ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the notion that angling pleasures, far from being simple, are extraordinarily complex. They operate on multiple layers of value and taste that have been deposited in modern social memory over the course of two hundred years. The cultural plates of European life shifted so radically as to provoke earthquakes in every dimension of social life and in every aspect of pleasure and taste. M. A. Clawson contends that the Freemasonry model of social relations provides a shape and form for all the diverse clubs that sprang up first in Britain and then in the United States throughout the nineteenth century. The voluntary associations that gained currency in Britain and later the United States typically adopted a goal of egalitarian social relations. The pleasures of angling, like those of the nose, the eye and the ear, began to lean in the direction of detachment, voluntarism, individualism, and social exclusivity.
