Catland Louis Wain and the great cat mania

In this jaunty account, biographer Hughes (George Eliot) details the Victorian and Edwardian cat craze that transformed pitiful-looking agents of pest control into sleekly gorgeous, companionable house pets. Commercial illustrator Louis Wain, known for his big-eyed, round-faced felines, was a prominent force behind the making of "the modern cat." Though Hughes structures her narrative around his life story (which ended with a 15-year stint in an asylum--still drawing cats, but abstract and multicolored ones), she also ventures beyond his influence, tracing a web of individuals who, from 1870 to 1920, built a cat-centered subculture. Among them were Frances Simpson, who popularized breeding standards, and Harrison Weir, whose reputation as a naturalist "bestowed scientific legitimacy" onto cat shows (his 1889 "manifesto" Our Cats and All About Them claimed that the only reason cats were so ill-behaved--a common perception at the time--was because they were generally mistreated; he recounts a friend's great shock at encountering cats sitting quietly and purring). Other topics include the "cat's meat men," who sold cat food door-to-door in London, and the queer undertones sometimes apparent in the era's cat obsession (Hughes contends Edward Lear's children's poem "The Owl and the Pussy-cat" is a queer allegory). Hughes narrates her invigorating wealth of information in a clever prose style. It makes for a unique and amusing window onto turn-of-the-20th-century art and culture. (June)

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.