A Cat with her Kittens by Louis Wain, 1907 [Bonhams, London, UK/Bridgeman Images]
LIKE a furry hot water bottle, black and white cat Peter snuggled against a Belsize Park woman with breast cancer.
She was Emily Wain, whose husband Louis became famous for his drawings of human-like, dapper cats living modern lives – a far meow from the weaselly-faced, ratty-tailed skulkers of earlier times.
Emily and Louis, who married in 1884, lived at 42 England’s Lane, Belsize Park, and Louis credited their pet Peter, who he spent hours sketching, with being the foundation of his career.
The life of Louis Wain, born with a cleft lip in 1860 Clerkenwell, winds through Kathryn Hughes’s engrossing book Catland, which explores the revolution in attitudes to felines. They rose from anonymous below-stairs prowlers to cosseted pets and show champs during the 70 years after 1870.
Hughes provides fascinating insight into Wain and the late-Victorian and Edwardian cat craze, which was fuelled by his pictures of felines, often nattily dressed, in magazines, newspapers, postcards and advertisements.
She writes: “Everywhere you looked, tabbies and gingers were busy going to the theatre, playing golf, strolling along the promenade, and indulging in spa days.”
Historian Hughes, a specialist in the Victorian period, told Review: “At the beginning of the 19th century, cats were regarded as pests or, if you wanted to be kind, pest-controllers. They lived in basement kitchens and farmyards and kept the place mouse-free.
“Yet by the 1880s cats were becoming regarded as much-loved family members and, in many cases, as precious commodities that could be shown and traded around the world. They were no longer mangy and sly-looking but round and silky.”
The rise of the modern cat chimed with change and innovation – electrification and machine production, geographic mobility, mass culture.
Felines were selectively bred and specialist breeds such as Blue Persians and Angoras emerged. Cat shows proliferated. The first, at Crystal Palace, Sydenham, in 1871, attracted 20,000 visitors. Another venue was the Botanical Gardens, Regent’s Park.
There were cat clubs, cat magazines and books. The pantomime Dick Whittington and His Cat – who is honoured by a cat statue at the foot of Highgate Hill – was a wow with Victorian audiences.
Louis Wain’s family was outraged by his marriage to Emily. She was his sisters’ governess, much older than him and, Hughes asserts, they were horrified at losing his income.
Emily died three years after marrying, and Louis took Peter with him when he moved from England’s Lane to Marylebone. The cat, who had a fictional biography written about him, lived to be 15.
Kathryn Hughes
Pictures by Wain, who was said by HG Wells to have “invented a whole cat world,” eschew soppy cuteness.
Wain’s cat mothers are likely to look anxious, bored, angry – or alarmed, like the mum holding three kittens, only one of which has her colouring.
She looks “as if she suspects a mix-up in the maternity ward,” Hughes writes.
Distraught-looking feline businessmen in Wain’s courtroom scenes echo, perhaps, his mother’s experience. She was a bankrupt embroiderer and charges of fraud against her were dismissed at Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court.
Hughes first encountered Wain’s drawings at her grandmother’s house as a child. She found them “quite frightening, with an undertow of menace. The schoolroom scenes, for instance, are full of bullying (someone is always slamming someone else’s tail in the desk). The domestic scenes are full of tears and teasing.”
Looking again as an adult, “what I saw – and still see – is ambivalence, lust, competitiveness, insecurity.
These are all the things that cats experience but so do humans. No one captures more exactly the anxieties of modern urban living than Louis Wain in his early drawings of the 1890s.”
She said an “alarming discovery” in her research was Kate Cording, who set up a home for stay cats in Islington. Cording pedalled around on a tricycle armed with a giant net to catch the strays – which were soon dead.
At first Cording, ironically founder of the Feline Defence League, outsourced the actual killing to the London Institution for Lost and Starving Cats in Hampstead, which had a “lethal box” for gassing cats.
Then she took matters in-house, using a “galvanised wire drowning cage,” and later resorted to chloroform poisoning.
“In fairness, she believed that she was doing the right thing,” Hughes said.
“Like many animal welfare activists of the 1890s Cording’s great fear was that stray cats would be rounded up and sold to scientists and doctors who practised vivisection.” Killing cats humanely seemed kinder than live experimentation.
Hughes was also surprised by “both the knowingness and innocence with which late-Victorians used the word ‘pussy’”.
Clergyman’s daughter and cat expert Miss Frances Simpson innocently titled her weekly newspaper column “Practical Pussyology” and “no one seems to have raised an eyebrow,” said Hughes.
Yet, at the same time, a sisters act was “taking London by storm with a song which involved them asking the gentlemen in the audience if they would ‘like to see their pussies’. This time, though, everyone knew exactly what they were suggesting. It was fascinating to see those two attitudes run side by side.”
Louis Wain, who died in 1939, spent his last 15 years in mental hospitals, first in a pauper’s ward until fundraisers got him moved.
During his asylum years Wain produced “kaleidescope” abstracts.
Hughes, who described these as “intricate, blazing and hallucinatory”, thinks his images from both early and late periods are beautiful.
She lives in Hackney Central and has two cats, Ted and Maud.
“They were quite helpful in the writing of the book but the publication doesn’t seem to interest them at all. Having said that, I did catch Ted reading the book under the bedsheets with a torch. But he’d hate to think I knew that.”
• Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World. By Kathryn Hughes, 4th Estate, £22
