Michael Wheeler: The Athenaeum: More Than Just Another London Club. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020.

• Francis O’Gorman

The Athenæum, founded in 1824, is “more than just another London club” because its originators intended it to be, first of all, more than a social and dining institution. Of course, it was intended to be that, too, but, under the imaginative and energetic leadership of John Wilson Croker (1780–1857) from the Admiralty, the club was to be strictly non-partisan, and its membership had to be distinguished cultural figures. The Athenæum was to be, as the founding intentions stated, a “Club for Literary and Scientific men and followers of the Fine Arts”: no proleptic sense of ‘two cultures’ here. The membership requirements assumed important publications and the library of the Clubhouse – initially at 12 Waterloo Place then, as now, at 107 Pall Mall – was a crucial resource. As Michael Wheeler makes admirably clear, the opportunity to read the latest periodicals, and the newest studies on topical matters, made the Clubhouse peculiarly attractive from the start and the opportunities to discuss those matters with other distinguished minds gave the Athenæum, from the beginning, the air of learned society (there were close connections from the beginning with, for instance, the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Royal Society).