The poet behind The Waste Land also had a substantial sideline in badly behaved cats. T.S. Eliot sent feline jokes and poems to children, developed them into Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and published the collection in 1939. Roughly four decades later, those cats reached the musical stage. The Broadway production eventually became the longest-running show in its history. Few routes from modernist poetry to mass entertainment have involved quite so many whiskers.
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 the Book Appeared
- 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
The correspondence reaches back earlier than the finished collection. The Eliot estate’s account describes a cat character in a 1931 letter to his godson Tom Faber and later poems sent to Alison Tandy. The children were an early audience for a work still taking shape, rather than the unsuspecting recipients of an already completed book.
This matters because the poems invite performance: their rhythms, voices, and absurd names want to be heard. Yet playfulness did not mean Eliot had no publishing ambitions. His letters show that he wanted the book to succeed, artistically and financially. The correspondence offers a glimpse of that development. It is a different use of letters from the storytelling structure of an epistolary novel, but both remind us that a letter can have a life beyond its first recipient.
Who Old Possum Actually Was
“Old Possum” was a nickname Eliot used among friends and made part of his literary identity. It is commonly associated with Ezra Pound; research into the nickname’s history notes that Virginia Woolf also claimed credit. The reserved modernist could clearly enjoy an animal alias. Even formidable poets need a less formidable name for the cat correspondence.
The Book That Almost Had a Different Name
Faber had already announced a proposed collection in its spring 1936 catalogue, with Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats in the longer title. The estate’s publication history follows the revisions before the book appeared three years later. The dogs lost their title billing, though they were not banished entirely: the battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles remained part of the feline entertainment.
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. Eliot illustrated its cover and dust jacket himself. The timing gives a light-hearted book a sobering historical backdrop, but the cover can also be enjoyed simply as another glimpse of the poet’s playful side.
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. The original sequence opens with “The Naming of Cats” and ends with “The Ad-dressing of Cats” before the later addition of “Cat Morgan Introduces Himself”, 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 and Axel Scheffler later gave the cats different visual personalities. Faber also commissioned Rebecca Ashdown’s 2014 illustrated edition for the book’s seventy-fifth anniversary. A few pages of verse can support a surprising range of whiskers. The text provides characters, while each artist gets to decide what sort of room they should walk into.
The Cats Were on the Radio Before the Book Appeared
The first broadcast preceded the book by almost two years. In November 1937, Eliot discussed a reading with Geoffrey Tandy and the BBC’s Ian Cox. On Christmas Day, Tandy read five of the poems on BBC radio. Listeners could hear these cats before they could buy the collection, and further broadcasts followed in 1938.
Tandy combined broadcasting with scientific work at the Natural History Museum. He and Eliot were friends, and Eliot was godfather to his daughter Anthea; Alison, another daughter, received and responded to draft poems. This was a family connection as well as a broadcasting one. Hearing the verses performed helps explain their theatrical appeal, though it does not make a later stage success inevitable.
Lloyd Webber was not the first composer to hear musical possibilities in the poems. Alan Rawsthorne’s Practical Cats for speaker and orchestra dates from 1954, as recorded in the Rawsthorne Trust’s catalogue. That concert work is another route from page to performance, with a narrator rather than a cast of dancing cats.
How Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats Became a Musical
Lloyd Webber began experimenting with settings in the late 1970s. His official timeline records an early presentation at Sydmonton in 1978, followed by a fuller concert draft in July 1980, performed by Gary Bond, Gemma Craven, and Paul Nicholas. The project developed in stages; it did not arrive all at once with its whiskers attached.
The Poem Valerie Eliot Kept Back
Valerie Eliot, the poet’s widow, supplied an unpublished Grizabella poem. According to the musical’s official history, she explained that Eliot had considered it too sad for a children’s book. The faded glamour cat gave the developing show a powerful emotional centre. Its portraits could now gather around someone seeking acceptance, rather than remain only a sequence of introductions.
The production brought together Cameron Mackintosh, director Trevor Nunn, choreographer Gillian Lynne, and designer John Napier. Judi Dench was originally cast as Grizabella, but an Achilles injury forced her to withdraw and Elaine Paige took over. The show’s famous emotional centre came through a very practical rehearsal crisis. Even theatrical cats cannot always land on their feet.
How “Memory” Draws on Eliot
“Memory” is not a poem from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Trevor Nunn wrote its lyric using Eliot’s earlier poetry. The production’s programme credits identify Rhapsody on a Windy Night and other poems of the Prufrock period as its basis. That makes it an adaptation of Eliot, rather than a song with no connection to him. A melancholy city poem found a new theatrical life through Grizabella. For the less literary question of why the tune stays with you, see why songs get stuck in your head.
The Numbers Nobody Expected
Cats opened at London’s New London Theatre on 11 May 1981 and ran there for twenty-one years. The Broadway League’s production record dates the original New York run from 7 October 1982 to 10 September 2000, with 7,485 performances. Its seven Tony wins included Best Musical. Whatever reservations anyone had about dancing poetry, audiences kept buying tickets.
In 1997, Cats overtook A Chorus Line as Broadway’s longest-running show; The Phantom of the Opera later surpassed it in 2006. That record belongs to a particular period, rather than being a permanent title. The international productions and revivals tell the larger story: these characters proved remarkably portable across languages, casts, and theatres.
Some of the success also supported charitable work. Valerie Eliot established Old Possum’s Practical Trust in 1990 and endowed it with funds from the musical in 2001. Its work has supported arts and cultural projects, including the London Library and Newnham College. The cats did more than sell tickets; they helped put resources back into cultural life. A library donation financed by a dancing cat is an excellent plot twist.
The Film, the Flop, and the Ballroom Revival
Broadway got a revival at the Neil Simon Theatre on 31 July 2016, with choreography by Andy Blankenbuehler and Leona Lewis as Grizabella. The production record counts 593 performances before its closure on 30 December 2017. It brought the show back without matching the extraordinary length of the original run.
Then came Tom Hooper’s 2019 film. Its digitally transformed performers made the stage convention feel very different on screen: human faces and feline bodies were suddenly sharing an uncomfortable amount of visual space. The result became notorious, and its worldwide box office was only around $75 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Ticket sales alone are not a complete studio profit-and-loss account, but the film certainly did not repeat the stage show’s triumph.
A later reinvention took another direction. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, co-directed by Zhailon Levingston and Bill Rauch, premiered at PAC NYC in 2024 and placed the material within ballroom culture. Its Broadway transfer opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in April 2026. The Tony Awards record confirms wins for direction, choreography, and costume design. The production’s August 2026 news records its final Broadway performance on 8 August. Its achievement was an imaginative transformation, not simply leaving every detail of the earlier staging untouched.
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?
No poem in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is called “Memory.” Nunn wrote the lyric drawing on Eliot’s earlier poetry, particularly Rhapsody on a Windy Night. It is a new song lyric with Eliot as its literary source.
Why is Grizabella not in the book?
The Grizabella poem was left out of the published collection. Valerie Eliot told Lloyd Webber that her husband had thought it too sad for children. Her sharing of the material helped give the musical its emotional centre.
Why is it called “Old Possum”?
It was a nickname Eliot adopted among friends, commonly linked with Ezra Pound. He used the persona in his playful correspondence, and it became the name on the collection. The literary alter ego was considerably furrier than his public reputation.
What order should I read the poems in?
The published order works well. “The Naming of Cats” introduces the idea that these animals have identities of their own; “The Ad-dressing of Cats” rounds off the original sequence, with “Cat Morgan Introduces Himself” added in later editions. For a quick taste of the tone, try “Macavity: The Mystery Cat,” with its feline master-criminal joke.
The Takeaway
Eliot took his light verse seriously enough to revise it, publish it, and hope it would succeed. That did not stop it being funny. Letters, radio readings, a musical, a film, and a ballroom reinvention each found different possibilities in the same cats. If you are writing something for an audience of one small person, you may not know its eventual destination. But giving it care from the beginning is a perfectly reasonable place to start.
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