Li'l Petey

Charles Dickens purchased Gad's Hill Place, a Georgian house near Higham in Kent, in 1856, and made it his principal residence from 1860 until his death on 9 June 1870. The house had drawn him since boyhood walks with his father from Chatham, who had pointed out the building as a goal for ambition; Dickens added a Swiss chalet in the garden as a writing room in 1864. The household kept a working kitchen cat from at least the early 1860s, and one of her 1862 litter became the centre of the Williamina story. The principal account is Mary "Mamie" Dickens's 1885 memoir My Father As I Recall Him, published in London by Roxburghe Press. Mamie reports that the white kitten was initially given to her sister Katey, who returned the cat to the household after marriage; the animal was at first named William, the sex being miscalled. After delivering her own first litter the cat was renamed Williamina. Mamie describes the new mother carrying each kitten in turn up two flights of stairs from the kitchen to Dickens's study, depositing them at his feet as he wrote, and refusing to be redirected; Dickens eventually conceded and let the litter occupy a basket beside his desk. A second cat from the same household, the Master's Cat as Mamie names him in the memoir, became Dickens's personal favourite; he had been deafened as a kitten and developed the habit of snuffing out the writer's reading candle with his paw to demand attention, an episode dated to the late 1860s. After the Master's Cat's death his preserved paw was mounted on an ivory handle as a paper-knife and given to Dickens, who used it for the rest of his life. The paper-knife is now in the collection of the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, donated by Henry Cole in 1909, where it is occasionally exhibited as part of Dickens-anniversary displays.