upright=1.1|thumb|A drawing of Jack Black from the 1851 book [[London Labour and the London Poor]]
Jack Black was a rat-catcher and mole destroyer from Battersea, England during the middle of the 19th century. At the time, England was ravaged by a massive population of rats that disrupted crops and spread disease, and Black's rat killing abilities made him a minor celebrity and Queen Victoria's official rat-catcher. Though he has been called the rat's "most notorious enemy," he did not kill all rats. Black said the rat work came naturally to him. He earned himself various jobs catching rats on private property, and he also supplied live rats to pubs for rat-baiting contests, a popular mid-Victorian activity of placing bets on the number of rats a dog could kill.
When Jack Black caught unusually coloured rats, he bred them to establish new colour varieties. He decorated his home-bred domesticated rats with ribbons and sold them as pets, mainly "to well-bred young ladies to keep in squirrel cages", he said. 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. By 1869, Charles Baudelaire called the rat "the poor child’s toy" in his poetry collection Le Spleen de Paris.