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I SELF-MADE MEN

You will make Jacob's ladder raise you to immortality.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY, addressing a poet

soon to be published by Jacob Tonson¹

ON ANY DAY but the Sabbath in 1690s London, ships from around the world disgorged Chinese tea, Indian sugar cane, Japanese porcelain, South American medicines and Persian silk at the eastern docks. Many of these cargoes were then carried by barge and cart to the Royal Exchange, ‘a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth’, built a couple of decades earlier between Cornhill and Threadneedle Street.² Entering the Exchange from the south, the visitor faced an elegant chessboard courtyard surrounded by two-storeyed arcades, containing over two hundred stalls, with the Mediterranean merchants to the right and American plantation traders to the left. At ‘high exchange’ (that is, in the early morning) the courtyard thronged with brokers, salesmen and ‘stock-jobbers’ trading in both tangible products and grand ideas. Upstairs, young girls sold ribbons and other ‘toys’ for ladies' dresses, while downstairs old beggar women sold the morning shoppers warm bags of walnuts, their shells littering the floor. Beadles patrolled, on the look out for trouble from the ‘mumpers’ (beggars) or the crowds of haggling Armenian, Jewish and Dutch merchants. For those unthreatened by London's role as a leading global centre of trade and commerce, in these years before there was a British Empire, the Exchange was a place to throw oneself into the urban melting pot.

Around 500,000 people lived in London at the end of the seventeenth century, out of five to six million in England as a whole. The city's population was densely packed into a small area of low buildings with only a few high steeples rising clear of the rooftops. One particularly large windmill sat on the south bank of the river close to the site of today's London Eye. Brick buildings were replacing wood after the Great Fire, and the West End was just beginning to emerge from open countryside. The Thames' northern bank was the southern perimeter of the city proper, with the old borough of Southwark south of the river, filled with prisons, shipyards, seedy inns and brothels, stinking tanneries and breweries. The other perimeters of London were the several royal palaces of St James's to the west, Old Street and Holborn to the north, King's (later Soho) Square to the northwest, and Whitechapel to the east. It was a time of thriving property developers: ‘New squares and new streets [are] rising up every day to such a prodigy of buildings that nothing in the world does, or ever did, equal it,’ Daniel Defoe declared.³

The Glorious Revolution of 1688—the armed invasion that deposed the Catholic James II and installed a Protestant Dutchman, William of Orange, and his wife (James's daughter), Mary, on the English throne—had had social repercussions as profound as its constitutional consequences. Ordinary people began to re-examine and loosen the bonds that had tied them to their homes and class. For thousands of ambitious younger sons and rural labourers in search of trades or professions, this meant migrating to London, where everything seemed up for grabs—and within reach. Records for 1690 show three-quarters of London apprentices were born outside the city. London was also simmering with energy thanks to an influx of skilled Huguenot refugees and Dutch immigrants, as well as soldiers and sailors on their way to or from William's current war against France, the War of the League of Augsburg, then being fought in Flanders and Ireland. Army and navy commissions were briskly traded, allowing many men to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Financing the war, meanwhile, required landowners elected to Parliament to start coming into the capital every winter (rather than merely every few years, as during previous reigns) to vote through the army supplies. These landowners were building townhouses and inventing new urban pastimes to amuse themselves through the long, cold parliamentary season.

William's government, as an institution, was itself a social parvenu, and the image of William as a foreign occupier, rather than rightful king, still flashed dangerously in the corner of the English people's collective vision. What mattered was that educated Englishmen should not question the legitimacy of the new regime, nor view the post-Revolutionary constitutional balance, with its greater emphasis on the House of Commons, as too nouveau or alien. Everything had to be overhauled, and new authorities made palatable. Adherents of the Whig party, on the whole more ideologically comfortable than the Tories with the Revolution and the post-Revolutionary social mobility, put their shoulders to this wheel.

Two such self-made Whigs were John Somers, one of the King's leading ministers, and Jacob Tonson, London's most prestigious publisher. Both were flourishing and fattening into comfortable middle age in the 1690s. Their characters were perfectly suited to the times—ambitious and ingenious, yet fundamentally pragmatic—and each was willing to play his part in the national effort of self-reinvention.

Tonson had grown up in central London. A 5-year-old in 1660, the year of Charles II's Restoration, Tonson's father was a barber-surgeon, a freeman of the City of London and a constable of High Holborn, while his mother's family were booksellers with successful shops at the gates of Gray's Inn. At 15, Jacob was apprenticed to the stationer Thomas Basset, where he laboured for the next eight years, elbow-deep in printer's ink and bookbinding resin from morning to night. Tonson read the books in Basset's shop voraciously, acquiring a love of literature, a dose of Latin and a practical understanding of the book trade. The world of books absorbed and comforted Tonson because he was lame in one leg and less physically able than other young men his age. That his nickname ‘left-legged Jacob’⁴ signified more than mere clumsiness is confirmed by a physician's reference to Tonson's conscience being ‘more paralytic and lost to all Sense of Feeling than his Legs’.⁵ Tonson was also teased throughout his life for his ginger hair and wide, freckled face ‘With Frowsy Pores that taint the ambient Air’.⁶

After completing his apprenticeship, Tonson immediately established his own firm, with premises at the Judge's Head in Chancery Lane. Kit-Cat authors later feared sending their manuscripts to this chaotic office in case they were lost amid all the ‘lumber’.⁷ Tonson was determined from an early age to buy rights to the work of major authors, living and dead, and so establish his reputation as a professional—some say the first professional—English publisher.

Tonson was the first to commission critical editions of Milton's poetry, notably Paradise Lost, and to make substantial profit from a literary backlist. He also had a nose for new talent. Alexander Pope later wrote of ‘genial Jacob’ bringing forth poems and plays from ‘the Chaos dark and deep, / Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep’.⁸ This idea of a publisher bringing forth creativity—rather than being merely a mechanical maker of books—was unprecedented. That the same publisher should be trusted to make critical amendments to manuscripts was even more unheard of. While Victorian antiquarians would snobbishly try to portray Tonson as merely a grubbing tradesman, there is clear evidence he was a man of great intellect and wit: Tonson later boasted, for example, that in the 1680s he had written various commendatory verses for new editions and passed these off as the work of his star authors, John Dryden and Edmund Waller. (This is also evidence, of course, that the publisher was not above corrupting the corpus of his authors' works in order to boost sales.)

Being published by Tonson was soon seen as an author's shortcut to the richest, most powerful readers, thanks to the publisher's gift for networking. Tonson aspired to be considered a gentleman, on a level with his clients and authors, and so would have felt insulted when called the ‘chief merchant to the muses’⁹ or a great ‘wit-jobber’ (that is to say, no better than a City ‘stock-jobber’).¹⁰ He wished to set himself apart from other publishers and booksellers who were increasingly sullied by association with the hack writers of ‘any mean production’ in Grub Street.¹¹

Though one contemporary bitingly remarked that Tonson ‘looked but like a bookseller seated among lords, yet, vice versa, he behaved himself like a lord when he came among booksellers’,¹² Tonson, in fact, succeeded in his social climbing: his correspondence shows that his authors accorded him the same terms of politeness that they employed to address their aristocratic patrons.¹³ He was treated as their friend, not their servant. There is some disagreement as to how Tonson won this respect—one fairly impartial contemporary called Tonson a man who would ‘Flatter no Body’,¹⁴ while another described him as shamelessly obsequious whenever there was a profit to be gained.¹⁵ Certainly, from early in his career, Tonson made extravagant but well-calculated gestures of hospitality to both social inferiors and superiors. A bill survives for a 1689 dinner at a French-run ‘ordinary’ (a restaurant, usually run by Huguenot refugees) at which Tonson helped pay for a ‘great table’ of food, along with 20 gallons of claret, 6 of ‘Canary’, 4 of white wine, unspecified quantities of ‘Rhenish’ and champagne, 42 bottles of ale, musicians, servants, a constant fire, candles, pipes and tobacco, as well as a hired coach to pick up and deposit the guests—which, when added to compensation for ‘glasses broke’, came to £31. 8s. 6d. (around £4,000 today).¹⁶

John Somers was one of those invited to Tonson's parties before the Revolution¹⁷—one of the ‘gentlemen of genius and quality’ Dryden complimented Tonson on cultivating so assiduously.¹⁸ Born in 1651 to the son of a Worcestershire attorney, Somers had quickly established a reputation as a brilliant legal mind while studying at Middle Temple—an Inn of Court that the sons of professionals ‘ambitious of rule and government’¹⁹ were attending in increasing numbers. Somers' father had stood on the Parliamentary side during the Civil War, and, in the same spirit, Somers fell into the Whig party's political camp. The Whigs opposed James II's moves towards Catholic emancipation during the 1680s, and so, in June 1688, Somers acted as counsel for seven bishops who signed a petition against James's order for a pro-Catholic Declaration to be read from pulpits. Somers distrusted this Declaration because it was brought in by royal prerogative rather than parliamentary statute, and because of his deeply ingrained prejudice that the Catholic Church—with its centraliz ation to Rome and absolutist principles—was intrinsically ‘unenlightened’. The invitation to William of Orange to invade was carried from a set of Protestant English nobles on the very day that the seven bishops' acquittal was celebrated in the streets by ordinary Londoners.

Following the Revolution, Somers' Whig credentials and intellectual reputation ensured his rapid promotion in government. He chaired the committee that drafted the Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of the new constitutional monarchy, and guided William towards accepting its limitations on royal prerogatives. Somers helped mount a retroactive public relations campaign, portraying the change of monarch as the triumph of ‘Reason’—a simple expression of John Locke's ‘contract theory’, whereby unworthy rulers deserved to be deposed. In reward, Somers was appointed Solicitor General and then, in 1692, Attorney General, the latter a profitable office with extensive scope for patronage. Less than a year later, Somers was made Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, in charge of the Court of Chancery, and Speaker in the House of Lords, though he himself did not yet have a peerage. By 1695, Somers was one of four men who formed the ‘Junto’ of leading Whigs—the Cabinet within the Cabinet when in the King's favour, and when out of it, a kind of unofficial opposition or ‘shadow’ Cabinet. The Junto's power came from its ability to form block votes in the Commons and to raise from the City of London the extra funds necessary to supply William's costly war.²⁰ Somers was a particularly talented fundraiser, having no prejudice against the City's ‘money men’. He was appointed one of the Lord Justices or regents entrusted with the administration of the kingdom whenever the King was on the Continent running the war.

At home, Somers was an incurable bibliophile. His library in Powys House, the impressive brick residence the King had granted him in Lincoln's Inn, was dominated by the legal texts in which the Tonson family firm specialized. Like Tonson, Somers' claim to gentility depended on his display of learning, and this library was the most tangible proof of that education. Tonson was careful not to lose touch with his increasingly powerful friend. He kept Somers' shelves well stocked and met him regularly to ‘unbend’ over an after-work drink in a tavern near Temple Bar, where the commerce of the City intersected with the politics and law of Westminster.

Tonson also flattered Somers' learning by offering the statesman opportunities for dispensing patronage to various authors in Tonson's publishing fold. Being unmarried and without significant extended family to support, Somers was free to put his patronage to such use. His beneficiaries included Dryden, though Somers allegedly authored an anonymous poem critical of Dryden's Catholicism and regretting, ‘The knot of friendship is but loosely tied / Twixt those that heavenly concerns divide.’²¹ Dryden in turn introduced younger authors to Tonson and hence to Somers' purse. Two such authors who arrived in London during these exciting post-Revolutionary years would quickly become the leading playwrights of their generation: William Congreve and John Vanbrugh.

Congreve had been 4 years old when his father, an English army officer, was posted to Ireland in 1674. A perk for those, like Congreve's father, in nominal service to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was free education for their sons at the best Irish grammar school, Kilkenny. Some sixty pupils were enrolled at the school in the early 1680s and Jonathan Swift was enrolled two years behind Congreve. Congreve went on to Trinity College Dublin at age 16 in 1686, with Swift following a few years later; these two talented young men lived together in the small community of students for several years without leaving any surviving trace of a particular attachment to one another.

Beyond Trinity's Elizabethan red brick walls, Dublin remained something of a frontier town, a place of opportunity for entrepreneurs and rough justice for criminals, including pirates, smugglers, deserters and horse-thieves; a place where disgraced Englishmen bought cheap land and acquired new identities. The Glorious Revolution was neither quick nor bloodless in Ireland. Instead, it haemorrhaged into the War of the Two Kings (between William III and James II, or ‘Liam’ and ‘Seamus’), with violence that pushed out large numbers of Anglo-Irish refugees. When Trinity College closed in 1689 because of the upheavals, Swift fled to England, where he found his first job as secretary to a retired diplomat. That spring, as the deposed King James tried to retake Ireland with the aid of French troops, 19-year-old Congreve likewise fled to England where his family had well-off relatives happy to put them up. Congreve lodged first with his grandfather in Staffordshire, where, recuperating from an illness, he picked up a pen and began to compose his first play.

Two years later, Congreve arrived in London, a fresh-faced 21-year-old looking for an edgier and more fashionable existence than that on offer in Staffordshire. He was admitted to study law at Middle Temple in March 1691, but was described by a friend as having ‘a wit of too fine a turn to be long pleased with that crabbed, unpalatable study’.²² Middle Temple was not overly concerned if he neglected his legal studies to pursue a ‘coffee house education’ instead, since for many so-called ‘amateur’ students the Inns of Court were merely gentlemen's finishing schools, providing congenial central London lodgings.²³ Congreve himself described the education of Middle Temple as being more social than professional—‘Inns o’ Court breeding', he said, was mainly about learning to snub one's country relations when they came to town.²⁴

Congreve's wit quickly made him many friends among his fellow students—several of whom would end up as his fellow Kit-Cats in the years ahead. He went drinking with them in the self-consciously literary taverns and coffee houses of Covent Garden, northwest of the Temple. In that neighbourhood, according to one Kit-Cat poet, lawyers traded their robes for the lace coats of dandies, country girls lost their noses to syphilis, ‘Poets canvass the Affairs of State’, and all classes ‘blend and jostle into Harmony’.²⁵

In the centre of Covent Garden was Will's Coffee House, where Dryden held court among literati of all political shades. Congreve was probably introduced to this circle by one of the other ageing Restoration dramatists of London: Thomas Southerne or William Wycherley, whom Congreve knew through some cousins. Dryden's court at Will's was imperious: those allowed to take a pinch from his snuffbox comprised his inner circle, while his special chair had a prescribed place by the fire in winter and on the balcony in summer, which he called ‘his winter and his summer seat’.²⁶ Yet, at the same time, Dryden carried himself with a charming humility that impressed Congreve deeply: Dryden was, Congreve remembered, ‘of all the Men that ever I knew, one of the most Modest’.²⁷ The next generation of writers would say much the same of Congreve.

Dryden soon declared ‘entire affection’ for Congreve: ‘So much the sweetness of your manners move / We cannot envy you, because we love,’ he wrote.²⁸ Congreve, in return, said he was ‘as intimately acquainted with Mr Dryden as the great Disproportion in our Years could allow’, concluding quite simply that he ‘loved’ the old man.²⁹ Congreve showed his Staffordshire manuscript to Dryden, who declared he had never seen ‘such a first play in his life’, but added that ‘it would be a pity to have it miscarry for want of a little assistance’. What the comedy, entitled The Old Batchelor, needed, Dryden declared, was only ‘the fashionable cut of the town’.³⁰ Though ostensibly a plot of romantic intrigues, the real seduction of the play lies in the enviably quick wit exchanged between its male characters—it is a love letter to the urbane world Congreve must have imagined in his teens and in which he was now becoming accepted. Taking Dryden's suggestions on board, Congreve spent summer 1692 in Derbyshire reworking the text. By Michaelmas, thanks to Dryden's endorsements, Congreve was directing rehearsals of The Old Batchelor at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane.

It was likely during these rehearsals that Congreve fell in love with the woman who would become his muse throughout the next decade: the actress Anne Bracegirdle, or ‘Bracey’. Since adolescence, Bracey had acted under the tutelage of Mr and Mrs Betterton, two experienced members of the United Company, the theatre company based at the Theatre Royal. A brunette with dark sparkling eyes, a blushing complexion and a miraculously perfect set of even white teeth, it was said of Bracey that ‘few Spectators that were not past it could behold her without Desire’.³¹ Congreve met her when she was ‘blooming to her Maturity’³² and already a star.

It was more respectable to claim infatuation with Bracey than with most actresses, since she was reputed to be as chaste as the virgins she played. She lived with her mother in rented lodgings on Howard Street, where Congreve paid drawing-room visits. If their Northamptonshire family was related to the Staffordshire Bracegirdles, they may even have been distantly related to Congreve. But away from the decorum of Howard Street, backstage at the theatre, Congreve pursued Bracey with fervour, writing her a love poem that lamented her chastity:

Would I were free from this Restraint,

Or else had hopes to win her;

Would she could make of me a Saint,

Or I of her a Sinner.³³

The Old Batchelor opened in March 1693 to a ‘Torrent of Applause’ that would have fulfilled any young writer's most immodest fantasies.³⁴ The debut was such a success that ‘many persons of Quality cannot have a Seat, all the places having been bespoken many days since’.³⁵ Jacob Tonson needed no further persuasion to become Congreve's publisher. Tonson printed, then quickly reprinted, the text of The Old Batchelor; he would thereafter hold exclusive rights to all Congreve's plays.

Around Michaelmas 1693, Tonson moved from above his shop in Chancery Lane to a house at the south side of Fleet Street, near the gate of Inner Temple. Soon after, according to poll tax records, Congreve moved out of Crane Court and became Tonson's lodger at this Fleet Street house. The two men, publisher and author, lived together, along with their several domestic servants, for seven years, until 1700. A later imaginary dialogue, written by a mutual friend of theirs, has Tonson exclaiming to Congreve that during these Fleet Street days, ‘While I partook your wine, your wit and mirth, / I was the happiest creature on God's earth!’³⁶

As Congreve's Old Batchelor had its debut on the London stage, 29-year-old John Vanbrugh arrived in the city, in circumstances unlike those of most other ambitious young newcomers. His boat had come from France, where since 1688 Vanbrugh had spent the best part of his twenties, detained without trial and on charges that had been forgotten almost as soon as the key turned in his cell door. The French had arrested Vanbrugh because they had miscalculated the status of his family, believing he would make a valuable bargaining chip to trade for a high-profile French prisoner. Though Vanbrugh's mother did have various noble relations, his late father had been a merchant in Chester, trading in property, lead, grain and Caribbean sugar, and his grandfather was a penniless Flemish refugee. When Vanbrugh's father died soon after the Revolution, Vanbrugh had inherited only a small sum and the burden of responsibility for his numerous siblings.

Some of Vanbrugh's captivity was spent in the Bastille, where his health suffered. Now, in 1693, having been traded for an insignificant Frenchman thanks to his mother's tireless lobbying, he returned to England a free man and, to use his own phrase, as ‘sound as a roach’.³⁷ Imprisonment was a formative experience for Vanbrugh: it gave him a real appreciation of what arbitrary government could mean, and a violent aversion to boredom. He was determined not to waste another minute of his life.

After his return from France, Vanbrugh stayed in London for only a year before leaving ‘that uneasy theatre of noise’³⁸ to join a marine regiment. Purchasing an officer's commission both advanced his social position and promised a secure income. In wartime, however, it was also an act of patriotism: Captain Vanbrugh saw action at a disastrous naval battle and was lucky not to be recaptured by the French. He borrowed some money from a fellow army officer, which he repaid when back in London by writing a play for the Theatre Royal, where his creditor was a patentee. The Relapse opened there in November 1696 and proved an overnight sensation, reviving the sinking fortunes of the United Company and more than repaying Vanbrugh's debt. Its success inevitably introduced Vanbrugh to Tonson and the coveted cultural patrons—like Somers—for whom Tonson acted as gatekeeper and broker. Congreve and Vanbrugh therefore started climbing ‘Jacob's ladder’ to fame and fortune as undeclared rivals, with only three years between their brilliant entrances into the London theatre world and Jacob Tonson's circle of highbrow friends. Soon, however, Tonson would find a solution to make the way less steep for them both: he and his patrons would found the Kit-Cat Club—an institution which would support the two authors throughout the rest of their lives.