Ophelia Field - The Kit-Cat Club - Friends Who Imagined a Nation

The metaphor of ‘appetite’ versus ‘taste’ was used in relation to all forms of connoisseurship, with the idea that ‘consumption’ should be refined and one's palate exercised: ‘Conversation with Men of a Polite Genius is another Method for improving our Natural Taste,’ Addison wrote. 55 At the dinner table, the expectation of conversational pleasures to be served by one's fellow diners was equal to the expectation of good food. Every dinner party in London was said to need at least one Kit-Cat guest, or ‘Flat was the Wine and tasteless was the Cheer.’ 56

Addison had joined the Club, however, not for its wine or conversation, but to remedy his unemployment. Resisting lethargy, he helped select the poems for another edition of Tonson's Miscellany , but this took only a little of his time and attention. Nothing could have come as more of a relief, in these circumstances, than an unexpected visitor bearing good news in the late summer. Harry Boyle, the Chancellor of the Exchequer with the stinking wigs, personally climbed the three flights of stairs to Addison's garret to deliver an important message directly from Lord Treasurer Godolphin. Boyle was possibly selected, or volunteered, as messenger because he was a Kit-Cat and this was a Kit-Cat-inspired business.

Halifax had suggested to Godolphin that Addison be commissioned to write a poem for the government, in exchange for a post as Commissioner for Appeals and Regulating the Excise (a virtual sinecure, worth £200 a year or some £26,500 today). Godolphin himself was ‘not a reading man’, 57 but the three Kit-Cat Junto leaders had persuaded him that the war effort needed a patriotic poem to celebrate Marlborough's great victory against Louis XIV and the Bavarians in August 1704 at the battle of Blenheim.

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