Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes [1] Clubland makes another, perhaps even more spectacular appearance in Verne’s male adventure romances in the second chapter of From the Earth to the Moon (1865). Here members of the Gun Club in Baltimore gather one October evening in the club’s great hall to hear their president, the imperturbable Impey Barbicane, call for “some grand experiment worthy of the nineteenth century” (9). That experiment turns out to be an expedition to the moon as he proclaims, “It is perhaps reserved for us to become the Columbuses of this unknown world” (10). The spectacle of this gathering has clearly captured Verne’s imagination as he lavishly details the exquisite environs of the club and the reactions of its enchanted audience. Verne was himself a member of the Reform Club where the greatest of clubland heroes, James Bond, would also turn out to be a member; Bond’s boss, M, belongs to the Blades Club, based on Boodle’s—Ian Fleming’s own club. [2] I am indebted to many scholars for their useful overviews of the multiple historical and societal forces that help to substantiate what has now become a stock but persuasive assessment of the late‐Victorian male psyche. See especially Peter Stearns’s Be A Man! Males in Modern Society, Katherine Snyder’s Bachelors, Manhood and the Novel, Joseph Kestner’s Sherlock’s Men, and Alan Sinfield’s The Wilde Century for their diagnoses of nineteenth‐century gendered anxiety. In Sexual Anarchy, Elaine Showalter argues that clubland provides male authors a retreat from women writers, a retreat that grew more economically necessary in the century’s final decades (81). Laura Morowitz and William Vaughan make a similar argument about late‐Victorian artistic brotherhoods, which effectively banished female artists from the marketplace (Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century). And, though her focus is different in several respects, Abigail Solomon‐Godeau concurs: the “homosocial networks among male artists” helped to effect the “consolidation of masculine bonds,” necessarily resulting in the exclusion of women, critical to the formation of the bourgeois public sphere (Male Trouble 11, 54). [3] Richard Marsh’s 1898 Curios and Thomas Hardy’s 1891 collection of stories A Group of Noble Dames deploy a common narrative device, in which the club setting provides the frame for a collection of thrilling, indeed frightening adventure stories. Hardy’s stories are told at the Wessex Field and Antiquarian Club, where men gather to listen to members recount legends “Before Dinner” and “After Dinner.” Curios focuses on two bachelors, Mr. Tress and Mr. Pugh, who compete as collectors and who take the reader on a thrilling ride through the mysterious world of connoisseurship. “The Adventure of the Great Auk’s Egg” takes place at the Society of Dilettanti, and one of the most harrowing chapters, “What Happened at the Club,” recounts a collectible coming to life in order to haunt the members of the narrator’s club. [4] The dark possibilities of clubbing may conjure up the legendary subversions of the impious clubs and nefarious societies of eighteenth‐century libertine culture. As Evelyn Lord reveals in her book The Hell‐Fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies, early‐modern hell‐fire clubs celebrated the powers of a violent, aggressive, and sexualized masculinity. Given their mission to celebrate the reign of the body and shake mainstream society in the context of Jacobite anti‐government politics, one can readily imagine how the indecent, ungodly pleasures they promised might have intrigued a writer like Wilde. [5] It comes as no surprise that Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross was a member of the Reform and loved to dine there in the company of lively men. The phantasmic promise of these tales in which clubland offers an escape is literalized by an arrangement that the Reform Club purportedly allowed: “It is said that in the 19th century the big black doors in Pall Mall to the east of the main entrance were not kept locked and it was the practice for members to leave the club in the evening saying a clear good night to the porter to establish an alibi and then, having found a suitable lady companion, to return with her through those other black doors and up to the chambers” (Burlingham and Billis 225). [6] The club is suggestively named the Inslip Club, and the characters vow to rest up before their next visit. The possibility of a network of such clubs is alluded to in a briefly mentioned rumor about a Paris club where the members practice cruelty of every kind. [7] One thinks of the logic behind the power architecture of Victorian clubhouses. Such a club as the Travellers—with its spare, massive elegance—was meant to be the antidote to the feminine clutter that defined the dominant domestic décor of the age. [8] Stevenson was elected to the Savile in 1874, which an early biographer called “the centre of his London life” (qtd. in Anderson, Hang Your Halo 50). In a letter to his mother that same year, Stevenson expressed his affection for his club: “I like my club very much […. here] one meets agreeable people” (Booth and Mehew 2: 27). Indeed, Edmund Gosse claimed that “Louis pervaded the club” (qtd. in Harman 107). Perhaps not surprisingly, Stevenson’s wife would later curse his club membership (Calder 87). Beerbohm was a member of the Athenaeum and was also elected to the Savile in 1899, where none of his club brothers—deemed his “Savile victims” (Anderson, Hang Your Halo 66)—were immune to his caricaturist’s treatment. In his history of the Savile Club, Garrett Anderson grants Beerbohm high praise as “one of those select who were as dear to the Savile’s heart as the Club so evidently was to his” (65). For Doyle and Wilde’s club memberships, see notes six and seven below. [9] That the dandy’s life begins only when he gains membership in the smart club of White’s, with its highly coveted reputation for style, is a common assertion throughout the long nineteenth century. [10] Sedgwick’s description of bohemia’s function nicely suits clubland as well: “[A]s a semiporous, liminal space for vocational sorting and social rising and falling, bohemia could seemingly be entered from any social level; but […] it served best the cultural needs, the fantasy needs, and the needs for positive and negative self‐definition of an anxious and conflicted bourgeoisie” (Epistemology of the Closet 193). [11] Here Beerbohm chooses the perfect setting, a men’s club, in which to showcase what surely struck him as the monstrosity of Wildean excess. Wilde’s mismatch in size and deportment with that of his club brother makes him cut a ridiculous figure. And his various missteps in personal style (the idiot’s grin, the ample double‐chins, and outrageous costume complete with green carnation) prove him to be the outsider to those‐in‐the‐know or the urbane observer, Beerbohm. [12] Although clubs are not the focus of his marvelous book Fictions of Loss, Stephen Arata does make a claim about Holmes that seems appropriate in the context of this study. For Arata, Holmes is characteristically “buried in an easy chair, pipe lit, feet up, gaze abstracted” (147), a kind of armchair detective who celebrates the hermeneutical triumph rather than enacting any real solution of a social problem. Implicit to Arata’s language is a strong sense that Holmes is himself a clubland hero meant to be appreciated by clubbable readers. [13] In a July 1904 review for the Quarterly Review, Andrew Lang speaks to this very sort of consumption of the Doyle stories by praising “The Author’s Edition” of “The Novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle” as “a delightful set for a smoking room in a club or in a country house” (qtd. in Orel 221). An ex‐soldier and known adventurer, Doyle was a member of the Reform Club who seemed aware of his own cultic stature in the eyes of his readers/fan club: “What I believe is that I have perhaps the strongest influence over young men, especially young athletic sporting men, of any one in England” (Kestner 27). [14] One must wonder if Stevenson was influenced by Thomas De Quincey and, indeed, shared his fascination with secret societies. The Suicide Club resembles De Quincey’s earlier tale, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827), which shocks its reader with its portrait of London’s Society of Connoisseurs in Murder who “profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of carnage; and, in short, Murder‐Fanciers” (47). De Quincey begins his tale with a direct reference to the type of fraternity that surely stands behind the works I discuss here: The Hell‐Fire Club, founded in the previous century. [15] In addition to St. Stephen’s, Wilde’s ten clubs include the Albemarle, a mixed club of about 600 members founded in 1879 and to which both Oscar and Constance belonged; the Lyric Club; and the Crabbet Club, for which Wilde attended only one meeting. The trajectory of Wilde’s life is marked by both famous and infamous moments spent in clubs. Ellmann describes an acrimonious exchange between Wilde and Whistler that took place at the Hogarth Club (271). The Hogarth is also mentioned in Wilde’s trials when Edward Carson inquires whether Wilde took “the office boy” Edward Shelley along with him to lunch at the Hogarth (Holland 139–40), a possible transgression inflected by concerns pertaining to age, class, and sexual orientation. Wilde mischievously declined an invitation to join the Thirteen Club for dinner, expressing dismay at the club’s mission to dispel all superstitions, which he felt were a charming source of romance and a necessary reprieve from the world’s adherence to common sense (Holland and Hart‐Davis 581). Although Wilde was proposed for membership to the Savile in October 1888, his election was indeterminately postponed due to apparent dissensus among club members regarding his eligibility. Wilde dismissively called the Club “a true republic of letters; not a sovereign among ‘em” (Anderson, Hang Your Halo 43). And, while in Holloway Prison, Wilde resigned from the New Travellers Club on 9 April 1895 (Holland and Hart‐Davis 692). [16] See Jerusha McCormack’s “Wilde’s Fiction(s)” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde for such a treatment of Wilde’s Irishness. Furthermore, her analysis of the dandy figure and his divided, shifting loyalties captures nicely my upcoming argument about Wilde’s defection from London’s clubland. McCormack writes, “Setting the stamp on that collusion, Wilde made himself over as a dandy, one who, as a leisured outsider, sought to establish […] a new kind of aristocracy. Despising the very society into which he seeks initiation, the dandy takes his revenge by creating himself in its image, miming its clothes, its manners and mannerisms [….] In effect, by means of his performance the dandy gets his audience to share his contempt for itself” (96–97). [17] Wilde’s father had been a Mason, and, while at Oxford, Wilde joined the Freemason Apollo Lodge on 23 February 1875 and, the following year, another chapter of the lodge, this one with an interest in the occult. A fellow student and Mason remarked about Wilde’s reaction to the Masonic costumes, “Wilde was as much struck with their gorgeousness as he was amazed at the mystery of our conversation” (Beckson 106). Karl Beckson speculates that the Masonic costume inspired Wilde’s conception of his Aesthetic dress for his American tour. [18] In similar fashion, scholars have noted Wilde’s insistence that only the West End’s most fashionable playhouses mount productions of his plays. See The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, edited by Peter Raby (249). [19] Queensberry left the note at the Albemarle on 18 February 1895, and the club porter placed it in an envelope to give to Wilde when he was next at the club, which was 28 February (Complete Letters 634). [20] This sense of elite brotherhood informs a textual allusion to Stevenson’s Suicide Club in “The Critic as Artist.” Gilbert invites Ernest outside where he suggests they might encounter Prince Florizel of Bohemia and become, in effect, three brothers of bohemia (248). [21] In his diaries, George Ives admits that Wilde once kissed him passionately in the New Travellers Club (Cook 145). They first met at the Authors’ Club. [22] In Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), Jack Saul services members of a secret club in Portland Place. And in a much earlier work, Satyrical Reflections on Clubs (1710), Ned Ward describes the thriving Molly club culture of eighteenth‐century London (see chapter 23). [23] In a moment of masterful imitation, Robert Hichens in The Green Carnation (1894) sends his protagonists, Mr. Amarinth and Lord Reggie (Wilde and Douglas), to a “certain small club” after a performance of Faust to “see all that was to be seen” and to talk, in part, about the closing of the Narcissus Club (13, 14). [24] One thinks of Wilde’s scornful account to Douglas of Queensberry’s need to go public in a club: “As for the costs of the trial, you may be interested to know that your father openly said in the Orleans Club that if it had cost him 20,000 he would have considered the money thoroughly well spent, he had extracted such enjoyment, and delight, and triumph out of it all” (De Profundis 74). Karl Beckson describes how Wilde’s life, particularly his resumption of a relationship with Douglas, became the talk of the Authors’ Club (251). And Charles Brookfield, an actor once maligned by Wilde, waged a “war of vengeance” against Wilde by spreading gossip that turned clubland hostile toward Wilde during his trials. It was Brookfield who procured the incriminating letters from rent boys used against Wilde in court (Anderson, Hang Your Halo 299). [25] Club culture betrayed Wilde once more when, on 4 July 1891, George Curzon stood to support Wilde’s election to the Crabbet Park Club and instead attacked him for his vile reputation. Wilde’s response, argues Neil McKenna, turned out to be a dress rehearsal later for court when he defended the love that dare not speak its name (136–37). In his biography on Wilde, Ellmann describes the same scene (320). [26] In a similar act of disaffiliation, Robbie Ross had to resign from several of his clubs because his friendship with Wilde implicated him in the Wilde scandal (Ellmann 457). [27] Wilde expressed similar revulsion for the Savage Club as recounted by the late‐nineteenth‐century British journalist Coulson Kernahan: “‘Oh, the Savage Club,’ said Wilde. ‘I never enter the Savage Club. It tires me so. It used to be gentlemanly Bohemian, but ever since the Prince of Wales became a member and sometimes dines there, it is nothing but savagely snobbish. Besides, the members are all supposed to be professionally connected with Literature, Science, and Art, and I abhor professionalism of every sort’” (Mikhail 2: 304). Wilde’s detestation of the clubby premium placed on professionalism makes him ache for the days of the “gentlemanly Bohemian,” that counter‐promise of detachment. In imagining his own discomfort in London’s traditional clubs, Wilde at least twice calls himself “a poor lion in a den of savage Daniels” (Mikhail 364; Holland and Hart‐Davis 361–62). [28] See McKenna for a fuller account of the Order, including some discussion of its rules and rituals, oaths, and membership numbers (200–01).