Club existed at the threshold between aristocratic and professional writing, and so developed a form of collective patronage for literary production that was suited to both. I was first drawn to the Kit-Cat authors by the fact that theirs were hardworking writing lives, supplemented by day-jobs and by a sense of wider public duty. I was curious to examine creative lives unprejudiced by the later Romantic cult of the artist, which still has us largely in its thrall.
Richard Steele once called for readers of his paper, The Spectator, to send in descriptions of their working lives, to ‘give a lively Image of the Chain and mutual Dependence of Human Society’. This book traces the chain of dependency that connected the Club's writers and patrons; at times, researching it felt like drawing one of those diagrams in magazines showing how everyone successful in British culture is privately linked to everyone else. As an exposé of such connections, this is also a book about class in Britain. As an immigrant to Britain myself, I share the Kit-Cats' interest in the nature of ‘Englishness’, particularly the origins of the London elite that defines itself by education and cultural appreciation, while my own lack of strong national identity means that those who hold strong communitarian values, whether in relation to a club or a country, always intrigue me.
To write a book about the Kit-Cat Club is to describe a fabulous conversation extending over two decades, not one word of which is reliably recorded. Many of Jacob Tonson's papers were pulped by the 1940s. Addison asked that most of his personal letters be destroyed, and his correspondence with Steele seems to have suffered this fate. Robert Walpole destroyed many of his personal papers and ordered the confiscation and destruction of many left by other Kit-Cat politicians. William Pulteney destroyed papers that might have shed light on the Club's final days. There is, moreover, no surviving rule or minute book for the Kit-Cat Club. Not one regular diarist has emerged from among its members. The Club's authors seldom wrote autobiographically, and when they did, they rarely described interior worlds or private feelings. In this sense, however, a group biography is an apt form for a book about the Kit-Cats: they believed creative forces came from the ‘commerce’ or ‘intercourse’ between men's minds, as opposed to later beliefs in subconscious, individual sources of creativity. They believed that their Club was more, in other words, than the sum of its parts.
Viewing each life through the lens of the Kit-Cat Club is necessarily selective, as every man had many personal and professional relationships, and intellectual influences, unconnected with the Club. While I have occasionally mentioned the most important non-members so as not to skew the historical record, it has been impossible to give every non-Kit-Cat patron, relation, colleague and friend his or her full biographical due. I hope the champions of these figures will forgive me.
Note on Dates, Money, Spelling and Punctuation
Before the English calendar changed in 1752, New Year's Day was 25 March. To avoid confusion for modern readers, all dates in this book, unless indicated, take 1 January as the beginning of the new year, such that a date which would have been ‘5 February 1699’, for example, is given here as ‘5 February 1700’. In addition, the ‘Old Style’ (Julian) calendar was ten or eleven days behind the ‘New Style’ (Gregorian) calendar used on the Continent. Unless otherwise stated, all dates are Old Style.
I have often followed an original value in pounds, shillings and pence (or guineas) with an approximation of its relative purchasing power today, though such calculations are notoriously problematic.
I have followed modern usage with respect to spelling and punctuation, but—to keep a dash of original flavour—not always with respect to capitalization. Abbreviated words have been expanded in all instances except titles of printed works, or where poetic metre demands.
I have also, for the sake of efficiency, used a number of modern words that did not exist in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, such as ‘journalist’, ‘scientist’ or ‘publisher’ (Addison was the first to use the word ‘editor’ in its modern sense in 1712).
PROLOGUE DRYDEN'S FUNERAL, MAY 1700
Thy Wars brought nothing about;
Thy Lovers were all untrue. 'Tis well an Old Age is out, And time to begin a New.
JOHN DRYDEN, Secular Masque (1700)
ON A WARM London afternoon, 13 May 1700, a crowd of mourners assembled beneath the turret and weathercock of the Royal College of Physicians, then a handsome brick building on the west side of Warwick Lane, near Newgate Prison. They were attending the funeral of former Poet Laureate, John Dryden. Among the writers, actors, musicians, patrons, politicians and publishers gathering to pay tribute to the man generally acknowledged as the greatest writer and critic of his generation were over a dozen members of a controversial dining society known as the Kit-Cat Club.
One of Dryden's patrons, Kit-Cat member Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, had earlier arranged for Dryden's embalmed body to be exhumed from the local churchyard of St Anne's in Soho, so that it could be reburied, with due pomp and ceremony, in Westminster Abbey. The Kit-Cat Club financed this second funeral at the suggestion of Dr Samuel Garth, another of the Club's members, who was both Dryden's personal physician and one of his literary disciples. Any of the aristocratic Kit-Cats with good credit could have single-handedly paid the funeral's bill, totalling only £45. 17s. (or around £5,500 today), but by transforming the occasion into a communal gesture the Club was demonstrating its generosity and good literary taste to Londoners. Though both Whigs and Tories attended the funeral, no public occasion could take place in the 1700s without one of these two political parties attempting to dominate it, and in this case the Tories resentfully acknowledged that the Kit-Cats were posthumously appropriating Dryden to their distinctively Whig narrative of English literature.
At four o'clock, Dr Garth and the other Fellows descended from the oak-panelled Censors' room on the Royal College's first floor to host a drinks reception, with music and ‘funeral baked meats’,1 for the assembled mourners. Garth, who wore a distinctive red cloak, delivered a Latin oration that offended several attendees for being addressed to the ‘great god Apollo’.2 Such an unchristian oration cleverly avoided the issue that the man whom the Kit-Cats were about to bury in an Anglican abbey had died a Catholic. One of Garth's literary enemies claimed the physician delivered the oration standing on a rotten beer barrel that collapsed halfway through. This slap-stick moment was probably a fabrication, however, since another anti-Kit-Cat observer, who said Garth ‘threw away some words and a great deal of false Latin’, fails to mention it.3
At five o'clock, the coffin—containing the body wrapped in a flannel shift, tied at the feet like a fishtail and packed in bundles of rosemary—was loaded into a horse-drawn hearse adorned with black feathers. Eight musicians in mourning scarves led the procession playing crape-covered oboes and trumpets. At the head of the cortège walked the College beadles, carrying staves. There were three other funeral coaches, one carrying Dryden's widow and son. Over fifty private coaches followed behind.
Departing the Royal College's forecourt, they processed down Warwick Lane and Ludgate Hill, passing the Fleet, a former tributary of the Thames that had dried into a fetid ditch. The carriages following the hearse became entangled with several ‘moveable Bawdy-houses’ (prostitutes in hackney coaches) as they passed Chancery Lane,4 the passengers bracing themselves as horses reared and carriages lurched against one another on the cobbles. The jam then cleared as they slowly proceeded west along the Strand, where gaps between the buildings offered glimpses of the equally traffic-clogged Thames below. At the hour Dryden's cortège passed, the Thames would have been at low tide, revealing the large mud-brown beach onto which shoeless children and scrap collectors were able to wander unimpeded, no embankments yet having been built. The procession finally turned down Whitehall, past the higgledy-piggledy buildings of Old Westminster Palace, towards the Abbey. In the surrounding streets, crowds gathered