Hodge (Cat)

Hodge was a cat who lived with Samuel Johnson at his Gough Square home in the mid-18th century.

James Boswell described Johnson's affinity for Hodge in his Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.:

"Hodge was Samuel Johnson's beloved cat. While he had other feline companions, Hodge is the most well-known, owing to a passage in James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

Boswell wrote:

'Nor would it be just, under this head, to omit the fondness which he shewed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson's breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, "why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this"; and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, 'but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.'"'"

According to Boswell, Johnson purchased valerian, an herb similar to catnip, to ease Hodge's pain as death neared.

He was also immortalized in the poet Percival Stockdale's "An Elegy on the Death of Dr. Johnson's Favorite Cat" (1810).

One line of the elegy reads, Hodge "lived in town, yet ne'er got drunk."

Hodge is memorialized by a statue outside the Gough Square home he shared with Johnson and Johnson's servant, Frank Barber. The statue depicts him sitting next to a pair of empty oyster shells and copy of Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, with the inscription, "a very fine cat indeed."