Did you understand that Thomas Hardy’s coronary heart was eliminated after his dying in 1928 so it may very well be placed in his household burial floor, whereas the remainder of him went to Westminster Abbey? And that one in all his beloved cats, coming upon the center that had been popped right into a biscuit tin after elimination to maintain it protected, ate it? The cat, I’m afraid to say, was promptly strangled, and so contained in the buried casket is a cat and contained in the cat is Hardy’s coronary heart.
This extraordinary vignette is an encapsulation of the wealthy content material of Kathryn Hughes’ new guide, Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World. We have a celebrated poet and novelist who was dotty about cats; a macabre anecdote that includes a peckish cat doing because it pleases however being swiftly dispatched.
There’s gossip – Hughes, a historian, tells us that that is “a version” of occasions – and the sense of the lifetime of a fantastic Victorian ending fairly cheaply in a extra fashionable period. In the run up, we’re handled to loads of element about Hardy’s canine’s-dinner of a wedding and in addition E M Forster’s horror at visiting the writer, being led spherical his pet cemetery and given chapter and verse about how every cat got here to a sticky finish.
Catland takes its title from an imaginary place created by the Edwardian artist Louis Wain because the setting for many years of feline illustrations and artwork. Hughes additionally makes use of Catland as an umbrella time period for the period from the 1870s to the eve of the Second World War when “cat capitalism” boomed, and cats went from pest controllers with “weaselly faces and ratty tails” to much-loved pets, pedigree standing symbols and furry money-spinners.
(Photo: Getty)
We see the cats march into a contemporary age of charitable efforts to enhance their lot, magazines dedicated to their care, and specifically formulated meals. Into all this Hughes weaves the story of Wain, whose anthropomorphic cats grew to become a staple of postcards, image books and ads, resulting in him changing into a celeb, and who was the topic of the 2021 movie The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, through which he was performed by Benedict Cumberbatch.
Wain was socially awkward, lacked business acumen and spent the final years of his life in a psychological asylum, after struggling the consequences of a severe head harm. There he made work that was stranger and, to us now, far more fascinating than his dressed-up kittens. Hughes painstakingly takes us by way of his household historical past. There had been occasions once I turned the web page from one other fascinating truth – how “pussy” grew to become slang for feminine genitals through the US showgirl-sisters who stuffed their knickers with kittens to flash on stage; how fin de siècle cat possession may very well be queer coded; who the primary cat burglar was; how single Victorians learnt the bare fact about replica through breeding cats – and was dismayed to be again in Wain’s firm.
Hughes spent seven years researching Catland and her prowess as a historian is obvious – her books embrace The Victorian Governess, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot: The Last Victorian – and there’s no lack of accounts of aristocratic households. Thankfully, she has an excellent eye for absurdities and untold tales, too.
This isn’t a gushing ode to pussycats written by a “cat parent” however a wide-ranging, if generally uneven, historical past of a interval of giant upheaval instructed by way of the altering fortunes of a home animal and an artist dropping his grip on his funds and sanity.
Despite discovering Wain wearisome at occasions, by the tip of Catland I couldn’t assist however really feel moved by his experiences and his work, and unhappy for the probabilities he’d missed. Cats, then again, had fortunately moved from having “wretched existences” to being handled with extra “tender gentleness”. Provided they hadn’t eaten something they shouldn’t, that’s.
Published by Fourth Estate on 25 April, £22
