Ned Ward [ Commerce / Art and Literature ]
… one-time-spy turned travel writer, John Macky, described London as having ‘an infinity of clubs or societies for the improvement of learning and keeping up with good humour and mirth’. 8 Ward’s satire skewers this fashion, with almost four hundred pages detailing thirty-two clubs and their chief activities. Clubs pretended to improvement, but for Ward ‘the general End thereof, is a Promiscuous Encouragement of Vice, Faction, and Folly’. 9 He …
Clubs | Humour | Impoliteness | Politics | Satire | Sex | Taverns
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