T. S. Eliot and the real cats behind Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

In the late 1930s, while the editorial head of Faber and Faber was publishing demanding modernist poetry and writing prefaces for Ezra Pound, part of his director's private correspondence went to three small children in the family circle. The letters were in verse. They were about cats. They had drawings in the margins. And almost every one of those cats existed off the page.

The main recipients were Tom Faber, son of his partner Geoffrey Faber, and the children of Frank Morley, another editor at the house. The letters circulated for several years through the homes of England's intellectual middle class, read aloud at bedtime. The collection appeared in 1939 under a title that played on the author's affectionate nickname among friends, Old Possum: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The book sold reasonably well. Forty-two years later, Andrew Lloyd Webber turned it into one of the highest-grossing musicals in West End history.

Who were the real cats behind the book?

Lyndall Gordon, in T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1999), documents from the correspondence held in the Faber archives that several of the cats in the book had counterparts in the poet's daily life or in nearby households. Eliot lived at various times with cats in his Kensington flat and in the country houses of his editor friends. The letters to Tom Faber describe specific scenes: cats sneaking into the pantry, cats greeting visitors, cats settling on the editor's manuscripts.

Jellylorum is the clearest case. It was the name of the Faber family's actual cat, mentioned by name in letters predating the book and later carried into the poem The Old Gumbie Cat and into the broader gallery of Jellicle Cats. Pettipaws and Wiscus also appear as names used in the correspondence for specific cats in the editorial circle.

Other names in the book have more literary origins. Macavity, the criminal cat of Macavity: The Mystery Cat, is a feline transposition of Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Moriarty. Eliot acknowledged it in later letters: the poem's meter deliberately echoes that of Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark and the criminal prose of the Victorian Sherlock Holmes. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, the thieving duo of Victoria Grove, seem inspired by stray cats of 1930s West London, though no specific pair is documented.

Old Deuteronomy, the venerable patriarch cat, is a more symbolic figure. His name blends the biblical reference to the fifth book of the Pentateuch with the cliché of the long-lived village cat. Mr. Mistoffelees, the magical black cabaret cat, derives from the Mephistopheles of Goethe and Marlowe, condensed into feline form.

The letter to Tom Faber, January 1936

One of the best-preserved letters, cited by Peter Ackroyd in T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984), is dated January 1936 and addressed to Tom Faber on his seventh birthday. In it Eliot describes, in irregular iambic tetrameter, the behavior of a cat that has slipped into Geoffrey Faber's office and knocked over a stack of printer's proofs. The letter includes a pen drawing by the author showing the cat on top of the papers.

The passage, not included verbatim in the book, contains several reusable lines that reappear in The Naming of Cats in the published volume. The famous opening "The naming of cats is a difficult matter" seems to have circulated as a letter verse before it was fixed as an edited piece.

From the page to the stage

In 1977, Andrew Lloyd Webber read Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats to his children and began composing melodies for the poems as a private exercise. The initial intent was a song cycle for concert performance rather than a musical. Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow and literary executor since 1965, granted Lloyd Webber the rights on the condition that the original texts be respected without free rewriting.

The musical, which premiered at the New London Theatre on May 11, 1981, under the direction of Trevor Nunn with choreography by Gillian Lynne, added a single unpublished poem: Grizabella, the Glamour Cat. Eliot had written it but cut it from the 1939 book, judging it too dark for children. Valerie Eliot recovered it from the archive and handed it to Lloyd Webber, who built the song Memory around the character, one of the most performed pieces in the twentieth-century Anglo-American musical repertoire.

Tom Hooper's 2019 film adaptation, with Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, and Taylor Swift, failed commercially and drew devastating reviews. Much of the problem was the visual design (actors coated in photorealistic digital fur unsettled audiences) and the loss of the abstract theatrical language that worked on stage. Eliot's book survived both adaptations without losing its standing.

The look of the book's cats

The book does not specify breeds. Edward Gorey's illustrations for the 1982 edition and the earlier ones by Nicolas Bentley (1940) show common European cats with varied coats: brown tabbies, black, black and white, golden. This reflects the feline reality of interwar London: urban populations of common cats with no pedigree, open genetic mixing, adult weights between 7.5 and 12 lb (3.5 to 5.5 kg), and a typical lifespan of 12 to 16 years with basic care.

Macavity is described as a ginger cat, with a sunken expression and the air of a weary villain. Mr. Mistoffelees is black from head to tail, the classic profile of the theater cat and Victorian superstition. Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer appear as brown and black striped tabbies, what feline shorthand calls a brown mackerel tabby, the majority pattern in the common European population.

The Jellicle Cat, a category Eliot invented, is not a breed but a metaphysics: a cat is Jellicle if it knows the secret names, the songs, the dance of the Jellicle Ball. The etymology of the term comes from a child's pronunciation of "dear little cats" in Eliot's letters to his godchildren, which contracted into "jellicle cats". The book's freest invention is also the most sung part of the musical.

The biographical and cultural context

Eliot was fifty when the book came out. By then he had already written The Waste Land (1922), and Four Quartets was in gestation. He was an established poet, a British citizen since 1927, an Anglican convert, and an editorial director at Faber and Faber with real weight in the London literary industry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, he had crossed the Atlantic for good in 1914, an American who became one of the central figures of British letters. But his personal life was marked by difficult years: his marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood had deteriorated to the point of her being committed to a sanatorium in 1938. The letters about cats to small children coincided with one of the hardest stretches of his private biography.

Lyndall Gordon suggests that the cat book served as a release valve for an author whose major work demanded sustained emotional intensity. Writing poems for children about mischievous cats was minor literature in canonical terms, but it offered lightness and play. Eliot acknowledged as much in a letter to Geoffrey Faber: the book was "a rest from serious verse".

The early academic reception was lukewarm. Later criticism, especially after the success of the musical, has revised the reading. Today the book is regarded as a sophisticated formal exercise: command of meter, intertextuality with Carroll, Lear, and the English nonsense tradition, play with bureaucratic and religious language applied to household animals. It is minor work in the technical sense, written in a light register by an author equally capable of the high register. It is not minor work in the dismissive sense.

What remains of Eliot in every Cats performed today?

The Cats franchise has produced productions in more than thirty countries and translations into roughly twenty languages. Even where the rest of the libretto is translated, the cats' names tend to stay in the original. Macavity remains Macavity, not "the Mystery Cat". The editorial decision follows Valerie Eliot's principle: the names are part of the poetic text, not a functional label.

Of the real cats in Eliot's circle, little material trace remains. The original letters are kept in the Faber and Faber archives and in university collections, especially the King's College Library in Cambridge. The cats themselves, the Jellylorums, Pettipaws, and the rest, lived their ordinary feline lives in 1930s London flats and vanished with no documentation beyond their name in a letter addressed to a child.

What survives is the transmutation. An older man of American origin, gray suit and ecclesiastical manners, wrote poems in Victorian meter about the cats of the publishing house where he worked to entertain his colleagues' children. Forty years later, those poems are sung every night in painted fur makeup in a London theater. The distance between the real cat sleeping on Geoffrey Faber's printer's proofs and the Grizabella played by Elaine Paige in 1981 measures fairly well the power of literary language to turn the domestic into myth.