But I think there is more to this - here you find insight in to the world of T S Eliot- from the source of those rather special names for the cats (and dogs) to the fact that London town would not be the same with out those feline characters making it their own. She grew up by the sea, on the south coast of England, spending most of her childhood reading, writing, drawing and running wild. A few years ago I bought over 30 copies and (having annotated them) sent them out in lieu of Christmas cards. After a Masters at Central Saint Martin's, she worked for the BBC until her lifelong passion for children's books led her to start creating them. They have also been published in versions illustrated by Edward Gorey (1982), Axel Scheffler (2009) and Rebecca Ashdown (2014).

I especially loved “The Rum Tum Tugger,” about a contrary cat who always wants what he can’t have and never wants what he’s offered: “When you let him in, then he wants to be out; / He’s always on the wrong side of every door. First illustrated edition, first impression, presentation copy, inscribed by the author as Old Possum on the front free endpaper, "to the Tandy Fambley from O.This version invariably has me singing along to the rhyme on the pastel coloured dust-jacket of this gorgeous hardcover copy, every time I pick it up:🐈 ‘Jellicle Cats come out to-night‘Jellicle Cats come one come all:The Jellicle Moon is shining bright ~Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.

Eliot's poems are the source material for Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats which is what inspired me to pick this up. Ricks and McCue identify "fambly" as a variant spelling and Eliot frequently used it in his letters to the Tandy family. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.In his book of practical cats, Old Possum, (1888 -- 1965), a great modernist poet, let his hair down. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Registered office: WSM Services Limited, Connect House, 133-137 Alexandra Road, Wimbledon, LONDON SW19 7JY. At about the same time another English composer, Humphrey Searle, composed another narrated piece based on the poems, using flute, piccolo, cello and guitar. Home to William Golding, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sally Rooney, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Max Porter, Ingrid Persaud, Anna Burns and Rachel Cusk, among many others, Faber is proud to publish some of the greatest novelists from the early twentieth century to today.

My favourite poem was the one on Macavity which was fun to read aloud and create some good rhythm to it. I would have liked it if individual lines had had their own illustrations and it would have been good for the text to wrap itself around the pictures.Well aware of how awful and derisive the reviews had been, I fortified myself with a good few glasses of shiraz and my TV blanket. Throughout the 1930s, the family would be the first audience on which Eliot tested out the cat poems, both in letters and on visits to the family's Hampshire cottage. One really likes the sequence of vignettes that accompany the muddle that the Tugger poses when he disrupts a housewife's sewing chores. I did however change one of the words describing some Siamese cats ('Chinks') which is not a word I'd want my grandchildren to use!