LITMIR.BIZ

      THE KIT-KAT CLUB.

       Table of Contents

      This famous Club was a threefold celebrity—political, literary, and artistic. It was the great Society of Whig leaders, formed about the year 1700, temp. William III., consisting of thirty-nine noblemen and gentlemen zealously attached to the House of Hanover; among whom the Dukes of Somerset, Richmond, Grafton, Devonshire, and Marlborough, and (after the accession of George I.) the Duke of Newcastle; the Earls of Dorset, Sunderland, Manchester, Wharton, and Kingston; Lords Halifax and Somers; Sir Robert Walpole, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Granville, Addison, Garth, Maynwaring, Stepney, and Walsh. They are said to have first met at an obscure house in Shire-lane, by Temple Bar, at the house of a noted mutton-pieman, one Christopher Katt; from whom the Club, and the pies that formed a standing dish at the Club suppers, both took their name of Kit-Kat. In the Spectator, No. 9, however, they are said to have derived their title not from the maker of the pie, but from the pie itself, which was called a Kit-Kat, as we now say a Sandwich; thus, in a prologue to a comedy of 1700:

      "A Kit-Kat is a supper for a lord;"

      but Dr. King, in his Art of Cookery, is for the pieman:

      "Immortal made, as Kit-Kat by his pies."

      The origin and early history of the Kit-Kat Club is obscure. Elkanah Settle addressed, in 1699, a manuscript poem "To the most renowned the President and the rest of the Knights of the most noble Order of the Toast," in which verses is asserted the dignity of the Society; and Malone supposes the Order of the Toast to have been identical with the Kit-Kat Club: this was in 1699. The toasting-glasses, which we shall presently mention, may have something to do with this presumed identity.

      Ned Ward, in his Secret History of Clubs, at once connects the Kit-Kat Club with Jacob Tonson, "an amphibious mortal, chief merchant to the Muses." Yet this is evidently a caricature. The maker of the mutton-pies, Ward maintains to be a person named Christopher, who lived at the sign of the Cat and Fiddle, in Gray's Inn-lane, whence he removed to keep a pudding-pye shop, near the Fountain Tavern, in the Strand. Ward commends his mutton-pies, cheese-cakes, and custards, and the pieman's interest in the sons of Parnassus; and his inviting "a new set of Authors to a collation of oven trumpery at his friend's house, where they were nobly entertained with as curious a batch of pastry delicacies as ever were seen at the winding-up of a Lord Mayor's feast;" adding that "there was not a mathematical figure in all Euclid's Elements but what was presented to the table in baked wares, whose cavities were filled with fine eatable varieties fit for the gods or poets." Mr. Charles Knight, in the Shilling Magazine, No. 2, maintains that by the above is meant, that Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, was the pieman's "friend," and that to the customary "whet" to his authors he added the pastry entertainment. Ward adds, that this grew into a weekly meeting, provided his, the bookseller's friends would give him the refusal of their juvenile productions. This "generous proposal was very readily agreed to by the whole poetic class, and the cook's name being Christopher, for brevity called Kit, and his sign being the Cat and Fiddle, they very merrily derived a quaint denomination from puss and her master, and from thence called themselves of the Kit-Cat Club."

      A writer in the Book of Days, however, states, that Christopher Cat, the pastry-cook, of King-street, Westminster, was the keeper of the tavern, where the Club met; but Shire-lane was, upon more direct authority, the pieman's abode.

      We agree with the National Review, that "it is hard to believe, as we pick our way along the narrow and filthy pathway of Shire-lane, that in this blind alley [?], some hundred and fifty years ago, used to meet many of the finest gentlemen and choicest wits of the days of Queen Anne and the first George. Inside one of those frowsy and low-ceiled rooms, now tenanted by abandoned women or devoted to the sale of greengroceries and small coal—Halifax has conversed and Somers unbent, Addison mellowed over a bottle, Congreve flashed his wit, Vanbrugh let loose his easy humour, Garth talked and rhymed."

      The Club was literary and gallant as well as political. The members subscribed 400 guineas for the encouragement of good comedies in 1709. The Club had its toasting-glasses, inscribed with a verse, or toast, to some reigning beauty; among whom were the four shining daughters of the Duke of Marlborough—Lady Godolphin, Lady Sunderland, Lady Bridgewater, and Lady Monthermer; Swift's friends, Mrs. Long and Mrs. Barton, the latter the lovely and witty niece of Sir Isaac Newton; the Duchess of Bolton, Mrs. Brudenell, and Lady Carlisle, Mrs. Di. Kirk, and Lady Wharton.

      Dr. Arbuthnot, in the following epigram, seems to derive the name of the Club from this custom of toasting ladies after dinner, rather than from the renowned maker of mutton-pies:—

      "Whence deathless Kit-Kat took his name,

       Few critics can unriddle:

       Some say from pastrycook it came,

       And some from Cat and Fiddle.

       From no trim beaus its name it boasts,

       Grey statesmen or green wits,

       But from this pell-mell pack of toasts

       Of old Cats and young Kits."

      Lord Halifax wrote for the toasting-glasses the following verses in 1703:—

      The Duchess of St. Albans.

      The line of Vere, so long renown'd in arms,

       Concludes with lustre in St. Albans' charms.

       Her conquering eyes have made their race complete:

       They rose in valour, and in beauty set.

      The Duchess of Beaufort.

      Offspring of a tuneful sire,

       Blest with more than mortal fire;

       Likeness of a Mother's face,

       Blest with more than mortal grace:

       You with double charms surprise,

       With his wit, and with her eyes.

      The Lady Mary Churchill.

      Fairest and latest of the beauteous race,

       Blest with your parent's wit, and her first blooming face;

       Born with our liberties in William's reign,

       Your eyes alone that liberty restrain.

      The Lady Sunderland.

      All Nature's charms in Sunderland appear,

       Bright as her eyes, and as her reason clear;

       Yet still their force to man not safely known,

       Seems undiscover'd to herself alone.

      The Mademoiselle Spanheim.

      Admir'd in Germany, ador'd in France,

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