Kit-Cat Club [ Association / Associational culture / Politics & Society ]
… nature of the Whig party, the Kit-Cat Club took a semi-mercantile approach to patronage of the arts by reliance on subscriptions. In 1703, for example, the building of the Queen’s Theatre on the Haymarket was funded by Kit-Cat subscription in order to create a ‘cradle and forcing-ground’ for opera in England. 12 Tonson, meanwhile, used Kit-Cat dominated subscription lists to fund his publication of Caesar’s Commentaries (1712), the first collected volume of essays from …
Friendship | Merchants | Patronage | Whigs
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