All sorts of animals have been kept as pets over the centuries. We know of sparrows in Catullus and John Skelton. There is a badger with a collar in a fresco by Signorelli – probably not much more biddable than the lobster Gerard de Nerval supposedly took for walks in Paris. The word ‘puss’ seems not to have referred to cats before the late 19th century but to hares, either a pet one (William Cowper had three, of whom Puss was sweet-natured and Tiney ‘the surliest of his kind’), or one being hunted in Surtees. Dogs always occupied a special place, with names and a position in the household.
Cats were more marginal, accepted for their useful function of mousing but only gradually being awarded a position of affection. Montaigne wondered if his cat (not naming it) was playing with him as much as he with her. By the 18th century, cats had names and personalities. Christopher Smart’s Jeoffrey has his own dignified manner of worshipping God in Smart’s long religious poem ‘Jubilate Agno’. Hodge, one of Samuel Johnson’s cats, gets a wonderful mention in Boswell’s biography when Johnson is suddenly conscious that he has praised another cat in front of Hodge and hurriedly, to save his feelings, says: ‘But he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’
White cats were considered ‘timid’, black cats ‘gentlemanly’, and tabbies ‘the honestest of all cat kind’
Such attachments, however, remained patchy. Cats were often tortured or killed for the amusement of urchins. When Horace Walpole’s Selima drowned in a vase full of water everyone evidently thought it screamingly funny and Thomas Gray wrote a supposedly amusing poem about it. People published novels in the 18th century from the point of view of dogs (for example, Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little), but as far as I know not of cats.
Kathryn Hughes’s excellent, curiosity-stuffed book is about the moment towards the end of the 19th century when cats started to be afforded the same dignity as dogs. It was a long process. When the Prince of Wales was invited in the 1890s to be patron of the National Cat Club, he refused, saying that he’d be asked to support a club for rats next. The challenges were stiff. If cats were to be given the same serious status as dogs, then breeds needed to be defined beyond broad descriptions of general colouring and long or short hair. Cats themselves were no help at all, wandering off at night and returning pregnant by any passing tom. The efforts of august societies to limit the mésalliances of cats provide some of the book’s funniest pages.
The classification of breeds was a peculiarly Victorian endeavour, driven by pseudo-science and class distinction. A difference was seen to exist between the long-haired upstairs creature and the unnamed ‘kitchen cat’. A brisk analysis of this drives two of P.G. Wodehouse’s most amusing stories about the moral and social decline of a bishop’s cat, ‘The Story of Webster’ and ‘Cats Will Be Cats’. This new science of distinction could be questionable. One expert claimed that white cats were ‘timid’, black cats were ‘gentlemanly’ and tabbies were ‘the honestest of all cat kind’. Non-feline considerations had a knack of entering. When a pair of Siamese cats were first introduced to Britain in 1871 there was much discussion about whether they were cats at all or some even more exotic creature.
Who were the cat fanciers? They might exist somewhat on the edges of society. Hughes has an interesting chapter about bachelors and homosexuals excessively attached to cats. Edward Lear is supposed to have moved up the hill to a new villa built to the exact specifications of his previous house so that his cat Foss wouldn’t be confused. When talking about Edmund Gosse’s passionate attachment to his cat Atossa, Hughes observes that for him ‘to love a cat was very like being in love with a straight man – all that emotional investment rewarded by emotional distance and even moments of what felt like disdain’. Other cat owners were just as curious – a Miss Simpson’s magazine column, ‘Practical Pussyology’, thought nothing of asking: ‘Have you ever tried boiling sheeps’ heads? It makes a delicious dish for pussy.’ Soon after, we hear of the spinster owners of multiple cats being sued by their neighbours for a pervasive stench.
Rich and warm relationships were being routinely formed. The death of a beloved cat has been covered by this magazine’s literary editor Sam Leith in his excellent Dead Pets. Hughes quotes Thomas Hardy’s beautiful poem ‘Last Words to a Dumb Friend’, beginning ‘Pet was never mourned as you…’ But there was still something considered a bit suspect about expressed emotion. Respectability, on the other hand, came with the arrival of aristocratic and even royal cat owners. The clubs attempted to claim Queen Victoria as one of their own, though from Dash, the King Charles spaniel she bathed as a treat on her coronation night, to Turi, the Pomeranian she had brought to her on her deathbed, the queen was clearly a dog person. There was the Duchess of Bedford, however, as well as Victoria’s granddaughter Thora, to push cat ownership into highly respectable territory.
Hughes pursues her subject into many different corners: ‘cat burglars’ first became a term in the early 20th century, and ailurophobia (terror of cats) is discussed. I much enjoyed a chapter on the vulgar innuendo around the word ‘pussy’, as in Mrs Slocombe’s finest moments. As early as the 1890s, an American music hall act, the Barrison Sisters, were asking audiences if they would like to see their pussies.
The meat of the book is its survey of the wider change of attitudes and habits. Hughes twines this around a biography of the cat artist Louis Wain. He had a career drawing comic images of cats behaving in human ways – walking on hind legs, driving cars and so on – before going bankrupt and mad, ending his days in an asylum. There is a recent film about him, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain.
I can’t get up much enthusiasm for Wain’s art. It is so remote from the fascinating real presence of cats, and his venture after the first world war into futurist ceramic cat figurines produced some of the most hideous objects I’ve ever seen. His work falls far short of the weird animal fantasies that artists in Munich, such as the young Paul Klee, were exploring at the same time. They are also nowhere near as good as Beatrix Potter’s cats; the unblinking Ribby in The Pie and the Patty-Pan has a much more authentic feline quality. Still, I acknowledge that many people love his art, and the story is well told and probably rather touching.
The cult and growing respectability of cat-fancying did have some unexpected outcomes. The shameless peregrinations of cats produced some of Edwardian literature’s most memorable moments, including Saki’s Tobermory, who acquires the power of speech, though not of discretion in retelling what he’s seen. Natsume Soseki’s classic of Japanese literature I Am A Cat was written two years after a spell living in Clapham. One of the most memorable cats in literature, however, doesn’t even exist, entering into M.R. James’s story ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ with the single most terrifying line in the master’s entire oeuvre: ‘There is no kitchen cat.’ It captures like little else the evanescent, evasive nature of the cat, pouring out of an open window like spilled mercury, heading off for who knows what cat-club-defying adventures in the night or murderous, pugilistic encounters, the evidence of which we only see the next morning in wounds, scars and a certain undeniable air of self-satisfaction.
Books / The naming of cats
16
1
27.04.2024
All sorts of animals have been kept as pets over the centuries. We know of sparrows in Catullus and John Skelton. There is a badger with a collar in a fresco by Signorelli – probably not much more biddable than the lobster Gerard de Nerval supposedly took for walks in Paris. The word ‘puss’ seems not to have referred to cats before the late 19th century but to hares, either a pet one (William Cowper had three, of whom Puss was sweet-natured and Tiney ‘the surliest of his kind’), or one being hunted in Surtees. Dogs always occupied a special place, with names and a position in the household.
Cats were more marginal, accepted for their useful function of mousing but only gradually being awarded a position of affection. Montaigne wondered if his cat (not naming it) was playing with him as much as he with her. By the 18th century, cats had names and personalities. Christopher Smart’s Jeoffrey has his own dignified manner of worshipping God in Smart’s long religious poem ‘Jubilate Agno’. Hodge, one of Samuel Johnson’s cats, gets a wonderful mention in Boswell’s biography when Johnson is suddenly conscious that he has praised another cat in front of Hodge and hurriedly, to save his feelings, says: ‘But he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.’
White cats were considered ‘timid’, black cats ‘gentlemanly’, and tabbies ‘the honestest of all cat kind’
Such attachments, however, remained patchy. Cats were often tortured or killed for the amusement of urchins. When Horace Walpole’s Selima drowned in a vase full of water everyone evidently thought it screamingly funny and Thomas Gray wrote a supposedly amusing poem about it. People published novels in the 18th century from the point of view of dogs (for example, Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little), but as far as I know not of cats.
Kathryn Hughes’s excellent, curiosity-stuffed book is about the moment towards the........
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