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The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
The story of the group of extraordinary eighteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers who gathered weekly at a London tavern
Named one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 • A Kirkus Best Book of 2019
“Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities—the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie—to vivid life.”— New York Times Book Review
“Magnificently entertaining.”— Washington Post
In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.”
In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth‑century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.
Named one of the 10 Best Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 • A Kirkus Best Book of 2019
“Damrosch brings the Club’s redoubtable personalities—the brilliant minds, the jousting wits, the tender camaraderie—to vivid life.”— New York Times Book Review
“Magnificently entertaining.”— Washington Post
In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk’s Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as “the Club.”
In this captivating book, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters. With the friendship of the “odd couple” Samuel Johnson and James Boswell at the heart of his narrative, Damrosch conjures up the precarious, exciting, and often brutal world of late eighteenth‑century Britain. This is the story of an extraordinary group of people whose ideas helped to shape their age, and our own.
488 pages, Hardcover
First published March 26, 2019
About the author
Leo Damrosch
19 books100 followersLeo Damrosch is an American author and professor. In 2001, he was named the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University.[1] He received a B.A. from Yale University, an M.A. from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His areas of academic specialty include Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and Puritanism.[1] Damrosch's "The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus" is one of the most important recent explorations of the early history of the Society of Friends. His Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005) was a National Book Award finalist for nonfiction and winner of the 2006 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for best work of nonfiction. Among his other books are "Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth" (1980), "God's Plot and Man's Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding" (1985), "Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson" (1987), and "Tocqueville's Discovery of America" (2010).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 244 reviews
July 6, 2020
Reading about the mid-to-late eighteenth century often makes me think of Duff Cooper's comment, that the wit and conversations then in evidence were such as ‘had never, perhaps, been heard since certain voices in Athens fell silent two thousand years before’. Cooper was talking about Paris, but the line is arguably even more applicable to London, where Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke (respectively the world's greatest lexicographer, biographer, historian, actor, painter and orator) would regularly get together in coffee-houses to drink prodigious amounts of alcohol and shoot the shit in immaculately weighted epigrams.
This book is an entertaining introduction to the period and the milieu; what it isn't, despite the title, is a history of the famous Literary Club itself. Positive reviews say that Damrosch ‘goes beyond’ just the Club, but this is a bit like saying that Columbus went beyond India by landing in the Bahamas instead. Yes, he goes beyond it, but he doesn't really go to it. There were a few club members I was interested to find out more about – like the playwright George Colman (mentioned once in passing) or the Irish separatist Lord Charlemont (not mentioned at all). There is no new research here on the Club. What there is, essentially, is a narrative retelling of Boswell's journals and his Life of Johnson, supplemented with a few short, chapter-length biographies of key associated names (Garrick, Burke, Adam Smith etc.) and relevant historical themes (a chapter on empire; a chapter on religious tension).
If that's what you're looking for, this does the job extremely well. Damrosch is particularly good on unpicking those instances where an anecdote in the Life has been sanitised or altered from the way it was originally recorded in Boswell's journals. On these occasions (and there are many), he does a good job of making you feel that you're being shown behind the curtain. And he does nail the essential contrasts – so catalytic for both men – between Boswell and Johnson:
On the controversies around the French Revolution, Damrosch, looking at Burke and his allies, points out:
Which is a good point, though he doesn't take it any further, and in general presents Burke as brilliantly foresighted. He was, but he was also quite reactionary. In fact, all of the club members were firmly conservative in their opinions (with the exception of Gibbon on religion). Johnson's response to the marriage of Hester Thrale to Gabriel Piozzi is a particularly upsetting example – this marriage feels like such a totemic moment of the period to me, just because it seems to crystallise so much about class, religion, gender, and beyond that just the incomprehensibility of people's reactions in a different age. (Hester was a smart and spiky Welshwoman who could hold her own with any of the male wits of the day; she married an Italian musician, and – because he was Catholic and foreign, and because she married him out of physical attraction – was shunned by all her friends and family for it. Johnson and Fanny Burney both told her, having been friends for years, that they would no longer speak to her.)
As an American, Damrosch makes a few slightly curious asides about how themes of the day relate to the American Founders, and occasionally the British geopolitical context gets the better of him – he refers to Johnson's trip to France as the only time he ever left England, despite writing at length about his journeys to Scotland and Wales. There are also a few minor factual slips, such as when he has the Hastings trial end four years early in 1791.
But in general this is a rich and rewarding distillation of the available primary sources. There is no new information here and no new arguments, but as an introduction to the people and the time, it's one of the best books you could read.
This book is an entertaining introduction to the period and the milieu; what it isn't, despite the title, is a history of the famous Literary Club itself. Positive reviews say that Damrosch ‘goes beyond’ just the Club, but this is a bit like saying that Columbus went beyond India by landing in the Bahamas instead. Yes, he goes beyond it, but he doesn't really go to it. There were a few club members I was interested to find out more about – like the playwright George Colman (mentioned once in passing) or the Irish separatist Lord Charlemont (not mentioned at all). There is no new research here on the Club. What there is, essentially, is a narrative retelling of Boswell's journals and his Life of Johnson, supplemented with a few short, chapter-length biographies of key associated names (Garrick, Burke, Adam Smith etc.) and relevant historical themes (a chapter on empire; a chapter on religious tension).
If that's what you're looking for, this does the job extremely well. Damrosch is particularly good on unpicking those instances where an anecdote in the Life has been sanitised or altered from the way it was originally recorded in Boswell's journals. On these occasions (and there are many), he does a good job of making you feel that you're being shown behind the curtain. And he does nail the essential contrasts – so catalytic for both men – between Boswell and Johnson:
Boswell was a romantic who fantasized about feudal affection between lords and their dependents, Johnson was a hardheaded pragmatist. Johnson insisted on reason and self-control, Boswell revelled in emotional “sensibility” and seized gratifications whenever he could. Johnson aspired to what he called “the grandeur of generality” and Boswell to specificity and piquant details. Johnson crafted language in the carefully assembled building blocks of the periodic style, Boswell's style was conversational and free.
On the controversies around the French Revolution, Damrosch, looking at Burke and his allies, points out:
One can't help reflecting on how nakedly all of these people declared a position which privileged people and their political allies today are careful to disguise.
Which is a good point, though he doesn't take it any further, and in general presents Burke as brilliantly foresighted. He was, but he was also quite reactionary. In fact, all of the club members were firmly conservative in their opinions (with the exception of Gibbon on religion). Johnson's response to the marriage of Hester Thrale to Gabriel Piozzi is a particularly upsetting example – this marriage feels like such a totemic moment of the period to me, just because it seems to crystallise so much about class, religion, gender, and beyond that just the incomprehensibility of people's reactions in a different age. (Hester was a smart and spiky Welshwoman who could hold her own with any of the male wits of the day; she married an Italian musician, and – because he was Catholic and foreign, and because she married him out of physical attraction – was shunned by all her friends and family for it. Johnson and Fanny Burney both told her, having been friends for years, that they would no longer speak to her.)
As an American, Damrosch makes a few slightly curious asides about how themes of the day relate to the American Founders, and occasionally the British geopolitical context gets the better of him – he refers to Johnson's trip to France as the only time he ever left England, despite writing at length about his journeys to Scotland and Wales. There are also a few minor factual slips, such as when he has the Hastings trial end four years early in 1791.
But in general this is a rich and rewarding distillation of the available primary sources. There is no new information here and no new arguments, but as an introduction to the people and the time, it's one of the best books you could read.
June 23, 2020
"Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both."
-- Samuel Johnson to James Boswell
The Club is a frame biography. But it is certainly more than its parts. At its core, Damrosch nails together small biographies of Johnson, Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbons, and other minor characters/members of "the Club." But this book goes beyond this. It is also a history of the age, using the members of the club as a lens into England in the mid-to-late 18th Century. And since the membership of the club involved writers, poets, historians, economists, artists, actors, etc., it allows Damrosch the ability to peruse the age from multiple perspectives with Johnson and Boswell being the gravity at the center of the book. Damrosch also does well to include the important women during this time AND to not sugar-coat the poor behavior of many of the men (especially Boswell). It is a balanced work whose narrative keeps pace with the wit of its subjects. I came here after reading Vol X last year of Durant's Story of Civilization Rousseau and Revolution. Both do a good job of surveying many of the important minds of the time.
Next up will be larger works by Boswell, Johnson, Smith, Burke, etc., and bigger biographies of the same.
-- Samuel Johnson to James Boswell
The Club is a frame biography. But it is certainly more than its parts. At its core, Damrosch nails together small biographies of Johnson, Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbons, and other minor characters/members of "the Club." But this book goes beyond this. It is also a history of the age, using the members of the club as a lens into England in the mid-to-late 18th Century. And since the membership of the club involved writers, poets, historians, economists, artists, actors, etc., it allows Damrosch the ability to peruse the age from multiple perspectives with Johnson and Boswell being the gravity at the center of the book. Damrosch also does well to include the important women during this time AND to not sugar-coat the poor behavior of many of the men (especially Boswell). It is a balanced work whose narrative keeps pace with the wit of its subjects. I came here after reading Vol X last year of Durant's Story of Civilization Rousseau and Revolution. Both do a good job of surveying many of the important minds of the time.
Next up will be larger works by Boswell, Johnson, Smith, Burke, etc., and bigger biographies of the same.
September 20, 2019
“They were great talkers because they knew and did so much, and many of them rose to accomplishments of the highest order. No fewer than seven — Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Gibbon, Adam Smith, and Boswell — made up a constellation of talent that has rarely if ever been equaled.” The Club was started in 1764 by the painter Joshua Reynolds and the writer Samuel Johnson. Membership was strictly limited. Some, but not all, of the men were (or became) famous. They were required to be intelligent and good conversationalists and they met weekly in the Turk’s Head Tavern. The Club evolved over the years, moving to a new locale, admitting additional members and finally morphing into the London Literary Society, which still exists today. But this book covers its early years and primarily focuses on the relationship between Johnson and his friend and biographer James Boswell.
The book not only has mini biographies of club members and others in their circle, but it places them in the context of events and intellectual debates of the day, including religion, the arts, slavery and imperialism. I could have done without the extensive discussion of Boswell’s sex life, but I enjoyed learning about these men. The discussions of David Garrick (actor and manager of a theater company) and the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinkley Sheridan were of particular interest to me. I had no idea that programs at Covent Garden and Drury Lane lasted for 5 hours.
The book was thoroughly researched, well written and entertaining. It made me want to read more about some of the characters. I also now want to read “Evelina” by Frances Burney, which was described in this book. I like it when books lead me to other books.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
The book not only has mini biographies of club members and others in their circle, but it places them in the context of events and intellectual debates of the day, including religion, the arts, slavery and imperialism. I could have done without the extensive discussion of Boswell’s sex life, but I enjoyed learning about these men. The discussions of David Garrick (actor and manager of a theater company) and the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinkley Sheridan were of particular interest to me. I had no idea that programs at Covent Garden and Drury Lane lasted for 5 hours.
The book was thoroughly researched, well written and entertaining. It made me want to read more about some of the characters. I also now want to read “Evelina” by Frances Burney, which was described in this book. I like it when books lead me to other books.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
February 14, 2020
Really, really enjoyed Professor Damrosch's tour and company. As a now-budding 18C dilletante, I say that this is the perfect book to accompany any reading of Boswell's justly celebrated The Life of Samuel Johnson.
What it isn't, though, is a thoroughly rigorous or exhaustive exhuming of the careers of the other club members. Think of this , rather, as a personable, winning, urbane and wise set of Very Short Introductions to Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, Smith and others, energetic little electrons orbiting around a nucleus composed of one unique atom of pious, maddeningly/winningly High Church Tory Johnsonium ever-fixedly fused to one (& thankfully one and only) bawdy, egoistic atom of Boswellia. There is so much to approve of and forgive in each of their lives to recount here, but Damrosch's lively and erudite narrative serves as a steadying corrective to Boswell's book in places (though I am only just past half way through that agreeable, highly readable beast), and would also give the casual reader many of the high points of that book without its attendant longueurs (tho those are the whole point, really).
[Edit: I forgot to mention one other thing I really liked, and one I didn't: the author is very good at bringing the women in Johnson's life into the mix, as Boswell pretty much leaves them out, especially Johnson's guide star Mrs. Thrale, who had little patience for Boswell's many personal failings. So that was really good. I was hoping to get much more on Oliver Goldsmith, though, and he doesn't even rate his own chapter, which is a shame, as Johnson esteeemed him highly and from what little I have read about him here and in LoJ, he seems a very interesting character.]
Not for the specialist, then, and, like Grace Jones sez, it's not perfect, but it's perfect for me—so much so that I shall read the good professor's books on Swift and Rousseau very, very soon.
What it isn't, though, is a thoroughly rigorous or exhaustive exhuming of the careers of the other club members. Think of this , rather, as a personable, winning, urbane and wise set of Very Short Introductions to Burke, Gibbon, Sheridan, Smith and others, energetic little electrons orbiting around a nucleus composed of one unique atom of pious, maddeningly/winningly High Church Tory Johnsonium ever-fixedly fused to one (& thankfully one and only) bawdy, egoistic atom of Boswellia. There is so much to approve of and forgive in each of their lives to recount here, but Damrosch's lively and erudite narrative serves as a steadying corrective to Boswell's book in places (though I am only just past half way through that agreeable, highly readable beast), and would also give the casual reader many of the high points of that book without its attendant longueurs (tho those are the whole point, really).
[Edit: I forgot to mention one other thing I really liked, and one I didn't: the author is very good at bringing the women in Johnson's life into the mix, as Boswell pretty much leaves them out, especially Johnson's guide star Mrs. Thrale, who had little patience for Boswell's many personal failings. So that was really good. I was hoping to get much more on Oliver Goldsmith, though, and he doesn't even rate his own chapter, which is a shame, as Johnson esteeemed him highly and from what little I have read about him here and in LoJ, he seems a very interesting character.]
Not for the specialist, then, and, like Grace Jones sez, it's not perfect, but it's perfect for me—so much so that I shall read the good professor's books on Swift and Rousseau very, very soon.
April 29, 2019
This is a history of one of the original London clubs that developed as a place where the emerging bourgeois professional and literary class of London could gather for food, drink, fellowship, and talking - lots of talking. The club members were self-selected and it was hard to join. Members included Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, and others, eventually including James Boswell, who wrote the great biography of Johnson. The “Club” began in 1763 and continued into the 20th century as the London Literary Society. One gets a good sense of what discussions at the club were like due to some example provided by the copious note taking of Boswell. The heart of the story however, is twofold. First, it is the story of Johnson and Boswell, which is worthwhile on its own - although readers who have not done so should read Boswell’s bio of Johnson. The second focus of the book is to provide briefer lives of the most noteworthy of the initial group members, along with some summaries of their critical works.
So the idea is that by looking at the life and works of the key members of the club, one gets a better picture of the emerging intellectual life of London in the Georgian Era. In this sense, the book is similar to “The Metaphysical Club” by Louis Menand (2001) which provided a group biography of a discussion group after the Civil War ;;that included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, and Charles Pierce, among others. Menand’s book was wonderful and won a Pulitzer. Damrosch’s book is also superb and he has an astonishing cast of characters with which to work. The club as a vehicle for discussing all the participants works sufficiently to tell a good story. The major players are outstanding. In addition, Damrosch also works in a number of women associated with club members who also contributed to this rich intellectual life, although the club never admitted women. Johnson and Boswell are still the stars of this show, but the supporting cast is worthwhile. The chapters on David Garrick and the London Theatre scene are especially good.
So the idea is that by looking at the life and works of the key members of the club, one gets a better picture of the emerging intellectual life of London in the Georgian Era. In this sense, the book is similar to “The Metaphysical Club” by Louis Menand (2001) which provided a group biography of a discussion group after the Civil War ;;that included Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, and Charles Pierce, among others. Menand’s book was wonderful and won a Pulitzer. Damrosch’s book is also superb and he has an astonishing cast of characters with which to work. The club as a vehicle for discussing all the participants works sufficiently to tell a good story. The major players are outstanding. In addition, Damrosch also works in a number of women associated with club members who also contributed to this rich intellectual life, although the club never admitted women. Johnson and Boswell are still the stars of this show, but the supporting cast is worthwhile. The chapters on David Garrick and the London Theatre scene are especially good.
May 1, 2022
“
Unlike some later clubs, it had no premises of its own, but met in an ordinary London pub. The members included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, and Adam Smith: arguably the greatest British critic, biographer, political philosopher, historian, and economist of all time.
”
-Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
The decades-long friendship between Dr. Samuel Johnson and his faithful friend-cum-biographer James Boswell is one of the most captivating relationships in the history of letters—on par, both in its lasting impact and ongoing fascination, with those of Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau, Eliot and Pound.
Dr. Johnson was a legendary 18th-century wit, critic, lexicographer, playwright, travelogue writer, literary scholar, and all-around intellectual colossus who is probably best known today for his brilliantly comprehensive and hugely influential dictionary of the English language—one of the earliest dictionaries and still regarded as one of the best: an epic and Herculean achievement by any measure.
His friend and acolyte James Boswell, thirty years his junior, was temperamentally about as different from Johnson as one could possibly be. The eldest son of a Scottish laird, Boswell was boisterous and swaggering, and yet possessed of an intense inner-life. He was a gifted diarist, and a yarn-spinner nonpareil. A barrister by profession and a drinker by inclination, he is without a doubt best-known today for his radically innovative and groundbreaking biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson—a genre-defining two-volume biography of his old friend and mentor that utterly and categorically changed the way biographies are written, down to this very day. George Bernard Shaw called Boswell “the dramatist who invented Dr. Johnson,” and W.H. Auden famously (and quite touchingly) remarked that Boswell’s devotion to Johnson was “as remarkable in its way as Dante’s to Beatrice.” Both of these extraordinary quotes underscore one of the most fascinating aspects of the Johnson-Boswell relationship: namely that Boswell, very much the junior partner, the sidekick, the son, as it were, to Dr. Johnson’s position as mentor and father figure, was to create—to call into existence, in a truly God-like sense—the personage that today we think of as the genuine “Dr. Johnson.” That this character is a literary conceit, that it is wholly the creation of James Boswell’s mind, is (somewhat frighteningly) beside the point. Boswell gives us the “real,” the “historical” Dr Johnson, just as Shakespeare gives us the “real” Julius Caesar, the “real” Marcus Brutus, the “real” Antony and “real” Cleopatra. That they are fictive creations, phantasmagoria, takes nothing away from that real(!) fact: that we incorporate them, be it partially or fully, into our historical comprehension. History is, after all, an act of imagination—just as it is to imagine a future, so it is to recreate a past. Boswell, like St. Paul, created the myth that became the truth; the foundation for all subsequent understanding of an historical figure. Though Johnson was a father figure to Boswell, Boswell, in effect, fathered the Johnson of our modern understanding—a mimetically potent portrait that supplanted all of our more dispassionate historical renderings.
~~~~
The Club is certainly an interesting and enjoyable book. Thus it may be because of my special fascination with Johnson and Boswell—and, extenuating from that, my unduly high expectations going in—that I felt somewhat disappointed. It’s interesting, but not consistently compelling; engrossing at times but never extraordinary. It is, to be sure, reliably buoyed by the endlessly fascinating lives of its subjects, and of the times in which they lived—and though the latter is somewhat circumscribed by Johnson and Boswell’s unapologetic parochiality (Johnson left British soil only once during his long life, and both men considered Great Britain—and more specifically London—to be the absolute apogee of worthwhile experience and meaningful existence), enough of the former is presented to keep things moving along at an adequate clip. A few fascinating asides that the author, to my mind, doesn’t give the reader nearly enough of, include the mere few pages on Boswell‘s intriguing interactions with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his wife Thérèse—whom Boswell, true to form, slept with, and Rousseau later found out about! (This little melodrama would seem deserving of at least an entire book in its own right—or perhaps a four-act play). I give Damrosch another black mark here for the scant paragraph or two he offers pertaining to Boswell’s encounters with that chimera, the original “most interesting man alive,” Voltaire. Again I strike off a full letter grade for the fragmentary scrapings, soupçon and scintilla which are the only substance Damrosch provides about Boswell’s (not intimate, but long-lived) correspondence with his fellow Scot and arguably-greatest philosopher of the Age, David Hume. And come on now—are we really given just a few scattered sentences on Edmund Burke’s legendary Parliamentary fisticuffs with his ideological nemesis, Thomas Paine? For shame, Mr. Damrosch. For shame!
I wanted more on ALL of that.
As long as we’re talking about Tom Paine, by far the two biggest sociopolitical events of the century—the American War of Independence and the French Revolution—are strangely all but absent from these pages. They’re mentioned, sure, but always in a sort of peripheral, desultory way. The most expedient reason I can think of for Damrosch making this somewhat odd decision would be to downplay the conservative, and at times downright reactionary views of some of his subjects. The most progressive of the bunch was probably Gibbon, and because of his liberal views and broadly deist religious beliefs, Johnson and Boswell excluded him from the group as much as possible, nicknaming him “the infidel,” which, in a casual bit of nastiness, was an allusion to Muslims—a group as misunderstood as they were feared in Johnson’s and Boswell’s day (Damn, I guess not much has changed). For similar reasons—a vague sense of hyper-Royalist conservatism—Johnson never even deigned to meet the greatest British philosopher, and, as already mentioned, possibly even the greatest philosopher of the age, full stop—Dave “the Hitman” Hume!
I suppose one could make a case that some of these topics are digressions from the “main narrative,” but in the course of a 500-page book one would think there would be space for such things; especially because, tangential though they may be, the devil—as well as some of the most interesting subject matter—is in the details. However, Damrosch does include quite a few other absorbing asides, and though they’re not all of equal interest, most are a pleasure to read.
The book’s main narrative is somewhat haphazardly structured around the titular “Club,” though Damrosch is never quite able to turn this into the thematic centerpiece he clearly wants it to be. In a somewhat desperate attempt to keep it relevant, even if only as a sort of thinly liminal connective tissue, Damrosch lumps the female characters in the story (who weren’t actual members of the all-male “Club”) into the creatively, if somewhat comically, named “shadow Club.” More on that in a moment.
Per the quote at the beginning of this review, the (actual) Club counted not only Johnson and Boswell among its members, but also such enduring thinkers as Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke. Although fairly adequate sketches are given of each man (the chapter on Gibbon is especially strong), and with anecdotes and biographical details scattered throughout, these three don’t receive much more attention than the rest of the supporting cast, especially fellow Club members like Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick, and indeed sometimes far less, as in the case of Hester Thrale, who quite deservedly gets more time on the page than anyone other than Johnson and Boswell. Point being, if you’ve come for detailed portraits of Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, or Edmund Burke, you won’t get them here. They are—understandably, if only for commercial reasons—given more attention on the cover and in the synopsis simply because they are the only names among the supporting cast with which most modern readers will likely be familiar. And though Damrosch gives a fairly good overview of their bodies of work and why they‘re still relevant today, you probably won’t walk away with a wealth of new information—although this, of course, depends on your level of familiarity going in. If a brief, Wikipedia-level account of the life and ideas of Burke, Smith and Gibbon is what you expect, you won’t be disappointed.
What most readers almost certainly will come away knowing far more about, and being much the better for, is the rest of Damrosch’s supporting cast—the ones who aren’t as well-known to us today but who, in their own time, were as famous and well-regarded as the headliners (and in some cases far more so).
These can be split into roughly three groups: first, the lesser-known Club members; second, the (male) non-Club members, who were friends or associates of Johnson and/or Boswell; and thirdly, the female (non)members of that (nonexistent) “shadow Club” that I mentioned earlier.
Of the first group there are those assorted members of the Club who were close with Johnson or Boswell—though mostly with Johnson, as many Club members didn’t think much of Boswell and his earnest adulation of the great man, whom, they remarked caustically if somewhat bitterly, Boswell followed around like a “spaniel.” These include the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose play The Rivals introduced the world to the delightfully gaffe-prone character Mrs. Malaprop, whence we get the equally delightful English word “malapropism”; the celebrated portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, who seems to have painted the portrait of every single person mentioned in this book at least twice; the poet Oliver Goldsmith; and the famous actor David Garrick.
Of the second group there are, as has already been noted, David Hume, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; but also the political agitator and stirrer-of-pots John Wilkes; the famed cartoonist, engraver, and political and social satirist William Hogarth, whose vivid depictions of everyday life in 18th-century London are still influential and much-admired to this day (and from whose name we get another delightful English word, “Hogarthian,” which is synonymous with satirical political illustrations of a certain style, as well as portrayals of squalid urban life, especially when set in London); and Pasquale Paoli, the charismatic Corsican general and freedom fighter who knew Napoleon’s parents when the Little Corporal was just a little glint in his father’s eye, and whom Boswell befriended as a young traveler in Corsica and was later reunited with during Paoli’s long exile in London.
Lastly, but certainly not least, are the female friends, confidantes, and wives of Club members. These are the ones who Damrosch broadly refers to as the “shadow Club”—a phrase I found amusingly evocative of a furtive conspiracy hatched amongst them to somehow infiltrate this mostly insignificant little corner of their husbands’ and friends’ social lives. In reality, though, they most likely regarded “the Club” in much the same way as the men did: as a fun but trivial and certainly a peripheral distraction, and anyhow one which only need be attended a few times a year (despite its meetings being held weekly, the most faithful attendee, Joshua Reynolds, only went to something like twelve out of fifty-two annual meetings at the height of his involvement, and was similarly involved in a half-dozen other clubs—his fellow members went far less frequently even than this). Those in this third group include the beautiful and talented Eva Garrick, a famed and fêted dancer and the wife of David Garrick; eminent author and Shakespeare scholar Lady Montague, whose writings on Shakespeare Johnson—perhaps unsurprisingly, as she was a direct competitor with him in this field—disdained; the successful novelist, playwright, and inveterate diarist, Fanny Burney, author of such bestselling classics as Evelina and Cecilia; and of course, Hester Thrale, the firm and unwavering friend, confidante, and—during his frequent and severe bouts of “melancholy” (what today would almost certainly be diagnosed as clinical depression)—caretaker of Dr. Johnson. Thrale, too, wrote a biography of Johnson after his death, which came out a few years before Boswell’s and was a notable success. Hester was yet another member of this extraordinary little social circle who was a committed diarist and letter-writer. There are, obviously, quite a few in this tale, and it’s from their voluminous and still-extant writings that Damrosch gives the reader by far the most vivid first-hand accounts.
One of the things I found a bit frustrating about this book—despite its exceptionally engaging cast of characters—is that Damrosch’s narrative gaze is simultaneously too broad and too narrow. Too broad to allow him to really pin down any one character, while too narrow to encompass all the richness and intellectual ferment of the time. Even the titular “Club” is oddly absent from much of the book—though one gets the impression that it’s just a narrative device Damrosch uses as his raison d’être for writing about this particular set of characters, however small a part it might play in the actual course of events. And this is not at all a necessarily bad thing. Using a thematic device to write about a particular milieu—be it a certain year (as in David McCullough’s 1776 or Bill Bryson’s 1927), decade (the Roaring Twenties, the Counterculture Sixties), city (New York, London, Paris), or whatever the author might choose as their particular narrative vehicle—can be a feature rather than a bug. But when a narrative device meant to keep a story coherent instead acts as a distraction, it‘s probably a conceit that should be abandoned in favor of something more appropriate to whatever story the author is really trying to tell. Damrosch could just as easily have used the friendship of Johnson and Boswell, or of Johnson and Hester Thrale—two relationships which give the book its most substantial emotional bearings—to tell the same story without having to bother with “the Club” in anything more than a cursory manner. This, after all, is pretty much exactly what he ends up doing anyway.
~~~~~~
Alright. So given that I did, in fact, find this book to be engaging and interesting, my continual carping and kvetching may seem to some like the proverbial ingrate who Uncle Junior describes in an early episode of The Sopranos as having “a Virginia ham under one arm,” but keeps “singing the blues ‘cause she got no bread.”
Fair enough. And I’ll try to keep the remainder short.
The only other problems I had with The Club are twofold, and in relation to the book’s upsides are details which don’t detract too much as a whole, but which are, nevertheless, both unappealing and unnecessary.
First is Damrosch’s persistence in giving factually and historically dubious armchair psychoanalysis of Johnson—unabashedly Freudian in tone and encompassing everything from obsessive-compulsive disorder (I’ve read Tourette’s as a far likelier and more parsimonious explanation for Johnson’s pronounced physical ticks), to some undercooked but elaborate theories of a vaguely defined mother complex, to seriously dodgy claims about repressed sexual masochism. All of which, ironically, leave the good Doctor as much of an enigma as ever.
Damrosch’s assessment of Johnson as a chronic depressive does genuinely help to illuminate the doctor’s personality; shading it in with his most profound and persistent psychological struggle—and thereby also giving insight into some of his principal motivations and crucial decisions as well; like his moving in with Hester Thrale and her husband at Streatham Place, their sprawling and idyllic estate just outside London, in which Johnson had his own room and an extensive library and which was a sort of port-in-a-storm for him when his debilitating bouts of depression left him left him feeling completely out at sea. But Johnson’s tendency toward depression is—much like Churchill’s—a well-known and well-documented historical fact, attested to not only by numerous close friends and contemporaries but on many occasions by Johnson himself. Where Damrosch goes too far is in his overwrought and under-supported analysis of nearly every aspect of Johnson’s psyche—conclusions which are not well-documented by the historical record, and moreover tend only to muddle and confuse rather than clarify Johnson’s complex and multi-faceted personality—a personality which, like anyone else’s, surely doesn’t boil down so easily into a handful of reductive Freudian clichés.
Finally, there are the thoroughly unsympathetic and oftentimes downright snobbish judgments which Damrosch consistently passes on Boswell. While Johnson’s faults are explained away or simply ignored, Boswell is taken to task for everything from his heavy drinking to his guilty Presbyterian piety, his philandering to his (as Damrosch tells it) thoroughly average intelligence. Given Damrosch’s unqualified praise for Boswell’s masterful biography, all this pompous and self-superior deprecation of Boswell’s intellect may leave the reader feeling more confused than enlightened, and with good reason. And though Boswell fully deserves many of the criticisms he faces here—for his unfaithfulness to his wife, for his unrestrained drinking, for frequenting brothels, etc.—oftentimes it comes off as mere priggishness or piling-on, and in those moments becomes as exhausting as it is bewildering. For God’s sake, I thought to myself at numerous points while reading The Club—I‘ve actually read Stalin biographers who are less comprehensively uncharitable to their subject as Damrosch is to Boswell in this book.
As I said, though (and despite Damrosch’s frequently communicated disdain for Boswell’s intellect), he does—unfailingly if somewhat inexplicably, in light of his purported opinions of the man’s abilities—give The Life of Johnson its just due, as the brilliant and timeless masterpiece that it is. As he tells the reader at one point, Boswell’s Life of Johnson “triumphs by bringing Johnson back to life.” Though Damrosch doesn’t quite manage the same trick here, there are extended periods throughout—sustained resuscitations, if you will—where he pulls it off admirably. Enough to keep the reader’s interest, and to give one a pleasantly engaging tour through 18th century England and Scotland, and through the lives of those eternally intertwined and infinitely fascinating figures, Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell—the Batman and Robin, Holmes and Watson, Cassidy and Kerouac of their day.
Damrosch is a knowledgeable historian and a very talented writer—as one inevitably is made aware of while reading The Club—enough so that I’m confident I’ll be reading another of his many narrative histories at some point down the line. Hopefully that one will have a stronger and a more relevant thematic centerpiece—as well as less inclination to hand down judgment and diagnoses to people who in the context of their own lives were not so much more flawed than the rest of us.
-Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
The decades-long friendship between Dr. Samuel Johnson and his faithful friend-cum-biographer James Boswell is one of the most captivating relationships in the history of letters—on par, both in its lasting impact and ongoing fascination, with those of Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau, Eliot and Pound.
Dr. Johnson was a legendary 18th-century wit, critic, lexicographer, playwright, travelogue writer, literary scholar, and all-around intellectual colossus who is probably best known today for his brilliantly comprehensive and hugely influential dictionary of the English language—one of the earliest dictionaries and still regarded as one of the best: an epic and Herculean achievement by any measure.
His friend and acolyte James Boswell, thirty years his junior, was temperamentally about as different from Johnson as one could possibly be. The eldest son of a Scottish laird, Boswell was boisterous and swaggering, and yet possessed of an intense inner-life. He was a gifted diarist, and a yarn-spinner nonpareil. A barrister by profession and a drinker by inclination, he is without a doubt best-known today for his radically innovative and groundbreaking biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson—a genre-defining two-volume biography of his old friend and mentor that utterly and categorically changed the way biographies are written, down to this very day. George Bernard Shaw called Boswell “the dramatist who invented Dr. Johnson,” and W.H. Auden famously (and quite touchingly) remarked that Boswell’s devotion to Johnson was “as remarkable in its way as Dante’s to Beatrice.” Both of these extraordinary quotes underscore one of the most fascinating aspects of the Johnson-Boswell relationship: namely that Boswell, very much the junior partner, the sidekick, the son, as it were, to Dr. Johnson’s position as mentor and father figure, was to create—to call into existence, in a truly God-like sense—the personage that today we think of as the genuine “Dr. Johnson.” That this character is a literary conceit, that it is wholly the creation of James Boswell’s mind, is (somewhat frighteningly) beside the point. Boswell gives us the “real,” the “historical” Dr Johnson, just as Shakespeare gives us the “real” Julius Caesar, the “real” Marcus Brutus, the “real” Antony and “real” Cleopatra. That they are fictive creations, phantasmagoria, takes nothing away from that real(!) fact: that we incorporate them, be it partially or fully, into our historical comprehension. History is, after all, an act of imagination—just as it is to imagine a future, so it is to recreate a past. Boswell, like St. Paul, created the myth that became the truth; the foundation for all subsequent understanding of an historical figure. Though Johnson was a father figure to Boswell, Boswell, in effect, fathered the Johnson of our modern understanding—a mimetically potent portrait that supplanted all of our more dispassionate historical renderings.
~~~~
The Club is certainly an interesting and enjoyable book. Thus it may be because of my special fascination with Johnson and Boswell—and, extenuating from that, my unduly high expectations going in—that I felt somewhat disappointed. It’s interesting, but not consistently compelling; engrossing at times but never extraordinary. It is, to be sure, reliably buoyed by the endlessly fascinating lives of its subjects, and of the times in which they lived—and though the latter is somewhat circumscribed by Johnson and Boswell’s unapologetic parochiality (Johnson left British soil only once during his long life, and both men considered Great Britain—and more specifically London—to be the absolute apogee of worthwhile experience and meaningful existence), enough of the former is presented to keep things moving along at an adequate clip. A few fascinating asides that the author, to my mind, doesn’t give the reader nearly enough of, include the mere few pages on Boswell‘s intriguing interactions with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his wife Thérèse—whom Boswell, true to form, slept with, and Rousseau later found out about! (This little melodrama would seem deserving of at least an entire book in its own right—or perhaps a four-act play). I give Damrosch another black mark here for the scant paragraph or two he offers pertaining to Boswell’s encounters with that chimera, the original “most interesting man alive,” Voltaire. Again I strike off a full letter grade for the fragmentary scrapings, soupçon and scintilla which are the only substance Damrosch provides about Boswell’s (not intimate, but long-lived) correspondence with his fellow Scot and arguably-greatest philosopher of the Age, David Hume. And come on now—are we really given just a few scattered sentences on Edmund Burke’s legendary Parliamentary fisticuffs with his ideological nemesis, Thomas Paine? For shame, Mr. Damrosch. For shame!
I wanted more on ALL of that.
As long as we’re talking about Tom Paine, by far the two biggest sociopolitical events of the century—the American War of Independence and the French Revolution—are strangely all but absent from these pages. They’re mentioned, sure, but always in a sort of peripheral, desultory way. The most expedient reason I can think of for Damrosch making this somewhat odd decision would be to downplay the conservative, and at times downright reactionary views of some of his subjects. The most progressive of the bunch was probably Gibbon, and because of his liberal views and broadly deist religious beliefs, Johnson and Boswell excluded him from the group as much as possible, nicknaming him “the infidel,” which, in a casual bit of nastiness, was an allusion to Muslims—a group as misunderstood as they were feared in Johnson’s and Boswell’s day (Damn, I guess not much has changed). For similar reasons—a vague sense of hyper-Royalist conservatism—Johnson never even deigned to meet the greatest British philosopher, and, as already mentioned, possibly even the greatest philosopher of the age, full stop—Dave “the Hitman” Hume!
I suppose one could make a case that some of these topics are digressions from the “main narrative,” but in the course of a 500-page book one would think there would be space for such things; especially because, tangential though they may be, the devil—as well as some of the most interesting subject matter—is in the details. However, Damrosch does include quite a few other absorbing asides, and though they’re not all of equal interest, most are a pleasure to read.
The book’s main narrative is somewhat haphazardly structured around the titular “Club,” though Damrosch is never quite able to turn this into the thematic centerpiece he clearly wants it to be. In a somewhat desperate attempt to keep it relevant, even if only as a sort of thinly liminal connective tissue, Damrosch lumps the female characters in the story (who weren’t actual members of the all-male “Club”) into the creatively, if somewhat comically, named “shadow Club.” More on that in a moment.
Per the quote at the beginning of this review, the (actual) Club counted not only Johnson and Boswell among its members, but also such enduring thinkers as Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke. Although fairly adequate sketches are given of each man (the chapter on Gibbon is especially strong), and with anecdotes and biographical details scattered throughout, these three don’t receive much more attention than the rest of the supporting cast, especially fellow Club members like Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick, and indeed sometimes far less, as in the case of Hester Thrale, who quite deservedly gets more time on the page than anyone other than Johnson and Boswell. Point being, if you’ve come for detailed portraits of Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, or Edmund Burke, you won’t get them here. They are—understandably, if only for commercial reasons—given more attention on the cover and in the synopsis simply because they are the only names among the supporting cast with which most modern readers will likely be familiar. And though Damrosch gives a fairly good overview of their bodies of work and why they‘re still relevant today, you probably won’t walk away with a wealth of new information—although this, of course, depends on your level of familiarity going in. If a brief, Wikipedia-level account of the life and ideas of Burke, Smith and Gibbon is what you expect, you won’t be disappointed.
What most readers almost certainly will come away knowing far more about, and being much the better for, is the rest of Damrosch’s supporting cast—the ones who aren’t as well-known to us today but who, in their own time, were as famous and well-regarded as the headliners (and in some cases far more so).
These can be split into roughly three groups: first, the lesser-known Club members; second, the (male) non-Club members, who were friends or associates of Johnson and/or Boswell; and thirdly, the female (non)members of that (nonexistent) “shadow Club” that I mentioned earlier.
Of the first group there are those assorted members of the Club who were close with Johnson or Boswell—though mostly with Johnson, as many Club members didn’t think much of Boswell and his earnest adulation of the great man, whom, they remarked caustically if somewhat bitterly, Boswell followed around like a “spaniel.” These include the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose play The Rivals introduced the world to the delightfully gaffe-prone character Mrs. Malaprop, whence we get the equally delightful English word “malapropism”; the celebrated portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds, who seems to have painted the portrait of every single person mentioned in this book at least twice; the poet Oliver Goldsmith; and the famous actor David Garrick.
Of the second group there are, as has already been noted, David Hume, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; but also the political agitator and stirrer-of-pots John Wilkes; the famed cartoonist, engraver, and political and social satirist William Hogarth, whose vivid depictions of everyday life in 18th-century London are still influential and much-admired to this day (and from whose name we get another delightful English word, “Hogarthian,” which is synonymous with satirical political illustrations of a certain style, as well as portrayals of squalid urban life, especially when set in London); and Pasquale Paoli, the charismatic Corsican general and freedom fighter who knew Napoleon’s parents when the Little Corporal was just a little glint in his father’s eye, and whom Boswell befriended as a young traveler in Corsica and was later reunited with during Paoli’s long exile in London.
Lastly, but certainly not least, are the female friends, confidantes, and wives of Club members. These are the ones who Damrosch broadly refers to as the “shadow Club”—a phrase I found amusingly evocative of a furtive conspiracy hatched amongst them to somehow infiltrate this mostly insignificant little corner of their husbands’ and friends’ social lives. In reality, though, they most likely regarded “the Club” in much the same way as the men did: as a fun but trivial and certainly a peripheral distraction, and anyhow one which only need be attended a few times a year (despite its meetings being held weekly, the most faithful attendee, Joshua Reynolds, only went to something like twelve out of fifty-two annual meetings at the height of his involvement, and was similarly involved in a half-dozen other clubs—his fellow members went far less frequently even than this). Those in this third group include the beautiful and talented Eva Garrick, a famed and fêted dancer and the wife of David Garrick; eminent author and Shakespeare scholar Lady Montague, whose writings on Shakespeare Johnson—perhaps unsurprisingly, as she was a direct competitor with him in this field—disdained; the successful novelist, playwright, and inveterate diarist, Fanny Burney, author of such bestselling classics as Evelina and Cecilia; and of course, Hester Thrale, the firm and unwavering friend, confidante, and—during his frequent and severe bouts of “melancholy” (what today would almost certainly be diagnosed as clinical depression)—caretaker of Dr. Johnson. Thrale, too, wrote a biography of Johnson after his death, which came out a few years before Boswell’s and was a notable success. Hester was yet another member of this extraordinary little social circle who was a committed diarist and letter-writer. There are, obviously, quite a few in this tale, and it’s from their voluminous and still-extant writings that Damrosch gives the reader by far the most vivid first-hand accounts.
One of the things I found a bit frustrating about this book—despite its exceptionally engaging cast of characters—is that Damrosch’s narrative gaze is simultaneously too broad and too narrow. Too broad to allow him to really pin down any one character, while too narrow to encompass all the richness and intellectual ferment of the time. Even the titular “Club” is oddly absent from much of the book—though one gets the impression that it’s just a narrative device Damrosch uses as his raison d’être for writing about this particular set of characters, however small a part it might play in the actual course of events. And this is not at all a necessarily bad thing. Using a thematic device to write about a particular milieu—be it a certain year (as in David McCullough’s 1776 or Bill Bryson’s 1927), decade (the Roaring Twenties, the Counterculture Sixties), city (New York, London, Paris), or whatever the author might choose as their particular narrative vehicle—can be a feature rather than a bug. But when a narrative device meant to keep a story coherent instead acts as a distraction, it‘s probably a conceit that should be abandoned in favor of something more appropriate to whatever story the author is really trying to tell. Damrosch could just as easily have used the friendship of Johnson and Boswell, or of Johnson and Hester Thrale—two relationships which give the book its most substantial emotional bearings—to tell the same story without having to bother with “the Club” in anything more than a cursory manner. This, after all, is pretty much exactly what he ends up doing anyway.
~~~~~~
Alright. So given that I did, in fact, find this book to be engaging and interesting, my continual carping and kvetching may seem to some like the proverbial ingrate who Uncle Junior describes in an early episode of The Sopranos as having “a Virginia ham under one arm,” but keeps “singing the blues ‘cause she got no bread.”
Fair enough. And I’ll try to keep the remainder short.
The only other problems I had with The Club are twofold, and in relation to the book’s upsides are details which don’t detract too much as a whole, but which are, nevertheless, both unappealing and unnecessary.
First is Damrosch’s persistence in giving factually and historically dubious armchair psychoanalysis of Johnson—unabashedly Freudian in tone and encompassing everything from obsessive-compulsive disorder (I’ve read Tourette’s as a far likelier and more parsimonious explanation for Johnson’s pronounced physical ticks), to some undercooked but elaborate theories of a vaguely defined mother complex, to seriously dodgy claims about repressed sexual masochism. All of which, ironically, leave the good Doctor as much of an enigma as ever.
Damrosch’s assessment of Johnson as a chronic depressive does genuinely help to illuminate the doctor’s personality; shading it in with his most profound and persistent psychological struggle—and thereby also giving insight into some of his principal motivations and crucial decisions as well; like his moving in with Hester Thrale and her husband at Streatham Place, their sprawling and idyllic estate just outside London, in which Johnson had his own room and an extensive library and which was a sort of port-in-a-storm for him when his debilitating bouts of depression left him left him feeling completely out at sea. But Johnson’s tendency toward depression is—much like Churchill’s—a well-known and well-documented historical fact, attested to not only by numerous close friends and contemporaries but on many occasions by Johnson himself. Where Damrosch goes too far is in his overwrought and under-supported analysis of nearly every aspect of Johnson’s psyche—conclusions which are not well-documented by the historical record, and moreover tend only to muddle and confuse rather than clarify Johnson’s complex and multi-faceted personality—a personality which, like anyone else’s, surely doesn’t boil down so easily into a handful of reductive Freudian clichés.
Finally, there are the thoroughly unsympathetic and oftentimes downright snobbish judgments which Damrosch consistently passes on Boswell. While Johnson’s faults are explained away or simply ignored, Boswell is taken to task for everything from his heavy drinking to his guilty Presbyterian piety, his philandering to his (as Damrosch tells it) thoroughly average intelligence. Given Damrosch’s unqualified praise for Boswell’s masterful biography, all this pompous and self-superior deprecation of Boswell’s intellect may leave the reader feeling more confused than enlightened, and with good reason. And though Boswell fully deserves many of the criticisms he faces here—for his unfaithfulness to his wife, for his unrestrained drinking, for frequenting brothels, etc.—oftentimes it comes off as mere priggishness or piling-on, and in those moments becomes as exhausting as it is bewildering. For God’s sake, I thought to myself at numerous points while reading The Club—I‘ve actually read Stalin biographers who are less comprehensively uncharitable to their subject as Damrosch is to Boswell in this book.
As I said, though (and despite Damrosch’s frequently communicated disdain for Boswell’s intellect), he does—unfailingly if somewhat inexplicably, in light of his purported opinions of the man’s abilities—give The Life of Johnson its just due, as the brilliant and timeless masterpiece that it is. As he tells the reader at one point, Boswell’s Life of Johnson “triumphs by bringing Johnson back to life.” Though Damrosch doesn’t quite manage the same trick here, there are extended periods throughout—sustained resuscitations, if you will—where he pulls it off admirably. Enough to keep the reader’s interest, and to give one a pleasantly engaging tour through 18th century England and Scotland, and through the lives of those eternally intertwined and infinitely fascinating figures, Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell—the Batman and Robin, Holmes and Watson, Cassidy and Kerouac of their day.
Damrosch is a knowledgeable historian and a very talented writer—as one inevitably is made aware of while reading The Club—enough so that I’m confident I’ll be reading another of his many narrative histories at some point down the line. Hopefully that one will have a stronger and a more relevant thematic centerpiece—as well as less inclination to hand down judgment and diagnoses to people who in the context of their own lives were not so much more flawed than the rest of us.
February 16, 2019
The Club was a group of polymaths who met in an inn once a week in the second half of the 1700s. Made up of actors, artists, intellectuals and writers, many of the members were people who remain well known to this day; Johnson, Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke and Adam Smith amongst others. I was expecting this book to be about the meetings themselves and what they entailed and discussed during these however rather it was a book of biographies of the members. Damrosch takes each club member and provides information on their lives, work and idiosyncrasies as well as giving the reader information on the social, cultural and political history of the time. The book uses a range of sources including the club members journals, work, letters, quotes and Johnson’s own definitions of words within the dictionary he compiled. Damrosch has researched well and places the sources, events and people themselves into context for the time thus providing an extra layer that biographies often miss out and lead to the misinterpretation of information. Furthermore the paintings, drawings and cartoons that are peppered throughout the book really help to give the reader a mental picture of both the club members and the historical setting.
I found this a fascinating read. Damrosch is clearly a skilled biographer. He is able to present the information in a very readable and clear manner and while the book is fairly long it does not read so. While I would have preferred a bit more balance between the members of the club (there is a large focus on Johnson and Boswell) and mentions of Rousseau and Voltaire who were not part of the club take up far more page space than many of the members this nevertheless was incredibly insightful. A perfect read for people who have knowledge of the club members and want to find out more about them or equally know very little but would like to begin researching. A book I am sure I will reread.
Thank you to Net Galley and Yale University Press for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
I found this a fascinating read. Damrosch is clearly a skilled biographer. He is able to present the information in a very readable and clear manner and while the book is fairly long it does not read so. While I would have preferred a bit more balance between the members of the club (there is a large focus on Johnson and Boswell) and mentions of Rousseau and Voltaire who were not part of the club take up far more page space than many of the members this nevertheless was incredibly insightful. A perfect read for people who have knowledge of the club members and want to find out more about them or equally know very little but would like to begin researching. A book I am sure I will reread.
Thank you to Net Galley and Yale University Press for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
October 3, 2021
4.75 Stars (Rnd ⬆️) — The NYT Book Review, I thank wholeheartedly, for putting me into this beautiful & poignantly written masterwork of nonfiction. Leo Damrosch, take a bow! A captivating & humbling biography of the quintessential figures in modern contemporary literature & most certainly the English language. Though quite easily this could’ve been a bore, that fact in-and-of-itself highlights just what a bang-up job the author and publisher have done here to create a page-turning walk down history manor, not to be missed.
Sometimes when reading nonfiction, one can begin to feel the moment where as the reader, it all becomes a little dull. Not through the subject or even any real fault of the author at all, but because it’s the nature of many nonfiction reads that at some point you must hit “reset” & switch to fiction or have a break for a day or so..
Leo Damrosch’s “The Club” - Is absolutely NOT one of these. This absolute gem of a novel is instantly accessible, engaging & oddly compelling, given that it is not necessarily content that is contrary to expectation nor revelatory. But what the author does, is write with such flow & unbridled enthusiasm & love that I simply
Could not put this little ripper (pardon the Aussie slang, but it’s exactly what it is) away despite having 6-7 other books
On the go, it simply demanded my attention ongoing & moreover, when working or even driving, I found myself thinking about the main cast of characters - especially Johnson, pondering what it must of been like to write the first true English dictionary or to sit & discuss topical diatribes with peers like Boswell each and every week, or flail around at night searching for the candle that lit up ones abode in the dead of night, due to it somehow blowing out!
Damrosch’ prose is delivered in such a way that any potential for moments of pretence or interludes whereby the reader needs to “push forward” with grit are abated & the absolute delight of the main characters & their abundance of excellent anecdotal content, filled with quirky quotations and diary excerpts!
This is no ordinary bit of nonfiction, the club is akin to monster titles such as recent heroes like Midnight in Chernobyl or Dominion, I challenge anyone whom picks it up, to be able to put it down for a single moment before say page 60.. when and if you do, you’ll have it open again in no time. This I discovered, is the point of no return, and even on re-reading in 2021, I found myself captivated by those formative years, defined in delightful, short and sharp bursts, with factoids and allegorical like whimsy, by Leo Damrosch — with prose that so eloquently softens the material and pace.
Sometimes when reading nonfiction, one can begin to feel the moment where as the reader, it all becomes a little dull. Not through the subject or even any real fault of the author at all, but because it’s the nature of many nonfiction reads that at some point you must hit “reset” & switch to fiction or have a break for a day or so..
Leo Damrosch’s “The Club” - Is absolutely NOT one of these. This absolute gem of a novel is instantly accessible, engaging & oddly compelling, given that it is not necessarily content that is contrary to expectation nor revelatory. But what the author does, is write with such flow & unbridled enthusiasm & love that I simply
Could not put this little ripper (pardon the Aussie slang, but it’s exactly what it is) away despite having 6-7 other books
On the go, it simply demanded my attention ongoing & moreover, when working or even driving, I found myself thinking about the main cast of characters - especially Johnson, pondering what it must of been like to write the first true English dictionary or to sit & discuss topical diatribes with peers like Boswell each and every week, or flail around at night searching for the candle that lit up ones abode in the dead of night, due to it somehow blowing out!
Damrosch’ prose is delivered in such a way that any potential for moments of pretence or interludes whereby the reader needs to “push forward” with grit are abated & the absolute delight of the main characters & their abundance of excellent anecdotal content, filled with quirky quotations and diary excerpts!
This is no ordinary bit of nonfiction, the club is akin to monster titles such as recent heroes like Midnight in Chernobyl or Dominion, I challenge anyone whom picks it up, to be able to put it down for a single moment before say page 60.. when and if you do, you’ll have it open again in no time. This I discovered, is the point of no return, and even on re-reading in 2021, I found myself captivated by those formative years, defined in delightful, short and sharp bursts, with factoids and allegorical like whimsy, by Leo Damrosch — with prose that so eloquently softens the material and pace.
November 29, 2019
While there is good stuff here, my interest flagged about halfway in. It's a long time ago, and TMI about characters I don't care much about. The book is due back, and I think I'm done.
Joseph Epsein's rave review: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-club... [paywalled. Ask if you would like a copy].
"What historical era produced the greatest aggregate of human intelligence? Fifth century B.C. Greece provided Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Phidias. In 18th-century France there were the philosophes, among them D’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, Helvétius. The founding generation of the republic—Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Adams—would be America’s entry. My own choice would be for middle- and late 18th-century London, where Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, David Garrick, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, David Hume and Richard Brinsley Sheridan walked the streets. These men knew one another well and, with the exception of Hume, belonged to the same club, which met on Friday evenings at the Turk’s Head Tavern, at 9 Gerrard Street, off the Strand. Here was a club that even Groucho Marx, who claimed he wouldn’t care to belong to any club that would accept him as a member, could not have resisted joining."
I like well-crafted reviews, Epstein's is wonderful. Read it, even if you don't read the book.
Joseph Epsein's rave review: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-club... [paywalled. Ask if you would like a copy].
"What historical era produced the greatest aggregate of human intelligence? Fifth century B.C. Greece provided Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Phidias. In 18th-century France there were the philosophes, among them D’Alembert, Diderot, Voltaire, Helvétius. The founding generation of the republic—Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Adams—would be America’s entry. My own choice would be for middle- and late 18th-century London, where Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, James Boswell, David Garrick, Charles James Fox, Adam Smith, David Hume and Richard Brinsley Sheridan walked the streets. These men knew one another well and, with the exception of Hume, belonged to the same club, which met on Friday evenings at the Turk’s Head Tavern, at 9 Gerrard Street, off the Strand. Here was a club that even Groucho Marx, who claimed he wouldn’t care to belong to any club that would accept him as a member, could not have resisted joining."
I like well-crafted reviews, Epstein's is wonderful. Read it, even if you don't read the book.
June 20, 2019
As an avid Johnsonian, I was amused by the book but learned very little. As has been remarked by others, the title is misnamed. The book focused entirely on the relationship between Boswell and Johnson, touching on some of the early members of Johnson’s conversational club here and there. The book had almost nothing to do with the club itself. While I know that the events of club meetings only exist within Boswell’s journals and his Life of Johnson, the author should have named the book something like Boswell and Johnson, an Unlikely Friendship. The book did remind me how misunderstood Samuel Johnson is. While he was guilty of much verbal condescension and, sometimes, cruelty, at bottom he was a man with a big heart who was largely beloved by the victims of his barbs. He was one of the foremost social commentators with his Rambler essays, the greatest lexicographer until James Murray and Bryan Garner, and a towering intellect. His single-handed composition of the first real dictionary of the English language with 40,000 entries and ten times that many representative quotations was perhaps the greatest act of non-scientific scholarship ever completed by a single person. Boswell, on the other hand, was a self-important, self-absorbed, narcissistic, arrogant, drunken, whore-mongering misogynist who accomplished only a single thing of note in his life, recording the words of Samuel Johnson and reproducing them in his biography. Boswell liked to pretend he was a gentleman, but his treatment of all women, including his wife, was unforgivable. In the end, he died the penniless loser that he was. I am, of course, grossly understating the significance and worth of Boswell's Johnson--one of the greatest biographies ever written and that could only have been written by an obsessed sycophant like Boswell, who took down seemingly every word uttered by the other during their 20+ year friendship. But that achievement in no way changes my opinion of its author. All this said, does anyone doubt that Donald Trump would love to have his own Boswell?
Having a chance to ruminate a bit more on Boswell, I was too harsh. Yes, he was all those things. But those things were caused by a combination of his terrible, arrogant father, Alexander, and his mental illnesses--almost certainly profound depression and bipolar syndrome. Of course Boswell struggled. Who among us with his baggage, and no modern treatment, would not. But that does not excuse his treatment of others, particularly women.
Having a chance to ruminate a bit more on Boswell, I was too harsh. Yes, he was all those things. But those things were caused by a combination of his terrible, arrogant father, Alexander, and his mental illnesses--almost certainly profound depression and bipolar syndrome. Of course Boswell struggled. Who among us with his baggage, and no modern treatment, would not. But that does not excuse his treatment of others, particularly women.
May 1, 2020
A hundred or so years ago, when I was in grad school, I took a course on seventeenth century literature, the so-called Age of Johnson. I found the reading onerous, but the professor, Paul Fussell, was one of the most renowned scholars of the period so I persisted. It didn't hurt that Fussell was a very smart, very entertaining instructor. Looking back I'd have to say that he planted the seeds of a curiosity about that era that persisted over the years. Which is what prompted me to read this book. And damned if I'm not grateful for it!
Writing a sales pitch for a book like this is a daunting challenge. What could possibly be more tedious than a bunch of musty old 17th century Brits talking about Literature and Art and such? Fair point, I guess, but that ain't THIS book. This book is actually a pleasure to read. Damrosch is the perfect guide to the subject. He's an entertaining storyteller who knows his stuff, calls out pedantry when he sees it, is frequently quite funny, and helpfully takes that extra moment to explain what a particular word or phrase meant then as opposed to what it means now. And best of all, he presents the times and the personalities in the most lively, engaging, and generous manner.
"The Club" was the name given to (and by) the luminaries who regularly got together to talk, drink, debate, eat, and drink. A lot. Over the years its members included Samuel Johnson, his biographer James Boswell, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbons, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and numerous others. For many modern readers, I know, these names might be at least somewhat familiar, but seeing them listed in this fashion is not going to be much of a draw. But Damrosch brings them, their times, and the many faces of London society to splendid life. And he does so with a light touch and a playful glint in his narrative eye (if I may).
As he follows these men around, Damrosch shows us what was happening in the streets, stores, and estates around them. We get a glimpse of crime and punishment in those days: the awful spectacle of public hangings that were designed to be long, drawn out executions and that attracted large crowds eager for entertainment. We see the ubiquity of prostitution, and the eagerness and frequency with which Boswell and the other Great Men made use of their services, with, of course, the expected STDs and robberies that were also common parts of the transaction. So common was this kind of thing, Damrosch tells us, that many wives of the period (and of that class) fully expected the husbands to interact with prostitutes.
Damrosch shows us the pernicious effects of class at the time. Heirs to fortunes were often merciless in their competition for inheritances. House support staff -- maids, servants, cooks, etc. -- were the single largest occupation in London and its environs, and evidently the most invisible because they never seem to rise to the attention of the Great Men.
Class and status were present everywhere in society. Damrosch shares comments made by Hester Thrale (a wealthy woman who allowed Samuel Johnson to live on her estate) about the shy young novelist, Fanny Burney: “She is a graceful looking girl, but ‘tis the grace of an actress, not a woman of fashion – how should it be? The Burneys are, I believe, a very low race of mortals.” (Feel free to curl your lip in disdain and hear in your imagination the posh tones in which these words might have been uttered.) Was Burney aware of this dismissal? It's not known, but she did manage to reciprocate sometime later. After writing several sentences about Thrale's wit, intelligence, and ability to entertain, Burney observed “Her manners were flaunting, her voice was loud, and she had no peace, and allowed none to others, but in the display of her talents.”
Damrosch also captures the benighted state of medicine at the time. Doctors could do next to nothing to treat disease. Damrosch tells of a 4 year old child suffering from an ear infection made worse by a case of the measles. Trying to cure the child, her parents had her seen by several physicians, one after another. The treatments began with sarsaparilla tea and went from there through blistering, purgation, and leeches. The child died. Indeed, the child mortality rate was horrifying at all levels of society.
Boswell and Johnson enjoy most of the attention, unsurprisingly, and we are granted fascinating glimpses, estimable and otherwise, into their humanity. Both were subject to severe bouts of depression (Boswell once described his mood as "a room where somebody has by accident snuffed out the candles") and held morbid fears of insanity. Johnson was nearly blind in one eye and suffered throughout his life from numerous uncontrollable tics, both physical and verbal. Boswell had a higher estimation of himself than he deserved (he wrote and published an anonymous rave review of one of his own books), but he was generally a good companion and a gifted raconteur of stories. And, dear lord!, he seemed to be perpetually priapic: His interaction with prostitutes (and, occasionally, women of his own class) were so numerous as to beggar belief. One can only gasp at the frequency with which he must have undergone whatever treatments were popular then for "venereal"diseases (arsenic and mercury were two of them; one wonders about their efficacy). Boswell wasn't shy about writing of his sexual exploits in his journals, and later scholars found plentiful evidence of pages being torn out by relatives after his death. (That notwithstanding, when the first volume of an edition of his journals was published in 1951, it stayed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for months and was a very popular Book of the Month Club selection -- for those of my readers here who are old enough to know what that was.)
Late in his life, Boswell commissioned a portrait of himself by his friend Joshua Reynolds (for which he ended up paying only half the fee). Years later his heirs were so ashamed of Boswell’s self-depiction in the “Life of Johnson” that they banished the portrait to the attic. His great-granddaughter eventually brought it back downstairs so visitors could “take potshots at it with a pistol.” (It's in a museum now, I assume it's been repaired, though I suppose it's possible that her guests were terrible shots.)
This is already far too long so I'll dispense with narration and list some of the things that struck me in reading "The Club." The brilliant men who participated in those evenings drank limitless bottles of wine and ate meals of many, many courses. Unsurprisingly, many suffered from gout, and more than a few were morbidly obese. (“I have no notion of health for a man whose mouth cannot be sewed up,” one woman wrote of her husband.) Heart attacks and strokes were quite common among them and their peers.
Edmund Burke's words about impeachment and government resonate today, as do David Hume's observations about religion: “Hear the verbal protestations of all men: nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: you will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them.”
And of course there are the examples of Johnson's acerbic wit. As he famously wrote, reading "Paradise Lost" was "a duty rather than a pleasure." Milton's epic, long the bane of students everywhere, was “one of the books which the reader admires, and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”
The same can't be said of "The Club," at least not for me. I would that it had gone a hundred more pages.
Writing a sales pitch for a book like this is a daunting challenge. What could possibly be more tedious than a bunch of musty old 17th century Brits talking about Literature and Art and such? Fair point, I guess, but that ain't THIS book. This book is actually a pleasure to read. Damrosch is the perfect guide to the subject. He's an entertaining storyteller who knows his stuff, calls out pedantry when he sees it, is frequently quite funny, and helpfully takes that extra moment to explain what a particular word or phrase meant then as opposed to what it means now. And best of all, he presents the times and the personalities in the most lively, engaging, and generous manner.
"The Club" was the name given to (and by) the luminaries who regularly got together to talk, drink, debate, eat, and drink. A lot. Over the years its members included Samuel Johnson, his biographer James Boswell, David Hume, Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbons, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and numerous others. For many modern readers, I know, these names might be at least somewhat familiar, but seeing them listed in this fashion is not going to be much of a draw. But Damrosch brings them, their times, and the many faces of London society to splendid life. And he does so with a light touch and a playful glint in his narrative eye (if I may).
As he follows these men around, Damrosch shows us what was happening in the streets, stores, and estates around them. We get a glimpse of crime and punishment in those days: the awful spectacle of public hangings that were designed to be long, drawn out executions and that attracted large crowds eager for entertainment. We see the ubiquity of prostitution, and the eagerness and frequency with which Boswell and the other Great Men made use of their services, with, of course, the expected STDs and robberies that were also common parts of the transaction. So common was this kind of thing, Damrosch tells us, that many wives of the period (and of that class) fully expected the husbands to interact with prostitutes.
Damrosch shows us the pernicious effects of class at the time. Heirs to fortunes were often merciless in their competition for inheritances. House support staff -- maids, servants, cooks, etc. -- were the single largest occupation in London and its environs, and evidently the most invisible because they never seem to rise to the attention of the Great Men.
Class and status were present everywhere in society. Damrosch shares comments made by Hester Thrale (a wealthy woman who allowed Samuel Johnson to live on her estate) about the shy young novelist, Fanny Burney: “She is a graceful looking girl, but ‘tis the grace of an actress, not a woman of fashion – how should it be? The Burneys are, I believe, a very low race of mortals.” (Feel free to curl your lip in disdain and hear in your imagination the posh tones in which these words might have been uttered.) Was Burney aware of this dismissal? It's not known, but she did manage to reciprocate sometime later. After writing several sentences about Thrale's wit, intelligence, and ability to entertain, Burney observed “Her manners were flaunting, her voice was loud, and she had no peace, and allowed none to others, but in the display of her talents.”
Damrosch also captures the benighted state of medicine at the time. Doctors could do next to nothing to treat disease. Damrosch tells of a 4 year old child suffering from an ear infection made worse by a case of the measles. Trying to cure the child, her parents had her seen by several physicians, one after another. The treatments began with sarsaparilla tea and went from there through blistering, purgation, and leeches. The child died. Indeed, the child mortality rate was horrifying at all levels of society.
Boswell and Johnson enjoy most of the attention, unsurprisingly, and we are granted fascinating glimpses, estimable and otherwise, into their humanity. Both were subject to severe bouts of depression (Boswell once described his mood as "a room where somebody has by accident snuffed out the candles") and held morbid fears of insanity. Johnson was nearly blind in one eye and suffered throughout his life from numerous uncontrollable tics, both physical and verbal. Boswell had a higher estimation of himself than he deserved (he wrote and published an anonymous rave review of one of his own books), but he was generally a good companion and a gifted raconteur of stories. And, dear lord!, he seemed to be perpetually priapic: His interaction with prostitutes (and, occasionally, women of his own class) were so numerous as to beggar belief. One can only gasp at the frequency with which he must have undergone whatever treatments were popular then for "venereal"diseases (arsenic and mercury were two of them; one wonders about their efficacy). Boswell wasn't shy about writing of his sexual exploits in his journals, and later scholars found plentiful evidence of pages being torn out by relatives after his death. (That notwithstanding, when the first volume of an edition of his journals was published in 1951, it stayed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for months and was a very popular Book of the Month Club selection -- for those of my readers here who are old enough to know what that was.)
Late in his life, Boswell commissioned a portrait of himself by his friend Joshua Reynolds (for which he ended up paying only half the fee). Years later his heirs were so ashamed of Boswell’s self-depiction in the “Life of Johnson” that they banished the portrait to the attic. His great-granddaughter eventually brought it back downstairs so visitors could “take potshots at it with a pistol.” (It's in a museum now, I assume it's been repaired, though I suppose it's possible that her guests were terrible shots.)
This is already far too long so I'll dispense with narration and list some of the things that struck me in reading "The Club." The brilliant men who participated in those evenings drank limitless bottles of wine and ate meals of many, many courses. Unsurprisingly, many suffered from gout, and more than a few were morbidly obese. (“I have no notion of health for a man whose mouth cannot be sewed up,” one woman wrote of her husband.) Heart attacks and strokes were quite common among them and their peers.
Edmund Burke's words about impeachment and government resonate today, as do David Hume's observations about religion: “Hear the verbal protestations of all men: nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: you will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them.”
And of course there are the examples of Johnson's acerbic wit. As he famously wrote, reading "Paradise Lost" was "a duty rather than a pleasure." Milton's epic, long the bane of students everywhere, was “one of the books which the reader admires, and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”
The same can't be said of "The Club," at least not for me. I would that it had gone a hundred more pages.
October 26, 2019
Following Leo Damrosch's lead, I'm going to quote liberally from the subjects of The Club in this review—for, although his own prose is certainly lively and accessible, the real stars are the individuals Damrosch studies, like Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith and others, who began meeting and exchanging ideas in London's Turk's Head Tavern, back in 1764.
Although a (much-changed) version of the Club exists even in the present day, The Club focuses on its first twenty years, and most of the best bon mots in the book come from just one of its founding members: Samuel Johnson. Possibly this is because his scribe Boswell did his best to record everything Johnson said in his hearing. Consider these examples, from early in The Club:
And Damrosch is not above inserting his own opinions as well, now and then:
The Club isn't just about Johnson and Boswell, though. Take, for example, the way Damrosch compares the opinions of historian Edward Gibbon and economist Adam Smith in this passage:
However, far from being an unreflective cheerleader of libertarianism (as if there were any other kind), Adam Smith, he of the "invisible hand," appears to have considered his notion to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive:
The oratory of statesman Edmund Burke receives Damrosch's scrutiny as well—as in Burke's conclusion to this speech, indicting Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India:
Damrosch does what he can to acknowledge the many women who surrounded the men of The Club, like Hester Thrale, who helped give Johnson a roof and bolstered him against depression... although ultimately Damrosch can do little to counteract the bulk of English history—a history which, after all, has been written by the weiners (heh... confirmed "quibbler" Edmund Burke might well have liked that pun, terrible as it is, at least according to Damrosch's account).
It's really tempting to dismiss the Club altogether, as a convocation of Dead White Males, but... I do think it's possible to honor the manifold achievements of these men, while still censuring their feet (and other parts) of clay, and I think Damrosch does a fine job of walking that line.
I will include one woman's words, at least; this is Fanny Burney, about the noted beauty Elizabeth Linley:
As The Club begins with Johnson and Boswell, so it ends. I found this observation from late in Johnson's life especially affecting:
Rich, multifaceted and dense... you will want to finish The Club. The dozens of vivid color plates in the middle of the book add luster as well, although flipping back and forth between the images and the references to them did get a little distracting.
I very much need to thank my Goodreads colleague Bronwen for bringing The Club to my attention—it's outside my usual range, so I might well have missed it while browsing on my own. Thanks!
Although a (much-changed) version of the Club exists even in the present day, The Club focuses on its first twenty years, and most of the best bon mots in the book come from just one of its founding members: Samuel Johnson. Possibly this is because his scribe Boswell did his best to record everything Johnson said in his hearing. Consider these examples, from early in The Club:
"There is no doubt that a man may appear very gay in company who is sad at heart. His merriment is like the sound of drums and trumpets in a battle, to drown the groans of the wounded and dying."and the savage sarcasm of,
—Samuel Johnson, p.18
If any creditors, Johnson says, could really be indifferent to the suffering endured by a {debtor's} prisoner's wife and children, "I must leave them to be awakened by some other power, for I write only to human beings."Damrosch often quotes from Johnson's own landmark A Dictionary of the English Language as well, as his source for contemporary definitions of words whose meanings have shifted.
—p.40
And Damrosch is not above inserting his own opinions as well, now and then:
Boswell always did enjoy the sound of his own voice.
—p.267
The Club isn't just about Johnson and Boswell, though. Take, for example, the way Damrosch compares the opinions of historian Edward Gibbon and economist Adam Smith in this passage:
In the Decline and Fall Gibbon states as a truism: "Most of the crimes which disturb the internal peace of society are produced by the restraints which the necessary, but unequal, laws of property have imposed on the appetites of mankind, by confining to a few the possession of those objects that are coveted by many."
Adam Smith, with whom Gibbon developed a friendship, said exactly the same thing in a series of lectures on jurisprudence. "Laws and government may be considered as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence."
Rousseau and Marx could not have put it better—except that in Smith's opinion this was a very good thing.
—p.168
However, far from being an unreflective cheerleader of libertarianism (as if there were any other kind), Adam Smith, he of the "invisible hand," appears to have considered his notion to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive:
"The government of an exclusive company of merchants is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever."
—Adam Smith, p.307
The oratory of statesman Edmund Burke receives Damrosch's scrutiny as well—as in Burke's conclusion to this speech, indicting Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India:
I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanours.The applicability of these orotund phrases to any more modern proceeding is left to the discrimination of the reader... although it should perhaps also be noted that the impeachment of Hastings, after dragging on for years, eventually ended in acquittal.
I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed.
I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he has dishonoured.
I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights and liberties he has subverted, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.
I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal laws of justice which he has violated.
I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank, situation and condition of life.
—Edmund Burke, p.309
Damrosch does what he can to acknowledge the many women who surrounded the men of The Club, like Hester Thrale, who helped give Johnson a roof and bolstered him against depression... although ultimately Damrosch can do little to counteract the bulk of English history—a history which, after all, has been written by the weiners (heh... confirmed "quibbler" Edmund Burke might well have liked that pun, terrible as it is, at least according to Damrosch's account).
It's really tempting to dismiss the Club altogether, as a convocation of Dead White Males, but... I do think it's possible to honor the manifold achievements of these men, while still censuring their feet (and other parts) of clay, and I think Damrosch does a fine job of walking that line.
I will include one woman's words, at least; this is Fanny Burney, about the noted beauty Elizabeth Linley:
"Had I been, for my sins, born of the male race, I should certainly have added one more to Miss Linley's train."
—p.199
As The Club begins with Johnson and Boswell, so it ends. I found this observation from late in Johnson's life especially affecting:
"As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly."Although his wit remained savage when warranted; this is Johnson from the same era, on the forgettable poems of Mark Akenside:
—Samuel Johnson, p.352
"When they are once found to be generally dull, all further labour may be spared, for to what use can the work be criticized that will not be read?"Or, to put it in more modern parlance, "DNF."
—p.359
Rich, multifaceted and dense... you will want to finish The Club. The dozens of vivid color plates in the middle of the book add luster as well, although flipping back and forth between the images and the references to them did get a little distracting.
I very much need to thank my Goodreads colleague Bronwen for bringing The Club to my attention—it's outside my usual range, so I might well have missed it while browsing on my own. Thanks!
April 3, 2019
This book is a vital survey of the intellectual and literary circle of luminaries who came to intersect their interests in an informal meeting called "the Club" at a local tavern called the Mitre. Ostensibly, it also spotlights many of the socio-cultural personas of the late 18th century in Britain: Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Joshua Reynolds, and Edward Gibbon.
Alongside his previous 2 books, a biography of Jonathan Swift and an artistic biography of William Blake, Leo Damrosch is on a roll. This is a book that certainly fills a niche, enlarging and expanding the spotlight that usually falls on only one of these leading lights of the age. The book does focus more heavily on Johnson and Boswell, but without marginalizing the other subjects. One reviewer complained that Adam Smith only receives 8 pages but it is not an Adam Smith bio; this book is an intellectual biography and at that it succeeds marvelously. Required reading for students and enthusiasts of the 1760s-1800s.
Alongside his previous 2 books, a biography of Jonathan Swift and an artistic biography of William Blake, Leo Damrosch is on a roll. This is a book that certainly fills a niche, enlarging and expanding the spotlight that usually falls on only one of these leading lights of the age. The book does focus more heavily on Johnson and Boswell, but without marginalizing the other subjects. One reviewer complained that Adam Smith only receives 8 pages but it is not an Adam Smith bio; this book is an intellectual biography and at that it succeeds marvelously. Required reading for students and enthusiasts of the 1760s-1800s.
January 13, 2021
The club is a centering device for this book but not a feature--a disappointment several have mentioned. I hoped for more insight into how membership in the club and the relationships and creative interactions among members impacted their creative trajectories and achievements. That's still a book I’d like to read.
Despite what if isn't, what it is is still a worthy read, though if you’ve read Boswell you're familiar with a good deal of what's covered here.
Despite what if isn't, what it is is still a worthy read, though if you’ve read Boswell you're familiar with a good deal of what's covered here.
November 1, 2020
The best (male) minds of late 18th-century England belonged to a casual club that met once a week at the Turk’s Head Tavern for food, drink, and conversation. The Club is the loose alignment that gives focus to this entertaining book, which opens a window to the era by way of several biographies.
A sentence from the prologue sums them up:
Whew. I’m convinced. These men mattered, then and now.
What made the book so engaging was the forward motion of the narrative as we became acquainted with first one, then another. Much of the detail was retrieved from the journals of Boswell. Without Johnson, Boswell would have had no story, but his remarkable skill in recall was amazing, and he confesses his debauchery as well as Johnson’s fabulous pronouncements. A substantial section of The Club focused on these two fascinating characters, in large part because we know so much more about the details of their lives.
The others do matter. They are especially interesting in this era of English colonial power. Burke was an ally for the American colonists as well as those under British rule in India. Gibbon became fascinated with Rome, and its decline, in part because of what he was seeing in England and America; the common topic is empire. Adam Smith accurately prophesied the rise of industrial England in the next century.
Damrosch did not limit his attention to this A list. Johnson had numerous women in his circle. His bouts with depression and his tics made him occasionally a peculiar character, and several women cared for and supported him. An intellectual group, they were drawn to his brilliant mind. Hester Thrale and her husband invited him to live with them, and they regularly maintained a spot for him in their expansive household. Hester herself was a writer, even while producing a baby just about every year. It was all possible because of the multitude of servants and cooks and nannies who did all the work.
Damrosch observed the silent presence of servants, and this is the quietly intrusive fact of economic life. Even the poorest of the men were freed from ordinary tasks. Edmund Gibbon, who lived out much of his life in Lausanne, Switzerland, led a schedule described as a day of research and writing, followed by an evening spent with friends. No cooking, cleaning, or checking on the credit card.
As an American, I am inclined to see the late 18th century in terms of our country’s rebellion and subsequent establishment of a separate nation. It was fascinating to think of those events against the highly developed culture and nuanced views from the mother country. The key figures all had opinions about empire and about colonizing other lands. This is one topic on which there was wide disagreement among these sharp minds. The other was the Christian religion.
It’s all enormously engaging, a wonderful amalgam of traditional historical observation, anecdotes, and stories.
The narrator for the audio version, Simon Vance, is excellent.
A sentence from the prologue sums them up:
The members included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, and Adam Smith—arguably the greatest British critic, biographer, political philosopher, historian, and economist of all time. Others were equally famous at the time: the painter Joshua Reynolds; the playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith; and David Garrick, the greatest actor of the century.In several instances, the men made singular contributions in their work. Johnson’s biographer Boswell, for example, was the first to write a biography which included actual conversations, with scenes written to evoke a mood. No one had thought to do that. Samuel Johnson wrote a dictionary which traced the history of a word, citing earlier and current usages; it’s an approach that prevails to this day. Edward Gibbon’s A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire offered a new way of looking at history, one which engaged readers in the frequently ambiguous task of assessing past times. Edmund Burke’s political wisdom, often delivered in parliamentary oratory, continues to inspire political thinkers. Adam Smith launched the study of economics through The Wealth of Nations. Even the actor Garrick introduced realistic acting, a contrast to the prior style of declamation.
Whew. I’m convinced. These men mattered, then and now.
What made the book so engaging was the forward motion of the narrative as we became acquainted with first one, then another. Much of the detail was retrieved from the journals of Boswell. Without Johnson, Boswell would have had no story, but his remarkable skill in recall was amazing, and he confesses his debauchery as well as Johnson’s fabulous pronouncements. A substantial section of The Club focused on these two fascinating characters, in large part because we know so much more about the details of their lives.
The others do matter. They are especially interesting in this era of English colonial power. Burke was an ally for the American colonists as well as those under British rule in India. Gibbon became fascinated with Rome, and its decline, in part because of what he was seeing in England and America; the common topic is empire. Adam Smith accurately prophesied the rise of industrial England in the next century.
Damrosch did not limit his attention to this A list. Johnson had numerous women in his circle. His bouts with depression and his tics made him occasionally a peculiar character, and several women cared for and supported him. An intellectual group, they were drawn to his brilliant mind. Hester Thrale and her husband invited him to live with them, and they regularly maintained a spot for him in their expansive household. Hester herself was a writer, even while producing a baby just about every year. It was all possible because of the multitude of servants and cooks and nannies who did all the work.
Damrosch observed the silent presence of servants, and this is the quietly intrusive fact of economic life. Even the poorest of the men were freed from ordinary tasks. Edmund Gibbon, who lived out much of his life in Lausanne, Switzerland, led a schedule described as a day of research and writing, followed by an evening spent with friends. No cooking, cleaning, or checking on the credit card.
As an American, I am inclined to see the late 18th century in terms of our country’s rebellion and subsequent establishment of a separate nation. It was fascinating to think of those events against the highly developed culture and nuanced views from the mother country. The key figures all had opinions about empire and about colonizing other lands. This is one topic on which there was wide disagreement among these sharp minds. The other was the Christian religion.
It’s all enormously engaging, a wonderful amalgam of traditional historical observation, anecdotes, and stories.
The narrator for the audio version, Simon Vance, is excellent.
November 12, 2019
“The Club” was an informal gathering of the brilliant and the witty, founded by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson in 1764. A select group of men would gather in a pub once a week for an evening of liquid indulgence and conversation, focused on the debate of large ideas.
Leo Damrosch’s book attempts to capture the group and the cultural and historical context that produced it. This is probably an impossible undertaking, and that it doesn’t entirely succeed is forgivable. The cover blurb describes Damrosch’s account as “brilliantly animated,” but to me it felt episodic, replete with anecdotes as lively as the protagonists but failing to create a coherent whole. It is also unfortunate that some of the protagonists were so rife with flaws and vices that reading about them was sometimes distasteful. In particular Johnson’s amanuensis and biographer James Boswell, who probably gets more page space than anyone else including Johnson himself, often made me want to set down the book and take a shower.
I came to this book desiring two things, one of them personal, the other a reasonable expectation for any reader. My personal wish was to learn more about Charles Burney, a member of the Club, in the context of his public life (having read much about his family life as the father of Fanny Burney), and here I found little to grab on to. The other expectation I formed of the book was that it would provide a global sense of the culture of London in the late eighteenth century, a picture of the currents of thought prevailing in that intellectually vigorous age. And here is where I was most disappointed: it seemed to me that the author, wading through a wealth of colorful detail, was unable to stand back often enough to offer a broad perspective. He reported insightful remarks in the course of detailing conversations among the Club members, but often failed to follow them up with context. The extent of his erudition makes me believe him capable of more than he provided.
The anecdotes are fascinating and the reader comes away with a clear sense of the texture of the lives of a loose group of extraordinary men. But I had larger ambitions for the work than were realized.
Leo Damrosch’s book attempts to capture the group and the cultural and historical context that produced it. This is probably an impossible undertaking, and that it doesn’t entirely succeed is forgivable. The cover blurb describes Damrosch’s account as “brilliantly animated,” but to me it felt episodic, replete with anecdotes as lively as the protagonists but failing to create a coherent whole. It is also unfortunate that some of the protagonists were so rife with flaws and vices that reading about them was sometimes distasteful. In particular Johnson’s amanuensis and biographer James Boswell, who probably gets more page space than anyone else including Johnson himself, often made me want to set down the book and take a shower.
I came to this book desiring two things, one of them personal, the other a reasonable expectation for any reader. My personal wish was to learn more about Charles Burney, a member of the Club, in the context of his public life (having read much about his family life as the father of Fanny Burney), and here I found little to grab on to. The other expectation I formed of the book was that it would provide a global sense of the culture of London in the late eighteenth century, a picture of the currents of thought prevailing in that intellectually vigorous age. And here is where I was most disappointed: it seemed to me that the author, wading through a wealth of colorful detail, was unable to stand back often enough to offer a broad perspective. He reported insightful remarks in the course of detailing conversations among the Club members, but often failed to follow them up with context. The extent of his erudition makes me believe him capable of more than he provided.
The anecdotes are fascinating and the reader comes away with a clear sense of the texture of the lives of a loose group of extraordinary men. But I had larger ambitions for the work than were realized.
January 17, 2019
In the second half of the eighteenth century a remarkable group of men met weekly in the Turk’s Head Tavern in London. Known simply as The Club, the group included Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon.
This book traces the fortunes of those men as well as some of the talented women who were their friends and supporters like the writers Fanny Burney, Hannah Moore, and Charlotte Lennox, and the woman on whom Johnson came to depend more than anyone else, Hester Thrale.
Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University but this is not a book for a closeted academic readership. With an eye for the telling detail and the emblematic anecdote, Damrosch brings the world of eighteenth century literary London vividly to life. It's a world populated by brilliant but flawed individuals beset by all the difficulties of class, sex, age, religion, and health, whose impact upon society is still felt today, and the author succeeds in making them wonderfully recognisable
Compelling reading for the intellectually curious, The Club is entertaining, vividly drawn and often genuinely moving.
This book traces the fortunes of those men as well as some of the talented women who were their friends and supporters like the writers Fanny Burney, Hannah Moore, and Charlotte Lennox, and the woman on whom Johnson came to depend more than anyone else, Hester Thrale.
Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature Emeritus at Harvard University but this is not a book for a closeted academic readership. With an eye for the telling detail and the emblematic anecdote, Damrosch brings the world of eighteenth century literary London vividly to life. It's a world populated by brilliant but flawed individuals beset by all the difficulties of class, sex, age, religion, and health, whose impact upon society is still felt today, and the author succeeds in making them wonderfully recognisable
Compelling reading for the intellectually curious, The Club is entertaining, vividly drawn and often genuinely moving.
February 9, 2019
There's not much to say about the titular Club, certainly not enough to fill 400 pages. Damrosch's strategy is to write about the lives of its members, and the general milieu they lived in. So, rather than a history of the club this book is mostly a series of independent biographies.
Adam Smith gets one chapter (8 pages!), Joshua Reynolds gets one chapter, Edmund Burke gets one chapter, and so on. Johnson and Boswell get a few each, and some about the two of them together.
There are two problems with this strategy: 1) the book never really congeals into a unified whole, it's just a series of independent chapters far too short to adequately cover their subjects, and 2) the focus on Johnson and Boswell puts Damrosch up against Boswell. Naturally, he can't compete. Who could compete with the greatest biography of all time?
The book is at its best when Damrosch is quoting his subjects, and luckily he does so prodigiously. They are after all extraordinarily interesting people, and this is a great collection of anecdotes about them. I also appreciated the visual material, Damrosch seems to have tracked down every painting he could find, and it really helps to bring the characters to life.
Received review copy through NetGalley.
Adam Smith gets one chapter (8 pages!), Joshua Reynolds gets one chapter, Edmund Burke gets one chapter, and so on. Johnson and Boswell get a few each, and some about the two of them together.
There are two problems with this strategy: 1) the book never really congeals into a unified whole, it's just a series of independent chapters far too short to adequately cover their subjects, and 2) the focus on Johnson and Boswell puts Damrosch up against Boswell. Naturally, he can't compete. Who could compete with the greatest biography of all time?
The book is at its best when Damrosch is quoting his subjects, and luckily he does so prodigiously. They are after all extraordinarily interesting people, and this is a great collection of anecdotes about them. I also appreciated the visual material, Damrosch seems to have tracked down every painting he could find, and it really helps to bring the characters to life.
Received review copy through NetGalley.
Read
January 11, 2021In spite of the title, this is really a series of short biographies, with an emphasis on Boswell and Johnson. So readers looking for a history of this club, or others of the period, would do better elsewhere.
But for an introduction to the lives of some of the members (specifically those around Johnson and Boswell) this is engagingly readable, with a lot of pictures. The main thrust is the “good parts” version of Boswell's journals, swapped off with his Life of Johnson. What detective work there is focuses on episodes in which the Life of Johnson and the journals differ, with reference to other period sources.
The narrative thrust is broken up by brief, usually chapter-length biographies of their particular friends (or enemies) in the Club, such as Gibbon, Hume, Sheridan, Garrick, Burke, and Adam Smith. We also get a recounting of the life of Hester Thrale, who was so close to Johnson, and of Fanny Burney. There are also riffs explaining the political scene of the time, and some of the religious tensions both in society and between individuals. If you know the period, this will not be offering any new material, but it is a pleasant read, centered around one of the famous clubs of the period—without actually stepping much inside.
But for an introduction to the lives of some of the members (specifically those around Johnson and Boswell) this is engagingly readable, with a lot of pictures. The main thrust is the “good parts” version of Boswell's journals, swapped off with his Life of Johnson. What detective work there is focuses on episodes in which the Life of Johnson and the journals differ, with reference to other period sources.
The narrative thrust is broken up by brief, usually chapter-length biographies of their particular friends (or enemies) in the Club, such as Gibbon, Hume, Sheridan, Garrick, Burke, and Adam Smith. We also get a recounting of the life of Hester Thrale, who was so close to Johnson, and of Fanny Burney. There are also riffs explaining the political scene of the time, and some of the religious tensions both in society and between individuals. If you know the period, this will not be offering any new material, but it is a pleasant read, centered around one of the famous clubs of the period—without actually stepping much inside.
Read
June 23, 2020I am currently reading this book, which has a fantastic focus: the famous London club featuring Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Topham Beauclerck, Adam Smith, and other luminaries. Damrosch is really nailing it with Johnson and Boswell, though he has an unfortunate tendency to prefer raunchy anecdotes. His chapter on Garrick is also solid.
His account of Adam Smith, however, is superficial and biased. He relies, for instance, on Duncan Foley (of _Adam's Fallacy_) rather than doing the hard work of really trying to understand Smith's _Wealth of Nations_. Worse, Damrosch summarily dismisses Smith's _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ as "very dry and abstract." Surely his distinguished professor could do better!
The rest of the book is similarly uneven. At times the author stresses the crassness of Johnson with no apparent purpose other than to shock or perhaps engage an audience he underestimates. His treatment of Burke is also shallow.
Damrosch is a good scholar, but this book is not his best. I cannot recommend it.
His account of Adam Smith, however, is superficial and biased. He relies, for instance, on Duncan Foley (of _Adam's Fallacy_) rather than doing the hard work of really trying to understand Smith's _Wealth of Nations_. Worse, Damrosch summarily dismisses Smith's _The Theory of Moral Sentiments_ as "very dry and abstract." Surely his distinguished professor could do better!
The rest of the book is similarly uneven. At times the author stresses the crassness of Johnson with no apparent purpose other than to shock or perhaps engage an audience he underestimates. His treatment of Burke is also shallow.
Damrosch is a good scholar, but this book is not his best. I cannot recommend it.
April 25, 2019
This is largely a rehash of Boswell's The Life of Johnson with additional biographical details on each of the major members of the Literary Club that Johnson helped to found. It contains some interesting theories on the real nature of Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale. It includes a lot of the stupid things that Boswell did and said during his lifetime, most of which we can do without. Boswell was an ass but he was also the artist who left us with a masterpiece. I like how William Gaddis describes the artist in The Recognitions: A bag of bones dragged about by the work of art. This book was a little disappointing in that it didn't offer a lot of new and interesting information on the characters who populate The Life. But I am glad I read it.
February 20, 2020
The Club is a sort of group biography about some of the greatest artists and intellectuals of 18th century Britain. It focuses in particular on Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, but also gets into the interesting lives of David Garrick (the greatest actor of his day), Edward Gibbon, Joshua Reynolds, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and others. These men were (mostly) friends of Johnson’s and they were all members of the same club.
The Club covers so much territory that it can’t do its work to any great depth, but it relates the lives of this group of men (and a few of the women in their orbit), with a gossipy energy and the result is a very readable book. I enjoyed it so much that I’m taking another run at Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
The Club covers so much territory that it can’t do its work to any great depth, but it relates the lives of this group of men (and a few of the women in their orbit), with a gossipy energy and the result is a very readable book. I enjoyed it so much that I’m taking another run at Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.
February 11, 2020
The Club (2019) is Leo Damrosch's entertaining history of the London Literary Club, an assemblage of major 18th century figures in English arts that met weekly at London's Turk's Head Tavern. A Harvard professor, Demrosch is the perfect interpreter of that diverse group and of its consequences. This is a delightful history of the literary scene in 18th century England, beautifully told in both words and paintings from the time, each with a commentary that brings them to life and sets their connection to the storyline.
The Club was formed in 1764 by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds. The 55 year-old Johnson had fallen into one of his deep depressions and Reynolds, his friend and the most famous painter in 18th century England, developed the notion of The Club as group therapy for "Dr" Johnson, a Doctor by virtue of one year at Oxford and an honorary degree conferred in 1765 by Trinity College. In The Club's second year Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language would revolutionize the world of word-keeping and help to standardize the language.
The intellectual core—the first nine members—were Johnson and Reynolds; Edmund Burke, the Irish political philosopher and parliamentarian; historian Edward Gibbon; Oliver Goldsmith, a playwright and poet; and John Hawkins, lawyer and musicologist. There were also four "men-about-town" whose public contributions were less substantial but whose company was as welcomed.
Notable later additions were: in 1773, James Boswell and David Garrick, the century's greatest actor, theater manager and producer; in 1775, Adam Smith, the moral philosopher and the author of The Wealth of Nations; in 1777, the playwright Richard Sheridan. The delay of Boswell's entry was primarily because the members considered him an intellectual lightweight whose primary strength was devotion to Johnson.
The choice of a tavern as the meeting place was easy: taverns were the social centers of male life in the 18th century—and The Club was decidedly all male. Johnson described a chair at a tavern as "the throne of human felicity." And so the Turk's Head Tavern became the meeting place every Friday until 1783, when it closed and the venue changed to Prince's Tavern. Damrosch's history focuses on The Club's first twenty years but it existed until "at least" 1969.
The Club spawned other clubs. For example, in 1911 Winston Churchill was refused membership because he was so controversial, so he formed The Other Club, fom which, no doubt, members of The Club were excluded.
Dr Johnson
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709, the son of a bookseller and an unloving mother to whom he gave as well as he got:
Latin was the principal subject taught and David Garrick was a principal student. Few students showed up—the Lichfield grammar school, which Johnson had attended, was essentially an educational monopoly. he Edial Hall School closed in 1731. Their marriage was a happy one, though Elizabeth's later years were spent in addiction to alcohol, opium, and romance novels. The marriage lasted until her death arrived in 1757.but Johnson remained devoted to Elizabeth and grieved for her long after her death.
Barred from a profession because he had no university degree, and with a failed teaching experience behind him, Johnson slipped into the one profession that was available to all with a literary mind: he moved to London in 1731 and became a Grub Street Hack, an author destined to remain poor by selling his work to printers (who, at that time, were also booksellers) whom he made rich. Much of his work was for Edward Cave, the creator of The Gentlemen's Magazine, a periodical that printed a miscellany of works; today we would call it a "magazine." At Cave's death, Johnson became the editor and tilted it toward humor. It was illegal to print Parliamentary speeches, so Johnson parapfhrased them a speeches made in the "Parliament of Lilliputia."
Johnson wrote numerous books and poems, but his lasting fame came in 1755 with completion of his most famous work: A Dictionary of the English Language defined the language of its time and affected its future usage. Damrosch clarifies its uniqueness:
James Boswell
James Boswell's fame comes not from what he did but from what he recorded: exchanges between notable individuals, highlighted by physical and verbal nuances unique to the parties. He was a keen observer who kept records of virtually every event he experienced. These were not dry records but lively observations that revealed the souls of the targets.
Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1740. His father, Alexander Boswell, was a judge with the honorific title Lord Auchinleck; Auchinleck was the name of the family estate. He also had the Scottish hereditary title Laird of Auchinleck. Boswell's father was overbearing and his mother was timid and a fervent Presbyterian who inflicted Boswell with a fear of god's infinite wrath.
In 1753, at age 13—the normal age of entry—Boswell matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a lackadaisical student preferring fun to study. At 17 he suffered a bout of deep depression and the remainder of his life was spent battling what appears to be bipolar disorder. His father considered him a playboy and at age 19 Boswell was ordered to leave Edinburgh to study at the University of Glasgow, where Adam Smith taught; It would be another 23 years before Smith's The Wealth of Nations would change the intellectual landscape of business and government policy.
In both Edinburgh and Glasgow Boswell was known as a conversationalist, a story-teller, a comedian, a mimic, and a skillful man with the ladies. But soon Boswell escaped Glasgow and went to London, where he saw as many plays as possible, and as many actresses as he could fit into. When his father located him he was ordered back to Edinburgh to begin private legal study. In 1762 he passed the examination in civil law and left Edinburgh for London, where he dabbled at the law law and lived on an annual allowance of £200 while he looked for a patron to buy him a post with the Horse Guards.
In 1763 Boswell began two great adventures: his father sent Boswell on a Grand Tour to develop some maturity and imbibe the civilization in foreign air, and he met Samuel Johnson who would become his father figure. Boswell returned from the Continent almost three years later after learning, by newspaper, of his mother's death. Much of his tour had been spent visiting great men—Rousseau and Voltaire included—and partaking of the pleasures of the brothel: in fact, a brothel was his first stop after learning of his mother's death.
Boswell and Johnson
Johnson and Boswell, the Club's bon vivants, became joined at the hip after meeting in 1773 in a London bookstore. They were physical opposites—Johnson was 6 feet tall, Bosworth was 5½ feet; Johnson was solidly built, Bosworth was slight; Johnson had many tics including grunts and groans as he spoke, constant movement of his face and limbs, and he never stepped on a crack on a sidewalk; Damrosch diagnoses Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but others suggest Tourette Syndrome. Boswell, on the other hand, was tic-free and his primary obsession seems to have been Johnson.
But in some ways they were psychological twins. Both suffered long periods of melancholia, a deep clinical depression that, at the time, was attributed to incorrectly observing the external environment rather than to internal neurological chaos. Both feared madness, and both delighted in the repartee, arguments, and mutual learning that was the heart of the Club for its twenty years of life.
The interplay between Johnson and Boswell is a lively part of the book that reveals their understanding of each other, their remarkable wit, and their trenchant observations on the world around them. Their friendship was solid by the time Boswell became a Club member in 1773. The two set off on an extended trip to Scotland in that year: beginning at Edinburgh—then nicknamed "Auld Reekie" because of its extremely foul odor—they proceeded counterclockwise up the east coast, over to the west past Loch Ness, out to the Isle of Skye, then down the west coast to Inverness, and finally eastward back to Auld Reekie.
Travelling in a fast post chaise, a two- person open carriage pulled by two horses, they thoroughly entertained each other while chatting with locals and keeping copious notes on whereabouts and activities for the full six weeks. The tangible results were two very well-received books: Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, published in 1775, and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, published much later in 1786 after Johnson's death.
Along the way Johnson, ever an instigator, sewed some seeds of discontent. One was associated with the "discovery" of a manuscript by an ancient bard named Ossian who preceded Shakespeare, making Ossian, a Scot, the first bard. The manuscript—a hoax—supposedly came into the hands of a Scot who published it. It was very popular in Scotland. Along the trail, Johnson was asked what he thought of Ossian's work, specifically, could it have been written by a Scot. His answer was
Edmund Burke was a great political philosopher whose first work, the 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful was a treatise in aesthetics. Until that time the object of Art had been the visual depiction of reality. Burke changed the emphasis to an investigation of what the viewer feels rather than what he sees. The major distinction he made is between the Beautiful, that which pleases our eye and our senses, and the Sublime, that which disturbs our minds by raising often fearful feelings. An advocate of the Beautiful might choose a seascape with flat water carrying a ship; an advocate of the Sublime would be moved by a storm-tossed ship laboring through heavy seas. The same distinction would apply to language—the Beautiful would delight the senses, the Sublime would disturb the soul.
In 1758 Burke married Mary Nugent, daughter of Charles Nugent, a physician who had successfully treated Burke. When The Club was formed, Charles Nugent would be a charter member, one of the "men about town." Burke's entry into politics followed a brief time at the Board of Trade under Lord Halifax. In 1765 he successfully ran for the MP of the small town of Wendover, near London. In 1774 he would become a member for the larger city of Bristol.
Political sentiment at the time was split between two parties—Whigs and Tories. Whigs represented the urban commercial and financial, interests and saw taxes as a general assist to their interests; Tories represented the rural and agricultural landed interests who were the primary tax payers. But the boundary between the two parties was very porous: there was no strong notion of party loyalty and no whips existed to keep party members in line.
In 1780 Bristol turned Burke out because of his independent stance. Burke joined a splinter group of the Whigs and quickly found another borough. After the defeat of Lord North's government following the 1782 Battle of Yorktown, Burke—a supporter the American cause—became paymaster-general for the army at the magnificent salary of £4000, enough to retire the significant debts he'd acquired to buy a large estate and maintain a social position. But the army position lasted only one year and he was returned to the life of a simple highly-indebted MP.
Burke's reputation in Parliament for clear thinking and effective oratory had grown in spite of his Irish brogue and suspicion of his Catholicism (he was Anglican). When the French Revolution began in 1789 he quickly spelled out its future in Reflections on the Revolution in France: it would lead to a bloodbath followed by the emergence of a dictator and war. This was a crystal-clear prediction of the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon.
His own view on government was traditional: the most stable government was a representational democracy in which the representatives were people of merit. Change should come by the action of representatives in Parliament, not by revolution.
Adam Smith
The requirements for Club membership were that one must be a vibrant conversationalist and raconteur, as well as a person of some political, literary or artistic note. How Adam Smith became a member in 1775 is a great mystery. Smith was a moral philosopher at the University of Edinburghand the author of A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he argued that moral principles were not hard-wired but grew out of social relationships. He was inscrutable, his mind devoted to contemplation of great truths while his Club companions squabbled, argued and cajoled.
In 1776, the year after joining The Club, Smith's fabulous The Wealth of Nations was published. In it Smith undertook to upend the prevalent view of trade and economic policy: Mercantilism, the philosophy that a nation's wealth was measured by the amount of gold held by the Treasury, and that anything that increased the infow of gold—like tariffs—strengthened the nation. This was, perhaps, true if the nation and the monarchy were synonymous, but Smith looked elsewhere for a nation's strength.
Smith argued that the true wealth lay in the nation's ability to produce goods, to trade those goods, and to employ its citizens/ Production was encouraged by the Division of Labor, trade was encouraged by Self Interest and by Laissez-Faire.
And so much more . . .
The Club was formed in 1764 by Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds. The 55 year-old Johnson had fallen into one of his deep depressions and Reynolds, his friend and the most famous painter in 18th century England, developed the notion of The Club as group therapy for "Dr" Johnson, a Doctor by virtue of one year at Oxford and an honorary degree conferred in 1765 by Trinity College. In The Club's second year Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language would revolutionize the world of word-keeping and help to standardize the language.
The intellectual core—the first nine members—were Johnson and Reynolds; Edmund Burke, the Irish political philosopher and parliamentarian; historian Edward Gibbon; Oliver Goldsmith, a playwright and poet; and John Hawkins, lawyer and musicologist. There were also four "men-about-town" whose public contributions were less substantial but whose company was as welcomed.
Notable later additions were: in 1773, James Boswell and David Garrick, the century's greatest actor, theater manager and producer; in 1775, Adam Smith, the moral philosopher and the author of The Wealth of Nations; in 1777, the playwright Richard Sheridan. The delay of Boswell's entry was primarily because the members considered him an intellectual lightweight whose primary strength was devotion to Johnson.
The choice of a tavern as the meeting place was easy: taverns were the social centers of male life in the 18th century—and The Club was decidedly all male. Johnson described a chair at a tavern as "the throne of human felicity." And so the Turk's Head Tavern became the meeting place every Friday until 1783, when it closed and the venue changed to Prince's Tavern. Damrosch's history focuses on The Club's first twenty years but it existed until "at least" 1969.
The Club spawned other clubs. For example, in 1911 Winston Churchill was refused membership because he was so controversial, so he formed The Other Club, fom which, no doubt, members of The Club were excluded.
Dr Johnson
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield in 1709, the son of a bookseller and an unloving mother to whom he gave as well as he got:
Mother: Samuel, you are just a puppy.Johnson attended the excellent Lichfield Grammar School, where his intelligence was obvious. He spent one year at Oxford, relying on financial aid from a classmate, but when that aid was withdrawn he was forced to leave. At age 23 he married 46 year-old Elizabeth Porter, a widow with a substantial inheritance, and they set up Edial Hall School in Lichfield.
Samuel: Do you know what they call a puppy's mother?
Latin was the principal subject taught and David Garrick was a principal student. Few students showed up—the Lichfield grammar school, which Johnson had attended, was essentially an educational monopoly. he Edial Hall School closed in 1731. Their marriage was a happy one, though Elizabeth's later years were spent in addiction to alcohol, opium, and romance novels. The marriage lasted until her death arrived in 1757.but Johnson remained devoted to Elizabeth and grieved for her long after her death.
Barred from a profession because he had no university degree, and with a failed teaching experience behind him, Johnson slipped into the one profession that was available to all with a literary mind: he moved to London in 1731 and became a Grub Street Hack, an author destined to remain poor by selling his work to printers (who, at that time, were also booksellers) whom he made rich. Much of his work was for Edward Cave, the creator of The Gentlemen's Magazine, a periodical that printed a miscellany of works; today we would call it a "magazine." At Cave's death, Johnson became the editor and tilted it toward humor. It was illegal to print Parliamentary speeches, so Johnson parapfhrased them a speeches made in the "Parliament of Lilliputia."
Johnson wrote numerous books and poems, but his lasting fame came in 1755 with completion of his most famous work: A Dictionary of the English Language defined the language of its time and affected its future usage. Damrosch clarifies its uniqueness:
Previous dictionaries of English were just word lists. They seldom gave much attention to nuances of meaning, and none at all to the way meaning mutates over time.Johnson's emphasis on nuance and word development has continued in the modern Oxford English Dictionary. His Dictionary was undoubtedly the basis for his 1765 honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin.
James Boswell
James Boswell's fame comes not from what he did but from what he recorded: exchanges between notable individuals, highlighted by physical and verbal nuances unique to the parties. He was a keen observer who kept records of virtually every event he experienced. These were not dry records but lively observations that revealed the souls of the targets.
Boswell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1740. His father, Alexander Boswell, was a judge with the honorific title Lord Auchinleck; Auchinleck was the name of the family estate. He also had the Scottish hereditary title Laird of Auchinleck. Boswell's father was overbearing and his mother was timid and a fervent Presbyterian who inflicted Boswell with a fear of god's infinite wrath.
In 1753, at age 13—the normal age of entry—Boswell matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a lackadaisical student preferring fun to study. At 17 he suffered a bout of deep depression and the remainder of his life was spent battling what appears to be bipolar disorder. His father considered him a playboy and at age 19 Boswell was ordered to leave Edinburgh to study at the University of Glasgow, where Adam Smith taught; It would be another 23 years before Smith's The Wealth of Nations would change the intellectual landscape of business and government policy.
In both Edinburgh and Glasgow Boswell was known as a conversationalist, a story-teller, a comedian, a mimic, and a skillful man with the ladies. But soon Boswell escaped Glasgow and went to London, where he saw as many plays as possible, and as many actresses as he could fit into. When his father located him he was ordered back to Edinburgh to begin private legal study. In 1762 he passed the examination in civil law and left Edinburgh for London, where he dabbled at the law law and lived on an annual allowance of £200 while he looked for a patron to buy him a post with the Horse Guards.
In 1763 Boswell began two great adventures: his father sent Boswell on a Grand Tour to develop some maturity and imbibe the civilization in foreign air, and he met Samuel Johnson who would become his father figure. Boswell returned from the Continent almost three years later after learning, by newspaper, of his mother's death. Much of his tour had been spent visiting great men—Rousseau and Voltaire included—and partaking of the pleasures of the brothel: in fact, a brothel was his first stop after learning of his mother's death.
Boswell and Johnson
Johnson and Boswell, the Club's bon vivants, became joined at the hip after meeting in 1773 in a London bookstore. They were physical opposites—Johnson was 6 feet tall, Bosworth was 5½ feet; Johnson was solidly built, Bosworth was slight; Johnson had many tics including grunts and groans as he spoke, constant movement of his face and limbs, and he never stepped on a crack on a sidewalk; Damrosch diagnoses Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but others suggest Tourette Syndrome. Boswell, on the other hand, was tic-free and his primary obsession seems to have been Johnson.
But in some ways they were psychological twins. Both suffered long periods of melancholia, a deep clinical depression that, at the time, was attributed to incorrectly observing the external environment rather than to internal neurological chaos. Both feared madness, and both delighted in the repartee, arguments, and mutual learning that was the heart of the Club for its twenty years of life.
The interplay between Johnson and Boswell is a lively part of the book that reveals their understanding of each other, their remarkable wit, and their trenchant observations on the world around them. Their friendship was solid by the time Boswell became a Club member in 1773. The two set off on an extended trip to Scotland in that year: beginning at Edinburgh—then nicknamed "Auld Reekie" because of its extremely foul odor—they proceeded counterclockwise up the east coast, over to the west past Loch Ness, out to the Isle of Skye, then down the west coast to Inverness, and finally eastward back to Auld Reekie.
Travelling in a fast post chaise, a two- person open carriage pulled by two horses, they thoroughly entertained each other while chatting with locals and keeping copious notes on whereabouts and activities for the full six weeks. The tangible results were two very well-received books: Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, published in 1775, and Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, published much later in 1786 after Johnson's death.
Along the way Johnson, ever an instigator, sewed some seeds of discontent. One was associated with the "discovery" of a manuscript by an ancient bard named Ossian who preceded Shakespeare, making Ossian, a Scot, the first bard. The manuscript—a hoax—supposedly came into the hands of a Scot who published it. It was very popular in Scotland. Along the trail, Johnson was asked what he thought of Ossian's work, specifically, could it have been written by a Scot. His answer was
Yes, Sir. And by many men, many women, and many children.For this, Johnson received a letter from an angry Scot.]
You are a slimey yellow-bellied frogEdmund Burke
You are a toad crawling along the ditches.
You are a lizard of the waste, crawling and creeping like a reptile.
Edmund Burke was a great political philosopher whose first work, the 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful was a treatise in aesthetics. Until that time the object of Art had been the visual depiction of reality. Burke changed the emphasis to an investigation of what the viewer feels rather than what he sees. The major distinction he made is between the Beautiful, that which pleases our eye and our senses, and the Sublime, that which disturbs our minds by raising often fearful feelings. An advocate of the Beautiful might choose a seascape with flat water carrying a ship; an advocate of the Sublime would be moved by a storm-tossed ship laboring through heavy seas. The same distinction would apply to language—the Beautiful would delight the senses, the Sublime would disturb the soul.
In 1758 Burke married Mary Nugent, daughter of Charles Nugent, a physician who had successfully treated Burke. When The Club was formed, Charles Nugent would be a charter member, one of the "men about town." Burke's entry into politics followed a brief time at the Board of Trade under Lord Halifax. In 1765 he successfully ran for the MP of the small town of Wendover, near London. In 1774 he would become a member for the larger city of Bristol.
Political sentiment at the time was split between two parties—Whigs and Tories. Whigs represented the urban commercial and financial, interests and saw taxes as a general assist to their interests; Tories represented the rural and agricultural landed interests who were the primary tax payers. But the boundary between the two parties was very porous: there was no strong notion of party loyalty and no whips existed to keep party members in line.
In 1780 Bristol turned Burke out because of his independent stance. Burke joined a splinter group of the Whigs and quickly found another borough. After the defeat of Lord North's government following the 1782 Battle of Yorktown, Burke—a supporter the American cause—became paymaster-general for the army at the magnificent salary of £4000, enough to retire the significant debts he'd acquired to buy a large estate and maintain a social position. But the army position lasted only one year and he was returned to the life of a simple highly-indebted MP.
Burke's reputation in Parliament for clear thinking and effective oratory had grown in spite of his Irish brogue and suspicion of his Catholicism (he was Anglican). When the French Revolution began in 1789 he quickly spelled out its future in Reflections on the Revolution in France: it would lead to a bloodbath followed by the emergence of a dictator and war. This was a crystal-clear prediction of the Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon.
His own view on government was traditional: the most stable government was a representational democracy in which the representatives were people of merit. Change should come by the action of representatives in Parliament, not by revolution.
Adam Smith
The requirements for Club membership were that one must be a vibrant conversationalist and raconteur, as well as a person of some political, literary or artistic note. How Adam Smith became a member in 1775 is a great mystery. Smith was a moral philosopher at the University of Edinburghand the author of A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he argued that moral principles were not hard-wired but grew out of social relationships. He was inscrutable, his mind devoted to contemplation of great truths while his Club companions squabbled, argued and cajoled.
In 1776, the year after joining The Club, Smith's fabulous The Wealth of Nations was published. In it Smith undertook to upend the prevalent view of trade and economic policy: Mercantilism, the philosophy that a nation's wealth was measured by the amount of gold held by the Treasury, and that anything that increased the infow of gold—like tariffs—strengthened the nation. This was, perhaps, true if the nation and the monarchy were synonymous, but Smith looked elsewhere for a nation's strength.
Smith argued that the true wealth lay in the nation's ability to produce goods, to trade those goods, and to employ its citizens/ Production was encouraged by the Division of Labor, trade was encouraged by Self Interest and by Laissez-Faire.
And so much more . . .
June 14, 2022
In 1764, The Club, as it was known, was formed at the Turk's Head tavern, in London. The Club was formed with a practical purpose in mind: Samuel Johnson was suffering from depression and isolation. The Club would be a place for discussion and socialising, a gentleman's club made of friends -- and new members could only be admitted by unanimous approval.
It was Johnson who coined the phrase, the Common Reader. And this book is written with the Common Reader in mind, meaning that it wears its learning lightly and draws the reader in by a friendly and elegant style. The Club is a superb introduction to the eighteenth century. Damrosch offers brilliant portraits of the intelligentsia: Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds, Gibbon, Smith, Sheridan, and, of course, the leading light, the humorous Johnson (and Boswell). By wise quotations, Damrosch allows the readers to hear the voices at The Club and offers portraits that are warts and all.
The book abounds with Reason and zaniness -- the irrepressible Johnson performing a kangaroo impression and rolling like a barrel downhill (literally) in defiance of old age.
Damrosch is best know for his detailed biographies -- Rousseau, Blake, Casanova, Swift -- so The Club is something new: a portrait of an Age as seen through its major players: and he cleverly includes some on the border of The Club so that the Age in not witnessed by men alone. He offers heartfelt appreciations of Hester Thrall and Fanny Burney.
The Club reads wonderfully and leaves a reader sighing. Burke could speak for three hours in parliament without stopping, in lucid, emotional paragraphs: now we have supposedly learned MPs who cannot string a few sentences together without countless errs and cliches. One of Samuel Johnson's finest witticisms concerns Truth, which many have milked, he says, though he regrets there are those who have left Truth to milk the bull!
A superlative book from start to finish.
It was Johnson who coined the phrase, the Common Reader. And this book is written with the Common Reader in mind, meaning that it wears its learning lightly and draws the reader in by a friendly and elegant style. The Club is a superb introduction to the eighteenth century. Damrosch offers brilliant portraits of the intelligentsia: Burke, Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds, Gibbon, Smith, Sheridan, and, of course, the leading light, the humorous Johnson (and Boswell). By wise quotations, Damrosch allows the readers to hear the voices at The Club and offers portraits that are warts and all.
The book abounds with Reason and zaniness -- the irrepressible Johnson performing a kangaroo impression and rolling like a barrel downhill (literally) in defiance of old age.
Damrosch is best know for his detailed biographies -- Rousseau, Blake, Casanova, Swift -- so The Club is something new: a portrait of an Age as seen through its major players: and he cleverly includes some on the border of The Club so that the Age in not witnessed by men alone. He offers heartfelt appreciations of Hester Thrall and Fanny Burney.
The Club reads wonderfully and leaves a reader sighing. Burke could speak for three hours in parliament without stopping, in lucid, emotional paragraphs: now we have supposedly learned MPs who cannot string a few sentences together without countless errs and cliches. One of Samuel Johnson's finest witticisms concerns Truth, which many have milked, he says, though he regrets there are those who have left Truth to milk the bull!
A superlative book from start to finish.
September 19, 2020
This book examines life in 18th century London focusing on the lives of the members of “The Club.” This included some the most accomplished and famous men of the time — the preeminent authors, thinkers, playwrights, and artists in Britain. Based on the premise, it seems like a book that I would love. I’m not sure why I didn’t enjoy it more. Perhaps it’s more worthwhile to read Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon than it is to read about them.
April 4, 2020
Damrosch, Leo. The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends who Shaped an Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
This isn’t a biography of Samuel Johnson. It is a biography of the social nexus in which Johnson found himself. It also highlights things that Boswell (for whatever reason) didn’t mention. It also tells you the grit and glory of 18th century London.
This is a “good” book in the plain sense of the word. We call books “good” because we want to keep reading them. They are just interesting. This book is like that. As it is, that isn’t all remarkable. Many books are good. This book, however, continues to be good while never sacrificing scholarly rigor.
While we should beware of a historicist reading of science, we must rejoice that science did kill several bad things--Freud’s psychoanalysis and the “humours” theory of medicine. Freud is wrong because genetics explains more than simply accusing everyone of repressed sexual fantasies. Of course, Freud predates Johnson. The point here is that later interpreters of Johnson misunderstood him by subjecting him to psychoanalysis.
As to medicine, “According to a medical theory that went back to ancient greece and was still respected, diseases were caused by an imbalance of four bodily fluids or “humors”--blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile” (17). The solution was usually to constantly drain the blood. Scripture, however, teaches us that “the life is in the blood.”
This book is 50% Boswell, 30% Johnson, and the remainder dealing with “The Club,” the distinguished gathering of the greatest intellectuals in Britain: Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, and others.
This means that Damrosch has to give analyses of Burke, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon, and he is mostly successful at that.
James Boswell
Boswell’s life was never boring--he made sure of that. Boswell’s faults, often hinted at, are placed fully in the open. He was a lecher. Indeed, scholars surmise, based on Boswell’s journals, that “by the time of his marriage at age of twenty-nine, Boswell had had liaisons with four actresses, three wives plus Rousseau’s companion Therese, and three middle-class women, as well as brief encounters with over sixty prostitutes--and that’s assuming he recorded them all” (234). His wife probably qualifies for sainthood.
I suspect, though I cannot prove, that Boswell never got over Hume’s attack on human nature and personhood. For Hume there is no continuous personal identity, for there is no such thing as a stable essence. There is only a “stream of sense impressions that the mind has from moment to moment” (76). Philosophically, this is sheer idiocy and Thomas Reid made short work of it. Existentially, however, Boswell found it quite compelling.
Edmund Burke
The section on Burke gives the American reader a good understanding of English politics. A Whig didn’t necessarily mean a radical. It usually meant someone who allied himself with the economic interests of London. This often meant expanding Britain’s empire by war. Tories, by contrast, allied themselves with Church and Crown. Nevertheless, the two often married each other.
Burke, for example, thought of himself as a Whig. However, he was such a traditionalist that he could probably have passed as a Tory. Like Johnson, he saw “subordination” as the key structure of “deference that kept society cooperative and peaceful” (165-166). Burke might have opposed taxing the Americans. He never thought, however, that they should themselves. Nor did he really think of that of the people in general. He believed in “government for the people by the entitled few” (165).
Conclusion
The reader is also urged to pay attention to the chapters on Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. This book is a magnificent picture of 18th century London.
Interesting notes
<<
This isn’t a biography of Samuel Johnson. It is a biography of the social nexus in which Johnson found himself. It also highlights things that Boswell (for whatever reason) didn’t mention. It also tells you the grit and glory of 18th century London.
This is a “good” book in the plain sense of the word. We call books “good” because we want to keep reading them. They are just interesting. This book is like that. As it is, that isn’t all remarkable. Many books are good. This book, however, continues to be good while never sacrificing scholarly rigor.
While we should beware of a historicist reading of science, we must rejoice that science did kill several bad things--Freud’s psychoanalysis and the “humours” theory of medicine. Freud is wrong because genetics explains more than simply accusing everyone of repressed sexual fantasies. Of course, Freud predates Johnson. The point here is that later interpreters of Johnson misunderstood him by subjecting him to psychoanalysis.
As to medicine, “According to a medical theory that went back to ancient greece and was still respected, diseases were caused by an imbalance of four bodily fluids or “humors”--blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile” (17). The solution was usually to constantly drain the blood. Scripture, however, teaches us that “the life is in the blood.”
This book is 50% Boswell, 30% Johnson, and the remainder dealing with “The Club,” the distinguished gathering of the greatest intellectuals in Britain: Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, and others.
This means that Damrosch has to give analyses of Burke, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon, and he is mostly successful at that.
James Boswell
Boswell’s life was never boring--he made sure of that. Boswell’s faults, often hinted at, are placed fully in the open. He was a lecher. Indeed, scholars surmise, based on Boswell’s journals, that “by the time of his marriage at age of twenty-nine, Boswell had had liaisons with four actresses, three wives plus Rousseau’s companion Therese, and three middle-class women, as well as brief encounters with over sixty prostitutes--and that’s assuming he recorded them all” (234). His wife probably qualifies for sainthood.
I suspect, though I cannot prove, that Boswell never got over Hume’s attack on human nature and personhood. For Hume there is no continuous personal identity, for there is no such thing as a stable essence. There is only a “stream of sense impressions that the mind has from moment to moment” (76). Philosophically, this is sheer idiocy and Thomas Reid made short work of it. Existentially, however, Boswell found it quite compelling.
Edmund Burke
The section on Burke gives the American reader a good understanding of English politics. A Whig didn’t necessarily mean a radical. It usually meant someone who allied himself with the economic interests of London. This often meant expanding Britain’s empire by war. Tories, by contrast, allied themselves with Church and Crown. Nevertheless, the two often married each other.
Burke, for example, thought of himself as a Whig. However, he was such a traditionalist that he could probably have passed as a Tory. Like Johnson, he saw “subordination” as the key structure of “deference that kept society cooperative and peaceful” (165-166). Burke might have opposed taxing the Americans. He never thought, however, that they should themselves. Nor did he really think of that of the people in general. He believed in “government for the people by the entitled few” (165).
Conclusion
The reader is also urged to pay attention to the chapters on Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon. This book is a magnificent picture of 18th century London.
Interesting notes
<<
October 2, 2019
Five stars from me because this is a book about fascinating people who lived in a fascinating and important time, who spoke and wrote in a style which I find irresistible. (Dr. Johnson's writing style strongly influenced Jane Austen. This is especially evident in Sense and Sensibility.) So, if you love Georgian/Regency style prose, this book is filled with delicious examples--lots of well-chosen quotes, entertaining anecdotes of friendships, rivalries, partying and bickering, and a fair amount of bawdy Georgian humour sprinkled throughout. Damrosch's own prose style is fluid and friendly.
As the good doctor himself said: "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book." This must have been true of Damrosch because a prodigious amount of research has gone into this book. Dr. Johnson and his biographer James Boswell are the main focus, but "The Club" is a dozen biographies in one, which is excellent if you would like to read a chapter's worth about Sheridan, Hume, Burke, Gibbon, Goldsmith et al, but don't want to read an entire book about them. The Club was an all-male affair, but Damrosch also writes about Fanny Burney and Johnson's friend Hester Thrale, and Hannah More gets a walk-on part. I was agreeably surprised to learn about Johnson's friendships with blue-stocking women because I think he has a reputation as a misogynist, mostly because of this quote: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
I think this book would be interesting and enjoyable even if you knew very little about these people, or haven't read Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson.
I found Damrosch's brief discussion of empiricism, religion and evangelicalism in Chapter 19 to be especially interesting. He explains the prevailing philosophies and religious attitudes of the time without overpowering the reader with details or dates. The way that he places these men and their contributions in the broader context of history and literature is extremely helpful. I was also delighted to learn about the term, 'periodic sentence,' which is the name for one of Johnson's writing techniques. Damrosch is very helpful in explaining when the meaning of a word has changed from our modern usage ("pursuit" for example). However, I didn't think it was necessary to inject modern sensibilities when discussing class, female emancipation and slavery; I believe we readers could have been relied upon to comprehend for ourselves that times and attitudes have changed.
Simon Vance, the narrator, has a very pleasant voice and he handles Scottish, Irish, and American accents adroitly. I particularly liked the regional accent he used for Dr. Johnson's voice.
If you would like to learn more about Georgian England, or would like to spend some time in the company of Johnson and Boswell, (and so many of their contemporaries loved spending time with them,) I recommend this book.
As the good doctor himself said: "The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book." This must have been true of Damrosch because a prodigious amount of research has gone into this book. Dr. Johnson and his biographer James Boswell are the main focus, but "The Club" is a dozen biographies in one, which is excellent if you would like to read a chapter's worth about Sheridan, Hume, Burke, Gibbon, Goldsmith et al, but don't want to read an entire book about them. The Club was an all-male affair, but Damrosch also writes about Fanny Burney and Johnson's friend Hester Thrale, and Hannah More gets a walk-on part. I was agreeably surprised to learn about Johnson's friendships with blue-stocking women because I think he has a reputation as a misogynist, mostly because of this quote: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
I think this book would be interesting and enjoyable even if you knew very little about these people, or haven't read Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson.
I found Damrosch's brief discussion of empiricism, religion and evangelicalism in Chapter 19 to be especially interesting. He explains the prevailing philosophies and religious attitudes of the time without overpowering the reader with details or dates. The way that he places these men and their contributions in the broader context of history and literature is extremely helpful. I was also delighted to learn about the term, 'periodic sentence,' which is the name for one of Johnson's writing techniques. Damrosch is very helpful in explaining when the meaning of a word has changed from our modern usage ("pursuit" for example). However, I didn't think it was necessary to inject modern sensibilities when discussing class, female emancipation and slavery; I believe we readers could have been relied upon to comprehend for ourselves that times and attitudes have changed.
Simon Vance, the narrator, has a very pleasant voice and he handles Scottish, Irish, and American accents adroitly. I particularly liked the regional accent he used for Dr. Johnson's voice.
If you would like to learn more about Georgian England, or would like to spend some time in the company of Johnson and Boswell, (and so many of their contemporaries loved spending time with them,) I recommend this book.
June 17, 2019
"The Club", organized in London in 1763, was like the 1920s Algonquin round table, a group of celebrities from all walks of life who got together once a week to talk about their works, the times, and each other. Since meetings were held in the Turks Head Tavern there was always drinking involved and the conversations could be quite caustic and humorous. The club was founded by the artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, really as an outlet for Samuel Johnson who friends hoped to get back into circulation following the death of his wife. On a personal note, Reynolds is the artist who painted the portrait of General Charles Burgoyne, one of my favorites in the Frick Collection. Membership to The Club was by unanimous vote of current members and all it took was one negative vote to blackball an individual. Subsequent notables elected were orator and politician Edmund Burke, author Edward Gibbons ("The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire"), author Adam Smith ("The Wealth of Nations") and James Boswell. It is from these meetings that Boswell, with his amazing ability to recreate whole conversations and remember entire quotes, wrote his masterpiece about the life of Samual Johnson. It's interesting to read the conversations and hear the impressions of one another. The leading spokesman is Johnson and, outside of Reynolds and Boswell, he doesn't appear to like too many of the members and has many trenchant observations regarding them. The book has the feel of the old "Tonight Show" with Ed McMahon as Boswell teeing up straight lines for Johnny Carson's Johnson. In fact, Carson and McMahon would get a pretty good laugh out of that last sentence that I'm not even going to edit. But Boswell is not very well liked because he is considered a lush and a satyr and members feel he has squandered his talents. Smith is shown to be quiet but Gibbons is almost universally considered a crashing bore. I enjoyed reading about these and other characters from the late 18th century. I hope you join the club and read it too.
June 11, 2020
The Club is a very entertaining overview of a group of friends who started to meet at a tavern every Friday in 1763. The book concentrates mostly on Boswell and Johnson. The author frequently compares what Boswell wrote in the Life of Johnson with the writings in his journal and its interesting to note how he embellished or deleted some details. The author seems even handed in his judgments of both men. He mentions Boswell's frequent dalliances with prostitutes and his inability to settle down to meaningful work, but also discusses his genius in dramatizing events in Johnson's life and inspiring Johnson to talk by peppering Johnson with questions. The author also includes chapters or information on Edward Gibbon, David Garrick, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan and Joshua Reynolds who were also members, and this is fascinating as well. Finally, although they are not as famous, he includes information on Fanny Burney and Hester Thrale, who as women were not members of the club, but were writers who interacted with Johnson and the others.
May 29, 2019
I read Boswell many years ago. “The Life” is a truly great book, one of those foundation of civilization things. “The Club” gives insight into the other members of The Club, most prominently Reynolds, Burke, Gibbon and Smith. Not to be suspicious but they all conform neatly to type. Burke a bit slick, Reynolds smarmy and charming, Smith dull and Gibbon the impossibly good writer endearingly besotted by his work. Boswell is presented as such a dim witted drunken rake that one wonders how he wrote such a good book, and Johnson is curiously charmless. Still, a marvelous history with much insight and information.
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