The Club was founded by Joshua Reynolds in 1764 to enable his friend Samuel Johnson, who was subject to depression, to enjoy regular “conversation and mental intercourse” (John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1787, 219). Club meetings were held weekly over supper at The Turk's Head, a tavern in Gerrard Street, Soho. In his ambitious group biography, Leo Damrosch aims to tell the story of this group of “extraordinary individuals, a constellation of talent” (1) and to assess their contribution to British culture. Members besides Johnson included James Boswell, Edmund Burke, and, later, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith and Adam Smith. Charles Burney, musicologist and father of Frances, wrote:

Burney's allusion to the emerging “liberal and literary professions” suggests a sense of pride in shared status based on talent rather than social rank. While the pedagogical aspect of the Club's meetings was less pronounced than it was in bluestocking assemblies, there was, nonetheless, an element of intellectual aspiration that can be linked to the emergence of an increasingly literate and political public sphere during the period.

The question of whether a club should be representative or exclusive is very much an Enlightenment question, reflecting an age in which ideas of individual and collective social responsibility came to the fore, whether in taverns, coffee houses, theaters, courts, colleges, or academies. One strand of the club's history that Damrosch touches upon is the shift of emphasis in the Club's constituency: at first, its members were all writers and artists, all closely linked. As the century progressed, membership expanded to include a wider range of society, including bishops and members of the aristocracy. Among the Club's many significant members were the great actor and theater manager David Garrick and orators Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who deployed their various voices to dramatic public effect. By the 1780s, a number of Whig politicians had joined the Club, much to the annoyance of Johnson, who preferred a space that was apolitical. From its beginnings as an intimate circle of friends, the Club came to be home to some of the leading politicians of the day.

Damrosch emphasizes the historical significance of his subjects and their various social and political allegiances but is ultimately more enthralled by their individual stories than by the relationships between them. The most distinctive thing about the Club—a new attitude to thinking and conversing—is arguably the most ephemeral and elusive from the point of view of the historian. There are few surviving records of its meetings, and the fullest account of what happened at the Club remains that of Boswell in his pioneering Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Damrosch relies heavily upon this well-known material in a series of biographical essays that telescope a vast amount of contextual information into relatively short chapters. The brief chapters “Empire” and “Infidels and Believers” are placed among a series of discrete individual biographies (Reynolds, Burke, Garrick, Smith, Henry and Hester Thrale, and Edward Gibbon). There is something about Damrosch's approach that can feel both too narrow and too wide-ranging—perhaps inevitable when dealing with such a spectrum of talent but paradoxical in the sense that the character of the Club itself becomes slightly lost in the process.

Damrosch promises the reader a vivid excursion through the “teeming, noisy, contradictory, and often violent world of eighteenth-century London” (10). While he gestures towards the parallel lives of those not admitted to the Club, servants and women in particular, their lives remain consigned to the shadows. A significant number of recent biographies have focused on those who were not members of the Club yet nonetheless felt impelled to contribute to their society and culture. Michael Bundock's The Fortunes of Francis Barber (2015) tells the story of Johnson's black servant, bringing to life the profound relationship between an independent man of letters and a former slave, providing a new vantage point from which to reassess the past. Ultimately, Damrosch's account reinforces the stature of Johnson as the leading intellectual of his age. As in painting an individual portrait, the psychological impact of a character's likeness emerges with full intensity only by darkening the background, modifying the context from which the face emerges. One of the most poignant visual images in Damrosch's book is the portrait of Johnson by Frances Reynolds, in which she employs just such a tactic to shed new light on the great man, his physical bulk emerging from the gloom to reveal an open face. Her unflinching depiction somehow detects the vulnerability behind the assertiveness of both her subject's gaze and her own. According to Boswell, Johnson thought portrait painting was not a woman's business: “Public practice of staring in men's faces is inconsistent with delicacy” (quoted at 142). Frances Reynolds's bold intervention challenges one to think otherwise. It is one of the strengths of Damrosch's book that he allows such haunting juxtapositions to speak to the reader tacitly, giving space for contemplation of the unspoken interchanges that reveal as much as any attempt to represent or account for distant speech.