The Regency Cat

Joanna here, talking about the cats of Regency England.  

What kind of cats can our characters expect to encounter as they go about their adventures?

Lots of cats, for one thing.
While Englishmen may love their dogs, the English householder hated his mice and depended on cats to get rid of them.  Defoe talks of forty thousand cats in London in the mid-1600s.  "Few Houses being without a Cat, and some having several, and sometimes five or six in a House."

 These London cats were working cats --
rangy, businesslike mousers and ratters.  I see them dozing the day away in the kitchen, then rising in the night, roaming the house to do battle with vermin, meeting the enemy behind the plush curtains of the drawing room and down behind the sofas in the parlor.  All the while, the gentlefolk snored in their beds. 

But there were pampered, plump cats as well.  We find them in paintings, batting at a soap bubble, peering into a fishbowl. 

"Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose."
Garrison Keillor

Samuel Johnson was one of many authors who owned cats.  Hodge kept him company as he worked on his dictionary.   Said Johnson, "He is a very fine cat; a very fine cat indeed."

Hodge was fond of oysters, which were then a plentiful, cheap food, eaten by the poor.  Johnson was the one to buy Hodge's oysters, saying his servant Francis might feel humiliated by the task and take a "dislike to the poor creature."  Today, a bronze statue of Hodge, seated on a dictionary, with a helping of oysters at his feet, stands in front of the house he and Johnson shared.

Hodge with his coal black fur would have been pretty typical of the cats of 1800.  Native English cats were shorthairs.  They came in in the same familiar shades of solid and stripe we see today. 

Two native cat kinds are of note . . . the Manx and the Tortoiseshell.

The tailless Manx cat was known to naturalists.  Our hero and heroine in London would probably never have seen one.  As late as 1820, visitors to Manx speak of them as an exotic curiosity found in the huts of the peasantry.   The burning question of the day -- for naturalists -- was whether this peculiar cat was a freak of nature, or the offspring of a female cat and a buck rabbit.  Opinion was divided.

Tortoiseshell cats were recognized as a distinct type.  They looked like their modern counterparts, with markings of mottled orange, white and chocolate.  It was widely known that this sort of cat was almost always female.     

William Cowper, the poet, writes to his cousin, "I have a kitten, my dear, the drollest of all creatures . . .  She is dressed in a tortoise-shell suit, and I know that you will delight in her."
 
Tortoiseshells were called 'Spanish Cats', and there was a general belief they came originally from Spain.   Why folks held this notion, I cannot say.

"Time spent with cats is never wasted."
Colette

So your 1800 folks would have mostly encountered the perfectly ordinary 'native' cats of the British Isles.
Which begs the question --  How did the housecat get to England anyway, and when?

Genetic evidence tells us that the domestic cat as breed started out in the 'Fertile Crescent' of the Middle East and spread out from there across the world.  Talking genes, housecats from Kentucky to Kyoto are indistinguishable from Felis silvestris lybica, the wildcat of the Middle East. 

So the Fertile Crescent is where man tamed the cat.  Or vice versa. 

Cats and humans have been together a good long time.  A nine-thousand-year-old grave in Cyrus contains a human skeleton, buried with stone tools and a handful of seashells.  In its own tiny grave, a foot and a half away, lies an eight-month-old cat, its body oriented in the same westward direction as its human companion.

The housecat spread out from the Middle East to the rest of the world.  Not just overnight.  The domestic cat took seven thousand years to reach China and another eight hundred years to make the jump to Japan.
 
Cats didn't spread in Europe much faster.  The first representation of cats in Mainland Greece is on a marble block from 500 BCE. 

Then Romans grain ships from Alexandria in Egypt introduced cats to Roman ports around the  Mediterranean.  Cats followed Romans into northern Europe with their conquests.  Perhaps they perched on top of a knapsack.  Maybe they hitched a ride in the commissary wagons.

A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.
Chesterfield

Oddly, domestic cats seem to have reached the British Isles before the Romans.  Did the Celts, who had kin on both side of the Channel, take their cat with the luggage when they visited? 

Archeologists, delightfully, have found little Fourth Century cat footprints baked into Roman tiles at Silchester in England.  One imagines some brindled tabby named Gaius or Decimus stalking birds across the tile yard, setting his feet down softly in the still-wet clay. 

Six hundred years later, cats found a protector in Hywel the Good, Welsh king and lawgiver.  When he codified Welsh law, he made particular provision for them.  A later version of his law reads:

"The value of a cat is fourpence. The value of a kitten from the night it is born until it opens its eyes, a legal penny; and from then until it kills mice, two legal pence; and after it kills mice, four legal pence, and at that it remains forever. Her properties are to see and hear and kill mice, and that her claws are not broken, and to rear kittens; and if she is bought, and any of those are wanting, a third of her value is to be returned."

I'm not so much talking about dogs here, but I have to add that Hywel's law said a guard dog, if killed more than nine paces from the door, is not paid for.  If it's killed within the nine paces, it's worth twenty-four pence.

They didn't try telling a cat where he had to report to duty, Welsh lawmen not being fools about cats, apparently.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.
Virginia Woolf

Our Regency hero, running down an alley to get away from the bad guys, is going to pass cats who are descendants of cats the Romans knew.  Cats with more than a thousand-year history in England.  They will be largely unremarkable in color and type because cat breeding and the importation of exotic cats from abroad comes later.  It's a Victorian phenomenon.

Cats are not really thought of as 'breeds' at this time. 
With three exceptions.

First off, you got yer Persians. 

Persians go way back as a distinct breed, both in and out of Europe.  This is the Persian cat story: An Italian nobleman, Pietro della Valle, left Venice in 1614 and wandered around the Middle East for a dozen years.  He was inspired to do this, apparently, by an unfortunate love affair.  His loss.  Cathood's gain.

When he was in Persia he wrotes, "There are cats of a species which properly belong to the province of Charazan. Their size and form are like those of the common cat; their beauty consists in their colour, which is grey, spotless, and uniform . . .  their hair is shining, soft and delicate as silk, and so long, that, though more smooth than rough, yet it is curled, particularly under the neck. . . . The most beautiful part of their body is the tail, which is very long and covered with hair of five or six inches in length, and which they turn up over their backs like the squirrel."

Pietro brought home 'four couple' of these cats in 1620.  From Italy, the breed eventually made its way to England.  Interestingly, the Persian cat does not seem to have traveled to England by way of France.  The French naturalist Buffon who wrote in the mid 1700s had never seen a Persian cat.

In England, however, the Persian flourished and multiplies.  They interbred with the English shorthairs, passing their long coat to some of their offspring, who now appeared in a variety of colors.  The cats became so common in England that, by the 1820s, any housekeeper or village spinster would be likely to have one.

A Persian cat would thus be a wholly suitable pet for our Regency heroine, or even our Blofeld-like Regency villain.

A cat is never vulgar.
Carl Van Vechten

The Angora is the second of the exotic breeds that would be familiar to our 1800 folks. 
They were described as "possessed of singular beauty, as it is clothed with long hair of a silvery white appearance, and silky texture; on the neck, from its superior length, it forms a kind of ruff; and the tail, by being thickly clothed with hair of a very fine quality and length, has the semblance of a brush."
The Lady's Magazine, 1800

The Angora was sometimes called the 'lion cat' because that ruff gave it the appearance of a lion.  They were called 'the French cat' till the middle of the Nineteenth Century because they were largely imported from Paris.

Angoras arrived in France in the Sixteenth Century when Nicholas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc imported several from Angora, that is, Ankara Province in Turkey.  The gentle, even indolent, good-natured white cats became favorites at the French Court.  Marie Antoinette kept a small herd of them.  They were said to roam about the table during court functions.

The difference between the Angora and Persian was the Angora had only the slightest undercoat beneath the long, silky outercoat.  Lacking a wooly layer, the hair followed the lines of its body.  The Persian, with coarser hair and a thick undercoat, was . . . well . . . Fluffier.
 
"A fine Angola Cat is as handsome an animal as can be imagined, and seems quite conscious of its own magnificence. It is a very dignified animal, and moves about with a grave solemnity that bears a great resemblance to the stately march of a full-plumed peacock conscious of admiring spectators."
Rev JG Wood

The final distinct and foreign breed our character might encounter in 1800 London is the Chartreux cat -- the 'blue cat'.  It's so called because the fur is "gray ash, blackish brown at the base, the coat is very dense of the sort which, when one sees the gray of the tips and the brown underlaying, the mixed colors make the appearance of the cat to be blue."
 Josephus Flavius Martinet 1778
 
Chartreux  cats were well known in France and the Netherlands.  Rarer in England, but seeing one would not be at all impossible.

The breed, as a distinct type, dates back to at least the Seventeenth Century.  Legend has it they were the "chats des Chartreux" -- the cats kept by the Carthusian monks.
The Carthusians reluctantly point out they have no records of this . . .

So . . .  Those are the cats of 1800 London.  All our favorite and accustomed British shorthairs.  No Siamese, no Burmese, no Japanese Bobtail, no Maine Coon Cats,  But Chartreux, Persian and Angora of a proper 1800s type that does not exactly resemble their modern breed standard.

"I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
Death thought about it.  "Cats," he said eventually. "Cats are nice."
Terry Pratchett

 

Adrian Hawkhurst, who will get his own book, Black Hawk, in November, has a small gray tabby cat at British Service Headquarters in London.  It's named 'Cat'.  We don't see much of it, but I know it's there.  

 

What's your favorite literary cat -- either appearing in a book or enlivening the life of an author.  One lucky poster, chosen at random, will win a copy of Forbidden Rose.

Comments

[Deb Marlowe]

Hi Joanna,

Lovely post!

I got my CP a set of Hodge bookends modelled after the statue outside Dr. Johnson's house.

Grimalkin is one of my favorite literary cats--the cat that was the lifelong companion to the Godolphin Arabian. I used him as a model for a cat in my latest release.

We are a cat family, and favor the London sort, who are willing to be pampered but also go out and patrol the grounds for vermin. Just have to be careful where you step when you leave the back door! :-)

[Kay Coombs]

Great article! There is something about a cat that makes a painting stand out!

Kay from...
http://www.lovebooklists.com

[Isobel Carr]

What a fantastic post! I have to say, my favorite fictional cat is Mehitabel. There’s just no real completion.

[Gabrielle Wolf-Stahl]

I like Koko from "The Cat Who..," series and I love this article! =-D

[joanna bourne]

Hi Deb --

We know what Grimalkin looked like. He was a gray striped cat. We can see him at

http://www.fenwickhall.com/johnsislandstud.html

And yes, I know exactly what you mean. In my case, it's little brown birds. She eats the mice, apparently, but gives me the avian booty. I really wish she wouldn't do that.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Kay,

I imagine the cats are more fun to draw than some of the sitters. *g*

[joanna bourne]

Fictional cats tend to be smarter than the human characters . . . Koko kinda lives up to that.

We had Siamese when I was a kid. They are really and truly not like other cats.

Siamese, as a distinct breed, date back to at least the 1300s. They have paintings.

I tried to figure out some way it would be possible to have Siamese cats in London in 1800 . . . but no go.

[Jane O]

You turn up with the most wonderfully oddball bits of research! And this is from someone who doesn't even like cats. (Well, it's not so much that I dislike them. It's more that I am allergic to them. A creature that makes it hard for you to breathe does not exactly endear itself.)

[Christine]

Wonderful article! I cannot tell you how appropriate I feel it is that Adrian would have a cat. He, from your descriptions, has a definite feline presence (at least to me). I cannot imagine him as a dog owner, but Cat seems perfect for him!

[Susanna Fraser]

I love Christopher Smart's poem "For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry," written around 1760 when the author was hospitalized for insanity. You can definitely tell it's not the work of an entirely stable mind, but it's as clear a picture of a cat as I've ever encountered:

http://42opus.com/v4n2/mycatjeoffry

Here's a sample. I love the phrase "brisking about the life":

For when his day's work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Jane --

There's some great blogs about the kind of dog you might expect to find running underfoot in C18 and early C19. Very interesting stuff.

I've used these blogs in imagining my Meeks Street guardian dogs.

But while I was doing that dog research, it occurred to me nobody seemed to be taking notice of what cats looked like. *g*

[Isobel Carr]

I love that poem, Susanna! A friend of mine used it on the grave marker for her amazing tom, Byron.

[Isobel Carr]

@Joanna: I'll be talking about Mastiffs a LOT over the next month, since my "debut" has one in it (book two has a Newf and book three is shaping up to star Deerhounds). In fact, I've been posting daily pics of my Mastiffs lately on Twitter. I wish you'd got to meet Clancy when you were here!

[joanna bourne]

Hi Christine --

You know, we have these wonderful detailed scenes in our head that we can never fit into a manuscript. Adrian and Cat is one of those scenes.

So *I* know he's in the background. I may have mentioned him once.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Susanna --

For the cat is an instrument for children to learn benevolence upon . . .

*g*

I almost used that as one of my quotes. I, too, love the poem.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Isobel Carr --

I'm sorry I didn't. I don't get to 'meet' many very large dogs.

The big guys walk around differently than smaller dogs. They have a different 'tude. I want, the next time I put one in a scene, to get that body awareness right.

[Helen]

Joanna

What a great post I do love cats and have had many over the years including persions siamese and loved them all they really have their own personality.
At the moment the only fictional cat I can think of is the one Prof McGonigal turns into in Harry Potter. But I do know how much I am looking forward to reading Adrian's story whoo hoo

Have Fun
Helen

[joanna bourne]

McG turns into British shorthair, doesn't she? So suitable.

I wonder if the cat was an actor or all CGI.

[Isobel Carr]

Clancy very much resembles a lion in the way he moves. This is a common comment about Neapolitan Mastiffs in particular (which is what his daddy is, looks just like Fang in the Harry Potter films). When he really gets going, like a flat out run, it’s pretty impressive.

[joanna bourne]

Useful and interesting. Lion, huh . . .

And he has an Irish name *g*

[Susan/DC]

What you call tortoiseshell cats I know as calico. The following is based on a biology class I took eons ago, so my memory might be off, but it's one of the few things I remember because I found it so interesting. The calico's coloring is due to a process known as Lyonization (fitting, no?) named for Mary Lyon, who first identified it. It is the process in which in female mammals (not just cats) one of the two X chromosomes is turned off. As far as I know it's random whether it's the one from the mother or father. This is why female identical twins are not as identical as male identical twins, and it's also why there are so few male calico cats and those that exist are sterile.

[wendy p]

My favorite is the Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss...I must have taken this book out of the library a million times when I was little...now, I just collect cats...up to 6...totally see myself as the crazy cat lady in another 20 years...

[joanna bourne]

Hi Wendy --

Oh, that is so funny.

CitH contains one of the great lines in literature.

"This mess is so wide and so deep and so tall,
We cannot clean it up. There is no way at all."

My second-favorite line from Seuss.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Susan --

About one of the X chromosomes being turned off in each cell -- you are exactly right.

The genes on one X chromosome have to be strong enough to run the body all by themselves -- because that's what they have to do in the male. If both X chromosomes were working, women would get a 'double dose'.

This is why females are simply more robust than males. *g*

[Isobel Carr]

He was named after Clancy Brown, who does the voice of Barkmeat on the wonderful cartoon Catscratch.

There are some pretty amazing videos on YouTube if you want to see giant breeds in action. There’s one of a pack of Neos ripping apart what looks like a burlap sack that is downright frightening!

[Annie]

Hi, Jo,

In one of those instances of synchronicity that make life interesting, a friend sent me the following link just yesterday:

http://writersandkitties.tumblr.com/

I'm very fond of Malta, the cat in Beautiful Joe who was trained not to kill the birds. Improbable, I know.

[joanna bourne]

Oh. Oh. Everybody go look at the link Annie posted.

I have tears in my eyes.

Writers and Cats.
Oh my.

[joanna bourne]

I have to add something re the pictures of Writers + Catz.

If you page back to Collette --
Her cat is a chartreuse.

[Annie]

Also, saying "writers and kitties" is fun!

[deniz]

Gaius or Decimus? Are you sure they aren't my Kedi's footprints? [bg] I named him after the Turkish word for cat, by the way - his full name is Kedi Venti Pipire of Camulodunum, which is my way of working my own cats' nicknames into his name.
Hmm, other literary cats... I do love Tolkien's poem The Cat.

[Kat]

Cat, Holly Golightly's cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

[theo]

I have a cat. Her name is just Molly. She's very vocal. There are two kinds of cats that are extremely vocal though there are many who are to a lesser degree. Siamese and polydactyls. For some reason, polydactyls gab all the time. Doesn't matter if you're listening, they're content to just yammer on in their little brrrp language.

She's managed to move off the upper kitchen cupboards though. Now she lives in my lower cupboard by the sink. I usually hear brrrp a lot while I'm cooking, but once in awhile, the cupboard sneezes too.

She wanders out occasionally now too. Guess she's losing her mind as she gets older.

I've been wracking my brain through this post and these comments and for the life of me, I can't think of one fictional cat that comes to mind!

Lovely post. I really enjoyed it.

[Mary Jo Putney]

What a splendid post! Personally, I think cats channel creativity from the astral plane, which is why so many writers have them.

I can't agree about talkative polydactyls, though. My current one (the long haired Fluffster) seldom speaks, and then it's the most discreet little ladylike meow to catch my attention. The previous polydactyl (Pandora for her thumbs), was also very quiet.

[LouisaCornell]

Another wonderful post about a subject near and dear to my heart. I am primarily a dog person, but I DO love my cats. I am owned by four felines - three males Bagheera (24 pounds) Tigger (19 pounds) and Pooh (17 pounds) and one female, the queen of the house literally and figuratively, Rebecca (8 pounds.)

Some of my favorite literary cats ?

Church from Stephen King's Pet Sematary

Duchess from Babe (so deliciously snarky!)

Thomasina from the Disney film (telling my age here!)

The Ghost and the Darkness - two rogue lions who turned man-eater in Kenya in the late nineteenth century. There is a book by John Henry Patterson called the Man-Eaters of Tsavo and there was a film made of the story. The actual lions' skins are stuffed and can be found on display in the Chicago Field Museum. Rather ghoulish, I know, but I tend to be on the side of the lions!

Muezza - the prophet Muhammad's favorite cat. There is a story which goes - Muezza was asleep on the sleeve of the prophet's robe and when the call for prayer came Muhammad cut off the sleeve of the robe so he could answer the call rather than disturb his feline friend.

[Mary Anne Landers]

Thank you for your post, Joanna. Lots of fascinating facts about cats!

Yes, I'm a cat person. I've had twelve during the past few decades. Not all at the same time!

As I type this, one of them, my little Farrah, is curled up asleep on my lap. She's gorgeous, sweet, smart---and bears a most unusual coloration. She's both a calico and a tabby; therefore she has more different shades of color in her fur than any other cat I've ever seen. And she has no tail, just a bump on her butt when the tail should be.

My favorite literary cat? I'm not sure this really counts as literature; but seeing as I'm a big folklore freak, I'd say Dick Whittington's cat. This kitty wasn't just a companion; she enabled Dick, a poor orphan, to start accumulating wealth and eventually become Lord Mayor of London.

At least, that's the way the famous legend has it. I already know that though Richard Whittington was a historical figure, this story is no more real than the one about George Washington and the cherry tree.

Keep up the good work!

[Louis]

My favorite fictional cat is "Piwacket" in the movie "Bell, Book and Candle" with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.

We had a pair of female Manx cats years ago. They had litters together and nursed each others kittens.

[Danielle Thorne]

Lovely, informative post.

[Karen D]

Cat lover here. And writer. So yes indeed I put a cat in my first book! He actually brings the hero and heroine together. I pretty much love any fictional cat--Crookshanks from HP, Koko from the Braun mysteries, the older Rita Mae Brown mysteries, and this new-to-me yet old mystery series starring a bachelor detective with 4 cats by John Harvey. Oh, and I read my daughter the funniest picture book the other day about Chester the cat.

Thank you, Joanna, for all the fascinating cat history. I can definitely see some of it cropping up in my next manuscript:)

[Sophie Page]

Lovely post, Joanna.

I think my favourite literary cat is Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat (saying 'Skimble, where is Skimble/ for unless he's very nimble, the Night Mail just can't go.)

Are you SURE some adventurous Hudson Bay Company type couldn't have brought back a Maine Coon to London? The combination of the fluff between their pads and french polished furniture produces hours of endless fun, as they skid 'n'slide.

[Pageturner]

Ooh, I didn't know there was a statue of Hodges - how nice! I shall look for it next time I go to London.

[email protected]

[Minna]

the only fictional cats I can think of are also from Harry Potter: Crookshanks and Mrs. Norris.

[Anne Roller]

Have to include Jo Beverly's "cat-rabbit of Hesse" - but I have always loved Piwacket

[Isobel Carr]

There's a great one of Dick Wittington's cat near Highgate.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Deniz --

I had a cat named Ghorbay, (which is 'cat' in Farsi,) when I lived in Tehran.

Tolkien's poem is here:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/cat/

[joanna bourne]

Hi Kat --

'Cat' the animal star of Breakfast at Tiffany's is lovely. That's such a romantic movie. That last scene in the rain . . .

[joanna bourne]

Hi Theo --

I didn't know that about polydactyls. They talk a lot, huh?

Polydactyls were known in 1800. There's discussion back and forth between naturalists over whether or not it's inherited and so on.

So the H&H of a Regency could certainly own one.

[joanna bourne]

Hi LouisaCornell --

That is a great lineup of cats.

Glad you mentioned Thomasina. It's brought the story, (and the cat,) back to me. Nice use of a 'plot pet' in that movie.

They say Disney was not fond of cats himself -- which is why there are more movies about dogs than about cats.

In Aristocats, Eva Gabor was the voice of 'Duchess', of course. Wonderful choice of Voice Actor.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Mary Anne --

I know the real Dick Whittington did not come from a poor family.

But I kinda shove that fact aside in my head and believe in the legend anyhow. *g*

[joanna bourne]

Hi Louise --

This 'female cats forming social groups' is the natural way for cats to live. They're very social under the right circumstances.

I love Piwacket. (I really loved Jimmy Stewart in that movie, too.)

[joanna bourne]

Hi Karen --

I would love to see more cats crop up in Regencies.

I don't think I've ever seen cats used incorrectly. That is, I haven't come across a Siamese walking through a Regency drawing room.

But I would like to see an irreproachably historical Angoras or a Chartreux.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Sophie --

It is possible there were long-haired cats in America in 1800.

Probably there were cats on the Mayflower. Cats weren't mentioned. (Dogs were aboard. An English springer spaniel and a mastiff were brought along by John Goodman.) But sailing ships of that era generally had cats on them as part of the 'crew'.

So cats in New England would have had close to 200 to develop their own mutation for long hair, or borrow the genes from the pet of some visitor.

That said, the earliest mention of a long-haired cat in New England is from 1861.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course, but . . .

[joanna bourne]

Hi Pageturner --

Isn't that a cool statue. I think it's supposed to be modeled after the artist's cat.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Mina --

I like Crookshanks. My kinda cat.

[joanna bourne]

Hi Anne Roller --

Ah. The cat rabbit. *g* And the Maine Coon, already mentioned, that myth said was the cross between a cat and raccoon.