The actors and actresses and well-known speakers of our acquaintance we met mostly at the old Playgoers’ Club, or at Phil May’s Sunday nights in the stable which had become his studio.
The old Playgoers’ was a most breezy place, where no one was allowed to speak for more than a few minutes, unless he could bring down the house with his wit. The ordinary person making a good sound speech was howled down. The chairman sometimes interfered to save a more distinguished orator. I remember the chairman of the club saying at one of the Christmas dinners to the section in the audience who were far enough away from the speaker to be talking quite as loud as he was, “Will those bounders at the back of the room shut up?”
The women writers very appropriately established themselves as a Writers’ Club in the area flat underneath A. P. Watt’s literary agency. There was no connection, but I suppose it resulted in an illustrious man author occasionally coming on from Watt’s to have a cup of tea at the Writers’ Club. They had an at-home every Friday afternoon, which was always extremely well supported.
I enjoyed going to these Writers’ Club teas very much, and went often, and on one or other occasion met most of the leading women workers of the day.
The Writers’ Clubbists did not take women’s theories so seriously as the Pioneers, perhaps because they were not subsidised, and had no fierce patron to keep them at concert pitch, but they were more literary, and, until the rise of the Women Journalists’, had almost the monopoly of working women writers. The Sesame had some, and when it was founded later on, the Lyceum became a regular haunt of them.
It was only in our last days at Addison Mansions that we joined the Dilettanti, a dining club of authors and artists, run by Paternoster and his charming wife. It has only a few score members, who once a month eat an Italian dinner together, washed down by old Chianti, at the Florence Restaurant in Soho, and listen to a brilliant paper by one of their members, which they afterwards discuss, with a great deal of wit and freedom. Henry Baerlein, Mrs. George Cran, and Herbert Alexander, are among its wittiest members, and Mrs. Adam, daughter of Mrs. C. E. Humphry, the ever-popular “Madge,” is quite the best serious speaker. The speaking is more really impromptu than at the Omar Khayyam, for the papers generally have titles which do not convey the least inkling of what they are to be about, and it is therefore impossible for people to prepare their speeches beforehand.
Literary at-homes were a great feature of that day. There was a large set of Literary, Art and Theatrical people who used to meet constantly at the houses of Phil May, A. L. Baldry, A. S. Boyd, Moncure D. Conway, Gleeson White, Dr. Todhunter, William Sharp, Zangwill, Rudolph Lehmann, E. J. Horniman, Joseph Hatton, Max O’Rell, John Strange Winter, George and Weedon Grossmith, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, J. J. Shannon, Mrs. Jopling, and Jerome K. Jerome. And the more eminent authors and artists, at any rate, used to meet a great deal at Lady St. Helier’s, Lady Lindsay’s, Lady Dorothy Nevill’s, the Tennants’ and the H. D. Traills’.
Sometimes they met in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening—more often the latter, because the artists came in greater numbers, and the actors, when the Theatres were closed. As I have said, there were very seldom performances at any of them, because the people met to talk, and be introduced to fresh celebrities, and whether the reception was in the afternoon or the evening, the hospitalities were of the simple American kind. They were bona fide meetings of clever people who wished to make each other’s acquaintance. Our friends came to us on Friday nights. At first, like Phil May, we kept open house every week, but as the number of our friends increased, we gradually tailed off to once a fortnight and once a month, because we had almost to empty the house out of the windows to make room for all who came.
When we ceased to receive every week, we sent out notices to the friends we wanted to see most that we were going to be at home on such an evening, and from this we passed to giving each at-home in honour of some special person, whom our friends were invited to meet. I cannot remember half the special guests they were invited to meet, but among them were Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Mark Twain, Mrs. Flora Annie Steel, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Maarten Maartens, Hall Caine, H. G. Wells, W. W. Jacobs, Sir Frederick Lugard (then Captain Lugard) when he came back from his great work in Uganda, F. C. Selous when he came back from his mighty hunting in South Africa, Zangwill, J. J. Shannon, Frankfort Moore, Savage Landor and Dr. George Ernest Morrison.
In a very short time, Bohemian at-homes, at which author and artist and actor met, became the rage in the Bohemian quarters of London—West Kensington, Chelsea, Chiswick, and the North-west. There were many people who were never so happy as when they went to an at-home every afternoon and evening of the week. They were all workers, and most of them too poor to use cabs much, so one wondered when they found time to do their work. That they did it was obvious, for most of them were producing a good deal of work, and many of them were laying the foundations of not inconsiderable fame.