The Nonsense Club was a literary club formed by a group of London wits, all of them former pupils of Westminster School, who met regularly on Thursday evenings during the 1750s and early 1760s. In collaboration and singly, members of the group edited several literary magazines and journals, produced a “brilliant body of satiric comedy”, and with John Wilkes fomented the most important domestic political debate of their time, that surrounding the freedom of the press.[1]
The precise membership of the club is unclear, but the name is generally now used in reference to its five leading members: the satirists and poets Charles Churchill and Robert Lloyd, the parodist Bonnell Thornton, the nature poet William Cowper, and the dramatist George Colman.[2]
The club came to public prominence with the publication of Churchill’s poem, The Rosciad, which satirised contemporary actors and acting styles. The group had become so well known by 1763 that the diarist James Boswell referred to them as “the London Geniuses”.[1]