Part 1

I‘ll try to write about the influences and history of the Lassie franchise. I’m not an expert in children‘s literature which is key here so there may be a few omissions. I think this is really a question about a kind of stylised relationship between dog and human that draws from a few different traditions. I’m writing this in bed sick so my sourcing won’t be very extensive beyond primary.

There were always examples of the kind you referenced. Argos, Odysseus‘s dog‘s unwavering loyalty is a key plot point in The Odyssey. It’s genuinely moving to read how when Odysseus returns after his voyage in disguise as an old beggar to see if his wife had stayed loyal to him after twenty years, his dog is the only one to recognise him. Here’s a very genuinely moving extract:

As they were speaking, a dog that had been lying asleep raised his head and pricked up his ears. This was Argos, whom Odysseus had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any enjoyment from him. In the old days he used to be taken out by the young men when they went hunting wild goats, or deer, or hares, but now that his master was gone he was lying neglected on the heaps of mule and cow dung that lay in front of the stable doors till the men should come and draw it away to manure the great close; and he was full of fleas. As soon as he saw Odysseus standing there, he dropped his ears and wagged his tail, but he could not get close up to his master. When Odysseus saw the dog on the other side of the yard, dashed a tear from his eyes without Eumaios seeing it, and said: 'Eumaeus, what a noble dog that is over yonder on the manure heap: his build is splendid; is he as fine a fellow as he looks, or is he only one of those dogs that come begging about a table, and are kept merely for show?' 'This dog,' answered Eumaios, 'belonged to him who has died in a far country. If he were what he was when Odysseus left for Troy, he would soon show you what he could do. There was not a wild beast in the forest that could get away from him when he was once on its tracks. But now he has fallen on evil times, for his master is dead and gone, and the women take no care of him. Book 17

Now, I think what you’re really talking about is maybe something more like Lassie but I’ll start elsewhere to demonstrate a difference. Virginia Woolf‘s 1933 Flush which is a biography of a Cocker Spaniel. Woolf was trying to make a tongue in cheek criticism of elitism, class disparity, and the unnatural ways of living that can be found in a city via the eyes of a dog.

Woolf was concerned that this wouldn’t be taken seriously and would be thought of as a children‘s book. 1933 is late on in history, with Jack London having written Call of the Wild in 1903. Woolf wrote experimental modernist novels for educated adults while London wrote pulp adventure novels intended for young boys. Woolf‘s Flush fitted, as she feared, very squarely into a well defined genre of literature that reduced complex social themes into accessible and fun characters for the benefit of children and young adults.

The tradition that Jack London emerged from was goes back a long way too and is referred to as Children‘s literature, with Jack London writing in the sub genre of the Adventure Novel. I think it is the first example of such a dog focused novel.

The concept of literature specifically for children emerged from things like fables and fairytales in which animals are very present. The printing press as well as innovations in thinking around the development of children in adults from thinkers such as Rousseau allowed the practical and philosophical context for this new genre to emerge.

Rousseau believed that the natural state of man was pure and it was society that corrupts, a theory laid out in his two 1762 works The Social Contract and Emile, or an education in which he says in the first line „Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.“

Rousseau‘s influence was that childhood was thought of as a special and pure time and state of being that was to be respected. Education started to change so that Children could be educated at their level about the world without corrupting them by the world. This was a process and one that can most clearly be seen in Dickens, both in his novels and in his campaign for social reform surrounding labour laws and access to education.

You asked about both literature and art, and dogs have been domesticated for at least 15,000 to 25,000 years. Dogs' social roles have varied from pariah dog scavenging and raising alarm against predators, to hunters, to trained attackers, and to much more cosseted pets. They've been raised for food, or worshipped as guards of the doors of death.

So how they may appear in art & literature is linked to their social roles. Dogs were widespread in Europe in diverse roles by 2,000 years ago or longer ago.

Prehistoric rock art at least 8,000 years old has been found in Saudi Arabia which depict dogs. This is the oldest art known so far that shows dogs.

This is younger by far than the 60,000 year old Caves at Lascaux which show wild horses, wisants, and so forth, and are thought to have been painted by Neanderthals.

Egyptian art depicts greyhound-like dogs.

The ancient Greeks certainly portrayed dogs on vases, including with collars, and dogs have barking parts in Greek plays (see Aristiphanes' The Wasps)

Roman mosaics often depict dogs, and we have enough literary references from Rome to know something about how they kept dogs; by then dogs had split into multiple roles-- companion, watchdog, guard dog, herding dogs, hunting hounds-- and in the city of Rome itself dog were often kept on leashes, some had to be muzzled. They bred Molossers-- large mastiff-like dogs used as dogs of war, as well as much smaller dogs. Many large dog breeds are called "molossers" for that reason, although there is no real proof of direct/pure descent from the Roman breeds.

One tribe, the Alani (the Alans), thought to originate out in Iran, emigrated to France & the Iberian peninsula, by the 410s, bringing their dogs with them.

Within centuries, the tribe eventually lost its individual identity with intermarriage, surviving only in the personal name "Alan," a town or two in France named after them, and the now-extinct type of dog called the Alaunt-- a sort of large dog with a longer muzzle and a mane vs the true "mastiff" types. This was used as a dog of war and a hunting dog, but breeding with sighthounds and other dogs split them in various regional landrace.In France "alaunt" came to mean a working dog breed, and alaunts split in 3 types-- Alant gentil was the lightest type. The original more-mastiff like dog, alant boucherie (mentioned in Chaucer as "alantz de bouchery") was considered the original bulldog as they were used as cattle dogs. (Boucherie indeed means "butchery" or butcher's shop")-- sort of the distant precursor of the Rottweiler.

In Spain and Italy, these "original bulldogs" were called alano-- as in the modern Alano Espanol-- the "Spanish Bulldog." So even by the 4th century AD some dog breeds were distinct and highly identified with their peoples. They could be used to symbolize them, then.

For England, let's go back to Chaucer. There may be earlier mention of dogs in Anglo-Saxon literature, but he's the best place to start because he clearly knew dogs well. In his Canterbury Tales he mentions a lot of dogs and various attitudes to them-- such as a prioress who loved her lapdog and didn't really treat other people well, he mentions the Alaunt de Bouchery, and Greek myths of hounds, etc.

How people treated dogs definitely depended by class-- in England, pure greyhounds were not permitted anybody below the nobility, so this could be used to satirize different groups, which Chaucer did. The Prioress was highly impractical, sentimental, and kept small hounds (lapdogs) which she spoiled excessively, feeding roast meat, milk, and bread that could have been better used to feed the poor-- (indeed famine was frequent and people often died waiting for provision.)-- a form of embezzlement, probably. And she is an extremely vicious anti-Semite even as she wears a brooch saying "AMOR VINCIT OMNIA" (love conquers all) and claims to weep for trapped mice.

Chaucer's Monk also wasn't quite monkish and loved to hunt, riding, and kept hunting hounds, symbolizing somebody who was overly given to animal lusts rather than holiness. And so on.

As for dogs' role in "children's' literature"-- they have a longer role in satire, really. Not just in the trope of using animals to represent humans through to today (Orwell's "Animal Farm" and Mikhail Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog," as well as the aforementioned Virginia Woolf novel "Flush" are just three satirical examples from the 20th century.)

But because of their unique role to humans especially in European societies and to the upper classes, they can also appear as themselves, as in Chaucer, to exemplify and symbolize their owners-- status symbols, or subtext.

You'll see exactly that a lot in Western Art especially in paintings. Dogs could be used to represent fidelity, but also intimacy/passion. They also, due to their clear body language, could be used to visually set mood and themes, too.

Now u/throwmyacountaway has already mentioned Odysseus' Argos, who is a hunting dog, but from later Greek and Roman sources we also have evidence of dogs being treated as "pure" pets with little practical use. These were described (usually with some scorn) in the literature, are featured in art (like this from Ptolemaic Egypt), and were even given tombs and epitaphs. I thought about writing a full answer about this myself, but found some earlier ones that were good enough to link instead. Firstly there are this and this by u/ionndrainn_cuain, and lapdogs are also mentioned here by u/toldinstone. Furthermore u/Iphikrates has written about dog naming in Ancient Greece in this thread.