IN THE MAGAZINE

This is a portrait of Joseph Addison by Godfrey Kneller from around 1703. In partnership with his friend Richard Steele, Addison was one of the pioneers of modern journalism. He founded both Tatler and The Spectator. Courtesy Yale Center of British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

HISTORY ON REPEAT FOREVER AND EVER - PART 2

Ophelia Field Traces Vice's Ancestors

Was there a single historical area that pulled you back towards the subject?

What brought me back was my fascination with a particular character, Sarah Churchill, the first Duchess of Marlborough (1660–1744). She reminded me of certain tough but misunderstood women I had met in politics and while working in the human rights field. A friend of mine told me about Sarah when I was describing a colleague at work one day. I started reading up on Sarah’s life. She was the best friend and possible lesbian lover of Queen Anne and totally fascinating. Before I knew it I was writing Sarah’s biography.

What is it that for you makes the period in which Sarah lived so interesting?

I like the early 18th century because it is one of the lesser-known periods of British history. It’s ignored by the masculine historians who love the Civil War and guns and blood. Plus the campy historians who love the big hair and costumes of the later 18th century also give it a wide berth. But it was also a time of important change when many elements of what we think of as modern life first emerged.

What are we talking here in terms of “modern”?

In my new book, I look at a number of situations in the 1690s and early 1700s that now seem amazingly familiar. The “culture wars” fought between puritanical Christians and the more secular, libertine, urban elites (including members of the Kit-Cat) are directly comparable to the culture wars over “God, guns and gays” raging in the United States today. The divide between city and country life was becoming more profound, and in the cities individuals were pushing the boundaries of free expression that had already cracked open in the 17th century. Only the other day the British government announced it would finally look at repealing the blasphemy laws, so that struggle isn’t even over yet.

Yikes. What else did the Kit-Cat Club get up to aside from having the best name in town?

The name came from one of the groups founders Christopher “Kit” Cat and yes the chocolate bar probably did pilfer its name from the club. More importantly the newspapers launched by Kit-Cat members Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the 1710s, The Tatler and The Spectator, were part of a printing and reading boom. They intended to teach Christian morals, but they were in fact a substitute for the authority of the pulpit. They taught hundreds of thousands of Englishmen how to live their daily lives according to “polite” social rules. They were the beginning of modern journalism, with its emphasis on culture, style and opinion. Without Addison and Steele, there would be no Vice.

Thanks guys, remind us we owe you one. Did the press criticise the government as it does now?

My period did see accusations made against the British government that its ministers were profiting privately from a long expensive war against France—criticism akin to current hostility to the “military-industrial complex” in the USA and the “No blood for oil” opposition to the recent invasion of Iraq. So yes, England’s wars against Louis XIV were sustained by anti-Jacobitism (fear of invasion or insurgency by supporters of the former Stuart monarchy), and this can be directly compared to anti-terrorism rhetoric today: both fears having a foundation in reality but at the same time being played upon by those whose power is based on defending national security.

We never learn, eh?

Perhaps not. I personally found deep relevance and comfort however in the way that writers and artists in the early 18th century, such as the poets and playwrights in the Kit-Cat Club, juggled their creative careers with day-jobs and adapted to the rapid professionalisation and commercialisation of the arts. Their worries almost exactly mirror ours.

Could you single out an event in British history which you feel has had the greatest resonance on the world we are sitting in right now?

Historians are prone to argue that anything important happened first in their period. They can be a bit like little kids at times. You can find two historians analysing events 500 years apart and each writing about “the first rise of capitalism’” or “the new middle-class”. I won’t claim to pick one event from the totality of British history, just one from my own period: the South Sea Bubble.

What happened when the bubble burst?

The 1690s saw the start of Europe’s “commercial revolution” in which the Bank of England was founded on new theories of credit finance, supporting the first ever national debt, and leading thousands to invest in the stock market. The Kit-Cat Club’s members were a part of this revolution. Less than 30 years later, however, in 1720, the profitless South Sea Company crashed and the first “bubble” burst, plunging London into deep economic gloom and confirming the deepest fears of those Christians who felt that the over-sophisticated financiers were intrinsically deceptive and sinful. Today, as we sit watching the sub-prime mortgage crisis plunge the global economy over the edge, and analysts still talk in terms of “bubbles”, it’s apparent that our society is still ricocheting between these poles of childish faith in the markets and then childish heartbreak at their unregulated greed.

Holy crap, this history thing really is into repeating itself again and again. If there was one period of history you would like to live in to escape all this booming and busting, what would you go for?

Knowing too much about the physical hardships of the 18th century, I would choose a more recent period. If I could be sure to be a woman safe on the British home front, I would live among those who survived both the First and Second World Wars, because that generation had two post-war chances to construct brave new international structures, based on brief windows of moral consensus and political will in the West. I’d like to have worked among those who established the ill-fated League of Nations, or paved the way for the extraordinary Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which will see its 60th anniversary this December. As a second best to living in the early 20th century, I plan to write about it.

Who is your favourite historian? You can’t say yourself here.

A living expert on my own period, the 18th century: the British historian Linda Colley, currently a professor at Princeton. Her books always combine impeccably detailed scholarship and fluent storytelling with sweeping new perspectives of the kind that women are usually too modest to make. Her best work has appeared once a decade—In Defiance of Oligarchy (1982), Britons (1992) and Captives (2002)—and has fundamentally shifted the terms of historical debate with their understanding that history is made as much by fears and imaginings as by economics and armies. Everyone should give them a read.

INTERVIEW BY JAMES KNIGHT
The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation by Ophelia Field is available in June from HarperPress.


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COMMENTS

Anonymous, on Mar 20, 2009 wrote: Glad i’m not the only fan of the c18th on the internet. Whaterver Ugh thinks, i’ll probably look this book up.