Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  Whether the Kit-Cat Club met to toast The Spectator on the Thursday it was launched is not recorded, or whether it convened at all that difficult spring, while Harley's ministry was enjoying a peak in popularity. In March 1711, a French spy, the Marquis de Guisard, made an attempt on Harley's life that won the chief minister public sympathy and disproved Whig allegations that his ministry was in league with Louis XIV. While these allegations were indeed an exaggeration, it was true that Harley and St John intended to conclude a peace deal with France. This was a grave national danger in Mr Spectator's eyes, which he referred to by innuendo, cautioning his readers against importing indecent French habits such as male servants for ladies' dressing-rooms.

  One of The Spectator's first essays was an allegory of Public Credit, depicted as a beautiful but fragile virgin on a golden throne. The phantoms of Jacobitism and Republicanism rush in to frighten her, until she is calmed by a host of friendly spirits, including the Hanoverian heir, who replenish her bags of gold. Addison wrote this allegory in the context of mounting tension between the Whig City and Harley's Exchequer. The latter, according to Swift, needed to raise £5.6 million but ‘the Whigs will not lend a groat, which is the only reason of the fall in stocks, for they are like Quakers and fanatics that will only deal among themselves’.18 This tension culminated at the April 1711 elections of Bank of England and United East India Company directors, where Tory shareholders turned out in high numbers to try to dislodge the Whig management of each. Dr Sacheverell purchased the £500 of Bank stock necessary to participate, and was hissed by the Whig shareholders when he turned up to vote. The Kit-Cat Club's political members played their usual role in ‘whipping up’ Whig shareholders and succeeded in narrowly averting the Tory takeovers.19

  In the Commons, the Whigs had no such majority to rally, and failed to prevent a parliamentary resolution, on 14 April, that bringing Palatine refugees into England was a ‘scandalous Misapplication of the Public Money, tending to the Increase and Oppression of the Poor of this Kingdom’.20

  In The Spectator's tenth issue, Addison estimated there were twenty readers for each of the 3,000 issues printed, suggesting that copies were circulated within households and coffee houses, and that public readings were spreading the paper's influence beyond a literate audience. In July 1711, Addison said his bookseller reported ‘Demand for these Papers increases daily’, and spoke of his 40–50,000 readers as a kind of composite patron.21 Whether the figures were accurate, it is significant that Mr Spectator hears of having a mass readership ‘with much Satisfaction’, rather than aristocratic embarrassment at being applauded by the common mob.

  Mr Spectator repeatedly declared he was taking knowledge from where it was ‘bound up in Books’22 to where it could ‘dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and Coffee-Houses’.23 The Spectator was a product of the Kit-Cat Club for this reason if for no other: Addison and Steele had been taught to seek popularity, on condition of not appealing to the lowest common denominator, by the elder generation of Kit-Cat authors and literary patrons. This popularizing principle was the legacy of Dryden, Congreve, Stepney and Prior, who had written vernacular translations of classical authors (though Addison recommended another translator's Virgil as being ‘finer’ than Dryden's,24 his ‘tepid homage’25 to Dryden becoming, over the years, a bone of contention between Addison and earlier Kit-Cats like Congreve and Tonson26). Now the commercial success of The Spectator vindicated the Kit-Cats' popularizing principle as no dramatic or poetic work had before. ‘[T]he general Reception I have found,’ boasted Mr Spectator, ‘convinces me that the World is not so corrupt as we are apt to imagine.’27

  By the issues numbered in the 200s, it was clear from readers' letters that the paper was a place to issue national announcements and that Mr Spectator wielded enormous social influence, tangible and immediate, in readers' lives. When Steele published an essay against ‘Fribblers’ (irresolute men who court women they never ask to marry), for example, fathers across Britain began closing their doors on such gentlemen callers.28 Contemporaries often noted the paper's far-reaching impact on the nation's manners, ordinary conversation and attitudes. Throughout the newly formed nation, anglicization, through The Spectator, meant ‘Kit-catization’. There is also evidence of the influence of the paper on Englishmen far beyond Britain's shores, such as a letter from an English merchant living in Sumatra who said that, besides the Bible and John Locke's essays, The Spectator and Tatler were his ‘constant Companions’.29

  The diversity of The Spectator's correspondents—gentlemen, businessmen, clergymen, actors, servants, ladies and schoolboys—was as striking as its readership figures. It was continuing The Tatler's success in expanding the size of Britain's literate culture, including the number of women readers. Alongside the Kit-Cats who subscribed to the journal's collected edition published in 1712–13, there were many merchants and minor office-holders, but also some thirty-six women, including several of the ‘middling sort’. In the fourth issue, Steele stated his intention to provide lessons for women readers on their duties and behaviour: ‘I shall take it for the greatest Glory of my Work, if among reasonable Women this Paper may furnish Tea-Table Talk.’30 Addison agreed, asserting that ‘there are none to whom this Paper will be more useful than to the female World’. He bemoaned the trifling concerns of ‘ordinary Women’, such that ‘the right adjusting of their Hair [is] the principal Employment of their Lives’.31 The obvious paternalism of these remarks is somewhat mitigated by the fact that many of the ‘women’ they were advising on whom to marry and how to live were, in fact, girls of 13 or 15.32

  As a publication considered decent for discussion in mixed-sex company and among every class of person, The Spectator was usurping the pulpit in defining Britain's moral order. Addison used his essays—particularly his Saturday essays—to sermonize in a spirit of rational piety. The Glorious Revolution had slackened the Episcopal Church's hold in England, if only because William was not raised an Anglican, and many Whigs—certainly most of the Kit-cats—were instinctively anti-clerical. The Spectator's popularity was partly explained by the British search for secular guidance on decency and manners, though the authors would have said they were prescribing Christian living and churchgoing, not offering an alternative.

  Mr Spectator's sermonizing tone tapped into the national zeal for self-improvement fomented by the Collierites and other moral reformers over the past decade. The British were trying to settle their own values during Anne's reign—a campaign of self-mastery and self-civilization less than half a century before they set out to master and civilize the rest of the world. They believed themselves more enlightened than the generation that had fought the Civil War, yet with less refined and cohesive culture than many of their European neighbours. The Spectator therefore declared itself for the ‘wearing out of Ignorance, Passion and Prejudice’ among the English.33

  Constructing an image of the ‘national character’ was the first order of business. When Addison remarked on how Frenchmen could converse with a warmth and intimacy that ‘abundance of wine can scarce draw from an Englishman’,34 he was generalizing his own taciturnity and reserve into a national characteristic. In Spectator no. 135, Addison summarized the English language as befitting the English temperament in being ‘modest, thoughtful and sincere’35—a description of his own better qualities, as man and author, rather than something that could be proved of his countrymen as a whole. By 1850, according to Paul Langford, there was near universal agreement on the key traits of the English character being energy, candour, decency, taciturnity, reserve and eccentricity.36 Addison and Steele, who together could claim every quality on this contradictory list, deserve a large share of the credit for forming this consensus.

  Marlborough's victories since 1702, and the expanding strength of British trade, were by now giving Britons a sense of themselves as a ‘chosen people’ in the same way that Americans would feel in later centuries. As royal bloodlines had been so easily thrown aside b
y the Revolution and the Act of Settlement, Whig patriotism stressed a providential view of the nation, bonded by Protestantism and political principles, rather than by blood. This they saw as a more ‘modern’ kind of nationhood. It was also the only patriotism they could logically assert between 1710–14, when their only powerful allies in London were the envoys of the Imperial and Dutch governments.

  In The Whig Examiner's last issue, Addison had told his readers: ‘Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance are the Duties of Turks and Indians.’ He contrasted these Tory and High Church tenets to the more critical, rationalist mindset of Englishmen. The Tories, Mr Spectator repeated in July 1711, were like ‘wild Tartars’.37 To be British, in other words, was to be Whig.

  Paradoxically, the Whigs managed to incorporate a certain cosmopolitanism into their image of Britishness that the Tories—associated with the rural nobility and peasantry—seemed to reject. The Spectator is full of respectful references to Oriental and Islamic cultures, shown to be admirable and even superior to European cultures. Drawing on his father's books about North Africa and ‘Muhammadanism’, Addison remarked on his ‘particular Pleasure’ in finding analogies to Christian belief in different cultures and countries.38 Similarly, Addison and Steele admired the commerce and internationalism of the Jews, as the invisible ‘Pegs in the Building’ of European civilization.39

  People supporting both parties were invested in Britain's international trade, but the Whigs claimed the lead in championing a mercantile model of political economy. Mr Spectator showed his Whig worldview by arguing that a commercial nation could never have too many traders, drawing parallels between military and mercantile glory. He repeatedly exhorted younger sons of the nobility and gentry to make themselves useful by joining some marketoriented profession. Addison and Steele were breaking down the traditional assumption that a life of aristocratic leisure was the height of individual freedom. In refreshing contrast to the later nineteenthcentury preoccupation with making the poor more productive and deserving, they focused on reforming the unproductive rich. It was a view drawn from their own experiences as authors who had always needed to earn an income, yet did not feel their consciences, intellects or art were prostituted by that fact.

  Though The Spectator declared the education of women a priority, the paper was just as interested in reforming men. The new, urban British society needed a ‘new man’, if only as a way around the rising rivalry between old blood/land and new money. The model of masculinity Addison and Steele presented was, again, one learned largely under the Kit-Cats' tutelage. They mocked excessive, Francophile refinement in men, just as Vanbrugh mocked Lord Foppington in The Relapse (1696), while stressing that a man was not effeminate if he avoided resorting to violence—the same message taught by the character of Sir Brute in Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife (1697). If Addison's and Steele's many complimentary poems, dedications and letters to Dorset, Somers, Halifax, Manchester, Wharton and others are to be even half-believed, these Kit-Cat patrons were Mr Spectator's measure of civilized male behaviour. Even Manchester and Wharton, for all their unrefined habits and youthful duels, were admired as models of a new synthesis between Restoration Court manners and the country squire's ‘old English Plainness and Sincerity’.40

  In one of The Spectator's many lessons on how an Englishman should comport himself, Addison advised that ‘an unconstrained Carriage and a certain Openness of Behaviour are the height of Good Breeding…our Manners sit more loose upon us’.41 It was the same philosophy by which Prior once flattered Dorset in referring to the relaxed ‘freedom’ of Dorset's dinners ‘which made every one of his guests think himself at home’.42 Today it remains a trait of the British upper class that less is considered more, and displaying wealth too ostentatiously is considered bad breeding. The Spectator adopted the Kit-Cat ethos of superficially underplaying distinctions of rank and advised pretentious provincial readers it was now outré to make too many formal bows to superiors, or to take the ‘trouble’ to serve one's dinner guests strictly according to their rank. ‘There is infinitely more to do about Place and Precedency in a Meeting of Justices’ Wives,' observed Addison, ‘than in an Assembly of Duchesses.’43

  C. S. Lewis wrote in 1945:

  I sometimes catch myself taking it for granted that the marks of good breeding were in all ages the same as they are today—that swagger was always vulgar, that a low voice, an unpretentious manner, a show (however superficial) of self-effacement, were always demanded…Even to this day, when we meet foreigners (only think of some young Frenchmen) who have not been subjected to Addisonian ‘reform’, we have to ‘make allowances’ for them.44

  These remarks emphasize the momentousness of The Spectator's reform of national manners, its reimagining of national character. Addison and Steele were not inventing these manners out of thin air, however, but teaching the nation to copy manners they themselves had been taught over the years by their Kit-Cat patrons.

  The English ‘have no adequate Idea of what is meant by “Gentlemanly, Gentleman-like, or much of a Gentleman”,’ Steele observed.45 The authors saw it as less important to be a gentleman in the technical sense than to behave in a gentlemanly way, less important to be a lady than to be ladylike. Many letters to Mr Spectator were anxious about this state of affairs. They came from people fearful of being duped by fake charm, unable to distinguish the genuine article from its replica, or fearful of not passing the test themselves. Social mobility begat status anxiety. The Spectator's readers started to bind up issues of the paper on single themes to form homemade sets for easy reference, making the publication physically resemble the Christian conduct books that preceded it.

  The Spectator's didacticism flowed in only one direction: outwards from London, which contained around a tenth of Britain's seven million people by 1711. This direction was most obvious in the realm of fashion. One letter—likely concocted by Addison while out of town during the summer of 1711—mocked the outmoded fashions in provincial society. Among many other lessons, Mr Spectator was teaching Britain what not to wear. Increasing fashion awareness in rural backwaters incidentally profited Whig cloth manufacturers and traders, like Furnese.

  Congreve, writing from Tunbridge Wells, complained that society there was ‘of that sort who at home converse only with their Relations; and consequently when they come abroad, have few Acquaintances, but such as they bring with them’.46 In 1711, Mr Spectator visited Tunbridge Wells to make similar, superior observations (on the indecency of swinging women upside down during country dancing, for example), knowing his pronouncements when printed would directly alter public behaviour in Tunbridge and every town of its kind. Steele explained the philosophy of making urbanity synonymous with the best of British—an attitude he and the other Kit-Cat authors learned at Dryden's knee—when he allied himself to ‘The Town’ in preference to the City or Court: ‘[T]he word Town implies the best People in the whole, wherever they are pleased, or are disposed, or able to live. The Town is the upper part of the World, or rather the fashionable People…everyone would be in Town if they could.’47

  Only a minority of Kit-Cats, like Tonson, were born into urbanity. Many, like Carlisle or Congreve, grew up in the sticks then migrated to London for their education, parliamentary seat or advancement. Their snobbery about the countryside was, therefore, largely selffashioning. It represented the experiences of large numbers of less prominent migrants to urban jobs in service, business or trade, thanks to the seventeenth-century beginnings of the agricultural revolution that were already displacing people from the land. The Spectator's role in educating socially ambitious newcomers on how to navigate London society and wear the mask of urbanity was import ant for thousands of these migrants.

  The Spectator, however, also exported urban habits to those who stayed at home in the provinces. The Kit-Cat Club, filtered through the Spectator Club, was imitated in the most literal sense by the formation of local clubs and societies across the land, for example. The Spectator directly inspired the f
ormation of the ‘Edinburgh Easy Club’ in 1712, where Scotsmen gathered to polish their conversation, and the ‘Gentleman's Society’ at Spalding, south Lincolnshire, which started meeting in a coffee house for literary conversation at around the same date. The Spectator also recommended Englishmen follow the French salon model by spending more time in women's company, since ‘where that was wholly denied, the Women lost their Wit and the Men their good Manners’.48 While the essayists constantly joked about women's senseless prattle and denigrated female friendships as less sturdy than male, there is a defensive ring to these jokes, as if they privately realized women were the more naturally adept gender when it came to personal communication and friendship. In this light, the Kit-Cat Club and its many imitators were like remedial classes where men could practise these arts removed from the pressure of female scrutiny—places for men who, as Steele put it, ‘cannot talk without the help of a Glass at their Mouths, or convey their Meaning to each other without the Interposition of Clouds [pipe smoke]’.49 These men were urged to smooth the rough edges off their manners and drop their tendency to pedantry by taking their wit into ladies' drawing rooms.

  Mr Spectator wrote in the grammar of balance, always setting one element against its antithesis (‘to appear free and open without Danger of Intrusion, and to be cautious without seeming reserved’50). This style of rhetoric suited a time when success depended upon steering a middle course between political extremes. Addison's famous ‘middling’ style was not only learned from the Romans but was a specific product of 1710–12's polarized political atmosphere. Much of this tone of moderation and reason in The Spectator derives from its sense of humour, seen as another vital ingredient of the new national character. As early as 1695, Congreve wrote: ‘I look upon Humour to be almost of English Growth’ because of the ‘great Freedom, Privilege and Liberty which the Common People of England enjoy’.51 This sense of humour was vital, Congreve argued, because the English were otherwise so depressive: