Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

  The exact date at which the semi-professional friendships between Tonson, his patron-readers (such as Somers, Montagu and Dorset) and his young authors (such as Congreve, Vanbrugh, Prior and Stepney) turned into ‘The Kit-Cat Club’ is unknown, but it was certainly during the final years of the seventeenth century. Thanks to his family's bookshops in the Gray's Inn neighbourhood, Tonson would have frequented the Cat and Fiddle long after moving his own premises from the area. Whereas Tonson's biographers tend to credit him with the foundational love of pies,10 Somers' biographers claim it was the Lord Keeper who discovered Cat's bakery and took his drinking companion Tonson there one day to taste them.11

  Although there had been clubs in England before, the Kit-Cat Club would be the first to have such wide-ranging interests and in-fluence, combining cultural, political and professional purposes. Previously, trade and craft guilds, political cliques and literary coteries had kept to their own relatively distinct spheres—so, for example, Will's Coffee House had been the venue one evening for Dryden's ‘Witty Club’ and for the politicians' ‘Grave Club’ another.12

  The Kit-Cat Club would draw many of its literary members from the Witty Club, but whereas the Witty Club members were both Whigs and Tories, being a Whig was to be as essential a qualification as wit when it came to joining the Kit-Cat. The republican and Whig clubs of the Civil War and Restoration periods had been notorious as hotbeds of subversion, insurrection and treachery. King William, who relied on the Whigs but ‘believed the Whigs…did not love monarchy’, remained suspicious of any club that might engender new republican conspiracies.13 The Kit-Cat Club, through its emphasis on literature and other highbrow culture, would strive to shake off these inherited associations, and make clubbing into a respectable pastime for a post-Revolutionary Whig gentleman. In doing so, it would provide the template for the literary and cultural clubs that proliferated later in the eighteenth century, of which Dr Johnson's is the most famous.

  Though the origins of the Club's name were disputed even within the members' lifetimes,14 the majority of primary sources support Ward's assertion that it came from Mr Cat's mutton pies, known as ‘Kit Cats’,15 on which the Club originally dined.16 The contemporary poet Sir Richard Blackmore writes, for example:

  Indulgent BOCAJ did his Muses treat,

  Their Drink was gen'rous Wine and Kit-Cat Pies their Meat,

  Here he assembled his Poetic Tribe,

  Past Labours to Reward, and New Ones to Prescribe.17

  A half-pun on the Club's name may also explain why it was adopted. A 1711 letter allegedly written by Mr Cat is signed with the variant spelling ‘Ch Chatt’.18 The slang ‘chit-chat’ for small-talk was commonly used, and practising the art of conversation was a central preoccupation of the Kit-Cat Club, so this name may have been thought amusingly apt. In addition, the name contained a classical allusion pleasing to the founders' Whiggish tastes: in ancient Rome, cats symbolized liberty since no animal less likes to be caged, and the goddess of Liberty was often represented with a cat at her feet. Though Tories and Whigs competed to claim many of the same patriotic principles, liberty was one rhetorical term used far more frequently by the Whigs.

  The heat of the scene before the pie-oven, as evoked by Ned Ward, was similarly symbolic. Warmth was considered a Whig characteristic, as shown by the anecdote in which the Kit-Cats asked Mr Cat to bake some pies with the poetry of the comic dramatist Thomas D'Urfey used as baking paper, to test that poet's Whig principles and fitness for membership. The story goes that the members complained when the pies were not baked through, to which Mr Cat replied that D'Urfey's writings were so cold they were cooling the dough. They were not, in other words, sufficiently Whig.

  Pies were certainly baked on discarded bits of writing in that paper-frugal century. Dryden described worthless pieces of poetry as ‘Martyrs of Pies’19 and Addison later mused with false modesty that his journalism would ‘make a good Foundation for a Muttonpie, as I have more than once experienced’.20 The nice image of Mr Cat's customers picking the last of the ‘kissing crust’ (the old name for the soft under-crust of a pie) off a piece of blank verse, the ink transferring from browned paper to golden pastry, was not fanciful but real.

  As pies and puddings were considered the best of English cookery, the Club's favourite dish would have signified the founders' selfconsciously English, as opposed to French, tastes. The pies were also regarded as humble fare symbolizing the condescension (in its archaic, entirely positive sense) of aristocrats conversing with struggling, lowly born authors. This was made clear by one playwright's hope that his play, even if lacking in delicacy, might nonetheless suit the taste of great men just as ‘A Kit-Cat is a Supper for a Lord’.21

  The Kit-Cat authors were never literally starving for a meal, but they were certainly hungry for recognition and fame. Patrons such as Dorset, Somers and Montagu were therefore essential guests at Mr Cat's table. Throughout the Kit-Cat Club's several incarnations, from its 1690s' foundation to its demise some two decades later, patronage was to remain the single most important constant in the Club's story—the mechanism that made it tick.

  Whereas writing for money was condemned by Renaissance critical theory as limiting an author's imaginative freedom, patronage allowed its recipients to profit without feeling sullied by the pecuniary motives of Grub Street hacks (one of whom, in their eyes, was Ned Ward). The Kit-Cat Club provided, in other words, the same ‘cover’ as verse letters—mimicking an earlier, courtly way of doing things. Verse letters in the 1690s pretended to have a readership of one, the aristocratic addressee, while actually having print runs of hundreds. The Club's authors pretended to be a carousing circle of amateurs with private incomes, when really they were piecing together their livings out of day-jobs, book sales and audience figures.

  They hoped to be permitted exceptions to the rules of class, familiarity being among the most valuable gifts that a noble patron could bestow. For a writer to be admitted into a nobleman's ‘conversation’ implied a rise in status with tangible benefits in terms of one's creditors. It was not simply a flattering attention from a social superior; it was an asset that could be spent afterwards as though it were hard cash.

  The tantalizing promise of patronage was meant to guarantee a certain level of conversational virtuosity at the Kit-Cat Club, in contrast to the conversation at the Witty Club, where Dryden's approbation was the only reward on offer. Though Will's Coffee House was supposed to be an ‘Exchange for Wit’, the fact that there was more profit in publishing a good line than throwing it away on one's friends caused the ‘Wit-Merchants’ to meet there, it was said, ‘without bringing the Commodity with them, which they leave at home in the Warehouses’.22 A character in one of Congreve's plays similarly refers to wit as an alternative currency, in which writers are naturally richer than their patrons: ‘None but dull rogues think; witty men, like rich fellows, are always ready for all expenses; while your blockheads, like poor needy scoundrels, are forced to examine their stock and forecast the charges of the day.’23

  A later satirical play about the Kit-Cat Club referred to certain members ‘who only listen in it’24—these were the aristocratic patrons who came in the spirit of an audience, ready to exchange one currency for another. It was a fair exchange, in so far as a poet might determine a patron's reputation among contemporary readers (and voters) and in the eyes of posterity. Tonson shrewdly realized that busy, wealthy and powerful men would gladly pay for the glamour of association with popular writers such as Vanbrugh and Congreve, or at least would prefer to play patrons than become targets of their satire. As Ned Ward put it, some Whig grandees joined ‘in hopes to be accounted wits, and others to avoid the very opposite imputation’.25

  The Kit-Cat authors, in their poetry and classical translations, self-interestedly perpetuated the idea that a well-rounded nobleman must be a generous patron. They constantly reminded their superiors that there was a parallel value system, independent of inheritance, in which the nobly
born were expected to compete, if not with their own literary talent then at least as discerning patrons. The Kit-Cat Club's broad membership implied a hierarchy based on values other than birth and wealth: ‘Though not of Title, Men of Sense and Wit.’26

  Prior and Stepney, for example, showed an imaginative sensitivity throughout their writings and classical translations to the theme of ‘meanly born’ men who led virtuous lives, or proved themselves great senators, lawyers or soldiers. In his translation of Juvenal's Eighth Satire, Stepney contrasted the great achievements of lowborn Cicero, or Tully ‘the native mushroom’, to highborn Rubellius whose useless life was no better than that of ‘a living statue’.27 It was an old Christian idea, given a fresh political edge: the natural corollary, or ultimate logic, of the Whig theory of kingship, that each man had to earn his own honour in this world.

  Lord Dorset was flattered as ‘bountiful Maecenas’, especially after his appointment as the King's Lord Chamberlain. This was a reference to the Roman patron whose circle had included Virgil and Horace, and who was therefore the prime classical model for Kit-Cat patronage. Dorset had been a patron to Tonson's authors, including Dryden, since before the Revolution, and when Tonson published Congreve's second play, Love for Love (1695), it was with a dedication to Dorset attached—a transparent bid by Congreve to become another of the Earl's favoured ‘Boys’. The publisher tended to broker the patronage of Somers when one of his prose authors needed subsidy, but that of Dorset when it was an aspiring poet or playwright.

  The contemporary writer John Macky emphasized Dorset's role as one of the Kit-Cat Club's ‘first founders’,28 alongside Tonson and Somers, and if this was indeed the case, then Dorset's motives were largely nostalgic and escapist. By the mid-1690s, Dorset was in his late fifties and his second marriage was souring because of quarrels over his wife's estate. He was therefore spending more time in town, pretending to a bachelor's lifestyle. At Charles II's Restoration Court, Dorset had enjoyed a dissipated youth, one of the ‘Merry Gang’ of poets and rakes alongside the infamous Earl of Rochester. Dorset had fought in street brawls and duels, been Nell Gwynn's lover and survived nearly fifteen years of nocturnal, riotous, self-destructive living. He had escaped frequent brushes with the law, including charges of murder and of gross indecency after a drunken appearance stark naked on a tavern balcony. Now in the 1690s, having a mid-life crisis, Dorset wanted to recapture the carefree spirit of his youth, or at least help the next generation of poets enjoy a similar camaraderie.

  For Montagu, as for Prior and Stepney, nostalgia for the collegiality of Westminster and Cambridge was a significant motive in their clubbing. These men treasured memories of sharing the life of the mind, before the realities of the world had separated them. To their eighteenth-century minds, family was directly associated with nature, in contrast to friendship, which they associated with the power of reason to make discerning, civilized choices. Montagu, at least, sought a place where his intellectually noble friendships with Prior and Stepney might be preserved, despite all that had changed in their relative circumstances since Cambridge. He also sought to extend his reputation as a patron by supporting other authors beyond his childhood friends. The Old Batchelor, for example, had won Congreve Montagu's patronage and friendship—something that may have aroused some jealousy from Prior and Stepney, since Prior once complimented Stepney's poetry by comparing it favourably to Congreve's weaker efforts.29

  For the Whig government ministers, furthermore, solidifying friendships through new clubs and associations was part of a wider civic duty to resolidify the nation. Civil turmoil had meant not knowing who your friends were from one day to the next; post-Revolutionary peace and prosperity now required rebuilding trust between like-minded men. When Dorset or Montagu was flattered as a modern Maecenas, it was not simply because they were each generous literary patrons, but because their aims resembled those of the Roman governor who, via his literary circle, had tried to reconcile a fractured society and forge ideals of ‘Roman-ness’ in the decades following a civil war.

  Over the years, many observers would complain that the Kit-Cat Club monopolized literary patronage. One imagined Tonson boasting:

  I am the Touchstone of all Modern Wit,

  Without my Stamp in vain your Poets write.

  Those only purchase ever-living Fame,

  That in my Miscellany plant their Name.30

  Another saw the Club's monopoly of literary fame as a corruption of literary justice: ‘But Mastiff Poets oft are doomed to Starve, / Whilst Lapdog Wits are hugged, who less deserve.’31 Cognoscenti have been envied in every age, but the Kit-Cat Club's networking was more acutely resented because it was unapologetically partisan. The Whigs recognized, years before the Tories, the benefits of creating a ‘sympathetic climate of opinion’ through art, and set about establishing a patronage network to incubate this ‘climate’.32 Dr Johnson called Dorset and Montagu ‘universal’ and ‘general’ patrons, meaning they rewarded writers of either party, but the majority of their largesse was dispensed within their own political fold.33 They did not regard the exclusion of Tory writers from the Kit-Cat Club as a corruption of the arts by politics, since they shared a belief in ‘amicitia‘—a community in which political fellowship flowed naturally from virtuous characters thinking and acting in perfect accord. The Tories of the 1690s may have shared the same classical reference points, but their power base, centred on country squires and clergy, was—for the time being at least—intrinsically less ‘clubbable’ than that of the more metropolitan Whigs.

  Another motive of the Kit-Cat patrons, to which Blackmore alluded in his verse account of the Club's foundation, was that ‘warlike William’ had no interest in English literature, so that authors ‘met with small Respect’ at Court and felt they must seek their rewards elsewhere. It had been, in fact, a deliberate policy on William's part to present himself as a warrior-king, too busy saving the Protestant world to bother with flattering poetic dedications. William avoided literary patronage partly in order to imply he had no need of propagandists—as a providential leader who needed no help but God's—and partly because he had little love for a language that was not his own. Hampton Court's competition with Versailles motivated royal patronage of the visual arts and architecture, but no similar royal bounty flowed towards English authors to match Louis XIV's patronage of writers such as Racine and De La Fontaine. Though the relative beneficence of previous English Courts to poets may have been exaggerated, the rising numbers of men attempting to pursue writing careers without private incomes under William III made it appear as if royal reward for wit was in short supply. This was the gap the Kit-Cats felt it their patriotic duty to fill.34

  The Kit-Cats' sense of patriotic duty was linked to their sense of historical continuity with previous literary clubs during what they regarded as England's last golden age: the reign of Elizabeth I. They had in mind the legendary ‘merry meetings’ of Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson and others at the Mermaid tavern, or the ‘Apollo’ wits Jonson gathered around himself at the Devil tavern in Temple Bar. This latter club fascinated Richard Steele (he described taking a party up to the Devil in 1709 and finding ‘the rules of Ben's Club’ were still to be seen ‘in gold letters over the chimney’35), and Tonson once received an unsolicited poem that flattered the Kit-Cat Club by comparison to Ben Jonson's club at the Devil.

  The dating of the Kit-Cat Club's foundation to the second half of the 1690s would place it in the context of a significant relaxation in attitudes to the public exchange of opinion. Sixteen ninety-five saw the second lapse of England's Licensing Act, after which there was a huge surge in the number of books, papers and pamphlets flying off London's presses—especially pamphlets which debated public affairs or satirized public figures.

  Authors and printers could still be prosecuted under blasphemy, obscenity and sedition laws, particularly if they expressed Jacobite views (that is, supportive of James II's restoration), but there was now a feeling that
just about anyone and anything could get published. It was no coincidence that the Kit-Cat's members chose Tonson as their chairman and secretary, emphasizing this link between their Club and the power of England's comparatively unfettered printing presses.

  By the 1710s, there would be some 21,000 books published in Britain—far more than in any other European country—and, by approxim ately the same date, clubbing would be seen as a quintessentially English activity, John Macky observing: ‘[A]lmost every parish hath its separate Club, where the Citizens, after the Fatigue of the Day is over in their Shops, and on the Exchange, unbend their Thoughts before they go to bed.’36 Freedom of commerce, association and expression went hand in hand.

  The Kit-Cat Club, like many of the clubs that would follow it, had an ambivalent relationship to the birth of the new style of financial capitalism around it. On the one hand, the Club was a way to preserve the ancient loyalties and hereditary customs that its members feared the new modes of commerce might extinguish. London's worlds of politics, publishing and commerce were ruthless and unregulated, making people seek refuge in the gentler ideal of ‘clubbability’. At the same time, as Whigs who generally appreciated and exploited the benefits of credit-based commerce and urban life, its members recognized that they needed to invest in social capital as much as financial capital, and the Club was formed to assist with such investment. This meant acquiring a reputation for learning and taste, and securing well-connected friends with inside information about both stocks and politics.