'A melancholy odyssey among London public houses': radical club life and the unrespectable in mid-nineteenth-century London

Abstract

This article re-opens the debate about metropolitan club life in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The traditional view of the clubs matches a historiography of British radicalism which privileges the eighteen-forties and eighties, and is neglectful of the middle years of the century. Addressing recent continuity arguments, this article modifies prevailing views of metropolitan political clubs by scrutiny of those elements that remained outside the Liberal consensus. In so doing it relates the history of radical club life in the capital to the popular politics of the mid nineteenth century, and to debates about Chartist survival. In addition, it re-examines the clubs in line with a new historiography of London which stresses the uniqueness of the capital, and the moral panics that emerged from concerns about the persistence of the radical underground.