Eustace Conway

There have been men, in and out of Century membership, whose own personality or achievement was overshadowed by that belonging to their father. Eustace Conway was perhaps one of them, yet he himself will be remembered by his friends for what he accomplished individually. His father, Moncure D. Conway, was an erratic and brilliant fellow-Centurion of ours a generation ago who fought the battles of the Civil War and afterward, not at the front but with the equally powerful initiative of his incisive platform speech and pen. His conversation was a tradition of the Century. He had been, so Professor Sloane recalled in the Club memorials for 1907, “editor, exhorter, preacher, author, lecturer, travel[l]er and reformer;” he had “the charm of originality, a grace of manner that won friends, and a sense of finality which perpetuated interest in his personality.”

It was not easy for the son to duplicate such qualities, and Eustace Conway did not try to do so. In social intercourse he was agreeable, but as a rule retiring. Practicing lawyer during half a century, Conway applied himself to the avocations of collecting rare manuscripts and investigating from all accessible material the story of Shakespeare and his period. On this subject he was an acknowledged expert; he published a book upon it, but only for private circulation. One of Conway’s pleasing reminiscences was of the personality and mannerisms of Charles Dickens; whom, as a friend of his father’s, he met pretty intimately. Like many other Dickens admirers, Eustace Conway took a hand at solving Dickens’ uncompleted “Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

Alexander Dana Noyes
1938 Century Association Yearbook