The Tuesday Club
Today I started reading The History of the Ancient and Honorable Tuesday Club and in the preface I’m already seeing a lot of material that gets at some of the weirdness surrounding the club phenomenon. Throughout Hamilton’s Preface you can see the elitism that R. and I were talking about in our meeting yesterday. Hamilton is defending himself against the accusation (I’m not sure if anyone had actually made this accusation) that he had wasted his time in an idle pursuit by writing down the history of the Tuesday Club, and in response he scolds his audience, arguing that their lives have been taken up with far more idle pursuits than this one. Further, Hamilton insists that the background research into ancient and modern authors that he has done while writing has contributed to his “Rational, Intellectual and Gelastic” edification. This last one is particularly interesting, and we don’t generally think of one’s sense of humor (and I must note that the term gelastic refers to a particularly ridiculous or absurd type of humor) as needing edification, but Hamilton clearly does. This seems completely bound up with this idea of elitism that runs through a lot of these clubs.
There is also an interesting passage toward the end of the preface in which he compares the history of the Tuesday Club to the histories of “Empires and Kingdoms.” This reference brings to the forefront the inherent political nature that all of these clubs, but particularly the formally constituted ones, have.
Chapter 3 is titled “Of Clubs in General, and their Antiquity,” and in this chapter Hamilton gives a short, facecious history of the concept of clubbing. He begins with this concise definition of the club:
By Clubs I mean those societies, which generally meet of an evening, either at some tavern or private house, to converse, or look at one another, smoke a pipe, drink a toast, be politic or dull, lively or frolicksome, to philosophize or trifle, argue or debate, talk over Religion, News, Scandal or bawdy, or spend the time in any other Sort of Clubical amusement. Out of this definition I expressly excluce, all your card matches and meetings, those properly belonging to the celebrated modern assemblies called Routs and Drums, which are many degrees inferior to Clubs, as being less ancient. (12)
Hamilton also traces the history of clubs back to the beginning of mankind, finding evidence for their existence both in mankind’s natural fellow-feeling for one another (which has recently been confirmed by the work of Newton) and Cain’s creation of the city in Genesis, in which Hamilton assumes there must have been a club.
On p. 39 Hamilton reproduces the laws with which the Tuesday Club of Annapolis was constituted. I’m not sure if they were written formally, but they seem selected with an eye toward the narrative of luxury that Hamilton plans to draw us through the text.
In Book II Ch. 3 the club begins to take shape and Hamilton explicitly compares the beginnings of the club to the Golden Age. He also tells of how they instituted the Gelastic Law, which requires them to laugh at any person who brings up politics or any other such serious subjects. However, he notes that there were times when this law was not effective, which he interprets not as a weakness in this particular law but in the institution of law itself.
Throughout the book, Hamilton has a concept that he refers to as the “clubical character.” By this he seems to mean the types of behavior and thought patterns cultivated by the ideal club member (which definitely ties it to a sort of neo-classical faith in the power of such an ideal). Thus, for instance, the clubical character is not inclined to play cards, but he is inclined to make bawdy jokes and to drink heavily. Throughout the first part of the text, at least, Hamilton seems to leave this concept of the “clubical character” intentionally vaguely defined, so as to highlight the Tuesday Club’s simultaneous potential for success and failure.
On p.71 we get the introduction of set speeches into the club, and this proves to be a very interesting phenomenon. Hamilton is very much against the idea of letting the members perform set speeches because he believes that it contributes to luxury and vanity, and also presumably because it detracts from the more informal conversation that the club was founded in order to foster. However, once one of the members is allowed to make a speech the rest of them want to try as well, and achieve mixed results. However, when a controversy erupts between two speakers the whole tradition just kind of collapses. I think this is fascinating because it’s an experiment that Hamilton is completely against, but because it is played out with so much silliness it becomes one of the many stories that make the Tuesday Club so fascinating. It’s like the club has built into its structure a way to consume and digest order, always returning to the anarchic free play that they intended for the club in the first place.
On p.84 when one of the members displays a talent for singing, they elect him chief musician of the club and pass a law stating that whenever he is to vote that if he does not sing his vote it is to count for nothing.
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