The Cheshire cat again

The earliest printed reference to the Cheshire cat’s grin evidently comes in 1792 in the concluding lines of Peter Pindar’s A Pair of Lyric Epistles to Lord Macartney and His Ship:

Yet, if successful, thou wilt be ador’d –
Lo, like a Cheshire cat our Court will grin!
How glad to find as many gems on board,
As will not leave thee room to stick a pin.

Pindar, whose real name was John Wolcott, was referring playfully to the British government’s high expectations of the magnificent, but ultimately unsuccessful diplomatic mission of Lord Macartney to China, which sailed in September 1792 on board the 64-gun Lion. Some years later the essayist Charles Lamb remarked in a letter to Thomas Manning dated February 26, 1808, that his friend the dramatist Thomas Holcroft “grinned like a Cheshire cat.” Interestingly Holcroft was himself responding to a humorous remark about the cat. “Why do cats grin in Cheshire?” Lamb continued. “Because it was once a county palatine and the cats cannot help laughing whenever they think of it, though I see no great joke in it.” An English ‘county palatine’ was a county over which an earl or lord originally had royal privileges with the right of exclusive civil and criminal jurisdiction. Presumably Lamb’s cat laughs at the disjunction between this ‘palatine’ status and modern, more bucolic realities. The phrase also crops up in chapter 24 of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes: Memoir of a Most Respectable Family (1855). There it is applied to a character who smiles “with all her might.” I am not quite sure where this leaves us, but I suppose it adds a little glimmer of extra light to the section about Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat, and the bizarre grin that makes a walk-on appearance in his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For reasons that I cannot now recall, that excursus needed to be excised from the chapter about deceit in my last book, A Brief History of the Smile. The thing about collateral losses of this kind is that they represent quite a lot of hard work, and I suppose the genius of blogging is that you can dust them off and put them in a place where interested parties can find and use them.

The Cheshire cat

The question as to the origin of the expression “Cheshire cat” was raised in the columns of Notes and Queries on April 24, 1852, where the following explanation was proffered by “H.,” a good thirteen years before Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published:

I remember to have heard many years ago, that it owes its origin [the Cheshire cat] to the unhappy attempts of a sign painter of that county to represent a lion rampant, which was the crest of an influential family, on the sign-boards of many of the inns. The resemblance of these lions to cats caused them to be generally called by the more ignoble name. A similar case is to be found in the village of Charlton, between Pewsey and Devizes, Wiltshire. A public-house by the road-side is commonly known by the name of The Cat at Charlton. The sign of the house was originally a lion or tiger, or some such animal, the crest of the family of, I believe, Sir Edward Poore.

At it happens, H. was wrong about Sir Edward Poore, third baronet, of Rushall in Wiltshire, whose crest was not a lion but an ermine-sleeved arm clasping an arrow. However, the Egertons of Tatton Park and Arley Hall in Cheshire did have a lion on their coat of arms, which was apparently painted on the signs outside inns traditionally associated with the family and their estate workers. Certainly there was once no shortage of inns in Cheshire with strong feline associations: The Red Cat at Brimstage, two called The Cheshire Cat, one at Nantwich and one at Brinnington, The Cat and the Lion at Stretton (which is not far from Daresbury, where Lewis Carroll was born) and The Cat and Fiddle at Buxton.

Or else the cat might have originated as a joke at the expense of some local identity such as Mr. Caterling, a gamekeeper in the time of Richard III who was noted for his ferocious way of dealing with poachers. It does not seem very likely that to grin like a Cheshire cat is merely an abbreviation of to grin like a Cheshire Caterling but this has also been proposed. According to another story the same Mr. Caterling had a grossly disfiguring sabre scar on his face. Other Cestrian candidates are one Thomas Catlin, who was evidently disliked because he was mean (and wore what would today be called a sadistic smile), or Sir William Catesby, a Speaker of the House of Commons who was beheaded at Bosworth in 1485.

Carroll depends here upon the strong contrast between his rather spiky protagonist (who gesticulates in a decidedly unfeline way) and what most people observe in real cats. However, there are certain points of similarity between the Cheshire Puss and domestic cats that keep us on our toes: For example, cats do get angry and, when provoked, horripilate, that is, make their fur stand on end so they look bigger and more threatening. (This useful skill is also called piloerection.) And the Cheshire cat is quite right: in a rage, usually before combat, cats crouch close to the ground, bare their teeth and swish their tail from side to side. Charles Darwin was particularly struck by the fact that in this more extreme state of anger, cats do not bother to horripilate. As well, particularly when hunting rodents, cats chatter, rapidly clicking their teeth together, a reflex that is thought to anticipate the mechanism by which they eventually secure their prey by the back of the neck and sever its spinal cord.

The most memorable aspect of Lewis Carroll’s invention is of course the Cheshire cat’s famous magical vanishing act. Was T. S. Eliot recalling it when he devised the following stanza of his rather gloomy poem “Morning at the Window’ (1917)?

The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

It seems at least possible. Certainly the gesture has prompted many different explanations ranging from the waning of the moon, traditionally associated with madness, to Sir Shane Leslie’s theory that the elusive cat was Carroll’s satirical representation of the catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Wiseman. Perhaps it is as simple as this: Carroll was fond of cats, and Alice Liddell, his subject and muse, owned a tabby cat called Dinah.