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How cat memes went viral 100 years ago
In the age of social media, we're living through a communications revolution. But this isn't the first one, nor is it the first time cats have been at the centre of social change.
It is a fundamental law of media history: as soon as a new communications technology emerges, people will use it to make pictures of cats. And those cat pictures show not only the special relationship between humans and their pets, but the changing ways that humans relate to one another.
Cat memes in their modern form date back to the 1990s, when email first allowed bored office workers and friends to message each other funny felines. The cats jumped from there to social media as the web developed, where viral videos like Keyboard Cat and memes such as Grumpy Cat bloomed across platforms. Demand for this content was so high that entire websites like ICanHasCheezburger sprung up to showcase the best e-cats, aggregating popular pet videos and cat memes.
But there was another trend long before any cat wanted to "has cheezburger", or any owner could even imagine taking a video of their pet with a handheld electronic rectangle: the Edwardian postcard. And, according to scholars of media history, understanding the cat postcards of the early 20th Century might help us to understand social media today.
"Some things persist across generations and media, and depictions of cats are one of those things. It's kind of reassuring," says Ben Weiss, a senior curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and co-curator of the museum's The Postcard Age exhibition.
In the 19th and early 20th Century, Weiss says, "postcards functioned like social media today". Cheaper, faster and more convenient than a letter, postcards were used to share random musings, plan logistics for where and when to meet, tell jokes and, as always, post cat pictures. Whether it's mail sent with a stamp in 1924 or posts made with the tap of a finger in 2024, cats of all forms have always been there for artists and audiences.
The first postcards were printed in Austria-Hungary in 1869 – fortuitous timing for an innovation in the mail field because in 1874, 21 countries established the Universal Postal Union, allowing mail to be sent and delivered internationally. More countries followed in the years to come, and postcards rode this wave.
Postcard culture exploded in the early 20th Century. Cats went along for the ride (Credit: Courtesy of the Edwardian Postcard Project, Lancaster University)
Like memes, postcards carried not just a picture and a few lines of text but were tangible evidence of a vast network and powerful institutions that had transported them rapidly across a far distance. They marked a changing world and technology's startling advance, delivered daily into the hands and mailboxes of citizens.
"We've forgotten the density of that early 20th-Century communications network, which postcards were moving through," says Weiss. "You could send a postcard to someone at 10 saying you'll be there at 5:30, if you're going from Manhattan to Jersey City, and you can get the message to them fairly quickly."
Postcards in the early 20th-Century city arguably marked the first time in history that communication at that speed was affordable and widely accessible to the average person. Between 1900 and 1914, says Weiss, "there's this massive worldwide postcard craze to the point where people talk about it being a disease in the public bloodstream".
During this era of postcard mania, uncountable millions of postcards circulated, and it was a perfect moment for cats to take over the new medium. At the time cats were considered more than just pest control. Monarchs and socialites, including Queen Victoria, were famous cat enjoyers, and the animal's association with Halloween was well-established. Some postcards featured cats just being cats: sipping milk from saucers, playing with yarn, basking in the sunlight. Others dressed cats up as humans, working jobs and taking part in domestic scenes.
Not everybody was comfortable with the postcard's impact on society. Newspapers called it a "fresh terror" and a "Frankenstein's monster", alarmed by the product's popularity, Cure says. The sacks of postal workers swelled with postcards, leading to stories about injuries from lifting overladen mail bags.
Like modern memes, early cat content was reused and repurposed for different messages (Credit: (left) Lancaster University and (right) The Johns Hopkins University)
"Postcards were seen as so fast," says Monica Cure, author of Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century. "There were lots of complaints about what postcards were going to do to people's reading and writing skills, because if you could just dash off a few lines, why did you need to actually learn grammar and become a good writer?"
People also feared the postcard would lead to more superficial relationships, because instead of writing pages to each other in letters, people were just sending pictures back and forth. The public, unsealed nature of postcards was also frightening to many people, Cure says. The first and earliest proposal for the postcard was actually shot down because "it was just too scary to have something where servants can read your mail".
Today, similar worries animate the conversations around social media. It's too fast, it's a national security threat, it's leading to shallower thinking. New forms of communication technology unsettle the ways people are used to seeing themselves and their communities, Cure says. New forms of social media also bring new forms of cat.
And like memes today, postcard culture intersected with politics. Some of the most famous postcard cats are associated with the Suffrage movement. Postcards were sold as fundraising for social causes, but postcard-making companies also pounced on any opportunity to make content around issues people cared about.
As with social media, the postcard cat was a medium for self-expression. They were also just cute (Credit: Courtesy of the Edwardian Postcard Project, Lancaster University)
"Postcards are similar to memes, and much like today, early 20th-Century visual culture was all about animals, especially cats," says Heidi Herr, a librarian at Johns Hopkins University, and the curator of the Votes and Petticoats exhibition commemorating the visual culture of the Suffrage movement. Cats were typically associated with the household setting, and "meant to be passive, beautiful, decorative and demure", Herr says, but at the same time, cats are predators and anyone who owns one can tell you they like to make use of their claws.
"The Suffragettes were capitalist queens, they were building their brand," says Herr. The movement was savvy in the use of new media like postcards and film to get their message out and cats offered potent symbolism.
Ann Lewis, a collector of Suffrage movement memorabilia and former communications director for the Clinton White House, says she was "enormously impressed" by the Suffrage movement's political messaging. "Politics is about communications," says Lewis, "telling people why they should vote for you." In an era where mass media essentially meant just the newspaper and mail, Suffragettes successfully waged a decades-long campaign to persuade an all-male electorate, and new media was a crucial part of their success. "Postcards are the email of their day – inexpensive and personal," says Lewis.
The Suffrage cat postcards still resonate with a generation raised on cat memes. Herr says stickers the library made of the Suffrage cats are among the most in-demand items on the Johns Hopkins campus. "I'm already seeing students with these stickers on water bottles and laptops, we gave away reproductions and I see them on dorm room windows. People are all about the cat."
People are still all about the cat, but people are also all about each other – and whether it's a postcard or a meme, the record of media history shows there's little which interests humans more than sending cute, funny animal pictures.
Source: BBC
