Content:
This item refers to the Italian tenor Giovanni Matteo Mario's death on
December
11,1883. Whitman referred to Mario in
Specimen Days & Collect
, published in 1882-1883,
in the passages entitled "Plays and Operas
too"An earlier version of the essay appeared in
"The Old Bowery," and "Old Actors, Singers, Shows, etc., in New
York."
Content:
This scrap refers to pages from Asia Booth Clarke's
The Elder and the Younger Booth
(1882), according to Grier (
Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts
[New York: New York University Press], 3, 1194). Although there is no mention of
Junius Brutus Booth's vegetarianism on page 84, as Whitman indicates, the phrase
"strict vegetarian" appears in Whitman's article "Booth and 'The Bowery,'" first
published in the
New York Tribune
(16 August 1885, page 4), and then in the essay "The Old Bowery"
November Boughs
(1888).
