‘A delightful celebration of 18th-century manners’ – Good Book Guide

‘With admirable literary dexterity, Frayling has turned out one of the most elegant books I’ve reviewed in a long time. It is beautiful to handle, it is unbelievably modest in price and clearly his research is impeccable’ – Birmingham Post

One day in February 1747 Horace Walpole’s cat Selima fell into a large Chinese porcelain goldfish tub and drowned.

Walpole was naturally upset (though he actually preferred dogs) and his friend the poet Thomas Gray wrote an elegy to console him. Not that it was much of a consolation, because its tone was more that of gentle mockery, exaggerating the accident into a tragedy with a moral lesson: ‘All that glisters is not gold.’

The Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes is, however, one of the most perfect, and best loved, poems in the English language, and it conferred immortality upon the unfortunate Selima. Christopher Frayling has made her fate the focus of a piece of literary research that involves Walpole himself (author, connoisseur, one of the most cultivated – and the richest – men in the country), Thomas Gray (sensitive but reticent genius), Richard Bentley (gifted dilettante), Dr Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Christopher Smart (cat-lovers), James Boswell (cat-hater), William Blake and Kathleen Hale (of Orlando the Marmalade Cat fame).

All contribute to this beautifully produced book of charm and erudition lightly worn, that adds seriously to our appreciation and enjoyment of 18th-century manners, and our understanding of people and their pets.

The illustrations centre on three sets of designs inspired by the poem: Richard Bentley’s Rococo Gothic images of 1753; William Blake’s watercolours, commissioned in 1797 by the Neoclassical sculptor Flaxman as a present for his wife; and Kathleen Hale’s drawings, created in 1944 but never published. The large format makes it possible to enjoy the designs of Bentley and Blake, and Kathleen Hale’s images, here reproduced for the first time at actual size.

Christopher Frayling was until recently Chairman of the Arts Council and Rector of the Royal College of Art. The seeds of this book were planted in late 1960s Cambridge, when he was researching the politics of Rousseau’s fiction, and encountered Walpole, Johnson and Boswell. A college cat was called Hodge (after Dr Johnson’s cat); Christopher Frayling’s supervisor’s party-piece, after formal dinners at Trinity, was to recite by heart Thomas Gray’s poem; and Frayling dedicated his thesis to his 26-year-old goldfish. It has, he says, taken him all this time to see the connections.

Also of interest
William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books
Hogarth
George III: A Life in Caricature
Panorama of The Enlightenment
Pre-Raphaelite Cats