The Cat: A Calendar and Anthology

Overview
Agnes Repplier’s The Cat: A Calendar and Anthology (1908) is a playful, erudite tribute that gathers centuries of writing about cats into a year’s worth of daily companionship. The book functions both as a reader’s calendar and as a compact survey of the feline’s literary career, revealing how poets, essayists, travelers, and moralists have regarded the creature that haunts hearths and myths with equal ease. Repplier, an accomplished American essayist, uses her deft, urbane sensibility to shape the selections and to celebrate the cat’s intelligence, reserve, humor, and occasional mischief.

Structure
Organized as a yearlong cycle, the volume assigns to each date a cat-related sentence, stanza, or brief passage. The calendar format encourages unhurried, episodic reading while building a mosaic portrait across the seasons. Repplier’s hand is felt in the tactful arrangement of quotations, the balance of moods and eras, and the light framing that turns an anthology into a narrative of attitudes. The result reads like an almanac of feline thought, one that invites small daily encounters rather than continuous argument.

Sources and Selections
Repplier draws widely across languages and periods. Classical and medieval glances establish the cat’s ancient prestige and suspicion; early modern voices consider its household ascent; the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries supply affectionate portraits and indelible set pieces. Thomas Gray’s elegy for the drowned favorite, with its moral shimmer and comic pathos, finds company with Christopher Smart’s exaltation of Jeoffry, where devotion becomes liturgy. Montaigne’s amused query about who truly plays with whom captures the cat’s counterintelligence in a line. The London scenes around Samuel Johnson and Hodge introduce a domestic celebrity whose oysters and saucer echo through English letters. From the French, the sinuous melancholy and adoration of Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier temper English common sense with a continental relish for the cat’s mystery. Scattered throughout are proverbs, travelers’ notes, and brief anecdotes that trace the animal’s changing fortunes from Egyptian sanctity to Parisian salon.

Themes
Across its pages the anthology tests and gently overturns familiar charges. The cat’s independence is shown as self-possession rather than coldness; its silence becomes eloquence; its alleged perfidy is balanced by fidelity to place and routine. Repplier’s arrangement privileges moments where the human observer recognizes a mind at work behind the whiskers, curiosity tempered by caution, playfulness edging into art. Domesticity anchors the book, yet superstition and folklore flicker at the margins, reminding readers how easily the cat slips between symbol and companion. The anthology also registers the moral imagination that attaches homilies to feline behavior, then lets wit undo the sermon.

Style and Voice
Although chiefly a gathering of other people’s words, the book bears Repplier’s signature: clipped, exact, and amused. Her curation prefers sparkle over bulk and puts concise turns of phrase alongside lyric fragments. The calendar pacing enforces brevity, and the cumulative effect is social as much as literary, like being seated among many quick, memorable talkers. Humor is never far away, but neither is tenderness; the selections are chosen to keep both alive.

Significance
The Cat: A Calendar and Anthology belongs with Repplier’s earlier feline studies as part of a wider Edwardian revaluation of animals in art and life. It makes a portable, civilizing case for the cat by letting tradition speak. Instead of thesis, it offers a procession of voices that readers can revisit as the year turns. The volume’s enduring charm lies in this gentle confidence: that a creature able to inspire such variety of keen notice needs no defense beyond being seen and remembered on the page, day by day.