Stanley, (Henry)

Walt Whitman mentions Stanley as one of the people who frequented Pfaff’s: “Our host himself, an old friend of mine, quickly appear’d on the scene to welcome me and bring up the news, and, first opening a big fat bottle of the best wine in the cellar, talk about ante-bellum times, ’59 and ’60, and the jovial suppers at his then Broadway place, near Bleecker street. Ah, the friends and names and frequenters, those times, that place. Most are dead--Ada Clare, Wilkins, Daisy Sheppard, O’Brien, Henry Clapp, Stanley, Mullin, Wood, Brougham, Arnold--all gone. And there Pfaff and I, sitting opposite each other at the little table, gave remembrance to them in a style they would have themselves fully confirm’d, namely, big, brimming, fill’d-up champagne-glasses, drain’d in abstracted silence, very leisurely, to the last drop” (CW 5:21). The man Whitman mentions may be Henry Stanley, a contributor to Vanity Fair (J. Watson 521).