Nice Cats of History

The Cat Who Helped to Write the Dictionary

The true story of Hodge, the 18th century’s most famous and beloved cat

Doctor Samuel Johnson, by Sir Joshua Reynolds / Statue of Hodge. Photo: Elliott Brown

Today we will be establishing the niceness of a historical cat named Hodge Johnson, who almost certainly sat on the first modern dictionary.

And that will not have been the only thing Hodge sat on. It is very likely that this great cat, this towering feline, at one time or another sat upon The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abisinnia, a satirical novella concerning the possibility of human happiness; Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth, a collection of sizzling hot takes regarding a particularly sad story about a Scottish king; and The Vanity of Human Wishes, a poetic disquisition on the futility of man’s quest for greatness in the style of Juvenal’s tenth satire. This prolific sitter is also suspected by many historians to have sat upon the author of all of these works, Samuel Johnson himself, the actual dude who wrote the fucking dictionary.

Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, 1755

But we are not here to talk about the achievements of Doctor Samuel Johnson. Doctor Samuel Johnson is a footnote in…