Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World

"Catland is absolutely charming. I hesitate that to use that word famously condemned by Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited (“Charm is the great English blight”) but it is. It’s winning, it’s witty. Kathryn Hughes’s tone is colloquial, friendly, amusing, arch, conspiratorial. Using this very intimate perspective, she inveigles you into quite a big idea, the process by which the domestic cat evolved from being a by-word for incestuous verminkind—hardly better than the mouse it hunted—to being both a member of the family, a loved relation, and also a high-status possession. That’s a big story, but she also tells it through a more microcosmic, human mini-biography of Louis Wain, an artist with a very particular, eccentric angle on art and on life. I think this tactic, of the slender within the wide, works very well. It worked, for example, with H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald’s wonderful work about falconry and T. H. White and her grief for her late father all at the same time. The way Kathryn Hughes has delivered Louis Wain—his deception, including self-deception, his eccentricities, his surprisingly sharp family, his increasingly untidy life, his financial naivete, increasingly his mental decline, which leads to a final, very unexpected, avant-garde artistic redemption—all within this extraordinary world of capitalism and enterprise, snobbery and aesthetics taking off around cat-fancying, is a remarkable cocktail which really seduced us all. Yes, he was a comical, worldly cat cartoonist. Or that’s what he turned into after a fairly short apprenticeship, dabbling with a few religious and decorative themes. He really found himself drawing cats who were, for instance, absentee fathers, getting away from all their kittens in order to go for a night’s gambling in Soho, sort of Edwardian bounders escaping from their nagging queens."