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- [00:01]
Narrator
Why get all your holiday decorations delivered through Instacart? Because maybe you only bought two wreaths, but you have 12 windows. Or maybe your toddler got very eager with the Advent calendar. Or maybe the inflatable snowman didn't make it through the snowstorm. Or maybe the twinkle lights aren't twinkling. Whatever the reason, this season Instacart's here for hosts and their whole holiday haul. Get decorations from the Home Depot, CVS and more through Instacart and enjoy free delivery on your first three orders, service fees and term supply. The DSW Black Friday sale is on take 30% off almost everything in stores and online right now. Yep, you heard that right. 30% off. Stock up on new shoes, bags and extras for you and yours from all the gift worthy brands you love. But hurry. Black Friday can't last forever. Get to your DSW store or dsw.com asap to save big exclusions. Apply details@dsw.com.
- [01:00]
Catherine Hughes
The History Channel Original Podcast.
- [01:05]
Sally Helm
History this Week October 18, 1887.
- [01:13]
Wesley Levisay
I'm.
- [01:13]
Sally Helm
Sally Helm in a big room at London's Crystal Palace. Under gorgeous high glass ceilings there sit rows and rows of cages full of 429 cats. There are thin cats and fat cats, long haired and short Persian cats, Siamese, a cat named Lucifer reclining on an embroidered cushion. All of these cats are waiting to be judged. Cat shows have been happening in England for almost 20 years and that's about the same amount of time that British cats have had any respect. Before that they were seen as not much better than vermin, almost on par with the rodents they killed. The cat shows have been part of an effort to change that and this one is the first to be put on by the National Cat Club. Up until now, the world of competitive cat breeding has been chaotic, unregulated. The early cat lovers have been fighting each other, arguing about the rules like what does long haired really mean? How long does the hair have to be? One owner actually got busted for dipping his black and white cat in yellow dye to enter it in the tortoise colored category. The National Cat Club wants to clean things up, bring order to this lawless cat world. On offer today for the prize winners are some fine silver sugar bowls and cash, not to mention the respect of other cat loving peers. And when the judging is done, the grand prize goes to Mr. Clark's Snow White Persian cat, Major. He's noted for his pure white color and majesty of tail. Mr. Clark credits Major's beauty to a diet of cool boiled milk for breakfast and tea, plus a large midday meal of horse meat. Clark takes home the silver sugar basin and a pair of silver tongs. Cats have really come up in the world. They've gone from pests to pets today. How'd that happen? How did cats overcome their image problem and convince human to buy them litter boxes and feather toys and fancy embroidered cushions? And who were the artists who dedicated their lives to that cause? Helping the world fall in love with cats.
- [04:08]
US Cellular Ad
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- [04:39]
Marc Jacobs Ad
Hello everyone, my name is Wesley Levisay. From the History of the Second World War podcast, join me on a journey through the most destructive conflict in human history. A journey that will take us not just through the famous campaigns and cataclysmic battles, but also to the lesser, well known corners of the war that touched millions all over the world as we try and answer not just the questions of what and where, but how and why. You can find history of the Second World War on all major podcast platforms or@historyofthes.com gift the remarkable with Marc Jacobs.
- [05:14]
Etsy Ad
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- [05:42]
Catherine Hughes
Cats.
- [05:43]
Sally Helm
Have been in Catherine Hughes life as far back as she can remember. She's now a professor of writing at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and she comes from a family of cat obsessives.
- [05:56]
Catherine Hughes
They're cat crazy, a little bit mad. My grandmother was an amateur cat breeder, so she bred Blue Persians, though she was hopeless at it, so she could never actually sell them or give them away. And so my poor mother, who was an only child, grew up with 17 cat siblings.
- [06:15]
Sally Helm
17 cats in a house is many cats, but even having one cat in the house is a relatively new thing. Hughes researched the history of domesticated cats for her new book, Cat Land, and over the years cats go through some phases of glory and Privilege. They were worshipped. In ancient Egypt, archaeologists once found a tomb full of 180,000 mummified cats. And they've lived alongside humans for millennia. They were probably first domesticated in the Middle east to help with pest control. Although, as any cat owner knows, cats kind of work for themselves.
- [06:57]
Catherine Hughes
It will help you catch mice if it feels like it. It cannot be trained to do anything. So, yes, cats have been around the human hearth, but they very, very specifically have done it on their own terms.
- [07:14]
Sally Helm
Fast forward to medieval Europe, and cats have a real image problem. They're still useful, of course. They keep basements and alleys free of mice and other critters, but they were.
- [07:26]
Catherine Hughes
Themselves really a superior form of pest, if you see what I mean. In the great chain of being, they were one up from rodents.
- [07:33]
Sally Helm
Even by the year 1800, it was very rare to see a cat living in someone's home. One particular type of person did have a reputation for keeping cats as pets.
- [07:45]
Catherine Hughes
A particular kind of woman, sort of a marginal woman, a single, lonely old woman who might live on the edge of the village.
- [07:53]
Sally Helm
Yep, the cat lady stereotype was already a thing. But for the most part, cats were.
- [08:00]
Catherine Hughes
Expected to fend for themselves. They weren't given special food. They weren't cared for in general.
- [08:05]
Sally Helm
In fact, little boys would throw stones at cats in the streets. Doctors sometimes used them for live experiments. But mostly, cats ran wild, making their own way in the world, congregating in the newly industrialized and rat filled cities in England and around the globe. But then some animal lovers start to take notice of cats. In the 19th century, there was a push to recognize that animal well being was important. That push happened especially in England. Parliament passed one of the earliest animal protection laws in 1822, banning the abuse of any horse, mare, gelding, mule, ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle. Not cats. Not at first.
- [08:55]
Catherine Hughes
But eventually people start to think, well, we've rescued dogs, we've rescued horses, but actually, the animal that is most ill used in the sense of having stones chucked at it in the street, are cats.
- [09:09]
Sally Helm
One person who notices this is an illustrator named Harrison Weir. He's known for his realistic drawings of animals. He's done illustrations for everything from children's books to scientific surveys. He's friends with Charles Darwin. Weir loves cats, who he once called extremely beautiful. And he wants to help. He gets to thinking about the tradition of agricultural shows where people, mostly farmers, enter their animals to win prizes.
- [09:39]
Catherine Hughes
People have got together to show off their pigs and their sheep and, you know, their horses. And their cart horses. Everybody's used to the notion of an agricultural show, but what would a cat show be like?
- [09:52]
Sally Helm
That's what Harrison Weir gets to wondering. He thinks this could help people see the beauty that he sees in those scraggly creatures, passing them in the streets. And then maybe they'd start treating cats.
- [10:04]
Catherine Hughes
Better if people saw that the cats are lovely, they're purry, they're delightful to hold and you would want one in your life, then maybe he can as well bring about a sort of change in attitudes. And so that's what he sets out to do.
- [10:20]
Sally Helm
Weir decides to organize London's first ever cat show. It's 1871. He takes out ads in the local papers and almost immediately people start to laugh at him.
- [10:35]
Catherine Hughes
Edward vii, who at that point was Prince of Wales, Queen Victoria's eldest son, was so shocked at the thought of a cat show, he said, what next? We'll have a mouse show, we'll have a flea show. I mean, like, how low do you want to go?
- [10:50]
Sally Helm
Remember, cats still have that image problem. People still think of them as pests. But Harrison Weir is determined. He rents out that high ceilinged glass building, London's Crystal Palace. But he does have a little trouble finding cat contestants for the show tiny.
- [11:12]
Catherine Hughes
There's a lot of empty cages.
- [11:14]
Sally Helm
And for the cats and owners that.
- [11:16]
Catherine Hughes
Did go, we've got stories and anecdotes about the smell being absolutely disgusting. You. I mean, cats do. Even the cleanest cats do smell if you keep them indoors. If you've got 170 of them of anxious cats, people were literally walking around with their hankies stuffed to their noses. I mean, it's not fun to mention this, but it was also the first cat show. It's sort of killing feels because if you imagine you get 170cats, questionable hygiene, people then reported afterwards, you know, they got their cats home and the poor animal sort of died within three days of explosive diarrhea, you know, because of course, that's what happens.
- [11:59]
Sally Helm
Harrison Weir still has to work out some serious kinks. But the cat show is not a total failure, not at all.
- [12:07]
Catherine Hughes
This is the sort of shocking thing. Huge numbers of people come to see it. There's drawings from the time, literally people with their faces pressed up against the bars. It was extraordinary.
- [12:19]
Sally Helm
Harrison Weir will eventually be called the father of the cat fancy because people in England begin to get excited about cats. Weir himself is interested in them, not just as cute pets, but also as kind of educational specimens.
- [12:36]
Catherine Hughes
The late Victorians are very, very fond of codifying of putting people in boxes, putting like with like. And he sort of starts that same project with cats. So he starts to describe breeds, as it were, down to like. There are 10 points that a Persian must have to be a Persian, and there are 10 points a Siamese must have to be a Siamese. And then people breed their cats in order to match his descriptions. And this is how breeds emerge, if you see what I mean. It's a kind of collaborative effort.
- [13:08]
Sally Helm
His Crystal palace show becomes an annual tradition. And just as these cat shows are coming into vogue in the 1870s, a second artist comes on the scene, a real original, a guy named Louis Wayne. He's been artistic ever since he was a kid. He was originally supposed to join the family embroidery business, but instead he went to art school and discovered a love of illustration. He's found himself a niche drawing animals and he thinks, maybe I should get into cats.
- [13:41]
Catherine Hughes
I mean, he would have liked to have been a dog artist, to be absolutely honest, but that was kind of already taken. And so, again, as in the way of cats being the newcomers, nobody being very interested in cats, them being a bit low status, he spots an opportunity. You know, the field is wide open.
- [13:58]
Sally Helm
Louis Wayne's early cat illustrations are very literal, almost scientific, kind of like Harrison Weir's. But slowly his style starts to change.
- [14:08]
Catherine Hughes
He starts taking risks with it and he starts anthropomorphizing. His cats start to stand up. They can walk on two legs, they appear to have opposable thumbs. They can open doors. So gradually, he's creating a sort of hybrid human cat world.
- [14:26]
Sally Helm
Catherine Hughes calls this world Catland. She says the first serious exploration of cat land comes in a series of holiday illustrations in 1886. It's called a Kittens Christmas Party. Louis wayne draws about 150 cats engaged in the various tasks of throwing a party.
- [14:52]
Catherine Hughes
They're tidying up, as one would, you know, getting the house spick and span, sending out invitations, deciding who they want to invite, possibly excluding people that they don't really like.
- [15:02]
Sally Helm
They play games. A little mouse hunt.
- [15:05]
Catherine Hughes
They have lovely meals, a lovely sort of mouse pie and things like that. They get a bit overexcited. Fisticuffs breaks out at some, but they're like overexcited toddlers, really. So they have slightly too much sugar and they get a bit hysterical. And some of them don't want to go home because they're having such a nice time. Others are just bursting into tears because they're so overstimulated. And then the final frame shows about 10 or a dozen cats, little kittens all tucked up in bed, dreaming little sort of kitten like dreams. So it's, it's, it's beautiful and charming. But I have to say there are always with Wayne, right from the start, these points of viciousness. You know, somebody's always getting left out, somebody's always in tears, somebody's feeling a bit sick, and somebody is sneaking off to go and perhaps bully somebody else.
- [16:02]
Sally Helm
She says it's like this huge panorama of little microdramas. And she thinks that is what makes Wayne's work so interesting.
- [16:11]
Catherine Hughes
People absolutely love it. So now they're doing things like they're going to the theater or they're playing tennis, they're going sailing.
- [16:19]
Sally Helm
Wayne draws more and more cats living their lives in cat land.
- [16:24]
Catherine Hughes
We have this suddenly this fully fledged world and people adore it. And I think it must be because, you know, as a cat owner, one always wonders what one's cats get up to when one's not looking. Cause it's very easy to believe that they do have a secret life. You know, are our cats going out and having conversations, committee meetings, love affairs, what are they doing? And I think Wayne was the first person to tap into that, that sense that, oh, maybe as they whisk out through the door, there's all sorts of things going on that we never know about. And he paints that world.
- [17:00]
Sally Helm
In the real world, the cat craze continues. Louis Wayne has a lot to do with it and so does Harrison Weir, who is still organizing his cat shows. They are ever more prestigious and therefore ever more competitive. Two decades into these cat shows, prize winnings have risen to as much as 30 shillings, which for an average worker is the equivalent of a few weeks of pay.
- [17:28]
Catherine Hughes
And the room for bad feelings, hurt feelings and disagreements is extraordinary.
- [17:32]
Sally Helm
For example, the owner of one prize winning cat goes to the police to report that a Crystal palace employee has stolen his cat to present as his own. The court holds a cat lineup to see if the owner can identify his. He says, none of these is my cat. And the case is ultimately dismissed. Harrison Weir eventually gets sick of all this drama and decides to found an organization called the National Cat Club. They are the ones who hold that 1887 cat show at the Crystal palace, the one that is supposed to finally bring order to chaos. No more fighting, no more cats sitting in police lineups. Harrison Weir is going to clean it all up.
- [18:19]
Catherine Hughes
But the one thing I've learned about cat owners and cat breeders, like cats, they cannot come to an agreement. They will not be persuaded to do anything they don't want to do. The infighting continues as he lasts precisely three years. At the end of three years, he is so disgusted that he writes a sort of open letter in which he says, I still love cats. I cannot bear cat people. I have never met a more horrible bunch of people.
- [18:50]
Sally Helm
We're quits.
- [18:51]
Catherine Hughes
And so the National Cat Club is is left without any leader.
- [18:57]
Sally Helm
But there's one man who seems perfect.
- [19:01]
Catherine Hughes
For the job and who swoops in. Louis wayne, who's now 30 years old, has got a reputation as Mr. Catman.
- [19:08]
Sally Helm
Wayne is now super well known in the cat world and outside it. His work, his cat land, with all its cuteness and bullying. It is all over England, newspapers and magazines. It's in people's homes.
- [19:23]
Catherine Hughes
One of his editors says, it's like you look at a wall and there will be a Louis Wayne cat on it.
- [19:28]
Sally Helm
And you know, it's good to have a celebrity at the top of your organization, someone with a little pole. Unfortunately, Wayne does lack certain leadership skills.
- [19:40]
Catherine Hughes
It would be hard to think of anybody more disastrously unsuited to the job. I have to say, Wayne is terribly badly organized. Absolutely hopeless. I mean, it's just. It's disastrous.
- [19:51]
Sally Helm
Louis Wayne nearly destroys the National Cat Club for good. Want to shop Walmart? Black Friday deals first. Walmart plus members get early access to our hottest deals. Join now and get 50% off a one year annual membership. Shop Black Friday deals first with Walmart.
- [20:11]
Wesley Levisay
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- [20:44]
Etsy Ad
This episode is brought to you by Etsy. Oh, hear that?
- [20:48]
Wesley Levisay
Okay, thank you.
- [20:51]
Etsy Ad
Etsy knows these aren't the sounds of holiday gifting. Well, not the ones you're hoping for. You want squeals of delight, happy tears.
- [21:01]
Catherine Hughes
How did you.
- [21:02]
Etsy Ad
And spontaneously written songs of joy.
- [21:05]
Sally Helm
I am so happy. Oh, yeah.
- [21:08]
Catherine Hughes
Oh yeah.
- [21:08]
Sally Helm
Oh yeah.
- [21:09]
Etsy Ad
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- [21:36]
Sally Helm
Louis Wayne, famous artist, is now probably the most powerful man in the world of cats, which is not necessarily a good thing.
- [21:46]
Catherine Hughes
Well, Wayne is so hopeless, I mean, in the sense of never answering letters, never doing anything, that an aristocratic woman called Lady Marcus Beresford decides we can't go on like this. And so she decides to form a splinter group. So we have the National Cat Club, which Wayne is in charge of. We now have the Cat Club, which Lady Marcus is in charge of.
- [22:07]
Sally Helm
Lady Marcus is much more organized than Louis Wayne ever was, and she also has a lot more money. Her cat shows have nicer cages, bigger prizes. And this cat schism is heavily covered by the press.
- [22:22]
Catherine Hughes
Inadvertently, they're providing enormous amounts of ammunition for people to make fun of them. You know, if they were talking about racehorses or something, there might be a point, you know, but these people are getting so frothy up about cats, and it's the ludicrousness of it that they find hysterically funny.
- [22:41]
Sally Helm
It'll take more than a decade for the Cat Club and the National Cat Club to reconcile, but any press is good press. And as this schism deepens, cats themselves are taking off in an even bigger way. They're going beyond cat people. They're going totally mainstream, in part because they're caught up in the changing times.
- [23:05]
Catherine Hughes
This is a time of extraordinary commodification of everything. And so what you get is this, the commodified cat, as it were.
- [23:14]
Sally Helm
The commodified cat needs lots of special cat stuff, which is stocked in a brand new place, the department store, to start with. Of course, there's kitty litter.
- [23:24]
Catherine Hughes
They had just gone to the bathroom from in the garden. Now they need a special sort of litter that comes from Japan.
- [23:32]
Sally Helm
Soon there's clothing made just for cats.
- [23:35]
Catherine Hughes
Cats now need their own little winter coats. Some of them even have little boots so that their paws don't touch the ground.
- [23:42]
Sally Helm
And cats get in on a technology that was just being perfected.
- [23:47]
Catherine Hughes
You should find a photographer who specializes in cats because they don't photograph very well, and as we all know, they don't like posing. So certain kind of cat photographers set up for a fee will photograph your cat.
- [24:03]
Sally Helm
This is all happening more than 100 years ago, but it'd be right at home in our times.
- [24:08]
Catherine Hughes
I mean, they don't. I don't quite have rhinestone hoods, which I have seen on Insta, but they have extraordinary kind of fancy getups.
- [24:16]
Sally Helm
One beneficiary of the commodified cat craze is Louis Wayne. He eventually gets pushed out as president of the National Cat Club, but his cat artwork has never been more popular.
- [24:30]
Catherine Hughes
He was drawing, he reckoned, a thousand cats a year.
- [24:33]
Sally Helm
He was a household name by 1900. Cats are firmly established as a part of domestic life. They have come in from the alleys and curled up by the fireplace. By the turn of the century, it's estimated that there are 350, 50,000 pet cats in England, 200,000 in London alone. They're taking off in the United States, too, where Louis Wayne travels to produce a comic strip for a New York newspaper. He later attends a cat show in Chicago, where he writes that most of the cats there were imported from Great Britain. But, quote, in a contest between English and American cats, I believe America's cats would win. Wayne spends three years living in America, building up cat land for a US audience. He's living back in England when World War I begins. Wayne draws up cats that encourage people to donate to the British war effort. And also during the war, he tries his hand at a new animation. Unfortunately, much like organizing cat shows, animation isn't really his thing.
- [25:45]
Catherine Hughes
He just finds the animation beyond him. He can't work quickly enough.
- [25:53]
Sally Helm
But other artists can.
- [25:55]
Catherine Hughes
And then, of course, what happens is that Felix the cat just takes off.
- [26:02]
Sally Helm
Felix the cat, you probably know him. Black cat, big white eyes. He becomes one of the most recognizable faces in animation history. Soon enough, Felix is all over the US and England. Wayne had been toiling away on a little animated cat that played golf, but there's no room for that.
- [26:23]
Catherine Hughes
The times have changed. He seems old fashioned. There's nothing worse than feeling old fashioned. And he then becomes really, really strange and starts locking himself in his room. He thinks spirits are after him. He's becoming more and more detached from a recognizable world. And his sisters have to arrange for him to be committed to, we might call this a mental hospital.
- [26:49]
Sally Helm
Now, Wayne is still beloved in England. His care is paid for by what's essentially a crowdfunding campaign. And while he is in the hospital, Wayne produces some of the most significant work of his career. It's very different than what came before. Not realistic. Cats throwing a party. This is something else. Catherine Hughes says it's hard to describe, but it's almost hallucinogenic.
- [27:18]
Catherine Hughes
I think one of his psychiatrists called it kaleidoscopic. It's not a faithful rendition of what cats look like it's still cats, but it's cats in their most sort of abstracted and patterned kind of way. But it is beautiful and it is extraordinarily intricate.
- [27:36]
Sally Helm
You can Google these illustrations. They are stunning. Hughes says the work was methodical, careful.
- [27:43]
Catherine Hughes
The psychiatrist at the time sort of said, this is not the work of a man who has lost his mind in the sense of some splurge of extraordinary, undisciplined work. It's very, very precise. It's very beautiful, it's very thoughtful. It's very considered. It's just very, very different from cats in smoking jackets at the theater.
- [28:10]
Sally Helm
This later work stands the test of time. People are still buying Louis Wayne's psychedelic cats at fancy auction houses today. Over the course of his life, it's estimated that Louis Wayne drew more than 150,000 cats. That makes him probably the most prolific cat artist in history. And today, cats, of course, are everywhere. Wayne helped make that happen. His art helped to show off their personalities, make them more approachable. All those happy cats are part of his legacy.
- [28:46]
Catherine Hughes
I think he'd be delighted that they're so well cared for in general that we don't by and large see a cat in the street. Our automatic assumption is that, not that we're going to throw a stone at it, you know, there's a sense in which it is now firmly within the domestic world.
- [29:01]
Sally Helm
As many as one third of American homes have a cat, and it's estimated that there are 220 million pet cats worldwide. If you were alive today, maybe Louisiana. Wayne would be making it big, selling to all those cat lovers with his own Instagram account or an Etsy store. But Catherine Hughes isn't so sure.
- [29:20]
Catherine Hughes
What is sort of charming about him and a lesson for us all. I don't think he would be that concerned about what other people thought about him, as it were. I don't think he was very interested in his public profile. I think he would probably be sitting quietly in a corner drawing cats.
- [29:45]
Sally Helm
Thanks for listening to History this Week, a Back Pocket Studios production in partnership with the History Channel. To stay updated on all things History this week, sign up@historythisweekpodcast.com and if you have any thoughts or questions, send us an email@historythisweekistory.com Special thanks to our guest, Catherine Hughes, author of Louis Wayne and the Great Cat Mania. This episode was produced and sound designed by Ben Dickstein and produced and story edited by me, Sally Helm, for Back Pocket Studios. Our executive producers are Ben Dickstein and David Weisbord from the History Channel. Our executive producers are Eli Lehrer and Liv Fiddler. Don't forget to follow, rate and review History this Week wherever you get your podcasts. And we will see you next week. Hey listeners, we just want to let you know that as we head into the holidays, History this Week is not going anywhere. You will have plenty of new stories to share with family and friends. So when you're showing off everything you learned, make sure to tell them you got it from History this Week.