[41 Brimmer St., Boston]

1.George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950): playwright, critic, political polemicist, was born and spent his first years in Dublin but joined his mother in London in 1876. A socialist by inclination, he joined the Fabian Society in 1884, and in 1895 became theatre critic for the Saturday Review. He made his name as playwright at the close of the century, beginning with Caesar and Cleopatra (1898); and the series of his theatrical successes included Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), Pygmalion (1912) – his screenplay for the film adaptation in 1938 won him an Academy Award – Androcles and the Lion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1925, but turned down the Order of Merit in 1946, two years before Eliot was appointed OM.

2.Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor (1879–1964), American-born British Conservative politician who married the American-born Waldorf Astor in 1906. She was the first woman to take her seat as a Member of Parliament in 1919, where she was known for her sharp if vagarious wit. She retired from politics in 1945. See Anthony Masters, Nancy Astor: A Biography (1981), Christopher Sykes, Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor (1984), and Siân Evans, Queen Bees: Six Brilliant and Extraordinary Society Hostesses Between the Wars (2016).

Sencourt independently confirmed, ‘One morning [when I was staying with TSE and Vivienne] … I heard Tom speaking on the telephone. In his smooth, courteous voice he was saying: “will you tell her Ladyship that I am unable to come to lunch with her because I don’t accept invitations from ladies I have not met, nor from one who invites me without my wife, nor from one who is divorced”. “Her Ladyship” was none other than Lady Astor, another American who had taken out British nationality, who was much better known than he was in 1930, and who was considered one of the most brilliant of hostesses both in her London home and in the country – her weekend parties at Clivedon [sic] were celebrated for their gatherings of men of power. On this occasion she had invited Eliot to meet Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, neither of whom he even wished to come into contact with.’ (T. S. Eliot, 119).

3.RichardAldington, Richard Aldington (1892–1962), poet and critic; friend of TSE in the years immediately after WW1. Aldington’s Stepping Heavenward, with its caricatures of TSE and Vivien Eliot, Ottoline Morrell and Virginia Woolf, had been published on 12 Nov. 1931. See further Vivien Whelpton, Richard Aldington, vol. 1: Poet, Soldier and Lover 1911–1929; vol 2: Novelist, Biographer and Exile 1930–1962 (Cambridge, 2019).

4.L. A. G. StrongStrong, Leonard Alfred George ('L. A. G.') (1896–1958), English novelist, historian, poet and critic.

5.T. SturgeMoore, Thomas ('T.') Sturge Moore (1870–1944), poet, playwright, critic, and artist – brother of the philosopher G. E. Moore – was christened Thomas but adopted his mother’s maiden name ‘Sturge’ to avoid confusion with the Irish poet Thomas Moore. A prolific poet, author of 31 plays, and a loyal contributor to the Criterion, he was also a close friend of W. B. Yeats, for whom he designed bookplates and bookbindings. He published his first collection of poetry, The Vinedresser and Other Poems, in 1899.

6.GoldsworthyDickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932), Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; historian, pacifist, and promoter of the League of Nations; Apostle. OM thought him ‘a rare and gentle Pagan Saint … by temperament religious and poetical’ (Ottoline at Garsington [1974], 117–19).

7.JamesStephens, James Stephens (?1882–1950), Irish novelist and poet; close friend of OM.

8.Charles Dickens, letter to John Forster, from an inn in Switzerland, 1844: ‘Fleas of elephantine dimensions were gambolling boldly in the dirty beds; and the mosquitoes!’ Katherine Mansfield, letter to Sydney Schiff, 25 Dec. 1921: ‘As to the gentle Ernestine she is quite overcome and there sounds a note of elephantine gambolling from the kitchen’ (The Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. John Middleton Murry [1928]; The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott; vol. 4, 1920–1921 [Oxford, 1996], 352).