This year marks the 250th anniversary of the first edition of The New Peerage published in 1769 by a bookseller and stationer, John Almon. He passed on the editorship to one of his assistants and, perhaps unfairly, it became known as Debrett’s after its second editor, John Debrett.
Debrett’s are celebrating their 250th birthday by publishing the 150th and final printed edition of Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage. It will be in two volumes totalling over 3,000 pages, contain some 140,000 names and cost a nugatory £450.
Its younger rival, first edition 1826, Burke’s Peerage, published its latest (107th) edition in 2003. I think both Debrett’s and Burke’s will now only be published digitally. However, for many generations to come country house libraries will have those reassuring red cloth bindings, doorstoppers of books, adorning their shelves, gleaming dull gold, with the owners’ page usually well-thumbed. Here is something from the 1896 Debrett’s.
What became of the Marlborough Club? The Bachelors’ has, by a circuitous route been assimilated into Brooks’s and the Kildare Street is now The Kildare Street and University Club. My family’s association with the Bachelors’ is not forgotten. A cartoon, by my great-half-uncle Paddy, is in the Gents at Brooks’s. He was a member of the Bachelors’. Its title is The Only Bachelor in The Bachelors’ Club. I will post a picture sometime.