The Spectator magazine is the greatest magazine of English language. Subscribe today for just £12

£12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online to see for yourselves. Also, against my advice is editor, we're giving away a free £20 £10,000 or Waitrose Voucher. Given that you're spending £12, you can do the maths.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher. But don't hurry because this offer probably loses us money.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of the spectator, and this week my guest is

the author and historian, Catherine Hughes, whose new book is Catland, Feline Enchantment and the Making of the

modern world. Catherine, welcome. Can you start, I mean a really obvious question is, what do you mean by

Catland? I mean several things. First of all, it's a word that was very associated with Louis Wayne,

who was a famous cat illustrator from the 1880s onwards. He often incorporated that word into his

title. So it would be Louis Wayne's Catland and feline friends, that sort of thing. But the word

had actually existed a long time before that. He didn't

invent it. It was in use from about, I think, mid-19th century, where people just wanted to talk

about a growing sense that the cat was changing status. It was coming out of the margins,

out of barns and basement kitchens, and coming into the drawing room, as it were.

And suddenly people were going sort of a bit cat crazy.

And so there was this word catland, which, of course, was used by some people in a very pejorative way.

You know, Catland is a mad world where old ladies, kiddies and slightly

suspect bachelors hang out stroking their pusses. And yeah, and the is intended because

it's there. So it's a multi-layered term, I think. Well, it's this transformation you

describe, which is kind of the thread, I guess, one of the threads that runs through your book.

I mean, it's kind of a surprise, I think, to most of your readers, certainly was to me a little bit.

Because, well, thanks of, you know, Thomas Gray, of Dr. Johnson's cat, Hodge, even of Christopher Smart, and they're, oh, you know, cats being treated as pets and being beloved companions goes right back or goes further back.

That's not right, is it?

...