SOURCE: Allen, Robert J. “The Kit-Cat Club and the Theatre.” Review of English Studies 7, No. 25 (January 1931): 56-61.

In the following excerpt, Allen traces the Kit-Cat Club's interest in and patronage of the theater, which included raising £3,000 for the building of London's famous Haymarket Theatre in 1705.

No select social group was more on the tongues of the Town during the early years of the eighteenth century than the Kit-Cat Club. There were among its number such gallants as Somerset and Manchester, such statesmen as Godolphin and Halifax, such warriors as Marlborough and Sir Richard Temple, and such poets as Walsh, Garth, Vanbrugh, Congreve, Steele, and Addison. Not too far in the background, there lurked always the enigmatic figure of Jacob Tonson, the publisher, whose presence in such a company is the less easily understood the more one abandons oneself to the conflicting contemporary explanations of his connection with the...