HISTORYWIT WAS THE thing. After the excesses of Restoration England of the 17th century - think of the Earl of Rochester and all the courtly rakes - after the plague, fire and civil strife that bedevilled the early years of King Charles 11 and succeeding decades - after these, a new, moderate, urbane and rational ideology was coming to the fore, with wit as its primary ingredient.
Its most prominent exponents, from the 1690s on, were a group of friends whose aim, not small, was to reform cultural tastes, and to direct political and professional life in the country. They were all Whigs and Williamites, upholders of constitutional monarchy; and all, as Virginia Woolf said about one of them, Joseph Addison, "on the side of sense and taste and civilisation". They belonged, Ophelia Field tells us, "to a controversial dining society known as the Kit-Cat Club".
The founding father of the Kit-Cat Club was a London publisher-cum-bookseller called Jacob Tonson, and its original meeting place was the Cat and Fiddle, a tavern on Gray's Inn Lane renowned for its pies. Tonson's idea was to bring together, in a social setting, a number of young authors in need of patronage - Matthew Prior, William Congreve and John Vanbrugh among them - and aristocratic would-be patrons such as Baron Somers and one-time rake Lord Dorset. From this more or less modest beginning in the late 1690s, the Club evolved and expanded until it had a finger in more than literary pies. The entire political and cultural ascendancy in England owed its precedence to Kit-Cat influence.
The Club did not have it all its own way, however. Its advanced attitude to religion and morality, its "fundamentally secular and cynical world view", its contempt for backwardness and insularity - these drew opposition from conservative elements in the country, from Tory propagandists and advocates of moral reform of all persuasions. In particular, the latter tried to impose moral values on the theatre, with Vanbrugh and Congreve (for example) coming in for censure on account of their portrayals of women on the stage as "bold, libidinous and knowing creatures". Field recounts an instance of women themselves, in the audience for Congreve's Double Dealer, taking exception to supposed aspersions cast on female behaviour, shouting in outrage and hurling missiles at the stage. It seems the reaction to Synge's Playboy, in the early 20th century, was not without precedent.
Women in that reign of Queen Anne might with more justification have expressed affront at their exclusion not only from public and professional life, but also from clubs and societies like the Kit-Cat. These clubs were solely a masculine affair and during their meetings, the existence of women was acknowledged only in the toasts raised to those of exceptional beauty or - in the case of the Kit-Cats - powerful Whig connections. The "friends who imagined a nation", however, enjoyed plenty of amorous entanglements, lawful, irregular, extra-marital and all.
Part of Ophelia Field's achievement, in this very readable book, is to dress up her scholarship as gossip, so that - for instance - we get a picture of the Steele household with its accoutrements of dissatisfied wife, demanding mother-in-law, bawling infants and indefatigable debt-collectors - from which the essayist liked to remove himself at every opportunity. (Of the Steele-Addison partnership, Richard Steele was the more unruly and Addison the more fastidious.) Some women did assert themselves, like Robert Walpole's "giddy" young sister Dolly, who scandalised society by blatantly flirting with the elderly married Kit-Cat, the Marquess of Wharton.
Wharton was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1708, and took Addison with him to Dublin as his Secretary. Ireland, like Scotland a year or so earlier, was thought to be a hotbed of Jacobite and Catholic agitation; and, as Swift put it in one of his Drapier's Letters, its English administrators believed "it would be better for England if this whole island were sunk into the sea".
Failing that, the next best thing was to promote Protestant interests and suppress "Popery" as rigorously as possible.
If Addison served on a number of committees involved in drafting Penal Laws - a fact not tending to endear him to the Irish - his greatest fame, more acceptably, is as a literary, not a political, figure. Addison and Steele between them are credited with having initiated the whole field of modern journalism with their periodicals, the Tatler (1709-11) and the Spectator (1711-12), both of which derived in large measure from Kit-Cat idiosyncrasies of style and strategy.
This enterprising club required an enterprising commentator, and in Ophelia Field it has found one. Her extensive - indeed, exhaustive - study covers everything from politics, wars and international relations, to literary, architectural, theatrical and social history, right down to the Kit-Cat diet of mutton pies, cheese-cakes, golden custards, puff-pastry apple tarts, rose-water codling and so on (explaining the stoutness of some of its members), and prodigious quantities of alcohol including Vanbrugh's special punch, French wine and English port. All of which led an envious Tory satirist to attribute the Kit-Cats' bon mots and geniality to intoxication: "Oft do they in high Flights and Raptures swell,/ Drunk with the Waters of our Jacob's Well."
• Patricia Craig is a critic, anthologist and biographer. Her memoir, Asking for Trouble, was published by Blackstaff in 2007