Harry Stafford to Walt Whitman, 17 July 1880
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All are well at our place they received your papers & letter in due time.1 How long do you intend staying in London, and when do you think of returning to Camden?2 I must say on the day after you left was very much surprised at your sudden departure.
Hoping to receive a letter from you soon. I am your affectionate son
H. L. Stafford
Haddonfield N.J.3
July
1880.
Dear Walt
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Your postal received was glad to hear from you and learn that at the time you wrote you were well and enjoying yourself but sorry to hear you were sick at last accounts
Your Dear Boy Harry
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Notes
- 1. Walt Whitman met the 18-year-old Harry Lamb Stafford (1858–1918) in 1876, beginning a relationship which was almost entirely overlooked by early Whitman scholarship, in part because Stafford's name appears nowhere in the first six volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden—though it does appear frequently in the last three volumes, which were published only in the 1990s. Whitman occasionally referred to Stafford as "My (adopted) son" (as in a December 13, 1876, letter to John H. Johnston), but the relationship between the two also had a romantic, erotic charge to it. In 1883, Harry married Eva Westcott. For further discussion of Stafford, see Arnie Kantrowitz, "Stafford, Harry L. (b.1858)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
- 2. This letter is written on a small card, and is in an envelope addressed, in Whitman's own hand, to "Walt Whitman London Ontario Canada"—he sent self-addressed envelopes to Harry and his family in order to encourage them to write while he was on his Canadian trip. The envelope is postmarked: 17 July 1880 at Kirkwood, New Jersey. [back]
- 3. Stafford conserved space on the page through crosshatch writing, leaving parts of the letter nearly illegible. [back]