The Ranelagh Club closed in 1939. From June 1940 until the end of the Second World War, the Free French Army used the Barn Elms manor house as its headquarters. The property was then left unoccupied, and burned down in the 1950s. Today the bulldozed ruins are overgrown, though traces of the manor house's shape are apparent in a fenced-off wooded area beside a modest community sports club. The tree-lined drive that once connected the manor to the Thames landing survives, and within the overgrown wood one just can discern the long-dead stumps of some of the giant elms Tonson and his friends once admired.
The fortunes of the Kit-Cat's theatre on the Haymarket improved under Heidegger's management, partly thanks to his masquerade balls and Handel's operas produced there, and partly because the West End was rising around it. Another theatre, called the New Theatre, was built on the same street in 1720, and the next year the Piccadilly turnpike was moved from the end of Berkeley Street to Hyde Park Corner to mark the town's westward expansion. Vanbrugh's original building in the Haymarket burnt down in 1789; Her Majesty's Theatre now stands on the site.
The Roaring Twenties saw the Kit-Cat name's return to the Haymarket, with the opening of a nightclub called The Kit-Cat Club in 1925. Originally a private members' club, it closed following a police raid and reopened as a public restaurant and jazz cabaret in October 1927. Many early American bandleaders played with the house Kit-Cat Band, the most famous being Armand ‘Al’ Starita. Starita and the Kit-Cat Band (also known, after its sponsor, as Jack Hylton's Kit-Cat Band) produced some of the finest British dance records of the late 1920s. The club remained open until the Blitz.
The most famous twentieth-century ‘Kit-Kat Club’ is that in the 1966 stage musical Cabaret made into a 1972 movie starring Liza Minnelli as American singer Sally Bowles, who lives a bohemian life in 1930s Berlin and falls in love with bisexual Brian. This musical film, directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse, has become a classic, shaping most people's idea of Weimar decadence. In fact, the cabaret club in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, and in the 1950s stage play and movie I Am a Camera, on which the later musical and film of Cabaret were based, was never called the Kit-Kat Club;8 the ‘Kit-Kat’ name was instead probably borrowed for Cabaret from the Haymarket dance club described above.
Today in Berlin, another ‘Kit-Kat Club’ is run by a group of radical sexual liberationists who encourage full nakedness and performance of sexual acts on the nightclub's dance-floor. Worldwide, the 1972 movie has also spawned hundreds of strip joints and bars using the ‘Kit-Cat’/'Kit-Kat' name. Sexual behaviour way beyond the Tory satirists' worst slanders against Wharton or Stanhope now occurs in Kit-Cat Clubs from Manila to Toronto.
The Kit-Cat Club was therefore a peculiar choice of name for an exclusive networking society, run by and for influential women in London, founded by Robert Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine and her friends at the end of the 1980s. Its current chair, Alice Sherwood, selects and invites speakers on a wide range of subjects, regardless of gender, to address the all-female members, and the men (often authors or journalists) are toasted from time to time—a nice inversion of the original Kit-Cat Club's election of female beauties as toasts. In other ways too, the original and current clubs have much in common: facilitating elite networking for professional gain in an atmosphere of convivial socializing, over drinks.
Of course, the main reason for the Kit-Cat name's current familiarity worldwide is the chocolate bar. Rowntree first launched the ‘biscuit’ in 1935 under the uninspiring name Chocolate Crisp. In 1937, it was relaunched as the ‘KitKat Chocolate Crisp’, following a suggestion by a young man named Nigel Balchin who was subsidizing his efforts to become a writer through a dayjob in the Rowntree factory's marketing department in York. As the original Kit-Cat Club started with the aim of helping writers pay their bills, it is a nice irony that its name was used, through this unlikely reincarnation, to do so again.
Rowntree first registered the name in 1911, when the eighteenth-century Club was still widely known in Britain and carried social cachet. When the Chocolate Crisp needed rechristening, the name may have caught Balchin's eye because it had gained, by then, fashionable associations with the Haymarket dance club, or perhaps because Balchin, being a literary man, knew something of the original club and its connections with Yorkshire via Castle Howard. Balchin became an acclaimed novelist in the 1950s.
The slogan ‘Give yourself a break at teatime’ was first used to market KitKats (as they quickly became known) in 1939,9 and then as ‘Have a Break, Have a KitKat’ in a 1957 television advertisement. Though it would be pleasing to think there was some intention to associate the KitKat name with leisured dining, thus relating back to the original Kit-Cat Club, early posters with the slogan show a bricklayer having a KitKat with his cuppa.
The product rose steadily in popularity after the Second World War, and its brand was a key asset when the Swiss food giant Nestlé acquired Rowntree in 1988. Today, twenty-two factories around the world produce KitKats in various sizes and flavours, and in Britain, forty-seven KitKats are reportedly eaten every second. In Japan, the bars are particularly popular around school exam time, because the name sounds similar to an expression for ‘good luck’ in Japanese. Christopher Cat, 1690s pastry chef, would surely be proud to know his name remains attached to one of the most widely enjoyed food treats of the twenty-first century.
EPILOGUE
LEGACIES
We are always doing, says he, something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.
JOSEPH ADDISON, The Spectator no. 583, 20 August 17141
THE BREADTH OF the Kit-Cat Club's ambition is without analogy. Its members took strikingly similar approaches to criticizing and then trying to reform literature, music, architecture, gardening, interior design, portraiture, cookery, manners, parliamentary politics and philosophy. In each art form, we can now see they sought to develop hybrid, anglicized styles that combined neoclassicism with more romantic elements drawn from England's heroic past. The Club's patronage in pursuit of this goal contributed significantly to the privatization of British culture, and, in its efforts to create new readers, new audiences and new consumers, the Club established a model for elite management of British culture that essentially remains intact to this day.
The most important cultural legacies belong to Addison, Steele, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Tonson. Being ‘extremely jealous of his reputation’,2 Addison was anxious how he would be presented by biographers, who he said watched for a great man's death ‘like so many undertakers, on purpose to make a penny of him’.3 His concern was not misplaced. A succession of biographers and critics has shaped posterity's opinion of the Kit-Cat Club's various literary members, and some have fared better than others.
The earliest biographies were Edmund Curll's third-person Memoirs, which appeared almost immediately after the deaths of Addison and Congreve.4 Alexander Pope was another contemporary who did much to shape posterity's opinion of Addison and Steele, both through his sharp portrait of Addison in Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (1734) and the anecdotes he shared in old age with an Oxford don and oral historian, Joseph Spence. Spence also recorded anecdotes told by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Tonson, which, after their publication in 1820, kept alive the reputation of the Kit-Cat Club throughout the nineteenth century.
The Kit-Cat poets remained high in the literary pecking order during the eighteenth century. The Club patrons who dabbled in poetry were accorded full status as authors—notably Dorset, whose handful of verses was rated above those of his Restoration pal Rochester by everyone except Swift; both Pope and Byron stated that Dorset's poetry influenced their own. Halifax's poetry, written when he was plain Charles Montagu, and Wharton's political ballads, were considered patriotic classics. When Pope satirized several minor Buttonian writers in his Dunciad (1728), he could not have imagined that one day virtually all the Whig poets of the early eighteenth century, including his mentors Walsh and Garth, would be forgotten.
&nb
sp; The book generally regarded as the first true English novel, Robinson Crusoe, was published in 1719, approximately a year after the Kit-Cat Club ceased to meet. Defoe, the self-proclaimed outsider of Whig literature, had produced a masterpiece about isolation, intended to be read by men and women in domestic solitude, and therefore marking a dramatic shift from the Kit-Cat idea of literature as something recited aloud before a table of inebriated friends. Addison's and Steele's periodicals had helped pave the way for this development in reading habits: The Spectator, if read through as a single work, featuring recurring fictional characters and flowing exchanges between readers and editors on various themes, has a novelistic quality. Yet the novel's advent made Kit-Cat attempts to dictate the future of English literature appear, with hindsight, misplaced: the Club's patrons never imagined that the next big thing would be fictional prose.
After Defoe, the second intruder into the Kit-Cats' literary garden was the young poet Richard Savage, whom Steele befriended towards the end of his life.5 Savage dramatized himself as a martyred outcast, going far beyond Steele's occasional blurts of self-pity, and Savage's emphasis on self-expression signalled the beginnings of the Romantic literary revolution. His introspective image conflicted with the Kit-cat view of writing as primarily communication with an audience—a social gesture among friends, or to a larger audience whom one flattered by addressing as though they were one's friends. Because the Kit-Cat Club also existed before the first great age of literary biography, its authors had few preconceptions about how they were supposed to live. Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage (1744) changed all that, prefiguring the Romantic depiction of poets as bardic visionaries and social rebels. Johnson's Savage put the glamour into starving in a garret, and within a generation struggling authors no longer clamoured to join the Establishment by charming a political patron, or gaining a Court place. Nobility of genius no longer needed the nobility's endorsement.
Johnson nonetheless admired Addison's prose as the supreme model of ‘English style’,6 and Johnson's essay periodicals respectfully imitated Addison's. Johnson was less convinced about the literary merits of Addison's Kit-Cat friends, however. He disapproved of Stepney's overly loose classical translations, and Stepney's reputation as a poet has never recovered since. Johnson believed Garth lacked ‘poetical ardour’,7 while Prior was ‘never low, nor very often sublime’.8 Though Prior remained, in 1781, a household name, Walsh was already ‘known more by his familiarity with greater men, than by anything done or written by himself’.9 Johnson largely dismissed Congreve, who died while Johnson was a student at Oxford, for writing in what seemed to him an affected style. He said Congreve's writing contained ‘more bustle than sentiment’, yet at the same time complimented some lines from Congreve's Mourning Bride as the ‘most poetical’ in ‘the whole mass of English poetry’.10
Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith weighed in on the debate, started by Tickell and Steele, over the relative merits—as writers and men—of Addison and Steele. Johnson empathized with Addison and underestimated Steele's contribution to The Tatler and The Spectator, though he recognized Steele's personal charms. Goldsmith, perhaps informed by his friendship with Johnson, described Steele as ‘selfvictimised by a competitive intimacy with his friend [Addison]’.11 The Addison–Steele relationship was then reimagined through the friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge, which uncannily reincarnated and exaggerated it in several ways. Coleridge championed Steele over Addison, arguing Steele had a ‘pure humanity springing from the gentleness, the kindness of his heart’.12 Coleridge apparently read a 1787 edition of Steele's letters to Prue and felt a sense of kinship, at least with Steele's constant battles to keep his creditors at bay. William Hazlitt similarly preferred Steele to Addison, for writing with the ‘stamp of nature’.13
Though Romantic poets often collaborated intensely, they (particularly Wordsworth in his 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads) also glossed over this fact to form the myth of the solo, inspired artist, ‘Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone’.14 This established a widespread prejudice against collaborations like those published by Tonson or sponsored by the Kit-Cat Club, and against writing as witty banter improved on paper, detached from deep personal feelings. The growing cult of the artist shrank the Kit-Cats' stature, though drawing heavily upon authors whom Tonson and Addison had popularized, like Milton and Shakespeare. When Byron wished to mock the affectation of a rich businessman and politician who hosted literary evenings in order to be thought a cultured patron, he used the Club's name:
‘Kit-Cat’, the famous conversationalist,
Who in his commonplace book had a page,
Prepared each morn for evenings.15
Nineteenth-century critics nonetheless assumed the place of Addison and Steele in the English canon was secure, partly because of endless reprintings of The Spectator and The Tatler, including cheap editions for schools, home libraries and export to the colonies. Throughout the 1800s, Steele's plays—The Funeral, The Tender Husband and The Conscious Lovers—were staples of English repertory, alongside Addison's Cato. The strait-laced Victorians carefully picked out their pieces of Kit-Cat literature, and their image of the Kit-Cat Club, to fit a tamed, tea-drinking, sentimental picture.16
Addison's first major biographer, Lucy Aikin, returned Addison's reputation to its pedestal in 1843, after the criticisms of the Romantics. Addison could do no wrong in Aikin's eyes, and she rejected evidence that he had ever been cold or ungenerous to Steele. If Addison's writing ever showed too much levity or moral weakness for her taste, she attributed the passage in question to Steele. Aikin was responsible for characterizing Addison as her own contemporary: ‘the first Victorian’.17
In the 1850s, William Thackeray praised Steele's candour and contagious delight in the world (‘He wrote so quickly and carelessly that he was forced to make the reader his confidant, and had not time to deceive him’), imagining Addison as able to maintain his ‘charming archness’ only because he was so remote from ordinary life. Steele, more schooled in self-doubt and failure, was easier for Thackeray to like, albeit with the same condescension as Addison exhibited throughout their friendship:
Poor Dick Steele stumbled and got up again, and got into jail and out again, and sinned and repented; and loved and suffered…If Steele is not our friend he is nothing. He is by no means the most brilliant of wits nor the deepest of thinkers: but he is our friend: we love him.18
The Victorians, in other words, took each man according to his own self-caricature. Preaching the underrated joys of lolling halfawake in a soft bed, ‘sensible only to the present Moment’, it is no wonder Steele gained a reputation as the creative partnership's lazier half.19 In fact, in the week in 1713 when Steele wrote that particular essay, he was not only producing The Englishman, but also working on several parliamentary committees and corresponding with the Hanover and Kit-Cat Clubs about financing an anti-Jacobite political pamphlet. Addison similarly became the victim of his own selfcaricature, such that the Victorians were able to mistake him for a humourless, morally judgemental man.
These caricatures were, at least, more positive than the Victorians' snobbish view of Tonson as ‘quite as ignorant as a barber's son could be expected to be’.20 Tonson's depiction as an avaricious, parsimonious businessman was based largely on his short quarrels with Dryden and perpetuated by Dryden's biographers. In the only previous book about the Kit-Cat Club—an illustrated work in 1849 attributed to James Caulfield—Tonson is relegated to the end as if he were the least important member, not the Club's founder and chairman. Only in recent decades has Tonson's true legacy, as a much-loved self-made man and cultural arbiter, who started not only the Kit-Cat Club but also the later eighteenth-century boom in affordable, vernacular books, begun to be appreciated. He was, in a sense, the model for every modern media mogul.
Congreve and Vanbrugh likewise suffered relative neglect by the Victorians, who, like the 1690s' Collierites, deemed their plays immoral. This had started with the Romantic c
ritics: William Hazlitt, for example, muttered in 1819 that Vanbrugh's morality ‘sits very loose upon him. It is a little upon the turn.’21 The Orange Comedians' legacies to the nineteenth century were therefore indirect—most notably through the popularity of Oscar Wilde's comedies of manners, which, like Congreve's plays, balanced above the harsh absurdity of life on a tightrope of wit, though Wilde never explicitly acknowledged this literary lineage. Edmund Gosse's 1888 biography admitted that the brilliance and artificiality of Congreve's nimble, staccato dialogue could produce ‘fatigue’, but objected to those, like Thackeray, who judged 1690s plays by the standards of nineteenthcentury realism.22 Gosse rightly understood that Congreve, standing on the threshold of the eighteenth century, had had a prophetic intuition of ‘all its peculiar graces’.23 Today Congreve remains the most highly regarded and widely known of the Kit-Cat authors, vindicating the Kit-Cat patrons' generous and protective treatment of his genius throughout his lifetime.
Steele's stock rose throughout the twentieth century, with Rae Blanchard's scholarly editions of Steele's writings beginning to appear in 1932 and sealing Steele's reputation as a serious figure of English literature. By 1925, however, Virginia Woolf noted that Addison and Steele were falling out of fashion, their works borrowed less and less often from her local library. Modernism was as unsupportive as Romanticism of the Kit-Cat authors' sociability and style of writing, yet Woolf concluded: ‘When we have said all that we can say against them—that many are dull, others superficial, the allegories faded, the piety conventional, the morality trite—there still remains the fact that the essays of Addison are perfect essays.’24
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