Название: The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation
Автор: Ophelia Field
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007287307
isbn:
The balancing of the Club's meat with more fruit and vegetables in the summer paralleled, symbolically, a balancing of the Club's masculinity with more ‘polite’, feminine tastes. After the Barn Elms renovations were completed, Vanbrugh, Carlisle and Garth hosted a ‘Barns Expedition’ by barge to show the house off to a party consisting of Marlborough's wife Sarah and other noble Whig ladies. And it was after the Club settled at Barn Elms (and the Fountain tavern) that the Kit-Cats added a larger dash of delicacy to their meetings with bespoke drinking glasses and decorative silverware.53 Vanbrugh always referred to the Barn Elms house by the feminine pronoun and, in one letter to Tonson, personified it as Tonson's mistress. This was an allusion to a quip in Wycherley's play The Country Wife,54 but also a way of countering accusations that an interest in interior design was in any way effeminate.
The metaphor of ‘appetite’ versus ‘taste’ was used in relation to all forms of connoisseurship, with the idea that ‘consumption’ should be refined and one's palate exercised: ‘Conversation with Men of a Polite Genius is another Method for improving our Natural Taste,’ Addison wrote.55 At the dinner table, the expectation of conversational pleasures to be served by one's fellow diners was equal to the expectation of good food. Every dinner party in London was said to need at least one Kit-Cat guest, or ‘Flat was the Wine and tasteless was the Cheer.’56
Addison had joined the Club, however, not for its wine or conversation, but to remedy his unemployment. Resisting lethargy, he helped select the poems for another edition of Tonson's Miscellany, but this took only a little of his time and attention. Nothing could have come as more of a relief, in these circumstances, than an unexpected visitor bearing good news in the late summer. Harry Boyle, the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the stinking wigs, personally climbed the three flights of stairs to Addison's garret to deliver an important message directly from Lord Treasurer Godolphin. Boyle was possibly selected, or volunteered, as messenger because he was a Kit-Cat and this was a Kit-Cat-inspired business.
Halifax had suggested to Godolphin that Addison be commissioned to write a poem for the government, in exchange for a post as Commissioner for Appeals and Regulating the Excise (a virtual sinecure, worth £200 a year or some £26,500 today). Godolphin himself was ‘not a reading man’,57 but the three Kit-Cat Junto leaders had persuaded him that the war effort needed a patriotic poem to celebrate Marlborough's great victory against Louis XIV and the Bavarians in August 1704 at the battle of Blenheim.
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