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A SPECTATOR AND TLS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024

‘Smart, gorgeously written cultural history’ TLS

‘Joyous cultural history’ The Times

‘Delightful’ Guardian

Some called it a craze. To others it was a cult. Join prize-winning historian Kathryn Hughes to discover how Britain fell in love with cats and ushered in a new era.

‘He invented a whole cat world’ declared H. G. Wells of Louis Wain, the Edwardian artist whose anthropomorphic kittens made him a household name. His drawings were irresistible but Catland was more than the creation of one eccentric imagination. It was an attitude – a way of being in society while discreetly refusing to follow its rules.

As cat capitalism boomed in the spectacular Edwardian age, prized animals changed hands for hundreds of pounds and a new industry sprung up to cater for their every need. Cats were no longer basement-dwelling pest-controllers, but stylish cultural subversives, more likely to flaunt a magnificent ruff and a pedigree from Persia. Wherever you found old conventions breaking down, there was a cat at the centre of the storm.

Whether they were flying aeroplanes, sipping champagne or arguing about politics, Wain’s feline cast offered a sly take on the restless and risky culture of the post-Victorian world. No-one experienced these uncertainties more acutely than Wain himself, confined to a mental asylum while creating his most iconic work. Catland is a fascinating and fabulous unravelling of our obsession with cats, and the man dedicated to chronicling them.

Kathryn Hughes is one of our best loved and most incisively witty social historians … brilliantly researched and unforgettable’ Miranda Seymour

‘On Victorian and Edwardian terrain, Hughes is near-omniscient … Through humour, elegance and sheer knowledge, Hughes builds something remarkable’ Literary Review

‘If a Louis Wain cat were reading this book, he would raise his topper in tribute’ The Times

‘An entertaining and often surprising cultural history … typically delivered in an inviting spirit of delight’ New Yorker

‘Hughes combines ingenuity, insight, and immense literary charm … A perfect gift for cat lovers, art lovers, and readers of all persuasions’ Elaine Showalter

Publisher Review

‘In Catland, Kathryn Hughes combines ingenuity, insight, and immense literary charm in a study of cat culture and modernism. A perfect gift for cat lovers, art lovers, and readers of all persuasions’ Elaine Showalter, Princeton University

‘Catland is a one-off, a book of high whimsy and deep research, a work of great subtly that is also startlingly original. Part-biography, part-social history, Catland is its own breed of historical investigation. Kathryn Hughes shows us not how we see ourselves, or even how we see our cats, but how we see ourselves in our cats, for better or worse, or in T.S. Eliot’s case, better or verse’ Amanda Foreman, historian and author of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire