Association and Enlightenment: Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700-1830, ed. Marc C. Wallace and Jane Rendell

There have been many histories of Edinburgh’s and Glasgow’s clubs and societies, but the academic study of Scotland’s “associational culture” really began in 1969 with Davis McElroy’s Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies, a revision (and significant expansion) of his 1952 Edinburgh dissertation. Far from being venues for urbane conviviality or drunken raillery, McElroy showed, Scotland’s clubs were a vehicle for the nation’s ongoing modernization, that is, its improvement, after the demise of its parliament in 1707. McElroy built this connection on the Lockean metaphor of association: ideas in the mind, like people in societies, flourish through their relations with each other, though these associations (both popular and ideal) need to be guided by rules of propriety and sense. Subsequent work has proved that the Age of Improvement, what we prefer to call the Scottish Enlightenment, was indeed propelled by this abiding metaphor. Steven Shapin, Paul Wood, and especially Roger Emerson made clear that much of Scotland’s associational life was dedicated to scientific matters and made Scotland a renowned center for agriculture and medicine. Religious reform, moral philosophy, and economic theory were debated in meetings of the Select Society and the Poker Club as much as in the churches and universities, as Nicholas Phillipson, Richard Sher, and John Dwyer showed. This was especially the case of David Hume’s philosophy as his lack of an academic position was relieved by his active and admired participation in Edinburgh’s club scene. More recent work on associational culture has expanded outward from the elite, male, urban clubs of Scotland’s major cities to encompass the publishing industry, the military, and the Empire, provincial reading clubs and local subscription libraries, the burgeoning radicalism of the corresponding societies, and the nascent feminism of women’s charitable organizations.Associational culture’s influence in Scotland and beyond is taken up by several of the chapters in Wallace and Rendell’s Association and Enlightenment and in the editors’ comprehensive introduction. But the editors also stress that it is the “variety” and “complexity” of Scottish associationalism that keeps it historically interesting after more than fifty years of sustained scholarship. It is probably inevitable that at a time and in a place where every town and village boasted a room or building dedicated to “polite” conversation, disputes and disagreements would arise. Indeed, associationalism requires a certain frisson both to enrich and, ultimately, to improve the ideas circulating within it. David Allen documents connective roots of Scottish club culture in the English associationalism delineated by Shaftesbury and Locke and popularized by Addison and Steele. Tracing those connections back through the Scottish philosophers’ own associative networks, he shows that it was precisely the fact that literary clubs and other sociable “institutions were suited to a considerable variety of outlooks and personalities, accommodating and even celebrating diversity rather than allowing it to become an impediment to fruitful interpersonal engagement” that made them instrumental to the fostering of a new liberal outlook in Scotland. To be sure, there is something speculative, if not also self-aggrandizing, about the ways that philosophers and historians like Francis Hutcheson, Henry Home (Lord Kames), and John Millar conceived of association and “communal organization” as an engine of social progress that had been impeded during the Middle Ages by arbitrary, feudal government and was only blossoming again in Europe in their time. But such claims are not complete exaggerations. Ralph MacLean’s depiction of the relationship between Glasgow University and that city’s growing commercial classes suggests that the societies in which academics and entrepreneurs mingled strongly influenced, on one hand, the development of Scottish political economy and the pluralizing of Scottish religion, while, on the other hand, giving the merchants respectability and clout.The main strength of this volume is the contributors’ insights into the ways that intellectual rivalries and administrative challenges within and among the clubs can nuance our picture of Scottish intellectual life. Jacqueline Jenkinson’s chapter, for instance, stresses the competition between the elite Medical Society in Edinburgh and the Philosophical Society in Glasgow (both founded in the 1730s) and, subsequently, the many smaller and less official medical societies formed in the cities and smaller towns (e.g., the student-run Royal Medical Society, which survives to this day). Against the conception of Scottish clubs as bastions of refinement and politesse, often opposed to the rowdiness of pubs and taverns, James Caulde unearths James Boswell’s participation between 1760 and 1765 in the Soaping Club, dedicated to “social Rabelaisian jubilation” and “rejecting country house hospitality.” Likewise, Rhona Brown describes the mixed, “bohemian” qualities of the Cape Club known primarily for its patronage of the poet Robert Ferguson. The collection makes a good deal of freemasonry, hardly surprising considering that one of the editors is an expert on the subject. Corey Andrew’s thorough account of the ways Robert Burns tried (and failed) to capitalize on “his status as a freemason” to “bridge the social and professional gaps” in Edinburgh society demonstrates how challenging it could be for someone of Burns’s rank to overcome rigid social hierarchies and how easy it was later for historians and biographers to romanticize his involvement as a sign of freemasonry’s own pretensions to equality.Complementing its sense of the complexity of Scotland’s associational culture is the volume’s realization of how our history of it must engage questions of space, class, and gender. Bob Harris, who has elsewhere surveyed the associational culture of Scotland’s provincial towns, considers the commercial and social buildings, including shops, taverns, inns, assembly rooms, as well as libraries and reading rooms, the sprang up throughout the Lowlands over the course of the century. Where and on what occasions these town and country societies met, Harris suggests, should play as big a part in our assessment of the purposes they served as do letters, memoirs, transactions, and subscription lists. Assessing the importance of student societies, Rosalind Carr stresses the way they helped form both “the polish and self-command necessary for professional and married life” and “a tavern-based libertine masculinity” in the young (and overwhelmingly elite) university men, in some respects providing a highly gendered, sexual education to those who, like Hume and Smith, never married.As Harris reminds us, the extent to which we can track associationalism beyond urban elite circles is impeded by a lack of documentary evidence, though this lack can lead to productive conjectures—including Harris’s own—about the role it played in Scottish culture. By the same token, one of the most fascinating conclusions reached by the contributors to this volume is that sociability in Scotland was itself largely a speculative affair. Thus, Martyn Powell makes clear that establishing a “public sphere” of clubs and societies in Scotland as well as in Ireland involved a good deal of fictionalizing, and even produced a number of fictitious clubs, the irony of which becomes palpable in the clubs that appear in eighteenth-century and Victorian fiction. As Jane Rendell notes, many of the women’s philanthropic, friendly, and benevolent societies established in Scotland between 1790 and 1830 were “ephemeral”—perhaps only managing to host one or two meetings or barely able to produce an adequate membership—not only because they faced “suspicion from magistrates” and other legitimating (read: male) civic institutions but also because the energy and ambition of the women who founded them exceeded what was practicable at the time. The legacies of Scottish associationalism include the scope and enthusiasm of the scholars working on it, their patient and detailed examination of its growing documentary archive, and their marshaling of an impressive variety of approaches to make sense of it.