The Athenaeum Library

When it was founded, in 1824, the Athenum broke the mould. The original members of this new kind of non-partisan club, with its close connections to the learned societies, were elected on the basis of their achievements rather than their background or political affiliation. The club was to serve as a meeting place for artists, writers and scientist... s, along with cabinet ministers, bishops and judges. Today influential men and women, drawn from a wide range of professional fields, are still attracted to a club which nurtures civilised conversation and companionship and access to a great library and high-quality cultural and social events. The last quarter century has witnessed the reinvention of the club which broke the mould two hundred years ago. The clubs original members included the engineers who created the infrastructure of the railway age. Their successors were the inventors of radar. With a tradition of hospitality to conflicting views, akin to that of the liberal arts and sciences, the club attracted most of the leading writers and artists of the nineteenth century. Dickens and Darwin were elected on the same day in 1838. It was in their palatial clubhouse in the West End of London that the Darwinians crossed swords with the bishops and where later generations of members held confidential conversations in wartime on the use of propaganda. The club has recruited not only intelligence chiefs but also, unwittingly, the most infamous spy of the Cold War. In 1928 the Athenum was described in the Graphic as the brainiest club in the world: it certainly was a hundred years earlier and probably still is today. John Wilson Croker, the clubs founder, was an MP, First Secretary to the Admiralty, a leading figure in literary circles and a moving spirit at the Union Club. A true blue Tory, he insisted that the founding committee should contain a majority of Whigs. Croker knew everyone who was anyone and ensured that the most outstanding creative thinkers joined his new literary club literary in the broadest sense. ...Read More