William Baldwin’s seminal but relatively obscure 1570 work, A Marvellous History Entitled Beware the Cat, still continues to captivate and beguile the minds of readers and critics. Even the book’s publication date is worthy of extended scholarly attention. Though it is believed Baldwin penned his polemic anti-papist tome in early 1533, the pro-Catholic Queen Mary’s tumultuous and bloody reign delayed the book’s inaugural printing till 1570, about seven years after the writer’s death. Readers continue to animatedly debate the themes espoused in Baldwin’s satiric prose more than four centuries after its inaugural publication.
As Beware the Cat continues to foment discourse among academic circles, there is no debating the fact that Baldwin’s centuries-old text has left an indelible influence on English literary tradition. From an alleged late-night discussion of whether animals were capable of speech emerged what literary scholars William Ringler and Michael Flachmann proclaimed as “one of the best and most interesting works of its kind produced in the sixteenth century.” In what many readers consider the first novel composed in English, there is little doubt that Baldwin’s prose aided the subsequent development of early English prose fiction. Ringler asserts that the genesis of the English novel began on the evening of 28 December 1552, the fictional date in which Baldwin sets his framed first-person narrative: “But though Beware the Cat is a satire, it is also a fictional narrative. In fact it is the earliest work of original prose fiction in English of more than short-story length—and so is the first English novel.”
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Beware the Cat as a “humanistic satire, beast fable, and dream vision that dramatizes a topsy-turvy travesty of sanctioned forms of social order that highlights the arbitrariness and transitory nature of norms that govern everyday life.” Though much of the discourse surrounding Beware the Cat consists of its satirical nature, narrative structure, anti-papist propaganda, and literary influences, there is little discussion regarding Baldwin’s usage of horror genre elements to convey his caustic anti-Catholic rhetoric.
Indeed, the text contains satire, but it also features tropes rooted in horror, such as werewolves, witches, macabre settings, magic potions, and a clandestine society of talking cats that conspire against their human masters. Not only is Beware the Cat the first conventional English novel, but it is also the first horror novel composed in English. In addition, Baldwin’s anti-papist narrative was the first horror novel to implement the “nefarious cat” archetype, which would later surface in the horror fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.
While it would be glib to suggest that Baldwin’s prose directly influenced Poe and Lovecraft, there can be little doubt that each writer was inspired by the folklore and legends surrounding the cat. Some of these legends are encapsulated in Edward Topsell’s 1607 tome, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects, an amalgamation of fact and superstition. For example, Topsell asserts that cats’ breath is hazardous to human lungs, and a feline’s flesh is poisonous, its teeth venomous. Topsell condemns cats as “the familiars of witches”, a reoccurring theme in modern horror literature.
Before delving into the horror elements depicted in Baldwin’s landmark text, we must first define what horror is and why the image of the cat holds so much reverence in the genre. According to the Horror Writers Association, horror is “a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay”. Horror fiction is prose that evokes those very emotions in the reader. Horror induces “the mundane or the supernatural, with the fantastic or the normal. It doesn’t have to be full of ghosts, ghouls, and things to go bump in the night. Its only true requirement is that it elicit an emotional reaction that includes some aspect of fear or dread.”
Many scholars attribute Horace Walpole’s gothic narrative Castle of Otranto (1764) as the first horror novel composed in English but Beware the Cat implements many of the genre’s conventions more than a century before Walpole was born. Though Beware the Cat is riddled with satire and humor, the text still evokes dread when felines are revealed to have their own language and a cunning sense of intelligence. That brings us to the archetypal horror cat, which haunts the superstitions and folklore of many Western cultures.
Author Chloe Rhodes notes that black cats, in particular, were often portrayed in the Middle Ages as being associated with witchcraft and that the dark-coated creatures are harbingers of misfortune. “According to Norse legend, Freya, queen of the Valkyries and goddess of fertility, drove a chariot pulled by black cats that some sources suggest turned into horses possessed by the Devil,” Rhodes writes. Rhodes also credits Baldwin as the first author to portray cats as witches in the guise of human form, which she argues was a common superstition during Beware the Cat’s publication. As the “familiars of witches”, many believed cats to be the creatures most favored by the devil. Some even went as far as killing cats en masse as a means to purge the world of their suspected evil, as Katharine M. Rogers illustrates:
The many records of cats being persecuted, both individually and in institutionally and in institutionalized rituals such as the St. John’s Eve bonfires, support the interpretation that they were considered so evil that it was legitimate, even praiseworthy, to destroy them. Many people besides Topsell believed cats assisted witches, possessed dangerous powers, and brought bad luck.
Indeed, cats were sacrificed as scapegoats “to allay public guilt or anxiety, as placatory offerings to ensure a good harvest or a stable building”, and, according to Rogers, one of the main reasons felines were selected for this dubious “honor” was due in part to their abundance and perceived lack of value. The cat’s mysterious aloofness didn’t win it any sympathy, either. Cats “do not share the dog’s eagerness to please, to be loved, to engage in fellowship with people” and respond only “when it pleases them”. In addition, the creatures practice a nocturnal lifestyle and “pursue their own agenda regardless of humans.” Moreover, a cat’s propensity to disobey humans led some to believe the creatures “failed to recognize the human dominion over animals ordained by providence and thus demonstrated their antagonism to man and God.” In essence, cats have always seemingly lived in a world of their own, and what their 16th-century human counterparts couldn’t understand they branded as evil.
Baldwin borrowed elements from these folkloric superstitions to pen his anti-Catholic satire. Narrated in the first person by the fictional Gregory Streamer, transcribed by Baldwin, and divided into three interconnected episodes, Beware the Cat is a complex oration about Streamer’s obsession to decode the language of cats. To accomplish this feat, Streamer concocts an alchemical potion based on a recipe by theologian and scientist Albertus Magnus (whose writings would fuel a young Victor Frankenstein’s obsessions in Mary Shelley’s famous novel published more than 200 years later) that enables him to translate cats’ mewing into English, much like an intergalactic translator in a Star Trek episode. During his narrative, Streamer injects anecdotes he claims others have told him concerning malevolent cats, werewolves, and witches.
Baldwin uses Streamer’s dubious narrative as an instrument to satirize and mock the Catholic Church’s naïve superstitions and alleged pagan practices, in particular transubstantiation and the worship of the holy trinity, which was a controversial practice in England during the 16th century. Even the narrator’s name is significant to Beware the Cat‘s anti-papist agenda. As literary scholar R.W. Maslen notes, “The forename Gregory allies him with several popes, strengthening readers’ growing sense that he is a clandestine Catholic; while his surname evokes a flag or pennon, suggesting that he changes direction with the wind—that he is a turncoat.” Since anti-Catholic propaganda was rife in England during the 16th century, Baldwin’s contemporary readers would have picked up on the author’s not-so-subtle dig at the reigning Pope Gregory XIII and the unreliable disposition of the novel’s narrator.
The unreliable narrator is a common horror trope that is implemented by later horror scribes, including Poe (“The Black Cat“), Henry James (The Turn of the Screw), and Lovecraft (“Nyarlathotep“). The presence of the fickle narrator in Beware the Cat is especially effective in horror because it distorts the line separating fantasy and reality. The reader is placed on a shaky foundation if the storyteller is unreliable. An inconsistent, unstable, inebriated, or deceptive narrator augments the tension and suspense in the prose because it causes the reader to question the events as they are presented as if experiencing a dream, hallucination, or nightmare. In Beware the Cat, not only are we given Streamer’s pompous and erroneous narration, but we also are treated to tales from unreliable secondary raconteurs at the fireside, which was a traditional “breeding ground of fairy tales and ghost stories by travelers and servants, two social groups notorious for spreading rumors and gossip”. The tension and paranoia mount as the sobering realization occurs that we can trust no one in this tale, not even the narrator himself.
Baldwin does not take long to establish a macabre setting to enhance the nascent terror in his horror story. Narrating through the voice of Streamer, he describes a gruesome site outside of John Day’s Aldersgate printing house, where the storyteller is lodged:
At the other end of the Printing House, as you enter in, is a side door and three or four steps which go up to the leads of the Gate, whereas sometime quarters of men, up upon poles. I call it abhominable because it is not only against nature but against Scripture; for God commanded by Moses that, after the sun went down, all such as were hanged or otherwise put to death should be buried, lest if the sun saw them the next day His wrath should come upon them and plague them, as He hath done this and many other realms for the like transgression.
The unsightly view from Streamer’s window of mutilated bodies rotting on poles immediately establishes a macabre tone. It injects an explicit foreboding like a classic ghost story’s “spooky graveyard” motif. Gothic writers of the 19th century, such as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Mary Shelley, implemented similar imagery in the form of dilapidated cemeteries, dungeons, and torture chambers to inject terror into their respective narratives. The presence of quartered bodies outside the narrator’s window in Beware the Cat epitomizes the very definition of horror. It almost immediately evokes a sense of dread and portent in the reader.
Once the novel’s macabre setting is established, we encounter our first talking cat through an anecdote relayed by a servant. In the form of a classic jump scare, a feline leaps out of a bush to announce to a passerby that “Grimalkin is dead.” When this startled pedestrian later informs his wife of the bizarre event, their kitten overhears the news and says, “And is Grimalkin dead? Then farewell dame,” and saunters away, never to be seen again. This anecdote is particularly unsettling and disturbing because Baldwin’s cats are not presented as the cutesy and childlike anthropomorphic animals in fairy tales such as “Puss in Boots”, where creatures are expected to communicate and behave like humans. Baldwin’s cats initially appear like realistic domesticated cats that sleep on their human master’s laps at night, purr, meow, and scratch. Yet, these creatures are suddenly revealed to “possess reason” and the ability to speak, much to the dismay of their human counterparts and 16th-century readers.
After the servant completes his account of the surreal tale, another member of the company regales his audience with an anecdote he heard 33 years ago in Ireland about a notorious pillager named Patrick Apore, who entered a town of “two houses”, killed its inhabitants in the middle of the night, and purloined their cattle. Hoping to avoid capture and reprisal from an advancing mob, Apore and his young horse keeper seek solace in a church where they encounter the Grimalkin, or the monarch of the cats, a name that later came to be synonymous with witchcraft, demons in the guise of cats, or some other creature bestowed on a witch by the devil as part of her unholy pact with him.
The Grimalkin demands food, andApore desperately feeds the impetuous creature all the meat he has on hand, including the livestock he pillaged from the village. Fearing they would be next on the cat’s menu, Apore and his servant boy flee the sanctuary in terror. When the servant alerts his master that the beast is in pursuit, Apore slays it with a dart, spurring the vengeful wrath of the Grimalkin’s feline acolytes. The cats murder the boy, and Apore himself is later mauled to death by his wife’s kitten in retaliation for the Grimalkin’s untimely demise.
The Grimalkin’s tale is the frame narrative’s most violent subplot, and it preceded later horror tales about cats seeking vengeance upon cruel humans such as Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Lovecraft’s “The Cats of Ulthar“. In Poe’s graphically violent 1843 short story, a malicious narrator inflicts inhumane tortures on his once-beloved cat before ultimately killing it by hanging. After replacing his deceased pet with another feline, the unstable narrator is driven mad by the animal’s presence and attempts to kill it with an axe but inadvertently cleaves his spouse with the instrument in the process. After sealing his unintended victim behind a brick wall in hopes of concealing his crime, the narrator’s gruesome act is exposed when his cat reveals the location of the body to police investigators.
Lovecraft’s cat horror story also uses the theme of retribution. “The Cats of Ulthar” is about a cruel elderly couple who take sadistic joy in murdering stray cats who venture haplessly onto their property. However, when they kill a Romani boy’s beloved feline, a curse is placed upon them, and hours later, they are devoured by hordes of stray cats that converge on their home by the hundreds. The cats in each of these tales act as “supernatural avengers” that bring evildoers to justice. As Rogers notes, the eponymous black cat in Poe’s story “is the clear-sighted judge or nemesis that brings (the narrator) to justice; at the same time, like Baldwin’s Devil’s cat, it acts like an agent of Satan—punishing his abuse of the first cat by drawing him into further evil and then damnation.”
Some of Baldwin’s horror tropes come into play late in Streamer’s first oration in the form of a philosophical discourse about Irish werewolves, witches, demonic possession, and sorcery.
There is also, in Ireland, one nation whereof some one man and woman are at every seven years’ end turned into wolves, and so continue in the woods the space of seven years. And if they hap to live out the time, they return to their own form again, and other twain are turned for the like time into the same shape—which is a penance (as they say) enjoined that stock by Saint Patrick for some wickedness of their ancestors.
This is preceded by the conjecture that witches have the unholy ability to transform themselves into cats. Baldwin uses this as an allegory of transubstantiation, “whereby Christ’s body is plucked from Heaven and thrust [. . .] into a piece of bread”. Streamer dismisses shape-shifting humans as mere superstition and instead offers an alternative explanation that sounds just as ludicrous: “For Though witches may take upon them cats’ bodies, or alter the shape of their or other bodies, yet this is not done by putting their own bodies thereinto, but either by bringing their souls for the time out of their bodies and putting them in the other, or by deluding the sight and fantasies of the seers.”
Though Baldwin is drawing off-the-wall parallels between witchcraft and transubstantiation to lambast and discredit the Catholic Church, his analogy helped lay the horror groundwork for the future generation of horror writers, especially Poe and Lovecraft, who borrowed from the established mythology to craft their contributions to the genre. For example, in “The Black Cat”, the narrator reflects on the feline’s enigmatic personality: “In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.” The presence of the cat-witch motif in Poe’s story is indicative of the feline’s popularity in conventional horror fiction, and it was Baldwin who first borrowed such a plot device in a longer narrative, giving credence to my suggestion that Beware the Cat is the first English horror novel.
In the second episode of Streamer’s oration, we witness the dubious narrator succumbing to his obsession with feline intelligence, compelling him to concoct a potion to enable him to comprehend the language of cats. In an obsession that would later be emulated by the character Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s horror novel, Streamer immerses himself in the writings of Albertus Magnus and itemizes his foul recipe for the magic potion.
And ere I laid them out of my hand, came Thomas (whom you heard of before) and brought me a cat, which for doing evil turns they had that morning caught in a snare set for her two days before, which for the skin’s sake being flain, was so exceedingly fat that, after I had taken some of the grease, the inwards, and the head, to make (as I made him believe) a medicine for the gout, [. . .] I shut my chamber door to me and flayed mine urchin [. . .] the flesh I washed clean and put it in a pot, and with white wine, Mellisophillos or Melissa (commonly called balm), rosemary, neat’s tongue, four parts of the first and two of the second, I made a broth and set it on a fire and boiled it, setting on a limbec, with a glass at the end over the mouth of the pot to receive the water that distilled from it, in the seething [. . .] bottle of wine which I put in the pot.
The writings of Albertus Magnus would much later help fuel Victor Frankenstein’s obsession to recreate life in the novel Frankenstein, the gothic story that some scholars credit as the first modern horror novel. As he begins his quest to create life, Victor writes, “On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and, excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies.” Though Shelley’s tale is much darker than Baldwin’s more satirically laden prose, the latter was the first to feature Magnus’s research in a horror context for nefarious research purposes. Both Streamer and Victor use their research as weapons to challenge nature, the former to break down the language barrier between animals and humans and the latter to create life.
Streamer also incorporates a piece of a cat’s liver, kidney, and heart, a fox’s heart, and a hare’s brain into his strange brew. Streamer’s experiment conjures the imagery of a witch hovering over a boiling cauldron filled with rats’ innards and frogs’ warts. For all of his efforts to discredit Catholicism by drawing parallels with sorcery and witchcraft, Streamer himself becomes a virtual witch in his incessant quest to unlock the secrets of the feline language. Even though Streamer erroneously distills the wrong ingredients into his veritable witch’s brew and misinterprets the astrological calendar by confusing the planetary and solar cycle, the resulting potion still enables him to achieve his ultimate goal, casting further hindrances on the narrator’s credibility (or sanity).
The third and final component of Streamer’s oration contains the most levity in Baldwin’s Beware the Cat. Whereas healthy and sane human beings would most likely hear meowing, hissing, and screeching, Streamer boasts that his potion-augmented senses comprehend human speech emanating from the cluster of felines loitering on the leads in the middle of the night. As the potion weaves its alchemic magic on Streamer’s auditory senses, he allegedly gains the superhuman ability to understand cats. He even eavesdrops on a feline court hearing that transpires on the roof of his lodgings. Here, Beware the Cat‘s narration is taken over by a cat named Mouse-Slayer, who is on trial for violating several feline bylaws.
Baldwin uses Mouse-Slayer’s testimony as a plot device to expose what he believes are the hypocrisy and clandestine habits of disreputable and sundry Catholics in a “time when preachers had leave to speak against the Mass, but it was not forbidden till half a year after.” Baldwin notes that the cats in his tale “understand us and mark our secret doings, and so declare them among themselves.” Through Mouse-Slayer’s oration, we learn about an old woman who is a practicing Catholic who secretly operates a brothel out of her home, gladly accepts stolen goods, and takes great pleasure in deceiving young, naïve women into cuckolding their husbands. Mouse-Slayer also recounts some cruel torments humans delightedly inflict on her, such as feeding her mustard to bring about tears in her eyes, blowing pepper in her nose, and gluing walnut shells to her paws.
Streamer inadvertently implicates himself in his attempts to discredit the Catholic Church. For example, Mouse-Slayer witnesses the bawd forging a love letter written to deceive and corrupt a virtuous wife by turning her into an adulterer. The document, however, is signed with the initials “G.S.”, incriminating Streamer as the duplicitous bawd’s accomplice in the clandestine plot. Baldwin is casting a revealing light on the malfeasance and hypocrisy orchestrated by the Catholic Church by further discrediting the integrity of his narrator. In contrast, the fictitious cats serve as “instruments of truth, and through them Baldwin draws readers’ attention to God’s all-seeing eyes, spying out truths we seek to disguise”.
Though the felines are initially presented as demonic avatars or witches’ pets, the humans emerge as the true antagonists of the tale. In the first episode, the human character Apore slew the Grimalkin following his murderous rampage in the village. In the third episode, the human characters exhibit malice, hypocrisy, and cruelty, including the narrator, who participates in the nefarious letter scheme. If anything, the cats are depicted as Beware the Cat‘s unlikely heroes in that they avenge all the wrongs committed by their human masters. In the second episode, the vengeful kitten kills Apore, ridding the world of a murderous plunderer; in the third part of the oration, Mouse-Slayer torments the bawd after witnessing the old woman’s cruelty:
Where, when they were all assembled, I, minding to acquit my dame for giving me mustard, caught a quick mouse, whereof my dame always was exceedingly afraid, and came with it under her clothes and there let it go, which immediately crope up upon her leg. But Lord, how she bestirred her then; how she cried out; and how pale she looked. And I, to amend the matter, making as though I leaped at the mouse, all to-bescrat her thighs and her belly, so that I dare say she was not whole again in two months after.
As in the second part of Beware the Cat, a feline reciprocates a human’s cruelty, only this time, the revenge is executed more comedically. Instead of killing the bawd, Mouse-Slayer causes the cruel old woman to prance around like a fool before her dinner guests. Mouse-Slayer later exposes the man with whom the corrupted wife has an affair in a similar jocular fashion:
While this gentleman was doing with my dame, my master came in—so suddenly that he had no leisure to pluck up his hose, but with them about his legs ran into a corner behind the painted cloth, and there stood (I warrant you) as still as a mouse. As soon as my master came in, his wife, according to her old wont, caught him about his neck and kissed him, and devised many means to have got him forth again […] I, seeing this, and minding to show my master how he was ordered, got behind the cloth, and to make the man speak I all to-pawed him with my claws upon his bare legs and buttocks […] But I, minding another thing, and seeing that scratching could not move him, suddenly I leaped up and caught him by the genitals with my teeth, and bore so hard that, when he had restrained more than I thought any man could, at last he cried out, and caught me by the neck thinking to strangle me.
Having exposed the adulterous couple, the vindicated Mouse-Slayer escapes the home unscathed after the cuckolded spouse pulls away the curtain to find a naked man trembling behind it. Once again, the cat foils the human characters’ duplicitous plot by outsmarting them. This plot device is echoed in Poe’s “The Black Cat” when the feline exposes his murderous master’s crime by alerting authorities to the location of the narrator’s slain spouse.
Despite cats’ dubious reputation for being an agent of the devil, Baldwin exhibits sympathy for his four-legged characters, as do Lovecraft and Poe. Mirroring the supernatural cats in “The Cats of Ulthar” and “The Black Cat”, the felines in Baldwin’s novel emerge as a kind of anti-hero, whereas their human masters are revealed as the story’s true villains. As Rogers points out: “Baldwin’s distinction between the companion cat who would be shocked by our sins and the Devil’s cat who eagerly looks for them is further evidence of his unusual sympathy with cats.” Despite their supernatural disposition and dubious reputation, Baldwin showcases his cats in a more positive light than his human characters, the latter of which is presented as sundry, hypocritical, cruel, arrogant, insidious, and manipulative.
Though Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat as a tongue-in-cheek anti-Catholic propaganda treatise that supported the sweeping Reformation of religion under Edward VI by attacking what Protestants felt were superfluous superstitious traditions imposed by the Church of Rome, his implementation of classic horror conventions such as witches, werewolves, supernatural cats, and demonic possession helped establish the formula for the English horror novel. William Baldwin’s landmark text helped pave the way for the gothic scribes of the 19th century, who laid the groundwork for the modern horror writers of the 20th century. While it is unlikely that Poe, Shelley, and Lovecraft read Baldwin’s obscure text, each writer was inspired by the same legends and folktales propagated for centuries. Baldwin first used these legends to formulate his horror tale. For example, literary scholar James T. Bratcher contends that the story of Grimalkin’s death was inspired by oral tradition and not by Baldwin himself.
To say that Baldwin’s story of the death of the cat Grimalkin subsequently became an English folktale assumes too much about the power of literary products to inspire folktales. This almost never happens, as folklorists know. Robert Southey may have made ‘The Three Bears’ a well-known nursery entertainment, but it is unlikely he invented the story; he was a ‘carrier’ of it into print.
Bratcher concludes his essay with an excerpt of a modernized retelling of the Grimalkin’s death as recorded from an African American woman in 1933. This 20th-century storyteller had probably never heard of Baldwin or Beware the Cat. Still, she was most certainly familiar with the legend of the Grimalkin because the folklore surrounding it reached farther and wider than the book could ever have. The same concept could be applied to Poe and Lovecraft. Even if these two scribes had never personally read Beware the Cat, they were inspired by the folklore and mythology Baldwin helped disseminate, such as the vengeful cat.
The seeds that Baldwin sowed in 1570 took root and resurfaced centuries later into what we now call horror fiction. Baldwin’s novel has fallen into relative obscurity and has gone largely unnoticed by horror fans. Ringler and Flachmann subtitled their 1988 edition of Beware the Cat as The First English Novel, but this edition is currently out of print. If Beware the Cat should ever be issued an updated edition, it would be fitting to rebrand it as the first English horror novel so that Baldwin’s text could be discovered and appreciated by a new audience.
Works Cited
Baldwin, William, William A. Ringler, and Michael Flachmann. Beware the Cat: The First English Novel. Huntington Library. 1988.
“Beware the Cat—William Baldwin.” Lit234.com. 2013.
Bratcher, James T. “The Grimalkin Story in Baldwin’s Beware The Cat.” Notes & Queries53.4 (2006): 428. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.
Litherland, Neal. “Grimalkin: Witch Familiars or Old, Ornery Cats?” Yahoo Voices. 5 December 2001.
Maslen, Robert. “‘The Cat Got Your Tongue’: Pseudo-Translation, Conversion, And Control In William Baldwin’s “Beware The Cat.” Translation & Literature 8.1 (1999): 3. Academic Search Premier.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Stories And Poems Of Edgar Allan Poe. Reissue Edition. Doubleday Books. 1984. Print.
Rhodes, Chloe. Black Cats and Evil Eyes: A Book of Old-Fashioned Superstitions. London: Michael O’Mara, 2014.
Ringler, William A. “Beware The Cat And The Beginnings Of English Fiction.” Novel: A Forum On Fiction 12.(1979): 113-126. Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective: 1907-1984 (H.W. Wilson). 18 February 2014.
Rogers, Katharine M. The Cat and the Human Imagination. The University of Michigan Press,.1998.
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. London, Michael
“What is Horror Fiction?” Horror.Org. Horror Writers Association. 2009. 21 February 2014.
“William Baldwin.” Matthew, H.C.G., and Brian Howard Harrison. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy: from the Earliest Times to the Year 2000 / Edited by H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford University Press. 2004.