Hodge, Samuel Johnson’s cat, a memorial statue before “Dr Johnson’s house” in London
Dear friends and readers,
I remarked on my blog on my time away this summer in NYC that I had read a couple of books beyond Ashford’s Mysterious Death of Miss Austen, one of them being, Doris Lessing’s wonderful On Cats, and had blogged about Lessing’s books and my two cats on Under the Sign of Sylvia.
I told about my blog on Lessing’s On Cats on C18-l (a list-serv dedicated to any and all things having to do with the 18th century), and the topic morphed to postings on the illustrations to Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the death of his Favorite Cat,” about its illustrators, and then, morphing again, to attitudes towards cats and primates in the 18th century, finally ending on Samuel Johnson and his cat Hodge.
An article by Lisa Berglund was recommended and I read it: “Oysters for Hodge, or Ordering Society, Writing Biography, and Feeding the Cat,” Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 33:4 (2010): 631-645. I found her insightful and informative. Much of the article is about the specifics of Johnson and Piozzi’s relationship and Boswell and Johnson’s relationship, how their presentation of Johnson’s relationship with his cat differed and reflected their own outlook. For me what I liked was the material that comes through on Johnson as a person, especially some of the most loveable aspects of the man, and Johnson and his favorite cat, Hodge. (We must recall of course that we don’t know for sure that Hodge was Johnson’s favorite cat; perhaps Johnson just said that to make Hodge feel especially valued, so Hodge’s feelings would not be hurt — joke alert.)
The basic stories told and retold by Johnson’s biographers (and again by Berglund) are taken generally this one: we see Johnson sitting and stroking his cat, Hodge, and informing his visitor, say Boswell, who (part of the context of the anecdote) tells us he hated cats and had been telling Johnson about Mr Langton, “a young Gentleman of good family. ‘Sir, when I heard of him last he was running about town shooting cats.’ Langton is treating cats the way Hancock and Hasting’s self-perceived spiteful neighbor (or ex-friend) treated their expensive Siamese (see my Doris Lessing blog). A cat is a shooting target. Johnson proceeded to assert vigorously that Hodge was as “a very good cat”, “a fine cat,” and (especially) that no one would shoot him.
Johnson had years previously bought a little black boy as a toddler, whom he named Francis Johnson, brought him up, educated and freed him. Francis as an adult worked as Johnson’s servant. Johnson also left his money to Francis who was basically cheated out of it (but that’s another story). Johnson himself defied hierarchy by going out himself to buy himself oysters for Hodge. That is, he did not ask Francis to go. Gentlemen and ladies were not supposed to go shopping and (perhaps) bargain and haggle. That’s what human servants were for. But Johnson did not want to ask Francis lest it derogate in Francis’s mind from Francis’s dignity. Note Johnson was thus sensitive to a man who was an ex-slave and black. Nor did Johnson want to bother any other servant: Johnson feared they’d get back at the cat, and he knew the cat was helpless. Cats in the 18th century were expected to find their own food, make it (by say killing a bird or mouse or rat.)
(It’s telling to me that When I told Jim about this he remembered how in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Sam Weller says “”It’s a wery remarkable circumstance, sir”, said Sam, “that poverty and oysters seems to go together” (Chapter 22). Jim was suggesting maybe Johnson’s value for Hodge only went so far as oysters were cheap. In other words, undercutting the thrust of the story, which is to show Johnson tenderly concerned for his cat.)
To return to Berglund’s article and one of her major theses. She allows to emerge from her materials the reality of thought or feeling behind the intellectual justification for dis-valuing non-human animals. To do so defies subordination, hierarchy, ranking. Boswell and Piozzi object to the way Johnson values Hodge in ways analogous to the way they (by implication) object to the way he values Francis (a black man).
Berglund quotes Piozzi: “Piozzi reports, ‘Francis the Black’s delicacy might not be hurt, at seeing himself employed for the convenience of a quadruped’”. To be fair, Piozzi also has an “impassioned statement” about “the place of pets in the lives of human beings occurs in British Synonymy. A lengthy entry in that book of English usage, discriminating the terms ‘hunting’, ‘coursing’, ‘shooting’ and ‘setting’, concludes with an idealised description of human and animal sympathy, exemplified in the hierarchical relationship between a dog and his master.” But note how central hierarchy still is. Piozzi’s story about Johnson buying the oysters occurs in a context where Johnson himself complains about the behavior of Piozzi’s mother’s spaniel at the dinner table, where Johnson felt the dog was overvalued. Spoiled, we’d say.
Boswell’s passages are also shaped (Berglund shows) by Boswell’s profound “discomfort” with Johnson’s physical and emotional direct engagement with his cat.
What an energetic description Boswell gives us, full of physically evocative verbs: ‘scrambling’, ‘smiling’, ‘half-whistling’, ‘rubbed’, ‘pulled’. We experience Johnson very much embodied here, rather than as detached intellect or dictatorial moralist. And yet what makes this passage engaging and at the same time odd is our realisation that Boswell’s vivid portrait emerges from profound discomfort. Boswell has an ‘antipathy’ to cats. If he observes Johnson and Hodge’s caresses so closely, it’s because their intimacy makes him nervous. He can barely force himself grudgingly to ‘observe’ that Hodge is ‘a fine cat’. (Three monosyllables are very atypical of rattling Bozzy.) Indeed, the words applied to the cat and his master graphically contrast to those with which Boswell describes himself: ‘antipathy’, ‘uneasy’, ‘suffered’. Boswell is uncomfortable, almost in pain, as he watches Johnson’s interaction with his pet.
Johnson’s affection for his cat, and his behavior to Francis is more than eccentric. It threatens “Boswell’s “sense of his perogative.”
This perogative is what we as human beings are entitled to do to animals because we are superior, not because (the real truth) we can. As Stanley Holloway dramatized in his brilliant music-hall routine, “Evings’ Dog Hospital” (unfortunately I can’t find it online), where the animal-keeper or “Mrs Evans” (he blames his wife) is clearly sadistic towards the “petted creatures,” animals who can’t talk.
They don’t have hands with thumbs either.
Yes there have been some changes, and the first are seen in the later 18th century, in the Romantic era, but only very grudgingly. More:
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Jim, age 24, with our dog Llyr, age 3
I suggest this kind of argument and these sorts of “pregative” feelings are still very strong with us today. When my dog died and I grieved so, I was told it was “inappropriate” because Llyr (her name) was “just a dog.” That phrase was repeated at me in tones of hostility at my absurdity. A central thesis in Sy Montgomery’s Walking with Apes is the reality that the three women scientists she writes about all were intensely concerned that non-humane primates have lives as valuable as human beings, as worthy. Goodall put an obituary for Flo, a female chimp, in the Sunday Times. Gildikas shows the loving relationship orangutans are capable of.
Gildikas herself mothering Supinah who herself takes her job as mother seriously (the way Lessing’s black cat does)
Family life is concentrated on by Goodall in her books:
Fossey fought a war for gorillas to have equal space and food as human beings. She lost.
Temple Grandin understands this seemingly ineradicable idea that there is this subordination of all creatures, this hierarchy and some of us are just ontologically more valuable than others. When one group of people exterminate another group, they are treating this other group as vermin (see film, Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity on WW2 holocaust of Jews) and presents her objections with tact in her Animals in Translation. She tries to persuade you it’s in your interest to regard your farm animals this way at least until the moment you kill them for your profit. But her case is harder since she write about non-pets and animals people kill and eat for food or use for materials for clothes &&
We do more than eat animals. We experiment on them ruthlessly. See my blog on Frederick Wiseman’s Primates: Watch what these primates do.
Against Thomas Gray’s cruelty and those who think it inappropriate somehow that Blake’s illustrations make the cats and fish so human-like, here are two cat and one caterpillar poems, two (appropriately) from the long 18th century:
“The Retired Cat”
A poet’s Cat, sedate and grave
As poet well could wish to have,
Was much addicted to inquire
For nooks to which she might retire,
And where, secure as mouse in chink,
She might repose, or sit and think.
I know not where she caught the trick,—
Nature perhaps herself had cast her
In such a mould philosophique,
Or else she learn’d it of her Master.
Sometimes ascending, debonnair,
An apple-tree, or lofty pear,
Lodged with convenience in the fork,
She watch’d the gardener at his work;
Sometimes her ease and solace sought
In an old empty watering-pot,
There wanting nothing, save a fan,
To seem some nymph in her sedan
Apparell’d in exactest sort,
And ready to be borne to court.
But love of change it seems has place
Not only in our wiser race,
Cats also feel, as well as we,
That passion’s force, and so did she.
Her climbing, she began to find,
Exposed her too much to the wind,
And the old utensil of tin
Was cold and comfortless within:
She therefore wish’d instead of those
Some place of more serene repose,
Where neither cold might come, nor air
Too rudely wanton with her hair,
And sought it in the likeliest mode
Within her master’s snug abode.
A drawer, it chanced, at bottom lined
With linen of the softest kind,
With such as merchants introduce
From India, for the ladies’ use,
A drawer impending o’er the rest,
Half open in the topmost chest,
Of depth enough, and none to spare,
Invited her to slumber there;
Puss with delight beyond expression
Survey’d the scene and took possession.
Recumbent at her ease ere long,
And lull’d by her own humdrum song,
She left the cares of life behind,
And slept as she would sleep her last,
When in came, housewifely inclined,
The chambermaid, and shut it fast,
By no malignity impell’d,
But all unconscious whom it held.
Awaken’d by the shock, cried Puss,
“Was ever cat attended thus!
The open drawer was left, I see,
Merely to prove a nest for me,
For soon as I was well composed
Then came the maid, and it was closed.
How smooth these ‘kerchiefs and how sweet!
Oh what a delicate retreat!
I will resign myself to rest
Till Sol declining in the west
Shall call to supper, when, no doubt,
Susan will come and let me out.”
The evening came, the sun descended,
And puss remain’d still unattended.
The night roll’d tardily away,
(With her indeed ’twas never day;)
The sprightly morn her course renew’d,
The evening grey again ensued,
And puss came into mind no more
Than if entomb’d the day before.
With hunger pinch’d, and pinch’d for room,
She now presaged approaching doom,
Nor slept a single wink or purr’d,
Conscious of jeopardy incurr’d.
That night, by chance, the poet watching,
Heard an inexplicable scratching;
His noble heart went pit-a-pat,
And to himself he said—“What’s that?”
He drew the curtain at his side,
And forth he peep’d, but nothing spied;
Yet, by his ear directed, guess’d
Something imprison’d in the chest,
And, doubtful what, with prudent care
Resolved it should continue there.
At length, a voice which well he knew,
A long and melancholy mew,
Saluting his poetic ears,
Consoled him, and dispell’d his fears;
He left his bed, he trod the floor,
He ‘gan in haste the drawers explore,
The lowest first, and without stop
The rest in order to the top;
For ’tis a truth well known to most,
That whatsoever thing is lost,
We seek it, ere it come to light,
In every cranny but the right.
Forth skipp’d the cat, not now replete
As erst with airy self-conceit,
Nor in her own fond apprehension
A theme for all the world’s attention,
But modest, sober, cured of all
Her notions hyperbolical,
And wishing for a place of rest
Any thing rather than a chest.
Then stepp’d the poet into bed
With this reflection in his head:
MORAL.
Beware of too sublime a sense
Of your own worth and consequence.
The man who dreams himself so great,
And his importance of such weight,
That all around in all that’s done
Must move and act for Him alone,
Will learn in school of tribulation
The folly of his expectation.
(I’d have made the moral show us the humanity of the cat in its irrationality, its fear. Lessing says cats retreat so, often are scaredy cats, wary in ways that threaten them because we take them too early from their mothers).
Readers may know of Anna Barbauld’s poem against animal experimentation (Priestley against mice), but few probably know this beautiful one which takes in the complexities of people’s relationships with even insects:
“The Caterpillar”
No, helpless thing, I cannot harm thee now;
Depart in peace, thy little life is safe,
For I have scanned thy form with curious eye,
Noted the silver line that streaks thy back,
The azure and the orange that divide
Thy velvet sides; thee, houseless wanderer,
My garment has enfolded, and my arm
Felt the light pressure of thy hairy feet;
Thou hast curled round my finger; from its tip,
Precipitous descent! with stretched out neck,
Bending thy head in airy vacancy,
This way and that, inquiring, thou hast seemed
To ask protection; now, I cannot kill thee.
Yet I have sworn perdition to thy race,
And recent from the slaughter am I come
Of tribes and embryo nations: I have sought
With sharpened eye and persecuting zeal,
Where, folded in their silken webs they lay
Thriving and happy; swept them from the tree
And crushed whole families beneath my foot;
Or, sudden, poured on their devoted heads
The vials of destruction. – This I’ve done,
Nor felt the touch of pity: but when thou,
A single wretch, escaped the general doom,
Making me feel and clearly recognise
Thine individual existence, life,
And fellowship of sense with all that breathes,
Present’st thyself before me, I relent,
And cannot hurt thy weakness.– So the storm
Of horrid war, o’erwhelming cities, fields,
And peaceful villages, rolls dreadful on:
The victor shouts triumphant; he enjoys
The roar of cannon and the clang of arms,
And urges, by no soft relentings stopped,
The work of death and carnage. Yet should one,
A single sufferer from the field escaped,
Panting and pale, and bleeding at his feet,
Lift his imploring eyes,-the hero weeps;
He is grown human, and capricious Pity,
Which would not stir for thousands, melts for one
With sympathy spontaneous:-Tis not Virtue,
Yet ’tis the weakness of a virtuous mind.
And Marge Piercy’s Sleeping with Cats from her memoir with the same name. In the book it has a subtitle: “On Guard”
I want you for my bodyguard,
to curl round each other like two socks
matched and balled in a drawer.
I want you to warm my bedside,
two S’s snaked curve to curve
in the down burrow of the bed.
I want you to tuck in my illness,
coddle me with tea and chicken
soup whose steam sweetens the house.
I want you to watch my back
as the knives wink in the thin light
and the whips crack out from shelter.
Guard my body against dust and disuse,
warm me from the inside out,
lie over me, under me, beside me
in the bed as the night’s creek
rushes over our shining bones
and e weak to the morning fresh
and wet, a birch leaf just uncurling.
Guard my body from disdain as age
widens me like a river delta.
Let us guard each other until death,
with teeth, brain and galloping heart,
each other’s rose red warrior.
My father’s cat, Pushkie: the poor cat was so afraid and nervous, she hid in the bedroom most of the time; she died young the way Siamese often do. My father was very fond of her because she was so loving to him, and he grieved severely when she died
Ellen
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Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 