OPHELIA FIELD
The Kit-Cat Club
To Paul, and the other members of the Second Hungarian Literary Society
All the good talk over the pies and wine, Congreve's wit, Wharton's fascinating impudence, and Addison's quiet humour, is lost forever without record. The Kit-Cat had no Boswell.
G. M. TREVELYAN, The Times, 10 March 1945
Persons in great Station have seldom their true Characters drawn till several Years after their Deaths. Their personal Friendships and Enmities must cease, and the Parties they were engaged in be at an end…[I]f an English Man considers the great Ferment into which our Political World is thrown at present, and how intensively it is heated in all its parts, he cannot suppose that it will cool again in less than three hundred Years.
JOSEPH ADDISON, The Spectator, no. 101, 25 June 1711
Remember that a free State is only a more numerous and more powerful Club…
SIR WILLIAM JONES, The Principles of Government, in a Dialogue between a Scholar and a Peasant, 1783
Table of Contents
Prologue - Dryden's Funeral, May 1700
Chapter II - Friendships Formed
Chapter III - The Scent of the Pie-Oven
Chapter IV - The Toast of the Town: A Kit-Cat Meeting, 1697
Chapter VII - The Whigs Go to War
Chapter VIII - Kit-Cat Connoisseurs
Chapter XI - Uneasy Unions: 1707
Chapter XIII - Ireland: Kit-Cat Colony
Chapter XIV - The Monopoly Broken: Whig Downfall
Chapter XV - In Their Own Image
Chapter XVII - Big Whigs: The First Georgians
Chapter XIX - The End of the Club
Chapter XX - Later Clubs and Kit-Cats
From the reviews of The Kit-Cat Club
A detailed chronology and other additional material may be found at www.opheliafield.com
THE KIT-CAT CLUB existed at a pivotal point in British history, and its members participated prominently in the cultural, constitutional and social revolutions of their times. The Kit-Cat Club's story can therefore be read as a study of how the political stability Britain experienced after 1720 was constructed and defended from the 1690s onwards. For over twenty years—from the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution in 1688, through two long and expensive wars against Catholic France, into the reign of George I after 1714—nearly all roads in British politics and culture led through the Kit-Cat Club, or took their direction in opposition to it.
That is the most objective explanation of why I wanted to write the first full biography of the Kit-Cat Club, but there were other reasons. This is, above all, a book about friendship. Having previously written on a female friendship in the early eighteenth century—the relationship between Queen Anne and her favourite, Sarah Churchill—I wanted to examine the more reticent but equally powerful male friendships of the same period. I was also interested in universal questions of how much we should be in business for ourselves, or how far we should be prepared to broker favours for friends, and nothing could better dramatize these dilemmas than the Kit-Cats' relationships with one another.
Of the fifty-odd Kit-Cat members, I have concentrated on a dozen, and within that dozen, on a literary quintet who are relatively well known today: Joseph Addison, William Congreve, Richard Steele, John Vanbrugh and the publisher Jacob Tonson. This is therefore also a book about being a writer. Those who look back to some hypothetical golden age, before commercialism corrupted the arts, will be consoled by how similar the anxieties