Category: 1910-1913

Today it’s time to answer the question that’s been on everyone’s mind, “what were cats doing in 1910?” Doing cat things, yes. Also, being pets, though they had it harder than now.

I found a “Brooklyn Eagle Humane Club” column which ran for years in a Brooklyn newspaper. Readers would write in to Aunt Jean, ask to join the club and then raise a question about good pet-keeping. The reader would always sign “your niece” (which confused me to no end, at first)!

Here’s an example:

Dear Aunt Jean,

I wish to become a member of the Humane Club. I promise to be kind to all animals. I have two lovely Maltese cats. When we go to the country, we express them, so they have a nice time running around as well as I.

Your loving niece, RUTH V. SWEENEY

I do not believe that cats enjoy traveling very much. They do not seem to like the idea of being boxed up, but prefer to be permitted to run about freely. It is nice for you to take them along with you.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, pg. 27, December 01, 1911

PETA was a long way off. Well into the twentieth century, boys and girls kept pigeons, chickens, rabbits, and other tame (or semi-tame) animals as pets. White mice and rats were pocket friends.

Even wild animals were made into pets. According to Pets in America: A History by Katherine C. Grier, squirrels were the most popular. They could chew through wood so special cages had to be made to hold them.

I apologize, here, to the squeamish. The thought of rats and squirrels running up and down my children’s bodies is more than I can stand myself. Let’s turn to back to cats, shall we?

In fact, “Maltese” is not a breed – it just refers to a cat that’s grey. Apparently, there are lots of grey cats in Malta and that’s how they came to have that name. I’m not a huge cat fan (allergies) but even I have to admit that the Dunning’s cat is a good-looking one.

The only literary reference I found to Maltese cats around 1910 was a short story by Rudyard Kipling called – you got it – “The Maltese Cat”. This was just the name given to a race horse in the story, though.

It was not until 1939 that T.S. Elliot immortalized cats in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. In 1910 Elliot was studying philosophy at the Sorbonne. It would still be another five years until he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

Lloyd Anderson Webber’s long-running musical Cats was based on Elliot’s 1939 cat poems. A friend from college told me that she knew a man who was on the cast of Cats so long that he began to believe he was a cat. She said when he got home from the show, he would have milk from a dish on the floor. Not proven, but an interesting anecdote…

In honor of Elliot and my grandma’s cat, here’s a poem to end my rambling. Have a nice day, everyone!

Our Maltese Cat
the Lord of the Barn 
hunting the mice and protecting the feed
let others play with balls of yarn
he’s got a job to do, indeed

the chipmunks too
are quite a scourge
he’ll have to grab a few today
relentless in his vermin purge
before he rests upon the hay.

Oh just this once, 
he’ll pose for you
with paws together, ears in air
but he’s got better things to do
not for him, that rocking chair! 

They rested. Hard-working farming family that they were, it’s clear that at the beginning of the 20th century, the Dunnings observed the sabbath. Almost every time a relative is mentioned in the Middletown newspapers of those days it concerns an event at the First Presbyterian Church.

The picture below shows what I believe to be a church party, likely on a Sunday. I don’t recognize any relatives but it’s my assumption that those are fellow church members. (I also assume they’ve clumped together to be included in the photograph).

Two things stand out to me about this shot. One, the look of satisfaction of the man on the right side. He may not be the pastor but he wears a sort of ‘proud of my flock’ look, no? Two, the girls who are sitting on the ground balancing their heads on their hands. “How much longer do we have to sit here?”

It’s just a picture, of course. That juxtaposition, though – the difference between the older generation’s view of the church and the newer – comes through loud and clear in two novels of the time.

Here’s a quote from Room With a View by E.M. Forster (published in 1908): “Paganism is infectious – more infectious than diphtheria or piety – and the Rector’s niece was taken to church protesting. As usual, she didn’t see why. Why shouldn’t she sit in the sun with the young men?” The Rector’s niece found church boring, and Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel House of Mirth agrees with that assessment.

“Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour of fresh mourning, felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston’s lawyer, solemnly erect behind the Buhl table at the end of the room, began to rattle through the preamble of the will. ‘It’s like being in church,’ she reflected, wondering vaguely where Gwen Stepney had got such an awful hat.”

Already, in the early 1900’s there was an opting-out of religion for one or the other reason. In Lily Bart’s set, those reasons were as varied as shampooing one’s hair, playing tennis or “smoking the cigarette of young despair” in one’s bedroom. In the Forster novel, opposition is intellectual.

Lucy’s fiance Cecil respects “honest orthodoxy” but only as a “result of a spiritual crisis; he could not imagine it as a natural birthright, that might grow heavenward like flowers.” In other words, he looks down on Lucy for accepting her parent’s religion wholesale.

“Victorian earnestness gives way to modern irony and indifference.” writes Pericles Lewis in an essay entitled “Modernism and religion”. Modernists wanted to turn conventionality on its head. That meant the questioning of things that were givens for their Victorian-age parents…things like regular church attendance.

It certainly struck me reading these novels that turning away from the ritual of church life in the U.S. was already well underway by 1905. That’s not to say, Lewis argues, that Modernists were complete secularists. On the contrary, he argues that they simply “came to define their religion in increasingly personal terms” so that “the sacred no longer has its former public role.”

Where has this led in 2019? Binge-watching as spiritual ritual? Facebook for social belonging? Oprah for belief? It’s easy (but not helpful) to be too cynical. All I know is that when I look through the pictures on my phone I don’t have any that look like the one above…and I wish I did.

Don’t you love picnics? Barring grass allergies, what’s not to love? A sunny day, a green lawn on which to lay your blanket, and carefully-wrapped delicacies to be shared between family and friends. It makes me happy just writing about it.

What’s more, it’s May 31st…prime picnic season. If you need to brush up on your skills, look no further! Today I’ll share some invaluable picnic pointers from the New-York Tribune, dated May 26th, 1910.

I must mention that I found this article under a section entitled “Of Interest to Women” beside the article “The Graduating Frock: It Ought to be Simple, but Should Also Be Lovely”. I could not seem to locate the accompanying “Of Interest to Men” section, ha. (For the record, I’m all for simple and lovely).

5 Picnic Tips

1.“Dishes and napkins of paper are to be preferred at picnics to china and linen, which have to be carried home and washed.”

I think we can all agree on this. Disposable plates and cups came out in 1904 and were clearly quick to gain in popularity.

2. “When starting out for a picnic, do not forget to take along the can opener, if you have a can to open, or the corkscrew, if you are to serve root beer, or some matches, if you intend to light an alcohol lamp.”

Not until 1959 was the “pull-tab” or “pop-top” invented by Ermal Fraze to open cans. In that case, you definitely needed the corkscrew. As for the root beer, in 1910, they still mean root beer made from roots such as sasafrass or sarsparilla root.

The flavor from the sasafrass root comes from Safrole oil. This oil was banned for mass consumption by the FDA in the 1960s after trials showed that lab animals given Safrole developed liver damage and cancer. In other words, if you choose root beer, please just grab an A&W off the shelf.

3. “If a chafing dish is carried along, creamed lobster or chicken may be prepared at home before starting and then reheated at the picnic grounds.”

Presumably this dish would be reheated using the alcohol lamp from tip 2? Friends, if creamed lobster was considered informal picnic food, what did formal dinners in 1910 look like? (I’ll look into it.) I can’t approve of this tip. My suggestion is a chicken salad wrap and I have a good recipe if you’re interested!

4. “Some picnic lovers like to carry bonbons and candy, by way of sweets, instead of cake. Most people, however, enjoy cake, and plenty of it, at a picnic.”

Yes, yes, yes. Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, please, or maybe vanilla cake with strawberry frosting? These go splendidly with lemonade (or wine, if you twist my arm). Brownies and lemon bars may be more user-friendly but…cake…cake. Is it the hard “c” sound? Just like picnic, the very word makes my mouth water.

5. “Lemonade, raspberry shrub and other beverages which must have fresh water added to them just before serving are not desirable for picnics unless one knows the character of the water supply.”

No one knows the character of the water supply? Oh dear. It turns out that the first continuous use of chlorine in the U.S. for disinfecting water didn’t take place until 1908 in Jersey City, NJ. In fact (not to ruin your appetite) the first sewage treatment plants in the U.S. didn’t come about until 1890.

Picnickers in 1910 still had to watch out for typhoid and other germs in the water from brooks and wells. In fact, the Safe Drinking Water Act was not passed by Congress until 1974. Up until then, there were no national standards for water quality and…we’re still working on it.

I enjoy picnics so much that I often do abbreviated ones with my girls on our front lawn. My husband bought a small plastic-like picnic blanket that we call the “lona”. When I’ve had all the craziness I can stand inside, I usually entice one or the other girl to read books on the lona with me.

In case you’re wondering, lona is the word my husband uses in Spanish for ‘thing you put on the ground outside’.  We’ve all adopted this word since it’s shorter and easier than “picnic blanket”. We are that efficient.

Let me take up no more of your precious leisure time. You’ve got a picnic to plan, surely! If you’re in the area, and so inclined, we would love to picnic with you at the Kensico Dam, the West Point picnic area, or wherever your favorite spot may be.