London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late Victorian Britain, by Amy Milne-Smith.

Abstract

London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class Late Victorian Britain, by Amy Milne-Smith. New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, xi, 296 pp. US $85.00 (cloth). Not many years past, the Reform Club turfed out Lady Renouf of Kensington because she had entertained David Irving to lunch too frequently. Lady Renouf has been described as a woman in her fifties. She married Sir Frank (the bank) Renouf, from New Zealand. She had charmed herself into Sir Frank's circumstances by claiming she was Lady Graiznoff, the divorced wife of a Russian nobleman. (Having sat next to her at a literary dinner a few years ago, I can testify to her ample charms. The prurient may glance at these charms, which are most pronounced, merely by calling her up on Google and goggle.) However, simply put, she was an adventuress and gold-digger. Her father had been a truck driver New South Wales; she herself had been merely a beauty queen some beauty pageant somewhere the Antipodes. The Reform Club might forgive her her father; her participation a beauty contest, her marriage, and her claim to be a Russian countess. Her political views were too extreme even for the British National Party. The Club had overlooked these details because they had, fact, elected her. However, David Irving was more than the club could stick. London's clubs have been much mocked. Some critics, for example, have snorted about the port-stained minute book of the Society of Dilettanti. Others have heaped criticism on these clubs as crude, corrupt cadres of social domination and control. There is another danger of the opposite kind. Clubs might be regarded as an Eden. Sentimentality, nostalgia, even affection, might cloak the more interesting intellectual features of associational behaviour. Amy Milne-Smith commits none of these mistakes This book is the one for which many of us interested social formations modern Britain have been waiting. Using London's clubs as intellectual material for excavating British society a period of intense transformation, Milne-Smith describes the way memberships these societies served as markers a complex system of institutions, social rituals, and habits to identify those whose social (and political) status carried heft and edge. This book examines the clubs themselves and analyzes their historical and social functions. Chapters are devoted to the ways these clubs created social communities through elections to them, and through their efforts to show how new bonds (and, therefore, barriers) established different social forms and shapes. And other chapters examine the ways these clubs affected social speculations about masculine patterns of life, marriage, and politics. London's clubs have been much written about. Many of them have published (sometimes privately) their own histories. Club narratives have found their way into popular fiction: Macgregor's Cynosure Club and Jeeves's Ganymede Club, for example. Milne-Smith draws on this vast body of literature. She makes extensive use of the unpublished minute books of Brooks's Club, St. James's Club. The Oriental Club, the Reform Club, the Travellers' Club, and the Isthmian Club. She also uses press accounts of the clubs to show how a wider public understood (or misunderstood) club life. One important theme this book is a discussion of inclusion. …