RSS

Contact us

Friday 5 December 2008

The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation

Where statesmen and authors met

Blair Worden reviews Ophelia Field's latest book

What a wonderful subject Ophelia Field has found, and how adroitly she has handled it. In the Kit-Cat Club, the coterie of Whig writers and politicians that began in the last years of the 17th century and lasted into George I’s reign, she finds both a mirror and a source of great movements of taste and power. The club’s founder was the cultivated publisher Jacob Tonson, who gathered and fed his authors at the Cat and Fiddle in Gray’s Inn Lane (‘kat’ being slang for a small fiddle). Swelling numbers impelled a move to more spacious quarters, and eventually to a property in Barnes which was converted for the club’s purposes by Vanbrugh, who with his fellow-playwright and rival Congreve was one of the initial luminaries. Addison and Steele soon joined them.

Born of a literary impulse, the club rapidly acquired a political one. In the first age of entrenched political parties, Whigs and Tories fought out the issues of crown and parliament, of church and state, and of war and peace, that had been bequeathed or created by the Revolution of 1688. Whig noblemen and Cabinet members — Somers, Montagu, Wharton, Walpole — were as prominent in the club as the writers to whom they gave jobs and money, and through whom they sought, amid the frequent and bitter electoral contests of the age, to give their party’s values and policies roots in public opinion. There were Kit-Cat members everywhere, on the back benches, among electoral agents, on embassies, in Dublin. When, on either side of Queen Anne’s death in 1714, the principles of the Revolution were imperilled, the club prepared to summon the nation to arms in its defence. But once the Hanoverian oligarchy was entrenched, and the Whigs had divided the spoils, the Kit-Cat withered.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved