Club talk: Gossip, masculinity and oral communities in late nineteenth-century London

Gender and History

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 86-106

  Milne Smith, Amy ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MISSISSIPPI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CLASS; CULTURAL INFLUENCE; CULTURAL TRADITION; GENDER IDENTITY; GENDER RELATIONS; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; MASCULINIZATION; NINETEENTH CENTURY; SOCIAL HISTORY;

ENGLAND; EURASIA; EUROPE; LONDON [ENGLAND]; UNITED KINGDOM; WESTERN EUROPE;

EID: 63049120248     PISSN: 09535233     EISSN: 14680424     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0424.2009.01536.x     Document Type: Article

References (142)

1. C. Stein, 'Yarns in the Club Smoking-Room: A VC', Pall Mall Magazine 18 October 1894, p. 195.
2. Paul Deslandes examines similar institutions of elite masculine identity, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, to see how these young men cemented the skills of exclusion. Paul Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
3. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven:YAle University Press, 1985), p. 282.
4. Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 123.
5. This favourable sense first appeared in 1811. Oxford English Dictionary.
6. Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage, Women and Men in History (Harlow: Longman, 1999), p. 58.
7. Melanie Tebbutt is the only scholar to spend much time in the nineteenth century at all. Her focus, however, is exclusively on women of the working class. Melanie Tebbutt, Women's Talk? A Social History of 'Gossip' in Working-Class Neighbourhoods, 1880-1960 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).
8. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, pp. 282-3.
9. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 2, 60, 381.
10. John Beard Haviland, Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge in Zinacantan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 5.
11. Gowing, Domestic Dangers, pp. 121-3.
12. Scott even specifically references the colonial clubs in Burma as a site where British officials could retire from their performance as imperial overlords. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 10-11, 12.
13. Haviland, Gossip, Reputation, and Knowledge, pp. 3, 6.
14. In Mrinalini Sinha's excellent article on the function of the gentlemen's club in India, she discusses the club's important role in maintaining racial divisions in the colonies, and helping define the boundaries of whiteness. Club life always has the dual purpose of keeping others out and keeping insiders together. Mrinalini Sinha, 'Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India', Journal of British Studies 40 (2001), pp. 489-521.
15. Even before the history of masculinities was prevalent, historians were very interested in the gentlemanly ideal and, with the infusion of gendered history, the scholarship continues. Michael Brander, The Victorian Gentleman (London: Gordon Cremonesi, 1975)
16. Philip Mason, The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal (London: André Deutsch, 1982)
17. David Castronovo, The English Gentleman: Images and Ideals in Literature and Society (New York: Ungar, 1987)
18. Penny Corfield, 'The Democratic History of the English Gentleman', History Today 42 (1992), pp. 40-47
19. John Tosh, 'Gentlemanly Politeness and Manly Simplicity in Victorian England', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002), pp. 455-72.
20. Jan B. Gordon, Gossip and Subversion in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: Echo's Economies (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996), pp. 38-9.
21. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)
22. Brian Cowan, 'Mr Spectator and the Coffeehouse Public Sphere', Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2004), pp. 345-66.
23. This figure includes gentlemen's clubs in their most embracive sense. Anthony Lejeune, White's: The First Three Hundred Years (London: A & C Black, 1993), p. 132.
24. 'Club-Cleaning', The World: A Journal for Men and Women 530 (1884), p. 9
25. 'London in Winter', World 290 (1880), p. 6.
26. Ex-Attaché, 'London's Leading Club: Features of English Club Life and the Relative Status of the Clubs of the Metropolis', New York Daily Tribune, 19 January 1902, p. 10.
27. Francis Waugh, The Athenaeum Club and its Associations (London: printed for private circulation, 1894), p. 14.
28. 'Clubs', Vanity Fair, 11 March 1882, p. 138.
29. Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 51.
30. Oxford English Dictionary.
31. Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 63.
32. Punch, 21 March 1900, p. 205.
33. Sometimes the critique was less explicit, such as in another cartoon that simply demonstrates a group of women enjoying some gossip. Punch 24 July 1912, p. 89.
34. 'The Joys of Scandal-Bearing', Punch, 21 March 1896, p. 136.
35. E.g., 'Club Gossip from London: Notes from the Metropolis', New York Times, 19 August 1877, p. 1
36. 'European Gossip: From Our London Correspondent', New York Times, 5 December 1886, p. 5
37. 'Gossip from England: London Society and the Drama', New York Times 9 July 1877, p. 5
38. 'London Gossip of the Day: Notes on Politics, Society, Books, and the Stage', New York Times, 3 June 1882, p. 5.
39. Unfortunately, determining reliable authorship is almost impossible in the periodical literature. At most, lengthy articles might have pseudonyms or initials, but the majority of shorter works are without even such clues.
40. The published biography of George Alexander Baird reads as an extended gossip column on the gentleman jockey who died at the age of thirty-two. He was a constant source of gossip during his life as a wealthy spendthrift who was heavily involved in both the turf and the boxing circuit. John Malcolm Bulloch, The Last Baird Laird of Auchmedden and Strichen: The Case of Mr Abington (Aberdeen, 1934).
41. Bourke, The History of White's, vol. 2.
42. Brooks's saw only nineteen bets made between 1860 and 1892, yet by the early twentieth century there were on average half a dozen bets made every week. 'The Betting Book [typed copy] 26 March 1771 - 8 August 1892', ACC/2371/BC/04/073/A
43. 'The Betting Book [typed copy] 2 December 1906 - 28 February 1909', ACC/ 2371/BC/04/074, London Metropolitan Archives.
44. E.g, Herbert Henry Asquith, Memories and Reflections, 1852-1927, vol. 1 (London: Cassell, 1928)
45. Sir Charles Biron, Without Prejudice: Impressions of Life and Law (London: Faber and Faber, 1936)
46. Barnaby Brook [pseud.], Mock-Turtle: Being the Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman (New York: Minton Balch & Company, 1931)
47. Almeric William Fitzroy, Memoirs (3rd edn, London: Hutchinson, 1925).
48. Hamilton, 'The Diary of Edward Hamilton', vol. 7 (7 April 1884), British Library, ADD.MSS.48636, 16.
49. Hamilton, 'The Diary of Edward Hamilton', vol. 16 (1 December 1886), British Library ADD.MSS.4865, 38.
50. Montstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, vol. 1 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905), pp. 21-2, 294.
51. Henry Lucy, The Diary of a Journalist, vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1920), p. 152.
52. Vanity Fair, 31 January 1891, p. 91.
53. George Leveson-Gower, Years of Content 1858-1886 (London, 1940), p. 171.
54. E.g., in Hamilton's diary, references to women are often coded and personal details are left out.
55. E.g., E. F. Benson's chatty memoir discusses the lives of some women at great length, but it was not published until 1930. E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peepshow (1930; repr. Toronto: Penguin Books, 2001).
56. 'Lady Hetty: A Story of To-Day', Vanity Fair, 16 January 1896, p. 47.
57. Mrs Irwin Smart, 'Which?' Vanity Fair, 23 July 1913, p. 95.
58. In E. F. Benson's story the rumours are more vague at the man's club and, though widespread, are presented as untrue. E. F. Benson, Dodo; a Detail of the Day (2nd edn, New York: D. Appleton, 1894), p. 190.
59. Joseph Hatton, 'London Club-Land', Art Journal, April 1885, p. 100.
60. Un Garçon, 'The Social Pilgrimage: Clubs and Clubmen', Vanity Fair 7 September 1893, p. 153.
61. The OED defines it as 'Having such qualities as fit one to be a member of a club; sociable'. Sociable seems a rather empty add-on, the closest one could get at for what is, in fact, a far more nuanced word.
62. Vanity Fair, 12 November 1887, p. 303.
63. Setting tales in India seems a universally acceptable way to tell outlandish or scandalous tales. One wonders if, in the Indian clubs, London proved the site of the best stories.
64. Benson, As We Were, pp. 86-7.
65. Emeric Hulme Beaman, 'Vain Tale. - No. DXCIII. His Friend's Name', Vanity Fair, 3 April 1902.
66. There is a record of at least one suicide occurring on club premises that was probably the subject of many club wags. In May 1905, Percival Osborn shot himself in the lower billiard room of the Travellers Club. His death was officially ruled a suicide due to temporary insanity. The shame of this act was accentuated by the fact that he killed himself in a relatively public way. The son of the deceased man wrote to the club committee soon after to apologise for his father's act. 17 May 1905, 'Committee Minute Book 18 November 1903 - 18 December 1907', p. 140, Travellers Club Archive.
67. C. Stein, 'Yarns in the Club Smoking-Room: A Death Vacancy', Pall Mall Magazine 3:14 (1894)
68. Stein, 'Yarns in the Club Smoking-Room: A VC'. A series entitled 'Bribery and Corruption: Some Club Yarns' ran for seven consecutive weeks in Vanity Fair in June and July 1910.
69. Black and White had a weekly column in the 1890s entitled 'In the Smoking Room' where a group of men discussed the day's popular topics - amusing news, court cases, ladies' fashions.
70. 'Overheard at the Club', Vanity Fair, 15 February 1906, p. 210.
71. Determining the authorship of such tales is almost impossible. However, clubmen were certainly heavily involved in the periodical press, and it is unlikely they would have allowed any gross misrepresentation of life behind the clubhouse doors.
72. Betraying club secrets would have come under the rubric of 'ungentlemanly' conduct, punishable by expulsion. Every club had a rule, similarly phrased, that worked as a catch-all for any behaviour deemed inappropriate by stating that, if a member 'committed a specified act, or acts, inconsistent with the character of a gentleman', he could be expelled. See e.g., The Rules and Regulations of the East India United Service Club (London: W. Boyle, 1890), p. 19.
73. Roger Fulford, Boodle's 1762-1962: A Short History (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1962), p. 1.
74. 'Club Manners', World, 2 July 1884, p. 9. This point holds true for the modern historian as well. When I contacted Boodle's Club, I was informed that the club holds virtually no records from the nineteenth century.
75. A motto modelled on one of Horace's epistles hung in the club dining room and read: 'Let no one bear beyond this threshold hence, words uttered here in friendly confidence'. 'Henry Irving at Home', Harper's New Monthly Magazine 64:381 (1882), p. 392.
76. G. M. Wrong, The Savile Club, 1868 to 1923 (London, 1923), p. 24.
77. This very closely mirrors the phenomenon among early modern English women, eighteenth-century salonni'eres and universally among dominant elites. Capp, When Gossips Meet, p. 381
78. Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), p. 338
79. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, p. 12.
80. Stanley Naylor, Gaiety and George Grossmith: Random Reflections on the Serious Business of Enjoyment (London: Stanley Paul, 1913), p. 179.
81. This is an uneven area of British historiography, taken for granted but rarely explored. See, though, Deslandes, Oxbridge Men
82. David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
83. Barbara Rogers, Men Only: An Investigation into Men's Organisations (London: Pandora, 1988)
84. John Scott, The Upper Classes: Property and Privilege in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 177-8
85. John Raymond de Symons, Tom Brown's Universe: The Development of the Victorian Public School (London: Millington, 1977).
86. 'Club Blabs', Smart Society, 14 December 1892, p. 17.
87. See e.g., Belgravia (1873)
88. Clubland (1910)
89. Illustrated London News (1880s and 1890s)
90. New York Times (1890)
91. New York Tribune (1900, 1902)
92. Pall Mall Gazette (1912)
93. Smart Society (1893)
94. Society Herald (1888)
95. Times (1880)
96. Vanity Fair (1910)
97. even Queen detailed ladies' clubland (1893).
98. Joseph Hatton, 'London Club-Land II', Art Journal, May 1885, p. 130.
99. Percy Fitzgerald to Garrick Club sub-committee, 4 October 1904, Box 2, 1900-49, Garrick Club Archive (GCA), London. Fitzgerald's book proves his claim, as it focuses on the early history of the club, its picture collection and the early days of the London theatre. Percy Fitzgerald, The Garrick Club (London: Elliot Stock, 1904).
100. Percy Fitzgerald to Garrick Club sub-committee, 18 March 1905, Box 2, 1900-49, GCA.
101. Lord Edmund Talbot to Arthur Lee, 6 September 1914, 34/5/17, Bonar Law Papers, House of Lords Record Office, London.
102. To be expelled from a club was a serious punishment and was treated as a sort of social ostracism. It would be difficult for a man to recover from such exclusion.
103. Unfortunately, due to the destruction of the Carlton clubhouse during the Second World War, there are no existing minute books from this period to verify if this case ever came before the club committee.
104. Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York: Garland, 1987), p. 148.
105. Two of the most famous examples of this were Robert Smythe Hichens, The Green Carnation (London: William Heinemann, 1894), a scandalous novel based on Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, and the more popular Dodo by E. F. Benson, a novel about a heroine modelled on Margot Asquith.
106. See also Trevor Fisher, Oscar and Bosie: A Fatal Passion (Stroud: Sutton, 2002), p. 76.
107. Mary Douglas, 'Jokes', in Chandra Mukeiji and Michael Schudson (eds), Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 291-310, here p. 293.
108. Richard Alexander Hough, The Ace of Clubs: A History of the Garrick (London: André Deutsch, 1986), p. 117.
109. William Thackeray to Edmund Yates, 13 June 1858, Box 1, 1831-99, GCA.
110. A further layer to the story is that Yates's article was published on the same day that Dickens publicly announced his separation from his wife. The literary rivalry, and the fact that Dickens believed Thackeray had been spreading rumours about his separation in the Garrick make it difficult to believe the timing was mere coincidence. P. D. Edwards, Dickens's 'Young Men': George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), p. 62.
111. Alexander Doland to Edmund Yates, c.1858, Box 1, 1831-99, GCA.
112. According to his lawyer, the committee had no power to expel, as he had not transgressed any specific club rule. Mssrs Farrer & Co. to Alexander Doland, 3 August 1858, Box 1, 1831-99, GCA.
113. More than twenty years after the fact he again published the correspondence with notes, proving the event was still in the public consciousness in the 1880s. While he claimed no bitterness as to his expulsion, he still believed in the injustice of the act. Edmund Yates, Mr. Thackeray, Mr Yates, and the Garrick Club: The Correspondence and Facts (London: Taylor & Greening, 1859)
114. Edmund Yates, 'An Old Club Scandal', c. January 1880, Box 1, 1831-99, GCA.
115. Anthony Lejeune, The Gentlemen's Clubs of London (London: Macdonald and Jane's, 1979), pp. 34, 127.
116. Gary Weber, 'Henry Labouchere, Truth and the New Journalism of Late Victorian Britain', Victorian Periodicals Review 26 (1993), pp. 36-9.
117. Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 12.
118. Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Women's Magazine, 1800-1914 (New York: Routledge, 1996).
119. 'A Phase of Humbug', Vanity Fair, 3 December 1881, p. 314.
120. 'Society Journalism', World, 21 March 1883, p. 8.
121. My forthcoming work on club life in general deals more explicitly about club membership and the politics of blackballing.
122. 'Club Life in London: The Leading Clubs of the City', New York Times 20 March 1877, p. 1.
123. This could be a way to discredit a rival. For example, the editor of Vanity Fair attacked a correspondent of To-Day, a short-lived rival paper, not on the basis of the veracity of the man's information, but for the propriety of his disclosure. Vanity Fair, 29 December 1898, pp. 448-9.
124. Isabella, 'A Letter from an American Lady', World 321 (1880), p. 18.
125. A Member of the St James's Club, 'The St James's Club', Vanity Fair 11 December 1881, p. 335.
126. Vanity Fair, 11 December 1881, p. 335.
127. When the Times reported on proposed rule changes at the Reform Club, it similarly excused itself by saying that not only was the issue already public knowledge, but that the changes were publicly relevant. Times, 19 May 1882, p. 9.
128. Vanity Fair, 11 August 1904, p. 165.
129. Michael Havers, Edward Grayson and Peter Shankland, The Royal Baccarat Scandal (London: William Kimber, 1977), p. 60.
130. Havers, Grayson and Shankland, Royal Baccarat Scandal, p. 248.
131. Fisher, Oscar and Bosie, p. 109.
132. Oscar Wilde to R. H. Sherard, 16 October 1897, in Rupert Hart-Davis and Merlin Holland (eds), The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 963.
133. That Lord Alfred Douglas remained an acceptable member of the elite owes much to his name having been kept out the papers. His behaviour was an open secret, but he was never put on trial. The fact that Douglas was from an aristocratic family also helped to some degree.
134. For counters to a more aggressive model of late nineteenth-century manhood, see e.g., James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)
135. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender & Race in United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
136. John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
137. Martin Francis, 'The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity', Historical Journal 45 (2002), pp. 637-52, here p. 643.
138. Howard Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999)
139. Martin Francis, 'A Flight from Commitment? Domesticity, Adventure and the Masculine Imaginary in Britain after the Second World War', Gender & History 19 (2007), pp. 163-85
140. Stephen Heathorn, 'How Stiff Were their Upper Lips? Research on Late-Victorian and Edwardian Masculinity', History Compass 2 (2004), pp. 1-7
141. Amy Milne-Smith, 'A Flight to Domesticity? Making a Home in the Gentlemen's Clubs of London, 1880-1914', Journal of British Studies 45 (2006), pp. 796-818.
142. Michel Foucault, 'Two Lectures', in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/ Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 78-108.