Life & Letters

Correspondence

About this Item

Title: Walt Whitman to Daniel G. Gillette, 4 November 1873

Date: November 4, 1873

Whitman Archive ID: loc.01719

Source: The Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Papers of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Transcribed from digital images or a microfilm reproduction of the original item. For a description of the editorial rationale behind our treatment of the correspondence, see our statement of editorial policy.

Notes for this letter were created by Whitman Archive staff and/or were derived from Walt Whitman, The Correspondence, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller, 6 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1961–1977), and supplemented or updated by Whitman Archive staff.

Contributors to digital file: Alex Kinnaman, Elizabeth Lorang, Kathryn Kruger, Zachary King, Eric Conrad, and Nicole Gray



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431 Stevens st.
cor West.
Camden, N. Jersey,
Nov. 4, 1873.

My dear Dan Gilette,1

Your kind letter—with that of your English friend Chrissie Deschamps, (so full of kindness & affectionate sympathy, plainly enough from the heart, & not conventional merely)—have reached me to-day. I am getting along pretty well. It seems to be a fluctuating & pretty stout struggle between my general physique & constitution, & my special cerebral ailment—in which I think the physique will yet carry the day.

My best regards & love to you, my friend, & to my English friends the same.


Walt Whitman

Dan, it is very lonesome to me here, I go out hobbling a little, but to no satisfaction, although I am very comfortably fixed in domestic matters. Write to me when you can, send me any stray printed thing you are sure might interest me, or if you come Philadelphiaward come & see me.


Correspondent:
According to the New York Directory of 1874–1875 and the Gouldings Directory of 1877–1878, Daniel G. Gillette was a clerk in the county courthouse. An undated entry in one of Whitman's address books (The Library of Congress #108) indicates that Gillette was at one time employed in the postmaster's office in New York.

Notes:

1. See the letter from Whitman to Gillette of September 26, 1873. Whitman consistently dropped an l in Gillette. [back]


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