BY A WHISKER

Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.

- REBECCA MEAD

In mid-nineteenth-century London, which had a population upward of two million people, the journalist and social researcher Henry Mayhew set out to survey the lives of the working and nonworking poor. One of the now obsolete categories of labor he investigated was that of the cats’-meat men: sellers of boiled horseflesh, who purchased their stinking wares from knackers’ yards, then wheeled it in barrows along appointed routes each day, selling it to the public as cat food at two and a half pence per pound. By Mayhew’s reckoning, there were a thousand such venders in the capital, serving the needs of a feline population of three hundred thousand: roughly one cat per dwelling house. Cats had a liminal status, perceived by the humans they lived alongside as being somewhere between regulators of vermin—they helped control the population of rats and mice that flourished among the goods brought in and out of London’s teeming docks—and vermin themselves. Weasel-­faced and rat-tailed, given to screeching and swiping, the mid-­century cat was a rogue scavenger and a fit target for the cruelty of children, thanks to its own well-known predisposition to cruelty.

At the same time, however, a new cat was beginning to emerge. This was a round-faced, wide-eyed, sleek-­bodied creature that was pampered, primped, and lavished with affection—like Oliver, a plump, stately, black domestic cat who was a member of a suburban household in the late nineteenth century and who, preserved in taxidermied condition with a yellow ribbon tied in a bow around his neck, is now in the collection of the Museum of London. Consider, too, the proliferating creatures drawn by Louis Wain, an artist born in Clerkenwell in 1860, whose anthropomorphized felines, engaged in activities such as playing cricket or singing in choirs, came to populate the pages of the Illustrated London News no less densely than their feral cousins prowled the warehouses along the Thames.