Hannah Rose Woods

The British aversion to touching wasn’t limited to the Victorian era: comparative studies confirm that we continue to be more selective about when and where we are touched than people from other countries. But we have never not touched one another. Those prim Victorians who supposedly shrank from bodily contact were also people who, in expanding industrial cities, had never been in such close physical proximity to crowds of strangers.

In this new economy, dogs became commodities – designed and standardised. Breeds were now brands, invested with cultural and social capital. The Duchess of Newcastle’s borzois, for instance, were associated with feminine, aristocratic and ‘oriental’ qualities – ‘as romantic and avant-garde as Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes’.