‍PRIDE they say, comes before a fall. And nowhere is that truer than the story of Fleet Street artist Louis Wain, who found fame but no fortune by opening a door to a world of human cats the nation came to love … but ended up in poverty and shut away in a mental asylum.

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‍ In 1925, when Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald heard that one of the most famous publishing artists in the world for more than 25 years was poverty stricken and in a pauper’s asylum without any money to buy even paper and pencils to draw in his lucid moments, he said:“Louis was on all our walls some 15 to 20 years ago. Probably no artist has given a greater  number of young people pleasure than he has.” 

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‍The PM was heartbroken as he spoke of a nationwide appeal to raise funds for the man who had brought fun into his own life as a boy.

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‍ For 30 years Wain’s anthropomorphised (humanised) cats smiled down from the walls of nurseries and schools in Britain and America. They were featured in the Illustrated London News and books and comics. Even on crockery. At his peak he drew 1,500 cats a year in pyjamas; drinking out of teacups; ice skating; playing golf; fishing; celebrating Christmas and always standing on two legs.

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‍ But he sold his talents for peanuts and would never ask anyone for help, even though he had lent money to people along the way, retreating into a world of his own with his fictional felines.

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‍ His life didn’t start well. He was born in Clerkenwell, London, with a cleft lip and ill health. He suffered a bad bout of scarlet fever that left him haunted by nightmares all his life and an unpredictable temper.

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‍ He was a sensitive, shy boy, very much a loner. He didn’t attend school until he was 10 and when he did, he spent much of his time playing truant and wandering around the streets alone. His only friend was a scruffy tabby given to him as a present and he would spend hours sketching him at home.

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‍ At 17, he went to art school dreaming of going to Fleet Street as a serious wildlife artist. He even sold a drawing of bullfinches on laurel bushes to the Illustrated and Sporting Dramatic News when he was 21. But he was disheartened when the caption mistakenly referred to the birds as robins. He became depressed that his art didn’t reflect the subject, although he managed to get a job with them for a while.

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‍ Things got worse as time went on and he failed to sell over 30 cat drawings to magazines and newspapers. “Who wants to look at drawings of cats,” said one Editor closing yet another door behind the heartbroken artist.

‍Wain creating his cat world

‍ He began to draw pictures of the animal world instead. That worked. He became known around Fleet Street for his wildlife work, all of which he sold for peanuts, without holding on to copyright. He was no businessman.

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‍ But by 1886 he tried with his cat pictures again and was commissioned by Macmillan to illustrate a children’s book, Mrs Tabby’s Establishment. And then came then another break with the publication in the Christmas edition of The Illustrated London News — his first drawing of anthropomorphised cats, A Kitten’s Christmas Party, which showed 150 cats celebrating in eleven panels and it gave him ideas for more.

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‍ Sadly, he had little time to share his new success with his wife Emily. She died of breast cancer January 1887 after just three years of marriage. One day he brought her home a stray cat to comfort her. They named him Peter the Great and Wain would spend hours sketching caricatures of him as he nestled in Emily’s arms on her bed. He would put little glasses on Peter and draw him reading a book to make her laugh.

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‍ It was during this time that he seriously developed his cat world further in his mind. He would draw Peter eating cake; drinking tea and doing other human things. Then more tragedy, his father died leaving him to look after his mother and five sisters. Just when he was making a name for himself in cat publishing. Times became hard.

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‍ The family moved to Westgate-on-Sea, in Kent and rented a house fortuitously from Sir William Ingram managing director of the Illustrated London News. To make ends meet the struggling artist had been selling his new cat pictures to anyone who would buy at giveaway prices. He never bothered about royalties. He even paid the bills with his cat drawings.

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‍ But he had managed to get a job reporting on agricultural shows and pet competitions. He never forgot his love for Peter though and began to take an interest in cat welfare, becoming President of the National Cat Club. When Ingram saw Wain’s new work, he loved it and offered him a job. From then on, his career blossomed.

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‍ In the years before the First World War in the Illustrated London News his cats were always dressed as humans; took part in sports; went to the seaside; tea parties and restaurants. They became cartoons sometimes ending in mishap and mayhem. Wain’s world was edgy and animated. He became a celebrity, attending dinners and functions and was a household name.

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‍ Then more tragedy. In 1914 he fell from a horse-drawn bus and hit his head on a kerb, spending weeks in a coma. It changed him. He began to draw a psychedelic world of cats, which today have high value. But he was difficult to live with, and his sisters had him certified insane as a schizophrenic and admitted to the pauper ward at London’s Springfield Hospital.

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‍ For a while he continued to draw his cats, and even decorated a ward with them, as his sisters flogged off his works to pay their rent. But he didn’t have the money to buy the art tools he needed. When his plight became known an appeal was set up and an exhibition arranged of his work. It raised over £2,300 but little found its way to Wain and his sisters. When the Prime Minister found out he awarded them civil list pensions.

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‍ Wain, who spent his last 15 years in mental hospitals, died in his room alone on July 4, 1939. He was drawing a cat that day.

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‍DID YOU KNOW?

‍The Bank of England officially kept 50 cats to hunt mice and rats in 1819   and budgeted for them in the nation’s accounts. Rats were pests because they ate paper for a source of roughage and used it for nest building or took it out of curiosity. But when a clerk was bitten by a tabby the governors believed was mad, all the cats were destroyed and a priest called in to exorcise him.

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‍FLEET STREET TRAVEL WRITER WHO FELL IN

‍LOVE WITH THE ONE-EYED MOUNTAIN MAN

‍WHEN a partly disabled young woman from a comfortable, middle class English background, who suffered from almost unbearable back pain, had a tumour removed from her spine and a wire cage fitted around her neck in 1873, she knew exactly what to do — make an 800-mile trip across the Rocky Mountains on horseback, by herself.

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‍ And so, Isabella Bird went on a journey that confirmed her as the world’s top woman travel writer and the first woman to be elected as a Fellow of the prestigious Royal Graphical Society.

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‍ Hardly able to walk and often suffering from nervous headaches and insomnia, she travelled all over the world including Australia, China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, India and Iran, climbing mountains, trekking through jungles, riding elephants, yaks, camels and horses in the late 1800s … and fell in love with a hard-drinking, one-eyed mountain man who could quote Shakespeare.

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‍ Isabella wrote for newspapers and Fleet Street journals, and her books became an inspiration to others. She travelled to Morocco when she was 70; cut open a bear with a Bowie knife to eat cherry pips from its stomach and was deeply hurt when a Times reporter described her as masculine because she wore men’s clothing on her journeys and rode astride her horses and not side-saddle as men thought women should.

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‍ At the time, clothes to suit explorers were made with men in mind … women were not expected to go on adventures; their place was in the home. Not only did Isabella, just 4ft 11in tall, write vividly about her experiences, but in later years as cameras developed, she photographed them too, taking great care to protect her photographic equipment, often strapping it under her travelling chair. She would develop her pictures under the night sky.

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‍ She once wrote: The tripod of my camera served for a candle stand, and on it I hung my clothes and boots at night, out of the way of rats. With these arrangements I successfully defied the legions of vermin which infest Korean and Chinese inns... With absolute security from vermin, all else can be cheerfully endured.”

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‍ Born in 1831 in Boroughbridge, Yorkshire, Isabella led a gutsy life. Her vicar father believed that young girls should be told about the world in a truthful way that didn’t mask the violence and ugliness of it in a soft haze of fairytale and illusion.

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‍ He taught her to ride and observe and love the natural world; and force herself endure discomfort and pain with patience and courage. Her frailty and ill-health worried him. She was always weak and tired and suffered one illness after another leading to depression.

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‍ Eventually doctors diagnosed a spinal condition that could lead to paralyses, and in 1850 she had tumour removed from her spine. Doctors recommended plenty of fresh air and her father gave her £100 to go to America and not come back until the money ran out.

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‍ The trip resulted in her first book, The Englishwoman in America, based on her letters home. It was a huge success. Her path was set and the world opened up to her. More adventures and books followed, and she became a devout Presbyterian helping communities wherever she went. She even did a spell at medical college to enhance her skills.

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‍ But she felt a great challenge still awaited her … the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, known as Bandit Country. So, in 1873 she ignored all warnings, eased herself into a horse saddle and headed North to the land of pioneers, fur trappers and loners. “The doctors recommended fresh air, didn’t they?” she would tell her doubters.

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‍ And it was there that she found the love of her life, a one-eyed desperado called Jim Nugent, whose volatile blend of alcoholism and quaint chivalry tugged at her heart strings. She saw beneath his wounds, both mental and physical. Whisky was his master, and she knew he was treading dangerously.

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‍ Nugent was so infamous that mothers would warn naughty children to behave, or they’d leave them for Rocky Mountain Jim. He was said to come down the mountains once a month to steal naughty children away for his supper.

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‍ But that’s not the man Isabella Bird met. Nugent was gentle and kind to her. She wrote: “He had lost an eye in a grizzly bear encounter and that side of his face was terribly repulsive, the other side looked as though it could have been “modelled in marble. His tawny ringlets cascaded down from hat to shoulders — a figure at once beautiful and tragic.”

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‍ On their first meeting, Nugent charmed Isabella by offering her water in a homely little tin, then apologised graciously that he had nothing better to offer a lady such as herself.

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‍ The top of Jim’s mud-roofed, black log cabin was draped with all manner of drying furs, and the horns and antlers of animals were lying all about. A partial deer carcass hung at one end of the cabin, while on one wall was a recently skinned beaver carcass. “It looked like some wild beast’s den rather than the home of a man.”

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‍ They spent months together and he would take her across the Rockies showing her the beauty of them. At night by the campfire, he would recite Shakespeare off the top of his head. She was impressed.

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‍ One day she was determined to climb Long’s Peak, the most dangerous mountain in the Rockies at 14,259 feet. Nugen took her up it, as she was wearing borrowed shoes too big for her and struggling to breath. He carried her like a bale of hay.

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‍ She wrote: “It was the worst part of the climb, one slip and a breathing, thinking, human being would lie 3,000 feet below, a shapeless, bloody heap!”

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‍ Still in love, Isabella went home to England, knowing that there was no future for them together. A few months later lovesick Nugent, who never got over her, was shot dead in a brawl.

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‍ Isabella died in Edinburgh, aged 73, on October 7, 1904. She was planning another adventure that day.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

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‍4 August 2025

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