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The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies
The Hell-Fire Clubs scandalized eighteenth-century English society. Rumors of their orgies, recruitment of prostitutes, extensive libraries of erotica, extreme rituals, and initiation ceremonies circulated widely at the time, only to become more sensational as generations passed. This thoroughly researched book sets aside the exaggerated gossip about the secret Hell-Fire Clubs and brings to light the first accurate portrait of their membership (including John Wilkes, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Prince of Wales), beliefs, activities, and the reasons for their proliferation, first in the British Isles and later in America, possibly under the auspices of Benjamin Franklin. Hell-Fire Clubs operated under a variety of titles, but all attracted similar members—mainly upper-class men with abundant leisure and the desire to shock society. The book explores the social and economic context in which the clubs emerged and flourished; their various phases, which first involved violence as an assertion of masculinity, then religious blasphemy, and later sexual indulgence; and the countermovement that eventually suppressed them. Uncovering the facts behind the Hell-Fire legends, this book also opens a window on the rich contradictions of the Enlightenment period.
250 pages, Hardcover
First published November 3, 2008
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August 3, 2009
Most boring book about sex and Satanism ever. I guess I wanted to read it for the salacious details and unfortunately, the author announces her academic goal of separating the truth from juicy gossip. Juicy gossip was the whole reason I was interested in this book, so I'm probably not the target audience.
February 19, 2010
Despite the somewhat abrupt start and ending to the narrative, this is a fairly solid, evidence-based history of trangressive male clubs (with a side view at moral majority reactions to the media coverage of the day and to very real disorder in the streets) in eighteenth century North Atlantic culture.
Unfortunately, the determination of Evelyn Lord not to speculate beyond the available evidence is limiting. The organisations being studied (actually very disparate in nature) are, by definition, secret. This means that, while the author's conclusions are always sensible and she is probably reliable in representing the most likely function of the clubs in any one situation and at any one time, many questions remain about the motivation and meaning of transgression for the middle and upper classes of the time.
It may be that such questions will never be answered. One school of thought likes to push the clubs into the territory of the esoteric. Another likes to explain them more sociologically in pragmatic or merely playful terms. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in-between. The evidence tends to drive us away from the esoteric and the spiritual but the evidence is also so sparse that we can never be sure of our ground - hence the interpretative vacuum in which so many, often quite demented, speculations are allowed to flourish.
Still, this book is an excellent starting point for further investigation. The difficulty with it is that the author's reluctance to analyse in favour of just telling the story leaves that burden with us. We, the readers, have to try and order a narrative that is fairly clear as to what happens when to whom but remains unclear as to the story's full meaning.
Sometimes it descends into the anecdotal with short sections on many one-off clubs, some of which (like the Beefsteaks) seem far from transgressional and others (like the Kingdom of Dalkey) merely carnivalesque and very public. If we learn anything, it is that transgressional clubs (with the probable exception of the Beggar's Benison movement) are exceptional, marginal and isolated even if, on occasions, they may be culturally initiative and sometimes highly entertaining to read about. Perhaps we can start by trying to break down the phenomenon into its probable components ...
First, there is a political story about how a class of psychologically vulnerable young aristocrats, returning from exile after a puritanical bourgeois revolution against their kind, and dependent on a strong Crown for patronage, threw their victory in the face of the still-strong middle class urban establishment as gross bad behaviour and the type of extreme sexual transgression that is represented in literature by the Earl of Rochester.
The establishment had permitted the return of monarchy - Charles II did not return to England except by invitation and it was an invitation that might be withdrawn at any time. The struggle between executive authority and its 'court' and a ‘country’ which had re-ordered itself completely after the execution of Charles I would continue in many forms over many decades.
The frustration of some elements in the aristocracy at their uncertain condition (alongside a natural bit of youthful revolt against their elders) often expressed itself in transgressive behaviour - in drinking and whoring 'clubs' sometimes with a link to Jacobitism after the arrival of the Hanoverians. The more personally unstable members of the aristocracy exhibited wild behavior closer to that of, say, the tabloid image of a Pete Docherty today than, say, that of the people’s princess, Cheryl Cole.
In this context, the transgressive behaviour of Anglo-Irish aristocrats of the Protestant Ascendancy might be regarded as the most 'in yer face' of all as far as the wider population were concerned. If aristocrats in England were insulting the mores of tradesmen, at least the tradesmen were free men on middle class incomes. In Ireland, the aristocrats were insulting a vast under-nourished and depressed peasantry whose entire culture was alien to them. To drink toasts to the devil (if this ever happened) was not just arrogant and contemptuous of 'ordinary folk', it was rubbing a crushed people's noses in the aristocrat's own shit. No wonder the peasants clung to their simple Catholic faith against such people - or at least as the latter were presented to them in the media of the day and by story-telling repute.
This leads us to the second factor. Much of this transgression in the first third or so of the century wass taking place amongst late adolescents and early twenty-somethings with too much money, expectations of future inheritance (and so too easy credit) or hoping for the patronage of the first two categories. The book is good on the role of the new hack media and pamphlets in fuelling what we would now call tabloid accounts of what went on amongst what were really little more than local gangs of testosterone-fuelled lads.
This was the sort of behaviour that footballers are now said to get up to in hotel rooms with willing groupies and hookers - with added violence. Eighteenth century England was becoming, for a while, before various ‘reform’ movements began their back-lash, an increasingly libertarian culture with no effective restraint in terms of public morality, one where the majority were pruriently fascinated by transgression and yet seeking to control it as socially damaging - the analogy with contemporary culture is surprisingly close although Lord determinedly avoids such comparisons.
Young males of wealth were also being sent on the Grand Tour by mid-century as a matter of course. Though most travelers probably conducted themselves much as expected by their elders, we have a creative minority who developed a fascination with what they saw and who sought to bring new ideas back to England where they fuelled a new aristocratic high culture that was more private, less urban, based on their estates and, because behind closed doors, more able to adopt transgressive forms where the will existed.
This brings us to the third model of transgression - the so-called 'Hell-fire Club' of Sir Francis Dashwood and friends. The name is a journalistic creation and there is no point in reproducing the detail of the story here.
In conformity with the author's concern only to deal with available evidence, this undoubtedly sexually transgressive Club, which has to be seen in the context of the significant and fertile contribution of Dashwood and his high aristocratic and intelligent bourgeois friends to wider British culture, is dealt with a bit cursorily in the book, repeating material easily found elsewhere (if here with more judgement).
However, what is clear (a visit to the re-modelled Parish Church in West Wyncombe is sufficient evidence of this) is that Dashwood was seeking to recreate a pagan Mediterranean sensibility behind the hedges and fences guarding the one final truth of the English revolution - the right of an estate-holder to do what he willed without interference of the State on his own property so long as he treated other English people as men and women with free choices (and so distinct from continental aristocratic practice). Basically, a whore could decline to be used if the price was not right and staff must be paid in coin.
The most charged speculations have always surrounded the sexual and esoteric aspects of the Club and the degree to which the highly intelligent but self-avowedly dilettante Dashwood was cocking a snook at the respectable establishment of the day. Even the significance of the sexual element has probably been exaggerated at the expense of the convivial because it is fairly clear that Dashwood was merely taking existing eighteenth century attitudes and just playing them out to their logical culmination under conditions where money and privacy were no object. Dashwood just added intellect to the mix.
In a world where men were married off for reasons of property as much as women, it was widely understood that pleasure and affectional relationships would have to operate within a parallel system to that of the conventional. The attraction of paganism would simply have been that it endorsed emotional reality (a precursor of romantic sensibility) rather than forced men of wealth into a 'tyrannical' Judaeo-Christian straitjacket, an imposition on the wealthy by those people who could not afford their natural instincts to be openly expressed under urban or small town scrutiny.
Pepys diary (not covered in this book) is full of perfectly reasonable affection and regard for a wife alongside erotic and affectional regard for other women, including the wives of friends, and this was quite normal for the time. By the mid-eighteenth century, 'reformers' (so often the bane of the lives of free men alongside the good they do for the truly oppressed) had made such freedoms a matter of censure for both men and women alike, moving England slowly but steadily towards the era of High Victorian morality where no respectable member of society could put a foot out of place in any social space, even the otherwise private space of the club. All that misplaced sexual energy was soon expanding an empire and slaughtering natives ...
As for the esoteric, there is no real evidence of some serious 'cult' in Dashwood’s circle but only of free-thinking men and probably women exploring transgressional ideas and adding transgressional behaviour to spice up their sexual lives - perhaps with foreign travel, the collection of texts and the plots and schemes of English politics creating an air of secrecy and resistance to the growing air of worthy conformity that was to be almost totalitarian in its effect on English culture by the mid-Victorian era.
The fact that Dashwood and his circle were (outside the influence of Benjamin Franklin on the American Revolution) effectively political failures suggests a degree of boredom behind the transgression. What do you do when you are a rich man without gainful employment? Wilkes became a 'success' by making a career of political transgression but only after he had broken with this set and was forced into extremity in order to be noticed.
It must be said that these transgressors were all rich enough to indulge their tastes. They tended to flaunt (like modern financiers) their wealth and freedom in front of struggling tradesmen engaged in six day trudgery and church on Sunday. There is no evidence that Dashwood did not pay his bills but many aristocrats did not. Failure to pay a tailor's bill could ruin his family. In a world where such tailors read the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, this aping of French disregard of 'ordinary folk' was not liberation to them but oppression.
The final turn to this aspect of the story, before the arrival of the next generation of dull establishment political clubs, such as the Beefsteaks where Gladstone and royalty ate comfortably, is the association of Dashwood with Benjamin Franklin and the work that they did together to simplify the Book of Common Prayer.
It is implied in many quarters that they might have talked of liberty in terms that would be understood in the American taverns that later revolted against local tyranny, first against local puritanism and then, at the right time, against a Crown whose only interest seemed to be to tax the middle classes to maintain wars to benefit the 'big men' of their day.
So matters turned full circle - eighteenth century transgression had started as an aristocratic revolt against an embedded establishment. A century later transgression is placed partly, if marginally, at the service of revolt by the more libertarian small man of property against that very same establishment, now in office for over a hundred settled years and probably to reach its apogee of sclerosis under Wellington and Castlereagh in the 1820s.
This brings us to the second half of the book which is an eye-opening account of a community of apparent transgression, based in Anglo-Scottish culture, that was clearly a revolt against the tendency of the Kirk to claim rights on all private life. This expressed itself as a network of voyeuristic and masturbatory clubs of prominent establishment males which may have been much more widespread than the remaining evidence (at St. Andrew's University) suggests and which spread through northern trade routes.
This 'Beggar's Benison' movement seems to have started around the Firth of Forth at mid-century, to have had no or little connection with English aristocratic transgression (although it had some possible link to the emergence of pornographic literature in London) and to have spread through the Baltic to the 'British' community in Russia and West to the United States. As it spread, it seems to have 'cleaned up' (as it did over time in Scotland) and become part of the tavern club culture that we noted above as potentially revolutionary in force.
The customs of this Movement are so counter-intuitive to our vision of Scottish sexual puritanism that they can only be explained by our making a major mental paradigm shift back into the world of Scottish modernisation and, at least for its precursors, into the debates over the Union with England (analogous to the debate over the European Union today) and the role of the Kirk. Secrecy about being pro-English or anti-Presbyterian might have been as sensible at one time as, amongst other political choices, being pro-Jacobite.
However, the Scottish-origin transgressive clubs appear to have been cultural rather than political. The real interest here is in the nature of Scottish sexual repression where the prime interest (and this appears to occur elsewhere in the story) is not in sexual conduct per se so much as in 'scientific' observation of female genitalia and in proving manhood through public (or rather private to the club) production of semen.
This is 'behind the bike sheds' stuff. It seems like an extension of all male education into adulthood as fixed and fetishistic sexual behaviour. There is none of that implied 'Eyes Wide Shut' eroticism of high English aristocratic transgression with willing whores and mistresses. This is paying servant girls to show their pussies and then expelling from the club the man who got so excited that he actually touched one ... the nearest analogy here is with the modern lap-dancing club and the 'no touch' rule. You can imagine the girls laughing all the way to the bank.
So, the author is offering us two separate narratives. The first is of the increasing attempt by some of the people considered to be natural rulers of their country, frustrated at having to bow down before a restrictive cultural conformity, to take their revolt from the streets as arrogant kids and back into the safety of their private estates before finally giving up and joining the establishment, reserving their subsequent sexual pleasures to the whore house and the mistress.
The second is of a repressed modernising and increasingly libertarian middle class of traders and businessmen trying to come to terms with their sexuality without risking their property and using the cover of Enlightenment investigation to find some low risk non-homosexual male bonding and a bit of sexual titillation behind closed doors.
The two narratives never quite converge though there are other stories - of the emergence of pornographic literature, of high aristocratic interest in radical libertarian ideas and of 'tavern' culture as a form of resistance to the power of the established church - that overlap a little with both. Transgressive clubs are interesting less because of what they say about their members as that they were ever necessary in the first place.
These clubs are a back-handed compliment to the power of the Judaeo-Christian culture in which they were embedded. Think of the growing power of methodism, of anti-alcohol and anti-sex industry campaigns, of the evangelical drive against slavery, of the promotion of the place of the woman as angel of the home, of the increasing need to be sexually discreet, of the relationship between sexuality and property and the increasing expectation that order be imposed by the State. On top of this, observe the perils of rapid modernisation and the management of emotion into 'sentiment' (and away from its raw expression as violence or lust).
All this is combined into one dominant culture that was eventually structured to repress any sexual dialogue and then channel it back into faux-pagan performance art and that peculiar British attitude that sex is 'naughty but nice', much like a cream cake, to be eaten and enjoyed only occasionally, in private and with considerable guilt at its presumed bad effects on both body and soul.
The roots of the decadent rebellion of the 1890s (with its faux-paganism and its fetishistic attitude towards sexuality) were in this same culture. Both rebellions, whether of the Hellfire Club or the decadents, certainly based on any sensible assessment of what happened afterwards, only point up the extent of the repressed sexual culture of the bulk of the British in history. Repression has been the national cultural norm of the British people from the Glorious Revolution to the 1980s. Even now, occasional moral panics from our modern tabloids and the commercialisation of sexuality suggest that underlying attitudes remain driven by sensational and by the ‘naughty but nice’ cream cake model of sex.
The book covers none of this cultural ground in depth but it is very good on the politics and sociology of the eighteenth century. Evelyn Lord is not interested in 'lessons from history' but only in telling the story as she finds it.
It is also a mine of amusing anecdotes with the added advantage that Evelyn Lord is very good at sifting fact from fiction and ensuring that we understand that most tales of transgression were probably fictional and certainly over-blown. On that basis, the book is recommended but you will have to make up your own mind as to its 'meaning'.
Unfortunately, the determination of Evelyn Lord not to speculate beyond the available evidence is limiting. The organisations being studied (actually very disparate in nature) are, by definition, secret. This means that, while the author's conclusions are always sensible and she is probably reliable in representing the most likely function of the clubs in any one situation and at any one time, many questions remain about the motivation and meaning of transgression for the middle and upper classes of the time.
It may be that such questions will never be answered. One school of thought likes to push the clubs into the territory of the esoteric. Another likes to explain them more sociologically in pragmatic or merely playful terms. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in-between. The evidence tends to drive us away from the esoteric and the spiritual but the evidence is also so sparse that we can never be sure of our ground - hence the interpretative vacuum in which so many, often quite demented, speculations are allowed to flourish.
Still, this book is an excellent starting point for further investigation. The difficulty with it is that the author's reluctance to analyse in favour of just telling the story leaves that burden with us. We, the readers, have to try and order a narrative that is fairly clear as to what happens when to whom but remains unclear as to the story's full meaning.
Sometimes it descends into the anecdotal with short sections on many one-off clubs, some of which (like the Beefsteaks) seem far from transgressional and others (like the Kingdom of Dalkey) merely carnivalesque and very public. If we learn anything, it is that transgressional clubs (with the probable exception of the Beggar's Benison movement) are exceptional, marginal and isolated even if, on occasions, they may be culturally initiative and sometimes highly entertaining to read about. Perhaps we can start by trying to break down the phenomenon into its probable components ...
First, there is a political story about how a class of psychologically vulnerable young aristocrats, returning from exile after a puritanical bourgeois revolution against their kind, and dependent on a strong Crown for patronage, threw their victory in the face of the still-strong middle class urban establishment as gross bad behaviour and the type of extreme sexual transgression that is represented in literature by the Earl of Rochester.
The establishment had permitted the return of monarchy - Charles II did not return to England except by invitation and it was an invitation that might be withdrawn at any time. The struggle between executive authority and its 'court' and a ‘country’ which had re-ordered itself completely after the execution of Charles I would continue in many forms over many decades.
The frustration of some elements in the aristocracy at their uncertain condition (alongside a natural bit of youthful revolt against their elders) often expressed itself in transgressive behaviour - in drinking and whoring 'clubs' sometimes with a link to Jacobitism after the arrival of the Hanoverians. The more personally unstable members of the aristocracy exhibited wild behavior closer to that of, say, the tabloid image of a Pete Docherty today than, say, that of the people’s princess, Cheryl Cole.
In this context, the transgressive behaviour of Anglo-Irish aristocrats of the Protestant Ascendancy might be regarded as the most 'in yer face' of all as far as the wider population were concerned. If aristocrats in England were insulting the mores of tradesmen, at least the tradesmen were free men on middle class incomes. In Ireland, the aristocrats were insulting a vast under-nourished and depressed peasantry whose entire culture was alien to them. To drink toasts to the devil (if this ever happened) was not just arrogant and contemptuous of 'ordinary folk', it was rubbing a crushed people's noses in the aristocrat's own shit. No wonder the peasants clung to their simple Catholic faith against such people - or at least as the latter were presented to them in the media of the day and by story-telling repute.
This leads us to the second factor. Much of this transgression in the first third or so of the century wass taking place amongst late adolescents and early twenty-somethings with too much money, expectations of future inheritance (and so too easy credit) or hoping for the patronage of the first two categories. The book is good on the role of the new hack media and pamphlets in fuelling what we would now call tabloid accounts of what went on amongst what were really little more than local gangs of testosterone-fuelled lads.
This was the sort of behaviour that footballers are now said to get up to in hotel rooms with willing groupies and hookers - with added violence. Eighteenth century England was becoming, for a while, before various ‘reform’ movements began their back-lash, an increasingly libertarian culture with no effective restraint in terms of public morality, one where the majority were pruriently fascinated by transgression and yet seeking to control it as socially damaging - the analogy with contemporary culture is surprisingly close although Lord determinedly avoids such comparisons.
Young males of wealth were also being sent on the Grand Tour by mid-century as a matter of course. Though most travelers probably conducted themselves much as expected by their elders, we have a creative minority who developed a fascination with what they saw and who sought to bring new ideas back to England where they fuelled a new aristocratic high culture that was more private, less urban, based on their estates and, because behind closed doors, more able to adopt transgressive forms where the will existed.
This brings us to the third model of transgression - the so-called 'Hell-fire Club' of Sir Francis Dashwood and friends. The name is a journalistic creation and there is no point in reproducing the detail of the story here.
In conformity with the author's concern only to deal with available evidence, this undoubtedly sexually transgressive Club, which has to be seen in the context of the significant and fertile contribution of Dashwood and his high aristocratic and intelligent bourgeois friends to wider British culture, is dealt with a bit cursorily in the book, repeating material easily found elsewhere (if here with more judgement).
However, what is clear (a visit to the re-modelled Parish Church in West Wyncombe is sufficient evidence of this) is that Dashwood was seeking to recreate a pagan Mediterranean sensibility behind the hedges and fences guarding the one final truth of the English revolution - the right of an estate-holder to do what he willed without interference of the State on his own property so long as he treated other English people as men and women with free choices (and so distinct from continental aristocratic practice). Basically, a whore could decline to be used if the price was not right and staff must be paid in coin.
The most charged speculations have always surrounded the sexual and esoteric aspects of the Club and the degree to which the highly intelligent but self-avowedly dilettante Dashwood was cocking a snook at the respectable establishment of the day. Even the significance of the sexual element has probably been exaggerated at the expense of the convivial because it is fairly clear that Dashwood was merely taking existing eighteenth century attitudes and just playing them out to their logical culmination under conditions where money and privacy were no object. Dashwood just added intellect to the mix.
In a world where men were married off for reasons of property as much as women, it was widely understood that pleasure and affectional relationships would have to operate within a parallel system to that of the conventional. The attraction of paganism would simply have been that it endorsed emotional reality (a precursor of romantic sensibility) rather than forced men of wealth into a 'tyrannical' Judaeo-Christian straitjacket, an imposition on the wealthy by those people who could not afford their natural instincts to be openly expressed under urban or small town scrutiny.
Pepys diary (not covered in this book) is full of perfectly reasonable affection and regard for a wife alongside erotic and affectional regard for other women, including the wives of friends, and this was quite normal for the time. By the mid-eighteenth century, 'reformers' (so often the bane of the lives of free men alongside the good they do for the truly oppressed) had made such freedoms a matter of censure for both men and women alike, moving England slowly but steadily towards the era of High Victorian morality where no respectable member of society could put a foot out of place in any social space, even the otherwise private space of the club. All that misplaced sexual energy was soon expanding an empire and slaughtering natives ...
As for the esoteric, there is no real evidence of some serious 'cult' in Dashwood’s circle but only of free-thinking men and probably women exploring transgressional ideas and adding transgressional behaviour to spice up their sexual lives - perhaps with foreign travel, the collection of texts and the plots and schemes of English politics creating an air of secrecy and resistance to the growing air of worthy conformity that was to be almost totalitarian in its effect on English culture by the mid-Victorian era.
The fact that Dashwood and his circle were (outside the influence of Benjamin Franklin on the American Revolution) effectively political failures suggests a degree of boredom behind the transgression. What do you do when you are a rich man without gainful employment? Wilkes became a 'success' by making a career of political transgression but only after he had broken with this set and was forced into extremity in order to be noticed.
It must be said that these transgressors were all rich enough to indulge their tastes. They tended to flaunt (like modern financiers) their wealth and freedom in front of struggling tradesmen engaged in six day trudgery and church on Sunday. There is no evidence that Dashwood did not pay his bills but many aristocrats did not. Failure to pay a tailor's bill could ruin his family. In a world where such tailors read the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, this aping of French disregard of 'ordinary folk' was not liberation to them but oppression.
The final turn to this aspect of the story, before the arrival of the next generation of dull establishment political clubs, such as the Beefsteaks where Gladstone and royalty ate comfortably, is the association of Dashwood with Benjamin Franklin and the work that they did together to simplify the Book of Common Prayer.
It is implied in many quarters that they might have talked of liberty in terms that would be understood in the American taverns that later revolted against local tyranny, first against local puritanism and then, at the right time, against a Crown whose only interest seemed to be to tax the middle classes to maintain wars to benefit the 'big men' of their day.
So matters turned full circle - eighteenth century transgression had started as an aristocratic revolt against an embedded establishment. A century later transgression is placed partly, if marginally, at the service of revolt by the more libertarian small man of property against that very same establishment, now in office for over a hundred settled years and probably to reach its apogee of sclerosis under Wellington and Castlereagh in the 1820s.
This brings us to the second half of the book which is an eye-opening account of a community of apparent transgression, based in Anglo-Scottish culture, that was clearly a revolt against the tendency of the Kirk to claim rights on all private life. This expressed itself as a network of voyeuristic and masturbatory clubs of prominent establishment males which may have been much more widespread than the remaining evidence (at St. Andrew's University) suggests and which spread through northern trade routes.
This 'Beggar's Benison' movement seems to have started around the Firth of Forth at mid-century, to have had no or little connection with English aristocratic transgression (although it had some possible link to the emergence of pornographic literature in London) and to have spread through the Baltic to the 'British' community in Russia and West to the United States. As it spread, it seems to have 'cleaned up' (as it did over time in Scotland) and become part of the tavern club culture that we noted above as potentially revolutionary in force.
The customs of this Movement are so counter-intuitive to our vision of Scottish sexual puritanism that they can only be explained by our making a major mental paradigm shift back into the world of Scottish modernisation and, at least for its precursors, into the debates over the Union with England (analogous to the debate over the European Union today) and the role of the Kirk. Secrecy about being pro-English or anti-Presbyterian might have been as sensible at one time as, amongst other political choices, being pro-Jacobite.
However, the Scottish-origin transgressive clubs appear to have been cultural rather than political. The real interest here is in the nature of Scottish sexual repression where the prime interest (and this appears to occur elsewhere in the story) is not in sexual conduct per se so much as in 'scientific' observation of female genitalia and in proving manhood through public (or rather private to the club) production of semen.
This is 'behind the bike sheds' stuff. It seems like an extension of all male education into adulthood as fixed and fetishistic sexual behaviour. There is none of that implied 'Eyes Wide Shut' eroticism of high English aristocratic transgression with willing whores and mistresses. This is paying servant girls to show their pussies and then expelling from the club the man who got so excited that he actually touched one ... the nearest analogy here is with the modern lap-dancing club and the 'no touch' rule. You can imagine the girls laughing all the way to the bank.
So, the author is offering us two separate narratives. The first is of the increasing attempt by some of the people considered to be natural rulers of their country, frustrated at having to bow down before a restrictive cultural conformity, to take their revolt from the streets as arrogant kids and back into the safety of their private estates before finally giving up and joining the establishment, reserving their subsequent sexual pleasures to the whore house and the mistress.
The second is of a repressed modernising and increasingly libertarian middle class of traders and businessmen trying to come to terms with their sexuality without risking their property and using the cover of Enlightenment investigation to find some low risk non-homosexual male bonding and a bit of sexual titillation behind closed doors.
The two narratives never quite converge though there are other stories - of the emergence of pornographic literature, of high aristocratic interest in radical libertarian ideas and of 'tavern' culture as a form of resistance to the power of the established church - that overlap a little with both. Transgressive clubs are interesting less because of what they say about their members as that they were ever necessary in the first place.
These clubs are a back-handed compliment to the power of the Judaeo-Christian culture in which they were embedded. Think of the growing power of methodism, of anti-alcohol and anti-sex industry campaigns, of the evangelical drive against slavery, of the promotion of the place of the woman as angel of the home, of the increasing need to be sexually discreet, of the relationship between sexuality and property and the increasing expectation that order be imposed by the State. On top of this, observe the perils of rapid modernisation and the management of emotion into 'sentiment' (and away from its raw expression as violence or lust).
All this is combined into one dominant culture that was eventually structured to repress any sexual dialogue and then channel it back into faux-pagan performance art and that peculiar British attitude that sex is 'naughty but nice', much like a cream cake, to be eaten and enjoyed only occasionally, in private and with considerable guilt at its presumed bad effects on both body and soul.
The roots of the decadent rebellion of the 1890s (with its faux-paganism and its fetishistic attitude towards sexuality) were in this same culture. Both rebellions, whether of the Hellfire Club or the decadents, certainly based on any sensible assessment of what happened afterwards, only point up the extent of the repressed sexual culture of the bulk of the British in history. Repression has been the national cultural norm of the British people from the Glorious Revolution to the 1980s. Even now, occasional moral panics from our modern tabloids and the commercialisation of sexuality suggest that underlying attitudes remain driven by sensational and by the ‘naughty but nice’ cream cake model of sex.
The book covers none of this cultural ground in depth but it is very good on the politics and sociology of the eighteenth century. Evelyn Lord is not interested in 'lessons from history' but only in telling the story as she finds it.
It is also a mine of amusing anecdotes with the added advantage that Evelyn Lord is very good at sifting fact from fiction and ensuring that we understand that most tales of transgression were probably fictional and certainly over-blown. On that basis, the book is recommended but you will have to make up your own mind as to its 'meaning'.
December 11, 2024
Fun enough to read: engaging and witty, with some good anecdotes. However, having gone down the rabbit hole with the footnotes, it would appear that some quotations have been embellished (e.g. Walpole's description of the House of Lord's reception of the 'Essay on Woman'). Furthermore, on several occasions the 'facts' are plain wrong: for example, Philip Wharton's father, described in the book as a religious bore and prude, was not only a womaniser and heavy drinker, but was also fined for desecrating and cr*pping in a church. I know that Yale has a better peer review process than this, so I'm not quite sure what's happened here.
August 15, 2019
On one hand, I could give this book five stars because the author clearly conducted meticulous research into the people and clubs and politics she covers over the span of time she addresses. On the other hand, it's supposed to be about "sex, satanism, and secret societies" but I learned more about British politics and Catholics versus Protestants in the British royal sphere. Even when the author does get to the "sex, satanism, and secret societies", she quickly dismisses (and hardly describes) the alleged goings-on as rumors, boys-will-be-boys behaviors or misunderstandings of history. I get it, as she says, other authors have embellished the truth and made too much out of what she shows were drinking clubs formed by bored aristocrats...on the other hand she called her book "THE HELLFIRE CLUBS: SEX, SATANISM AND SECRET SOCIETIES" so I wanted more from it. That earns it a one star rating. So, I'm compromising and giving it three stars....but ugh, what a slog of a read.
June 29, 2017
On researching my favorite founding father, Ben Franklin, I found that it was rumored that he had attended a Hellfire Club. Intrigued, I decided to find out more about these secret organizations. This book goes into great detail about them, much is mere speculation as they were secret organizations. Most of them were domains of the wealthy and despite the rumors, were mainly places to relax, act and dress "silly", tell bawdy stories and of course, get drunk. Although, there are some confirmed accounts of rowdies attacking innocent people, clubs that paid local girls to strip (although they only looked, didn't touch), illicit sex, mutual masturbation, blasphemy and mocking religion, and possible devil worship, for the most part, these clubs were likely quite innocent. If you are into British history and want to read an in-depth study of these clubs, which reveal few confirmed details of their existence go ahead and read this book. By the way, Ben Franklin, most likely, didn't attend the clubs. He did work on revising the Book of Common Prayer with a reputed club founder after the club was disbanded. Knowing that Franklin was a Deist who believed religion should help serve the people, I really doubt he would join in anti-religious activities. Being that he was quite fond of women, he could, possibly, have been tempted by the sexual activities.
May 6, 2021
I am not surprised by Lord's argument the 18th century Hellfire Club (and other societies such as the Mohocks and the Beggar's Benison) were not, in fact, the hotbeds of Satanism and lechery they were portrayed as at the time. Mostly they were places to tell dirty jokes, drink yourself unconscious and bring in hookers for some discreet randiness. That's still no excuse for a book this dull.
Lord can't help that these groups were secret and so there's not a lot of reliable information about them, but she writes in a droning voice, with no sense of narrative. As the information is so slight, she pads out the books with things like a chapter on the Grand Tour of Europe — interesting in itself, but not what I paid for.
Lord can't help that these groups were secret and so there's not a lot of reliable information about them, but she writes in a droning voice, with no sense of narrative. As the information is so slight, she pads out the books with things like a chapter on the Grand Tour of Europe — interesting in itself, but not what I paid for.
September 5, 2020
Sometimes these nonfiction books just sort of trail off and leave me wanting more. I wasn’t ready for this book to end but end it did. So here’s my question, what do I read next?
June 25, 2024
Evelyn Lord has written such a wonderful book that separates the fact from fiction and speculation, surround the 1700s Private Members Clubs of England, Scotland, Ireland and Colonial America.
The book is split into a dedicated chapter, and each chapter having its own little sub chapters when talking about clubs or members of the clubs. Chapter 7 "Public Men and Private Vices" delves (briefly) into the lives of 4 members of various "Hell Fire Clubs"
While there are some issues that I found whilst reading the book, particularly in the final chapter of the book, I will probably say that there was not much information surrounding them clubs, but just enough to be placed into one chapter.
I will say if you are wanting to buy this book to start your own Secret Society/ Hell Fire Style Club, I will be the bearer of bad news and state that there is no How-To guide in here.
Overall, this is a wonderfully written book and would highly recommend this to anyone.
The book is split into a dedicated chapter, and each chapter having its own little sub chapters when talking about clubs or members of the clubs. Chapter 7 "Public Men and Private Vices" delves (briefly) into the lives of 4 members of various "Hell Fire Clubs"
While there are some issues that I found whilst reading the book, particularly in the final chapter of the book, I will probably say that there was not much information surrounding them clubs, but just enough to be placed into one chapter.
I will say if you are wanting to buy this book to start your own Secret Society/ Hell Fire Style Club, I will be the bearer of bad news and state that there is no How-To guide in here.
Overall, this is a wonderfully written book and would highly recommend this to anyone.
September 30, 2023
This book wasn’t what I thought it would be, and is not like a lot of other material that mentions the hell fire clubs. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think this book focuses on fact, and not sensationalism. But I think there isn’t a lot of factual evidence out there to be included. So if you like reading about 18th century England, I think this book is valuable and you’ll like it. But there isn’t going to be a ton of detail about what went on in so-called hell fire clubs. It’s more discussing the clubs and people who were accused of being “hellfire club’s”.
December 12, 2025
Evelyn Lord manages to clinically observe a boisterously taboo subject to the detriment of any interest one may have had to peep into the secret rooms of the 18th century bourgeoisie in the first place. Lord's disciplined tone sucks any shock or fun out of a communal ejaculation saucer, despite the obvious authority and care she has for the subject. Informative and well researched? Absolutely. A scandelously energizing read? Not in the slightest.
February 7, 2022
A very sober take on what the Hellfire Clubs actually were as well as the potential members. Probably the most obvious flaw, as others have pointed out, is that there's not a lot presented as to how these clubs were viewed by the public or other members of society; Evelyn comes at this from the perspective that the reader is already familiar with this point of view.
August 4, 2023
A great read which taught me a lot about social and political society of the 18th century as well as what led to it. Lord conveys the chaos, rebellion, and mischief of the Hellfire Clubs in a which allows you to live through them with her words.
June 29, 2024
What a way of ruining a fun and complex part of history. It really made me lean to the idea of allowing historical inaccuracies to prevail. Since the alternative is unmasking pure aristocratic boredom and silly white men.
August 28, 2013
This is the least salacious book about Hell-Fire Clubs you'll ever read. (What I wanted; the sensational books make me think I'm reading something by Tipper Gore.)
It's an odd one; the author works hard to put the clubs in context, and by doing so provides a course on remedial 18th century history, mainly repeating a few bits over and over. The details on the clubs are scanty (not surprising since they were secret clubs and there are few records) and so the book is a mishmash of the history of clubs and politics in general, contemporary accounts, and repetitive information about the few Hell-Fire clubs we know about.
The repetition was what did me in. Yes, okay, I got it: after falling out, Wilkes was the mortal enemy of the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Francis Dashwood. HOW MANY TIMES DOES THIS NEED TO COME UP? Also, yes, the connection between Sandwich and Rochester. Got it, over and over and over again. (And really? One of my great-grandfathers logged old growth forests, but I'm a treehugger who wants to save ALL the spotted owls. Blame the culture of the time, not the family connection.)
Rochester, among others, is described in character sketches that lack nuance. (We're really going to take the deathbed conversion at face value?)
To sum it up: yeah, there were Hell-Fire clubs, but the Satanism? Probably not. Sexual stuff? Probably. Upper class? Mostly, except for in Scotland and the colonies.
It's an odd one; the author works hard to put the clubs in context, and by doing so provides a course on remedial 18th century history, mainly repeating a few bits over and over. The details on the clubs are scanty (not surprising since they were secret clubs and there are few records) and so the book is a mishmash of the history of clubs and politics in general, contemporary accounts, and repetitive information about the few Hell-Fire clubs we know about.
The repetition was what did me in. Yes, okay, I got it: after falling out, Wilkes was the mortal enemy of the Earl of Sandwich and Sir Francis Dashwood. HOW MANY TIMES DOES THIS NEED TO COME UP? Also, yes, the connection between Sandwich and Rochester. Got it, over and over and over again. (And really? One of my great-grandfathers logged old growth forests, but I'm a treehugger who wants to save ALL the spotted owls. Blame the culture of the time, not the family connection.)
Rochester, among others, is described in character sketches that lack nuance. (We're really going to take the deathbed conversion at face value?)
To sum it up: yeah, there were Hell-Fire clubs, but the Satanism? Probably not. Sexual stuff? Probably. Upper class? Mostly, except for in Scotland and the colonies.
May 8, 2011
Picked this up expecting that the book would 1) establish that these kinds of clubs didn't really exist in the fashion portrayed in the popular imaginary, 2) run through the actually-existing models, and 3) riff on exactly how the popular imaginary did in fact construct the penny-dreadful version of the clubs. Sadly, while I got 1), the discussion of 2) was fairly sketchy and fragmented, and 3) was barely there at all. The result is that the book doesn't really justify its own existence; there's really not enough source material to support a full book, and the author winds up just cramming in tangentially-related material to pad out the page count rather than engaging in the deeper analysis a monograph should include. Structurally, the book does itself no favors either, with case-study chapters rubbing up against location-based surveys and more general subjects, with lots of repetition between chapters. There's some entertaining incidental trivia about early modern Britain, some miscellaneous stories of gentry behaving badly, and a couple of anecdotes pointing towards some interesting secret societies, but there's just not much there there.
November 12, 2009
Very readable and thorough, if not especially deep, book about the men's clubs in English-speaking upper-class society in the 18th Century, with a focus on those that secretly celebrated blasphemy and sexual deviance. There is not a lot of historical context only because to provide it woudl require a 1200-page history of the period, or something, and the sources are thin enough and unreliable enough that much of the information is spotty. Even so, Lord does a wonderful job of weaving it all into a wicked narrative that's skeptical toward the claims of contemporaries and later writers, but still has plenty of fun with the misbehavior of the wealthy. Anyone but a history nerd would probably find it fairly dry, but I loved it. The references are exceptional, which is valuable when looking at a fairly obscure topic like this.
June 22, 2013
This is my first full-on history book I picked up to read , and that too on an esoteric and frankly, titillating topic . The interest in Secret societies has pervasively increased , which earlier belonged to strait-jacketed esoterica , after reading Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series . Coming to the book , Dashwood does a clean job of it by transparently sifting the fact from the propaganda , which is the first thing one would look for in such a topic . The effects of such underground societies of which "certain" geniuses were members , on later day Victorian moral and social conventions has been delineated well . Further , Dashwood gives the interpretative freedom to the reader , without any self-assumed responsibility for moral or religious policing . A fine read , only if you are curious about the subject .
March 30, 2010
The Hell-Fire Clubs is another book I zoomed through; it was difficult to put down! Lord's research was extensive and her writing was compelling. My only criticism was that there was a chapter that could have been omitted which had mini-biographies of notable members of The Friars of Medmenham. Since they had already been introduced to readers the chapter came off as filler, which I think is unnecessary. Otherwise, the book is packed with great facts and stories of these nefarious men and their social gatherings. The Hell-Fire Clubs is great book for those interested in the private lives of noblemen, fans of Men Behaving Badly, and of course, the Hellfire clubs.
http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.b...
http://georgianaduchessofdevonshire.b...
March 21, 2012
not an iota as racy as the title suggests... but that doesn't really matter as it had lots of interesting facts. on the hellfire clubs itself it was a bit thin on the ground as there (seemingly) are no proper (i.e. trustworthy) sources but reports from outsiders or vengeful ex-members. which leaves most things up to speculation. the main picture painted is one of a club of men who liked to drink, gamble and cause general mischief. much like the gangs of today but in its heyday a lot of it on the richer side of society. that development from the disorderly rioteers to gentlemanly pleasure clubs was well presented. all in all, it shows more about the 18th century in britain and it is good at that.
although the title seems to be a bit of a misnomer...
although the title seems to be a bit of a misnomer...
July 22, 2010
The book flap lied - or, rather, it grossly exaggerated what is easily one of the most boring history books I've ever read. This is a poorly organized and written mess that criticizes other authors who have made conjectures about what these clubs did only to do the same thing. At the end of the day, these clubs come off as early precursors to frats at American colleges and nothing more. What kept me reading (other than the relatively short length) is that the author a decent amount of research, which I enjoyed learning. I just wish she had corralled it into a decent book. Not recommended.
May 12, 2012
I was looking for something fulfilling but a little trashy to read during the end of the semester-- this turned out to be a little dry, and, as it went on, somewhat sloppily structured. However, there's enough salacious detail and meaty archive-work that it succeeded in taking my mind off Agamben and Schmitt for a few hours. Lord's thesis is also so compellingly anti-climactic that it's worth just seeing how unspectacular her findings are-- there's something kind of thrilling about the totality of the myth of the hellfire club's deflation.
September 23, 2013
You might think it would be impossible to make a book on this topic, with this title, into a boring read.
You would be wrong.
A wealth of historical detail, so I'm glad I read it, but the author clearly didn't want to be writing about the actual topic, and does her best to talk about everything *around* the clubs rather than the clubs themselves. I get the impression she was writing on this topic to satisfy an agent or publisher, and found the whole thing a bit sordid and/or low-class for her tastes.
You would be wrong.
A wealth of historical detail, so I'm glad I read it, but the author clearly didn't want to be writing about the actual topic, and does her best to talk about everything *around* the clubs rather than the clubs themselves. I get the impression she was writing on this topic to satisfy an agent or publisher, and found the whole thing a bit sordid and/or low-class for her tastes.
December 17, 2009
i'm convinced this book only has the word sex on the cover in order to sell -- the author goes to great, boring, tedious lengths to debunk all sorts of fun myths about secret societies. i couldn't be bothered to read the last chapter -- names and dates makes for poor history reading. blaaah.
April 20, 2012
Sadly there is not much in the way of historical insight in this book. It gives the available information, which isn't very much, and then there is a lot of padding. I don't know if there's a better book out there, though.
March 5, 2015
I got this book while visiting the actual hellfire caves in Wycombe. Once I started I couldn't put it down. It's a really interesting book into the history's of hellfire clubs if your into your history I highly recommend this book.
Want to read
October 28, 2008I agree with Paul. Thanks for the tip, Amber!!!
July 1, 2009
It has its moments. I do not know what I was looking for, but I am not quite finding it.
December 4, 2010
GREAT book. Well researched and wonderfully written.
March 9, 2012
A solid examination on what little evidence remains of the Hell-fire Clubs and their ilk. Lord does end the book abruptly, however, and those hoping for salacious orgies should look elsewhere.
February 26, 2016
This book describes the help fire clubs in a historical context rather than the blasphemous, sex crazed madmen that we have come to know them by.
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