For the next 200 years, literary historians did Tonson a similar disservice, underrating his intellect, influence and social status until he was virtually thrown back among the Grub Street publishers from whom he had consistently worked to distinguish himself. Tonson was blamed for a rash of inaccurate and scurrilous biographies that appeared in the eighteenth century, receiving the tag of ‘bodysnatcher’96 that may be more fairly applied to his nemesis Curll. If anything, considering the number of great men with whom Tonson was intimate, the remarkable thing is how discreet he always remained. That Tonson never published his memoirs, or gave Croxall his history of the Kit-Cat Club, may be a loss for us, but it is also one of the reasons his authors and the Club's noble members trusted him. Tonson took to his grave the bulk of their indiscretions, committed after several bottles of wine in the hours before the dawn of a Friday morning. To posterity, instead of gossip, Tonson left an estimated 750–850 publications.
XX
LATER CLUBS AND KIT-CATS
[W]e are of all nations the most forward to run into clubs, parties and societies.
DAVID FORDYCE, Dialogues Concerning Education (1745)
THE KIT-CAT CLUB popularized the idea that private individuals could form their own institutions and remake their own society. The Whig idea that Englishness meant not being subject to state control of one's private life or leisure—an idea less widely accepted on the Continent—was established in practice through the proliferation of clubs that did not overtly threaten state institutions but existed alongside them. In the seventeenth century, the word ‘club’ carried violent, conspiratorial connotations; post-Kit-Cat, despite the Tory satirists' best efforts, it conjured something much more respectable, constructive, high-cultured and high-minded.
The Kit-Cat Club, and its fictional offspring the Spectator Club, produced a spate of contemporary and subsequent imitators and started a long-running craze for gentlemen's clubs. During the eighteenth century there were some 12,000 town-based clubs in England, another 3,000 in Scotland and some 750 in Wales. By the 1730s, the trend had spread to the American colonies. An estimated 20,000 London gentlemen were meeting in some form of club every evening by the middle of the century, and by the century's end there were also numerous female and mixed-sex ‘societies’. Foreign visitors regularly remarked on the fact that what we now call ‘civil society’ flourished in Britain at this time when there was a degree of economic prosperity, social mobility and freedom of the press, all within the framework of a limited monarchy. This was not merely English chauvinistic pride: the French and central European governments were demonstrably more repressive of independent clubs and societies throughout the century, just as they censored their presses more rigorously. The only exception, perhaps, was the way the Austrian Emperor allowed Viennese coffee houses to flourish unchecked during the same period. French salons certainly rivalled British clubs as settings for intellectual debate, but they remained politically self-censoring because government informers infiltrated them on a scale without parallel in England.
The Kit-Cat Club's less sober face also had imitators. Its toasting rituals were revived most precisely by a club called ‘The World’, whose aristocratic members, including the 4th Earl of Chesterfield, met at the King's Head (formerly Queen's Head), Pall Mall, in the mid-eighteenth century. The World's members engraved their toasting glasses with diamonds, just like the Kit-Cats who had met at the same tavern before them. François de la Rochefoucauld remarked on it being a particularly English habit to end a dinner with several hours of toasting, after which the conversation became, he noted, alarmingly free.
The Union of the English Freemasons Grand Lodge was inaugurated at a tavern near St Paul's in 1717, and it was no coincidence that several younger Kit-Cats joined the Freemasons after the Kit-Cat Club's demise. The Freemasons may be viewed as the longest-lived of eighteenth-century London clubs. The earliest members were all men of property, loyal to the Hanoverian Crown, but political homogeneity was far less central than at the Kit-Cat Club. There were lodges that located themselves in opposition to one another on either side of the 1717–20 Whig schism, for example, with the Prince of Wales himself initiated into one for the Prince's Party. Like the Kit-Cat Club, the Freemasons were committed to ‘meeting upon the level’ as brothers, and to mutual material support and string-pulling. And just as the Kit-Cat had a distinctive cultural agenda, so the Masonic lodges supported a cultural revival in Britain after 1717. In London, the Fountain tavern on the Strand, former Kit-Cat venue, was used for meetings of the Royal Alpha Lodge of Freemasons. But Freemasonry was not confined to a cosmopolitan London elite; by 1725 there were fifty-two lodges throughout Britain, many outside large towns. Masonic mythology and ritual were much more about a return to the rural idyll of the medieval artisan than the urbane and determinedly lax habits of the Kit-Cat Club. This may explain why Freemasonry spread almost as rapidly in France as in England.
John, Duke of Montagu, served as a Grand Master in 1721–2, and Newcastle and Walpole later joined the Freemasons, with an occasional lodge convening at Walpole's Norfolk home. There is substantial circumstantial evidence that Steele became a Freemason late in life, making his portrait by Thornhill (a Freemason) and engraved by John Faber Junior (also a Freemason) as much a ‘club portrait’ as his Kit-Cat portrait by Kneller. Though the pyramid monuments built at Stowe and Castle Howard were most likely allusions to the Roman mausoleum of Caius Cestius, they may also have referenced Masonic symbolism.
The Temple Bar area, where Somers and Tonson first drank together after 1688, remained the centre of London's clubland until the late eighteenth century, when clubs moved west to St James's and Pall Mall. Many St James's clubs, such as White's, focused more on gambling, a vice not derived from the Kit-Cat Club. Between 1720 and 1722, immediately after the South Sea bubble, illegal gaming houses in Covent Garden increased tenfold. Londoners complained cards were destroying the art of conversation, though each generation tended to make this complaint afresh. The Covent Garden literati's chattering in fact continued undiminished at the Bedford Coffee House throughout the 1720s, much as it had flourished at Will's before the Kit-Cat Club's foundation.
Certain clubs were founded with an emphasis on sexual and moral decadence in the 1720s. Most notable was the ‘Hell-Fire Club’, established by Wharton's wayward son Philip. Philip, who rejected everything his late father stood for by ending his life an avowed Jacobite and Roman Catholic, amplified the Kit-Cats' pornographic and irreligious side at the Hell-Fire Club. Its more notorious namesake started meeting in the early 1750s, mostly at West Wycombe and Medmenham Abbey, where Sir Francis Dashwood, John Wilkes and others attended pseudo-Franciscan meetings of ‘The Order’ or ‘Brotherhood’ and allegedly participated in orgiastic, satanic rituals.
Dashwood earlier founded the ‘Dilettanti Society’ in 1734, a club for the appreciation of ancient Greek art, comprising gentlemen home from their Grand Tours and determined to purify British taste along neoclassical lines. Like the ‘Virtuosi of St Luke’, a London artists' club formed after 1714, which hosted an annual members' feast, or the ‘Artists’ Club' at the Bull's Head tavern to which Hogarth belonged, the Dilettanti had narrow objectives compared to the multidisciplinary Kit-Cats. Indeed, after the Kit-Cat Club, there was generally a return to clubs specializing in a single profession or interest. There were also numerous Whig clubs involved in local politics of the 1720s and 1730s, like that of Sir Thomas Samwell at Upton House near Coventry, of which Philip Mercier painted a lively group portrait, but none that quite had the nationwide reach of the Kit-Cat and Hanover Clubs, or which tried to combine politics with cultural reform in the same extraordinary way.
Dr Johnson established the most self-conscious imitation of the Kit-Cat Club as cultural powerhouse. Johnson, like Tonson, came from a bookseller-stationer family and books comforted him through early, graceless years of physical debility. In 1764, Johnson and the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds founded ‘The Club’ at the Tu
rk's Head tavern on Gerrard Street. Its nine founders were each concerned with different aspects of the arts in Britain, systematically exceeding the Kit-Cat Club's ambitions by including not only writers and politicians but also artists, actors, scientists and other scholars. The Club grew to about the same size as the Kit-Cat (thirty-five members by 1791), but, unlike its prototype, The Club conferred membership based on talent and charm rather than political allegiance, including both Whigs and Tories. It also contained far fewer aristocratic members—only a minority of The Club's members were even landowners. Johnson and his friends wanted to direct British arts by sheer force of intellectual influence, rather than by subsidy, patronage or commissioned propaganda. Edmund Malone, who had an antiquarian interest in the Kit-Cat Club, became a member—evidence, beyond Johnson's own scholarly interest in the individual Kit-Cat authors, that the similarities between Tonson's and Johnson's clubs were more than mere coincidence.
No political club that succeeded the Kit-Cat managed to replicate its peculiar blend of progressive and conservative elements. On the one hand, the later eighteenth century saw a resurgence of radical clubs, such as the freethinking ‘Robin Hood Society’ (which met after 1747 in a Temple Bar tavern, under the chairmanship of a baker named Caleb Jeacocke—a cross, it would seem, between Christopher Cat, Jacob Tonson and the 1650s republican James Harrington), or the ‘Hampden Clubs’ founded in the 1810s (out of which demands for universal male suffrage emerged). Political dialogue widened to the newly educated classes; societies across the country held lively debates during the 1770s on Spectator-like subjects, and around 800 book clubs were meeting nationwide by the 1820s. Even as The Spectator had been closing in 1712, its readers had written in to say that they would keep its spirit, and the new love of reading and debate it had given to them, alive: ‘[T]here are a number of us who have begun your Works afresh, and meet two Nights in the Week in order to give you a Rehearing…This we conceive to be a more useful Institution than any other Club.’1
At the other political and social extreme, the Regency and Victorian periods were the heyday of the St James's gentlemen's clubs, which accepted almost exclusively upper-class members and were bastions of class privilege, as expressed by the construction of grandiose, public-looking buildings for member-only use. Today their great silent rooms are the sedate descendants of the coffee house gambling clubs, whose names several still bear, rather than the more egalitarian and socially activist Kit-Cat Club.
Of the nineteenth-century clubs, the Garrick, at its foundation in 1831, perhaps most resembled the Kit-Cat Club, as it was a venue where ‘actors and men of refinement and education might meet on equal terms’ so that ‘easy intercourse was to be promoted between artists and patrons’.2 Tonson, Dorset and Somers would have recognized these goals, and indeed the Garrick's founders (twenty-four peers and a selection of writers, actors, musicians and publishers) replicated the Kit-Cat's balance of titled wealth and untitled talent.
Tonson's self-interest in founding the Kit-Cat as a perk for his authors and patrons, and as an informal editorial board for his firm, profoundly changed British publishers' social confidence and professional status. John Nichols, a nostalgic Kit-Cat chronicler, enjoyed the hospitality of the publishing brothers Charles and Edward Dilly, whose famous literary dinners were attended by Boswell, Johnson, Goldsmith and Joseph Priestley. In the 1810s, the drawing-room society of the publisher John Murray—attended by, among others, de Staël, Disraeli, Canning, Scott, Southey and Byron—consciously mirrored Tonson's ambition to play cultural broker. A copy of Tonson's Kit-Cat portrait graced Murray's offices in Albemarle Street.
Another notable Kit-Cat literary heir was a club of the same name founded at Yale University at the beginning of the twentieth century for ‘men who have shown literary ability and interest in literary subjects’. Just as Vanbrugh's architecture remains, ironically, the most famous product of the first Kit-Cat Club's literary membership, so the most famous member of the Yale Kit-Cat Club was Robert Moses, its President in 1909 who later became the master builder of twentieth-century New York.3
A legitimate analogy can also be drawn between the Kit-Cat Club and the businesslike clubs for media types founded in central London since the 1980s, such as the Groucho Club, Soho House or Adam Street. The Kit-Cat Club has more in common with these ventures than with the Pall Mall institutions or the louche, early twentiethcentury literary coteries of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia. The Kit-Cats were not simply complacent, snobbish oligarchs, as they are sometimes portrayed, nor were they the anti-Establishment aesthetes, bohemians and ‘angry young men’ who make up London's more recent literary mythology. They were worldlier—and busier—than both.
There are remarkably few physical memorials to the Kit-Cat Club. Most of its tavern venues, like the Cat and Fiddle on Gray's Inn Lane or the Fountain on the Strand, no longer exist. Victorian antiquarians John Timbs and James Caulfield were loath to believe that such an aristocratic club could have started in Christopher Cat's pie-shop. While to us the humble origin may add charm, to these Victorians it was an embarrassment, and their efforts to gloss over the Christopher Cat connection injected various confusions into the Kit-cat Club's geographical chronology.
There is no blue plaque or memorial to the Club at Barn Elms. When Jacob Junior died in 1735, his will specified that Kneller's Kit-cat portraits should remain at Barn Elms, where he had ‘lately at some Expence’ built a special gallery for them.4 This may have been the first instance in Britain of a gallery being purpose-built to display a single exhibition, united by subject and artist. After Tonson's death, the paintings were bequeathed to Jacob Junior's children. One of their descendants built another gallery for the paintings at Bayfordbury House in Hampshire, to which they were moved around 1812, after having been housed at a series of locations in Kent, Berkshire and Herefordshire. There was a sale in 1945, when Tonson's descendants vacated Bayfordbury, at which point those Tonson manuscripts not already dispersed or pulped went to the National Portrait Gallery archives and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.
The set of Kneller portraits remains the Club's single greatest monument. It was acquired by the National Arts Collection Fund at the Bayfordbury sale, and passed to the National Portrait Gallery at a time, post-Second World War, when the country was feeling particularly patriotic and the ‘Whig interpretation of history’ was in full swing. G. M. Trevelyan was closely involved in the purchase, assuring the National Portrait Gallery's Director they were worth every penny and writing in The Times to educate the public about why the Kit-cats should be honoured as modern Britain's founding fathers—the Kneller series being their Mount Rushmore. In the catalogue accompanying the portraits' first public exhibition, the war against Louis XIV was implicitly compared with the defeat of Hitler. The catalogue's author concluded that the Kit-Cat Club ‘ensured the safety of the Revolution Settlement and laid the foundations of eighteenth century England’.5
‘Count’ Johann Jacob Heidegger, who assumed the management of the Kit-Cats' Haymarket theatre, also assumed the lease at Barn Elms directly from the Tonsons and used it as his summer residence until 1750. In the nineteenth century, the radical writer and agriculturalist William Cobbett lived at the Barn Elms manor house, experimenting with various farming ideas in its gardens. Tonson's house there, despite its Vanbrugh interiors, was not preserved. In 1816, Sir Richard Phillips visited as a ‘reverential pilgrim’ and discovered Jacob Junior's 1730s Kit-Cat gallery in a deplorable state, having been used as a laundry, then damaged by fire and dry-rot, though ‘[t]he names of the members were still visible on the walls, written in chalk as they had been marked for the guidance of the man who hung up the pictures, and the marks made by the pictures were still to be seen’.6 An article in The Mirror of 1832 described the same room as a separate building at the end of the old manor house's garden, with the clubroom or gallery upstairs, containing red wall hangings covered in cobwebs, holes in the floor and a swallow's nest in the ceiling.
From 1884, the whole Barn Elms property was leased to an exclusive sporting club named the Ranelagh Club. This club, instituted to supply ‘an agreeable riverside resort to Gentlemen desirous of dining out of London, participating in Polo, Lawn Tennis, Pigeon Shooting, Pony Racing, etc, and for providing various outdoor entertainments during the season’, was uniquely important to British social life during the 1890s and 1900s. Among the several hundred members listed in 1889, at least a handful (including the Marquess of Hartington, the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Montagu) were directly descended from the Kit-Cats, showing how little British society had altered in 200 years.
The Ranelagh Club restored the Kit-Cat gallery room for use by its members. A black and white photograph shows the entrance to ‘the kit-cat room’, though the image helps little in imagining the original. Thanks to the Ranelagh Club's Secretary, Mr C. J. Barrett, author of The History of Barn Elms and the Kit-Cat Club (1889), the sporting club also took an active interest in the site's eighteenth-century tenants, and did much to keep the Kit-Cat Club's memory alive. The winter gardens were decorated with plaster replicas of Tonson and Kneller, a picture of Tonson hung in the central stairwell, and copies of Faber's engravings adorned the clubhouse walls. The Ranelagh Club took as its insignia an ersatz coat of arms based on the emblematic frontispiece Faber added to the Kit-Cat engravings in 1735.7 This coat of arms saying ‘Kit-Cat Club, 1703’ (the date Tonson leased the house at Barnes) was printed on the Ranelagh Club's menus and event programmes, and moulded on the medals, silver bowls and drinking vessels awarded at sporting competitions. It was also woven into the Club's upholstery and flags.
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