About "Dumb Kate.—an Early Death"

"Dumb Kate.—An Early Death" was first published in The Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine in May 1844. Kate, the story's protagonist, is a beautiful young woman, characterized as both harmless and helpless, as she has been unable to hear or speak since birth.¹ Her parents own an old fashioned tavern operated out of an ancient house surrounded by trees in a rural New York village. One of the regular customers of the tavern is the son of a wealthy farmer, and this young man seduces the defenseless Kate and then moves to New York City, where his business dealings make him a man of fortune. Lonely and heartsick, Kate dies and is buried in a churchyard on a hill. In the ending paragraphs, a young boy tosses a "bruised flower" on her grave.² The boy's gesture may be symbolic of both Kate's seduction and a young life lost too soon. For years afterward, Kate's story becomes the topic of conversation among local gossips when they pass the grave on Sundays.³

The setting of the tale, in a rural area, separated in time and place from the bustling city, reveals a sense of anti-urbanism that appeared in several pieces of Whitman's fiction, including "The Tomb-Blossoms" and his temperance novel Franklin Evans. In "Dumb Kate," Whitman characterizes the tavern as a place in which young women risk being seduced. This is certainly not the first time Whitman has portrayed the barroom as a space of sexual attraction, whether between Kate and her seducer or between male friends. Other fiction works that include temperance themes and present the barroom as a social environment conducive to the formation of romantic attachments and/or male friendships include Franklin Evans, the unfinished novel fragment "The Madman," and the short stories "The Child's Champion" and "The Love of the Four Students."

The Columbian Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, edited by John Inman, a contributor to many periodicals himself, was intended to compete with Graham's Magazine and, like Graham's, it included poetry, book reviews, and largely sentimental prose. During the first two years of its run, at the time Whitman's story appeared, the magazine included a piece of music and a colored fashion plate in each number.⁴ Besides Whitman, other contributors to the magazine included Park Benjamin (who had helped found The New World), the temperance writer T. S. Arthur, and leading women writers including Lydia Maria Child and Catherine M. Sedgwick.⁵ In the opening number, the editor hailed the ability of the magazine to "unite the certain attractions of a popular author with the chances of an able but unknown candidate."⁶

In addition to "Dumb Kate.—An Early Death," The Columbian Magazine also published "The Child and the Profligate" (October 1844; a revised version of "The Child's Champion"), "Eris: A Spirit Record" (March 1844), and "The Little Sleighers" (September 1844).

Whitman reprinted "Dumb Kate.—An Early Death" himself in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Kings County Democrat on July 13, 1846, while he was editing that paper. During his two-year editorship (1846–1848), Whitman published items about fiction in the Eagle, and he showed renewed interest in the fiction he had written just a few years earlier. He revised and reprinted Franklin Evans and thirteen of his own short fiction pieces—including "Dumb Kate"—in the paper.⁷

He also reprinted "Dumb Kate—An Early Death" under the shortened title of "Dumb Kate" in the "Pieces in Early Youth" section of Specimen Days & Collect (1882), in which he reprinted a selection of his short fiction.⁸ Several of Whitman's revisions to the original Columbian Magazine version of the story for publication in the Eagle (1846) and Collect (1882) are recorded in our footnotes. For a complete list of revisions to the language of the original text (1844) made or authorized by Whitman for publication in Collect, see Thomas L. Brasher's The Early Poems and the Fiction.⁹