In September 1780 two pampered pussies exchanged letters which were hand delivered to their respective residences. The Persian cat Snow Grimalkin, who lived in Cathedral Close, Lichfield, explained to his fellow feline, Miss Po Felina of the Bishop’s Palace, that he had spied her in her ‘stately’ abode washing her ‘beautiful round face’ and ‘elegantly brinded ears’ with her ‘velvet paws’ while swishing her ‘meandering tail’ with ‘graceful sinuosity’. The ‘treacherous’ Cupid had, however, hidden himself behind her ‘tabby beauties’, leading Snow Grimalkin to long for more sights of his beautiful amour, watching ‘day and night’ from his balcony and serenading her with songs echoing through the ‘winding lanes and dirty alleys’ of Lichfield, hoping that the still ‘starlight evenings’ might induce her to ‘take the air’ on the palace leads. However, despite these efforts, Po Felina sat ‘wrapped in fur’, ‘purring with contented insensibility’ and sleeping ‘with untroubled dreams’; nevertheless, Snow Grimalkin hoped that the offering of numerous mice ‘for your food or your amusement’ and ‘an enormous Norway rat’ that covered his ‘paws with its gore’ might just be the present to secure the object of his attentions. Unfortunately, while Po Felina admired the ‘spotless ermine’ and ‘tyger strength’ of Snow’s ‘commanding form’ and ‘wit and endowments’, she was too wary of his ‘fierceness’ to return his affections.

While, of course, the exchange of letters between Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward on behalf of their cats was meant to be playful and witty, in the Augustan tradition of mock-heroic and humorous writing, with each pet assuming something of the character of their owners, it also demonstrates the importance of pets in the Georgian household and the extent to which, as we shall see in this chapter, Darwin was a close observer of animal behaviour and a strong believer in animal agency and intelligence. As portrayed by Darwin, with his blood-stained paws and smooth white fur, Snow Grimalkin combined bestial behaviours that were vestiges of a natural state with the advantages of birth, breeding and beauty. This was a miniature tiger who was ‘rough and hardy, bold and free’, whose ‘nervous paw’ could take ‘My Lady’s lapdog by the neck’ or ‘with furious hiss assault the hen and snatch a chicken from the pen’, rather than a cosseted cat.