Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  The Kit-Cats not only made it look easy to reform a nation constitutionally, but also to reform the fundamental attitudes and aspirations of that nation. Far more important than any single play, journal, opera or building left behind by a Kit-Cat, was the Club's legacy of spreading Whig attitudes in Britain, which, by the 1730s, could no longer be considered strictly ‘Whig’ because they had become so commonplace. Steele's Guardian had once lectured that a ‘Fine Gentleman’ of Britain should be ‘properly a Compound’—of military courage, political honour, literary talent and other virtues.53 It was as if, instead of mixing neoclassicism and English historicism to make a palace or an opera, Steele was mixing his ‘Compound’ ideal English character from the qualities he admired in his friends and patrons. Tonson's printing presses were the progenitors of this new national identity, conveying metropolitan values to the rest of the country through the tri-weekly post. Addison, Steele and their fellow Kit-Cats were in this way responsible for writing a story about the nature of Englishness and the conduct of English men and women, which thousands of ordinary people began to repeat unconsciously to themselves and imitate in their daily lives.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE

  1 Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), vol. 1, part 1, pp. 347–82. Malone's version is based on Ballard MSS in the Bodleian.

  2 Thomas Hearne, quoted in: Harvey Cushing, Dr. Garth: The Kit-Cat Poet (Baltimore, Md., 1906), p. 21.

  3 HMC, Reginald Cholmondeley MSS, p. 333, p. 359, Edward Hinton at Westminster to his cousin the Rev. John Cooper, 14 May 1700.

  4 Edward (Ned) Ward, The London Spy (1698), ed. Paul Hyland (East Lansing, Mich., 1993), no. 2(6), April 1700.

  5 Anon. [Tom Browne], ‘A Description of Mr D——n's Funeral’ (1700), in A New Collection of Poems relating to State Affairs (1705). Alexander Pope's copy at British Library shelfmark C.28.e.15.

  6 Ibid.

  7 James Caulfield, Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons Composing the Kit-Cat Club; with a prefatory account of the origin of the association, illustrated with fortyeight portraits from the original paintings by Sir Godfrey Kneller (London, 1849), p. 249—quoting from Dryden's ‘Life of Lucian’ (c. 1696).

  8 Charles E. Ward (ed.), The Letters of John Dryden (Durham, NC, 1942), pp. 80–1.

  9 Anon. [Tom Browne], ‘A Description of Mr D——n's Funeral’ (1700) in A New Collection of Poems relating to State Affairs (1705). Alexander Pope's copy at British Library shelfmark C.28.e.15.

  10 Madeleine Bingham, Masks and Façades: Sir John Vanbrugh, The Man and his Setting (London, 1974), p. 76.

  11 Jonathan Swift, On Poetry, A Rhapsody (1733).

  12 Dryden's early biographer, Edmond Malone, considered this to be a libel spread by a woman who wrote an account of the event almost three decades afterwards, to pay her way out of debtors' prison. She based her account largely on a satirical eyewitness ‘Description of Mr D——n's Funeral’ (1700), which said it was conducted with as much confusion as ‘at St Bart's famed Fair’.

  13 Charles Stonehill (ed.), Complete Works of George Farquhar (New York, 1967), vol. 1, p. 391.

  14 Anon., ‘The Seven Wise Men’, Add MSS 40,060, f.51.

  15 R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, Calif., 1993), p. 248.

  16 Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815 (London, 1994), p. 5.

  17 Anon. [Tom Browne], ‘A Description of Mr D——n's Funeral’ (1700), in A New Collection of Poems relating to State Affairs (1705). Alexander Pope's copy at British Library shelfmark C.28.e.15.

  18 William Shippen, Faction Display'd (1704).

  19 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690).

  I SELF-MADE MEN

  1 Wycherley to Pope, 1709, quoted in William Roberts, The Earlier History of English Book-Selling (London, 1889), p. 156.

  2 Donald F. Bond, The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), no. 69, Saturday, 19 May 1711, by Addison.

  3 Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro The Whole Island of Great Britain…Letter V (1724–7).

  4 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728). John Dryden also referred to Jacob having ‘two left legs’.

  5 Sarah Lewis Carol Clapp (ed.), Jacob Tonson in Ten Letters by and about Him (Austin, Tex., 1948), letter from Dr William Oliver to Jacob Tonson Jr, 12 July 1735.

  6 From a triplet allegedly pencilled by Dryden beneath a Kneller painting of Tonson, in July 1698, and then later incorporated by William Shippen into his poem Faction Display'd (1704): HMC, Bath MSS, vol. 3, p. 238, The Prior Papers, letter from Richard Powys to Prior.

  7 Matthew Prior to Jacob Tonson, 13 September 1695, quoted in: The Gentleman's Magazine, new series, 2 (July 1834), p. 464.

  8 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (1728).

  9 Edward (Ned) Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (1709).

  10 Both in Anon., Satire on Modern Translators (1698) and also Richard Blackmore, A Satyr Against Wit (1699).

  11 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1873), entry for ‘Grub Street’.

  12 Edward (Ned) Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (1709).

  13 S. Fitzmaurice, ‘Servant or Patron? Jacob Tonson and the language of deference and respect’, Language Sciences 24, 3 (May 2002), p. 247.

  14 John Dunton, Life and Errors of J. D. late Citizen of London (1705).

  15 Edward (Ned) Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (1709).

  16 NPG, Tonson Papers. It was the NPG Director, Sir Henry Hake, who suggested in 1945 that this bill was illustrative of the Kit-Cat Club's dining habits, but there is no direct connection between the document and the Club other than Tonson's name.

  17 HMC, Bayfordbury MSS, p. 71, no. 73.

  18 John Dryden, ‘Life of Lucian’ (c. 1696).

  19 Complaint of Sir Henry Chauncy in 1700, quoted in David Lemmings, Gentlemen and Barristers: The Inns of Court and the English Bar 1680–1730 (Oxford, 1990), p. 11.

  20 The War of the League of Augsburg (also known as the Nine Years War, or the War of the Grand Alliance) starting in 1689.

  21 John Somers, ‘Dryden's Satire to his Muse’, The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets, vol. 3 (London, 1751).

  22 Charles Gildon and Gerard Langbaine, The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets (1712 edn), p. 21.

  23 David Lemmings, Gentlemen and Barristers: The Inns of Court and the English Bar 1680–1730 (Oxford, 1990), p. 8.

  24 William Congreve, The Way of the World, Act 2, Scene 1.

  25 Samuel Garth, The Dispensary (1725, 9th edn as reprinted, New York, 1975), Canto IV.

  26 Dr Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (London, 1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), vol. 1, p. 409.

  27 John Dryden, Dramatick Works (1718).

  28 John Dryden, ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, On His Comedy, call'd, The Double Dealer’ (1694), prefixed to Tonson's edition of The Double Dealer.

  29 William Congreve to the Duke of Newcastle, quoted in John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), p. 76.

  30 Thomas Southerne's account, Add MS 4,221, f.61.

  31 Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life…, (1740), ed. B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968), p. 72.

  32 Ibid.

  33 William Congreve, ‘A Complaint to Pious Selinda’, in Poems Upon Several Occasions (1710). This poem was about Bracegirdle according to the actor Anthony Aston.

  34 Colley Cibber in the Introduction to Ximena, or The Heroik Daughter (1719).

  35 Earl of Burlington to William Congreve's father, quoted in C. Y. Ferdinand and D. F. McKenzie, ‘Congreve, William’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (September 2004, online edn, October 2005).

  36 Nicholas Rowe, The Reconcilement between Jacob Tonson and Mr Congreve (1707).

  37 John Vanbrugh, The Provok'd Wife (1697), Act 5, Scene 2.

  38 John Vanbrugh, The Relapse (1696), Act 1, Scene 1.
r />   II FRIENDSHIPS FORMED

  1 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), no. 313, Thursday, 28 February 1712, by Eustace Budgell.

  2 Geoffrey Holmes, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society 1680–1730 (London, 1982), p. 43.

  3 Jacob Tonson Sr to Jacob Tonson Jr, quoted in Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), p. 169. Original found at Bodleian MS Eng Letters c.129 f.116–17.

  4 Westminster School, Record of Old Westminsters.

  5 Prior's mother had some rather posher relations, whereby Prior was the kinsman of a later patron named Edward Villiers, Earl of Jersey, so he was not utterly obscure.

  6 Dialogues of the Dead, quoted in C. K. Eves, Matthew Prior, Poet and Diplomatist (New York, 1939), p. 24.

  7 Edward (Ned) Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (1709).

  8 ‘Memoirs of the Life of Charles Montagu’, in The Works and Life of Charles, late Earl of Halifax (1715), p. 17. See Brice Harris, Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset: Patron and Poet of the Restoration (Urbana, Ill., 1940), pp. 150–1. Prior's own direct reference to Montagu having been preferred for the Mouse poem over him: ‘one Mouse eats while t'other's starved’ is found in his poem, ‘On Mr Pr—r's letters to Mr [Fleetwood] Sheppard (not omitting the last one unown'd)’ (1690).

  9 The only exception to the above resolve were the poems Montagu sometimes wrote as petitions for career advancement, such as a panegyric on King William—‘An Epistle to the Rght Hon Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord Chamberlain of his Majesty's Household. Occasion'd by His Majesty's Victory in Ireland’ (1690)—in which Montagu called Dorset ‘The Muses’ Darling, Confidant and Friend'.

  10 BL Add MS 28,644, Unpublished poetry of Charles Montagu.

  11 BL Add MS 7,121, Letters to Lord Halifax (1706ff.), f.45, the poem by Matthew Prior ‘To Mr Charles Montagu on his Marriage with the Right Hon the Countess of Manchester’ (1688).

  12 NA SP 105/82, Correspondence of Montagu and Stepney.

  13 Matthew Prior, ‘On Mr Pr—r's letters to Mr [Fleetwood] Sheppard (not omitting the last one unown'd)’ (1690).

  14 T. B. Macaulay, The History of England (London, 1858), vol. 4, pp. 325–7; D. W. Jones, War and Economy in the Age of William III and Marlborough (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11–12.

  15 Charles Davenant, England's Enemies Exposed (1701).

  16 H. T. Swedenberg, ‘George Stepney, My Lord Dorset's Boy’, Huntington Library Quarterly 10, 1 (November 1946), p. 5. See also Susan Spens, George Stepney 1663–1707: Diplomat and Poet (Cambridge, 1997), p. 45.

  17 C. K. Eves, Matthew Prior, Poet and Diplomatist (New York, 1939), p. 215. See also H. Bunker Wright, ‘Matthew Prior's Cloe and Lisetta’, Modern Philology 36, 1 (August 1938), pp. 9–23.

  18 George Stepney to Mrs Holmes, Dresden, 7/18 December 1693, quoted in C. K. Eves, Matthew Prior, Poet and Diplomatist (New York, 1939), p. 88.

  19 Matthew Prior, ‘An Epistle to Charles Montague…’ (1692).

  20 George Stepney to Charles Montagu, 26 December 1693, quoted in Susan Spens, George Stepney 1663–1707: Diplomat and Poet (Cambridge, 1997), p. 86.

  21 George Stepney in Dresden to his mother, c. 1693, quoted in Susan Spens, George Stepney 1663–1707: Diplomat and Poet (Cambridge, 1997), p. 84.

  22 HMC, Bath MSS, vol. 3, The Prior Papers, Matthew Prior to Montagu.

  23 Ibid., Matthew Prior to Lord Dorset, 8/18 March 1695.

  24 Ibid., Matthew Prior in The Hague to Montagu (then Chancellor of the Exchequer), 5 January /25 February 1695.

  25 Anthony Quick, Charterhouse: A History of the School (London, 1990), p. 12.

  26 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler, 2 vols (Oxford, 1987), no. 181, Tuesday, 6 June 1710—vol. 2, pp. 482ff.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), no. 1.

  29 The Theatre no. 11, Saturday, 6 February 1720—Steele objecting to the description of his face as ‘dusky’ by John Dennis. John Loftis (ed.), Richard Steele's ‘The Theatre’ (Oxford, 1962), p. 51.

  30 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler, 2 vols (Oxford, 1987), no. 235, Tuesday, 10 October 1710—vol. 3, p. 215. See also Mr Harwood, quoted in Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), pp. 8–9.

  31 Dedication in the 2nd edition of The Drummer (1722) ‘To Mr Congreve’, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), pp. 505ff.

  32 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), no. 5: Steele to Henry Gascoigne, May 1690.

  33 Mary Delariviere Manley, The New Atalantis (1709).

  34 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 54, Wednesday, 2 May 1711, by Steele.

  35 ‘When All Thy Mercies, O My God’ quoted in Bonamy Dobrée, Essays in Biography 1680–1726 (Oxford, 1925), p. 225.

  36 John Dryden and Jacob Tonson (eds), Examen Poeticum (1693).

  37 Dedication in the 2nd edition of The Drummer (1722) ‘To Mr Congreve’, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), pp. 505ff.

  38 Mary Delariviere Manley, The New Atalantis (1709).

  39 William Congreve, Love for Love (1695), Act 1, Scene 1.

  III THE SCENT OF THE PIE-OVEN

  1 Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections, ed. C. E. Doble et al. (Oxford, 1885–1921), vol. 1, p. 116, entry for 6 December 1705.

  2 Edward (Ned) Ward, The History of the London Clubs (1709); Philip Lempriere of Bath to William Baker of Bayfordbury, 13 February 1777, NPG, Tonson Papers.

  3 There are several ways in which the tavern may have acquired its name without any reference to Mr Cat, however: ‘cats’ and ‘kittens’ were also slang for the large and small pewter pots in which beer was served. The earliest tavern called the Cat and Fiddle was established in 1501, and nobody really knows when the ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ rhyme was first struck up.

  4 Edward (Ned) Ward, The History of the London Clubs (1709).

  5 Some have tried to give the credit as Club founder entirely to Mr Cat, but this is highly unlikely. See T. H. S. Escott, Club Makers and Club Members (London, 1914), p. 90. If Cat wrote the 1711 letter mentioned above, then he was literate, but it is hard to believe he would have thought up a literary club as a scheme for increasing pie and pastry sales. Records show that a baker in London might have had annual takings of £200 (today over £18,000), with profits estimated at over of a quarter of this in a year when fruit, sugar and flour were expensive. Collaboration with Tonson did prove profitable for Cat, and he grew rich enough to eventually retire to a house in Chelsea. In the 1690s, however, the pastry-cook would have been the lowly servant of men like Somers and Dorset, and even Tonson, rather than a Club member himself.

  6 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (London and New Haven, 1985), p. 122.

  7 Edward (Ned) Ward, The History of the London Clubs (1709).

  8 Some have doubted the matching claims of Ward and Blackmore that Tonson's primary motive in establishing the Kit-Cat Club was to obtain rights from authors. (E.g: ‘If he had really needed fresh “copy” at the slightest possible expense, he would have been more likely to approach a hack and secure the necessary work on his own terms.’ Harry M. Geduld, Prince of Publishers: A Study of the Work and Career of Jacob Tonson (Bloomington, Ind. and London, 1969), pp. 152–3.) Such doubters are missing the fact that Tonson was making a concerted effort to distance himself from the hacks and their paymasters.

  9 George Francis Papali, Jacob Tonson, Publisher: His Life and Work (Auckland, 1968).

  10 E.g. ibid.

  11 William L. Sachse, Lord Somers: A Political Portrait (Manchester, 1975).

  12 Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), vol. 1, part 1, p. 489.

  13 Arthur Onslow, quoted in Gilbert Burnet, History of His Own Time (1715), p. 4 n. 5.

  14 As the Tory poet Dr Arbuthnot wrote:
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  Whence deathless Kit-Cat took its Name

  Few Critics can unriddle

  Some say from Pastry Cook it came,

  And some from Cat and Fiddle.

  This poem is untitled and has sometimes been misattributed to Pope. Dr Arbuthnot, Miscellanies (Dublin, 1746) includes ‘On the Toasts of the Kit-Cat Club’ (c. 1716) at p. 317.

  15 Mr Cat's name can also be written with a double t, and similarly Kit-Cat was variously spelled in the early eighteenth century as ‘Kit-kat’, ‘Kitt-Catt’, etc.

  16 Four contemporaries—Joseph Addison, John Oldmixon, Thomas Hearne and Richard Blackmore—testify to this etymology of the Club's name. Edmond Malone, writing in 1800, noted: ‘The Club is supposed to have derived its name from Christopher Katt, a pastry-cook, who kept the house where they dined and excelled in making mutton-pies, which always formed a part of their bill of fare. In The Spectator no. 9, they are said to have derived their title, not from the maker of the pie, but from the pie itself. The fact is, that on account of its excellence, it was called a Kit-Kat, as we now say a Sandwich.’ Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), vol. 1, part 1, p. 525 n. 6. In William King's Art of Cookery (1708), there is also reference to someone ‘Immortal made, as Kit-cat for his Pies.’