Where statesmen and authors met

In the prose style of Addison and Steele’s The Spectator, which was founded in 1711, Field finds ‘a flower grown from the bed of Kit-Cat conversation’. ‘The Spectator Club’, introduced to readers in the second issue, no doubt owed something to the Kit-Cat. But the periodical’s sober insistence on the virtues of non-partisanship sets it apart from the Kit-Cat’s world. For there is an element of circularity to Field’s thesis. If you place an institution at the centre of a nation’s history, the history can soon look as if it centred on it. What people who were members of the Kit-Cat did in their lives is not necessarily the same as what they did because they were members of it. But if Field’s history has its forgivable distortions, it is an excellent way not only into its subject but into the social and political setting to which she determinedly relates it.

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