Whereas Congreve pretended Collier's insults were too exaggerated to be wounding (‘He would have poisoned me, but he overdosed it, and the Excess of his Malice has been my Security’28), Vanbrugh admitted A Short View's undeniable popularity now made it, as another Kit-Cat admitted, a ‘thing no farther to be laughed at’.29
More self-confident defence came from a non-Kit-Cat writer also targeted by Collier, the neoclassical critic John Dennis. A friend of Congreve's since 1691, Dennis suffered from an absurd prickliness of temper, a quality that probably disqualified him from Kit-Cat membership, if he sought it. Dennis' response to Collier's Short View rightly linked the ‘high flying’30 Jacobite author with those censors at the opposite end of the religious and political spectrum: the Puritans.31 Dennis defended the stage without denying its appeal to ‘passions’ above reason, and did not bother to claim that drama need serve a reforming purpose. One enemy asserted Dennis ‘sat at the head of a Club’ to ‘impeach’ Collier,32 which suggests that the Kit-Cats deferred to an ad hoc grouping of anti-Collierites to handle the matter. In his Defence of the Short View (1699), Collier stated he would only continue the debate with writers like Congreve and Vanbrugh, not with small fry like Dennis.
By 1699, there were nine Societies for the Reformation of Manners working across London, and by 1701 there would be almost twenty. Moral reformers in the Commons and Lords continued to introduce legislation that intruded into the private sphere, with the King's approval. Somers and his Kit-Cat colleagues in the Lords were among those to vote down a 1699 Bill to make adultery a misdemeanour punishable under the common law, for example. Somers had personal reasons for doing so: from as early as 1694, he had been the lover of his Herefordshire ‘housekeeper’, Mrs Elizabeth Fanshawe Blount, whose husband was in prison. One Tory satire accused Somers of having had Mr Blount arrested in order to bed the wife, whereas Somers' friends portrayed him as having rescued her from a negligent, shiftless husband.33
In February 1699, William proclaimed that actors must avoid using profane and indecent language—disregarding the role of his own Cabinet ministers, Somers and Montagu, in encouraging and financing the writing of the allegedly profane and indecent plays in the first place. When Congreve's Double Dealer was revived in March 1699, it was in the expurgated version.
The Kit-Cat Club survived Collier's attacks on its members because it did not attempt to defend the imaginations of Vanbrugh and Congreve as they really deserved to be defended. Instead, the Kit-Cat critics emphasized the points on which they agreed with Collier: that wit without decency is not true wit; that smut should not be used to compensate for a deficit of ‘sprightly Dialogue’,34 and that mobbish audiences needed elevation and education, for the whole nation's sake. While the Kit-Cat patrons supported the Club's authors in defiance of the censors, the more ambitious Whig politicians also recognized that they needed to work on their public image, and that a new, more ‘improving’ literature was required to win the moral highground back from the Tories. Congreve and Vanbrugh were not, however, willing to produce it.
It would be the stars of the following generation of Kit-Cat authors—Addison and Steele, not yet members in 1698—who succeeded in bridging the gap between the Club's libertine, Restoration founders, led by Dorset, and Collier's puritanical strictures. Steele, who was at heart a faithful Christian, later admitted to having privately admired much that Collier preached, ‘as far as I durst, for fear of witty Men, upon whom he had been too severe’.35
In 1698, at the height of the culture wars, Steele was known as ‘Captain Steele’—one of the many demobilized officers whose uniforms reddened the theatre audiences after the peace of Ryswick. Steele was then living either with his aunt and uncle at their Bond Street house, or at the Whitehall home of his boss, Lord Cutts. Steele said Cutts treated him like a son and provided him with ‘an introduction into the world’, so it may have been through this military patron that Steele first entered Dryden's outer orbit at Will's Coffee House. There was already, of course, the connection established with this circle through Addison, though Addison lived in Oxford until 1699.
Steele seems to have charmed Congreve, in particular, with whom he passed ‘many Happy Hours’.36 This was quite an honour, since Congreve confided to Joe Keally that he was ‘not apt to care for many acquaintance, and never intend to make many friendships’.37 Steele, for his part, said that he felt the ‘greatest Affection and Veneration’ for Congreve, admiring, in particular, Congreve's poem ‘Doris’.38 No evidence survives to tell us whether Steele felt a similarly warm regard for Vanbrugh in the late 1690s; as a soldier-turned-playwright, Vanbrugh was the obvious role model for Steele at this juncture.
Steele also appears to have befriended Congreve's housemate, Tonson, by 1698. That year, Tonson moved his firm's offices from Chancery Lane to his family's old premises in Gray's Inn, where they would remain until 1710. A satirical advertisement appeared cruelly referring to Tonson's ‘Sign of the two left Legs, near Gray's Inn BackGate’.39 Steele was often to be found at this shop during 1698. There he could sit for hours and read for free, with a glass of wine by his side, as bookshops then were more like paying libraries where, for a small subscription, one could read the most recent publications on the premises, leaving a bookmark in a volume if not finished at a single sitting.
An additional attraction at Tonson's shop was the publisher's 18-year-old niece Elizabeth, an assistant in the business. In 1699 or 1700, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter by Steele, christened Elizabeth and given the surname of ‘Ousley’, after Dorothea Ousley, a nurse who raised illegitimate infants and orphans in the neighbourhood. How Tonson felt about Steele, an insolvent Irishman, ex-soldier and aspiring playwright, having impregnated his unmarried niece is not recorded, nor is there evidence that Steele's guardian aunt and uncle ever found out about the baby.
Steele felt that an illegitimate child was deeply shameful, not an everyday occurrence. He must have known how Addison disapproved of the ‘Vermin’ who carelessly produced bastards and whose punishment should be, Addison joked, transportation to a colony in need of population.40 The person to whom Steele therefore turned during the crisis was not Addison, nor any of his witty male friends, but Mrs Mary Delariviere Manley, an unconventionally worldly woman who had been a confidante to Charles II's mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, and who had lived with several men in London, starting with John Tilly, a lawyer and warden of Fleet Prison. Steele met Mrs Manley through Tilly, who in the mid-1690s had joined Steele and another old university friend as gullible investors in some alchemical research.
Manley claimed Steele dealt with two unwanted pregnancies in the late 1690s—one baby died, the other was presumably Elizabeth Ousley. It is unclear whether Elizabeth Tonson was the mother in both instances. Mrs Manley explained that she had stood as guarantor for Steele when he needed credit with a midwife, though whether for an abortion or a birth is unclear. Steele never paid the midwife's bill, so she threatened to sue and make the matter public. A note in Steele's hand confirms this story, referring to blackmail by a Mrs Phip[p]s in Watling Street, near St Paul's, ‘at the sign of the Coffin and Cradle’, through her ‘threatening to expose the occasion of the debt. It is £22.—£5 of it is paid’.