Discussion Post: The Dancing Men
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sherlock60This week, the canon story we’re looking at is The Dancing Men and the chosen topic is Gentlemen’s Clubs—and Ladies’ Too!
A few facts:
🃞🃝 At the turn of the twentieth century, London boasted approximately two hundred gentleman's clubs; half of these all-male enclaves had been founded in the last thirty years of the century… Gentlemen's clubs tended to cluster in London in the exclusive preserve known as “clubland,” located predominately on St. James's Street and Pall Mall…
Premier among the Victorian clubs were the Athenaeum, founded in 1824 for men of science, literature, and art; the Reform (1836) associated originally with supporters of the Reform Bill; its twin club the Carlton, founded in 1832 for political conservatives . . . and the various clubs that could provide for needs of an Imperial city, such as the Travellers Club, founded in 1819 for men who had travelled a minimum of 500 miles outside the British Isles, the Royal Colonial Institute, for men associated with the colonies and British India, and the United Service Club (1815), founded after the Battle of Waterloo for senior level military officers. Other distinctive and important clubs included the Garrick (1831), which boasted one of clubland's best art collections, the Eccentric (1890) for music hall performers; the Saville (1868), for the younger generation of literary men; and the Savage (1857), for actors, musicians, and artists. [Barbara Black, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 London clubs developed from the coffee-houses which sprang into existence in the late seventeenth century, and they quickly came to play an important role in the social life of the city. One of the most prestigious, White’s Chocolate House, decided around the turn of the century to reserve some rooms for the exclusive use of its more elegant clientele, its popularity having started to attract people with whom the aristocrats did not necessarily want to mix (especially
for gambling, an aristocratic addiction in the eighteenth century). Other eighteenth century clubs − Boodle’s, the Cocoa Tree, Brooks’s and Arthur’s − also transformed their coffee-houses into clubhouses.
After the end of the Napoleonic wars the institution of the club assumed its full identity with the foundation of the United Service (1815), the Travellers’ (1819), the Union (1822), and the Athenaeum (1824). Such clubs may be characterised by two main features: their luxurious premises, offering a large range of services from dining facilities to libraries, and their well-defined procedures for the selection of members. [Antonia Taddei]
🃞🃝 To be a clubman entailed the luxury of dropping in at any moment to a space where one could meet friends, read, enjoy a meal, play cards, or simply relax in peace and quiet. A sociable Victorian gentleman would have belonged to several clubs as a matter of course, and it would have been a secure pillar of his identity… [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Club membership was one of the visible markers of social identity for men. In scanning the pages of Who’s Who, men listed their clubs among the other descriptions of their pedigree and achievements as a way to describe who they were and to what group they belonged… The realities of the late nineteenth century meant that many titles were recent and positions could be bought; thus neither guaranteed social acceptance alone. Thus, membership in the right club could be an important reflection of one’s rightful position as a gentleman. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Leonore Davidoff in her book The Best Circles described what she called “the Victorian Social Dance”, a complex and constraining code of social etiquette that the aristocratic and middle classes had to endure in building a set of acquaintances… Now if you were a young buck with ideas and ambitions to make your way, you needed to meet the “right” people, but you didn’t have the time for such social niceties whilst everyone else was making the money. However, Victorian social convention dictated that certain rules still had to be followed, and marrying these two seemingly disparate forces is where the St James’s gentlemen’s clubs really came into their own.
The clubs offered the chance to by-pass this “social dance” and gave easier opportunities to network, but still in a suitably controlled environment that helped satisfy the strict social codes of Victorian society… At the same time, they offered: privacy – both from the outside world and an assurance of the discretion of fellow members; communication – both in terms of networking, news and gossip and the fact that they were early adopters of new communications technology such as the telegraph and telephone; and status – membership was a form of qualification as a “gentleman”... [markslondonrambles, on Mark Rowland’s London Rambles]
🃞🃝 Until the 1950s, clubs were also heavily regulated in the rooms open to non-members. Most clubs contained just one room where members could dine and entertain non-members; it was often assumed that one's entire social circle should be within the same club. [Wikipedia]
🃞🃝 ...while gambling at the clubs certainly decreased during the nineteenth century, the popular imagination still perceived clubs as a place where a man could run through a fortune... [But] while clubs may have accepted gambling, these were no longer the days of the Regency cardsharps. Gambling was a recurrent public relations problem for clubs in general, although within the clubs the committees worried less about ruinous losses and more about bad credit, late hours, and negative publicity. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 While clubs were private institutions, [membership] elections were very public among the small upper-class community with candidates listed on the fireplace mantles of clubs, and election results sometimes published in the newspapers… In all clubs, candidates were excluded for a variety of reasons, typically related to status, politics, or simple spite...
The methods of election at West End clubs were remarkably similar. Members nominated candidates, vouched for their eligibility and added their names to a sometimes-lengthy waiting list… Each candidate’s name, family, and profession (if any) was recorded in a book, which was on display in the club before an election by ballot took place. Candidates could wait months or even years before their election depending on the popularity of the club at the time. When a candidate came up for election, his supporters championed his cause among members, and often wrote letters of endorsement to the committee. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 It is difficult to determine how socially damaging a blackballing [being refused membership] actually was. For a man on the boundaries of respectable or upper-class life, it could serve as the deciding blow to his hopes for social advancement. However, for a man of title and position, it might only damage his ego. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Many of the club histories celebrate their high points of demand. The Army and Navy Club had 3,000 candidates waiting in 1865, the Athenaeum boasted a typical waiting list of 1,600 or sixteen years in the 1890s, while White’s could still claim a nine-year waiting list in the 1990s. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 At the turn of the 20th century the clubs fell into fairly rapid decline. One of the reasons was that they became victims of their own popularity. Waiting lists were… long… many not willing to wait simply set up their own. This eroded their key selling point – the cachet of exclusivity – and ultimately led to their decline.
At the same time the rapid expansion of rail-based public transport… and the installation of telephone exchanges in every major city between them reduced the necessity for proximity and the political parties were establishing dedicated management structures and party HQ’s. As such. their raison d’etre as the hub of social, business and political networks diminished rapidly. [markslondonrambles, on Mark Rowland’s London Rambles]
🃞🃝 ...In the service clubs the reserve men, who made up the bulk of the domestics, went first. One claim after another was made, until all up and down St. James’s and Pall Mall the best of the domestics have been withdrawn. In fact, the better the club the greater proportion of reserve forces were requisitioned (Lady, “Metropolitan Gossip”).
Empty clubs, a dramatic loss of service, and a lack of servants are exactly the kind of consequences one would anticipate from the First World War. Except that this account was written in 1900, not 1914. This supposed transformation of clubland was a result of the (relatively) minor Boer War. The inconvenience of Boer War was but a ripple in comparison to the wave of destruction, social upheaval, and rapid change that the twentieth century would bring. While members liked to imagine their beloved institutions as immune from the ravages of time, the changes going on around them could not be ignored. ...by 1918, London clubland was no longer the central site where elite men defined their class and gender identities. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Women also set about establishing their own clubs in the late nineteenth century, such as the Ladies' Institute, and the Ladies' Athenaeum. They proved quite popular at the time, but only one London-based club, The University Women's Club, has survived to this day as a single-sex establishment. [Wikipedia]
🃞🃝 The idea [of a club for women] had first been mooted in 1857 when Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon thought of opening a club room on the same premises as that of the feminist journal they planned to publish. Initially their aim was very modest, merely to provide a room in which to make available the magazines and papers they knew women of cultivation but limited means would like to read but could not otherwise afford.
The club room did materialise, by 1860 known as the Ladies’ Institute. It was housed in premises in Langham Place, just north of Oxford Street, comprising a Reading Room, open from 11 in the morning to 10 at night, a Luncheon Room and a room for the reception of parcels. The latter was a boon for women travelling into central London to shop at the new department stores. Thus the club provided rest and recreation not only for London’s many middle-class working women, such as daily governesses, who were likely to be living alone in lodgings, but also for her like-minded, but more leisured, sister.
🃞🃝 From the 1880s, once the idea had been shattered that clubs were only for men, women’s clubs multiplied, two distinct types emerging. There were those that… [appealed] to independent-minded working women, and those that provided ‘tea and shopping facilities’, social in their aims and fashionable in their membership. [Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere]
🃞🃝 ‘Is it not possible for ladies to possess a Club which will not afford too striking a contrast with the splendours of St James?’ So wrote Frances Power Cobbe in the early 1870s. ...after 1870, clubs for women had, indeed, been opened. Although many of these, like the Somerville, University or Writers’, were particularly aimed at working middle-class women. What Frances Power Cobbe was envisaging was the opening of clubs on a par of grandeur with the gentleman’s clubs, such as the Athenaeum or Carlton. Within 20 years her plea had, to some extent, been answered. Such clubs did open: their existence may owe something to the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act, which gave women greater control over their own funds.
However opulent the late-19th-century ladies’ clubs they never competed for territory with the gentlemen. Ladies’ clubs tended to group to the north of Piccadilly, close to the shopping areas of Oxford, Bond and Regent streets, leaving the southern side to the men. [Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere]
🃞🃝 In London most of the Victorian and Edwardian ladies’ clubs tended to be located in the shopping, feminine area south of Oxford Street, north of Piccadilly and west of Regent Street. Not only were they conveniently situated for shopping and socialising, but the fact that they were in an acceptably feminine area appears successfully to have negated the masculinity inherent in the idea of the club. However in 1892 the Writers’ Club, founded to provide a social and working centre for women authors and journalists, did open its doors in an essentially masculine area, Norfolk Street, just off the Strand.
...in 1904 a group with higher aspirations broke away to form the Lyceum Club. This was the first woman’s club to brave the male club land of Piccadilly, initially taking over premises that had formerly housed the Imperial Services Club. Its founder, Constance Smedley, recorded that the Lyceum was intended for ladies engaged with literature, journalism, art, science and medicine, who required ‘a substantial and dignified milieu where [they] could meet editors and other employers and discuss matters as men did in professional clubs: above all in surroundings that did not suggest poverty’. [Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere]
Some useful resources:
Clubs and Other Private Organizations On The Victorian Web. List of clubs, with links to other articles on The Victorian Web.
London Clubs in the Nineteenth Century By Antonia Taddei. Part of ‘University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History’. A PDF.
Gentleman behaving badly: Gambling in London Clubland By Amy Milne-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, on The Victorian Web.
Understanding London Clubland: Exclusion in Action — Club Elections By Amy Milne-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, on The Victorian Web.
Exclusion in Theory: Ideal Society, Ideal Clubmen By Amy Milne-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, on The Victorian Web.
The Athenæum Club, Pall Mall, London On The Victorian Web.
Gentlemen's club On Wikipedia.
The St James’s gentlemen’s clubs; Victorian London’s LinkedIn By markslondonrambles, on Mark Rowland’s London Rambles.
List of gentlemen's clubs in London On Wikipedia.
Rooms Of Their Own: Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Clubs: A Practical Demand By Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere.
Rooms Of Their Own: Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Clubs: Tea and Shopping By Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere.
Rooms Of Their Own: Victorian And Edwardian Women’s Clubs: Hesitant Beginnings By Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere.
A Looker-On in London, by Mary H. Krout, 1899 - Chapter 9 -Women's Clubs On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
London's Clubs for Women By Sheila Braine, Living London, 1902. On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Gentlemen’s Clubs of Edwardian London By Camille Hadley Jones, on Edwardian Promenade.
Nineteenth Century Gentleman’s Clubs By Mary Ann Sullivan, on the Bluffton University website.
19th century gentlemen's clubs On![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
little_details, questions posted by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
salamandraga.
The Cannibal Club: Racism and Rabble-Rousing in Victorian England By Jeff M. Campagna, on the Smithsonian.
character and dangers of clubs On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Members-Only Clubs That Charles Dickens Built By Jason Diamond, on Flavorwire.
The Racquet Club History On the Racquet Club website.
Crockford’s Club: How a Fishmonger Built a Gambling Hall and Bankrupted the British Aristocracy By Mike Dash, on the Smithsonian.
Athenaeum Club: Rules and regulations, list of members, and donations to the library, 1852; with suppl. for 1853 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
The Burlington Fine Arts Club: 17, Savile Row, W., rules, regulations, and bye-laws with list of members, 1899 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
Roxburghe Club: Chronological list of members ; Catalogue of books ; Rules and regulations, 1902 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
Army and Navy Club: The rules and regulations, with an alphabetical list of the members of the army and Navy Club, 1861 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
A few facts:
🃞🃝 At the turn of the twentieth century, London boasted approximately two hundred gentleman's clubs; half of these all-male enclaves had been founded in the last thirty years of the century… Gentlemen's clubs tended to cluster in London in the exclusive preserve known as “clubland,” located predominately on St. James's Street and Pall Mall…
Premier among the Victorian clubs were the Athenaeum, founded in 1824 for men of science, literature, and art; the Reform (1836) associated originally with supporters of the Reform Bill; its twin club the Carlton, founded in 1832 for political conservatives . . . and the various clubs that could provide for needs of an Imperial city, such as the Travellers Club, founded in 1819 for men who had travelled a minimum of 500 miles outside the British Isles, the Royal Colonial Institute, for men associated with the colonies and British India, and the United Service Club (1815), founded after the Battle of Waterloo for senior level military officers. Other distinctive and important clubs included the Garrick (1831), which boasted one of clubland's best art collections, the Eccentric (1890) for music hall performers; the Saville (1868), for the younger generation of literary men; and the Savage (1857), for actors, musicians, and artists. [Barbara Black, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 London clubs developed from the coffee-houses which sprang into existence in the late seventeenth century, and they quickly came to play an important role in the social life of the city. One of the most prestigious, White’s Chocolate House, decided around the turn of the century to reserve some rooms for the exclusive use of its more elegant clientele, its popularity having started to attract people with whom the aristocrats did not necessarily want to mix (especially
for gambling, an aristocratic addiction in the eighteenth century). Other eighteenth century clubs − Boodle’s, the Cocoa Tree, Brooks’s and Arthur’s − also transformed their coffee-houses into clubhouses.
After the end of the Napoleonic wars the institution of the club assumed its full identity with the foundation of the United Service (1815), the Travellers’ (1819), the Union (1822), and the Athenaeum (1824). Such clubs may be characterised by two main features: their luxurious premises, offering a large range of services from dining facilities to libraries, and their well-defined procedures for the selection of members. [Antonia Taddei]
🃞🃝 To be a clubman entailed the luxury of dropping in at any moment to a space where one could meet friends, read, enjoy a meal, play cards, or simply relax in peace and quiet. A sociable Victorian gentleman would have belonged to several clubs as a matter of course, and it would have been a secure pillar of his identity… [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Club membership was one of the visible markers of social identity for men. In scanning the pages of Who’s Who, men listed their clubs among the other descriptions of their pedigree and achievements as a way to describe who they were and to what group they belonged… The realities of the late nineteenth century meant that many titles were recent and positions could be bought; thus neither guaranteed social acceptance alone. Thus, membership in the right club could be an important reflection of one’s rightful position as a gentleman. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Leonore Davidoff in her book The Best Circles described what she called “the Victorian Social Dance”, a complex and constraining code of social etiquette that the aristocratic and middle classes had to endure in building a set of acquaintances… Now if you were a young buck with ideas and ambitions to make your way, you needed to meet the “right” people, but you didn’t have the time for such social niceties whilst everyone else was making the money. However, Victorian social convention dictated that certain rules still had to be followed, and marrying these two seemingly disparate forces is where the St James’s gentlemen’s clubs really came into their own.
The clubs offered the chance to by-pass this “social dance” and gave easier opportunities to network, but still in a suitably controlled environment that helped satisfy the strict social codes of Victorian society… At the same time, they offered: privacy – both from the outside world and an assurance of the discretion of fellow members; communication – both in terms of networking, news and gossip and the fact that they were early adopters of new communications technology such as the telegraph and telephone; and status – membership was a form of qualification as a “gentleman”... [markslondonrambles, on Mark Rowland’s London Rambles]
🃞🃝 Until the 1950s, clubs were also heavily regulated in the rooms open to non-members. Most clubs contained just one room where members could dine and entertain non-members; it was often assumed that one's entire social circle should be within the same club. [Wikipedia]
🃞🃝 ...while gambling at the clubs certainly decreased during the nineteenth century, the popular imagination still perceived clubs as a place where a man could run through a fortune... [But] while clubs may have accepted gambling, these were no longer the days of the Regency cardsharps. Gambling was a recurrent public relations problem for clubs in general, although within the clubs the committees worried less about ruinous losses and more about bad credit, late hours, and negative publicity. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 While clubs were private institutions, [membership] elections were very public among the small upper-class community with candidates listed on the fireplace mantles of clubs, and election results sometimes published in the newspapers… In all clubs, candidates were excluded for a variety of reasons, typically related to status, politics, or simple spite...
The methods of election at West End clubs were remarkably similar. Members nominated candidates, vouched for their eligibility and added their names to a sometimes-lengthy waiting list… Each candidate’s name, family, and profession (if any) was recorded in a book, which was on display in the club before an election by ballot took place. Candidates could wait months or even years before their election depending on the popularity of the club at the time. When a candidate came up for election, his supporters championed his cause among members, and often wrote letters of endorsement to the committee. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 It is difficult to determine how socially damaging a blackballing [being refused membership] actually was. For a man on the boundaries of respectable or upper-class life, it could serve as the deciding blow to his hopes for social advancement. However, for a man of title and position, it might only damage his ego. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Many of the club histories celebrate their high points of demand. The Army and Navy Club had 3,000 candidates waiting in 1865, the Athenaeum boasted a typical waiting list of 1,600 or sixteen years in the 1890s, while White’s could still claim a nine-year waiting list in the 1990s. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 At the turn of the 20th century the clubs fell into fairly rapid decline. One of the reasons was that they became victims of their own popularity. Waiting lists were… long… many not willing to wait simply set up their own. This eroded their key selling point – the cachet of exclusivity – and ultimately led to their decline.
At the same time the rapid expansion of rail-based public transport… and the installation of telephone exchanges in every major city between them reduced the necessity for proximity and the political parties were establishing dedicated management structures and party HQ’s. As such. their raison d’etre as the hub of social, business and political networks diminished rapidly. [markslondonrambles, on Mark Rowland’s London Rambles]
🃞🃝 ...In the service clubs the reserve men, who made up the bulk of the domestics, went first. One claim after another was made, until all up and down St. James’s and Pall Mall the best of the domestics have been withdrawn. In fact, the better the club the greater proportion of reserve forces were requisitioned (Lady, “Metropolitan Gossip”).
Empty clubs, a dramatic loss of service, and a lack of servants are exactly the kind of consequences one would anticipate from the First World War. Except that this account was written in 1900, not 1914. This supposed transformation of clubland was a result of the (relatively) minor Boer War. The inconvenience of Boer War was but a ripple in comparison to the wave of destruction, social upheaval, and rapid change that the twentieth century would bring. While members liked to imagine their beloved institutions as immune from the ravages of time, the changes going on around them could not be ignored. ...by 1918, London clubland was no longer the central site where elite men defined their class and gender identities. [Amy Milne-Smith, on The Victorian Web]
🃞🃝 Women also set about establishing their own clubs in the late nineteenth century, such as the Ladies' Institute, and the Ladies' Athenaeum. They proved quite popular at the time, but only one London-based club, The University Women's Club, has survived to this day as a single-sex establishment. [Wikipedia]
🃞🃝 The idea [of a club for women] had first been mooted in 1857 when Bessie Parkes and Barbara Bodichon thought of opening a club room on the same premises as that of the feminist journal they planned to publish. Initially their aim was very modest, merely to provide a room in which to make available the magazines and papers they knew women of cultivation but limited means would like to read but could not otherwise afford.
The club room did materialise, by 1860 known as the Ladies’ Institute. It was housed in premises in Langham Place, just north of Oxford Street, comprising a Reading Room, open from 11 in the morning to 10 at night, a Luncheon Room and a room for the reception of parcels. The latter was a boon for women travelling into central London to shop at the new department stores. Thus the club provided rest and recreation not only for London’s many middle-class working women, such as daily governesses, who were likely to be living alone in lodgings, but also for her like-minded, but more leisured, sister.
🃞🃝 From the 1880s, once the idea had been shattered that clubs were only for men, women’s clubs multiplied, two distinct types emerging. There were those that… [appealed] to independent-minded working women, and those that provided ‘tea and shopping facilities’, social in their aims and fashionable in their membership. [Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere]
🃞🃝 ‘Is it not possible for ladies to possess a Club which will not afford too striking a contrast with the splendours of St James?’ So wrote Frances Power Cobbe in the early 1870s. ...after 1870, clubs for women had, indeed, been opened. Although many of these, like the Somerville, University or Writers’, were particularly aimed at working middle-class women. What Frances Power Cobbe was envisaging was the opening of clubs on a par of grandeur with the gentleman’s clubs, such as the Athenaeum or Carlton. Within 20 years her plea had, to some extent, been answered. Such clubs did open: their existence may owe something to the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act, which gave women greater control over their own funds.
However opulent the late-19th-century ladies’ clubs they never competed for territory with the gentlemen. Ladies’ clubs tended to group to the north of Piccadilly, close to the shopping areas of Oxford, Bond and Regent streets, leaving the southern side to the men. [Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere]
🃞🃝 In London most of the Victorian and Edwardian ladies’ clubs tended to be located in the shopping, feminine area south of Oxford Street, north of Piccadilly and west of Regent Street. Not only were they conveniently situated for shopping and socialising, but the fact that they were in an acceptably feminine area appears successfully to have negated the masculinity inherent in the idea of the club. However in 1892 the Writers’ Club, founded to provide a social and working centre for women authors and journalists, did open its doors in an essentially masculine area, Norfolk Street, just off the Strand.
...in 1904 a group with higher aspirations broke away to form the Lyceum Club. This was the first woman’s club to brave the male club land of Piccadilly, initially taking over premises that had formerly housed the Imperial Services Club. Its founder, Constance Smedley, recorded that the Lyceum was intended for ladies engaged with literature, journalism, art, science and medicine, who required ‘a substantial and dignified milieu where [they] could meet editors and other employers and discuss matters as men did in professional clubs: above all in surroundings that did not suggest poverty’. [Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere]
Some useful resources:
Clubs and Other Private Organizations On The Victorian Web. List of clubs, with links to other articles on The Victorian Web.
London Clubs in the Nineteenth Century By Antonia Taddei. Part of ‘University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History’. A PDF.
Gentleman behaving badly: Gambling in London Clubland By Amy Milne-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, on The Victorian Web.
Understanding London Clubland: Exclusion in Action — Club Elections By Amy Milne-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, on The Victorian Web.
Exclusion in Theory: Ideal Society, Ideal Clubmen By Amy Milne-Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Wilfrid Laurier University, on The Victorian Web.
The Athenæum Club, Pall Mall, London On The Victorian Web.
Gentlemen's club On Wikipedia.
The St James’s gentlemen’s clubs; Victorian London’s LinkedIn By markslondonrambles, on Mark Rowland’s London Rambles.
List of gentlemen's clubs in London On Wikipedia.
Rooms Of Their Own: Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Clubs: A Practical Demand By Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere.
Rooms Of Their Own: Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Clubs: Tea and Shopping By Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere.
Rooms Of Their Own: Victorian And Edwardian Women’s Clubs: Hesitant Beginnings By Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere.
A Looker-On in London, by Mary H. Krout, 1899 - Chapter 9 -Women's Clubs On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
London's Clubs for Women By Sheila Braine, Living London, 1902. On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Gentlemen’s Clubs of Edwardian London By Camille Hadley Jones, on Edwardian Promenade.
Nineteenth Century Gentleman’s Clubs By Mary Ann Sullivan, on the Bluffton University website.
19th century gentlemen's clubs On
little_details, questions posted by salamandraga. The Cannibal Club: Racism and Rabble-Rousing in Victorian England By Jeff M. Campagna, on the Smithsonian.
character and dangers of clubs On The Dictionary of Victorian London.
The Members-Only Clubs That Charles Dickens Built By Jason Diamond, on Flavorwire.
The Racquet Club History On the Racquet Club website.
Crockford’s Club: How a Fishmonger Built a Gambling Hall and Bankrupted the British Aristocracy By Mike Dash, on the Smithsonian.
Athenaeum Club: Rules and regulations, list of members, and donations to the library, 1852; with suppl. for 1853 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
The Burlington Fine Arts Club: 17, Savile Row, W., rules, regulations, and bye-laws with list of members, 1899 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
Roxburghe Club: Chronological list of members ; Catalogue of books ; Rules and regulations, 1902 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
Army and Navy Club: The rules and regulations, with an alphabetical list of the members of the army and Navy Club, 1861 Whole book online, plus many ways to download. On the Internet Archive.
Please feel free to discuss this topic in the comments.
Please also feel free to comment about the canon story itself or any related aspects outside this week’s theme. For example, any reactions, thoughts, theories, fic recs, favourite adaptations of the canon story… Or any other contribution you wish to make. And if you have any suggestions for fic prompts springing from this week's story, please feel free to share those in the comments as well.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-01-15 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-15 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-15 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-01-15 01:57 pm (UTC)http://archiveofourown.org/works/6540835/chapters/21142232
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Date: 2017-02-13 11:38 pm (UTC)The most unexpected (and perhaps most irrelevant!) thing I discovered during all that link-following, was that in the Irene Adler novels by Carole Nelson Douglas, Douglas cast the historical Caroline Norton, who was so involved in the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, as Godfrey Norton's mother. (Your linkspam mentions the Act, I went wikipedia-surfing because women's financial and social independence is relevant to my interests, and suddenly I was all HELLO THIS BACKSTORY IS VERY FAMILIAR.) I hadn't realized she was a historical figure and not an OC.
Also, again from googling random things to properly understand the quoted bits, now I finally know what "Old Sarum" refers to! (Now if I could only remember where I've heard the phrase before! But the next time I see it, I shall be ready!)
Also, thank you for including the Smithsonian article about the so-called Cannibalism Club. It was an incredibly unpleasant read, of course, but it very succinctly lays out the tangled mess of Victorian orientalism, colonialism, and racism, and how those fantasies and structures entangle with both science and power. Most things I've read aren't willing to critically engage with that mess, other than to note that it existed.
I haven't read nearly all the provided links yet, but something that I'm not clear on and was hoping to get the answer for: did gentlemen's clubs have rooms that members could rent to stay over in, a la a hotel rooms? Every once in a while I've seen something that suggested maybe yes, but most of what I've read suggested that they were mostly a members-only bar / reading room / club room, so... Do you know?
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Date: 2017-02-14 08:51 pm (UTC)On The Dictionary of Victorian London: A man may, if he be so minded, make his club his home; living and lounging luxuriously, amid grazing to his heart's content on the abundant club-house literature, and enjoying the conversation of club friends. Soap and towels, combs and hair-brushes, are provided in the lavatories; and there are even some clubs that have bed-rooms in their upper storeys, for the use of members. [Twice Round the Clock, or The Hours of the Day and Night in London, by George Augustus Sala, 1859]
I've also found from present-day articles:
Fun or not, most [Victorian] clubs didn’t allow women of any sort, not even the disreputable kind. Although many of them had bedrooms, they were strictly for sleeping. [Victorian Dahl, on History Hoydens]
Most had a number of large rooms: library, lounge, dining room, smoking room, billiard room, and card room. In the second half of the [19th] century some provided bedrooms for members who lived outside the city and preferred to stay in the club rather than a commercial hotel. [Mary Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University website]
The Lyceum had a library, an art gallery in which the work of members was displayed, 35 bedrooms and employed hairdressers and sewing maids. [Elizabeth Crawford, on Woman and her Sphere] (The Lyceum was a ladies' club formed in 1904.)
So it looks like some did, some didn't ^^
I love the way your researches have linked things up by accident ^^ (Now done a bit of reading up about Caroline Norton myself. And embarrassingly I had no idea what Old Sarum was despite being English ^^") Also pleased (in a sense ^^") that you were glad to find the Smithsonian article. I was unsure about including it at first because it made me feel so uncomfortable. But it passed my 'relevant and interesting' test, so in the end it felt like I would be censoring my own post if I left it out.
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Date: 2017-02-15 01:29 am (UTC)That's one of the best parts of researching random things, imo, all the random connections that you hadn't thought to look for. :-)
And yeah, including links like that one is hella uncomfortable. But fwiw, I personally find spaces that never acknowledge the racism permeating the era to be... alienating? isolating? Not comfortable, in any case. So there's a bit of picking how one's going to deal with the poison, more than whether one will. Or leastways, that's how I read it.