Question for selenak: do you know if gentlemen's clubs in 1730s London would have been open to Peter as a foreigner? I tried googling it and found nothing conclusive either way, other than some hints that foreigners were not normally welcome, but I thought you might know an example off the top of your head.
If so, do you know if clubs were common enough at that date that he likely would have joined one if it was available? We know he was seeking out literary companionship: "I passed for English in the public and frequented all good companies, especially people of letters, whom I always sought out in order to benefit from their instructive conversation." And I wondered if that was clubs.
It occurred to me that if foreigners weren't welcome, passing for English might have been something that allowed him to join under false pretenses (I have long wondered if he enrolled at Trinity College under an assumed name), but a club is probably the one place where it would be hard to pass as English for long. You have to not only *sound* English when you talk, you have to have a whole backstory, presumably family connections, and not give yourself away in little ways. Being mistaken for English in casual conversation was what I first assumed. But maybe he was living undercover with a whole English identity anyway, to keep FW from finding out where he was.
There was the Royal Society, to which either Fritz of Wales (according to Thea von Seydewitz) or Andrew Mitchell (according to the AM dissertation) sponsored Manteuffel as a (long-distance) member in the early 1740s. I think Algarotti was one, too, so there are two foreigners in the early 1740s for you. It might also be worth checking out whether Voltaire when he was in England ever made it into a club.
That's true, but I'm not sure how much it applies: the Royal Society wasn't a gentlemen's club, it was an academy with a royal charter, meant to garner international prestige. It's more comparable to the Berlin or French academies, and gentlemen's clubs are somewhere in between that and a salon.
As for the Society of Dilettanti, I came across that years ago when first researching Peter's life and wondering if clubs formed a part of it, and while the Society initially looked promising (the 1734 founding date!), 1) it required members to have visited Italy, which Peter hadn't, so he couldn't have joined that one specifically, 2) I was never able to find any evidence that they admitted foreigners, which would form a precedent for the possibility that he could have joined some other club. I've gone through the list of members from 1736 on and not found any well into the 1740s.
So I'm still unsure. What I have seen is a couple references to people using "So-and-so wants to admit foreigners to our club!!" as a scare tactic, which suggests that admitting foreigners was definitely not the norm. In the nineteenth (or late eighteenth? I forget) century, there was a push to allow foreign ambassadors to join a certain club, and that was controversial.
Which leaves me thinking that Peter *probably* couldn't have joined one, but between him passing as English, and the possibility that some clubs might have been less exclusive, I'm not 100% sure.
Also, the Society of Dilettanti always makes me think of this passage from one of Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy skits:
I think we have a problem – English people in general have a problem. We tend to go into the world, going, "Hello, hello... Hello, do you speak English? Hello!" You know, in Afghanistan. "Hello, sausage, egg and chips, please… A sausage, egg and chips. Okay, two sausages. Do you speak English? You just don't try, do you?! Here all day speaking Afghan..."
It's quite possible that a bunch of Englishmen talking about their opinions of the modern-day foreigners they'd met, and the need to relocate the art and archaeological findings to more civilized countries, would *not* have been the most congenial environment for modern-day foreigners. ;) Except Algarotti, who would have been nodding vigorously and getting on his soapbox to feed them more ammunition, and who, of course, was hated by nineteenth-century Italians for having helped relocate all that art out of the country. Which is one reason he's not more famous today. :P
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timeasmymeasure
Clubs
Date: 2024-09-30 12:35 pm (UTC)If so, do you know if clubs were common enough at that date that he likely would have joined one if it was available? We know he was seeking out literary companionship: "I passed for English in the public and frequented all good companies, especially people of letters, whom I always sought out in order to benefit from their instructive conversation." And I wondered if that was clubs.
It occurred to me that if foreigners weren't welcome, passing for English might have been something that allowed him to join under false pretenses (I have long wondered if he enrolled at Trinity College under an assumed name), but a club is probably the one place where it would be hard to pass as English for long. You have to not only *sound* English when you talk, you have to have a whole backstory, presumably family connections, and not give yourself away in little ways. Being mistaken for English in casual conversation was what I first assumed. But maybe he was living undercover with a whole English identity anyway, to keep FW from finding out where he was.
Re: Clubs
Date: 2024-09-30 01:53 pm (UTC)Also, there was this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Dilettanti
Re: Clubs
Date: 2024-10-06 03:42 pm (UTC)As for the Society of Dilettanti, I came across that years ago when first researching Peter's life and wondering if clubs formed a part of it, and while the Society initially looked promising (the 1734 founding date!), 1) it required members to have visited Italy, which Peter hadn't, so he couldn't have joined that one specifically, 2) I was never able to find any evidence that they admitted foreigners, which would form a precedent for the possibility that he could have joined some other club. I've gone through the list of members from 1736 on and not found any well into the 1740s.
So I'm still unsure. What I have seen is a couple references to people using "So-and-so wants to admit foreigners to our club!!" as a scare tactic, which suggests that admitting foreigners was definitely not the norm. In the nineteenth (or late eighteenth? I forget) century, there was a push to allow foreign ambassadors to join a certain club, and that was controversial.
Which leaves me thinking that Peter *probably* couldn't have joined one, but between him passing as English, and the possibility that some clubs might have been less exclusive, I'm not 100% sure.
Also, the Society of Dilettanti always makes me think of this passage from one of Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy skits:
I think we have a problem – English people in general have a problem. We tend to go into the world, going, "Hello, hello... Hello, do you speak English? Hello!" You know, in Afghanistan. "Hello, sausage, egg and chips, please… A sausage, egg and chips. Okay, two sausages. Do you speak English? You just don't try, do you?! Here all day speaking Afghan..."
It's quite possible that a bunch of Englishmen talking about their opinions of the modern-day foreigners they'd met, and the need to relocate the art and archaeological findings to more civilized countries, would *not* have been the most congenial environment for modern-day foreigners. ;) Except Algarotti, who would have been nodding vigorously and getting on his soapbox to feed them more ammunition, and who, of course, was hated by nineteenth-century Italians for having helped relocate all that art out of the country. Which is one reason he's not more famous today. :P