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

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘very cunningly’ resolved to feed a gang of ‘poetical young sprigs’—including his Fleet Street housemate Congreve—on a regular basis, with Cat's baked goods, provided the poets ‘would do him the honour to let him have the refusal of all their juvenile productions’.⁷ Beyond first options on the works of new authors, Tonson wished to forge professional loyalties in the heat of Cat's pie-oven, with an eye to longer-term profits.⁸ Ever since Tonson's earliest ventures, he had been securing authors' loyalties through gifts of food and wine—sending exotic melons to Dryden when first wooing the dramatist into his publishing fold, for example—and hiding commercial motives under a veneer of pseudo-baronial hospitality. As early as the 1680s, Tonson had organized what he called ‘Clubbing with Ovid’⁹—that is, assembling networks of translators to produce collaborative publications. Now he was simply clubbing men in the same way as he had previously anthologized their writings.

      The exact date at which the semi-professional friendships between Tonson, his patron-readers (such as Somers, Montagu and Dorset) and his young authors (such as Congreve, Vanbrugh, Prior and Stepney) turned into ‘The Kit-Cat Club’ is unknown, but it was certainly during the final years of the seventeenth century. Thanks to his family's bookshops in the Gray's Inn neighbourhood, Tonson would have frequented the Cat and Fiddle long after moving his own premises from the area. Whereas Tonson's biographers tend to credit him with the foundational love of pies,¹⁰ Somers' biographers claim it was the Lord Keeper who discovered Cat's bakery and took his drinking companion Tonson there one day to taste them.¹¹

      Although there had been clubs in England before, the Kit-Cat Club would be the first to have such wide-ranging interests and in-fluence, combining cultural, political and professional purposes. Previously, trade and craft guilds, political cliques and literary coteries had kept to their own relatively distinct spheres—so, for example, Will's Coffee House had been the venue one evening for Dryden's ‘Witty Club’ and for the politicians' ‘Grave Club’ another.¹²

      The Kit-Cat Club would draw many of its literary members from the Witty Club, but whereas the Witty Club members were both Whigs and Tories, being a Whig was to be as essential a qualification as wit when it came to joining the Kit-Cat. The republican and Whig clubs of the Civil War and Restoration periods had been notorious as hotbeds of subversion, insurrection and treachery. King William, who relied on the Whigs but ‘believed the Whigs…did not love monarchy’, remained suspicious of any club that might engender new republican conspiracies.¹³ The Kit-Cat Club, through its emphasis on literature and other highbrow culture, would strive to shake off these inherited associations, and make clubbing into a respectable pastime for a post-Revolutionary Whig gentleman. In doing so, it would provide the template for the literary and cultural clubs that proliferated later in the eighteenth century, of which Dr Johnson's is the most famous.

      Though the origins of the Club's name were disputed even within the members' lifetimes,¹⁴ the majority of primary sources support Ward's assertion that it came from Mr Cat's mutton pies, known as ‘Kit Cats’,¹⁵ on which the Club originally dined.¹⁶ The contemporary poet Sir Richard Blackmore writes, for example:

      Indulgent BOCAJ did his Muses treat,

      Their Drink was gen'rous Wine and Kit-Cat Pies their Meat, Here he assembled his Poetic Tribe, Past Labours to Reward, and New Ones to Prescribe.¹⁷

      A half-pun on the Club's name may also explain why it was adopted. A 1711 letter allegedly written by Mr Cat is signed with the variant spelling ‘Ch Chatt’.¹⁸ The slang ‘chit-chat’ for small-talk was commonly used, and practising the art of conversation was a central preoccupation of the Kit-Cat Club, so this name may have been thought amusingly apt. In addition, the name contained a classical allusion pleasing to the founders' Whiggish tastes: in ancient Rome, cats symbolized liberty since no animal less likes to be caged, and the goddess of Liberty was often represented with a cat at her feet. Though Tories and Whigs competed to claim many of the same patriotic principles, liberty was one rhetorical term used far more frequently by the Whigs.

      The heat of the scene before the pie-oven, as evoked by Ned Ward, was similarly symbolic. Warmth was considered a Whig characteristic, as shown by the anecdote in which the Kit-Cats asked Mr Cat to bake some pies with the poetry of the comic dramatist Thomas D'Urfey used as baking paper, to test that poet's Whig principles and fitness for membership. The story goes that the members complained when the pies were not baked through, to which Mr Cat replied that D'Urfey's writings were so cold they were cooling the dough. They were not, in other words, sufficiently Whig.

      Pies were certainly baked on discarded bits of writing in that paper-frugal century. Dryden described worthless pieces of poetry as ‘Martyrs of Pies’¹⁹ and Addison later mused with false modesty that his journalism would ‘make a good Foundation for a Muttonpie, as I have more than once experienced’.²⁰ The nice image of Mr Cat's customers picking the last of the ‘kissing crust’ (the old name for the soft under-crust of a pie) off a piece of blank verse, the ink transferring from browned paper to golden pastry, was not fanciful but real.

      As pies and puddings were considered the best of English cookery, the Club's favourite dish would have signified the founders' selfconsciously English, as opposed to French, tastes. The pies were also regarded as humble fare symbolizing the condescension (in its archaic, entirely positive sense) of aristocrats conversing with struggling, lowly born authors. This was made clear by one playwright's hope that his play, even if lacking in delicacy, might nonetheless suit the taste of great men just as ‘A Kit-Cat is a Supper for a Lord’.²¹

      The Kit-Cat authors were never literally starving for a meal, but they were certainly hungry for recognition and fame. Patrons such as Dorset, Somers and Montagu were therefore essential guests at Mr Cat's table. Throughout the Kit-Cat Club's several incarnations, from its 1690s' foundation to its demise some two decades later, patronage was to remain the single most important constant in the Club's story—the mechanism that made it tick.

      Whereas writing for money was condemned by Renaissance critical theory as limiting an author's imaginative freedom, patronage allowed its recipients to profit without feeling sullied by the pecuniary motives of Grub Street hacks (one of whom, in their eyes, was Ned Ward). The Kit-Cat Club provided, in other words, the same ‘cover’ as verse letters—mimicking an earlier, courtly way of doing things. Verse letters in the 1690s pretended to have a readership of one, the aristocratic addressee, while actually having print runs of hundreds. The Club's authors pretended to be a carousing circle of amateurs with private incomes, when really they were piecing together their livings out of day-jobs, book sales and audience figures.

      They hoped to be permitted exceptions to the rules of class, familiarity being among the most valuable gifts that a noble patron could bestow. For a writer to be admitted into a nobleman's ‘conversation’ implied a rise in status with tangible benefits in terms of one's creditors. It was not simply a flattering attention from a social superior; it was an asset that could be spent afterwards as though it were hard cash.

      The tantalizing promise of patronage was meant to guarantee a certain level of conversational СКАЧАТЬ