June 9 '79
My dear Josiah Child
I have only just rec'd yours of April 22d, with $24.50 from Trübner & Co.1 for which am't see receipt enclosed—
I note the order for nineteen new copies, & as soon as I go back to Camden, (within a week) they shall be carefully forwarded to you. You speak of a remittance for of three guineas, promised to be forwarded by Mr. Fraser for the Tobacco Plant piece.2 As no such remittance has been rec'd by me, nor heard about, it has probably been deferred—Mr. F. can address me, & send P O order to Camden—I shall prepare other two pieces & send him for the paper, in response to his kind request.
Thanks for letter enclosures—Mr. Westness's, Mr Walters's & Mr Norman's.3 Will try to send you photos for him (Thos: Dixon's4 is not enclosed)—I keep well, for me—have been away from home gallivanting around, land & water, & especially this city, the last two months—I send you a paper with this.
Walt Whitman
(I write this from New York City, U S A. 1309 Fifth av: near 86th st. : but I return soon to 431 Stevens st: Camden New Jersey—which is my permanent P O address—)
Notes
- 1. Josiah Child was the
agent for Trübner & Company (see the letter from Whitman to
Trübner & Company of October 1, 1878). On
June 25 Whitman shipped thirty-six volumes at $3.50 each, as he informed the
firm two days later (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg Collection
of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington,
D.C.). [back]
- 2. "Three Young Men's
Deaths," which appeared in the April issue (2, 318–319). Whitman sent the
article on November 27, 1878, to John Fraser, the
editor of the magazine. He received $15.30 for it on June 15 (Whitman's
Commonplace Book). See the letter from Whitman to John Fraser of June 16, 1879. "The Dalliance of the Eagles"
appeared in this magazine in November 1880 (2, 552). [back]
- 3. In the Walt Whitman Review, 16 (1970), 56–57, Professor Florence B.
Freedman has identified T. D. Westness as an uneducated English admirer; see
also Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden
(1906–1996), 9 vols., 3:571–573. Freedman also points out that
Walters may be the Frank W. Walters mentioned in William Sloane Kennedy's The Fight of a Book for the World (West Yarmouth, MA: The
Stonecroft Press, 1926), 41. For Henry Norman of the Pall Mall
Gazette, see Walt Whitman, The Correspondence,
ed. Edwin Haviland Miller (New York: New York University Press,
1961–1977), 4:62. [back]
- 4. Thomas Dixon, an
uneducated corkcutter of Sunderland, England, was one of Whitman's early English
admirers. In 1856 he had bought copies of Leaves of Grass
from a book peddler; one of these copies was later sent by William B. Scott to
William Michael Rossetti. Dixon vigorously supported cultural projects and was
in effect the ideal laborer of Ruskin, who printed many of his letters to the
corkcutter in Time and Tide (1867). See Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto
(1892), 2:32–33, 267–269; Harold Blodgett, Walt
Whitman in England (1934), 15–17; The Works of
John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1905),
17:78–79. [back]