The Very First Cat Memes in the Victorian Era
Our collective obsession with photographing and captioning feline antics goes back more than 100 years.
Though it’s easy to assume that the modern fascination with ridiculously posed cat photos began with the advent of high-speed internet, I Can Has Cheezburger was not the first to explore this kind of humor. Instead, two different men named Harry were the ones who made funny cat pictures popular… all the way back when Queen Victoria was on the throne.
In the 1870s, photography had become accessible to the general public. Though the technology for taking photos of people and objects was only about thirty years old, it had already become sufficiently popular for inexpensive photograph cards to be circulated among friends. These small pasteboard cards, called carte de visites (“visiting cards”) or CDVs, could be purchased with a print of your own image or the image of a celebrity such as Sojourner Truth or Ulysses S. Grant.
Pets were sometimes photographed along with their owners, but photos of animals became a real craze in 1872 when Harry Pointer released a series of images called…
