The Decline of the Nuclear Family, and the Rise of the Club
David Brooks’ cover story for the March issue of The Atlantic, “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake,” charts the decline and fall of the American nuclear family. In the first part of the essay, he illustrates how the nuclear family—two parents, 2.5 kids, 1 dog, a suburban home, etc.—is an anomaly in human history. While the experiment worked for a while in the mid-twentieth century, it “has been crumbling in slow motion for decades,” leaving people—especially the working class and poor—lonely, adrift, and financially strained.
In the second section, “Redefining Kinship,” Brooks offers his solution: “When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new—sometimes finding it in something very old.” That “very old” thing is what he calls the “forged” or “chosen” family. For thousands of years, traditional societies across the world “lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with.” In short, Brooks says:
Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin. It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.
Having spent my early 20s in Austin (a quickly growing city with a young transplant population who don’t settle long term) and after reading another Atlantic article from a few years back, “The Hot New Millennial Housing Trend is a Repeat of the Middle Ages,” I have been thinking a lot more about the possibilities of chosen families and how many social ills they could solve: isolation and loneliness (particularly for single and unmarried people—based on purely anecdotal experience, my impression is that many young adults feel as if the only stable option that doesn’t doom them to a life alone is marriage or romantic partnership), and the affordability of childcare and housing, especially in cities.
I was especially excited to see David Brooks’ take on the topic, not only because the issue is near to my heart, but also because Brooks is an avowed fan of Samuel Johnson—he wrote a chapter on Johnson in his book The Road to Character (2015), and was invited to address the Johnsonians at our annual birthday dinner at the Folger Shakespeare Library in 2017. I hoped that Johnson would get a shout-out in the essay. For if Johnson was, as he was famously called, “that great Cham of literature,” surely he was also that great Cham of the Forged Family. An essay can only hold so many illustrative examples, and Brooks’ essay was perhaps not the place for an extended digression on Samuel Johnson—the focus was on what extended kinship could look like in twenty-first century America. But it does seem to me that Johnson’s life and his fierce commitment to communities of non-biological kin during a time (not wholly unlike our own) when traditional social and family life was changing under the pressures of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization illustrates the future Brooks imagines.
Johnson’s Club
In many ways, life was not kind to Johnson (1709-1784). Born into the unprosperous home of a Lichfield bookseller, he contracted a disease called the “King’s Evil” when he was a child, which left him deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, and smallpox left his face with permanent scarring. The tics and compulsions he later developed in life—as Brooks described, “he would twist his hands, rock back and forth, roll his head in a strange and compulsive manner. He would emit a bizarre whistling sound and display symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, tapping his cane in odds rhythms as he walked down the street”—indicates that he probably had Tourette’s syndrome. When Boswell first met Johnson, he wrote in his journal, “Mr. Johnson is a man of a most dreadful appearance. He is a very big man, is troubled with sore eyes, the palsy, and the king’s evil. He is very slovenly in his dress and speaks with a most uncouth voice.” He was prone to severe bouts of depression, which left him fearing that he might go insane. He was also convinced that he faced eternal damnation. Johnson struggled as an anonymous hack writer in London for years before his talent and intellect received any recognition. And by the time he was an adult, most of his nuclear family had passed away. His only brother, Nathaniel, died in 1737, and his father died in 1731. His wife Elizabeth, or “Tetty,” died in 1752 and he never remarried or had any children of his own. His mother died seven years later—he wrote Rasselas to pay for her funeral.
In the face of external misfortune and his internal demons, he surrounded himself with friends, a “forged family,” if you will. In London, he lived with, in Leo Damrosch’s words, “a ménage of unfortunates who relied on him for support.” They were social outcasts, people who London society had little value for: there was Anna Williams, a blind Welsh poet and spinster; Dr. Robert Levet, an unlicensed physician who cared for the poor and who Johnson described in his elegy “On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet” as “Officious, innocent, sincere, / Of every friendless name the friend”; Francis Barber, a freed former slave from Jamaica who Johnson hired as a servant and companion (Johnson also paid for his education and provided for him in his will); Elizabeth Desmoulins, the companion of his late wife; and Poll Carmichael, an ex-prostitute. Johnson’s roommates are relevant in two ways for Brooks’ essay. First, that forged families can provide for the poor and disenfranchised in ways that are not always possible in the nuclear family. Second, that the life of extended kinship networks is not always glamorous, easy, or fun. It is difficult to sacrifice our independence to live “in daily intimate contact” with people who are different from us or who we didn’t necessarily choose. Johnson’s own household was hardly warm and fuzzy. Johnson once told his friend, “Williams hates everybody; Levet hates Desmoulins, and does not love Williams; Desmoulins hates them both; Poll loves none of them.”
Later in his life, Johnson also had a second home just outside London with his friends Hester and Henry Thrale at their estate, Streatham Park. Shortly after Johnson’s Shakespeare edition was published, the Thrales began to worry because they hadn’t heard from Johnson in a while. They found him prostrate in his London apartment, deep in a pit of depression, and brought him to live with them, giving him his own room just above the library. There, he could read and write at his leisure and surround himself with the constant stream of friends and guests the sociable Hester Thrale invited to her famous dinner parties.
Another significant way Johnson found community amidst his feelings of isolation was through clubs. He and his friend Hawkins founded the Ivy Lane Club, and he was also a member of a club with the fantastic name “Sublime Society of Beef Steaks.” In Leo Damrosch’s new book, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Damrosch tells the story of how Johnson’s friend Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great painter and portrait artist, suggested he and Johnson start a literary club because he was worried about his friend’s wellbeing. The Literary Club, which became known as just “The Club,” started meeting once a week in 1764 and continued well into the twentieth century. By election only, the original members included some of the greatest minds and most talented men in eighteenth-century England: Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, and David Garrick to name a few.
Johnson and Boswell “Walking up the High Street” by Samuel Collings from Picturesque Beauties of Boswell
Not just for Johnson but for all men and women who were attempting to navigate the loneliness of the modern urban world, clubs were a thriving part of social life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America. In a scene from Alcott’s Little Women (delightfully captured in Greta Gerwig’s new adaptation), the March sisters form the Pickwick Club, since “secret societies were the fashion.” Joseph Addison, ever the keen observer of London life, wrote some of the most amusing accounts and parodies of club culture. In Spectator no. 9 (Saturday, March 10, 1711), he declares, “Man is said to be a Sociable Animal, and, as an Instance of it, we may observe, that we take all Occasions and Pretences of forming ourselves into those little Nocturnal Assemblies, which are commonly known by the name of Clubs.” These assemblies will find any “trivial” or “particular” common interest to bring them together, so that we end up with any number of whimsical clubs with eccentric rules and rituals: the Hum-Drum Club, the Kit-Cat Club, the Chit Chat Club, the Hebdomadal Club, the Rattling Club, the Twopenny Club, and, my personal favorite, the She Romp Club (see Spectator 217).
Clare Coffey is right to point out in her recent essay for Plough “City of Clubs,” which is about Philadelphia’s still-thriving tradition of clubs, that “clubs won’t save the world, or your soul”—they certainly didn’t fully cure Johnson’s malaise, though they did do a great deal to help him find joy and meaning. But if we are willing to look to the past to inspire new ways twenty-first century Americans can respond to the crisis of the nuclear family, I would say we should certainly not rule out a tradition that had for so long helped people come together in fellowship. Our world, I’d argue, is ready for a Club Renaissance. With a Club, you can not only “bring back the big tables”; you can adopt pompous Latin mottoes. You can wear all your fanciest clothes and dance on tables. You can take turns giving elaborate and slightly ridiculous toasts while wearing fake (or real) moustaches. You can eat sublime beef steaks and invent your own signature punch recipes. You can sit together in complete silence or talk loudly all at once. You can have poetry contests and crown the winner with laurels. And, of course, there’s nothing to stop your Club from doing all these things at once.
