A history of bawdy men's clubs throughout the ages which never seems to be as interesting as it could be. Lord takes us through what's known of clubs that were all about excess and bad behaviour, although whether any of them were actually satanic is questionable.

While outsiders thought many of the clubs utterly depraved, on the whole the clubs seem to just be about drinking and bringing in local ladies to get naked and show the men the location of the clitoris. My main takeaway from The Hell-Fire Clubs was that "prick" was the go-to word to describe the penis for much of the last few hundred years and that much of the behaviour listed seems to pale in comparison to the recent behaviour that has come to light of male Australian Liberal (conservative) Party politicians and staffers. ( )

You would think a book about 17th and 18th century men’s clubs specializing in debauchery couldn’t be dull, but The Hell-Fire Clubs manages. Well, OK, it’s not that dull, really, just not as titillating as you might expect from the title. Author Evelyn Lord is a serious historian, and does not succumb to the temptation to treat the topic casually, even though that would have sold more books.


The catch here is that the Hell-Fire Clubs were something like Chemtrails, 9-11 Truth, and the International Bicycle Riders Conspiracy – everybody knew what they were, but when it came right down to it nobody could come up with any evidence that they actually existed. The contemporary accounts are completely untrustworthy, coming from Restoration and Georgian equivalents of Weekly World News and a full of details on nonexistent Black Masses, nonexistent Masked Ladies of Quality Engaging in Unspeakable Acts, and nonexistent Dastardly Plots. It improved circulation for newsheets and novels – John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure (latter expurgated and retitled as Fanny Hill dates from this time, and Cleland (of course) was rumored to have attended Hell-Fire Club meetings. There are a number of similar but less well-known books.


Thus, rather than observations on the lewd goings-on, most of the book is biographies of various people who were reputed to be members of Hell-Fire Clubs: the Duke of Wharton, the Earl of Rochester, Sir Francis Dashwood, John Wilkes, and the Earl of Sandwich.


Of the people mentioned, Sir Francis Dashwood was the only one who organized anything even remotely similar to a Hell-Fire Club – the Medmenham Friars. Dashwood leased on old abbey, and he and a group of friends met there periodically. Although there were the normal accusations of exotic and erotic rituals, all that ever seemed to happen were dinner parties and a lot of drinking. Now and then members brought their mistresses. Dashwood was a fan of fancy dress, and the Medmenham Friars sometimes had masquerades, which must have added to the rumors. Dashwood also owned an estate at West Wycombe Park, and landscaped a garden there with a grotto (not an uncommon feature at the time); this particular grotto had a narrow, elliptical entranceway bordered by dense shrubbery; those features caused some comment and must have contributed to the rumors.


There was a documented group that didn’t fit the traditional image of a Hell-Fire Club as a den of debauched upper-class gentlemen in a stately country manse or a secret London hideaway. This was the Beggar’s Benison club, in the small port of Anstruther, Scotland. The members were middle-class tradesman and minor officials, and met twice a year to:


* Examine women hired to strip-tease for the occasion (no touching; one member had to be ejected when he ventured a little groping),

* Engage in mutual masturbation,

* Listen to “improving lectures”,

* Tell bawdy jokes, and

* Make bad puns.


Except for a few details, I note that this could almost describe my life. Ms. Lord notes that the reason much is known about the Beggar’s Benison Club is that the minutes of the organization were donated to St. Andrews University; she ventures, therefore, that there might have been a number of similar organizations that never got around to preserving their actions for posterity.


Lord makes an interesting observation – it wouldn’t have caused any comment for gentlemen of these times to patronize brothels or keep mistresses – in fact it probably would have been a little out of the ordinary if they didn’t. Instead, contemporary criticism of the Hell-Fire clubs focused on the following accusations: blasphemy took place, gentlewomen were involved, and politics was discussed. You could get into more trouble by drinking a toast to Satan or being a Jacobite than by raping a milkmaid or publically fondling your latest mistress. Ironically, it probably was worse for the middle-class groups, especially in Presbyterian Scotland; the middle class was always more censorious (and more eager for scandal) than the gentry.


Some interesting capsule biographies of an assortment of minor English nobility; perhaps most useful for debunking the myth of the Hell-Fire club. Bought from the remainder bin. ( )

I thought I was sure to love this book, but it didn't live up to my expectations. The title offers "hell-fire clubs" as an organizational genre, but the study never does a very good job of delimiting what they were. Author Lord basically seems willing to give consideration to any membership society that fostered street violence, blasphemy, or clandestine sex, within the historical span of her study, which covers the entire 17th through 18th centuries, in the Anglophone world generally. She repeatedly invokes a hypothesis regarding "outlets for masculine energy" as though it were self-explanatory and evidently credible.

On p. 94, she writes: "The reason for painting Dashwood as a friar will never be known...." It seems to me rather that there are a variety of perfectly obvious motives: the pun on his given name, the reputation of friars for sexual misconduct, Dashwood's role as the founding "Saint" of the Medmenham "Order," and so on. She often seems to pose as a skeptic when she's merely suffering from a lack of contextual information or insight. In general, I found her treatment of the Medmenham Friars--a necessary central feature of any book on this topic--to be less thorough and less perceptive than that of Geoffery Ashe, whose work she often cites.

She mentions Freemasonry in passing a few times, suggesting that one or another of the clubs that serve as the object of her study were aping or mocking it; but if she actually knows anything about the workings of Masonry, she doesn't bother to explain how or why this verdict would be of interest.

The prose style is pleasant enough, and the photographic plates are excellent. The book is shorter than it seems: its 214 pages are in a generous font on heavy stock. A real strength of the book is the chapter on Scottish hell-fire groups, focused on the sex society of the Beggar's Benison. The ending is abrupt and rather inconclusive. All in all, it's not a waste of time for anyone genuinely interested in the topic, but it's far from everything I'd hoped it would be.

Reads like the abstract of a much deeper work: covers a broad range from Russia to America - and through two centuries - but only superficially. Very little sex, and even less Satanism.

Author has several arguments with Ashe's "The Hell-Fire Club: Sex, Rakes and Libertines in 18th-century Europe" (2005).

Fun Facts: John Locke was an original shareholder in the Royal African Company; that is, he was a slaver.

- there was a Georgian book called "A complete set of charts of the coasts of Merryland".

Aristocrats in government (p,135): "Although he (Dashwood) was in opposition for most of his political career he did have his moment in government in 1761 when he was returned as Member for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, and entered the house for the government. In 1762 the Earl of Bute, the first minister, appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer, a post for which he was totally unfitted. John Wilkes suggested that the new Chancellor, now Lord Le Despencer, could not settle a tavern bill without trouble. Horace Walpole, who heard Dashwood's budget speech, described it as coarse and blunt with 'neither knowledge nor dignity, his style is naked, vulgar and irreverent to an assembly that expects to be informed. . . Men were puzzled to guess why he was chosen. . . ." ( )