If you want some esoteric information to share around the dinner table tonight, try this. The keeping of rats as pets (in England, at least) seems to have started with
Jack Black, who Wikipedia describes as:
...rat-catcher and mole destroyer by appointment to Her Majesty Queen Victoria during the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Black cut a striking figure in his self-made "uniform" of scarlet topcoat, waistcoat, and breeches, with a huge leather belt inset with cast-iron rats.
The title "mole destroyer" has a certain ring to it, don't you think? As Wikipedia goes on to explain:
When he caught any unusually coloured rats, he bred them, to establish new colour varieties. He would sell his home-bred domesticated coloured rats as pets, mainly, as Black observed, "...to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages." Beatrix Potter is believed to have been one of his customers, and she dedicated the book Samuel Whiskers to her rat of the same name. The more sophisticated ladies of court kept their rats in dainty gilded cages, and even Queen Victoria herself kept a rat or two.
How would you all manage without me providing such vital information?
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