Why are Cheshire cats said to grin? The question was posed in 1850 in Notes and Queries, the Victorian periodical that operated on the same principle as Wikipedia, through readers’ contributions.
Why are Cheshire cats said to grin? The question was posed in 1850 in Notes and Queries, the Victorian periodical that operated on the same principle as Wikipedia, through readers’ contributions. The question, and some answers, are included in an entertaining selection from Notes and Queries made by Justin Lovill under the title Ringing Church Bells to Ward off Thunderstorms (Bunbury Press, £12.99). I gave a copy to my husband to keep him quiet, but he keeps reading out bits from the next room, just out of earshot, while I’m cleaning vegetables.
The Notes and Queries question was posed 15 years before Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice asks the Duchess if she could tell her ‘why your cat grins like that?’ Her answer is gnomic: ‘It’s a Cheshire cat,’ said the Duchess, ‘and that’s why. Pig!’ The last remark was made to her sneezing baby.
The phrase was already established. In 1808, Charles Lamb uses it in a letter and then breaks off into a parenthesis: ‘(Why do cats grin in Cheshire? — Because it was once a county palatine, and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.)’ The same nonsense explanation is presented by the questioner in Notes and Queries, though he could not remember where it came from. Since Lamb’s letters were published in 1837, perhaps he half-remembered them.
The Oxford English Dictionary declares the origin as ‘undetermined’, and refers readers to the very page in N&Q that Mr Lovill has reproduced. In it a reader signed ‘H’ suggests the Cheshire cat is ‘the unhappy attempts of a sign painter to represent a lion rampant, which was the crest of an influential family, on the signboards of many of the inns’ of the county.
This has some plausibility, even if the writer meant shield, not crest. Some mediaeval earls of Chester had a rampant lion on their shields, but the lions that often look to me as though they are grinning are those called leopards by heralds. These are passant guardant (heads turned to the viewer) on the arms of the kings of England, and on those of earls of Chester as heir to the throne (such as the future Edward II).
A less likely explanation is that Cheshire cheese was once made in moulds that made it look like a cat with — presumably — a cheesy grin.
It may seem odd to use a simile to an unknown object, but language devours fossilised references with an easy grin.
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