Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. In last week's show, we aired an interview with Kathryn Hughes, the author of the new book, Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania. We heard lots of appreciation from so many listeners and their familiars that we're releasing an extended cut for you this week. In Hughes's book, she traces the many meanings ascribed to cats and their guardians, because cruelty to cats, whether drowning, stoning, stomping or exploding, has a long tradition. Early on, Hughes describes the notorious case in 1730 of the great cat massacre in Paris.

Kathryn Hughes: It's an extraordinary event. Two apprentices in Paris became really, really outraged because they discovered that their master's wife, in effect their mistress, was feeding her pet cat much nicer food than she was giving them. This just seemed absolutely outrageous to these teenage boys so they rounded up all the cats in the area and staged a mock trial in the courtyard. The charge against these cats was that they were living at a rate of extravagance that was far, far too good for them. Very unsurprisingly, these poor cats were found guilty and the apprentices then slaughtered all the cats.

Brooke Gladstone: They hung them, didn't they?

Kathryn Hughes: Some of them were hung. La Grise, the mistress's cat, was smashed with an iron bar so that her spine broke. Slaughtered the lowest of the low, they are restored to their most abject kind of state.

Brooke Gladstone: In the late 1800s, once seen as mangy mouse hunters, relegated to back alleys and kitchens, suddenly cats become very popular. Could you describe the reasons for and the scale of that cultural shift?

Kathryn Hughes: For millennia, cats had been tolerated, useful in kitchens for catching mice, useful in the barnyard for catching rats. They have a freelance association with mankind, but they're not in the service of anybody. The dog can be trained to go down rabbit holes or fetch prey or pull people out of the snow. The cat can never be trained to do those things. Then what happens? As Britain becomes more and more urbanized and people are still pouring into the cities, there's also space for the cat, as it were, to start moving up from the kitchen into the sitting room.

Brooke Gladstone: You do describe the period from 1870 to the eve of the Second World War, a period of 70 years as cat land, when cats were transformed from anonymous background furniture into individual actors with names, personalities, even biographies. You build your story around one of the progenitors of Catland, a peculiar character named Louis Wain.

Kathryn Hughes: Catland is created by many social trends coming together but I think one of the most important elements is the fact that this illustrator called Louis Wain, who starts off as a lowly freelance commercial illustrator, starts to draw cats as if they are people. They start to walk upright, they start to wear clothes. Onto those creatures, he maps a kind of topography of middle class life in the 1890s and beyond, playing tennis, going to the opera, sitting down to breakfast, taking tea.

His first really important picture is called the cats Christmas dance, and it's a huge panoply of cats in evening dress under the Christmas tree having a dance. Some of the younger ones are getting a little bit amorous with each other under the mistletoe.

Brooke Gladstone: His heyday is the '90s, what you call a fin de siecle world of artifice, disguise and impersonation. What was it about the 1890s?

Kathryn Hughes: The world is speeding up. The pretty, modest middle classes have a little bit more money to spend. We now have a weekend, annual holidays so people are carving out a life for themselves, which is not just about putting enough food on the table, but creating a sense of yourself as a person with tastes and pleasures and hobbies. That is, I think, particularly ripe for Wain, as it were, to map onto his cats. Cats enjoying a dip in the sea, taking to the road on bicycles.

Brooke Gladstone: Weirdly, cats were changing to look more like the ones Wain drew. Not so weaselly and rat like as London cats were typically seen, but adorable, sleek, big eyed like Wain's. Or did it just seem that way?

Kathryn Hughes: That's exactly what happens. The London cat was well known for being stringy and looking more like a weasel than a cat. What women particularly start to do is kind of carve out of this genetic sameness, distinct breed so you start to get Persians are imported from France, Siamese from the Far east. You might put two beautifully marked tabbies together and hope that out of their offspring, you would get a particularly charming kind of effect.

Brooke Gladstone: The British cats were manly and hardworking, whereas the foreign ones were effeminate and deceptive.

Kathryn Hughes: That's absolutely right. It's very interesting to watch as the rhetoric takes on all the qualities that you might expect. The long haired cats that come in from France are effeminate. They spend too much time grooming themselves. They're pretty, but they're shallow. All those kind of nationalistic stereotypes. British cats are short haired, stocky, sensible, because they know that they need to get on with life. This has no bearing in truth.

Brooke Gladstone: Despite this embrace of cats, their improved public image, there obviously remain negative associations with the animals and their owners that they never managed to shake off. Like the cat lady trope we've been hearing so much about lately, brandished mostly as a term of ridicule.

Kathryn Hughes: It's always about the fact that the cat lady is lavishing on the cat the kinds of attention and material resources that should have gone into a husband and children. For instance, having your cat buried in a particularly fine coffin, trying to get the local minister to conduct a Christian burial service, or leaving your cat a lot of money so that it can live in the manner to which it's been accustomed. Everything is about subverting normal family patriarchal rules. That is what is so offensive and why so much print is expended on these strange women.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that cats are markers of dissident sexuality. They're not quite tamable.

Kathryn Hughes: Now, it's a trope that draws very obviously on old anxieties around witches and their cats from the Middle Ages, as well as the fact that the cat lady may well not have children herself. There's a sense in which the cat, as a creature of the street, comes and goes, makes its own way in life, will never be told what to do, and is also very, very fertile, very promiscuous, and is up on the roof calling two or three times a year to be mated.

Kathryn Hughes: Again, we get the slippage between the actual female cat and the female cat owner. I think there's always this sense of women and women who like cats in particular, of just not playing the game, of always being on the point of leaving, always on the point of putting their own interests first. There's a sense in which cats and women cannot be tamed, cannot be brought to heel like a well trained dog, cannot and will not ever be completely trustworthy. I think that's where the anxiety comes from, that sense of always being up on the roof.

Kathryn Hughes: Louis Wain often draws cats up on the roof, and they're often playing musical instruments. That really is a stand in for a very free and easy, autonomous sexuality and sociality. That sense that the cat will always do what it wants and it will find new spaces to do what it wants. It will never do what it's supposed to do. It may lie in front of the family hearth for half an hour, snoozing, but look again and you'll find that it's gone and there will just be a whisk of a tail.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] How were men who owned cats perceived in society? Did cat mania change those perceptions? Even Louis Wain said that when he first started drawing cats, it was difficult because it was tied up with being effeminate.

Kathryn Hughes: I think that's right. There's always this anxiety, and Wain puts it very well about no public man being able to suggest that he likes cats because it will make him seem effeminate. It makes sense. If cats are so tied up with the notion of being a woman, a man who likes a cat is suggesting that there's something of the female about him. There is a phrase that's used, and it's not really used as a slur, the phrase pussy bachelor.

Kathryn Hughes: It was often applied to a man, he might well not actually be gay in the way that we understand that now. In other words, he may not have organized his life around romantic relationships with men, but it was clear that he was never going to get married. He wasn't drawn towards women. That expression pussy bachelor, does suggest that the man who likes cats, there's something strange about him, and I don't think that ever goes away.

Kathryn Hughes: What we see throughout the late 19th into the 20th century is men who have cats knowing that it's a signal they, too are living a life that is slightly off center and apart, and they're not fully invested, as it were, in the act of reproductive heterosexuality. The most famous example is Edward Lear, the nonsense writer, the man that wrote The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, very famous poem. He was gay, and he was absolutely devoted to his cat, Foss.

Kathryn Hughes: He lived with him on such intimate terms that when he moved house, at one point he lived on the Italian Riviera, he was so worried about his elderly cat not being able to find his way around the new house that he had the house built on exactly the same pattern as the old one, so that Foss would know exactly where to go and wouldn't be nonplussed in any way at all, because he knew how much cats really do dislike change.

Brooke Gladstone: You said it's a signifier of all kinds of non conforming sexuality, the cat. In France with Baudelaire, association is with men who sleep with sex workers and don't get married. They're the ones with the cats.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Proper men have dogs.

Kathryn Hughes: Proper men have dogs. Some of the original anxiety around the cat, actually in the middle ages, its association with witches, was that the cat was a shape shifter. Now, there is something extraordinarily malleable about a cat's form. They are amazingly good at elongating themselves, getting into spaces, or if they meet another cat they don't like, they will fluff themselves up and their spine will become a sort of horseshoe shape.

Kathryn Hughes: I think that also works imaginatively as well, and rhetorically, so that the cat is both associated with Baudelaire, the bohemians of the 1850s and 1860s in Paris, who are living a very heterosexual life. They're not wishing to get married, but they have-- There's a constant flow of women through the studio so they're a kind of ultra hyper male kind of sexuality. It is, at the same time, and certainly in Britain, associated with a kind of male bonding that doesn't really involve women.

Kathryn Hughes: It's an emotional that is organized around other men and that is a pussy bachelor. I think that is quite-- There's something so extraordinary about the cat that it can actually be the two things at once. I think that is something to do with its uncanniness and it's shape shifting.

Brooke Gladstone: You write at length about the Lloyd sisters. They're at one end of the spectrum of cat ladies. Who were they? How did they end up in the press?

Kathryn Hughes: The Lloyd sisters are three sisters who live in Birmingham in the 1860s. They live in a house that's called [unintelligible 00:12:45] Villa, a brand new house that has aspirations to some sort of gentility. They're very poor and they take in cats and try and nurse them back to health. The problem is they don't have the money or the means to do this in any kind of healthy or salubrious ways.

Brooke Gladstone: A little grey gardens, as you'd say here.

Kathryn Hughes: Very grey gardens, yes. Charles Austin, a very unpleasant man who lives next door, makes a series of formal complaints. Then, in the end, these women are taken to court for really running an unruly household. Now, they're not running a brothel, they're running a cat hospital, but in a sense, the two things hover over each other. I came across the story in the press, the magistrates who put the elder sister, Ann Lloyd, on trial for running a disorderly house.

Brooke Gladstone: She was described by journalists as somewhat eccentric in appearance and manner. A mad cat lady suspected of sharing immoderate intimacy with cats by having them sleep in her and her sister's beds.

Kathryn Hughes: I think the Lloyd sisters are sort of lightning rods. They attracted all the kinds of anxieties and tensions, fears, and it comes to court. What was so shocking is the misogyny on display. The magistrates laugh at Miss Lloyd every time she opens her mouth to say something about the cats, about the way they're being tortured by the local boys. Worst of all is when the policeman is called as a witness and he's asked about, "How much did the house really smell?" The policeman says, "There's a strong smell of fish. I didn't know whether it was the ladies bodies or it was the fish that they were feeding to the cats."

Kathryn Hughes: The court absolutely erupts. Of course, we know, of course, I'm sure it was intended then, a very unpleasant reference to aging female bodies and curdled female juices. It's just extreme. This is Victorian England. I had no idea that this kind of thing went on.

Brooke Gladstone: That's a classic. Becoming a cat lady in the 19th century was, for some, quite a lucrative business. Miss Frances Simpson, the stylish daughter of a vicar, pioneered the modern breeding of cats. You wrote, "Her greatest achievement was to take a subject that society treated as a bit of a joke, single women and their cats, and turn it into the means to an independent and dignified life."

Kathryn Hughes: Frances Simpson is an extraordinarily interesting case of a woman who decides that she's not going to go into the usual careers open to single, middle class women, teaching, possibly nursing. She's going to do something quite different. She loves cats and she decides to build a business around cats. First of all, she's a journalist, so she has a lot of columns in newspapers on cat care and cat history. Miss Simpson, a vicar's daughter, can write with a completely straight face, a column called Practical Pussyology, in which she advises people on everything from what to feed your cat, how to dress it in the winter, if it's going on a railway journey.

Kathryn Hughes: She also gets very interested in cat breeding. She invents the Blue Persian, out of which she makes a very tidy sum of money selling her cats for up to £100 a go. She is also the main channel between America and Britain so she works, as it were, as an agent in Britain, sending out pedigree cats, kittens, to American cat ladies.

Brooke Gladstone: She was an entrepreneur.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes. She even sets up in Selfridges, which is our biggest department store. She is the first person to suggest that there'll be a cat lounge in Selfridges where you could come and buy kittens. Whereas something that before you'd have just scooped up a cat from the gutter and taken it home and hoped for the best, now, you picked out a particularly charming cat and then you were briefed on how to look after it by Miss Simpson so it becoming very, very tony, as a kind of occupation. I think she's an extraordinary woman.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the most powerful women during the cat mania was the Duchess of Bedford, known as Lady Russell. She was president of the National Cat Club. She was known for training her cats to hold poses and play croquet. It seems to me that the richer the cat lady, the more acceptable she was.

Kathryn Hughes: Money solves everything. The Duchess of Bedford was herself an extremely ambivalent mother. She had one child 10 months into her marriage and then stopped sleeping with her husband, the duke. Never had any more babies, couldn't stand her son, in fact. They were estranged most of the time and was not very interested in family life at all. She was much more interested in animals and in also becoming one of the first female aviators in Britain.

Kathryn Hughes: Nobody thought to be scornful about her because she is the Duchess of Bedford and she's immensely wealthy. I think it's always about, isn't it? It's always about there's a finite amount of resources, and if they're going in the wrong direction, so with the Lloyd women, they can't actually keep their cats properly. That tends to provoke the most outrage and disgust. Somebody like Miss Simpson who, she's not married, but she's a very attractive woman. She's very fashionable.

Kathryn Hughes: In some ways, she conforms to all the kinds of things that one might want a woman to be. She's just seen as charmingly ambitious and entrepreneurial. I understand that J.D. Vance, the whole point about his anxiety about cat ladies is simply that they don't have sufficient stake in future generations. It's always about where the resources go, where one's interest goes, whether there's enough to go around. I think that is perfectly borne out here.

Brooke Gladstone: You had a fascinating chapter about the use of cat imagery in the suffragist movement, and you said that one particular picture actually won some men over to the suffragist side.

Kathryn Hughes: A lot of women who were active in the movements to get votes for women were also very, very preoccupied with societies against cruelty to animals and cats in particular. You would expect to find suffragist artists using the cat as a kind of idea of a independent female denoting agency. That doesn't happen, in fact. The image of the cat gets taken up by the anti-suffragists. There's a rash of drawings of cats dressed as suffragists or suffragettes looking quite ridiculous.

Kathryn Hughes: Pictures of cats dressed up in silly hats holding notices saying, "We demand the vote." A sense, again, in which all that misogyny comes tumbling out because there's something ridiculous about a cat demanding the vote. What next? Will mice demand the vote? Then comes one particular image towards the end of the struggle. When suffragists were imprisoned in Holloway, they often went on hunger strike and were then force started to go, what's called force feeding, where a tube is stuck down their throat, a nasty, thin gruel tips down.

Brooke Gladstone: Which is in itself dangerous.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes, it's waterboarding. It's a kind of torture. It was so unpopular that a state of affairs was reached whereby the women, when they got so thin, they would be allowed to go home until they were well enough to be brought back to prison, and then they would be tortured again. It was called the Cat and Mouse Act, and it was such a disgusting idea. It was called Cat and Mouse Act because the cat played with the mouse.

Kathryn Hughes: It doesn't finish it off. It enjoys torturing the mouse, letting it go, and then jumping on it again. A particular potent poster was produced showing the home secretary as a bloodthirsty cat with a suffragist clamped between his teeth. That piece of rhetorical propaganda was so powerful that it actually got the liberals out of power.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, you thank your own cats, Maud and Ted, in your book for accompanying you as you wrote it. What led you to write this?

Kathryn Hughes: Ted and Maud are here actually recording the interview as we speak because they like to have their own copy of everything so they're sitting here on my lap. My grandmother, who was born in 1907, was a breeder of Blue Persians, a hopeless breeder, because she could never bear to sell them. My mother, who was an only child, grew up with 17 cat siblings. My grandmother was a cat lady, and I think much preferred the cats to my mother.

Kathryn Hughes: As I was growing up, I remember my grandmother had the Louis Wain book. She had a lot of Louis Wain books. At that point, so I'm talking about the '70s and '80s. They weren't really very well known at all. I was fascinated by these books, particularly fascinated by Louis Wain's schoolroom scenes because they would have cats behaving really, really badly, and the naughty cats were pulling each other's whiskers and chucking mice at each other.

Kathryn Hughes: I was completely fascinated by this and actually really, really frightened because I was a very, very good child and I hated that kind of disorder which I experienced at my own school, as one does. As I grew up, I was very aware that there was always a kind of anxiety in these drawings that other people seemed to find so charming. Often the male cats were a bit lascivious. They often had two girlfriends on the go at once. There was just something that was very uncomfortable about them. I always thought that at some point I would write a book about Louis Wain.

Brooke Gladstone: You were also writing about cultural dissonance, right?

Kathryn Hughes: Yes. My interest has always been in figures that undercut or undermine or just make more complicated what we thought we knew hiding in plain sight. I thought that there was something about the cat that performed that same kind of work, in the sense that when I told people I was writing about the cat in the 19th century, people would say, "I don't quite understand. Are you talking about famous people and their cats? What is there to say? There is no cultural history of cats."

Kathryn Hughes: I thought that was very interesting because there is actually a huge cultural history of cats, but it's a history made up of small feelings, hints of unhappiness, dissatisfaction, slurs, discomforts, all kinds of things that don't quite fit. As a historian of the 19th century domestic life in particular, I'm always interested in those moments when things don't quite fit. Years ago, I wrote my PhD on the Victorian governess because I was very interested in the way that she was both a servant and a lady, a woman who looked after children but wasn't a mother herself.

Kathryn Hughes: She was supposed to be both very pure, but she was also associated with notions of an unbridled female sexuality. You have to look at a book like Jane Eyre. It struck me that the cat did much of the same kind of cultural work, that a cat also was hiding in plain sight, always there. Somehow, once you started following the leads, you found that you got to two entirely opposing places at once. For instance, a cat is a devoted mother. Cats are very good mothers to their kittens, but they also are extraordinarily promiscuous.

Kathryn Hughes: That seems to capture the sense in which the cat is many, many things at once, can never quite be constrained, will always exceed your expectations. That's what really interested me.

Brooke Gladstone: You also noted that history comes around in new, interesting forms. You wanted to explain to people the roots of cute cat videos on the internet and that we're disposed to think they're cute because of the cat mania that Wain and the cat lady breeders helped to bring about.

Kathryn Hughes: Particularly, I think it happened during COVID where people were building businesses out of their cats on Instagram. The public discourse was, this is entirely new. This is shocking. Is this not decadent? All the things that have been talked about back in the 1880s and 1890s, when there'd been a lot of commentary in the press about the ludicrousness of cat ladies spending a fortune on making their cats look attractive, buying ribbons to put around their necks.

Kathryn Hughes: I wanted to show people that things that seem entirely new nearly always have a history. They don't come back in exactly the same form, but they do come back. We only have to look at what happened at the same time as J.D. Vance made that strange remark about cat ladies. We also have Taylor Swift posing with her cats. I think it was on the cover of TIME magazine. We have those juxtapositions. Still nothing ever quite fits about the cat, and it never has. We really need to realize that all our feelings, all our anxieties have a history.

Brooke Gladstone: No amount of love for cats will ever do away with the cat lady trope. That'll stick with us for the long haul, right?

Kathryn Hughes: Absolutely. Just look at the way in which cat ladies have come out fighting as a result of the Vance comment in the last few days. There's just an army of outraged cat ladies, many of whom actually have children, many of whom also have dogs. There's nothing to say to a cat lady. You can't also be a dog lady. It's just so interesting the way that that remark has produced this brouhaha around the world. We're just agog about it here in Britain.

Brooke Gladstone: By the way, whatever happened to Louis Wain? He spent some time in America working for a newspaper magnate, also the model for Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst. His ending, though, was pretty sad.

Kathryn Hughes: It's a very sad story. Wain, in his peak, was 1902. He's a household name. He is so famous. He is the man who draws cats but gradually, the demand for his work starts to fade. By the time of the first world War, there's a paper shortage, and then after the war, there's less demand for his work. In the cinema, Felix the Cat is actually an American creation, has taken over, is occupying that space of the anthropomorphic cat.

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Brooke Gladstone: A different sort of cat.

Kathryn Hughes: Actually, I've been looking at a lot of the old Felix cartoons. Felix, it seems to me, embodies a lot of the spirit of a Wain cat. There's a kind of perky can do attitude. There's a pugnacity. There's a kind of, I was going to say underdog, but there's a sense of always not starting from a position of great authority, but actually carving out something that works. Felix is always very, very worried about getting tied down by girl cats, which is something you see in Louis Wain as well.

Kathryn Hughes: Felix is a man about town, and he's not going to get hoodwinked into any kind of heterosexual, patriarchal kind of authority. He's always on his own. His song, which was very, very famous in Britain as well as America, was Felix kept on walking. Felix doesn't he keep on walking. There's always somewhere new to explore.

Brooke Gladstone: And Wain?

Kathryn Hughes: Wain, he's always suffered from a slightly precarious mental health. He becomes more and more distraught as his work fails to sell. Throughout most of his life, he's been having to look after five of his sisters who are unmarried, although one of them does die quite young, and the strain is simply too much. By 1924, when he's 65, his sisters actually have to sign the papers, which mean that he's taken into what in the vocabulary of the day is called the lunatic asylum.

Kathryn Hughes: What's even worse, it's the pauper lunatic asylum. It's where you go where you've lost your mind, but you've also lost all your money, really the lowest of the low. Unfortunately, that is where he's sent. The most extraordinary fall from grace. Luckily, there is a happy ending because the novelist HG Wells, who's always been a big fan of Wain, discovers that Wain is languishing in the pauper asylum and starts a GoFundMe money raising campaign and raises enough money to get Wain out of the pauper lunatic asylum and into Bethlem, which is the most famous mental hospital in Britain. Wain actually has a comparatively comfortable life towards the end.

Brooke Gladstone: Later known as bedlam.

Kathryn Hughes: Yes, known as bedlam for short. I have to say, by the time Wain is there, it's actually perfectly nice. Think of it as a rather nice rehab. There Wain, in a sense, comes to have a very happy ending because he no longer has to satisfy the magazines and newspapers with endless pictures of cats doing crazy things. He starts to concentrate on his own art. Draws cats, which are just extraordinarily contemporary. They look like Picassos. They are very, very abstract. They're very strange. They're cats but you have to look really hard to know that they're cats.

Kathryn Hughes: They're multicolored, jagged. They're quite extraordinary. Those are the artworks that go for an awful lot of money these days. Nick Cave, very famous Australian musician, is a great collector of Louis Wain's cats. They are very valuable now. What's so unusual about Wain? He goes from being a commercial artist to being a household name to being a pauper lunatic, to being actually a man whose work is now really quite highly regarded. I don't think there are many artists of whom you can say that.

Brooke Gladstone: Kathryn, thank you very much.

Kathryn Hughes: Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed talking to you.

Brooke Gladstone: Kathryn Hughes is an emerita professor of life writing at the University of East Anglia and a literary critic for The Guardian. She's the author of the book Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Tune into the big show on Friday to hear how the Democrats and Republicans are waging very different social media campaigns this election season.[music]

 

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