Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Annals of the Royal Society Club: The Record of a London Dining-Club in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
The first attempt to put this history into writing was made by Admiral William Henry Smyth, F who in the summer of the year 1858 was requested by his brother Members of the Club to undertake the task. He prepared a Sketch of the Rise and Progress of the Royal Society Club which was printed for the Club in 1860. It forms a thin quarto volume of 84 pages, with An Additional Word of ten pages more, appended in the spring of the following year. As its title denotes, this work was merely a sketch, based almost entirely on the minutes of the Annual General Meetings. But, full of the spirit of good-fellowship, it gave a pleasing picture of the life of the Club. After the lapse of nearly fifty years, during which some important incidents had occurred in the Club's experience, a desire arose among the Members that a continuation of Admiral Smyth's narrative should be prepared. Accordingly the late Mr.' Robert H. Scott, who had been Treasurer for seventeen years, and was about to retire from office, was asked if he would supply such a continuation. But his health had already begun to fail, and he was never able to undertake the task. Meanwhile 'the stock of Admiral Smyth's volume was nearly exhausted. The opportunity seemed to the Members to be favourable for the preparation of a new and possibly fuller history of the Club, and they honoured me by the proposal that I should take the work in hand. As I had given a good deal of attention to the history of the Royal Society, I was naturally attracted by the subject of the Society's Dining Club but to enable me to judge of the nature and extent of the material available for literary treatment, the Senior Treasurer at the beginning of last year put into my hands the whole of the Archives of the Club. I soon saw that the material was abundant and possessed sufficient interest to be worthy of being treated in considerable detail. And I thereupon embarked on the work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
