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The Athenaeum: More Than Just Another London

Club
By Michael Wheeler. Pp. xvii + 415 + 36 illustrations, indexed. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2020. £35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-24677-3. Hardback.

Seth Alexander Thévoz

To cite this article: Seth Alexander Thévoz (2021): The Athenaeum: More Than Just Another
London Club, The London Journal, DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2021.1883975

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2021.1883975

Published online: 18 Feb 2021.

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the london journal, 2021, 1–2

Review
The Athenaeum: More Than Just Another London Club, By MICHAEL WHEELER. Pp. xvii +
415 + 36 illustrations, indexed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. £35.00. ISBN
978-0-300-24677-3. Hardback.

Michael Wheeler’s new book on London’s Athenaeum Club stands as a substantial work of
intellectual and social history in its own right, as well as an institutional history. Crucially, he
uses the Athenaeum as a prism through which to view the changing British ‘Establishment’,
across two centuries.
Private members’ clubs were a staple of nineteenth-century sociability. London was their
capital, hosting some 400 such institutions at their peak, inspiring ‘copycat’ clubs across
north America, and the empires of Britain, Portugal and Spain. The Athenaeum, founded
in 1824, was far from London’s oldest club, but it was certainly one of the most influential,
both architecturally and organizationally; and it retains a cache of intellectual (if not social)
snobbery. Unusually for a club, it embraced meritocracy over aristocracy from the outset,
with its focus on literary and scientific achievement for admission.
Despite the central role played by clubs in regulating Victorian sociability, they have
largely evaded serious study among historians until the last three decades. Early accounts
tended to be either gossipy journalism from outsiders, or hagiographies from insiders. The
literary sub-genre of London club histories evolved in the late nineteenth century, heavily
influenced by Victorian ‘tombstone’ biographies, and ‘Old School’ histories. Reverentially
written, the subtext of these antiquarian histories was invariably, ‘Why my club is the
most important club on Earth.’ (The author was – and is – always a club member.) In the
Athenaeum’s case, the claim was not without supporting evidence; but the conceited
nature of the genre has made for many frivolous volumes.
These limitations of the genre marred the first history of the Athenaeum, Francis
G. Waugh’s self-congratulatory pamphlet The Athenaeum Club and its Associations
(London, 1894), and the first two full-length Athenaeum histories, Humphry Ward’s
History of the Athenaeum, 1824–1925 (London, 1925) and Frank Richard Cowell’s The
Athenaeum: Club and Social Life in London, 1824–1975 (London, 1975), respectively
written to tie in with the Club’s 100th and 150th anniversaries. One might not expect a
book written in anticipation of the Athenaeum’s 200th anniversary to have fared much
better.
The reader of the ‘typical’ London club history can expect the following staple features: a
few (largely speculative) words on how the Club was set up, with an apologia for the paucity
of surviving sources; some details on the original architect whilst saying little about changing
building use and architectural tastes in the decades since; some comic anecdotes about
drunken antics from people who really ought to have known better; some discussion of
the minute books, and particularly, complaints received about poor-quality food; a skipping-
over of the several decades of maladministration, incompetence and malfeasance which are
an integral part of any club’s history; and the inevitable conclusion that somehow, the Club
has emerged stronger than ever, and is currently found in rude health.
It is little wonder that the London club history is regarded as a slight, peripheral genre.
Fortunately, only the last of the above staple bugbears is to be found here. Michael Wheeler’s

© 2021 Seth Alexander Thévoz DOI 10.1080/03058034.2021.1883975

2 REVIEW

new history of the Athenaeum wades into this unpromising territory, to deliver the very
model of an institutional history.
In doing so, Wheeler had the advantage that the conspicuously intellectual Athenaeum has
already fared better than most clubs for more serious study. Hugh Tait and Richard Walker
published an exhaustive catalogue of the Club’s substantial art holdings (London, 2000), and
Felipe Fernández-Armesto has edited a scholarly essay collection, Armchair Athenians
(London, 2001). Nevertheless, Wheeler’s book can lay claim to being the first full-length
history of the Club which is both readable and informative.
The Athenaeum’s archive is unusually well-preserved, but one never senses this book is
overly dependent upon it. The Athenaeum plays the role of a silent character, linking a
rich cast of characters including Bagehot, Beerbohm, Darwin, Dickens, Disraeli, Faraday,
Gladstone, Kipling, Macaulay, Ruskin, Strachey and Wilberforce, not to mention populari-
zers of ‘high culture’ from John Murray to Noël Coward.
Clubs remain a closed, elite world to most, and Wheeler does not overlook this, capturing
the popular representations (and misrepresentations) of the Club, including its occasional
satirization and outright vilification. Nor does the book shy away from the conspicuous
shunning of women members until 2001, or furores such as Jimmy Savile’s membership.
Even when analysing changing tastes and behaviours within the Club, the book maintains
a key contextual sense of wider social change, as well as the changing shape of the curious
demi-monde of Pall Mall’s Clubland, with its own rules and conventions, noting how the
Athenaeum has differed from its fellow clubs.
A key to the book’s success lay in how it was developed. Once Wheeler was commissioned,
a History Committee of distinguished scholars was formed in February 2011 to oversee the
project. Initially planned to take six years, and drafted by August 2017, the book ultimately
took ten years to reach publication in September 2020, supported by a peer review system
amongst leading historians within the Club, before then proceeding to the publisher’s own
peer review. Crucially, in publishing the volume years ahead of the 2024 tie-in anniversary,
there was not the usual unseemly rush found with most club histories. The resultant attention
to detail shows in the final product.
If the book’s implicit argument has a major shortcoming, it is that the Athenaeum’s mem-
bership has never quite had the ‘Establishment’ monopoly that is reputed – although it has
come close. The neighbouring Travellers’ and Reform Clubs, for instance, have long been
an enticing alternative for civil servants, academics, and judges, the latter club particularly
after the mid-twentieth century collapse of the Liberal Party left it without a natural hinter-
land, ripe for an ‘Establishment’ takeover. Nevertheless, the Athenaeum has consistently cap-
tured a slice of ‘the great and the good’, and Wheeler uses that unique vantage point to great
effect. The resultant book is scholarly, impish, outward-looking, and eminently readable.
This is how club histories should be written.

Librarian, National Liberal Club SETH ALEXANDER THéVOZ