The Cannibal Club was a Victorian dining club associated with The Anthropological Society, probably founded at the same time in 1863 by Sir Richard Francis Burton and Dr James Hunt. The club met in Bartolini's dining rooms, just off Fleet Street, where its official symbol was a mace carved to look like an African head gnawing on a human thighbone. The club's name is thought to derive from Burton's fascination with cannibalism, but which he regretted that he never witnessed on his travels. Its members included Richard Monkton Milnes, Charles Bradlaugh, Thomas Bendyshe, Algernon Swinburne, Sir James Plaisted Wilde, General Studholme John Hodgson and Charles Duncan Cameron.
Dane Kennedy, in his biography of Richard Burton, suggests that "the very name of the new club signalled the determination of its organizers to create an atmosphere where subjects deemed deviant by society could receive an open airing (...) which must have given far freer rein to participants than the sober, 'scientific' etiquette that governed the proceedings of the Anthropological Society".
Burton famously referred to the club's meetings as "orgies", though the brother and father of his wife Isabel often attended. Kennedy argues that the club's function has since been widely misunderstood. The Cannibal Cathechism, written by Swinburne for the club, as well as the club's membership, suggest that the dinners served as an opportunity for renowned radicals and social misfits to air their views: "There can be little question, then, that the Cannibal Club was much more than a meeting place for homosocial merriment; it was in fact a venue for venting what were considered at the time subversive opinions about religion, race, sex, and much more."