Nearly everything that has been written by or about Thomas Dunckerley over the past 250 years has involved his role in promoting Freemasonry. As we have seen, Thomas Dunckerley was a great promoter of himself, and as Freemasonry became an increasingly important part of his public persona he appears to have drawn little distinction between furthering it, and furthering himself as a leading officer and exemplar of the Craft.

Thomas Dunckerley was drawn to Freemasonry, but in eighteenth-century England he had many other associational options. There is a rich literature documenting the origins and development of associational life in England – the societies, clubs and academies that by Dunckerley's time made up so much of the fabric of civic life in England's cities and towns. Inspired by the seminal work by Jürgen Habermas, much of the recent historiography of association focuses on the role played by these societies in creating and giving shape to the ‘public sphere’ of eighteenth-century urban life. In his comprehensive study of British clubs and societies, Peter Clark discusses a vast array of associations, many ephemeral, which flourished between 1580 and 1800. While many associations were quite casual, others began to take on a more formal structure early in the eighteenth century, and soon characteristic patterns of institutionalization emerged: regular meetings, designated officers, by-laws and constitutions, regalia and rudimentary record-keeping.