Catland
*Shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize*
A Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year
A Spectator Book of the Year
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
A New Yorker Book of the Year
Some called it a craze. To others it was a cult. Join prize-winning historian Kathryn Hughes to discover how Britain fell in love with cats and ushered in a new era.
'Smart, gorgeously written cultural history’ TLS
‘Delightful’ Guardian
‘Excellent’ Spectator
‘Joyous cultural history’ The Times
‘He invented a whole cat world’ declared H. G. Wells of Louis Wain, the Edwardian artist whose anthropomorphic kittens made him a household name. His drawings were irresistible but Catland was more than the creation of one eccentric imagination. It was an attitude – a way of being in society while discreetly refusing to follow its rules.
As cat capitalism boomed in the spectacular Edwardian age, prized animals changed hands for hundreds of pounds and a new industry sprung up to cater for their every need. Cats were no longer basement-dwelling pest-controllers, but stylish cultural subversives, more likely to flaunt a magnificent ruff and a pedigree from Persia. Wherever you found old conventions breaking down, there was a cat at the centre of the storm.
Whether they were flying aeroplanes, sipping champagne or arguing about politics, Wain’s feline cast offered a sly take on the restless and risky culture of the post-Victorian world. No-one experienced these uncertainties more acutely than Wain himself, confined to a mental asylum while creating his most iconic work. Catland is a fascinating and fabulous unravelling of our obsession with cats, and the man dedicated to chronicling them.
‘Through humour, elegance and sheer knowledge, Hughes builds something remarkable’ Literary Review
‘If a Louis Wain cat were reading this book, he would raise his topper in tribute’ The Times
‘Catland is a tour de force of (cat) history: sleek, elegant and razor-sharp when needed’ History Today
‘Excellent … Hughes reveals a fascinating, forgotten aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: how the British fell in love with felines’ Daily Mail
‘An entertaining and often surprising cultural history … typically delivered in an inviting spirit of delight’ New Yorker
Kathryn Hughes is the prize-winning author of four previous books on Victorian social history, including a biography of Mrs Beeton which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and adapted for the BBC. For the past twenty years she has been a literary critic at the Guardian and writes regularly on books, art and culture for the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. Kathryn is currently Professor Emerita at the University of East Anglia, and a Fellow of both the Royal Literary Society and the Royal Historical Society.