What to Do With Friends, According to the Lunar Men and Inklings

The best answer to what to do with friends on a repeating schedule has three parts: a date nobody has to negotiate, a job for the evening (read something, test something, argue about something), and some small cost for missing it. The Lunar Society of Birmingham, a dinner club of engineers, doctors and manufacturers, ran on that formula for roughly a quarter of a century. The Inklings in Oxford had the first two and lacked the third, and their Thursday nights quietly stopped in 1949.

For anyone whose friend plans keep dying in a group chat, the two clubs make a useful pair: similar people, well-kept letters and diaries, very different endings.

How did the Lunar Society pick its date?

They let the moon pick it. The members met once a month on the day nearest the full moon, so they would have moonlight for the ride home on unlit roads. T. E. Thorpe, in his 1906 biography Joseph Priestley, gives the day as the Monday nearest the full moon and describes them sitting down to dinner at two o’clock and talking until eight. The society’s Wikipedia history, which leans on Robert Schofield’s studies, says the day was originally a Sunday and moved to Monday after Priestley arrived in 1780, because a minister could not spend his Sundays at dinner.

The full moon ended the scheduling conversation before it started. Nobody had to propose a date, poll the members or chase the quiet ones; the members, who cheerfully called themselves “lunaticks,” only had to decide whether to show up.

The regulars included Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley and William Withering; no membership list survives, and historians count about fourteen confirmed attendees. Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men (Faber, 2002) is the standard modern history; Simon Schaffer, reviewing it in the London Review of Books (April 2003), notes how much of the friendship ran through letters, since members were so often away on business, plant hunts and house calls.

What did they actually do at dinner?

The host set the agenda in the invitation. Thorpe quotes a letter from Watt to Darwin dated January 3, 1781, reminding him that he had promised “to dine with sundry men of learning at my house on Monday next.” Watt then lists the program: “a new book to be cut up,” the question of whether heat is “a compound of phlogiston and empyreal air,” and whether a mirror can reflect the heat of a fire. He closes with a tease, warning Darwin that he “may be found wanting whichever opinion” he adopts.

So the evening had a job. Someone brought a book, a gadget or an experiment, and the rest of the table took it apart. Priestley brought news from his laboratory, and Thorpe argues that Watt’s thinking on the composition of water came straight out of those dinners. C. S. Lewis, nearly two centuries later and in another context, put it this way in The Four Loves (1960): “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends.”

What happened when someone missed it?

They felt it, and they wrote to say so. On April 5, 1778, Erasmus Darwin sent Boulton a letter apologizing for missing a meeting at Soho because a patient needed him; the letter survives among Boulton’s papers in Birmingham. In it Darwin pictures the talk at the table being knocked back and forth like a shuttlecock while he sits alone on the road. There were no fines. The cost of absence was missing the best conversation of the month and having to own up to it in writing.

The clearest evidence comes from Priestley after a Church-and-King mob burned his house and laboratory in July 1791. Writing to Withering, he said he would “look back with pleasure and regret to our Lunar meetings.” From Clapton in October 1792 he put the loss more precisely: “I feel I want the spur to constant exertion which I had with you.” A monthly deadline in front of friends had been doing work he only noticed once it was gone.

How did the Inklings run their Thursdays?

The Inklings, the Oxford circle around C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, met on Thursday evenings in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College, with a separate, looser gathering at the Eagle and Child pub on Tuesdays. The earliest recorded meeting dates to March 1934. Warren Lewis, C. S. Lewis’s brother and a regular, described the routine (as quoted by Sam Schuldheisz on 1517.org): once “half a dozen or so had arrived, tea would be produced,” pipes were lit, and Lewis would ask, “well has nobody got anything to read us?” Then “out would come a manuscript and we would settle down to sit in judgement upon it.”

Chapters of The Lord of the Rings went through that room. Tolkien later wrote, in a 1965 letter to Dick Plotz, that what he owed Lewis was “sheer encouragement,” because Lewis was “for long my only audience.” Diana Pavlac Glyer’s The Company They Keep (Kent State University Press, 2007) goes further, comparing members’ rough drafts with published versions to show suggestions from those Thursdays turning up on the page, pushing back on Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings (1978), which played that influence down.

Why did the Inklings’ Thursdays stop?

Warren Lewis also said there were “no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections,” per Britannica. So the evening existed only as long as Lewis kept hosting and someone kept bringing pages. Warren’s diary entry for Thursday, October 27, 1949, reads: “No Inklings tonight, so dined at home.” Nobody recorded a decision to end it. The Thursdays simply did not resume.

The pub meetings, which had a fixed table and a fixed weekday, carried on for years afterward, moving to Mondays in 1955. The half of the club with a standing slot outlived the half that depended on one man’s invitation.

A side-by-side look

Group	What they did	How often	What kept it going	What ended it
Lunar Society, Birmingham (regular from about 1775)	Dinner at 2 p.m., then experiments, new books and arguments until 8	Monthly, the day nearest the full moon	A date set by the sky; a host who named the topic in advance; absent members wrote to apologize	Deaths of members, and the 1791 riots that drove Priestley out; gone by 1813
Inklings, Thursday nights (about 1934 to 1949)	Tea, pipes, reading unfinished manuscripts aloud for frank criticism	Weekly, in term	Lewis’s room and Lewis asking “has nobody got anything to read us?”	No rules and one host; the evenings faded without a decision
Inklings, pub sessions	Beer and talk at the Eagle and Child	Weekly, Tuesday, later Monday	A fixed table and a fixed weekday	Continued for years after 1949, moving to Mondays in 1955
Algonquin Round Table, New York (1919 to about 1929)	Daily lunch, wisecracks, Saturday-night poker	Daily	The hotel kept the table for them	Members left New York; Edna Ferber later found a family from Kansas at the table

What to do with friends, borrowing from both clubs

Pick a date rule that settles itself: first Thursday, the Sunday nearest the full moon, every payday Friday. Then give the evening a job and rotate who sets it, the way Watt did, so each invitation says what will happen (“bring your worst sourdough,” “I’m showing the bike I rebuilt”). Jeffrey Hall’s estimate that close friendship takes around 200 hours together is easier to reach when the hours have something in them besides catching up.

The third piece is the one modern groups skip. Darwin paid no fine, but he still felt he owed Boulton a written explanation, and that small embarrassment was the price of an empty chair. Group chats fail on the opposite principle: nobody owns the plan, so everyone assumes someone else will send the invite, and skipping costs nothing. The same logic is behind DontSnooze, which turns a missed alarm into something your chosen friends actually see.

Franklin’s Philadelphia Junto worked from a standing list of questions, another way to give the night a job. And if a group does fade the way the Inklings’ Thursdays did, an ending can be an adjournment instead of a failure.

A practical start for this month: look up the next full moon, name one person to host, and have them put a single line in the invite saying what is on the table that night.