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Anacreontic Society

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Anacreontick's in full song by James Gillray
Anacreontick's in full song by James Gillray

The Anacreontic Society was a popular gentlemen's club of amateur musicians in London founded in the mid-18th century. These barristers, doctors, and other professional men named their club after the Greek court poet Anacreon, who lived in the 6th century B.C. and whose poems, "anacreontics", were used to entertain patrons in Teos and Athens. Dubbed "the convivial bard of Greece", Anacreon's songs often celebrated women, wine, and entertaining. While the society's membership, one observer noted, was dedicated to "wit, harmony, and the god of wine", their primary goal (beyond companionship and talk) was to promote an interest in music. The society presented regular concerts of music, and included among their guests such important musicians as Joseph Haydn, who was the special guest at their concert in January 1791. There is also evidence of an Anacreontic Society having existed at St Andrews University in the late 18th century in much the same vein as the Anacreontic Society of London. However, due to the club's informal nature, detailed accounts of the group are sparse. The collection of the Irish Anacreontic Society, active in Dublin from 1740 to 1865, is among the special collections of the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Anacreontic Society (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Anacreontic Society
Arundel Street, London Holborn

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N 51.512441666667 ° E -0.11410555555556 °
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Arundel Street
WC2R 3DX London, Holborn
England, United Kingdom
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Anacreontick's in full song by James Gillray
Anacreontick's in full song by James Gillray
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Crown and Anchor, Strand
Crown and Anchor, Strand

The Crown and Anchor, also written Crown & Anchor and earlier known as The Crown, was a public house in Arundel Street, off The Strand in London, England, famous for meetings of political (particularly the early 19th-century Radicals) and various other groups. It is no longer in existence.The first tavern built on the site sometime before 1710 accommodated the Academy of Vocal Music and the Royal Society. George Frideric Handel premiered his first oratorio, Esther, here in 1732, a significant moment in British musical life as it was the first oratorio in English (rather than the usual Italian). Samuel Johnson and James Boswell dined here during the 18th century. A second tavern was built in 1790, and both this and its earlier incarnation may have been called The Crown. Its rooms were large and able to accommodate 2,500 people, leading to its use as a venue for political meetings, particularly by the Radicals, including John Cam Hobhouse and Charles James Fox. One meeting was addressed by the Irish leader and MP in the United Kingdom Parliament, Daniel O'Connell. On 11 November 1823, George Birkbeck made a speech at the Crown and Anchor, attended by over 2000 people including Jeremy Bentham, Hobhouse and Henry Brougham, at which he proposed the foundation of an institution dedicated to educating the working-class inhabitants of London. This meeting led to the foundation of London Mechanics' Institute on 2 December 1823, which would go on to become Birkbeck, University of London.The Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, founded by John Reeves in 1792, were known as the Crown and Anchor Society or Association.During the late 20th century, the site housed offices and a branch of HSBC Bank. It is today a residential development, 190 Strand, incorporating groundfloor retail units.