History of Pompey the Little

This 1751 satirical masterpiece has a premise so audacious it still surprises: a lapdog narrates the fall of English society. Born in Bologna to pedigreed Italian parents, Pompey is snatched from his mistress's boudoir and transplanted to London, where he passes from owner to owner through the city's wilder reaches. Each new home opens a fresh chapter of absurdity: the country squire, the military officer, the merchant, the lawyer, the clergyman, the fashionable rake. Coventry uses his canine observer to skewer the entire spectrum of Georgian England with precision and wit. The dog notices everything and forgives nothing, offering sly commentary on greed, vanity, pretension, and lust with an anthropologist's detachment and a satirist's bite. This is picaresque fiction at its most inventive: a creature of mere inches reveals what humans in all their grandeur cannot see in themselves.