Though out of fashion, Addison, Steele, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and the Kit-Cat Club itself, remained household names among educated Britons until the 1940s, representing an Establishment against which young critics could rebel. Cyril Connolly, as if imitating his hero Coleridge's bias, rejected Addison's ‘Mandarin’ way of writing in Enemies of Promise (1938),25 and C. S. Lewis contrasted Addison unfavourably with Pope and Swift, because Addison dealt ‘only with middle things’. Lewis agreed with Connolly on Addison's smug complacency, though with more nuance:
Almost everything which my own generation ignorantly called Victorian seems to have been expressed by Addison. It is all there in The Spectator—the vague religious sensibility, the insistence upon what came later to be called Good Form, the playful condescension towards women, the untroubled belief in the beneficence of commerce, the comfortable sense of security which far from excluding, perhaps renders possible the romantic relish for wildness and solitude.26
Lewis nonetheless admitted Addison's essential character was still superior to those of Pope and Swift, with their ‘hatred and bigotry and even silliness’.27
Peter Otway Smithers' scholarly biography of Addison in 1955 was a necessary corrective to class-conscious rhetoric and caricature. Smithers, like Addison, was a Magdalen man and MP, and, using the first full collection of Addison's letters published in 1941, he gave equal attention to Addison's political and literary careers. Smithers concluded ‘no other Englishman has influenced the social development of his country more powerfully’.28 This was certainly a plausible conclusion in 1950s Britain, when a very Kit-Cattish ideal of what it meant to behave like an English gentleman had once again risen to the fore.
From the 1960s on, the Kit-Cats came under fresh attack. Marxist critics saw Addison and Steele as cheerleading for the bourgeoisie and coopted by the aristocracy. Later, the rise of sociological approaches (gender and race studies, most notably) in English Literature departments did the Club no favours. No collection of the poetry of any single Whig writer from the post-1688 period has been published since 1937. Brian McCrea, in Addison and Steele Are Dead (1990), brilliantly analysed the various causes of post-Second World War ‘benign neglect’29 of Whig literature, in contrast to growing respect for the work of the Tory Scriblerians. McCrea attributed this primarily to Kit-Cat writing's lack of ambiguity, ironic narration and other abstruse, multilayered meanings that make texts useful for the ‘procedures’ of academic criticism.30
Steele once complained that ‘Modest and well-governed Imaginations’ were losing out in the race for immortality to ‘Satyrs, Furies and Monsters’ of art,31 and most readers today prefer Swift's dark, scatological satire to the politer Whig alternative. The Kit-Cats occasionally felt great highs and lows (as Congreve asked, ‘Where is the mind which passions ne'er molest?’32), but were genuinely, on the whole, emotionally stable men whose dark hours came less from suffering for their art than from objective crises, such as debts and deaths. One of the Kit-Cats' key words was ‘Æquanimity’: a contagious state of being that could make all else go well. If a husband should find equanimity, wrote Steele, it will ‘easily diffuse itself through his whole Family’.33 If writers can find it, so might the whole nation of readers. Today, the Kit-Cat authors' essential emotional stability and unfashionable sanity partly explain their neglect.
Another prejudice has long been held against the Kit-Cats: that commissioned writing is intrinsically inferior to independent writing. The triumphal rise of the mass market, freeing authors from the tyranny of arbitrary, aristocratic patrons, became a myth of twentiethcentury progress, in which the Kit-Cats were seen as the last hurrah of the old order. The alternate story, based on Congreve's advice to Cobham that ‘men have ever been the same’, is that authors, even geniuses, have always needed to supplement their incomes with subsidies from various sources, noble and ignoble, and that there have always been doubts about the capitalist marketplace as the most reliable judge of literary quality.
The posthumous triumph over the Kit-Cats of Swift and other writers excluded from Junto patronage is deeply ironic: it is as if posterity has formed its own club where the ‘in-crowd’ is suddenly ‘out’. The Kit-Cats' conviction that a man's life, character and conversation were as important as his literary works, however, may mean that, if they could see how the Scriblerians' literary reputations have overtaken their own, they would not be too troubled. Steele told Pulteney with complete sincerity that ‘[t]he greatest Honour of Human Life is to live well with Men of Merit’34 and on another occasion told a fan that the qualifications of a good poet were ‘To be a very well-bred Man.’35 Congreve meant something similar when, in 1727, he told Voltaire he wished to be remembered as a gentleman, not a poet. Again, the Romantics' separation and elevation of Art over Life made such well-balanced attitudes deeply unfashionable and misrepresented them as shallow social snobbery.
Very recently, there has been renewed interest in the late Stuart period and the Whig literature that dominated it. It is as if the Kit-cats became so unfashionable that they can now be fashionable again, their obscurity giving them the sympathetic status of a minority interest. The Victorians would never have believed Addison and Steele needed rediscovering. Yet today, when The Spectator and The Tatler are mostly known in Britain as the titles of a weekly political magazine and a glossy, monthly society magazine (founded in 1828 and 1901 respectively), and when their original namesakes are no longer read for pleasure but merely quoted by historians, there is a strong case for rediscovery. Addison's and Steele's wit and wisdom merit appreciation by a new generation of readers whose values and preoccupations are probably closer to those of the early eighteenth century than at any time since the journals were first published. After 300 years, a remarkable affinity between the Kit-Cats' worldview and that of many Western, secular liberals can be discerned. Londoners and denizens of other major world cities today often identify more closely with one another, in their urbanity and cosmopolitanism, than with their rural compatriots, and, at a time when Enlightenment values are felt to be under threat from religious extremists, the witty, worldly ‘moderation’ of Kit-Cat writers seems more appealing, less of a smokescreen or sell-out, than once it did.
After English literature, the art form most explicitly subjected to Kit-Cat ambitions was music, a fact that has since been consistently overlooked. Vanbrugh, Congreve and their patrons deserve credit for training Londoners' taste in opera, from which Handel and the next generation of impresarios reaped the benefits. The campaign of Addison and other Kit-Cats to establish an indigenous English opera seria tradition may have failed, but that says more about the inadequacy of the composers they had at their disposal than the idea's intrinsic foolishness. George I founded the first Royal Academy of Music in 1719, and though this was his pet project, it also grew out of the Kit-Cat Club's pre-1714 agenda to promote English music in preparation for his reign. The Royal Academy's aristocratic support came from both sides of the Whig schism and included a few Tories, but Newcastle (the Academy's first Governor) and other former Kit-cats were ‘very prominent’ in its affairs.36 By 1722, Vanbrugh told Carlisle that, while no good new plays were being written for the English stage, ‘Music has taken deep root with us.’37 Even after the Academy as first instituted collapsed in 1728, this remained true, evidenced by Handel's popularity.
In architecture, Vanbrugh's idiosyncratic style, as shown by his masterpieces of Blenheim, Castle Howard and Stowe, at first seems to bear little relation to what immediately preceded or followed. But it becomes easier to understand when seen as a product of Kit-Cat thinking: the pursuit of an anglicized neoclassical style, importing baroque models but interpreting them loosely and romantically through visual allusions to heroic English history, such as details from medieval castles or Jacobean manors. In the 1720s, enthusiasm for neo-Palladian villas overtook and sidelined Vanbrugh's style of building, partly because Vanbrugh's houses were too grand to be replicated easily by smaller landowners. By as early as
1727, the unfavourable consensus was that Vanbrugh's houses consisted ‘of great heaps of brick and thick walls, but little accommodation within’.38 Lord Burlington had a far wider legacy, as if he found in the modest scale of his neo-Palladian Chiswick villa the architectural equivalent of the intimate Kit-Cat portrait or the brief, conversational Spectator essay. It was a scale more in keeping with the coming age, when epic ambitions, even in architecture, could no longer be taken quite so seriously.
Vanbrugh's most influential and imitated architecture was therefore his smaller-scale garden architecture. The oriental and gothic elements of Vanbrugh's follies were much beloved by the later eighteenth century, Sir Joshua Reynolds enthusing that they brought ‘to our remembrance ancient customs and manners, such as the Castles of the Barons of ancient Chivalry’.39 In landscape design more broadly, Vanbrugh, Carlisle, Cobham and other Kit-Cats were hugely innovative and influential, thanks to the literary (that is, narrative) and theatrical aesthetic of their creations, and the respectful incorporation of the natural English landscape into neoclassical schemas. As early patrons to men like Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, the Kit-Cats also deserve credit for the generation of gardens that followed.
In painting, Kneller's Kit-Cat series contributed to the later eighteenth-century craze for portraiture, and specifically suggested more intimate, egalitarian options than the full-length portrait in official robes. The size of Kneller's portraits is, in fact, still known by art experts as a ‘Kit-Cat’. Kneller's pictures taught the new selfmade men of wealth how to style themselves as cultured gentlemen by sitting for their own portraits, and Tonson taught his fellow tradesmen and professionals how to create a gallery of paintings even in a relatively modest private home.
What is astonishing is that the Kit-Cat cultural projects—the building of theatres, the funding of subscription publications, the hiring of opera singers—were only half the story, the other half being the Club's lasting impact on Britain's constitution, legislation and political culture.
The debate about the political legacy of the Kit-Cats and their fellow Whigs has swung, since the mid-1800s, between poles of idealization and cynicism. The ‘Whig histories’ of Macaulay and Trevelyan caricatured the period as the start of a long, linear progress towards civil and religious liberties, parliamentary freedom and British supremacy. The Whig leaders of the 1688 Glorious Revolution and their party political heirs were credited not only with this triumphal progress but also with liberal ideological motives for their actions. The clubs and coffee houses of Queen Anne's London were similarly mythologized as seedbeds of pluralist, democratic values—a view reinforced by Continental social theorists after the Second World War who sought to explain the origins of Anglo-Saxon civil society.
At the other extreme, L. B. Namier in 1929 depicted post-1688 politics as driven by competition for power between rival factions formed around bonds of kinship and vested interests, devoid of public-spirited motives. This opened the revisionist floodgates, and soon any positive consequence of Whig Junto policy was regarded as an inadvertent side effect of anti-Catholic bigotry and self-serving protectionism. The absence of a direct causal link between the 1689 constitutional settlement and later nineteenth-century constitutional reforms was easily demonstrated, and the clubs of Anne's London were reimagined, in the same revisionist spirit, as being like Vanbrugh's stage-set garden follies at Stowe: high-minded classical façades stuck onto ugly old bastions of snobbery and privilege.
J. H. Plumb, in 1969, offered the first important corrective to the revisionists, arguing that 1675–1725 saw enormous progress towards political stability in England. Plumb argued that stability emerged ‘through the actions and decisions of men, as does revolution’ and was neither inevitable nor accidental.40 He attributed it to ‘a sense of common identity in those who wielded economic, social and political power’,41 to which Kit-Cat Club membership clearly contributed. Plumb also attributed national stability to ‘single-party government’,42 a norm which the single-party Kit-Cat Club also played its part in promoting. Just as Somers had once introduced obligatory oaths to fix Englishmen's loyalties to King William, so the Kit-Cat Club fixed its members to the Junto and to Whig ‘Revolution Principles’. One or two notable failures excepted—Prior's defection to impeach his friends in 1701 and Somerset's collaboration with Oxford in 1710—the Club proved a remarkably effective fixative, teaching its members to think in terms of political cooperation only with their ‘own kind’. Plumb also attributed British stability after 1720 to a ‘legislature firmly under executive control’,43 achieved partly through the Junto's use of the Kit-Cat Club as a site for ‘parliamentary junketings’44 and for exercising the Whigs' superior party and parliamentary control. It was no coincidence that the Club's lifespan correlated closely to a period of frequent electoral campaigning, being the venue for ‘informal “whipping” of the party's members in both Houses’ and ‘marshalling the proxy votes of the Whig peers’.45
Once the protégés nurtured by the first generation of Kit-Cats started fighting among themselves for the spoils of power, the Club as an entity was doomed, but its ‘Kitlings’ nonetheless managed the country for another half century. After Walpole regained power in 1721, he exploited it more fully than any previous minister and so became what we call a ‘Prime Minister’. Though it is usually argued that Walpole took Oxford as his model, Walpole's political apprenticeship was not served at Oxford's side but among the Kit-Cats, and it was from the Junto that he learned how to organize the press, politicize the culture, and wield power through patronage and partying.
Two of the youngest ‘Kitlings’, Newcastle and Pulteney, also later became Prime Ministers. If one counts the nominal premiership of Spencer Compton (a puppet controlled by Lord Carteret in 1742–4), there were only nine years when the British government was not in the hands of a Kit-Cat Prime Minister between 1714 and 1762, and for eight of those it was in the hands of Newcastle's younger brother, Henry Pelham.
While the rise of the first Prime Minister in this period is well recognized, it is less often remarked that the same period saw the rise of the Cabinet, as part of a general enthusiasm for collective governmental responsibility through parliamentary boards and committees. Though Cabinet meetings, as a subsection of the Privy Council, predated the Kit-Cat Club, it was during the Club's lifespan that the Cabinet became, for the first time, a ‘vital organ of government’.46 During the regency following Anne's death, when the regents' collective responsibility overlapped with the Kit-Cat Club's membership, the link between Cabinet and Club was explicit. By the time the Club dissolved, the Cabinet was meeting and taking decisions without George I's presence (though Walpole later weakened the Cabinet again, for his own ends).
Several recent historians have emphasized that Parliament in this period was not an antagonist to the Crown so much as its co-conspirator in a series of conservative changes—that the Whig aristocracy put strenuous effort into supporting, not overthrowing, the monarchy—albeit monarchs of their choosing.47 Even Macaulay and Trevelyan admitted the Glorious Revolution was defensive and conservative, designed to preserve certain noble families' privileges. Yet this should not obscure the importance of the Junto's radically conditional style of deference to William, Anne and George—a pragmatic mixture of respect and resentment, obedience and independence, which helped define the British system of government. The early eighteenth century saw a shift from the Crown's wishes being endorsed by elections to election results forcing the royal hand and ministers audaciously twisting royal arms. The careers of the Kit-Cats were important threads connecting these two eras.
In terms of political philosophy, the Kit-Cat Club kept the soil fertile for certain ideas during the long decades between Locke and Hume. Through its mixture of members, it melded the Whig party's mainstream ideology, which was essentially conservative and aristocratic, with more meritocratic, socially progressive ideas, as promoted by the Club's non-aristocratic authors. While it did not seek to o
verturn social hierarchies, it helped establish the perception that social rank was no longer ‘the very precondition for participating in debate’.48 If the Kit-Cats did not always live up to their political rhetoric, that rhetoric at least set the terms under which they and their political descendants were held accountable.
Late eighteenth-century French philosophers acknowledged an intellectual debt to Addison and Steele, modelling their close-knit communities on English clubs and societies. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers acknowledged a similar debt, while The Spectator's assault on metaphysics ‘prepared the way for the new egalitarian emphasis upon “common sense” offered by Thomas Paine’.49 Read throughout the English-speaking world, essays like Spectator no. 287, which argued that liberty is best preserved by division of government among persons ‘of different ranks and interests’, had a crucial influence on political philosophers in the decades that followed. The definition of liberty used by American revolutionaries can be traced back to Addison's 1712 definition in the above Spectator, and his radical statement that: ‘Liberty should reach every Individual of a People, as they all share one common Nature; if it only spreads among particular Branches, there had better be none at all, since such a Liberty only aggravates the Misfortune of those who are deprived of it.’50
Benjamin Franklin was hugely influenced by belonging to London's ‘Honest Whigs Club’, later founding his own club in America called ‘The Junto’.51 Franklin read volumes of The Spectator during his adolescence, and trained himself to write his first published articles, the Silence Dogood letters, by rewriting Spectator essays from memory.
Though Tories had been instrumental in the 1688 invitation to William, the 1701 Act of Settlement (Oxford had his portrait painted proudly holding this document), and the making of the Union in 1707, it was the Kit-Cats who achieved the greatest trick in all three cases: making these breathtakingly bold changes seem perfectly reasonable and necessary. Addison wrote of Somers: ‘[I]f he did not entirely project the Union of the Two Kingdoms, and the Bill of Regency…there is none who will deny him to have been the chief Conductor in both.’52 The Whig party in general, and the Kit-Cat Club in particular, should be given just such measured credit for both achievements. While there has been widespread historical agreement, at least until very recently, that the impact of the Union with Scotland was positive for the Scots, the verdict on the Whig and Kit-Cat legacy in Ireland is less straightforward. Wharton and Addison certainly handled Ireland in the English interest, without encouraging the union of kingdoms that the Irish oligarchy desired and without opposing the persecution of the Catholic majority. In 1720, a former Kit-Cat, Grafton, became Irish Lord Lieutenant, and in 1730–7 and 1750–5, Dorset's son Lionel also held this office.
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