August 24, 1872

Max Beerbohm (August 24, 1872 to May 20, 1956), the English comic writer and caricaturist, in his 1911 novel Zuleika Dobson, provides a glimpse "through the railings, and across the road, ...[of]  a skimpy and dingy cat, trying to look like a tiger." The eponymous heroine of this story is a femme so fatale that an entire undergraduate class at Oxford kill themselves out of love for her, and are subsequently not much missed by anyone. The humor involves a special sociology of the English heart and Oxford University, a topic that requires some context to appreciate.

Here is a Beerbohm cartoon unrelated to anything else in this post.

Beerbohm wrote to Lytton Strachey, and the humor is more apparent:

The kitten of whom I told you last year is now a confirmed cat....He is...vigorous and vagrant but not I am sorry to say, either affectionate or intelligent....[H]e dislikes rain but has no knowledge of how to avoid it if it falls...

The humor survives because cats have not changed since Edwardian England.