A new book published by University of Manchester historians shows that the much-loved St Bernard dog we know today was a Victorian invention.

According to the team, the St Bernard today bears very little resemblance to the rescue dogs of the Swiss monks who lived on the St Bernard Pass, from which they are said to be descended.

The leading champion of the new St Bernard, defining its physical form after introducing them to Britain was John Cumming Macdona, the colourful vicar of Mossley and then Cheadle, both now in Greater Manchester.

Over half of the St Bernards in the first Kennel Club Studbook were from Macdona's kennel, including the Prince of Wales's 'Hope'.

As a show dog, its physical form was changed and standardised by Victorian breeders leading to inbreeding and health problems.

“The Invention of the Modern Dog” published this week by Johns Hopkins University Press, shows how Victorian dog lovers first raised concerns, challenging the breeders of fancy show dogs in ways that anticipated the concerns of modern animal welfare groups.

Robert Leighton, an authority on dogs, wrote in 1907 how breeding St Bernards as ‘show’ dogs turned them into ‘cripples’ because they were too tall and heavy and called for new conformation standards.

He wrote: “The St. Bernard is a purely manufactured animal, handsome in appearance certainly, but so cumbersome that he is scarcely able to raise a trot, let alone do any tracking in the snow.”

The rescue work of the dogs kept by the monks in the hospice on the St Bernard Pass had come to prominence in the early nineteenth century through stories of the heroism of a dog called Barry.

Then called Alpine Mastiffs, a painting by Edwin Landseer of two dogs ‘reanimating a traveller’ popularised the false idea that the dogs carried a barrel of brandy on their collar.