A cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history

Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando, The Cat That Walked By Himself, Gobbolino or Behemoth in The Master and Margarita, he really existed. Protagonist of the most anthologised section of the mad poet Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno, the eccentrically spelled ginger tom now takes a fresh lease of fictionalised life in this jeu d’esprit.

Oliver Soden’s ‘biography’ of Jeoffry takes its most obvious bearings from another novelised animal biography, Virginia Woolf’s life of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush. It is, if you’ll forgive me, a pretty feline performance. It’s at once a sly introduction to Christopher Smart and the literary milieu of 18th-century London (Dr Johnson’s cat Hodge gets a cameo, and mention is made of another contemporary, the ill-fated mog memorialised in Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’), and a cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history — from the brothels and theatres of central London to the treatment of mental illness.

It has a good deal, too, to tell the reader about cats. I had a cat for years and I never noticed, for instance, that it had three sets of eyelids — but Jeoffry tells us that they do. Also that they are lactose-intolerant (a suggested cause for Jeoffry’s kittenhood nickname of ‘Squits’), that they ‘run at a higher temperature than humans’, ‘are near-sighted’, and that they can purr in alarm as well as pleasure.

It is also, of course, a work of imaginative reconstruction, of fiction, even as its scholarly apparatus — endnotes, footnotes and index— bespeaks scrupulous research. I found myself marvelling — assuming the history is to be trusted — that a single cat, at a distance of 250-odd years, can be reliably traced from kittenhood in a London bawdy house, via its most celebrated owner, to sunset years in Devon (including an encounter with the infant Samuel Taylor Coleridge).