Brits may not always be very sociable, but they have learned to be clubbable when they choose. They even embraced conviviality three hundred years ago. For sure, the eighteenth century was a prime time for social organizations of all kinds: if Paris had its high-minded salons, London had plenty of groups that ranged from the polite assemblies of scientists and bluestockings to bibulous fraternities looking for an excuse to make merry. The habit soon spread from England, Scotland, and Ireland to places like Annapolis, Maryland. This was a small town with scarcely enough inhabitants to raise a posse, let alone get together a regular quorum of like-minded hedonists. It had been renamed in honor of the future Queen Anne (how could the citizens have guessed that she would one day figure in an Oscar-winning movie as part of a lesbian love triangle?).
The main founding father of the Tuesday Club was Alexander Hamilton, not that one, of course, but a doctor born in Edinburgh. In 1745, he and his friends set about replacing the Ugly Club, the previous center of social life among the gentry of Annapolis, and like most of these associations an all-male affair. For a member to qualify, “it was sufficient to profess and believe that he was not handsome, till he was declared to be a monstrous ugly fellow by the Ladies in public company.”
Understandably, in the Tuesday Club there were ways of masking identity, so that the roll of
