Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes
Fourth Estate, 2024
Let me be honest, right from the start: I do not like cats. I am asthmatic and particularly allergic to cat hair, so I cannot go anywhere near them, even if I wanted to. I therefore approached this book with some trepidation, but I have to admit that from the first chapter, I was captivated. Kathryn Hughes has folded together a story of seemingly disparate threads —the late Victorians who turned cat breeding into a successful business model, the life and work of cat illustrator Louis Wain, and the unfolding social history of the period— into an account of how the humble household cat came to be at the centre of our lives for the past century or more, almost without our noticing it.
Many of us will be familiar with the work of Louis Wain, though we may not know his name. In a period in which anthropomorphic representations of animals were increasingly used by authors —Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear being the best-known examples— it didn’t take long before illustrators of popular magazines began to explore their potential. Enter Louis Wain, who made a career from creating illustrations in which cats of various kinds re-enacted contemporary scenes. His pictures portray both the comic and tragic elements of human life, all encapsulated within a tableau of feline forms. As the author points out quite often, by using the cat motif Wain was able to explore the social complexities of the scenes that he depicted by exaggerating cat behaviour, as it was understood by people at the time.
A good example of this, reproduced in colour in the book, is The Ambush, a drawing that Wain made in 1914. The scene shows a father cat in top hat and bow tie, arriving home laden with Christmas presents. He is met by his unruly children —fourteen of them, armed to the teeth (no pun intended) with weapons, mainly swords, knives, and guns. Hughes does a magnificent job of unpicking some hidden messages in what is outwardly a comic scene. After looking at the image for a while, what becomes noticeable is the colouring of the kittens. The father is pale white and yellow, and yet only one of the kittens shares his tone: the other kittens are a mixture of stripes and various other shades. The sheer number of kittens and their disparate shadings suggest that perhaps ‘Father’ is not father to them all, an idea which neatly fits into the common trope of feline promiscuity. And then there are the kittens’ faces: most are open-mouthed with their sharp fangs clearly visible, which plays to another perception of the nature of cats, namely that of barely-controlled savagery. However, two of the kittens are hiding away, echoing the idea that some cats are noted for their timidity. While the weapons are all toys, the threat of violence towards the father figure is very real, as are the sharp teeth. What at first seems a comic scene of domestic chaos becomes, on reflection, one in which anarchy and threatened violence are dominant, with the adult unable to restrain or control the children. As more of the Wain illustrations in the book reveal, this was a consistent pattern, in which seemingly comical cat situations were loaded with comment on the lives of contemporary middle and upper class households, referencing understandings of feline behaviour to hint at brutality and cruelty simmering just below the surface of human civilisation.
Hughes uses the word ‘Catland’ to describe the imaginary sphere in which the lives of cats and their owners overlap to create a place in which the social rules and behavioural norms of both become intertwined. Until the mid-nineteenth century, most cats had survived on the periphery of human life. They were to be found close to homes, earning their keep by eliminating rats and mice from the hovels in which many people lived, but they were, in most cases, only semi-domesticated. This relationship began to change in the latter part of Victoria’s reign, especially amongst the upper class. Cats became companions, and a corresponding commercial opportunity appeared in breeding cats to be attractive to potential owners. Alongside this, or perhaps because of it, small-scale cat shows began to be held, to display these beautiful animals for potential sale.
It is fascinating to compare the different paths taken by the owners and breeders of cats and dogs respectively. The first major dog show was held at the Crystal Palace in 1870 and in 1873 the Kennel Club was established to set the standards for the various breeds, since dog show organisers had previously had problems evaluating the quality of the animals on display. The first important cat show was held just one year later, in 1871, at the same venue. Like the dog show it was not a great financial success, but also like the dog show it set a precedent for what was to follow. In 1889 Harrison Weir, who had helped organise the 1871 show, published Our Cats and AllAbout Them, which was both a manual for how to take care of these now domesticated animals but, more importantly, laid out in detail the characteristics of what had by now become established breeds. No longer were cats to be distinguished simply on the basis of long or short hair: a multiplicity of different breeds, each with their own distinguishing marks and characters, were described with precise clarity. Just as the Kennel Club had done for dogs in 1873, each cat breed now had a set of markers with which judges, and potential buyers, could evaluate the supposed quality of each animal.
Hughes is particularly interesting when exploring areas that we might not expect. With the boom in cat ownership, alongside the classification of the different breeds there grew up a supporting industry in both breeding and upkeep. Whereas in the distant past most cats had had to fend for themselves and catch or scavenge for their food, within cities like London there evolved a whole service industry devoted to feeding domesticated cats with the remains of expired horses (of which there were many). The first standardised cat food was not produced by the American James Spratt until the 1880s, but the most common form of ready cat food was provided by the cat’s meat men. These were street traders who had individual rounds in the city, selling skewers of boiled horse meat for consumption by household cats. Hughes reveals details of a special dinner held in a Holborn restaurant in 1901, at which 250 invited cat’s meat men sat down to dinner together. Henry Mayhew, writing in 1851, described the trade like this: "The cat and dog’s meat dealers... purchase meat at the knacker’ s yards. They sell it to the public at the rate of 2 1\2 d per pound, and in small pieces on skewers at a farthing, a halfpenny, and a penny each." He goes on to explain further that "The trade is much worse now. There are so many at it, they say, that there is barely a living for any." The numbers speak for themselves. With hundreds —if not thousands— of cat’s meat sellers, and 250 of the most eminent dealers gathering for a formal dinner, it is easy to appreciate the explosion in cat ownership, breeding, and showing in the late Victorian period. The pre-war years saw the domestic cat become firmly embedded within the fabric of the family life of all social classes. (This had a most unfortunate consequence in the form of a grisly episode concerning Thomas Hardy’s interment; his body was buried at Poets Corner but his heart, which was to rest at Stinsford church, was eaten by one of his cats overnight, so that his executors killed and buried the cat in the churchyard with the heart inside it.)
At the very start of the book, the author explicitly states that it is not a biography of Louis Wain. However, his life and work are the connecting thread which holds the narrative together, and Hughes is clearly fascinated by him. The fascination becomes contagious as the narrative unfolds. Born with a cleft palate, Wain did not attend school until he was ten and then was frequently bullied, so that he spent much of his school years wandering the streets to avoid his tormentors. The details of his life are fully described in the book, and while not completely tragic, it was certainly a difficult one. His father died when he was twenty, he had five sisters who never married, and his mother was a discharged bankrupt, so that he had to assume the financial burden of the whole family, while he also lost his wife at a young age.
Wain began his career as an illustrator of all kinds of animals, and made a living selling his drawings as a freelance artist. He married in 1884, much against his family’s wishes. His wife, Emily, was already ill with the breast cancer that would claim her life in 1887. Early in their marriage the couple moved to a small cottage in Hampstead, where Emily remained while her husband travelled the country to make drawings at various animal shows. At the same time they acquired a cat whom they named Peter, and he became the inspiration for Wain’s future career. He began to sketch the cat at home, and from these drawings developed the anthropomorphic images for which he became famous. Hughes devotes a whole chapter to the subject of Peter. She states that Wain spent hours sketching Peter in various poses, and began to publish some of these in magazines. Originally these scenes were simply of cats doing cat things, but in 1886 A Kitten’s Christmas Party appeared in the December edition of the Illustrated London News, and Wain’s new career began. Emily died a month later and the now widowed twenty-six-year-old moved house, taking Peter with him. Over the next few years his style developed until, in December 1890, he had published what Hughes calls "the first fully-fledged account of Catland"--A Cats’ Christmas Dance.
It is worth considering just what Wain has achieved with this image. It depicts many human personalities in feline guises: the exasperated waiter pushing his way through a crowd of unmoving guests (with a tray of mice on his shoulders); the tired matron trying to control her four offspring; two young kittens attempting to scramble onto the stage to annoy the elegant orchestra players; and several well dressed (and quite elderly) male cats watching from the sidelines. There is even a solitary cat who stands all alone near the centre of the scene looking out at us, as if bewildered by the whole event and left out of the fun. As Hughes correctly states, this is Catland in its full glory, and Wain was just starting to enjoy himself.
Hughes continues to chart Wain’s career with all its ebbs and flows. At one point he was made bankrupt, like his mother before him, but he continued to publish his illustrations in magazines and books, and as postcards. He became popular with advertisers, especially those selling household goods like soap and soap powder. He spent three years in America, where his work was gaining visibility, but when he returned to England his style significantly changed. Hughes writes that he visited three exhibitions in 1912: the Roger Fry exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists," the Japanese-British Exhibition at the White City, and finally the Italian Futurist exhibition. The influence of these new, exciting styles was immediate. Wain’s work became flatter and more decorative. He drew scenes in which Japanese cats were dressed in highly stylised kimonos, using dense colours and abstract design patterns that were entirely new. But perhaps most interesting of all are the ceramic cats which first went on sale in the summer of 1914, which, as David Bomberg also found to his cost, was not the best time to introduce new art to the general public.
Inspired by the Maneki-Neko, the Japanese 'lucky cat,' Wain patented nineteen designs for ceramic cats with names such as Sphinx Cat, Futurist Cat, and Road Hog Cat. They really are extraordinary, and yet they were dismissed at the time and largely ridiculed. Indeed, although they were marketed as ‘lucky’ cats, stories began to circulate that they were the exact opposite, with rumours of the ill fortune that they supposedly brought with them. One writer even claimed that a ship containing a consignment of Futurist Cats had been torpedoed, which was certainly not very lucky. And then the accident happened.
In October 1914 Wain fell from a doubledecker omnibus in Bond Street and cracked his head on the pavement. He was hospitalised for three weeks, and seemingly made a full recovery. Although during the war years he produced patriotic images encouraging men to join up and fight, he found that his style of illustration was losing popularity. His behaviour became more and more erratic until, in 1924, he was committed to the Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting. He was to spend his remaining years in institutions, finally dying in July 1939 in Napsbury Hospital where he had spent the last nine years of his life.
It was while he was at Napsbury that Wain produced some of his most extraordinary artwork. For some, the highly-coloured and decorative images of cats are precursors of 1960s psychedelic art, while for others they are the logical conclusion for an artist who had spent his life giving extra meaning to representations of domestic felines. However, many of these images also resonate with other types of ‘outsider’ art produced by patients in mental institutions.
This really is a book to dip into and enjoy even if, like me, you are not particularly keen on cats. The story of how they have intertwined themselves with our lives is recounted by Hughes with great skill. We all know how dogs became domesticated, and different breeds were developed to carry out various tasks. By contrast, besides their penchant for catching mice and rats, cats only serve to provide us with companionship. However, as Hughes makes clear, their role in the human world is now firmly entrenched —and their path to preeminence, as described by this author, is a truly fascinating story. --Paul Flux