Barbara Black is a professor of English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She is the author of On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2000). Her work has appeared in such journals as Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Poetry, and Salmagundi. She is a contributor to the volume Dickens, Sexuality and Gender, edited by Lillian Nayder.
Listed in: Literary Criticism | European | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh · Victorian Studies · British History · Gender Studies
A Room of His Own
A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland
By Barbara Black
In nineteenth-century London, a clubbable man was a fortunate man, indeed. The Reform, the Athenaeum, the Travellers, the Carlton, the United Service are just a few of the gentlemen’s clubs that formed the exclusive preserve known as “clubland” in Victorian London—the City of Clubs that arose during the Golden Age of Clubs. Why were these associations for men only such a powerful emergent institution in nineteenth-century London?
