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

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      In February 1699, William proclaimed that actors must avoid using profane and indecent language—disregarding the role of his own Cabinet ministers, Somers and Montagu, in encouraging and financing the writing of the allegedly profane and indecent plays in the first place. When Congreve's Double Dealer was revived in March 1699, it was in the expurgated version.

      The Kit-Cat Club survived Collier's attacks on its members because it did not attempt to defend the imaginations of Vanbrugh and Congreve as they really deserved to be defended. Instead, the Kit-Cat critics emphasized the points on which they agreed with Collier: that wit without decency is not true wit; that smut should not be used to compensate for a deficit of ‘sprightly Dialogue’,³⁴ and that mobbish audiences needed elevation and education, for the whole nation's sake. While the Kit-Cat patrons supported the Club's authors in defiance of the censors, the more ambitious Whig politicians also recognized that they needed to work on their public image, and that a new, more ‘improving’ literature was required to win the moral highground back from the Tories. Congreve and Vanbrugh were not, however, willing to produce it.

      It would be the stars of the following generation of Kit-Cat authors—Addison and Steele, not yet members in 1698—who succeeded in bridging the gap between the Club's libertine, Restoration founders, led by Dorset, and Collier's puritanical strictures. Steele, who was at heart a faithful Christian, later admitted to having privately admired much that Collier preached, ‘as far as I durst, for fear of witty Men, upon whom he had been too severe’.³⁵

      In 1698, at the height of the culture wars, Steele was known as ‘Captain Steele’—one of the many demobilized officers whose uniforms reddened the theatre audiences after the peace of Ryswick. Steele was then living either with his aunt and uncle at their Bond Street house, or at the Whitehall home of his boss, Lord Cutts. Steele said Cutts treated him like a son and provided him with ‘an introduction into the world’, so it may have been through this military patron that Steele first entered Dryden's outer orbit at Will's Coffee House. There was already, of course, the connection established with this circle through Addison, though Addison lived in Oxford until 1699.

      Steele seems to have charmed Congreve, in particular, with whom he passed ‘many Happy Hours’.³⁶ This was quite an honour, since Congreve confided to Joe Keally that he was ‘not apt to care for many acquaintance, and never intend to make many friendships’.³⁷ Steele, for his part, said that he felt the ‘greatest Affection and Veneration’ for Congreve, admiring, in particular, Congreve's poem ‘Doris’.³⁸ No evidence survives to tell us whether Steele felt a similarly warm regard for Vanbrugh in the late 1690s; as a soldier-turned-playwright, Vanbrugh was the obvious role model for Steele at this juncture.

      Steele also appears to have befriended Congreve's housemate, Tonson, by 1698. That year, Tonson moved his firm's offices from Chancery Lane to his family's old premises in Gray's Inn, where they would remain until 1710. A satirical advertisement appeared cruelly referring to Tonson's ‘Sign of the two left Legs, near Gray's Inn BackGate’.³⁹ Steele was often to be found at this shop during 1698. There he could sit for hours and read for free, with a glass of wine by his side, as bookshops then were more like paying libraries where, for a small subscription, one could read the most recent publications on the premises, leaving a bookmark in a volume if not finished at a single sitting.

      An additional attraction at Tonson's shop was the publisher's 18-year-old niece Elizabeth, an assistant in the business. In 1699 or 1700, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter by Steele, christened Elizabeth and given the surname of ‘Ousley’, after Dorothea Ousley, a nurse who raised illegitimate infants and orphans in the neighbourhood. How Tonson felt about Steele, an insolvent Irishman, ex-soldier and aspiring playwright, having impregnated his unmarried niece is not recorded, nor is there evidence that Steele's guardian aunt and uncle ever found out about the baby.

      Steele felt that an illegitimate child was deeply shameful, not an everyday occurrence. He must have known how Addison disapproved of the ‘Vermin’ who carelessly produced bastards and whose punishment should be, Addison joked, transportation to a colony in need of population.⁴⁰ The person to whom Steele therefore turned during the crisis was not Addison, nor any of his witty male friends, but Mrs Mary Delariviere Manley, an unconventionally worldly woman who had been a confidante to Charles II's mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, and who had lived with several men in London, starting with John Tilly, a lawyer and warden of Fleet Prison. Steele met Mrs Manley through Tilly, who in the mid-1690s had joined Steele and another old university friend as gullible investors in some alchemical research.

      Manley claimed Steele dealt with two unwanted pregnancies in the late 1690s—one baby died, the other was presumably Elizabeth Ousley. It is unclear whether Elizabeth Tonson was the mother in both instances. Mrs Manley explained that she had stood as guarantor for Steele when he needed credit with a midwife, though whether for an abortion or a birth is unclear. Steele never paid the midwife's bill, so she threatened to sue and make the matter public. A note in Steele's hand confirms this story, referring to blackmail by a Mrs Phip[p]s in Watling Street, near St Paul's, ‘at the sign of the Coffin and Cradle’, through her ‘threatening to expose the occasion of the debt. It is £22.—£5 of it is paid’.⁴¹

      Steele's refusal to return the favour and lend Mrs Manley some ‘trifling sum’ ended their friendship some years later.⁴² She complained of his ingratitude, to which Steele responded that he only refused because he did not have the ready cash to lend. He still had, he insisted, ‘the greatest Sense imaginable of the Kind Notice you gave me when I was going on to my Ruin’.⁴³

      This guilty sense of his own ‘ruin’ was the source of Steele's sympathy for Collier's coinciding jeremiads about national ruin, though Steele was too much of a Whig to think the Williamite world any more sinful than its Restoration predecessor. Steele's comment about Collier having been ‘too severe’ on witty men was similarly born of his growing friendship with Collier's targets, Congreve and Vanbrugh. Steele recognized that Tory efforts to caricature the Whigs and their wits as unfaithful individuals, both sexually and politically, ignored a certain code of honour upheld by these men, who proved, in fact, as emotionally loyal to their mistresses as they were to their ‘Revolution Principles’.⁴⁴ Their fidelity to one another as friends, through the Kit-Cat Club, was also an important way in which they sought to counter these Tory accusations and attest their virtue.

      During the first five years of the new century, the Collierites and their allies did not slacken in their efforts to force moral reform on the theatres and society as a whole—over thirty pamphlets on the controversy would be published by the end of 1700 alone, including A Second Defence of the Short View by Collier himself. This pushed the Kit-Cat Club to display its defiance of these repressive religious forces more overtly, as on 9 January 1700, when the Club went to the theatre ‘in a body’, to see a performance designed as a rebuff to denunciations of the Whig theatres. The day before, Matt Prior, in London, wrote to Abraham (‘Beau’) Stanyan, one of Congreve's friends from Middle Temple student days and now a fellow Kit-Cat, serving as a diplomat in Paris: ‘Tomorrow night, Betterton acts Falstaff, and to encourage that poor house the Kit Katters have taken one side-box and the Knights of the Toast have taken the other.’⁴⁵

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