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The Athenæum More Than Just
Another London Club
Michael Wheeler
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020 Hardback. 420 p. 36 colour illustrations ISBN 978-0300246773. $50/£35
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2 Seen from abroad, London gentlemen’s clubs appear as a quintessentially
British institution. Even if the oldest one, White’s, was founded in 1693, most
of them were established in the nineteenth century. In 2024, the Athenæum will celebrate its
bicentenary, and this may well be the reason why Professor Michael Wheeler decided
to spend six years researching those almost two centuries of existence.
Obviously, previous anniversaries had been duly commemorated in their time by
various publications. In 1894, the Reverend F.G. Waugh wrote The Athenæum Club and its
Associations, no more than a “slim volume” [270]. In 1926, for the first hundred
years of the Pall Mall club, journalist Humphry Ward was chosen to produce a
commemorative book in which he used the research accumulated by historian Henry
Tedder, whose work was left unfinished when he died in August 1924; more than
two thirds of Ward’s History of the Athenæum
were occupied by “potted biographies” [96]. Finally, in 1975, F.R. Cowell
published The Athenæum : Club and Social
Life in London, 1824-1974, which ended on a “lament over modern Britain”
[286]. Since the Athenæum and Clubland more generally have managed to reinvent themselves
over the last fifty years, the need existed for a new approach to a “Society” which
singularised itself right from the beginning by being openly non-partisan and
by welcoming the country’s intellectual glories rather than the landed and the
titled. Following chronologically the trajectory of the club, The Athenæum : More Than Just Another London
Club is divided into four parts, devoted to the creation and early years
(1823-30), the Victorian era, until the redecoration of the building and change
in the status of the club (1830-90), the somewhat stagnant period which came
next (1890-1939), and finally the time of decline and renaissance, bringing us
to the present day. How does one write the history of a London club? A dry list of its
members and a mere survey of the various rules successively added to the
original ones would obviously make most unpalatable reading. Such basic data
have to be fleshed out, and this is exactly what Michael Wheeler does,
underlining all the social and professional connections between the now more or
less famous individuals who were elected members, not forgetting their links of
friendship. He thus produces a sort of intellectual portrait of several
decades, with references to the cultural and political battles which were
fought in Britain all through the last two centuries. Wheeler can also briefly
focus on particularly flamboyant members, such as “Mummy Pee” Pettigrew
(elected in 1830), who “entertained his friends by carrying out autopsies on
mummies, and was asked by the duke of Hamilton to preserve his body after
death” [98], or the Reverend Canon Brian Dominick Frederick Titus Brindley, a
liturgist well-known for his red-heeled shoes as much as for the fantasies
about young men which provoked his fall from grace in 1989 [319]. It all started in the early 1820s, when John Wilson Croker, an MP and
first secretary of the Admiralty, decided to create a “literary club” in the
widest meaning of the word. As the reader is usefully reminded by Professor
Wheeler, “literary” and “scientific” were not opposing terms in the first half
of the nineteenth century, “when scientific papers were written in polished English
prose, often embellished with classical allusions, and when scientific
discovery and literary work often went hand in hand” [14-15]. Croker’s ambition
was to create an informal site of discussion, a place of cross-fertilisation,
where the artists, writers and patrons of a recently victorious nation could
meet. The committee he gathered, seconded by Sir Humphrey Davy, gave a more
clearly scientific turn to the society which was still without a name on the
day of its inaugural meeting, Monday 16 February 1824. It took as a temporary
address the apartments of 12, Waterloo Place, vacated by the Union Club. Over
twelve months, the one thousand original members were selected. As a sign of
the club’s commitment to intellectual exchange, most of them were polymaths,
with few writers strictly speaking, even if being a “man of letters” was one of
the criteria to become a member. Several years were then necessary for the
Athenæum to build its own clubhouse. When Carlton House was demolished, a new
site was found and, in a time of Greek revival, the aim of the Prince Regent
being to outshine Paris, a protégé of John Nash was asked to draw the plans:
Decimus Burton designed a simple but elegant building with a portico and a
frieze, characterised by neoclassical sobriety, which opened in February 1830,
a few months before the death of George IV. Faced with growing debts, the Athenæum soon resorted to a solution it
would use many times along its history: welcoming new members. Two hundred of
them were required, one hundred being selected by the committee, the other
hundred being elected by ballot. Thanks to the new “Rule II”, “persons of
distinguished eminence” could be fast-tracked into the club without having to
cool their heels on an already long waiting list: a “Rule II candidate” could
join the club in two rather than ten or fifteen years. In 1838, as forty people
were still needed to attain the objective of twelve hundred members, the
committee proceeded to the rapid selection of the so-called “Forty Thieves”,
who included such promising luminaries as Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin,
then aged 26 and 29 respectively. The growing library of the club soon made it
necessary to create more shelf space to accommodate dozens of new books (in
1830, Burton had provided for 4000 volumes, but they were ten times as numerous
in 1860), and poor ventilation could not be easily remedied in spite of the
experiments led by physicist Michael Faraday. During the Victorian age, as a
club whose members covered a wide range of ideologies, the Athenæum weathered
two Reform Bills and a few religious controversies. It was even open-minded
enough to tolerate the irregular private lives of several famous figures, like
John Stuart Mill (who had fallen in love with a married woman before she became
his second wife) or Richard Burton, well-known as a specialist of the East but
less so as a closet pornographer. “Diversity and heterodoxy were certainly in
evidence” [149]. In 1890, the Athenæum was entirely redecorated by such pillars of the
Aesthetic Movement as Sir Edward John Poynter, PRA, and Sir Lawrence
Alma-Tadema. While their contribution made the building even more sumptuous and
daring in the eyes of their contemporaries, the institution itself slowly
turned into “a bulwark against the forces of change and modernity” [159]. The
club now counted more Professors than MPs and in 1902, nine of the twelve
recipients of the Order of Merit were Athenians. More than ever, Athenæum
rhymed with Mausoleum, like a cathedral providing the safety of rest and
routine. During World War I, those characteristics were further set into
relief, while the club shared the same restrictions as the rest of the country
and contributed to the war effort. Among the “Owls” (a nickname due to the
association with the Greek goddess of wisdom), there were war writers, war
artists, spies, and even conscientious objectors like Bertrand Russell. The
Roaring Twenties were a time of reserve and dignity, when only mature and
established personalities were recruited, rather than young men of promise.
Despite its anti-modern stance, and a steep decline in the number of
candidates, the Athenæum welcomed Aldous Huxley in 1922, Lytton Strachey in
1931 and W.B. Yeats in 1939. An annexe for ladies was created in 1936, where
members could be joined by their wives (it would remain open until 1961). World War II was marked by the election of exiled foreign leaders and
ministers – De Gaulle was one of them. The bomb was very much discussed, but
also the questions of economic and moral reconstruction. The mid-1950s marked
the beginning of a period of financial instability for most London clubs, and
the Athenæum had to find new means of saving on expenses (selling some of its books
was contemplated, but refused). Confronted with the rise of the middle class
and of youth culture, it was more and more often seen as the preserve of the
Establishment, welcoming eminent artists only when they were in their old age:
Benjamin Britten was 61 when he became a member in 1974, barely two years
before his death. The 1980s opened an era of great changes. The notion of
accepting women members started being discussed in 1984, but only became
reality in 2002. The dress code for both gentlemen and ladies then had to be
reconsidered, even though composer John Tavener persistently objected to
wearing a tie. A new programme of activities was introduced, with talks, films,
concerts and even semi-staged operas, the demand for seats being much greater than
the supply. Music and history have become the dominant private passions of
members (after the death of Seamus Heaney in 2013 and P.D. James in 2014,
literature was only represented through academic writers, and Bridget Riley was
the only painter). Nevertheless, the Athenæum remains “an institution which
nurtures civilised conversation and companionship, traditional standards and
etiquette, and access to a great library and high-quality cultural and social
events” [325].
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