Club Life

Culper Bell

Private
Joined
May 2, 2019
Location
Greensboro, North Carolina

Athenaeum Club 1830.jpg

The Athenaeum Club, ca. 1830

Rather than adhering to the definition that leans toward boisterous music, drunken singing, and promiscuous dancing, British clubs in the 19th century were more akin to today's fancy country clubs where your important parties and receptions are held - but even that much isn't wholly true.

They were more than simply places to have a fancy meal. Particularly the Athenaeum in London was the very center of society in a multitude of ways. It was the place to discuss political life on both ends of the spectrum, to forge and dismantle ideals and policies, where men chuckled and decided who would be the next Bishop of Bath and Wells, drank sherry and exhiled the current Chancellor of Exchequer. Human destinites were cradled here, but so too were they easily crushed with an air of friendly comradery. The pressures of this are clear in Osbert Lancaster's All Done from Memory while recounting the long forgotten 'clubland'.

While affluential men like bishops, university professors, poets and journalists mingled here, so too did the newly emerged upper-middle class. A conglomerate bound by money and cleverness, forged through a starvation crisis due to the Napoleonic Blockade. Through a long series of highly artificial hybrid selection of British cattle and sheep, Britain had narrowly evaded a violent struggle to avoid starvation; as Reverend T. R. Malthus prophecised. Rather there was cooperation and ingenuity, and a very uniquely British hybrid of a social class arose through the fires of the rigid French system and inflexibility of aristocratic privelege combined.

"Thus they gradually spread over the length and breadth of English intellectual life, criticizing the assumption of the ruling class above them and forming opinions of the upper middle class to which they belonged. They were leaders of the new intelligentsia." wrote Noel Annan of The Intellecutal Aristocracy in J.E. Plumb. The bourgoisie, professional classes, merchant and manufacturing classes had given way to a new way of social standing, and by the 1860's the upper middle class busied itself with intellectual freedom within universities. And with these ideas, they took to the British clubs to discuss and mingle.

Lancaster further recounts "In Victorian times writers and artists ... had conformed to the pattern of the upper-middle-class to which most of them belonged. The haute Boheme did not exist and the Athenaeum rather than the Closerie des Lilas shaped the social life of the literary world." This could have easily applied to the scientific world as well. Joseph Pristley would tell his dinner mates what he called 'dephologisticated air', only steps away from discovering oxygen Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier would finish the work. Pristley could then tell a dinner neighbour the properties of H2O, this dinner neighbour happening to be James Watt, and both would be quick on their way to discover uses for steam. Their dinner host Matthew Boulton would overhear the conversation and will provide the funding to construct steam engines.

For all of it's volatility, 'clubland' allowed the cleverness of men to stimulate each other to new heights of invention, to greater economic triumph, and the birth of new social classes.

Athenaeum Club Lobby 1841.jpg

The Athenaeum Club Lobby, ca. 1841
 
This post reminded me of Puccini's opera La Boheme:

I am a poet!

What's my employment? Writing.

Is that a living? Hardly.

I've wit though wealth be wanting,

Ladies of rank and fashion

All inspire me with passion;

In dreams and fond illusions,

Or castles in the air,

Richer is none on earth than I.

It feels ironic that Puccini writes of making a meager living while the aristocracy is what inspires him most. Though it is arguably richer to have creativity than materialistic riches.
 
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