ABSTRACT
Bibliography Banfield, Stephen. Sensibility and English Song.
Bush, Geofrrey and Nicholas Temperley, eds. English Romantic Songs, 1800-1860. Musica Britannica, vol. 43. 1979. (Anthology.)
SOULS, THE A talented company of witty men and
women favored by birth, wealth, and good looks, the Souls formed in the early 1880s and numbered forty at George Curzon's famous Bachelors' Club dinner for them in 1889. Anti-Philistine in their taste for art, literature, and cycling, these friends called themselves "the Gang"; they were dubbed "the Souls" because they considered their souls superior and talked incessantly about them. They occasionally enhanced the Marlborough set of the Prince of Wales, but, having their Shakespeare by heart, preferred poetry to fox hunts, charades and pencil games to cards. Wilfrid Blunt (1840-1922) found in their society "all that . . . was most intellectually amusing and least conventional" (Diaries, 1891).
