New Dates for the Rhymers' Club

37 NEW DATES FOR THE RHYMERS» CLUB By Karl Beckson (Brooklyn College of The City University of New York) In a recent note on a new date for the inception of the Rhymers» Club, Prof. Daniel Rutenberg suggests that the year I89O is probably more accurate than the widely accepted date of I89I.1 He cites, however, no new evidence to support his conjecture and overlooks at least one source already published. Moreover, Prof. Rutenberg accepts the widely assumed belief that the Rhymers stopped meeting in 1894; here, too, he relies on received opinion. I propose, therefore, to cite a new unpublished source which confirms the founding date of the Rhymers» Club and evidence which disposes of the previously accepted terminal date for the club. Aside from a remark by Ernest Rhys in Everyman Remembers (1931) that the Rhymers» Club was "set going at the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street," and an equally vague statement by Yeats In The Trembling of the Veil (1922), there Is no extant account oFTîow the club was actually founded. Dr. Ian Fletcher has stated that the club "la faet gradually cohered out of informal readings at 20 Fitzroy Street,"2 the offices and studios of The Century Guild of Artists, but he offers no evidence to support his claim. Neither Rhys nor Yeats mentions such a genesis. We do know that meetings of the club were occasionally held at the "Fitzroy settlement ," as it was apparently called, the earliest in February, I890, shortly after the founding of the club. A published letter from Herbert Home, one of the "Hobby Horsemen" at the Century Guild, to Rhys, dated February 9, I890, states, "I asked the Rhymers here the other evening,"3 an indication that Fitzroy Street was not their usual meeting place. In the absence of other evidence that the Rhymers began meeting early in I890, I believed, at one time, that the date of Home's letter was erroneous, but new evidence confirms the year I890 as the founding date of the Rhymers* Club. An unpublished letter in the Columbia University Library from Rhys to E. C. Stedman, dated May 21, I89O, reports the "»Rhymsters» Club* lately formed here." (The term "Rhymsters" was apparently an alternate name used during the first two years of the club's existence: in an unpublished letter in the Princeton University Library, dated February 7, I89I, Arthur Symons still uses "Rhymsters" in writing to Rhys.) In view of the date of Home's letter to Rhys, we may assume, therefore, that the Rhymers* Club was founded in January, I89O. (There is, conceivably, a possibility that it was founded even earlier, but I am aware of no evidence to support such a conjecture.) The terminal date of the club is less certain. It has been generally assumed that the Rhymers stopped meeting following publication of The Second Book of the Rhymers * Club in June, 1894, the result, presumably, of weakened interest in a club which had 38 no rules or established program. In point of fact, however, the Rhymers were still meeting in the fall of 1894 and indeed planning a third anthology. An unpublished letter from Elkln Mathews to Herbert Home, dated September 20, 1894, reveals that Mathews, who had published the Rhymers» first anthology in 1892, was attempting to acquire the new volume for his own firm,^ his association with John Lane in the Bodley Head at that time undergoing dissolution . (Why the third anthology was never published remains unknown .) There is additional evidence that the Rhymers continued to meet, if only sporadically, beyond the fall of 1894. In the Mathews Papers at the University of Reading, there is a post card from G. A. Greene to Mathews, postmarked May 13, 1895, inviting the publisher to a Rhymers' dinner,5 perhaps an indication that negotiations for publication of a third anthology had not entirely ended. Furthermore, an unpublished post card, dated November 2, I896, from Yeats to Greene reveals that Yeats convened a meeting of the Rhymers," but whether this was an effort on Yeats» part to revive the club, which had long since dissolved, or whether other meetings were regularly held in I896 remains unknown. Clearly...