From pests to pampered pets … how Victorian artist Louis Wain ushered in the age of the cat
‘Catland”, as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One is the imaginary universe of Louis Wain’s illustrations – in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. In the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. He’s all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other “Catland”, the one we all live in. Wain’s career accompanied a transformation in attitudes between 1870 and 1939 in which cats went from being necessary evils or outright pests to fixtures of home and hearth.
For much of human history, cats were nameless creatures who lived on scraps, caught mice and unsightly diseases, yowled in streets, were familiars of witches and had fireworks stuffed up their bums by cruel children. Now, flesh-and-blood cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed to lives of expensive idleness, while fictional cats are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isn’t pornography, it’s sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.
