This is a
list of historical cats.
Unnamed
- Sir Isaac Newton's cat, whose incessant desire to be let in or out allegedly drove him to devise the catflap.
- A cat who wandered on stage during the premiere of Rossini's The Barber of Seville, sending the audience into gales of laughter
Named
- Cc the cat, the first cloned pet.
- Dinah, the actual cat of Alice Liddell.
- F. D. C. Willard (Felis Domesticus Chester Willard). Named for his sire (Willard of Aspen, Colorado), Chester acquired a resume of two research papers in low temperature physics after entering this unlikely field in collaboration with his keeper, J. H. Hetherington of the University of Michigan. Belatedly learning of a style rule for Phys. Rev. Lett. prohibiting the use of the authorial pronoun we in single-author papers, Hetherington solved the problem this presented to him by appending the name of his cat on the title page of a draft paper rather than by rewriting the body of the text. The dearth of word processing facilities in the mid-1970s made this a cost effective response.
- Grimalkin, the American painter Benjamin West's cat.
- Henrietta, the now-deceased cat of New York Times foreign correspondent Christopher S. Wren, made famous by the book The Cat Who Covered the World (ISBN 0-684-87100-9 in one printing).
- Hodge, the cat belonging to Dr Samuel Johnson.
- Humphrey, a cat who took up residence at Downing Street in the early 1990s (named for the character of Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes, Minister).
- India "Willie" Bush, US President George W. Bush's cat, named for Rubén Sierra "El Indio".
- Jellylorum was T. S. Eliot's own cat, immortalized in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the basis for the musical Cats.
- Jeoffry was Christopher Smart's cat, who is praised in his owner's poem "Jubilate Agno (A Poem from Bedlam)".
- Khouli-Khan, the cat of Thomas Anson is memorialized by the neoclassical "Cat's Monument" in the park at Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire, unless the cat in question is the first cat to circumnavigate the globe in the company of Admiral George Anson on HMS Centurion
- Mouschi, the attic cat, and Bosche, the warehouse and office cat, in Anne Frank's family's Amsterdam attic hideout, in World War II
- Muezza, the cat of Muhammad; the Prophet cut off his sleeve rather than disturb the cat, who was sleeping on it.
- Old Foss, the cat belonging to Edward Lear.
- Pangur Ban, the cat who inspired an otherwise unknown 8th (or 9th) century Irish monk to write a poem cataloguing their similarities.
- Polar Bear, the white cat adopted by writer and animal activist Cleveland Amory, and featured in The Cat Who Came for Christmas, The Cat and the Curmudgeon and The Best Cat Ever
- Selima was Horace Walpole's cat, immortalized in Thomas Gray's Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes (http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem885.html).
- Smudge the Glasgow People's Palace cat.
- Socks, stray cat adopted by the family of President Bill Clinton, named by his daughter Chelsea.
- Trim, beloved ship's cat of explorer Matthew Flinders, said to have been the first cat to circumnavigate the world.
Large Cats
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