Elizabeth Steinhart
JMS Pearce
Hull, England

We share a fascination for the varied activities, relics, and quirky names of eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries’ gentlemen’s clubs and societies. One of us (ES) recently found the blue plaque of the Turk’s Head Literary Club above a Chinese supermarket in London’s Soho.

Distinguished literati, physicians, and scientists were members of such clubs. Before the days of social media, wireless, television, and movies, these small, intimate conclaves, remote from their workplaces and homes, began in seventeenth-century chocolate houses and coffee houses. They developed as places for people to socialize, argue, and exchange ideas. Each club or society had its own distinctive ethos. They were male-dominated and many thrived on exclusivity and class distinction, but nonetheless were responsible for many new scientific, literary, and political advances, not least in the reform of the Royal Society.

The aims and ambience of such clubs were well described by Samuel Johnson who wanted a group “composed of the heads of every liberal and literary profession to have somebody to refer to in our doubts and discussions, by whose Science we might be enlightened.” He described “an oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude, while the wine prompted free conversation and an interchange of discourse with those whom I most love: I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinion and sentiments I find delight.”

Club members traveled on foot or in horse-drawn carriages along unpaved or cobbled streets strewn with straw and mud, household debris, and feces, both human and animal. “Wetters” were employed to spray water on the streets and ladies used vinaigrettes to counter the foul smells. Before asphalt, wooden blocks were introduced to reduce the intolerable clanking of clattering hooves.

Mention has been made in these columns of the Lunar Society, Hexagon Club, X Club, and the Scriblerus Club.* Amongst many other notable gatherings were the Whig’s Kit-Kat Club, and Britain’s oldest surviving provincial learned society—the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, founded in 1710. The Royal Society founded in 1660 by Christopher Wren was of a different order—primarily devoted not to convivial debate but specifically to science (natural philosophy). There were many regional literary and philosophical societies promoting academic and educational lectures for its members.

Clubs comprised very small groups of creative, ingenious, and often eccentric men who enjoyed informal, candid discussions and friendly banter. They included a variety of scholars, literati, scientists, physicians, politicians, clerics, and industrialists. Within club precincts, abundant good food and drink were not infrequent accompaniments. Members often belonged to several clubs and societies; for instance, Dr. Johnson also founded the Essex Head Club and the Ivy Lane Club. What they discussed in color and cast has now largely passed, but a few have survived and still hold meetings.

The Turk’s Head Literary Club

In 1764, the artist Joshua Reynolds, and lexicographer and essayist Dr. Samuel Johnson founded The Literary Club at what used to be the Turk’s Head Tavern at 9 Gerrard Street, Soho (Fig 1).

At the time, it was probably the most famous of the literary and theatrical clubs in London. The number of its members was at first limited to nine and included the Irish physician Christopher Nugent, poet Oliver Goldsmith, playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and the statesman-philosopher Edmund Burke. They met for supper and conversation on Monday evenings at 7:00 pm until late in the night at the Turk’s Head tavern, kept by Charles Swinden. Samuel Johnson related:

We assembled generally at seven o’clock of an Evening, once a Week, at the Turk’s-Head, in Gerrard-Street, Soho, till that Tavern was sold and made into a private Dwelling; after which Event we mov’d our Gatherings successively to Prince’s in Sackville-Street, Le Tellier’s in Dover-Street, and Parsloe’s and The Thatched House in St. James’s-Street.

By 1784, the Club included seven peers, three bishops, and a dean. Their number quickly increased. Soon afterwards, they were joined by the actor David Garrick, lawyer and biographer James Boswell, libertarian Whig Charles James Fox, botanist and natural historian Sir Joseph Banks, author Edward Gibbon, eminent-if-eccentric St. Thomas’s physician George Fordyce, and the famous philosopher Adam Smith. By May 1780, the club boasted thirty-five members and the decision was taken to restrict the membership to forty. By November 1783, the landlord of the Turk’s Head and his widow who had kept the tavern had died, and the house reverted to private use.

Boswell and Johnson regarded conversation as its own art form, which stimulated ideas. But there was often dissension amongst the members. Adam Smith chose to publish his ideas in print rather than be engrossed in contentious conversations where they might be misunderstood. Johnson disliked Reynolds’ inclusion of clergymen, conservative Whigs, and grandees interested in social cachet rather than conversation. Today, its literary phantom meets monthly at Brooks’s, with social dinners and a certain amount of discussion about politics and current affairs. The original site in Gerrard Street is now the New Loon Moon Supermarket in Chinatown.

During the nineteenth century, many famous names including historians, nine prime ministers, and archbishops graced the Turk’s Head Literary Club. But there were remarkable exclusions, possibly the most celebrated being Sir Winston Churchill and the formidable lawyer FE Smith (1^st Earl Birkenhead), who in 1911 were deemed too controversial. They reacted by forming The Other Club, which thrived, dining on alternate Thursdays at 8:15 pm at the Savoy Hotel’s Pinafore Room, principally for rancorous political discourse.

This era of tiny groups of “clubbable,” self-selected scholars and dignitaries has diminished in recent years, under time’s unflinching rigor. Perhaps it has sacrificed a source of unbridled originality and invention as well as an element of snobbery. Apart from their congenial conversations, their members spawned fertile deliberations that benefitted science, literature, engineering, and medicine as well as industry, commerce, and political and social ideology.

Note

* The famously exclusive Athenaeum, White’s, Boodle’s Brooks’s, Reform, Garrick, East India, and other clubs had connections with the learned societies, and originally served as convivial, dining, and gambling establishments mainly for the upper classes.

Reference

Leo Damrosch (Author), Simon Vance (Narrator). The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age. CD Audiobook, Mar 26, 2019.