A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland

4. Membership Has Its Privileges

 &4 Membership Has Its Privileges The Imperial Clubman at Home and Away [O]n whatever savage territory the Union Jack is planted, the first symptom of British colonization is to set up a depot of British compounds;—the second, to build a church;—and the third, to form a club. —Mrs. Catherine Gore, Sketches of English Character In 1866, Anthony Trollope profiled a prominent personage , the Alpine Club man, in his Travelling Sketches. His interest in his subject had two likely sources. As a lover of foxhunting in particular and the sporting life more generally, Trollope had longed to join the Alpine Club but realized that both his age and his level of athleticism made him unfit for membership. Then, in the aftermath of a fatal climbing accident on the Matterhorn that took the lives of several Alpine Club members, Trollope ’s admiration deepened. Trollope begins his sketch by acknowledging the club’s, and the country’s, recent loss. Writing like a latter-day Milton, Trollope presents the Alpine Club man as an iteration of Lycidas—the hero “dead ere his time”—and the club’s activity of climbing as an epic venture for his readers’ generation. This eulogy to the “gallant fellows” struck down in the midst of their high adventure seamlessly gives way to an extended expression of boosterism, as Trollope celebrates the mettle and the “spirit of enterprise” that define these British climbers. In Trollope’s estimation, the Alpine Club man “does not carry himself quite as another man, and has his nose a little in the air, even when he is not climbing” (93). The “genuine Alpine Club man . . . [is] . . . a god upon the earth. To have had his feet where a room of his own  & our feet have never rested, and can never rest, to have inhaled an air rarer than that which will ever inflate our lungs, to be one of a class permitted to face dangers which to us would be simply suicidal, does give him a conscious divinity” (93–94). Trollope’s admiration crescendos in appreciation until he bestows upon the Alpine Club man the highest compliment: he who climbs, Trollope claims . . . he is the happy man. Trollope explains, “When we hear of a man who is calm and collected under every danger, we know that we hear of a happy man” (91). Willing to face down sudden death, Trollope ’s Alpine Club men behave like soldiers at war, embodying an esprit de corps that “makes our men active, courageous, ready in resource, prone to friendship, keen after gratifications which are in themselves good and noble” (89, 90). In the sketch’s final moves, Trollope closes by imagining a world conquered by British climbers, a world where “no natural fortress [not even Mont Blanc] has not been taken” (92). By this point, Trollope’s memorial to vanquished heroes has become a full-blown paean to the work that living British men, when they act together, are destined to execute. Underlying his celebration of this particular fraternity, the Alpine Club, is a deeply felt appreciation of heroic British masculinity writ large. What inscribes this one club as an organization of men worth profiling is Trollope’s vision of a national culture energized by competitiveness and accomplishment. His British masculine elite, pledging its allegiance both to the virtue of courage and to the ideal of friendship, embodies the ethos of adhesion that forms a club as well as a country’s collective sense of itself. Trollope’s British gentlemen adventurers hail from the “bracing menonly world” of nineteenth-century clubland (Clark, 176). Their narrative— indeed, their very story-worthiness—already begins to suggest the powerful political instrumentality of clubs to the nineteenth-century British imperial project. As I argue in this book’s other chapters, club life prepared Victorian men for various life paths and careers: strategically connected clubmen were well positioned to become successful novelists, influential public figures , powerful politicians, metropolitan journalists, and—now we can add to the list—key officials in service to the empire. Gentlemen’s clubs with more direct and explicit ties to empire, both home and away—both in London and in the colonies—foreground more intensely and with more at stake than other types of clubs what Mary Ann Clawson calls the “social metaphor of brotherhood” (40). When Bernard Darwin defines “clubbability” as “a liking for our fellow creatures and a general power of getting on with them,” [3.14.132.214] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 02:02...