ORIGIN OF KIT-KAT PICTURES.
In Shire-lane, Temple Bar, is said to have originated the famous Kit-Kat Club, which consisted of thirty-nine distinguished noblemen and gentlemen zealously attached to the protestant succession of the house of Hanover. The club is supposed to have been named from Christopher Kat, a pastry-cook, who kept the house where the members dined; and who excelled in making mutton-pies, which were always in the bill of fare, these pies being called kit-kats. Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, was secretary to the club. “You have heard of the Kit-Kat Club,” says Pope to Spencer. Sir Richard Steele, Addison, Congreve, Garth, Vanburgh, Manwaring, Stepney, and Walpole, belonged to it.
Tonson, whilst secretary, caused the club meetings to be transferred to a house belonging to himself at Barn Elms, and built a handsome room for the accommodation of the members. The portrait of each member was painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller; but, the apartment not being sufficiently large to receive half-length pictures, a shorter canvas was adopted; and hence the technical term of kit-kat size. Garth wrote the verses for the toasting-glass of this club, which, as they are preserved in his works, have immortalized four of the reigning beauties at the commencement of the last century—Lady Carlisle, Lady Essex, Lady Hyde, and Lady Wharton.
In 1817, the club-room was standing, and was the property of Mr. Hoare, the London banker. Sir Richard Phillips visited it at this date, when it was sadly in decay. It was 18 feet high, and 40 feet long, by 20 wide. The mouldings and ornaments were in the most superb fashion of the last century; but the whole was falling to pieces from the effects of dry-rot. There was the faded cloth-hanging of the walls, whose red colour once set off the famous portraits of the club that hung around it. Their marks and sizes were still visible, and the numbers and names remained as written in chalk for the guidance of the hanger! “Thus,” says Sir Richard, “was I, as it were, by these still legible names, brought into personal contact with Addison, and Steele, and Congreve, and Garth, and Dryden, and with many hereditary nobles, remembered only because they were patrons of those natural nobles!—I read their names aloud!—I invoked their departed spirits!—I was appalled by the echo of my own voice! The holes in the floor, the forests of cobwebs in the windows, and a swallow’s nest in the corner of the ceiling, proclaimed that I was viewing a vision of the dreamers of a past age—that I saw realized before me the speaking vanities of the anxious career of man! The blood of the reader of sensibility will thrill as mine thrilled! It was feeling without volition, and therefore incapable of analysis!”
Not long after this the club-room was united to a barn, to form a riding-house. The kit-kat pictures were painted early in the eighteenth century, and about the year 1710, were brought to this spot; but the club-room was not built till ten or fifteen years afterwards. The paintings were forty-two in number, and were presented by the members to the elder Tonson, who died in 1736. He left them to his great nephew, also an eminent bookseller, who died in 1767. They were then removed from the building at Barn-Elms, to the house of his brother, at Water-Oakley, near Windsor; and on his death, to the house of Mr. Baker, of Hertingfordbury, where they were splendidly lodged, and in fine preservation. We are not aware if the collection has been dispersed.