CATLAND

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.