… cannot but reflect with indignation how much ‘tis in a woman’s power to distress a brave or learned man amongst his own society and friends, at his table and round his domestic hearth, from whence a man should draw the best sources of social … Oxford English Dictionary, a drum was ‘A social gathering held at a private house, attended by people from fashionable society’ (www.oed.com, s.v. ‘drum, n° 3’). 5 . See, for instance, Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: … Yet London sociability changed with the years, and Boscawen increasingly complains about the late hours of fashionable society. Lady Northampton, she wrote, ‘observes very justly that London is so alter’d since her friends us’d to be …