"Under the Mistletoe": an illustration from an 1885 issue of Little Wide Awake magazine.

An illustration from Snarleyyow by Frederick Marryat (1897).  The caption reads: "Vanslyperken bent over the cur and kissed it again and again."

This glowing dog manifests itself in Captain Marryat's Novels by Frederick Marryat, 1896.

"The inside dog generally starts it," as we learn in While the Billy Boils by Henry Archibald Hertzberg Lawson, 1897.

In the famous nursery rhyme, the little lamb gets all the credit for following Mary everywhere, but this 1896 illustration sets the record straight: Mary's sheepdog deserves some acclaim for directing the action.

From 1674, reproduced in Monographien zur deutschen Kulturgeschichte by Georg Steinhausen, 1899.

An illustration from Humorous Poems by Thomas Hood (1893).  The caption reads: "He seemed a dog adrift."

An illustration from an 1881 issue of Cornhill magazine.  The caption reads: "They always fly at me, and nobody else."

An illustration from an 1883 issue of Frank Leslie's Pleasant Hours magazine.

"Fine March weather" by Hugh Thomson, from Mary Russell Mitford's Our Village (1893).

The wild wind of March, from Little Wide Awake, 1885.

Illustration by H. J. Ford from The Animal Story Book by Andrew Lang (1914).  The caption reads: "And what do you think she saw?"

An illustration from a 1909 issue of Puck magazine.

Robinson Crusoe started off as an armchair traveler.  (See evidence, from Little Wide Awake, 1882.)

An illustration from an 1870 issue of Peterson's magazine.

Children's staring contests with animals were apparently all the rage in the late 1800s, if these illustrations from Peterson's magazine are any indication.

Here's a precursor to David Lynch's comic strip "The Angriest Dog in the World," about a dog "so angry he cannot move; he cannot eat; he cannot sleep; he can just barely growl; bound so tightly with tension and anger, he approaches the state of rigor mortis."  This vintage angriest dog appears in Puck, 1886.

An illustration from a 1904 issue of Scribner's magazine.