SOURCE: Papali, G. F. “The Kit-Cat Club.” In Jacob Tonson, Publisher: His Life and Work (1656-1736), pp. 86-109. Onehunga, Aukland: Tonson Publishing House, 1968.

In the following excerpt from a work written in 1933, Papali examines the central role of Jacob Tonson in the Kit-Cat Club.

Even if Jacob Tonson did not achieve anything great as a publisher, his claim to posterity's remembrane was established when he became the Secretary of the Kit-Cat Club, a distinguished assembly of some of the leading literary and social figures of the early eighteenth century. Such an honour in the company of eminent Whigs necessarily exposed Tonson, for a whole generation, to the shafts of Tory satirists. And the veiled and cowardly attacks made by political antagonists, as well as fragments of the correspondence of the Kit-Catters, are some of the valuable contemporary records warranting the conclusion that the Club was a humanely progressive...