Rat Catchers in Fiction
A famous fictional rat-catcher was The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Ratcatchers also make a major appearance in Dario Argento's The Phantom of the Opera.
Another, more recent appearance of a rat-catcher in fiction is the children's novel The Twinkie Squad by Gordon Korman. As a result of a student prank which leaves the entire school smelling like dead fish, the principal hires several "professionals" to find and remove the cause of the stench, including a sewer gas expert, an x-ray technician, and a man calling himself the "District of Columbia Ratcatcher". All three "experts" fail to find anything, with the rat-catcher concluding that there is a dead animal in the walls which can only be found and removed by means of demolition.
However, the story has a modern setting, not a Victorian one, and therefore the rat-catcher in the story is more of a general pest-control man, not strictly a specialist in rats alone.
In the DC Universe one of Batman's enemies is the Rat Catcher, formerly Otis Flannegan, who was employed as a real rat catcher for Gotham City. He occasionally orchestrates rat plagues using his uncanny ability to control rats.
British author Roald Dahl wrote a short story with the title "The Ratcatcher."
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Famous quotes containing the words rat and/or fiction:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)