One day in 1757 the poet Christopher Smart went out to St James’s Park, started praying loudly and couldn’t stop. He was hauled off to St Luke’s Asylum, where a cascade of ecstatic verse proceeded to pour from him, in which he identified his cat companion, Jeoffry, as ‘the servant of the Living God’. According to Smart’s delighted itemising, Jeoffry served the Almighty by catching rats, keeping his front paws pernickety clean and observing the watches of the night. He was a peaceable soul too, kissing neighbouring cats ‘in kindness’ and letting a mouse escape one time in seven. But perhaps Jeoffry’s greatest accomplishment was his ability to ‘spraggle upon waggle’. Both spraggling and waggling, Smart’s magnificat suggests, are deeply pleasing to the Lord.
Although Jeoffry has become famous through Smart’s much-anthologised poem ‘My Cat Jeoffry’, he has left no other pawprint on the historical record. We don’t know how Smart found him, or how he found Smart. Nor is it certain what became of him after the poet was released in 1763 and restarted his life as a denizen of Grub Street, a huge comedown for a one-time fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge. It is this gap that Oliver Soden proceeds to plug in his delightful ‘biography’ of Jeoffry. Soden decides that Jeoffry is rust-coloured. He starts him off in a Covent Garden brothel, where he spends his kitten days chasing used condoms across the floor, avoiding piss pots and wondering at the meaty smells emanating from the bed under which he crouches while his mistress, Nancy Burroughs, doggedly transacts her business. This setting gives Soden the perfect chance to provide colour to the black-and-white world of William Hogarth’s prints, a riotous jumble of muck and mayhem, law and disorder, moral and amoral decline. He even rifles through Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies for 1761 to give Nancy a back story: she is ‘very ugly; chiefly a dealer with old fellows’ who specialises in the birch.
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