From the Athenaeum Club's founding in 1824, membership was highly prized. Unlike the eighteenth-century aristocratic clubs on St James's Street in central London, including Boodle’s, White's and Brooks’s, the Athenaeum admitted members, drawn from the old and new professions, who were select if no longer principally titled. Candidates were nominated by individual members and elected by the full membership under a system of blackballing common to other clubs. But eligibility for election to the Athenaeum differed: ‘individuals known for their scientific or literary attainments, artists of eminence in any class of the Fine Arts, and noblemen and gentlemen distinguished as liberal patrons of Science, Literature or the Arts’ were admitted either by the club as a whole or, in extraordinary circumstances, by committee (Athenaeum Club 1882). In addition, a provision known as Rule II enabled the club's administrative committee to grant invitations to individuals deemed to have distinguished themselves in these fields.

Just a few years before the club was founded, establishing quasimeritocratic criteria for membership would not have been an obvious choice. The Welsh Grenadier Guards officer and man-about-town Rees Gronow recalled that clubs in the early nineteenth century were made up of titled and landed members ‘almost without exception’ (1862: 76). The emphasis on achievement in electing individuals to club membership reflected widespread social changes. In the 1810s and early 1820s the East India Company, as I discussed in Chapter 1, was slowly and haltingly introducing meritocratic criteria for recruitment and promotion in the Examiner's Office. At Oxford and Cambridge students were being reimagined as individuated subjects with measurable mental abilities. Cambridge led the way with the Senate House examination, later known as the Mathematical Tripos, which had assumed its basic shape in 1753, more than seventy years before the Athenaeum established its membership criteria. Publication of a list of successful candidates, in order of merit, began several decades later. The formal system of university examination – initially oral but, partly for logistical reasons, soon written – instituted at Oxford in 1800 meant that candidates, regardless of social status, faced the prospect of failure for the first time. Moreover, undergraduates from upper-class families were no longer able ‘to take honorary MA degrees at the conclusion of their residence’ (Curthoys 1997: 343). The principle of merit was supplanting privilege.