THE MONDAY EVENING CLUB: June 2015

Monday, June 15, 2015

Never On Sunday: A visit to one of the Club's antecedants

"The Dinner Party" by Henry Sargent, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 27, 2015

A few years ago, Ann and I were wandering through Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts when we noticed a handsome painting of a group of 18 men at what was clearly a nineteenth century dinner table, attended by two man servants. We jokingly commented that it looked like an historical version of our Monday Evening Club.

Well, be careful about speculation! Some research showed that the painting was of a dinner meeting of Boston’s Wednesday Evening Club. The artist was Henry Sargent, a Boston artist who was born in 1770 and died in 1845. The painting was done in 1821. Sargent’s paintings are known for giving intimate glimpses of Boston’s homes in the early 19^th century and this painting certainly does.

All this, of course, then led to curiosity about the Wednesday Evening Club of Boston – and that is the subject of my talk tonight for it is a fascinating look at our forebears and the similarities with our Club that make for what seemed to me to be a captivating story.

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ABOUT US

The Monday Evening Club was founded in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1869. It currently has 11 active members. Membership is by invitation only, and the number of members has ranged up to about 24 over the years.

. . . MORE ABOUT US

A history of the Club was written by Rabbi Harold I. Salzmann on the occasion of the 130th anniversary in 1999 (posted with updates to 2009).

The rules of the Club adopted in 1869 remain in force although some of them are followed only loosely.

A series of posts provides biographical information on our past members:
(1) Founding members joining in 1869
(2) Members joining 1870-1876
(3) Members joining 1877-1883
(4) Members joining 1885-1900

(5) Members joining 1902-1912
(6) Members joining 1916-1941
(7) Members joining 1942-1961

(8) Members joining 1964-present

More historical information may be found here.

Other Monday Evening Clubs

We've heard of a number of other Monday (or other) Evening Clubs built around the concept of a dinner, presentation and discussion. Presumably there was a common impetus for this, but we haven't yet discovered what it was.

Among the clubs we've run into are:

The Monday Evening Club of Newburyport, Mass. (Founded shortly after World War I). Despite its name, the Newburyport club meets on Wednesday evenings from October to June. Newburyport is also home to the Fortnightly Club, founded in the 1870s, and the Tuesday Night Club, founded around 1910. (We are indebted to William Plante, Jr., of the Newburyport Monday Evening Club, for this information.)

The Monday Evening Club of Haverhill, Mass. (Founded 1860)

The Monday Evening Club of Hartford, Conn. (Founded 1869; Mark Twain was a member; papers are archived at Trinity College.)

The Whiting Club, founded in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1903. It currently has 35 members from throughout the North Shore, and launched its website in 2014 (website expired as of 2019).

The Thirteen, a Salem, Massachusetts club launched in the early 1900s, which apparently was one of a number of "thirteen clubs" founded in that era — one aim being to dispel superstitions by traditionally having just 13 members, meeting on the 13th, and so on. (Thanks to Charlie Newhall, historian of the Whiting Club and member of both the Whiting and The Thirteen, for information on both clubs.)

The Social Circle in Concord, Concord, Mass. (Founded in 1794.) This club, limited to 25 members, all male, and typically including some of the leading citizens of Concord and nearby towns, meets at members' homes from October to March on Tuesday evenings. Members prepare biographies of Circle members who have died, and from time to time these are published as the Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord, of which seven volumes have been published to date. Meetings are devoted to conversation, rather than the presentation and discussion of papers.

The Prismatic Club of Detroit — This club was founded in 1867, and has owned an imposing clubhouse since about 1927. It was founded by Samuel Ripley Bartlett, a Detroit businessman who grew up in Concord, Mass., where his father was a member of the above-mentioned Social Circle. The Prismatic has from 60 to 75 members (known as Prisms) who meet every Saturday evening during a fall-through-spring season. Each member presents a paper every other year.

The Thursday Evening Club of Pittsfield, Mass. — Founded in 1918 and following a format similar to our Club's. Some of our members know some of their members. We probably should have a joint meeting sometime!

The Ariston Club of New London, Conn. — Founded in 1900, and still active in recent years. Apparently its members dressed in black tie for meetings.

We'd be pleased to receive reports of other Monday Evening Clubs, or "evening" clubs, "fortnightly clubs," "social circles" or other societies that use the dinner-paper-discussion format, and to link to their web sites or blogs.