Horace Walpole's Cat

Description

In February 1747, Selima the tabby fell into a Chinese porcelain tub in Walpole's Mayfair house and never returned to dry land. The poem by Thomas Gray, 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold-fishes', was written as her epitaph. Here is the true history of the event, and a look at the sparking social and cultural life of the period. The book is beautifully illustrated with Richard Bentley's original series of designs for the poem,William Blake's wonderful watercolours of some fifty years later, and the unpublished illustrations produced in the 1940s by Kathleen Hale, of Orlando the Cat fame.

Sir Christopher Frayling is perhaps the most wide-ranging cultural historian of our times: the author of numerous publications on subjects ranging from vampires to Westerns; the writer and presenter of successful television series, whether on advertising, the Middle Ages or Tutankhamun. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and was Rector of the Royal College of Art, London, from 1996 to 2009, where he remains Professor Emeritus of Cultural History. His many public appointments have included Chairman of Arts Council England; Chairman of the Design Council; and the longest-serving Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Charmingly illustrated history of one of the best-loved and best-titled poems.-- "Entertainment Weekly" Frayling's essays add scholarly gravity balanced with a true love of the literature of Walpole, Gray, Johnson, and their contemporaries. Each set of illustrations emphasizes different aspects of the brief, clever, and charming poem with whimsical drawings and lively characterizations.-- "Bloomsbury Review"