Kathryn Hughes in conversation with The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize

How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize?

I am so thrilled to be shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. It consistently shows an independence of spirit and a refusal to run with the herd which resonates so strongly with me. The books it brings to prominence aren’t necessarily the ones you’ve seen going up for all the other prizes but they are the ones that matter. I always take note of what is on the Duff Cooper shortlist to get a steer on what I should be reading next. I know that I’m going to be delighted by non-fiction that is beautifully written and not afraid to be idiosyncratic. It is exactly what I aim for in my work – so imagine the thrill of being noticed by the judges! It is one of the highlights of my working life.

What drew you to the subjects of cats, the cat fancy and Louis Wain?

I love cats, but so do a lot of people. The last thing I wanted to do was write a soppy appreciation of historical or literary cats – there’s lots of books like that out there already and they are mostly not very good (believe me, I’ve read them).

I’m an academic historian too, specialising in the Victorian period, and I was intrigued by the fact that, within the space of 30 years between 1880 and 1910, cats went from being anonymous household rat catchers to much-loved family pets. Instead of skulking in a basement kitchen, now they sat purring in front of the drawing room fire. Rather than being called ‘Puss’ or ‘hey you’ they were now ‘Lady Snowflake’ or ‘Princess Apple Blossom’.

This new culture of middle-class cat keeping spawned something called ‘the fancy’, a group of women and men who dedicated themselves to breeding good-looking cats for competition and sale. Even Queen Victoria’s favourite granddaughter was an enthusiastic cat fancier who entered her pets for rosettes and sold them to America for hundreds of dollars. Clergy daughters were particularly keen on breeding cats for profit – it beat being a governess. New industries sprung up to service the cat fancy, supplying cat food, cat baskets, cat clothes, cat art etc. From a social and economic point of view this was fascinating for an historian, and I couldn’t believe my luck that no-one had previously written about it.

As for Louis Wain – I had known his art since I was little. My grandmother, a cat breeder, had all his annuals. And, truthfully, I was always rather frightened by them. His anthropomorphic drawings show cats going about their late Victorian business. And, believe me, there is nothing cute about them. Wain’s top-hatted male cats are caught up in constant competition: they take each other to law, duke it out in the street, or cheat at golf. The female cats are ‘catty’ and remarkably uninterested in being mothers. They steal each other’s beaux, window shop endlessly for a fancy new dress, and write letters while their kittens are drowning in the bathtub. It is clear to me now that Wain was holding up an unflattering mirror to the psychological, financial and social stresses of being upwardly middle-class in the late Victorian period.

As for Louis Wain himself. I knew the gist of the sad story of how he had gone from being the most famous commercial artist in the world to a pauper ward in a lunatic asylum. But now I needed to know more – what mental illness did he suffer from, how had everything slipped away from him, and why had he suddenly become famous again in the era of 1960s Pop Art? I couldn’t believe that no-one had ever written a scholarly biography. At that moment I knew that had found my next book.

How did you plan, research and write Catland?

I started my research in late 2017 in the usual way. That meant months in the British Library tracking down every publication that Louis Wain had ever contributed to as well as beginning to work through Our Cats and Fur and Feather, two weekly magazines where the Cat Fancy gathered to debate the tricky business of how long a Blue Persian’s tale should ideally be. The problem is that these kind of ephemeral publications, which are considered low value, are not indexed and certainly not digitised. This means there is a huge amount of tedious work involved going through them, looking for tiny leads.

At the same time, I was doing biographical research which also turned out to be tricky. Most of the people I mention in the book, including Louis Wain and the main cat fanciers, had no descendants and no archives (cats do prefer not to leave a trace). But I was determined to turn over ever clue I could find, writing to people around the world in the hope that they might have something – a letter, a picture, a memory that would blow these life stories wide open.

Then in 2020 Covid struck and the research libraries that I depend on closed. From a book-researching point of view it was a nightmare. But it did give me something that I hadn’t had before – oceans of time in which I could read and re-read the material that I’d already gathered. I came to know my research intimately in a way that I don’t think had been true of my earlier books. I made new connections, saw things from different angles. So the book that emerged is, I think, richer in that way as a result of having been forced to stew in its own juices (and mine).

As for writing the book: it was hell because all writing is hell, at least for me. I wrestled for years with sentences that wouldn’t fly and phrases that didn’t mean what I wanted them to. Words skittered out of my head and failed to return when called. And then I went back over my final draft and tried to make the whole thing feel effortless and elegant and as if had come to me in a lovely dream. As if.

What were the surprises you encountered along the way?

Everything was a surprise because I had gone into the subject knowing little about it, and not even being sure whether there was enough there to make a book. The sheer weirdness of so much of the cat life was a revelation. What about the heiress Kate Strong who turns up to a grand Vanderbilt ball wearing a dress made up of cat fur? Around her neck she had a ribbon with a bell (her family’s pet name for her was ‘puss’). Then there’s the Barrison sisters, a music hall involving 5 sisters whose party piece involves pulling up their skirts and asking the gentlemen in the audience if they’d like to see their pussies? Stuffed into the front of each girl’s knickers was a little kitten (I suspect they were taxidermied). Or there’s Charles Dickens who was so fond of his pet cat that, after Bob’s death, he had his forepaw made into a handle for a letter opener. Every morning, when he was opening his correspondence, it meant he had a chance hold hands with his beloved old cat. Finally, I’m not sure what to make of Louis Wain’s suggestions that, thanks to the magnetizing capacity of their fur, cats always walk towards the North Pole (he didn’t say what they did when it was time to turn round and come home again).

Tell us how Catland can be seen as a continuation or a departure from your earlier books.

I think people were surprised when I told them that I was writing a book about Victorian cats. They know me as a university-based academic historian of the nineteenth century, and now it looked as though I had decided to produce a book for the gift market full of pictures of kitties in frocks.

To me, though, Catland seemed like an obvious continuation of my earlier scholarship. My passion has always been for finding 19th Century subjects that have been hiding in plain sight. My PhD, which turned into my first book, was about the Victorian governess – all those real-life Jane Eyres and Becky Sharps who spent the best years of their life as residential teachers in other peoples’ families. Spoiler alert: most of them didn’t find a Mr Rochester to marry. I was amazed to discover that no-one had ever written a book before about this group of lovely but marginalised young women who have left such an indelible stamp on popular understanding of Victorian culture.

My biography of Mrs Beeton was, once again, all about telling the story of a subject that everyone thought they already knew. Far from being a bossy middle-aged lady cook, Mrs Beeton was actually a 21 year old girl who had never lifted a saucepan. Oh, and she plagiarised all her recipes. It was such a huge thrill to be able to tell such a rich and unexpected story.

Victorians Undone, which was about how five famous Victorians felt in their bodies, was again all about uncovering (literally in this case) something that everyone had taken for granted. Far from being cut off from their bodies, it turns out that the Victorians spent all their time thinking about them. This was a world without antibiotics, cosmetic dentistry or enough clean handkerchiefs. It was an itchy, painful and smelly place, even for such luminaries as Queen Victoria and Charles Darwin.

With this in mind, Catland is an obvious continuation of my earlier work. In fact, when I was feeling wretched and anxious about it (that’s my default position) I told myself that all I had to do was combine the principles of my governess book with the principles of my Mrs Beeton book and I would have something worth writing: a combination of an under-reported social phenomenon (the cat fancy) and a biography of a subject about whom little was known (Louis Wain).

What advice would you give a writer of non-fiction starting out today, given the current publishing climate?

When I was starting out as a writer of non-fiction in the 1990s people told me that the climate was impossible. The Net Book Agreement, which had been in place since the beginning of the century, had just been cancelled and publishing insiders were convinced that this was the end of quality non-fiction as we knew it. I simply refused to believe that it would have any effect on me and I think that is the only attitude to have. You simply have to believe that you and your work will prevail. It doesn’t make you likeable if you say it out loud, so you should just keep saying it to yourself.

In the thirty years that I’ve been writing books, I can’t ever remember a time when someone said: ‘we are going through a golden age for non-fiction’. The climate is always bad and whatever you are writing is never quite right for the current market. You have to steel yourself not to care.

And, although it sounds slightly trite, you do have to stay true to yourself. I don’t do any form of social media in my private or professional life and I’m assured that this is disastrous. But if I did try and join Facebook or X now I would do it badly and sound ridiculous. The world will have to love me just the way I am.

What’s next for you as an author?

I’m just beginning to sniff around a subject for a new book and, at this stage, I’m too superstitious to say anything more.