William Blake’s Cat

Mary Ann Linnell, wife to John Linnell and mother-in-law to Samuel Palmer, recalled in a letter of 1839 that “Mr Blake … used to say how much he preferred a cat to a dog as a companion because she was so much more quiet in her expression of attachment”.

It was perhaps in vague recollection of Mrs Linnell’s words that Tim Heath, two weeks ago, just before the Blake Society Zoom meeting, asked me if the Blakes, Catherine and William, ever had a cat. The answer is yes.

The Blakes moved to a cottage at Felpham in Sussex in September 1800 where Blake could work under the often burdensome patronage of the wealthy writer William Hayley. There he made the acquaintance of Hayley’s friend John Marsh (1752-1828) of Chichester, attorney, musician, prolific gentleman composer (thirty-nine symphonies), and diarist. Marsh recorded most of his long life in minute detail, in a journal that survives in thirty-seven volumes at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

In his Journal for 5 April 1802, Marsh wrote: “On Monday the 5th our white Cat produced 4 white Kittens, one of which we saved for Mr Blake of Felpham (Mr Hayley’s friend) but had great difficulty in rearing it, the Cat seeming to have very little Milk—”, and then repeated in his marginal summary: “Bred a White Kitten for Mr Blake”. It is pleasant to picture the white kitten playing with Catherine’s embroidery wool, or William, sitting quietly for once, dozing with a white kitten on his lap. (My understanding is that the gene that causes cats to have completely white fur is also linked to congenital hearing impairment. White cats with blue eyes are commonly deaf. One hopes that the Blakes’ white kitten escaped that disability.) Marsh’s journal also reports visits to Blake on 9th May and 26th June 1801, and gifts of white kittens to others in December 1801. Three years later, on 22th May 1805, he wrote again: “We drove to Felpham & carried our little white kitten to Mr Hayley”.

The Blakes would have had to leave the white cat behind when they returned to London in September 1803. Cats like to come and go, and could not have been accommodated in their first-floor rooms in South Molton Street. (The OED’s earliest citation for cat litter—”an absorbent material, typically in the form of coarse grains of dried clay, used in an indoor box to absorb the urine and faeces of a domestic cat”—is 1956. And as for a scratching post to stop your cat destroying the furniture, the OED citation is as late as 1968.)

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Early humans were hunter-gatherers, and dogs were domesticated to assist in the hunt. But cats only became useful to humans with the development of agriculture, when people began to till the earth and—crucially—store surplus crops. With grain stores came mice, and when wild cats first wandered into agricultural settlements, the cats were delighted by the abundance of prey in the storehouses; people were delighted by the pest control. Cats, it would seem, domesticated themselves. Cats became such a basic part of human life that they’re hardly noticed or mentioned (there are no cats in the Bible), and yet they are, I would say, necessary to civilization.

The Ancrene Wisse or “Guide for Anchoresses” is an anonymous thirteenth-century manual for women who have chosen to live alone, walled up in a cell, devoting themselves to a life of prayer and contemplation. It prescribes an enclosed life of deep austerity. Anchoresses were prohibited from eating meat and are advised to lie on nothing softer than a rush mat and use an arm in lieu of a pillow. They were not allowed any accessories or items of clothing that were decorative rather than practical; rings, brooches, patterned belts and gloves were forbidden. They were allowed one animal companion, a cat. Perhaps the cat, keeping her anchoress’s cell clear of rats and mice, was what protected Dame Julian while the Black Death raged through fourteenth-century Norwich.

Certainly, in Blake’s London, every house and shop would have had its cat. He would have known the family cat while growing up in Broad Street, and William and Catherine must have had a cat when at Hercules Buildings in Lambeth. On their return from Felpham to South Molton Street and later Fountain Court, their landlords’ cats would have prowled the house.

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I can count just five mentions of cats in the whole of Blake’s writing. There’s the baffling reference in An Island in the Moon, where Mrs Gimblet “seemd to listen with great attention while the Antiquarian seemd to be talking of virtuous cats, but it was not so. she was thinking of the shape of her eyes & mouth & he was thinking, of his eternal fame”. Virtuous cats is perhaps a comic malapropism but of what I don’t know. Maybe the comedy involves Dr. Gustavus Katterfelto, the German lecturer on the “Philosophical, Mathematical, Optical, Magnetical, Electrical, Chemical, and Pneumatic Arts”, who entertained London in the 1780s. Featuring electrified cats, an arithmetically-adept dog, and giant microscopes, his show reached its high point when his daughter, wearing a metal helmet, was hoisted to the ceiling “by the power of a single magnet”. 

In Auguries of Innocence, that wonderful summing-up of Blake’s thought, he writes

The Beggers Dog & Widows Cat
Feed them & thou wilt grow fat

Blake here has spotted the affinity between widows and cats. (For many years, in the 1980s and 1990s, Mrs Cissie Walledge, an elderly widow in Edmonton, organised “Madam Fluffy’s Garden Party” to raise funds for the Cats Protection League. Mrs Walledge kept the annual garden party going long after Madam Fluffy had ascended to kitty-heaven; it became a must for local politicians and aspiring politicians. Michael Portillo was seen there when MP for Enfield-Southgate, though attendance failed to save his political career.)

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In 1797, Blake’s friend, the sculptor John Flaxman, commissioned him to illustrate Thomas Gray’s poems as a present for his wife Nancy. The 116 water-colour illustrations rank among Blake’s major achievements as an illustrator. Gray’s poems include an “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes”, linking female and feline attributes in relating the fall of Selima, Horace Walpole’s cat, as she plunges to a watery grave while in pursuit of goldfish.

The hapless Nymph with wonder saw:
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch’d in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What Cat’s averse to fish?

Blake provided six symbolic and allusive illustrations of Gray’s cat.

1. “Midst the tide
Two Angel forms were seen to glide”

The opening design finds Selima perched atop the rectangular window of the text as she gazes intently down toward the bottom of the page. Selima, a fusion of human and animal qualities, crouches on knees and extends her hand toward the limitless ocean below. The goldfish that tempt her also assume figures somewhere between the human and the animal, spectres propelled through the water by a prickly webbed armature of fins.

2. “Demurest of the Tabby kind”

In the second design, the “pensive Selima” has now a tiny naked woman squatted between her shoulders, and is no longer looking down, where the goldfish swim, unconscious of the danger above. The fish, like Selima above, are split, human qualities riding atop animal qualities.

3. “The pensive Selima

Her Ears of Jet & Emrald Eyes
She saw & purr’d applause”

On the third page, Selima has become human, but with distinct traces of the feline in whiskers, pointed ears, and “her conscious tail”. She gazes into the vase, where “the azure flowers” painted on the porcelain have come to serpentine life and wave their tendrils in the water. The goldfish have become an embracing human couple, though they still have fins.

4. “Still had she gazd but midst the tide

Two Angel forms were seen to glide.
The hapless nymph with wonder saw
A Whisker first & then a Claw &c.”

In Blake’s fourth design Selima stalks the “angel forms” that glide carefree through the water. Selima is again a creature of myth, half cat and half woman, but Blake emphasizes the feline. Behind her, Fate, portrayed as an old woman, cuts the thread of life.

5. “Malignant Fate sat by & smild

The slippery verge her feet beguild
She tumbled headlong in”

The very powerful fifth design shows Selima, pushed by “Malignant Fate”, plunging into the water, while the goldfish, now warriors in military garb, dart from her grasp.

6. “Nine times emerging from the flood

“She mew’d to every watry God”

In the final design, Selima rises, hands clasped in prayer, retaining her fully human form while the fish are reduced to their complete animal state. Selima’s mouth is open and her head is raised to heaven as she sings a hymn “to every watr’y god”.

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Of course the most wonderful poetry about cats comes not from William Blake nor Thomas Gray (and certainly not from T.S. Eliot) but from Christopher Smart when he writes about his cat Jeoffry, his cell companion in the St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics:

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
…
For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins.
For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary.
For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life.
For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

But there are no cats in the Bible, only the larger felines, lions and leopards. And “tiger” in eighteenth-century usage is a category that can even include the jungle cats native to South America such as jaguars. Blake’s friend John Gabriel Stedman writes in his Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) of a “Tiger-Cat…With its Eyes emitting flashes of Lightning”.

This is where we come to Blake’s Song of Experience, “The Tyger”, a likely candidate for the most anthologized poem in English, and for a good handful of the English-speaking, poetry-reading world, one of the earliest poems heard or memorized.

The Tyger.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

            

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Such a fierce poem but such a friendly pussy-cat to illustrate it. Saree Makdisi suggests that when we read “Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” (lines 19-20) we are meant to imagine William Blake himself smiling:

Of course he did: the maker is Blake himself. He made "The Lamb" and he made "The Tyger," and there can be no doubt whatsoever that Blake smiled as he peeled first the one and then (five years later) the other out of the bed of his rolling press, seeing each one of his inky creations for the first time.

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Sources and further reading

G.E. Bentley, Jr.—Blake records.—2nd ed.—New Haven ; London : Yale University Press 2004.

Thomas Gray.—William Blake’s water-colours illustrating the poems of Thomas Gray; with an introduction and commentary by Sir Geoffrey Keynes.—Chicago ; Paris : J. Philip O’Hara in association with Trianon Press 1972.

    Blake's 116 watercolours on 58 sheets for the Poems of Thomas Gray are now in the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

John Marsh.—The John Marsh journals : the life and times of a gentleman composer (1752-1828).—Vol. 1 ; edited, introduced, and annotated by Brian Robins.—Sociology of music ; no. 9A.—Hillsdale NY : Pendragon Press 2011.

Saree Makdisi.—Reading William Blake.—Reading writers and their work.—Cambridge : Cambridge University Press 2014.

Christopher Smart.—Jubilate agno.
    The poem was written between 1759 and 1763, during Smart's confinement for insanity in St. Luke's Hospital, Bethnal Green. The poem remained in manuscript until 1939, when it was published under the title Rejoice in the Lamb: A Song from Bedlam, and edited by William Force Stead. A subsequent edition, now titled Jubilate agno, was prepared by W.H. Bond in 1954, correctly establishing the order of the text. There have been numerous modern reprints.