The Club

 At a time when it's become more difficult for us to make use of that "third space" in social life between work and home—the gym, the bar, the restaurant, the church—readers may find it worthwhile to spend some time at one of the most eminent gathering places of the eighteenth century. I'm referring to that social group known to its members as simply The Club. Unlike most gentleman's clubs in eighteenth-century London, the Club had neither a fancy name nor membership dues nor a building to call its own. It met every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern, and it's members had no other thought in mind than to dine, drink, and converse until midnight and beyond.

What makes it worthy of our attention is its roster, which included eminent men from several walks of life. Alongside the two men who founded the club—painter Sir Joshua Reynolds and man of letters Samuel Johnson—it included such luminaries as economist Adam Smith, playwright Richard Sheridan, historian Edward Gibbon, actor David Garrick, and statesman Edmund Burke. James Boswell, whose Life of Johnson has long since become a classic, was also a member, and he also figures prominently in the narrative.

The book is vastly informative and also a pleasure to read, though readers ought to be forewarned about what kind of a history lies in store. The Club is not an intellectual history of the type that evaluates the contributions made by the individuals involved to the advancement of their respective disciplines, on the order of How the Scots Invented the Modern World. Nor is it a social history, describing the changing tastes, norms, and mores of the era as exemplified by these collegial but disparate men. And strange to say, very little of the book is taken up with reproducing or imaginatively reconstructing conversations that might have taken place at the Turk's Head.

What Damrisch gives us is a series of "brief lives," highlighting the moments when those lives intersect but also delving amply into the meat of each individual story, while making no claim to originality with respect to determining the significance of any of them. Yes, The Rivals and She Stoops to Conquer are funny plays. Yes, The Wealth of Nations is a landmark work of economic theory. Yes, The Decline and Fall had a profound effect on how people of the time thought about Christianity. But Damrosch seems more interested in the love lives, the dining room bon mots, and the rising (and falling) fortunes of his protagonists than in the abiding relevance of their masterworks.

The "star" around which the narrative unfolds is Samuel Johnson.

Samuel Johnson

But that star is a binary star, because much of what we know about Johnson's private life and career comes to us by way of the exhaustive journals of his young and sycophantic friend  James Boswell. Nowadays no one but an academic is likely to be reading Johnson's picaresque moral tale Rasselas, or his Lives of the Poets, or even his once-famous dictionary. His fame depends largely on the portrait drawn of him by Boswell in his Life of Johnson. By all accounts Johnson was an argumentative but tender-hearted curmudgeon who lived in poverty, suffered from depression, was unhappily married to an opium addict, and spent as much time as he could away from home. He is well-known for such one-liners as "Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." Or "Wine gives a man nothing ... it only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost." Or "Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o'clock is a scoundrel." Or "Nature has given women so much power that the law has wisely given them very little."

Women do play a significant role in the narrative, prominent among them Hester Thrale, the wife of an enormously wealthy brewer. She invited Johnson and his friends to many lavish dinners and even seems to have acted as a sometime counselor to his nightmares and warden to his most deviant impulses. Also present at these dinners were bluestocking Lady Montague and novelist Fanny Burney, the daughter of pioneering musicologist Charles Burney. Drawing on the private journals of these and other members of the Thrale's social set, Damrosch paints a vivid portrait of a heady social environment in which wealth and social status went hand in hand, as did patronage and artistic reputation. Sir Joshua Reynolds made a fortune painting portraits of the rich; Boswell inherited a fortune; Burke borrowed heavily to maintain the lifestyle of a distinguished MP, and so on.    

Dr. Johnson was never well off himself.  Hence his famous remark: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Then again, he also remarked: "Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments."

With the passing years more individuals were elected to join the Club, few of them well-known today, and Johnson attended less often, but very little of the book actually focuses on the meetings themselves, and it hardly matters. Damrosch has fashioned a series of lively portraits, and he's included such outliers as the rabble-rouser John Wilkes, philosophers David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Corsican revolutionary Pasquale Paoli, in the mix. The result is a free-flowing and affectionate essay full of witty remarks, telling anecdotes, and shrewd observations. Damrosch doesn't aim to be comprehensive or deep, but he knows how to weave a complicated tale artfully, and every page of this book is interesting.