Anne Lynch's New York City Literary Salon

Image circa 1849. She does look like she would be a good Salon Host, doesn’t she?

Anne Lynch’s house was the place to be on a Saturday night for writers in mid-19th century New York City. I haven’t yet found how she managed to pull it off, although the fact that she did was commented upon. The author Catherine Sedgwick, for example, wondered how “a young lady without position or fortune and struggling for existence should have succeeded in attracting to herself a society with in its intellectual character far superior to any of the city.”

How indeed?

In the mid-1840s when she moved to New York, she was about 30 years old and single. She published prose and poetry in the many magazines of the day, although none really stand the test of time (a lot of sap). She taught, usually as a private tutor to rich young women, to support herself and her widowed mother. Her most recent stop had been Philadelphia. There she met famous actress Fanny Kemble, who took a liking to her. Kemble perhaps paved the way when Lynch decided to move to New York with some of those oh-so-important “letters of introduction.”

Still….in status-conscious New York, she managed to establish a highly popular literary salon at each of several places she lived, while also working as a teacher at the Brooklyn Girls’ Academy. People didn’t come for the food or spirits; she served tea and cookies. But she created an atmosphere where men and women could come together to discuss ideas. Musician and journalist Richard Storrs Willis (brother of N.P. Willis) in a tribute book published after her death in 1893 wrote:

Quite remarkable indeed was a personal magnetism, silent and unconscious, withal to herself, by which she attracted kindliness, interest and a willingness to serve….all crystallized in her drawing-room receptions, which became so unique a feature in conventional New-York.

“Regulars'“ included, at various times, Edgar Allen Poe, Margaret Fuller, Horace Greeley, and Nathaniel Parker Willis (who called her “Lynchie,” but this was not a common nickname). Visitors came when they were in town—Ralph Waldo Emerson and others. (A group with some overlapping members, but more self-styled Bohemians, also met at Pfaff’s saloon around the same time, which I wrote about here and here).

Charles Dudley Warner wrote,

Hospitality is a common virtue with us, but hers was especially distinguished by tact and without the least ostentation so that her visitors looked upon her home not as a place of entertainment but as a home….She was one of the most truly helpful persons I ever knew. Many give money and good words; she gave herself. Every young aspirant in whom she discovered talent, however unknown and friendless, had in her a friend…

Her economic situation improved when she secured a “long-delayed payment” to her mother as the only survivor of Revolutionary War officer Ebenezer Gray and when she married an Italian professor teaching at City University of New York (now NYU) named Vincenzo Botta. The Bottas—and her mother—moved to a larger home on West Thirty-Seventh Street and she expanded her gatherings.

In the spirit of helping new artists succeed, a letter in the New York Public Library Digital Collections attests to her persistence:

My dear Mr. Duyckinck:

My friend Mr. Rossiter the artist has committed the accompanying poem to my care. and I promised to submit it to you. If you have not room for it in the Literary World, will you have the kindness to return it. My messenger will wait for your decision unless you prefer to have me send again in a day or two.

I have not verified whether she was successful on Mr. Rossiter’s behalf, as I cannot access The Literary World virtually. But she interceded or encouraged many others.

One of the most noteworthy of the talented-but-still-undiscovered writers whom she championed was Edgar Allen Poe. They had a parting of the ways but let’s leave with Poe describing her:

In person she is rather above the usual height, somewhat slender, with dark hair and eyes – the whole countenance at times full of intelligent expression… She is chivalric, self-sacrificing, equal to any fate, capable even of martyrdom, in whatever should seem to her a holy cause. She has a hobby, and this is the idea of duty.