![]() Alice first encounters the Cheshire Cat at the Duchess's house in her kitchen, and later on the branches of a tree, where it appears and disappears at will, and engages Alice in amusing but sometimes perplexing conversation. The Cheshire Cat is now largely identified with the character of the same name in Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. For this reason, he favours the well-fed farm cats of Cheshire's dairying environment-a widely-known and well-promoted idea at the time the phrase arose-as the best candidate for the origin of the Cheshire Cat idiom. In his analysis, the essential feature of any actual historical explanation would be one that demonstrated its innate connection to Cheshire: An idiom that retained the localism while spreading nationwide, would, in his view, need to be strongly connected to the county, in the minds of people elsewhere. The author, Peter Young, considered most to be "inventive" but unlikely. The dictionary does not expand further on this, its editors possibly considering the connection between cats and lions self-explanatory or obvious.Ī 2015 article published in the Cheshire History journal examined these suggested origins, along with numerous others seen on the internet. A later edition of Brewer's adds another possible explanation, similar to Maunder's, that a painter in Cheshire once used to paint grinning lions on inns. The cheese was cut from the tail end, so that the last part eaten was the head of the smiling cat. Īccording to Brewer's Dictionary (1870), "The phrase has never been satisfactorily accounted for, but it has been said that cheese was formerly sold in Cheshire moulded like a cat that looked as though it was grinning". The sign of the house was originally a lion or tiger, or some such animal, the crest of the family of Sir Edward Poore. A public-house by the roadside is commonly known by the name of The Cat at Charlton. ![]() ![]() A similar case is to be found in the village of Charlton, between Pewsey and Devizes, Wiltshire. The resemblance of these lions to cats caused them to be generally called by the more ignoble name. This phrase owes its origin to the unhappy attempts of a sign painter of that country to represent a lion rampant, which was the crest of an influential family, on the sign-boards of many of the inns. In 1853, Samuel Maunder offered this explanation: A possible origin of the phrase is one favoured by the people of Cheshire, a county in England which boasts numerous dairy farms hence the cats grin because of the abundance of milk and cream. There are numerous theories about the origin of the phrase "grinning like a Cheshire Cat" in English history. The phrase also appears in print in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel The Newcomes (1855): "Lo, like a Cheshire cat our court will grin." The phrase appears again in print in John Wolcot's pseudonymous Peter Pindar's Pair of Lyric Epistles (1792): He grins like a Cheshire cat said of any one who shows his teeth and gums in laughing. The first known appearance of the expression in literature is in the 18th century, in Francis Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, Second, Corrected and Enlarged Edition (1788), which contains the following entry:Ĭheshire cat. One distinguishing feature of the Alice-style Cheshire Cat involves a periodic gradual disappearance of its body, leaving only one last visible trace: its iconic grin. It has transcended the context of literature and become enmeshed in popular culture, appearing in various forms of media, from political cartoons to television, as well as in cross-disciplinary studies, from business to science. While now most often used in Alice-related contexts, the association of a "Cheshire cat" with grinning predates the 1865 book. ![]() The Cheshire Cat ( / ˈ tʃ ɛ ʃ ər/ or / ˈ tʃ ɛ ʃ ɪər/) is a fictional cat popularised by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and known for its distinctive mischievous grin. "Most everyone's mad here." "You may have noticed that I'm not all there myself." Male (the Queen of Hearts cries "off with his head" when the cat upsets the king) The Cheshire Cat as illustrator John Tenniel depicted it in the 1865 publication ![]()
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