As the calendar turns to October, we’re featuring an item related to one of the month’s unofficial mascots - cats! A quirky little pamphlet called Murthy’s Cattage: A Biographical Dictionary of Cats in Literature is this month’s item in our virtual display case. Inside the pamphlet, the reader will find a list of cats associated with literature and authors. Each entry includes a biographical note, which sometimes includes a physical description or breed like Tabby, or Maltese, or one of October’s favorite symbols - black cats!
Murthy’s Cattage was compiled by Howard Millar Chapin and was published in Providence, Rhode Island in 1911. The pamphlet is dedicated to the memory of Chapin’s own cat, and the namesake of the book, Murthy, a picture of whom appears on the first pages. Within the pamphlet is an alphabetical listing of cats, and according to an introductory note at the beginning of the list, “this work is a brief biographical dictionary of cats in literature, that is of cats mentioned in literature or owned by literary or historical personages.” Many of the literary references and authors named in the dictionary might be unfamiliar to today’s readers but examining the list reveals some familiar names. There’s Chanoine, who belonged to Victor Hugo; Sour-Mash, who belonged to Mark Twain; and Puss-in-Boots, the folklore hero of a familiar nursery tale. National Black Cat Day is October 27 so we searched the list for a few black cats that were the well-loved pets of some nineteenth century authors. There’s Lucifer, who was the pet of Harriet Prescott Spofford, a New England author who published extensively from the 1850s into the 1920s. Spofford wrote newspaper serials, novels, detective stories, and poems. Gavroche and Eponine, both black cats, were the pets of French author Théophile Gautier (and named soon after the publication of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables). Gautier loved cats so much that a carving of one is included on his headstone in Paris. And Dixie, who was the subject of Dixie Kitten by Eva March Tappen. Tappen was a Massachusetts resident and a graduate of Vassar College, who went on to be a teacher and a children’s book author. She was also the owner of Dixie’s kitten, and fellow black cat, Topsy.
Beyond the introductory note and the alphabetical listing of cats, there’s no other information in this brief pamphlet, though we would be interested in reading about how Howard Millar Chapin selected cats for this list, how he found some of the biographical information, or how he traced the lineage of some of the cats included. A search of the title and the author’s name did reveal some interesting details about him, though. Murthy’s Cattage was just one of many books by Chapin (and might be one of his most whimsical topics); he also wrote at length about Rhode Island’s history and American colonial history. He served as the Librarian of the Rhode Island Historical Society from 1912 until 1940. His papers are held in the RIHS collection and the finding aid can be accessed here.
Murthy’s Cattage is a brief pamphlet of less than a dozen pages, and it can be accessed in DSpace here. Even though not all the references found in the dictionary are immediately recognizable, it is still worth a read through for the cat descriptions. And it also serves as a bit of a literary time capsule, by highlighting authors and titles that might not be as well-known today as they were when this pamphlet was published in 1911. See what new cats you might find when you take a look at Murthy’s Cattage!
Elizabeth Roscio
Preservation Librarian
