Camden New Jersey U S America 1
April 11 '87
Yours of March 29 rec'd2 & welcomed—I sent you a
request for two or three printed slips of the Preface, when in type—also some
of the "additional note"—Keep your eyes open sharp to any little technical or
sentence alterations of the text of "Spec: Days in
America" for your Ed'n—as the book was printed rather hurriedly here for the
America area, without tho't of foreign reprint—If you have any frontispiece
portrait, try to have a good one—else none at all w'd be best—the one in
y'r little L of G is bad—I go on to New York (if I can get there) to deliver
my "Death of Lincoln" lecture3—
W W
Correspondent:
Ernest Percival Rhys
(1859–1946) was a British author and editor; he founded the Everyman's
Library series of inexpensive reprintings of popular works. He included a volume
of Whitman's poems in the Canterbury Poets series and two volumes of Whitman's
prose in the Camelot series for Walter Scott publishers. For more information
about Rhys, see Joel Myerson, "Rhys, Ernest Percival (1859–1946)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Ernest Rhys | Care of Walter Scott, Publisher | 24 Warwick Lane | London England
| EC. It is postmarked: Camden, N.J. | Apr 11 | 12 M | 87; London | (?) | Ap 22
| AH. [back]
- 2. See also Rhys' letter of
March 29, 1887. [back]
- 3. The lecture was a
tremendous success, and Whitman was so showered with adulation that he observed
in the Commonplace Book: "If I had staid longer, I sh'd have been killed with
kindness & compliments" (Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of
Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.). The
arrangements for the lecture were made by John H. Johnston; see his letter to
Walt Whitman on March 24, 1887. The poet stayed at
the Westminster Hotel in a suite once occupied by Dickens, where on April 13 he
was visited by such old friends as Johnston, Burroughs, Stedman, and Richard
Watson Gilder. At the Madison-Square Theatre on the next day he was escorted on
stage by William Duckett and gave his lecture before an audience that included
James Russell Lowell, John Hay, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Andrew Carnegie.
After his speech he received "two or more hundred friends" at Westminster Hotel,
appearing "little fatigued," according to the New York Evening
Sun. On the following day he sat for C. O. Cox, the photographer, and
Dora Wheeler, "portrait painter" (Clara Barrus, Whitman and
Burroughs — Comrades (1931), 264–265). A lengthy notice
appeared in the New York Times on April 15. For this
lecture Walt Whitman received $600, $250 from the sale of tickets and
$350 from Carnegie. [back]