Camden1
May 27 '83
Your good letter came four days ago—Herb's has also reached me2—both warmly appreciated & thanked—I keep
well—am still here in C. but shall go off somewhere soon—Dr Bucke's book
will be first published in England3—Josiah Child,
(at Trübner's) will have some copies in a very few days, (to enter one at
Stationers' Hall, London, to secure the English copyright: & to make the
first sales)—You will see your pen & thought are in it4—Herb's picture intaglio forms the
frontispiece—Mrs Stafford is about as well as usual again.5 It is a very warm Sunday afternoon—as I write up
in my third story south room—
W W
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Mrs. Ann Gilchrist | 12 Well Road Hampstead | London England. It is postmarked:
Camden | May | 27 | 5 PM | N.J.; Philadelphia | May | 27 | 1883 | Pa. [back]
- 2. Anne Gilchrist wrote on
May 6, and Herbert on April 29. When Anne Gilchrist replied to Whitman on July 30, she was unexpectedly (and sensibly)
critical of Bucke's biography: she particularly objected to "carefully gathering
together again all the rubbish stupid or malevolent that has been written of
you" and to "all that unmeaning, irrelevant clatter about what Rabelais or
Shakespeare or the ancients & their times tolerated in the way of coarseness
or plainness of speech." She also forwarded to Whitman her recent biography of
Mary Lamb (1883). She wrote again on October
13–21. Apparently Whitman did not reply to either letter. [back]
- 3. The biography was
published in London on June 15 (Whitman's Commonplace Book, Charles E. Feinberg
Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.). [back]
- 4. Richard Maurice Bucke
included extracts from Anne Gilchrist's article in The
Radical from May, 1870 (204–206). [back]
- 5. Whitman was with the
Staffords from May 12 to 15 (Whitman's Commonplace Book). [back]