In this episode of Biographers of Conversation, the distinguished British biographer Oliver Soden chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about his choices while crafting Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat.
For I will consider my cat Jeoffry...
Times Literary Supplement ‘Book of the Year’
Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat
Jeoffry was a real cat who lived in a London asylum with Christopher Smart, an eighteenth-century poet whose verse was notable for its visionary power, Christian ardour and lyrical virtuosity. Whimsical and profound, witty and deeply moving, Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat shares the story of a poet and a poem. It also transports us into the bustling streets of eighteenth-century London, where we encounter a vibrant cast of characters, including the likes of King George, Handel and Samuel Johnson.
Christopher Smart, c.1743, oil on canvas
Attributed to Thomas Hudson
Pembroke College, Cambridge
Before and during his incarceration, Christopher Smart wrote Jubilate Ago, a 4,000-line hymn of praise to God for all the wonders of the natural world. Jeoffry inspired the poem’s most famous section, ‘For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry’, which includes 74 lines of verse. In this extract of the poem, Christopher Smart immortalises Jeoffry, extolling his many virtues and habits. It also expresses Christopher’s profound emotional connection to Jeoffry.
Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, 1759-63, Fragment B, Seq. 19. MS Eng 719
Jeoffry appears ten lines from the bottom.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat focuses on Christopher Smart’s relationship and interactions with his beloved cat. In this semi-fictionalised biography, Oliver Soden cleverly uses Jeoffry as a lens through which to explore Christopher’s character, personality and often troubled life. Through a blend of historical research, biography and imaginative storytelling, Oliver Soden brings Christopher Smart and Jeoffry to life, revealing the profound impact a pet can have on human creativity and spirituality.
Oliver pieced together fragments of information such as details of Mother Douglas’s notorious brothel in the Piazza, Covent Garden; Harris’s List, an annual catalogue of sex workers in Georgian London; newspaper reports; and historical events such as The London Earthquake, which occurred on 8 March 1750. In the author’s note, Oliver admitted that ‘the dividing line between fact and fiction is necessarily wobbly’ in The Poet’s Cat, and ‘sometimes one is disguised as the other’.
Blending Fact and Fiction
Before Jeoffry lived with Christopher Smart, he roamed through the narrow alleyways of the West End witnessing the comings and goings of theatre goers such as King George, Handel and Samuel Johnson. He also watched frockcoated men arriving and leaving the bordellos of Covent Garden and witnessed a police raid on Mother Douglas’s brothel.
‘A Perspective View of Covent Garden’, engraving, 1741
by John Maurer
Royal Academy
The view looks west towards St Paul’s Church, where Christopher Smart is buried.
Through Jeoffry’s eyes, we watch members of the aristocracy step out of ornate carriages onto Drury Lane then disappear into The Theatre Royal, and we witness a riot when a French play was performed in the theatre during The Seven Years’s War between France and Great Britain. We visit the notorious Covent Garden bordellos, experience a police raid on Mother Douglas’s brothel, and see inside Christopher’s spartan cell at St Lukes Hospital, the asylum where he was imprisoned for mania.
Praise for Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat
Jeoffry is the greatest cat in the English language, and here are his life and times, wittily and deftly imagined, entwined with a memoir of Kit Smart, lunatic and poet, and the London he shared with Samuel Johnson and his cat Hodge.
An inspired and original tale.
Hilary Mantel
Simply unforgettable ... Oliver Soden has written a little masterpiece ... The life and times of Jeoffry, the cat described in Smart’s famous poem, are imagined here by Soden in one of the most beautiful and haunting books of recent times. This is a book to savour, reflect upon, and give to friends ... It is beautifully written. It is gentle. It is full of historical detail and whimsy, in more or less equal measure.
It is a complete treat ... a lovely, enchanting piece of work.
Alexander McCall Smith
Delightful... the perfect chance to provide colour to the black-and-white world of William Hogarth’s prints... a particularly fine evocation of a cat’s-eye view.
Kathryn Hughes, Literary Review
I greatly enjoyed this book ... Oliver Soden has found a really vivid ‘ground-level’ way to capture Georgian London, and as soon as Smart comes on the scene a most moving chemistry develops between the cat who has no words and the poet who is adrift in them.
Ann Wroe
This is an intensely poignant portrait of a celebrated cat. Jeoffry’s tale is both simple, in its feline perspective of eighteenth-century life, and complex, in its vivid detail, so expertly and engagingly marshalled. It is told with vibrant pace and energy, embraces shocking violence and exquisite tenderness, and is bejewelled with a rich cast of cultural luminaries. As we follow the irresistible subject towards and through his interaction with the poet who would give him his immortality, we smell the streets and the confined spaces, we suffer the blows, we weep the tears. This beautifully written and highly affecting book is a must-read for lovers of poetry, of the eighteenth century, and of cats.
Jane Glover, author of Handel in London
Oliver Soden has done for Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffry what Virginia Woolf did for the Brownings’ dog, Flush. Except he’s made a much better job of it. This is a beautifully written, wise and wonderfully entertaining account of loyalty and the meaning of biography. Smart’s cat was indeed a magical being, and Oliver Soden has plucked a wealth of literary art from the cat’s life and from Smart’s unforgettable vision.
I intend to give a copy to everybody I like.
Andrew O’Hagan
A pretty feline performance. It’s at once a sly introduction to Christopher Smart and the literary milieu of 18th-century London ...and a cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history... It has a good deal, too, to tell the reader about cats... I found myself marvelling... that a single cat, at a distance of 250-odd years, can be reliably traced from kittenhood ... to sunset years ... All biographies adopt points of view, make suppositions, put fictional flesh on the bones of the facts the record gives us; and their test is how persuasively they do so.
This one does so with great panache and not a little of the writerly flourish.
Sam Leith, Spectator
Soden’s delightful, insinuating book curls around your thoughts and tickles you with its whiskers... Soden jokes that if ‘Jubilate Agno’ is a magnificat (a song of praise to God), the Jeoffry verses are a magnifi-cat. His own magnifi-cat recreation, bound in cloth-covers and sporting a Gainsborough kitty, would make a fine stocking filler – silk, buckled or gartered.
Economist
A heart-lifting delight; I absolutely loved it. A triumph.
Alexandra Harris
An absolute classic … Oliver Soden combines the originality of wit and concept found in Virginia Woolf’s Flush with an intimate portrayal of the humanity of a cat that T.S. Eliot understood so well. I found myself so gloriously moved and entertained by Jeoffry who has leapt purring and stretching, hunting and curling his way into my heart.
Juliet Nicolson
Audiobook narrated by Oliver Soden and Stephen Fry
Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat. Media Coverage and Interviews
Stephen Fry in conversation with Oliver Soden about Jeoffry, The Poet’s Cat
Press
‘Revealed: Composer Sir Michael Tippett’s secret Trotskyist past’, Sunday Telegraph
‘Biographer Oliver Soden on how he started writing’, Suffolk Magazine
‘Fascinating Tippett letter reveals composer changed by prison’, Guardian.
Podcasts
The Play Podcast (on Private Lives)
Broadway Nation (on Noel Coward, seven episodes)
Radio
‘Michael Tippett – a child of his time’, Interview with Andrew Ford , ABC Radio National
The Lives of Noël Coward, Interview with Andrew Ford, ABC Radio National
Michael Tippett and Ukrainian polyphony, Interview with Tom Service for Music Matters (BBC Radio 3)
Composer of the Week, Michael Tippett, Interview with Donald Macleod for Composer of the Week (BBC Radio 3)’
‘Proms interval talk: An introduction to A Child of Our Time’, Interview with Martin Handley for BBC Proms (BBC Radio 3)
‘Proms Plus Literary - Michael Tippett’, Interview with Rana Mitter for BBC Proms (BBC Radio 3)
Film
In conversation with Stephen Fry, for Spiracle Audio
Interview with Fred Parker, Clare College, Cambridge
Interview with Lucy Walker, Britten-Pears Foundation
Interview (2) with Lucy Walker, Britten-Pears Foundation
Interview with Rachel Leach, LSO Live
Interview with Tim Marrinan, Morley College
Interview with Russell Jackson, Birmingham University.
Oliver Soden is a writer and broadcaster, and the critically acclaimed author of Michael Tippett: The Biography (2019); Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat (2020); and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward (2023).
Michael Tippett: The Biography was hailed by Philip Pullman as a ‘delight to read’; by the Spectator as ‘an exceptional piece of work’; and by Gramophone as ‘nothing short of miraculous’. Book of the Year in the Spectator, Times Literary Supplement and Observer, it was read (by the author) for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, with Sir Derek Jacobi as Tippett. The book won both a Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize for Storytelling; it was shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and longlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown.
Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat, a semi-fictionalised biography of the cat who belonged to eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, was described as ‘inspired and original’ by Hilary Mantel and as ‘the most beautiful and haunting book of recent times’ by Alexander McCall Smith. Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement, it was championed as ‘a little classic’ by Dame Eileen Atkins on BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read.
Masquerade, the first biography of Noël Coward in nearly thirty years, was published in 2023 to widespread praise. ‘This is the biography’ wrote the Telegraph in its five-star review, ‘truthful, sympathetic and thorough, that Coward deserves.’ The Financial Times hailed a ‘captivating biography by an emerging literary star’. Oliver was co-creator of A Marvellous Party, a charity gala celebrating Coward staged in the West End in November 2024, and starring Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir Derek Jacobi and Dame Patricia Routledge.
Oliver’s writing – on art, music and literature – has appeared in the Guardian, Spectator, London Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement. He is also a frequent guest speaker at literary festivals and on BBC Radios 3 and 4, Times Radio and ABC Radio National. Oliver has worked on award-winning television documentaries such as Janet Baker: In Her Own Words and for BBC Radio 3’s long-running programme Private Passions.
Oliver was educated at Lancing College in Sussex, and at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a double first in English. Born in 1990, he grew up in Bath and Sussex, and lives in London.