Anyone who has lived with a cat will likely recognize the personalities populating Kathryn Hughes’s Catland. That is not surprising, because many of our current pet-keeping practices as well as our pet-keeping sentiments have their roots in the Victorian era she studies. Those origins—the beginnings of a popular fascination with cats as valued companions and cohabitants in a rapidly changing world—are the focus of this entertaining book that traces the evolution of the modern cat. In fifty short, episodic chapters, Hughes leads readers on a mostly British tour, with sojourns in the United States, through Catland as it developed between 1870 and 1920. Along the way, Hughes points out a variety of cat-connected characters, some familiar, some not, who were integral features of Catland’s modernizing cultural landscape.

At the center of that landscape, as the book’s subtitle indicates, stands famed commercial artist Louis Wain, whose life provides the narrative and illustrative backbone for Hughes’s account. Wain’s drawings of anthropomorphized cats engaged in the affairs of modern life—whether in the household, on the sporting field, at work, along the motorways, or high above in airplanes—were widely consumed in Britain and abroad. By the end of the nineteenth century, Wain’s was a household name; his work appeared in Christmas annuals, picture postcards, comic strips, and advertisements. He took his talents briefly to the United States, where he produced images for the American market and commentaries on the American cat scene. That was the public persona. The private Wain was far more complicated and tragic than his whimsically rendered kitties might suggest. Hughes excels at reconstructing the artist’s convoluted life from scattered sources and unearthing new archival materials that add much more texture to the picture. From Wain’s familial connections to the business of art embroidery, through his brief marriage and widowhood, to his eventual mental disintegration and institutionalization, Hughes reveals a life both made and unmade by modernity.

But Hughes does not write a mere biography of Louis Wain. Instead, she expands her scope to include the wider world of cat fancy. There are chapters devoted to the “beforetimes” when feline reputations appeared as utilitarian at best and, at worst, troublesome or even dangerous. There were the “cat’s meat men,” peddlers of questionable character who hawked horsemeat and offal for feeding household mouse-catchers. Another chapter traces the changing gender dynamics of cat ownership, as respectable cat fanciers, both men and women of the highest caliber, began to challenge images of suspicious “cat ladies” and “pussy bachelors.” (Pejorative connotations persist, as the recent brouhaha over a vice-presidential candidate’s “childless cat ladies” comment proves).Footnote ¹ Hughes details the beginnings of elite cat shows and the creation of specific breed standards, showing how modern, pedigreed cats provided recreation for a new class of cat enthusiasts and remuneration to a new cat industry. Pampered pets occupied an entirely different realm than those mangy alleyway roamers of earlier days. And then there are the other, more surprising examples of cat mania: the penchant for wearing cat fur, the progressive cat rescuer slaughtering strays in her backyard, and taxidermists molding stuffed cats into improbable anthropomorphic poses. In the end, Hughes leaves no cat-themed metaphorical phrase unturned as she reveals the varied dimensions of this new-fangled cat culture.

With its episodic and eclectic sketches, Catland could have easily become a disjointed jumble. Yet Hughes manages to wrangle everything from street urchins and strays to royalty and show champions into a coherent, chronological narrative. In this task, Hughes is aided by Wain, whose life story is the unifying thread woven into the book’s variegated fabric. Wain appears at unexpected moments—as the president of the National Cat Club, as cartoon filmmaker, or as a psychiatric case study—to create oddly satisfying moments of congruence. The result is an account that never seems to wander because Wain functions as both subject and frame for the picture Hughes paints.

Then there are the actual pictures. As might be expected, Catland is amply illustrated with Wain creations. Hughes’s skillful readings set these images in biographical and historical context, adding greater depth to Wain’s two-dimensional, cartoonish cats. Although the book could benefit from more extensive captioning, the text provides sophisticated and detailed interpretations of the images. Wain’s feline courtroom scenes, for example, take on new poignancy when situated against the backdrop of his mother’s legal troubles. Ambivalent family vignettes mirror Wain’s own discontent with his somewhat dysfunctional relatives. His later abstract paintings, completed while institutionalized, receive sympathetic treatment from Hughes, who sees this work not as proof of mental decline, but rather as evidence of an ever-evolving artistic talent. Catland also includes other fascinating illustrations that demonstrate the broader contemporary cat mania at work. Indeed, the photo of vaudeville’s Barrison Sisters with fuzzy kittens peeping out of their knickers is worth the price of the book alone.

The thematic strand running through Hughes’s narrative is that of modernity—how cats became modern and how “they made everything around them modern, too” (6). At times, though, that string is stretched. For instance, one anecdote, relayed by Wain, about a cat’s hostility toward his painting displayed at a publisher’s office, is perhaps overdrawn. Hughes reads it as an indication of “the modern conundrum of doubled consciousness … the philosophical fault line that cleaved through the first decades of the twentieth century” (198). Still, the larger points about modernization are well taken, even if lines of causation probably did not originate with cats. Historians might find disappointing the lack of the usual scholarly apparatus of theoretical frameworks and extensive citations. But to fault the book for such would be to criticize it for what it was not meant to be. Hughes, a literary critic and former professor of life writing, has crafted a carefully researched, insightful, and engaging popular history. There is plenty here to recommend Catland to scholars interested in the era’s animal and cultural history. For cat lovers, there is even more.