In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs.
Barbara Black is a professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She is the author of On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000). Her work has appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Poetry, and Salmagundi. She is a contributor to the volume Dickens, Sexuality and Gender, edited by Lillian Nayder.
"Her book is an absorbing and enlightening study of the importance of clubs to the formation of upper- and upper-middle class Victorian masculinity, as the Victorian gentleman searched for a room of his own, separate from both home and the workplace. Black takes us on a chronological tour of the Victorian gentleman's clubs in London and the colonies [...] For Black, the Victorian gentleman's club is a representation of embattled masculinity just as much as it is a statement of masculine power and confidence [...] Black deftly reveals how every club is a statement of both exclusion and inclusion; it needs its outsiders to help define those whom it chooses to let in [...] She ranges over the century with ease, and her obvious enthusiasm and love for London's old clubhouses and club culture makes this a very readable book." - Mary L. Shannon, Times Literary Supplement
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