[walrus01]

This is a very uninformed comment if you understand even the most rudimentary of the problems involved in early photography and the history of the daguerrotype and photograph, specifically, that exposures needed to be multiple seconds long to capture an image.

[mattigames]

Yes I know about exposure, this isn't about the technical qualms of any giving photograph but the utility it has for the general public by being smudged to this degree.

[andrewflnr]

The real problem looks like glare, at least to my rudimentarily informed eye.

[walrus01]

Lenses and optics in general were also extremely rudimentary at that time, it looks to me like a combination of the cat moving during an 8 second exposure and a hand-ground lens.