16 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 3, no. 349, Thursday, 10 April 1712, by Addison.
17 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Tatler (Oxford, 1987), vol. 1, no. 11, Thursday, 5 May 1709.
18 John Loftis (ed.), Richard Steele's ‘The Theatre’ (Oxford, 1962), no. 12, 9 February 1720.
19 Ibid.
20 As the comedy had flopped when first performed, some discerned subconscious hostility for the reattributed reprint, but if so, it was a strange sort of revenge: the revelation of Addison's name meant the play sold out and was successfully revived on the stage for years afterwards.
21 Dedication in the 2nd edition of The Drummer (1722) To Mr Congreve, in Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), pp. 505ff.
22 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 2, no. 253, Thursday, 20 December 1711, by Addison.
23 Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1968 edn), p. 424.
24 BL Add MS 5,145C, Steele to Lady Steele, 24 September 1717 (Blanchard no. 582).
25 BL Add MS 32,700, ff.211–13, Newcastle (at Claremont) to Lord Hardwicke, 14 October 1739.
26 Richard Steele, The State of the Case between the Lord Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household and the Governor of the Royal Company of Comedians (1720).
27 John Loftis (ed.), Richard Steele's ‘The Theatre’ (Oxford, 1962), no. 28, Tuesday, 5 April 1720.
28 Rae Blanchard (ed.), The Correspondence of Richard Steele (Oxford, 1968 edn), no. 170, Steele to the Duke of Newcastle, February 1720 or 1721.
29 In August 1717, John Law, an Englishman favoured by the French Regent, formed the Company of the West, later known as the Mississippi Company. It held the rights to trade between France and the French colony of Louisiana (encompassing today's Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota and parts of Canada), and also to mine and farm Louisiana. Law met many Kit-Cats in London, in 1714, including Steele (who tried to interest him in the Fishpool) and, it seems likely, Jacob Tonson. In 1717, Tonson decided to invest in Law's Mississippi Company. The recent diplomatic entente between France and Britain meant that investment in a French company was no longer unpatriotic. While Tonson was with Law in Paris in 1719, the Mississippi Company merged with the French East India and China Company to create a global trading conglomerate. The Mississippi Company's stocks immediately jumped, and by December 1719 were trading at twenty times their 1717 price. It proved lucky that a severe fever prolonged Tonson's Paris stay until 1720. It meant he was there to receive a tip-off from John Law that the Mississippi Company bubble was about to burst.
30 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, 4 vols (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 114, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 29 November 1719.
31 Kathleen M. Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Knoxville, Tenn., 1971), p. 164.
32 HMC, Bayfordbury MSS, p. 71, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 18 February 1720.
33 John Loftis (ed.), Richard Steele's ‘The Theatre’ (Oxford, 1962), no. 17, Saturday, 27 February 1720. In another issue, Steele went so far as to accuse the government of being a bunch of crooks (‘Highway-Men’) operating with impunity (ibid., no. 20, 8 March 1720).
34 Ray A. Kelch, Newcastle, a Duke without Money: Thomas Pelham-Holles 1693–1768 (London, 1974), p. 54.
35 John Loftis (ed.), Richard Steele's ‘The Theatre’ (Oxford, 1962), no. 17, Saturday, 27 February 1720.
36 BL Add MS 35,854, f.99, William Cowper's Diary.
37 The former Lord President, asked to make way for Townshend, was the ageing Kit-Cat Duke of Kingston, who went back to being Lord of the Privy Seal, remaining so until his death.
38 The South Sea Company survived the crash and continued to pay out low but steady dividends, so that Vanbrugh reinvested and received an income from the Company (profits directly from the slave trade), which ultimately supported his widow.
39 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (London, 1879 edn), p. 285.
40 Wharton's son Philip was the most dramatic example of a wayward son, far exceeding his father's much-exaggerated reputation as an atheist and libertine. Philip was a precocious child, raised to deliver orations before his father's friends. Addison took a particular interest in the boy's education during the years when Wharton was Addison's electoral patron in Malmesbury. At 16, Philip broke his father's heart by eloping with an unsuitable woman. Failing to annul the marriage, Wharton sent the boy, with a Huguenot escort, to study in Geneva. Philip's ultra-Whig father did not live to see him then escape Geneva to join the Jacobite Court in France. After George I's accession, Philip switched his allegiance back to the Whigs and in 1717 took up a seat in the Irish Lords. The King gave him his dukedom in January 1718, hoping it might fix his political loyalties to the Court; Philip entered the English Lords upon his majority in December 1719. The following year, Philip founded the ‘HellFire Club’ in London. This was a club of Whig gentlemen, but one where debauched women were admitted. Orgies and satanic rituals at the Hell-Fire were the alleged spawn of the sedate Kit-Cat toasting rituals. To contemporaries, the Hell-Fire Club sounded like one of Ned Ward's fictional inventions; although reports were exaggerated, they were based on some genuinely dissolute behaviour and the Club's reputation provided much-needed distraction for the scandalized reading public after the South Sea crisis. Not to be confused with the similar Hell-Fire Club later formed by Sir Francis Dashwood, offshoots and namesakes of this Club survived right into the twentieth century. Aligned with the first clique to oppose Walpole after 1721—a ‘Country Whig’ (anti-corruption) grouping led by Lord Cowper—Philip prepared for the 1722 election by hosting a series of balls and lavish suppers in York in the summer of 1721, which Vanbrugh attended while staying at Castle Howard. One famous ‘diabolical masquerade’ held at Somerset House in London prompted a royal proclamation in April 1721 for the suppression of Hell-Fire Club meetings.
41 Walpole undermined the credibility of witnesses testifying to the Commons against Sunderland, and so obtained his former enemy's acquittal. Sunderland at first remained in office, but was so politically weakened by owing this debt to Walpole, and so personally weakened by the damage to his reputation, that he resigned after a month. He nonetheless retained an important Household Office with access to the King.
42 Calhoun Winton, Sir Richard Steele MP (Baltimore, Md., 1970), p. 170; Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole's Poets: The Use of Literature as Pro-Government Propaganda, 1721–1742 (Newark, NJ, 1999), p. 28.
43 Prince of Wales to Lord Hervey, quoted in Fran Beauman, The Pineapple (London, 2005), pp. 88–9.
44 Denys Sutton, ‘The faire majestic Paradise of Stowe’, Apollo 97 (1973), p. 542.
45 William Congreve, ‘Of Pleasing’ (1700).
46 HMC, Bayfordbury MSS, p. 70, MS of William Congreve, ‘Of Improving the Present Time’ (1729).
47 Denys Sutton, ‘The faire majestic Paradise of Stowe’, Apollo 97 (1973), p. 542.
48 Nicholas Rowe, The Reconcilement between Jacob Tonson and Mr Congreve (1707).
49 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 102, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 1 July 1719.
50 Denys Sutton, ‘The faire majestic Paradise of Stowe’, Apollo 97 (1973), p. 544.
51 Many buildings Vanbrugh designed for Stowe were completed after the architect's death, and many were altered or destroyed as the gardens were continuously remodelled over the next century.
52 Tim Richardson, The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden (London, 2007), p. 58.
53 Horace, Second Epode.
54 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 1, no. 94, Monday, 18 June 1711, by Addison.
55 HMC, Bayfordbury MSS, p. 70, MS of William Congreve, ‘Of Improving the Present Time’ (1729).
56 Madeleine Bingham, Masks and Façades: Sir John Vanbrugh, the Man and his Setting (London,
1974), p. 321.
57 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 127, Vanbrugh to Lord Carlisle, June 1721.
58 Bodleian, MS Eng Letters c.129, f.127.
59 The Weekly Pacquet, 9 July 1720.
60 HMC, Bath MSS, vol. 3, p. 469, Robert Arbuthnot to Matthew Prior, 28 September 1719.
61 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 139, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 18 June 1722.
62 Anon., A Letter to a Buttonian K***** from Sir James Baker, admirer-general of the fair sex and late secretary of the toasts of the Kit-Cat Club (1718). ‘Sir James’ was a fictional narrator and pseudonym used by John Gay the previous year when he helped Pulteney and Walpole attack General Cadogan's financial probity. This 1718 piece is therefore also likely by Gay.
63 The sender, an Oxford poet, says he will understand if his submission is rejected by ‘the Club’ and neither Tonson nor his nephew are known to have belonged to any other club besides the Kit-Cat. BL MS 28,275, f. 82, Dr Abel Evans to Tonson, 18 January 1719.
64 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 165, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 12 August 1725.
65 Ibid., no. 168, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 25 October 1725.
66 Laurence Whistler, Vanbrugh's biographer, claimed that the surviving Kit-Cats did actually get together in November 1725, but the evidence is unclear; Sarah Lewis Carol Clapp (ed.), Jacob Tonson in Ten Letters by and about Him (Austin, Tex., 1948), Jacob Tonson to Jacob Tonson Jr, 22 April 1728, speaks of planning to go to Bath where he will meet ‘my most worthy friend Mr Congreve’.
67 BL Add MS 32,992, f.340, Tonson to Newcastle.
68 BL Add MS 28,275, f.110, Newcastle to Tonson.
69 Sarah Lewis Carol Clapp (ed.), Jacob Tonson in Ten Letters by and about Him (Austin, Tex., 1948), Jacob Tonson to Jacob Tonson Jr, 29 April 1728.
70 Ibid., Dr William Oliver to Dr Alexander Small, 5 July 1732.
71 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966 edn), vol. 1, no. 118.
72 Swift and Pope's joint Preface to their Miscellanies (1727), quoted in Bernard Harris, Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1967), p. 36.
73 Geoffrey Webb and Bonamy Dobrée (eds), The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927–8), vol. 4, no. 168, Vanbrugh to Tonson, 25 October 1725.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 The Weekly Journal quoted in Kerry Downes, Sir John Vanbrugh: A Biography (London, 1987), p. 3.
77 Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753).
78 BL Add MS 33,064, Newcastle Papers, 30 July 1723 (Blanchard no. 1 to no. 626—misdated).
79 George Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1956), vol. 2, p. 133, Pope to John Gay, 11 September 1722.
80 Lord Wharncliffe (ed.), The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (London, 1861), vol. 1, p. 472, Lady Mary to the Countess of Mar, 1723.
81 Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753).
82 Henrietta paid for Congreve's monument in the Abbey, and it was probably the wax or clay model for this effigy, a bust of the author, that she asked if she could keep at home. This may be the source of the lewd story in The Daily Post and The Amorous Duchess: or, Her Grace Grateful (1733) that she had a wax model of her dead lover made to take to bed—a slur James Boswell repeated in The London Journal years later, describing the Duchess dining with her wax surrogate at the Godolphins' table.
83 Sarah Lewis Carol Clapp (ed.), Jacob Tonson in Ten Letters by and about Him (Austin, Tex., 1948), Jacob Tonson to Jacob Tonson Jr, 3 February 1729.
84 National Archives, PROB 1/103, Charles Wilson [Edmund Curll], Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Amours of William Congreve Esq (1730).
85 David Thomas, William Congreve (London, 1992), p. 12.
86 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford, 1966 edn), no. 798.
87 John C. Hodges (ed.), William Congreve: Letters and Documents (London, 1964), p. 241, Alexander Pope to John Gay, 1728/9.
88 BL Add MSS 28,275, f.491, Samuel Croxall to Jacob Tonson Jr, 10 March 1733.
89 Sarah Lewis Carol Clapp (ed.), Jacob Tonson in Ten Letters by and about Him (Austin, Tex., 1948), pp. 4–5, Pope to Lord Oxford, 1731.
90 BL Add MS 28,275, f.491, Samuel Croxall to Tonson Junior, 10 March 1733.
91 Croxall's hand may match that on the undated and incomplete ‘Account of the Kitt-Catt Club’ in the Tonson Papers of the NPG, though in BL letters he writes ‘Kit-Cat’ and in the NPG MS the writer spells it ‘Kitt-Catt’.
92 ‘Upon News of Jacob Tonson's Death’, The Gentleman's Magazine, no. 6 (1736), p. 106.
93 Ibid., p. 168.
94 Edmond Malone (ed.), Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (London, 1800), p. 537 n. 3. When Jacob Junior died four months before his uncle, on 15 November 1735, he described himself in his will as a bookseller, bookbinder, stationer and a printer in partnership with J. Watts. See also National Archives, PROB 10/7376/6.
95 Ibid.
96 See, for example, Prof. Walter Raleigh on Tonson having seized on the ‘many rotten corpses…before they were cold, and commemorated them in batches’, as quoted in Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper (London, 2002), p. 18.
XX LATER CLUBS AND KIT-CATS
1 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 5, no. 553, Thursday, 4 December 1712, by Addison.
2 The Garrick Club official website.
3 Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker (New York, 1975), p. 44.
4 David Piper, Catalogue of Seventeenth-Century Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery (Cambridge, 1963), p. 399 n. 4, quoting the will of Jacob Junior, 1735: ‘whereas I have lately at some Expence Erected an Edifice or Building at Barnes wherein the said collection of the Kit-Cat pictures are now placed’; NPG, Tonson Papers: the 1730s bills for the clubroom's construction and reframing of the pictures survive, as does a plan of how the pictures were hung by Jacob Junior. The majority of the aristocrats and patrons were at eye-level and the writers hung higher up, harder to see. The idealized society of equals was already, within a generation, being undercut by Jacob Junior's reflexive deference to rank.
5 NPG Catalogue, with introduction by Miss Mary Ransome (London, 1945), p. 4.
6 Unsourced newspaper clipping in the Tonson Papers, NPG.
7 It shows two figures (denoting concord): a Britannia-like woman on the left, standing in front of a lyre (symbol of lyric poetry and music), holding a spear (denoting pre-eminence and command) and with a caduceus (symbol of commerce) over her helmet; and on the right, a man, probably meant to be Mars the god of war, holding a dagger. At their feet lies Pegasus, symbol of the creative/poetic/intellectual spirit overcoming the impediments of the world, and hence of immortality, and other emblems of the arts, abundance and plentiful generosity. Over their heads shines the sun of enlightenment and power, (in some versions) with a moon inside its orb. Inside the shield that the two figures flank, instead of Faber's text, it says simply ‘[The] Kit-Cat Club, 1703’.
8 The nightclub in Goodbye to Berlin and I Am a Camera was named ‘the Lady Windemere’. Peter Parker, Isherwood's biographer, has been unable to find a real nightclub in Berlin called either by this name or ‘the Kit-Cat Club’.
9 Roger Fitzgerald, Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862–1969 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 339.
EPILOGUE: LEGACIES
1 Donald F. Bond (ed.), The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), vol. 4, no. 583, Friday, 20 August 1714, by Addison.
2 Eustace Budgell quoted in Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford, 1968 edn), p. 457.
3 Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, no. 35, Friday, 20 April 1716.
4 Steele a
nd Vanbrugh received no such attention from Curll—the first having had the ‘egotism’ (a term Addison coined from the French in relation to memoirists) to publish his Apology for Himself in 1714.
5 Dr Johnson claimed Steele tried betrothing Elizabeth to the young poet Richard Savage, whom Steele had taken under his wing, though Steele lacked the cash to play patron. On one occasion, as if he missed the collaboration with Addison and was looking for a surrogate, Steele took Savage to write a pamphlet in a Hyde Park tavern, Savage transcribing Steele's dictation, while they enjoyed a meal. When the dinner and pamphlet were finished, Steele explained that the pamphlet must be sold to pay for the meal. Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1753). Note also that a play called Richard Savage by J. M. Barrie and H. B. Marriot was performed at the Criterion Theatre in spring 1891, the third act of which took place with Steele at a meeting of the Kit-Cat Club.
6 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905 edn), vol. 2, entry on Addison.
7 Ibid., entry on Garth.
8 Dr Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets (London, 1781), ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1905), vol. 2, p. 208.
9 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 330.
10 Ibid., entry on Congreve.
11 Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (eds), Addison and Steele: The Critical Heritage (London, 1980), p. 33.
12 Ibid., p. 74.
13 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London, 1819), p. 190, Lecture V.
14 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1799–1850).
15 Lord Byron, Don Juan (1823), Canto XIII.
16 A group portrait of a male tea party in the 1690s, attributed to John Closterman or Kneller, was exhibited at the Exhibition of National Portraits at Kensington in 1867 with the label of ‘The Kit-Cat Club’. Today experts think it much more likely to be a picture of key members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners. The nineteenth-century confusion in captioning has a nice irony, since the Kit-Cats tried to perform exactly this trick: co-opting and absorbing the public backlash against the licentiousness of the Restoration Court. They tried to show that self-reform and self-censorship could be done with more conviviality and panache and less sobriety than Jeremy Collier or the Society for the Reformation of Manners demanded.
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