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Mentioned in A Bygone Bohemia

Edward Howland was born in Charleston, South Carolina and was educated at Harvard. He is remembered as an "elegant scholar" who sold "his choice library he had spent many years and a fortune to collect" to help Henry Clapp launch the Saturday Press (Rawson 106). Howland was in charge of the business side of the publication (Miller 26) and is also listed among the “friendly contributors” who “were glad to furnish articles for nothing, being friendly toward the establishment of an absolutely independent critical paper” (Winter 294).

Charles Edwards Lester was born in Griswold, Connecticut, a descendant of Jonathan Edwards. After graduating from the bar, he entered Auburn theological seminary but stopped preaching due to frequent hemorrhages of the lungs. Venturing to Great Britain in 1840 to improve his health, he was appointed U.S. consul in Italy and remained there six years before returning to New York City.

Growing up in Poughkeepsie, New York, Fitz Hugh Ludlow began sampling various drugs at the age of sixteen. He went to Union College in Schenectady, New York, where he continued to experiment with drugs, especially hashish (Martin 51-2). His most well-known work, The Hasheesh Eater (1857), was written in the tradition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and was based on his personal experiences under the influence of the drug.

Not much is known about the details of Benjamin Masset's life. However, according to A. L. Rawson, Masset was "a true friend" of Ada Clare, who held a significant role in the Pfaffian circle as the "queen" to Clapp, considered the "king." It is also from Rawson that we learn that Masset advised Ada Clare about the two novels she wrote. He allegedly told her to print one of them and to destroy her other work (Rawson 100).

Known in the New York journals as "the Literary Policeman," George S. McWatters was a New York City police officer who occasionally visited Pfaff's and there earned the respect of the bar's bohemian patrons (McWatters xix). A.L. Rawson writes, "McWatters was a genial and kind-hearted policeman, and fond of children. When Ada [Clare]'s boy came he named him 'the Prince,' and the title was at once accepted by the coterie. . . . The coterie [at Pfaff's] helped to get him appointed on the 'force,' where he served until retired for long and faithful service" (107).

Adah Menken, an actress "not known for her talent, but rather for her frenetic energy, her charismatic presence, and her willingness to expose herself," was born in a suburb of New Orleans (Richards 192). Adah’s given name was probably Adah Bertha Theodore, but conflicting accounts of her early years and parentage (many generated by herself for publicity purposes) make it difficult to say with certainty.

Known best by his pseudonym of Petroleum V. Nasby, David Ross Locke was born in upstate New York near Binghamton to a poor family. According to his biographer, John Harrison, Locke had "little formal education." (5) Instead, Locke built his career off his own hard work and ingenuity, starting from a very young age. When he was 12, Locke became an apprentice at a Cortland newspaper called the Democrat, a position that lasted for seven years.

Harry Neill was born to a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia (Gunn, vol. 18, 54). Henry Clapp’s New York Times obituary describes Neill as “a gifted Philadelphian” ("Obituary" 7). Neill was a journalist whose work was published in Vanity Fair and other contemporary periodicals. He also wrote under the alias, Inigo (T. Miller 37). Before moving to New York in his early 20s, Neill's work appeared in Philadelphia's Bulletin and the Evening Journal.

Characterized as an "eccentric literary man not without a spice of genius," William North was born in England and eventually settled in New York City (W. Rossetti 48-49). In England he established a periodical North's Magazine, and in New York he began publishing sensational stories like "The Living Corpse" which appeared in Putnam's in 1853 and was later reprinted in the Saturday Press.

Born in County Cork and raised primarily in Limerick, Ireland, Fitz-James O'Brien moved to New York City in 1852. Descending from an Anglo-Irish landholding family, O'Brien received his inheritance (estimated at £8000) at about the age of 21. Between 1849 and 1851, it is believed that O'Brien edited a failed literary magazine called The Parlour Magazine of the Literature of All Nations and squandered his inheritance (Wolle 21). Leaving England almost penniless, O'Brien immigrated to America and made the U.S.

Hatchik Oscanyan was born in Constantinople, Turkey. He later changed his name to Christopher. As an Armenian resident of the Ottoman Empire, he came to the United State for an education, but he decided to stay after he completed his studies at New York University (Nance 56; Lause 52). Scholar Susan Nance describes Oscanyan, along with Bayard Taylor, as individuals who "labored to sell various Ex Oriente Lux messages about the East in a growing information and publicity infrastructure that was taking shape in the 1840s, just as they both came to public notice" (54-5).

William Page was born in Albany in 1811, but he attended public school in New York. In 1826, he began to take classes at the National Academy of Design after it first opened, and it was from here that he was awarded one of it first annual student prizes. By 1830, he was painting commissioned portraits in cities throughout New York State, including Rochester, Albany, and New York City. He joined the American Academy in 1835, where he also served on its board of directors.

Charles Pfaff's obituary in the New York Times characterizes him as the proprietor of the famous Bohemian "chop house" at 647 Broadway that flourished between 1860 and 1875 ("In and About the City," 2). Born in Baden, Switzerland likely in 1819, Pfaff first arrived in New York in the early 1850s "part of a wave of German immigrants" (Blalock; Martin 18). According to scholar Justin Martin, "Herr Pfaff was a round little man with shaggy eyebrows and chubby fingers. His Old World manner and thickly accented English gave him a courtly and discreet air" (18).

Described in his obituary as a "well-known artist and critic," Dr. Edward Ruggles was a friend of the Whitman family who was an "eccentric physician and painter in Brooklyn" (New York Times, March 12, 1867, 5; G. W. Allen 323). Ruggles earned his medical degree at Bowdoin College sometime around 1840.

A. L. Rawson describes Schwartz as a friend of Ada Clare. He was “an engineer and rival of Ericsson” whose association with the Pfaffians is unknown (103). Although there is a not a concrete link that ties him to Pfaff’s proper, Schwartz’s friendship with Clare suggests that he was involved with the Bohemian coterie that regularly gathered at her 42nd Street home. The Schwartz that Rawson mentioned in his article may be the same person as "Theodore Schwartz," who was an engineer in New York City, according to his patent application for a caloric engine (Scientific American, Jan.

A former teacher, Charles Bailey Seymour moved from London to New York City in 1849. In New York, he began working as the dramatic and musical editor for the New York Times. In 1858, Seymour published the book Self-Made Men. The book, which won him a certain degree of fame, was "a collection of short biographies of British and American subjects that included [Henry] Clapp's old mentor, Elihu Burritt" (Lause 48).

Charles Dawson Shanly emigrated to New York City from Ireland via Canada and was working as the Assistant Secretary of the Department of Public Works in 1857. In New York City during the late 1850s and 1860s, Shanly was productive as a journalist and editor at such publications as Vanity Fair, Mrs. Grundy, the New York Leader, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Saturday Press.

Described as a "golden woman of poetical tendencies," Shaw was born to an Ohio clergyman (Kendall 305). Shaw married young but divorced and was shunned by her family as a result (Lawson 104). Though her first marriage to Dr. LeBaum failed, Shaw did remarry in 1863 to Captain Henry Bogardus. Shaw who was "brillant, beautiful, but eccentric" worked as an actress throughout the country, including cities such as New Orleans and St. Louis (Kendall 305).

Henry Wheeler Shaw was one of the "brightest and most popular humorous men of the day" (J. Derby 239). He was best known as a talented "humorist, a homespun philospher [sic], and a conscious literary artist. One of his chief strengths was originality; in such a graphic epigram as ’when a feller gits a goin down hil, it dus seem as tho evry thing had bin greased for the okashun,’ even the deliberate misspellings fade into the background behind the compelling image" (Kesterson). At age seventeen, Shaw began a ten year exploration of western portions of the United States.

Nathaniel Graham Shepherd (also Shepard) was born in New York City and grew up to study poetry there. Little information remains about his early life, but Shepherd was an artistically inclined youth. In pursuit of artistic growth, he moved to Georgia for a number of years to teach drawing. Upon returning to New York, Shepherd made his livelihood in the insurance business while still pursuing poetry in his leisure time.

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