Kathryn Hughes, author, historian, critic UK, Catland, Victorians Undone, The Short Life & Long Times of Mrs Beeton, George Eliot, The Last Victorian, The Victorian Governess

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Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World

A SPECTATOR, WALL STREET JOURNAL , TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, THE TIMES and SUNDAY TIMES and THE NEW YORKER BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2024

Welcome to Catland

The year is 1900 and Britain is in the grip of a cat craze. Duchesses are smuggling exquisite Siamese, working men are competing for prizes for the fattest tabby, single ladies are making a fortune from breeding Blue Persians. In households up and down the country, an animal that had been regarded as a servant or urban nuisance for centuries is transforming into a cherished pet and much-loved family member. Wherever you look, old social hierarchies are breaking down.

In Catland, Kathryn Hughes chronicles the cat craze through the life and times of the commercial artist 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 that era. In the process they offer a sly commentary on the restless and risky culture of the very human post-Victorian world. And no-one experienced these uncertainties more acutely than Wain himself, a chaotic genius who spent the last decades of his life as a pauper in a mental asylum, producing kaleidoscopic feline portraits which today sell for thousands.

Beautifully illustrated and based on new archival findings about Wain’s life, the wider cat fancy, and the media frenzy it created, Catland chronicles the fascinating story of how the modern cat emerged.

PRAISE FOR CATLAND

Joyous cultural history’ 
– The Times

‘Delightful’ 
– The Guardian

Catland is a tour de force of (cat) history: sleek, elegant and razor-sharp when needed.’
– History Today

Smart, gorgeously written cultural history’ 
– TLS

Catland is the cat’s meow — an enchanting cabinet of curiosities, and an ingenious, witty work’
– Boston Globe

Catland is a delight.  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

‘On Victorian and Edwardian terrain, Hughes is near-omniscient … 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
 
‘Hughes’ excellent, curiosity-stuffed book is about the moment towards the end of the 19th century when cats started to be afforded the same dignity as dogs’
– Spectator
 
Hughes has a brilliant eye for absurdities and untold stories. This isn’t a gushing ode to pussycats but a wide-ranging history of a period of huge upheaval’
– i News
 
A darting, hobby-horsical, hugely interesting book with the feel of a passion project rather than a sobersides work of history. But its ease and authority come from how Hughes as a historian is completely at home in the era under discussion, offering feline sideways glances at class, economics, urbanisation, eugenics, gender politics and much else besides’
– Guardian
 
An entertaining and often surprising cultural history … typically delivered in an inviting spirit of delight, and [Hughes] is not above engaging in a little anthropomorphizing’
– New Yorker
 
Excellent … Hughes reveals a fascinating, forgotten aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: how the British fell in love with felines’
– Daily Mail
 
‘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.
― Wall Street Journal
 
Kathryn Hughes, author, historian, critic UK, Catland, Victorians Undone, The Short Life & Long Times of Mrs Beeton, George Eliot, The Last Victorian, The Victorian GovernessWhat’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