clubs. The decades after the Restoration saw a proliferation of clubs and societies in London and the main provincial cities, many of them meeting in taverns or coffee-houses. They were prompted by greater prosperity, growth in the size of towns, and a marked increase in the membership of the professions. Contemporaries attached much importance to clubs as instruments of civility: one writer in 1739 remarked that though many clubs were run by ‘the meanest and rudest of the citizens’, they maintained ‘the best order and decorum’. Though the most famous club, to which Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon belonged, was literary, the majority were dining clubs, or political or gambling clubs. The Cocoa Tree Chocolate House, in Anne's reign, was a haunt of Tories and Jacobites; Read's Coffee House in Fleet Street was the home of Whigs. Sixty years later, Almack's and Brooks's were famous gambling clubs. The 19th-cent. gentlemen's clubs were likely to have their own premises, not too far from the House of Commons, and to be run, not by a proprietor, but by a committee of members. The Athenaeum (1824), founded by J. W. Croker, was literary; the Carlton (1832) was established to restore the fortunes of the Tory Party after its shattering election defeat; the Reform Club (1836) was a Whig and radical riposte to the Carlton's success. The heyday of the gentlemen's club was late Victorian and Edwardian England, with clubs offering overnight accommodation and libraries as well as good dining facilities. Trollope's old lawyer Abel Wharton, in The Prime Minister, ‘twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays, dined at that old law club, the Eldon, and played whist after dinner till twelve o'clock’. At the other end of the social scale were highly successful working men's clubs, where the drink was beer and the entertainment a local comedian, sing-song, or dominoes.

J. A. Cannon