Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity and Oral Communities in Late Nineteenth‐Century London

Abstract

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.

Members only: the Victorian gentlemen’s club as a space for doing business 1843–1900

“…By the early nineteenth century, the club was recognized as a formal structure in society (Milne-Smith 2011). Subsequently gentlemen's clubs as cultural institutions became 'creatures of their relational networks' as the cultural values embedded within the club reflected the understandings of social reality (Meyer and Rowan 1977, 343).…”

“…Literary historian Barbara Black discusses that the clubs of London were social forces, in addition to being significant cultural influencers (Black 2012). They played a central role in constructing an elite class, fostering a community that defined what it meant to be a man in nineteenth century England (Black 2012;Milne-Smith 2011;Tosh 2007). Most historians agree that the club was a masculine escape for the middle-class gentleman of the nineteenth century, a way for them to flee from the domesticity of the Victorian home (Milne-Smith 2006;Sinha 2001;Tosh 2007).…”

“…The emphasis has been placed on their role in elite and middle-class society, in addition to their influence on gender and class inequality (Black 2012;Milne-Smith 2006Tosh 2015).…”

Gentlemanly Professionals and Men-about-Town: Occupational Identities Amongst London Advertising Men, 1951–67

“…As Amy Milne-Smith has shown, the clubman was allowed and expected to have a few vices, so long as they were not 'vulgar'. 63 Licensed cross-dressing in theatrical productions was well-established in all male societies like single sex grammar schools, public schools and the Armed Forces, but the Thirty Club pantomimes perhaps hinted at a degree of unorthodoxy amongst Oughton and his colleagues. The 'unorthodoxy' of the Thirty Club pantomimes, however, was culturally distanced from the queer underworld of 1950s London or the more eroticized consumption of the commercial sex industry that developed in the wake of the Wolfeneden Report.…”

The 'bickerings' of the 'Mangungu Brethren': Talk, Tales and Rumour in Early New Zealand

“…Modes of talk can be sanctioned or informal, and both assist to establish and maintain social rules, protocols and customs, and to mark 'proper conduct' in the mission field. 11 Ways of talking and what one talked about and to whom denoted social rank and status and marked a group as exclusive. In nineteenth-century British gentleman's clubs, patronized mainly by elite men, their oral world was defined around codes of honour, gentlemanly masculinity and appropriate behaviour.…”