Profession: writer

Stoker knew Wilde’s parents, and married a woman Wilde had courted. He met Doyle, Shaw and Tennyson when he moved to London; he attended Doyle’s wedding, stayed with him and had a letter from him praising ‘Dracula’ when it was published. Whitman had been one of his heroes; they exchanged letters until Whitman’s death — speculation has been aroused by one in which Whitman relays his physical measurements — and met a few times, when Stoker was in America with Irving’s theatre-company (it is untrue that Stoker crossed the Atlantic just to see him). Twain was another American friend.

Wilde, an attention-seeker, made many passing acquaintanceships in Britain, France and the U.S. Yeats was a friend of his mother, and had Christmas dinner with him. Stoker and he knew each other from Dublin. Whistler was a mentor, friend and competitive sparring-partner. Daudet, Degas, Verlaine, Zola, Goncourt, Toulouse-Lautrec and Schwob (a helpful friend) were among those met in Paris. He procured a boy for Gide in Algiers, and met Longfellow, Alcott, Holmes and Whitman on an American lecture-tour. Morris said he was an ass (but clever); James called him an unclean beast, but nominated him for a London club.

Cézanne was a schoolmate in the south of France, and close friend for years. Flaubert was friend and mentor, Maupassant a follower but also, with Huysmans, a collaborator and regular dining companion. As a young journalist, he wrote fearlessly in support of Manet, who with Renoir frequented the same café. He met Mallarmé through Manet, and Turgenev and Daudet through Flaubert. Bjørnson and Mirbeau, both friends, strongly supported him over the Dreyfus affair. Zola’s depiction of a fictional artist heavily based on Cézanne, Monet and Manet finally cost him Cézanne’s friendship, despite Monet and Pissarro’s interventions.

Flaubert was highly regarded by many younger realist writers: Zola, Daudet, the Goncourts and Maupassant (a disciple, whom he badgered to work harder) all met regularly to eat and talk together. Turgenev (introduced by Sainte-Beuve) was also among this circle of friends, and introduced James, who thought Flaubert’s emotional development had stopped at the time of his first epileptic fit. Hugo, more an acquaintance, was a literary influence. Du Camp was a lifelong friend; Flaubert caught syphilis when they dallied in Beirut. Sand (as well as Turgenev) conducted a great and intimate correspondence with him.

Longfellow encouraged her teenage writings. Independently wealthy, she surrepticiously supported her close friend James (a strong influence on her own writing), took him out in her car, and promoted him unsuccessfully for a Nobel Prize. Conrad, Gide, Cocteau, Lewis and her friend Huxley all visited her in Provence. Despite reading Proust avidly and having friends in common, she never met him. Fitzgerald famously visited her outside Paris, but in nervous anticipation had apparently drunk too much beforehand; he tried to impress, she was unamused, it was a disaster.

Tennyson was a friend from university, where Whewell was Thackeray’s rather distant tutor; Thackeray also met Goethe aged 19 or 20 on a journey to Weimar, though it’s unclear whether he made any impression on the old man. Leigh Hunt championed Thackeray’s work, while Eliot, Trollope and the Brownings were befriended as part of a London literary circle. Dickens had been a good friend, but they sustained a petty feud for years before being reconciled through a chance meeting on a London club doorstep . Vigny befriended Thackeray during a long stay in London. Carlyle described him as “of enormous appetite.”