The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation. Ophelia Field

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СКАЧАТЬ a year, Steele asked his uncle to pull strings with the Dean of Christ Church to get him a scholarship, reporting that though he had gained his tutor's respect, ‘these places are not given by merit but are secured by friends’.³² When his uncle's efforts failed to produce the scholarship, Steele moved to Merton College to accept one there instead. Steele left Merton in May 1692 and enlisted in the army as a ‘wretched common Trooper’,³³ since he lacked the funds to buy an officer's commission. Years later, Steele recalled Oxford students who window-shopped, played billiards and bowls, and who were ‘seized all over with a general Inability, Indolence and Weariness, and a certain Impatience of the Place they are in’.³⁴ Steele sounds as though he was well acquainted with these ‘loungers’, but he probably left university voluntarily, out of patriotic duty, rather than because he was expelled, as Jonathan Swift later hinted. Steele would have watched the fireworks in Oxford celebrating the Treaty of Limerick after William's victory in Ireland, and the troops returning from the Irish wars. Though Steele missed his chance to participate in this Protestant victory in his homeland, he could still serve the Protestant cause on the Continent. Since the regiment he joined belonged to his uncle's patron's son, enlisting may also have been a direct order from his uncle that Steele could not refuse.

      Addison did not feel a similar pull towards the adventure of war. He remained to wander the water walks and gardens of Magdalen, translating and composing Latin poetry to the acclaim of his fellow academics. These pastimes between teaching duties sound more plausible from what we know of Addison than his later confessional lines referring to his ‘heedless steps’ upon ‘the slippery paths of youth’.³⁵

      One thing Addison never let himself be was heedless, and his decision not to enlist was decidedly careful of his own person.

      When Addison sent a poem flattering Dryden's talent to the poet in London, Dryden and Tonson included it in the Miscellany Poems they co-edited in 1693.³⁶ Addison's 1694 poem, ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’, then summarized the history of English poetry, culminating—implausibly to modern judgement—with Charles Montagu at its pinnacle. Addison immediately found a flattered benefactor in the 33-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer. Steele later recalled that Congreve was the instrument of Addison's ‘becoming acquainted with’ Montagu.³⁷ How Congreve and Addison first met, however, is uncertain. Most likely it was through Dryden and/or Tonson, following Addison's inclusion in the Miscellany, or perhaps Tonson invited Addison home to the Fleet Street house the publisher then shared with Congreve. Either way, there was soon mutual respect between Addison and Congreve, whose respective specializations in Latin and Greek literature spared them direct rivalry.

      By 1695, Addison was studying to take orders, though he increasingly wished neither to follow his father into the Church nor to remain a university tutor. Addison therefore sought to add a further patron to his portfolio and did so in the traditional way: by poetic tribute. His verse ‘On His Majesty, Presented to the Lord Keeper [Somers]’ was a bold move on the young academic's part, since he had never met Somers, and had no family connection to justify the presentation. Somers must not have minded, since he let Tonson and Congreve bring the poem's author to meet him. Until now, Addison had been not so much a Whig as Whig-leaning, but these two poems, courting Montagu and Somers, marked his first clear declaration of political allegiance.

      Addison's friend Steele had more enthusiasm but less opportunity to serve William's government. Steele too wrote an elegy for Queen Mary: ‘The Procession: A Poem on Her Majesties Funeral, By a Gentleman of the Army’. Steele's, however, was not printed by Tonson, but by a lesser firm, probably at Steele's own expense. If Addison and Steele corresponded during these years while following such starkly divergent paths, the letters are lost. Addison seems not to have shared any of his impressive new literary contacts with his former school friend.

      Steele had by this time seen active military service in Flanders during 1692–4, for a salary of about 4 shillings (now around £20) a day. Steele had thereby ‘wiped off the Rust of Education’,³⁸ and depended, as a soldier puts it in one of Congreve's plays, ‘upon the outside of his head [rather] than the lining’.³⁹ Nonetheless, in the army as in international diplomacy, promotion could be secured by demonstrating literary wit in flattery. As a result of dedicating his elegy on Queen Mary to Baron Cutts, a war hero turned governor of the Isle of Wight, Steele was permitted to switch to the Coldstream Guards, a more elite regiment that provided security at the royal palaces. Steele was made a captain, and, though Cutts was the Guards' nominal commander, much of the actual commanding was left to Steele, especially in early 1697 when he served as Cutts' private secretary. The prospect of a peace to end the War of the League of Augsburg spelled an end, however, to further army promotion for Steele.

      Dick Steele would soon prove himself, like Tonson and Prior, an extremely enterprising man, in tune with this enterprising period of British history. This was the legacy of each of these three men's childhood struggles, in contrast to the more complacent confidence of Congreve and Addison—both of whom, despite the forced migrations of the Congreve family and the early death of Addison's mother, came from relatively stable and financially secure homes. Belonging to a club (or a political party) would always be a more primal need for Prior and Steele, both parentless, than for Congreve or Addison. Kindred spirits become far more important than kin if you have fewer kin to begin with.

       III THE SCENT OF THE PIE-OVEN

      Who knows but by the dint of Kit-Cat's Pies, You may, e'er long, to Gods and Monarchs Rise.

      NED WARD, The Secret History of Clubs (1709)

      A CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNT by a writer named Ned Ward states that the Kit-Cat Club originally convened at the Cat and Fiddle, a London tavern owned by one Mr Christopher (or ‘Kit’) Cat (or ‘Catling’¹), a pastry cook from Norfolk, whose supposed portrait shows a gnarly man with a white knotted handkerchief on his head. The Cat and Fiddle was on Gray's Inn Lane, a street then noted for its fresh air blowing down from open fields to the north of the city.² As a ‘kit’ was slang for a small fiddle, the Cat and Fiddle's signboard, jutting into the lane with its painted emblem of a fiddle-playing puss, may have been a punning reference to the tavern's proprietor.³

      Ned Ward's account describes the meeting of this ‘greasy’ piemaker, Mr Cat, and the ‘amphibious’ publisher-cum-bookseller, Tonson, when they were neighbours in Gray's Inn. Ward envisaged Tonson, his aspiring writers and wealthy patrons gathered sweatily together within the scent of Mr Cat's pie-oven to eat a ‘collation of oven trumpery’—mutton pies, cheese-cakes, golden custards, puff-pastry apple tarts, rose-water codling tarts, and other ornate dishes requiring engineering in dough. As they became drunk, the guests composed doggerel in praise of Mr Cat's pastry creations. The ‘voracious mouth’ of the flaming oven swallowed what they bothered to write down on paper, suggesting it was as near to hand as a spittoon or wastepaper basket.⁴

      The Kit-Cat Club thus began as an eccentric publishing rights deal, cooked up by Tonson,⁵ and has also been called ‘the first expenseaccount publisher's dinner on record’.СКАЧАТЬ