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Philadelphia Public Ledger

Whitman published his tribute to Queen Victoria in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, founded in 1836 as a "penny" paper, newspapers which were published daily and sold for a penny. Like other penny papers, the Public Ledger gained a wide readership by publishing local news, such as crime and court reports. By the 1870s, the Public Ledger was the largest newspaper in Philadelphia and was also well-known nationally. Whitman had long admired Queen Victoria who was born in 1819, the same year as his own birth. As early as 1845, he had written in the American Review that she had "more estimable qualities thus far, than any of the long line of monarchs who have sat upon the British throne, and so generally oppressed the British people." He wrote to his friend Richard M. Bucke on May 24, 1889 that he had drunk "health and respects to Queen Victoria" and 1890, he celebrated her seventy-second birthday with this poem and admiring note.

Bibliography

Loving, Jerome. Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Mott, Frank Luther. American Journalism a History: 1690-1960. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan Company, 1995.

Pannapacker, William. "Philadelphia, Pennsylvania." In Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, edited by J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998.

Whitman, Walt. The Correspondence. Edited by Edwin Haviland Miller. New York: New York University Press, 1969.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: Comprehensive Reader's Edition. Edited by Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

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