautiful photographs by Geoffrey Shakerley) might more accurately have been titled The English Dog at the Stately Home, since the dogs in question aren’t exactly the spavined little mutts owned by every Darby and Joan in the tenements of Leeds. No, these are well-to-do dogs, many of them show-dogs and all of them accustomed to a higher standard of living than 99 % of the human beings on Earth. They’re the dogs of the privileged.

And yet, in example after example of the owner profiles Wigan has assembled here, that very fact serves to underscore some of the ways that doting dog-owners are exactly the same regardless of how many family estates they happen to own. Almost all of these posh owners are every bit as overly indulgent to their dogs as any naff chav from Bradford East would be – in fact more so, since they have so much more largesse to dispense.

Take the example of Archie, Tigger, and Bandit, the whippets owned by the Duchess of Roxburghe and given the run of Floors Castle in Scotland, and listen to the Duchess recount what’s obviously a favorite tale:

It is in the dining room that Archie’s and Tigger’s manners leave a little to be desired. Janie recalls, ‘When we had the first really big dinner party after we got married, the table was beautifully laid with white damask and I came floating down to dinner all dressed up. I put the dogs out but it was raining and Tigger came back into the house covered in mud, got up on to the dining room table and ate all the butter and toast. There were little paw marks all over the table.’

For some of these upper crust owners, the care and wellbeing of not just their own dogs but all the dogs within their considerable ambit has become a load-bearing pillar of their lives. The upper crust doesn’t get any upper or crustier, for instance, than the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, the foremost peers in the land, and there under their entry is the late and enormously caring Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk. She was the daughter of the 3^rd Baron Belper and married the 16^th Duke of Norfolk, became the mistress of his vast estates, and spent the rest of her life tirelessly doing charity work – including caring for the great crowds of dogs that would always be found roaming in and out of Arundel Castle:

Overseeing this unique brood are Bessie, Lavinia Norfolk’s original Labrador, and Lara, a graceful retriever who belonged to a friend of Sarah’s. Bessie came from the Labrador Rescue Society along with two other Labradors, one blind and the other with severe hip displacement, the result of being permanently chained in a kennel. There were severe sores on her legs where she had sat for too long, but the Duchess cured the dog with exercise in Arundel Park.

But did I err and call the Duchess of Norfolk the highest of the high? Heaven forfend! There is, of course, one rung higher, and it happens to be occupied by one of the world’s most famous dog-lovers – and her savage, stubby-legged entourage:

The Queen is one of the most experienced breeders of Pembrokeshire corgis. She always choose the sire herself, aiming for good looking puppies that maintain the red colour of the original Pembrokes. Owners of suitable studs are asked to bring their dogs to Windsor so that the Queen can make her choice.

And where the dogs themselves might be a little bit excessively mundane, Felicity Wigan steps in with her graceful narrative in order to give them a little boost of interest, as in the case of the rather pudgy bull terrier named Lambchop who had the run of the great country house of Sledmere that was designed by Capability Brown (about whom you’ll all hear quite a bit if a copy of Jane Brown’s excellent biography should ever make its way to the Brattle Bookshop bargain carts) in the Yorkshire Wolds. Wigan does her compassionate best to invest Lambchop with rather more, um, bottom than I suspect an objective reading of the facts would allow:

Bull terriers are never slender, but at one point Lambchop swelled to the sense of occasion at Sledmere to such an extent that she weighed four stone. Even slimline, Lambchop is a slow mover. She slinks, which is the most dignified way of doing things, deliberately. During the monthly concert in the library at Sledmere, Lambchop may be seen slinking silently down the grand staircase. Pausing briefly for breath by the splendid statue of the Apollo Belvedere (a 1780 copy by Wilton, of which the original is in the Vatican), Lambchop cocks an ear to Beethoven and, having deduced that the guests are unlikely to be dispensing chocolate biscuits in her direction, decides the party is not for her. Lambchop’s expression implies long and complicated thought processes, all of which are concentrated on food. Having dismissed the concert, she ambles towards the more reliable option of the kitchen.

But alas, some specimens are resistant to any amount of spin-doctoring …