Gossip is not only a guilty pleasure; it is also an important tool of social control. Nowhere is this more evident than in the nineteenth‐century gentlemen's clubs of London. This article looks at the private lives of elite men whose gossip helped shape class and gender ideals. Archival documents, private memoirs and periodical literature provide both an insider and outsider vision of a very private world. Looking at how men gossiped points to codes of gentlemanly behaviour, the importance of homosocial life, and the place of oral culture in a modern, literate age.

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use the terms "upper class" and "elite" throughout the article to refer to the membership of gentlemen's clubs. Clubmen were aristocrats, politicians, and men at the top of the business, professional, and military worlds. This would include men from both the landed aristocracy and the upper middle class or the aristocracy of talent. A more detailed exploration of membership can be found in my dissertation, "Clubland: Masculinity, Status, and Community in the Gentlemen's Clubs of London, c. 1880-1914" (PhD diss., University of Toronto, forthcoming).

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