Kit-Cat Club, The

by Field, Ophelia

47 Anon. [Jonathan Swift], ‘An Essay to Restore the Kit-Cat Members to their lost Abilities, for the sake of the LADIES who admire em’, Letters, Poems and Tales: Amorous, Satyrical, and Gallant. Which passed between several persons of distinction. Now first published from respective originals found in the cabinet of…Mrs Anne Long (1711).

  48 Herefordshire County Record Office MS, Cowper Box 9, Diary 5, 47–8.

  49 BL Add MS 7,121, Letters to Lord Halifax (1706ff.), f.27, Defoe to Halifax, undated.

  50 Mary Delariviere Manley, The New Atalantis (1709).

  51 Herbert Davis et al (eds), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift (Oxford, 1939–75), vol. 8, p. 34.

  52 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 3, no. 355, Thursday, 17 April 1712, by Addison.

  53 Ibid., vol. 2, no. 243, Saturday, 8 December 1711, by Addison.

  54 In August 1711, Henley would die in gambling debt and intestate, and the first series of Maynwaring's Medley came to an end. Around the same time, a Tory named Barber replaced Tonson as The Gazette's publisher, showing how the change of leadership was cascading through all levels of government contract.

  55 The Moderator, 3 October 1710.

  56 Jonathan Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, p. 166.

  57 Spencer Compton, Francis Godolphin, Ned Hopkins, James Stanhope and Richard Boyle (though Richard Boyle was soon found another pocket borough by his Kit-Cat brother-in-law Lionel).

  58 The Whig Examiner, no. 3, Thursday, 28 September 1710.

  59 Anon., The Golden Age Revers'd (1703), accused Stanhope of sodomy, saying he ‘to a Venus arms prefers a pathetic boy’.

  60 J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (Boston, Mass., 1961), vol. 1, p. 160, Walpole to James Stanhope, 19 September 1710.

  61 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 8 October 1710.

  62 Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), p. 138.

  63 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 26 October 1710 and also 5 January 1711.

  64 In May 1712, Congreve wrote with relief to Joe Keally that his income as Commissioner of Wine Licences was no longer under threat; thereafter Congreve started investing in Bank of England stock (£2,400 by 1717).

  65 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 19 October 1710.

  66 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), p. 199.

  67 E.g. Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 14 January 1711.

  68 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 16 March 1711.

  69 Rae Blanchard, The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), no. 382, Steele to Mrs Steele, autumn 1710.

  70 Wharton met the Queen upon his return to England, leading to a false rumour he had been dismissed as Lord Lieutenant. The Irish Lord Justices acted on this rumour and assumed interim power until a new Lord Lieutenant was appointed. Hearing of this, Addison wrote with irritation to Dawson: ‘I think it is Ridiculous for the L[or]ds Justices to act otherwise than under that Commission [i.e Wharton's] (unless Her Majesty had been pleased to send them a new one) as it would have been for any other to have taken upon him the Government without any Commission at all.’ Days later, Wharton was replaced by the 2nd Duke of Ormonde.

  71 HMC, Report VII: Appendix (1879), Copies of Letters of George Berkeley to Sir J. Percival, p. 238.

  72 In December 1710, Addison wrote to Joshua Dawson, defending Wharton from Tory threats of prosecution before the Irish Commons and requesting all ‘particulars that may be of service in case the Impeachment goes on’. Addison called on Dawson's conscience (despite having stood for election as a Tory) to help deny the charges against Wharton, saying: ‘For my own part, though perhaps I was not the most obliged person that was near His Lordship, I shall think myself bound in Honour to do him what Right I can in case he should be attacked.’ Herbert Wood, ‘Addison's Connexion with Ireland’, Royal Society of Antiquarians of Ireland Journal, 5th series, 14 (1904), pp. 133–58, Addison to Joshua Dawson, 14 December 1710. In January 1711, Addison said he hoped the impeachment proceedings had been dropped and thanked Dawson for warning that he too risked being charged as a signatory on some ‘unjustifiable’ orders. Ibid., Addison to Joshua Dawson, 12 January 1711.

  73 Ibid., 1 September 1710.

  74 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 8 October 1710.

  75 Ibid., January 1711. At the same time, the Tory Postboy published an acrostic on Wharton's name, labelling him a republican, regicide and libertine, ‘O'ergrown in Sin, cornuted, old, in Debt.’

  76 The Examiner, no. 17, Thursday, 30 November 1710.

  77 Ibid., no. 26, 1 February 1711.

  78 Anon., ‘A Song at the Kit-Cat Club’, in The State Bell-Man's Collection of Verses for the Year 1711 (1710–11), p. 13.

  79 Herbert Wood, ‘Addison's Connexion with Ireland’, Royal Society of Antiquarians of Ireland Journal, 5th series, 14 (1904), pp. 133–58, Addison to Joshua Dawson, 12 January 1711.

  80 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 14 December 1710.

  81 Such as the Royston Club, which kept the bulk of Herefordshire's MPs in tune with Tory policy during 1701–34.

  82 Daniel Defoe, Eleven Opinions about Mr H[arley] (1711).

  83 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 2 January 1711.

  84 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 23, Tuesday, 27 March 1711, by Addison.

  85 Arthur Maynwaring to Sarah Churchill said ‘it is possible to scribble these men down’ in 1711. That the Tories shared this belief in the power of the press was shown by efforts to tax it out of existence in 1712. J. A. Downie, ‘The Development of the Political Press’, in Clyve Jones, Britain in the First Age of Party, 1660–1750 (London and Ronceverte, W. Va., 1987).

  86 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 23, Tuesday, 27 March 1711, by Addison.

  87 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 9–20 June 1711.

  88 Not to be confused with Beaufort's ‘Board of Brothers’. In 1709, the crypto-Jacobite Duke of Beaufort and his friends established ‘The Board of Brothers’ or ‘The Board of Loyal Brotherhood’, but this was largely a drinking society, with limited political clout. Their meetings' minutes survive, recording gestures such as sending Dr Sacheverell, in pre-trial detention, cash and bottles of claret. In later years, the ‘Board of Brothers’ became a meeting place for Tory MPs at the Cocoa Tree Coffee House, eventually evolving into the organizational base of the Tory party after 1750.

  89 St John pretended the Club was a purely cultural project: ‘We shall begin to meet in a small number, and that will be composed of some who have wit and learning to recommend them; of others who, from their own situations, or from their relations, have power and influence…None of the extravagance of the Kit-Cat, none of the drunkenness of the Beef-Steak [Club] is to be endured,’ he continued. ‘The improvement of friendship and the encouragement of letters are to be the two great ends of our society.’ Henry St John, Letters and Correspondence, ed. George Parke (London, 1798), vol. 1, pp. 246–7, St John to the 4th Earl of Orrery, 12 June 1711.

  90 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 7 December 1710.

  XV IN THEIR OWN IMAGE

  1 The Medley, 4 April 1712.

  2 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), p. 254.

  3 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 1, Thursday, 1 March 1711, by Addison.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2nd edn 1968), p. 232.

  6 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 3, no. 367, Thursday, 1 May 1712, by Addison.

  7 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 46, Monday, 23 April 1711, by Addison.

  8 Richard Steele, Dedication to The Drummer, ‘To Mr Congreve’, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), pp. 505ff.

  9 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 221, Tuesday, 13
November 1711, by Addison.

  10 Ibid., vol. 3, no. 304, Monday, 18 February 1712, by Steele.

  11 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 2, Friday, 2 March 1711, by Steele.

  12 Ibid.

  13 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 2, Friday, 2 March 1711, by Steele.

  14 C. S. Lewis, ‘Addison’, Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1945), p. 3.

  15 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 3, no. 422, Friday, 4 July 1712, by Steele.

  16 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 9, Saturday, 10 March 1711, by Addison.

  17 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 72, Wednesday, 23 May 1711, by Addison.

  18 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, 12 January 1711.

  19 Steele's fulsome dedication to Halifax in the fourth volume of the collected Tatler, published three days later, was a defiant statement of Whig solidarity with the founder of the Bank of England and the New East India Company. Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, ‘To Charles Montagu Baron Halifax’ (1712).

  20 Abel Boyer, History of the Life and Reign of Queen Anne (1722), p. 496.

  21 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 124, Monday, 23 July 1711, by Addison.

  22 Ibid.

  23 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 10, Monday, 12 March 1711, by Addison.

  24 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 512, Friday, 17 October 1712, by Addison.

  25 Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), p. 150.

  26 In later years, Tonson said Addison was ‘so eager to be the first name’ among writers that he and Steele ‘used to run down even Dryden's character as far as they could’. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966), no. 814; Jacob Tonson also told Spence that Addison, envious of Dryden's laurels, used ‘to decry Dryden, as far as he could, while Pope and Congreve defended him’. Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), p. 540.

  27 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 262, Monday, 31 December 1711, by Addison.

  28 Ibid., no. 288, Wednesday, 30 January 1712, by Steele.

  29 Letter of 1714 from an English merchant reader in Sumatra, Joseph Collet, saying that, after the Bible and John Locke, The Spectator and The Tatler were ‘my constant Companions’. Town-Talk, no. 7, Friday, 27 January 1716.

  30 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 4, Monday, 5 March 1711, by Steele.

  31 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 10, Monday, 12 March 1711, by Addison.

  32 Addison answers a letter from a 13-year-old girl who is deciding whether she should marry a ‘Mr Shapely’. Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 475, Thursday, 4 September 1712, by Addison.

  33 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 10, Monday, 12 March 1711, by Addison.

  34 Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1941), no. 11, Addison to Charles Montagu, from Blois, December 1699.

  35 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 135, Saturday, 4 August 1711, by Addison.

  36 The traits that Langford identifies as key to the English character, by the general agreement of foreigners and the English themselves between 1650 and 1850: Energy, Candour, Decency, Taciturnity, Reserve, Eccentricity. Paul Langford, Englishness Identified, Manners and Character 1650–1850 (Oxford, 2000), p. 15.

  37 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 126, Wednesday, 25 July 1711, by Addison.

  38 Ibid., vol. 5, no. 600, Wednesday, 29 September 1714, by Addison.

  39 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 495, Saturday, 27 September 1712, by Addison.

  40 Ibid., vol. 4, no. 557, Monday, 21 June 1714, by Addison (quoting Archbishop Tillotson); Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2000), p. 10.

  41 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 119, Tuesday, 17 July 1711, by Addison.

  42 Robert Sackville-West, Knole (London, 1998), p. 74; ‘As good Nature is said…to belong more particularly to the ENGLISH than any other Nation, it may again be said that it belonged more particularly to the late Earl of DORSET than to any other ENGLISH Man.’ Dedication to the Right Honorable Lionel, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Poems on Several Occasions (1718).

  43 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 119, Tuesday, 17 July 1711, by Addison.

  44 C. S. Lewis, ‘Addison’, Essays on the Eighteenth Century Presented to David Nichol Smith in Honour of his Seventieth Birthday (Oxford, 1945), p. 7.

  45 The Guardian, no. 38, Friday, 24 April 1713.

  46 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), p. 188, Congreve to John Dennis, 11 August 1695.

  47 Town-Talk, in a letter to a Lady in the Country, no. 1, Saturday, 17 December 1715.

  48 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 53, Tuesday, 1 May 1711, by Steele.

  49 Ibid.

  50 Ibid., vol. 5, no. 467, Tuesday, 26 August 1712, author unknown.

  51 William Congreve, ‘Concerning Humour in Comedy’, Congreve to John Dennis, 10 July 1695.

  52 William Congreve, Amendments to Mr Collier's False and imperfect citations (1698); Sister Rose Anthony, The Jeremy Collier Stage Controversy 1698–1726 (Milwaukee, Wis., 1937), p. 112.

  53 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 169, Thursday, 13 September 1711, by Addison.

  54 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 6, Wednesday, 7 March 1711, by Steele.

  55 Ibid., vol. 3, no. 292, Monday, 4 February 1712, author unknown.

  56 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 29, Tuesday, 3 April 1711, by Addison.

  57 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 45, Saturday, 21 April 1711, by Addison; vol. 2, no. 208, Monday, 19 October 1711, by Steele; vol. 5, no. 502, Monday, 6 October 1712, by Steele.

  58 Ibid., vol. 3, no. 360, Wednesday, 23 April 1712, by Steele.

  59 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 58, Monday, 7 May 1711, by Addison.

  60 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 62, Friday, 11 May 1711, by Addison.

  61 Ibid., vol. 3, no. 409, Thursday, 19 June 1712, by Addison.

  62 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 70, Monday, 21 May 1711, by Addison.

  63 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 85, Thursday, 7 June 1711, by Addison.

  64 Ibid., vol. 3, no. 369, Saturday, 3 May 1712, by Addison.

  65 Ibid., vol. 2, no. 160, Monday, 3 September 1711, by Addison.

  66 Ibid., vol. 5, no. 592, Friday, 10 September 1714, by Addison.

  67 Ibid., vol. 3, no. 419, Tuesday, 1 July 1712, by Addison.

  68 Abraham Cowley quoted in ibid., vol. 1, no. 123, Saturday, 21 July 1711, by Addison.

  69 This absence may be evidence of their close daily contact, making letters unnecessary. It is probably also, however, evidence of Addison's discretion. He and Steele probably ‘culled’ their correspondence, indeed almost obliterated it, just as Addison recommended a man should ‘cull’ his comments for public consumption. Ibid., vol. 2, no. 225, Saturday, 17 November 1711, by Addison.

  70 Richard Steele, Dedication to The Drummer ‘To Mr Congreve’, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), pp. 505ff.

  71 Ibid.

  72 Joseph Addison, ‘When All Thy Mercies, O My God’ (1712).

  73 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 68, Friday, 18 May 1711, by Addison.

  74 Ibid., vol. 2, no. 225, Saturday, 17 November 1711, by Addison.

  75 Ibid., vol. 1, no. 68, Friday, 18 May 1711, by Addison.

  76 In summer 1711, Addison confided to Edward Wortley Montagu that in the past year he had lost both a fortune and an unnamed mistress. This is the sole, tantalizing reference to Addison having a premarital sex life, though he may have been using the term ‘mistress’ in its chivalric sense, merely referring to some blip in his protracted, platonic courtship of the Countess of Warwick. This letter suggests Wortley Montagu was more
of a ‘bosom friend’ to Addison than any of the Kit-Cats, even Steele. Walter Graham (ed.), The Letters of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1941), no. 321, Addison to Edward Wortley, 21 July 1711.

  77 Richard Steele quoted in Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905 edn), vol. 2, entry on Addison.

  78 Richard Steele, Preface affixed to vol. 4 of the collected Tatler (1710–11), as reprinted in Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (Oxford, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 3–5.

  79 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 10, Monday, 12 March 1711, by Addison.

  80 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905 edn), vol. 2, entry on Addison.

  81 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 521, Tuesday, 28 October 1712, by Steele.

  82 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero, quoted in The Englishman, ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford, 1955), vol. 1, no. 48, Saturday, 23 January 1714, by Steele.

  83 The first surviving manuscript reference to the project dates from June 1703, when Vanbrugh told Tonson that the Kit-Cats had not ‘finished their pictures’ though ‘to excuse them (as well as myself) Sir Godfrey has been most in fault. The fool has got a country house near Hampton Court and is so busy about fitting it up (to receive nobody) that there is no getting him to work.’ Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 3, 15 June 1703, Vanbrugh to Tonson. Tonson owned a Kneller portrait of Dorset, the Kit-Cat founder, dated no later than 1697. It is of Kit-Cat dimensions, and may have been the first in the series, painted soon after the Club began. It may, alternatively, have been the model for the series, after Kit-Cat friends admired it at Tonson's house. Tonson may also have owned a 1698 Kneller portrait of Dryden, which is of similar, though not identical, pose. United by admir ation for Dryden and Dorset, the Kit-Cat authors would have liked to be painted in imitation of them. The precedent for Kneller's Kit-Cats as a series was probably his earlier half-length portraits of scholars and poets (Dryden, Prior, Locke, [Joseph] Carreras and Newton), or his portraits of the Royal Society's Fellows. After Dorset's possible 1697 starting point, the next Kit-Cat painted (though originally a slightly larger portrait) was the gourmand Dartiquenave, dated to 1702. The last single portraits—of Tonson, Pulteney and Scarbrough—were completed in 1717, then one final double portrait of two late members in 1721. The dating of most of the portraits in the series is approximate. Badges of office and medals of honour provide clues in some cases, the names pencilled on the backs suggest certain men were painted before gaining certain titles, and art experts have used stylistic and other internal evidence to propose estimated dates for others. A certain off-white powdering of the wigs tells us, for example, which were painted after 1715. Tonson's papers confirm the dates of others.