I’m addicted to flicking through the old photographs posted by the National Library on Flickr. They attract me in the way peeping through a window into the past would: to catch a glimpse of real people captured in a moment of the 19th century.

My recent research led me to a collection of ‘four-legged’ images, where I soon discovered that people in the Victorian-era, from all walks of life, were just as obsessed with their dogs as we are today.