Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends who Shaped an Age (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 488 pp., $30.00.

UPON RECIEVING Leo Damrosch’s engaging new book, The Club, I hauled my dusty copy of Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language off the shelf. I say “haul” because my facsimile of the original 1755 edition weighs more than twelve pounds: heavy going for lifting though not for reading. I wanted to see how Johnson defined the word “club” since the focal point of Damrosch’s collection of eighteenth-century London lives and ideas is a club. And not just any club, but the Club—the small circle of friends organized by the great lexicographer and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the foremost English portrait artist of the time.

A club, according to Johnson’s Dictionary, is “[a]n assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions.” Johnson’s own club certainly lived up to his definition, which the author gets around to quoting after a hundred pages or so. The concept of the Club had been Sir Joshua’s. It was to be a group made up of “convivial and interesting friends who would spend an evening together once a week.” The co-founders decided, Damrosch tells us,

...that nine members would be a good number—enough to keep conversation lively and wide-ranging, even when not everyone was able to attend. Another member said later that the intention was to choose people so agreeable ‘that if only two of these chanced to meet for the evening, they should be able to entertain each other.’ They chose a Latin motto for the club, esto perpetua, ‘Let it be perpetual.’

So it has. Allowing for dormant intervals, the Club has “remained in being right down to the present day, under the name of the London Literary Society” and including in its ranks such latter-day nineteenth- and twentieth-century luminaries as Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Ewart Gladstone, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Rudyard Kipling, Neville Chamberlain, Lord Kenneth Clark, T.S. Eliot, Max Beerbohm and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

All of which is pretty impressive, but not nearly so much so as the list of eighteenth-century members that, besides Reynolds and Johnson, included: poet/playwright/novelist Oliver Goldsmith; parliamentary orator and foremost political essayist of his time, Edmund Burke; the leading actor and theatrical manager of the period; David Garrick, who introduced a more natural acting style and launched a popular Shakespeare revival; Adam Smith, the father of modern economics; and Edward Gibbon, member of parliament and author of one of the greatest historical works of all time—his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Nor should we omit James Boswell, failed barrister but inspired biographer, and the compulsive diarist thanks to whom modern readers can share much of the wit, wisdom and repartee that sparkled and flowed at the Club’s weekly meetings, held at the Turk’s Head Tavern on Gerrard Street near the Strand in its first twenty years and afterwards carried on at other London hostelries.

There had, of course, been earlier London clubs. Some of them survive today. White’s, founded in the late seventeenth century, was a Tory stronghold with a large aristocratic contingent. As director of speechwriting for President Ronald Reagan, I was pleased to see that this had not changed when I dined there. One of the first members my host introduced me to was the chap then in charge of writing speeches for the heir to the throne, Charles, Prince of Wales. A little younger than White’s, Brooks’ and Boodle’s were both eighteenth-century spin-offs, with a heavy representation of Whig rather than Tory grandees. But these flush establishments, mainly reserved for the titled and the very wealthy, were best known for the quality of their wine cellars and the high stakes at their gaming tables. By contrast, Johnson’s outfit had a membership based on merit, intelligence and the then new but now familiar Johnsonian concept of “clubability”—of cultivation, wit, esprit and conviviality—that could contribute to the quality of its conversations.

THE GREATEST talker of them all was Johnson himself, the power of whose words was such that it could overcome a physical presence that can only be described as wretched. On initially meeting the hulking, twitching Johnson, the visitor’s sense of sight and smell was likely to kick in almost immediately. The first time Boswell visited him in his lodgings, he remembered that,

His brown suit of clothes looked very rusty; he had on a little old shriveled unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the moment that he began to talk.

Johnson loved a good argument, even with himself. He once told a fellow member that “he had had a dream in which he was upset because somebody else was besting him in a contest of wit.” Consolation came with wakening, however, when “he realized that he himself was responsible for both sides” of the argument in his dream. Johnson declared that wine exhilarated his spirits, “and prompts me to free conversation and an interchange of discourse with those whom I most love. I dogmatize and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinions and sentiments I find delight.” Still, Johnson, who could imbibe prodigious quantities of alcohol, went on the wagon more than once, sipping lemonade while his comrades dived into the port, punch and brandy. It never stemmed the flow of conversation since, for him, the words, not the drink, were heady. A lonely, haunted widower prone to lengthy bouts of sloth and depression, he even composed a prayer to ward off his twin foes:

Enable me, by thy Holy Spirit, so to shun sloth and negligence, that every day may discharge part of the task which Thou hast allotted me; and so further with thy help that labour which, without thy help, must be ineffectual, that I may obtain, in all my undertakings, such success as will most promote thy glory, and the salvation of my own soul…

Prayerful moments aside, Johnson came fully to life while writing or talking. And, for Johnson, talking usually meant jousting. He almost always was victorious in the lists. “There is no arguing with Johnson,” Goldsmith once complained, “for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.”

As with several other of his famous contemporaries—like Johnson, talented, self-made men of humble origins—his world view, personal, political and spiritual, was essentially conservative. Like the Duke of Wellington in the next century, Johnson was loyal to the Church of England as a social as well as a religious pillar because, as the Great Duke would later express it, it made honest men out of thieves. It was also free of the—to Johnson—detestable mummery of Roman Catholicism on the one hand and the religious hysteria and cant of many of the Non-Conformist attenders of “chapel,” the forerunners of today’s charismatic evangelicals. For Johnson, God was not just an Englishman. He was an Anglican.

But Johnson’s Anglican God inspired a sense of humanity as well as a sense of sin. Desperately poor for much of his life, and never a rich man, he was both humane and practical when it came to the meaning of wealth, declaring that, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,” but also that, “Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life.” These were words he not only stated but lived by with countless acts of generosity to the needy.

The learned doctor had a particularly sharp eye for spotting the limousine liberals (perhaps one should say coach-and-four liberals) of his day, demagogues like John Wilkes who appealed to the lowest instincts of the mob, and self-righteous Whig grandees who boasted endlessly about the glories of that splendid—but physically non-existent—document, the English Constitution. Under the guise of attacking royal prerogatives, the parliamentary Whigs functioned largely as a hereditary plutocracy bent on governing the United Kingdom and its people in their own interest. Johnson had it right: “Sir, your levelers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?” The “deplorables,” then as now, were to be kept in their place at all cost.

It was Johnson’s rise from poor obscurity through sheer grit and brilliance that made many members of the Whig elite hate him so intensely. Thus Horace Walpole, the pampered son of Sir Robert Walpole, the greatest—and most corrupt—Whig parliamentary leader (and prime minister in all but name, the title not yet having come into use) of the eighteenth century, “deplored” the good doctor with rather labored condescension in Memoirs of the Reign of King George III:

With a lumber of learning and some strong parts, Johnson was an odious and mean character. By principle a Jacobite, arrogant, self-sufficient, and over-bearing by nature, ungrateful through pride and of feminine bigotry [sic], he had prostituted his pen to party even in a dictionary, and had afterwards, for a pension, contradicted his own definitions. His manners were sordid, supercilious and brutal, his style ridiculously bombastic and vicious; and, in one word, with all the pedantry he had all the gigantic littleness of a country schoolmaster.

This from a man who owed his wealth and parliamentary position to nepotism and whose primary literary achievement was writing The Castle of Otranto, a melodramatic Gothic potboiler mainly remembered for inspiring shoals of third-rate horror tales and bathetic “romantic” novels. Walpole’s hatred extended beyond the grave. While Damrosch describes Walpole as “hypersophisticated,” there was also an element of priggishness and snobbery in his spiteful characterization of Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, as “that sot.” It is also on display in the satirical verse, more hateful than clever, that he scribbled in his copy of the Life:

When boozy Bozzy belched out Johnson’s sayings,

And half the volume filled with his own brayings,

Scotland beheld again before her pass

A brutal bulldog coupled with an ass.

BUT EVEN Walpole was able to recognize the literary merit of Johnson’s fellow Club member, Edward Gibbon. After he had read the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, which appeared in 1776, the same year as Thomas Paine’s and Adam Smith’s great works, he wrote the author a congratulatory letter, asking how he could “…know so much, judge so well, possess your subject and your knowledge and your power of judicious reflection so thoroughly, and yet command yourself and betray no dictatorial arrogance of decision?” Only the next sentence could be considered a two-edged compliment: “You have unexpectedly given the world a classic history.”

Damrosch aptly mentions the reaction of a young, Victorian “army officer in India” upon reading Gibbon’s masterpiece more than a century after its publication:

I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.

So wrote the youthful Winston Churchill who, in time, would not only make history himself but master the handling of both “the story and the style” of Cleo’s art. This throw-away vignette is one of many reminders in Damrosch’s masterful compilation, of how Johnson’s circle shaped not only its own age, but future ones as well.

Sadly, Boswell, who loathed Gibbon, seems to have paid scant attention to his participation in Club conversations so that few of his words are preserved in either his Life or his diaries. One of the main reasons for Boswell’s dislike of Gibbon may have been what he considered the latter’s atheism since Boswell, though a dedicated whoremonger, also considered himself a sincere believer and enjoyed wallowing in transient repentance almost as much as he reveled in his countless couplings with streetwalkers, sometimes literally on the street. Gibbon, a pudgy piglet of a man, was not much to look at. Of him, Boswell wrote, “I think ridicule may be fairly used against an infidel; for instance, if he be an ugly fellow, and yet absurdly vain of his person.”

Which Gibbon undeniably was. Reynolds—who, as a society artist catering to the carriage trade, knew well how to flatter even his homeliest sitters—created one of the best-known likenesses of Gibbon. Years later, Charles James Fox, a member of the Club, and a leading Whig politician who was anything but a prude or a religious zealot, caught Gibbon gazing adoringly at his own portrait,

…which hung over the chimney piece—that wonderful portrait in which, while the oddness and vulgarity of the features are refined away, the likeness is perfectly preserved. Less kindly observers said that Gibbon’s pudgy face resembled the rear end of a baby.

By contrast, Gibbon’s prose was both stately and symmetrical. Like Johnson, he wrote in a Latinate, periodic style, each sentence building into the next and each paragraph strengthening the composition as a whole. “It has always been my practice,” Gibbon declared, “to cast a long paragraph in a single mould: to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen until I had given the last polish to my work.” It gleams to this day. What Gibbon did painstakingly and by rote may have been more instinctive or intuitive in the case of Johnson, especially since, for most of his life, he was writing on commercial deadline and depended on his writing to pay for the food he ate and the roof over his head. But the result is the same: eloquent, elegant, sonorous but often very forceful well-rounded periods deployed for a purpose and building to a magnificent climax.

Intelligent imagination also played a key part, as Damrosch reminds us:

In the Decline and Fall, all we have to go on is fragments of ambiguous evidence from the distant past. Sometimes the evidence seems convincing, but Gibbon reminds us that we still have to think about who wrote it down back then, and what their agenda might have been. Much of what we think we know about many characters in the story comes from enemies who hated them. Gibbon’s great achievement is to help readers to construct the narrative along with him.

Had Gibbon published Decline and Fall before joining the Club, he would probably have been blackballed. For members like Boswell and Johnson, Gibbon’s expressed skepticism of claims that the rise of Christianity “could only be explained by miraculous divine intervention” was blasphemy, pure and simple. Both Boswell and Johnson referred to Gibbon as an “infidel.” This was absurd. While Gibbon did not ignore or dismiss the significance of Christianity, he treated “the history of the Church as simply one historical phenomenon among many, not as the key to the meaning of history itself.” To Gibbon, there was nothing miraculous about the rise of Christianity. He attributed it to “secondary causes,” including, in Damrosch’s inventory, the “proselytizing zeal of early Christians, their promise of immortality, their ‘pure and austere morals,’ and their organization as a militant body within the larger society.”

All good debating points, but they beg the question. If Christianity—and even the “secondary causes” of its triumph—were not in some way unique or uniquely inspired, why did Christianity so quickly and widely outpace dozens of other now-forgotten religious movements and cults and win over most of the developed Western world and the Byzantine east by prayer and persuasion rather than by compulsion and the sword? Even Gibbon stated wonderment at how, at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD, the Moslem wave of armed conquest was turned back “‘by the genius and fortune of [Charles Martel]’ in ‘an encounter which would change the history of the world.’” He even speculated on what might have happened if the Moors had won:

The Arabian fleet might have sailed, without a naval combat, into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.

DAMROSCH’S CONSPECTUS abounds in inspired descriptions and, just as importantly, wide-ranging, judiciously chosen quotations from both Club members and a wide array of their contemporaries, plus intelligent commentary by subsequent writers and scholars. Throughout, Damrosch serves as a learned but never pedantic navigator through complex lives, relationships and works of art both literary and visual. Indeed, one of the most notable achievements of his book is his inspired choice of illustrations which he often alludes to in his narrative, everything from Reynold’s portraits to penny prints, all offering insights into his characters, the age they dwelled in, and the traces of both their work and their world that still shape our lives. He deftly wheels in supporting members of the cast such as Fannie Burney, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and so many other colorful characters. All are treated with informed fairness and all are brought fully to life. Like Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Damrosch’s work pulls together an extravagant range of characters—some motley, some magnificent—and all of them brimming with life and color.

His book’s structure is a little haphazard, since his narrative must move backward and forward in time and place, and focus on different people in different periods, but the pudding never loses its theme. The overall effect is of a stunning series of inspired lectures accompanied by magnificent slides, all combining to deepen our understanding of its subject matter and our appreciation both of its intrinsic appeal and its contemporary relevance. Damrosch is a conscientious master of period minutiae. Only one bit of botched detail springs to mind. In his description of a London street scene, Damrosch describes some of the services being offered at “The New Bagnio,” a then-trendy Turkish bath of sorts. One of them, “cupping” is defined as “medical bloodletting,” which it was not. The practice of cupping is designed to relieve a variety of complaints by applying heated glasses, usually to the patient’s back or chest. The heat of each glass, acting on the air within it, creates a mild vacuum and stimulates sluggish circulation, pulling more blood to outer layers of the skin, usually creating a healthy flush. For a period in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it enjoyed the kind of vogue we now see with acupuncture. “Bleeding” was an entirely different procedure involving opening major veins and actually drawing large amounts of blood. With bleeding, the result could be fatal, as may have been the case with George Washington who went to bed with a serious cold rendered even more lethal by repeated and copious bleedings. Cupping, on the other hand, could have done him no harm and might actually have provided some relief.

As the Club gradually morphed into a trophy membership for the already rich and famous, often at the expense of talent and “clubability,” it is reassuring to know that its spirit occasionally manifested itself elsewhere. One such Victorian avatar was the Savage Club. Founded in 1857, it was named after Richard Savage, the purported bastard of a countess and an earl, and a colorful Grubb Street hack who perished in debtor’s prison in 1743. Johnson was enamored of Savage and made him the subject of one of his earliest works, The Life of Richard Savage, of whom he wrote that “having no profession,” he “became by necessity an author.”

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the Savage Club was a haven for an amiable mélange of talented but out-of-pocket young scribblers and ancient, over-the-hill hacks, troubadours and bohemians. It has limped on into our own times, usually occupying a modest space set aside for it by a larger, more affluent club. When I happened on it in the 1970s, it occupied a small, rather dingy taproom in the otherwise palatial Lansdowne Club on Fitzmaurice Place in fashionable London W1.

I was there as the guest of an old friend, Brigadier Peter Young, who had been a World War II commando officer, commander of a regiment of the Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha, head of war studies (military history) at Sandhurst, and “Captain-General” of the Sealed Knot— a rollicking group of period re-enactors specializing in cavalier versus roundhead battles of the English Civil War. Peter was, of course, a cavalier. He was also a prolific author of books and articles on all matters military and very much a boulevardier. One drink led to another in the musty, dimly lit premises of the Savage Club, the little conversational circle began to grow and to glow, and a good time was had by all. In its own modest way, it was a Johnsonian moment, and a reminder that under the right conditions, as Johnson told Boswell on at least one occasion, “a tavern chair” can be “the throne of felicity.”

Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and has written extensively on politics, history, gastronomy and the arts for American and overseas publications.

Image: Reuters