Content:
This manuscript appears to be a partial draft of a piece of fiction about a character named Ganguernet. The January 1844 issue of
The Knickerbocker
magazine featured a story called "Ganguernet: Or, 'A Capital Joke,'" which was "Translated from the French by John Hunter." The story includes a scene with a nearly identical plot to the one described in this portion of Whitman's manuscript, although the wording is, for the most, quite different. It is unclear whether Whitman was simply paraphrasing Hunter's translation, or whether both stories were derived separately from the same source text. On the back of the leaf (loc.00264) is a draft of Whitman's early poem "The Play-Ground," which was published in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
on June 1, 1846. As the prose draft is crossed out and the poetry draft is not, it is likely that the poetry draft was written later. Thus, the date of composition for the prose manuscript is probably between 1844 and 1846. The title "The Play-Ground" is written vertically along the left side of this leaf, presumably labeling the material on the reverse.
