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

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СКАЧАТЬ part to present himself as a warrior-king, too busy saving the Protestant world to bother with flattering poetic dedications. William avoided literary patronage partly in order to imply he had no need of propagandists—as a providential leader who needed no help but God's—and partly because he had little love for a language that was not his own. Hampton Court's competition with Versailles motivated royal patronage of the visual arts and architecture, but no similar royal bounty flowed towards English authors to match Louis XIV's patronage of writers such as Racine and De La Fontaine. Though the relative beneficence of previous English Courts to poets may have been exaggerated, the rising numbers of men attempting to pursue writing careers without private incomes under William III made it appear as if royal reward for wit was in short supply. This was the gap the Kit-Cats felt it their patriotic duty to fill.³⁴

      The Kit-Cats' sense of patriotic duty was linked to their sense of historical continuity with previous literary clubs during what they regarded as England's last golden age: the reign of Elizabeth I. They had in mind the legendary ‘merry meetings’ of Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson and others at the Mermaid tavern, or the ‘Apollo’ wits Jonson gathered around himself at the Devil tavern in Temple Bar. This latter club fascinated Richard Steele (he described taking a party up to the Devil in 1709 and finding ‘the rules of Ben's Club’ were still to be seen ‘in gold letters over the chimney’³⁵), and Tonson once received an unsolicited poem that flattered the Kit-Cat Club by comparison to Ben Jonson's club at the Devil.

      The dating of the Kit-Cat Club's foundation to the second half of the 1690s would place it in the context of a significant relaxation in attitudes to the public exchange of opinion. Sixteen ninety-five saw the second lapse of England's Licensing Act, after which there was a huge surge in the number of books, papers and pamphlets flying off London's presses—especially pamphlets which debated public affairs or satirized public figures.

      Authors and printers could still be prosecuted under blasphemy, obscenity and sedition laws, particularly if they expressed Jacobite views (that is, supportive of James II's restoration), but there was now a feeling that just about anyone and anything could get published. It was no coincidence that the Kit-Cat's members chose Tonson as their chairman and secretary, emphasizing this link between their Club and the power of England's comparatively unfettered printing presses.

      By the 1710s, there would be some 21,000 books published in Britain—far more than in any other European country—and, by approxim ately the same date, clubbing would be seen as a quintessentially English activity, John Macky observing: ‘[A]lmost every parish hath its separate Club, where the Citizens, after the Fatigue of the Day is over in their Shops, and on the Exchange, unbend their Thoughts before they go to bed.’³⁶ Freedom of commerce, association and expression went hand in hand.

      The Kit-Cat Club, like many of the clubs that would follow it, had an ambivalent relationship to the birth of the new style of financial capitalism around it. On the one hand, the Club was a way to preserve the ancient loyalties and hereditary customs that its members feared the new modes of commerce might extinguish. London's worlds of politics, publishing and commerce were ruthless and unregulated, making people seek refuge in the gentler ideal of ‘clubbability’. At the same time, as Whigs who generally appreciated and exploited the benefits of credit-based commerce and urban life, its members recognized that they needed to invest in social capital as much as financial capital, and the Club was formed to assist with such investment. This meant acquiring a reputation for learning and taste, and securing well-connected friends with inside information about both stocks and politics.

      This was a period of great social anxiety, as boundaries between classes became increasingly blurred and the concept of gentility increasingly uncertain. In the seventeenth century, a ‘gentleman’ had been a man entitled to bear arms and with no need to work for a living, but by the 1690s gentility was becoming a more fluid matter of education, manners and taste. Outward indicators of a genteel education, such as the great private libraries of Somers and Montagu, could be imitated by anyone with money, as when a character in one of Vanbrugh's plays mocked the way gilt-covered books were valued as interior décor by the nouveau riche. Another Vanbrugh character was a ‘fake’ peer who purchased his peerage from the Crown for £10,000. To be a Kit-Cat, in this context, was to wear a badge of cultural honour that could not be faked or debased by imitation. For the first time, membership of a particular club became a recognized social credential.

      It would be unfair, however, to describe the Kit-Cat Club as concerned only with preserving the reactionary cultural credit of the aristocracy in the face of entrepreneurial capitalism and social mobility. As would become clear in the following decade, the Club promoted a very particular, patriotic agenda, slicing through every art form, to raise the nation as a whole up to their cultural level, and for that they had to look outwards, far beyond their own charmed circle. Tonson's presses, pouring forth their texts for the literate public, were the first evidence of this engagement with the wider world.

      It was not self-interest, self-improvement or civic duty that made these men leave their homes and go out to a tavern on a cold wet night, however, but rather a longing for relaxation, amusement and the sympathy of friends. The tasty wine and pies of Mr Cat and the enticingly warm wit of Congreve or Prior, were as crucial to the successful foundation of the Kit-Cat Club as any social or economic cost-benefit analysis at the back of its founders' minds.

       IV THE TOAST OF THE TOWN: A KIT-CAT MEETING, 1697

      We taught them how to toast, and rhyme, and bite, To sleep away the day, and drink away the night.

      WILLIAM SHIPPEN, Faction Display'd (1704)

      IN THE FADING light of a Thursday afternoon during the winter of 1697–8, the Kit-Cat members made their way—by foot, coroneted coach, carriage and swaying sedan chair—towards the Cat and Fiddle tavern in Gray's Inn, to attend a Club meeting that would end with an unusual visitor.

      Tonson would have arrived early to ready the room. As a later Kit-Cat advised: ‘Upon all Meetings at Taverns, 'tis necessary some one of the Company should take it upon him to get all Things in such Order…such as hastening the Fire, getting a sufficient number of Candles, [and] tasting the Wine with a judicious Smack.’¹

      When the other members arrived, each bowed to the gathered company before being relieved of his outer jacket or cloak, hat, gloves, cane or sword by a waiting servant. Disrobing elegantly was an art, and Congreve mocked country bumpkins who went too far and pulled off their boots on such occasions.

      It has been suggested that the Club's seating arrangements mimicked an Oxbridge college dining hall, with a ‘high table’ for the grandest nobles and lower tables at right angles for everyone else, but it is more likely that such a sharp distinction between aristocrats and wits was deliberately avoided, to the mutual flattery of both. The Club's presidential pride of place, a wooden ‘elbow chair’ (armchair) at one end of the table, was occupied not by the Club's highest ranking peer, but by Tonson, while Matt Prior mentions that it was unnecessary to sit in one's seat for the duration of a Kit-Cat meal.

      The diners first washed their hands in a basin, then the highest ranking member said grace. In 1697, this was the Duke of Somerset, Charles Seymour, the second highest ranking peer in the kingdom. He was a vastly wealthy and notoriously proud man, who spoke with an affected lisp and had once disowned his daughter when he awoke from a nap and caught her seated in his presence. Only 35 in 1697, however, such caricaturish excesses lay ahead of him. Somerset was at this time renovating his stately home of Petworth in Sussex, where he and СКАЧАТЬ