Book review: The Kit-Cat Club

THE KIT-CAT CLUB WAS A COTERIE of Whig writers and politicians. Its founder and moving spirit was the astute Jacob Tonson, one of the first respectable and successful publishers. The club began meeting in the late 1690s at the Cat and Fiddle in Gray's Inn Lane, eventually moving to a country property of Tonson's at Barnes. Its members included the Whig lords who constituted the "Junto", key members of governments in the reign of William III and Anne, and younger Whig politicians, most notably Sir Robert Walpole, generally considered the first British prime minister.

The most important literary members were Congreve, Addison, Steele, Vanbrugh (a playwright before he became the architect of Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace), and Matthew Prior, though he defected to the Tories and was expelled from the club. But the three greatest writers of the age were not members: Dryden and Pope, because they were Catholics and Tories (though not Jacobites); and Swift, because he did not please the Whig lords and so also became a Tory.

The relationship of politicians and writers was mutually flattering and beneficial. Indeed, the club's writers served in a sense as a Whig think tank, seeking to guide tastes and opinion. They were defenders of the Revolution of 1688, promoters of the war with the France of Louis XIV, and advocates of the 1707 Union. They also sought to end the cultural dominance of France by promoting English fashions in poetry, theatre, architecture and landscaping. Much of their work was journalism, often in verse, and little of it can give pleasure today. An exception may be made for the essays written by Steele and Addison in the Tatler (mostly Steele's work) and the Spectator.

Ophelia Field gives her study of the club the subtitle, "Friends Who Imagined a Nation". This fairly describes the book's central argument, which is that "the Club's story can be read as a study of how the political stability Britain experienced after 1720 was constructed and defended from the 1690s onwards ... For over 20 years ... nearly all roads in British politics and culture led through the Kit-Cat Club, or took their direction in opposition to it." She makes her case cogently, with keen intelligence and a wealth of illuminating detail, and her character sketches of the club's leading figures are perceptive, fair and interesting. My one criticism is that the book is rather light on those who were on the other side. It would, for instance, have benefited from a fuller treatment of Swift, the outstanding talent of the age, who flirted with the club and then, notably in his magnificent pamphlet, "The Conduct of the Allies", became the Whigs' most incisive and effective critic.

Yet the club's own effectiveness cannot be denied. As several elections showed, there was probably a Tory majority in the politically conscious part of the nation, yet the Whigs won the battle, and the long marginalisation of the Tories after 1714 testifies to the skill with which the Kit-Cat writers prepared the ground, manipulating opinion.

They were well rewarded by their patrons, who provided them with jobs and sinecures, but this doesn't mean they were mere venal hacks or hirelings. They seem mostly to have written what they believed, and were sincere in attempting to bring a new civility to public life. Yet, when the Whig supremacy was established, and Walpole's system of corruption and patronage was in full flower, most of the best writers were to be found in the opposing camp.

As ever, there was some hypocrisy. So we find Addison, on a visit to France, criticising "the displacement of whole villages" by Louis XIV just for "the bettering of a View" from Versailles – despite the fact that his fellow Kit-Cat, Vanbrugh, was doing exactly the same thing in building Castle Howard for his Kit-Cat patron, the Earl of Carlisle. Meanwhile, Prior asserted that Frenchmen "make love to each other to a degree that is incredible, for you can pick your boy at the Tuileries or the play" – even though accusations of sodomy were levelled at more than one Kit-Cat member.

Field has written a fascinating and elegant book, thoroughly researched and giving a full and brilliant picture of one of the most interesting and important periods in English, indeed British, history.

A minor cavil: she writes carelessly of the Act, rather than the Treaty, of Union.