![cat mug](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/cat-mug-1.png)
Loving Cats: ‘The Electrical Life of Louis Wain’
The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. —Nikola Tesla
Many people believe that the fashion of keeping cats as house pets was popularised by the nineteenth-century English illustrator Louis Wain, whose colourful and gay anthropomorphised drawings of felines smoking pipes, pushing wheelbarrows, standing on their hind legs and reading magazines, in London’s top newspaper of the day, the Illustrated London News, made cats socially acceptable. (One of those illustrations is reproduced atop this page.) Before Wain, other than the odd secret cat club, which no one of respectable social standing belonged to, man’s best friend, the dog, was the traditional house pet, with most cats living as strays or mere mouse-catchers. In the 2021 British film The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, Louis Wain’s wife, Emily, tells him:
Throughout history, cats have been worshipped as mystical gods and…
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