The Need for Buddies
Roy Porter, 22 June 2000
British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World
by Peter Clark.
Oxford, 516 pp., £60, January 2000,0 19 820376 4 Show More
by Peter Clark.
Oxford, 516 pp., £60, January 2000,
“... included Burke, Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sir Joseph Banks, Burney, Garrick, Sheridan, Gibbon and Adam Smith. In their role as self-appointed custodians of culture, literary clubs combined some of the functions of the Paris salon and the university the capital lacked. There was no true continental equivalent to the British obsession with the institution ... ”