Disgraced, Undone, and made the Nation's Sport,
From Places turned, and banished from the Court,
Why did we not (Fools as we were) foresee,
Our Swift Destruction in a Monarchy?78
Wharton tried to appear unaffected by A Short Character and other journalistic attacks, telling the House of Lords that ‘I matter 'em not’, but he was shaken by the onslaught. Addison referred to A Short Character as ‘a scurrilous little book’,79 and, perhaps suspecting the identity of its author, started steering clear of Swift: ‘Mr Addison and I are different as black and white, and I believe our friendship will go off by this d[amn] business of party,’ Swift told a friend. ‘He cannot bear seeing me fall in so with this Ministry; but I love him still as much as ever, though we seldom meet.’80
During the 1710 election, the only Tory clubs were those organized by Tory MPs in certain counties.81 Over the winter of 1710–11, however, a group of Tory backbenchers formed what became known as ‘The October Club’ (either in honour of the Tory election landslide that October or because the members drank ‘October Ale’), dedicated to influencing the policy of Harley's government. It met at the Bell tavern in King Street, Westminster, and had nearly 150 members, whom Defoe denounced as ‘oath-taking Jacobites, self-contradicting, moon-blind high-flyers [ultra-conservative Anglicans]’.82 That a journalist in Harley's pay should take such a line indicates Harley was as troubled as the Kit-Cats by these extremist Tory backbenchers. The Octoberites were angry that Somerset or any Whig had been invited into the government; they called for the impeachment of all Whig leaders and merciless suppression of Dissenters.
Harley countered the October Club's political organization with the much more exclusive ‘Saturday Club’: dinners held at his home each Saturday, to which Harley invited Henry St John, Sir Simon Harcourt and two or three other close colleagues to discuss policy and strategy, just as the Whig Junto did on Thursdays at the Kit-cat. Swift was immensely flattered to be invited too.
Steele, for all his talk of sacrificing income to principle, may have cut a deal with Harley in early 1711 by which he would be permitted to keep his Stamp Office job on the understanding that he closed The Tatler. The ‘death’ of Isaac Bickerstaff therefore came on 2 January 1711, when the last Tatler appeared. The writer John Gay, then a young man just arrived in London, reported on how even Tories mourned the loss of this witty and wise periodical.
In the last number, Steele revealed his authorship (which had been effectively known, at least in literary London, for some time) and hinted heavily at Addison's large number of contributions. Steele may not have had his friend's permission to drop such hints, as Addison remarked that he was ‘surprised’83 to be so unmasked and left for Bath the following morning, saying he needed to drink the waters for his eyesight. There was, Addison remarked, ‘something very barbarous and inhuman in the ordinary Scribblers of London’84 and he was reluctant to be known as one of them. Around the same date, Maynwaring was writing optimistically to the Duchess of Marlborough that ‘it is possible to scribble these men [Harley's ministry] down’.85 Such contrasting Kit-Cat remarks show the gap between Addison's view of journalism as literature and Maynwaring's view of it as propaganda.
In March 1711, probably thinking of Swift's attacks on Wharton, Addison lamented satire without signature as ‘Arrows that fly in the dark’, which inflict ‘a secret Shame or Sorrow in the Mind of the suffering Person’.86 Swift's role as the leading contributor to The Examiner was made public by a Whig pamphlet in May, forcing him temporarily to lay down his pen to avoid prosecution for libel.
Luckily for Swift, the Tories were clasping him firmly to their political bosom that spring, by establishing a club specifically intended, Swift said, ‘as a rival to the Whig Kit-Kat Club’.87 Henry St John and several Tory literati, such as Dr Arbuthnot (the Tories' caustic equivalent to Dr Garth), founded the ‘Brothers Club’,88 and by June 1711 Swift had joined. Prior also became a member, grateful to have new comrades to replace those who disowned him in 1701. The Brothers took in ‘none but men of wit or men of interest; and if we go on as we begin, no other club in this town will be worth talking of,’ Swift boasted. The Club took the Kit-Cat model of mixing literary men with politicians and patrons, who footed the bills for meals, though ‘with none of the Extravagance of the Kit-Cat’.89 It even met on Thursdays, at the same time as the Kit-Cat, sometimes at the Thatched-House tavern near St James's, but also—unlike the Kit-Cat—at members' homes, including Prior's on Duke Street. (There is an anecdote, with a nice touch of unintentional irony, about Prior trying to feed these Tory friends the kind of humble fare he ate in his Kit-Cat days, leading Swift to complain of indigestion: ‘[M]ade a debauch after nine at Prior's house, and have eaten cold pie, and I hate the thoughts of it, and I am full, and I don't like it.’90)
St John was the Brothers' chief patron, as only the sons of Harley and Harcourt were admitted, not their ministerial fathers. Though Harley appears to have made financial contributions towards the Brothers, the Club soon turned into a base for St John's personal rivalry with Harley, and patronage through the Kit-Cat model of dispensing government offices was tricky for St John to organize alone.
After The Tatler closed, Steele shifted his political views to other publications. Realizing Steele would not be gagged by the threat of unemployment, Harley and the Brothers started to encourage Tory propaganda depicting Steele as a Grub Street hireling and republican menace—a smear campaign to be relentlessly pursued for several years. The charge of being a hack was unfair: Steele, more than most, believed that when he wrote for the Whigs he was ‘writing for his country’. He was, literally and intellectually, deeply invested, and willing to pay the price of his beliefs.
XV
IN THEIR OWN IMAGE
[W]ho is there so remarkable in any sort of Learning that would not be content to part with all his past Reputation to be able for the future to write like the Spectator?
ARTHUR MAYNWARING in The Medley, 4 April 17121
THE PUBLIC'S SORROW at The Tatler's closure in January 1711 turned, on 1 March 1711, to excitement at a new dish, served fresh six mornings a week: Addison and Steele's Spectator. Like its predecessor, it sold for a penny, consisted of a single essay by a narrator (‘Mr Spectator’), and often incorporated both real and fictional readers' letters. Steele was the paper's instigator, but Addison, with time on his hands since his dismissal, committed to writing an equal share of the daily essays. Soon, thanks to Steele's reverence for his friend, Addison dominated the paper's tone and editorial line.
The Spectator would have an immediate and lasting influence on British society, journalism and literature, creating a whole new style of conversational criticism and engagement with contemporary culture. Addison's 1954 biographer concluded that its influence in Britain ‘might be found to exceed that of any other work except the Bible’.2
The Spectator's authorship was again anonymous, but the first issue acknowledged the biographical curiosity of readers, which the unmasking of Isaac Bickerstaff had recently intensified: ‘I have observed,’ wrote Addison, ‘that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or a choleric Disposition, Married or a Bachelor.’3 Most readers would have believed that Mr Spectator was Steele (not least because he gave the narrator his own short face and body) with occasional assistance from several others. Few beyond their closest friends knew the extent of Addison's contribution.
Thanks to their patrons' political demise, Addison and Steele were now more equal in their material circumstances than at any time since their schooldays. Each retained one English salary: Addison his Magdalen fellowship; Steele his Stamp Office pay. Knowing he could not push his luck too far with the latter, Steele agreed the new paper should take a politically moderate stance: Mr Spectator's manifesto was to ‘observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and the Tories, unless I shall be forced to declare myself by th
e Hostilities of either side’.4 The first part of this statement showed Addison's influence—having ‘bridled’ Steele's Whig zeal5—while the second part remained a coded warning that The Spectator would not be intimidated by Harley.
A dozen or so retailers collected the advertisements that financed the paper, including Steele's friend Charles Lillie, a perfumier and snuff-seller on the Strand. Addison wrote on The Spectator's economic benefits, boasting it would ‘consume a considerable quantity of our Paper Manufacture, employ our Artisans in printing, and find Business for great Numbers of Indigent Persons’ (as its hawkers). Journalism was, in his eyes, a compassionate capitalist venture, ‘providing Bread for a Multitude’.6 By late 1712, it was providing a great deal of ‘bread’ for Tonson, whose firm printed it jointly with Sam Buckley. The Spectator's profits amply repaid all Tonson's investment in the Kit-Cat Club.
The paper's earliest issues were written by the two friends working side by side. Addison would make rough notes through the day (‘a whole Sheet full of Hints that would look like a Rhapsody of Nonsense to anybody but myself’7), then compose his essays orally, declaiming as he paced the room, while Steele, with healthier eyesight and residual deference, was tasked with ‘throwing it upon Paper’.8 At the end of the essay, they would look into their books, ‘consider which of the Ancient Authors have touched upon the Subject’, and insert a Latin or Greek motto at the start.9 Addison then spent hours editing the piece, even interrupting a print run to correct his own prose. Steele, by contrast, wrote quickly, volubly and somewhat carelessly, relying on Addison for overall editorial cohesion.
As time wore on and The Spectator's parameters became established, Addison and Steele worked much more independently. Addison wrote alone in his study, in an armchair with a lamp burning at his elbow, while Steele was one of those rare writers who liked to write in crowded public places, perhaps because such spots were less distracting than his household of unhappy wife, demanding motherin-law, bawling infants and probing debt collectors. A bookseller in Lincoln's Inn Fields claimed Steele wrote his first ‘rudimental Essays in Spectatorship’, and sorted through readers' letters, at a table in his shop front,10 and Steele worked so often at Tonson's shop on the Strand that he kept a personal stock of wine there. The difference in the two men's habits also reflected Addison's nervousness about his authorship being revealed, while Steele was happy to be celebrated, through knowing winks, as Mr Spectator. The fictional persona added gravitas to Steele's opinions and blended Addison's writing seamlessly with his own. Steele would readily have credited Addison's work if Addison had wished it, but it suited both that he did not.
Like The Tatler, The Spectator operated at the level of innuendo. It gently indoctrinated its readers not by demonizing Tories and Jacobites but by making them seem silly and unfashionable. Such prejudice-setting was lethally effective when it came to those readers in the ‘middle condition’ in London, the provinces and England's new colonies, who wanted to be told how to behave, what to read and what to think. These readers sought a moral education outside the Church, a critical education without pedantry and a social education without condescension. In providing all this, Addison and Steele transformed the journalistic profession into one as much about shaping taste and opinion as communicating facts.
The Spectator's second issue introduced the literary conceit of the ‘Spectator Club’,11 which would be used sporadically thereafter. This imaginary dining club included representatives of many different professions and classes—as if the Club was the nation's body politic in miniature. The two most dominant characters were Sir Andrew Freeport, a Whig entrepreneur, in whom many saw Sir Henry Furnese (‘He made his Fortunes himself; and says that England may be richer than other Kingdoms by as plain Methods as he himself is richer than other Men’12), and Sir Roger de Coverley, a Worcestershire landowner, Tory baronet and fox-hunter. Sir Roger was presented as harmless, eccentric and lovable, but also oldfashioned and dim-witted.
While Sir Andrew Freeport won Spectator Club arguments on issues like the nature of charity and prosperity, Sir Roger won the reader's affection, especially in his behaviour towards those below him. ‘When he comes into a House,’ Steele wrote of Sir Roger, ‘he calls Servants by their Names and talks [to them] all the way upstairs to a Visit.’13 Addison, who was the primary creator of Sir Roger, was playing on the old literary theme of the town's superiority to the country, while at the same time, in making Sir Roger so likeable, advocating reconciliation between the ‘Landed’ and ‘Monied’ interests. It was an approach much influenced by earlier Kit-Cat authors: Vanbrugh's Relapse (1696), for example, presented a Jacobite character, Young Fashion, as essentially sympathetic and redeemable, and that play's ending found redemption in the symbolic marriage of town and country.
The Tories believed the ‘Monied Interest’ had been perverting government since the 1690s, and The Spectator was launched during a particularly fierce Tory backlash against new money. The Tories passed the 1711 Landed Property Qualification Act, for example, to exclude all but landowners from becoming MPs, but this only resulted in men who had become rich through commerce buying country estates, making older families feel even more dispossessed and squeezed. Preaching the mutual interdependence of town and country in this context, while ostensibly neutral, was therefore a Whig project. It became a debate about which class was the truest repository of English virtues: the urban ‘middling sort’ or the nobility or peasantry. The Whiggish Spectator championed the ‘middling sort’, determined to spread the culture of the capital throughout the country.
C. S. Lewis wrote that fondness for The Spectator's Sir Roger expressed the superiority that ‘the victorious party so easily accords to the remnants of a vanishing order’.14 If so, the Kit-Cats' superiority was either prophetic or nostalgic, since Sir Roger was conceived at a time when the Whig elite had every reason to doubt its political survival, and when Addison and Steele had to project a confidence in their own futures that they did not feel.
The subliminal message was that neither Sir Roger nor Sir Andrew was a party zealot, as demonstrated by their belonging to the same club. Given that Addison and Steele did not belong to such a nonpartisan club, this might have laid them open to charges of hypocrisy, but by inviting Tory friends like young Alexander Pope to contribute to The Spectator, they used the publication to supplement the partisanship of their Kit-Cat careers (and, they hoped, declaw Pope as a potential enemy). By not making the Spectator Club a venue for cultural patronage, they sidestepped direct comparisons with the Kit-Cat.
Some readers, reasoning that Steele could not write so many essays single-handedly, believed the Spectator Club really existed, the members taking turns writing; or suspected the Spectator Club was an apolitical front for the paper's collective authorship by the Kit-cats. The real relationship between the Kit-Cat Club and The Spectator was less direct but more profound.
Most superficially, the Kit-Cat Club was the two authors' primary source for the experience of what it was like to attend an all-male dining club, since neither were members of any other clubs prior to 1711. More interestingly, The Spectator's much-admired prose style was a flower grown from the bed of Kit-Cat conversation. Virginia Woolf observed that all the great eighteenth-century writers seem to have learned to write by talking, and the Kit-Cat Club was one of the most demanding arenas in which Addison and Steele exercised their conversational skills. Steele felt writing second best to the simplicity and sincerity of unpremeditated speech, and directly equated a man's personal charm with his charm on the page: ‘The good Writer makes his Reader better pleased with himself, and the agreeable Man makes his Friends enjoy themselves rather than him.’15 Style in speech and prose was part of a single project of elegant selfdepiction and self-projection.
Many Spectator essays move from a particular anecdote into a wider, generalized discussion—a classic format for clubbable conversation. The Spectator essays gain additional strength through their cross-referencing, such that
they formed an ongoing conversation with regular readers from week to week, flattering them into feeling ‘in the club’ and encouraging them to participate by sending in their letters.
Other facets of The Spectator's style also derived from earlier Kit-Cats' writings, such as Congreve's aphorisms, or Garth's combination of allegorical, mock-epic elements with a socially reforming message in The Dispensary. The trick of writing apparently nonpolitical literature that contained strong Whig subtexts was learned from plays such as Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696), in which a child's rebellion against an ‘arbitrary’ parent is an allegory of a nation's rebellion against its ‘arbitrary’ king.
As the periodical progressed, its authors made less use of the Spectator Club device, but the club theme never entirely disappeared, thanks to The Spectator's obsession with classifying people. Addison's first Spectator essay on the subject of ‘those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the Name of Clubs‘ mentioned the Kit-Cat, but, like Ned Ward, mixed real with fictional clubs invented for satirical effect. There was the Club of Fat-Men where a man could not be a member if he could fit through the door, the Hum-Drum Club of men who smoked their pipes in silence, and the Club of Duellists (which ‘did not continue long, most of the Members of it being put to the Sword or hanged’16). In another essay, Addison described the Everlasting Club, whose members sat in twenty-four-hour rotation so that there was always company to be found for a drink. It claimed to have started during the Civil War, treating ‘all other Clubs with an Eye of Contempt, and talks even of the Kit-Cat and October [Clubs] as a Couple of Upstarts’.17
Kit-Cat Club, The Page 28
