The original Cannibal Club of 19th century London

Bertolini's restaurant was cheap, but charming: perfect for the creatures who roamed 19th-century London after the sun went down. On Tuesday nights, in Bertolini's backroom, respected judges and doctors, esteemed lawyers, admired politicians and award-winning poets and writers drank heavily, smoked cigars and secretly discussed what they thought they knew of the British colonies, more specifically polygamy, bestiality, phallic worship, female circumcision, ritual murder, savage fetishes and island cannibalism. The gentlemen would trade in exotic pornography and tales of flogging and prostitution. If, by chance, a pious, God-fearing bloke were to accidentally stumble into the Fleet Street backroom on a Tuesday night, the tips of his Victorian moustache would've certainly stood on end.

Before the debate between science and creationism, there was the debate between monogenism and polygenism. Monogenists believed that all of humanity shared a common ancestry while polygenists were convinced that different races of man had different origins. There was a palpable tension in Victorian England between the creation of a democratic scientific methodology and the elitist attitudes that reinforced Anglo-Saxon superiority. During Britain's "Imperial Century" these convenient human classifications were perfectly inline with colonialist sensibilities—of course, no race could match the enlightenment of the English Gentleman. The conflict captured the imagination of Victorian England and, by 1863, drove a wedge between the polygenist and monogenist members of the then 20-year-old Ethnological Society of London. Determined to continue advocating their polygenist ideologies, Captain Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt, both members of the Ethnological Society of London, broke away and established The Anthropological Society of London. The new splinter society supported the pseudoscientific practices of phrenology, the measuring of skull size with craniometers and, of course, polygenism. Recent scholarship has even suggested that its members were covert propagandists, acting on behalf of the Confederate States of America to convince Londoners that enslaved Africans were biologically incapable of any development beyond their menial work as slaves.

From the intellectual ferment of the Anthropological Society's inaugural year grew an even more exclusive and overtly seditious conclave of high-society rebels: a gentlemen's dining group called the Cannibal Club. ....Burton....was to be the mastermind behind the new hush-hush fraternity. He was famous for infiltrating Mecca in 1853, disguised as an Arab merchant and for translating the raw, unexpurgated texts of erotic Eastern literature such as the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights. He was presented to the Queen and he dined with the Prime Minister. When asked by a young vicar if he'd ever killed a man, Burton replied cooly, "Sir, I'm proud to say that I have committed every sin in the Decalogue." Burton was one of Hell's original hounds and the Cannibal Club was his sanctuary.

Sitting around in stovepipe top hats, tailored frocks and loosened cravats in the banquet room of Bertolini's, the members would be called to order with a strike of Burton's gavel. The gavel, naturally, was a piece of wood carved in the likeness of their official symbol: a mace drawn to resemble an African head gnawing on a thighbone. And before launching into one of their raucous powwows, a member would stand and recite the club's Cannibal Catechism: an anthem of sorts that purposely mocked the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, likening it to a cannibal feast. The opening stanza of the invocation, written by Cannibal Club mainstay, respected playwright and decadent poet, Algernon Charles Swineburne, depicts just how profoundly blasphemous and anti-clerical the group was:

Preserve us from our enemies;

Thou who art Lord of suns and skies;

Whose meat and drink is flesh in pies;

And blood in bowls!

Of thy sweet mercy, damn their eyes;

And damn their souls!

Swineburne also contributed to the eminent 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1903 to 1907 and again in 1909.

Read more here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cannibal-club-racism-and-rabble-rousing-victorian-england-180952088/