Catland!
Today, we chat with bestselling author Kathryn Hughes about cats' influence on history and her new book, Catland. Did you know that cats have been a part of our lives for thousands of years? Their roles have changed, and they have some pretty famous fans. Cats have influenced fashion trends, art and literature. We talk about everything cats, from Mark Twain to "cat burglars."This is an interesting and difFURent episode for sure!
Listen to Episode #141 Now:
BIO:
Kathryn Hughes is a prize-winning author whose new book Catland: Louis Wain and the Great Cat Mania (Johns Hopkins University Press) has been described by the New York Times as a ‘delight’ and the Wall Street Journal as ‘sparkling’. It tells the story of how cats in the late nineteenth century went from being useful household servants, adept at catching mice, to being much loved family pets. Outside the home, pedigree cats now became stylish fashion accessories, changing hands for hundreds of dollars. Standing to capture this transformation was Louis Wain, the famous commercial artist who put cats into pants and showed them indulging in a glamorous modern life, playing golf, going to the theatre and falling in and out of love. The novelist H G Wells said of Wain ‘he invented a whole cat world’.
Kathryn has written five books on Victorian cultural life and is currently Professor Emerita at the University of East Anglia. She writes regularly for The New York Review of Books and the Guardian newspaper.
Transcript:
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Announcer: This is Pet Life Radio.
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Announcer: Let's talk pets.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Hey there, cat lovers, welcome to Nine Lives with Dr.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Kat.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I'm your host, Dr.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Kathryn Primm, and I'm a small animal veterinarian and crazy cat lover.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Today, I have an exciting and fun guest with me, Kathryn Hughes.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: She is a prize-winning author, and she has a new book called Catland.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And I think that you're really gonna like it.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: The New York Times describes it as a delight, and the Wall Street Journal says it is sparkling.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So we're gonna talk with Kathryn and find out everything about her book and how she loves cats and how she loves history.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So we'll be right back.
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Announcer: You know the expression, cats have nine lives.
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Announcer: Well, what if you can give them one more?
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Announcer: The Give Them Ten Movement is on a mission to help give cats an extra life.
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Announcer: How?
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Announcer: With spay and neuter.
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Announcer: Spaying or neutering your cat helps them live a longer, healthier life.
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Announcer: And it helps control free-roaming cat populations, too.
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Announcer: Learn more about the benefits of spay and neuter and meet Scooter, the neutered cat, at givethemten.org.
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Announcer: That's givethemten.org.
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Announcer: Let's Talk Pets on petliferadio.com.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Welcome back to Nine Lives with Dr.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Kat on PetLife Radio.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I have Kathryn Hughes with me today.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Hi, Kathryn.
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Kathryn Hughes: Hi, Kathryn.
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Kathryn Hughes: It's very nice to speak to somebody who spells their name the same way as me.
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Kathryn Hughes: It's quite rare.
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Kathryn Hughes: So I'm so glad to talk to another Kathryn who spells her name with an L-O-I-N at the end.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I think it was you that said, there is no other way, right?
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Kathryn Hughes: There is no other way.
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Kathryn Hughes: You are so right.
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Kathryn Hughes: Everybody else is just doing it wrong.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Exactly.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So I really appreciate you taking the time to join me today.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Can you kind of start with just telling a little bit about yourself and your journey in history and cats?
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Kathryn Hughes: Yeah, of course.
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Kathryn Hughes: Well, I grew up in a really big cat-loving family.
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Kathryn Hughes: My grandmother bred blue Persian cats, and my mother, who was an only child, grew up with something like 17 cat siblings.
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Kathryn Hughes: So I come from a very long line of absolute cat lovers.
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Kathryn Hughes: I'm also a university historian, which means I'm a professor of history at university.
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Kathryn Hughes: And this project was just the sort of the perfect combination of my two interests.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, it's a sort of wonderful thing for me to do.
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Kathryn Hughes: I love history, particularly Victorian history.
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Kathryn Hughes: So the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
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Kathryn Hughes: And I adore cats.
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Kathryn Hughes: I've actually got a cat sitting on my lap here.
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Kathryn Hughes: He likes to supervise all my broadcasts.
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Kathryn Hughes: So it was just a perfect project for me.
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Kathryn Hughes: And I was just really pleased to see that it hadn't really been done before, because that's something that as an historian, you always worry about.
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Kathryn Hughes: You think, oh, somebody surely written about the way in which cats became so fashionable in the 19th century.
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Kathryn Hughes: But when I looked in the library, I found it hadn't really been done.
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Kathryn Hughes: So it was just the perfect topic for me.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Well, so cats have a long history alongside human beings.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And I know that you have looked into how this relationship began.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So can we talk a little bit about that?
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Kathryn Hughes: Yeah, sure.
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Kathryn Hughes: Well, the difference, I think the big difference between cats and dogs is that dogs were domesticated, because they started living alongside humans about 40,000 years ago.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, people argue about the date.
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Kathryn Hughes: With cats, it's only about 12,000 years ago.
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Kathryn Hughes: So already you've got this very distinct kind of relationship.
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Kathryn Hughes: Dogs were there right from the start when we were hunter-gatherers, where we were sort of running across the plains to catch our dinner.
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Kathryn Hughes: Dogs were necessary to track down the prey, to follow it down burrows, to guard the cave.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, they were there right from the beginning.
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Kathryn Hughes: Cats are much later additions to the human household.
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Kathryn Hughes: They come along once early men and women start agriculture.
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Kathryn Hughes: So once men and women start staying in one place, they're not hunting and gathering, but they're growing crops.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that's where the cat really comes in.
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Kathryn Hughes: The cat becomes very useful as a sort of semi-detached freelance domestic worker.
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Kathryn Hughes: So cats are very useful for catching rodents, for keeping the hay barn completely free of nasty critters that will eat up your foodstuffs.
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Kathryn Hughes: They're very good at keeping the domestic hearth nice and clean, but they're not integrated in the same way.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, you don't have a guard cat, for instance, nor do you have a cat sort of, I don't know, helping out hunting, hunting for dinner.
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Kathryn Hughes: It doesn't do that.
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Kathryn Hughes: So cats have always had this kind of independent relationship with humans.
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Kathryn Hughes: They're there, they're providing a service, but there's a sense in which if the terms of the engagement change, in other words, if the cat feels that it could go, it could find better terms of employment, it could go to next door's farm and find more nice things to eat, it will do that.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that I think tells us a lot about the different sort of relationships really that cats and dogs have with the human household.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, it's very interesting because early men and women bred dogs for specific tasks.
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Kathryn Hughes: So they bred sort of little, we call them dachshunds over here, sausage dogs.
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Kathryn Hughes: They go down burrows to flush out rabbits.
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Kathryn Hughes: And we bred big dogs, St.
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Kathryn Hughes: Bernards, to help pull people out of snow.
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Kathryn Hughes: And we bred big dogs to pull carts.
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Kathryn Hughes: None of that happened with cats.
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Kathryn Hughes: Cats were just left to get on with the project of reproducing themselves.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that's why cat breeds are such a recent thing.
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Kathryn Hughes: They didn't really start until the mid-Victorian period.
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Kathryn Hughes: Really, they exist still in a sort of state of nature.
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Kathryn Hughes: They're with us, but they're with us because they want to be here.
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Kathryn Hughes: I think that would be the best way to describe it.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Yeah, I like to say if a cat likes me, I feel like I've really done something because he or she doesn't really need me.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: They are choosing to be with me.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So I think that's kind of the same thing.
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Kathryn Hughes: Yeah, yeah.
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Kathryn Hughes: That is absolutely right.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that's why it's just such a privilege, as you say, when they do decide to live with you.
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Kathryn Hughes: Because it's like, I mean, I always say, it's like having a slightly kind of high-maintenance boyfriend or in the sense that, you're never quite sure of the relationship.
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Kathryn Hughes: He could be dating other people.
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Kathryn Hughes: And it's like that with a cat, it's got options.
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Kathryn Hughes: It doesn't have to kind of please you in particular.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that's what I think makes the cat so intriguing.
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Kathryn Hughes: As opposed to the dog, which is, I mean, over here, we always refer to the dog as being man's best friend.
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Kathryn Hughes: That sense in which the dog is always soldered to you.
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Kathryn Hughes: He's there, he's never going to leave you.
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Kathryn Hughes: You could introduce the most kind of appalling sort of circumstances and conditions, and he would still love you.
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Kathryn Hughes: And I think that's the difference between cats and dogs.
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Kathryn Hughes: It's that kind of really intriguing streak of independence that cats have.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I agree.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Okay, so you have some interesting, famous cat fans.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And some of these were surprises to me.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So can you talk a little bit about some of the things you uncovered along the way of famous cat fans?
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Kathryn Hughes: Well, I was really intrigued by Mark Twain, actually, because he was so cat crazy, that when he went away on holiday, he would actually make sure that the house where he was going had cats for him to live alongside.
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Kathryn Hughes: If it didn't have that, he would hire cats locally to come and live with him.
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Kathryn Hughes: Say, he rented a cottage in the summer for six weeks, he would actually rent local cats to come and live with him, which I think is just quite extraordinary and struck everybody as completely eccentric, of course, at the time.
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Kathryn Hughes: Then we've got Florence Nightingale, very famous one of our really famous nurses, the first nurse.
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Kathryn Hughes: She lived with, I think she had 17 cats and she lived in London.
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Kathryn Hughes: And she would absolutely, I mean, she treated them like people and she called them after famous politicians.
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Kathryn Hughes: So she would call them Gladstone.
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Kathryn Hughes: That was the name of our prime minister at the time, or Disraeli, another prime minister.
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Kathryn Hughes: And she also talks in her letters to her friends about wanting to find them good husbands.
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Kathryn Hughes: So she's always trying to mate her cats with other pedigree animals.
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Kathryn Hughes: And her cats are actually just rather resistant to this, because they're indoor and outdoor cats.
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Kathryn Hughes: So her cats like to go outside and mate with rather rough street cats.
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Kathryn Hughes: And Flores Nightingale is absolutely appalled by this.
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Kathryn Hughes: And she says that no matter how much she tries to find nice suitors for her cats, that they will always have their own way with the sort of neighborhood toms.
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Kathryn Hughes: And she's very, very outraged by that.
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Kathryn Hughes: And then there's some really spooky sort of behaviors that I think we would find very strange.
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Kathryn Hughes: So Charles Dickens, the famous novelist, he was very fond of a cat called Bob.
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Kathryn Hughes: So much so that when Bob died, Dickens had Bob's front forepaw made into a sort of a handle for a letter opener.
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Kathryn Hughes: So if you can imagine, Bob's sort of the front bit of his paw was attached to a knife.
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Kathryn Hughes: And then Dickens used that every day to open his letters.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that really gruesome letter opener can be found, I think it's in the New York Library.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that I think strikes us as very odd, because while we love our cats, I think the idea of after their death, of cutting bits off them, and then incorporating them into household furniture, would honestly strike us as completely unacceptable and quite macabre.
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Kathryn Hughes: So it's very, very interesting to see how attitudes have changed to what you do with your cat and how you commemorate them.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I agree.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I would not make anything out of my cat's parts.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So I find that a little odd.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Now, there are some of the things that I've read aren't as odd, like the man who had his new house built on the same design as his old house, so it wouldn't confuse his cat.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And I mean, some of the things are a little more in line with what I might do.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: But you tell us some more.
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Kathryn Hughes: Yeah, no, you're mentioning there Edward Lear, the famous poet who wrote a poem called The Owl and the Pussycat, which every English school child knows.
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Kathryn Hughes: Owl and Pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat.
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Kathryn Hughes: Lear was an absolute cat man.
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Kathryn Hughes: He lived in the Italian Riviera, and he was so attached to his cat, who was called Foss, that when Lear decided that he had to move house, instead of just moving house, he had a villa built on exactly the same plan as his current house.
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Kathryn Hughes: So that Foss, who was getting quite elderly, wouldn't be confused about the layout of the rooms.
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Kathryn Hughes: And I think that's kind of completely charming, this idea that you would construct your house entirely to take account of the preferences of your aging cat.
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Kathryn Hughes: But I think that seemed so eccentric that that's a story that has come down to us.
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Kathryn Hughes: So it tells you that actually most people didn't do that sort of thing.
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Kathryn Hughes: I think what I was very surprised to discover in the 19th century was still that the cat was regarded as not having a kind of incredibly high status.
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Kathryn Hughes: So people weren't necessarily cruel to cats, but the idea that you would lavish attention on them in quite the same way that we do today, or that Edward Lear did, that seems quite unusual, I think.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So not very many people like you said Thomas Hardy carved gravestones.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Not very many people did that back then.
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Kathryn Hughes: That's true, actually.
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Kathryn Hughes: So Thomas Hardy, one of our great novelists, wrote Tests of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure.
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Kathryn Hughes: He was a devoted cat man.
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Kathryn Hughes: Unfortunately, he had really bad luck because his house was very near to the railway.
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Kathryn Hughes: Railways had just come in.
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Kathryn Hughes: They were the big new thing.
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Kathryn Hughes: Unfortunately, the railway ran at the bottom of his garden, which meant his cats tended to come to grief on the railway line.
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Kathryn Hughes: And this absolutely undid him with grief.
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Kathryn Hughes: He was absolutely distraught about this.
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Kathryn Hughes: And what he would do, he would insist on carving gravestones for each of his cats in the garden.
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Kathryn Hughes: And although he was a great novelist, he had started, he was a working man.
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Kathryn Hughes: He had started actually as a stonemason.
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Kathryn Hughes: So he'd come from very humble beginnings.
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Kathryn Hughes: But he remembered those skills.
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Kathryn Hughes: And so even as an elderly man, he would use his old kind of stone marking tools to make these very elaborate graves for his cats in the garden.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that is actually a very sort of charming story, I think.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Yes, I think it's very charming.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I think today we do a lot of those things.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: But back then, it was really different.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I want to take a quick break and come right back and talk about some surprising things and some creepy things that I learned from Catland.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And I want you to give the taste of.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So we'll be right back.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Let's talk pets.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Let's talk pets.
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Announcer: On PetLife Radio.
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Announcer: petliferadio.com.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Welcome back to Nine Lives with Dr.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Kat on PetLife Radio.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So Kathryn Hughes and I are talking about cats in history, interesting things that people did because they loved their cats, and surprising facts.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So there are some interesting facts that have kind of come down through history where cats have played a role that I was surprised by.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Can we talk about those?
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Kathryn Hughes: Yeah, which ones did you have in mind particularly?
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I thought it was super interesting, the role that cats played in fashion.
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Kathryn Hughes: Ah, yeah, that is absolutely extraordinary.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, again, there's some slightly creepy things.
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Kathryn Hughes: There was in the 1880s, one of the Vanderbilts held a very swish party in New York to celebrate having built a house that was bigger than anybody else's.
00:16:31.161 --> 00:16:41.961
Kathryn Hughes: And one of the guests actually arrived, it was a fancy dress ball, arrived in a dress that was entirely made out of cat skins.
00:16:41.961 --> 00:16:51.021
Kathryn Hughes: And on her head, she had perched a whole kitten head that was sort of, sort of popped on front and on top of her head like a hat.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, this seems absolutely extraordinary.
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Kathryn Hughes: We would find this absolutely repulsive.
00:16:56.021 --> 00:16:59.041
Kathryn Hughes: But the newspapers took many, many photographs of her.
00:16:59.041 --> 00:17:00.841
Kathryn Hughes: It was in the New York Times.
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Kathryn Hughes: People thought it was a simply sort of charming thing to do.
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Kathryn Hughes: Again, I find that really, really strange.
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Kathryn Hughes: And the other thing that happened once, once people started driving in the new automobiles, which tended to be open to the elements.
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Kathryn Hughes: So therefore quite chilly, quite cold.
00:17:18.861 --> 00:17:25.721
Kathryn Hughes: There was again a feeling that cat skin was particularly good at making car coats.
00:17:25.721 --> 00:17:37.141
Kathryn Hughes: So very, very dense fur would, would be made into a coat that would then protect your chauffeur in particular from the driving wind that came with driving in an automobile.
00:17:37.141 --> 00:17:42.121
Kathryn Hughes: So that sort of thing again, seems absolutely repugnant to us, I think.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: But cats were kind of prestigious in Egypt and in times before.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So I don't know, how did that devolve that way?
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Kathryn Hughes: I think what happened, cats weren't worshipped in Egypt.
00:17:55.101 --> 00:18:03.361
Kathryn Hughes: That's a bit of a sort of misunderstanding, but they were, you're absolutely right, they were revered, and they were treated with immense kind of honor.
00:18:03.361 --> 00:18:12.561
Kathryn Hughes: And what seems to happen is that, as in, it happens a lot in history, things change, different things happen, fashions go up and down.
00:18:12.561 --> 00:18:18.201
Kathryn Hughes: So what seems to have happened after the Egyptians is that cats then become farm servants.
00:18:18.201 --> 00:18:25.101
Kathryn Hughes: As I said before, they're helping out, keeping, keeping farmyards free from, from, from, from mice.
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Kathryn Hughes: And then what happens, I think in the beginning of the 19th century is that cats, people start looking at cats again in a new way, and sort of honouring them, not just as kind of helpful kitchen pest, pest controllers, but as much loved companion animals.
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Kathryn Hughes: And so what you find is you find families bringing their cats up from the kitchen and introducing them to the sitting room and the drawing room, and giving them quite a sort of honoured place as a family member.
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Kathryn Hughes: And cats start to become the playfellow of middle-class children in particular.
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Kathryn Hughes: So there's an idea that a cat is a nice way, giving a child a cat to play with is a nice way, not just of honouring the cat, but also teaching the child kindness, teaching the child cleanliness, because the Victorians were very, very keen on the fact that cats are very, very clean animals.
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Kathryn Hughes: And so there's this feeling that if you introduced your slightly untidy, messy children to a pet cat, they might pick up kind of some good habits of hygiene.
00:19:32.861 --> 00:19:37.601
Kathryn Hughes: There was something else that Victorians really, really admired cats for.
00:19:37.601 --> 00:19:40.761
Kathryn Hughes: That was that cats are very, very good mothers.
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Kathryn Hughes: They look after their kittens really immaculately.
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Kathryn Hughes: They would do anything for their kittens.
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Kathryn Hughes: They really, really kind of make sure that they're well and they're fed.
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Kathryn Hughes: And again, actually Victorian families liked that as a sort of model for how they would like their families or how they would like to think that middle-class women would conduct themselves.
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Kathryn Hughes: So it's very interesting.
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Kathryn Hughes: The cat goes from being this slightly kind of raw boned family kitchen servant, comes up to the drawing room or the sitting room and becomes a sort of model of genteel behavior.
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Kathryn Hughes: It's very, very interesting.
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Kathryn Hughes: And along the way, the cat gets a new kind of identity.
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Kathryn Hughes: So when it's in the kitchen, it's possibly called Puss or Kitty or something very generic.
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Kathryn Hughes: Once the cat is introduced into the drawing room, it starts to have really quite grand names.
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Kathryn Hughes: So people start calling their cats things like Snowball or Princess Elvira or something very sort of grand and slightly dainty.
00:20:49.081 --> 00:20:54.041
Kathryn Hughes: And that, I think, tells you something about the way that cat's status, as it were, changes.
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Kathryn Hughes: They become honored family members.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And then they influenced things like makeup, which I found very, very fascinating because people still do cat eye makeup now.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: But talk a little bit about that.
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Kathryn Hughes: Yeah, I find that so interesting.
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Kathryn Hughes: So it really so happens in the 1920s, so a little bit later.
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Kathryn Hughes: You're absolutely right.
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Kathryn Hughes: That's around the time that great discoveries are being made in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.
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Kathryn Hughes: And the pharaoh's tombs are coming to light.
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Kathryn Hughes: And people are starting to see, because there's now photography, images of those extraordinary pictures of what Tutankhamun and the female members of the pharaoh's family, what they look like.
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Kathryn Hughes: And what they have is that very distinctive cat eye.
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Kathryn Hughes: And which, of course, Egyptians, they made that makeup out of sort of coal and water.
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Kathryn Hughes: But Helena Rubenstein, the cosmetics innovator, around this time, introduces eyeliner to American women in particular, comes over to Britain, and teaches them how to do what we now call the cat flick, that sort of coal kind of line along the edge of your eyelashes.
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Kathryn Hughes: And then that little flick that makes you look like a cat, which is always very popular.
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Kathryn Hughes: I mean, it goes in and out of fashion.
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Kathryn Hughes: It was very popular in the 1960s, but it's very popular again now.
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Kathryn Hughes: And that was so, so interesting, I think.
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Kathryn Hughes: This idea that an idea of Egyptians, and idea of Egyptians loving cats ends up with Helena Ruebenstein making this particular kind of cosmetics that means that American women in the 1920s, again in the 1960s, and again now, can make that little sort of cat flick.
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Kathryn Hughes: I think it's absolutely fascinating.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Yes, it's on TikTok.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I mean, it's really lasted the distance.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Okay, so I know we're kind of running out of time, but you talked about some, a little bit of kind of the creepy things that people have done, but you've got specific cases of creepiness that involves cats.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Can we talk about some of those?
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Kathryn Hughes: Yeah, if it's not too upsetting, I'm very aware that some of this stuff sounds very, very strange.
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Kathryn Hughes: In Britain, there's long been a tradition of people stuffing animals to make sort of human pictures and images.
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Kathryn Hughes: And what we get in about the 1880s is a man called Walter Potter, who is stuffs kittens and then marshals them into kind of sort of all too human settings.
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Kathryn Hughes: So he makes something called the kittens wedding, which is very famous, which shows lots of little stuffed kittens.
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Kathryn Hughes: And they're all dressed up in a high Victorian fancy kit.
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Kathryn Hughes: And they're all there.
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Kathryn Hughes: It's there's a bride and a bridegroom and a vicar, a priest and a whole congregation.
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Kathryn Hughes: And it's both, I mean, charming and completely, completely weird if you, if you think about it for a bit too long.
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Kathryn Hughes: There was also a Philadelphian man and he became very, very famous for stuffing kittens again, and then making them, dressing them up in human gear, and making them look as if they were living a sort of down-home American dream.
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Kathryn Hughes: And I remember seeing those books as a child.
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Kathryn Hughes: My grandmother, who is a cat breeder, had some of them and they really gave me the creeps.
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Kathryn Hughes: You can still, you can still see them now.
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Kathryn Hughes: You can certainly see them on Pinterest and things like that.
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Kathryn Hughes: So cat, little kittens dressed up in gingham frocks, doing Americana things, making pies, greeting the postman, doing the washing, swinging on a swing, posting a letter.
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Kathryn Hughes: And again, people seem to have found this thing absolutely charming.
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Kathryn Hughes: I think we would find it very strange.
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Kathryn Hughes: I don't think we'd ever let a child see this now because it would give anybody nightmares.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Well, and it would be illegal.
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Kathryn Hughes: And it would be illegal.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Okay.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: So what about some phrases that we had in the English language like cat burglar?
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Where did that come from?
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Kathryn Hughes: Oh, that's so interesting.
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Kathryn Hughes: So this was a man in the 1920s.
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Kathryn Hughes: We don't even quite know what his name was because he kept on changing it because he was that much of a criminal.
00:25:29.201 --> 00:25:35.621
Kathryn Hughes: Anyway, young man who made a name for himself as a very, very skilled burglar.
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Kathryn Hughes: And so what he would do is he would climb up drainpipes when, even when the families were inside, sitting down, he would climb up their drainpipes, shimmy in through a bathroom window that had been left open, and then steal all the jewelry that he could find or any money.
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Kathryn Hughes: And this so baffled the police before they caught him, that they referred to him as the Cat Burglar of Streatham.
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Kathryn Hughes: Because he seemed like a magic person.
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Kathryn Hughes: He arrived in the dark, in the night.
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Kathryn Hughes: You could never catch him.
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Kathryn Hughes: He was gone before anybody could find him.
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Kathryn Hughes: And actually, I think it was the Washington Post found this so interesting that they ran a story about the Cat Burglar of London town, and it took off in America.
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Kathryn Hughes: Obviously, not the same burglar.
00:26:25.141 --> 00:26:27.741
Kathryn Hughes: He was by now locked up safely in prison.
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Kathryn Hughes: But it sort of started a fashion for other burglars to do this thing of not going to the scene of the crime armed with heavy kind of hammers and mallets and baseball bats, but simply armed with your very lithe body and your nine lives, doing the deed, doing the bad deed before anybody had noticed what was going on.
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Kathryn Hughes: So it's a fascinating story.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: Well, I agree.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And I don't want to spoil all of the fascination of your book.
00:26:57.941 --> 00:27:06.821
Dr. Kathryn Primm: I would love to hear what you hope that readers will take away from your book and maybe touch a little bit more on the premise of the actual book.
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Kathryn Hughes: Well, the premise of the book is about the fact that Kat's really four centuries had been almost invisible, which is to say there were lots of them around.
00:27:18.441 --> 00:27:23.561
Kathryn Hughes: Every farmyard had them, every basement kitchen had them, but nobody really noticed them.
00:27:23.561 --> 00:27:26.741
Kathryn Hughes: They were sort of part of the domestic furniture, as it were.
00:27:27.541 --> 00:27:53.421
Kathryn Hughes: And then what seems to happen in about the middle of the 19th century is that suddenly people start noticing these extraordinary creatures, which have been amongst them all this time, beautiful, clever, skilled, and fascinatingly independent, as we said, always slightly semi-detached, always able, as it were, to move on if they found something that liked them better.
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Kathryn Hughes: And what seems to happen is that this vision of the cat as a very modern creature, someone who can negotiate the new urban conditions, who thrives in the city, who always can find something to do, could find a way to survive, all that thrives, all that chimes very nicely with the way in which humans are also moving into the cities and finding new ways of living together, new ways of surviving, new kinds of jobs, new kinds of activities, and a sense that the world is speeding up, that there's cinema, there's automobiles, that world is suddenly becoming modern.
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Kathryn Hughes: And it is a world into which the cat fits very nicely, I think, and there was a very famous artist, both, he's British, but he worked in New York for a while, called Louis Wayne, who made some fabulous pictures of cats living a sort of modern urban life.
00:28:54.581 --> 00:29:07.681
Kathryn Hughes: So dressed up in clothes, going about a modern, rather sort of, rather kind of exciting, glamorous life, going to the theater, meeting friends to play tennis, driving an automobile.
00:29:07.681 --> 00:29:16.121
Kathryn Hughes: And somehow Louis Wayne managed to sort of put together this notion of the cat as a very kind of modern and slightly glamorous animal.
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Kathryn Hughes: And I was so intrigued by the way in which these things come together, that modern urban living comes together just at the point where people start is, started to notice cats in a slightly different way.
00:29:30.561 --> 00:29:37.901
Kathryn Hughes: And I do think cats, if it's not too highfalutin to say this, cats sort of start to kind of be an agent of change.
00:29:37.901 --> 00:29:40.561
Kathryn Hughes: They start to make the world seem modern.
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Kathryn Hughes: And I was very, very excited in, in exploring that.
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Kathryn Hughes: But also in finding out all sorts of just extraordinary interesting stories along the way.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: I agree 100 percent.
00:29:52.821 --> 00:29:59.501
Dr. Kathryn Primm: And I appreciate you taking the time to share your incredible thoughts and all the cool little snippets from your book.
00:29:59.501 --> 00:30:05.781
Dr. Kathryn Primm: Let's talk about where my audience can find your book and learn more about you.
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Kathryn Hughes: Oh, okay.
00:30:06.621 --> 00:30:08.021
Kathryn Hughes: Well, that's very kind of you to ask.
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Kathryn Hughes: Now, the book in America is called Catland.
00:30:11.921 --> 00:30:18.381
Kathryn Hughes: And of course, you can get it in all good bookstores or Amazon, should you want to go there.
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Kathryn Hughes: I've got a website, which is kathrynhughes.co.uk.
00:30:22.961 --> 00:30:25.901
Kathryn Hughes: And Kathryn, as we've already discussed, is beltkathrynhughes.co.uk.
00:30:30.681 --> 00:30:33.761
Kathryn Hughes: And I think the links there will point you to the book.
00:30:33.761 --> 00:30:36.521
Kathryn Hughes: It's very easily available.
00:30:36.521 --> 00:30:45.861
Kathryn Hughes: And you can also read on the website just a bit more about me and my work and the kinds of historical topics that I'm interested in.
00:30:45.861 --> 00:30:48.061
Dr. Kathryn Primm: So the book is a really, really easy read.
00:30:48.061 --> 00:30:54.521
Dr. Kathryn Primm: I encourage all of my listeners to check it out because you will learn something interesting about cats.
00:30:54.521 --> 00:30:57.081
Dr. Kathryn Primm: So thanks again for your time today.
00:30:57.081 --> 00:31:02.721
Dr. Kathryn Primm: And also, I would like to thank my producer Mark Winter because he makes it all happen.
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Dr. Kathryn Primm: And I would like for all of my listeners to go out and have a perfect day.
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