Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania by Kathryn Hughes

Johns Hopkins

Review by Walter Cummins

Kathryn Hughes appears to have taken great pleasure in writing Catland, bouncing back and forth between considering the life of Louis Wain, an artist who created thousands of humanized felines, and explaining the flourishing of cats during Victorian and Edwardian Britain. The British attitude toward cats certainly changed radically during that period, when they stopped being regarded as just another vermin for nasty young boys to torture and set on fire and became pets to be bred, pampered, and cherished. Before then cats had suffered what Hughes calls an “image problem,” citing Beeton’s 1862 Book of Home Pets: “She [a cat] is said to be selfish, cruel, greedy, and without an atom of affection; indeed, to be in disposition the very reverse to the dog.’

Wain’s drawings in magazines and annuals certainly played a role in this image transformation, but it’s quite possible that the new attitudes toward felines would have taken place without him. In her chapters on cats Hughes often does not make a Wain connection, and much of her writing about Wain has only a minimal mention of cats. She does point out that he benefited from the cat phenomenon of his lifetime.

For anyone interested in cats or in the oddities of Victorian and Edwardian behavior this separation of focus doesn’t matter because Hughes knows so much about both subjects and imparts it in lively prose, as in, “Open any mid-market magazine and you were virtually guaranteed to see Wain’s bright-eyed felines grinning right back at you.” Wain was famous, a household name, his art as popular as Beatrix Potter’s before she took her Peter Rabbit wealth and retired to gardening in the Lake District. Wain, in contrast, was always financially strapped, unable to turn his popularity into sufficient pounds.  He even went bankrupt at the time a fulsome article praising him appeared in The Idler.

That may be the result of his inability to function in the world beyond drawing and occasionally writing for magazines. His hare lip appears to have estranged him from normal social interaction, and some believe he was on the autism spectrum, a condition when exacerbated led him to spend his final years in mental institutions, benign but still compulsively drawing.  It’s probably only a coincidence that has nothing to do with cat obsession, but the poet Christopher Smart was also institutionalized when in the 1760s he wrote Jubilate Agno, which includes a tribute to his cat Jeoffry: “For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. / For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.”

While Jeoffry and Hodge, the cat of Smart’s friend Samuel Johnson, enjoyed literary fame rare for the thousands of feral felines before the time of Catland, they can be considered harbingers of that glorification of cats. Hughes dates this time frame from 1870 to the eve of World War Two: “a period of seventy years during which cats transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors, with names, personalities and even biographies of their own.” Catland spread to Europe, Japan, and the United States, where Wain spend three years that Hughes writes about. But her focus is Britain.

One British thematic connection of the Wain and cat topics is the quest for patrician airs among people with social aspirations already possessed by certain breeders of cats.  Wain’s mother, Julie, was a poseur of the first sort, “a bit of a fibber,” feigning standing, such as claiming she had been born in Paris instead of London. When her “emotionally absent” and alcoholic husband, William, Louis’s father, died of cirrhosis of the liver, she struggled to maintain the illusion, hiring a governess, Emily Marie Richardson, for her five daughters when she couldn’t afford the cumulative school fees. That backfired when twenty-three-year-old Louis married the governess, who was seventeen years older. The family lamented his “déclassé” choice and the need for Louis to support a wife at their expense. She died  of breast cancer a few years later, returning his earnings for Julie and his sisters. Yet Julie went bankrupt years before her son did, a fact noted in the London Gazette, and she was prosecuted for fraud after attempting to borrow money under a false name. Still in the years ahead she maintained the pose of social respectability with her embroidery business.

Those involved in advancing the status of cat came from much more genuine breeding. Harrison Weir, an international wildlife illustrator, organized what he claimed was the first cat show at Crystal Palace in 1971. Many others followed. Weir went on to publish Our Cats and All About Them in 1889. Cats became his calling. He was followed by Miss Frances Simpson, the middle class unmarried daughter of a clergyman, who became a cat breeder and author of cat columns and books. When she died in 1926, she had accumulated a fortune of three quarters of a million pounds.

Many followed her in the field of cat breeding, advertising in the press and charging, as she did, a stud fee of one pound, a significant sum in those days. Like her, those in the field, in their promotions, used many euphemisms for cat sex, which in the real world could be very noisy, calling cat pregnancy “an interesting condition.” Breeders also engaged in cat customization, for example, mating a thin-headed cat with one with a thick head to obtain a litter with a different, more acceptable appearance. The modern cat was being constructed, in effect, to order. Neutering males also began as a practice to avoid uncontrolled mating.

Two classes of cat were emerging, those breed to be showy pets and those Hughes calls “below stairs,” roaming nameless servants set loose to control mice and rats. The class distinction advanced when aristocratic women, such as Lady Dorothy Nevill, and prominent gay men, like Edward Lear, began to covet and caress display cats.

One upper class example was the Duchess of Bedford, who resided at the magnificent Woburn Abbey and served as the titular president of the National Cat Club, and who invited Louis Wain to Woburn to write an article about her cats for The Windsor Magazine. Her dedication to cats elevated feline adoration to the highest levels of the aristocracy. But as much as the duchess flaunted her cats, she disliked her son and tolerated the decades-long affair of her husband, the duke, with her son’s governess. She wrote a book about birds, canoed, hunted expertly, and flew her own plane, dying in a crash at seventy-one, her body never found. As Hughes notes, “The singularity of the Duchess of Bedford’s life is a reminder of the ways in which late-Victorians of all classes renegotiated the codes and roles that they had been handed.”

In the world of Catland, many felines, though passive in their manipulation, found themselves embodying pampered codes and roles their feral rat-eating forebearers never could have imagined, if a cat can imagine. Wain certainly imagined all sorts of cats with his fecund art, even when he was unable to function in the real world.