There's a movie with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Wain. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021). Not my favorite movie, but maybe someone here might like it.
I agree, I don’t particularly like it as a movie… but I also can’t stop thinking about it, and Wain. I even just brought it up at work today, so funny to see a story about him on HN a few hours later!
"Weasel-faced and rat-tailed". WTF? Has this guy ever seen cats, rats, and weasels? Weasels have long pointy faces, cats have short flat ones. Outside the primates, you would be hard-pressed to find an animal whose face looks less like a weasel's, nor more like a human's, than a cat's. Similarly, rates have naked tails, cats have fluffy tails. A cat's tail looks less like a rat's tail than a monkey's does. The only animals that are less "rat-tailed" than cats are ones that have no tails at all.
The article of course is about how Mr Wain invented one (rather odd) image of cats in Victorian literature. The cats themselves seem to have remained much the same for millenia. Which in itself is interesting as dogs have hugely been changed from their wolf origins by selective breeding but cats seem to have mostly remained independent and done their own thing.
This article is focused just on western views on cats. Particularly British views.
Views of cats throughout history and in other parts of the world aren’t covered in this article. No mention of how changing British views of the cat may or may not have had influence on the culture of British colonies either.
It’s a book review column, and the book is “Catland” by the literary critic Kathryn Hughes. She focuses on Victorian literature, so it’s not surprising that this isn’t a global survey of cultural attitudes about cats through the ages.
Greek historian Herodotus reports that, [in ancient Egyptian society] whenever a household cat died, the entire family would mourn and shave their eyebrows.
Cats were given ritual burials in ancient Egypt [1]; killing one carried the death penalty [2].
Puss in Boots is based on India’s Panchtantra; they feature positively in Persian, Chinese and Japanese literature and mythology, too [id].
The exception to the rule, in fact, seems to be the Norse, from whom I presume the Britons acquired their disposition. (We continue to treat pets as property under U.S. law.)
