[In the following essay, Geduld discusses the origins and history of the Kit-Cat Club, paying special attention to the role of publisher Jacob Tonson as founder and secretary.]

The social aspect of Jacob Tonson's career is well represented in his role as chairman-secretary to the celebrated Kit-Cat Club, which he helped to inaugurate towards the end of the seventeenth century.¹

During Dryden's lifetime the evolution of the English club was accelerated primarily through the popularity of the newly established coffee-houses and their use for informal political discussion as well as socializing and conviviality. Like many similar meeting-places, the Kit-Cat Club, which in the eighteenth century became the most famous and influential manifestation of the Whig party in its social sphere, appears to have risen from relatively humble, non-political beginnings. Two centuries of scattered allusion and comment, based largely on oblique contemporary references and on anecdotes of questionable authenticity, have failed to remove the obscurity that surrounds its origin. Certainly there is abundant evidence that the Kit-Cat Club, or the society out of which it grew, was established before the turn of the seventeenth century. Edward Ward maliciously remarked that Tonson “many years since conceived a wonderful Kindness for one of the greasie Fraternity then Living at the end of Bell-Court in Gray's-Inn-Lane.”² This was a pastrycook and tavernkeeper named Christopher Cat,³ who “by his Culinary Qualifications so highly advanced himself in the Favour of his Good Friend [Tonson] that thro' his advice and Assistance” he removed his establishment to the Cat and Fiddle,⁴ a tavern in Shire Lane,⁵ near Temple Bar.⁶ It was here that the Club first met under Tonson's auspices, although before 1700 it was almost certainly known by a name other than the “Kit-Cat.” Edward Ward asserts that the club arose from a kind of poets' or translators' society cunningly devised by Tonson for the benefit of himself and his friend Christopher Cat. He would have us believe that Tonson enticed “a parcel of Poetical young Sprigs, who had just Wean'd themselves of their Mother University”⁷ to a sumptuous feast of mutton pies and custard at the Cat and Fiddle. The young poets (presumably contributors to Tonson's third and fourth Miscellanies) “having more Wit than Experience, put but a slender value, as yet, upon their Maiden Performances.”⁸ After the feast, they therefore eagerly complied with Tonson's suggestion that they should form a club and hold weekly meetings at the Cat and Fiddle, “provided they would do him the Honour to let him have the Refusal of their Juvenile Products.”⁹ Tonson would thus reap the profits of a large quantity of original “copy” merely at the expense of a mutton-pie supper.

It is hardly necessary to indicate that Ward's account is the fanciful product of a Tory propagandist and satirist. His version contains enough of truth and likelihood to have an appearance of authenticity, but there is no reason why Tonson should have devised such an extraordinary scheme simply for the purpose of obtaining “copy” from unknown writers. By 1690, he was a well-established publisher on familiar terms with many of the leading writers of his day. If he had really needed fresh “copy” at the slightest possible expense, he would have been more likely to approach a hack and secure the necessary work on his own terms. Nevertheless, Ward's explanation carries sufficient verisimilitude to persuade the modern reader that a possible origin of the Club is indeed to be found in Tonson's introduction of the publisher's dinner, a custom that has continued down to our own age. In fairness to Ward, it is also to be noticed that his story receives support from another important source, namely “The Kit-Cats” (1708), a mock-heroic poem by Sir Richard Blackmore.¹⁰ In the work, the foundation of the Club is attributed to Tonson, and Ward's description of the first meeting in Shire Lane is closely paralleled:

He [Tonson] still caress'd the unregarded Tribe,
And did to all their various Tasks prescribe,
From whence to both great Acquisition came,
To him the Profit, and to them the Fame.

On the other hand, the close similarity of the material presented by both writers publishing their works at about the same time, together with their use of the title “Bocaj”—an inversion of Tonson's Christian name—suggests, if not a borrowing of one from the other, at least the use of identical and highly questionable sources.

John Oldmixon, a personal acquaintance of Jacob Tonson, provided an entirely different version of the origin of the Kit-Cat Club.¹¹ In his History of England, he claimed that the Club developed

… from a private Meeting of Mr. Somers, afterwards Lord Chancellor and another Lawyer, now in a very high station in the Law, and Mr Tonson, sen. the Bookseller, who before the Revolution, met frequently in an Evening at a Tavern near Temple Bar, to unbend themselves after Business, and have a little free and cheerful Conversation in these dangerous times. … Other Gentlemen of the same good English principles joyning themselves afterwards to this original Society. It became the most Noble One, and the most Pleasant that perhaps ever was in the World.¹²

Yet another account of the Club, supported by James Caulfield, its first historian, asserts that Charles, Earl of Dorset,¹³ and not Lord Somers, was among the founding members.¹⁴

If we are still in doubt as to the Club's origin, we are no less perplexed by the problems arising out of its name. The generally accepted explanation would derive “Kit-Cat” from an abbreviation of the name of the pastrycook Christopher Cat.¹⁵ This idea is repudiated by Addison,¹⁶ who says that the members of the Club derived their title not from Christopher Cat but from his celebrated mutton pies, which were known as “kit-cats.”¹⁷ A third derivation is to be found in verses frequently attributed to Dr. Arbuthnot:

Whence deathless Kit-Cat took its name,
Few Criticks can unriddle:
Some say from Pastry-Cook it came,
And some from Cat and Fiddle.
From no trim Beaux its Name it boasts,
Grey Statesmen or green Wits;
But from this Pell-mell Pack of Toasts
Of old Cats and young Kits.(18)

The date on which the Club was founded has also been widely disputed. Works of general reference have perpetuated the erroneous impression that the Kit-Cat Club came into being about 1700 or shortly afterwards.¹⁹ Certainly the Club existed during the last decade of the seventeenth century, though probably not under its famous name and perhaps not for the purposes for which it later became celebrated. The Reverend Owen Manning, writing in 1814, stated, without evidence, that the Club was formed during the reign of James II about the time of the trial of the seven Bishops.²⁰ Oldmixon, in the passage from his History of England quoted above, merely notices that the founders of the Club first came together “before the Revolution.” From yet another source we are entitled to claim a questionable existence for the Club during the 1690's. According to Lady Louisa Stuart, her grandmother, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, visited the club as a child of eight.²¹ Lady Mary was born in May, 1689, so that on her granddaughter's evidence the Club would have been flourishing in 1697, when she was eight years of age. Unfortunately, the story as told by Lady Louisa Stuart is rounded off by a reference to Lady Mary's father, who was so overjoyed at his daughter's popularity among the Club members that he ordered her portrait to be painted as a gift for the clubroom. This fact obviously conflicts with the first, for the clubroom and its portraits were not added to the house at Barn Elms until 1703.

On the other hand, a number of widely scattered allusions help to establish reasonable grounds for believing that the Club was rapidly maturing during the period 1695-1700. Sir Godfrey Kneller painted the “kit-cat” portrait of Congreve about the year 1695 and almost certainly completed the Club portrait of Dryden before the poet's death in 1700. Among the letters from R. Powys to Prior is one dated July 14, 1698, in which the following occurs:

Mr. Godfrey Kneller hath drawn at length the picture of your friend Jacob Tonson which he shewed Mr. Dryden, who desired to give a touch of his pencil, and underneath it writ these verses:

With leering look, bull-faced and freckled fair,
With frowsy pores poisoning the ambient air,
With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair.(22)

It seems a fair conjecture that Powys' allusion to a picture by Kneller refers to the “kit-cat” portrait of Tonson, though here again we are confronted with the contradictory fact that the series Kneller produced for the Club was painted in relation to the dimensions of a room at Barn Elms that was not constructed until 1703.

It is notable that almost all the known members of the Club are included in the subscription list to Dryden's Virgil, published by Tonson in 1697. The poet himself may not have been a member of the Club, although Spence²³ maintained that Dryden, in the last decade of his life, spent a great deal of his leisure time in the company of Addison—a stalwart Kit-Cat partisan; and an anonymous Satire on Modern Translators,²⁴ published about 1698, refers obscurely to “The Head of the Gang … Bayes [i.e., Dryden] … by the Club thought most fit.” Certainly the Kit-Cat Club must have been fairly well established by 1700, when its members paid the expenses of Dryden's funeral.²⁵

Evidence for the existence of the Kit-Cat Club before 1700 also includes an interesting body of material associating its activities with an obscure society known as the Order of the Toast. Shadwell was possibly referring to the latter when he wrote in The Scowrers (1691):

You're all meer Sops in Wine, your Brains are Bogs;
A Toast is equal to a common Drunkard.(26)

Widespread misunderstanding has unfortunately arisen from statements made by Malone in his life of Dryden, where he asserts, without foundation, that the Kit-Cat Club actually originated from the Order of the Toast.²⁷ Malone bases his remarks on a misinterpretation of verses by Elkanah Settle²⁸ written in 1699 and addressed “To the most renowned the President and the rest of the Knights of the most Noble Order of the Toast:”

Why should the noble Winsor garters boast
Their fame, above the Knighthood of the Toast,
Is't on their first original they build?
Their high priz'd knighthood these to you must yield.
A lady dropp'd a garter at a ball;
A toy for their foundation—was that all?
Suppose the nymph that lost it was divine;
The garter's but a relic from the shrine;
The Toast includes the deity—not one star
But the whole constellation of the Fair.(29)

Malone seems to have assumed that the two societies were identical because of their similar custom of drinking toasts to famous beauties of the day. It is more likely that the Kit-Cat Club adopted this practice from the Order of the Toast or perhaps vice versa, for an allusion later than the verses by Settle implies that the different titles do indeed refer to two distinct bodies: “To-morrow night,” writes Prior to Abraham Stanyan, “Batterton [sic] acts Falstaff, and to encourage that poor house the Kit Katters have taken one side-box, and the Knights of the Toast have taken the other.”³⁰ Malone also provides the text of a letter by Dryden³¹ in which the poet mentions “The Ballad of the Pews,” attributed to Maynwaring³² or Lord Peterborough.³³ This is probably the poem “A Ballad, Call'd The Brawny Bishop's Complaint,” a lampoon on Bishop Burnet³⁴ which alludes to “Bur[ling]ton,” “K[in]gston,” and “B[oy]le”—all members of the Kit-Cat Club—in a stanza immediately preceded by references to the Knights of the Toast. The allusion implies, at the most, a close association between the two societies. R. J. Allen goes so far as to say that “as the last decade of the century wore on, the more brilliant of the Knights of the Toast deserted their order for the new club [i.e., the Kit-Cat] bringing with them the custom of Toasting.”³⁵

In due course the custom of drinking toasts to beautiful women became associated more and more with the Kit-Cat Club, whose members began to write their toasts in verse and to engrave them with a diamond on their drinking glasses. According to “Martinus Scriblerus,” the women chosen were always young—though perhaps not always as young as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is said to have been at the time of her visit. It is also likely that the beauties for whom the members balloted were actually invited to the Club and never selected merely on a hearsay recommendation. The fullest account of this aspect of the Club's activities is given by Addison in The Tatler, no. 17:

Though this institution had so trivial a beginning it is now elevated into a formal order; and that happy virgin who is received and drunk to at their meetings, has no more to do in this life but to judge and accept of the first good offer. The manner of her inauguration is much like that of the choice of a Doge in Venice. It is performed by balloting; and when she is so chosen she reigns indisputably for that ensuing year; but must be elected anew to prolong her empire a moment beyond it. When she is regularly chosen, her name is written with a diamond on a drinking glass. The hieroglyphic of the diamond is to show her that her value is imaginary; and that of the glass to acquaint her that her condition is frail, and depends on the hand which holds her.³⁶

At some date before 1703, the Kit-Cat Club moved from Shire Lane to new premises at the Fountain tavern³⁷ in the Strand. This establishment appears to have been acquired by Jacob Tonson and supervised by Christopher Cat. The removal was probably the result of an increase in membership. “The group which gathered about Somers and Tonson was composed at first, in all likelihood, of rising young wits,”³⁸ but whatever their original objects may have been, by the turn of the seventeenth century the Club had become transformed into a thoroughly Whig institution. The fame of the writers associated with it—Addison, Steele, Prior, Congreve, Vanbrugh, Garth, Walsh, and Maynwaring—probably attracted the numerous Whig peers who, during the eighteenth century, introduced a strongly aristocratic flavor into the Club.³⁹ The Cat and Fiddle may have been too small to accommodate the increasing membership, or it is possible that the peers objected to meeting in surroundings that enjoyed a reputation as unsavory as that of Shire Lane.⁴⁰ It is impossible to say how long the members continued to meet at the new Club premises in the Strand. Edward Ward asserted that the Fountain tavern was burnt to the ground (at some unspecified date) and concluded rather ludicrously that the fire broke out as a result of the members tossing their literary work into one of Christopher Cat's bakery ovens.⁴¹ In 1703, Tonson added a clubroom to his newly acquired residence at Barn Elms.⁴² By this date the number of members had risen from thirty-nine at the Cat and Fiddle to a maximum total of forty-eight. Their portraits⁴³ were commissioned by Jacob Tonson and executed by Sir Godfrey Kneller over a period of approximately twenty years. Kneller painted the entire series on canvases measuring 36 x 28 inches, a size especially selected in accordance with the dimensions of the clubroom at the Barn Elms.⁴⁴ Forty of the portraits were hung in two rows, one above the other, on all four sides of the room in the following order:⁴⁵

Over the Chimney
          The Duke of Newcastle and Henry, Earl of Lincoln, in one picture.
In the First Row
          1. Charles Seymour, Duke of Somerset.
          2. William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire.
          3. Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond.
          4. Charles Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton.
          5. John, Duke of Montagu.
          6. Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset.
          7. Richard, Lord Lumley.
          8. Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle.
          9. Sir Richard Temple.
          10. Thomas Hopkins, Esq.
The Door (first row continued)
          11. William Walsh, Esq.
          12. Algernon Capel, Earl of Essex.
          13. James, Earl of Berkeley.
          14. John Vaughan, Earl of Carbery.
          15. Charles, Lord Cornwallis.
          16. Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax.
          17. John, Lord Somers.
          18. Thomas, Earl of Wharton.
          19. Charles Montagu, Duke of Manchester.
          20. Evelyn Pierrepont, Marquis of Dorchester.
Chimney (beginning of the second row)
          21. Lionel Cranfield Sackville, Duke of Dorset.
          22. Charles, Lord Mohun.
          23. Robert Walpole, Esq.
          24. Spencer Compton, Esq.
          25. Lieutenant General James Stanhope.
          26. Hon. William Pulteney, Esq.
          27. John Dormer, Esq.
          28. John Tidcomb, Esq.
          29. Abraham Stanyan, Esq.
          30. John Dryden, Esq.
Door (2nd row continued)
          31. Sir Godfrey Kneller.
          32. Jacob Tonson, senior.
          33. Sir John Vanbrugh.
          34. William Congreve, Esq.
          35. Joseph Addison, Esq.
          36. Sir Samuel Garth, M.D.
          37. Sir Richard Steele.
          38. Arthur Maynwaring, Esq.
          39. George Stepney, Esq.
          40. Francis, Lord Godolphin.

It will be seen that the peers predominated, with a maximum total of nearly thirty members, including most of the leaders of the Whig party and several young political figures, such as Robert Walpole, James Stanhope, and William Pulteney—statesmen who were to become the rulers of eighteenth-century England. “Behind an appearance of conviviality they conceded a perfectly serious purpose, viz. to organize a central place for the leaders in the Hanoverian party.”⁴⁶ Walpole subsequently described the members of the Kit-Cat Club as the “Patriots that saved Britain.”⁴⁷

In comparison with their fellow members, the writers formed a small but doubtless influential minority which seems never to have exceeded nine or ten members. James Caulfield maintained that Arthur Maynwaring “used to be the ruling man in all conversations and, with Lord Boling-broke, to pass for a great genius, although posterity has never condescended to take heed of either the oratory of the one, or the philosophy of the other.”⁴⁸ Pope and Tonson told Joseph Spence that Garth, Vanbrugh, and Congreve, on the other hand, were the three “most honest hearted, real good men of the poetical members of the kit-cat club.”⁴⁹ Tonson himself remained Club secretary from start to finish. The members appear to have considered his presence indispensable. During the summer of 1703, the Club meetings were suspended whilst Tonson went to Amsterdam to buy paper and engravings for his edition of Caesar's Commentaries.⁵⁰ Congreve in a letter written to the publisher about this time informs him that “I believe Barn-Elms wants you and I long to see it but dont care to satisfie my curiosity before you come.”⁵¹ The Duke of Somerset wrote appealingly: “Our club is dissolved till you revive it again, which we are impatient of.” Vanbrugh too announced that “The Kit-Cat will never meet without you, so you see here's a general stagnation for want of you.” In the preceding month he had written to Tonson:

In short, the Kit-Cat wants you much more than you ever can do them. Those who remain in town, are in great desire of waiting on you at Barn Elms; not that they have finished their pictures neither; though to excuse them as well as myself, Sir Godfrey has been most in fault. The fool has got a country-house near Hampton Court and is so busy fitting it up (to receive nobody) that there's no getting him to work.

Inevitably the publisher's position in the Club provoked the criticism of writers other than Edward Ward and Sir Richard Blackmore. Nicholas Rowe, in an imaginary dialogue between Tonson and Congreve, written in imitation of one of Horace's Odes, bestows upon the former the following lines:

While in your early Days of Reputation,
You for blue garters had not such a passion;
While you did not use (as now your Trade is)
To drink with noble Lords and toast their Ladies.
Thou Jacob Tonson, were to my conceiving
The cheerfullest, best, honest, Fellow-living.(52)

Many of the other comments were less restrained than Rowe's. An anonymous poem entitled Faction Display'd (1704)⁵³ freely plagiarizes Dryden's triplet on Tonson and refers to the publisher as “Bibliopolo”—a strategically important agent in the dissemination of Whig propaganda. Serious implications arise in the course of “Bibliopolo's” address to the Whig leaders:

I am the Founder of your lov'd Kit-Kat
A Club that gave Direction to the State,
'Twas there we first instructed all our Youth,
To talk Prophane and Laugh at Sacred Truth.
We taught them how to Tost and Rhime and Bite,
To Sleep away the Day and drink away the Night.(54)

Mary (“Madonilla”) Astell in the dedication to her essay “Bart'lemy Fair: or, an Enquiry after Wit” (1709) reiterates the charge of blasphemy in an extensive catalogue of crimes which she attributes to the Kit-Cat Club in general and to Tonson in particular.⁵⁵ Even Swift, in his essay on Mr C[olli]ns Discourse of Free Thinking, appears (by indirection) to refer to the Club's reputation for atheism.⁵⁶ Elsewhere, in his Letter of Thanks from my Lord W[harto]n to the Lord B^p of S. Asaph, In the Name of the Kit-Cat-Club [1712], Swift gives the Club short shrift in the course of his main onslaught on Lord Wharton and Bishop Fleetwood.⁵⁷

On political grounds alone the Club had no shortage of enemies. Public suspicion was probably heightened by the knowledge that the members held most of their meetings in private. Tory propagandists were thus in a position to accuse the Club of dark dealings and treachery of every kind. As early as 1705, it was claimed that the members “are fall'n off the Design of their first Institutions; and from turning Criticks upon Wit, are fall'n into Criticisms upon Policy, I might say AGENTS in it.”⁵⁸ During the Tory administration of 1710-14 the Club clearly came to represent the leaders of the Opposition. Thus the (Tory) Examiner, No. 6, asserts that “The Collective Body of the Whigs have already engross'd our Riches; and their Representative the Kit-cat, have pretended to make a Monopoly of our Sense.”

This last complaint evidently refers to the increasing importance of the Kit-Cat Club as an arbiter of literary taste. The same writer objects that “Mr P[rio]r, by being expell'd the Club, ceases to be Poet; and Sir Harry F[urness]e becomes one by being admitted into it.” How far the members actually pursued their policy of literary patronage it is now impossible to determine. Edward Ward has insisted that The Country Mouse and the City Mouse was written by Prior and Halifax under the auspices of the Club.⁵⁹ Pope informed Joseph Spence of a Club subscription of four hundred guineas, raised in 1709 for the encouragement of good comedies. Tonson himself may have used his position as much to consult the advice of the members as to procure their own “copies” for the press.⁶⁰ It certainly seems likely that the taste of the Club, as voiced by individual members, found its way, through Addison, into the pages of The Spectator.

R. J. Allen has ascribed to Tonson the early association between the Kit-Cat Club and the theatre.⁶¹ From 1703 onwards, the members began to regard Barn Elms as their permanent headquarters. During the summer months, as an alternative, they sometimes met at the Upper Flask tavern in Hampstead⁶² and at other times at the Queen's Arms in Pall Mall—particularly when they were visiting the theatre. In 1702, Tom Brown, describing the audience at one of the London playhouses, had remarked that “the L[ord] D[orset] is known by his Ribbon, and T[om] D['Urfey] or some other Impertinent Poet talking Nonsense to him, the L[ord] H[alifax] by sitting on the Kitcat side, and Jacob [Tonson] standing Door-Keeper for him.”⁶³

This, together with Prior's reference to one of the Club's theatre visits in the company of the Knights of the Toast, seems to indicate that a side-box was regularly reserved for Club members. There is no way to determine how long this custom had continued, but in the year of Tonson's visit to Holland, Vanbrugh's letters are full of references to a scheme for a new theatre, which later evidence has shown to be associated with the Kit-Cat Club. Colley Cibber describes how:

… a new Project was form'd, of building … a stately Theatre, in the Hay-Market by Sir John Vanbrugh, for which he raised a Subscription of thirty Persons of Quality, at one hundred Pounds each, in Consideration whereof every Subscriber, for his own Life, was to be admitted to whatever Entertainments should be publickly perform'd there, without farther Payment for his Entrance. Of this Theatre, I saw the first Stone laid, on which was inscribed The little Whig, in Honour to a Lady of extraordinary Beauty, then the celebrated Toast and Pride of that Party.⁶⁴

“The little Whig” was the Countess of Sunderland, a daughter of the Duke of Marlborough, and one of the celebrated Toasts of the Kit-Cat Club, to which the “thirty Persons of Quality” refers. The new Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket was opened on April 24, 1705, with a performance of Giacomo Greber's The Loves of Ergasto, an opera, acted and sung by an Italian cast.⁶⁵ Direct evidence of the part played by the Club is provided by Charles Leslie in the Rehearsal for May 12, 1705:

The KIT CAT CLUBB is now grown Famous and Notorious, all over the Kingdom. And they have Built a Temple for their Dagon, the new Playhouse in the hay-Market. The Foundation was laid with great Solemnity, by a Noble Babe of Grace. And over or under the Foundation Stone is a Plate of Silver, on which is Graven Kit Cat on the one side and little Whig on the other … And there was such Zeal shew'd and all Purses open to carry on this Work, that it was almost as soon Finish'd as Begun.⁶⁶

Tonson himself is linked with the new theatre through two advertisements—the first appears in the London Gazette for January 18, 1711;⁶⁷ the second is preserved in an obviously satiric proclamation of the “New Hospital in the Haymarket for the Case of Folly,” in which it is declared that “Subscriptions will be taken in till Ladyday next, at the Sign of the two Left Legs, near Gray's-Inn Back-Gate.”⁶⁸

Many vague allusions to Tonson, the Kit-Cat Club, and the new theatre in the Haymarket are discernible in A Kit-Kat c … b, Described (1705), an anonymous prose satire on a typical member of the Club. The author, like Tom Brown, refers to “J——— T———” as the “Kit-Kat Door-Keeper,” who “can shew you his Picture, with the rest that belong to the Cl—b.” The typical member is described as “a Principal Contributor towards the Transforming a Stable into a Theatre” in order “to shew [like Collier] his Aversion to Prophaneness and Immorality, and [he] is altogether for Captain H——d and Mr. C[ongre]ve's being Directors of it, because those two Gentlemen's Drammatick Performances have so very much answer'd the Design of the Royal Proclamations for a General Reformation of Manners.”⁶⁹

A review of the surviving evidence nevertheless tells us very little about what, in retrospect, is perhaps the most interesting of the Club's enterprises. Apart from a few anecdotes, we know only that the members subscribed to the building of a theatre which they afterwards frequented.⁷⁰ It is likely that the Club actively patronized many of the dramatists of the day, but apart from the four-hundred guinea subscription that Pope mentioned to Spence, nothing further is available on the subject.

What the Club did in its final years and when exactly its activities came to an end it are equally impossible to determine. Pope told Spence that it was dissolved soon after 1709,⁷¹ but a letter from Steele to Ambrose Philips shows that the members were meeting again at the Upper Flask in the summer of 1712.⁷² In a letter dated 1716, Steele informs Welsted that he has just written “three Couplets … to be printed … for the Kitt Catt Club,”⁷³ and on March 30 in the following year he wrote to his wife: “The omission of last post was occasioned by my attendance on the Duke of Newcastle, who was in the chair at the Kit-Cat.”⁷⁴ The Club was still flourishing in 1718 when the notorious publisher Edmund Curll issued a collection of “Letters, Poems and Tales: Amorous, Satyrical, and Gallant” containing a scurrilous “Essay to Restore the KITCAT Members to their lost abilities,”⁷⁵ but the Club seems to have been finally dissolved about 1719⁷⁶ or 1720. By 1725, twenty-four out of the forty-eight members still survived. In that year Vanbrugh wrote nostalgically to Tonson of a journey which he and his wife had taken in the company of Viscount Cobham and the Earl of Carlisle, both “former” Kit-Cat members:⁷⁷

You may believe when I tell you were often talked of, both during the journey and at home; and our former KIT-CAT days were remembered with pleasure.

We were one night reckoning who were left, and both Lord Carlisle and Cobham expressed a great desire of having one meeting next Winter if you come to town; not as a club, but as old friends that have been of a club, and the best club that ever met.⁷⁸

Further arrangements for a reunion were communicated to the surviving members, and during the same year Vanbrugh wrote to Tonson concerning the Duke of Newcastle:

He will chearfully accept of the Clubs Invitation to dine with them one day, or one hundred, if so God pleases. I'm sorry a meeting cou'd not be on the same day and at the place you mention; both I am sure, would be highly agreeable to the Members of it. But they will not so soon be within Call: when they are, we'll try to find some other day of Happy Remembrance.⁷⁹

The deaths of Vanbrugh, Congreve, Steele, and the Dukes of Devonshire and Kingston probably deferred the reunion, if indeed it was ever held.

In 1731, however, Tonson did dine at Barn Elms in the company of Pope, Gay, Lord Oxford, and Lord Bathurst. Interest in the Club had long since waned, but until the end of his life, Tonson entertained the desire to write a history of the Kit-Cat and its members. At Ledbury he informed Dr. Samuel Croxall that “no body could tell better what to say of them than himself for, to tell … the truth, he had been drunk with every one of them.”⁸⁰ Croxall himself later told Tonson's nephew of the projected history:

He designs to be very exact in doing it, & will take some time for it. He talk'd of coming to Hereford assizes next Week;⁸¹ I press'd him if he did to bring the Characters⁸² along with him; he said it would be impossible to finish them as they ought to be done, in that time.⁸³

If Tonson ever completed the work, it probably remained in manuscript and disappeared after his death in 1736. The first published history of the Club was James Caulfield's Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons Composing the Kit-Cat Club, a work not to be commended for its accuracy or interest. Caulfield, influenced by Malone, deals harshly with Tonson's character, which he relegates, together with his portrait, to an ignominious position at the end of the volume. There can be no doubt that Tonson's business did benefit considerably through his association with the Club, but his fellow members have also testified to his enduring popularity as secretary, and he does seem to have had the best interests of the Club sincerely at heart. His fondness for gambling, for eating, and above all for drinking, his friendship for Dryden and for many of the younger writers, his forthright manner and grotesque appearance, must have made him a person of interest to peer and poet alike.

Tonson's association with the Kit-Cat Club sets him apart from the generations of bookseller-stationers who preceded him; for he was the earliest publisher to understand and exploit the delicate art of public relations, and this, no less than his achievements as popularizer of Dryden, Milton, and Shakespeare, distinguishes him as the earliest professional publisher.

Notes

1. General accounts of the Kit-Cat Club will be found in James Caulfield's Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons Composing the Kit-Cat Club (London, 1821), G. Barret's History of Barn Elms Kit Kat Club (London, n.d.), and R. J. Allen's The Clubs of Augustan London (Cambridge, Mass., 1933). See also “Memoirs of the Kit-Cat Club,” Quarterly Review, XXVI (Jan. 1822), 245; “Memoirs of the Kit-Cat Club,” Monthly Review, XCVII (1822), 36; “The Kit-Cat Club,” Blackwood's Magazine, XI, 20; The Graphic, Mar. 11, 1893. For miscellaneous anecdotes of the Club see John Timbs, Club Life of London (London, 1872), pp. 49-53.

2. Edward Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (London, 1709), pp. 360-77.

3. Little is known of Christopher Cat. In accounts of the Club he is referred to sometimes as a pastry-cook, sometimes as a tavern-keeper. He appears to have served the Club members as steward, first at the Cat and Fiddle, then at the Fountain tavern in the Strand and at the Upper Flask tavern in Hampstead. He was wealthy enough to have owned a house in Chelsea Walk, in addition to his own tavern. See Notes and Queries, 5th ser., III (1875), 259. His name appears spelt variously as: Cat, Catt, Kat, Katt, and it is noteworthy that Catt, Kett, Kitten, and Ketton are Norfolk names. The connection with Norfolk is strengthened by an original letter, preserved in the archives of the Norwich Monthly Meeting, whose contents have been published in Notes and Queries, 5th ser., III (1875), 259-60. This letter, dated May 9, 1711, is signed “Chr. Catt”—probably the Christopher Cat of the Kit-Cat Club—and addressed to the writer's colleagues in the Norwich Society of Friends. It suggests that Tonson's Christopher Cat may have been a Quaker. A painting depicting a scene in Cat's house in Chelsea Walk is known to have been lent by a Mrs. H. W. Hutton to the 1867 exhibition of National Portraits at Kensington. This picture, whereabouts unknown, showed Steele, Addison, Addison's stepson (Lord Warwick), Lord Oxford, Sir Godfrey Kneller and others at tea.

4. The precise connection between the Cat and Fiddle, the name of its proprietor, the term kit-cat applied to his mutton pies, and the name of the Club, is uncertain. It has been suggested that the nursery rhyme, “Hey Diddle Diddle,” is connected with the tavern sign and that the line, “The little dog laughed to see such sport,” refers obscurely to Dryden's description of Tonson's bulldog features.

5. Shire Lane no longer exists. It ran parallel to Chancery Lane in approximately the same position as the present-day Bell Yard, formerly Lower Serle's Place. In the reign of James I it was rechristened “Rogues' Lane.” In the mid-eighteenth century, Shire Lane was still noted as a disreputable place. In 1724, for instance, Jack Sheppard used to frequent the Bible tavern—a printers' house-of-call at 13 Shire Lane, and an establishment probably well-known to the Tonsons.

6. Christopher Cat's pastry-cook house may have been either adjacent to or identical with the Cat and Fiddle. Leopold Wagner (More London Inns and Taverns [London, 1925]) suggested that the auxiliary Groom's in Bell Yard occupied the site of the Kit-Cat Clubhouse. It is notable that none of Tonson's shops was situated more than half a mile from Shire Lane.

7. The Secret History of Clubs, p. 361.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 362.

10. Sir Richard Blackmore, d.1729, poet and physician-in-ordinary to William III. Blackmore was satirized by two members of the Kit-Cat Club: by Garth in The Dispensary, IV, 172, and by Steele in his Commendatory Verses on the Author of the Two Arthurs.

11. John Oldmixon (1673-1742), dramatist, poet, Whig historian and pamphleteer.

12. Oldmixon, The History of England during the reigns of King William and Queen Mary … George I (London, 1735), III, 479.

13. Charles, Earl of Dorset (1638-1706), courtier and poet; member of the Kit-Cat Club.

14. Memoirs of … the Kit-Cat Club, p. iii. See E. W. Brayley, A Topographical History of Surrey (London, 1841-48), III.

15. According to Edward Ward, “… the Cook's name being Christopher, for brevity call'd Kit and his Sign being the Cat and Fiddle, they [the original members] very merrily deriv'd a quaint Denomination from Puss and her Master, and from thence called themselves the Kit-Cat Club” (The Secret History of Clubs, p. 363).

16. The Spectator, no. 9, March 10, 1711. See The Works of Joseph Addison, ed. R. Hurd, II (London, 1888), p. 251.

17. But Malone [John Dryden, Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works, ed. Edmond Malone (3 vols.; London, 1798)], I, pt. ii, 526, maintains that a “kit-cat” was the same thing as a sandwich.

18. Arbuthnot's Miscellanies (Dublin, 1746), p. 317.

19. See for example: “Kit-Cat Club,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., XV, 838, in which it is indicated that the Club was founded “about 1703.”

20. Owen Manning, History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (London, 1804-1814), III, 317. The Bishops were tried for seditious libel on June 29, 1687, and were acquitted the following day.

21. The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. Lord Wharncliffe (London, 1861), I, 52-53. See also D. C. Taylor, William Congreve (London, 1931), p. 197; Louis Melville, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Her Life and Letters (London, 1925), has a frontispiece illustration by Aubrey Hammond depicting Lady Mary at the Club.

22. Historical Manuscripts Commission, ser. 58, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath (preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire, England) (London, 1908), III, 238-39.

23. J. Spence, Anecdotes, ed. S. W. Singer (London, 1858), p. 34.

24. Sometimes attributed to Prior.

25. Dryden's funeral expenses came to £45.17.0. He was buried in Westminster Abbey; the funeral service was conducted by the Bishop of Rochester, May 13, 1700. Tonson and Garth were among the mourners. See R. J. Allen, “The Kit-Cat Club and the Theatre,” RES, VII (1931), 56-61; H. Cushing, “Dr. Garth: the Kit Cat Poet,” Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, XVII (1906), 1-17; R. W. Couper, “John Dryden's First Funeral,” Athenaeum, no. 4005 (July 30, 1904), 145-46; a reply to Couper's article. W. J. Harvey, “John Dryden's First Funeral,” Athenaeum, no. 4009 (August 27, 1904), 271; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report V. Appendix, 333, 359-60. An attack on Tonson's participation in the funeral proceedings is to be found in an anonymous poem preserved in the British Museum “[A] Description of Mr. D———N's Funeral …” (London, 1700). This poem has been attributed to the physician Thomas Browne (1672-1710); see Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature (Halkett and Laing), new and enlarged edition by Dr. James Kennedy, W. A. Smith, and A. F. Johnson (London, 1926), II, 41.

26. The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1927), V, 139.

27. Malone, I, pt. ii, 113n.

28. Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) was a poet and dramatist. After the Restoration his plays rivalled Dryden's in popularity. He was attacked by Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel.

29. Malone, I, pt. ii, 115n.

30. Letter dated 19 January 1700; quoted in Historical Manuscripts Commission … Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath (London, 1908), III, 394. This letter by Prior contains what is perhaps the earliest known reference to the Kit-Cat Club. Prior's correspondent, Abraham Stanyan (1669?-1732), diplomat and m. P., was a member of the Club.

31. Malone, I, pt. ii, 109.

32. Arthur Maynwaring (1668-1712) was a political writer and member of the Kit-Cat Club.

33. Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough (1658-1735), was a statesman and a patron of letters and science.

34. Poems on Affairs of State (London, 1703), III, 372-73.

35. The Clubs of Augustan London, p. 41. Other references to the Order of the Toast may be found in Poems on Affairs of State, II, 255, and in a letter from Addison to Abraham Stanyan, Feb. 1700. See The Works of Addison, ed. G. W. Greene (New York, 1856), V. 329.

36. The Tatler, no. 24, June 4, 1709. Millamant's “I toast fellows,” in Congreve's The Way of the World, may be a female counterblast to the Kit-Cat toasts.

37. Tonson had bought the Fountain tavern in Catherine Street. See Nicholas Adolph Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1951), p. 166. It was probably at the Fountain that the Club membership increased from a minimum of thirty-nine members (as at the Cat and Fiddle) to a maximum of forty-eight. See James Caulfield, Memoirs of … the Kit-Cat Club, p. iv. In Sir Richard Blackmore's poem, “The Kit-Cats” (1708), there occur the following lines about the tavern:

    High over the Gate he [Bacchus] hung his wavering sign,
    A Fountain Red with overflowing wine.

    The Fountain was frequented by Freemasons during the first half of the eighteenth century. It was used by the Royal Alpha Lodge—no. 9 on the Official List. Philip Lemprière in a letter to William Baker (13 Feb. 1777) mentions that the Kit-Cat Club moved from the Gray's Inn area to the Devil or Rose tavern in Temple Bar. There is no other evidence for this; but another Devil tavern, in Fleet Street, had been the location of Ben Jonson's clubroom, the Apollo, early in the seventeenth century.

38. The Clubs of Augustan London, p. 41.

39. Prior resigned his membership of the Club in 1707, when he became a Tory.

40. Nevertheless, in its heyday the Club met at the equally disreputable Upper Flask tavern in Hampstead.

41. Edward Ward, The Secret History of Clubs, pp. 360-77.

42. Tonson's house adjoined Barn Elms manor house and the residence of Lady Hoare. See Manning, History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, III, 317.

    The Barn Elms district has many associations with notabilities. In 1589 Sir Francis Walsingham entertained Elizabeth I and her court at Barn Elms. Cowley resided in the area during the 1660's and may have had a sub-lease of Barn Elms from the Cartwright family. Handel lived at Barn Elms soon after he came to England in 1711. Vanderbank the painter and “Monk” Lewis the novelist also resided there at different times.

    In Tonson's day Barn Elms manor house and his own residence were situated in a paddock at a small distance from the Thames. A description of Tonson's house at Barn Elms and of the Clubroom in its final stages of dilapidation may be found in Sir Richard Phillips, A Morning's Walk from London to Kew (London, 1817). In his Topographical History of Surrey (London, 1841; 1848), E. W. Brayley states that Tonson's house was still standing and was being used as a laundry in 1841. During the early twentieth century, Barn Elms manor was taken over by the Ranelagh Club, and it is believed by local residents that the Ranelagh Golf-House occupies the site of the Kit-Cat Clubroom.

43. See The Gentleman's Magazine, LXIII (June 1793), 520, for a listing of the order of the portraits at Barn Elms. Among the remaining members were Prior, Dryden(?), Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751), Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1695-1751), Sir Harry Furness and Sir Godfrey Kneller (?). Kneller's portrait was placed in a separate art collection at Water Oakley.

44. Canvases of this particular size have since been known as kit-cats. The advantage of kit-cat dimensions is that they allow the artist to include at least one of the hands of the sitter in his portrait.

45. Details from [J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the 18th Century (London, 1812-15)], I, 298-99. The order was the same when the pictures were at Water Oakley, residence of Richard Tonson II, and at Barn Elms Clubroom. Mezzotint engravings of the portraits were published by Tonson in 1723, republished by J. Faber, and re-engraved by Cooper for inclusion in J. Caulfield's Memoirs of the Celebrated Persons Composing the Kit-Cat Club. At the time of Jacob Tonson's death, in 1736, the portraits passed into the possession of his grandnephew, Richard Tonson II, who removed them from Barn Elms to his home at Water Oakley. Richard died in 1772 and the portraits were inherited by the Baker family into which Richard's sister Mary had married. The paintings remained at the Baker estate in Bayfordbury until 1945, when they were acquired and presented to the nation by the National Art Collections Fund. On the various members and their portraits see further National Portrait Gallery Catalogue of the Portraits (London, 1945).

46. Sir Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1902), p. 322. On the same page Besant contradicts himself by stating “what the club did in its serious vein is not known.”

47. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting (London, 1762-71), II, 591.

48. Memoirs of the … Kit-Cat Club, p. iii.

49. Spence, Anecdotes, p. 35.

50. This edition was an “authorized” production of the Club. Tonson was ordered to dedicate the work to the Duke of Marlborough, as he did, and not to the Duke of Ormond, as he had promised. Six members of the Club agreed to write the dedicatory epistle. The edition was published in 1712, with a portrait of Marlborough by Kneller. See Hist. MSS. Comm. Rep., XIII, 209; Rep. VIII, 75.

51. 1 July 1703. In William Congreve: Letters and Documents, collected and edited by John C. Hodges (New York, 1964), pp. 108-109.

52. Rowe's “Dialogue between Tonson and Congreve in imitation of Horace” (1714), in Miscellaneous Works of Nicholas Rowe (London, 1733), I, 11.

53. Usually attributed to William Shippen (1673-1743), parliamentary Jacobite and brother of Robert Shippen (1675-1745), a principal of Brasenose College, Oxford.

54. Faction Display'd (London, 1704), p. 15. Anonymously published poem preserved in the British Museum (see above, p. 203, n3).

55. Mary Astell (1668-1731), writer on theological topics. See Florence Smith, Mary Astell (New York, 1916), p. 25, for an argument that The Tatler no. 32, for June 23, 1709, is a reply to Mary Astell's attack on the Club.

56. Mr. C———ns's [Anthony Collins] Discourse of Free-thinking, put into plain English … for the use of the poor (London, 1713).

57. Swift, Works, ed. Thomas Sheridan (London, 1803), IV, 517.

58. Obscure references survive associating the Club with an unsavory anti-Jacobite demonstration of November 17, 1711, when, in commemoration of the anniversary of Elizabeth I's coronation, effigies of the Pope, the Pretender, and the Devil were prepared for burning in a derelict house. See Abel Boyer, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne, digested into Annals (London, 1712), X, 279.

59. Secret History of Clubs, pp. 360-77.

60. As late as 1719, Dr. Abel Evans (1679-1737), an Oxford divine, wrote to Tonson, after having sent him the manuscript of some poems: “If the Club do not like those verses and you do not think of printing 'em I would have you send 'em back by the post …” (MSS. 28275).

61. The Clubs of Augustan London, p. 232.

62. William Howitt, The Northern Heights of London (London, 1869), records a tradition that members of the Club used to sip their ale under an old mulberry tree which, in 1869, still stood, bound together by iron bands, in a garden adjoining the Upper Flask. Flask Walk, a street which runs into Heath Street, near Hampstead Underground Station, is the one surviving local record of the tavern.

63. “Amusements Serious and Comical Calculated for the Meridian of London,” in The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, in Prose and Verse (London, 1707-1708), III, 41. Brown was also, of course, the author of the famous jingle addressed to Dr. Fell.

64. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (London, 1740), pp. 257-58.

65. Vanbrugh commissioned the Earl of Manchester to secure Italian singers on behalf of the theatre.

66. Charles Leslie (1650-1722), non-juror, pamphleteer, and controversialist. After the passage given here, Leslie quotes from the “Prologue Spoken at the First Opening of the Queen's New Theatre, in the Hay-Market,” which he says was written by “Dr. G[ar]th, Chaplain to Kit-Kat, an Open and Profess'd Enemy to all Religion.”

67. “Lost on Monday 8th inst., at the Theatre in the Haymarket, a Gold Watch made by Tompion, with Gold chain and amethyst seal. Whoever brings it to Jacob Tonson in the Strand shall have 5 Guineas Reward and no questions asked.” London Gazette, January 18, 1711.

68. The Clubs of Augustan London, p. 236.

69. See British Museum T. 1689(15). This satire resembles the work of Edward Ward.

70. See J. Timbs, Club Life in London, pp. 49-53.

71. Anecdotes, p. 257.

72. George A. Aitken, The Life of Richard Steele (London, 1889), I, 344.

73. Henry Austin Dobson, Richard Steele (London, 1886), p.53. Leonard Welsted (1688-1747), poet and scholar: at various times he was clerk in the Secretary of State's office, and in the Ordnance Office.

74. Henry R. Montgomery, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Sir R. Steele (Edinburgh, 1865), II, 113.

75. Curll said on the title page that he was publishing for the first time manuscripts “found in the cabinet of the celebrated toast Mrs. Anne Long, since her decease.” The author of this collection accuses the Club of using the custom of toasting as a means of concealing the nightly debauches at Barn Elms.

76. It is last mentioned as an active Club in the letter from Dr. Abel Evans to Tonson: MSS. 28275; see preceding note 61. In 1703, when the Club moved to Barn Elms, the average age of its members was thirty-three years; but between 1719 and 1720, five of the members died. This brought the total number of members' deaths to sixteen, before the dissolution of the Club; it is possible that the increasing number of deaths hastened the Club's end. Tonson probably resigned his position of Club secretary when he retired in 1720.

77. Vanbrugh died in the following year.

78. August 25, 1725. See Caulfield, Memoirs of the … Kit-Cat Club, p. vii.

79. Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. B. Dobrée and G. Webb (London, 1927), IV, 170.

80. Letter of Croxall to Tonson, dated 1732; see MSS. 28275.

81. Tonson was Commissioner of the Peace for Herefordshire.

82. Presumably the “Characters” of the Club members.

83. Letter of Croxall to Tonson; see above, note 80.