Cats and kittens

About this book

"Cats and kittens" by Edgar S. Werner is a collection of readings and recitations written in the early 20th century. It gathers poems, short tales, songs, fables, and “action” pieces about felines, many with music, tableaux, and staging notes for schoolrooms, parlors, and amateur theatricals. Expect a playful, sentimental, and often instructive celebration of cats and kittens designed for young performers and family audiences.

The opening of the collection frames it as a staged entertainment: a playful “Opening Address” has children pretending to be cats, followed by “Tootsy Wootsy,” a kitten-loving recitation presented in dialect and in standard English, complete with a foreword and detailed pose-by-pose directions for a child and a live kitten. It then shifts into a mix of pieces that model the book’s range: a heartwarming story (“Homeliest Cat at the Show,” in which a tenement girl’s homely rescue cat wins a prize), brief informative and moral items contrasting cats and dogs and explaining feline habits, interactive action-poems with movement cues (“The Cats’ Tea Party,” “The Cat That Came to School”), classic rhymes with music (“Ding Dong Bell”), and gentle essays and tales (from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s lesson on kitten “pins” to a rescue vignette where a streetwise cat earns a ribbon). The sequence closes this early stretch with livelier set pieces, including a “Dick Whittington” song-and-tableaux and a comic dialect monologue about the black cat, underscoring the volume’s performative, family-friendly spirit.