Mark Twain? Albert Bigelow Paine? Apocryphal?
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, Mark Twain adored cats. He once humorously wrote about genetically crossing cats and people. He concluded that the quality of people would be improved, but the quality of cats would deteriorate. Would you please help me to find the exact quotation together with a citation?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Mark Twain maintained a set of notebooks to describe his experiences and to record fragments of his thoughts and ideas. In 1894 he penned the following:1
Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
The text above appeared in the book “Mark Twain’s Notebook” which was edited by Albert Bigelow Paine and published posthumously in 1935. Paine was Twain’s biographer and literary executor. Paine examined Twain’s notebooks and selected a subset of passages to reprint in book form under the title “Mark Twain’s Notebook”.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Twain wrote a thematically pertinent vignette dated September 1887 which described his encounter with a young man who was carrying a gun. Twain initially feared the youth was a “lunatic out gunning for men”. Next, he worried whether a group of “four sorry-looking cats” were the target. But Twain learned that the youth was hoping to provide a meal for the cats.
The 1887 vignette appeared in the 2009 book “Who is Mark Twain?” edited by Robert H. Hirst who is the general editor of the scholarly Mark Twain Project:2
Aha!—so far from being a madman, he was saner, you see, than the average of our race; for he had a warm spot in him for cats. When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.
A separate Quote Investigator article about the quotation immediately above is available here.
In 1949 “The Ladies’ Home Journal” printed the quotation under examination as a filler item:3
Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could he crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
—MARK TWAIN: Mark Twain’s Notebook.
In 1996 the collection “When In Doubt, Tell the Truth and Other Quotations from Mark Twain” edited by Brian Collins included an entry for the quotation with a citation pointing to Albert Bigelow Paine’s 1935 edition of “Mark Twain’s Notebook”.4
In conclusion, Mark Twain deserves credit for the quotation which he wrote in one of his notebook in 1894. Editor Albert Bigelow Paine saw Twain’s remarks and included them in the 1935 book “Mark Twain’s Notebook”.
Image Notes: Picture of cats in a basket from Jari Hytönen at Unsplash. The image has been cropped and resized.
Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Luther Mckinnon whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration.
- 1935, Mark Twain’s Notebook by Mark Twain, Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, Chapter 21: European Residence, Year: 1894, Quote Page 236 and 237, Harper & Brothers, New York. (Verified with hardcopy) ↩︎
- 2010 Paperback (Based on 2009 Hardcover), Who is Mark Twain? by Mark Twain, Edited by Robert H. Hirst (General Editor of Mark Twain Project), Title of manuscript: An Incident, Editor’s date of manuscript: September 1887, Start Page 165, Quote Page 166, HarperStudio: Imprint of HarperCollins, New York. (Verified with scans of paperback edition; hardcover was published in 2009) ↩︎
- 1949 April, The Ladies’ Home Journal, Volume 66, Number 4, (Filler item), Quote Page 141, The Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Verified with scans)1949 April, The Ladies’ Home Journal, Volume 66, Number 4, (Filler item), Quote Page 141, The Curtis Publishing Company, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
- 1996, When In Doubt, Tell the Truth and Other Quotations from Mark Twain, Edited by Brian Collins, Topic: Cats, Quote Page 19, Columbia University Press, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎