Game-changing books that offer hope, as recommended by speakers at this yearβs Hay festival, including Theresa May, Tom Holland, Helen Garner and Jon Ronson
From pests to pampered pets β¦ how Victorian artist Louis Wain ushered in the age of the cat
βCatlandβ, as Kathryn Hughes describes it, is two things. One isΒ the imaginary universe of Louis Wainβs illustrations β in which cats walk on their hind legs and wear clothes, and humans do not feature. InΒ the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, these kitschy pictures were everywhere and he was world famous. Heβs all but forgotten now, though his influence lives on. And one of the ways it does, Hughes argues, is in the other βCatlandβ, the one we all live in. Wainβs 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 onΒ 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-bloodΒ cats are beloved family pets, selectively bred, and accustomed toΒ lives of expensive idleness, while fictional catsΒ are cute rather than vicious, cuddly rather than satanic. The small part of the internet that isnβt pornography, itβs sometimes observed, is mostly cat pictures.