Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  One of the mourners, frail old Samuel Pepys, would surely have thought back to another Westminster Abbey funeral he had attended in the company of the 27-year-old Dryden in 1658: that of Oliver Cromwell. Since then, England had seen a royal restoration and a revolution, but the turmoil and bloodshed of the Civil War still felt like recent history. Families and communities torn apart by the previous century's conflicts were still healing these divisions. With the new century only a couple of months old by the terms of their calendar, a sense of excitement hung in the air that spring, but the nation still lacked confidence, and feared the possibility of slipping back into barbarity.

  Dryden's death proved a turning point for the Kit-Cat Club, after which it self-consciously set about trying to direct the course of English civilization in the new century, particularly the course of the two arts most beloved of Dryden: literature and music. None of Dryden's admirers, or ‘Apollo's sons’,14 not even Congreve, felt up to carrying this torch alone, but together—through subscriptions and collaborations—the Kit-Cats assumed what they considered their patriotic duty: to guide and nurture native talent. No grouping before or since has worked towards such an ambitious vision of national reform, encompassing every high art form and seeking to dominate every aspect of Britain's social and intellectual life.

  By compensating for the especially sizeable gaps in royal patronage of English poetry, theatre and music, the Club would contribute to a shift in authority from the Court to private citizens. More than their monarchs, they would fulfil the country's need for new role models, in fashions, manners and morals. This helped turn the Court into ‘the highly symbolic, sober, secluded, and slightly strange institution it has since become’,15 while at the same time laying the foundations for the exponential growth of cultural consumption that would occur in the later eighteenth century. The Kit-Cat founders were born into an age of plague, fire and civil strife; the younger members would live to see the self-consciously ‘civilized’ age of Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and Robert Adam.

  Similarly, when the Kit-Cat founders were born, most Britons would have said their monarch ruled them, but by the time the youngest members died, the majority would have said they were governed by an elected House of Commons. The Club was to be both a cause and a symptom of this shift in the political culture, from individual to collective accountability, and its leading members would also be closely involved in turning Britain from a ‘ramshackle federal state’16 to something significantly closer to a modern ‘nation state’. The political stability of Britain after 1720 owed much to a sense of common purpose and values among those who wielded power, and the Kit-Cat Club was the prime example of a political grouping formed and sustained around shared ideological and cultural values, ‘Alike in Morals, and alike in Mind’,17 rather than around bonds of kinship. Its members would pursue an ultra-Whig political agenda for over twenty years, such that an opponent could plausibly describe the Kit-Cat in 1704 as a ‘Club that gave Direction to the State’,18 and such that its final generation of members, most notably Robert Walpole, came to dominate the first half-century of Georgian politics.

  The Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote in 1690 that, alongside Divine Law and Civil Law, the third type of law was ‘the law of opinion…praise or blame, which, by secret and tacit consent, establishes itself in the several societies, tribes and clubs of men in the world’.19 The Kit-Cat Club continued this seventeenth-century tradition of ‘clubs of men’ carving out negative freedoms from the state, not least of which was the right to hold meetings and discuss their opinions freely. Kit-Cat members would help shape the nation's taste, character and international image in the coming decades, planting a particular idea of ‘Englishness’ in the popular imagination and contributing to the building of a more prosperous, polite and self-confident society.

  On this evening in 1700, however, the Kit-Cats were first and foremost a remarkable group of friends, several of whom had known each other since childhood. Self-identification by their Kit-Cat name, and demonstrations of unity such as the funding of this ceremony, were now public vows confirming the men's personal and professional commitment to each other—nuptials of Whig fraternity. Dryden's death, several years after the Kit-Cat Club's foundation, marked the Club's coming of age.

  I

  SELF-MADE MEN

  You will make Jacob's ladder raise you to immortality.

  WILLIAM WYCHERLEY, addressing a poet

  soon to be published by Jacob Tonson1

  ON ANY DAY but the Sabbath in 1690s London, ships from around the world disgorged Chinese tea, Indian sugar cane, Japanese porcelain, South American medicines and Persian silk at the eastern docks. Many of these cargoes were then carried by barge and cart to the Royal Exchange, ‘a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’, built a couple of decades earlier between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street.2 Entering the Exchange from the south, the visitor faced an elegant chessboard courtyard surrounded by two-storeyed arcades, containing over two hundred stalls, with the Mediterranean merchants to the right and American plantation traders to the left. At ‘high exchange’ (that is, in the early morning) the courtyard thronged with brokers, salesmen and ‘stock-jobbers’ trading in both tangible products and grand ideas. Upstairs, young girls sold ribbons and other ‘toys’ for ladies' dresses, while downstairs old beggar women sold the morning shoppers warm bags of walnuts, their shells littering the floor. Beadles patrolled, on the look out for trouble from the ‘mumpers’ (beggars) or the crowds of haggling Armenian, Jewish and Dutch merchants. For those unthreatened by London's role as a leading global centre of trade and commerce, in these years before there was a British Empire, the Exchange was a place to throw oneself into the urban melting pot.

  Around 500,000 people lived in London at the end of the seventeenth century, out of five to six million in England as a whole. The city's population was densely packed into a small area of low buildings with only a few high steeples rising clear of the rooftops. One particularly large windmill sat on the south bank of the river close to the site of today's London Eye. Brick buildings were replacing wood after the Great Fire, and the West End was just beginning to emerge from open countryside. The Thames' northern bank was the southern perimeter of the city proper, with the old borough of Southwark south of the river, filled with prisons, shipyards, seedy inns and brothels, stinking tanneries and breweries. The other perimeters of London were the several royal palaces of St James's to the west, Old Street and Holborn to the north, King's (later Soho) Square to the northwest, and Whitechapel to the east. It was a time of thriving property developers: ‘New squares and new streets [are] rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings that nothing in the world does, or ever did, equal it,’ Daniel Defoe declared.3

  The Glorious Revolution of 1688—the armed invasion that deposed the Catholic James II and installed a Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange, and his wife (James's daughter), Mary, on the English throne—had had social repercussions as profound as its constitutional consequences. Ordinary people began to re-examine and loosen the bonds that had tied them to their homes and class. For thousands of ambitious younger sons and rural labourers in search of trades or professions, this meant migrating to London, where everything seemed up for grabs—and within reach. Records for 1690 show three-quarters of London apprentices were born outside the city. London was also simmering with energy thanks to an influx of skilled Huguenot refugees and Dutch immigrants, as well as soldiers and sailors on their way to or from William's current war against France, the War of the League of Augsburg, then being fought in Flanders and Ireland. Army and navy commissions were briskly traded, allowing many men to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Financing the war, meanwhile, required landowners elected to Parliament to start coming into the capital every winter (rather than merely every few years, as during previous reigns) to vote through the army supplies. These landowners were building townhouses and inventing new urban pastimes to amuse themselves through the long
, cold parliamentary season.

  William's government, as an institution, was itself a social parvenu, and the image of William as a foreign occupier, rather than rightful king, still flashed dangerously in the corner of the English people's collective vision. What mattered was that educated Englishmen should not question the legitimacy of the new regime, nor view the post-Revolutionary constitutional balance, with its greater emphasis on the House of Commons, as too nouveau or alien. Everything had to be overhauled, and new authorities made palatable. Adherents of the Whig party, on the whole more ideologically comfortable than the Tories with the Revolution and the post-Revolutionary social mobility, put their shoulders to this wheel.

  Two such self-made Whigs were John Somers, one of the King's leading ministers, and Jacob Tonson, London's most prestigious publisher. Both were flourishing and fattening into comfortable middle age in the 1690s. Their characters were perfectly suited to the times—ambitious and ingenious, yet fundamentally pragmatic—and each was willing to play his part in the national effort of self-reinvention.

  Tonson had grown up in central London. A 5-year-old in 1660, the year of Charles II's Restoration, Tonson's father was a barber-surgeon, a freeman of the City of London and a constable of High Holborn, while his mother's family were booksellers with successful shops at the gates of Gray's Inn. At 15, Jacob was apprenticed to the stationer Thomas Basset, where he laboured for the next eight years, elbow-deep in printer's ink and bookbinding resin from morning to night. Tonson read the books in Basset's shop voraciously, acquiring a love of literature, a dose of Latin and a practical understanding of the book trade. The world of books absorbed and comforted Tonson because he was lame in one leg and less physically able than other young men his age. That his nickname ‘left-legged Jacob’4 signified more than mere clumsiness is confirmed by a physician's reference to Tonson's conscience being ‘more paralytic and lost to all Sense of Feeling than his Legs’.5 Tonson was also teased throughout his life for his ginger hair and wide, freckled face ‘With Frowsy Pores that taint the ambient Air’.6

  After completing his apprenticeship, Tonson immediately established his own firm, with premises at the Judge's Head in Chancery Lane. Kit-Cat authors later feared sending their manuscripts to this chaotic office in case they were lost amid all the ‘lumber’.7 Tonson was determined from an early age to buy rights to the work of major authors, living and dead, and so establish his reputation as a professional—some say the first professional—English publisher.

  Tonson was the first to commission critical editions of Milton's poetry, notably Paradise Lost, and to make substantial profit from a literary backlist. He also had a nose for new talent. Alexander Pope later wrote of ‘genial Jacob’ bringing forth poems and plays from ‘the Chaos dark and deep, / Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep’.8 This idea of a publisher bringing forth creativity—rather than being merely a mechanical maker of books—was unprecedented. That the same publisher should be trusted to make critical amendments to manuscripts was even more unheard of. While Victorian antiquarians would snobbishly try to portray Tonson as merely a grubbing tradesman, there is clear evidence he was a man of great intellect and wit: Tonson later boasted, for example, that in the 1680s he had written various commendatory verses for new editions and passed these off as the work of his star authors, John Dryden and Edmund Waller. (This is also evidence, of course, that the publisher was not above corrupting the corpus of his authors' works in order to boost sales.)

  Being published by Tonson was soon seen as an author's shortcut to the richest, most powerful readers, thanks to the publisher's gift for networking. Tonson aspired to be considered a gentleman, on a level with his clients and authors, and so would have felt insulted when called the ‘chief merchant to the muses’9 or a great ‘wit-jobber’ (that is to say, no better than a City ‘stock-jobber’).10 He wished to set himself apart from other publishers and booksellers who were increasingly sullied by association with the hack writers of ‘any mean production’ in Grub Street.11

  Though one contemporary bitingly remarked that Tonson ‘looked but like a bookseller seated among lords, yet, vice versa, he behaved himself like a lord when he came among booksellers’,12 Tonson, in fact, succeeded in his social climbing: his correspondence shows that his authors accorded him the same terms of politeness that they employed to address their aristocratic patrons.13 He was treated as their friend, not their servant. There is some disagreement as to how Tonson won this respect—one fairly impartial contemporary called Tonson a man who would ‘Flatter no Body’,14 while another described him as shamelessly obsequious whenever there was a profit to be gained.15 Certainly, from early in his career, Tonson made extravagant but well-calculated gestures of hospitality to both social inferiors and superiors. A bill survives for a 1689 dinner at a French-run ‘ordinary’ (a restaurant, usually run by Huguenot refugees) at which Tonson helped pay for a ‘great table’ of food, along with 20 gallons of claret, 6 of ‘Canary’, 4 of white wine, unspecified quantities of ‘Rhenish’ and champagne, 42 bottles of ale, musicians, servants, a constant fire, candles, pipes and tobacco, as well as a hired coach to pick up and deposit the guests—which, when added to compensation for ‘glasses broke’, came to £31. 8s. 6d. (around £4,000 today).16

  John Somers was one of those invited to Tonson's parties before the Revolution17—one of the ‘gentlemen of genius and quality’ Dryden complimented Tonson on cultivating so assiduously.18 Born in 1651 to the son of a Worcestershire attorney, Somers had quickly established a reputation as a brilliant legal mind while studying at Middle Temple—an Inn of Court that the sons of professionals ‘ambitious of rule and government’19 were attending in increasing numbers. Somers' father had stood on the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, and, in the same spirit, Somers fell into the Whig party's political camp. The Whigs opposed James II's moves towards Catholic emancipation during the 1680s, and so, in June 1688, Somers acted as counsel for seven bishops who signed a petition against James's order for a pro-Catholic Declaration to be read from pulpits. Somers distrusted this Declaration because it was brought in by royal prerogative rather than parliamentary statute, and because of his deeply ingrained prejudice that the Catholic Church—with its centraliz ation to Rome and absolutist principles—was intrinsically ‘unenlightened’. The invitation to William of Orange to invade was carried from a set of Protestant English nobles on the very day that the seven bishops' acquittal was celebrated in the streets by ordinary Londoners.

  Following the Revolution, Somers' Whig credentials and intellectual reputation ensured his rapid promotion in government. He chaired the committee that drafted the Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of the new constitutional monarchy, and guided William towards accepting its limitations on royal prerogatives. Somers helped mount a retroactive public relations campaign, portraying the change of monarch as the triumph of ‘Reason’—a simple expression of John Locke's ‘contract theory’, whereby unworthy rulers deserved to be deposed. In reward, Somers was appointed Solicitor General and then, in 1692, Attorney General, the latter a profitable office with extensive scope for patronage. Less than a year later, Somers was made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, in charge of the Court of Chancery, and Speaker in the House of Lords, though he himself did not yet have a peerage. By 1695, Somers was one of four men who formed the ‘Junto’ of leading Whigs—the Cabinet within the Cabinet when in the King's favour, and when out of it, a kind of unofficial opposition or ‘shadow’ Cabinet. The Junto's power came from its ability to form block votes in the Commons and to raise from the City of London the extra funds necessary to supply William's costly war.20 Somers was a particularly talented fundraiser, having no prejudice against the City's ‘money men’. He was appointed one of the Lord Justices or regents entrusted with the administration of the kingdom whenever the King was on the Continent running the war.

  At home, Somers was an incurable bibliophile. His library in Powys House, the impressive brick residence the King
had granted him in Lincoln's Inn, was dominated by the legal texts in which the Tonson family firm specialized. Like Tonson, Somers' claim to gentility depended on his display of learning, and this library was the most tangible proof of that education. Tonson was careful not to lose touch with his increasingly powerful friend. He kept Somers' shelves well stocked and met him regularly to ‘unbend’ over an after-work drink in a tavern near Temple Bar, where the commerce of the City intersected with the politics and law of Westminster.

  Tonson also flattered Somers' learning by offering the statesman opportunities for dispensing patronage to various authors in Tonson's publishing fold. Being unmarried and without significant extended family to support, Somers was free to put his patronage to such use. His beneficiaries included Dryden, though Somers allegedly authored an anonymous poem critical of Dryden's Catholicism and regretting, ‘The knot of friendship is but loosely tied / Twixt those that heavenly concerns divide.’21 Dryden in turn introduced younger authors to Tonson and hence to Somers' purse. Two such authors who arrived in London during these exciting post-Revolutionary years would quickly become the leading playwrights of their generation: William Congreve and John Vanbrugh.

  Congreve had been 4 years old when his father, an English army officer, was posted to Ireland in 1674. A perk for those, like Congreve's father, in nominal service to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was free education for their sons at the best Irish grammar school, Kilkenny. Some sixty pupils were enrolled at the school in the early 1680s and Jonathan Swift was enrolled two years behind Congreve. Congreve went on to Trinity College Dublin at age 16 in 1686, with Swift following a few years later; these two talented young men lived together in the small community of students for several years without leaving any surviving trace of a particular attachment to one another.