The Club

The Club was a gathering of British writers, politicians, and thinkers during the second half of the 18th century. The dominant member was Samuel Johnson, creator of a dictionary and several other works, as well as a celebrated wit. His biographer was James Boswell, a Scottish nobleman and lawyer, whose biography of Johnson is considered one of the greatest such works in the English language.

Leo Damrosch's engaging book, simply called The Club, but with the subtitle of Johnson, Boswell, And The Friends Who Shaped An Age tells the story of many of the members of the Club, but the focus is on Johnson and Boswell. Other members included the painter Joshua Reynolds, the actor David Garrick, playwrights Richard Sheridan and Oliver Goldsmith, the economist Adam Smith, the politician Edmund Burke, and the historian Edward Gibbon.

"Early in 1764, Reynolds proposed to Johnson that they form a club, made up of convivial and interesting friends who would spend an evening together once a week," Damrosch writes. "Unlike some later London clubs, this one did not have physical premises of its own, though for the first two decades it did meet regularly at the Turk’s Head Tavern at 9 Gerrard Street, just off the Strand." It started with nine members, and any future members had to be elected by unanimous vote. The purpose of the Club seemed to be just a place for lively discussion of the issues of the day.

Damrosch has to keep a lot of balls in the air in this book, and at times I did forget who was who. It is inordinately about Johnson and Boswell. Johnson was a great wit and quote machine. Here are just a sample: “I have great merit in being zealous for subordination and the honours of birth, for I can hardly tell who was my grandfather.” “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Damrosch paints Johnson as a curmudgeon who had a heart.

Boswell, on the other hand, doesn't come out well in the telling. He was a sycophant, was tactless, a whoremonger, and likely an alcoholic--he once took a pledge for sobriety, which for him meant stopping at six glasses of wine. He kept a strikingly honest journal about his sexual proclivities: "It has been calculated that by the time of his marriage at the age of twenty-nine, Boswell had had liaisons with four actresses, three wives plus Rousseau’s companion Thérèse, and three middle-class women, as well as brief encounters with over sixty prostitutes—and that’s assuming he recorded them all." The relationships didn't stop after his marriage, though.

The other members of the club are described comparatively quickly. As a fan of theater, I was interested in reading about Garrick, who managed one of the two theaters in London, the Theater Royal at Drury Lane. He was the greatest actor of his age, and while Damrosch notes that we would find his acting style over the top, it was remarkably natural for that time period. He changed the way productions were presented: "Until then there had been no such thing as a director who would take charge of an entire production and rehearse the actors as an ensemble. They rehearsed themselves informally, if at all, and memorized their own parts with little or no attention to the others."

I also found Edward Gibbon interesting. He was the author of The Decline and Fall Of The Roman Empire, and Johnson referred to him as "the Infidel," for he was quite daringly irreligious: "What Gibbon did not believe was that Jesus was literally the Son of God, incarnated in human form. He thought of Jesus as a great teacher, whom later theologians reinvented as the second person of the Holy Trinity, using Greek philosophical concepts that Jesus himself never did."

Damrosch also writes about others in the periphery of the Club, such as Henry and Hester Thrale, who owned the house where Johnson lived for many years. Henry died at 52, likely because he was a glutton, and when Hester remarried to an Italian music teacher Johnson cut her out of his life. Another interesting person Damrosch writes about is Fanny Burney, who wrote novels and was the last character of this book to die, at age 87 in 1840.

I liked that Damrosch also put the lives of these people in context. There is a fascinating chapter on what was going on in England at the time: the Seven Years War, the colonization of India, the war for independence in America. Burke favored the Americans in that conflict, even though he was in Parliament, but he was no radical--he believed in the aristocracy. "Burke energetically defended the privileges of the aristocracy, though he never denied that many aristocrats were complete idiots. He was defending a principle, as he saw it, not individuals."

After Johnson died Boswell, who had a spaniel-like adoration of Johnson, wrote his Life Of Johnson, which Damrosch indicates made up for a life of mediocrity and debauchery. Boswell himself died only eleven years after Johnson, probably from a lifetime of venereal diseases finally catching up with him.

What I took most from this book was how fun it must have been to be around Johnson. He had his faults but seemed to be a caring and devoted friend. And what a wit. I'll close with this anecdote: "An Irish clergyman was present at a dinner where someone asked what the greatest pleasure was, and Johnson replied, “Fucking.” He added that the second best was drinking, “and therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink, though not all could fuck.”"