Rat Fancy grew out of a most violent and surprising place past. The Brown Rat, which arrived in England in the early 1800s, was larger and hardier than the native Black Rat, and flourished to the point that the rat population swelled to overwhelming numbers. Queen Victoria hired rat catchers such as the infamous Jack Black to save the people of England from the swarming rodents. Black’s daughter was so proud of her father’s prestigious work that she sometimes wore a red velvet dress with the words “Rat Catcher’s Daughter” stitched on the bodice.
Sometimes rat catchers sold their captives to rat-baiting pits instead of killing them immediately. The cruel sport served two purposes; a way of killing excess rats that had been caught and an outlet for the rising frustration at the rise of the rat population. It was particularly popular in London and involved placing a large number of rats in an enclosure with a dog. The dog would then proceed to dispatch as many rats as possible, and the one who killed the largest number in the shortest time was declared the winner. Bets were placed on the dogs and large sums of money exchanged hands at these establishments. Rat-baiting coexisted in England alongside equally gruesome sports, such as bear-baiting, in which dogs as well as humans with weapons stepped into a pit to maim and kill bears.
Occasionally a particular rat with interesting markings would be saved from the horrors of the rat-baiting pit. These lucky individuals would be the first of the fancy rats to be domesticated as companions. Ironically, it was Jack Black the rat catcher who played a pivotal role in igniting the craze. He noticed that a white rat attracted quite a bit of attention from admiring young women. Rather than sell the albino animal, Black decided to try breeding her, and his business gamble paid off. Many of the earliest fancy rats were her white, spotted, and hooded descendants.
“The fancy” is a term derived from “fantasy.” A fancier could mean someone who simply enjoyed a particular thing, or, as one fancier more elaborately put it, “one who takes a great delight in establishing pedigrees, strains, and pure breeds.” Rabbits, cats and cavies were at the end of the nineteenth century the favorites amongst fanciers. Before long, mice and and finally rats caught on.
In 1901 a trailblazing young socialite named Mary Douglas got permission from the National Mouse Club to enter her beloved pet hooded rat into a show. The rat won, and suddenly England was gripped by the rat fancy the way it would be gripped by Beatlemania 160 years later. The National Mouse Club eagerly renamed itself the National Rat and Mouse Club. Ladies like Mary Douglas socialized with rats sitting on their laps and walked their pets on leashes made of expensive ribbon. Mary “the mother of rat fancy” herself advocated tirelessly for the maligned animal until her death nearly 20 years later.
Even during these halcyon days of rat appreciation, not all was well. It’s telling that Queen Victoria, who was so taken by the rat fancy that she had enormous gilded cages built for her two pets, continued to employ rat catchers to decimate their non-fancy brethren. And like Mother Mary herself, people who wanted to acquire fancy rats had to buy them from these rat catchers or from naturalists who were starting to use the animals as test subjects for genetics and a growing number of other scientific theories.
When the charismatic Mary Douglas died in 1920, rat fancy faded along with her. The society of fanciers reverted to the National Mouse Club in 1929 and keeping rats as pets remained a niche hobby for decades. The children of people who had hand-fed, groomed, and doted on fancy rats grew up once again seeing them as nothing more than pests. But Mother Mary had helped create a moment. For the first time, the people of England had questioned whether killing and torturing rats was necessary. They had opened themselves up to discovering the incredible personalities of rats and fallen in love.