Blair Worden reviews Ophelia Field’s latest book
What a wonderful subject Ophelia Field has found, and how adroitly she has handled it. In the Kit-Cat Club, the coterie of Whig writers and politicians that began in the last years of the 17th century and lasted into George I’s reign, she finds both a mirror and a source of great movements of taste and power. The club’s founder was the cultivated publisher Jacob Tonson, who gathered and fed his authors at the Cat and Fiddle in Gray’s Inn Lane (‘kat’ being slang for a small fiddle). Swelling numbers impelled a move to more spacious quarters, and eventually to a property in Barnes which was converted for the club’s purposes by Vanbrugh, who with his fellow-playwright and rival Congreve was one of the initial luminaries. Addison and Steele soon joined them.
Born of a literary impulse, the club rapidly acquired a political one.
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