Catland

'Remarkable' Literary Review
'Startlingly original' Amanda Foreman
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.

Reviews

'Hughes' excellent, curiosity-stuffed book is about the moment towards the end of the 19th century when cats started to be afforded the same dignity as dogs’ Philip Hensher, Spectator
‘Hughes has a brilliant eye for absurdities and untold stories. This isn’t a gushing ode to pussycats but a wide-ranging history of a period of huge upheaval told through the changing fortunes of a domestic animal and an artist losing his grip on his finances and sanity' i News
'Kathryn Hughes is one of our best loved and most incisively witty social historians. Louis Wain, whose anthropomorphised kitties brought the lowly English mouser prancing into the parlours, bedrooms and even ballrooms of England, provides the biographical thread for her brilliantly researched and unforgettable portrait of Victorian times' Miranda Seymour, author of I Used to Live Here Once
‘On Victorian and Edwardian terrain, Hughes is near-omniscient … Through humour elegance and sheer knowledge, Hughes builds something remarkable’ Literary Review
‘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’ Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire