In the winter of 1934, a middle-aged bank clerk turned publisher sat down to write a letter to a small child and signed it “Old Possum”. The letter had a poem in it, about a cat. He kept doing this for years, to several children, without any plan to collect the results. Those letters became Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a thin volume of light verse from a poet best known for a 434-line meditation on spiritual collapse. Roughly four decades later, the same poems turned into the longest-running musical Broadway had ever seen. This is the least likely career pivot in twentieth-century literature, and almost none of it was planned.
What This Article Covers
- The Poems Started as Letters, Not a Book
- What Is Actually Inside Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
- The Cats Were on the Radio Before They Were on Paper
- How Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats Became a Musical
- The Numbers Nobody Expected
- The Film, the Flop, and the Ballroom Revival
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Poems Started as Letters, Not a Book
T.S. Eliot wrote the cat poems in the mid-1930s as private gifts. They went out in correspondence to his godchildren and to the children of friends, most famously Tom Faber, son of Eliot’s Faber and Faber business partner Geoffrey Faber, and Alison Tandy, daughter of the broadcaster and marine biologist Geoffrey Tandy. The British Library holds letters and manuscript drafts from this period under Add MS 71002 and 71003, which is how we know the poems circulated in draft for years before anyone thought of a book.
This matters more than it sounds. The poems were written for specific children, to be read aloud, by a man who was also running a publishing house and writing Murder in the Cathedral at the same time. They were not a commercial product. They were the literary equivalent of doodling in the margin of a meeting agenda. If you like the idea of a book assembled entirely out of private correspondence, we have written about the epistolary novel and how the letter format built its own genre, and the parallel is closer than it looks.
Who Old Possum Actually Was
“Old Possum” was not Eliot’s invention. Ezra Pound coined it for him, a reference to the opossum’s habit of playing dead when threatened, aimed squarely at Eliot’s lifelong talent for revealing as little of himself as possible. Eliot returned fire by calling Pound “Brer Rabbit” in private letters. Two of the most severe figures in modernist poetry spent their correspondence addressing each other as characters from American folk tales, which is either delightful or a warning about what happens to men who read too much.
The Book That Almost Had a Different Name
Faber announced a volume in 1936 under the title Mr Eliot’s Book of Pollicle Cats and Jellicle Cats. It never appeared. The dogs got cut, the title got shortened, and the manuscript sat for another three years while Eliot kept adding and discarding poems. “Pollicle” and “Jellicle” both survived into the final text, and both are Eliot’s phonetic renderings of a small child’s attempt at “poor little dog” and “dear little cat”. The most difficult poet of his generation built his private cat taxonomy out of toddler mispronunciation.
What Is Actually Inside Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
Faber and Faber published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats on 5 October 1939, one month after Britain declared war on Germany. Eliot designed the dust jacket himself and drew the cover illustration: a formally dressed figure helping nine cats up a ladder. Read that image against its publication date and it stops being cute.
The original collection ran to fourteen poems, with “Cat Morgan Introduces Himself” added in 1952 to bring the standard edition to fifteen. The cast list is the reason anyone still knows the book: Jennyanydots the Old Gumbie Cat, Growltiger, the Rum Tum Tugger, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer, Old Deuteronomy, Mr Mistoffelees, Macavity, Gus the Theatre Cat, Bustopher Jones, Skimbleshanks. It opens with “The Naming of Cats” and closes with “The Ad-dressing of Cats”, two poems that are, underneath the nonsense meter, a genuine argument about identity and how you approach a creature that has not agreed to be approached.
The illustration history is its own small industry. Nicolas Bentley illustrated the 1940 edition, Edward Gorey took it on in 1982 with exactly the spidery, faintly wrong menace you would expect, Axel Scheffler of Gruffalo fame in 2009, and Rebecca Ashdown in 2014. Very few books of poetry get four full visual reinterpretations in seventy-five years. Cats do well in this respect generally, which is a pattern we have traced before in the long history of black cat superstitions.
The Cats Were on the Radio Before They Were on Paper
Here is the fact that almost nobody knows. The first public performance of the Practical Cats poems happened two years before the book existed. In November 1937 Eliot met Geoffrey Tandy and Ian Cox of the BBC’s Programme Division to discuss a broadcast reading of his unpublished cat and dog poems. On Christmas Day 1937, five of them went out on BBC radio, read aloud by Tandy, with Eliot’s permission and no printed source for listeners to go and buy.
Tandy was not a professional performer. He was Assistant Keeper of Botany at London’s Natural History Museum from 1926 to 1947, a seaweed specialist who did broadcast work on the side, and Eliot was godfather to his daughter Anthea. The poems kept running on the BBC after publication too, turning up in Children’s Hour and schools programming from 1940 into the late 1950s. By the time Andrew Lloyd Webber got near them, two generations of British children had heard these poems performed out loud rather than read them silently. That is not a small detail. It is the reason the material was already halfway to a stage.
There was one earlier musical attempt, largely forgotten. In 1954 the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra under the title Practical Cats. It is a perfectly respectable concert piece. It did not make anyone rich.
How Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats Became a Musical
Lloyd Webber started setting the poems to music in late 1977, with no production in mind and no expectation of a full show. He presented the results as a song cycle at his own Sydmonton Festival in the summer of 1980, performed by Gemma Craven, Gary Bond and Paul Nicholas. It was a private-ish event for friends and industry contacts. It was also the moment the whole thing changed, because of who was in the audience.
The Poem Valerie Eliot Kept Back
Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow and literary executor, came to Sydmonton and brought something with her: an unpublished fragment called “Grizabella the Glamour Cat”, a faded glamour cat who has fallen on hard times. Eliot had cut it. Her account is that he thought it was too sad for a children’s book. That fragment is the reason a song cycle turned into a narrative musical, because it handed the material the one thing Eliot’s published poems do not have, which is a character with something to lose.
Producer Cameron Mackintosh brought in Trevor Nunn to direct and Gillian Lynne to choreograph, with John Napier designing. Lloyd Webber underwrote the production personally and took a second mortgage on his house to do it. Rehearsals began on 9 March 1981. Judi Dench was cast as Grizabella, tore her Achilles tendon in rehearsal shortly before opening, and was replaced by Elaine Paige with days to spare.
“Memory” Is Not Really an Eliot Lyric
The song that made the show globally famous is not from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats at all. Trevor Nunn wrote the lyric to “Memory” by pulling from Eliot’s serious early work, principally “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes”, both from the 1917 collection Prufrock and Other Observations. So the biggest commercial hit ever extracted from Eliot’s poetry is a lyric assembled by a theatre director out of two bleak modernist city poems, sung by a cat that Eliot deleted, in a show built from verses he mailed to children. If you want to know why that melody refuses to leave your head once it gets in, the mechanics are covered in our piece on why songs get stuck in your head.
The Numbers Nobody Expected
Cats opened at the New London Theatre in the West End on 11 May 1981 and closed exactly twenty-one years later, on 11 May 2002, after 8,949 performances. The Broadway production opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on 7 October 1982 with a record pre-sale of $6.2 million against a $5.5 million production cost, and closed on 10 September 2000 after 7,485 performances across eighteen years. It won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical in London and seven Tony Awards in New York, including Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score.
On 19 June 1997 it passed A Chorus Line to become the longest-running show in Broadway history, a title it held until The Phantom of the Opera took it on 9 January 2006. Worldwide gross had passed US$3.5 billion by 2012, across more than thirty countries and fifteen-plus languages. The Hamburg production ran fifteen years and more than 6,100 performances. Japan has staged over 10,000 performances since 1983. One performer, Marlene Danielle, appeared in the Broadway production for its entire eighteen-year run, which may be the single strangest employment record in American theatre.
The money did something unusual. Valerie Eliot founded Old Possum’s Practical Trust in January 1990 to channel the proceeds from the musical into charitable giving. The Trust has distributed just over £7 million, currently gives away roughly £250,000 a year in grants typically between £500 and £5,000, and has funded artistic, literary, musical and theatrical projects along with capital donations to Newnham College and the London Library. Eliot was President of the London Library from 1952. A lifelong library habit funded by a dancing cat: he would probably have found that acceptable.
The Film, the Flop, and the Ballroom Revival
Broadway got a revival at the Neil Simon Theatre on 31 July 2016, with new choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler and Leona Lewis as Grizabella. It ran 593 performances and closed on 30 December 2017. Respectable, not transformative.
Then came the 2019 film. Tom Hooper directed, following his Les Misérables, on a production budget of around $95 million. It grossed roughly $75 million worldwide. Deadline estimated the loss at $71 million once ancillaries were counted, and Universal booked the write-down in its Q4 2019 results. The film won six Golden Raspberry Awards, including Worst Picture and Worst Director. The core problem was that the digital fur made human faces read as neither human nor cat, a failure mode with a name, and one we have explained in our guide to what actually works when a cat carries a film.
The recovery came from an unexpected direction. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, co-directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, premiered off-Broadway at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in 2024 and restaged the whole thing inside New York’s LGBTQ+ ballroom scene, where a competitive night of categories, walks and judging is already the format. The Jellicle Ball is a ball. Nobody had to change the plot. It transferred to Broadway’s Broadhurst Theatre in 2026, won Tony Awards for direction, choreography and costume design, and was scheduled to close on 8 August 2026. Forty-five years after the first production, the fix was to take the material literally.
What the whole sequence demonstrates is that cats survive format changes better than almost any other subject. Letters, radio, orchestral recitation, stage musical, film, ballroom. The internet worked out the same principle independently, which is roughly the story we told in the history of Longcat: give people a cat and a structure, and they will keep rebuilding the structure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did T.S. Eliot write the musical Cats?
No. Eliot died in 1965, sixteen years before the show opened. He wrote the poems that Andrew Lloyd Webber set to music in the late 1970s. Eliot is credited as lyricist because the sung text is largely his verse, but the show itself was assembled by Lloyd Webber, director Trevor Nunn, producer Cameron Mackintosh and choreographer Gillian Lynne.
Is “Memory” a T.S. Eliot poem?
Not as such. Trevor Nunn wrote the lyric, drawing on imagery and lines from Eliot’s “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes”. Neither poem is in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and neither was written about a cat.
Why is Grizabella not in the book?
Eliot cut her. The fragment “Grizabella the Glamour Cat” stayed unpublished because, according to Valerie Eliot, he judged it too sad for a children’s collection. She brought it to the 1980 Sydmonton Festival, which is how it reached Lloyd Webber and became the emotional spine of the show.
Why is it called “Old Possum”?
Ezra Pound gave Eliot the nickname, referring to the opossum’s trick of playing dead and to Eliot’s reluctance to give anything away about himself. Eliot used it for the poems he signed in letters to his godchildren, and it went on the book.
What order should I read the poems in?
The published order works, since “The Naming of Cats” opens and “The Ad-dressing of Cats” closes, and the two frame everything between them. If you want the fastest sense of what Eliot was doing, read “Macavity: The Mystery Cat” first. It is a Sherlock Holmes parody with a Moriarty who happens to be a cat, and it explains the tone of the whole collection in about forty lines.
The Takeaway
Eliot never treated the cat poems as serious work. He mailed them to children, let a seaweed specialist read them on the radio, drew the cover himself and moved on. Four decades later they generated billions in ticket sales, a charitable trust that funds libraries, one of the most recognisable songs in musical theatre, an expensive film disaster and a Tony-winning ballroom reinvention. The side project outlived the reputation-management. If you have something you are writing for an audience of one small person, do not assume you know what it is yet.
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