Edward Fitzgerald buys a Constable and conceives Alice (1841)

Found in  A Fitzgerald Medley (Methuen, 1933) an excerpt from a letter by Fitzgerald (the translator of Omar Khayyam) that he sent to his friend Frederick Tennyson in January 1841. Charles Ganz, the editor of the anthology, includes this in the introduction to a piece Fitzgerald wrote for children - a version of Dickens's Little Nell in simple language for children. The letter reads:

I have just concluded, with all the throes of imprudent pleasure, the purchase of a large picture by Constable*, of which, if I can continue in the mood, I will enclose you a sketch. It is very good:but how you and Morton would abuse it! Yet this, being a sketch, escapes some of Constable's faults, and might escape some of your censures. The trees are not splashed with that white sky-mud, which (according to Constable's theory) the Earth scatters up with her wheels in travelling so briskly round the sun; and there is a dash and felicity in the execution that gives one a thrill of good digestion

The Literary Cranks of London - Omar Khayyam Club

We could find no further copies of  the 1894 London journal The Sketch which in that year was running a series 'The literary cranks of London.' However the 1899 publication The Book of Omar and Rubaiyat has an essay on the Omar Khayyam Club entitled 'The literary cranks of London' by 'A Member' which is almost certainly reprinted from the series. The book shows a menu card for the society designed by the PRB artist Simeon Solomon. The other club in the series was 'The Johnson Club' - there were possibly more.
Mention is made here of 'The Ghouls' which may pay further investigation... Of the many societies that flourished then the Omar Khayyam is one of the few to have survived and still meets. There is also an American chapter.

THE OMAR KHAYYAM CLUB 

By A MEMBER 

The literary cranks of London are as the sand of 

the sea-shore for number, and yet they have 

rather diminished than increased during the last few 

years. The Wordsworth Society no longer collects 

archbishops and bishops and learned professors in the 

Jerusalem Chamber to solve the mystery of existence 

under the guidance of the great poet of Rydal, and one 

is rather dubious as to whether the Goethe Society has 

much to say for itself to-day, although in its time it 

has crammed the Westminster Town Hall with enthu- 

siastic lovers of German literature. The Shelley Society 

one only hears of from time to time by its ghastly bur- 

den of debt, a state which perhaps reflects the right 

kind of glory upon its great hero, whose aptitude for 

making paper boats out of Bank of England notes, if 

apocryphal, is, at any rate, a fair exemplification of his 

capacity for getting rid of money. And as to the 

Browning Society, with its blue-spectacled ladies, deep 

in the mysteries of Sordello, if the cash balance, 

which is said at Girton to have been expended in 

sweetmeats, had any existence, at the London centre, 

one knows not what confectioner at the West End 

has reaped the benefit.