In The Club, the American literary scholar Leo Damrosch brilliantly brings together the members’ voices ... Beginning with the friendship between Johnson, the moralist, and Boswell, his promiscuous future biographer—a connection that was initially forged outside the Club—Damrosch breathes life into 'The Friends Who Shaped an Age' (in his subtitle’s phrase). As this stellar book moves from one Club member to another, it comes together as an ambitious venture homing in on the nature of creative stimulus ... Resonating beyond the well-documented links among these leading lights, The Club captures their distinctly individual voices and invites us to feel the pulsations of contact over a period of 20 years ... The best historians...invite readers to accompany them 'behind the scenes.' Damrosch does precisely that here ... a book that sustains a shared conversation, a terrific feat in keeping with that of the Club itself.
...in his engaging and illuminating The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Leo Damrosch makes no attempt to describe [the club] as a coherent entity, or to follow its development and endow it with a specific part in 'shaping an age.' Instead, he uses the Club to give a fresh slant to the more familiar story of the friendship between Johnson and Boswell ... Concerned that we should see, as well as hear, these groups, Damrosch includes a superb array of color plates and black-and-white illustrations ... Damrosch is a crisp guide to everything from rhetorical styles to the gallows at Tyburn, where prisoners from Newgate were executed. Like a benign lecturer fixing his audience with a stare over his glasses, he alerts us to crucial points with a nod ... He wears his learning lightly, and his sympathetic enjoyment is infectious ... While Damrosch’s insights into the characters and achievements of Johnson, Boswell, and the leading Club members are astute, he is also generous in his acknowledgment of other commentators. These evoke a body of readers over time that includes some unexpected voices ... on Damrosch’s stage, we are transported back to a world of conversations, arguments, ideas, and writings.
The great strength of The Club is that it renders these personages from another century so vividly that we feel we once knew them ourselves. Damrosch accomplishes this by incorporating into his text chapters of masterful biography—familiar territory for 18th-century scholars, who get to meet old friends brought to life as rarely before. For those who don’t know the era and its people well, The Club offers a wonderfully painless way of getting to know them ... While Damrosch is not reluctant to provide facts regarding his subjects’ public lives and projects, what matters more to him is presenting them as 'the genuine progeny of common humanity,' Johnson’s celebrated words of praise for the characters of Shakespeare ... Thankfully, the fact that women were not allowed in the Literary Club hasn’t stopped Damrosch from writing about them with the sensitivity they deserve ... Damrosch brings all these people, men and women alike, to vivid life. After finally closing the book, I found that I missed them.
The whole would be more than the sum of the parts, the Turk’s Head’s private upstairs room a crucible of collaborative thinking far stronger than any solitary effort of individual genius. Did it turn out that way in practice? That’s the story Damrosch wants to tell, but he meets some obstacles along the way. One is the awkward fact that we don’t have a great deal of detail about what went on in the Turk’s Head ... Even if there’s a risk of overstating the Club’s importance as a way of unleashing the creativity of its members, it certainly provides a good basis for a study of intersecting lives. Damrosch sketches the lives adroitly, with an eye for anecdote[.]
Contemporary paintings and caricatures, all closely scrutinized by Damrosch, further enrich our feel for the age’s high and low life ... Because it tracks at least a dozen figures, The Club can’t compare in scholarly depth with Damrosch’s superb critical biographies of Rousseau and Swift. Nonetheless, the now retired Harvard professor of English has brought “the common reader”— Johnson’s term — an exceptionally lively introduction to late 18th-century English thought and literature. No doubt the book grew out of what must have been a dazzling survey course on the age of Johnson. If you’re already an aficionado of this period, you will recognize that Damrosch compresses a vast amount of detail into his narrative and relates many of the best anecdotes and verbal bonbons associated with Johnson or his friends. I did miss seeing one of my favorite Johnsonisms, though ... Damrosch seamlessly mixes learned exposition with striking factoids and observations ... a magnificently entertaining book.
Damrosch provides a very readable introduction to a group of people who, both individually and collectively, have fascinated scholars across the humanities and social sciences for centuries ... The Club is an unusual book: part group biography, part literary criticism and the cultural history of ideas, and part political and social history of 18th-century Britain. It is, in Damrosch’s words, 'a book with pictures'—and lots of them, used to great effect. It takes the style of literary biography while recognizing how the development of that genre is indebted to Boswell himself, thanks to his innovative inclusion of conversation in his Life of Johnson ... While I confess to being slightly disappointed that there is not more on the intellectual content of meetings of The Club itself, what this genre does provide space for is the history of intellectual culture beyond privileged male spaces ... One of the many merits of this book is that Damrosch, emeritus professor of English literature at Harvard, is able to integrate the vital role played by women...who lacked the social freedom if not the intellectual abilities of their male counterparts.
... excellent ... the Club itself gets very little direct attention in Mr. Damrosch’s pages, despite its giving him his title...The real subject of The Club is literary life in England in the second half of the 18th century ... In [Damrosch's] career he has achieved the ideal for academic publication set many years ago by Jacques Barzun at Columbia: that of impeccable scholarship at the service of absolute lucidity, resulting in work that can be enjoyed by thoughtful readers both inside and outside the academy. “The Club” is such a work—learned, penetrating, a pleasure to read ... As Samuel Johnson seems to have dominated every room he ever entered, so does he dominate Mr. Damrosch’s book ... filled with interesting oddments ... 31 elegant color plates and numerous black-and-white drawings of the book’s dramatis personae [are] scattered throughout this splendid book.
Enriched with well-chosen color plates and black-and-white illustrations, this is an excellent introduction to Johnson and his world for the novice and a pleasant retelling for the initiated.
Damrosch’s approach to the difficult problem of how to bring each of the many interesting Club members to life has been to drop a great many of them entirely and to concentrate on the two he deems absolutely central: Johnson and Boswell. And since he is unable (with reason) to assume any knowledge on the part of many of his readers, he begins the book with long biographical chapters on these two men, up until 1764. The result is that we don’t even get to the founding of the Club until well over a hundred pages into the book. The early material on Johnson and Boswell is perfectly fine, but it covers very, very well trodden ground ... Modern obsession with gender issues has made Damrosch’s task difficult in other ways, too ... the whole book suffers from the sort of bland politesse that has come to prevail in literary circles—an inappropriate tone to assume when writing about some of the most robustly outrageous conversationalists of all time: Johnson, in particular, took an almost brutal pleasure in offending his interlocutors ... Damrosch also seems strangely nervous about discussing his subjects’ sex lives ... , in our age of fluid sexuality and tolerance of deviance, why should anyone be bothered if poor old Johnson got his thrills in odd ways? ... Though Damrosch has diffused his narrative in too many directions, he does point to the real importance of the Club, aside from its immortal table talk: it exemplified the rise in cultural importance of the new middle class, the bourgeoisie.
Damrosch offers incisive portraits of individual members, highlighting their relationships and interactions with one another to reveal 'the teeming, noisy, contradictory, and often violent world' they inhabited ... besides illuminating the salient issues of the day, Damrosch characterizes with sharp insight his many protagonists ... Although Damrosch emphasizes the men and their works, he does not neglect the women in their lives ... Late-18th-century Britain comes brilliantly alive in a vibrant intellectual history.
... delightfully captures the bonds of friendship and competition which joined some of the late 18th century’s greatest minds ... Damrosch doesn’t provide a fly-on-the-wall account of the Club’s meetings but rather crisp, colorful portraits of its members, illuminated by quotes from their lively, sometimes contentious interactions with each other ... This effervescent history shines a light on the extraordinary origins of a club which still exists to this day.
