Samuel Johnson was a fractious, combative, gloomy member of a number of London clubs – the Ivy Lane Club, later on the Club (which he co-founded with Sir Joshua Reynolds), and, shortly before his death, the Essex Head Club. But there was nothing exceptional in this. Members of the educated, professional, and bourgeois classes in the Georgian capital regularly belonged to several clubs and societies. The physician turned clergyman and pioneer archaeologist William Stukeley, for example, was a member of the Royal Society, the Society of Antiquaries, the Egyptian Society, and London Masonic lodges, as well as helping to set up associations in the provincial town of Stamford where he lived for part of his life. By the 1730s one London writer remarked, “what numbers of these sociable assemblies are subsisting in this metropolis. In the country not a town … is without its club.”

Origins

When and why did clubs and societies start? What kinds of activities did they engage in? How were they organized? And what benefits did members enjoy?