Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania

by Kathryn Hughes Narrated by Jenn Lee

Overview

In 1900, Britain and America were in the grip of a cat craze. An animal that had for centuries been seen as a household servant or urban nuisance had now become an object of pride and deep affection. From presidential and royal families who imported exotic breeds to working-class men competing for cash prizes for the fattest tabby, people became enthralled to the once-humble cat. Cats themselves were now traded for increasingly large sums of money, bolstered by elaborate pedigrees that claimed noble ancestry and promised aesthetic distinction.



In Catland, Kathryn Hughes chronicles the cat craze of the early twentieth century through the life and career of Louis Wain. Wain's anthropomorphic drawings of cats in top hats falling in love, sipping champagne, golfing, driving cars, and piloting planes are some of the most instantly recognizable images from the era. Despite being a household name, Wain endured multiple bankruptcies and mental breakdowns, spending his last fifteen years in an asylum, drawing abstract and multicolored felines. But it was his ubiquitous anthropomorphic cats that helped usher the formerly reviled creatures into homes across Europe.



Based on new archival findings about Wain's life, the wider cat fancy, and the media frenzy it created, Catland chronicles the fascinating history of how the modern cat emerged.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

This is history as told by someone whose knowledge of and infectious enthusiasm for her subject is matched by obvious delight and warm, expressive writing.
—New York Times

A zesty account of the many ways in which the cat came in from the alley and took up its place at the hearth. Hughes makes the case that the new world of cats which Wain both chronicled and helped to create is a signal instance of modernism in all its confusion and uncertainty.
—Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker

A sparkling account of the 'great cat mania' that engulfed whole societies between roughly 1870 and 1920 and whose effects are still with us today.
—Meghan Cox Gurdon, Wall Street Journal

What's most delightful about Catland is how cleverly it explores so many corners of society. In the life and work of this peculiar illustrator, Hughes manages to open up a fresh venue on our 'magnificent cultural obsession'.
—Washington Post

Hughes's Catland provides the richest and most comprehensive account of Wain's life and times available and brings out nuances and connotations of his imagery that would be easy to miss.
—Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed

Hughes narrates her invigorating wealth of information in a clever prose style. It makes for a unique and amusing window onto turn-of-the-20th-century art and culture.
—Publishers Weekly

A tremendous literary feat in which we learn about Victorian sociology through the work of a remarkably unique artist.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Through humour, elegance and sheer knowledge, Hughes builds something remarkable.
—Literary Review

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2024-03-20
A surprisingly engaging study of an eccentric late-Victorian illustrator whose work “transformed [cats] from anonymous background furniture into individual actors with names [and] personalities…of their own.”

Upon his death in a British mental hospital, Louis Wain (1860-1939) was a household name, but he is largely forgotten today. Known for his distinctive style of drawing cats mimicking the mannerisms, poses, and aspirations of Victorian society, many of his feline characters wearing the era’s latest fashion styles, Wain managed to eke out a respectable living for decades as a freelance illustrator for periodicals and postcard designers. Born with a cleft lip and largely home-schooled and retiring by nature, he had to support five younger sisters and an unstable mother nearly to the end of his life. His proclivity for cat characters emerged at a time when people in Britain began to shift their focus from dogs to cats. Hughes, a literary critic for the Guardian and author of Victorians Undone, is marvelously knowledgeable about the era’s famous cat people, including Charles Dickens, Edward Lear, and T.S. Eliot, and about the period’s massive societal changes. “It is no coincidence,” writes Hughes, “that the modern cat emerged during what historians call ‘the second industrial revolution,’ that period between 1870-1920 which was marked by electrification, machine production, geographic mobility, mass culture, and the fracturing of class relations.” In 1907, Wain traveled to New York to work on a syndicated cat cartoon; he was able to reinvent himself at the end of World War I with dazzling avant-garde cat designs before his hospitalization, probably for schizophrenia, in 1924. This consistently fascinating book includes a generous selection of Wain’s illustrations, which became increasingly bizarre during his later years.

A tremendous literary feat in which we learn about Victorian sociology through the work of a remarkably unique artist.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940195558420
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged