Novel
Beautiful Joe
Margaret Marshall Saunders · 1893
Synopsis
Joe, a mongrel dog born near Fairport, a small town in Maine, tells his own life. His first master, a milkman named Jenkins, leaves his mother without food, kills his brothers and sisters, then, after a bite, cuts off his ears and tail with a hatchet. A young man passing by on a bicycle, a cousin of the pastor's children, snatches him from Jenkins and carries him to the Morrises, where the eldest daughter, Laura, adopts him. From there, the dog reports what he sees of the animals in the household, of a farm where the family spends the summer, of a troupe of performing animals, and of what men do to them.
Context
A real dog from Meaford, Ontario, mutilated by its master and taken in by the Moore family, is the origin of the book: the author, whose brother was engaged or married to a daughter of the house, met it around 1892. As the American Humane Education Society's competition concerned the treatment of animals in the Northern States, she transposed the affair to an imaginary small town in Maine and turned the Moores into the Morrises. She won first prize, worth two hundred dollars. A sequel appeared in 1902, and the animal has given its name to a park in Meaford.
Who it is for
A story for young readers, told in the first person by a dog; the mutilation at the beginning is told without euphemism.
Prizes and reception
The first Canadian book to sell more than a million copies, seven million by the end of the thirties, translated into more than a dozen languages and into Braille.
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