Such were the deep currents of literary life in 18th-century England that a group of friends meeting weekly in a London tavern included men as monumental as Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon. Even those members who are lesser known today—Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, Richard Brinsley Sheridan—were enormously famous in their time. Leo Damrosch, author of superb biographies of Jonathan Swift, William Blake, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, dives deep to show what happened when the paths of these major figures crossed.

“The Club”—a disappointingly unoriginal name for a group of great minds—was formed by Reynolds, one of the age’s greatest portrait painters, for Johnson’s benefit. Johnson suffered from severe melancholy and it was thought that the regular society of friends would help him. So in 1764, at Turk’s Head Tavern off the Strand, the first members got together for drinks and discussion. Membership was limited initially to nine agreeable men chosen by unanimous election, but it wasn’t long before the rules were broken and the group swelled in number. Agreeability even took a back seat in the case of a few inductees.

The Club’s first 20 years saw such lesser lights as James Boswell, Charles James Fox, and Earl Spencer (Viscount Althorp) admitted. Even though Johnson died in 1784, The Club continued admitting new members well into the 20th century. Alfred Tennyson, William Gladstone, and Matthew Arnold were admitted. Winston Churchill was not. The frequency and location changed, and it seems to have been absorbed into the club culture of London society. Despite the infusion of some very famous names, and despite The Club’s original motto, esto perpetua, “Let it be perpetual,” the 19th- and 20th-century iterations lacked the lifeblood of the original. Something of the animating spirit and purpose of its founders was missing, inviting little beyond curiosity. This is perhaps why Damrosch focuses on the first 20 years of its existence.

These years were a time of extraordinary change in England and the world. Religious wars were largely in the rearview, while international conflicts on a scale not seen before loomed. Science, economics, philosophy, and literature were hurtling ahead in new—though not entirely auspicious—directions. Damrosch gives us a sense of the dynamism and grandeur of the period by his expert use of sources and with a generous selection of paintings, portraits, and sketches. A record of The Club’s membership from 1764-1784 in the appendix helps keep names and occupations straight, especially since some of them make only a cameo appearance.

It may seem a fool’s errand to chronicle the early years of a group that kept no minutes, but this is to misunderstand Damrosch’s purpose. The Club was more than its meetings and more than its members. For the author, The Club is simply an artifact of convenience to explore the age and the minds that shaped it. Naturally, Johnson dominates the book.

But Damrosch has no interest in simply adding to the list of magnificent Johnson biographies by John Wain, W. Jackson Bate, and Peter Martin—though his narrative ability is every bit as strong and deserves to be in their company, as much as he is in their debt. Instead, Damrosch gives ample space to many others that shared the stage with Johnson, especially to Burke, the diarist Hester Thrale, the novelist and playwright Fanny Burney, and to Garrick, the trailblazing Shakespearean actor and Johnson’s former student. There is also, for better or worse, plenty of Boswell.

One quickly tires of Boswell both here and in his The Life of Samuel Johnson. But, of course, Johnson would have faded into the library stacks only to be consulted by specialists were it not for Boswell. So we tolerate his insinuations, asides, and persistent puffery in published writings and in his journals and letters. If nothing else, we should acknowledge that Boswell’s ear and pen changed biography forever.

Damrosch rightfully relies on Boswell, but not to the exclusion of others. He draws amply from the letters and journals of nearly everyone in The Club’s orbit. Especially interesting is the diary of Hester Thrale.

Johnson lived with Hester and Henry Thrale for many years. When not in London, Johnson and occasionally other Club members could be found at the Thrale’s country mansion, Streatham Park. Since Boswell was rarely invited there, we are indebted to Hester and her diary for supplying us with a portrait of Johnson not seen in The Life, and one that illuminates his relationship with women. Damrosch makes great use of Thrale—her dynamism and wit are irrepressible before the leveling effects of time and page—and not merely for her perceptive observations. He relies on the Thraliana to check the accuracy and motives of other observers throughout the book. While this is the biographer’s task, it is an infrequent pleasure to see it done so well and so seamlessly. It’s one of the things that makes Damrosch worth reading.

Damrosch gives significant members their own chapters. Far from disrupting the narrative flow, one’s appreciation for the nuances of character Damrosch provides grows while the big picture never fades from view. We needn’t be at the Turk’s Head to get a sense of Burke’s rapturous eloquence. Young Fanny Burney observed, “I can give you very little of what was said…All, therefore, that is related from him loses half his effect in not being related by him.” Nor could occasional tension between Garrick and Samuel Johnson be any more palpable after learning that, among other annoyances, Garrick would not let Johnson borrow his books, especially his Shakespeare quartos—Johnson was notoriously destructive of books. Johnson was so wounded by Garrick’s refusal, he even opposed his friend’s election to The Club for several years, though Garrick was ultimately allowed to join in 1773. Johnson, despite objecting to Garrick’s disruptive “buffoonery,” would brook no criticism of his friend and wept so fiercely upon Garrick’s death he was said to be “bathed in tears.”

Edward Gibbon was another matter. Johnson and Boswell loathed the writer of the great history of Rome and dubbed him “The Infidel.” Damrosch is fairer in his treatment of Gibbon and creates a very human portrait. Nevertheless, Gibbon’s detractors persist today—not unjustly—and form a club of their own. Indeed, Cardinal John Henry Newman could be counted among them, for once opining, “You must not suppose I am going to recommend [Gibbon’s] style for imitation, any more than his principles….”

Despite The Club’s fluidity of membership and attendance over 20 years, Damrosch manages to give us a strong sense of what those gatherings were like. Petty grievances and real hatreds aside, the meetings were, by all accounts, lively affairs. One meeting involved the consumption of “eight bottles of wine, six of claret, two of port.” And that was only the tally for Reynolds, Gibbon, aristocratic wit Topham Beauclerk, and Sheridan, the Irish playwright who owned the London Theatre Royal. It doesn’t take much to imagine at some point, late in the evening perhaps, mellifluous conversation devolving into slurring shouts above the din at Turk’s Head. Damrosch’s narrative never loses sight of the group’s humanity.

He is especially sympathetic and moving in his portrayal of decline and death. Damrosch captures the passage of time simply and elegantly. By reminding the reader, for example, that Boswell or Henry Thrale had only so much time left to live at a particular point, he surrounds the events or words that follow with a poignant shadow. The horrors and uselessness of 18th-century medicine only add to the effect. The dying were usually denied even false hope; bloodletting and blistering had dismal track records. One admires how each of the characters in this grand story met their end. Johnson, despite the use of opium throughout his life, remained resolute. Before his death he declared, “I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.”

[The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press) 488 pp., $30.00.]