100 Cats Who Changed Civilization by Sam Stall

bitter end. Boswell notes how the great lexicographer, as his cat’s final hours approached, went off to purchase some valerian (a relative of catnip) toease his suffering. Upon his death the poet Percival Stockdale wrote An Elegy on the Death of Dr Johnson’s Favourite Cat , which reads in part, “Who, by his master when caressed / Warmly his gratitude expressed / And never failed his thanks to purr / Whene’er he stroked his sable fur.”
    Today, across the street from the building where Johnson composed his masterwork, stands a statue of Hodge perched atop a copy of his owner’s book. In his dictionary, Johnson defined cats in general as “a domestic animal that catches mice, commonly reckoned by naturalists the lowest order of the leonine species.” But it is his more gracious assessment of Hodge, as “a very fine cat indeed,” that adorns the statue of his literary soul mate.

CATTARINA
    THE CAT WHO TOUCHED
THE DARK HEART OF POE

    During his short literary career, Edgar Allan Poe wrote great poems, penned some of the world’s most terrifying horror stories, and invented the detective novel. But his achievements brought him neither happiness nor material success. Quite the contrary. Before his death from alcohol abuse in 1849 at age forty, he suffered more than a lifetime’s worth of disappointment, rejection, and grief.
    In 1842, his wife, Virginia, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. For the next five years, until her death in 1847, her health deteriorated. The couple’s poverty exacerbated her suffering. Poe, though intermittently employed at various magazines, was never well off. And his personal demons, chiefly his inability to stop drinking, brought turmoil to his home. His problem grew so severe that he feared he might actually hurt Virginia during one of his drunken fits.
    Throughout these years the couple’s most devoted companion was a feline named Cattarina. The Poes, who didn’t stand on ceremony, sometimes called their tortoiseshell cat Kate (Poe himself was often referred to as “Eddie”). The cat would sit on her master’s shoulder as he wrote and would cuddle next to Virginia, sometimes providingthe only warmth that their freezing cottage had to offer.
    Poe never physically harmed his wife, who by all accounts he loved deeply. But the fear was always there, along with what must have been searing guilt over his inability to give her a better life. He shared those feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing in his story The Black Cat —a tale of unparalleled gruesomeness inspired in part by Cattarina’s devotion to Virginia and by Poe’s anxiety about his own dark side.
    The story, written in 1842, tells the tale of a drunk who, in a fit of alcoholic rage, hangs his cat, who Poe describes as a “beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree.” Not long afterward he’s followed home by another feline that looks almost exactly like the one he killed—except for an unnerving ring of white fur around the creature’s neck.
    The man’s wife takes an immediate liking to the newcomer, and they become inseparable. The man, however, comes to believe that his new pet wants to avenge his earlier crime. During yet another drunken rage he tries to kill it with an ax, only to murder his wife instead. He quickly walls up her body in the basement and is relieved to find that the cat has disappeared.
    Later, he brazenly shows the basement to searchers sent to investigate his wife’s disappearance. But suddenly, a terrible wail erupts frombehind the masonry. The wall is pulled down, revealing the dead woman with the black cat perched on her head, screeching. In his haste the man had sealed up the animal with his wife.
    The story’s finale is one of the most unforgettable scenes in horror literature—and one of the most psychologically revealing. In the real world, Poe tried his best to care for his wife, and never gave so much as a dirty look to his dark muse, Cattarina. But it