British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World

533 Pages·2002·4.823 MB·English

by  Peter Clark

viii Preface
development but also help to condition patterns of economic mod-
ernization.3 Yet, paradoxically, there is a recognition that associational
vitality cannot be taken for granted. Recent studies of the role of
voluntary organizations in contemporary Britain and America have
suggestedadeclineinpublicparticipation,withaconsequentthreatto
civil society at the end of the twentieth century.4
These approaches raise many issues: when and why do voluntary
societies emerge? What forms do they take? Who joins them and for
what reasons? Where are they located? What do they do? How stable
and effective are they? And what is their impact? For Britain (and the
United States) the historical evolution of clubs and societies, the
predominant species of modern voluntary association, and their
advent as a major social institution remains obscure, with many of
the key questions concerning their development only starting to be
explored.Thenineteenthcenturyhasoftenbeenseenasthegreatage
of British societies, when their numbers multiplied and they made a
central contribution to public policy and community life.5 In fact, the
origins of the movement are considerably earlier. As we will find in
this study, clubs and societies were not some kind of Darwinian
outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution, but the product of that
expansive period of English social and economic development from
thetimeoftheEnglishRevolutiontothelateeighteenthcentury.This
was a period of accelerating urbanization which also brought forth a
host of other innovations—from spas and seaside resorts to hobbies
andspectatorsports,illuminatedstreets,window-shopping,andeven-
tuallysteam-poweredfactories.Theoriginofclubsandsocietiesisnot
simply a point of historical genealogy. It is arguable that the special
pressures and conditions of the early modern period moulded the
distinctive character of British clubs and societies,and so their role in
modern society. Equally significant, the Georgian period saw the
institution exported to other parts of the English-speaking world,
notleasttoitssecondhomeinNorthAmerica.Toanswertheoriginal
question: there is a good case for saying that we cannot understand
modern society without understanding the world of the modern
3 R. D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ,
1993).
4 Id.,‘WhoKilledCivicAmerica?’,Prospect(Mar.1996),66–72;B.KnightandP.Stokes,
TheDeficitinCivilSocietyintheUnitedKingdom(Birmingham,1996).
5 e.g.R.J.Morris,‘Clubs,SocietiesandAssociations’,inF.M.L.Thompson(ed.),The
Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950, Vol. III (Cambridge, 1990), 405–43; see also
below,ch.13
Preface ix
voluntary association, and we cannot understand that without under-
standing its pre-industrial origins.
I came to the subject of this book from two directions: first, from
my research on British towns, in which clubs and societies emerge
during the Augustan era as one of the key elements of that urban
cultural renaissance so brilliantly described by Peter Borsay; secondly,
and more directly, from my earlier study of public drinking houses,
where I discovered that after the Restoration inns, taverns, coffee-
houses, and alehouses lodged an ever-increasing number and variety
of clubs and societies. Impressed by their diversity, their strange
names, and their infiltration of urban society, I began hunting down
associations in archives and libraries, first in England and later in
Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and North America. I attempted a brief,
preliminary survey of the rise of this social institution in my H. J.
Dyos Lecture Sociability and Urbanity: Clubs and Societies in the Eighteenth
Century City (Leicester, 1986). The importance of the subject seemed
increasingly evident. If a British Enlightenment did exist, then one of
its principal engines was the Georgian voluntary society. Fanning out
across the English-speaking world, clubs and societies may have
served as a vector for new ideas, new values, new kinds of social
alignment, and forms of national, regional, and local identity. By the
late eighteenth century there are indications of the emergence of
modern-style voluntary societies with stronger administrative struc-
tures and a detailed public agenda.
Attemptingtotrackdownandclarifythesedevelopments,however,
has posed many problems. One is the nature of the documentation,
voluminous in quantity but often poor in quality; this issue is dis-
cussed in more detail in Chapter 1. Another problem is that for any
systematic discussion of the rise of associations in early modern
Britain one needs to address not only the domestic history of the
institution, but alsoitsinteraction with a host ofwider developments:
the growth of towns and cities, the rise of public sociability and
conspicuous consumption, the evolution of private and public space,
growing gender differentiation, and much else. To try to contain this
increasingly gargantuan topic, I decided to conclude the main analysis
at1800,bywhichtime,arguably,thesingularimportanceandprincipal
features of British associational life had been established. Even with
this somewhat arbitrary chronological closure, however, it is obvious
that the investigation is limited and incomplete. More needs to be
done on mapping and quantifying the growth of voluntary associ-
ations,oncarryingoutregionalandcommunitysurveys,onunravelling