7 Authors Who Owned Strange Pets

Legend has it that Virgil, the Roman poet who wrote the Aeneid, had a pet fly. The story goes that Virgil spent a huge amount of money throwing an extravagant funeral—there was a tomb, professional mourners, and even an orchestral lament—for his dearly departed bug. The whole thing was said to actually be a ploy to stop the government from seizing his estate, which they weren’t allowed to do if there was a mausoleum on-site.

Although a good story, this is sadly just that—a story, with there being no proof that the poet threw a funeral for a fly.

But there are plenty of other authors throughout history who really did keep strange pets. No flies have made the cut, but here are seven examples of other unusual animals kept by poets, playwrights, and novelists. 

1. Henrik Ibsen Had a Scorpion
2. Lord Byron Had a Bear
3. Flannery O’Connor Had a Backwards Walking Chicken
4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti Had a Wombat
5. Charles Baudelaire Had a Bat
6. Charles Dickens Had a Raven
7. Alexandre Dumas Had Three Monkeys

Henrik Ibsen Had a Scorpion

Henrik Ibsen achieved worldwide fame thanks to writing plays such as A Doll’s House (1879) and Hedda Gabler (1891). But in 1865, before the Norwegian playwright had established himself as a literary giant, Ibsen was in Rome writing Brand on a small scholarship. Throughout the penning of this tragedy, he had a rather unusual writing companion: a scorpion.

The playwright kept the scorpion in a beer glass—empty, of course—on his desk. “From time to time the brute would ail,” he wrote. “Then I would throw a piece of ripe fruit in to it, on which it would cast itself in a rage and inject its poison into it; then it was well again.” It’s not known how long this scorpion actually lived for while under Ibsen’s care—their diet typically consists of insects, not fruit, so it’s no surprise that it wasn’t particularly healthy.

Lord Byron Had a Bear

Romantic movement poet Lord Byron was a notorious bad boy. One of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” In keeping with this rebellious reputation, when Byron was a student at Cambridge’s Trinity College, he had a pet bear.

Students weren’t allowed to have dogs on campus, so Byron was parted from his beloved Newfoundland, Boatswain. But there was no official rule against keeping a bear in the dorms, so Byron brought one onto campus as a form of protest.

“I have got a new friend, the finest in the world, a tame bear,” Bryon wrote to his friend Elizabeth Bridget Pigot in an 1807 letter. “When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was, ‘he should sit for a fellowship.’” The bear was not allowed to sit for a fellowship, but it was surprisingly allowed to remain on campus. 

Byron kept a variety of other unusual animals throughout his life, with his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley reporting that he had—amongst the typical cats, dogs, and horses—an eagle, a crow, a falcon, an Egyptian crane, a couple of guinea fowl, three monkeys, and five peacocks. All of these animals were given free range of Byron’s house in Ravenna, Italy.

Flannery O’Connor Had a Backwards Walking Chicken

Although chickens aren’t that uncommon to keep as pets, the Cochin chicken that Flannery O’Connor had as a child was definitely unusual because it could walk backwards. Word of the backwards walking bird reached Pathé News, who covered it in a short video segment in 1932, with young O’Connor herself briefly featuring. “I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life,” the then-established Southern Gothic writer said in 1959. “Everything since has been anticlimax.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Had a Wombat

When English poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti saw the wombats at London Zoo in Regent's Park, he was enamored. He soon purchased two of his own, and while one of them died almost immediately, the other, named Top (after William Morris’s nickname, Topsy), was given free rein of his house.

“The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness,” he declared in an 1869 letter to his brother. He also wrote a short poem about Top, in which he said that peace could not “be gained until I clasp my wombat,” and he featured the marsupial in paintings. Sadly, Top only lasted a few months before dying. Rossetti had the wombat stuffed so that he could be displayed in his house.

Although wombats held a particularly special place in Rossetti’s heart, he also kept other exotic animals throughout his life, including kangaroos, an armadillo, a mole, a toucan, and a llama (and he even taught the former to ride the latter).

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Charles Baudelaire Had a Bat

In 1857, Charles Baudelaire’s most famous poetry book, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), was published. A few years later, the French poet—who was racked by both ill health and financial problems—was residing in Hôtel du Grand Miroir in Brussels.

The room was sparse, but Baudelaire decided to liven it up a bit by keeping a bat as a roommate. He had captured the winged creature in a nearby churchyard. But the bat likely didn’t enjoy being Baudelaire’s pet; the poor animal was kept in a cage and fed a diet of milk and bread.

Charles Dickens Had a Raven

Famed Victorian novelist Charles Dickens loved his pet raven, Grip, so much that he decided to feature the bird as a character in his 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge.

In a letter to his friend George Cattermole in January of that year, he explained that “my notion is to have [Barnaby] always in company with a pet raven, who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very queer character of him.”

The real Grip was fairly knowledgeable, having a large vocabulary, but he also had a taste for paint and died of lead poisoning just a few months after that letter was sent.

Dickens had Grip stuffed and hung above his desk (the taxidermied bird now resides at the Free Library in Philadelphia), but he also got another raven, which he again called Grip. When the second Grip died, he replaced the raven again and, true to form, gave it the same name for a third time. While Dickens loved his ravens, his children weren’t fans because the birds all had mischievous and aggressive personalities.

However, fellow writer Edgar Allan Poe was quite taken with the literary version of Grip. Although not confirmed, it’s generally accepted that Grip was the inspiration for his famous 1845 poem “The Raven.” Not only are some lines of the poem reminiscent of a scene in Barnaby Rudge, but in Poe’s review of the novel, he stated that Dickens could have done more with the bird: “Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama.”

Alexandre Dumas Had Three Monkeys

After achieving fame and fortune with The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1846), Alexandre Dumas built a massive house called Château de Monte-Cristo outside of Paris. On the grounds of the château, the French novelist kept an abundance of animals. He had a cat, a few dogs, and numerous birds, including Diogenes the vulture, Buvat the macaw, Papa Everard the parakeet, and Lucullus the golden pheasant.

He also kept three monkeys, which he named after a novelist, a translator, and an actress. He refused to reveal their real names to the public, though, because they were named “in reference to some detail of the private life or some physical peculiarity of the original.” When writing about the monkeys, he used the pseudonyms Last of the Laidvianoirs, Potich, and Mademoiselle Desgarcins.