Charles W. Eldridge to Walt Whitman, 2 May 1876
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Washington D. C.
May 2. 1876
Dear Walt:
Enclosed I send you a copy of a letter received by William.1 He says he knew the writer by correspondence only, when he was on the Saturday Eve'g Post. Her name was then Fanny Malone Raymond,2 and she was said to be extremely beautiful and probably is so yet.
You had better accept their invitation—How did you
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like Williams article?3 And how is your health.
write me if you can—All your friends well here as far as I know.
Correspondent:
Charles W. Eldridge (1837–1903) was one half
of the Boston-based abolitionist publishing firm Thayer and Eldridge, who issued
the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. In December 1862, on
his way to find his injured brother George in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Whitman
stopped in Washington and encountered Eldridge, who had become a clerk in the
office of the army paymaster, Major Lyman Hapgood. Eldridge helped Whitman gain employment in Hapgood's office.
For more on Whitman's relationship with
Thayer and Eldridge, see David Breckenridge Donlon, "Thayer, William Wilde (1829–1896) and Charles W. Eldridge
(1837–1903)," Walt Whitman: An
Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1998).
Notes
- 1. William Wilde Thayer was one half of Thayer and Eldridge, the Boston publishing firm responsible for the third edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1860). For more on Whitman's relationship with Thayer and Eldridge see "Thayer, William Wilde [1829–1896] and Charles W. Eldridge [1837–1903]," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings [New York: Garland Publishing, 1998]). [back]
- 2. Fanny Raymond Ritter (c.1835–1891) was an American musician, writer, historian, and the wife of the German-American composer Frédéric Louis Ritter (1834–1891). The Ritters were friends of William Sloane Kennedy and William D. O'Connor, and they had invited Whitman for a visit in 1876. [back]
- 3. [back]