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The Cat's Meat Man: Feeding Felines in Victorian London
As cats evolved from feral ratters into beloved Victorian companions, a nascent pet-food economy arose on the carts of so-called “cat’s meat men”. Kathryn Hughes explores the life and times of these itinerant offal vendors, their intersection with a victim of Jack the Ripper, and a feast held in the meat men’s honor, chaired by none other than Louis Wain.
On September 8, 1888, Annie Chapman, a middle-aged alcoholic who subsisted on crochet work, flower-selling, and casual prostitution, was found murdered and disembowelled on the back-door steps of a terraced house in Hanbury Street. Legally this work should not have been done in the small hours, but as the cheery abattoir owner Mr Potler tells Dickens (or his stand-in): “the London tabbies are so dainty that they don’t like horse that’s been killed too long over-night”. Two hundred and fifty cat’s meat men, in their best bib and tucker, sat down at long tables and greeted “the appearance of the soup, the roast beef, and the boiled legs of mutton with prolonged cries of ‘Mee-att!’ in the familiar notes of the street”.
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