![]() The Cat Fanciers' Association profile reads: “When gracelessness is observed, the British Shorthair is duly embarrassed, quickly recovering with a 'Cheshire cat smile'”. Īnother possible inspiration was the British Shorthair: Carroll saw a representative British Shorthair illustrated on a label of Cheshire cheese. The scholar David Day has proposed Lewis Carroll's cat was Edward Bouverie Pusey, Oxford professor of Hebrew and Carroll's mentor. At one point, the cat disappears gradually until nothing is left but its grin, prompting Alice to remark that "she has often seen a cat without a grin but never a grin without a cat". The cat sometimes raises philosophical points that annoy or baffle Alice but appears to cheer her when it appears suddenly at the Queen of Hearts' croquet field and when sentenced to death, baffles everyone by having made its head appear without its body, sparking a debate between the executioner and the King and Queen of Hearts about whether a disembodied head can indeed be beheaded. Alice first encounters the Cheshire Cat at the Duchess's house in her kitchen, and later on the branches of a tree, where it appears and disappears at will, and engages Alice in amusing but sometimes perplexing conversation. The Cheshire Cat is now largely identified with the character of the same name in Lewis Carroll's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Ī survey published in 2015 showed how highly fanciful were many purported explanations seen on the internet. The cheese was cut from the tail end, so that the last part eaten was the head of the smiling cat. Īccording to Brewer's Dictionary (1870), "The phrase has never been satisfactorily accounted for, but it has been said that cheese was formerly sold in Cheshire moulded like a cat that looked as though it was grinning". The sign of the house was originally a lion or tiger, or some such animal, the crest of the family of Sir Edward Poore. A public-house by the roadside is commonly known by the name of The Cat at Charlton. A similar case is to be found in the village of Charlton, between Pewsey and Devizes, Wiltshire. The resemblance of these lions to cats caused them to be generally called by the more ignoble name. This phrase owes its origin to the unhappy attempts of a sign painter of that country to represent a lion rampant, which was the crest of an influential family, on the sign-boards of many of the inns. In 1853, Samuel Maunder offered this explanation: A possible origin of the phrase is one favoured by the people of Cheshire, a county in England which boasts numerous dairy farms hence the cats grin because of the abundance of milk and cream. There are numerous theories about the origin of the phrase "grinning like a Cheshire Cat" in English history. The phrase also appears in print in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The Newcomes (1855): "Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin." ![]() The phrase appears again in print in John Wolcot's pseudonymous Peter Pindar's Pair of Lyric Epistles (1792): He grins like a Cheshire cat said of any one who shows his teeth and gums in laughing. The first known appearance of the expression in literature is in the 18th century, in Francis Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Second, Corrected and Enlarged Edition (1788), which contains the following entry:Ĭheshire cat. One distinguishing feature of the Alice-style Cheshire Cat involves a periodic gradual disappearance of its body, leaving only one last visible trace: its iconic grin. It has transcended the context of literature and become enmeshed in popular culture, appearing in various forms of media, from political cartoons to television, as well as in cross-disciplinary studies, from business to science. While now most often used in Alice-related contexts, the association of a "Cheshire cat" with grinning predates the 1865 book. The Cheshire Cat ( / ˈ tʃ ɛ ʃ ər/ or / ˈ tʃ ɛ ʃ ɪər/) is a fictional cat popularised by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and known for its distinctive mischievous grin. "You may have noticed that I'm not all there myself." Male (the Queen of Hearts cries "off with his head" when the cat upsets the king) The Cheshire Cat as illustrator John Tenniel depicted it in the 1865 publication
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