The Hell-fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies by Evelyn Lord (review)

263 such an act of self-immersion.’’ Readers who like unsettling experiences will enjoy this book. Lengthy quotations of primary sources, which function both as a tribute to the author’s interest in blogging and as an enhancement to the work’s conversational feel, are also strengths. Paradoxically, they ground discussion. Readers who want a wild ride into the world of eighteenth-century breeding, or those who do not mind using the book’s Index to steer their way through discussions, will not be disappointed . Pam Lieske Kent State University at Trumbull EVELYN LORD. The Hell-fire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies. New Haven & London: Yale, 2008. Pp. xxix ⫹ 247. $32.50. Ms. Lord casts a skeptical eye on the lurid descriptions of previous writers in order to demythologize, to sift fact from fiction, but in the end she leaves us no better informed. We may, in fact, wind up a few steps back. The first sign of danger is Ms. Lord’s statement that she will not embark on ‘‘a search for the truth about the clubs,’’ which she says is impossible, given the lack of evidence. Instead, she will offer ‘‘an approximation of the truth’’ based on her interpretation of the available sources and ‘‘modern vision.’’ This sounds like an excuse for not digging deeply into primary sources. Ms. Lord makes much of the surviving minutes of the apparently colorful meetings of the Knights of the Beggar’s Benison, but rather less than she should of the fact that they are an 1892 ‘‘transcript’’ of destroyed originals that could well have been cooked up by a Victorian with a taste for the salacious. She briefly mentions that a reference to Fanny Hill (1750, under that title) in the proceedings for 1737 may be a later interpolation , but that does not prevent her from saying on the previous page that a manuscript copy of Cleland’s novel probably found its way, via East India Company officers, to the Beggar’s Benison in Scotland in the 1730s. The approximate truth clearly works both ways. This theory of history allows Ms. Lord to move from the frequently repeated allegations of the Duke of Wharton’s participation in a hell-fire club in the 1720s to statements that the members of such clubs did this, that, and the other. What clubs? What members ? She has established nothing: she merely rehashes the old stuff, with no more critical involvement than the addition of ‘‘allegedly’’ or ‘‘reputedly’’ to the tired old tales, or a brief disclaimer that it might all be fictional. If it is fictional , the historian’s job is to say why and present the best evidence of what actually did happen, or else not bother. She (correctly) concludes there was no actual Satanism, but puts it in the title of her book anyway. There were ‘‘many links’’ between rakish clubs of the seventeenth century and those in the next, but no actual evidence is provided, and a few lines later she tells us that in any event ‘‘the links may be coincidental.’’ A coincidental link is no link. Ms. Lord loves to ask unanswered questions (‘‘Was Bubb Dodington just a chubby eccentric with a taste for the exotic , or a serious politician and public figure?’’; ‘‘Was the Kingdom of Dalkey a front for revolutionary activities, or simply an excuse for a good day out?’’). This is no substitute for analysis. The book contains a good deal of filler, for example the potted biographies of Sir Francis Dashwood, the Earl of Sand- 264 wich, George Bubb Dodington and John Wilkes, which are not used in any significant way to develop conclusions about the clubs they belonged to or the nature of that activity. At best, Ms. Lord asserts, ‘‘boys will be boys.’’ There is also no real engagement with recent scholarship on masculinity and male sociability in the eighteenth century. Members of rakish groups may not have been acting ‘‘against accepted social and moral norms’’ as much as conforming to their own expectations of gentlemanly leisure activity. The book is ostensibly about ‘‘hell-fire’’ clubs, but is often just about clubs (the Beefsteaks); and sometimes not even about clubs at all...