ABSTRACT
IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO FIND an agreed-upon point of origin for clubs, and there are many reasons for forming them: not all subcultural by any means. Clubs are, primarily, a means of socialising and of giving socialisation some sort of defi nition, an underwriting cultural logic and a structure and method of organisation. In his history of British clubs, Peter Clark writes that by 1800, ‘clubs and other forms of association had become a vital component of the social life of the educated English-speaking classes’ (Clark 2002: 3). But he also notes that clubs were common and popular enough well before that time even for writers to satirise them: like the Tory polemicist and humorist Ned Ward, whose A History of the London Clubs (1709) began by describing just six of these but soon expanded to account for over thirty. Political and religious associations had their clubs, and so did various trades and occupations; and many of these clubs (like the Whiggish Kit Kat Club, or the Tory Scriblerian Club – see Chapter 4) were essential to the well-being, and successful management, of the nation itself. Kathleen Wilson writes that during the eighteenth century clubs ‘were central to structuring and sustaining extraparliamentary politics, embodying forms of sociability and engagement capable of shaping their members’ social and political relations with each other, with civic culture and with the nation-state itself’ (Wilson 1995: 71). For Wilson, these clubs also embodied principles of rationality and masculinity, instrumental in the delineation of a ‘public political sphere’ outside of the feminised home (73). We might think of the Freemasons here, too, although the history of Freemasonry goes back even further, to the fourteenth century and the Guilds or ‘Mysteries’ of Masons (stone craftsmen) which had gained at this time some
political power in London. By the seventeenth century, societies of Masons or Free Masons were admitting members outside of their trades and forming ‘fellowships’, ‘brotherhoods’, and so on. In 1717, four Lodges got together and founded the fi rst Grand Lodge of England, which met in taverns in Drury Lane and Westminster. Their knowledges were increasingly mystifi ed and their Lodge meetings were increasingly ritualised, with Freemasonry becoming a matter of secrecy and coded recognition, a means of establishing social and professional hierarchies – even as it tied itself, especially in its North American incarnations, to nation-building and political power. The Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon in Canada has an elaborate and informative website with detailed scholarly histories and genealogies of Freemasonry, as well as a set of documents about its own formation in 1860, its various Grand Masters, its achievements, and so on. This infl uential Canadian society also posts a number of ‘anti-masonic’ commentaries which accuse Freemasonry of anti-Christian behaviour or off er ‘conspiracy theories’ about its political infl uence, its links to the Ku-Klux-Klan, etc. – all of which are refuted. Freemasonry, it notes, ‘has been described as a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols’ <https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/info.html>;. By way of contrast, it also links to another informative page about the Hell-Fire Clubs of the eighteenth century. Even though the founder of the fi rst Hell-Fire Club in London, Philip, Duke of Wharton, was also a Grand Master in 1722-23, this page draws a careful distinction between Hell-Fire Clubs and Freemasonry: ‘The practices and philosophies of the several Hell-Fire Clubs would certainly appear to be antithetical to those of Freemasonry. Where Freemasonry taught moderation, the Hell-Fire Clubs promoted excess; while Freemasonry bound its members to obey the moral law and to be lawful citizens, the Hell-Fire Clubs encouraged drunkenness, debauchery and a disregard for social convention’ <https://freemasonry. bcy.ca/history/hellfi re/hellfi re.html#george>. We have, in these remarks, a version of a binary we have already seen in relation to subcultures: in particular, as sites of excess to be distinguished from the restraints of mainstream society or ‘dominant culture’.
