The Need for Buddies

Roy Porter

  • British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World by Peter Clark
    Oxford, 516 pp, £60.00, January 2000, ISBN 0 19 820376 4

If two Englishmen were cast away on a desert island, what’s the first thing they would do? They’d set up a club. The brothers Goncourt’s celebrated quip chimes precisely with a much cherished image of the bewhiskered Victorian gent digesting the Times at the Reform or Athenaeum, before sorting out the world’s evils. But as Peter Clark, Britain’s leading urban historian, notes in a characteristically fact-packed but thoughtful study, that most English of institutions was going strong long before then.

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