Wonderful new book takes you into an exclusive club

raphy. As for Johnson, he hadn’t yet written his masterpiece of criticism, the Lives of the Poets, which appeared in 1781. And no one fully appreciated the political oratory of Edmund Burke.

Johnson’s ailments necessarily fill several pages. He suffered often from dark, painful depression (he called it “indolence”) and with “gloom and despair, which made existence misery.” Facial tics embarrassed him. He tended to shout. Boswell had similar troubles. His diary discloses mood swings that indicate (Damrosch says) bipolar disorder. Alcoholism caused him memory blanks. A fondness for prostitutes brought on venereal disease. At one point he wrote in his diary, “I ranged an hour in the street and dallied with ten strumpets.”

Not all those in the Club admired all the others. Members must often have had their patience tried. Johnson called Adam Smith “as dull a dog” as he had met. Johnson and Boswell both loathed Edward Gibbon and liked to call him “the Infidel.” They knew he was skeptical of the theory that Christianity had spread through Divine Intervention, and questioned the accepted history of the early Church. Damrosch tells us that in writing his multi-volume book on the Decline of the Roman empire, Gibbon managed often to avoid “tedious chronicles of fact” in order to create a lively narrative. We also get an eloquent short biography of Gibbon, including his energetic rescue of his family’s fortunes after his father had all but totally ruined them.

The whole text exhibits Damrosch’s affection for his subjects. He loves being, imaginatively, in the Johnsonian world. He likes its inhabitants, whatever their faults, and enjoys their eccentricities as well as their talents. The one obvious flaw in the book is in the title — “and The Friends Who Shaped an Age.”

These stars of literature and thought did not shape their age — not if you compare them with revolutions, industrial progress and increased literacy. These men did shape the age’s style and some of its thinking, but otherwise that line is an exaggeration. Damrosch has said that the goal of his book is “to make readers today at home in their world and to introduce them to an unforgettable cast of characters.” Making readers feel at home: a magnificent ambition! And that’s what The Club superbly accomplishes.