Tory Historian had yet another argument about Whigs recently, when buying a second-hand copy of Ophelia Field's "The Kit-Cat Club" in a well known and highly regarde West London bookshop.
The owner of the bookshop, a somewhat leftish minded lady, seemed to be convinced that the Whigs were the forerunners of all liberal and democratic thinkers, not merely a group of families and individuals who managed to wrest power away from the Crown and tried to ensure that it stayed with them.
Could this be a hang-over from the old Whig tradition of history or a somewhat more up-to-date misreading, based on that Duchess?
On the other hand, a reading of the Prologue (titter ye not!), which deals with Dryden's second, very grand, funeral, organized by the Kit-Cat Club, made Tory Historian smile.
Though both Whigs and Tories attended the funeral, no public occasion could take place in the 1700s without one of these two political parties attempting to dominate it, and in this case the Tories resentfully acknowledged that the Kit-Cats were posthumously appropriating Dryden to their distinctively Whig narrative of English literature.It is, however, unlikely that the Kit-Cats would have understood that expression "narrative" in this context.
0 comments