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Guilt by Association: The Atheist Cabal and the Rise of the Public Sphere in Augustan England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Roger D. Lund
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Extract

It is a cliché of literary history that the natives of the long eighteenth century were uniquely “clubbable” men and women. As Peter Clark points out, by the mid-eighteenth century voluntary associations of all sorts had become “an essential part of the social and cultural language of urban life.” Clark chronicles the rise of coffee houses, benefit societies, lodges, fraternal organizations, and clubs of every kind. As he points out, however, while the “image and concept of the voluntary society increasingly penetrated every nook and cranny of British social and cultural life” in the eighteenth century, there was no “extended philosophical justification for the importance and freedom of voluntary associations in society.” The absence of such justifications may be traced, at least in part, to a relatively wide-spread suspicion of voluntary association as manifested in “atheist” clubs and heterodox conventicles, forms of association that figured prominently in the imagination of Augustan pamphleteers, but whose history, as Justin Champion remarks, “is obscure and little studied.” As I argue in this essay, a brief study of atheist clubs that presumably flourished in the early decades of the eighteenth century reveals a resistance on the part of High-Church Anglican pamphleteers to the growth of clubs and private associations because they presumably posed a threat to the establishment both in Church and State.

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Research Article
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Albion , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , Fall 2002 , pp. 391 - 421
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Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 2002

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References

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