1916 Unpublished Autograph Poem Handwritten and Delivered by Laurence Housman in New York: A Queer English Writer and Suffragist’s Wartime Appeal for Peace, Equality, and the Moral Renewal of the New World

On offer is an unpublished autograph poem, handwritten by English dramatist, illustrator, and reformer Laurence Housman (1865–1959), an internationally celebrated playwright, pacifist, and early queer rights advocate.

In 1916, Housman was at a moment of creative and ideological fervor: a queer English moralist witnessing the New World during Europe’s collapse into war. From the first stanza of his poem, his dinner-table gratitude becomes an appeal for peace, human fellowship, and the suffragist’s dream of equality beyond empire.

Housman sailed to America on the S.S. California, and arrived in New York on March 1, 1916 for his first ever visit and speaking tour. On the day he arrived on American soil, he addressed his peers at the New York Players Club, describing himself as“an ardent suffragist”, clarifying his plans to give “several talks before suffrage gatherings” during his two months in America, and stating that he is motivated by the “conditions which the war has imposed on women in England has made me stronger in my desire to see women sharing equal rights with men. The war has forced women to work alongside men at occupations that are entirely new to them…” [New York Tribune, March 2, 1916]. Two days later, at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, he gave an interview to Nixola Greeley-Smith for The Evening World (published in the Evening World on Mar 6), calling New York “an over-masculine city” and arguing that the world’s collapse lay in men’s worship of hardness and property.

Between these public statements and his first scheduled lecture at the National Arts Club on March 8, 1916, Housman attended a convivial Monday gathering, memorialized in this poem, framed as an after-dinner toast yet weighted with moral urgency. The poem simultaneously honours and appeals to his American contemporaries.

He opens in light self-mockery:

“‘Twas my delight, on a Monday night,
(As I chanced to be in the locality
Of your chamber of Tubs) to sample the club’s
Hebdamoal hospitality.”

The lilting rhythm and comic diction are deliberate masks. What begins as social verse quickly turns into transatlantic reflection. Housman contrasts the free fellowship of his New York hosts with the murderous tribalism consuming Europe. Another excerpt:

“Relaxed from the weight, all horror and hate,
Of Europe’s bloody necrophilists,
I tucked in my knees, quite smugly at ease,
With dramatists, painters, and novelists.
…There, close on one bench, sat German and French
And Japanese come from the Yellow Seas,
And Russian and Hun were sharing the fun,
Forgetting their racial jealousies.”

Across these stanzas, the club becomes a microcosm of peace, its international ease a rebuke to“the Old World’s savage diplomacies”.

The humor ripens into moral vision: Housman sees in America what he no longer sees in Europe—an instinct for cooperation un-poisoned by imperial pride. Still neutral in early 1916, the United States represented for him a moral frontier, a country that might prove civilization could be sustained by intellect and empathy rather than domination. The poet’s tone, initially genial, grows exhortative:

“It’s the Head not the Heart that still keeps us apart…
There’s Peace knocking sure at America’s door,
If she’ll only have courage to open it.”

In this closing appeal Housman urges America to become the conscience that Europe, in its masculine self-destruction, had forfeited. From his vantage, the United States stood as the possible inheritor of a more humane order, one that valued life above property and reason above violence. Beneath its convivial surface, the poem reads as a transatlantic sermon: a queer humanist’s hope that the gentler instincts of art, intellect, and fellowship might survive in the New World even as they perished in the Old.

The reference to a “chamber of Tubs” and “Hebdomadal hospitality” likely nods to one of the weekly arts-club dinners around Gramercy Park, perhaps the Players or the National Arts Club, where dramatists, painters, and novelists gathered on Monday evenings. The phrase is likely Housman’s own humorous coinage.

As an artifact, this piece stands at the intersection of literature, gender history, wartime conscience, and transatlantic reform. It documents Housman’s first week in America, his first direct appeal to an American audience, and his earliest poetic response to the United States—a nation he imagined as moral heir to a Europe undone by its own masculinity. Written by a pacifist homosexual suffragist in the middle of the Great War, it fuses charm and prophecy, dinner talk and diplomacy, turning gratitude into theology. The poem remains unpublished and unrecorded, and its date, five days after arrival, makes it the earliest known creative work from his 1916 tour.

Autograph poem on two lined leaves in Housman’s hand, signed and dated March 6 1916; mounted photograph opposite showing Housman with a group of men in formal dress (one likely his brother, A.E. Housman); bound in red-marbled boards with cloth spine and manuscript title label. Bright, clean, and well-preserved; Good+ condition.

BIO NOTES:

Laurence Housman (1865–1959) was a playwright, illustrator, and reformer whose blend of aestheticism and activism made him one of the moral architects of early-twentieth-century Britain. A founder of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage and later of the British Society for Sex Psychology, he championed pacifism, socialism, and sexual honesty long before such positions were safe. As the brother of poet A. E. Housman, he shared the family’s literary refinement but turned his art toward ethical theatre and public conscience. His private homosexuality, lived in celibate integrity, shaped his philosophy of tenderness and reason over force. His fantasy play Prunella (1906) achieved New York success under Winthrop Ames in 1914, paving the way for his American tour of 1916. During the war he lectured widely on art, citizenship, and peace, arguing that the enfranchisement of women and the rejection of militarism were inseparable moral imperatives. A Club Dinner Memory, composed in New York during his opening week, remains a rare firsthand document linking queer authorship, suffrage activism, and wartime humanism across the Atlantic.