The Saturday Club, established in 1855, was an informal monthly gathering in Boston, Massachusetts, of writers, scientists, philosophers, historians, and other notable thinkers of the mid-19th century.
Overview
The club began meeting informally at the Albion House in Boston.[1] Publishing agent and lawyer Horatio Woodman first suggested the gatherings among his friends for food and conversation.[2] By 1856, the organization became more structured with a loose set of rules, with monthly meetings held over dinner at the Parker House.[1] The Parker House served as their place of meeting for many years. It was a hotel built in 1854 by Harvey D. Parker.[3][4]
In 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes published a poem titled "At the Saturday Club" in which he reminisced about the gatherings. By then, many of its members were dead. Ralph Waldo Emerson's son, Edward Waldo Emerson, published two books about the Saturday Club and its members in the early 20th century. A version of the Saturday Club still exists in Boston.
Gallery
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Louis Agassiz
Benjamin Peirce
Charles Sumner and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1863
Parker's, School Street, Boston, 1855
Ralph Waldo Emerson, ca.1872
Asa Gray
John Lothrop Motley, ca.1860
Further reading
Adams, Thomas Boylston. Saturday Club 1957–1986. Boston: Saturday Club, 1988.
^ abMellow, James R. Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980: 539. ISBN0-8018-5900-X
^ abcGale, Robert L. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003: 210. ISBN0-313-32350-X
^Whitehill, Walter Muir. "Review of The Saturday Club: A Century Completed 1920–1956" by Edward W. Forbes and John H. Finley, Jr. The New England Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Mar. 1959), pp. 108–112.
^Morison, Samuel Eliot. "Review of Later Years of the Saturday Club" by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. The New England Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Apr. 1928), p. 267.
^Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1999: 46.ISBN1-57003-244-0.
^Gale, Robert L. A Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003: 210–211. ISBN0-313-32350-X
^O'Connell, Shaun. Boston: Voices and Visions. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010: 92. ISBN978-1-55849-820-4