The Collectanea of the Rev. Daniel Lysons

In the British Museum there exists a remarkable collection of ephemera — newspaper cuttings, tickets, advertisements, handbills, and broadsides — assembled over a lifetime by the Reverend Daniel Lysons, F.R.S., F.S.A. (1762–1834), the celebrated antiquary and topographer.

In 1916, Brother F. W. Levander presented to the Lodge Quatuor Coronati a systematic catalogue drawn from these papers: an alphabetical inventory of some two hundred societies, ranging from the illustrious to the absurd, from the political to the criminal.

What emerges is an extraordinary portrait of Georgian associational life — a London teeming with fraternal orders, drinking clubs, mutual benefit societies, mock-Masonic lodges, and political cabals, each with its Grand, its Secretary, its passwords and its rituals.