28 June 1873 • London, England (MS: UkGS, UCCL 09201)
slc
June 28.Ⓐemendation
Your note apprising me of the privilege which has been extended to me of visiting at the Cosmopolitan Club has been received & I desire to return my thanks & express my appreciation of the courtesy thus conferred upon me.1explanatory note
TheseⒶemendation acknow my acknowledgments have not been delayed through forgetfulness, but by the turmoil & confusion of changing quarters & re-settling my family, & so I ask pardon with good confidence.
With great respect I am, sir,
Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, Bart. | 10 Upper Grosvenor street | W. postmarked london • w y ju28 73
In 1865, upon the death of his uncle, William Stirling-Maxwell (1818–78) became the ninth baronet of Pollok, County Renfrew (Scotland). He was a doctor of law, member of Parliament for Perthshire (1852–68, 1874–78), lord rector of the University of Edinburgh, and the author of several works of history. John Lothrop Motley described him as “mild, amiable, bald-headed, scholarlike, a Member of Parliament and a man of fortune” (Motley to Mary Motley, 28 May 58, Motley, 1:227–28). Stirling-Maxwell was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, established in 1852 and described by Sir Wemyss Reid as
the most distinguished of the clubs given up to tobacco and talk. Membership is in itself a diploma. ... In its comfortable room not a few of those who are concerned in the Government of the Empire meet to exchange their views, and to indulge in frank discussion of the questions of the hour. (Sims, 1:80)
Motley said in 1858 that it met “late in the evenings twice a week, Sundays and Wednesdays, in a large room which is the studio of the painter {Henry Wyndham} Phillips, in Charles Street, leading from Berkeley Square” (Motley, 1:227). Ostensibly “free from party colour” and “diversely representative” (although exclusively male) in its membership, the club remained for half a century “the London paradise of the intelligent foreigner” (Escott, 167–69). Among the members Clemens had already met (or would soon meet) were Lord Houghton, John Lothrop Motley, Joaquin Miller, Thomas Hughes, Robert Browning, and Anthony Trollope. Clemens’s reading notes about a two-volume unidentified work (possibly a reminiscence) include the following: “Cosmopolitan Club. 30 Charles St Berkeley □ went there with Lord Houghton several times 11 or 12 pm” (CU-MARK Burke 1904, 1056–57; Boase, 3:761; Trollope, 1:147; 1 and 2 July 73 to Miller, n. 1click to open link).
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which is in the Stirling of Keir Papers, Strathclyde Regional Archives, Glasgow, Scotland (UkGS).
L5 , 391–392.