Pleasures Engendered by Gender: Homosociality and the Club

Abstract

The famous jibe made by the brothers Goncourt during the nineteenth century, that if two Englishmen were to be cast upon an uninhabited island, their first consideration would be the formation of a club,1 was not merely an observation of how post-Enlightenment England was viewed by the French, but also how English society had begun to view itself. The formation of clubs has become one of the enduring legacies of the eighteenth century, at a time when many were established to encapsulate various kinds of pleasure. From these we have inherited an invaluable record of social behaviour. How and why the rise of the club facilitated the pursuit of pleasure, particularly in regard to gender, are questions that tend to have been overlooked, even though they should be fundamental to our understanding of this period.