This was a period of great social anxiety, as boundaries between classes became increasingly blurred and the concept of gentility increasingly uncertain. In the seventeenth century, a ‘gentleman’ had been a man entitled to bear arms and with no need to work for a living, but by the 1690s gentility was becoming a more fluid matter of education, manners and taste. Outward indicators of a genteel education, such as the great private libraries of Somers and Montagu, could be imitated by anyone with money, as when a character in one of Vanbrugh's plays mocked the way gilt-covered books were valued as interior décor by the nouveau riche. Another Vanbrugh character was a ‘fake’ peer who purchased his peerage from the Crown for £10,000. To be a Kit-Cat, in this context, was to wear a badge of cultural honour that could not be faked or debased by imitation. For the first time, membership of a particular club became a recognized social credential.
It would be unfair, however, to describe the Kit-Cat Club as concerned only with preserving the reactionary cultural credit of the aristocracy in the face of entrepreneurial capitalism and social mobility. As would become clear in the following decade, the Club promoted a very particular, patriotic agenda, slicing through every art form, to raise the nation as a whole up to their cultural level, and for that they had to look outwards, far beyond their own charmed circle. Tonson's presses, pouring forth their texts for the literate public, were the first evidence of this engagement with the wider world.
It was not self-interest, self-improvement or civic duty that made these men leave their homes and go out to a tavern on a cold wet night, however, but rather a longing for relaxation, amusement and the sympathy of friends. The tasty wine and pies of Mr Cat and the enticingly warm wit of Congreve or Prior, were as crucial to the successful foundation of the Kit-Cat Club as any social or economic cost-benefit analysis at the back of its founders' minds.
IV THE TOAST OF THE TOWN: A KIT-CAT MEETING, 1697
We taught them how to toast, and rhyme, and bite, To sleep away the day, and drink away the night.
WILLIAM SHIPPEN, Faction Display'd (1704)
IN THE FADING light of a Thursday afternoon during the winter of 1697–8, the Kit-Cat members made their way—by foot, coroneted coach, carriage and swaying sedan chair—towards the Cat and Fiddle tavern in Gray's Inn, to attend a Club meeting that would end with an unusual visitor.
Tonson would have arrived early to ready the room. As a later Kit-Cat advised: ‘Upon all Meetings at Taverns, 'tis necessary some one of the Company should take it upon him to get all Things in such Order…such as hastening the Fire, getting a sufficient number of Candles, [and] tasting the Wine with a judicious Smack.’1
When the other members arrived, each bowed to the gathered company before being relieved of his outer jacket or cloak, hat, gloves, cane or sword by a waiting servant. Disrobing elegantly was an art, and Congreve mocked country bumpkins who went too far and pulled off their boots on such occasions.
It has been suggested that the Club's seating arrangements mimicked an Oxbridge college dining hall, with a ‘high table’ for the grandest nobles and lower tables at right angles for everyone else, but it is more likely that such a sharp distinction between aristocrats and wits was deliberately avoided, to the mutual flattery of both. The Club's presidential pride of place, a wooden ‘elbow chair’ (armchair) at one end of the table, was occupied not by the Club's highest ranking peer, but by Tonson, while Matt Prior mentions that it was unnecessary to sit in one's seat for the duration of a Kit-Cat meal.
The diners first washed their hands in a basin, then the highest ranking member said grace. In 1697, this was the Duke of Somerset, Charles Seymour, the second highest ranking peer in the kingdom. He was a vastly wealthy and notoriously proud man, who spoke with an affected lisp and had once disowned his daughter when he awoke from a nap and caught her seated in his presence. Only 35 in 1697, however, such caricaturish excesses lay ahead of him. Somerset was at this time renovating his stately home of Petworth in Sussex, where he and his wife had spent the preceding summer, and he was the Chancellor of Cambridge University, responsible for re-establishing that university's press. Tonson's firm was collaborating with it to produce a series of Cambridge classics: a canon-forming list first shaped by Dryden and, after Dryden's death, by the Kit-Cats. Somerset may also have been personally responsible for Montagu receiving the title of High Steward of Cambridge University earlier in the year.
By now the Club had expanded beyond the first huddle of friends before Mr Cat's pie-oven, though it is uncertain whether it had already reached its later cap of thirty-nine members. Certainly a number of other dukes and earls had been admitted, and after Somerset finished the grace, these nobles were first to offer their plates to the carving man. They also initiated all calls for wine throughout the meal. The Kit-Cats' belief that it was vulgar to over-emphasize such distinctions of rank, however, would have blunted many rules of 1690s etiquette, good English breeding showing itself ‘most where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least’.2 The very English prejudice by which the confidence to flout class divides is considered the sign of real class was just emerging.
Some class divisions were beyond flouting, however: a number of waiters—footmen brought by the guests mixed with ‘drawers’ from the tavern below—would have stood discreetly against the walls for long hours. These silent observers took their opinions of the Kit-Cat Club to their graves, but one such ‘Spectator of Gentlemen at Dinner for many Years’ complained how masters expected their servants to be sober and chaste when the masters themselves—with the advantages of education and property—could not exercise the same self-control.3
The waiters would have laid out the first course, including ‘pottages’ (stewy soups) and large joints of meat, before the Club members arrived. Dorset, in line with his other Restoration tastes, loved lavish banquets where diners ‘devour Fowl, Fish and Flesh; swallow Oil and Vinegar, Wines and Spices; throw down Salads of twenty different Herbs, Sauces of a hundred Ingredients, Confections and Fruits of numberless Sweets and Flavours’.4 By mid-winter, however, the contributions of game and fresh produce, brought to town at the end of the summer from the landed members' estates, would have been running out. If there were a separate dessert course, it would likely have involved fruit and nuts in preserving syrups, or a spiced rice pudding called a ‘whitepot’.
The vogue for decorative dishes in symmetrical or pyramidical shapes did not start until the latter part of the eighteenth century, so the Kit-Cat pies, with their decorative pastry, would have been the likely centrepieces. The menu almost certainly included native oysters, available then like sturgeon and lobster in cheap plenitude from the Thames. Fish, such as anchovy, was also used to make salty relishes to accompany meat, and passed around, like salt, on the tip of one's knife. Cutlery was just becoming commonplace, but using fingers and fingerbowls remained perfectly acceptable.
Eating the main meal of the day with friends in the mid-afternoon was an increasingly fashionable pastime, but also a civilizing duty. Only beasts, Epicurus taught them, dined alone. Congreve reflected that he disliked ‘seeing things that force me to entertain low thoughts of my Nature. I don't know how it is with others, but I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a Monkey without very Mortifying Reflections, though I never heard anything to the Contrary, why that Creature is not Originally of a Distinct Species.’5 Kit-Cat dinners demonstrated, among other more overt purposes, the members' distance from the apes—or, more to the point, from the London ‘mob’ outdoors. Public dining also, implicitly, demonstrated men's distance from women. Being a lady in this period required rejection of physical appetites, for food as for sex. It was no more polite for a woman to say she was hungry, or let men see her eating in public, than to mention if she was sweaty or lustful. The fact that the Kit-Cat was a dining club should therefore be seen as the corollary of