London Clubs and Victorian Politics

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London Clubs and Victorian Politics

 

Seth Alexander Thévoz on History Today 

 

Victorian London saw an explosion in the popularity of clubs. At the beginning of the 19th century London’s West End contained some 30 such establishments, but by 1900 the number had multiplied to over 250. Clubs provided a convenient and regulated way of meeting others with shared interests, affording men of even modest incomes the means to live in luxurious surroundings they could ill afford at home. (Indeed, one miserly 19th-century member, Charles Agar, was so reluctant to leave the Carlton Club each evening that the night porter invariably had to search the building for him.) Although strict social conventions forbade the meeting of strangers in society without introduction, clubs offered a unique opportunity to make new acquaintances, since being a fellow club member carried its own recommendation.

Clubs caught the popular imagination in Victorian Britain and their basic business model was increasingly imitated. The earlier ‘clubs’ of the 18th century had started as dining societies that met in the same pub, inn, coffee house or chocolate shop. They often provided a front for illicit gambling, as the status of a club complicated things for authorities wishing to raid the premises. Some venues offered idiosyncratic services to their members, not least the Cocoa Tree Club on St James’s Street, which before its closure in the 1840s was the only club to have had a brothel on the premises. Unsurprisingly, those MPs who belonged to it strenuously denied their membership.

When clubs had occupied their own building before the 19th century they were invariably run as a profitable venture by a landlord. The Union Club founded in 1800 (best known for its building in Trafalgar Square, now Canada House) was crucial in setting a precedent that most other clubs would follow. It was the first to make each of its members joint shareholders in a permanent set of premises. The significance of this was that members began to treat the club as an extension of their homes and club use increased dramatically. (This also contributed to the closure of so many clubs in the 20th century, as dwindling membership and soaring land values meant that each member’s share was worth more, so many clubs closed and sold up.) From the 1820s onwards newly-founded clubs would adopt passages of the Union Club’s constitution verbatim. Furthermore, even the established clubs of the 18th century soon began to copy this and shifted from proprietary clubs to member-owned clubs by staging management buy-outs by the membership, although Tory-inclined White’s would not do so until 1891, well after most other establishments.

The effect was dramatic and signalled a marked increase in club use. Other institutions began to operate along the club model, such as the London Library in 1841, which grew out of the Travellers’ Club library and granted access to its private reading rooms in exchange for a subscription. The middle of the century saw new clubs extend from the aristocracy to the professional and middle classes, as an increasing number were themed around professions and interests: the military, the civil service, expatriate nationalities and the arts and sciences.

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