Camden N J
U S A1
July 22—'82
We are all still here & about the same—I am well as usual—your
letters rec'd & dearly welcomed2—I am busy
printing "Specimen Days"—the Staffords well—best love—
W W
first Phil. ed'n out last Wednesday—all sold in twenty four hours—not
one left—2d ed'n ready soon—
Notes
- 1. This letter is addressed:
Mrs Anne Gilchrist | Keats' Corner—12 Well Road | Hampstead | London
England. It is postmarked: Phila. Paid All | Jul | 22 | 1882 | Pa. [back]
- 2. Anne Gilchrist wrote on
May 8 and again on June 18. In the earlier
letter she objected to Whitman's rearrangement of his poems and to the new
titles in the 1882 edition. In the latter she praised "A Memorandum at a
Venture": "It is as clear as daylight to me that you speak
truth—invigorating ennobling truth, full of hope & promise &
impetus for the race. I have never for a moment wavered in my belief in this
truth since it burst upon me a veritable sunrise in reading your poems in 1869"
(University of Pennsylvania). On July 28 Gilchrist in a letter to Burroughs
offered her defense of Whitman, which she was willing to have submitted to the
New York Tribune (Clara Barrus, Whitman
and Burroughs—Comrades [Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1931], 220–221). The newspaper, however, declined to publish it (Barrus,
242). [back]