A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland by Barbara Black (review)

As scholars of nineteenth-century English society and culture know—especially those scholars who have read the novels of Anthony Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, and William Thackeray—the Victorian clubland was all-important to the gentry of that period and to the ever-increasing numbers of aspiring middle-class males. Novels, diaries, memoirs, and even cartoons attest to the fact that club culture dictated the male world. The clubs represented status, security, and prestige, and served as a place for smoking, reading newspapers, tame gaming, and socializing. In A Room of His Own, Barbara Black investigates how England managed to maintain approximately 200 different clubs during the "Golden Age of Clubland." The prologue and six chapters mine major Victorian writers' works to examine social and cultural customs in detail.

For a reader interested in periodicals and newspapers of that period, this book will be relevant for two reasons. First, it reproduces cartoons about clubs from various nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers and refers to club-related articles in several Victorian periodicals, such as Thackeray's articles on clubs for Punch, especially his weekly series entitled "The Snobs of England." Second, and more importantly, chapter 3, "Clubland's Special Correspondence," examines the relationship between clubs and journalism. Tracing the concept of clubs back to eighteenth-century coffeehouses, Black shows how clubs and the press were combined and how that relationship expanded in the nineteenth century. As she writes, "The burgeoning nineteenth-century press often asserted its social authority and political currency by being intimate with clubland" (113). They interacted with each other. The press wanted information and readership, and club members wanted news and gossip. In fact, some newspapers may have catered to club members for the majority of their readership. Black discusses how the Pall Mall designed itself after the eighteenth-century Spectator and Tatler in order to evoke the feeling of those newspapers in the coffeehouses, and she also briefly discusses some little-known Victorian newspapers and magazines that were published expressly for the clubs.

Although the main focus of Black's book is male clubs and how they contribute to patrons' Englishness, an epilogue gives women the last word. Entitled "A Room of Her Own," it briefly names some of the clubs catering solely to women that emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century when the status of women was slowly changing. When women began engaging in mixed outdoor games like croquet and lawn tennis and traveling the roads of England on bicycles, they, too, began to aspire to the culture of clubland.