London Debating Societies 1776 - 1799

A collection of advertisements placed by the flourishing London debating societies of the late eighteenth century in the most popular London newspapers. London in the first decades of the eighteenth century was already rich in a variety of public entertainments. In addition to the theatres and shows, to the coffee houses and inns, there was a series of forums in which people came together to listen to and participate in conversation. By the 1770s, these private or semi-private clubs or societies increased in size and number in the metropolis, as gripping political and religious issues seized the interests and imaginations of Londoners. In 1780 these now enlarged clubs were transformed into large-scale, commercial events, whose managers used the publicity that the burgeoning press sold to advertise their topics of debate, to rouse and create a paying public for such debates, and to combine an expanding interest in public speaking with the respectable pursuit of profit.